Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (18 page)

Ponch sat down, looked up at Quelt with big, woebegone eyes, hung his head, and offered her a paw.
Sorry,
he said.

“It’s all right,” Quelt said. “Don’t go all chopfallen on me. Let’s go in; they’re waiting for us.”

They went down to the house. There on the broad front steps, under the silver thatch of the eaves, they met Quelt’s parents, who were dressed like their daughter in long, loose, pale casual clothing, in two or three layers of cream or gold or beige—a long tunic or a short one with a long, sleeveless overvest flung on top, soft sandals, and, in Quelt’s father’s case, a soft scarf wrapped around the neck. Nita was astounded to find them even taller and more beautiful than Quelt. Kuwilin Peliaen, Quelt’s
tapi,
and Demair Peliaen, Quelt’s
pabi,
each towered at least two feet above their daughter.

“Come in, come in,” Demair said, laughing like her daughter, easily, and looking at Kit and Nita as if they were neighbors, not people she’d never seen before. Demair had Quelt’s hair, perhaps even a fairer version, though hers was shorter, worn in a soft fluffy cap around her head. Kuwilin, on the other hand, was completely bald, and this suited him extremely well—his longer, narrower features gave him an impressive and austere look, but that never lasted long when he started laughing. In fact, all of them laughed at least once every few minutes, at least as far as Nita could tell. And there was nothing artificial about it, nothing nervous. She felt entirely welcomed—entirely at home.

“You were a long time coming!” Kuwilin said. “I thought maybe we wouldn’t see you until tomorrow.”

“Worldgates,” Demair said. “It’s the old story: Hurry up and run in all directions, then sit and wait forever. No matter! You’re here now. Come in out of the wind and be welcome with us. Come see the house!”

With Quelt and her parents, Nita and Kit walked around the house, looking at everything. Nita was astounded at how technologically advanced this place was, despite its rural look. She immediately recognized a computer and data-retrieval system, disguised as a whole stuccoed wall. There were various appliances for housekeeping and entertainment; at first, Nita couldn’t understand how they were powered, but after a few words exchanged in the Speech with Quelt, she understood that these ran on fuel cells of an unusually advanced sort, operating off hydrogen cracked out of seawater.

Yet the whole look of the house was very simple and spare—appliances and storage were mostly hidden away against the walls, or in them, by woven screens or cupboard doors. There was a great deal of artwork, paintings and sculpture done by both of Quelt’s parents. Her father’s art looked more like what Nita thought of as modern or abstract art: splashes of bright color against the pale, plain stuccoed walls. Quelt’s mother’s art was mostly portraiture, pictures of her husband and daughter, and very beautiful landscapes—all of these featuring the sea or the hill behind the house. There were also some still-life studies of flowers in the dining room, the work of someone who had sat in front of one of the blue
jijis
flowers up on the hill for a very long time, studying every petal of it, every hair.

“Young cousins,” Quelt’s mother said when they’d seen everything, “what about latemeal? Did you eat anything on the journey?”

“Uh—” Kit said.

“Everything,” Nita said. “But we’re ready for more. And so is Ponch. Huh, Ponch?”

Ponch looked at Quelt’s mother and wagged his tail.
Food is always nice,
he said.

Quelt’s mother smiled. “The perfect houseguest,” she said. “Things will be ready in a few moments… Do you change clothes for latemeal?”

“Is it required?” Nita said, since she knew places where it was.

Quelt’s mother tilted her head sideways. “The careful guest,” she said, “perhaps wants to show the other diners honor.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other. “Change for dinner,” they said in unison.

***

They unlimbered their pup tents, slipped into them, and changed into clean things. Nita, feeling the heat, got into one of her beach wraps and put a light jacket over it, then went out to see about dinner. Everybody sat down in the great room, on cushions around the long, low table, which groaned with the feast Quelt had threatened. Nita began to understand, with some amusement, that Quelt’s mother and father were as much in love with food and its treatment as her own mom had been. It was strange for her, too, to look down the table at the vast array of bowls and plates and platters, filled with dishes hot or cold that sported unfamiliar shapes and colors, greens and blues very much in evidence. She laughed to herself as she saw Kit go straight for the blue foods, so that Quelt’s mother laughed and passed him more of them. For her own part, Nita sat there dealing with her first really leisurely contact with alien foods—smells and textures that she’d never encountered before, but that were nonetheless instantly appetizing.

