“Yes,” her mother said, sounding lost.
Nita and Kit looked at each other, and Kit shook his head. “We’re never gonna be able to explain this,” he said.
She agreed with him. “Only one thing we can do, I guess,” Nita said, musing.
“Show them?”
Nita looked at Kit, and for the first time in what seemed days, a smile began to grow. “Remember that place we went a week and a half ago?” she said. “The one with the great view?”
“I’ll get my book,” he said, grinning back, “and the string.”
“Don’t forget the chip!” Nita said, but Kit had already gone out, bang! just like a candle, and Nita was talking to empty air. She turned to her mother and father. “He went to get some supplies,” she said. “Most wizardry you need things for — raw materials, kind of.”
“Fine, honey,” her mother said, “but does he have to keep appearing and disappearing like that?”
“It’s faster than walking,” Nita said. “And we haven’t got all night. He and I are going to have to be out early again tomorrow morning—“
“Nita!” said her father.
She went to him and put her arms around him. “Please, Dad,” she said, “let it be for a little while. We told you why. But you have to feel this first. It won’t make sense unless you do. In fact, it may never make sense. Just trust me!”
Kit popped back out of nothing, making Nita’s mother jump again. “Sorry, Mrs. Callahan,” he said. “It’s fun, that’s all. It’s a ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ spell. So’s this one we’re going to do. Just a little more involved.” He dropped the necessary supplies on the sand — a small coil of cord, an old silicon chip salvaged from a broken pocket calculator, a gray stone. Then he started going through his own manual.
Nita looked down at the stone Kit had brought. “Good idea,” she said. “Shorthand, huh?”
“It remembers the way. Should save some work. Good thing, too… we’ve got two more sets of variables this time. Get the figures for me, will you?”
“Right.” Nita held out her book a bit as she went through it, so that her mother and father could look over her shoulder. “See, Mom? Dad? It’s just an instruction manual, like I said.”
“I can’t read it,” her father said, staring at the graceful strokes of the written form of the Speech. “What is it, Arabic?”
“No,” she said. “No Earthly language. At least, not strictly Earthly. A lot of the forces we work with don’t have names in any language on Earth — or they only have vague ones. You can’t be vague about magic.”
“Good way to get killed,” Kit said from where he knelt in the sand, scribbling with a stick and sounding cheerful. “Mr. Callahan, Mrs. Callahan, don’t step on any of these things I’m writing in the sand, or we’ll all be in big trouble. Mrs. Callahan, what’s your birthday?”
“April twenty-eighth,” said Nita’s mother.
“Mr. Callahan?”
“July seventh,” said Nita’s father.
“Neets, how big a circle?”
“Half a second,” Nita said. “Brighter,” she said to her manual. Its pages began to glow softly in the dark. “Okay, here we are. Four of us… about a cubic foot of air for each breath. Allow for excitement — say thirty breaths a minute. Times four…” She turned to another page. “Start,” she said, and heard over her shoulder her mother’s quick intake of breath as the page Nita had opened to abruptly went blank. “Print one two zero times four.” A set of characters appeared. “Okay, print four eight zero times twenty… Good, print nine six zero zero divided by three… Great. Cubic meters… uhh … Oh, crap. Kit, what’s the volume of a cylinder again?”
“V equals pi times r squared times the height.”
“That’s it. Now how did I do this before?” Nita chewed her lip a little, thinking. “Okay,” she said to the book, “print three point one four one seven times, uh, three zero.” A figure flickered at her. “No, that is not a number,” she said to the book. “Times three zero, and don’t get cute with me… Okay. Print square root parenthesis three two zero zero divided by nine four point two five one close parentheses. Great. End. Kit? Make it thirty-six feet wide.”
“Got it,” Kit said. “Mrs. Callahan, would you stand on this string, please? And whatever happens, don’t go near the edge of the circle after I close it.” He started to walk around them all, using Mrs. Callahan and the long knotted string as a compass. “Neets? Come check your name. And theirs; they can’t do it—“
She stepped over to the circle and made sure that the Speech-characters describing herself and her parents were correct, then glanced over Kit’s too for safety’s sake. Everything was in order. Kit finished the circle he was making in the sand, closed it with the figure-eight design called a wizard’s knot, and stood up. “All set,” Nita said.
“Then let’s go.” He opened his book; Nita went looking for the page in hers on which the spell was written. “It’s a ‘read’ spell,” Nita said to her mother and father. “That means it’s going to be a few moments before it takes. Don’t say anything, no matter what you feel or see or hear. Don’t move, either.”
“You might want to hang on to each other,” Kit said. Nita gave him a wry grin; there had been occasions in the past when the two of them, terrified out of their wits, had done just that. “Ready?”
“Go ahead,” said Nita’s father, and reached out and pulled Nita’s mother close.
Nita and Kit looked at each other and began slowly to read out loud. The strange, listening stillness of a working spell began to settle in around the four of them, becoming more pronounced with every word of the Speech, as the Universe in that area waited to hear what would be required of it. The wind dropped, the sound of the surf grew softer, even the breakers in the area became gentler, flatter, their hiss fading to a bare whisper…
The sense of expectation, of anticipation, of impatient, overwhelming potential grew all around them as the silence grew… slowly undergoing a transformation into a blend of delight and terror and power that could be breathed like air, or seen as a shading now inhabiting every color, a presence inhabiting every shape.
Nita raised her voice into the stillness unafraid, speaking the words of the spell formula, barely needing to look at her book. The magic was rising in her, pouring through her with dangerous power. But with the sureness of practice she rode the danger, knowing the wonder to which it would bring her, reveling in her defiance of her fear. And in more than that: for Kit was across the circle from her, eyes on hers, matching her word for word and power for power — peer and friend and fellow-wizard, afraid as she was, and still willing to dare, for the delight of what lay on the other side of the magic—
Almost through, Nita thought, exulting. Her words and Kit’s wound about one another, wove together, binding the spell tighter around the circle-squeezing air in, squeezing power in, pushing inward with such force that the circle and its contents had no choice but to be somewhere else than they were.
Almost — Nita matched her words to Kit’s with a laugh in her voice, rushing him, finding that she couldn‘t rush him because he had already matched pace to keep up with her— She laughed at being anticipated so. Faster and faster they went, like two kids seeing who could say the Pledge of Allegiance faster, as all around them the silence began to sing with inturned power, the air shimmered and rang with force like a gong ringing backward, soft at first, then louder, though without sound, without breaking that silence — a hiss, a murmur, an outcry of something about to happen, a shout of inner voices, a silent thunderclap. And the last not-sound, so loud it unmade the world around them and struck them deaf and blind—
Then true silence again, with darkness above and whiteness below — but not the same darkness or whiteness as on the beach.
“We’re here,” Nita whispered. “Mom, Dad, have a look around. Don’t go near the edges of the circle.”
“Be careful how you move,” Kit said. “You only weigh a sixth of what you usually do. If your muscles overreact you could bounce right out of the circle. I almost did, first time.”
Nita watched her mother and father stare around them. She swallowed— partly out of reflex, for her ears were ringing in the silence that surrounded them now. That was to be expected; this stillness was more total than anything experienced on Earth. Her other reason for swallowing was more practical. The sudden transfer to one- sixth gravity tended to upset your stomach unless you were used to it.
Her father was staring at the ground, which had changed from wet beach sand to a mixture of grayish gravel and pebbles, and rocks the size of fists or melons, all covered with a gray-white dust as fine as talc. But Nita’s mother was staring up at the sky with a look of joy so great it was pain — the completely bearable anguish of an
