Wizards At War

1: Situational Awareness

In the bright light of an early mid-spring morning, a teenaged girl in faded blue jeans and a white V-necked T-shirt stood in her downstairs bathroom, brushing her teeth and examining herself with a critical eye. Have I lost weight? she thought, pulling the T-shirt a little away from her as she looked down. This doesn’t fit like it did two weeks ago…

The view in the mirror was more or less the usual one: light brunette hair cut just above her shoulders, a face neither unusually plain nor unusually beautiful, a nothing-special figure for a fifteen-year-old. But there were changes besides the fit of her T-shirt. Nita Callahan racked the toothbrush and then leaned close to the mirror over the sink, pulling down the skin above her right cheekbone with one finger. My tan looks pretty good, but are those circles under my eyes? she thought. I look wrecked. You’d think I hadn’t just had ten days off on a planet that was almost all beach. “I think I need a vacation from my vacation,” Nita muttered.

She started to turn away from the sink; then stopped, noticing something in the mirror. Nita leaned close to it again, pushing her bangs up with one hand and eyeing her forehead. Oh no, is that a pimple coming up? She poked it, felt that telltale sting. Great. I really need this right now!

She sighed. “Okay,” she said. Normally she wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about spending any significant part of her morning talking to a zit, but if she talked the pimple out of happening right now, it’d take her less effort than if she waited until later.

“Uh, excuse me,” she said in the wizardly Speech—and then stopped. Wait a minute. I don’t know the word for “pimple.”

Nita frowned. For a moment she considered the tube of facial scrub on the shelf by the sink, then shook her head and reached out toward what looked like empty air beside her. Her arm promptly disappeared nearly to the shoulder into that “empty air” as she dug deep into the pocket of otherspace where she normally kept her wizard’s manual. Nita felt around for a moment—I really have to clean this thing out; there’s way too much stuff in here—and then pulled out what to most people would have looked like a small hardbound library book an inch or so thick.

Nita started paging through it. Let’s see. Pimple, pimple … see “aposteme.” She shook her head, turning more pages. What’s an aposteme? Sometimes I really wonder about the indexing in this thing.

“Nita?” came a shout, faintly, from the other end of the house.

“What, Daddy?” she shouted back.

“Phone!”

Nita raised her eyebrows. At this hour of the morning? Not Kit; he wouldn’t bother with the phone, or he’d just text instead of calling the house phone. “Thanks!”

The word for “phone,” at least, she knew perfectly well. Nita held out her hand. “If you would?” she said in the Speech to the handset in question.

The portable phone from the kitchen appeared in her hand, its hold button blinking. She hit the button, meanwhile balancing her manual on the edge of the sink while she kept paging through it. “Hello?”

“Nita,” Tom Swale’s voice said. “Good morning.”

“Hey, how are you?” Nita said.

“A little pressed for time at the moment,” said her local Senior Wizard. “How was your holiday?”

“Not bad,” she said. “Listen, what’s the Speech word for ‘pimple’?”

There was a pause at the other end. “I used to know that,” Tom said.

“But you don’t anymore?”

“I’ll look it up. You should do that, too. How are your houseguests doing?”

“They’re fine as far as I know,” Nita said. “Probably having breakfast. I was just going to get some myself.”

“You should definitely do that,” Tom said. “But can you and Kit and the visiting contingent spare me and Carl a little time afterward?”

“Uh, sure,” Nita said. “I was going to call you anyway, because I heard some really strange things from Dairine about what went on here while we were away… and the manual wouldn’t say anything about the details. Where did you guys vanish to? Assuming I’m allowed to ask.”

“Oh, you’re allowed. That’s what I’m calling about. I have a lot of people to get in touch with today, but since you two and your guests are just around the corner, we thought we might drop by and brief you in person.”

“Sure,” Nita said. “I’ll let everybody know you’re coming.”

“Fine. An hour or so be all right?”

“Sure.”

“Great. See you then.”

Tom hung up, leaving Nita staring at the phone in her hand. She pushed the hang-up button and just stood there.

