Rirhath B / the Crossings 1 page

Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Version history

Time fix

Young Wizards: Lifeboats

Rubrics

ONE: JD 2455600.4380

TWO: Sol III: 2/2/2011

THREE: Rirhath B / the Crossings

FOUR: 11848 Cephei IV / Tevaral

FIVE: Thursday

SIX: Friday

SEVEN: Saturday

EIGHT: Sunday

NINE: Monday

TEN: Tuesday

ELEVEN: Wednesday

TWELVE: February 14, 2011: Tevaral

THIRTEEN: February 14, 2011: Earth

Afterword

Now available for preorder: GAMES WIZARDS PLAY

Young Wizards New Millennium Editions

Young Wizards:

Lifeboats

Diane Duane

Errantry Press

County Wicklow

Republic of Ireland

Young Wizards: Lifeboats

Diane Duane

Published by Errantry Press, an imprint of EbooksDirect.dianeduane.com, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

A division of the Owl Springs Partnership

© 2015 Diane Duane: all rights reserved. This work may not be republished or reproduced by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

This ebook is version / edition 1.01 of the work, dated 21 September 2015.

Version history

v1.00 (6 September 2015): Initial Ebooks Direct release

v1.01 (21 September 2015): Correction of typographical errors; formatting adjustments.

Time fix

This work falls between Young Wizards book 9, A Wizard of Mars, and the forthcoming book 10, Games Wizards Play.*

Its events follow those of the Young Wizards novellas Not On My Patch and How Lovely Are Thy Branches, and occur on February 2nd, 2011, and between JD 2455595.5118 and JD 2455602.2003 respectively… depending on where you’re standing.

*coming February 2, 2016 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Click here to preorder at Amazon.com.

Young Wizards: Lifeboats

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any [long-term] survival value.

— Arthur C. Clarke (amendment via Stephen Hawking)

You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.

— Edwin Louis Cole

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

— Thornton Wilder

ONE:

JD 2455600.4380

In the pursuit of the business of errantry, most wizards who walk the High Road past the borders of atmosphere swiftly become used to looking up into strange skies—nights with extra moons, days with extra suns, skies with (compared to the observer’s homeworld) too many stars or not nearly enough. Rings arching overhead, their complex detail blunted and tinted by atmosphere in a hundred shades of pastel; multicolored nebula-veils flung crumpled and glowing across tens of millions of miles of darkness; comet-tails painting the endless night with the palest and most attenuated of brushstrokes—all these become relatively commonplace.

Over the busy few years since Kit Rodriguez had passed his Ordeal and become a wizard, he’d seen all these and more. One or two such sights had become familiar enough that he hardly noticed them any more. But what hung over Kit now was something he knew would be haunting his dreams for a long time to come.

Across the broad, shadowy twilit landscape where he sat, down from the distant mountains edging the horizon, a chill wind blew. Out before him in the darkness, a broad plain faintly suffused with bloody light, uneasy with the distant half-seen movement of thousands of people, lay glittering with the lights of hundreds of scattered electronic campfires—the most visible sign of people sharing their last meals, and their last moments of warmth together, before their lives ended. A quarter of the sky above him was blotted out by a great lowering mass of darkness and fire: horribly convex and claustrophobic, seemingly pressing downwards from the sky like a burning roof about to collapse on everyone trapped underneath it. The appearance was at least partly an illusion, Kit knew, but the reality it hinted at was deadly enough. All around him a world was ending—was literally in its death-throes—and nothing he could do was going to stop it.

Kit sat there shivering in that thin cold wind, feeling (for the moment anyway) both helpless and very much alone. And then even the shivering stopped, very suddenly, as he realized that very near him, something was moving in that darkness. He could hear the rustle of it as it made its way toward him through the wind-shaken grass… could see a hint of its movement, indistinct, bizarre.

