by Diane Duane
“What’s its name again?”
“Alaalu. We’ll use public transport to start with. We’ll short-gate it to Grand Central around two, and then go over to the Crossings from there. After that we just pick up a scheduled service for Alaalu. The manual says there are outbound gatings from the Crossings about once every two hours, or on demand. No big deal.”
“Leaving early, huh?” Dairine said, reaching out to the cornflake box in front of her to pour another bowl. “Can’t bear to see Dad freaking out over the new arrivals?”
“Actually,” Nita said, cutting her toast in halves, “I think he’ll do just fine… and the sooner I’m out of here, the happier he’ll be. One less thing for him to concentrate on.”
“Hnh,” Dairine said, a noise which suggested both that she was chewing and that she didn’t know whether to believe Nita or not.
Nita sat down and started eating her toast. “You packed yet?” Dairine said.
Nita shook her head. “After breakfast,” she said, picking up the second piece. She munched in silence for a little while, and then looked up to find Dairine looking at her with an expression that on anyone else might have been somewhat wistful. “What?”
“This is turning out okay after all, isn’t it?” Dairine said.
“I think so,” Nita said. “And Dad’s calming down a little.”
Dairine snickered into her cereal. “Yeah. Anyway, it’ll be fun to have some other wizards here to hang out with. And Carmela’s been wanting to get some more practice with the Speech. This’ll be a great way.” Dairine poured more milk on her cornflakes. “Be good for them to meet a normal Earth person… ”
Nita smiled as she finished her toast. “Don’t let Kit hear you call her that.”
“Yeah.” Dairine took another spoonful of cornflakes. “Go on, you should start packing. It’s gonna take you longer than you think.”
It annoyed Nita to have to admit that her sister was right. After her dad went off to work, she spent the rest of the morning and the very beginning of the afternoon putting things into her pup tent and taking them out again. The things that stayed in included Nita’s desk, which, she discovered, was too heavy to drag in so that she wound up having to levitate it; a lot of books and the little speakers that plugged into her smartphone so she could listen to music: a lot of clothes in cardboard boxes, including every swimsuit she owned, and much other junk from her dresser drawers that Nita had gradually realized she couldn’t do without. That recurring realization was what stopped her, eventually, as she stood in front of her dresser holding her third stack of underwear. Am I insane? I can always come back.
She chucked the underwear back into the open dresser drawer, pushed it shut with her foot, and went into the bathroom for toiletries and a couple of towels.
There’s a thought. Beach towels… She opened the towel cupboard and pulled out a couple of big ones, smiling at the thought of lying around under some alien sun, listening to the ocean, doing nothing—
Sunblock! Nita rummaged around in the medicine cabinet, but all the sunblock in there had sell-by dates in the previous year. This stuff is useless now. I can always use a wizardry to do the same job…
She went back into her room, which looked strangely empty without her desk, and glanced around to see if there was anything she’d forgotten. A glance at her watch told her it was one-thirty. Getting close to time to go, Nita thought. Looks like I’m all set—
“Honey? Good grief, what’s going on in here?”
Nita looked over her shoulder. Her dad was standing in the doorway, gazing into her room in some confusion. “Are you going to leave anything in here?” he said. “You sure you don’t need the posters on the wall, too?”
“Nope, I’m all done,” Nita said. As she spoke, she bent down to pull the tag of words in the Speech that controlled the pup tent’s access; the gray shadow of the portal slid up into the silvery rod and vanished. Nita took the rod down out of the air, telescoped it down to a foot, and slipped it into her backpack. “You’re home for lunch?”
“It’s lunchtime, yeah, but I’ve already had a sandwich. I just thought I’d see if you needed me to drive you and Kit to the station in Freeport.”
“No, it’s okay, Daddy, we’re going straight into Grand Central.” Nita picked up the backpack and slung it over her shoulder with one last look around her room. “And you should be getting ready for the visitors.”
“There’s not that much to do,” her dad said as they went down the stairs together. “The place is clean—Dairine did a good job of it. I guess I just wanted to see you off.”
