Wizards at War promo Part 2

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

Kit shivered, looking over at Nita. She glanced at him, a sidewise, nervous look.

“Why do I get this feeling,” Nita said, “that on a planet with nuclear weapons, we’ll probably blow ourselves up a long time before light and gravity start to malfunction?”

“Not that most of the rest of the inhabited universe won’t be just a little way behind us,” Kit said.

Carl cleared his throat. “Exactly.”

They all sat there in silence for a few moments. Then, after a moment, “If that’s all,” Filif said, sounding a little forlorn, “please, may we have the daylight back again?”

If that’s all?? Kit thought.

“Sure,” Tom said, and put out his hand. The wizardry surrounding them collapsed itself to a little blue-white sphere no bigger than a ball-bearing, and dropped into his palm. As the wizardry shrank away, ordinary afternoon sunshine reasserted itself all around them, and the reality of Nita’s dining room: the flowered wallpaper, the dining room table with some of the leftovers of breakfast still on it – a marmalade jar with a knife stuck in it, a couple of crumpled paper napkins.

Tom dropped the imaging wizardry back onto the open page of his wizard’s manual. It flattened itself to the page: he reached out and closed the book again. Kit watched him do it, feeling peculiarly remote from it all. We’re sitting here in Nita’s dining room talking about the end of civilization, he thought, and not in ten thousand years, either. From the sound of it, it’s gonna be more like ten thousand hours…or minutes.

Roshaun glanced up from the table, where his troubled gaze had been resting for a few moments. “Senior,” he said, “why is all this happening now? Surely if this is so simple a strategy, the Lone One should have enacted it and made an end of us all ages ago.”

“You’d think that,” Tom said. “But we don’t know why; and there are all kinds of possibilities, assuming that the Lone Power is behind this. One is that It might not have known how to do this before. Though they’re immortal, the Powers that Be aren’t omniscient: they learn, though the exact shape of their learning curves is never likely to be clear to us because of the way they exist outside of time, dipping in and out as it suits them. Or the Lone Power could well have known for aeons how to produce this result, but for some reason It bided Its time, waiting for what it judged the best moment to spring it on an unsuspecting universe.”

“Then perhaps,” Filif said, “something has happened either to embolden it…or to frighten It.”

Dairine’s eyes got wide. “Believe me, Filif, It’s bad enough when It’s not frightened! If something’s coming that’s got even It scared…” She shivered. And then looked up again and said, “But what could be bad enough to scare the Lone Power?”

Carl shook his head. “We have no idea,” he said. “And yet another possibility is that something’s going on in our universe which the Lone One doesn’t want us interfering with – something so deadly, or by Its way of thinking, desirable, that It gladly throws away a weapon or tactic which would probably work only once – because the odds are good that, if we have enough time, we can work out how to stop what It’s doing. If you buy that theory, then you could also believe that It doesn’t care whether we find a way to stop the expansion or not. This inrush of dark energy and dark matter may simply be a distraction, a tactic to keep us from discovering what’s really happening and from dealing successfully with that.”

“And you don’t have any idea which of these theories might be the right one,” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Tom said.

“What about the Powers that Be?” Kit said. “What do they say?”

“Right now,” Tom said, “nothing that’s any help. They’re waiting for the experts in this universe to give them some more data.”

“The experts?” Nita said.

Tom smiled just slightly, but once again that smile had a grim edge to it. “Us,” he said. “While They live here too, They do it on a different level. We’re a lot more expert in the business of actually dealing with physicality, day to day, than They are.”

“It’s like the difference between manufacturing something, say a dishwasher,” Carl said, “and using it every day. You could say that the Powers know what the Universe acted like when it left the factory….but we’re the ones who know its quirks, and the little noises it makes every day when it’s running. And where to kick it to make them stop.”

“Okay,” Dairine said. “Am I getting this straight? This problem is one that’s happening only in our own universe?”

“Yes,” Carl said. “For the time being. But we have to solve it…not just for our own sake. If we fail, and the Lone One is responsible, then it’ll probably roll this tactic out everywhere else It can. And the One only knows how many other beings will suffer our fate.”

Kit was still trying to deal with the image of the universe seen as a malfunctioning dishwasher. He put the idea aside as one that would be useful when he had to explain all this to his mama and pop, even if it did make his own brains hurt. Meanwhile, Tom picked up his manual and put it into the air beside him: it vanished. “At the moment,” Tom said, “we can’t get bogged down in too much speculation on the whys and wherefores. Obviously we want to find out whether it’s the Lone Power behind what’s happening, or something else, something new. But right now our first imperative is to stop the dark matter from tearing the universe apart – or slow it down and buy ourselves some more time to solve the problem.”

“Or rather, buy you the time to solve it,” Carl said. “Wizards under latency age, or just past – near their peak power levels, one way or another -- are the only ones who’re going to keep their power long enough to make a difference now.”

Kit saw Dairine swallow hard: and Nita glanced at him, while Sker’ret clenched its uppermost six legs together, and Filif held very still, and Roshaun looked down at the table again, as if afraid what might show in his eyes if anyone saw them.

And then suddenly, Tom smiled. It wasn’t an angry smile, though it was fierce, and it had a surprising edge of amusement to it. "Now, believe it or not, we have some good news for you. For the duration -- for as long as there is a duration – as far as wizardry goes, the lid is off. Any wizardry you can build to fight what’s happening, any wizardry you can figure out how to fuel, is fair game. Normally we all limit our workings carefully to keep them from damaging the universal ecosystem, or the other beings who share it with us. But now the system itself is on the chopping block, along with everything else. If we don't save that...” He shook his head. “Then not just wizardry, but the reason we do it – the Life we’re sworn to protect -- is at an end.”

Kit was immersed in a strange combination of shock and excitement, but at the same time there were practical questions nagging at him. "When you said we were going to be running things on the Earth,” he said, “you didn’t mean just us….did you?”

Tom’s grin became less fierce. “No,” he said, “we didn’t. Forgive us for making absolutely sure we had your attention when we started.”

“Obviously there are a lot of other wizards on the planet who’ll be of use in this crisis,” Carl said. “Not to mention a whole lot of wizards elsewhere in our galaxy. Seniors here and just about everywhere else have been selecting out younger wizards in their catchment areas who’ve shown promise, or have produced good results in the past. You won’t be surprised to find that you fall into those categories. We’ve been organizing two main intervention groups – those who’ll be staying here, managing the usual problems that come up at home, and those who’ll be going offplanet to look for ways to stop the dark matter incursion. In a couple of days we’ll be putting you in touch with the groups you’ll be assigned to. In the meantime, start doing your research on what we’ve been up to – it’ll all be in your manuals. And don’t hesitate to do your own networking: anybody you feel will help you handle what’s going on, get in touch with them pronto. But over these next couple of days, you’ve also got some logistical problems to deal with."

