She shook her head and got back on track. “I thought you weren’t wild about your grandparents.”
Penn waved a hand as he went rummaging around in a chest over to one side of the recreation room. “My folks aren’t,” he said, “but they’d die rather than admit it. They’re still all hung up on the old-fashioned filial piety thing. Baba, though, he doesn’t care what they think of him. Come to think of it, he mostly doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him. Which makes him kind of cool, even though he’s not trying.”
Penn straightened up from the chest, letting its lid slam down. In his hands he was holding something that looked like a tube made of bamboo slats. He shook it open and dropped it to the floor. As it fell, Nita could see that it was a mat lined with paper and tightly written all over its interior surface both in the Speech and Chinese. It spread itself out on the floor, and from it a worldgating diagram flooded right out to the walls.
“There’s a place over there for your name,” Penn said, pointing at an empty circular stance locus near the spell’s far edge. “Climb on in, add all the detail you feel the need for. It’s pretty generic . . .”
“Right,” Nita said, and made her way around to where she would stand. My, aren’t we businesslike this morning, she thought. Is someone a little nervous about this meeting? I wonder.
She turned her charm bracelet around on her wrist and felt for the charm that was a capital N. From it she pulled out, in a line of Speech-curlicues burning with pale golden light, the template version of her name that she kept for such off-the-cuff transits. This she dropped into the circle, and then bent over to do a careful double-check. Even though it was her own boilerplate, it was always smart to check it once it was in place in someone else’s spell. Sometimes unexpected spell elements could alter your own name’s parameters, and if you came out of the other end of a transit with an extra head or something because you hadn’t checked, you had nobody but yourself to blame.
“Ready?” Penn said, already in his own locus, and impatient.
“Yeah, yeah,” Nita said, and was about to add “Keep your pants on” until she stopped herself. There were too many responses Penn might come up with that she didn’t want to hear. “Ready.”
Penn shoved his hands in his pockets—jeans pockets, this morning, and just a T-shirt over the jeans with some Chinese characters—and began to read the spell. Swiftly the room around them went quiet as the universe leaned in to hear. A moment later came the slam of air as the transit spell activated—
And then another slam as they came out on the far side. Penn bent down to pick up the little bamboo mat as Nita looked around her. Concrete, a lot of it: concrete ceiling, concrete pillars, concrete floors . . . “What is this, a parking structure?”
“Yep,” Penn said, rolling up the mat and sticking it in his back pocket. “We’re right under the Hyatt on the Bund—that’s the big shopping street on this side of the river. Come on—”
He headed for a stairwell and Nita followed. A few moments later they were up at ground level and out on the street, and she gazed around in unease and amazement.
Nita had of course seen images of Shanghai before. They turned up all the time on TV and in movies, the splendid upward-spearing skyline glowing jewel-bright in many colors by night and neon-blue down among the feet of the skyscrapers, where the highways ran like rivers. She knew in a general way that the hypermodern downtown was just one side of a very complicated picture in which old shabby-seeming neighborhoods crouched and sprawled in the shadow of the sheen and gleam of plate glass and the glow of a superilluminated downtown. But here, on the Bund, both sides lay right up against each other, seemingly a little hostile. It unnerved Nita.
And the other thing that amazed her as the two of them started walking away from the Hyatt was the color of the air, and her ability to see the air in the first place. “Penn, my God, the pollution! What are people doing about it?”
“Not enough,” he said, sounding relatively unconcerned. “Too many people here and not enough wizards, I guess. The amount of energy spent dirtying it up is more than anyone wants to spend cleaning . . .”
Nita shook her head. “Seriously, it reminds me of Titan.” Penn threw her a look. “Well, it does! The same shade of brown, almost.”
“Never wanted to get involved with this myself. Seems hopeless, like shoveling out the ocean . . .”
Nita didn’t say anything as they turned the corner between the Hyatt and the next skyscraper over, and almost within a block the neighborhood changed entirely to row after row of three- and four-story apartment buildings with shops on the bottom floor, or locked gates in stucco-faced walls through which tiny courtyards could be glimpsed. She felt the urge to look over her shoulder, back at the skyscrapers towering over them, and then back again at the run-down and tattered buildings in their shadow, to try to make some sense of the disconnect.
Shanghai was a very busy city, the streets full of people, and Nita found herself getting a lot of looks as she followed in Penn’s wake. She worked to smile at the people they passed, but it took some doing; those who noticed her almost without fail stared at her with either the kind of curiosity you might bestow on some exotic animal walking down your street, or expressions of mild suspicion or hostility. This is weird, Nita thought. I don’t mind this sort of thing in the Crossings. But on Earth . . . She took a deep breath and instructed herself to ignore it and concentrate on following Penn. Shortly he took a sharp turn onto a side street lined with more of the small apartment buildings, and then another turn onto an even smaller street, which seemed to be lined entirely by blank walls with gates in them. “There’s not much of this type of architecture left in the city,” Penn said. “Baba’s lucky to have a place like this. Though maybe it’s not luck. He knows a lot of wizards in town, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them’s on the planning management board.”
