by Diane Duane
Carmela nodded, and roughed up the top of Kit’s hair before he was able to do anything about it. “I’ll go tell Mama and Pop that we’re home,” she said. “And that you’re a hero.”
“Spare me!” Kit said, but Carmela was already trotting down the driveway.
Nita and Kit headed for the back door. Just briefly, as they opened the back gate, Nita paused to look up at the Moon. There it hung, just past first quarter and looking utterly innocent, as if nothing of any importance had been happening.
“It’s hard to believe,” she said to Kit.
“I still can’t believe it,” Kit said. He was standing by the gate as if waiting for someone to run past him.
“Come on,” she said softly. She checked to make sure that the wizardly screening field around their property was still in place, so that the neighbors wouldn’t freak when they saw a body being levitated in through the back door.
They had gotten no farther than into the kitchen when Nita heard the sound of someone dropping newspapers by the easy chair. A moment later, her dad came around through the dining room and into the kitchen. Nita ran to him and hugged him hard. “Are you okay?”
“I feel fine,” he said. “How about you?”
There were too many possible answers to that question, some of them contradictory. “It’s going to take a while to tell you everything that happened,” Nita said. “But are things okay here?”
Her dad sighed. “It looks that way,” he said. “The political situation looked pretty bad late last night and early this morning, but now the news channels say that all the people who were threatening each other with nukes have begun to see sense and back down.” His expression got wry. “One of the commentators said, ‘Often you wait for one party or the other in a crisis to blink. But this time they all blinked at once.’”
Nita managed a very slight smile. “That would have been about the time,” her dad said, “that every dog in town started to howl.”
She put her eyebrows up at that. “Oh, yes,” her dad said. “And it wasn’t just here, either. Dogs all over the state, possibly all over the country. There are as many theories as there are news channels that are bothering to carry the story. The main theory seems to be that the government was testing some new kind of sound weapon. Or early warning system.”
Nita shook her head. “Ponch,” she said.
Her dad had been looking at Kit, who was looking at Ronan. “I thought maybe it was something like that,” he said. “Because all the other governments on the planet seem to have been testing the same weapon. —Tell me later. What about Ronan there?”
“He needs somewhere to rest awhile before he goes home,” Nita said. “Dairine said we should put him in her room.”
Her dad nodded. “Fine. Neets … how is she?”
Nita shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Her dad sighed. “Okay,” he said. “By the way, school called.”
“Oh no.”
“You all have to be back tomorrow,” he said.
Nita was tempted to say No, please, I need one more day! But then she nodded, for it struck her that the utter terrible normalcy of school might actually be something of a rest, after all this. “Okay,” she said. She turned to Kit. “Let’s get him upstairs so he doesn’t have to be floating around down here.”
It took a few minutes to maneuver Ronan up the stairs and into Dairine’s bed. When Nita got up to her room, Dairine was standing and looking into the closet with a very strange expression. As they came in, she turned hastily.
“Give us a hand here, Dair?” Nita said, pretending not to have noticed. Within a few moments they had Ronan settled, and Nita pulled off Filif’s levitator field, wrapped it up into a small tight ball, and stuffed it in her pocket.
“Did Dad tell you about school?” Nita said quietly to Dairine.
“Yeah.” Dairine gave Nita a look. “And don’t even ask. Yeah, I’ll be there. The last thing we need right now is more trouble. But I’m going out in a little while, and I might not be back till late.”
Nita nodded.
“I’m lying on an effing Star Wars bedspread,” said a dry voice behind them. “Will I ever be able to look myself in the eye again?”
They all turned.
“By the fact that I’m not on Rashah,” Ronan said, looking around him, “but instead apparently in suburban hell and in contact with this dubious cultural artifact, I take it that we won.”
Nita went over to the bed and looked down at him. “Mostly,” she said, “because of you.”
“Now why do I doubt that?” Ronan said. He started to stretch, and then scowled. “Janey mack, feels like somebody’s been performing Riverdance on my chest.”
Nita spared a moment to wonder who or what “janey mack” was. “That would be because of the incredibly dumb stunt you pulled,” she said.
“Wasn’t so dumb, was it?” Ronan said. “We’re here.”
Nita found herself getting annoyed. “You scared us to death.”
Ronan looked at her. “Oh, stop your whinging,” he said. “I couldn’t go anywhere, the way you were yelling at me. Don’t think I didn’t hear you.” He turned his head wearily to look at Kit. “What is it with these women? Always yelling…”
“They do that,” Kit said, rolling his eyes.
Nita scowled at him, joined by Dairine.
“But it has to be a lot quieter in there now,” Kit said.
Ronan snorted. “And sure now don’t I miss Him,” he said, sounding annoyed. “Typical. If I’d known I’d be rid of Him so soon, maybe I’d have appreciated Him more.”
“But you didn’t know,” Nita said. “You thought He was going to be in there forever.”
“He knew, though. That much I gathered as He was leaving. And He was just after gathering that the Spear hadn’t been forged for me, or for Him, all that while ago. It was always forged for Her, for the Hesper, even when the Smith of Falias first made it, ten thousand years ago. And I thought I was just a spear-carrier? So was He.” And Ronan laughed, then. “He thought it was a stitch. You should have heard Him laughing.”
