Ponch, upside down, looked at Nita with one eye. He’s lazy.
“He’s lazy? You should talk. You sleep all day!”
I’ve been doing my job, Ponch said. I don’t have to hunt. I don’t have any puppies to guard. So I sleep, and the rest of the time I have fun.
Nita chuckled. “Sensible,” she said. “Okay, I take it back.” She stretched again, ran her hands through her hair. “You know what I love about this place? No bugs.”
“Bugs?”
“Insects. Little life-forms that come and bite you.”
“The keks would do that.”
“Yeah, but the keks you can get up and walk away from. These things fly after you in the air and sit on you and bite you. Some of them are so small you can hardly see them. They’re a real pain.”
“But you can talk them out of biting you, surely…”
“I’ve tried. It’s an uphill battle, believe me. You get better reactions out of walls and rocks than you do out of most bugs.”
Quelt laughed, and got up, and stretched. “I should go put the laundry in to run,” she said. “I told my ‘mom’ I would.”
Nita laughed. “We’re corrupting you with all these strange foreign words,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t think so. I hear what you call my topi…”
Nita and Quelt smiled at each other. “Go on,” Nita said. “Ponch, go on and kick the boss out of bed. It’s a sin for him to miss this.”
Quelt and Ponch went back toward the house, and Nita watched them go with a slight smile. Chores on this world didn’t seem as onerous as chores did at home, somehow. And even less so when I don’t have to do them, she thought. But Quelt didn’t seem to mind doing them, either.
Nita sat there a while longer, looking out at the sea and watching the tiny waves slide lazily up the sand, so unlike the energetic surf of the South Shore. But then the Great South Bay has tides, because Earth has a Moon. That’s the only thing I miss here: a really big moon.
Still, this is gorgeous…
Very slowly, the east started to turn a fiercer orange red than before. Nita sat in that fiery light and soaked it up with endless appreciation.
But the dream would not quite go away.
The heart of the world is frozen, and so there is no heart.
Nita blinked, and then she shivered, her sunburn briefly forgotten.
Dairine and Filif and Sker’ret got back from Mount Everest late that afternoon to find that Roshaun had arrived while they were gone. Carmela was sitting in front of the TV with him, discussing clothes once more. Annoyed as Dairine was with the prince, she had to be amused—at least Carmela had found someone as interested in personal adornment as she was. I didn’t think it was possible, Dairine thought. And at least Roshaun had come back. Though not because of anything I said…
Filif, wanting some relaxation, joined Roshaun and Carmela in the living room. Dairine’s dad was sitting at the dining room table, making some notes about supplies for the store on a pad. As Dairine and Sker’ret came in, his head jerked up, a little guiltily, Dairine thought, to make sure Filif wasn’t in sight.
“You okay, Daddy?” she said, bending over to hug him and give him a kiss.
“Huh? Oh, fine,” he said. “How was your day? You guys have a nice lunch?”
Sker’ret looked most satisfied. “Very filling,” he said.
“Oxygen bottles, mostly,” Dairine said.
Her dad glanced up at that, amused. “Nothing wrong with a little roughage in the diet. Where are you off to?”
“Just down to Sker’ret’s pup tent. He’s going to lend me some music. Stick your head in and yell if you need me.”
“Okay.”
They went down the basement stairs more or less together—it always being a question, when Sker’ret was on forty legs and she was on two, who was ahead and who was behind at any one time, if not both at once. On the mountain, Dairine and Sker’ret had started discussing popular music while Sker’ret ingested carefully chosen chunks of garbage—including some climbing expedition’s very broken tape recorder—and Sker’ret had suggested that when they got back, they could use one of the manual’s data transfer options to pass some favorite selections back and forth. Dairine promptly had Spot grab a wide and peculiar assortment from the big computer at home—everything from boy bands to Beethoven—and was curious to see what Sker’ret was going to pass to her in return.
They slipped in through his pup-tent access. Dairine looked around and saw several of the sitting/lying racks Sker’ret’s people preferred, sort of a cross between a giant step stool and monkey bars. Dairine looked around at the stacks and racks of storage. “Very organized,” she said.
“Not what my parent says,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine snickered. “None of us is ever neat enough for our parents. One of those universal traits.” Sker’ret laughed and started rummaging around for his own version of the manual, a little flat data pad.
Dairine sat partly down on one of the racks—it was impossible for a human to get really comfortable on one of them, no matter how she tried—and perched there,
swinging her leg, while Spot spidered around, peering into everything. “You told me before that they wouldn’t let you into the restaurants in the Crossings,” Dairine said. “Why not? Did you misbehave in there or something?”
Sker’ret’s laugh acquired something of an edge. Dairine heard a hint of bitterness about it. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s just that families of employees aren’t expected to use the same facilities as the patrons.”
Dairine stared at him a moment. Abruptly, the data slipped into place. “Oh no,” she said. “You’re not just some Rirhait, are you? You’re related to the Stationmaster …”
“I’m the youngest of his first brood,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine breathed out. “That means you inherit management of the whole place when he retires, doesn’t it?”
“It would mean that if I were normal,” Sker’ret said. “But I’m not, am I? I’m a wizard.” Now there was no mistaking the bitterness. “I’m supposed to run the Crossings, and become one of the most powerful beings for light-years around. It’s as much a political position as anything else: Control worldgates and you control so much else. No one argues with the Stationmasters.”
“But you can do that and be a wizard,” Dairine said. “Can’t you?”
Sker’ret looked at her with several eyes. “I want to,” he said. “But they don’t want me to. As far as my parent is concerned, to be a wizard is a distraction from what I’m supposed to be doing, from the business of life, and the ‘real world.’” He snorted, a most peculiar, rather metallic sound. “Not precisely a waste of time— we know as well as anybody else how useful wizards are. But my parent is furious with me. He wants me to reject the wizardry, to give it up. And I can’t!”
Dairine drew a deep breath. Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart. That was one of the first laws of the Art. You could give it up, if you were unwilling or unable to hold by the strictures embodied in the Wizard’s Oath. It could leave you of its own volition, if pain or illness or changes in your life made it impossible for you to keep the Oath any longer. But the prospect was horrible to imagine, at least for Dairine. To actually have the people around you trying to force you to give up wizardry, to give up that most intimate connection with the universe and What had made it—
She shuddered. “You go your own way,” she said to Sker’ret. “You do what your heart tells you.”
“Hearts,” Sker’ret said.
“Whatever. You do that! That’s how They talk to you. Don’t let anyone push you around.”
“That’s easy to say,” Sker’ret said, “when your ‘father’s’ not the Stationmaster of the Crossings.”
Dairine gave Sker’ret a look. “I have news for you,” she said. “I think you’re tougher than he thinks you are. I think there’s room in the universe for you to be exactly what you want to be. Your father—sorry, your parent—may be the most powerful entity for light-years around, but if he were sure of that, he wouldn’t be pressuring you so hard. So I think you still may have some bargaining room left.”