by Diane Duane
Mamvish stretched. “So by this Abstention,” she said, “it’s if I had eaten you! And therefore it’s as if if I’ve made you young, which no one has done before and now can be done by others as well! Therefore I’ll take your name, some day. When we know each other better, I will add it in with Hwenmam’s and make some part of you part of me. I will make you young whether you will or no, as you made me older than I would otherwise have been and before my time.”
And with that resolution made, she stood up and shook herself and said to the Powers that Be, “Very well: now I am ready. Let’s begin.”
Before the night was over she was standing under the vast moon of another world, setting a novel self-unfolding fractal spell into the crust of that planet (called Emidile) to burn it clean of a catalytic poison inflicted upon it by another world with which the Emidili had been at war.
The Emidili themselves, a crustacean species, would of course have to be moved off their world while the crust finished healing. But Mamvish was already making plans as to how that could be done. Her mind had gone back to the little malfeh she’d seen at her clutching-place, and how they had made rafts of themselves and floated away to safety.
Rafting, Mamvish thought. That is what we’ll call it…
Behind her eyes there was a most aggrieved yelp as Hwenmam bit Tarsheh’s tail again.
“Come on,” Mamvish said to them all. “Work to do!” She vanished.
And somewhere in the depths of reality, a Power all Alone rubbed Its aching head.
Ronan Nolan Jnr.
Preface
Attempting to describe (from a position in linear time) the thought processes of immortal hypersomatic beings far more centrally positioned than we in the vast matrix of the Pleroma is always going to be a dodgy business. Leaving aside their mutually interpenetrative relationship with and profound perception of the One at Creation’s core, the mere structure of minds capable of operating in thousands of dimensions at once is never going to be less than starkly incomprehensible to those limited to working in a mere three or four.
And describing conversations between such beings is even more difficult. As linear time involves them only when they choose for it to do so, an overheard conversation—assuming the ability to overhear it at all—could easily, from our point of view, appear to begin after it ends… not to mention seeming to take either centuries, or some incomprehensible fraction of Planck time—or anything in between. Such a conversation might also have no middle… or seem to, as the most pertinent parts of the discussion may take place along other dimensional axes effectively as distant from us as if they were out beyond the creation-event horizon.
Nonetheless we know that such conversations between and among the Powers that Be do indeed happen. Among most of the Powers, indeed nearly all of them, these discussions—be they casual or work-based, and regardless of the terrible energies or Pleroma-deep drama bound up in them—are normally positive and grounded in (almost literally) infinite good will.
But one class of these chats taking place at the white-hot heart of Things is not known for its good will at all. There is always an element of competition involved when dealing with the Power who first taught energy how to become scarce and the worlds how to run down. And it would be hard to find more competition between two Powers, even in conversation, even when one is so close to the Heart of Things and the other is so far away, than is the case when the two parties to the conversation are the Starsnuffer—the Kindler of Wildfires, the Power who Walks Alone—and his brother, old associate and (now) immortal enemy, the Regent of the Sun, the Guardian of the Divided Name, Chief Prince of the Presence, known casually to his present associates as the One’s Champion.
These conversations may normally be expected to be of dimensions-deep nuance and of terrifying complexity of bandwidth, data and emotion, such that their sheer intensity would simply evaporate to their composite quanta beings of less seniority who might blunder through such an interaction’s fringes. However, since these two Powers are such close contemporaries in the great Scheme of Things, their conversations would to an eavesdropping being from someplace less central inevitably sound a whole lot like very young siblings having a fairly basic squabble.
So about this new one…
Which new one? …Oh. He’s nothing that special.
Come on, don’t try that with me! You wouldn’t be bothering if he wasn’t.
You have no idea of why I’d be bothering.
Maybe I should look into it a bit more closely. Anything you’re interested in is worth taking away from you and… Laughter. Roughing up a bit.
Don’t even bother going there. He’s mine.
Want to bet?
No. And he is! From the very beginning.
Actually, no.
You are so wrong. But you’ll soon see.
You think so?
I know so! Just watch.
Don’t be so sure…
You’re insufferable. You’re always so sure you’re going to win. I’m going to make you eat your words this time.
We’ll see about that.
And this conversation persists for centuries, or millennia, or fractions of Planck time, while elsewhere life goes its own way…
Induction
“Ronan!”
Sitting at the breakfast table in their little kitchen, poking with one hand at the button on his phone that scrolled the texts while shoveling cereal into his face with the other, Ronan Nolan rolled his eyes. “Don’t shout, Mam, I’m right here.”
She was pouring out a mug of tea and didn’t turn around. “Not you.”
He glanced at the ceiling as if for help, not that any was going to arrive. “Not you”: that was the story of his life, lately. He went back to finishing his cereal as fast as he could before it went soggy.
His Da—the source of the confusion, or at least a continuation of it—came down the stairs and down the hall into the kitchen, managing to both hurry and yawn at the same time. “You rang?”
“Traffic report.”
