(And Methchánë and Ysen and Cahadhwy and Rasaugéhil.... They are nice tonight.)
Nita looked up hurriedly. The tree above her was leaning back comfortably on its roots, finished with the stretching-upward of growth for the day, and gazing at the stars as she was, (I was hoping that haze would clear off,) it said as silently as Nita had spoken, in a slow, relaxed drawl. (This will be a good night for talking to the wind. And other such transient creatures. I was wondering when you were going to come out and pay your respects, wizardling.)
(Uh—) Nita was reassured: the rowan sounded friendly. (It's been a busy week.)
(You never used to be too busy for me,) the rowan said, its whispery voice sounding ever so slightly wounded. (Always up in my branches you were, and falling out of them again. Or swinging. But I suppose you outgrew me.)
Nita sat quiet for a moment, remembering how it had been when she was littler. She would swing for hours on end, talking to herself, pretending all kinds of things, talking to the tree and the world in general. And sometimes—(You talked back!) she said in shocked realization. (You did, I wasn't making it up.)
(Certainly I talked. You were talking to me, after all ... Don't be surprised. Small children look at things and see them, listen to things and hear them. Of course they understand the Speech. Most of them never realize it any more than you did. It's when they get older, and stop looking and listening, that they lose the Speech, and we lose them.) The rowan sighed, many leaves showing pale undersides as the wind moved them. (None of us are ever happy about losing our children. But every now and then we get one of you back.)
(All that in the book was true, then,) Nita said. (About the Battle of the Trees—)
(Certainly. Wasn't it written in the Book of Night with Moon that this world's life would become free to roam among our friends there)—the rowan stretched upward toward the turning stars for a moment—(if we helped? After the world was green and ready, we waited for a, long time. We started letting all sorts of strange creatures live in our branches after they came up out of the water. We watched them all; we never knew which of our guests would be the children we were promised. And then all of a sudden one odd-looking group of creatures went down out of our branches, and looked upward again, and called us by name in the Speech. Your kind...) The tree looked down musingly at Nita. (You're still an odd-looking lot,) it said.
Nita sat against the rowan and felt unhappy. (We weren't so kind to you,) she said. (And if it weren't for the plants, we wouldn't be here.)
(Don't be downcast, wizardling,) the tree said, gazing up at the sky again. (It isn't your fault. And in any case, we knew what fate was in store for us. It was written in the Book.)
(Wait a minute. You mean you knew we were going to start destroying your kind, and you got the world ready for us anyway?)
(How could we do otherwise? You are our children.)
(But ... we make our houses out of you, we—) Nita looked guiltily at the book she was holding. (We kill you and we write on your bodies!)
The rowan continued to gaze up at the night sky. (Well,) it said. (We are all in the Book together, after all. Don't you think that we wrote enough in the rock and the soil, in our day? And we still do. We have our own lives, our own feelings and goals. Some of them you may learn by your wizardry, but I doubt you'll ever come to know them all. We do what we have to, to live. Sometimes that means breaking a rock's heart, or pushing roots down into ground that screams against the intrusion. But we never forget what we're doing. As for you)—and its voice became very gentle—(how else should our children climb to the stars but up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago, that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater, more precious. You have your own stories to write. And when it comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your life? And who reads?) It breathed out, a long sigh of leaves in the wind. (Our cases aren't that much different.)
Nita sat back and tried to absorb what the tree was saying. (The Book of Night with Moon,) she said after a while. (Do you know who wrote it?)
The rowan was silent for a long time. (None of us are sure,) it said at last. (Our legends say it wasn't written. It's simply been, as long as life has been. Since they were kindled, and before.) It gazed upward at the stars.
(Then the other Book, the dark one—)
The whole tree shuddered. (That one was written, they say.) The rowan's voice dropped to a whisper. (By the Lone Power—the Witherer, the one who blights. The Kindler of Wildfires. Don't ask more. Even talking about that one or its works can lend it power.)
Nita sat quiet for a while, thinking. (You came to ask something,) the rowan said. (Wizards are always asking things of rowans.)
(Uh, yes.)
(Don't worry about it,) the rowan said. (When we decided to be trees of the Light, we knew we were going to be in demand.)
(Well—I need some live wood. Just enough for a stick, a little wand. We're going to open the Grand Central worldgate tomorrow morning.)
Above Nita's head there was a sharp cracking sound. She pressed back against the trunk, and a short straight branch about a foot and a half long bounced to the grass in front of her. (The Moon is almost full tonight,) the rowan said. (If I were you, I'd peel the leaves and bark off that twig and leave it out to soak up moonlight. I don't think it'll hurt the wood's usefulness for your spelling, and it may make it more valuable later on.)
(Thank you, yes,) Nita said. The book had mentioned something of the sort—a rowan rod with a night's moonlight in it could be used for some kind of defense. She would look up the reference later. (I guess I should go in and check my spells over one more time. I'm awfully new at this.)
(Go on,) the tree said, with affection. Nita picked up the stick that the rowan had dropped for her, got up and stretched, looking up at the stars through the branches. On impulse she reached up, hooked an arm around the branch that had had the swing on it.
(I guess I could still come and climb sometimes,) she said.
She felt the tree looking at her. (My name in the Speech is Liused,) it said in leafrustle and starflicker. (If there's need, remember me to the trees in Manhattan. You won't be without help if you need it.)
"I'm Nita," she said in the Speech, aloud for this once. The syllables didn't sound strange: they'sounded like a native language and made English feel like a foreign tongue. For a moment every leaf on the tree quivered with her name, speaking it in a whispery echo.
(Go,) the rowan said again. (Rest well.) It turned its calm regard to the stars again.
Nita went back inside.
Saturday morning about eight, Kit and Nita and Fred took the bus down to the Long Island Railroad station and caught a shiny silver train for Manhattan. The train was full of the usual cargo of Saturday travelers and shoppers, none of whom paid any particular attention to the boy and girl sitting by one window, going over the odd contents of their backpacks with great care. Also apparently unnoticed was a faint spark of white light hanging in the center of the window between the two, gazing out in fascination at the backyards and parking lots and stores the train passed.
(What are all those dead hunks of metal there? All piled up?)
(Cars, Fred.)
(I thought cars moved.)
(They did, once.)
(They all went there to die?)
(They were dead when they got there, probably.)
(But they've all climbed on top of each other! When they were dead?)
(No, Fred. They have machines—)
Nita sighed out loud. "Where were we?" she said to Kit.
"The battery."
"Right. Well, here it is."
"Lithium-cadmium?"
"Right. Heavy thing, it weighs more than anything else we've got. That's the last thing for activating the piece of time, isn't it?"
"One more. The eight and a half sugar cubes."
"Here." Nita held up a litt
le plastic bag.
"Okay. Now the worldgate stuff. The pinecone—"
"Bristlecone pine." Nita held it up then dropped it in her backpack.
"The aspirin."
"Uh-huh."
"The fork."
"Here."
"The rowan branch."
"Yup." She held it up. Cut down and peeled, it was about a foot long, a greenish white wand.
"Great. Then we're set. You've got all that other stuff, why don't you give me the battery?"
"Here." Nita handed it to him, watched as he found a good spot for it in his backpack, under the sandwiches. "What's that?" she said, spotting something that hadn't been accounted for in the equipment tally.
"Huh? Oh; this." He reached in and brought out a slim piece of metal like a slender rod, with a small knob at one end and broken off jaggedly at the other.
"What is it?"
