Wizards At War

3: Initial Reconnaissance

Nita let out a long breath as she went back up the driveway. Kit’s uncertainty disturbed her… possibly because she was feeling more than her own share. I’m so used to having Kit to backstop me, she thought. Whenever I get nervous, he’s always there to help me get a grip. But for a while I may have to do the gripping.

Across from the back door, Roshaun was leaning against the fence that ran just this side of the lilac bushes, with yet another lollipop sticking out of his face. Carmela was leaning against the fence, too, on one side of him. Spot seemed to have wandered off.

On the other side of Roshaun, her arms folded, eyes narrowed in annoyance, Dairine was saying, “He’s never done this before. How am I supposed to depend on Spot if he can’t even remember things from one moment to the next? He’s my version of the manual! What if this memory loss thing starts extending to his reference functions? The little spells I can keep in my head, sure, but how’m I supposed to do wizardry if he can’t feed me the complicated ones?” She let out a long breath. “I’m going to ask Spot’s people to check him out. If they can figure out what’s going on with him…”

Roshaun took the lollipop out and examined it. It was a red-and-white-striped one. “Everything is changing,” he said. “We are all going to have to learn new ways to be wizards, I think, if we are to bring our worlds safely through this.” He glanced at Nita’s manual. “Some of us have already started work, it seems.”

“It’s going to take me a while just to get used to how much it weighs now,” Nita said, hefting the manual. She glanced around. “Sker’ret went out. He seem okay to you?”

“He was fine.”

“Where’s Filif?”

“He might have gone through his gate downstairs,” Dairine said. “Where are you headed?”

“Gotta make a call,” Nita said, and went up the steps.

Inside the back door she paused and looked down the basement steps. “Filif?” she called.

No answer. Nita raised her eyebrows and went down the wooden stairs, reaching up for the string that hung down from the bulb at the stairs’ bottom. The basement was unfinished—some painted metal posts supporting the joists of the upstairs floor, a concrete floor underfoot, mostly covered with many cardboard and wooden boxes containing old books, kitchenware and magazines, and much other junk: off to the left, the oil burner and various yard tools; off to the right, an ancient busted chest freezer; more boxes, and the washing machine and dryer. Cellar windows high in the cinderblock walls let in a little daylight, except for three yard-wide circular spots on the wall at the back of the house. In those, complete darkness reigned, the visual effect of worldgates in standby mode: two of them Filif’s and Sker’ret’s original ones, and the third a replacement for Roshaun’s, which had become nonfunctional after being stuck into the core of the Sun.

From behind her came a faint clattering noise. Nita glanced that way and saw that Sker’ret was pouring himself down the stairs. “Hey,” she said, “have you seen Filif?”

“He said he was going to the Crossings to have a look around, while he still had free time,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll be meeting him. Do you need him, Senior?”

“Oh, please, don’t you start,” Nita said. “Look at this thing!” She showed him her manual.

He pointed several eyes at it. “It looks like the inside of my head feels at the moment,” Sker’ret said. “I wish my people got our wizardry like that. It looks so much more manageable.”

“Yeah, well, I wish my people didn’t have to keep it a secret,” Nita said. “Like yours don’t.”

Sker’ret chuckled at her. “We’ve all got our little problems.”

“The question is how much longer we’re gonna have them,” Nita said. “Years and years, I hope. How long will you be?”

“Not long.”

“Good. And listen—I meant to ask you earlier.” Then she stopped herself. Maybe this is too nosy … No, we have to start keeping an eye on each other; we may be getting into some dangerous places soon. “Sker’ret,” she said, “if you don’t want to go back to your own people for some reason… no matter what happens in the next few weeks… stay with us. We’re glad to have you here.”

Sker’ret held all his eyes still, the only time since she’d come home from the holidays that Nita could remember seeing him do that. “Thank you,” Sker’ret said. “Seriously, I thank you. I’ll be back in a while.”

And he poured himself through his own worldgate at some speed, vanishing into the darkness of the interface segment after segment, until nothing was left.

Oh, God, did I insult him somehow? I hope not. But now for my own problems…

Nita went up the cellar stairs and into the kitchen. Outside in the driveway she could still hear Dairine’s and Roshaun’s voices raised, and then Carmela’s laughter. Nita shook her head, amused. Dairine and Roshaun, she thought. I don’t get it. They’re too much alike: he ought to drive her nuts. In fact, it sounds like he is driving her nuts … But maybe that’s it, Nita thought, picking up the wireless phone from its cradle. Maybe she likes the challenge. Looks like she’s picked herself a big one.

Nita stared at the phone, once more envying wizards who practiced in cultures where they didn’t have to work undercover. Though the visual effects of wizardry often went without being noticed by ordinary humans, you couldn’t absolutely count on it. And a “passive” effect, like one’s absence for three weeks when they were supposed to be in school, would definitely get noticed. I’ve got no choice, Nita thought. But I wish I didn’t have to make the call.

Nita fiddled with the phone until it consented to display the number that had been given her for use in emergencies. She looked at the name: Millman, Robert. And right under it, the entry that her dad refused to erase: Mom (cellphone).

