“She really didn’t give you any idea that she was up to this?” Nita’s dad said, coming into the dining room.
Nita shook her head as Tom and her dad sat down at the table with her. “It was news to me,” Nita said. “She doesn’t tell me everything she does, not by a long shot. And I can’t always guess. Which may be a good thing, since if I’d known about this, I’d have—” Reamed her out, Nita was about to say, and then she stopped, because she didn’t know if it was strictly true.
She looked over at Tom. “I’ve seen the section in the manual about this exchange thing,” Nita said, “but when I read it, it never occurred to me that you could just sign yourself up for one. I thought someone had to nominate you.”
“Oh, not always,” Tom said. “You can sign up for it yourself, if you have the spare time and think the circumstances warrant it.”
“Which plainly Dairine did,” Nita’s dad said. “Harry,” Tom said, “I think all we have here is a case of Dairine doing what she usually does: pushing the envelope. Testing. It’s not that unusual for an early-latency wizard. You come into your power
in a big way, then it drops off in a big way, and afterward you’re likely to spend a while plunging around trying to redefine yourself as more than a wonder child. There’s always the fear, ‘Was that all I had? Was the way I was when I started out as good as I’m ever going to get?’ It takes a while to put that to bed.”
Nita’s dad sighed, leaned back in his chair and drank some coffee, then made a face: It had gone cold. “This hasn’t made trouble for you, has it? If it has, I’m sorry.”
Tom shook his head. “It’s nothing major,” he said. “Not compared with some of the sanctioning I have to deal with. The adult wizards are worse than the kids, in some ways: As you get older, there’s an unfortunate tendency to start to lose the innate hunger for rules that you have when you’re young. Some of us start trying to bend them in ways that aren’t always innocuous…”
Nita’s dad abruptly burst out laughing. “Whoa, you lost me. Kids have an innate hunger for rules?”
Tom looked wry. “Played hopscotch lately?” he said. “One toe over that chalk line and you are dead. But let me extend the metaphor more toward adult experience, because one of the places where the rule-hunger does persist is sports. You’re a soccer fan, Harry; I see you up at the high school refereeing on weekends. About this weird and complex regulation called the offside rule—”
“I can explain that,” Nita’s dad said.
“And what’s more, you’ll enjoy explaining it,” Tom said. “Possibly as much as you enjoy enforcing it on the would-be violators.”
Nita’s dad opened his mouth and then shut it again, grinning. “You might be able to convince me about this eventually,” he said.
Tom just smiled. “Anyway, this isn’t anything that I don’t deal with more remotely, twenty or thirty times a week. It just happens that we live around the corner, so I have an excuse to exert my influence personally…and to drink your coffee, which is better than Carl’s: He thinks any coffee that doesn’t eat the pot is a waste.” Tom sighed and leaned back in his chair. “As far as this particular problem goes, it’s no big deal. Since we’ve had the energy authorized for an excursus, I need to think about what to do with it. But that’s the least of my worries at the moment.”
He ran one hand through his hair as he spoke. Nita looked at it in slight shock; she saw something she’d never noticed before. All of a sudden there was some silver showing there, above the ears, and sprinkled in salt-and-pepper fashion through the rest of Tom’s hair. When did that start? Is he okay?
“Interesting times?” Nita’s dad said.
Tom nodded. “Interesting times. The world isn’t quite what it used to be, lately…”
“Most of us have noticed,” Nita’s dad said. “Come on, let me give you another cup of that; we’ll stick it in the microwave. I can’t believe how fast this stuff seems to get cold. More milk?”
Her dad and Tom went back into the kitchen. Nita got up and headed upstairs.
Her sister was sitting at her desk, her arms folded, her head down on them. Nita stood there in the doorway, looking at her.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” Dairine said, not lifting her head. “See how okay I am. Thanks for
asking.”
Nita had been practicing ignoring her sister’s sarcasm for years and by now was expert at the art. “What was the matter with you?” Nita said, though not nearly as loudly as she’d have liked.
There was a long silence before Dairine said anything. “I needed to get away,” she said at last. “Just for a while. I needed…I don’t know. Not a vacation. I needed to do something else, somewhere else. Millman said a change would be a good idea if I could swing it. And for you, too.” She gave Nita a look that was almost fierce.
Millman was the school psychologist who had been counseling them both, on and off, since their mom died. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell you to do anything like this,” Nita said, annoyed. “You know how it has to look to Dad! He’s going to think you don’t think he’s being a good enough dad or something.”
“But it’s not like we were going to be away all the time, Neets!” Dairine said. “It’s easy to come home at nights if you want to. There’s a protocol all set up—the Powers give you an expanded worldgating allowance and everything: You don’t have to worry about blowing huge amounts of energy on transport to come back from your host world if you get homesick, or if you need to deal with something else back here. You can be back anytime you need to be, no problem—and the rest of the time, you can concentrate on being where you are.”
Nita let out a long breath. “That,” she said, “kind of looks like the last thing you were doing, Dair.”
Dairine rubbed her eyes with her hands. It was their dad’s gesture, helpless and pained, and Nita’s insides seized up when she saw it.
“I didn’t think it through,” Dairine said after a little while. “Tom got that right.”
She was quiet for another long time, almost too long, but there was no break in the tension. After a moment, Nita sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked when she did so.
Dairine threw her a look, though not the one Nita was expecting. “You’ve been toughing it out all the time,” Dairine said, and went back to staring at her desk, all cluttered with diskettes and blank CDs and artwork and paperwork, with the flat-screen monitor of her main computer, and also now with Spot, his legs all retracted, looking as muted and unhappy as Dairine did. “You think I don’t see?” Dairine said, reaching out to trace some aimless design on Spot’s upper case with one finger. “And when Dad and I can’t connect, you’re the one who winds up talking sense to him, and to me, and getting us all going in the same direction. But who’s there to make things easier for you?…You’re getting worn out with it. You need a change of pace, something besides worrying about whether we’re okay. We’re tougher than you think we are. But you…”
Dairine fell silent, possibly unwilling to say what she was thinking. Nita looked at her and felt equally unwilling to force the issue, for she was afraid their thoughts were running in tandem. How many times have I had this idea myself in the past couple of months? Nita thought. How many times have I thought, I wish I were out of here. I wish that just for a few days a week, I was somewhere I didn’t have to deal with helping to put everything back together in some new shape, one that doesn’t have Mom in it?…
“Look,” Nita said to Dairine after a moment. “You meant well. You just have
to take these things past the meaning sometimes! Especially when it’s Dad. You know what a disciplinarian he is…or thinks he is. Now that Mom’s not here, he thinks he has to be twice as much of one. Have you given any thought to trying to be, you know, good for a while?”