“Oh? How’s Dairine doing?”
“Haven’t seen her as yet today,” Nita’s dad said. “She wasn’t up when I headed to the store this morning. I think the past couple of days have been a little wearing for her.”
“Uh-oh,” Nita said. “How are you doing, Daddy? Are the guests too weird?”
“Not really,” her father said. “One of them’s sort of a walking tree. That I can cope with. Another one’s a giant centipede. That’s all right, too. That boy has a healthy appetite and everything interests him. He’s a whiz with machinery, too: yesterday he fixed my lawn mower when it stalled. The third one—” There was a sudden pause. “Oh, good morning to you, too. Yes, right out there. No, not that way!”
Nita heard a crash. “They’re not making trouble for you, are they, Daddy?”
“It’s not the usual kind of trouble,” her dad said, “and I don’t mind.” There was a pause. “Yes, go ahead, just don’t tell Dairine I gave it to you.”
There were loud crunching noises in the background. “Is that static?” Nita said.
“No, honey, it’s fine.”
“You didn’t say anything about the third guest.”
“That may have been on purpose,” Nita’s dad said.
Nita looked down the beach. “What’s he doing?”
“Being himself,” Nita’s dad said, “for which I suppose I shouldn’t blame him. But if he were my son—” There was another pause. “Oh,” her father said, “there you are.”
There was a clunk and rustle as if the phone had been taken out of Nita’s dad’s hand. “This was the dumbest idea in the world,” Dairine said loudly. “I just want you to know I confess to having been really stupid.”
Nita wasn’t sure what to make of that. Dairine’s confessions could sometimes be extremely heartfelt, but she was also extremely good at retracting them later when circumstances changed. “Well,” Nita said, “things are terrific here, so I don’t know if I necessarily accept your evaluation of the whole thing.”
“It’s good where you are?”
“It’s super.”
“I hate you,” Dairine said. And there was another clunk and rustle of the phone as it was passed back to their father.
“I’m not sure what to make of that,” he said a moment later.
“I am,” Nita said. “When she calms down, tell her I feel sorry for her, and I’ll phone her some pictures later. We got the portable worldgates plugged in last night, so I can come right home if you need me. I’ve got some phonepics for you too, and some video.”
“Don’t know if Dairine’ll thank you… ”
“I’ll take my chances. What about the third one?”
“The third what?”
“Wizard, Daddy. What’s his problem?”
“I think he—Oh, good morning, Roshaun. Right over there… ” There was another pause. “Not right now, sweetie.”
Nita resolved to take a look at Roshaun’s profile. Maybe there’s something I can do to help… Then again, she could imagine Dairine’s response to this. It was best to leave matters alone, perhaps.
“Did you get all your homework done?”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Both kinds.”
“Wait. Do wizards get homework assignments?”
“Not as such, Daddy. Just some reading I was doing.” Earlier that morning, Nita had been going over the “Bindings and Strictures” material again. As Tom had suggested, it was complex, but fortunately most of the strictures, especially the Binding Oath, could be used only once, anyway.
“Well, as long as the schoolwork’s done. Anything you need there?”
Nita sighed. “Sunblock,” she said. “I burned yesterday.”
“I thought you could do a wizardry for that.”
“I got distracted, and I forgot… ”
“That’s bad for your skin, honey. You be more careful.”
“I will,” Nita said. “Just leave it in my room, okay? I can pop out later and pick it up.”
“Okay, I’ll leave it on the bed. Uh-oh… here comes Carmela. I should get off. Things start getting lively when she turns up.”
Nita grinned. “Is she getting a lot of practice at the Speech?”
“I think there’s more going on than that,” Nita’s dad said, “but you’d better talk to your sister… She’ll fill you in.”
“Okay. Talk to you later, Daddy!”
“You have a good time, sweetie. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Daddy. Bye!”
