BANG!
The wind blew Dairine’s hair back, and a tall figure imploded into the space in the middle of the circle of leaves. He was nearly as tall as Dairine’s dad and was dressed in what even Dairine, for whom clothes were mostly unimportant, was willing to describe as “splendid robes.” He was wearing an undertunic and hose and boots in some golden fabric or substance. There was an overtunic or long jacket in scarlet, all embroidered over in gold; and he was wearing gauntlets of gold, and a strange sort of scarf of gold over the outer jacket. And there was a fillet of gold bound around his head, but it was a more reddish gold, which wonderfully set off all that hair, which, it turned out, went right down his back and was long enough for him to sit on. There he stood, looking around imperiously at all of them, his thumbs hooked in the broad golden belt under the overtunic.
Dairine’s first thought, which she couldn’t control, was, Noisy arrival. Sloppy technique. Her second thought was, Maybe it’s something cultural, dressing up so fancy. But the back of her mind answered instantly and without reason: Yeah, sure. He’s showing off. And why?
The new arrival looked around. “And where is the welcoming committee?” he said.
Dairine didn’t know quite what she’d been expecting from the final arrival, but this wasn’t it. “Dai stihó,” she said after a moment.
That tall, blond figure turned his attention to her, and Dairine abruptly felt so short, so insignificant, so very minor. However, that feeling immediately kicked her into a most profound state of annoyance. “Yes,” he said after a moment, “may you also go well. And you would be?”
“You’re the newcomer,” Dairine said, “and I am your host. It’s for you to introduce yourself.” Where this made-up rule had come from, she had no idea, but she felt disinclined to make things easy for this guy.
He stood there and continued to look down at Dairine, way down, as if from some inaccessible mountain peak. “I,” he said, “am Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Wellakhit.” And he looked at her as if he expected her to know what it meant.
“Pleased to meet you, cousin,” Dairine said, feeling that it was just barely true and desperately hoping that at some point it would be more so. But at the moment she was having all kinds of doubts. “I’m Dairine Callahan. Welcome to Earth.”
Roshaun looked around at the scrubby wooded surroundings with those green, green eyes. “This is perhaps a public park?” he said.
“No,” Dairine said. “It’s part of the property that belongs to our house. We use this area for coming and going on business, because our planet is sevarfrith. ”
The Rirhait and the Demisiv each nodded or twitched briefly. Sevarfrith was a syllabic acronym for several words in the Speech that, taken together, meant “a world or culture where wizardry must be conducted under cover.” There were numerous longer forms of the acronym that indicated the general or specific reason for the restriction, but the simple version was routinely used as shorthand. Dairine knew that this information would have been in the visitors’ own orientation packs, but it seemed like a good time to mention it.
“That’s a shame for you, isn’t it?” the Rirhait said. “I’m sorry about your trouble.”
“It’s okay,” Dairine said. “It’s more of a logistical problem than anything else. You get used to it after a while. The best thing to do is treat it as if it’s a game. For the first day or so, while you guys are getting used to being here, I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a wizardry around the perimeter so that the people who live in the immediate vicinity won’t see anything, in case somebody’s visual overlay slips. If you look around, you can see it—I’ve left the perimeter visually active for anyone who uses the Speech.”
She gestured around her, indicating the paired lines of blue green light that ran around the backyard from the left rear corner of the house, down the property line and above the chain-link fence, right around the back of the property, where they were standing, and up the right side toward the garage. “Inside that, you’re safe in your own shape. At night, though, there may be some leakage of light from inside the space, and we can’t be certain that some of the neighbors might not be able to see you; so it’s better to be careful.”
The Demisiv looked up through the leaves of the trees at the shifting light of the sky above, where clouds were racing by in a stiff wind. “That’s fine,” Filif said. “We wouldn’t want to frighten anybody.”
“Come on this way,” Dairine said, and led them out of the woods. “Oh,” she said, “and this is my associate, Spot.”
