Crash! “Oh no,” Sker’ret said, “I am sorry about that.” Several more jars and bottles fell down and either smashed on the counter or bounced off the floor; a few glass jars bounced and then smashed when they came down the second time.
Both Filif and Roshaun crowded carefully back out of the way, and looked at Dairine to see what she would do. Dairine let out a long breath and started carefully across the wet, glass-crunchy floor toward the basement steps, where a mop and broom were kept.
His claws clutched full of the remains of various cans and bottles, Sker’ret looked after Dairine with a number of its eyes. “Where are you going?”
“Well,” Dairine said, “I could do a wizardry, but sometimes a mop makes more sense… ”
“What’s a mop?” Filif said.
“It’s a thing we use to clean up the floor if something wet’s gotten on it—”
“To clean it up?” Sker’ret said, sounding shocked. “But we haven’t had anything yet!”
Dairine opened her mouth to say something, and then completely forgot what, as Sker’ret began to eat.
He ate the glass. He ate the cans. He ate the asparagus, and the peas, and the canned tomatoes, and every other foodstuff that had fallen on the floor. He slurped up every bit of liquid. And when he was done, he looked around him, and with his foreclaws, he picked up the torn-off cupboard door, which he had carefully set aside while dealing with the canned goods.
“Not the door!” Dairine yelled.
Sker’ret’s head turned in some alarm. “No?”
“No,” Dairine said, trying to calm herself. “Sorry; that’s part of the kitchen.”
“Oh,” Sker’ret said. “My apologies. I didn’t realize.” Carefully he set the door aside again, and turned his attention downward.
“No, no, no, no,” Dairine said. “Leave the floor!”
Somewhat bemused, Sker’ret cocked a few eyes back at Dairine, shrugged some of his legs, and began to levitate.
Roshaun was leaning against the counter by the kitchen sink, his arms folded, watching this spectacle with insufferable amusement. Dairine desperately wanted to punch him in the nose, even though he hadn’t said a word. Filif was watching, too, though with a far less superior air. Maybe it’s the berries, Dairine thought. It’s hard to look supercilious when you have berries hanging off you.
The back door opened. All four of the occupants of the kitchen looked up, startled.
Dairine’s father came in, closed the door behind him, and looked at his daughter, the young man, the centipede, and the tree. “Hello, everybody,” Harry Callahan said.
Filif, Roshaun, and the gently floating Sker’ret all looked at Dairine’s dad. Then they all looked at Dairine, waiting to take their cue from her.
Dairine had rarely been more embarrassed to have her father turn up without warning…or more relieved. “Daddy!” she said. “Who’s in the store?”
“Mike’s there for the rest of the day,” her dad said. Mike was his new assistant, whom he’d taken on a few weeks back: a young guy just out of high school who had been looking for a job and was good with flowers. “It’s been a slow afternoon, anyway. I’m not needed there. Who’re your friends?”
Dairine looked at her dad sidewise, admiring his cool, especially since she knew he’d done his reading and knew perfectly well who these people were. There he stood, acting like a man who had aliens in his house every day. And he’d looked right at the cupboard door and not even mentioned it. “This is Filif,” she said. “Filif, this is my father.”
“I am honored to meet the stock from which the shoot proceeds,” Filif said. He rustled all over, bending a little bit like a tree in a wind.
Dairine was relieved to see that her dad must have the briefing pack somewhere about his person, as he was plainly understanding the Speech that Filif was using. “Well, you’re very welcome,” Dairine’s father said.
“And this is Sker’ret… ”
“Well met on the journey,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine’s dad reached out to take the claw that Sker’ret offered him. “You don’t have to float there like that, son,” he said. “The floor’s not so clean in here that you need to be afraid to walk on it.” He glanced to one side. “Something wrong with the cupboard?”
“It came off,” Sker’ret said.
“That happens,” Dairine’s dad said. “Just leave it there for the time being; we’ll put it back where it belongs later.” He turned to Roshaun.
