“Harder?”
“Well, alcoholic.”
“I am not averse to such molecular structures,” the guy said, musing. “Yet . . . Would there be water?”
“A bunch of kinds. Get you one?”
“Pray do. With gas, possibly?”
“Fizzy it is.”
Nita went off to the nearest drinks table, finished her Cel-Ray, and swapped the empty bottle for a full one. Then she found a sparkling water bottle and wandered back to sit down next to the guy in the striped sweater. She handed him his drink. “Your health,” Nita said, holding up her bottle.
He looked at it in slight confusion.
Nita laughed. “Uh, you clunk them together. At least some of us do that around here.”
“Oh! I see. Na’gekh emeirsith, then.”
“Yeah, mud in your eye too, my Advisory always says.”
The young guy’s mouth quirked up in amusement. They both drank. “So what do you make of the results so far?” Nita said.
“’Tis all a wonder and a confusion, thus far. So many names, so many gifts.”
“They’ve got a postevent analysis app running in the manuals,” Nita said. “What’s the old saying? ‘You can’t tell the players without a scorecard’? Something like that. Or you could hunt down one of the wizards who was doing sideline analysis today. They’re all in here relaxing now that this round’s action is over.”
“Nay, I’ve no wish to trouble them now in their repose. I’m but late-come myself: on me their expertise would be naught but ill spent. Enough it is to look on the gathering as thou dost, at ease.”
Nita had to laugh. “You know, cousin, you can loosen up a little, you’re among friends . . .”
“Loosen up?”
“The recension,” Nita said. “I mean, I get that you’re serious about the older language structure, but . . .” She waved a hand. “Way too formal! Give the tough grammar the evening off.”
He giggled. “Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure I had permission.”
His giggle made her want to laugh too: there was just something generally funny about him. “Honestly,” she said, “it’s not a problem. No one in this crowd’s going to stand on ceremony.” She looked out over the dance floor as one of the couples up on the hardened-air platform stage-dived out over the surrounding crowd, drifted down onto them as slowly as falling leaves, and were crowd-surfed off to one side.
“Seems you’re right,” the young guy said, and chuckled. “Those folks over there—what’re they doing?”
Nita followed his gaze. “Oh. I think they call that pogoing. It was big a long time ago. Looks like it’s coming back . . .”
They sat there chatting for some minutes while Nita split her attention between watching for Kit and trying to figure out where her companion’s accent came from. I don’t know why, but he reminds me of somebody, Nita thought. He hadn’t offered a name, and that wasn’t a big deal: some wizards were sensitive about personal names, feeling (not without reason) that some aspects of their power might be closely associated with them. Or do I know him from somewhere else? And if I do, what’s the matter with me, because how would I ever meet this guy and not remember him? He’s such a trip.
It was like meeting someone on the street but not knowing who they are because you’re seeing them in a different context from usual. Like that one lady who works over at the big supermarket in Freeport, the time she came into Daddy’s shop to buy some flowers, and we just couldn’t identify her because she didn’t have the store’s uniform jacket and the name tag on. Now, in the same mode, Nita sat there racking her brains. Did we meet him on the Moon during the Pullulus situation? Or maybe I’ve seen him somewhere else, dressed differently? Something more formal, not jeans and stripes and . . .
Wait. Stripes?
It hit her all at once. Planetaries. Mr. Bynkij said there were Planetaries here.
“Oh my God,” Nita said.
Her companion looked at her in slight confusion, but even so, he was smiling. “It’s been a while since anyone’s made that mistake,” he said.
Nita felt like an idiot, and didn’t care. The humor, the laughter: the joviality. Oh God. Do I even listen to myself? “I can’t believe it. You’re Jupiter.”
Her companion looked down at his sweater with vague concern. “Was it this?” he said, pulling the sweater out a little from his middle. “Please tell me it wasn’t the stripes.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “I told Saturn this was too much.”
I told Saturn. I can’t cope with this . . . !
Nita tried to get a grip. “What do I call you?” When the wizard mediating for a planet was of another species, that Planetary was often called by his or her or its planet’s name: the way European kings or queens used to be called formally by the names of their countries. But this was also a matter of identity, because Jupiter was a being.
“Well,” he said after a moment. “Some of your people used to call me Jove . . .”
“Jove,” Nita said, trying it on. “Jovie . . .”
He giggled once more, a ridiculously contagious sound. “I don’t think anyone’s ever put a diminutive on it,” said the largest planet in the Solar System. “Jovie, then. And as for you, nondiminutive cuz—for today, wonder of wonders, you’re the size of a planet—”
“Nita. Nita Callahan. And please,” she said, grinning. “Size jokes? Too many ways to take those wrong. And here I went all the way over to that table to bring you bottled water! You be nice.”
Jupiter laughed and drank his water. Nita drank her soda, wondering how much congruency the concept “his” had with what was going on with him. Or anything else. How do you have a gender when you’re made of hydrogen and helium?
Then again, carbon doesn’t come with an automatic gender either . . . In any case, gas giants didn’t seem to have all that much trouble becoming sentient. Sometimes they developed extra species to keep them company, but just as often they sailed along their orbits in uncounted millennia of splendid solitude, thinking thoughts no human could easily understand. They had a bent for philosophy, and also for math and physics, given that they were living the physics of their lives on a scale that few other sentient beings did.
“So,” Nita said finally, about halfway down her Cel-Ray bottle, “you came all the way up here, and did this—” she waggled her bottle at his shape change, unquestionably a work of art in terms of displacement of mass alone—“just to see what the new intake looks like?”
“Indeed. Sorry, I meant ‘yeah.’ It’s hard, you know, just changing recensions all of a sudden!”
“I know,” Nita said. “I’ve been there.” She rolled the bottle back and forth between her hands.
“We work often enough with Earth’s wizards, all of us,” Jupiter said. “It’s wise to know them better as they come fully into their practice.” He gave Nita a look. “For you were busy with Mars not too long ago, weren’t you?”
Nita blushed. “I was one of the team.”
“But it was your work that reforged the planet’s kernel,” Jupiter said, “and I stood guard over that while the species who’d come to live on Mars slowly found their way back to the One. That’s why you seemed familiar to me. The name I knew, and the being; but the shape, only at second hand. Because you were in on that group debrief, weren’t you, when the intervention was finally finished.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. She was nervous about admitting that her memories of the debrief were sketchy. Bad enough that Irina had been dissecting their performance, but the presence of an outer Planetary in the conversation, vast, massive, and old, had left her feeling very small, nervous, and ephemeral at the time.
“So that explains it,” Jupiter said. “The familiarity. At any rate, when all that was handled, I said to myself, ‘They did very well on little notice and in a situation they weren’t sure how to handle.’ So when the Invitational schedule was settled, I thought it might be wise to drop by.” He shifted his shoulders a bit. “Though the business
of handling the visitation can be a bit complex in terms of the physics . . .”
Nita watched him stretch, with a slight air of discomfort that reminded her of someone wearing jeans that were a size too tight. “Does it hurt for you?”
“What? How do you mean?”
“You’re so big, usually. And . . . there are so many different kinds of matter involved in you. Does it hurt being crammed down so small?”
“Oh!” He laughed. “No, not at all! So much of my matter’s empty space anyway, after all . . . I’ve just packed things down tighter than usual, locally. And left the rest at home. I mean—” He pulled the striped sweater away from him again, looked at it. “Clothes, that’s what you call these?”
“That’s right.”
“And you have others.”
“Sure.”
“But you wouldn’t normally wear them all at once.”
“Uh, no!” Nita laughed. “No, that wouldn’t work too well.”
“This is like that,” Jupiter said. “You wear one thing at a time. If I’d worn all my monatomic hydrogen to this do, there wouldn’t be anyplace for anyone else to sit down . . .”
Nita had to work at controlling her laughter again. “You said Saturn said something to you about—” She waved her bottle at the shirt. “Are you buddies? Well, wait, of course you would be, you’re only an orbit away from each other . . .”
Jupiter smiled. “A bit more than that. We’re dating.”
“Really? Wow.” Nita let out a breath of amusement, because since she’d said the B word to Kit, the whole issue of relationships seemed to be stalking her most of the time. “What does that look like for planets?”
He blinked. “Look like?”
“I mean, when you’re close. When you . . .” I’m about to discuss sex with a planet. Yes, this is my life. But her curiosity was getting the better of her, as usual. Nita cleared her throat. “I don’t even know what I’m . . . When you want to express it. Do you, I don’t know, get physical somehow? Get together . . .”
Jupiter’s eyes went wide. “You mean . . . touch each other?” His mouth opened, and closed, and opened again, until Nita was reminded of one of Carl’s koi. “Oh no. No, no, no, we don’t do that.” And then he looked embarrassed. “I mean, forgive me, I didn’t mean to sound judgmental, I know it’s normal for a lot of you, of course I know that, but the whole, uh, reproduction thing . . .”
“Sorry,” Nita said, “sorry, Jovie, didn’t mean to put you on the spot!” She was blushing harder than he was.
It was almost as if he hadn’t heard. “And as for touching, physical touching, oh no, no that would be very problematic, if we—you know, if our orbits—started to, you know, coincide at all, it would get incredibly messy, the gravity and the tidal effects and the radiation and . . . No.”
“Okay,” Nita said. And then she had to laugh again, because it was the only way she could think of to break the tension. While she’d understood that putting an alien psychology inside a human form could be exciting, because the form inevitably invokes its own psychology and tries to impose that on the indwelling mind, she’d never seen such an emphatic version of it before. “Are you okay? I didn’t want to freak you out!”
“No,” Jupiter said, calming down. “No, it’s just . . . well.”
“You should have seen me the first time I was in another body,” Nita said. “I was a wreck half the time, it seems like. Maybe because I wasn’t paying enough attention to it.”
“What happened?”
She took a moment to think where to start the story, and told him about her first times in whaleshape while being involved with the Song of the Twelve. Nita stuck to the technicalities of running a new body in a crisis situation, but soon enough she had to at least mention the emotional contexts, the blood and the breath of a new body, the feelings that came with it, the different ways in which it reacted to excitement and dread and desire.
