“It’s not your fault you’re not as full as you should be, come the end of the week,” Nita said. “I’ll talk to my dad. Do you mind, though?”
It’s my job to feed you, the refrigerator said, sounding less grumpy but still a little unhappy. But in a more usual way. Talk to him, will you?
“First thing. And, in the meantime, think how broadening it is for you to swap insides with a colleague every now and then!”
Well, I guess you’ve got a point, the refrigerator said, sounding more interested. Yeah, go ahead…
Nita whistled for her wizard’s manual. Her book bag wriggled and jumped around on the counter as if something alive were struggling to get out. Nita glanced over and just had time to realize that only one of the two flap-fasteners was undone when the manual worked its way out from under the flap and shot across the kitchen into her hand.
“Sorry about that,” she said to the manual. “Casual wizardries, home utilities, fridge routine, please…”
The manual flipped open in her hand, laying itself out to a page about half covered with the graceful curly cursive of the wizardly Speech. “Right,” Nita said, and began to read.
The spell went as spells usually did—the workaday sounds of the wind and the occasional passing traffic outside, the soft hum of the fridge motor and other kitchen noises inside, all gradually muting down and down as that concentrating silence, the universe listening to what Nita was saying in the Speech, came into ever greater force and began to assert its authority over merely physical things. The wizardry itself was a straightforward temporospatial translocation, or exchange of one volume of local space for another, though even a spell like that wasn’t necessarily simple when you considered that each of the volumes in question was corkscrewing its way through space-time in a slightly different direction, because of
their differing locations on the Earth’s surface. As Nita read from the manual, an iridescent fog of light surrounded her while the words in the Speech wove and wrapped themselves through physical reality, coaxing it for just a little while into a slightly different shape. She said the spell’s last word, the verbal expression of the wizard’s knot, the completion that would turn it loose to work—
The spell activated with a crash of silent thunder, enacting the change. Silence ebbed; sound came back—the wind still whistling outside, the splash and hiss of a car going by. Completed, the spell extracted its price, a small but significant portion of the energy presently available to Nita. She stood there breathing hard, sweat standing out on her brow, as she reached out and opened the refrigerator door.
The fridge wasn’t empty now. The shelves looked different from the ones that were usually there, and on one of those shelves was that lemon soda Kit had mentioned, a few plastic bottles of it. Nita reached in and pulled one of those out first, opened it, and had a long swig, smiling slightly: It was her favorite brand, which Kit’s mom had taken to buying for her. Then Nita looked over Kit’s refrigerator’s other contents and weighed the possibilities. She had a brief flirtation with the idea of one of those yogurt drinks, but this was not a yogurt moment; anyway, those were Carmela’s special thing. However, there was that chicken, sitting there wrapped in plastic on a plate. About half of it was gone, but the breast on the other side was intact and golden brown, gorgeous.
“Okay, you,” Nita said, “come here and have a starring role in a sandwich.” She reached in, took out the roast chicken, put it on a clean plate, and then unwrapped it. Nita pulled the sharpest knife off the magnetic knife rack by the sink and carved a couple of slices off the breast.
She contemplated a third slice, then paused, not wanting to make too much of a pig of herself.
“Uh-oh,” something said again.
Nita looked around her, but couldn’t see anything. Something in the dining room? she thought. “Hello?” she said.
Instead of a reply, there came a clunking noise, like a door being pulled open. “Kit,” said a female voice, “what’s wrong with the fridge? All the food’s gone. No, wait, though, there’s a really ugly alien in here disguised as a leaky lettuce. Hey, I guess I shouldn’t be rude to it; it’s a visitor. Welcome to our planet, Mr. Alien!”
This was followed by some muffled remark that Nita couldn’t make out, possibly something Kit was saying. A moment later, Kit’s sister Carmela’s voice came out of Nita’s refrigerator again. “Hola, Nita, are your phone bills getting too big? This is a weird way to deal with it…”
Nita snickered. “No, ‘Mela,” she said into the fridge, “I’m just dying of hunger here. I’ll trade you a roast chicken from the store later on.”
“It won’t be as good as my mama’s,” Carmela said. “But you’re welcome to some of this one. We can’t have you starving. Hey, come on over later. We can shop.”
Nita had to grin at that, and at the wicked twist Carmela put on the last word. “I’ll be over,” she said.
Clunk! went the door of Kit’s refrigerator, a block and a half away. Or three feet away, depending on how you looked at it. Nita smiled slightly, put the chicken
back in the fridge, and closed the door. She’d left a verbal “tag” hanging out of the wizardry she’d worked, like a single strand of yarn hanging off the hem of a sweater. Nita said the word, and the spell unraveled itself to nothing.
She went back to the bread box, got those two heel pieces of bread, which no longer looked so repulsive now that the chicken was here, and started constructing her sandwich, smiling in slight bemusement. “Welcome to our planet, Mr. Alien,” Carmela had said. Nita absolutely approved of the sentiment. What was unusual was that Carmela had used the Speech to express it.
Nita shook her head. Things were getting increasingly strange over at Kit’s house lately, and it wasn’t just the electronics—his family, even his dog, seemed to be experiencing the effects of his wizardry more and more plainly all the time, and no one was sure why. Though Carmela’s always been good with languages, Nita thought. I guess I should have expected her to pick up the Speech eventually, once she started to be exposed to it. After all, lots of people who aren’t wizards use it— on other planets, anyway. And at least the lettuce didn’t answer her back…Of course, the fact that it hadn’t suggested that it should have been in the compost heap several days ago. Nita got up, opened the fridge again, and fished the lettuce out in a gingerly manner. Carmela was right: It was leaking. Nita put the poor soggy thing in the sink to drain—it would have to be unwrapped before it went into the compost—rinsed and dried her hands, and went back to her sandwich.
“Uh-oh,” said that small voice again.
Wait a minute, I know who that is…Nita stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, with half the sandwich in her hand, looking around. “Spot,” she said, looking around. “Where are you?”
“Uh-oh,” Spot said.
She couldn’t quite locate the sound. Is he invisible or something? “It’s okay, Spot,” Nita said. “It’s me.”
No answer came back. Nita glanced around the dining room for a moment or so, looking on the seats of the chairs, and briefly under them, but she still couldn’t see anything. After a moment she shook her head. Spot was an unusually personal kind of personal computer—he would speak to her and her father occasionally, but never at any length. Probably, Nita thought, this had to do with the fact that he was in some kind of symbiotic relationship with Dairine—part wizard’s manual, part pet, part…Nita shook her head and went back to her sandwich. Spot was difficult to describe accurately; he had been through a great deal in his short life. The part of this that Nita knew about—Spot’s participation in the creation of a whole species of sentient computers—would have been enough to account for the weird way he sometimes behaved. But he had been constant companion to Dairine on all her errantry after that, and for all Nita knew, Spot had since been involved in stranger things.