“Yeah, of course.”
“And it takes a fair amount of practice to learn to do the vector diagrams and so forth without errors, and a lot of time, sometimes, to learn to speak the Speech properly. More time yet to learn to think in it. Well…” Tom sat down again and began turning his empty glass around and around on the table. “Now that technology’s proceeded far enough on this planet for computers to be commonplace, the Powers have been working with the Senior wizards to develop computer-supported wizards’ manuals. The software draws the necessary diagrams internally, the way a calculator does addition, for example; you get the solution without seeing how it’s worked out. The computer also synthesizes the Speech, though of course there are tutorials in the language as you go along.”
“The project has both useful and dangerous sides,” Carl said. “For one thing, there are good reasons why we use the Speech in spelling. It contains words that accurately describe things and conditions that no Earthly language has words for. And if during a spell you give the computer instructions that’re ambiguous in English, and it describes something inaccurately… well.” He looked grim. “But for the experienced wizard, who already knows the theory he’s working with, and is expert in the Speech, it can be a real timesaver.”
“A lifesaver, too, under special circumstances,” Tom said, looking somber. “You two know how many children go missing in this country every year.”
“Thousands.”
“It’s not all kidnappings and runaways,” Tom said. “Some of those kids are out on their Ordeal. Because they don’t have time to become good with the Speech, they get in trouble with the Lone Power that they can’t get out of. And they never come back.” He moved uneasily in the chair. “Providing them with the wizard’s software may save some of their lives. Meantime…”
Carl turned over a page or two in his manual, shaking his head. “Meantime, I want a look at Dairine’s software; I need to see which version she got. And I want a word with her. If she lights out into the middle of nowhere on Ordeal without meaning the Oath she took, she’s going to be in trouble up to her neck. But also, your folks should know about all this. Easier if we tell them, I think. How ‘bout it, partner?” He looked over at Tom.
“No question. I was about to suggest it myself.”
Nita sagged with relief.
“Good. Your folks busy this afternoon, Neets?”
“Just with the computer.”
“Perfect.” Carl put out his hand, and from its sharger cradle the kitchen phone leapt into his hand. “Anything come up today since I looked at the calendar?”
“Nope, blessedly peaceful for a change…”
“Not that that lasted long,” Carl rolled his eyes for a moment: then focused. “Harry? Hi there, Carl Romeo… Nothing much, I just heard from Nita that you got the new computer in… Yeah, they stopped in on the way home. …Yeah. What did you decide on?… Nice machine, that. Did it hook up all right?” Carl listened for a few seconds to the soft squeaking of the phone, while Picchu chewed idly on Carl’s Coke bottle while keeping one eye on the phone.
Carl’s eyebrows meanwhile went up as he listened. “…Yes, of course I would. It may not have been anything serious, but no harm in looking at it. I was going to ask if we could stop by anyway, there’s something going on with the kids that I’d like to check on… Not at all. Absolutely, that’s perfect. Fine… Fine. See you in a bit. Bye now.”
He hung up. “That was your mom in the background,” he said to Nita, “insisting on feeding us again. I think she’s decided the best thing to do with adult wizards is tame them with kindness and gourmet cuisine.”
“Magic still makes her nervous,” Nita said.
“Or we still make her nervous,” Tom said, getting up to shut and lock the patio doors.
“Well, yeah. Neither of them can quite get used to it, that you were their neighbors for all these years and they never suspected you were wizards….”
“Being out in the open,” Tom said, “causes even more problems than ‘passing’… as you’ll have noticed. But the truth works best. Front door locked?” he said to Carl.
“Yup,” said Carl. He looked down at his side in surprise: from the table, Picchu was calmly climbing beak over claw up his shirt. “Bird—”
“I’m going,” said Picchu, achieving Carl’s shoulder with a look of calm satisfaction, and staring Carl right in the eye. “I’m needed.”
