Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (12 page)

“Yeah.”

“We’ve got a custom gate wizardry set out in the middle of the crater,” Nguyet said. “Been a lot of traffic through there in the past few hours, in both directions. You can never tell … it might confuse Somebody.” She grinned. When she did, that fierce look in Nguyet’s face got fiercer. Kit liked it: it made her otherwise extremely delicate, “porcelain” prettiness look more like the kind of porcelain that’s made into high-tech knives.

“I hope so,” Kit said.

Tuyet’s grin was even more feral than his sister’s. “We’ll keep an eye on things here,” he said. “Get out there and make It crazy.”

“That’s the plan,” Nita said. “Good luck, you two.”

The twychild waved and headed on out of the force field, making their way down toward S’reee. “That was interesting,” Kit said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Imagine how it must have been for them. Joint Ordeals. Never having to find someone to help you with a spell…” She shook her head.

“Having another wizard in your head with you all day, instead of by invitation?” Kit said. “A little too weird for me.”

“But if you’ve been used to it all your life,” Nita said, “even before you knew you were wizards, then maybe we’re the ones that would seem weird to them.” She tucked her manual away. “Never mind. Here come the others.”

The center of Spring Lake Crater was empty except for one thing: a large hemispherical force-field bubble. Inside it, laid out on the pockmarked, dusty gray surface, was a huge circle of blue light; and that outer circle was subdivided into about twenty smaller ones of various sizes. The diagram was a duplicate in pure wizardry of the more concrete and “mechanical” gating circles and pads of the worldgating facility at the Crossings. Everyone knew the drill, at this point, and one after another, Filif and Sker’ret and Nita and Ronan went out into the diagram and stood in the middle of one of the subsidiary circles. With Ponch bouncing along behind him, Kit made his way out to an unoccupied circle and stood in it.

“Everybody ready?” Sker’ret said. “I’ll do the master transport routine—”

He began to recite a long phrase in the Speech, rattling it off with the assurance of someone who’d done it many times before. As Sker’ret spoke, and that familiar silence of a listening universe began to build around them all, Kit gazed back the way they’d come for a last look at the near-full Earth, the edge of its globe just touching the edge of Spring Lake Crater. A thought came unbidden:
What if this is the last time you see that?

He shook his head.
Silly idea. We’ve been in bad places before and made it home, even when we thought we wouldn’t.

But there’s something about this time that’s different,
the back of his mind said to him.
Everything’s changing. The things you thought you could always depend on aren’t dependable anymore. Maybe it’s smarter not to take anything for granted now.

Kit swallowed as the glow of the working worldgating wizardry rose all around them like a burning mist, beginning to obscure the view.

See you later,
he said silently to the fading Earth… and hoped very much, as they all vanished, that he would.

Dairine stepped through the brief darkness of Roshaun’s portable worldgate into the huge, high-ceilinged, overdone space he called home, and waited for Roshaun to come out behind her. Sunlight poured through those tall crystalline “patio” doors off to the left, but it was a fainter color than it had been when she was here before. This light was a weary, dulling, late-afternoon orange that burned, but burned cool. In it, every bright surface in the room gleamed coppery, and the silver gilt of Roshaun’s long flowing hair briefly matched the red of Dairine’s as he came out of the worldgate.

Dairine put Spot down. The laptop put out legs and quickly crab-walked out into the middle of everything, producing as many eyes as Dairine had ever seen him come up with at one time. He settled himself down flat, pointing every eye in a different direction. Apparently the architecture had him fascinated. This Dairine understood, since Roshaun’s living space in the palace on Wellakh closely resembled a three-way collision between an antique furniture warehouse, a jewelry store, and a Gothic cathedral carved and decorated by the artistically insane. Rich overlapping carpets covered the floor everywhere; sofas and wardrobes and tables and chairs ornate enough to be thrones were placed here and there under rich canopies. Delicately wrought lamps hung down from a ceiling almost lost to sight in an opulent gloom, through which the occasional gemstone gleamed down like a lazily observant eye.

Roshaun stood there looking around for a moment, then glanced over at Dairine. “I wish we did not have to make this stop,” he said.

