The Galactic Mage (7 page)

Altin carefully directed the mana out and felt each tendril find a source to tap, subtle vibrations that murmured to him through a net of mana that was all around him now. When it was done, when the tendrils were all locked taut and humming like harp strings tuned and ready to be plucked, he could at last complete the spell. He spoke the last word carefully, meticulously, changing the tempo just enough to let the growth begin. He opened the gate in his mythothalamus and allowed the outbound mana to flow back in, allowing it to run into his head as one lets light in by opening an eye. And oh how it did run.

What started at first as a tiny influx, as soft pulses along a web of wires, turned suddenly into a raging current broken loose as if from a sundered dam. Altin gasped and tried to cut it off, but the torrent began to rage. His tiny threads began to bloat and swell like overburdened veins throbbing the pulse of some infernal monstrous heart. He felt the threads stretch and bend and twist with such fervor it was as if the mana had begun to boil; he fought against it as one might battle the end of a strip miner’s hose shaken free of its restraining mount. Terror began to skulk about the back of consciousness, and he tasted bile rising in his throat. What had he unleashed?

He felt the heat growing in his head, the friction of the energy coming much too fast, and he knew that he risked over-channeling if he didn’t cut the mana off. Fear made him want to open his eyes and see the gravel on the floor, but he knew doing that would be a disaster, if not an instant death. He could sense the gravel’s reflection in the mana, could feel that it was growing quickly, swelling, even looming at him, charging him like a bull.

He ground his teeth and battled against the current washing in, squeezing down the valve in his brain with every ounce of his magical strength. He heard himself cry out with the effort and hovered at the brink of failure as the gate in his mind tried to close but trembled under the enormity of the press of twice a normal sky’s-worth of mana. He sent a silent prayer to several of the gods, gods he almost never thought about, as he fought and fought to shut the mana down.

And finally he did. At last he slammed the mental gate, painfully, but down, cutting off the mana just as something hit him like a blow from Taot’s tail, striking him in the chest with an audible crack of ribs and bashing him against the wall. His knees went weak as he cut off the spell and fortunately he’d begun to fall just before the impact came, the limpness likely saving him from being pinned, or worse, from being crushed against the battlements. He gasped in agony as his back scraped over the edge of an archer’s gap and again as his head bounced off it, then thumped against the floor with a thud. He was dimly aware of a shadow growing over him and then everything went dark.

When he finally came to, he lay silently, breathing and afraid to open his eyes, afraid to discover what he had done. When he did open them, he was still in total darkness. At first he thought he’d fried his vision, and probably his magic too, and panic welled as he lay there dreading that he’d just fulfilled another prophecy of the Six. But after a time, he calmed himself and began to look more carefully around. There was a faint glow coming from around a bend ahead of him. The light outlined a curving surface, revealing that he was tucked into what was little more than a crawl space formed around the edge of the tower by the massive expanse of what was clearly an enormous boulder now—the pebble swollen to something larger than a house.

The glow had to be coming from his room below—in through the window and up the stairs—and he was suddenly grateful for the design of that stairway he’d cursed so many times before, having always had to duck whenever he went down. He twisted, intent on crawling towards the light, but the pain in his ribs nearly blacked him out again. Good gods.

He lay back, panting, and took the time to consider what had taken place, half terrified and half in awe of what the Liquefying Stone could do. He could have been crushed. He could have died. But on the other hand, the pebble was now an enormous boulder, made so with a child’s spell and a tiny mana thread. Such power was incredible. But how had it so nearly come undone? How could the mana flow so fast?

As he reenacted the casting slowly in his mind, he began to realize why Tytamon called the stone Liquefying Stone. Normally mana oozed, it ran like maple sap on a cool November night. But not this time. The stone made the mana run like water, liquefied. Fast and dangerous, a torrent, a river raging with melting snow, stronger, even more powerful than a river could ever be, and flowing from everywhere at once. It was amazing and Altin felt himself rejoice. This really was it. He knew at once that this was what he needed to make it to the moon.

But first he needed to clean up his new mess, and hopefully before Tytamon found out what he’d done. He had a feeling Tytamon already knew, but the old man was a mystery. And in the face of that, Altin would operate on hope.

He groped around in the darkness, wincing at every move, and found the Liquefying Stone lying near his knee. He brought it up near his face and regarded it in the faint glow coming from around the parapet’s curve. “Tricky little bastard, I’ll give you that,” he said to it. “But you’re the ticket for the trip.” He laughed, then winced and nearly puked, and then slowly, painfully, made his way around and down into his room.

He wrapped his chest as best he could with some rags lying in a corner—he’d deal with his ribs later—and bundled the Liquefying Stone in an unused strip. He placed it on the table near the mouse-nibbled bread and headed downstairs, out into the meadow. The best way to deal with his pebble problem was from the outside, not from underneath its bulk.

Once outside he looked upon his creation for the first time and almost had to laugh. The pebble was indeed enormous now, and, cradled in the battlements like it was, it looked like a giant snowball on a cone, just like the vendors sold at fairs and festivals, icy treats sprinkled with colorful fruit juices and perfect on a hot summer day. Only this one was not colorful, it was slate gray, the gray of Mt. Pernolde. Altin couldn’t help think there was something to be said for the fact that at least when he screwed up one of Tytamon’s towers, he kept to the color scheme. He chuckled at his own silent joke, but laughter made his ribs hurt, and it was mostly nervous laughter anyway. He had to get rid of that gigantic thing.

He made a few practice gestures with his arms to see how much the movements of casting would hurt and consequently subject his spell to failure, or even further disaster, but he found that he could manage. Casting wouldn’t be pleasant, but discipline would get it done. Discipline was the cornerstone of good magic.

He chanted a familiar teleporting spell that brought him atop the large boulder and looked dubiously around. No, this wouldn’t work. If he tried to shrink it back to normal while standing up here, he would have a twenty-foot fall if the boulder shrank too fast, and given his condition, he wasn’t willing to take the risk. However, the circumference of the enormous rock exceeded that of the tower itself and thus eliminated the option of a stance on the parapet. That was a problem. This particular spell required that the caster be within at least twenty paces of the target and holding it in full view. The tower was forty-feet high, and even were it a bit shorter, the angle required for something constituting a full view took him well beyond range. He studied the curtain wall beneath him with a grunt. Close enough, but posing the same angular problem as did standing on the ground.

It was then that Altin heard Taot coming in for his morning meal. He turned and watched the dragon glide in as he normally did around this time of day. There was the answer. He saw that the dragon had already spotted him and he hurriedly sent the obstreperous beast a message conveying the sense of injury and a need for delicacy—just in case Taot was in the mood for some rough and rib-exploding joke. The dragon replied with feelings of concern, best described as a brown sense, and something like worry for the pack. Altin had often struggled to explain dragon emotion to people since the day he’d tamed the creature, but no one ever understood. One simply couldn’t ascribe color to emotion and expect anyone to understand.

He reassured Taot that he was fine, just bruised, and sent a sense of urgency along with a request for a short ride. The dragon responded with mild annoyance, but was willing to comply. Dragons were such moody things.

Altin quickly teleported back to the meadow and called the dragon to him with a thought. He clambered aboard as soon as Taot offered him his neck, and nearly fainted with the effort halfway up. He received another thought of concern from the dragon, this one tinged with a questioning element regarding strength, darker, a probe on the dragon’s part, checking to be sure Altin had not gone weak or been wounded past the point of worth.

Altin sent back raw power, channeling a swell of mana with the telepathic note, a large bubble like a mountain pregnant with lava but not yet ready to burst. The feeling Altin conveyed was not a threat; it was just a statement that the dragon could understand. Animal magic was raw, reflexive and made by instinct, not by thought. Dragons in particular understood how magic worked, at least in their own way, and they understood power very well. Taot knew what Altin meant, and his concern was abated by the show of strength. He was just making sure Altin was still worthy of respect. There was no room in nature for the weak. It was not a matter of love; it was a matter of life and death.

Altin patted him on the neck to assure him there were no hard feelings and then directed him to fly up close to the tower top. Taot responded silently and leapt into the air, the pure power of the leap, launched by muscles thick as pine trunks, jarring Altin once again to the point of nearly passing out. He gasped and fought against the spots that swam in his vision as the dragon cleared the distance between them and the tower with two sweeps of his enormous wings. Once there, Taot hovered, his wings beating against the air with long, measured strokes that had Altin bobbing in the air. Altin sent Taot an image of exactly how he wanted the dragon faced and, once achieved, shifted from the straddling position to his knees. He made a few more practicing gestures, getting used to the rhythm of Taot’s wings, and, once comfortable, began the reverse version of the stone-expanding spell.

It was much easier than it had been only a quarter of an hour before. The spell became simple again without the Liquefying Stone, like he remembered it from his youth, and in a matter of moments the boulder was just a pebble once again. Altin breathed a sigh of relief. He looked around to see if Tytamon was anywhere in view, checking the windows of the great central tower, still high above despite his being on Taot’s back. He saw no gray whiskers visible in any of its windows, loops or holes. He could finally relax.

When it was done, Taot deposited Altin as gently as possible atop the tower and flew off with a screech of delayed hunger towards the herds that roamed the vast expanse of Tytamon’s meadows. He’d had enough of his human, now it was time to eat.

Altin watched him go, thanking him with a thought, and then turned to the little piece of gravel, picking it up between two fingers and regarding it with a smile. It worked. The Liquefying Stone worked. It posed a few problems, sure, but that was just about figuring it out. At least now he had something to go on; now he had the start. Experimenting with magic was like swimming in an icy mountain lake; jumping in was the hard part, but from there it was just a matter of getting settled in. And that was exactly what he had in mind to do with the Liquefying Stone: get settled in.

Chapter
6

O
rli had to wait almost two weeks before the council came to a decision regarding what the fleet would do. Apparently the debates upon the admiral’s ship were as heated as they were long. The hawks among the officers wanted to press on to the next two star systems in search of the Hostiles, while the doves had argued for turning around and heading straight for Earth. And then there was the large contingent of officers who, like Orli, felt that after ten years in space, it was time to take the sure thing and just settle on the vacant Andalia which was essentially sitting in their laps.

Neither the doves nor the settler factions fancied the notion of another fifteen years in space, which is how long it would take them if the fleet decided to go on to both of the nearest solar systems and have a look around—a year and a half to the closest, and another five to the one beyond that. For the doves and settler factions, doing so amounted to a “gross period of time dedicated to the blind search of vast emptiness and a colossal waste of our lives.” For many, to carry on was nothing short of a death sentence, a slow but certain demise from age aboard the ship.

The arguments had been heated and more than one near riot had occurred, but in the end, the three sides managed a compromise of sorts: the hawks gained a mission to the nearest of the two star systems by arguing that the safety of Earth was entirely in their hands and that at least
some
effort should be made to procure it before they “turned tail and fled;” the settlers agreed to stay aboard their ships for the duration of that mission before being deposited back on Andalia prior to the fleet’s returning home, which would appease the doves at mission’s end. Everyone agreed that the nearest solar system was the most likely source of the Hostile activity anyway, given its proximity, and so, that was that. A three-year compromise robbing Orli of another huge chunk of her life, unless she went back to Earth, which would make it ten. She had no intention of doing that. Andalia was fine. Anywhere was fine. Just not here on this ship.

When she heard the announcement, that she’d just been volunteered for three more years, she collapsed amongst a patch of tomato vines she’d been tending in the ship’s large nursery and cried. It was the third time in as many days that found her weeping amongst the leaves.

When the sobbing subsided a bit, she pulled her hands out of her dirty garden gloves, wiped her eyes and lay back onto the damp soil to stare up into the bright lights above. Rows of unnaturally straight fixtures manufactured for precise balance of all spectrums of light, adjustable to the finest degrees a gardener might desire and as pleasing to the eye as a kick was to the throat. She used to be grateful for them, for their ability to sustain her little seven acres of nature, but now she hated them. Now she could not help but compare them to the Andalian sun, feeling the incompleteness of the manmade light.

The Andalian sun was hot and genuine and shining golden all around; it touched her directly, its rays reached down and warmed her with a real caress; there was no arbiter, no mediating events, it was just her and the sun, connected. But not these lights. They had no heat. They were sterile. White. Their heat was a lie, snuck in from vents near the ceiling, spaced around the room at fifty-yard intervals. Spaced and paced by man and machine. It wasn’t real. It was fake heat, piped in to make the misty air heavy, and tropically hot. But it was all a lie.

Orli wanted to go home. And so she cried. Often.

The months following the announcement that the fleet was moving on to the next star system were tough on her, and for a time she became terribly depressed. Slowly, however, with help from Roberto and mandatory weekly visits to the ship psychologist as ordered by her section chief, she began to come out of it for the most part and could focus on her work. In fact, she buried herself in it and used it to hide from thoughts of life beneath an open sky, thoughts of birds and bugs and clouds and gentle scented breezes. Most of the time she pulled it off.

Most of the time, she found herself in her lab going through the various specimens that she had brought back from Andalia with greater diligence than was her research habit prior to having gone planet-side. Truth be told, prior to her specimens being released from quarantine, prior to Andalia itself, there hadn’t been much for her to research anyway; most of her lab work had merely been in discovering things already discovered. She’d made several of these during the last ten years, shocking revelations that excited her and reminded her why she’d gotten into botany from the start, only to find out that whatever epiphany she’d had had been discovered centuries earlier by someone else. It was annoying, and a little embarrassing too. But now she was doing real botany, cataloguing things that had never been catalogued before, discovering things that were actually new.

“They’re going to teach college classes about you someday,” Roberto pointed out, meandering into her lab and interrupting her work as he usually did when his shifts on the bridge were done. “I was thinking of you down here with all your Andalia plants everywhere. You realize that you’re the first person to be messing with any of this stuff? You’re going to be famous. You know that?”

She smiled secretly before turning around with a serious face. “I’m happy to know that our weapons specialist spends his time thinking about flowers rather than paying attention to his job. It makes me feel so secure.”

He gave her a look of boredom. “As if there’s anything to shoot. At least you have something to do down here now. I still have the same boring shit every day for the next….” He stopped himself from making any reference to the long journey ahead. It bothered him, but not like it did Orli, not after Andalia, and he knew it.

She turned away from him and prodded the azalea she’d been looking at when he came in. It was just that. An azalea. Nothing special about it at all. Nothing. Except that it came from Andalia and not from Earth. She’d really begun to marvel at that over the last week or so. While she was really enjoying trying to classify some of the new species she’d found, it was the old species, the Earthlike species, that had the most significant ramifications in her mind. It seemed so entirely impossible that species could evolve exactly the same on two completely different planets in two entirely different solar systems. The miracle of life itself seemed impossible enough, but for life to happen and evolve on identical pathways seemed entirely beyond belief, and, frankly, gave evidence in her mind that the Andalians had in fact been real, not some Hostile trick. She had always been aware of the debate over the likelihood of such parallel evolution, but, perhaps more than anyone, she was in a position to really begin to understand the reality of such an amazing circumstance.

“Don’t you think it’s odd,” she said, taking the potted plant and turning to face Roberto again, “that an azalea on Earth could be an azalea on Andalia too? Doesn’t that seem to defy the principles of evolution?”

He scrunched up one side of his face, pushing his tawny cheek upwards in a contemplative way. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe there’s just something inevitable about that particular survival technique—whatever it is plants do. You’re the botanist; I don’t know the terms. But, you know, maybe there’s something that goes on along the way that just has to be dealt with in whatever way azaleas deal with stuff, you know? I mean, pretty much everything on Earth breathes air, right? So, we all came to the same strategy there. What’s the difference?”

She nodded, considering. “True.”

“I mean, they kinda already argued this out about the Andalians themselves anyway, didn’t they? You know, them being human and all. It’s pretty much the same deal I imagine.”

“Yes, I’m sure it is. But still. It’s so… odd. I mean, if you look at the diversity of life on Earth, it seems that there would be similar differences on other planets too, exponential differences at that.”

“Well, I know you’re not a big fan of God, so I won’t spend too much time on this, but, well, that’s where faith comes in. Falls under ‘God’s plan’ in my book. You agnostics got to find your own answers.”

She gave an ironic half laugh. Sometimes she wished she had faith too. It would help to think her life wasn’t just being wasted out here, that there was a reason rather than just blind and piss-poor luck. She stared down into the azalea’s blooms, stroking its petals gently with a slender-fingered hand. It was a long while before she answered. “Well, whatever it is, it’s very interesting. And this one is the healthiest specimen I’ve ever seen. It’s so much more robust than mine ever are. I’m going to bring a few of mine into the quarantine and see if they’ll cross pollinate.”

“Hell yes,” Roberto cheered. “Now we’re talking. Earth plants getting it on with alien azaleas. Oh yeah.” He whooped and gently slapped the azalea on one leaf. “My brother,” he said to it. “Get it on.”

“My God, Roberto, is that all you ever think about?”

“For the most part,” he conceded, grinning.

She shook her head, but the smile on her face belied her irritation with his endless prurience. She appreciated his humor more than anything else on the ship.

“Well, you need to get out of here,” she said. “I’m still on duty for another two hours.” She darted her eyes at the lens in the upper corner of the room indicating that a superior might at any moment notice that she was goofing off.

“Roger that,” he said. “See you at dinner.”

She waved him off and went back to work. Returning the Andalian azalea to its place on a shelf at the back of the lab, she brought out the small leafy weed she’d picked on her last day on Andalia, the one she’d picked because the captain called. It was perhaps the least attractive of the samples she’d taken; it was small and flat-leafed, with no bloom and nothing particularly intriguing in its coloration. Its primary appeal lay in the fact that it did not appear to be anything that grew on Earth. It had similarity to many varieties, but seemed to match none. She’d already spent the bulk of two days looking through the computer archives for a genetic match and hadn’t found one, although there were several that were close. Her little weed was almost a dandelion, just a few genes off, and it was almost any one of seven varieties of thistle too, again just a few genes away. What was really fun, at least for her, was that the little plant might even have become some sort of fern had it not taken a side road somewhere in its recent evolutionary past. But it was none of the above. It was simply its own thing. As different from anything found on Earth as the azalea was exactly the same. It was a question and an answer all at once, but she wasn’t quite sure what the question was and therefore had no way to take meaning from the reply. She sighed. Maybe there was something in the soil that could tip her off.

She scraped a bit of dirt from the little plant’s roots onto a glass plate and set it under her microscope. She punched up the view on her monitor and shifted to the lens she wanted. She heard the whine of the tiny motor as the nosepiece turned and a moment later the dark micro-world of Andalian soil came into view.

For the most part it contained exactly what she expected it would, assorted core minerals found throughout the universe and an array of organic material consisting of decomposed plants and some entirely generic bacterium. However, there was one thing that stood out as delightfully new: a fungus, a tiny spore nestled in with all the rest, and just one, apparently dormant, waiting for whatever it was that would bring it back to life. Orli felt the thrill of discovery for about the twentieth time since beginning her work on the Andalian samples. Here was something new again. Another thing to look into and another place to hide from her misery. Maybe she could get a few more weeks out of this one. A few weeks of intrigue that would help her pass the time and avoid thinking about how hopelessly far off having a real life was going to be. And so it was with a thin veil of enthusiasm masking the specter of depression that flitted about the dark places in her mind that Orli set herself upon the spore. Maybe this time the question and the answer would finally line up.