The print on the page in the manual in Nita’s lap said, “Connection broken, JD 2455292.06806.” Nita shut the manual and leaned back, looking around her. Down by the main holding pen, Kuwilin was still scattering feed for the flying sheep. Nita got up, dusted the sand off herself, and went to see if he needed any help.
By the time she got there, he was leaning over the pen’s fence, watching the sheep munch up their feed. There were always faint sucking and snorting noises when they did this. Their lips were prehensile, expert at picking up the feed pellets and ironwood seed while avoiding the sand, but every now and then they got greedy and wound up doing a lot of spitting.
Nita leaned on the fence beside Kuwilin, watching the sheep. “It takes such a long time every day to feed them,” she said.
“Well, too much at once and they get sick,” Kuwilin said. “Was that your ‘dad’? How is he?”
“He’s okay. But my sister sounds like she’s having some problems. I think she wishes she were here. And the exchange wizards… I think she’s having problems with one of them.” Nita pushed her hair back from where the sea breeze had blown it in her face again. “She’ll work it out. Was Kit helping you again?”
“Yes, he was,” Kuwilin said, “and if you two didn’t have better things to do with yourselves, I’d take you on as migrant volunteer labor. Kit’s getting very good at relieving them of the shesh. They hardly notice.” Kuwilin sighed, a sound that humans and Alaalids had in common. “Which is good, because this time of year, it’s hard to keep them in one place for long. They want to wander. And if they run into another big migratory group, half of them may not come back. Of course,” Kuwilin added, “they do pass directional information back and forth… so I might lose fifty this autumn and get a hundred and fifty back next spring. It depends if they like where they’ve been better than where they’re going.” He smiled.
“They’re not birds,” Kit said, running up with Ponch lolloping along behind him.
“What?”
“The things Ponch was chasing last night. They’re not birds: they’re bats, sort of. With fur. And they have antennae, and flaps.”
“Flaps?”
Kit shrugged. “Maybe they’re more like webbed feet.”
“They sing, too,” Quelt’s tapi said. “Have you heard them? Well, maybe not yet: we were still eating latemeal when they would have been singing, the other night and last night, too. You can hear them better if you go up the hill behind the house. They’re mating this time of year, and the singing can go on for hours. It can keep you up for hours, too.”
Ponch abruptly got between Kuwilin and Kit with yet another stick in his mouth. “Where is he finding all these?” Kuwilin said, grabbing it and trying to take it out of Ponch’s mouth. Ponch gripped hard on the stick and shook his head back and forth, fighting with Kuwilin. “We could be rich, with all the ironwood he brings home. I should hire the whole lot of you. You do more work around here than Quelt does!”
“I wouldn’t let her hear you say that,” Nita said under her breath, and laughed.
“Well, it’s true!” And Kuwilin laughed as well. “But it’s not her fault, I know. She has more important things to be doing for the world, and we try not to bother her about chores.”
“When did you find out she was a wizard?” Kit said.
Ponch jumped up and down, growling, with the stick in his mouth. Kit took it and threw it, and Ponch chased off after it. “Why, she just came in at firstmeal one morning and tol
d us,” Kuwilin said. “I guess that would be a couple of hundred years ago now—”
“Two hundred and sixty,” said Demair, coming out of the house and down to the pen with a jug and a cup of sepah for her husband. “You should come in and wash,” she said. “You smell of ceiff.”
“I always smell of ceiff,” said Kuwilin. “So does everything here, even these Earth folk. They’ll probably go home smelling that way. We should bottle some of the air over the pen and send it home with them, labeled ‘A Souvenir of Alaalu.’”
Kit snorted with laughter. Nita jabbed him in the ribs with one elbow. “They’ll have to bottle you, too,” she said. To Kuwilin, she said, “Was that before her Ordeal, or after?”
“‘Ordeal?’” Demair said. “Oh, you mean the Own Choice. After, I suppose.”
She looked at Nita in slight perplexity. “‘Ordeal’—is that what they call it in your world? Is it normally dangerous for you?”
