or less two hours after you went...no matter how much time you spend there. Could get tiring.
Ask me if I care!
There were many other details. Nita spent the rest of an hour or so absorbing them, then passed on to what seemed the most important part of the work in front of her: constructing the matrix to hold the spells she'd be using in the practice universes. The matrix would hold a selection of wizardries ready for use until she could get back to where the manual could be depended on for fast use.
The thought of a place where you couldn't depend on the manual made Nita twitch a little. But that was where she had to go to do her mother any good, so she got over it and started considering the structure of the matrix. It was complex; it had to be in order to hold whole ready-to-run spells apart from one another, essentially in stasis, so that they couldn't get tangled. The matrix structure that the manual suggested was straightforward enough to build but fiddly—like putting chain mail together, ring by ring and rivet by rivet, each ring going through three others.
Nita cleared her desk and laid the manual out where she could keep her eye on the guide diagram it provided. Then she put out her hands and pronounced eighty-one syllables in the Speech. Once complete, the sentence took physical form, drifting like a glowing thread into her hands. She said the sentence again, and again, until she had nine of the strands. Then Nita wound them together and knotted the ends of the ninefold strand together with a wizard's knot, creating a single sealed loop, which she scaled down in size. The next loop of nine strands was laced through that one, as were the next two. When it was finished, there would be three-to-the-sixth links in the matrix: seven hundred twenty-nine of them...
Nita didn't allow the numbers to freak her out. She kept at it, making each set of nine strands, winding them together, looping them, linking them through the other available links, and fastening them closed. The work was as hypnotic in its way as crocheting—a hobby that Nita had taken up a couple of years ago at her mother's instigation, then promptly dumped because the constant repetition of motions made her hands cramp. But this was not about making a scarf. This was about saving her mother's life... so Nita found it a lot easier to ignore the cramps.
Gradually the delicate structure began to grow. Several times Nita missed hooking one of the substructures into all the others it had to be connected to, and the diagram in the manual flashed insistently until she went back and fixed it. Slowly, though, she started to get the rhythm down pat, and the eighty-one syllables, repeated again and again, came out perfectly every time, though they started becoming meaningless with the repetition. I'm going to be saying these things in my sleep, Nita thought, finishing one more unit and moving on to the next.
About an hour into this work, Nita heard her dad come home. The back door shut, and she heard him moving around downstairs in the kitchen, but she kept doing what she was doing. A few minutes later there was a knock at her door, and he came in.
Nita looked up at him, grateful for the interruption, and flexed her hands to get rid of the latest bout of cramps. The steady energy drain that came with doing a repetitive wizardry like this was really tiring her out, but that couldn't be helped. "How's Mom?" she said.
"She's fine," her father said, and sat down wearily on her bed. "Well, not fine; of course not. But she's not in pain, and she's not so full of the drugs this afternoon ... We talked about the surgery. She's okay about that."
"Really?" Nita said.
Her father rubbed his face. "Well, of course not, honey," he said. "Who wants anybody monkeying around with their brain? But she knows it's got to be done."
"And the rest of it?"
Her dad shook his head. "She's not exactly happy about the possibility that the cancer might have spread. But there's nothing we can do about that, and there's no point in worrying about it when there's something so much more important happening in a few days."
He looked at the faint line of light lying on Nita's desk. "What's that?"
She picked it up, handed it to him. "Go ahead," she said when he hesitated. "You can't hurt it." He reached out and took the delicate linkage of loop after loop of light into his hands. "What's it for?" "Helping Mom."
"You talked to Tom and Carl?"
"Yeah." Nita wondered whether to get into the details, then decided against it. When he's ready to ask, I'll be ready to tell. I hope. "There are places I can go," she said, "where I can learn the skills I need to deal with the... cancer." She had trouble saying the word. I'm going to have to get over that. "I won't be gone for long, Dad, but I'll be going to places where time doesn't run the same way. I may be pretty tired when I get back."
He handed back the partly made matrix. "You really think this has a chance of making a difference? Of making your mom well?"
"It's a chance," Nita said. "I won't know until I try, Daddy." "Is Dairine going with you?"
Nita shook her head. "She's got to sit this one out."
Her father nodded. "All right. Sweetheart...you know what I'm going to say." "Be careful."
He managed just the slightest smile. "When are you going to tell Mom about this?"
"When I've tried it once. After I see how it goes, I'll tell her. No point in getting her worried, or excited, until I know for sure that I can get where I have to go and do what I have to."
"One other thing, hon..."
Nita looked at her father with concern.
"For tomorrow and Tuesday, anyway, I think you and Dairine should go to school as usual. It's better for us all to stick to our normal routines than to sit around home agonizing over what's going on."
Nita wasn't wild about this idea, but she couldn't find it in her heart to start arguing the point with her father right now. "Okay," she said after a moment.
"Then I'll go get us something to eat," her father said, and went out.
Nita turned back to the desk, let out a long sad breath at the pain and worry in her dad's face, and said the eighty-one syllables one more time...
Kit spent the day adding notes to his manual on where he had been. Once or twice during the process he checked the back of the book to see if there was anything from Nita but found nothing. At first he thought, Maybe she's busy. It's not like she doesn't have her own projects to work on. But as the evening approached, Kit began to wonder what she was up to. / guess I could always shoot her a thought.
He pushed back in his desk chair, leaned back— Ow!"
Kit turned around hurriedly and realized that Ponch was lying right behind him, half asleep... or formerly half asleep. He wasn't now; not with one of Kit's chair legs shoved into his gut. "Sorry," Kit said, pulling the chair in a little.
"Hmf," Ponch said, and put his head down on his paws again. Kit sighed and closed his eyes once more. Neets?..,
... Nothing. Well, not quite. She was there, but she wasn't in receiving mode right now, or just wasn't receptive. Additionally, coming from her direction, Kit could catch a weird sort of background noise, like someone saying something again and again—a fierce in-turned concentration he'd never felt in her before. What's she doing?... The noise had a faint taste of wizardry about it, but there was also an emotional component, a turmoil of extreme nervousness, but blocked, stifled—he couldn't make anything of it.
Weird, he thought. Neets? Anybody home?
Still no reply. Finally Kit sighed and leaned forward to his work again. The manual had presented him with a detailed questionnaire about his experiences in the places he'd been, and there were still a lot of sections to fill in. /'// walk over there after I'm done and see what the story is.
It was after eight before Kit got up. He went downstairs to get his jacket, for it was chilly; fall was setting in fast. As Kit went by, his pop looked up from the living-room chair where he was reading, and said, "Son, it's a school day tomorrow. Don't be out late."