Games Wizards Play

by Diane Duane

  And then there was the bit with the Sun, and the voice that had whispered to her before but that now had roared in frustration and long-suppressed rage. . . . Boy, that was freaky. But of course the Sun’s on my mind right now. How could it not be? And not just because of Penn. She sighed. Dairine . . .

  She flipped the pancakes, then under her breath said “Dammit!” They’d burned already. Nita turned down the control for that burner again, but the last time she’d done this the setting had been too low and the pancakes had sat there in the pan refusing to cook except with the residual heat. What is going on with this thing? she thought. Please don’t let the stove be dying. That’s an expense Daddy wouldn’t like right now.

  She stood there impatiently tapping the spatula against the edge of the frying pan. As for Penn, she thought, what was going on with him yesterday? Why was he so scared of the Sun?

  Unless he didn’t mind the thought of doing things to it at a distance. But when he got close enough to it for it to do something to him . . . She shook her head, because the question brought her back to her earlier one. Why would you purposely build a project that was going to scare you? It still doesn’t make any sense.

  Nita was pulled out of the moment’s distraction by the smell of something burning. “Oh, come on now, stop that!” she said. Hurriedly she scooped the four pancakes out of the pan and then put her hand down on the edge of the stove, away from the heat but close enough to the burner for there to be a direct connection between her and the metal. “You could just find a good temperature and hold it,” she muttered to the stove burner in the Speech. “I don’t want to burn any more of these. I’m running out of batter and because somebody forgot to get eggs last shopping, I can’t make any more!”

  The burner silently gave Nita to understand that the heat fluctuations weren’t its problem: there was something wrong with the house wiring, or maybe the circuitry in the stove. It wasn’t to blame. It got power fed to it, it glowed, it did its job, the power settings weren’t its problem—

  Nita heard the screen door open. Oh great, she thought, now Kit’s going to think I couldn’t handle this mechanical thing. Or that I was saving it for him to do something about. Like he’s the repairman . . .

  He shut the door behind him, sniffing the air, and came into the kitchen. “Got something burning there, Juanita,” Kit said, and started laughing.

  “I will kill you to make up for not having killed him,” Nita said, standing there with the batter jug in one hand. “Thought I was going to lose my lunch right then.”

  “He is kind of clueless sometimes,” Kit said. “It’s not as if it doesn’t say in the manual what you prefer to be called.”

  “Yeah, well, I wonder how much of the reading he’s been doing! Some parts he seems to get all right, and the rest of it—it’s like he doesn’t even bother. Doesn’t think it’s important enough or something.”

  Kit shrugged and reached past Nita for one of the pancakes lying on a nearby plate on top of a paper towel. “Maple syrup?” he said, rolling it up expertly.

  “Second cupboard over. Assuming that someone remembered to buy some.”

  Kit went rummaging for it. “Her turn to do the shopping this week?”

  Nita blew out an exasperated breath and poured the last of the batter into the frying pan. “No problem getting her to go to the Crossings,” Nita said. “But the Pathmark? Might as well be halfway across the galaxy.”

  Kit shook his head in a resigned way. “I know where she gets the Crossings thing from . . .” He regarded his pancake as he poured maple syrup on it over the plate that was holding the others. “You decide you need more charcoal in your diet or something?”

  “No. The heat in this guy keeps jumping around.” She nodded at the burner. “He says it’s not his fault, though.”

  Kit’s eyes went unfocused as he ate the first half of his pancake. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Something to do with his connection to the stove . . . I’m not sure what that’s about. Might be a short.”

  Nita sighed. “Okay.”

  “But today’s really big question is, how late did you have to stay up last night getting Penn to make all those changes?”

  She blinked. “I didn’t stay up at all. Did he do a lot? I saw a note in the manual that he’d been working on the spell diagram, but I didn’t check the details right then. I wanted a shower first.”

  Kit nodded until his mouth wasn’t so full. “Yeah, he did a lot. He pulled the main core routine apart, the whole energy-scooping part, and put it back together again in a completely different configuration. Must’ve taken him all night.”

  Nita shook her head and flipped the last few pancakes as Kit reached past her and rolled up another one. “How about that.”

  Kit gave her a slightly sly look. “The manual also said you had a chat session with him.”

  Nita hadn’t bothered copying Kit in on that because she’d foreseen the chat getting either inappropriate or angry, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him seeing either result. “It was real short,” she said. “I told him the odds were more in his favor if he fixed it, and I told him what Dairine told me. And sure enough, he tried to wheedle me into doing it for him—” Kit rolled his eyes. “Thought I’d die laughing. I said to him, ‘You think that’s gonna happen, you need your grasp on reality retooled.’ Told him we’d see him sometime after the presentations started later today, and I closed the chat down and that was that. End of story.”

  “Well,” Kit said, “he did the job. Or at least he did something. We’ll see how it looks when he lays it out.” He reached for a third pancake.

  “You’d better leave some for me!”

  “I’m eating the burnt ones.”

  “That’s all of them!”

  “Better hurry up, then.” Kit grinned at her.

