by Diane Duane
“That was a compliment,” Dairine said. “Accepted with thanks.”
“And on that note,” Carl said, “especially speaking of power levels taking a dive, even the ones we’re working with here… Someone has a few other stops to make before he heads off for his own shift pretty soon.” He neatly deprived Tom of the Guinness bottle and drained it.
Tom laughed and shook his head. “Hate to admit it, but he has a point…”
The Supervisories got up and wandered around making their good-nights to everyone, and finally waved and vanished into the dark in the direction of the short-transport pad. Everybody else made themselves comfortable around the Stone Throne for a while, enjoying the fire, snacking casually on what food remained of the buffet that had been laid out, and just generally relaxing and ignoring Thesba, now standing fairly high overhead and occasionally obscured by drifting cloud. Ronan had renewed his discussion of the “first” of the Star Wars films with Cheleb and Djam and Mr. Frilly; he’d started that one running on the streaming video with the purpose of freezing it on every scene he didn’t like, one after another, and mocking them all mercilessly. Dairine was sitting in the grass with her back against one of the standing stones and Spot in her lap, smiling slightly and watching this performance unfold.
Kit strolled over to the remains of the buffet to get himself some beef jerky—Ronan had brought that, and it was surprisingly good—and glanced around him. Just about then Nita wandered up by him, watching the video-screening action with an expression of dry amusement that suggested she had absolutely no intention of getting involved. “You know,” she said, “that Creamsicle juice has been really nice but I would kill for some fizzy water just about now.”
“I’ve got some,” Kit said. “Come on back.”
He led her around to the standing stone where his puptent was anchored, opened the portal, and stepped through, waving the lights up. Glancing around at the place, he got annoyed with himself: his supplies were a lot more disorganized than he thought he’d left them. I guess I didn’t really do that good a job tidying yesterday, he thought. Too much on my mind… “Sorry,” he said, “it’s kind of messy in here.” He went over to the far side of the puptent where he had a few six packs of bottled water stacked up, and started pulling the plastic off one of them.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nita said. “You should see mine.” She sighed and leaned against the curved puptent wall.
Kit fought with the plastic until he could find the right place to get it to rip. “I meant to ask,” he said. “When I couldn’t reach you for hours and hours the other day—what was that about?”
“What, yesterday?”
“No.” Kit paused once again to try to remember what day it was. “Uh, Thursday.”
“Oh.” Nita rubbed her face, looking tired for a moment. “I had to go off site to deal with a flood.”
“What?” He handed her the bottle.
“They were running short of hydromages to do emergency response work, and I was handy to substitute in. But what embarrasses me is that it was kind of a relief. There are times—”
Nita broke off and looked away, as if whatever admission she’d been about to make was painful enough that she didn’t even like sharing it with Kit. “Well, anyway,” she said, looking back again. “There was an earthquake down on the south side of the continent somewhere, don’t ask me where, Bobo knows the coordinates, and it destroyed a local dam, and all the water started flooding the plain around one of the bigger gating complexes. And they couldn’t stop the flowthrough in time—the gates were being really adversarial and kept jamming each other open while all these thousands of people kept moving through. One of the local Supervisories just turned up on my doorstep, literally outside my puptent, a big fluffy guy and honestly he reminds me of a giant chicken, and said ‘Get down here now.’ And so I got down there now.”
“God,” Kit said.
Nita shrugged. “It wasn’t too tough to stop, really. I had to reroute a big reservoir’s worth of water all over the flood plain, but it wasn’t anything like as heavy a job as Mars was. Not that that would have been a big deal either right now, with our power levels the way they are.”
Nita scowled down at the bottle she was holding. “So I got the water out of there, and went down to report off to Big Fluffy Chicken Guy. And while this was happening some Tevaralti people came along to say thank you. You know how that goes.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. Those moments always embarrassed him too. He was so used to keeping wizardry secret, at least at home, that it was hard to get used to being thanked out in the open.
“And a few of them were Tevaralti who didn’t want to move on to the refuge worlds, but they came and said thank you anyway. Which was nice enough, I guess.” He could feel her annoyance growing. “And I think they knew I couldn’t understand it, because one of them said, ‘It’s just that we need to be of one mind, we can’t go unless we’re of one mind—’”
“Yeah, somebody said that to me the other day.”
“And another one said ‘If the One desired us to go, It would have changed all minds so that all minds are one, It would have acted Itself.’ And I just got so mad.” She actually grabbed some of her hair in her fists and waved it around. “I wanted to grab him and say, ‘Well, what are we, chopped liver?’ Like we’re not what the Powers use to fix things.” She let go of her hair and flapped her arms in helpless anger. “Honestly.”
Kit laughed, and the laugh came out a little broken. “I know,” he said. “Though I don’t think they’d get the chopped liver part.”
