“So what’s your problem?” his sister said.
“We need to talk about that first thing you ordered off the Mizarthu shopping channel.”
“Which thing?”
“The laser dissociator.”
“Oh, that! It’s in my bedroom somewhere.”
Kit sighed. It sometimes seemed that the contents of whole planets could be accurately described as “in Carmela’s bedroom somewhere.”
“Where, exactly?”
“I don’t know. I’ll look for it later; I’m busy right now. What’s the matter with it?”
“I need to make it safe.”
“From what?”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Not from,” he said, “for. As in, safe for being on the same planet with.”
“Oh, come on, Kit. There haven’t been any problems since we figured out where the safety switch was.”
There haven’t been any problems, Kit thought, his eyes nearly crossing with frustration. Repairing the tile and the plastering in the bathroom had been a week’s work, at a time when he had much better things to do—and his pop had insisted Kit do it the “old-fashioned way,” meaning by hand and not by wizardry. “There was nearly a problem,” Kit said, “when you thought you had it set for ‘hot curler’ and it was set for ‘low disintegrate.’”
“I got that sorted out,” Carmela said. “You always have to harp on the small stuff! I thought that wasn’t good for a wizard.”
I will not kill her, Kit thought. It would speed up entropy. But only a little…
Kit let out a long breath. “Just find it for me in the next day or so, okay?” he said. “You can still use it on your hair, but I want to make sure that nobody else, like one of your friends when they’re over, can find it accidentally, go off with it, and blow up their bathrooms. Or more valuable real estate, like the insides of their heads.”
An odd look grew on Carmela’s face. “Like the inside of my head isn’t valuable?”
Kit gave her a dry look. His sister opened her mouth.
“Left yourself open for that one,” Kit said. “And another thing. These alien chat rooms you’ve been using…”
“You’re just jealous because I’m getting good at the Speech,” Carmela said, producing a pouting expression resembling that of a cranky supermodel.
Kit rolled his eyes. “No, I’m not jealous. I just think you should be careful about who you talk to!” he said. “It’s like any other kind of Net chat. What they show you and what they sound like may not have anything to do with who or what
they really are.”
“I know that!”
“I don’t think you know how much you don’t know that! I don’t want you thinking you’re having harmless clothes-and-hair-and-pop-star talk with some alien girloid, and then have Earth get invaded because it turns out you were actually talking to some twelve-legged, methane-breathing centipede prince who’s decided to turn up with a battle fleet and demand your hand in marriage!”
Carmela’s face wrinkled up. “Euuuuuu,” she said. “Centipedes. You just said the unmagic word.”
Kit kept his face straight. His sister was not wild about bugs of any kind, and he knew it. “So don’t give people in alien chat rooms your real name or address or anything, okay?” he said.
“Okay,” Carmela said with a long-suffering sigh. Then she looked curious. “What is the Earth’s address, by the way?”
“I’m not telling you,” Kit said.
“You don’t trust me!”
“No. And, anyway, it’s complicated, and you don’t have the technical vocabulary to say it.”
“Yet,” Carmela said. “I don’t think it’s going to take me that long. And once I’m really good at the Speech, maybe I should look into becoming a wizard, too.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Kit said, feeling incredibly relieved that it didn’t. Yet the very idea still freaked him out somewhat. Just what I need. My very own version of Dairine…! Oh, please, no. “You can’t be a wizard unless the Powers invite you,” Kit said. “And you’re too old.” Oh, please, let her be too old! “Besides, it’s a lot of hard work.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Carmela said. “Nita makes it look easy. She just reads out of her book, or waves that little white wooden wand of hers, and things happen.”
“It is not that easy,” Kit said, starting to get irritated, possibly by the insinuation that wizardry was easier for Nita than it was for him. “It’s like saying that someone just sits down at their computer and fiddles with the keys and things happen. Wands are just hardware. At the end of the day, it’s the software that does the job…and you have to write it yourself.”
Carmela gave Kit a not-entirely-convinced look. “Well,” she said, getting up, “I’ll go get the thingy for you.”
Downstairs, the phone rang. “In a while,” Carmela said as she ran out, pounding down the hall. “And when you’re playing around with it,” she added from halfway down the stairs, “make sure you don’t void the warranty!”
Kit felt like banging his head against the wall. “The warranty,” he said to no one in particular. “Why should she care about the warranty?”
He looked down at Ponch and heaved a sigh. Ponch opened one eye.
“You weren’t asleep,” Kit said.
Not the whole time, Ponch said silently.
“What am I going to do with her?”
Ponch looked after her. Ignore her. She’s just saying things like that to make you chase your tail; I can hear it in her voice. She thinks it’s fun.
Kit shook his head. “The problem with sisters is that you can never tell what they’re going to pull next. And she’s been getting… unusual lately.”
Then Kit wondered if he should have chosen another word. Ponch, too, had been getting unusual lately. This by itself wasn’t a surprise—wizards’ pets often start to acquire strange abilities or behaviors as their companions use their wizardry more, but in Ponch’s case, the level of unusual had become very high indeed. Here was a dog who recently had developed the ability to create a new universe and take Kit for a walk through it. And you have to wonder, Kit thought, is someone who can do that really a dog anymore?
Ponch rolled to his feet, got up, stretched fore and aft, and then came over to Kit and put his nose on Kit’s knee. Dinner? Ponch said.
Kit laughed. Whatever his own concerns, there were still some things about Ponch that were entirely doggy. “Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”
The two of them went downstairs together. Kit’s mama was slumped on the dining room sofa reading a newspaper, dressed in one of her pink nurse’s uniforms; she was just back from the day shift at the local hospital and hadn’t yet bothered to change. In the living room, Carmela was on the phone, talking rapidly about some new CD to what Kit assumed was yet another of the crowd of guys who were chasing her around. “Mama,” Kit said, “when’s dinner ready?”
“About an hour. Nita coming?”
“She said so, yeah.”
“Okay. You feed the monster there?”
“I’m doing that now.”
“You looked outside yet?”
“Not yet,” Kit said, with dread. He was sure he knew what he was going to see.
As they went into the kitchen together, Ponch started alternating between dancing around and spinning in circles on the same spot. Dinner!
“Yeah,” Kit said, “and you know what it is?”
What?
“It’s dog food!”
Oh, hurray! Dog food again! Ponch said, and jumped up and down some more; but Kit caught the amused glint in his eye.
Kit got a can of dog food out of the cupboard where the canned goods were kept. “You making fun of me?” Kit said.
His eyes on the can, Ponch sat down, very proper, with his front feet placed so that the white tips on his forefeet came right together, making him look extremely composed and serious. Never, Ponch said. At least, not at dinnertime.