Yet the excuse sounded hollow. More to the point, it sounded like an excuse. When the bell rang for the last time that day, at two-forty-five, Nita walked out through the exuberant Friday afternoon rush to the lockers in a somber mood. She looked for Kit in the parking lot, didn’t see him, and wasn’t surprised: He had quicker, quieter ways of getting home than the other kids here.
She could have taken that same way home, but didn’t. She walked home slowly, thinking. Nita paused only long enough in her house to dump her books and change out of her school clothes into something more comfortable — looser jeans, a floppier sweatshirt — and to check on Dairine. Her sister was lying on her stomach, on her bed, with Spot lying on the bed next to her; the little computer had put out a couple of stalky eyes to look at a book Dairine was reading.
“School okay?” Nita said.
Dairine gave Nita the kind of look that someone in the Middle Ages might have given a relative who asked if the black plague was okay. Her only other answer was to bounce herself up and down on the mattress a little. The bed creaked loudly.
“Did not,” Nita said, and went downstairs again to get her parka.
“Where you going?” came the voice from upstairs.
“Tom’s.”
Tom and Carl’s backyard was already going twilit, this time of year, even so soon after school.
Nita paused there a moment, looking up at the sky, which was clear for a change after several days’ worth of cloudy weather, and wished that spring would hurry up — she hated these short days. She meandered over to the koi pond and glanced down into it. The pond wasn’t heated, but it didn’t freeze, either; into the pond and the ground beneath it, Carl had set a small utility wizardry that acted on the same general principle as a heat pump, keeping the water at an even sixty degrees Fahrenheit.
All the same, at this time of the year the koi were naturally a little sluggish. Right now they were mostly gathered together under the weeds and water lilies down at one end of the pond. Nita peered down, able to see nothing but the occasional flick of tail or fin, and once a coppery eye glancing back up at her. “Hey,” she said. “Got any words of wisdom?” The single koi that had looked back, a white one with an orange patch on its head, drifted up to just beneath the surface and regarded her.
Then it stuck its mouth up into the air.
“Seen in plain daylight the firefly’s just one more bug; but night restores it
—”
Nita raised her eyebrows. The koi gave her a look that suggested she was a waste of its time, and drifted straight back under the lily pads again.
“If you listen to them for too long,” Tom said as he pushed open the patio door, “you won’t be able to say anything that takes more than seventeen syllables.”
“I should send Dairine over,” Nita said.
“Even their powers have limits,” Tom said, as Nita came in. “I just made some tea. Can I interest you?”
“Yeah. It’s cold.” Nita slipped out of her parka, draped it over one of Tom’s dining room chairs.
“They’re predicting snow,” Tom said, pouring each of them a mug of tea and bringing them over to the table.
“That’s funny. It’s clear.”
“For the moment. There’s a storm working its way up the coast, though. Four to six inches, they said.”
Nita gave him a wry look. “Why couldn’t this happen on Monday and get us a day off from school?” she said.
“There are about thirty different answers to that, from the strictly meteorological mode down to the ethical,” Tom said, looking equally wry, “but they all factor down more or less to mean, ‘Just because. So cope with it.’”
Nita nodded and smiled a little, but the smile fell off almost immediately. “I need to ask you something.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Tom said, “though Annie and Monty doubtless have a different opinion. Anyway, what’s up?”
She looked at him across the table. “Am I using wizardry to avoid life?” Nita said.
Tom raised his eyebrows. “Wizardry is Life,” he said. “Or, at the very least, in service of Life.
By definition. So, equally by definition, the answer to that question is no. Want to try rephrasing?”
Nita sat for a moment and thought. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with the manual.”
“So do we all.”
“No, I mean a lot of time. For me, anyway.”
“And this means—?”
Nita paused, wondering how to phrase this. “My last really big wizardry,” she said, “didn’t work.”
“Uh, there we’d have to disagree.”
“I don’t mean in terms of wizardry,” Nita said. “I mean in terms of what the pissed-off places in the back of my brain think about it. My mom still died.”
“Mmm,” Tom said. His expression was noncommittal.
“What I want to know is — is it possible to use research as a way to put off doing other stuff you should be doing?”
“Again, anything’s possible. What is it you think you should be doing?”
Nita shook her head, pushed her teacup back and forth on the table mat. “I don’t know.
Something more… active.”
“You think research is passive?”
“Compared to what I’ve been doing up until now, yeah.”
Nita reached sideways into the air for her manual, came out with it, opened it to the listings area, and pushed it over to Tom, tapping on her listing. “ ‘Optional,’” Nita said. “I’m not real wild about that.”
“I’m not sure I read that construct the same way,” Tom said. “I’d translate it more as meaning your options are open: that you’re not concretely assigned to anything at the moment. Maybe a better rendering would be ‘freelance.’” He glanced at her manual. “But then you seem to be taking a look at the vocabulary end of things at the moment.”
“Please,” Nita said. “I feel so ignorant. Me with my whole six hundred and fifty words.”
“Maybe it’ll be some consolation to you that the average English-speaking person’s day-to-day vocabulary is only a thousand or fifteen hundred words,” Tom said. “But I understand how you feel.
And the Speech is so much more complex than English in terms of specialized vocabulary. It has to be, if you’re going to name things properly. And so that means doing vocabulary-building all the time.”
He knocked one knuckle on the tabletop a couple of times. Immediately his version of the manual appeared on the table — seven or eight thick volumes like phone books. “This one,” Tom said, pulling a single volume out of the stack — while the ones above it considerately remained hovering in place over where the middle one had been—“this one is my vocabulary work for this year.”
Nita looked at it in horror as Tom dropped it to the table and flipped it open. “Remind me never to become a Senior,” she said.
“As if you can avoid it when it happens,” Tom said, sounding resigned. “Nita, you wouldn’t be the first wizard to get confused about the apparent differences between active and passive work in wizardry. But the Powers That Be don’t see the distinction — or They see it as largely illusory.” He paged through the book, stopping about halfway through to glance at something.
“If you go through this, you’ll see often enough where it says that wizards are told only what they need to know ‘for the work at hand.’ Which leaves you with the question: What do they find in it when there is no work at hand — no official assignment? You’d be surprised. But it’s never anything that goes to waste. Sooner or later, every wizard’s work, however minor, does someone, somewhere, some good. It’s an extension of the ‘all is done for each’ principle.”