“I don’t know that we would’ve ever had any choice about that,” Quelt said. “It’s always going to happen eventually, isn’t it? But it’s not so bad. We live a pretty long time. And it’s not as if the dead people go away.”
Nita looked up at that and nodded. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” she said. “There’ve been times I woke up in the middle of the night here and thought I heard people whispering… ”
Quelt looked at Nita and purposely nodded, using the human gesture. “That’s right,” she said, “I thought you’d probably be able to hear them. When we die, we don’t die out of the world. We die into it. The people who were here are always around.” And Quelt looked at Nita with a little less certainty than usual, an expression a little less serene. “It’s not like that for you, in your world, is it?” she said.
Nita shook her head. “No,” she said, and couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice. “Definitely not.”
Kit looked up. “Here comes Ponch,” he said.
Nita glanced up. She couldn’t see anything but a vague troubling of the flowers across the field. “What has he got?” she said, and began to trot off toward him.
Behind her, she could just hear Quelt saying, in a slightly lowered voice, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, since you seem interested in the subject. How do you die?”
“Uh… let’s save that for a little later, okay?” Kit said, and the two of them vanished, heading back to the house by the sea.
Out among the blue flowers, Nita sighed sorrowfully and went after Ponch.
9: Disruption of Services
Dairine wandered through the house early that morning, looking into every room except the one she was trying to avoid looking into: the basement. Filif was in the kitchen, watching her dad get ready for work. Nobody was in the dining room. Sker’ret was in the living room, watching TV and playing around with the remote. Nobody was in the bathroom or any of the bedrooms.
She let out a long breath and wandered back the way she had come, glancing at the TV as she passed through the living room. “That really looks a lot better,” she said to Sker’ret.
“Something was wrong with the green color matrix,” Sker’ret said. “I talked to the power converter and got it to tweak its voltage a little. Everything seems to be behaving now.”
“You could have a word with my DVD player upstairs if you felt like it,” Dairine said. “But not right now.”
“Are we ready to go?”
“A few minutes.”
She wandered back into the kitchen. “You see what Sker’ret did to the TV, Daddy?” Dairine said.
“I sure did. That boy’s a whiz with the machinery, isn’t he?”
“He’s kind of a structures specialist,” Dairine said. “A taking-things-apart-and-putting-things-back-together fan. I’d say everything would be fine with him around until you ran out of broken things to fix.” She smiled. “Then would be the time to hide… ”
“When he has a free moment, he can come down to the shop,” Dairine’s dad said, finishing his coffee and going to the sink with the mug. “My poor old copier… ” He shook his head.
“I’ll put it on the list.” To Filif, she said, “Seen Roshaun this morning?”
“Not today,” Filif said. “He went into his pup-tent when we all did last night, and I haven’t seen him since.” And he raised a branch and pushed his baseball cap into what was intended to be a jaunty angle. It flopped back down again, because it’s hard to keep a baseball cap in a given position when your head is a single conifer-like branch, similar to the top of a Christmas tree.
“Hmf, ” Filif said, and started weaving a few outer limbs around in a gesture that Dairine recognized as the beginning of a wizardry, Filif’s invocation of a shorthand or “macro” version of something he’d set up before. He had a lot of these for physical manipulation, which made sense for a tree. Dairine’s neck hairs rose a little at the feel of the Speech being used in a nonverbal mode. Dairine’s dad, drinking his coffee, eyed this procedure with some interest, watching the baseball cap come up to level and settle itself as if there were a head underneath it.
“Slick,” Dairine said.
“I don’t know,” her dad said, looking with dry humor at the baseball cap, and turning away again. “I’m not sure what you’re doing bringing something like that into a house full of Mets fans… ”
The cap was a Yankees cap, and Dairine hadn’t had either the inclination or the heart to start explaining to Filif why such a cap could possibly be an issue. He’d really wanted it, and Dairine had gone back to the shopping center and gotten it for him. But she felt fortunate in having been able to talk him out of the Jams, convincing him that they were “very last year.”
