of wizardry or another; but the kind of wizard who's Senior material refuses to specialize too far. They are the Renaissance people of sorcery, every one of them tried repeatedly against the Lone Power, in both open combat and the subtler strife of one Power-influenced human mind against another.
Seniors are almost never the white-bearded wizards of archetype. . mostly because of their constant combats with the Lone One, which tend to kill them young. They advise other wizards on assignment, do research for them, lend them assistance in the losing battle to slow down the heat-death of the universe.
Few worlds have more than thirty or forty Seniors. At this point in Kit's and Nita's practice, Earth had twenty-four: six scattered through Asia, one in Australia and one (for the whales) in the Atlantic Ocean; three in Europe, four in Africa, and nine in the Americas-five in Central and South America (one of whom handled the Antarctic) and four in the north. Of these, one lived in Santa Cruz, one lived in Oklahoma City, and the other two lived together several miles away, in Nassau County.
Their house in Nita's town was very like their neighbors' houses. perhaps a little bigger, but that wasn't odd, since Carl worked as chief of sales for the big CBS flagship TV station in New York, and Tom was a moderately well-known freelance writer of stories and movie scripts. They looked like perfectly average people-two tall, good- looking men, one with a mustache, one without; Carl a native New Yorker, Tom an unrepentant Californian. They had all the things their neighbors had-mortgages and phone bills and pets and occasional fights: they mowed the lawn and went to work like everybody else (at least Carl did: Tom worked at home). But their lawn had as few weeds as Nita's did these days, their pets understood and sometimes spoke English and numerous other languages, their phone didn't always have a human being on the other end when it rang, and as for their fights, the reasons for some of them would have made their neighbors' mouths drop open.
Their backyard, being surrounded by a high hedge and a wall all hung witn plants, was a safe place to appear out of nothing: though as usual there was nothing to be done about the small thundercrack of air suddenly displaced by two human bodies. When Nita's and Kit's ears stopped ringing, the first thing they heard was someone shouting, 'All right, whatcha drop this time?' and an answering shout of 'It wasn't me, are the dogs into something?' But they weren't: the two sheepdogs, Annie and Monty, came bounding out from around the corner of the house and leapt delightedly onto Kit and Nita, slurping any part of them not covered with clothes. A little behind them came Dudley the terrier, who contented himself with bouncing around them as if he were spring-loaded and barking at the top of his little lungs.
'Had dinner yet?' Carl called from the kitchen door, which, like the dining room doors, looked out on the backyard. 'Annie! Monty! Down!'
'Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!' screamed another voice from the same direction: not surprising, since its source was sitting on Carl's shoulder. This was Machu Picchu the macaw, also known (to her annoyance) as 'Peach': a splendid creature all scarlet and blue, with a three-foot tail, a foul temper, and a precognitive talent that could read the future for months ahead-if Peach felt like it. Wizards' pets tend to become strange with time, and Seniors' pets even stranger than usual; and Peach had been with them longer than any of the others. It showed.
'Come on in,' called one last voice: Tom. Kit and Nita pushed Annie and Monty more or less back down to dog level, and made their way into the house through the dining room doors. It was a pleasant, open place, all the rooms running freely into one another, and full of handsome functional furniture: Tom's desk and computer sat in a comfortable corner of the living room. Kit pulled a chair away from the dining table and plopped down in it, still winded from his earlier wizardry. Nita sat down next to him. Carl leaned over the table and pushed a pair of bottles of Coke at them, sitting down and cracking a third one himself. Tom, with a glass of iced coffee, sat down too.
'Hot one today,' Carl said at last, putting his Coke down. Picchu sidled down his arm from his shoulder and began to gnaw thoughtfully on the neck of the bottle.
'No kidding,' Kit said.
'You look awful,' said Tom. 'What've you two been up to?'
For answer Nita opened Kit's manual to the directory and pushed it over to Tom and Carl's side of the table. Tom read it, whistled softly, and nudged the manual toward Carl. 'I saw this coming,' he said, 'but not this soon. Your mom and dad aren't going to be happy. Where did she go?'
'Mars,' Kit said.
'Home,' Nita said.
'Better start at the beginning,' said Carl.
When they came to the part about the worldgate, Carl got up to go for his supervisory manual, and Tom looked at Kit with concern. 'Better get him an aspirin too,' Tom called after Carl.
'I'm allergic to aspirin.'
'A Tylenol, then. You're going to need it. How did you manage to disalign a patent gateway all by yourself?. . But wait a minute.' Tom peered at Kit. 'Are you taller than you were?'
'Two inches.'
'That would explain it, then. It's a hormonal surge.' Tom cleared his throat and looked at Nita. 'You, too, huh?'
'Hormones? Yes. Unfortunately.'
Tom raised his eyebrows. 'Well. Your wizardry will be a little more accessible to you for a while than it has since you got started. Just be careful not to overextend yourself. . it's easy to overreach your strength just now.'
Carl came back with his supervisory manual, a volume thick as a phone book, and started paging through it. Annie nosed Kit from one side: he looked down in surprise and took the bottle of Tylenol she was carrying in her mouth. 'Hey, thanks.'
'Lord,' Carl said. 'She did a tertiary gating, all by herself. Your body becomes part of the gateway forcefields,' he said, looking up at Nita and Kit. 'It's one of the fastest and most effective kinds of gating, but it takes a lot of power.'
'I still don't get it,' Nita said. 'She doesn't have a manual!'
'Are you sure?' Carl said; and 'Have you gotten a computer recently?' said Tom.
'Just this morning.'
Tom and Carl looked at each other. 'I thought only Advisory levels and above were supposed to get the software version of the manual just yet,' Carl said.
'Maybe, but she couldn't have stolen one of those any more than she could have stolen one of the regular manuals. You're offered it… or you never see it.'
Nita was puzzled. ' 'Software version'?'
Tom gave her a wry look. 'We've been beta-testing it,' he said. 'Sorry^ testing the 'beta' version of the software, the one that'll be released afte we're sure there are no bugs in it. You know the way you normally do spell: You draw your power diagrams and so forth as guides for the way you want the spell to work, but the actual instructions to the universe are spoken aloucf in the Speech?'
'Uh-huh.'
'And it takes a fair amount of practice to learn to do the vector diagrams and so forth without errors, and a lot of time, sometimes, to learn to speal(the Speech properly. More time yet to learn to think in it.
Well…' Ton sat down again and began turning his empty glass around and around on the table. 'Now that technology has proceeded far enough on this planet for computers to be fairly widespread, the Powers have been working with the Senior wizards to develop computer-supported wizards' manuals. The software draws the necessary diagrams internally, the way a calculator does addition, for example; you get the solution without seeing how it's worked out. The computer also synthesizes the Speech, though of course there are tutorials in the language as you go along.'
'The project has both useful and dangerous sides,' Carl said. 'For one thing, there are good reasons why we use the Speech in spelling. It contains words that can accurately describe things and conditions that no Earthly language has words for. And if during a spell you give the computer instructions that're ambiguous in English, and it describes something inaccurately. . well.' He looked grim. 'But for the experienced wizard, who already knows the theory he's working with, and is expert in the Speech, it can be a real timesaver.'
'A lifesaver, too, under special circumstances,' Tom said, looking somber. 'You two know how many children go missing in this country every year.'
