“But your cell phone—”
“Oh, that,” her dad said. “Everybody’s been having trouble with their phones the past day or so. We had another of your solar flares. Didn’t Roshaun say we might get some more of those after he and Dairine and the others fixed the Sun?”
“Oh my gosh,” Nita said. “I forgot. So much has been happening, and I thought—” She sighed. “Never mind.”
“It’s a pity you weren’t here last night,” her dad said. “We had a really nice aurora. You’d have loved it.”
An aurora, she thought. When did I last have time to look at the sky for fun? “Daddy,” she said, “this is going to sound really strange, but what day is today?”
“It’s April thirtieth,” her dad said.
“Oh, no!” Nita said. “We have to be back at school on Monday; that’s as much time as Mr. Millman could get us! What if we can’t, what if…”
Her dad sighed and sat down in his easy chair, though he didn’t lean back. He looked at Nita, concerned, and then glanced at the TV. It was still discussing wars and rumors of wars. “I know this sounds unlike me,” he said, “but don’t worry about that right now. How are you doing with what you left to do?”
“It’s too early to say,” Nita said. “But things are really messed up.”
“Yeah,” said her dad. He threw another glance at the TV. “The news is so bad right now.” He shook his head. “Let’s not get into it. Sweetie, you should get back there and concentrate on your job.”
“But what about you?” she said. Sker’ret’s ancestor was on her mind, and Dairine had left a précis in the manual about her meeting with Roshaun’s family. All Nita could think of at the moment was her father, alone in an empty house at a bad time.
“I’m doing okay,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Don’t distract yourself. I can cope.”
“But—”
“Honey, things here may be going to hell in a handbasket,” he said, “but after what you’ve told me, I know why. So when I feel awful, at least I’m privileged to know what’s causing it. For the meantime, you let me worry about this planet, and I’ll let you worry about all the others. If what you’re doing works, we’ll all have less to worry about here.” He smiled, though the smile was pained. “Dairine’s all right?”
“As far as I know.”
“Good,” her dad said.
“I have to call Kit’s mama and pop and tell them that he’s okay, too.”
“I can do that for you,” her dad said. “I need to talk to them anyway. In case the school decides to give us any trouble, we’re going to want to present a united front.”
“Okay,” she said. “I have to go check in real quick with Tom and Carl. As soon as I’ve done that, I’ll be going back.”
“Have you got enough stuff in your pup tent?” her dad said.
“Loads,” Nita said. “I’ll come back if I need anything.”
“Okay,” her father said. He looked at the TV, picked up the remote, and very pointedly turned off the TV. “At times like this,” he said, “you can pay too much attention to the news. Either they’ll blow up the world, or they won’t. Meantime, our job is to get on with life.”
“I think you’re right,” Nita said. “Daddy…”
She went to him and hugged him again. He hugged her back, hard. “You be careful,” he said. “But do what you have to. Don’t worry about me.”
She looked up at him. “I’m going to anyway,” Nita said. “But I will do what I have to.”
“Good,” her dad said, and pushed her gently away. “Don’t worry about the phones. Get in touch when you can, or just leave me voicemail. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then I’ll see you later.” He smooched her on the top of her head, and went into the kitchen, and outside.
“Bye-bye,” Nita said.
Standing there in the living room, she heard her dad start the car up and back out of the driveway. Everything was suddenly very quiet.
Hurriedly, Nita headed out the back door, locked it, and set out on the short walk to Tom and Carl’s.
***
She hadn’t had to ring the doorbell more than once before the door opened. Tom peered out at her. “Oh, hi, Nita. How’re you doing?”
He looked so perfectly normal that she could have wept. “Oh, wow, it’s great to see you!”
“It’s always good to see you, too,” Tom said. He stood in the doorway and looked at her quizzically.
This conversation somehow wasn’t going quite the way Nita had imagined it. “Where’s Carl?”
“At work. Where else would he be?”
That calm reply ran a chill down Nita’s spine. Wrong, this is all wrong.
“Uh,” she said. “Yeah. Listen, I thought I should touch base about where we’ve been.”
Tom raised his eyebrows. “School, I thought,” he said. “Spring break would have ended, I don’t know, last week sometime?”
Nita opened her mouth and closed it again.
“Listen,” Tom said, “I’d love to chat, but I’m on a deadline. I’ve got to get this article to the magazine by Friday.”
Magazine? What’s going on with him?
“Tom,” Nita said. “Uh, this is kind of important. Do you have guests or something?” She leaned a little past him to try to see into the house.
“Guests? No, I’m just working.” His tone was polite, but a little cool now.
Nita was beyond understanding what was going on. “Okay, I won’t keep you. But this is an errantry matter.”
He blinked at her, actually blinked. “Errantry?”
Then he laughed. “Oh, wow, you had me going there for a minute. I remember how serious we used to be about those role-playing games. Wizardry. Spells. The magic Speech that everything understands. It’s great that you still like thinking about that kind of thing even when you’re in junior high.”
Nita stood there absolutely speechless. Tom’s laugh was kind, but he wasn’t playacting.
