Wizard's Holiday

Wizard’s Holiday

By Diane Duane

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Diane Duane’s

Young Wizards Series

So You Want to Be a Wizard

Deep Wizardry

High Wizardry

A Wizard Abroad

The Wizard’s Dilemma

A Wizard Alone

Copyright © 2003 by Diane Duane

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For Virginia Heinlein

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Unending stairs reach up the mountain above you, And you keep climbing, while the welcoming voices Cheer you along. They make the long climb easier, Though the gift you’re bringing may to you seem small. Don’t worry, it’s what they need: For all the cheering, See how empty the streets are? Take your time. Make your way upward steadily toward what waits, Through day’s blind radiance to the city’s pinnacle, And fall up the last few steps into empty sky….

—hexagram 46, Sheng

“Onward and Upward”

“With me, a change of trouble is as good as a vacation.”

—David Lloyd George (1863-1945)

What, can the Devil speak true?

—William Shakespeare,

Macbeth, I, iii

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That Getaway Urge It was the Friday afternoon before the start of spring break. The weather was nothing like spring. It was cold and gray outside; the wind hissed unrepentantly through the still-bare limbs of the maple trees that lined the street, and in that wind the rain was blowing horizontally from west to east, seemingly right into the face of the girl, in parka and jeans, running down the sidewalk toward her driveway. Except for her, the street was empty, and no one looking out the window of any nearby house was close enough to notice that the rain wasn’t getting the young girl wet. Even if someone had noticed, probably nothing would have come of it; human beings generally don’t recognize wizardry even when it’s being done right under their noses.

Nita Callahan jogged up her driveway, unlocked the back door of her house, and plunged through it into the warmth of the kitchen. The back door blew back and slammed against the stairwell wall behind her in a sudden gust of wind, but she didn’t care. She pushed the door shut again, then struggled briefly to get her backpack off, flinging it onto the kitchen counter.

“Freedom!” she said to no one in particular as she pulled off her jacket and tossed it through the kitchen door onto the back of one of the dining room chairs. “Freedom! Free at last!” And she actually did a small impromptu dance in the middle of the kitchen at the sheer pleasure of the concept of two weeks off from school… though the dancing lasted only until her stomach suddenly growled.

“Freedom and food,” Nita said then, and opened the refrigerator and stuck her head into it to see what was there to eat.

There was precious little. Half a quart of milk and half a stick of butter; some small, unidentifiable pieces of cheese bundled up in plastic wrap, at least a couple of them turning green or blue because of the presence of other life-forms; way back in a corner, a plastic-bagged head of lettuce that had seen better days, probably several weeks ago; and a last slice of frozen pizza that someone, probably her sister, Dairine, had left in the fridge on a plate without wrapping it, and which was now desiccated enough to curl up at the edges.

“Make that freedom and starvation,” Nita said under her breath, and shut the refrigerator door. It was the end of the week, and in her family, shopping was something that happened after her dad got home on Fridays. Nita went over to the bread box on the counter, thinking that at least she could make a sandwich—but inside the bread box was only a crumpled-up bread wrapper, which, she saw when she opened it, contained one rather stale slice of bread between two heel pieces.

“I hate those,” Nita muttered, wrapping up the bread again. She opened a cupboard over the counter, pulled down a peanut butter jar, and saw that the jar had been scraped almost clear inside. She rummaged around among various nondescript

canned goods, but there was no soup or ravioli or any of the faster foods she favored—just beans and other canned vegetables, things that would need a lot of work to make them edible.

Nita glanced at the clock. It was at least half an hour before the time her dad usually shut his florist’s shop on Fridays and came home to pick up whoever wanted to go along to help do the shopping. “I will die of hunger before then,” Nita said to herself. “Die horribly.”

Then she glanced at the refrigerator again. Aha, Nita thought. She went to the wall by the doorway into the dining room and picked up the receiver of the kitchen phone.

She dialed. The phone at the other end rang, and after a couple of rings someone picked up. “Rodriguez residence…”

Behind the voice was a noise that sounded rather like a jackhammer, if jackhammers could sing. “Kit? How’d you beat me home?”

“My last-period study hall was optional today… I was finished with my homework so I went home early. What’s up?”

“I was going to ask you that,” Nita said, raising her voice over the racket. “Is your dad redoing the kitchen or something?”

She heard Kit let out an exasperated breath. “It’s the TV.”

“It’s acting up again?” Nita said. Kit’s last attempt to use wizardry to repair his family’s new home entertainment system had produced some peculiar side effects, such as the TV showing other planets’ cable channels without warning.

“Neets,” Kit said, “it’s worse than just acting up now. I think the TV’s trying to evolve into an intelligent life-form.”

Nita’s eyebrows went up. “That could be an improvement …”

“Yeah, but evolution can have a lot of dead ends,” Kit said. “And I’m getting really tempted to end this one with a hammer. The TV says it’s meditating…but most things get quieter when they meditate.”

She snickered. “Knowing your electronics, you may need that hammer. Meanwhile, I don’t want to talk about your TV. I want to talk about your refrigerator.”

“Uh-oh,” Kit said.

“Uh-oh,” something inside Nita’s house also said, like an echo. She glanced around her but couldn’t figure out what had said it. Weird… “Kit,” Nita said, “I’m dying here. You saw what lunch was like today. Nothing human could have eaten it. Mystery meat in secret sauce again.”

“Fridays are always bad in that cafeteria,” Kit said. “That’s why I eat at home so much.”

“Don’t torture me. What’s in your fridge?”

There was a pause while Kit walked into his kitchen, and Nita heard his refrigerator door open. “Milk, eggs, some of Carmela’s yogurt drinks, beer, some of that lemon soda, mineral water, half a chocolate cake, roast chicken—”

“You mean cold cuts?”

“No, I mean half a chicken. Mama made it last night. You’ve had this recipe before. She rubs it with this hot-smoked paprika she gets from the gourmet store, and then she stuffs it with smoked garlic, and then she—”

Nita’s mouth had started to water. “You’re doing this on purpose,” she said. “Let me raid your fridge.”

“Hey, I don’t know, Neets, that chicken breast would be pretty good in a sandwich with some mayo, and I don’t know if there’s enough for—”

“Kit!”

He snorted with laughter. “You really need to get your dad to buy more food when he shops,” Kit said. “You keep running out on Friday. If he’d just—”

“KIT!!”

Kit laughed harder. “Okay, look, there’s plenty of chicken. Don’t bust your gnaester. You coming over later?”

“Yeah, after we shop.”

“Bring a spare hammer,” Kit said. “This job I’m doing might need two.”

“Yeah, thanks. Keep everybody out of the fridge for five minutes. See you later, bye!”

Nita hung up, then stood for a moment and considered her own refrigerator. “You know what I’ve got in mind,” she said to it in the Speech.

And you keep having to do it, the refrigerator “said.” Being inanimate, it wasn’t actually talking, of course, but it still managed to produce a “sound” and sensation that came across as grumpy.

“It’s not your fault you’re not as full as you should be, come the end of the week,” Nita said. “I’ll talk to my dad. Do you mind, though?”

It’s my job to feed you, the refrigerator said, sounding less grumpy but still a little unhappy. But in a more usual way. Talk to him, will you?

“First thing. And, in the meantime, think how broadening it is for you to swap insides with a colleague every now and then!”

Well, I guess you’ve got a point, the refrigerator said, sounding more interested. Yeah, go ahead…

Nita whistled for her wizard’s manual. Her book bag wriggled and jumped around on the counter as if something alive were struggling to get out. Nita glanced over and just had time to realize that only one of the two flap-fasteners was undone when the manual worked its way out from under the flap and shot across the kitchen into her hand.

“Sorry about that,” she said to the manual. “Casual wizardries, home utilities, fridge routine, please…”

The manual flipped open in her hand, laying itself out to a page about half covered with the graceful curly cursive of the wizardly Speech. “Right,” Nita said, and began to read.

The spell went as spells usually did—the workaday sounds of the wind and the occasional passing traffic outside, the soft hum of the fridge motor and other kitchen noises inside, all gradually muting down and down as that concentrating silence, the universe listening to what Nita was saying in the Speech, came into ever greater force and began to assert its authority over merely physical things. The wizardry itself was a straightforward temporospatial translocation, or exchange of one volume of local space for another, though even a spell like that wasn’t necessarily simple when you considered that each of the volumes in question was corkscrewing its way through space-time in a slightly different direction, because of

their differing locations on the Earth’s surface. As Nita read from the manual, an iridescent fog of light surrounded her while the words in the Speech wove and wrapped themselves through physical reality, coaxing it for just a little while into a slightly different shape. She said the spell’s last word, the verbal expression of the wizard’s knot, the completion that would turn it loose to work—

The spell activated with a crash of silent thunder, enacting the change. Silence ebbed; sound came back—the wind still whistling outside, the splash and hiss of a car going by. Completed, the spell extracted its price, a small but significant portion of the energy presently available to Nita. She stood there breathing hard, sweat standing out on her brow, as she reached out and opened the refrigerator door.

The fridge wasn’t empty now. The shelves looked different from the ones that were usually there, and on one of those shelves was that lemon soda Kit had mentioned, a few plastic bottles of it. Nita reached in and pulled one of those out first, opened it, and had a long swig, smiling slightly: It was her favorite brand, which Kit’s mom had taken to buying for her. Then Nita looked over Kit’s refrigerator’s other contents and weighed the possibilities. She had a brief flirtation with the idea of one of those yogurt drinks, but this was not a yogurt moment; anyway, those were Carmela’s special thing. However, there was that chicken, sitting there wrapped in plastic on a plate. About half of it was gone, but the breast on the other side was intact and golden brown, gorgeous.

“Okay, you,” Nita said, “come here and have a starring role in a sandwich.” She reached in, took out the roast chicken, put it on a clean plate, and then unwrapped it. Nita pulled the sharpest knife off the magnetic knife rack by the sink and carved a couple of slices off the breast.

She contemplated a third slice, then paused, not wanting to make too much of a pig of herself.

“Uh-oh,” something said again.

Nita looked around her, but couldn’t see anything. Something in the dining room? she thought. “Hello?” she said.

Instead of a reply, there came a clunking noise, like a door being pulled open. “Kit,” said a female voice, “what’s wrong with the fridge? All the food’s gone. No, wait, though, there’s a really ugly alien in here disguised as a leaky lettuce. Hey, I guess I shouldn’t be rude to it; it’s a visitor. Welcome to our planet, Mr. Alien!”

This was followed by some muffled remark that Nita couldn’t make out, possibly something Kit was saying. A moment later, Kit’s sister Carmela’s voice came out of Nita’s refrigerator again. “Hola, Nita, are your phone bills getting too big? This is a weird way to deal with it…”

Nita snickered. “No, ‘Mela,” she said into the fridge, “I’m just dying of hunger here. I’ll trade you a roast chicken from the store later on.”

“It won’t be as good as my mama’s,” Carmela said. “But you’re welcome to some of this one. We can’t have you starving. Hey, come on over later. We can shop.”

Nita had to grin at that, and at the wicked twist Carmela put on the last word. “I’ll be over,” she said.

Clunk! went the door of Kit’s refrigerator, a block and a half away. Or three feet away, depending on how you looked at it. Nita smiled slightly, put the chicken

back in the fridge, and closed the door. She’d left a verbal “tag” hanging out of the wizardry she’d worked, like a single strand of yarn hanging off the hem of a sweater. Nita said the word, and the spell unraveled itself to nothing.

She went back to the bread box, got those two heel pieces of bread, which no longer looked so repulsive now that the chicken was here, and started constructing her sandwich, smiling in slight bemusement. “Welcome to our planet, Mr. Alien,” Carmela had said. Nita absolutely approved of the sentiment. What was unusual was that Carmela had used the Speech to express it.

Nita shook her head. Things were getting increasingly strange over at Kit’s house lately, and it wasn’t just the electronics—his family, even his dog, seemed to be experiencing the effects of his wizardry more and more plainly all the time, and no one was sure why. Though Carmela’s always been good with languages, Nita thought. I guess I should have expected her to pick up the Speech eventually, once she started to be exposed to it. After all, lots of people who aren’t wizards use it— on other planets, anyway. And at least the lettuce didn’t answer her back…Of course, the fact that it hadn’t suggested that it should have been in the compost heap several days ago. Nita got up, opened the fridge again, and fished the lettuce out in a gingerly manner. Carmela was right: It was leaking. Nita put the poor soggy thing in the sink to drain—it would have to be unwrapped before it went into the compost—rinsed and dried her hands, and went back to her sandwich.

“Uh-oh,” said that small voice again.

Wait a minute, I know who that is…Nita stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, with half the sandwich in her hand, looking around. “Spot,” she said, looking around. “Where are you?”

“Uh-oh,” Spot said.

She couldn’t quite locate the sound. Is he invisible or something? “It’s okay, Spot,” Nita said. “It’s me.”

No answer came back. Nita glanced around the dining room for a moment or so, looking on the seats of the chairs, and briefly under them, but she still couldn’t see anything. After a moment she shook her head. Spot was an unusually personal kind of personal computer—he would speak to her and her father occasionally, but never at any length. Probably, Nita thought, this had to do with the fact that he was in some kind of symbiotic relationship with Dairine—part wizard’s manual, part pet, part…Nita shook her head and went back to her sandwich. Spot was difficult to describe accurately; he had been through a great deal in his short life. The part of this that Nita knew about—Spot’s participation in the creation of a whole species of sentient computers—would have been enough to account for the weird way he sometimes behaved. But he had been constant companion to Dairine on all her errantry after that, and for all Nita knew, Spot had since been involved in stranger things.

There were no further utterances from Spot. “Okay,” Nita said, straightening up. “You stay where you are, then…She’ll be back in a while.”

She sat down at the table and called her manual to her again. Two weeks of my own, she thought. Yeah! There were a hundred things to think about over the school holiday: projects she was working on with Kit, and things she was doing for her own enjoyment that she would finally have some time to really get into.

She opened the manual to the area where she kept wizardries-in-progress and paged through it idly, pausing as she came to a page that was about half full of the graceful characters of the Speech. But the last line was blinking on and off to remind her that the entry was incomplete. Oh yeah, she thought. I’d better finish this while the material’s still fresh.

Nita sat back and eyed the page, munching on her sandwich. Since she’d first become a wizard, she tended to dream things that later turned out to be useful—not strictly predictions of the future, but scenes from her life, or sometimes other people’s lives, fragments of future history. The saying went that those who forgot history were doomed to repeat it; and since Nita hated repeating herself, she’d started looking for ways to make better use of the information from her dreams, rather than just be suddenly reminded of them when the events actually happened.

Her local Advisory Wizard had given her some hints on how to use “lucid” dreaming to her advantage, and had finally suggested that Nita keep a log of her dreams to refer to later. Nita had started doing this and had discovered that the dreams were getting easier to remember. Now she glanced down at the page and had a look at this morning’s notes.

Reading them brought the images and impressions up fresh in her mind again. Last night’s dream had started with the sound of laughter, with kind of an edge to it. At first Nita had thought that the source of the laughter was her old adversary, the Lone Power, but the voice had been different. There was an edge of malice to this laughter, all right, but it was far less menacing than the Lone One had ever sounded in Nita’s dealings with it, and far more ambivalent. And the voice was a woman’s.

Then a man’s voice, very clear: “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” he says. His voice is friendly. The timbre of the voice is young, but there’s something behind it that sounds really old somehow. Nita closed her eyes, tried to remember something more about that moment than the voice. Light! There was a sense of radiance all around, and a big, vague murmuring at the edge of things, as if some kind of crowd scene was going on just out of Nita’s range of vision.

And there was barking, absolutely deafening barking. Nita had to smile at that, because she knew that bark extremely well. It was Kit’s dog, Ponch, barking excitedly about something, which wasn’t at all strange. What was strange was the absolute hugeness of the sound, in the darkness.

The darkness, Nita thought, and shivered once as the image, which hadn’t been clear this morning, suddenly presented itself.

“Record,” she said to the manual, and sat back with her eyes closed.

Space, with stars in it. Well, you would expect space to be dark. But slowly, slowly, some of the stars seemed to go faint, as if something filmy was getting between her and them, like a cloud, a creeping fog…

Slowly the dark fog had crept across Nita’s field of vision. It swallowed the stars. Now that she was awake, the image gave her the creeps. Yet in the dream, somehow this hadn’t been the case. She saw it happening; she was somehow not even surprised by it. In the dream, she knew what it meant, and its only effect on Nita had been to make her incredibly angry.

She opened her eyes now, feeling a little flushed with the memory of the anger. Nita looked down at the manual, where the last line of the Speech, recording her last

impression, was blinking quietly on and off, waiting for her to add anything further.

She searched her memory, then shook her head. Nothing new was coming up for now. “Close the entry,” she said to the manual, and that last line stopped blinking.

Nita shut the manual and reached out to pick up her sandwich and have another bite. It was frustrating to get these bits and pieces and not understand what they meant; but, eventually, when she got enough of them together, they would start to make some kind of sense. I just hope that it happens in time to be of some use. For sure, something’s going to start happening shortly. The darkness had not “felt” very far away in time. I’ll mention it to Tom when I have a chance.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of other things to think about. That Martian project, for example, she thought as she finished her sandwich. She got up to go into the kitchen and get rid of the plate. Now that’s going to be a whole lot of fun—

From outside the house came a splash and hiss as someone drove through the puddle that always collected at the end of the driveway in rainy weather. Nita glanced out the kitchen window and saw the car coming up the driveway. Daddy’s a little early, she thought. It must have been quiet in the store this afternoon. But where is Dairine? I thought she’d be back by now…

Nita ran some cold water from the tap into a measuring cup, filled up the water reservoir of the coffeemaker by the sink, put one of the premeasured coffee filters her dad favored into the top of the machine, and hit the on switch. The coffeemaker started making the usual wheeze-and-gurgle noises. Outside, the car door slammed; a few moments later, shaking the rain out of his hair, Nita’s dad came in—a tall man, silver-haired, big-shouldered, and getting a little thick around the waist; he’d been putting on a little weight these past few months. He was splattered with rain about the shoulders, and he was carrying a long paper package in his arms. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Hi, Daddy.” Nita sniffed the air. “Mums?” she said. She recognized that slightly musty scent before she saw the rust-and gold-colored flowers sticking out of the wide end of the package.

Her dad nodded. “We had a few left over this afternoon …No point leaving them in the store. I’ll find a vase for them.” He put the flowers down on the drain board, then peered into the sink. “Good lord, what’s that?”

“Lettuce,” Nita said. “Previously.”

“I see what you mean,” Nita’s dad said. “Well, that’s my fault. I meant to make some salad last weekend, but it never happened. That shouldn’t have gone bad so fast, though…”

“You have to put the vegetables in the crisper, Daddy. It’s too dry in the main part of the fridge, and probably too cold.” Nita sighed. “Speaking of which, I was talking to the fridge a little while ago…”

Her father gave her a cockeyed look. Nita had to laugh at the expression.

“You’re going to tell me that the refrigerator has a problem of some kind? Not a mechanical one, I take it.”

“Uh, no.”

Her dad leaned against the counter, rubbing his face a little wearily. “I still have trouble with this idea of inanimate objects being able to think and have emotions.”

“Not emotions the way we have them,” Nita said. “Ways they want things to be…and a reaction when they’re not. And as for inanimate…They’re just not alive the way we are.” She shrugged. “Just call this ‘life not as we know it,’ if it helps.”

“But it is life as you know it.”

