by Diane Duane
He said nothing, merely looked at her gravely.
You’re not gonna help me out at all here, are you, Nita thought. No, of course not. I’m gonna make myself look like an idiot in front of one of the oldest bodies in the Solar System. Probably older than the Sun. Oh, who the hell cares? Compared to this guy, Jupiter really is a spotty teenager. “I just want to make sure I’ve got the right end of this,” Nita said. “‘Colleagues?’ As in Planetaries.”
“Candidates for the position,” Aidoneus said. “Yes. There are routinely a number of beings in differing degrees of candidacy, or training for it, as no inhabited planet can be left without a Planetary for very long. Yet in the normal course of events, as I think you might guess, the position is hardly something that happens to someone overnight. Not even as I reckon overnight.” There was a dry smile somewhere inside that darkness: Nita could sense it. “Aptitude is the main issue. Though to be sure it needs a certain type of personality; or a range of personality traits that work together. A certain flexibility.”
“You’re thinking I might have that,” Nita said.
“You’d know best,” the dark Planetary murmured. “In any case, it’s something to think about in the long term, as you pursue other avenues of practice.”
“You wouldn’t even be mentioning this if you didn’t think I had a chance, would you?”
“It’s never wise to raise hopes without some possibility of them being fulfilled,” said Pluto. “Entropy is thereby increased. You might never come to that position, despite a lifetime of candidacy. You also know, I suspect, that the work is dangerous and wearing, and that Planetaries on your world can be relatively short-lived if circumstance and their own natures join to conspire against them.”
Nita did know that. She thought of Angelina Pellegrino, Planetary at twenty-two and dead at thirty-seven. She thought of Atiehwa:ta and Delacroix and Henoseki, who’d been mighty in the position and had fallen before their time. But also there were people like Asegaff and Davidson who’d worked as Planetaries and lived to a great old age, dying old and full of honor, among wizards at least. And is there any other kind of honor I’d care about?
Nita sat quiet for a moment. “I’m nowhere near ready for this.”
“That’s a matter for debate,” Aidoneus said. “But the assessment rests with you for the time being; others’ opinions, except for mine right now, and Irina’s of course, have no particular bearing on the process as it unfolds. Let’s just say that there’s interest, and if you choose to pursue the various courses of study needed for prequalification, you would find no opposition. That,” and Nita could actually feel Pluto’s Planetary grimacing, “normally comes later. When things start getting political.”
Nita let out an exasperated breath. “Do not even try telling me that there’s politics involved in this.”
“Sentient beings are involved in this,” Aidoneus said. “Of course there’s politics. Motivation and countermotivation, ebbing and flowing and chafing against one another: how else can things be? But we do what we can to make it work regardless.”
And it smiled at her inside those shadows. “In the meantime,” Aidoneus said, “consider your options. There’s no rush. And come see me.”
Nita smiled back. “I will.” She nodded back at Kit. “Can he come too?”
“Of course,” said the darkness of the outermost Solar System as it faded away. “ . . . But no furniture.”
Shortly thereafter Nelaid and Miril departed for Wellakh with the still only partially conscious Roshaun, taking Dairine and Nita’s dad with them for the first short hop to Earth; and the cleanup crews got busy putting the crater Daedalus in order for the Invitational’s last two presentations.
Out of a sense of sisterly loyalty (and because in a wholly nonvisionary manner she foresaw Dairine giving her endless grief if she didn’t), Nita decided to hang around long enough to see Mehrnaz’s presentation. There in company with the astonished thousands in the crater, an hour or so later, she and Kit watched the senior geomancers present trigger a violent earthquake that (while sparing the crater) shook the Moon for hundreds of miles around. But hardly had it begun before Dairine’s protegée flung the huge and dazzling network of her spell out across the lunar surface to its full extent, powered it up, and stopped the quake cold in a splendid anticlimax closely resembling a gigantic and devastating sneeze that had failed to go off.
The roar of applause that went up as the ground outside the crater quieted made Nita grin in triumph. But at the same time she felt the weariness coming down on her more and more heavily. And there was a peculiar flickering of images going on at the edge of her vision, a remnant of the kind of thing she’d briefly seen when Penn’s internal guest broke loose. She turned to Kit.