“And this is Roshaun,” Dairine said.
“…ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Wellakhit,” Roshaun said, and to Dairine’s mortification, looked at her dad as if expecting him to bow.
Her dad’s response took just a fraction of a second longer this time. “Make yourself right at home,” he said to Roshaun. “But then I see you already have.” He turned away from Roshaun with exactly the same matter-of-fact motion that Dairine had seen her dad use with customers who were wasting his time at the counter. “So let’s all go into the living room and sit down. What’s on the agenda, Dairine?”
She recognized the code—her father rarely called her by her whole name unless there was trouble of some kind. At least for once, the cause of the trouble wasn’t her…or if it was, she was only the indirect cause. All of them followed her dad into the living room, and Dairine said, “They’ve spent the day traveling, and I was thinking maybe some food would be nice… ”
“Absolutely. I could do with some dinner myself. We can sit and relax and get acquainted. Any thoughts?”
“Well, I thought maybe something neutral.” She glanced at Roshaun, who was looking around their living room with an expression of badly concealed confusion, as if he’d found people living in a hole in the ground and liking it. “Some fruit drinks to start with, maybe, and then… ” Dairine was grasping at possibilities; this was more Nita’s specialty than hers. “I don’t know, maybe something vegetarian… ”
“That sounds nice,” Filif said. “Something to do with my people. What’s it mean?”
“Huh? Vegetarian? Oh, around here it means people who eat only vegetables… ” Then Dairine heard what she was saying, and stopped short.
But she hadn’t stopped soon enough. Filif stood there frozen in shock, and the decency field around his roots almost went away. “You… eat… vegetables?”
Oh, great, Dairine thought, in a complete fury with herself. Why didn’t I just come right out and say, “Hi there, we’re cannibals”? Except I just did. “But they’re not, you know, the people kind of vegetables,” Dairine said, though the look Filif was turning on her made her wonder whether she was going to have any success with this approach. “They don’t… They’re not alive, I mean, not the way you’re alive… I mean, they don’t think...”
Then Dairine stopped herself again, this time because she was getting onto conceptually shaky ground. When you were a wizard, you quickly discovered that thought and sentience didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, and sometimes they manifested independently.
Her father leaned over her shoulder and looked down at Filif with an unusually calm expression. “What do you do for nourishment at home, son?” he said.
“Normally,” Filif said, having recovered enough to tremble a little, “we root.”
“I’ve got just the place for you,” Dairine’s dad said. “You come on outside with me. Dairine, you take care of these two for the moment.”
Her dad went out the back door, closely followed by Filif. She sagged a little with relief and turned back to the others. Sker’ret was looking out the front window of the living room with great interest, but Roshaun was leaning against the polished wooden breakfront, snickering.
“That was interesting,” he said. His tone of voice suggested not that he was trying to restrain his amusement, but that he was intending to let it loose full force as soon as he had an excuse. He found Earth funny, he found Dairine’s dad funny, and he found Dairi
ne funny.
Dairine just looked at him. It would be so very bad, she thought, to punch out a guest on his first day in the house. Very, very bad. But really satisfying… “Come on and see the rest of the house,” Dairine said, rather more to Sker’ret than to Roshaun; and she led them off on the grand tour.
The tour (along with a lot of explaining, especially in the bathroom) took about fifteen minutes, after which Dairine left Roshaun and Sker’ret in the living room and went into the kitchen again. Her dad was standing there with a screwdriver; he was in the final stages of refastening the cupboard door. “Could have sworn Nita and I brought home canned stuff to replace everything we used last week,” he said.
“You did,” Dairine said. “I think we may need more. Where’s Filif? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” her father said, swinging the door back and forth a couple of times.
“He didn’t go outside the yard, did he? I put a force field around the edges of things that’ll keep the neighbors from seeing anything. But if he went out—”
“He didn’t. He may get around, but he didn’t feel like going anywhere right now, except under the sky. I get the feeling he doesn’t particularly like being indoors.”