Kit forced himself to stay absolutely still, waiting, watching, as darkly shining tentacles slowly came oozing along toward him out of the smoky twilight. And along with them, wide and staring, came the eyes… so many eyes fixed on him: alien, unreadable, strange.

As the creature crept toward him and more and more of those weird cold eyes became apparent every moment, Kit sat still and gripped his antenna-wand and tried to keep himself calm, waiting to see what would happen. But the main thought running through his mind at the moment was:

When they asked me to do this job… why exactly didn’t I wait a few moments before I said yes?

TWO:

Sol III: 2/2/2011

About a thousand years ago, it now felt like, it had been five in the afternoon, and gray outside: just gray.

It was cold. It was cloudy. It was getting dark already. It was the beginning of February, and there was going to be a math test two days from now, on Friday, and Kit was going to flunk it. Massively, he thought. Horribly. In ways that no human being has ever flunked before. I’m about to make history. Future generations will laugh at the sound of my name.

Kit was sitting upstairs at the desk in his room, leaning on his elbows, his head propped in his hands. Normally the desk was comfortably cluttered with piled-up books and old CDs and DVDs and stick drives and scrap paper and soft drawing pencils; but all that had been cleared away in a desperate attempt to help focus his concentration. Now the desk was unnaturally tidy, and on it in front of him Kit had his math book open and a workbook open and a notebook open, and a calculator app up and running on his phone. He was gazing in an unfocused way at all of these while he played with a fairly hard-leaded pencil he’d just sharpened for the fourth time—the pencil being a mute and miserable acknowledgment of the fact that this was not going to be homework he could do using a pen. All over the floor around Kit were ripped-out, crumpled-up pages from the notebook, the most recent ones crumpled up a whole lot harder than the earlier ones, and thrown a lot further away.

Also open in front of him was his manual, which was not helping, not even slightly. Neither was the person using it to talk to him.

“I really can’t do this,” Kit muttered.

You really can, said his manual: or rather, that was what it said on the text page of his manual, which was displaying the texts Nita was sending him. Just take your time.

“I really wish you’d just, you know, give me a hint about this…”

You mean do it for you. He was sure she was laughing at him.

“Why not? Isn’t this what—” He was going to say what friends are for, and then had an instantaneous moment of panic, because of course that’s what we are, friends, except of course it’s kind of—more, and if I just say ‘friend’ what if she misunderstands me and she thinks that—

Nope, Nita said.

Kit rubbed his eyes, ridiculously grateful to have been let off the hook so easily. At the same time he was annoyed by it, and at the moment couldn’t really figure out why. So he fell back on annoyance at the math, which was a lot easier to rationalize. “Why do I even need this? I am never going to need calculus for anything!”

You might need it for wizardry.

“And if I do, the manual will do it for me!”

Except you can’t bring your manual into the test on Friday.

“I could! I could disguise it as a calculator!”

It won’t let you. It’ll know you’re doing it to cheat.

“This is so unfair.”

What, that I won’t do it for you? Or that wizardry won’t let you cheat?

“You could have a word with Bobo! Bobo would change the rules for me.”

In your dreams, but nowhere else, something breathed in Kit’s ear.

All the hair on Kit’s neck abruptly stood up, for what he’d heard was no voice of a living thing. It sounded like his own thoughts, happening inside his own head, except it wasn’t anything that Kit had been thinking. —What? Kit thought, and “What?!” he said.

What? Nita said.

“Uh. I heard something. I think—” Kit dropped the much-chewed pencil on his much-erased notebook page and shook his head, because this shouldn’t be possible, at least not as far as he knew. “I think I heard Bobo!” Which was leaving him seriously freaked out, because having Wizardry itself in his head was definitely not his department, it was Nita’s. Does this mean that we—is this something that’s happening because we’re— Kit broke out in a sweat.

But when the text field on his manual started filling up again, the feeling he got from the message was perhaps a touch annoyed, but otherwise unconcerned. Oh great, not you too.

