Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  Kit turned to go face-forward into the pillow again, inhaled from the pillowcase the smell of the fabric softener his mama favored for the laundry, and instantly fell asleep.

  In the middle of that nap, it struck him as not even slightly surprising that Ponch was lying on the bed with him. They’d been having a conversation for some while, but at the moment Kit couldn’t remember how it had started.

  “Timeheart’s such an echo chamber, though,” Ponch said. He was lying with his hind legs splayed out to one side underneath him, his nose propped on Kit’s shoulder. “The more central it gets, the more connected everybody is. The Powers work in and out of each other all the time, the One works in and out of all Its avatars… Anything can get heard. And because the Lone Power is still a Power, It can still hear some things too. That ability can’t be removed from It. Once given, gods can’t take back their gifts.”

  “Mmm, kind of a problem.”

  “Yes. And sometimes things are delicate; sometimes they have to happen just so, if they’re going to happen at all. It’s like stalking a squirrel. You twitch at the wrong moment and they see you, next moment they’re up a tree and it’s all over…”

  “So sometimes you have to whisper.”

  “Yes. But I knew you’d hear me,” Ponch said. “You always did. You hear me even better now.”

  “Sometimes, anyway.”

  “Oh, most of the time,” Ponch said. “Sometimes, like this, it’s important. I knew you’d get it. You were always smart; if I got smart, it was because of you. So this went really well.”

  “I hated running out of saltines,” Kit said. “But somehow I knew that was you.”

  “And you gave them all away,” Ponch said, nuzzling him. “So typical. Whatever I know about sacrifice, I learned from you.”

  “Well, okay, that’s good.” He reached up to scratch Ponch behind the ears. “But now there’s a whole species of creatures crazy about saltines and living in a world where there aren’t any. You’re gonna have to do something about that.”

  “Always thinking of everybody else,” Ponch said. “Leave that with me. I’ll take care of it. You get some sleep.”

  So Kit did.

  TWELVE

  February 14, 2011: Tevaral

  Elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, in the planetary system of a star of the great OB association near mu Cephei, otherwise known as Erakis, matters progressed to their inevitable conclusion. And as usual, when reality reasserted itself after wizardry had so tightly held sway over Thesba, the natural processes that had been baulked for so long turned out to have their own surprises up their sleeves.

  The wizardly team who had been holding Thesba together through the final weeks of the Tevaral Rafting Intervention were naturally unwilling to simply remove all the safeties at once. Best practice in such events mandated that when discontinuing a wizardry that had been changing or maintaining the structural integrity of an entire astronomical body, the constrictions and controls applied to it should be removed in reverse order to that in which they’d been applied.

  One by one, power feeds were gradually reduced to the complex webwork of wizardries that had been holding the warped and damaged cores of Thesba in the same relationship to one another, then to the ones that had been maintaining those cores’ integrity relative to the moon’s inner mantle and its outer one, and then to the largest and most powerful of the wizardries, those that had been holding the crust in place over the restless, molten substructure. Finally the last connections between those wizardries and the hundreds of wizards who had been fueling them were cut. Everyone for whom breathing was a normal function of their physiology then held that breath to see what would happen next.

  For some long minutes Thesba seemed to do nothing in particular—merely continued on its normal course around Tevaral, heading for what in Kit’s gates’ location would have been its second rising of the day. Many of the wizards involved in monitoring the decommissioning of the management wizardries, at least those who were of a betting temperament, began laying wagers with one another as to how long this process would continue. Others, more deeply versed in planetary and orbital mechanics, or with a better instinctive feel for events of this type, didn’t bother.

  Approximately six minutes and forty seconds after power was withdrawn from the final maintenance wizardries that had been holding Thesba in one piece, a fissure began to develop in the crust on Thesba’s leading side, stretching from about halfway up into its northern hemisphere to just south of its equator. Other similar fissures began to develop on the opposite side of the moon, but the first one continued to grow, stretching longer, pulling wide, deepening with astonishing speed. Through the already-hot glow of the revealed upper mantle, hotter material from deeper inside the moon began to spew out. The great longitudinal fissure pulled wider yet, stitching up into the polar regions, across them, and down into the northern hemisphere on the other side.

  Though wizardly data recorders were functioning and analyzing every movement of mass in real time, with merely visual senses it quickly became impossible to grasp exactly what was happening. The moon’s atmosphere had kindled, and the flammable gases in it began oxidizing at such a rate that within a very short time all of Thesba’s surface became invisible under a planet-wide sheet of fire.

  It took some minutes more of the moon’s transit along its already disturbed orbital path to make it possible to tell what was going on. Thesba’s overall shape seemed now more transversely ovoid than spherical as it sailed along in an obscuring cloud of its own rapidly combusting atmosphere, trailing burning gases and outthrown magma behind it in a long disastrous trail. But then came the unexpected thing—terrible in the way that only events of such magnitude can be, fascinating even though frightening, a sight that would leave the analysts working out the moments of inertia behind this particular event for months if not years to come. Through the ruin of Thesba’s structure, past the split shell of the mantle layers and the shattered crust, the misshapen iron core slowly shouldered bodily out of the moon that had hidden it since it coalesced, tumbling as it came, rotating more quickly now that it was freed from the pressure of the quintillions of tons of mass that had so long held it in check. Slowly the core began to draw further and further away along the orbital path, making its way ahead of the broken halves of Thesba that were now ever so gradually beginning to fall behind it, trailing further and further in its wake.

