“I really wish you’d just, you know, give me a hint about this…”
You mean do it for you. He was sure she was laughing at him.
“Why not? Isn’t this what—” He was going to say what friends are for, and then had an instantaneous moment of panic, because of course that’s what we are, friends, except of course it’s kind of—more, and if I just say ‘friend’ what if she misunderstands me and she thinks that—
Nope, Nita said.
Kit rubbed his eyes, ridiculously grateful to have been let off the hook so easily. At the same time he was annoyed by it, and at the moment couldn’t really figure out why. So he fell back on annoyance at the math, which was a lot easier to rationalize. “Why do I even need this? I am never going to need calculus for anything!”
You might need it for wizardry.
“And if I do, the manual will do it for me!”
Except you can’t bring your manual into the test on Friday.
“I could! I could disguise it as a calculator!”
It won’t let you. It’ll know you’re doing it to cheat.
“This is so unfair.”
What, that I won’t do it for you? Or that wizardry won’t let you cheat?
“You could have a word with Bobo! Bobo would change the rules for me.”
In your dreams, but nowhere else, something breathed in Kit’s ear.
All the hair on Kit’s neck abruptly stood up, for what he’d heard was no voice of a living thing. It sounded like his own thoughts, happening inside his own head, except it wasn’t anything that Kit had been thinking. —What? Kit thought, and “What?!” he said.
What? Nita said.
“Uh. I heard something. I think—” Kit dropped the much-chewed pencil on his much-erased notebook page and shook his head, because this shouldn’t be possible, at least not as far as he knew. “I think I heard Bobo!” Which was leaving him seriously freaked out, because having Wizardry itself in his head was definitely not his department, it was Nita’s. Does this mean that we—is this something that’s happening because we’re— Kit broke out in a sweat.
But when the text field on his manual started filling up again, the feeling he got from the message was perhaps a touch annoyed, but otherwise unconcerned. Oh great, not you too.
Kit opened his mouth, closed it again. Then said, “Wait. Me too?”
Yeah, Ronan heard him once a couple of weeks ago.
His immediate reaction was Oh what a relief!… instantly followed by Wait a minute, how does he rate? Then Kit rolled his eyes at himself. Get a grip. “Really?”
Yeah. We were having a conversation about some girl Ronan said he was having trouble with, and then he said he heard Bobo tell him to ‘stop acting the maggot.’
Kit blinked. “What?”
You’re asking me what it means? How do I know what maggots act like in Ireland? All I know is that Ronan messaged me afterwards and told me that the Spirit of Wizardry was going to get its head punched in if somebody didn’t put some manners on it.
That made Kit snicker. “You sure Bobo’s not trying to pick up some overtime working as the voice of people’s consciences or something?”
Please. He’s been snarky enough lately that I’m wondering what’s going on with him. Like somebody took Jiminy Cricket and replaced him with Jon Stewart.
Kit laughed harder.
Meanwhile, look, you’ve just got to loosen up about this… You’re just making it harder for yourself. Calculus is just a way of describing change; of modeling systems that’ll show the way things move through space and time.
“I have a manual for that!” Kit said. “And as for this, I want to kick whoever invented it.”
That would be Sir Isaac Newton, Nita said, and tracking him down to kick him’s probably gonna take a lot more moving through space and time than either of us wants right now. Just go back and read the chapter on differentials again. Seriously, it’s not that bad.
Kit groaned and dropped his head onto his folded arms, rolling it back and forth. Yes it is! Why are you so optimistic?
Because you’re smart, and I know you’ll get it if you work on it.
“Oh please,” Kit muttered. “Only if you do find Isaac Newton and lock him in here with me.”
Anyway, this shouldn’t be so hard for you! How come you’re having so much trouble concentrating lately?
There were about fifty answers to that, Kit thought. The problem was trying to figure out which one was affecting him today. The Christmas holidays had been good—in fact, unusually good, because of aliens coming to camp out “in the basement,” a truly memorable holiday party and sleepover, and other wizardly incursions into the normal events of the season. It had all been so terrific that Kit almost didn’t mind going back to school afterwards, due to being kind of wrung out by all the happy excitement.
But that hadn’t lasted long. School had without warning turned mind-numbingly boring. It was the contrast, maybe, Kit thought, with all the stuff that happened in December. All of a sudden everything went back to normal. Too much normal. Nothing that interesting’s come up for me and Neets at the errantry end, these last few weeks. And the other wizards we know have all been busy with stuff: too busy to have time to hang out. Kit rubbed his eyes. Then this calculus unit started, and life hasn’t been worth living ever since. It’s like it’s all in some other language that even knowing the Speech can’t help…
Which was part of the problem, maybe. Kit wasn’t used to feeling helpless, these days. What he was used to was figuring things out—for wizardry was all about working your way through to the answers—and about depending on stubbornness to get him to and through the places where figuring things out wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, calculus seemed to be gazing with faint amusement at his stubbornness and just barely resisting the urge to burst out laughing.
And then of course there was the other issue, which Kit absolutely wasn’t going to mention to Nita at the moment. Twelve days yet. Twelve days… Kit started chewing on the pencil again.
Earth to Rodriguez? the text in the manual said. Come in, Rodriguez!
Kit dropped the pencil in annoyance. “Neets, seriously,” Kit said, “what’s with the texting? You coming down with laryngitis or something?”
There was a pause. Busy, she said after a moment.
“With what? Or is Dairine hanging over your shoulder?” Because that was always a possibility. If that was the case, what she was doing made sense: the manual could take a wizard’s subvocalizations, or even raw thought, and render them as text when necessary.
Another pause, longer this time. Well…
Kit picked up the pencil again and started twiddling it as another pause ensued, even longer—
Then a sudden noise at the other end of his room made Kit jump right up out of his chair as the big framed picture of him and Ponch on the far wall leaped away from that wall and landed with a thump face down on his bed.
A second later, a head—a pebbly-scaled, goggle-eyed saurian head, a hugely toothy head nearly four feet wide—appeared out of nothing, apparently sticking itself right through that wall and filling most of that end of the room. It looked around it with interest.
Kit stared. “What the—?” he said. It came out more as a squeak than a word, his voice breaking, but just for this once Kit was too stunned to be embarrassed by that. “…Mamvish?”
If what Kit was looking at was a projection, it was a most unusual one: it gave a general sense of not so much coexisting with the local reality as overriding it. Makes sense, though, Kit thought, for the shape looking at him belonged to one of the most powerful wizards in this part of the galaxy: someone with power ratings so high that the Lone Power had apparently elected to sit out her Ordeal, claiming to have been indisposed. If despite this Mamvish also acted generally like a very gifted eight-year-old with a very short fuse, well, that was more or less what she was, comparing her present age—just a couple of Earth millennia—against her own very long-lived people’s lifespans.