“I know,” Nita said. “Dad, I’ll be fine. This isn’t any worse than going over to Kit’s: I can be home in a minute if you need me. And I see from my manual that Tom’s done something to your phone so you can call me any time. It’ll just come through the manual.”
“That’s the only thing I’m not sure about,” her dad said as they headed toward the kitchen. “My service plan costs enough as it is. And I’m not sure how they charge me for things half the time, anyway. The minutes and the texts and the data, it’s all so confusing. If phone calls to other star systems start showing up on my next bill—”
Nita grinned. “If they do, I think you should take them right to the phone company and see what they do. Take me too. Can’t wait to see how customer service handles it.”
Her dad nodded, smiled, reached out to her. Nita went and gave him a big hug. “I’ll phone you pictures,” Nita said.
“Just don’t get confused and share them to the shop’s Facebook page, honey. You’ll get everyone confused.”
Nita grinned. “Bye, Dad,” she said, and went out.
In the driveway, Dairine was waiting for her, and trying not to look as if she was waiting. “You got everything?” she said.
Nita rolled her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “In fact, that’s what I’m afraid of. You may see me coming back to return stuff.”
“I don’t want to see you for at least a couple days,” Dairine said, with such force that Nita was a little surprised.
“Well, just do me a favor and call me if anything starts to happen, okay?”
“If I need you, sure.”
This was not the answer Nita had been looking for. “I want progress reports,”
Nita said. “If Dad—”
“Dad will be fine! Don’t you trust me with him?”
Nita broke out in a sudden sweat, as any direct answer was likely to get her in trouble either as a wizard or as a sister. “Look,” she said, “just set your manual to generate a daily précis, okay? If I don’t hear from you, I can check that. That won’t be any trouble.” And it won’t find endless, creative ways to cover up whatever’s happening, either.
“Yeah, sure,” Dairine said. And, without warning, she hugged Nita. “You take care of yourself,” she said. “Don’t get in trouble.”
“Me?” Nita said.
“They say memory’s the first thing to go,” Dairine said under her breath. She turned and went back into the house, waving one hand more or less behind her. “Have fun… ”
Nita shrugged her backpack into place and turned away.
***
A few minutes later, at Kit’s house, Nita knocked on the back door, then stuck her head in.
In the living room, cacophony from Carmela’s chat utility made a background to more urgent voices. “You should take a heavier jacket, honey!”
“Mama, the average temperature there this time of year is eighty degrees. In fact, it’s eighty degrees most of the year.”
“It might still get cold at night if you’re going to be at the beach. You’re not going to have to go anywhere nice, are you? Out to dinner or anything? You should take a good shirt.”
“Mama, I can come right back here and get one.”
“Why waste the time when you can put it in this wonderful magic closet right now?”
“Yeah,” said Carmela’s voice from the living room. “I want a wonderful
magic closet, too! Or I’ll take that one when you’re done.”
A silence fell that to Nita said more about Kit’s state of mind than many words could. “Helloooo!” she said as she walked into the kitchen. “Kit?”
“Living room!”
She went in there and found him standing in front of his own pup-tent access, looking very resigned and simply throwing through the interface everything his mother handed him. Carmela, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, as usual, was watching the whole process with intense amusement though not laughing out loud. Nita suspected that ‘Mela knew this could be bad for her health at the moment. “Oh, hello, Nita,” Kit’s mama said. “He’ll be ready in a sec. See that, she’s wearing a heavier jacket—” she said, and hurried past Nita toward the kitchen and the back door.
“What time is it?” Kit said to Nita.
“Almost two,” she said. “We should go.”
Instantly, if not sooner, Kit said silently. I’m starting to feel like a garage sale here.
You can always smuggle all this stuff back later.
I’m planning on it!
“Here,” Kit’s mama said, coming in with a jacket that, Nita judged, could probably keep Kit warm in Antarctica. Kit took it from her and flung it through the access to the pup tent, where it vanished. “Mama,” he said, “we really have to go, or we’re going to be late. Is that it?”
