Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (17 page)

We shouldn’t even joke about it,
she said.
He’s our guest. The Powers That Be sent him to us. We have to be nice to him.

Within reason,
Spot said.

I didn’t say that!
Dairine said.

You were thinking it,
Spot said.
I heard you.

Dairine sighed.
Can’t keep much away from you, can I?

Not for a while now,
Spot said.
So what do we do next?

Hope that nothing gets worse,
Dairine said.

She got undressed, and instead of the usual floppy T-shirt, she actually put on pajamas. There was always the chance that something untoward would happen in the middle of the night. Among other possibilities, Dairine had begun dreading any sudden crunching noises that might start coming from the kitchen.
Do Rirhait get the midnight munchies?
she wondered.
If it’s just for the dishes, Daddy won’t mind. But if Sker’ret forgets himself and gets started on the woodwork…Let’s just hope he doesn’t.

The bed creaked under her as she got into it. Dairine sighed, thinking of Nita having a good time far away.
Off getting a suntan on Beach World,
she thought.
I hope she remembered to bring sunblock. She burns so easily…

Dairine pulled the covers up and tried to snuggle down into the pillow and get comfortable. Her mind, though, was buzzing with the events of the day, and she knew it was going to be a long time before she got to sleep. Especially since there was another issue bothering her, one much larger than the potential impact of a Rirhait on the structure of her kitchen.
This is supposed to be a vacation,
Dairine thought,
a holiday. But at the same time, there are no accidents, and the Powers never do anything without a reason: In a finite universe, energy is too precious to waste. Which means these wizards were sent here for some reason.

Dairine pulled the covers over her head.
Wizards are always answers,
she thought.
But if these three are the answer to something here, then what’s the question?

The image of Roshaun, elegant, completely self-assured, and absolutely infuriating, rose before Dairine’s closed eyes. Furious, she squeezed them closed tighter.

And will I find out what it is before I have to strangle myself to keep from killing him?

Nita and Kit turned toward the source of the voice that had spoken to them. “Sorry,” its owner said. “Sorry! I was late. I had to help my
tapi,
my father. Are you all right?”

The first thing that struck Nita was how very tall Quelt was. Nita was getting tall for her age, everyone said, though she still felt short to herself. Looking up at Quelt, her first thought was that she felt shorter than ever. Her second thought was,
This girl would be a star at basketball…

But there was a lot more to Quelt’s looks than just her height. Her whole body was elongated; her arms and legs were perhaps half again as long as they would’ve been in any human born on Earth. She looked like a tall, slender, graceful ceramic sculpture, or a lovely smooth carving done in wood—a beautiful, polished brown wood, like teak or mahogany. Her skin even had that kind of subtle sheen, halfway between matte and shiny.

Her face was long and narrow, with high cheekbones, and she had large, dark, liquid eyes; her head was covered with something that Nita couldn’t quite analyze—a silvery blond growth halfway between hair and fur, shaggy at the top and sides, partly covering her small round ears, and reaching into a long, soft ponytail down the back of her neck to about the middle of her back. The effect of the fair hair against the dark, dark skin was striking, and, Nita thought, very stylish. Quelt was wearing a long, loose, sleeveless garment of some kind of woven fabric, and it flowed around her as she came hurriedly to them, her hand stretched out. She was smiling, a great wide smile that went right across her face. There seemed to be no separate teeth inside that smile. Instead, Quelt had two one-piece, dazzlingly white bony plates in the same place where teeth would be in a human.

“We’re fine!” Nita said. She was getting over that staggered-by-the-landscape feeling, and now she put her hand out to take Quelt’s.

Quelt took hers in turn, and pumped it up and down enthusiastically. “See,” Quelt said, “I’ve been studying your people’s customs.
Dai stihó!”

“Uh,
dai stihó!”
Nita said. And then she laughed. “It’s okay,” Nita said, “you can stop now. You don’t have to keep doing it!” Quelt laughed, too.

“Quelt?” Kit said, offering his hand and getting the same pump-it-up treatment. “Did I pronounce that right?”