We’ll lose our wizardry, he’d told her himself. All of us. And also, Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart… or the heart that’s come to believe that it’s impossible.
Nita had to give it one more try. “Tom,” she said, “the universe is tearing itself apart, and we’ve been out trying to repair it. I just didn’t want you to worry about where we were.”
He sighed. “You’ve been listening to the news, too, huh?” he said. “It’s enough to make anyone want to take their second childhood early.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Look, sweetie, I have to get back to work. Was there anything else? Anything serious, I mean. How’s your dad?”
“He’s fine,” Nita said. Her heart was breaking, and there was no way she could take time to deal with it now. “Uh, where are Annie and Monty?”
“Carl had to drop them off at the groomer’s this morning,” Tom said. “Their fur was getting out of hand again. You can stop in and play with them later if you like.”
“Okay,” Nita said. She knew it was irrational to try to prolong the conversation, but she desperately wanted to. What am I going to tell Kit? This is so awful. And we’re really on our own now. “Do you mind if I go around back and see how the fish are doing?” she said.
“Sure. Anything else? I have to get back to this.”
She looked into Tom’s eyes, desperate to find there the one thing she wanted to see, but it wasn’t there. “Nope,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Come back anytime,” Tom said. “Best to your dad.” And he shut the door.
Nita stood on the doorstep feeling utterly shattered, bereft in a way she hadn’t felt since her mother died. The bottom had fallen out of her world again, and this time what had gone out from under her was something that had seemed too solid, too important, ever to go away. Not even just wizardry itself, but the memory of having been a wizard, party to the most basic glories and tragedies of the universe, was now suddenly reduced in Tom—her role model, in some ways her hero, a fig
ure of power and competence—to a cute memory of some kind of friendly “let’s pretend.” The thought was almost too painful to bear.
But bearing pain, and learning how to deal with the weight of it, was something at which Nita had been getting a lot of practice lately. She went down the front steps and around on the little path that ran down the side of the house to the backyard.
It was tidy as always. Across the lawn, near the back wall, was the koi pond. Carl had spent considerable time rebuilding it over last summer, widening the edge of the pond so there was a place to sit while he fed the fish.
Nita wandered over to it, looking toward the sliding doors at the back of the house. They were closed; it was still chilly for the time of year. From inside, just very faintly, she heard the machine-gun fast clicking of Tom typing super fast on his laptop. For a long time she and Kit had teased Tom about his typing speed, claiming that it almost certainly had something to do with his wizardry. Apparently not.
Nita sat down on the pond’s edge and gazed into the water. It was clear enough, but lily pads hid about half the surface. The koi are probably hiding, Nita thought. If they even remember who they are any more.
She let out a long, unhappy breath. There was no point in her spending any more time here. She should get back to the Crossings, and then to Rashah, and get on with work. But Nita couldn’t bring herself to move just yet. Walking away from this house, where there was suddenly no wizardry, was going to hurt. She would delay that pain for just a little longer.
As she looked down into the pond, an old memory stirred. She felt around in her pockets, looking for a penny, but couldn’t find anything but a dime. Nita gazed at her reflection in the water for some moments, waiting, hoping, but no fish came up to look at her. Finally Nita dropped the dime into the water.
The tiny plunk! sounded loud in the silence. Nothing happened.
Nita let out a long breath. It’s like everything that’s happened was a dream.
And what if it was? What if it was all a game—nothing but a fantasy?
That terrible thought hung echoing in her mind. Nita shivered. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where what I am isn’t real anymore! she thought. A world with no room in it for wizards—what kind of place would that be?
Very slowly, a drift of white and orange came up to the surface of the dark water. The koi looked at her, blank-eyed, almost with a sad expression—
—and spat the dime back at her.
It hit Nita in the chest, surprisingly hard. The koi eyed her with an annoyed expression. “Boy, are you people ever slow learners,” it said. “I thought we told you no throwing money on our living room floor! Seriously…”
Another koi, bigger and more silvery, with bright scales like coins scattered here and there down its body, drifted up beside the first. Nita was practically gasping with relief. “You’re still you!” she said. “You haven’t lost wizardry!”
“We’ve got less to lose,” the marmalade koi said. “Or more. Humans are always sort of in the middle when it comes to magic; they’re always trying to talk themselves out of it.”
“They’re always trying to talk themselves out of whatever power they’re given,” said the koi with the mirror-scales. “Just listen to them! Whatever happens to humans is always somebody else’s fault. It’s almost, pardon the phrase, magical.”
“But the magic’s going away, all the same,” Nita said softly.
A third koi, one of the calico-patterned ones, drifted up to the surface. “Night falls,” it said,
“and all things
Go too silent for me; my
Heart’s chill with starfall.”
Nita sighed. The sentiment sounded as sad and full of foreboding as she felt. “Do you guys do anything but that?” she said.
The calico koi gave her a look. “Everybody’s a critic,” it said. “You prefer sapphics? Those are hard.”
