by Diane Duane
“Ready now,” Filif said.
To the Yaldiv surrounding them, Kit said, “Take care of yourselves, people, and go well. Meanwhile, stand clear—”
The Yaldiv crowded away. Nita took a last look around in that great dimness, which just a short time ago had been so bright. Things looked really bad here, too, she thought. Just keep telling yourself that!
They vanished.
***
The group came out into a Crossings that wasn’t quite as frenetic as Nita had seen it last; and there seemed to be fewer Rirhait around … but she wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or not. The group got off the transit pad on which they’d arrived and looked around.
“Which way?” Kit said. “We should check with the Master before we head out.”
“That won’t take long,” Nita said, and smiled just slightly. Away down the long shining corridor she saw a vividly purple shape pouring itself along toward them, followed by about thirty other Rirhait.
“You’re back!” Sker’ret shouted at them, long before he got anywhere near them. The urgency of his manner was so much unlike Sker’ret’s usual soft-spoken diffidence that Nita couldn’t do anything but get down on one knee and grab him as he came up with them. Then she wheezed a little, because being hugged by someone with twenty or more pairs of legs can leave you a little short of air. “Oh, Mover without us and within,” Sker’ret said, “I didn’t know if we were going to see you again! …I mean, ‘when!’”
Nita just hugged him, then let him go. “We weren’t real sure about that ourselves,” Kit said, “so don’t sweat it.”
“The ceiling looks better,” Carmela said, looking up.
“It’s mostly back up where it belongs,” Sker’ret said. “There’s still some of it we need to regrow, but we’ve got other things to think about right now.”
“Is wizardry working properly here?” Roshaun said.
“For the moment,” Sker’ret said. “Though the manual functions went very strange there for a little while.”
“‘Strange’ has taken on many new meanings over the past sunround or so,” Filif said, pushing his baseball cap around so that the front went frontways for a change. “We should be grateful that we’ve lived to see it do so. What about the Pullulus?”
“Its density in our neighborhood increased very noticeably a couple of hours ago,” Sker’ret said. “Our star’s not endangered yet, but the increase continues.” He sounded nervous. “The odd thing is that Rirhath B seems to be affected much more severely than any system for hundreds of light-years around.”
“Somebody’s paying off a grudge,” Kit said, “and it’s going to take a lot of power to defuse it.”
“So I thought,” Sker’ret said. “All the wizards we have who’re still functional are assembling to defend this facility and our star; and help is coming from the nearest inhabited systems where the Pullulus isn’t any longer a threat. The local intervention force is assembling on one of our outer satellites, to distract attention away from the Crossings proper—because we’re going to be using that to evacuate the planet.”
Nita swallowed hard, wishing there was a way to do something similar for Earth. And you will know it was all your fault, said that cruel voice in the back of her mind. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll clear out of here and let you get on with it.”
“I checked your local news not long ago,” Sker’ret said. “Your world’s wizards are doing something similar—those who’re still viable. Not many, the manual says.”
“Thanks,” Nita said. “At least our planet’s still there. We’ll get going. But Sker’, are you sure you’re all right here? What about your ancestor?”
His eyes wreathed in barely concealed distress. “Still missing. There are many places yet to search. As for the rest of it, I’m not sure any of us are going to qualify for ‘all right’ any time soon. But we’ve all just got to cope.”
“What is the status of the Pullulus beyond your local area?” said Roshaun.
“Its expansion has either slowed or stopped completely in most places,” Sker’ret said. “Whatever you did seems to have worked.”
“Believe me, it wasn’t anything we did,” Dairine said. “Or not directly.”
Sker’ret pointed a couple of skeptical eyes at her. “I wouldn’t be too sure,” he said. “Never underestimate how connected things are: ‘All is done for each.’ But I suspect we’ve all got better things to do than start tallying up our scores just yet.” He looked past Nita and Kit to where Ronan hung in the cloud of Filif’s levitation field. “So come on over to this gate cluster and I’ll reprogram as many as you need. Roshaun, Filif, what are your plans?”
