"Any chance you might
hold it down out there? People in here are still sleeping."
Nita looked around. One of the koi in the fishpond had put its head up out of the water and was giving them both a cranky look.
Carl sighed. "Sorry, Akagane-sama." He bowed slightly in the fish's direction.
The koi, a big handsome one spotted in dark orange-gold and white, rolled halfway over on the edge of the pool, and caught sight of Nita with one golden eye. It looked at her thoughtfully, then said:
"If half a loaf is better than no bread, then at least I want the crumbs now."
"It's blackmail, that's what it is," Carl said, and vanished into the house. A few moments later he came back out and dropped some koi pellets and toast crumbs into the water.
The fish let out a bubble of breath, glancing at what Carl was holding. "All the drawing lacks," it said, "is the final touch: to add eyes to the dragon..."
Then it slipped back into the water with a small splash, and started eating.
Nita glanced at Carl. He shrugged. "Sometimes I don't know whether I have koi or koans," he said. "Anyway, you're all set now. The Grand Central gate will acknowledge this when it comes in range." He handed Nita the matrix, and it looked like a charm bracelet again. But there was something added: a single golden charm—a tiny fish. "So when're you going to start?"
"Uh, this afternoon, if I can stay awake that long."
"Go well, then," Carl said. "Speaking of which, I have to go, too." He patted her on the shoulder. "Good luck, kiddo." He went into the house.
Nita slipped the bracelet onto her wrist, and headed back to her transit circle.
Kit went to school that morning still excited about what he'd brought back from his dog walk. He'd transited the little flower, still in stasis, over to Tom's Sunday night, and he spent all his morning classes wondering what Tom would make of it. At lunchtime Kit managed to get out to where the pay phones were ranked in front of the Conlon Road entrance, and waited in line for nearly ten minutes before one was free.
Tom answered right away. "You get it okay?" Kit said.
"Yup. And I've been going through a precis of the raw data from your walk—the whole capture is about a thousand pages, maybe more. The really interesting thing about your jaunt, though, is that the places you went, the places you made, are still there."
Kit wasn't sure what to make of that. "I thought they would just go away afterward." "Seems not."
"What does that mean?"
"That I need an aspirin, mostly," Tom said. "Well, it means a few other things, too."
Kit glanced around—none of the other kids nearby was paying him the slightest attention—and whispered, "But...you can't just make things—planets, whole universes—out of nothingl"
"Strangely enough, that's how it was originally done. What's unusual is that it's not usually done that way anymore. Received wisdom had it that the grouped khiliocosms, or 'sheaf of sheaf of universes,' the whole aggregate of physical existence, had a stable and unchanging amount of matter and energy. What you and Ponch have been doing would seem to call that into question."
"Uh, then I guess we're sorry," Kit said. "We didn't mean to make trouble for anybody."
Tom burst out laughing. "The only ones it's trouble for are the theoretical wizards, most of whom are probably now pulling out their hair, scales, or tentacles. You get transitory changes in the structure and nature of wizardry every now and then. Mostly they're situa-tional ripples in the fabric of existence, and mostly they pass. But they're going to have a party explaining this one."
"Is it going to be a problem?" Kit said.
"For the average wizard in the street? No," Tom said. "But I think you should have a talk with Ponch to keep him from running off and creating universes on his own. We don't know how stable these universes are... and we don't know if they might not be able to proliferate."
"Proliferate?"
"Breed," said Tom.
Kit was taken aback. "Universes can breed!" he whispered.
"Oh yes. I could get into the geometries of it, the mechanics of isoparthenogenetic n-dimensional rotations and so on, but then I'd need three aspirins, and my stomach'll get upset. Just have a word with Ponch, okay? I'd rather not wake up and discover that one of Ponch's creations has self-rotated and left our home space hip-deep in squirrels. It would cause talk."
"Uh, yeah."
"Meanwhile, what you brought back is safe, and lots of people are going to want to look at it. So on behalf of research wizards everywhere, thanks a lot. What's the rest of your day look like?"
"Geometry, social studies... and gym." Kit made a face. He was not a big gym fan; wizardry can keep you from falling off the parallel bars, but it can't make you good at them.
"Uh-oh," Tom said, picking up on Kit's tone of voice. "Every now and then I think, In the service of my Art I may accidentally drown in liquid methane or have my living-room rug slimed by giant slugs, but no one can ever make me climb one of those ropes again."
"Must be nice," Kit said.
"It will be, you'll see. Meanwhile, I think you've impressed Somebody with how you handled yourself out there. I was told to authorize you for further exploration. When you two go for your next walk, though, leave the manual on verbose reporting. It'll be useful for the researchers."
"No problem."
"Thanks again..." Tom hung up.
Then there was nothing to do with the rest of the day but go through classes as usual. While changing periods, Kit looked for Nita but didn't see her. Once, as he was just going into his math classroom before the bell rang, he caught sight of someone from behind, way down the hall, who he thought was her. But then Kit dismissed the idea; Neets didn't wear skirts that short. And it's a shame, said some unrepentant part of his mind.
Kit made an amused face. That part of his mind had been getting outspoken lately. His dad had reassured him that this was nothing to be concerned about— "revving up," he called it—but he wouldn't say much more. That made Kit want to laugh. His father, big and tough and worldly wise though he was, had a core of absolute shyness that few people outside the family recognized—but Kit knew it was the source of his own quiet side. He suspected that when it came to the facts of life, he was going to have to ask his dad to sit down and explain it all, to get the chore out of the way.
Kit went through the rest of the day, looking around for Nita again when school finished, but he couldn't find her. He went home, checked his manual, and found no new message from her, so he walked over to her house but found no one home. It made Kit want to laugh as he looked at the empty driveway. There'd occasionally been times when he didn't want to see Nita about anything specific, and she couldn't be avoided. Now, when he did want to talk to her, she couldn't be found—
Kit went home, had dinner, and did his homework. By the time he was finished with the miserable geometry, he was ready to take all the blame for their fight, if only to get things back the way they ought to be—anything to distract himself from the horror of cosines and the Civil War. He pushed all the schoolbooks on his desk aside and shot her a thought: Neets! Earth to Nita!
Nothing. But this time it was a nothing he recognized—a faint mutter of distant low-level brain activity.
Monday Morning and Afternoon
Nita was deeply asleep. Kit glanced at the clock in mild bemusement. At eight at night?! Never mind. Tomorrow morning early I'll meet her before she goes to school; we'll walk over together.
He wandered down the hall to his sister's room, peered in. Carmela was not there, but the TV and the tape deck were, and from the earphones lying on the bed, he could faintly hear someone singing in Japanese. The VCR was running, and on the TV, some kind of cartoon singing group—three slender young men with very long ponytails—seemed to be appearing in concert, while searchlights and lasers swept and flashed around them. It's not like the house isn't full of her weird J-pop half the time to start with, Kit thought, but she's got cartoon J-pop, too? Oh well. It's an improvement on the heavy metal.