High Wizardry yw[n&k-3 Read online

  "Deimos," Dairine whispered. Or maybe it was Phobos, the other of Mars's two little moons. Whichever it was, it went through half its month in a few minutes, sliding down toward the horizon and down behind something that stood up from it. It was a mountain peak, upraised as if on a pedestal, and so tall that though it came up from far behind the foreshortened horizon, its broad flat base spanned half that horizon easily. "What is that?" she said.

  "Syntax error 24," said the Apple dispassionately. "Rephrase for precision."

  "That mountain. What is it? Identify."

  "Earth/IAU nomenclature 'Olympus Mons.' "

  Dairine took in a sharp breath. It was an ancient volcano, long extinct, and the highest mountain in the Solar System. "How do I get up there?"

  "Reference short-transit utilities."

  She did. Five minutes later she stood in a place where the wind no longer sang, for it was too thin to do so; where carbon dioxide lay frozen on the rust red stones, and the fringes of her protective shell of air shed a constant snow of dry ice and water vapor as she moved; a place from which she could see the curvature of the world. Dairine stood twelve miles high atop Olympus Mons, on the ridge of its great crater, into which Central Park could have been dropped entire, and looked out over the curve of the red world at what no nonwizardly child of Earth had seen with her or his own eyes before: the asteroid belt rising like a chain of scattered stars, and beyond them, the tiniest possible disk, remote but clear.

  "Jupiter," she whispered, and turned around to look for Earth. From here it would look like a morning or evening star, just a shade less bright than Venus. But in mid-movement she was distracted. There was something down in the mile-deep crater, a little light that shone.

  "What's that?" she said, holding up the Apple.

  "Syntax error 24-"

  "Yeah, yeah, right. That light! Identify."

  "A marker beacon. Provenance uncertain at this range."

  "Get us down there!"

  With Dairine's help, it did. Shortly she was staring at a pole with a light on it, streamlined and modern-looking, made of some dark blue metal she couldn't identify. Set in the ground beside the pole was a plate of dull red metal with strange markings on it. "What's it say?"

  "Error trap 18. Sense of query: semantic value?"

  "Right."

  "First (untranslatable) climbing expedition. Ascent of (untranslatable proper name): from (date uncertain) to (date uncertain). We were here. Signed, (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name)."

  "People," Dairine whispered.

  "Affirmative."

  She looked up at the stars in the hard violet sky. "I want to go where they came from!"

  "Reference transit utility."

  She did, and spent some minutes tapping busily at the keys. In the middle of it, selecting coordinates, delightedly reading through planet names-she stopped and bit her lip. "This is going to take longer than an hour," she said to herself. Come to think of it, she might want to be away for quite some time. And seeing all the problems Nita had started having with their folks when she told them she was a wizard, it wouldn't do for Dairine to let them know that she was one too. Not just yet.

  She thought about this, then got out of the "travel" utility and brought up the directory again-taking more time with it, examining the program menus with great care. In particular she spent a great deal of time with the "Copy" and "Hide" utilities, getting to know their ins and outs, and doing on finicky piece of copying as a test.

  The test worked: she sent the copy home.

  "That should do it," she said, got back into the "Travel" utility, and wit the program's prompting started to lay in coordinates. "Darth Vader," muttered under her breath, "look out. Here I come."

  Shortly thereafter there was nothing on Olympus Mons but rocks, and dryl ice snow, and far down in the crater, the single blinking light.

  Search and Retrieval

  "We're dead," Nita mourned, sitting on the planetarium steps with her head in her hands. "Dead. My mother will kill me."

  Kit, sitting beside her, looked more bemused than upset. "Do you know how much power it takes to open a gateway like that and leave it open? Usually it's all we can do to keep one open long enough to jump through it."

  "Big deal! Grand Central gate and the World Trade Center portals are vopen all the time." Nita groaned again. "Mars!"

  "Each of those gates took a hundred or so wizards working together to open, though." Kit leaned back on the steps. "She may be a brat, but boy, has she got firepower!"