She laughed at that, which was just as well, because despite the gravity of what they’d been discussing, the reminder of Mars had taken Kit by surprise in a way that had occasionally happened before. Just the image was enough: Nita standing there facing down a scheming Martian vizier and a rebellious and dangerous Martian princess while she held a huge threatening wave of water over their city like a giant attack dog straining at its leash. Nita taut and furious and absolutely in command, looking extremely dangerous as she explained to the people who were more or less holding Kit hostage that if they didn’t do what she told them right now she was going to excuse the whole lot of them from existence.
Actually, Nita looking absolutely smoking hot, Kit thought, realizing that his mouth had gone dry. Though it might have had something to do with the Martian daywear, which tended toward the filmy and skimpy and… Seriously, seriously I need to stop thinking about this right now, Kit thought. Before something… uh, well, yeah, maybe too late—
She’d turned her head aside for a moment, which was just as well, as it gave Kit just enough time to adjust his clothes and make things less visible while she dropped her gaze to the water bottle and started fighting with the top of it. “Ever since they changed the caps on these it takes forever to get them open,” she said, scowling at it. “I swear, you need to be a wizard to—”
The bottle top popped off and fizzy water bubbled up and hissed out of it, spraying everywhere. Nita nearly dropped the bottle, then said, “Oh no you don’t, you stop that!”
The water stopped right where it was in the air, frozen in mid-spray like something caught by strobe photography.
“Come on, let’s get this out of here,” Nita said, and headed out the portal with the bottle and all the stasis-held water. Kit followed her, trying hard to make sure he wasn’t walking strangely enough for her to notice. “Boy,” she was saying, “somebody must have been in a real hurry when he was packing!”
Kit gulped as he followed her out into the cool darkness and around behind the standing stone. Oh thank you, he said to the night, thank you for being dark! Because sometimes no matter how carefully you tried to walk, things just got worse. “Well, weren’t you?”
Nita released the water-stasis spell and let the bottle finish fizzing enthusiastically over the grass. “Yeah, but I didn’t shake my drinks up! I bet you just brought the portal interface down into the kitchen and started
firing things into it…”
“Um,” Kit said. While this was true, it wasn’t worth even breathing the suggestion that the way Nita’d been hanging onto the bottle when she flapped her arms around might also have had something to do with it.
“Yeah, there you go,” Nita said, and took a swig out of the now much calmer bottle. “Thought so.” She gave him a sidewise look. “You didn’t bring any of Carmela’s soda, did you?”
“What? Of course not.”
“Shame,” Nita said, “I like that…” She took another drink, sighed, handed Kit the bottle.
He drank, ever so glad to have something to do to take his mind off things. After several long swallows Kit sighed at the realization that personal matters were now subsiding to more manageable levels, and allowed himself to look at Nita again.
Which was of course exactly the moment she caught him at it. “What’re you looking at?”
“You,” he said in the Speech.
She spent a long moment looking at him the same way, and opened her mouth.
Then her shoulders slumped and she closed her mouth and twisted it into a very annoyed expression. “I don’t believe this,” Nita said. “Bobo says I’ve got to get back. The gate I yelled at before is acting up again; they need me to settle it…”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay.”
She looked at him shyly. “Hug?”
Kit went nearly white-hot as the reason not to want Nita to get any closer, the reason he’d thought had stood itself down, now stood itself right up again. Yes! one part of his mind was yelling, and Bad idea, bad idea, shouted another—
But it was too late, Nita was already turning toward him, reaching for him. And, But I need a hug! some idiotically needy part of him was yelling.
Oh God. Okay, maybe if I turn a little bit, that might be enough to—
Too late. Nita’s face was against his neck. And she was shaking.
Kit instantly started to get upset, which on top of the blushing was hard to take. “Wait, what’s the matter, are you—what’re you—”
“Why,” Nita said, taking a breath as if she needed to get some control of herself, “why… do you even bother?”
“What?”
And then Kit realized she was laughing.
“We are such idiots,” Nita said, pulling away. And her eyes were wet, but they were tears of laughter. “Look at us!”
It was just as well there was no one else around to witness the moment, because Kit would have simply died. …Yet it was also funny, impossibly funny. There they stood in the middle of an alien mass migration, under a moon that was so far from being romantic that it was genuinely ridiculous, and they were having a physiology-based personal-crisis moment. At least Kit was. It was hard to work out what Nita was having, and he was both chagrined that he couldn’t read her mind and desperately glad that she couldn’t read his. At least I don’t think she can…
She was still shaking with laughter, though. “Kit. Do you honestly think I don’t notice this stuff?”
“Uh,” Kit said in a desperate moment of honesty, “I was kind of praying for that, yeah.”
“Well I hate to tell you this, but plainly the One is on another call at the moment.”
Kit burst out laughing. And then Nita was laughing again too, and…
“Uh, that hug. Can I have one not contaminated by…”
“Undue boner action?”
“Oh shut up.”
