“Have you been upgrading Spot again?” Nita said.
“He’s been upgrading himself,” Dairine said. “Wireless, optical… some other stuff.” She looked affectionately at the bag as she shouldered it, and the little eye on its silvery stalk disappeared back down between the backpack and its flap.
“I wouldn’t let anybody see him, if I were you,” Nita said.
“They can’t. But he can see them. Gotta go, Neets.”
“See you…”
Dairine left. Nita spent some moments more reading the manual in the quiet, until suddenly she realized that if she didn’t get out of there, she was the one who was going to be in trouble for being late. She ran off to get her own backpack, and her manual went floating after her.
The rest of the day went by fairly quickly, partly because Nita’s concerns about the communications between her and “her aliens” kept bringing Nita back to the manual in every free moment that wasn’t taken up with class work. She hardly thought seriously about anything else until just before her lunch period, when Nita suddenly remembered that today was when the time and day for her next session with Mr. Millman would be posted.
When the bell rang, she made her way down into the corridor in the south wing of the school, where the administrative offices were, and from there into the main office, where the bulletin board for the special services messages was located. Nita found the pinned-up folded message that said N.
CALLAHAN, pulled it off the board, and headed out into the corridor, opening it.
The message said, “Dear Nita: 7:30 A.M., Monday. Hope the magic’s going okay. Don’t forget to bring some cards. I want to find out how to keep them from falling out of my sleeve. R. Millman.“
Nita looked at this and was tempted to shred the note right down to its component atoms. What in the worlds made me say that to him, she thought, shoving the note into the pocket of her jeans and stalking off down the hall.
By the time she got to the cafeteria, though, she’d shrugged off the annoyance and was once again worrying at the clown-robot-knight problem. Nita got herself a sandwich and a fruit juice, sat down by herself off to one side, and spent another half hour studying how species that didn’t understand plurals handled the Speech. It was complex. Mostly they wound up repeating singular forms with a redactive or “virtual” plural, which—
It’s sounding a little dry in there, Neets…
Nita smiled. You have no idea, she said, and shut the manual. Nita disposed of her lunch tray and went out of the cafeteria, into the small side parking lot. Kit was leaning against the chain-link fence on the far side, hugging himself a little against the cold, watching a boys’ gym class out in the athletic field running easy laps to cool down after soccer practice.
Nita went to lean against the fence beside him. “You know any card tricks?” she said under her breath.
He looked at her oddly. “No. Why?”
“I did something incredibly stupid. I mentioned magic to Millman at our last meeting. He thought I meant magician stuff, though, the sawing-people-in-half kind of magic. Now he wants me to show him some.”
Kit stared at Nita, then burst out laughing. “You should do some wizardry, and let him think it’s magic. I bet you can do all kinds of fancy card tricks when you can really make them vanish.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Nita frowned. “I’m not sure I like the idea, though. Making the real thing look like something fake…It’s too much like lying.”
Kit nodded. “What made you mention magic to him at all, though?”
“I wish I could remember. It was an impulse, and I felt like such a dork afterward.” She sighed.
“Never mind. Now I have to learn card tricks in my endless free time.”
Kit raised his eyebrows. “You make any headway with your aliens?”
“Yeah. Or rather, I’m not sure.”
“Not sure they’re aliens?”
“Not sure they’re aliens, plural. Then again, let’s not get into the plural thing. I’m having enough trouble with it.” Nita rubbed her face. “I seem to have been talking to the same one at least twice.
I’m not sure if I was talking to him, or it, the first time, the time with the clown on the bike.”
“But you understood him this time, anyway.”
“I’m not sure of that, either. I think I did… but I keep thinking he was holding something back, or having trouble saying something. And it could have been important.” She sighed. “I’m just going to have to keep trying. What about you? Did you have time to go after your Ordeal kid again?”
“Not yet. Ponch is still worn-out from the last time. I’m going to try to get in touch with Darryl again tonight, maybe tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come along?”
He sounded almost wistful. Nita gave it a moment’s thought, but then shook her head: She might feel more like working today, but she still wasn’t sure of her ability to be of use in a crisis situation.
“Give me a little more time,” she said. “I want to work on this Speech problem for the moment. I think if I bear down on it hard enough, I may make a breakthrough.”
“I wouldn’t want to derail you,” Kit said. “But keep me posted.”
“You okay?” Nita said.
Kit looked at her a little strangely. “Why?”
“You look kinda worn-out yourself.”
He looked surprised at that, then shrugged. “What Ponch does,” he said, “it takes a lot out of me, too, maybe more than I realize. I do feel a little run-down. It’s okay: I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight and be fine tomorrow.”
“What is going on with Ponch?” Nita said. “You were still looking for answers to that…”
Kit shook his head. “I think I’m going to be looking for answers for a while. Trouble is, every time I try to settle down to work it out with the manual, something new goes wrong with the TV. Or something else interrupts me.”
The bell rang. “See that? The story of my life,” Kit said.
“Not just yours,” Nita said. “Look, call me later.
You ought to take a look at what I’m working on from the ‘inside’; maybe you can make some sense of it.“
“Right,” Kit said.
They parted company and went off to their classes. Nita more or less sleepwalked through her afternoon algebra and statistics class, grateful not to be called on. Her mind was still tangled up in virtual plurals, non-pronominal pronouns, and the question of what could be that wrong with Kit’s TV that it would prove a distraction to him. The second-to-last period that afternoon was a study hall, and Nita got no more than three sentences into an essay on the abandonment of the gold standard before ditching the essay to return to the manual again; the gold standard made even virtual plurals look good by comparison.
Toward the end of that period, though, and during the next one — a music appreciation class full of jangly, early twentieth-century twelve-tone music, which Nita found impossible for anyone to appreciate — she started wondering exactly what was going on with her. Sure, she might occasionally detest her homework— more than occasionally, especially in the case of her present social studies class: Her teacher had a great love of saddling her students with essays on apparently useless subjects. But detesting the homework didn’t mean Nita didn’t get it done.
Oh, come on. It’s not like the universe is going to come apart because I’m less than excited about the gold standard and feel more like working on wizardry.