Nita sighed and punched the dial button. After a few moments’ silence, the phone at the other end started ringing. It rang seven or eight times, and Nita stood there thinking, What do I say to him, exactly? She had been surprised enough to find out that the school psychologist even knew there were wizards, let alone that he knew some personally. But she had no idea how much they might have told him about what the practice of wizardry was like.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Millman?”

“Speaking; what can—Nita?” There was a second’s hesitation while she imagined him putting on his professional hat in case it was needed. “How’s your break going?”

“Uh, it got kind of complicated.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. But everything else isn’t.”

“I see. What can you tell me about that?”

Professional hat maybe, but not professional voice. He sounded the way he always did, absolutely unruffled, ready to let you set matters out at your own speed. Nita had found Millman surprisingly easy to talk to, even before he let her know that he knew wizards and wizardry existed. “I’m still trying to figure that out,” Nita said.

“You know that what you say is safe with me,” Mr. Millman said.

“Yeah. But it’s your safety I’m concerned about. It wouldn’t be very nice to get you all unstable.”

“I’ll take my chances that I can cope with whatever weirdness you’re about to drop on me. Tell me what you need.”

“Right now … some time off.”

“Meaning time after your spring break ends?”

“Yes.”

“On mental-health grounds, I take it?”

“Yeah.”

There was a brief silence. “Not that such things are impossible to arrange,” Millman said, “but—”

“I wouldn’t be asking you about this unless it was serious.”

“Okay. If I’m right in thinking that this has something to do with your break so far, you should tell me about how that went.”

“Uh…” The question, as always, was just how much to tell him. “We went off-world on sort of a student-exchange program,” Nita said. “It was pretty nice, most of the time.”

“But there were problems.”

“Yeah.” She had to restrain the temptation to yell down the phone, Problems? You bet, because they sent us to Paradise, and we found out the snake was still living in it. And if that wasn’t weird enough, the snake was sort of on our side for a change! Mostly. But even had Nita felt comfortable telling Millman about it, she hadn’t yet found the words to explain, even to herself, why the experience still unnerved her so.

“From the sound of what you’re not saying,” Millman said, “I gather you’re still processing the results. What’s going on that makes you need this extra time off?”

“There’s about to be trouble with the older wizards,” Nita said.

“The Seniors?”

“All the adult wizards. And there’s an incoming threat that we’ve got to find out how to cope with, in a hurry.”

“You couldn’t possibly tell me anything about what’s causing this threat?”

“I wish I could,” Nita said. “Even the older wizards don’t understand it completely yet … and they don’t know what to do about it. That’s what we’re going to have to figure out. And I really don’t know if I feel up to this!”

“But you don’t feel you have any choice, it sounds like.”

“None at all.”

“Dairine’s having to deal with this situation, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else I should know about?”

“Kit, too,” she said. Millman knew he was a wizard as well, but no more than that.

There was more silence. “This is problematic,” Millman said. “Especially since I haven’t been seeing Kit professionally. The school system would buy into the concept for you and Dairine, since we’ve been working together for a while. But as for Kit… And I’m reluctant to lie about this, not just because lying is wrong, but because it undermines my relationship and my contract with the school.”

“I know,” Nita said.

There was another silence. Finally, in a changed tone of voice, Millman said, “This kind of lost school time is not good, especially with your aptitude tests coming up.”

“If we don’t do something pretty drastic right away,” Nita said, “there may not be a planet to have aptitude tests on for very long. Or there might be a planet… but no one left on it.”

She could just hear Millman thinking. “You need to understand,” he said after a moment, “that just because we share the same privileged information about your special talents, I’m not to be routinely considered as a get-out-of-jail card. This gambit isn’t going to work more than once. Just so you know.”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Being in this situation again is the very, very last thing on my mind.”

“Good.” He was silent for a little longer. “How long do you think you’ll need?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Well,” Millman said at last, “I can cover for you for ten days, tops. I can pull Kit under the umbrella as well by telling the school that something came up for him over the spring break: something crucial that needs to be sorted out. Would that be true?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Absolutely.”

“All right. If his parents will back me up, we’ll be okay for that long. But that’s all I can give you. After ten days, if you don’t show up at school again, you’re likely to find the district superintendent banging on your dad’s door. Or, if someone at school gets too nervous, social services, and possibly the cops.”

Nita swallowed. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll tell Kit.”

“Good. Can you give me some more detail about what exactly is going to be happening to the planet, so that I can help people around here deal with the fallout, if things get sufficiently strange?”

Fallout, Nita thought. I wish he hadn’t used that word. The thought of mushroom clouds sprouting all over the planet was haunting her. “I haven’t had a lot of time yet to go over the pre-mission précis in my manual. But people are going to start losing their sense of what’s underneath reality. Only physical things are going to seem real, after a while. And even those won’t feel right for long. Finally, only violent emotions are going to feel good—”

She wondered how much sense this was going to make to Millman, if any. But the faint scratching noise she heard in the background suggested that he was taking notes. “Okay,” Dr. Millman murmured. “Any sense yet of what you’ll have to do to reverse this situation?”

“The universe has started expanding too fast,” Nita said, “and we have to stop it before it tears itself apart.”