“So now what?” he said, knowing—she suspected—perfectly well.
“I’m wrecked,” she said. “I want to go home and do something really ordinary. Sit down, have something to drink . . .”
“Pitanga juice? Celery soda? Aussie lemonade?”
Nita punched him in the shoulder in the good old-fashioned way. “Tea.”
The two of them were just sitting down at the dining room table when the doorbell rang.
Kit pushed his mug off to one side and bent over to thump his forehead on the table. “Nooooo . . . .”
“Oh, now what,” Nita muttered, and got up to answer the bell. But as she opened the front door and realized who was standing there, her mood of slight annoyance fell right off. “Carl!” she said. “I thought Tom said you were off doing supervisory stuff again.”
“Nope,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Nita said, leading him into the dining room. “Want some of your coffee?”
“Thanks, but no need. I’ll only be here a few minutes. Hi, Kit.”
“Hey, Carl!”
He sat down at the table with them. “I wanted you to know that I’m available for counseling services over the next week or so should you require them,” he said, “because from the sound of it, and from even the short version of the report on the Invitational before they had to recess for the site cleanup, I can’t think offhand of anyone more likely to need them.”
“Well, Penn, possibly,” Kit said. “He’s going to have a ton of issues.”
“One of his local Supervisories will be handling that with him,” Carl said.
“Or maybe Dairine,” Nita said.
“Though she’s got an above-Supervisory wizard on hand already,” Carl said, “I suspect Nelaid would recuse himself. So extend the offer to her on my behalf, if you would.”
“No problem,” Nita said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“And I’ll drop a note in her manual as well. Meanwhile, how’re you holding up?”
Nita shivered. “I’m starting to see all kinds of things. Way better than usual, when I concentrate on them.”
“I think that’s partly due to exercising the talent in a crisis situation so close to a major shift in wizardly power balances,” Carl said. “Everybody who was in the neighborhood for the Simurgh’s release will be having similar surges . . . But you did something else, too. If I read your own précis correctly, when you were in a liminal state in the run-up to the finals, you extended an unusual kindness to an old enemy. And apparently had it returned in an unusual mode.”
Nita nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said.
“Dangerous game,” Carl said, looking at her thoughtfully. “But sometimes it pays off. So some of that energy will be coming back to you too. Has started to already, from the sound of it. What you want to see, for the next little while, you’ll probably find a lot easier to visualize. That’ll fade in the near future, so don’t let it spook you either way.”
“Okay.”
“And about Dairine,” Carl said. “What’s your take on how she’s holding up?”
Nita closed her eyes. “Well . . .”
On a splendidly upholstered couch, somewhere very far away, a long, lean form lay all wra
pped up in the silken bedclothes of another world, as someone sat by the bed and looked down at him, practically vibrating with concern. And under the weight of that regard, eyes slowly opened—eyes colored a very pale gold—and gazed into the gray ones that watched.
The face was very still, almost bemused. Then its lips parted.
“Whatever took you so long?” Roshaun said.
A second later a pillow hit him in the face.
Nita opened her eyes again, acutely aware from unspoken context that a fierce bout of hugging was about to start, and she didn’t need to be there. “I think she’ll be fine,” she said. “Anyway, this isn’t so bad, for as long as it lasts.”
“Let’s just hope what you’re able to see stays at about this level before it starts falling off,” Carl said. “I know a visionary who had a surge and started receiving other planets’ sports channels on his interior antennae. Not exactly a picnic.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just, if now I’m supposed to be doing this other thing, then I guess this won’t stay . . .”
Carl looked at her quizzically. “What other thing?”
“Well, I mean, the Planetary thing. When all this time Tom’s been pushing me toward the visionary stuff . . .”
Carl looked at her with incredulity. “Pushing you? You’re kidding, right? You were always a visionary, Nita. You presented that tendency as part of your Ordeal! Almost—if I’ve got the timing right from what you’ve told me—almost before your Ordeal even got properly started. You fell asleep on top of your wizard’s manual and threw a prophetic dream right off the bat.”