Kit opened his mouth, closed it again. Then said, “Wait. Me too?”

Yeah, Ronan heard him once a couple of weeks ago.

His immediate reaction was Oh what a relief!… instantly followed by Wait a minute, how does he rate? Then Kit rolled his eyes at himself. Get a grip. “Really?”

Yeah. We were having a conversation about some girl Ronan said he was having trouble with, and then he said he heard Bobo tell him to ‘stop acting the maggot.’

Kit blinked. “What?”

You’re asking me what it means? How do I know what maggots act like in Ireland? All I know is that Ronan messaged me afterwards and told me that the Spirit of Wizardry was going to get its head punched in if somebody didn’t put some manners on it.

That made Kit snicker. “You sure Bobo’s not trying to pick up some overtime working as the voice of people’s consciences or something?”

Please. He’s been snarky enough lately that I’m wondering what’s going on with him. Like somebody took Jiminy Cricket and replaced him with Jon Stewart.

Kit laughed harder.

Meanwhile, look, you’ve just got to loosen up about this… You’re just making it harder for yourself. Calculus is just a way of describing change; of modeling systems that’ll show the way things move through space and time.

“I have a manual for that!” Kit said. “And as for this, I want to kick whoever invented it.”

That would be Sir Isaac Newton, Nita said, and tracking him down to kick him’s probably gonna take a lot more moving through space and time than either of us wants right now. Just go back and read the chapter on differentials again. Seriously, it’s not that bad.

Kit groaned and dropped his head onto his folded arms, rolling it back and forth. Yes it is! Why are you so optimistic?

Because you’re smart, and I know you’ll get it if you work on it.

“Oh please,” Kit muttered. “Only if you do find Isaac Newton and lock him in here with me.”

Anyway, this shouldn’t be so hard for you! How come you’re having so much trouble concentrating lately?

There were about fifty answers to that, Kit thought. The problem was trying to figure out which one was affecting him today. The Christmas holidays had been good—in fact, unusually good, because of aliens coming to camp out “in the basement,” a truly memorable holiday party and sleepover, and other wizardly incursions into the normal events of the season. It had all been so terrific that Kit almost didn’t mind going back to school afterwards, due to being kind of wrung out by all the happy excitement.

But that hadn’t lasted long. School had without warning turned mind-numbingly boring. It was the contrast, maybe, Kit thought, with all the stuff that happened in December. All of a sudden everything went back to normal. Too much normal. Nothing that interesting’s come up for me and Neets at the errantry end, these last few weeks. And the other wizards we know have all been busy with stuff: too busy to have time to hang out. Kit rubbed his eyes. Then this calculus unit started, and life hasn’t been worth living ever since. It’s like it’s all in some other language that even knowing the Speech can’t help...

Which was part of the problem, maybe. Kit wasn’t used to feeling helpless, these days. What he was used to was figuring things out—for wizardry was all about working your way through to the answers—and about depending on stubbornness to get him to and through the places where figuring things out wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, calculus seemed to be gazing with faint amusement at his stubbornness and just barely resisting the urge to burst out laughing.

And then of course there was the other issue, which Kit absolutely wasn’t going to mention to Nita at the moment. Twelve days yet. Twelve days… Kit started chewing on the pencil again.

Earth to Rodriguez? the text in the manual said. Come in, Rodriguez!

Kit dropped the pencil in annoyance. “Neets, seriously,” Kit said, “what’s with the texting? You coming down with laryngitis or something?”

There was a pause. Busy, she said after a moment.

“With what? Or is Dairine hanging over your shoulder?” Because that was always a possibility. If that was the case, what she was doing made sense: the manual could take a wizard’s subvocalizations, or even raw thought, and render them as text when necessary.

Another pause, longer this time. Well…

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 very 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 precis 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 the one thorny phrase corresponding to “species/environment extinction event” that 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.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 852