“Wow,” she said. She looked down at the manual, which now lay open to one of its many glossaries, and was showing her fourteen different variations on the “aposteme” word. “Kit?” Nita said.

A slightly muffled reply came seemingly from the back of the manual, along with the sound of barking somewhere in the Rodriguez household. “I can’t believe we’re out of dog food,” Kit said. “I leave for a week and a half, and this place goes to pieces.”

“We were doing just fine without you,” said another voice from two blocks away: Kit’s sister Carmela. “It’s not our fault you forgot to put dog food on the shopping list before you left. Neets, is it true he destroyed a whole alien culture in just ten days?”

Nita snorted. “Wouldn’t have been just him, ‘Mela. And we didn’t destroy it. We just happened to be there when they were going on to the next thing.”

“‘Just happened’?” Carmela said. Her tone was one of kindly disbelief. “You’re so nice to try to share the blame! See you later on…”

After a moment Kit said, “Am I allowed to think about teleporting her to Titan and dumping her in a lake of liquid methane?”

“No,” Nita said, feeling around under her bed for her sneakers. “It’d upset those microbes there … the ones Dairine’s been coaching in situational ethics.”

“The thought of Dairine coaching anybody in ethics…,” Kit said. “No offense, but sometimes I wonder if someday our solar system is going to be famous for having entire species made up of criminal masterminds.”

“Well, if the Powers That Be have slipped up, it’s too late to do anything now. And speaking of the Powers, you should get over here in about an hour. Tom and Carl want to talk to everybody.”

“We’re not in trouble, are we?”

“I don’t think so,” Nita said. “In fact, I think maybe they are.”

“And here I thought we were going to have a few quiet days before spring break was over,” Kit said.

Nita shook her head. “Guess not. But now we get to find out why nobody could find them anywhere.”

From down the hall, toward the front of the house, she could hear voices in the dining room. “Sounds like they’re having breakfast out there,” Nita said.

“Should I wait to come over?”

Nita shrugged and turned away from the mirror. “What for?” she said. “Might as well come have some breakfast, too, if you haven’t had anything.”

“I have, but another breakfast wouldn’t kill me. Give me ten minutes, though. I have to talk to Ponch.”

“Why? Are all the neighbors’ dogs sitting around outside the house again?” This had been a problem recently, apparently due to what Tom and Carl had described as some kind of wizardly leakage. Diagnosing its source had been difficult with so much wizardry happening around their two households lately… and with the present houseguests in residence, the diagnosis promised to get no easier.

“Nope,” Kit said. “Everything’s perfectly quiet. He just has more questions about life.”

Nita smiled. “Yeah, who doesn’t, lately,” she said. “Take your time.”

Nita paged briefly through the manual, looking at the pimple words. There are too many ways to have this conversation, she thought. And I’m still pooped. If Tom hadn’t called, I’d just go back to bed. She yawned—

In the moment when her eyes closed during the yawn, the darkness reminded Nita of something. Another darkness, she thought. I had a dream… She’d been standing somewhere on the Moon, and it had been dark. Bright lights were scattered all around her, throwing strange multidirectional shadows across the rocks and craters, but the sky was as blank of stars as if the whole thing was a stage set. And something was growling…. Nita suddenly got goose bumps.

She opened her eyes. The bathroom, the morning light, the mirror, all the things around her were perfectly normal. But the memory left her feeling chilly.

It means something, of course, Nita thought. Lately, what doesn’t? Every wizard has a specialty, but the specialty can change. Nita’s initially straightforward affinity to living things was now turning into something more abstract—an ability to glimpse other beings’ realities and futures, or her own, while dreaming or in other similar states. She was struggling to master it, but in the meantime all she could do was pay attention and try to learn as she went along.

Great, she thought. News flash: It was dark on the back side of the Moon. I’ll make a note. Meanwhile, as for the zit…

She looked one more time at the way-too-extensive pimple vocabulary in the manual, shrugged, and shut it. Later, Nita thought, and headed out of the bathroom.

“All right,” her dad was saying from the kitchen as she passed through the living room, and Nita started walking a little faster as she caught the smell of frying bacon. “How many are we for dinner tonight?”

