Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (3 page)

“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 yours 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.

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.”

“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.”