“Yes it does,” Kit said. “God only knows what it’s doing to your insides.”
“Only what it does to the insides of thousands of other New Yorkers,” Nita said. “Otherwise they’d have the Board of Health after them. Anyway, if you’re worrying about insides, you shouldn’t keep putting that habanero relish on your burgers. You won’t have any stomach lining left.”
“Come on, it can’t hurt your stomach lining. That’s a myth.” Nonetheless, Nita observed that he changed over to a ballpark mustard relish for his fourth burger.
“You’re going to roll home after that,” Nita said.
“Look,” Kit said. “I’ve been on my feet all day! And so have you. And these burgers are small.”
Nita smiled. “You’re just trying to make up for the lack of blue food,” she said. “You don’t fool me.”
Kit sighed. “I was kind of hoping Sker’ret might’ve brought something in from the Crossings, but I guess it wouldn’t have made sense for him to be doing the catering too . . .”
They wandered back into the main part of the room, where the divide between dancing Invitational guests and nondancing ones was becoming more pronounced as the evening wore on. A lot more people were now sitting or lounging around the walls, the sound of conversation and laughter scaling up into a low roar that competed very successfully with the dance music in the middle of the room. Nita and Kit wandered in a long arc around the room, saying hi to various people they recognized.
“What’s going on over there?” Nita said to Kit at one point. “There’s a whole bunch of people in a circle on the floor—”
Kit shook his head. The two of them set off in that direction: and then Nita saw Kit register something that made him break out in a grin. “What?”
“It had to happen” was all he said as they made their way over to the group. A shout went up inside the circle, along with cries of “Oh, man, how the hell—” and “Deal me out, I’m done!” And among these, one voice with a sharp, abrasive Australian accent rose highest of all. “That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, read ’em and weep—!”
Nita threw Kit a look. She knew that voice. “Oh, no—”
“Oh, yes,” Kit said. As they approached, Nita saw a thin wiry guy in dark slacks and a shirt plastered with giant Day-Glo flower designs. He was raking toward him a huge pile of the participants’ glowing souvenir tokens, blue and green both, while others in the game were throwing down their cards in resignation or disgust. “Who wants to buy in to the next hand, ladies and gentlemen? Who knows, everybody else’s luck might change . . .”
“Matt,” Nita said, shaking her head. “Only you.”
Matt looked up at her, and a grin of delight stretched across his face. “Nita!” He jumped up and stepped straight through the circle to her, threw his arms around her, and nearly crushed her in a hug. “Long time no see!”
She hugged him back and ruffled his dark hair, which was all over the place as usual. “Lissa was talking about you before—”
He smiled sourly. “I bet she was!”
“But I didn’t realize she meant you were here! Are you mentoring?”
“Not me. My mate Dokes.” He peered up over the circle of card players and past them into the main part of the room. “. . . Never mind, can’t see him. But come on, Nita, you could’ve found me in a minute. There’s an app for that . . .” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a WizPhone, and waved it at her.
“Oh no, don’t tell me Darryl’s got to you too,” Nita muttered.
“Are you kidding? No one can resist him. I’m starting to think he’s on commission.” Matt laughed. “But never mind that. Care to try your luck?”
“I could get into that,” Kit said. And he promptly sat down cross-legged in the circle. “Who’ll stake me a few?”
A tux-clad young African-American gent with glasses and a studious look laughed and handed Kit a few. “Glutton for punishment, huh . . .”
“Randy, hush up, you’ll scare him off!” said a tall brunette who’d made room for Kit on his other side, handing him some tokens as well. She had a small Siamese cat on her shoulder, and Nita found herself suddenly wondering if Irina was around, and exactly where her parakeet was.
“Looks too late for that, Bex,” Matt said. “Kit’s just gonna have to take his medicine . . .”
Kit looked up over his shoulder at Nita. “Neets? Want in?”
