The Wizard's Dilemma

The Wizard's Dilemma

DIANE DUANE

Book 5 of the Young Wizard series

The revelation of some uneasy secrets would move most anything, even pigs and fishes, to lift their heads and speak: and at such times it furthers one to cross the great dark water and learn the truth its silent shadows hide.

In the wet, reedy evening, birdsong echoes, old calling young, eventually answered; while another stands in the dark and calls its fellow, hearing for answer only the ancient silence in which tears fall, under a moon near-full. The lead horse breaks the traces and goes astray to cry its clarion challenge harsh at heaven. Understandably. But can it understand in time the danger that dogs immoderate success?... —hexagram 61

"a, wind troubles the waters"

If Time has a heart, it is because other hearts stop. —Book of Night with Moon 9.V.IX

Friday Afternoon

"HONEY, HAVE YOU SEEN your sister?" "She's on Jupiter, Mom."

There was no immediate response to this piece of news. Sitting at a dining-room table covered with notebooks, a few schoolbooks, and one book that had less to do with school than the others, Nita Callahan glanced over her shoulder just in time to catch sight of her mother looking at the ceiling with an expression that said, What have I done to deserve this?

Nita turned her head back to what looked like her homework, so that her mother wouldn't see her smile. "Well, yeah, not on Jupiter; it's hard to do that... She's on Europa."

Her mother came around and sat down in the chair opposite Nita at the table, looking faintly concerned. "She's not trying to create life again or something, is she?"

Friday Afternoon

"Huh? Oh, no. It was there already. But there was some kind of problem." The look on her mother's face was difficult to decipher. "What kind?"

"I'm not sure," Nita said, and this was true. She had read the mission statement, which had appeared in her copy of the wizard's manual shortly after Dairine left, but the fine print had made little sense to her— probably the reason why she or some other wizard had not been sent to deal with the trouble, and

Dairine had. "It's kind of hard to understand what single-celled organisms consider a problem." She made an amused face. "But it looks like Dairine's the answer to it."

"All right." Her mom leaned back in the chair and stretched. "When will she be back?"

"She didn't say. But there's a limit to how much air you can carry with you on one of these jaunts if you're also going to have energy to spare to actually get anything done," Nita said. "Probably a couple of hours."

"Okay...We don't have to have a formal dinner tonight. Everyone can fend for themselves. Your dad won't mind; he's up to his elbows in shrubs right now, anyway." The buzz of the hedge trimmer could still be heard as Nita's dad worked his way around the house. "We can take care of the food shopping later... There's no rush. Is Kit coming over?"

Nita carefully turned the notebook page she'd been working on. "Uh, no. I have to go out and see him in a little while, though... Someone's meeting us to finish up a project. Probably it'll take us an hour or two, so

don't wait for me. I'll heat something up when I get home."

"Okay." Her mother got up and went into the kitchen, where she started opening cupboards and peering into them. Nita looked after her with mild concern when she heard her mom's tired sigh. For the past month or so, her mom had been alternating between stripping and refinishing all the furniture in the house and leading several different projects for the local PTA-^the biggest of them being the effort to get a new playground built near the local primary school. It seemed to Nita that her mother was always either elbow deep in steel wool and stain, or out of the house on errands, so often that she didn't have a lot of spare time for anything else.

After a moment Nita heaved a sigh. TVb point in trying to weasel around it, though, she thought. I've got problems of my own.

Kit...

But it's not his fault... Is it?

Nita was still recovering from an overly eventful vacation in Ireland, one her parents had planned for her, to give Nita a little time away from Kit, and from wizardry. Of course, this hadn't worked. A wizard's work can happen anywhere, and just changing continents couldn't have stopped Nita from being involved in it any more than changing planets could have. As for Kit, he'd found ways to be with Nita regardless—which turned out to have been a good thing. Nita had been extremely relieved to get home, certain that everything would then get back to normal.

Trouble is, someone changed the location of normal" and didn't bother sending me a map, Nita thought. Kit had been a little weird since she got home. Maybe some of it was just their difference in age, which hadn't really been an issue until a month or so ago. But Nita had started ninth grade this year and, to her surprise, was finding the work harder than she'd expected. She was used to coasting through her subjects without too much strain, so this was an annoyance. Worse yet, Kit wasn't having any trouble at all, which Nita also found annoying, for reasons she couldn't explain. And the two of them didn't see as much of each other at school as they'd used to. Kit, now in an accelerated-study track with other kids doing "better than their grade," was spending a lot of his time coaching some of the other kids in his group in history and social studies. That was fine with her, but Nita disliked the way some of her classmates, who knew she was best friends with Kit, would go out of their way to remind her, whenever they got a chance, how well Kit was doing.

As if they're fooling anyone, she thought. They're nosing around to see if he and I are doing something else...and they can't understand why we're not. Nita frowned. Life had been simpler when she'd merely been getting beaten up every week. In its own way, the endless sniping gossip—the whispering behind hands, and the passed notes about cliques and boys and clothes and dates—was more annoying than any number of bruises. The pressure to be like everyone else—

to do the same stuff and think the same things—just grew, and if you took a stance, the gossip might be driven underground... but never very far.

Nita sighed. Nowadays she kept running into problems for which wizardry either wasn't an answer, or else was the wrong one. And even when it was the right answer, it never seemed to be a simple one anymore.

As in the case of this project, for example. Nita looked down at the three notebook pages full of writing in front of her. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was turning into a disaster. Nita knew that wizards weren't assigned to projects they had no hope of completing. But she also knew that the Powers That Be weren't going to come swooping in to save her if she messed up an intervention. She was expected to handle it: That was what wizards were for... since the Powers couldn't be everywhere Themselves.

This left Nita staring again at her original problem: how to explain to Kit why the solution he was suggesting to their present wizardly project wasn't going to work. He's so wrong about this, she thought. / can't believe he doesn't see it. I keep explaining it and explaining it, and he keeps not getting it. She sighed again. 7 guess I just have to keep trying. This isn't the kind of thing you can just give up on.

Her mother plopped down beside her again with a pad of Post-it notes and peeled one off, sticking it to the table and starting to jot things down on it. "The sticky stuff on those is getting old," Nita said, turning to a clean page in her notebook. "It doesn't stick real well anymore."

"I noticed," her mother said absently, repositioning the note. "Milk, rye bread—" "No seeds."

"Your dad likes caraway, honey. Humor him."

"Can't you just get me one of the little loaves without the seeds, Mom?"

Her mother gave her a sidelong look. "Can't you just... you know..." She attempted to twitch her nose in the manner of a famous TV "witch" of years past, and failed to do anything much except look like a rabbit.

Nita rolled her eyes. "Probably I could," she said, "but the trouble is, that bread was made with the seeds, and it thinks they belong there."

"Bread thinks* What about?"

"Uh, well, it— See, when you combine the yeast with the flour, the yeasts—" Nita suddenly realized that if this went on much longer, she was going to wind up explaining some of the weirder facts of life to her mother, and she wasn't sure that either she or her mother was ready. "Mom, the wizardry would just be a real pain to write. Probably simpler just to take the seeds out with my fingers."

Her mother raised her eyebrows, let out a breath, and made a note. "Small loaf of nonseeded rye for daughter whose delicate aesthetic sensibilities are offended by picking a few seeds out of a slice of bread."

"Mom, picking them out doesn't help. The taste is still there!"

"Scouring pads... chicken breasts..." Her mom gnawed reflectively on the cap of the pen. "Shampoo, aspirin, soup—"

"Not the cream-of-chemical kind, Mom!"

"Half a dozen cans of nonchemical soup for the budding gourmet." Her mother looked vague for a moment, then glanced over at what Nita was writing. She squinted a little. "Either I really do need reading glasses or you're doing math at a much higher level than I thought."

Nita sighed. "No, Mom, it's the Speech. It has some expressions in common with calculus, but they're—" "What about your homework?"

"I finished it at school so I wouldn't keep getting interrupted in the middle of it, like I am here!" "Oh dear," her mother said, peeling off another note and starting to write on it. "No seedless rye for you." Nita immediately felt embarrassed. "Mom, I'm sorry—"

"We all have stress, honey, but we don't have to snap at each other." The back door creaked open, and Nita's father came in and went to the sink.

Nita's mother glanced up. "Harry, I thought you said you were going to oil that thing. It's driving me nuts."

"We're out of oil," Nita's father said as he washed his hands. "Oil," her mother said, and jotted it down on the sticky note. "What else?"

Her father picked up a dish towel and stood behind her mother's chair, looking down at the shopping list. "Lint?" he said.

This time her mother squinted at the notepaper. "That's 'list.'"

"Could have fooled me."

Nita's mom bent closer to the paper. "I see your point. I guess I really should go see the optometrist."

"Or maybe you should stop using the computer to write everything," her dad said, going to hang up the towel. "Your handwriting's going to pot."

"So's yours, sweetheart."

"I know. That's how I can tell what's happening to yours." Her father opened the refrigerator, gazed inside, and said, "Beer."

"Oh, now wait a minute. You said—"

"I lost ten pounds last month. The diet's working. After a hard day in the shop, can't I even have a cold beer? Just one?"

Nita put her head down over her notebook and concentrated on not snickering.

"We'll discuss that later. Oh, by the way, new sneakers for you," her mother said, giving her father a severe look, "before your old ones get up and start running around by themselves, without either of our daughters being involved."

"Oh, come on, Betty, they're not that bad!"

"You put your head in the closet, take a sniff, and tell me that again... assuming you make it out of there alive... If you can even tell anymore. I think all those flowers you work with are killing your sense of smell—"

"You don't complain about them when I bring home roses."

"It counts for more when somebody brings roses home if he's not also the florist!"

Nita's dad laughed and started to sing in off-key imitation of Neil Diamond, "Youuu don't bring me floooooowerrrs...," as he headed for the back bedroom.

Nita's mom raised her eyebrows. "Harold Edward Callahan," she said as she turned her attention back to her list making, "you are potentially shortening your lifespan..."

The only answer was louder singing, in a key that her father favored but few other human beings could have recognized. Nita hid her smile until her mother was sufficiently distracted, and then went back to her own business, making a few more notes on the clean page. After some minutes of not being able to think of anything to add, she finally closed the notebook and pushed it away. She'd done as much with the spell as she could do on paper. The rest of it was going to have to wait to be tested out in the real world.

She sighed as she picked up her copy of the wizard's manual and dropped it on top of her notebook. Her mother glanced over at her. "Finished?"

"In a moment. The manual's acquiring what I just did."

Her mother raised her eyebrows. "Doesn't it go the other way around? I thought you got the spells out of the book in the first place."

"Not all of them. Sometimes you have to build something completely new if there's no precedent spell to help you along. Then when you test the new spell out and it works okay, the manual picks it up and makes it available for other wizards to use. Most of what's in here originally came from other wizards, over a lot of years." She gave the wizard's manual a little nudge. "Some wizards don't do anything much but write spells and construct custom wizardries. Tom, for example."

"Really," Nita's mother said, looking down at her grocery list again. "I thought he wrote things for TV."

"He does that, too. Even wizards have to pay the bills," Nita said. She got up and stretched. "Mom, I should get going."

Her mother gave her a thoughtful look. "You know what I'm going to say..." "'Be careful.' It's okay, Mom. This spell isn't anything dangerous." "I've heard that one before."

"No, seriously. It's just taking out the garbage, this one."

Her mother's expression went suddenly wicked. "While we're on the subject—"

"It's Dairine's turn today," Nita said hurriedly, shrugging into the denim jacket she'd left over the chair earlier. "See ya later, Mom..." She kissed her mom, grabbed the manual from on top of her notebook, and headed out the door.

In the backyard, she paused to look around. Long shadows trailed from various dusty lawn furniture; it was only six-thirty, but the sun was low. The summer had been short for her in some ways—half of it lost to the trip to Ireland and the rush of events that had followed. Now it seemed as if, within barely a finger-snap of summer, the fall was well under way. All around her, with a wizard's ear Nita could hear the murmur of the birches and maples beginning to relax toward the winter's long rest, leaning against the earth and waiting with mild expectation for the brief brilliant fireworks of leaf-turn; the long lazy conversation of foliage moving in wind; and the light of sun and stars beginning to taper off to silence now, as the hectic immediacy of summer wound down.

She leaned against the trunk of the rowan tree in the middle of the backyard and looked up through the down-drooping branches with their stalks of slender oval leaves, the green of them slowly browning now, the dulled color only pointing up the many heavy clusters of glowing BB-sized fruit that glinted scarlet from every branch in the late, brassy light. "Nice berries this year, Liused," Nita said.

It took a few moments for her to hear the answer: Even with the Speech, there was no dropping instantly into a tree's time sense from human life speed. Not bad this time out... not bad at all, the tree said modestly. Going on assignment?

"Just a quick one," Nita said. "I hope."

Need any thing from me?

"No, that last replacement's still in good shape. Thanks, though."

You're always welcome. Go well, then.

She leaned for a moment more to let her time sense come back up to its normal speed, then patted the rowan tree's trunk and went out into the open space by the birdbath. There she paused for a little to just listen to it all: life, going about its business all around her— the scratchy self-absorbed noise of the grass growing, the faint rustle and hum of bugs and earthworms contentedly digging in the ground, the persistent little string music of a garden spider fastening web strand to web strand in a nearby bush—repetitive, intense, and mathematically precise. Everything was purposeful... everything was, if not actually intelligent, then at least aware—even things that science didn't usually think were aware, because science didn't yet know how to measure or overhear the kinds of consciousness they had.

Nita took a deep breath, let it out again. This was the core of wizardry, for her: hearing it all going, and keeping it all going—putting in a word in the Speech here or a carefully constructed spell there, fixing broken things, helping what was hurt to heal and get going again...and being astonished, delighted, sometimes scared to death in the process, but never, ever bored.

Nita said a single word in the Speech, at the same time stroking one hand across the empty air in search of the access to the little pinched-in pocket of time space where she kept some of her wizardry equipment.

Responsive to the word she'd spoken, a little tab of clear air went hard between her fingers: She pulled it from left to right like a zipper, and then slipped her hand into the opening and felt around. A second later she came out with a piece of equipment she usually kept ready, a peeled rod of rowan wood that had been left out in full moonlight. She touched the claudication closed again, then looked around her and said to the grass, "Excuse me..."

The grass muttered, unconcerned; it knew the drill.

Nita lifted the rod and began, with a speed born of much practice, to write out the single long sentence of the short-haul transit spell in the air around her.

The symbols came alive as a delicate thread of pale white fire, stretching around her from the point of the rowan wand as she turned: a chord of a circle, an arc, then the circle almost complete as she came to the end of the spell, writing in her "signature," her name in the Speech, the long chain of syllables and symbols that described who and what she was today.

With a final figure-eight flourish, she knotted the spell closed, pulled the wand back, and let the transit circle drop to the grass around her, an arabesqued chain of light. Turning slowly, Nita began to read the sentence, feeling the power lean in around her as she did so, the pressure and attention of local space focusing in on what Nita told it she wanted of it, relocation to this set of spatial coordinates, life support set to planet-surface defaults—

The silence began to build around her, the sound of the world listening. Nita read faster, feeling the words of the Speech reach down their roots to the Power That had first spoken them and taught them what they meant, till the lightning of that first intention struck up through them and then through Nita, as she said the last word, completed the spell, and flung it loose to work—

Wham! The displacement of transported air always sounded loud on the inside of the spell, even if you'd engineered the wizardry to keep it from making a lot of noise on the outside. The crack of sound, combined

with the sudden blazing column of light from the activated transit, left Nita momentarily blind and deaf.

Only for a moment, though. A second later the light died back, and she was standing near the end of a long jetty of big rough black stones, all spotted and splotched with seagull guano and festooned with washed-up seaweed in dull green ribbons and flat brown bladdery blobs. The sun hung blinding over the water to the west, silhouetting the low flat headlands that were all she could see of the Rockaway Beach peninsula from this angle. Somewhere beyond them, lost in mist and sun glare and half submerged beneath the horizon line, lay the skyline of New York.

Nita pulled her jacket a little more tightly around her in the chilly spray-laden wind and turned to look over her shoulder. Down at the landward end of the quarter-mile-long jetty, where it came up against the farthest tip of West End Beach, was a squat white box of a building with an antenna sticking up from it: the Jones Inlet navigational radio beacon. Beyond it there was no one in sight—the weather had been getting too cool for swimming, especially this late in the day. Nita turned again, looking southward, toward the bay. At the seaward end of the jetty was the black-and-white painted metal tower that held up the flashing red Jones Inlet light, and at its base a small shape in a dark blue windbreaker and jeans was lying flat on the concrete pediment to which the tower was fastened, looking over the edge of the pediment, away from Nita.

She headed down the jetty toward him, picking her way carefully over the big uneven rocks and wondering at first, 7s he all right? But as she came near, Kit looked up over his shoulder at her with an idle expression. "Hey," he said.

She climbed up onto the cracked guano-stained concrete beside him and looked down over the edge, where the rocks fell steeply away. "What're you doing?" Nita said. "The barnacles complaining about the water temperature again?"

"Nope, I'm just keeping a low profile," Kit said. "I don't feel like spending the effort to be invisible right now, with work coming up, and there've been some boats going through the inlet. Might be something happening at the Marine Theater later. It's been a little busy."

"Okay." She sat down next to him. "Any sign of S'reee yet?"

"Nothing so far, but it's only a few minutes after when we were supposed to meet. Maybe she got held up. Whatcha got?"

"Here," Nita said, and opened her manual. Kit sat up and flipped his open, too, then paged through it until he came to the "blank" pages in the back where research work and spells in progress stored themselves.

Nita looked over his shoulder and saw the first blank page fill itself in with the spell she had constructed that afternoon, spilling itself down the page, section by section, until that page was full, and the continued-on-next-page symbol presented itself in the lower right-hand corner, blinking slowly. "I had an idea," she said, "about the chemical-reaction calls. I thought that maybe the precipitates weren't going to behave right—"

"Okay, okay, give me a minute to look at it," Kit said. "It's pretty complicated."

Nita nodded and looked out to sea, gazing at the blinding golden roil and shimmer of light on the Great South Bay. These waters might look pretty, but they were a mess. New York and the bedroom communities around it, all up and down Long Island and the Jersey shore, pumped terrible amounts of sewage into the coastal waters, and though the sewage was supposed to be treated, the treatment wasn't everything it was cracked up to be. There was also a fair amount of illegal dumping of garbage and sewage going on. Various wizards, independently and in groups, had worked on the problem over many years; but the nature of the problem kept changing as the population of the New York metropolitan area increased and the kinds of pollution shifted.

Nita and Kit were more than usually concerned about the problem, as they had friends who had to live in this water. Since shortly before Nita had had to go away for the summer, they'd been slowly trying to construct a wizardry to take the pollution out of the local waters on an ongoing basis. If it worked, maybe the scheme could be extended up and down the coast. But the problem was getting it to work in the first place. Their efforts so far hadn't been incredibly successful.

Kit was looking at the second full page of Nita's work. Now he turned it over and looked at the third page, the last one. "This," he said, tapping a section near the end, "is pretty slick." "Thanks."

"But the rest of this—" Kit shook his head, turned back to the first two pages, and touched four or five other sections, one after another, so that they grayed out. "I don't see why we need these. This whole centra-replication routine would be great—if the chemicals in the pollution knew how to reproduce themselves. But since they don't, it's a lot of power for hardly any return. And implementing these is going to be a real pain. If you just take this one—" he touched another section and it brightened—"and this, and this, and you—"

Nita frowned. "But look, Kit, if you leave those out, then there's nothing that's going to deal with the sewer outfall between Zachs Bay and Tobay Beach. That's tons of toxic sludge every month. Without those routines—"

Kit closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose in a way Nita had seen Tom, their local advisory wizard, do more than once when the world started to get to him. "Neets, this is all just too involved. Or involved in the wrong way. You're making it more complicated than it needs to be."