“Close enough,” Quelt said, and bobbed her head to Kit, producing again that curiously wide smile. “And Kit? And Nita? Is that right?”

Kit turned his head to the left and inclined it forward, an Alaalid nod. “A lot closer than usual,” he said. “We hear all kinds of variations.”

“I’m so glad,” Quelt said. “I’m so new at this—and I’ve only once met a wizard who wasn’t Alaalid. But never mind that. And this is Ponsh?” She softened the sound of the consonant a little bit as she bent down to have a good look at Ponch. He sat down and, without warning, offered her a paw.

Quelt took the paw and shook it nearly as enthusiastically as she had shaken Kit’s hand. “This is another of the sentient species on your planet?” Quelt said. “Your associate?”

“That’s right,” Kit said. “Except Ponch is a little more sentient than most.”

“Yes,” Quelt said, “it’s the contagion principle. I’ve heard of it.” She let Ponch’s paw go, straightened up again, and looked carefully at all three of them. “But are you
sure
you’re all right? Sometimes when we get visitors here, they have trouble with”—Quelt looked around at that tremendously distant horizon— “—the look of things.”

“Well, by our standards, this planet really is huge,” Kit said. “In fact, it’s almost as big as a planet can be for humanoid life to evolve, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Quelt said. “Any bigger and it wouldn’t have had enough metal and heavy elements in the crust to keep the atmosphere in place. We were very lucky when our system formed. And we still don’t have a lot of metal. But I’m keeping you standing around here talking exogeology, and you haven’t had anything to eat or drink yet, or even seen the house! And my
pabi
and
tapi
are waiting to meet you. Come on!”

They started walking downhill from the flowery clearing where the gate from the Crossings had deposited them. Quelt looked up at the sky with a critical expression, and then back at Nita. “Is this weather all right for you?” she said.

“It’s just fine!” Nita said. “It feels like summer.”

“It’s still only spring,” Quelt said. “But let me know if anything goes wrong, or if it’s cold for you, or anything. If the weather starts to act up, I’ll fix it.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Nita said. And then she thought about it for a moment, and added, “Well, I guess you would be, if you’re the only wizard here… ”

They started to climb a little rise between them and the sea, kicking through the flowers as they went; Ponch romped ahead of them. “Oh, yes,” Quelt said. “I listen to what the Telling has to say about the way the weather is at the moment, and if there’s a problem, or if I’m not to change it for some other reason, Those Who Are send me word. But beyond that, I’ve been working with the weather here for long enough now that They seem to trust me with it.”

“The Telling,” Nita said. “That’s your version of the wizard’s manual, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” Quelt said. “Did I understand that correctly? You get the Telling as a physical thing?”

“Sure,” Nita said. “Here, take a look.”

Nita pulled her manual out of her backpack and handed it to Quelt. Quelt turned it over curiously in her hands as they climbed. “It’s so compact,” Quelt said. “Isn’t it a problem for you, though? Don’t you leave it places and then realize you’ve left it behind?”

“There are ways around that,” Kit said. “If we don’t feel like physically carrying the manuals, we can always pull the fabric of space apart a little bit and stuff the manual into the pocket.”

“That could be tricky,” Quelt said thoughtfully.

“It can be,” Nita said, “but if you—”

She was interrupted by a sudden flurry of crazy barking from Ponch as he came to the top of the rise, saw something that excited him, and dived down over the far side. “Oh no,” Kit said, “what’s he seen now?”

The barking continued, and Kit ran up to the top of the rise. Nita and Quelt went after him. As Nita made the top of the rise herself, she looked down and saw Quelt’s house. “Wow,” she said. It was not just one building but an assortment of low, wide buildings clustered together, built in a soft-peach-colored material almost exactly the shade of the pink-and-peach-striped beach that stretched away for miles and miles on either side until it faded from view in the haze before the horizon. The buildings were topped off with conical, pointed roofs made of bunches of the silvery reeds that grew on the seaward side of the rise as it sloped down toward the beach. Through these long, tall reeds, Ponch was plunging—though he himself was invisible at the moment, the reed-leaves were thrashing with his passage—and heading at top speed for a big pen made of more of the silver reeds interwoven with lengths of darker, silver gray wood, built off to one side of the largest building.

Milling around in the pen were a number of creatures that Nita at first had a great deal of trouble making any sense of. They looked like golden or cream-colored pom-poms, and as Ponch and his barking got closer, the activity in the pen got more frenzied.

“Ponch!” Kit yelled. But it was too late. Ponch came rocketing out of the reeds at the bottom of the rise and shot straight toward the pen. He was within only a few feet of the silvery, wooden fence when there was a sudden chorus of sharp, odd honking noises. All of the pom-poms leaped into the air…

… and kept on going, as every one of them suddenly sprouted wide golden or cream-white wings, two pairs each, and flew off down the beach in a noisy, honking flock. Ponch danced around on his hind legs, barking at the creatures, and then took off down the beach after them.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry!” Kit said, and started running after Ponch.

Quelt started laughing. “No, it’s all right,” she said. “But this is why I was late! I was helping my
tapi
get the
shesh
off them. It doesn’t matter now. We were finished…” But she kept on laughing.

Nita shook her head. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “He really loves to chase things so much. He created a whole universe full of nothing but squirrels once, so he could spend all his time chasing them.”

“He created a
universe?”

“Ponch is unusual,” Nita said. “It’s a long story.”

Quelt nodded a few times, a gesture that Nita was coming to read as the equivalent of an Earth human shaking his head. “I get that sense,” she said. “Well, he won’t have to create universes to have things to chase here. The
ceiff
are here three times a day, every day—they come back to be groomed and tended—and once we’ve got the
shesh
off them, Ponsh can chase them as often as he likes.”

Quelt and Nita ambled down through the reeds toward the houses. “They’re kind of like sheep,” Nita said. “And
shesh
—is it the furry stuff they’re covered with? Or is it something to do with food?”

“It’s a food precursor,” Quelt said. “The
ceiff
make a secretion that we process. It’s kind of complicated, but it tastes really good when you’re done with it. We trade it to other people all over the islands hereabouts: it’s very much in demand.” She started to laugh again. “And I should warn you, my
tapi
is really passionate about it. Don’t get him started—you’ll be hearing about
shesh
all night.”

“It said in the orientation pack that your
tapi
had ‘elected to do manual labor permanently’” Nita said. “It sounded like most people don’t here.”

“What, work?” Quelt said. She and Nita paused by the pen, looking down the beach to where Kit was still chasing after Ponch, and Ponch was still chasing after the flying sheep. “No,” Quelt said, “no one has to do it all the time. Nonetheless, some people like to, like my
tapi.
Otherwise, our people usually seem to have enough of everything to go around—food and things to make clothes and houses. Anything that’s unusually hard for people to get, like metal—either they process it on a small scale, in local groups, and everybody takes a turn doing the work, or else I get it for them. It’s one of the main things I use my wizardry for.” She looked at Nita, a little surprised. “Why? Do people on your world
have
to work?”

“Most people,” Nita said. “In fact, pretty much everybody.”

Quelt shook her head in wonder. “You’ve got to tell me all about your world,” she said, as Kit trotted back toward them, holding Ponch by the collar.
“Everything!
But we’ll have lots of time to talk about it. At dinner, and for days after. In the meantime, we’d better get inside! Pabi and Tapi have made great masses of food for you; they’re terrified you’ll be hungry after the trip.”

At that, Kit looked slightly embarrassed and Nita burst out laughing. “I think parents all must go to the same school,” she said. “Though how they get there and back without us knowing is something we’ll never understand. Ponch,” Nita said, “
what
were you doing, you bad boy?”

Ponch shook himself all over, spraying Nita and Quelt and Kit with seawater—he had managed to get in and out of the surf several times while chasing the flying sheep.
If they didn’t want to be chased,
he said,
they shouldn’t have flown away!

“Well, Quelt and her dad spent most of the afternoon getting those things together into that pen,” Nita said, “and now look! They’re all over the place. Don’t chase them anymore! You understand?”