Nita sat there in the grip of an attack of complete chagrin. What an utter dork I've been, she thought. I'm going straight over there to apologize. No, I'm not going to wait even that long.
She flipped back to the messaging pages, touched the message from Kit to wake up the reply function. "Kit?" she said in the Speech. "Can we talk?"
Send?
"Send it," Nita said.
Then she waited. But to her complete astonishment, the page just flashed once, leaving her message sitting where it was. Message cannot be dispatched at this time. Please try again later.
What?? "How come?"
The notification blanked out, replaced by the words: Addressee is not in ambit. Please try again later. Nita stared. She had never seen such a description before and didn't have any idea what it meant.
She put the manual down on the desk. "Keep trying," Nita said, and went downstairs. It was quiet; there was no smell of anyone having been making breakfast down there. / may be the only one up.
Nita picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Kit's number. It rang a couple of times, then someone picked up. "Hello?"
It was Kit's sister. "Hola, Carmela!"
"'Ola, Nita," said Carmela, in a somewhat odd voice—she had her mouth full. There was a pause while she swallowed. "You missed him; he's not here."
"Where'd he go, do you know?"
"Nope. He left a note on the fridge; must've been early... said he was going out to do some wizard thing and he'd be back later."
"Today, you think?"
"Oh yeah, today. If he was gonna be gone longer than tonight, he sure would have told Pop and Mama, and they would've screamed, and I would've heard it."
Nita had to chuckle. "Okay, Mela. If he comes in, tell him I called?" "Sure, Neets. No problem."
"Thanks. Bye-bye."
"Byeeee..."
Nita hung up. He's out on errantry... but where? I should have been able to find him. It shouldn't matter if he was on the Moon, or even halfway out of the galaxy. His manual still would have taken the message. It's not like the manuals care about light speed, or anything like that.
After a few moments Nita went back upstairs to see what the manual might be showing. The last page still hadn't changed.
/ don't believe this, Nita thought. I ought to call Tom and Carl and see what they say. Where is he that the manual can't find him?!
She picked up the manual and started to take it downstairs to the phone with her, then stopped. She would have to tell Tom and Carl what had been going on, and she was too embarrassed.
But where was Kit?
Down the hall Dairine's door opened, and her sister wandered down toward her in the direction of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a huge Fordham T-shirt of their dad's. She looked at Nita vaguely. "What's for breakfast?"
"Confusion," Nita said, rather sourly. "What?"
"Nothing yet. Nobody's up. And I can't find Kit."
Dairine stopped and stared at her, pushing the hair out of her eyes and yawning. "Why? Where is he?" "Somewhere the manual can't find him."
"What?"
"Look at this!" Nita was concerned enough to show Dairine her manual, even though it meant she would see the messages above the strange new notification. Dairine looked at the back page and shook her head.
"I've never seen that before," she said. "You sure it's not a malfunction or something?" Nita snorted. "Have you ever seen a manual malfunction?"
"I have to admit," Dairine said slowly, "if I did, I'd get worried... considering What powers them. Come on, let's see if mine's doing the same thing."
Nita followed Dairine to her room and glanced at where the pile of stuff from yesterday had mostly been dumped on the floor. "You'd better take care of this before Mom gets up," Nita said. "She'll have some new and never-before-seen species of cow."
"Plenty of time for that," Dairine said, going over to her desk and knocking one knuckle on the outside of the laptop's case. "She was up till half past forever last night with Dad's stuff."
The laptop sprouted its legs again and stood up on them, stretching them one after another like a centipede that thought it was a cat. "Morning, Spot," Dairine said.
"Mmg," said the laptop in a small scratchy voice.
"Manual functions?"
"Spcfy."
"Messaging," Dairine said.
The laptop popped open its lid, and its screen flickered on, showing the usual apple-without-the-bite logo, then blanking down again. A moment later the operating system herald displayed, a stylized representation of a book open to a small block of text. This was then replaced by a messaging menu, overlaid on a shimmering blue background subtly watermarked with the manual logo. "Main address list," Dairine said. "Test message." The screen blanked. "To Kit Rodriguez. Where are you? Send."
The words displayed themselves on the screen exactly as they had in Nita's manual, blinked out, and then reappeared with a little blue box underneath them in which was written in the Speech, Error 539426010: Recipient is not in ambit. Please resubmit message later.
"Huh," Dairine said. "More information."
The blue box enlarged slightly. No further information available. "We'll see about that," Dairine muttered. "Thanks, cutie."
"Yr wlcm," said the laptop, and sat down on the desk again, stretching out its legs. "Doesn't waste his words, does he?" Nita said, smiling.
"He's shy," Dairine said, with a wry expression. "You should hear him when we're alone. Let's try this."
She went over to the sleek cube of the new computer and waved a hand over the top of it. The light behind the apple came on. Nita cocked an ear. "Is its fan broken?"
"No, it doesn't have one. There's just some kind of little chimney that convects out the heat, so it doesn't need a fan."
"Or a plug..."
Dairine grinned, and waved over the top of the silvery case again. A second later the monitor, a suitably slick flat-screen model on a Lucite base, appeared to one side of the main processor case. "Mom may have some problems with that," Nita said.
"Oh, it won't do that when I get all the normal software installed and put it out downstairs. Meantime, I don't see why it should have to sit on the desk when there's umpteen billion cubic parsecs of perfectly good otherspace to stick it in."
On the screen appeared a manual herald like the one that had been displaying on the laptop, but this one had a discreet Greek letter (3 blazoned across the image of the book. Dairine waved once more over the top of the processor case, and the keyboard, also in brushed stainless steel, appeared. "What do you need that for?" Nita asked.
"I type faster than I talk." "Impossible."
Dairine gave Nita a dirty look and started typing, while Nita looked in interest at the keyboard, the standard North American QWERTY type. "Not much good for the Speech."
Dairine hit the carriage return and shook her head. "Come on, Neets, really." She flicked a finger in the air over the keyboard; the keyboard stretched, and the keys shimmered and reconfigured themselves to display the 418 characters of the Speech. "Eventually we won't need this, but the wireless transparent neuro-translation routines are still in pre-alpha." She looked at Nita with a mischievous expression. "Getting interested finally? I can copy Spot for you and give you his twin, if you like."
"Thanks, but I'll stick with the manual I know."
Dairine shook her head in poorly concealed pity. "Luddite."
"Technodweeb," Nita said. "Call me sentimental. I like books. They don't crash."
"Huh," Dairine said, as the monitor blanked and then brought up a long, long list. Dairine glanced over at Spot. "You wanna pass it that last error?"
A moment later that same little blue screen appeared on the monitor. "Right," Dairine said. She glanced over her shoulder at Nita. "Sometimes the beta shows background information that the normal release version doesn't have in it yet, or doesn't routinely release. Any additional information on this?" she said to the desktop machine.