“No,” Dairine said, “I think maybe you’re right.”
“And he’s enough of a conifer for me to know his tastes, at least a little,” her dad said, opening the cutlery drawer where the screwdrivers lived and dropping in the one he’d been using. “Anyway, we chatted enough for me to confirm that he likes his soil acidic. I plugged him into that new bed I was getting ready for the rhododendrons and told him to kick back for a while. He should do fine.”
“You’re taking this pretty well,” Dairine said, before she could stop herself.
“I don’t know that we have much choice at this point,” her dad said, sounding somewhat resigned. “I agreed to this, after all, so I may as well try to enjoy it. Now then—what about dinner?”
“Sounds good.” But Dairine immediately started worrying again, as that produced a whole new level of problems. Filif…
Her dad was ahead of her. “What have we got in the house that’s not recognizably a vegetable?” He thought for a moment. “Pasta?”
“Spaghetti and meatballs,” Dairine said.
“How’s Filif likely to handle the sight of tomato sauce?” Dairine’s dad said.
Dairine thought about that. Tomatoes were vegetables … but a jar of spaghetti sauce might pass if no one actually discussed what went into it. Of course, even pasta had been a vegetable once
Her father was way ahead of her. “Since Filif isn’t going to be eating what we are,” Dairine’s dad said, “and since I’m not operating under the restrictions you are, I’m prepared to prevaricate if I have to. But let’s see if we can’t just steer the conversation in other directions if the history of food comes up. Meanwhile, utensils… ” Her dad started rummaging through the flatware drawer for a matched set. “I suspect Roshaun can use a fork and a spoon on his spaghetti. If he hasn’t had the experience before, we’ll teach him. And as for Sker’ret—”
“I think if we can get him to stick to the spaghetti and leave the plates and the table alone,” Dairine said, “we’ll be doing okay.”
Dairine’s dad reached up into another cupboard and came down with a couple of odd plates from an old set, which Dairine knew for a fact her dad hated, and had been looking for an excuse to get rid of. “And in case of accidents—” he said.
Dairine grinned, and went looking for a pot for the spaghetti.
***
As it turned out, the plates survived dinner, though Dairine’s temper almost didn’t.
And the problem, as she’d suspected it would be, had been Roshaun. Filif came in to “sit” at the table in a large bucket of potting soil that Dairine’s dad brought in for him, and Sker’ret more or less draped himself over the seat and through the open back of one of the dining room chairs, leaving his front end free to deal with the spaghetti. Dairine’s dad only had to warn Sker’ret once that they were only eating things on top of the tablecloth and inside containers. This led to a lively discussion of what humans ate, and Dairine sat there in mostly mute appreciation of how her father somehow confined himself entirely to discussing how things tasted, without ever going near the subject of what they were. Dairine spent most of her time ingesting spaghetti—she found that she was ravenous—and forcing herself not to glare at Roshaun.
It took him exactly five seconds to master the fork and spoon, though he let it be known that at his home, his people used several different kinds of tongs to handle slippery foods like this. He let a number of things be known over the course of dinner, dispensing the occasional fact or opinion as if he expected everybody to be eagerly awaiting his every word… and paying precious little attention to anyone else’s opinions, if they came up. His clothes, his possessions, the size of his house, which apparently would have dwarfed Dairine’s, all these came up for brief and tasteful mention. What did not come out was anything personal, anything revealing of the inner nature of the entity who sat there at the table, managing the fork and spoon with the grace of someone who’d been using them for years, and never had never gotten spaghetti sauce or any other sauce on him, not once.
Dairine sat there listening to it all, and stewed. Sker’ret didn’t seem to notice Roshaun’s attitude, or if he did, he didn’t reveal it during his workmanlike and concentrated assault on the food. Filif mostly sat quietly listening to the others, and rustled occasionally whenever anyone said anything with sufficient emphasis to suggest that they wanted a response from the listeners. Dairine and her dad concentrated on keeping the conversation going along in a relatively friendly fashion, but Dairine increasingly felt like she was doing weight training, and with weights that were getting heavier every minute.
