There were no further utterances from Spot. “Okay,” Nita said, straightening up. “You stay where you are, then… She’ll be back in a while.”
She sat down at the table and called her manual to her again. Two weeks of my own, she thought. Yeah! There were a hundred things to think about over the school holiday: projects she was working on with Kit, and things she was doing for her own enjoyment that she would finally have some time to really get into.
She opened the manual to the area where she kept wizardries-in-progress and paged through it idly, pausing as she came to a page that was half full of the graceful characters of the Speech. But the last line was blinking on and off to remind her that the entry was incomplete. Oh yeah, she thought. Better finish this while the material’s still fresh.
Nita sat back and eyed the page, munching on her sandwich. Since she’d first become a wizard, she tended to dream things that later turned out to be useful—not strictly predictions of the future, but scenes from her life, or sometimes other people’s lives, fragments of future history. The saying went that those who forgot history were doomed to repeat it; and since Nita hated repeating herself, she’d started looking for ways to make better use of the information from her dreams, rather than just be suddenly reminded of them when the events actually happened.
Her local Advisory Wizard had given her some hints on how to use “lucid” dreaming to her advantage, and had finally suggested that Nita keep a log of her dreams to refer to later. Nita had started doing this and had discovered that the dreams were getting easier to remember. Now she glanced down at the page and had a look at this morning’s notes. Reading them brought the images and impressions up fresh in her mind again.
Last night’s dream had started with the sound of laughter, with kind of an edge to it. At first Nita had thought that the source of the laughter was her old adversary, the Lone Power, but the voice had been different. There was an edge of malice to this laughter, all right, but it was far less menacing than the Lone One had ever sounded in Nita’s dealings with it, and far more ambivalent. And the voice was a woman’s.
Then a man’s voice, very clear: “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, ” he says. His voice is friendly. The timbre of the voice is young, but there’s something behind it that sounds really old somehow. Nita closed her eyes, tried to remember something more about that moment than the voice. Light! There was a sense of radiance all around, and a big, vague murmuring at the edge of things, as if some kind of crowd scene was going on just out of Nita’s range of vision.
And there was barking, absolutely deafening barking. Nita had to smile at that, because she knew that bark extremely well. It was Kit’s dog, Ponch, barking excitedly about something, which wasn’t at all strange. What was strange was the absolute hugeness of the sound, in the darkness.
The darkness, Nita thought, and shivered once as the image, which hadn’t been clear this morning, suddenly presented itself. “Record,” she said to the manual, and sat back with her eyes closed.
Space, with stars in it. Well, you’d expect space to be dark. But slowly, slowly, some of the stars seemed to go faint, as if something filmy was getting between her and them, like a cloud, a creeping fog…
The dark fog had crept so slowly across Nita’s field of vision, swallowing the stars. Now that she was awake, the image gave her the creeps. Yet in the dream, somehow this hadn’t been the case. She saw it happening; she somehow wasn’t even surprised by it. In the dream, she knew what it meant, and its only effect on Nita had been to make her incredibly angry.
She opened her eyes now, feeling a little flushed with the memory of the anger. Nita looked down at the manual, where the last line of the Speech, recording her last impression, was blinking quietly on and off, waiting for her to add anything further.
She searched her memory, then shook her head. Nothing new was coming up for now. “Close the entry,” she said to the manual, and that last line stopped blinking.
Nita shut the manual and reached out to pick up her sandwich and have another bite. It was frustrating to get these bits and pieces and not understand what they meant; but, eventually, when she got enough of them together, they would start to make some kind of sense. I just hope that it happens in time to be of some use. Because for sure, something’s going to start happening shortly. The darkness hadn’t felt very far away in time. I’ll mention it to Tom when I have a chance.
