Cephei IV / Tevaral 1 page

The countdown ended. Everything around all of them went dark.

Then things brightened up again, at least somewhat. Kit looked around them, getting an initial impression that was a bit muddled. The sky above them was dark. It was nighttime: the hex under their feet fading away against smooth pale stone, the stone illuminated in a pale warm gold, their shadows leaning and stretching away from them all across the polished surface of it. But the shadows weren’t quite dark; they seemed to be filled in with a subtle blush of red. Out at the edge of things, past the huge slab of stone, a lot of shortish humanoid people with shaggy feathery hair were moving to and fro, some carrying artificial light sources with them, some followed by what was clearly wizard-light in the form of generalized glows or small point sources.

Under Kit’s feet, the smooth stone surface buzzed and jumped. At first he thought, Oh, it’s like at the Crossings; time to get off the hex. But the jumping didn’t stop, just got worse… and he saw Nita next to him put her arms out to balance herself, and Tom and Carl bumped into each other with their shoulders, Tom laughing uneasily. “I’ve never cared for that kind of thing,” he said under his breath.

Dairine looked around her, Spot in her arms, and scowled at the surroundings as the extremely unnerving slippy-slidy feeling of the earth under Kit’s feet finally calmed down. “An earthquake,” she said, sounding disgusted, “is such a bad way to say hello...”

Nita turned toward Kit, laughing, and the sound was as uneasy as Tom’s had been. “Wow, they weren’t kidding about the tectonic instability, huh?” she said, and looked up.

And her mouth fell open.

Kit turned to see what she was looking at… and froze.

The open countryside around the paved place where they stood was relatively flat. Away against the horizon, some gentle hills rose up against the sky, clothed in haze and some rags and tatters of low cloud. Higher cloud was being driven across the sky in long streams and banners. But these were nothing like thick enough to hide what seemed to stare down through them through the darkness, leaning menacingly over the fragile, trembling world below.

A quarter of the sky above them was obscured by a vast bloated sphere that, even though it obviously wasn’t moving, nonetheless seemed to be pressing itself down toward the world beneath it, so that despite how stupid the urge made Kit feel, he still felt like he should duck. That huge glowing mass seemed to be pushing the whole sky overhead downward under its weight, an illusion somehow compounded by the way the hastily-blown clouds looked as they fled across its face—seemingly thinning away to nothing as if squeezed flat by pressure from above. Toward the horizon the clouds reflected the moon’s light a bit on their upper sides—an unhealthy yellow like the final stages of a healing bruise, the moon’s extensive cloud deck afire with the sulfurous color in the light of Tevaral’s sun. Wherever the toxic soup of airborne sulfides and upthrown volcanic ash in that cloud deck didn’t cover the moon’s surface, mostly what could be seen was the flickering restless red of burning stone: dully-glowing lava flows covering tens of thousands of square kilometers, the great moon’s surface scabbed and scorched black, and here and there huge cracks welling up through the burnt and ravaged crust with bleeders of fresh lava, brightening, fading, brightening again. And all the time that sense of the fire and the darkness kept on pressing down, endlessly threatening to fall out of the sky and crush you flat.

“Thesba,” Nita said from right behind Kit, very soft.

He was glad she was so close, because (irrational though the sense was) Kit felt like he needed backup—like he’d never been so comprehensively loomed over by anything in his life. He stared up at this awful apparition and tried to imagine what it would have been like before everything started to go wrong here, when it was still quiet and benign; when it didn’t look like it was going to come to pieces right this minute and start raining itself down in fire and brimstone on your head. But his imagination kept coming up blank, images of what had been or might have been driven out by this terrible threatening now.

“It’s like… like it shouldn’t be possible,” Kit said under his breath.