She shook her head. “Not me,” she said. It was a matter of embarrassment to her that though she was good at all kinds of things, no matter how many times she tried to master the rules of poker, she always forgot them five minutes after she’d learned them. “You enjoy yourselves . . .”
“Don’t worry,” Matt said, stepping back into the circle and sitting down again, “I’ll clean him out pretty quick if you’re in a rush.”
“Wouldn’t be too sure of that if I were you,” Kit said.
“No, it’s okay,” Nita said to Matt. “I’m going to lounge around for a while and let my dinner settle . . . I’ll come back in a bit.” She raised her eyebrows at Kit. “Don’t let him have it all his way . . .”
Kit grinned. He and Dairine played regularly, and Dairine had pronounced him “pretty competent,” which Nita suspected meant “extremely good.” Matt may get a surprise . . . but then Kit’s surprised him before.
And it was surprisingly restful to wander around and take it easy. For the moment, at least, Penn was not in evidence. Maybe the long day finally caught up with him.
Or he found somebody to go home with . . . Because there was that sense with Penn that the thought of sex in general, or of hooking up in particular, was always imminent. It was as if he thought that all the innuendo made him interesting. When what it mostly makes him is a lot tougher to be around, Nita thought. You hate to say anything to him for fear it’s going to bring something like that up . . . Who wants to hear somebody talking about that all the time?
She stopped by the drinks table. The young wizard who’d served her earlier was still standing there, and he smiled at her.
Nita raised her eyebrows at him. “You know what I want.”
Without hesitation he handed her a bottle of Cel-Ray, and said, “Just so you can thank me later in life, my name is Frank.”
Nita saluted Frank with the bottle and ambled on. It seemed to her that over the last hour or so, the general atmosphere of the party had gone edgier, crazier. She could see that most of the adult wizards seemed to have abandoned the field. That was probably why the tall, dark, shadow-draped shape standing near a padded bench in the room’s most dimly-lit corner caught her attention.
So very tall, she thought. Nobody’s that tall, at least nobody from this planet. And so very dark. Nobody’s that—
As the thought came to her, Nita stopped where she was and stared. For a second she thought she was looking at the Lone Power. Except what would he be doing here?
But a moment’s more inspection disabused her entirely of the idea. About this figure, there was nothing of that sense of nasty evil amusement that the Lone Power normally wore. A great still feeling of deep cold seemed wrapped around it, yes. But the cold was . . . uninflected. It didn’t mean anything: it just was.
Nita swallowed. One of these days this curiosity’s going to get me in trouble, she thought. But she didn’t think this was going to be one of those days. Slowly, casually, she made her way over toward that corner.
She knew from the way it turned slightly that the figure was watching her come. Humanoid, she thought. That much its cloak of shadows couldn’t conceal. But there was no way to tell much more from that distance.
So Nita walked up to it, parked herself next to it, and nodded hello. “Dai stihó,” she said, then leaned against the wall and looked out toward the room while taking a sip of her soda.
“And to you also,” said the shadow-wrapped form, “dai stihó, young cousin.”
Such a very soft voice, such a dark voice; and no way to see the face it belonged to or guess
what thoughts were going on behind it. But something in the voice reminded her strongly of Jupiter . . . a quality that said there was much more going on here than just the physical appearance. I think I’m two for two tonight, Nita thought. And is it possible . . . ? Only one way to find out.
“Why’re you over here all by yourself?” She looked into the shadow. “You should come on out and mingle.”
“That’s very kind of you,” the voice said quietly. “But I’m . . . not that much of a mingler. I’m not from around here.”
The words gave her an odd anticipatory feeling in the pit of her stomach . . . though nothing like what Nita felt when Kit was in question, not the always hard-to-analyze stomach flip. It felt a little like fear, yet there was nothing bad about it. Awe, Nita thought. Jovie had this feeling about him too, but you had to sit with him a while to feel it, and his was funnier. This is stronger. More serious.
“. . . You’re a capture,” Nita said.
