Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (7 page)

“Yeah. But it’s
your
safety I’m concerned about. It wouldn’t be very nice to get
you
all unstable.”

“I’ll take my chances that I can cope with whatever weirdness you’re about to drop on me. Tell me what you need.”

“Right now … some time off.”

“Meaning time after your spring break ends?”

“Yes.”

“On mental-health grounds, I take it?”

“Yeah.”

There was a brief silence. “Not that such things are impossible to arrange,” Millman said, “but—”

“I wouldn’t be asking you about this unless it was serious.”

“Okay. If I’m right in thinking that this has something to do with your break so far, you should tell me about how that went.”

“Uh…” The question, as always, was just how much to tell him. “We went off-world on sort of a student-exchange program,” Nita said. “It was pretty nice, most of the time.”

“But there were problems.”

“Yeah.” She had to restrain the temptation to yell down the phone,
Problems? You bet, because they sent us to Paradise, and we found out the snake was still living in it. And if that wasn’t weird enough, the snake was sort of on
our
side for a change! Mostly.
But even had Nita felt comfortable telling Millman about it, she hadn’t yet found the words to explain, even to herself, why the experience still unnerved her so.

“From the sound of what you’re not saying,” Millman said, “I gather you’re still processing the results. What’s going on that makes you need this extra time off?”

“There’s about to be trouble with the older wizards,” Nita said.

“The Seniors?”

“All the adult wizards. And there’s an incoming threat that we’ve got to find out how to cope with, in a hurry.”

“You couldn’t possibly tell me anything about what’s causing this threat?”

“I wish I could,” Nita said. “Even the older wizards don’t understand it completely yet … and they don’t know what to do about it. That’s what
we’re
going to have to figure out. And I really don’t know if I feel up to this!”

“But you don’t feel you have any choice, it sounds like.”

“None at all.”

“Dairine’s having to deal with this situation, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else I should know about?”

“Kit, too,” she said. Millman knew he was a wizard as well, but no more than that.

There was more silence. “This is problematic,” Millman said. “Especially since I haven’t been seeing Kit professionally. The school system would buy into the concept for you and Dairine, since we’ve been working together for a while. But as for Kit… And I’m reluctant to lie about this, not just because lying is wrong, but because it undermines my relationship and my contract with the school.”

“I know,” Nita said.

There was another silence. Finally, in a changed tone of voice, Millman said, “This kind of lost school time is
not
good, especially with your aptitude tests coming up.”

“If we don’t do something pretty drastic right away,” Nita said, “there may not be a planet to
have
aptitude tests on for very long. Or there might be a
planet…
but no one left on it.”

She could just hear Millman thinking. “You need to understand,” he said after a moment, “that just because we share the same privileged information about your special talents, I’m not to be routinely considered as a get-out-of-jail card. This gambit isn’t going to work more than once. Just so you know.”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Being in this situation again is the very,
very
last thing on my mind.”

“Good.” He was silent for a little longer. “How long do you think you’ll need?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Well,” Millman said at last, “I can cover for you for ten days, tops. I can pull Kit under the umbrella as well by telling the school that something came up for him over the spring break: something crucial that needs to be sorted out. Would that be true?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Absolutely.”

“All right. If his parents will back me up, we’ll be okay for that long. But that’s all I can give you. After ten days, if you don’t show up at school again, you’re likely to find the district superintendent banging on your dad’s door. Or, if someone at school gets too nervous, social services, and possibly the cops.”

Nita swallowed. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll tell Kit.”

“Good. Can you give me some more detail about
what
exactly is going to be happening to the planet, so that I can help people around here deal with the fallout, if things get sufficiently strange?”

Fallout,
Nita thought.
I wish he hadn’t used that word.
The thought of mushroom clouds sprouting all over the planet was haunting her. “I haven’t had a lot of time yet to go over the pre-mission précis in my manual. But people are going to start losing their sense of what’s underneath reality. Only physical things are going to seem real, after a while. And even those won’t feel right for long. Finally, only violent emotions are going to feel good—”

She wondered how much sense this was going to make to Millman, if any. But the faint scratching noise she heard in the background suggested that he was taking notes. “Okay,” Dr. Millman murmured. “Any sense yet of what you’ll have to do to reverse this situation?”

