The other two koi sank down into the water as well. Nita sighed and leaned back, watching Tom as he walked over to another of the plant beds, squatted down beside it, and then let out a long, annoyed breath. He reached down in among some of the plants, pushed broad green leaves aside, and sighed.
“Guys,” Tom said in the Speech, “how many times do we have to have this conversation?” He picked something up, looked at it. It was a slug. He shook his head and tossed it off to one side, into another leafy bed. “Those are your strawberries—” fling— “over there! These are my strawberries—” fling— “over here!”
Nita gave him a crooked smile. “That can’t be real good for them.”
“Slugs are resilient,” Tom said.
Nita watched another one fly through the air. “Yeah. I see how they bounce...”
“Do I hear a criticism coming?”
Nita restrained herself, but wasn’t quite ready to stop teasing Tom yet. “Isn’t it weird that a Senior Wizard can talk the sky into hitting things with lightning but can’t talk a bunch of slugs out of eating his strawberries?”
Tom sighed. “Lightning’s a lot easier to talk to than slugs,” he said. “Not that you’re so much talking to the slug as to its DNA... which has been the way it is for about a hundred million years. Strawberries are a relatively recent development, to a slug. But then, so are human beings.” He grinned. “Anyway, I live in hope that they’ll get it eventually. But enough of you being on my case. Or just you. Kit’s running late. Where’s he gotten to?”
Nita rolled her eyes. “That’d be the question, the last couple weeks.”
Tom glanced up. “He’s missing Ponch, huh?”
Nita shrugged, not sure how to describe what was going on. Kit’s dog had been getting increasingly strange for a long time, but in the complex and disruptive events of the last month he had gone way beyond strange, right out of life and into something far greater. Kit wasn’t exactly sad about what had happened, but he was definitely sad at not having his dog around anymore. “It’s complicated,” Nita said. “I don’t think it’s just about Ponch. But he’s been away from home a lot.”
Tom straightened up again and gave Nita a look that was slightly concerned. “A lot of that going around right now...”
Nita sighed. “Tell me about it. But his sister Helena’s coming home from college in a couple of weeks. That has to be on his mind. And then there’s Carmela. He’s having trouble dealing with her lately.”
Tom pulled off his gardening gloves and tossed them up into the air: they vanished. “Yeah, well,” he said. “First time off the planet, and what does she do but stride out into the universe like she owns the place and blow up the Lone Power? For what that’s ever worth in the long term. Still, I could see where it might make Kit feel a little surplus.” Tom strolled back to her, his hands in his pockets. “Does Carmela seem any different?”
“No. Or yes,” Nita said. “But that might just be because of her PSAT scores.”
Tom put his eyebrows up. “Worse than expected?”
“Better,” Nita said. “It’s screwed up her college plans. She thought she was going to take it easy and go to the community college in Garden City. Now all of a sudden her pop and mama and her guidance counselor are giving her all this stuff about CalTech and Harvard.”
Tom gave Nita a wry look. “Interesting problem. But otherwise it sounds like you’re telling me that, though her PSATs might be an issue, shooting up a major interstellar transport center and being dragged halfway across the known Universe hasn’t particularly cramped her style.”
“No. And that’s what has me worried. Tom, tell me she’s not turning into a wizard!”
He laughed one big laugh. “Would it break your heart if she was?”
“Mine? Not really. Kit’s? That’s another story.”
“Not that I could do anything one way or the other,” Tom said. “If the Powers offered her the Oath and she accepted it. It’d be out of our hands. But wouldn’t you think it’s kind of late for her to become a wizard? You know how it goes. Onset in humans is usually between twelve and fourteen...”
“Except for people like Dairine,” Nita muttered.
“Yes, well,” Tom said, straightening up with a groan and massaging the small of his back, “your sister’s the exception to most of the rules I know. How’s she coping, by the way?”
Nita shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s hard to work out what’s going on with her sometimes. All she’ll say is that she’s looking for Roshaun.”