Kit noticed Dairine beginning to squirm a little in her seat. Uh huh, he thought. Bet I know what that’s about…

“First of all,” Tom said to Dairine, “you’ve made the best of being ‘grounded’ inside the boundaries of the Solar System for the last little while, so – assuming that you’ve learned your lesson -- the Powers that Be have cleared us to un-ground you.” Dairine stopped squirming, and started to grin. “But don’t you assume that this automatically means you’re going to be sent off planet with everyone else: the team assignments haven’t been thrashed out yet, and you may be of more use here.”

Dairine sat still and assumed an expression which Kit had long since come to recognize as an attempt to look “serious” and “good.” As usual, he had a lot of trouble taking it seriously. “Anyway,” Tom said, “whichever way your team assignments go, you’re all either going to have to be on call at a moment’s notice to deal with things here, or you’re going to have to be away for some time.” He glanced from Dairine to Kit to Nita. “Normally in an emergency we’d help you deal with your absence from school and ‘real life’ by issuing you with timeslide wizardries, so that you could spend as much time away as you needed to, and come back at the same time you left. But this situation’s not normal. If things go the way we think they will, local implementations of wizardry may start to suffer early on…and if a timeslide failed, you could wind up marooned in the wrong time period, with no way home. So you’re going to have to find other ways to handle your absence. Any way that we can help, let us know as soon as you have a plan.”

Nita just nodded. “Uh,” Kit said, “right.” I can see it all now, he thought. I go to my mama and pop and say, Hey, I need to take some more time off school. Yeah? How much? Oh, just enough to save the universe. Might be a few weeks. But no more than a few months, because everything that exists may be destroyed by then…

Tom, meanwhile, had turned to Filif, Roshaun and Sker'ret. “The story’s different for you three,” he said. “Sker’ret, Filif, we don’t have direct jurisdiction over you – your Seniors or Advisories at home have that. But we can advise you while you’re here. Both your species fortunately have long latency periods, so that your worlds have plenty of wizards on hand to deal with the local-level threat. Your people in particular, Filif, have such a high latency age that nearly all the wizards on the planet are still of an age range to be immune to what's going to happen. Officially, you’re still both enjoying excursus status. The emergency, naturally, supersedes the ‘holiday’; if you feel uncomfortable staying here any longer, and you want to go back to be with your own people, you’re free to do so at any time. But there’s no need for you to rush home unless you feel you must.”

“I am free to come and go as I please,” Filif said, “and have no binding ties to draw me immediately back. I am, after all, just one tree in a forest….and I think perhaps I might be of more use here.” He glanced at Dairine with fifteen or twenty eye-berries: she smiled at him, an encouraging look. But Kit thought there was still something a little dubious about his tone. Is he okay, I wonder?

Tom glanced over at Sker’ret, who gave him a casual look in return. “I’m in no hurry either,” he said. “People of my species are legally independent a long time before we’re latent. My esteemed ancestor won’t mind if I stay for the time being.”

Kit glanced briefly at Nita, and saw her eyes flick toward him, then away again. She hears it too, he thought. There was something uncomfortable going on with Sker’ret and his family. Not something that’s going to get us all in trouble while we’re trying to handle this mess, I hope…

Tom nodded. “All right, then. But, Roshaun, unfortunately matters aren’t as simple in your case.”

Roshaun glanced up at Tom with an expression that Kit found totally unrevealing. “Though your species has a longer latency period than ours,” Tom said, “your own situation’s complicated by your family’s unique relationship with your planet, and the way wizardry’s practiced there. Since your father the Sun Lord-that-was is your Advisory, you're going to have to go home and sort out your intentions with him.”

Roshaun’s expression didn’t change. “It should not take long,” he said.

“All right. If he’s got any questions about what's been going on here, have him get in touch with us; we’ll be glad to fill him in on the details. In fact, I kind of look forward to it, because I read the précis in the manual about what you did while we were gone.”

Roshaun nodded graciously, his face adding only the slightest smile of pleasure at the praise, but otherwise staying unmoved and cool…and Kit suddenly found himself really wishing he could somehow eavesdrop on that conversation. His father’s his Advisory?? The thought made him boggle. Sure, there were families in which wizardry ran -- Nita's was an example. But having such a close relative be a wizard too, and your superior -- It’d be like having a father who was also principal of your school. It could be super…if your pop was absolutely perfect, and some kind of saint. But, boy, if he wasn’t…

“So,” Carl said. “Now you’re as up to date as we are. Just make sure you understand one thing. You’re not going to be immune from the loss-of-wizardry effect forever. For a while it’ll even seem to be going the other way; because as we lose our power, the Powers that Be are going to make sure it’s not wasted. It’s going to pass to you. But unless you work very fast to find out exactly what it is you need to do with it to save the world, then all that extra power isn’t going to help you for long. You’ll lose it, as we’ll lose it. You’ll lose the Speech, and wizardry, and even the belief that there was ever any such thing. And then the darkness will fall.”

Nita swallowed hard. Kit couldn’t: his mouth was too dry. “So work fast,” Tom said. “We’ll be doing the same, for as long as we can. We’ll set you up with all the automatic manual assistance we can before we become nonfunctional.” His face hardened as he said it, as if he was trying hard not to let his real feelings out. “But after that, it’s up to you.”

Kit, glancing briefly sideways, saw Nita swallow. He’d seen that sealed-over expression on her often enough lately: he hadn’t ever thought he’d see it on Tom. You get used to thinking they’ll always have a way out, Kit thought. That they’ll always have a plan, that they’ll figure out what to do. But when you see that it’s not going to be that way…

Tom glanced around at all of them. “So,” he said. “If you have any questions -- “

He paused as a faint clicking noise came from off to his left, and then watched with interest as Dairine’s laptop walked into the room. A small, rectangular silvery case on many jointed legs, it now hunched itself down on the polished wood floor, put up two stalky eyes, rather like Sker’ret’s, and glanced from Tom to Carl and then to Dairine.

“I was wondering when you were going to come out from under the bed,” Dairine said, sounding to Kit both annoyed and a little relieved. “Spot, are you okay?”

From Spot issued a small whirring noise, like a cuckoo clock getting ready to strike. Dairine leaned over to peer down at him.

“Three true things wait discovery,” Spot said.

“Darkness overspreading,
“A commorancy underground:
“And the moon is no dream – ”

He sat there for a moment more, silent, and then got up on all his little legs again and spidered off into the kitchen.

They all looked after him. “Uh, excuse me,” Dairine called after him, “but what was that?”