“I did. I mentioned about His sense of humor,” Nita said, and rubbed one ear in memory of having been bitten there by the Defender, long ago.
“You did. But the whole bloody thing was a setup. The Hesper’d never have broken loose all the way unless the Lone One was there trying to stop Her. If It’d just ignored Her, none of this would ever have happened.” He grinned that dark grin of his. “But wasn’t that how They had it planned?”
He sighed, then, and glanced at Kit. “Where’s the big fella?” he said.
Kit shook his head and turned away.
“It’s a long story,” Nita said. “You get some rest. We’ve got some things to do.”
“And what’s that big ugly thing on your face?”
Nita put up one hand, astonished. The zit stung her. She glared at Ronan.
“As soon as you’re rested,” she said, “go home, you ungrateful slob!”
Ronan grinned at her as they went out.
***
Nita paused just long enough to take the shower she had been desperately longing for and change her clothes. About half an hour later, pausing only to stop in at a shop in a little strip mall on the way, she and Kit were standing on Tom and Carl’s doorstep.
Nita pushed the doorbell. She looked at Kit uneasily while they waited, and waited.
The inside door opened. Tom and Carl were standing there looking at them.
“Uh, hi,” Nita said.
The silence lasted a few moments. Then Tom said, “We are on errantry… and, boy, do we ever greet you!”
He held the screen door open for them. Nita tackled Tom, and the hug went on for some time.
A few minutes later, they were sitting around the kitchen table. Nita shrugged out of her backpack, pulled out the little cup for which she’d stopped at the strip mall, and put it down on the table.
Carl picked it up, looking be
mused. “Why thank you,” he said. “It’s been months since anyone brought me half a pint of mealworms.”
“Tell Akegane-sama that I owe him one,” Nita said.
“Her,” Carl said.
“Are you guys okay now?” Kit said.
“If ‘okay’ includes being tragically embarrassed,” Tom said, “yes. But we couldn’t help it, any more than any other adult wizard on the planet could.” He turned to Nita. “I remember saying exactly what I said… and I believed it.” He shook his head. “It was terrible.”
Carl was nodding; he ran his fingers through his hair. “Imagine not doing anything but work for the TV station.” He shuddered. “It was a nightmare. Thank the One there’s more to life. Meanwhile, let’s see your manuals.”
Nita and Kit pulled them out and dropped them on the table. They were both back to their normal size.
“So it’s over,” Kit said.
“Oh,” Tom said, “I very much doubt that.”
Kit looked briefly panic-stricken. “You mean the Pullulus could happen again? But It said—”
Nita shook her head. “It’s never going to do that again,” she said. “The whole reason for the Pullulus was to keep anyone from helping the Hesper wake up. It’s too late for that now, and the Lone One won’t waste so much energy again on an attack. This was a one-off.”
“Is that a precognition?” Carl said.
Nita opened her mouth, closed it again. “Uh,” she said. “I don’t know…”
“Well, you’d better start keeping an eye on what you say,” Tom said. “You started your Ordeal with a precognitive event, as I remember. At the time I wondered if that was going to be something that would develop in more detail later on. Looks like I was right; you may be changing specialties again. Better get back to your manual studies and make sure.”
Nita shook her head. “And just when I thought things might get quiet now, stay the same for a while…”
Carl shook his head, smiling slightly. “There’s only one part of this job that’s the same for life,” he said; “that everything’s subject to change without notice.”
Tom nodded. “Anyway, I’d agree with your assessment,” he said. “The Pullulus itself is retreating rapidly everywhere now. Within days, even hours, perhaps, it’ll be completely gone. And in the event on the Moon, it was burned clear out of space for something like eight light-years in all directions. As far away as Sirius.”
“The Dog Star,” Nita said softly, and smiled.
“There was also another interesting development associated with that burnout,” Carl said. “It seems to have duplicated itself on a smaller scale in the neighborhood of Rirhath B. They burned clean about the same time we did, the manual says.”
Kit managed a small smile. “Probably someone saying ‘thank you’ for all the blue food,” he said. “Carmela told us about that when she got back from checking on Sker’ret.”
“Did they track down the Master, finally?” Tom said.
Nita nodded. “It took some doing, but once wizardry got working again in the neighborhood, Sker’ret found him and the Crossings staff on some little ice planet orbiting a brown dwarf in the Lesser Magellanic. I think the Tawalf and their masters had some idea that they might use them as hostages, or hold them for ransom, if the attack didn’t go as planned. They were all suffering from exposure, but Rirhait are tough: they’ll recover in a few months. Sker’ret will be the Master for the time being.”
“Good,” Tom said. “That place works best when a wizard’s running it.” He stretched.
Carl sat back, his arms folded. “Well, the universe is fortunate to have come through this with so little damage,” he said. “Not that in other times and places the Lone Power won’t attack in ways that are as awful, locally. But that doesn’t change the fact that this was a victory of a kind we may never see again in our lifetimes.”
