Wizards At War

“That would be bad enough,” Tom said, “but matters get even worse. The changes in the structure of space then start affecting the thought processes and reactions of all living beings in the area. Their behavior will start to become less and less rational… less committed to Life. This is the point where a wizard whose power levels are below a certain level starts losing the ability to speak or understand the Speech … because you stop believing that you can. Soon you stop believing in the Speech.”

Kit gulped at the awful thought.

“‘Wizardry will not live in the unwilling heart,’” Sker’ret said, quoting one of the most basic tenets of the Art.

“Yes,” Tom said. “And nonwizards will suffer, too. Matters of the heart and spirit will be valued less and less. Shortly only physical things will seem real to people. And when that happens—because most humans will still remember that, once, the heart and the spirit did matter—they’ll 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.”

Kit shivered, looking over at Nita. She glanced at him, a sidewise, nervous look.

“Why do I get this feeling,” Nita said, “that on a planet with nuclear weapons, we’ll probably blow ourselves up a long time before light and gravity start to malfunction?”

“Not that the rest of the known universe won’t be just a little way behind us,” Kit said.

Carl cleared his throat. “Exactly.”

They all sat there in silence for a few moments. Then, after a moment—”If that’s all,” Filif said, sounding a little forlorn, “please, may we have the daylight back again?”

“Sure,” Tom said, and put out his hand. The wizardry surrounding them collapsed itself to a little blue-white sphere no bigger than a ball bearing, and dropped into his palm. As the wizardry shrank away, ordinary afternoon sunshine and the reality of Nita’s dining room reasserted themselves: the flowered wallpaper, the dining room table with some of the leftovers of breakfast still on it—a marmalade jar with a knife stuck in it, a couple of crumpled paper napkins.

Tom dropped the imaging wizardry back onto the open page of his wizard’s manual. It flattened itself to the page; he reached out and closed the book again. Kit watched him do it, feeling peculiarly remote from it all. We’re sitting here in Nita’s dining room talking about the end of civilization, he thought, and not in ten thousand years, either. From the sound of it, it’s gonna be more like ten thousand hours … or minutes.

Roshaun glanced up from the table, where his troubled gaze had been resting for a few moments. “Senior,” he said, “why is all this happening now? Surely if this is so simple a strategy, the Isolate Power should have enacted it and made an end of us all ages ago.”

“We don’t know why,” Tom said. “There’s always the possibility that the Lone One might not have known how to do this before. Though they’re immortal, the Powers That Be aren’t omniscient: They learn, though the exact shape of their learning curves is never likely to be clear to us because of the way they exist outside of time, dipping in and out as it suits them. Or the Lone Power could have known for aeons how to produce this result, but for some reason was waiting for the best moment to spring it on an unsuspecting universe.”

“Then, perhaps,” Filif said, “something has happened either to embolden It, or to frighten It.”

Carl shook his head. “We have no idea,” he said. “Another possibility is that something’s going on in our universe that the Lone One doesn’t want us interfering with—and this inrush of dark matter may simply be a distraction to keep us from discovering what’s really happening, and dealing with it.”

“But you don’t have any idea which of these theories might be the right one,” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Tom said.

“What about the Powers That Be?” Dairine said. “What do they say?”

“Right now,” Tom said, “they’re waiting for the experts in this universe to give them some more data.”

“The experts?” Nita said.

Tom smiled just slightly, but once again that smile had a grim edge to it. “Us,” he said. “While They live here, too, They do it on a different level. We’re a lot more expert in the business of actually dealing with physicality, day to day, than They are.”

“It’s like the difference between manufacturing something, say a dishwasher,” Carl said, “and using it every day. You could say that the Powers know what the universe acted like when it left the factory, but we’re the ones who know the little noises it makes every day when it’s running. And where to kick it to make them stop.”