“Everybody should have a few floppy shirts,” Nita said. “Don’t distract me.” She flipped through a few pages and found what she was looking for, the manual’s “persona” utility. “What’s your birthday again?”
“November sixth,” Carmela said, knotting up the T-shirt into a more fashion-conscious configuration above the waist of her jeans. She peered over Nita’s shoulder, watching the way the Speech-characters on the manual page shifted and changed as she spoke. “Look at them jump around! Is that analyzing my voice?”
“And your brainwaves, and a lot of other things,” Nita said. “It makes a shorthand version of your name in the Speech: that gets pasted into the spell. What was the last book you read?”
“Gulliver’s Travels,” Carmela said, watching a new layer of characters appear and nest themselves in among the first group, shoving them around in various directions and changing the colors in which they appeared on the page. “The uncensored one. Hey, what do you mean ‘shorthand’? Is it safe to put shorthand anything in a spell?”
“Safe enough for this,” Nita said, watching the Speech-characters knit themselves into a little thorny circlet on the page, bristling with attachment-spurs that would hook into the larger spell. “We’re not going out of atmosphere, and less than fifty-eight thousand miles total. Not enough for significant error to build up.” Then Nita wrinkled her nose. “Wasn’t that kind of gross?”
“What, the book? Come on. I don’t know why that parents’ group keeps trying to ban it. You’d think school kids had never heard that people pee.” Carmela snickered. “Maybe the grownups are just trying to keep word from getting out.”
Nita smiled slightly as the diagnostic fitted another level of meaning into the long sentence-acronym it was assembling from the data that came with Carmela’s physical presence. A broad spectrum of information about her was being summed up and pulled into the construct: it’d be interesting to analyze it all in detail later on, though some of the information was already giving Nita second thoughts. “Your favorite color is this shade of yellow?” Nita said, putting her finger on one part of the Speech construct and pulling that set of characters off to one side, out into the air. She had to wince at the little bead of light that came to life at the tail end of the character chain. It was a particularly eye-watering shade of citrus yellow-green.
“This week, yeah,” Carmela said. “Next week, who knows?”
Nita shrugged: at least the routine was picking up its data correctly. “Okay,” she said, and let go of the character string: it snapped back into the circlet where it belonged. “Great— we’re set. Two seconds…”
Nita turned back to the center of the manual. “Gating circles, please?” she said in the Speech. The manual fell open at the place where she stored her transit circles. “Thank you.” She reached into the page and pulled one out, an on-Earth transit routine that had her own Speech-name and the transit’s starting location, her bedroom, woven into it already. With a flick of her wrist she dropped it to the floor around the spot near the window where the two of them stood. Then Nita turned back to the page where she’d generated Carmela’s shorthand name. Carefully she lifted the long string of glowing characters out of the page and dropped it near Carmela, where there was a receptor socket ready to take it in the larger transit circle.
Carmela looked down at it all suspiciously. “Are you sure this is safe?” she said.
Nita gave Carmela an amused look. “This from somebody who let a TV remote install a worldgate in her bedroom closet? Come on. You should really have Sker’ret check that, anyway. He’s the expert.”
Nita shut the manual, looked at the spell that lay burning on the floor around them, and started to say the words of the Wizard’s Knot that would fasten the spell closed and start it going.
You’re forgetting something…
Nita’s jaw dropped. “Oh, wow, you’re right!” she said. “Mela, wait right here. Don’t touch anything!”
She jumped over the edge of the spell-circle and ran downstairs. Nita trotted through the kitchen, shut and locked the back door— something else she’d forgotten— and then picked up the plastic shopping bag of tomatoes from beside the sink. You’re welcome, said the peridexis.
Nita rolled her eyes. “Everybody gives me a hard time,” she said, heading back upstairs. “Thanks, Bobo.”
In Nita’s bedroom, Carmela was standing there with her arms folded and an I’m-waiting-patiently,- what-do-you-mean-don’t-touch-anything? expression on her face. “Does your invisible friend possibly have a secret identity?” she said. “A cute one?”
Nita gave Carmela a look. “You behave,” she said, “or I’m going to let your mama and pop know just what they’re trying to turn loose on the poor unsuspecting nerdboys of CalTech.”
“Please,” Carmela said, sounding unusually fervent even for her. “Just do that, and I’ll fall at your feet and kiss them forever.”
“Yet another image I didn’t need,” Nita said. She looked down at the transit spell and began, once more, to speak the words in the Speech.
The world always seems to press in all around to hear a spell being spoken. As Nita said the words, and heard the merely audible sounds of the everyday world go quiet under the pressure of that larger regard, she started to become strangely aware of something else: the sense that the spell itself was reacting strangely to something else in the circle. The peridexis, she thought. She’d noticed this before, recently, when heading out for offplanet work— Carmela’s presence in the spell merely added an unusual edge to the effect, as the peridexis shifted its presence to adapt to her. As the spell pressed in with more force around them, Nita wondered for the umpteenth time how she was going to get used to having what seemed to be wizardry itself in her head with her. It wasn’t all a bad thing: she’d kept a little of the increase in power which all Earth’s younger wizards had experienced during the recent crisis, when others had lost theirs much sooner. But she couldn’t get rid of the idea that there was something about all this she wasn’t understanding yet, and she needed to get to grips with it pretty quick…
The silence leaned in around them, becoming total. Light started fading as well, leaving the two of them, for the long, strange stretch between one breath and the next, marooned in an odd daylight darkness. For that little time, Nita and Carmela were all that seemed to exist: and of the two of them, Carmela seemed much less concerned about it all, standing as casually there in the spell-circle as someone waiting for a bus. Nita turned slightly to read and say the last words of the spell, feeling the world resisting them. It always resisted a little at the end of a gating: no matter how sweetly you persuaded a place to let you stop being where you were while it stayed the same, the local physicality hung onto you and complained to the last. What’s funny, Nita thought, is that I never really noticed it until now. Was I always in too much of a rush? Am I just hypersensitive because of this change-of-specialty thing? Or is it the peridexis? Whatever—
She pushed through the resistance, said the spell’s last word, and added the final syllables of the Wizard’s Knot to make it all come real. Reality, finally becoming resigned to the wizardry, surrendered. Everything went black: then not quite black, but the deepest possible blue—
***
Heat: that was the first thing that made an impression— heat that even at dawn still pressed in all around and briefly took your breath. Nita glanced around to make sure that Carmela was all right, for in the direction they’d been facing, the sky was still fairly dark. Then Nita groaned and put the tomato bag down on the indefinite-colored, sandy ground, massaging the arm that had been holding it for what now felt like about a century.