Kit waved a hand to stop her. “Time out for a minute. Why didn’t Dairine take this contact, if it was her they were trying to reach?”
“Dairine wasn’t up for it last night,” Nita said. She let out a long breath. “Or most nights lately. Kit, she and my mom were even closer than Mom and I were, in some ways. She’s taking everything way harder than I am. She’s been missing a lot of school, and my dad’s really worried about it.” Nita’s expression was that of someone purposefully putting a painful subject to one side. “Anyway, she was asleep when the ‘call’ came, and she didn’t wake up to take it, the way she usually would. She was too tired, or else she just didn’t want to. So I got it, somehow or other. But I couldn’t understand it.”
Kit shook his head. “You mean, whoever was on the other end wasn’t using the Speech?”
Nita shook her head. “No, it was. But not the usual way. It was almost like it didn’t know it was speaking: there was something … I don’t know … accidental about the communication. Like whoever it was hadn’t actually meant to call. Except it also felt kind of urgent.”
Kit shook his head. “Were you able to get a location, a place of origin?”
“Just a sense that it was somewhere way out at the edge. I didn’t have time for a proper trace,” Nita said. “It didn’t last long enough. Besides, I was asleep myself. Maybe the message got garbled with something I was dreaming. But normally I would have woken up when something like that came in.”
“You were tired, too,” Kit said.
Nita sighed. “I’m tired all the time,” she said. “It’s just part of the depression, the shrink says. It’ll go away someday.”
“What a big help,” Kit muttered.
Nita laughed then, an oddly wistful sound that startled Kit. “No,” she said. “Really, it is a help. Knowing that someday it will go away makes it a little easier now. Not a lot … but every little bit helps, at the moment.”
“So you got a call from the outer limits,” Kit said. “And you’re not sure what it was about … But at least a little of its message got through.”
“Not a whole lot,” Nita said. “I’m just hoping it ‘calls back’ and either gets Dairine this time, or gets me when I’m awake and can make something out of what it’s saying.” She leaned against the fence. “If the first message was from the same person, or people, it didn’t make sense, either. At least not beyond ‘I can’t get off.’”
“‘I can’t get off…’” Kit thought about it, then shook his head. “Maybe it’s just one of those situations where your brain takes a really alien concept and makes the best translation it can until you have more information.”
“I really don’t know,” Nita said. “I’m going to sit down with the manual later and see if I can find something that’ll throw some light on why I’m not able to understand more clearly what’s coming through.”
“It couldn’t have anything to do with—You know.”
Nita shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think this is just something different that I need to grow into learning how to do. It’s not like even people who’ve been wizards for a long time know every word in the Speech. I may just need to do some vocabulary building.” She shrugged, glanced absently at her watch: the lunch period would be over shortly. “More research… How about you, though?” She looked up again. “I saw your listing, and Tom’s note on it. You found the kid you were looking for?”
“Yeah, but not so that I could make any real contact with him. Another weird situation.”
He told Nita in words, and a few images shared mind to mind, about where he had found Darryl and lost him again. At the sight of the indistinct shape twisting in a halo of lightnings, and the Lone Power standing there watching in the shadows, Nita sucked in a soft, concerned breath, and shook her head. “Poor guy,” she said.
“Poor him, yeah, and poor me, if our ‘old friend’ had decided to shift Its interest elsewhere,” Kit said. “I could have used you there, if only for moral support.”
Nita looked at the ground for a few moments. “Are you sure I’d do you much good at this point?” she said. “I’m not exactly… stable right now. If I lost my grip in the middle of something important, don’t know what I’d do afterward.”
Kit wasn’t sure what to say to that. Nita was too good a wizard to understate or overstate the problem. If she wasn’t confident enough to work actively at the moment, maybe she was wiser to sideline herself somewhat until she felt more sure of herself. That certainty of what to do and how to do it had saved them both more than once. If her certainty should fail at a crucial moment…
“Your call, Neets,” Kit said. “I don’t want to push you.”
“If you really need me,” Nita said, “all you have to do is yell. You know I’ll be there in a second, if I can figure out how to get to where you are.”
“Ponch can find you,” Kit said. He grinned. “I’m beginning to think there’s not much he can’t find… if I can just figure out how to ask him for it.”
Nita nodded. Over at the school building, the end-of-period bell rang. “Let me know when you’re going to go looking for him again,” Nita said. “At least I can keep the time free for you if you do need me for something.”
“Right. And let me know what you find out about your mystery messages.” The two of them started to walk back toward the school doors. “Be funny if it’s some rogue intelligence trying to figure out whether it’s okay to invade the Earth. Whatever you do, don’t give them our address.”
“The way things are going in my life at the moment,” Nita said, “it’s more likely to be some alien kid making crank calls, or trying to order a pizza.” And she actually smiled slightly.
Kit knocked his fist against hers, and went to his next class.