"A piece of junk. A busted-off car antenna. Well," Kit amended, "it was, anyway. I was sitting out behind the garage yesterday afternoon, reading, and I started talking to my dad's old car. He has this ancient Edsel. He's always talking about getting it reconditioned, but I don't think he's really going to—there's never enough money. Anyway he goes out every now and then to work on the engine, usually when he's tired or mad about something. I don't know if he ever really gets any work done, but he always comes inside greasy all over and feeling a lot better. But I was going over the spells in my head, and the car spoke to me in the Speech—"
"Out loud?"
"No, inside, like Fred does. Kind of a grindy noise, like its voice needed a lube job. I wasn't too surprised; that kind of thing has been happening since I picked the book up. First it was rocks, and then things started to talk to me when I picked them up. They would tell me where they'd been and who'd handled them. Anyway, the car and I started talking." Kit paused, looking a touch guilty. "They don't see things the way we do. We made them, and they don't understand why most of the time we make things and then just let them wear out and throw them away afterward..."
Nita nodded, wondering briefly whether the train was alive too. Certainly it was as complex as a car. "What about this antenna thing, though?" she said after a moment.
"Oh. The car said to take it for luck. It was just lying there on the ground, rusting. Dad replaced the antenna a long time ago. So I took it inside and cleaned it up, and there are some wizardries you can do with metal, to remind it of the different forces it felt when it was being made. I did a couple of those. Partly just practicing, partly..."
"You thought there might be trouble," Nita said.
Kit looked at her, surprised. "I don't know," he said. "I'm going to be careful, anyway. Carl was pretty definite about not messing around with the worldgate; I wasn't thinking about anything like that. But it occurred to me that it'd be easy to carry the antenna to school if I wanted to. And if anyone started bothering me—" He shrugged, then laughed. "Well, that's their problem. Hey, look, we're getting close to that big curve where you can see the city before you go under the river. Come on, these trains have a window in the very front of the first car. (Fred! Want to see where we're going?)
(Why not? Maybe I'll understand it better than where we've been...)
Kit and Nita wriggled into their backpacks and made their way up through a couple of cars, hanging on carefully as they crossed the chained walkways between them. Treetops and housetops flashed by in a rush of wind and clatter of rails. Each time Nita touched the bare metal of the outside of the train, she jumped a little, feeling something, she wasn't quite sure what. The train? she thought. Thinking? And now that I'm aware that it does, I can feel it a little?—though not as clearly as the trees. Maybe my specialty is going to be things that grow and Kit's is going to be things that run. But how many other kinds of life are there that I could learn to feel? Who knows where thought is hiding?...
They went into the first car and made their way up to the front window, carefully hanging on to the seats of oblivious riders to keep the swaying of the train from knocking them over. There were no more stops between there and Penn Station, and the train was plunging along, the rails roaring beneath it. Those rails climbed gradually as the already elevated track went higher still to avoid a triple-stacked freeway. Then the rails bent away to the left in a long graceful curve, still climbing slightly; and little by little, over the low brown cityscape of Brooklyn, the towers of Manhattan rose glittering in the early sunlight. Gray and crystal for the Empire State Building, silver-blue for the odd sheared-off Citibank building, silver-gold for the twin square pillars of the World Trade Center, and steely white fire for the scalloped tower of the Chrysler Building as it caught the Sun. The place looked magical enough in the bright morning. Nita grinned to herself, looking at the view and realizing that there was magic there. That forest of towers opened onto other worlds. One day she would open that worldgate by herself and go somewhere.
Fred stared at the towers, amazed. (This is more life? More even than the place where you two live?)
(Ten million lives in the city, Fred. Maybe four or five million on that island alone.)
(Doesn't it worry you, packing all that life together? What if a meteor hits it? What if there's a starflare? If something should happen to all that life—how terrible!)
Nita laughed to herself. (It doesn't seem to worry them...) Beside her, Kit was hanging on to a seat, being rocked back and forth by the train's speed. Very faintly Nita could hear what Kit heard and felt more strongly; the train's aliveness, its wild rushing joy at doing what it was made to do—its dangerous pleasure in its speed, the wind it fought with, the rails it rode. Nita shook her head in happy wonder. And I wanted to see the life on other planets. There's more life in this world than I expected.
