r thought suited Its own desires perfectly. After the Choice is done, the Lone One said, what you ve asked for will be yours. Before, Druvah said. I know perfectly well who you are. And I know that the gifts of the Powers can t be recalled once bestowed. The Lone One looked somewhat taken aback. My way, or not at all, Druvah said. Ictanik looked at him, narrow-eyed, furious. Finally, she said, Very well. And when you give me this power, Druvah said, what am I supposed to do for you Just a small thing, the Lone One said. Simply leave me a foothold in your world…a place where my essence can lie dormant until the day comes when you do need it for the Change that is to come. With you as the eternal guardian of your world, I won t be able to do any harm. Kit knew that innocent look, and he went cold at the sight of it. The Lone One s going to make sure something happens to Druvah, sooner or later, Kit thought. Probably sooner. It ll find a loophole in the promise It s made, and It ll kill him somehow. And then the Alaalids will be stuck with It in their world forever. He had the urge to go over to Druvah and shake him and say, Don t do it! But Druvah was hundreds of thousands of years away from Kit. He said to the Lone One, I agree. Pay me my price now, or I do nothing for you. The Lone Power looked at him for a long moment, then closed Its eyes. The ferocity of the released power staggered Kit where he stood, even at this remove in time and space. Druvah, though, did not stagger. He went rigid as ironwood, and then, as the rigor passed, he looked at Ictanik with the slightest smile. Now, he said, to work. Druvah went back to the other six wizards, who looked at him dubiously. Well, he said, I ve listened to Its words. Now you ll listen to mine in turn. I am the power source for this Choice, this work we do to protect our world for all the generations that will come after. The spell we ve built so far has many good things about it. Lives will be long in our world, and there will be peace and prosperity and joy for an endless-seeming time. The Lone One will have no more part in our world than entropy, Its child, makes absolutely necessary. Our world s center, its kernel, It will never be able to reach, and this world will be a good one, a glad one, for a very long time. But not forever. I see the doings of the day after forever, when our people realize they must change and cannot, and there won t be any release from the trap our present wizardry will have built for them. You only say this because the Lone One has said it to you, Seseil cried. Power passed between you, just then. She has bought you! Many will say that, Druvah said. Only the day after forever will reveal the truth. So for now, if you want to enact the Choice we ve made here, the wizardry that will protect our world, let s do so. But I will only power the wizardry if we add to it this stricture: that, come the day after forever, when the children of the children of a thousand millennia from now finally realize they need to change their world and themselves, our descendants in power will be able to repeal this Choice, this protection, and make another that suits them better. Never! We know what s best for them So parents always say of their children, Druvah said. Sometimes they re even right. Nonetheless, if we make a Choice-wizardry today, or ever, this is how it s going to have to be. However, so that no such change of our whole world will be made lightly, let us add this to the stricture: The decision must be unanimous. Kit saw Seseil smile then. Under his breath, the Alaalid said to one of the other wizards near him, That will never happen. So let us do as he asks. So the wizardry went forward. Kit watched it through to the end, watched the actual implementation of the massive working that was meant to keep this world safe from the Lone Power s malice forever. It shook the earth when it was done, and thundered against the sky, and rooted itself into Alaalu s star and into the fabric of all the space in Alaalu s system, right out to the heliopause. When it was over, all the wizards went away to their homes, well satisfied that they had made their world safe from the evils of the universe until their star should come naturally to the end of its life span and go cold. Only Druvah was left. He stood and watched his colleagues go, and finally turned his own back and walked off the way Ictanik had gone. Kit watched him go with a strange feeling. The silence that fell after that mighty working was deafening. In it, only the wind blew. Everything seemed finished, and Kit almost expected to look up into that piercingly blue sky and see hanging there the words THE END. But the way he felt, if there were going to be words written in the heavens, they could only be TO BE CONTINUED. We need to get up out of this, Ponch said from beside Kit, panting. It s over. They stepped up out of the pool. Kit had to struggle, gasping, up the last six or ten feet of the climb; and when they came out onto the surface, he looked down and found everything beneath them empty just water. No wizards, no past. I think maybe I broke it, Ponch said, apologetic. Oh, great, Kit muttered. Well…never mind. We found out what we needed to. Let s get back and tell Nita. And then we have to talk to Quelt. We ve got to do something. They ve made a terrible mistake, and we have to help them somehow. If they ll let us, Ponch said. In Dairine Callahan s kitchen, hectic planning was in progress. This data source is useful, Prince Roshaun said, looking over Dairine s shoulder at Spot s rendition of the SOHO satellite s data feed. But does it have history If we re going to avoid collapsing your star, I need data for at least the past fifty years. Dairine laughed weakly. We ve barely been in space that long, she said. The satellite s only a few years old. For earlier data, you re going to need the manual. We ll use both, Roshaun said, running a finger down Spot s screen and bringing up an array of solar views and a great many complicated-looking charts and graphs. We don t have a lot of time. Here, they have ultrasound data. And magnetographs. Good. He went quiet for a moment, studying the images. The star s active side is pointing away from us right now. That buys us time… 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! 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, a