by Diane Duane
Kit picked up the pencil again and started twiddling it as another pause ensued, even longer—
Then a sudden noise at the other end of his room made Kit jump right up out of his chair as the big framed picture of him and Ponch on the far wall leaped away from that wall and landed with a thump face down on his bed.
A second later, a head—a pebbly-scaled, goggle-eyed saurian head, a hugely toothy head nearly four feet wide—appeared out of nothing, apparently sticking itself right through that wall and filling most of that end of the room. It looked around it with interest.
Kit stared. “What the—?” he said. It came out more as a squeak than a word, his voice breaking, but just for this once Kit was too stunned to be embarrassed by that. “…Mamvish?”
If what Kit was looking at was a projection, it was a most unusual one: it gave a general sense of not so much coexisting with the local reality as overriding it. Makes sense, though, Kit thought, for the shape looking at him belonged to one of the most powerful wizards in this part of the galaxy: someone with power ratings so high that the Lone Power had apparently elected to sit out her Ordeal, claiming to have been indisposed. If despite this Mamvish also acted generally like a very gifted eight-year-old with a very short fuse, well, that was more or less what she was, comparing her present age—just a couple of Earth millennia—against her own very long-lived people’s lifespans.
The main question now was what she was doing projecting an eidolon of herself through Kit’s bedroom wall. Normally, when Mamvish’s insanely busy schedule made it possible for her to grace this planet with her presence, she came in via personal worldgating and concealed herself somewhere convenient until people could come meet up with her. That was the way Kit had last seen her, for about thirty seconds, at Christmas—cheerfully stamping around in the snow in his temporarily spell-shielded driveway while wizards and assorted others fought for the chance to hug her hello before she had to teleport away again, heading back to the business of saving some threatened species light years away.
Now, though, Mamvish looked harried and worried: her conical eyes, so much like those of an iguana or chameleon, were revolving out of phase with one another, in directions Kit had never seen them go before. And a layer or two down in her extraordinary hide, always an indicator of what was going on in her thoughts and emotions, such a violently-colored whirl and blaze of crimson and golden Speech-characters was roiling under the surface that she looked like she might be about to catch fire.
Kit was so flummoxed by all of this that he didn’t even think to say “Dai stihó” to her before anything else. What came out instead was, “Mamvish, would you hold still, you’re knocking all my stuff down!”
“Oh,” Mamvish said, looking around her in shock. Her eyes bugged out a bit more than usual then, the expression fairly abashed, as she tried to move as little as possible. Nonetheless she managed to jostle the bookshelf at the far end of the room, right by the left side of her massive head, and knock some of Kit’s older model airplanes off the top shelf. “Sorry, Kit. Sorry! Kind of in a hurry here—!”
Kit winced as the models hit the floor and shattered, then tried to get control of himself: there certainly had to be more important things to think about than assorted busted plastic when Mamvish’s head was sticking through his wall. More or less… “It’s okay,” Kit said. “What’s up?”
Mamvish rolled her iridescent eyes some more—always a sight worth watching, even when she appeared to be mostly annoyed at herself—and went entirely still except for the storm of Speech-symbols swirling under her skin. “Christopher Kellen Rodriguez,” she said, “well met in haste and on the business of the Powers we jointly serve! In my capacity as Species Archivist to the Powers that Be and chief among senior rafting coordinators for the galactic subregion locally referred to as the Orion Arm, by seniority granted and Wizard’s Right asserted, I formally request and require your assistance in an intervention classified as physically and temporally urgent for the survival of a significant portion of a sentient species ranked at aggregated centrality-level two hundred or above. Said intervention will for logistical purposes be staged out of the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility at Rirhath B, and will take place in and around the immediate neighborhood of a star manual-designated as ‘Sendwathesh’ and locally identified as 11848 Cephei, a type A8 star in a circumstellar microassociation with the star locally identified as mu Cephei, also known as Erakis. This intervention’s duration is estimated to be on the close order of seventy-two to ninety-six hours local time, plus or minus twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The anticipated level of difficulty does not exceed ‘moderately dangerous’, though instabilities in the local situation may at short notice require its reclassification to ‘critical’, ‘extremely critical’, or ‘disaster’. Will you assist?”
Then Mamvish stopped, panting, and her eyes rolled desperately around as if she was concerned about moving any other part of her, for fear she’d accidentally make something else fall down.
“Wow,” Kit said, and for some moments didn’t know what to say: it had been quite a while since (in the wizardly sense) he’d been drafted. As always, the Powers left the final choice to participate in a Wizard’s Right situation with the wizard being requisitioned for the project. But the truth was that a responsible wizard didn’t refuse such a call when it came. No one invoked Wizard’s Right unless there was the prospect of serious loss of life, and a plan to keep it from happening.
Kit went ever so briefly hot with pride at the thought that there was something going on in which he’d somehow been identified as important. “Mamvish, sure, of course,” he said, and paused to start doing the kind of math in his head that he mercifully didn’t have trouble with. “…But wait. Four days? And it might be six or seven, but it also might be just two?”