There was a pause: then the sound of little feet on the kitchen floor again, and Spot put several stalked eyes around the doorframe, gazing at Dairine. What was what? he said silently.

“What you just said.”

What did I say?

Kit threw Nita a Huh?? look. She gave him one right back, and shrugged.

Dairine looked perplexed. “You’re the computer wizard here,” she said. “You’re supposed to be the one with all the memory! What do you mean, ‘What did I say’?”

Kit said, “You said, three true things wait discovery – “

“Darkness overspreading,” Nita said.

“And then something about a commorancy underground,” Dairine said. “Whatever a commorancy is – ”

“And the moon is no dream,’” Roshaun said. “Well, I should say not. It’s real enough. Indeed, when we went there – “

Dairine elbowed him. “Ow!” Roshaun said.

Did I say that? I don’t recall. And Spot headed off into the kitchen again. A second later there came a little subdued pop! of displaced air as he teleported outside.

“Oh, great,” Dairine muttered. “Since when does he have memory errors? This is just not the time…”

Tom, however, looked thoughtful. “Has he done this before?” he said.

Dairine shook her head. “Absolutely not!”

“Well, this could be interesting.” He looked over at Carl. “That certainly sounded oracular to me. How about you?”

“Sounds a lot like our koi,” Carl said. “Not haiku, though: sounded more like some kind of poetic shopping list. You’d better start taking notes,” he said to Dairine. “Some of this might turn out to be useful at some point.”

“Well, that’s just great, because he’s what I usually take the notes in!” Dairine said, aggrieved. “If all of a sudden he’s forgetting stuff – “

Nita put her eyebrows up, reached across the table, and pushed a pad of yellow sticky notes over to Dairine.

Dairine gave Nita a sardonic look. “Oh, sure! So we’re going to be running all over the place, saving the universe, and I’m going to have to juggle stickies while I’m doing it?” …Nonetheless, Dairine pulled one of the notes off and started scribbling on it furiously. “How do you spell ‘commorancy’?”

“You’re asking me?” Nita said.

“You’re always the spelling champ…”

“It’d help if I’d ever heard the word before!”

Tom sighed. “Better look it up. And let us know how this goes: oraculars that turn up at crisis moments don’t usually do so accidentally. Meanwhile – we really do have to get moving. We’ve got a lot more people in the area to see today, and some who’re a lot further away than the Island. Any questions before we go?”

For Kit there were at least ten or twenty, many of them variants on the theme of How are we supposed to save the world when you don’t know how…? One question, though, had pushed its way to the forefront and was going to drive Kit crazy until he got an answer.

“Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” he said.

Tom and Carl each let out a long breath. “Because there might not have been any need for you to worry about it, if we’d been able to solve the problem?” Carl said after a moment. “Because you had enough things to deal with in your own lives? Because we were fairly sure we could handle the problem – and so were the Powers that Be?”

Everyone was quiet again. “And then things didn’t turn out the way any of us thought they would,” Carl said, “so it became time to start worrying you about it. Believe me, we wish we didn’t have to. But right now, wishing’s just a waste of time. We’ve got our work cut out for us. So…”

He and Tom got up. “Thanks for making the time for us,” Tom said. “We’ll be in touch over the next couple of days.”

They headed for the back door: Nita got up and went after them, and Kit got up and followed her, while Dairine finished scribbling on her sticky note, and Roshaun, Sker’ret and Filif watched her.

Nita peered in Tom’s open car window as he settled himself in the driver’s seat and Carl got in on the far side. “If you’ve got all these people to see,” she said, “why don’t you just worldgate it?”

“We’re saving our strength,” Tom said as he started the car. “And anyway, when all this is done, we still need some groceries.” His smile, though kind of tired-looking, had the usual humor about it. “See you later…”

Tom backed out the Nissan out of the driveway, turned, and headed up the street. Neither Nita nor Kit said anything until the car was almost down to the traffic lights at Park Avenue.

“They are both completely freaked,” Nita said at last. “I’ve never seen them like that before.”

Kit shook his head. “They’re freaked?!”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know.”

He was glad it wasn’t just him. All the same, Nita looked a lot calmer than Kit felt: he envied her her composure. “All we have to do now,” he said, “is start figuring out what to do until they get us assigned to these teams…”

Behind them, the screen door banged: they both turned to look. Dairine came out. A moment later she was followed by Roshaun, who stood there somehow managing to look regal in a floppy T-shirt, and glanced up and down the driveway as if nothing particularly upsetting had happened. And what about him? Kit said silently. Completely cool. Or so he wants us to think…

I don’t know him well enough to know what’s going on inside his head, Nita said. Dairine’s another story, though. The very thought that she might have to stay home again while we’re out in the Great Wherever is driving her nuts.

Yeah, I thought so…

“You’re gonna love them,” Dairine was saying to Roshaun as the two of them came down the driveway. “They’re unbelievably terrific.”

“Who?” Kit said. “Your little one-celled buddies on Titan?”

Dairine turned a don’t-get-cute expression on Kit. “Them too,” she said. “But they weren’t who I was talking about.”

“Uh oh,” Nita said, glancing at Kit. Then she looked back at Dairine. “Something tells me you’re thinking about doing some traveling…”

Dairine looked over her shoulder, back up the driveway. Twenty feet or so behind her, Spot was sitting in the middle of grass strip that ran between the two concrete strips of the driveway, staring with all his eyes at the sky. They all looked up to see what he was looking at, but nothing was immediately obvious.

“It’s a long way there, and a long way back,” Dairine said, looking back at Kit and Nita. “It’s not somewhere I’ve been for a while, except virtually. Not enough energy available for the transit. But now – “ She laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles. “Now it’s a whole new ball game.”

“Don’t do that,” Nita said. “You know it’s bad for your hands.”

“Like the state of my finger joints is going to matter if the world comes to an end next month?!” Dairine said.

Nita made a face. Kit had to admit that Dairine had a point. “Doing your own spell to get there’s going to cost you a lot of power,” Nita said.

“It would if I was going to do one,” Dairine said. “But why should I, when the visitors’ worldgates in the cellar are fully subsidized?” She threw Roshaun a grin.

“And on checking mine,” Roshaun said, “or rather its replacement, I find that as of your Seniors’ talk with us, the subsidy has been extended indefinitely. We’ve retroengineered those gates before…”

“Yeah, but this is going to be a much longer jump,” Dairine said. “If you’re not real careful about how you restate the spell’s power statements, you’re gonna make a mess. Better let me handle it.”

Roshaun frowned. “I should remind you that when I restated them last time – “

Kit took Nita by the elbow and steered her casually away; they headed down to the end of the driveway. They’re at it again, he said silently. How many times is this now since we got back?