“No,” his mother said, and handed him a brown paper bag. “Here’s your lunch.”
Kit sighed, twisted around, and put the bag into his backpack, which he was wearing fully slung, as if he’d expected to be out of there a good while ago. “That’s it,” he said.
“I don’t know,” his mama said. “I keep getting the idea I’ve forgotten something—”
“Tell me later, Mama,” Kit said, pulling up the “shade” of the pup-tent access interface and stowing its rod in his backpack. “I’ll call you. And then I can come back for whatever it is.”
Ponch, who had been lying on his back between Carmela and the TV, now got up, shook himself, and stood there with his tongue hanging out. Is it time?
“Yes, it is,” Kit said. “Mama… ”
He went over to her and hugged her hard. Nita was astonished to see Kit’s fairly hard-boiled mom actually getting teary, and fighting to manage it.
“Tell Pop I’ll call him tonight,” Kit said.
“I will, sweetie.”
Carmela looked up at Kit and just waved at him. “Bring me stuff,” she said.
“If I remember,” Kit said, very offhandedly. Nita controlled her smile; she’d already seen the shopping list Carmela had given him.
“Come on,” Kit said to her. With Ponch bouncing around them, he and Nita went out the back door and headed into Kit’s backyard, making their way to the cover of the sassafras woods out in the back. To anyone who might have been watching, they vanished among the leaves. And then, a few seconds later, with just the slightest pop! of displaced air, they vanished much more thoroughly.
***
Nita and Kit and Ponch arrived at the spot in Grand Central Terminal that they normally used when making a transit at peak times—a dark and quiet place away from the Main Concourse proper but still inside the terminal, near one of the northernmost of the westward-pointing tracks. The platform between tracks eleven and thirteen was a spot where wheeled wire freight baskets and the occasional locked mail container were left for later pickup. There was rarely anyone there in the middle of the day, and the area was only dimly lit by the red eyes of infrared spots, while hidden security cameras passed pictures of what the spots showed them to the train master’s office.
No security camera, of course, can do anything about a wizard who is both invisible and shielded against infrared leakage. Nita and Kit popped out of nowhere into the dark, being careful to minimize the air displacement when they did—there was no point in appearing invisibly while also making a noise like a gunshot.
Carefully, Nita and Kit made their way toward where the train gates opened onto the Main Concourse, and then down to where platform thirty-three joined the main strip of platforms on the upper level. It was still hard to be careful enough, though.
“Ow!”
“Sorry, I didn’t see you.”
Nita had to snicker softly at that. “It’s mutual. There’s the door—”
“Yeah. Are we away from the cameras now?”
“Wait a sec… Yeah, no new ones since we were here last. Let’s lose these.”
They both stepped into the shadows, dumped the spells that cloaked them, and flicked back into visibility. Kit slipped out of his backpack, brushed himself down, and put the backpack over one shoulder again.
“Itchy?” Nita said.
“Yeah, being invisible does that to me… It didn’t used to.” He glanced down at Ponch. “I think I’m catching it from somebody.”
It’s not my fault, Ponch said, sounding virtuous. Maybe you‘re just starting to feel your skin for a change.
Kit rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said.
They went out through the gate for the platform between tracks fifteen and sixteen and paused just past it, looking up and down the length of the Main Concourse. It was a bright day; the scattered light of the sunbeams striking through the great south windows washed through the dusty early-afternoon air and lit up the turquoise of the painted sky high above them, washing out its stars. As they walked across the Concourse, good smells came drifting down from the steak restaurant at one end of the Concourse terrace. “Whaddaya think,” Kit said. “Food hall?”
Nita gave him a pretend-shocked look. “You mean you’re not going to just sit down on the stairs here and eat your bag lunch?”
Kit gave Nita a look. “Please. I’m saving it for when I’m feeling homesick. Meanwhile… ”
“Aha,” said a voice from just below knee level. “I heard you were coming through this morning.”