“Family stuff,” Dairine said. “Always a mess. You’re just lucky to have parents who’re wizards.”

“Am I indeed,” Roshaun said. “You shall judge. For the moment, I have to change.”

“Really?” Dairine said in amusement. “You mean there’s somewhere in the galaxy that won’t immediately buy into Carmela’s fashion statement? She’ll be horrified.”

Roshaun gave her what was meant to be a cutting look, and with apparent regret pulled off the floppy T-shirt that had been covering him nearly to his knees.
Has Carmela got a thing going for him?
Dairine wondered.
But no, now it’s Ronan.
She had to smile a little.
Wait till she figures out the ramifications of
that
one.
Dairine spared a second for an entirely clinical appreciation of the lean look of Roshaun’s upper body above the soft golden-fabric “sweatpants” he was wearing.
How old
is
he in “real” years, I wonder? If there’s even an approximation that makes any sense. Officially, as his people see age, he can’t be much older than Nita or Kit.

Roshaun carefully draped the T-shirt over an ornately carved chaise longue. “I shall return momentarily,” he said. “Do you require refreshment?”

Somehow Dairine didn’t think Roshaun was likely to have a supply of her favorite soft drink on hand. “I’m okay,” she said. “You go do what needs doing.”

He vanished behind an intricately carved and gilded screen. Dairine glanced over into the middle of the floor, where Spot was still watching everything with all his eyes.

“How are you feeling?” she said.

“Peculiar.”

That made her twitch a little. “Is that something new?”

“Not since this morning, if that’s what you’re asking,” Spot said. “I don’t feel like I’m losing my mind. But then again, I haven’t ‘felt’ any of these strange fugues you tell me I’m experiencing, either.”

That was one of the things bothering Dairine the most. A computer that was losing memory or files was enough cause for concern by itself. But when the computer was sentient, and at least partly wizardly, and was forgetting things it was saying or thinking from one moment to the next—

“I haven’t lost any spell data,” Spot said, sounding to Dairine’s trained ear faintly annoyed. “I’ve been running diagnostics constantly since this started to happen.”

“And they haven’t been showing anything?”

“No.” Spot sounded even more annoyed.

Dairine sighed. “In the old days, we wouldn’t have had these problems.”

“These are not the old days,” Spot said. “You are no longer half human, half manual. I am no longer just a machine with manual access. Both of us have become more, and less. And the new increased power levels do not make us who we were again. They only make us more powerful versions of who we are now.”

Dairine looked out the doors at the setting Wellakhit sun. It looked like a huge shield of beaten copper, sliding down toward the sea-flat horizon. It seemed like an age ago, now, that time when she’d come home from her Ordeal with the constant soft whisper of a whole new species’ ideation running under all her conscious thought, like water under the frozen surface of a winter stream. They had always instantly had the answers to any question—or had seemed to, the mobiles’ time sense being so much swifter than that of the human kind of computer that was built of meat instead of space-chilled silicon. And the answers they’d come up with, she had always been able to implement with staggering force, since she’d come into her power young.

But slowly that power had faded to more normal levels, and the connection to the computer wizards of what Dairine thought of as the “Motherboard World” had stretched thin, carrying less power, less data. It never entirely failed. That whisper of machine thought still ran at the bottom of her dreams, and if she listened hard while waking, she could find it without too much trouble. But nothing now was as easy as it had been in the beginning. Knowing that this was the fate of wizards everywhere didn’t make it any easier.
I thought I
wasn’t
wizards everywhere. I thought I was different.

Roshaun came out from behind the screen. Dairine’s jaw actually dropped.
And I thought he looked a little too formal
before.

Those long golden trousers had been exchanged for others completely covered with thousands of what looked like star sapphires but were orange-golden and as tiny as beads. The upper garment was, by contrast, a simple gauzy thing, like a knee-length vest of pale golden mist. Under it Roshaun was bare-chested except for a massive collar of red gold with a huge amber-colored stone set in it, a smooth and massive thing the width of Dairine’s clenched fist.

The stone shifted as Roshaun swallowed. “How do I look?” he said.

Between the realization that he was actually nervous and the total effect, Dairine was for once sufficiently impressed to tell him the truth. “Great,” she said. “Tiffany’s would want you for their front window. Why is it always gold with you people?”

