Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

by Diane Duane

  He had managed with the Aethyrs’ help to make contact with the Planetary wizard in charge of the emergency endeavors, a planetary management specialist named Tarat. It took not much time to find him, as he was the tall shaggy-haired one in a sort of long silken wrap, standing at the center of a huge informational Speech-diagram showing details about the star Phaleron, a great aggregation of data and imagery. He was also the center of a crowd of other wizards who were both telepathically and vocally shouting at each other, while he attempted (apparently without much success) to keep them calm.

  Rho immediately felt sorry for him. Without hesitation he went straight into the heart of that circle, took up stance there with the utter self-assurance of someone instructed by royalty in the art of looking certain, and waited in well-mannered but imperious silence until the wizards surrounding Tarat started to fall quiet at the sudden appearance of someone in their midst who was definitely not at all local.

  “Cousins all,” Rho said in one of the phrasings used by wizards bent on joining an intervention already in progress, “dai stiho! Greeting you in the Aethyrs’ names, I charge you to tell me your trouble and make me part of its solution!”

  They gazed at him in astonishment, and Tarat after a moment said, “You’re the wizard who messaged me before? You’re on Ordeal!”

  The word wasn’t one a Wellakhit would use, but he understood it as a cognate Speech-term to Challenge. “Yes.”

  “Well then of course we need to give your input extra weight! And you are here from—”

  “Wellakh.”

  From the empty air Tarat retrieved what looked like a little book-roll, pulled it apart in his hands, and scrolled through it. “Oh,” he said after a moment, the emotions rolling off him quickly becoming divided between horror and a kind of stricken, impressed understanding. “Oh, my, yes, I see why this would be something you’d know about! How is it that we haven’t heard from you until now? —But sorry, sorry, you’re just now on Ordeal, as of—what, the last rotation? You didn’t waste your time, did you cousin! Never mind, thank you so very much for coming, in the One’s name tell us what you have in mind, because we need help in a hurry!”

  Rho immediately turned his attention to the reference spell circle on the floor beneath all their feet. “Well. Before I got here, I was having a look at your chromosphere figures for the last—what do you call it? Month?” He had always wished Wellakh had a moon: he resolved to have a look at this world’s specimen if he had time. “And you see this curve here, this is all wrong, this shouldn’t be—”

  “Well of course it’s wrong, the star’s about to flare, isn’t it?”

  “No, you’re missing what I’m saying, this is atypical! If you look down here, yes, the heliopause, look at these dynamics, see the skew on those numbers, why’s the curve bulging like that? And look here at the heliopause, it’s deranged, yes, but this looks rather short-term, doesn’t it? Yes, here, let’s have a look at the iron lines—”

  It took Rho a few moments’ work with his Aethyr to work out how to display a full chromatographic spectrum for the star, but once he had it hanging in the air before them, Rho saw clearly that his initial impression had been right. What was going on here was dangerous in the short term, indeed quite dangerous… but the effects didn’t seem to have penetrated to the levels of the star’s structure closer to the core. It was, at the end of the day, an upper-atmospheric phenomenon with only a moderate amount of mass and convection devoted to the ongoing morbidity dynamic, and so it could be derailed—

  “All right, good, yes, look here,” Rho said, excited and pleased that there was a possible response to the problem so readily available, “I know this is going to sound peculiar to you but it’s not as bad as it looks—” He plunged into what his father would doubtless have dismissed as a fairly easygoing analysis of a case of diseased stellar chromatography.

  Tarat meanwhile was all but goggling at him, as if the Aethyrs had sent him some kind of unstable genius. Rho found this funny—not to mention even headier than being called “Emissary” for the first time—and found himself having trouble not bursting out laughing at the sudden wash of amazed respect from the other.

  Tarat was staring at Rho’s diagrams. “And this will—” He sounded as if he hardly dared say it. “This strategy will put the whole problem right, won’t it! Not just delay the flare, but derail it entirely!” An astonished look of sudden hope, of hope that its owner had plainly never hoped to feel again, washed over his face. “Powers that Be be praised, this will do the work that’s needed, this will stop it!”

  “Well,” Rho said, “at least it will persuade your star to choose another path.” No one simply told a star “You’re going to have to stop that now” and expected results. The thought of trying such a stunt with Thahit, after hearing some of his father’s stories, horrified him. You explained, you cajoled, you wheedled, and sometimes you got quite forceful, even physical. But stars were themselves quite physical in their outlook, and a good robust intervention was not only acceptable but sometimes expected as a sign of respect.

  “Yes,” Tarat said, “yes it will—”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Well, we’ll need to call in the other wizards who’re working on this, and the planetary governments, and then we’ll have to take some time to allow for decision-making—”

  True choice is made in a flash, he could hear his father saying, in a breath. Those asking for time to think in the face of a crisis are routinely looking for ways to avoid dealing with it. Once you know the right way to go, for all Aethyrs’ sakes don’t give them time to start arguing about it!

