Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (2 page)

“Okay, you,” Nita said, “come here and have a starring role in a sandwich.”

She reached in, took out the roast chicken, put it on a clean plate, and then unwrapped it. Nita pulled the sharpest knife off the magnetic knife rack by the sink and carved a couple of slices off the breast. She contemplated a third slice, then paused, not wanting to make too much of a pig of herself.

“Uh-oh,”
something said again.

Nita looked around her, but couldn’t see anything.
Something in the dining room?
she thought. “Hello?” she said.

Instead of a reply, there came a clunking noise, like a door being pulled open.

“Kit,” said a female voice, “what’s wrong with the fridge? All the food’s gone. No, wait, though, there’s a really ugly alien in here disguised as a leaky lettuce. Hey, I guess I shouldn’t be rude to it; it’s a visitor.
Welcome to our planet, Mr. Alien!”

This was followed by some muffled remark that Nita couldn’t make out, possibly something Kit was saying. A moment later, Kit’s sister Carmela’s voice came out of Nita’s refrigerator again.
“Hola,
Nita, your phone bills getting too big or something? Interesting way to deal with it… ”

Nita snickered. “No, ‘Mela,” she said into the fridge, “I’m just dying of hunger here. I’ll trade you a roast chicken from the store later on.”

“Won’t be as good as my mama’s,” Carmela said. “But you’re welcome to some of this one. We can’t have you starving. Hey, come on over later. We can shop.”

Nita had to grin at that, and at the wicked twist Carmela put on the last word. “I’ll be over,” she said.

Clunk!
went the door of Kit’s refrigerator, a block and a half away. Or three feet away, depending on how you looked at it. Nita smiled slightly, put the chicken back in the fridge, and closed the door. She’d left a verbal “tag” hanging out of the wizardry she’d worked, like a single strand of yarn hanging off the hem of a sweater. Nita said the word, and the spell unraveled itself to nothing.

She went back to the bread box, got those two heel pieces of bread, which no longer looked so repulsive now that the chicken was here, and started constructing her sandwich, smiling in slight bemusement. “Welcome to our planet, Mr. Alien,” Carmela had said. Nita absolutely approved of the sentiment. What was unusual was that Carmela had used the Speech to express it.

Nita shook her head. Things were getting increasingly strange over at Kit’s house lately, and it wasn’t just the electronics. His family, even his
dog,
seemed to be experiencing the effects of his wizardry more and more plainly all the time, and no one was sure why.
Though Carmela’s always been good with languages,
Nita thought.
I guess I should have expected her to pick up the Speech eventually, once she started to be exposed to it. After all, lots of people who aren’t wizards use it
—
on other planets, anyway. And at least the lettuce didn’t answer her back…

Of course, the fact that it
hadn’t
suggested that it should have been in the compost heap several days ago. Nita got up, opened the fridge again, and fished the lettuce out in a gingerly manner. Carmela was right: It was leaking. Nita put the poor soggy thing in the sink to drain—it would have to be unwrapped before it went into the compost—rinsed and dried her hands, and went back to her sandwich.

“Uh-oh,”
said that small voice again.

Wait a minute, I know who that is…
Nita stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, with half the sandwich in her hand, looking around.

“Spot,” she said, looking around. “Where are you?”

“Uh-oh,”
Spot said.

She couldn’t quite locate the sound.
Is he invisible or something?
“It’s okay, Spot,” Nita said. “It’s me.”

No answer came back. Nita glanced around the dining room for a moment or so, looking on the seats of the chairs, and briefly under them, but she still couldn’t see anything. After a moment she shook her head. Spot was an unusually personal kind of personal computer: he would speak to her and her father occasionally, but never at any length. Probably, Nita thought, this had to do with the fact that he was in some kind of symbiotic relationship with Dairine—part wizard’s manual, part pet, part…

No telling, really.
Nita shook her head and went back to her sandwich. Spot was difficult to describe accurately, partly because he’d been through so much in his short life. The part of this that Nita knew about—Spot’s participation in the creation of a whole species of sentient computers—would have been enough to account for the weird way he sometimes behaved. But he’d been constant companion to Dairine on all her errantry after that, and for all Nita knew, Spot had since been involved in stranger things.

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… ”