Don’t ask me. I stopped counting yesterday.

They walked down to the end of the driveway and looked up and down the street, while behind them the argument started to escalate. “And what about you?” Kit said. “What’s your dad going to make of all this?”

Nita shook her head. “He’s been pretty good about everything the last week or so, to hear Dairine tell about it,” she said. “He’s already dealt with the house guests saving the Solar System. After that, maybe saving the universe won’t seem like such a stretch…”

But she didn’t sound certain: and the uncertainty was catching. Kit looked around at the still-bare maple trees, the occasionally-cracked sidewalk, the street with its potholes, the across-the-street neighbor washing his car in the driveway, the front-fender rattle of one of the neighborhood kids riding by on a mountain bike – and found that everything suddenly felt peculiarly fragile and undependable. It was as if everyday physical reality had been replaced by an eggshell-thin overlay that hid something far more solid and deadly, something that might break through at any moment. Kit stuffed his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders a little. The day that had seemed mild earlier seemed chilly, now, as the spring breeze whistled down the street and rattled the branches on the trees.

“Well,” Kit said, “even if our parents don’t completely get what’s happening, it’s not like they can stop us.”

“I know,” Nita said. “But I’m so used to them coping, now. Or at least my mom always did. And my dad’s showing more talent at it than I thought. I’m getting spoiled for being open about it…it saves so much time and trouble.” She rubbed her forehead for a moment. “Time… What are we going to do about school?”

“I’m still thinking about that one,” Kit said.

Nita looked around, shook her head. “I just can’t think straight right now,” she said. “I’m in shock. And now I’m wondering if I’m going to lose it totally when it really starts to sink in. Dairine’s right for once: they’ve just told us the world might end in – what, a few weeks? A couple months?”

“Something like that.” Kit’s mouth was going dry again.

She looked up and down the street. “Makes everything look different,” she said. “Look, here comes Carmela…”

Kit glanced to the left, down toward the corner, where his street crossed Nita’s. Carmela had just come around the corner, carrying a big pile of what Kit could eventually see by their violent colors were more teen magazines, and Ponch was trotting after her. As they came down the block, Nita said, “When she finds out, is she going to be able to cope with this?”

Kit had to laugh. “Carmela? Neets, how would I know? I don’t know if I can cope with it yet.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “You will,” Nita said.

Kit shrugged. Her certainty was reassuring. He just hoped it was justified.

“You guys done with your big meeting?” Carmela said as she came up to them. “Roshaun said it was private, so I bailed out.”

“Yeah, we’re done,” Kit said.

“Roshaun still here?”

Ponch jumped up on Kit and started trying to wash his face, as usual. “Having a discussion with Dairine,” Nita said.

Carmela snickered. “I just bet.” She went on up the driveway.

I went home and got some food, Ponch said. Your pop forgot that Carmela fed me.

“Yet another criminal mastermind,” Kit said. “What are we going to do with you?”

Give me enough food that I don’t need to manipulate you. Did you miss me?

“Didn’t even notice you were gone,” Kit said, which was true, if not terribly tactful.

Ponch bounced up one last time, snapped at Kit’s face playfully, and dropped back to all fours, wagging his tail. I didn’t think you’d mind if I went. Tom and Carl are nice, but they didn’t bring their dogs. It got boring.

“For you, maybe,” Kit said. He looked over at Nita. “Look, I’m gonna go home and give my mom and pop the news. The sooner they find out about it, the sooner they’ll get over it. I hope.”

“Yeah.” Nita let out a long breath. “Telling my dad’s gonna be fun, too… at least I have a few hours to figure out how to explain it. The manual should have a stripped-down version of what Tom and Carl gave us…maybe I can use that.”

She reached out to the seemingly empty air and slipped her hand into the otherspace-pocket where she kept her own manual. Then her eyes went wide.

“What?” Kit said.

Nita pulled her manual out, and Kit suddenly understood her reaction. Nita’s wizard’s manual normally looked like a hardcover library book – buckram-bound, a little beat up, and the size of a largish paperback. But now it was twice its normal size, and three times its normal thickness. It looked more like a phone book now.

“It looks like Tom’s…” Kit said.

“Yeah,” Nita said, looking both intrigued and troubled. “Great. …See you afterwards?”

“Yeah. The usual place?”

“Sure.”

He lifted a hand, a half-wave: Nita nodded, grinned a little wearily, and made her way back up the driveway, where Dairine was saying to Roshaun, “If you would just listen – “

Kit snickered as he turned and headed down the sidewalk toward the corner. Ponch followed him, trotting along and looking up at him. So what was it about?

“Look out for the tree!”

I know where all the trees are, Ponch said, just barely avoiding the maple he’d been about to run straight into. What happened? Are you all right?

“Huh? I’m fine,” Kit said. “But we have to save the universe.”

Ponch looked up at him, swinging his tail widely from side to side as they walked along. Oh, Ponch said. Okay.

Kit smiled. He felt a little weak in the knees at the moment, but there was something about Ponch’s matter-of-fact acceptance of the seemingly impossible that made him feel better -- for the moment, anyway. “Come on,” he said. “We need to talk to Mama and Pop….and then I’ve got a couple calls to make.”

(3) Initial Reconnaissance

Nita let out a long breath as she went back up the driveway. It had disturbed her to hear how uncertain Kit was feeling right now…because she was feeling more than her own share of that uncertainty. I’m so used to having Kit to backstop me, she thought. Whenever I get nervous, he’s always there to help me get a grip. But for a while I may have to do the gripping…at least until we get a clearer sense of what’s going to happen now, and what we need to do. She glanced down at her manual. Assuming that we can…

Across from the back door, Roshaun was leaning against the fence that ran just this side of the lilac bushes, with yet another lollipop sticking out of his face. Carmela was leaning against the fence too, on one side of him. Spot seemed to have wandered off for the moment.

On the other side of Roshaun, her arms folded, eyes narrowed in annoyance, Dairine was saying, “It still doesn’t make any sense. He’s never done that before. How am I supposed to depend on Spot if he can’t even remember things from one moment to the next? He’s my version of the manual! What if this memory loss thing starts extending to his reference functions? The little spells I can keep in my head…but how am I supposed to do wizardry if he can’t feed me the complicated ones?” She let out a long breath. “Well, I’ll ask Spot’s people to check him out. If they can figure out what’s going on with him…”

“And if they can’t?” Carmela said.

Dairine shook her head, frowning.

Roshaun took the lollipop out and examined it: it was a red-and-white striped one. “Everything is changing,” he said. “We are all going to have to learn new ways to be wizards, I think, if we are to bring our worlds safely through this.” He glanced at Nit’s manual. “Some of us have already started work, it seems.”

