Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in arch of a real silver fork. Fred was hanging over her shoulder, almost invisible a faint red point lazily emitting heat.
INot for a long time) he said, glancing curiously at a pressed-glass salt-
a*er Nita was holding. (Not since I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes '°w everything, but a white hole's business is emission. Within limits,) he added, and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered. (I don't ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen went down. Some of those things hurt on the way out. And anyway, all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing and I could blow my quanta.)
She looked up at him, worried. "Really? Have you emitted that much stuff that you're in danger of blowing up?"
(Oh, not really — I'd have to lose a lot more mass first. After all, before I was a black hole, I was a respectable-sized blue-white star, and even those days I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn't worry about it—I'm nowhere near the critical threshold yet.) " 'Cute'?" Nita said.
(Well, it is… And I suppose there's no harm in getting better at emis-| sions. I have been improving a lot. Wliat's that?) |
Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with a| battered old fork. It was scratched and its tines were bent out of shape, but if was definitely silver, not stainless steel. "That's what I needed," she said|
"Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood, and then tonighf
I go over my part of the spells again."
(You sound worried.) '
"Well, yeah, a little," Nita said, getting up. All that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the more sense the bushes and trees made. "It's just—the rowan branch has to come off a live tree, Fred, and I can't just pick it—that'd be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers off. I have to ask for it. And if the tree won't give it to rne , ."
(Then you don't get your pen back, at least not for a while.) Fred shim-mered with colors and a feeling like a sigh. (I am a trouble to you.)
"Fred, no. Put your light out a moment so we can get out of here." Nita interrupted the shopkeeper's intense concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred was pacing her again. "If you're trouble, you're the best trouble that's happened around here for a while. You're good to talk to, you're good company — when you don't forget and start emitting cosmic rays—"
Fred blazed momentarily, blushing at Nita's teasing. In an excited n* ment the night before he had forgotten himself and emitted a brief blast ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up Nita's backyard a good л£ionized the air for miles around, and produced a local but brilliant ai (Well, it's an old habit, and old habits die hard. I'm working on it.) "Heat we don't mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the longwave kind doesn't hurt people's eyes," (You fluoresce when I use that, though...)
Nita laughed. "I don't mind fluorescing. Though on second thought, don't do that where anyone but Kit can see. I doubt my mother'd understand."
They walked home together, chatting alternately about life in the suburbs and life in a Part °f deep space close to the Great Galactic Rift. Nita felt niore relaxed than she had for months. Joanne had been out of sight since Monday afternoon at Tom and Carl's. Even if she hadn't, Nita had been practicing with that body shield, so that now she could run through the syllables of the spell in a matter of seconds and nothing short of a bomb dropped on her could hurt her. She could even extend the spell to cover someone else, though it wasn't quite so effective; she had a harder time convincing the air to harden up. But even that lessened protection would come in handy if she and Kit should be in trouble together at some point and there was no time to cooperate in a spelling. Not that she was expecting any more trouble. The excitement of a trip into the city was already catching at her. And this wasn't just another shopping trip. Magic was loose in the world, and she was going to help work some…
She ate supper and did her homework almost without thinking about either, and as a result had to do much of the math homework twice. By the time she was finished, the sun was down and the backyard was filling with a cool blue twilight, In the front of the house, her mother and father and Dairine were watching TV as Nita walked out the side door and stood on the step, letting her eyes get used to the dimness and looking east at the rising Moon. Canned laughter echoed inside the house as Fred appeared by her shoulder.
(My, that's bright for something that doesn't emit heat,) Fred said, looking at the Moon too. "Reflected sunlight," Nita said absently. (You're going to talk to the tree now?) "Uh huh."
л (Then I'll go stay with the others and watch that funny box emit. Maybe II figure out what it's trying to get across.)
'Good luck," Nita said as Fred winked out. She walked around into the Mcyard, Spring stars were coming out as she stood in the middle of the lawn and °°Ked down the length of the yard at the rowan, a great round-crowned tree nowy with white flowers. Nita's stomach tightened slightly with nervous-Iess' It had been a long time ago, according to her manual, that the trees had j>0rie to war on mankind's behalf, against the dark powers that wanted to eP human intelligence from happening at all. The war had been a terrible ' *> lasting thousands of centuries—the trees and other plants taking more a rnore land, turning barren stone to soil that would support them and the animals and men to follow; the dark powers breaking the soil with earthqua[.e and mountain building, scouring it with glaciers, climate-changing good ground for desert, and burning away forests in firestorms far more terrible than the small brushfires any forest needs to stay healthy. But the trees and the other plants had won at last.
They had spent many more centuries readying the world for men — but when men came, they forgot the old debts and wasted the forests more terribly than even the old dark powers. Trees had no particular reason to be friendly to people these days. Nita found herself thinking of that first tree that had spoken to her, angry over the destruction of its friend's artwork. Even though the rowan tree had always been well tended, she wasn't certain how it was going to respond to her. With the other ash trees, rowans had been in the forefront of the Battle; and they had long memories.
Nita sighed and sat down under the tree, book in hand, her back against its trunk. There was no need to start right away, anyhow — she needed a little while to recover from her homework. The stars looked at her through the rowan's windstirred branches, getting brighter by the minute. There was that one pair of stars that always looked like eyes, they were so close together. It was one of the three little pairs associated with the Big Dipper. The Leaps of the Gazelle, the ancient Arabs had called them, seeing them as three sets of hoofprints left in the sky. "Kafza'at al Thiba," Nita murmured, the old Arabic name. Her eyes wandered down toward the horizon, finding a faint reddish gleam. "Regulus." And a whiter gleam, higher: "Arcturus." And another, and another, old friends, with new names in the Speech, that she spoke silently, remembering Carl's warning: (Elthathte. , ur'Senaahel…} The distant fires flickered among shadowy leaves. (Lahirien…) (And Methchane and Ysen and Cahadhwy and Rasaug6hil… .They are nice tonight.) Nita looked up hurriedly. The tree above her was leaning back comfortably on its roots, finished with the stretching-upward of growth for the day, and gazing at the stars as she was. (I was hoping that haze would clear off,) it said as silently as Nita had spoken, in a slow, relaxed drawl. (This will be a good night for talking to the wind. And other such transient creatures. I was wondering when you were going to come out and pay your respects, wizardling.) {Uh—) Nita was reassured: the rowan sounded friendly, fit's been a bus)' week.) (You never used to be too busy for me,) the rowan said, its whispery voice sounding ever so slightly wounded. (Always up in my branches you were, and falling out of them again. Or swinging. But I suppose you outgrew me.)