“I wouldn’t bet on the two,” Mamvish said, sounding very annoyed for a moment. “Nothing about this project has gone the way it was expected to so far—” Her projection twitched in frustration, and another model, a World War II Spitfire that Kit was particularly fond of, fell off the top of the bookshelf and crashed to the floor.
Kit sighed. It’s a good thing I can restore those to their previous energy state with a little work… he thought. Or a lot… “Mam, what’s this about?” he said. “Who else is in on this?”
Her eyes revolved faster. “Everyone, nearly,” she said.
Kit blinked, not very sure how to take that.
“It’s so annoying because there’s just no time for personal briefings!” Mamvish said. “I’m requisitioning everybody else on this planet who’s qualified for this and not otherwise occupied, right this minute, and then I have five or six other planets to visit before I can get back to the Crossings and start holding the orientations—we’re going to have to do them a couple or few thousand beings at a time, there’s no other way. Right now speed’s of the essence: the sooner we can get all the necessary wizards emplaced, the better it’s going to be for everybody. How soon can you be there?”
Oh God, this is going to get complicated.
“Mamvish,” Kit said, “obviously this is incredibly serious and I really want to come—” He glanced back at his math notebook with complete loathing: anything that would get him away from this, up to and including a planetary disaster, was welcome. “But we’re in the middle of the school week and I really doubt my folks are going to let me take four days off…”
“Oh no, it’s all right, I know you’re in a time-structured learning situation! And the sooner that’s done with, the happier I’ll be… we could use you out here full time! But for this intervention, your local timeflow won’t be a problem. Timeslides have been authorized for everyone who participates: you’ll be away from your local time coordinates for a maximum of ten minutes. Ideally less, depending on the strain on local temporality due to multiple slides terminating in your area. Call it fifteen minutes at most.”
“Whoa,” Kit said. Senior wizards tended to be ve
ry twitchy about handing out free passes for what was essentially personal time travel. Whatever was going on out there must be pretty dire. “But I’ve still got to talk to my mama and pop, I can’t do this without them saying it’s okay—”
“You do that,” Mamvish said. “If you need me to, I’ll talk to them as well.”
What is going on? Kit thought. Well, never mind, better get busy. “Popi’ll be home pretty soon,” Kit said. “Mama hasn’t left for work yet—I’ll talk to her now.”
“Very well,” Mamvish said. “I’ve dropped a preliminary precís in your manual. Very preliminary: everything’s changing so fast… Dai stihó, cousin. And hurry!”
And she was gone. Kit stared at the far wall, where the photo of him and Ponch was hanging again: and at his bookshelf, where the model planes were sitting as if nothing had happened to them at all, probably right down to the placement of the individual grains of dust that had coated them (because even with wizardry, Kit was terrible at dusting).
He sat back down in his chair and looked at his manual. The text page was blank.
“Neets?” he said.
There was a pause: and then a voice spoke from the page. “Well,” Nita said, “somehow I don’t think I’m all that busy any more…”
“Giant saurian wizard head just got stuck through your wall?” Kit said.
Nita snickered. “She was in so much of a rush she messed up her coordinates. I got her butt end first.”
Kit burst out laughing. “Never mind. Gotta go talk to the folks. Catch you afterwards? ”
“Me too. Say an hour or so.”
Before he went downstairs, Kit took just long enough to have a very brief glance at the précis Mamvish had dumped into his manual. It was going to have to be brief, because the red-highlighted section of pages which had appeared in the book was about as thick as his finger. “Jeez,” he said under his breath as he looked over the abstract on the first page of the section. Speech-words of a severity that he’d never seen before were peppered all through it, including one long thorny phrase that corresponded to “species/environment extinction event” and somehow managed to look as if it was crouching on the page and preparing to leap at your throat.
Kit shivered with a sudden chill down his back and realized that he’d actually started sweating again just looking at the précis. The basics of it were bad enough, quickly grasped as he looked at the diagram displaying itself at the top of the manual page and cycling through several different views and modes. A relatively Earthlike world circling a distant star; a moon of that world’s, much larger than Earth’s moon; a schematic of a set of tectonic lines underlying the crust of that moon, all flaring and flowing red with violent stresses—
He shook his head, not really needing the following view of the inevitable next stage in the process, the moon’s breakup. Doesn’t much matter where the pieces go after that, Kit thought, sucking breath in. Bust up one of a pair like that and the other one’s gonna be uninhabitable pretty quick… And that was the problem, because there were a lot of people living on that planet. Which is where Mamvish comes in. Question is, what’s she got planned?
Kit slapped the manual shut and headed out of his room and down the stairs, fairly twitching with unease and excitement. It was interesting how news of a major interstellar disaster could within seconds make your own problems seem so amazingly small, so utterly petty. Especially since for these last few hours, Kit’s mind had been bouncing back and forth in helpless discomfort from one to another of three subjects, trapped among them like a pinball trying to bounce out of the machine. They were (in repeatedly-changing order of importance) his dad’s job troubles, calculus, and Valentine’s Day.
Well, there are sure better things to think about now…
Except (some unconvinced fraction of his head insisted as he thumped down the stairs) maybe Valentine’s Day…
“If you keep on running down the stairs like that you’re going to break a leg some day,” said a voice from the kitchen as Kit came down into the living room.
