“As in first contact with an alien species?”
“I think so,” Nita said. “We’ve been having some trouble communicating.”
Her dad shook his head. “I should get you to talk to my cut-flower distributor,” he said. “If you can get through to something from another planet, maybe you could even get through to him.”
Nita had heard enough stories about her dad’s troubles with this particular supplier in the past couple of years to make her uncertain. “I might need more power than I’ve got at the moment,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” her dad said. “”What exactly did you do to your sister yesterday?“
Nita raised her eyebrows. “I got her to see sense,” she said.
Nita’s dad gave her a loving but skeptical look. “Using what kind of nuclear weapon?” he said.
“Just so I know when the government calls.”
Humor
, she thought. When was the last time I heard Daddy make a joke? Since… well. Since then.
“I moved her bedroom furniture around,” Nita said. “Did a couple of other things… nothing lifethreatening.”
She looked at her dad over the rim of her mug of tea as she took a drink. “Not that I didn’t think about it.”
Her dad sighed. “You wouldn’t have been the first one,” he said, rinsing out his coffee cup. He got his coat off the hook by the door and shrugged into it. “Keep an eye on her, though, will you?”
“Sure, Daddy.”
Her dad came over and gave her a hug that lingered for a moment. He put his chin down on the top of her head, something else he hadn’t done for a while, and said, “You’ve been the one holding everything together.
And that’s not fair to you. I feel like I haven’t been doing everything I could…“
Nita shook her head. “I’m not sure I see it that way, Daddy,” she said, and that was all she could get out.
He squeezed her, let her go. “The shop’s open late tonight,” he said. “I won’t be home till nine.
You have anything planned?”
Nita shook her head. “I need to do some research,” she said. “If I have to go out, it won’t be for long, and nowhere far.”
“Okay. Bye…”
She leaned against the counter again, leafing through her manual, while the sound of her dad’s car faded off down the road. She thought she knew how he felt: as if he was the weak link in the family. But she often felt that way herself, and she knew Dairine did, too — and they couldn’t all be right. This was something that had come up in one of her earliest talks with Mr. Millman, a simple piece of logic that had completely eluded Nita until then — probably her first sign that Millman was not just some “good idea” wished on her by the school, but was someone genuinely worth listening to. Nita knew now that all you could do was try to let the sense of inadequacy pass over you, or the other person, and dissipate. Arguing too hard about it was likely to make the other person think you were trying to hide the truth from them.
She sighed and turned another page. The size of her manual’s linguistics section had nearly tripled since she got up with the day’s research in mind, and she was left now with the realization that her own knowledge of the Speech was even more basic than she’d thought it was. I can’t believe how dumb I’ve been about this
, she thought. The quick vocabulary test she’d taken before her dad came down for his coffee had suggested that Nita was readily familiar with about 650 terms in the Speech… out of a possible 750,000. And more words were being rediscovered or coined every day by wizards of every species. There were even regional dialects and variants, alternate recensions used by species whose physiologies or brain structure, or sometimes even the structure of their home universe, meant that the most basic forms of the Speech had to be altered to make sense. I’ve been treating this like it was a dead language
, Nita thought. But it’s alive. It’s the language of Life Itself: How could it not be?
And then, no matter how many of the words you might know, there was always the question of context… the way a species used the Speech. Some species understood it clearly, but meant very different things by their usage of it than other species did. Some members of other species, too, whether wizards or not, might have only a beginner’s acquaintance with the Speech, a most basic understanding of how to use it. Like it looks like I have, Nita thought, turning the manual’s pages ruefully.
So the question is: Was I the one being incompetent the other day, or was the robot? Or the clown
? Because of the way she felt lately, Nita thought the incompetence was a lot more likely to have been on her side. And how come I got so little from the knight? Nita remembered Dairine’s line about the robot, about how the species contacting Nita seemed to have no plurals, possibly even no personal pronouns. What she’d heard last night seemed to confirm the idea. He never said “we,” she thought. But then, he never said “I,” either. There was something so…I don’t know…so limited about the way he was expressing himself. Was that just because I was having trouble dealing with the way he used the Speech? Or was he hiding something?
And why?
She leaned there on her folded arms for a while, looking rather glumly at the manual, and didn’t even bother looking up when Dairine came padding in wearing one of their dad’s T-shirts, hunting her breakfast. “Morning.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, turning over another page covered with necessary vocabulary that she didn’t know.
Dairine stuck her head in the refrigerator. “My bed creaks now,” she said.
“It’s always creaked,” Nita said as Dairine came out with the milk. “That’s because you jump on it.”
“I think it’s because it just spent the better part of a day down a crevasse full of liquid nitrogen,” Dairine said, getting a bowl for her cereal.
“If it spent any time in liquid nitrogen, it wouldn’t just creak,” Nita said. “It’d shatter.”
“Yeah, well, I’m thinking your wizardry wasn’t temperature-tight,” Dairine said, pouring first cereal and then milk. “I think you dropped a variable.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I bet you did.”
“Didn’t.”
Dairine gave Nita a look that said, Yes, you did, you idiot, and went out into the dining room with her cereal.
Nita smiled slightly as she turned another page. At least Dairine seemed to be back to normal for the moment. Of course, it might be a ploy to lull me into a false sense of security. But Nita thought her sister knew better than to bother trying to mislead her just now, when Nita’s fuse was shorter than usual. Next time, it might not be just Dairine’s bed that wound up down a crevasse… and Dairine’s present power levels weren’t what they had been a while ago. Nita’s couple of years’ more experience as a wizard might be enough temporarily to keep Dairine in line.
She raised her eyebrows and went back to the vocabulary list. I really wish there were ways to just magically make all this information go into my head
, Nita thought. Oh well…
Dairine finished her cereal and went to get dressed, and Nita kept reading, turning page after page in the manual, looking for a hint as to what she might have been missing. It was at least an hour later when Dairine came by again, dressed, with the backpack she used as a book bag over her shoulder; Nita glanced up just long enough to see Dairine putting her coat on, and to notice the small, glowing, rose-colored eye looking at her from inside the bag.