(It's beautiful,) Fred said from his vantage point just above Kit's shoulder.
"It really is," Nita said, very quiet.
The train howled defiant joy and plunged into the darkness under the river.
Penn Station was thick with people when they got there, but even so it took them only a few minutes to get down to the Seventh Avenue subway station and from there up to Times Square and the shuttle to Grand Central. The shuttle ride was short and crowded. Nita and Kit and Fred were packed tight together in a corner, where they braced themselves against walls and seats and other people while the train shouted along through the echoing underground darkness.
(I can't feel the Sun,) Fred said, sounding worried.
(We're ten or twenty feet underground,) Nita said silently. (We'll get you some Sun as soon as we get off.)
Kit looked at Fred with concern. (You've been twitchy ever since we went into the tunnel, haven't you?)
Fred didn't speak for a moment. (I miss the openness,) he said then. (But worse I miss the feeling of your star on me. Where I come from no one is sealed away from the surrounding emissions.) He trailed off, his thoughts full of the strange hiss and crackle of interstellar radiation—subtly patterned sound, rushing and dying away and swelling up again—the Speech in yet another of its forms. Starsong, Nita thought. (You said you heard about the Book of Night with Moon,) she said. (Was that how? Your ... friends, your people, they actually talk to each other over all those distances—millions of light-years?)
(That's right. Not that we use light to dp it, of course. But the words, the. song, they never stop. Except now. I can hardly hear anything but neutrinos...)
Kit and Nita glanced at each other. (The worldgate is underground, Fred,) Kit said. (In back of a deli, a little store. We'll have to be there for at least a few minutes to get Nita's pen out.)
(We could go out first and look around,) Nita said. (We're early—it's only nine thirty. We don't even have to think about anchoring the timeslide for a little bit yet.)
The subway cars screeched to a halt, doors rolled open, and the crush loosened as people piled out. Nita got off gladly, looking around for directional signs to point the way toward the concourse level of Grand Central—it had been a while sin
ce she'd been there.
"Are you sure you know your way around this place?" Kit asked as Nita headed down a torn-up looking corridor.
"Uh-huh. They're always doing construction in here. C'mon."
She led them up a flight of stairs into the lower Grand Central concourse—all beige tiles, gray floor, signs pointing to fifty different trains, and small stores packed together. "The deli's down there," she said as she went, waving a hand at a crowd of hurrying people and the wide hall past them. "We go up here." And another flight of stairs, wider and prettier, let them out on the upper concourse, a huge stretch of cream-colored marble under a great blue dome painted with constellations and starred with lights.
They headed across the marble floor, up a short ramp, and out one of many brassy yellow doors, onto the street. Immediately the three of them were assailed by noise, exhaust fumes, people hurrying in all directions, a flood of cabs and buses and cars. But there was also sunlight, and Kit and Nita stood against the wall by the Grand Central doors, letting Fred soak it up and get his composure back. He did so totally oblivious to the six men and three jackhammers working just across the street behind a barrier of sawhorses and orange plastic cones. (That's much better,) he said.
(It was quieter inside, though,) Kit said, and Nita was inclined to agree with him. The rattling clamor of the jackhammers was climbing down her ears into her bones and making her teeth jitter. The men, two burly ones and one skinny one, all three broad-shouldered and tan, all in helmets and jeans and boots, appeared to be trying to dig to China. One of them hopped down into the excavation for a moment to check its progress, and vanished up to his neck. Then the hammering started again. "How can they stand it?" Nita muttered.
(Stand what? It's lovely out here.) Fred danced about a little in the air, brightening out of invisibility for a few moments and looking like a long-lived remnant of a fireworks display.
(Fred, put it out!) Kit said. (If somebody sees you—)
(They didn't see me in the field the other day,) Fred replied, (though Artificer knows they looked.)