Nita saw Kit start a little at that, but it somehow didn’t surprise her at all. “Are you going to eat something now?” Demair said to her husband. “Cousins?”
Nita shook her head. “Not right now,” she said, “thank you. I want to ask Quelt about this.”
“All right. We’ll leave some cold things for you on the sideboard.”
Kit and Nita went up the rise together to look over it into the meadowlands. Ponch came bouncing after, with yet another stick in his mouth, or the same one.
“Were they talking about what I think they were?” Kit said. “Do they routinely talk to dead people here?”
Nita was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know if they think of them as dead,” she said. “They do seem to run things differently on Alaalu.”
“Tell me about it. Your dad say anything interesting?” Kit asked. “How are things at home?”
“I think Dairine is having a personality conflict…”
“You mean, besides her usual one with the entire planet?” Kit said.
“Ouch,” Nita said, amused. They came out on top of the rise, and started scanning the horizon: This being Alaalu, it took a while. Finally, maybe a few miles off, they spotted Quelt, a tiny pale patch moving among the blue flowers.
“There she is,” Kit said.
“Yeah. No, I think Dairine’s got a personal problem with this third wizard, the humanoid one.”
“Oooo, boy,” Kit said.
“When she finally has it out with him, the sky’ll light up; we’ll see it all the way over here.”
“Yeah. Meantime, let’s go find Quelt.”
They walked the distance, because there was no rush. It was hard to feel, here, that there was any rush, anywhere—any need for haste. Maybe it had to do with the Alaalid species being so long-lived, but Nita wasn’t entirely convinced. She kept remembering that dream-image of a beach full of statues. Something else is going on…
They caught up with her about half an hour later. She had seen them and started walking toward them. Ponch reached her first, having run ahead to greet her. “Did we disturb you?” Nita said, when they got close enough to speak without shouting.
“Oh, no,” Quelt said. “I was talking to the wind, to the Telling, actually, about the Great Vein. I think the plates are moving again in that part of the seas. It’s going to be harder to get at the metal, and I needed to devise some alternative access points.”
“It’s at the bottom of the ocean, that vein? Wow,” Nita said. Both she and Kit had some grasp of what it was like to function at the great depths. “Tough work…”
“It’s not too bad if I can crack the crust, and let the metals come up molten and crystallize out into nodules,” Quelt said. “Then we can send mechanical depth-handling machines down to bring it all up. I think that’s the way I’ll go with this. Are the ceiff all fed?”
“Twice,” Kit said. “Tapi thinks I’m spoiling them.”
“I have news for you. Tapi wants you for a hired hand!” Nita said. Quelt snorted with laughter.
“Trust him to try to get a wizard to do yard work,” she said. “Parents!”
There was some group amusement over that. “Still,” Kit said, “the yard work has to get done. Quelt, can we ask you a personal question?”
“Cousin! Of course you can.”
“I mentioned the Lone Power to your folks,” Kit said, “and they barely knew what It was.”
“She,” Nita said, and shivered.
“I mean, they had to be reminded,” Kit said. “Is that usual, here? Your parents—you told them about your—I was going to call it your Ordeal, but our word for it at home seems a lot too rugged, the way they sounded.”
“Your ‘Own Choice,’” Nita said.
“Normally, we would fight with the Lone Power personally,” Kit said. “Very personally. And, normally, most people in our world know the Lone One exists, or have at least heard of It. In our world, Its effects are all over the place, and they have been for a long time, though things are changing. But here—” Kit waved his arms around him. “Your world is so perfect, our people would hardly believe it. How come? Does it have to do with the way you guys made your Choice?”
“And what did you do?” Nita said. “Because believe me, if we could have done the same kind of thing…” She shook her head.
Quelt’s expression was somewhat bemused. “Well, it would have something to do with the ne’whaHiilse’t, the Debate and Decision,” Quelt said at last. “But I’m not sure how to explain the differences, assuming they can be explained.” She mused for a moment. “You should probably come look at the Display.”
“Sorry?” Nita said.
“Oh, the Debate and Decision happened right here, on our island,” Quelt said. “So we keep an enactment of it. In fact, that’s one of my jobs as the world’s wizard, to make sure the enactment is kept running. Even though most of us don’t think about it a whole lot! I suppose we might as well go have a look at it—”
Then Quelt laughed. “You know, we’ve done some of the tourist things, but this one is so boring for most people that it never occurred to me to take you there. That’s silly of me, on second thought. You are wizards; of course you’d be interested. And I haven’t gone through the whole experience myself for a long time, though people come from all the other islands to see it.”
Kit looked from Quelt to Nita and back again.
“Let’s go,” he said.
****
Quelt had a transit spell prepared. “It’s in case I need to go do a service call,” she said, “but that hasn’t happened for a hundred years or so…” The spell looked much like one of Kit’s or Nita’s “prepackaged” ones; a circle of words in the Speech, which Quelt pulled out of the air and offered to Nita and Kit so that they could insert their personal information—their own names in the Speech and data about their body mass and composition. Both of them routinely carried shorthand versions of these in their manuals, and Kit had a spare one for Ponch. They pulled these out, hooked them onto Quelt’s spell, and stepped into it when she cast the line of bright words down among the flowers.
Wizardry dulled the air around them to a blue haze as they read the words in the Speech together. It was interesting for Nita to have a third voice reading with them, a different flavor in the air, as the universe leaned in around them, obeying the spell, and then popped them loose into another place entirely.
Nita and Kit looked around. Here the horizon was no less high, but the immediately surrounding landscape was flatter, a huge plain. As she glanced around, Nita realized that she was in one of the first places she’d seen on Alaalu that wasn’t within sight of water.
“It’s the heart of the continent,” Quelt said, leading them down a very slight slope. “The nearest ocean is three thousand miles away. A pretty distance, for us. And here we are—”
Not far away from them, down another shallow slope, was something Nita at first took for a wide, deep pool of water. But then she realized that there was too much light reflected in that pool; it was radiant by its own virtue. And there was something strange about the surface of the water—it didn’t ripple.
“It’s air held solid,” Quelt said. “You know the spell, I think. A variation of the Mason’s Word wizardry, with the spell that produces the forms held down inside it. Come on, you can walk out on it.”
She led the way across the surface of the “pool,” strolling out as if onto a crystal floor. Nita and Kit followed her, pausing with Quelt at about the middle of the surface to look down into the depths. There they saw eight figures, male and female, plainly Alaalids by their coloration, hair, and dress. Seven stood more or
less together; the eighth one stood apart.
Nita started to laugh, then. “They really are short, aren’t they?” she said. “No wonder we’re such celebrities!”