Wizard's Holiday

“Come on in,” Dairine said, “and we’ll get you guys settled. Does anyone want some dinner?”

“Dinner?” Filif said.

“Things to eat,” Dairine said, as they walked toward the house. “Dinner is the name of the meal we eat, starting around this time of day.”

“Definitely!” Sker’ret said. “What have you got?”

“All kinds of things,” Dairine said. “We’ll see if we can’t find you something that will suit your tastes…not to mention your physiologies. This—” she said, indicating the kitchen—is where we do our cooking,” Dairine said. Roshaun simply looked around again with that uninterested, downhis-nose expression, but Filif and Sker’ret turned all around, staring at everything in fascination. “Cooking?” Filif said.

“What’s that?”

“What do you eat that needs to be cooked?” Sker’ret said.

“I can see this is going to take some explaining,” Dairine said. “It’s partly a physiology thing for my people, and partly cultural. But, look, before we get into that, you’re going to want to set up your personal worldgates and your pup tents. The pup tents…” She thought about that for a moment. “Sometimes, this time of year, the weather can be unpredictable. Probably it’s going to be more convenient for you if you put the pup tents down in the basement.”

“Where’s that?” Sker’ret said.

“Down the stairs here,” Dairine said. “Right by where we came in. See that door? That’s the one. Down there—”

Dairine led the way down the stairs. Sker’ret flowed down them past her; Dairine looked over her shoulder to see how Filif was managing. She couldn’t see what his roots were doing through the decency field, but he seemed to be having no trouble negotiating the stairs. “Is this okay for you?” Dairine said.

Filif made a little hissing noise that Dairine realized was a chuckle. “I go up and down cliffs all the time at home,” he said. “This is a lot less trouble. What’s this place for? What’s down here?”

“Uh,” Dairine said, and then was tempted to laugh. “Nearly everything.”

It was true enough. Dairine couldn’t remember when the basement had last been cleaned out. The washing machine and clothes dryer were down here, and so was the furnace for the house’s central heating. Both of those were off on the left side of the stairs, toward the front of the house. But the rest of the basement … it was a farrago of old lawn furniture, indoor furniture that had been demoted to the basement and never thrown out, a decrepit bicycle or two, cardboard boxes full of old clothes and paperback books that were meant to go to the local thrift store, an old broken chest freezer, in which Dairine’s mom had once at tempted to raise earthworms…

Dairine found herself wondering whether she should bother being embarrassed about the mess, since at least one of her guests seemed to have no idea what a basement was for. She glanced at Roshaun, who was now looking around with an expression that was more difficult to read.

“A storage area,” Roshaun said.

It was the first thing he’d said that hadn’t instantly sounded obnoxious. “Sort of,” Dairine said. “Though it’s gotten a little…cluttered.”

“Has it?” Roshaun said. “I wouldn’t be an expert in clutter.”

Dairine sighed. “I wish I weren’t,” she said. “Anyway”—she indicated the bare cinder-block wall that was the south wall of the basement—”since you need a matter substrate to deploy your gates on, that should do. And you can leave the pup-tent accesses down here as well.”

For a few moments, they were all busy getting out the prepackaged wizardries. Sker’ret appeared to reach into one of the front segments of his body to pull out the two little tangles of light that Dairine knew they would all be carrying. Roshaun reached into an interior pocket of his ornate over-robe for his own pup-tent access, hanging it on the air and turning away from it, unconcerned. Filif, though, didn’t do anything that Dairine could see…but a moment later, his pup-tent access was hanging

in the air next to Roshaun’s, and from a single branch, which he’d pushed out a little past the main bulk of his greenery, there depended a little strip of darkness.

Dairine watched as he flung it at the concrete wall. There the darkness clung and ran down the wall, the black patch widening as it went. After a few seconds there was a roughly triangular-shaped patch of darkness in the concrete wall, the size of Filif’s body. Light fell into that darkness and was completely absorbed.

Sker’ret was doing the same with his own customized worldgate. He reared up with it held in his front mandibles and plastered it against the gray cement of the wall. That darkness, too, ran down to create a lower, more archlike shape, black as a cutout piece of night. Standing in front of it, Sker’ret thrust a front claw into it; the claw vanished up to the second joint.

Roshaun turned away, heading back up the steps. “Aren’t you going to set up your gate?” Dairine said.

“It can wait awhile,” Roshaun said. “I’m in no hurry.”

He was halfway up the stairs already, glinting golden in silhouette from the sunlight still coming in through the screen door. Dairine raised her eyebrows, and said to the other two, “Come on, and I’ll give you the grand tour of the house.”

“There’s more?” Filif said, sounding surprised.

“Sure,” Dairine said. “I’ll show you.”

By the time she and the other two were up the stairs, Roshaun had already opened the oven door, and was looking in. “If this is a food preparation area,” he said, “it can’t be meant to service very many people.”

“It’s not,” Dairine said. “There are only three of us here.”

“I know about that,” Sker’ret said. “There’s you, and your sire, and your sister.” He said both the relationship words as if they were strange new alien concepts.

Yes, Dairine thought. And if you knew it, why doesn’t Roshaun know it? “That’s right,” Dairine said.

Roshaun closed the oven door and looked around him, still with that faintly fancier-than-thou attitude, but also with a slight air of confusion. “Even so,” he said, looking into the dining room as if he expected to see something there and didn’t see it, “surely you don’t prepare your food yourselves?”

“Uh, sure we do,” Dairine said. Did I miss something about this guy’s profile? she thought. I should go back and have another look, because he’s really behaving strangely… “My sister’s better at it that I am, but I should be able to manage something.”

Sker’ret was up on his hind legs, or some of them, carefully inserting a couple of claws into a cupboard door. “I’ll be glad to help you,” he said. “What’s in here? Is this where you keep the food?”

He pulled the cupboard door open—literally. It came off its hinges, and Sker’ret put his head end into the cupboard, holding the door off to one side as he rummaged around. “What are all these bright-colored things?” he said, taking out packages and jars and cans, holding them up, and staring at them with many stalked eyes.

“Uh, yeah, those are all kinds of food. It’s just that, you want to watch out for the ones in the glass—”

Crash! went two of the jars that Sker’ret was holding in his claws. It became increasingly apparent that Sker’ret did not know his own strength. The shower of broken glass, various kinds of canning juices, and things like asparagus and peas and peaches in a jar, was shortly joined by more leakage from cans that Sker’ret was holding with his other claws. Roshaun and Filif looked on this, fascinated, but neither saying anything. “Oh, I’m sorry, these are very fragile, aren’t they?” Sker’ret said. “Were those supposed to do that?”

“Not exactly,” Dairine said, hoping against hope that she could stop this catastrophe before it got much further along, and get it cleaned up before her dad got home. “Why don’t you let me take care of that, and I’ll just—

Crash! “Oh no,” Sker’ret said, “I am sorry about that.” Several more jars and bottles fell down and either smashed on the counter or bounced off the floor; a few glass jars bounced and then smashed when they came down the second time. Both Filif and Roshaun crowded carefully back out of the way, and looked at Dairine to see what she would do. Dairine let out a long breath, and started carefully across the wet, glass-crunchy floor toward the basement steps, where a mop and broom were kept.

His claws clutched full of the remains of various cans and bottles, Sker’ret looked after Dairine with a number of its eyes. “Where are you going?” he said.

“Well,” Dairine said, “I could do a wizardry, but sometimes a mop makes more sense…”

“What’s a mop?” Filif said.

“It’s a thing we use to clean up the floor if something wet’s gotten on it—”

“To clean it up?” Sker’ret said, sounding shocked. “But we haven’t had anything yet—”

Dairine opened her mouth to say something, and then completely forgot what, as Sker’ret began to eat.

He ate the glass. He ate the cans. He ate the asparagus, and the peas, and the canned tomatoes, and every other foodstuff that had fallen on the floor. He slurped up every bit of liquid. And when he was done, he looked around him, and with his foreclaws, he picked up the torn-off cupboard door, which he had carefully set aside while dealing with the canned goods.

“Not the door!” Dairine yelled. Sker’ret’s head turned in some alarm.

“No?”

“No,” Dairine said, trying hard to calm herself. “I’m sorry; that’s part of the kitchen.”

“Oh,” Sker’ret said. “My apologies. I didn’t realize.” Carefully he set the door aside again, and turned his attention downward.

“No, no, no, no,” Dairine said. “Leave the floor!”

Somewhat bemused, Sker’ret cocked a few eyes back at Dairine, shrugged some of his legs, and began to levitate.

Roshaun was leaning against the counter by the kitchen sink, his arms folded, watching this spectacle with insufferable amusement. Dairine desperately wanted to punch him in the nose, even though he hadn’t said a word. Filif was watching, too, though with a far less superior air. Maybe it’s the berries, Dairine thought. It’s hard to look supercilious when you have berries hanging off you.

The back door opened. All four of the occupants of the kitchen looked up, startled.

Dairine’s father came in, closed the door behind him, and looked at his daughter, the young man, the centipede, and the tree. “Hello, everybody,” Harry Callahan said.

Filif, Roshaun, and the gently floating Sker’ret all looked at Dairine’s dad. Then they all looked at Dairine, waiting to take their cue from her.

Dairine had rarely been more embarrassed to have her father turn up without warning…or more relieved. “Daddy!” she said. “Who’s in the store?”

“Mike’s there for the rest of the day,” her dad said. Mike was his new assistant, whom he’d taken on a few weeks back: a young guy just out of high school who had been looking for a job and was good with flowers. “It’s been a slow afternoon, anyway. I’m not needed there. Who’re your friends?”

Dairine looked at her dad sidewise, admiring his cool, especially since she knew he’d done his reading and knew perfectly well who these people were. There he stood, acting like a man who had aliens in his house every day. And he had looked right at the cupboard door and not even mentioned it. “This is Filif,” she said. “Filif, this is my father.”

“I am honored to meet the stock from which the shoot proceeds,” Filif said. He rustled all over, bending a little bit like a tree in a wind.

Dairine was relieved to see that her dad must have the briefing pack somewhere about his person, as he was plainly understanding the Speech that Filif was using. “Well, you’re very welcome,” Dairine’s father said.

“And this is Sker’ret…”

“Well met on the journey,” Sker’ret said.

Dairine’s dad reached out to take the claw that Sker’ret offered him. “You don’t have to float there like that,” he said. “The floor’s not so clean in here that you need to be afraid to walk on it.” He glanced to one side. “Something wrong with the cupboard?”

“It came off,” Sker’ret said.

“That happens,” Dairine’s dad said. “Just leave it there for the time being; we’ll put it back where it belongs later.” He turned to Roshaun.

“And this is Roshaun,” Dairine said.

“… ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Wellakhit,” Roshaun said, and to Dairine’s mortification, looked at her dad as if expecting him to bow.

Her dad’s response took just a fraction of a second longer this time. “Make yourself right at home,” he said to Roshaun. “But then I see you already have.” He turned away from Roshaun with exactly the same matter-of-fact motion that Dairine had seen her dad use with customers who were wasting his time at the counter. “So let’s all go into the living room and sit down. What’s on the agenda, Dairine?”

She recognized the code—her father rarely called her by her whole name unless there was trouble of some kind. At least for once, the cause of the trouble wasn’t her…or if it was, she was only the indirect cause. All of them followed her dad into the living room, and Dairine said, “They’ve spent the day traveling, and I was thinking maybe some food would be nice…”

“Absolutely. I could do with some dinner myself. We can sit and relax and get acquainted. Any thoughts?”

“Well, I thought maybe something neutral.” She glanced at Roshaun, who was looking around their living room with an expression of badly concealed confusion, as if he’d found people living in a hole in the ground and liking it. “Some fruit drinks to start with, maybe, and then…” Dairine was grasping at possibilities; this was more Nita’s specialty than hers. “I don’t know, maybe something vegetarian…”

“That sounds nice,” Filif said. “Something to do with my people. What’s it mean?”

“Huh? Vegetarian? Oh, around here it means people who eat only vegetables…”

Then Dairine heard what she was saying, and stopped short.

But she hadn’t stopped soon enough. Filif stood there frozen in shock, and the decency field around his roots almost went away. “You… eat… vegetables?”

Oh, great, Dairine thought, in a complete fury with herself. Why didn’t I just come right out and say, “Hi there, we’re cannibals”? Except I just did. “But they’re not, you know, the people kind of vegetables,” Dairine said, though the look Filif was turning on her made her wonder whether she was going to have any success with this approach. “They don’t…They’re not alive, I mean, not the way you’re alive…I mean, they don’t think…”

Then Dairine stopped herself again, this time because she was getting onto conceptually shaky ground. When you were a wizard, you quickly discovered that thought and sentience didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, and sometimes they manifested independently.

Her father leaned over her shoulder and looked down at Filif with an unusually calm expression. “What do you do for nourishment at home, son?” he said.

“Normally,” Filif said, having recovered enough to tremble a little, “we root.”

“I’ve got just the place for you,” Dairine’s dad said. “You come on outside with me. Dairine, you take care of these two for the moment.”

Her dad went out the back door, closely followed by Filif. She sagged a little with relief and turned back to the others. Sker’ret was looking out the front window of the living room with great interest, but Roshaun was leaning against the polished wooden breakfront, snickering.

“That was interesting,” he said. His tone of voice suggested not that he was trying to restrain his amusement, but that he was intending to let it loose full force as soon as he had an excuse. He found Earth funny, he found Dairine’s dad funny, and he found Dairine funny.

Dairine just looked at him. It would be so very bad, she thought, to punch out a guest on his first day in the house. Very, very bad.

But really satisfying…

“Come on and see the rest of the house,” Dairine said, rather more to Sker’ret than to Roshaun; and she led them off on the grand tour.

The tour took about fifteen minutes, after which Dairine left Roshaun and Sker’ret in

the living room and went into the kitchen again. Her dad was standing there with a screwdriver; he was in the final stages of refastening the cupboard door. “I could have sworn Nita and I brought home canned stuff to replace everything we used last week,” he said.

“You did,” Dairine said. “I think we’re going to need more. Where’s Filif? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” her father said, swinging the door back and forth a couple of times.

“He didn’t go outside the yard, did he? I put a force field around the edges of things that’ll keep the neighbors from seeing anything. But if he went out—”

“He didn’t. He may get around, but he didn’t feel like going anywhere right now, except under the sky. I get the feeling he doesn’t particularly like being indoors.”

“No,” Dairine said, “I think maybe you’re right.”

“And he’s enough of a conifer for me to know his tastes, at least a little,” her dad said, opening the cutlery drawer where the screwdrivers lived and dropping in the one he’d been using. “Besides that, we chatted enough for me to find out that he likes his soil acidic. I plugged him into that new bed I was getting ready for the rhododendrons and told him to kick back for a while. He should do fine.”

“You’re certainly taking this well,” Dairine said, before she could stop herself.

“I don’t know that we have much choice at this point,” her dad said, sounding somewhat resigned. “I agreed to this, after all, so I may as well try to enjoy it. Now then—what about dinner?”

“Sounds good.” But Dairine immediately started worrying again, as that produced a whole new level of problems. Filif…

Her dad was ahead of her. “What have we got in the house that’s not recognizably a vegetable?” He thought for a moment. “Pasta?”

“Spaghetti and meatballs,” Dairine said.

“How’s Filif likely to handle the sight of tomato sauce?” Dairine’s dad said.

Dairine thought about that. Tomatoes were vegetables … but a jar of spaghetti sauce might pass if no one actually discussed what went into it. Of course, even pasta had been a vegetable once

Her father was way ahead of her. “Since Filif isn’t going to be eating what we are,” Dairine’s dad said, “and since I’m not operating under the restrictions you are, I’m prepared to prevaricate if I have to. But let’s see if we can’t just steer the conversation in other directions if the history of food comes up. Meanwhile, utensils…” Her dad started rummaging through the flatware drawer for a matched set. “I suspect Roshaun can use a fork and a spoon on his spaghetti. If he hasn’t had the experience before, we’ll teach him. And as for Sker’ret—”

“I think if we can get him to stick to the spaghetti and leave the plates and the table alone,” Dairine said, “we’ll be doing okay.”

Dairine’s dad reached up into another cupboard and came down with a couple of odd plates from an old set, which Dairine knew for a fact her dad hated, and had been looking for an excuse to get rid of. “And in case of accidents—” he said.

Dairine grinned, and went looking for a pot for the spaghetti.

As it turned out, the plates survived dinner, though Dairine’s temper almost didn’t. And the problem, as she’d suspected it would be, had been Roshaun. Filif came in to “sit” at the table in a large bucket of potting soil that Dairine’s dad brought in for him, and Sker’ret more or less draped himself over the seat and through the open back of one of the dining room chairs, leaving his front end free to deal with the spaghetti. Dairine’s dad only had to warn Sker’ret once that they were only eating things on top of the tablecloth and inside containers. This led to a lively discussion of what humans ate, and Dairine sat there in mostly mute appreciation of how her father somehow confined himself entirely to discussing how things tasted, without ever going near the subject of what they were. Dairine spent most of her time ingesting spaghetti—she found that she was ravenous—and forcing herself not to glare at Roshaun.

It took him exactly five seconds to master the fork and spoon, though he let it be known that at his home, his people used several different kinds of tongs to handle slippery foods like this. He let a number of things be known over the course of dinner, dispensing the occasional fact or opinion as if he expected everybody to be eagerly awaiting his every word…and paying precious little attention to anyone else’s opinions, if they came up. His clothes, his possessions, the size of his house, which apparently would have dwarfed Dairine’s, all these came up for brief and tasteful mention. What did not come out was anything personal, anything revealing of the inner nature of the entity who sat there at the table, managing the fork and spoon with the grace of someone who’d been using them for years, and had never gotten spaghetti sauce or any other sauce on him, not once.

Dairine sat there listening to it all, and stewed. Sker’ret didn’t seem to notice Roshaun’s attitude, or if he did, he didn’t reveal it during his workmanlike and concentrated assault on the food. Filif mostly sat quietly listening to the others, and rustled occasionally whenever anyone said anything with sufficient emphasis to suggest that they wanted a response from the listeners. Dairine and her dad concentrated on keeping the conversation going along in a relatively friendly fashion, but Dairine increasingly felt like she was doing weights, and ones that were getting heavier every minute.

But they made it through the main course without a murder, and through dessert (her dad’s chocolate pudding) without trying to keep a medicine ball in the air. And at the end of it all, “Well,” Dairine’s dad said, looking around the table, “it’s been a long day, and I’m sure that it would be a good thing if we all got some rest now.”

“But it’s not even dark yet,” Filif said.

“I know,” Dairine’s dad said, in a very kindly voice. “But there’s the time difference to think of; there has to be at least some time difference between your planet and this one. And whatever it is, I’m sure it means that you need some rest now. I know I do.” And he stood up.

The others stood up with him. “I think I might withdraw,” Roshaun said graciously. “Your local night is how long?”

“Eight hours,” Dairine said, while thinking grimly, It was in your orientation

pack, if you had bothered to read it.

“I’ll walk you downstairs,” Dairine said. “You all saw where my room is. If you need anything, I’ll be awake about an hour and a half after the sun comes up. You all have everything you need in your pup tents?”

“More than enough,” Filif said.

“Me, too,” Sker’ret said.

“A sufficiency,” said Roshaun, and turned away from Dairine with no further acknowledgment. “Your best of rest, then.”

Dairine went with their three guests to the stairs, saw them safely down. “Good night, everybody,” she said, closing the door to the cellar stairs.