“I just have better equipment to detect it with,” Nita said. “I talk to it and it talks back. It’d be rude not to answer, after that. Anyway, Daddy, it’s weird to hear you say you have a problem with this! You talk to your plants all the time. In the shop and here. You should hear yourself out in the garden.”

At that, her dad looked nonplussed. “But even the scientists say it’s good to talk to plants. It’s the frequency of the sound waves or something.”

“That’s like saying that telling someone you love them is good just because of the sound waves,” Nita said. “If you were from Mars and you didn’t know how important knowing people loved you was, you might think it was the sound waves, too. Don’t you feel how the plants like it when you talk to them?”

“They do grow better,” her dad said after a moment. “Liking…I don’t know.

Give me a while to get used to the idea. What’s the fridge’s problem?”

“It hates being empty. A fridge’s nature is to have things in it for people to eat! But there’s hardly anything in it half the week, and that makes it sad.” Nita gave her dad a stern look. “Not to mention that it makes me sad, when I get home from school. We need to get more stuff on Fridays!”

“Well, okay. But at least—”

“Uh-oh,” said a little voice.

Nita’s dad glanced up, and both of them looked around. “What?” he said.

“It’s Spot,” said Nita.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “He’s been doing that every now and then since I got home.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I looked for him before, but I couldn’t see him. Dairine can probably tell us when she gets back. So, Daddy, about the shopping…”

“Okay,” her father said. “Your mom was such an expert at judging what we needed right down to Friday afternoon. Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention. You probably did, though.”

“Uh, no,” Nita said, “but I saw her do it often enough that I can imitate what she did until I start understanding the rules myself.”

“Fine,” her dad said. “That’s your job now, then. Let me get out of my work clothes and we’ll go out as soon as Dairine gets back.”

“Uh-oh,” said that small voice again. “Uh-oh. Uh-oh!”

“What is it with him?” Nita’s father said, looking around in confusion. “He sounds like he’s having a guilt attack. Wherever he is…”

The uh-oh-ing stopped short.

Nita’s dad looked into the dining room and spied something. “Hey, wait, I see where he is,” he said, and went to the corner behind the dining room table. There was a little cupboard and pantry area there, set into the wall, and one of the lower cupboard’s doors was partly open. Nita’s dad looked into it. “What’s the matter with you, fella?”

“Uh-oh,” said Spot’s voice, much smaller still.

“Come on,” Nita’s dad said, “let’s have a look at you.” He reached down into the bottom of the cupboard, in among the unpolished silver and the big serving plates, and brought out the little laptop computer. It had been undergoing some changes recently, what Dairine referred to as an “upgrade.” In this case, upgrading seemed to involve getting smaller and cooler looking, so that a computer that had once been fairly big and heavy was now not much bigger than a large paperback book in a dark silvery case.

Spot, however, had equipment that no other laptop had, as far as Nita knew—not just sentience but (at least sometimes) legs. These—all ten of them, silvery and with two ball-and-socket joints each—now popped out and wiggled and rowed and made helpless circles in the air while Nita’s dad held Spot up, blowing a little dislodged cupboard dust off the top of him.

“Some of that stuff in there needs to be polished,” her dad said. “It’s all brown. Never mind. You got a problem, big guy?”

It was surprising how much expression a closed computer case could seem to have, at least as far as Spot was concerned. He managed to look not only nervous but embarrassed. “Not me,” Spot said.

“Well, who then?”

“Uh-oh,” Spot said again.

Nita could immediately think of one reason why Spot might not want to go into detail. She was reluctant to say anything: It wasn’t her style to go out of her way to get her little sister into trouble. Besides, since when does she need my help for that?

“All right,” Nita’s father said, sounding resigned. “What’s Dairine done now?”

Despite her best intentions, Nita had to grin, though she turned away a little so that it wouldn’t be too obvious.

“Come on, buddy,” Nita’s father said. “You know we’re on her side. Give.”

Spot’s little legs revolved faster and faster in their ball-and-socket joints, as if he were trying to rev up to takeoff speed. “Spot,” her dad said, “come on, it’s all right. Don’t get all—”

With a pop! and a little implosion of air that made the dining room window curtains swing inward, Spot vanished.

Nita’s dad looked at his empty hands, then looked over at Nita and dusted his palms. “Now where’d he go?”

Nita shook her head. “No idea.”

“I haven’t seen him do that before.”

“Usually I don’t see him coming or going, either,” Nita said. “But he can do that kind of stuff if he wants to. He’s got a lot of the manual in him; wizardry is his operating system, and Spot can probably use it for function calls I’ve never even thought about.” She went into the kitchen and got her backpack off the counter, bringing it into the dining room and dropping it on the table. “He and Dairine aren’t usually far apart for long, though. When she comes back, he will, too.”

“Did she have a late day today?” Nita’s dad said.

“Choir practice, I think,” Nita said. “No, wait, that was yesterday. She should

be home any minute.”

Nita’s dad nodded. “Any coffee left from this morning?

“I threw it out when I left for school,” Nita said. “You know what it tastes like when you leave it all day. I just made you some fresh.”

“Thanks.”

Her dad headed into the kitchen. As he did, the front doorbell rang. “It’s probably the newspaper guy,” Nita’s dad said. “He collects around now. Get that, will you, honey?”

“Sure, Daddy.” Nita went to the front door and opened it.

Instead of the Newsday guy, Nita found Tom Swale standing there—a tall man in his mid-thirties, dark-haired, good-looking, and one of the Senior Wizards for the New York metropolitan area. He was bundled up in a bright red ski parka and dripping slightly from the rain. “Hi, Nita. I saw the car in the driveway. Is your dad around?”

“Uh, yeah, come on in.”

“You need money, Nita?” said her dad from the kitchen.

“Not for Tom, Daddy,” Nita said. “He’s free.” She led Tom into the dining room and took his coat as he slipped out of it, hanging it over the back of one of the chairs. Her dad looked around the kitchen door, slightly surprised.

“Harry,” Tom said, “I’m sorry to turn up unannounced like this. Is Dairine around?”

“Uh, not at the moment.” Nita’s dad suddenly looked a little pale—and Nita wondered whether her dad was thinking back to the last time the local Senior Wizard had turned up on their doorstep asking for Dairine. “It’s whatever Dairine’s done, isn’t it?”

Tom’s rueful expression suggested that he understood what was going through Nita’s dad’s head. “Well, yes. I wouldn’t say it was on the scale of previous transgressions. But there’s something she needs to take some correction on.”

At that, Nita’s dad looked somewhat relieved. “A daily occurrence,” he said, “if not hourly. Tom, come on in, have a cup of something, and tell me about it.”

“Thanks.”

They headed past Nita into the kitchen. “By the way, you any good with vanishing computers?” Nita’s dad said.

“Please. I have enough trouble with them when they’re visible,” Tom said, giving Nita a wink in passing. Nita took this as a signal that she was meant to be elsewhere, so she went into the living room, picked up the extension phone, and dialed.

When Kit picked up the phone this time, the noise in the background was more muted. “Talked to the TV, huh?” Nita said.

“At length,” Kit said. “It seems to have worked for the moment.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “I had to sweet-talk the fridge a little myself just now.”

“You’re getting good at that,” Kit said. “Used to be you had more trouble with machines.”

Nita shrugged. “Experience?” she said. “Maybe I’m changing specialties. Or maybe yours is rubbing off. Look, don’t ask me.” She lowered her voice. “I was

going to say that if the noise is still too much for you over there, maybe you want to find an excuse to come over here for a while. It may not be any quieter, but it’s gonna be more interesting.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“I don’t know, but—” Nita heard something then: a voice, higher than hers, younger than hers, coming up the driveway and singing, more or less to the tune of the chorus of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” “Two weeks! Two weeks! I get two weeks off now, hurray, hurray—”

“Oh, boy,” Nita said. “Here it comes!”

The back door opened. “Two weeks! Two— Uh.”

There was a soft bang! as something materialized in the kitchen without being too careful about air displacement. “Uh-oh,” Spot’s voice said, sounding panic-stricken.

“Both of you stay right where you are,” Nita’s dad said.

Nita choked down her laughter. “Can’t miss this, gotta go!” she whispered, and hung up.

Dealing with

Unforeseen

Circumstances Carefully, intending to seem neither too sneaky nor too enthusiastic about it, Nita made her way into the dining room and sat down very quietly at the end of the dining room table, where she could just see into the kitchen.

Her dad and Tom were leaning against the kitchen counter, coffee cups in hand, looking at a suddenly very subdued Dairine. “I’ll give you three guesses,” Tom said, “why I’m here.”

Dairine leaned against the opposite counter and brushed her red bangs out of her eyes in a way that was meant to look casual, but to Nita’s practiced eye, the act was failing miserably. Dairine was freaked.

“And Spot knows, too, I’ll bet,” Tom said, “which is why he’s so skittish all of a sudden. Dairine, you know that as a responsible wizard you have an obligation to tell the people who’re still helping you manage your life about what’s going on with you…and when you’re intending to embark on some course of action that is going to affect them.”

“Uh, yeah, well, I was about to—”

“In some cases that information should really reach your family before you embark on the course of action, wouldn’t you say? Assuming that you want to stay in a good relationship with the Powers That Be. Which right now seems increasingly unlikely.”

Nita saw Dairine go so pale that her freckles looked about four shades darker than usual.

Tom put out his hand, and as if from the empty air, his wizard’s manual fell into it. It was a manual larger than Nita’s, nearly the size of a phone book—but as one of the supervisory wizards for this part of the East Coast, he had a lot more people, places, and things to look after in the course of his practice than Nita did. “Let me read you my copy of a message that doubtless will have reached you via Spot not too long ago,” Tom said, looking over his manual at Dairine as he opened the book and paged through it. “And which is doubtless why poor Spot is having a crisis of the nerves. ‘To: D. Callahan, T Swale, C. Romeo: We confirm availability for two of your species in the sponsored noninterventional excursus program at this time. However, your applicant supervisee-wizard’s proposal for an excursus is rejected for the following reasons: Durational impropriety. Evasion of local issues. Attempt to circumvent local dirigent authority…’” Tom paused, looking down the page with an expression of annoyed bemusement. “Actually,” he said, “despite the fact that the Powers That Be have listed about twelve other reasons here, those three are probably sufficient for the moment.”

“Okay, Tom,” Nita’s dad said. “For the wizardly challenged among us, this means… ?”

“Dairine,” Tom said, taking another drink of his coffee with his free hand, “has signed herself and Nita up for a cultural outreach program.”

What? Nita thought, her eyes going wide. She pushed herself very quietly back out of sight of the kitchen, flushing hot in one instant and cold in the next. Then, ever so carefully, she leaned forward again to see what her dad’s expression looked like.

He had raised his eyebrows, that was all. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad…”

“Probably not, until you consider that it would have involved them spending ten to fourteen days halfway across the galaxy,” Tom said. “Or sometimes somewhere further off…though these young-practitioner exchanges usually stay within a radius of a hundred thousand light-years, for administrative reasons.”

Nita watched her dad’s expression shift from bemused to slightly concerned. “You mean,” he said, “this is like a student-exchange program here on Earth.”

“There are similarities,” Tom said. “But the similarities also mean that while Dairine and Nita were gone, you would have had other wizards staying here with you.”

Dairine’s father slowly turned his head and trained a look on Dairine that was so blank it was scary.

“I was going to tell you, Daddy,” Dairine said in a much smaller voice than previously. “It was just that—”

“You were going to tell me, huh?” Nita’s father said, in a flat, unrevealing voice that matched his expression. “Not ask me?”

Nita swallowed.

“I just thought if I got everything arranged,” Dairine said, in a smaller voice yet, “got it all set up, then I could talk to you and we could—”

Dairine’s dad looked at her severely. “What?” he said. “You were thinking you’d just present this thing to me as a fait accompli? Bad move.”

“Daddy, we’ve all been—” Dairine stopped. “Some time off would have been really—”

“Uh-huh,” Nita’s dad said, absolutely without inflection. Out of his view, Nita covered her face with her hands. “Did Nita know anything about this?”

“No.” Now Dairine was starting to sound a little sullen. “It was going to be a surprise.”

“The message confirms that,” Tom said. “It wasn’t Nita who was being sanctioned, Harry.”

Nita’s dad’s expression broke enough for him to frown at Dairine. “Well, it didn’t sound like Nita’s style. But for your part, consider yourself lucky that I don’t ground you.”

“I, however, don’t have that much leeway,” Tom said. “The message the Powers That Be dropped on my head, after this one, requires me to restrict you to Sol System for the next two weeks, as a corrective. So consider it done.”

“Aww, Tom!”

Tom snapped his manual closed and tossed it into the air. It vanished. “Next time,” Tom said, “think it through.”

Nita’s dad gave Dairine that terrible level look again. “Dairine, I think you should go take some private time to consider what you’ve been up to,” he said. “Forget leaving the solar system: For the time being, I don’t want you to leave the house. By any means, so no doing transport spells in your room, young lady. In fact, I don’t think I want to lay eyes on you again till Nita and I get back from doing the shopping. So go on now.”

“I really am sorry,” Dairine said, very, very low. Nita listened to the words, judging the tone critically, and gave Dairine about a six on a scale of ten for penitence. As Dairine hurried through the dining room past her, Nita kept her face carefully straight, but the glance that Dairine threw at her, knowing their dad couldn’t see it, made Nita revise the score about half a point upward. Dairine was angry, but also genuinely sorry.

Dairine vanished through the living room and up the stairs to her bedroom. “And since you’ve been sitting there taking all this in…” Tom said through the kitchen doorway. Nita blushed. Tom gave Nita a look that wasn’t half as severe as it might have been.

“She really didn’t give you any idea that she was up to this?” Nita’s dad said, coming into the dining room.

Nita shook her head as Tom and her dad sat down at the table with her. “It was news to me,” Nita said. “She doesn’t tell me everything she does, not by a long shot. And I can’t always guess. Which may be a good thing, since if I’d known about this, I’d have—” Reamed her out, Nita was about to say, and then she stopped, because she didn’t know if it was strictly true.

She looked over at Tom. “I’ve seen the section in the manual about this exchange thing,” Nita said, “but when I read it, it never occurred to me that you could just sign yourself up for one. I thought someone had to nominate you.”

“Oh, not always,” Tom said. “You can sign up for it yourself, if you have the spare time and think the circumstances warrant it.”

“Which plainly Dairine did,” Nita’s dad said. “Harry,” Tom said, “I think all we have here is a case of Dairine doing what she usually does: pushing the envelope. Testing. It’s not that unusual for an early-latency wizard. You come into your power

in a big way, then it drops off in a big way, and afterward you’re likely to spend a while plunging around trying to redefine yourself as more than a wonder child. There’s always the fear, ‘Was that all I had? Was the way I was when I started out as good as I’m ever going to get?’ It takes a while to put that to bed.”

Nita’s dad sighed, leaned back in his chair and drank some coffee, then made a face: It had gone cold. “This hasn’t made trouble for you, has it? If it has, I’m sorry.”

Tom shook his head. “It’s nothing major,” he said. “Not compared with some of the sanctioning I have to deal with. The adult wizards are worse than the kids, in some ways: As you get older, there’s an unfortunate tendency to start to lose the innate hunger for rules that you have when you’re young. Some of us start trying to bend them in ways that aren’t always innocuous…”

Nita’s dad abruptly burst out laughing. “Whoa, you lost me. Kids have an innate hunger for rules?”

Tom looked wry. “Played hopscotch lately?” he said. “One toe over that chalk line and you are dead. But let me extend the metaphor more toward adult experience, because one of the places where the rule-hunger does persist is sports. You’re a soccer fan, Harry; I see you up at the high school refereeing on weekends. About this weird and complex regulation called the offside rule—”

“I can explain that,” Nita’s dad said.

“And what’s more, you’ll enjoy explaining it,” Tom said. “Possibly as much as you enjoy enforcing it on the would-be violators.”

Nita’s dad opened his mouth and then shut it again, grinning. “You might be able to convince me about this eventually,” he said.

Tom just smiled. “Anyway, this isn’t anything that I don’t deal with more remotely, twenty or thirty times a week. It just happens that we live around the corner, so I have an excuse to exert my influence personally…and to drink your coffee, which is better than Carl’s: He thinks any coffee that doesn’t eat the pot is a waste.” Tom sighed and leaned back in his chair. “As far as this particular problem goes, it’s no big deal. Since we’ve had the energy authorized for an excursus, I need to think about what to do with it. But that’s the least of my worries at the moment.”

He ran one hand through his hair as he spoke. Nita looked at it in slight shock; she saw something she’d never noticed before. All of a sudden there was some silver showing there, above the ears, and sprinkled in salt-and-pepper fashion through the rest of Tom’s hair. When did that start? Is he okay?

“Interesting times?” Nita’s dad said.

Tom nodded. “Interesting times. The world isn’t quite what it used to be, lately…”

“Most of us have noticed,” Nita’s dad said. “Come on, let me give you another cup of that; we’ll stick it in the microwave. I can’t believe how fast this stuff seems to get cold. More milk?”

Her dad and Tom went back into the kitchen. Nita got up and headed upstairs.

Her sister was sitting at her desk, her arms folded, her head down on them. Nita stood there in the doorway, looking at her.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” Dairine said, not lifting her head. “See how okay I am. Thanks for

asking.”

Nita had been practicing ignoring her sister’s sarcasm for years and by now was expert at the art. “What was the matter with you?” Nita said, though not nearly as loudly as she’d have liked.

There was a long silence before Dairine said anything. “I needed to get away,” she said at last. “Just for a while. I needed…I don’t know. Not a vacation. I needed to do something else, somewhere else. Millman said a change would be a good idea if I could swing it. And for you, too.” She gave Nita a look that was almost fierce.

Millman was the school psychologist who had been counseling them both, on and off, since their mom died. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell you to do anything like this,” Nita said, annoyed. “You know how it has to look to Dad! He’s going to think you don’t think he’s being a good enough dad or something.”

“But it’s not like we were going to be away all the time, Neets!” Dairine said. “It’s easy to come home at nights if you want to. There’s a protocol all set up—the Powers give you an expanded worldgating allowance and everything: You don’t have to worry about blowing huge amounts of energy on transport to come back from your host world if you get homesick, or if you need to deal with something else back here. You can be back anytime you need to be, no problem—and the rest of the time, you can concentrate on being where you are.”

Nita let out a long breath. “That,” she said, “kind of looks like the last thing you were doing, Dair.”

Dairine rubbed her eyes with her hands. It was their dad’s gesture, helpless and pained, and Nita’s insides seized up when she saw it.

“I didn’t think it through,” Dairine said after a little while. “Tom got that right.”

She was quiet for another long time, almost too long, but there was no break in the tension. After a moment, Nita sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked when she did so.

Dairine threw her a look, though not the one Nita was expecting. “You’ve been toughing it out all the time,” Dairine said, and went back to staring at her desk, all cluttered with diskettes and blank CDs and artwork and paperwork, with the flat-screen monitor of her main computer, and also now with Spot, his legs all retracted, looking as muted and unhappy as Dairine did. “You think I don’t see?” Dairine said, reaching out to trace some aimless design on Spot’s upper case with one finger. “And when Dad and I can’t connect, you’re the one who winds up talking sense to him, and to me, and getting us all going in the same direction. But who’s there to make things easier for you?…You’re getting worn out with it. You need a change of pace, something besides worrying about whether we’re okay. We’re tougher than you think we are. But you…”

Dairine fell silent, possibly unwilling to say what she was thinking. Nita looked at her and felt equally unwilling to force the issue, for she was afraid their thoughts were running in tandem. How many times have I had this idea myself in the past couple of months? Nita thought. How many times have I thought, I wish I were out of here. I wish that just for a few days a week, I was somewhere I didn’t have to deal with helping to put everything back together in some new shape, one that doesn’t have Mom in it?…

“Look,” Nita said to Dairine after a moment. “You meant well. You just have

to take these things past the meaning sometimes! Especially when it’s Dad. You know what a disciplinarian he is…or thinks he is. Now that Mom’s not here, he thinks he has to be twice as much of one. Have you given any thought to trying to be, you know, good for a while?”