Oh no... here we go again. I thought he was going to get it this time, I really did... "But if you don't name all the chemicals, if you don't describe them accurately—"

"The thing is, you don't have to name them all. If you just take a look at the spell I brought with—" Friday Afternoon

"Kit, look. That stripped-down version you're suggesting isn't going to do the job. And the longer we don't do something, the worse the problem gets! Everything that lives along this shoreline is being affected... whatever's still alive, anyway. Things are dying out there, and every time we go back to the drawing board on this, more things die. Getting this wizardry running has taken too long already."

"Tell me about it," Kit said in a tone that struck Nita as a lot more ironic than it needed to be.

And after all the work I did! she thought. Nonetheless she tried to calm down. "All right. What do you think we should do?"

"Maybe," Kit said, and paused, "maybe it would be good if we let S'reee take a look at both versions. If she thinks—"

Nita's eyes widened. "Since when do we need a third opinion on something this straightforward? Kit, it'll either do what it's supposed to or it won't. Let's test it and find out!"

He took a deep breath and shook his head. "I can tell already, it's not going to do what we need."

She stared at Kit, not knowing what to say, and then after a moment she got up and stared down at him, trying to keep from clenching her fists. "Well, if you're so sure you're right, why don't you just do it yourself? Since my advice plainly isn't worth jack to you."

"It's not that it's not worth anything, it's that—" "Oh, now you apologize."

"I wasn't apologizing." "Well, maybe you need to!"

"Neets," Kit said, also frowning now, "what do you want me to do? Tell you that I think it's gonna be fine, when I don't really think so?"

Nita flushed. When you were working with the Speech, in which what you described would come to pass, lying could be fatal... and you quickly learned that even talking about spells less than honestly was dangerous.

"Energy is precious," Kit said. "Neither of us can just throw it around the way we used to a couple years ago. It's a nuisance, but it's something we have to consider."

"Do you think I wasn't considering it? I took my time over that. I didn't even put it through the spell checker. I checked all the syntax, all the balances, by hand. It took me forever, but—"

"Maybe the 'forever' was a hint, Neets," Kit said.

She had been trying to hang on to her temper, but now Nita got so furious that her eyes felt hot. "Fine," she said tightly. "Then you go right ahead and handle this yourself. And just leave me out of it until you find something you feel is simplistic enough to involve me in."

Kit's expression was shocked, and Nita didn't care. Who needs this? she thought. No matter what I try to do, it's not good enough! So maybe it's time I stopped trying. Let him work it out himself, if he can.

Nita turned and made her way back down the jetty, her eyes narrowed in annoyance as she slapped her claudication open and pulled out the rowan wand. In one angry, economical gesture, she whipped the wand

around her, dropping her most frequently used transit circle to the stones, the one that would take her home. It was a little harder to speak the spell than usual. Her throat was tight, but not so much so that she couldn't say the words that would get her out of there. In a clap of imploding air, she was gone, and spray from a wave that crashed against the jetty went through the place where she had been.

Friday, Early Evening

KIT RODRIGUEZ JUST SAT there on the concrete platform at the bottom of the Jones Inlet light tower for some minutes, looking at the spot where Nita had vanished, listening to the hiss of the surf, and trying to work out what the heck had just happened.

What did I say? Kit went over their conversation a couple of times in his head and couldn't find any reason for her to have gotten so upset. What is her problem these days? It can't be school. Nobody bothers her anymore; she does okay.

It was a puzzle, and one he'd been having no luck solving. Maybe it was because he'd been so busy... and not just during the last couple of months, either. Granted, lately he'd been spending a lot of time on the bottom of the Great South Bay. And over the past couple of years, he'd also been to Europe, and had stopped off on or near most of the planets in the solar system, though only on the way to places much farther out, including some places that weren't exactly planets. Even Kit's mother, who initially had been really nervous about his wizardry, had eventually started to admit that all that travel was probably going to be educational, and theoretically ought to make him, if not smarter, at least more mature. But Kit was beginning to have his doubts. For the past few weeks, when he hadn't been in school, in bed, or a few hundred feet deep in water, he'd been spending a lot of his spare time sitting on a particular rock in the Lunar Carpathians, looking down on the green-blue gem that was Earth from three hundred thousand kilometers out, and coming back again and again to the question, Are girls another species?

The first time the thought had occurred to him, he'd felt embarrassed. He had been in places where members of other species had been present in their hundreds—sometimes in their thousands—tentacles and oozy bits and all. None of them had at the time struck him as all that alien; they were, when you got right down to it, just people. And though their differences from human beings were tremendous, sometimes making them completely incomprehensible, that still didn't undermine his affection for them. He liked the aliens he met, even when they were weird. Come to think of it, I like them because they're weird. But Nita, who theoretically was just as human as Kit was, had been pushing the weirdness-andincomprehensibility envelope pretty hard lately. Her behavior was hard to understand, from someone who was usually so rational—

Something dark broke the dazzle of the water about a quarter mile away. Kit cocked an ear and heard a long high whistle, slightly muffled, and after that first shape—a short stumpy barnacle-pocked dorsal fin — came the sleek dark shining shape of the back of a humpback whale, rolling in the water as she breached and blew. One small eye set way down at the end of the long, long jaw regarded Kit as S'reee slid toward the jetty, back-finning expertly to keep from coming to grief on the rocks. "Dai stiho, Kit," she whistled and clicked in the Speech. "Sorry I'm late. Traffic..."

Uneasy as he was, Kit had to chuckle. "I know. I can hear it even up here." The main approaches to New York Harbor ran straight through this part of the Great South Bay, and for a whale, keeping clear of the ever-increasing number of ships—not so much the ships themselves but the inescapable sound of their engines and machinery, always a nuisance for a creature that worked extensively with sonar—was a problem and made getting around quickly a lot more trouble than it used to be. Noise pollution in the bay was as much a problem for the many species who lived there as was the sewage, and would probably be a more difficult problem to solve. It was one of a number of projects S'reee had been forced to tackle since her abrupt promotion to the position of senior cetacean wizard for these waters.

S'reee rolled idly in the water, looking down the jetty. "It's my fault; I should have left the Narrows earlier. But never mind. Where's hNii't?"

"I don't think she's going to be with us today," Kit said. S'reee didn't reply immediately, but that thoughtful little eye dwelt on Kit. As whales went, S'reee wasn't that much older than Kit or Nita, but the increased responsibilities she'd been pushed into had been making her perceptive—maybe more perceptive than Kit exactly cared for right now, especially since he still wasn't sure that he hadn't misstepped somehow.

"Well," S'reee said after a moment, "is that a problem? Can we manage, or should we reschedule?"

Kit thought about that. "I've got something that might be worth looking at," he said. "We may as well lay it out in place and have a look at it."

"All right."

Kit reached into the pocket of his jeans, which was also the way into his own storage pocket of space, and came out with a little ball of light, a spell in compacted form, which he dropped to the concrete he was standing on. As the compaction routine came loose and let the spell expand, he shoved his manual down into the pocket, then picked up the spell and shook it out.

It was a webwork of interconnected statements in the Speech, all of which briefly flared bright and then, dimming, settled and spread themselves into a form that could have been mistaken for a cloak made of plastic wrap. Kit whirled it around him, then held still while the spell sealed itself shut all about him and completed its access to its air supply, also tucked away in the spatiotemporal claudication in his pocket. Normally this spell was used as a space suit, for occasions when moving or working in a large "bubble" of air wasn't desirable, but Kit had adapted it for use as a wet suit. He glanced back at the beach to make sure no one was watching—the last thing he wanted was for someone to think some kid out here was suicidal—and jumped well away from the rocks, into the water next to S'reee.

The two of them submerged. Kit took a moment to adjust the wizardry he was wearing, to add weight as necessary so that it would counteract the buoyancy of the air in the wet suit and his lungs, then he took hold of S'reee's dorsal fin, and she towed him away from the jetty, southward.

The waters were getting murky this time of year, but not murky enough to hide something that Kit was beginning to get tired of looking at: an irregular cluster of humped, sinister shapes, half buried in sludge, not far from where the sewerage outfall from Tobay Beach tailed off. Half a century ago, some ship had dropped or dumped a cargo of mines on the bottom, in about fifty fathoms of water. But as far as Kit was concerned, that wasn't half deep enough.

"We really need to do something about that," Kit said, glancing at the mines as they passed them by. "Somebody seriously exceeded their recommended stupidity levels the day they dumped those here."

"I wouldn't argue the point," S'reee said as they headed out to the point where they had been preparing to anchor their wizardry. "But one thing at a time, cousin. Do you really think you have a solution for our present problem?"

"I've got something," Kit said. "You tell me." "Shortly."

It took them a few minutes more to reach the spot, due south of Point Lookout, where the three of them had been contemplating anchoring the wizardry once they'd settled on what it was going to be. Here the tides came out of Jones Inlet with most force, helping keep the dredged part of the ship channel clean; but here also the pollution from inside the barrier islands came out in its most concentrated form, and this, Kit and Nita had thought, would be a good place to stop it. "The day before yesterday, I spent a little while checking the currents here," S'reee said, as she paused to let Kit slip off, "and I'd say you two were right about the location. Also, the bottom's pretty bare. There isn't too much life to be inconvenienced by tethering a spell here, and what there is won't mind being relocated. Let's see what you've got."

Kit pulled out his manual, turned to the workbook section, and instructed it to replicate the structure of the proposed spell in the water, where they could see it. A few seconds later he and S'reee were looking together at the faintly glowing schematic, a series of concentric and intersecting circles full of the "argument" of the wizardry.

S'reee swam slowly around it, examining it. "I have to confess," she said at last, "this makes more sense than what the three of us were looking at earlier. All those complex chemical-reaction subroutines... they'd have taken us weeks to set up, and exhausted us when we tried to fuel them. Besides, it was too much of a brute-force solution. It's no good shouting at the Sea, as our people say; you won't hear what it has to say to you, and it won't listen until you do."

"You think it'll listen to this?"

S'reee swung her tail thoughtfully. "Let's find out," she said. "If nothing else, it's going to be quicker to test to destruction, if it fails at all. And between you and me—and I hate to say it—it's a more elegant solution than what Nita was proposing."

Kit felt uneasy agreeing with her. "Well," he said, "if it doesn't work, it won't matter how elegant it is. Let's get set up."

He started laying out the spell for real. It contained a simplified version of one of the circles he and Nita had been arguing about two days before—there was no point in wasting a perfectly good section of diagram that could be tied into the revision. Kit drew a finger through the water, and the graceful curves and curlings of the written Speech followed after as he drifted around in a circle about twenty yards across, reinstating the first circle as he'd held it in memory.

"Is this how the second great circle looks?" S'reee said, describing the circle with a long slow motion of body and tail. Fire filled the water, following her gesture, writing itself in pulsing curls and swirls of light — all the power statements and the conditionals that were secondary parts of the spell.

"You've got it," Kit said. "One thing, though..." He looked ruefully at the place where Nita's name was written. Carefully he reached out and detached the long string of characters in the Speech that represented Nita's wizardly power and personality, and let it float away into the water for the time being. A wizard doesn't just casually erase another wizard's name, any more than you would casually look down the barrel of a gun, even when you were sure that the chamber was empty. Changing a name written in the Speech could change the one named. Erasing a name could be more dangerous still.

"You'll need to knit that circle in a little tighter to compensate," S'reee said. "Taking care of that now."

It took only a few moments to finish tightening the structure. Kit looked it over one more time; S'reee did the same. Then they looked at each other. "Well?" Kit said.

"Let's see what happens," said S'reee. Together they began to recite—Kit in the human, prose-inflected form of the Speech; S'reee in the sung form that whale-wizards prefer. Kit stumbled a couple of times until he got the rhythm right—though the pace was quicker than that at which whales sing their more formal and ritual wizardries, it was still fairly slow by human standards. One word at a time, he thought, resorting to humming the last syllables when he needed to let S'reee catch up with him; and as they spoke together and fed power to it, the wizardry began to light up around them like a complex, many-colored neon sculpture in the water, a hollow sphere of curvatures and traceries, at the center of which they hung, waiting for the sense of the presence they were summoning.

And slowly, as the wizardry came alive around them, the presence was there, making itself felt more strongly each passing moment as Kit and S'reee worked together toward the last verse—the wizard's knot, in this case a triple-stranded braid, which would seal together three great circles' worth of spell. The pressure came down around them, the weight of tons of water and millions of years of time, hard to bear; but Kit hunched himself down a little, got his shoulders under the weight and bore it up. The water went from the normal dusky green of these depths to a flaring bluegreen, like a liquid set on fire. All around them, if it was possible for water to feel wetter than water already was, it did. The personality of the local ocean, partly aware, washed through both Kit and S'reee, intent on washing away resistance over time, as it always had.

Kit had no intention of being washed anywhere. Slowly and carefully he and S'reee started to put their case, defining a specific area on which they desired to operate, telling the ocean what they wanted to do and why it was going to be a good thing.

They were reminding the ocean how things had once been: a long discussion, setting aside for the moment its outrage over having been systematically polluted. But then the local waters were a different issue from the greater, world-girdling Sea, which was a whole living thing, a Power in its own right and the conduit through which the whales' own version of wizardry came to them.

The Sea stood in the same relationship to the ocean as the soul stood to the body, and the ocean, merely physical as it was, had its own ideas about the creatures that had come over the long ages to populate it. To the ancient body of water, which had suddenly found itself playing host to the first and simplest organisms, everything biological looked suspiciously like pollution. The merely physical ocean, remembering that most ancient, blood-saline water, had for a long time resisted the idea of anything living in it. Many times life had tried to get started as the seas cooled, and many times it had failed before the one fateful lightning strike finally lanced down and stirred the reluctant waters to life.

Now, Kit was suggesting—with S'reee, a recently native form of "pollution," to back him up—a possible compromise. Here in this one place, at least, the ocean had an opportunity to return to that old purity, to water in which any chemical except salt was foreign. Maybe in other places this same intervention could be brought about, with wizards to power it and the ocean's permission. But first they had to get this initial permission granted.

It was a long argument, one which the ocean was reluctant to let anyone else win, even though it stood to benefit. Kit knew from his research in the manual and from a number of conferences with S'reee that there was always difficulty of this kind with oceanic wizardries. The waters themselves, far from being fluid and pliant to a wizard's wishes, could be as rigid as berg ice or as hostile as hot pillow lava to action from "outside." The discussion had to be most diplomatic.

But Kit and S'reee had done their homework, and they didn't have to hurry. They just kept patiently putting their case in the Speech, taking their time. And Kit thought he started to feel a shift— I think it's starting to listen! S'reee said privately to Kit.

Kit swallowed and didn't respond...just kept his mind on the argument. But now he was becoming certain that she was right. Just this once, persistence was winning out. They'd both been hoping for this, for though the waters had flinched under those early lashes of lightning, they also had conceived a certain sneaking fascination for the wild proliferation of life that had broken loose in them over a mere few thousand millennia. Now, as Kit and S'reee hung in the center of the spell sphere they had constructed, they saw the light of the Sea around them start slowly, slowly to shift in color and quality as it began to accept the spell.

The shimmer of the wizardry's outer shell began to dissolve into splashes of green and gold brilliance, the catalytic reactions that would make the pollutants snow down as inert salts onto the ocean bottom as fast as they built up. That inert "garbage" would still have to be cleaned up, but the Sea itself had routines for that, older than human wizardry and just as effective for this particular job.

Kit and S'reee watched the wizardry spread away in great ribbony tentacles, diffusing itself, dissolving slowly into the water—one long current drifting away southward, another running up the channel, with the rising flood tide, toward the inland waters and the main sources of the pollution. After three or four minutes there was nothing left to be seen but the most subtle shimmer, a radiance like diluted moonlight.

Then even that was gone, leaving the waters nearly dark, but someone sensitive to the power they had released could still have felt it, a tingle and prickle on the skin, the feel of advice taken and being acted upon. The silence faded away, leaving Kit and S'reee listening to the wet-clappered bonk, bonk of the nun buoy half a mile away, the chain-saw ratchet of motorboat propellers chopping at the water as they passed through Jones Inlet.

Kit, hovering in the water, looked over at S'reee. The dimly seen humpback hung there for a long moment, just finning the water around her, then dropped her jaw and took a long gulp of the water, closing her mouth again and straining it back out through the thousands of plates of baleen.

"Well?" Kit said.

She waved her flukes from side to side, a gesture of slow satisfaction. "It tastes better already," she said. "It worked!"

S'reee laughed at him. "Come on, Kit, a spell always works. You know that."

"If you mean a spell always does something, sure! It's getting it to do what you originally had in mind that's the problem."

"Well, this one did. It certainly discharged itself properly. If it hadn't, the structure of it would still be hanging here, complaining," S'reee said. "But I think we've done a nice clean intervention." She chuckled, a long scratchy whistle, and finned her way over to Kit, turning a couple of times in a leisurely victory roll.

Kit high-fived one of her ventral fins as it waved past him, but the gesture brought him around briefly to where he saw Nita's name, detached from the spell, still hanging there, waving like a weed in the water and glowing faintly. Kit sighed and grabbed the string of symbols, wound them a few times around one hand, and stuffed them into his "pocket," then grabbed hold of that ventral fin again and let S'reee tow him back to the surface.

They floated there for a few minutes in the twilight, getting their breath again as the reaction to the wizardry began to kick in. "How long was that?" Kit said, looking at the shore, where all the streetlights down the parkway had come on and the floodlights shone on the brick red of the Jones Beach water tower and picked out its bronze-green pyramidal top.

"Two hours, I'd guess," S'reee said. "As usual it seems like less when you're in the middle of it. Maybe you should get yourself back onto land, though, Kit. I'm starting to feel a little wobbly already."

Kit nodded. "I'll go in a few minutes," he said, and looked around them. They were about three miles off Jones Beach. He looked eastward, to where a practiced eye could just make out the takeoff lights of planes angling up and away from Kennedy Airport. "I wonder, how soon could we expand the range of this closer to the city? There's a whole lot of dirty water coming from up there. Even though they don't dump raw sewage in the water anymore, the treatment plants still don't do as good a job as they should."

"You're right, of course," S'reee said. "But maybe we should leave the wizardry as it is for a while, and see how it behaves. After that, well, there's no arguing that the water around here can still use a lot more work. But we've made a good start."

"Yeah, the oysters should be happy, that's for sure," Kit said. There hadn't been shellfish living off the south shore of Long Island for many years now. After this piece of work, that would have a chance to change. Certainly the oystermen would be happy in ten or twenty years, and the fish who ate oysters would be, too, a lot sooner.

"True. Well, I don't see that we can do much more with this at this point," S'reee said, "except to say, well done, cousin!"

"Couldn't have done it alone," Kit said. But something in the back of his mind said, But you did do it alone. Or not with the usual help...

"Come on," S'reee said, "you've got to be feeling the reaction. We're both going to need a rest after that. I'll swim you back."

As they got close to the jetty, Kit said, "We should have another look at the wizardry again.. .When, do you think?"

"A week or so is soon enough," S'reee said, standing on her head in the water and waving her flukes meditatively in the air as Kit let go of her and clambered up out of the water onto the lowest rocks. "No point in checking the fueling routines any sooner; they're too charged up just now."

"Okay, next Friday, then. And I want to think about what we can do about those explosives down there, too."

"You're on, cousin. Dai stiho. And when you see hNii't'..." S'reee paused a moment, then just said, "Tell her we all have off days; it's no big deal."

