High Wizardry

Search and Retrieval

"We're dead," Nita mourned, sitting on the planetarium steps with her head in her hands. "Dead. My mother will kill me."

Kit, sitting beside her, looked more bemused than upset. "Do you know how much power it takes to open a gateway like that and leave it open? Usually it's all we can do to keep one open long enough to jump through it."

"Big deal! Grand Central gate and the World Trade Center portals are vopen all the time." Nita groaned again. "Mars!"

"Each of those gates took a hundred or so wizards working together to open, though." Kit leaned back on the steps. "She may be a brat, but boy, has she got firepower!"

"The youngest wizards always do," Nita said, sitting up again and picking up Kit's manual from beside her. "Lord, what a horrible thought."

"What? The gate she made? We can close it, but-"

"No. This. Look." She held out his manual. It was turned to one of the directory pages. The said:

That was Nita's usual directory listing, and normal enough. But above it, between her and CAHANE, Jak, whose listing was usually right above hers, there was something new.

"Oh, no," Kit said. "And look at that rating level."

Nita dropped the book beside her. "I don't get it. She didn't find a ual, how could she have-"

"She was in yours," Kit said.

"Yeah, but the most she could have done was take the Oath! She's smart but not smart enough to pull off a forty-million-mile transit without having the reference diagrams and the words for the spell in front of her! And the manuals can't be stolen; you know that. They just vanish if someone tries." Nita put her head down in her hands again. "My folks are gonna pitch a fit! We've got to find her!"

Kit breathed out, then stood up. "Come on," he said. "We'd better start doing things fast or we'll lose her. There's a phone over there. Call home and tell them we're running a little behind schedule. The planetarium's all locked up by now: so no one'll be around to notice if I walk through a couple of walls and close that gate down."

"But what if she tries to come back and finds it closed behind her?"

"Somehow I can't see that slowing her down much," Kit said. "And besides, maybe she's supposed to find it closed. She is on Ordeal."

Nita stood up too. "And we'd better call Tom and Carl. They'll want the details."

"Right. Go ahead; I'll take care of the gate."

Kit turned around, looked at the bricks of the planetarium's outer wall. He stepped around the corner of the doorway wall, out of sight of the street, and laid one hand on the bricks, muttering under his breath.

His hand sank into the wall as if into water. "There we go," he said, and the bricks rippled as he stepped through them and vanished.

Nita headed for the phone, feeling through her pockets for change. The thought of her sister running around the universe on Ordeal made her hair stand up on end. No one became a wizard without there being some one problem that their acquisition of power would solve. Nita understood from her studies that normally a wizard was allowed to get as old as possible before being offered the Oath: the Powers, her manual said, wanted every wizard who could to acquire the security and experience that a normal childhood provides. But sometimes, when problems of an unusual nature came up, the Powers would offer the Oath early-because the younger children, not knowing (or caring) what was impossible, had more wizardry available to them.

That kind of problem was likely to be a killer. Nita's Ordeal and Kit's had thrown them out of their universe into another one, a place implacably hostile to human beings, and run by the Power that, according to the manual, had invented death before time began-and therefore had been cast out of the other Powers' society. Every world had stories of that Lone Power, under many names. Nita didn't need the stories; she had met It face-to-face' now, and both times only luck-or the intervention of others-had saved her life. And Nita had been offered her wizardry relatively early, at thirteen: Kit even earlier, at twelve. The thought of what problem the Powers must need solved if They were willing to offer the Oath to someone years younger-and the thought of her little sister in the middle of it Nita found some quarters, went to a phone and punched in her number. What was she going to tell her mother? She couldn't lie to her: that decision, made at the beginning of the summer, had caused her to tell her folks that she was a wizard, and had produced one of the great family arguments of her life. Her mother and father still weren't pleased that their daughter might run off anywhere at a moment's notice, to places where they couldn't keep an eye on her and protect her. Nor did it matter that those places tended to be the sort where anyone but an experienced wizard would quickly get killed. That made it even worse. .

At the other end, the phone rang. Nita's throat seized up. She began clearing it frantically.

Someone answered. "Hello?"

It was Dairine.

Nita's throat unseized itself. "Are you all right? Where are you?" she blurted, and then began swearing inwardly at her own stupidity.

"I'm fine," Dairine said. "And I'm right here."

