Diane Duane - The Wizard's Dilemma

She broke out in a sweat at the sight of the page with not a thing on it but the previous two communications. He must be completely furious, she thought. This is gonna be awful... and when Dairine hears about it, she's going to laugh herself sick. I'll probably have to kill her.

Nita put the manual down, pulled open a drawer in her dresser and extracted a clean T-shirt, then pulled it on along with yesterday's jeans and turned back to the desk. / wonder what he's up to, though. Maybe he's out working on the water with S'reee.

Nita flipped through to Kit's listing in the directory and glanced at it. Last project: mesolittoral waterquality intervention, for details see reference MSI-B14-/XHU/ Py66384-67/1141-2211/ABX6655/3: other participants, Callahan, Juanita L, hominid / Sol III, S'reee alhruuni-Aoul-mmeiihnhwiii!r, cetacean / Sol HI; intervention status complete /functioning...

Nita's mouth dropped open.

... anentropia rate 0.047255-E8; effectiveness rating 3.5 +/- .10; review scheduled Julian date 2451809.5

—

Oh, my God. It's working!

The initial reaction of sheer delight at the solution of a problem that had had them all literally running in circles for so long was now drowned by a nearly intolerable wave of combined embarrassment and annoyance.

They got it working without me. He was right.

I was wrong.

Nita sat there in shock. / am so stupid!

Yet she couldn't quite bring herself to believe it. And she was still listed as a participant in the spell. Nita paged back to the section where intervention references were kept, and shortly found a copy of the spell diagram that Kit and S'reee had been using.

Nita traced the curves and circles of it, all apparent in an enlarged hologrammatic format when you looked at the page closely. The basic structure of the wizardry was derived broadly from the last pattern she and Kit had worked on together, before they started disagreeing about the details. It was missing any of the extra subroutines she had insisted were absolutely necessary to make the spell work right. The detailed versions of the effectiveness figures were at the bottom of the page, updating themselves as she watched, demonstrating that the water coming out of Jones Inlet was indeed getting cleaner by the second—

Nita sat there in the grip of an attack of complete chagrin. What an utter dork I've been, she thought. I'm going straight over there to apologize. No, I'm not going to wait even that long.

She flipped back to the messaging pages, touched the message from Kit to wake up the reply function. "Kit?" she said in the Speech. "Can we talk?"

Send?

"Send it," Nita said.

Then she waited. But to her complete astonishment, the page just flashed once, leaving her message sitting where it was. Message cannot be dispatched at this time. Please try again later.

What?? "How come?"

The notification blanked out, replaced by the words: Addressee is not in ambit. Please try again later. Nita stared. She had never seen such a description before and didn't have any idea what it meant.

She put the manual down on the desk. "Keep trying," Nita said, and went downstairs. It was quiet; there was no smell of anyone having been making breakfast down there. / may be the only one up.

Nita picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Kit's number. It rang a couple of times, then someone picked up. "Hello?"

It was Kit's sister. "Hola, Carmela!"

"'Ola, Nita," said Carmela, in a somewhat odd voice—she had her mouth full. There was a pause while she swallowed. "You missed him; he's not here."

"Where'd he go, do you know?"

"Nope. He left a note on the fridge; must've been early... said he was going out to do some wizard thing and he'd be back later."

"Today, you think?"

"Oh yeah, today. If he was gonna be gone longer than tonight, he sure would have told Pop and Mama, and they would've screamed, and I would've heard it."

Nita had to chuckle. "Okay, Mela. If he comes in, tell him I called?" "Sure, Neets. No problem."

"Thanks. Bye-bye."

"Byeeee..."

Nita hung up. He's out on errantry... but where? I should have been able to find him. It shouldn't matter if he was on the Moon, or even halfway out of the galaxy. His manual still would have taken the message. It's not like the manuals care about light speed, or anything like that.

After a few moments Nita went back upstairs to see what the manual might be showing. The last page still hadn't changed.

/ don't believe this, Nita thought. I ought to call Tom and Carl and see what they say. Where is he that the manual can't find him?!

She picked up the manual and started to take it downstairs to the phone with her, then stopped. She would have to tell Tom and Carl what had been going on, and she was too embarrassed.

But where was Kit?

Down the hall Dairine's door opened, and her sister wandered down toward her in the direction of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a huge Fordham T-shirt of their dad's. She looked at Nita vaguely. "What's for breakfast?"

"Confusion," Nita said, rather sourly. "What?"

"Nothing yet. Nobody's up. And I can't find Kit."

Dairine stopped and stared at her, pushing the hair out of her eyes and yawning. "Why? Where is he?" "Somewhere the manual can't find him."

"What?"

"Look at this!" Nita was concerned enough to show Dairine her manual, even though it meant she would see the messages above the strange new notification. Dairine looked at the back page and shook her head.

"I've never seen that before," she said. "You sure it's not a malfunction or something?" Nita snorted. "Have you ever seen a manual malfunction?"

"I have to admit," Dairine said slowly, "if I did, I'd get worried... considering What powers them. Come on, let's see if mine's doing the same thing."

Nita followed Dairine to her room and glanced at where the pile of stuff from yesterday had mostly been dumped on the floor. "You'd better take care of this before Mom gets up," Nita said. "She'll have some new and never-before-seen species of cow."

"Plenty of time for that," Dairine said, going over to her desk and knocking one knuckle on the outside of the laptop's case. "She was up till half past forever last night with Dad's stuff."

The laptop sprouted its legs again and stood up on them, stretching them one after another like a centipede that thought it was a cat. "Morning, Spot," Dairine said.

"Mmg," said the laptop in a small scratchy voice.

"Manual functions?"

"Spcfy."

"Messaging," Dairine said.

The laptop popped open its lid, and its screen flickered on, showing the usual apple-without-the-bite logo, then blanking down again. A moment later the operating system herald displayed, a stylized representation of a book open to a small block of text. This was then replaced by a messaging menu, overlaid on a shimmering blue background subtly watermarked with the manual logo. "Main address list," Dairine said. "Test message." The screen blanked. "To Kit Rodriguez. Where are you? Send."

The words displayed themselves on the screen exactly as they had in Nita's manual, blinked out, and then reappeared with a little blue box underneath them in which was written in the Speech, Error 539426010: Recipient is not in ambit. Please resubmit message later.

"Huh," Dairine said. "More information."

The blue box enlarged slightly. No further information available. "We'll see about that," Dairine muttered. "Thanks, cutie."

"Yr wlcm," said the laptop, and sat down on the desk again, stretching out its legs. "Doesn't waste his words, does he?" Nita said, smiling.

"He's shy," Dairine said, with a wry expression. "You should hear him when we're alone. Let's try this."

She went over to the sleek cube of the new computer and waved a hand over the top of it. The light behind the apple came on. Nita cocked an ear. "Is its fan broken?"