  The general prediction of what would come next, once this had happened, was straightforward enough. The two great halves of Thesba would remain in orbit a while, tumbling, fragmenting, some of the fragments rebounding into one another. A debris field somewhat congruent to the moon’s old orbit would form. But it would not remain in that form for long. The core, plowing through Thesba’s shattered remnants again and again in its early orbits as the fragments began to decelerate due to their lesser mass, would impact over and over with the larger pieces—some of them becoming briefly gravitationally associated with the core again, some being caromed violently out of its way in what to a player of the Earth game “billiards” would have recognized as massively destructive bank shots. Those impacts, brutally inelastic and as subject to the laws of motion as anything else, would themselves change the rogue core’s orbit more than once, deforming that orbit, bumping it into a more elliptical configuration and finally into one that would be terminally parabolic. It would be the core’s acceleration, increased by interactions with Tevaral’s mass and a serendipitous angle with the system’s white-giant primary, that would finally bring the core plummeting into Tevaral’s southern hemisphere in sixty-three days’ time—the bullet-like impact of a three quintillion-ton mass of spinning metal into the body of a dying world already racked by weeks of massive earthquakes and tsunamis.

  The Interconnect Project wizards and scientists most skilled with numbers and probabilities would be exercising their skills at the betting end of things for several weeks to come over the issue of whether Tevaral itself woul
d survive that impact as a single body, or itself break up as Thesba had, its shattered mass slowly becoming the source of a vast asteroid field that would someday occupy its orbit around Sendwathesh. But on the day Thesba shattered, the world called Tevaral, identified (in Earth’s astronomical nomenclature) as 11848 Cephei IV, was proactively struck from the records of all extant Galactic and interstellar associations of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, and formally declared uninhabitable…

  …and its dominant species and biosphere classified as “successfully resettled without undue loss of life”.

  THIRTEEN

  February 14, 2011: Earth

  Valentine’s Day was a Monday this year. Mondays were bad enough as a general thing, but the strains of this one had been unusual. Now Nita and Kit were walking home from school, both of them slightly weary after the overexposure to everybody else’s showy declarations of affection.

  Kit in particular was tired due to the results from his calculus test having come back. He hadn’t failed. Neither had he passed brilliantly. He was going to be hearing about this from his Pop. Right now he had other things on his mind as they came up to his driveway.

  “I didn’t want to give you your thing today,” Kit said, “because everybody was watching and… I didn’t want to have to make the explanations in front of them, because it would all have been made up and it wouldn’t have made any sense. I thought I’d wait till now. So here.”

  He reached into his pocket. “I was going to wrap this,” he said, “and then I couldn’t find any wrapping paper—and we were all out of ribbon—”

  “And you are absolutely useless at wrapping things,” Nita said. “I hate to have to say it, but you know it’s true. So it’s okay.”

  Kit nodded, blushing, and reached into his pocket: handed her what he had made. It was a small heart-shaped object, maybe an inch long, and it glinted in the afternoon light.

  Nita turned it over in her fingers, feeling the weight of it. “It’s crystallized carbon,” she said.

  “There was a lot of it exposed on Tevaral’s surface after they started scraping the biosphere off,” Kit said. “So I thought—”

  “It’s diamond, actually,” Nita said.

  Kit blushed. “It’s not diamond diamond,” he said. “The crystalline structure’s all wrong, you know that perfectly well, don’t give me grief here. It’s pretty, and it’s tough, and it takes a whole lot to hurt it.” Like someone else I know.

  “Oh really,” Nita said very softly.

  Kit cleared his throat. “I asked Hesh if he would have somebody grab me a chunk. Worked it over a little bit.”

  Nita turned the little heart over in her hand. On the outside of it was engraved one of the simpler graphical restatements of the Wizard’s Knot. “There’s something in there, though,” she said, looking up at him.

  Kit nodded. “Turn it over,” he said.

  She did. The other side was very finely micro-engraved with the words, TEXT ME.

  “Cheleb had this funny idea,” Kit said. “That maybe you’d asked me to change my name for you. Or that I was thinking about asking you to change yours for me.”

  Nita laughed under her breath. “He really has a tendency to sort of plunge around without being entirely clear about the cultural underpinnings of some of the things he says, doesn’t he?” She gave Kit a wicked look. “‘Impregnation rituals…’” She covered her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Kit said, “when we get him here, we’ll sort him out. Anyway… I encoded my full name in the Speech into the crystalline structure in there for you, and it syncs to the one in my manual. It’s not like you didn’t have it already, anyway, it’s not like we haven’t done stuff like this occasionally when we needed to for spells, for interventions. But if you need it in a hurry, or when we’re doing preflight on a wizardry, with this you can just plug this into the spell the way you would plug in a USB stick.”