  Nita pulled the last pancakes out of the pan and took the maple syrup away from Kit before he started drinking it (which he’d been known to do). She rolled up the least burnt one, poured syrup in the plate and dunked it. “You satisfied with how Penn did on the verbal presentation stuff?”

  Kit nodded. “Yeah. I wish we had another session to do heckling with him, though. He’s getting better at handling the interruptions, but he still hates them, and it shows. Wish we could desensitize him.”

  “He was worse about that with you than he was with me.”

  Kit reached for a fourth pancake and rolled it up. “I don’t know if that’s him being competitive with guys, or competitive with me . . . Though why would he be competitive with me?” Kit shrugged. “Don’t get it.”

  “Could be both,” Nita said. “The way he is with girls . . .”

  Kit shook his head. “You really have problems with him, don’t you.”

  “It’s his attitude. I honestly don’t know what’s going on with him. But it’s as if he thinks girls are some other species. I wish I had some idea where he gets that from.”

  “You mean you’re not another species?”

  Nita kicked Kit ever so gently in the shin. “Thanks a lot. Maybe he sees guys as being . . . I don’t know, more worthy of competing with? More of a challenge?”

  Kit was at that moment finishing his pancake, and shrugged again. Nita grabbed a couple more pancakes, rolled them up together, wiped up what was left of the maple syrup with them and wolfed them down.

  “So, you ready?”

  “Just want to wash my hands and grab a jacket. Where should we pop out? Right at the Javits? They’ve got a dedicated ‘beam in’ spot; Sker’ret installed it yesterday.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a nice day. Thought we might go into Grand Central and walk over.”

  “Not Penn Station?”

  “They’re doing something to the gates, the manual says. Penn’s offline.”

  “Oh, great. That has to be driving Rhiow nuts.” Nita laughed. “You know, we’re going to have to have something else to call him if we’re going to talk about him and the station at the same time.”r />
  “Easy. Penn Station is Big Penn. Our mentee is Little Penn.”

  “Yeah, in terms of needing to be cut down to size.”

  “Looks like it’s gonna take a few minutes for your blood sugar to sort itself out . . .”

  “Shut up.” But Nita laughed. “Let’s go.”

  9

  Manhattan: Javits Center

  GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL at midmorning, for Nita at least, had a surprisingly restful feel. The worst of the morning rush hour was over, the Sun shone in beautifully through the big windows, and lots of people strolled casually or purposefully across the bright, echoing space without there being too much of a feeling of stress or hurry. Nita was quite aware that her own history with this place tended to affect her perceptions; any space tends to look serene when it’s not full of angry dinosaurs or about to be trashed by the Lone Power in a bad mood. But that didn’t stop her from enjoying the slower pace.

  She and Kit transported as usual into the commuter-free “safe space” at the far end of Track 23 just off the Main Concourse—where the onsite worldgating team had the terminal’s security cameras permanently spoofed, and a simple on-demand light-bending stealth-spell operated 24/7 to keep any unexpected nonwizards in the area from noticing when the emplaced worldgate operated. As it happened, Nita and Kit arrived during a brief quiet period between train arrivals, and it took only a moment or two for them to make sure no one on adjacent platforms could see them. They were heading toward the edge of the stealth field some meters away when something down low near the floor passed through it and faded into visibility, trotting down the platform toward them: a small black cat with its tail held cheerfully in the air.

  “Rhiow!”

  “Well, look what the Queen dragged in!” said the most senior of Grand Central’s worldgating team as she came up with them in mid-platform, rubbing against one of Kit’s shins and then rearing up against Nita’s.

  “Yeah, and dai stihó to you too!” Nita said, reaching down to scratch her between the ears.

  Rhiow dropped to all fours again and gazed up at them with big golden eyes. “Cousins, I can’t stay, the Lexington gate got stuck in the middle of its maintenance cycle again and I have to go debug it. But it’s fine to see you! You’re on your way over for the Invitational?”

  “Yeah,” Kit said. “I saw that Penn Station’s gate’s down, though. That must be a nuisance for you with all the people coming through . . .”

  “Oh no, it’s because of the Invitational that it’s down! Just a temporary service reconfiguration. We can’t leave a set of short-term gates operating so close to the permanent gate structures at Penn: they’re too territorial, they’d start making trouble for each other. So all the Penn Station worldgate traffic’s being rerouted through here for the day. Not such a big deal.”

  “Oh, that’s okay then, I guess,” Nita said. “We were worried something was broken.”

  Rhiow’s ears went flat for a moment. “Powers That Be, don’t even think it! Things are busy enough as it is.”

  “Too busy for you to stop by Javits later?” Kit said.

  “This evening? Most likely there’ll be time. Tell them to save me some of that upstate milk.” And she flirted her tail at them and headed briskly on down to the end of the platform again, leaping off of it and vanishing into the dark.

  “No problem,” Nita called after her. “See you later!”

  “Upstate milk?” Kit said as they headed on down the platform in the other direction and the stealth field released them into visibility.

  “There’s this dairy farm in the Catskills that’s been selling milk in one of the city farmers’ markets on weekends,” Nita said. “She and Hwaith have it bad for this stuff. They keep going on about the cream on top, apparently it’s not homogenized . . .”