“The usual,” came the reply. “Three humans, one humanoid, one tree, one giant bug—”

“Humanoid king,” said another voice.

“Yeah, fine, whatever.”

“And who were you calling a bug?”

“Or a humanoid? I am the human. You’re the humanoids.”

Nita came around the corner from the living room and paused in the dining room doorway. The room’s slightly faded yellow floral wallpaper was bright in morning sun, and the polished wood of the table was covered with cereal boxes, empty plates and bowls, various cutlery, the morning paper, and several teen-girl-oriented magazines of a kind that Nita had sworn off as too pink and clueless a couple of years ago. At the head of the table, poring over the international-news section of the newspaper, was a slender young man with the most unnervingly handsome face and the most perfect waist-length blond hair Nita had ever seen. He was dressed in floppy golden-colored pants and high boots of something like glittering bronze-colored leather, unusually ornate—but over it all he was wearing a very oversized gray T-shirt that said FERMILAB MUON COLLIDER SLO-PITCH SOFTBALL, and he was sucking on a lollipop. Sitting at the right side of the table, turning the pages of one of the too-pink magazines and eyeing it with many, many red eyes like little berries, was what appeared to be a small Christmas tree, though one without any ornaments except a New York Mets baseball cap. Across the table from the tree was Nita’s sister, Dairine, in T-shirt and jeans, her red hair hanging down and half concealing her freckled face as she paged through the paper’s entertainment and comics section from last weekend. And at the end of the table opposite the blond guy was a giant metallic-purple centipede, reading several different columns’ worth of classified ads with several stalked eyes.

“You’re too late,” Dairine said. “The French toast is history.”

“Knew I could count on you,” Nita said.

At the table, the centipede pointed a couple of spare eyes at the Christmas tree. “You done with that?” the centipede said.

“Yes,” the tree said, and pushed the pink magazine over to the centipede.

“Thanks,” said the centipede. It tore the cover off the magazine, examined it with a connoisseur’s eye, and started to eat it.

“Morning, everybody,” Nita said as she headed through the dining room and around the corner into the kitchen, where her father was. “You all sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you,” said the Christmas tree and the centipede.

“Adequately,” said the slim blond guy, nodding graciously to Nita as she passed.

In the kitchen, Nita’s tall, blocky, silver-haired dad was standing in front of the open fridge in sweatpants and a T-shirt, considering the contents. Nita went to him and hugged him. “Morning, Daddy.”

“Morning, sweetie.” He hugged her back, one-armed. “Didn’t think I’d see you so early.”

“I’m surprised too,” Nita said. “Didn’t think I’d get over the lag so fast. Tom and Carl are coming over in a while. Oh, and Kit.”

“That’s fine.”

Nita rummaged in the cupboard over the counter by the stove to find herself a mug, then put the kettle on the burner for tea. She put one hand on the kettle and said to the water inside it, in the Speech, “You wouldn’t mind boiling for me, would you?”

There was a soft rush of response as the water inside the kettle heated up very abruptly. Nita took her hand off in a hurry. It took only about five seconds for the kettle to start whistling with steam.

Nita stood there and breathed hard for a moment, feeling as if she’d just run a couple of flights of stairs. No wizardry was without its price, even one so small as making water boil: one way or another, you paid for the energy.

“You’re getting impatient in your old age,” her father said, reaching into one of the canisters on the other side of the refrigerator and handing Nita a tea bag.

“Yup,” Nita said as she dropped the tea bag into the mug and poured boiling water on it.

She smiled. Her father seemed to have become surprisingly blasé in a very short time about wizardry in general—but Nita and Dairine had between them put their parents through a fair amount of wizardly business in the past couple of years, and the adults’ coping skills had improved in a hurry once they’d come to grips with the idea that the magic in the house wasn’t going to go away. We were lucky, I guess, Nita thought. So many wizards don’t dare come out to their families at all. Or they try it, and it doesn’t work, and then they have to make them forget… She got down some sugar from the cupboard. But look at him now. You’d think everybody had alien wizards living in their basement.

“It’s almost nine,” her dad said. “I should get ready to go, honey.”

“Okay,” Nita said as her dad headed through the dining room and toward the back of the house.

