High Wizardry New Millennium Edition (4 page)

“Find me a real one and we’ll talk,” Dairine said, not even looking up as she turned the pages.

“Sounds like you’ve already got plans what to do with it.”

She flicked a glance up at Kit that was half scowl, half smile: an expression suggesting that Kit could become part of those plans if he wasn’t careful. “Using it on Darth Vader,” she said mildly, “saving the Galaxy, no big deal…” She turned the same expression on Nita. “Don’t you two have somewhere to be?”

Nita briefly considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and—after a moment’s amusement—found that, in prospect, she felt sorry for Vader. “Call us when you get bored with in here,” she said, “and we’ll go do the multimedia show.”

“Yeah, fine,” Dairine muttered, barely noticing.

“C’mon,” Nita said to Kit. “We’ll go down to the far end of the Museum and work our way back.”

The two of them ambled out of the bookstore started making their way southward, through the main front-entrance hall, to the Forest Hall at the southeastern corner; then hung a right, heading westward through the New York State environment exhibit and the Hall of Oceans, and finally to what Nita most wanted to see, the Ross Hall of Meteorites. Here and there large chunks of ancient scorched rock or rock-and-metal stood about in cases or on individual pedestals arranged around circular railings. But the the centerpiece was the huge Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal—thirty-four tons of darkly shining nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese.

“That is really something,” Kit said as they went up the steps into the central circle where the meteorite sat.

Nita nodded. “When they redid the place they had to build around it,” she said. “It’s too heavy to just sit on the floor. See that pedestal? It’s solid steel. Goes right down into the bedrock…”

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.

“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 sinking into the particular kind of wizardly “understanding” with the meteorite that was his speciality where theoretically inanimate objects were concerned. “Long, long dark times,” Kit said, his eyes closing. “Just space, and cold. And then, real slowly, light starts to grow. Then faster. It dives 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 broke into pieces,and came down—” Kit took his hand away abruptly. “It’s not wild about that memory.”.

“And now here it is….”

“Resting,” Kit said. “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 terrible 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.

“Next one’s half an hour.”

“Let’s head back and see if we can catch it.”

*

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 elect to attach herself to them for the sky show, which may have been lucky; for Dairine got fascinated by the huge high-tech Zeiss star projector, standing under the dome like a giant lens-studded dumbbell. Only threats of wizardly compulsion kept her from trying to force her way into the fabulously techie 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 had been working their way around the sun-and-planets exhibit that surrounded the planetarium’s Great Sphere . There were digital scales that told you your weight on various planets. Nita had just gotten on the scale for Jupiter, which weighed her in at two hundred thirty-six pounds.

“Putting on a little weight, there, Neets,” Dairine said behind her. “Especially up front.”

For about three seconds Nita was fiercely tempted to pull her manual out and activate a spell she’d been tinkering with, one that would punch the wizardly version of a “mute” button on her sister. A couple of weeks previously Nita had had to go up a bra size; and having picked up that Nita’s feelings about this were mixed, Dairine had been running the subject into the ground.
Just one test to see if it’d really work. And to enjoy the look on her face…

Then Nita breathed out and let the urge go, as it occurred to her that letting Dairine know she’d gotten to her would be a tactical error. “It’s all muscle, Dair,” she said, without a trace of irony. “Besides, it’s where you are that counts. Check this out.” She sidestepped to the Mars scale, the needle of which stopped at thirty-seven pounds.

“Huh,” Dairine said with a frown, and wandered off. Nita smiled slightly at her back.
Annoyed that she didn’t get the reaction she wanted. Good…
“Listen, wait a minute! Where’re you headed?”

“Bathroom.” Dairine was already halfway down the corridor that led out of the Scales of the Universe area.

“Okay, but hurry up, it’s almost closing time.”

Kit, who’d been standing on the Saturn scale, now moved over to the Jupiter. “What was that about?” he said. “Don’t often hear you thinking that loudly. Or in that tone.”

Nita let out a sigh that was more of a hiss of annoyance.

“Oh, crap.” She tried the scale for Mercury: thirty-seven pounds. “…Growth issues.”

“You don’t look any taller.”

She turned around and
stared
at him.

“What?”Kit looked genuinely confused. Then, finally, he looked at her chest. “Oh.” He shrugged. “Didn’t notice.”

Thank God,
Nita thought. And immediately after that,
He didn’t notice?
She swallowed and said, “Anyway, she’s really been riding me, and I swear, if she keeps it up much longer…”

“She’s probably jealous.”

Nita laughed. “What, of
me?”

“Who else?” Kit got off the scales and wandered over to the railing between them and the glass curtain-wall, one face of the clear cube surrounding the Great Sphere. “Neets, why’re you surprised?
You’re a wizard.
You’re the one who told me how hot Dairine’s been for magic since she was a little kid. Any kind… Star Wars, you name it. And now all of a sudden not only does it turn out that there really
is
such a thing, but
you
turn up with it! And from what we had to tell her to keep her quiet after she found out, Dari knows that you and I do serious stuff.” Kit wandered back over toward her. “She wishes she could get her hands on the power… and there’s no guarantee she ever will.”

Nita walked away from the scales and made her way over to the railing by the glass wall. Kit beside her. “I think she’s been into my manual in the last couple days.”

“So there you go,” Kit said. “If she can’t have the magic, she’s gonna try to punish you for having it. Hate to say this, but she’s acting like even more of a brat than usual.”

