Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (3 page)

“Yeah, I’m tired, too,” Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. “You wouldn’t think a vacation’d leave you so wiped out.”

“And there won’t be much time to get rested up now,” Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. “At least there’s stuff to do…”

“And five whole days left before we have to go back to school.” Kit looked at her meaningfully.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.
When
did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad’s cellphone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He
hates
it when people call me on his phone.”

Kit gave Nita a resigned look. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”

“Well,
resist
next time!” Nita said. “Anyway, we can’t just run off and start digging up half of Syrtis on our own. We have to talk to the rest of the intervention team and see if they’ve got any kind of idea where to
start.
”

“Yeah, but they said individual research was still okay,” Kit said as they walked up the driveway toward the gate leading to the backyard.

“You don’t fool me,” Nita said. “You just want to run all over Mars like some kind of areo-geek, and you want
me
to split the labor on the transport spell with you!”

“Oh, wait a minute now, it’s not that simple!”

Nita grinned, for he hadn’t denied it outright. Kit had developed a serious case of Mars fever—serious enough that he’d added a map of the planet’s two hemispheres to his bedroom wall and started sticking pins in it, the way he’d been doing with his map of the Moon for months. “It
is
cool, isn’t it,” Nita said, “standing there at sunset and seeing Earth? Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not the same as when you do it from closer.”

“So let’s message Mamvish and see if she feels like getting the team together in the next few days. It’ll give you an excuse to go do some ‘new research.’ And we can take the guests along: they like to do tourist things, from what Dairine says.”

The screen door slammed again. Nita looked back to see Dairine wandering down toward them.

“Filif says he knows about Tom and Carl coming,” she said. “He’ll be up in a minute.”

“Okay,” Nita said. “Hey, you did a good job on the shield-spell around the yard. The energy for that has to have been costing you a fair amount. You need some help with it? Kit and I can take some of the strain.”

Dairine looked briefly pained. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “If it starts to be a problem before the guests have to go, you can make a donation. Spot’s holding the spell diagram for me at the moment.”

Nita blinked. “Hey, yeah, where
is
he this morning? I haven’t seen him.”

“He’s up in my bedroom,” Dairine said, “under the bed, saying, ‘Uh-oh.’”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Kit said. Dairine’s laptop computer was more than half wizard’s manual, if not more than half wizard, and the
uh-oh-
ing had proven at least once to be an indicator of some unspecified difficulty coming.

Nita shrugged. “Neither do I. But maybe Tom and Carl will know what the trouble is—”

The sound of a car turning into Nita’s driveway brought all their heads around. It was Tom’s big Nissan. “Since when do they drive over here?” Kit said as Filif came drifting toward them from the backyard gate. “They only live three blocks away.”

“Yeah,” Nita said over her shoulder. “Come on—”

A few moments later, Tom and Carl were getting out of Tom’s car: Tom looking as he usually did, tall and broad-shouldered, his hair graying, casually dressed in jeans and shirt with the sleeves rolled up; Carl, a little shorter, dark, dark-eyed, and—today at least—looking unusually intense, with the shirtsleeves down at full length. Nita’s attention fastened instantly on that intensity, and on Tom’s hair.
He started going gray so fast,
she thought.
What’s been going on? What have I been missing?

Nita and Kit greeted the two Seniors as casually as would have been normal. “Hey, you three,” Tom said.

“Filif?” Carl said, turning to him. “Berries all in place?”

Filif laughed, a rustling sound.
For the moment, anyway.

“Can we go in?” Carl said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Come on.” She gestured toward the door.

Kit pulled the screen door open, holding it for everybody. Nita dawdled a little, watching with fascination as Filif went up the back steps after Tom and Carl. It was hard to see how Filif did it: his people had some personal-privacy thing about their roots, and when they moved, there was always a visually opaque field around the root area, like a little cloud that concealed the actual locomotion.

