“I’ve thought of leaving,” Dairine said, barely above a whisper. “Running away.”
Nita flushed first cold, then hot. “It would kill Dad,” she said. “You know it would.”
Dairine was quiet for a few moments. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t done it. But it doesn’t make it any easier, Neets. And just when I could actually use some help dealing with… with stuff
, the woman they’ve got assigned as my counselor is a complete waste of time. She’s some girl just out of college who’s more nervous about the kids at school than they are about her. What kind of good can she do anybody? Least of all me. She doesn’t even have a clear memory of what it’s like to be a kid anymore. I know she doesn’t: That part of her brain might just as well have a big sign on it saying, ‘Your message here.’ She’s completely relieved not to remember what it was like to be one of us poor, powerless creatures.“ Dairine’s expression went fierce with contempt. ”Just having to look at her makes my brain hurt.“
“I wonder if they could give you Millman, instead,” Nita said. “He’s good.”
“I don’t care,” Dairine said. “I’ll put up with her, with school, with whatever. For Dad’s sake.
And I will not let this break me. But I am going to hate every single water-torture-drop second of it, and I may just let you know about that every now and then.”
She looked up at Nita in defiance.
“Come here and gimme a hug,” Nita said.
Dairine gave her a look. “You’re just saying that because Mom would say it.”
“I’m saying it,” Nita said, furious, “because right now I need a hug.”
The nature of the look Dairine was giving Nita changed. She got up off the hassock, went over to Nita, and hugged her hard. Nita hung on to Dairine, not saying anything for a few moments, then let go of her and went back into the kitchen. She assembled a sandwich, hardly paying attention to what went into it, put it on a plate, and started to take it up to her room. “By the way,” Nita said as she went, and Dairine went after her, “I think your machine buddies have been trying to reach you.”
“Huh?”
“I got a call from one of them this morning. At least I think that’s what it was.”
Nita went into her room and sat down at the desk. Dairine followed her in and sat on the bed. “I haven’t been expecting anything.”
“Then what was this?” In her mind, Nita showed Dairine the image of the clown, going around and around. “And this?” She showed her the image of the robot.
Dairine looked at the two images carefully, especially the second one, and shook her head. “Not for me, Neets,” she said. “Neither of those are any of my guys. These are organic in origin.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The silicon life-forms and the machine intelligences have a specific kind of flavor,” Dairine said. “A couple different flavors, actually, but they’re similar. Like fudge ripple and rocky road.”
Nita gave her sister an amused look. Only Dairine would think of classifying other life-forms’ telepathic signatures in terms of ice cream. “Whatever got in touch with you is organic, all right,” Dairine said. “But you’re right about the distance. A long way off… And it’s thinking — I don’t know — more like an organ than an organism. It doesn’t seem to have any plurals in its thoughts, any sense of existing in relationship to a larger world. It’s all alone.“ She sat silent for a moment, pondering. ”I wonder if it even understands the concept of communication, as such. It might be all by itself in its own pinched-off space. Yet now it’s trying to reach out.“
“Trying to get out, maybe?” Nita said.
Dairine shook her head again. “I don’t know,” she said. “If you don’t know you’re by yourself, in your own universe, how do you know there’s anyone else to try to reach… anywhere to get out to? Really weird.”
She got up, stretched a little listlessly. “Anyway, Neets, that call wasn’t for me,” Dairine said.
“It’s all yours.”
“Great,” Nita said. “All I have to do now is figure out what it wants.”
Dairine wasn’t even listening anymore, though. She was already wandering out the door. Nita watched her go, and let out one more of many quiet, worried breaths. Wandering anywhere wasn’t her sister’s style. Dairine, when she went somewhere, went full tilt, focused like a laser.
Until a month ago
, Nita thought. Until the world changed.
She gulped, feeling the tears rise. No, Nita thought. I am not going to do that right now. I am going to sit here with the manual, have a look at the tutorials in the Speech, and see if there’s something obvious I’m missing. Which is entirely possible, because there’s always more of the Speech to learn. But when whoever this is calls again, this time I’m going to understand it.
“Oh,” Dairine said. “By the way…”
Nita looked up to see Dairine standing in the doorway again. “I’m sorry about this morning,” Dairine said.
“Uh, okay,” Nita said.
“Really, Neets. Very sorry. I was being incredibly stupid.”
“Uh, yeah,” Nita said, unwilling to agree too forcefully with this sentiment, no matter how true it was. “Thanks.”
“So would you kindly get off your butt and bring my bed back from Pluto?”
Nita smiled slightly and reached for her manual.
That night, when the call came again, while she was asleep, she was ready for it.
Nita had spent the better part of four rather frustrating hours buried in her manual after her talk with Dairine, and had been forced to realize that no matter how she might cram, she wasn’t going to be able to make a big difference in her vocabulary in the Speech in a single night, or for that matter, a single month. Like any other serious language study, it was going to take time. In the short term, it made more sense to concentrate on being able to make as much sense as possible of the next dream, when it came. That meant being in control of the dream, instead of just wandering around in it.
What people had come in recent years to call lucid dreaming had always been a tool for wizards.
In some ways the mind was at its most flexible when unconscious, and therefore not insistently trying to make sense of everything. Human logic wasn’t the only kind, and it could get in the way.
The dream-state’s ready acceptance of just about everything often was a useful tool for understanding and getting comfortable with the thought processes of a species you didn’t know well.
The spell to induce lucid dreaming was very easy to construct — hardly more than an instruction in the Speech to one’s own brain to handle some of its chemistry, but only some, as if it were still awake. It took Nita about ten minutes and about the same effort as running up and down stairs a few times to knit the appropriate words of the Speech into a loose, glowing chain about a foot and a half long. This she fastened around her throat, necklace style, though the actual fastening took her several minutes: It was hard to do the wizard’s knot with both hands out of sight behind her neck. Oh, the heck with this
, Nita finally thought, giving up. She pulled the loose ends of the spell out in front where she could see them, did the “knot” up that way to clasp the “necklace” shut, and got into bed.
After that, it was just a matter of getting to sleep.
This took longer than usual when she was expecting something to happen. But it was becoming so normal for it to take a long time, lately, that Nita was beginning to just accept this. Gradually, enough of the tension and anticipation slipped away to let the fatigue of the day do its job on Nita, dropping her over the edge of consciousness into sleep.