Duane, Diane - Wizards - Young Wizards 03 - High Wizardry

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"Hey, there's somebody in the driveway! It's a truck! Mom! Mom, the com-puter's here!"

The first sound Nita heard that morning was her little sister's shrieking. Nita winced and scrunched herself up into a ball

under the covers. Then she muttered six syllables, a very simple spell, and soundproofed her room against her sister's noise.

Blessed silence fell. Unfortunately the spell also killed the buzzing of the locusts and the singing of the birds outside the

open window. And Nita liked birds. She opened her eyes, blinking at the bright summer sun coming in the window, and

sighed.

Nita said one more syllable. The mute-spell came undone, letting in the noise of doors opening and shutting, and Dairine

shrieking instructions and suggestions at the immediate planet. Outside the window a catbird was sit-ting in the elm tree,

screaming, "Thief! Thief!" in an enthusiastic but sub-standard imitation of a blue jay.

So much for sleeping late, Nita thought. She got up and went over to the dresser by the window, pulled a drawer open and

rummaged in it for a T-shirt and shorts. "Morning, Birdbrain," she said as she pulled out a "Live Aid" T-shirt.

The catbird hopped down to a branch of the elm right outside Nita's window. "Bob-white! Bob-white!" it sang at the top of

its lungs.

"What's a quail doing in a tree?" Nita said. She pulled the T-shirt on. Listen to those locusts! Hot one today, huh?"

'Highs in the nineties," the bird sang. "Cheer up! Cheer up!"

'Robins are for spring," Nita said. "I'm more in the mood for penguins at the moment. . . ."

"What's up?" .w^ jr. ,-Myv...,ivj<-.;/

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"Enough with the imitations! I need you to take a message for me. Wfz. ards' business. I'll leave you something nice. Half

of one of Mom's muffins? Huh?"

The catbird poured out several delighted bars of song that started as a phoebe's call and ended as the five-note theme from

E. T.

"Good," Nita said. "Then here's something new to sing." She had been speaking all along in the Speech of wizards, the

language everything alive understands. Now she added music to it, singing random notes with the words. "Kit, you wanna

see a disaster? Come on over here and watch my folks try to hook up the Apple."

The bird cocked an interested eye at her. "You need it again?" Nita said.

" 'Kit, you wanna see a disaster?' "

"That's my boy. You remember the way?"

In a whir of white-barred wings, the catbird was gone.

"Must be hungry," Nita said to herself, pulling on her shorts, and then socks and sneakers. While pulling a sneaker on, she

glanced at the top of the dresser. There among the stickers and the brushes and combs, under the new Alan Parsons album,

lay her wizard's manual.

That by itself wasn't so strange; she'd left it there yesterday afternoon. But it was open; she didn't remember having left it

that way. Nita leaned over, tying the sneaker, and looked at the page. The Wizards' Oath—Nita smiled. It didn't seem like

only a few months ago that she'd first read and taken that Oath herself: it felt more like years. February, was it? she

thought. No, March. Joanne and her crew chased me into the library. And beat the crap out of me later. But I didn't care. I'd

found this—

Nita sighed and flipped the book back to the Oath. Trouble came with wizardry. But other things came too—

Whamwhamwham!

Nita didn't even need to turn around to see who was pounding on her door as it banged open. "Come in!" Nita said, and

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glared at Dairine, who already was in.

"It's here!"

"I would never have known," Nita said, dropping the Parsons album back on top of the manual. "Dari, sometimes people

like to sleep on a Saturday, y'know?"

"When there's a computer here? Nita, sometimes you're such a spud."

Nita folded her arms and leaned against the dresser, ready to start a lec-ture. Her sister, unfortunately, took all the fun out

of it by mocking Nita's position and folded arms, leaning against the doorjamb. Funny how someone so little could look so

threatening: a little red-haired eleven-year-old stick of a thing in an Admiral Ackbar T-shirt, with a delicate face and watery

gray eyes-

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Problem was, there was someone smart behind those eyes. Someone too smart.

Nita let out an annoyed breath. "I won't kill you this time," she said.

"I wasn't worried about that," Dairine said. "And you won't turn me into a toad or anything, either, so don't bother trying

that line on me. . . . C'mon, let's watch Mom 'n' Dad mess it up." And she was out the door.

