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 and not me! Days later, when the cry ebbed, the frustration gave way to blunt, stubborn determination. I’ll have it. I will.
She’d 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. When she’d borrowed it, had read like one. Now, though, the excitement, the exultation, flared up in Dairine again. For instead of a story, between the book’s covers she found pages and pages of an Arabic-looking script she couldn’t read. And near the front were more pages that she could read, 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 completely 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.
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 the stairs from the station on the west side of the intersection of Eighty-first and Central Park West. For a little bit they stood there just getting their bearings. It was warm, but not uncomfortable yet: Central Park glowed green and golden across the street from them.
Dairine was fidgeting. “Now where?”
“Right here,” Nita said, turning around. The four bocks stretching downtown from them, between 77th and 81st, were dominated 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. But far closer to them, diagonally across the street to the right, was the massive glass cube of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, packed with planets built to scale, and the giant sphere of the Sun that also housed the Hayden Planetarium.
“Bored already,” Dairine said, her face twisted into an expression of profound disdain. “Screw that. I’m going over to Natural History and look at the stuffed elephants.”
Nita knew better than to take this attitude seriously: she knew Dairine was simply cranky about being made to do something she hadn’t thought of herself first. “Climb on the stuffed elephants, you mean,” Nita said, as that had been one of many disastrous results of one of Dairine’s previous school trips. “Not a chance. 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, I’ve got news for you! You are not the boss of me, and if you—”
“Kit,” Nita said under her breath. He looked at her: she shook her head a bit, then glanced over at her sister. “Dair, are you nuts? This place is full of space stuff. A live Space Shuttle mockup. Meteorites ten feet long. A bookstore.” She smiled slightly. “With Star Wars books…”
Dairine stared at Nita. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? God, you’re so slow sometimes. Come on!” And the moment the traffic was clear, she headed across the street. Seconds later she was trotting down one side of the semicircular brick ramp toward the broad low arch below the main planetarium cube overhanging the Space Center’s main doors.
“You catch more flies with honey…” Nita said to Kit under her breath as the two of them followed at a safe distance.
“I guess,” Kit said, shaking his head. “She’s not like my sisters…”
“Yeah, well, your sisters are human beings.”
They laughed together and went in after Dairine. To Nita’s mild relief—because paying for her little sister’s admission ticket would have killed her hot-dog money—Dairine had money for that 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 small wad of bills and buttoning it into the front pocket of her shorts.
“Where’d you get all that?”
“Taught a couple of guys in my class to play poker last month,” said Dairine. And off she went, heading straight for the bookstore.
“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 don’t seem to be a lot of people here today. Anyway, she did say she wouldn’t leave. If she were going to weasel out of it, she’d ‘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—Shuttle and starship — and an impressive assortment of every kind of science. Dairine was already browsing through a fat The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars coffee-table book, almost visibly salivating. “They’ve got some plastic lightsabers over there,” Kit said over her shoulder, teasing. “With Real Action Sound…”
“Find me a real one and we’ll talk,” Dairine said, not even looking up as she turned the pages.
“Sounds like you’ve already got plans what to do with it.”
She flicked a glance up at Kit that was half scowl, half smile: an expression suggesting that Kit could become part of those plans if he wasn’t careful. “Using it on Darth Vader,” she said mildly, “saving the Galaxy, no big deal…” She turned the same expression on Nita. “Don’t you two have somewhere to be?”
Nita briefly considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and—after a moment’s amusement—found that, in prospect, she felt sorry for Vader. “Call us when you get bored with in here,” she sa
id, “and we’ll go do the multimedia show.”
“Yeah, fine,” Dairine muttered, barely noticing.
“C’mon,” Nita said to Kit. “We’ll go down to the far end of the Museum and work our way back.”
The two of them ambled out of the bookstore started making their way southward, through the main front-entrance hall, to the Forest Hall at the southeastern corner; then hung a right, heading westward through the New York State environment exhibit and the Hall of Oceans, and finally to what Nita most wanted to see, the Ross Hall of Meteorites. Here and there large chunks of ancient scorched rock or rock-and-metal stood about in cases or on individual pedestals arranged around circular railings. But the the centerpiece was the huge Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal—thirty-four tons of darkly shining nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese.
“That is really something,” Kit said as they went up the steps into the central circle where the meteorite sat.
Nita nodded. “When they redid the place they had to build around it,” she said. “It’s too heavy to just sit on the floor. See that pedestal? It’s solid steel. Goes right down into the bedrock…”
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 sinking into the particular kind of wizardly “understanding” with the meteorite that was his speciality where theoretically inanimate objects were concerned. “Long, long dark times,” Kit said, his eyes closing. “Just space, and cold. And then, real slowly, light starts to grow. Then faster. It dives 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 broke into pieces,and came down—” Kit took his hand away abruptly. “It’s not wild about that memory.”.
“And now here it is….”
“Resting,” Kit said. “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.
“Next one’s half an hour.”
“Let’s head back and see if we can catch it.”
*
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 elect to attach herself to them for the sky show, which may have been lucky; for Dairine got fascinated by the huge high-tech Zeiss star projector, standing under the dome like a giant lens-studded dumbbell. Only threats of wizardly compulsion kept her from trying to force her way into the fabulously techie 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 had been working their way around the sun-and-planets exhibit that surrounded the planetarium’s Great Sphere . There were digital scales that told you your weight on various planets. Nita had just gotten on the scale for Jupiter, which weighed her in at two hundred thirty-six pounds.