When they were all inside, Nita slipped past them and into the dining room to rearrange the chairs. As Tom and Carl came in, Sker’ret and Roshaun rose to greet them, the respectful gesture of a less senior wizard to a more senior one—though Nita noticed with some annoyance that Roshaun looked slightly skeptical.

“Sker’ret,” Tom said, while Nita sorted out the seating, “I was talking to your honorable ancestor this morning. He sends his best.”

“Does he?” Sker’ret said, politely enough, but Nita thought she caught some edge behind the words. Roshaun was standing there off to one side, with Dairine, looking slightly superior as usual. Carl turned to him. “Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Nuiiliat,” Carl said, “
eniwe’ sa pheir
—”And then he continued, not in the Speech, but in a beautiful flow of language that sounded more like running water than like words. Nonetheless, the meaning was plain, for those who speak the Speech can listen in it as well, comprehending any language. “A sorrow for your new burden, Sunborn. Bear it as befits you, and lay it down in its proper time, mere cast-off shadow as it is of the greater radiance beyond.”

Roshaun looked utterly stunned. He bowed to Tom and Carl as if they were as royal as he thought he was, or more so. “May it be so,” he said, “here and henceforward.”

They nodded to him, and moved around the table to get settled.

“Now those are
Seniors,
” Roshaun said under his breath as he sat down beside Nita. “I was wondering if your people had any worthy of the name.”

“You have no idea,” Nita said softly. She wondered yet again exactly what was involved in becoming a Senior.
It’s not like they’re
so
old. It’s not like they’re just grown up, either. Lots of grown-ups are wizards, and they never make Senior level, or even Advisory. What is it? What do you have to
do?
How do they know so much stuff, and make it look so easy?

At last everyone was seated. “Normally we’d spend a lot more time being social,” Tom said, “but today’s not the day for it, so please forgive us if we get right down to business.”

He let out a long breath, looking them all over. “Some of you,” he said, “will have noticed that the world has been getting… well, a lot more complicated of late. And, seemingly, a lot worse.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, thinking ruefully (among other things) of one significant change in the Manhattan skyline in the last decade, and what had come after.

“By ‘of late,’” Tom said, just a little sharply, “I mean, over the past couple thousand years.”

“Oh,” Nita said, and shut her mouth.

“It’s not local,” Tom said. “Matters have been worsening gradually all over the worlds; and wizards who study macrotrends have been concerned about it for some time. The Powers That Be haven’t had much to say except that this worsening is a sign of a huge change coming… something that’s not been seen before in the worlds. And now we know the change is upon us… because the expansion of the universe is speeding up.”

Kit looked a little confused. “But hasn’t it always been expanding? What’s the problem?”

“Bear with me,” Tom said. He looked at Nita. “What do you know about ‘dark matter’?”

“Mostly that it’s been missing,” Nita said. “Astronomers have been looking for it for a long time, maybe a hundred years or so. Now they’ve started to find it.”

“And so have scientists on a lot of other worlds,” Carl said. “Know what’s strange about that?”

“That it took us so long?” Kit said.

Carl shook his head. “That all the species who were looking for dark matter started finding it at around the same time.”

Nita sat there and wondered what to make of that.

“The discovery or location of dark matter and the increase in the speed of the universe’s expansion are somehow connected,” Tom said. “Dark matter is being detected in ever-increasing masses and volumes… as if it’s been appearing out of nowhere. And in all the places where ‘new’ dark matter is being found, local space is beginning to expand much faster than it should.
Thousands
of times faster.”

“So everything’s getting farther and farther away from everything else,” Kit said.

“Right. Now, that’s bad enough by itself. But there are also side effects to this kind of abnormal expansion. Mental ones, and effects that go deeper than the merely mental.”

Roshaun stirred uncomfortably, and a sort of rustle went through Filif’s branches.

“The expansion isn’t just affecting space itself,” Carl said. “It also stretches thin the structure space is hung on—the subdimensions, the realms of hyperstrings and so on. If the expansion isn’t slowed to its normal rate, physical laws are going to start misbehaving. And since those laws are the basis on which life and thought work, people here and everywhere else are going to start being affected personally by the greatly increased expansion.”

