by Diane Duane
Socialize with, Nita thought, and groaned inwardly. Like she’s sending me off to some kind of dog park for teenagers. To get socialized with normal human beings. What have I done to deserve this?!
“Come on, Neets, cheer up a little! It should be interesting, going to a foreign country for the first time.”
I’ve been to foreign galaxies, Nita thought. This I’m not so sure about! But she also had that sense that further argument wasn’t going to help her. No matter: there were ways around this problem, if she just kept her mouth shut.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go. ...But I won’t like it.”
Her mother gazed at her thoughtfully. “I thought you were the one who told me that wizardry was about doing what you had to, whether you liked it or not?”
“It’s true,” Nita said, and got up to go out.
“And Nita,” her mother said.
“What, Mom?”
“I want your promise that you will not be popping back here on the sly to visit Kit. That little ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ spell that he’s so fond of. The one you two use when you want to save your train fare for junk food.”
Nita felt the blood drain away from her face. That was the one thing she had been counting on to make this whole thing tolerable. “Mom! But Mom, it’s easy, I can just—”
“No, you can’t ‘just.’ We want you to take a break from each other for a while. Now I want you to promise me.”
Nita let out a long breath. Her mother had her, and knew she did; for a wizard’s promise had to be kept. When you spend your life working with words that describe and explain, and even change, the way the Universe is, you can’t play around with those words, and you can’t lie… at least not without major and unpleasant consequences.
“…I promise,” Nita said, hating it. “But this is going to be miserable.”
“We’ll see about that,” Nita’s mother said. “You go ahead now, and do what you have to do.”
***
“Crap,”Kit said. “This is completely dire.”
They were sitting on the Moon, on a peak of the Carpathian Mountains, about thirty kilometers south of the crater Copernicus. The view of Earth from there this time of month was good; it was waxing toward the full, while a dazzling Sun hung quite low over the Moon’s horizon. Long, long shadows stretched across the breadth of the Carpathians, so that the illuminated crests of the jagged peaks stood up from great pools of darkness, like rough-hewn pyramids floating on nothing. It was cold there; the wizardly force-field that surrounded Kit and Nita snowed flakes of frozen oxygen gently onto the powdery white rock around them whenever they moved and changed the field’s inner volume. But cold as it was, at least it was private.
Which was good, as Nita’s mood was raw and her nerves were frayed, and there were few people besides Kit who she trusted to see her this way. “We were just getting those trees locked down,” Nita muttered. “I cannot believe this.”
“Do they really think it’s going to make a difference?” Kit said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Who knows what they think, half the time? And the worst of it is, they won’t let me come back. She made me promise. Dammit!” Nita picked up a small piece of pumice and chucked it away, watching as it sailed about a hundred yards away in the light gravity and bounced several feet high when it first hit ground again. It continued bouncing down the mountain, and she watched it, scowling. “And now the upcoming-projects schedule is shot too. The hurricane-steering thing—that waiting list was about a mile long and we finally got on it, and then this happens! Not to mention the Venus survey. And that custom worldgating workshop at the Crossings, that’s shot too now. We’ll lose our places and it’ll be years before we can reapply. There won’t be any time to do anything about them before I have to go.”
Kit stretched and looked unhappy. “We can still Manual-chat. Or overhear each other thinking, when that works.”
“Mmf,” Nita said.
“Or I can just call you.”
“Better not,” Nita said. “Roaming charges.”
“Not so sure about that,” Kit said. “Did I tell you I was talking to Tom and Carl last week about ways to tweak your phone with wizardry so you get around long-distance problems? There are apps you can install that hook it into the manual…”
“Oh really,” Nita said.
“But as for work here… I’ll get the trees finished with pretty soon: you can coach me at a distance—”
“It won’t be the same! You know that.” Nita had often enough tried explaining to her parents the “high” you got from working closely with another wizard: the feeling that magic made in your mind while working with another, the texture, was utterly unlike that of a wizardry worked alone—more dangerous, more difficult, ultimately more satisfying. But her folks didn’t seem to get it. Or maybe they are starting to get it… and it’s starting to freak them out.
Nita sighed. “There must be some way we can work around this. How’re your folks handling things lately?”
At that Kit sighed too. “Variable. My Pop doesn’t mind it so much. He says, ‘Big deal, my son’s a brujo.’ Sometimes he’s actually kind of proud about it. But my Mama...” He shook his head, sighed. “Half the time she’s okay. Mostly after she’s been talking to my Pop. But other times… She doesn’t really want to say it, but I think she may have the idea that somehow we’re meddling with Dark Forces.”
