When the page-riffling stopped, Tom ran his finger down one column of the print on the right-hand page. “Okay,” he said, “here we go.” He began to speak, very quietly and conversationally, in the Speech. As Kit watched, the manual and its pages seemed to spread out more and more widely across the table—or maybe it was the table underneath it shrinking. But, no, that couldn’t be true; Kit was leaning with his forearms on the table, and it wasn’t moving, and neither was he.
Nonetheless, the room darkened, the yellow-flowered wallpaper fading down and out as if someone had turned off the day. The pages of the book darkened; the table darkened, too, and kept on spreading out into the darkness, somehow seeming to avoid everyone who was sitting around it. Farther and farther that flat darkness spread, though Kit and Nita and Dairine and Roshaun and Filif and Sker’ret were all still illuminated, as if by an overhead light that nobody could see.
Across the table from them, illuminated in the same way, Tom leaned back in his chair, his arms folded, his gaze cast down as he watched the ever-spreading pages of the book. There on the surface of the page, as it grew, Kit could see the previously prepared spell diagram that Tom had been working from—a blue-glowing, densely interwritten circle of characters in the Speech, the outer circle containing the basic parameters of the spell, knotted with the wizard’s knot, and the inside of the circle containing the variables.
As they sat there, the outer circle of the spell rotated up around them out of the horizontal, leaving a hemisphere of incandescent blue filigree overhead, in which various characters of the Speech sparked and glittered as the wizardry worked. For a few moments, as everything got more and more silent except Tom’s voice speaking in the Speech, they seemed to be sitting inside an elaborate blue-burning globe, a glowing wire frame. Then, without warning, the globe expanded outward in all directions, as if heading for infinity.
Where it passed, first stars flared into being, and then galaxies. Within a few breaths’ time, the kitchen table was at the heart of a viewpoint on the Local Group, the thirty-odd galaxies closest to Earth’s Milky Way spiral, which Tom had placed at the center of the view for reference purposes. Close by hovered the ragged irregular patches of starfire that were the Greater and Lesser Magellanic clouds; a little farther off, the great golden-tinged spiral of the Andromeda galaxy hung in its majesty, with the other associated galaxies scattered in various directions around it and the Milky Way. The imaging wizardry’s blue sphere shot out past the Local Group, sowing more and more galaxies and groups of galaxies in its wake, until it was as if the eight wizards—and the dining room table—were floating free in a near-infinite volume of space.
“So here’s the neighborhood,” Tom said. As he spoke, the utter blackness between the galaxies paled to a sky blue, and the light of the stars paled as well. “I’m lightening up the black of space a little, so you can see where our part of the trouble first started—”
He pointed off to one side. Faintly, in the depths of the space between the Andromeda galaxy and its neighbor, the smaller loosely coiled spiral in Triangulum, a dim patch of darkness started to grow in the blue. At first Kit wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but it became more and more distinct.
“We first spotted that dark patch about three years ago,” Tom said. “Back then it seemed as if it was just an anomaly, a dark-matter aggregate that was in the process of popping out and would stabilize after a while. Space is always springing little ‘surprises’ or accidents in interstellar structure that seal themselves up over time. Intervening too soon, or too energetically, can make them worse.”
“Like when you keep picking at something,” Kit said, “and it doesn’t heal.”
Carl chuckled.
“Something like that,” Tom said. “At any rate, the wizards over in Andromeda kept an eye on it. The dark-matter area grew, but not much, and not quickly. There came a point where it seemed to have stopped. But then another one appeared…”
They saw it fade in, very gradually, on the opposite side of the Local Group, over by the small irregular galaxy known on Earth as GR8. “And after that, the dark-matter aggregates started appearing more quickly,” Tom said. “In rapid succession, over the past couple of years, concentrations of dark matter appeared near 30 Doradus and M32.”
The dark splotches were spreading fast, popping up seemingly randomly in every direction. “It’s getting closer,” Nita said. “There’s one right by the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That’s really close; just next door, almost.”
Kit didn’t know the names or locations of the galaxies as well as Nita did: the fine details of astronomy were her department. But right now what troubled him most was the rate at which the darkness seemed to be spreading. “Did you just speed up the simulation?” he said to Tom.
Tom shook his head. “No, the spread began accelerating last year,” he said. “That was when the Powers That Be first asked wizards to start doing local interventions.” He let out a breath. “The early wizardries, which were large-group workings like the one we just came back from, seemed at first to work. The aggregates of dark matter froze, even began to retreat in a few cases. As you see here—”
The assembled wizards watched the twilight-colored virtual space between galaxies and groups of galaxies continue to undergo a bizarre and splotchy nightfall. After a few moments, the darkness grew no darker, but there was still too much of it. And to Kit, the galaxies burning in the simulation-wizardry began to look small and threatened.
“That’s how the situation stood until a few days ago,” Tom said. “That spot over there”—he pointed at one side of the simulation, and the view of that area leaped closer—”that’s where Carl and I were last week. Two thousand Seniors and Planetary-Supervisory Wizards from all over our own galaxy, along with groups from Andromeda, the Sagittarius and Canis Major Dwarfs—we went there to reverse the effect in that one spot. We defined a local control structure, a temporary ‘kernel’ for that part of space, and operated on it to force the dark matter back out of our space.”
“And the intervention did not work,” Roshaun said softly.
“No,” Tom said. “Instead, this happened.”
The darkness began to spread again—and this time, much faster.
“It was as if someone was waiting to see whether we’d be able to pull it off,” Carl said. “When it was plain that we couldn’t, the expansion took off again at twice the speed. And this is what the projected result looks like.”
Kit looked up into what was left of the blue of intergalactic space as the simulation ran. In a frighteningly short time, the blue was all gone. Then, the blackness began to intrude among the stars of the galaxies themselves. Their stars pushed apart; the galaxies started to lose shape.
“But how can it be happening so fast?” Kit said. “That has to be a lot faster than the speed of light. Matter can’t go that fast in space.”
Nita was shaking her head. “But space can,” she said. “Sit an ant on a balloon and blow up the balloon really fast, and the ant winds up moving a lot faster than it could ever move by itself. If something’s stretching space out of its usual shape, then everything inside space—matter and light and gravity and time—gets distorted, too.”
“And that’s where the real trouble starts,” Carl said. “Physical law is fairly robust, but wizardry is more delicate and subtle. The way this expansion undermines what we do is very simple … very nasty.”
“When you do a spell,” Tom said, “you have to accurately describe what you’re working on in the Speech, or you risk destroying it. And to accurately describe anything, you have to know, and describe, not only what it is, but where it is. Now, your manual normally helps you factor in the adjustments you need for the way things in your location are moving: your planet’s rotation, its orbit around the Sun, and so on. But if all of a sudden, because of this expansion, things are moving unpredictably in directions or speeds they shouldn’t be—”