(I know. But my fields aren't working the way they should. Maybe it's this gravity. I'm not used to any gravity but my own. I think it went down the wrong way.)
"Oh, brother," Kit said.
"Well," Nita said, "at least Joanne hasn't got it. When we go to the Advisories tonight, maybe they can help us get it out."
Fred made a small thought-noise somewhere between a burp and a squeak. Nita and Kit looked up at him, concerned—and then both jumped back hurriedly from something that went bang! down by their feet.
They stared at the ground. Sitting there on the packed dirt was a small portable color TV, brand new.
"Uh, Fred—" Kit said.
Fred was looking down at the TV with embarrassment verging on shame. (I emitted it,) he said.
Nita stared at him. "But I thought white holes only emitted little things. Subatomic particles. Nothing so big—or so orderly."
(I wanted to visit an orderly place,) Fred said miserably. (See what it got me!)
"Hiccups," Kit muttered. "Fred, I think you'd better stay outside until we're finished for the day. We'll go straight to the Advisories' from here."
"Joanne permitting," Nita said. "Kit, we've got to go in."
(I'll meet you here,) Fred said. The mournful thought was followed by another burp/squeak, and another bang! and four volumes of an encyclopedia were sitting on the ground next to the TV.
Kit and Nita hurried for the doors, sweating. Apparently wizardry had more drawbacks than the book had indicated....
Lunch wasn't calm, but it was interesting, due to the thirty teachers, assistant principal, principal, and school superintendent who were all out on the athletic field, along with most of the students. They were walking around looking at the furniture, vacuum cleaners, computer components, books, knickknacks, motorcycles, typewriters, art supplies, stoves, sculptures, lumber, and many other odd things that had since morning been appearing one after another in the field. No one knew what to make of any of it, or what to do; and though Kit and Nita felt sure they would be connected with the situation somehow, no one accused them of anything.
They met again at the schoolyard door at three, pausing just inside it while Nita peered out to see if Joanne was waiting. She was, and eight of her friends were with her, talking and laughing among themselves. "Kit," Nita said quietly, "we've got problems."
He looked. "And this is the only door we can use."
Something went bang! out in the field, and Nita, looking out again, saw heads turn among Joanne's group. Without a moment's pause every one of the girls headed off toward the field in a hurry, leaving Joanne to glare at the school door for a moment. Then she took off after the others. Kit and Nita glanced at each other. "I get this feeling..." Kit said.
"Let's go."
They waited until Joanne was out of sight and then leaned cautiously out of the door, looking around. Fred was suddenly there, wobbling in the air. He made a feeling of greeting at them; he seemed tired, but cheerful, at least for the moment.
Nita glanced over her shoulder to see what had drawn the attention of Joanne and her group—and drew in a sharp breath at the sight of the shiny silver Lear jet. "Fred," she said, "you did that on purpose!"
She felt him look back, too, and his cheerfulness drowned out his weariness and queasiness for a moment. (I felt you wondering whether to come out, so I exerted myself a little. What was that thing?)
"We'll explain later; right now we should run. Fred, thank you!"
(You're most welcome. Just help me stop this!)
"Can you hold it in for a few blocks?"
(What's a block?)
They ran down Rose Avenue, and Fred paced them. Every now and then a little of Fred's hiccup noise would squeak out, and he would fall behind them, controlling it while they ran on ahead. Then he would catch up again. The last time he did it, they paused and waited for him. Twenty-seven Hundred Rose had a high poplar hedge with one opening for the walk up to the house, and neither of them felt like going any farther without Fred.
(Well?) he said, when he caught up. (Now what?)
Nita and Kit looked at each other. "I don't care if they are wizards," Nita said, "I want to peek in and have a look before I just walk in there. I've heard too many stories about this place—"
(Look,) Fred said in great discomfort, (I've got to—)
Evidently there was a limit on how long a white hole in Fred's condition could hold it in. The sound of Fred's hiccup was so much louder than usual that Nita and Kit crowded back away from him in near panic. The bang! sounded like the beginning of a fireworks display, and when its echoes faded, a powder blue Mercedes-Benz was sitting half on, half off the sidewalk.
(My gnaester hurts,) Fred said.
