Cephei IV / Tevaral 12 page

Dairine snickered, triumphant. “That is the least effective s’more in the history of s’mores.”

“They’ve got a history?” Ronan said. “If this is anything to go by, I’d say it’s just about over.”

Nita threw Ronan a withering look and bit into the s’more. “It’s not that bad,” she said. But she was plainly making the best of a bad situation.

“All we need now is cocoa and scary stories,” Tom said, amused.

“If we’re having cocoa, I want some,” said a new voice, and Carl appeared out of the darkness beyond the stones in very similar hiking clothes to Tom’s. “Beats making my own.”

Over the various shouts of greeting, Tom gave Carl a wry look. “Don’t tell me you brought that with you?!”

“’Course I did,” Carl said, sitting down by Tom. “We’re a long way from home in a taxing situation. Am I not allowed to have comfort food? Think carefully before you answer, because I didn’t say a single word about your Triscuits.”

“You have cocoa? Have you got marshmallows?” came the immediate demand from several people sitting around the circle.

“Only the mini ones,” Carl said, looking regretfully at the campfire. “They’re no good for toasting.”

“No, not for toasting,” Nita said. “For s’mores. The marshmallow fluff doesn’t really cut it.”

“No, I see that.” Carl made a face. He stood up. “Well, it’s worth a try. Be right back.”

He got up and headed off for the short-transport pad, and quickly returned with half a bag of the tiny marshmallows. “This,” Dairine said, eyeing them, “is absolutely going to be one of those problems that only wizardry can solve…”

This proved true, as no one had anything like a skewer thin enough to toast mini marshmallows on. They wound up levitating them over the fire in small groups, which was delicate business—the mass of each individual mini marshmallow was so small that managing them in such a way that they all toasted evenly within the same time period was extremely difficult. Routinely half of them got burnt black while the other half were still only the faintest brown, and finally even Carl had to admit that they weren’t that much better a solution to the s’mores problem then the marshmallow fluff had been.

“Make a note,” Ronan said on being handed first even vaguely viable s’more and regarding it with mild resignation as it started falling apart in his hand, “the next time we go to evacuate an entire planetary population, bring full-sized marshmallows.”

“Not that I want to have to help do this again anytime soon,” Nita said, glancing in Thesba’s general direction with an annoyed look. “But then I can’t imagine this happens all that often…”

“You’d be surprised how often it happens,” Tom said, stretching his legs out. “This is kind of a special situation—it’s rare that a planet has this specific problem with getting its population offworld, or that it has to happen so quickly. Normally planets don’t just haul off and blow up the way Krypton was supposed to have; they tend to give you plenty of warning. But I’d say that the Interconnect Project winds up moving, oh, at least one or two populations a year entirely off their home worlds, ecosystems and all.”

Some of the wizards sitting around the fire exchanged concerned glances at that. “After all, we live in a fairly small, quiet suburb of the galaxy,” Carl said. “In closer to the core, and in the more populous arms, there are tens of millions of worlds inhabited by intelligent species, and of that number a small percentage come under catastrophic threat in any given year—solar disasters, black holes wandering through, local gravitic disturbances… A very small percentage, sure. And wherever possible, Planetaries and resident wizards keep a close eye on things and managed to derail at least some of the conditions that threaten inhabited worlds before they get out of hand. But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. This is one of those times...” He ran a hand through his hair. “The big projects are always subject to logistical problems: it can’t be helped. It’s the small single-planet projects that’re usually the most successful.”

“And as a result you hardly ever hear about them after the fact,” Tom said. “Atlantis…”

“Well, that was a bit of a mixed result,” Carl said, and sighed.

Tom laughed a short sardonic laugh. “You think?”

“This something happened on Earth?” said Cheleb.

“The Aphthonic Intervention,” Tom said. “It’s in the manual. There was a continent in the planet’s early developmental stages that was one of the first homes of one of several ancestor species—”

Kit smiled, remembering a brief conversation he’d had on this subject with a most unusual pig. “I know four different versions of this story,” he said, “but not which one is true.”