Spot put up a selection of stalked eyes and looked around him, fixing on each of the aliens in turn. “Dai stihó,” he said.
“Dai,” said Filif and Sker’ret. Roshaun peered down at the small laptop in Dairine’s arms. “Is it sentient?” he said.
I’m beginning to think he’s more sentient than you are, Dairine thought. And immediately after that, she thought, What is the matter with me? “We like to think so,” Dairine said, as politely as she could. “Though since he and I started working together a couple of years ago, there’ve been a few discussions over which of us is more sentient.”
They made their way up the lawn toward the house. “It’s spring here!” Filif said. “I love the colors.”
“Yeah,” Dairine said. “They haven’t really started yet, though. In a few weeks there’ll be a lot more flowers here.”
“Oh,” Roshaun said, “so the look of the place will improve, then? I’m glad to hear it. At home, we would have had the groundskeepers reprimanded.”
Dairine flushed as hot as if someone had insulted her, or her dad, or Nita, to her face. There was something insufferably superior about Roshaun’s delivery. I have to be imagining this, Dairine thought. I’ve known this guy exactly two minutes. It’s much too soon to believe that he’s a complete asshole.
Nonetheless, as Roshaun looked around the Callahan backyard, as he took in the slightly beat-up lawn furniture and the artfully ragged plantings, he radiated a sense that all of this was below him, somehow. I don’t get it, Dairine thought. Where is he getting this attitude? All the wizards I’ve ever known have been nice!
Well, Spot said in her head, how many wizards have you known?
That brought her up short. Well… she said.
Sker’ret, oblivious to what was going on inside Dairine’s head, was looking around him in all directions, a job made easier by stalked eyes that went every which way. “Do you have an indoor dwelling place here,” it said, “or do you stay outside?”
His tone of Speech was entirely different, suggesting a cheerful interest. “Not this time of year,” Dairine said. “It’s too cold for us to stay out just yet… though the time’s coming. We’re heading for the dwelling now—this white structure. Come on in.”
She led the way toward the back door, Spot pacing her. Sker’ret came trundling along behind, followed by Roshaun, with Filif bringing up the rear. “And these other structures built so close to your dwelling,” Roshaun said, looking left and right as they approached the house, “more members of your species live in these as well?”
“That’s right,” Dairine said.
“They are perhaps an extended kinship group?” Roshaun said. “Members of your family?”
“Oh, no,” Dairine said. “As I said, they’re just our neighbors.”
“Neighbors,” Roshaun said, as if trying out a completely unfamiliar word. “It’s fascinating. At home, it wouldn’t be permitted.”
Dairine stopped halfway up the stairs to the back door. “Not permitted?” she said. “By whom?”
Roshaun looked at Dairine as if she were insane. “By us,” he said. “Our family wouldn’t want, you know, people looking at them.” And the word he used wasn’t the plural of the one in the Speech that meant “person, fellow sentient being”; it was one that meant a being markedly less advanced than you in the Great Scheme of Things. Usually the word was used affectionately, or at wor
st in a neutral mode, for creatures that were aware in some mode but not quite sentient. But Roshaun’s tone of voice seemed to put an additional unpleasant spin on it, turning the word into something more like “lowlife.”
Dairine stood there wondering if she was suffering from low blood sugar or something of the kind. It has to be me, she said. No one could be so offensive on purpose… and if he’s doing it accidentally, then it’s not his fault. Why am I finding it so hard to cut him some slack? “It must be very lonely for you, then,” Dairine said.
“Oh, no,” Roshaun said, “I wouldn’t say that… ”
The phrasing caught Dairine’s attention sharply as she opened the screen door. You wouldn’t say it because it would be true, she thought. That insight, if it was one, she filed away for later study. “My father,” she said, “isn’t here right now. He’s still at work. But he’ll be along in an hour or so.”
“What does he work at?” Sker’ret said.
“He’s a florist,” Dairine said as they went in the back door into the kitchen.