There was another of those long, thoughtful pauses. “Um,” Millman said. “Okay, I see why you might need a few extra days off for that.”

The complete dryness of his voice was bizarrely reassuring to Nita, so much so that she laughed out loud.

“Better,” Millman said. “Hold that mood. For my own part, I’ll do what I can for people who start having trouble at school. But, meanwhile, keep me posted, all right? If things are going to get a lot worse all of a sudden, I’d appreciate knowing about it. We’re all on the same side here.”

That was the thought that Nita was still having trouble wrapping her brains around. She was much more used to hiding the things going on with her from everyone at school. “I’ll do what I can,” she said.

“So will I,” said Millman, “and together we’ll have to hope it’s enough. But, Nita… for you, this has to seem like an impossible burden.”

She swallowed hard. “Yes,” Nita said.

“Call me if you start to feel the strain. I’ll help for as long as I can.”

“Thanks.”

“Okay. Go well,” he said.

“Yeah. Thanks again.”

Millman hung up.

She sat there staring at the phone for a moment before sticking it back in its cradle. Well, she thought, at least that’s handled.

So. A total of two weeks to save the universe, huh?

It did seem absolutely impossible. But there would be powerful forces working to help them. And when someone believed in you—

Maybe this won’t exactly be a piece of cake, she thought. But at least you know people are rooting for you when you start cutting it up!

Nita picked up her manual, tucked it under her arm, and headed upstairs to her room.

***

One side of the dining room at the Rodriguez house had a sofa against the wall, and on that sofa Kit sprawled, lying flat on his back and reading his own manual. For maybe the tenth time, his arms had become tired enough that he had to rest the book on his stomach. He was having trouble believing how much new data was in that book all of a sudden. The effect wasn’t new: any manual would grow and shrink depending on what information you needed. But this time it felt like there was more stuff in there. It felt more important, and somehow more dangerous.

He turned a page and looked once more at the image he’d kept revisiting: a slowly rotating image of the galaxy, seen as if from several hundred thousand light-years away. It was displaying in negative, the stars black against white space, and the space was full of slowly growing fuzzy dark patches.

From the living room came the sound of laughter: Carmela, long since back from dumping her load of teen magazines at Nita’s place, was now sitting in front of the entertainment system’s big screen and talking to someone in the Speech. “No,” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s too early here to even think about grenfelzing…”

Kit let his manual fall closed. “‘Mela?” he said over the sound of alien laughter from the TV.

“Kit, I’m talking to somebody. Can’t it wait?”

“If I wait, I’ll forget. What is grenfelzing, exactly?”

“It’s kind of like emmfozing,” his sister said after a moment, “but with chocolate.”

Kit covered his eyes. “Sorry I asked,” he said. Since he’d made the mistake of using wizardry to configure the entertainment system, Carmela had been spending what seemed like hours every day talking to the various alien species whose hundreds and thousands of interactive channels had suddenly become available along with the more commonplace Earth cable. ‘Mela’s grasp of the wizardly Speech had been getting more acute. But at the same time it seemed to Kit that Carmela’s sense of humor was getting weird, even for her.

Well, at least she’s not turning into a wizard, Kit thought. It’s much too late for that.

He turned his attention back to his manual. “Did that last message go through?”

Received, the manual page said.

“Okay,” he said to the manual, “show me again where all this started.”

The image of the galaxy reset itself. “Zoom in on that,” Kit said.

The spiral grew and swelled past the ability of the page to show it all. Shortly after that, the page was full of the empty space between the Milky Way and the next galaxy over. “There’s nothing there at all,” he said softly.

Ponch was lying upside down on the floor with his feet in the air. Now he glanced up. Where? Ponch said.

“Here.” Kit put the manual down on the floor, stood up. “Walk-in, please?” he said to the manual.

The imagery spread out of the book format and surrounded Kit, obscuring the dining room. He walked into the space between the Milky Way’s spiral and the spot that Tom had shown them earlier. Ponch got up off the now-invisible dining room rug, shook himself, and wandered into the negative-image intergalactic brightness, standing beside Kit with his tail idly waving.

“This is where it began,” Kit said. “You sense anything?”

Ponch stretched out his head and sniffed. I don’t smell anything, he said. But it’s hard for me to scent through this. Your manual has its own way of telling what’s happening. It’s not like the way I scent things.

Kit shook his head. “The manual doesn’t detect anything, either,” he said after a moment. He reached out a hand and poked it into the brightness. The manual obediently rolled down a menu showing Kit a list, in the specialized characters of the Speech, for the various forces and energies that had been operating in that part of space when the stretching had happened. “Light, gravity, string structure, everything was behaving itself.” He shook his head and closed the Walk-in. “Then this came out of nowhere…”

In the living room, the laughter started again. Kit rolled his eyes, picked up his manual, and slapped it shut. “How am I supposed to save the universe with all this noise?” he hollered.

“Go save it somewhere else?” Carmela said. “I mean, even if you go read in your own room, and shut the door so that the sound of other people having lives doesn’t bother you, you’ll still be in this universe. Right? And you should be able to save it just fine from there.”