“The universe has started expanding too fast,” Nita said, “and we have to stop it before it tears itself apart.”

There was another of those long, thoughtful pauses. “Um,” Millman said. “Okay, I see why you might need a few extra days off for that.”

The complete dryness of his voice was bizarrely reassuring to Nita, so much so that she laughed out loud.

“Better,” Millman said. “Hold that mood. For my own part, I’ll do what I can for people who start having trouble at school. But, meanwhile, keep me posted, all right? If things are going to get a lot worse all of a sudden, I’d appreciate knowing about it. We’re all on the same side here.”

That was the thought that Nita was still having trouble wrapping her brains around. She was much more used to hiding the things going on with her from everyone at school. “I’ll do what I can,” she said.

“So will I,” said Millman, “and together we’ll have to hope it’s enough. But, Nita… for you, this has to seem like an impossible burden.”

She swallowed hard. “Yes,” Nita said.

“Call me if you start to feel the strain. I’ll help for as long as I can.”

“Thanks.”

“Okay. Go well,” he said.

“Yeah. Thanks again.”

Millman hung up.

She sat there staring at the phone for a moment before sticking it back in its cradle.
Well,
she thought,
at least that’s handled.

So. A total of two weeks to save the universe, huh?

It did seem absolutely impossible. But there would be powerful forces working to help them. And when someone believed in you—

Maybe this won’t exactly be a piece of cake,
she thought.
But at least you know people are rooting for you when you start cutting it up!

Nita picked up her manual, tucked it under her arm, and headed upstairs to her room.

***

One side of the dining room at the Rodriguez house had a sofa against the wall, and on that sofa Kit sprawled, lying flat on his back and reading his own manual. For maybe the tenth time, his arms had become tired enough that he had to rest the book on his stomach. He was having trouble believing how much new data was in that book all of a sudden. The effect wasn’t new: any manual would grow and shrink depending on what information you needed. But this time it
felt
like there was more stuff in there. It felt more important, and somehow more dangerous.

He turned a page and looked once more at the image he’d kept revisiting: a slowly rotating image of the galaxy, seen as if from several hundred thousand light-years away. It was displaying in negative, the stars black against white space, and the space was full of slowly growing fuzzy dark patches.

From the living room came the sound of laughter: Carmela, long since back from dumping her load of teen magazines at Nita’s place, was now sitting in front of the entertainment system’s big screen and talking to someone in the Speech. “No,” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s too early here to even
think
about grenfelzing…”

Kit let his manual fall closed. “‘Mela?” he said over the sound of alien laughter from the TV.

“Kit, I’m talking to somebody. Can’t it wait?”

“If I wait, I’ll forget. What
is
grenfelzing, exactly?”

“It’s kind of like emmfozing,” his sister said after a moment, “but with chocolate.”

Kit covered his eyes. “Sorry I asked,” he said. Since he’d made the mistake of using wizardry to configure the entertainment system, Carmela had been spending what seemed like hours every day talking to the various alien species whose hundreds and thousands of interactive channels had suddenly become available along with the more commonplace Earth cable. ‘Mela’s grasp of the wizardly Speech had been getting more acute. But at the same time it seemed to Kit that Carmela’s sense of humor was getting weird, even for her.

Well, at least she’s not turning into a wizard,
Kit thought.
It’s much too late for that.

He turned his attention back to his manual. “Did that last message go through?”

Received,
the manual page said.

“Okay,” he said to the manual, “show me again where all this started.”

The image of the galaxy reset itself. “Zoom in on that,” Kit said.

The spiral grew and swelled past the ability of the page to show it all. Shortly after that, the page was full of the empty space between the Milky Way and the next galaxy over. “There’s nothing there at all,” he said softly.