“Oh no…”
“Oh yeah. An idea which Helena put into her head.” Kit rolled his eyes. “Thank you so much, idiot big sister! I caught her looking at some kind of website about exorcisms the other day.”
“Cute,” Nita muttered.
Kit shook his head. “When are they making you leave?”
“Saturday.” Nita rested her chin on one hand, picked up another rock and chucked it away. “All of a sudden there’s all this junk I have to pack, and all these things we have to do. Go to the bank and get Euros. Get me a debit cardBuy new clothes. Wash the old ones.” She rolled her eyes and fell silent. Nita hated that kind of rushed busy-ness, and she was up to her neck in it now.
“How’s Dairine holding up?”
Nita laughed. “Hardly heartbroken. Anyway, she’s so busy doing big-scale long-range wizardry that half the time I only see her at meals. Don’t get me started about breakfast.” She snorted. “There she sits shoving cornflakes into her face while she builds these weird half-Speech-half-machine-language wizardries with Spot the magic computer. Or else she sits there having these bizarre voicelink conversations with wizards halfway across the Galaxy through Spot’s manual functions. It’s like watching intergalactic Skype.” Nita fell into an imitation of Dairine’s higher-pitched voice, made even more squeaky by annoyance. “‘No, I will not move your planet! What do you want to move it for? It’s fine right where it is!’”
Kit merely rolled his eyes and produced an expression of general disgust, with which Nita empathized completely. Dairine had come into wizardry at a younger age than most, and at a much higher power level; and she was also (by several months) a newer wizard than the two of them were. As a result she was presently more powerful than Nita and Kit put together, which annoyed Nita incredibly… not that there was a thing she could do about it. All she and Kit had on Dairine right now was experience, and the useful advantage of being two brains against one. Or at least it was useful sometimes. “At least she’s not on your case as much as she used to be, it sounds like,” Kit said.
Nita sighed. “Yeah. We don’t fight nearly as much as we used to. In fact, it’s been real quiet, that way. Not sure it’s normal.”
“Oh, right,” Kit said, and laughed, “the way we’re normal? Is it just me, or are we starting to sound like our folks?”
Nita had to laugh too. “You may have something there.”
But then the amusement went out of her, because all the comfortable familiarity between them was about to be seriously interfered with.. “Kit, this really, really sucks. Who’m I going to have to talk
to in Ireland?” She kicked one of the moon rocks in front of her and watched it bounce lazily downslope. “I miss you already and I haven’t even left!”
“Hey, c’mon,” he said, and nudged her shoulder with his. “You’ll get through it.” And he gave her a slightly evil grin. “Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some guy over there—”
“Don’t joke,” Nita said, irritable. “I don’t care about meeting ‘some guy over there.’ Don’t even know if they speak the same language.”
“Your aunt does.”
“My aunt’s American,” Nita said.
“Oh, come on, it’s not like they don’t speak English over there,” Kit said. “Otherwise why would all these big companies have factories and stuff all over the country? It can’t all be just Irish-speakers.” He looked at Nita with a concerned expression. “Come on, Neets. Life’s handing you lemons, so set up a lemonade stand. You can see a new place, you can probably meet some of their wizards. They’ll be in the manual directory... Give it a chance!” He picked up a rock too, turning it over in his hands. “Where are you going to be, exactly? Dublin? Or somewhere else?”
“That’s all there is,” Nita said grimly. “Dublin, and everywhere else. Which is filled with potato fields and cow pastures as far as the eye can see.”
“Saw that in the manual, did you?” Kit said. Nita rolled her eyes at him. “You haven’t done any research at all, have you.”
Nita snorted, for Kit could be incredibly pedantic; sometimes it came off as funny, but this was not one of those times. “No. I just really haven’t felt like it, okay? Because I’m seriously pissed off about this whole thing.”
“I was looking at the Ireland chapter in the History of Wizardry section of the manual a couple of months ago,” Kit said. “There’s a lot of interesting junk going on over there…”
“Kit, I don’t care what kind of junk is going on over there! I go on over here. This is where I do my work. I’m half of a team. What use am I without the rest?” Nita kicked another moon rock, watched it bounce away.
“Oh, I don’t know. You might be good for something. Scrubbing floors...doing the dishes...”
She turned to glare at him, though at the same time Nita felt guilty about it: he really was trying to cheer her up. “Not just trash talk, but sexist trash talk?” She laughed at him, though the laugh was kind of edgy. “You’re a dead wizard walking.”