“It’s Life’s color,” Roshaun said. “In this way we do Life honor. What about you?”

Her eyebrows went up. “What
about
me?”

“Are you going to meet my father dressed like that?”

“Like what?” Dairine looked down at her cropped jeans and T-shirts and the long black tunic-y T-shirt that said “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1”. “I look fine.”

“Surely something more formal…”

Dairine made a face. Of various things she hated, dressing up (except at Halloween) was close to the top of the list. “Why not just tell him this is formal wear on my planet?”

“I could tell him that,” Roshaun said, “but it would not be true.” He frowned.

Dairine sighed. “Oh, all right.” she said. “Spot?”

He came ambling over and she picked him up, flipped his screen open, called up the manual functions and started paging through the menus for what she wanted.

“It cannot be a seeming,” Roshaun said. “He will see through that.”

Dairine frowned. “You’re such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes.”

“And you are so intransigent and disrespectful,” Roshaun said, “nearly all of the time.”

“What? Just because I don’t let you walk all over me, Mister Royalty?”

Roshaun let out a long breath. “He is waiting,” he said. “This is going to be difficult enough as it is. Please do something about the way you look. Something genuine.”

Dairine grimaced.
Still…
She couldn’t think when he’d last said “please” to her; for a while she’d thought his vocabulary didn’t even contain the word. “Oh, all right,” she said, closed Spot’s lid again and put him down. “Spot, what’re the coordinates of my closet?”

“Here are the entath numbers,” he said, and rattled off a series of numbers and variables in the Speech. “Do you want me to set it up?”

“Sure, knock yourself out.”

A straightforward square dark doorway appeared in front of her. The darkness cleared to reveal the inside of the closet in Dairine’s bedroom. As usual, its floor was a tumble of mixed-up shoes and things fallen off hangers; her mother had always said that when the Holy Grail and world peace were finally found, they would be at the bottom of Dairine’s closet, under the old sneakers.

Dairine sighed and started pushing hangers aside. Last year’s Easter dress and the dress from the year before looked unutterably lame. Lots of jeans, lots of school clothes … but none of them suitable for meeting a former king. “This doesn’t look promising,” Dairine said under her breath.

“Hurry,” said Roshaun.

The tension in his voice cut short all the acid retorts Dairine could have deployed. “Oh, the heck with this,” she said, irritable. She turned her back on the closet. “Spot, close that. Do we have a routine for
making
clothes?”

“Searching,” Spot said, as the darkness went away. “Found.”

In her mind, Dairine looked down the link between them and saw the wizardry he’d located. It was a matter-restructuring protocol which would use what she was wearing and turn it into something else. She glanced at Roshaun. “How unisex is what you’ve got on?” she said.

He looked surprised. “‘Unisex’?”

“Do girls wear that kind of thing where you live?”

“Well, yes, but—” Surprise became confusion. “What is the problem with your own clothes? What do your people usually wear when meeting your leaders?”

“If we’ve got any guts at all, a real annoyed expression,” Dairine said. “Never mind, I can come up with something. Spot, hit it.”

“Working.”

A second too late it occurred to Dairine that this process might show Roshaun more about her than was anybody’s business but her own. A sudden chill ran over her body as every stitch of clothing on her pulled an inch or so away and resolved into its component atoms, then started to reassemble in new shapes. Her first urge was to duck behind the nearest sofa, but it was too late; any movement could possibly result in a dress that came out her ears. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and held still.

The chill faded. Cautiously Dairine opened one eye. Roshaun’s expression was confused but not scandalized.
Not that that means anything in particular. Does his culture even have a nudity taboo? Never mind, mine does!
She looked down at herself.

“Whoa,” Dairine said.

She was wearing a simple, scoop-necked, short-sleeved, floor-length dress, in a velvety substance as green as grass and as light as fog. Around her left wrist, where her watch usually went, was a bracelet of emeralds the size of quail’s eggs, held together with nothing but a series of characters in the Speech—a delicate chain of symbols in softly burning green smoke, scrolling through the gems as she watched. Another chain just like it held a single similar stone at her throat.