“Uh, yeah, well, I was about to—”
“In some cases that information should really reach your family before you embark on the course of action, wouldn’t you say? Assuming that you want to stay in a good relationship with the Powers That Be. Which right now seems increasingly unlikely.”
Nita saw Dairine go so pale that her freckles looked about four shades darker than usual.
Tom put out his hand, and as if from the empty air, the most compact version of his wizard’s manual fell into it. It was larger and bulkier than Nita’s, nearly the size of a phone book—but as one of the supervisory wizards for this part of the East Coast, he had a lot more people, places, and things to look after in the course of his practice than Nita did.
“Let me read you my copy of a message that doubtless will have reached you via Spot not too long ago,” Tom said, looking over his manual at Dairine as he opened the book and paged through it. “And which is doubtless why poor Spot is having a crisis of the nerves. ‘To: D. Callahan, T Swale, C. Romeo: We confirm availability for two of your species in the sponsored noninterventional excursus program at this time. However, your applicant supervisee-wizard’s proposal for an excursus is rejected for the following reasons: Durational impropriety. Evasion of local issues. Attempt to circumvent local dirigent authority… ’” Tom paused, looking down the page with an expression of annoyed bemusement. “Actually,” he said, “despite the fact that the Powers That Be have listed about twelve other reasons here, those three are probably sufficient for the moment.”
“Okay, Tom,” Nita’s dad said. “For the wizardly challenged among us, this means… ?”
“Dairine,” Tom said, taking another drink of his coffee with his free hand, “has signed herself and Nita up for a cultural outreach program.”
What? Nita thought, her eyes going wide. She pushed herself very quietly back out of sight of the kitchen, flushing hot in one instant and cold in the next. Then, ever so carefully, she leaned forward again to see what her dad’s expression looked like.
He had raised his eyebrows, that was all. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad… ”
“Probably not, until you consider that it would have involved them spending ten to fourteen days halfway across the galaxy,” Tom said. “Or sometimes somewhere further off… though these young-practitioner exchanges usually stay within a radius of a hundred thousand light-years, for administrative reasons.”
Nita watched her dad’s expression shift from bemused to slightly concerned. “You mean,” he said, “this is like a student-exchange program here on Earth.”
“There are similarities,” Tom said. “But the similarities also mean that while Dairine and Nita were gone, you would have had other wizards staying here with you.”
Dairine’s father slowly turned his head and trained a look on Dairine that was so blank it was scary.
“I was going to tell you, Daddy,” Dairine said in a much smaller voice than previously. “It was just that—”
“You were going to tell me, huh?” Nita’s father said, in a flat, unrevealing voice that matched his expression. “Not ask me?”
Nita swallowed. “I just thought if I got everything arranged,” Dairine said, in a smaller voice yet, “got it all set up, then I could talk to you and we could—”
Dairine’s dad looked at her severely. “What?” he said. “You were thinking you’d just present this thing to me as a fait accompli? Bad move.”
“Daddy, we’ve all been—” Dairine stopped. “Some time off would have been really—”
“Uh-huh,” Nita’s dad said, absolutely without inflection. Out of his view, Nita covered her face with her hands. “Did Nita know anything about this?”
“No.” Now Dairine was starting to sound a little sullen. “It was going to be a surprise.”
“The message confirms that,” Tom said. “It wasn’t Nita who was being sanctioned, Harry.”
Nita’s dad’s expression broke enough for him to frown at Dairine. “Well, it didn’t sound like Nita’s style. But for your part, consider yourself lucky that I don’t ground you.”
“I, however, don’t have that much leeway,” Tom said. “The message the Powers That Be dropped on my head, after this one, requires me to restrict you to Sol System for the next two weeks, as a corrective. So consider it done.”
“Aww, Tom!”
Tom snapped his manual closed and tossed it into the air. It vanished. “Next time,” Tom said, “think it through.”
