s 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 those who had no right to do so. But that didn t normally keep a properly trained wizard from at least detecting that a kernel was indeed present. And Nita hadn t been able to confirm that by casual sensing…which was unusual. Now she pulled out her manual and sat down in the sand with her back against a dune, twitching a little, and not from sand getting into her clothes. She felt slightly guilty about what she was doing. It wasn t as if Quelt wasn t taking really good care of her world, as far as Nita could tell. And normally you didn t start investigating another wizard s environment or practice of the Art unless you d been asked to; no intervention without a contract was the usual order of business. But we re here to see how this world works, among other things, Nita thought, and when I notice something as weird as this, what am I supposed to do Ignore it A world s kernel shouldn t he separated from it without good reason. There are too many things that could go wrong. Maybe even things that have gone wrong already Nita let out a long breath and paged through the manual, bringing up the custom kernel-detection routines she had started designing over the past few months. She d come to be able to sense a kernel directly, if it was anywhere at all nearby usually within some thousands of miles; and if she did a wizardry to augment her internal sensing abilities, her range increased greatly. To save time, Nita had started to file away the spells she used for this purpose, hooking them into a matrix that kept them ready to fuel and turn loose. Now all she had to do for routine kernel-finding was plug in the details about a planet s or space s physical characteristics, and turn the spell loose. Nita came to the pages in her manual where she kept the routines stored, and once again she looked guiltily up and down the beach. But there was no sign of Quelt, nor did Nita really expect there to be the whole family was extremely thoughtful about one another s privacy, and their guests . But if you re so concerned that something s wrong here, Nita s uneasy conscience said to her, why don t you just take the problem straight to Quelt Nita sat thinking about that for some moments, and finally shook her head. Because I really think something s wrong here. Because I m not sure she ll see it the same way I do or maybe even see it at all. Because Just because. I don t really know why. But I have to look into this. It was, finally, just a hunch. Tom and Carl had told her often enough to trust them She laid the manual open next to her on the golden sand and started to read. The wizardry wasn t a showy one, and wouldn t manifest its results outside of her manual, but it was complex, taking several minutes to read straight through. It seemed to take forever for the listening silence to give way to the normal sounds of day with the spell s completion, and when it finally did, Nita had to slump back against the dune and just gasp for breath for some minutes more. The wizardry was not a cheap one to enact. It was maybe fifteen or twenty minutes more before she felt up to actually starting to use the running spell to look for Alaalu s kernel. After that she lost track of time, something she found herself doing with great ease here where the day was thirty percent longer than at home. When she finally closed the spell down and shut the manual, it had to be at least a few hours later, to judge by the sun s position. Nita sat there a while more just listening to the water slide in and out, to the occasional songbird twitter of the bat-creatures that soared and swooped over the sea. It s just nowhere here, she thought. Nowhere in the ground or in the sea, not even anywhere inside the planet s orbit. Not even for a hundred million miles outside. Where have they put it And why isn t it closer What s going on Above her Nita heard the faint scratching sound of someone coming down the dune toward her. She looked up over her shoulder and saw the twin silhouettes of Kit and Ponch sliding down the dune, cutouts against the bright sky. I was looking for you back at the house, Kit said. Demair was there, but she said no one had seen you all day. I skipped breakfast, Nita said. Did you sleep okay last night Kit said to her. Nita shook her head. No. Dreams again Partly. But I was thinking, she said. Kit sat down beside her with his back against the dune, and Nita told him what she d been thinking about. At the end of it, she looked at Kit and said, Does that make any sense to you Kit nodded. More than you d think. I was doing a little exploring this morning… He told her where he d been. Nita s eyes widened as Kit told her about the conversation he d overheard, with Ponch s help, between Druvah and the Lone Power. When he finished, Nita looked down at the sand and started digging in it idly with one hand. What I don t like, Nita said, is that what for us is the most interesting part of the Choice, and the weirdest part, almost didn t seem to matter to Quelt at all. She just skipped past it… And we took her at her word that it was just a boring part. A cultural blind spot maybe Nita said. Kit shook his head. I don t know. But I think that now we re going to have to go see the Relegate s Naos. Kit stood up. As he did, Ponch came running up the dune behind him. Are we going somewhere Kit reached down and roughed up Ponch s ears a little. Yeah, he said. To see the Lone Power. Come on… They stood there on the edge of the valley and looked down into it. The valley itself was huge. Looking across it, Nita wondered if this spot had indeed been one of the impact craters she d been expecting to see, for it was like a gigantic bowl, and it had its own mini-horizon inside the greater one, where the snowy mountains of the Tamins range could be seen off to the north and east. Away down in the middle of the great round valley, Nita could just see something small and pale: a little building. There was nothing else to be seen, for what looked like miles and miles, except flowery meadows, some scattered patches of woodland, and occasional flocks of ceiff, ambling from place to place or taking flight without warning. That s it Kit said. Nita nodded. It s probably a lot bigger than it looks from here, she said. The distances keep fooling me. We can do a quick transit spell over to it, Kit said. Nita nodded, and Kit constructed the spell and spoke it. The hush of the universe listening to the words leaned in around them; they vanished, and the soft bang! of the air rushing away from them as they reappeared reached them before the more distant bang! of their disappearance. The Naos was a simple structure done mostly in the peach-colored sandstone that the Alaalids favored. Nine tall columns upheld a round dome that glittered in the sunlight as if polished slick; inside the dome was another, smaller structure, constructed of screens of the same stone, intricately carved and pierced. Pointing toward each of the directions of the Alaalid compass were six broad sets of steps, running down to the surrounding greensward from the main pedestal-level on which the columns stood. The whole structure gave an impression of elegant and airy lightness, at least as far as architecture was concerned. To Nita, it suggested an extremely beautiful trap. They walked slowly toward one of the flights of steps and paused there. Ponch looked at it, wandered over to the side of the steps, lifted a back leg, and made a liquid comment. Are you ready for this Kit said silently. Nita nodded. She had ready a set of wizardries that had been effective enough against the Lone Power in other times, and she had some newer defenses, not yet tried, that might work even better if it turned out she needed them. Let s go, she said. They walked up the stairs slowly, in step, in the hot sunlight she and Kit, with Ponch between them. Nita felt a little grim amusement: The only thing missing from the present scenario was the jingling of spurs, and someone whistling menacingly off in the distance. At the top of the stairs they stopped, looking through the columns toward the curved, pierced stonework shell inside. That was the naos proper, the center of the structure. It wasn t precisely dark in there, but by comparison with the bright day outside, it seemed shadowy enough. Right in front of them, the stonework was interrupted by a wide doorway th