“I think I should return home,” Filif said. “My people have few enough wizards that they will need all the ones they have. The Pullulus is holding steady there, but there’s no telling whether it might not soon increase.”
Roshaun was once more holding in one hand the fierce little core of light that was his manual. He looked up from it with a slightly relieved expression. “So far,” he said, “nothing untoward seems to be going on in or near Wellakh’s system. In fact, the Pullulus seems to be receding.” He looked over at Dairine. “I will therefore return with you and have a look at your star before making my way home, just to be sure the repairs we did are holding.”
Dairine looked at Roshaun and opened her mouth as if about to say something, then closed it again and nodded. Nita found this weird enough that she would have liked to get a closer look at her sister, but Dairine had turned away to put Spot down.
She let out a long breath and turned to Filif. “Fil,” she said, and hugged him. His fronds tickled her back. “When you know that everything’s safe at home, come on back and let us know. My dad likes having you in the garden.”
“When I know,” Filif said. He was as uncertain of the near future as Nita was, but he wasn’t going to show it. He paused to look at Ronan. “Take care of him,” Filif said. “He stood strong: he does not deserve to fall.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Nita said.
The others crowded in close to say their good-byes. Finally Filif stood away from them. “Cousins,” he said, “you’re needed at home, and so am I. Till the journey brings us together again, dai stihó!”
“Dai,” they all said, and Filif made his way to the gate that Sker’ret had programmed for him. He glided out onto the pad, all his berries alight, and a second later he flicked out of view.
Nita let out a breath. Will we see him again? she wondered. And more to the point … will he see us again?
“There’s one main area of activity on your world’s satellite right now,” Sker’ret said. “Should I drop you there?”
Kit stepped over to the console pad at which Sker’ret was working and looked over his top few sets of shoulders at the coordinates. “We know the spot,” he said, and glanced over at Nita. “Let’s go.” He put an arm around Sker’ret, grabbed a fistful of eyes and wobbled them around a little. “Sker’—”
“Cousin,” Sker’ret said. He looked up at the others. “Go do what needs doing for your own world. One way or another, we’ll meet again.”
They all headed onto the same pad from which Filif had departed, and Roshaun and Dairine guided Ronan along behind them. At the control pad, looking very uncertain, very alone, even while surrounded by all his people, Sker’ret raised a single foreleg to them.
One way or another, Nita thought as she looked at him. He hit a control on his console. Which doesn’t necessarily mean while we’re still alive.
The Crossings disappeared from view.
***
There is no “dark side” of the Moon. In the course of its monthlong day, all of it eventually sees the Sun. But on the side of the Moon that the Earth never sees, just a shade below the spot where the lunar equator and its central meridian cross, there’s a crater called Daedalus; and many of Earth’s wizards know it well.
Almost dead center in the far side, the three-ki
lometer-high rim of the crater rises into the black and starry night. Normally Daedalus is where a moon-walker goes when he or she needs peace and quiet for some reason—in this case, “quiet” meaning complete isolation from the radio noise that Earth spills out into space. It’s not a big crater—barely sixty miles wide, with a floor surprisingly flat and smooth for any feature on the far side of the Moon. But in the crater’s broad center stand three small mounds, each about three miles wide, arranged in a triangle pointing southeast. At the top of the southernmost mound is a tiny crater, barely a half mile wide. There are many names for it, but most wizards call it the “Dimple.”
Nita and Kit and the others came out just above where the smaller bowl of the Dimple dropped away before them, and paused, looking around. It was dark, the Sun well down behind the western horizon, and Earth, of course, was nowhere to be seen. Nita did a moment’s calculation in her head. The Moon had just gone new when they’d left. Now, as seen from the Earth, it would be just past first quarter. In “real time,” we’ve been gone ten days, almost eleven—
Just the thought started to make her feel shaky again, but she had no time for that right now. The Dimple below them was absolutely crammed full of wizards, faintly illuminated by hundreds of sparks or globes of wizard-light. Behind Nita, Roshaun and Dairine and Spot made their own lights, while Carmela looked around her in astonishment.