Nita was taken aback. “Well, yes, in that you usually wind up fighting with the Lone Power, one way or another—”
Both Demair and Kuwilin looked blank. “Who?”
Kit looked surprised. “You know, the Lone Power. You do know the Lone One?”
“Invented entropy?” Nita said. “Got thrown out of Timeheart? Runs around trying to get sentient species to willingly buy into death?”
“Oh, that one,” Demair said, and laughed. “Certainly, we know about her. But she’s no problem.”
“‘No problem,’” Nita said softly. Then she looked around at the landscape and thought of the Cities as well, clean, safe, full of smiling people; all in all, it was a world where there seemed to be no such thing as crime or disaster or hatred or anything of the kind. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe I see your point.”
“But how come she’s not?” Kit said.
Kuwilin and Demair looked at each other, perplexed again. “I always assumed it had something to do with our species’ Choice,” Kuwilin said, “but I wouldn’t be an expert. Quelt would know more about it, I’d imagine.”
Nita looked around. “Where is she now?” she said.
“Up in the meadows. She said she had to talk to the wind about something.”
Nita nodded. This was an expression that she’d heard a number of times recently, one that most often seemed to mean that the person had something she wanted to think about in private. “But to finish answering your first question,” Kuwilin said, “she just came in that morning and said, ‘I’m a wizard, and in a few years I have to take over from the one we’ve got.’ She showed us some wizardry; we were very impressed. And then her mentor, the old wizard, Vereich, came along and said, ‘I hear my successor is come into her power; we’d better start work.’ Of course, he knew he wasn’t long for the body at that point—he must have been four thousand or so then. No, five, now that I think of it. Delightful old man; I still hear from him occasionally.”
Nita saw Kit start a little at that, but it somehow didn’t surprise her at all. “Are you going to eat something now?” Demair said to her husband. “Cousins?”
Nita shook her head. “Not right now,” she said, “thank you. I want to ask Quelt about this.”
“All right. We’ll leave some cold things for you on the sideboard.”
Kit and Nita went up the rise together to look over it into the meadowlands. Ponch came bouncing after, with yet another stick in his mouth, or the same one. “Were they talking about what I think they were?” Kit said. “Do they routinely talk to dead people here?”
Nita was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know if they think of them as dead,” she said. “They do seem to run things differently on Alaalu.”
“Tell me about it. Your dad say anything interesting?” Kit asked. “How’re things at home?”
“I think Dairine is having a personality conflict… ”
“You mean, besides her usual one with the entire planet?” Kit said.
“Ouch,” Nita said, amused. They came out on top of the rise, and started scanning the horizon: this being Alaalu, it took a while. Finally, maybe a few miles off, they spotted Quelt, a tiny pale patch moving among the blue flowers.
“There she is,” Kit said.
“Yeah. No, I think Dairine’s got a personal problem with this third wizard, the humanoid one.”
“Oh, boy,” Kit said. “When she finally has it out with him, the sky’ll light up; we’ll see it all the way over here.”
“Yeah. Meantime, let’s go find Quelt.”
They walked the distance, because there was no rush. It was hard to feel, here, that there was any rush, anywhere—any need for haste. Maybe it had to do with the Alaalid species being so long-lived, but Nita wasn’t entirely convinced. She kept remembering that dream-image of a beach full of statues. Something else is going on…
They caught up with her about half an hour later; she’d seen them and started walking toward them. Ponch reached her first, having run ahead to greet her. “Did we disturb you?” Nita said, when they got close enough to speak without shouting.
“Oh, no,” Quelt said. “I was talking to the wind, to the Telling, actually, about the Great Vein. I think the plates are moving again in that part of the seas. It’s going to be harder to get at the metal, and I needed to devise some alternative access points.”
“It’s at the bottom of the ocean, that vein? Wow,” Nita said. Both she and Kit had some grasp of what it was like to function at the great depths. “Tough work… ”
“It’s not too bad if I can crack the crust, and let the metals come up molten and crystallize out into nodules,” Quelt said. “Then we can send mechanical depth-handling machines down to bring it all up. I think that’s the way I’ll go with this. Are the ceiff all fed?”
