Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Dairine stared, caught between bemusement and suspicion. “Are you all right?” she said. “Have you flunked something?”

“No! This isn’t about anything but me helping you cover your butt, because it looks like you could use some help with that right now.”

Dairine scowled, but now at least the scowl suggested that they might be on the same side of the argument. “All right, how?”

“We’re going to bug your manual,” Nita said.

Dairine’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no you are not!” she said. “Nobody but me messes with Spot!”

“Of course somebody does!” Nita said. “All the time. Wizardry messes with Spot every second of the day.”

Dairine gave her a strange look.

“All Dad wants is to know where you are, and that you’re okay,” Nita said. “There are two ways that can happen. He can make me run after you constantly and report in on everything you do. I mean everything. If he doesn’t like something you’re up to, I’ll have to haul you out of it… which is probably going to make us kill each other by the end of the summer. You’ll be sick and tired of me butting in on you every five minutes, yeah?”

“Yeah—”

“And I’ll want you dead because having to keep tabs on you will ruin my schedule and drive me berserk. Since killing each other would get the Powers That Be cranky with us, let’s try something else. Remember the translation spinoff we arranged with Tom last month, so Dad would have access to the manual info about Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun when they came to visit?”

Dairine nodded, but couldn’t cover the wince of pain on hearing Roshaun’s name. Nita pretended she hadn’t noticed. “We’ll do the same deal,” Nita said, “but instead we’ll hook the output from your daily manual precís into it. Dad can read it on the computer, or even his cell phone.”

“He won’t understand half of it,” Dairine said, scowling.

“Not my problem,” Nita said. “You get to explain stuff to him when you get home every day. He’ll calm down even more when you’re telling him about what you’re doing.”

“It’s gonna be a nuisance,” Dairine said.

“Not as much a nuisance as being grounded.”

Dairine grinned. “Like he could.”

“He couldn’t. But Tom could.” The amusement fell out of Dairine’s expression. “You know he and Dad talk every few days! One word from Dad to Tom, and unless you’re officially on errantry, your butt’s going to be stuck on Earth till the two of them agree otherwise.” Dairine opened her mouth. “And the Powers That Be wouldn’t countermand Tom unless there was something big going on! Till we hit the local legal age, They’re mostly on Dad’s side.”

Dairine stared at the polished floor. “I don’t know,” she said at last, looking toward the simulation. “This has kind of a Big Brother sound to it…”

“Or Big Sister?” Nita said. “Yeah, it does. But it’s the best deal we’re going to get from Dad right now. And since Bobo is wizardry, and the Powers That Be run him, he can’t do anything bad to you or Spot.” Nita glanced around. “Where is he, anyway?”

Dairine gestured with her head toward the star simulator. To Nita’s considerable surprise, a small shadow, like a rectangular sunspot, materialized near the bottom of the slowly rotating globe: and then a dark oblong shape extruded itself from the shadow and dropped toward the shining floor. The shape put out legs in midair and landed on them, bouncing slightly as it came down. Then it came spidering over to Dairine and Nita.

“Has he had another upgrade?” Nita said. When she’d seen Spot only that morning, he’d looked as he had for the last couple of months—shining black and wearing, set into the back of the closed lid, what could at first glance have been mistaken for the fruity logo of a large computer company, except that this apple had no bite out of it Now, though, he looked significantly thinner, and the black of his carapace had gone matte.

“Scheduled molt,” Dairine said. “He was installing some new firmware and thought while he was at it he’d try one of the new nonreflective coatings on his shell.”

“Sharp look, guy!” Nita said to him. “Suits you.”

Thanks, Spot said. As usual, he was no more verbally forthcoming with Nita than with anyone else but Dairine. But he did sound faintly pleased.

Dairine let out a long breath. “I don’t know about this,” she said under her breath. “Bobo’s kind of your tool.”

Nita burst out laughing. Dairine looked at her strangely. “What? What’s so funny?”

It took Nita a few moments to get the laughter under control. “My tool! Oh, please. Like I can order wizardry around and tell it what to do! Please let that happen.” She got down on one knee. “Spot,” she said, “have you been following this?”

Yes.

“Will this solution work for you? You’re the one who’ll be the source of the raw data. Bobo’ll just be managing the spinoff for Dad: he’ll feed the massaged data to the computer at home.”

Maybe with text-message alerts and tweets when something new comes in, Bobo said at the back of Nita’s mind. And copied to e-mail, of course…

Nita rolled her eyes. Not only do I have the spirit of wizardry living in my head, but it’s a geek spirit. She turned her attention back to Spot.

He turned one eye up to look at Dairine. Okay with you?

She shrugged. “If we’re going to stay on track with what we’re doing here, sounds like it has to be.”

All right, Spot said, and trundled off back under the simulator. There he levitated up into the body of the surrogate sun, vanishing in the glare of its chromosphere.

Nita shook her head. “How hot does it get in there?”

“Not too bad,” Dairine said, and sighed. “A couple thousand degrees K. The temperature’s scaled down, like the exterior, for practice. Wizards here usually scale themselves way up in apparent size to work with Thahit. Seems it perceives us better that way.”

Nita nodded. “Okay. Look… thanks for working with me on this. Why don’t you go get changed and we’ll head home and deal with Dad before he gets too crazy. The sooner we disarm him, the sooner life gets back to what passes for normal.”

Dairine nodded, moved away. Then suddenly she stopped and turned: and the strange, hard look on her face made Nita wonder if she was going to have to do this bout of persuasion all over again.

“One thing,” Dairine said.

Nita tried to stay calm. “Yeah?”

Dairine came back to Nita almost reluctantly. “When you came after me just now,” Dairine said, “you checked your manual first, didn’t you? To see what happened to Roshaun.”

Nita froze. Dairine’s voice had gone expressionless and flat, and hearing it sound that way scared Nita: the last time she’d heard that tone from her sister had been just after their mom had died. How do I handle this? What do I say?

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I did.”

Dairine stared at her. Then she whispered, “What did it say?”

Oh, God, I was afraid of this! Either she hasn’t looked, or she has and doesn’t believe what she saw. And if whatever I say is the wrong answer, now I get blamed for whatever I found. “Uh. It was something weird. Something really— vague.”

Dairine’s face was simply frozen. Nita didn’t dare move. Oh, no, I’m dead now…

But suddenly her sister was hugging her hard, her face buried in Nita’s vest. “Oh, wow,” Dairine was saying, “oh, wow, I was so scared, I thought that he— and then I thought I was crazy; it didn’t make any sense. But if you saw it, too, then it’s true, he’s not, not dead, he’s not—”

Nita was bemused, but for the moment the safest course seemed to be to just hang on to Dairine while her sister got herself under control. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay!” —while very much hoping it actually was.