She wandered back into the dining room with her tea and pulled one of the spare chairs over from the wall, pushing it down to the far end of the table between Sker’ret and where Dairine had been sitting. The centipede—Nita smiled at herself. I should lay off that, she thought, it’s so Earth-centric… The Rirhait was carefully tearing out another page from the teen magazine. He then examined both sides of the page with great care before shredding it up with several pairs of small knife-sharp mandibles and stuffing it into his facial orifice.

“Where’d these come from?” Nita said to Dairine as she came back in.

“Carmela brought them,” Dairine said. “They’re sure not mine. I mean, look at the covers! You could find them in the dark. The publishers must think human females are nearly blind until they’re eighteen. And completely fixated on one segment of the visual spectrum.”

The Christmas tree—The Demisiv, I mean, Nita thought—reached out a frond-branch to pull another magazine off the pile. “I think the colors are delightful,” he said.

“That’s just because you’re a sucker for Day-Glo, Filif,” Dairine said. “You’ll get over it.”

Nita somehow wasn’t so sure about that. “And as for you, Sker’ret,” she said to the Rirhait, “you’re a one-being recycling center.”

“There’s a pile of Dad’s old Time magazines by the chair in the living room,” Dairine said. “For when you want something a little more substantial.”

“Oh, substance isn’t everything,” Sker’ret said. “Sometimes a little junk food’s just what you need.”

He munched away. Nita drank her tea, watching Roshaun read while he maneuvered the lollipop stick from one side of his mouth to the other. It was like catching some coolly elegant anime character relaxing between shots, because the bulge it produced in the Wellakhit’s face looked very out of place against that otherwise flawless facial structure, the emerald green eyes and the too-perfect blond hair.

Roshaun felt Nita’s gaze resting on him, and looked up. “What?”

It was exactly what Dairine would have said. Nita controlled her smile. “The lollipop…”

“What about it?”

“Hate to say this, but you’re kind of spoiling your grandeur.”

“What grandeur he has,” Dairine remarked.

“Kings are made no less noble by eating,” Roshaun said. “Rather, they ennoble what they eat.”

“Wow, who sold you that one?” Nita said. She grinned. At the same moment, her stomach growled, and she made up her mind about breakfast. “Think I’ll go ennoble a couple of waffles.”

Roshaun ignored her and continued to work on the lollipop, while Nita went back into the kitchen and headed for the freezer. “And you’re going to get cavities,” Dairine said.

As Nita turned around with the frozen-waffle box, she saw Roshaun deliberately arch one eyebrow. “How can a biped come down with a geological feature?”

“It’s hwatha-t,” Dairine said, turning a page in the weekend section. “Not emiwai.”

“Oh,” Roshaun said. “Well, it’s all right: people from my planet don’t get those.”

“I don’t care if you come from Dental Hygiene World,” Nita said as she put the waffles in the toaster and started it up, “you’ll get cavities all right if you start stuffing that much sugar in your face every day.”

Roshaun merely chewed briefly, and then reached out to the canister in the middle of the table for another lollipop. Nita winced. “Oh, Roshaun, don’t chew them up like that. It hurts just listening to you!”

“You sound like Sker’ret,” Dairine said, turning another page.

“Sker’ret is if nothing else enthusiastic and robust in his approach to the things he enjoys,” Roshaun said, “so I’ll take that as a compliment.” He got up and wandered out the back door.

As the screen door slammed behind him, Nita glanced over at Dairine. “You’ve got a live one there,” she said.

Dairine glanced up and shrugged. “Listen, at least he’s not complaining about our food anymore. You should have heard him last week.”

“I didn’t understand it, either. All your food’s lovely,” Sker’ret said, and munched another page of the teen magazine.

Nita’s waffles popped up. She went to the cupboard for a plate and pulled the waffles one by one out of the toaster, hissing a little as their heat stung her fingers. Dropping the waffles on the plate, she turned to root around on the shelf next to the stove for a bottle of maple syrup. “Got my hands full here,” she said in the Speech to the silverware drawer by the sink. “Would you mind?”