Nita’s dad gave Dairine that terrible level look again. “Dairine, I think you should go take some private time to consider what you’ve been up to,” he said. “Forget leaving the solar system: for the time being, I don’t want you to leave the house. By any means, so no doing transport spells in your room, young lady. In fact, I don’t think I want to lay eyes on you again till Nita and I get back from doing the shopping. So go on now.”
“I really am sorry,” Dairine said, very, very low. Nita listened to the words, judging the tone critically, and gave Dairine about a six out of ten for penitence. As Dairine hurried through the dining room past her, Nita kept her face carefully straight, but the glance that Dairine threw at her, knowing their dad couldn’t see it, made Nita revise the score about half a point upward. Dairine was angry, but also genuinely sorry.
Dairine vanished through the living room and up the stairs to her bedroom. “And since you’ve been sitting there taking all this in… ” Tom said through the kitchen doorway. Nita blushed. Tom gave Nita a look that wasn’t half as severe as it might have been.
“She really didn’t give you any idea that she was up to this?” Nita’s dad said, coming into the dining room.
Nita shook her head as Tom and her dad sat down at the table with her. “This is all news to me,” Nita said. “She doesn’t tell me everything she does. And I can’t always guess. Which may be a good thing, since if I’d known about this, I’d have—” Reamed her out, Nita was about to say, and then she stopped, because she didn’t know if it was strictly true.
She looked over at Tom. “I’ve seen the section in the manual about this exchange thing,” Nita said, “but when I read it, it never occurred to me that you could just sign yourself up for one. I thought someone had to nominate you.”
“Oh, not always,” Tom said. “You can sign up for it yourself, if you have the spare time and think the circumstances warrant it.”
“Which plainly Dairine did,” Nita’s dad said.
“Harry,” Tom said, “I think all we have here is a case of Dairine doing what she usually does: pushing the envelope. Testing. It’s not that unusual for an early-latency wizard. You come into your power in a big way, then it drops off in a big way, and afterward you’re likely to spend a while plunging around trying to redefine yourself as more than a wonder child. There’s always the fear, ‘Was that all I had? Was the way I was when I started out as good as I’m ever going to get?’ Takes a while to put that to bed.”
Nita’s dad sighed, leaned back in his chair and drank some coffee, then made a face: It had gone cold. “This hasn’t made trouble for you, has it? If it has, I’m sorry.”
Tom shook his head. “Nothing major,” he said. “Not compared with some of the sanctioning I have to deal with. The adult wizards are worse than the kids, in some ways: as you get older, there’s an unfortunate tendency to start to lose the innate hunger for rules that you have when you’re young. Some of us start trying to bend them in ways that aren’t always innocuous… ”
Nita’s dad abruptly burst out laughing. “Whoa, you lost me. Kids have an innate hunger for rules?”
Tom looked wry. “Played hopscotch lately?” he said. “One toe over that chalk line and you are dead. But let me extend the metaphor more toward adult experience, because one of the places where the rule-hunger does persist is sports. You’re a soccer fan, Harry; I see you up at the high school refereeing on weekends. About this weird and complex regulation called the offside rule—”
&nb
sp; “I can explain that,” Nita’s dad said.
“And what’s more, you’ll enjoy explaining it,” Tom said. “Possibly as much as you enjoy enforcing it on the would-be violators.”
Nita’s dad opened his mouth and then shut it again, grinning. “You might be able to convince me about this eventually,” he said.
Tom just smiled. “Anyway, this isn’t anything that I don’t deal with more remotely, twenty or thirty times a week. It just happens that we live around the corner, so I have an excuse to exert my influence personally… and to drink your coffee, which even when it doesn’t come out of a fancy capsule machine is way better than Carl’s. He thinks any coffee that doesn’t eat the pot is a waste.” Tom sighed and leaned back in his chair. “As far as this particular problem goes, it’s no big deal. Since we’ve had the energy authorized for an excursus, I need to think about what to do with it. But that’s the least of my worries at the moment.”
He ran one hand through his hair as he spoke. Nita looked at it in slight shock; she saw something she’d never noticed before. All of a sudden there was some silver showing there, above the ears, and sprinkled in salt-and-pepper fashion through the rest of Tom’s hair. When did that start? Is he okay?