“Besides,” she whispered in his ear after as she slipped her arms around him again, “…could be it’s kinda late for that.”
Kit’s eyes widened.
“Because it’s not like you’re the only one who—”
And that was when the cry came from behind them:
“Oh no! Wait! Is this impregnation event? Didn’t want to miss it!”
Kit froze as he realized there was something really important he had forgotten to tell Nita about. Completely forgotten. Cheleb. Biology. And the candy hearts.
Oh God!
Cheleb stopped where hae was as hae saw that they’d stopped what they were doing and both had their gazes fixed on haem. “Chel,” Kit said, and couldn’t for the life of him work out where to go from there.
Nita pulled back and gave Kit a look. “Is this conversation one I should be part of?” she said.
“Uh, no. Well, yes. Not now okay?” he whispered desperately in her ear.
“Wow,” Nita murmured, plainly impressed by a display of truly world-class ambiguity and indecisiveness.
Kit groaned softly to himself and turned his attention to Cheleb again. “Cheleb. You were saying?”
“Ah. Well.” Cheleb shifted from one clawed foot to another. “Didn’t have time to tell you earlier. After you left for Nita’s gate complex, had… an incursion here.”
“Oh brother,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me...”
“Well, all right,” said Cheleb, “but failing to do so will leave you in data vacuum—”
“No, it’s an idiom,” Kit said, just a touch exasperated, because he was afraid he knew what was coming. “Do tell me. Sibiks?”
“Many,” said Cheleb. “Among other things, very interested in place where food got dropped around Stone Throne. Took a while to get rid of them but were almost all gone and then found that portal on your puptent had been open a while, maybe since you left...”
Kit covered his eyes.
“Couldn’t find command interface to shut portal interface right away, had to go in and then chase some of them out.” Kit blinked: Cheleb was practically babbling. “Was looking for last one to get rid of it, hiding under some boxes, and then found this—”
Embarrassed, Cheleb proffered the empty heart-candy box.
Kit took the box and immediately understood what had happened. One of the sibiks had found the open box and eaten all the hearts. But Cheleb didn’t know that. Hae thought that Kit had eaten them, and of course that would mean—
Kit stopped, because Nita was looking at him very strangely. He was trying to come up with some creative excuse for having a box of candy hearts at all when Nita simply reached out and took the box away from him.
“They’re all gone,” she said. It was astonishing how she could make a simple declarative sentence sound so much like it meant about five other things, all at once.
“Yeah,” Kit said, “they are.” He swallowed. “And that’s really terrific.”
Nita looked at him carefully and then started nodding. “Yes it is!” she said. “Isn’t it!”
“And Cheleb is really excited for us,” Kit said, “because hae’s pretty sure that since all these are gone, that means…”
“That we really like each other in a very special way!” Nita said. Her eyes were had gone theatrically wide in a way that Kit recognized, and both made him nervous and made him want to laugh.
“And that because of that,” Kit said, “we’re going to do something about it—”
“Right this minute!” Nita said, with increasingly terrifying enthusiasm.
Kit just kept quiet after that and waited with some trepidation to see what would happen.
“You did tell haem, I hope,” Nita said, very seriously indeed, “that among members of our species this gesture has to be reciprocated by the other party—”
“In a similar manner,” Kit said.
“—on or around February 14th.”
“I, uh, might have neglected to mention.”
“And so of course we can’t do anything right now,” Nita said, “not only because February 14th is a while away yet, but because we’re in the middle of a planetary disaster and it would be incredibly inappropriate to distract one another from our Wizardly Duties.”
He could actually hear the capitalization. Kit merely nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s so sad.”
“But duty comes first,” Nita said, nodding in unison with him. “Still, we will be strong.”
“Yes, we will,” Kit said with all the sincerity he could muster.
Cheleb was practically vibrating with emotion. “So beautiful,” hae said, positively starry-eyed—which with haes eyes, took a lot of work.
“Thank you,” Kit said.
“But we really ought to be alone right now,” Nita said.
“Yes, yes, of course!” Cheleb said, and vanished back into the stone circle, overjoyed.
Nita waited until he was safely gone, and then said, “Sometime real soon, tomorrow maybe, I’m going to need you to explain what that was all about,” she said. Her voice was shaking with laughter that she was refusing to let out.
“I will,” Kit said. “But first I need to tell you that you are so smart.”
She grinned. “Takes one to know one.” Then she sighed. “Shame, though. If your tentacly guys got in there and ate your candy, they probably got all the rest of the saltines, too…”
Kit sighed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Besides, I gave Mamvish my ketchup. Not much point in getting all hung up about the saltines when there’s no ketchup to put on them…”
She pulled him close again. Kit cooperated, wholeheartedly. After a moment she said, a bit breathlessly, “When we get home, after all this crap is handled… let’s talk about this, yeah? A long, long talk.”
“Yeah.”
And Nita vanished back into the circle to pick up her things and make for the short-transport pad.