“Please,” Nita said, hefting the manual. “It’s going to take me a while just to get used to how much it weighs now…let alone how much more stuff’s inside it.” She glanced around. “I saw Sker’ret go out. He seem okay to you?”

“He was fine.”

“Where did Filif go? He sounded a little shook in there…”

Dairine and Roshaun both shook their heads. “I thought I saw him go back inside,” Dairine said. “He might have gone through his gate downstairs. Where are you headed?”

“Gotta make a call,” Nita said, and went up the steps.

Inside the back door she paused and looked down the basement steps. “Filif?” she called.

No answer. Nita raised her eyebrows and went down the wooden stairs, reaching up for the string that hung down from the bulb at the stairs’ bottom. The basement was unfinished – some painted metal posts supporting the joists of the upstairs floor, a plain concrete floor underfoot, many cardboard and wooden boxes containing old books, old kitchenware and magazines, and much other junk: off to the left, the oil burner and various yard tools: off to the right, an ancient busted chest freezer, more boxes, and the washing machine and dryer. Cellar windows high in the cinderblock walls let in a little daylight, except for three yard-wide circular spots on the wall at the back of the house. In those complete darkness reigned, the visual effect of worldgates in standby mode: two of them Filif’s and Sker’ret’s original ones, and the third a replacement for Roshaun’s, which had become nonfunctional after being stuck into the core of the Sun.

Nita paused in front of the three dark spots. We should have labeled these things, she thought. Now I have to play ‘what’s behind door number one?’…

She grinned briefly at the thought and put her head through the leftmost doorway. On the other side of the darkness, she found herself looking into a splendidly furnished waiting area, full of sofas and chairs of strange design, carpets beautifully patterned in many colors, but mostly various shades of gold, and ornate standing and downhanging lamps of golden metal. Roshaun’s palace on Wellakh, Nita thought, stepping in. Boy, his people never heard of understatement in decorating…

Then she made a face at herself. Don’t judge! Just because this isn’t normal for you, doesn’t mean it’s not normal for them…

Wide doors of glass or some other transparent material made up the wall on the far side of the room. Through them an amber afternoon poured in, the side effect of a very golden sun beating down on the broad terrace outside. The light was too golden for the scene to be anywhere on Earth – and indeed, Roshaun’s homeworld was tens of thousands of lightyears away from Nita’s basement. Looks hot out there, Nita thought. And I miss the heat a little, after spending time on Alaalu. Maybe I’ll ask Roshaun to take me through for a little tour later on: I don’t know much about him and his people yet. On to door number two…

On this side, the worldgate looked like a black hole hanging in the middle of the air: it only had to be attached to matter on one side of the interface. Nita smiled again at the sight of it, for it looked exactly like the kind of “hole” that cartoon characters dropped in front of each other without warning for maximum comic effect. Nita stepped carefully over the boundary of the darkness – worldgate edges could be very sharp – and back into her basement.

She had to blink once or twice to get used to the dark, after the brilliance of the room in Roshaun’s palace-home. Okay, Nita thought, and hung an almost immediate left through the next dark circle in the wall.

The darkness persisted on the other side of the worldgate, surprising her. Nita paused and rubbed her eyes, for the brightness of Roshaun’s world was still interfering with her night vision. Not really night here, she thought, looking around her. It was more a twilight, and all around her was a soft rushing noise and a wet green smell.

She stood still, breathing air that felt cool and damp, and almost green itself. Her eyes started to get used to the dimness, and Nita looked all around her and found that the twilight was nothing to do with the time of day. She was in the depths of a forest; and the whole forest was whispering to itself, ignoring her.

The trees looked like conifers, similar to spruces. The greenery on their boughs was made up of fronds rather than needles, and the branches were the same soft, dark blue-green color as the fronds. Those outreaching branches were huge; the lowest branches, stretching out maybe ten or fifteen feet above Nita’s head, were the size of the trunks of trees themselves. It seemed at first glance as if what moved the fronds hanging down from them was the wind whispering through them. But as she stood there, Nita realized there was no wind. The air around her was perfectly still. The whispering was coming from the trees, from the branches, a huge sussurrant consonance of voices -- trees speaking to themselves, among themselves, in a low soft roar like the wind before a storm. This is the forest primeval, said the suddenly remembered voice of her English teacher, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks…

Nita moved quietly closer to one of the great trunks that rose up out of the ground near her. The ground itself was hidden by who knew how many years’ worth of downfallen fronds, turned pale as they dried, so that it seemed as if the ground glowed palely under that dark “sky” of interlocked and crisscrossing branches, which blocked out any view of what lay above. The trunk nearest her had the girth of a sequoia, massive, possibly twenty feet in diameter: but it was smooth, like a beech or willow. Nita put out a hand and touched it.

“I am on errantry, and I greet you,” Nita said in the Speech.

For moments there was no response. Then slowly the sound and tenor of the rushing voices around her began to change. It was as if it took them a while to notice her. That would have been normal for trees, even on Earth: they lived at a different speed than human beings did, taking minutes or hours to pronounce a single sentence in their language of leafrustle and light. But here the long pause seemed to involve a good while spent examining Nita, deciding whether to say anything, and what. Looking up into those branches, she suddenly saw something which had not been obvious before: thousands of small berry-eyes, perhaps tens of thousands of them, looking down at her.

…Wizard…

…associate…

…Filifermanhathrhumneits’elhhessaiffnth…

“That’s who I came looking for,” Nita said. “Is he here?”

Rather to Nita’s surprise, that deep rushing sound, the sound of the Demisiv tree-people talking to one another, began to fade away. The silence that began to build around her was almost more unnerving than the rushing-wind sound had been.

“It’s not urgent,” Nita said. “If he’s busy with something, I can come back later…”

…associate…

…nightfall…

…bold to brave the danger…

A shudder went through the huge trunk she was touching. They can feel it too, she thought. The trouble that’s coming --

“We do what we’ve got to,” Nita said. “Not just for ourselves, but for you too: we’re glad to help. Anyway, if you see Filif, please tell him it wasn’t anything important: I just wanted to know where he was, and how he was. We had kind of a difficult meeting this morning.”

The rustling began to build again. Nita was a little relieved: the silence had had a strange tension about it which she hadn’t understood.