“Had to get your attention somehow. Getting you mad is always good for stopping the self-pity…”
Which was why it really was going to be a pain in the butt to be away from him for a month and a half. Nita ran her hands through her hair in resigned annoyance. “Look, fine, you’ve made your point. I’ll do some research. But right now, what're we going to do about the trees? We’ve got to get this cleared up before I go. No point in wasting all this work.”
Kit leaned back. “I think we can get them to do another session tomorrow. The part of the negotiation about the roots was doing pretty well. I guess if we can get Aras to loosen up a little about the seedling acorns, Uriv might concede a couple of points regarding the percentage of sunlight.”
“Yeah…” Nita said. “And if they don’t see the sense of this pretty quick, we can always threaten to uproot the whole lot of them and plant them about three miles apart. They’ve been having too much fun fighting. Time it stopped.” The smile she turned on him was grim. “You be the good cop… I’ll be the bad cop.”
Kit sighed and looked at Nita with a grin that was a bit sad around the edges. “The missing-you-already thing?” he said. “Got that too.”
Looking at him, Nita saw it was true. The bad mood started falling off her, because if there was anything she hated more than being miserable, it was seeing Kit that way. “It’s only six weeks,” she said.
“Yeah, well… I’d say that six weeks won’t be a problem and we’ll do it standing on our heads,” Kit said. “Except wizards don’t lie, and a lie that big could be seen from space. And you wouldn’t believe it anyway.”
Nita’s smile was admiring if not happy. “Nope,” she said. “But I’d give you extra credit for trying.” She sighed, stood up. “Never mind. We’re running out of air. Let’s just get down there and get on with it. The sooner we start, the sooner it’ll be September.”
***
Saturday came.
Kit went with Nita and her parents on the late-afternoon ride to Kennedy Airport. It was a grim, silent sort of ride, broken only by the kind of strained, fake-cheerful conversation people make when they desperately need to say something, anything, to keep the silence from getting too thick. At least it seemed silent to the parents, which was an illusion Nita didn’t mind perpetuating in her present mood. They got cranky enough about her and Kit constantly texting each other under the table at dinnertime or while doing homework. If they found out that the two of them could pass thoughts back and forth as well, God only knew how hard they would have freaked.
Telepathy wasn’t all that simple a matter, and the two of them had gone off it somewhat since they got started—partly because mindtouch often got itself tangled up with a lot of other information you didn’t need or want the other person to have. Talking often turned out to be safer. But at this point, habits or not, they were going to have to get a lot better at the mindtouch for quick communications until the digital end of their wizardry got a little better sorted out.
The car could have a breakdown… Kit said silently.
Nita sighed. No.
I’m not kidding. It wants to do that already. It can feel how everybody is! It hates this. And there’s this one valve that’s kinda loose..
No! If I miss the flight they’ll just reschedule me, and it’ll cost more. Let’s not make this worse than it is.
Not sure that’s possible…
She sighed again, because today it was Kit who was more depressed about what was happening—possibly because he’d been hoping Nita’s folks would have a last-minute change of heart. She’d tried telling him this wasn’t on the cards, but then it was one of Kit’s specialties to always be holding the door open, mentally, for something better to happen. It’s going to be okay, she said, as soon as we get through all this. Honest.
You’re really believing that at the moment, he said.
Don’t have much choice, Nita said, as the car took the exit off the Southern State Parkway for Kennedy. As soon as they’ve dumped me and I’m on the plane, I want to talk to you about that smartphone app, I don’t know if I’ve got it configured right.
Okay—
And then within minutes they were caught up in the inevitable steps of the dance: the airport traffic, the airport parking, the airport shuttle bus, the crowded terminal, the check-in lines, the baggage check-in—Nita’s wheeled suitcase wasn’t too huge and she could handle it herself without too much trouble, though she was privately determined to make it weightless if she had to carry it anywhere alone. And then, of course, after the passport check at the counter, came the passport and boarding-pass check conducted by the unescorted-minor representative from the airline, who talked over Nita’s head to her parents while regarding Nita herself as if she was a cross between a piece of annoying baggage and some kind of small wild animal that might bite her or poop on her without warning. And then came the embarrassing giant nametag / ticket / passport pouch they hung around Nita’s neck as if she was a clueless six-year-old—
Nita concentrated quite hard on staying calm and well-behaved all through this, despite thinking of how many times she and Kit had waltzed on their own through the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility, many many lightyears away, by merely holding up their manuals and saying “We’re on errantry and we greet you, which way’s the 600 cluster?”— that being the group of worldgate hexes that connected through to Grand Central and Earth’s great legacy gates. This, though… this is making me want to kill people.