“Don’t go more than six feet from us,” Kit said to her, as Ponch went running and half bouncing off down the slope, scattering gray-white dust in all directions. “That’s where our air stops.”
“Doesn’t seem to be stopping him,” Carmela said.
“Ponch plays by his own rules,” Kit said, looking down into the crater as Nita did. “So unless you can create your own universes, either stay close or get vacuum-dried.”
“Kit, it’s not a problem,” Dairine said. “Look…”
He glanced up as Nita did. Over the entire crater a faint dome of wizardry was shivering. “Somebody down there roofed the whole thing over with an auto-maintaining life-support wizardry,” Dairine said. “We can let the personal shields go as soon as we pass the boundary. Probably somebody didn’t care to sweat the small stuff while there were bigger things to be doing.”
“Makes sense,” Kit said. “Come on.”
They all stepped through the brief shiver of the spell’s outer boundary and onto the downward slope of the crater. “Big crowd,” Kit said. But the look on Kit’s face reflected the worry that Nita was feeling. He’d noticed that though there might be hundreds and hundreds of wizards down there, there wasn’t even one who looked adult.
“They’ve all lost it, haven’t they?” Kit said. “Every single one.”
Nita nodded, her mouth feeling dry again. It got drier when she looked up. Out in space, in what should have been a vast expanse of bright, unblinking stars, there was a huge blot of darkness, as if someone had spilled ink. At the edges of that huge, irregular patch, the stars twinkled and went faint.
Nita shivered all over. She had seen this in dreams, fleetingly, even before they got back from their trip to Alaalu—this darkness gradually and inexorably drawing across the stars. I was hoping it was just a nightmare, she thought. I should have known better. “So there’s still nobody to deal with this but us,” she said. “Question is, who’s in charge?”
Kit shook his head. “Not sure it’s the right question to be asking,” he said. “Let’s get on down there and see.”
However, someone had seen them appear at the crater’s rim and was already heading up toward them. Nita looked down, spotting the tropical-print tunic and the miniskirt and leggings, and that long, long dark hair that she’d admired so much, and immediately knew it was Tran Hung Nguyet bouncing upslope.
“You guys!” Nguyet said, shaking her head in astonishment as she came up to them. “You dropped right out of the manuals for a long time. We thought we’d lost you.”
“Were you waiting for us?” Nita said.
Nguyet shook her head. “A little too busy, sorry,” she said. “But I felt the power pop out all of a sudden.” She glanced over at Dairine, who was putting Spot down so that he could put his legs out and make his own way. “Is it him? He feels a lot different from before. Which is good, because we need all the power we can get right now.” She looked up at Ronan, hanging there in stasis. “What happened to him?”
“The Spear of Light,” Kit said.
Nguyet looked stunned. “And he’s still here?”
“I think he got some kind of special dispensation,” Dairine said.
“Boy, he must have,” Nguyet said. “Come on, we need you. Almost all of us are back in-system now—the ones who were away hunting a solution for the Pullulus as a whole got word through the manuals that its power supply had been ‘withdrawn.’ Then all of a sudden that changed to ‘abrogated.’” She gave them a look that was peculiarly admiring. “You got lucky again, didn’t you?” Nguyet said.
“I don’t know if lucky’s the way to put it,” Nita muttered.
“Well, that’s how my brother keeps putting it,” said Nguyet. “You should take it up with him, because he keeps going on about how your part of the world is ruining everybody’s statistical averages. Though just what Mister Number Cruncher means by that, I have no idea. If we all live through this, maybe one of you can stay awake long enough for him to explain what he’s talking about.” She rolled her eyes. “Bring some caffeine or a stay-awake spell.”
Dairine looked bemused. “What statistical averages?”