Her dad was standing there by the sink, having just put a stack of dishes down beside it, and presently washing a couple of glasses by hand. As Dairine turned away from the basement door, he glanced over at her.

“A harder day than you were expecting?” he said.

“Uh, yeah,” said Dairine. “Did it show?”

“You mean, to the guests? In Filif’s and Sker’ret’s case, I don’t think so. They seem like nice kids.” Her father put one glass down on the drainer, picked up the other to rinse it out. “I’d like to know what’s going on with Roshaun, though.”

“So would I,” Dairine muttered. She was sufficiently shell-shocked at the moment, and sufficiently in need of something grindingly ordinary, that she actually found herself picking up a dish towel to help her dad finish up at the sink. “Daddy, it’s driving me crazy.”

He looked at her with slight concern. Dairine understood why. It wasn’t in her nature to make a lot of admissions of that kind, even in the family. Dairine let out a long breath and said, “I’ve never met a wizard who wasn’t…”

“Good?” her father said. “Nice?”

Dairine shook her head. “It’s not just that,” she said. “All the wizards I know—know at all closely—their wizardry is really important to them. Maybe it’s not the main thing their life is about: No one says it has to be. But it’s important. This guy, though…it feels like he wants you to think that wizardry’s a hobby for him. How can anyone be that way? Wizardry’s about talking the universe right when it goes wrong…finding out what’s going on in people’s heads and helping them make the world happen. Finding out how things want to be, and helping them be that way. How can anything be more important than that?”

She waved her arms in the air, frustrated. “Sure, it’s about having fun, too—you’d have to be incredibly obtuse and clueless not to have fun being a wizard. And there are about a billion ways to do it! But this guy—” She shook her head. Much more quietly Dairine said, “I really don’t like him. And I really don’t like that I really don’t like him. The worst part is that I don’t have any reasons for it. He’s one of my own kind, a wizard, and he rubs me the wrong way.”

Her father sighed. “You know,” he said, “there’ve been people I’ve worked with, occasionally, over the years, that I’ve had the same problem with. And I’ve never known what to do about it.”

“Wait for them to go away?” Dairine said.

“Sometimes they do,” her dad said. “Sometimes you’re just stuck with them.”

Dairine sighed in turn. “Two weeks…”

“It’s only been a few hours,” her dad said. “Don’t give up yet. Things may improve.”

“From your mouth to the Powers’ ears,” Dairine muttered. But she found it hard to believe that Roshaun was going to shift his behavior in any way that would matter.

Her dad handed her the glass from the drainer. “Before I turn in—anything I should know about the downstairs?” her dad said.

“They’ve got a pup tent each,” Dairine said, “and they’re probably sleeping in them. So if you go down there, make sure you turn on the light so you don’t stumble into any place you don’t want to be. They’ve also got a worldgate each, fastened to the bare wall, in case they need to get home in a hurry for some emergency. I wouldn’t lean any of your tools against those…You might not get them back.”

Her dad nodded. “It’s strange,” he said, “hearing them speak. It sounds like English…but it runs deeper, somehow. You hear undertones.”

“That’s the Speech,” Dairine said. “Everything understands it somewhat. But you’re hearing it with better understanding than a nonspeaker usually gets.” She finished drying the glass, put it up on the counter. “If it starts to bother you…”

Her father shook his head. “I’ll let you know,” he said. “But no problems so far.” He finished with the last glass, handed it to Dairine, and leaned against the counter.

“So what are we going to do with them for two weeks?” her dad said. “Regardless of where Nita and Kit might be, it’s too cold for us to go to the beach…though you might take them out that way once to show them the sea. I get a feeling there aren’t many oceans where Filif comes from.”

“You’re getting to like him already,” Dairine said, and smiled.

“I’m not used to having the plants talk back,” her dad said. “Or, if they do, being able to understand them. It’s an experience.”

Dairine nodded. “Well, we can help them get used to suburban life gradually,” she said. “Carmela wants to come talk to the visitors, anyway. And once they’ve got their disguise routines sorted out, we can take them around the neighborhood, to start with. They can even go over to the Rodriguezes’ and see Kit’s weird TV. For all I know, they may be able to see some program they’re missing.”

Dairine’s dad chuckled at that. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s try to keep them out of sight until we’re sure their disguises are going to stay in place. I really don’t want a UFO scandal erupting on my doorstep.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Dairine said.

“Good,” her dad said. He had been washing the last couple of dishes; he racked them up in the drainer. “I’m going to turn in, sweetie. It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah.”

Her dad grabbed Dairine and hugged her hard. “A long day for you, too,” he said. “No, leave those last two. Throw in the towel and go to bed.”

Dairine hung up the dish towel, but not before tossing a last amused glance at the two dishes still in the drainer. “You’re just hoping that Sker’ret will wake up with an urge for something in the middle of the night…”

Her dad grinned at her and went to bed.

Dairine took herself to bed after him, first walking through the house and making sure that doors were locked and lights turned off. Once up in her room, the tiredness came down over her as if someone had put a sack over her head. She kept blinking to keep her eyes open. But before she got undressed for bed, before she even thought of doing anything else, she turned to Spot, who was sitting on her desk as usual, and flipped his lid open. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Get me Roshaun’s profile.”

It’s right here, Spot said.

Dairine looked at the profile, once again examining that picture of Roshaun. She knew she was imagining it, but on this examination, after meeting the original, that picture seemed to have something that had been missing before: just the slightest sneer.

She glanced down the column of material in the Speech that was the public part of Roshaun’s name. There, embedded in the long intertwined tracery of characters, would be information about his personality, his abilities, his power levels and level of accomplishment as a wizard, and much else. But now that she looked at it, there was something strange about that long series of names he flaunted around. Some family thing, she’d thought at first. But Dairine had suddenly started having doubts.

Dairine read Roshaun’s full name again, slowly, not as a phrase in an alien language this time, worth savoring for the exotic sounds, but this time translating each word. Roshaun ke Nelaid, it began: “Roshaun of the princes’ line of Seriv, son of the Sun Lord, beloved of the Sun Lord, son of the great King, descendant of the Inheritors of the Great Land, the Throne-destined—”

Dairine sat there at her desk and was appalled, realizing that Roshaun had actually given her the short version of his name. It went on for about six more epithets, which sounded impressive but were difficult to decipher, and ended in the words am me’stardet Wellakhir, “royal and kingly Masters, Guardians, and Guarantors of Wellakh.”

Oh my god, Dairine thought. The situation was worse than she’d thought it could possibly be. They’ve sent me some kind of planetary prince, she thought. The Powers That Be really did think I was getting out of hand, and this is my punishment. I’m going to get to spend two weeks’ worth of holiday baby-sitting spoiled royalty.

She tried to read the rest of Roshaun’s profile— “Power level 6.0-6.8 ± 0.5; Specialty: stellar dynamics, stellar atmospheres and kinetics, consultant level 3.6…”—but she couldn’t concentrate. Very gently she put Spot’s lid down. Normally, her next line would have been, What have I done to deserve this? But she knew what she had done. Boy, Dairine thought, when the Powers That Be get annoyed with you, they don’t play around. She put her face down in her hands and moaned.

Then she opened Spot’s lid again and looked one more time at that endless name. That by itself was bad…very bad. It was also full of reasons for Roshaun’s self-importance. Still, Dairine thought, it’s no excuse for him to be such a snot. Maybe we can do something about that, given enough time.

But there was something even stranger about the name—not anything

specifically bad…just odd. Not once in that whole epic string of words was the word wizard mentioned, not even as a footnote.

Now what am I supposed to make of that? Dairine thought. Because even if he was the king of a world somewhere, or in line to be one, if he was also a wizard, that fact was more than worthy of being mentioned in the same breath.

Dairine lay there and brooded over it for a while.

You’re worried about Roshaun, Spot said.

About him? No, Dairine said. But he raises questions.

Like how to avoid killing him, Spot said. And behind the words, Dairine could hear that very characteristic, machine-accented laugh of his. It was something Spot had learned from her. It was one of the first things Spot had learned from her.

We shouldn’t really even joke about it, she said. He’s our guest. The Powers That Be sent him to us. We have to be nice to him.

Within reason, Spot said.

I didn’t say that! Dairine said.

You were thinking it, Spot said. I heard you.

Dairine sighed. Can’t keep much away from you, can I?

Not for a while now, Spot said. So what do we do next?

Hope that nothing gets worse, Dairine said.

She got undressed, and instead of the usual floppy T-shirt, she actually put on pajamas. There was always the chance that something untoward would happen in the middle of the night. Among other possibilities, Dairine had begun dreading any sudden crunching noises that might start coming from the kitchen. Do Rirhait get the midnight munchies? she wondered. If it’s just for the dishes, Daddy won’t mind. But if Sker’ret forgets himself and gets started on the woodwork…Let’s just hope he doesn’t.

The bed creaked under her as she got into it. Dairine sighed, thinking of Nita having a good time far away. Off getting a suntan on Beach World, she thought. I hope she remembered to bring sunblock. She burns so easily…

Dairine pulled the covers up and tried to snuggle down into the pillow and get comfortable. Her mind, though, was buzzing with the events of the day, and she knew it was going to be a long time before she got to sleep. Especially since there was another issue bothering her, one much larger than the potential impact of a Rirhait on the structure of her kitchen. This is supposed to be a vacation, Dairine thought, a holiday. But at the same time, there are no accidents, and the Powers never do anything without a reason: In a finite universe, energy is too precious to waste. Which means these wizards were sent here for some reason.

Dairine pulled the covers over her head. Wizards are always answers, she thought. But if these three are the answer to something here, what’s the question?

The image of Roshaun, elegant, completely self-assured, and absolutely infuriating, rose before Dairine’s closed eyes. Furious, she squeezed them tighter.

And will I find out what it is before I have to strangle myself to keep from killing him?

****

Customs and Other Formalities Nita and Kit turned toward the source of the voice that had spoken to them.

“Sorry,” its owner said. “Sorry! I was late. I had to help my tapi, my father. Are you all right?”

The first thing that struck Nita was how very tall Quelt was. Nita was getting tall for her age, everyone said, though she still felt short to herself. Looking up at Quelt, her first thought was that she felt shorter than ever. Her second thought was, This girl would be a star at basketball…

But there was a lot more to Quelt’s looks than just her height. Her whole body was elongated; her arms and legs were perhaps half again as long as they would’ve been on Earth. She looked like a tall, slender, graceful ceramic sculpture, or a sculpture done in wood—a beautiful, polished brown wood, like teak or mahogany. Her skin even had that kind of subtle sheen, halfway between matte and shiny. Her face was long and narrow, with high cheekbones, and she had large, dark, liquid eyes; her head was covered with something that Nita couldn’t quite analyze—a silvery blond growth halfway between hair and fur, shaggy at the top and sides, partly covering her small round ears, and reaching into a long, soft ponytail down the back of her neck to about the middle of her back. The effect of the fair hair against the dark, dark skin was striking, and, Nita thought, very stylish. Quelt was wearing a long, loose, sleeveless garment of some kind of woven fabric, and it flowed around her as she came hurriedly to them, her hand stretched out. She was smiling, a great wide smile that went right across her face. There seemed to be no separate teeth inside that smile. Instead, Quelt had two one-piece, dazzlingly white bony plates in the same place where teeth would be in a human.

“We’re fine!” Nita said. She was getting over that staggered-by-the-landscape feeling, and now she put her hand out to take Quelt’s. Quelt took hers in turn, and pumped it up and down enthusiastically.

“See,” Quelt said, “I’ve been studying your people’s customs. Dai stihó!”

“Uh, dai stihó!” Nita said. And then she laughed. “It’s okay,” Nita said, “you can stop now. You don’t have to keep doing it!” Quelt laughed, too.

“Quelt?” Kit said, offering his hand and getting the same pump-it-up treatment. “Did I pronounce that right?”

“Close enough,” Quelt said, and bobbed her head to Kit, producing again that curiously wide smile. “And Kit? And Nita? Is that right?”

Kit turned his head to the left and inclined it forward, an Alaalid nod. “A lot closer than usual,” he said. “We hear all kinds of variations.”

“I’m so glad,” Quelt said. “I’m so new at this—and I’ve only once met a wizard who wasn’t Alaalid. But never mind that. And this is Ponsh?” She softened the sound of the consonant a little bit as she bent down to have a good look at Ponch. He sat down and, without warning, offered her a paw.

Quelt took the paw and shook it nearly as enthusiastically as she had shaken Kit’s hand. “This is another of the sentient species on your planet?” Quelt said. “Your associate?”

“That’s right,” Kit said. “Except Ponch is a little more sentient than most.”

“Yes,” Quelt said, “it’s the contagion principle. I’ve heard of it.” She let Ponch’s paw go, straightened up again, and looked carefully at all three of them. “But are you sure you’re all right? Sometimes when we get visitors here, they have trouble with”—Quelt looked around at that tremendously distant horizon—”just the look of things.”

“Well, by our standards, this planet really is huge,” Kit said. “In fact, it’s almost as big as a planet can be for humanoid life to evolve, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Quelt said. “Any bigger and it wouldn’t have had enough metal and heavy elements in the crust to keep the atmosphere in place. We were very lucky when our system formed. And we still don’t have a lot of metal. But I’m keeping you standing around here talking exogeology, and you haven’t had anything to eat or drink yet, or even seen the house! And my pabi and tapi are waiting to meet you. Come on!”

They started walking downhill from the flowery clearing where the gate from the Crossings had deposited them. Quelt looked up at the sky with a critical expression, and then back at Nita. “Is this weather all right for you?” she said.

“It’s just fine!” Nita said. “It feels like summer.”

“It’s still only spring,” Quelt said. “But let me know if anything goes wrong, or if it’s cold for you, or anything. If the weather starts to act up, I’ll fix it.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Nita said. And then she thought about it for a moment, and added, “Well, I guess you would be, if you’re the only wizard here…”

They started to climb a little rise between them and the sea, kicking through the flowers as they went; Ponch romped ahead of them. “Oh, yes,” Quelt said. “I listen to what the Telling has to say about the way the weather is at the moment, and if there’s a problem, or if I’m not to change it for some other reason, Those Who Are send me word. But beyond that, I’ve been working with the weather here for long enough now that They seem to trust me with it.”

“The Telling,” Nita said. “That’s your version of the wizard’s manual, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” Quelt said. “Did I understand that correctly? You get the Telling as a physical thing?”

“Sure,” Nita said. “Here, take a look.”

Nita pulled her manual out of her backpack and handed it to Quelt. Quelt turned it over curiously in her hands as they climbed. “It’s so compact,” Quelt said. “Isn’t it a problem for you, though? Don’t you leave it places and then realize you’ve left it behind?”

“There are ways around that,” Kit said. “If we don’t feel like physically carrying the manuals, we can always pull the fabric of space apart a little bit and stuff the manual into the pocket.”

“That could be a little tricky,” Quelt said thoughtfully.

“It can be,” Nita said, “but if you—”

She was interrupted by a sudden flurry of crazy barking from Ponch as he came to the top of the rise, saw something that excited him, and dived down over the far side. “Oh no,” Kit said, “what’s he seen now?”

The barking continued, and Kit ran up to the top of the rise. Nita and Quelt went after him. As Nita made the top of the rise herself, she looked down and saw

Quelt’s house. “Wow,” she said. It was not just one building but an assortment of low, wide buildings clustered together, built in a soft-peach-colored material almost exactly the shade of the pink-and-peach-striped beach that stretched away for miles and miles on either side until it faded from view in the haze before the horizon. The buildings were topped off with conical, pointed roofs made of bunches of the silvery reeds that grew on the seaward side of the rise, as it sloped down toward the beach. Through these long, tall reeds, Ponch was plunging—though he himself was invisible at the moment, the reed-leaves were thrashing with his passage—and heading at top speed for a big pen made of more of the silver reeds interwoven with lengths of darker, silver gray wood, built off to one side of the largest building.

Milling around in the pen were a number of creatures that Nita at first had a great deal of trouble making any sense of. They looked like golden or cream-colored pom-poms, and as Ponch and his barking got closer, the activity in the pen got more frenzied.

“Ponch!” Kit yelled. But it was too late. Ponch came rocketing out of the reeds at the bottom of the rise and shot straight toward the pen. He was within only a few feet of the silvery, wooden fence when there was a sudden chorus of sharp, odd honking noises…and all of the pom-poms leaped into the air…

…and kept on going, as every one of them suddenly sprouted wide, golden or cream white wings, two pairs each, and flew off down the beach in a noisy, honking flock. Ponch danced around on his hind legs, barking at the creatures, and then took off down the beach after them.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry,” Kit said, and started running after Ponch.

Quelt started laughing. “No, it’s all right,” she said. “But this is why I was late! I was helping my tapi get the shesh off them. It doesn’t matter now. We were finished …” But she kept on laughing.

Nita shook her head. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “He really loves to chase things so much. He created a whole universe full of nothing but squirrels once, so he could spend all his time chasing them.”

“He created a universe?”

“Ponch is unusual,” Nita said. “It’s a long story.”

Quelt nodded a few times, a gesture that Nita was coming to read as the equivalent of an Earth human shaking his head. “I get that sense,” she said. “Well, he won’t have to create universes to have things to chase here. The ceiff are here three times a day, every day—they come back to be groomed and tended—and once we’ve got the shesh off them, Ponsh can chase them as often as he likes.”

Quelt and Nita ambled down through the reeds toward the houses. “They’re kind of like sheep,” Nita said. “And shesh—is it the furry stuff they’re covered with? Or is it something to do with food?”

“It’s a food precursor,” Quelt said. “The ceiff make a secretion that we process. It’s kind of complicated, but it tastes really good when you’re done with it. We trade it to other people all over the islands hereabouts: It’s very much in demand.” She started to laugh again. “And I should warn you, my topi is really passionate about it. Don’t get him started—you’ll be hearing about shesh all night.”

“It said in the orientation pack that your topi had ‘elected to do manual labor permanently’” Nita said. “It sounded like most people don’t here.”

“What, work?” Quelt said. She and Nita paused by the pen, looking down the beach to where Kit was still chasing after Ponch, and Ponch was still chasing after the flying sheep. “No,” Quelt said, “no one has to do it all the time. Nonetheless, some people like to, like my topi. Otherwise, our people usually seem to have enough of everything to go around—food and things to make clothes and houses. Anything that’s unusually hard for people to get, like metal—either they process it on a small scale, in local groups, and everybody takes a turn doing the work, or else I get it for them. It’s one of the main things I use my wizardry for.” She looked at Nita, a little surprised. “Why? Do people on your world have to work?”

“Most people,” Nita said. “In fact, pretty much everybody.”

Quelt shook her head in wonder. “You’ve got to tell me all about your world,” she said, as Kit trotted back toward them, holding Ponch by the collar. “Everything! But we’ll have lots of time to talk about it. At dinner, and for days after. In the meantime, we’d better get inside! Pabi and Tapi have made great masses of food for you; they’re terrified you’ll be hungry after the trip.”

At that, Kit looked slightly embarrassed and Nita burst out laughing. “I think parents all must go to the same school,” she said. “Though how they get there and back without us knowing is something we’ll never understand. Ponch,” Nita said, “what were you doing, you bad boy?”

Ponch shook himself all over, spraying Nita and Quelt and Kit with seawater—he had managed to get in and out of the surf several times while chasing the flying sheep. If they didn’t want to be chased, he said, they shouldn’t have flown away.

“Well, Quelt and her dad spent most of the afternoon getting those things together into that pen,” Nita said, “and now look! They’re all over the place. Don’t chase them anymore! You understand?”

