Her sister sat there, still staring at the quilt. This worn-down look wasn't something Nita was used to seeing in her sister. Dairine's energy levels were usually such that you wanted to hook her up to wires and make serious money by selling power to the electric company. "I don't care if it is normal," Dairine said. "I hate it."
"You think you're the only one? I wasn't wild about my first flush wearing off, either. But you get used to it."
"Why do we have to get used to it?" Dairine burst out. "What good am I if I'm not effective?"
"You mean, what good are you if you can't solve every problem you come up against in three seconds?" Nita said. "Well, obviously, none at all. Guess you'd better go straight to the bathroom and flush yourself."
Dairine stared at her sister. "Or find a black hole and jump in," Nita said, leaning back and closing her eyes. "Tom says there's a lot of interest in the time-dilation effects, especially on the middle-sized ones.
Be sure to file a report with the Powers when you get back. Assuming this universe is still here."
Nita waited for the explosion. There wasn't one. She opened her eyes again to find Dairine staring at her as if she were something from Mars. Actually, Dairine had stared at things from Mars with a lot less astonishment.
"What?" Dairine said.
Nita had to smile, even though Dairine's whining was annoying her. "Sorry. I was going to say, you remind me of me when I was your age."
Dairine made a face. "There's a horrible thought." 117
She wrapped her arms around her knees, and put her face down against them. "The last thing I want is to be that normal again." She produced an elaborate shudder, turning normal into a swear word.
"You want to watch that, Dari," Nita said. "Just because we're wizards doesn't mean we're any better than 'normal' people. The minute you start acting like there's a 'them' and an 'us,' you're in trouble. The only thing that makes wizards different is that we have the power to do more than usual to help. And helping other people, as part of keeping the world running, is the only reason the power exists in the first place." It was a lesson Nita had learned at some cost, having done enough dumb things in her time until she got it straight.
Dairine gave Nita a noncommittal look. "Edgy, aren't we? Still nothing from Kit?"
Nita made a face. "No. But just let it sit for the time being, okay? Meanwhile, what was their problem? The amoebas or whatever they are?"
"They call themselves hnlt," Dairine said. "And how they manage to do that when they've only got one cell each, I don't know."
" 'Life knows its way,'" Nita said, quoting a proverb commonplace to wizards in more than one star system. "And personality arrives right behind it. Sooner than you'd think, a lot of the time."
"Yeah. Well, they have this—I mean, there's a—" Then Dairine made a wry face at how ineffective English was for describing this kind of problem. She
dropped into the Speech for a couple sentences' worth of description of something that seemed to be happening to the gravity on Europa. Apparently the sea bottom far down under the surface ice was being cata-strophically shifted in ways that were destroying some of the hnlt habitats.
After a moment, Nita nodded. "That's a nasty one. So what did you do?"
Dairine looked glum. "I suggested they wait a little while and see what happens," she said. "The Sun's real active now, and the activity is pushing Jupiter's atmosphere around a lot harder than usual, even the densest parts down deep. That's what's causing the gravitational and magnetic anomalies. It'll probably quiet down by itself when the sunspot cycle starts to taper off."
"Makes sense. Good call."
"But Neets, what's the point") I couldn't do anything. I couldn'tl Only a few months ago I could— I could do everything up to and including pushing planets around. And now, because I can't, a lot of the bnlt are going to die before the Sun quiets down. All I can do is help them relocate their habitats elsewhere on Europa. But those other places are going to be just as vulnerable. No matter what I do, I'm not going to be able to save them all..."
Nita shook her head; not that she didn't feel sorry for her sister. "Dari, it's just the way things go. You started at a higher-than-usual power level, so you're having a bigger-than-usual crash."
"Why don't you try finding some more awful way of putting that?" Dairine muttered. "Take your time."
Nita understood how Dairine felt; she'd been down this road herself. "You'll be finding your next few years' working-level in a while. But as for the way you were last month..." Nita sighed at the memory of the way she'd been when she got started. "Entropy's running. The energy runs out of everything... even us. We have to learn not to blow it all over the landscape, that's all."
Dairine was silent for a few moments. Finally she leaned against the wall and nodded. "I guess I'll just have to keep working on it. Where's Mom?"
"Late," Nita said. "She's probably still looking for Dad's paperwork. She said he started burying it all in those old carnation boxes in the back again."
"Uh-oh. And after she got him the new filing cabinets." Dairine snickered. "I bet he got yelled at."
They heard someone pulling into the driveway. Nita cocked an ear at her bedroom window, which was right above the driveway, and could tell from the sound that it was her dad's car. Her mom had walked to town. Nita glanced at the clock. It was a little before five, the time their dad usually shut the store on Saturdays. "There they are. Bet he closed up early to get her to stop giving him grief."
The back door opened, closed again. Nita got up, yawning; even after the sandwich, dinner was beginning to impinge on her mind, and her stomach was making sounds that could have passed for a polite greeting on Rirhath B. "Mom say anything to you about what she was going to make tonight? Maybe we can get a head start."
"I don't remember," Dairine said as they headed through the living room. This answer was no surprise; Dairine's normal response to food was to eat it first and ask questions later.
"Huh," Nita said. "Dad—"
She stopped. Her father stood in the kitchen, looking down at the counter by the stove as if he expected to find something there, but the counter was bare, and her father's expression was odd. "You forget something, Daddy?" Nita said.
"No," he said. And then Nita saw his face working not to show what it felt, his hands not so much resting on the edge of the counter as holding it, holding on to it, and heard his voice, which pushed its way out through a throat tight with fear.
"Where's Mom?" Dairine said.
Nita's stomach instantly tied itself into a horrible knot. "Is she all right?" she said. "She's—" her father said. And then immediately after that, "No. Oh, honey—"
Dairine pushed her way up beside Nita, her face suddenly as pale as her father's. "Daddy, wbere's Mom} \"
"She's in the hospital." He turned to them, but he didn't let go of the counter, still hanging on to it. As his eyes met Nita's, the fear behind them hit her so hard that she almost staggered. "She's very sick, they think—"
He stopped, not because he didn't know what to say, but because he refused to say it, to think it—it was impossible. Nonetheless Nita heard it, as her dad heard it, repeating over and over in his head:
They think she might die.
Saturday Afternoon and Evening
IN A PLACE WHERE directions and distances made no sense, Kit and Ponch stood in the endless, soundless dark, the leash spell hanging loose between them and glowing with silent power.
So here we are. You feel okay?
I feel fine.
So what should I make?
Anything, Ponch said, as he had before.