Carl shrugged. It was difficult and time-consuming to start fights with a creature who could rip your ear off faster than you could remove her. “You do anything nasty on their rug,” he said, “and it’s macaw croquettes for lunch tomorrow, capisce?”
Picchu, preening a wing feather back into place, declined to answer.
“Then let’s motor,” Tom said. They headed for the garage.
*
“It really is sleek,” Tom said, “and the documentation’s clear, which is a blessing.” Nita watched with barely suppressed amusement as Tom and her father leaned down together to look at the screen. “But you say it froze on you?”
“Just briefly after Dairine was messing with it, before the kids left. It seems okay now, though: I rebooted it shortly after that, and we went through the setup screen with no trouble. But after that it started freezing up again every now and then.”
“Where’s Dairine, Daddy?” said Nita.
“Up in her room. You two must really have worn her out for her to come home so early.”
“Which train did she take?” Kit said.
“She didn’t say. She looked a little tired when she got in… said she was going to go read or something. Tom, have I got all the connections tight?”
“Everything looks fine from here,” Tom said, examining the back of the machine. “Let’s reboot it and see how it behaves.”
Carl, standing beside Nita, reached around the back of the Apple and hit the reset button. The screen went dark, and then after a moment the start-up chime rang softly again, and the Apple logo came up. But then Nita stared as she realized the apple had no bite out of it.
Nita’s dad’s attention was on that as well. Tom and Carl looked at it, then at each other. “See, I thought I saw that before,” Nita’s dad said, “but I wasn’t sure…”
“Interesting,” Carl said as the screen displayed its wallpaper again, and a couple of rows of icons.
“Uh huh,” Carl said. He reached down to the keyboard and typed control-C, and a window came up into which he typed a long series of characters, too quickly for them to register for Nita as anything but a blur. They disappeared, and a message appeared in the graceful Arabic-looking letters of the wizardly Speech. USER LOG? it said.
“Yes, please,” Carl said. “Authorization seven niner three seven one comma five one eight.”
“Password?” said the computer in a dry, cultured female voice.
Carl leaned near the screen and whispered something.
“Confirmed,” said the computer politely, and began spilling its guts in window after window full of the Speech in a simple clean Apple-ish font. Carl’s attention was on one window in particular, and something came up in it that made his face change suddenly, its expression going rather closed. “Pause,” Carl said. “Harry, you’d better have a look at this.”
Nita’s father got up, brushing himself off, and looked at the screen, and froze. He’d seen the Speech in Nita’s manual more than once, and knew the look of it. “Carl,” Nita’s father said. “What is this?”
Carl looked as if he wished he didn’t have to say anything. “Harry, it wouldn’t be fair to make Nita tell you this… but you seem to have another wizard in the family.”
“What?!”
“Yes,” Carl said, “that was my reaction too. Translation,” he said to the computer.
“Translation of protected material requires double authorization by ranking Seniors and justification filed with Planetary or equivalent,” said the computer, sounding stubborn.
“What’ve y
ou done to my machine!”
“The question,” Tom said, getting up off the floor, “is more like, what has Dairine done to it? Or caused to be done to it. Sorry, Harry. This is a hell of a way for you to find out.”
Nita watched her father take in a long breath, then turn toward the stairs. “Don’t call her just yet, Harry,” said Tom. He laid a hand on the computer. “Confirmed authorization one zero zero three oblique zero two. We’ll file the justification with Irina later. Translate.”
The screen’s contents abruptly turned into English. Nita’s father bent over a bit to read it. “‘Oath accepted—’”
“This Oath, Harry,” Carl said. “Display heartcode.”
The computer cleared its screen and displayed one small block of text, dark in its white window. Nita held still while her father read the Wizards’ Oath. There was movement behind her: she looked up and saw her mother, with a peppermill clutched forgotten in one hand, looking over her father’s shoulder with a stricken expression.
“Dairine took that?” her father said at last.
“So did we, Daddy,” Nita said.