  "The youngest wizards always do," Nita said, sitting up again and picking up Kit's manual from beside her. "Lord, what a horrible thought."

  "What? The gate she made? We can close it, but-"

  "No. This. Look." She held out his manual. It was turned to one of the directory pages. The said:

  CALLAHAN, Juanita T. 243 E. Clinton Avenue HempsteadNY 11575 (516) 555-6786

  Journeyman rating (RL +4.5 +/-.15) Available/limited (summer vacation)

  That was Nita's usual directory listing, and normal enough. But above it, between her and CAHANE, Jak, whose listing was usually right above hers, there was something new.

  Novice rating

  (RL +9.8 +/-.2)

  on Ordeal: no calls

  CALLAHAN, Dairine E. 24? E. Clinton Avenue HempsteadNY 11575 (516) 555-6786

  "Oh, no," Kit said. "And look at that rating level."

  Nita dropped the book beside her. "I don't get it. She didn't find a ual, how could she have-"

  "She was in yours," Kit said.

  "Yeah, but the most she could have done was take the Oath! She's smart but not smart enough to pull off a forty-million-mile transit without having the reference diagrams and the words for the spell in front of her! And the manuals can't be stolen; you know that. They just vanish if someone tries." Nita put her head down in her hands again. "My folks are gonna pitch a fit! We've got to find her!"

  Kit breathed out, then stood up. "Come on," he said. "We'd better start doing things fast or we'll lose her. There's a phone over there. Call home and tell them we're running a little behind schedule. The planetarium's all locked up by now: so no one'll be around to notice if I walk through a couple of walls and close that gate down."

  "But what if she tries to come back and finds it closed behind her?"

  "Somehow I can't see that slowing her down much," Kit said. "And besides, maybe she's supposed to find it closed. She is on Ordeal."

  Nita stood up too. "And we'd better call Tom and Carl. They'll want the details."

  "Right. Go ahead; I'll take care of the gate."

  Kit turned around, looked at the bricks of the planetarium's outer wall. He stepped around the corner of the doorway wall, out of sight of the street, and laid one hand on the bricks, muttering under his breath.

  His hand sank into the wall as if into water. "There we go," he said, and the bricks rippled as he stepped through them and vanished.

  Nita headed for the phone, feeling through her pockets for change. The thought of her sister running around the universe on Ordeal made her hair stand up on end. No one became a wizard without there being some one problem that their acquisition of power would solve. Nita understood from her studies that normally a wizard was allowed to get as old as possible before being offered the Oath: the Powers, her manual said, wanted every wizard who could to acquire the security and experience that a normal childhood provides. But sometimes, when problems of an unusual nature came up, the Powers would offer the Oath early-because the younger children, not knowing (or caring) what was impossible, had more wizardry available to them.

  That kind of problem was likely to be a killer. Nita's Ordeal and Kit's had thrown them out of their universe into another one, a place implacably hostile to human beings, and run by the Power that, according to the manual, had invented death before time began-and therefore had been cast out of the other Powers' society. Every world had stories of that L
one Power, under many names. Nita didn't need the stories; she had met It face-to-face' now, and both times only luck-or the intervention of others-had saved her life. And Nita had been offered her wizardry relatively early, at thirteen: Kit even earlier, at twelve. The thought of what problem the Powers must need solved if They were willing to offer the Oath to someone years younger-and the thought of her little sister in the middle of it Nita found some quarters, went to a phone and punched in her number. What was she going to tell her mother? She couldn't lie to her: that decision, made at the beginning of the summer, had caused her to tell her folks that she was a wizard, and had produced one of the great family arguments of her life. Her mother and father still weren't pleased that their daughter might run off anywhere at a moment's notice, to places where they couldn't keep an eye on her and protect her. Nor did it matter that those places tended to be the sort where anyone but an experienced wizard would quickly get killed. That made it even worse. .

  At the other end, the phone rang. Nita's throat seized up. She began clearing it frantically.

  Someone answered. "Hello?"

  It was Dairine.

  Nita's throat unseized itself. "Are you all right? Where are you?" she blurted, and then began swearing inwardly at her own stupidity.

  "I'm fine," Dairine said. "And I'm right here."

  "How did you get back? Never mind that, how did you get out? And you left the gate open! Do you know what could have happened if some poor janitor went in that door without looking? It's sixty below this time of year on Mars-"

  "Nita," Dairine said, "you're babbling. Just go home. I'll see you later." And she hung up.

  "Why that rotten little-" Nita said, and hung up the phone so hard that people on the street corner turned to look at her. Embarrassed and more annoyed than ever, she turned and headed back to where Kit was sitting. "Babbling," she muttered. "That rotten, thoughtless, I'm gonna-"

  She shut her mouth. Babbling? That didn't sound like Dairine. It was too simple an insult. And why "just go home" instead of "just come home"? There's something wrong.

  She stopped in front of Kit, who looked up at her from his seat on the step and made no move to get up. He was sweating and slightly pale. "That gate *as fastened to Mars real tight," he said. "I thought half of Mariner Plain was going to come with it when I uprooted the forcefields. What's the matter w'th you?

  You look awful."

  "Something's wrong," Nita said. "Dairine's home."

  "What's awful about that? Good riddance." Then he looked at her sharply. "Wait a minute. Home?

  When she's on Ordeal?"

  That hadn't even occurred to Nita. "She sounded weird," Nita said. "Kit it didn't sound like her."

  "We were at home for our Ordeal-at least, at the beginning. ." She shook her head. "Something's wrong. Kit, let's go see Tom and Carl." He stood up, wobbling a little. "Sounds good. Grand Central?"

  "Rockefeller Center gate's closer." "Let's go."

  A Senior wizard usually reaches that position through the most strenuous kind of training and field experience. All wizards, as they lose the power of their childhood and adolescence, tend to specialize in one field of wizardry or another; but the kind of wizard who's Senior material refuses to specialize too far. They are the Renaissance people of sorcery, every one of them tried repeatedly against the Lone Power, in both open combat and the subtler strife of one Power-influenced human mind against another.

  Seniors are almost never the white-bearded wizards of archetype. . mostly because of their constant combats with the Lone One, which tend to kill them young. They advise other wizards on assignment, do research for them, lend them assistance in the losing battle to slow down the heat-death of the universe.

  Few worlds have more than thirty or forty Seniors. At this point in Kit's and Nita's practice, Earth had twenty-four: six scattered through Asia, one in Australia and one (for the whales) in the Atlantic Ocean; three in Europe, four in Africa, and nine in the Americas-five in Central and South America (one of whom handled the Antarctic) and four in the north. Of these, one lived in Santa Cruz, one lived in Oklahoma City, and the other two lived together several miles away, in Nassau County.

  Their house in Nita's town was very like their neighbors' houses. perhaps a little bigger, but that wasn't odd, since Carl worked as chief of sales for the big CBS flagship TV station in New York, and Tom was a moderately well-known freelance writer of stories and movie scripts. They looked like perfectly average people-two tall, good-looking men, one with a mustache, one without; Carl a native New Yorker, Tom an unrepentant Californian. They had all the things their neighbors had-mortgages and phone bills and pets and occasional fights: they mowed the lawn and went to work like everybody else (at least Carl did: Tom worked at home). But their lawn had as few weeds as Nita's did these days, their pets understood and sometimes spoke English and numerous other languages, their phone didn't always have a human being on the other end when it rang, and as for their fights, the reasons for some of them would have made their neighbors' mouths drop open.

  Their backyard, being surrounded by a high hedge and a wall all hung witn plants, was a safe place to appear out of nothing: though as usual there was nothing to be done about the small thundercrack of air suddenly displaced by two human bodies. When Nita's and Kit's ears stopped ringing, the first thing they heard was someone shouting, "All right, whatcha drop this time?" and an answering shout of "It wasn't me, are the dogs into something?" But they weren't: the two sheepdogs, Annie and Monty, came bounding out from around the corner of the house and leapt delightedly onto Kit and Nita, slurping any part of them not covered with clothes. A little behind them came Dudley the terrier, who contented himself with bouncing around them as if he were spring-loaded and barking at the top of his little lungs.

  "Had dinner yet?" Carl called from the kitchen door, which, like the dining room doors, looked out on the backyard. "Annie! Monty! Down!"

  "Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!" screamed another voice from the same direction: not surprising, since its source was sitting on Carl's shoulder. This was Machu Picchu the macaw, also known (to her annoyance) as "Peach": a splendid creature all scarlet and blue, with a three-foot tail, a foul temper, and a precognitive talent that could read the future for months ahead-if Peach felt like it. Wizards' pets tend to become strange with time, and Seniors' pets even stranger than usual; and Peach had been with them longer than any of the others. It showed.

  "Come on in," called one last voice: Tom. Kit and Nita pushed Annie and Monty more or less back down to dog level, and made their way into the house through the dining room doors. It was a pleasant, open place, all the rooms running freely into one another, and full of handsome functional furniture: Tom's desk and computer sat in a comfortable corner of the living room. Kit pulled a chair away from the dining table and plopped down in it, still winded from his earlier wizardry. Nita sat down next to him. Carl leaned over the table and pushed a pair of bottles of Coke at them, sitting down and cracking a third one himself. Tom, with a glass of iced coffee, sat down too.

  "Hot one today," Carl said at last, putting his Coke down. Picchu sidled down his arm from his shoulder and began to gnaw thoughtfully on the neck of the bottle.

  "No kidding," Kit said.

  "You look awful," said Tom. "What've you two been up to?"

  For answer Nita opened Kit's manual to the directory and pushed it over to Tom and Carl's side of the table. Tom read it, whistled softly, and nudged the manual toward Carl. "I saw this coming," he said, "but not this soon. Your mom and dad aren't going to be happy. Where did she go?"

  "Mars," Kit said.

  "Home," Nita said.

  "Better start at the beginning," said Carl.

  When they came to the part about the worldgate, Carl got up to go for his supervisory manual, and Tom looked at Kit with concern. "Better get him an aspirin too," Tom called after Carl.

  "I'm allergic to aspirin."

  "A Tylenol, then. You're going to need it. H
ow did you manage to disalign a patent gateway all by yourself?. . But wait a minute." Tom peered at Kit. "Are you taller than you were?"

  "Two inches."

  "That would explain it, then. It's a hormonal surge." Tom cleared his throat and looked at Nita. "You, too, huh?"

  "Hormones? Yes. Unfortunately."

  Tom raised his eyebrows. "Well. Your wizardry will be a little more accessible to you for a while than it has since you got started. Just be careful not to overextend yourself. . it's easy to overreach your strength just now."

  Carl came back with his supervisory manual, a volume thick as a phone book, and started paging through it. Annie nosed Kit from one side: he looked down in surprise and took the bottle of Tylenol she was carrying in her mouth. "Hey, thanks."

  "Lord," Carl said. "She did a tertiary gating, all by herself. Your body becomes part of the gateway forcefields," he said, looking up at Nita and Kit. "It's one of the fastest and most effective kinds of gating, but it takes a lot of power."

  "I still don't get it," Nita said. "She doesn't have a manual!"

  "Are you sure?" Carl said; and "Have you gotten a computer recently?" said Tom.

  "Just this morning."

  Tom and Carl looked at each other. "I thought only Advisory levels and above were supposed to get the software version of the manual just yet," Carl said.

  "Maybe, but she couldn't have stolen one of those any more than she could have stolen one of the regular manuals. You're offered it… or you never see it."

  Nita was puzzled. " 'Software version'?"

  Tom gave her a wry look. "We've been beta-testing it," he said. "Sorry^ testing the 'beta' version of the software, the one that'll be released afte we're sure there are no bugs in it. You know the way you normally do spell: You draw your power diagrams and so forth as guides for the way you want the spell to work, but the actual instructions to the universe are spoken aloucf in the Speech?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "And it takes a fair amount of practice to learn to do the vector diagrams and so forth without errors, and a lot of time, sometimes, to learn to speal(the Speech properly. More time yet to learn to think in it.