Games Wizards Play

  “Coffee.”

  “Did she drink it all already? Wow, she must really be having trouble with the zone lag.”

  “What? Oh.”

  Her dad was staring straight at the glass jar of Dairine’s coffee, but it was as if he couldn’t see it. Nita reached into the cupboard past him, grabbed it, and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “I won’t let her know you had any. Just grab another jar of it from the store when you go by there.”

  Her dad made himself some coffee, and then once it was made, leaned against the counter and stood staring into his mug for a while as he stirred. He looks so concerned, Nita thought. What’s going on with him?

  “Nita,” he said. “You have a moment?”

  “What? Sure.”

  “Okay. Good.” And he took a breath. “You and Kit—”

  With a shock Nita realized what was coming. Oh no, she thought. Not right now. Not on top of everything else!

  Nita held her breath.

  “How’s it been going?” her dad said.

  She had no idea where he’d been planning to start, but this was so low-key, even for her dad, that Nita was tempted to laugh out loud. Except that would probably throw him right off his stride when he needed to talk to her about this, and she didn’t want to do that. This was going to be weird and difficult enough for them both as it was.

  In any case there was no point in trying to pretend she didn’t know what subject he was trying to broach. “We’re fine,” she said. “A little freaked, maybe.”

  “Both of you?” he said, giving her a curious look. “Kit’s been playing it pretty calm.”

  “Playing it, yeah,” said Nita.

  Her dad smiled half a smile. It was an expression that Nita remembered her mom wearing a lot, and now she found herself wondering which of her parents had come up with it first and how long it had taken to rub off on the other one. After a moment he said, “Has anything. . .”

  “. . . Happened?” Nita gave him a look that she hoped would be dry without being too snotty.

  Her dad had the grace to look embarrassed at asking so baldly. “Uh. Maybe I, uh . . .”

  Nita simply leaned on the counter and regarded him, wondering how deep a hole he was about to dig for himself and how long he’d take to stop digging.

  “Um.” He looked up. “In baseball terms?”

  Nita paused to give this some consideration. “First base?” she said.

  Her dad made a face that suggested this was probably okay.

  “Might have stolen first a few times,” Nita said. “And thought about stealing second . . .”

  At that, unexpectedly, he laughed. “Um. All right. But you do know . . .”

  “Almost certainly, Daddy.” She was wishing that he’d get the hint and let the subject drop, but there didn’t seem to be much chance of that.

  “That there are parts of what you’re getting into that are, uh . . . they have life consequences . . .”

  “Dad,” Nita said. “We had all this in school. It’s okay.”

  “Yes,” her dad said, “about the mechanics, I know you know about that—”

  Nita had to smile. “You remember that time when Kit was getting the TV set up for PeculiarSat . . . ?” This was the household code for GalacNet and the other major extraterrestrial image and data feeds to which wizards had access. “. . . And Mom was playing around with the remote and she stumbled across the TentaclErotica channel?”

  Her father put down the coffee mug and covered his face. “Oh God,” he said.

  “You knew then that I already knew everything I needed to know about this,” Nita said.

  “Excuse me,” her father said, and picked up the mug again, and he was actually blushing, “I knew that you already knew everything anybody possibly needed to know about tentacly things from alpha Centauri doing it! Because the explanations—”

  “Aldebaran VIIa, actually,” Nita said.

  “—Nearly gave me a coronary!”

  “They’ve got a lot of sexes,” Nita said. “They have a lot of sex. If you go there on business, you have to be prepared. But everybody in that was consenting, Daddy! That’s the important thing. Hvurkh means hvurkh!”

  Her dad started laughing. “Okay,” he said, “fine. That’s about a third of the talk I wanted to have . . .”

  “Oh good,” Nita said, unable to stop dreading whatever the other two-thirds were going to be.

  “So, beyond the, you know, the just doing it . . .” Her dad stopped, cleared his throat. “Look, wizardry aside—you’re just getting started in life. College is coming.” Nita winced and groaned softly: too well she knew it. “And even though you’re as strong and smart as anyone could hope for their daughter to be . . . it’s going to be a good while yet before you’ve got the emotional maturity to deal with parenthood.”

  “Please,” Nita said. “I have exactly zero plans for that for the next ten years. Or twenty.”

  “Well,” her dad said, “planning is kind of the issue, isn’t it? And not forgetting to have the planning in place when, um, when things do happen. If they do.”

  His embarrassment was so profound that Nita would have done almost anything to spare him this. It didn’t seem the time, though, to get into the various management strategies available to a wizard who wasn’t ready to reproduce. “We know what we need to do,” Nita said. “Or not do. Honest, Daddy. You don’t need to worry.” She stopped herself before she could have a chance to say We’ll be careful or any other of about twenty other reassuring phrases that could be terribly misunderstood.

  “Okay,” her dad said. “Most of the rest of it . . .” He actually shrugged. “It was going to be about keeping your options open. A lot can happen in ten years. Or twenty.” He looked up, favouring her with an expression that was a bit challenging.

  This was harder to cope with, harder to be reassuring about. At the moment Nita was equally torn between not being able to define what was going on with her and Kit, and not being able to believe that the way they were with each other could ever possibly happen with anyone else. Knowing this in the abstract was completely different from the inextricably intertwined senses of fluttery nervousness and total certainty that she got when she looked at Kit. She couldn’t explain it to herself, and she despaired of explaining it to anyone else, especially her father.

  “Because you can’t always be sure,” her dad said after a moment. He drank some coffee and looked at something over the top of the cup: not Nita. “I wasn’t sure with your mom for a long time.”

  Nita blinked at that. “Really?” It seemed impossible, somehow. And certainly impossible that the two of them had ever been with anyone else.

  Her dad shook his head. “We met a fair number of times before we started getting serious,” he said. “At first she thought I was a jock. Well, I was, then.” He grinned a little: his college-football time, to hear him tell it, had been one of the best parts of his life. “And at first I thought she was a snotty stuck-up elitist. Ballet . . .” Her dad snorted. “. . . But then after a while things shifted, and it all made sense. We made sense—when I’d have sworn just a few months before that it never could. We never could. Just . . .” He shrugged. “Give things room to move if they need to.”

  “Okay,” Nita said. “I’ll try.”

  He nodded, then, and drank some more coffee.

  “So,” Nita said. “And . . . you’re okay with everything?” Because she suddenly realized that it was important that he was: surprisingly important.

  “Do I have a choice?” her dad said.

  Nita didn’t have an answer for that.

  He was looking down into the coffee mug again, swirling the coffee. “There was a time,” her dad said, “when I realized . . .” He sighed. “It was that night at the beach, when you told us the truth about what you and Kit were up to. And at first we were just too shocked to believe it. Because honestly, how could we? Magic? Come on.” He shook his head. “But after it started sinking in, I had just the
worst possible moment. It was something Kit said that triggered it. And I realized—and so did your mom—that no matter what we said or did, if you were intent on doing this dangerous thing, there was nothing we could do to stop you. Nothing.”

  “It was hard,” Nita said after a moment, and wasn’t certain whether she was thinking more about the effect of that night on her mom and dad, or on her. “But I knew you’d be okay with it sooner or later.”

  “It was hard,” her dad said, sounding very somber. “But we did get our brains wrapped around it, finally.” He looked up from his coffee. “This is like that, in a way. Even if you weren’t a wizard and you wanted to get it on with somebody, realistically there’s no way we could—I could stop you. What, am I supposed to keep you in a cage? And probably there’s no way I could even know about it if you absolutely set your mind on keeping it secret.”

  This struck Nita as the wrong moment to agree with him. She kept quiet.

  “But there comes a point where you have to just decide to trust people,” her dad said. “No matter what age they are. And in your case, yeah, you have a set of priorities that your mom and I never could have predicted. But you’re still our daughter, and I know how we brought you up, and I think you’ll do the right thing without me having to watch you day and night.” He laughed a little helplessly. “Even if I could.”

  In the face of a vote of confidence like that, there wasn’t much Nita could do but put her cold tea down and go hug him.

  Her dad smooched her on the top of her head and hugged her back. “There,” he said. “Wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

  “Good.” Nita grinned at his relief, let him go, and shoved her tea in the microwave, pushing the button that would give it a minute to heat up. “So are we okay?”

  “For the moment,” her dad said.

  Nita threw him an oh no, what now? look.

  “Well, I’m not sure it’s responsible to have this talk just once,” her dad said. “The whole idea that you can just get it over with . . . As if conditions might not change in the future, for you, for me . . .” He shrugged. “Remember when you were six or so and we had that talk about you not crossing the street without looking both ways?”

  Nita had no memory of that at all. “It was kind of a long time ago . . .”

  Her dad gave Nita a look that suggested her attempt to deflect his question without hurting him had been noticed, appreciated, and was being allowed to pass without comment. “But it’s not like, having given you that long talk, I was just going to stop worrying forever about whether you were crossing the street safely, right? What kind of sense with that make? Of course I’m going to keep worrying about it. And we might need to talk again some time when you have more data. Or things change some other way. But I’ll leave that with you.”

  “Okay,” Nita said.

  Her dad finished the last of his coffee, ran some water into the mug and left it in the sink. “Gotta go,” he said. He felt around in his pockets for his car keys. “Seeing Dairine? I keep missing her, her hours are so strange right now.”

  “Yeah, probably I will.”

  “Thank her for getting the garbage out, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Her dad kissed her again and headed out the back door: it slammed behind him.

  Ten minutes of the birds and the bees, Nita thought as the microwave pinged at her. Just before I get ready to gate halfway around the planet. What is my life . . . ? She’d calmed down a bit by the time Kit turned up: though her dream of this morning was still very much on her mind as he came in and she spent a few moments looking carefully into his eyes.

  The look he gave her in return was bemused. “Is there something on my face?”

  “One of your normal expressions,” Nita said. “Which I’m glad to see.”

  “Another of those dreams . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” Nita said. She turned away.

  “Pancakes?” Kit said.

  “Not today,” Nita said. “Sticking to toast. Want some tea?”

  “What’s that, the peppermint stuff? Yeah.”

  She made him a cup and they sat. “So,” Kit said. “Tonight’s the night.”

  “Yeah. We’re due at Penn’s when?”

  “Four o’clock, our time. Then over to Canberra.”

  Nita nodded. “You know,” she said, “I’m thinking those unworthy thoughts again.”

  “What? Wishing that he’ll get knocked out?”

  “Well, the odds are a lot better this time . . .”

  “For us, you mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kit sighed. “True. You want to know what’s kind of embarrassing?”

  “Tell me.”

  “That I’m wishing that too.”

  “So it’s not just my nerves he’s getting on more and more . . .”

  “Not so much him,” Kit said. “But you know, I’m not so excited about going to the far side of the Moon.”

  Nita reached out and stroked Kit’s arm. “I know. And you know what? Neither is Dairine.”

  “Similar reasons, I guess,” Kit said.

  “Yeah.” Roshaun’s terrifying disappearance had come mere minutes before Ponch’s climactic battle with the Wolf That Ate the Stars.

  “But if she’s going,” Kit said, “I need to go too. If only to remind her that happy endings are possible . . .”

  All Nita could do was sit there for a moment regarding him in shameless admiration. “You know,” she said, “you’re not only a terrific wizard, but you’re a nice person.”

  Kit threw her a look that was skeptical on the surface of it, but he was still smiling. “So,” he said. “Onward to the semis.”

  “Yeah. But I’m betting that before that, we’ll have at least a few other things to distract us.”

  “Such as?”

  “Penn being a jerk,” Nita said. “Again, and again, and again . . .”

  “And if I can get you lovely ladies to turn your ever-so-fickle attention to the unique power control segment—”

  “Penn!” Nita said.

  He looked at her brightly. “And there’s a question from one of them now!”

  Dear Powers That Be, give me strength. “Penn, I truly almost hate to break this to you,” Nita said, “but even though more than half of the people judging you today are going to be female, an even more significant portion of them, say a hundred percent or so, are going to be more experienced than you. And another significant percentage, kind of hard to evaluate but let’s be kind and just say most, are going to be smarter than you as well. So you need to amend your attitude right now or you are not going to do well.”

  “You’re taking this way too seriously, way too personally! But it’s not your fault you can’t see how easy this is going to be for me.” Penn’s tone was almost pitying. “I know you’ve always had to try hard, it’s written all over your service history, but some of us just don’t have to go down that road. It’s going to be okay, Juanita, seriously, you’re worrying way too much about this—”

  “Penn,” Kit said sharply, “it’s not funny, and it’s not cute. They’ll laugh you out of there. If you call Irina Mladen a ‘lovely lady’ to her face, after she’s done with you you’re going to wind up wishing that the Earth would open up and swallow you. In fact, considering her specialty, the odds are better than even that it will.”

  In turn, Penn threw Kit a sly look. “I see what the problem is,” he said. “She’s been getting to you.” He glanced at Nita. “It’s okay . . . I know what you’re really thinking.”

  Kit covered his face.

  Nita waved her arms and pushed herself away from the wall at the side of Penn’s downstairs rec room where she’d been leaning. “Nope,” she said. “Nope, nope, nope. Kit? You mind if I go ahead?”

  The slightly wistful look he gave her suggested that he wished he’d thought of it first. “No, go on,” Kit said.

  “Mmm,” Penn said to her, “can’t stand the heat?”

  ?
??Don’t go there, Penn,” Nita said. She pulled her transit circle out of her charm bracelet—preloaded with the coordinates for the venue in Canberra—and dropped it, glowing, to the floor around her. To Kit she said, “A couple hours?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nita breathed in, breathed out very hard, and said the activation word for the transit circle before she could be tempted to stick around and reduce the number of semifinalists by one.

  The arrangement for the wizardly space at the convention center in Canberra was much the same as it had been in New York: a spell-shielded area to keep the nonwizards at bay, various meeting rooms, and a big, beautiful, airy public space conducive to a large number of people getting together after the business of the meeting was done. It was a smaller space, though, than the New York venue had been. With only fifty or so participants presenting projects privately to a panel of judges instead of out in the open, there wasn’t any need for a huge space that would resemble a carnival fairway.

  With all the appealing outdoor terraces around the convention center where people who felt inclined could bask in the sunshine, and with the lovely warm weather then prevailing, the whole feeling of the event seemed to Nita to have taken a more leisurely turn. This struck her as a good thing, as the tension level had ratcheted up a great deal. Quite a lot of people, especially Australian wizards, had come in to take part in the proceedings and see who went through to the finals. These attendees had started arriving early to learn how the initial rankings stacked up. But there was no mistaking the casual guests for the competitors, who all had a twitchy look to them that instantly set them apart.

  There was a good reason for this: the drastic results of the previous round had led a lot of people to suspect that the trend toward unusually hard judging was likely to continue. And when the four core judges were announced, this theory was instantly confirmed. One of the core group was naturally Irina Mladen. Another was Jarrah Corowa, possibly one of the most famous wizards of Aboriginal origin on the planet, and an expert in spells that had to do with materials technologies. A third was the venerable Yi Ling Harrie from Singapore, at ninety-three one of the oldest and best-known aeromancers still in active practice; and the fourth was Malak Marouane, Moroccan-born but practicing mostly in animal communications in Central Africa. Nita, looking over their images in her manual, thought with anticipation of the response should Penn call any one of them a “lovely lady.” It’d be memorable . . .