The look of embarrassment and annoyance that had started forming on Roshaun’s face abruptly evaporated.
“So it is,” he said. And, very slowly, Roshaun began to smile.
“The problem,” Dairine said, “is going to be control, isn’t it? You say that the amount of mass we have to remove from Sol is very specific. Whereas once you stick this into the middle of a star and open it up, it’s going to throw matter out the far end like a fire hose…and what we need is the kind of control you get with a garden hose. Or an eyedropper…”
Roshaun looked at the wizardry. “Calibrating it,” he said, “is going to be the exciting part.”
“Taking it apart so that it can be calibrated, without sucking the whole area into deep space, or another dimension,” Sker’ret said, “that’s going to be the exciting part.” He flexed his front fourteen or so legs. “Let me at it!”
“Just drop it there,” Filif said, indicating the ground with a spare frond, “so that we can all get a good look at it. I can root it in one place and keep it from jumping around while you mobile types work on it.”
Dairine dropped the worldgate to the ground off to one side of their spell diagram. Immediately a black hole opened there, one into which light fell and
vanished. The other three wizards bent over the hole, intent. But Roshaun looked up at Dairine first, and the expression was hard to read. Forgiving? she thought. Possibly apologetic? Maybe even a little more mellow than usual?
I’ll settle for the last, she thought. She got down on her knees along with the others and got to work.
The work that followed was complex beyond anything Dairine had ever done by herself. In fact, part of the complexity lay exactly in that she wasn’t doing it herself, that she couldn’t do it herself because she no longer had the power for that kind of thing. They all had to do it together, and without wasting time on disagreements. The Earth and the Sun were both rotating into a configuration that was going to be deadly enough without letting personalities get in the way.
As darkness fell, Roshaun laid out the outlines of the full spell diagram—a glowing circle with four big lobes inscribed inside, like a four-leaf clover. Be nice if it was lucky for us, Dairine thought as she bent over the lobe that was her responsibility. For nearly half an hour now she had been referring back to Spot again and again as she laid in detailed information about the Sun’s interior characteristics, tracing out the numbers and constants and technical terms in pale long curves of the cursive form of the Speech, lacing them into the spell structure. Spot had been quiet and had let her get on with it, hearing Dairine’s tone of mind as she worked. It was not a time for cheery conversation.
Her back hurt; her eyes hurt from squinting at the more delicate parts of the spell. She wondered if she was possibly getting astigmatism, as Nita had had years back. She grew out of that, though, and she doesn’t need the glasses anymore. But if we live past tonight, I won’t care if I need glasses…
She swallowed, or tried to: Her throat was dry. If we live past tonight. Dairine didn’t seem able to get past the thought, to her shame, while the others seemed a long way from worrying about it at all. The three of them were crouched over the spell diagram, all their concentration bent on it—Roshaun tracing glowing-spiderweb curve after curve of the wizardry’s interface between the portable worldgate and the conduit that would suck the plasma into it, out of the Sun; Filif’s branches all hung with faint delicate statements and syllogisms in the Speech, like luminous angel hair, as he shed them with precise control onto the “probe” part of the wizardry, which would slide into the Sun and find the right place to bleed it; Sker’ret knitting glittering cat’s cradles of fire between his claws and weaving them into the spell’s basic control structures, the shields that would keep them alive in that terribly hostile environment. He’s the real star here, Dairine thought. He’s good at everything. Look at how good he is at troubleshooting—he can find a weak link in a spell just by the smell of it. If we live through this, it’s going to be because of him—
Dairine breathed out in annoyance at herself and shook the thought aside for the twentieth time. What’s the matter with me that I can’t stop thinking about it? It wasn’t like this on my Ordeal.
Much…
But that seemed like such a long time ago now. And during a lot of her Ordeal, she had been running for her life. She hadn’t had a lot of time for heavy thinking when she was on the run. It was when she stopped and tried to do something else, like a wizardry, that the thoughts caught up with her and came
tumbling all over whatever she was trying to do. Like now…
She ground her teeth, a bad habit the dentist had warned her about, and then just got on with it. For quite some time, Dairine didn’t look up, but kept her mind on the structure of the Sun, the pressures and stresses and temperatures. The numbers were so insane that here, kneeling on the damp ground on a cool spring night, it was almost impossible to believe in them. Temperatures in the millions or even billions of degrees, fluid gases denser than molten metal— I should borrow Nita’s sunblock. No, she took it to Alaalu, didn’t she? Never mind…
Dairine straightened up, her back immediately rewarding her with a spasm of pain. She rubbed it, looking around. Roshaun and Sker’ret were kneeling on opposite sides of the spell diagram, fine-tuning the wizardry’s power equations. Filif was nowhere to be seen.
Took a rest break, probably, Dairine thought. I could use one of those myself. She stood up and stretched, turned her back on the spell diagram for the moment, and walked a little way toward the house.
—ashamed of myself—
She paused. “I don’t see why,” she heard her father say.
Dairine stood where she was in the shadow of the sassafras saplings just before the main part of the lawn. Maybe twenty feet away, over by the lilac hedge on the left side of the property, she could just see a shadow standing in the darkness, and another shadow, no longer hung with wizardly angel hair but faintly starred with lights. Dairine hadn’t noticed before that Filif’s berries actually glowed a little in the dark.
“After all,” Dairine’s dad was saying, “the fire you jump into isn’t anything like the one you run away from.”
It may burn you as badly…
“Maybe,” her dad said. “But…I don’t know. The quality of the pain’s different when you’re not running.”
You do know, Filif said.
Her dad was silent. “Maybe I do,” he said at last.
Yet that’s how my people became sentient, they think, Filif said, and there was a desperate laughter about his thought. They learned to run from the fire. They evolved mobility and, later, the beginnings of intelligence. And then the darkness at the Fire’s heart spoke to us and said, “You can be safe from Me, if you pay the price. Instead of burning terribly, and dying in it, without warning and in awful pain….you’ll burn just a little. But all the time, all your lives. At least you’ll know what’s coming, instead of having to always live with the unexpected…”
“And you decided,” Dairine’s dad said, “that it was better to take your chances with the wildfires.”
There was a rustle of branches, the sound Filif made when producing his people’s equivalent of a nod. Even though some of us said that we wouldn’t be what we are without the Fire, he said. That without it, all growth chokes together, and chokes out the Light. Dairine could just make out an uplift of branches toward the sky, all the berries going dim, from her angle, as they looked upward.
“Well, I think your people were smart,” Dairine’s dad said. “Light’s better, in the long run…even though you may not always like what it shows you.”