"How did you get back? Never mind that, how did you get out? And you left the gate open! Do you know what could have happened if some poor janitor went in that door without looking? It's sixty below this time of year on Mars-"

"Nita," Dairine said, "you're babbling. Just go home. I'll see you later." And she hung up.

"Why that rotten little-" Nita said, and hung up the phone so hard that people on the street corner turned to look at her. Embarrassed and more annoyed than ever, she turned and headed back to where Kit was sitting. "Babbling," she muttered. "That rotten, thoughtless, I'm gonna-"

She shut her mouth. Babbling? That didn't sound like Dairine. It was too simple an insult. And why "just go home" instead of "just come home"? There's something wrong.

She stopped in front of Kit, who looked up at her from his seat on the step and made no move to get up. He was sweating and slightly pale. "That gate *as fastened to Mars real tight," he said. "I thought half of Mariner Plain was going to come with it when I uprooted the forcefields. What's the matter w'th you?

You look awful."

"Something's wrong," Nita said. "Dairine's home."

"What's awful about that? Good riddance." Then he looked at her sharply. "Wait a minute. Home?

When she's on Ordeal?"

That hadn't even occurred to Nita. "She sounded weird," Nita said. "Kit it didn't sound like her."

"We were at home for our Ordeal-at least, at the beginning. ." She shook her head. "Something's wrong. Kit, let's go see Tom and Carl." He stood up, wobbling a little. "Sounds good. Grand Central?"

"Rockefeller Center gate's closer." "Let's go."

A Senior wizard usually reaches that position through the most strenuous kind of training and field experience. All wizards, as they lose the power of their childhood and adolescence, tend to specialize in one field of wizardry or another; but the kind of wizard who's Senior material refuses to specialize too far. They are the Renaissance people of sorcery, every one of them tried repeatedly against the Lone Power, in both open combat and the subtler strife of one Power-influenced human mind against another.

Seniors are almost never the white-bearded wizards of archetype. . mostly because of their constant combats with the Lone One, which tend to kill them young. They advise other wizards on assignment, do research for them, lend them assistance in the losing battle to slow down the heat-death of the universe.

Few worlds have more than thirty or forty Seniors. At this point in Kit's and Nita's practice, Earth had twenty-four: six scattered through Asia, one in Australia and one (for the whales) in the Atlantic Ocean; three in Europe, four in Africa, and nine in the Americas-five in Central and South America (one of whom handled the Antarctic) and four in the north. Of these, one lived in Santa Cruz, one lived in Oklahoma City, and the other two lived together several miles away, in Nassau County.

Their house in Nita's town was very like their neighbors' houses. perhaps a little bigger, but that wasn't odd, since Carl worked as chief of sales for the big CBS flagship TV station in New York, and Tom was a moderately well-known freelance writer of stories and movie scripts. They looked like perfectly average people-two tall, good-looking men, one with a mustache, one without; Carl a native New Yorker, Tom an unrepentant Californian. They had all the things their neighbors had-mortgages and phone bills and pets and occasional fights: they mowed the lawn and went to work like everybody else (at least Carl did: Tom worked at home). But their lawn had as few weeds as Nita's did these days, their pets understood and sometimes spoke English and numerous other languages, their phone didn't always have a human being on the other end when it rang, and as for their fights, the reasons for some of them would have made their neighbors' mouths drop open.

Their backyard, being surrounded by a high hedge and a wall all hung witn plants, was a safe place to appear out of nothing: though as usual there was nothing to be done about the small thundercrack of air suddenly displaced by two human bodies. When Nita's and Kit's ears stopped ringing, the first thing they heard was someone shouting, "All right, whatcha drop this time?" and an answering shout of "It wasn't me, are the dogs into something?" But they weren't: the two sheepdogs, Annie and Monty, came bounding out from around the corner of the house and leapt delightedly onto Kit and Nita, slurping any part of them not covered with clothes. A little behind them came Dudley the terrier, who contented himself with bouncing around them as if he were spring-loaded and barking at the top of his little lungs.

"Had dinner yet?" Carl called from the kitchen door, which, like the dining room doors, looked out on the backyard. "Annie! Monty! Down!"

"Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!" screamed another voice from the same direction: not surprising, since its source was sitting on Carl's shoulder. This was Machu Picchu the macaw, also known (to her annoyance) as "Peach": a splendid creature all scarlet and blue, with a three-foot tail, a foul temper, and a precognitive talent that could read the future for months ahead-if Peach felt like it. Wizards' pets tend to become strange with time, and Seniors' pets even stranger than usual; and Peach had been with them longer than any of the others. It showed.

"Come on in," called one last voice: Tom. Kit and Nita pushed Annie and Monty more or less back down to dog level, and made their way into the house through the dining room doors. It was a pleasant, open place, all the rooms running freely into one another, and full of handsome functional furniture: Tom's desk and computer sat in a comfortable corner of the living room. Kit pulled a chair away from the dining table and plopped down in it, still winded from his earlier wizardry. Nita sat down next to him. Carl leaned over the table and pushed a pair of bottles of Coke at them, sitting down and cracking a third one himself. Tom, with a glass of iced coffee, sat down too.

"Hot one today," Carl said at last, putting his Coke down. Picchu sidled down his arm from his shoulder and began to gnaw thoughtfully on the neck of the bottle.

"No kidding," Kit said.

"You look awful," said Tom. "What've you two been up to?"

For answer Nita opened Kit's manual to the directory and pushed it over to Tom and Carl's side of the table. Tom read it, whistled softly, and nudged the manual toward Carl. "I saw this coming," he said, "but not this soon. Your mom and dad aren't going to be happy. Where did she go?"

"Mars," Kit said.

"Home," Nita said.

"Better start at the beginning," said Carl.

When they came to the part about the worldgate, Carl got up to go for his supervisory manual, and Tom looked at Kit with concern. "Better get him an aspirin too," Tom called after Carl.

"I'm allergic to aspirin."

"A Tylenol, then. You're going to need it. How did you manage to disalign a patent gateway all by yourself?. . But wait a minute." Tom peered at Kit. "Are you taller than you were?"

"Two inches."

"That would explain it, then. It's a hormonal surge." Tom cleared his throat and looked at Nita. "You, too, huh?"

"Hormones? Yes. Unfortunately."

Tom raised his eyebrows. "Well. Your wizardry will be a little more accessible to you for a while than it has since you got started. Just be careful not to overextend yourself. . it's easy to overreach your strength just now."

Carl came back with his supervisory manual, a volume thick as a phone book, and started paging through it. Annie nosed Kit from one side: he looked down in surprise and took the bottle of Tylenol she was carrying in her mouth. "Hey, thanks."

"Lord," Carl said. "She did a tertiary gating, all by herself. Your body becomes part of the gateway forcefields," he said, looking up at Nita and Kit. "It's one of the fastest and most effective kinds of gating, but it takes a lot of power."

"I still don't get it," Nita said. "She doesn't have a manual!"

"Are you sure?" Carl said; and "Have you gotten a computer recently?" said Tom.

"Just this morning."

Tom and Carl looked at each other. "I thought only Advisory levels and above were supposed to get the software version of the manual just yet," Carl said.

"Maybe, but she couldn't have stolen one of those any more than she could have stolen one of the regular manuals. You're offered it… or you never see it."

Nita was puzzled. " 'Software version'?"

Tom gave her a wry look. "We've been beta-testing it," he said. "Sorry^ testing the 'beta' version of the software, the one that'll be released afte we're sure there are no bugs in it. You know the way you normally do spell: You draw your power diagrams and so forth as guides for the way you want the spell to work, but the actual instructions to the universe are spoken aloucf in the Speech?"

"Uh-huh."

"And it takes a fair amount of practice to learn to do the vector diagrams and so forth without errors, and a lot of time, sometimes, to learn to speal(the Speech properly. More time yet to learn to think in it.

Well…" Ton sat down again and began turning his empty glass around and around on the table. "Now that technology has proceeded far enough on this planet for computers to be fairly widespread, the Powers have been working with the Senior wizards to develop computer-supported wizards' manuals. The software draws the necessary diagrams internally, the way a calculator does addition, for example; you get the solution without seeing how it's worked out. The computer also synthesizes the Speech, though of course there are tutorials in the language as you go along."

"The project has both useful and dangerous sides," Carl said. "For one thing, there are good reasons why we use the Speech in spelling. It contains words that can accurately describe things and conditions that no Earthly language has words for. And if during a spell you give the computer instructions that're ambiguous in English, and it describes something inaccurately. . well." He looked grim. "But for the experienced wizard, who already knows the theory he's working with, and is expert in the Speech, it can be a real timesaver."