  Nita nodded, smiled. “Great minds think alike,” she said.

  “Oh really?”

  She reached into the pocket of her jeans, brought something out and handed it to Kit. At first glance it appeared to be a very tightly-woven cord of metal mesh, the individual strands of the black metal catching the light as you turned it. There was a black metal catch to fasten it. The thing as a whole looked very sleek and smooth, like one of those elephant-tail-hair bracelets that people used to wear. It wasn’t very long: in fact, bracelet length was just about right.

  Nonetheless, Kit was in teasing mood. “Keychain?” he said.

  Nita gave him a look. “Maybe,” she said, “if I asked Sker’ret really nicely, he’d sort me out a ‘trapdoor transport’ so I could drop you in it and have it send you back to Tevaral in exactly the spot where you could stand there just long enough to have time to look up and see a nice big chunk of Thesba getting ready to fall on your head…”

  She was kidding. It was just as well. Kit grinned at her, and they started walking again while Kit ran the smoothly braided thing through his fingers. It felt beautiful. He could also feel the Speech, a lot of the Speech, sizzling in it.

  “You were working on this before we left, weren’t you,” Kit said. “All those times when we were manual-chatting and you didn’t want to go visual.”

  “Yeah, I tried doing both at once earlier on and— well, it wasn’t a good idea.” She grinned. “A few accidents…”

  “So what is it?”

  “It’s every spell we’ve ever done together,” Nita said. “With the enacture stripped out. And the actuator sequences removed, just to make sure.”

  Kit breathed out, shaking his head in amazement. “It’s terrific,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  They’d come to a stop at the end of Kit’s driveway. “Oh,” Nita said. “There’s one more thing.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and pulled it out, handing it to him.

  It was a box with a heart-shaped cellophane window. He looked up from it and grinned at her.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, and hugged him.

  He hugged her back, not particularly caring at the moment if the neighbors saw. After a moment, though, she put some air between them and made a peculiar face. “Also,” she said, “I have no idea what this is about, but Bobo says to tell you, ‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t know about the Jacuzzi.’” Nita raised her eyebrows. “You had a Jacuzzi over there? You had it really well hidden.”

  “Uh, no,” Kit said. “Something Ronan was up to.”

  “What hasn’t he been up to, more like,” Nita said under her breath. “Never mind.”

  She hugged Kit harder, then pushed him away and headed off down the street.

  Kit looked at the box, opened the top of it, and as he’d done with Cheleb, poured a little stream of hearts out into his hand.

  Then he started to smile… and then to laugh out loud where he stood. Kit turned over the hearts in his hand, the way Cheleb had, with his finger, one by one. They were pink and blue and yellow and purple and green and white. And regardless of the color, every single one of them said:

  I KNOW.

  1

  Afterword

  There’s a saying among some writers that a novel should be the story of the single most important thing then happening in the viewpoint character’s life. This seems like a good rule to follow, and until now I think all the major Young Wizards works in print have followed it. However, it’s been my intention for a while to do some longer works in-universe that would be, not so much an abandonment of the rule, but a relaxation of it. I’ve been wanting a chance to display and explore aspects of the characters’ lives that we don’t always get a chance to see in a main-continuity YW novel—situations in which the characters’ usual position at center stage is subverted a bit.

  Probably this urge arose because in real life, we’re not always at the center of the stories that surround us. In fact, mostly we’re not. Often enough, whether we like it or not, we function at the periphery of somethi
ng much bigger, our contributions seeming marginal. And since the life Nita and Kit are living is real-life to them, it stands to reason that sometimes the wizardly life will be less personally manageable, in terms of just deciding what you’re going to do and then going off and doing it. Sometimes you’re going to be part of a larger group, working on a single problem in unison, and you won’t be driving the problem’s solution except in the sense that you’re working in support of it.

  Unfortunately it seems likely that in traditional or conventional publishing, and especially in the present market, the proposal for such a novel might not get much further than your editor’s desk. Fortunately, the technologies now available to storytellers to independently make out-of-continuity works available to large numbers of readers have made it possible to tell this kind of story after all.

  Various versions of the “How To Save A Planet” problem have been wandering around in the YW universe’s middle distance for me for a good while now. In particular, questions and answers about the technologies and themes implied by Mamvish’s appearance on the scene in A Wizard of Mars have been percolating since approximately 2008, when the first skeletal notes on the Interconnect Project begin appearing in the Errantry Concordance. You could in fact make a case that this whole issue has been bubbling under the surface for much longer than that—since the time our viewpoint characters first set foot in the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility during the course of High Wizardry. After all, it hardly seems likely that a gigantic gating facility of this kind would just appear out of nowhere all by itself. The presence of a place that works and acts like the Crossings implies the presence of massive technological and infrastructural support from multiple species, along with a long-established tradition of interstellar trade, commerce and cooperation.