Filif looked at her with many more berries than previously. “A doctor!” he said.
“Uh—” Dairine paused. She’d translated the English word into the Speech a little loosely, but it struck her as a good idea, on second thought, not to get into the minutiae of floristry any more clearly right now… especially since the image suddenly rose before her mind of what her dad actually did with the flowers in his shop. Yeah, my dad takes the corpses of things that grow in the ground and then arranges them in tasteful designs. She could just hear herself telling Filif that.
“He does landscaping, too,” she said hurriedly, having to search around a little for the closest word the Speech had for that. There were several possibilities, but she didn’t think the word for terraforming was going to be appropriate here, so she selected a word that implied a smaller scale of operations.
“Oh, an architect,” Filif said. “That’s a good thing to do for people!”
“Yes… ” Dairine said, wishing she’d had a little more time to think about the implications of having a sentient vegetable in the house. Well, I was the one who couldn’t wait to have them here, she thought. Now they’re here, and I’m just going to have to deal with it.
“Come on in,” Dairine said, “and we’ll get you guys settled. Does anyone want some dinner?”
“Dinner?” Filif said.
“Things to eat,” Dairine said, as they walked toward the house. “Dinner is the name of the meal we eat, starting around this time of day.”
“Definitely!” Sker’ret said. “What have you got?”
“All kinds of things,” Dairine said. “We’ll see if we can’t find you something that will suit your tastes… not to mention your physiologies. This—” she said, indicating the kitchen—is where we do our cooking…”
Roshaun simply looked around again with that uninterested, down-his-nose expression, but Filif and Sker’ret turned all around, staring at everything in fascination. “Cooking?” Filif said. “What’s that?”
“What do you eat that needs to be cooked?” Sker’ret said.
“I can see this is going to take some explaining,” Dairine said. “It’s partly a physiology thing for my people, and partly cultural. But, look, before we get into that, you’re going to want to set up your personal worldgates and your pup tents. The pup tents… ” She thought about that for a moment. “Sometimes, this time of year, the weather can be unpredictable. Probably it’s going to be more convenient for you if you put the pup tents down in the basement.”
“Where’s that?” Sker’ret said.
“Down the stairs here,” Dairine said. “Right by where we came in. See that door? That’s the one. Down there—”
Dairine led the way down the stairs. Sker’ret flowed down them past her; Dairine looked over her shoulder to see how Filif was managing. She couldn’t see what his roots were doing through the decency field, but he seemed to be having no trouble negotiating the stairs. “Is this okay for you?” Dairine said.
Filif made a little hissing noise that Dairine realized was a chuckle. “I go up and down cliffs all the time at home,” he said. “This is a lot less trouble. What’s this place for? What’s down here?”
“Uh,” Dairine said, and then was tempted to laugh. “Nearly everything.”
It was true enough. Dairine couldn’t remember when the basement had last been cleaned out. The washing machine and clothes dryer were down here, and so was the furnace for the house’s central heating. Both of those were off on the left side of the stairs, toward the front of the house. But the rest of the basement … it was a farrago of old lawn furniture, indoor furniture that had been demoted to the basement and never thrown out, a decrepit bicycle or two, cardboard boxes full of old clothes and paperback books that were meant to go to the local thrift store, an old broken chest freezer in which Dairine’s mom had once attempted to raise earthworms…
Dairine found herself wondering whether she should bother being embarrassed about the mess, since at least one of her guests seemed to have no idea what a basement was for. She glanced at Roshaun, who was now looking around with an expression that was more difficult to read. “A storage area,” Roshaun said.
It was the first thing he’d said that hadn’t instantly sounded obnoxious. “Sort of,” Dairine said. “Though it’s gotten a little… cluttered.”
“Has it?” Roshaun said. “I wouldn’t be an expert in clutter.”
