Interim Errantry
Page 50
Getting more specific, though, I think it’s safe to say that the seed of this aspect of Crossings-related backstory was planted in High Wizardry and the events that follow it. Dairine’s overheard conversation in which she tells somebody “No I will not move your planet, it’s fine right where it is!” can be read as implying not only that species may and do move their planets electively, but also, logically, that they may relocate them when dire necessity requires it.
And, wizardry being what it is—all about preserving life—when I started considering the issue, it seemed likely that there would be, at the very least, some kind of working group that dealt specifically with this kind of problem, and concentrated the expertise for its solution in a single resource. From that understanding, the basic blueprint and rationale behind the Interconnect Group—originally primarily concerned with worldgates, but its remit having since been extended to include many other useful technologies—began to lay itself out.
The Group’s operational rationale is straightforward. When they’re endangered, move planets and their populations to safety if you can. If you can’t move the planet, clone or twin it as closely as you can somewhere else, and relocate the population. If you can’t do that, archive the living population—using some instrumentality either wizardly or scientific (or both)—and preserve them until you can.
The old saying “show don’t tell” is sometimes somewhat abused by people who don’t understand that sometimes, despite your best intentions, you do have to tell. That said, showing is usually better. Once I started to understand how the Interconnect Group functioned, the next question became how to tell a story that showed the saving of a specific world.
The idea of a moon falling onto its primary, and the image of what would really happen, had been nagging at me for a while secondary to my involvement as science advisor for an event-TV project called Impact that eventually aired on SyFy. (For all I know, it still may air occasionally, and you’ll see my advisor-credit there if you bother watching through to the end.) As sometimes happens in cases like this, the script’s story through-line was already in place, and a lot of creative choices had been made that didn’t have a lot to do with physics, or indeed with many of the finer details of physical reality as we presently understand it. I was therefore thrown into the position of being the youngest fairy godmother at the christening, with no power to undo the curse presently saddling the about-to-be-newborn infant—only enough to attempt to mitigate the curse somewhat. (And even this attempt turned out to be of minimal effect. Never mind: you do what you can, cash the check, and move on.)
As part of this work I found myself in the situation of giving notes to the production partners rather than taking them, which was interesting (and amusing) for a change. But some of the notes have a certain air of desperation about them. Like this one:
Just a note here in passing: whichever character tells the President or whoever it is that "not even bacteria would be left" after an impact of any significant portion of the Moon with the Earth is seriously understating the nature of the problem by suggesting that there would be something left afterwards that vaguely resembled a planet. The result would more likely be the very early stages of an asteroid belt… if that. An impact of this type would at the very least split the Earth open like a melon. But much worse damage is likely.
Think of the structure of a bubble. The air inside is held in place by a very thin and fragile structure, and the whole thing comes undone with any really significant puncture. The Earth's crust is similarly thin in comparison to what it contains. (Just as a referent: no known meteoric impact has ever punched all the way through the crust, not even the great Yucatan impact. Proof: life still exists here.) A much more likely outcome, after the initial splitting that would follow so traumatic an impact, would be the explosive escape of vast amounts of magma from the Earth's lower mantle, where all that molten metal and stone is held (under immense pressure) by the upper mantle and crust above it. Imagine shaking a bottle of soda and then popping off the cap. Then imagine that the soda is four sextillion tons of molten metal and lava …You wouldn't want to be standing too close.
… So if you get a sense that I was looking forward to a chance to tell a Moon-falls-down-on-a-planet story correctly, you’d be absolutely right. In particular, I was looking forward to a chance to tell the tale of such a cataclysm not as something that happens all of a sudden and in a hilariously compressed time frame—the way it did in Impact—but as something that’s been going on for a while and still, sadly, even with all available technological and wizardly power brought to bear on it, just can’t be stopped.
This was the story I realized I needed for Lifeboats. It involves the kind of wizardly work that’s probably about half or three-quarters of what wizards do—work not characterized by breakneck haste or personal versions of what we now sometimes refer to in film trailers as “situations of extreme peril”. It allowed me the opportunity to put our viewpoint characters in situations where they have enough time to examine what’s going on around them in depth, and where the work requires revelation of some of what’s been going on in the background, unsuspected or uninvestigated, for a long time.
Inside the shell of the story, of course, lies the matter of most interest, to me anyway: the characters’ reactions to being stuffed into this kind of situation, along with many many others, and the understanding that sometimes you don’t get much of a vote in how things play out. Sometimes, instead of making up your own mind what you’re going to do, you’re just going to have to do what those older, wiser, or more centrally placed have told you to do. Sometimes you’re going to have to sit on your butt and wait. And sometimes (as here) there’ll be obscure or mysterious elements to what’s going on around you. That’s as it should be. Even for wizards the world isn’t always explicable, no matter how much we’d like it to be. And it would be a duller place if it was.
The challenge for a wizard doing such work will always be remembering that employment of the Art in this mode can be surprisingly efficacious, even if you’re not always “in control”, or involved in what looks like a dangerous and convoluted quest or a heroic last stand. In the normal course of things, I suspect that if you’re a youngish wizardly practitioner, you’re going to frequently be reminded that sometimes you and the Powers That Be get the job done simply by holding still, paying attention, and allowing yourself to have your natural reactions to what’s going on. You don’t always have to nearly get nuked by the Lone Power or nearly eaten by a shark. Sometimes slow and steady really does win the race… even when you honestly don’t think you’re racing: because all is done for each.
In the broad spectrum of wizardly intervention, there have to be a lot of stories like this. It’s been fun to tell at least one of them.
Thanks for listening!
— Diane Duane
September 1, 2015
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m Errantry