Wizards At War

Kit spent a moment trying to see the universe as a malfunctioning dishwasher, then put the idea aside; it made his brain hurt. Meanwhile, Tom picked up his manual and put it into the air beside him. It vanished. “Anyway,” Tom said, “right now we need to stop the dark matter from tearing the universe apart—or at least slow down its growth and buy ourselves some time to solve the problem.”

“Or rather, buy you the time to solve it,” Carl said. “Wizards near latency age—near their peak power levels—are the only ones who’ll keep their power long enough to make a difference now.”

Kit saw Dairine swallow hard, and Nita raised her eyebrows at him, while Sker’ret clenched its front four or six legs together, and Filif held very still, and Roshaun looked down at the table again, as if afraid what might show in his eyes if anyone saw them.

And then suddenly, Tom smiled. It wasn’t an angry smile, though it was fierce, and it had a surprising edge of amusement to it. “Now, after all that,” he said, “believe it or not, we have some good news for you. For the duration—for as long as there is a duration—as far as wizardry goes, the lid is off. Any wizardry you can build to fight what’s happening, any wizardry you can figure out how to fuel, is fair game. Normally we all limit our workings carefully to keep them from damaging the universe, or the beings who share it with us. But now the system itself is on the chopping block, along with everything else. If we don’t save that…” He shook his head. “Then not just wizardry, but the Life we’re sworn to protect, is at an end.”

Kit was immersed in a strange combination of shock and excitement, but at the same time practical questions nagged at him. “When you said we were going to be running things on the Earth,” he said, “you didn’t mean just us… did you?”

Tom’s grin became less fierce. “No,” he said, “we didn’t. Forgive us for making absolutely sure we had your attention when we started.”

“Obviously there are a lot of other wizards on the planet who’ll be of use in this crisis,” Carl said. “Not to mention a whole lot of wizards elsewhere in our galaxy. Seniors here and just about everywhere else have been selecting out younger wizards in their catchment areas who’ve shown promise, or have produced good results in the past. You fall into those categories. We’ve been organizing two main intervention groups—those who’ll be staying here, managing the usual problems that come up at home, and those who’ll be going off-planet to look for ways to stop the dark-matter incursion. Shortly we’ll be putting you in touch with the groups you’ll be assigned to. In the meantime, start researching on what we’ve been up to—it’ll all be in your manuals. Anybody you feel will help you handle what’s going on, get in touch with them pronto. But you’ve also got some logistical problems to deal with.”

Kit noticed Dairine beginning to squirm a little in her seat. Uh-huh, he thought. Bet I know what that’s about.

“First of all,” Tom said to Dairine, “you’ve made the best of being ‘grounded’ inside the solar system for the last little while, so—assuming you’ve learned your lesson—the Powers That Be have cleared us to unground you.” Dairine stopped squirming, and started to grin. “But don’t you assume that this automatically means you’re going to be sent off-planet. The team assignments haven’t been thrashed out yet, and you may be of more use here.”

Dairine sat still and assumed an expression that Kit had long since come to recognize as an attempt to look “serious” and “good.” As usual, he had trouble taking it seriously.

“Anyway,” Tom said, “whichever way your team assignments go, you’re all either going to have to be on call at a moment’s notice to deal with things here, or you’re going to have to be away for some time.” He glanced from Dairine to Kit to Nita. “Normally, in an emergency, we’d help you deal with your absence from school and ‘real life’ by issuing you with timeslide wizardries, so that you could spend as much time away as you needed to and come back at the same time you left. But this situation’s not normal. Local implementations of wizardry may suffer early on … and if a timeslide fails, you could wind up marooned in the wrong time period, with no way home. So you’re going to have to find other ways to handle your absence. Any way that we can help, let us know as soon as you have a plan.”

Nita just nodded.

“Uh,” Kit said, “right.” I can see it all now, he thought. I go to my mama and pop and say, Hey, I need to take some more time off school. Yeah? How much? Oh, just enough to save the universe. Might be a few weeks. But no more than a few months, because everything that exists may be destroyed by then…