Nita looked down. Standing by them was a big, stocky, silvery gray tabby cat, waving his tail, and Nita knew only she and Kit and Ponch could see him because he was using a form of selective invisibility that left him visible to wizards but invisible to other humans. “Hey, Urruah!” Nita said. “Dai stihó!”
Urruah was one of the feline wizards who kept the New York worldgates running properly, cats being much better than other Earthly species at seeing the superstrings on which the gates’ structures were hung. “Ponch,” Kit said, “would you come sit over here so it doesn’t look like we’re talking to the floor? Thanks.”
Ponch sat down next to Urruah, gazing at him. For a moment or so their gazes locked, then Ponch put down his ears, which had been up, and let his tongue hang out.
Urruah’s whiskers went forward. “Nice doggy,” he said.
Woof, woof, Ponch said, his eyes glinting. The irony was audible.
“Good to see you,” Kit said. “Where’s Rhiow today?”
“Our esteemed team leader,” Urruah said, “is over in the FF’arhleih Building—that’s the old post office over on Eighth Avenue—doing stasis work on the substrates there for when we move the worldgates over.”
“I thought the new Penn Station project was on hold,” Nita said.
“Once again,” Urruah said. “Ehhif bureaucracy, such a wonderful thing.” He rolled his eyes. “But the more time you give the worldgate substrates to root, the less trouble the gates give you when you put them in place. We just didn’t realize there was going to be so much lead time, so Rhiow has to keep adjusting the wizardries on the mirror substrate to keep it from denaturing while we wait for the City to get its vhai’d act together. Meanwhile, I see you’re going somewhere for pleasure today… ”
“A sponsored noninterventional excursus,” Nita said.
Urruah grinned. “I did one of those once,” he said. “The species was aquatic: I didn’t feel dry for weeks afterward. Nice people, though. Where are they sending you?
“Alaalu.”
“Never heard of it,” Urruah said. �
�But why should I? With a billion homeworlds out there, and no time to see them all. By the way, were you issued subsidized jump-throughs?”
“You mean the custom worldgates? Yeah,” Kit said.
“And they’re wrapped up tight?” Urruah said. “You haven’t tried to commission them?”
“Huh? No,” Nita said. “The docs said you absolutely shouldn’t do that.”
“Okay, good,” Urruah said. “That’s fine.”
“But why shouldn’t you?” Kit said.
Urruah gave him a look. “You mean, why shouldn’t you take an open worldgate through an open worldgate? Please. Temporal eversions are bad enough. Those you can patch, or revert, if you know how. Even simple spatial ones, if the effect isn’t spread over too much area. But a multidimensional one—”
“Everything turns inside out?” Nita said, guessing.
Urruah gave her a pitying look. “The reality would be much more complex, much worse, and very much less reversible. Since I assume you like this planet as it is, and not as eighth-dimensional origami, let’s not do it. When are you two scheduled back?”
“Two weeks.”
“Well, have a good time,” Urruah said. “Try not to destroy your host civilization or anything. Going via the Crossings?”
“Yeah,” Kit said.
“I hoped so. Would you mind doing an errand as you pass through?”
“Sure,” Nita said, “no problem.”
“Great—I appreciate it. Stop by the Stationmaster’s office when you get there and tell him we’d appreciate it if they’d route the elective main trunk nontypical traffic around us for the next thirty-six hours. When Rhi’s finished we’re going to have to do some matching maintenance on the local gate substrates.”
Kit had his manual open and was making a note. “Thirty-six hours… Got it.”
“That should be plenty of time. I’ll message him when the maintenance is done, and one of us will drop by in a day or three to discuss some other matters.”
Urruah got up and stretched. “Meanwhile, your transit gate will be off platform eighteen. We just moved it over there from thirty; the Metro-North staff are doing track welding today. The locus’ll be patent for the Crossings in about six minutes, after the two-twenty to Croton-Harmon gets out of your way. If you hurry, you can catch it.”