Dairine didn’t look up, but she snickered, a supremely cynical sound.

It was what Nita had been hoping to hear. “Yeah,” Nita said. “Well, think about that, too. You could throw him seriously off balance if you kept at it long enough.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said after a moment or so. “That might be worth seeing…”

“Do what you can,” Nita said. “Give him some relief.”

“What about you?” Dairine said.

“What about me what?” Nita said, and then abruptly heard in her head what her present English teacher would say to her if she uttered such a sentence in class. Mr. Neary was fiercer about correct grammar than some people were about the eternal battle between Good and Evil.

“You could still go,” Dairine said.

Nita stared at her sister.

“And you could still take someone else. Say, Kit…”

After a moment, Nita shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “This thing with Dad is going to take some patching up. There’s no way he’d go for it right now…”

But Nita was somehow finding it hard to be as energetic about the refusal as she thought she should have been. Dairine just looked at her, straight-faced, for a moment or two. Finally Nita shook her head once more and got up. The bed creaked again.

“That thing’s never recovered from being down that crevasse on Pluto,” Dairine said. “Its springs are shot. You owe me a new one.”

Nita threw a look back at the desk, at Spot. How a featureless silvery-dark metal case could look less depressed than it had five minutes ago, Nita didn’t know, but Spot’s did. This reassured her, too, for Spot was a good reflection of Dairine’s genuine moods—Dairine might successfully fake what was going on with her, but Spot had no such talent.

“It was not down any crevasse,” Nita said. “I left it in the middle of a plain of perfectly good frozen nitrogen, high and dry. But who knows, I might read up on the crystal-reconstruction spells in the metals section of the manual over the next day or so, and talk the steel back the way it used to be. I’m getting good with metal, I’m told.”

This airy and overconfident statement elicited another snicker, even more cynical than the last one. Nita grinned. She had been a talk-to-the-trees type in the beginning of her wizardry, a specialist in work with organic life-forms, but everything changed eventually.

“You sit here and think about stuff,” Nita said. “Be real contrite in case Dad comes in. And when we’re gone, if Dad hasn’t done it already, make a little effort to get on his good side by taking that poor lettuce out of the sink and sticking it in the compost heap. It’s time it got recycled into something alive to make up for what happened to it in the fridge.”

Sure.

Nita went softly down the stairs and headed toward the dining room. Voices were speaking there. She stopped not far from the stairs, out of sight.

“I’m parenting for two here, Tom,” Nita heard her dad say.

“I know,” Tom said quietly. “It can’t be easy.”

“I don’t want to be hard on her. But at the same time, I have to try to keep some semblance of normalcy around here…keep some structures in place that the kids know they can depend on.” There was one of those pauses in which Nita could practically hear her father rubbing his face.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Tom said, getting up. “You know you are. In the meantime, Harry, any time you need a friendly ear, you know our number. One or the other of us is almost always around. Wizardry isn’t all about errantry. Mostly it’s just talking.”

“I know,” her dad said. “I see that here a lot—”

There was a knock at the back door. Nita heard her dad’s chair scrape back as he went to answer it. “Oh, hi, Kit,” her dad said. “Come on in. I can’t get used to it, the times when you walk over: I keep expecting you to just appear out of nothing in the living room, as usual.” Her dad laughed then. “‘As usual…’”

“Uh, hi, Mr. Callahan. No, I didn’t want to, because …”

Tom got up as Nita put her head around the living room door into the dining room. “News travels fast, huh?” Tom said to her as the back door shut behind Kit.

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said. She picked up Tom’s jacket, which was still wet, and shook it off before handing it to him. Residual water went everywhere. “Why didn’t you keep the rain off you when you came over?” she said.

“I don’t always do wizardry just because I can,” Tom said, smiling slightly and shrugging into the parka. “An attitude toward errantry that you’ll understand a lot better when you’re my age. Besides, I like the rain. By the way, how’s the reading coming?”

When Tom asked Nita this, she knew it didn’t have anything to do with fiction. Nita had been spending a lot of time with the manual over the past months, starting to explore for herself the kind of “research” wizardry that Tom did. In particular, she had been studying the Speech more closely, mostly for its own sake—there was always something new to find out about the language in which the Universe had been written—but also with an eye to finding other ways to deal with the Lone Power than just brute force. “I’ve been doing some more research on the Enactive and pre-Enactive modes,” Nita said. “Ancillary Oaths and bindings.”

“Oh ho,” Tom said. “That’ll keep you busy for the next couple of years… There’s a lot of finicky material there. A lot of memory work, too. Hit the Binding Oath yet?”

“Some references to it,” Nita said. “But I haven’t seen the Oath itself.”

“It’s worth a look,” Tom said. “Our own Oath is based on it. Or maybe I should say closely related. It’s worth studying, even if its uses are limited. Meanwhile, we’ve got more immediate problems than research.” He glanced back toward the stairs. “Talk to her, will you?”

“I did.”

“Good. See you later. See you, Kit.”

Tom went out the front door and closed it behind him.

“Honey,” Nita’s dad said, “I need to change out of my work clothes. Give me a few minutes.”

“It’s such a pleasure to get out of the house,” Kit said. “The phone hasn’t stopped ringing all afternoon.”

“Why?”

“Carmela. Every five minutes it’s yet another of her slavering horde of boyfriends.”

“I didn’t think she’d gotten up to the ‘horde’ level,” Nita said. “She told me she was just planning to test the wonderful world of dating.”

“Test?” Kit said. “It’s more like she’s holding auditions. There’s a new one on the phone every ten minutes. And I really don’t want to be around when she narrows them down to the ‘short list.’ Being here is a relief…even just for a little while. So are you coming over for dinner?”

Nita sat down and reached across the table for a pen and a pad of sticky notes, pulling off the top note and starting to jot down a list of needed groceries. “We have to go shop first. I’ll come over when we get back. We’ve really got to talk about the next couple of weeks.”

“That business on Mars,” Kit said as he sat down across from her. “We need to get that taken care of before it gets out of hand. Those depth charges in Great South Bay…It’s time to get together with S’reee and the rest of the deep-side team to deal with those before they get any more unstable. And then there’s that gate-relocation thing in the city…”

Kit paused, glancing toward the back of the house as he heard the bedroom door close. “It was Dairine, yeah?” Kit whispered.

“Yeah.”

“What did she do? What did Tom do?”

“He grounded her. She can’t leave the system.”

Kit whistled softly. “What about your dad?”

“I thought he was going to lose it completely,” Nita said, under her breath. “He sent her to her room. I can’t even remember the last time he did that.”

“What did she do! Kit said.

Nita finished with the sticky note, then put the pen down and told him. Kit’s eyes slowly went wide.

“Wow,” Kit said. “Halfway across the galaxy, he said?”

“Yeah,” said Nita.

“That’d really be something. You don’t get to do a transit like that every day, and this would be a sponsored one! Think of being able to go that far and not have to pay for the energy.”

Nita had been thinking of it, in an idle way. “Halfway across the galaxy” was forty-five thousand light-years or so. If you independently constructed a spell to do that kind of distance, it would really take it out of you. And doing such a transit using a previously set-up worldgate had its costs, too—you needed a good reason to do it, such as being formally “on errantry.”

“It’s a shame you couldn’t go, anyway,” Kit said.

“Oh, come on,” Nita said. “I couldn’t go now.”

“Why not? It’s spring break. We’ve got two whole weeks off!”

Nita frowned, shook her head. “It wouldn’t be right somehow. My dad—”

“Your dad wouldn’t mind,” Kit said. And then his expression went very amused. “Come to think of it, my dad wouldn’t mind.”

Nita looked at Kit in confusion. “What?”

“You haven’t been over in the past couple of days,” Kit said. “Between Carmela and Ponch—”

“Oh no,” Nita said. “What’s Ponch doing now?”

“Wait till you come over,” Kit said, looking rather resigned. “It’ll be easier for you to see than for me to explain. But when I told my pop that we were going to have to go to Mars, he said, ‘Don’t let me keep you.’”

Nita stared at Kit in surprise. “I bet your mama didn’t say that, though.”

Kit’s grin had a slight edge to it. “No. My mama suggested I go take a look at Neptune while I was at it, and not hurry home.”

Nita snickered. “Seriously,” Kit said. “This would be really neat. If we went to see Tom…”

They heard the door to Nita’s dad’s bedroom open. “Look,” Nita said, “let’s talk about it later. But I don’t think—”

Nita’s dad came in from the living room. “You ready?” he said to her.

“Yeah,” Nita said, getting up. “Daddy, can I have dinner at Kit’s?”

“Sure,” her dad said. “Kit, she’ll see you later. Neets, let’s get this shopping done.”

Fifteen minutes later, Nita and her dad walked in the sliding doors of the grocery store. The way things had gone in the old days, on occasions when the whole family went to the store together, it had been Nita’s dad’s job to push the cart and make helpful suggestions: Her mom had done the choosing. Nita now sighed a little as her dad went for the cart, and she consciously took on the choosing role for the first time. When shopping before, she had been rather halfhearted about it, which possibly had been the cause of some of the trouble. I guess I owe the fridge a little apology, she thought, and got out the sticky-pad page on which she’d made her list.

They went down the vegetable aisle and got potatoes, celery, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce, which Nita very pointedly handed to her dad. “The crisper this time,” she said. “He’s counting on you.”

“‘He’?” Nita’s dad said, turning the lettuce over several times in his hands and looking at it closely. “How can you tell?”

“If you’re a wizard, you can look at the gender equivalent of the word lettuce in the Speech,” Nita said. “Or, on the other hand, you can just ask him.”

“I’d probably prefer to pass on that second option,” Nita’s dad said as they came to the cold cuts and prepackaged meats. “I don’t know if I’d want to talk to something I might eat.”

“Daddy, this might sound weird to you,” Nita said, looking for her preferred brand of bologna, “but some things are less upset about being eaten than they are about being wasted.”

“Ouch.”

Nita looked at her dad in sudden shock. “Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

Her dad smiled slightly as they turned into the next aisle. “I didn’t think you did. But sometimes ‘ouch’ is a healthy reaction. Or so I hear.”

“You’ve been talking to Tom again,” Nita said.

“No, Millman. Never mind. We need some pizzas.” Her father paused in front of a freezer case.

“Yeah.” Nita picked a pizza from the freezer compartment. The front of it was full of images of ancient stone ovens. Nita turned it over and started reading the ingredients. “This is disgusting,” Nita said. “Look at all the junk they put in this!”

“That’s probably why they call it junk food.”

“Used to be that just meant the empty calories,” Nita said. “These days…” Not even this year’s unit on organic chemistry had prepared her to cope with some of the ingredient names on that label. Nita made a face and put the package back. “I’m not sure I want to be eating so many things I can’t pronounce.”

“Home cooking means a lot more work…”

“I know,” Nita said. “I’m beginning to see why Mom was so intense about it. I guess I’m just going to have to learn.”

They turned into the paper-towels-and-toilet-paper aisle, and Nita’s dad put a couple of the giant economy-size bundles of toilet paper in the cart. “It has been tough, hasn’t it?” her dad said.

Nita sighed and nodded. “It hurts sometimes,” she said after a moment. “Hurts pretty bad.” Then, having a sudden thought, she added, “But not so much that I need to leave the planet for extended periods.”

Her father looked thoughtful. “You sure about that?” he said.

Nita looked at him, uncertain what was going through his mind.

“What are other kids at school doing over spring break?” he said.

Nita shrugged. “Some of them are going away,” she said. Among a few of her friends there had been excited talk of family vacations, trips to Florida or even, in one or two cases, to Europe. These by themselves had left Nita unimpressed, for travel by itself was no problem for a wizard. You could be planets or star-systems away from home in a matter of minutes or hours, depending on whether you used private or public transport. But the idea of being able to get away with the family, even for just a few days, had an entirely different attraction. Unfortunately, this was the busy time of year for Nita’s dad. Even though the craziness of Valentine’s Day was over, it would be Easter soon, and no florist in his right mind took a vacation right now.

“It doesn’t matter, Daddy,” Nita said. “Kit and I have a lot of stuff we’ve been planning to do. We might need to travel, but not far. No farther than Mars, anyway. It’ll be nice to just kind of take it easy for a while. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worrying,” said her dad. But there was a strangely neutral sound to his voice, and Nita didn’t know quite what to make of it.

“Daddy,” Nita said, “are you okay?”

“Sure, honey,” he said.

Nita wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t say anything. She and her dad went to the checkout, paid for the groceries, bagged them up, and carted everything out to the

car. Then they headed for home.

They were only a few minutes away from the supermarket when Nita’s dad said, “There were going to be aliens in the house?”

Nita’s thoughts had been occupied with the weather on Mars this time of year, and the question took her by surprise. “Uh, yeah,” she said. “It is an exchange program.”

“Not incredibly strange aliens, I take it.”

“Well, they’d have to be able to handle the basic environment,” Nita said. “Our atmosphere, our gravity. That doesn’t mean they’d be humanoid; there’s a lot of variation in body structures among the kinds of carbon-based life that breathe oxygen. Anyway, whoever these guys were supposed to be, they might look pretty weird. But that wouldn’t matter. If they’re wizards, we’d have the most important stuff in common.”

Her dad looked thoughtful. “They wouldn’t be, you know, saving the world or anything while they were here?”

Nita wondered what he was getting at. “I don’t think so,” she said. “The manual says it’s supposed to be a chance to see what the practice of wizardry looks like in some place really different, so that you get some new ideas about how to handle it at home. You’re never formally sent out on errantry when you’re on one of these, or so the manual says. If something minor comes up in passing, sure, you handle it. Otherwise…” She shrugged. “Pretty much you take it easy.”

Her dad nodded, stopped the car at a traffic light. “We did get the milk, didn’t we?”

“Plenty.”

“I keep having this feeling that I’ve forgotten something.”

Nita pulled out her Post-it note and once again compared it against the list in her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so…”

Her dad brooded briefly. “This is going to drive me crazy until I remember what it is I think I forgot,” he said. “Never mind. Nita, why don’t you go?”

“Where, to Mars?”

“No. On this exchange.”

Nita stared at him.

He glanced back at her. Then the traffic light changed to green, and her dad turned his attention back to his driving.

“Are you kidding?” Nita said.

“No,” said her dad, turning the corner off Nassau Road onto their street.

At first Nita didn’t know what to say. “Uh, I don’t know if I can,” she said at last. “Tom may already have used the energy for something else.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” her father said.

“Did you talk to him about this?” Nita said, still very confused.

“In generalities, yes,” her dad said. “I doubt you would have heard it, as you were occupied. I could hear you sneaking up the stairs.”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said, “okay…”

“Well?”

Nita was flummoxed. “But, Daddy,” she said at last, “what about the aliens?”

“They’re wizards, you said.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And they’ll be able to disguise themselves, so the neighbors won’t get into a panic and call the cops or the FBI or anything like that?”

“Daddy, I think you’ve been watching too much TV. I don’t think the FBI really does aliens.”

“So these other wizards can cover up for themselves?”

“Well, sure, that would be part of it, lots of times you have to do that when you’re on another planet, but—”

“And Dairine will be here. From what you’ve told me, Dairine doesn’t have any trouble with aliens.”

Nita thought about that. Dairine’s response to aliens could range from partying with them to blowing them up, but so far she didn’t seem to have misjudged how to handle any given situation involving sentient beings who weren’t human. It was her own species she seemed to have trouble with. “No, she does okay.”

“I hear another ‘but’ coming,” her father said, as they paused at the last traffic light before their block.

“I don’t know if this is a good time to go away and leave you alone,” Nita said at last.

“If Dairine’s here, I won’t be alone,” her dad said.

“I mean—”

“Sweetie,” said her dad, “I think maybe a break would be a smart thing for you right now. Dairine and I would be capable of coping here. And among other things, it’ll give me a chance to practice talking to her without a mediator. Possibly a useful life skill.”

Nita smiled half a smile. “You really have been talking to Millman,” she said.

“About this? No. Some things I can figure out for myself. I am forty-one, you know.”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said, and then was quiet for a moment.

“You need time to think about this?” her dad said. “Maybe the thought of going so far away scares you a little?”

“Daddy!” Nita said. “I’ve been a lot farther away than this.”

“On ‘business,’ yes,” her dad said. “But this is different. Honey, you ought to be a little kinder to yourself. Go on, goof off a little! You deserve it. And maybe I could use a little controlled weirdness. Sounds like that’s what we’d be in for.” And he threw Nita a sly look. “Also, it’s a way to give Dairine a little something on the sly to make up for me, and your friends the Powers That Be, slapping her down so hard. Yeah?”

You are such a softie, Nita thought, with a sudden great rush of love for her dad. “Okay,” Nita said. “Thanks, Daddy!”

“One thing,” her dad said. “I really would be happier if Kit was with you. You two’ve been pretty good backup for each other in the past, and he’s worked hard, too. I don’t think a break from routine would hurt him, either. Obviously it’s going to be up to his folks, but when you go over there, see what they think.”

Without knowing how she knew, Nita was already certain of what they’d think. “You talked to them about me going already!” Nita said. “When you didn’t even know what I was going to say!”

Her dad shot her another amused look. “We have many mysterious modes of communication,” he said as he signaled the turn into their driveway. “Aided by the fact that not even children who are wizards can keep an eye on their parents every minute of the day.”

Nita had to grin as the car splashed through the puddle at the bottom of the driveway. “Let’s get this stuff unpacked,” her dad said. “Then you’d better go talk to Kit and make plans.”

Planning Your Trip Kit was sitting in his room, riffling through his wizard’s manual, frowning in concentration and trying not to be distracted by the sound of his dog’s snoring, when his sister stuck her head in through the open doorway. “You busy?” Carmela said.

Kit sighed, pushed back from the desk. “No. What is it?”

“You are busy,” his sister said, walking carefully around Ponch, who had stretched his big black self right across the rug in the middle of the floor and was lying there with his paws in the air, taking up most of the spare floor space in the room. “Good, I’ll hang around and make you crazy.” She leaned over his shoulder, so far over that her single long dark braid hung down in front of Kit’s face. “What’s that little red glowing thing in the air there?”

“Just a wizardry. I’m playing with the speed of light.”

“I thought that was supposed to be a law,” Carmela said. “You shouldn’t break laws.”

“I’m not. I’m not even bending this one,” Kit said. “Just bending space.”

“For the fun of it,” his sister said in wonder. “You make my brains bleed sometimes, you know that?”

“Not half as much as I wish I did,” Kit said. “‘Mela, what is it?”

She turned away, sat down on Kit’s bed, and grinned. “I wanted to know what you thought of Mark.”

Endless possible answers spun through Kit’s mind, all of them true, but none of them particularly kind. He settled for one of the less injurious ones. “He looks like a dork,” Kit said.

“How cruel!” Carmela cried. Then she smiled, and the smile was wicked. “True, but cruel.”

“It’s the backward baseball cap,” Kit said. “I’m sorry, but that’s getting pretty ancient. Plus his cap’s too small for him, and the pop-fasteners in it always leave these marks like little rivets on his forehead—” Kit stopped himself. I’m seriously discussing my sister’s would-be boyfriends, he thought. This is not something I want her to get used to. “Listen,” Kit said, “there’s something more important than this that we need to discuss. You’ve been having a lot of fun with the TV…”

“Since you fixed it so it shows alien cable,” his sister said, “I’ve revised my opinion of you way upward.”

“That concerns me so deeply,” Kit said. The “fix” hadn’t been intended to

add that particular feature to the new entertainment system, but when Kit had later tried to remove the alien content, the TV and DVD player had gone on strike. Kit had been forced to restore the system, and had had to admit privately that his sister’s demands that it be put back the way it’d been after the “fix” were even more annoying than the system’s refusal to function normally.

“So what’s your problem?” his sister said.

“We need to talk about that first thing you ordered off the Mizarthu shopping channel.”

“Which thing?”

“The laser dissociator.”

“Oh, that! It’s in my bedroom somewhere.”

Kit sighed. It sometimes seemed that the contents of whole planets could be accurately described as “in Carmela’s bedroom somewhere.”

“Where, exactly?”

“I don’t know. I’ll look for it later; I’m busy right now. What’s the matter with it?”

“I need to make it safe.”

“From what?”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Not from,” he said, “for. As in, safe for being on the same planet with.”

“Oh, come on, Kit. There haven’t been any problems since we figured out where the safety switch was.”

There haven’t been any problems, Kit thought, his eyes nearly crossing with frustration. Repairing the tile and the plastering in the bathroom had been a week’s work, at a time when he had much better things to do—and his pop had insisted Kit do it the “old-fashioned way,” meaning by hand and not by wizardry. “There was nearly a problem,” Kit said, “when you thought you had it set for ‘hot curler’ and it was set for ‘low disintegrate.’”

“I got that sorted out,” Carmela said. “You always have to harp on the small stuff! I thought that wasn’t good for a wizard.”

I will not kill her, Kit thought. It would speed up entropy. But only a little…

Kit let out a long breath. “Just find it for me in the next day or so, okay?” he said. “You can still use it on your hair, but I want to make sure that nobody else, like one of your friends when they’re over, can find it accidentally, go off with it, and blow up their bathrooms. Or more valuable real estate, like the insides of their heads.”

An odd look grew on Carmela’s face. “Like the inside of my head isn’t valuable?”

Kit gave her a dry look. His sister opened her mouth.

“Left yourself open for that one,” Kit said. “And another thing. These alien chat rooms you’ve been using…”

“You’re just jealous because I’m getting good at the Speech,” Carmela said, producing a pouting expression resembling that of a cranky supermodel.

Kit rolled his eyes. “No, I’m not jealous. I just think you should be careful about who you talk to!” he said. “It’s like any other kind of Net chat. What they show you and what they sound like may not have anything to do with who or what

they really are.”

“I know that!”

“I don’t think you know how much you don’t know that! I don’t want you thinking you’re having harmless clothes-and-hair-and-pop-star talk with some alien girloid, and then have Earth get invaded because it turns out you were actually talking to some twelve-legged, methane-breathing centipede prince who’s decided to turn up with a battle fleet and demand your hand in marriage!”

Carmela’s face wrinkled up. “Euuuuuu,” she said. “Centipedes. You just said the unmagic word.”

Kit kept his face straight. His sister was not wild about bugs of any kind, and he knew it. “So don’t give people in alien chat rooms your real name or address or anything, okay?” he said.

“Okay,” Carmela said with a long-suffering sigh. Then she looked curious. “What is the Earth’s address, by the way?”

“I’m not telling you,” Kit said.

“You don’t trust me!”

“No. And, anyway, it’s complicated, and you don’t have the technical vocabulary to say it.”

“Yet,” Carmela said. “I don’t think it’s going to take me that long. And once I’m really good at the Speech, maybe I should look into becoming a wizard, too.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Kit said, feeling incredibly relieved that it didn’t. Yet the very idea still freaked him out somewhat. Just what I need. My very own version of Dairine…! Oh, please, no. “You can’t be a wizard unless the Powers invite you,” Kit said. “And you’re too old.” Oh, please, let her be too old! “Besides, it’s a lot of hard work.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Carmela said. “Nita makes it look easy. She just reads out of her book, or waves that little white wooden wand of hers, and things happen.”

“It is not that easy,” Kit said, starting to get irritated, possibly by the insinuation that wizardry was easier for Nita than it was for him. “It’s like saying that someone just sits down at their computer and fiddles with the keys and things happen. Wands are just hardware. At the end of the day, it’s the software that does the job…and you have to write it yourself.”

Carmela gave Kit a not-entirely-convinced look. “Well,” she said, getting up, “I’ll go get the thingy for you.”

Downstairs, the phone rang. “In a while,” Carmela said as she ran out, pounding down the hall. “And when you’re playing around with it,” she added from halfway down the stairs, “make sure you don’t void the warranty!”

Kit felt like banging his head against the wall. “The warranty,” he said to no one in particular. “Why should she care about the warranty?”

He looked down at Ponch and heaved a sigh. Ponch opened one eye.

“You weren’t asleep,” Kit said.

Not the whole time, Ponch said silently.

“What am I going to do with her?”

Ponch looked after her. Ignore her. She’s just saying things like that to make you chase your tail; I can hear it in her voice. She thinks it’s fun.

Kit shook his head. “The problem with sisters is that you can never tell what they’re going to pull next. And she’s been getting… unusual lately.”

Then Kit wondered if he should have chosen another word. Ponch, too, had been getting unusual lately. This by itself wasn’t a surprise—wizards’ pets often start to acquire strange abilities or behaviors as their companions use their wizardry more, but in Ponch’s case, the level of unusual had become very high indeed. Here was a dog who recently had developed the ability to create a new universe and take Kit for a walk through it. And you have to wonder, Kit thought, is someone who can do that really a dog anymore?

Ponch rolled to his feet, got up, stretched fore and aft, and then came over to Kit and put his nose on Kit’s knee. Dinner? Ponch said.

Kit laughed. Whatever his own concerns, there were still some things about Ponch that were entirely doggy. “Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”

The two of them went downstairs together. Kit’s mama was slumped on the dining room sofa reading a newspaper, dressed in one of her pink nurse’s uniforms; she was just back from the day shift at the local hospital and hadn’t yet bothered to change. In the living room, Carmela was on the phone, talking rapidly about some new CD to what Kit assumed was yet another of the crowd of guys who were chasing her around. “Mama,” Kit said, “when’s dinner ready?”

“About an hour. Nita coming?”

“She said so, yeah.”

“Okay. You feed the monster there?”

“I’m doing that now.”

“You looked outside yet?”

“Not yet,” Kit said, with dread. He was sure he knew what he was going to see.

As they went into the kitchen together, Ponch started alternating between dancing around and spinning in circles on the same spot. Dinner!

“Yeah,” Kit said, “and you know what it is?”

What?

“It’s dog food!”

Oh, hurray! Dog food again! Ponch said, and jumped up and down some more; but Kit caught the amused glint in his eye.

Kit got a can of dog food out of the cupboard where the canned goods were kept. “You making fun of me?” Kit said.

His eyes on the can, Ponch sat down, very proper, with his front feet placed so that the white tips on his forefeet came right together, making him look extremely composed and serious. Never, Ponch said. At least, not at dinnertime.

Kit opened the can and dumped it into Ponch’s dish, filled the dry food dish, and checked to make sure that there was plenty of water in the bowl beside it. Ponch jumped up again, turned around in excited circles a few times more, and then went over to the dish and started to gobble his food.

Kit shook his head and rinsed out the can at the sink before throwing it out. In the living room it had gone quieter as Carmela got off the phone and went back to talking to the TV, or rather to someone the Powers That Be only knew how many light-years away. From the sound of it, she was translating a subtitled display rather

than listening to live Speech, but at the moment, this didn’t seem to be helping her much. “What?” Kit heard her say. “Do I what? Do I grenfelz? Uh, I don’t think so. No, I am not shy! Okay then, show me an image—”

There was a moment’s silence, after which Carmela dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. Kit was incredibly tempted to go see what she was looking at. I won’t do it, he thought. She’ll get the idea I’m trying to chaperone her, and she’ll give me all kinds of grief.

And I would be trying to chaperone her—

Kit went to look out the kitchen window again. He’d done this earlier, when he’d just come back from Nita’s and Ponch had still been asleep. Then, the sidewalk outside their house had been empty. Now, though, it was full of dogs.

There were at least ten of them. Most were neighborhood dogs: various multicolored and multisized mutts, the big blue-merle collie from the Winchesters’ place down the block, a pair of bulldogs from two streets over, and even the dysfunctional little terrier from three houses down, Tinkerbell—the one who normally threatened, in unusually fluent dog-language, that if he ever got out of his yard, he’d rip Kit’s throat out. Yet there he was, sitting peacefully on the sidewalk and gazing at the Rodriguez house as intently as all the other dogs were. The big silvery Great Dane from down Nita’s street, sitting next to Tinkerbell and as intent on the house as he was, shifted position slightly and put one huge foot on Tinkerbell’s rear end, nearly squashing him flat. Tinkerbell just wriggled out from under, shook himself, sat down again, and resumed staring at the house. Kit let out an annoyed breath.

“Are they still out there?” Kit’s mama said from the dining room couch, turning a page of the paper.

“Yeah,” Kit said.

“Remember our little talk the other day?” Kit’s mama said, her voice just slightly edgy.

“Yeah, Mama. I’m working on it.”

“Well, work harder.”

Kit turned away from the window, annoyed. He had spent some weeks in consultation with Tom Swale on the question of what was causing the increasing weirdness around his house. The best explanation Tom had been able to come up with was “hypermantic contagion syndrome,” an irritatingly vague suite of symptoms usually more casually described as “wizardry leakage.” Days of perusing his manual had left Kit completely in the dark as to exactly what kind of wizardry, or whose, was leaking, from where, into what…and until he figured those things out, there was no stopping the leak.

Kit looked out at the dogs and sighed. At least they were quiet at the moment. But they tended not to stay that way. And when they started making noise and drawing the attention of the whole neighborhood, his folks got tense. It wasn’t that they’d started giving him trouble about his wizardry as such. But the Rodriguez house used to be a fairly quiet and peaceful place, before the past month or so. Before the dogs, that is. Before the TV began evolving. Before Carmela became a boy magnet. The noise wasn’t his fault, and Kit had pointed out more than once that there was nothing he could do about the amount of noise Carmela made—the

number of times the phone rang in a given day was hardly anything to do with wizardry. But any time Kit said this, his mom would just glance first at the TV, which did have something to do with it…and then she’d look out the window to where half the dogs in the neighborhood were sitting, gazing at their house as if it were full of top sirloin, or something even more important. And then the howling would start—

Kit turned away from the kitchen window. “Ponch,” he said softly to his dog, “they’re all out there again.”

I keep telling them they shouldn’t do that, Ponch said silently, concentrating on licking his bowl clean. And for a while, they don’t. But then they forget.

“But why are they doing it?”

I don’t know. I keep asking them, hut they don’t understand it, either. They’re not so good at figuring things out. Ponch looked up, licking his chops. He sounded faintly aggrieved. I’ll let you know when I figure out what’s on their minds.

“Well, hurry up and do what you have to do to find out,” Kit said. “And when you go out there, tell them no howling!”

They like to sing, Ponch said, sounding a little injured. I like it, too. Even Carmela likes to sing. What’s the matter with it?

Kit closed his eyes briefly. His sister’s singing voice was, to put it kindly, untrained. “Just tell them, okay?” Kit said.

Okay…

Ponch turned his attention back to the bowls, starting a long, noisy, sloppy drink of water. From the living room, Kit heard Carmela start laughing again. Grenfelzing, Kit thought. Should I be worried that my sister is being invited to grenfelz I just hope this isn’t something that’s going to rot her morals somehow…

From down the street, Kit could faintly hear the sound of a familiar car engine coming toward the house: his dad, coming back from the printing plant three towns over where one of the bigger suburban New York newspapers was produced. The station wagon pulled in and parked. A few minutes later, Kit’s father came in the back door, pulled his jacket off his burly self, and chucked it at the new coat tree by the back door, which Kit’s mama had bought a few weeks before. The coat tree swayed threateningly, but for once it didn’t fall over—Kit’s pop was getting the hang of the maneuver. “Son, they’re out there again,” he said as he came through the kitchen.

“I know, Pop,” Kit said. “Ponch is working on it. Aren’t you?”

There was no reply. Kit looked over at Ponch, who had left the water bowl and turned his attention to the neighboring bowl of dry, crunchy dog food. He was now steadily eating his way through it with an air of total concentration.

Kit’s pop sighed as he came into the dining room, leaned over Kit’s mama (now sprawled out on the sofa) to smooch her, and took the newspaper from her, straightening up to glance out the window of the dining room. “It’s like being in a Hitchcock movie,” Kit’s pop said, “except I don’t think he would have gotten the same effect if he’d covered someone’s front yard with sheepdogs and Great Danes. Whose sheepdog is that? I’ve never seen it before.”

“I don’t know, Pop. I could go ask it.”

“Look, son,” Kit’s dad said. “Don’t bother. Just ask Ponch to have another word with them, okay? Otherwise we’re going to have the neighbors over here again, in a group, like last time…and I have a feeling this time they might think about bringing torches and pitchforks.”

“I asked him, Pop. He’ll go out when he’s finished his dinner.”

“Right. When’s ours, honey?”

“Three-quarters of an hour.”

“Then I’m going to go sit down and read this awful rag,” Kit’s pop said, “and see if I can figure out what’s wrong with the world.” He walked into the living room, leaving Kit wondering yet again why his dad was so unfailingly rude about the newspaper he worked for as a pressman. “Carmela, what are they doing there?”

“Grenfelzing.”

“Really. What’s the fire hose for?”

“I don’t think it’s a fire hose, Popi…”

“Oh, my lord—” Kit’s pop said.

The phone rang again. Halfway to the living room, Kit dived back into the kitchen for the wireless phone on the counter, and managed to pick it up and hit the talk button before Carmela could pick up the extension in the living room. “Rodriguez residence.”

“It’s me,” Nita said.

“Oh, good. Thanks for not being yet another of the thundering herd.”

Click. “I heard that!”

“Get off, ‘Mela. It’s for me.”

“Wow, I’ll call the media.” Click.

“She giving you a hard time?”

“Always.” Kit let out a harassed-sounding breath. “Please, please, please, come on over and give me something to do besides keep my sister off the phone. That chicken’s gonna be ready soon, anyway.”

“I’ll be over in a few. But you need to hear about this first. My dad wants me to go away on this exchange thing!”

“You gonna go?” Kit immediately began to itch with something that felt embarrassingly like envy.

“Yeah. And when we got back from shopping, my manual was about half an inch thicker than when we’d left, and a whole bunch of sealed claudication packages were sitting on my desk.”

“Hey, super,” Kit said, and was instantly annoyed at himself for not sounding as enthusiastic as he thought he should have. “This is going to be really great for you! You should get out there and have a good time—”

“What do you mean, I should go?” And Nita burst out laughing. “You’re so pitiful when you’re trying to be a good loser. I was going to tell you that my dad doesn’t want me to go alone. Tom still has an opening, and he’s holding it for you!”

“Wow,” Kit said. The envy instantly dissolved, first in delight, then in mild outrage. “Hey, and you let me stew for a whole, I don’t know, five seconds, thinking I was going to have to sit here while you were gone!”

“That’s to get you back for the chicken thing,” Nita said, and started imitating Kit. “ ‘Oh, I don’t know. I might want it myself…’” She broke up laughing again.

“Cut it out!” But Kit had to laugh, too. “Okay,” he said. “I have to figure out how to handle this. Where’re we supposed to be going?”

“The manual says it’s some planet called Alaalu.”

“Never heard of it,” Kit said. He put out a hand and felt around for something only he would be able to feel, the tag of a wizardly “zipper” in the air, which controlled entry to the personal otherspace pocket that followed him around. Kit found the tag, pulled it down, and pushed his hand into the opening so that it appeared to vanish while he felt around for his manual. “Alaalu…Is it in this galaxy?”

“Yeah,” Nita said, and Kit heard manual pages rustling again at her end. “Outer Arm Four, around radian one-sixty.”

Kit thought about that for a moment as he felt around and found his manual, then pulled it out of the claudication into local space. “That’s the Scutum Arm, right? Straight across the Bar from us.”

“Yeah,” Nita said as Kit zipped the pocket up again. “The mirror of the arm we’re in. The system’s a little more than sixty thousand light-years from here.”

Kit put his manual down on the counter and started flipping through it to the galaxography section. “Alaalu, Alaalu,” he muttered, paging through to the section dealing with the Scutum Arm. Kit ran one finger down the long column of planet names and coordinates on the index page and found Alaalu there.

“Got it,” Kit said, and riffled along to the page in question, which had an image of the planet’s star system. Apparently there was only one inhabited planet in the system, an exception to the usual rule. The star around which Alaalu IV circled was about the same size as Earth’s Sun, and in the same general class, a little golden G0. “Not exactly next door,” Kit said, studying the star’s position about three-quarters of the way down the long arm on the other side of the galaxy’s spiral. He tapped on the image of the star system to zoom in on the planet. “Who lives there?”

“Well, people. Who else? Humanoids, anyway: real tall people, all kind of a tan color.” Nita said. “Check page…” She glanced at her own manual. “I have it on page nine-sixty-two.”

“Right,” Kit said. For the moment his attention was on the image of the planet, banded blindingly around its equator with a white, two-way highway of swirling weather systems. The view was in real time, and the very slightest shift was visible as Alaalu turned in the amber light of its sun. The planet’s seas were as blue as Earth’s, and huge; there were only three landmasses, none of them large enough to be considered a continent. One was a big, rough-edged crescent, about a third of the way up from the equator toward Alaalu’s north pole—a three-quarter circle with the open end pointing more or less north. Kit wondered if he was looking at a remnant of some gigantic, ancient meteor strike—the rest of the “splash” rim damaged in some recent earthquake or plate movement. The other two landmasses were halfway around the planet from the crescent island—they were irregularly shaped blobs, long and narrow, with great chains of islands large and small strung out from them at either end, and each chain straddling Alaalu’s equator. One island chain ran almost vertically, pointing at the poles; the other crossed the equator more diagonally, like a sword stuck in the planet’s equatorial belt.

At first, Kit thought these were relatively short island chains, but then he got a look at the scale indicator plotted against the planet’s globe. “Neets,” he said, “those

island chains are nine thousand miles long!”

“I know,” Nita said. “I had to look twice, too. Check the main stats for the planet. Thirty-six thousand miles in diameter…”

“Wow,” Kit said. He put the manual aside for the moment. There was a ton of technical detail there to digest.

“It’s a nice place, anyway. A peaceful planet, no recent wars, not a lot of intraspecies hostility of any kind. Warm climate at the equator, but not too hot.”

“One of those places where life really is a beach,” Kit said, starting to smile in anticipation. “Could this actually be a vacation for a change?”

“Looks that way. Oh, there’d be some cultural stuff. We’d have to travel around on their planet, find out what it’s like living in one of their families. That kind of thing.”

“Sounds boring. In a good way.”

“I don’t know about you,” Nita said, sounding a little sharp, “but I could use some good boring about now.”

“No argument there,” Kit said. Recent months had featured too many excitements by half.

“But you know what’s really weird about this place?”

“What, besides that it’s peaceful?”

“Yeah. Know how many wizards it has?”