Tom nodded, heading for the French doors at the back of the house. Nita got up from the edge of the pond and followed him in. “What’s your take on that?” Tom said.
Nita shook her head as she stepped into the relative cool of the living room. That he vanished in a cloud of moondust while he was doing a wizardry that had one end stuck in the core of the Sun, and he’s probably dead, and my sister’s in denial? she thought, but refused to say out loud.
On the kitchen table, Tom’s version of the wizard’s manual was stacked up several volumes high. “What’s it say about him in there?” Nita said.
Tom put up his eyebrows. “You haven’t looked in your own manual?” he said.
“Well...”
“Scared to?”
Nita gave him a look. She had of course been scared to. Finding out the truth would have forced her into a position where she would have had to start working out what to do about Dairine.
Tom shook his head. “You know,” he said, going over to the sink to wash his hands, “if I looked in there for an answer, and then told you what I was shown, it might not be data that from your point of view would necessarily be definitive. Or even useful. Has that occurred to you?”
“No,” Nita said.
“Well, when you do get around to looking, tell me what you see.”
Nita rolled her eyes, as she’d been hoping to get Tom to do the scary thing for her: she’d had more than enough of being scared in the last month or so. Great. Now I get to go back to being just too chicken to look...
“And by the way,” Tom said, turning off the faucet and reaching for a dish towel hanging over the door of the cupboard under the sink, “you’re blinking.”
“Huh?” Nita said, and then glanced to her right. “Oh, yeah, right.”
There in midair beside her, a little pinpoint of blue light like a star was flashing on and off. “I really should hook up a sound to this,” Nita said, reaching out to the little light and pulling it straight down in the air. “I did this wizardry the other morning real early, and I didn’t want to wake anybody up while I was testing it.”
A vertical slit of darkness opened in the air, exposing the inside of the otherspace pocket in which Nita kept her wizard’s manual and various other useful objects while she was out and about. She reached into the darkness, felt around for a moment, and then came out with her manual.
Nita started paging through it while Tom opened the fridge and rummaged around. “Message?” he said, coming out with a couple of cans of cola.
“Yeah. Uh, got any fizzy water in there?”
“Sure. Thought you were the big cola fan, though...”
“I’m off the sugar for a while.”
“Don’t tell me,” Tom said, coming out with a bottle of mineral water, “that you’re starting to worry about your weight! Completely inappropriate for you at your age—”
“Huh? Oh, no, no, it’s just that I keep getting these... Never mind.” Nita trailed off, partly on purpose, as she flipped the manual open to the back pages where the messaging wizardries and messages were stored. No way she was going to get into acne-and body-image issues right now with a wizard of a completely different sex, seniority, and order of importance.
On the rearmost page of the manual, one block of text was alternately glowing dark and fading. Nita peered at it. Then she snickered. “Kit’s getting ready to go to Mars,” she said, putting down the manual for a moment and opening the miner
al water to take a swig. “What a surprise!”
Tom chuckled as he popped open his can of cola. “Kind of the flavor of the month with him, isn’t it?”
“More like the flavor of the year.” Nita read down the message and tapped the reference link at the bottom of it: another message, the one that had caused Kit to send her the first, appeared in the first one’s place. “He’s got Mars posters up in his room, and little Mars crawlers on his desk, and half the Mars books in the school library aren’t there: they’re stacked up on his bed...”
She grinned. “Hey, this is great. Mamvish got in just now! We’ve been talking to her a lot by manual this last year, but we’ve never seen her in person. Kit’s gonna be buzzed to meet her finally.”
Nita shut her manual and put it away in the otherspace pocket again, “zipping up” the little blue light to close it again. She pinched the light; it went out. “Which is probably why he ran straight over to Gili Motang without waiting for me.”