The drawer, well used to the request by now, slid open. Nita tucked the maple syrup bottle into the crook of her elbow while holding the plate in that hand, and went fishing in it for a knife and fork. “Thanks,” she said to the drawer.

It courteously closed itself as Nita headed into the dining room. Filif drifted past her in the opposite direction, brushing Nita with the fronds on one side as he passed. “You need anything?” Nita said.

“No, I’m just going out to root for a little,” Filif said, levitating gracefully past her and toward the back door. “I’ll be back shortly.”

Nita headed into the dining room; the screen door creaked open and banged shut behind her. She sat down and poured syrup on her waffles, then started to eat. “So what’re your plans for the day?” Dairine said.

“To stay right here until Tom and Carl turn up,” Nita said between bites.

“They’re coming here?” Dairine said, looking alarmed.

Sker’ret looked surprised, too. “They’re your Seniors, aren’t they? Wouldn’t you normally go to them?”

“Yeah, but what’s been normal lately?” Nita said.

The screen door creaked open again. A moment later, a black four-legged shape burst into the room and began jumping up on the people at the table, one after another, putting his front paws on them and licking them until they protested they’d had enough. When the large Labrador-ish creature got to Nita, he started the same procedure with her, and then paused, looking with sudden interest at her waffle.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Nita said.

But it smells so nice, Ponch said silently.

“And it’s going to keep smelling nice until it’s all gone,” Nita said. “Oh, come on, don’t give me those big sad puppy-dog eyes. Kit gave you breakfast.”

He might not have. You haven’t asked.

There was no lessening of the puppy-dog–eyes effect. Nita went back to eating. “I don’t have to ask,” she said. “I know he did. You’re really pitiful, you know that?”

Not pitiful enough, it seems, Ponch said, in a tone of mild regret. He dropped to the floor again and went to sit by Sker’ret instead.

Sker’ret looked at Ponch with several eyes, then offered him a strip of torn-off magazine page. Ponch sniffed it, mouthed it briefly, and then let Sker’ret have it back, somewhat damp. Tastes like my dry dog food, Ponch said.

Kit came in from the kitchen in Ponch’s wake. “Did I hear you bad-mouthing breakfast?”

Not hers, Ponch said.

Kit flopped down in Roshaun’s vacant seat. Ponch got up and went to rest his head on Kit’s knee. I don’t mind the dry food so much when there’s some wet food. But when you have to eat it by itself—

“It tastes like cardboard, is that what you’re trying to tell me? Okay, we’ll try another brand.” Kit ruffled Ponch’s ears. “Boy, when you got smart, you sure got picky…”

I was always picky, Ponch said, with an air of wounded dignity. But now that I’m smart, I can tell you why.

Kit looked over at Nita, amused. As he did, it struck her that he looked a little different somehow. “Is it just me,” she said, “or are you having another growth spurt? You look taller today.”

“I am taller,” Kit said, looking toward the kitchen as the screen door creaked open again. “Probably so are you. Looks like ten days in eight-tenths Earth gravity makes your spine stretch. My mom picked up on it last night. She measured me and I’d gained half an inch.”

“Huh,” Nita said, turning her attention back to what was left of her waffle.

“I, too, am taller,” Roshaun said, coming back into the dining room. “Your gravity is somewhat lighter than ours at home.”

“You’re the last one around here who needs to be any taller,” Dairine said as Roshaun reached for the lollipop canister again. “I have to stand on a step stool to get your attention as it is.”

“You finished that last one already?” Nita said, taking a bite of waffle as Roshaun sorted through the canister, pulling out a couple of the root-beer–flavored pops. “Roshaun, you’re not going to have any teeth left by the time you get home.”

“We shall see. And what is this delicacy?” He reached down into Nita’s plate and snitched a chunk of waffle off it just as Nita was about to spear it with her fork. As it was, she nearly speared him instead, and wasn’t terribly sorry about it. “Hey!” Nita said. “Cut it out!”

Roshaun ignored her, chewing. “A naive but pleasing contrast,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be so concerned about my sugar intake, if I were you.” He smiled at Nita.

