by Diane Duane
“Have you read from it?” Nita said, made uneasy by the disturbed look on Tom’s face.
Tom glanced at her in shock, then began to laugh. “Me? No! And I hope I never have to.”
“But if it’s a good Book, if it preserves things—” Kit said.
“Oh, it’s good, all right. It preserves, or lets things grow the way they want to. But reading it, being the vessel for all that power—I wouldn’t want to. Even good can be terribly dangerous.” Tom shook his head, sighed. “But this isn’t anything you two need to worry about. The Advisories and the Senior wizards will handle it.”
“You’re worried, though,” Kit said.
“Yes, well—” Tom took another drink. “A universe can go a long time without affirmation-by-reading. But the bright Book has an opposite number, a dark one; the Book Which Is Not Named, we call it. It’s written in the Speech too, but its descriptions are… skewed. And if the bright Book has somehow fallen out of the protection of the wizards who should be looking after it, the dark one gains potential power. If someone should read from that one now, while the Book of Night with Moon isn’t available to counteract the power of the dark one…” Tom shook his head.
Carl came in then, the macaw still riding his shoulder. “Here we go,” he said, and dumped several sticks of chalk, an enormous black claw, and a 1943 zinc penny on the table. Nita and Kit stared at each other, neither quite having the nerve to ask what the claw had belonged to. “Now you understand,” Carl said as he picked up the chalk and began to draw a circle around the table, “that this is only going to stop the hiccups. You three are going to have to go to Manhattan and hook Fred into the Grand Central worldgate to get that pen out. Don’t worry about being noticed. People use it all the time and no one’s the wiser. I use it sometimes when the trains are late.”
“Carl,” Tom said, “doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that the first wizardry these kids do produces Fred—who brings this news about the good Book—and they come straight to us—”
“Don’t be silly,” the macaw on Carl’s shoulder said in a scratchy voice. “You know there are no accidents.”
Nita and Kit stared.
“Wondered when you were going to say something useful,” Carl said, sounding bored. “You think we keep you for your looks? OW!” he added, as the bird bit him on the ear. He knocked it on the beak with one knuckle, and while it was still shaking its head in annoyance, he put the bird up on the table beside Tom.
Picchu sidled halfway up Tom’s arm, stopped and looked at Nita and Kit. “Dos d’en agouni nikyn toude pheresthai,” it muttered, and got all the way up on Tom’s shoulder, and then glared at them again. “Well?”
“Speaking in tongues again,” Tom said, sounding resigned. “Showoff. Ignore her, or rap her one if she bites you. We just keep her around because she tells the future.” Tom made as if to smack the bird again, and Picchu ducked back. “You want to show off? How about the stocks tomorrow, bird?” he said.
Picchu cleared her throat. “‘And that’s the way it is,’“ she said in a voice very much like that of a famous newscaster of many years before, “‘May 20th, 2008. From New York, this is Walter—’“
Tom fisted the bird lightly in the beak, clunk! Picchu shook her head again.” ‘Issues were down in slow trading,’“ she said resentfully. “‘The Dow-Jones average—’“ and she rattled off some numbers. Tom grimaced.
“I should have gone into pork bellies,” he muttered. “I ought to warn you two: If you have pets, look out. Practicing wizardry around them can cause some changes.”
“There we go,” Carl said, and stood up straight. “Fred, you ready? Hiccup for me again.”
I can’t, Fred said, sounding nervous. You’re all staring.
“Never mind, I can start this in the meantime.” Carl leaned over the table, glanced down at one of the books, and began reading in the Speech, a quick flow of syllables sharpened by his Brooklyn accent. In the middle of the third sentence Fred hiccuped, and without warning the wizardry took. Time didn’t precisely stop, but it held still, and Nita became aware of what Carl’s wizardry was doing to Fred, or rather had done already—subtly untangling forces that were knotted tight together. The half-finished hiccup and the wizardry came loose at the same time, leaving Fred looking bright and well for the first time since that morning. He still radiated uncertainty, though, like a person who isn’t sure he’s stopped hiccuping yet.
“You’ll be all right,” Carl said, scuffing away the chalk marks on the floor. “Though as I said, that pen is still in there with the rest of your mass, at the other end of your claudication, and you’ll need Grand Central to get it out.”
Have you stopped my emissions entirely? Fred said.
“No, of course not. I couldn’t do that: you’ll still emit from time to time. Mostly what you’re used to, though. Radiation and such.”
“Grand Central!” Kit was looking worried. “Wait a minute… my mama and pop wouldn’t want me being in the city alone.”
“Wouldn’t be alone,” Nita said.
“Yeah, but you know what I mean. I could sneak in, I guess, but they’d still want to know where I’d been all the time I’d been away.”
“Well,” Tom said, looking thoughtful, “you’ve got school. You couldn’t go before the weekend anyway, right? Carl could sell you a piece of Saturday or Sunday—”
Kit and Nita looked at each other, and then at the two men. “Uh, we don’t have much money.”