Nita made a face. It didn't help that Dairine knew she was a wizard. She would sooner have told her parents about her

wizardry than have told Dairine.

Of course, her folks had found out too ...

Nita headed out the bedroom door and down the stairs.

The living room was full of boxes and packing material, loose-leaf books, and diskette boxes. Only the desk by the window

was clean; and on it sat a cream-colored object about the size and shape of a phone book—the key-board/motherboard

console of a shiny new Apple IIIc+. "Harry," Nita's mother was saying, "don't plug anything in, you'll blow it up. Dairine,

get out of that. Morning, Nita, there's some pancakes on the stove."

"Okay," Nita said, and headed into the kitchen. While she was still spreading maple syrup between two pancakes, someone

banged on the screen door.

"C'mon in," Nita said, her mouth full. "Have a pancake."

Kit came in: Christopher Rodriguez, her fellow-wizard, quick and dark and sharp-eyed, and at thirteen, a year younger than

Nita. And also suddenly two inches taller, for he had hit a growth spurt over the summer. Nita couldn't get used to it; she

was used to looking down at him. She handed him a pancake.

"A little bird told me there's about to be trouble," Kit said.

"C'mon," Dairine's strident voice came from the living room, "I wanna play Lunar Landed"

" 'About to be?' " Nita said.

Kit grinned around the mouthful of pancake and gestured with his head at the living room, raising his eyebrows.

Nita nodded agreement, her mouth full too, and they headed that way.

"Dairine," Nita's mother was saying, "leave your dad alone." Her mother was sitting cross-legged in jeans and sweatshirt, in

the middle of a welter of Styrofoam peanuts and paperwork, going through a loose-leaf binder. "And don't get those

manuals out of order, either. Morning, Kit! How're your mom and dad?"

"Fine, Mrs. Callahan. Hi, Mr. Callahan."

"Hi, Kit," said Nita's dad, rather muffled because he was under the desk by the living room window. "Betty, I've got the

three-prong plugs in."

'Oh, good. Then you can set up the external monitor ..."

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"When can I play?" Dairine hollered.

"At this rate," said her father, "sometime in the next century. Nita, do something with her, will you?"

"It's a little late for birth control," Kit said in Nita's ear. Nita spluttered with laughter.

Dairine flew at her. "Was that something dirty? I'll get you for that, you—"

Queep! something said. All heads turned; but it was just the computer, which Nita's dad had plugged in. "Harry, you will

blow it up," Nita's mother said calmly, from down among the cartons. "We haven't finished reading the instructions yet."

"We don't have to, Betty. We didn't connect the hard disk yet, so we—"

Dairine lost interest in killing Nita. "Can I play now?!"

"See, it says in this manual—"

"Yes, but this one is before that one, Harry—"

"But, look, Betty, it says right here—"

Dairine quietly slipped the plastic wrapping off the monitor and slipped it into its notch at the back of the computer, then

started connecting the cables to the screen. Nita glanced at Kit, then back toward the kitchen. He grinned agreement.

"Your folks are gonna lock her in a closet or something," Kit said as they got out of the combat zone.

"I hope so ... that's probably the only way I'm gonna get at it. But it's okay; she won't blow it up. Her science class has a

IIIc: that's one of the reasons Mom and Dad got this one. Dari already knows more about it than the teacher does."

Kit rolled his eyes. "Uh-huh," Nita said. "But I'm not gonna let her monopolize this toy, lemme tell you. It's a neat little

thing—it has the new foldout screen, and batteries—you could put it in a bookbag. I'll show you later. . . . Where's Ponch?"

"Outside. C'mon."

They went out and sat on the side steps. The locusts were buzzing louder than ever as Ponch, Kit's big black mutt, part

Border collie, part German shepherd, came bounding up the driveway to them through the green-gold early sunlight. "Oh,

Lord, look at his nose," Nita said. "Ponch, you got stung again, you loon."

"I buried a bone," Ponch said in a string of whines and barks as he came up to them. "The bad things bit me."

"His favorite bone-burying place," Kit said, sounding resigned, "has three yellowjacket nests spaced around it. He gets

stung faster than I can heal him."

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"Brave," Ponch said, resting his chin, with the swollen black nose, on Nita's shoulder, and looking sideways at her for

sympathy.

"Dumb," Nita said, scratching him behind the ears. "But brave. Go get a stick, brave guy. I'll throw it." Ponch slurped

Nita's face and raced off.