"I will," Kit said. "Dai, S'reee."

The humpback slid under the water without so much as a splash. Kit spent a moment listening to the high raspy whistle of S'reee's radar-ranging song dwindling away as she navigated out of the shallows, heading for the waters off Sandy Hook. Then, in the flashing crimson light of the jetty's warning beacon, he unsealed the wet-suit spell, shook it out, wrapped it up tight, and shoved it back into his pocket along with Nita's written name and his manual. He shivered then, feeling a little clammy. It's the interior humidity of the suit, he thought, frowning. / forgot to adjust the spell after I noticed the problem the last time.

Kit grimaced, toying with the idea of doing a wizardry to dry his clothes out, and then thought, Probably by the time I get home they'll be dry from my body heat already. No point in wasting power.

He reached into the back of his mind and felt around behind him for his own preset version of what he referred to as the beam-me-up spell, found the one that was set for home, and pulled it into reality, shook it out in one hand, like a whip: a six-foot chain of multicolored light, a single long sentence in the Speech, complete except for the wizard's knot at the end that would set it going. He said that one word, and the wizardry came alive in his hand, bit its own tail. Kit dropped the chain of fire on the worn wooden decking of the fishing platform and stepped into it— The blaze of the working spell and the pressure-and-noise whoomp! of displaced air blinded him briefly, but it was a result Kit was used to now. He opened his eyes again and saw streetlight-lit sidewalk instead of planking. Kit bent over, picked up the wizardry again, undid the knot and shook it out, then coiled it up and stuffed it into his pocket, and down still farther into the pocket in his mind, while simultaneously bracing himself for what he knew was going to hit him in a few seconds. Wobbly as he, too, was starting to feel now, he might not be able to keep it from knocking him over...

But nothing happened. Kit glanced around and then thought, Whoops! Wrong destination, for he was standing not outside his own house but two and a half blocks away. It was Nita's house he was looking at: He had grabbed the wrong spell, the only other one in his mind that got as much use as the take-mehome one. Nita's house's porch light was off; there were lights in the front windows, but the curtains were drawn.

/ should go see if she wants to talk, he thought.

But her mood had been so grim, earlier... and now he'd found that he'd underestimated the dampness of his clothes. They were chilly, and he was getting still chillier standing here.

/ really don't feel like it, Kit thought. Let it wait until tomorrow. She'll be in a better mood then.

He walked away into the dusk.

Friday Evening

KIT WALKED A COUPLE of blocks down Conlon Avenue to his own house, the usual kind of twostory frame house typical of this area. It was strange that he and Nita had lived so close together for so long and had never run into each other before becoming wizards; just one of those things, Kit guessed. Or maybe there was some reason behind it. But the Powers That Be were notoriously closemouthed about Their reasons. Whatever. We both know where we are now. Then Kit breathed out, amused. Or at least most of the time we do...

As Kit headed up the driveway to his house, he heard the usual thump, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham of paws against the back door, and he grinned and stopped. CRASH went the screen door, flying open, and a bolt of black lightning—or something moving nearly as fast as lightning might if it had four legs and fur—came hurtling out, leaped over the steps

to the driveway without touching them, hit the ground with all legs working at once, like something out of a cartoon, and launched itself down the driveway at Kit. He had just enough time to brace himself before Ponch hit him about chest high, barking.

Kit laughed and tried to hold Ponch's face away from his, but it didn't work; it never worked. He got well slobbered, as Ponch jumped up and down on his hind legs and scrabbled at Kit's chest with his forepaws. The barking was as deafening as always, but there was, of course, more to it than that. Anyone who knew the Speech could have heard Kit's dog shouting, "You're late! You're late! Where were you? You're late!"

"Okay, so I'm late," Kit said. "What're you complaining about? Didn't anyone feed you?" You smell like fish, Ponch said inside his head, and licked Kit's face some more. "I just bet I do," Kit said. "Don't avoid the question, big guy."

I'm hungry!

Kit snickered as he pushed the dog down. Ponch was very doggy in some ways—loyal, and (as far as he knew how to be) truthful. He was also devious, full of plots and tricks to get people to feed him as many times a day as possible. / should be grateful that that's as devious as he gets, Kit thought as he made his way to the back door. "Come on, you," he said, and pulled open the screen door.

Inside was a big comfortable combined kitchen and dining room, where his mama and pop usually could be found this time of night. The only thing that happened in the living room at Kit's house was TV watching and the entertainment of family friends and guests— when that didn't drift into the kitchen as well. There was a big couch off to one side, under the front windows, with a couple of little tables on either side, one of which had a small portable TV that was blaring the local news; in the middle of the room was the big oval dining table, and on the other side of the room were the cooking island and, beyond it, the fridge and sink and oven and cupboards. On the cooking island was a pot, boiling, but as Kit went by he peered into it and saw nothing but water. He chucked his book bag over the back of one of the dining-room chairs and sidestepped neatly as Ponch, running in the slowly closing screen door after him, hit the tiled floor and skidded halfway across it, almost to the door that led to the living room. "Hey, Mama," Kit called, "I'm home. What's for dinner?"

"Spaghetti," his mother called from somewhere at the back of the house. "It would have been meatballs as well, but we didn't know which planet you were on."

Kit let out a small breath of relief, for spaghetti was not one of the things his mother could ruin, at least not without being badly distracted. She was one of those people who do a few dishes really well—her arroz con polio was one of the great accomplishments of civilization on Earth, as far as Kit was concerned—but beyond those limits, his mama often got in trouble, and there were times when Kit was incredibly relieved to find his pop cooking. Especially since it means I don't have to interfere... He smiled ruefully. The last time he tried using wizardry to thicken one of his mama's failed gravy recipes had been memorable. These days he stuck to flour.

Kit's father came up the stairs from the basement into the kitchen—a big brawny broad-shouldered man, dark eyed, and dark haired except around the sideburns, where he claimed his work as a pressman at a Nassau County printing plant was starting to turn him gray. "He's gonna take that screen door off its hinges some day, son," Kit's father said, watching Ponch recover himself and start bouncing around the kitchen.

"Might not be a bad idea," said Kit's mother from the next room. "It's as old as the house. It looks awful." "It's not broken yet," Kit's father said. "Though every time that dog hits it, you get your hopes up, huh?"

Kit's mother came into the kitchen and didn't say anything, just smiled. She was taller than Kit's dad, getting a little plump these days, but not so much that she worried about it. Her dark hair was pulled back tight and bunned up at the back, and Kit was slightly surprised to see that she was still in one of her nurse's uniforms—pink top and white pants. Though maybe it's not "still," he thought as she paused to give Kit a one-armed hug and sat down at the end of the table.

"You have to work night shift tonight, Mama?"

She bent over to slip one of her shoes onto one white-stockinged foot, then laced the shoe up. "Just evening shift," she said. "They called from work to ask if I could swap a shift with one of the other nurses in the med-surg wing; he had some emergency at home. I'll be home around two. Popi'll feed you." "Okay. Did anybody feed Ponch?"

"I did," said Kit's mother.

"Thanks, Mama," Kit said, and bent over to kiss her on the cheek. Then he looked down at Ponch, who was now sitting and gazing up at Kit with big soulful eyes and what was supposed to pass for a wounded look. You didn't believe me!

Kit gave him a look. "You," he said. "You fibber. You need a walk?" "YEAH- YEAH- YE AH-YE AH-YE AH-YE AH!"

His mother covered her ears. "He's deafening," she said. "Tell him to go out!" Kit laughed. "You tell him! He's not deaf."

"I'm glad for him, because / will be shortly! Pan-cho! Gooutr

Delighted, Ponch turned himself in three or four hurried circles and launched himself at the screen door again. Thump, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham, CRASH!

"I see," Kit's father said as he paused by the spaghetti pot, "that he's figured out how to push the latch with his paw."

"I noticed that, too," Kit said. "He's getting smart." And then he made an amused face, though not for his father to see. Smart didn't begin to cover the territory.

"So how did your magic thing go tonight?" his dad said. Kit sat down with only about half a groan. "It's not magic, Pop. Magic is when you wave your hand and stuff happens without any good reason or any price. Wizardry's the exact opposite, believe me."

His father looked resigned. "So my terminology's messed up. It takes a while to learn a new professional vocabulary. The thing with the fish, then, it went okay?"

Kit started to laugh. "You call S'reee a fish to her face, Pop, you're likely to remember it for a while," he said. "It wasn't the fish; it was the water. It was dirty."

"Not exactly news."

"It's gonna start getting cleaner. That'll be news." Kit allowed himself a satisfied grin. "And you heard it here first."

"I imagine Nita must be pleased," his mother said. "I imagine," Kit said, and got up to go to the fridge.

He could feel his mother looking at him, even without turning to see. He could hear her looking at his pop, even without so much as a glance in her direction. Kit grimaced, and hoped they couldn't somehow sense the expression without actually seeing it themselves. The problem was that they were parents, possessed of strange unearthly powers that even wizards sometimes couldn't understand.

"I thought maybe she was going to come over for dinner," said his pop. "She usually does, after you've been out doing this kind of work."

"Uh, not tonight. She had some other stuff she had to take care of," Kit said. Like chewing the heads off her unsuspecting victims!

The sudden image of Nita as a giant praying mantis made Kit snicker. But then he dismissed it, not even feeling particularly guilty. "Where's Carmela?"

"Tonight's a TV night for her," Kit's pop said. "A reward for that math test. I let her take the other portable and the VCR; she's upstairs pigging out on Japanese cartoons."

Kit smiled. It was unusual for things to be so quiet while his sister was conscious, and the thought of sitting down and letting the weariness from the evening's wizardry catch up with him in conditions of relative peace and quiet was appealing. But Ponch needed walking first. "Okay," Kit said. "I'm gonna take Ponch out now."

"Dinner in about twenty minutes," his dad said.

"We'll be back," Kit said. As he went out the back door, he took Ponch's leash down off the hook where the jackets hung behind the door. Out in the driveway he paused and looked for Ponch. He was nowhere to be seen.

"Huh," Kit said under his breath, and yawned. The post-wizardry reaction was starting to set in now. If he didn't get going, he was going to fall asleep in the spaghetti. Kit went down to the end of the driveway, looked both ways up and down the street. He could see a black shape snuffling with intense interest around the bottom of a tree about halfway down Conlon.

Kit paused a moment, looking down where Conlon Avenue met East Clinton, wondering whether he might see a shadow a little taller than him standing at the corner, looking his way. But there was no sign of her. He

made a wry face at his own unhappiness. Just a fight. Nonetheless, he and Nita had had so few that he wasn't really sure about what to do in the aftermath of one. In fact, Kit couldn't remember a fight they'd had that hadn't been over, and made up for, in a matter of minutes. This was hours, now, and it was getting uncomfortable. What if I really hurt her somehow? She's been so weird since she got back from Ireland. What if she's so pissed at me that she—

He stopped himself. No point in standing here making it worse. Either go right over there now and talk to her or wait until tomorrow and do it then, but don't waste energy obsessing over it.

Kit sighed and turned the other way, toward the end of the road that led to the junior-senior high school. He saw Ponch sniffing and wagging his tail near the big tree in front of the Wilkinsons' house. Ponch cocked a leg at the tree and, after a few seconds' meditation, bounded off down the street. Kit went after him, swinging the leash in the dusk.

From farther down the street came a sound of furious yapping. It was the Akambes' dog, whose real name was Grarrhah but whose human family had unfortunately decided to call her Tinkerbell. She was one of those tiny, delicate, silky-furred terriers who looked like she might unravel if you could figure out which thread to pull, but her personality seemed to have been transplanted from a dog three or four times her size. She was never allowed out of the backyard, and whenever one of the other neighborhood dogs went by, she would claw at the locked gate and yell at them in Cyene, "You lookin' at me? I can take you! Come over here and say that! Stop me before I tear 'im apart!" and other such futile provocations.

Kit sighed as Ponch went past and as he followed, and the noise scaled up and up. There was no point in going over and talking to Grarrhah. She took her watchdog role terribly seriously, and would work herself into such a lather that she would already be lying there foaming at the mouth from overexcitement and frustration by the time you got to the gate. Making a poor creature like this more crazy than she was already was no part of a wizard's business, so Kit just walked by as Grarrhah shrieked at him from behind the gate, "Thief! Thief! Burglars! Joyriders, ram raiders, walk-by shooters; lemme at 'em, I'll rip 'em to shreds!"

Kit walked on, wondering if there was something he could do for her. Then he grinned sourly. "What a laugh! I don't even know what to do about Neets.

All at once he changed his mind about letting things wait until the next day. Kit reached into his pocket and pulled out the manual. Among many other functions, it had a provision for print messaging for times when wizards were having trouble getting in touch with each other directly—a sort of wizardly pager system. He flipped to the back pages where such messages were written and stored. "New message," he said. "For Nita—"

The page glowed softly in the dusk and displayed the long string of characters in the Speech that was Nita's name, and the equivalent string for her manual.

There the book sat, ready to take down his message ... and Kit couldn't think what to say. I'm sorry? Friday Evening

For what? I didn't run her down. I told her what I thought. I don't think I was nasty about it. And I was right, too.

He was strongly tempted to tell her so, but then Kit came up against a bizarre notion that doing that under the present circumstances would be somehow unfair. He spent another couple of minutes trying to find something useful to say. But he wasn't sure what was bothering Nita, and he was still annoyed enough at the way she'd behaved to feel like it wasn't his job to be the understanding one.

Kit frowned, opened his mouth...and closed it again, discarding that potential message as well. Finally all he could find to say was, "If you need some time by yourself, feel free." He looked at the page as the words recorded themselves in the Speech.

More?

"No more," Kit said. "Send it"

Sent.

He stood there for a moment, half hoping he would get an answer right back. But there was no response, no hint of the subtle fizz or itch of the manual's covers that indicated an answer. Maybe she's out. Maybe she's busy with something else.

Or maybe she just doesn't want to answer...

He closed the manual and shoved it back into his pocket. Then Kit started walking again. When he reached the streetlight where Jackson Street met Con-Ion, he looked around. "Ponch?" he said, then listened for the jingle of Ponch's chain collar and tags.

Nothing.

Now where'd he go? Sweat started to break out all over Kit at the thought that Ponch might have gotten into someone's backyard and caught something he shouldn't have. Ponch's uncertain grasp of the difference between squirrels—which he hunted constantly with varying success—and rabbits—which he chased and almost always caught—had made him disgrace himself a couple of months back when one of the neighbor's tame rabbits had escaped from its hutch and wandered into Kit's backyard. Ponch's enthusiastic response had cost Kit about a month's allowance to buy the neighbor a new rabbit of the same rare lop-eared breed... a situation made more annoying by the fact that wizards are enjoined against making money out of nothing except in extreme emergencies connected with errantry, which this was not. Kit had yelled at Ponch only once about the mistake; Ponch had been completely sorry. But all the same, every time Ponch's whereabouts couldn't be accounted for, Kit began to twitch.

Kit started to jog down the street toward the entrance to the school, where Ponch liked to chase rabbits in the big fields to either side. But then he stopped as he heard a familiar sound, claws on concrete, and the familiar jingle, as Ponch came tearing down the sidewalk at him. Kit had just enough warning to sidestep slightly, so that Ponch's excited jump took him through air, instead of through Kit. Ponch came down about five feet behind where Kit had been standing, spun around, and started jumping up and down in front of him again, panting with excitement, "Come see it! Come see, look, I found it, c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon, comeseecomeseecomesee!"

"Come see what?" Kit said in the Speech. "I found something."

Kit grinned. Normally, with Ponch, this meant something dead. His father was still getting laughs out of the story about Ponch and the very mummified squirrel he had hidden for months under the old beat-up blanket in his doghouse. "So what is it?"

"It's not a what. It's a where."

Kit was confused. There was no question of his having misunderstood Ponch; the dog spoke perfectly good Cyene, which anyone who knew the Speech could understand. And as a pan-canine language, Cyene might not be strong on abstract concepts, but what Ponch had said was fairly concrete.

"Where?" Kit asked. "I mean, what where?" Then he had to laugh, for he was sounding more incoherent by the moment, and making Ponch sound positively sophisticated by comparison. "Okay, big guy, come on, show me."

"It's right down the street."

Kit was still slightly nervous. "It's not anybody's rabbit, is it?"

Ponch turned a shocked look on him. "Boss! I promised. And I said, it's not a whatl" "Uh, good," Kit said. "Come on, show me, then."

"Look," Ponch said. He turned and ran away from Kit, down the middle of the dark, empty, quiet side street...

... and vanished. Kit stared. Uhbb... what the—/

Astonished, Kit started to run after Ponch, into the darkness... and vanished, too.

Nita had come back from the Jones Inlet jetty that evening to find that her mother had left to go shopping. Her dad was in the kitchen making a large sandwich; he looked at Nita with mild surprise. "You just went out. Are you done for the day already?"

"Yup," Nita said, heading through the kitchen. "Kit coming over?"

"Don't think so," Nita said, dropping her manual on the dining-room table.

Her father raised his eyebrows and turned back to the sandwich he was constructing. Nita sat down in the chair where she'd been sitting earlier and looked out the front window. She was completely tired out, even though she hadn't done anything, and she was thoroughly pissed off at Kit. The day felt more than exceptionally ruined. Nita put her head down in her hands for a moment.

As she did, she caught sight of a sticky-note still stuck to the table. "Uh-oh—" "What?"

"Mom forgot her list—"

"You mean her 'lint'?" Her dad chuckled. "Yeah. It's still stuck here."

"She'll call and get me to read it to her, probably." There was a soft bang! from the backyard—a sound Friday Evening

that could have been mistaken for a car backfiring, except that there weren't likely to be cars back there. "Is that Dairine?" Nita's dad said.

"Probably," said Nita. It hadn't taken her parents long to learn the sound of suddenly displaced air—a sign of a wizard in a hurry or being a little less than slick about appearing out of nothing. At first it seemed to Nita as if her folks, after they'd found out she was a wizard, spent nearly all their time listening for that sound in varying states of nervousness. Now they were starting to get casual about it, which struck her as a healthy development.

But wait a minute. Maybe it's Kit, coming back to apologize— Nita started to get up.

The screen door opened and Dairine came in. Nita sat down again. "Hey, runt," she said. "Hey," said Dairine, and went on past.

Nita glanced after her, for this was not Dairine's normal response to being called runt. Her little sister paused by the table just long enough to drop her own book bag onto a chair, then went into the living room, pushing that startling red hair out of her eyes. It was getting longer, and, as a result, her resemblance to their mother was stronger than ever. Has she started noticing boys? Nita wondered. Or is something else going on?

Something scrabbled at the back door. Dairine sighed, came back through the dining room and the kitchen, went to the screen door, and pushed it open. A clatter of many little feet followed, as what appeared to be a little silvery-shelled laptop computer, about the

size of a large paperback book, spidered into the kitchen on multiple spindly legs.

Nita peered at it as it followed Dairine back into the living room. "Am I confused," she said, "or is that thing getting smaller?"

"You're always confused," said Dairine as she headed for her room, "but yeah, he's smaller. Just had an upgrade."

Nita shook her head and went back to looking at her mom's list. Dairine's version of the wizard's manual had arrived as software for the household's first computer, and had been through some changes during the course of her Ordeal. Finally she'd wound up with this machine...if machine was the right word for something that was clearly alive in its own right. In the meantime the household's main computer continued to go through periodic changes, which made some of the neighbors suspect that Nita's father was making more money as a florist than he really was. For his own part, Nita's dad shrugged and said, "Your mom says it does the spreadsheets just fine. I don't want to know what else it might do... and as long as I don't have to pay extra for it..."