“Who said anything about money?” Carl said. “Wizards don’t pay each other cash. They pay off in service—and sometimes the services aren’t done for years. But first let’s see if there’s any time available this weekend. Saturdays go fast, even though they’re expensive; especially Saturday mornings.”
He picked up another book and began leafing through it. Like all the other books, it was printed in the same type as Nita’s and Kit’s manuals, though the print was much smaller and arranged differently. “This way,” Tom said, “if you buy some time, you could be in the city all day, all week if you wanted—but once you activate the piece of time you’re holding, you’re back then. You have to pick a place to anchor the time to, of course, a twenty-foot radius. But after you’ve finished whatever you have to do, you bring your marked time to life, and there you are. Maybe five minutes before you started for the city, back at home. Or anywhere and any when else along the path you’ll follow that day.”
“Huh,” Carl said suddenly. “Callahan, J., and Rodriguez, C., is that you two?” They nodded. “You have a credit already,” Carl said, sounding a little surprised. “What have you two been doing to rate that?”
“Must have been for bringing Fred through,” Tom said. “I didn’t know that Upper Management had started handing out free backtiming credits, though. Something unusual’s going on.”
From her perch on Tom’s shoulder, Picchu snorted. “And what’s that supposed to mean?” Tom said. “Be useful, bird. Is there something you know that these kids ought to?”
“I want a raise,” Picchu said, sounding sullen.
“You just had one. Talk!”
“‘Brush your teeth twice a day, and see your dentist regularly,’“ the macaw began, in a commercial announcer’s voice.
Tom stared at her meaningfully. “All right, all right,” Picchu muttered. She looked over at Kit and Nita, and though her voice when she spoke had the usual good-natured annoyance about it, her eyes didn’t look angry or even teasing—they looked anxious. Nita got a sudden chill down her back. “Don’t be afraid to make corrections,” Picchu said. “Don’t be afraid to lend a hand.” She fell silent, seeming to think for a moment. “And don’t look down.”
Tom stared at the macaw. “Can’t you be a little more specific?”
“Human lives,” Picchu said irritably, “aren’t much like the Dow-Jones index. No, I can’t.”
Tom sighed. “Sorry. Kids, if she says it, she has a reason for saying it—so remember.”
&
nbsp; “Here you go,” Carl said. “Your piece of time is from 10:45 to 10:47 on this next Saturday morning. There aren’t any weekend openings after that until sometime in July.”
“We’ll take this one,” Kit said. “At least I can. Nita, will your folks let you go?”
She nodded. “I have some allowance saved up, and I’d been thinking about going into the city to get my dad a birthday present anyhow. I doubt there’ll be any trouble.”
Kit looked uncomfortable for a moment. “But there’s something I’m not sure about. My spell—our spell brought Fred here. How are we going to get him back where he belongs?”
Am I a problem? Fred said, sounding concerned.
“Oh, no, no—it’s just that, Fred, this isn’t your home, and it seemed as if sooner or later you might want to go back where you came from.”
“As far as that goes,” Tom said, “if it’s your spell that brought him here, you’ll be able to send him back. The instructions are in your book, same as the instructions for opening the Grand Central worldgate.”
“Stick to those instructions,” Carl said. “Don’t be tempted to improvise. That claudication is the oldest one in New York, and it’s the trickiest because of all the people using it all the time. One false syllable in a spell and you may wind up in Schenectady.”
Is that another world? Fred asked.
Carl laughed. “It might as well be. …Is there anything else we can do for you?”
Nita and Kit shook their heads and got up to leave, thanking Tom and Carl and Picchu. “Let us know how things turn out,” Tom said. “Not that we have any doubts—two wizards who can produce a white hole on the first try are obviously doing all right. But give us a call. We’re in the book.”
The two men saw Nita and Kit as far as the patio door, said their good-byes, and went back into the house. Nita started off across the lawn the way she had come, but Kit paused for a moment by the fishpond, staring down into it. He pulled a penny out of his pocket, dropped it in.
Nita saw the ripples spread—and then suddenly another set of ripples wavered away from the head of a very large goldfish, which spat the penny back at Kit and eyed him with distaste. “Do I throw money on your living-room floor?” it said, and then dived out of sight.
Kit picked up his penny and went after Nita and Fred as they pushed through the poplar hedge again. The blue Mercedes, which had been half in the street and half on the sidewalk, was now neatly parked by the curb. In front of it sat Annie, with her tongue hanging out and a satisfied look on her face. There were teeth marks deep in the car’s front fender. Annie grinned at them as Nita and Kit passed, and then trotted off down the street, probably to “find” something else.
“If my dog starts doing things like that,” Kit muttered, “I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to my mother.”
