“Uh. Pluto . . .”
“Call me Aidoneus if you like,” said the Planetary, enthroning itself on a nearby rock. (There was no way, Nita thought, in which the way it settled itself in majesty amidst its enfurling shadows could merely be thought of as “sitting down.”) “Still one of your words, but perhaps a bit more targeted. The other word has more to do with concept surrounding wealth. Not really my department . . .”
“Wow. Aidoneus. Okay.” Nita was fighting to keep about four different things from coming out of her mouth, any one of which would have made her sound like a needy six-year-old if it turned out that she was wrong. “Uh, when you say ‘such a role’—”
He said nothing, merely looked at her gravely.
You’re not gonna help me out at all here, are you, Nita thought. No, of course not. I’m gonna make myself look like an idiot in front of one of the oldest bodies in the Solar System. Probably older than the Sun. Oh, who the hell cares? Compared to this guy, Jupiter really is a spotty teenager. “I just want to make sure I’ve got the right end of this,” Nita said. “‘Colleagues?’ As in Planetaries.”
“Candidates for the position,” Aidoneus said. “Yes. There are routinely a number of beings in differing degrees of candidacy, or training for it, as no inhabited planet can be left without a Planetary for very long. Yet in the normal course of events, as I think you might guess, the position is hardly something that happens to someone overnight. Not even as I reckon overnight.” There was a dry smile somewhere inside that darkness: Nita could sense it. “Aptitude is the main issue. Though to be sure it needs a certain type of personality; or a range of personality traits that work together. A certain flexibility.”
“You’re thinking I might have that,” Nita said.
“You’d know best,” the dark Planetary murmured. “In any case, it’s something to think about in the long term, as you pursue other avenues of practice.”
“You wouldn’t even be mentioning this if you didn’t think I had a chance, would you?”
“It’s never wise to raise hopes without some possibility of them being fulfilled,” said Pluto. “Entropy is thereby increased. You might never come to that position, despite a lifetime of candidacy. You also know, I suspect, that the work is dangerous and wearing, and that Planetaries on your world can be relatively short-lived if circumstance and their own natures join to conspire against them.”
Nita did know that. She thought of Angelina Pellegrino, Planetary at twenty-two and dead at thirty-seven. She thought of Atiehwa:ta and Delacroix and Henoseki, who’d been mighty in the position and had fallen before their time. But also there were people like Asegaff and Davidson who’d worked as Planetaries and lived to a great old age, dying old and full of honor, among wizards at least. And is there any other kind of honor I’d care about?
Nita sat quiet for a moment. “I’m nowhere near ready for this.”
“That’s a matter for debate,” Aidoneus said. “But the assessment rests with you for the time being; others’ opinions, except for mine right now, and Irina’s of course, have no particular bearing on the process as it unfolds. Let’s just say that there’s interest, and if you choose to pursue the various courses of study needed for prequalification, you would find no opposition. That,” and Nita could actually feel Pluto’s Planetary grimacing, “normally comes later. When things start getting political.”
Nita let out an exasperated breath. “Do not even try telling me that there’s politics involved in this.”
“Sentient beings are involved in this,” Aidoneus said. “Of course there’s politics. Motivation and countermotivation, ebbing and flowing and chafing against one another: how else can things be? But we do what we can to make it work regardless.”
And it smiled at her inside those shadows. “In the meantime,” Aidoneus said, “consider your options. There’s no rush. And come see me.”
Nita smiled back. “I will.” She nodded back at Kit. “Can he come too?”
“Of course,” said the darkness of the outermost Solar System as it faded away. “ . . . But no furniture.”
Shortly thereafter Nelaid and Miril departed for Wellakh with the still only partially conscious Roshaun, taking Dairine and Nita’s dad with them for the first short hop to Earth; and the cleanup crews got busy putting the crater Daedalus in order for the Invitational’s last two presentations.
Out of a sense of sisterly loyalty (and because in a wholly nonvisionary manner she foresaw Dairine giving her endless grief if she didn’t), Nita decided to hang around long enough to see Mehrnaz’s presentation. There in company with the astonished thousands in the crater, an hour or so later, she and Kit watched the senior geomancers present trigger a violent earthquake that (while sparing the crater) shook the Moon for hundreds of miles around. But hardly had it begun before Dairine’s protegée flung the huge and dazzling network of her spell out across the lunar surface to its full extent, powered it up, and stopped the quake cold in a splendid anticlimax closely resembling a gigantic and devastating sneeze that had failed to go off.
The roar of applause that went up as the ground outside the crater quieted made Nita grin in triumph. But at the same time she felt the weariness coming down on her more and more heavily. And there was a peculiar flickering of images going on at the edge of her vision, a remnant of the kind of thing she’d briefly seen when Penn’s internal guest broke loose. She turned to Kit.
“So now what?” he said, knowing—she suspected—perfectly well.
“I’m wrecked,” she said. “I want to go home and do something really ordinary. Sit down, have something to drink . . .”
“Pitanga juice? Celery soda? Aussie lemonade?”
Nita punched him in the shoulder in the good old-fashioned way. “Tea.”
The two of them were just sitting down at the dining room table when the doorbell rang.
Kit pushed his mug off to one side and bent over to thump his forehead on the table. “Nooooo . . . .”
“Oh, now what,” Nita muttered, and got up to answer the bell. But as she opened the front door and realized who was standing there, her mood of slight annoyance fell right off. “Carl!” she said. “I thought Tom said you were off doing supervisory stuff again.”
“Nope,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Nita said, leading him into the dining room. “Want some of your coffee?”
“Thanks, but no need. I’ll only be here a few minutes. Hi, Kit.”
“Hey, Carl!”
He sat down at the table with them. “I wanted you to know that I’m available for counseling services over the next week or so should you require them,” he said, “because from the sound of it, and from even the short version of the report on the Invitational before they had to recess for the site cleanup, I can’t think offhand of anyone more likely to need them.”
“Well, Penn, possibly,” Kit said. “He’s going to have a ton of issues.”
“One of his local Supervisories will be handling that with him,” Carl said.