Dairine headed past the two of them, sighing. There’s no way to avoid it. I’m just going to have to go on down there, she thought. “You about ready to go?” she said.
“Yes,” her dad and Filif said in unison, and then both burst out laughing, since they were each talking about going to a different place.
“Great,” Dairine said. “Back in a minute.”
She went down the stairs into the basement and looked around. There were the three pup-tent accesses, each hanging from its silvery rod. One of them was active. Annoyed, Dairine went over to it and most reluctantly put her head in.
The inside was illuminated, not with the standard directionless lighting of a basic pup-tent installation, but by a number of ornate lamps positioned here and there across the carpeted floor. Carpets? Dairine thought. But there they were, beautifully woven in alien patterns of many colors, some of them embroidered as well. They were scattered all over the inside of a space that was significantly larger than the others’ pup tents, which she’d seen when they’d invited her in.
And the place was decorated as if it was a palace. There was elaborate artwork hanging against the walls or, in some cases, unsupported in the air; there was a great couch in the middle of everything, with rich coverings and ornate cushions scattered over it. There was enough furniture—sofas and wardrobes and chests—to supply a good-sized furniture store, except that no furniture store Dairine knew would be likely to carry this kind of stuff, everything glittering with gold or inlaid with green or blue metals that Dairine didn’t immediately recognize. Just look at all this junk, she thought. It was dazzling but, to her eye, overdone. Then again… if I grew up in a place that looked like this, maybe I’d think it was normal, too.
She tried very hard to believe that, but had trouble. Why are you bothering with him? part of her brain kept shouting. He’s a waste of your time!
Dairine looked around. Anyway, he’s not here, she thought. Well, maybe he had something to take care of at home, and used his custom worldgate this morning, before anybody noticed. She shrugged and was about to turn away and go back upstairs when something in the back of the pup tent caught her eye: a subtle shimmer in an empty patch on the back wall. Dairine walked over to it, looked at it, curious; reached out a hand… then stopped herself.
Should I put on a ‘glove’? she wondered. As a rule, it wasn’t terribly safe to stick your hand through an interface without being sure of what was on the other side. Then again… there’s air in here, and the pup-tent interface isn’t one of the impermeable types. So there has to be air on the other side of that…
She pushed her hand into the interface, saw it vanish to the wrist. Her hand didn’t feel unusually hot or cold, and there wasn’t the strange dry tautness of the skin that short-term exposure to vacuum produced. No, it’s okay, she thought. Dairine stuck her head through, looked around.
And froze.
She was looking into not another artificial space, not an extension of the pup-tent, but an area that was almost the outdoors; daylight wasn’t too far away. She stepped through.
A translucent terrace roof arched over Dairine’s head, and she slowly walked out from under it onto the terrace proper—a huge spread of golden-colored stone, reaching hundreds
of yards to her left and right, with a carved stone railing standing about a meter high in front of her and running all down the terrace’s length. At the railing she stopped, looking out in wonder at an immense landscape all covered in a massive garden of red and golden plant life. Everything was manicured, managed, perfect, the strangely shaped trees not seeming to have so much as a leaf out of place, the amber-colored grass seemingly mown with micrometric precision. There wasn’t a molehill or a hump or a hill anywhere in sight. It was as if a myriad of gardeners had worked the place over with rollers from right where Dairine stood to the distant horizon, where the sun was setting in a glowing blaze of cloud.
Dairine let out a breath. This was beautiful, but she couldn’t spend all day admiring the scenery. She turned around to go back the way she’d come—
—and froze yet again. There was the terrace, and the terrace roof, but above it reared up a huge, graceful, imposing mass of a building, all built in the same golden stone as the terrace, and spreading far away in both directions. It was at least a New York City block square— And a long block, not a short one! she thought—rearing up before her in stack upon stack of towers and spires and turrets and battlements, spearing defiantly upward as if to make up for the flat countryside all around. This is a palace, Dairine thought. His palace.