Kit gave Ponch a helpless look. “She has a point…”

I don’t think it would be smart for you to admit that, Ponch said, glancing in Carmela’s direction.

“Come on,” Kit said, getting up.

He went through the living room as quietly as he could. Carmela, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, didn’t look up as he passed. As Kit went up the stairs, behind him she said, “You’re tense. I forgive you.”

I hate it when she forgives me and she’s right, Kit thought. But aloud he just said, “Thanks,” and went up the stairs.

Ponch trotted up behind him, his nails clicking on the wood of the steps. So you were serious before, when you said about us having to save the universe?

They came out on the landing, and Kit paused there for a moment with his hand on the banister. Ponch went under his arm and paused, too, looking up at him. “Yeah,” Kit said.

I wasn’t sure if you were joking, Ponch said.

Kit laughed a single laugh. “Not this time.”

All right. Let’s do it, then.

Kit laughed again as they went into his room. “You’re on,” he said. “You point me in the right direction when you see what we need to do.” He tossed his manual onto the bed and looked around at the place: desk and work chair, chest of drawers, braided rug, pushpin-stuck maps of the Moon and Mars, neatly made bed. Everything was unnaturally clean, but then he’d been away for the better part of ten days and hadn’t had time enough to get things into their normal comfortable mess.

He sprawled on the bed, picked up the pillows at the head of it and started whacking them into a shape he could lean against, while trying to think some more about where to start attacking this problem. The weirdest thing is that space started stretching in some place where there was so little stuff to do a wizardry on. Anyone who could work directly on the structure of space-time is going to be really powerful…

That was the thought that kept making Kit think that once again the Lone Power was involved. But Tom and Carl seemed real eager to keep us from coming to that conclusion. And if the Powers That Be themselves think that this is something new…

He picked up the manual and flipped it open again, pausing briefly to look at the Wizard’s Oath, all by itself in a block of text in the middle of its page. Just after that came a section containing your own personal data—especially about the way the “long version” of your name looked in the Speech at the moment, information that was vital for doing spells. After that normally came the sections on spell writing, specialized vocabulary in the Speech, and so on. But now, before those sections, Kit’s manual contained a “notifications” area nearly a quarter inch thick. Every page of it was full of bold headings and blocks of text that rewrote themselves as you read them, constantly updating with real-time information from the physical universe. He glanced down at one heading: METEOROLOGICAL INTERVENTION:

Diversion of tropical disturbance/incipient cyclone “Pewa” (NOAA) aka CP102010 (JTWC) approved JD 2455307.2625. Cyclone centerpoint latitude: 21:11:15N, longitude 141:55:30E, SSE of Iwo Jima. Storm heat energy release presently holding at only 1.6 × 1012 watts/day, making it ideal for “bounce-away” intervention within thirty hours (cutoff time/latest implementation 2455312.8900). Intervention team is scouting for available backup wizards with past experience in tropical-latitude hydro and meteo work (usual SE Asia specs on assignment to master [interim] crisis evaluation group Earth). Seniors are urgently requested to check their local talent for availability.

Kit shook his head, for this was just one small problem on a planet full of them. On all the pages that followed were status reports on more interventions of every kind. Wizards all over the world were doing spells for everything, from melting back an overaggressive glacier to stopping a small southeast Asian “bush war” from breaking out by giving all the potential combatants a brief, profound case of amnesia. The fighters in question had instantly forgotten what they’d come for; by the time the spell wore off, all of them had wandered hours and miles away from the battlefield, and were universally so freaked out that they had no desire to find their way back..

Sweet, Kit thought, reading that précis with admiration. And smart. But that spell must have really cost the wizards. The psychotropic wizardries are so tough to work.

The trouble was that the smart people who thought up that solution were the very ones whose expertise the Earth would shortly be losing—the typical adult wizards who worked the spells that kept Life going, or stopped bad things from happening, unnoticed by anyone but other wizards, their Seniors, and the Powers That Be. It’s going to be us carrying the weight now. And either doing what the real Seniors have been doing… or screwing it up.

Kit made himself breathe. Don’t get too hung up on how big it looks, he thought. Take it a piece at a time. That has to be what Tom and Carl did. They weren’t born Seniors.

Ponch jumped up on the bed and walked up to just behind Kit, flopping down. The springs creaked under them both as he settled himself with his head over Kit’s shoulder. Kit turned over a few more pages, looking at team wizardries going on all over the planet. There are so many things happening, Ponch said, looking down at the pages.

Kit turned his head to look at Ponch in some surprise. “Can you read this?”

I see things happening on the page there, Ponch said. Those marks—when I look at them, I see the ice melting. Is that reading?

“Maybe not exactly the way I understand it,” Kit said, “but, yeah, I think so.” He turned another page.

Look at all the spells. Everybody’s so busy.

“This is what the wizardly world’s like every day,” Kit said. “And for us, it’s about to get a lot busier than this if we’re going to solve this problem.”

What if you can’t?

It was a thought that had been coming up for Kit about every ten minutes. “We have to,” he said. “We don’t have a get-out clause. We have to do everything to make the ‘end of the world’ not happen. Everything.” He was surprised to find himself shaking.

