There were no further utterances from Spot. “Okay,” Nita said, straightening up. “You stay where you are, then…She’ll be back in a while.”
She sat down at the table and called her manual to her again. Two weeks of my own, she thought. Yeah! There were a hundred things to think about over the school holiday: projects she was working on with Kit, and things she was doing for her own enjoyment that she would finally have some time to really get into.
She opened the manual to the area where she kept wizardries-in-progress and paged through it idly, pausing as she came to a page that was about half full of the graceful characters of the Speech. But the last line was blinking on and off to remind her that the entry was incomplete. Oh yeah, she thought. I’d better finish this while the material’s still fresh.
Nita sat back and eyed the page, munching on her sandwich. Since she’d first become a wizard, she tended to dream things that later turned out to be useful—not strictly predictions of the future, but scenes from her life, or sometimes other people’s lives, fragments of future history. The saying went that those who forgot history were doomed to repeat it; and since Nita hated repeating herself, she’d started looking for ways to make better use of the information from her dreams, rather than just be suddenly reminded of them when the events actually happened.
Her local Advisory Wizard had given her some hints on how to use “lucid” dreaming to her advantage, and had finally suggested that Nita keep a log of her dreams to refer to later. Nita had started doing this and had discovered that the dreams were getting easier to remember. Now she glanced down at the page and had a look at this morning’s notes.
Reading them brought the images and impressions up fresh in her mind again. Last night’s dream had started with the sound of laughter, with kind of an edge to it. At first Nita had thought that the source of the laughter was her old adversary, the Lone Power, but the voice had been different. There was an edge of malice to this laughter, all right, but it was far less menacing than the Lone One had ever sounded in Nita’s dealings with it, and far more ambivalent. And the voice was a woman’s.
Then a man’s voice, very clear: “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” he says. His voice is friendly. The timbre of the voice is young, but there’s something behind it that sounds really old somehow. Nita closed her eyes, tried to remember something more about that moment than the voice. Light! There was a sense of radiance all around, and a big, vague murmuring at the edge of things, as if some kind of crowd scene was going on just out of Nita’s range of vision.
And there was barking, absolutely deafening barking. Nita had to smile at that, because she knew that bark extremely well. It was Kit’s dog, Ponch, barking excitedly about something, which wasn’t at all strange. What was strange was the absolute hugeness of the sound, in the darkness.
The darkness, Nita thought, and shivered once as the image, which hadn’t been clear this morning, suddenly presented itself.
“Record,” she said to the manual, and sat back with her eyes closed.
Space, with stars in it. Well, you would expect space to be dark. But slowly, slowly, some of the stars seemed to go faint, as if something filmy was getting between her and them, like a cloud, a creeping fog…
Slowly the dark fog had crept across Nita’s field of vision. It swallowed the stars. Now that she was awake, the image gave her the creeps. Yet in the dream, somehow this hadn’t been the case. She saw it happening; she was somehow not even surprised by it. In the dream, she knew what it meant, and its only effect on Nita had been to make her incredibly angry.
She opened her eyes now, feeling a little flushed with the memory of the anger. Nita looked down at the manual, where the last line of the Speech, recording her last
impression, was blinking quietly on and off, waiting for her to add anything further.
She searched her memory, then shook her head. Nothing new was coming up for now. “Close the entry,” she said to the manual, and that last line stopped blinking.
Nita shut the manual and reached out to pick up her sandwich and have another bite. It was frustrating to get these bits and pieces and not understand what they meant; but, eventually, when she got enough of them together, they would start to make some kind of sense. I just hope that it happens in time to be of some use. For sure, something’s going to start happening shortly. The darkness had not “felt” very far away in time. I’ll mention it to Tom when I have a chance.
Meanwhile, there were plenty of other things to think about. That Martian project, for example, she thought as she finished her sandwich. She got up to go into the kitchen and get rid of the plate. Now that’s going to be a whole lot of fun—
From outside the house came a splash and hiss as someone drove through the puddle that always collected at the end of the driveway in rainy weather. Nita glanced out the kitchen window and saw the car coming up the driveway. Daddy’s a little early, she thought. It must have been quiet in the store this afternoon. But where is Dairine? I thought she’d be back by now…
Nita ran some cold water from the tap into a measuring cup, filled up the water reservoir of the coffeemaker by the sink, put one of the premeasured coffee filters her dad favored into the top of the machine, and hit the on switch. The coffeemaker started making the usual wheeze-and-gurgle noises. Outside, the car door slammed; a few moments later, shaking the rain out of his hair, Nita’s dad came in—a tall man, silver-haired, big-shouldered, and getting a little thick around the waist; he’d been putting on a little weight these past few months. He was splattered with rain about the shoulders, and he was carrying a long paper package in his arms. “Hi, sweetie.”
“Hi, Daddy.” Nita sniffed the air. “Mums?” she said. She recognized that slightly musty scent before she saw the rust-and gold-colored flowers sticking out of the wide end of the package.
Her dad nodded. “We had a few left over this afternoon …No point leaving them in the store. I’ll find a vase for them.” He put the flowers down on the drain board, then peered into the sink. “Good lord, what’s that?”
“Lettuce,” Nita said. “Previously.”
“I see what you mean,” Nita’s dad said. “Well, that’s my fault. I meant to make some salad last weekend, but it never happened. That shouldn’t have gone bad so fast, though…”
“You have to put the vegetables in the crisper, Daddy. It’s too dry in the main part of the fridge, and probably too cold.” Nita sighed. “Speaking of which, I was talking to the fridge a little while ago…”
Her father gave her a cockeyed look. Nita had to laugh at the expression.
“You’re going to tell me that the refrigerator has a problem of some kind? Not a mechanical one, I take it.”
“Uh, no.”
Her dad leaned against the counter, rubbing his face a little wearily. “I still have trouble with this idea of inanimate objects being able to think and have emotions.”
“Not emotions the way we have them,” Nita said. “Ways they want things to be…and a reaction when they’re not. And as for inanimate…They’re just not alive the way we are.” She shrugged. “Just call this ‘life not as we know it,’ if it helps.”
“But it is life as you know it.”
“I just have better equipment to detect it with,” Nita said. “I talk to it and it talks back. It’d be rude not to answer, after that. Anyway, Daddy, it’s weird to hear you say you have a problem with this! You talk to your plants all the time. In the shop and here. You should hear yourself out in the garden.”