…acceptance…

…but after that comes the refusal…

…and the Fire that does not burn…

…but if the Kindler is reborn, and fails…

…all our light passes then…

They do know, Nita thought. Or they know something about it. Still, she frowned a little at the difficulty she was having with communication. Her wizardly understanding of the Speech ought to translate another species’ idiom, no matter how alien, into a form she could understand…and she was finding this vagueness confusing. But Dairine was complaining about this, too. She said that when she and Roshaun and the others went to the Sun, she had trouble understanding it in the Speech. Maybe this is the first of those side effects that Tom and Carl were warning us about…

Nita looked up through the branches, into the twilight of endlessly overlapping fronds. “I know,” she said at last. “That’s what we’re all going to be dealing with shortly.” And Nita felt like adding, Try not to feel too scared… except that it would have been just laughable: there was every reason to be scared.

The murmuring changed. Was the sound just a little less somber, now – a little more cheerful? Or maybe they can hear me thinking, a little. The Speech does work that way with some species…

The rustling got louder.

…changes…

…always unnerving…

…but not necessarily the way you think.

And all around Nita, the trees started to move…but not just their branches.

Nita held very still as the ground under her feet, which had seemed firm enough before, now began to vibrate. It was like descriptions of earthquakes that she’d heard from time to time: but this was much more unsettling, for even in earthquakes, though trees may fall, they don’t normally walk. All around her, the ground churned: the dried fronds of who knew how many years tumbled out of sight into darker, moister earth and older leafmatter underneath. Nita looked off to both sides, and then over her shoulder, and saw the trees sliding away all around her – sliding through the ground as casually and easily as kids wade through soft damp sand at the beach.

Slowly, as the trees drew back from her in all directions, the densely interleaved branches started to part over Nita’s head. The twilight under their densely interleaved packed branches started to become lighter; color started to creep into things. The fronds gained color, became slowly spangled with drops of light. Raindrops? Nita thought, and couldn’t tell for sure, as the light grew all around.

Directly above her head, a sudden patch of brilliance revealed itself as the trees drew back and back. Nita was standing exactly in the middle of a perfectly circular clearing, and above her head a frond-bounded circle of sky the size of Earth’s full Moon was growing larger every second. The trees moved back and back: the breathing rush of their voices grew louder, though she still had trouble telling exactly what was being said.

-- from the darkness --

-- light: though not as expected --

-- never as expected --

The patch of brilliance sparkled like the drops of wetness on the trees’ fronds. Nita blinked again, dazzled, and initially having trouble understanding what she was seeing. Something was glittering up there –

And suddenly it all made sense, as Nita got past her preconceptions and realized what she was seeing: a sky which, even in broad daylight, was still full of stars. In sheer astonishment, she forgot to breathe. Not even the planet that was home to the great worldgating facility at the Crossings had anything like this: the fierce blue-white light of the Crossings’ star always blanked out its spectacular sky in a blazing milk-white haze until night fell. But now she stood alone in the clearing which the trees had made for her, and saw the Demisiv planet’s primary -- a little pink star, a red dwarf perhaps – hanging halfway up the sky, casting long soft shadows of the tallest trees’ tops far out over the endless forest that rolled away in gentle undulations across the surface of the planet as far as Nita could see from this high but hemmed-in spot. Right across that vast sky, even in the near neighborhood of that world’s little sun, burned and glittered a veritable treasury of stars, the nearest stars in what was probably a “satellite” globular cluster of the Milky Way.

Wow, Nita thought at last. Wow. What this must look like at night…

She stood there for quite some time just looking at it all, listening to that silence, trying to understand whatever it was trying to tell her. Finally she had to give up, for no voices spoke in the rustle of the branches any more. “Uh, thanks,” she said at last. “Thank you…”

No more answers came back. I’m going to have to ask Filif about this, Nita thought. And also, if his people are normally so, well, reticent…why is he such a chatterbox?

She allowed herself another few seconds of looking at that astonishing view, and then turned back to the worldgate that hung in the air beside her. It means something, of course, she thought. Lately, everything means something. Sooner or later every wizard discovers that he or she has a specialty, but the specialty can change: and Nita had been trying to come to terms with a change in her own. What had been a straightforward affinity to living things was now turning into something more abstract -- an ability to glimpse other realities while dreaming, or sometimes while wide awake. Nita was struggling to get a better sense of how it worked, but in the meantime all she could do was pay attention, take notes, and try to learn as she went along. But how much more time am I going to have to figure it out? she thought as she stepped through the gate. All the same, there was something oddly reassuring about that vision of brightness, light within spreading light…

The memory of it faded abruptly in the darkness of the basement. From off to her left came a faint clattering noise: Nita glanced that way and saw that Sker’ret was pouring himself down the stairs. “Hey,” she said, “I was just going to look for you. Have you seen Filif?”

“He said he was going to the Crossings to have a look around, while he still had the free time,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll be meeting him. Do you need him, Senior?”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, don’t you start,” she said. “Just look at this thing!” She showed him her manual.

He pointed several eyes at it. “It looks like the inside of my head feels at the moment,” Sker’ret said. “I wish my people got our wizardry like that: it looks so much more manageable.”

“Yeah, well, I wish my people didn’t have to keep it a secret,” Nita said. “Like yours don’t.”

Sker’ret chuckled at her. “We all have our little problems.”

“The question is how much longer we’re gonna have them,” Nita said. “Years and years, I hope. How long are you going to be?”

“Not long,” Sker’ret said. “Any message for Filif, if I see him?”

“Tell him his world has a nice sky,” Nita said. “I just went to see if he was there. I wanted to make sure he was okay after the meeting.”

Sker’ret’s look struck Nita as somewhat puzzled. “He looked all right when I saw him last.”

“Good. And listen – I meant to ask you earlier.” Then she stopped herself. Maybe this is too nosey… No, we have to start keeping an eye on each other: we may be getting into some dangerous places soon. “Sker’ret,” she said, “if you don’t want to go back to your own people for some reason…no matter what happens in the next few weeks…stick with us. We’re glad to have you here.”

Sker’ret held all his eyes still, the only time since she’d come home from the holidays that Nita could remember seeing him do that. Only one eye was actually looking at Nita, and she wondered if that was strictly normal.

“Thank you,” Sker’ret said. “Seriously – I thank you. I’ll be back in a while.”

And he poured himself through his own worldgate at some speed, vanishing into the darkness of the interface segment after segment, until nothing was left.

Oh God, did I insult him somehow? I hope not. …Anyway, it sounds like Filif’s probably okay. Now for my own problems…

Nita went up the cellar stairs and into the kitchen. The house was quiet around her: outside in the driveway she could still hear Dairine’s and Roshaun’s voices raised, and then Carmela’s laughter. Nita shook her head, amused, as she picked up the phone. Her and Roshaun, Nita thought. I don’t get it. They’re too much alike: she ought to drive her nuts. In fact it sounds like he is driving her nuts…

Then again, maybe that’s it, Nita thought, picking up the wireless phone from its cradle. Maybe she likes the challenge. I’d say she’s picked herself a big one… For Roshaun seemed at least as arrogant, self-assured and annoying as Dairine could be at her worst. And a king, Nita thought. She may have bitten off more than she can chew, this time.

She stared at the phone. I’m stalling, Nita thought then.

Once more Nita found herself envying the wizards who practiced in cultures where they didn’t have to work under cover. Though the visual effects of wizardry often went without being noticed by ordinary humans, you couldn’t absolutely count on it…and a “passive” effect, like one’s absence for three weeks when they were supposed to be in school, would definitely get noticed. I’ve got no choice, Nita thought. But I wish I didn’t have to make the call. This seemed like such a good idea half an hour ago...

And it’s still good. Stop being such a chicken.

Nita fiddled with the phone until it consented to display the number that had been given her for use in emergencies. Nita had at first resisted the idea of putting it into the phone, certain that she’d never need it: but her dad had insisted. And I guess Daddy was right…because if this isn’t an emergency, what will be?

She looked at the name: Millman, Robert. And right under it, the entry that her dad had refused to erase: Mom (cellphone).

Nita looked at that for a moment, then sighed and punched the “dial” button. After a few moments’ silence, the phone at the other end started ringing. It rang seven or eight times, and Nita stood there thinking, What do I say to him, exactly? She had been surprised enough to find out that the school psychologist even knew there were wizards, let alone that he knew some personally. But she had no idea how much they might have told him about what the practice of wizardry was like; she was going to be feeling her way.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Millman?”

“Nita. How’s your break going?”

“Uh, it’s gotten kind of complicated.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. But everything else isn’t.”

“I see. So what can you tell me about that?”

It was that normal calm voice of his, absolutely unruffled, always ready to let you set matters out at your own speed. Nita had found Millman surprisingly easy to talk to, even before he let her know that he knew wizards and wizardry existed. “I’m still trying to figure that out,” Nita said.

“You know that what you tell me is safe with me,” Mr. Millman said.

“Yeah, I know that. But it’s your safety I’m concerned about. It wouldn’t be very nice to get you all unstable.”

“I guess not,” said the voice at the other end. “Well, it’s good of you to be concerned, but I’ll take my chances that I can cope with whatever weirdness you’re about to drop on me. Tell me what you need.”

“Right now…some time off.”

“Meaning time after your spring break ends?”

“Yes.”

“On mental-health grounds, I take it.”

“Yeah.”

There was a brief silence. “Not that such things are impossible to arrange,” Millman said, “but – “

“Look, I wouldn’t be asking you about this unless it was serious.”

“Okay. If I’m right in thinking that this has something to do with your break so far, you should tell me something about how that went.”

“Uh…” The question, as always, was just how much to tell him. “We went offworld on sort of a student-exchange program,” Nita said. “It was really nice…pretty much.”

“But there were problems.”

“Yeah.” Once again she had to restrain the temptation to yell down the phone, Problems? Yeah, you bet, because they sent us to Paradise, and then we found out the snake was still living in it. And if that wasn’t weird enough, for once the snake was on our side, mostly! But even had Nita felt comfortable telling Millman about it, she hadn’t yet found the words to explain, even to herself, why the experience still unnerved her so. It’s just got to wait…

“From the sound of what you’re not saying,” Millman said, “I gather you’re still processing the results. So you’ll tell me about those when you feel you can. Meanwhile, what’s going on that makes you need this extra time off?”

I guess I’ve got to tell him. “There’s about to be trouble with the older wizards,” Nita said.

“The Seniors?”

“Not just them. All the adult wizards. And there’s an incoming threat that we’ve got to find out how to cope with, in a big hurry.”

“You couldn’t possibly tell me anything about what’s causing this threat?”

“I wish I could,” Nita said. “But even the older wizards don’t understand it completely yet…and even if they did, they don’t know what to do about it. That’s what we’re going to have to do. And I really don’t know if I feel up to this!”

“But you don’t feel you have any choice, it sounds like.”

“No,” Nita said. “We don’t.”

“Dairine’s having to deal with this situation too?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else I should know about?”

“Kit too,” she said. Millman knew he was a wizard as well, but no more than that.

There was more silence. “This is kind of problematic,” Millman said. “Especially since I haven’t been seeing Kit professionally. The school system would buy into the concept for you and Dairine, since we’ve been working together for a while now. But as for Kit… And I’m very reluctant to lie about this, not just because lying is wrong, but because it undermines my relationship and my contract with the school.”

“I know,” Nita said.

There was another silence. Finally, in a somewhat changed tone of voice, Millman said, “This kind of lost school time is not good, especially with your midyear aptitude tests coming up...”

“If we don't do something pretty drastic right away," Nita said, "there may not be a planet to have aptitude tests on for very long. Or there might be a planet…but no one left on it.”

She could just hear Millman thinking. “I want you to know,” he said after a moment, “that just because we share the same privileged information about your special talents, I’m not to be routinely considered as a Get Out Of Jail card. This gambit isn’t going to work more than once...just so you know.”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Being in this situation again is the very, very last thing on my mind.”

"Good." He was silent for a little longer. "How long do you think you'll need?"

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Wonderful. …Well,” Millman said at last, “I can cover for you for a week. Ten days tops. I can pull Kit under the umbrella as well by telling the school that something came up for him over the spring break -- something crucial that needs to be sorted out. Would that be true?”

“Yeah,” Nita said.

“All right. If his parents will back me up, then we’ll be okay for that long. But that’s all I can give you. After ten days, if you don’t show up at school again, you're likely to find the district superintendent banging on your dad's door. Or, if someone at school gets too nervous, the cops."

Nita swallowed. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll tell Kit.”

“Good. Can you give me some more detail about what exactly is going to be happening to the planet… so that I can help people around here deal with the fallout, if things get sufficiently strange?”

Fallout, Nita thought. I wish he hadn’t used that word… For the thought of what could happen if they failed, the thought of mushroom clouds sprouting all over the planet, was haunting her. “Look,” she said, “I haven’t had a lot of time yet to go over the pre-mission précis in my manual. But people are going to start losing their sense of what’s underneath reality. Only physical things are going to seem real, after a while. And even those won’t feel right for long. Finally only violent emotions are going to feel good – “

She wondered how much sense this was going to make to Millman, if any. But the faint scratching noise she heard in the background suggested that he was taking notes. “Sounds like ‘blanket’ loss of associations,” Dr. Millman murmured. “Selective anomie… unattributable concreteness. Okay. Any sense yet of what you’ll have to do to reverse this situation?”

“The universe has started expanding too fast,” Nita said, “and we have to stop it before it tears itself apart.”

There was another of those long, thoughtful pauses. “Um,” Millman said. “Okay, I see why you might need a few extra days off for that.”

