Dairine stared at the polished floor. “I don’t know,” she said at last, looking toward the simulation. “This has kind of a Big Brother sound to it…”
“Or Big Sister?” Nita said. “Yeah, it does. But it’s the best deal we’re going to get from Dad right now. And since Bobo is wizardry, and the Powers That Be run him, he can’t do anything bad to you or Spot.” Nita glanced around. “Where is he, anyway?”
Dairine gestured with her head toward the star simulator. To Nita’s considerable surprise, a small shadow, like a rectangular sunspot, materialized near the bottom of the slowly rotating globe: and then a dark oblong shape extruded itself from the shadow and dropped toward the shining floor. The shape put out legs in midair and landed on them, bouncing slightly as it came down. Then it came spidering over to Dairine and Nita.
“Has he had another upgrade?” Nita said. When she’d seen Spot only that morning, he’d looked as he had for the last couple of months—shining black and wearing, set into the back of the closed lid, what could at first glance have been mistaken for the fruity logo of a large computer company, except that this apple had no bite out of it Now, though, he looked significantly thinner, and the black of his carapace had gone matte.
“Scheduled molt,” Dairine said. “He was installing some new firmware and thought while he was at it he’d try one of the new nonreflective coatings on his shell.”
“Sharp look, guy!” Nita said to him. “Suits you.”
Thanks, Spot said. As usual, he was no more verbally forthcoming with Nita than with anyone else but Dairine. But he did sound faintly pleased.
Dairine let out a long breath. “I don’t know about this,” she said under her breath. “Bobo’s kind of your tool.”
Nita burst out laughing. Dairine looked at her strangely. “What? What’s so funny?”
It took Nita a few moments to get the laughter under control. “My tool! Oh, please. Like I can order wizardry around and tell it what to do! Please let that happen.” She got down on one knee. “Spot,” she said, “have you been following this?”
Yes.
“Will this solution work for you? You’re the one who’ll be the source of the raw data. Bobo’ll just be managing the spinoff for Dad: he’ll feed the massaged data to the computer at home.”
Maybe with text-message alerts and tweets when something new comes in, Bobo said at the back of Nita’s mind. And copied to e-mail, of course…
Nita rolled her eyes. Not only do I have the spirit of wizardry living in my head, but it’s a geek spirit. She turned her attention back to Spot.
He turned one eye up to look at Dairine. Okay with you?
She shrugged. “If we’re going to stay on track with what we’re doing here, sounds like it has to be.”
All right, Spot said, and trundled off back under the simulator. There he levitated up into the body of the surrogate sun, vanishing in the glare of its chromosphere.
Nita shook her head. “How hot does it get in there?”
“Not too bad,” Dairine said, and sighed. “A couple thousand degrees K. The temperature’s scaled down, like the exterior, for practice. Wizards here usually scale themselves way up in apparent size to work with Thahit. Seems it perceives us better that way.”
Nita nodded. “Okay. Look… thanks for working with me on this. Why don’t you go get changed and we’ll head home and deal with Dad before he gets too crazy. The sooner we disarm him, the sooner life gets back to what passes for normal.”
Dairine nodded, moved away. Then suddenly she stopped and turned: and the strange, hard look on her face made Nita wonder if she was going to have to do this bout of persuasion all over again.
“One thing,” Dairine said.
Nita tried to stay calm. “Yeah?”
Dairine came back to Nita almost reluctantly. “When you came after me just now,” Dairine said, “you checked your manual first, didn’t you? To see what happened to Roshaun.”
Nita froze. Dairine’s voice had gone expressionless and flat, and hearing it sound that way scared Nita: the last time she’d heard that tone from her sister had been just after their mom had died. How do I handle this? What do I say?
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I did.”
Dairine stared at her. Then she whispered, “What did it say?”
Oh, God, I was afraid of this! Either she hasn’t looked, or she has and doesn’t believe what she saw. And if whatever I say is the wrong answer, now I get blamed for whatever I found. “Uh. It was something weird. Something really— vague.”
Dairine’s face was simply frozen. Nita didn’t dare move. Oh, no, I’m dead now…
But suddenly her sister was hugging her hard, her face buried in Nita’s vest. “Oh, wow,” Dairine was saying, “oh, wow, I was so scared, I thought that he— and then I thought I was crazy; it didn’t make any sense. But if you saw it, too, then it’s true, he’s not, not dead, he’s not—”
Nita was bemused, but for the moment the safest course seemed to be to just hang on to Dairine while her sister got herself under control. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay!” —while very much hoping it actually was.
After a moment Dairine pushed her away, turning her back to wipe her eyes. “Come on,” Nita said, “let’s get moving. Go change.”
Dairine nodded and vanished.
Nita turned away from the slowly rotating star— then jumped. In complete silence, Nelaid had reappeared behind her and was standing with hands clasped behind his back, looking past Nita at the simulator.
That ironic gaze shifted to her now. Nita popped out in a sweat. The effect was similar to being in the principal’s office, except that in this case she hadn’t been called: she’d walked in and told the principal to his face that whatever he was doing, he needed to stop it while she dealt with business. “I’m really, really sorry,” Nita said. “If I could have, I’d have waited till she got home. But my dad—”
Nelaid held up a hand, closed his eyes. It was a gesture Nita had seen other humanoid species use as the equivalent of a headshake. When Nelaid opened his eyes again, his expression was milder, if no less ironic. “She is, I take it, a trial to you.”
Nita rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.”
“I might,” Nelaid said. “I had a younger brother once. He should have been Sunlord when our father left the body. But others had different plans for him. And my father, and me.”
In the précis on Wellakh, Nita had seen references to the political instability of the world: but the phrase “frequent assassinations” can sound merely remotely troubling until you find yourself discussing the reality of it with one of the targets. Not certain how to respond, Nita kept quiet.
“She reminds me of him,” Nelaid said, looking at the simulation of the Wellakhit homestar as it gently rotated. As they watched, a single loop of prominence arched up out of the leftward limb of the star, strained away from it, snapped in two; the ends frayed away and the separate jets fell back to the sun’s surface in a splash of plasma.
“Of your brother?” Nita said.
Nelaid closed his eyes again. When they opened, Nita was sorry she’d said anything: the grief and pain in Nelaid’s eyes flared as the prominence had, brief and fierce. Then the look was swallowed back into that look of carefully controlled irony, and might never have been there at all. “Is she in difficulty at home?” Nelaid said.
“Some. It’ll be okay when we get back. Our dad just needs to know what Dairine’s doing.”
And then the idea hit her. “I wonder—” Nita said, and stopped. Where do I go from here? There are too many ways this can go wrong—
Too late: Nelaid was waiting. “It might make our father happier,” Nita said, “if he knew for sure that she had someone keeping an eye on her. Someone—”