Kit smiled to see him run.

"So what*re we doing today? Anything?"

"Well, there's a new show at the planetarium in the city. Something about other galaxies. My folks said I could go if I

wanted to."

"Hey, neat. You got enough money?"

"Just."

"Great. I think I've got enough—let me check."

Nita went back into the house, noticing as she passed through the living room that Dairine was already slipping a diskette

into the Apple's built-in disk drive, while her oblivious mother and father were still sitting on the floor pointing at different

pages in three different manuals, and arguing cheerfully. Queep! the computer said from the living room, as Nita got into

her room and upended the money jar on the dresser.

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There was no pause in the arguing. Sometimes I think they like it, Nita thought, counting the bills. She had enough for the

planetarium, and maybe a couple of hot dogs afterward. Nita stuffed the money in her pocket and pushed the jar to the

back of the dresser.

—And her eye fell on the record album again. She tipped it up by one corner to look at her wizard's manual, still open to

the Oath. She pulled the book out, idly touching the open pages as she held it. In Life's name, and for Life's sake, began the

small block of type on the right-hand page, / say that I will use this art only in service of that Life . . .

Dairine was in here yesterday, Nita thought, skimming down over the words of the Oath. . . . And she was reading this. For

a moment Nita was furious at the idea of her sister rummaging around in her things; but the anger didn't last. Maybe, she

thought, this isn't so bad after all. She's been pestering me with questions about wizardry ever since she found out there

really is such a thing. She thinks it's all excitement. But the Oath is heavy stuff. Maybe it threw a little scare into her with

all the stuff about "time's end" and doing what you have to, no matter what. Be a good thing if it did make her back off a

little. She's too young for this. . . .

Nita shut the manual, tucked it under her arm and headed out into the living room. Dairine was standing in front of the

computer, keying in instruc-tions; the Apple logo came up on the monitor, followed by a screenful of green words too

small for Nita to read from across the room. Her mother and father were still deep in the manual. "Mom," Nita said, "Kit

and I want to go into the city, to the planetarium, is it okay? Kit's folks said he could."

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Nita's mother glanced at her, considering. "Well ... be back before | dark."

"Stay out of Times Square," her father said without looking up, while paging through a manual open in his lap.

"Do you have enough money for the train?" her mother said.

"Mom," Nita said, hefting her wizard's manual in one hand, "I don't think we're going to take the train."

"Oh." Her mother looked dubiously at the book. She had seen more than enough evidence of her daughter's power in the

past couple of months: but Nita knew better than to think that her mother was getting comfortable about wizardry, or even

used to it. "You're not going into the city to, uh, do something, are you?"

"We're not on assignment, Mom, no. Not for a while, I think, after last time."

"Oh. Well . . . just you be careful, Neets. Wizards are a dime a dozen as far as I'm concerned, but daughters . . ."

Nita's father looked up at that. "Stay out of trouble," he said, and meant it.

"Yes, sir."

"Now, Betty, look right here. It says very plainly, 'Do not use disk without first—' "

"That's software, Harry. They mean the diskette, not the disk drive—"

Nita hurried out through the kitchen before her folks could change their minds. Kit was evidently thinking along the same

lines, since he was standing in the middle of the sandy place by the backyard gate, using the stick Ponch had brought him

to draw a wizard's transit circle on the ground. "I sent Ponch home," he said, setting various symbols around the

circumference of the circle.

"Okay." Nita stepped in beside him. "Where you headed? The Grand Central worldgate?"

"No, there are delays there this morning. The book says to use Penn Station instead. What time have you got?"

Nita squinted up at the Sun. "Nine thirty-five."

"Show-off. Use the watch; I need the Naval Observatory time."

"Nine thirty-three and twenty seconds," Nita said, scowling at her Timex, "now."

"Not bad. Let's haul it before—"

"What are you doing!" yelled Nita's father, inside the house. Nita and Kit both jumped guiltily, then looked at each other.

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Nita sighed.

"Too late," Kit said.

At nine thirty-three and twenty-eight seconds, the screen door opened and

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pairine was propelled firmly out of it. Nita's father put his head out after Dairine, and looked up the driveway. "Take her

with you," he said to Nita, and meant that too.