The phone on the wall rang. Her dad went over to it, picked it up. "Hello... Yes. Yes, you did, dopey... I am... Wait and I'll read it to you... Oh. Well, okay, sure... She just came in. No, both of them... Sure, I'll ask."

Nita's dad put his head around the corner. "Honey, your mom forgot a couple other things, too, so she's coming back. She says, do you want to go clothes shopping? They're having sales at a couple of the stores in the mall."

Nita couldn't think of anything else to do at the moment. "Sure."

Her dad turned his attention back to the phone. Nita went back to her room to change into a top that was easier to get in and out of in a hurry. From upstairs she could hear faint thumping and bumping noises. What's she doing up there? she thought, and when she finished changing, Nita went up the stairs to Dairine's room.

It was never the world's tidiest space—full of books and a ridiculously large collection of stuffed animals — but now it was even more disorganized than usual. Everything that had been on Dairine's desk, including chess pieces and chessboard, various schoolbooks, notebooks, calculators, pens, papers, paintbrushes, watercolor pads, compasses, rulers, a Walkman and its earphones, and much less classifiable junk, was now all over Dairine's bed. The desk was solely occupied by an extremely handsome, brushed stainless-steel cube, about a foot square, sitting on a clear Lucite base. Dairine looked over her shoulder at Nita as she came in. "Whaddaya think?" she said.

"I think it's gorgeous," Nita said, "but what is it?"

Dairine turned it around. There on one side was what could have been mistaken for the logo of a large computer company... but there was no bite out of the piece of fruit in question. The logo was inset into the side of the cube in frosted white and was glowing demurely. This by itself would not have been all that unusual, except that there was no sign of any cord plugged into any wall.

"You mean this is a computer"} Is this what you're replacing the old downstairs one with?" Nita said, sitting down on the bed. "It looks really cool. One of your custom jobs?"

"Nope, it's their new one," Dairine said. "Almost. I mean, the newest one in the stores looks like this. But those don't do what this one does."

Nita sighed. "Internet access?"

Dairine threwNitzzyou-must-be-joking, of-coarse-it-has-that look. Wizards had had a web that spanned worlds for centuries before one small planet's machine-based version of networking had started calling itself World Wide. But that didn't mean they had to be snobbish about it; and local technology, and ideas based on it, routinely got adapted into the business of wizardry as quickly as was feasible. "All the usual Net stuff, sure," Dairine said, "but there's other business... the new version of the online manual, mostly. I'm in the beta group." She glanced over fondly at her portable, which was sitting on the desk chair, scratching itself with some of its legs. "They voted me in."

Nita raised her eyebrows and leaned back. "Coming from the machine intelligences, that sounds like a compliment. Just make sure you don't mess up Dad's accounting software when you port it over." She cocked an eye at the portable, which was still scratching. "Spot here have some kind of problem?"

"If you're smart, you won't suggest he's got bugs!"

"No, of course not..."

Dairine leaned against the desk. "His shell's itching him from the last molt. But he's also been getting more like an organic life-form lately. I don't know whether it's a good thing or not, but there's nothing wrong with his processing functions, or his implementation of the manual, and he seems okay when we talk." Dairine looked at the laptop thoughtfully. "I thought Kit was going to be with you. He said he wanted to see the new machine when it came in."

"Huh?"

Nita's heart sank a little at the look Dairine was giving her. But her sister just picked the laptop up off the chair and put it on the desk. The laptop reared itself up on some of its legs and went up the side of the new computer's case like a spider, clambering onto the top and crouching there. Somehow it managed to look satisfied, a good trick for something that didn't have a face. Dairine sat on the end of the bed. "Something going on?"

Nita didn't answer immediately.

"Uh-huh," her sister said. "Neets, it's no use. Mom and Dad you might be able to hide it from for a while, but where I'm concerned, you might as well have it tattooed on your forehead. What's the problem?"

Nita stared at the bedspread, what she could see of it. "I had a fight with Kit. I can't believe him. He's gotten so—I don't know—he doesn't listen, and he—"

"Neets," Dairine said. "Level with me. By any chance... are you on the rag?" Nita's jaw dropped. Dairine fell over laughing. Nita gave Dairine an annoyed look until she quieted down. At last, when Dairine was wiping her eyes, she muttered, "I don't have that problem. Anyway, it's the wrong time."

"Well, you do a real good imitation of it," Dairine said. "If that's not it, what is the problem?"

Nita crossed her legs, frowning at the floor. "I don't know," she said. "Since I got back, it's like...like Kit doesn't trust me anymore. In the old days—"

"When dinosaurs walked the earth."

"Nobody likes a smart-ass, Dairine. Before I went away, if I'd given him the spell I gave him today, after all that work, he'd have said, fine, let's do it! Now, all of a sudden, everything's too much trouble. He doesn't even want to try."

"Maybe he doesn't want to blow energy on something that looks like it's going to fail," Dairine said.

"Boy, and I thought he was the winner of the tactlessness sweepstakes right now," Nita said. "You should call him up and offer to coach him."

"He'll have to make an appointment," Dairine said, pushing the pillows into a configuration she could lean on. "I've been busy." But her face clouded as she said it.

Aha, Nita thought. "I was going to ask you about that—"

The open window let in the sound of a car pulling into the driveway below. Dairine looked out the window. Below, a car door opened and shut, though the car's engine didn't turn off. "There's Mom," Dairine said.

Nita sighed and got up.

"But one thing," Dairine said. "Was Kit clear that the guy you were seeing over there—" "I wasn't seeing him!"

"Yeah, right. Ronan. You sure Kit isn't confused about that?" Nita stared. "Of course he isn't."

"You sure you're not confused about it?" For that, Nita had no instant answer. "Nita?" her mother called up the stairs.

"Later," Nita said to Dairine. "And don't think you're getting off easy. I want a few words with you about 'busy.'"

Dairine made a noncommittal face and got up to do something to the new computer as Nita went out.

In the darkness, Kit stood very still. He had never seen or experienced a blackness so profound; and with it came a bizarre, anechoic silence in which not even his ears rang.

"Ponch?" he said.

Or tried to say. No sound came out. Kit tried to speak again, tried to shout...and heard nothing, felt nothing. It was the kind of effect you might expect from being in a vacuum. But he knew that feeling, having been there once or twice. This was different, and creepier by far.

Well, hang on, Kit thought. Don't panic. Nothing bad has happened yet.

But that doesn't mean that it's not going to. Come to think of it, am I even breathing? Kit couldn't feel the rise of his chest, couldn't feel or hear a pulse. What happens if there's nothing to breathe here? What happens if I suffocate?

True, he didn't feel short of breath. Yet, said the back of his mind. Kit tried to swallow, and couldn't feel it happening. Slowly, old fears were creeping up his spine, making his neck hairs stand on end in their wake. It was a long time since Kit had gotten over being afraid of the dark... but no dark he'd had to cope with as a little kid had ever been as dark as this. And those darknesses had been scary because of the possibility that there was something hiding in them. This one was frightening, and getting more so by the minute, because of the sheer certainty that there was nothing in it. I've had enough of this. Which way is out?!

... But no! Kit thought then. I'm not leaving without my dog. I'm not leaving Ponch here and running away!

But how do you run away when you can't move? And how do you find something when you can't go after it? The horror of being trapped here, wherever here was, rose in him. I'm not going to put up with this, Kit thought. I'm not going to just stand here and be terrified! He tried to strain every muscle, tried to strain even one, and couldn't move any of them. It was as if his body suddenly belonged to someone else.

So / can't move. But I can still think—

There was a spell Kit knew as well as his transit spells, so well that he didn't even bother keeping it in compacted form anymore; he could say it in one breath. It was the spell he used to make a small light for reading under the covers at night. Kit could see the spell in his mind, fifty-nine characters in the Speech, twenty-one syllables. Kit pronounced them clearly in his mind, said the last word that tied the knot in the spell, and turned it loose—

Light. Just a single source of light, pale and silvery. There was no way to tell for sure if it was coming from near or far; it looked small, like a streetlight seen from blocks away. Just seeing it relieved Kit tremendously. It was the first change he had managed to make in this environment. And if he could do that, he could do something else. Just take a moment and think what to do—

Kit realized he was gasping for breath. He also realized that he was able to feel himself gasping. He tried to move his arms, but it was like trying to swim in taffy. As he concentrated on that light, he thought he saw a change in it. The light's moving— But that was wrong. Something dark was moving in front of it. Oh no, what's that—

Suddenly he could move his hand a little. He reached toward his pocket to fish out something he could use as a weapon if he had to protect himself. It was taking too long. The dark thing was blocking the light, getting closer. Kit strained as hard as he could to get his hand into his pocket, but there was no time, and the dark object got closer, flailing its way toward him. Kit felt around in his mind for one other spell he'd used occasionally when he had to. Not one that he liked to use, but when it came to the choice between surviving and going down without a fight...

The dark shape blotted out the light, leaving it visible only as a faint halo around whatever was coming. Kit said the first half of the spell in his mind and then waited. He wasn't going to use it unless he absolutely had to, for killing was not something a wizard did unless there was no choice.

The dark shape was closer. Kit felt the spell lying ready in his mind, turning and burning and wanting to get out and do what it had been built for. But not yet, Kit thought, setting his teeth. Not just yet. I want to see—

The black shape was right in front of him now. It launched itself at him. Kit got ready to think the last word of the spell—

—and the dark thing hit him chest high, and started washing his face as it knocked him over backward.

The two of them came down hard together on blacktop. Suddenly everything seemed bright as day in the single light of the streetlight down at the end of the side street. There Kit lay in the road, with a bump that was going to be about the size of a phoenix's egg starting to form on the back of his head, and on top of him Ponch washed his face frantically, saying, "Did you see it? Did you see what I found? Did you? Did you?"

Kit didn't do anything at first but grab his dog and hug him, thinking, Oh, God, I almost blew him up; thank you for not letting me blow him up! Then he sat up, looking around him, and pushed Ponch off with difficulty. "Uh, yeah," he said, "I think so... But why are you all wet?"

"It was wet there."

"Not where / was," Kit said. "But am I glad you came along when you did. Come on, let's get out of the street before someone sees us." Fortunately this was a quiet part of town, without much traffic in the evening, and the two of them had the additional protection that most people didn't recognize wizardry even when it happened right in front of them. Any onlooker would most likely just have seen a kid and his dog suddenly fall over in the middle of the street, where they'd probably been playing, unseen, a moment before.

Kit got up and brushed himself off, feeling weird to be able to move. "Home now?" said Ponch, bouncing around him.

"You better believe it," Kit said, and they started to walk back down the street. "I'm hungry!"

"We'll see about something for you when we get in." "Dog biscuits!" Ponch barked, and raced down the street. Kit went after him. When he came in the back door, his father was just taking the spaghetti pot over to the sink to drain it. "Perfect timing," he said.

Kit looked in astonishment at the beat-up kitchen wall clock. It was only fifteen minutes since he'd left. His father looked at him strangely. "Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Kit shook his head. "Uh...I'm okay. I'll explain later. Leave mine in the pot for me for a few minutes, will you, Pop?" He headed into the living room and sat down by the phone.

That was when the shakes hit him. He just sat there and let it happen—not that he had much choice—and meanwhile enjoyed the wonderful normality of the living room: the slightly tacky lamps his mother refused to get rid of, the fact that the rug needed to be vacuumed. At least there was a rug, and a floor it was nailed to—not that terrifying empty nothingness under his feet. Finally Kit composed himself enough to pick up the phone and dial a local number.

After a few rings someone picked up. A voice said, "Tom Swale." "Tom, it's Kit."

"Hey there, fella, long time no hear. What's up?"

"Tom—" Kit paused, not exactly sure how to start this. "I need to ask you something about your dogs." "Oh no," Tom said, sounding concerned. "What have they done now?"

"Nothing," Kit said. "And I want to know how they do it."

There was a pause. "Can we start this conversation again?" Tom said. "Because you lost me somewhere. Like at the beginning."

"Uh, right. Annie and Monty—" "You're saying they didn't do anything?" "Not that I know of."

"Okay. This conversation now makes sense to Sherlock Holmes, if no one else. Keep working on me, though."

Kit laughed. "Okay. Tom, your dogs are always turning up in your backyard with... you know. Weird things."

"Including you, once, as I recall." "Hey, don't get cute," Kit said.

He was then immediately mortified by the tone he had taken with his Senior wizard, a genuinely nice man who had a lot to do in both his jobs and didn't need thirteen-year-olds sassing him. But Tom simply burst out laughing. "Okay, I deserved that. Are you asking me how they do it?"

"Yeah."

"Then it's my reluctant duty to tell you that I'm not sure. Wizards' pets tend to get strange. You know that."

"But do they always?"

"Well, except for our macaw—who was strange to start with and who then turned out to be one of the Powers That Be in a bird suit—yes, mostly they do."

"Are there any theories about why?"

"Loads. The most popular one is that wizards bend the shape of certain aspects of space-time awry around them, so that we're sort of the local equivalent of gravity lenses... and creatures associated with us for long periods tend to acquire some wizardly qualities themselves. Is this helping you?"

There was a lot of barking going on in the background. "I think so."

"Good, because as you can probably hear, the non-weird part of our local canines' lifestyle has kicked in with a vengeance, and they say they want their dinners. But they can wait a few minutes. As far as wizards' dogs are concerned, the development of 'finding' behaviors seems to be relatively common. It may be an outgrowth of the retrieving or herding behaviors that some dogs have had bred into them. Does Ponch have any Labrador in him?"

"Uh, there might be some in there." This had been a topic of idle discussion around Kit's house for a long time, his father mostly referring to Ponch, when the subject came up, as "the Grab Bag." "But he's mostly Border collie. Some German shepherd, too."

"Sounds about right."

"But Tom—" Kit was wondering how to phrase this. "That the dogs might be able to find things, that I can understand. But how can they findplaces? Because Ponch has started finding them."

There was quite a long pause. "That could be interesting," Tom said. "Has he taken you to any of these places?"

"Just once. Just now." "Are you all right?"

"Now I am. I think," Kit said, starting to shake again. "You sure?"

"Yeah," Kit said. "It's all right. It was just.. .nothing. No sound, no light or movement. But Ponch got in there, and he knew how to get out again. He got me out, in fact, because I couldn't do much of anything."

"That's interesting," Tom said. "Would you consider going there again?"

"Not right now!" Kit said. "But later on, yeah. I want to find out where that was! And how it happened."

"Well, pack animals do prefer to work in groups. From Ponch's point of view, you two probably constitute a small pack, and maybe that's why he's able to share his new talent with you. But until now, to the best of my knowledge, no wizard's found out exactly

where the dogs go to get the things they bring back, because no one's been able to go along. If you really want to follow up on this—"

"Yeah, I do."

"Then be careful. You should treat this as an unstable worldgating; you may not be able to get back the same way you left. Better check the manual for a tracing-and-homing spell to keep in place. And make sure you take enough air along. Even though Ponch seems unaffected after short jaunts, there's no guaranteeing that the two of you will stay that way if you linger." "Okay. Thanks."

"One other thing. I'd confine the wizardry to just the two of you."

Kit was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You're saying that I should leave Nita out of this..."

Tom paused, too. "Well, it's possible that the only one who's going to be safe with Ponch as you start investigating this will be you. The semisymbiotic relationship might be what got you out of your bad situation last time. You don't want to endanger anyone else until you're sure what's going on."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"But there's something else," Tom said. "I just had a look at the manual. Nita's assignment status has changed. It says, 'independent assignment, indeterminate period, subject confidential.' You know what that's about?"

"I have an idea," Kit said, though he was uncertain. "It sounds like she's chasing down something of her own," Tom said. "Usually when there's a formal status change like that, it's unwise to interrupt the other person unless you need their help on something critical to an ongoing project."

"Uh, yeah," Kit said. Now, how much does he know? "We just wound up a project, so nothing's going on." He felt guilty at the way he'd put that—but there were lots of things that "we" could mean.

"Okay. I saw the precis on that last one, though. Nice work; we'll see how it holds up. But as regards Ponch, let me know when you find something out. The manual will want an annotation from you on the subject, though it'll 'trap' the raw data as you go. And if you find anything in Ponch's behavior that has to do with more-normal worldgating, tell the gating team in New York—though the fact that a dog's involved is probably going to make them laugh, if it doesn't actually ruffle their fur..."

"So to speak. Okay, Tom. Thanks!"

"Right. Best to Nita." And Tom hung up, to the sound of more impatient barking. Ouch, Kit thought. The last few words made him hurt inside.

But he took a moment to get over it, then got up and went back into the kitchen to see about some spaghetti.

Friday Night

AFTER DINNER KIT WENT upstairs to his bedroom, pausing by the door to Carmela's room, at the sound of a faint hissing noise coming from inside. He knocked on the door.

"Come in!" his sister shouted.

Slightly surprised, Kit stuck his head in the door. His sister was lying on her bed, on her stomach, and the source of the hissing was the earphones she was wearing. On the TV, it looked as if a young boy in a down vest and baseball cap was being electrocuted by a long-tailed yellow teddy bear. "Oh," Kit said, now understanding why Carmela had shouted.

"What?" His sister pulled one of the earphones out.

"Nothing," Kit said. "I heard something going 'sssssssss' in here. Thought maybe it was your brains escaping."

His sister rolled her eyes.

"Isn't that kind of stuff a little below your age group?" Kit said.

Carmela ostentatiously put the earphone back in. "Not when you're using it to learn Japanese. Now go away."

Kit closed her door and, for once, did what she told him. Carmela was no more of a nuisance to Kit than she had to be at her age. She had even taken his wizardry pretty calmly, for an otherwise excitable fifteen-year-old, when Kit had told the family about it. After the shock wore off, "I always knew you were weird" had been Carmela's main response. Still, Kit kept an eye on her, and always put his manual away where she wouldn't find it; the thought of her turning into an older version of Dairine terrified him. Still, wizardry finds its way. If it's gonna, happen, there's no way I can stop it. His older sister, Helena, seemed safe from this fate, being too old for even late-onset wizardry. She had just left for her first year of college at Amherst, apparently relieved to get out of what she described as "a genuine madhouse." Kit loved her dearly but was also slightly (and guiltily) relieved to be seeing less of her, for she was the only member of the family who seemed to be trying to pretend that Kit's wizardry had never really happened.

Maybe she'll sort it out over the next year or so.

Meantime, I have other problems—

He pushed his door open and looked around at his room. It was a welter of bookshelves; the usual messy bed; a worktable, where he made models; the desk, where his ancient computer sat; and some rock posters, including one from a hilariously overcostumed and overmade-up metal group, which had been a present from Helena when she cleared out her room —"a souvenir," she'd said, "of a journey into the hopelessly retro."

Kit tossed his jacket onto the bed and plopped down into the desk chair, where he put out his hand and whistled for his manual. It dropped into his hand from the little pouch of otherspace where he kept it. Kit pushed the PC's keyboard to one side and opened the manual.

First he turned to the back page, the messaging area. There was nothing there, but he'd known there wouldn't be; he hadn't felt the "fizz" of notification when he picked up the manual. Then Kit paged backward to the active wizards' listing for the New York area. Yes, there it was, between CAILLEBERT, ARMINA, and CALLANIN, EOIN:

CALLAHANJuanitaL.

243 E. Clinton Avenue Hempstead, NY 11575 (516) 555-6786

power rating: 6.08 +/-.5 status: conditional active

independent assignment / research:

subject classification withheld period: indeterminate

Apparently the Powers had something planned for her... or were maybe just cutting her some slack.

Sounds like she can use it, too, Kit thought, feeling brief irritation again at the memory of the afternoon. Well, okay.

