Chapter 2
Passwords
LIKE SO MANY OTHER human beings, Dairine had made her first major decision about life and the world quite early; at the age of three, in fact. She had seen Nita (then six years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time, and at the end of the day come back crying because she hadn't known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her.
Nita's crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine's three-year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn't know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones.
So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything; not surprisingly, Dairine's senses became abnormally sharp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four... just how, she never remembered: but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it-reading aloud to herself from a Britannica article on taxonomy, and sounding out the longer words-her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn't understand why. It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things... perhaps even to make them do things.
For fear of her parents being upset, and maybe stopping her, until she was five or so she kept her reading out of their sight as much as she could. The thought of being kept away from books terrified her. Most of what moved Dairine was sheer delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn't free to explore the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything. Dairine sat home and busied herself with conquering the world.
Eventually it came time for her to go off to kindergarten. Remembering Nita, her parents were braced for the worst, but not at all for Dairine's scowling, annoyed response when she came home. "They won't listen to what I tell them," Dairine said. "Yet." And off she went to read, leaving her mother and father staring at each other.
School went on, and time, and Dairine sailed her way up through the grades. She knew (having overheard a couple of her mother's phone conversations with the school's psychiatrist) that her parents had refused to let her skip grades. They thought it would be better for her to be with kids of her own age. Dairine laughed to herself over this, since it made school life utterly easy for her: it also left her more free time for her own pursuits, especially reading. As soon as she was old enough to go to the little local library for herself, she read everything in it: first going straight through the kids' library downstairs at about six books a day, then (after the concerned librarian got permission from Dairine's parents) reading the whole adult collection, a touch more slowly. Her mom and dad thought it would be a shame to stifle such an active curiosity. Dairine considered this opinion wise, and kept reading, trying not to think of the time-not too far away-when she would exhaust the adult books. She wasn't yet allowed to go to the big township library by herself.
But she had her dreams, too. Nita was already being allowed to go into New York City alone. In a few years, she would too. Dairine thought constantly of the New York Public Library, of eight million books that the White Lions guarded: rare manuscripts, books as old as printing, or older. It would take even Dairine a while to get through eight million books. She longed to get started.
And there were other dreams more immediate. Like everyone else she knew, Dairine had seen the Star Wars movies. Magic, great power for good and evil, she had read about in many other places. But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her with a terrible immediacy that the books had not; with a picture of power available even to untrained farmboys on distant planets in the future, and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present. And if you could learn that supreme knowledge, and master the power that filled and shaped the universe, how could the world ever hurt you? For a while Dairine's reading suffered, and her daydreams were full of the singing blaze of lightsabers, the electric smell of blasterfire, and the shadow of ultimate evil in a black cloak, which after terrible combat she always defeated. Her sister teased her a lot less about it than Dairine expected.
Her sister... Their relationship was rather casual, not so much a relationship as the kind you might have with someone who lived close enough for you to see every day. When both Dairine and Nita were little, they had played together often enough. But where learning came in, for a while there had been trouble. Sometimes Nita had shown Dairine things she was learning at school. But when Dairine learned them almost immediately, and shortly was better at them than Nita was, Nita got upset. Dairine never quite understood why. It was a victory for them both, wasn't it, over the world, which would get you if you didn't know things? But Nita seemed not to understand that.
Eventually things got better. As they got older, they began to grow together and to share more. Possibly Nita was understanding her better, or had simply seen how much Dairine liked to know things; for she began to tutor Dairine in the upper-grade subjects she was studying, algebra and so forth. Dairine began to like her sister. When they started having trouble with bullies, and their parents sent them both off to self-defense school, Dairine mastered that art as quickly as anything else she'd ever decided to learn; and then, when a particularly bad beating near home made it plain that Nita wasn't using what they'd learned, she quietly put the word out that anyone who messed with Nita would have Dairine to deal with. The bullying stopped, for both of them, and Dairine felt smugly satisfied.
That is, she did until one day after school she saw a kid come at Nita to "accidentally" body-block her into the dirt of the playground she was crossing. Dairine started to move to prevent it-but as the kid threw himself at Nita, he abruptly slid sideways off the air around her as if he had run into a glass wall. No one else seemed to notice. Even the attacker looked blank as he fell sideways into the dust. But Nita smiled a little, and kept on walking... and suddenly the world fell out from under Dairine, and everything was terribly wrong. Her sister knew something she didn't.
Dairine blazed up in a raging fire of curiosity. She began watching Nita closely, and her best friend, Kit, too, on a hunch. Slowly Dairine began to catch Nita at things no one else seemed to notice; odd words muttered to empty air, after which lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things came loose.