“How many?”

“One.”

Kit blinked.

“One?” he said. “For the whole planet?”

“Yup.”

“And how many people live there?”

“It says a billion and a half.”

Kit stared at the manual, not knowing what to make of this. “They haven’t had a big catastrophe or something that’s wiped out all their wizards?”

“Nope. The manual says one wizard is all they need.”

Kit shook his head. “Wow,” he said again. He had trouble even imagining any world so peaceful and orderly that one wizard was enough to keep things running smoothly.

“So go ask your folks! Wouldn’t they like to get rid of you for a couple of weeks?”

Kit fell silent, listening to his home. The TV was now shouting with a cacophony of alien voices, the audio expression of yet another chat room, and his sister was alternately shouting at the screen in the Speech and talking into her cell phone.

“Come on over and we’ll find out,” Kit said. “I think this’ll go all right.”

Outside, without warning, the howling started…in chorus.

“Kit!” his father said.

“Just hurry up,” Kit said. “I need some moral support!”

To Kit, it seemed to take hours for Nita to arrive: His brain was buzzing with plans

and possibilities that couldn’t start getting handled until he’d settled things with his folks. But it was really only about ten minutes before Nita bounced in the back door, grinning. “Here,” she said, and handed Kit a chicken, wrapped in plastic wrap on a little cardboard tray.

“Thanks,” Kit said, and stowed it in the fridge.

“What’s that noise? Opera?”

Beyond, in the living room, the entertainment system was making a sound like a fire siren bewailing its lot. “No,” Kit said, “just ‘Mela’s chat application again. Come on.”

“By the way, the K-9 Corps is out there again,” Nita said as she and Kit headed through the dining room. “Hi, Mrs. Rodriguez.”

“Hi, Nita,” Kit’s mama said from the sofa, where she was still lying with her feet up on the arm and her eyes closed. “Dinner in half an hour.”

“Thanks!”

“At least they’re just sitting there now,” Kit said softly. “They were howling before.”

“I missed that. Where’s Ponch?”

“Out back somewhere. He got them to be quiet, and after that he took off. For some reason he’s never real social after he has to go talk to them.”

They went into the living room. There, Carmela was sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the TV, a cell phone on the floor nearby but, miraculously, not in use. “Hi, ‘Mela,” Nita said. She peered at the screen. “ ‘Multispecies General Discussion,’” she read off the channel-indicator band at the bottom. “What’s it like?”

“Interesting, mostly.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Grenfelzing. Which for some reason Kit doesn’t want me to get involved with. He thinks it’ll stunt my growth.”

“Anything that would keep you from needing to buy new clothes every other week would be welcome,” said Kit’s pop from behind the paper. “If grenfelzing has that effect, bring it on.”

Kit looked at the screen, which Nita was studying with interest. It was divided into three main parts: a status bar along the bottom; a constantly scrolling column down one side; and the main part of the screen, subdivided into eight squares, each of which featured a live image, or what looked like one. The scrolling column was full of words in the Speech, moving very fast indeed, and the audio was screeching or blatting or warbling or hooting with any number of alien-sounding voices, all talking (it seemed) at once.

“Which one is supposed to be you?” Nita said, looking at the screen.

“That one.” Carmela pointed at what appeared to be a portrait of a pink octopus. “I picked it off a screenful of sample cover faces.”

‘“Mela,” Nita said, “you know what would be better? Go off-line and pick something more humanoid. Otherwise, if Pink Octopus Guy turns up at school someday and wants to sit next to you, the explanation you’re going to find yourself making is going to sound like something out of a lame sitcom.”

“Oh,” Carmela said. “Okay.” She tossed the remote to Kit. “But do aliens

really turn up on Earth just like that?”

“There’s no other possible way to explain you,” Kit said.

“Ooooooooo,” Carmela said, standing up without uncrossing her legs. “I feel unloved now. Nita, come see my catalogs!”

“I’ll come up in a while,” Nita said. “Thanks.”

Carmela wandered upstairs.

Kit glanced at his pop. “Uh, Popi,” Kit said, “uh, is it okay if I go halfway across the galaxy for a couple of weeks?”

“Sure,” Kit’s father said from behind the paper. “Is Nita going with you?”

“Uh, yeah, Pop.”

“Her dad said it’s okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Fine. Dress warm,” Kit’s father said, and turned to the comics section.

Kit and Nita exchanged a glance. Finally, Kit turned toward the kitchen.

“You’ll want to fill Mama in on the details,” Kit’s father said, in a tone of voice suggesting complete unconcern.

Kit couldn’t bear it anymore. He looked over his shoulder and saw his father just peering over the top of the newspaper at him, waiting for his reaction. His father bent the paper down just enough to let Kit see his grin, then let the paper pop up again and went on with his reading.

“I’ve been had,” Kit muttered to Nita as they went back into the kitchen.

Kit’s mama was up off the couch now, and looked up as she poured herself some coffee. “In case you were wondering,” she said, “Tom was on the phone a while ago.”

“Oh,” Kit said.

“He gave us the basics,” Kit’s mama said, leaning against the counter. “I gather that this isn’t going to be at all dangerous, and that you’ll be able to come home at night if you want to, or if we want you to.”

“Uh, yeah,” Kit said.

“Well, let’s think about this,” his mother said. “Your grades have been okay…” Kit was already beginning to grin when his mama glanced up at him and said, “I emphasize the ‘okay’ Not brilliant. I’m still not entirely pleased with your midterm grades, especially that history test.”

“Mama,” Kit said, “my history teacher is a date freak. He doesn’t care if you understand anything about history except when things happened!”

“Aha, the appeal to vague generalities as opposed to concrete data,” Kit’s mother said. “Sorry, honey. Not having the dates is like knowing why someone’s having a cardiac arrest but not being real sure where their heart is. You’re just going to have to work harder at that, even if you can’t see the point right now.”

“You’re gonna tell me that it’ll all make sense someday,” Kit said.

“It sure will,” his mother said, “and on that day you’ll suddenly realize that your mom wasn’t really as dumb as you secretly thought she was at the very moment you were also trying to wheedle her into letting you go off on a jaunt halfway across the galaxy.”

I think this is a real good time not to say anything, Kit thought.

“Okay,” Kit’s mama said. “I want a commitment from you that you’re going

to work harder in that history class. Otherwise, the next time you want to go out on a recreational run like this, the answer is going to be no. Even if you work in other worlds, you have to live in this one…and Tom says even wizards need day jobs.”

“I promise, Mama,” Kit said.

His mother had another drink of coffee, then looked reflectively into the cup. “Of course,” she said, “you’d promise to turn into a three-headed gorilla as long as you could go on this trip.”

“Mama!”

Her grin broke out at full strength. “I know,” she said. “Wizards don’t lie. But if I don’t get to tease you sometimes, life won’t be worth living. When do you leave?”

“Thanks, Mama!” Kit said, and jumped at her and hugged her harder than necessary, if only to get her back for the teasing.

“It’s some time in the next couple of days, Mrs. Rodriguez,” Nita said. “I didn’t check the exact date—I was looking at the rest of the info package. We can tell you in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Kit’s mama said. “Get that sorted out and you can fill us in over dinner.”

They went up to Kit’s room—or, rather, Kit ran up the steps three at a time in his excitement, and Nita came up after him. As Kit passed Carmela’s room, she put her head out and looked him up and down as if he were nuts. “What’s going on with you?” she said.

“I get to go away for spring break!” Kit said.

“Oh, really? Where to?”

“Sixty-two thousand light-years away,” Kit said casually. “The other side of the galaxy.”

“Great!” Carmela said. “I’ll give you a shopping list.”

“You do your own shopping,” Kit said as he and Nita went into his room. He glanced over at Nita and saw her grinning. “What’s so funny?”

“Your whole family teases you,” Nita said. “I’ve never seen them get so coordinated about it before.”

“Neither have I,” Kit said. “I don’t know whether I should be worried or not.”

“This is new,” Nita said, looking up at a double-hemisphere map of the Moon on the wall at the head of Kit’s bed. The map had a lot of different-colored pins stuck in it, in both hemispheres, though there were about twice as many on the “near side” of the Moon as on the “far side.” “Are you trying to win a Visited Every Crater competition or something?”

Kit threw her a look. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said. “I’m trying to get to know the Moon before it becomes just another tourist destination.” But his attention was on his desk by the window.

It was covered with schoolbooks brought home over spring break (the school did locker cleaning then) and notebooks and pens. What it was not strewn with were the three objects that had just appeared, between one breath and the next, and were floating a few inches above the cluttered surface. They were silvery packages about

the size of paperback books, wrapped with “sheet” force fields that sizzled slightly blue at the corners; and they were bobbing slightly in the draft from the nearby window, as its weather stripping had come loose again. “When are you going to fix that?” Nita said.

“Later,” said Kit. He inspected the little floating packages to see if they had notations on them. One did. A single string of characters in the Speech was attached to it and was waving gently in the draft: read this first.

“Is this what you got?” Kit said.

Nita nodded. “That one’s the mission statement,” she said.

Kit took hold of the wizardly package, pulled it into the middle of the room, and pulled the string of characters out until the normally curved characters of the Speech went straight with the tension of the pull. As they did, the package unfolded itself in the air, a sheet of semishadow on which many more characters in the Speech swiftly spread themselves in blocks of text and columns, small illustrations and diagrams, and various live and still images. SPONSORED ELECTIVE/NONINTERVENTIONAL EXCURSUS PROGRAM , said the header, NOMINEE AUTHORIZATIONS AND ANCILLARY DATA. NOTE: WHERE CULTURAL CORRESPONDENCES ARE NOT EXACT, LOCAL ANALOGUES ARE SUBSTITUTED . Beneath the header, divided into various sections, was a tremendous amount of other information about the world where they’d be staying, the family they’d be staying with, the culture, the locality where the family lived, the planet’s history, the climate, the flora and fauna, on and on and on…

“It’s gonna take me all night to read this!” Kit said.

“Relax,” Nita said. “It’s not like there’s going to be a test or anything! You don’t have to inhale it all at once. We’ve got time for that.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. It was just beginning to sink in how very far from home they were going. Kit was delighted, and at the same time, all of a sudden it was making him twitch.

He scanned down the data. Addendum to authorization: You may be accompanied by your adjunct Talent if desired. “Hey,” Kit said, “I can bring Ponch!”

“Great! And there are the dates,” Nita said, pointing to one side where the duration of the trip was expressed, as usual on Earth, in Julian-day format— 2452747.3333 to 2452761.3333, it said. She had her manual out and was paging through it.

“It sounds close,” Kit said.

Nita raised her eyebrows. “No kidding,” she said. “That first date is tomorrow at three in the afternoon. I didn’t realize it was so soon!”

“You won’t hear me complaining,” Kit said. “What’s the other date?”

“Exactly two weeks later.”

“Just before school starts again,” Kit said. “Good thing I finished my break work early.”

Nita made a face. “I wish I had,” she said. “I’ve got a few reports to do…I’m going to have to bring them with me.” Then she grinned again. “Fortunately, that’s not a problem. See that one there, the big one?” She pointed at another of the

packages floating over the desk.

Kit went to it, brought it into the middle of the room, and pulled its “tag.” Instead of unfolding itself, the package rolled itself up tight into a narrow cylindrical shape, losing its “wrapping” in the process. There it hung in the air, a silvery rod about three feet long and half an inch wide.

“What is that?” he said.

“A pup tent,” Nita said. “Watch this—”

There was another of those little threads of words in the Speech hanging down from the middle of it. Nita pulled on the thread. As if it were a window shade, a pale sheet of shadow pulled down out of the rod.

“That’s really slick,” Kit said. “What’s it for? Shelter?”

“Storage,” Nita said, “for the things you need to bring with you. It’s a claudication, but it’s a lot bigger than our little pockets.” She finished pulling the access interface down to floor level and straightened up again.

“Hey,” Kit said, looking through the shadow. He put a hand through the shadow: The hand vanished. Then he put his head in through the access.

Inside was just a gray space about the size of Kit’s living room, with a ceiling about ten feet high. The space was softly illuminated by a light that came from nowhere. Through the walls of the “pup tent,” he could faintly see his own room. It was a good trick, because from the outside there was nothing to be seen but the rod and the rectangular doorway hanging down from it.

When he pulled his head out, Nita was snickering.

“You should see how you look when just your head vanishes,” she said.

Kit thought about that for a moment. “What did my neck look like?”

“A guillotine ad,” Nita said.

Kit raised his eyebrows. “My mama would probably be interested.”

“We can show her later. Anyway, clothes and books and things can go in there…”

“Some spare food?” Kit said. “In case you wake up in the middle of the night and need potato chips or something?”

Nita gave him a look that was only slightly dirty. Potato chips were a recent weakness of Nita’s, one that Kit had started actively teasing her about. “Yeah,” she said. “A case or so of those…and see if I give you any.”

Kit grinned. “Okay,” he said. “What’s that last one? Did you open yours?”

“Nope,” Nita said. “It says not to. In fact, it just about screams not to. Check it out.”

Kit picked up the last package. It, too, had a “tag” of characters in the Speech hanging from it, but as Kit started to pull on it, a little half-transparent window appeared in the air, like a floating page of the manual. Nita peered over his shoulder at it.

DANGER!—CUSTOM PORTABLE

WORLDGATING LOCUS—DANGER!

DO NOT IMPLEMENT WITHOUT

READING INSTRUCTIONS!

The display skipped a few lines and then went on, in the Speech:

DEPLOYMENT INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Before departure: Insert coordinates of desired “home” egress points into

compacted routine package, including at least two alternate points for each

primary point (for use should primary point be occupied).

2. Transport compacted routine package to relocation site. WARNING! DO

NOT attempt to deploy routine package before arrival at final relocation site.

Note that basic deployments cannot be reversed once exercised.

3. After arriving at relocation site, attach coordinate package to supplied

power conduit package, choose an appropriate locus for installation, 1 and

activate in the usual manner. 2

See main documentation for details regarding operation and decommissioning

at end of legitimacy period. NOT RATED FOR TRANSITS OF MORE

THAN 150,000 l.y.

1

See attached annotation for cultural and logistical considerations.

2

This installation requires a matter substrate. Do not install in areas where

matter state is likely to experience unpredictable shifts. Do not deploy in

vacuum or microgravity. Retroengineering this wizardry is not recommended

unless you are confident that you have sufficient understanding of gate

substrates, hyperstring structure and string tension relationships, matter-energy

polymorphism. Consult your local Advisory or gating technician for technical

assistance.

“They’re spatial-only transit gates,” Nita said. “Subsidized ones. You can use them as many times as you want…come home whenever you want…and you don’t have to pay for it. I love this!”

“I wonder what happens if you try to deploy them ‘before arrival at final relocation site,’” Kit said. He juggled the claudication package in one hand.

“You wouldn’t!” Nita said.

“Well…” Kit grinned, finally, and shook his head. “No. But you do have to wonder…”

Kit put the worldgate package aside and looked up again at the cultural exchange mission statement. “So, who are they sticking us with?” he said, looking through the cultural info. “Wait. Here it is—”

“Your host family: The Peliaen family consists of a female-analogue parent

(Demair), a male-analogue parent (Kuwilin), and one sublatency Alaalid, your

counterpart and fellow wizard Quelt (female analogue). The Peliaens are

atypical in that one family member (Kuwilin) has elected to do physical labor

as a permanent avocation rather than in rotation, as is common in this society.

The family lives in a typical rural dwelling by the shore of the Inner Sea,

twenty [kilometers] from the nearest large population aggregate…”

“It’s a beach,” Kit said. “It is a beach! This is gonna be terrific!”

“The last time we had a vacation by the beach,” Nita said casually, “I almost got eaten by a shark. Let’s hope this goes a little more smoothly, huh?”

“It has to,” Kit said. “The Powers wouldn’t let anything like that happen to you now! See, it says right there, in big letters, ELECTIVE/NONINTERVENTIONAL!”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I guess you’re right.” She let out a breath and looked relieved.

“Kit?” came his mama’s voice from downstairs. “Nita?”

“Chicken!” Nita said, and was out of the room before Kit even had time to turn around. He chuckled, folded up the wizardries to bring them down to show his mama and pop, and went down after her.

As he passed through the living room, Carmela was sitting in front of the TV again, looking at a screenful of data. “More chat stuff?” Kit said casually as he passed.

“Oh, no,” Carmela said, intent on the screen. “I didn’t know there was a galactic positioning system! And look, you can put in a planet’s name, and it looks in the database, and, see that, here’s the address of Earth!”

Kit caught up with Nita as they went into the dining room, where his mama was setting the table. “The sooner we get out of here, the better,” he said under his breath. “I just don’t know if halfway across the galaxy’s gonna be far enough.”

On the Road Nita was up late that night, reading over the cultural exchange material. A little voice in her head kept nagging her, saying, You really need your sleep. You’re going to be a wreck tomorrow…But she couldn’t help herself: She was too excited. She lay in bed for a long time with her copy of the briefing folder hanging over her head, reading about the planet, the society, the people

They had never had a war on Alaalu. They didn’t seem to have any diseases, and the manual said there wasn’t any crime. Their climate was stable, so that natural disasters like floods and hurricanes happened only once or so every few centuries; their planet’s tectonics were unbelievably leisurely, so that whole lifetimes might go by without there being even one earthquake or volcanic eruption. It has to do with the size of the planet, I guess, Nita thought, sleepily reaching out to touch the folder to get the content she was reading to scroll down a little. And there’s no moon big enough to stress the planet’s crust. And the weather stays calm because the axis doesn’t tilt, and the sun’s the right distance away…

She lay back after looking at one of the images of a beach—broad, white, and tideless—with that golden sun lying low over an endless blue green sea. This is going to be just what I need, Nita thought. Two weeks at the beach…

But the beach was full of statues.

Nita stood looking around her in a twilight that, as she considered it, was not the one that came before sunset, but the one that came before dawn. The water ran up and down the beach, strangely quiet. The waves were very small; she thought perhaps she was on a lakeshore somewhere.

At this time of day, everything—sea, sand, sky—seemed to be the same color, a soft bluish gray. The beach ran seemingly to infinity on each side, sloping strangely upward and vanishing in a mist of twilight distance. And in that dimness, dotted here and there along the beach, a hundred thousand tall statues stood.

Every time Nita looked in a different direction, there seemed to be more of them. They were wonderfully made. It seemed to Nita that the statues had been painted to look just like real people: very tall people, of whom even the shortest were six or seven feet high. They wore long, loose, comfortable clothes, tunics and soft trousers and long skirts, and they were all very handsome, with blind, bland faces, all slightly smiling.

Nita went over to the closest of them, admiring the wonderful realism with which the statue had been carved. You could even see the coarse, soft weave in the fabric of the clothes it wore, as if it were real. She reached out to touch the “fabric” of the nearest statue’s sleeve—

And found that it was fabric, something like loosely woven linen…and the arm underneath it was warm.

They’re not statues—

Nita snatched her hand back, shocked. But there was no answering movement from the—Not a statue. A person. But what’s the matter with them? Why don’t they move?

“Why don’t you move?” she cried to the night. “What’s wrong?”

No voice answered her, at first. But then, slowly, Nita began to hear another sound, one she’d mistaken for the sound of the little waves coming up the beach. It was someone whispering. The whisper said, “We are as we’ve decided to be. Everything is fine.”

“It’s not!” Nita said. “There’s more to life than just standing around! You should move! You should do things!”

“We are as we’ve decided to be,” said another whisper. And another, and another, until there was a whole chorus of them, all saying, as if in perfect content, “Everything is fine. Everything is fine…”

In the dream, Nita was not convinced. She started to walk down the beach, looking for just one of these people who would say something besides “Everything is fine.” Finally, she broke into a run, looking into face after smiling face, and the speed of her running stirred the clothes of the people she ran past…but nothing else. None of them moved. None of them turned to watch her. Finally, after a long dream-time of running, Nita stopped. Because this was dream, she wasn’t out of breath. But she could still hear the whispering, endless, like the sound of the sea: “We are as we’ve decided to be…”

“.. and everything is fine…”

She stood there in the twilight, which was slowly growing brighter, and started feeling like she wanted to leave. She didn’t want to see the light of full day

shine on all these statues and make it plain how stuck they were. Nita started to look for a way to get off the beach. But it was all beach, a beach full of statues, no matter where she turned. She started to despair.

Then, far away, something moved. Nita strained her eyes to see it. Slowly, she began to see that it was shorter than all the other blind, frozen figures, and it was walking right toward her. As it came ever closer, Nita found herself feeling an irrational fear, which grew with every step it took toward her.

She wanted to run. But she couldn’t. Now she was the frozen one, a statue herself. No! Nita thought, and tried and tried to move; but she had stayed here too long, and the statues’ immobility had spread to her. And that single moving figure was closer now. Much closer. Only a few hundred feet away—

In terror she stood there, rooted to the sand, and watched him come. He was only as tall as she was, but Nita felt as afraid of him as if he’d been a hundred times taller. He was dark-skinned, wearing pale, long, loose clothes like the statues wore. He had long, dark reddish hair-stuff that hung down his back, and his eyes were dark, too, unreadable. He came to stand right in front of Nita, and nothing she could do made her able to move so much as a muscle, though she desperately wanted to get away.

“I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” the man said. “You know what has to be done.”

Nita couldn’t speak, couldn’t even shake her head.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’ll be morning soon.” And sure enough, dawn was coming on. In fact, it seemed to be coming on with a rush, as if something had held it back, waiting for this man to arrive. Now the whole eastern sky went pale with light, paler, bright, blinding, and the Sun leaped into the sky as if over a wall, and the whole beach went up in a single cry of terror as at last, at last, the statues spoke—

It was the Sun that woke her up, finally, streaming very early into her room through the east-facing blinds that she’d forgotten to close. The briefing folder, programmed not to waste energy, had folded itself up again after Nita fell asleep and was hovering in the air over her head, a neat little dark package. Nita plucked it out of the air, threw off the covers, got up, and stuffed the folder into her backpack, which was hanging over the back of her desk chair. Then she got into her jeans and threw on a baggy T-shirt stolen from her dad.

“Everything is fine…”

Wow, Nita thought. That’s one for the book. She got her manual, opened it to her “dream log” pages, and added a record of what she could remember of the dream. Most of it, I think. It was vivid.

When she finished, she went down for breakfast. Dairine was there ahead of her, which was moderately unusual. She was sitting at the dining room table, halfway through a bowl of cornflakes, with a folder spread out on the table next to the bowl. Spot was crouched off to one side, with no legs in evidence, but he had put up a pair of stalked eyes and was regarding the cornflakes with a dubious expression. “Morning,” Nita said.

“Yeah.”

Nita put a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster, started them toasting, and went to get a mug from the dish drainer. “What’s that you’re reading?”

“An orientation pack with information on the incoming guests. Dad’s got one, too.”

Nita was surprised. “When did that come in?”

“Last night.”

“It is in English, isn’t it?”

“No,” Dairine said. “It’s got a Speech-to-text converter, though. Very neat. He started in on it last night. I think he’s reading the rest of it in bed right now.”

“Great. How many guests are we getting?”

“Three, it looks like.”

Nita opened the cupboard over the counter and rummaged around a little for the dark tea she liked. “Where from?”

“All over. There’s a Demisiv, a Rirhait, and somebody from Wellakh, which I’ve never heard of.”

“Wellakh,” Nita said. “Don’t think I’ve heard of it, either.” Then it hit her. “Three? Where are they all going to stay? We’ve only got one extra bedroom, and I don’t have the bunk beds in mine anymore.” She found the tea bags and fished one out of the box. “Assuming they can even use beds, and don’t need racks or hooks or something…”

“They’ll stay in the pup tents. That’s what they’re for,” Dairine said. “They can put as much of their own stuff in there as they like, if it turns out they need it. Beds, furniture, whatever. In fact”—and Dairine looked up at Nita—“I’ve been looking over the docs, and they could do a lot more than that if they liked…”

Nita looked around the corner of the kitchen door at Dairine. The expression on her sister’s face was one Nita had seen entirely too often—the amused look of someone who’s figured out a new way to put something over on the universe. It’s too early in the morning for this, Nita thought, picking up the kettle and going over to the sink to fill it. “How do you mean?” she said.

“The pup tents have a ‘back door,’” Dairine said.

“What, like the main access?”

“No, it’s different,” Dairine said. There was a pause and some crunching. “If you change the permeability of the pup tent’s matter-void interface—”

“Whoa, wait a minute!” Nita said. “That’s reverse engineering! The custom gate interface said you weren’t supposed to do that.”

“Oh, to the gate, yeah. But the pup tents—”

“Dairine!”

There was a pause for more crunching. “I said you could do that,” Dairine said. “I didn’t say I was going to.”

This declaration wasn’t specific enough to give Nita any relief, but she sighed and put the kettle on the stove, turning the burner on. And if she does start gimmicking things while I’m not here, well, that’s just her problem. The thought of not having to be involved in cleaning up after some trouble of Dairine’s made Nita feel oddly cheerful.

Her toast popped up. Nita got a plate and reached into the fridge for the butter. “So how are you guys doing your big transit to this planet?” Dairine said. “What’s its name again?”

“Alaalu. We’ll use public transport to start with. We’ll short-gate it to Grand

Central around two, and then go over to the Crossings from there. After that we just pick up a scheduled service for Alaalu. The manual says there are outbound gatings from the Crossings about once every two hours, or on demand. No big deal.”

“Leaving early, huh?” Dairine said, reaching out to the cornflake box in front of her to pour another bowl. “Can’t bear to see Dad freaking out over the new arrivals?”

“Actually,” Nita said, cutting her toast in halves, “I think he’ll do just fine… and the sooner I’m out of here, the happier he’ll be. One less thing for him to concentrate on.”

“Hnh,” Dairine said, a noise which suggested both that she was chewing and that she didn’t know whether to believe Nita or not.

Nita sat down and started eating her toast. “You packed yet?” Dairine said.

Nita shook her head. “After breakfast,” she said, picking up the second piece.

She munched in silence for a little while, and then looked up to find Dairine looking at her with an expression that on anyone else might have been somewhat wistful. “What?”

“This is turning out okay after all, isn’t it?” Dairine said.

“I think so,” Nita said. “And Dad’s calming down a little.”

Dairine snickered into her cereal. “I think so. Anyway, it’ll be fun to have some other wizards here to hang out with. And Carmela’s been wanting to get some more practice with the Speech: This’ll be a great way.” Dairine poured more milk on her cornflakes. “It’ll be good for them to meet a normal Earth person…”

Nita smiled slightly as she finished her toast. “Don’t let Kit hear you call her that.”

“Yeah.” Dairine took another spoonful of cornflakes. “Go on, you should start packing. It’s gonna take you longer than you think.”

It annoyed Nita to have to admit that her sister was right. After her dad went off to work, she spent the rest of the morning and the very beginning of the afternoon putting things into her pup tent and taking them out again. The things that stayed in included Nita’s desk, which, she discovered, was too heavy to drag in so that she wound up having to levitate it; a lot of books and CDs and her own little desktop CD player and sound system; a lot of clothes in cardboard boxes, including every swimsuit she owned, and much other junk from her dresser drawers that Nita had gradually realized she couldn’t do without. That recurring realization was what stopped her, eventually, as she stood in front of her dresser holding her third stack of underwear. Am I insane? I can always come back.

She chucked the underwear back into the open dresser drawer, pushed it shut with her foot, and went into the bathroom for toiletries and a couple of towels. There’s a thought. Beach towels… She opened the towel cupboard and pulled out a couple of big ones, smiling at the thought of lying around under some alien sun, listening to the ocean, doing nothing—

Sunblock! Nita rummaged around in the medicine cabinet, but all the sunblock in there had sell-by dates in the previous year. This stuff is useless now. I can always use a wizardry to do the same job…

She went back into her room, which looked strangely empty without her desk, and glanced around to see if there was anything she’d forgotten. A glance at her watch told her it was one-thirty. Getting close to time to go, Nita thought. Looks like I’m all set—

“Honey? Good grief, what’s going on in here?”

Nita looked over her shoulder. Her dad was standing in the doorway, gazing into her room in some confusion. “Are you going to leave anything in here?” he said. “Are you sure you don’t need the posters on the wall, too?”

“Nope, I’m all done,” Nita said. As she spoke, she bent down to pull the tag of words in the Speech that controlled the pup tent’s access; the gray shadow of the portal slid up into the silvery rod and vanished. Nita took the rod down out of the air, telescoped it down to a foot, and slipped it into her backpack. “You’re home for lunch?”

“It’s lunchtime, yeah, but I’ve already had a sandwich. I just thought I’d see if you needed me to drive you and Kit to the station in Freeport.”

“Daddy, we’re going straight into Grand Central,” Nita said, picking up the backpack and slinging it over her shoulder with one last look around her room. “And you should be getting ready for the visitors.”

“There’s not that much to do,” her dad said as they went down the stairs together. “The place is clean—Dairine did a good job of it. I guess I just wanted to see you off.”

“I know,” Nita said. “Dad, I’ll be fine. This isn’t any worse than going over to Kit’s: I can be home in a minute if you need me. And I see from my manual that Tom’s done something to your cell phone so you can call me any time. It’ll just come through the manual.”

“That’s the only thing I’m not sure about,” her dad said as they headed toward the kitchen. “My cell phone company has too many different ways it charges me to start with. If phone calls to other star systems show up on my next bill—”

Nita grinned. “If they do, I think you should take them right to the phone company and see what they do. And I want to go with you.”

Her dad nodded, smiled, reached out to her. Nita went and gave him a big hug.

“I’ll send you postcards,” Nita said.

“Just don’t confuse the mailman.”

Nita grinned. “Bye, Dad,” she said, and went out.

In the driveway, Dairine was waiting for her, and trying not to look as if she was waiting. “You got everything?” she said.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “In fact, that’s what I’m afraid of. You may see me coming back to return stuff.”

“I don’t want to see you for at least a couple of days,” Dairine said, with such force that Nita was a little surprised.

“Well, just do me a favor and call me if anything starts to happen, okay?”

“If I need you, sure.”

This was not the answer Nita had been looking for. “I want progress reports,” Nita said. “If Dad—”

“Dad will be fine! Don’t you trust me with him?”

Nita broke out in a sudden sweat, as any direct answer was likely to get her in trouble either as a wizard or as a sister. “Just set your manual to generate a daily precis, okay? If I don’t hear from you, I can check that,” she said. “That won’t be any trouble.” And it won’t find endless, creative ways to cover up whatever’s happening, either.

“Yeah, sure,” Dairine said. And, without warning, she hugged Nita. “You take care of yourself,” she said. “Don’t get in trouble.”

“Me?” Nita said.

“They say the memory’s the first thing to go,” Dairine said under her breath. She turned and went back into the house, waving one hand more or less behind her. “Have fun…”

Nita shrugged her backpack into place and turned away.

A few minutes later, at Kit’s house, Nita knocked on the back door, then stuck her head in.

In the living room, cacophony from Carmela’s chat utility made a background to more urgent voices.

“You should take a heavier jacket, honey!”

“I don’t think I need to, Mama. The average temperature there this time of year is eighty degrees. In fact, it’s eighty degrees for most of the year.”

“It might still get cold at night if you’re going to be at the beach. You’re not going to have to go anywhere nice, are you? Out to dinner or anything? You should take a good shirt.”

“Mama, I can come right back here and get one.”

“Why waste the time when you can put it in this wonderful magic closet right now?”

“Yeah,” said Carmela’s voice from the living room. “I want a wonderful magic closet, too! Or I’ll take that one when you’re done.”

There was a silence, which to Nita said more about Kit’s state of mind than many words could. “Helloooo!” she said as she walked into the kitchen. “Kit?”

“In the living room.”

She went in there and found him standing in front of his own pup-tent access, looking very resigned and simply throwing through the interface everything his mother handed him. Carmela, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, as usual, was watching the whole process with intense amusement though not laughing out loud. Nita suspected that ‘Mela knew this could be bad for her health at the moment. “Oh, hello, Nita,” Kit’s mama said. “He’ll be ready in a sec. See that, she’s wearing a heavier jacket—” she said, and hurried past Nita toward the kitchen and the back door.

“What time is it?” Kit said to Nita.

“Almost two,” she said. “We should go.”

Instantly, if not sooner, Kit said silently. I’m beginning to feel like a garage sale here.

You can always smuggle all this stuff back later.

I’m planning on it!

“Here,” Kit’s mama said, coming in with a jacket that, Nita judged, could probably keep Kit warm in Antarctica. Kit took it from her and flung it through the access to the pup tent, where it vanished. “Mama,” he said, “we really have to go, or we’re going to be late. Is that it?”

“No,” his mother said, and handed him a brown paper bag. “Here’s your lunch.”

Kit sighed, twisted around, and put the bag into his backpack, which he was wearing fully slung, as if he’d expected to be out of there a good while ago. “That’s it,” he said.

“I don’t know,” his mama said. “I keep getting the idea I’ve forgotten something—”

“Tell me later, Mama,” Kit said, pulling up the “shade” of the pup-tent access interface and stowing its rod in his backpack. “I’ll call you. And then I can come back for whatever it is.”

Ponch, who had been lying on his back between Carmela and the TV, now got up, shook himself, and stood there with his tongue hanging out. Is it time?

“Yes, it is,” Kit said. “Mama…”

He went over to her and hugged her hard. Nita was astonished to see Kit’s fairly hard-boiled mom actually getting teary, and fighting to manage it.

“Tell Pop I’ll call him tonight,” Kit said.

“I will, sweetie.”

Carmela looked up at Kit and just waved at him. “Bring me stuff,” she said.

“If I remember,” Kit said, very offhandedly. Nita controlled her smile; she’d already seen the shopping list Carmela had given him.

“Come on,” Kit said to her. With Ponch bouncing around them, he and Nita went out the back door and headed into Kit’s backyard, making their way to the cover of the sassafras woods out in the back. To anyone who might have been watching, they vanished among the leaves. And then, a few seconds later, with just the slightest pop! of displaced air, they vanished much more thoroughly.

Nita and Kit and Ponch arrived in Grand Central Terminal, where they normally went when making a transit at peak times—into a dark and quiet place away from the Main Concourse proper but still inside the terminal, near one of the northernmost of the westward-pointing tracks. The platform between tracks eleven and thirteen was a spot where wheeled wire freight baskets and the occasional locked mail container were left for later pickup. There was rarely anyone there in the middle of the day, and the area was only dimly lit by the red eyes of infrared spots, while hidden security cameras passed pictures of what the spots showed them to the train master’s office.

No security camera, of course, can do anything about a wizard who is both invisible and shielded against infrared leakage. Nita and Kit popped out of nowhere into the dark, being careful to minimize the air displacement when they did—there was no point in appearing invisibly while also making a noise like a gunshot.

Carefully, Nita and Kit made their way toward where the train gates opened onto the Main Concourse, and then down to where platform thirty-three joined the main strip of platforms on the upper level. It was still hard to be careful enough,

though.

“Ow!”

“Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

Nita had to snicker softly at that. “It’s mutual. There’s the door—”

“Yeah. Are we away from the cameras now?”

“Wait a sec…Yeah, no new ones since we were here last. Let’s lose these.”

They both stepped into the shadows, dumped the spells that cloaked them, and flicked back into visibility. Kit slipped out of his backpack, brushed himself down, and put the backpack over one shoulder again.

“Itchy?” Nita said.

“Yeah, being invisible does that to me…It didn’t used to.” He glanced down at Ponch. “I think I’m catching it from somebody.”

It’s not my fault, Ponch said, sounding virtuous. Maybe you‘re just starting to feel your skin for a change.

Kit rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said.

They went out through the gate for the platform between tracks fifteen and sixteen and paused just past it, looking up and down the length of the Main Concourse. It was a bright day; the scattered light of the sunbeams striking through the great south windows washed through the dusty early-afternoon air and lit up the turquoise of the painted sky high above them, washing out its stars. As they walked across the Concourse, good smells came from every direction—most obviously from the steak restaurant at one end of the Concourse terrace and the “progressive American” restaurant at the other.

“Whaddaya think,” Kit said. “Food hall?”

Nita gave him a pretend-shocked look. “You mean you’re not going to just sit down on the stairs here and eat your bag lunch?”

Kit gave Nita a look. “I’m saving it for when I’m feeling homesick. Meanwhile…”

“Aha,” said a voice from just below knee level. “I heard you were coming through this morning.”

Nita looked down. Standing by them was a big, stocky, silvery gray tabby cat, waving his tail, and Nita knew only she and Kit and Ponch could see him because he was using a form of selective invisibility that left him visible to wizards but invisible to other humans. “Hey, Urruah!” Nita said. “Dai stihó!”

Urruah was one of the feline wizards who kept the New York worldgates running properly, cats being much better than other Earthly species at seeing the superstrings on which the gates’ structures were hung. “Ponch,” Kit said, “would you come sit over here so it doesn’t look like we’re talking to the floor? Thanks.”

Ponch sat down next to Urruah, gazing at him. For a moment or so their gazes locked, then Ponch put down his ears, which had been up, and let his tongue hang out.

Urruah’s whiskers went forward. “Nice doggy,” he said.

Woof, woof, Ponch said, his eyes glinting. The irony was audible.

“Good to see you,” Kit said. “Where’s Rhiow today?”

“Our esteemed team leader,” Urruah said, “is over in the FF’arhleih Building—that’s the old post office over on Eighth Avenue—getting the substrates

ready for when we move the worldgates over.”

“I didn’t think the new Penn Station was going to be ready for months yet,” Nita said.

“It’s not,” Urruah said. “But the more time you give the worldgate substrates to root, the less trouble the gates give you when you put them in place. We’re getting ready to install a ‘mirror’ substrate in the new building. Meanwhile, I see you’re going somewhere for pleasure today…”

“A sponsored noninterventional excursus,” Nita said.

Urruah grinned. “I did one of those once,” he said. “The species was aquatic: I didn’t feel dry for weeks afterward. Nice people, though. Where are they sending you?

“Alaalu.”

“Never heard of it,” Urruah said. “But why should I? There are a billion homeworlds out there, and no time to see them all. By the way, were you issued subsidized jump-throughs?”

“You mean the custom worldgates? Yeah,” Kit said.

“And they’re wrapped up tight?” Urruah said. “You haven’t tried to commission them?”

“Huh? No,” Nita said. “The docs said you absolutely shouldn’t do that.”

“Okay, good,” Urruah said. “That’s fine.”

“But why shouldn’t you?” Kit said.

Urruah gave him a look. “You mean, why shouldn’t you take an open worldgate through an open worldgate? Please. Temporal eversions are bad enough. Those you can patch, or revert, if you know how. Even simple spatial ones, if the effect isn’t spread over too much area. But a multidimensional one—”

“Everything turns inside out?” Nita said, guessing.

Urruah gave her a pitying look. “The reality would be much more complex, much worse, and very much less reversible. Since I assume you like this planet as it is, and not as eighth-dimensional origami, let’s not do it. When are you two scheduled back?”

“Two weeks.”

“Well, have a good time,” Urruah said. “Try not to destroy your host civilization or anything. Are you going via the Crossings?”

“Yeah,” Kit said.

“I hoped so. Would you mind doing an errand as you pass through?”

“Sure,” Nita said, “no problem.”

“Great—I appreciate it. Stop by the Stationmaster’s office when you get there and tell him we’d appreciate it if they’d route the elective main trunk nontypical traffic around us for the next thirty-six hours. We’re doing some maintenance on the local gate substrates.”

Kit had his manual open and was making a note. “Thirty-six hours…Got it.”

“That should be plenty of time. I’ll message him when the maintenance is done, and one of us will drop by in a day or three to discuss some other matters.” Urruah got up and stretched. “Meanwhile, your transit gate will be off platform eighteen. We just moved it over there from thirty; the Metro-North staff are doing track welding today. The locus’ll be patent for the Crossings in about six minutes,

after the two-twenty to Croton-Harmon gets out of your way. If you hurry, you can catch it.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. “Dai, big guy.”

“Dai,” Urruah said to her and Kit, and waved his tail at Ponch as he turned.

“Auhw heei u’uuw lau’hwu rrrhh’uiu,” Ponch said to Urruah.

Urruah paused in midturn, and Nita’s eyes widened slightly as she caught sight of the look on Urruah’s face. It was always dangerous to judge animals’ expressions by comparing them with human ones, but wizards’ knowledge of the subverbal modes of the Speech lent them some slight latitude in reading nonhuman expressions—at least those of creatures from their own worlds that were not too far removed from them in basic psychology. Whatever Ponch had said, it had been in Ailurin, the cats’ language, and it hadn’t been something Urruah had been expecting. It had also gone by too quickly for Nita to “listen” in the Speech and hear what it had meant.

“Uh, yes, certainly,” Urruah said, recovering himself. He waved his tail at them all once more, then strolled off across the Main Concourse, weaving from side to side to avoid the commuters, who couldn’t see him.

They turned away, and Kit looked at Ponch with some surprise. “What was that about?” Kit said. “I didn’t know you spoke cat.”

Correspondence course, said Ponch, and kept on walking.

Nita threw Kit a glance. Have I told you recently, she said silently, that your dog is getting strange?

You and the rest of the world…

The three of them made their way to the gate for platform eighteen and, once through it, slipped to the right of it, away from the main part of the platform, where they wouldn’t be seen disappearing. Hurry up, Ponch said as Kit’s invisibility spell came down over him, too. It itches!

“So stop complaining and come on,” Kit said. They walked down the length of the platform, staying to the left side, where there was no train. People went tearing past them on the right as down at the end of the platform the 2:20’s conductor yelled ‘“Boarrrrrrrrrrrd!” Those last few people made it onto the train, its doors closed, and with a great revving roar of locomotive engines, deafening in that confined space, it slowly began to pull out.

Kit and Nita and Ponch stayed off to the side while a few more people came running down the platform, saw that the train was already on its way out, and slowed to a stop, then turned and went back down toward the Main Concourse to find out when the next train was. “We’re clear,” Nita said softly. “Come on.”

The three of them made their way down to the end of the platform, where steps led down to the track level. The steps were of no interest to them, though: They looked to their left, where no train stood…but where the air just past the platform’s edge, to a wizard’s eye, rippled gently, as if with uprising heat.

“It’s patent,” Kit said. “Let’s go. Ponch, jump it, the edge is sharp…”

I know that!

Kit grinned, took a deep breath, glanced at Nita. She nodded. They stepped forward together, into the empty air, into the dark, as Ponch jumped past them…

… and the three of them stepped out again a long second later, ditching their invisibility spells in the process, into the white brilliance of the Nontypical Transit area at the Crossings Hypergate Facility on Rirhath B.

The gating was a “hardwired” one, long-established and with a lot of comfort features built in for the convenience of the wizards who used it every day on business. Nita and Kit came out on the other side without feeling the unsettling effects usually associated with moving several light-years between worlds, which were not only spinning in different directions and velocities but being dragged through interstellar space by their home stars along wildly differing vectors. The three of them took a moment to just stand there on the shining white floor and look around. The place was worth looking at.

Nontypical Transit was a wide empty space about the size of a football field, and around it that wide white floor went on and on for so far around on all sides that Nita was fairly sure she ought to have been able to see the curvature of the world, had it not been so completely covered with people of a thousand different species. “Is it rush hour?” she said.

“Probably. Let’s get out of here before something materializes on top of us.” This wasn’t really a concern, Nita knew, as the manual made it plain that the whole NT area was programmed not to allow two different transportees, whether using wizardry or another form of worldgating, to occupy the same space. All the same, she and Kit and Ponch made their way toward the edge of the Nontypical Transit area, looking up at what every tourist passing through the Crossings spent some time admiring: the ceiling. Or rather, the ceilings, for there were thousands of them, real and false, interpenetrating one another or floating under or over one another, in a myriad of airy, randomly shaped structures of glass and metal and other materials that Nita didn’t immediately recognize. The effect was like a shattered, miles-wide, horizontal stained glass window, eternally looking for new and interesting ways to assemble itself, and then eternally changing its mind. It was morning at the moment, and the violent silver-gilt light of Rirhath B, only slightly softened by the eternal green-white cloud of daylight hours, burned through the glass high above them and cast bright, sliding shadows on the vast floor in a thousand colors, all changing every moment as ceilings high up in the tremendous structure briefly eclipsed one another and parted company again.

“It’s different from last time,” Kit said.

Nita nodded as they finally reached the end of the NT area. It had been night the last time they’d been here, and at night the ceilings simply seemed to go away, appearing to leave the whole vast terminal floor open to the view of Rirhath B’s astonishing night sky—a crowded vista of short-period variable stars, all swelling and shrinking like living things that breathed light. “This is nice, too,” Nita said, and then had to laugh at herself as they headed out into the main terminal floor. Nice was a poor word for this tremendous space, for its many cubic miles of stacked-up glass and metal galleries, holding offices, stores, restaurants, and a hundred other kinds of facilities for which English has no words.

Nita and Kit and Ponch made their way down the main drag toward the core of the terminal structure, taking their time. There were three main wings to the

Crossings, each several miles long, and there were small intergates strung all down the length of each wing, marked on the floor by ellipses in various visible and invisible colors. There was also a selective-friction slidewalk down one side of each wing, which, while looking no different than the rest of the polished white floor, would scoot you along at high speed if you were in a hurry. But Nita was in no rush, and neither was Kit. Ponch paced along beside them, plainly enjoying himself, looking at all the strange people and smelling the strange smells, and amiably wagging his tail.

Scattered down the length of the mile-wide wing before them, in the middle of the floor, were platforms and daises and kiosks and counters of various shapes and sizes, each with a long, tall, cylindrical black sign on a black metal pole. These were gate indicators, flashing their destinations and patency times in hundreds of languages and hundreds of colors. Kit paused by one of these as they came up to it, a ring-fenced area where a number of people who looked like huge furbearing turtles striped in orange and gray were waiting for their gate to go patent. Kit put his hand on the pole and said in the Speech, “Information for Alaalu?”

On the side facing him and Nita, the jarring red symbols that had previously been showing there blanked out and were replaced by a long string of symbols in blue, in the Speech, which uncurled itself down the length of the sign. “Wing three,” Nita said, “gate five-oh-six…”

“In a little more than an hour,” Kit said.

“Great,” Nita said. “We can sit down somewhere near the gate and have a snack.”

Kit got a dubious look. “Uhh…”

Nita laughed at him: Kit had had a major problem with some of the local food their last time through. “This time,” she said, “just don’t eat anything you don’t recognize, and you’ll be fine.”

“Same rule as for the school cafeteria, I guess,” Kit said. “Yeah, why not? But let’s get that errand done for Urruah first.”

“Yeah.”

They made their way to the central area for which the whole facility was named: the original Crossings. Once upon a time, two and a half millennia before, it had been just a muddy place by a riverbank—one that became a crossroads over time as its own native species learned to exploit it. Then, much later, it became an interplanetary and interstellar crossroads as well. Soon, now, with the opening of the new extension, it would add intergalactic transport as well, becoming a master hub for worldgating operations among three other galaxies of the Local Group. But the Crossings would remain paramount among the intragalactic hubs, its local space having about it a concentration of those forces that, when entwined with specific planetary characteristics, made gating easier than anywhere else.

All alone in the middle of a great expanse of floor was the spot where a reed hut had stood by the riverbank, not far from the ancient cave that contained a natural worldgate. At the cave’s entrance, a sequence of footprints in the mud had suddenly stopped without warning—an image as famous on Rirhath B as the corrugated bootprint of an astronaut in the moondust was famous on Earth. Cave and hut were long gone. In their place stood a cubical structure of tubular bluesteel,

no different from many of the other kiosks that stood around the Crossings. This one had nothing in it but a desk, its surface covered with inset, illuminated input patches of many shapes and colors, the shapes and colors shifting every second. Behind the desk was a meter-high rack of thinner bluesteel tubing, shaped somewhat like the kind of kickable step stool to be found in libraries. And inside the rack, more or less—except where its many jointed legs hung out of the structure, or were curled around the racking for support—was the Stationmaster.

Nita and Kit walked up to the desk. Nita was calm enough about it at first: She’d been here before. But then she had a sudden panic attack. What do we say to it? She thought, looking at the silvery blue giant centipede, which was busily banging away with its front four or six legs at the input patches on the desk. When you were on wizardly business, the same phrase did the job no matter where you were: “I am on errantry, and I greet you!” But they weren’t on errantry this time out.

Kit and Nita paused in front of the desk, and the Rirhait behind it looked at them with several stalky eyes: The others kept their attention on what it was doing. “Oh,” the Stationmaster said. “You again.”

“Nice to see you, too,” Kit said.

Ponch sat down beside Kit, looking at the Stationmaster with an expression that suggested he wasn’t sure whether to chase it or run away. The Master, in its turn, turned an eye in Ponch’s direction, and the eye’s oval pupil dilated and contracted a couple of times.

“They’re hard on their associates, these two,” the Stationmaster said to Ponch. “And on the surroundings. Where they go, things tend to get trashed. Are you insured?”

Ponch yawned. I’m not too worried about it, he said.

“It wasn’t our fault, the last time,” Kit said, sounding just slightly annoyed. “We weren’t the ones who chased Nita’s sister through the terminal with blasters.”

“Not to mention the dinosaur,” Nita said.

“No, I suppose not,” the Stationmaster said, waving a casual claw in the air. “Well, the facility’s general fund handled it, and all the damage caused by your broodmate’s incursion and departure has been repaired now.” It tapped away at the desk a little more. “I assume this isn’t a social call…”

“No, actually,” Kit said, and pulled out his manual. “The New York gating team asked us to deliver a message, since we were passing this way.”

At that, six of the Stationmaster’s eight eyes fixed on Kit, all their pupils dilating at once. The effect was disconcerting. “New York,” it said. “That would be Earth.”

It sounded actively annoyed. “That’s right,” Kit said, throwing Nita a glance as he flipped open his manual. “Here’s what they say—” He read Urruah’s message aloud.

The Stationmaster’s antennae worked while Kit read, the equivalent of a nod. “Very well,” it said. “I’ll message them when I have a moment. Let’s move on. You have your departure data?”

“Yes,” Kit said.

“Excellent. Don’t let the gate constrict on your fundament on the way out,” the Master said, and it poured itself out of its rack, whisked around and out of the

kiosk, and went hastening away across the concourse, on all those legs, without another word.

A few moments’ worth of silence passed as Nita and Kit watched him go. “Maybe I’m from a little backwater planet at the outside edge of the Arm,” Kit said, “but where I come from, we would call that rude.”

“Oh, come on, you can’t be judgmental,” Nita said.

“It didn’t even say thank you!”

“Well…”

“You agree with me,” Kit said with some satisfaction.

Nita let out a long breath and turned to start walking in the general direction of their gate. “Yeah,” she said. “Even though I’m probably wrong to.”

Kit made a face as they turned away. “Okay,” he said, “and you’re probably right that I shouldn’t judge it by human standards. Maybe there was something else on its mind.”

“Maybe,” Nita said. “Though…it might be possible that Rirhait are just naturally rude.”

Kit sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We did the errand. Let’s go get some lunch.”

He still didn’t sound as if he was entirely happy about the idea. “You’ve still got your bag lunch if you want it,” Nita said.

Kit laughed, then. “Nah. What’s the point of going to alien worlds if you’re not going to at least try to eat their junk food on the way? Let’s go down by the gate and see what’s there.”

An hour later, they made their way over to the pretransit area by their gate. “That wasn’t so bad,” Kit said. “A lot better than last time…”

“Last time you didn’t read the menu,” Nita said. She had to grin, though, because this time the problem had been to get Kit to stop reading it.

Ponch was wandering along beside them looking as satisfied as Kit. They’d found a little snack bar a hundred yards or so along from gate 506, and once they’d figured out how to convert the seating system to suit bipedal humanoids, they discovered that all the tables had an embedded, programmable menu of a type new to Nita. You told the table, or touched in, the long version of the ten-letter acronym for your species—adding eight letters that concerned themselves only with your body chemistry—and the menu embedded in the tabletop changed itself to show only things that wouldn’t disagree with you. Kit, having tested one dish that looked like blue pasta, had been so taken with the flavor that he’d gone on a “blue binge” and eaten six more blue things, sharing them with Ponch.

“I can’t believe you pigged out like that,” Nita said under her breath as they made their way over to the pretransit lounge for their gate.

“Why not? It was good!”

“It was free,” Nita said.

“Oh, come on. Nothing’s free. You know that.”

“Of course I do. I mean, you didn’t have to pay for it…

They had both been prepared to pay for what they ate. Typically, when a

wizard was on errantry, the transfer of energy to pay for things was handled by the manual, to be deducted later if deferment was appropriate. But when they’d tried to take care of the bill early, putting their manuals down on the table’s deduction patch, the table had simply said CHARGED TO GENERAL FUND— EXCURSUS. Once they’d realized that the cultural exchange program was taking care of their expenses, Kit had gone, to Nita’s way of thinking, a little bit nuts.

Now, walking along beside them, Ponch burped happily and wagged his tail. When can we come back?

“You’ve done it now,” Nita said. “You’ve got him spoiled for alien food. Your mom’s going to have words with you…”

“Aw, he knows it’s a vacation. Don’t you, Ponch?”

Yes. But we can come back other times! And Ponch paused. I can come here by myself, too.

Nita shook her head as they made their way over to the transit gate. “From now on you’ll know where to find him when he’s missing,” she said. “Shaking down alien tourists for blue stuff.”

Their gate was like many others in that part of the terminal: an information kiosk with a big, flat, vertical screen, a tall standard with the gate number, and the outline of a hexagon embedded in the floor, constantly shifting colors and wavelengths of light as it tried to make itself visible to as many species’ visual senses as possible. By the kiosk, a gate technician was standing—a tall bipedal humanoid in a green glass jumpsuit cut down the back to allow its rudimentary wings room to move.

Nita went up to her and held out her manual. “We’re scheduled for a gating to Alaalu,” she said.

“Alaalu?” whistled the gate technician in a cordial tone as she took Nita’s manual, waved it in front of the data screen. “Never heard of it. Where is it?”

“Radian one-sixty somewhere,” Nita said.

The gate tech’s feathered crest went up and down as the display brought up an abbreviated version of Nita’s name and identity information in the Speech, along with a little bare-bones schematic of the galaxy. “Oh, I see. Thank you, Emissary,” she said, handing Nita back her manual. “How interesting…I’ve never gated anyone there before. It doesn’t seem to get much traffic. But then that’s quite a jump; it’s nice for you that it’s subsidized, isn’t it?”

“We sure think so,” Kit said. Usually, the energy to pay for such a “fixed” gating also eventually would have been deducted through the manual, either in a lump or as time payment—and even the extended-payment option could leave a wizard fairly wrecked when such distances were involved.

The gate technician put her crest up in a smile. “So do a lot of your colleagues. I’ve seen quite a few of them through here in the past two hands of days.”

Nita stole a look at the technician’s claws. A little more than a week… “Do these exchanges usually all happen at this time of year, or are they staggered?” she said, curious.

“I’ve never thought about it,” said the gate tech, taking Kit’s manual and waving it in front of the display in turn. “I always assumed they were staggered. But

there does seem to be an unusual amount of excursus traffic right now.” Kit’s information came up, and the gate tech examined it for a moment, then handed Kit back his manual and raised her crest to Ponch. “It’s probably a coincidence. The time indicator’s up there on the standard, Emissary, Interlocutor. Stand clear of the locus until it goes dark, then enter it and hold your position. And go well.”

“Thank you.” They wandered over to the standard; Nita put her hand on it. “Minutes, please?” she said.

The charactery running up and down the standard writhed, gathered itself together into a bright blob, and then resolved itself into the digits 14:03. The last two digits then started counting down in seconds.

“Not long now,” Nita said, putting her manual back in her backpack. “I can’t wait!”

Ponch sat down, his tongue hanging out, and burped again. Is there time for a nap?

“No!” Kit and Nita said in unison.

Ponch let out a big sigh. Oh, well…

They waited. Five minutes went by, and then ten, and they were still the only ones waiting there. “This must really be a quiet place we’re going to,” Nita said to Kit.

“That’s what the manuals said.”

“Terrific!” Nita said. And right at that moment, the hexagon on the floor in front of them went black.

“Let’s go!” Kit said. They stepped into the hexagon; Ponch got up, sauntered onto it, and sat down next to Kit. On the standard nearby, the digits changed themselves to read “59,” and started counting down again.

Nita became aware that her heart was pounding. She had to smile as the count went down past thirty, and she stole a glance at Kit and saw that he was grinning, too. “20… 15… 10…”

Nita almost felt like she should be hearing rocket engines igniting, but around them was nothing but the sound of hoots and shrieks and rumbles and roars and laughter, the voices of life. Here we go! she thought.

3, said the countdown clock on the standard.

2

1—

—and then Nita found herself under another sky, with the wind in her hair.

She took a first deep breath of another world’s air, rich with scents she couldn’t identify—and then completely forgot to breathe as she tried to find the horizon and get herself oriented. It wasn’t that there was any trouble finding the horizon. In front of her lay endless green fields all starred with blue flowers, until, as she looked much farther away, the blue of the flowers was all she could see. But beyond that, where the horizon should have been, there was more of it; landscape dappled in a hundred shades of green and blue green, sloping upward to gently rolling hill country, sloping further upward still to the beginnings of mountains. They were not so high by themselves, but the horizon was. To Nita, the world around her seemed to climb halfway up that blue, blue sky, three-quarters of the way up it, impossibly high. It felt wrong. But it wasn’t. It’s me, she told herself, working to

breathe. It’s just me…

Nita knew perfectly well that the apparent flatness of her home planet was an illusion. She had seen, on the Moon, the unexpected curvature of a body much smaller than the Earth, so that the horizon seemed cramped and close, and things a mile or so away seemed much too near. What she saw now was the opposite of that. Things that seemed far away would turn out to be farther still. Those mountains towering up against the edge of things were even farther away. And that was the problem. It shouldn’t be possible to be under a sky and still see things that were so far away, against a horizon that left you feeling you were at the bottom of a huge, shallow bowl, with all that blue sky pooling on top of you, pouring onto you like water, pressing you down

It’s just big, Nita thought. Just the size of the planet makes it seem this way. But it was too big. And something else about it seized her by the heart and squeezed, so that she was almost having trouble breathing.