“Yeah,” Nita said. The two of them stood there a moment longer, then let out a joint breath and glanced around. The others, just as transfixed as they’d been, were finally moving off the hex now: they followed them. “The orbital mechanics is weird,” Nita said under her breath. “The way their masses are balanced—the rotational speed and so forth, obviously it does all work out… though it definitely looks like it shouldn’t. We’re used to a moon that’s a lot further away, moves a lot more slowly…”

Kit nodded. There was a lot more to experience here—a thin chill wind laden with strange new scents and smells, a deluge of them, and a half-lit night edged all around with peculiar animal calls and many less identifiable sounds. But he was having trouble right now doing anything but ignoring the mental and spiritual weight of what hung in the sky above them. It seemed to Kit that the smartest thing to do at the moment was keep his eyes away from that: so as they made their way toward the edge of the gating slab and toward the small broad Tevaralti who seemed to be heading directly toward them, that was what he did.

“Cousins,” the being called to them, “you’re from Sol III—or Earth, is it? Which do you prefer?”

“Earth will do fine,” Tom said. “Dai stihó, rank-kin—”

Kit recognized a supervisory-level greeting intended for another of the same wizardly rank. “Well met in an ill time,” said the Tevaralti as he came up to them. He was broader and rounder than the Planetary, and was wearing the same kind of strappy-looking harnesswork; and he was shaggier-feathered, too, with a rounder, blunter face. “I’m called Vesh.” He crooked out an arm, bent at the feather-fringed elbow.

“Tom Swale,” Tom said, and moved next to Vesh and hooked his own crooked elbow through Vesh’s for a moment, then let go. “My associate Carl Romeo—” Carl followed suit. “These wizards with us are in our immediate and secondary supervisory groups, as well as sharing a vicinity locus.”

“Cousins, you’re all very welcome…” Vesh said, flicking his crest up at Kit and Nita and Dairine and Ronan in turn. “Let me orient you all briefly in place and time: you’ll have leisure for finer assessments for your own purposes when you’re settled by the gates you’ll be attending. This is one of forty main offplanet reception areas scattered around Tevaral. Its exact location’s been stored for you in your codices or other errantry-specific references for later use if you need to return to the Crossings in an emergency. But speaking more generally, right now you’re on the southern shore of the northeast continent, Chaish or Methneveh as it’s called in its primary languages. We’re halfway through the autumn months in this hemisphere, and about halfway through the local night. We’re asking you all to stay within call of this area for the next—” He paused, apparently searching briefly for a Speech-translation of the time interval into Earth idiom. “The next hour. Our transit circles to the population-rafting gates you’ll be tending are rather congested at the moment and we have to relieve that before sending you on.”

Everyone nodded or murmured agreement. “You two gentlebeings,” Vesh said, turning to Tom and Carl, “I was sent to brief specifically, as many more of your sub-supervisory wizards are here, and you’ll want to find some time once you’re settled to advise us as regards fine details of their assignments. For the rest of you, there’s a facility just beyond the gating substrate with refreshments and places to rest for a short time or erect your temporary-stay facilities if you like, while you wait for your further gatings. Supervisories?…”

He drew Tom and Carl off to one side, while behind everybody else the hex they’d vacated abruptly filled up with more incoming wizards, and other Tevaralti moved out to meet them. “Be nice to just get where we’re going and settle in,” Ronan said under his breath, looking around. “Pity we can’t just gate to wherever it is on our own.”

“I don’t think they’d thank you for that,” Dairine said, putting Spot down. “Too many gates open on this planet at once: you heard Mamvish. In fact I bet if you tried it, you’d find personal gatings are being disallowed…”

She glanced down at Spot, who was turning slowly in place, and then stopped, his stalked eyes fixed on one spot in the sky, distant over the hills. As long as it’s nothing to do with Thesba… Kit thought, watching Dairine as she too turned. Gonna take a while to get used to that…

At first he couldn’t see what the two of them were looking at, partly because there was a fair amount of low cloud over that way, clinging to the tops of the distant hills. But then through the cloud Kit got a glimpse of something. Aircraft light? he thought. Or some kind of satellite maybe?

But what he could see of it through the cloud was brighter than he’d have expected an aircraft light to be, and it didn’t move, just held still. And then the cloud gave way before it, and it leapt out sharp to see, distant in the darkness: a glittering shivering point of light, piercingly bright and deeply red, like a watching, baleful eye.