Ponch sat down, looked up at Quelt with big, woebegone eyes, hung his head, and offered her a paw. Sorry, he said.

“It’s all right,” Quelt said. “Don’t go all chopfallen on me. Let’s go in; they’re waiting for us.”

They went down to the house. There on the broad front steps, under the silver thatch of the eaves, they met Quelt’s parents, who were dressed like their daughter, in long, loose, pale casual clothing, in two or three layers of cream or gold or beige—a long tunic or a short one with a long, sleeveless overvest flung on top, soft sandals, and, in Quelt’s father’s case, a soft scarf wrapped around the neck. Nita was astounded to find them even taller and more beautiful than Quelt. Kuwilin Peliaen, Quelt’s tapi, and Demair Peliaen, Quelt’s pabi, each towered at least two feet above their daughter.

“Come in, come in,” Demair said, laughing like her daughter, easily, and looking at Kit and Nita as if they were neighbors, not people she’d never seen before. Demair had Quelt’s hair, perhaps even a fairer version, though hers was shorter, worn in a soft fluffy cap around her head. Kuwilin, on the other hand, was completely bald, and this suited him extremely well—his longer, narrower features gave him an impressive and austere look, but that never lasted long when he started laughing. In fact, all of them laughed at least once every few minutes, at least as far as Nita could tell. And there was nothing artificial about it, nothing nervous. She felt

entirely welcomed—entirely at home.

“You were a long time coming!” Kuwilin said. “I thought maybe we wouldn’t see you until tomorrow.”

“Worldgates,” Demair said. “It’s the old story: Hurry up and run in all directions, then sit and wait forever. No matter! You’re here now. Come in out of the wind and be welcome with us. Come see the house!”

With Quelt and her parents, Nita and Kit walked around the house, looking at everything. Nita was astounded at how technologically advanced this place was, despite its rural look. She immediately recognized a computer and data-retrieval system, disguised as a whole stuccoed wall. There were various appliances for housekeeping and entertainment; at first, Nita couldn’t understand how they were powered, but after a few words exchanged in the Speech with Quelt, she understood that these ran on fuel cells of an unusually advanced sort, operating off hydrogen cracked out of seawater.

Yet the whole look of the house was very simple and spare—appliances and storage were mostly hidden away against the walls, or in them, by woven screens or cupboard doors. There was a great deal of artwork, paintings and sculpture done by both of Quelt’s parents. Her father’s art looked more like what Nita thought of as modern or abstract art: splashes of bright color against the pale, plain stuccoed walls. Quelt’s mother’s art was mostly portraiture, pictures of her husband and daughter, and very beautiful landscapes—all of these featuring the sea or the hill behind the house. There were also some still-life studies of flowers in the dining room, the work of someone who had sat in front of one of the blue jijis flowers up on the hill for a very long time, studying every petal of it, every hair.

“Young cousins,” Quelt’s mother said when they’d seen everything, “what about latemeal? Did you eat anything on the journey?”

“Uh—” Kit said.

“Everything,” Nita said. “But we’re ready for more. And so is Ponch. Huh, Ponch?”

Ponch looked at Quelt’s mother and wagged his tail. Food is always nice, he said.

Quelt’s mother smiled. “The perfect houseguest,” she said. “Things will be ready in a few moments…Do you change clothes for latemeal?”

“Is it required?” Nita said. She knew places where it was.

Quelt’s mother tilted her head sideways. “The careful guest,” she said, “perhaps wants to show the other diners honor.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other. “Change for dinner,” they said in unison.

They unlimbered their pup tents, slipped into them, and changed into clean things. Nita, feeling the heat, got into one of her beach wraps and put a light jacket over it, then went out to see about dinner. Everybody sat down in the great room, on cushions around the long, low table, which groaned with the feast Quelt had threatened. Nita began to understand, with some amusement, that Quelt’s mother and father were as much in love with food and its treatment as her own mom had been. It was strange for her, too, to look down the table at the vast array of bowls and plates and platters, rilled with dishes hot or cold that sported unfamiliar shapes and colors, greens and blues very much in evidence. She laughed to herself

as she saw Kit go straight for the blue foods, so that Quelt’s mother laughed and passed him more of them. For her own part, Nita sat there dealing with her first really leisurely contact with alien foods—smells and textures that she’d never encountered before, but that were nonetheless instantly appetizing.

“We’re lucky this way,” Quelt said, passing Nita a bowl of some bright orange sauce to dribble over a plateful of something that smelled most deliciously of fried chicken but tasted like sweet-and-sour pork. “Our body chemistries are a lot alike; we’re both using iron as the heart of the molecule that carries oxygen around in our blood. So that means there’ll be certain similarities in—” And then Quelt stopped and laughed. Nita looked up at her with her mouth full, chewing. Quelt said, “As if it matters! Do you want to know what these things are, or would you prefer just to point, and I’ll pass them to you?”

“Pointing’ll do fine for the moment,” Nita said, and she pointed and had many things passed to her. She was grateful that table manners on Alaalu, or at least this part of it, were very similar to those on Earth, right down to the short but elegant grace said before the meal: “Here we are,” said Kuwilin, “and here’s all this fine food. May it do us good, so we can thank the Powers for it!”

When they were halfway through the meal, the sun was easing down toward the water outside the dining room window—not a window as such, but just an opening with windbreak shutters folded back out of the way of the view. Quelt’s mother stretched. “This is a good time to take a rest from the food,” she said, “and it won’t run away…or not far.” There was some laughter at that, since everyone was feeling a little overstretched: Dinner had featured at least six different kinds of shesh. Nita had started out thinking of this as a sort of alien cheese, but then she realized that such an appraisal fell very far short of the mark. There were too many ways to treat the shesh, as she found when she made the mistake of getting Kuwilin talking about it.

Demair rolled her eyes and started talking to Kit about what life on Earth was like, while Kuwilin held forth on shesh—the storage, processing, pressing, coloring, and texturization of the foodstuff; the handling of its seasonal variations; and its preparation for dining, using at least a hundred technical terms that Nita hadn’t realized even occurred in the Speech. Hearing them now, she found herself wondering whether there were some wizards who practiced their art exclusively in the culinary mode, forsaking all other usages. Or more likely, she thought, it’s true what we’ve always read in the manual.. that wizardry is only another kind of science—just one with its roots sunk deeper into the universe than most.

For the moment, it didn’t matter. After a while, they all got up and left the table, went outside, and strolled down the beach, watching the sun go down in a great blaze of fire—peach and orange and gold against that sky, which, despite a touch of green, or perhaps because of it, seemed more intensely blue than any Nita had ever seen on Earth. That color ran chills down Nita’s neck, once or twice, when she looked up at it. What is it? she wondered. What is it about this place that reminds me of something else? Whatever else it reminds me of, it’s good…

Ponch gamboled up and down in the water, running at the slight waves, biting them, chasing them out to sea again. Nita, walking with the others, gazed up and down those miles and miles of empty beach, and was astounded. “Can anyone live

in a place like this?” she said.

Quelt’s mother looked at her in some surprise. “Anyone who likes,” she said. “It’s a little isolated here, but some of us like that. People in other islands, maybe they don’t—but then they have hundreds and thousands of stad to sail before they see another human face. This is the biggest island, so we have the Cities here.” She shook her head. “I’ve lived in the Cities—they’re nice if you want to see a thousand faces that you don’t know every day, and maybe there’s a kind of freedom in that. But for my part, perhaps I’m too much of a homebody. Maybe I prefer seeing just two other faces that I know, most days, and hearing the same three flocks of flying sheep come in every day and go again…the water coming up and down, and nothing else.” She smiled, a long, lazy, untroubled look.

“For the rest,” Kuwilin said, “this is no crowded world. Granted, there’s much more sea than land. The sea is openhanded with us, and gives us more than enough food for everyone. People who have more than they need give to those who have less, if they need it, or if they ask for it. Why? How is it in your world?”

Nita started to answer, then stopped herself. She was disinclined to break the perfect spell of quiet that was coming down over her so quickly in this place. She glanced at Kit, who was walking on the far side of Kuwilin, but he was looking out to sea, not paying attention. “It’s different,” she said. “It’s very different. People don’t give that readily in my world.”

“But what’s the matter with them?” Quelt’s mother said. “Don’t they have enough?”

“Of many things,” Nita said, “maybe not. There are so many of us. And while there’s a lot more land on my planet than there is on Alaalu, our world is much smaller.” She pulled out her manual. “See,” she said, paging to the map of Alaalu, which showed Earth beside it for comparison’s sake.

“But it’s such a little planet,” Demair said, looking over Kuwilin’s shoulder at the manual. “And small planets like that are usually rich in metal. Metal makes technology so easy: You must all be wealthy. How can you not have enough of everything?”

Nita shook her head. “It would take me a long time to explain,” she said.

“You’ll be here for days,” said Demair. “Maybe you can make us understand. If not, don’t worry about it. This is supposed to be a holiday for you, so Quelt’s said.”

“Maybe it’s strange to us,” Kuwilin said, “that people from a rich inner world with so much technology would come here willingly to spend time with…”

“Shepherds,” Nita said. “That would be the word you’re looking for.”

“Shepherds. So you have ceiff well?”

“Ours don’t fly,” Nita said. “And maybe it’s a good thing, bearing in mind what Earth sheep eat, and how much of it they eat, and what they do with it afterwards…”

Kuwilin roared with laughter. “Still,” he said, “your planet sounds like a wonder-place! Ceiff that don’t fly…ground you can just dig the metal out of…cities all over the place, as many of them as grains of sand!”

“We have a lot of cities,” Nita said, and shook her head. “But I think maybe this is better.” The sun dipped toward that high, distant horizon, went oblate in the

thickening atmosphere of the edge of the world—flattened almost to an egg shape—and started to slide down behind the rim of everything. Slowly, high above, stars were coming out.

There was a pause. “About the shesh,” Kit said, “can I watch you make it tomorrow?”

“Certainly,” Kuwilin said. “I can always use help. Certain people”—he looked at Quelt with amusement—”are always off all over the planet, serving the world and doing Important Things, and can’t be bothered to stay home and deal with the beasts.”

“Tapi, you’re cruel to me,” Quelt said. “You know I’d sooner stay home and do not-Important Things here. But I have to go see about the Great Vein again tomorrow.” She turned to Nita and Kit. “We have just two veins of metal in our whole world’s crust that are close enough to the surface for me to use wizardry on to pull the metal out directly. Every now and then we need metal in bulk for replacing old machines that have worn out, or building new ones…and I’m the only one here who can get it out in such amounts. All the other metal comes from the plants—”

Kit looked up in surprise. “You get metal from plants?”

“Oh, yes,” Demair said. “See the reeds up there?” She pointed at the slope far behind them, behind the house.

“The ones we came down through?”

“That’s right. That’s ironwood. The plants were bred a long time ago to concentrate metal oxides from the soil in their tissues. We harvest the reeds and store them until the mobile smelter comes along, once or twice a year. Then we get the metal’s value to trade for other things, if we need them.”

“That’s such a good idea,” Kit said. “Who organizes this? The government?”

Kuwilin and Demair and Quelt all looked at Kit. “What’s a government?” Kuwilin said.

Kit opened his mouth, closed it again.

“If people over on, let’s say, Dafel Island, find that they need metal, they get together and do something about it,” Kuwilin said. “They make arrangements to trade for it; or they find empty islands and plant out ironweed for themselves; or they get in touch with Quelt here, and she helps them. Or they ask other people for it, and other people give it to them. Everybody knows that what you give to the world, the world gives back, eventually. That’s its job.”

Demair looked at Kit with slight puzzlement. “Do you mean you have some kind of machine that makes people give people things?” Demair said.

Nita had never thought of government in quite those terms before. “You could say that,” she said. “It’s still going to take a lot of explaining…”

“Not right now,” said Demair, putting her arms out to turn them all around as a group. “There’s the rest of dinner, yet.”

Kit groaned slightly. Nita gave him a look. Just keep quiet and feed Ponch under the table, she said silently. I told you you were going to be sorry for pigging out on the blue stuff!

They went back to the house in the glowing, golden twilight, and Demair moved about lighting little oil lamps in the various rooms and on the dinner table. The rest of dinner was much like the first part, except that the courses that Kuwilin

now brought out were sweeter, sharper, the flavors more acute. Nita wondered whether this had something to do with a walk on the beach helping her appetite get its second wind…or whether she was just getting even more relaxed.

“Don’t rush yourself,” Demair said, leaning toward her. “Everything here will keep. There’s time for everything, and you’ll be here for a while.”

“And tomorrow afternoon,” Quelt said, “when I get back from metal wrestling, you tell me what you want to do. We can go to the Cities, if you like. Or we can do tourist things.” She grinned.

“If you go to the Cities,” Demair said, “I have a list for you.”

Kit grinned and fed Ponch something under the table. “Not that I’m going to have time for your list if I’m with famous people,” Quelt said.

Nita looked up from considering one last piece of shesh. “What?”

Quelt laughed. “Of course you’re famous,” she said. “On a world with just one wizard, if another one turns up all of a sudden—or two—do you think people aren’t going to be fascinated? Your pictures are all over the talknets. Everyone thinks you’re very elegant. In fact”—and Quelt preened her ponytail—”normally they all take me for granted, but now I’m in danger of becoming famous myself.”

Kit and Nita burst out laughing. “It’s because you’re so small,” Quelt said. “Once we weren’t as tall as we are now. But in the days of the Ancients, everybody was more your size. Little.”

“I don’t mind being famous,” Nita said, “but what I really, really want to do is lie in the sand, by the water, and do nothing.”

Quelt grinned that grin at her and Kit again. To Nita, it seemed to threaten to go right around her face, suggesting that if Quelt did it any harder, the top of her head might fall off. “I like that, too,” she said. “It’s the only thing I like as much as wizard work.”

Then suddenly Quelt jumped up. “I forgot!” she said. “Pabi, it’ll be time for the keks pretty soon—”

“Yes,” Demair said. “You two might like to see that. Our beaches are famous for them.”

“Keks?” Kit said.

“Come on,” Quelt said. “Afterward, I’ll show you where we have couches put down for you, in the outbuilding—you can put your pup tents up there. But right now, hurry or we’ll miss them—”

Nita and Kit got up to follow her out. Ponch loitered briefly by the table, accepted a couple of final tidbits from Demair and Kuwilin, and then ran after.

Nita and Kit and Quelt started down the beach again together, but this time in the opposite direction from the way they’d gone before. Almost all the sunset glow was gone; stars were thick overhead, and they were bright—the broad band of the back side of the Milky Way was glowing almost as bright as a diffuse full moon in that night unbroken by any streetlight or other artificial light source. Ponch tore past the three of them, racing down the beach, running ahead and romping in and out of the water, a black shape shining in the bright starlight. “I should warn you,” Kit said to Quelt, “he’s going to do that the whole time we’re here. He likes the water.”

Quelt smiled. “So do we,” she said. “It’s no problem.” She looked up to their right, where the rise that ran behind the Peliaen house was more of a dune, bare of

the ironwood reeds. “We have to go up there, out of the way,” she said. “Can you see all right?”

“Sure,” Kit said.

“Then come on—”

They climbed the dune. Once at the top, Quelt sat down, facing the water, and Nita and Kit sat down on either side of her, looking out at the starlit sea.

For long minutes, none of them said anything. Nita found herself willing to sit there all night, for no reason at all, just looking at the starlight on that softly moving water. There was no crash of surf here, hardly any noise but the whisper of the little waves sliding in and out, the whisper of the wind, and the starlight glitter. This is what I came for, she thought. All of the craziness to get here would have been worth just this. But we get another two whole weeks of it.

“Here they come,” Quelt said softly. “The keks.”

Nita strained her eyes, looking out at the water. Then she saw a motion near the shore: not water, but something else.

Silent, hardly daring to breathe, Nita and Kit watched them come. First one or two, then five, ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand: a host of tiny creatures, blue green and shining, came flooding up out of the water onto the beach. They had a lot of legs, like crabs, but no pincers. They had eyes like crabs, though; and the general look of them as they scuttled around was very crablike, though Nita couldn’t remember ever having seen any crab look quite so busy.

Soon the wet gleam of the sand under the starlight was obscured by them, black with them. All up and down the length of that beach, from right in front of them to (it seemed) the edge of the world, the crabs started to dig, throwing the peach-colored sand up behind them in little showers. The whole beach became obscured by the haze created by sand in the air, sand kicked up by millions of little legs.

“What are they doing?” Nita whispered.

“Watch,” said Quelt.

They watched, while some of the tiny satellites that were all Alaalu had by way of moons went sliding by overhead, casting shifting shadows over the shapes on the beach. And slowly, slowly, the beach above the waterline began to be obscured by something that was not flat.

The keks were building.

“What are they making?” Kit said, very quietly, as if he was afraid he might frighten them.

“We don’t know,” Quelt said. “No one knows. They build these things in the sand…then they go back into the water by midnight. And the next night, they come and do it again. They’ve always done it, as far as I know. Since our people began to notice things…”

They sat there and watched for maybe another half an hour. There, in the darkness, the crabs sculpted the sand. Shapes reared up—mostly little cones with holes opening out of them. They would collapse, get built again, collapse once more. And, finally, the keks got tired of it, and slowly, one by one, they started going into the sea again.

In the darkness, Kit said, “That was so neat…” And he let out a tremendous

yawn.

Quelt laughed under her breath. “Come on, cousins,” she said. “It’s late for all of us. No need to get up early tomorrow.”

They got up and walked back to the house along the rise, looking down at the strange shapes built on the sand, watching as the sea began to creep up and wash them slowly away. Before too long they were back at the Peliaens’ house, where here and there in an open window, a little lamp showed like a star.

“There’s your building,” Quelt said, leading them to it. It was thatched with ironwood, like the other buildings, and had several open windows that let the warm night breeze in. Screens partitioned it in half. “You have a gender-separability thing at your age, don’t you?” Quelt said. “I thought so. Is this all right?”

Kit yawned. “This is fine,” Nita said, and started to laugh at Kit, until she yawned herself.

“There’s a big couch on each side,” Quelt said. “Some coverings and cushions if you need them.” And then she bent down to each of them and took them gently by the shoulders. “I’m so glad you came!” Quelt said. “This is going to be fun.”

Nita reached up, did the same for Quelt. “You have a good night,” she said.

Quelt smiled, slipped out of the building like a shadow. Kit, standing there and looking out the window, smiled, too.

“The coolness of this situation,” he said, “cannot possibly be overstated.” And he yawned.

Nita glanced at him and laughed. “I wouldn’t have put it quite that way,” she said, “but, yeah, you’re right there. These people are really, really nice…and this is going to be a terrific holiday. Now go to bed!”

On either side of the screen, they went to sleep under strange stars—and, for the first time, did it not on errantry, where anything might happen, but in safety, and at leisure. Nothing seemed strange about the stars, here, and that odd, high horizon somehow made the sky seem smaller, a cozier and more protected place. Nita fell asleep with the sound of the sea whispering in her ears. And later on, there were other whispers entirely, but all friendly ones. This is so great, she thought once in the middle of the night as she turned over and saw, not her own dark bedroom wall, with the occasional late-night car headlight flickering across it through the Venetian blinds, but the nearby low, wide window opening onto the sea, and through it, stars falling like rain, so many of them that she was somehow surprised not to hear them pattering on the roof. So great. I love being a wizard…

And she fell asleep again, while all around her, cheerful, unperturbed, like the wind, the whispers went on.