Ponch was lying upside down on the floor with his feet in the air. Now he glanced up.
Where?
Ponch said.

“Here.” Kit put the manual down on the floor, stood up. “Walk-in, please?” he said to the manual.

The imagery spread out of the book format and surrounded Kit, obscuring the dining room. He walked into the space between the Milky Way’s spiral and the spot that Tom had shown them earlier. Ponch got up off the now-invisible dining room rug, shook himself, and wandered into the negative-image intergalactic brightness, standing beside Kit with his tail idly waving.

“This is where it began,” Kit said. “You sense anything?”

Ponch stretched out his head and sniffed.
I don’t smell anything,
he said.
But it’s hard for me to scent through this. Your manual has its own way of telling what’s happening. It’s not like the way I scent things.

Kit shook his head. “The manual doesn’t detect anything, either,” he said after a moment. He reached out a hand and poked it into the brightness. The manual obediently rolled down a menu showing Kit a list, in the specialized characters of the Speech, for the various forces and energies that had been operating in that part of space when the stretching had happened. “Light, gravity, string structure, everything was behaving itself.” He shook his head and closed the Walk-in. “Then
this
came out of nowhere…”

In the living room, the laughter started again. Kit rolled his eyes, picked up his manual, and slapped it shut. “How am I supposed to save the universe with all this noise?” he hollered.

“Go save it somewhere
else?”
Carmela said. “I mean, even if you go read in
your own room,
and shut the door so that the sound of other people having
lives
doesn’t bother you, you’ll still be in this universe. Right? And you should be able to save it just fine from there.”

Kit gave Ponch a helpless look. “She has a point…”

I don’t think it would be smart for you to admit that,
Ponch said, glancing in Carmela’s direction.

“Come on,” Kit said, getting up.

He went through the living room as quietly as he could. Carmela, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, didn’t look up as he passed. As Kit went up the stairs, behind him she said, “You’re tense. I forgive you.”

I hate it when she forgives me and she’s right,
Kit thought. But aloud he just said, “Thanks,” and went up the stairs.

Ponch trotted up behind him, his nails clicking on the wood of the steps.
So you were serious before, when you said about us having to save the universe?

They came out on the landing, and Kit paused there for a moment with his hand on the banister. Ponch went under his arm and paused, too, looking up at him. “Yeah,” Kit said.

I wasn’t sure if you were joking,
Ponch said.

Kit laughed a single laugh. “Not this time.”

All right. Let’s do it, then.

Kit laughed again as they went into his room. “You’re on,” he said. “You point me in the right direction when you see what we need to do.” He tossed his manual onto the bed and looked around at the place: desk and work chair, chest of drawers, braided rug, pushpin-stuck maps of the Moon and Mars, neatly made bed. Everything was unnaturally clean, but then he’d been away for the better part of ten days and hadn’t had time enough to get things into their normal comfortable mess.

He sprawled on the bed, picked up the pillows at the head of it and started whacking them into a shape he could lean against, while trying to think some more about where to start attacking this problem.
The weirdest thing is that space started stretching in some place where there was so little stuff to
do
a wizardry on. Anyone who could work directly on the structure of space-time is going to be really powerful…

That was the thought that kept making Kit think that once again the Lone Power was involved.
But Tom and Carl seemed real eager to keep us from coming to that conclusion. And if the Powers That Be themselves think that this is something new…

He picked up the manual and flipped it open again, pausing briefly to look at the Wizard’s Oath, all by itself in a block of text in the middle of its page. Just after that came a section containing your own personal data—especially about the way the “long version” of your name looked in the Speech at the moment, information that was vital for doing spells. After that normally came the sections on spell writing, specialized vocabulary in the Speech, and so on. But now, before those sections, Kit’s manual contained a “notifications” area nearly a quarter inch thick. Every page of it was full of bold headings and blocks of text that rewrote themselves as you read them, constantly updating with real-time information from the physical universe. He glanced down at one heading: METEOROLOGICAL INTERVENTION: