Wizards at War promo

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

http://www.youngwizards.com/YoungWizardsComWizardsAtWarBlurbPage.html

The calm before the storm...

Dummy cover for 'Wizards at War'


Nita and Kit return from the wizardly holiday they've been enjoying thousands of lightyears from Earth, looking forward to returning to their everyday routine. But there doesn't seem much hope of that what with three other wizards living in Nita's basement, her sister Dairine's computer muttering peculiar prophecies, and Kit's increasingly magical dog Ponch behaving more strangely every day.

Yet there's other, far worse trouble brewing. A strange darkness of the mind and heart is about to fall over the older wizards of the world, stealing away their power. Soon the young wizards of Earth and many other planets find themselves forced to defend the people of their worlds - wizards and non-wizards alike -- against an invasion of a kind they've never imagined. But mere defense won't be enough. In company with their alien teammates, Kit, Nita, and Dairine must race to search worlds both known and unknown for the secret weapon which the Powers that Be have promised them - before the minions of the Lone Power find it first. And then, for the first time in millennia, the wizards must go to war...

Wizards at War, the eighth "Young Wizards" novel, will be published in Spring 2005 by Harcourt Trade Publishers.

---

(As a note, there's italics and underlining in the source text that I'm not copying)

http://www.youngwizards.com/YoungWizardsComWizardsAtWarExcerptPage.html

Wizards at War: Chapter One -- "Situational Awareness"

(1) Situational Awareness

“All right,” said the weary adult voice from downstairs. “Let’s try it again. How many is that for breakfast now?”

“Three humans,” came the reply, also from downstairs but a little nearer: “one alien humanoid prince, one giant bug, one talking tree – “

“King,” said another voice from downstairs, a younger one than the first.

“What?’

“Alien king.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever.”

“Talking tree? Since when is that so special?”

“Okay. One talking, walking tree.”

“And who were you calling a bug?”

“Or a humanoid? I am the human. You’re the humanoids.”

The doorbell rang.

“Uh-oh,” someone said: not from downstairs, but it was hard to tell exactly where.

“It’s probably the newspaper guy, collecting,” said the adult voice. “Money’s on the table. Dairine?”

“Got it, daddy…”

Sitting on her bed, Nita Callahan yawned as she pulled on a T-shirt. It was going to be another of those mornings…as if there was any other kind of morning lately. “Kit?” she said.

This time, the reply came from her desk near the back bedroom window, seeming to come from the vicinity of the wizard’s manual that sat on the desk. With it came a faint sound of barking somewhere in the background of the Rodriguez household. “I can’t believe we’re out of dog food,” Kit said. “I leave for a week and a half, and this place goes to pieces.”

“We were doing just fine without you,” said another voice from two blocks away: Kit’s sister Carmela. “It’s not our fault you forgot to put dog food on the shopping list before you left. Neets, is it true he destroyed a whole alien culture in just ten days?”

Nita sat down on her bed and started pulling her socks on. “It wouldn’t have been just him, ‘Mela,” she said. “And we didn’t destroy it. We just happened to be there when they were going on to the next thing.”

“’Just happened?’” Carmela said. Her tone was one of kindly disbelief. “I think it’s so nice of you to try to share the blame. But I know the truth. Are the others up yet?”

“Sounds like it, yeah.”

“Great…I’ll be over in a while.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Kit said, “Am I allowed to think about teleporting her to Titan and dumping her in the liquid methane ocean?”

“No,” Nita said wearily, feeling around under her bed for her sneakers. “It’d upset those little microbes that live there. The ones Dairine’s been coaching in situational ethics.”

There was a brief silence. “The hnlt? I thought they lived under the ice on Europa.”

“No, this is some other new species. Dairine’s been getting a lot of assignments to the supercooled lifeforms lately…I guess because she did so well with them on her Ordeal.”

There was a little more barking in the background, which got quiet after a moment. “The thought of Dairine coaching anybody in ethics…” Kit said. “No offense, but sometimes I wonder if someday our solar system is going to be famous for having entire species made up of criminal masterminds.”

“You and me both,” Nita said. “But if the Powers that Be have slipped up, it’s probably too late to do anything about it now…”

She finished tying her shoelaces and stood up to peer at herself in her mirror. The view was more or less the usual one: light brunette hair cut just above her shoulders, a face neither unusually plain or unusually beautiful, a nothing-special figure for a fourteen-year-old. But there were changes. Nita leaned close to the mirror that hung over her chest of drawers, pulling down the skin above her right cheekbone with one finger. My tan may look pretty good, but are those circles under my eyes? she thought. I look wrecked. You’d think I hadn’t just had ten days off on a planet that was almost all beach. “I think I need a vacation from my vacation,” Nita muttered.

“At least we’ve got a few days of spring break left,” Kit said.

“Five, counting the holiday,” Nita said. “It’s gonna go too fast, as usual…”

Downstairs, a noisy conversation was going on in the wizardly Speech. At least Nita recognized it as such: her Dad was hearing it as English, which was just as well. Bad enough that Carmela’s picking up on the Speech now. If Daddy started to, he might start getting a much better idea of what wizards do. And that could be trouble… But then, it occurred to Nita, the presence of three other wizards in the house was probably having the same effect. I have this feeling that having the others here is going to cause more problems than it solves.

“Should I wait a while to come over?” Kit said.

Nita shrugged and turned away from the mirror. “Don’t see why,” she said. “Just waiting isn’t going to make things get any more sane, if you ask me.”

“Okay,” Kit said. “Ten minutes. No, make that ten minutes after Carmela. I have to talk to Ponch…”

“Are all the neighbors’ dogs sitting around outside your house again?” This had been a problem recently, apparently due to some kind of wizardly leakage. Diagnosing its source had been difficult because there had been so much wizardry happening around their two households lately…and with the present houseguests in residence, the diagnosis promised to get no easier.

“Nope,” Kit said. “Everything’s perfectly quiet. He just has some more questions about life…”

Nita smiled. “Yeah, who doesn’t, lately,” she said. “Take your time.”

She turned away from the manual and went out of her room and into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. It had been a busy ten days: a “working holiday” halfway across the Galaxy had turned into a far more complicated business than she or Kit had expected. But now they were home, and Nita was slowly settling back into what passed for “real life” when you were a wizard. It’s so weird, she thought, squeezing out toothpaste. Everything looks so small and ordinary all of a sudden… But ordinary could be a welcome relief after the kind of things they’d been through. And now we can get on with magic a little closer to home. Especially the Mars thing…

There were of course some unanswered questions still hanging in the air about the working holiday: but answers to them were here, not off- planet for a change. Particularly there were matters she’d wanted to discuss with Tom Swale, their local Advisory wizard. She had a call in to him, and suspected she’d be hearing from him later: it was still pretty early in the morning, and a Saturday as well. From what Dairine had told Nita when she got back in yesterday afternoon, Tom had been having a lively enough time over the past couple of weeks. He was entitled to sleep late today.

Nita racked up the toothbrush, then thought she noticed something in the mirror. She pushed her bangs up with one hand and eyed her forehead. Oh, no, is that a pimple coming up? Nita poked it, felt that telltale sting. Great. I really need this right now!

Of course, it wasn’t as if there weren’t things she could do about it. Wizardry was all about using the Speech to talk the Universe into doing what you wanted: a common blemish would be amenable enough to being talked back into normal skin. But it would take some time and effort, and in her present mood Nita wasn’t enthusiastic about spending much time talking to a zit. She reached for a bottle of facial scrub instead. Let’s see if it gets any worse. If I have to, I can have a word with it tomorrow…

A few minutes later she hung up her washcloth and made her way downstairs. She could smell bacon frying, and there was a comfortable chatter of voices coming from the dining room.

She came around the corner from the living room and paused in the doorway. The dining room’s slightly faded yellow floral wallpaper was bright in morning sun, and the polished wood of the table was covered with cereal boxes, empty plates and bowls, various cutlery, the morning paper, and several girl-teen magazines of a kind that Nita had sworn off as too pink and clueless a couple years ago. At the head of the table, poring over the international-news section of the newspaper, was a slender young man with the most unnervingly handsome face and the most perfect waist-length blond hair Nita had ever seen. He was dressed in floppy golden-colored pants and high boots of something like glittering bronze-colored leather, unusually ornate – but over it all he was wearing an oversized gray T-shirt that said FERMILAB MUON COLLIDER SLO-PITCH SOFTBALL, and he was sucking on a lollipop. Sitting at the right side of the table, turning the pages of one of the too-pink magazines and eyeing it with many, many red eyes like little berries, was what appeared to be a small Christmas tree, though one without any ornaments. Across the table from the tree was Nita’s sister Dairine, in T-shirt and jeans, her red hair hanging down and half-concealing her freckled face as she paged through the paper’s entertainment and comics section. And at the end of the table opposite the blond guy was a giant metallic-purple centipede, reading several different columns’ worth of classified ads with several stalked eyes.

A couple of other eyes looked over at the Christmas tree. “You done with that?” the centipede said.

“Yes,” the tree said, and pushed the pink magazine over to the centipede.

“Thanks,” said the centipede. It tore the cover off the magazine, examined it with a connoisseur’s eye, and started to eat it.

Just another weekend in suburbia, Nita thought. “Morning, everybody,” she said as she came around the corner into the dining room, and headed into the kitchen, where her father was. “You all sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you,” said the Christmas tree and the centipede. “Adequately,” said the slim blond guy, nodding graciously to Nita as she passed.

In the kitchen, Nita’s tall, blocky, silver-haired dad was standing in front of the open fridge in sweat pants and a T-shirt, considering the contents. Nita went to him and hugged him. “Morning, Daddy…”

“Morning, sweetie.” He hugged her back, one-armed. “Didn’t think I’d see you so early.”

“I’m surprised too,” Nita said. “Didn’t think I’d get over the lag so fast. Kit’s coming over in a while.”

“That’s fine.” He opened the freezer. “Just as I thought…we’re out of sausages. Remind me to bring some home after work.”

“Okay.” Nita rummaged in the cupboard up over the counter by the stove to find herself a mug, then put the kettle on the burner for tea. She put one hand on the kettle and said to the water inside it, in the Speech, “You wouldn’t mind boiling for me, would you?”

When you were dealing with the basic compounds on which life was based, it was always a question for a wizard whether the answer you seemed to hear was the substance itself responding, or just a kind of verbal confirmation that the Universe at large didn’t object to doing what you had in mind. Nita had given up worrying about the distinction for some time now: but she heard a soft rush of response as the water inside the kettle heated up very abruptly. She took her hand off in a hurry. It only took about five seconds for the kettle to start whistling with steam.

Nita stood there and breathed hard for a moment, feeling as if she’d just run a couple of flights of stairs. No wizardry was without its price, even one so small as making water boil: one way or another, you paid for the energy. “You’re getting impatient in your old age,” her father said, reaching into one of the canisters on the other side of the refrigerator and handing Nita a teabag.

“Yup,” Nita said, dropped the teabag into the mug, and poured boiling water on it. “Any more bacon?”

“Sker’ret and Dairine and I had the last of it,” her dad said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Nita said. “I’m not sure what I want yet.” She smiled a little. Her father seemed to have become surprisingly blasé in a very short time about having three more wizards staying in the basement….but Nita and Dairine had between them put their parents through a fair amount of wizardly business in the last couple of years, and the adults’ coping skills had improved in a hurry once they’d come to grips with the idea that the magic in the house wasn’t going to go away. We were lucky, I guess, Nita thought. So many wizards don’t dare ‘come out’ to their families at all. Or they try it, and it doesn’t work, and then they have to make them forget…

“It’s almost nine,” her dad said. “I should go get ready to head out. Anything we need from the supermarket besides the bacon and the sausages?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said as her dad headed through the dining room and toward the back of the house. “I’ll think about it and call you.”

She wandered back into the dining room with her tea and pulled one of the spare chairs over from the wall, pushing it down to the far end of the table between Sker’ret and Dairine. The centipede was carefully tearing out another page from the teen magazine, and he then examined both sides of the page with great care before shredding it up with several pairs of small knife-sharp mandibles and stuffing it into his facial orifice.

“Where’d these come from?” Nita said to Dairine.

“Carmela brought them,” Dairine said. “They’re sure not mine. I mean, look at that cover! Well, no, it’s too late for that.” She pointed at another magazine, the front of which hadn’t yet been eaten. “But just look at it – you could find it in the dark. The publishers must think that human females are blind until they’re eighteen, or something.”

The Christmas tree reached out a frond-branch to pull another magazine off the pile. “I think the colors are delightful,” he said.

“That’s just because you’re a sucker for day-glo, Filif,” Dairine said. “It’s a newbie thing. You’ll get over it.”

Nita somehow wasn’t so sure about that. “And as for you, Sker’ret,” she said to the giant centipede, “you’re a one-being recycling center. We could use you around here.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t mind stopping in to help you out this way,” Sker’ret said. “These are tasty.”

“There’s a pile of Dad’s old Time magazines by the chair in the living room,” Dairine said. “For when you want something a little more substantial.”

“Oh, substance isn’t everything,” Sker’ret said. “Sometimes a little junk food is just the thing…”

He munched away. Nita drank her tea, watching Roshaun read while he maneuvered the lollipop stick from one side of his mouth to the other. The bulge it produced in his face sorted very oddly with that otherwise flawless facial structure, the emerald-green eyes and the too-perfect blond hair. The remark she’d overheard earlier had been true enough -- he did indeed looked like some coolly elegant anime character relaxing between shots.

Roshaun felt Nita’s gaze resting on him, and glanced up. “What?”

It was Dairine’s usual response. Nita controlled her smile. “The lollipop…”

“What about it?”

"I hate to say this, but you’re kind of spoiling your own grandeur."

"What grandeur he has," Dairine remarked.

"Kings are made no less noble by eating," Roshaun said. "They rather ennoble what they eat."

"Wow, who sold you that one?" Nita said. "I want one too.” She grinned: at the same moment, her stomach growled, and she made up her mind about breakfast. “I think I’ll go ennoble a couple of waffles."

Roshaun gave her an amused look and continued to work on the lollipop, while Nita went back into the kitchen and headed for the freezer. "And you're going to get cavities," Dairine said.

As Nita got out the frozen-waffle box, she saw Roshaun throw Dairine a bemused look. "How can a biped come down with a geological feature?"

“It’s hwatha-t,” Dairine said, turning a page in the weekend section. “Not emiwai."

"Oh," Roshaun said. "Well, it’s all right: people from my planet don’t get those."

"I don’t care if you come from Dental Hygiene World,” Nita said as she put the waffles in the toaster and started it up, “you’ll get them all right if you start stuffing that much sugar into your face every day."

She glanced around into the dining room again. Roshaun merely chewed briefly, and then reached out to the canister in the middle of the table for another lollipop. Nita winced. "Oh, Roshaun, don't chew them up like that, it hurts just listening to you!"

"You sound like Sker'ret," Dairine said, turning another page.

“Sker’ret is if nothing else enthusiastic and robust in his approach to the things he enjoys,” Roshaun said, “so I’ll take that as a compliment.” He got up and wandered out through the kitchen, heading toward the back door.

As the screen door slammed behind him, Nita glanced over at Dairine. “You’ve got a live one there,” she said.

Dairine glanced up and shrugged. “Listen,” she said, “at least he’s not complaining about the food any more. You should have heard him last week.”

“I didn’t understand it myself,” Sker’ret said, and munched up another page of the teen magazine.

Nita’s waffles popped up. She went to the cupboard for a plate for them, pulled the waffles one by one out of the toaster, hissing a little as the heat of them stung her fingers. Then she dropped them on the plate and turned to root around on the shelf next to the stove for a bottle of maple syrup. “Got my hands full here,” she said in the Speech to the silverware drawer by the sink, “would you mind?”

The drawer, well used to the request by now, slid open. Nita tucked the maple syrup bottle into the crook of her elbow while holding the plate in that hand, and went fishing in it for a knife and fork.

“So what are you guys gonna do today?” Nita said. “Thanks,” she said to the drawer, which courteously closed itself as she headed into the dining room.

“No plans,” Dairine said as Nita maneuvered herself and her plate to the table. “Oh, we might try the mall again, if people feel like it. But after all the craziness, a quiet day seemed like a good idea. What about you?”

Nita, starting to cut up her waffle, shook her head. “No plans,” she said. “Besides talking to Tom, anyway. Staying home and putting my feet up sounds really good.”

The screen door creaked open. Nita glanced up, and a moment later a black four-legged shape burst into the room and began jumping up on the people at the table, one after another, putting his front paws on them and licking them until they protested they’d had enough. When the large Labrador-ish creature got to Nita, he started the same procedure with her, and then paused, looking with sudden interest at her waffle.

“Oh no you don’t!” Nita said.

But it smells so nice, Ponch said silently.

“And it’s going to keep smelling nice while I’m eating it,” Nita said, “so just get used to that. Oh, come on, don’t give me those big sad puppydog eyes. Kit gave you breakfast.”

He might not have. You haven’t asked.

There was no lessening of the puppydog-eyes effect. Nita went back to eating. “I don’t have to ask,” she said. “I know he did. You’re really pitiful, you know that?”

Not pitiful enough, it seems, Ponch said, in a tone of mild regret. He dropped to the floor again and went to sit by Sker’ret instead.

Sker’ret looked at Ponch with several eyes, then offered him a strip of torn-off magazine page. Ponch sniffed it, mouthed it briefly, and then let Sker’ret have it back, somewhat damp. Tastes like my dry dog food, Ponch said.

Kit came in from the kitchen in Ponch’s wake, shrugging out of his jacket. “This was a mistake,” he said. “It’s warm out there this morning. Now did I hear you badmouthing breakfast?”

Not hers, Ponch said.

Kit went to sit in Roshaun’s vacant seat. “Yeah, I just bet.”

Ponch went over to him and put his head on Kit’s knee. I don’t mind the dry food so much when there’s some wet food. But when you have to eat it by itself –

“It tastes like cardboard, is that what you’re trying to tell me? Okay, we’ll try another brand…” Kit ruffled Ponch’s ears. “Boy, when you got smart, you sure got picky…”

I was always picky, Ponch said, with an air of wounded dignity. But now that I’m smart, I can tell you why.

Kit threw Nita an amused glance. Catching it, she thought that he looked different too, all of a sudden. Maybe it’s just all this travel… “Is it just me,” she said, “or are you having another growth spurt? You look taller today.”

“I am taller,” Kit said, glancing toward the kitchen as the screen door creaked open again. “And probably so are you -- you should go measure yourself. Looks like ten days in eight-tenths Earth gravity makes your spine stretch. My mom picked up on it last night. She measured me and I’d gained half an inch.”

“Huh,” Nita said, turning her attention back to what was left of her waffle.

“I too am taller,” Roshaun said, coming back into the dining room. “Your gravity here is lighter than ours at home…”

“You’re the last one around here who needs to be any taller,” Dairine said as Roshaun reached for the lollipop canister again. “I have to stand on a stepstool to get your attention as it is.”

“You finished that last that one already?” Nita said, taking a bite of waffle as Roshaun sorted through the canister, pulling out a couple of the root beer-flavored pops. “Roshaun, you’re not going to have any teeth left by the time you get home.”

“We shall see. And what is this delicacy?” He reached down into Nita’s plate and snitched a chunk of waffle off it just as Nita was about to spear it with her fork.

As it was, she nearly speared him instead, and wasn’t terribly sorry about it. “Hey!”

“Royal prerogative,” Roshaun said. “A king may eat what he pleases, where he finds it.”

“A king where you live,” Nita said. “Where I live, a king may find himself with some toothmarks if he ventures into my plate, so make a note!”

Roshaun ignored her, chewing. “A naïve but pleasing contrast,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be so concerned about my sugar intake, if I were you.” He smiled at Nita.

“I don’t eat this every five minutes, Roshaun!” Nita said, but it was too late: he was already sauntering out again.

Kit smiled as the screen door slammed once more, but the smile was sardonic. “Is he for real?” Kit said under his breath.

“He’s real enough to fix a busted star,” Dairine said, giving Kit an annoyed look.

Kit raised his eyebrows. “Well, okay. And at least one of those was probably for Carmela,” he said to Nita. “They were out there talking when I got here. But finish explaining this to me, because you didn’t get into detail yesterday,” he said to Dairine. “He’s a prince?”

“A king,” said Dairine, Filif and Sker’ret in a bored chorus, sounding like people who’d heard the correction much too often lately.

“The ‘upgrade’ happened the other day,” Dairine said.

“And he won’t let us forget it,” Filif said.

“I don’t know,” Sker’ret said. “I think maybe I liked him better as a prince. He was so much less self-assured…”

Dairine snorted and got up, heading through the kitchen and out after Roshaun. “Sker’ret my boy,” said Nita’s dad as he came in from the living room, now dressed in jeans and a polo shirt for work, “your mastery of the art of irony becomes more comprehensive every day.”

It was hard to be sure how she could tell that an alien with no face was smiling, but Nita could tell. “You going now, Daddy?” she said. Her dad normally opened the florist shop he owned a little early on Saturdays, so that he could get some bookkeeping done.

“In a few minutes. I need to get some more of the floral-arrangement foam: there’s a box out in the garage. Assuming that some people haven’t eaten it – “ He went out: the screen door slammed again.

“I only had one,” Sker’ret said, sounding contrite.

Kit raised his eyebrows. “You notice Dairine?”

“What about her?” Nita said.

“She seems a little edgy about Roshaun. Is something going on with her?”

Nita shook her head. “At first I thought it might just be a crush,” she said. “It’s seemed to me for a while that she was overdue. But I think something else happened up there on this intervention they went out on. Something’s got her a little freaked.”

“Any idea what?”

Nita shook her head again, spearing a last couple of pieces of waffle. “Nothing yet. She’ll tell me when she’s ready. Which brings me to something else. Tom and Carl…”

“Sker’ret said they were missing without warning the other day,” Kit said.

“Yeah. That’s definitely not like them.” Nita put the knife and fork down in the plate. “And apparently Dairine had to go way, way up the chain of command to get an OK for that intervention she did with Roshaun and Sker’ret and Filif. Something big’s going on out there: something very weird…” Nita had a drink of her tea. “Anyway, I’ve got a call in to Tom… I didn’t want to bug him using manual-chat so early in the morning: he’s probably still getting over the lag from wherever he was.”

“Should be an interesting story,” Kit said.

“Yeah. I just hope it doesn’t get too interesting.” Nita got up, stretched, picked up her plate. “Come on, let’s go outside, it looks really nice out….”

They left the others to their reading and went out through the back door and down the brick steps to the driveway. It had been unseasonably mild for the past several days, so Nita’s dad had told her, and that weather seemed to be holding. The morning was a little hazy, but the sun was warm as they stood in the driveway. The green tendrils of the morning-glories that climbed up the red brick chimney on the outside of the house were already starting to wind their way up it again, clambering up along the dried brown-gray lacework of many years’ older growth: and across the driveway, the leaves on the big lilac bushes were starting to come out. Nita was glad to see them, though they also made her sad. This winter seemed to have lasted forever, some ways: any sign of things being made new was welcome. But her mom had loved those lilacs, and she wouldn’t be seeing them again.

Nita sighed.

“I’m tired too,” Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway. There was no sign of Roshaun, or Dairine, or Carmela: they were probably out in the back yard. “What you said earlier about needing a vacation from the vacation…that’s me too.”

“And we’re not going to get it,” Nita said. “I can feel it in the air.” She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now showing the first touches of that particular new spring yellow-green. “Well, at least there’s stuff to do…”

“Plenty. And a few 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. Look, we can’t just run off and start digging up Syrtis Major 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 yet.”

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

“You don’t fool me,” Nita said. “You just want to run around on Mars, and you want me to split the labor on the transport spell with you.”

“Oh, come on, it’s not that simple – “

Nita noticed that he hadn’t denied it outright. She grinned. 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 some months. There was no point in beating him up about it. “It is cool, isn’t it,” Nita said after a moment, “standing there at sunset and seeing Earth. Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star…”

Kit gave her a look that was annoyed in an appreciative kind of way. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s not the same as when you do it from closer…”

“So look,” Nita said. “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…”

They came to the gate, and Nita paused and leaned over it for a moment, looking into the back yard. “It’s so clean back here all of a sudden,” she said. “I can’t get over it.” She opened the gate, and she and Kit went through: rather belatedly, Ponch came lolloping down the driveway, and Nita held the gate open for him, then shut it again. “I mean, look at this…” Over behind the garage, where an old ramshackle wooden shed had stood almost since Nita could remember, there was now nothing but bare ground. “What the heck happened to that?”

Dairine came strolling up the path that ran through the middle of the garden. “Sker’ret happened,” she said, and grinned. “Daddy started feeding him stuff and couldn’t stop. He’s just such a gourmet.”

“It was nice,” Sker’ret said, flowing along in Ponch’s wake. He went up and over the fence and came down the other side in a flurry of little polished legs, pausing beside Nita and Kit and Dairine as he goggled up at Nita with various eyes on waving stalks. “Very crunchy. And a lovely brown sort of flavor. You people don’t know how lucky you are to have such terrific food…”

Nita restrained herself from saying how half-rotten wood would have tasted to her. Most of getting along with members of alien species, she’d learned, was to keep your own provincial reactions to yourself. “Where’d all the garden tools go?” she said.

“In the garage,” Dairine said. “Sker’ret helped Daddy clean that out, too.”

“I always liked eating buffet-style,” Sker’ret said, and flowed off toward the rear of the back yard.

Nita glanced around. The air in the Callahan yard would seem clear enough to any nonwizardly person who happened to look that way: but Nita’s vision, well trained in perceiving active spelling by now, could see a tremor of power all around the edges of their property, a selective-visibility field that would hide the presence or actions of anything nonhuman. “I see you put a shield-spell up so the neighbors won’t be freaked by the guests…”

“Yeah.”

“The energy for that has to have been costing you a fair amount,” Nita said. “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 they 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.’”

Nita and Kit looked at each other. Dairine’s computer was more than half wizard’s manual, if not more than half wizard, and had been behaving strangely of late. The ‘Uh-oh’-ing had proven at least once to be an indicator of some unspecified difficulty coming.

There was a rasping sound as the bathroom window, which opened onto the back yard, scraped up. “Nita?” her father called. “Phone!”

“And now we find out why. – Coming!” Nita called back to her dad, and made her way back up the driveway to the back door.

She came into the kitchen from one side as her dad did from the other: he had his jacket on. “Tom,” her dad said.

“I thought so. Thanks,” Nita said, heading for the cradle on the countertop where the portable phone sat. “You closing the shop early today?”

“We’ll see how it goes,” her dad said. “Things have been quieter since the Valentine’s Day rush died down. If it slows up enough this afternoon, I can leave Mike to close up.” Mike was his new assistant at the store.

“Okay,” Nita said. “Have a nice day.”

“You too, honey,” he said, and kissed her. “Keep an eye on the guests…”

“No problem with that, believe me.” Her dad headed for the door, and as it creaked shut behind him, Nita picked up the phone and punched the blinking “hold” button. “Hello?”

“Nita,” Tom Swale’s voice said. “Good morning.”

“Hey, how are you?” Nita said.

“A little pressed for time at the moment,” he said. “How are your house guests doing?”

“They’re fine as far as I can tell,” Nita said. “Enjoying themselves.”

“Well, they’re entitled,” Tom said. “We owe them one: they and Dairine did a good job handling that problem with the Sun while we were out of range.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Nita said. “Where were you guys? I mean, assuming I’m allowed to ask.”

“Oh, you’re allowed, all right. More than allowed. That’s what I’m calling about. I have a lot of people to get in touch with today, but since you two and your guests are just around the corner, we thought we might drop by and brief you in person.”

“Uh, sure. Any time. Nobody seems to have any particular plans for anything today. Or if they do, they can change them.”

“Fine. An hour or so be all right?”

“Sure.”

“Great. See you then.”

Tom hung up, leaving Nita staring at the phone in her hand. She pushed the “hang-up” button and just stood there a moment.

“Wow,” she said.

The door creaked again as Kit came in. “Was it Tom?”

“Yeah. They’re coming over in about an hour.” Nita stuck the phone back in the charging cradle.

“Tom and Carl?”

“Sounds like.”

Kit looked surprised. “Sounds serious.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “It does. And they want to see all of us.”

“Really.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. She was already beginning to twitch.

“You know,” Kit said, “we’re lucky they’re so close. Imagine how many wizards have to go miles and miles to see an Advisory or a Senior if they need one.”

“Well,” Nita said, “if you have to get in touch and you can’t travel, there’s always the manual….” Yet Kit’s comment chimed with a thought that had occurred to Nita more than once over the last couple of years. Early in her practice, she’d come to take more or less for granted how convenient Tom’s and Carl’s close presence was. Later, when she’d thought harder about the situation, Nita had come to consider it a lucky spin-off of a side effect -- for where there were a lot of people concentrated in a relatively small space, as in the New York metropolitan area, the barriers between realities got worn thin; worldgating became easier, and wizardry tended to work slightly better. Now, though, she had passed through the “count-your-blessings” stage and had started wondering about theory. Was it the normal state of things for wizards to occur in clusters? If it wasn’t an illusion, and they did, was it accidental? She had started to investigate the subject, but then, as usual, life had intervened. And now there were more important things to be thinking about…

“So?” Kit said.

Nita shook her head. “Don’t ask me. Come on, let’s go out and make sure Sker’ret’s not eating anything he shouldn’t…”

They went out and did that for half an hour or so, and didn’t have much to do: Sker’ret was increasingly conscious of being a guest in a strange place, and hadn’t eaten anything much in the back yard that morning except for an old, rusty red-and-blue painted swing set which Nita’s dad hadn’t already suggested to him as a snack, perhaps not being sure how he was with metal. “Crunchy,” was Sker’ret’s verdict, having mostly eaten one leg of it. “I like the way it flakes. What’s the pretty color?”

“Paint,” Nita said. She was standing with Kit under the lacy pale-green tracery of the old wild cherry trees out in the back, which were ahead of the maple trees and had leafed out already. Off to one side, Filif was standing under one of the cherry trees, communing with it in some obscure way. “Should you be eating that?”

“I don’t know. What’s in it?”

“Plastic,” Nita said.

“You hope,” said Kit. “I mean, you hope it’s not lead….”

“Lead? There’s lead in this?” Sker’ret said. He took another big crunch out of what was left of the swing set. It fell over, and leftover fallen leaves from last fall flew in all directions.

“You’re right,” he said, as Kit and Nita looked at each other. “You people leave lead just lying around where anyone can have it? May I please come stay with you again on my own holidays?”

“Uh – “ Nita said.

Kit glanced back toward the house. “Is that a car in your driveway?” Kit said.

Nita listened. “Yeah. Come on – “

She and Kit headed up through the yard, relaxing a little when she saw the car: it was Tom’s big Nissan. “Since when do they drive over here?” Kit said. “They only live three blocks away…”

“Yeah.” Nita looked over her shoulder. “Filif? Sker’ret? Come on -- ”

By the time the other two got up to the house, Dairine and Roshaun had arrived from somewhere. Tom and Carl were leaning against Tom’s car, waiting: Tom looking as he usually did, tall and broad-shouldered, casually dressed in jeans and shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and suddenly graying: Carl a little shorter, dark, dark-eyed, and – today at least – looking unusually intense, with the shirtsleeves down at full length. Nita fastened instantly on that intensity, and on Tom’s hair. This started happening real fast, she thought, looking at the gray. What’s been going on? What have I been missing?

Nita and Kit greeted them as casually as would have been normal. “Filif?” Carl said. “Berries all in place?”

Filif laughed, a rustling sound. “Sker’ret,” Tom said. “Talked 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. More history, she thought, more gossip. Can’t let these guys go before I find out everything that’s been going on with them…

Roshaun was standing there off to one side, with Dairine, and with that perfect expression of cool skepticism plastered all over his face. 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, hearing and comprehending any language. “A sorrow for your new burden, Sun-born: bear it as befits you, and lay it down in good time, mere cast-off shadow as it is of the greater radiance beyond.”

Roshaun’s expression was worth seeing. He looked utterly stunned.

But then Nita was equally astonished to see Roshaun actually bow 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.”

Tom and Carl both nodded. “Should we go in?”

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

Kit pulled the screen door open, holding it for Sker’ret and Filif. Nita dawdled behind a little, watching with fascination as Filif went up the back steps. It was hard to see how he did it: his people had some personal-privacy thing about their roots, and when they moved, there was always an visually opaque field around the root area, concealing the actual locomotion.

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

“You have no idea,” Nita said softly. Herself, she was now wondering 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 grownups 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?…

She put the question aside for the moment and went into the dining room to rearrange the chairs a little. Tom and Carl had already seated themselves: Nita and Kit spent a few moments getting everybody else comfortable.

Tom stretched a little when they were all sorted out. “Normally we would spend a lot more time being social,” he said, “but unfortunately 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: three human kids, whatever Roshaun might say, along with a hominid, a centipede, and a sentient tree.

"Some of you,” Tom said, “will have noticed that the world has been getting…well, a lot more complicated lately. And seemingly, a lot worse."

"Yeah," Nita said, thinking ruefully of the Manhattan skyline.

"By 'lately'," Tom said, just a little sharply, "I mean, 'over the last couple of thousand years.'"

"Oh," Nita said, and shut her mouth, determining to keep it shut for the next little while.

"It isn’t 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 about this trend, except in terms of a change coming...something that's not been seen before in the worlds. And that's got to be cause for concern, seeing that They've seen about everything happen that can happen. Things repeat, in big cycles and small, everywhere...and there are so very few genuinely new things anywhere..."

"And now that's changing," Carl said. "For the better, or for the worse...it's too soon to say. But one change we know about for sure. The universe is expanding faster."

Nita frowned: she glanced at Kit.

"And?" Kit said.

"I know, it doesn’t sound like much to start with. But bear with me. Do you know anything about 'dark matter'?" Tom said, looking at Nita. "Or 'dark energy?'"

"Mostly that they're missing," Nita said. "Astronomers have been looking for them for a long time, maybe a hundred years or so, because otherwise you can’t explain how fast the universe is expanding. Or was."

“Well, they've finally found them," Tom said, "both the scientists here, and on a lot of other worlds. Know what's strange about that?"

"That it took us so long?" Kit said.

Carl shook his head. "That we all found it at about the same time."

"Everybody?" Nita said. "All the sentient species?"

"All the ones who were looking," Carl said.

Nita sat there and wondered what to make of that.

"Something has decided to show Its hand," Tom said. "Or else... has been forced to. We don't know which. Not even the Powers that Be are sure."

"Forced by what?" Filif said.

Carl shook his head. “We have no idea.”

For a few moments no one said anything.

"It's the dark matter that seems to be speeding up the universe's expansion," Tom said at last. "Or maybe that's a sloppy way of putting it. We're not sure which is cause and which is effect, at the moment. But the result is the same. It's there, in patches that are growing...in ever-increasing masses and volumes...as if it was appearing out of nowhere. And the scary part, the thing which has caused the Powers to have all the supervisory- and senior-level wizards call in their supervisees, is that everywhere dark matter is being discovered, the expansion of the universe, in places, is starting to go much faster than it should. Thousands of times faster.”

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

“That’s right. Now, that’s bad enough by itself. Obviously species that are spread out over a lot of space are going to find themselves more distant from one another than ever before, and from everyone else. For ‘solitary-culture’ worlds where almost the whole species lives on the same planet, like Earth, obviously the problem isn’t going to make an immediate difference in the way people there live. But there are inevitable side effects of 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 happening in space,” Carl said. “It’s happening in subspace as well, so the ‘strings’ that space-time is hung on are getting stretched out of shape. And not just physical constants are being affected; so are the ethical constants that human science doesn't recognize or have names for, though the Speech does. 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. In our case, the case of senior wizards – and I don’t mean Seniors, but everyone past latency, what our own species calls adolescence -- it’s going to look like a general weariness, at first," Tom said. "A gradually increasing physical and then mental malaise. Finding it hard to care, even hard to believe in what we're all doing. And eventually... loss of wizardry."

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

"Yes," Tom said. "It's already begun. Which is why we're warning you now, because the effect’s been speeding up. Not quite exponentially, but fast enough.” He let out a long breath. “Naturally this is something that we’d try to derail. So most of the Seniors and Advisory-level wizards from this part of the Galaxy have been involved during this past week with an intervention which was meant to deal with the problem, at least in the short term, for our Galaxy."

Nita glanced at Kit. Kit swallowed. "And it didn't work," he said.

Carl shook his head.

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 chance....a better than even chance... Tom had been saying to her Dad, about something the senior wizards had been contemplating. But apparently that chance had turned out to be nowhere near as good as Tom and his associates had thought. "So that’s where you were when you were gone," Nita said. "When we couldn’t get through to you even with the manuals."

"That’s right,” Carl said. “The details about what we were doing can wait, for the moment. The problem was that none of us were sure when the necessary forces could be completely assembled. When the call came, we had to drop everything and go: there was no time for explanations."

"Or for interruptions," Tom said. "To say we were busy would have been putting it mildly...not that it made any difference, at last. Because we failed. And 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 may be about 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 exchanged a glance, and looked at Nita and Kit.

“You are,” they said.

(2) Force Support

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 have to dump on top of you,” he said. “But this is no joke. The changes that are coming are rapidly going to make adult wizards everywhere less and less effective. As I say, it’s already started. In a very short time – it’s hard to say how long, but certainly within a couple of weeks, and possibly within a matter of days – we are not going to be able to do our jobs any more.”

“We hoped we could head it off,” Carl said. “But even a mass intervention involving something like two thousand Seniors from this part of the Galaxy couldn’t stop what was happening in our neighborhood…or get to the bottom of the cause.”

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

“That looks like the physical cause, yes,” Carl said. “But not the underlying one. We’ve been trying to find out what is, but – “ He raised his hands, let them fall again. “We’re no closer to the answer. We have some hints and possibilities, but nothing concrete.”

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

“Well, that would be an easy first assumption,” said Tom. “But the early indications are that something very different from the Lone One’s usual pattern of attack is going on. Otherwise the Powers that Be would have been a lot clearer about what was required of us. We’re trying to find out what the direct cause of the expansion is, first: that makes more sense than just treating the symptoms. Though we’ve been working on that too…”

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

He and Tom glanced at each other. The look made Kit uncomfortable: some of the good-natured humor that was always there when Tom and Carl talked to each other was missing. They’re wrecked, he thought. And they’re scared. And they’re trying not to show it, because they don’t want to frighten the kids…

“Before we get into the particulars,” Tom said, “we should start at the beginning.” He looked over at Carl again. “Or do you want to do the run-through this time? I wouldn’t want to deprive you…"

Now the humor was back again -- but Kit had heard what he’d heard, and was still unnerved. Carl, though, just raised his eyebrows, resigned. "You go ahead," he said. “I’ll chime in when I feel the need. I’ll have lots of chances to do it by myself over the next few days. And you were so good the first few times, this morning…”

Nita gave Tom a sudden look of fake disappointment. “Wait a minute…you mean we weren't your first stop?" she said.

“Oh, my.” Tom grinned at her, and Kit relaxed just a little. "Much as we love you guys, I'm sure you'll forgive us if we had to run through this first for the Planetary Wizard, and the Interspecies Liaison Supervisors. Irina, in particular, just hates to wait. As I hope you’ll someday have time to discover."

He paused, then. "You're not expecting any visitors right now, are you?"

"No," Nita said, "we're okay. The paper guy’s been, and my Dad won’t be home till around five." Kit saw her face go concerned, then. “But he’s going to have to know about this – “

“I’ll dump a copy of the presentation to your manual,” Tom said, “and you can fill him in. Meanwhile – “

He reached into the air and came back a moment later with one volume of his wizard’s manual. It was, as usual, larger and thicker than Nita's -- more like a phone book then a library book. Tom 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.

When the page-riffling stopped, Tom ran his finger down one column of the print on the right-hand page. “Okay,” he said, “here we go." He began to speak, very quietly and conversationally, in the Speech. As Kit watched, the manual and its pages began to seem to spread out more and more widely across the table -- or maybe it was the table underneath it shrinking. But no, that couldn't be true; Kit was leaning with his forearms on the table, and it wasn't moving, and neither was he.

Nonetheless, the room darkened around them, the yellow-flowered wallpaper fading down and out around them as if someone had turned tonight on. The pages of the book darkened; the table darkened too, and kept on spreading out into the darkness, somehow seeming to avoid everyone who was sitting around it. Further and further that flat darkness spread; and Kit and Nita and Roshaun and Filif and Sker’ret were all still illuminated, as if by an overhead light that nobody could see. Across the table from them, illuminated in the same way, Tom leaned back in his chair, his arms folded, his gaze cast down as he watched the ever-spreading pages of the book. There on the surface of the page, as it grew, Kit could see the previously prepared spell-diagram that Tom had been working from -- a blue-glowing, densely interwritten circle of characters in the Speech, the outer circle containing the basic parameters of the spell, knotted with the Wizard’s Knot, and the inside of the circle containing the variables.

As they sat there, the outer circle of the spell rotated up around them out of the horizontal, leaving a blue hemispherical tracery overhead, in which various characters of the Speech sparked and glittered as the wizardry worked. For a few moments, as everything got more and more silent except Tom's voice speaking in the Speech, it was as if they were all sitting inside an elaborate filigree globe of blue-burning tracery, a glowing wireframe. Then, without warning, the tracery blasted outwards in all directions, as if heading for infinity.

Where the tracery had passed, first stars flared into being, and then galaxies. Within a few breaths’ time, the kitchen table was at the heart of a viewpoint on the Local Group, the thirty-odd galaxies closest to Earth’s Milky Way spiral, which Tom had placed at the center of the view for reference purposes. Close by hovered the ragged irregular patches of starfire that were the Greater and Lesser Magellanic clouds: a little further off, the great golden-tinged spiral of the Andromeda galaxy hung in its majesty, with the other associated galaxies scattered in various directions around it and the Milky Way. The imaging wizardry’s blue tracery shot out past the Local Group, sowing more and more galaxies and groups of galaxies in its wake.

“So here’s the neighborhood,” Tom said. As he spoke, the utter blackness between the galaxies paled to a deep twilight blue, and the light of the stars paled a little as well. “And here’s where our part of the trouble first started – “

He pointed off to one side. Faintly, in the depths of the space between the Andromeda galaxy and its neighbor, the smaller loosely-coiled spiral in Triangulum, a dim patch of darkness started to grow in the “false color” blue. At first Kit wasn’t sure he was seeing it; but it became more and more distinct.

“We first spotted that about three years ago,” Tom said. “Back then it seemed as if it was just an anomaly, a dark-matter aggregate that was just in the process of popping out, and would stabilize after a while. Space is always springing events like that on us -- little ‘surprises’ or accidents in the interstellar structure that heal themselves up over time. Intervening too soon, or too energetically, can make them worse.”

“Like when you keep picking at something,” Kit said, “and it doesn’t get better…”

Carl chuckled. “Something like that,” Tom said. “At any rate, the wizards over in Andromeda and M33 kept an eye on it. It grew, but not a whole lot, and not very fast. There came a point where it seemed to have stopped. But then another one appeared…”

They saw it fade in, very gradually, on the opposite side of the Local Group, over by the small irregular galaxy known on Earth as GR8. “And after that the dark-matter aggregates started appearing more quickly,” Tom said. “In rapid succession, over the last couple of years, concentrations of dark matter appeared near 30 Doradus, M32, and Dwingeloo 1 – “

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” Nita said suddenly, waving her hands in the air to stop Tom, while yet more of the dark blotches faded in. “’Dwingeloo’? What kind of a name is that for a galaxy??”

“That was the first question I asked,” Carl said. “Still waiting for an answer on that one.”

Tom shook his head. “I’ll get back to you on that someday,” he said. “It’s sure not what the people living there call it. Anyway – you can see the way things started going.”

The dark splotches were spreading fast, popping up seemingly randomly in every direction. “It’s getting closer,” Nita said. “There’s one right by the Antlia dwarf galaxy. And there’s one right by the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That’s really close – almost next door – “

Kit didn’t know the names or locations of the galaxies as well as Nita did: astronomy had always been her specialty. But right now what troubled him a lot more than just distances was the rate at which the darkness seemed to be spreading. “Did you just speed the simulation up?” he said to Tom.

Tom shook his head. “No. The spread began accelerating last year,” he said. “The dark matter started becoming evident in unusually high concentrations as far away as the Sculptor and Centaurus galaxy groups…then right out to the Virgo and Coma Rich Clusters. That was when the Powers that Be asked wizards to start doing interventions.” He let out a breath. “The early wizardries, which were large-group workings like the one we just came back from, seemed at first to work. The aggregates of dark matter froze, even began to retreat in a few cases. As you see here – “

The assembled wizards watched the twilight-colored virtual space between galaxies and groups of galaxies continue to undergo a bizarre and splotchy nightfall. After a few moments, the darkness grew no darker…but there was still too much of it. And to Kit, the galaxies burning in the simulation-wizardry began to look somehow small and threatened.

“That’s how the situation stood until a few days ago,” Tom said. “That spot over there – “ He pointed at one side of the simulation, and the view of that area leapt closer, so that it could be seen in more detail. “That’s where Carl and I were last week. Two thousand seniors and Planetary-supervisory wizards from all over our own galaxy, along with groups from Andromeda and the Sagittarius and Canis Major Dwarfs – we went out there to try to reverse the effect in that one spot. We defined a local control structure, a temporary ‘kernel’, for that part of space, and operated on it to force the dark matter back out of our space.”

“And the intervention did not work,” Roshaun said softly.

“No,” Tom said. “Instead, this happened.”

The darkness began to spread again – and this time, much faster.

“It was as if someone was waiting to see whether we’d be able to pull it off,” Carl said. “When it was plain that we couldn’t – the expansion took off again, at twice the speed. And this is what the projected result looks like…”

Kit looked up into what was left of the “false blue” of intergalactic space as the simulation ran. In a frighteningly short time, the blue was all gone. Then, little by little, that darkness began to intrude among the stars, affecting the galaxies themselves. Their stars started to push apart; the galaxies slowly started to lose shape.

“But how can it be happening so fast?” Kit said. “That has to be a lot faster than lightspeed…”

Nita was shaking her head. “Lightspeed’s just that,” she said. “The limit on the speed of light inside the space in our universe. The space itself doesn’t have to be limited to that speed. And that’s what’s expanding…”

“She’s right,” Carl said. “And this is where the real trouble starts -- when the expansion starts intruding into the galaxies, where there are actually people living. As space itself is distended, the infrastructure underneath it, subspace, gets stretched out of shape too. Our physical existence depends on that substructure; when it changes, the way physical laws behave changes too. Even gravity and light are going to start to misbehave when things get really bad. But the expansion’s going to affect us a lot sooner, because the physical laws and constants we use as wizards are a lot more delicate and subtle. The way this expansion undermines what we do is very simple…very nasty.”

“When you do a spell,” Tom said, “you have to accurately describe what you’re working on in the Speech, or you risk destroying it. And to accurately describe anything, you have to know, and describe, not only what it is, but where it is. Now, your manual normally helps you factor in the adjustments you need for the way things in your location are moving: your planet’s rotation, its orbit around the Sun, and so on. But if all of a sudden things are moving unpredictably in directions they shouldn't be moving because of irrational changes in the structure of subspace – ”

“Then your wizardry doesn’t work at all,” Kit said. “Or it starts to, and then it breaks down.”

The thought gave him the shivers. There were so many ways that a failed wizardry could be deadly that he hated to give it much more thought. And what’s worse, Kit thought, is that up until now, the one thing you could always count on was that a spell always worked. If all of a sudden it doesn’t…

“That would be bad enough,” Tom said, “but matters get even worse after that. The changes in the infrastructure of space then start affecting, not just higher-order constants, like the ethical constants, but also the thought processes and reactions of beings in the area. Their behavior will start to become both more concrete and less rational…eventually, less committed to life. This is the point where a wizard whose power levels are below a certain level starts to lose the ability to speak or understand the Speech…because you stop believing that you can. And soon, you stop believing in it at all.”

Kit gulped at the awful thought. “’Wizardry will not live in the unwilling heart….’” Sker’ret said.

It was one of the most basic tenets of the Art. “Yes,” Tom said. “Well, that’s bad enough for us. But nonwizards will suffer too. The things of the spirit and the heart will start to matter less and less. Shortly the only things that seem real to people will be the merely physical. And when that happens – because most humans will still remember that once, the heart and the spirit did matter – they’ll start to get scared and angry. Eventually anger and violence will be the only things that seem to work the way they used to…the only things left that make people feel alive.”