She immediately looked around her guiltily, as if somebody might catch her being somewhere she shouldn’t and dump her in a dungeon. Then Dairine straightened, held her head up. He shouldn’t be here, either. Not like this!
She marched back under the terrace roof, toward the long line of glass-paned doors she saw at the back of the roofed-in area. One of them stood open, near where the illicit pup-tent access still hung down. Dairine headed on past it and through that door.
If she’d thought the furnishings of the pup tent were opulent, she’d been seriously mistaken. She now found herself in a high-ceilinged, elliptical space that was nearly the size of the auditorium at her school. This, too, was filled with massive and ornate furniture, rich carpeting scattered across the goldstone floor, figured hangings on the walls. The gold and gems were everywhere, inlaid or appliqued or just stuck onto things with wild abandon. Dairine shook her head, gazing around—
And someone laughed at her. Her head snapped around.
There he was, in more of his trademark glittering robes, leaning back in a gaudy chair that was halfway to being a throne, and with his feet up on a footstool. “I wondered how long it would take you to sneak in here,” Roshaun said, stretching and lapsing back into a comfortable slouch again. “I admit, you kept me waiting longer than I thought I’d have to.”
I wish I’d kept you waiting a lot longer! Dairine thought. “What are you doing here?” she said. “The pup-tents are what you’re supposed to be sleeping in, on an excursus, if you’re not using the actual host family space for it. And you’re not supposed to sleep away every night, either!”
“The guidelines are just that,” Roshaun said, “guidelines. You’ll have noticed that there’s not a lot of heavy enforcement. The Aethyrs have better things to do.”
His word for the Powers That Be, I guess. “And that’s another thing! You’re not supposed to retroengineer the wizardries They gave us, either—”
“That restriction is only on the custom worldgates,” Roshaun said, “not the pup-tents.” He smiled slightly.
Dairine stared at Roshaun, remembering how obvious and casual this rationale had sounded when she was considering it, and wondering why it now sounded so outrageous and annoying. “And why are you so stuck on every little rule all of a sudden?” Roshaun said, obviously amused at Dairine’s expense. “You’ve broken a fair number of them in your time.”
She looked at him in shock. “Oh, yes,” Roshaun said, “I’ve seen your précis. Something of an early star, weren’t you? But suffering a bit of a decline at the moment. Ah, that tough time when you have to redefine yourself as something less than you dreamed… ”
Dairine opened her mouth, but managed to stop what she was about to say on its way out. The best she could find to replace it was, “Why are you such a pain in the ass?”
“Probably for the same kinds of reasons you are,” Roshaun said, and turned away. “But I don’t propose to discuss my developmental history with the likes of you.”
The likes of— !! “That’s not good enough!” she shouted. “Why did you even bother applying for this excursus if you didn’t want to be with other—”
Suddenly doors burst open all around. Dairine looked around her in shock as a sudden inrush of people arrived from what seemed every possible direction. Most of them were dressed like Roshaun, in long overtunics over shorter tunics and breeches and boots, though all of these people wore the style in plainer, more sober-colored fabrics. Some of them were actually carrying spears, and Dairine’s wizardly senses detected a number of energy signatures hidden about those servants’ persons that had nothing to do with spears. Pulse weapons, she thought, and a few other niceties…
Dairine stood there with her head up, but inside her head, she said eighteen words of a nineteen-word spell that would bounce back at them anything they threw at her. And if Roshaun gets a little singed, well, tough—
Roshaun, though, just laughed and waved his servitors away. “No, it’s all right. You’re not needed,” Roshaun said. “You may all go.”
“Lord prince,” said one of the spear carriers, looking at Dairine. “This is an alien! You shouldn’t be alone with—”
Roshaun laughed. “Nonsense! She’s no possible danger to me. Go on.”
