The man holding that kernel nodded, first of all, to Esemeli. “I thought you’d turn up here eventually,” he said.
It smiled and bowed to him. “You and I,” Esemeli said, “have unfinished business to transact.”
“So we do,” the man said. Then he looked over at Nita and Kit.
“Druvah,” Kit said.
The Alaalid bowed a little to Kit, and then to Nita.
“Cousins, well met on the journey,” he said. “You’re very welcome to the heart of things.”
“Thank you,” Kit said.
“Yes,” Nita said, “thank you. But I have a question…
“Ask,” Druvah said.
“When we’re finished talking to you…how do we get out of here?”
“No one does that,” Druvah said, “until we change the world.”
And Esemeli smiled—
Dairine, Roshaun, Sker’ret, and Filif were standing in position in blazing light, perhaps two thousand miles above the Sun’s photosphere, while the invisible corona lashed space with superheated plasma above their heads.
The wizardry was protecting them from the heat and more than ninety-nine percent of the visible light that boiled out of the Sun’s nuclear furnace to express itself in the photosphere’s glare. That outermost layer of the Sun’s actual body was no more than an eggshell’s thickness compared to the vast bulk of the star beneath it, but it boiled and roiled with golden fire. It was beautiful, but instantly deadly to anyone not protected as they all were. Even so, none of them intended to linger a moment longer than necessary. But the beauty was compelling.
“Look at it,” Filif said, gazing into that furious brilliance with all his berries,
which caught it and glinted red as blood. “So magnificent, so dangerous—”
Dairine had to smile just slightly at the poet living inside the bush who liked baseball caps. Her own impression was more prosaic. “It looks like oatmeal,” she said. And so it did, if oatmeal boiled at seven thousand degrees Celsius and every grain of it was a capsule full of burning liquid helium eight hundred miles across. The motion was the same, though—new grains bubbled up every second, persisting in the violent roiling pressure for maybe twenty minutes, and then were pushed away to be swallowed into the depths. They rumbled, and the sound was real; sonic booms from them rippled incessantly across the surface of the Sun.
“Where’s the tachocline?” Roshaun said.
“Two-hundred-eighteen thousand five hundred kilometers through two-hundred-twenty-one thousand six hundred,” Sker’ret said. “It’s fluctuating, though.”
“Which way?”
“Up.”
Roshaun looked uncertain. “We could wait for it to stabilize,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No point in that. I’m going to adjust the wizardry to take us in, and hold steady at two-twenty-two. Everyone, check my numbers.”
They all watched as Roshaun brought out his version of the manual, a little tangle of light like a miniature sun itself, and read from it a precise string of words and numbers in the Speech. Inside the wizardry, the “depth” constant changed to reflect the shift. Everyone looked at the numbers.
“Did you all check me?”
Dairine read the numbers three times. “You’ve got it,” she said.
“Check,” Sker’ret said.
“And I check you, too,” said Filif, trembling.
“Then let’s go—”
They vanished again—this time into the inferno.
In the heart of hearts of Alaalu, Nita and Kit stood looking at the planet’s oldest surviving wizard—if his present state—half myth, half spirit—could be described as “surviving”—as he said, “We’ve been waiting for you here for a while.”
“Not too long, I hope,” Kit said.
Druvah’s smile was reassuringly ironic.
“Long enough,” he said. “But I don’t mind.” He bowed to Esemeli, and It looked at him and eyed him with an expression of reserved disdain.
“You did a good job hiding your kernel,” Nita said.
“It seemed necessary,” Druvah said. “Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to keep it in an ambivalent state: not quite in the real world, in Time; not all the way into the deeper world, out of Time; but oscillating between them, a million times every moment, so that its location was always more a possibility than a definite thing.”
“Uncertainty,” Nita said to Kit. “The way you get it in atomic structure, with the electrons more or less certain to be in a given area, but never really just in one spot…”
“That quality of matter I borrowed for this wizardry, yes,” Druvah said. “And for myself as well, so that I could keep an eye on what our destiny was bound to.” He looked at Nita and Kit. “But where is the last wizard?”
They looked at each other.
“Well,” Nita said.
“Unfortunately,” Esemeli said, “she will not be coming.”
Druvah looked at her in a shock so stately, it resembled composure.
“The strangers on whom you pinned all your hopes,” Esemeli said, “unfortunately have given your wizard the fright of her life, by telling her the truth. A choice irony. She’s seen what the Telling showed her of their world and wants nothing to do with it, or them. Or, by extension, you, Druvah. She even made herself unavailable enough to them this morning that they couldn’t be warned in time about what they were so eager to do.”
Esemeli turned Its attention to Nita and Kit and smiled at them sweetly…a little too sweetly. “You, at least,” the Lone Power said to Nita, “will recognize the source of the Whispering you’ve heard in the nights. This is the Whispering’s core, the place into which the souls of the Alaalid die, when they die into the world. Here, by virtue of the Choice the Alaalids made, everything is preserved forever as it was when it arrived. Think of it as a sketchy little version of Timeheart.” The furious, hating twist It put on the word gave Nita an abrupt shiver. “Too sketchy, though. And also by virtue of that Choice, nothing that comes here ever leaves here, whether it comes of its own free will or not.”
Esemeli directed the full force of that infuriating smile on Nita. “You should have asked fewer questions about how soon you could get where you were going,” the Lone One said, “and more about whether you could get out afterward. But most to the point, you forgot the line in the Binding Oath about not allowing you to err by inaction.”
Nita felt all the blood run straight down out of her face, leaving her staggered and shivering.
She and Kit looked over at Druvah.
The most powerful of the ancient Alaalid wizards nodded regretfully. “What It says is true,” Druvah said. “I have no power to change it. And the one who has that power has not come with you, as I had hoped she would.” His voice was filled with regret, and Nita looked over at Kit, her mouth suddenly going dry with fear. “Indeed, that was my only hope. But the future has not turned out the way I thought it would. It seems my people must remain as they are. And here we must all stay, until the day after forever…”
The Lone One’s laughter began to echo in that bright place, filling it, and drowning out all other sound, even the sound of the Whispering
The wizardry brought Dairine, Roshaun, Filif, and Sker’ret out in the midst of a hurricane of fire.
Not exactly in the middle of it, Dairine thought, trying desperately to keep hold of her nerves, for the status readouts hanging in front of her own part of the wizardry told her exactly what was going on out there, and it terrified her. It was one
thing, as she’d once done, to sink a skinny little spatial slide into this nuclear fury and pull out a pencil-sized stream of molten mass. When she’d done that, she’d been dealing with a star’s core, and the core was a placid pool on a windless night compared to the place where they now found themselves. By definition, the tachocline was turbulent. Its name meant “the place where the speed changes,” and it was where the more placid motion but more terrible temperatures of the radiative zone below met the boiling madness of the convective zone above. The tachocline slid between the two zones like ball bearings rubbed between two hands, in wide belts and roiling spots like the atmosphere of Jupiter, but at wind speeds that made Jupiter’s seem tame. “Wind,” though, seemed a pitiful word for the insensate power that was raging around them in wildly varying directions. The solar medium was no denser than water here—but even water becomes a deadly weapon when it’s blasting past you at twenty times the speed of sound, and at two million degrees.