But they made it through the main course without a murder, and then through dessert (her dad’s chocolate pudding) without any serious incidents. And at the end of it all, “Well,” Dairine’s dad said, looking around the table, “it’s been a long day, and I’m sure that it would be a good thing if we all got some rest now.”
“But it’s not even dark yet,” Filif said.
“I know,” Dairine’s dad said, in a very kindly voice. “But there’s the time difference to think of; there has to be at least some time difference between your planet and this one. And whatever it is, I’m sure it means that you need some rest now. I know I do.” And he stood up.
The others stood up with him. “I think I might withdraw,” Roshaun said graciously. “Your local night is how long?”
“Eight hours,” Dairine said, while thinking grimly, It was in your orientation pack, if you’d bothered to read it. “I’ll walk you to the stairs, guys. You all saw where my room is. If you need anything, I’ll be awake about an hour and a half after the sun comes up. You all have everything you need in your pup tents?”
“More than enough,” Filif said.
“Me, too,” Sker’ret said.
“A sufficiency,” said Roshaun, and turned away from Dairine with no further acknowledgment. “Your best of rest, then.”
Dairine went with their three guests to the stairs, saw them safely down. “Good night, everybody,” she said, closing the door to the cellar stairs.
Her dad was standing there by the sink, having just put a stack of dishes down beside it, and presently washing a couple of glasses by hand. As Dairine turned away from the basement door, he glanced over at her. “A harder day than you were expecting?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Dairine. “Did it show?”
“You mean, to the guests? In Filif’s and Sker’ret’s case, I don’t think so. They seem like nice kids.” Her father put one glass down on the drainer, picked up the other to rinse it out. “I’d like to know what’s going on with Roshaun, though.”
“So would I,” Dairine muttered. She was sufficiently shell-shocked at the moment, and sufficiently in need of something grindingly ordinary,
that she actually found herself picking up a dish towel to help her dad finish up at the sink. “Daddy, it’s driving me crazy.”
He looked at her with slight concern. Dairine understood why. It wasn’t in her nature to make a lot of admissions of that kind, even in the family. Dairine let out a long breath and said, “I’ve never met a wizard who wasn’t… ”
“Good?” her father said. “Nice?”
Dairine shook her head. “It’s not just that,” she said. “All the wizards I know—know at all closely—their wizardry’s really important to them. Maybe it’s not the main thing their life is about: No one says it has to be. But it’s important. This guy, though… it feels like he wants you to think that wizardry’s a hobby for him. How can anyone be that way? Wizardry’s about talking the universe right when it goes wrong… finding out what’s going on in people’s heads and helping them make the world happen. Finding out how things want to be, and helping them be that way. How can anything be more important than that?” She waved her arms in the air, frustrated. “Sure, it’s about having fun, too—you’d have to be incredibly obtuse and clueless not to have fun being a wizard. And there are a billion ways to do it! But this guy—”
She shook her head. Much more quietly Dairine said, “I really don’t like him. And I really don’t like that I really don’t like him. The worst part is that I don’t have any reasons for it. He’s one of my own kind, a wizard, and he rubs me the wrong way.”
Her father sighed. “You know,” he said, “there’ve been people I’ve worked with, occasionally, over the years, that I’ve had the same problem with. And I’ve never known what to do about it.”
“Wait for them to go away?” Dairine said.
“Sometimes they do,” her dad said. “Sometimes you’re just stuck with them.”
Dairine sighed in turn. “Two weeks… ”
“It’s only been a few hours,” her dad said. “Don’t give up yet. Things may improve.”
“From your mouth to the Powers’ ears,” Dairine muttered. But she found it hard to believe that Roshaun was going to shift his behavior in any way that would matter.