by Диана Дуэйн
"Oh, no, no—it's just that, Fred, this isn't your home, and it seemed as 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 ou'H 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.
"Nearly." Carl laughed. "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 fishpool, 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 / 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 teethmarks 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. 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 c°irie after you too."
Right. Give me a call tonight. I'm in the book…, " He took off down a
Side street. ^>he looked around, considering the best direction to run in—and then nought of the book she was carrying. There wasn't much time, though. She °rced herself to calm down even while she knew they were coming for her, acte herself turn the pages slowly to the place Kit had shown her that °rning, the spell that made blows slide off. She read through it slowly in the
Aech, sounding out the syllables, taking the time to look up the pronunciation of the ones she wasn't sure of, even though they were getting close and she could hear Joanne's laugh.
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; and she rolled around on the ground and fell back from their punches and made what she hoped were horrible groaning noises. After a while Joanne and her four friends turned away to leave, satisfied that they had taught her a lesson. And Nita stood up and brushed herself off, uncut, unbruised, just a little dirty. "Joanne," she called after them. In what looked like amazement, Joanne turned around. Nita laughed at her. "It won't work any more," she said. Joanne stood dumb,
"Never again/' she said. She felt like turning her back on them, but in-stead she walked toward them, watching the confusion in their eyes. On a sudden urge, she jumped up in the air and waved her arms crazily. "BOO!" she shouted.
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, 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 slowly. She was thinking of all the glorious plans she'd had to use her new-found 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 would 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. "Come on, 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 book told her 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 sup-plies and objects that had to be present at an opening so that space would be properly bent, spells that had to be learned just so. The phone calls flew between Nita's house and Kit's for a couple of days, and there was a lot of 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. You ever swallow anything accidentally before, Fred?" Nita said under her breath. It was late Friday afternoon, and she was in a little antiques-and-)unk store on
Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in arch of a real silver fork. Fred was hanging over her shoulder, almost invisible a faint red point lazily emitting heat.
INot for a long time) he said, glancing curiously at a pressed-glass salt-
a*er Nita was holding. (Not since I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes '°w 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 those 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 emis-| sions. I have been improving a lot. Wliat'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 if was definitely silver, not stainless steel. "That's what I needed," she said|
"Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood, and then tonighf
I go over my part of the spells again."
(You sound worried.) '
"Well, yeah, a little," Nita said, getting up. All that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the more sense the bushes and trees made. "It's just—the rowan branch has to co
me off a live tree, Fred, and I can't just pick it—that'd be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers off. I have to ask for it. And if the tree won't give it to rne , ."
(Then you don't get your pen back, at least not for a while.) Fred shim-mered with colors and a feeling like a sigh. (I am a trouble to you.)
"Fred, no. Put your light out a moment so we can get out of here." Nita interrupted the shopkeeper's intense concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred was pacing her again. "If you're trouble, you're the best trouble that's happened around here for a while. You're good to talk to, you're good company — when you don't forget and start emitting cosmic rays—"
Fred blazed momentarily, blushing at Nita's teasing. In an excited n* ment the night before he had forgotten himself and emitted a brief blast ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up Nita's backyard a good л£ionized the air for miles around, and produced a local but brilliant ai (Well, it's an old habit, and old habits die hard. I'm working on it.) "Heat we don't mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the longwave kind doesn't hurt people's eyes," (You fluoresce when I use that, though...)
Nita laughed. "I don't mind fluorescing. Though on second thought, don't do that where anyone but Kit can see. I doubt my mother'd understand."
They walked home together, chatting alternately about life in the suburbs and life in a Part °f deep space close to the Great Galactic Rift. Nita felt niore relaxed than she had for months. Joanne had been out of sight since Monday afternoon at Tom and Carl's. Even if she hadn't, Nita had been practicing with that body shield, so that now she could run through the syllables of the spell in a matter of seconds and nothing short of a bomb dropped on her could hurt her. She could even extend the spell to cover someone else, though it wasn't quite so effective; she had a harder time convincing the air to harden up. But even that lessened protection would come in handy if she and Kit should be in trouble together at some point and there was no time to cooperate in a spelling. Not that she was expecting any more trouble. The excitement of a trip into the city was already catching at her. And this wasn't just another shopping trip. Magic was loose in the world, and she was going to help work some…
She ate supper and did her homework almost without thinking about either, and as a result had to do much of the math homework twice. By the time she was finished, the sun was down and the backyard was filling with a cool blue twilight, In the front of the house, her mother and father and Dairine were watching TV as Nita walked out the side door and stood on the step, letting her eyes get used to the dimness and looking east at the rising Moon. Canned laughter echoed inside the house as Fred appeared by her shoulder.
(My, that's bright for something that doesn't emit heat,) Fred said, looking at the Moon too. "Reflected sunlight," Nita said absently. (You're going to talk to the tree now?) "Uh huh."
л (Then I'll go stay with the others and watch that funny box emit. Maybe II figure out what it's trying to get across.)
'Good luck," Nita said as Fred winked out. She walked around into the Mcyard, Spring stars were coming out as she stood in the middle of the lawn and °°Ked down the length of the yard at the rowan, a great round-crowned tree nowy with white flowers. Nita's stomach tightened slightly with nervous-Iess' It had been a long time ago, according to her manual, that the trees had j>0rie to war on mankind's behalf, against the dark powers that wanted to eP human intelligence from happening at all. The war had been a terrible ' *> lasting thousands of centuries—the trees and other plants taking more a rnore land, turning barren stone to soil that would support them and the animals and men to follow; the dark powers breaking the soil with earthqua[.e and mountain building, scouring it with glaciers, climate-changing good ground for desert, and burning away forests in firestorms far more terrible than the small brushfires any forest needs to stay healthy. But the trees and the other plants had won at last.
