“Okay,” Nita said. “See if I go out of my way to bring you stuff from the bait shop again.”
Doitsu eyed Nita from under the water. “The mealworms were lovely,” he said. “But your scansion’s execrable. ‘Wha’d’?”
Nita rolled her eyes. “I’m just getting the hang of this! Cut me some slack.”
“When you can construct a haiku without apostrophes, sure,” Doitsu said. “And not a moment sooner. If you’re going to be an oracular, you’ve got standards to maintain. So get out there and make me not want to spit in your eye.” And he vanished down into the water again.
Nita shifted the bag of tomatoes to the other arm. “I’m getting trash-talked by fish,” she said under her breath. “Something’s wrong with this picture.” She sighed and took the flagstone path around the side of the house, heading for home.
It wasn’t too long a walk, which was a good thing: though she kept shifting the tomato bag from hand to hand, both her arms were still killing her by the time she got close to her house. As Nita came down the sidewalk in the early sunset light, she looked at her front yard— all covered with ground ivy, and with the single big maple tree standing up out of the middle of it, shading everything— and thought, Why does it look so little these days? And the house, too. It was a standard enough bungalow for this neighborhood— white-shingled, black-roofed, two stories, with the attic partly converted—but lately it had seemed much smaller than it had this time last year. As Nita walked up the driveway, the memory of the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility came back to her unbidden: that vast main concourse illuminated with its strange sourceless night lighting, its tremendously high roof-sky seemingly absent and the whole concourse open to the huge, pulsating, many-colored stars of its home planet’s neighborhood. After you’d been there as much as I have this last month, anything’d look small, Nita thought. That place has got to be the size of New Jersey. Well, Rhode Island, anyway…
She went up the stairs to the back door, expecting to have to let herself in: but the inside door was open. Nita opened the screen door, braced it behind her so it wouldn’t slam, and dumped the bagged tomatoes on the drainer by the sink as she went through the kitchen. “Daddy?”
“He had to go back to the shop for something,” came a voice from inside, and Nita grinned, because it wasn’t her sister’s voice coming from the living room, but someone else’s entirely. “He’ll be back in an hour, he said.”
Nita went through the dining room into the living room. There Kit’s older sister Carmela was sitting on the floor amid a heap of cushions and a scatter of TV remotes. Nita looked at the remotes in bemusement, as she couldn’t remember their TV having quite that many. There was the VCR remote, sure, and the one for the TV, and the—
“Ohaiyo gozaimas’!” the TV yelled at her as she entered.
Nita stopped still. Oh no… she thought. “Mela,” she said, “you didn’t—”
“I brought our remote over,” Carmela said, and stretched her fluffy-sweatered self out among the cushions, toying with her single long dark braid. “Dairine said it might be smart to train your TV to get the alien cable channels, the way Kit did with ours. This is bargain-shopping season, after all! And we don’t want to freak out the visitors at home…”
Nita perched briefly on the arm of her dad’s easy chair behind Carmela and looked at the TV. It wasn’t nearly as fancy or new a model as Kit’s new entertainment-center TV was, but all the same it was showing a channel-listing page as sleek and modern as anything Kit’s set could boast. And as Carmela punched the “scroll” button, the online guide shifted through page after page after page of channels that didn’t exist anywhere on this planet. The entries on the scrolling pages were all in the curving, curling characters of the wizardly Speech, which many worlds used as a common language of discourse. “Wait a minute,” Nita said. “What visitors?”
“Ooh,” Carmela said, “you mean you haven’t heard? Guess who’s coming home from college!”
“No, I did hear,” Nita said, easing herself down off the easy chair to flop down among the cushions, “but I thought that wasn’t till July…”
Carmela shook her head until her braid flopped around. She punched the remote, which immediately changed the TV Guide channel to one of the many thousands of alien shopping channels available to users of GalacTrans or whatever other unearthly “cable” provider Carmela had hooked them into. “Nope,” she said, watching absently as some alien being apparently made entirely of wreathing chartreuse smoke did its best to demonstrate the virtues of what Nita thought was some kind of household appliance, maybe a food processor. It picked up one indecipherable “accessory” after another with tendrils of green smoke, waving them around. “That whole thing blew up,” Carmela said, leaning back and briefly looking at Nita upside down. “Helena had a fight with her boyfriend, so no Paris for them! She’s already cashed in the plane tickets. She’s going to come back next week and stay here until her college choir’s trip to Romania or wherever they’re going…”
“Slovenia, Kit said,” Nita said.
“Whatever. At least she’ll have fun with the vampires!”
Nita shook her head. “No vampires,” she said. “Some undead, yeah, and some confused Goth wannabes. But there haven’t been real turn-into-a-bat-and-flap-around vampires since 1652.”
“Really? What happened in 1652?”
“Some other time, okay?” Nita said, increasingly distracted by the chartreuse-smoke creature, which was now pouring itself rapidly into what looked like the container of the food processor and pulling a lid down over it. A second later, a tentacle of green smoke came curling out of the container and punched one of the buttons on the processor’s front. The tendril was abruptly sucked back into the main mass of the creature as many peculiar things started happening inside the container at that point, including small lights flashing like sparks inside an outraged microwave.
“So when’s Helena’s trip?”
“August the first,” Carmela said, shaking her head.
“Gonna be tough at home till then, Neets.” She raised her eyebrows, looking at Nita out of the corner of her eye. “I know,” Carmela said. “Let’s do a road trip. Let’s go over to Ireland and see your buddy Ronan!”
Nita rolled her eyes. “He is not my buddy!”
“Yeah, and isn’t it wonderful,” Carmela said. Her real intentions, Nita thought, couldn’t possibly be as predatory as her smile made them appear. I hope! “But isn’t it August when everything gets crazy in Ireland? It did last time…”
“Believe me,” Nita said, “what happened then is not a regularly scheduled event.” She sat there for a moment more watching the TV, where the “blender” seemed to have stopped— at least the flashing and smoking going on inside it had. The mist creature came out, not yellow-green now, but pink, and waved its tendrils around: a long line of number-characters in the Speech, probably the “food processor’s” details, started flashing on the screen. Nita shook her head. “I came in late,” she said. “What’s this about?”
“It’s a portable wanjaxer,” Carmela said. “On sale, it looks like. Which is all right, except I don’t know if I really want to get into wanjaxing. I mean, I’m as broad-minded and tolerant as the next girl, but there are all these hue issues…”
Nita rolled her eyes. Carmela had been spending a lot of time lately studying alien lifestyles, and her attempts to explain some of the finer points could take hours. “Forget it,” Nita said. “You see Kit before he left?”
Carmela looked at Nita in shock. “You didn’t? You mean he just ditched you and ran off halfway around the world?” She paused. “Is it halfway?”
Nita frowned, considering. “I’d have to look it up. How’d you know where he went?”