In front of one gate—a wire-mesh and iron-grilled structure set in an energetically flaking blue-plastered wall—Penn stopped, reached out to touch the padlock hanging from the gate’s latch, and murmured a few words in the Speech. The padlock undid itself, and Penn opened the gate and slipped through. Nita followed, and Penn locked the gate behind them.
They were standing in a courtyard about the length and width of Nita’s driveway. Narrow cinderblock balconies surrounded it on three sides, and there was a stairway up to one of them. “Over here,” Penn said, and led the way.
Nita followed up the stairs, looking around her and trying very hard not to judge, but it was difficult. The place seemed exceedingly run-down, and the balcony, though it was uncluttered, was one long passage of peeling paint and raw, stained concrete, the roof above it discolored again and again with rust marks from dripping water. Finally Penn came up to a door down at the far end of the balcony, with a reinforced iron screen door outside. Penn pulled the screen door and the interior one open, shouting something in Chinese. The Speech rendered it for Nita: “Hey, Baba, the genius is here!”
Nita found herself standing in the middle of a small living room with a sofa and easy chairs that when new would not have looked out of place in any suburban home back in New York, but now were pretty beat up and looked like the kind of thing you put out on the curb and hoped someone would steal. There was a new flat-screen TV opposite the curtained front window, and a scatter of remotes and magazines across a central wooden coffee table along with someone’s relatively new laptop.
Penn stood over the coffee table, fumbling around in his pocket, and came out with his token from the Cull. He flipped it onto the table and then pushed past Nita. “I’ve got to get a few things,” he said, “make yourself at home.”
He slipped into the next room. Nita looked around a little helplessly. “I thought your grandfather was going to be here.”
Penn came back into the room wearing an expression that Nita could not read. Annoyance? Disdain? Nervousness? “Oh, he’s here,” he said, “but he doesn’t like me bothering him in the dayti
me. Claims he’s busy. Here—” He opened another door. “You go talk to him if you like.”
“But I—if he doesn’t want to be—”
“Don’t worry, he knows some English. He likes Americans! Thinks they’re interesting.” Penn’s expression let Nita know what he thought of that concept as he more or less shoved Nita into the room and shut the door behind her.
She stood there feeling profoundly embarrassed. And as she glanced around, she realized that he had shoved her into the kitchen.
Nita took a long breath. I will kill him, she thought, without even bothering to use wizardry. Just a nice blunt rock. She let the breath out, and concentrated on taking in where she was. As kitchens went, it was on the basic and run-down side—cupboards on two sides of the room, a small refrigerator, and a plainly patterned linoleum floor, rather worn and grimy in the middle. Off to one side was a window with a stainless-steel counter running under it, a sink to one side of the window and a double gas burner on the other side, with a wok sitting on one of the burners. In the middle of the floor was a well scrubbed, somewhat scratched and hacked-up wooden dining room table. And sitting in one of the chairs around it was a little old baldheaded man wearing gray tracksuit bottoms and a darker gray hoodie.
Nita stood there for a moment while he looked her over. And now what do I say? she thought. Does he know what Penn’s up to? How am I supposed to explain myself?
“Well, young cousin,” he said in English, “don’t just stand there. Sit down and tell me what you’re doing here.”
He had a voice like a rusty hinge, and for some reason it made her want to smile, even though there wasn’t anything overtly friendly about it. All she said was, “Thank you, sir,” then pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.
They studied each other for a few moments. Penn’s grandfather was on the wiry side but surprisingly unwrinkled, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw. If his age showed anywhere it was in his eyes: the lids drooped. But the gaze with which those eyes favored Nita was sharp, sharp as knives. Beyond that, it was intriguing how someone sitting so straight in his chair could still seem so relaxed. There was a tablet computer off to his side on the table; on top of it, face-down and open, was a paperback book in a dialect of Chinese. Off to the other side was an open bottle of beer, which he had apparently been drinking from the neck. “I’m sorry if I interrupted you,” Nita said.
“You didn’t interrupt me,” the old man said. “Penn interrupted me.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Nita said. “He said he was coming here to show you his passing-through token from the Invitational.”
“Knowing Penn,” his grandfather said, “it’s you he came here to show me. We’re all supposed to be very impressed by his mentors. Forgive me if I don’t give him what he wants. At least, not right away . . .”
Nita had some difficulty keeping herself from laughing. “Impressed with his ‘mentors,’ plural?” She managed to smile without allowing it to look scornful. “But as for not giving him what he wants, I’m with you on that.”
The diminutive figure flashed her a totally unselfconscious smile that was missing some teeth. “You don’t like him much.”
“He’s a challenge,” Nita said. “But I have to believe there’s a reason.”
“Can we use the Speech?” Penn’s grandfather said. “It’s harder to hide what you’re feeling.”
Nita nodded. Bobo, she said silently, stay close here. I may need you to fill me in on vocabulary.
I’ll grab your vocal cords if you’re about to say something stupid, Bobo said.