“I don’t eat these every five minutes, Roshaun!” Nita said, but it was too late: he was already sauntering out again.

Kit smiled as the screen door slammed once more, but the smile was sardonic. “Is he for real?” Kit said under his breath.

“Real enough to fix a busted star,” Dairine said, giving Kit an annoyed look.

Kit raised his eyebrows. “Finish explaining this to me,” he said to Dairine as she got up, “because you didn’t get into detail yesterday. He’s a prince?”

“A king,” Dairine and Sker’ret said in chorus, sounding like they’d heard the correction much too often lately.

“The upgrade from ‘prince’ happened the other day,” Dairine said.

“And he won’t let us forget it,” Sker’ret said. “I think I liked him better as a prince. He was so much less self-assured…”

Dairine rolled her eyes. She made her way around the table and out, heading through the kitchen after Roshaun. Squeak, bang! went the screen door.

“Sker’ret, my boy,” said Nita’s dad as he came in from the living room, now dressed in jeans and a polo shirt for work, “your mastery of the art of irony becomes more comprehensive every day.”

It was hard to be sure how she could tell that an alien with no face was smiling, but Nita could tell. “You going now, Daddy?” she said.

“I want to get some bookkeeping done before I open the shop. See you, sweetie.” Once again, the screen door banged shut.

“Something going on with Dairine and Roshaun?” Kit said after a moment.

Nita shook her head. “At first I thought it might just be a crush,” she said. “But now I’m starting to wonder.” Nita speared the last pieces of waffle, and a thought hit her. “Hey, did Filif hear that he needs to be here?”

The wizards around the table looked at one another. “He went out as you were coming in, didn’t he?”

Nita nodded. “He’s probably out back,” she said. “I’ll check.”

She got up and put her plate in the kitchen sink; and with Kit in tow, and Ponch following him, she went out through the side door, down the brick steps to the driveway. The morning was a little hazy, but the sun was warm on their faces. The view up and down the driveway would have seemed clear enough to any non-wizardly person who happened to pass by, but Nita’s vision, well trained in perceiving active spelling by now, could see a tremor of power all around the edges of their property, a selective-visibility field that would hide the presence or actions of anything nonhuman. Inside the screening field, the leaves on the big lilac bushes across the driveway were out at last, and the flower-spikes were growing fast. Nita was glad to see them, though they also made her sad. The winter and the earliest part of the spring seemed to have lasted forever, some ways: any sign of things being made new was welcome. But her mom had loved those lilacs, and wouldn’t be seeing them again. Nita sighed.

“Yeah, I’m tired, too,” Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. “You wouldn’t think a vacation’d leave you so wiped out.”

“And there won’t be much time to get rested up now,” Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. “At least there’s stuff to do…”

“And five whole days left before we have to go back to school.” Kit looked at her meaningfully.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. When did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad’s cellphone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He hates it when people call me on his phone.”

Kit gave Nita a resigned look. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”

“Well, resist next time!” Nita said. “Anyway, we can’t just run off and start digging up half of Syrtis on our own. We have to talk to the rest of the intervention team and see if they’ve got any kind of idea where to start.”

“Yeah, but they said individual research was still okay,” Kit said as they walked up the driveway toward the gate leading to the backyard.

“You don’t fool me,” Nita said. “You just want to run all over Mars like some kind of areo-geek, and you want me to split the labor on the transport spell with you!”

“Oh, wait a minute now, it’s not that simple!”

Nita grinned, for he hadn’t denied it outright. Kit had developed a serious case of Mars fever—serious enough that he’d added a map of the planet’s two hemispheres to his bedroom wall and started sticking pins in it, the way he’d been doing with his map of the Moon for months. “It is cool, isn’t it,” Nita said, “standing there at sunset and seeing Earth? Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not the same as when you do it from closer.”

“So let’s message Mamvish and see if she feels like getting the team together in the next few days. It’ll give you an excuse to go do some ‘new research.’ And we can take the guests along: they like to do tourist things, from what Dairine says.”

The screen door slammed again. Nita looked back to see Dairine wandering down toward them.

“Filif says he knows about Tom and Carl coming,” she said. “He’ll be up in a minute.”