“Yes, but—” He sat down on the edge of the desk, staring at the screen. “Dairine isn’t quite like you two….”
“Exactly. Harry, this is going to take a while. But first, you might call in Dairine. She did something careless this afternoon, and I want to make sure she doesn’t do it again.”
Nita felt sorry for her father; he looked so pale. Her mother went to him, put an arm around him. “What did she do?” she said.
“She went to Mars and left the door open,” said Tom.
Nita’s dad shut his eyes. “She went to Mars.”
“Just like that…” said her mother.
Carl sighed. “Harry, Nita tells me she took you two to the Moon once to prove a point. Imagine power like that, but used without due care and attention. I need to make sure that’s not going to happen, or I’ll have to put a lock on some of her power. And there are other problems, because that power may be necessary for something….” Carl looked stern but unhappy. “Where is she, Harry?”
“Dairine!” Nita’s dad said, raising his voice.
“Yo,” came Dairine’s voice from upstairs, her all-purpose reply.
“Come down here a minute.”
“Do I have to? I’m reading.”
“Now.”
The ceiling creaked a little, the sound of Dairine moving around her room. “What have I done to deserve this?” said Nita’s father to the immediate universe.
“Harry,” Carl said glancing at the computer screen and away again, “this may come as a shock to you…”
“Carl, I’m beyond shocking. I’ve walked on the Moon without a spacesuit and seen my eldest daughter turn into a whale. That my youngest should go to Mars on a whim…”
“Well, as to what you’ve done to deserve it…you have a right to know the answer. The tendency for wizardry comes down to the kids through your side of the family.”
That was a surprise to Nita. As for her dad, he looked stricken, and her mother looked at him with an expression that was faintly accusing. Carl said, “You’re related to the first mayor of New York, aren’t you?”
“Uh, yeah… he was—”
“—a wizard, and a considerable talent. One of the youngest Seniors in recent history, in fact. The talent in your line’s considerable; too bad it missed you, but it does skip generations without warning. Was there something odd about one of your grandparents?”
“Why, my—” Nita’s father swallowed and looked as if he was suddenly remembering something. “I saw my grandmother disappear once. I was about six. Later I always thought I’d imagined it….” He swallowed again. “Well, that’s the answer to why me. The next question is, why Dairine?”
“She’s needed somewhere,” said Carl. “The Powers value the status quo too highly to violate it without need. It’s what we’re defending, after all. Somewhere out there is a life-or-death problem to which only Dairine is the answer.”
“We just need to make sure she knows it,” said Tom, “and knows to be careful. There are forces out there that aren’t friendly to wizards—” He broke off suddenly as he glanced over at the computer screen. “Carl, you should see this.”
They all looked at the screen. user log, it said, and under the heading were listed a lot of numbers and what Nita vaguely recognized as program names. “Look at that,” Tom said, pointing to one. “Those are the spells she did today, using the computer. A huge amount of online memory used and storage invoked, in the yottabytes. A lot of it in one session, the latest one—at 16:52 hours—”
“That’s what… about ten of five?” Nita’s mother said. “She wasn’t even here then….”
The stairs creaked as Dairine came down them into the living room. She paused a moment, halfway, as well she might have done with all those eyes and all those expressions trained on her… her father’s bewildered annoyance, her mother’s indignant surprise, Tom’s and Carl’s cool assessment, Nita’s and Kit’s expectant looks.
Then Dairine hesitantly walked the rest of the way down. “I came back,” she said abruptly.
Nita waited for more. Dairine said nothing.
Nita’s parents exchanged glances, evidently having the same thought: that a Dairine who said so little wasn’t normal. “Baby…” her mother said, sounding uncertain, “you’ve got some explaining to do.”
But Carl stepped forward and said, “She may not be able to explain much of anything, Betty. Dairine’s had a busy day with the computer. Isn’t that so, Dairine?”
“Don’t want to talk about it,” Dairine said.
“I think it’s more like you can’t,” said Carl.