Ronan’s Da folded his tall dark closecropped self down into one of the little kitchen chairs and rubbed his face and yawned one more time. He could wear shirts and ties and work trousers all he liked, but with his long ironic face he still always wound up looking like some kind of hard man from a gangster show. “What about it?” his Da said, sitting down and grabbing for the toast Ronan’s Mam had just put down on the table for him.
“They just said on the radio not to use the back road up to town this morning,” said his Mam. “Somebody broke the gates at the DART level crossing again. It’s all backed up.”
His Da squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and made a kind of aggrieved hissing noise. “Idiots,” he said. “Dual carriageway, then. Wonderful.”
He started eating his toast at about twice the usual speed, since taking the M1 motorway up to town was going to mean he’d be an extra half hour getting to work at the Fingal County Council buildings. Ronan’s Da worked as a mid-level planning commissioner with the county planning board. “Not a bad job”, he’d always say, “except for the bit where I spend the whole day saying ‘no’ to people. Well, we can’t all have everything…”
His Mam had visited the fridge for milk and paused halfway back from it to flip the eggs in a skillet on the stove. Then she put a mug of sweet white tea down in front of his Da, who grabbed it and more or less chugged it. “Got that history test today?” he said to Ronan.
Ronan shook his head. “Yesterday,” he said. “We get the marks on Friday.”
“Any predictions?”
“Pass,” Ronan said.
His Da glanced up at him as the rest of the second piece of toast went down. “’Pass’ as in ‘not fail’ or ‘pass’ as in ‘don’t be asking me that first thing in the morning?”
“Second one,” Ronan said, being unwilling to get into predicting anything when he genuinely had no idea what that grade was going to look like. It had been an essay test, and his
history teacher’s essay marking varied wildly depending on whether her very on-and-off relationship with her boyfriend was on or off at the moment. He couldn’t wait to be out of his second-year classes in a couple of months and be shut of her and the history module and all the rest of it. Summer, he thought in desperate longing. The weather may be shite but at least there’s no school… And even if the weather was generally bad at least the temperatures were higher, so you had a chance of getting in a decent hurling match with the lads without coming down with pneumonia.
“Fair enough,” his Da said. “Keep us posted.” And mercifully it seemed like that was all Ronan was going to hear about it this morning. Not that he normally wasted God’s time praying about school business, but that test had got up to the “Please God just let me pass the fecking thing” level, and it really would be a relief to have it off his plate. There would be a few more tests that would get him this tense before the end of the year, but it was way too soon to waste time worrying about them. Got a few weeks anyway, Ronan thought, dropping his gaze to his phone again.
From down the hall came a clunk as the mail flap in the front door went. Ronan’s Da looked mournfully at his eggs, started to get up.
“I got it,” Ronan said, and pushed back from the table, dropping his spoon in the empty cereal bowl.
“Expecting a letter?” his Da said, amused.
The cheeky answer would have been No, just don’t want the morning half ruined by you complaining about your eggs going cold. But Ronan kept that to himself. “Anybody wants me, they’ll email me,” he said as he headed down the hall. “I’m done, you’re not. Problem?”
“None whatsoever. Well done that man.”
Ronan bent to pick up the letters that had fallen on the wipe-your-feet mat by the front door and wandered back toward the kitchen, sorting through them. “Ronan L,” he said (the electric bill), “…Ronan R,” (his Mam’s Granda, who had been dead for two years but was still getting mail here, usually something to do with his pension), “…Mary G,” his Mam’s mobile phone bill, “…Ronan L,” the house phone bill, “…Ronan L…” —some stationery catalog, the third one this week at least. “Jaysus but these people use up a lot of paper on these things, you should tell them to stop some of them!”—“Ronan L…”
Not for the first time he wished there were a few less Ronans around: he felt kind of lost in the crowd. But the name kept cropping up in the Nolan family—on both sides—to the point where it looked like the whole lot of them had been out of the room when God passed out the name-imagining abilities. And the daily post didn’t even begin to cover the seriousness of the problem. There was Mam’s Granda Ronan (the dead one), Granda Ronan (his Da’s Da, who lived in Little Bray), Ronan’s Da Ronan (or simply “Ronan Nolan” to the neighbors), the middle-aged cousin normally referred to as Beardy Ronan (despite the beard taking occasional unexpected sabbaticals), and three other younger-cousin Ronans who were the children of his Da’s sisters.
Finally he himself had come along and became (to his horror) “Baby Ronan.” That had lasted for years. He’d had to reason, beg, or (in one memorable case) pummel his cousins out of it, one by one, until at last it was only the unmanageable oldsters clinging to the usage. Nothing you can do about them anyway except not talk to them when they show up at Christmas... Not that that helped. In fact it made it worse. (”Oh and here’s the babby, will you look at ye, the height on you, I remember when you were just a wee dote and you…” Normally Ronan stopped listening at that point, as some reference to infantile bodily excretions routinely followed.)
Ronan handed his Da the pile of mail and flopped back down in his chair without passing any comment on the topmost piece, a plain white envelope marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. Ronan knew the look of those: it was something from the bank. Sometimes this was good news and sometimes not so good. When he was very small and had heard his father talking about “the overdraft” and how big it was getting, Ronan had for a while got the idea that this was some kind of cold-breathed monster living in the ceiling in his Mam’s and Da’s bedroom that might or might not creep out in the middle of the night and eat the family. While Ronan knew better now, he also still knew that discussing the overdraft without being invited to could lead to trouble.