He paused and then flipped back to a spot a few pages after Nita's listing, running his finger down one column. There it was: RODRIGUEZ, CHRISTOPHER R. Address, phone number, power rating, status, last assignment, blah, blah, blah... . But there was something else after his listing.

Notes: adjunct talent in training

Kit sat back. Now what the heck does that mean?

He heard thumping on the stairs down the hall and glanced up in time to see Ponch hit his door, push it open, and wander in, waving his tail. The dog turned around a few times in the middle of the floor, then lay down with a thump.

Kit looked at him thoughtfully. Ponch banged his tail on the floor a few times, then yawned. "You tired, big guy?" Kit said, and then yawned as well. "Guess I am, too." "It's like chasing squirrels when I do what we did," Ponch said. "I want to sleep afterward." "I understand that, all right," Kit said. "Got a little while to talk?"

"Okay."

"Good boy. Ponch, just where exactly were we?" "I don't know."

"But that wasn't the first time you did that, was it?"

"Uh..." Ponch looked as if he thought he was about to confess to something that would get him in trouble.

"It's okay," Kit said, "I'm not mad. How long have you been doing that?" "You went away," Ponch said. "I went looking for you."

Kit sighed. When Nita had been in Ireland over the summer, he'd "beamed over" there several times to help her out. Once or twice he'd been there long enough to get a mild case of gatelag, and he remembered Ponch's ecstatic and relieved greetings when he came back. "So... when? End of July, beginning of August?"

"I guess. Right after you went the first time." "Okay. But where did you go? Since you didn't find me."

"I tried, I really tried!" Ponch whimpered. "I missed you. You were gone too much." "It's okay; I'm not mad that you didn't find me! It was just an observation." "Oh." Ponch licked his nose in relief.

"So where did you go?"

"It was dark."

"You're right there," Kit said. "The same place we were together?"

"We weren't there together all the time," Ponch said. "You're not there until you do something."

Kit wasn't terribly clear about what Ponch meant. He was tempted to push for more information, but Ponch yawned at him again. "Can we go there another time?"

"Sure." Ponch put his head down on his paws. "Whenever you want. Can I go to sleep now?" "Yeah, go ahead," Kit said. "I wish 7 could."

Shortly, Ponch had rolled over on his side and was

emitting the tiny little snore that always sounded so funny coming from such a big dog. Kit stood up, yawning again. He couldn't put off the reaction to the evening's wizardry much longer, but first he wanted to look into a couple of things. Fortunately, tomorrow was Saturday, and he could sleep late. Kit sat down again, opened the manual once more, and soon found the section he wanted. Tracking and location protocols.. . isodimensional... exodimensional...

Kit found a pen and a pad and started making notes.

The mall was crowded that evening, but not so much so that Nita and her mother had any trouble getting their shopping done. The clothes came first, for Nita's mother was concerned that Nita didn't have anything decent to wear to school; and privately Nita agreed with her. At the first shop they went into, though, some differences emerged between their definitions of decent.

Nita's mom walked among the racks, shaking her head and trying to avoid looking at the two tops and three skirts Nita was carrying. "They're all so expensive," her mother said under her breath. "And they're not terribly well made, either. Such a rip-off..."

Nita knew this wasn't the problem. She trailed along behind, not saying anything. As she finished looking at the racks, her mother stopped and looked at Nita. "Honey, tell me the truth. Are the other girls really wearing stuff like this?" From the nearest rack, she picked up a black skirt identical to one of the ones Nita was carrying, holding it up with a critical expression.

"Stuff exactly like this, Mom. Some of them are shorter. This one's a little conservative." Because I chickened out on the really short one.

"And the principal hasn't been sending people home for wearing skirts this short? Really?" "Really."

"You wouldn't be bending the truth in the service of fashion, here?"

Nita had to laugh at that. "If I was gonna lie to you about anything, Mom, don't you think I would have done it when it was about much bigger stuff? Great white sharks? Saving the world?" And she grinned.

"I begin to wonder," her mom said, putting the skirt back on the rack, "exactly how much you aren't telling me that I ought to know about."

"Tons of things," Nita said. "Where should I start? Did I tell you about the dinosaurs in Central Park?"

Her mother looked over her shoulder with one of those expressions that suggested she wasn't sure whether Nita was joking. But the expression shaded into one that meant her mom had realized this wasn't a joke and she didn't like the idea. "Is this something recent?"

"Uh, kind of. Except we made it so it never happened, and maybe recent isn't the right word."

Nita's mother frowned, perplexed. Nita ignored this; the translation of what she'd said was bothering her. "Potentially recent?" Nita said, to see how the substitution sounded. Unfortunately English lacked the right kind of verb tenses to describe a problem that could be easily expressed in the Speech. "No, it can't happen anymore, I don't think. At least, not that time, it can't. Formerly recent?"

"Stop now," Nita's mother said, "before this takes you, me, and the dinosaurs many places that none of us wants to go, and let's get back to the skirt." She picked it up again. "Honey, your poor old mom tries hard not to live entirely in the last century, but this thing's hardly more than a wide belt."

"Mom, remember when you trusted me about the shark?"

"Yeeees...," her mother said, sounding dubious. "So trust me about the skirt!"

Her mother gave her a cockeyed look. "It's not the sharks I'm worried about," she said. "It's the wolves."

"Mom, I promise you, none of the 'wolves' are going to touch me. I just want to look normal. If I can't be normal, let me at least simulate the effect!"

Her mother looked at her with mild surprise. "You're not having problems at school, are you?" "No, I'm fine."

"The homework—"

"It's no big deal. There's more than there used to be, but so far I'm not overloaded." "You are having problems, though."

"Mom—" Nita sighed. "Nobody beats me up anymore, if that's what you're worried about. They can't. But a lot of the kids still think I'm some kind of nerd princess." She grimaced. Once Nita had thought that when she got into junior high, reading would be seen as normal behavior for someone her age. She was still waiting for this idea to occur to some of her classmates. "It's nothing wizardry will cure. Just believe me when I tell you that dressing in style will help me blend in a little. I know I didn't care much about clothes in grade school, but now it's more of an issue. As for the length, if you're worried that moral rot will set in, I'll promise to let you know if I see any early warning signs."

Her mother smiled slightly. "Okay," she said, put back the skirt she'd been holding, and reached out to take the one Nita was carrying. "Moral rot hasn't been much of a problem with you. So this is an experiment. But if I hear anything from your principal, I'm going to make you wear flour sacks down to your ankles until you graduate. You and the dinosaurs better make a note."

"Noted, Mom," Nita said. "Thanks." She went off to put the other two skirts back where she'd found them. This one's a start. She'll soften up in a couple of weeks, and we can come back for the other ones.

They went to the cash register and paid for the skirt. Then Nita's mom drove them to the supermarket, and as they tooled up and down the aisles with the cart, Nita began to feel normal, almost against her will. But then, while standing there with a bottle of mouthwash in her hand and working out if it was a better bargain than other bottles nearby, Nita's mother suddenly turned to her and said, "What kind of dinosaurs?"

Boy, Nita thought, maybe it's a good thing I didn't mention the giant squid!

When Nita and her mom got home, Nita and Dairine helped put away the groceries (and Nita helped her mom keep Dairine out of them); so it was half an hour before she could get up to her room and fish out her manual. As she picked it up, she felt a faint fizz about the covers, a silent notification that there was a message waiting for her. Hurriedly she flipped it open to the back page. At the top of the page was Kit's name and his manual reference. In the middle of the page were the words: If you need some time by yourself, feel free.

Just that. No annotation, no explanation. Nita flushed hot and cold, then hot again. Why, that little— He wouldn't even pkk up the phone and call me! Or else he's really, really mad, and be doesn't trust himself to talk to me. Or maybe he just doesn't feel like it.

Nita felt an immediate twinge of guilt... and then stomped on it. Why should I feel guilty when he's the one who's screwing up? And then can't take the heat when someone tries to straighten him out about it?

Time by myself? Fine.

"Fine," she said to the manual.

Send reply?

"Yeah, send it," Nita said.

Her reply spelled itself out in the Speech on the page, added a time stamp, and archived itself. Sent.

Nita shut the manual and chucked it onto her desk, feeling a second's worth of annoyed satisfaction... followed immediately by unease. She didn't like the feeling. Sighing, Nita got up and wandered back out to the dining room.

Now that the groceries were gone, computer-printed pages were spread all over the dining-room table. While Nita looked at them, her mother came in from the driveway with a couple more folders' worth of paperwork, dropping them on top of one pile. "Stuff from the flower shop?" Nita said, going to the fridge to get herself a Coke.

"Yup," her mother said. "It's put-Daddy's-incredibly-messed-up-accounts-into-the-computer night."

Nita smiled and sat down at the table. Her father was no mathematician, which probably explained why he pushed her so hard about her math homework. Her mom went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of tea, and put it into the microwave. "You should make him do this," Nita said, idly paging through the incomprehensible papers, a welter of faxes and invoices and In-terflora order logs and many, many illegible, scribbly notes.

"I've tried, honey. The last time he did the accounts, it took me a year to get them straightened out. Never again." The microwave dinged; her mother retrieved the cup, added sugar, and came back in to sit at the end of the table, sipping the tea. "Besides, I don't like to nag your dad. He works hard enough... Why should I make it hard for him when he comes home, too?"

Nita nodded. This was why she didn't mind spending a lot of time at home; with the possible exception of Kit, she seemed to be the only person she knew who had an enjoyable home life. Half the kids in school seemed to be worrying that their parents were about to divorce, but Nita had never even heard her parents raise their voices to each other. She knew they fought — they would vanish into their bedroom, sometimes, when things got tense—but there was no yelling or screaming. That suited Nita entirely. It was possibly also the reason her present fight with Kit was making her so twitchy.

Her mother paged through the paperwork and came up with a bunch of paper-clipped spreadsheet printouts. "Though privately," she muttered as she took the papers apart and started sorting them by month, "there are times I wish I'd never given up ballet. Sure, you get sprains and strains and pulled muscles, and your feet stop looking like anything that ought to be at the end of a human leg, but at least there was never much eye-strain." She smiled slightly. "But if I ever went back to that, there would be all those egos to deal with again. 'Creative differences'... that being code for everybody shouting at one another all day." She shook her head. "This is better. Now where did the pen go?"

Nita fished it out from under the papers and handed it over. Her mother started writing the names of months on top of the spreadsheets. "How many days in May, honey?"

"Thirty-one." Nita started looking around under the papers and came up with another pen. "Mom..." "Hmm?"

"If you had a fight with somebody... and they were incredibly wrong, and you were right... what would you do?"

"Apologize immediately," her mother said.

Nita looked at her in astonishment.

"If they mattered to me at all, anyway," her mother said, glancing up as she put one page aside. "That's what I always do with your dad. Particularly if circumstances have recently proved me to be correct."

"Uh...," Nita said, seriously confused.

Her mom labeled another page and turned it over. "Works for me," she said. "I mean, really, honey..." She glanced at the next page, turned it over, too. "Unless it's about a life-and-death issue, why make a point of being right? Of getting all righteous about it? All it does is make people less likely to listen to you. Even more so if they're close to you."

Nita gave her mother a sidelong look. "But, Mom, if it really is a life-or-death issue—"

"Sweetie, at your age, a lot of things look like life-and-death. Don't get that look; I'm not patronizing you," her mother added. "Or what you do—I know it's been terribly important sometimes. But think of the problem as a graph, where you plot the intensity of experience against total time. You've had less total time to work with than, say, your dad or I have. Things look a lot more important when the 'spreadsheet' is only a page long instead of four or five."

Nita considered that to see if it made sense. To her annoyance, it did. "I hate it when you sneak up on me by being objective," she said.

Her mother produced a weary smile. "I'll take that as a compliment. But it's accidental, honey. It'll take me days to get this sorted out, and right now my whole life is beginning to look like a grid. I don't see why yours shouldn't, too."

Nita smiled and put her head down on her arms. "Okay. But, Mom... what do you do if you find out that you're wrong?"

"Same thing," her mother said. "Apologize immediately. Why change a tactic that works?" "Because it makes you look like a wimp."

Her mother glanced up from the papers again, raising her eyebrows. "Excuse me, I must have missed something. It's not right to apologize when you're wrong?"

Nita saw immediately why Dairine refused to play chess with their mother anymore. She was cornered. "Thanks, Mom," she said, and got up.

Her mother let out a long breath. "Nothing worthwhile is easy, honey," she said, and looked down ruefully at the papers, rubbing her eyes. "This, either. Come to think of it, I could probably use an aspirin about now." And she got up and went to get one.

Nita was starting to feel like she could use one herself. She's probably right. And something's got to be done. The water situation out there isn't going to just fix itself—

But what am I supposed to do? I can't work with Kit when I'm pissed off at him! It's going to have to wait. The Powers That Be understand that wizards need room to be human, too.

But even as she thought it, Nita felt guilty. A wizard knew that the energy had been running slowly out of

Friday Night

the universe for millennia. Viewed in that context, no delay was worthwhile. Every quantum of energy lost potentially could have been used to make some fragment of the cosmos work better. A relationship, for example...

Nita got up and wandered back to her room, thinking about what she might do to make herself useful, besides the project she and Kit and S'reee had been working on in the bay. It wasn't as if there weren't projects she'd been interested in that Kit hadn't been enthusiastic about. This would be a good time to start one of those.

Yet as Nita shut the door of her room, Dairine's point came back to her. Is it possible that Kit and I really do still have unfinished business about Ronan? Before, Nita wouldn't have thought it likely. Now she wondered. Dairine could be cunning and sly, and a pain in the butt...but she was also a wizard. She wouldn't lie.

But why wouldn't Kit have told me?

Unless he thought the idea was stupid. Or unless he really didn't think it was a problem.

She sat down at the desk and put her feet up on it, and picked up the manual, hoping to feel that fizz... but there was nothing. Nita dropped it in her lap and stared at the dark window. / was stupid with him, she thought. But he wasn't being terribly open-minded, either. Or real tactful.

She opened the manual idly. Life had changed so much since she'd found it; it now seemed as if she'd had the manual within reach all her life—or all the life that mattered. In some ways it seemed to Nita as if all her childhood had simply been an exercise in marking time, waiting for the moment when this book would snag her hand as she trailed it idly down a shelf full of books in the children's library. It was always handy now, either in her book bag or tucked away in her personal claudication. A couple years' use had taught Nita that the manual wasn't the infallibly omniscient resource she'd taken it for at the beginning. It did contain everything you needed to know to do your work... but it left deciding what the work was to you. You might make mistakes, but they were yours. The manual made it all possible, though. It was compendium, lifeline, communications device, encyclopedia, weapon, and silent adviser all rolled into one. Nita couldn't imagine what wi/ardry would be like without it.

And there was something else associated with wizardry that she couldn't imagine being without, either.

She riffled through the pages, let her hand drop. The manual fell open at a spot near its beginning, and as Nita looked down, she wondered why she should even be surprised that she found herself looking at this particular page.

In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art, which is Its gift, in Life's service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened or threaten another. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded—

She let out a long unhappy breath as she gazed at the words. I will ease pain—

Nita had made her share of mistakes during her practice, but if there was one thing she prided herself on, it was taking the Oath seriously. But lately maybe I haven't been doing a very good job. On the large things, yeah. But have they been blocking my view of the small ones?

And what makes me think that being friends with Kit is something small?

Nita closed the book, put it down on the desk, and pushed it away. It's too late tonight. Tomorrow. I'll go over and see him tomorrow... and we'll see what happens.

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

SLEEPING IN TURNED OUT to be an idle fantasy. Kit rolled over just after dawn, feeling muzzy and wondering what had managed to jolt him out of a peculiar dream, when suddenly he realized what it was. A cold wet nose had been stuck into his ear.

"Ohh, Ponch..." Kit rolled over and tried to hide his head under the pillow. This was a futile gesture. The nose followed him, and then the tongue.

Finally he had no choice but to get up. Kit sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes, while Ponch jumped up and washed the back of Kit's neck as if he hadn't a worry in the world. Kit, for his own part, ached as if someone had run him over lightly with a truck, but this was a normal side effect of doing a large, complex wizardry; it would pass.

"Awright, awright," Kit muttered, trying to push Ponch away. He glanced at the clock on his dresser— Ten after six?!,.. What have I done to deserve this?—and then looked over at the desk. His manual sat where he had left it, last thing. Closing it, finally getting ready to turn in, he had felt the covers fizz, had opened the book to the back page, and had seen Nita's response.

Fine.

He got up, went over to the desk, and opened the manual again. Nothing had been added since. Nita was plainly too pissed off even to yell at him. But Tom had been pretty definite about letting her be if she was working on some other piece of business. Okay. Let her get on with it.

He shut the manual and went to root around in his dresser for jeans and a polo shirt. Ponch was jumping for joy around him, his tongue lolling out and making him look unusually idiotic. "What're you so excited about?" Kit asked in the Speech.

"Out, we're gonna go out, aren't we?" Ponch said in a string of muffled woofs and whines. "We're gonna go there again, you can go with me, this is great, let's go out!" And Ponch abruptly sat down and licked his chops. "I'm hungry," he said.

There..., Kit thought, and shuddered. But now that the experience was half a day behind him, he was feeling a little less freaked out by it, and more curious about what had happened.

He put his head out his bedroom door. It was quiet; nobody in his house got up this early on a Saturday, unless it was his dad, who was an occasional surf-casting nut and would sometimes head out before dawn to fish the flood tide down at Point Lookout. No sign of that happening today, though.

"Okay," he said to Ponch. "You can have your breakfast, and then I want a shower... and then we'll go out. After I take care of something."

Ponch spun several times in a tight circle and then launched himself out into the hall and down the stairs.

Kit went after him, fed him, and then went back upstairs to take a shower and make his plans. When he came downstairs, Ponch was waiting at the side door to be let out.

"In a minute," Kit said. "Don't / get something to eat, too?" "Oh."

"Yeah, coh.' You big wacko." Kit grabbed a quart of milk out of the fridge and drank about half of it, then opened one of the nearby cupboards and found a couple of the awful muesli-based breakfast bars that his sister liked. He stuck them in his pocket and then went to the write-on bulletin board stuck to the front of the fridge. The pen, as usual, wasn't in the clip where it belonged; Kit found it behind the sink. On the board he wrote: GONE OUT ON BUSINESS, BACK LATER. This was code, which Kit's family now understood. To Ponch he said, "You go do what you have to first... I have something to get ready."

Kit let the dog out and locked the door behind them. Then he and Ponch went out into the backyard. It wasn't nearly as tidy or decorative as Nita's. Kit's father wasn't concerned about it except as somewhere to sit outside on weekends, and so while the lawn got mowed regularly, the back of the yard was a jungle of sassafras saplings and blackberry bushes. Into this little underbrush forest Ponch vanished while Kit sat down on a creaking old wooden lounger and opened his manual.

He knew in a general way what he wanted—a spell that would keep him connected to Ponch in mind, letting him share the dog's perceptions. It also needed to be something that would keep them within a few yards of each other, so that if physical contact became important, Kit could have it in a hurry. He paged through the manual, looking for one particular section and finding it: Bindings, ligations, and cinctures—wizardries that dealt with holding energy or matter in place, in check, or in alignment with something else. Simplex, multiplex.. . Here's one. First-degree complex aelysis.. .proof strength in mdynes... to the minus four... The original formula for the spell, Kit saw, had called for fish's breath, women's beards, and various other hard-to-find ingredients. But over many years the formula had been refined so that all you needed to build it now were knowledge, intention, a basic understanding of paraphysics, and the right words in the Speech.

Yeah, this is what I need. "All right," Kit said softly in the Speech. "This is a beta-class short-term interlocution." He pronounced the first few sentences, and the spell started to build itself in the air in front of him—a twining and growing chain of light, word linking to word in a structure like a chain of DNA, but with three main strands instead of two.

After a couple of minutes he was finished and the structure nearly complete. Kit plucked it out of the air, tested it between his hands. It looked faintly golden in the early morning light, and felt at least as strong as a steel chain would, though in his hands it was as light and fine as so much spun silk.

Not bad, Kit thought. But there was still one thing missing. The place down at one end of the spell where his own name and personal information went was now full; Kit had pasted it in from the wizardry he and S'reee had just done. But as for Ponch... It embarrassed him to have to turn to his dog, who'd now returned from the bushes and was sitting and watching Kit with great interest. "Ponch," he said, "I can't believe I've never asked you this before. But what's your name?"

The dog laughed at him. "You just said it." "But Grrarhah down the street uses a Cyene name."

"If the people you lived with named you Tinker-bell," Ponch said in a surprisingly dry voice, "so would you."

Kit had to grin at that. "I don't mind the name you gave me," Ponch said. "I use that. It says who I am." He stuck his nose in Kit's ear again and started to wash it.

"Euuuu, Ponch!" Kit pushed him away...but not very hard. "Okay, look, give it a rest," Kit said. "I have to finish something here." "Let me see."

Kit showed him the wizardry. As Ponch watched, Kit pronounced the fifteen or sixteen syllables of the Speech that wound themselves into the visible version of Ponch's name, containing details like his age and his breed (itself a tightly braided set of links with about ten strands involved). Ponch nosed at the leash; it came alive with light as he did so. "There's the collar," Kit said, looping the end of the spell through the wizard's knot he had tied there, then holding the wide loop up. The similar loop at the other end, made up of Kit's name and personal information, would go around his wrist.

Ponch slipped his head through the wider of the two loops, then shook himself. The loop tightened down. "That feel okay?" Kit said. "Not too tight?"

"It's fine. Let's go."

"Okay," Kit said, and stood up. He slipped his wrist through the other loop and pronounced the six words that got the environmental and tracking functions of the wizardry going, the parts that would snap them back here if anything life threatening happened. The "chain" flickered, showing that the added functions were working. "Right. Show me how."

"Like this—"

Ponch took no more than a step forward, and without a moment's hesitation that darkness slammed silently down around them again. This time at least Kit was sure he had air around him and Ponch, and he had oxygenation routines ready to kick in if their bodies were affected by any kind of paralysis. Nonetheless, Kit still couldn't move, couldn't see anything.

Or could he?

Kit would have blinked if he could have, or squinted. Often enough before, in very dark places, he'd had the illusion that he could see a very faint light when there was actually nothing there. This was like that —yet somehow different, not as diffuse. He could just make out a tiny glint of light, far away there in the dark, distant as a star...

It faded. Or maybe it wasn't truly there at all. Oh well. Ponch?

Here I am.

And abruptly Kit really could see something, though he still couldn't move. Down just out of range of his direct vision, though still perceptible as a dim glow, he could tell that the "leash" was there, the long chain structure of the wizardry glinting with life as the power ran up and down it. It was unusual to be able to see it doing that, instead of as a steady glow; there was something odd about the flow of time here. Maybe that was the cause of the illusion of breathlessness.

Kit tried to speak out loud but again found that he couldn't. It didn't matter; the leash wizardry would carry his thoughts to Ponch. What do we do now? Kit said silently.

Be somewhere.

Kit normally would have thought that that was unavoidable. Now he wasn't so sure. Well, where did you have in mind?

Here.

And something appeared before them. It was hard to make out the distance at first, until Kit saw what the thing was: a small shape, pale gray against that darkness, except for a whiter underbelly.

It was a squirrel.

This was so peculiar that even if he hadn't been frozen in place, Kit still wouldn't have done much but stand and stare. There it was, just a squirrel, sitting up on its hind legs and looking at them with that expression of interest-but-not-fear you get from a squirrel that knows you can't possibly get near it in time to do anything about it.

Okay, Kit said in his mind, completely confused. Now what?

Shhh.

The instruction amused Kit. He wasn't exactly used to his dog telling him what to do. But suddenly, a little farther away, there was another squirrel, rooting around in the grass, looking for something: a nut, Kit supposed.

And another squirrel... and then another. They were all doing different things, but each of them existed absolutely by itself, as if spotlighted on a dark stage. Next to him, Ponch shifted from foot to foot, whimpering in growing excitement.

There were more squirrels every moment... ten of them, twenty, fifty. But then something else started to happen. Not only squirrels, but other things began to appear. Trees, at first. / guess that makes sense; where there are squirrels, there are always trees. They were unusually broad of trunk, astonishingly tall, with tremendous canopies of leaves. And slowly, underneath them, grass began to roll out and away into what built itself into a genuine landscape—grass patched with sunlight, wavering with the shadows of branches. The sky, where it could be seen, came last, the usual creamy blue sky of a suburban area near a large city, spreading itself gradually up from horizon to zenith, as if a curtain were being lifted. Finally, there was the sun, and Kit felt a breeze begin to blow.

Ponch made a noise halfway between a whine and a bark and leaped forward, dragging Kit out of immobility, as he tore off toward the nearest squirrel. The whole landscape now instantly came alive around them like a live-action version of a cartoon: squirrels running in every direction, and some of them rocketing up the trees, all of them in frantic motion—especially the one that Ponch was chasing as he dragged Kit along. This was an experience Kit had had many, many times before in the local park, and all he could do now was try not to fall flat on his face as he was pulled along at top speed.

Kit laughed, finding that his voice worked again. Briefly he considered just letting Ponch off the spell leash. But then that struck Kit as a bad idea. He still had no sense of where they were, or what the rules of this place were. Better just tell the spell to extend as far as it needs to, so he can run.

It took a few seconds to change the loci-of-effect and extensibility variables—longer than it normally would have taken, but then, Kit thought he wasn't doing badly for someone who was being hauled along through a forest at what felt like about thirty miles an hour. Finally Kit was able to extend the leash, then slowed down from the run until he was standing there in the bright sun between two huge trees, watching his dog go tearing off across the beautiful grass, barking his head off with delight.

He's found Squirrel World, Kit thought, and had to laugh. There was seemingly infinite running room, there was an endless supply of squirrels, and there were trees for the squirrels to run up, because there had to be some challenge about this for it to be fun.

He's found dog heaven. Or maybe Ponch heaven...

Ponch was far off among the trees now. Kit sat down on the grass to watch him. This space had some strange qualities, for despite the increased distance, Kit's view of Ponch was still as clear and sharp as if he were looking at him through a telescope. Ponch was closing on the squirrel he'd been chasing. As Kit watched, the squirrel just made it to the trunk of a nearby tree and went up it like a shot. Ponch danced briefly around on his hind legs at the bottom of the tree, barking his head off, then spotted another squirrel and went off after that one, instead.

Maybe this isn't exactly Ponch heaven after all, Kit thought. Could this be the dog version of a computer game? For there didn't seem to be instant wish fulfillment here. Ponch still wasn't catching the squirrels; he was mostly chasing them.

Kit watched this go on for a while, as his dog galloped around over about fifty acres of perfect parkland, littered with endless intriguing targets. The question is, where is this? Somewhere inside his mind? Or is it an actual place? Though it's a weird one. Their entry here hadn't been anything like a normal worldgating. Normally you stepped through a gate, whether natural or constructed, and found another place waiting there, complete. Or sometimes, as he'd seen happen in Ireland over the summer, that other place came sweeping over you, briefly pushing aside the one where you'd been standing earlier.

But this was different. It's as if Poncb was making this world, one piece at a time...

He gazed down at the grass. Every blade was perfect, each slightly different from every other. Kit shook his head in wonder, looked up and saw Ponch still romping across the grass. There was always another squirrel to chase, and Kit noticed with amusement that the ones that weren't being chased were actually following Ponch, though always at a discreet distance. So he won't be distracted? When Ponch managed to pursue one closely enough that it actually had to run up a tree, there were always others within range when he was ready for them.

How is he doing this? Kit wondered. "Ponch?"

Ponch let off a volley of frustrated barks at the squirrel he was chasing, which had gone halfway up one of the massive tree boles and was now clinging to it head down and chattering at him. Kit couldn't make out specific Skioroin words at this point, but the tone was certainly offensive. Ponch barked at the squirrel more loudly. "Yeah, okay, get over it," Kit yelled. "There are about five thousand more like him out there! Can you give it a rest so we can have a few words, please?"

Ponch came galloping back to Kit a few seconds later. "Isn't it great, do you like it, do you want to chase some, I can make some more for you..."

"Sit down. Your tongue's gonna fall off if it waves around much more than that," Kit said. Ponch sat down beside him and leaned on Kit in a companionable manner, looking entirely satisfied with life, and panting energetically. "Look," Kit said. "How are you doing this?"

"I don't know."

"You must know a little," Kit said. "You told me yesterday, 'You're not there until you do something.' What did you do?"

"I wanted you."

"Yes, but that was the first time." "That's what I did."

Kit sighed and put his head down on his knees, thinking. "This," he said, "what you did just now. How did you do this? Where did all these squirrels come from?"

"I want squirrels."

"Yeah, and boy, have you got them," said Kit, looking around him in amusement. The two of them were completely surrounded by squirrels, an ever growing crowd of them, all sitting up on their little hind legs and staring at Ponch, all intent and quiet... as if someone in a whimsical mood had swapped them for the seagulls in The Birds. "Where did they all come from?"

Ponch sat quiet for a moment, and stopped panting as a look of intense concentration came over his face. Then he looked at Kit and said, "I wanted them here."

Suddenly Kit got it. The way Ponch used wanted was not the way it would have been used in Cyene; it was the form of the word used in the Speech. And in the wizardly language, the verb was not passive. The closest equivalent in English would be willed; in the Speech, the word implies not just desire but creation.

"You made them," Kit said.

"I wanted them to be here. And here they are." The dog jumped up and began to bounce for sheer joy.

"Isn't it great^l"

Kit rubbed his nose and wondered about that. "What happens when you catch them?" he asked, to buy himself time.

"I shake them around a lot," Ponch said, "and then I'm sorry for them."

Kit grinned, for this was more or less the way things went in the real world. But then he paused, surprised. He'd slipped and spoken to Ponch in English, but the dog had understood him.

"Are you able to understand me when I'm not using the Speech?" Kit asked. Ponch looked amused. "Only here. I made it so I would always know what you're saying." "Wow," Kit said. He looked around him again at the patient squirrels. "Have you made anything else?" "Lots of things. Why don't you make something?"

"Uh...," Kit said, and stopped. The ramifications of this were beginning to sink in, and he wanted to make some preparations. "Not right this minute. Look, you wanna go see Tom and Carl?"

Ponch began to bounce around again. "Dog biscuits!"

"Yeah, probably they'll give you some. And if they have a spare clue for me to chew on, that wouldn't hurt, either." Kit got up. "You done with these guys?"

"Sure. They wait for me. Even if they didn't, I can always make more." "Okay. Let's go home."

Ponch acquired a look of concentration. A second later, the landscape went out, as if a light had simply been turned off behind it, and Kit felt a tug on the leash. He followed it—

—and they stepped out again into early morning in Kit's backyard: birdsong, dew, the sound of a single station wagon going down the street in front of the house as the newspaper guy threw the morning paper into people's driveways...

Kit took a deep breath of the morning air and relaxed. From above them came an annoyed chattering noise. Ponch wheeled around and began dancing on his hind legs and barking.

"Didn't you just have enough of those?" Kit said. "Shut up; you're going to wake up the whole neighborhood! Come on... We need to go see Tom."

Nita rolled over in her bed that morning, feeling strangely achy. At first she wondered if she was catching a cold; but it didn't seem to be that. Probably it's just from being upset, she thought. Hey, I wonder...

She got up and padded over to the desk, where her manual lay. Nita picked it up and flipped to the back page, hoping to see some long angry rant from Kit. But there was nothing.

She broke out in a sweat at the sight of the page with not a thing on it but the previous two communications. He must be completely furious, she thought. This is gonna be awful... and when Dairine hears about it, she's going to laugh herself sick. I'll probably have to kill her.

Nita put the manual down, pulled open a drawer in her dresser and extracted a clean T-shirt, then pulled it on along with yesterday's jeans and turned back to the desk. / wonder what he's up to, though. Maybe he's out working on the water with S'reee.

Nita flipped through to Kit's listing in the directory and glanced at it. Last project: mesolittoral waterquality intervention, for details see reference MSI-B14-/XHU/ Py66384-67/1141-2211/ABX6655/3: other participants, Callahan, Juanita L, hominid / Sol III, S'reee alhruuni-Aoul-mmeiihnhwiii!r, cetacean / Sol HI; intervention status complete /functioning...

Nita's mouth dropped open.

... anentropia rate 0.047255-E8; effectiveness rating 3.5 +/- .10; review scheduled Julian date 2451809.5

—

Oh, my God. It's working!

The initial reaction of sheer delight at the solution of a problem that had had them all literally running in circles for so long was now drowned by a nearly intolerable wave of combined embarrassment and annoyance.

They got it working without me. He was right.

I was wrong.

Nita sat there in shock. / am so stupid!

Yet she couldn't quite bring herself to believe it. And she was still listed as a participant in the spell. Nita paged back to the section where intervention references were kept, and shortly found a copy of the spell diagram that Kit and S'reee had been using.

Nita traced the curves and circles of it, all apparent in an enlarged hologrammatic format when you looked at the page closely. The basic structure of the wizardry was derived broadly from the last pattern she and Kit had worked on together, before they started disagreeing about the details. It was missing any of the extra subroutines she had insisted were absolutely necessary to make the spell work right. The detailed versions of the effectiveness figures were at the bottom of the page, updating themselves as she watched, demonstrating that the water coming out of Jones Inlet was indeed getting cleaner by the second—

Nita sat there in the grip of an attack of complete chagrin. What an utter dork I've been, she thought. I'm going straight over there to apologize. No, I'm not going to wait even that long.

She flipped back to the messaging pages, touched the message from Kit to wake up the reply function. "Kit?" she said in the Speech. "Can we talk?"

Send?

"Send it," Nita said.

Then she waited. But to her complete astonishment, the page just flashed once, leaving her message sitting where it was. Message cannot be dispatched at this time. Please try again later.

What?? "How come?"

The notification blanked out, replaced by the words: Addressee is not in ambit. Please try again later. Nita stared. She had never seen such a description before and didn't have any idea what it meant.

She put the manual down on the desk. "Keep trying," Nita said, and went downstairs. It was quiet; there was no smell of anyone having been making breakfast down there. / may be the only one up.

Nita picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Kit's number. It rang a couple of times, then someone picked up. "Hello?"

It was Kit's sister. "Hola, Carmela!"

"'Ola, Nita," said Carmela, in a somewhat odd voice—she had her mouth full. There was a pause while she swallowed. "You missed him; he's not here."

"Where'd he go, do you know?"

"Nope. He left a note on the fridge; must've been early... said he was going out to do some wizard thing and he'd be back later."

"Today, you think?"

"Oh yeah, today. If he was gonna be gone longer than tonight, he sure would have told Pop and Mama, and they would've screamed, and I would've heard it."

Nita had to chuckle. "Okay, Mela. If he comes in, tell him I called?" "Sure, Neets. No problem."

"Thanks. Bye-bye."

"Byeeee..."

Nita hung up. He's out on errantry... but where? I should have been able to find him. It shouldn't matter if he was on the Moon, or even halfway out of the galaxy. His manual still would have taken the message. It's not like the manuals care about light speed, or anything like that.

After a few moments Nita went back upstairs to see what the manual might be showing. The last page still hadn't changed.

/ don't believe this, Nita thought. I ought to call Tom and Carl and see what they say. Where is he that the manual can't find him?!

She picked up the manual and started to take it downstairs to the phone with her, then stopped. She would have to tell Tom and Carl what had been going on, and she was too embarrassed.

But where was Kit?

Down the hall Dairine's door opened, and her sister wandered down toward her in the direction of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a huge Fordham T-shirt of their dad's. She looked at Nita vaguely. "What's for breakfast?"

"Confusion," Nita said, rather sourly. "What?"

"Nothing yet. Nobody's up. And I can't find Kit."

Dairine stopped and stared at her, pushing the hair out of her eyes and yawning. "Why? Where is he?" "Somewhere the manual can't find him."

"What?"

"Look at this!" Nita was concerned enough to show Dairine her manual, even though it meant she would see the messages above the strange new notification. Dairine looked at the back page and shook her head.

"I've never seen that before," she said. "You sure it's not a malfunction or something?" Nita snorted. "Have you ever seen a manual malfunction?"

"I have to admit," Dairine said slowly, "if I did, I'd get worried... considering What powers them. Come on, let's see if mine's doing the same thing."

Nita followed Dairine to her room and glanced at where the pile of stuff from yesterday had mostly been dumped on the floor. "You'd better take care of this before Mom gets up," Nita said. "She'll have some new and never-before-seen species of cow."

"Plenty of time for that," Dairine said, going over to her desk and knocking one knuckle on the outside of the laptop's case. "She was up till half past forever last night with Dad's stuff."

The laptop sprouted its legs again and stood up on them, stretching them one after another like a centipede that thought it was a cat. "Morning, Spot," Dairine said.

"Mmg," said the laptop in a small scratchy voice.

"Manual functions?"

"Spcfy."

"Messaging," Dairine said.

The laptop popped open its lid, and its screen flickered on, showing the usual apple-without-the-bite logo, then blanking down again. A moment later the operating system herald displayed, a stylized representation of a book open to a small block of text. This was then replaced by a messaging menu, overlaid on a shimmering blue background subtly watermarked with the manual logo. "Main address list," Dairine said. "Test message." The screen blanked. "To Kit Rodriguez. Where are you? Send."

The words displayed themselves on the screen exactly as they had in Nita's manual, blinked out, and then reappeared with a little blue box underneath them in which was written in the Speech, Error 539426010: Recipient is not in ambit. Please resubmit message later.

"Huh," Dairine said. "More information."

The blue box enlarged slightly. No further information available. "We'll see about that," Dairine muttered. "Thanks, cutie."

"Yr wlcm," said the laptop, and sat down on the desk again, stretching out its legs. "Doesn't waste his words, does he?" Nita said, smiling.

"He's shy," Dairine said, with a wry expression. "You should hear him when we're alone. Let's try this."

She went over to the sleek cube of the new computer and waved a hand over the top of it. The light behind the apple came on. Nita cocked an ear. "Is its fan broken?"

"No, it doesn't have one. There's just some kind of little chimney that convects out the heat, so it doesn't need a fan."

"Or a plug..."

Dairine grinned, and waved over the top of the silvery case again. A second later the monitor, a suitably slick flat-screen model on a Lucite base, appeared to one side of the main processor case. "Mom may have some problems with that," Nita said.

"Oh, it won't do that when I get all the normal software installed and put it out downstairs. Meantime, I don't see why it should have to sit on the desk when there's umpteen billion cubic parsecs of perfectly good otherspace to stick it in."

On the screen appeared a manual herald like the one that had been displaying on the laptop, but this one had a discreet Greek letter (3 blazoned across the image of the book. Dairine waved once more over the top of the processor case, and the keyboard, also in brushed stainless steel, appeared. "What do you need that for?" Nita asked.

"I type faster than I talk." "Impossible."

Dairine gave Nita a dirty look and started typing, while Nita looked in interest at the keyboard, the standard North American QWERTY type. "Not much good for the Speech."

Dairine hit the carriage return and shook her head. "Come on, Neets, really." She flicked a finger in the air over the keyboard; the keyboard stretched, and the keys shimmered and reconfigured themselves to display the 418 characters of the Speech. "Eventually we won't need this, but the wireless transparent neuro-translation routines are still in pre-alpha." She looked at Nita with a mischievous expression. "Getting interested finally? I can copy Spot for you and give you his twin, if you like."

"Thanks, but I'll stick with the manual I know."

Dairine shook her head in poorly concealed pity. "Luddite."

"Technodweeb," Nita said. "Call me sentimental. I like books. They don't crash."

"Huh," Dairine said, as the monitor blanked and then brought up a long, long list. Dairine glanced over at Spot. "You wanna pass it that last error?"

A moment later that same little blue screen appeared on the monitor. "Right," Dairine said. She glanced over her shoulder at Nita. "Sometimes the beta shows background information that the normal release version doesn't have in it yet, or doesn't routinely release. Any additional information on this?" she said to the desktop machine.

The blue box was partly overlapped by another one, in a lighter shade of blue. It contained the words:

For accurate and secure message storage and delivery, manual messaging functions require each party's manual to supply a coordinate based on the intersection between each wizard's personal description in the Speech and his present physical location in a given universe. Message dispatch and storage cannot be achieved when one or both addressees are in transit or experiencing transitory states between universes. Please remessage when the condition no longer obtains.

"Oh, well, I guess that's okay, then," Dairine said in astonishment heavily tinged with irony. She looked at Nita. "Another universe? That's normally not a transit you make without permission from seriously high up."

"Yeah," Nita said. She opened her manual again and paged through to where Kit's status report was.

Dairine hit a couple of keys; the monitor changed to show the same view. Under the listing for the water wizardry, Kit's status report said:

Present project: access-routine investigation and stabilization, training assignment with adjunct talent; situation presently in development. Detail reference: in abeyance due to possible Heisenberg-related effects; update expected c. Julian day 2451796.6.

"Adjunct?" Dairine muttered.

The thought went through Nita like a spear: He's working with someone else! At first it seemed ridiculous. But considering how I treated him... why shouldn't he want to work with other people? I've brought this on myself. Idiot! Idiot!

"Whatever else is going on," Dairine said, "the Powers That Be know about it. Look, here's an authorization code. They must have some way of keeping tabs on him if They've even got a projected update time in there. Point six... that's after dinner, I guess. Try again then."

Nita closed her manual, feeling slightly relieved. "Yeah..."

"But Neets, look," Dairine said, "if you're worried, why not just try to shoot him a thought? No matter what the manual's doing, it's not like your brain is broken."

"Unusual sentiment from you," Nita said.

Dairine's smile was slightly sardonic. "So maybe I'm mellowing in my old age," she said. There was more of an edge than usual on the expression, but Nita got the feeling it wasn't directed at her... for a change.

She sat down on the bed, pushing the area rug around with her feet. "Never mind. If he's in another universe, I doubt I've got the range to reach him."

"Probably you're right," Dairine said. "But that's not the reason you're not going to try, is it?"

Nita looked at her sister and found Dairine regarding her with an expression that actually could have been described as understanding. "You're afraid you're gonna find that he's shut you out on purpose," Dairine said, "and you couldn't stand it."

Nita didn't say anything. Dairine glanced away, looking at the computer, and hit a key to clear the screen. "Well...," Nita said at last, "lately it's been harder than usual to hear him thinking, anyway. And he's been having the same trouble with me."

There were things that that could mean for wizards, especially if they'd been working closely together for some time... and Nita knew Dairine understood the implications. "Neets," Dairine said at last, "if you're really that worried, you should take the chance, anyway. It's better than sitting here busting a gut."

"I hate it when you're right," Nita said finally.

"Which is always," Dairine said, "but never mind; I'm used to it by now." She went back to tapping at the keyboard.

Nita let out a long breath and closed her eyes.

Kit?

Nothing.

Kit? Where are you?!

Still nothing. Nita opened her eyes, as upset with herself, now, as with the situation. She must have sounded completely pitiful and helpless, if he'd heard her.

But I don't think he did. And that by itself was strange. Even when you called someone mind to mind and they refused contact, there was always a sense that they were still there. This time there was no such sense. And the manual, as Nita opened it once more to the page she'd marked, and looked at it again, still reported Kit as out there, doing

something...

"Nothing?" Dairine said.

"Not a refusal," Nita said, trying to keep relief out of her voice. "Just... nothing. Maybe he really is just out of range."

Dairine nodded. "Just have to wait till he gets back, then."

Nita sighed and headed downstairs. As she came into the dining room, she heard someone in the kitchen. Turning the corner, she saw that it was her mother, standing there by the counter and looking bleary as she drank a mug of tea and gazed out the window.

"Mom, you look pooped!" Nita said.

Her mother laughed. "I guess. Even after I went to bed last night I had numbers going around and around in my head... Took me a while to get to sleep. Never mind, I'll have a nap before dinner. Speaking of which, where has Kit been the past day or so?"

Nita tried to think of what to say. Her mother glanced at her, glanced away again. "Just so I can keep the leftovers from piling up," her mother said. "I just like to know when I'm supposed to be cooking for five. You think he might be along tonight?"

"I don't know for sure," Nita said. "I'll tell you when I find out."

"Okay. I'm going to the shop later, if you want me." Her mom had another drink of tea, then put the mug aside. "Some paperwork was missing from what your dad gave me yesterday, and I need to go root around in what he calls a filing system. Did we miss anything from shopping last night?"

"I think we need more milk."

"I think we need to buy your sister a cow," her mother said, and went off to get dressed.

Nita went up to her room to kill some time until she could reach Kit. It was annoying to be mad at someone, but it was even worse to discover that you were wrong to be mad at them, and worse yet not to be able to apologize to them and get it over with. I'm never gonna, make this mistake again!

Or at least I sure hope I won't... because it just hurts too much.

When Kit got over to Tom and Carl's place with Ponch, he wasn't surprised to find Tom already working —sitting out on the patio in jeans and T-shirt and a light jacket, typing away on his portable computer at the table next to the big square koi pond. "It's the only quiet time I get before the phone starts ringing," Tom said, letting Kit in the side gate. "Come on in, tell me what you found..."

Over a cup of tea, while Ponch sprawled under the table, Kit described what Ponch had been doing, and Tom looked at the "hard" report in his Senior's version of the manual, which was presently about the size of a phone book. Tom shook his head, turning over pages and reading what Kit could see even from across the table was a very abstruse analysis indeed, in very small print.

"This is a new one on me," he said at last. "I'll ask Carl to have a look later; the worldgating and timesliding end of things is more his specialty. But I'm not even sure that what Ponch is doing is either of those. And I can't find any close cognates to this kind of behavior in any other wizards' reports."

"Really?" Kit said. "How far does that go back?"

"All the way," Tom said absently. "Well, nearly. Some of the material before the first hundredth of a second of the life of this universe is a little sketchy. Privacy issues, possibly."

He shook his head and closed the book. "Kit, I'm not sure where you were. I'm not sure it can even be classified as a where, as a physical universe that, given the right geometries, can be described in terms of its direction and distance from other neighboring universes. Ponch's place might be another dimension, another continuum even, completely out of the local sheaf of universes. Or an entirely different state of being, not physical the way we understand it at all." He shrugged. "He's found something very unusual that's going to take some exploring before we begin to understand it. At least your whole experience is stored in the manual, and you'll want to add notes to it later. It'll help the other wizards who'll be starting analysis on it."

"I thought your version of the manual was going to be able to explain this." Tom leaned back. "There's never any guarantee of that. We're told new things about the universe all the time. But we're not routinely told what they mean. Wizardry is like science that way. We're expected to figure out the meaning of the raw data ourselves."

"So what do I do?"

"Well, what were you thinking of doing?"

"What Ponch suggested," Kit said. "Going into that...that 'state,' I guess, and seeing if I could do what he was doing: make things."

"Probably not a bad idea," Tom said. "You seem to have come out of this all right... but don't get careless. Exploratory wizardry can be dangerous, even though you are working for the Good Guys."

The patio door slid open, and there was Carl, in jeans and flip-flops and an NYPD T-shirt. "I heard voices," he said.

"Sorry, we didn't mean to disturb you—"

"Not your voices," Carl said, rueful. "The voices of certain fur-bearing persons who're in the kitchen right now, eating anything that doesn't run away fast enough."

"Dog biscuits!" Ponch said, and immediately got up and went over to jump on Carl in a neighborly way.

"Go on in. They'll show you where the box is," Carl said, and Ponch ran into the house. "If there's anything they know, it's that."

"Where's ours!" came a chorus of voices from the koi pond.

"It's too early. And you're all overweight, anyway," Carl said, sitting down at the table.

Ill

A noise of boos and bubbly razzes came from the pond. "Everybody's a critic," Carl said. "What have we got?"

"Take a look," Tom said, and pushed his copy of the manual over to Carl.

"Huh," Carl said after a moment's reading. Then he looked over his shoulder in the direction of the continuing racket. "Will you guys hold it down?" He glanced over at Kit. "See, if you'd waited half an hour, you could have had all the fish breath you wanted."

Kit laughed. "What do you make of this?" Tom said.

Carl shook his head. "Once again, the universes remind us of their most basic law; they're not only stranger than we imagine, they're stranger than we can imagine. Which is what makes them so much fun." He turned a page. "I really don't understand this, but there are a couple of people I can call later. You going to go back there?" he said to Kit.

"Yeah, when I get back home."

"All right. Try an experiment. Try to affect the space where you find yourself, the way Ponch did, and see how that works. But also, see if you can bring something back with you. It doesn't have to be anything big. A leaf, a pebble. But something to analyze might help us determine the nature of the space, or whatever, that it comes from."

"Just test it first to make sure it's not antimatter," Tom said.

"Uh, yeah," Kit said. He had no desire to be totally annihilated. Saturday Morning and Afternoon

"It's just a thought," Carl said. "Antimatter universes are well outnumbered by orthomatter ones, but you can't tell just by looking."

"I'll make a note," Kit said. "Anything from Nita?" said Tom.

"Uh... not yet," Kit said. "I think, besides whatever she's working on, she may be wanting to take a little holiday from group spelling. We were having a rough time there for a while."

"Happens all the time," Carl said, leaning back in his chair. "You get stuck at different stages of mastery, and things can get a little bumpy. It passes, as a rule. But it can be tough when one partner or member of a group is working faster than the other, or in a different paradigm."

Kit thought about that. "Look... do you guys ever fight?"

Carl and Tom looked at each other in astonishment, and then at Kit, and both laughed. "Oh, lord! Constantly!" Tom said. "And it's not just about the joint practice, either. There aren't enough hours in the day for all the stuff we have to deal with. Finding time just to be friends can be tough, but it has to be made... and when we don't make it, we get sore at each other more easily."

"It always came so naturally with Neets," Kit said. "I guess maybe I didn't think much about having to work on it."

"Believe it, you have to," said Carl. "And then we have what we laughably call 'normal lives' as well. I have a job and an office to go to, Tom has to sit here and hit his deadlines, and there are bills to pay and work to do around the house and everything else. But first and foremost comes the wizardry, and keeping it part of 'normal life' is always a challenge. Sure, we bite each other sometimes. Sometimes it takes a while to patch things up. Don't let it throw you. But don't let it take too long, either."

"No," Kit said. "It's funny. I'm glad I got this last job done. It's useful. But now I don't know what to do next. And Neets always knows; she always has an idea for something else that needs doing. Sometimes it drives me nuts. Now it feels weird not to have her bugging me about 'the next thing.'"

"You'll work it out," Carl said. "Sorting out the details of your practice in the early part of your wizardly career is the exciting part."

"Yeah." Kit got up. "I'll let you know how it comes out." "Right."

He recovered Ponch from pigging out on dog biscuits and walked home from Tom and Carl's, giving Ponch a chance to run ahead and lose some of the excitement. The route took Kit past Nita's, not entirely accidentally. He knew that sometimes she got up early. But all the curtains at her house were still drawn, all the doors were closed, and the car was in the garage. Kit reached into his jacket pocket, slipped his hand around the manual. There was no fizz about its cover.

He sighed and went on by, and a few minutes later they were back at Kit's house. It was still quiet inside as he went down the driveway and into the back, and he and Ponch took themselves into the back of the yard, among the sassafras trees, where they were out of view from the Macarthurs' and Kings' houses.

"You ready?" Kit said to Ponch.

"Let's go!"

And they stepped together once more into the dark__

For Nita, the afternoon took its own sweet time going by. There was still no sign of Kit. Her mother had gone off to the shop after lunch, and Dairine went off, too, and took Spot with her. Nita sighed and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. She tried to do some work with the manual, but every time she touched it, its cover was still and fizzless under her hands, and she put it down as quickly as she picked it up. She even dallied with the idea of doing some work on a science report that was due in a couple of weeks, but the thought of actually starting it before she needed to was repulsive. When I first got into wizardry, I'd never have thought it was possible to be bored again, Nita thought, but it seems that a wizard really can do anything, given enough time.

Around four o'clock she was back in her bedroom, having just finished a bologna sandwich, when she heard a whoomp! of displaced air in the backyard. Nita looked hurriedly out the back window but saw that it was only Dairine, with Spot spidering along behind her. She sighed, slumped a little, and took down a book to read.

She had read no more than a page or two when Dairine came in, looking out of sorts. "Where've you been?" Nita asked, chucking the book away, since it was obvious she wasn't going to get any reading done, either.

"Europa." "Again?"

Dairine frowned. "Neets," she said wearily, and sat on her bed, "I'm having some problems."

"You?"

"Please," Dairine said. She was staring at the bedspread as if it were written over with the secrets of the universe instead of a slightly faded stars-and-moons pattern. After a while she said in a low voice, as if embarrassed, "I'm not getting the results I was getting a while ago."

Nita pushed back from her desk and folded her arms, putting her feet up. This was a problem she'd come to know all too well. "Dair, it happens to all of us. You get a little older...you lose your initial edge and your first big blast of power, and start feeling your way to where your specialty's going to be. It's not always what you first thought it'd be. Tom says it's real common for a first specialty to shift, and for your power levels to jump around a lot when you're new to the Art."

Her sister sat there, still staring at the quilt. This worn-down look wasn't something Nita was used to seeing in her sister. Dairine's energy levels were usually such that you wanted to hook her up to wires and make serious money by selling power to the electric company. "I don't care if it is normal," Dairine said. "I hate it."

"You think you're the only one? I wasn't wild about my first flush wearing off, either. But you get used to it."

"Why do we have to get used to it?" Dairine burst out. "What good am I if I'm not effective?"

"You mean, what good are you if you can't solve every problem you come up against in three seconds?" Nita said. "Well, obviously, none at all. Guess you'd better go straight to the bathroom and flush yourself."

Dairine stared at her sister. "Or find a black hole and jump in," Nita said, leaning back and closing her eyes. "Tom says there's a lot of interest in the time-dilation effects, especially on the middle-sized ones.

Be sure to file a report with the Powers when you get back. Assuming this universe is still here."

Nita waited for the explosion. There wasn't one. She opened her eyes again to find Dairine staring at her as if she were something from Mars. Actually, Dairine had stared at things from Mars with a lot less astonishment.

"What?" Dairine said.

Nita had to smile, even though Dairine's whining was annoying her. "Sorry. I was going to say, you remind me of me when I was your age."

Dairine made a face. "There's a horrible thought." 117

She wrapped her arms around her knees, and put her face down against them. "The last thing I want is to be that normal again." She produced an elaborate shudder, turning normal into a swear word.

"You want to watch that, Dari," Nita said. "Just because we're wizards doesn't mean we're any better than 'normal' people. The minute you start acting like there's a 'them' and an 'us,' you're in trouble. The only thing that makes wizards different is that we have the power to do more than usual to help. And helping other people, as part of keeping the world running, is the only reason the power exists in the first place." It was a lesson Nita had learned at some cost, having done enough dumb things in her time until she got it straight.

Dairine gave Nita a noncommittal look. "Edgy, aren't we? Still nothing from Kit?"

Nita made a face. "No. But just let it sit for the time being, okay? Meanwhile, what was their problem? The amoebas or whatever they are?"

"They call themselves hnlt," Dairine said. "And how they manage to do that when they've only got one cell each, I don't know."

" 'Life knows its way,'" Nita said, quoting a proverb commonplace to wizards in more than one star system. "And personality arrives right behind it. Sooner than you'd think, a lot of the time."

"Yeah. Well, they have this—I mean, there's a—" Then Dairine made a wry face at how ineffective English was for describing this kind of problem. She

dropped into the Speech for a couple sentences' worth of description of something that seemed to be happening to the gravity on Europa. Apparently the sea bottom far down under the surface ice was being cata-strophically shifted in ways that were destroying some of the hnlt habitats.

After a moment, Nita nodded. "That's a nasty one. So what did you do?"

Dairine looked glum. "I suggested they wait a little while and see what happens," she said. "The Sun's real active now, and the activity is pushing Jupiter's atmosphere around a lot harder than usual, even the densest parts down deep. That's what's causing the gravitational and magnetic anomalies. It'll probably quiet down by itself when the sunspot cycle starts to taper off."

"Makes sense. Good call."

"But Neets, what's the point") I couldn't do anything. I couldn'tl Only a few months ago I could— I could do everything up to and including pushing planets around. And now, because I can't, a lot of the bnlt are going to die before the Sun quiets down. All I can do is help them relocate their habitats elsewhere on Europa. But those other places are going to be just as vulnerable. No matter what I do, I'm not going to be able to save them all..."

Nita shook her head; not that she didn't feel sorry for her sister. "Dari, it's just the way things go. You started at a higher-than-usual power level, so you're having a bigger-than-usual crash."

"Why don't you try finding some more awful way of putting that?" Dairine muttered. "Take your time."

Nita understood how Dairine felt; she'd been down this road herself. "You'll be finding your next few years' working-level in a while. But as for the way you were last month..." Nita sighed at the memory of the way she'd been when she got started. "Entropy's running. The energy runs out of everything... even us. We have to learn not to blow it all over the landscape, that's all."

Dairine was silent for a few moments. Finally she leaned against the wall and nodded. "I guess I'll just have to keep working on it. Where's Mom?"

"Late," Nita said. "She's probably still looking for Dad's paperwork. She said he started burying it all in those old carnation boxes in the back again."

"Uh-oh. And after she got him the new filing cabinets." Dairine snickered. "I bet he got yelled at."

They heard someone pulling into the driveway. Nita cocked an ear at her bedroom window, which was right above the driveway, and could tell from the sound that it was her dad's car. Her mom had walked to town. Nita glanced at the clock. It was a little before five, the time their dad usually shut the store on Saturdays. "There they are. Bet he closed up early to get her to stop giving him grief."

The back door opened, closed again. Nita got up, yawning; even after the sandwich, dinner was beginning to impinge on her mind, and her stomach was making sounds that could have passed for a polite greeting on Rirhath B. "Mom say anything to you about what she was going to make tonight? Maybe we can get a head start."

"I don't remember," Dairine said as they headed through the living room. This answer was no surprise; Dairine's normal response to food was to eat it first and ask questions later.

"Huh," Nita said. "Dad—"

She stopped. Her father stood in the kitchen, looking down at the counter by the stove as if he expected to find something there, but the counter was bare, and her father's expression was odd. "You forget something, Daddy?" Nita said.

"No," he said. And then Nita saw his face working not to show what it felt, his hands not so much resting on the edge of the counter as holding it, holding on to it, and heard his voice, which pushed its way out through a throat tight with fear.

"Where's Mom?" Dairine said.