There was one day when their father had been complaining about the crabgrass in the front lawn, and Dairine had seen an odd, thoughtful look cross Nita's face. That evening her sister had sat on the lawn for a long time, talking under her breath. Dairine couldn't hear what was said; but a week and a half later their father was standing on and admiring a crabgrass-free lawn, extolling the new brand of weedkiller he'd tried. He didn't notice, as Dairine did, the large patch of crabgrass under the apple trees in the neighbor's yard next door... carpeting a barren place where the neighbor had been trying to get something green to grow, anything, for as long as Dairine could remember. It was all stuff like that... little things, strange thin nothing Dairine could understand and use.
Then came summer vacation at the beach-and the strangeness started to come out in the open. Nita and Kit started spending a lot of time away from home, sneaking in and out as if there were something to hide. Dairine heard her mother's uneasy conversations about this with her father, and was amused; whatever Nita was doing with Kit, Dairine knew sex wasn't involved. Dairine covered for Nita and Kit, and bided her time, waiting until they should owe her something.
The time came soon enough. One night the two of them went swimming and didn't come back when it got dark, as they'd agreed to. Dairine's mom and dad went out looking for Nita and Kit on the beach, and took Dairine with them. She got separated from them, mostly on purpose, an
d was a quarter-mile down the beach from them when, with a rush of water and noisy breath, a forty-foot humpback whale breached right in front of her, ran itself aground-and turned into Nita.
Nita went white with shock at the sight of Dairine. Dairine didn't care. "You're going to tell me everything," she said, and ran down the beach to distract her parents just long enough for Nita and Kit-also just changed back from a whale-to get back into their bathing suits. And after the noisy, angry scene with their parents that followed, after the house was quiet, Dairine went to Nita's room, where Kit was waiting, too, and let them tell her the whole story.
Wizard's manuals, oaths, wizardry, spells, quests, terrible dangers beyond the world, great powers that moved unseen and unsuspected beneath the surface of everyday existence, and every now and then broke surface-Dairine was ecstatic. It was all there, everything she had longed for. And if they could have it, she could have it too....
Dairine saw their faces fall, and felt the soft laughter of the world starting behind her back again. You couldn't have this magic unless you were offered it by the Powers that controlled it. Yes, sometimes it ran in families, but there was no guarantee that it would ever pass to you....
At that point Dairine began to shut their words out. She promised to keep their secret for the time being, and to cover for them the best she could. But inside she was all one great frustrated cry of rage: Why them, why them find not me! Days later, when the cry ebbed, the frustration gave way to blunt, stubborn determination. I'll have it. I will.
She had gone into Nita's room, found her wizard's manual, and opened it. The last time she'd held it, it had looked like a well-worn kid's book from the library and, when she'd borrowed it, had read like one. Now the excitement, the exultation, flared up in Dairine again; for instead of a story she found pages and pages of an Arabic-looking script she couldn't read... and near the front, many that she could, in English.
She skimmed them, turning pages swiftly. The pages were full of warnings and cautions, phrases about the wizard's responsibility to help slow down the death of the universe, paragraphs about the price each wizard paid for his new power, and about the terrible Ordeal-quest that lay before every novice who took the Wizards' Oath: sections about old strengths that moved among the worlds, not all of them friendly. But these Dairine scorned as she'd scorned Nita's cautions. The parts that spoke of a limitless universe full of life and of wizards to guard it, of "the Billion Homeworlds," "the hundred million species of humanity," those parts stayed with her, filled her mind with images of strangeness and glory and adventure until she was drowning in her own thought of unnumbered stars. I can do it, she thought. I can take care of myself. I'm not afraid. I'll matter, I'll be something....
She flipped through the English section to its end, finding there one page, with a single block of type set small and neat:
In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life's service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so-looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded....
It was the Oath that Nita had told her about. Not caring that she didn't understand parts of it, Dairine drew a long breath and read it out loud, almost in triumph. And the terrible silence that drew itself down around her as she spoke, blocking out the sounds of day, didn't frighten her; it exhilarated her. Something was going to happen, at last, at last....
She went to bed eagerly that night.
Chapter 3
Up and Running
NITA AND KIT AND Dairine made their way among the shops of the lower level of Penn Station and caught the C train for the Upper West Side, coming up at Eighty-first and Central Park West. For a little bit they stood there just getting their bearings. It was warm, but not uncomfortable yet. The park glowed green and golden.
Dairine was fidgeting. "Now where?"
"Right here," Nita said, turning around. The four-block stretch behind them, between 77th and 81st streets, was commanded by the huge, graceful bulk of the American Museum of Natural History, with its marble steps and beast-carved pediment, and the great bronze equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt looking eastward across at the park. Tucked into a corner of the building on 81st Street
stood the art deco-looking brick cube of the Hayden Planetarium, topped with a greened-copper dome.