“Everything’s fine…”

****

Local Excursions

A VOICE WAS SHOUTING SOMETHING indistinct through a roar of fire. After a while, she could just make it out:

“Dairiiiiiiine!”

She held very still, hoping they would just stop shouting her name and go away. But the roaring just got louder, an indistinct, crackling, rushing sound—

“Dairiiiiiiine.” The voice came from downstairs. “Where arrrrrrrre they?”

Dairine rolled over in her bed and clutched the pillow over her head. Then she jumped, a half-awake version of the falling-out-of-bed awakening. There was a tree next to her bed, rustling in no wind whatever.

“Uh, hi,” she said. “Uh, Filif. Yeah. Was there something you needed?”

“You were making a noise,” Filif said.

“Snoring,” Dairine said. “That’s called snoring.” Usually, when Nita accused her of it, she tried to find a way around the accusation, but she and Filif were both using the Speech, so there was no point in trying.

“Also,” Filif said, “there is someone who wants you.”

Dairine sat up in the bed, rubbing her eyes and trying to become more conscious. Her body was resisting her: She felt wrecked. If I feel like this at home, she thought, what would I have felt like if I’d gone away? Maybe this whole excursus thing wasn’t such a great idea…

“Dairiiiiiiine!”

“Coming!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

“You’re loud today,” Filif said, sounding amused.

“Yeah, well, I’m about to get louder,” Dairine said, getting out of bed and scouting around her room to find a pair of jeans to get into. Then she realized that Filif was standing on them. “Fil,” she said, “could I get you to move sideways a little? Thanks.”

Filif backed away, looking around her room. “This is interesting,” he said.

“How?” Dairine went to her chest of drawers and rummaged in it for another oversize T-shirt.

“It’s so…enclosed.”

“You’ve got to show me your home,” Dairine said, “when we have a moment. But I have a feeling that’s not going to be for a while…”

She went into the bathroom, took care of some things, changed, and then headed downstairs. In the dining room, Carmela was sitting at the table, looking in astonishment at Sker’ret. The Rirhait was mostly coiled up on a chair himself, but had draped the front half of his body over the back of it, and, in turn, was staring at Carmela with most of his eyes. Both he and Carmela glanced up at Dairine as she came in.

“Decide to sleep in this morning?” Carmela said.

Dairine glanced at her watch. It was 9:30. “I don’t know if I would describe this as ‘sleeping in,’” she said. “Or maybe it would’ve been, if some people hadn’t been shrieking my name at the top of their lungs.”

“Oh, come on,” Carmela said. “How can you sleep when you’ve got all these wonderful people in your house?” She leaned across the table toward Sker’ret and grabbed one of his clawed forelegs, wiggling it back and forth. Sker’ret chuckled, a

raspy, ratchety little sound. “I mean, look at this guy!”

Dairine stared at Carmela. “I thought you hated bugs!”

“Bug bugs, yeah,” Carmela said. “But Sker’ret’s not a bug! I mean, look at the size of him! Nobody’s going to have to worry about him going down their back or getting in their shoes!”

One of Sker’ret’s eyes came around to waver almost in front of Carmela’s nose. She grabbed the stalk just behind the eye and wiggled it, too, playfully. “And look at all these eyes he’s got! He’s just terrific!”

“Thank you!” Sker’ret said. “You’re an amiable being, and I like you, too.”

As she rummaged in the kitchen cupboard for tea, Dairine had to smile: The attitude was so like him generally. It’s a shame he can’t stay around a while after this is over, she thought.

“ ‘Amiable,’” Carmela said. “See that? He’s cultured. What a nice vocabulary you have!” she said to Sker’ret.

“You’re really going to spoil these guys,” Dairine said, filling the kettle and putting it on to boil. “Sker’ret, don’t use hard words on her. She’s still in the kindergarten level in the Speech.”

“I don’t think she’s doing so badly,” Sker’ret said. “It’s not like we’re going to start talking technical things out of the blue.”

The sound of rustling in the doorway brought Carmela’s head around. “And what have we here?” she said. “Why, you’re just a little shrub! Aren’t you cute!” She stood up and went over for a closer look at him.

“You’re not bad-looking for a biped yourself,” Filif said.

Dairine gave him a look from the kitchen. “You flirt!” she said.

“It’s true,” Filif said. It was impossible to say how one perceived that a tree was winking at you, but Dairine perceived it. Maybe it’s the berries, she thought.

What made Dairine have to control herself very carefully for the next couple of minutes was Carmela’s response…because she perceived the winking, too. “You tease,” she said, and ran an affectionate hand through Filif’s needles. “Dairine, is it possible to become an item with a tree?”

“Uh,” Dairine said. Many, many possible responses went through her head. “There might be a splinter problem,” she said at last.

Carmela burst out laughing. “We’ll see. I’m just trying to resist the urge to take this kid home and decorate him. You and I,” she said to Filif, “we’re going to spend lots of time talking, because I want to know all about you.”

“That would be good,” Filif said. “I want to know about you, too.”

“I thought you said that people here didn’t know about wizards,” Sker’ret said to Dairine.

The teakettle boiled and started whistling: Dairine got it off the stove and poured boiling water on the tea bag in her mug. “Mostly they don’t,” she said. “Carmela’s an exception to the rule. Most rules,” she added, smirking slightly.

“I heard that, and I’m taking it as a compliment!” Carmela said.

Dairine heard footsteps on the basement stairs, and winced. The sound was too light to be her father’s tread, and he was probably at the shop already, anyway. Let’s give Roshaun another chance, she thought. Maybe I just got off on the wrong foot with him yesterday.

Roshaun came into the kitchen, and at first sight of him, all of Dairine’s good intentions evaporated. He was even more splendidly dressed than he had been the day before. Today the long overjacket that he favored was in blue, and it was richly, even thickly, embroidered with jewels, in all shades of blue and green, some of them the size of marbles or quail’s eggs. Gauntlets, tunic, boots, all were in metallic blues and greens, and the fillet binding his brows was of some blue metal. The fillet was the only part of the costume that really interested Dairine. But no way am I going to show it!

“Good morning,” Dairine said to Roshaun.

Roshaun merely nodded at her and swept through the kitchen into the sunny dining room. It’s hopeless, Dairine thought. I think all my feet with this guy are going to be the wrong feet. I wonder if the Powers would let me send him back and get another wizard?

Roshaun paused in the doorway, gazing in at his fellow wizards, and at Carmela. It was a second or so before Carmela turned, most casually, and looked Roshaun up and down.

“A little early for such a big fashion statement,” she said, “but maybe some of us need to start early. And you would be?”

Roshaun straightened up even straighter and taller than he had been standing, if that was possible, and gazed at Carmela.

“That’s Roshaun,” Dairine said, doing her best to keep any kind of smile from showing.

“… ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Wellakhit,” Roshaun began, and this time went on reciting names for at least twice as long as he originally had with Dairine.

Carmela stood there watching Roshaun go through this performance with the vaguely impatient expression of someone who’s arrived at the movies on time and then has to sit through ten minutes of commercials and previews. Finally, Roshaun trailed off and stood gazing imperiously at Carmela, waiting for her response.

“He means he’s a prince,” Dairine said, not entirely kindly. I’m sorry, Powers That Be. I haven’t had my breakfast yet; it’s that pesky blood sugar again…

Carmela regarded Roshaun in the most leisurely manner possible.

“No methane,” she said at last. “Two legs.” She gave these a last noncommittal glance, which suggested that perhaps he’d put them on backward that morning, but she wasn’t going to embarrass him by mentioning it. “Well, one out of four’s not bad,” Carmela said at last. “Let’s go for two. You wouldn’t have a battle fleet on you, would you?”

Peering out through the kitchen doorway while pretending to do something concerning toast, Dairine saw that even Roshaun was having trouble looking haughty and completely confused at the same time. “We have not yet been formally introduced, in that I…” Roshaun finally said, trying hard to sound chilly about it.

Dairine opened her mouth, but had no chance to say anything, for Carmela was once again looking Roshaun up and down, this time with the expression of someone who’s been asked a personal question by someone who should have been asking her “Paper or plastic?” “Formally introduced? I’ll let you know if and when I think we need to be,” Carmela said. She turned her back on Roshaun with a grim

look and the merest twitch of a wink at Dairine. “Meanwhile,” she said to Dairine, “I need to use the bathroom. But make a note for me: When you next hear from my brother, tell him he and I are going to have a talk, because I see that he was pulling my leg, and I’m already planning numerous ways to make him pay.” She leaned over and whispered in Dairine’s ear—the “whisper” being something that could have been heard at twenty paces— “And whatever you do, get me a date with that bush!”

Carmela then walked away toward the back of the house with a demeanor of complete unconcern, leaving Filif and Sker’ret sitting there exuding the pleasure of having met a wonderful being, while Dairine and Roshaun stared after her, both briefly mute with astonishment.

The moment didn’t last long for Roshaun. “Her brother was pulling her leg?” Roshaun said to Dairine. “Does this have some cultural significance?”

“I think it’s gonna be significant for him when he gets back,” Dairine said, making a mental note to be there when that happened.

“Who is she?” Roshaun said.

“She’s Carmela. Our neighbor,” Dairine said. “One of those lesser life-forms you don’t want anything to do with.”

There was a silence that lasted for several seconds, a noticeable period when dealing with Roshaun. “She’s magnificent,” he said at last.

Dairine burst out laughing. “Oh, boy,” she said, when she got enough breath back to speak, “does her brother ever need to hear that you said that!” If he does ever hear about it, she thought. How do I make best use of a piece of information like this? The alien prince has the hots for Kit’s sister. This is too funny—

“What did she mean,” Filif said, “she wanted to decorate me?”

Oh, lord, Dairine thought, as the humor of the moment abruptly evaporated. “Some of us have a tradition here,” she said. “We bring trees into our houses”—she was not going to tell him that most of those trees had been severed from their roots—”and we put decorations on them. Pretty things…glass balls…lights…”

There was a surprisingly long silence from Filif, at the end of which he said, “I want to see!!”

“I’ll find you a picture,” Dairine said. “It’s a pity you weren’t here at Christmas.” Then she wished she could take the line back. To see thousands of slowly dying trees standing around in vacant lots waiting to be bought by my people and put on display until their needles drop off?! Do not put so much emphasis on this that he wants to come back someday and see this for himself!

“But if we, uh, if we go to the mall today,” Dairine said, desperately trying to cover by manufacturing a plan for his and everybody else’s distraction from the dangerous subject, “we can decorate you with other stuff.”

Carmela reappeared in the dining room as if by magic. “Did someone mention the mall?” she said.

“Let’s go!” Filif said. “I want to see the decorations!”

“You all need to put on your disguises first,” Dairine said, “because there will be no end of trouble if you go out the way you are. And I want to see the disguises before we go anywhere.”

“I’m sure I won’t need anything to pass unremarked in this culture,” Roshaun said.

Carmela started to laugh. “Oh, you are so funny!” she said, and the dry way that she said it brought Roshaun up short. “No, of course you don’t need to do anything! You look just like everyone around here! Oh, my.” She turned away, ostentatiously half covering her face with one hand and throwing a look at Dairine that Roshaun could not possibly have missed.

He didn’t miss it. “Perhaps the lady would show me the correct manner of a disguise for this world,” Roshaun said, all haughtiness again, “since we have seen so few examples of this world’s dress…”

“Dairine,” Carmela said, “can we use the TV for a moment? I’ll show him a few things and lay a groundwork.”

“Be my guest,” Dairine said, drinking some tea. “If you think it’ll do any good…”

She went in with her mug of tea and sat down at the table with Sker’ret and Filif as Carmela and Roshaun headed into the living room. “So how are you guys this morning?” Dairine said to them.

“Everything’s well,” Sker’ret said. “Though I’m getting hungry again…”

“We’ll find you something,” Dairine said.

“And how about you?” Filif said. “Are you well?”

From the living room, Dairine heard Carmela’s muted chuckle. A moment later, Roshaun said, “Under no circumstances will I be seen in anything like that—”

Dairine grinned. “Getting better every minute,” she said, and drank her tea.

The mall was still fairly quiet when they got there later that morning. It was Sunday morning, and a lot of the most serious shoppers wouldn’t be in for some hours yet. There were, however, going to be a lot of kids there who were also on spring break, getting an early start on their malling. It was meeting these that Dairine was secretly most dreading, but she refused to show any sign of her concern to her fellow wizards.

She had been nervous enough, earlier, over the prospect of simply getting them all out of the driveway. But in retrospect, that had worked well enough. Everyone’s disguises looked good, and stayed in place, repaying the hour or two of work that Dairine and Carmela had spent on their charges before letting them out.

Filif had needed the most coaching. His disguise was no shape-change, but a visual illusion keyed to a wizardry he built, with some assistance from Dairine, to mimic human limb action, facial affect, and clothing. The illusion would not withstand close examination, such as being touched, but Dairine had no plans to let anyone near enough to touch him, and told him so.

“Your people must be very easily shocked,” Filif said, in a pitying tone of voice. It sounded funny coming from the big, stocky, dark-haired guy that he had become, partly with Carmela’s coaching.

“They are,” Dairine said, “and sometimes so am I. I certainly will be if your disguise falls off in the middle of the street because somebody bumps up against you. So keep your distance from people, and we’ll all be fine.”

“What about me?” Sker’ret said. “Do I look all right?”

“You look excellent,” Dairine said, sizing him up. Carmela had talked him

more or less into the shape of a slim, redheaded surfer guy. “In fact, I’m not sure you need any advice from me. You may want to go talk to Carmela about that sweatshirt, though.” The sweatshirt was illusionary and looked perfectly orthodox, except for the words “Will Do Magic for Food,” which he had added to the front of the illusion, in the Speech.

And then there had been Roshaun. Carmela had worked him over most effectively, and without completely losing her temper—a feat Dairine had to admire. Roshaun was “wearing,” over some of his real clothes, a long, floppy shirt and large trousers. “You’ve got the height to carry them,” Carmela had said, just a little admiring. “Not many people do.” And Roshaun had fallen for the line. Carmela had also made him reduce his epic ponytail to a more manageable length, at least in illusion. The two long front locks in front of his ears had given Carmela the most trouble; Roshaun adamantly refused to put them behind his ears, where they would show less. “They’re supposed to show!” he said.

“What they’re going to show here,” Carmela said “is that you look too different. All you need is for some wise guy to come along and pull one of those—”

Roshaun looked at her, indignant. “Who would dare?!”

“I would,” Carmela said, suiting the gesture to the concept. Roshaun winced. “And if it’s something I’d do, it’s something that will probably occur to other people. This is not your palace you’re going into, Your Royal Highness. This is a mall. You are entering a world where anything can happen—mostly having to do with people getting real judgmental about your looks.” She raised her eyebrows. “Fortunately,” she said, “your looks are okay. But if I were you, I wouldn’t push your luck with the hair.”

“As you say,” Roshaun had muttered, but he agreed with ill grace, if any at all. At the time, Carmela had thrown Dairine a look that said, This boy is going to take some kicking into shape. Dairine had kept her face very straight. But Carmela had caught her answering flicker of eyes, and knew that Dairine was in complete agreement.

With everyone’s disguises well in place, they had set out for the mall. Originally, Dairine’s plan had been to do a private-gating transit there, a variant of Kit’s and Nita’s “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell. She had long had several sets of prelocated coordinates laid in for each of the major malls nearby. But Dairine was astounded to come up against serious resistance to this concept from all her guests—even Roshaun, who she would’ve thought would resist so plebeian an option as walking on general principles.

“One cannot truly experience a place by doing fast transits to and from locations,” Roshaun said, looking down his nose at Dairine. “Having come all this way, I may as well see what this world looks like from the ground up.”

“He’s right,” Sker’ret said. “I see enough gates as it is. Walking has got to be lots more fun.”

Dairine had sighed. “Just so you know that it’s not soft ground we’re going to be walking along,” she said, looking at Filif. “You can’t walk through it. It’s all concrete—”

“I can deal with that,” Filif said. “I haven’t had to walk through any of your floors here; I can manage.”

And as a result, they all walked down Dairine’s street toward Nassau Road, maybe half a mile away, and the bus stop there. It was beautiful, bright, sunny weather—unusually warm for that time of spring—and people were out washing their cars, mowing their lawns…doing all the things that would make it easier for them to see that there were aliens walking down their street. Dairine found herself praying for rain, gloom, a sudden hailstorm or blizzard—anything that would drive people in out of their front yards and reduce the chances of them seeing some part of her charges’ disguises slip.

To her eyes, they were a motley group…but then Dairine was looking for errors. People who lived on the street and chanced to be looking out their windows probably only saw five kids in a ragged group wandering down the sidewalk together. In particular, Dairine was admiring Sker’ret’s command of the human gait, which he seemed to have no trouble handling. Probably, Dairine thought, it’s all of those legs. If you can manage about forty of them, you shouldn’t have that much trouble with two.

Neither thunder nor rain nor gloom of night answered Dairine’s prayer; but somehow, striding, gliding, or just approximating walking the best they could, everybody made it down to Nassau Road in one piece, and without causing peculiar looks from anybody—even the Nassau County police cruiser that went past them at one point. Dairine had sweated as the cops had gone by; she felt as if she had INSTIGATOR OF ALIEN MALL-CRAWLING FIASCO stenciled across her forehead. But the cops barely glanced at them, having better things to do with their time. Nonetheless, Dairine heaved a sigh of relief when they were gone.

On Nassau Road, they had stood for a while at the corner, waiting for the bus. One going to Roosevelt Field, one of the oldest shopping malls in the area, was scheduled to come by every half hour. “It used to be kind of a dump,” Carmela said, “but they fixed it up—it’s better now.”

“And what does one do in a mall?” Roshaun said.

“Walk around,” Dairine said. “Look at things.”

“What kind of things?” Filif said.

“Decorations,” Dairine said. “Like the kind we were talking about before. Not the seasonal stuff—but the kind of decorations you see in Roshaun’s and Sker’ret’s disguises, the kind that humans wear all the time. Personal ornamentation.”

“Clothes,” Carmela said with relish. “And there are all kinds of other places to buy things. Electronics and appliances, and there’s a food court—”

Sker’ret looked up, instantly fascinated. He was getting the hang of showing his emotions in the human expression. Probably from watching us, Dairine thought. He’s a quick study. At the rate he’s going, we could pass him off as human in a few days…

“What kind of food?” said Sker’ret.

Some kinds that we should keep Filif away from, Dairine thought, suddenly remembering the restaurant in the food court that had a huge salad bar. Fortunately, it was at about that point that Carmela began describing one of her favorite places up there—the ice cream stand. The others, even Roshaun, were enthralled by this.

“You freeze food, and then you eat it?” Roshaun said. “Don’t you break your teeth?”

“Not if you’re careful,” Carmela said. She went on talking about ice cream for some minutes, until the bus came. Dairine was fascinated by how much attention Roshaun was paying Carmela. He’s not all that interested in ice cream, Dairine thought. Kit is just about going to bust a gut when he hears about this. I can’t wait for him to call—in fact, if I have a chance, I should message him myself from the mall.

The bus pulled up, and Sker’ret and Filif regarded it with wonder. Roshaun eyed it with some suspicion. “There are other people in this vehicle,” he said.

“Of course there are,” Dairine said behind him. “Wizards are supposed to support public transport. It’s ecologically sound. Besides, you were the one who wanted to use ground transport and see your local environment. Well, here’s the environment for you. So get in, put the money I gave you in the box, and sit down!”

Roshaun did as he was told, though not without throwing a glance at Dairine that suggested he would discuss this impertinence with her later. She snorted and sat down herself.

