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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.” She 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. 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 something 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. 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 Date: 2015-12-24; view: 605
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