"Let's peek," Nita said, turned, and pushed a little way through the hedge. She wanted to be sure there were no monsters or skeletons hanging from trees or anything else uncanny going on in the yard before she went in. What she did not expect was the amiable face of an enormous black-and-white English sheepdog, which first slurped her face energetically, then grabbed her right arm in gentle but insistent teeth and pulled her straight through the hedge.
"Kit!" she almost screamed, and then remembered not to because Crazy Swale or whoever else lived here might hear her. Her cry came out as sort of a grunt. She heard Kit come right through the bushes behind her as the sheepdog dragged her along through the yard. ■ There was nothing spooky about the place at all—the house was big, a two-story affair, but normal-looking, all warm wood and shingles. The yard was grassy, with a landscaped garden as pretty as one of her father's. One side of the house had wide glass patio doors opening on a roofed terrace. Potted plants hung down and there was even a big square masonry tank, a fishpond—Nita caught a glimpse of something coppery swimming as the sheepdog dragged her past it to the terrace doors. It was at that point that the dog let go of her arm and began barking noisily, and Nita began seriously thinking of running for it.
"All right, all right," said a man's voice, a humorous one, from inside the house, and it was definitely too late for running. Kit came up behind Nita, panting. "All right, Annie, let's see what you've got this time."
The screen door slid open, and Nita and Kit looked in slight surprise at the man who opened it. Somehow they had been expecting that any wizard not their age would be old, but this man was young, certainly no more than in his middle thirties. He had dark hair and was tall and broad-shouldered. He looked rather like someone out of a cigarette ad, except that he was smiling, which the men in cigarette ads rarely do. "Well," the man said, sounding not at all annoyed by three unexpected guests, "I see you've met Annie..."
"She, uh," Nita said, glancing down at the dog, who was smiling at her with the same bemused interest as her master. "She found me looking through your hedge."
"That's Annie for you," the man said, sounding a bit resigned. "She's good at finding things. I'm Tom Swale." And he held out his hand for Nita to shake.
"Nita Callahan," she said, taking it.
"Kit Rodriguez," Kit said from beside her, reaching out to shake hands, too.
"Good to meet you. Call me Tom. What can I do for you?"
"Are you the Advisory?" Kit said.
Tom's eyebrows went up. "You kids have a spelling problem?"
Nita grinned at the pun and glanced over her shoulder. "Fred?"
Fred bobbed up between her and Kit, regarding Tom, who looked back at the unsteady spark of light with only moderate surprise. "He's a white hole," Nita said. "He swallowed my space pen."
(T-hup!) Fred said, and bang! went the air between Kit and Nita as they stepped hurriedly off to either side. Fourteen one-kilogram bricks of 999-fine Swiss gold fell clattering to the patio's brown tiles.
"I can see this is going to take some explaining," Tom said. "Come on in."
They followed him into the house. A big comfortable living room opened onto a den on one side and a bright kitchen-dining room on the other. "Carl, we've got company," Tom call
ed as they entered the kitchen.
"Wha?" replied a muffled voice—muffled because the upper half of its owner was mostly in the cabinet under the double sink. The rest of him was sprawled across the kitchen floor. This by itself wasn't so odd; what was odd was the assortment of wrenches and other tools floating in the air just outside the cabinet doors. From under the sink came a sound like a wrench slipping off a pipe, and a sudden soft thump as it hit something else. Probably its user. "Nnngg!" said the voice under the sink, and all the tools fell clattering to the kitchen floor. The voice broke into some most creative swearing.
Tom frowned and smiled both at once. "Such language in front of guests! You ought to sleep outside with Annie. Come on out of there, we're needed for a consultation."
"You really are wizards!" Nita said, reassured but still surprised. She had rarely seen two more normal-looking people.
Tom chuckled. "Sure we are. Not that we do too much freelancing these days—better to leave that to the younger practitioners, like you two."
The other man got out from under the sink, brushing himself off. He was at least as tall as Tom, and as broad-shouldered, but his dark hair was shorter and he had an impressive mustache. "Carl Romeo," he said in a voice with a pronounced Brooklyn accent. He shook hands with Kit and Nita. "Who's this?" he said, indicating Fred. Fred hiccuped; the resulting explosion produced six black star sapphires the size of tennis balls.