The astonishing dryness of his voice was bizarrely reassuring to Nita, so much so that she laughed out loud.

“Better,” Millman said. “Hold that mood. For my own part, I’ll do what I can for people who start having trouble at school. But meanwhile, keep me posted, all right? If things are going to get a lot worse all of a sudden, I’d appreciate knowing about it. After all, we’re all on the same side here.”

That was the thought that Nita was still having trouble wrapping her brains around. She was much more used to hiding the things going on with her from everyone at school. "I'll do what I can," she said.

“So will I," said Millman, "and together we'll have to hope it's enough. But, Nita…for you, this has to seem like an impossible burden.”

She swallowed hard. “Yes,” Nita said.

“Call me if you start to feel the strain. I’ll help for as long as I can.”

“Thanks.”

“Okay. Go well,” he said.

"Yeah. Thanks again."

Mr. Millman hung up.

She sat there staring at the phone for a moment before sticking it back in its cradle. Well, she thought, at least that’s handled.

So. A total of two weeks to save the universe, huh?

It did seem absolutely impossible. But there would be powerful forces working to help them. And when someone believed in you –

Maybe this won’t exactly be a piece of cake, she thought. But at least you know people are rooting for you when you start cutting it up!

Nita picked up her manual, tucked it under her arm, and headed upstairs to her room.

One side of the dining room at the Rodriguez house had a sofa against the wall, and on that sofa Kit sprawled, lying flat on his back and reading his own manual. For maybe the tenth time, his arms had become tired enough that he had to rest the book on his stomach. He was having trouble believing how much new data was in that book all of a sudden. The effect by itself wasn’t anything new – any manual would grow and shrink depending on what information you needed to be carrying. But this time it felt like there was more stuff in it: it felt more important, and somehow more dangerous. Kit was having trouble getting used to it. And to think I used to want one like this… he thought.

He turned a page and looked once more at the image he’d kept revisiting: a slowly rotating image of the Galaxy, seen as if from several hundred thousand lightyears away. It was displaying in negative, the stars black against white space, and the space was full of slowly growing dark patches.

From the living room came the sound of laughter: Carmela, long since back from dumping her load of teen magazines at Nita’s place, now sitting in front of the entertainment system’s big TV and talking to someone in the Speech. “No,” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s too early here to even think about grenfelzing…”

Kit raised his eyebrows and let his manual fall closed. “Mela?” he said over the sound of alien laughter from the TV.

“Kit, I’m talking to somebody. Can’t it wait?”

“No. If I wait, I’ll forget. What is grenfelzing, exactly?”

“It’s kind of like emmfozing,” his sister said after a moment, “but with chocolate.”

Kit covered his eyes for a moment. “Sorry I asked,” he said. Since he’d made the mistake of using wizardry to configure the entertainment system, Carmela had been spending what seemed like hours every day talking to the various alien species whose hundreds and thousands of interactive channels had suddenly become available along with the more commonplace Earth TV. Mela’s grasp of the wizardly Speech had been getting more acute lately, which by itself should have been a good thing. But at the same time it seemed to Kit that Carmela’s sense of humor was becoming peculiar, even for her – and sometimes, like now, she sometimes made not more sense than usual, but less. Well, at least she’s not turning into a wizard, Kit thought. It’s much too late for that – I hope…

He turned his attention back to his manual. “Okay,” he said to it in the Speech, “show me again where it started. I want to see what’s near there.”

The image of the Galaxy reset itself. “Zoom in on that,” Kit said.

The spiral grew and swelled past the ability of the page to show it all. Shortly after that, the page was full of the empty space between the Milky Way and the next galaxy over. “There’s nothing there at all,” he said softly.

Ponch was lying upside down on the floor with his feet in the air. Now he glanced up. Where? Ponch said.

“Here.” Kit put the manual down on the floor, stood up. “Walk-in, please?” he said to the manual.

The imagery spread out of the book format and surrounded Kit, obscuring the dining room. He walked into the space between the Milky Way’s spiral and the spot which Tom had shown them earlier. Ponch got up off the now-invisible dining room rug, shook himself, and wandered into the negative-image intergalactic brightness, standing beside Kit with his tail idly waving.

“This is where it began…” Kit said. “You see anything?”

It’s bright.

“I mean, besides that.”

Ponch peered into the unrelieved brightness. What am I supposed to be looking for?

Kit let out a long tired breath. “I wish I had the slightest idea,” he said. “Any weird kind of energy, any life signs…”

Ponch stretched out his head and sniffed. I don’t smell anything, he said. But it’s hard for me to scent through this. Your manual has its own way of telling what’s happening. It’s not like the way I Scent things.

Kit shook his head. “The manual doesn’t detect anything, either,” he said after a moment. “No one was anywhere near here before the space started to stretch…” He reached out a hand and poked it into the brightness. The manual obediently rolled down a “menu” showing Kit a list, in the specialized characters of the Speech, for the various forces and energies which had been operating in that part of space when the stretching had happened.

“No wizardry was happening there,” Kit said. “Light, gravity, string structure, everything was behaving itself.” He shook his head. “And then this came out of nowhere…”

In the living room, the laughter started again. Kit rolled his eyes, bending down to pick up his manual and slap it shut. “How am I supposed to save the universe with all this noise?” he hollered.

“Go save it somewhere else?” Carmela said. “I mean, even if you go read in your own room, and shut the door so that the sound of other people having lives doesn’t bother you, you’ll still be in this universe. Right? And you should be able to save it just fine from there.”

Her tone wasn’t nearly as sarcastic as it might have been: she was plainly cutting Kit some slack. Kit gave Ponch a helpless look. “She has a point,” he said, very low.

I don’t think it would be smart for you to admit that… Ponch said, glancing in Carmela’s direction.

“Come on,” Kit said, letting out a long breath and getting up. “No one’s going to be here for a while yet.”

He went through the living room as quietly as he could. Carmela, sitting crosslegged in front of the TV, didn’t look up as he passed. As Kit went up the stairs, from behind him, he heard her say: “You’re tense. I forgive you.”

I hate it when she forgives me and she’s right, Kit thought. But aloud he just said “Thanks,” and went up the stairs.

Ponch trotted up behind him, his nails clicking on the wood of the steps. So you were serious before, when you said about us having to save the universe? Ponch said.

They came out on the landing, and Kit paused there for a moment with his hand on the banister: Ponch went under his arm and paused too, looking up at him. “Yeah,” Kit said.

I wasn’t sure if you were joking, Ponch said.

Kit laughed a single laugh. “Not this time.”

Comments

[sohma-kodora.livejournal.com]

Hi, LJ CUT PLEASE!!!

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

Sorry. ;)