“We’re lucky this way,” Quelt said, passing Nita a bowl of some bright orange sauce to dribble over a plateful of something that smelled most deliciously of fried chicken but tasted like sweet-and-sour pork. “Our body chemistries are a lot alike; we’re both using iron as the heart of the molecule that carries oxygen around in our blood. So that means there’ll be certain similarities in—”

And then Quelt stopped and laughed. Nita looked up at her with her mouth full, chewing. Quelt said, “As if it matters! Do you want to know what these things are, or would you prefer just to point, and I’ll pass them to you?”

“Pointing’ll do fine for the moment,” Nita said, and she pointed and had many things passed to her. She was grateful that table manners on Alaalu, or at least this part of it, were very similar to many of those on Earth, right down to the short but elegant grace said before the meal: “Here we are,” said Kuwilin, “and here’s all this fine food. May it do us good, so we can thank the Powers for it!”

When they were halfway through the meal, the sun was easing down toward the water outside the dining room window—not a window as such, but just an opening with windbreak shutters folded back out of the way of the view. Quelt’s mother stretched. “This is a good time to take a rest from the food,” she said, “and it won’t run away… or not far.” There was some laughter at that, since everyone was feeling a little overstretched: dinner had featured at least six different kinds of
shesh.

Nita had started out thinking of this as a sort of alien cheese, but then she realized that such an appraisal fell very far short of the mark. There were too many ways to treat the
shesh,
as she found when she made the mistake of getting Kuwilin talking about it. Demair rolled her eyes and started talking to Kit about what life on Earth was like, while Kuwilin held forth on
shesh
—the storage, processing, pressing, coloring, and texturization of the foodstuff; the handling of its seasonal variations; and its preparation for dining, using at least a hundred technical terms that Nita hadn’t realized even occurred in the Speech. Hearing them now, she found herself wondering whether there were some wizards who practiced their art exclusively in the culinary mode, forsaking all other usages.
Or more likely,
she thought,
it’s true what we’ve always read in the manual.. that wizardry is only another kind of science
—
just one with its roots sunk deeper into the universe than most.

For the moment, it didn’t matter. After a while, they all got up and left the table, went outside, and strolled down the beach, watching the sun go down in a great blaze of fire—peach and orange and gold against that sky, which, despite a touch of green, or perhaps because of it, seemed more intensely blue than any Nita had ever seen on Earth. That color ran chills down Nita’s neck, once or twice, when she looked up at it.
What is it?
she wondered.
What is it about this place that reminds me of something else? Whatever else it reminds me of, it’s good…

Ponch gamboled up and down in the water, running at the slight waves, biting them, chasing them out to sea again. Nita, walking with the others, gazed up and down those miles and miles of empty beach, and was astounded. “Can
anyone
live in a place like this?” she said.

Quelt’s mother looked at her in some surprise. “Anyone who likes,” she said. “It’s a little isolated here, but some of us like that. People in other islands, maybe they don’t—but then they have hundreds and thousands of
stad
to sail before they see another human face. This is the biggest island, so we have the Cities here.” She shook her head. “I’ve lived in the Cities—they’re nice if you want to see a thousand faces that you don’t know every day, and maybe there’s a kind of freedom in that. But for my part, perhaps I’m too much of a homebody. Maybe I prefer seeing just two other faces that I know, most days, and hearing the same three flocks of flying sheep come in every day and go again… the water coming up and down, and nothing else.” She smiled, a long, lazy, untroubled look.

“For the rest,” Kuwilin said, “this is no crowded world. Granted, there’s much more sea than land. The sea is openhanded with us, and gives us more than enough food for everyone. People who have more than they need give to those who have less, if they need it, or if they ask for it. Why? How is it in your world?”