Kit sucked in a breath. It was a star. But it was so bright and so vividly colored that you were convinced you could see it as a disc, though he knew that would be impossible. “It looks like Mars,” he said. “But so much brighter…”

Nita came up to stand beside him, rubbing her upper arms because of the chill. “That’s the star I told you about: mu Cephei. One of the biggest and brightest red supergiants anybody knows about. Maybe the reddest star in this part of the galaxy. Possibly the reddest star anywhere in this galaxy.”

“Yeah, it’s real pretty, for all the good that does us,” Dairine said. “Just as well we’re getting these people out of here.” She was regarding the star with an expression that Kit found unnervingly expert. “Because that thing’s so massive that when it goes, it’ll go supernova, and there won’t be much left around here afterwards.”

“Not likely to happen now, is it?”

Dairine shrugged, and for some reason the casual quality of the gesture ran a chill down Kit’s spine. “Today? Naah, with wizardry we’d notice the signs from this close. Tomorrow? Doubt it. Next month? Next year? Who knows?” She shook her head as Tom headed back toward them, leaving Carl discussing something with Vesh. “Tell you, though, it’ll take more than a wizard to stop it. Or any crowd of wizards alive, because nobody’s got that kind of power. People have tried to keep supernovae from going off in the past. Mostly it makes it worse.” She looked up thoughtfully at the “eye” in the sky. “We’ll see it from Earth, though. About two thousand years after it’s destroyed everything in this neighborhood…”

“Probably,” Tom said quietly as he joined them, “that would have come up in the viability study before this particular rafting project entered the implementation stage. You’d think twice about committing huge amounts of energy to ‘heroic measures’ in order to keep a planetary system alive in situ when its medium-term viability is balanced on a knife-edge anyway…”

Kit shivered.

Ronan had turned around to look up at Thesba again, and was regarding it with an an expression that suggested he really would have liked to be elsewhere. “Know what,” he said, “I’m really on the wrong side of the gatelag at the moment: I was about to turn in when they called me up. If they’re offering us someplace to plug the pup tents in, I wouldn’t mind popping into mine and having a kip. Assuming nobody needs me for anything vital…”

Kit shook his head. “Go on,” Nita said, “we’ll message you if anything exciting happens.”

Ronan lifted a hand and headed off toward the complex of low, softly lit buildings that the Tevaralti had positioned off to the side of the gating area. “Not such a bad idea,” Dairine said, watching him go: “Spot wants to go talk to their computers. We’ll go over and get him jacked in for a while.”

“Yell if you need me,” Nita said. Dairine waved a hand at her and took herself off in Ronan’s wake.

Vesh had come back to confer with Tom again, and when Tom moved away from him to go after Carl, Kit said, “Vesh. You’re busy right now, but…”

“Cousins, there’s no one on the planet right now who’s not busy,” Vesh said, sadly but not without humor. “We’ve got a few moments: ask what’s on your mind.”

“The people who won’t go…”

Vesh shook his crest-feathers, a gesture Kit wasn’t sure what to make of as yet. “Why won’t they?” he said. “I’m Tevaralti and I don’t know. It’s no matter of pride… though it’d be easy enough to mistake it for such. I think it’s more that some of them are…” He shook his crest in a different way, and squeezed his eyes shut briefly. “Some are uneasy about from what sources they’ll accept assistance; they’re afraid they might somehow be tricked, or led astray. And not to have that happen is very important to them. That’s as close as I can come to it.”

Vesh opened his eyes again and looked unhappy—at least that was what Kit made of the expression. Tevaralti expressions seemed to live more in the eyes than in any part of the face, which was fairly immobile due to a bone structure that seemed to mirror what would have been various shapes or types of beaks in earlier evolutionary periods. “They’re not ungrateful, cousins; never think it. But uncertain… that they are, yes.”

Then his crest went up as if he was hearing something the rest of them couldn’t. “I’m needed,” he said. “Hold me excused, if you would…” And he headed off.

During this, Nita had turned to gaze up at Thesba again. Kit swallowed and did the same, determined to start getting himself used to the sight of it.

She gave him a look. “You want to go up top for a quick look?”

“Get the lay of the land?” Kit said. “Sure, why not?”

“Okay, come on.”

It took a few minutes to find another of the Tevaralti wizards who had time to listen to an explanation of what they wanted to do, which by itself caused some confusion. (”You want to gate up into space? Up into cisThesban space…?!”) But after a few moments Nita closed her eyes and then opened them again and said, very firmly, “Distancing maneuver.”