Meanwhile, there were plenty of other things to think about. That Martian project, for example, she thought as she finished her sandwich. She got up to go into the kitchen and get rid of the plate. That’s gonna be a ton of fun—
From outside the house came a splash and hiss as someone drove through the puddle that always collected at the end of the driveway in rainy weather. Nita glanced out the kitchen window and saw the car coming up the driveway. Daddy’s early, she thought. Must have been quiet in the store this afternoon. But where is Dairine? I thought she’d be back by now…
Nita ran some cold water from the tap into a measuring cup, filled up the water reservoir of the new coffee-maker by the sink, put one of the premeasured coffee capsules her dad favored into the top of the machine, and hit the on switch. The coffeemaker started making the usual wheeze-and-gurgle noises. Outside, the car door slammed; a few moments later, shaking the rain out of his hair, Nita’s dad came in—a tall man, silver-haired, big-shouldered, and getting a little thick around the waist; he’d been putting on some weight these past few months. He was splattered with rain about the shoulders, and he was carrying a long paper package in his arms. “Hi, sweetie.”
“Hi, Daddy.” Nita sniffed the air. “Mums?” She recognized the flowers’ slightly musty scent before she saw the rust-and gold-colored blooms sticking out of the wide end of the package.
Her dad nodded. “We had a few left over this afternoon … No point leaving them in the store. I’ll find a vase.” He put the flowers down on the drain board, then peered into the sink. “Good lord, what’s that?”
“Lettuce,” Nita said. “Previously.”
“I see what you mean,” Nita’s dad said. “My fault. I meant to make some salad last weekend, but it never happened. That shouldn’t have gone bad so fast, though… ”
“You have to put the vegetables in the crisper, Daddy. It’s too dry in the main part of the fridge, and probably too cold.” Nita sighed. “Speaking of which, I was talking to the fridge a little while ago… ”
Her father gave her a cockeyed look. Nita had to laugh at the expression. “You’re going to tell me that the refrigerator has a problem of some kind? Not a mechanical one, I take it.”
“Uh, no.”
Her dad leaned against the counter, rubbing his face a little wearily. “I still have trouble with this idea of inanimate objects being able to think and have emotions.”
“Not emotions the way we have them,” Nita said. “Ways they want things to be… and a reaction when they’re not. And as for inanimate… They’re just not alive the way we are.” She shrugged. “Just call this ‘life not as we know it,’ if it helps.”
“But it is life as you know it.”
“I’ve just got better equipment to detect it with,” Nita said. “I talk to it and it talks back. After that, it’d be rude not to answer. Anyway, Daddy, it’s weird to hear you say you’ve got a problem with this! You talk to your plants all the time. In the shop and here. You should hear yourself in the garden.”
At that, her dad looked nonplussed. “But even scientists say it’s good to talk to plants. It’s the frequency of the sound waves or something.”
“That’s like saying that telling someone you love them is good just because of the sound waves,” Nita said. “If you were from Mars and you didn’t know how important knowing people loved you was, you might think it was the sound waves, too. Don’t you feel how the plants like it when you talk to them?”
“They do grow better,” her dad said after a moment. “Liking… I don’t know. Give me
a while to get used to the idea. What’s the fridge’s problem?”
“It hates being empty. A fridge’s nature is to have things in it for people to eat! But there’s hardly anything in it half the week, and that makes it sad.” Nita gave her dad a stern look. “Not to mention that it makes me sad, when I get home from school. We need to get more stuff on Fridays!”
“Well, okay. But at least—”
“Uh-oh,” said a little voice.
Nita’s dad glanced up, and both of them looked around. “What?” he said.
“It’s Spot,” said Nita.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Don’t know,” Nita said. “He’s been doing that now and then since I got home.”
“Where is he?”
“Not sure. I looked for him before, but couldn’t see him. Dairine can probably tell us when she gets back. So, Daddy, about the shopping… ”
“Okay,” her father said. “Your mom was such an expert at judging what we needed right down to Friday afternoon. Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention. You probably did, though.”
“Uh, no,” Nita said. “But I saw her do it often enough that I can imitate what she did until I get the hang of it myself.”
“Fine,” her dad said. “Then that’s your job now. Let me get out of my work clothes and we’ll go out as soon as Dairine gets back.”
“Uh-oh,” said that small voice again. “Uh-oh. Uh- oh!”
“What is it with him?” Nita’s father said, looking around in confusion. “He sounds like he’s having a guilt attack. Wherever he is… ”
The uh-oh-ing stopped short.
Nita’s dad looked into the dining room and spied something. “Hey, wait, I see where he is,” he said, and went to the corner behind the dining room table. There was a little cupboard and pantry area there, set into the wall, and one of the lower cupboard’s doors was partly open. Nita’s dad looked into it. “What’s the matter with you, fella?”
“Uh-oh,” said Spot’s voice, much smaller still.
“Come on,” Nita’s dad said, “let’s have a look at you.”
He reached down into the bottom of the cupboard, in among the unpolished silver and the big serving plates, and brought out the laptop. It had been undergoing some changes recently, what Dairine referred to as an “upgrade.” In this case, upgrading seemed to involve getting thinner and darker; he had gone black-skinned—except for what looked much like the luminous white fruit-logo of a major computer company on his lid, the significant difference being that the fruit had no bite out of it.
But Spot also had some equipment less normal for laptops in general: sentience, for one thing, and (at least sometimes) legs. These—all ten of them, silvery and with two ball-and-socket joints each—now popped out and wiggled and rowed and made helpless circles in the air while Nita’s dad held Spot up, blowing a little dislodged cupboard dust off the top of him.
“Some of that stuff in there needs polishing,” her dad said. “It’s all brown. Never mind. You got a problem, big guy?”
It was surprising how much expression a closed computer case could seem to have, at least as far as Spot was concerned. He managed to look not only nervous but embarrassed. “Not me,” Spot said.
“Well, who then?”
“Uh-oh,” Spot said again.
Nita could immediately think of one reason why Spot might not want to go into detail. She was reluctant to say anything: It wasn’t her style to go out of her way to get her little sister into trouble. Besides, since when does she need my help for that?
“All right,” Nita’s father said, sounding resigned. “What’s Dairine done now?”
Despite her best intentions, Nita had to grin, though she turned away a little so that it wouldn’t be too obvious.
“Come on, buddy,” Nita’s father said. “You know we’re on her side. Give.”
Spot’s little legs revolved faster and faster in their ball-and-socket joints, as if he were trying to rev up to takeoff speed. “Spot,” her dad said, “come on, it’s all right. Don’t get all—”
With a pop! and a little implosion of air that made the dining room window curtains swing inward, Spot vanished.
Nita’s dad looked at his empty hands, then looked over at Nita and dusted his palms. “Now where’d he go?”
Nita shook her head. “No idea.”
“Haven’t seen him do that before.”
“Usually I don’t see him coming or going, either,” Nita said. “But he can do that kind of stuff if he wants to. Spot’s got a lot of the manual in him; wizardry’s his operating system, and he can probably use it for function calls I’ve never even thought about.” She went into the kitchen and got her backpack off the counter, bringing it into the dining room and dropping it on the table. “He and Dairine aren’t usually far apart for long, though. When she comes back, he will, too.”
“Did she have a late day today?” Nita’s dad said.
“Choir practice, I think,” Nita said. “No, wait, that was yesterday. She should be home any minute.”
Nita’s dad nodded. “Any coffee left from this morning?”
“Are you kidding? You know what it tastes like when you leave it. I just made you some fresh.”
“Thanks.”
Her dad headed into the kitchen. As he did, the front doorbell rang. “Get that, will you, honey?”
“Sure, Daddy.” Nita went to the front door, opened it.
They hadn’t been expecting anybody, and Nita definitely had not been expecting to find Tom Swale standing there—a tall man in his mid-thirties, dark-haired and good-looking, one of the Senior Wizards for the New York metropolitan area, and their neighbor. He was bundled up in a bright red ski parka and dripping slightly from the rain. “Hi, Neets. Saw the car in the driveway. Is your dad around?”
“Uh, yeah, come on in.”
“Who was that, sweetie?” said her dad from the kitchen.
“Someone who probably knows I just made coffee,” Nita said, grinning a bit. She led Tom into the dining room and took his coat as he slipped out of it, hanging it over the back of one of the chairs.
Her dad looked around the kitchen door, slightly surprised. “Tom?” He smiled a bit. “Carl really is interested in this coffeemaker, isn’t he…”
“Yes he is, but that’s not it today,” Tom said, smiling slightly. “Sorry to turn up unannounced like this. Is Dairine around?”
“Uh, not at the moment.” Nita’s dad suddenly looked a little stricken—and Nita wondered whether her dad was thinking back to the last time the local Senior Wizard had turned up on their doorstep asking for Dairine. “It’s whatever Dairine’s done, isn’t it?”
Tom’s rueful expression suggested that he understood what was going through Nita’s dad’s head. “Well, yes. I wouldn’t say it was on the scale of previous transgressions. But there’s something she needs to take some correction on.”
At that, Nita’s dad looked somewhat relieved. “A daily occurrence,” he said, “if not hourly. Tom, come on in, let’s have the machine do a cup for you and you can tell me about it.”
“Thanks.”
They headed past Nita into the kitchen. “By the way, you any good with vanishing computers?” Nita’s dad said.
“Please. I have enough trouble with them when they’re visible,” Tom said, giving Nita a wink in passing. Nita took this as a signal that she was meant to be elsewhere, so she went into the living room, grabbed the handsfree out of its cradle there, and dialed.
When Kit picked up, the noise in the background was more muted. “Talked to the TV, huh?” Nita said.
“At length,” Kit said. “Seems to have worked for the moment.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, “I had to sweet-talk the fridge a little myself just now.”
“You’re getting good at that,” Kit said. “Used to be you had more trouble with machines.”
Nita shrugged. “Experience?” she said. “Maybe I’m changing specialties. Or maybe your
s is rubbing off. Look, don’t ask me.” She lowered her voice. “I was going to say that if the noise is still too much for you over there, maybe you want to find an excuse to come over here for a while. It may not be any quieter, but it’s gonna be more interesting.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know, but—” Nita heard something then: a voice, higher than hers, younger than hers, coming up the driveway and singing, more or less to the tune of the chorus of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” “Two weeks! Two weeks! I get two weeks off now, hur ray, hurray—”
“Oh, boy,” Nita said. “Here it comes!”
The back door opened. “Two weeks! Two— Uh. ”
There was a soft bang! as something materialized in the kitchen without being too careful about air displacement. “Uh-oh, ” Spot’s voice said, sounding panic-stricken.
“Both of you stay right where you are,” Nita’s dad said.
Nita choked down her laughter. “Can’t miss this, gotta go!” she whispered, and hung up.
2: Dealing with Unforeseen Circumstances
Carefully, intending to seem neither too sneaky nor too enthusiastic about it, Nita made her way into the dining room and sat down very quietly at the end of the dining room table, where she could just see into the kitchen.
Her dad and Tom were leaning against the kitchen counter, coffee cups in hand, gazing at a suddenly very subdued Dairine. “I’ll give you three guesses,” Tom said, “why I’m here.”
Dairine leaned against the opposite counter and brushed her red bangs out of her eyes in a way that was meant to look casual, but to Nita’s practiced eye, the act was failing miserably. Dairine was freaked.
“And Spot knows, too, I’ll bet,” Tom said, “which is why he’s so skittish all of a sudden. Dairine, you know that as a responsible wizard you have an obligation to tell the people who’re still helping you manage your life about what’s going on with you… and when you’re intending to embark on some course of action that is going to affect them.”