  Rho gave Tarat a long look across his book-scroll. “I’d say you’re short of time for discussion,” Rho said. “This approach will work if the management is implemented quickly. But within a matter of hours this situation will have progressed too far to be altered. Look at that set of variables there!” He pointed at one tightly nested group of core energy statements that was winding itself tighter and tighter as they watched. “And there, the convection transfer in and out of the upper chromosphere. If that energy gets to the surface and begins to derange things further, well—”

  He did what was apparently in at least some places the local version of a shrug, with his shoulders instead of one hand.

  Tarat’s eyes went wide. So did those of many of the others standing around them.

  And it was as if that simple gesture was what tipped them over into action. “We’ll call the local specialists and the governments’ representatives in,” Tarat said. “You’ll explain it to them?”

  “It seems that’s what I’m here for,” Rho said, and had to bite his lip to keep a sudden grin of triumph from popping out. Most inappropriate, he could hear the King saying. Restrain yourself.

  Rho did. But at the same time he found himself wishing his father was here to see this…

  ***

  The call duly went out to the various experts and dignitaries who had to be convinced that this was the way to save their lives, and those of their worlds, and their star. What ensued was a long session, and not an easy one. By the time it was coming to what felt like an end, Rho had lost count of the number of times he’d wanted to bang all their heads against the single small table in the middle of the big room where they all met to stand in a circle and have matters explained to them. The various beings and entities spent what seemed like endless time assailing him with annoying questions that were, he had to admit, completely understandable under the circumstances, even though from Rho’s point of view they were fairly stupid.

  The only question that satisfied him at all was when the king or chief presider or mayor or whatever of one of the smaller nations on the most sun-distant of the system’s three planets said, at the end of the clearest explanation Rho could come up with, “How can we be sure this will work?”

  King Nelaid would have said, In this universe, no one can be certain of anything. Demanding certainty is demanding re
assurance that what happened yesterday will happen today. The laws of averages alone militate against it— Rho knew, though, that though his father was right, that approach wasn’t what was needed here.

  So he simply shrugged again, that gesture for some reason seeming to have a near-wizardly effect on these people. “It worked on Thahit,” Rho said, “three hundred forty-one sunrounds ago. And the planet lived to see another sunround. Indeed, at least three hundred forty-one more.”

  Then he folded his arms and waited to see what they’d do.

  To his utter astonishment, they decided, all of them, in a rush, and accepted his plan.

  The tension in the great room, of course, didn’t now relax: it got much worse, much of that increase coming from the wizards who were going to be expected to pull off this feat. “Will you come with us?” said Tarat.

  “Of course I will,” Rho said. He was very glad to be invited, and with so many natives of the star’s system handy to explain what a stranger not native to the local stellar economy was doing there, he felt it likely that they need expect no more than the usual problems from the star itself.

  It took a while more to complete the formalization of the agreement to intervene, and to pull together and fully brief the wizardly team that would step into the star to put its problem right, and to set in place what protections they could against the electromagnetic disturbances that would inevitably propagate through the system in their intervention’s wake. But at long last they were all standing together inside a wide forcefield-enclosure poised over that burning, roiling surface, and Rho looked down into the turbulent fires and felt, peculiarly, satisfaction, even before any of them had done anything. It was his very first in-person stellar intervention as a wizard, the very first time in his life that he would do what he had been born to do, trained to do, intended to do, from the very beginning. He was, at long last, exactly where he was supposed to be.

  Even if I fail, he thought— But he wasn’t going to fail. This was actually going to be a fairly simple piece of work.

  The star, whose name was Peklimut, resisted them. This was expected, since stars are as resistant to sudden change imposed from without as any other being. And now, Rho thought as the forcefield-bubble from which they were working began to sink into the star and be buffeted by the inner fluid turbulence of its upper chromosphere, now comes what I’ve been waiting for!

  He knew that almost every wizard meets the Lost Aethyr at some point, or in some form, during their Challenge. And when the star began to rage at them as the wizardry meant to change its behavior set deeply into its structure, and some thousands of partitions of distance beneath the intervention group turned into a wildly raging battleground of forces, This is it! Rho thought. This is the combat I always thought I knew how to imagine when I lay on my couch at home, thinking how it would finally be when I became a wizard. Which was why he found it funny in a way how prosaic this seemed by comparison with his dreams; as if the Lost One should turn up in dark-flaming glory on your doorstep and then tell you that your Challenge was to clean your room.

  Not that the star didn’t try to flare right then, of course—and worse than Thahit had, in its day. But Rho knew what to do about that, hands-on. And in wizardly seeming, “hands on” was the modality he used to control the impulse, reaching down into the shrieking and rebellious roil of plasma beneath them and simply seizing hold of the forces trying to come broiling up from beneath the heliopause at them, holding them in place beneath it and not allowing them to move.

  It was just as well Rho had no time to panic, plunged into his very first wizardry as he was almost without preparation. But wizardry aside, he knew what needed doing, having done it in the stellar simulator. And the Aethyr helped him by simply casting that work into wizardly idiom, and laying out the spell diagrams he needed to speak his way through. Or shout! Rho thought between breaths, for the roar of the angry star was enough to deafen anything living. So concentrate, so that ‘living’ is a condition that endures awhile more! And he focused on the words in the Speech and on feeling the wizardry come live around him—

  Seeing that Rho’s strategy was working, the other wizards were already following suit. Other hands were thrust down along with his into the burning maelstrom, and all of them hung on together while under them the star bucked and writhed and tried to burst out of its own gravitational confines, attempting in a spasm of insensate fury and frustration to blow.

  But it couldn’t—not with all of the intervention group imposing their joint will on its physics—and didn’t. And when Peklimut had exhausted its rage and its inner atmosphere began to settle, there was leisure for Rho to step back a little and watch as the star’s own native wizards reached down more subtly into the mathematics of Peklimut’s physical situation, setting deeply into the star riders and provisos to its equations that would prevent further such flare events from having a chance to start setting themselves up in the first place.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours—but what was actually only a space of maybe a thousand breaths—they were all able to step away from the work and rise to the surface again, leaving Peklimut regarding them with a combination of annoyance and relief, and a general sense of being glad its (admittedly) helpful intruders were all done with business now and well out of its mass, because it had had enough of this to last it a lifetime.

  On the return to Varesh, the planet where the intervention group and the planetary dignitaries had met, that was when Rho finally felt—along with understandable and inevitable triumph—the equally inevitable weight of the energy expenditure spent on the wizardry he’d just enacted, as it fell down all over him like a wet blanket, seemingly dragging at both his limbs and his brains. Oh, my couch, I want you, Rho thought as he sagged against a handy chair and propped himself upright with both hands while people crowded around him, congratulating him. Ah, to get back home and just fall down for a while!

  He could imagine the conversation that would ensue when he suddenly turned up in Sunplace, not just a wizard all of a sudden but exhausted by wizardry—and this too fit none of his previous fantasies about the event. There should have been a triumphant return, there should have been tears and laughter and hugging, the dignitaries of Wellakh should have been called in and bowed before the new wizard who would have laughed kindly at their discomfiture at finding all their whispered doubts to be invalid, now and forever. But instead all Rho wanted now was to stagger into his parents’ chamber and show them his Aethyr and say Yes, royal father, yes, queenly mother, I am a wizard now, and can we of your grace have this conversation later because I’m dead on my feet!

  For the time being, though—because his mother and father had drilled into him the meaning and uses of diplomacy—Rho had little choice but to stand there and suffer with a smile the accolades of the people he’d come so far to help, making as much nontechnical conversation as he could manage and accepting food and drink from them (at least the food and drink his Aethyr allowed him: once or twice he was nearly most kindly poisoned). But it was a relief when he felt he’d accepted enough of their hospitality that in good conscience he could finally say the formula his mother had taught him: “With regret, my cousins, all now being well, I will withdraw: and when I am gone, the Aethyrs be with this work and with you!”

  Naturally this announcement was accepted with the normal invitations for him to stay a little longer—after all, he’d just helped save the world, indeed several worlds! But Rho held his ground, and finally someone escorted him back to the facility’s excessively palatial worldgating suite, where his Aethyr showed him how to set his desired coordinates into the mechanism.

  The thought of going straight home passed through his mind, but even as tired as he was he couldn’t quite bear to lose that feeling of freedom yet. He’d pause in the Crossings long enough to have some kind of energy drink to wake him a bit, and something basic and Wellakhit to eat, and after that go home and face his royal parents.

  That plan made, entr
opy naturally immediately asserted itself in the form of a scheduling problem. The local worldgating management system told Rho that for operational reasons (whatever that might mean) the gating previously scheduled for a hundred breaths from now had been rescheduled for five hundred breaths from now. Rho muttered under his own breath, chose the least comfortable looking of the seats in the overdecorated gating suite—being half afraid he’d fall asleep in it—and waited.

  While he waited, his mind wandered a bit in a combination of fatigue and satisfaction. After a while Rho found himself idly returning in memory to that impression he’d garnered from Peklimut, that faint fleeting sense of its feeling that it was glad to be done with this annoying event, as it had had more than enough of it. Yet the impression, re-examined, now seemed to add: in the recent past.

  Rho blinked. Who but these wizards had been working with this star recently?

  …Or was the word he was seeking more like “meddling”? Or “tampering?”

  Though I might have imagined that…

  But what if I didn’t? Is it possible that what I picked up was something its usual caretakers wouldn’t even have noticed, normally?

  In fact, was it the kind of thing that it would take someone who wasn’t intimate with Peklimut to notice?

  Rho had no leisure to take that thought much further, as right around then the hex cluster in the room flashed blue and a chime indicated its imminent patency for transit to the Crossings. But when he appeared once more under the great floating ceilings once more—above which the burning day had slid toward planetary afternoon—and strolled out slowly into the massive central concourse, a peculiar thought pushed its way to the forefront of his mind and took hold of him, impossible to ignore: