Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (43 page)

Ever so slowly, the rain of fire began to taper off. Kit and Nita and Ponch stood there, watching the world gradually go quiet again. “Well,” Nita said at last, “I guess that’s it.”

“Wait,” Kit said.

They waited. That stillness persisted for a little while longer—

And the planet erupted all over in one last blast of brilliance, with uncounted and uncountable streaks of soulfire piercing upward and out of the heart of the heart of the world, as those who had gone before and had been in the Whispering now erupted into a freedom that only one of them had ever anticipated. Nita and Kit both threw up a hand to shield their eyes as all the rest of the souls who had ever lived on Alaalu departed, in a storm of outward-streaking fire, for a far wider ambit. But at last all the new light died away, leaving them able to look down again at a blue world turning underneath them, a place both very old, and suddenly new.

Nita and Kit glanced at each other.

“Now what?” Kit said.

“I guess we go home early,” said Nita.

Ponch looked at them both reproachfully.
Not without my stick!

Kit gave Ponch an amused look. “We did leave some of our stuff down there,” he said. “The worldgates and so on. We’d better go pack them up and bring them back with us.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Come on, Ponch.”

They vanished, making their way back to an empty world.

***

Dairine stared into the roiling fire, and at the empty spot in the wizardry across from her.
We’ve got to get him out of there!
she shouted at the others.

Filif and Sker’ret looked at her, stricken.
How?
Sker’ret said anxiously.
Filif’s nearly out of energy. I can’t retool the whole wizardry while we’re in here. We’ll never last! We’ve got to get out, or we’ll all
—

No!
Dairine gulped.
There’s still one thing we can try. Spot!

Spot popped his lid up.
We’re not going to lose anybody in
my
solar system,
she said.
Not on
my
watch!

Dhhairihn,
Filif said, his needles all trembling,
what are you
—

I’m going to get him out of there,
she said. And turned—

What in the Powers’ names are you doing?
said a casual voice, infernally calm, intensely annoying.

He came walking up out of the Sun, the way someone would come walking up out of the water—occasionally slipping a little to one side or another, blown off kilter by the furious wind inside the Sun, but otherwise unhurt. And slowly the tachocline was beginning to calm. Dairine stared unbelievingly at Roshaun as he ascended calmly and regally back into the wizardry and locked himself once more into the matrix.

We should get out of here as quickly as possible,
he said,
because there are about to be three or four CMEs in rapid succession, and anything in the solar atmosphere that’s not Sun is likely to be smashed like an egg within seconds.
He looked over at the Rirhait.
Sker’ret?

Sker’ret said one word.

The second after that, they were standing in the incredible darkness of a backyard in suburban Nassau County, and the wizardry that had surrounded them flickered and went out.

Dairine staggered out of her place, snapping Spot shut and holding on to him, because if she didn’t she would do something else. She was ready to weep with terror and relief, and was intent on not doing so. She lurched toward Roshaun, who stood several paces away from her, and stopped.

“Why did you do that?”
she shouted at him. Or at least it was meant to be a shout: her throat seized up on her and it came out as more of a squeak.

Roshaun paused for several breaths. “Because I didn’t have to,” he said at last. And he said it in the Speech, so it was true. But his eyes, which would not meet hers, told her that there was more to the matter than that.

Still breathing hard from what she’d been through, Dairine turned away and walked back to the house, slowly, and went into her room and shut the door. And only then did she allow herself, somewhat later, the very smallest smile.

***

Eventually Dairine heard the others make their way down into the basement, seeking out their pup tents. She let them do it undisturbed. The morning would be soon enough for debriefings.
We’ve had enough stress for one night,
she thought to herself, as she got undressed and got into bed.

But she lay awake in the dark for a long time, considering the annoying economy of the Powers That Be, Who hate wasting anything.
And
none
of this was an accident,
she thought.
They saw the trouble coming. And we were sent exactly what we needed to prevent a catastrophe.. exactly the right tools for the job. An expert in solar dynamics. A tree who’s afraid of any fire but
that
one. And a fixer par excellence… All crazy people, all with nothing to lose because it’s not their world, not their star. And all personally committed beyond even their commitment to the Powers…

…because of knowing somebody here.

Dairine had no idea when she finally fell asleep. In the morning, the sunlight streaming in her window woke her up… and it was just normal sunlight, not something much more terrible. Spot sat on her desk with his lid open, showing her the SOHO satellite feed, which was showing three of the most spectacular CMEs anyone had ever seen, bubbling off the inward-rotating limb of the Sun in great splendor and fury. But behind them the face of the Sun was calming rather than becoming any more turbulent, and the speculation among the astronomers who kept an eye on solar weather was that the Sun was in for some quiet times ahead.

Having got out of bed to read all this, Dairine got dressed.
And as for me,
she thought,
maybe there’ll be some
less
quiet times.

At the thought, she grinned and went down to say good morning to the houseguests… and to one of them in particular.

Nita and Kit waited above Alaalu for a long while, far up in the darkness beyond atmosphere, to make sure everything was safely over with. But finally there were no more of those fading cries of joy to be “heard” anywhere, no matter how they listened. Space’s own silence, briefly jarred out of its ancient composure, reasserted itself.

Come on,
Nita said silently to Kit.

They transited back down to the planet’s surface and stood above the house by the sea, looking down through the lengthening shadows of local sunset at the thatched buildings, the warm lights still burning in the windows, the flying sheep in the pens, all gathered together. Everything looked utterly normal, peaceful. Nita let out a long breath.
Peaceful it might be,
she thought.
But normal?

For as they came down to solid ground again neither of them could hear anything but a great silence. It wasn’t merely a matter of the lack of sound, but of the effect of many minds that had been in that world but now were gone, gone off to do other business, to live other lives. They had left behind them a world that was empty, and strangely innocent and clean: an old world made new.

Quietly Nita and Kit made their way back to the Pelaiens’ house and moved through it, looking around one last time. Kit blew out the lamps. Nita went out to the little outbuilding that had been their bedroom and undid the worldgates from the wall, collapsing them. Then, she didn’t know why, she folded up the coverlets they had been given and left each of them carefully at the foot of its bed.

Afterward Nita went outside, having packed up the pup-tents and worldgates, and found Kit over by the pen, letting the
ceiff
go free. Ponch charged joyously into the pen one last time. The
ceiff
flew up in a storm of wings, honking, and Ponch chased them down the beach, well into the distance.

“They’ll be okay,” Kit said. “They were wild a long time before there were any more sentient species here to take care of them.”

“I know,” Nita said.

They stood there, watching night fall on Alaalu. From Nita’s point of view, this was a world she would not be coming back to for a while. It was too full of memories, and too empty now by comparison.
And some of the stuff I heard here,
she thought,
I’m going to be digesting for a while…

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” Kit said. “Not for anything.”

Nita nodded.
“They’re
okay, anyway,” she said.

Kit laughed softly. “Considerably more than okay,” he said. “Imagine it. Not needing bodies anymore. They’ve got a whole world of new worlds to get used to.”

The silence fell again, and in it there were no whispers, no voices except the most ancient one—the immemorial whisper of the tideless Alaalid sea, saying the single word it knew how to say, over and over again. “Come on,” Kit said. “We should get back and see how things are at home.”

“Yeah,” Nita said.

There was a pause while Kit yelled for Ponch, and Ponch came bouncing back along the beach.
Is it time to go home?

“Yeah.”

Oh boy,
Ponch barked,
dog food again!

Kit threw Nita another of those looks that suggested he thought his dog was making fun of him. She rolled her eyes. If there was anything she knew about Ponch today, it was that she understood him even less than she thought she had the day before, but this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “So how do we route this,” she said, “now that we’ve decommissioned the custom gates?”

Kit shrugged. “We still have return tickets for the Crossings in our manuals,” he said. “I guess we just go back to the drop-off point and call for pickup. After that, we route back home through Grand Central.” And then he started to laugh.

Nita stared at him. Kit was laughing so hard that he had to lean against the rails of the fence. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“Oh, jeez,” he said, and tried to speak, and then had to stop and give himself over to the laughing again. Nita rolled her eyes and leaned against the fence until he should get over it.

“Well?”
she said.

“What Urruah said to us before we left,” Kit said, snickering.

“Which was?”

“You don’t remember?”

“He said a lot of stuff,” Nita said, shouldering her backpack and starting to walk back up to the slope to where the worldgate from the Crossings had originally dropped them off.

Kit walked with her. “I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “Strain your brain till you remember.”

Nita did her best to replay, in her head, their conversation with Urruah. As she and Kit got up to the top of the dune, where Quelt had met them that first day, and he got out his manual to call the Crossings for their pickup, all Nita could hear was Urruah’s voice saying, “Nice doggy.”

She got out her own manual, paged it open to where the worldgating pickup information would be… and as the page showed her the words “Outbound/return transit approved, pickup imminent, please hold position,”
that
was when she remembered.

Try not to destroy your host civilization or anything …

A pang went through Nita. But then she smiled. If there was anything they hadn’t done for their host civilization, it was destroy it. It had become something greater than it had ever been before, something it had been destined for millennia to become. That they’d been there at the time to help it along was… not luck. Nita knew better than to describe the Powers that sent wizards on errantry by such a name.
It was lucky for us, though,
she thought, and smiled one last time, not entirely sadly, at the thought of Quelt’s face.

A moment later, she and Kit vanished. Night came down on the Inner Sea of Alaalu.

And not very much later, the
keks
came out of the water, up onto the dry land, and began at last to build, not models, not the plans for their new civilization, but the real thing, the civilization itself, in a world that at last had been vacated by its old tenants and was ready for the new ones.

***

It took them some hours to get home. The Crossings was as busy as always, and Grand Central, too, was congested when they passed through. For Nita, getting into her backyard at last was a tremendous satisfaction, if a little strange. She came out of the sassafras trees into the backyard proper and stood there for a moment in the twilight. Softly she said to Kit, “Look how close the horizon is.”

He nodded. “Weird… ”

Together they went through the yard, with Ponch bouncing along behind them. Down the driveway they went, and up to the back door of Nita’s house. Nita pulled the screen door open, and they went in.

“Hey, I’m back!” she said.

There was no answer at first. Then her dad came out of the living room, went over to Nita, and hugged her hard. “Hey, welcome home! I missed you!” he said. “And you!” he said to Kit, and hugged him as well.

Nita looked around her. The house seemed smaller than it had when she’d left: cozier, somehow. But this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “How are things going?” she said.

Her father laughed weakly. “Uh, not too badly,” he said. “The past few days have been a little hectic… but let’s not get right into it. Want some tea?”

“Wow, yes,” Nita said.

“Kit?”

“You could convince me,” Kit said, and sat down at the dining room table with a look of great pleasure.

Nita went to put the kettle on. “Where is everybody?” she said. “Where’s Dairine?”

“The boys are over at the mall,” Nita’s dad said. “Dairine’s having a shower. She’ll be down in a little while.”

On the counter, her dad’s cell phone rang. “Hey,” he said,
“that’s
the way it’s supposed to work. And about time… ”

“What’s the matter? Was the network busy again?” Nita said.