Диана Дуэйн: High Wizardry

"Jupiter," she whispered, and turned around to look for Earth. From here it would look like a morning or evening star, just a shade less bright than Venus. But in mid-movement she was distracted. There was something down in the mile-deep crater, a little light that shone.

"What's that?" she said, holding up the Apple.

"Syntax error 24-"

"Yeah, yeah, right. That light! Identify."

"A marker beacon. Provenance uncertain at this range."

"Get us down there!"

With Dairine's help, it did. Shortly she was staring at a pole with a light on it, streamlined and modern-looking, made of some dark blue metal she couldn't identify. Set in the ground beside the pole was a plate of dull red metal with strange markings on it. "What's it say?"

"Error trap 18. Sense of query: semantic value?"

"Right."

"First (untranslatable) climbing expedition. Ascent of (untranslatable proper name): from (date uncertain) to (date uncertain). We were here. Signed, (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name)."

"People," Dairine whispered.

"Affirmative."

She looked up at the stars in the hard violet sky. "I want to go where they came from!"

"Reference transit utility."

She did, and spent some minutes tapping busily at the keys. In the middle of it, selecting coordinates, delightedly reading through planet names-she stopped and bit her lip. "This is going to take longer than an hour," she said to herself. Come to think of it, she might want to be away for quite some time. And seeing all the problems Nita had started having with their folks when she told them she was a wizard, it wouldn't do for Dairine to let them know that she was one too. Not just yet.

She thought about this, then got out of the "travel" utility and brought up the directory again-taking more time with it, examining the program menus with great care. In particular she spent a great deal of time with the "Copy" and "Hide" utilities, getting to know their ins and outs, and doing on finicky piece of copying as a test.

The test worked: she sent the copy home.

"That should do it," she said, got back into the "Travel" utility, and wit the program's prompting started to lay in coordinates. "Darth Vader," muttered under her breath, "look out. Here I come."

Shortly thereafter there was nothing on Olympus Mons but rocks, and dryl ice snow, and far down in the crater, the single blinking light.

"We're dead," Nita mourned, sitting on the planetarium steps with her head in her hands. "Dead. My mother will kill me."

Kit, sitting beside her, looked more bemused than upset. "Do you know how much power it takes to open a gateway like that and leave it open? Usually it's all we can do to keep one open long enough to jump through it."

"Big deal! Grand Central gate and the World Trade Center portals are vopen all the time." Nita groaned again. "Mars!"

"Each of those gates took a hundred or so wizards working together to open, though." Kit leaned back on the steps. "She may be a brat, but boy, has she got firepower!"

"The youngest wizards always do," Nita said, sitting up again and picking up Kit's manual from beside her. "Lord, what a horrible thought."

"What? The gate she made? We can close it, but-"

"No. This. Look." She held out his manual. It was turned to one of the directory pages. The said:

CALLAHAN, Juanita T. 243 E. Clinton Avenue HempsteadNY 11575 (516) 555-6786

Journeyman rating (RL +4.5 +/-.15) Available/limited (summer vacation)

That was Nita's usual directory listing, and normal enough. But above it, between her and CAHANE, Jak, whose listing was usually right above hers, there was something new.

Novice rating

(RL +9.8 +/-.2)

on Ordeal: no calls

CALLAHAN, Dairine E. 24? E. Clinton Avenue HempsteadNY 11575 (516) 555-6786

"Oh, no," Kit said. "And look at that rating level."

Nita dropped the book beside her. "I don't get it. She didn't find a ual, how could she have-"

"She was in yours," Kit said.

"Yeah, but the most she could have done was take the Oath! She's smart but not smart enough to pull off a forty-million-mile transit without having the reference diagrams and the words for the spell in front of her! And the manuals can't be stolen; you know that. They just vanish if someone tries." Nita put her head down in her hands again. "My folks are gonna pitch a fit! We've got to find her!"

Kit breathed out, then stood up. "Come on," he said. "We'd better start doing things fast or we'll lose her. There's a phone over there. Call home and tell them we're running a little behind schedule. The planetarium's all locked up by now: so no one'll be around to notice if I walk through a couple of walls and close that gate down."

"But what if she tries to come back and finds it closed behind her?"

"Somehow I can't see that slowing her down much," Kit said. "And besides, maybe she's supposed to find it closed. She is on Ordeal."

Nita stood up too. "And we'd better call Tom and Carl. They'll want the details."

"Right. Go ahead; I'll take care of the gate."

Kit turned around, looked at the bricks of the planetarium's outer wall. He stepped around the corner of the doorway wall, out of sight of the street, and laid one hand on the bricks, muttering under his breath.

His hand sank into the wall as if into water. "There we go," he said, and the bricks rippled as he stepped through them and vanished.

Nita headed for the phone, feeling through her pockets for change. The thought of her sister running around the universe on Ordeal made her hair stand up on end. No one became a wizard without there being some one problem that their acquisition of power would solve. Nita understood from her studies that normally a wizard was allowed to get as old as possible before being offered the Oath: the Powers, her manual said, wanted every wizard who could to acquire the security and experience that a normal childhood provides. But sometimes, when problems of an unusual nature came up, the Powers would offer the Oath early-because the younger children, not knowing (or caring) what was impossible, had more wizardry available to them.

That kind of problem was likely to be a killer. Nita's Ordeal and Kit's had thrown them out of their universe into another one, a place implacably hostile to human beings, and run by the Power that, according to the manual, had invented death before time began-and therefore had been cast out of the other Powers' society. Every world had stories of that Lone Power, under many names. Nita didn't need the stories; she had met It face-to-face' now, and both times only luck-or the intervention of others-had saved her life. And Nita had been offered her wizardry relatively early, at thirteen: Kit even earlier, at twelve. The thought of what problem the Powers must need solved if They were willing to offer the Oath to someone years younger-and the thought of her little sister in the middle of it Nita found some quarters, went to a phone and punched in her number. What was she going to tell her mother? She couldn't lie to her: that decision, made at the beginning of the summer, had caused her to tell her folks that she was a wizard, and had produced one of the great family arguments of her life. Her mother and father still weren't pleased that their daughter might run off anywhere at a moment's notice, to places where they couldn't keep an eye on her and protect her. Nor did it matter that those places tended to be the sort where anyone but an experienced wizard would quickly get killed. That made it even worse. .

At the other end, the phone rang. Nita's throat seized up. She began clearing it frantically.

Someone answered. "Hello?"

It was Dairine.

Nita's throat unseized itself. "Are you all right? Where are you?" she blurted, and then began swearing inwardly at her own stupidity.