Why do I know this place? Nita thought. What does this remind me of?

“Neets?” Kit said to her. “Neets, are you all right?”

She swallowed. “Yeah,” she said. “How about you?”

“Uh, yeah.”

She glanced over at Kit. He looked a little pale but seemed otherwise all right. “But how can it be this big?” she said. “How can anything be this big? And do you feel it—”

“There you are! Sorry I’m late,” someone said from behind them. “Dai stihó, cousins. Welcome to Alaalu!”

Arrivals Dairine stood outside the back door, glancing occasionally at her watch and waiting.

Even before she’d been a wizard, waiting had been tough for her. Nothing happens fast enough—that had been the most basic motto of her short life. When she’d become a wizard, at first Dairine had thought that that would be the end of waiting, at last—that everything would begin happening at a speed that would suit her, and that the world would finally start working. Now, looking back at that early time, she had to laugh at herself. Dairine had discovered the hard way that even becoming a practitioner of the Art that sourced its power from the magic at the heart of the universe was no guarantee of protection against bureaucracy, accident, or failed expectations. Entropy was running, and in an environment conditioned by the never-ending battle against that ancient enemy and its inventor, not even wizardry could necessarily make your wishes come true.

There were other compensations, of course. On her Ordeal and after it, she had seen things that few other human beings have been privileged to see. She had watched the Sun rise through Saturn’s rings, heard spring thunder in Jupiter’s atmosphere, watched distant galaxies rise over alien landscapes; she had even officiated at the birth of a species. But none of these experiences had gone very far to make her any more patient. Maybe when I’m older, she thought. By the time I’m

twenty I’ll probably have it licked.

It wasn’t licked yet, though. Dairine looked at her watch again. It’s ten after three, she thought. Where are these people?

Beside her, on the step, Spot sat and looked at the sunny spring afternoon with a much calmer attitude than Dairine. Probably gate-traffic congestion, he said.

Behind the thought came the usual background that Dairine heard when she and Spot were communicating: a sort of stream-of-machine-consciousness, a trinary roar, seething with background thought that sounded like distant surf. The background thought was both Spot’s and that of the far-distant wizardly machine intelligence to which Dairine was a sort of godmother, and with which she had been affiliated since passing her Ordeal. Sometimes that distant activity of mind, half manual, half living thing, looked out through Dairine’s eyes and lived with her at what it considered an incredibly leisurely pace, thinking thoughts in whole seconds rather than in milliseconds; but mostly it went about its own business at its own speed, a blur of thought of which only the high points emerged in Dairine’s consciousness. Now, in that mode, Spot said, It’s not as if they’re using a private gating complex. There may be delays at the other end—

“Yeah,” Dairine said. She sat on the step again—this was probably the fourth or fifth time she’d stood and sat down—and picked Spot up. “Let me see that briefing pack again.”

Spot obligingly flipped up his screen and went into “wizard’s manual” mode. On the screen appeared Dairine’s version, in the Speech, of the briefing pack that the Powers That Be, or their administrative assistants, had sent her dad. Dairine had read it through once last night, mostly with an eye to seeing how good the translation was. Even considering the source, she was concerned that a Speech-to-text utility couldn’t be perfect. There were words in the Speech that simply didn’t go into English, and Dairine had wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything in her dad’s version of the briefing that he was going to misconstrue. To her relief, though, the material had been translated as perfectly as could have been expected, the translation being more a simplification than anything else.

Each of the visitors had his—or its—own page in the package. There were 3-D “live” pictures of them embedded in the briefing pack, though even in manual-based documents there was never any guarantee that the image would be an exact rendition of any being’s state or likeness when it actually arrived. But even if the documentation hadn’t exactly and accurately portrayed them, they were still, to put it mildly, a mixed bunch. The Rirhait was more like a giant metallic purple centipede than anything else; one of twenty-four of its parents’ first brood hatched out, very newly become a wizard—within the past Rirhait year, which was about two Earth years. It was interested enough in other worlds and other scholia of wizardry to have applied for this excursus almost as soon as it hit post-Ordeal status. “It” was probably incorrect: Sker’ret (that being the part of his name that Dairine could most easily pronounce, the rest being all consonants) was more or less a “he.”

She keyed ahead to the next page. All of the visitors, in fact, were “he”s, though with the next one, it was hard to say exactly what made him that way. Maybe it’s the berries, Dairine thought, studying his picture. Filifermanhathrhumneits’elhhessaiffnth was his whole name, a word that to Dairine

sounded oddly like wind in branches—and that was probably appropriate because he was a tree. If there are trees that walk, Dairine thought. But, plainly, on his world, Demisiv, there were…though walking probably wasn’t the right word for it. They got around, anyway, and could be surprisingly mobile when they needed to be. As far as Dairine could tell from the manual’s description of the Demisiv people, they spent all their lives wading around through the ground, and the whole surface of their sealess planet was one great migratory forest, with mighty bands of trees rooting only briefly and then getting on the move again, hunting other skies to grow under, new ground to grow in. Maybe the concept of a tree with wanderlust isn’t so weird, Dairine thought as she studied Filif’s image, which looked rather like a Christmas tree with red berries. His whole people seem to have it, in a way. He’s just wandering farther than usual…

She keyed ahead to the last page in the info packet and looked at it rather speculatively. “Roshaun ke Nelaid (am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz…) det Wellakhit,” said the entry beside the live image of someone who was obviously humanoid. Good thing Neets isn’t here, Dairine thought, studying that picture one more time, because he’s really hot.

The manual gave only a head shot unless you requested another view of a subject, and right then Dairine didn’t bother. Roshaun-and-all-the-rest-of-the-names was handsome, almost perfectly so—and it was the disbelief in his apparent perfection that kept Dairine looking at him rather longer than she intended. He had a long, fair-skinned face with a very thoughtful expression. This was partially concealed by surprisingly long, blond hair, most of which was tied behind his head, but he also had very long bangs, which he was probably always pushing out of his eyes, and a long lock of hair hanging down in front of each ear. The eyes were a startling green, a shade not normally achieved on Earth without the assistance of contact lenses.

He’s definitely a looker, Dairine thought, though the handsomeness was a little less striking now, on her second or third glance, than it had been at the first. What is it with his name, though? It goes on and on. She looked at the referral to the planet Wellakh, turned to that page, and tried to find something that explained the name structure. She scanned down the planet’s entry, skipping the usual information about size and location and so forth, looking for anything that could give her a hint.

Something’s coming, Spot said.

Through him she could feel the faint troubling of local space that meant a worldgating was incoming: a kind of curdling or shivering in the air. Dairine stood up. “Well, finally,” she said. “How many? Are they all together, or are they coming separately?”

Separately, I think, Spot said.

“Where’s the locus of emergence?”

Out in the backyard, where you and Nita usually vanish.

“Right,” Dairine said. She snapped Spot’s lid shut and headed through the backyard to the part farthest to its rear, where the sassafras trees had been growing wild for as long as Dairine could remember.

Though her dad was careful about the landscaping, he had purposely left the back of the lot a casual, partial wilderness of trees of all sizes, self-seeding, and

blocking the view of the yard from the neighbors’ lots. About fifteen feet in among them, well sheltered by growth of all sizes, was an empty patch about six feet in diameter, which Nita had talked into staying that way. There the ground was bare of everything but fallen leaves, and just outside that spot Dairine now stationed herself, putting Spot down.

“How long?” she said.

Any moment—

Her hair blew back in the abrupt breeze of an appearance, which made only a very small Whumff sound as the air displaced. Standing in front of her, low down in that rough circle of brown and gold leaves, was the Rirhait, gleaming softly in the sunlight that was filtering through the new leaves. Likening him to a centipede, Dairine thought, was probably a little simplistic. The body wasn’t a series of smooth sections but looked rather as if a number of metallic purple beach balls had been stuck together, flattening a little at the ends. Then someone had attached three pairs of legs to each beach ball—two pointing down, and a third pointing up. When we get friendly, I’ve got to ask him what those extra ones are for, Dairine thought. At one end of the centipede, stalked eyes—Dairine thought there were about eight of them—were fastened to the top of the last “beach ball,” and there were some scissory mouth parts underneath.

The Rirhait was doing something Dairine herself had done often enough: shifting a little from foot to foot to check the gravity, to see if he needed to adjust his wizardry to compensate. In the Rirhait’s case, this produced an effect something like a spectator wave. All the while he looked around with his own version of an expression Dairine had worn, herself, often enough—that first glance in which you try to get your bearings in an alien environment as quickly as possible, getting the scale of things, while trying not to look as if you’re completely freaked out. How she would tell if a Rirhait was freaked out, Dairine wasn’t sure. For the moment, the best approach was to keep it from getting that way to start with.

“Dai stihó!” she said right away in the Speech, to give her guest something to fix on. “Are you Sker’ret?”

“That’s me,” the Rirhait said after a moment. “And you’d be Darren?”

“Dairine,” she said. “Maybe you want to move over—” But the Rirhait was already pouring himself out of the circle and over toward Dairine. She looked curiously down at him as he came: He reminded her strangely of a favorite pull toy she’d had when she was about four.

“Were you waiting long?” he said.

“No,” Dairine said. “How was the trip at your end?”

“The usual,” Sker’ret said. “You hurry to get to the gating facility and then you sit around and wait forever.”

Dairine had to laugh. Sker’ret looked up at her with all its eyes, in shock.

“Sorry?” he said.

“No,” she said, “it’s all right. I was laughing. That’s a happy sound.”

“Thanks, I was wondering,” Sker’ret said. “I thought you had something in your throat.”

The air in front of them trembled. There was another, even more demure explosion of air and sound, more a pop! than anything else. And there stood a tree.

Except he wasn’t a tree. “Dai stihó!” Dairine said, and was delighted to see the branches of the tree shiver in unison and look at her with all their berries.

“Dai!” the tree said.

“I hope you’ll forgive me,” Dairine said, “but your name’s kind of a mouthful for me. Will Filif be all right?”

“We use that at home,” Filif said. His voice was absolutely the rustling of wind in leaves. Dairine wondered how he did it, because all she could see were needles, which wouldn’t rustle terribly well.

The tree part of Filif seemed fine; Dairine cast a glance down at his roots and saw that they were shrouded in a kind of portable haze. She recognized this instantly as a decency field, used by some wizards to conceal a part of themselves that they didn’t feel it appropriate to show to other people, either of their own species or another one.

“How was your trip?” Dairine said. “Is there anything you need right now?”

“No, I’m fine,” Filif said. There was a diffident sound to his voice that made Dairine wonder whether this was strictly the truth—but he was using the Speech, so it couldn’t be a lie.

“Good,” she said. “We’ll go in, in a little while, and get you guys settled in. You have your pup tents all setup?”

“Oh, yes,” the two said in unison.

Dairine looked around her. “Speaking of which, where’s our third guy?”

Filif and Sker’ret looked at each other. “We weren’t early, were we?” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Dairine said. “Roshaun of the multiple names seems to be—”

BANG!

The wind blew Dairine’s hair back, and a tall figure imploded into the space in the middle of the circle of leaves. He was nearly as tall as Dairine’s dad and was dressed in what even Dairine, the consummate T-shirt and baggy pants fan, was willing to describe as “splendid robes.” He was wearing an undertunic and hose and boots in some golden fabric or substance. There was an overtunic or long jacket in scarlet, all embroidered over in gold; and he was wearing gauntlets of gold, and a strange sort of scarf of gold over the outer jacket. And there was a fillet of gold bound around his head, but it was a more reddish gold, which wonderfully set off all that hair, which, it turned out, went right down his back and was long enough for him to sit on. There he stood, looking around imperiously at all of them, his thumbs hooked in the broad golden belt under the overtunic.

Dairine’s first thought, which she couldn’t control, was, Noisy arrival. Sloppy technique.

Her second thought was, Maybe it’s something cultural, dressing up so fancy. But the back of her mind answered instantly and without reason: Yeah, sure. He’s showing off. And why?

The new arrival looked around.

“And where is the welcoming committee?” he said.

Dairine didn’t know quite what she’d been expecting from the final arrival, but this wasn’t it. “Dai stihó,” she said after a moment.

That tall, blond figure turned his attention to her, and Dairine abruptly felt so

short, so insignificant, so very minor. However, the feeling immediately kicked her into a most profound state of annoyance. “Yes,” he said after a moment, “may you also go well. And you would be?”

“You’re the newcomer,” Dairine said, “and I am your host. It’s for you to introduce yourself.” Where this made-up rule had come from, she had no idea, but she felt disinclined to make things easy for this guy.

He stood there and continued to look down at Dairine, way down, as if from some inaccessible mountain peak. “I,” he said, “am Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Wellakhit.” And he looked at her as if he expected her to know what it meant.

“Pleased to meet you, cousin,” Dairine said, feeling that it was just barely true and desperately hoping that at some point it would be more so. But at the moment she was having all kinds of doubts. “I’m Dairine Callahan. Welcome to Earth.”

Roshaun looked around at the scrubby wooded surroundings with those green, green eyes. “This is perhaps a public park?” he said.

“No,” Dairine said. “It’s part of the property that belongs to our house. We use this area for coming and going on business, because our planet is sevarfrith.”

The Rirhait and the Demisiv each nodded or twitched briefly. Sevarfrith was a syllabic acronym for several words in the Speech that, taken together, meant “a world where wizardry must be conducted under cover.” There were numerous longer forms of the acronym that indicated the general or specific reason for the restriction, but the simple version often was used as shorthand. Dairine knew that this information would have been in the visitors’ own orientation packs, but it seemed like a good time to mention it.

“That’s a shame for you, isn’t it?” the Rirhait said. “I’m sorry about your trouble.”

“It’s okay,” Dairine said. “It’s more of a logistical problem than anything else. You get used to it after a while. The best thing to do is treat it as if it’s a game. For the first day or so, while you guys are getting used to being here, I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a wizardry around the perimeter so that the people who live in the immediate vicinity won’t see anything, in case somebody’s visual overlay slips. If you look around, you can see it—I’ve left the perimeter visually active for anyone who uses the Speech.” She gestured around her, indicating the paired lines of blue green light that ran around the backyard from the left rear corner of the house, down the property line and above the chain-link fence, right around the back of the property, where they were standing, and up the right side toward the garage. “Inside that, you’re safe in your own shape. At night, though, there may be some leakage of light from inside the space, and we can’t be certain that some of the neighbors might not be able to see you; so it’s better to be careful.”

The Demisiv looked up through the leaves of the trees at the shifting light of the sky above, where clouds were racing by in a stiff wind. “That’s fine,” Filif said. “We wouldn’t want to frighten anybody.”

“Come on this way,” Dairine said, and led them out of the woods. “Oh,” she said, “and this is my associate, Spot.”

Spot put up a selection of stalked eyes and looked around him, fixing on each of the aliens in turn. “Dai stihó,” he said.

“Dai,” said Filif and Sker’ret. Roshaun peered down at the small laptop in Dairine’s arms. “Is it sentient?” he said.

I’m beginning to think he’s more sentient than you are, Dairine thought. And immediately after that, she thought, What is the matter with me?

“We like to think so,” Dairine said, as politely as she could. “Though since he and I started working together a couple of years ago, there’ve been a few discussions over which of us is more sentient.”

They made their way up the lawn toward the house. “It’s spring here!” Filif said. “I love the colors.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “They haven’t really started yet, though. In a few weeks there’ll be a lot more flowers here.”

“Oh,” Roshaun said, “so the look of the place will improve, then? I’m glad to hear it. At home, we would have had the groundskeepers reprimanded.”

Dairine flushed as hot as if someone had insulted her, or her dad, or Nita, to her face. There was something insufferably superior about Roshaun’s delivery. I have to be imagining this, Dairine thought. I’ve known this guy exactly two minutes. It’s much too soon to believe that he’s a complete turkey.

Nonetheless, as Roshaun looked around the Callahan backyard, as he took in the slightly beat-up lawn furniture and the artfully ragged plantings, he radiated a sense that all of this was below him, somehow. I don’t get it, Dairine thought. Where is he getting this attitude? All the wizards I’ve ever known have been nice!

Well, Spot said in her head, how many wizards have you known?

That brought her up short. Well…she said.

Sker’ret, oblivious to what was going on inside Dairine’s head, was looking around him in all directions, a job made easier by stalked eyes that went every which way. “Do you have an indoor dwelling place here,” it said, “or do you stay outside?”

His tone of Speech was entirely different, suggesting a cheerful interest. “Not this time of year,” Dairine said. “It’s too cold for us to stay out just yet… though the time’s coming. We’re heading for the dwelling now—this white structure. Come on inside.”

She led the way toward the back door, Spot pacing her. Sker’ret came trundling along behind, followed by Roshaun, with Filif bringing up the rear. “And these other structures built so close to your dwelling,” Roshaun said, looking left and right as they approached the house, “more members of your species live in these as well?”

“That’s right,” Dairine said.

“They are perhaps an extended kinship group?” Roshaun said. “Members of your family?”

“Oh, no,” Dairine said. “As I said, they’re just our neighbors.”

“Neighbors,” Roshaun said, as if trying out a completely unfamiliar word. “It’s fascinating. At home, it wouldn’t be permitted.”

Dairine stopped halfway up the stairs to the back door. “Not permitted?” she said. “By whom?”

Roshaun looked at Dairine as if she were insane. “By us,” he said. “Our family wouldn’t want, you know, people looking at them.” And the word he used

wasn’t the plural of the one in the Speech that meant “person, fellow sentient being”; it was one that meant a being markedly less advanced than you in the Great Scheme of Things. Usually the word was used affectionately, or at worst in a neutral mode, for creatures that were aware in some mode but not quite sentient. But Roshaun’s tone of voice seemed to put an extra unpleasant spin on it, turning the word into something more like “lowlife.”

Dairine stood there wondering if she was suffering from low blood sugar or something of the kind. It has to be me, she said. No one could be so offensive on purpose… and if he’s doing it accidentally, then it’s not his fault. Why am I finding it so hard to cut him some slack?

“It must be very lonely for you, then,” Dairine said, as politely as she could.

“Oh, no,” Roshaun said, “I wouldn’t say that…”

The phrasing caught Dairine’s attention sharply as she opened the screen door. You wouldn’t say it because it would be true, she thought.

That insight, if it was one, she filed away for later study. “My father,” she said, “isn’t here right now. He’s still at work. But he’ll be along in an hour or so.”

“What does he work at?” Sker’ret said.

“He’s a florist,” Dairine said as they went in the back door into the kitchen.

Filif looked at her with many more berries than previously. “A doctor!” he said.

“Uh—” Dairine paused. She’d translated the English word into the Speech a little loosely, but it struck her as a good idea, on second thought, not to get into the minutiae of floristry any more clearly right now…especially since the image suddenly rose before her mind of what her dad actually did with the flowers in his shop. Yeah, my dad takes the corpses of things that grow in the ground and then arranges them in tasteful designs. She could just hear herself telling Filif that.

“He does landscaping, too,” she said hurriedly, having to search around a little for the closest word the Speech had for that. There were several possibilities, but she didn’t think the word for terraforming was going to be appropriate here, so she selected a word that implied a smaller scale of operations.

“Oh, an architect,” Filif said. “That’s a good thing to do for people!”

“Yes…” Dairine said, wishing she’d had a little more time to think about the implications of having a sentient vegetable in the house. Well, I was the one who couldn’t wait to have them here, she thought. Now they’re here, and I’m just going to have to deal with it.