“No problem, I’ll be done with this in a moment and I was thinking about another.” Which was true enough: the slightly bitter taste of the Cel-Ray had caught her by surprise at first, but it grew on you. “They’ve got the usual sodas and fruit juice. If you’re of drinking age in your jurisdiction and you feel like indulging, there’s harder stuff . . .”
“Harder?”
“Well, alcoholic.”
“I am not averse to such molecular structures,” the guy said, musing. “Yet . . . Would there be water?”
“A bunch of kinds. Get you one?”
“Pray do. With gas, possibly?”
“Fizzy it is.”
Nita went off to the nearest drinks table, finished her Cel-Ray, and swapped the empty bottle for a full one. Then she found a sparkling water bottle and wandered back to sit down next to the guy in the striped sweater. She handed him his drink. “Your health,” Nita said, holding up her bottle.
He looked at it in slight confusion.
Nita laughed. “Uh, you clunk them together. At least some of us do that around here.”
“Oh! I see. Na’gekh emeirsith, then.”
“Yeah, mud in your eye too, my Advisory always says.”
The young guy’s mouth quirked up in amusement. They both drank. “So what do you make of the results so far?” Nita said.
“’Tis all a wonder and a confusion, thus far. So many names, so many gifts.”
“They’ve got a postevent analysis app running in the manuals,” Nita said. “What’s the old saying? ‘You can’t tell the players without a scorecard’? Something like that. Or you could hunt down one of the wizards who was doing sideline analysis today. They’re all in here relaxing now that this round’s action is over.”
“Nay, I’ve no wish to trouble them now in their repose. I’m but late-come myself: on me their expertise would be naught but ill spent. Enough it is to look on the gathering as thou dost, at ease.”
Nita had to laugh. “You know, cousin, you can loosen up a little, you’re among friends . . .”
“Loosen up?”
“The recension,” Nita said. “I mean, I get that you’re serious about the older language structure, but . . .” She waved a hand. “Way too formal! Give the tough grammar the evening off.”
He giggled. “Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure I had permission.”
His giggle made her want to laugh too: there was just something generally funny about him. “Honestly,” she said, “it’s not a problem. No one in this crowd’s going to stand on ceremony.” She looked out over the dance floor as one of the couples up on the hardened-air platform stage-dived out over the surrounding crowd, drifted down onto them as slowly as falling leaves, and were crowd-surfed off to one side.
“Seems you’re right,” the young guy said, and chuckled. “Those folks over there—what’re they doing?”
Nita followed his gaze. “Oh. I think they call that pogoing. It was big a long time ago. Looks like it’s coming back . . .”
They sat there chatting for some minutes while Nita split her attention between watching for Kit and trying to figure out where her companion’s accent came from. I don’t know why, but he reminds me of somebody, Nita thought. He hadn’t offered a name, and that wasn’t a big deaclass="underline" some wizards were sensitive about personal names, feeling (not without reason) that some aspects of their power might be closely associated with them. Or do I know him from somewhere else? And if I do, what’s the matter with me, because how would I ever meet this guy and not remember him? He’s such a trip.
It was like meeting someone on the street but not knowing who they are because you’re seeing them in a different context from usual. Like that one lady who works over at the big supermarket in Freeport, the time she came into Daddy’s shop to buy some flowers, and we just couldn’t identify her because she didn’t have the store’s uniform jacket and the name tag on. Now, in the same mode, Nita sat there racking her brains. Did we meet him on the Moon during the Pullulus situation? Or maybe I’ve seen him somewhere else, dressed differently? Something more formal, not jeans and stripes and . . .
Wait. Stripes?
It hit her all at once. Planetaries. Mr. Bynkij said there were Planetaries here.
“Oh my God,” Nita said.
Her companion looked at her in slight confusion, but even so, he was smiling. “It’s been a while since anyone’s made that mistake,” he said.
Nita felt like an idiot, and didn’t care. The humor, the laughter: the joviality. Oh God. Do I even listen to myself? “I can’t believe it. You’re Jupiter.”
Her companion looked down at his sweater with vague concern. “Was it this?” he said, pulling the sweater out a little from his middle. “Please tell me it wasn’t the stripes.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “I told Saturn this was too much.”
I told Saturn. I can’t cope with this . . . !
Nita tried to get a grip. “What do I call you?” When the wizard mediating for a planet was of another species, that Planetary was often called by his or her or its planet’s name: the way European kings or queens used to be called formally by the names of their countries. But this was also a matter of identity, because Jupiter was a being.
“Well,” he said after a moment. “Some of your people used to call me Jove . . .”
“Jove,” Nita said, trying it on. “Jovie . . .”
He giggled once more, a ridiculously contagious sound. “I don’t think anyone’s ever put a diminutive on it,” said the largest planet in the Solar System. “Jovie, then. And as for you, nondiminutive cuz—for today, wonder of wonders, you’re the size of a planet—”
“Nita. Nita Callahan. And please,” she said, grinning. “Size jokes? Too many ways to take those wrong. And here I went all the way over to that table to bring you bottled water! You be nice.”
Jupiter laughed and drank his water. Nita drank her soda, wondering how much congruency the concept “his” had with what was going on with him. Or anything else. How do you have a gender when you’re made of hydrogen and helium?
Then again, carbon doesn’t come with an automatic gender either . . . In any case, gas giants didn’t seem to have all that much trouble becoming sentient. Sometimes they developed extra species to keep them company, but just as often they sailed along their orbits in uncounted millennia of splendid solitude, thinking thoughts no human could easily understand. They had a bent for philosophy, and also for math and physics, given that they were living the physics of their lives on a scale that few other sentient beings did.
“So,” Nita said finally, about halfway down her Cel-Ray bottle, “you came all the way up here, and did this—” she waggled her bottle at his shape change, unquestionably a work of art in terms of displacement of mass alone—“just to see what the new intake looks like?”
“Indeed. Sorry, I meant ‘yeah.’ It’s hard, you know, just changing recensions all of a sudden!”
“I know,” Nita said. “I’ve been there.” She rolled the bottle back and forth between her hands.
“We work often enough with Earth’s wizards, all of us,” Jupiter said. “It’s wise to know them better as they come fully into their practice.” He gave Nita a look. “For you were busy with Mars not too long ago, weren’t you?”
Nita blushed. “I was one of the team.”
“But it was your work that reforged the planet’s kernel,” Jupiter said, “and I stood guard over that while the species who’d come to live on Mars slowly found their way back to the One. That’s why you seemed familiar to me. The name I knew, and the being; but the shape, only at second hand. Because you were in on that group debrief, weren’t you, when the intervention was finally finished.”