"It looks like a tomb," Dairine said. "Shove that. I'm going to Natural History and look at the stuffed elephants."
"Climb on the stuffed elephants, you mean," Nita said. "Forget it. You're staying with us."
"Oh? What makes you think you can keep track of me if I decide to-
"This," Kit said grimly, hefting his wizard's manual. "If we have to, we can put a tracer on you. Or a leash..."
"Oh, yeah? Well, listen, smart guy, I-"
"Kit," Nita said under her breath, "easy. Dari, are you out of your mind? This place is full of space stuff. The new Shuttle mock-up. A meteorite ten feet long." She smiled slightly. "A store with Star Wars books..."
Dairine stared at Nita. "Well, why didn't you say so? Come on." She headed down the cobblestone driveway toward the planetarium doors.
"You never catch that fly with vinegar," Nita said quietly to Kit as the two of them followed at a safe distance.
"She's not like my sisters," Kit said.
"Yeah. Well, your sisters are human beings...."
They snickered together and went in after Dairine. To Nita's mild relief- because paying for her little sister's ticket would have killed her hot-dog money-Dairine already had admission money with her. "Dad give you that?" Nita said as she paid.
"No, this is mine," said Dairine, wrapping the change up with the rest of a wad, and sticking it back in her shorts.
"Where'd you get all that?"
"I taught a couple guys in my class to play poker last month," said Dairine. And off she went, heading for the souvenir store.
"Neets?" Kit said, tossing his manual in one hand.
Nita thought about it. "Naah," she said. "Let her go. Dairine!"
"What?"
"Just don't leave the building!"
"Okay."
"Is that safe?" Kit said.
"What, leaving her alone? She'll get into the Shuttle mock-up and not come out till closing time. Good thing there's hardly anyone here. Besides, she did say she wouldn't leave. If she were going to weasel out of it, she would've just grunted or something."
The two of them paused to glance into the souvenir store, full of books and posters and T-shirts and hanging Enterprises-both shuttle and starship. Dairine was browsing through a Return of the Jedi picture book. "Whatcha gonna get, hotshot?" Kit said, teasing.
"Dunno." She put the book down. "What I really need," she said, looking down at a set of Apollo decals, "is a lightsaber."
"And what would you do with it once you had it?"
"Use it on Darth Vader," Dairine said. "Don't you two have somewhere to be?"
Nita considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and felt sorry for Vader. "C'mon," she said to Kit. They ambled down the hall a little way, to the Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal- thirty-four tons of nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese. Nita laid her hands and cheek against it; on a hot day in New York, this was the best thing in the city to touch, for its pleasant coolness never altered, no matter how long you were in contact with it. Kit reached out and touched it too.
"This came a long way," he said.
"The asteroid belt," Nita said. "Two hundred fifty million miles or so..."
"No," Kit said. "Farther than that
." His voice was quiet, and Nita realized that Kit was deep in the kind of wizardly "understanding" with the meteorite that she had with trees and animals and other things that lived. "Long, long dark times," Kit said, "nothing but space, and the cold. And then slowly, light growing. Faster and faster-diving in toward the light, till it burns, and gas and water and metal boil off one after another. And before everything's gone, out into the dark again, for a long, long time...."
"It was part of a comet," Nita said.
"Until the comet's orbit decayed. It came in too close to the Sun on one pass, and shattered, and came down-" Kit took his hand away abruptly. "It doesn't care for that memory," he said.
"And now here it is...."
"Tamed," Kit said. "Resting. But it remembers when it was wild, and roamed in the dark, and the Sun was its only tether...."
Nita was still for a few seconds. That sense of the Earth being a small safe "house" with a huge backyard, through which powers both benign and terrible moved, was what had first made her fall in love with astronomy. To have someone share the feeling with her so completely was amazing. She met Kit's eyes, and couldn't think of anything to say; just nodded.
"When's the sky show?" he said.
"Fifteen minutes."
"Let's go."
They spent the afternoon drifting from exhibit to exhibit, playing with the ones that wanted playing with, enjoying themselves and taking their time. To Nita's gratification, Dairine stayed mostly out of their way. She did attach herself to them for the sky show, which may have been lucky; for Dairine got fascinated by the big Zeiss star projector, standing under the dome like a giant lens-studded dumbbell, and only threats of violence kept her out of the open booth that contained the computer-driven controls.
When the sky show was done, Dairine went off to the planetarium store to add a few more books to the several she'd already bought. Nita didn't see her again until late in the afternoon, when she and Kit were trying out the scales that told you your weight on various planets. Nita had just gotten on the scale for Jupiter, which weighed her in at twenty-one hundred pounds.