“Twice,” Kit said. “Tapi thinks I’m spoiling them.”
“I have news for you,” Nita said. “Tapi wants you for a hired hand!”
Quelt snorted with laughter. “Trust him to try to get a wizard to do yard work,” she said. “Parents!”
There was some group amusement over that. “Still,” Kit said, “the yard work has to get done. Quelt, can we ask you a personal question?”
“Cousin! Of course you can.”
“I mentioned the Lone Power to your folks,” Kit said, “and they barely knew what It was.”
“She, ” Nita said, and shivered.
“I mean, they had to be reminded,” Kit said. “Is that usual, here? Your parents—you told them about your—I was going to call it your Ordeal, but our word for it at home seems a lot too rugged, the way they sounded.”
“Your ‘Own Choice,’” Nita said.
“Normally, we would fight with the Lone Power personally,” Kit said. “Very personally. And, normally, most people in our world know the Lone One exists, or have at least heard of It. In our world, Its effects are all over the place, and they have been for a long time, though things are changing. But here—” Kit waved his arms around him. “Your world is so perfect, our people would hardly believe it. How come? Does it have to do with the way you guys made your Choice?”
“And what did you do?” Nita said. “Because believe me, if we could’ve done the same kind of thing… ” She shook her head.
Quelt’s expression was somewhat bemused. “Well, it would have something to do with the ne’whaHiilse’t, the Debate and Decision,” Quelt said at last. “But I’m not sure how to explain the differences, assuming they can be explained.” She mused for a moment. “You should probably come look at the Display.”
“Sorry?” Nita said.
“Oh, the Debate and Decision happened right here, on our island,” Quelt said. “So we keep an enactment of it. In fact, that’s one of my jobs as the world’s wizard, to make sure the enactment is kept running. Even though most of us don’t think about it a whole lot! I suppose we might as well go have a look—”
Then Quelt laughed. “You know, we’ve done some of the tourist things, but this one is so boring for most people that it never occur
red to me to take you there. That’s silly of me, on second thought. You are wizards; of course you’d be interested! And I haven’t gone through the whole experience myself for a long time, though people come from all the other islands to see it.”
Kit looked from Quelt to Nita and back again. “Let’s go,” he said.
Quelt had a transit spell prepared. “It’s in case I need to go do a service call,” she said, “but that hasn’t happened for a hundred years or so… ” The spell looked much like one of Kit’s or Nita’s “prepackaged” ones; a circle of words in the Speech, which Quelt pulled out of the air and offered to Nita and Kit so that they could insert their personal information—their own names in the Speech and data about their body mass and composition. Both of them routinely carried shorthand versions of these in their manuals, and Kit had a spare one for Ponch. They pulled these out, hooked them onto Quelt’s spell, and stepped into it when she cast the line of bright words down among the flowers.
Wizardry dulled the air around them to a blue haze as they read the words in the Speech together. It was interesting for Nita to have a third voice reading with them, a different flavor in the air, as the universe leaned in around them, obeying the spell, and then popped them loose into another place entirely.
Nita and Kit looked around. Here the horizon was no less high, but the immediately surrounding landscape was flatter, a huge plain. As she glanced around, Nita realized that she was in one of the first places she’d seen on Alaalu that wasn’t within sight of water.
“It’s the heart of the continent,” Quelt said, leading them down a very slight slope. “The nearest ocean is three thousand miles away. A pretty distance, for us. And here we are—”
Not far away from them, down another shallow slope, was something Nita at first took for a wide, deep pool of water. But then she realized that there was too much light reflected in that pool; it was radiant by its own virtue. And there was something strange about the surface of the water—it didn’t ripple.
“It’s air held solid,” Quelt said. “You know the spell, I think. A variation of the Mason’s Word wizardry, with the spell that produces the forms held down inside it. Come on, you can walk out on it.”