You are frightened, Filif said to Dairine. It’s clouding your thinking. Sit down and be quiet until you’ve managed the fear.
Dairine sat down, hard, as if she’d been pushed. Maybe I was, she thought, somewhat dazed. She wasn’t quite sure if Filif hadn’t given her muscles a hint.
And you’re frightened, too, Filif said to Roshaun. And it’s making you angry because you feel powerless. Sit down and be quiet until you find your power again.
Roshaun sat down as hard as Dairine had. She watched this with both confusion and satisfaction, but at the bottom of it was a kind of scared awe. She had been fooled by Filif’s diffident manner, and had been treating him as a bush in a baseball cap, someone faintly funny. She’d had no idea there was such power underneath.
For some few moments there wasn’t any sound but both Dairine and Roshaun breathing hard. Eventually this sound, too, started to slow. When it did, Filif said, So. What does one do about a problem like this?
“There are a number of possible solutions that would cure this problem permanently,” Roshaun said. “Most of them need a lot of time for assessments, though, to tailor the wizardry to the star. And I don’t think we have enough time for that right now. There are some faster interventions, though. Effective at least in the short term. They buy you time to enact the more complex solutions.”
What is the best intervention for this problem, then?
Roshaun took a long breath. “Bleeding the star.”
“What?” Dairine said.
“Bleeding the star. You remove a small percentage of its mass.”
“Remove it? To where?”
“Anywhere you like, but out of the star’s corpus. Yes, it’s dangerous! Bleed off too much mass, and fusion in the star fails. Bleed off too little, and the intervention merely makes the star’s core go critical sooner.”
“Its core—” Dairine broke out in a sweat. “It’s not going to go nova, is it?”
“No. Nothing like that. But there are worse things.”
“Worse than the Sun going nova?!”
Roshaun gave her a bleak look. For a moment he didn’t speak.
“How would you like it,” he said at last, “if your star flared up just enough to roast one side of your world? That happened to our planet once. I would have thought you’d noticed. Or maybe you didn’t read the orientation package. It’s right there on the first page of the historical material—”
Dairine flushed hot. She was a fast reader, sometimes too fast. She had missed it, and now felt profoundly stupid. “My great-great-ancestors were a family of wizards, back then,” Roshaun said. “In their time, our star flared without warning. The land on that side of Wellakh was blasted to slag and lava; the seas on that side boiled off. The air on that side all burned away. The wizards of the world had just enough time between the flare and its wave front’s arrival to isolate the spaceward side of Wellakh from the worst effects of the flare, and to keep the planet’s ecology from being completely destroyed in the terrible winds and floods and fires that followed. But only just enough. It was very close, and almost all of the wizards died from giving all of their power to keep the world and its people alive. Then, after that, it took centuries of suffering and rebuilding for our world to recover. The quick obliteration that a nova would have brought would have seemed merciful by comparison.”
Dairine swallowed. “But afterward,” Roshaun said, “my ancestors, wizards and nonwizards both, spent generations learning how the sun behaved, finding out how to cure it. And they did cure it, finally, though again, almost all of my line’s wizards died in the cure. Why do you think my family are kings now? They gave their lives to save the world, to make sure it would never need to be saved again from death by fire. So that in any generation where a wizard is born into the royal family again, everyone looks at them and says, ‘See, there’s the son of the Sun Lord, the Guarantor, there’s the one who’ll give his life to protect us…’”
Without particularly asking what you had in mind to do with your life besides that, Dairine thought, hearing Roshaun’s voice go rough with abrupt pain. And she found herself thinking of the view from the balcony of Roshaun’s family’s palace, right across that very flat, strangely featureless landscape…right in the middle of the sealess, mountainless, melted-down side of the world. Who built that there to make sure that the “Sun Kings” never forgot what they were there for? Dairine thought. As if to say, “We’ll give them everything they want…but when the bad day comes again, they’d better deliver!”
She sat there in silence, feeling shock and shame in nearly equal parts. Roshaun’s bleak look was turned more inward now, and he seemed not to register Dairine looking at him. Finally, he did glance over at her once more, and something of the old cool distance was back in his eyes. But now Dairine knew it was a mask, and she also knew what lay under it.
“I’m an idiot,” Dairine said.
Roshaun simply looked at her. So did Spot.
She looked down at him. “Yes, I am,” Dairine said. “This is no time for misguided loyalty. We’ve got to do something.” She looked back over at Roshaun. “But we still have to get permission,” Dairine said. She looked down at Spot. “Any luck finding the planetary supervisor yet?”
No.
Dairine covered her face with her hands. “Great. We can’t do this, we can’t, without making sure that no one else is—”
I do have an authorization, though, Spot said.
Dairine looked up, surprised. “What? From where?”
Spot popped his lid up and showed her.
In the Speech, very small, Dairine saw the characters that spelled out the words “Approved. Go.” Following those was a shorthand version of a wizardly name, but even the shorthand version was very long, and the power rating appended to it was so high that Dairine looked at it several times to make sure she wasn’t just misplacing a decimal point.
“This is a Galactic Arm coordinator’s ID,” Dairine said softly.
It made her feel no better in terms of an answer to the question of where Earth’s wizardly command structure had gone all of a sudden. But at least she knew now that she wouldn’t be interfering with anyone else’s intervention.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go fix the Sun.”
Kit woke up with Ponch’s wet nose in his face.
Nita says you should get up.
“Nita is a nuisance,” Kit muttered.
And Quelt is here.
Kit blinked. “That’s another story,” he said. “I want to catch her before she goes out on business or something …”
Kit rolled off his couch, grabbed the bathrobe he’d brought with him, wrapped it around himself and headed out the door at such speed that he nearly knocked Quelt flat. She was carrying a basket of laundry, and she staggered, and then laughed.
Kit grabbed her and steadied her, and then rocked back himself, off balance. “Are you all right?” Quelt said.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Kit said, “and I have one question for you. What’s the ‘Relegate’s Naos’?”
Quelt looked at him in some surprise. “Uh, it’s where the Lone Power lives,” she said.
Kit stared.
“It lives here??”
“Of course she does,” Quelt said, putting the laundry basket down and looking at Kit very peculiarly.
“Since when?”
“Well, since after the Choice. When she lost out, they built her a place of her own.”
Kit stood there with his mouth open and didn’t care who saw him. “Why in the One’s Name did they do that?” he said.
Quelt looked at him with some confusion. “Well, she had bound herself into the world, and when she lost, she couldn’t dissolve that relationship. She was stuck here. So they made her a place to stay. It’s very nice; it’s a few thousand miles from here. That’s where you go for an Own Choice, when you’re a wizard here. We go see her, and have a good talk with her, and tell her she should have behaved herself.”