Young Wizards: Lifeboats
Diane Duane
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1517733502
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When the renowned saurian Species Archivist to the Powers that Be summons young wizard Kit Rodriguez to participate in an urgent off-planet intervention intended to save many millions of lives, Kit’s hardly going to say "no."
He soon discovers that not only he, but his wizardly partner Nita Callahan and her sister Dairine, his friend Ronan Nolan, and tens of thousands of other wizards from Earth have also been drafted in to intervene on the distant world called Tevaral. There the planet’s single huge moon Thesba has become tectonically unstable and will very soon break up, its massive fragments raining down onto the surface of Tevaral and completely destroying it. The wizards’ mission: to extract Tevaral’s hominid population and "raft" them off-planet to new homeworlds before the apocalyptic disaster begins.
There’s only one problem: millions of the people of Tevaral don’t want to go.
Kit, Nita and their thousands of fellow Earth wizards must now race against time to find a way to save the Tevaralti despite their near-symbiotic relationship with their beloved world and its unique life forms. As doomsday inexorably draws nearer, hope is fading fast, and it seems like it’s going to take a miracle to keep the people of Tevaral from being wiped out. True, wizardry is all about miracles. But will one turn up in time?...
***
Young Wizards: Lifeboats is a 90,000+ word canonical work in the Young Wizards universe, and is set in February 2011, shortly after the events of the two preceding YW novellas Not On My Patch and How Lovely Are Thy Branches. These three works together constitute a "transitional trilogy" following the events of A Wizard of Mars and preceding the events of the forthcoming Games Wizards Play.
support waiting for them on the far side, on their new homeworlds. Just help them make it through. That’s the whole of your job in this intervention: keep your gate running, get them through. When we’ve gotten as many people off the planet as will go, our work will be done. If the Powers are kind, it will be everybody, all the Tevaralti; that’s what we’re striving for. But until we find the key to that result—the reason behind the resistance of those who won’t leave—our job is to get the ones out
effect was somewhat ruined by Tom casually turning toward her and walking backwards for a bit as they all made their way toward the 500 hexes. Dairine rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Not much more to tell, anyway. All the Temal species realized that a really great way to use the technology would be to remove whole planetary populations from endangered venues, where before you’d have had no choice but to do potentially world-saving interventions with the whole population stuck on site. And
aliens who didn’t cover up at all, and aliens who came down somewhere between the two extremes. The Tevaralti seemed to come down on the “clothing optional” side of the discussion. Some of them were wearing various kinds of harness that might or might not have something like fabric or leather draped from this or that part of it (apparently never the same part, as far as Kit could tell, so this was no reliable hint as to what parts of themselves they might consider appropriate to keep covered.
boundary, more or less defined by a line of long low tents and the cubical structures that Kit’s nose now identified as the Tevaralti version of portable toilets—extremely advanced, yes, but not quite perfect at disguising their purpose or their contents. And then the wind shifted again, and the sibik grabbed Kit even tighter, almost throttling him with a tentacle that had been left around his neck, and shouted “Yes!” Kit tried to ease the tentacle’s grip slightly as they followed the sibik’s
too much or too little. Flowers? For someone whose dad’s a florist? Maybe not. Jewelry? That could wind up loaded with dangerous symbolism that Kit didn’t care to get tangled up in. Hardware? Yeah, right, buy that for someone who can go to the Crossings and get whatever gadget she wants, from this planet or not, discounted a hundred percent… Kit slapped the manual shut and stuck it on the windowsill, scowling. Maybe something really simple would be best. Something personal. Or homemade. Yeah,