Nita's stomach instantly tied itself into a horrible knot. "Is she all right?" she said. "She's—" her father said. And then immediately after that, "No. Oh, honey—"

Dairine pushed her way up beside Nita, her face suddenly as pale as her father's. "Daddy, wbere's Mom} \"

"She's in the hospital." He turned to them, but he didn't let go of the counter, still hanging on to it. As his eyes met Nita's, the fear behind them hit her so hard that she almost staggered. "She's very sick, they think—"

He stopped, not because he didn't know what to say, but because he refused to say it, to think it—it was impossible. Nonetheless Nita heard it, as her dad heard it, repeating over and over in his head:

They think she might die.

Saturday Afternoon and Evening

IN A PLACE WHERE directions and distances made no sense, Kit and Ponch stood in the endless, soundless dark, the leash spell hanging loose between them and glowing with silent power.

So here we are. You feel okay?

I feel fine.

So what should I make?

Anything, Ponch said, as he had before.

Kit thought about that... and discovered that he couldn't decide what to do first. Typical, he thought. Presented with the possibility to create any thing you can think of, your mind goes blank.

He tried to take a breath and found that his breathing now seemed to be working properly. "Am I getting used to this place?" Kit said softly in the Speech, and found that he could actually hear himself.

No answer; but then if one had come, he'd have jumped out of his skin.

Saturday Afternoon and Evening

"Okay," he said then. "Lights..."

And suddenly Kit found himself standing unsupported in the midst of interstellar glory. "Wow," he said softly. He and Ponch were apparently somewhere in the fringes of a gigantic globular cluster, all the nearby darkness blazing with stars of every possible color—and the farther darkness was peppered with not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of galaxies, little globes and ovals and spirals everywhere, a megacluster of the kind that astronomers were sure existed but had never seen.

It's bright, Ponch said.

"No argument there," said Kit, as he wondered why producing all this had been so easy. He was used to wizardry taking a good deal more effort. Is this even wizardry? he wondered. It had needed no construction of spells, no careful and laborious plugging in of words and variables, and no sudden drain of energy after the wizardry was fueled from your own power and turned loose. That last factor was what made Kit mistrust this process. He was used to the concept that every wizardry had its price, and one way or another, you paid; and its corollary: that any wizardry that doesn't charge you a decent admission fee usually isn't worth anything.

All the same, it would be smart to play around in here a little and see what it was worth. Kit also thought he could guess why Carl wanted him to try to bring back some small physical artifact. It would confirm whether or not this space was simply some kind of illusion or mirage, amusing but otherwise not terribly useful. "Okay," he said, "let's take this from the top. A sun, first..."

And one appeared, though he hadn't even asked for it in the Speech: a deep yellow-orange star, a vast, roiling, heaving landscape of blinding flame, directly below his feet. For a second Kit flinched at the roar and turmoil of burning gas beneath him, all dancing with prominences and loops and arches of radiant plasma— inexhaustible fountains of fire half a million miles high, leaping away from the star's seething limb and pouring themselves back into the surface again in slow-motion grace. In vacuum you wouldn't normally get sound, I guess, Kit thought. But he seemed to be in some kind of peculiar rapport with this space that let him sense things he ordinarily wouldn't, and the tearing basso wind-roar of superheated ions blasting upward past him was strangely satisfying. Ponch, sitting beside him, squinted down at the ravening brilliance but didn't comment.

"Not bad, huh?" Kit said.

Ponch yawned. "The squirrels are more fun."

"You've got a one-track mind," Kit said. "Okay, now we need a planet..."

And the star receded into the distance, reducing itself to proper sunlike size. Below Kit was his planet, all covered in cloud, muttering softly to itself as it rotated, already coasting away from them along its orbit. Kit thought he could actually feel the heat pouring off it, a feverish sensation. A lot of heat trapped under those clouds, he thought. It's a Ksupergreenhouse," like Venus... There was no telling how big this world was, without anything to give him a frame of reference. Have to go down there and take a closer look, Kit thought—

—and suddenly he was standing on a rocking, shaking, stony surface. All around him rocks tumbled down low cracked cliffs, and a wind as brutal as the solar one but laden with a stinging drizzle of acid instead of fire shrieked past him. In a more normal reality, Kit knew this terrible supersonic fog would have eaten the unprotected flesh off his bones in seconds, but here he seemed immune. Because I imagined it?

Kit grinned and waved one hand in front of him airily. "Lose the acid," he said, "lose the wind, lose the clouds." The instant he spoke, the air went clear, fell silent, and the dull, overarching, brassy canopy faded away to dark clarity. The stars showed through again, and the high, hot, golden sun. But sound vanished as well, and it started to get very cold.

"No, no; atmosphere is okay!" Kit said. "Something I can breathe. Landscape..."

Green rolling grassland spread itself away in every direction under a blue, blue sky. Ponch leaped up in delight. "Squirrels!"

"No squirrels," Kit said. "Don't overdo them or you'll get bored." He rubbed his hands together in delight. "You know what this is, Ponch? It's magic-crayon country."

"Crayons? Where?" Ponch had conceived a weird fondness for the taste of crayons when Kit was younger, and had always gone out of his way to steal and eat them.

"Not that way," Kit said, turning around and gazing all about him at the total wilderness. "But if I thought of an elephant with three hairs in its tail here— Uh-ob."

Ponch began barking deafeningly. The elephant, large and purple-gray, as in the original illustration from that old children's book, looked around in surprise, then looked over at Ponch and said, a little scornfully, "Do you have a problem?"

"Sorry," Kit said. "Uh, can I do something for you?"

"Trees are generally better for eating purposes than grass," the elephant said. "A little more variation in the landscape would be nice. And so would company."

Kit thought about that. A second later the grassland looked much more like African veldt, with a scattering of trees and an impressive mountain range in the distance, and another elephant stood next to the first one. They looked each other up and down, twined their trunks together, and walked off into the long grass, swinging their three-haired tails as they went.

Kit paused then, wondering whether they were a boy and a girl, and then wondering whether it mattered. Maybe it's better not to get too hung up on the minor details right now, he thought.

He glanced down at Ponch. "Want to try another one?"

"You sure you don't want to think again about the squirrels?"

"Yes, I'm sure." Kit folded his arms, thinking. He took a step forward, opened his mouth to speak—

—and found he didn't have to do even that. The two of them were standing in a waste littered with reddish rocks; an odd springy green mosslike growth was scattered here and there around them. The strangely foreshortened landscape ran up to a horizon hazed in red-violet dust, where low mountains reared up jagged against an amethyst sky; and so did an outcropping of delicate towers, apparently built of green glass or metal, gleaming faintly in the setting of a small, remote-seeming, pinky-white marble of a sun.

"Yes," Kit said softly. It was Mars, but not the Mars of the real world, which nowadays, as he'd seen for himself, was unfortunately short on cities. This was the romantic Mars of stories written a hundred years ago, where fierce eight-legged thoats ran wild across dead sea bottoms, and displaced, sword-swinging warriors from Earth ran around after very, very scantily clad Martian princesses.

Ponch glanced around, looking for something.

"What?" Kit said.

"No trees."

"You can hold it in till we get home. Come on..."

He took another step forward, thinking. One step and he and Ponch were in the darkness; another, and they were in what looked like New York City but wasn't, because New York City was not under a huge glass dome, floating through space.

"Aha," Ponch said, immediately heading toward a fire hydrant.

"Uh-uh," Kit said. Another few steps and they were in darkness; another step after that, in a landscape all veiled in blowing white, whiteness crunching underfoot, and up against an indigo sky, great crackling curtains of aurora, green and blue and occasionally pinkish red, hissing in the ferociously cold air. Something shuffled past in the blowing snow, some yards away, paused to swing its massive head around toward Kit, looking at him out of little dark eyes: a polar bear. But a polar bear the size of a mammoth... Ponch jumped and strained at the leash, barking. "Oh, come on; let him live," said Kit, and he took another step, into the dark. Reluctantly, Ponch followed. Kit was getting the rhythm of it now. A few steps in darkness, to do a few moments' worth of thinking... and then one step out into light, into another landscape or vista or place. The last step, this time, and he and Ponch were wading up to Kit's knees and Ponch's neck in some kind of long, harsh-edged beach grass clothing a vista of endless dunes. Off to their right the sea rolled up to a long black beach in an endless muted roar. Kit looked up into the shadow of immense wings going over, ruffling his hair and making the grass hiss around him with their passing—one huge shape silhouetted against the twilight, then two, five, twenty, with wings that seemed to stretch across half the sky. They soared in echelon toward a horizon over which a long violet evening was descending, and beyond which the distant and delicate fire of a barred spiral galaxy, seen almost face on, was rising slowly behind a glittering haze of nearer, lesser stars.

He had the hang of it now./## let the mind run free, let the images flow.

A few steps more and Kit came out into the middle of a vast plane of what looked like black marble, stretching away to infinity in all directions, and above it light glinted, reflected in the surface: not a sun or a moon, but an artificial light of some kind, almost like a spotlight. Far away, on a patterned place in the floor, small figures stood, some of them human, some not— some of them alien species that Kit had seen before in his travels, others of which he had never seen the like. One moved, then another. There was a pause, and then several moved at once, and one of them vanished. Kit started to go closer, until he saw the great shadowy shapes bending in all around him in the upward-towering dimness, to look more closely at the one piece that seemed to have escaped the game board.

Kit smiled slightly, waved at them, and took another step. The darkness descended, then rose once more on some long, golden afternoon on a rise of land overlooking a lake. A pointy-towered palace lay all sun gilded down by the water, banners flying from every sharp-peaked roof, and knights on horses clattered along a dusty road toward the castle gate, the late sun glittering sharp off lance heads and armor, the colors of the knights' surcoats as vivid as enamel. Another step, quicker, as Kit started pushing the pace: out into the aquamarine light of some underwater place, white sand under his feet, lightwaver playing in broad patterns across it, and an odder, bluer light glimmering against the depths ahead of him as the rippling, ribbony creatures of some alien abyss came up out of shadows ten miles deep to peer curiously at the intruder.

Kit found he could do without the darkness between worlds. It was a new vista at every step now, and Ponch padded along beside him on the wizardly leash as calmly as any dog being taken for a walk in the park. Forests of massive trees, all drowned in shadow, bare sand stretching away to impossible distances and suggesting planets much larger than Earth, gleaming futuristic cityscapes covering entire continents; a step, and night under some world's overarching greenish rings, a single voice chanting in the air, like a nightingale saluting them; a step, and the time before dawn in a vast waste of reedy waters reflecting the early peach-pink of the sky, everything still except for the flop of a fish turning, then putting its head up to look thoughtfully at them as they waded past; a step, and the blurring, whirling uncertainty of the vast space between an atom's nucleus and the silvery fog of its innermost electron shell— —and a step out into a place where, if he had taken another step, Kit would have fallen some thousands of feet straight down. There, on the top of a mountain imperially preeminent among its fellows, Kit paused, looking down through miles of blue-hazed air at lakes held between neighboring peaks like silent jewels under a rosette of suns—three small pinkish stars riding high in a morning sky—and all the snow on all the mountains from here to the horizon stained warm rose, so they all looked lit from within. Kit breathed that high chill air— which no one besides him and Ponch had ever breathed before, the air of a world made new that moment—and shook his head, smiling the smallest smile.

He thought of the darkness. What a place to play. Neets has got to see this.

He stood there looking down on the immense vista for a few moments longer. "We should get back," he said.

"Why?"

"I'm not sure about the time difference yet," Kit said. "And I don't want to worry Mom."

Another thought niggling at the back of Kit's mind was: If this... state. ..is as easy to shape and reshape as it seems, it'd be real easy to get hooked on it. He'd had a phase, a couple years back, when he'd been hooked enough on a favorite arcade game to give himself blisters and blow truly unreasonable amounts of his allowance money in the process. Now Kit remembered that time with embarrassment, thinking of all the hours he'd spent on something that now bored him, and he watched himself, in a casual way, for signs that something similar might happen again.

But I almost forgot. Kit reached down and picked up something from the mossy rocks at his feet: a single flower, a little five-petaled thing like a white star. Kit slipped it into his pocket, and farther in, right down into the space-time claudication, sealing it there. Then he turned around to glance at Ponch— the top of the peak was so narrow that they hadn't had room to stand side by side. "Ready?"

"Yes, because I don't think I can hold it in much longer."

Together they stepped straight out into the air, out into the darkness—

—and out into Kit's backyard.

He looked around. Twilight was falling. Guess I was right to be a little concerned about the time, Kit thought. Looks like it wasn't running at the same rate in all those places. Something else to tell Tom...

He took the leash off Ponch, wound up the wizardry, and stuffed it into his pocket. Ponch immediately headed off toward the biggest of the sassafras trees to give it a good "watering."

Kit went into the house. His mother and father were eating; his dad looked up at Kit, raised his eyebrows, and said, "Son, can't you give us a hint on how long you're going to be when you go out on one of these runs? Tom couldn't tell me anything."

"Sorry, Pop," Kit said as he went past his dad, patting him on the shoulder. "I wasn't sure myself. I didn't think it'd be this long, though, and now I know what the problem is... I'll watch it next time."

"Okay. You want some macaroni and cheese?"

"In a minute."

Kit headed up the stairs in a hurry; Ponch hadn't been the only one with "holding it" on his mind. Then he went into his room to check his pocket and was delighted to find the flower right where he'd put it. Kit placed it carefully on his desk, traced a line around it with his finger, and said the six words of a spell that would hold the contents aloof from the local progress of time for twenty-four hours.

This was not a cheap spell, and the pang of the energy drain the spell cost him went straight through him. Kit had to sit down in his desk chair and get his

Saturday Afternoon and Evening

breath back. While he sat there, he reached farther into his pocket, touched his manual... and felt the fizz.

He grinned, pulled it out, paged to the back of it... and let out a long breath. The manual was showing a message that had come in only a few minutes before. / can't talk now. But can we talk later? I've got some apologizing to do.

All right, Kit thought, relieved. She's seen sense at last, and I'm not gonna rub her nose in it. There's too much serious neatness going on here. "Reply," he said to the manual. "Call me anytime: I'm ready."

And he ran down the stairs, exhilarated, to feed Ponch and have his own dinner. Just wait till she sees! Whatever's been going on with her, this is gonna take her mind off it.

I can't wait.

Saturday Evening

How SHE AND DAIRINE got their dad into the dining room and sat him down, Nita couldn't afterward remember, except for a flash of horror at the awful topsy-turviness of things. It was the parents who were supposed to be strong when the kids were scared. But now there were just the three of them, sitting there close, all of them equally scared together. Her father was hanging on to his control, and Nita held on to hers as much out of her own fear as out of sympathy; if she broke down, he might, too.

"She collapsed as she was leaving the store," her father said, staring at the table. "I thought she was kneeling down to look at one of the plants in the window, you know how she would always fuss over the display not being just right. She just seemed to kneel down... and then she leaned against the doorsill. And she didn't get up."

"What was it?" Dairine cried. "What happened to her?"

"They're not sure. She just passed out, and she wouldn't wake up. The ambulance came, and we took her over to the county hospital. They did some physical tests, and then they X-rayed her chest and her head, and put her in the ICU..." Her father trailed off. Nita saw the frightened look in his eyes as he relived some memory that terrified him. "They said they'd call when they had some news."

"I'm not waiting for that!" Dairine said. "We have to go to the hospital. Right now!" She turned as if intending to go get her jacket.

Her father caught hold of her. "Not right now, honey. The doctor told me that they need a few hours to get her stable. She's okay, but they need to do some tests, and—"

"Dad," Nita said.

He looked at her.

The terror in his eyes was awful, worse than what Nita was feeling. She wanted to grab him and hold him and pat his back and say, "It's going to be all right." But she had no idea whether it was going to be all right or not. Nita settled for grabbing him and holding him, and Dairine, too.

Then they began to wait.

The time until they went to the hospital passed in a kind of horrible disturbed silence, most of the disturbance coming from the phone, as it rang and rang and rang again, and every time, Nita's father lunged for it, hoping it was the hospital, and every time, it wasn't.

There were always people on the other end who'd heard from someone they knew about Nita's mom or had seen the ambulance at the shop. Every time Nita's dad had to explain to someone what had happened, he got more upset.

"Daddy, stop answering itl" Nita cried at one point.

"They're your mother's friends" was all he would say. "And mine. They have a right to know. And besides, what if the hospital calls?" And there was no arguing with that.

"Let us answer it," Dairine said.

"No," said their dad. "Things are hard enough for you two. You let me handle it." The phone rang again, and he went to answer it.

After that, it seemed that the phone just went on ringing all evening.

Nita was terrified. She wasn't used to not knowing what was happening, not being able to do anything— and her shock was such that she wasn't even able to make any kind of plan about what to do next. Dairine paced around the house like a caged creature, her face alternately frightened and furious, and she wouldn't talk to anybody, not even Spot, who crouched mutely near one of the chairs in the living room and simply watched her go back and forth. Nita felt actively sorry for it but didn't know what to do; Spot's relationship was exclusively with Dairine, and she didn't know how it would take to being comforted by someone else.

If comforted is even the word, Nita thought, because I wouldn't know what to say or do to make it Saturday Evening

comfortable... any more than I know what to say to Dairine. Or Dad. That was the worst of it: not being able to do anything for either of them. Again and again, after her dad hung up the phone, that deadly quiet would descend, emphasizing the voice that was not there, all of a sudden. And then the phone would ring into the silence again... and Nita felt certain that if it rang once more, she'd scream.

But finally the hospital called. Nita watched her father answer, his face naked in its changes, shifting every second between fear and uncertainty and greater fear. "Yes. This is he. Yes." He paused, turning away from where Nita sat at the dining-room table.

"She is?"

Nita's heart seized. "Uh, good."

She breathed again. And I don't even know why; I don't even know what's happening! "Yes...sure we can. About half an hour. Yes. Thanks."

He hung up, turned to Nita. Dairine was standing there by the living-room door, as intently as Nita had been. "She's still in intensive care," her dad said, "but they say she's stable now, whatever that means. Let's go."

Shortly, Nita found herself walking into a setting entirely too familiar to her from too many TV shows: all the people in pastel uniforms with stethoscopes hanging around their necks and shoved into their breast pockets, all the white jackets, the metal beds and the stretcher-trolleys in the corridors, people going places in a hurry and doing important but inexplicable things. What the TV shows had never gotten across, and what now struck itself deeply into Nita's mind, was the smell of the place. It wasn't a bad smell. It was clean enough... but that cleanliness was cold, a chilly distancing scent of disinfectant and other chemicals. The faces of the people working there were kind, mostly, but a lot of them had a strange preoccupied quality, unlike the faces of the actors on the TV shows. These people weren't acting.

Nita and Dairine stuck close to their father as they made their way through the hospital corridors and to the reception desk, where someone could tell them where to go. "They've moved her out of ICU, Mr. Cal-lahan," the lady at the desk said. "She's over in Neurology now. If you go down that hall and turn right—"

Her father nodded and led them off down the hall. About three minutes' walking brought them through swinging doors and up to a nurses' station.

One of the nurses there, a large, cheerful-looking lady in a pink scrub-style uniform, with her brown hair pulled back tight in a bun, looked up as they approached. "Mr. Callahan?"

"Yes."

"The doctor would like to see you—that's Dr. Kashiwabara, she's the senior neurologist. If you can go into that room across the hall and wait for a few minutes, she'll be with you shortly."

They went into the plain little room—white walls, beige tile floor, noisy orange sofa that was also literally noisy, with plastic-covered cushions that wheezed when you sat down on them—and waited, in silence. Nita's dad put an arm around her and Dairine, and Nita hoped she didn't look as stiff with fear as she felt. 7 can't believe this, she thought, bizarrely angry with herself. I'm so scared, I can't even think. I 'wasn't this afraid when I thought a shark might eat me! And this isn't even about me. It's someone else—