— and plain pale daylight came down around them, heavy as a collapsed tent. Gravity yanked at them. Kit fell over sideways and lay there panting on the ground like someone who's run a race. Nita sagged, covered her face, bent over double right down to the ground, struggling for breath.
Eventually she began to recover, but she put off moving or opening her eyes. The book had warned that spelling had its prices, and one of them was the physical exhaustion that goes along with any large, mostly mental work of creation. Nita felt as if she had just been through about a hundred English tests with essay questions, one after another. "Kit?" she said, worried by his silence.
"Nnngggg," Kit said, and rolled over into a sort of crouch, holding his head in his hands. "Ooooh. Turn off the Sun."
"It's not that bad," Nita said, opening her eyes. Then she winced and shut them in a hurry. It was.
"How long've we been here?" Kit muttered. "The Sun shouldn't be showing here yet." "It's—" Nita said, opening her eyes again to check her watch and being distracted by a bright light to her right that was entirely too low to be the Sun, and squinting at it—and then forgetting what she had started to say.
Hanging in midair about three feet away from her, inside the circle, was a spark of eye- searing white fire. It looked no bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion to its size, and was giving off light about as bright as that of a two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in midair, up and down, looking like a will-o'-the-wisp plugged into too powerful a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open and stared.
The bright point dimmed slightly, appeared to describe a small tight circle so that it could take in Kit, the drawn circle, trees and leaves and sky; then it came to rest again, staring back at Nita. Though she couldn't catch what Kit was feeling, now that the spell was over, she could feel the light's emotions quite clearly — amazement, growing swiftly into unbelieving pleasure. Sud-denly it blazed up white-hot again.
(Dear Artificer,) it said in bemused delight, {I've blown my quanta and gone to the Good Place!)
Nita sat there in silence for a moment, thinking a great many things at once. Uhh. … she thought. And, So I wanted to be a wizard, huh? Serves you right. Something falls into my world and thinks it's gone to Heaven. Boy, ls >t gonna get a shock. And, What in the world is it, anyway?
'Kit," Nita said. "Excuse me a moment," she added, nodding with abrupt courtesy at the light source. "Kit." She turned slightly and reached down to shake him by the shoulder. "Kit. C'mon, get up. We have company." (Mmrnp?" Kit said, scrubbing at his eyes and starting to straighten up. Oh, no, the binding didn't blow, did it?"
Nope. It's the extra power you called in. I think it came back with us."
"Well, it—oh," Kit said, as he finally managed to focus on the sedately hovering brightness, "Oh. It's—uh… ."
"Right," Nita said. "It says," she added, "that it's blown its quanta. Is that dangerous?" she asked the light.
(Dangerous?) It laughed inside, a crackling sound like an overstimulated Geiger counter. (Artificer, child, it means I'm dead.) "Child" wasn't precisely the concept it used; Nita got a fleeting impression of a huge volume of dust and gas contracting gradually toward a common center, slow, confused, and nebulous. She wasn't flattered.
"Maybe you won't like hearing this," Nita said, "but I'm not sure this is the Good Place. It doesn't seem that way to us, anyhow."
The light drew a figure-eight in the air, a shrug. (It looks that way to mej it said. (Look how orderly everything is! And how much life there is in just one place! Where I come from, even a spore's worth of life is scarcer than atoms in a comet's tail.) "Excuse me," Kit said, "but what are you?"
It said something Nita could make little sense of. The concept she got looked like page after page of mathematical equations. Kit raised his eye-brows. "It uses the Speech too," he commented as he listened. "So what is it?"
Kit looked confused. "Its name says that it came from way out in space somewhere, and it has a mass equal to — to five or six blue-white giant stars and a few thousand-odd planets, and it emits all up and down the matter-energy spectrum, all kinds of light and radiation and even some subatomic particles." He shrugged. "You have any idea what that is?"
Nita stared at the light in growing disbelief. "Where's all your mass?" she said. "If you have that much, the gravity should have crushed us up against you the minute you showed up." (Elsewhere,) the light said offhandedly. (I have a singularity-class temporospatial claudication.) "A warp," Nita whispered. "A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?" It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?)
"Do I look like a cloud of gas?" Nita snapped back, and then sighed — her mouth was getting the better of her again. "I'm sorry. That's just what we call your kind of, uh, creature. Because you act like a hole in the Universe that light and radiation come through, I know you're not, really. But, Kit,' she said, turning, "where's my pen? And where's the power you were after? Didn't the spell work?"
"Spells always work," Kit said. "That's what the book says. When you ask for something, you always get back something that'll help you solve your problem, or be the solution itself." He looked entirely confused. "I asked for that power aura for me, and your pen for you—that was all. If we got a white hole, it means he's the answer—" "If he's the answer," Nita said, bemused, "I'm not sure I understand the question."
(This is all fascinating,) the white hole said, (but I have to find a functional-Advisory nexus in a hurry. I found out that the Naming of Lights has gone missing, and I managed to find a paradimensional net with enough empty loci to get me to an Advisory in a hurry. But something seems to have gone wrong. Somehow I don't think you're Advisories.) "Uh, no," Kit said. "1 think we called you—"
(You called me?) the white hole said, regarding Kit with mixed reverence and amazement. (You're one of the Powers born of Life? Oh, I'm sorry I didn't recognize You—I know You can take any shape but somehow I'd always thought of You as being bigger. A quasar, or a mega-nova.) The white hole made a feeling of rueful amusement. (It's confusing being dead!) "Oh, brother," Kit said, "Look, I'm not—you're not—just not. We made a spell and we called you. I don't think you're dead."
(If you say so,) the white hole said, polite but doubtful. (You called me, though? Me personally? I don't think we've met before.)
"No, we haven't," Nita said. "But we were doing this spell, and we found something, but something found us too, and we wouldn't have been able to get back here unless we called in some extra power—so we did, and it was you, I guess. You're not mad, are you?" she asked timidly. The thought of what a live, intelligent white hole might be able to do if it got annoyed scared her badly.
(Mad? No. As I said, I was trying to get out of my own space to get the news to someone who could use it, and then all of a sudden there was a paranet with enough loci to handle all the dimensions I carry, so I grabbed rt.) The white hole made another small circle, looking around him curiously. (Maybe it did work. Are there Advisories in this—on this— What is this, anyway?}
Kit looked at Nita. "Huh?"
(This,) the white hole said, (all of this.) He made another circle. 'Oh! A planet," Nita said. "See, there's our star." She pointed, and the white hole rotated slightly to look. (Artificer within us,) he said, (maybe I have blown my quanta, after all. I always wanted to see a planet, but I never got around to it. Habit, I guess. on get used to sitting around emitting X-rays after a while, and you don't 'nk of doing anything else. You want to see some?) he asked suddenly. He a little insecure. , maybe you'd better not," Nita said. (How come? They're really pretty.)