Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (7 page)

“Are they still out there?” Kit’s mama said from the dining room couch, turning a page of the paper.

“Yeah,” Kit said.

“Remember our little talk the other day?” Kit’s mama said, her voice just slightly edgy.

“Yeah, Mama. I’m working on it.”

“Well, work harder.”

Kit turned away from the window, annoyed. He had spent some weeks in consultation with Tom Swale on the question of what was causing the increasing weirdness around his house. The best explanation Tom had been able to come up with was “hypermantic contagion syndrome,” an irritatingly vague suite of symptoms usually more casually described as “wizardry leakage.” Days of perusing his manual had left Kit completely in the dark as to exactly what kind of wizardry, or whose, was leaking, from where, into what… and until he figured those things out, there was no stopping the leak.

Kit looked out at the dogs and sighed. At least they were quiet at the moment. But they tended not to stay that way. And when they started making noise and drawing the attention of the whole neighborhood, his folks got tense. It wasn’t that they’d started giving him trouble about his wizardry as such. But the Rodriguez house used to be a fairly quiet and peaceful place, before the past month or so.
Before the dogs, that is.
Before the TV began evolving. Before Carmela became a boy magnet.
The noise wasn’t his fault, and Kit had pointed out more than once that there was nothing he could do about the amount of noise Carmela made—the number of times the phone rang in a given day was hardly anything to do with wizardry. But any time Kit said this, his mom would just glance first at the TV, which
did
have something to do with it… and then she’d look out the window to where half the dogs in the neighborhood were sitting, gazing at their house as if it were full of top sirloin, or something even more important. And then the howling would start—

Kit turned away from the kitchen window. “Ponch,” he said softly to his dog, “they’re all out there again.”

I keep telling them they shouldn’t do that,
Ponch said silently, concentrating on licking his bowl clean.
And for a while, they don’t. But then they forget.

“But
why
are they doing it?”

I don’t know. I keep asking them, hut they don’t understand it, either. They’re not so good at figuring things out.
Ponch looked up, licking his chops. He sounded faintly aggrieved.
I’ll let you know when I figure out what’s on their minds.

“Well, hurry up and do what you have to do to find out,” Kit said. “And when you go out there, tell them no howling!”

They like to sing,
Ponch said, sounding a little injured.
I like it, too. Even Carmela likes to sing. What’s the matter with it?

Kit closed his eyes briefly. His sister’s singing voice was, to put it kindly, untrained. “Just tell them, okay?” Kit said.

Okay…

Ponch turned his attention back to the bowls, starting a long, noisy, sloppy drink of water. From the living room, Kit heard Carmela start laughing again.

“Grenfelzing,”
Kit thought.
Should I be worried that my sister is being invited to
grenfelz?
I just hope this isn’t something that’ll rot her morals somehow…

From down the street, Kit could faintly hear the sound of a familiar car engine coming toward the house: his dad, coming back from the printing plant three towns over where one of the bigger suburban New York newspapers was produced. The station wagon pulled in and parked. A few minutes later, Kit’s father came in the back door, pulled his jacket off his burly self, and chucked it at the new coat tree by the back door, which Kit’s mama had bought a few weeks before. The coat tree swayed threateningly, but for once it didn’t fall over—Kit’s pop was getting the hang of the maneuver. “Son, they’re out there again,” he said as he came through the kitchen.

“I know, Pop,” Kit said. “Ponch is working on it. Aren’t you?”

There was no reply. Kit looked over at Ponch, who had left the water bowl and turned his attention to the neighboring bowl of dry, crunchy dog food. He was now steadily eating his way through it with an air of total concentration.

Kit’s pop sighed as he came into the dining room, leaned over Kit’s mama (now sprawled out on the sofa) to smooch her, and took the newspaper from her, straightening up to glance out the window of the dining room. “It’s like being in a Hitchcock movie,” Kit’s pop said, “except I don’t think he’d have gotten the same effect by covering someone’s front yard with sheepdogs and Great Danes. Whose sheepdog
is
that? I’ve never seen it before.”

“I don’t know, Pop. I could go ask it.”