"Yes, sir," Nita said, trying not to sound surly as the screen door slammed shut. Kit rolled his eyes and slowly began

adding another set of symbols to those already inside the circle. Dairine scuffed over to them, looking at least as annoyed

as Nita felt.

"Well," Dairine said, "I guess I'm stuck with you."

"Get in," Kit said, sounding resigned. "Don't step on the lines."

"And try not to freak out too much, okay?" Nita said.

Dairine stepped over the bounds of the circle and stood there with her arms folded, glaring at Nita.

"What a great time we're all going to have," Kit said, opening his manual. He began to read in the wizardly Speech, fast.

Nita looked away from her sister and let Kit handle it.

The air around them began to sing—the same note ears sing when they've been in a noisy place too long; but this singing

got louder, not softer, as seconds passed. Nita had the mild satisfaction of seeing Dairine start to look nervous at that, and

at the slow breeze beginning around them when every-where else the summer air was still. The breeze got stronger, dust

around them whipped and scattered in it, the sound scaled up until it blotted out almost everything else. And despite her

annoyance, Nita suddenly got lost in the old familiar exhilaration of magic working. From memory—for she and Kit had

worked this spell together many times—she lifted her voice in the last chorus of it, where the words came in a rush, and the

game and skill of the spell lay in matching your partner's cadence exactly. Kit dropped not a syllable as Nita came in, but

flashed her a wry grin, matching her word for word for the last ten seconds; they ended together on one word that was half

laugh, half shout of triumph. And on the word, the air around them cracked like thunder and struck inward from all

directions, like a blow—

The wind stilled and the dust settled, and they found themselves in the last aisle of a small chain bookstore, next to a door

with a hand-lettered sign that said employees only. Kit put his manual away, and he and Nita were brushing themselves off

when that door popped open and a small sandy-haired man with inquiring eyes looked out at them. "Something fall down

°ut here? No? . . . You need some help?"

"Uh," Nita and Kit said, still in unison. "X-Men comics," said Dairine, not missing a beat. "Up front on the right, in the

rack," said the small man, and vanished through his door again.

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"Hope they have the new annual," Dairine said, brushing dust off her shorts and Admiral Ackbar shirt, and heading for the

front of the store.

Kit and Nita glanced ruefully at each other and went after her. It looked like it was going to be a long day.

Passwords

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Like so many other human beings, Dairine had made her first major decision about life and the world quite early; at the age

of three, in fact. She had seen Nita (then six years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time, and at the end of the day

come back crying because she hadn't known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her.

Nita's crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine's three-

year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn't know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it

could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones.

So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything; not surprisingly,

Dairine's senses became abnor-mally sharp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four . . .

just how, she never remembered: but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had

bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it—reading aloud to herself from a Britan-nica article on taxonomy, and

sounding out the longer words—her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn't understand why.

It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things . . .

perhaps even to make them do things.

For fear of her parents being upset, and maybe stopping her, until she was s'x or so she kept her reading out of their sight as

much as she could. The thought of being kept away from books terrified her. Most of what moved Dairine was sheer

delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn't free to explore

the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and

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years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything. Dairine sat home and

busied herself with conquer-ing the world.

Eventually it came time for her to go off to kindergarten. Remembering Nita, her parents were braced for the worst, but not

at all for Dairine's scowling, annoyed response when she came home. "They won't listen to what I tell them," Dairine said.

"Yet." And off she went to read, leaving her mother and father staring at each other.

School went on, and time, and Dairine sailed her way up through the grades. She knew (having overheard a couple of her

mother's phone conversa-tions with the school's psychiatrist) that her parents had refused to let her skip grades. They

thought it would be better for her to be with kids of her own age. Dairine laughed to herself over this, since it made school

life utterly easy for her: it also left her more free time for her own pursuits, especially reading. As soon as she was old

enough to go to the little local library for herself, she read everything in it: first going straight through the kids' library

downstairs at about six books a day, then (after the concerned librarian got permission from Dairine's parents) reading the

whole adult collection, a touch more slowly. Her mom and dad thought it would be a shame to stifle such an active

curiosity. Dairine considered this opinion wise, and kept read-ing, trying not to think of the time—not too far away—when

she would exhaust the adult books. She wasn't yet allowed to go to the big township library by herself.