***
Nita walked home from school that afternoon with the “robot” problem still very much occupying her mind. She found Dairine sitting outside on the back steps, staring idly down the driveway.
“Dad didn’t come back early?” Nita said.
Dairine shook her head as Nita got out her house key. “What’re you doing out here?” Nita said.
Her sister gave her a look. “Didn’t seem to be much point in going into the house when you’ve left a live teleport spell going.”
Nita opened the door. “Dair,” she said, “maybe I’m cruel, but I’m not a sadist. Besides, why waste energy? The spell expired at the end of your school day.”
They went in. Nita hung up her parka and went to the fridge to find something to eat. Dairine stood there looking out the back door as she took off her own coat. “Close the door. You’re going to let all the heat out,” Nita said. “So how did the meeting with the principal go?”
Dairine rolled her eyes. “I made an agreement with him and Dad to stop cutting, if that’s what you’re asking about,” she said, closing the door. She went through the kitchen toward the living room.
“That’s not exactly what I was asking about,” Nita said. “What about Dad? How did he handle it?”
“He was okay,” Dairine said from the living room.
There was something about her sister’s tone of voice that made Nita forget about food for the moment. She went into the living room after her. “Was he upset?” Nita said.
“No,” Dairine said.
“He should have been,” Nita said.
“If things were normal, he probably would have been. But nothing is normal.”
Dairine sat down very abruptly on a hassock in front of one of the easy chairs. “Neets,” she said, so softly that Nita could barely hear her, “school sucks. It sucks so completely that even the Speech barely has words for it. It doesn’t feel like any of it matters anymore. And everyone who looks at me is thinking either ‘Aww, poor little kid’ or ‘She’s just trying to get sympathy by looking so sad; why doesn’t she just get over it?’ If I can’t actually hear them thinking it, I can see it in their faces. Every day of this is like Chinese water torture. The sec
onds just fall on your head one after another, and every one is just like the last one. The minutes just crawl by, and nothing gets better. Everything just keeps hurting. And you have to sit there, in the middle of all this meaningless junk, and put up with it, and act like it matters. Like anything matters.”
Nita found herself thinking of the weary, repetitive feeling she’d sensed in the robot when she’d been confronted with it. Moment following moment, all of them the same… There were similarities. She sighed, shook her head sadly. “Dair—”
“I’ve thought of leaving,” Dairine said, barely above a whisper. “Running away.”
Nita flushed first cold, then hot. “It would kill Dad,” she said. “You know it would.”
Dairine was quiet for a few moments. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t done it. But it doesn’t make it any easier, Neets. And just when I could actually use some help dealing with … with stuff, the woman they’ve got assigned as my counselor is a complete waste of time. She’s some girl just out of college who’s more nervous about the kids at school than they are about her. What kind of good can she do anybody? Least of all me. She doesn’t even have a clear memory of what it’s like to be a kid anymore. I know she doesn’t: That part of her brain might just as well have a big sign on it saying, ‘Your message here.’ She’s completely relieved not to remember what it was like to be one of us poor, powerless creatures.” Dairine’s expression went fierce with contempt. “Just having to look at her makes my brain hurt.”
“I wonder if they could give you Millman, instead,” Nita said. “He’s good.”
“I don’t care,” Dairine said. “I’ll put up with her, with school, with whatever. For Dad’s sake. And I will not let this break me. But I am going to hate every single water-torture-drop second of it, and I may just let you know about that every now and then.”
She looked up at Nita in defiance.
“Come here and gimme a hug,” Nita said.
Dairine gave her a look. “You’re just saying that because Mom would say it.”
“I’m saying it,” Nita said, furious, “because right now I need a hug.”
The nature of the look Dairine was giving Nita changed. She got up off the hassock, went over to Nita, and hugged her hard. Nita hung on to Dairine, not saying anything for a few moments, then let go of her and went back into the kitchen.
She assembled a sandwich, hardly paying attention to what went into it, put it on a plate, and started to take it up to her room. “By the way,” Nita said as she went, and Dairine went after her, “I think your machine buddies have been trying to reach you.”
“Huh?”
“Got a call from one of them this morning. At least I think that’s what it was.”
Nita went into her room and sat down at the desk. Dairine followed her in and sat on the bed. “I haven’t been expecting anything.”
“Then what was this?” In her mind, Nita showed Dairine the image of the clown, going around and around. “And this?” She showed her the image of the robot.
Dairine looked at the two images carefully, especially the second one, and shook her head. “Not for me, Neets,” she said. “Neither of those are any of my guys. These are organic in origin.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The silicon life-forms and the machine intelligences have a specific flavor,” Dairine said. “A couple different flavors, actually, but they’re similar. Like fudge ripple and rocky road.”
Nita gave her sister an amused look. Only Dairine would think of classifying other life-forms’ telepathic signatures in terms of ice cream. “Whatever got in touch with you is organic, all right,” Dairine said. “I’m not sure about the distance, though. But it feels really alone.” She sat silent for a moment, pondering. “Might be stuck in some kind of pinched-off space. It’s trying to reach out, anyway.”