“Well, yeah . . .”
“So this is one of your ground-of-being states. Of course it’ll always need sharpening: no gift’s ever perfect right out of the box. But you’re in no danger of losing it if you start concentrating on something else. In fact the two disciplines will probably help each other. If you did decide to go into Planetary work—and you’re talking about a course that would last decades, like a doctorate you get to keep doing over and over—then having the visionary talent overlaid on it can only be useful.”
Nita sighed. “Okay,” she said. “But I’m going to need a while to think this over.”
“So think,” Carl said. “Take your time. The Planetaries aren’t going anywhere.” Then he grinned. “Except around in big circles.”
“You mean ellipses.”
He gave her an amused look that said both You’re correcting a Supervisory? and Good, about time.
Then something went ping! and Nita and Kit looked at each other in confusion, as it wasn’t an alert that belonged to either of their phones.
“Sorry, just me,” Carl said, and went fishing in his pockets. A moment later he came up with his phone and peered at it.
“Huh,” he said, resigned. “So much for rooting for the home team.”
“What?” Nita said.
“Tiilikainen got it.”
“What?” said Kit.
“The second fella who presented,” Carl said, turning the phone around to show Nita and Kit the list of scores and rankings from the Moon. “The one with the solution for the Gulf Stream convection problem. He took it on points.”
Nita peered at the phone’s screen. “I could never say his name . . .”
“All those vowels,” Carl said.
“But Penn came in third,” Kit said.
“And Mehrnaz came in second!” Nita said. “Dairine’ll be glad.”
Carl nodded. “So that’s that for another eleven years,” he said. He turned off the phone and stuffed it back in his pocket. “By the way,” he said to Kit as he did so, “this reminds me. I meant to have a word with you about your sister.”
“Oh God,” Kit said in dread. “What’s she done now?”
“I wanted to let you know that while everybody was up on the Moon, Carmela was videoing the final rounds. She got some wonderful footage of the Simurgh going home, and that’s already hitting the intergalactic Nets. She’s probably going to clean up on it. I know she’s a very sensible person, as a rule, and God knows I don’t care to squash anyone’s entrepreneurial spirit. But do me a favor and make sure she doesn’t post it on the Web, all right?”
Kit covered his face and moaned.
Carl stood up, grinning. “A word to the wise, that’s all,” he said. “So you two have a good evening. Sit tight . . . I’ll let myself out.”
And he made for the front door and a moment later shut it behind him.
“Oh sweet Powers That Be in a bucket,” Kit said, staring into what was left of his tea and rubbing his hands through his hair. “When I catch up with her, we are going to have such words.”
“Might help you with that,” Nita said, as she got up and walked over to the sink with the cups. “Let’s go take care of it. Your mama cooking tonight?”
“I think we can talk her into it.” He held a hand out to her.
She took it.
Shortly thereafter a casual observer of suburban life would have seen a couple of teenagers walking down the street together, hand in hand in the deepening dusk, with the full Moon rising behind them. As they reached the nearby corner, one of them stood still, glancing back at that Moon, and then looked up at the other. Their faces were coming closer together in the dimness when the quiet around them was broken by one of their phones beeping for attention.
“Oh, come on now . . .”
“Go on, you might as well get it.”
A pause.
“What is it?”
“Oh no.”
“What? Let me see.”
A moment’s silence. And then the words:
“She didn’t.”
“She did.”
“And it’s going to be all over school in about a minute!”
There was a pause. “If I were her,” the deeper of the two voices said, “I would head for the most distant possible planet right now!”
And hand in hand they jogged around the corner and out of sight.
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in the Young Wizards series.
About the Author
DIANE DUANE is the award-winning author of more than fifty science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as numerous short stories, teleplays, comic books, and computer games. Among her novels are four New York Times bestsellers, and the ten books in the Young Wizards series. She lives in rural Ireland with her husband, the writer Peter Morwood, and an assortment of overworked computers, none of which has shown wizardly tendencies . . . yet.
To find out more about Diane Duane and the Young Wizards series, visit www.youngwizards.com.