"A lifesaver, too, under special circumstances," Tom said, looking somber. "You two know how many children go missing in this country every year."

"Thousands."

"It's not all kidnappings and runaways," Tom said. "Some of those kids are out on their Ordeal. . and because they don't have time to become good with the Speech, they get in trouble with the Lone Power that they can't get out of. And they never come back." He moved uneasily in the chair. "Providing them with the wizard's software may save some of their lives. Meantime. ."

Carl turned over a or two in his manual, shaking his head. "Meantime, I want a look at Dairine's software; I need to see which version of it she got. And I want a word with her. If she lights out into the middle of nowhere on Ordeal without meaning the Oath she took, she's going to be in trouble up to her neck. . Anyway, your folks should know about all this. Easier if we tell them, I think. How 'bout it, partner?" He looked over at Tom.

"I was about to suggest it myself."

Nita sagged with relief.

"Good. Your folks busy this afternoon, Neets?"

"Just with the computer."

"Perfect." Carl put out his hand, and from the nearby kitchen wall the phone leapt into his hand. Or tried to: the phone cord brought it up short, and there it hung in the air, straining toward Carl like a dog at the end of a leash. "I thought you were going to put a longer cord on this thing," Carl said to Tom, pushing his chair back enough to get the phone up to his face, and hitting the autodialer in the handpiece. "This is ridiculous."

"The phone store was out of them again."

"Try that big hardware store down in Freeport, what's its name- Hi Harry. Carl Romeo. . Nothing much, I just heard from Nita that you I got the new computer. . Yeah, they stopped in on the way home. Yeah. What did you decide on?. . Oh, that's a sweet little machine. A lot of nice software for that." Carl listened for a few seconds to the soft squeak-1 ing of the phone, while Picchu left off chewing on Carl's Coke bottle and | began nibbling delicately on the phone cord.

Carl smacked her gently away, and his eyebrows went up as he listened. | "Okay. Fine. . Fine. See you in a bit. Bye now."

He hung up. "That was your mom in the background," he said to Nita, "insisting on feeding us again. I think she's decided the best thing to do with adult wizards is tame them with kindness and gourmet cuisine."

"Magic still makes her nervous," Nita said.

"Or we still make her nervous," Tom said, getting up to shut the doors.

"Well, yeah. Neither of them can quite get used to it, that you were their neighbors for all these years and they never suspected you were wizards. . "

"Being out in the open," Tom said, "causes even more problems than 'passing'… as you'll have noticed.

But the truth works best. The front door locked?" he said to Carl.

"Yup," said Carl. He looked down at his side in surprise: from the table, Picchu was calmly climbing beak over claw up the side of his polo shirt. "Bird-"

"I'm going," said Picchu, achieving Carl's shoulder with a look of calm satisfaction, and staring Carl right in the eye. "I'm needed."

Carl shrugged. It was difficult and time-consuming to start fights with a creature who could rip your ear off faster than you could remove her. "You do anything nasty on their rug," he said, "and it's macaw croquettes for lunch tomorrow, capeesh?"

Picchu, preening a wing feather back into place, declined to answer.

"Then let's motor," Tom said. They headed for the garage.

"Lord," Tom said, "who writes these manuals, anyway? This is better than most, but it still might as well be in Sanskrit. Harry, where's that cable?" Nita watched with barely suppressed amusement as Tom and her father dug among the manuals all over the floor, and Tom went headfirst under the desk. "Computer seems to be running, anyway," Carl said.

"Had to drag Dairine away from it before she blew it up," said Mr. Calla-han, peering under the desk to see what Tom was doing.

"Where is she, Daddy?" said Nita.

"In her room. You two must really have run her down for her to come home so early."

"Which train did she take?" Kit said.

"She didn't say. She looked a little tired when she got in… said she was going to go read or something.

Tom, is that plug really supposed to go in there? It looks too big."

"They always do. See, this little bit inside the casing is all that actually goes in. Mmmf. ."

Carl, standing beside Nita, reached around the back of the Apple and hit the reset button. The A> prompt that had been there vanished: the Apple logo came up again. It had no bite out of it.