“Only four?” Tom raised his eyebrows at Kit, amused. “I’d have said eight at least. But as for how many of them are true? All of them, of course. You should know by now, though, how different the truth can look depending on what angle you’re examining it from.”

“Oh God,” said Ronan, “it’s one of those Rashomon things, isn’t it.”

“Well, no. What sank the continent isn’t disputed. Atlan Seamount was the biggest underwater volcano this planet has ever produced, and the Atlantis continent lay right on top of it; its main volcanic neck and pre-volcanic basement cone came up straight up through the middle of the Atlan land mass. When the big eruption went off at last, the resulting explosion was like the one they expect to hit Yellowstone some day, except a hundred times worse. It cracked the body of the continent straight through in five places.”

“See, the wizards there had unfortunately tried to throttle the volcano,” Carl said, “and that never works. Then when it went off at last, they initiated a last-ditch backtiming intervention to go back and keep the triggering event from happening.” He shook his head. “Timesliding living beings on a surface is one thing. But timesliding the surface itself, especially when that involves a significant portion of the Earth’s crust—that’s something else entirely. It… tends not to work well. The continent was completely shattered, and the crustal structure underneath it was shredded.”

“And when the timeslide intervention failed,” Tom said, “the backlash saturated the whole area with uncontrolled temporal anomalies. As a result there’s no magnetic data stored in the present crustal record to confirm that any of it ever happened at all. Not that there’s much of that crust material left, anyway, in the upper layers. Afterwards, other continental plates were pushed in over the subducted, damaged plates, and…” He lifted his arms, let them fall. “That was that.”

“But what did work,” Carl said, “was the project put together by some wizards who were intent on getting as much of the unique animal life as possible off Atlan, and onto other continents, before it was destroyed. That worked extremely well—a guided export of breeding stock to environments where they’d prosper. So we still have fireworms and basilisks and a lot of other unique creatures that turn up in fairy tales. Without the Aphthonic Intervention, the only place they’d turn up is fairy tales.”

“Well,” Ronan said, “that’s all very well, as long as the basilisks stay away from me. Not so sure why they went to so much trouble to save that species. Nasty little buggers.”

“Now now,” Tom said, “mustn’t judge.”

“Watch me,” Ronan said. “But I hope we’ve got a bigger action plan in case anything larger goes wrong.”

“Of course we do,” Tom said.

“After all,” Carl said, “it’s not like our Moon isn’t going to do this eventually.”

Almost all the Earth-based participants’ heads snapped up at that—everyone’s except Nita’s, Kit noticed. She merely bowed her head over the s’more she was trying to assemble, smiling an odd little smile.

“It’s moving away from the Earth right now,” Tom said, “a few inches further every year. But that’s not going to go on forever. Sooner or later it’s going to start spiraling back in. It’ll get closer and closer, and start dipping toward the Roche limit, the point where Earth’s tidal forces and gravitation start really messing with anything that gets too close.” He stretched out his legs in front of him, leaned back against his rock. “When it gets down to about eighteen thousand miles over the surface, that’s when the real excitement starts as far as the lunar structure is concerned. At that point the gravitational and tidal forces of the Earth begin actually deforming the Moon, stretching it out of shape. Much closer than that, say around ten thousand miles out, and the Moon simply breaks in pieces like an egg that’s been dropped on the floor.”

Nita was still fiddling with her s’more, wearing that slight smile. “You knew about this before, didn’t you?” Carl said. “Remiss of you not to mention.”

She looked up with mischief in her eyes. “Well,” she said, “it’s maybe half a million years from now this’ll happen, give or take. Might be twice that: no one’s sure. Doesn’t seem to be much point in yelling ‘fire’ when the building hasn’t really even started burning yet.”

Tom smiled slightly. “We know a lot more about what the Moon’s made of these days,” he said, “but if I remember rightly the jury’s still out on what happens after it breaks up. Does it simply fall down on us, or are the pieces shredded by the tidal effects into small enough chunks for us to wind up with rings?”

Nita leaned back against her own rock and sighed. “It is still out,” she said. “But more on the yes-to-rings side than the other way. Seems there are density anomalies that may make the shredding easier.”