“Putting on a little weight, there, Neets,” Dairine said behind her. “Especially up front.”
For about three seconds Nita was fiercely tempted to pull her manual out and activate a spell she’d been tinkering with, one that would punch the wizardly version of a “mute” button on her sister. A couple of weeks previously Nita had had to go up a bra size; and having picked up that Nita’s feelings about this were mixed, Dairine had been running the subject into the ground. Just one test to see if it’d really work. And to enjoy the look on her face…
Then Nita breathed out and let the urge go, as it occurred to her that letting Dairine know she’d gotten to her would be a tactical error. “It’s all muscle, Dair,” she said, without a trace of irony. “Besides, it’s where you are that counts. Check this out.” She sidestepped to the Mars scale, the needle of which stopped at thirty-seven pounds.
“Huh,” Dairine said with a frown, and wandered off. Nita smiled slightly at her back. Annoyed that she didn’t get the reaction she wanted. Good… “Listen, wait a minute! Where’re you headed?”
“Bathroom.” Dairine was already halfway down the corridor that led out of the Scales of the Universe area.
“Okay, but hurry up, it’s almost closing time.”
Kit, who’d been standing on the Saturn scale, now moved over to the Jupiter. “What was that about?” he said. “Don’t often hear you thinking that loudly. Or in that tone.”
Nita let out a sigh that was more of a hiss of annoyance.
“Oh, crap.” She tried the scale for Mercury: thirty-seven pounds. “…Growth issues.”
“You don’t look any taller.”
She turned around and stared at him.
“What?”Kit looked genuinely confused. Then, finally, he looked at her chest. “Oh.” He shrugged. “Didn’t notice.”
Thank God, Nita thought. And immediately after that, He didn’t notice? She swallowed and said, “Anyway, she’s really been riding me, and I swear, if she keeps it up much longer…”
“She’s probably jealous.”
Nita laughed. “What, of me?”
“Who else?” Kit got off the scales and wandered over to the railing between them and the glass curtain-wall, one face of the clear cube surrounding the Great Sphere. “Neets, why’re you surprised? You’re a wizard. You’re the one who told me how hot Dairine’s been for magic since she was a little kid. Any kind… Star Wars, you name it. And now all of a sudden not only does it turn out that there really is such a thing, but you turn up with it! And from what we had to tell her to keep her quiet after she found out, Dari knows that you and I do serious stuff.” Kit wandered back over toward her. “She wishes she could get her hands on the power… and there’s no guarantee she ever will.”
Nita walked away from the scales and made her way over to the railing by the glass wall. Kit beside her. “I think she’s been into my manual in the last couple days.”
“So there you go,” Kit said. “If she can’t have the magic, she’s gonna try to punish you for having it. Hate to say this, but she’s acting like even more of a brat than usual.”
That agreed too well with thoughts Nita had been trying to reject. “Yeah….”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a woman’s voice from speakers high up in the cube, “the planetarium is now closing. Thank you.” And some of the lights high above them started to gently dim.
Nita sighed. Kit punched her lightly in the arm. “Come on,” he said, “don’t let her get to you. Let’s go over to the park and get a couple of dirty-water hot dogs to take the edge off before we go home. If she starts getting on our nerves, we’ll tell her I’m about to turn her into a fire hydrant and then call in every dog on the upper West Side to try her out.”
“Too late,” Nita said. “She already knows we don’t do that kind of thing.”
“She knows you don’t do that kind of thing,” Kit said. “But she may not know that I don’t….”
; Nita looked at his grim expression and wondered briefly whether the grimness was all faked. “I really am starved.”
“So c’mon.”
They headed down the inside of the cube together and came to the stairwell leading to the level below. There, under an arrow pointing toward the first floor level, was a sign they’d seen earlier that day and laughed at:
TO MARS, VENUS, AND LADIES’ ROOM
“Wait for me,” Nita said. “Once she’s done in there, she’ll probably try to break into ‘Venus’ to see how they’re doing the lava.”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Being a fire hydrant may be too good for her.”
Nita went down the stairs. “Dari?” she called, annoyed. “Come on before they lock us in.”
It was considerably cooler down here: probably something to do with the air conditioning. Nita turned right at the bottom of the stairs and walked quickly through the Venus exhibit, rubbing her upper arms at the chill, which went right through her thin T-shirt. The sluggishly erupting Venerian volcano behind its glass wall had already been turned off. No one else, visitor or staff, was to be seen from where Nita stood all the way down to the temporary plasterboard wall with the AmHist logo and the laser-printed sign that said MARS CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE.
“Still in the toilet,” Nita muttered, annoyed. Reading, probably. One of these days she’s gonna fall in… She went back the way she’d come and went on past the stairs to the ladies’ room.
It was not only cold down here, there was a serious draft. She grabbed the handle of the door and pulled; it resisted her slightly, and there was a faint hoo noise, air sliding through the door crack as she tugged. “Dari? Come on, we’re leaving!” Nita pulled harder, the door came open—
Air blew hard past her and ruffled her hair into her eyes. Bitter cold smote the front of her, and in it the humidity in the air condensed out instantly, whipping past Nita through the sucking air as stinging, dust-fine snow.