Twenty-four minutes, Bobo said.
Nita swallowed and headed directly for Aurilelde. “If you’re trying to get at me that way,” Nita said to her, “you’re going to have to get a lot more personal.”
That was when the blow hit Nita and slammed her tumbling up toward space. “Think so?” Aurilelde said. “Then we’ll just give you your wish.”
Around Nita, now choking in the vacuum, suddenly freezing, the pitiless darkness closed in…
***
In the darkness Khretef’s voice was saying, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. When they’re done, when Aurilelde’s won, we’ll be one forever. Why should this be so bad?” Khretef was almost pleading. “We were so alike, anyway, almost the same…”
Standing there by himself in the dark, holding off its ever-increasing pressure, Kit shook his head. “We have things in common, sure!” he said. “We’re alive! And you and me, we’re in the service of Life: you took the Oath! We’re on the same side! So why are you trying to rub me out? Wizards don’t destroy things without good reason! Wizards keep things going, they fix what’s broken, they don’t throw other living beings out just because they’re in the way!”
“But Aurilelde says—”
“Aurilelde’s not a wizard, Khretef! She’s a seer, yeah, but even seers don’t always see straight. Especially if they’re scared! She’s scared for you, and she’s letting that warp the way she sees what has to happen. You can’t just let her pictures of how the world ought to be erase yours. It’s as bad as what she’s told you that you’ve got to do to me!”
“That’s wrong,” Khretef said. “That has to be wrong. You don’t understand—”
Once again that uncertainty made Kit sure he was right. “She got it backwards, buddy!” Kit said. “She foresaw us, me and Nita, and she saw that we were somehow the answer to Mars’s problem. No news there: every wizard’s the answer to some problem of the universe’s! But she also saw that everything was going to have to change for you guys in some big weird way, and that scared her. She started concentrating on the parts of the vision she could bear to look at, and screened out the rest. She saw she needed a wizard’s power to bring Earth’s wizards into the picture. She saw herself at the center of it, protecting her dad and her people, even protecting you. So you gave her access to your power. And now you just feel like an idiot because you can’t take it back without a fight, and fighting her’s the last thing you want to do!”
The silence in the darkness was anguished.
Finally the voice spoke again, and this time it was far less Kit’s, far more Khretef’s. “She was so sure,” he said. “Even when I started becoming uncomfortable about letting her share my own power…” Kit could feel Khretef’s shame at that remembered discomfort: how could he deny any part of himself to the love of his life? “And then she said, ‘The other’s coming: give me his power if you can’t give me yours! It won’t matter; he’s just another you. And think what it will mean. No more fighting. The end of the other side’s threats, at last and forever—’”
“The old story,” Kit said. “And not Aurilelde’s voice, either. You know who wrote that dialogue! You didn’t invent war: the Lone Power did! One of its favorite tools—because war’s the easy way out of conflict. And not having wars, having enough compassion and smarts to stay out of them, is real hard work! Getting into the other guy’s mindset is real tough to do in the first place, and it’s hard to stay there. Lots easier to decide that the other guy’s so different from you that there’s no hope for him. That he’s going to hate you forever, and for the sake of your peace of mind he’s better off dead.”
The image of that dark splotch on the Korean peninsula, where the light suddenly stopped, was flaring at the back of Kit’s mind: and Khretef saw it, too, laid out before them in the darkness as Kit had seen it while sitting on his Earthwatching rock on the Moon. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, Khretef! Break the pattern and poke the Lone One in the eye!”
There was a long silence. “They’ll say I’m a traitor to both sides,” Khretef whispered. “Again! And I’ll be betraying Aurilelde, too—”
“Brother, you’ve got to do something!” Kit said. “You can’t just sit here and let this go on! It’s not just your world, and your people—all of them, the Eilitt and the Shamaska. It’s Earth, too, billions of people whose lives are going to get completely screwed up because of what’s happening here if it’s not stopped! You’re a wizard. You know how it has to go! You can love Aurilelde all you like, but if you don’t act now, the Lone Power’s just going to sit there laughing at how you gave It just what It wanted while you were sure you were doing the only thing you could.”
Another long and desperate silence. “What do I do?” Khretef said finally.
“Let me go!” Kit said. “I’ll do what I can for you and Aurilelde, I promise, but right now we’ve got two whole worlds to worry about. Let me out of here!”
The silence continued. Then the pressure against which Kit had been straining started to let up. From deep inside the darkness, Kit felt a shift in the power underlying the place. The feeling started slowly transmuting into a weird stretching, as if something was fastened to Kit’s skin and his bones, pulling him painfully out of shape. Kit set his teeth, tried to deal with the pain as it worsened, became intolerable—
It stopped.
It’s not working, Khretef said silently, as if inside Kit’s head again. It’s too late. For both of us…
***
Nita tried to blink, couldn’t. She gasped for air, shivering with the frost that had formed on her skin in just a few seconds of airless darkness. Bobo?
She hit you with a chunk of hardened atmosphere, the peridexis said. I was just able to keep your shields in force at minimum, because you weren’t entirely unconscious. You got lucky. Stay conscious, or I can’t be of any use to you!
Nita brushed away ice, blinked until her eyes worked again, and turned to face Aurilelde, who was hanging there in the darkness and laughing. “You see?” she said. “You have no idea what I can do. With the kernel, and the power of a wizard whose will is in abeyance, I can do things you can’t imagine!”
Nita was starting to get really steamed now. “What, hitting somebody with a brick? That’s unimaginable? Heaven forbid I should get really creative with you, then. Let’s keep it simple.” Because all that bluffing down there aside, I really don’t want to run the risk of killing you and maybe screwing up the kernel forever!
She reached her hands out into the space around her. Dust, she thought. The space around the planet was full of it. Nita called it to her, whispering in the Speech. Dust, come help your mother-world, because if this space case has her way, there won’t be a solid place for you to fall back on: you’ll be left floating out around here by yourself forever in the dark till Jupiter eats you or you fall into the Sun! Come lend me a hand here, get solid, get real—
Seconds later Nita was almost obscured by a cloud of it. Aurilelde laughed at her. “You think you can hide that way?” she cried, and came at Nita. “Watch this—”
“By all means,” Nita said, turning the spell loose, and swept one hand down at Aurilelde. The dust followed, clumping together, solidifying, and striking Aurilelde hard in the chest. The impact of the blow sent her plummeting toward the planet as if a giant hand had swatted her there.
Nita dived after her, intent on the kernel. Have to work out how to do this. Don’t want to hurt her, just have to get that kernel out of her! Got them out of walls and floors and planetary cores before: but those weren’t alive. How do I do this without—