From outside in the hall came a loud popping sound and a puff of displaced air that stirred some of the papers on Kit’s desk. A second later, Nita looked in Kit’s door. “Hey,” she said.

“Thought you were going to meet me ‘upstairs,’” Kit said, jerking a thumb toward the ceiling, or, rather, toward something beyond it.

“I thought I’d check here first.” She came over to the bed and looked down over his shoulder at the manual. “Yeah,” she said, seeing what Kit was looking at. “I’ve been spending a while with that. Any ideas?”

“I’ve got a few,” Kit said. “But we need to talk to the others—” Kit tipped the cover of the manual shut and got up. “You tell your dad yet?”

“Not yet. You talk to your mom and pop?”

“Yeah, but I think it’s not the kind of conversation you can have just once. My pop just said, ‘I trust you to do the right thing. You’ll figure it out. You always have before.’”

“Oh, God,” Nita said. “Well, at least Millman has us covered.”

“Millman?” Kit gave her a surprised look. “You and Dairine, yeah, but—”

“No, you, too, if your folks’ll go along with it. But only ten days.”

I should eat first! Ponch said. He scrambled off the bed, turned several times in an excited circle, and shot out the bedroom door and down the stairs, making small enthusiastic woofing noises to himself.

“I was going to ask you how he was taking all this,” Nita said as they went after him, “but I guess that’s my answer.”

“As long as the end of the world doesn’t mess up his mealtimes,” Kit said, “he’ll be fine.”

“Hah,” Nita said. “Anyway, you’ve been looking the problem over again—”

“Yeah. I hate to say it, but I think Tom and Carl and the other Senior Wizards were running down a blind alley.” They went down the stairs into the living room. “I think whatever started that part of space expanding was done from somewhere a long way off. No point in wasting time sniffing around out there.”

“Ohaiyo gozaimasu!” yelled the big-screen TV and the DVR and the DVD player all together as the two of them came into the living room.

Kit stopped just long enough to bow to them. “Hey, guys,” he said. “Anything good on today?”

“…On insponder 2186043, the Gratuitous Transaction Channel presents the sixth-rerun thirteenth episode of How Much for Just the Planet? In this episode, Mexev finally hears from Anielle, who reads her an electronic communication from Turun, alleging that Nisb had a clandestine meeting with Keniphna at which they discussed the possible bribery of Twell—”

Kit gave Nita a look. “This is what happens when certain people leave the Galactic TV guide turned up to ‘verbose.’” He looked back toward the big screen and the other equipment. “Guys,” he said in the Speech, “back it down to ‘vaguely tantalizing,’ will you?”

“Ahem,” the DVR said, sounding put out. “The Planetary Acquisitions team is menaced by a strange alien force.”

Nita snickered.

Kit rolled his eyes and led the way into the dining room. “Remind me never to use wizardry on anything electronic again,” he said. “Anyway, even if the Seniors managed to stop the expansion in that one part of space, what were they going to do then? Patch all the other spots one at a time? Even if there were enough wizards to do it, it’d be like sticking Band-Aids on a sponge. The leakage just starts happening somewhere else.”

“I think you’re right,” said Nita. “Small-scale solutions won’t work on this problem. We need to stop wasting time on finicky analysis of the affected space, and find the source of what made it misbehave.”

“Wherever that might be,” Kit said. He collapsed onto the sofa. “So what now?”

“I think first we should start getting in touch with the younger wizards who’ve been picked for these intervention teams Tom was talking about,” Nita said. “I know he said he’d be in touch, but somehow I don’t feel comfortable just sitting around and waiting.”

“Neither do I,” Kit said. “I had an idea about that, too—”

The back door creaked open. “Another charming bijoux residence,” said a cool voice from just outside. “The overall understatement is most effective.”

A few moments later Dairine came in, followed by Roshaun, who gazed around him with the vague, polite interest of someone visiting a theme park, or some kind of historical recreation. Behind them came Filif and Sker’ret, who also looked around at everything, but with more interest. As the screen door slammed shut behind them, Ponch ran over to the new arrivals and started jumping up and down among them in excitement, slurping Sker’ret and sticking his nose in among Filif’s fronds.

“You did have your disguises on when you came over here, didn’t you?” Kit said.

“Please,” Dairine said, putting Spot down. He went spidering away past them all and into the living room. “What’s tough now is getting the seemings off them.” She glanced over at Roshaun in his baggy T-shirt. “Some of us are becoming real fashion victims.”

The back door creaked open again, and Carmela came in. “‘Mela,” Kit said, “have you seen Mama and Pop?”

“They went out for a while,” Carmela said. “Pop said something about ‘bracing himself for the rest of the explanation.’”

“Okay,” Kit said. Then he blinked, for an odd humming sound was coming from the living room. Kit headed in there, with Nita in tow. Spot was crouched down in front of the TV, staring at it with his own stalky eyes, and images and words in the Speech were flickering across the wide screen much too quickly for Kit to follow. “What’re you guys up to?” Kit said.

“Dataaaaa…,” said the TV and the DVR and the DVD all together, and fell silent again.

