by Diane Duane
“The orientation pack said that was a good thing, because people are more comfortable on their own ground!”
“That is completely true,” Tom said. “It was very smart of you to pick up on that suggestion. And no, the Powers are not going to give you a timeslide as a reward for being considerate. In fact if I were acting for them and I were going to give you anything right about now, it would be be a recommendation that you start stocking up on coffee.”
Frustrated, Dairine had scowled at him. “I thought coffee was supposed to stunt your growth.”
“Urban myth,” Tom said, heading over to sit down at his desk in the living room again. He flipped his laptop open, his expression intimating he’d had about enough of Dairine for one day. “Invented by a guy at the beginning of the twentieth century who was trying to sell people on his new grain-based coffee substitute. There are various other reasons why someone your age might want to avoid overdoing the caffeine-based beverages, but stunting your growth would not be one of them.”
“Tom,” Dairine whined, “they’re nine and a half hours ahead of us!”
“And you did that without even looking at the manual!” Tom said, tapping at his laptop’s keyboard and not looking up. “My faith in young people’s ability to do mind math is completely restored.”
Dairine paused, frowning. “What happened to the other half-hour?”
Tom shook his head. “Lost in translation? Take it up with the world temporal steering commitee. Maybe one of them has some time-share scam going.”
She sighed. When Tom got snarky like this, it was impossible to get anything useful out of him.
“I can hear you thinking how nonforthcoming I’m being at the moment,” Tom said. “But spare a thought for the other thirty or forty people who’ve been in here this morning already, looking for advice and assistance with Invitational issues.” He sighed. “And the thirty or forty who’ll come after you’ve left, before I get anywhere near my lunch. I’m a very popular man today . . .”
Dairine had to laugh at that. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get off your case now.”
“Please and thank you!”
She was heading for the door when Tom paused in his typing, staring at the laptop screen. “One thought,” he said, “just in passing. You might find it useful to have a personal invisibility spell loaded up for when you arrive.”
She studied him curiously. “Okay,” she said. “Anything else?”
“There’s a Dutch instant coffee that’s nice,” Tom said, still not looking up. “Sort of a big coffee crystal, very smooth. Can’t think of the name right now, Carl always buys it. Glass jar. If you look in the cupboard . . .”
“Thanks so very much,” Dairine said, rolling her eyes, and got out of there.
She spent some time before she left consulting both her manual and the Internet to see how people dressed in Mumbai. After all, she and Mehrnaz might wind up going out somewhere; there wasn’t any point in sticking out or looking like a tourist. After checking some images online, Dairine spent a while rummaging around in her closet and her drawers and finally settled on a light, high-collared, long-sleeved summery white tunic from a few years back. It still fit, even if it was shorter on her than it used to be. Over jeans it would be okay.
She hadn’t really started to get ready until her dad came back from the shop around nine that night, quite late for him: apparently he had to start getting himself together for a Tuesday night wedding. At the rate he’s going, Dairine thought, he’s gonna have to hire somebody else to help in the store. Mike won’t be enough. She was grateful, though, that business had picked up so much lately. After their mom had died, when he’d got past the initial shock, there had been a time when her dad had insisted on being in the shop all day, handling every order, burying himself in the work. He’d lost weight and worn himself out. Both Nita and Dairine had worried a lot about him, because simply telling him that he needed to slow down had had no effect.
It had been a bad time for all of them, but slowly their lives had worked themselves into a new kind of normalcy—insofar as anything about life could be normal when two of the three people in a family were wizards—and their dad’s work habits had evened out, too. As much because he just couldn’t keep doing that any more, I guess. His body wouldn’t put up with it. And, Dairine had suspected at the time, it had also occurred to their dad that if he put himself in the hospital by abusing himself, he wouldn’t be taking very good care of his daughters. Shortly he’d hired Mike, and started training him in what needed to be done in the store. Mike was smart and he liked the work, and (as important, to Dairine’s way of thinking) liked their dad. So that part of life had started to get normal, at least.
She grabbed her hairbrush off her dresser, brushed her hair back, and fumbled around in her dresser drawer to find a scrunchie for it: better not have it flapping around in the breeze when you’re in a strange new place where you might want to move fast. In the midst of putting her hair up, Spot came spidering in. “Ready?” she said.
Of course. You?
“Nearly.” And then she looked at herself in the mirror, and dropped her hands. “No . . .”
No?
Dairine sighed. “I kind of feel like I’m leaving Nelaid flat. You know what I mean?”
I’m not very sure. As I remember, he told you that you ought to do this thing.
“Yeah, well. When he and Dad get in one of those tag-teaming moods, sometimes it’s not so easy to figure out what they’re thinking separately.”
She gave the scrunchie one final twist and sat down on her bed while Spot clambered up onto it and looked at her thoughtfully with several stalked-up eyes. Stopping your work with him right now troubles you, he said.