The ride took about twenty minutes, which ranked among the twenty longest minutes of Dairine’s life. She had cautioned her colleagues not to speak in the bus more than they had to. Because they were using the Speech, the other bus riders would hear them exactly as if they were speaking in their own languages—and some of the ethnicities in the area might find that a little strange, in terms of the way the strangers looked. Especially, Dairine thought, considering the kinds of things these guys are likely to he saying if they get started.

But, by and large, the visitors behaved themselves pretty well, at least in terms of not talking. Nothing Dairine could do or say would keep them from plastering their noses up against the window of the bus—at least in Filif’s and Sker’ret’s cases; Roshaun would not have done anything so declasse, and sat there looking scornfully unfocused. But even he would steal the occasional glance of wonder out the windows, and the others gawked at everything they saw, exclaiming softly to themselves sometimes when they just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Everything was amazing to them. Storefronts, parked cars, parking meters, traffic lights, real estate signs in front of houses, trees and flowers, garbage in the street…and advertising. Especially advertising. Dairine spent nearly half the bus ride, from the point where they left her town to the point where they entered Hempstead town and drove through it toward the shopping center, explaining what “milk” was and why it was important that you should “got” some.

Yet at the same time, the bus ride made Dairine nostalgic for the first time she had gone off-planet, when everything had been new and strange. As they piled off the bus in the parking lot of the shopping center, Dairine remembered her first alien parking lot, and how she had nearly been killed by any number of alien vehicles before she got her bearings. And how I talked to somebody’s luggage for the better part of five minutes, she thought, before I realized what I was doing. It seemed like a long time ago now. She had almost forgotten what it was like. But she was quickly being reminded; and the other wizards’ attitude toward the strangeness of her world was beginning to affect her. She found herself looking at shopping-cart pens and sliding doors and the displays in the outer shop windows of the shopping center as if she had never seen such things before. It was refreshing.

They went into the mall, and in a matter of seconds, Dairine was being bombarded with questions. “What’s that for?” “Why is that colored that way?” “You mean people actually ride on those?” “They should fall off, shouldn’t they?” “Isn’t that beautiful!” “Why is all this water in here?” “What’s that smell?” “Are those ‘decorations’?”

That was the question that got asked most frequently. Filif was fixated on the concept. “Those decorations,” Filif said, “those look especially nice…” He moved over to the window in question and peered in.

Dairine came up behind him, not wanting to touch him—that always ran the risk of breaking the visual illusion—but she leaned over him and whispered, “I don’t think these are for you.”

“Why not?”

“Well…” Dairine looked up at the sign over the store’s door. “Can you read that?”

Filif turned his human face up toward the sign, dutifully. Though he seemed to be looking at it with human eyes, somehow Dairine could still perceive the alert attention of a whole array of berries trained on the letters. “Victoria’s—did I pronounce that right? Secret.”

“That’s right,” Dairine said.

“Who’s Victoria?” said Filif. “And what’s its secret?”

“I’ve never been clear about that myself,” Dairine said. “But if you start wearing those, people are going to talk. Come on.” She turned away, having a great deal of difficulty dealing with the image of a Christmas tree in a garter belt.

Filif moved away carefully, but not without a backward look at the bright colors of the lingerie in the window. Then Dairine saw Sker’ret hurrying ahead of them, and she began to fear the worst. “Sker’ret?” she said. “Wait up!”

She went after him as quickly as she could, with a glance at Carmela to suggest that she should keep an eye on the others. But Carmela already had her hands full. She and Roshaun had paused by a window display of clothes and were apparently discussing them. Sker’ret had moved a little farther away and was closely examining a freestanding gift stall stacked high with balloons, cards, gift plaques, and bright-colored candies. Oh no, Dairine thought. What is it with the colors? These guys are like five-year-olds.

The sound of laughter came to Dairine from down the mall. A group of five older kids—high school juniors, Dairine guessed—came wandering along toward them, much more interested in the shoppers of their own age than in the merchandise. “Hey, sweet things!” one of them called to Carmela. “Who’s your skinny friend?”

Carmela didn’t respond. “Hey, elf boy!” shouted another of the guys. “Nice hair!” This was followed by a chorus of snickering and laughter.

Dairine saw Roshaun draw himself up to his full height and turned to favor the oncoming group with an expression of truly withering scorn. “‘Elf boy’?” he said softly. “What kind of disrespectful, speciesist—” One of his hands moved in a gesture that Dairine recognized as the preliminary to producing some predesigned wizardry. She gulped and hurried toward him.

But Carmela merely glanced over her shoulder at the approaching group. “Ah,

ah, ah,” she said under her breath, and reached out sideways to take Roshaun’s hand in hers. Roshaun’s eyes went wide, and he stopped absolutely still, as if he’d been frozen that way.

Dairine slowed down a little, caught between surprise and admiration. She may not be a wizard, she thought, but she’s got some moves. Just loudly enough to be heard, as the five passed close by, Carmela said to Roshaun, “Don’t mind them. They’re just wonder-struck by your profound majesty and glory and so forth. We don’t get a lot of princes around here, and when they see somebody like you and contrast your elevated station with their tiny antlike lives, it’s really hard for them to cope.”

Carmela said all this not in English, but in perfect Japanese, the language she’d been studying when she first started to pick up the Speech. As wizards, Dairine and Roshaun had no problem understanding her; they heard the language “through” the Speech and made sense of it that way. But the five guys were completely thrown off. They saw what seemed like a Japanese translator of some kind—who looked at them as coolly as if they were members of an alien species—who was apparently carefully translating what they’d said for someone who looked like a living anime star, someone whose expression was better suited to the last half hour of a samurai movie than anything else…the part where things really break loose.

Dairine saw faint unease ripple through the guys as they found themselves facing something they didn’t understand. The guys passed close to Carmela and Roshaun, who watched them with expressions of clinical interest and complete disdain, and didn’t stop—just headed on down the mall. It took a few moments for them to get their composure back, and then one of them muttered something under his breath.

Roshaun looked at Carmela in curiosity as Dairine came over to them. “‘Duckhead’?” he said. “He called me a duckhead. A…duck? That’s some kind of flying creature, isn’t it?”

Carmela had let go of Roshaun’s hand and was gazing after the five nonplussed guys with barely concealed amusement. Now she glanced over at Dairine, not saying anything.

“Uh,” Dairine said. “Yeah, it is. They swim, too.”

Roshaun looked thoughtful. “I see. The idiom suggests that a humanoid can share the same attributes of flexibility…the ability to adapt to multiple environments. I like that. Evidently they saw they’d misjudged me, even if it took them a few moments.”

Dairine was ever so glad that what Roshaun had said had come out as a statement rather than a question, but then it didn’t seem to be Roshaun’s style to ask a lot of questions. Saved by a personal blind spot, Dairine thought with relief. Normally she hated being saved by anyone or anything, but at the moment, she was all too willing to make an exception.

Then Dairine remembered Sker’ret. She looked around in panic and saw him proceeding quickly up the mall ahead of them, looking in windows, while a shiny, silver, Mylar balloon bobbed and trailed along behind him. Hey, he’s got the hang of money already, she thought. Maybe this isn’t going all that badly.

Ahead of her, Carmela was now actually strolling along arm in arm with

Roshaun, pointing out things in the store windows to him. How does she do it? Dairine wondered. She’s got him eating out of her hand. Maybe I don’t want to know…She hurried off after Sker’ret.

He was going up one of the escalators at some speed. Dairine thought she knew why. The smell of fast food was coming from somewhere up ahead, and Sker’ret had targeted on that with the intensity of a heat-seeking missile looking for the tailpipe of a jet. “Sker’ret,” she called after him, “this is really no time for that. We can do this later! In fact we can all do it together!”

“Do what?” Sker’ret said.

“Eat,” Dairine said. “Again.”

Sker’ret was standing in the middle of the food court when Dairine caught up with him. His disguise was firmly in place, but Dairine could still dimly perceive, underneath the illusion, all his eyes writhing in every possible direction, looking around at all the goodies. Sker’ret turned slowly in a circle, looking at the kosher hot dog place, the McDonald’s, the Chinese fast food place, the burrito joint “This is wonderful!” he said. “Every planet should have places like this!”

“Oh, come on, Sker’ret,” Dairine said. “Rirhath B has places like this! Even the Crossings has some.”

“Not like this,” Sker’ret said, a little sadly. He stopped spinning, training all his available eyes on the kosher hot dog place. “Besides, I’m not allowed to go into the ones in the Crossings.”

For the moment, Dairine concealed her surprise. Sker’ret made his way back toward the escalator, stepping sadly onto the downward-running side and riding it back the way he’d come with an expression of deep sorrow. Dairine followed him, wondering what that had been about. Something else to ask him about later…

They rejoined the group and then set about systematically wandering through the entire mall, wing by wing, until everyone had seen everything. Even Roshaun was beginning to get a little tired as they got near the end of the “crawl”—a source of irrational pleasure for Dairine. Some of that otherwise indelible arrogance came off him; he looked like he just wanted to sit down for a while.

“Goodness,” Carmela said, as Roshaun sat down on the bench at the base of one of the escalators, “we have to do something about your stamina. If you’re going to become serious about mall crawling, you can’t poop out after an hour like that.”

“I have not ‘pooped out,’” Roshaun said. “But my feet do pain me somewhat. And keeping up the disguise takes a certain amount of energy. Perhaps a restorative?”

“Food!” Sker’ret said.

Dairine chuckled. “Carmela,” she said “could you take these guys upstairs and get them something? Ice cream, probably. Filif…” She looked over at him; he was gazing down the length of the mall with a yearning expression. “I’m going to be your personal shopper for a little while. You and I should go off and see about some of those decorations we were discussing.” That way, I don’t have to worry about you stumbling into the salad bar, which is probably going to look to you like the site of a mass murder.

Filif was delighted. “Yes!” he said. “Let’s go!”

“You have enough money on you, Carmela?” Dairine said. “I brought some

spare cash—”

“It’s okay,” Carmela said. “I’m fairly loaded today.” She turned to Roshaun and Sker’ret. “Come on, boys,” she said. They got up, and she shepherded them through the mall.

“Come on,” Dairine said to Filif. Together they headed down the center of the shopping mall, toward the place that Dairine had spotted Filif looking at with most interest earlier. Well, she thought, the second-most interest.

The store she had in mind was a chain sportswear shop specializing in bright colors—indeed, colors that were almost too bright for Dairine to look at. But she had noticed several times now that whenever Filif stopped to look in any window for long, it had been one where Day-Glo colors were splashed onto things with abandon. Now, as they headed down the mall together, Dairine became aware of some looks from other kids on spring break who were passing by on the other side of the mall, and looking curiously at Filif. “Hey, kid,” one of them shouted at him, “you walk like a dweeb!”

There was a gust of laughter from the other kids. Dairine ostentatiously ignored them, but she stole a glance at Filif and saw that this was slightly true: His mimicked “gait” was already somewhat less polished than it had been when they left home. He, too, was getting tired. “Hey,” Dairine said, “never mind this. We’ll get you out of here and come back another time. But right now maybe we should get you back home, where you can get that off—”

“Oh, no,” Filif said. “Not until we see the decorations!”

She smiled at him. He was so intense about it. “Okay,” Dairine said. “Just hang on.”

They went into the sportswear store, a tremendous place full of sneakers and workout clothes and shorts and bathing suits—all in the year’s popular colors, any one of which, Dairine thought, should burn her retinas. “Look at the mannequins,” Dairine said. “See those models of people, up on top of the racks and in the windows? Those give you an idea how we wear these things. And over there”—she pointed—”are places to try things on, if you see something you like…We can always do that another time, though. There are hats, and Tshirts, and shorts…all kinds of things.”

Filif nodded. “I see,” he said.

“Okay,” Dairine said. “Look around a little, and see what you think of things. We’ll go in a little while and catch up with the others.”

Filif made his way off among the racks, delighted. Dairine watched him begin unhooking shirts and shorts from the racks, holding them up to the light, admiring the colors. For all I know, Dairine thought, maybe there’s not a lot of bright color in his world. And his people seem to go about their lives just walking around in the dirt…She turned, looked at a T-shirt, and then turned her attention back to the mall outside, listening carefully. There were no sounds of screaming, or of people running. The disguises must still be holding all right upstairs. I just hope Carmela yells for me if Sker’ret gets out of hand, she thought. That boy’s appetite…

She walked idly between the racks of Tshirts, then started looking at some bathing suits. In the background, over the insipid chain-store Muzak, she could hear one of the staff saying to somebody in the changing room, “Sir, can I give you

a hand with that? No? All right. You, sir, how are you doing in there? You need that in a twelve? Fine…”

Dairine sighed and turned her attention back to the Tshirts. I can’t believe how garish the colors are this year, she thought. I can’t wait for it to be next year, when the style changes and things might calm down a little bit.

She yawned again. “Sir?” said the cheerful voice in the background. “How are you in there? Those sizes all right? Fine. Hello? Sir—”

Dairine stretched, pulled a bathing suit off the rack, looked in astonishment at the garish print. Not on your life, she thought, and put it back, blinking. Her eyes still felt grainy; she hadn’t had a lot of sleep the previous night. The thought of going upstairs and having an ice cream herself, a big one, was looking increasingly attractive. “Sir?” said the voice in the background. “Would you like some—”

And then she heard the shriek.

Dairine suddenly realized what she had been hearing, or rather, not hearing. She hurried toward the changing room, flung the outer curtain open. Past it she saw one of the staff standing half in and half out of one of the changing rooms, the curtain held in his hand, frozen. And one after another, other people’s heads popped out of the other changing rooms, staring at the sales guy.

Oh no, Dairine thought. Spot!

She put out her hand, and an instant later Spot was in it. Dairine flipped his lid open as she came up behind the staff guy, pushing the curtain aside. The poor man was staring at something he probably had not seen in a changing room before—a Christmas tree wearing Day-Glo orange Jams and several baseball caps, all brightly colored. The top one was on backwards.

“I like the root covers,” Filif said thoughtfully, “but I’m not sure about the hat.”

There were about twelve things that Dairine was not sure of at that moment, almost all of them being why she had let Filif out of her sight. Blood sugar! But there was no time for that now; there was movement in the other cubicles—You know which spell I need, she said silently to Spot. His screen cleared and came up with the general-purpose invisibility spell—a quick one that Dairine had used on herself often enough and had had some practice in throwing over other things in a hurry. Silently she read the words, felt the air in front of her twist itself out of shape and into another refractive configuration entirely, under the influence of the Speech. A moment later, both she and the sales guy, and the three heads peering in from behind them, were all staring at what appeared to be empty space.

“Are you okay?” Dairine said to the sales guy.

He looked at her as if she’d come out of nowhere. “I, uh…,” he said. “I, uh, I think maybe I had a little too much of something or other last night…” He stared once again at the mirror in the “empty” cubicle, and then turned and let the curtain fall. The other customers went away, and after that the shop guy wandered back out onto the sales floor, shaking his head.

Dairine rolled her eyes, relieved. Silently, she said to Filif, I wish you’d asked me for help!

I didn’t need any help, Filif said. I’m doing fine!

She said, You have no idea. I’m leaving that invisibility over you for now.

You need to put that stuff down and come out with me. We’ll come back for this later, under more controlled circumstances. Let’s go!

She reached through the field of invisibility until she could feel a branch or three, and took hold of them, cautiously, being careful not to squish any of the berries. Trying as hard as she could to look casual about it, trying equally hard not to look as if she was leading something invisible away by the hand or branch, Dairine made her way out of the sportswear store and out into the center of the mall again. There she looked around, took a moment to recollect her wits, and said, You stay invisible for a few minutes, okay? I’ll be back for you. We’re going home. Don’t let anybody bump into you!

All right, Filif said. And then we can come back another time for the decorations?

Absolutely, Dairine said.

She went up to the food court. There sat Roshaun, Carmela, and Sker’ret, ingesting large ice-cream sundaes. They all looked up at her in surprise.

“Where’s Filif?” Carmela said.

“About to be taken home,” Dairine said. “The fast way. Meet me back there later, okay?”

“Sure,” Carmela said. Dairine turned and headed off again…but not before catching sight of Roshaun’s amused smirk.

I am going to get him for that, Dairine thought, heading back to where Filif waited. And as for the rest of this…I am never applying for anything again. Cultural exchange—!

She snorted at her own stupidity and went off to find an invisible tree.

****

Taking in the Sights “Dad?” Nita said.

“I can hear you fine, honey,” Nita’s dad said. “Whatever Tom did to the phone, you don’t have to shout. How are you?”

“I’m fine! Everything’s fine.”

Nita was sitting on the beach with her manual in her lap, while a hundred yards away Kit and Ponch were running along the pink sand, racing. Ponch was winning—this not even the new venue could change. The sun was up, and warm already; the wind was just strong enough to take the sun’s heat away, but not so strong as to chill; the waves slipped up and down the beach, whispering.

“What’s it like?” said her dad’s voice from the manual.

Nita laughed. “Like the Hamptons,” she said. “Except they don’t have money here.”

There was a pause at her dad’s end. “That takes a stretch of the imagination,” he said, sounding somewhat dry, for the resorts and wealthy residential communities of the Hamptons, out at the end of Long Island, were (in the Callahan household, at least) often described by the head of the household as a place where people had

“more money than sense.” “No money, huh? What do they use instead?”

“It’s a barter economy, but with exceptions. For things that are hard to get locally, they have other ways of dealing with getting stuff around. But when the dust settles, everybody here seems to have what they need. And that’s good, because the people here are really, really nice.”

“How’s the family you’re with?”

“They’re the best,” Nita said. “They remind me of us.”

Her dad chuckled. “No higher praise, I guess…A barter economy. Are they farmers, then?”

“No. Well, they have sheep,” Nita said, looking back toward the grassland. “If sheep fly…” From where she sat, she could see yet another of Kuwilin’s small flocks of flying sheep landing, while the first flock he’d been feeding took off. A scatter of feed, a flurry of golden wings, and off they went, and another little flock wheeled down out of that blue, blue sky to take their place. It was like feeding pigeons, except that the effect would have been unfortunate if the sheep had tried to land on you the same way pigeons did.

Nita laughed again as exactly that thing started to happen to Quelt’s tapi, who waved the sheep off with a weary familiarity. “But you haven’t been just sitting there looking at sheep, I hope.”

“Oh, no,” Nita said. “We’ve been doing tourist things. The stuff that nobody here does unless they have visitors.”

Her father laughed. “They have that there, too?”

“Oh, yeah. We went to the Cities to do an errand for Quelt’s mom.”

“Which city?”

“The Cities. It’s just what they call it…Don’t ask me why. As if they were interchangeable.”

“They are,” Kit said, running past. “Modular. They put them where they need them.” Ponch ran past him with a stick of ironwood in his mouth; Kit threw Nita a resigned glance and trotted off after him.

“But they’re really pretty,” Nita said. “It’s as if they did New York, but in pink and peach and cream colors. And there’s no garbage.”

Her father whistled. “A city with no garbage…”

Nita shrugged. “People here don’t seem to litter. I don’t know if they even have a word for it. They don’t throw a lot of stuff away. Come to think of it, they don’t have a lot of stuff, period.”

“They don’t sound deprived, though…”

“Nope. Did I tell you, we’re famous here?”

“No.”

“They like us because we’re short. And wizards are a big deal here. It’s going to be strange to come back and have to keep quiet about it again.”

“That would be a sore point around here at the moment,” Nita’s dad said.

“Oh? How’s Dairine doing?”

