un, 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, 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. A few moments passed in silence. You were kind to me when I was frightened, Filif said. At a time like that, what else could I do Dairine s dad said. You re my daughter s colleagues. And her friends. I may not be a wizard, but I ve been scared in my time: I know how it feels. Any time you re feeling scared, you re welcome here. Then I m welcome now, Filif said, because though where we re going is the source of the Light as well as the heart of the Fire, and it d be all kinds of glory to die there, I d really rather not. I d rather none of you did, Dairine s dad said. And you re not going to. My daughter s a pretty hot property as a wizard, and she s not going to lose anybody on her watch. The absolute certainty in his voice was somehow worse than anything Dairine could have imagined, and it made her eyes sting. Hastily, she stepped back into the shadows and turned her attention back where it belonged, to the spell. I will make Dad right, she thought, if it kills me… * * * * Subversive Factions NITA STOOD ON THE BEACH, a few miles down from the house by the sea, and watched Alaalu s sun come up. It always seemed to take a long time, and today it seemed to be taking even longer than usual. Something s missing, she thought. When she d first started to get this feeling, she d discounted it. That s how stressed out I ve been, she d thought at the time. They take me to an island paradise for a week, and already I m dissatisfied with it, looking for some way to find fault. The problem s probably in my own head. I should kick back and relax, let everything be all right for a change. I ve just gotten out of the habit of trusting the world. For a day or so, she d talked herself into believing it. But this morning she knew that that was exactly what she had done. She had talked herself into believing, however temporarily, something that wasn t true. She had mistakenly, but purposely, deactivated one of a wizard s most useful tools: the hunch. What her hunch told her contradicting the whispering voices that spoke to her while she slept, the voices of the joyous but complacent was that not everything was right here. That there was trouble in paradise. Not with the people. Not with the creatures living here. But something else, something much more basic. Something s missing. And in at least one case, she thought she knew what it was Worlds had hearts. This was information she had started to work with when her mother got sick. People, planets, even universes all the places inhabited by mind, either on the small scale or the grand had kernels : hidden, bundled constructs of wizardry, of the fluid interface between science and magic, where matter and spirit and natural law got tangled together. The rules for a universe were written in its kernel, and the matter in a universe or a world ran by those rules, the way a computer runs by its software. The rules could be altered, but usually it wasn t smart to do so unless you really knew what you were doing. Nita was still far too new at kernel studies to fall into this category. But she had a fairly good grasp of the basics, after working hard at the subject over recent months, and she d learned a lot of the places and ways in which a world s kernel might routinely be hidden. When she d first started to get the something is missing feeling, the state of Alaalu s kernel was one of the first things to occur to her. A lot of planets kernels were hidden for good reasons mostly so that they wouldn t be altered by