Nita stared. "Uh huh," Carl said, and hit the CONTROL key and the letter C to boot up the system. The A> prompt came back. Then Carl typed a string of numbers and figures, too quickly for them to register for Nita as anything but a green blur. They disappeared, and a message appeared in the graceful Arabic-looking letters of the wizardly Speech.

USER LOG?

"Yes, please," Carl said. "Authorization seven niner three seven one comma five one eight."

"Password?"

Carl leaned near the console and whispered something.

"Confirmed," said the computer politely, and began spilling its guts in screenful after screenful of green.

"Pause," Carl said at one point. "Harry, I think you'd better have a look at this."

"What, did we plug it in wrong-"

"No, not that." Nita's father got up, brushing himself off, and looked at the screen. Then he froze. He had seen the Speech in Nita's manual once or twice, and knew the look of it.

"Carl," Nita's father said, beginning to look stern, "what is this?"

Carl looked as if he would rather not say anything. "Harry," he said, "it wouldn't be fair to make Nita tell you this. But you seem to have another wizard in the family."

"What!"

"Yes," Carl said, "that was my reaction too. Translation," he said to the computer.

"Translation of protected material requires double authorization by ranking Seniors and justification filed with Chief Senior for planet or plane," said the computer, sounding stubborn.

"What've you done to my machine!"

"The question," Tom said, getting up off the floor, "is more like, what has Dairine done to it? Sorry, Harry. This is a hell of a way for you to find out."

Nita watched her father take in a long breath. "Don't call her yet, Harry," said Tom. He laid a hand on the computer. "Confirmed authorization one zero zero three oblique zero two. We'll file the justification with Irina later Translate."

The screen's contents abruptly turned into English. Nita's father bent over a bit to read it. " 'Oath accepted-' "

"This Oath," Carl said. "Type a-colon-heartcode."

The computer cleared its screen and displayed one small block of text in green. Nita was still while her father read the Wizards' Oath. There was movement behind her: she looked up and saw her mother, with a peppermill clutched forgotten in one hand, looking over her father's shoulder. Her face looked odd, and it wasn't entirely the green light from the computer screen.

"Dairine took that?" her father said at last.

"So did we, Daddy," Nita said.

"Yes, but-" He sat down on the edge of the desk, staring at the screen. "Dairine isn't quite like you two…"

"Exactly. Harry, this is going to take a while. But first, you might call in Dairine. She did something careless this afternoon and I want to make sure she doesn't do it again."

Nita felt sorry for her father; he looked so pale. Her mother went to him. "What did she do?" she said.

"She went to Mars and left the door open," said Tom.

Nita's dad shut his eyes. "She went to Mars."

"Just like that. . " said her mother.

"Harry, Nita tells me she took you two to the Moon once, to prove a point. Imagine power like that. . used irresponsibly. I need to make sure that's not going to happen, or I'll have to put a lock on some of her power. And there are other problems. The power may be very necessary for something. . " Carl looked stern but unhappy. "Where is she, Harry?"

"Dairine," Nita's dad said, raising his voice.

"Yo," came Dairine's voice from upstairs, her all-purpose reply.

"Come on down here a minute."

"Do I have to? I'm reading."

"Now."

The ceiling creaked a little, the sound of Dairine moving around her room. "What have I done to deserve this?" said Nita's father to the immediate universe.

"Harry," Carl said glancing at the computer screen and away again, "this may come as a shock to you. ."

"Carl, I'm beyond shocking. I've walked on the Moon without a spacesuit and seen my eldest daughter turn into a whale. That my youngest should go to Mars on a whim. ."

"Well, as to what you've done to deserve it… you have a right to know the answer. The tendency for wizardry comes down to the kids through your side of the family."

That was a surprise to Nita, and as for her father, he looked stricken, and her mother looked at him with an expression that was faintly accusing. Carl said, "You're related to the first mayor of New York, aren't you?"

"Uh, yeah… he was-"

"-a wizard, and one of the best to grace this continent. One of the youngest Seniors in Earth's history, in fact. The talent in your line is considerable; too bad it missed you, but it does skip generations without warning. Was there something odd about one of your grandparents?"

"Why, my-" Nita's father swallowed and looked as if he was suddenly remembering something. "I saw my grandmother disappear once. I was about six. Later I always thought I'd imagined it. . " He swallowed again. "Well, that's the answer to why me. The next question is, why Dairine?"