“Maaaamaaa,” Kit said in profound annoyance as he headed into the kitchen. His little plump brunette mama was in scrubs—pink pants and a flowery pink top—and cleaning up after herself, having just made and eaten a pre-work sandwich.
“You will!” his mama said, turning to him and grabbing a paper towel to dry her hands on. “And I will have absolutely no pity on you when it happens.” She reached up to open a cupboard and put away the washed plate she’d just been eating from.
“Got much more important stuff to worry about than that,” Kit said.
His mama leaned back against the counter and eyed Kit. “I told you to stop worrying,” she said. “Your pop’s coping just fine.”
Kit sighed. His father’s promotion into a senior manager’s position at the regional newspaper’s printing plant had caught them all by surprise. It had also left Kit’s pop in something of a state of shock for a couple of weeks, especially when it became apparent that he was going to have to do a lot of extra training to replace the guy who’d had to leave the company because of an injury, and whose position he’d been promoted into. Kit couldn’t remember ever seeing his pop get so thrown by anything, and it had disturbed him more than he’d expected.
“It’s not that,” Kit said, and found that he suddenly felt strangely guilty that it wasn’t. “Something’s just come up.”
“Uh oh,” his mama said. “Magic stuff?”
“Uh, yeah. An end of the world thing.”
His mama’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
“What? Hey, no no no, not ours!”
“Oh good,” his mama said, leaning back against the counter. “I mean, I had plans for the weekend…”
“Yeah. Well, some other people had plans too, but their world’s about to end, so we need to go save them.”
“I don’t know if I even want to know the details about how that’s going to happen,” Kit’s mama said. “...Though I see I’m going to have to. How long were you planning to be gone?”
“About ten minutes.”
His mama rubbed her eyes. “You’re saving a very small world?”
“Well, the population’s just a hundred fifty million or so, yeah…”
“And you’re going to do that in ten minutes?”
“No,” Kit said, popping his manual open again and dropping it on the counter beside his mama. “Looks more like about a week. But we’ll only be gone for ten minutes.”
She looked down at the diagram on the changing page—visible to her because Kit wanted it to be—and shook her head. “More magic…”
“Timeslides,” Kit said. “When you’ve got something serious like this going on, the Powers that Be aren’t stingy with the energy allowances for the people handling it.”
At the sound of a car in the driveway, both their heads came up. “Hmm, running early,” Kit’s mama said, “wonder what that’s about?”
As he heard the engine in his Pop’s station wagon shut down, Kit thought—not at all for the first time—of one of the basic premises of wizardry, and the way it worked in wizards’ lives: “there are no coincidences.” This is really serious. The universe is trying to make this simpler for me… The question, as always, was whether the attempt was going to work.
Bundled up in his parka and not merely one but two scarves, Kit’s Pop came in the back door and stood there a moment stamping his feet on the back mat as he started peeling himself out of the layers of cold-weather gear. “All this slush,” he muttered, “it freezes and it thaws and then it freezes again, and it gets dirtier all the time…”
“Just so it doesn’t come in here,” Kit’s mama said. “I just mopped an hour ago.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t…” He sighed as he pulled off the last layer, a heavy sweater that he wore in this weather so he wouldn’t have to keep putting on his coat and taking it off when running back and forth between the hangarlike press buildings and the newspaper’s offices down the street from t
hem.
“Is there a problem at work?” Kit’s mama said. “You’re early.”
“No, everything’s fine. My training guy just had to leave early today, so I’m done early too.” He shook his head. “He’s as stressed about this whole thing as I am. He and Telly were good friends, and now suddenly I’m where Telly is and neither of us want me to be there, really…” He leaned against the counter where Kit’s mama was leaning, and she leaned against him while he looked down at Kit’s manual. “So what’s going on? Anything interesting?
“Kit has to go save the world,” his mama said, sounding resigned.
His pop glanced up at him from under his eyebrows. “Again?”
Kit had to grin at that. Though being a wizard caused a lot of problems, he was well beyond grateful that one of them wasn’t having to hide what was going on from his family.
“Not ours,” Kit’s mama said.
“Not that ours doesn’t need saving,” his Pop said, and turned away for a moment to go get a cup. Kit knew immediately where he was headed: the new capsule-coffee machine that Kit’s mama had given him for Christmas. “I see more of the headlines in one day than most human beings, so believe me, I know…” He went hunting in the little bin on the counter by the fridge for the capsule he wanted. “So what is it this time?”
“There’s a planet with a big moon that’s blowing up,” Kit said. “Well, not blowing at the moment. Getting ready to come apart. Though there’ll probably be some blowing up in the later stages…”
“Wonderful,” his dad said as he fiddled with the coffee machine. “And there are people living there?”
“A hundred fifty million, plus or minus. We’ve got to get them off before stuff starts happening—especially before the pieces of moon start falling out of orbit.” Kit turned a page over in the manual to a double-page spread that illustrated part of the celestial mechanics involved, and the long accelerating spiral of debris that would start to hammer down onto the surface of the planet when the moon began breaking up.