“I haven’t seen her as yet today,” Nita’s dad said. “She wasn’t up when I headed to the store this morning. I think the past couple of days have been a little wearing for her.”

“Uh-oh,” Nita said. “How are you doing, Daddy? Are the guests too weird?”

“Not really,” her father said. “One of them’s just a tree. That I can cope with. Another one’s a giant centipede. That’s all right, too. That boy has a healthy appetite and everything interests him. He’s a whiz with machinery, too: Yesterday he fixed my lawn mower when it stalled. The third one—” There was a sudden pause. “Oh, good morning to you, too. Yes, right out there. No, not that way!”

Nita heard a crash. “They’re not making trouble for you, are they, Daddy?”

“It’s not the usual kind of trouble,” her dad said, “and I don’t mind.” There was a pause. “Yes, go ahead, just don’t tell Dairine I gave it to you.”

There were loud crunching noises in the background. “Is that static?” Nita said.

“No, honey, it’s fine.”

“You didn’t say anything about the third guest.”

“That may have been on purpose,” Nita’s dad said.

Nita looked down the beach. “What’s he doing?”

“Being himself,” Nita’s dad said, “for which I suppose I shouldn’t blame him. But if he were my son—” There was another pause. “Oh,” her father said, “there you are.”

There was a clunk and rustle as if the phone had been taken out of Nita’s

dad’s hand. “This was the dumbest idea in the world,” Dairine said loudly. “I just

want you to know I confess to having been really stupid.”

Nita wasn’t sure what to make of that. Dairine’s confessions could sometimes be extremely heartfelt, but she was also extremely good at retracting them later when circumstances changed. “Well,” Nita said, “things are terrific here, so I don’t know if I necessarily accept your evaluation of the whole thing.”

“It’s good where you are?”

“It’s super.”

“I hate you,” Dairine said. And there was another clunk and rustle of the phone as it was passed back to their father.

“I’m not sure what to make of that,” he said a moment later.

“I am,” Nita said. “When she calms down, tell her I feel sorry for her, and I’ll send her a postcard later. We got the portable worldgates plugged in last night, so I can come right home if you need me. And I can send you a postcard, too.” Nita had spent a little time that morning designing a wizardry that would “take pictures” of the surroundings and deliver them home through the portable gate.

“I don’t know if she’ll thank you…”

“I’ll take my chances. What about the third one?”

“The third what?”

“Wizard, Daddy. What’s his problem?”

“I think he—Oh, good morning, Roshaun. Right over there…” There was another pause. “Not right now, sweetie.”

Nita resolved to take a look at Roshaun’s profile. Maybe there’s something I can do to help… Then again, she could imagine Dairine’s response to this. It was best to leave matters alone, perhaps.

“Did you get all your homework done?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Both kinds.”

“Do wizards get homework assignments?”

“Not as such, Daddy. Just some reading I was doing.” Earlier that morning, Nita had been going over the “Bindings and Strictures” material again; it was complex, but fortunately most of the strictures, especially the Binding Oath, could be used only once, anyway.

“Well, as long as the schoolwork’s done. Anything you need there?”

Nita sighed. “Sunblock,” she said. “I burned yesterday.”

“I thought you could do a wizardry for that.”

“I got distracted, and I forgot…”

“That’s bad for your skin, honey. You be more careful.”

“I will,” Nita said. “Just leave it in my room, okay? I can pop out later and pick it up.”

“Okay, I’ll leave it on the bed. Uh-oh…here comes Carmela. I should get off. Things start getting lively when she turns up.”

Nita grinned. “Is she getting a lot of practice at the Speech?”

“I think there’s more going on than that,” Nita’s dad said, “but you’d better talk to your sister…She’ll fill you in.”

“Okay. Talk to you later, Daddy!”

“You have a good time, sweetie. Love you.”

“Love you, too, Daddy. Bye!”

The print on the page in the manual in Nita’s lap said, “Connection broken, JD 2452749.06806.” Nita shut the manual and leaned back, looking around her. Down by the main holding pen, Kuwilin was still scattering feed for the flying sheep. Nita got up, dusted the sand off herself, and went to see if he needed any help.

By the time she got there, he was leaning over the pen’s fence, watching the sheep munch up their feed. There were always faint sucking and snorting noises when they did this. Their lips were prehensile, expert at picking up the feed pellets and ironwood seed while avoiding the sand, but every now and then they got greedy and wound up doing a lot of spitting.

Nita leaned on the fence beside Kuwilin, watching the sheep. “It takes such a long time every day to feed them,” she said.

“Well, too much at once and they get sick,” Kuwilin said. “Was that your ‘dad’? How is he?”

“He’s okay. But my sister sounds like she’s having some problems. I think she wishes she were here. And the exchange wizards…I think she’s having problems with one of them.” Nita pushed her hair back from where the sea breeze had blown it in her face again. “She’ll work it out. Was Kit helping you again?”

“Yes, he was,” Kuwilin said, “and if you two didn’t have better things to do with yourselves, I’d take you on as migrant volunteer labor. He’s getting very good at relieving them of the shesh. They hardly notice.” Kuwilin sighed, a sound that humans and Alaalids had in common. “Which is good, because this time of year, it’s hard to keep them in one place for long. They want to wander. And if they run into another big migratory group, half of them may not come back. Of course,” Kuwilin added, “they do pass directional information back and forth…so I might lose fifty this autumn and get a hundred and fifty back next spring. It depends if they like where they’ve been better than where they’re going.” He smiled.

“They’re not birds,” Kit said, running up with Ponch lolloping along behind

him.

“What?”

“The things Ponch was chasing last night. They’re not birds: They’re bats. Sort of. With fur. And they have antennae, and flaps.”

“Flaps?”

Kit shrugged. “Maybe they’re more like webbed feet.”

“They sing, too,” Quelt’s tapi said. “Have you heard them? Well, maybe not yet: We were still eating latemeal when they would have been singing, the other night and last night, too. You can hear them better if you go up the hill behind the house. They’re mating this time of year, and the singing can go on for hours. It can keep you up for hours, too.”

Ponch abruptly got between Kuwilin and Kit with yet another stick in his mouth. “Where is he finding all these?” Kuwilin said, grabbing it and trying to take it out of Ponch’s mouth. Ponch gripped hard on the stick and shook his head back and forth, fighting with Kuwilin. “We could be rich, with all the ironwood he brings home. I should hire you all. You do more work around here than Quelt does!”

“I wouldn’t let her hear you say that,” Nita said under her breath, and laughed.

“Well, it’s true!” And Kuwilin laughed as well. “But it’s not her fault, I know. She has more important things to be doing for the world, and we try not to bother her about chores.”

“When did you find out she was a wizard?” Kit said.

Ponch jumped up and down, growling, with the stick in his mouth. Kit took it and threw it, and Ponch chased off after it. “Why, she just came in at firstmeal one morning and told us,” Kuwulin said. “I guess that would be a couple of hundred years ago now—”

“Two hundred and sixty,” said Demair, coming out of the house and down to the pen with a jug and a cup of sepah for her husband. “You should come in and wash,” she said. “You smell of ceiff.”

“I always smell of ceiff,” said Kuwilin. “So does everything here, even these Earth people. They’ll probably go home smelling that way. We should bottle some of the air over the pen and send it home with them, labeled ‘A Souvenir of Alaalu.’”

Kit snorted with laughter. Nita jabbed him in the ribs with one elbow. “They’ll have to bottle you, too,” she said. To Kuwilin, she said, “Was that before her Ordeal, or after?”

“‘Ordeal?’” Demair said. “Oh, you mean the Own Choice. After, I suppose.” She looked at Nita in slight perplexity. “‘Ordeal’—is that what they call it in your world? Is it normally dangerous for you?”

Nita was taken aback. “Well, yes, in that you usually wind up fighting with the Lone Power, one way or another—”

Both Demair and Kuwilin looked blank. “Who?”

Kit looked surprised. “You know, the Lone Power. You do know the Lone One?”

“Invented death?” Nita said. “Got thrown out of Timeheart? Runs around trying to get sentient species to willingly buy into death?”

“Oh, that one,” Demair said, and laughed. “Certainly, we know about her. But she’s no problem.”

“‘No problem,’” Nita said softly. Then she looked around at the landscape and thought of the Cities as well, clean, safe, full of smiling people; all in all, it was a world where there seemed to be no such thing as crime or disaster or hatred or anything of the kind. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe I see your point.”

“But how come she’s not?” Kit said.

Kuwilin and Demair looked at each other, perplexed again. “I always assumed it had something to do with our species’ Choice,” Kuwilin said, “but I wouldn’t be an expert. Quelt would know more about it, I’d imagine.”

Nita looked around. “Where is she now?” she said.

“Up in the meadows. She said she had to talk to the wind about something.” Nita nodded. This was an expression that she’d heard a number of times recently and that most often seemed to mean that the person had something she wanted to think about in private.

“But to finish answering your first question,” Kuwilin said, “she just came in that morning and said, ‘I’m a wizard, and in a few years I have to take over from the one we’ve got.’ She showed us some wizardry; we were very impressed. And then her mentor, the old wizard, Vereich, came along and said, ‘I hear my successor is come into her power; we’d better start work.’ Of course, he knew he wasn’t long for the body at that point—he must have been four thousand or so then. No, five, now that I think of it. A delightful old man; I still hear from him occasionally.”

Nita saw Kit start a little at that, but it somehow didn’t surprise her at all. “Are you going to eat something now?” Demair said to her husband. “Cousins?”

Nita shook her head. “Not right now,” she said, “thank you. I want to ask Quelt about this.”

“All right. We’ll leave some cold things for you on the sideboard.”

Kit and Nita went up the rise together to look over it into the meadowlands. Ponch came bouncing after, with yet another stick in his mouth, or the same one.

“Were they talking about what I think they were?” Kit said. “Do they routinely talk to dead people here?”

Nita was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know if they think of them as dead,” she said. “They do seem to run things differently on Alaalu.”

“Tell me about it. Your dad say anything interesting?” Kit asked. “How are things at home?”

“I think Dairine is having a personality conflict…”

“You mean, besides her usual one with the entire planet?” Kit said.

“Ouch,” Nita said, amused. They came out on top of the rise, and started scanning the horizon: This being Alaalu, it took a while. Finally, maybe a few miles off, they spotted Quelt, a tiny pale patch moving among the blue flowers.

“There she is,” Kit said.

“Yeah. No, I think Dairine’s got a personal problem with this third wizard, the humanoid one.”

“Oooo, boy,” Kit said.

“When she finally has it out with him, the sky’ll light up; we’ll see it all the way over here.”

“Yeah. Meantime, let’s go find Quelt.”

They walked the distance, because there was no rush. It was hard to feel, here, that there was any rush, anywhere—any need for haste. Maybe it had to do with the Alaalid species being so long-lived, but Nita wasn’t entirely convinced. She kept remembering that dream-image of a beach full of statues. Something else is going on…

They caught up with her about half an hour later. She had seen them and started walking toward them. Ponch reached her first, having run ahead to greet her. “Did we disturb you?” Nita said, when they got close enough to speak without shouting.

“Oh, no,” Quelt said. “I was talking to the wind, to the Telling, actually, about the Great Vein. I think the plates are moving again in that part of the seas. It’s going to be harder to get at the metal, and I needed to devise some alternative access points.”

“It’s at the bottom of the ocean, that vein? Wow,” Nita said. Both she and Kit had some grasp of what it was like to function at the great depths. “Tough work…”

“It’s not too bad if I can crack the crust, and let the metals come up molten and crystallize out into nodules,” Quelt said. “Then we can send mechanical depth-handling machines down to bring it all up. I think that’s the way I’ll go with this. Are the ceiff all fed?”

“Twice,” Kit said. “Tapi thinks I’m spoiling them.”

“I have news for you. Tapi wants you for a hired hand!” Nita said. Quelt snorted with laughter.

“Trust him to try to get a wizard to do yard work,” she said. “Parents!”

There was some group amusement over that. “Still,” Kit said, “the yard work has to get done. Quelt, can we ask you a personal question?”

“Cousin! Of course you can.”

“I mentioned the Lone Power to your folks,” Kit said, “and they barely knew what It was.”

“She,” Nita said, and shivered.

“I mean, they had to be reminded,” Kit said. “Is that usual, here? Your parents—you told them about your—I was going to call it your Ordeal, but our word for it at home seems a lot too rugged, the way they sounded.”

“Your ‘Own Choice,’” Nita said.

“Normally, we would fight with the Lone Power personally,” Kit said. “Very personally. And, normally, most people in our world know the Lone One exists, or have at least heard of It. In our world, Its effects are all over the place, and they have been for a long time, though things are changing. But here—” Kit waved his arms around him. “Your world is so perfect, our people would hardly believe it. How come? Does it have to do with the way you guys made your Choice?”

“And what did you do?” Nita said. “Because believe me, if we could have done the same kind of thing…” She shook her head.

Quelt’s expression was somewhat bemused. “Well, it would have something to do with the ne’whaHiilse’t, the Debate and Decision,” Quelt said at last. “But I’m not sure how to explain the differences, assuming they can be explained.” She mused for a moment. “You should probably come look at the Display.”

“Sorry?” Nita said.

“Oh, the Debate and Decision happened right here, on our island,” Quelt said. “So we keep an enactment of it. In fact, that’s one of my jobs as the world’s wizard, to make sure the enactment is kept running. Even though most of us don’t think about it a whole lot! I suppose we might as well go have a look at it—”

Then Quelt laughed. “You know, we’ve done some of the tourist things, but this one is so boring for most people that it never occurred to me to take you there. That’s silly of me, on second thought. You are wizards; of course you’d be interested. And I haven’t gone through the whole experience myself for a long time, though people come from all the other islands to see it.”

Kit looked from Quelt to Nita and back again.

“Let’s go,” he said.

****

Quelt had a transit spell prepared. “It’s in case I need to go do a service call,” she said, “but that hasn’t happened for a hundred years or so…” The spell looked much like one of Kit’s or Nita’s “prepackaged” ones; a circle of words in the Speech, which Quelt pulled out of the air and offered to Nita and Kit so that they could insert their personal information—their own names in the Speech and data about their body mass and composition. Both of them routinely carried shorthand versions of these in their manuals, and Kit had a spare one for Ponch. They pulled these out, hooked them onto Quelt’s spell, and stepped into it when she cast the line of bright words down among the flowers.

Wizardry dulled the air around them to a blue haze as they read the words in the Speech together. It was interesting for Nita to have a third voice reading with them, a different flavor in the air, as the universe leaned in around them, obeying the spell, and then popped them loose into another place entirely.

Nita and Kit looked around. Here the horizon was no less high, but the immediately surrounding landscape was flatter, a huge plain. As she glanced around, Nita realized that she was in one of the first places she’d seen on Alaalu that wasn’t within sight of water.

“It’s the heart of the continent,” Quelt said, leading them down a very slight slope. “The nearest ocean is three thousand miles away. A pretty distance, for us. And here we are—”

Not far away from them, down another shallow slope, was something Nita at first took for a wide, deep pool of water. But then she realized that there was too much light reflected in that pool; it was radiant by its own virtue. And there was something strange about the surface of the water—it didn’t ripple.

“It’s air held solid,” Quelt said. “You know the spell, I think. A variation of the Mason’s Word wizardry, with the spell that produces the forms held down inside it. Come on, you can walk out on it.”

She led the way across the surface of the “pool,” strolling out as if onto a crystal floor. Nita and Kit followed her, pausing with Quelt at about the middle of the surface to look down into the depths. There they saw eight figures, male and female, plainly Alaalids by their coloration, hair, and dress. Seven stood more or

less together; the eighth one stood apart.

Nita started to laugh, then. “They really are short, aren’t they?” she said. “No wonder we’re such celebrities!”

Quelt laughed, too. “I should have brought you here first to explain it,” she said.

They walked above the group standing there under some other sunlight, in another time, in a field full of flowers very like the ones all around them now. When she stood still, Nita found, she could see those figures down below moving, talking, consulting with one another—all but the one who stood apart, an Alaalid taller than the rest of them, dressed all in white, and coolly beautiful, with eyes of a gorgeous burning amber.

“Wow,” Kit said. “Who’s that?”

“Esemeli,” Quelt said.

“She’s hot,” Kit said, in considerable admiration.

Nita threw a glance at him. Next to Kit, Ponch, too, was gazing down into the depths…but he was starting to growl softly.

Kit looked at Ponch in shock, and then at Quelt. “Oh no. You mean she’s—”

“The Lone Power,” Nita said. “The local version.”

“That’s her,” Quelt said. “But we came in in the middle of the story. If you come over here, you can see it from the start.”

They walked over to the far side of the Display, and looked deep down into it. The landscape that presented itself was like the one in which they stood, but less groomed-looking, rougher around the edges. There was a field full of the blue jijis flowers; it seemed to stretch to the horizon, which was unusual in that world where no landscape seemed to go very far before running into the sea. In the middle of the field stood the seven Alaalid men and women, and in the center, the extremely beautiful one.

“That’s her when she first arrives,” Quelt said. “And there are our first seven wizards, who’re making the Choice.”

Nita cocked her ear at something she was coming to recognize since she’d started to study the Speech more closely—the “Enactive mode,” one of the most powerful ways in which the Speech could be spoken. Quelt wasn’t using the mode itself, but a secondary form called the pre-Enactive voice: a form for talking about first-level enactments and other major change, without actually using the words that would bring the change to pass. Its tenses were very weird if translated into any human language, where present and past are usually separate; so Nita didn’t bother trying to translate it in her head, and just let it sound like one very large kind of present.

“Come on,” Quelt said. “They tell the story better than I can.” And she stepped right down into the crystalline surface as if it were water.

Nita and Kit both stared. Quelt looked over her shoulder at them. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not an actual portal, just a replay. You can’t actually interact with it, but it’s as if you were there…”

“How do we—” Kit said, and then looked around him in surprise as, very slowly, he started to sink into the crystal where he stood.

“You just let yourself,” Quelt said. “There’s no problem breathing or

anything; the wizardry takes care of that for you.”

Do I have to go, too? Ponch said to Kit. I feel like running now.

“No, it’s fine,” Kit said, still sinking. “You go ahead.”

Ponch bounded off the Display and into the flowers.

“I think I’d rather do it your way,” Nita said, and followed Quelt’s lead, just taking a step down as if she were standing on a flight of stairs. The substrate behaved that way, too, letting her foot go down into the crystal.

Nita followed Quelt down into the substrate, while beside the two of them Kit just kept on sinking where he stood, as if he were on some kind of elevator. Within half a minute or so, they were standing in the same field of flowers as the seven figures and the eighth one, standing in the center of the circle.

“Let me get this straight,” Kit said. “This isn’t actually the past, and that wasn’t some kind of timeslide—”

“No, not at all,” Quelt said. “I don’t think that’d be allowed. You wouldn’t want to get involved in time paradoxes where a Decision was involved.”

“I don’t know,” Nita said as they walked toward the circle of Alaalids. “There have been times when I’ve wished we could do something like that with ours.”

Quelt gave Nita a concerned look. “You’re going to have to tell me more about that later,” she said. “Anyway, this wizardry just makes it seem as if we were there. “We can hear what they say, watch what they do.”

For the moment, though, none of the figures seemed to be doing much of anything. “The scenario repeats whenever anyone who sees it wants it to,” Quelt said. “Most people get taken here once or twice when we’re little. I got to see it more often than most people, because Vereich ran me through the Choice a lot while he was training me as his replacement.” She looked a little amused by this. “There’s not really a lot to it, but it is history, and something a wizard here would need to know about…”

They walked around the circle. “So these were our wizards,” Quelt said. “That little one there: He’s the chief, Seseil. He wrote out the first part of the Telling.”