“Maybe we don’t really want to know,” Nita said. “It might be some kind of relationship thing. The secret life of machines.”

The two of them wandered back into the dining room, where Carmela had just finished getting some glasses down from one of the cupboards. “Boy,” she said with satisfaction as she went back into the kitchen, “this is a whole lot more interesting than just spending the day grenfelzing.”

Roshaun looked baffled. “Grenfelzing? What is that?”

“It’s like emmfozing, except that—”

“Okay, hold it right there. I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” Kit said. “Since when do aliens know about chocolate?!”

Carmela gave him a pitying look as she came in with a carton of fruit juice and a bottle of cola. “Poor little brother,” she said. “You mean you actually don’t know why Earth has so many UFO sightings?”

“Thought it was something to do with human beings thinking they’re the center of the universe.” Kit snorted. “Like other species have so much time to waste kidnapping us. Not to mention making weird patterns in wheat fields.”

“Oh, no, those are just people with boards and ropes,” Carmela said, ducking back into the kitchen. She came out a moment later with a bottle of spring water, which she put down in front of Filif. “And, very occasionally, sentient ball lightning. But most of the aliens are here for cocoa plants. The only reason people get abducted is when they have chocolate on them.”

Nita looked at Kit. “Please tell me she’s making this up!” she said.

Kit could only shrug. “She spends half her time watching the alien versions of the Discovery Channel. It could be true.”

“It is true,” Carmela said. “For silicon-based life-forms, one of the chemicals in chocolate is an aphrodisiac.”

“Oh, now, wait a minute!” Kit said, and covered his eyes with one hand.

“But most warm-blooded carbon-based species just really like the taste,” Carmela said. “Every time a new species finds out about chocolate, they send someone here to get cocoa plants so they can take them home and genetically tailor them to their physiologies.” Carmela smiled a bright and infuriating smile. “See, I don’t ‘waste’ all my time in alien chat areas. I’ve been doing educational things. Like telling my chat buddies which brands of chocolate are best.”

Kit was left with the image of some intergalactic SWAT team turning up on his doorstep and arresting his sister for being a cocoa pusher. “Why do I get the feeling that you are totally out of control?”

“Your control,” said Carmela, and wandered off, smiling angelically. “You’re just now noticing?”

Kit clutched his head as Nita stifled a laugh. “It’s not funny,” Kit muttered. “And here I was just hoping we might survive the next month or so! Now I have to worry about my sister getting our whole planet put on probation for corrupting underage species or something.”

The doorbell rang.

Aha, Kit thought, and braced himself.

Nita’s amusement at the way Carmela was putting Kit through the wringer was diverted by a weird feeling she couldn’t quite analyze. It was like feeling the sun on sunburned skin; and it felt directional, so that she could get a sense, in her mind anyway, of where it was coming from. She turned to look toward the front door. Now what the—

“Probably just another of the thundering herd,” Carmela said, frowning, and heading that way herself.

“Don’t let any of your would-be boyfriends in here!” Kit said.

“Are you kidding?” Carmela said. “There’s a lot cooler stuff happening in here than mere guys.”She vanished around the corner into the living room.

“Someone’s being unusually cooperative today,” Kit said under his breath. “I bet I know why.”

Nita looked at him. Oh no, she said silently. She doesn’t think that just because she knows about what’s going on, that she might get to go along with—

If she gets that idea, Kit said, believe me, I’ll get her past it. Way past it. We have more than enough problems.

Nita heard Carmela open the front door. The silence that followed was entirely uncharacteristic, so much so that Nita looked in that direction, still wondering at that uneasy “sunburn” sensation.

A voice at the front door said, “Uh, is Kit here?”

Nita’s eyes went wide.

Oh… my… God, she thought.

“Or Nita?” the voice said.

“Uh, yeah,” Carmela said, after another of those unusually long pauses. “Yeah. Can I tell her who’s asking for her?”

Nita stood there for several seconds more getting used to what was happening, and then got up and headed for the Rodriguezes’ front door.

Carmela stood there looking up at a tall dark figure dressed in black jeans, black shirt, a black leather jacket over it all, and with that shaggy longish dark hair hanging down over one eye, in just the way Nita remembered.

“Ronan,” Nita said.

Ronan Nolan Junior glanced over Carmela’s head at Nita, and actually smiled, though as usual for him it was a rather grim and edgy smile. “Hey,” he said, “dai stihó.”

“Dai, cousin.” Nita thought for a moment, and then said, “Or is it ‘cousins‘?”

He rolled his eyes. “Some days,” he said, “your guess’d be as good as mine.” He looked from her to Carmela. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” Carmela said, sounding rather stunned.

Ronan stepped in and glanced around the living room. “Listen,” he said, “normally I wouldn’t just show up without warning—”

“Is anything normal at the moment?” Nita said.

“Now you’d be asking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nita said. “Believe it or not, it’s kind of good to see you.”

“Kind of?”

She smiled slightly. Ronan smiled a little, too, then looked down at his feet. Nita followed his glance. To her surprise, Spot was standing in front of Ronan, staring up at him with multiple stalked eyes.