Nguyet shook her head. “This would not be my department,” she said. “You want to know about skateboarding or weather wizardries, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Math is Tuyet’s problem. Meanwhile, let’s get down there.”
They all headed downslope together. “Where is Tuyet?” Nita said.
“Down there helping coordinate the group,” said Nguyet. “There are maybe three thousand of us.” She shook her head. “Not as many as I wish we had … mostly human, and a few of the heavy hitters from the Affiliate species. Anyone Senior who’s still functioning, and everybody else with any special skills, is down on Earth. They’re all busy keeping things from blowing up. Literally.”
It was surprising how grim such a delicately pretty face could look, and Nita felt increasingly uneasy as they made their way down to the fringes of the huge crowd. Wizards of every height and shape and color were there, and of every age between eight or nine and maybe sixteen. There were several dolphins and small whales hanging in force-field–confined water jackets, and a very few cats scattered about. Though it all looked disorganized, Nita could see a lot of the most central group standing around the huge spell diagram in the middle of the crater. Its characters and arcs were rippling with the subdued fire of a wizardry on “hold,” completely implemented except for the starting command and the attachment of power sources.
Dairine and Roshaun and Carmela took a moment to guide Ronan off to one side of the crowd and put him carefully down. Then they made their way back to where Nita and Kit and Nguyet were examining the spell. “Complicated,” Dairine said as they came up to the edge of the spell and everyone could get a good look at it. “A repulsor?”
“That’s right,” Nguyet said, as Tuyet came bouncing along to join them. “Seemed like the smartest thing to do was to concentrate on pushing the Pullulus as far out into space as we could. Increasing its distance minimizes its effects, and we may be able to buy ourselves enough time for it to lose power and die off, the way it’s doing a lot of other places.”
Nita wasn’t sure how effective this was going to be, bearing in mind what the Lone One had said to them before the Hesper had embodied. “You try anything a little more proactive?” Kit said.
Nguyet looked frustrated. “Are you kidding? Three or four times. We tried a couple of long-range transports, but you might as well bail out a leaky boat with a sieve. More of the Pullulus just flowed right back into the same space. Then we tried just fr
ying it, a wholesale denaturing of the dark matter out to about the orbit of Mars—”
Tuyet shook his head. “We didn’t have anything like enough power. Leave even a grain of that stuff and it starts regenerating itself. And the kids who tried to channel that much power are just one big mental bruise. Seems like even though the Powers That Be can hand us nearly infinite power, the very biggest spells still have to be handled in groups to keep people from burning themselves out. They can change the rules, I guess, but not the way our brains work.”
“Listen,” Nita said, “do you have anybody else down here who’s sensing the peridexis directly?”
Nguyet looked at her. “The what?”
“Oh, great,” Nita said. “I guess it’s just me, then.”
“If I had the slightest idea what you were talking about, I’d be happier,” Tuyet said. “Anyway, check the manual and see if anybody else here has what you need. Then find a place to plug your name in so you can feed the spell power, because we need to get it running. The main body of the Pullulus is already just outside Mars’s orbit, and we really don’t want to let it get any closer. Its mass is already starting to screw up the Sun.”
Nita glanced back at Roshaun. He had been standing and gazing, not at the spell, but at the ground. Now he looked up and nodded. “I thought that was what I was feeling when I arrived,” he said. “You are right, and the effect is increasing every moment.”
“That’s right,” Nguyet said, “you’re one of the team who settled it down before when it started to act up. Can you do anything about it now?”
“I can try,” Roshaun said.
“We can try,” Dairine said, somewhat more forcefully than usual.
“Great,” Nguyet said.
“Okay, pay up,” said a voice from behind her.
Nguyet turned. “What?”
Darryl McAllister was standing behind her, with something folded and glowing in his hands. “You owe me a quarter,” he said.
“I owe you a smack in the head,” Nguyet said, “if you start bothering me with small stuff right now!” Nonetheless, she fished around in her pocket and handed Darryl a coin.