Dairine sighed. “I wish I weren’t,” she said. “Anyway”—she indicated the bare cinder-block wall that was the south wall of the basement—”since you need a matter substrate to deploy your gates on, that should do. And you can leave the pup-tent accesses down here as well.”
For a few moments, they were all busy getting out the prepackaged wizardries. Sker’ret appeared to reach into one of the front segments of his body to pull out the two little tangles of light that Dairine knew they would all be carrying. Roshaun reached into an interior pocket of his ornate over-robe for his own pup-tent access, hanging it on the air and turning away from it, unconcerned. Filif, though, didn’t do anything that Dairine could see… but a moment later, his pup-tent access was hanging in the air next to Roshaun’s, and from a single branch, which he’d pushed out a little past the main bulk of his greenery, there depended a little strip of darkness.
Dairine watched as he flung it at the concrete wall. There the darkness clung and ran down the wall, the black patch widening as it went. After a few seconds there was a roughly triangular-shaped patch of darkness in the concrete wall, the size of Filif’s body. Light fell into that darkness and was completely absorbed.
Sker’ret was doing the same with his own customized worldgate. He reared up with it held in his front mandibles and plastered it against the gray cement of the wall. That darkness, too, ran down to create a lower, more archlike shape, black as a cutout piece of night. Standing in front of it, Sker’ret thrust a front claw into it; the claw vanished up to the second joint.
Roshaun turned away, heading back up the steps. “Aren’t you going to set up your gate?” Dairine said.
“It can wait awhile,” Roshaun said. “I’m in no hurry.”
He was halfway up the stairs already, glinting golden in silhouette from the sunlight still coming in through the screen door. Dairine raised her eyebrows, and said to the other two, “Come on, and I’ll give you the grand tour of the house.”
“There’s more?” Filif said, sounding surprised.
“Sure,” Dairine said. “I’ll show you.”
By the time she and the other two were up the stairs, Roshaun had already opened the oven door, and was looking in. “If this is a food preparation area,” he said, “it can’t be meant to service very many people.”
“It’s not,” Dairine said. “There are only three of us here.”
“I know about that,” Sker’ret said. “There’s you, and your sire, and your sister.” He said both the relationship words
as if they were strange new alien concepts.
Yes, Dairine thought. And if you knew it, why doesn’t Roshaun know it? “That’s right.”
Roshaun closed the oven door and looked around him, still with that faintly fancier-than-thou attitude, but also with a slight air of confusion. “Even so,” he said, looking into the dining room as if he expected to see something there and didn’t see it, “surely you don’t prepare your food yourselves?”
“Uh, sure we do,” Dairine said. Did I miss something about this guy’s profile? she thought. I should go back and have another look, because he’s really behaving strangely… “My sister’s better at it that I am, but I should be able to manage something.”
Sker’ret was up on his hind legs, or some of them, carefully inserting a couple of claws into a cupboard door. “I’ll be glad to help you,” he said. “What’s in here? Is this where you keep the food?”
He pulled the cupboard door open—literally. It came off its hinges, and Sker’ret put his head end into the cupboard, holding the door off to one side as he rummaged around. “What are all these bright-colored things?” he said, taking out packages and jars and cans, holding them up, and staring at them with many stalked eyes.
“Uh, yeah, those are all kinds of food. It’s just that, no, wait, you want to watch out for the ones in the glass—”
Crash! went two of the jars that Sker’ret was holding in his claws. It became increasingly apparent that Sker’ret didn’t know his own strength. The shower of broken glass, various kinds of canning juices, and things like asparagus and peas and peaches in a jar, was shortly joined by more leakage from cans that Sker’ret was holding with his other claws. Roshaun and Filif looked on this, fascinated, but neither saying anything. “Oh, I’m sorry, these are very fragile, aren’t they?” Sker’ret said. “Were those supposed to do that?”
“Not exactly,” Dairine said, hoping against hope that she could stop this catastrophe before it got much further along, and get it cleaned up before her dad got home. “Why don’t you let me take care of that, and I’ll just—