Jupiter shuddered a little, the kind of shiver you might get during the middle of a really good horror movie when you saw the Slimy Scary Thing From Wherever sneak up through the darkness on the scientists . . . especially when you were safely out of reach of its ickiness. “That’s so . . . biological.”
The way Jupiter used the word sounded like someone trying out an evil term for a particularly kinky physical act. “Well, okay,” Nita said, “guilty as charged. But you must have a way to go about it that’s less biological.”
“Well, yes.”
Her curiosity was up and running. “So what do you do, then?”
“We resonate.”
It was naturally a word in the Speech: nothing in English could have produced the huge shiver of force and meaning that ran down Nita’s spine as Jupiter pronounced it. The single word bore with it a terrible weight of meaning, a long harsh deep whisper of what would have been sound if there had been any medium besides interplanetary space to carry it. Even through that, attenuated, distant, it throbbed, far-separated molecules nudging one another as its message transmitted itself through them. Nita felt like a gong that had been struck: the vibration, the message, the meaning shaking her, flesh and bone and brain, the blood in her veins and the air in her lungs, all vibrating together.
But not just with the vibrations of that one note. There was another note, somebody else’s, huge and message-freighted like this one. Bandwidth, Nita thought, dazed. Huge bandwidth. Radiation at a distance, heat, light, gravity, color: it all communicated, it all . . .
Resonated. He’s not kidding. She was still trembling with it and couldn’t seem to stop, had to put her hands up to her ears, then over her eyes when covering the ears didn’t help. Inside the darkness behind closed eyes she could still feel it shaking her, immense, long, old. But how could something that had been going on for billions of years feel so young? There was laughter in it, so much laughter! The agreement was laid down in curtains of radiation and reaffirmed across hundreds of millions of miles in slight orbital aberrations and gravitational perturbations that not even the most eagle-eyed human astronomer (except for those who were wizards) would ever recognize for what they were—two planets delicately and immaterially poking each other, stroking each other, fields interlacing at the greatest possible distances. Surface patterns changed, features appeared and disappeared as the two worlds wrote each other notes in their upper atmospheres, joked broadly by copying spots and stripes from each other, announcing their relationship across vast distances, uncaring if other planets saw it and rolled their eyes. Some features—the Great Red Spot, the Hexagonal Jet Stream—hadn’t gone away since an initial early declaration of relationship, around the time humans first started paying close attention to the sky with instruments better than the naked eye. Now the features were more complex than they had been, true. The dance of hydrogen atmospheres and organic chemistries around the borders of the markings had grown fainter and more nuanced: but each of the two great planets was still more or less wearing a tattoo of the other one’s name on its forehead.
Nita regained enough self-awareness to shake her head as the vibration of the two worlds’ relationship inside her head began to die back a little and she found more room to breathe. “You guys,” was all she could say at first. “Wow.”
“We have fun,” Jupiter said.
It was a staggering understatement. She could still feel echoing in her body the shadows of the complex dance that Jupiter and Saturn performed with and around each other every second (“How can you be dancing around Saturn when her orbit’s outside yours?” “It’s a simple topological inversion. Turn your back on the Sun and the inner orbits and include Saturn and everything else, and they’re all inside your orbit—”)
And how did I even hear that? Nita thought, dazed.
Resonances, Jupiter thought, and giggled. There’s always room for one more in the dance.
“Wow,” Nita said again, because it was all she could think of to say.
“But you know, they laugh at us, the other planets,” Jupit
er said. “They say, ‘You two have been going around together for how long? And you’re only now noticing it? Are you ever obtuse.”
At that Nita started laughing again, though this time there was a slight edge to it. “Yeah,” she said, recalling various recent conversations with both Dairine and Carmela, “well, don’t be embarrassed, you’re not the only one who gets that.”
“Oh good.”
And without any warning the crowd in front of them seemed to part, and Kit came through it in a hurry. He headed over to Nita and stood in front of her with barely a glance at the guy sitting next to her, and bent down toward her with worry written all over his face. “Are you okay? I felt—something—right across the room.”
“Oh no, no,” Nita said. “I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?” Kit said. And now he turned his head toward Nita’s companion. “And who’s your friend?”
Nita grinned. “Kit, Jupiter,” she said. “Jupiter, Kit.” She paused. “Wait a minute, I think I got that backwards. The older one should come first, right?”
Kit’s eyes went wide as the full impact of the other’s persona hit him. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
“Better sit down,” Nita said. “This is going to take some explaining . . .”
It did. It was dark by the time they left Jovie to his own devices and headed across the room. “That,” Kit said, “was . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t even know how to begin describing that.”
“Me either,” Nita said. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some ordinary. And something to eat.”
“Yeah,” Kit said.
There were buffet tables in all four corners of the big room. The burritos on offer had a lot of appeal for Nita, and she went through several of them one after another, with another bottle of the Cel-Ray soda. “Your appetite’s plainly okay,” Kit said, looking suspiciously at the soda, “otherwise I’d start worrying. That stuff smells like metal polish.”
“No it doesn’t!”