Диана Дуэйн - Wizards At War

Ponch was scratching behind his collar, turning it around and around as he scratched. It wasn't as if Kit didn't hear this jingling nearly every day. What had awakened him was the utter silence into which the sound fell: a silence devoid of the little creaks and breathing noises that every house made, of wind or rain or weather outside the house… and of the normal world in which it all existed. Kit lay there for several moments just listening to that barren stillness. There was nothing but vacuum and cold outside. Well, that's all there is on the Moon, too, Kit thought. But the Moon was different. It was within sight of home. And it didn't have that roiling, growing darkness above it, shutting out the stars. Kit felt around for the zipper of his sleeping bag and pulled it down, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. His pup tent was sparsely furnished compared to Nita's. Besides his sleeping bag and some essential toiletries, mostly it seemed to contain dog food. "You can starve when you have to," his mother had said to him, "but your pet won't understand why his meals are late, whether he can talk or not! So you make sure your dog always eats before you do. And whether you do or not." And when Kit's mother finished with it, the "short wall" of Kit's pup tent was half obscured by a stack of cans and bags about four feet high, not to mention five or six big bottles of watercooler water. His own supplies seemed meager by comparison– mostly beef jerky and fruit jerky and trail bars, and one or two of the kinds of cereal he didn't mind eating straight from the box, since finding milk while out on errantry was usually a problem. / have to go out, Ponch said, standing up and shaking himself. "Okay," Kit said, reaching for his manual. "I'll make you an air bubble." No, it's all right, Ponch said. / can take air with me, if I think about it. Kit stood up and stretched. Maybe it's not just our power that's getting boosted, he thought. Would you open the door? Ponch said. / have to go! "Okay, just a minute." Kit pulled on his jeans and had to hunt for his sweatshirt before he found it had somehow managed to get under his sleeping bag. Kit pulled it on. Ponch had started turning in circles on the pup-tent floor, either in excitement or because he really needed to be out of there. "Okay, okay," Kit said, and reached down for the door's little spell tab, which acted like the pull on a zipper. A long spill of words in the Speech came up on the plain gray wall, showing him details about the outside environment: Some words flashed urgently on and off to remind Kit that there was hard vacuum outside. Kit just pulled up on the tab. Like a blind going up, the silvery-gray surface of the pup tent gave way to a view of the barren surface of the planetoid where they had camped. Ponch burst out through the interface, galloping away across the surface and bouncing in the lower gravity. Kit watched him go, noting idly that this place wasn't as dusty as the Moon, even though it felt much older. He went back to the sleeping bag and rooted around for his socks, put them on, and his sneakers, and then picked up his manual. "Bookmark, please?" he said to it. The manual's pages riffled through to an image of the world to which Ponch had brought them. The world had no name that living beings had ever given it. Nonetheless, it had its own name in the Speech, Metemne, and the manual showed its location, well out toward the edge of a small irregular galaxy some hundreds of thousands of light-years past the Local Group. A long way from home… Kit paged through the manual to his routines for vacuum management, found the one that he'd been using on the Moon, and spoke the words that would activate his personal bubble. Then he stepped out through the pup-tent door onto the rough dark gray surface. Except for the position of the planet's little star, now high in the sky, nothing had changed; the dark shifting and swarming of the Pullulus continued. / didn't think I could hate something just because of the way it looked, Kit thought, but I think I hate that. Maybe because I feel so much like it hates me. Kit glanced off to his left. There was a little rise off in that direction, and he could see the soft slow wreathing of the fire about the head of the Spear of Light, jutting up from behind a massive boulder at the top of the rise. Ronan was still on guard, or if he wasn't, the Defender in him was. It has to be weird, Kit thought, to have something, someone, like that, sharing brain space with you. But at least He's on our side. I think… Kit sighed. Once it hadn't been so complicated. If someone was a wizard, they were on your side, on the right side. But these days, the mere exercise of wizardry wasn't a guarantee. You found yourself wondering about people's motives all the time. And if you didn't know them well, you started to be less certain about turning your back on them in a tight situation. And there were other issues on his mind. Ronan and Nita had been close in ways that Nita was too shy to discuss. Now Nita was feeling twitchy about Ronan, and Kit kept wondering why. Oh, it wasn't anything serious with them. I know that. At least, I think / know that… From around the shoulder of that rise, Ponch came galloping back and skidded to a stop in front of Kit. Okay, let's go for a walk! Kit laughed and went off after his dog, taking it easy at first to make sure he had the hang of the local gravity. It was heavier than the Moon's, so that you could run without completely bouncing off the surface if you were careful. Passing the rise where Ronan still sat, Kit had a long look around the surface of Metemne and decided that it wasn't someplace he would come back to for a holiday. The planet wasn't much more than a bumpy rock pile. Whether there had even been water here in the planet's earliest days was a question Kit couldn't answer just by looking. He crouched down and put a hand on a largish boulder that