snorted. It s still not working. He looked over at Sker ret. I m tempted to give this to you as an hors d oeuvre. No, Daddy, Dairine said. It s probably still just the Sun. The effect can last a day or so, sometimes. Roshaun wandered in while Dairine and her dad were looking again at Spot s display from the SOHO satellite. Do these people know they re feeding their data to wizards her dad said, as he took the kettle off the stove, put decaf instant coffee into a mug, and made himself one last cup of coffee before bed. I don t think they d mind, Dairine said. It s more or less a public service. That smells wonderful, Roshaun said. What is it And then his eye fell on Spot s display. Roshaun froze. It s coffee, Dairine s father said. Well, it s sort of coffee. How much you can really consider something to be coffee when there s no caffeine in it is a moot point. He wandered out of the kitchen, and so entirely missed seeing Roshaun s ashen expression. Is that your star Roshaun said, very softly. Huh Dairine looked over her shoulder. Yeah. It s just a CME. You don t have to look all worried about it. But he did look worried about it. Dairine, how many of these have you had lately Dairine stopped dead. She couldn t remember Roshaun having ever spoken her name directly to her before, not once. I don t know, she said, after taking a moment to get over the initial shock. We re in a sunspot maximum now, and we expect a lot of them. One or two a week, we ve been having, but Roshaun looked stricken. Dear Aethyrs, that s the first sign, he said. I ve seen this before. Don t you know what this means No, Dairine said. Should I Are you insane! he shouted at her. Your star is about to start having a crisis! And if you want to have a star for much longer, or you want your planet to be in any state to notice that it has a star, you ll shut up and listen!!. Completely astounded, Dairine shut up. I wondered why the thing pained me to look at it, Roshaun said. It s going to bubblestorm. Your Sun s got to be fixed before it goes into a catastrophic flare cycle Are you crazy You can t just run off and fix the Sun! We don t even know if it s really broken or not! I do, Roshaun said. It s broken. And if somebody doesn t fix it right away This kind of thing happens all the time here. This is normal! This is not normal, Roshaun said angrily. You don t know what you re talking about. This kind of behavior is very, very abnormal in a star of this class, and it has to be dealt with before it starts to accelerate toward a crisis process that can no longer be stopped! Her father appeared in the kitchen again. I assume, he said softly, that someone is going to get a grip on himself or herself and explain all this shouting to me Roshaun is completely out of his mind, Dairine said, and thinks the Sun is broken. And he wants to go fix it. Which he is not going to do, because you ve got to get permission from at least a regional-level wizard if you re going to screw around with a system s primary! I don t care. Unless something is done Dairine had awful visions of Roshaun going off and doing something on the sly, and messing up Sol past all repair. Look, she said, we really need to at least talk to Tom and Carl about this before you go off and start playing around with my star. My star, not yours, right Thank you. She went over to the phone, picked it up, dialed. Hi there, said Tom s voice. Tom It s Dairine. Listen, I know the drill. Leave a name and number and we ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks. Beep! Dairine swallowed. Tom, it s Dairine. I need to talk to you right away. I ll get you via Spot. Bye. She hung up. Where are they she thought. She d never called Tom and Carl s house before and failed to get one or the other of them, except when they were on vacation, and they always warned everybody about that first. Spot Yes Message both Tom and Carl right away. Flag it emergency and high-urgent. I need to talk to them right now. Spot sat silent for a moment. Then he said, The message has been bounced. What The bounce message says, Subjects are on assignment, unavailable. Oh no, Dairine thought. Oh no. What does that mean She sat there and stared into space for a moment. It may be nothing, she thought. There may be all kinds of times they go off on assignment together and I don t know anything about it. It s not like Nita or Kit or I call them every five minutes to see where they are. But the cold feeling at the bottom of Dairine s gut told her that this was not just nothing. She remembered something Tom had said once, when Dairine s dad had asked him why he wasn t off the planet more: Harry, would you normally open the door and get out of a car you were driving They re not there, are they her dad said. No. Roshaun was looking at her in increasing anger. We re just going to have to do something, then. No we are not, Dairine said. We are going up to at least planetary level on this one. She turned back to Spot and began firing off messages in all directions. But there was no response. It wasn t as if the Planetary Wizard for Earth wouldn t talk to her; wizards at even that level were remarkably accessible to their colleagues. But again and again Spot simply said, Subjects are on assignment, unavailable. What can I do to help her dad said. Daddy… Dairine shook her head. Nothing right now. Go on…I ll let you know what happens. Silently, her dad kissed her, and went. An hour later, Dairine was still sitting in the dining room, in shock, realizing that no one in the upper wizardly structure was available at all. Good lord, she thought, where is everybody Who s minding the planet ! And, horrified, she knew the answer, at least for the moment. We are… * * * * Travel-Related Stress DAIRINE S FIRST URGE WAS to go off and physically look for somebody in the echelons above the planetary level. But she couldn t. The limitations that Tom had put on her ability to use wizardry for transit were still in place, whether he was here or not. She was limited to Sol System, and couldn t even get around the prohibition by going elsewhere on the planet and using a fixed gate. All of the worldgates had monitoring wizardries built into them that would recognize Dairine s banned status and refuse her access. Roshaun was looking at her from where he d sat down across the table. All the time Dairine had been trying to find someone higher up the wizardly command structure, he had simply sat there, not saying a word, watching her. It was perhaps the longest time she d ever seen him be quiet. Now he said, You re wasting time. She looked at him with profound misgivings. There was no arguing that he was an expert of sorts in this business; it was his specialty as a wizard. Even Spot s manual functions confirmed that. But You don t trust me, Roshaun said. Not as far as I could throw you, Dairine said. And why not Roshaun said. Because I m not like you Maybe not. But I am still a wizard. The Powers That Be trust me, if you don t. And why Dairine said. That s what I want to know! You are the least wizardlike wizard I ve ever met! You don t even use wizardry if you can help it! You re a whole lot more interested in being a prince than in being a wizard, the way it looks to me! The rules say that wizardry can t live long in the unwilling heart. How long do you think you re likely to be one of us if you keep acting the way you do How long is it going to be before the act becomes the reality He stared at her, and it took Dairine several breaths to realize how stricken, and then furious, the look in his eyes was becoming. That s it, he said, and stood up. That s it. I m off home. I m weary of your arrogance, and your bad manners, and your mistrust, and your Dairine jumped up, too. You re weary of my arrogance Why, you stuck-up, self-centered, self-important don t have to explain myself to the likes of you, you parochial, controlling little always so sure you re right, then go ahead, go home and be right there, where all your people are so busy bowing and scraping to you that none of them has the nerve to confront you when you re Suddenly Dairine s face was full of greenery, and a number of berries were looking at her from very, very close, in a chilly, annoyed sort of way. You should stop this now, Filif said. Filif s silent speech was forceful. It was like running suddenly into a tree. Across from her, beyond the greenery, she could tell that Roshaun was feeling the same impact. 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. Kit looked at Quelt in astonishment. And you just walked away from that little conversation without having any further trouble Kit said. Well, yes, Quelt said. Why not Kit was utterly dumbfounded. He looked at Ponch, who was eyeing him with some moderate confusion himself. Come on! Kit said, and headed off. Ponch ran after him, leaving Quelt gazing after them. Well, she said to no one in particular, no help with the laundry this morning, I see… Kit made his way straight back to the great Display, via his beam-me-up-Scotty spell, into which he had laid the Display s coordinates. There s something I m looking for, he said to Ponch as they popped out in the early morning over