“Oh, my lord—” Kit’s pop said.
The phone rang again. Halfway to the living room, Kit dived back into the kitchen for the wireless phone on the counter, and managed to pick it up and hit the talk button before Carmela could pick up the extension in the living room. “Rodriguez residence.”
“It’s me,” Nita said.
“Oh, good. Thanks for not being yet another of the thundering herd.”
Click. “I heard that!”
“Get off, ‘Mela. It’s for me.”
“Wow, I’ll call the media.” Click.
“She giving you a hard time?”
“Always.” Kit let out a harassed-sounding breath. “Please, please, please, come on over and give me something to do besides keep my sister off the phone. That chicken’s gonna be ready soon, anyway.”
“I’ll be over in a few. But you need to hear about this first. My dad wants me to go away on this exchange thing!”
“You gonna go?” Kit immediately began to itch with something that felt embarrassingly like envy.
“Yeah. And when we got back from shopping, my manual was about half an inch thicker than when we’d left, and a whole bunch of sealed claudication packages were sitting on my desk.”
“Hey, super,” Kit said, and was instantly annoyed at himself for not sounding as enthusiastic as he thought he should have. “This is going to be really great for you! You should get out there and have a good time—”
“What do you mean, I should go?” And Nita burst out laughing. “You’re so pitiful when you’re trying to be a good loser. I was going to tell you that my dad doesn’t want me to go alone. Tom still has an opening, and he’s holding it for you!”
“Wow,” Kit said. The envy instantly dissolved, first in delight, then in mild outrage. “Hey, and you let me stew for a whole, I don’t know, five seconds, thinking I was going to have to sit here while you were gone!”
“That’s to get you back for the chicken thing,” Nita said, and started imitating Kit. “ ‘Oh, I don’t know. I might want it myself…’” She broke up laughing again.
“Cut it out!” But Kit had to laugh, too. “Okay,” he said. “I have to figure out how to handle this. Where’re we supposed to be going?”
“The manual says it’s some planet called Alaalu.”
“Never heard of it,” Kit said. He put out a hand and felt around for something only he would be able to feel, the tag of a wizardly “zipper” in the air, which controlled entry to the personal otherspace pocket that followed him around. Kit found the tag, pulled it down, and pushed his hand into the opening so that it appeared to vanish while he felt around for his manual. “Alaalu…Is it in this galaxy?”
“Yeah,” Nita said, and Kit heard manual pages rustling again at her end. “Outer Arm Four, around radian one-sixty.”
Kit thought about that for a moment as he felt around and found his manual, then pulled it out of the claudication into local space. “That’s the Scutum Arm, right? Straight across the Bar from us.”
“Yeah,” Nita said as Kit zipped the pocket up again. “The mirror of the arm we’re in. The system’s a little more than sixty thousand light-years from here.”
Kit put his manual down on the counter and started flipping through it to the galaxography section. “Alaalu, Alaalu,” he muttered, paging through to the section dealing with the Scutum Arm. Kit ran one finger down the long column of planet names and coordinates on the index page and found Alaalu there.
“Got it,” Kit said, and riffled along to the page in question, which had an image of the planet’s star system. Apparently there was only one inhabited planet in the system, an exception to the usual rule. The star around which Alaalu IV circled was about the same size as Earth’s Sun, and in the same general class, a little golden G0. “Not exactly next door,” Kit said, studying the star’s position about three-quarters of the way down the long arm on the other side of the galaxy’s spiral. He tapped on the image of the star system to zoom in on the planet. “Who lives there?”
“Well, people. Who else? Humanoids, anyway: real tall people, all kind of a tan color.” Nita said. “Check page…” She glanced at her own manual. “I have it on page nine-sixty-two.”
“Right,” Kit said. For the moment his attention was on the image of the planet, banded blindingly around its equator with a white, two-way highway of swirling weather systems. The view was in real time, and the very slightest shift was visible as Alaalu turned in the amber light of its sun. The planet’s seas were as blue as Earth’s, and huge; there were only three landmasses, none of them large enough to be considered a continent. One was a big, rough-edged crescent, about a third of the way up from the equator toward Alaalu’s north pole—a three-quarter circle with the open end pointing more or less north. Kit wondered if he was looking at a remnant of some gigantic, ancient meteor strike—the rest of the “splash” rim damaged in some recent earthquake or plate movement. The other two landmasses were halfway around the planet from the crescent island—they were irregularly shaped blobs, long and narrow, with great chains of islands large and small strung out from them at either end, and each chain straddling Alaalu’s equator. One island chain ran almost vertically, pointing at the poles; the other crossed the equator more diagonally, like a sword stuck in the planet’s equatorial belt.
At first, Kit thought these were relatively short island chains, but then he got a look at the scale indicator plotted against the planet’s globe. “Neets,” he said, “those
island chains are nine thousand miles long!”
“I know,” Nita said. “I had to look twice, too. Check the main stats for the planet. Thirty-six thousand miles in diameter…”
“Wow,” Kit said. He put the manual aside for the moment. There was a ton of technical detail there to digest.
“It’s a nice place, anyway. A peaceful planet, no recent wars, not a lot of intraspecies hostility of any kind. Warm climate at the equator, but not too hot.”
“One of those places where life really is a beach,” Kit said, starting to smile in anticipation. “Could this actually be a vacation for a change?”
“Looks that way. Oh, there’d be some cultural stuff. We’d have to travel around on their planet, find out what it’s like living in one of their families. That kind of thing.”
“Sounds boring. In a good way.”
“I don’t know about you,” Nita said, sounding a little sharp, “but I could use some good boring about now.”
“No argument there,” Kit said. Recent months had featured too many excitements by half.
“But you know what’s really weird about this place?”
“What, besides that it’s peaceful?”
“Yeah. Know how many wizards it has?”
“How many?”
“One.”
Kit blinked.
“One?” he said. “For the whole planet?”
“Yup.”
“And how many people live there?”
“It says a billion and a half.”
Kit stared at the manual, not knowing what to make of this. “They haven’t had a big catastrophe or something that’s wiped out all their wizards?”
“Nope. The manual says one wizard is all they need.”
Kit shook his head. “Wow,” he said again. He had trouble even imagining any world so peaceful and orderly that one wizard was enough to keep things running smoothly.
“So go ask your folks! Wouldn’t they like to get rid of you for a couple of weeks?”
Kit fell silent, listening to his home. The TV was now shouting with a cacophony of alien voices, the audio expression of yet another chat room, and his sister was alternately shouting at the screen in the Speech and talking into her cell phone.
“Come on over and we’ll find out,” Kit said. “I think this’ll go all right.”
Outside, without warning, the howling started…in chorus.
“Kit!” his father said.