She nodded. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. So much of what he’s teaching me, I started out having to parrot it back to him. Do what he was doing. But it’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to understand the theory.” She reached up and fiddled with her hair again. “I keep seeing something he does, or sometimes I’ll be hearing something Nelaid’s talking about, truly hearing it instead of just listening to it, and it’ll remind me of something or other Roshaun said to me once.”
Something specific?
“No . . . Except yes. Once or twice,” Dairine murmured, her gaze going unfocused as in her mind she saw herself walking around the stellar simulator, staring at it, at its many readouts of the subtle and complex forces in play inside Thahit or Earth’s Sun, and listening to what Nelaid was telling her about them. And something he said would unexpectedly trigger the sound of Roshaun’s voice saying something very similar. Then her insides would flare up with the thought, That, that was something important. But why was it important? And then half the time she’d lose the thread of whatever it was about in a flood of sheer relief that she could remember what his voice sounded like, that she hadn’t forgotten how he sounded. The thought of forgetting Roshaun’s voice woke Dairine up sweating cold, some nights.
But you can’t remember what it was about, Spot said.
“No,” she said, and sighed. “I wonder sometimes, am I imagining it? But I don’t think so.” Dairine frowned. “There’s something . . . something useful that I’ve been missing. Something we’ve been getting close to, when I’m working with the simulator. We’ve been doing a lot of work on stellar kernel stuff, the star’s software . . .” She sighed again. “There’s so much data, though, it keeps piling up, and every time I think I might have time to start reviewing it, something else happens and I get distracted . . .”
You don’t have to do this, you know. They said you didn’t.
“But yeah, I do, because I said I was going to,” Dairine said. “If I was going to pull out, I should have done it before the meet-and-greet the other night . . . I’m in it now. It’s only for a few weeks. And who knows, maybe something’ll happen to jog my memory.”
Dairine got up, looked herself over in the mirror one last time, and on a hunch reached into the
top dresser drawer to rummage around. She pulled out a big dark blue scarf in light, cheap silk, something of her mom’s. She kept remembering that Mehrnaz had had her head covered. What religion she might be wasn’t any of Dairine’s business at this point, but if Mehrnaz felt she needed to wear something like that when she was out in public, then Dairine might wind up in the same situation. And it wouldn’t do to differ from her mentee in any way that would attract people’s attention. She wound the scarf around her neck a couple of times, knotted it, shoved the ends down her collar, and then turned to pick Spot up off the bed. “Ready to go undercover?”
Ready.
Down at the bed’s end was one last thing she thought she might need: a plain brown leather messenger bag with a long strap. Her mom had bought it for her some years back thinking it would be good for schoolbooks, but her mother’s concept of what you needed to carry your books to school in was plainly from the distant past, when schools didn’t believe in giving you quite so much homework. Dairine slid Spot into the bag and buckled it shut. “Got those coordinates I selected?”
Located. Ready to initialize.
“Then let’s go!”
They popped out in a place Dairine had carefully preselected with the manual, an alleyway within a few minutes’ walk of Mehrnaz’s family’s apartment. It was a strange sort of halfway-to-Oz moment: the pavement of the alley where she stood all scattered with rubbish, barred doors and screen doors opening off it, walls full of windows reaching up high on either side and blocking out the light, so that it was almost dim here, with the hum of overtaxed air-conditioners drifting down from above. But at the alley’s end, everything was people and vehicles and bikes rushing by in both directions in full sunlight, a gaudy hot morning light completely unlike what morning light far north of here would be.
On target? Spot said in her mind. He could most likely see it through her eyes, but out of courtesy he often acted as if he couldn’t.
“Yeah,” Dairine said.
She walked down the alley and out into the street. But this took her longer than she expected, because that street—which she’d selected because it seemed quiet—was extremely busy and crowded. Dairine had walked New York streets at lunch hour more than once, but this was far worse than anything she remembered. There seemed to be different rules for how you walked here: people seemed willing to be pushed a lot closer together than they’d been even in the worst crush Dairine could remember at rush hour in the subway. The smells here were different, too: car exhaust, of course—the traffic was crazy—but also bizarre scents and unexpected stinks, people’s perfumes and bodies and the smell of food seemingly everywhere. For me it’s the middle of the night, she thought, her stomach growling emphatically as she went by a storefront where they were frying something spicy-smelling, so why am I hungry?
And the whole picture was complicated by the way people stared at her . . . specifically, the way men were staring at her. It wasn’t as if that had never happened before, but the gawking she was experiencing now was different from the usual kind. From some of the guys, there was an unpleasant owning quality to the gaze they fastened on her: as if they felt they had a right to stare.
At first Dairine handled this exactly the way she would’ve handled it at home. As she walked, she stared back to let them know she wasn’t afraid. But shortly she began to notice that this didn’t help. At home, glances would’ve shifted, eyes would’ve looked away. Here a lot of them just kept on looking, and some of the men smiled. Dairine did not find the smiles at all nice.