sat off to one side. From the beginning of his practice of wizardry, Kit had always been good at hearing what was going on with objects that most people would have considered inanimate. Now he let his mind go a little unfocused, and waited. …no one here, the stone said eventually. For a long time… It wasn't that it actually spoke; that took a different kind of life. But the impression was plain. "Did anyone ever live here?" Kit said. Never. It would have been nice, the boulder said. There was an atmosphere… and water. But nothing ever got started. "I'm sorry," Kit said. We can't all have what we want, I suppose, the boulder said, and fell silent. Slowly Kit got up and dusted off his hands as Ponch came running along from behind a nearby outcropping of gray stone. There's nothing here, Ponch said. Come on, let's play! "I wouldn't say nothing," Kit said, glancing down at the boulder. "No people, maybe." He walked off to have a look around the outcropping, and Ponch trotted along beside him. Then it's nowhere important. "I guess it's easy to think that," Kit said. "There's so much life around, we start taking it for granted that any planet'll get some in time." He shook his head. "Trouble is, once life does show up, before you know it, the Lone One's turned up, too, and it's running around messing up the Choices of every species It finds." It didn't mess up ours, Ponch said. Kit raised his eyebrows. "I keep meaning to get the details on that," he said, as they walked around the outcropping together. "Though it must have gone the usual way, since there's no Choice without wizards, and there are dog wizards, Rhiow tells me…" Ponch's expression was eloquent of skepticism. Oh, well, if you're going to believe things cats say about dogs… Kit got a sense that he was poised above a dangerous abyss. "Uh," he said, "okay, maybe I should ask someone who knows about it firsthand." Ponch woofed; it was a dog laugh, of sorts. He picked up a rock in his mouth, shook it from side to side as if to make sure it was dead, and came bouncing over to Kit to put it in his hand. We have wizards, yeah. But as for the Choice, I just know what everybody's mom tells them when they're still drinking milk. Kit took the rock and spent a while trying to get the dog slobber off it. "So educate me," he said. Oh, it's the usual thing, Ponch said. There was us, and the Ones, and we ruled the world. And then the Bad Thing came and said, I can make it better for you. But we said, How? We have the Ones. We live with them, and hunt with them, and run around with them, and they give us whatever we need, and everything's fine. So the Bad Thing went away. The end… So throw the rock! Kit blinked, and threw the rock well away from the outcropping, across the bare gritty plain. Ponch tore off across the planet's surface after it, leaving little scoots of gravel hanging up in the vacuum in a trail behind him. If that's his idea of "the usual thing," Kit thought, then all the Choices I've run into now have been real unusual. In fact, Ponch's version of his species' Choice didn't sound much like a choice at all. And he didn't sound very interested in talking about it. He watched Ponch pounce on the rock, pick it up, shake it around, and lose it because of shaking it too hard; he went bounding across the surface again to get it back. Then again, Kit thought, there are some species that're in really close relationships with each other, and their Choices are interrelated. Why shouldn't the dogs' Choice be involved with the human one? It makes a kind of sense. Ponch skidded to a stop in front of Kit, dropping the rock in front of him. Again! "Yeah, sure," Kit said. He picked up the rock and threw it. Ponch went bouncing off after it. Boy, he's redly into it this morning. Needs to dump some stress, I guess. Kit had to grin at himself then. Oh, great. Now you're doing psychoanalysis on your dog. But still… There'd been an overly casual quality to the way Ponch had been talking about the canine Choice. As if there was something about it he didn't want to be thinking about. Almost as if he was trying to distract himself. Ponch came bounding and plunging back with his rock, and dropped it in front of Kit once more. Again! "Uh, no, I think we've done enough of that." Why? Is it time for something? Ponch looked a little crestfallen. "Probably," Kit said, fervently hoping that this was true. But he had to smile; Ponch's sense of time was weak, except when mealtimes were concerned. "Let's have a look here." He got out his manual and flipped its cover open to show the front page, which he'd set to show him the date and time. "See, it says here-" Then his jaw dropped. 762.3? How did that happen? Crap! Kit slapped the manual shut, turned around, and started back toward the pup-tent accesses. "Come on," he said, "we're running really late! We have to get Neets up." Ponch began to jump up and down with excitement as they went; in the low gravity, he was able to jump up to a height where his head was level with Kit's. How come? "Because it's a lot later than it should be!" Kit started doing the astronaut-bounce that was the only way to hurry in this kind of gravity without falling on your face. "And I don't know how it got that way. Come on!" Nita stood in front of the mirror over the chest of drawers in her bedroom, staring anxiously at her face. / was right, she thought, utterly exasperated, as she pushed her bangs aside to get a closer look. It is a zit. She let out a breath, then. Trouble is, this isn't real. I'm asleep. And what am I wasting my time dreaming about? Zits! Nita shook her head. / can't believe that the other day I actually thought this was a big deal. Nonetheless, the place where the pimple was coming up still stung. Nita found herself torn between the eternal choices: Squeeze it, which always grossed her out and sometimes left a mark? Or do a wizardry on it? Or just let it be, and go through the next couple of days feeling like a leper? She shrugged.Читать дальше