“He wrote it?” Kit said, looking at the lean figure, slight for an Alaalid, who stood there among the flowers, barefoot, in breeches and a loose shirt. “Usually, it just seems to arrive somehow. You hear it, or find it, or find that you know the beginnings of it…”

“That’s sort of how it went for us,” Quelt said. “Seseil wrote the words that he heard the wind Telling the water. All the others did that, too, sooner or later, except they all heard different words. Seseil had to journey all over the settled lands, from island to island, to find other people who’d heard the words and could tell him the ones he didn’t know. It took a long time to find them all, but he wouldn’t give up.”

As they came around the side of the circle, Nita looked into that hard, wise face, frozen for the moment into immobility, and had no trouble believing what Quelt was telling them. “That’s the Imrar, isn’t it?” Nita said. “The poem about the Island Journey. It got mentioned in one of the orientation sources.”

“That’s right,” Quelt said. “It took him three hundred years, and he had all kinds of adventures. But he found all the words at last. And up above us, in physical

reality, in that field—that’s where they started the argument that ended with Ictanikë arriving.”

“Wait a minute,” Kit said. “I thought you just said the Lone One’s name was Esemeli.”

“That’s her second name: It comes later. So here you see them with Ictanikë, when she turns up for the first time. They were a little confused about her, because she plainly knew about wizardry, though she wasn’t a wizard.”

“I’ve heard many a strange tale on my travels,” Seseil said. The sound was fading in slowly, as if somebody was turning it up, and Nita wandered a little closer to hear. “But this is one of the stranger ones. What exactly is it that you’re offering us?”

“It doesn’t sound like anything new,” said another of the wizards. “This is the world, and entropy is running. We have time, and life to live in it.”

“But not in power,” Ictanikë said. “Not in power that you can depend upon. You sailed the seas from inner to outer and back again, finding a word here and a word there, hoping the wind would bring you what you need to know. Why should you be at the world’s mercy this way? With help from someone wise, someone longer in the world, you can find your power much more quickly. I can help you do that.”

The Alaalid wizards looked at one another, not quite sure what to make of this. “Help is always welcome,” one of them said.

“But you must pay my price,” Ictanikë said.

The uncertainty among them grew. Nita saw several of them exchange glances, and, in particular, Seseil began to regard Ictanikë with what looked like the beginnings of suspicion. “Among us,” Seseil said, “when one person needs something, another one gladly gives it to them. That way, you know that when the day comes that you need something, another will be ready to give. If you have a gift to give us, we’ll accept it gladly…assuming it’s a thing we need. But this talk of price—”

Ictanikë smiled, and there was a sly look to the expression, which Nita didn’t care for. “So adult beings conduct their affairs in the worlds beyond your world,” Ictanikë said. “Go the way I will show you, and you, too, will do your business among the worlds in such a way as to impress all with your wisdom and power. But you should also know that not all beings even in this world conduct their business in such a kindly way, giving freely and accepting freely. Even here there are places where the creatures of the world take what they please, and give little back, or nothing. You must know how to conduct yourselves in such places, and how to defend yourself from those who would take what is yours by force. I can teach you these things.”

“And how is it you know about that in the first place?” Seseil said. “You speak confidently of the worlds beyond our world. You speak of prices to be paid, as if our way of giving and accepting were a trap. Nor do any of us know you, or where you come from. I think any advice you might have to give should be looked at with care.”

Nita watched, and saw how most of the wizards drew together toward Seseil. But one or two of them still stood off to one side, regarding Ictanikë with curiosity if

not interest. And one of them, an Alaalid with long red hair hanging down below his shoulders, moved a little way toward Ictanikë and said to her, “What exactly would your price be?”

Nita froze…for the redheaded wizard was the small man, just her height, who had come to her in the dream of statues and said, “I’ve been waiting for you…”

Ictanikë’s smile grew somber. “It’s as you’ve said, entropy is indeed running. But with my price, you can buy yourselves…an exemption. Around you, you see what happens to the rest of the world. Even the mountains are worn away in time; all life ends. But for you, for the wise, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to go on, to reject the fate of the material things around you. If I help you, you can have life…and then cheat death.”

The wizard with the long red hair looked thoughtfully at Ictanikë. “Who is that?” Kit whispered.

Quelt waved a hand, and all the figures froze in place again. “That’s Druvah,” Quelt said. “He was one of the oldest of the wizards. You can tell by his hair; ours doesn’t usually get that red color for a long time.”

“Uh-oh,” Nita said. “I think I see what’s coming…”

Quelt let the Display continue.

“You still haven’t said what your price will be,” Druvah said.

“It’s only a little thing,” said Ictanikë. “I know the One who brought entropy into being. For those who’re that One’s friends, there are privileges and rewards. One of them is to circumvent the waste and pain that come with age. A people who make this bargain have no need of watching the strength and joy of youth slip slowly away. It’s theirs forever. They have an eternity to grow from power to power…and if they so desire it, more than an eternity. They can go onward into the time beyond Times, in their own bodies, in the flesh. To do so, of course, they must take entropy’s inventor as their master, not some impersonal wind. The relationship is far more rewarding, more personal.”

“But is it more free?” said Seseil. “Those who speak in terms of prices, themselves will do nothing for nothing. The wind has spoken the name of one of the Powers that lives in the dead calm, in the sun that beats down and parches the dry isles and dries up everything that would grow. We want nothing to do with that Power, or Its gifts.”

And the wizards began to argue. Nita sighed, because she had heard various versions of this argument since she’d become a wizard, and it rarely turned out particularly well for the world in question. The Lone Power had had eons of practice at making Its case, and was extremely good at befuddling the innocent and putting one over on the clever. As she watched, Nita noticed Druvah walking off in an absent sort of way, and Ictanikë went after him.

Kit noticed that, too. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Neets is right. I know where this is going.” He glanced over at Quelt.

Quelt made a gesture with an upraised hand; Nita read this as a shrug. “It goes on for a while,” Quelt said.

Off to the side, Nita could see Druvah and Ictanikë talking animatedly. “I bet that one does, too,” Nita said.

“Oh, yes,” Quelt said. “Do you want to skip ahead?”

“Sure,” Kit said.

Quelt made another gesture with her hand, and all the figures blurred about briefly, then came to a stand again. Ictanikë and Druvah were walking back toward the main group now, and the others watched them come, Seseil watching most carefully. To Seseil, Druvah said, “Ictanikë has told me a great many things, and I’m convinced that we should give her suggestions a more careful hearing.”

Seseil’s face was calm, but in his eyes Nita thought she saw signs of the first anger she had yet seen in an Alaalid. “I feel no such need,” Seseil said, “nor I think does anyone else here. We want nothing of her ‘exemption.’ Through her voice the dead calm speaks, and there’s no good in that. We will cast her out. We will wall her out of our world. And, henceforth, we will take our chances with the winds.”

The other five wizards in the circle with Seseil held up their hands against Ictanikë in a gesture of rejection. She began to be battered back away from them as if the wind was actually blowing her from the circle, though in the grass around there was no sign of it and only the slightest breeze stirred the flowers. Nita held her breath, waiting for the storm to break. But to her surprise, nothing happened. Druvah stood there and watched Ictanikë forced away and away, and finally turned his back on the Lone Power; but, equally, he turned away from the other wizards and began to walk off through the flowers, a lonely figure.

“You will call me back, before the end of things,” Ictanikë said, and looked warningly around her at the circle of wizards. “You think you are acting in virtue, but you are acting in ignorance. And though you are swift in decision now, you will have long to repent it!”

“Never,” Seseil said. “We want nothing to do with you. Take yourself away, and do not bother us again.”

Ictanikë looked one last time at the other wizards with Seseil. Every one of them was of the same face and the same mind. Her frown became terrible; still in the act of being forced away, she raised her hands.

Nita winced. Here it comes, she thought. I bet now we find out why this planet has what looks like a really big impact crater…

But, again, nothing happened. Ictanikë let her hands fall, and turned, and walked away from the wizards. She went the way Druvah went, not hurrying. Slowly, she vanished into the dazzle of the day, and was gone from sight a long time before she came anywhere near that impossibly distant horizon.

Seseil and the other wizards lowered their hands, and closed up their circle again. Kit glanced over at Quelt. “That was it?” he said.

“That was it,” Quelt said. “Should there have been more?”

“Well,” Kit said, “not necessarily. But I’ve seen Choices that took a little longer.”

Nita looked around again at the scenario with some confusion. “This is kind of strange,” she said. “The way Druvah was acting—unless I’m misunderstanding it—it’s more like the kind of thing the Lone One would do. Are you sure he wasn’t—” She paused. It was a word no wizard liked to use about another one. “Overshadowed,” Nita said at last, when she realized that Quelt wasn’t going to say it.

“You mean actively being influenced by the Lone Power?” Quelt said. “No,

not as far as we can tell.”

“What happened to Druvah afterward?” Kit said.

“He left,” Quelt said. “The reasons given differ. And he did say that he didn’t care for the way the Choice had been made…Some versions of the story tell how Druvah said he didn’t want anything more to do with his own people. They say he threatened the other wizards and said to them something like what Ictanikë had said—that they couldn’t make this Choice without him, or that later they’d wish that they’d listened to him, and that someday they’d need him back and wouldn’t be able to find him. But all the stories agree that he went away from the place where he lived and was never seen there again.”

“A sore loser,” Kit said.

“Maybe not,” Nita said. “Maybe he was just sad, or embarrassed when he realized he was wrong.”

“You might be right about that,” Quelt said. She watched as slowly the various wizards wandered off together across the flowery fields, heading out into the world they’d helped to shape. “There are other stories that say how sometimes people would see him for a day, an hour, on some lonely road, or climbing a mountain, or sailing by himself on the sea, always looking for something, always acting as if something was missing. But it wasn’t thought lucky to see him. He was tricky to talk to, they said, and he didn’t always make sense. Or you might hear his voice behind first one tree and then another in the forest, always moving in front of you when you got close, never staying where you thought it was.”

Quelt turned and started walking up through the crystalline air again. Kit and Nita walked up the air behind her. “Sort of a trickster,” Nita said.

“That’s right,” Quelt said. She shrugged. “There’s even one story that says he went wandering right out of the world, among other worlds, looking for whatever he was missing. It doesn’t really matter in terms of the Choice. It’s made now. And pretty well made, I think.”

They broke the surface of the crystalline Display and walked out across it, back to the sward that surrounded it. Kit looked all around him at the bright day, as if wondering whether he should say something, and then, finally, he said, “So people here do die…”

“I don’t know that we would’ve ever had any choice about that,” Quelt said. “It’s always going to happen eventually, isn’t it? But it’s not so bad. We live a pretty long time. And it’s not as if the dead people go away.”

Nita looked up at that and nodded. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” she said. “There’ve been times I woke up in the middle of the night here and thought I heard people whispering…”

Quelt looked at Nita and purposely nodded, using the human gesture. “That’s right,” she said, “I thought you’d probably be able to hear them. When we die, we don’t die dead. We don’t die out of the world. We die into it. The people who were here are always around.” And Quelt looked at Nita with a little less certainty than usual, an expression a little less serene. “It’s not like that for you, in your world, is it?” she said.

Nita shook her head. “No,” she said, and couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice. “Definitely not.”

Kit looked up. “Here comes Ponch,” he said.

Nita glanced up. She couldn’t see anything but a vague troubling of the flowers across the field. “What has he got?” she said, and began to trot off toward him.

Behind her, she could just hear Quelt saying, in a slightly lowered voice, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, since you seem interested in the subject. How do you die?”

Nita said nothing.

“Uh…let’s save that for a little later, okay?” Kit said.

They went back to the house by the sea.

****

Disruption of Services Dairine wandered through the house early that morning, looking into every room except the one she was trying to avoid looking into: the basement. Filif was in the kitchen, watching her dad get ready for work. Nobody was in the dining room. Sker’ret was in the living room, watching TV and playing around with the remote. Nobody was in the bathroom or any of the bedrooms.

She let out a long breath and wandered back the way she had come, glancing at the TV as she passed through the living room. “That really looks a lot better,” she said to Sker’ret.

“Something was wrong with the green color matrix,” Sker’ret said. “I talked to the irradiation module and got it to tweak its voltage a little. Everything seems to be behaving now.”

“You could have a word with my stereo upstairs if you felt like it,” Dairine said. “But not right now.”

“Are we ready to go?”

“A few minutes.”

She wandered back into the kitchen. “Did you see what Sker’ret did to the TV, Daddy?” Dairine said.

“I sure did. That boy’s a whiz with the machinery, isn’t he?”

“He’s kind of a structures specialist,” Dairine said. “A taking-things-apart-and-putting-things-back-together fan. I’d say everything would be fine with him around until you ran out of broken things to fix.” She smiled. “Then would be the time to hide…”

“When he has a free moment, he can come down to the shop,” Dairine’s dad said, finishing his coffee and going to the sink with the mug. “My copy machine…” He shook his head.

“I’ll put it on the list.” To Filif, she said, “Have you seen Roshaun this morning?”

“Not today,” Filif said. “He went into his pup tent when we all did last night, and I haven’t seen him since.”

He raised a branch and pushed his baseball cap into what was intended to be

a jaunty angle. It flopped back down again, because it’s hard to keep a baseball cap in a given position when your head is a single conifer-like branch, similar to the top of a Christmas tree.

“Hmf,” Filif said, and started weaving a few outer limbs around in a gesture that Dairine recognized as the beginning of a wizardry, Filif’s invocation of a shorthand or “macro” version of something he’d set up before. He had a lot of these for physical manipulation, which made sense for a tree. Dairine’s neck hairs rose a little at the feel of the Speech being used in a nonverbal mode.

Dairine’s dad, drinking his coffee, eyed this procedure with some interest, watching the baseball cap come up to level and settle itself as if there were a head underneath it.

“Slick,” Dairine said.

“I don’t know,” her dad said, looking with dry humor at the baseball cap, and turning away again. “I’m not sure what you’re doing bringing something like that into a house full of Mets fans…”

The cap was a Yankees cap, and Dairine hadn’t had either the inclination or the heart to start explaining to Filif why such a cap could possibly be an issue. He’d really wanted it, and Dairine had gone back to the shopping center and gotten it for him. But she felt fortunate in having been able to talk him out of the Jams, convincing him that they were “very last year.”

Dairine headed past the two of them, sighing. There’s no way to avoid it. I’m just going to have to go on down there, she thought. “You about ready to go?” she said.

“Yes,” her dad and Filif said in unison, and then both burst out laughing, since they were each talking about going to a different place.

“Great,” Dairine said. “Back in a minute.”

She went down the stairs into the basement and looked around. There were the three pup-tent accesses, each hanging from its silvery rod. One of them was active.

Dairine let out a long, annoyed breath, went over to it, and most reluctantly put her head in.

The inside was illuminated, not with the standard directionless lighting of a basic pup-tent installation, but by a number of ornate lamps positioned here and there across the carpeted floor. Carpets? Dairine thought. But there they were, beautifully woven in alien patterns of many colors, some of them embroidered as well. They were scattered all over the inside of a space that was significantly larger than the others’ pup tents, which she’d seen when they’d invited her in.

And the place was decorated as if it were a palace. There was elaborate artwork hanging against the walls or, in some cases, unsupported in the air; there was a great couch in the middle of everything, with rich coverings and ornate cushions scattered over it; there was enough furniture—sofas and wardrobes and chests—to supply a good-sized furniture store, except that no furniture store Dairine knew would be likely to carry this kind of stuff, everything glittering with gold or inlaid with green or blue metals that Dairine didn’t immediately recognize. Just look at all this junk, she thought. It was dazzling but, to her eye, overdone.

Then again…if I grew up in a place that looked like this, maybe I’d think it

was normal, too.

She tried very hard to believe that but had trouble. Why are you bothering with him? part of her brain kept shouting. He’s a waste of your time!

Dairine looked around. Anyway, he’s not here, she thought. Well, maybe he had something to take care of at home, and used his custom worldgate this morning, before anybody noticed. She shrugged and was about to turn away and go back upstairs when something in the back of the pup tent caught her eye: a subtle shimmer in an empty patch on the back wall. Dairine walked over to it, looked at it, curious; reached out a hand…then stopped herself.

Should I put on a ‘glove’? she wondered. As a rule, it wasn’t terribly safe to stick your hand through an interface without being sure of what was on the other side. Then again…there’s air in here, and the pup-tent interface isn’t one of the impermeable types. So there has to be air on the other side of that…

She pushed her hand into the interface, saw it vanish to the wrist. Her hand didn’t feel unusually hot or cold, and there wasn’t the strange dry tautness of the skin that exposure to vacuum produced. No, it’s okay, she thought. Dairine stuck her head through, looked around.

And froze.

She was looking into not another artificial space, not an extension of the pup tent, but an area that was almost the outdoors; daylight wasn’t too far away. She stepped through. A translucent terrace roof arched over Dairine’s head, and she slowly walked out from under it onto the terrace proper—a huge spread of golden-colored stone, reaching hundreds of yards to her left and right, with a carved stone railing standing about a meter high in front of her and running all down the terrace’s length. At the railing she stopped, looking out in wonder at an immense landscape all covered in a massive garden of red and golden plant life. Everything was manicured, managed, perfect, the strangely shaped trees not seeming to have so much as a leaf out of place, the amber-colored grass seemingly mown with micrometric precision. There wasn’t a molehill or a hump or a hill anywhere in sight. It was as if a myriad of gardeners had worked the place over with rollers from right where Dairine stood to the distant horizon, where the sun was setting in a glowing blaze of cloud.

Dairine let out a breath. This was beautiful, but she couldn’t spend all day admiring the scenery. She turned around to go back the way she’d come—

—and froze yet again. There was the terrace, and the terrace roof, but above it reared up a huge, graceful, imposing mass of a building, all built in the same golden stone as the terrace, and spreading away far in both directions. It was at least a New York City block square—And a long block, not a short one! she thought—and reared up before her in stack upon stack of towers and spires and turrets and battlements, spearing defiantly upward as if to make up for the flat countryside all around.

This is a palace, Dairine thought. His palace.

She immediately looked around her guiltily, as if somebody might catch her being somewhere she shouldn’t and dump her in a dungeon. Then Dairine straightened, held her head up. He shouldn’t be here, either. Not like this!

She marched back under the terrace roof, toward the long line of glass-paned

doors she saw at the back of the roofed-in area. One of them stood open, near where the illicit pup-tent access still hung down. Dairine headed on past it and through that door.

If she’d thought the furnishings of the pup tent were opulent, she’d been seriously mistaken. She now found herself in a high-ceilinged, elliptical space that was nearly the size of the auditorium at her school. This, too, was filled with massive and ornate furniture, rich carpeting scattered across the goldstone floor, figured hangings on the walls. The gold and gems were everywhere, inlaid or appliqued or just stuck onto things with wild abandon. Dairine shook her head, gazing around—

And someone laughed at her. Her head snapped around. There he was, in more of his trademark glittering robes, leaning back in a gaudy chair that was halfway to being a throne, and with his feet up on a footstool.

“I wondered how long it would take you to sneak in here,” Roshaun said, stretching and lapsing back into a comfortable slouch again. “I admit, you kept me waiting longer than I thought I’d have to.”

I wish I’d kept you waiting a lot longer, Dairine thought. “What are you doing here?” she said. “The pup tents are what you’re supposed to be sleeping in, on an excursus, if you’re not using the actual host family space for it. And you’re not supposed to sleep away every night, either!”