Nita smiled. “Interesting,” Penn’s grandfather said, picking up his beer bottle. “You have an outrider.”
He used the specialist phrase in the Speech for a wizard whose thought processes were somehow augmented by those of another sentience. Nita swallowed; though it was a blanket term, Bobo’s presence wasn’t something she was used to having other people notice. “That’s right,” she said, also in the Speech. “Not many people pick up on it.”
He nodded, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. “I notice things,” Penn’s grandfather said. “Though mostly I’m a mathematician.” He reached out to pick up the paperback lying on top of the tablet, turned it to face Nita, and she could see it was a Sudoku book. “So tell me. Who else in your family is a wizard?”
“My sister . . .”
“No. Outside of your own generation.”
“One of my aunts,” Nita said. “That’s all, as far as I know.”
“You’ve looked no further back than that?”
“I did once, but we only seem to go back five or six generations, and even then we keep skipping them. We may have been ‘outbreak’ wizards.” She used one of the terms in the Speech for newly established wizardly families, specifically the kind that occur in clusters, geographically or temporally speaking. There was some conjecture that this clustering might be a reflection of the Powers attempting to solve some problem that was about to arise. But there was no way to prove it one way or the other.
“A difference between us, then. Our family has had quite a few generations, going back into the 1500s at least.” He smiled slightly, a dry look. “Even family members who don’t know we have wizardry in the line always know there’s something a little odd about us. Though we do try to keep it quiet.” The smile went tighter. “We don’t mention it to the government, for one thing.”
Nita blinked. “I thought China was supposed to be . . . more culturally accepting of wizardry.”
“Sometimes that has been true. But cultures can change very quickly sometimes. And this is one of those times.”
“There’s supposed to be a saying,” Nita said. “They say it’s Chinese, anyhow. ‘May you live in interesting times . . . ’”
Penn’s grandfather nodded. “It’s Chinese . . . though I’m sure other people have said it, too. Other countries, other empires. The world’s changing faster than it ever used to. The change comes from a thousand directions, nowadays, and it leaves you wondering whether you ever actually knew what was going on.”
“I know how that feels,” Nita muttered.
“I looked you up in the Tao.” Penn’s grandfather said. Nita put her eyebrows up at that. She knew what the Tao was; to consider the wizard’s manual as being included in it made perfect sense, since the Tao was everything. “You’re older than I thought.”
“I’d think it would’ve told you how old I am,” Nita said.
“It told me what age you are. But how old you are is another story.” He had a swig of his beer. “Some of us seem to get pushed into being older quicker.”
It was as if he was almost daring Nita to say something. Finally she took a breath and said, “My mother died not long ago.”
She didn’t think she had ever put it to anybody quite that bluntly. The look the old man gave her was oddly congratulatory, as if he had been expecting her to soften the declaration somehow. “So did mine,” he said. “There seems to be a lot of that going around. The human condition . . .”
Nita was beginning to wonder if there was some kind of secret sport among Chinese wizards that involved being borderline rude all the time, and seeing how much of it you could get away with. If not, and if this was merely a personality thing, then it was definitely something Penn had gotten from his granddad. Well, she thought, two can play at that game. “People die,” Nita said, “people get born. Sometimes even in that order.”
He flashed a gap-toothed grin: an expression suggesting that he thought she should win a prize of some kind. “My daughter,” he said, “was a wizard of great skill. Weather was her specialty. She died much, much too young. It was an accident; insofar as anything’s ever truly an accident. But it was one of those events in which nobody living can see any sense.” He stared at a drop of condensation running down the neck of his beer bottle. “Your culture has it too, I think; the saying that the Powers ‘called somebody home.’ Because it makes no sense, what’s happened to them; t
here’s no other reason possible, or palatable, that this person who was walking around warm and vibrant one day is suddenly gone from the world.”
He shook his head. “The pain you have to suffer for such a thing—it makes no sense. And when there are young people involved, when you have a boy like Penn who worshiped his mother, and suddenly the world is broken and the Sun is black in his eyes because she’s not there anymore—”
Nita swallowed. “Entropy,” she said very quietly.
Penn’s grandfather nodded.
It occurred to Nita that the Powers That Be had known exactly what they were doing when they sent her as part of a team to mentor Penn. “He became a wizard after that, then?” she said.
“A year and a half later, after his father remarried and they all emigrated. It was a very sudden Ordeal.” And then he laughed at himself. “Well, what Ordeal isn’t? We’d all thought that perhaps Penn would be a skipped generation. But we were very wrong. Typical of him to show us so noisily how wrong we were.” He took another drink of his beer, put it down on the table, and turned the bottle around and around on top of one of many water-rings there. “Hell journey,” he said.
Nita held very still. That was not information the manual would ever have given her—certainly not without Penn’s permission, which wasn’t likely to have been granted. So-called hell journeys, Ordeal-fueled forays across multiple dimensional barriers, were famously associated with wizards who were very angry, or very stubborn, or very troubled, or all three. “Let me guess,” Nita said. “He went to try to get her back.”