“Assuming there are any human beings left on Earth at that point,” Ronan said. “And not just gone because we’ve destroyed our environment, or evolved into something different, or simply left.”

Carl nodded. “Half a million years is a good while yet,” he said. “Anything can happen…”

Everyone got quiet. But Kit was for the moment lost in another vision. “Imagine what that would look like, though,” he said. Gradually he became aware of the others looking at him strangely. “But seriously. When we look up at that moon from home, it’s nearly a quarter million miles away. Imagine how it would look at twenty thousand miles away. It would fill half the sky.”

A lot of eyes went up to the darkly burning, lowering presence that was easily taking up a third of the sky here. “And then,” he said, “rings…”

Kit realized that Nita’s gaze was fixed on him, and when their eyes met, the look he saw there said something he’d occasionally seen there before: you see this vision, too. And you see what it would be like. I thought I was the only one…

“But it still leaves us with a problem,” Tom says. “Or rather, it leaves somebody with a problem. Not me, not any of you; this won’t happen on any of our watches. But when that inward spiral starts, assuming there are people left, and you’re Earth’s Planetary… what do you do? Do you allow nature to take its course? Do you start the process of stabilizing the Moon’s orbit so that doesn’t descend any further? Granted, the choice becomes a bit simpler if there’s nobody left but the Planetary, or the small group of wizards who’ve been left behind as caretakers. Oh yes,” Tom said, putting his hands behind his head and leaning against them, “there are worlds where that’s exactly what’s happened. The dominant species has moved away, or changed beyond their need to keep that world any longer—yet they feel sentimental about it, and so they keep it exactly as it was before they left.”

“Kind of like keeping somebody’s room just like it was when they died,” Ronan said. “Little bit creepy, if you ask me.”

“I wouldn’t argue,” Tom said. “Nonetheless, it happens. Attachment’s a strange thing. Sometimes a being, or a species, will get very attached indeed. And the urge towards inertia, towards preservation as opposed to the urge towards change, is very common.” He looked out across the plain toward the gating complex. “So is the urge towards nostalgia.” He looked at their campfire. “But is allowing entropy to have its way with physical matter always necessarily an evil choice? Might there not be examples of entropically-grounded change that aren’t negatively connoted—that don’t necessarily mean the Lone Power is standing somewhere in the background going ‘Nya-ah-ah’ at us like Dishonest John?”

This produced some confused looks among the audience. Carl, who’d settled himself crosslegged across the fire from Tom with his back to another rock, raised his eyebrows and said, “You’re dating yourself again.”

“Hardly,” Tom said, smiling slightly and taking a drink of his Guinness. “It’s widely known my personal history reaches back to at least the Pleistocene. No one’s going to care if I reference the Saturday morning cartoons we had back then.”

He gave absolutely no sign of noticing Nita’s sudden red-hot blush. “I’ll grant you, at this end of time and causality it’s hard to imagine what the form of change and growth that the Powers that Be originally intended would have looked like in operation. Impossible for us to tell, of course; before the other Powers got their version of change fully up and running, the Lone Power installed its own more toxic version over the top, and that’s what we’re stuck with. But the rest of the Powers seem to have accepted some of Its forms of change, at this end of time, as part of nature. Must we keep entire ecosystems running past the time at which they’d have relatively gracefully expired, merely out of the urge to stick it to the Lone One? If everything must die, can’t we allow some of it to die with dignity?”

Kit saw that some of the group around the campfire were looking at Tom rather strangely. “I know,” Tom said. “You’re young in your practices yet… used to fighting the Lone One tooth and nail, and even winning. Which is as it should be. That’s why wizardry was given into your hands, into all our hands, when young. Yet even when you’re young, you have to learn to pick your fights. Then you start learning to leverage your experience against your power levels.” His glance rested on Dairine for a moment. “Some of us learn that earlier than others. There are people who waste time feeling sorry for wizards whose power levels took a dive after they come off their Ordeals, never suspecting how much smarter and more effective those wizards are now they’ve realized how to make the most of what they’ve got.”

“That was a compliment,” Dairine said. “Accepted with thanks.”