Nita looked down the street for signs of Joanne. “If we can just get home without being killed, I wouldn’t care what the dog found—” And then she broke off. “Uh-oh…”
A good ways down the street, four or five girls were heading toward them, and Nita saw Joanne’s blond hair. “Kit, we’d better split up. No reason for them to come after you too.”
“Right. Give me a call tonight. I’m in the book…” He took off down a side street.
She looked around, considering the best direction to run in—and then thought of the book she was carrying. There wasn’t much time, though. She forced herself to calm down even while she knew they were coming for her and turned the manual’s pages to the place Kit had shown her that morning, the spell that made blows slide off. She read through it slowly in the Speech, sounding out the syllables, taking the time to look up the pronunciation of the ones she wasn’t sure of, even though she could hear Joanne’s nasty laugh getting closer.
And then Nita sat down on the curb to wait for them.
They let her have it when they found her, as they had been intending to all day. Nita was tense all over as she waited for the first blows to fall… but they didn’t. She could feel them skidding away from her, not even touching her skin, and the girls who were punching and kicking her as hard as they could didn’t even seem to be seeing that it wasn’t working.
It was all Nita could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Instead she smothered her laughter and rolled around on the ground, falling back from the punches and making what she hoped were horrible groaning noises. And after a while Joanne and her four friends turned away to leave, satisfied that they had taught her a lesson.
Then Nita stood up and brushed herself off, uncut, unbruised, just a little dirty. “Joanne!” she called.
Amazed, Joanne turned around. And Nita laughed at her. “It won’t work anymore!” she said.
Joanne stood dumb.
“Never again,” Nita said. She was tempted to turn her back on them and walk off, but that just didn’t feel like enough, somehow. Instead she walked toward them, watching the confusion in their eyes.
They started to back away from her, horrified. Nita kept coming. And then, as they backed up faster and faster, on a sudden urge Nita started to run: ran straight at them.
They went pale as Nita charged them, waving her arms in the air and screaming like a maniac, just screaming at the top of her lungs like something from a bad horror movie. “BOOOOOOOO!”
They broke and ran, all of them. Joanne was the first, and then the rest followed her in a ragged tail down Rose Avenue. Not a word, not a taunt. They just ran.
Nita stopped short. The feeling of triumph that had been growing in her withered almost instantly. Some victory, she thought. It took so little, so little to scare them. Maybe I could have done that at any time, even without a shield. Maybe. And now I’ll never know for sure.
Are you all right? Fred said quietly, bobbing again by her shoulder. They didn’t hurt you this time.
“No,” Nita said. She was thinking of all the glorious plans she’d had to use her newfound wizardry on Joanne and her bunch, to shame them, confuse them, hurt them. And look what so small and inoffensive thing as a body shield had done to them. They were scared out of their minds. And they’d probably hate her worse than ever now.
I’ve got to be careful with this, she thought. I thought it was going to be all fun.
“C’mon, Fred,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
Temporospatial Claudications: Use and Abuse
The week went by quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to suspect that he’d been doing it so long that it actually seemed that way to him. It wasn’t simple, as her manual made plain as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter… which was forty pages long in small print.
Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements: specific supplies and objects that (for a wizard who didn’t routinely work with the gate) had to be present at an opening so that space would be properly bent, and spells that had to be learned just so. Nita’s cellphone, and she suspected Kit’s, were unusually busy for a couple of days, and there was a lot of texting and visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also got to see a lot of Kit’s mother and father and sisters, all of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita couldn’t speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it in self-defense. Kit’s dog told her the brand of dog biscuits it could never get enough of; she began bringing them with her when she visited. The dog spoke the Speech with a Spanish accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they discussed who should do what in the spelling. Kit wound up with most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies.
Late on Friday afternoon, Nita was in a little antiques-and-junk store on Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in search of a fork that was made of real silver instead of stainless steel. Fred was hanging over her shoulder, almost invisible, a faint red point lazily emitting
heat. “You ever swallow anything accidentally before, Fred?” Nita said under her breath.
Not for a long time, he said, glancing curiously at a pressed-glass saltshaker Nita was holding. Not since I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes swallow everything, but a white hole’s business is emission. Within limits, he added, and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered. I don’t ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen went down. Some of those things hurt on the way out. And anyway, all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing and I could blow my quanta.
She looked up at him, worried. “Really? Have you emitted that much stuff that you’re in danger of blowing up?”
Oh, not really—I’d have to lose a lot more mass first. After all, before I was a black hole, I was a respectable-sized blue-white star, and even these days I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn’t worry about it—I’m nowhere near the critical threshold yet.
“’Cute’?’” Nita said.
Well, it is … And I suppose there’s no harm in getting better at emissions. I have been improving a lot. What’s that?
Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with a battered old fork. It was scratched and its tines were bent out of shape, but it was definitely silver, not stainless steel. “That’s what I needed,” she said under her breath. “Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood, and then tonight I go over my part of the spells again…”
