Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

Afterward Nita went outside, having packed up the pup tents and worldgates, and found Kit over by the pen, letting the ceiff go free. Ponch charged joyously into the pen one last time. The ceiff flew up in a storm of wings, honking, and Ponch chased them down the beach, well into the distance.

“They’ll be okay,” Kit said. “They were wild a long time before there were

any more sentient species here to take care of them.”

“I know,” Nita said.

They stood there, watching night fall on Alaalu. From Nita’s point of view, this was a world she would not be coming back to for a while. It was too full of memories, and too empty now by comparison. And some of the stuff I heard here, she thought, I’m going to be digesting for a while…

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” Kit said. “Not for anything.”

Nita nodded. “They’re okay, anyway,” she said.

Kit laughed softly. “Considerably more than okay,” he said. “Imagine it. Not needing bodies anymore. They’ve got a whole world of new worlds to get used to.”

The silence fell again, and in it there were no whispers, no voices except the most ancient one—the immemorial whisper of the tideless Alaalid sea, saying the single word it knew how to say, over and over again. “Come on,” Kit said. “We should get back and see how things are at home.”

“Yeah,” Nita said.

There was a pause while Kit yelled for Ponch, and Ponch came bouncing back along the beach. Is it time to go home?

“Yeah.”

Oh, hoy, Ponch barked, dog food again!

Kit threw Nita another of those looks that suggested he thought his dog was making fun of him. She rolled her eyes. If there was anything she knew about Ponch today, it was that she understood him even less than she thought she had the day before, but this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “So how do we route this,” she said, “now that we’ve decommissioned the custom gates?”

Kit shrugged. “We still have return tickets for the Crossings in our manuals,” he said. “I guess we just go back to the drop-off point and call for pickup. After that, we route back home through Grand Central.”

And then he started to laugh.

Nita stared at him. Kit was laughing so hard that he had to lean against the rails of the fence. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“Oh, jeez,” he said, and tried to speak, and then had to stop and give himself over to the laughing again. Nita rolled her eyes and leaned against the fence until he should get over it.

“Well?” she said.

“What Urruah said to us before we left,” Kit said, and started snickering.

“Which was?”

“You don’t remember?”

“He said a lot of stuff,” Nita said, shouldering her backpack and starting to walk back up to the slope to where the worldgate from the Crossings had originally dropped them off.

Kit walked with her. “I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “Strain your brain a little.”

Nita did her best to replay, in her head, their conversation with Urruah. As she and Kit got up to the top of the dune, where Quelt had met them that first day, and he got out his manual to call the Crossings for their pickup, all Nita could hear was Urruah’s voice saying, “Nice doggy.”

She got out her own manual, paged it open to where the worldgating pickup information would be…and as the page showed her the words “Outbound/return transit approved, pickup imminent, please hold position,” that was when she remembered.

“Try not to destroy your host civilization or anything …”

A pang went through Nita, but then she smiled. If there was anything they hadn’t done for their host civilization, it was destroy it. It had become something greater than it had ever been before, something it had been destined for millennia to become. That they’d been there at the time to help it along was…not luck. Nita knew better than to describe the Powers that sent wizards on errantry by such a name. It was lucky for us, though, she thought, and smiled one last time, not entirely sadly, at the thought of Quelt’s face.

A moment later, she and Kit vanished. Night came down on the Inner Sea of Alaalu.

And not very much later, the keks came out of the water, up onto the dry land, and began at last to build, not models, not the plans for their new civilization, but the real thing, the civilization itself, in a world that at last had been vacated by its old tenants and was ready for the new ones.

It took them some hours to get home. The Crossings was as busy as always, and Grand Central, too, was congested when they passed through. For Nita, getting into her backyard at last was a tremendous satisfaction, if a little strange. She came out of the sassafras trees into the backyard proper and stood there for a moment in the twilight. Softly she said to Kit, “Look how close the horizon is.”

He nodded. “Weird…”

Together they went through the yard, with Ponch bouncing along behind them. Down the driveway they went, and up to the back door of Nita’s house. Nita pulled the screen door open, and they went in.

“Hey, I’m home!” she said.

There was no answer at first. Then her dad came out of the living room, went over to Nita, and hugged her hard.

“I missed you!” he said. “And you!” he said to Kit, and hugged him as well.

Nita looked around her. The house seemed smaller than it had when she’d left: cozier, somehow. But this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “How are things going?” she said.

Her father laughed weakly. “Uh, not too badly,” he said. “The past few days have been a little hectic… but let’s not get right into it. Want some tea?”

“Wow, yes,” Nita said.

“Kit?”

“You could convince me,” Kit said, and sat down at the dining room table with a look of great pleasure.

Nita went to put the kettle on. “Where is everybody?” she said. “Where’s Dairine?”

“The boys are over at the mall,” Nita’s dad said. “Dairine’s having a shower. She’ll be down in a little while.”

On the counter, her dad’s cell phone rang. “Hey,” he said, “that’s the way it’s supposed to work. And about time…”

“What’s the matter? Was the network busy again?” Nita said.

Her dad picked up the phone and answered it, shaking his head. “Hello?”

He listened for a moment, then shook his head again. “Just a moment, please.” He handed her the phone. “It’s for you.”

“Uh-oh,” Nita said. Her father was firm about not having Nita’s friends call her on his phone. “I’m sorry, Daddy! Who is it?”

He looked resigned. “Someone on Mars.”

She took the phone and threw Kit a bemused look.

“Holiday’s over,” she said. Kit shrugged and went to get some tea.

… And in the living room, none of them saw Spot crouching down in the middle of the floor, and whispering in a voice dry with dread and hardly to be heard:

“Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh…!”