Don’t react. Make me a picture of the thing now.
“What makes you think I’d want anything of yours?” Joanne was saying, still with that smile. “Your family’s way too downmarket to ever afford to get you anything cool. We did you a favor, busting that lame MP3 player you were running around with—”
Nita looked straight at her and thought about the pen. Silver barrel, grooved all around the lower half to keep the user’s fingers from slipping. Her initials engraved on it. Hers, her pen.
Enough. Now then—
“But you know, now that I think of it, I do remember finding a pen on the ground somewhere last week. Did I even keep it, or did I just throw it out like the piece of junk it was?” Joanne was enjoying this so much that she actually flipped open the top of her backpack and began rummaging around. “Let’s see. …Oh, look here!”
She came up with something. Silver barrel, grooved—and Nita went hot again, not with embarrassment this time. “Give it to me!”
“Come get it,” Joanne said, dropping her backpack, keeping her smile, holding the pen back a little, cocking the other fist. “And I’ll fix your eye makeup at the same time—”
Which was when a spark of white light seemed to light on the end of the pen as Joanne held it up. Then both were gone with a pop and a breath of air.
Joanne spun, thinking one of her gang had plucked it out of her fingers. “Where’d it go?”
Her crew stared at her, dumbfounded.
Joanne whirled on Nita. Nita smiled and just shrugged with her hands held out, empty.
Joanne stepped in close. “What’d you just pull, you little creeper? Where is it?”
Nita took a few hurried steps back, unable to stop grinning even though she knew she was going to get hit. Heads were turning all around the schoolyard at the prospect of a fight. “That’s it,” Joanne hissed, while behind her one or two of her toadies were pulling out their phones, “somebody better call nine one one because you’re gonna need the paramedics in a minute—”
The eight-thirty bell went off so suddenly they both jumped. Joanne stared at Nita for a long long moment, then turned and went to pick up her backpack. “Then again, why rush?” she said, straightening. “Hope you like sleeping here, Callahan. Because when you try to leave…”
She walked off toward the doors with her gang trailing behind her. Nita stood where she was, still shaking, but with amazement and triumph as much as with fear. Kit came up beside her when Joanne was gone, and Fred appeared, a bright point between them.
“You were great!” Kit said.
“I’m gonna get killed tonight,” Nita said, but she couldn’t be terrified about it just yet. “Fred, you got it?”
The point of light was flickering, and there was something about the way it did so that made Nita wonder if something was wrong. Yes, Fred said, the thought coming with a faint queasy feeling to it. And that’s the problem.
“Are you okay?” Kit asked. “Where’d it go?”
I swallowed it, Fred said, sounding genuinely miserable now.
“But that was what you were going to do,” Nita said, puzzled. “Catch it in your own energy field, you said. Make a little pocket and hold it there.”
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. Lying there screen-side-up, its power cord trailing off to one side, was a small flatscreen TV.
“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 antique-looking encyclopedia were sitting on the ground next to the TV.
Kit and Nita hurried for the doors, sweating. Apparently using wizardry could produce more complications than the book had initially 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, 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, some of them texting while they waited, probably getting the word out on what was about to happen. “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. They all stared. And then 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. “That wasn’t an accident…” Kit said.
“Let’s go.”
They waited until Joanne was out of sight and then leaned cautiously out of the door, looking around. A second later Fred appeared, wobbling in the air. He made a slightly tired but cheerful feeling of greeting at them.
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 that had appeared out of nowhere. “Fred, you did that on purpose!”
She felt him glance at it, his cheerfulness drowning out his queasiness for a moment. I felt you wondering whether to come out, so I exerted myself a little. What was that thing?
“Later. Right now we should run. Fred, thanks!”
You’re most welcome. Just help me stop this!
“Can you hold it in for a few blocks?”
Depends. 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’d 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 around before I just walk in there. I’ve heard too many stories about this place—”
Look, Fred said in great discomfort, I’m really sorry but I’ve simply 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 th
at 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 late-model powder blue Mercedes-Benz was sitting half on, half off the sidewalk.
My gnaester hurts, Fred said.
“Let’s peek,” Nita said hurriedly, 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.
Nita and Kit stared in surprise at the man who opened it. Somehow they’d been expecting that any wizard not their age would be old, but this man was no more than in his middle thirties. He had dark hair and was tall and broad-shouldered, with a face that was quite handsome and heavy on the smile lines. “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. “Got 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 called 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 consult.”
“You’re really wizards?” Nita said, reassured but still surprised. She’d rarely seen two more normal-looking people.
Tom chuckled. “Sure we are. Though in our position we don’t freelance: that’s best left to the younger practitioners, like you two.”
The other man got out from under the sink, brushing off his hands and his somewhat smudged T-shirt and jeans. 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? Got some Coke, some fizzy lemonade, mineral water…”
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; among other things, he helps keep the worldgates at Grand Central Station and Rockefeller Center running. So you’ve come to the right place.”
“His personal wormhole’s acting up, huh?” Carl said. “Probably a local-mass issue. 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 and development, mostly. 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 also, like most Advisories, we’re a local clearinghouse for news and gossip in the Business.”
“But you do other things, too.” Kit looked around at the house.
“Oh, sure, we have jobs. 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 Cosmopolitan.
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“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, it’s 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, or someone, change their nature.” He paused, took another drink of his mineral water. “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.”
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. So there’s no problem with the Book of Night with Moon having everything described in it. In fact, 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.”