Nita started to answer, then stopped herself. She was disinclined to break the perfect spell of quiet that was coming down over her so quickly in this place. She glanced at Kit, who was walking on the far side of Kuwilin, but he was looking out to sea, not paying attention. “It’s different,” she said. “It’s very different. People don’t give that readily in my world.”

“But what’s the matter with them?” Quelt’s mother said. “Don’t they have enough?”

“Of many things,” Nita said, “maybe not. There are so many of us. And while there’s a lot more land on my planet than there is on Alaalu, our world is much smaller.” She pulled out her manual. “See,” she said, paging to the map of Alaalu, which showed Earth beside it for comparison’s sake.

“But it’s such a little planet,” Demair said, looking over Kuwilin’s shoulder at the manual. “And small planets like that are usually rich in metal. Metal makes technology so easy: you must all be wealthy. How can you not have enough of everything?”

Nita shook her head. “It’s going to take so long to explain,” she said.

“You’ll be here for days,” said Demair. “Maybe you can make us understand. If not, don’t worry about it. This is supposed to be a holiday for you, so Quelt’s said.”

“Maybe it’s strange to us,” Kuwilin said, “that people from a rich inner world with so much technology would come here willingly to spend time with… ”

“Shepherds,” Nita said. “That would be the word you’re looking for.”

“Shepherds. So you have
ceiff
as well?”

“Ours don’t fly,” Nita said. “And maybe it’s a good thing, bearing in mind what Earth sheep eat, and how much of it they eat, and what they do with it afterwards… ”

Kuwilin roared with laughter. “Still,” he said, “your planet sounds like a wonder-place!
Ceiff
that don’t fly… ground you can just dig the metal out of… cities all over the place, as many of them as grains of sand!”

“We have a lot of cities,” Nita said, and shook her head. “But I think maybe this is better.” The sun dipped toward that high, distant horizon, went oblate in the thickening atmosphere of the edge of the world—flattened almost to an egg shape—and started to slide down behind the rim of everything. Slowly, high above, stars were coming out.

There was a pause. “About the
shesh,”
Kit said, “can I watch you make it tomorrow?”

“Certainly,” Kuwilin said. “I can always use help. Certain people”—he looked at Quelt with amusement—”are always off all over the planet, serving the world and doing Important Things, and can’t be bothered to stay home and deal with the beasts.”

“Tapi, you’re cruel to me!” Quelt said. “You know I’d sooner stay home and do not-Important Things here. But I have to go see about the Great Vein again tomorrow.” She turned to Nita and Kit. “We have just two veins of metal in our whole world’s crust that are close enough to the surface for me to use wizardry on to pull the metal out directly. Every now and then we need metal in bulk for replacing old machines that have worn out, or building new ones… and I’m the only one here who can get it out in such amounts. All the other metal comes from the plants—”

Kit looked up in surprise. “You get metal from
plants?”

“Oh, yes,” Demair said. “See the reeds up there?” She pointed at the slope far behind them, behind the house.

“The ones we came down through?”

“That’s right. That’s ironwood. The plants were bred a long time ago to concentrate metal oxides from the soil in their tissues. We harvest the reeds and store them until the mobile smelter comes along, once or twice a year. Then we get the metal’s value to trade for other things, if we need them.”

“That’s such a good idea,” Kit said. “Who organizes this? The government?”

Kuwilin and Demair and Quelt all looked at Kit. “What’s a government?” Kuwilin said.

Kit opened his mouth, closed it again.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kuwilin said. “Here’s what we do. If people over on, let’s say, Dafel Island, find that they need metal, they get together and do something about it. They make arrangements to trade for it; or they find empty islands and plant out ironweed for themselves; or they get in touch with Quelt here, and she helps them. Or they ask other people for it, and other people give it to them. Everybody knows that what you give to the world, the world gives back, eventually. That’s its job.”

Demair looked at Kit with slight puzzlement. “Do you mean you have some kind of machine that
makes
people give people things?” Demair said.

Nita had never thought of government in quite those terms before. “You could say that,” she said. “It’s still going to take a lot of explaining…”

“Not right now,” said Demair, putting her arms out to turn them all around as a group. “There’s the rest of dinner, yet.”