They had spent many more centuries readying the world for men — but when men came, they forgot the old debts and wasted the forests more terribly than even the old dark powers. Trees had no particular reason to be friendly to people these days. Nita found herself thinking of that first tree that had spoken to her, angry over the destruction of its friend's artwork. Even though the rowan tree had always been well tended, she wasn't certain how it was going to respond to her. With the other ash trees, rowans had been in the forefront of the Battle; and they had long memories.
Nita sighed and sat down under the tree, book in hand, her back against its trunk. There was no need to start right away, anyhow — she needed a little while to recover from her homework. The stars looked at her through the rowan's windstirred branches, getting brighter by the minute. There was that one pair of stars that always looked like eyes, they were so close together. It was one of the three little pairs associated with the Big Dipper. The Leaps of the Gazelle, the ancient Arabs had called them, seeing them as three sets of hoofprints left in the sky. "Kafza'at al Thiba," Nita murmured, the old Arabic name. Her eyes wandered down toward the horizon, finding a faint reddish gleam. "Regulus." And a whiter gleam, higher: "Arcturus." And another, and another, old friends, with new names in the Speech, that she spoke silently, remembering Carl's warning: (Elthathte. , ur'Senaahel…} The distant fires flickered among shadowy leaves. (Lahirien…) (And Methchane and Ysen and Cahadhwy and Rasaug6hil… .They are nice tonight.) Nita looked up hurriedly. The tree above her was leaning back comfortably on its roots, finished with the stretching-upward of growth for the day, and gazing at the stars as she was. (I was hoping that haze would clear off,) it said as silently as Nita had spoken, in a slow, relaxed drawl. (This will be a good night for talking to the wind. And other such transient creatures. I was wondering when you were going to come out and pay your respects, wizardling.) {Uh—) Nita was reassured: the rowan sounded friendly, fit's been a bus)' week.) (You never used to be too busy for me,) the rowan said, its whispery voice sounding ever so slightly wounded. (Always up in my branches you were, and falling out of them again. Or swinging. But I suppose you outgrew me.)
Nita sat quiet for a moment, remembering how it had been when she w littler. She would swing for hours on end, talking to herself, pretending k'nds of things, talking to the tree and the world in general. And some- es_ (You talked back!) she said in shocked realization. (You did, I wasn't making it up.)
(Certainly ! talked. You were talking to me, after all… . Don't be sur-nrised. Small children look at things and see them, listen to things and hear them. Of course they understand the Speech. Most of them never realize it any more than you did. It's when they get older, and stop looking and listening, that they lose the Speech, and we lose them.) The rowan sighed, many leaves showing pale undersides as the wind moved them. (None of us are ever happy about losing our children. But every now and then we get one of you back.) (All that in the book was true, then,) Nita said. (About the Battle of the Trees—)
(Certainly. Wasn't it written in the Book of Night with Moon that this world's life would become free to roam among our friends there) — the rowan stretched upward toward the turning stars for a moment—(if we helped? After the world was green and ready, we waited for a long time. We started letting all sorts of strange creatures live in our branches after they came up out of the water. We watched them all; we never knew which of our guests would be the children we were promised. And then all of a sudden one odd-looking group of creatures went down out of our branches, and looked up-ward again, and called us by name in the Speech. Your kind… .) The tree looked down musingly at Nita. (You're still an odd-looking lot,) it said.
Nita sat against the rowan and felt unhappy. (We weren't so kind to you,) she said. (And if it weren't for the plants, we wouldn't be here.)
(Don't be downcast, wizardling,) the tree said, gazing up at the sky again. (It isn't your fault.
And in any case, we knew what fate was in store for us. It was written in the Book.)
; (Wait a minute. You mean you knew we were going to start destroying your kind, and you got the world ready for us anyway?)
(How could we do otherwise? You are our children.)
(But … we make our houses out of you, we—) Nita looked guiltily at tne book she was holding. (We kill you and we write on your bodies!)
The rowan continued to gaze up at the night sky. (Well,) it said. (We are all m the Book together, after all. Don't you think that we wrote enough in he rock and the soil, in our day? And we still do. We have our own lives, our
Wn 'eclings and goals. Some of them you may learn by your wizardry, but I °ubt you'll ever come to know them all. We do what we have to, to live.
Orfietimes that means breaking a rock's heart, or pushing roots down into ground that screams against the intrusion. But we never forget what we're lng As for you)—and its voice became very gentle—(how else should our dren climb to the stars but up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago, that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater, more precious. You have your own stories to write. And when it comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your life? And who reads?) It breathed out, a long sigh of leaves in the wind. (Our cases aren't that much different.)
Nita sat back and tried to absorb what the tree was saying. (The Book of Night with Moon,) she said after a while. (Do you know who wrote it?)
The rowan was silent for a long time. (None of us are sure,) it said at last. (Our legends say it wasn't written. It's simply been, as long as life has been. Since they were kindled, and before.) It gazed upward at the stars. (Then the other Book, the dark one—)
The whole tree shuddered. (That one was written, they say.) The rowan's voice dropped to a whisper. (By the Lone Power — the Witherer, the one who blights. The Kindlcr of Wildfires. Don't ask more. Even talking about that one or its works can lend it power.)