"She's needed somewhere," said Carl. "The Powers value the status quo too highly to violate it without need. It's what we're defending, after all. Somewhere out there is a life-or-death problem to which only Dairine is the answer."

"We just need to make sure she knows it," said Tom, "and knows to be careful. There are forces out there that aren't friendly to wizards-" He broke off suddenly as he glanced over at the computer screen.

"Carl, you should see this."

They all looked at the screen. USER LOG, it said, and under the heading were listed a lot of numbers and what Nita vaguely recognized as program names. "Look at that," Tom said, pointing to one. "Those are the spells she did today, using the computer. Eighty-eight gigabytes of storage, all in one session, the latest one-at : hours. What utility uses that kind of memory?"

"That's what. . about ten of five?" Nita's mother said. "She wasn't even here then…"

The stairs creaked as Dairine came down them into the living room. She paused a moment, halfway, as well she might have done with all those eyes and all those expressions trained on her. . her father's bewildered annoyance, her mother's indignant surprise, Tom's and Carl's cool assessment, and Nita's and Kit's expectant looks. Dairine hesitantly walked the rest of the way down.

"I came back," she said abruptly.

Nita waited for more. Dairine said nothing.

Nita's parents exchanged glances, evidently having the same thought: that a Dairine who said so little wasn't normal. "Baby. ." her mother said, sounding uncertain, "you have some explaining to do."

But Carl stepped forward and said, "She may not be able to explain much of anything, Betty. Dairine's had a busy day with the computer. Isn't that so Dairine?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Dairine said.

"I think it's more like you can't," said Carl.

"Look at the user log, Harry," Tom said from behind Nita and Kit. "Eighty-eight gigs spent on one program. A copy program. And run, as you say, when she wasn't even here. There's only one answer to that."

Slowly, as if he were looking at a work of art, Carl walked around Dairine. She watched him nervously.

"Even with unlimited available memory and a computer running wizard's software," Carl said, "there's only so much fidelity a copy can achieve. Making hard copies of dumb machinery, even a computer itself, that's easy. Harry, look at the log: you'll see that this isn't the machine you bought. It's an exact copy of it.

Dairine made it."

Carl kept walking around Dairine. She didn't move, didn't speak. "Carl, come on," Nita's father said from behind her, "cut it out. You're scaring her."

"I think not," Carl said. "There's only so much you can do with eighty gigs, as I said. Especially when the original is a living thing. The copy's responses are limited. See, there's something that lives inside the hardware, inside the meat and nervous tissue, that can't be copied. Brain can be copied. But mind-not so well. And soul-not at all. Those are strictly one to a customer, at least on this planet."

The air was singing with tension. Nita glanced at Kit, and Kit nodded, for he knew as well as she did the feel of a spell in the working. Carl was using no words or gestures to assist in the spell, nothing but the slow certain pressure of his mind as he thought in the Speech. "She copied the computer and took it to the city with her," Carl said, "and got away when she could. And when she left Earth, she decided-I'd imagine-that she wanted some time to sightsee. But, of course, you would object to that. So she copied something else, to buy herself some time."

The spell built and built in power, and the air sang the note ears sing in silence, but much louder.

"Nothing not its own original can exist in this room," Carl said, "once I turn the spell loose. Harry, you're having trouble believing this, are you? You think I would treat your real daughter this way?"

Nita's father said nothing.

"Run," Carl said softly.

Dairine vanished. Air imploded into the place where she had been: manuals ruffled their pages in the sudden wind, papers flew up and slowly settled. Behind them, the Apple simply went away; its monitor fell two inches to the desk with a loud thump, its screen gone dark, and the hard-drive cable slithered off the desk like a stunned snake and fell in coils to the floor.

Nita's father put his face in his hands.

Her mother looked sharply at Tom and Carl. "I've known you two too long to think you were toying with us," she said as Carl sat down slowly on the sofa, looking a bit pale. "You said something a moment ago about forces that weren't friendly. ."

"Nita's told you some of what wizards are for," Tom said, looking at Carl in concern, then up again.

"Balance. Maintenance of the status quo; protecting life- There are forces that are ambivalent toward life.

One in particular. that held Itself aloof from creation, a long time ago, and when everyone else was done, created something none of the other forces had thought of: death. And the longest Death… the running-down of the Universe. The other Powers cast It out. . and they've been dealing with the problem, and the Lone Power, ever since."

