Nita rubbed her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”
They got up together to go down to their building and put what they needed
for one more trip to the Relegate’s Naos into their pup tents. Behind them Ponch came trotting along, the leash around his neck, holding the loose end of it in his mouth, and with a thoughtful look in his eyes…
****
At about quarter of three in the morning, Dairine stood at the garage end of the driveway, once more gazing up at the Moon and waiting for the rest of the group to join her.
“Dairine,” a voice said out of the darkness.
It was her dad.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Where are they, honey?”
“They’ll be here soon.”
He came down the back steps and stood beside her, looking up at the Moon. For a few moments neither of them said anything.
“Remember when Nita went away,” Dairine said at last, “and we thought she might not come back again, because of the wizardry she was doing out in the ocean, with the whales?”
“And the shark,” her dad said. “Yes, I remember that.”
“This is like that,” Dairine said. “This is my shark.” She looked at her dad.
In the darkness it was hard to see expressions. Her dad laughed, and the laugh sounded strange and strained. “And here I was concerned about Nita because she might wind up being sent off somewhere else by the Powers That Be to do something dangerous,” he said. “Now it turns out the problem was going to be a little closer to home, right under my nose—”
“They didn’t send her,” Dairine said. “Not as such. But if when you’re away you find a mess, or a problem to fix, you don’t just walk away from it: You fix it. Now I have to go do the dangerous thing…and the stakes are bigger this time.”
“Are you sure you have to do this?” her dad said.
“It’s my star,” Dairine said. “I can’t just send my houseguests off to deal with it! I have to go with them. Especially—” She fell silent.
Dairine’s dad said, “I meant, are you sure what you’re planning to do to the Sun really has to be done?”
“Oh.” Dairine gulped, dry-mouthed, and nodded. “It was sanctioned,” she said, “at a very high level. We’d never have gotten the sanction in the first place if the job didn’t really need doing.”
She was finding it hard to speak. “I have to go pretty soon,” she said. “We have to. We’re who gets this job.”
Her dad was silent for a moment. “I don’t have to tell you not to do anything stupid,” he said then. “That’s the last thing you’ll do.”
“How can you be so sure?” Dairine said. “After the dumb thing I did that started all this—”
Her dad shook his head, plainly feeling around for the right words. “Maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all, what you did,” he said. “It brought these particular wizards here just in time to do a job that at least one of them is a specialist in. Prince
Unlikely.”
Dairine nodded and said nothing. Her feelings about Prince Unlikely were far too complex for her to discuss. For the moment, she was scared to death, and upset, and didn’t dare say how she felt for fear that it should overwhelm her and make her useless for what had to be done in a very little while. All she could do was go to her dad and hug him.
“Dairine, you may be thoughtless sometimes,” her dad said, “but never stupid. If there’s anything you’ve got, it’s a brain…and I’d say your heart’s in the right shape, too. Go do what you have to do. And be careful.”
He didn’t let her go for a long time…then finally released her and went inside.
At 3:00 a.m., Filif, Sker’ret, and Roshaun joined Dairine out at the far end of the backyard. The circle of the wizardry lay glowing on the ground, ready to be implemented, the elaborate interlace of sigils and symbols pulsing gently in the night.
With Spot in her arms, Dairine was doing as the others were doing: moving slowly around the periphery of the wizardry, checking its terms, making sure that everything added up, that nothing was misspelled or misplaced, and—most important—that each of their names was correctly included, and that each name was tied into the wizardry correctly for the role that wizard would be playing.
The roles divided fairly neatly for this piece of work. Roshaun, as main designer of the work and the one most familiar with the theory behind it, would be watching the timing of the wizardry and directing the others in when each stage should implement. Sker’ret, the fixer, would be the one to actually “flip the switches,” speaking the words in the Speech that would take them in, help them locate where they needed to be, and manipulate the Sun’s mass once they got to the right spot. Filif would be the main power source for the wizardry, the one whose job it was to “get out and push,” leaving the others free to do fine adjustments and to react to situations as they developed. “Our people’s life comes from that of our star,” he’d said to Dairine while they were still in the design stages, “a little more directly than usual. This is a chance to give the power back. The universe appreciates such resonances…”
And as for me, Dairine thought, I go along for the ride.
Roshaun glanced over at her and said nothing. Dairine paid no attention, being in the process of checking her name for the third time. Sker’ret finished his check and came along beside her, peering at her name.
She waved the darkness she was holding in her hand in front of Sker’ret’s various eyes. “You sure you can spare this?” she said.
He spared a few eyes to peer at it. “It’s not like I’m going to have much trouble getting home even if we blow this one up,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll just go through Grand Central.”
“You’ll love it,” Dairine said absently. “The food’s great there. Just please don’t eat the trains.”
She looked at her name one last time and sighed. It was no shorter than it had been when she first started her wizardry, but some of its terms had changed to shapes not strictly human, and a number of the characters were truncated, or
indicated power levels much reduced. “You guys hardly even need me for this,” she said, “it’s so perfectly tied up.”
Filif rustled at her. “You’re here,” he said, “because this is your Sun. You’re its child, native to the space inside its heliopause. It knows you. It will listen to you where it might not listen to us.”
“Yeah,” Dairine said, allowing herself a breath of laughter. “Sure.” She knew she was no longer quite the power at wizardry that she had been, but she was good enough to hold up her part of a group working and make sure that if anyone else needed help, they would get it in a hurry.
She glanced at her watch. “We’d better move,” she said. “The bubblestorm area’s going to be coming around toward the Sun’s limb soon.”
Roshaun nodded, and took his position near the part of the wizardry that held a precis of its blueprint and the coordinates they were heading for, along with the latest data that the manual had for them on the depth of the tachocline. There would be no more precise data until they got closer to the Sun and could correct for relativistic errors and other problems.
The others arranged themselves around the rim of the wizardry, and then each took one step into it, into the locus prepared for them—the area that held optimum life support for each and that also contained a last-ditch “lifepod” wizardry intended to at least get them out with their lives if anything went wrong. But if anything goes that wrong, Dairine thought, we’re not likely to have time enough to implement the lifepods, anyway…
It was a thought she kept to herself as she looked past the circle and saw the tall shadow standing there in the dark, watching her, saying nothing. She raised a hand to him. He didn’t move for a few breaths…then raised his own.
“Ready?” Roshaun said.