That agreed too well with thoughts Nita had been trying to reject. “Yeah….”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a woman’s voice from speakers high up in the cube, “the planetarium is now closing. Thank you.” And some of the lights high above them started to gently dim.

Nita sighed. Kit punched her lightly in the arm. “Come on,” he said, “don’t let her get to you. Let’s go over to the park and get a couple of dirty-water hot dogs to take the edge off before we go home. If she starts getting on our nerves, we’ll tell her I’m about to turn her into a fire hydrant and then call in every dog on the upper West Side to try her out.”

“Too late,” Nita said. “She already knows we don’t do that kind of thing.”

“She knows
you
don’t do that kind of thing,” Kit said. “But she may not know that
I
don’t….”

Nita looked at his grim expression and wondered briefly whether the grimness was all faked. “I really am starved.”

“So c’mon.”

They headed down the inside of the cube together and came to the stairwell leading to the level below. There, under an arrow pointing toward the first floor level, was a sign they’d seen earlier that day and laughed at:

TO MARS, VENUS, AND LADIES’ ROOM

“Wait for me,” Nita said. “Once she’s done in there, she’ll probably try to break into ‘Venus’ to see how they’re doing the lava.”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Being a fire hydrant may be too good for her.”

Nita went down the stairs. “Dari?” she called, annoyed. “Come on before they lock us in.”

It was considerably cooler down here: probably something to do with the air conditioning. Nita turned right at the bottom of the stairs and walked quickly through the Venus exhibit, rubbing her upper arms at the chill, which went right through her thin T-shirt. The sluggishly erupting Venerian volcano behind its glass wall had already been turned off. No one else, visitor or staff, was to be seen from where Nita stood all the way down to the temporary plasterboard wall with the AmHist logo and the laser-printed sign that said MARS CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE.

“Still in the toilet,” Nita muttered, annoyed.
Reading, probably. One of these days she’s gonna fall in…
She went back the way she’d come and went on past the stairs to the ladies’ room.

It was not only cold down here, there was a serious draft. She grabbed the handle of the door and pulled; it resisted her slightly, and there was a faint hoo noise, air sliding through the door crack as she tugged. “Dari? Come on, we’re leaving!” Nita pulled harder, the door came open—

Air blew hard past her and ruffled her hair into her eyes. Bitter cold smote the front of her, and in it the humidity in the air condensed out instantly, whipping past Nita through the sucking air as stinging, dust-fine snow.

Nita was looking through the doorway into a low rust-red wasteland: nothing but stones in all sizes, cracked, tumbled, piled, with beige sand covering everything and dun dust blowing by. Close, too close to feel right or look normal, lay a jagged horizon hazed in a translucent brick color that shaded up to a butterscotchy gold. Midway up the golden sky, just clear of the dusty reddish haze, burned a small pale sun, fierce, distant-looking, and cold.

Nita stared at that sun until her eyes watered with it, realizing what its size and brightness, or lack of it, meant. Then she slammed the ladies’ room door shut. Air kept moaning past her, through the cracks, out into the dry rusty wasteland on the other side.

“Mars,” Nita breathed, and terror grabbed her heart and squeezed. “
She went to Mars…!”

That morning Dairine had awakened with the Oath’s words ringing in her ears to find herself not in a galaxy far far away, but in her own bed. She had lain there for a long few minutes in bitter disappointment—turning quickly to annoyance with herself at being taken in by what was plainly a bad joke—before she heard the UPS truck pull up outside. It was the computer, of course: and to this lesser excitement she had gratefully surrendered herself.

Dairine was good with computers. It was just one more kind of knowledge, good for using to keep people and the World off your back; and computers were really surprisingly easy to work with once you got it through your head that they were utterly stupid things, unable to do anything you didn’t tell them how to do, in language they understood. Once she’d got her brains wrapped around that concept, Dairine had started using the computers at school to start turning herself into a hacker.

She had no interest in the malicious types of hacking that were nothing better than electronic breaking-and-entering or sabotaging other people’s machines. For one thing, anybody could do that kind of thing, without understanding any programming at all. Particularly she disdained the egotripping kids at school who bragged that they were hackers, but were actually no better than “script kiddies”, scavengers who crawled the Web in search of ready-built pieces of programming to do their dirty work. Dairine’s kind of hacking involved getting down into the computer’s software and tweaking it so it would do things it hadn’t been built to. She’d started learning how to handle the C++ program compiler, and in the meantime had become far more familiar than most of her teachers with what made the school computers tick (which, as far as she was concerned, wasn’t hard). And the computers—tireless partners that they were, absolutely obedient to correctly-given orders and endlessly forgiving of mistakes—were the perfect companions. She and they worked well together, and the smartest of Dairine’s teachers had noticed that the machines “behaved” better around Dairine than around anyone else. She never noticed this herself, having taken it for granted.

So while her mother and father sat arguing over the paperwork, of course Dairine had been in no mood to wait, and had taken matters into her own hands. As soon as the Apple logo came up on the screen, she was already hovering over the keyboard, waiting for the Setup Assistant to come up and get past that so that she could start installing the first of a number of game discs she had waiting.

But then she found herself pausing to look closely at the screen… because there was something odd about the logo. It was the famous apple, all right. But it had no bite out of it.

Dairine stared. Was this some kind of bootleg machine? But that was impossible: this came straight from the nearest Apple distributor. Their address was all over the outer package, and she knew that address pretty much by heart , because she’d been checking the tracking info on her dad’s order about every hour or so for the past few days. And everything else was here, and just as it should be, all the paperwork and so forth—