The Tevaralti wizard they were talking to, a tall slender one clothed in shaggy dark feathers and not much else, opened his golden eyes quite wide at that and said, “Oh. Of course!”—and led them over to one of a number of small side hexes arranged around the edges of the main pattern on the big reception slab. “Do you have coordinates you prefer?”

Nita rattled off a string of characters and numbers in the Speech. The pattern was broadly similar to the coordinate system that they used on Earth, but the numbers were significantly larger. Immediately, the little hex near them lit up blue, and the edges of the hex’s outline began to pulse softly.

“It’s intention-triggered,” said the Tevaralti wizard. “Just tell it when you’re ready to go. It’ll provide your outgoing wizardry with return-location coordinates. And you have an alert mechanism hooked up to your instrumentality, yes?”

“That’s right,” Nita said. “It’s all handled. Thanks, cousin.”

“Go well, then—” And immediately the Tevaralti wizard was off, feathers fluttering, to tend to somebody else.

“Brainstorm?” Kit murmured.

Nita gave him an amused side-eye. “Bobo can be really helpful sometimes. Bubble us up?”

Kid had had the necessary wizardry ready within moments of Nita suggesting they go topside. He said the last few words of the spell. Things went very briefly dark and silent around them as the universe leaned in to hear what Kit was asking of it, and then obligingly made it happen. A few seconds later they were standing exactly where they had been, but surrounded by a transparent forcefield bubble two meters wide. Kit just stood there for a moment waiting for the usual feeling of the personal energy leaving him, the price for having done such a spell, and was surprised to feel it so very much less than usual. “They said about an hour,” Kit said. “So I packed air for two hours…”

Nita nodded. “Because you never can tell.”

“Gravity?”

She considered for a moment. “Nah, why bother? We won’t be there that long.”

“Okay.”

“Personal fields?” The skinfields were an optional addition, meant as kind of a failsafe in case something went wrong with the forcefield bubble. Not that anything ever had, but—

“Because you never can tell.”

Kit nodded and said the twelve extra words necessary to implement the personal shields. Once more he hardly even felt the deduction of his personal energy. I could get used to this… “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

The reception pad winked out.

And then they were hanging in space. The thing that struck Kit immediately was how different the light balance was, once you were up here. Down on the planet surface, on the night side at least, Thesba’s hot sullen glow and lowering, downpressing presence dominated everything. Up here Tevaral had a chance to shine on its own.

It was worth seeing. Far greener than home—partly because of the way its atmosphere scattered light and partly due to the dominant green-blue color of the vegetation—and nearly twice as big as Earth, the effect was striking. If the look of Earth from space was along the lines of a turquoise or sapphire, then Tevaral came down more along the emerald or opal side of the equation, its seas more golden from the angle of the place in space where he and Nita hung suspended. Their forcefield was anchored to this one set of coordinates, so that underneath them the planet’s rotation could just barely be seen, if you fixed your eyes on one spot and watched how it approached the terminator and slid under. And the slow swing of Thesba around its primary was visible too, a leisurely movement toward moonset, sliding at the same kind of speed that the Sun’s light seen through blinds at home might creep down the wall late in the day.

Kit held still and quiet as he watched this, waiting for Nita to get past the first few moments of physical discomfort that came of being in space without gravity. The Moon wasn’t too hard to deal with, as a rule: even as little as one-sixth gee gave your gut and your inner ear enough gravity to keep them feeling relatively normal. However, the balance-weirdness and orientation problems that came with microgravity were another story. Kit had been lucky enough to find he could get over these pretty quickly. But Nita (like the vast majority of astronauts) had had a fair amount of trouble with it her first few times, and even now had to hold still and not be too active for the first few minutes in zero-gee until her brain managed to talk her inner ear out of misbehaving.

She floated there with her eyes closed for a few seconds, apparently waiting for her inner ear to get the news about where they were, and then cracked one eye open, taking in the view.

“Okay?” Kit said.

“Okay.”

Kit reached into his otherspace pocket for his manual and flipped it open, pulling up a spell that he normally kept ready and partially executed for situations like this. He spoke the last five words of the spell, and the inside of the forcefield came alive with a heads-up display of the most prominent bodies within range.

The image of Thesba’s inner structure in the display was seriously unnerving. Peculiar stresses and striations revealed themselves in the moon’s inner mantle—numerous many-forked streaks of pulsing red light in the display, running outward through the upper mantle and radiating toward the crust from the thin, deformed boundary regions outside that peculiar lumpy triple inner core. The outer crust was a patchwork of restless magma leakage, broad wounds torn through the outermost discontinuity level and bleeding giant lakes of superheated molten stone and metal up to the surface, where they cooled fitfully to stone and then tore and bled again.

Kit stared at all this in fascinated horror. “What a mess.”

“Scenic,” Nita murmured. “But not for long.”

Kit just laughed and ran a hand through his hair, which as usual when he hadn’t put anything on it to keep it in line, his hair stood up a bit in the almost-zero gee. “Definitely not the kind of moon you’d want to go up to and sit around on, watching your home planet…”

Nita shook her head, her hair immediately rising in a cloud around her in the microgravity. She pushed it back. “Not unless you wanted to burn your butt right off. And assuming you could even see it through that atmosphere.”

“Yeah.”

“But then the whole thing’s pretty much of a write-off. All the flows in the dynamo layer are changing, which means Thesba’s magnetic field’s going to be completely screwed up real soon. Meaning Tevaral’s magnetic field will get screwed up too, and if radiation starts getting into the lower atmosphere from space, that’ll be bad for everybody on the Tevaralti surface pretty quick…” Nita sighed. “Possibly one of the reasons that the cousin down there wasn’t very happy about the idea of us coming up here.”

“Or else he took a look at our personal profiles and got worried that we might be coming up here to start messing around with it on our own.”

Nita had to snicker at that as she pushed her hair out of her face again. “Yeah,” she said, “guess that might have been an idea that could’ve occurred. But…”

“I am absolutely not going any closer to that than this,” Kit said. “Right here’s close enough. It looks like it’d blow if you sneezed at it.”

“Like other things might,” Nita said, glancing upwards and away from Thesba, over Tevaral’s dark limb. Distant in the deep sky but not nearly distant enough, a pitiless, red-burning eye, Erakis laid crimson highlights over everything it touched, filling in shadows that should have been quite dark with an uneasy, bloody glow. As Nita pressed a hand against the forcefield to turn herself so she could look at Erakis more directly, her hair fluffed up again and got in her face, and the red giant’s light set all the tendril-ends of it on fire.

“This is getting to be such a nuisance,” Nita muttered. She pulled the hair back with one hand, twisted it together, and stuffed the end of the attempted ponytail down the back of her shirt. It promptly came out again and fluffed up in all directions like a dandelion head gone to seed.

Kit didn’t comment, having noticed over the past couple of months that Nita had been letting her hair get longer, and uncertain about both why, and what would be safe to say. Is it because Dairine started getting hers cut shorter, I wonder? But then again, who knew if there was even any connection? Maybe this was all in his head.

“Why did I not bring a scrunchie?” Nita was muttering. “Oh God, Bobo, make a note for me. When in space, always have a scrunchie!”

Kit didn’t hear any response, which again left him feeling strangely relieved. “Was this the thing you were trying to remember before we left?”

“Uh,” Nita said, and paused. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

There was a moment’s quiet as if she was listening to something, and then Nita frowned. “Yes, fine, I’ll try that memory routine when we get home, but for the moment will you do me a favor and just make my hair lie down?”

Kit tried not to look as if it was at all funny that Nita was annoyed enough to be having this conversation out loud. “I don’t care,” she said, “a touch of localized gravity will do just fine if it’s not too much trouble!”

Kit knew that tone of voice, and winced. Nita’s hair very quickly laid itself down flat.

“Thank you,” she said, and blew out a breath.

“Better?” Kit said.

She nodded, pushing against the force field with one foot to turn back toward him. “Yeah. …But not just that. Being up here, seeing this this way… that’s better, too.”

“You lost me.”