Tom smiled at Nita’s annoyed expression. “Well, maybe it’s understandable,” he said. “Mamvish is heavily in demand all over this side of the galaxy: normally we don’t get to see so senior a wizard out this way unless it’s something to do with worldgates. If the Powers’ own Species Archivist has come out to our neighborhood in person to check up on something, that’s definitely a hot topic. So if Kit wants to go do the fanboy thing, well, so will half the other wizards on the planet.” Tom paused. “And now that I think of it...” He got up and went back to the fridge.
Puzzled, Nita watched Tom open it again and start rooting around. “I guess there really are no accidents,” he said, coming out with a very large plastic bag full of tomatoes. Tom shut the fridge and handed the bag to Nita.
She looked at the bag, and then at Tom again. Tom grinned at her. “When you catch up with Kit,” he said, “make sure you take that with you. It’s been so hot so early this year, the backyard’s getting overrun with these.” He sighed. “And in another week it’ll be the zucchini. I’ve really got to check in with the global warming intervention group...”
“Tomatoes??” Nita said. “What kind of spell uses tomatoes?”
“And tell Mamvish we send our best,” Tom said. “I’d love to go see her myself, but I have to get back to work. Carl and I and all the other Seniors are still hip-deep in the on-planet cleanup from last month’s business.”
“I feel for you,” Nita said, not entirely sincerely. “Tom, there are a ton of these! My arms are breaking!”
Tom just laughed. “So levitate them.”
The spell to make them float would have cost as much energy as just carrying them, or more. Nita just gave Tom an annoyed look, boosted the overstuffed bag up from the bottom, and shifted it to her other arm. Tom picked up his cola again and went over to the table, gesturing at the stack of manuals. Several of them picked themselves up off one in the middle of the stack: Tom pulled it out, and the others settled back onto the stack once more.
“Obviously our manuals will update with a précis of what you all decide to do about whatever she’s here for,” Tom said, sitting down. “Especially since Mamvish won’t have come all this way just for fun. But do me a favor and drop me a note to fill in any details you think we should know about.”
“Okay,” Nita said, and shifted the bag to the other arm again. Tom was already paging through his own manual, wearing a distracted look... which frankly didn’t surprise Nita, considering what all the wizards on the planet had been through of late. So why hang around and pester him? Let’s go find out what the tomatoes are good for.
She hefted the bag again to resettle it over her hip, then wandered out of the house and over to the fishpond again, peering in. One of the koi came drifting up to the surface: it was Doitsu. “Hey,” Nita said. “I forgot to ask you:
“Wha’d you think of the mealworms?
Did they satisfy
That deep-down desire for ‘yum’?”
Doitsu gave her a look and just hung there in the water, fanning his fins and saying nothing.
“Okay,” Nita said. “See if I go out of my way to bring you stuff from the bait shop again.”
Doitsu eyed Nita from under the water. “The mealworms were lovely,” he said. “But your scansion’s execrable. ‘Wha’d’?”
Nita rolled her eyes. “I’m just getting the hang of this! Cut me some slack.”
“When you can construct a haiku without apostrophes, sure,” Doitsu said. “And not a moment sooner. If you’re going to be an oracular, you’ve got standards to maintain. So get out there and make me not want to spit in your eye.” And he vanished down into the water again.
Nita shifted the bag of tomatoes to the other arm. “I’m getting trash-talked by fish,” she said under her breath. “Something’s wrong with this picture.” She sighed and took the flagstone path around the side of the house, heading for home.
It wasn’t too long a walk, which was a good thing: though she kept shifting the tomato bag from hand to hand, both her arms were still killing her by the time she got close to her house. As Nita came down the sidewalk in the early sunset light, she looked at her front yard— all covered with ground ivy, and with the single big maple tree standing up out of the middle of it, shading everything— and thought, Why does it look so little these days? And the house, too. It was a standard enough bungalow for this neighborhood— white-shingled, black-roofed, two stories, with the attic partly converted—but lately it had seemed much smaller than it had this time last year. As Nita walked up the driveway, the memory of the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility came back to her unbidden: that vast main concourse illuminated with its strange sourceless night lighting, its tremendously high roof-sky seemingly absent and the whole concourse open to the huge, pulsating, many-colored stars of its home planet’s neighborhood. After you’d been there as much as I have this last month, anything’d look small, Nita thought. That place has got to be the size of New Jersey. Well, Rhode Island, anyway...