"Fred here," Tom said, "has a small problem."
"I wish I had problems like that," Carl remarked. "Something to drink, people? Soda?"
After a few minutes the four of them were settled around the kitchen table, with Fred hovering nearby. "It said in the book that you specialize in temporospatial claudications," Kit said.
"Carl does. Maintenance and repair; he keeps the worldgates at Grand Central Station and Rockefeller Center working. You've come to the right place."
"His personal gate is acting up, huh?" Carl said. "I'd better get the books." He got up. "Fred, what're the entasis figures on your warp?"
Fred mentally rattled off a number of symbols in the Speech, as he had when Kit asked him what he was. "Right," Carl said, and went off to the den.
"What do you do?" Nita said to Tom.
"Research, mostly. Also we're something of a clearinghouse for news and gossip in the Business. If someone needs details on a rare spell, or wants to know how power balances are running in a particular place, I can usually find out for them."
"But you do other things, too." Kit looked around at the house.
"Oh, sure, we work. I write for a living—after all, some of the things I see in the Business make good stories. And Carl sells commercial time for WNXT in the city. As well as regular time, on the side."
Kit and Nita looked at each other, puzzled. Tom chuckled. "Well, he does claudications, gatings, doesn't he? Temporospatial—time and space. If you can squeeze space—claudicate it—so that you pop out of one place and into another, why can't you squeeze time the same way? Haven't you heard the saying about 'buying time'? Carl's the one you buy it from. Want to buy a piece of next Thursday?"
"I can get it for you wholesale," Carl said as he came back into the room. In his arms he was carrying several hardbound books as thick as telephone directories. On his shoulder, more interesting, was a splendid scarlet-blue-and-yellow macaw, which regarded Kit and Nita and Fred out of beady black eyes. "Kit, Nita, Fred," Carl said, "Machu Picchu. Peach for short." He sat down, put the books on the table, and began riffling through the one on top of the stack; Tom pulled one out from lower in the pile and began doing the same.
"All right," Tom said, "the whole story, from the beginning."
They told him, and it took a while. When they got to Fred's part of the story, and the fact that the Naming of Lights was missing, Tom and Carl became very quiet and just looked at one another for a moment. "Damn," Tom said, "I wondered why the entry in the Materia Magica hadn't been updated in so long. This is news, all right. We'll have to call a regional Advisories' meeting."
Fred hiccuped again, and the explosion left behind it a year's back issues of TV Guide.
"Later," Carl said. "The situation here looks like it's deteriorating." He paused at one page of the book he was looking through, ran his finger down a column. The macaw peered over his shoulder as if interested. "Alpha-rai-entath-eight, you said?"
(Right.)
"I can fix you," Carl said. "Take about five minutes." He got up and headed for the den again.
"What is the Naming of Lights?" Kit said to Tom. "We tried to get Fred to tell us last night, but it kept coming out in symbols that weren't in our books."
"Well, this is a pretty advanced subject. A novice's manual wouldn't have much information on the Naming of Lights any more than the instruction manual for a rifle would have information on atomic bombs..." Tom took a drink. "It's a book. At least that's what it looks like when it's in or near this Universe. The Book of Night with Moon, it's called here, since in these parts you need moonlight to read it. It's always been most carefully accounted for; the Senior wizards keep an eye on it. If it's suddenly gone missing, we've got trouble..."
"Why?" Nita said
"Well, if you've gotten even this far in wizardry, you know how the wizards' symbology, the Speech, affects the things you use it on. When you use it, you define what you're speaking about. That's why it's dangerous to use the Speech carelessly. You can accidentally redefine something, change its nature. Something, or someone—" He paused, took another drink of his soda. "The Book of Night with Moon is written in the Speech. In it, everything's described. Everything. You, me, Fred, Carl,...this house, this town, this world. This Universe and everything in it. All the Universes..."
Kit looked skeptical. "How could a book that big get lost?"