It was a guess, but an educated one, and the shadow-veiled head bowed in assent. “Insofar as any capture is ever nonconsensual at such a level,” he said. “I knew what I was being captured by.” A glint of very dark eyes, more felt than seen. “Or rather, whom.”
And when he agreed, that clinched it. “Then I know who you are.”
“Do you indeed,” the darkness said, sounding not so much surprised as interested.
“Yes,” Nita said. “Yes I do. And I just want you to know one thing.”
“That being?”
“You’ll always be a planet to me.”
The dark shape looked at her in astonishment. Then slowly it bowed, and its shadows flared outward around it, almost winglike.
“I’m so sorry about what happened,” Nita said. “I sure wasn’t consulted.”
The darkness shrugged, though it was a most understated, fractional shrug. “It was merely a shift in terminology,” Pluto said. “A classification issue. Ontologically it’s not particularly significant: I bear no one ill will for it.”
“Still,” Nita said. “I feel like you were robbed of something. Status, or . . .” She paused. “I don’t know. And though I understood the reasons for it when it happened, it made me sad.”
Again one of those bows, though not quite as deep this time. “I appreciate your concern.” The darkness straightened. “At a time when you surely have much else on your mind . . .”
Nita’s glance slid sideways to the spot across the room where she’d left Kit.
“Relationship,” that regal darkness murmured. “So often an issue.”
Nita burst out laughing, thinking about Dairine’s line that what was going on with her could be seen from space. Apparently it could.
“You know,” she said, “forgive me, but this is weirder than usual. With Jupiter, with Saturn—that they can think and talk, and be wizardly, and even that they can cram their consciousness down into shapes like these if they want to—” She flapped her arms a little. “It makes sense once you manage to wrap your brain around it. They’re life forms. But you, you’re—well—you’re a rocky body covered with ice.”
“Well,” Pluto said, “since we’re apparently speaking frankly, as is the wont of good cousins who seek truth together, you’re a sloppy skin-contained sack of carbon compounds and water, slathered all over a silicate frame.” She caught a glint of amusement from the eyes hidden inside those enveloping shadows. “But not just carbon compounds and water. True, you have highly evolved organs in which various structures and chemical processes mediate emotion and intellection. Yet no one has yet succeeded in determining the location of mind. Unless I’m behind in the news . . .”
“Not that far behind, it looks like,” Nita said.
“Good to hear. Your practice has been relatively brief, as your species reckons time, but already you have personal experience of some modes of consciousness that do not map at all closely onto the ones your world commonly knows or accepts. One of these—I would not say a natural law, but certainly a tendency—is for accretions of matter over a certain size or mass to acquire or engender a specific type of consciousness. Such an accretion may remain solitary; it may over many ages become gregarious. But whether or not it ever touches another consciousness, it exists.” There was a thoughtful pause. “The One does love to talk to Itself; this would appear to be another mode in which It does so.”
Nita nodded, trying to think when she had last been so courteously put in her place. “Okay . . .”
“In any case, it’s not unusual for solar systems to have mixed populations—some worlds sentient but without a Planetary, some in which the sentience holds the Planetary position itself, some in which the world’s own consciousness fluctuates cyclically. But again, relationship’s always an issue. Solar systems aren’t simply about orbital mechanics. They’re about who’s doing what with whom, in what emotional context.”
“Like Jupiter and Saturn,” Nita said.
Nita could just imagine eyes rolling inside that cool darkness. “Quite. But not always on that scale. You and I, for example; we have history.”
Nita’s eyes went wide. “Wait, what?”
“Oh, come now, my cousin. How should I not recognize you across a room, no matter how crowded it was?” And she didn’t have to see, or try to see, the smile growing inside those shadows now: it was quite audible in the dark voice. “Many are the wizards of your kind who’ve visited me briefly, and once having seen the sights have gone on their way. But only one has ever dropped her sister’s bed down my very deepest crevasse.”
