He reached into his pocket. “I was going to wrap this,” he said, “and then I couldn’t find any wrapping paper —and we were all out of ribbon—”
“And you are absolutely useless at wrapping things,” Nita said. “I hate to have to say it, but you know it’s true. So it’s okay.”
Kit nodded, blushing, and reached into his pocket: handed her what he had made. It was a small heart-shaped object, maybe an inch long, and it glinted in the afternoon light.
Nita turned it over in her fingers, feeling the weight of it. “It’s crystallized carbon,” she said.
“There was a lot of it exposed on Tevaral’s surface after they started scraping the biosphere off,” Kit said. “So I thought—”
“It’s diamond, actually,” Nita said.
Kit blushed. “It’s not diamond diamond,” he said. “The crystalline structure’s all wrong, you know that perfectly well, don’t give me grief here. It’s pretty, and it’s tough, and it takes a whole lot to hurt it.” Like someone else I know.
“Oh really,” Nita said very softly.
Kit cleared his throat. “I asked Hesh if he would have somebody grab me a chunk. Worked it over a little bit.”
Nita turned the little heart over in her hand. On the outside of it was engraved one of the simpler graphical restatements of the Wizard’s Knot. “There’s something in there, though,” she said, looking up at him.
Kit nodded. “Turn it over,” he said.
She did. The other side was very finely micro-engraved with the words, TEXT ME.
“Cheleb had this funny idea,” Kit said. “That maybe you’d asked me to change my name for you. Or that I was thinking about asking you to change yours for me.”
Nita laughed under her breath. “He really has a tendency to sort of plunge around without being entirely clear about the cultural underpinnings of some of the things he says, doesn’t he?” She gave Kit a wicked look. “‘Impregnation rituals…’” She covered her eyes.
“Yeah,” Kit said, “when we get him here, we’ll sort him out. Anyway… I encoded my full name in the Speech into the crystalline structure in there for you, and it syncs to the one in my manual. It’s not like you didn’t have it already, anyway, it’s not like we haven’t done stuff like this occasionally when we needed to for spells, for interventions. But if you need it in a hurry, or when we’re doing preflight on a wizardry, with this you can just plug this into the spell the way you would plug in a USB stick.”
She nodded, smiled. “Great minds think alike,” she said.
“Oh really?”
She reached into the pocket of her jeans, brought something out and handed it to Kit. At first glance it appeared to be a very tightly-woven cord of metal mesh, the individual strands of the black metal catching the light as you turned it. There was a black metal catch to fasten it. The thing as a whole looked very sleek and smooth, like one of those elephant-tail-hair bracelets that people used to wear. It wasn’t very long: in fact, bracelet length was just about right.
Nonetheless, Kit was in teasing mood. “Keychain?” he said.
Nita gave him a look. “Maybe,” she said, “if I asked Sker’ret really nicely, he’d sort me out a ‘trapdoor transport’ so I could drop you in it and have it send you back to Tevaral in exactly the spot where you could stand there just long enough to have time to look up and see a nice big chunk of Thesba getting ready to fall on your head…”
She was kidding. It was just as well. Kit grinned at her, and they started walking again while Kit ran the smoothly braided thing through his fingers. It felt beautiful. He could also feel the Speech, a lot of the Speech, sizzling in it.
“You were working on this before we left, weren’t you,” Kit said. “All those times when we were manual-chatting and you didn’t want to go visual.”
“Yeah, I tried doing both at once earlier on and— well, it wasn’t a good idea.” She grinned. “A few accidents…”
“So what is it?”
“It’s every spell we’ve ever done together,” Nita said. “With the enacture stripped out. And the actuator sequences removed, just to make sure.”
Kit breathed out, shaking his head in amazement. “It’s terrific,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
They’d come to a stop at the end of Kit’s driveway. “Oh,” Nita said. “There’s one more thing.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and pulled it out, handing it to him.
It was a box with a heart-shaped cellophane window. He looked up from it and grinned at her.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, and hugged him.
He hugged her back, not particularly caring at the moment if the neighbors saw. After a moment, though, she put some air between them and made a peculiar face. “Also,” she said, “I have no idea what this is about, but Bobo says to tell you, ‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t know about the Jacuzzi.’” Nita raised her eyebrows. “You had a Jacuzzi over there? You had it really well hidden.”
“Uh, no,” Kit said. “Something Ronan was up to.”
“What hasn’t he been up to, more like,” Nita said under her breath. “Never mind.”
She hugged Kit harder, then pushed him away and headed off down the street.
Kit looked at the box, opened the top of it, and as he’d done with Cheleb, poured a little stream of hearts out into his hand.
Then he started to smile… and then to laugh out loud where he stood. Kit turned over the hearts in his hand, the way Cheleb had, with his finger, one by one. They were pink and blue and yellow and purple and green and white. And regardless of the color, every single one of them said:
I KNOW.
Afterword:
There’s a saying among some writers that a novel should be the story of the single most important thing then happening in the viewpoint character’s life. This seems like a good rule to follow, and until now I think all the major Young Wizards works in print have followed it. However, it’s been my intention for a while to do some longer works in-universe that would be, not so much an abandonment of the rule, but a relaxation of it. I’ve been wanting a chance to display and explore aspects of the characters’ lives that we don’t always get a chance to see in a main-continuity YW novel—situations in which the characters’ usual position at center stage is subverted a bit.
Probably this urge arose because in real life, we’re not always at the center of the stories that surround us. In fact, mostly we’re not. Often enough, whether we like it or not, we function at the periphery of something much bigger, our contributions seeming marginal. And since the life Nita and Kit are living is real-life to them, it stands to reason that sometimes the wizardly life will be less personally manageable, in terms of just deciding what you’re going to do and then going off and doing it. Sometimes you’re going to be part of a larger group, working on a single problem in unison, and you won’t be driving the problem’s solution except in the sense that you’re working in support of it.
Unfortunately it seems likely that in traditional or conventional publishing, and especially in the present market, the proposal for such a novel might not get much further than your editor’s desk. Fortunately, the technologies now available to storytellers to independently make out-of-continuity works available to large numbers of readers have made it possible to tell this kind of story after all.
Various versions of the “How To Save A Planet” problem have been wandering around in the YW universe’s middle distance for me for a good while now. In particular, questions and answers about the technologies and themes implied by Mamvish’s appearance on the scene in A Wizard of Mars have been percolating since approximately 2008, when the first skeletal notes on the Interconnect Project begin appearing in the Errantry Concordance. You could in fact make a case that this whole issue has been bubbling under the surface for much longer than that—since the time our viewpoint characters first set foot in the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility during the course of High Wizardry. After all, it hardly seems likely that a gigantic gating facility of this kind would just appear out of nowhere all by itself. The presence of a place that works and acts like the Crossings implies the presence of massive technological and infrastructural support from multiple species, along with a long-established tradition of interstellar trade, commerce and cooperation.