"Who said it was big? You'll notice something about your manuals after a while," Tom said. "They won't get any bigger, but there'll be more and more inside them as you learn more, or need to know more. Even in plain old math it's true that the inside can be bigger than the outside; it's definitely true in wizardry. But believe me, the Book of Night with Moon has everything described in it. It's one of the reasons we're all here—the power of those descriptions helps keep everything that is in existence." Tom looked worried. "And every now and then the Senior wizards have to go get the Book and read from it, to remind the worlds what they are, to preserve everything alive or inanimate."
"Have you read from it?" Nita said, made uneasy by the disturbed look on Tom's face.
Tom glanced at her in shock, then began to laugh. "Me? No, no. I hope I never have to."
"But if it's a good Book, if it preserves things—" Kit said.
"It's good—at least, yes, it preserves, or lets things grow the way they want to. But reading it, being the vessel for all that power—I wouldn't want to. Even good can be terribly dangerous. But this isn't anything you two need to worry about. The Advisories and the Senior wizards will handle it."
"But you are worried," Kit said.
"Yes, well—" Tom took another drink. "If it were just that the bright Book had gone missing, that wouldn't be so bad. A universe can go a long time without affirmation-by-reading. But the bright Book has an opposite number, a dark one; the Book Which Is Not Named, we call it. It's written in the Speech too, but its descriptions are ... skewed. And if the bright Book is missing, the dark one gains potential power. If someone should read from that one now, while the Book of Night with Moon isn't available to counteract the power of the dark one..." Tom shook his head.
Carl came in then, the macaw still riding his shoulder. "Here we go," he said, and dumped several sticks of chalk, an enormous black claw, and a 1943 zinc penny on the table. Nita and Kit stared at each, other, neither quite having the nerve to ask whose claw it had been. "Now you understand," Carl said as he picked up the chalk and began to draw a circle around the table, "that this is only going to stop the hiccups. You three are going to have to go to Manhattan and hook Fred int
o the Grand Central worldgate to get that pen out. Don't worry about being noticed. People use it all the time and no one's the wiser. I use it sometimes when the trains are late."
"Carl," Tom said, "doesn't it strike you as a little strange that the first wizardry these kids do produces Fred—who brings this news about the good Book—and they come straight to us—"
"Don't be silly," the macaw on Carl's shoulder said in a scratchy voice. "You know there are no accidents."
Nita and Kit stared.
"Wondered when you were going to say something useful," Carl said, sounding bored. "You think we keep you for your looks? OW!" he added, as the bird bit him on the ear. He hit it one on the beak, and while it was still shaking its head woozily, put it up on the table beside Tom.
Picchu sidled halfway up Tom's arm, stopped and looked at Nita and Kit. "Dos d'en agouni nikyn toude pheresthai," it muttered, and got all the way up on Tom's shoulder, and then glared at them again. "Well?"
"She only speaks in tongues to show off," Tom said. "Ignore her, or rap her one if she bites you. We just keep her around because she tells the future." Tom made as if to smack the bird again, and Picchu ducked back. "How about the stocks tomorrow, bird?" he said.
Picchu cleared her throat. "'And that's the way it is,'" she said in a voice very much like that of a famous newscaster, "'July eighteen, 1988. From New York, this is Walter—'"
Tom fisted the bird in the beak, clunk! Picchu shook her head again." 'Issues were down in slow trading,'" she said resentfully. "'The Dow-Jones average—'" and she called off some numbers. Tom grimaced.
"I should have gone into pork bellies," he muttered. "I ought to warn you two: If you have pets, look out. Practicing wizardry around them can cause some changes."
"There we go," Carl said, and stood up straight. "Fred, you ready? Hiccup for me again."
(I can't,) Fred said, sounding nervous. (You're all staring.)
"Never mind, I can start this in the meantime." Carl leaned over the table, glanced down at one of the books, and began reading in the Speech, a quick flow of syllables sharpened by his Brooklyn accent. In the middle of the third sentence Fred hiccuped, and without warning the wizardry took. Time didn't precisely stop, but it held still, and Nita became aware of what Carl's wizardry was doing to Fred, or rather had done already—subtly untangling forces that were knotted tight together. The half-finished hiccup and the wizardry came loose at the same time, leaving Fred looking bright and well for the first time since that morning. He still radiated uncertainty, though, like a person who isn't sure he's stopped hiccuping yet.