“You want hard,” said the mirror-scaled koi, scoffing, “you want sonnets. Sonnets are tough—”
Nita rolled her eyes. “I meant, do you do anything besides predict the future,” she said.
The calico koi gave her a morose look. “We’re talking to you, aren’t we?”
“Not a lot of future to predict at the moment, anyway,” said the marmalade koi. “Normally there are billions of branchings from one second to the next. Right now, though…”
“Everything’s started to look like mushroom clouds,” the mirror-scaled koi said.
Nita thought of her dream: of Della, brushing her hair aside. The news all sucks. She shivered in the chill. “But there’s something else,” she said. “It’s darker than usual on the far side of the Moon.”
“You saw that, too?” said the calico koi. “And the moon is no dream.’ Interesting.”
Nita swallowed. “Was it real?” she said. “Is that really going to happen?”
The koi all looked at her with eyes that were unusually unrevealing, even for fish. “Depends,” said the calico koi.
“On whether you can make it happen,” said the mirror-scaled koi.
“And whether it’s a good idea,” said the marmalade koi.
Nita grimaced. “And here I was thinking maybe it was you guys I really came back here to see,” she said. “A lot of help you are.”
“But we are,” said the calico koi. “We’re just not supposed to do it directly. That’s not part of being oracular. Our job is to make you think.”
“It takes some doing sometimes,” said the mirror-scale koi, its expression clearly scornful now.
Nita mulled that over. “So there’s still hope?”
“Always hope,” said the mirror-scaled koi. “But you can’t just sit there and stare at it. You have to do something with it.”
She nodded. “I wish there was something I could do for them.” Nita said, glancing back at the house.
The mirror-scaled koi looked at her with compassion. “Save the world,” it said. “And don’t get hung up on the details.”
“A world of dew,” said the mirror-scale koi,
“And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.”
Nita nodded. She was learning to take her time with these utterances. They worked better if you let them unfold slowly than if you tried to crack them open like cracking a nut with a hammer. “I should get back,” she said. “You guys take care of yourselves.”
The fish bowed to her.
“And take care of them,” Nita said, looking back at the house.
“We’ll do what we can,” the mirror-scaled koi said. “But if anyone’s going to fix this, it’s going to have to be you.”
Nita nodded and got out her manual. A moment later, she was gone.
12: Regime Change
When Nita reappeared at the Crossings, she glanced around from the pad where she stood and was astonished. The whole place was crawling with giant centipedes—thousands upon thousands of Rirhait in blue, green, various shades of pink, and more shades of purple than she had known existed. At least, she thought, the place doesn’t feel as creepy anymore.
This far down the side corridor from which she’d originally departed, there wasn’t as much damage as there had been nearer the main intersection. Farther up the wide corridor, among the shattered shops and kiosks, some of the damage was being put right in what, for Rirhait, was a fairly straightforward way. They were eating it.
She headed up the corridor, and several Rirhait came flowing along toward Nita. They stopped in front of her, and one of them reared up about half of his body into the air in what Nita had come to recognize as a gesture of respect. “Emissary,” he said, “Sker’ret is waiting for you at the central control module.”
Nita nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Please tell him I’ll be with him in a moment.”
They wreathed their eyes at her and flowed away. Nita headed after them, mulling as she went the things the koi had said to her. There was something about the structure of the second haiku that was puzzling he
r. Within every dewdrop, a world of struggle. It was going to take her a while to figure out what that meant. Not too long, I hope.
When she got down to the command center, she found it almost completely surrounded by bustling Rirhait. Not actually in the rack but within reach of it, Sker’ret was standing with his eyes pointing in many different directions, giving orders to the Rirhait all around him as fast as they presented themselves. As Nita approached, she saw one eye swivel in her direction. Spotting her, Sker’ret came flowing over to her, almost as if relieved to get away from the other Rirhait.
“Are your people at home all right?” he said.
Nita nodded as she came up by the control center, and leaned against the outer racking. “My dad’s okay,” she said, “but Tom and Carl—” She shook her head. “They’ve lost it.”
“Your Seniors!” Sker’ret looked at her in horror. “Mover’s Name, I didn’t think it could start happening so soon.”
“Just a check,” Nita said. “How long have I been gone?”
Sker’ret looked confused. “Hardly an hour of your time,” he said. “Oh, I see, you’re worried about the irregular transit times. Don’t be. I’ve corrected for them—for the moment, at least. When you transit again, if you lose time, it’ll be hours, not days.”
“But you’re going to have to keep correcting—”
“Yes. And it’s going to get harder,” Sker’ret said. “The Pullulus is affecting our local space now.”
“Right,” Nita said, looking around at the frantic activity going on around her. “You find out anything more about who was behind our little friends the Tawalf?”
Sker’ret waved some of his upper legs in an I-don’t-know gesture. “It doesn’t seem to have been the Lone Power, at least not directly. The Tawalf’s aggression contract was bought by a crime syndicate somewhere in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. There are two or three species involved, all from economic or political groups that have had disagreements with the Crossings in the past. The Rirhait law-enforcement authorities are following that up.”