“And on that note,” Carl said, “especially speaking of power levels taking a dive, even the ones we’re working with here… Someone has a few other stops to make before he heads off for his own shift pretty soon.” He neatly deprived Tom of the Guinness bottle and drained it.

Tom laughed and shook his head. “Hate to admit it, but he has a point…”

The Supervisories got up and wandered around making their good-nights to everyone, and finally waved and vanished into the dark in the direction of the short-transport pad. Everybody else made themselves comfortable around the Stone Throne for a while, enjoying the fire, snacking casually on what food remained of the buffet that had been laid out, and just generally relaxing and ignoring Thesba, now standing fairly high overhead and occasionally obscured by drifting cloud. Ronan had renewed his discussion of the “first” of the Star Wars films with Cheleb and Djam and Mr. Frilly; he’d started that one running on the streaming video with the purpose of freezing it on every scene he didn’t like, one after another, and mocking them all mercilessly. Dairine was sitting in the grass with her back against one of the standing stones and Spot in her lap, smiling slightly and watching this performance unfold.

Kit strolled over to the remains of the buffet to get himself some beef jerky—Ronan had brought that, and it was surprisingly good—and glanced around him. Just about then Nita wandered up by him, watching the video-screening action with an expression of dry amusement that suggested she had absolutely no intention of getting involved. “You know,” she said, “that Creamsicle juice has been really nice but I would kill for some fizzy water just about now.”

“I’ve got some,” Kit said. “Come on back.”

He led her around to the standing stone where his puptent was anchored, opened the portal, and stepped through, waving the lights up. Glancing around at the place, he got annoyed with himself: his supplies were a lot more disorganized than he thought he’d left them. I guess I didn’t really do that good a job tidying yesterday, he thought. Too much on my mind… “Sorry,” he said, “it’s kind of messy in here.” He went over to the far side of the puptent where he had a few six packs of bottled water stacked up, and started pulling the plastic off one of them.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nita said. “You should see mine.” She sighed and leaned against the curved puptent wall.

Kit fought with the plastic until he could find the right place to get it to rip. “I meant to ask,” he said. “When I couldn’t reach you for hours and hours the other day—what was that about?”

“What, yesterday?”

“No.” Kit paused once again to try to remember what day it was. “Uh, Thursday.”

“Oh.” Nita rubbed her face, looking tired for a moment. “I had to go off site to deal with a flood.”

“What?” He handed her the bottle.

“They were running short of hydromages to do emergency response work, and I was handy to substitute in. But what embarrasses me is that it was kind of a relief. There are times—”

Nita broke off and looked away, as if whatever admission she’d been about to make was painful enough that she didn’t even like sharing it with Kit. “Well, anyway,” she said, looking back again. “There was an earthquake down on the south side of the continent somewhere, don’t ask me where, Bobo knows the coordinates, and it destroyed a local dam, and all the water started flooding the plain around one of the bigger gating complexes. And they couldn’t stop the flowthrough in time—the gates were being really adversarial and kept jamming each other open while all these thousands of people kept moving through. One of the local Supervisories just turned up on my doorstep, literally outside my puptent, a big fluffy guy and honestly he reminds me of a giant chicken, and said ‘Get down here now.’ And so I got down there now.”

“God,” Kit said.

Nita shrugged. “It wasn’t too tough to stop, really. I had to reroute a big reservoir’s worth of water all over the flood plain, but it wasn’t anything like as heavy a job as Mars was. Not that that would have been a big deal either right now, with our power levels the way they are.”

Nita scowled down at the bottle she was holding. “So I got the water out of there, and went down to report off to Big Fluffy Chicken Guy. And while this was happening some Tevaralti people came along to say thank you. You know how that goes.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. Those moments always embarrassed him too. He was so used to keeping wizardry secret, at least at home, that it was hard to get used to being thanked out in the open.

“And a few of them were Tevaralti who didn’t want to move on to the refuge worlds, but they came and said thank you anyway. Which was nice enough, I guess.” He could feel her annoyance growing. “And I think they knew I couldn’t understand it, because one of them said, ‘It’s just that we need to be of one mind, we can’t go unless we’re of one mind—’”

“Yeah, somebody said that to me the other day.”