Her first impulse was to use some wizardry to give them something else to think about—like falling on their faces in the crowded street—and see if they could smile at that. But she could imagine what Tom’s response would be to that kind of behavior. I’m not here to cause trouble, she thought. I’m here to get a job done, and help somebody out, and keep a low profile. If there’s some kind of culture-shocky thing going on, for the moment my job is to cope.
Annoyed, Dairine stepped to one side of the street into the narrow space between a news kiosk and a sweetshop, and said the last few words of the spell she’d been holding ready on Tom’s advice. A second later, she was invisible and moving away from there, while one of the nearest men who’d been staring and grinning at her now blinked and tried to figure out what had happened.
Dairine snickered quietly and kept moving, while at the same time being fairly resentful at having to disappear. It was a challenge, moving in circumstances like these when nobody else could see her, but, she reminded herself, it was a challenge she was up for.
She glanced at her watch as they went. “Nearly nine thirty . . .”
Nine twenty-eight. We’re close.
Maybe sixty yards ahead of her, Dairine could see the street where she needed to turn. She passed ten or fifteen more storefronts, some shining and modern and some unbelievably ramshackle, bizarrely standing side by side. It was as if the place had history that it was both trying to hang on to and eager to get rid of. Up near the corner where the crazy-busy street met a crazier-busier boulevard, Dairine pressed herself briefly into a doorway out of the relentless flow of people and stood there for a moment to get her breath, shaking her head at the shouting, blazing multilingual cacophony of it all.
Straight ahead on your right, Spot said.
Got it. Let’s be uninvisible for a few moments. Not being seen here has its uses, but crossing the street that way strikes me as kind of death wish-y. In particular, a very few moments watching the intersection from here had suggested to Dairine that traffic lights in Mumbai were considered more of a hint or guideline than an actual requirement that anyone stop.
Fading in now. Find a spot to be less conspicuous on the other side and I’ll fade us out again.
Dairine waited a few seconds for the fade to be complete before shouldering herself out into the crowd of people waiting at the corner for the lights to change. In a matter of seconds she was surrounded by more people coming up on her from behind, and was about to tell herself Now, don’t get all paranoid when Spot observed, At five o’clock behind you, someone who wants the bag—
She felt a hand on the strap even as everyone started to move out in unison into the intersection. For that she had a wizardry ready, one which had come highly recommended in the manual for wizards on the go in public places when thieves were about. Smiling, Dairine whispered the last few words of the spell and kept walking. She couldn’t feel any difference, but to the person tugging fruitlessly on the strap of her bag, it now had a virtual weight of several hundred pounds.
Dairine then spun around to walk backwards for a pace or three, smiling what she hoped was a most evil and eldritch smile right into the shocked and uncomprehending face of the thin little woman who’d been attempting to relieve her of Spot’s bag. Then Dairine turned back again in the direction in which she’d been headed, pushing farther into the crowd as it crossed the street. As soon as she got up on the sidewalk on the far side she spotted another alleyway not too far ahead, and when she reached it turned into it, giving it just enough of a glimpse to make sure it was empty. Okay, fade . . .
A few moments later she peered out of the alley, waiting for a tiny gap in the crowd to slip into. The trick of it seemed to be to make sure you were always moving faster than the people who might bump into you from behind. Only a couple hundred more yards, right?
A hundred and fifty-three.
She kept going. This street, though it looked more upmarket and modern than the one she’d turned off of, still had something of that between-periods struggle going on. But it was hard to say which looked grander—the glossy new shops and apartments, all glass and chrome, or the older buildings, most of which were of carved stone and had a solider, more impressive look to them. That’s probably because they were built to let you know where the money and power were, Dairine thought. Though her world history unit last year had touched only briefly on India, she had a fairly clear sense of the complexity of the relationship be
tween this country and the power that had once run everything here but now insisted that these days they were both absolutely the best of friends. Dairine made an amused face at the idea. If she knew anything about friendship at all, it was that even when it was true and deep, it was never uncomplicated.
A hundred yards, Spot said. On your left. There’s a sort of little driveway circle in front.
Dairine nodded: up ahead she saw something that might have been a taxi pull into it. She forged ahead, and as she did so an errant breeze—welcome enough in this heat—blew across in front of her and brought her a smell of something else frying. I don’t know what that is, she thought, but I really want some. It smelled like sauteed onions, and it was already talking her stomach out of the idea that it was bad for her to eat so late at night.
Scent analysis, Spot said. Onion bhaji.
Oh, God, Dairine said silently. Make a note of that! Whatever else we do, I’m going out for some of that later.
Noted. Fifty yards.
Dairine sighed at her growling stomach and kept on walking. And after a few more shiny shopfronts, Right there, Spot said. Across the street.
Dairine stared at the building. “But that’s a hotel!”
Only part of it, Spot said. There’s a private dwelling on the top floor. You’ll want to go around the side: there’s a private entrance under the archway that leads back toward the parking lot.
Dairine stared at the building, amazed. The whole front of it was faced in rose-colored marble, with a colonnade of paler marble pillars stretching across the facade. The place was huge, and rose up in about five stories more of carved pink marble, like something out of a film set.