“Okay,” Nita said. “Hey, you did a good job on the shield-spell around the yard. The energy for that has to have been costing you a fair amount. You need some help with it? Kit and I can take some of the strain.”

Dairine looked briefly pained. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “If it starts to be a problem before the guests have to go, you can make a donation. Spot’s holding the spell diagram for me at the moment.”

Nita blinked. “Hey, yeah, where is he this morning? I haven’t seen him.”

“He’s up in my bedroom,” Dairine said, “under the bed, saying, ‘Uh-oh.’”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Kit said. Dairine’s laptop computer was more than half wizard’s manual, if not more than half wizard, and the uh-oh-ing had proven at least once to be an indicator of some unspecified difficulty coming.

Nita shrugged. “Neither do I. But maybe Tom and Carl will know what the trouble is—”

The sound of a car turning into Nita’s driveway brought all their heads around. It was Tom’s big Nissan. “Since when do they drive over here?” Kit said as Filif came drifting toward them from the backyard gate. “They only live three blocks away.”

“Yeah,” Nita said over her shoulder. “Come on—”

A few moments later, Tom and Carl were getting out of Tom’s car: Tom looking as he usually did, tall and broad-shouldered, his hair graying, casually dressed in jeans and shirt with the sleeves rolled up; Carl, a little shorter, dark, dark-eyed, and—today at least—looking unusually intense, with the shirtsleeves down at full length. Nita’s attention fastened instantly on that intensity, and on Tom’s hair. He started going gray so fast, she thought. What’s been going on? What have I been missing?

Nita and Kit greeted the two Seniors as casually as would have been normal. “Hey, you three,” Tom said.

“Filif?” Carl said, turning to him. “Berries all in place?”

Filif laughed, a rustling sound. For the moment, anyway.

“Can we go in?” Carl said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Come on.” She gestured toward the door.

Kit pulled the screen door open, holding it for everybody. Nita dawdled a little, watching with fascination as Filif went up the back steps after Tom and Carl. It was hard to see how Filif did it: his people had some personal-privacy thing about their roots, and when they moved, there was always a visually opaque field around the root area, like a little cloud that concealed the actual locomotion.

When they were all inside, Nita slipped past them and into the dining room to rearrange the chairs. As Tom and Carl came in, Sker’ret and Roshaun rose to greet them, the respectful gesture of a less senior wizard to a more senior one—though Nita noticed with some annoyance that Roshaun looked slightly skeptical.

“Sker’ret,” Tom said, while Nita sorted out the seating, “I was talking to your honorable ancestor this morning. He sends his best.”

“Does he?” Sker’ret said, politely enough, but Nita thought she caught some edge behind the words. Roshaun was standing there off to one side, with Dairine, looking slightly superior as usual. Carl turned to him. “Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Nuiiliat,” Carl said, “eniwe’ sa pheir—”And then he continued, not in the Speech, but in a beautiful flow of language that sounded more like running water than like words. Nonetheless, the meaning was plain, for those who speak the Speech can listen in it as well, comprehending any language. “A sorrow for your new burden, Sunborn. Bear it as befits you, and lay it down in its proper time, mere cast-off shadow as it is of the greater radiance beyond.”

Roshaun looked utterly stunned. He bowed to Tom and Carl as if they were as royal as he thought he was, or more so. “May it be so,” he said, “here and henceforward.”

They nodded to him, and moved around the table to get settled.

“Now those are Seniors,” Roshaun said under his breath as he sat down beside Nita. “I was wondering if your people had any worthy of the name.”

“You have no idea,” Nita said softly. She wondered yet again exactly what was involved in becoming a Senior. It’s not like they’re so old. It’s not like they’re just grown up, either. Lots of grown-ups are wizards, and they never make Senior level, or even Advisory. What is it? What do you have to do? How do they know so much stuff, and make it look so easy?

At last everyone was seated. “Normally we’d spend a lot more time being social,” Tom said, “but today’s not the day for it, so please forgive us if we get right down to business.”

