6
Mumbai
IT WAS PECULIAR, Dairine thought, that as a wizard you could go thousands of light-years away from home, even millions, and not get all that nervous about it. But go halfway across your own planet and you started to twitch.
Her own nervousness annoyed her. I’ve traveled distances that some human beings can’t even conceive of, she thought. I’ve been out practically to the information event horizon, the place beyond which things can barely be said to exist. I have buddies out there. And now I’ve got someone I know in Bombay—no, Mumbai, she corrected herself—and I’m losing my grip. What’s the matter with me?
Dairine stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom, finishing up the business of getting dressed. The unusual thing for her was that she was doing it at midnight, and was already resisting the temptation to yawn.
“You ought to give us timeslides,” she’d said to Tom when she’d gone over to his place to discuss this visit with him.
He’d given her a look of incredulous amusement. “Let me get this straight. You want us to selectively derange the structure of local space-time and risk a cascade of possible temporal paradoxes so that you don’t have to have your personal sleep schedule messed up?”
“You gave Nita and Kit one for their Ordeal when they asked!”
“Actually, that was because they were on their Ordeal,” Tom replied. He was leaning against his dining room table with his arms folded and his legs crossed at the ankle, and his whole demeanor radiated a disinclination to take Dairine seriously. “And the suggestion came from us. Carl has latitude to offer such instrumentalities to probationary wizards if he thinks it’s appropriate, which he did—as the Powers gave him to understand that Nita and Kit’s ability to return from their trip at the same time they left would prove useful. And as it happens, it did. In your case, however, a timeslide would serve no such purpose. And seeing that you were the one who suggested that the two of you meet up at your mentee’s place—”
“The orientation pack said that was a good thing, because people are more comfortable on their own ground!”
“That is completely true,” Tom said. “It was very smart of you to pick up on that suggestion. And no, the Powers are not going to give you a timeslide as a reward for being considerate. In fact if I were acting for them and I were going to give you anything right about now, it would be be a recommendation that you start stocking up on coffee.”
Frustrated, Dairine had scowled at him. “I thought coffee was supposed to stunt your growth.”
“Urban myth,” Tom said, heading over to sit down at his desk in the living room again. He flipped his laptop open, his expression intimating he’d had about enough of Dairine for one day. “Invented by a guy at the beginning of the twentieth century who was trying to sell people on his new grain-based coffee substitute. There are various other reasons why someone your age might want to avoid overdoing the caffeine-based beverages, but stunting your growth would not be one of them.”
“Tom,” Dairine whined, “they’re nine and a half hours ahead of us!”
“And you did that without even looking at the manual!” Tom said, tapping at his laptop’s keyboard and not looking up. “My faith in young people’s ability to do mind math is completely restored.”
Dairine paused, frowning. “What happened to the other half-hour?”
Tom shook his head. “Lost in translation? Take it up with the world temporal steering commitee. Maybe one of them has some time-share scam going.”
She sighed. When Tom got snarky like this, it was impossible to get anything useful out of him.
“I can hear you thinking how nonforthcoming I’m being at the moment,” Tom said. “But spare a thought for the other thirty or forty people who’ve been in here this morning already, looking for advice and assistance with Invitational issues.” He sighed. “And the thirty or forty who’ll come after you’ve left, before I get anywhere near my lunch. I’m a very popular man today . . .”
Dairine had to laugh at that. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get off your case now.”
“Please and thank you!”
She was heading for the door when Tom paused in his typing, staring at the laptop screen. “One thought,” he said, “just in passing. You might find it useful to have a personal invisibility spell loaded up for when you arrive.”
She studied him curiously. “Okay,” she said. “Anything else?”
“There’s a Dutch instant coffee that’s nice,” Tom said, still not looking up. “Sort of a big coffee crystal, very smooth. Can’t think of the name right now, Carl always buys it. Glass jar. If you look in the cupboard . . .”
“Thanks so very much,” Dairine said, rolling her eyes, and got out of there.
She spent some time before she left consulting both her manual and the Internet to see how people dressed in Mumbai. After all, she and Mehrnaz might wind up going out somewhere; there wasn’t any point in sticking out or looking like a tourist. After checking some images online, Dairine spent a while rummaging around in her closet and her drawers and finally settled on a light, high-collared, long-sleeved summery white tunic from a few years back. It still fit, even if it was shorter on her than it used to be. Over jeans it would be okay.
She hadn’t really started to get ready until her dad came back from the shop around nine that night, quite late for him: apparently he had to start getting himself together for a Tuesday night wedding. At the rate he’s going, Dairine thought, he’s gonna have to hire somebody else to help in the store. Mike won’t be enough. She was grateful, though, that business had picked up so much lately. After their mom had died, when he’d got past the initial shock, there had been a time when her dad had insisted on being in the shop all day, handling every order, burying himself in the work. He’d lost weight and worn himself out. Both Nita and Dairine had worried a lot about him, because simply telling him that he needed to slow down had had no effect.
It had been a bad time for all of them, but slowly their lives had worked themselves into a new kind of normalcy—insofar as anything about life could be normal when two of the three people in a family were wizards—and their dad’s work habits had evened out, too. As much because he just couldn’t keep doing that any more, I guess. His body wouldn’t put up with it. And, Dairine had suspected at the time, it had also occurred to their dad that if he put himself in the hospital by abusing himself, he wouldn’t be taking very good care of his daughters. Shortly he’d hired Mike, and started training him in what needed to be done in the store. Mike was smart and he liked the work, and (as important, to Dairine’s way of thinking) liked their dad. So that part of life had started to get normal, at least.
She grabbed her hairbrush off her dresser, brushed her hair back, and fumbled around in her dresser drawer to find a scrunchie for it: better not have it flapping around in the breeze when you’re in a strange new place where you might want to move fast. In the midst of putting her hair up, Spot came spidering in. “Ready?” she said.
Of course. You?
“Nearly.” And then she looked at herself in the mirror, and dropped her hands. “No . . .”
No?
Dairine sighed. “I kind of feel like I’m leaving Nelaid flat. You know what I mean?”