“Refused?” Roshaun said.
“They’re somewhere where they can’t take an incoming communication, because they’re scared they might be overheard,” Dairine said. She bit her lip.
“Perhaps we should simply go to them,” Roshaun said.
“You’re exactly right,” Dairine said, putting Spot down again. She turned to the mobiles. “Guys, I hate to spell and run, but we’ve got to find them right away—because if they don’t realize what they’re dealing with, they’re going to mess it up. And if it gets messed up this once, then the whole universe is screwed up forever.”
“Even more screwed up than it is at the moment?” Roshaun said.
“You have no idea,” Dairine said. “Come on, let’s open up a gate and get going!”
8: Active Defense
Kit came half awake to the sound of something bumping on the floor, very fast, and something jingling. He opened one eye.
Dim light—the wizard-light he’d left hovering near the ceiling in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night—showed him Ponch, sitting by where the door of the pup tent would be when Kit spoke it open. Ponch was scratching behind his collar, turning it around and around as he scratched.
It wasn’t as if Kit didn’t hear this jingling nearly every day. What had awakened him was the utter silence into which the sound felclass="underline" a silence devoid of the little creaks and breathing noises that every house made, of wind or rain or weather outside the house, and of the normal world in which it all existed. Kit lay there for several moments just listening to that barren stillness. There was nothing but vacuum and cold outside. Well, that’s all there is on the Moon, too, Kit thought. But the Moon was different. It was within sight of home. And it didn’t have that roiling, growing darkness above it, shutting out the stars.
Kit felt around for the zipper of his sleeping bag and pulled it down, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. His pup tent was sparsely furnished compared to Nita’s. Besides his sleeping bag and some essential toiletries, mostly it seemed to contain dog food. “You can starve when you have to,” his mother had said to him, “but your pet won’t understand why his meals are late, whether he can talk or not! So you make sure your dog always eats before you do. And whether you do or not.” And when Kit’s mother finished with it, the “short wall” of Kit’s pup tent was half obscured by a stack of cans and bags about four feet high, not to mention five or six big bottles of watercooler water. His own supplies seemed meager by comparison—mostly beef jerky and fruit jerky and trail bars, and one or two of the kinds of cereal he didn’t mind eating straight from the box, since finding milk while out on errantry was usually a problem.
I have to go out, Ponch said, standing up and shaking himself.
“Okay,” Kit said, reaching for his manual. “I’ll make you an air bubble.”
No, it’s all right, Ponch said. I can take air with me, if I think about it.
Kit stood up and stretched. Maybe it’s not just our power that’s getting boosted, he thought.
Would you open the door? Ponch said. I have to go!
“Okay, just a minute.” Kit pulled on his jeans and had to hunt for his sweatshirt before he found it had somehow managed to get under his sleeping bag.
Kit pulled it on. Ponch had started turning in circles on the pup-tent floor, either in excitement or because he really needed to be out of there. “Okay, okay,” Kit said, and reached down for the door’s little spell tab, which acted like the pull on a zipper. A long spill of words in the Speech came up on the plain gray wall, showing him details about the outside environment: some words flashed urgently on and off to remind Kit that there was hard vacuum outside.
Kit just pulled up on the tab. Like a blind going up, the silvery-gray surface of the pup tent gave way to a view of the barren surface of the planetoid where they had camped. Ponch burst out through the interface, galloping away across the surface and bouncing in the lower gravity. Kit watched him go, noting idly that this place wasn’t as dusty as the Moon, even though it felt much older.
He went back to the sleeping bag and rooted around for his socks, put them on, and his sneakers, and then picked up his manual. “Bookmark, please?” he said to it.
The manual’s pages riffled through to an image of the world to which Ponch had brought them. The world had no name that living beings had ever given it. Nonetheless, it had its own name in the Speech, Metemne, and the manual showed its location, well out toward the edge of a small irregular galaxy some hundreds of thousands of light-years past the Local Group. A long way from home…
Kit paged through the manual to his routines for vacuum management, found the one that he’d been using on the Moon, and spoke the words that would activate his personal bubble. Then he stepped out through the pup-tent door onto the rough dark gray surface.
Except for the position of the planet’s little star, now high in the sky, nothing had changed; the dark shifting and swarming of the Pullulus continued. I didn’t think I could hate something just because of the way it looked, Kit thought, but I think I hate that. Maybe because I feel so much like it hates me.
Kit glanced off to his left. There was a little rise off in that direction, and he could see the soft slow wreathing of the fire about the head of the Spear of Light, jutting up from behind a massive boulder at the top of the rise. Ronan was still on guard, or if he wasn’t, the Defender in him was. It has to be weird, Kit thought, to have something, someone, like that, sharing brain space with you. But at least He’s on our side. I think…
Kit sighed. Once it hadn’t been so complicated. If someone was a wizard, they were on your side, on the right side. But these days, the mere exercise of wizardry wasn’t a guarantee. You found yourself wondering about people’s motives all the time. And if you didn’t know them well, you started to be less certain about turning your back on them in a tight situation.
And there were other issues on his mind. Ronan and Nita had been close in ways that Nita was too shy to discuss. Now Nita was feeling twitchy about Ronan, and Kit kept wondering why. Oh, it wasn’t anything serious with them. I know that.
At least, I think I know that…
From around the shoulder of that rise, Ponch came galloping back and skidded to a stop in front of Kit. Okay, let’s go for a walk!
Kit laughed and went off after his dog, taking it easy at first to make sure he had the hang of the local gravity. It was heavier than the Moon’s, so that you could run without completely bouncing off the surface if you were careful. Passing the rise where Ronan still sat, Kit had a long look around the surface of Metemne and decided that it wasn’t someplace he would come back to for a holiday. The planet wasn’t much more than a bumpy rock pile. Whether there had even been water here in the planet’s earliest days was a question Kit couldn’t answer just by looking.
He crouched down and put a hand on a largish boulder that sat off to one side. From the beginning of his practice of wizardry, Kit had always been good at hearing what was going on with objects that most people would have considered inanimate. Now he let his mind go a little unfocused, and waited.