He let out a long breath, looking them all over. “Some of you,” he said, “will have noticed that the world has been getting… well, a lot more complicated of late. And, seemingly, a lot worse.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, thinking ruefully (among other things) of one significant change in the Manhattan skyline in the last decade, and what had come after.

“By ‘of late,’” Tom said, just a little sharply, “I mean, over the past couple thousand years.”

“Oh,” Nita said, and shut her mouth.

“It’s not local,” Tom said. “Matters have been worsening gradually all over the worlds; and wizards who study macrotrends have been concerned about it for some time. The Powers That Be haven’t had much to say except that this worsening is a sign of a huge change coming… something that’s not been seen before in the worlds. And now we know the change is upon us… because the expansion of the universe is speeding up.”

Kit looked a little confused. “But hasn’t it always been expanding? What’s the problem?”

“Bear with me,” Tom said. He looked at Nita. “What do you know about ‘dark matter’?”

“Mostly that it’s been missing,” Nita said. “Astronomers have been looking for it for a long time, maybe a hundred years or so. Now they’ve started to find it.”

“And so have scientists on a lot of other worlds,” Carl said. “Know what’s strange about that?”

“That it took us so long?” Kit said.

Carl shook his head. “That all the species who were looking for dark matter started finding it at around the same time.”

Nita sat there and wondered what to make of that.

“The discovery or location of dark matter and the increase in the speed of the universe’s expansion are somehow connected,” Tom said. “Dark matter is being detected in ever-increasing masses and volumes… as if it’s been appearing out of nowhere. And in all the places where ‘new’ dark matter is being found, local space is beginning to expand much faster than it should. Thousands of times faster.”

“So everything’s getting farther and farther away from everything else,” Kit said.

“Right. Now, that’s bad enough by itself. But there are also side effects to this kind of abnormal expansion. Mental ones, and effects that go deeper than the merely mental.”

Roshaun stirred uncomfortably, and a sort of rustle went through Filif’s branches.

“The expansion isn’t just affecting space itself,” Carl said. “It also stretches thin the structure space is hung on—the subdimensions, the realms of hyperstrings and so on. If the expansion isn’t slowed to its normal rate, physical laws are going to start misbehaving. And since those laws are the basis on which life and thought work, people here and everywhere else are going to start being affected personally by the greatly increased expansion.”

“How?” Filif said.

“That’s going to vary from species to species,” Tom said. “In our case, the case of more senior wizards—and I don’t mean Seniors, but everyone much past latency, what our own species calls adolescence—it’s going to look like a slowly increasing physical and then mental weariness. We’re going to start finding it hard to care, even hard to believe in what we’re all doing. And then our wizardry will vanish.”

Nita looked at Tom and thought, with a sudden twisting in her gut, how very tired he looked.

“Yes,” Tom said. “It’s already begun.” He let out a long breath. “Now of course this is something we’d try to derail. Most Seniors and Advisory-level wizards from this part of the galaxy were involved this past week with an intervention that was meant to deal with the problem, at least in the short term, for our galaxy.”

Nita thought of Tom and her dad sitting in her dining room and talking, some days back, when they’d thought no one was listening. We have a fighting chance—actually, a lot better than just a chance, Tom had been saying to her dad, about something the Senior Wizards had been contemplating.

“So that’s where you were when nobody could get through to you, even with the manuals,” Nita said.

Carl nodded. “None of us was sure when the necessary forces could be completely assembled. When the call finally came, we had to drop everything and go. There was no time for explanations.”

“Or interruptions,” Tom said. “To say we were busy would have been putting it mildly… not that it made any difference, in the end. Because we failed. After that we were all sent home to our homeworlds to start organizing their defense.”

Nita went cold in a rush, as cold as if someone had dumped a bucket of snow over her head.

“Why now?” Kit said. “Why is all this happening now?”

“Not even the Powers are sure,” Carl said. “Someone’s going to have to find out, though, because the ‘why’ may be the key to solving the problem. If it can be solved.”

Kit had a very uneasy look on his face. “So, if you guys are going to lose your wizardry for a while… who’s going to take over for you as Seniors?” he said. “Who’s going to be running the planet?”

Tom and Carl looked at each other, then at Nita and Kit.

“You are,” they said.