She went up the stairs to the back door, expecting to have to let herself in: but the inside door was open. Nita opened the screen door, braced it behind her so it wouldn’t slam, and dumped the bagged tomatoes on the drainer by the sink as she went through the kitchen. “Daddy?”
“He had to go back to the shop for something,” came a voice from inside, and Nita grinned, because it wasn’t her sister’s voice coming from the living room, but someone else’s entirely. “He’ll be back in an hour, he said.”
Nita went through the dining room into the living room. There Kit’s older sister Carmela was sitting on the floor amid a heap of cushions and a scatter of TV remotes. Nita looked at the remotes in bemusement, as she couldn’t remember their TV having quite that many. There was the VCR remote, sure, and the one for the TV, and the—
“Ohaiyo gozaimas’!” the TV yelled at her as she entered.
Nita stopped still. Oh no... she thought. “Mela,” she said, “you didn’t—”
“I brought our remote over,” Carmela said, and stretched her fluffy-sweatered self out among the cushions, toying with her single long dark braid. “Dairine said it might be smart to train your TV to get the alien cable channels, the way Kit did with ours. This is bargain-shopping season, after all! And we don’t want to freak out the visitors at home...”
Nita perched briefly on the arm of her dad’s easy chair behind Carmela and looked at the TV. It wasn’t nearly as fancy or new a model as Kit’s new entertainment-center TV was, but all the same it was showing a channel-listing page as sleek and modern as anything Kit’s set could boast. And as Carmela punched the “scroll” button, the online guide shifted through page after page after page of channels that didn’t exist anywhere on this planet. The entries on the scrolling pages were all in the curving, curling characters of the wizardly Speech, which many worlds used as a common language of discourse. “Wait a minute,” Nita said. “What visitors?”
“Ooh,” Carmela said, “you mean you haven’t hea
rd? Guess who’s coming home from college!”
“No, I did hear,” Nita said, easing herself down off the easy chair to flop down among the cushions, “but I thought that wasn’t till July...”
Carmela shook her head until her braid flopped around. She punched the remote, which immediately changed the TV Guide channel to one of the many thousands of alien shopping channels available to users of GalacTrans or whatever other unearthly “cable” provider Carmela had hooked them into. “Nope,” she said, watching absently as some alien being apparently made entirely of wreathing chartreuse smoke did its best to demonstrate the virtues of what Nita thought was some kind of household appliance, maybe a food processor. It picked up one indecipherable “accessory” after another with tendrils of green smoke, waving them around. “That whole thing blew up,” Carmela said, leaning back and briefly looking at Nita upside down. “Helena had a fight with her boyfriend, so no Paris for them! She’s already cashed in the plane tickets. She’s going to come back next week and stay here until her college choir’s trip to Romania or wherever they’re going...”
“Slovenia, Kit said,” Nita said.
“Whatever. At least she’ll have fun with the vampires!”
Nita shook her head. “No vampires,” she said. “Some undead, yeah, and some confused Goth wannabes. But there haven’t been real turn-into-a-bat-and-flap-around vampires since 1652.”
“Really? What happened in 1652?”
“Some other time, okay?” Nita said, increasingly distracted by the chartreuse-smoke creature, which was now pouring itself rapidly into what looked like the container of the food processor and pulling a lid down over it. A second later, a tentacle of green smoke came curling out of the container and punched one of the buttons on the processor’s front. The tendril was abruptly sucked back into the main mass of the creature as many peculiar things started happening inside the container at that point, including small lights flashing like sparks inside an outraged microwave.
“So when’s Helena’s trip?”