“Look, son,” Kit’s dad said. “Don’t bother. Just ask Ponch to have another word with them, okay? Otherwise we’re going to have the neighbors over here again, in a group, like last time… and I have a feeling this time they might think about bringing torches and pitchforks.”

“I asked him, Pop. He’ll go out when he’s finished his dinner.”

“Right. When’s ours, honey?”

“Three-quarters of an hour.”

“Then I’m going to go sit down and read this awful rag,” Kit’s pop said, “and see if I can figure out what’s wrong with the world.” He walked into the living room, leaving Kit wondering yet again why his dad was so unfailingly rude about the newspaper he worked for as a pressman. “Carmela, what are they doing there?”

“Grenfelzing.”

“Really. What’s the fire hose for?”

“I don’t think it’s a fire hose, Popi… ”

A pause. “Oh, my
lord
—” Kit’s pop said.

The phone rang again. Halfway to the living room, Kit dived back into the kitchen for the wireless phone on the counter, and managed to pick it up and hit the talk button before Carmela could pick up the phone in the living room.

“Rodriguez residence.”

“It’s me,” Nita said.

“Oh, good. Thanks for not being yet another of the thundering herd.”

Click.
“I heard that!”

“Get off, ‘Mela! It’s for
me!”

“Wow, I’ll call the media.”
Click.

“She giving you a hard time?”

“Always.” Kit let out a harassed-sounding breath. “Please, please,
please,
come over and give me something to do besides keep my sister off the phone. That chicken’s gonna be ready soon, anyway.”

“Be over in a few. But you need to hear about this first. My dad wants me to go away on this exchange thing!”

“You gonna go?” Kit immediately began to itch with something that felt embarrassingly like envy.

“Yeah. And when we got back from shopping, my manual was about half an inch thicker than when we’d left, and a whole bunch of sealed claudication packages were sitting on my desk.”

“Hey, super,” Kit said, and was instantly annoyed at himself for not sounding as enthusiastic as he thought he should have. “This’ll be so great for you! You should get out there and have a good time—”

“What do you mean,
I
should go?” And Nita burst out laughing. “You’re so pitiful when you’re trying to be a good loser, you know that? I was
going
to tell you that my dad doesn’t want me to go alone. Tom still has an opening, and he’s holding it for you!”

“Wow,”
Kit said. The envy instantly dissolved, first in delight, then in mild outrage. “Hey, and you let me stew for a whole, I don’t know, five
seconds,
thinking I was going to have to sit here while you were gone?”

“That’s to get you back for the chicken thing,” Nita said, and started imitating Kit. “ ‘Oh, I don’t know. I might want it myself… ’” She broke up laughing again.

“Cut it out!” But Kit had to laugh, too. “Okay,” he said. “I have to figure out how to handle this. Where’re we supposed to be going?”

“The manual says it’s some planet called Alaalu.”

“Never heard of it,” Kit said. He put out a hand and felt around for something only he would be able to feel, the tag of a wizardly “zipper” in the air, which controlled entry to the personal otherspace pocket that followed him around. Kit found the tag, pulled it down, and pushed his hand into the opening so that it appeared to vanish while he felt around for his manual. “Alaalu… Our galaxy, or somewhere else?”

“Ours,” Nita said, and Kit heard manual pages rustling again at her end. “Outer Arm Four, around radian one-sixty.”

Kit thought about that for a moment as he felt around and found his manual, then pulled it out of the claudication into local space. “That’s, uh… the Scutum Arm, right? Straight across the Bar from us.”

“Yeah,” Nita said as Kit zipped the pocket up again. “The mirror of the arm we’re in. The system’s a little more than sixty thousand light-years from here.”

Kit put his manual down on the counter and started flipping through it to the galaxography section. “Alaalu, Alaalu,” he muttered, paging through to the section dealing with the Scutum Arm. Kit ran one finger down the long column of planet names and coordinates on the index page and found Alaalu there.

“Got it,” Kit said, and riffled along to the page in question, which had an image of the planet’s star system. Apparently there was only one inhabited planet in the system, an exception to the usual rule. The star around which Alaalu IV circled was about the same size as Earth’s Sun, and in the same general class, a little golden G0.