Kit had been looking out the window into the backyard, his expression unreadable. Nita looked at him with some concern. “Is it true, you think, what we heard from the Powers?” he said. “That we’re going to see more ‘births’ of the Hesper, and each one’ll get stronger?”
Carl, too, had been wearing a brooding look. Now he stretched and stood up. “It seems likely,” he said. “But the Powers, like the One, are cagey about their scheduling. They’re not going to give away anything that will make it easier for the Lone Power to derail what They’ve got planned.”
He went to the window, looked out to see what Kit was looking at: Annie and Monty, the two sheepdogs, playing out on the lawn, taking a bone away from each other and running around the yard with it. “But in the meantime, take a little while to feel good about what you’ve just done. Any victory that can be won in the physical universe is just a picture of the bigger, slower one that started happening outside of time ages ago, and will keep happening outside of time until it’s all over.”
“And we win?” Kit said. He sounded doubtful.
Carl put a hand on his shoulder. “As long as we don’t stop fighting,” he said, “we always win. Because what we do, They do.”
“Not the other way around?” Nita said.
Tom shook his head. “It’s a popular misconception.”
He stood up. “You both look wrecked,” he said. “You should go get some rest. I understand that tomorrow is a school day.”
“Don’t remind us,” Kit said.
“And over the next week or so,” Carl said, “we’d appreciate it if you went through the manual ‘overviews’ of recent events and annotated them. Your take on exactly what happened is going to be invaluable.”
Nita nodded, shouldering back into her backpack’s straps. There were already a number of things that were bothering her. The peridexis, for one thing, had gone silent, and she was wondering whether she was ever going to hear that voice again; the inside of her head was strangely lonely. She wished she had better understood the reassurance it gave her almost the first time it had spoken, when the shadow of the Pullulus first fell over her dreams: “There is only one to whom it will answer, and that one is not here.” It meant Ponch. But there’ve been so many other things it said that I still don’t understand. She still remembered the Transcendent Pig, on the Moon, looking at them all with an expression that suggested there was still something it was waiting for. Or did I just imagine that? Having to study your own life is a pain.
They all headed for the door. Tom looked at them as he opened the inside door. “You did good,” he said. “But you know that.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “I just wish it didn’t hurt so much.”
Carl nodded. “I know,” he said. “Dai stihó… and hang in there. It’s all you can do.”
***
At around the same time, many light-years away, Dairine stood alone on the high platform outside the throne room on Wellakh.
Her clothes were much different than they had been when she came here last, and she didn’t care. The only one for whom she would have willingly changed her clothes was not here now, though she was still wearing one thing from that outfit that she wouldn’t willingly show anyone else.
Dairine stood there at the railing, looking out over the vast, blasted sunside plain. There was no sign of the huge crowd of people who’d been there before. They had had the Pullulus, Dairine’s manual told her, as Earth had, but when Earth’s infestation had been destroyed, so had theirs. Now they were probably cleaning up the local effects the same way that people were doing it on Earth. And like people on Earth, they’d be telling one another, for a long time, sad stories about the awful time the world changed, and how nothing now was the way it had used to be.
Eventually she heard the footsteps behind her on the stone. They stopped a long way from her. She turned, then, and saw the two tall figures standing there. Behind them, the great bronze doors stood open; in the great hall of the royalty of Wellakh, on the floor, halfway down that long, polished way to the throne, a single light burned. It was the same golden-yellow color of th
e planet’s sun; and very alone it looked, burning there by itself.
Dairine stood there a moment longer, and scrubbed at her eyes briefly. She was probably kind of dirty, but she couldn’t help it. If she’d stopped to take a shower—if she’d done anything except come straight here—she might have talked herself out of coming at all. And that would have been wrong. Slowly, she walked to them—Roshaun’s mother, Roshaun’s father, standing there together, waiting for her.
She could hardly bear their faces as she got closer to them. Wellakh’s sun was behind them; they stood in the shadow of the uprising peak from which the castle was carved. Their faces were in shadow, and their eyes. But that didn’t stop Dairine from seeing their expressions … and she wished she couldn’t.
She stopped a few feet from them, and looked up into their faces. They were so calm, and that by itself made the tears come to her eyes again. The hollow sorrow in Roshaun’s mother’s eyes was terrible to see. His father—Dairine looked up into that cool, set face, and realized that his mastery of his own expression was not as total as he might have hoped.
“I think we know,” Roshaun’s father said, “why you are here. And why you are here alone.”
Dairine looked up. “He did everything he could,” she said. “He did everything that was asked of him. More than was asked of him.” She gulped. “And it wasn’t enough. But that never stopped him…”
Roshaun’s mother stood very still, and only nodded, the tears running down her face. “Where did it happen?” Lady Miril said.
“In my solar system,” Dairine said. “We solved the root cause of the Pullulus, but after that we decided to go back to my world…”
“We decided?” Roshaun’s father said.
Dairine looked him in the eye. “He decided,” she said. “You of all people should know that nobody made his choices for him. Not you; not me.” Then she reached into her pocket. “But, afterward, this was left.” She brought out the collar with the Sunstone, looked down at it, and then held it out to Roshaun’s father. “Please,” she said, “take it.” Because having it hurts too much—
