“He left,” Quelt said. “The reasons given differ. And he did say that he didn’t care for the way the Choice had been made…Some versions of the story tell how Druvah said he didn’t want anything more to do with his own people. They say he threatened the other wizards and said to them something like what Ictanikë had said—that they couldn’t make this Choice without him, or that later they’d wish that they’d listened to him, and that someday they’d need him back and wouldn’t be able to find him. But all the stories agree that he went away from the place where he lived and was never seen there again.”
“A sore loser,” Kit said.
“Maybe not,” Nita said. “Maybe he was just sad, or embarrassed when he realized he was wrong.”
“You might be right about that,” Quelt said. She watched as slowly the various wizards wandered off together across the flowery fields, heading out into the world they’d helped to shape. “There are other stories that say how sometimes people would see him for a day, an hour, on some lonely road, or climbing a mountain, or sailing by himself on the sea, always looking for something, always acting as if something was missing. But it wasn’t thought lucky to see him. He was tricky to talk to, they said, and he didn’t always make sense. Or you might hear his voice behind first one tree and then another in the forest, always moving in front of you when you got close, never staying where you thought it was.”
Quelt turned and started walking up through the crystalline air again. Kit and Nita walked up the air behind her. “Sort of a trickster,” Nita said.
“That’s right,” Quelt said. She shrugged. “There’s even one story that says he went wandering right out of the world, among other worlds, looking for whatever he was missing. It doesn’t really matter in terms of the Choice. It’s made now. And pretty well made, I think.”
They broke the surface of the crystalline Display and walked out across it, back to the sward that surrounded it. Kit looked all around him at the bright day, as if wondering whether he should say something, and then, finally, he said, “So people here do die…”
“I don’t know that we would’ve ever had any choice about that,” Quelt said. “It’s always going to happen eventually, isn’t it? But it’s not so bad. We live a pretty long time. And it’s not as if the dead people go away.”
Nita looked up at that and nodded. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” she said. “There’ve been times I woke up in the middle of the night here and thought I heard people whispering…”
Quelt looked at Nita and purposely nodded, using the human gesture. “That’s right,” she said, “I thought you’d probably be able to hear them. When we die, we don’t die dead. We don’t die out of the world. We die into it. The people who were here are always around.” And Quelt looked at Nita with a little less certainty than usual, an expression a little less serene. “It’s not like that for you, in your world, is it?” she said.
Nita shook her head. “No,” she said, and couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice. “Definitely not.”
Kit looked up. “Here comes Ponch,” he said.
Nita glanced up. She couldn’t see anything but a vague troubling of the flowers across the field. “What has he got?” she said, and began to trot off toward him.
Behind her, she could just hear Quelt saying, in a slightly lowered voice, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, since you seem interested in the subject. How do you die?”
Nita said nothing.
“Uh…let’s save that for a little later, okay?” Kit said.
They went back to the house by the sea.
****
Disruption of Services Dairine wandered through the house early that morning, looking into every room except the one she was trying to avoid looking into: the basement. Filif was in the kitchen, watching her dad get ready for work. Nobody was in the dining room. Sker’ret was in the living room, watching TV and playing around with the remote. Nobody was in the bathroom or any of the bedrooms.
She let out a long breath and wandered back the way she had come, glancing at the TV as she passed through the living room. “That really looks a lot better,” she said to Sker’ret.
“Something was wrong with the green color matrix,” Sker’ret said. “I talked to the irradiation module and got it to tweak its voltage a little. Everything seems to be behaving now.”
“You could have a word with my stereo upstairs if you felt like it,” Dairine said. “But not right now.”
“Are we ready to go?”
“A few minutes.”
She wandered back into the kitchen. “Did you see what Sker’ret did to the TV, Daddy?” Dairine said.
“I sure did. That boy’s a whiz with the machinery, isn’t he?”
“He’s kind of a structures specialist,” Dairine said. “A taking-things-apart-and-putting-things-back-together fan. I’d say everything would be fine with him around until you ran out of broken things to fix.” She smiled. “Then would be the time to hide…”
“When he has a free moment, he can come down to the shop,” Dairine’s dad said, finishing his coffee and going to the sink with the mug. “My copy machine…” He shook his head.
“I’ll put it on the list.” To Filif, she said, “Have you seen Roshaun this morning?”
“Not today,” Filif said. “He went into his pup tent when we all did last night, and I haven’t seen him since.”
He raised a branch and pushed his baseball cap into what was intended to be
a jaunty angle. It flopped back down again, because it’s hard to keep a baseball cap in a given position when your head is a single conifer-like branch, similar to the top of a Christmas tree.
“Hmf,” Filif said, and started weaving a few outer limbs around in a gesture that Dairine recognized as the beginning of a wizardry, Filif’s invocation of a shorthand or “macro” version of something he’d set up before. He had a lot of these for physical manipulation, which made sense for a tree. Dairine’s neck hairs rose a little at the feel of the Speech being used in a nonverbal mode.
Dairine’s dad, drinking his coffee, eyed this procedure with some interest, watching the baseball cap come up to level and settle itself as if there were a head underneath it.
“Slick,” Dairine said.
“I don’t know,” her dad said, looking with dry humor at the baseball cap, and turning away again. “I’m not sure what you’re doing bringing something like that into a house full of Mets fans…”
The cap was a Yankees cap, and Dairine hadn’t had either the inclination or the heart to start explaining to Filif why such a cap could possibly be an issue. He’d really wanted it, and Dairine had gone back to the shopping center and gotten it for him. But she felt fortunate in having been able to talk him out of the Jams, convincing him that they were “very last year.”
Dairine headed past the two of them, sighing. There’s no way to avoid it. I’m just going to have to go on down there, she thought. “You about ready to go?” she said.
“Yes,” her dad and Filif said in unison, and then both burst out laughing, since they were each talking about going to a different place.
“Great,” Dairine said. “Back in a minute.”
She went down the stairs into the basement and looked around. There were the three pup-tent accesses, each hanging from its silvery rod. One of them was active.
Dairine let out a long, annoyed breath, went over to it, and most reluctantly put her head in.
The inside was illuminated, not with the standard directionless lighting of a basic pup-tent installation, but by a number of ornate lamps positioned here and there across the carpeted floor. Carpets? Dairine thought. But there they were, beautifully woven in alien patterns of many colors, some of them embroidered as well. They were scattered all over the inside of a space that was significantly larger than the others’ pup tents, which she’d seen when they’d invited her in.