“Look at the user log, Harry,” Tom said from behind Nita and Kit. “Huge storage space spent on a single program run. A copy program. And run, as you say, when she wasn’t even here. There’s only one answer to that.”
Slowly, as if he were looking at a work of art, Carl walked around Dairine. She watched him nervously. “Even with unlimited available memory and a computer running wizard’s software,” Carl said, “there’s only so much fidelity a copy can achieve. Making hard copies of dumb machinery, even a computer itself, that’s easy. Dairine did that once before moving on to more advanced work.”
Carl kept walking around Dairine. She didn’t move, didn’t speak. “Carl, come on,” Nita’s father said from behind her, “cut it out. You’re scaring her.”
“I think not,” Carl said. “There’s only so much you can do with a copy… especially when the original’s a living thing. The copy’s responses are limited. See, there’s something that lives inside the hardware, inside the meat and nervous tissue, that can’t be copied. Brain, sure, no problem copying that. But mind? That’s tougher work. And soul—there’s no copying that at all. Those are strictly one to a customer, at least on this planet.”
The air was singing with tension. Nita glanced at Kit, and Kit nodded, for he knew as well as she did the feel of a spell in the working. Carl was using no words or gestures to assist in the spell he was buildling, nothing but the slow certain pressure of his mind as he thought in the Speech. “She copied the computer into a smaller more mobile format and took it to the city with her,” Carl said, “then got away when she could. And after she’d left Earth, she decided—I’d imagine—that she wanted some time to sightsee. But, of course, you’d rightly object to that. So she copied something else, to buy herself some time.”
The spell built and built in power, and the air around them all began to sing the note ears sing in silence, but much louder. “Nothing not its own original can exist in this room,” Carl said, “once I turn the spell loose. Harry, you’re having trouble believing this, are you? You think I’d treat your real daughter this way?”
Nita’s father said nothing.
“Run,” Carl said softly.
Dairine vanished. Air imploded into the place where she had been, and all around the room, paperwork
ruffled or blew about in the sudden wind, then slowly settled.
Nita’s father put his face in his hands.
Her mother looked sharply at Tom and Carl. “I’ve known you two too long to think you were toying with us,” she said as Carl went to sit down slowly on the sofa, looking pale. “You said something a moment ago about forces that weren’t friendly…”
“Nita’s told you some of what wizards are for,” Tom said, looking at Carl in concern, then up again. “Balance. Maintenance of the status quo; protecting life. There are forces that are ambivalent toward life. One in particular theld Itself aloof from creation, a long time ago, and when everyone else was done, It created something none of the other forces had thought of: death. And the longest Death… the running-down of the Universe. The other Powers cast It out… and they’ve been dealing with the problem, and the Lone Power, ever since.”
“Entropy,” Nita’s mother said, looking thoughtful. “That’s an old story.”
“It’s the only story,” Tom said. “Every sentient species has it, or learns it.” He looked over at Nita’s father, who was recovering somewhat. “I’m not about to pass judgment on whether the Lone One’s invention was a good idea or not. There are cases for both sides, and the argument has been going on since time was set running. Every being that’s ever lived has argued the case for one side or the other, whether it’s been aware of it or not. But wizards fight the great Death, and the lesser ones, consciously… and the Entity that invented death takes our interference very personally. New wizards always meet it in one form or another, on their Ordeals. Some survive, if they’re careful. Nita and Kit were careful… and they had each other’s help.”
“‘Careful’ is not Dairine’s style,” Nita’s mother said, sounding rueful. “And she’s alone.”
“Not for long,” Tom said. “We’ll track her, and see that she has help. But I think Nita will have to go. She knows Dairine’s mind fairly well.”
“I’m going too,” said Kit.
Carl, still ashen from the exertion of his spell, shook his head. “Kit, your folks don’t know you’re a wizard. You might have to be gone for quite a while—and I can’t sell you two a time warp as I did once before. My time-jurisdiction stops at atmosphere’s edge.”