“And another one said ‘If the One desired us to go, It would have changed all minds so that all minds are one, It would have acted Itself.’ And I just got so mad.” She actually grabbed some of her hair in her fists and waved it around. “I wanted to grab him and say, ‘Well, what are we, chopped liver?’ Like we’re not what the Powers use to fix things.” She let go of her hair and flapped her arms in helpless anger. “Honestly.”

Kit laughed, and the laugh came out a little broken. “I know,” he said. “Though I don’t think they’d get the chopped liver part.”

She laughed at that, which was just as well, because despite the gravity of what they’d been discussing, the reminder of Mars had taken Kit by surprise in a way that had occasionally happened before. Just the image was enough: Nita standing there facing down a scheming Martian vizier and a rebellious and dangerous Martian princess while she held a huge threatening wave of water over their city like a giant attack dog straining at its leash. Nita taut and furious and absolutely in command, looking extremely dangerous as she explained to the people who were more or less holding Kit hostage that if they didn’t do what she told them right now she was going to excuse the whole lot of them from existence.

Actually, Nita looking absolutely smoking hot, Kit thought, realizing that his mouth had gone dry. Though it might have had something to do with the Martian daywear, which tended toward the filmy and skimpy and… Seriously, seriously I need to stop thinking about this right now, Kit thought. Before something… uh, well, yeah, maybe too late—

She’d turned her head aside for a moment, which was just as well, as it gave Kit just enough time to adjust his clothes and make things less visible while she dropped her gaze to the water bottle and started fighting with the top of it. “Ever since they changed the caps on these it takes forever to get them open,” she said, scowling at it. “I swear, you need to be a wizard to—”

The bottletop popped off and fizzy water bubbled up and hissed out of it, spraying everywhere. Nita nearly dropped the bottle, then said, “Oh no you don’t, you stop that!”

The water stopped right where it was in the air, frozen in mid-spray like something caught by strobe photography.

“Come on, let’s get this out of here,” Nita said, and headed out the portal with the bottle and all the stasis-held water. Kit followed her, trying hard to make sure he wasn’t walking strangely enough for her to notice. “Boy,” she was saying, “somebody must have been in a real hurry when he was packing!”

Kit gulped as he followed her out into the cool darkness and around behind the standing stone. Oh thank you, he said to the night, thank you for being dark! Because sometimes no matter how carefully you tried to walk, things just got worse. “Well, weren’t you?”

Nita released the water-stasis spell and let the bottle finish fizzing enthusiastically over the grass. “Yeah, but I didn’t shake my drinks up! I bet you just brought the portal interface down into the kitchen and started firing things into it…”

“Um,” Kit said. While this was true, it wasn’t worth even breathing the suggestion that the way Nita’d been hanging onto the bottle when she flapped her arms around might also have had something to do with it.

“Yeah, there you go,” Nita said, and took a swig out of the now much calmer bottle. “Thought so.” She gave him a sidewise look. “You didn’t bring any of Carmela’s soda, did you?”

“What? Of course not.”

“Shame,” Nita said, “I like that…” She took another drink, sighed, handed Kit the bottle.

He drank, ever so glad to have something to do to take his mind off things. After several long swallows Kit sighed at the realization that personal matters were now subsiding to more manageable levels, and allowed himself to look at Nita again.

Which was of course exactly the moment she caught him at it. “What’re you looking at?”

“You,” he said in the Speech.

She spent a long moment looking at him the same way, and opened her mouth.

Then her shoulders slumped and she closed her mouth and twisted it into a very annoyed expression. “I don’t believe this,” Nita said. “Bobo says I’ve got to get back. The gate I yelled at before is acting up again; they need me to settle it…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay.”

She looked at him shyly. “Hug?”

Kit went nearly white-hot as the reason not to want Nita to get any closer, the reason he’d thought had stood itself down, now stood itself right up again. Yes! one part of his mind was yelling, and Bad idea, bad idea, shouted another—

But it was too late, Nita was already turning toward him, reaching for him. And, But I need a hug! some idiotically needy part of him was yelling.