“Three matters unknown but soon to be:

The way of the Gods with the created,

The way of the created with the Gods,

The way between them across the bridge of Being.”

Ronan blinked as Spot walked away again, toward the TV and the DVD and DVR, where he sat down on the rug and both legs and eyes vanished.

“You remember Spot,” Nita said.

Ronan raised his eyebrows. “Had an upgrade, from the looks of him,” he said.

“Yeah. Well, he’s started doing poetry. Haiku, sort of.”

Ronan shook his head. “Triads,” he said. “In Ireland we used to get a lot of prophecies that way: everything in threes.”

Nita shrugged. “His basic logic’s trinary, Dairine says. But at least it beats him sitting in the corner going ‘uh-oh’ all day.”

Ronan snorted. “Been hearing a fair amount of that myself,” he said. “That’s why I’m here. You’ve been in touch with your Advisories about the trouble that’s coming—”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Did they seem a little less helpful than usual?”

“A little,” Nita said, hating to admit it.

Ronan nodded. “It’s the same all over. Well, things are moving already, and we have to be part of it. But I need your help. We need it.”

He looked uncomfortable as he said “we.” That, at least, was in character. “Come on,” Nita said, and led him toward the dining room. Then she paused and turned, responding again to that sun-on-sunburn feeling. “It’s here, isn’t it?” Nita said.

“What’s here?”

“The Spear. You’ve got it with you.”

Ronan nodded. “Thought you might notice.”

Now it was Nita’s turn to laugh a little. “How do you not notice that?” she said, for she’d been present at the forging of the Spear of Light, and had been more frightened by it than by almost anything else she’d seen or experienced during her practice of wizardry. It wasn’t that the Spear was a bad thing: absolutely the opposite. But it was hard to be in the neighborhood of a power of pure goodness for very long. That Ronan could handle the full force of the Spear—had apparently been destined to handle it—made Nita as nervous as the thought of the Power that lived inside his head with him and made dealing with the Spear possible.

“Is it a problem?” Ronan said.

Nita shook her head. “Right now we can use all the help we can get—and that means weapons, too. Where have you got it? In an otherspace pocket?”

“No, in this one.” Ronan reached inside his jacket and came out with a plastic ballpoint pen.

Nita blinked. “That?”

“Mightier than the sword, theoretically,” Ronan said, clicking the point in and out a couple of times. Nita got just the briefest glimpse of a spark of blindingly white fire at the tip of the ballpoint, as if its ink were lightning. “Don’t think I carry it around in its normal shape all day, do you? It’s murder on people’s woodwork.” He slipped the pen back into the inside pocket and went into the dining room past her. “Dai stihó, everybody—”

“Dai stihó,” said five audible voices and one silent one.

Nita stood there watching them all get acquainted with the newcomer. Ronan looked taller somehow. Seems a little late for a growth spurt, Nita thought: Ronan had to be around seventeen now, maybe more. But there was always the possibility that what Nita was picking up was something to do with the Other that lived inside him—a being much older, and far more powerful, than any of them.

She glanced over at Kit as Ronan made his way around to him, and banged a friendly fist against Kit’s. “You don’t look surprised,” Nita said.

Kit and Ronan looked at her, and then at each other, and Ronan raised his eyebrows. “Why would he be?” Ronan said.

“I asked him to come,” Kit said.

Nita’s mouth dropped open. She shut it.

“I was thinking of coming anyway,” Ronan said, “but this makes everything easier.” He glanced around at the other wizards. “And I’m glad to meet you folks, because it seems like you weren’t sent here by accident.”

“No,” Dairine said. “We kind of got that feeling…”

Without warning, Carmela came around the corner and pulled Nita away from behind Ronan, backward and out of sight of the dining room, where Kit had started to ask Ronan something.

“Who. Is. Your. Friend??” Carmela whispered, as Nita regained her balance. “Where did he come from?”

“Ireland. There’s this town on the east coast, it’s called Bray—”

“No, no, no,” Carmela said. “I meant it in a much more existential way. I was referring to his basic, you know, hotness.” Carmela put her head down by Nita’s. “Is he attached?” she whispered.

“In ways it would take me days to describe,” Nita said, “yes.”

Carmela’s face fell.

“But none of them are those kinds of ways,” Nita said.

A smile appeared slowly on Carmela’s face. “Oh, good.” Carmela then strolled back into the dining room in the most casual manner imaginable.

Nita shook her head. Did I think things were getting weird around her? We’re about to set a weirdness baseline the likes of which the planet’s never seen. She went after Carmela.

Ronan had just sat down at the table. The others got comfortable on the sofa or on chairs or on the floor, each according to his kind.

“As I just said to Nita, things are starting to happen already,” Ronan said. “The new ‘young Seniors’ are starting to meet on the Moon, right now. You’d have found out about the gathering shortly from your manuals, or whatever form of the Knowledge you use. But I needed to reach you before you left … because I’ve got access to information that’s too sensitive to be entrusted to the manuals.”

Nita’s eyes went wide.

“Whoa,” Kit said softly.

“Here’s the short version,” Ronan said. “The Powers have learned that hidden somewhere in this universe, there’s an Instrumentality, a weapon, that will stop the stretching of space-time—if we can find it and ‘arm’ it soon enough. They say if we start looking now, there’s a good chance we’ll find the Instrumentality before things get really bad.”

“What are the adult Seniors saying about this?” Sker’ret said.

“Nothing,” Ronan said. “They haven’t been told.”

Nita shot Kit an uncomfortable glance.

“I know how it sounds,” Ronan said. “But we can’t tell them. They’re already losing their power; that’s why the intervention last week failed. And that power loss also means they won’t be able to guard the secret from the one Power who’d benefit most from learning it and sabotaging what we’ve got to do.”

“Which is what?” Carmela said.

Ronan glanced sharply at her. “I’m not sure you should be here,” he said.

“I live here,” Carmela said in the Speech. “Get used to it.”

Ronan looked at her for a moment more, then shrugged. “Well. The One’s Champion has passed me a hint of what the solution to the problem might be. But the Powers can’t tell anybody straight out, not even me.” Ronan looked royally annoyed. “If the Powers speak plainly about this to anyone, or put it in the manuals, the Lone One will shortly know whatever it is They know. So we have to go looking for the weapon with nothing but hints to guide us.”

Nita was shaking her head. “I don’t get it. Why are you the one to get this news? Why didn’t the Powers say anything about this to Tom and Carl and the other Seniors who went out on the intervention last week?”

“Because they’re the ones the Lone Power would expect to be given that news,” Ronan said. “I’m sure It was listening to their every thought. But me? I’m a failure.”

He smiled one of those particularly grim smiles of his as he said it, and Nita winced a little. With Ronan it was often hard to tell whether he was being bitter because he meant it, or whether he was doing it for effect.

“I’ve had the One’s Champion in my head for a good while now,” Ronan said. “And I haven’t done much of anything.” He shrugged. “The usual wizardry: local interventions, small-time stuff. But nothing to suggest that I’ve come to any kind of long-term agreement with the Champion, or that I’m anything to be concerned about.”

And whose idea was that, I wonder? Nita thought. Ronan had at first fought the idea of the ancient warrior Power, which humans had occasionally called Thor, or Athena, or even Michael, winding up inside him. He’d hoped the presence of that Power would eventually just fade away and leave him in peace to be human.

“And if the Lone One eavesdrops on me and isn’t able to hear what’s going on in my head terribly well,” Ronan said, “It’s likely to jump to the conclusion that it’s my fault. Ambivalence … the thing that makes a wizard least effective.” His smile wasn’t quite so bitter this time. “So I guess the Powers fancy me as an undercover agent. It was ‘suggested’ to me that someone I knew would be able to get the search for the Instrumentality started. Right after the suggestion came, you got in touch with me”—he glanced over at Kit—”which kind of clinched it.”

“Great minds think alike,” Kit said.

Ronan’s grin acquired a sly and amused edge to its darkness. “There’ll be other suggestions as we go along,” he said. “And the Champion will keep us from being eavesdropped on. But for the moment, to get started, the Champion says we need a Finder. We need the best one there is.”

Ponch, lying on the floor, lifted his head. That would be me, he said, and yawned, and sat up. What are you looking for?

“All I have to go on is imagery,” Ronan said. “I don’t know where it comes from, and neither does the Champion. But if you really have the tracking gift, my lad, it won’t matter. You’ll be able to find it.”

Kit said, “Ponch is very good. He’s ‘made’ whole universes before, to find what he wanted.”

Ponch’s tail started to wag. Squirrels! he said, and started to jump up and down.

Kit groaned. “Ponch,” he said, “this is so not the moment! First you have to find what Ronan and his ‘friend’ need you to find.”

Then the squirrels? Hurray! At least that was how the thought translated from a deafening spate of mental barking.

Kit exchanged a wry glance with Ronan. “The Lone One has to know something about what Ponch can do.”

“Probably more than we’d like It to. All we can do is try to cover our tracks.”

“Then we should head for the Moon first,” Kit said. “If a lot of wizards are there, it’ll seem normal that we should be there, too. If after that we go out into space as just one more of however many teams, It may get thrown off our track long enough for us to find what we’re looking for.”

“Right you are,” Ronan said. “So we should get going now.”

“What, right now?” Nita said.

Ronan threw her one of those of-course-you-dummy looks that Nita had hated so much until she came to understand that they were caused by impatience, not cruelty. “There are other kinds of ‘now,’” Ronan said, “but, yeah, that was the one I meant.” He looked around at the others. “How about it?”

Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun exchanged glances. “If the Powers That Be want to send us on the hunt,” Sker’ret said, “it seems foolish to refuse.”

“I have some issues at home that will have to be handled,” Roshaun said. “But after that”—he looked over at Dairine—”I have never yet worked directly with one of the Powers That Be.” He smiled. “It should be interesting. For the Power, of course.”

Dairine shot Roshaun a look that he entirely missed, but Nita didn’t. She had to cover her mouth to keep from snickering.

Filif rustled. “I am with you,” he said at last.

Kit turned to Nita. “What do you say?”

She let out a breath. “I say we go,” she said.

Half an hour later, they were on the Moon.