There was a long pause. Then slowly all the servants began to bow and depart, though the armed ones gave Dairine a number of hard looks as they left.
She had to smile grimly at that, though she was trying to contain her annoyance at the assessment that she was “no danger.” Never mind. People a lot more important in the big scheme of things have thought otherwise…
The room emptied and the doors closed. Roshaun dusted his hands off as if he’d actually done something, and sat back down on his “throne,” stretching his legs out lazily. “So what’s on your little agenda today?”
Dairine collapsed the almost-built shield-spell, deciding she didn’t need it anymore. And as for him, listen to him! she thought. Every word out of Roshaun is a needle. Well, I’m just going to stop jumping when he sticks the needle in, no matter what he says. “We’re going up Mount Everest and K2,” she said. “Those are two of the highest mountains on Earth. A lot of people climb them—some just for the challenge, some almost as a tourist thing. But they leave a lot of garbage behind… so every now and then some wizards go up there and clean it up a little. It’s kind of an art form, taking away enough of the oxygen bottles and so forth to keep the place from turning into a dump, without taking so many that people notice they’re vanishing. That’s all we need, to turn into a yeti myth or something.”
She stopped, because he had actually yawned at her. “I don’t think so,” Roshaun said.
“I don’t think so what!”
“Housecleaning,” Roshaun said, “wouldn’t normally be a part of my job description.”
Despite all her good intentions, Dairine instantly got steamed again. “Neither would doing wizardry, most times, from the look of things around here,” she said. “Why lift a finger when all these people will jump out and do everything for you?” And once again she stopped herself. “Well, never mind. The whole point of the excursus is to see what other people’s wizardly practice is like. This would’ve been good for that. And besides it being a kind of fun service-thing to do, I’d have thought you’d enjoy the view. You don’t seem to have a lot of high ground around here.”
“We have a fair amount of it elsewhere,” Roshaun said, “on the other side of the planet—”
He was still trying to sound bored, but somehow it wasn’t working. Dairine glanced over at him quickly, but if anything had shown in his face while she was looking away, it was too late to catch a hint
of it now. He had sealed right over again. “Look,” Dairine said, “I really don’t know what your problem is. But let’s just drop it, okay? Come on back with me and we’ll—”
“At the moment, I’d rather not,” Roshaun said. There was still something ever so slightly different about his tone of voice. Some of that snide quality had come off it, if only a few percent’s worth.
“If it’s just a personality thing… ” Dairine said, after some hesitation.
“It’s nothing so simple,” Roshaun said, turning away from her and reaching out to some kind of data pad by his chair. “I don’t much like your little world, and your Sun pains me.”
Dairine wasn’t terribly sure what to make of the second remark, but the first was easy enough to understand. “Well, you have a nice time here by yourself,” she said. “Lie around and take it easy… Have someone peel you a grape or three. And don’t feel rushed into hurrying back.”
She headed back toward the access to the pup tent and made her way back through its overdecorated interior, growing gradually more annoyed. Halfway through, though, Dairine stopped, turned, and looked over her shoulder at the extra access Roshaun had added. Somebody could get him in trouble for that… She stood there absently biting her lower lip for a few moments, considering possibilities. Then she grimaced at her own ill temper. This guy is really messing me up… and I hate it.
Never mind.
***
She slipped through the main pup-tent access into her basement and trotted up the stairs. “Roshaun’s not going to be with us this morning,” she said to Filif. “Something’s going on at home that he had to take care of. Let’s just get ourselves up Everest and do some tidying.”
Her dad was still standing by the counter, keying numbers into his cell phone. He held it to his ear, shook his head, and glanced at the phone. “Honey, before you go,” her dad said, “what’s going on with the cell phones today? I was trying to call one of my suppliers… had to use the landline, finally. Is it the usual network-busy problem, or is the magic possibly interfering with it?”