“Don’t ask me why. It ought to look worse.” She was gazing down on Tevaral now. “But after popping out down there, I needed to recover a little before we get down to work…”

“Not just you,” Kit said under his breath. It wasn’t an admission he’d thought he was going to make just yet, but… Too late now.

“Oh good,” Nita said, sounding relieved. “I didn’t know if it was just me. I could feel that…” She glanced at Thesba. “Just leaning on me.”

Kit nodded. “But there’s something else,” he said. “This isn’t how we’ve worked, usually. Mostly it’s been small teams, little groups, except for the Pullulus War.”

“Yeah. Except for that, never a big deal like this,” Nita said, gazing down at Tevaral. “It could throw you off.”

It already has, Kit thought, but he had enough control over himself to avoid saying that for the moment.

“And we’re so used to doing this on our own terms,” Nita said. “Getting called in on a Wizards’ Right declaration… you don’t really want to even think about refusing. They’re too important. The last time…”

“The Song of the Twelve.”

Nita sighed. “Yeah. Well, I don’t think this is going to be anything like that. There are a whole lot more participants, for one thing. The odds of us winding up in any situation even remotely similar to that seem…” She waved a hand.

“Remote?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, there are how many thousands of us here just from Earth? And a whole lot from all kinds of other places.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, and couldn’t help twitching. Nita looked at Kit for several long moments, apparently having picked up on this.

Then she burst out laughing helplessly. “…Oh God. Have I just doomed us?”

Kit had to laugh too. “Yeah, probably.”

“Oh great, well, that’s out of the way…” Nita turned her attention back to Tevaral. “Then it doesn’t matter that I really, really wish there was nothing wrong with mindchanging some of those people so we could get them all out of here.”

Her voice had gone a lot quieter. Kit sighed, shook his head. “You heard Mamvish… Troptic Stipulation. We have to let them do what they’re going to do.”

“We don’t have to like it, though,” Nita muttered. “I’m not wild about it and I haven’t even started doing what we’re here for yet. And I can just imagine how Dairine’s going to be after a few days.”

Kit could imagine too, and almost wished he couldn’t. The subject of fatality and what one would dare doing to stop it was sensitive enough even just between the two of them, in the wake of Nita’s mother’s death. The thought of how those tensions could wind up playing out here between Nita and Dairine was less than pleasant. “Let me know if she starts getting on your nerves…”

Nita sighed. “I wouldn’t wish her on you. I can deal.”

“Yeah, but you may need somebody to vent on afterwards.”

She gave him a sideways smile that said both Thank you and Oh really? “And who do you vent on after I’m done with you?”

Kit thought about that. “Ronan, usually. Then he tells me I’m a gobshite, or some other rude Irish thing, and we move on.”

“Oh well,” Nita said, “as long as there’s a protocol, that’s okay then.”

“Also…” He wasn’t sure how to say this and not have it sound either overbearing or needy. “I kind of hate being split up, this time.”

“Why? Nothing bad’s going to happen. We’ll be fine.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant. “I mean… It’s easier to cope when you’re around. When we’re on errantry. And because of all these people who don’t want to go, even though we’re trying to help them… I think it might be harder than usual to cope.”

“For you and for me, is what you’re saying.” She gave Kit a penetrating look.

“Look, I’m not trying to get into a contest with you about who’s going to have more trouble with this…” Because I’m having trouble with it already!

Nita scowled: but it wasn’t an angry expression… more the one Kit had seen Nita turn on problems she was trying to solve. “Listen, I don’t like being split up either! It’s what you said before: you get used to working one way and then it makes you nervous when you get shoved out of your comfort zone. Or into something big and complicated like this, where it’s already running at full speed like some big machine.”

“And you don’t feel like a cog…”

Nita laughed, though it sounded as if the joke was at her own expense. “Maybe not. But that’s what I am today. What we both are. And I doubt anybody’d thank the cogs if they started deciding they didn’t like where they’d been installed, and just relocated themselves somewhere else in the machinery.”

“Back into the comfort zone…”

“And someplace where they make everything else grind to a halt. Not the kind of thing a wizard does…” Her eyes drifted back to Thesba. “It’s an honor to be involved in this, you know? That’ll help me cope. And you too.”

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 628