“How?” Filif said.

“That’s going to vary from species to species,” Tom said. “In our case, the case of more senior wizards—and I don’t mean Seniors, but everyone much past latency, what our own species calls adolescence—it’s going to look like a slowly increasing physical and then mental weariness. We’re going to start finding it hard to care, even hard to believe in what we’re all doing. And then our wizardry will vanish.”

Nita looked at Tom and thought, with a sudden twisting in her gut, how very tired he looked.

“Yes,” Tom said. “It’s already begun.” He let out a long breath. “Now of course this is something we’d try to derail. Most Seniors and Advisory-level wizards from this part of the galaxy were involved this past week with an intervention that was meant to deal with the problem, at least in the short term, for our galaxy.”

Nita thought of Tom and her dad sitting in her dining room and talking, some days back, when they’d thought no one was listening.
We have a fighting chance—actually, a lot better than just a chance,
Tom had been saying to her dad, about something the Senior Wizards had been contemplating.

“So that’s where you were when nobody could get through to you, even with the manuals,” Nita said.

Carl nodded. “None of us was sure when the necessary forces could be completely assembled. When the call finally came, we had to drop everything and go. There was no time for explanations.”

“Or interruptions,” Tom said. “To say we were busy would have been putting it mildly… not that it made any difference, in the end. Because we failed. After that we were all sent home to our homeworlds to start organizing their defense.”

Nita went cold in a rush, as cold as if someone had dumped a bucket of snow over her head.

“Why now?” Kit said. “Why is all this happening now?”

“Not even the Powers are sure,” Carl said. “Someone’s going to have to find out, though, because the ‘why’ may be the key to solving the problem. If it can be solved.”

Kit had a very uneasy look on his face. “So, if you guys are going to lose your wizardry for a while… who’s going to take over for you as Seniors?” he said. “Who’s going to be running the planet?”

Tom and Carl looked at each other, then at Nita and Kit.

“You are,” they said.

Kit sat there and came to terms with what it felt like when all the blood drained from your face. It was a feeling he really didn’t like.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said after a moment.

Tom shook his head. “I know this is a terrible thing to dump on you,” he said. “But in a very short time—certainly within a couple of weeks, possibly within days—we adult wizards are not going to be able to do our jobs anymore.”

“We hoped we could head it off,” Carl said. “But even a mass intervention involving more than two thousand Seniors from this part of the galaxy couldn’t stop what was happening in our neighborhood, or deal with the cause.”

“But you said it was the dark matter,” Sker’ret said.

“That’s the ‘what,’” Carl said. “But we’re still missing the ‘why’…and there’s no point in treating the symptoms. We need to find the cause… and we haven’t.” Carl raised his hands, let them fall again. “We have hints and possibilities—”

“It’s the Lone Power again, isn’t it?” Dairine said.

“That’d be an easy first assumption,” said Tom. “But the early indications are that something different from the Lone One’s usual pattern of attack is going on. We’re continuing to investigate…”

“Not with a lot of success,” Carl muttered.

Kit squirmed in discomfort, for some of the good-natured humor that was always there when Tom and Carl talked to each other was missing.
They’re scared,
he thought.
And they’re trying not to show it, because they don’t want to frighten the kids…

“We should start at the beginning,” Tom said. He looked over at Carl. “Do you want to do the run-through this time? Wouldn’t want to deprive you.”

Now the humor was back, but Kit was still unnerved. Carl, though, just raised his eyebrows, resigned. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll have plenty of chances to do it by myself over the next few days.”

Tom took a deep breath, then reached into the air and brought out his wizard’s manual. It was, as usual, larger and thicker than Nita’s—more like a phone book than a library book. He put it down on the table and opened it to about the halfway point. “Go ahead,” he said, and the manual’s pages began riffling by themselves to the place he was looking for.