Dairine didn’t look up, but she snickered, a supremely cynical sound.
It was what Nita had been hoping to hear. “Yeah,” Nita said. “Well, think about that, too. You could throw him seriously off balance if you kept at it long enough.”
“Yeah,” Dairine said after a moment or so. “That might be worth seeing…”
“Do what you can,” Nita said. “Give him some relief.”
“What about you?” Dairine said.
“What about me what?” Nita said, and then abruptly heard in her head what her present English teacher would say to her if she uttered such a sentence in class. Mr. Neary was fiercer about correct grammar than some people were about the eternal battle between Good and Evil.
“You could still go,” Dairine said.
Nita stared at her sister.
“And you could still take someone else. Say, Kit…”
After a moment, Nita shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “This thing with Dad is going to take some patching up. There’s no way he’d go for it right now…”
But Nita was somehow finding it hard to be as energetic about the refusal as she thought she should have been. Dairine just looked at her, straight-faced, for a moment or two. Finally Nita shook her head once more and got up. The bed creaked again.
“That thing’s never recovered from being down that crevasse on Pluto,” Dairine said. “Its springs are shot. You owe me a new one.”
Nita threw a look back at the desk, at Spot. How a featureless silvery-dark metal case could look less depressed than it had five minutes ago, Nita didn’t know, but Spot’s did. This reassured her, too, for Spot was a good reflection of Dairine’s genuine moods—Dairine might successfully fake what was going on with her, but Spot had no such talent.
“It was not down any crevasse,” Nita said. “I left it in the middle of a plain of perfectly good frozen nitrogen, high and dry. But who knows, I might read up on the crystal-reconstruction spells in the metals section of the manual over the next day or so, and talk the steel back the way it used to be. I’m getting good with metal, I’m told.”
This airy and overconfident statement elicited another snicker, even more cynical than the last one. Nita grinned. She had been a talk-to-the-trees type in the beginning of her wizardry, a specialist in work with organic life-forms, but everything changed eventually.
“You sit here and think about stuff,” Nita said. “Be real contrite in case Dad comes in. And when we’re gone, if Dad hasn’t done it already, make a little effort to get on his good side by taking that poor lettuce out of the sink and sticking it in the compost heap. It’s time it got recycled into something alive to make up for what happened to it in the fridge.”
Sure.
Nita went softly down the stairs and headed toward the dining room. Voices were speaking there. She stopped not far from the stairs, out of sight.
“I’m parenting for two here, Tom,” Nita heard her dad say.
“I know,” Tom said quietly. “It can’t be easy.”
“I don’t want to be hard on her. But at the same time, I have to try to keep some semblance of normalcy around here…keep some structures in place that the kids know they can depend on.” There was one of those pauses in which Nita could practically hear her father rubbing his face.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Tom said, getting up. “You know you are. In the meantime, Harry, any time you need a friendly ear, you know our number. One or the other of us is almost always around. Wizardry isn’t all about errantry. Mostly it’s just talking.”
“I know,” her dad said. “I see that here a lot—”
There was a knock at the back door. Nita heard her dad’s chair scrape back as he went to answer it. “Oh, hi, Kit,” her dad said. “Come on in. I can’t get used to it, the times when you walk over: I keep expecting you to just appear out of nothing in the living room, as usual.” Her dad laughed then. “‘As usual…’”
“Uh, hi, Mr. Callahan. No, I didn’t want to, because …”
Tom got up as Nita put her head around the living room door into the dining room. “News travels fast, huh?” Tom said to her as the back door shut behind Kit.
“Uh, yeah,” Nita said. She picked up Tom’s jacket, which was still wet, and shook it off before handing it to him. Residual water went everywhere. “Why didn’t you keep the rain off you when you came over?” she said.
“I don’t always do wizardry just because I can,” Tom said, smiling slightly and shrugging into the parka. “An attitude toward errantry that you’ll understand a lot better when you’re my age. Besides, I like the rain. By the way, how’s the reading coming?”
When Tom asked Nita this, she knew it didn’t have anything to do with fiction. Nita had been spending a lot of time with the manual over the past months, starting to explore for herself the kind of “research” wizardry that Tom did. In particular, she had been studying the Speech more closely, mostly for its own sake—there was always something new to find out about the language in which the Universe had been written—but also with an eye to finding other ways to deal with the Lone Power than just brute force. “I’ve been doing some more research on the Enactive and pre-Enactive modes,” Nita said. “Ancillary Oaths and bindings.”
“Oh ho,” Tom said. “That’ll keep you busy for the next couple of years… There’s a lot of finicky material there. A lot of memory work, too. Hit the Binding Oath yet?”
“Some references to it,” Nita said. “But I haven’t seen the Oath itself.”
“It’s worth a look,” Tom said. “Our own Oath is based on it. Or maybe I should say closely related. It’s worth studying, even if its uses are limited. Meanwhile, we’ve got more immediate problems than research.” He glanced back toward the stairs. “Talk to her, will you?”
“I did.”
“Good. See you later. See you, Kit.”
Tom went out the front door and closed it behind him.
“Honey,” Nita’s dad said, “I need to change out of my work clothes. Give me a few minutes.”
“It’s such a pleasure to get out of the house,” Kit said. “The phone hasn’t stopped ringing all afternoon.”
“Why?”
“Carmela. Every five minutes it’s yet another of her slavering horde of boyfriends.”
“I didn’t think she’d gotten up to the ‘horde’ level,” Nita said. “She told me she was just planning to test the wonderful world of dating.”
“Test?” Kit said. “It’s more like she’s holding auditions. There’s a new one on the phone every ten minutes. And I really don’t want to be around when she narrows them down to the ‘short list.’ Being here is a relief…even just for a little while. So are you coming over for dinner?”
Nita sat down and reached across the table for a pen and a pad of sticky notes, pulling off the top note and starting to jot down a list of needed groceries. “We have to go shop first. I’ll come over when we get back. We’ve really got to talk about the next couple of weeks.”
“That business on Mars,” Kit said as he sat down across from her. “We need to get that taken care of before it gets out of hand. Those depth charges in Great South Bay…It’s time to get together with S’reee and the rest of the deep-side team to deal with those before they get any more unstable. And then there’s that gate-relocation thing in the city…”
Kit paused, glancing toward the back of the house as he heard the bedroom door close. “It was Dairine, yeah?” Kit whispered.
“Yeah.”
“What did she do? What did Tom do?”
“He grounded her. She can’t leave the system.”
Kit whistled softly. “What about your dad?”
“I thought he was going to lose it completely,” Nita said, under her breath. “He sent her to her room. I can’t even remember the last time he did that.”