"Entropy," Nita's mother said, looking thoughtful. "That's an old story."

"It's the only story," Tom said. "Every sentient species has it, or learns it." He looked over at Nita's father, who was recovering somewhat. "I'm not about to pass judgment on whether the Lone One's invention was a good idea or not. There are cases for both sides, and the argument has been going on since time was set running. Every being that's ever lived has argued the case for one side or the other, whether it's been aware of it or not. But wizards fight the great Death, and the lesser ones, consciously.

and the Entity that invented death takes our interference very personally. New wizards always meet it in one form or another, on their Ordeals. Some survive, if they're careful. Nita and Kit were careful. . and they had each other's help."

" 'Careful' is not Dairine's style," Nita's mother said, sounding rueful. "And she's alone."

"Not for long," Tom said. "We'll track her, and see that she has help. But I think Nita will have to go.

She knows Dairine's mind fairly well."

"I'm going too," said Kit.

Carl, still ashen from the exertion of his spell, shook his head. "Kit, your folks don't know you're a wizard. You might have to be gone for quite a while — and I can't sell you two a time warp as I did once before. My time-jurisdiction stops at atmosphere's edge."

"I'll tell them what I am," Kit said.

Nita turned and stared at him.

"I've been thinking about doing it for a while, since you told your folks," he said to her. "You handled it pretty well," he said to Nita's parents. "I should give my mom and dad the benefit of the doubt." The words were brave: but Nita noticed that Kit looked a little worried.

"Kit, you'll have to hurry," Tom said. "She's got a long lead on you, and the trail will get cold fast. Neets, where would Dairine want to go?"

Nita shook her head. "She reads a lot of science fiction."

Carl looked worried. "Has she been reading Heinlein?"

"Some," Nita said. "But she's mostly hot for Star Wars right now."

"That's something, at least. With luck she won't think of going much farther than a few galaxies over.

Anything in particular about Star Wars?"

"Darth Vader," Kit said. "She wants to beat him up."

Tom groaned and ran one hand through his hair. "No matter what the reason," he said, "if she goes looking for darkness, she'll find it."

"But Darth Vader's not real!" said Nita's mother.

Tom glanced at her. "Not here. Be glad."

"A few galaxies over…" Nita's father said to no one in particular.

Carl looked grim. "We can track her, but the trail's getting cold; and at any rate Tom and I can't go with you."

"Now, wait a minute…" Nita's mother said.

Carl looked at her gently. "We're not allowed out of the Solar System," he said. "There are reasons. For one thing, would you step out the door of a car you were driving?"

Nita's mother stared at him.

"Yes, well," Tom said. "We'll get you support. Wizards everywhere we can reach will be watching for you. And as for a guide-"

"I'll go," said Picchu abruptly, from the computer table.

Everyone stared, most particularly Nita's mother and father.

"Sorry, I should have mentioned," Carl said. "Peach is an associate. Bird, isn't this a touch out of your league?"

"I told you I was needed," Picchu said irritably. "And I am. I can see the worst of what's going to happen before it does; so I should be able to keep these two out of most kinds of trouble. But you'd better stop arguing and move. If Dairine keeps throwing away energy the way she's doing, she's going to attract Someone's attention. . and the things It sends to fetch her will make Darth Vader look like a teddy bear by comparison."

Nita's mother looked at Carl and Tom. "Whatever you have to do," she said, "do it."

"Just one question," Tom said to Picchu. "What do They need her for?

"The Powers?" Picchu said. She shut her eyes.

"Well?"

"Reconfiguration," she said, and opened her eyes again, looking surly. "Well? What are you staring at? I can't tell you more than I know. Are we going?"

"Gone," Nita said. She headed out of the room for her manual.

"I'll meet you in the usual place when I'm done," Kit called after her, and vanished. Papers flew again, leaving Nita's mother and father looking anxiously at Carl and Tom.

"Powers," Nita heard her father say behind her. "Creation. Forces from before time. This is-this business is for saints, not children!"

"Even saints have to start somewhere," Carl said softly. "And it's always been the children who save the Universe from the previous generation, and remake the Universe in their own image."

"Just be glad yours are conscious of the fact that that's what they're doing," Tom said.

Neither of her parents said anything.

In her bedroom, Nita grabbed her manual, bit her lip, said three words, and vanished.