  They made their way up the ramp from the Grand Concourse and out through the bright brass doors into the sunshine, turning right on Forty-second and heading west. Cabs blared horns, trucks rumbled by, a fire engine honked its way past in a blur of red and white, lights flashing and siren yipping as it braked at the intersection of Forty-second and Lex, then slid through against the lights, still yipping. People going both ways on the sidewalk pressed in around them, brushed past them, trailing fragments of conversation over them. “But then I thought, why in the world would I—” “—not going to do that—” “I never made that bet with you!” “—starts making fun of my hat and I said, ‘You know nothing, and anyway this isn’t a fedora, it’s a trilby—’”

  “You thought he was going to give you trouble?” Kit said as they paused at the intersection of Forty-second and Madison, waiting for the light.

  “Who?”

  “Penn. About the chat.”

  Nita let out an annoyed breath. “Or I was going to give him some, yeah.”

  The light changed: they headed across. “Not that he wouldn’t have had it coming,” Kit said.

  “Yeah. It’s just that—I don’t know, I keep getting the feeling that every time I try to have a conversation with him, he’s saying one thing and meaning something else.” Nita made a face. “Possibly something creepy. Or else he’s writing me off as too girly to listen to. No middle ground with him.”

  Kit looked amused. “You know,” he said, “we could turn Lissa loose on him.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Wait, is she going to be here?”

  “Yeah, I saw her on the incoming visitor list in the manual this morning.” Kit grinned. “After ten minutes or so of Lissa in I’m-talking-tech-to-you,-stupid mode, he’ll be so grateful for you.”

  The notion made Nita smile, though there was a slightly sour edge to it. I should be able to do that to him myself, she thought. As they came up to the next light at Fifth Avenue, Nita gazed across and leftward at the New York Public Library and the great couchant lions guarding the doors. She was briefly distracted by the idea of them leaping off their pedestals and roaring down Fifth Avenue in the darkness years ago. Then she realized that Kit was watching her with a worried expression. “What?”

  “You look pissed off.”

  “I am,” Nita muttered.

  “Look—” Kit’s expression was slightly nervous. Nita stared at him, confused. “Lissa’s not . . . I mean, there’s nothing you should—”

  Nita thought of what Carmela had said to her a while back: You two get so used to reading each other’s minds that you forget how to talk. She had to smile: there was truth in it. But she didn’t see why she couldn’t still tease Kit about it. “For someone who’s usually all about finding the right words, you sure get tongue-tied sometimes.”

  “What I mean is . . .” Then Kit caught Nita’s tone and knew that everything was okay, and laughed. “I don’t know what I mean.”

  She realized that Kit was looking down at her hand, hanging beside his. His was twitching a little. Nita looked up at him and said, “I know what you mean about not knowing what you mean.”

  Then they both cracked up. “Do you even listen to yourself?” Kit said.

  “Been trying not to, lately.”

  The light changed. Kit reached out and took her hand, and they crossed Fifth together a little awkwardly. You’d think crossing the street while holding someone’s hand would be easier, Nita thought. Not the other way around . . .

  “With Penn, though . . .” Nita said after a moment, jumping back a subject as they headed on down Forty-second and past the side of the library. “Who needs any more of that? With all the crap at school—”

  “Yeah.” Occasionally it seemed as if sometime during the last year or so in school, somebody had thrown a switch, and suddenly talk about sex was everywhere (though as far as Nita could tell, there was a lot more talk going on about it than action). And not talking about it was as fraught with trouble as talking about it was. If you got into such discussions even as protective coloration, there could be an ugly backlash. Nita had learned the hard way that some people took her refusal to talk about it either as proof she
and Kit weren’t doing it, or proof that they were. Being hit with both insinuations at once had recently caused Nita to completely forget for several minutes about years of being committed to not increasing entropy. She’d been within a breath of increasing it (generally) all over the athletics field in back of the school, and (specifically) all over Michaela whose-last-name-she-could-never-remember-and-now-didn’t-want-to.

  “You didn’t kill her,” Kit said. “That was a good thing.”

  Nita stared at him, then flapped her free hand helplessly in the air. “See that?” she said. “You don’t even have to know what I’m thinking to know what I’m thinking.”

  Kit started laughing again. “Kind of hard to miss what your face is doing.”

  “God, am I that transparent? How am I any possible use if everybody can tell what I’m thinking all the time?”

  “I don’t know. Might have saved Michaela deVera’s life that you were that transparent. Because word has it that nobody’s heard a peep out of her about you since she saw the look on your face while you were standing over her on the track.”

  DeVera. Okay. But it’ll probably be ten minutes before I forget her name again, because God I can’t stand her. “Oh great, thank me for that by all means,” Nita muttered. “Just don’t blame me if now she lives long enough to reproduce.”

  Kit started whooping with laughter, laughing so hard that he had to stop walking and pull Nita over with him to one side, so he could lean on one of the big, sloping, squared pillars of the building they were passing and regain control of himself. “Oh God, oh God,” was all he could say for nearly a minute. And then finally, when he had the strength to push himself upright and wipe his eyes, Kit gasped, “Who would—who would even be a part of that? Seriously!”