“Not the door!” Dairine yelled. Sker’ret’s head turned in some alarm.
“No?”
“No,” Dairine said, trying hard to calm herself. “I’m sorry; that’s part of the kitchen.”
“Oh,” Sker’ret said. “My apologies. I didn’t realize.” Carefully he set the door aside again, and turned his attention downward.
“No, no, no, no,” Dairine said. “Leave the floor!”
Somewhat bemused, Sker’ret cocked a few eyes back at Dairine, shrugged some of his legs, and began to levitate.
Roshaun was leaning against the counter by the kitchen sink, his arms folded, watching this spectacle with insufferable amusement. Dairine desperately wanted to punch him in the nose, even though he hadn’t said a word. Filif was watching, too, though with a far less superior air. Maybe it’s the berries, Dairine thought. It’s hard to look supercilious when you have berries hanging off you.
The back door opened. All four of the occupants of the kitchen looked up, startled.
Dairine’s father came in, closed the door behind him, and looked at his daughter, the young man, the centipede, and the tree. “Hello, everybody,” Harry Callahan said.
Filif, Roshaun, and the gently floating Sker’ret all looked at Dairine’s dad. Then they all looked at Dairine, waiting to take their cue from her.
Dairine had rarely been more embarrassed to have her father turn up without warning…or more relieved. “Daddy!” she said. “Who’s in the store?”
“Mike’s there for the rest of the day,” her dad said. Mike was his new assistant, whom he’d taken on a few weeks back: a young guy just out of high school who had been looking for a job and was good with flowers. “It’s been a slow afternoon, anyway. I’m not needed there. Who’re your friends?”
Dairine looked at her dad sidewise, admiring his cool, especially since she knew he’d done his reading and knew perfectly well who these people were. There he stood, acting like a man who had aliens in his house every day. And he had looked right at the cupboard door and not even mentioned it. “This is Filif,” she said. “Filif, this is my father.”
“I am honored to meet the stock from which the shoot proceeds,” Filif said. He rustled all over, bending a little bit like a tree in a wind.
Dairine was relieved to see that her dad must have the briefing pack somewhere about his person, as he was plainly understanding the Speech that Filif was using. “Well, you’re very welcome,” Dairine’s father said.
“And this is Sker’ret…”
“Well met on the journey,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine’s dad reached out to take the claw that Sker’ret offered him. “You don’t have to float there like that,” he said. “The floor’s not so clean in here that you need to be afraid to walk on it.” He glanced to one side. “Something wrong with the cupboard?”
“It came off,” Sker’ret said.
“That happens,” Dairine’s dad said. “Just leave it there for the time being; we’ll put it back where it belongs later.” He turned to Roshaun.
“And this is Roshaun,” Dairine said.
“… ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Wellakhit,” Roshaun said, and to Dairine’s mortification, looked at her dad as if expecting him to bow.
Her dad’s response took just a fraction of a second longer this time. “Make yourself right at home,” he said to Roshaun. “But then I see you already have.” He turned away from Roshaun with exactly the same matter-of-fact motion that Dairine had seen her dad use with customers who were wasting his time at the counter. “So let’s all go into the living room and sit down. What’s on the agenda, Dairine?”
She recognized the code—her father rarely called her by her whole name unless there was trouble of some kind. At least for once, the cause of the trouble wasn’t her…or if it was, she was only the indirect cause. All of them followed her dad into the living room, and Dairine said, “They’ve spent the day traveling, and I was thinking maybe some food would be nice…”
“Absolutely. I could do with some dinner myself. We can sit and relax and get acquainted. Any thoughts?”
“Well, I thought maybe something neutral.” She glanced at Roshaun, who was looking around their living room with an expression of badly concealed confusion, as if he’d found people living in a hole in the ground and liking it. “Some fruit drinks to start with, maybe, and then…” Dairine was grasping at possibilities; this was more Nita’s specialty than hers. “I don’t know, maybe something vegetarian…”
“That sounds nice,” Filif said. “Something to do with my people. What’s it mean?”
“Huh? Vegetarian? Oh, around here it means people who eat only vegetables…”
Then Dairine heard what she was saying, and stopped short.
But she hadn’t stopped soon enough. Filif stood there frozen in shock, and the decency field around his roots almost went away. “You… eat… vegetables?”
Oh, great, Dairine thought, in a complete fury with herself. Why didn’t I just come right out and say, “Hi there, we’re cannibals”? Except I just did. “But they’re not, you know, the people kind of vegetables,” Dairine said, though the look Filif was turning on her made her wonder whether she was going to have any success with this approach. “They don’t…They’re not alive, I mean, not the way you’re alive…I mean, they don’t think…”
Then Dairine stopped herself again, this time because she was getting onto conceptually shaky ground. When you were a wizard, you quickly discovered that thought and sentience didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, and sometimes they manifested independently.
Her father leaned over her shoulder and looked down at Filif with an unusually calm expression. “What do you do for nourishment at home, son?” he said.
“Normally,” Filif said, having recovered enough to tremble a little, “we root.”
“I’ve got just the place for you,” Dairine’s dad said. “You come on outside with me. Dairine, you take care of these two for the moment.”
Her dad went out the back door, closely followed by Filif. She sagged a little with relief and turned back to the others. Sker’ret was looking out the front window of the living room with great interest, but Roshaun was leaning against the polished wooden breakfront, snickering.
“That was interesting,” he said. His tone of voice suggested not that he was trying to restrain his amusement, but that he was intending to let it loose full force as soon as he had an excuse. He found Earth funny, he found Dairine’s dad funny, and he found Dairine funny.
Dairine just looked at him. It would be so very bad, she thought, to punch out a guest on his first day in the house. Very, very bad.
But really satisfying…
“Come on and see the rest of the house,” Dairine said, rather more to Sker’ret than to Roshaun; and she led them off on the grand tour.
The tour took about fifteen minutes, after which Dairine left Roshaun and Sker’ret in
the living room and went into the kitchen again. Her dad was standing there with a screwdriver; he was in the final stages of refastening the cupboard door. “I could have sworn Nita and I brought home canned stuff to replace everything we used last week,” he said.
“You did,” Dairine said. “I think we’re going to need more. Where’s Filif? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” her father said, swinging the door back and forth a couple of times.
“He didn’t go outside the yard, did he? I put a force field around the edges of things that’ll keep the neighbors from seeing anything. But if he went out—”
“He didn’t. He may get around, but he didn’t feel like going anywhere right now, except under the sky. I get the feeling he doesn’t particularly like being indoors.”