At that Nita burst out laughing so hard that she had to sit down on the nearby bench. The dark shape beside her simply smiled more broadly inside its shadows—laughter possibly being beneath its ancient dignity—and sat down too.
It took a while before Nita could breathe again. When she was able, she said, “Oh, I am so, so sorry.”
“I’m not,” said Pluto. “It made my day.”
“Meaning about a week around here,” Nita said, and snickered. “Well, good. Because she still blames me every time her bed squeaks.”
“It could be metal fatigue,” Pluto said, as if trying to be helpful.
“Um, you know, probably not. It was there for hours and hours. The cold probably screwed up the crystalline structure of the metal in the springs.” Nita wiped her eyes. “Don’t tell her I said that.”
“It shall remain between us, I assure you.”
It took a few moments more for Nita to get herself to stop feeling like she wanted to burst out in giggles. “Okay. Look, I don’t want to monopolize you.”
“I would say there would have been no fear of that,” Pluto said. “Nonetheless I thank you for your consideration: when one is normally used to a more solitary lifestyle, such gatherings can be wearing.”
Nita nodded, got up, and stretched. “Are you sticking around for the rest of the Invitational?”
“I will be in and out,” Pluto said. “The other Planetaries and I have matters to discuss, and it’s rare enough to have as congenial an opportunity as this—where we can also have a chance to view at close range those with whom our work in this System is so closely associated.”
“And who dump bedroom furniture on you without warning,” Nita said.
“Yes,” Pluto said, “and perhaps we might dispense with that in future? It could adversely affect the neighborhood’s property values.”
Nita burst out laughing again. What is it tonight? Tension relief? Or all these amazing things happening? “No more furniture,” she said. “Cross my heart.”
The dark Planetary rose up in great majesty and bowed to her again, leaving Nita wondering how mere silent motion could be so thoroughly imbued with gentle sarcasm. “Then may the view of the long Night delight your heart,” Pluto said. “And let us meet again before the end.”
“Yes,” Nita said. “Good night to you too.” She bowed in return, then headed back into the room.
She started working her way over in the general direction o
f the poker corner and took several more slugs of the Cel-Ray, for her mouth had gone dry. Apparently awe could be retroactive. This, Nita thought, has been a most, most unusual day. “Bobo,” she said under her breath, “have you been taking notes this evening?”
Meetings with beings of Planetary level or better normally invoke automatic archival activity, Bobo said, for their reference as well as yours.
“Oh good,” Nita thought. Though she then remembered what Dairine had told her about the Mobiles’ archival project, and had to wonder if the best use of it was preserving for all eternity the story of how she’d dumped her sister’s bed in Pluto’s backyard.
She giggled to herself. What a day. I can’t think when I’ve laughed so much for so many different reasons . . . Nita paused briefly by the dance floor, which was packed even tighter now, though the floating hardened-air platforms had been removed, possibly for safety reasons. She shook her head, amused, turned away—
And someone seized her by the elbow. “At last! At last our schedules coincide.”
Nita’s dentist had warned her at her last checkup about gritting her teeth. I know teenage life is a lot more stressful than it used to be, but seriously, Nita . . . Now she turned toward Penn and forced her jaw to relax.
“Whatever schedule I have,” she said, “I don’t believe I even had you penciled in.”
But his attention was now on the bottle she was carrying. “Don’t tell me you’re still drinking that stuff!” Penn said. “Seriously, it smells like windshield washer fluid.”
“Oh, come on, it does not,” Nita said. “I swear, some people just get so unnerved by anything new and different!”
“Like me!” Penn said, throwing his arms wide. “Come on, Juanita! Come dance with me. Everybody else has!”
“Uh, no,” Nita said. “Seriously, no thanks . . . it’s not my thing.” Even with people she liked, she wasn’t terribly confident about her dancing skills. Except earlier, when a slow dance sequence had started, she’d looked at some of the couples and thought, Kit . . .
“That dreamy look,” Penn said, “I know what that means . . .”