“The guidelines are just that,” Roshaun said, “guidelines. You’ll have noticed that there’s not a lot of heavy enforcement. The Aethyrs have better things to do.”

His word for the Powers That Be, I guess, Dairine thought. “And that’s another thing! You’re not supposed to retroengineer the wizardries They gave us, either—”

“That restriction is only on the custom worldgates,” Roshaun said, “not the pup tents.” He smiled slightly.

Dairine stared at Roshaun, remembering how obvious and casual this rationale had sounded when she was considering it, and wondering why it now sounded so outrageous and annoying.

“And why are you so stuck on every little rule all of a sudden?” Roshaun said, obviously amused at Dairine’s expense. “You’ve broken a fair number of them in your time.”

She looked at him in shock. “Oh, yes,” Roshaun said, “I’ve seen your precis. Something of an early star, weren’t you? But suffering something of a decline at the moment. Ah, that tough time when you have to redefine yourself as something less than you dreamed…”

Dairine opened her mouth, but managed to stop what she was about to say on its way out. The best she could find to replace it was, “Why are you such a pain in the ass?”

“Probably for the same kinds of reasons you are,” Roshaun said, and turned away. “But I don’t propose to discuss my developmental history with the likes of you.”

The likes of—!! “That’s not good enough!” she shouted. “Why did you even bother applying for this excursus if you didn’t want to be with other—”

Suddenly doors burst open all around. Dairine looked around her in shock as a sudden inrush of people arrived from what seemed every possible direction. Most

of them were dressed like Roshaun, in long overtunics over shorter tunics and breeches and boots, though all of these people wore the style in plainer, more sober-colored fabrics. Some of them were actually carrying spears, and Dairine’s wizardly senses detected a number of energy signatures hidden about those servants’ persons that had nothing to do with spears. Pulse weapons, she thought, and a few other niceties…

Dairine stood there with her head up, but inside her head, she said eighteen words of a nineteen-word spell that would bounce back at them anything they threw at her. And if Roshaun gets a little singed, well, tough—

Roshaun, though, just laughed and waved his servitors away. “No, it’s all right. You’re not needed,” Roshaun said. “You may all go.”

“Lord prince,” said one of the spear carriers, looking at Dairine. “This is an alien! You shouldn’t be alone with—”

Roshaun laughed. “Nonsense! She’s no possible danger to me,” he said. “Go on.”

All of the servants bowed and departed, though the armed ones gave Dairine a number of hard looks as they left.

She had to smile grimly at that, though she was trying to contain her annoyance at the assessment that she was “no danger.” Never mind. People a lot more important in the big scheme of things have thought otherwise…

The room emptied and the doors closed. Roshaun dusted his hands off as if he’d actually done something, and sat back down on his “throne,” stretching his legs out lazily. “So what’s on your little agenda today?”

Dairine collapsed the almost-built shield-spell, deciding she didn’t need it anymore. And as for him, listen to him! Every word out of Roshaun is a needle, Dairine thought. Well, I’m just going to stop jumping when he sticks the needle in, no matter what he says. “We’re going up Mount Everest and K2,” she said. “Those are two of the highest mountains on Earth. A lot of people climb them—some just for the challenge, some almost as a tourist thing. But they leave a lot of garbage behind…so every now and then some wizards go up there and clean it up a little. It’s kind of an art form, taking away enough of the oxygen bottles and so forth to keep the place from turning into a dump, without taking so many that people notice they’re vanishing. That’s all we need, to turn into a yeti myth or something.”

She stopped, because he had actually yawned at her. “I don’t think so,” Roshaun said.

“I don’t think so what!”

“Housecleaning,” Roshaun said, “wouldn’t normally be a part of my job description.”

Despite all her good intentions, Dairine instantly got steamed again. “Neither would doing wizardry, most times, from the look of things around here,” she said. “Why lift a finger when all these people will jump out and do everything for you?” And once again she stopped herself. “Well, never mind,” she said. “The whole point of the excursus is to see what other people’s wizardly practice is like. This would have been good for that. And besides it being a kind of fun service-thing to do, I’d have thought you’d enjoy the view. You don’t seem to have a lot of high ground around here.”

“We have a fair amount of it elsewhere,” Roshaun said, “on the other side of the planet—”

He was still trying to sound bored, but somehow it wasn’t working. Dairine glanced over at him quickly, but if anything had shown in his face while she was looking away, it was too late to catch a hint of it now. He had sealed right over again. “Look,” Dairine said, “I really don’t know what your problem is. But let’s just drop it, okay? Why not come on back with me and we’ll—”

“At the moment, I’d rather not,” Roshaun said.

There was still something ever so slightly different about his tone of voice. Some of that snide quality had come off it, if only a few percent’s worth.

“If it’s just a personality thing…” Dairine said, after some hesitation.

“It’s nothing so simple,” Roshaun said, turning away from her and reaching out to some kind of data pad by his chair. “I don’t much like your little world, and your Sun pains me.”

Dairine wasn’t terribly sure what to make of the second remark, but the first was easy enough to understand. “Well, you have a nice time here by yourself,” she said. “Lie around and take it easy…Have someone peel you a grape or three. And don’t feel rushed into hurrying back.”

She headed back toward the access to the pup tent and made her way back through its overdecorated interior, growing gradually more annoyed. Halfway through, though, Dairine stopped, turned, and looked over her shoulder at the extra access Roshaun had added.

Somebody could get him in trouble for that…

Dairine stood there absently biting her lower lip for a few moments, considering possibilities. Then she grimaced at her own ill temper. This guy is really messing me up…and I hate it.

Never mind.

She slipped through the main pup-tent access into her basement and trotted up the stairs. “Roshaun’s not going to be with us this morning,” she said to Filif. “Something’s going on at home that he had to take care of. Let’s just get ourselves up Everest and do some tidying.”

Her dad was still standing by the counter, keying numbers into his cell phone. He held it to his ear, shook his head, and glanced at the phone.

“Honey, before you go,” her dad said, “what’s going on with the cell phones today? I was trying to call one of my suppliers. Is it the usual network-busy problem, or is the magic possibly interfering with it?”

“I really doubt that,” Dairine said. “Tom’s too good at this kind of wizardry. But you know what, I heard something on the news this morning. Let me check—” She turned to Spot, who was sitting on the counter. “Get me a weather report? The SOHO satellite’ll do.”

Spot flipped up his lid and showed Dairine the manual’s version of the live feed from the SOHO solar-orbiter satellite, with a selection of pictures of the Sun taken in various wavelengths of light—red, green, blue. “There you are,” Dairine said, pointing to the blue version, where one particular detail was clearest. “We’re having a little bad weather.”

Dairine’s dad peered over her shoulder at the image of something like a big

bump or bulge of light on the side of the Sun. “That happened last night,” Dairine said. “It’s a CME, a coronal mass ejection.”

“In English, please?” her dad said.

Dairine grinned. “Think of it as a solar zit.”

Her dad made a face. “Honey, do you think you could possibly have put that more indelicately?”

“Gives you the right impression of what’s happening, though,” Dairine said. “Every now and then the Sun shoots out a big splat of plasma into space. No one really knows why. But if the splat’s aimed toward Earth, when the front of the plasma wave gets here, there’s all kinds of trouble with satellites because of the ionized radiation. Radio gets messed up for a day or so, phone connections get screwed up until the wave front passes.” She shrugged. “It’s no big deal. These guys make sure everybody gets enough warning to turn their satellites’ sensors away from the wave front before it hits.” She put Spot’s lid down. “Probably the phones’ll come back up later today or tomorrow.”

Her father sighed, turning to the wall phone and picking it up. “It’s a nuisance,” he said as he started to dial.

“Yeah,” Dairine said.

Sker’ret came in from the living room. “So where are you three off to?” Dairine’s dad said.

“Mount Everest,” Dairine said.

Her father looked at her. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts: It was more like summer than spring outside, at the moment. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you to dress warm?”

“We all have force fields,” Dairine said. “We’ll be fine.”

Her dad watched her and hit a key on the phone’s dialing pad. “Voice mail,” he muttered. “I hate this. Mount Everest, though? Why?”

“We’re taking Sker’ret out to lunch,” Dairine said, grinning a wicked grin. “Nepalese food…sort of. See you later.”

They vanished.

It was much later that evening, after latemeal, when lamps were lit and Nita had gone down to the beach again for one last swim, when Kit finally had time to sit down in private on his bed-couch, with his manual, and page through it for some more detail.

Much of what Quelt had shown them and told them was there, and more information about the way of death on Alaalu. Entropy might have its way with the bodies of the people who lived there, but not with their spirits. Those lingered on. Kit saw from the manual that this Choice had, in fact, not taken place as quickly as it had seemed at first glance. In particular, the wizards making this Choice had understood that without entropy, there was no passage of time, no way to live or be. They’d seen that any bargain they might have struck with the Lone Power in an attempt to eliminate entropy completely would’ve been a cheat. Naturally, the Power that had invented entropy had some control over it; the exemption It had been offering the Alaalids would have been real enough, a kind of eternal life. But Kit knew enough about the Lone Power’s intentions to understand that whatever

advantage over death they purchased by accepting the bargain It offered them, they would eventually have paid dearly in some other coin.

Still, he thought, the way they’ve got it here…they’re lucky. There was a passing, but it was nothing to be afraid of. And afterward, the one who died became simply one more part of a world full of whispers, all friendly…the relatives and cousins of an elder time, passed along but not passed away, at peace after life as their people were at peace in life. She’s been hearing them, he thought, remembering what Nita had said earlier.

He looked down at the manual again. “And as for the Lone One, now the Relegate, and defeated, the new way of the world meant she was part of the world, though made new. So they gave her a new name,” the manual said, translating the local version of the Choice story, “which was Esemeli, the Daughter of the Daughter of Light; and she did them no more harm, nor can do again. She went into the place prepared for her, the Relegate’s Naos, and there she dwells still, in peace, as all things are at peace. And the world goes its way, and its wind speaks the One’s name, and all things are well, forever…”

Kit closed the manual and looked out through the window on his side of the room, out to the twilit sea.

The Lone One defeated, he thought. I’m not sure I like the sound of that. It wasn’t that such defeats were impossible: They weren’t. But they were difficult to maintain, and to defend. Death might be thrown out of a scenario, but It had ways of sneaking back in if you weren’t very, very careful

He tucked his manual away under his pillow, pulled the light covers up over himself, and lay there looking out the window. She’ll he back soon, he thought. It’s almost crab time. Nita won’t be swimming then.

At the end of Kit’s couch, Ponch lay with his chin on the covers, his eyes shifting occasionally out to the twilight, as Kit fell asleep, considering—

Nita was walking far down the beach, well above the waterline, watching the keks and trying to distract herself from the stinging of her neck and shoulders.

This always happens when I get distracted, she thought, feeling her neck and then stopping; the stinging just got worse. First I forget the sunblock, then I forget the wizardry that’s supposed to do what the sunblock would have done if I’d remembered it.

She sighed, watching the hurly-burly down on the sand as the keks bustled around and climbed over and under each other, building their strange little sand castles. Besides her sunburn, the main problem for Nita at the moment was Alaalu’s thirty-two-hour day, which was making her experience something like jet lag without the jets. Kit, for some reason, seemed to have snapped very quickly into the local rhythm and had no trouble sleeping for sixteen hours and waking for sixteen, as the Peliaens did. But Nita’s body stubbornly insisted on hanging on to its own ideas about when morning was, and when 7:30 A.M. rolled around back home, it woke Nita up with a snap and wouldn’t let her go back to sleep. She could have done a wizardry on herself to force the issue, but she found herself resisting that option. This place is so super, why do I want to waste hours sleeping? And no one here

minds if I’m up in the middle of the night, anyway.

Nita looked over the whispering water as a small flock of moons started to come sailing up over the eastern horizon. Because of the size of the planet, there were a lot of them—even the smallest of them the size of Earth’s moon, but all out at a distance that made them look a third or a quarter the size. The planet’s gravitation held all these little moons in a very large and vaguely defined “ring” pattern, like a skinny doughnut stretched around the world. Inside that doughnut, or torus, the individual moons’ gravities caused them to speed each other up and slow each other down and generally behave in ways that were impossible to predict. Like more flying sheep, Nita thought, as the present “flock” rose and sailed across the night sky, throwing shifting silvery lights down on the water. In the light, the keks seemed to be working faster, though this was probably an illusion.

Nita wandered down to the waterline and stood just out of the keks’ way, peering down at the little structures they were building in the sand. None of the structures lasted long: The keks would clamber over them, knock them down, start over again. Or else a chance wave would come up higher than normal and wash everything away. The keks’ response was always the same: Start building again.

“What are you guys doing?” Nita said in the Speech.

What we must, one of them, or all of them, said, and kept right on building.

Nita shook her head, amused. It was exactly the kind of purposeful but unilluminating answer you tended to get from ants when you asked them where they were going, or from a mosquito when you asked it why it had bitten you. Bugs had very limited agendas and had trouble talking about anything else.

“Why?” Nita said.

Because.

She shook her head and smiled…then winced as the motion of the headshake made her neck sting. “It’s nice to have a purpose in life,” she said to the keks.

Yes, it is, they said, and started working faster, as if trying to make up time for having been distracted by her.

Nita smiled and let them be. She walked off up the beach again, thinking, I really should just go back and get the sunblock. Her dad would be annoyed with her when he saw the burn, but all the same, she wanted to see him. The precis that her manual had been passing on to her, via Dairine, were too dry to give her any sense of what was really going on at home.

Slowly she walked back to the Peliaens’ place. The absolute peace of it, as she came within sight of the house and its outbuildings in the moons’ light and starlight, impressed itself on Nita once again. Yet, also, at the same time, up came that strange something-wrong, something-missing feeling that she’d started to experience more and more often as she and Kit settled in.

I think I’m just not used to things being so peaceful, she thought. I’ve got to let myself get used to it. She smiled ruefully as she made her way quietly to the outbuilding that was her and Kit’s bedroom. With my luck, I’ll get used to it just around the time we have to go home.

From the other side of the big room’s dividing screen, as she went in, she could just hear Ponch snoring softly. / wonder if the dogs have started acting normally back home, Nita thought. Or if they’re behaving worse. Well, I’ll let Kit

find out about that.

Very quietly, she went over to the darkness against the far wall of her side of the room, the worldgate that led back to her house. Being careful of the edges, she stepped through.

Without any fuss, she was in her mostly empty bedroom. Maybe I should put the desk back in here, she thought, because I don’t think it’s going to get a lot of use where we are. With her schoolwork done, she was determined not to think another thought about school for at least a week, if she could help it.

Nita glanced out the window. It was midafternoon. The bedroom’s wall clock said 3:30. I thought it would be earlier, she thought. My time sense is so screwed up. She looked at her bed, saw no sunblock there. Either her dad had forgotten to put it out for her, or he just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

She went out of her room and paused by Dairine’s door and looked in: No one was there. Out with her new buddies, Nita thought. Or visiting them in their pup tents, possibly.

She went on down to the bathroom and rummaged among the various sun creams, sunblocks, and tanning oils in the cupboard under the sink. Finally, she came up with a bottle of high-factor stuff only a few months past its use-by date. This should be okay, Nita thought, and went quietly down the stairs.

The living room was empty, but from the dining room she heard a voice, Tom’s voice. Nita froze only a few steps from the stairs.

“It’s something we just have to deal with,” Tom was saying. “Sometimes you hit—When we speak of them in English, we call them ‘cardinal events,’ which is a vague equivalent to a word in the Speech that’s derived from the Speech’s root word for ‘hinge.’ There are moments in the lives of people, of nations, of cultures, of worlds, on which everything to come afterward hangs, or turns—like the hinge of a door. If intervention comes at one moment, the door swings one way. If it comes a moment early, a moment late, the hinge swings another. And sometimes no intervention, regardless of its size, is enough to change the way the door swings. There are some changes that simply have so much impetus behind them, driven by the force of earlier events—the way in which other ‘hinges’ have swung—that there’s no stopping them, no matter what you do. As a result, a life changes, or ends…or a thousand lives do, or three thousand…and whole avalanches of change come tumbling down through the opening left by the way that door swung. All a wizard can do, in the face of one of these avalanches of chance and change, is pick a spot to intervene in the consequences and try to clean up afterward.” And Tom sighed. “No matter what we do,” he said, “entropy is still running.”

There was a long silence. “I’m so sorry,” Nita heard her dad say.

“Not half as sorry as we were,” Tom said, “that we couldn’t stop it.” Another painful breath. “But day by day, in the aftermath, we do what we can, and try to be ready for the next ‘hinge’… try to recognize it when it comes. It’s all we can do. And we have to keep reminding ourselves, because we know it’s true, that what comes of what we do will eventually make a difference; and the Powers That Be will find a way through even our species’ worst cruelties to something better, if we just don’t give up.”

There was a silence. “The way you look,” her dad said, “you haven’t been

getting a lot of rest lately.”

“No,” Tom said. For a moment or so there was silence. “There’s trouble coming.”

“Worse than what we’ve got now?”

“Unless we can stop it,” Tom said, “much, much worse. But we’ve got a head start: a fighting chance. Actually, a lot better than just a chance. We can’t do anything now but see how it goes.”

A chill ran down Nita’s back. “Let me know if I can help,” her dad said.

“This is help,” Tom said after a moment. “And I appreciate it.”

Nita breathed in, breathed out, unnerved, then turned softly and went back upstairs. I’ll come see Daddy tomorrow. This isn’t the time.

Once upstairs, she put her head into Dairine’s door again, on the off chance that she might have come back from wherever she was.

“She’s out,” said a scratchy little voice from Dairine’s desk.

Spot was sitting there, looking strangely forlorn under Dairine’s desk lamp. Nita went quietly in, thought about sitting on the bed, then decided against it; it would creak.

“You okay, big guy?” Nita said.

“Okay,” Spot said.

Nita shook her head and stroked his case a little. He was such a one-person machine. “Tell Dairine I was here, all right?” she said. “I didn’t talk to Dad…He was busy. But there’s some stuff I want her to check into for me. I’ll talk to her about it tomorrow.”

“All right,” Spot said.

“Thanks.”

Nita went back to her room. As she came in, the worldgate came alive enough to display a faint shadow of itself, a circle hanging in midair, through which the rest of her room appeared grayed out. Nita ducked a little, stepped through it again.

On the far side of the bedroom, Ponch was still snoring. Nita sat down on the edge of her bed-couch, suddenly feeling very tired, even though she’d spent no energy whatever on the worldgating. It was strange to hear Tom, someone on whose strength and expertise Nita depended, sounding like he needed to lean on someone else in turn. But why wouldn’t he, sometimes? she thought. He’s just a wizard like the rest of us…

And, “Trouble coming,” he’d said. Nita was going to get Dairine to look into that and report back to her.

In the meantime…maybe I could sleep a little.

She got undressed and crawled in under the light covers. It was not one of those nights when it “rained stars” in a periodic fall of dust and small fragments from the moonbelt. The darkness remained quiet except for the whisper of the sea, and the softer whispers of the voices in the air, untroubled by anything Nita might have seen or heard in some other world far away. Here everything was fine; here the world was going the way it was supposed to go.

That soft insistence itself troubled her for a while. But, eventually, Nita did sleep.

At dawn, Nita woke up from a completely irrational dream of ice and icebergs and snow.

She sat up on her long couch and felt the back of her neck, rather gingerly. At least I won’t burn any worse now, she thought, but this still bothers me…