“Trying to get out, maybe?” Nita said.
Dairine shook her head again. “No idea,” she said. She got up, stretched a little listlessly. “Anyway, Neets, that call wasn’t for me,” Dairine said. “It’s all yours.”
“Great,” Nita said. “All I have to do now is figure out what it wants.”
Dairine wasn’t even listening anymore, though. She was already wandering out the door. Nita watched her go, and let out one more of many quiet, worried breaths. Wandering anywhere wasn’t her sister’s style. Dairine, when she went somewhere, went full tilt, focused like a laser.
Until a month ago, Nita thought. Until the world changed.
She gulped, feeling the tears rise. No, Nita thought. I am not going to do that right now. I am going to sit here with the manual, have a look at the tutorials in the Speech, and see if there’s something obvious I’m missing. Which is entirely possible, because there’s always more of the Speech to learn. But when whoever this is calls again, this time I’m going to understand it.
“Oh,” Dairine said. “By the way…”
Nita looked up to see Dairine standing in the doorway again. “Sorry about this morning,” Dairine said.
“Uh, okay,” Nita said.
“Really, Neets. Very sorry. I was being incredibly stupid.”
“Uh, yeah,” Nita said, unwilling to agree too forcefully with this sentiment, no matter how true it was. “Thanks.”
“So would you kindly get off your butt and bring my bed back from Pluto?”
Nita smiled slightly and reached for her manual.
***
That night, when the call came again, while she was asleep, she was ready for it.
Nita had spent the better part of four rather frustrating hours buried in her manual after her talk with Dairine, and had been forced to realize that no matter how she might cram, she wasn’t going to be able to make a big difference in her vocabulary in the Speech in a single night, or for that matter, a single month. Like any other serious language study, it was going to take time. In the short term, it made more sense to concentrate on being able to make as much sense as possible of the next dream, when it came. That meant being in control of the dream, instead of just wandering around in it.
What people had come in recent years to call lucid dreaming had always been a useful tool for wizards. In some ways the mind was at its most flexible when unconscious, and therefore not insistently trying to make sense of everything. Human logic wasn’t the only kind, and it could get in the way. The dream-state’s ready acceptance of just about everything was often handy for understanding and getting comfortable with the thought processes of a species you didn’t know well.
The spell to induce lucid dreaming was easy to construct—hardly more than an instruction in the Speech to one’s own brain to handle some of its chemistry, but only some, as if it were still awake. It took Nita about ten minutes and about the same effort as running up and down stairs a few times to knit the appropriate words of the Speech into a loose, glowing chain about a foot and a half long. This she fastened around her throat, necklace style, though the actual fastening took her several minutes: it was hard to do the wizard’s knot with both hands out of sight behind her neck. Oh, the heck with this, Nita finally thought, giving up. She pulled the loose ends of the spell out in front where she could see them, did the “knot” up that way to clasp the “necklace” shut, and got into bed.
After that, it was just a matter of getting to sleep.
This took longer than usual when she was expecting something to happen. But it was becoming so normal for it to take a long time, lately, that Nita was beginning to just accept this. Gradually, enough of the tension and anticipation slipped away to let the fatigue of the day do its job on Nita, dropping her over the edge of consciousness into sleep.
It was the nature of the spell not to activate until dreaming actually began. How long she actually spent in the preparatory space between falling asleep and dreaming, Nita had no idea. But the activation seemed to come very quickly.
She was standing in the dark again, in a place where light fell in one spot fro
m some source she couldn’t see. The darkness was not entirely quiet; from outside it came a faint sound, blurred and confused, like traffic noise outside a closed window, or voices in another room with the door closed—a hum, a mutter that both sounded and felt remote. Alone in that faintly humming darkness, under the single source of light, lay a big slab or dais of some kind—and there was some kind of figure on it.
Slowly, Nita made her way through the darkness toward the patch of light. The feeling of this dream was entirely different from that of the previous ones. She could still taste metal in the air, somehow, but it now seemed to her less mechanical, less impersonal a flavor. Maybe I’m just getting used to it, Nita thought, as she passed through the immense darkness pressing down all around, heading slowly for the light.
It was a dais there, under the white radiance that seemed to fall on it from nowhere; and the figure kneeling there, in the center of the stone, glittered blindingly silver in the light. It was a knight, kneeling there on the pure white stone, completely covered from head to foot in plate armor, and holding before him, with its point resting on the stone, a sword in a metal scabbard that gleamed even more brightly than the armor did.
Nita tried to remember in what book she had seen this image, a long time ago. Yet at the same time she also thought of the robot she’d seen the previous night, for the knight’s helmet was the same in front—a perfectly smooth, blank surface, with just a single dark opening crossing it, for the eyes to look out through.
Quietly she stepped around in front of—him? There was no telling.
“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”
There was a long silence.