But she had her dreams, too. Nita was already being allowed to go into New York City alone. In a few years, she would

too. Dairine thought con-stantly of the New York Public Library, of eight million books that the White Lions guarded: rare

manuscripts, books as old as printing, or older. It would take even Dairine a while to get through eight million books. She

longed to get started.

And there were other dreams more immediate. Like everyone else she knew, Dairine had seen the Star Wars movies.

Magic, great power for good and evil, she had read about in many other places. But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her

with a terrible immediacy that the books had not; with a picture of power available even to untrained farmboys on distant

planets in the future, and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present. And if you could learn that

supreme knowledge, and master the power that filled and shaped the universe, how could the world ever hurt you? For a

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while Dairine's reading suffered, and her daydreams were full of the singing blaze of lightsabers, the electric smell of

blasterfire, and the shadow of ultimate evil in a black cloak, which after terrible combat she always defeated. Her sister

teased her a lot less about it than Dairine expected.

Her sister. . . . Their relationship was rather casual, not so much a rela-

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five-relationship as the kind you might have with someone who lived close enough for you to see every day. When both

Dairine and Nita were little, they had played together often enough. But where learning came in, for a while there had been

trouble. Sometimes Nita had shown Dairine things she was learning at school. But when Dairine learned them almost

immediately, and shortly was better at them than Nita was, Nita got upset. Dairine never quite understood why. It was a

victory for them both, wasn't it, over the world, which would get you if you didn't know things? But Nita seemed not to

understand that.

Eventually things got better. As they got older, they began to grow to-gether and to share more. Possibly Nita was

understanding her better, or had simply seen how much Dairine liked to know things; for she began to tutor Dairine in the

upper-grade subjects she was studying, algebra and so forth. Dairine began to like her sister. When they started having

trouble with bullies, and their parents sent them both off to self-defense school, Dairine mastered that art as quickly as

anything else she'd ever decided to learn; and then, when a particularly bad beating near home made it plain that Nita

wasn't using what they'd learned, she quietly put the word out that anyone who messed with Nita would have Dairine to

deal with. The bullying stopped, for both of them, and Dairine felt smugly satisfied.

That is, she did until one day after school she saw a kid come at Nita to "accidentally" body-block her into the dirt of the

playground she was cross-ing. Dairine started to move to prevent it—but as the kid threw himself at Nita, he abruptly slid

sideways off the air around her as if he had run into a glass wall. No one else seemed to notice. Even the attacker looked

blank as he fell sideways into the dust. But Nita smiled a little, and kept on walking . . . and suddenly the world fell out

from under Dairine, and everything was terribly wrong. Her sister knew something she didn 't.

Dairine blazed up in a raging fire of curiosity. She began watching Nita closely, and her best friend, Kit, too, on a hunch.

Slowly Dairine began to catch Nita at things no one else seemed to notice; odd words muttered to empty air, after which

lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things came loose.

There was one day when their father had been complaining about the crabgrass in the front lawn, and Dairine had seen an

odd, thoughtful look cross Nita's face. That evening her sister had sat on the lawn for a long time, talking under her breath.

Dairine couldn't hear what was said; but a week and a half later their father was standing on and admiring a crabgrass-free

lawn, extolling the new brand of weedkiller he'd tried. He didn't notice, as Dairine did, the large patch of crabgrass under

the apple trees in the neigh-bor's yard next door . . . carpeting a barren place where the neighbor had been trying to get

something green to grow, anything, for as long as Dairine

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could remember. It was all stuff like that . . . little things, strange thin nothing Dairine could understand and use.

Then came summer vacation at the beach—and the strangeness started to come out in the open. Nita and Kit started

spending a lot of time away from home, sneaking in and out as if there were something to hide. Dairine heard her mother's

uneasy conversations about this with her father, and was amused; whatever Nita was doing with Kit, Dairine knew sex

wasn't involved. Dairine covered for Nita and Kit, and bided her time, waiting until they should owe her something.

The time came soon enough. One night the two of them went swimming and didn't come back when it got dark, as they'd

agreed to. Dairine's mom and dad went out looking for Nita and Kit on the beach, and took Dairine with them. She got

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separated from them, mostly on purpose, and was a quarter-mile down the beach from them when, with a rush of water and

noisy breath, a forty-foot humpback whale breached right in front of her, ran itself aground—and turned into Nita.

Nita went white with shock at the sight of Dairine. Dairine didn't care. "You're going to tell me everything," she said, and

ran down the beach to distract her parents just long enough for Nita and Kit—also just changed back from a whale—to get

back into their bathing suits. And after the noisy, angry scene with their parents that followed, after the house was quiet,

Dairine went to Nita's room, where Kit was waiting, too, and let them tell her the whole story.

Wizards' manuals, oaths, wizardry, spells, quests, terrible dangers beyond the world, great powers that moved unseen and

unsuspected beneath the surface of everyday existence, and every now and then broke surface— Dairine was ecstatic. It

was all there, everything she had longed for. And if they could have it, she could have it too. . . .

Dairine saw their faces fall, and felt the soft laughter of the world starting behind her back again. You couldn't have this

magic unless you were offered it by the Powers that controlled it. Yes, sometimes it ran in families, but there was no

guarantee that it would ever pass to you. . . .

At that point Dairine began to shut their words out. She promised to keep their secret for the time being, and to cover for

them the best she could. But inside she was all one great frustrated cry of rage: Why them, why them find not me! Days

later, when the cry ebbed, the frustration gave way to blunt, stubborn determination. /'// have it. I will.

She had gone into Nita's room, found her wizard's manual, and opened it-The last time she'd held it it had looked like a well-

worn kid's book from the library and, when she'd borrowed it, had read like one. Now the excitement, the exultation, flared

up in Dairine again; for instead of a story she found

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pages and pages of an Arabic-looking script she couldn't read . . . and near the front, many that she could, in English.

She skimmed them, turning pages swiftly. The pages were full of warnings and cautions, phrases about the wizard's

responsibility to help slow down the death of the universe, paragraphs about the price each wizard paid for his new power,

and about the terrible Ordeal-quest that lay before every novice who took the Wizards' Oath: sections about old strengths

that moved among the worlds, not all of them friendly. But these Dairine scorned as she'd scorned Nita's cautions. The

parts that spoke of a limitless universe full of life and of wizards to guard it, of "the Billion Homeworlds," "the hundred

mil-lion species of humanity," those parts stayed with her, filled her mind with images of strangeness and glory and

adventure until she was drowning in her own thought of unnumbered stars. I can do it, she thought. I can take care of

myself. I'm not afraid. I'll matter, I'll be something. . . .

She flipped through the English section to its end, finding there one page, with a single block of type set small and neat.

In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life's service alone. I

will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; nor will I

change any creature unless its growth and . life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To

these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for

.;•:. courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so—looking always

, toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That

from Which they proceeded. . . .

It was the Oath that Nita had told her about. Not caring that she didn't understand parts of it, Dairine drew a long breath and

read it out loud, almost in triumph. And the terrible silence that drew itself down around her as she spoke, blocking out the

sounds of day, didn't frighten her; it exhila-rated her. Something was going to happen, at last, at last. . . .

She went to bed eagerly that night.

Up and Running

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Nita and Kit and Dairine made their way among the shops of the lower level of Penn Station and caught the C train for the

Upper West Side, coming up at Eighty-first and Central Park West. For a little bit they stood there just getting their

bearings. It was warm, but not uncomfortable yet. The park glowed green and golden.

Dairine was fidgeting. "Now where?"

"Right here," Nita said, turning around. The four-block stretch behind them, between 77th and 81st streets, was

commanded by the huge, graceful bulk of the American Museum of Natural History, with its marble steps and beast-carved

pediment, and the great bronze equestrian statue of Teddy Roo-sevelt looking eastward across at the park. Tucked into a

corner of the build-ing on 81st Street stood the art deco-looking brick cube of the Hayden Planetarium, topped with a

greened-copper dome.

"It looks like a tomb," Dairine said. "Shove that. I'm going to Natural History and look at the stuffed elephants."

"Climb on the stuffed elephants, you mean," Nita said. "Forget it. You're staying with us."

"Oh? What makes you think you can keep track of me if I decide to—

"This," Kit said grimly, hefting his wizard's manual. "If we have to, we can put a tracer on you. Or a leash . . ."

"Oh, yeah? Well, listen, smart guy, /—"

"Kit," Nita said under her breath, "easy. Dari, are you out of your mind? This place is full of space stuff. The new Shuttle

mock-up. A meteorite ten feet long." She smiled slightly. "A store with Star Wars books . . ."

Dairine stared at Nita. "Well, why didn't you say so? Come on." Sfle headed down the cobblestone driveway toward the

planetarium doors.

HIGH WIZARDRY 349

"You never catch that fly with vinegar," Nita said quietly to Kit as the two of them followed at a safe distance.

"She's not like my sisters," Kit said.

"Yeah. Well, your sisters are human beings. . . ."

They snickered together and went in after Dairine. To Nita's mild relief— because paying for her little sister's ticket would

have killed her hot-dog money—Dairine already had admission money with her. "Dad give you that?" Nita said as she

paid.

"No, this is mine," said Dairine, wrapping the change up with the rest of a wad, and sticking it back in her shorts.

"Where'd you get all that?"

"I taught a couple guys in my class to play poker last month," said Dairine. And off she went, heading for the souvenir

store.

"Neets?" Kit said, tossing his manual in one hand.

Nita thought about it. "Naah," she said. "Let her go. Dairine!"

"What?"

"Just don't leave the building!"

"Okay."

"Is that safe?" Kit said.

"What, leaving her alone? She'll get into the Shuttle mock-up and not come out till closing time. Good thing there's hardly

anyone here. Besides, she did say she wouldn't leave. If she were going to weasel out of it, she would've just grunted or

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something."

The two of them paused to glance into the souvenir store, full of books and posters and T-shirts and hanging

Enterprises—both shuttle and starship. Dairine was browsing through a Return of the Jedi picture book. "Whatcha gonna

get, hotshot?" Kit said, teasing.

"Dunno." She put the book down. "What I really need," she said, looking down at a set of Apollo decals, "is a lightsaber."

"And what would you do with it once you had it?"

"Use it on Darth Vader," Dairine said. "Don't you two have somewhere to be?"

Nita considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and felt sorry for Vader. "C'mon," she

said to Kit. They ambled down the hall a little way, to the Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal— thirty-four tons of

nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese. Nita laid her hands and cheek

against it; on a hot day in New York, this was the best thing in the city to touch, for its pleasant coolness never altered, no

matter how long you were in contact with it. Kit reached out and touched it too.

"This came a long way," he said.

350 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

"The asteroid belt," Nita said. "Two hundred fifty million miles or so . . ."

"No," Kit said. "Farther than that." His voice was quiet, and Nita realized that Kit was deep in the kind of wizardly

"understanding" with the meteorite that she had with trees and animals and other things that lived. "Long, long dark times,"

Kit said, "nothing but space, and the cold. And then slowly, light growing. Faster and faster—diving in toward the light, till

it burns, and gas and water and metal boil off one after another. And before everything's gone, out into the dark again, for a

long, long time. ..."

"It was part of a comet," Nita said.

"Until the comet's orbit decayed. It came in too close to the Sun on one pass, and shattered, and came down—" Kit took his

hand away abruptly. "It doesn't care for that memory," he said.

"And now here it is. ..."

"Tamed," Kit said. "Resting. But it remembers when it was wild, and roamed in the dark, and the Sun was its only tether. . .

Nita was still for a few seconds. That sense of the Earth being a small safe "house" with a huge backyard, through which

powers both benign and terri-ble moved, was what had first made her fall in love with astronomy. To have someone share

the feeling with her so completely was amazing. She met Kit's eyes, and couldn't think of anything to say; just nodded.

"When's the sky show?" he said.

"Fifteen minutes."

"Let's go."

They spent the afternoon drifting from exhibit to exhibit, playing with the ones that wanted playing with, enjoying

themselves and taking their time. To Nita's gratification, Dairine stayed mostly out of their way. She did attach herself to

them for the sky show, which may have been lucky; for Dairine got fascinated by the big Zeiss star projector, standing

under the dome like a giant lens-studded dumbbell, and only threats of violence kept her out of the open booth that

contained the computer-driven controls.

When the sky show was done, Dairine went off to the planetarium store to add a few more books to the several she'd

already bought. Nita didn't see her again until late in the afternoon, when she and Kit were trying out the scales that told

you your weight on various planets. Nita had just gotten on the scale for Jupiter, which weighed her in at twenty-one

hundred pounds.

"Putting on a little weight, there, Neets," Dairine said behind her. "Espe-cially up front."

Nita almost turned around and decked her sister. Their mom had just taken Nita to buy her first bra, and her feelings about

this were decidedly mixed—a kind of pride combined with embarrassment, because none of the

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