Oh God. Okay, maybe if I turn a little bit, that might be enough to—

Too late. Nita’s face was against his neck. And she was shaking.

Kit instantly started to get upset, which on top of the blushing was hard to take. “Wait, what’s the matter, are you—what’re you—”

“Why,” Nita said, taking a breath as if she needed to get some control of herself, “why… do you even bother?”

“What?”

And then Kit realized she was laughing.

“We are such idiots,” Nita said, pulling away. And her eyes were wet, but they were tears of laughter. “Look at us!”

It was just as well there was no one else around to witness the moment, because Kit would have simply died. …Yet it was also funny, impossibly funny. There they stood in the middle of an alien mass migration, under a moon that was so far from being romantic that it was genuinely ridiculous, and they were having a physiology-based personal-crisis moment. At least Kit was. It was hard to work out what Nita was having, and he was both chagrined that he couldn’t read her mind and desperately glad that she couldn’t read his. At least I don’t think she can…

She was still shaking with laughter, though. “Kit. Do you honestly think I don’t notice this stuff?”

“Uh,” Kit said in a desperate moment of honesty, “I was kind of praying for that, yeah.”

“Well I hate to tell you this, but plainly the One is on another call at the moment.”

Kit burst out laughing. And then Nita was laughing again too, and…

“Uh, that hug. Can I have one not contaminated by…”

“Undue boner action?”

“Oh shut up.”

“Besides,” she whispered in his ear after as she slipped her arms around him again, “…could be it’s kinda late for that.”

Kit’s eyes widened.

“Because it’s not like you’re the only one who—”

And that was when the cry came from behind them:

“Oh no! Wait! Is this impregnation event? Didn’t want to miss it!”

Kit froze as he realized there was something really important he had forgotten to tell Nita about. Completely forgotten. Cheleb. Biology. And the candy hearts.

Oh God!

Cheleb stopped where hae was as hae saw that they’d stopped what they were doing and both had their gazes fixed on haem. “Chel,” Kit said, and couldn’t for the life of him work out where to go from there.

Nita pulled back and gave Kit a look. “Is this conversation one I should be part of?” she said.

“Uh, no. Well, yes. Not now okay?” he whispered desperately in her ear.

“Wow,” Nita murmured, plainly impressed by a display of truly world-class ambiguity and indecisiveness.

Kit groaned softly to himself and turned his attention to Cheleb again. “Cheleb. You were saying?”

“Ah. Well.” Cheleb shifted from one clawed foot to another. “Didn’t have time to tell you earlier. After you left for Nita’s gate complex, had… an incursion here.”

“Oh brother,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me...”

“Well, all right,” said Cheleb, “but failing to do so will leave you in data vacuum—”

“No, it’s an idiom,” Kit said, just a touch exasperated, because he was afraid he knew what was coming. “Do tell me. Sibiks?”

“Many,” said Cheleb. “Among other things, very interested in place where food got dropped around Stone Throne. Took a while to get rid of them but were almost all gone and then found that portal on your puptent had been open a while, maybe since you left...”

Kit covered his eyes.

“Couldn’t find command interface to shut portal interface right away, had to go in and then chase some of them out.” Kit blinked: Cheleb was practically babbling. “Was looking for last one to get rid of it, hiding under some boxes, and then found this—”

Embarrassed, Cheleb proffered the empty heart-candy box.

Kit took the box and immediately understood what had happened. One of the sibiks had found the open box and eaten all the hearts. But Cheleb didn’t know that. Hae thought that Kit had eaten them, and of course that would mean—

Kit stopped, because Nita was looking at him very strangely. He was trying to come up with some creative excuse for having a box of candy hearts at all when Nita simply reached out and took the box away from him.

“They’re all gone,” she said. It was astonishing how she could make a simple declarative sentence sound so much like it meant about five other things, all at once.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “they are.” He swallowed. “And that’s really terrific.”

Nita looked at him carefully and then started nodding. “Yes it is!” she said. “Isn’t it!”

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 518