For the moment his Da just pushed that envelope aside and glanced at the others, then returned his attention to his eggs and bacon. Mam had finally sat down across from him and was slathering orange marmalade on top of the butter on her toast, a bizarre behavior that Ronan could never understand. For him it was one or the other, never both.
“Nothing for you?” his Da said, giving him one of those sidelong looks suggesting teasing and being teased was okay at the moment. “Something some owl dropped off, maybe?”
Ronan snickered. “Probably a bit late for that.” His thirteenth birthday had come and gone two months earlier with a small cake-heavy party that devolved (stealthily) into a cider bash in the parking lot up the hill. His fourteenth year had therefore begun with what felt like a near-fatal hangover and a resolution to leave the fecking booze alone until his eighteenth-party rolled around. If the kids at school mocked him for this resolution, Ronan didn’t care: they hadn’t spent as much time as he had with his throbbing head down the loo.
“Unless the post office lost it the way they lost the last one…” his Mam muttered as she bit into her toast.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Ronan said as he grabbed his bowl off the table and got up to rinse it in the sink and stick it in the dishwasher. “Way they’ve been going lately, it probably wound up on Mars.”
His Da snorted. Thousands of pieces of undelivered mail had recently been discovered dumped in a local landfill: increasingly unlikely opinions about where even more could probably be found had been all over the media in the last couple of weeks. “Pity the bills can’t go there too,” he said, spearing the last quarter-rasher of bacon and the last bit of fried egg and gobbling them down.
Ronan’s Mam snickered as his Da pushed back from the table. “Not the bills you need to send to Mars,” she said. “It’s the people sending them.”
“Lotta work, that…” His Da headed down the hallway to get his coat. Even though it was April the weather had been running chilly and damp. “How many companies?”
“All of them,” his Mam said.
“I’ll get on it,” said the voice down the hall. “Right after lunch.”
“You’re not even done with breakfast and you’re on about lunch…”
But Da was back in the kitchen, looking around on the counter between the fridge and the sink. “What?” his Mam said.
“Keys. And this.” He grabbed Ronan’s Mam’s chin and smooched her.
She smiled around the smooch. “G’way with you before you’re late.”
He got, trotting down the hall again. Ronan turned to follow him, as he was due to head for school in twenty minutes or so.
“Ronan—”
He paused, looked over his shoulder. “Me this time?”
His Mam gave him a dry look and put a hand on his arm, turning him toward her. “Is this one of the old uniforms? Thought we gave all those to the Goodwill.”
He glanced down at the sleeves of his school uniform’s jumper. “Nope, it’s a new one.”
She looked down at the navy-blue uniform trousers and shook her head in disbelief. “We just got this uniform last month…”
“Getting taller, Mam.”
“Well, fine, but I wish you could, I don’t know, pace yourself a little…”
Down the hall the door opened. “DART’ll be late if that gate’s broken again,” his Da called from the door.
“I’ll drive,” his Mam shouted back.
“Okay. Bye!”
The door shut.
His Mam just stood still and sighed for a moment. She looked ridiculously housewifely: petite, blonde, with her cute little sharp-eyed face, wearing a little flowery dress with an apron over it—as if she’d fallen out of some la
undry-powder commercial instead of being about to go be the IT lady at a four-star hotel up in Dalkey.
The laundry-powder-ad concept Ronan kept to himself, as his Mam could get pretty scathing about books not being judged by their covers. And what do I know, maybe dresses with Hawaiian flowers all over them are hot in hotels right now. “Gonna be late,” Ronan said, picking up his phone off the table and glancing at the time.
She sighed. “Yeah.” She went to him and kissed him. “Check up on Nana before you go?”
“Sure. When’s her carer today?”
“Two o’clock. Theoretically.”
They gave each other a resigned look. “Might happen,” Ronan said.
“Even odds on pigs flying,” his Mam said, untying the apron and chucking it across the kitchen into the laundry basket by the under-counter washing machine.
“You want me to check her at lunch?”
His mam sighed. “No,” she said, “it’s okay. This new one’s good about calling if she’ll be late, and if she does, there’s Mary next door. Anything you need from the Superquinn? I’ll stop there on the way home.”
Ronan shook his head. His Mam headed down the hall and up the stairs to change: he leaned against the counter for a while, scrolling down texts from Pidge and some other friends at school.
His Mam bustled back in with her coat on, slinging her work bag over her shoulder. “See you later,” she said, kissed him and was gone.
The front door shut. Ronan sighed, listening to the quiet of the house, and then went upstairs to see about his Gran.
***
On the way up he stayed on the right side of the stairs so as to miss the one step where the carpeting had pulled away from its nail and was coming loose; then hung a sharp right at the landing, switching back down the hall that led to the front bedrooms. The left-hand one was his Mam’s and Da’s. The right-hand one…