“Interesting times?” Nita’s dad said.
Tom nodded. “Interesting times. The world isn’t quite what it used to be, these days… ”
“Noticed that,” Nita’s dad said. “Come on, that cup’s gone cold on you… let me stick it in the microwave. More milk?”
Her dad and Tom went back into the kitchen. Nita got up and headed upstairs. Her sister was in her room, sitting at her desk, her arms folded, her head down on them.
Nita stood there in the doorway, looking at her. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” Dairine said, not lifting her head. “See how okay I am. Thanks for asking.”
Nita had been practicing ignoring her sister’s sarcasm for years and by now was expert at the art. “What was the matter with you?” Nita said, though not nearly as loudly as she’d have liked.
There was a long silence before Dairine said anything. “I needed to get away,” she said at last. “Just for a while. I needed… I don’t know. Not a vacation. I needed to do something else, somewhere else. Millman said a change would be a good idea if I could swing it. And for you, too.” She gave Nita a look that was almost fierce.
Millman was the school psychologist who had been counseling them both, on and off, since their mom died. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell you to do anything like this,” Nita said, annoyed. “You know how it has to look to Dad! He’s going to think you don’t think he’s being a good enough dad or something.”
“But it’s not like we were going to be away all the time, Neets!” Dairine said. “It’s easy to come home at nights if you want to. There’s a protocol all set up—the Powers give you an expanded worldgating allowance and everything: You don’t have to worry about blowing huge amounts of energy on transport to come back from your host world if you get homesick, or if you need to deal with something else back here. You can be back anytime you need to be, no problem—and the rest of the time, you can concentrate on being where you are.”
Nita let out a long breath. “That,” she said, “kind of looks like the last thing you were doing, Dair.”
Dairine rubbed her eyes with her hands. It was their dad’s gesture, helpless and pained, and Nita’s insides seized up when she saw it. “I didn’t think it through,” Dairine said after a little while. “Tom got that right.”
She was quiet for another long time, almost too long, but there was no break in the tension. After a moment, Nita sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked when she did so.
Dairine threw her a look, though not the one Nita was expecting. “You’ve been toughing it out all the time,” Dairine said, and went back to staring at her desk, all cluttered with DVDs and artwork and paperwork, with the flat-screen monitor of her main computer, and also now with Spot, his legs all retracted, looking as muted and unhappy as Dairine did. “You think I don’t see?” Dairine said, reaching out to trace some aimless design on Spot’s upper case with one finger. “And when Dad and I can’t connect, you’re the one who winds up talking sense to him, and to me, and getting us all going in the same direction. But who’s there to make things easier for you?… You’re getting worn out with it. You need a change of pace, something besides worrying about whether we’re okay. We’re tougher than you think we are. But you… ”
Dairine fell silent, possibly unwilling to say what she was thinking. Nita looked at her and felt equally unwilling to force the issue, for she was afraid their thoughts were running in tandem. How many times have I had this idea myself in the past couple of months? Nita thought. How many times have I thought, ‘I wish I were out of here. I wish that just for a few days a week, I was somewhere I didn’t have to deal with helping to put everything back together in some new shape, one that doesn’t have Mom in it?’…
“Look,” Nita said to Dairine after a moment. “You meant well. You just have to take these things past the meaning sometimes! Especially when it’s Dad. You know what a disciplinarian he is… or thinks he is. Now that Mom’s not here, he thinks he has to be twice as much of one. Have you given any thought to trying to be, you know, good for a while?”
Dairine didn’t look up, but she snickered, a supremely cynical sound. It was what Nita had been hoping to hear. “Yeah,” Nita said. “Well, think about that, too. You could throw him seriously off balance if you kept at it long enough.”
“Yeah,” Dairine said after a moment or so. “That might be worth seeing… ”
“Do what you can,” Nita said. “Give him some relief.”
“What about you?” Dairine said.
“What about me what?” Nita said, and then abruptly heard in her head what her present English teacher would say to her if she uttered such a sentence in class. Mr. Neary was fiercer about correct grammar than some people were about the eternal battle between Good and Evil.
“You could still go,” Dairine said.
Nita stared.
“And you could still take someone else. Say, Kit… ”
After a moment, Nita shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “This thing with Dad is going to take some patching up. There’s no way he’d go for it right now… ” But Nita was somehow finding it hard to be as energetic about the refusal as she thought she should have been. Dairine just looked at her, straight-faced, for a moment or two. Finally Nita shook her head once more and got up. The bed creaked again.
“That thing’s never recovered from being down that crevasse on Pluto,” Dairine said. “Its springs are shot. You owe me a new one.”
Nita threw a look back at the desk, at Spot. How a near-featureless dark metal case could look less depressed than it had five minutes ago, Nita didn’t know, but Spot’s did. This reassured her, too, for Spot was a good reflection of Dairine’s genuine moods—Dairine might successfully fake what was going on with her, but Spot had no such talent.
“It was not down any crevasse,” Nita said. “I left it in the middle of a plain of perfectly good frozen nitrogen, high and dry. But who knows, I might read up on the crystal-reconstruction spells in the metals section of the manual over the next day or so, and talk the steel back the way it used to be. I’m getting good with metal, I’m told.”
This airy and overconfident statement elicited another snicker, even more cynical than the last one. Nita grinned. At the beginning of her wizardry she had started out as a talk-to-the-trees type, a specialist in work with organic life-forms, but everything widened out eventually as you went along. “You sit here and think about stuff,” Nita said. “Be real contrite in case Dad comes in. And when we’re gone, if Dad hasn’t done it already, make a little effort to get on his good side by taking that poor lettuce out of the sink and sticking it in the compost heap. Time it got recycled into something alive to make up for what happened in the fridge.”
“Sure.”
Nita went softly down the stairs and headed toward the dining room. Voices were speaking there. She stopped not far from the stairs, out of sight. “I’m parenting for two here, Tom,” Nita heard her dad say.
“I know,” Tom said quietly. “It can’t be easy.”
“I don’t want to be hard on her. But at the same time, I have to try to keep some semblance of normalcy around here… keep some structures in place that the kids know they can depend on.” There was one of those pauses in which Nita could practically hear her father rubbing his face.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Tom said, getting up. “You know you are. In the meantime, Harry, any time you need a friendly ear, you know our number. One or the other of us is almost always around. Wizardry isn’t all about errantry. Mostly it’s just talking.”
“I know,” her dad said. “I see that here a lot—”
There was a knock at the back door. Nita heard her dad’s chair scrape back as he went to answer it. “Oh, hi, Kit,” her dad said. “Come on in. I can’t get used to it, the times when you walk over: I keep expecting you to just appear out of nothing in the living room, as usual.” Her dad laughed then. “‘As usual… ’”
“Uh, hi, Mr. Callahan. No, I didn’t want to, because … ”
Tom got up as Nita put her head around the living room door into the dining room. “News travels fast, huh?” Tom said to her as the back door shut behind Kit.
“Uh, yeah,” Nita said. She picked up Tom’s jacket, which was still wet, and shook it off before handing it to him. Residual water went everywhere. “Why didn’t you keep the rain off you when you came over?” she said.
“I don’t always do wizardry just because I can,” Tom said, smiling slightly and shrugging into the parka. “An attitude toward errantry that you’ll understand better when you’re my age. Besides, I like the rain. By the way, how’s the reading coming?”
When Tom asked Nita this, she knew it didn’t have anything to do with fiction. Nita had been spending a lot of time with the manual over the past months, starting to explore for herself the kind of “research” wizardry that Tom did. In particular, she had been studying the Speech more closely, mostly for its own sake—there was always something new to find out about the language in which the Universe had been written—but also with an eye to finding other ways to deal with the Lone Power than just brute force. “I’ve been doing some more research on the Enactive and pre-Enactive modes,” Nita said. “Ancillary Oaths and bindings.”