“And if this succeeds,” Quelt said, “we’ll all be together, and go on into—”
She shook her head. “There aren’t words. I don’t think there can be. But every
one of you has looked up, or out, sometime, and thought, ‘There’s something
else that’s supposed to happen. What is it?’ This is it! This is the something else!
Let’s go!”
The roar died back, slowly, to a murmur again. There was no great cry of acclamation, no uproar of acceptance. Her people were, indeed, too afraid. But Nita could feel the change in the air, and glancing over at Kit, she knew that he could, too.
It’s happening, Nita thought in silent wonder. And, holidays aside, this is why the Powers That Be sent us here. Because even if they’d told Quelt Themselves, face-to-face, what needed to happen, she wouldn’t have believed Them. The proof had to come through someone she knew personally, someone she liked. Strangers just passing through, people with no agenda. Somebody she sat on the beach with and talked to about nothing important, at dawn.
Us…
Quelt waited until the silence fell. More and more strongly through it, strongly enough for even Ponch to feel it, so that he sat there wagging his tail, the silent acquiescence grew. It was another of those out-of-time moments that might have lasted an hour, or a day, or a month: In this otherworldly worldheart, there was no telling. But there came a time when the acceptance was complete, and when that happened, Quelt moved slowly to the center of it all, where Druvah stood, and held out her hands.
He gave her Alaalu’s kernel. She turned it over in her hands a few times, regarding it, and then looked up and around.
“We made a Choice once, as wizards, for our people,” Quelt said.
Druvah said, “We did.”
“And the Choice can be unmade,” Quelt said, “by all the living wizards of Alaalu, unanimously.”
Druvah said, “So the original structure of the Choice was built.”
“Then it’s time to unbuild it,” Quelt said. “I am all the living wizards of Alaalu. I say now to the Choice that was made, be unmade in this regard: that our people may go, not merely our own way, but the whole way, the way that lay in the One’s mind before we could perceive it clearly!”
The silence became complete.
Kit and Nita stood there waiting for whatever would happen. The Lone Power turned Its back on the proceedings, though It moved no farther.
It started to get brighter, in the world inside the world. The radiance from that dazzling and impossible sky began to build, thickening in the air around them the way a low cloud thickens into mist near the ground, but here that mist was radiance that washed out colors in light, starting to dissolve away the outlines and details of things as it grew. Nita glanced down at her hands, wondering if she should be nervous about the way they were beginning to refine themselves away into something that was more light than shape—
Ponch nosed Kit, and put the leash in his hand. We’d better get out of here!
“Seems like a real good idea to me!” Kit said. He grabbed Nita’s arm. Just before they took a step forward together, she glanced over and caught just a flash of eyes in her direction, as Quelt’s arms went around her mother and father, and she buried her face against her mother’s shoulder. But she was smiling. And that smile spread to Kuwilin’s face, slowly, and then to Demair’s, as the two of them looked up and the light indwelling in the world-kernel of Alaalu spread and spread outward from them, flowering into something long awaited, something long denied, blinding—
Nita stepped quickly forward with Kit and Ponch.
Ponch brought them out far above the planet, looking down from space. The shield-spell that Kit had inlaid into Ponch’s leash for times like this instantly took hold, protecting the three of them from the cold and the vacuum. There was air, too, which was important, but for the moment, Nita had forgotten to breathe.
Below them, the whole surface of the planet was coming alive with lightning strikes. From cloud to cloud, from cloud to earth, they crackled across the day side, the massive discharges clearly visible, and on the night side, the clouds flickered with them like electrified milk. Auroras whipped and crackled at the poles, even lashing up and out along the lines of the planet’s magnetic field, and all over the planet, Alaalu’s horizon burst out in spiky spurts of blue-jet and red-sprite lightning, and curving prominences of ion-fire.
“A little leftover Alaalid anger?” Kit said under his breath.
Nita nodded. “But I think not for long…”
Slowly, the atmospheric fury died away. The night sky went quiet first; on the day side, a few genuine lightning bolts, startled out of several great storm systems by the less natural discharges, let themselves loose for several minutes. Things went still.
Then, slowly, light began to grow here and there on the world’s surface. It was most obvious in the Cities, from which it seemed at first that white fireworks were rocketing upward. But the lights came from scattered islands, even from far out in Alaalu’s immense seas…and they were not fireworks. They leaped and curved through the lower atmosphere, yes, but then the lights found their way up and out, and once into space, shot free, like meteors in reverse—growing brighter and brighter as they pierced up and out of the atmosphere, shooting up and out of the planet’s gravity well, burning brighter still as they fired themselves up and outward into the eternal night.
Nita swallowed as the upward-streaking fires increased in number. It was the starfall she had awakened to, late their first night, but in reverse, the stars falling back up into the sky now; and like that other starfall, they fell upward more and more thickly every second, a shower of fire bursting off the planet in every possible direction, out into the unending starlight of space, getting lost in the blinding radiance of Alaalu’s sun, or persisting for an amazing time as they streaked out toward the system’s heliopause. For what might have been a very long time, or a very short one, Alaalu rained a new kind of life into the night. A billion and a half of them, Nita thought. She knew that for the moment they all had to be at least a little ways outside of Time; otherwise, seeing a billion and a half of anything go by would have taken forever. But this is the day after forever…
Slowly, the rain of fire began to taper off. Kit and Nita and Ponch stood there, watching the world go quiet again. “Well,” Nita said at last, “I guess that’s it.”
“Wait,” Kit said.
They waited. That stillness persisted for a little while longer—
And the planet erupted all over in one last blast of brilliance, with uncounted and uncountable streaks of soulfire piercing upward and out of the heart of the heart of the world, as those who had gone before and had been in the Whispering now erupted into a freedom that only one of them had ever anticipated. Nita and Kit both threw up a hand to shield their eyes as all the rest of the souls who had ever lived on Alaalu departed, in a storm of outward-streaking fire, for a far wider ambit. But at last all the new light died away, leaving them able to look down again at a blue world turning underneath them, a place both very old, and suddenly new.
Nita and Kit glanced at each other.
“Now what?” Kit said.
“I guess we go home early,” said Nita.
Ponch looked at them both reproachfully. Not without my stick!
Kit gave Ponch an amused look. “We did leave some of our stuff down there,” he said. “The worldgates and so on. We’d better go pack them up and bring them back with us.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Come on, Ponch.”
They vanished, making their way back to an empty world.
Dairine stared into the roiling fire, and at the empty spot in the wizardry across from her. We’ve got to get him out of there! she shouted at the others.
Filif and Sker’ret looked at her, stricken.