“Not exactly next door,” Kit said, studying the star’s position about three-quarters of the way down the long arm on the other side of the galaxy’s spiral. He tapped on the image of the star system to zoom in on the planet. “Who lives there?”

“Well, people. Who else? Humanoids, anyway: real tall people, all kind of a tan color.” Nita said. “Check page… ” She glanced at her own manual. “I have it on page nine-sixty-two.”

“Right,” Kit said. For the moment his attention was on the image of the planet, banded blindingly around its equator with a white, two-way highway of swirling weather systems. The view was in real time, and the very slightest shift was visible as Alaalu turned in the amber light of its sun. The planet’s seas were as blue as Earth’s, and huge; there were only three landmasses, none of them large enough to be considered a continent. One was a big, rough-edged crescent, about a third of the way up from the equator toward Alaalu’s north pole—a three-quarter circle with the open end pointing more or less north. Kit wondered if he was looking at a remnant of some gigantic, ancient meteor strike—the rest of the “splash” rim damaged in some recent earthquake or plate movement. The other two landmasses were halfway around the planet from the crescent island. They were irregularly shaped blobs, long and narrow, with great chains of islands large and small strung out from them at either end, and each chain straddling Alaalu’s equator. One island chain ran almost vertically, pointing at the poles; the other crossed the equator more diagonally, like a sword stuck in the planet’s equatorial belt.

At first Kit thought these were relatively short island chains, but then he got a look at the scale indicator plotted against the planet’s globe. “Neets,” he said, “those island chains are nine
thousand
miles long!”

“I know,” Nita said. “I had to look twice, too. Check the main stats for the planet. Thirty-six thousand miles in diameter… ”

“Wow,” Kit said. He put the manual aside for the moment. There was a ton of technical detail there to digest.

“Looks like a nice place, anyway,” Nita said. “A peaceful planet, no recent wars, not a lot of intraspecies hostility of any kind. Warm climate at the equator, but not too hot.”

“Somewhere that life really
is
a beach,” Kit said, starting to smile in anticipation. “Could this actually be a vacation for a change?”

“Looks that way. Oh, there’d be some cultural stuff. We’d have to travel around on their planet, find out what it’s like living in one of their families. That kind of thing.”

“Sounds boring. In a good way.”

“I don’t know about you,” Nita said, sounding a little sharp, “but I could
use
some good boring about now.”

“No argument there,” Kit said. Recent months had featured too many excitements by half.

“But you know what’s really weird about this place?”

“What, besides that it’s peaceful?”

“Yeah. Know how many wizards it has?”

“How many?”

“One.”

Kit blinked.

“One?” he said. “For the whole planet?”

“Yup.”

“And
how
many people live there?”

“It says a billion and a half.”

Kit stared at the manual, not knowing what to make of this. “They haven’t had a big catastrophe or something that’s wiped out all their wizards?”

“Nope. The manual says one wizard is all they need.”

Kit shook his head. “Wow,” he said again. He had trouble even imagining any world so peaceful and orderly that one wizard was enough to help keep things running smoothly.

“So go ask your folks! Wouldn’t they like to get rid of you for a couple of weeks?”

Kit fell silent, listening to his home. The TV was now shouting with a cacophony of alien voices, the audio expression of yet another chat room, and his sister was alternately shouting at the screen in the Speech and talking into her smartphone. “Come on over and we’ll find out,” Kit said. “I think this’ll go all right.”

Outside, without warning, the howling started… in chorus.

“Kit!”
his father said.

“Just hurry up,” Kit said. “I need some moral support!”

***

To Kit, it seemed to take hours for Nita to arrive. His brain was buzzing with plans and possibilities that couldn’t start getting handled until he’d settled things with his folks. But it was really only about ten minutes before Nita bounced in the back door, grinning. “Here,” she said, and handed Kit a chicken, wrapped in plastic wrap on a little cardboard tray.

“Thanks,” Kit said, and stowed it in the fridge.

“What’s that noise? Opera?”