“But it won’t stay that way forever,” Filif said, looking over Roshaun’s shoulder. “The star rotates…”
“What’s the period?” Roshaun said to Dairine.
“Six hundred hours,” Dairine said. “Just a little less, actually.”
“And the spot that’s starting to bubblestorm has gone around more than three quarters of the way already—” Roshaun was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We have perhaps nineteen hours before that particular crisis point rotates toward us again. And maybe twenty-six or twenty-eight hours before it boils over—”
He shook his head, looking at the data. “It’s going to take nearly that long to design the wizardry,” he said. “And then we have to go implant it.”
“We have to go to the Sun??” Filif said.
The excitement in his voice was astonishing—and Dairine found it difficult to reconcile with the creature who had only hours earlier been emotionally shattered by the fact of a forest fire.
“We don’t have much choice,” Roshaun said. “We’re just four wizards against a star that weighs, oh, nine hundred octillion tons or so. We’d need a lot more power than we’ve got to just sit here and throw the wizardry at it from a distance. It makes more sense to do the serious work up close.”
Filif was trembling, and not with fear.
“Can you?” Roshaun said to him.
“Watch me!” Filif said.
Dairine shook her head. “Better show me where to get started, then,” she said to Roshaun.
He looked at her with an expression she’d never seen on his face before: just the faintest glimmer of respect. At another time, this might have either annoyed her or pleased her, but right now Dairine found that she hardly cared one way or another.
They spent the next twelve hours and more constructing the wizardry—first the “rough” version, then the real one. Dairine had never been involved in such a detailed, exacting, exhausting piece of work in her life, not even when Nita had called her in to assist with a big group wizardry in Ireland. This time, there were many fewer wizards involved, and the work the four of them were doing was, in its way, far more complex.
Conceptually, it wasn’t that much of a problem. “We have to go into the Sun,” Roshaun said, “stick a conduit into it just underneath the tachocline—that’s the layer just above the radiactive zone and just under the convective zone—pull out some mass, and then pull the shunt out and leave without burning ourselves to cinders.”
“Oh, well,” Sker’ret said, “nothing to it.” Roshaun and Dairine had found
themselves giving Sker’ret the same somewhat skeptical look. Then each of them had registered the other one giving him that look…and things had, from Dairine’s point of view, somehow, irrationally, gotten a lot better between them. “Nothing to it” was more an expression of Sker’ret’s natural ebullience than anything else. Simply having stated the problem itself produced a number of further problems. Dump the extracted solar material where, exactly? What was going to come out would emerge at a temperature of at least a couple of million degrees centigrade and would expand like mad before cooling down to ambient-space temperatures. “Expand like mad,” Dairine thought, would be a mild description of the result. The associated explosive expansion would closely mimic that of any number of H-bombs, with only the pesky radiation left out. Additionally, the wizardry itself had to be capable of conducting the material and not failing under the forces to which it was exposed, which meant pushing a tremendous amount of energy into it to produce the result. That was Dairine’s main concern, as she studied the problem with Roshaun and Sker’ret and Filif, and started building the response. Where are we going to get that kind of power? she thought. Where in the worlds?
And then, assuming they successfully built a wizardry that could handle these forces without withering away like straw in a fire, the real excitement would start…because not even a relatively small and tame star like the Sun, a GO and nothing particularly exciting, was just going to lie there and let you suction out this much mass without complaining bitterly about it. The star would throw more CMEs—several of them at least—but this time the effect wouldn’t be to breed further ones. It would be to leak off energy, the way small earthquakes prevent big ones. And after that, there would be quiet.
If everything worked.
Toward the end of the first part of their work session, Roshaun, who had been helping rough out the major spell diagram in the air above the spot where they would inscribe it for real, suddenly sat back on his heels, wiping his brow with the back of one hand and looking completely horrified.
“What’s the matter?” Sker’ret said to him.
Roshaun sat looking at the rough spell diagram. “This is all for nothing,” he said. “There’s no way we can make this work.”
He’s seen it, Dairine thought. I didn’t want to say anything. I was hoping he was going to pull some kind of rabbit out of the hat. Oh, god, what are we going to do now?!
“What do you mean?” Filif said.
“The problem is—” Roshaun looked around at the others. “The problem is power,” he said. “It’s one thing to design the conduit that’s going to take the mass out of the heart of this star. But it’s another thing to power it. There are just four of us. There’s only so big a conduit we can drive to dump the mass at a safe enough distance. Unless we get a lot more wizards—”
“There’s no time for that,” Sker’ret said. “You said yourself, it’s only a matter of hours now—!”
Dairine sat there, frowning silently at the diagram hanging in the air, as the others started to debate other ways of handling the problem, but the argument started to get desperate, for there were no other ways around the power problem.
Wizardry was not a forgiving art: You got what you paid for, and you paid for results in effort, in power subtracted from your personal ecosystem…sometimes in terms of a deduction from your life span. When she had gone on her Ordeal, and for a little while after she passed it, Dairine’s power levels had been such that she’d hardly ever bothered wondering whether she could “afford” a spell or not. There was a time, Dairine thought, when I could’ve driven this spell entirely by myself. In fact, I did do a smaller version of this, once. It infuriated her to think how easily, almost carelessly, she had once expended the kind of power that would be needed for a work like this. It’s true, what Roshaun said, Dairine thought. I was a star once, but I’m now having to deal with the limitations of not being a star anymore.
The other three sat arguing while Dairine sat just staring at the rough spell diagram. I guess there just comes a time, she thought, where you can’t bully the universe anymore. You think you can. You assume that you’ll be able to power your way through any problem that comes along. But sooner or later, the world asserts itself. That’s when you have to start substituting cleverness for raw power. And it’s really annoying, because raw power is more fun.
Still…
Dairine stood up, smiling slightly. “Would you guys excuse me for a moment?” she said, and went down into the basement.
A few moments later, she came up with something in her hand. They all looked at her, confused. Dangling there from Dairine’s fingers was one of the custom worldgates, a loose “hole” of blackness in the air.
“Er—aren’t you supposed to leave that deployed onto a matter aggregate?” Sker’ret said, looking uneasy.
“You can remove it for short periods,” Dairine said. “But this has other uses.” She looked rather pointedly at Roshaun. “Someone here has some talent for reverse engineering when it suits him. And this, unlike any of us here, has no limit on how much matter it can move. It’s subsidized!”