High Wizardry New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page B

(untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name), (un-translatable proper name).”
    “People,” Dairine whispered.
    “Affirmative.”
    She looked up at the stars in the hard violet sky. “I want to go where they came from!”
    “Reference transit utility.”
    She did, and spent some minutes working her way through the search functions associated with the transit utility, tapping at the laptop’s keys. In the middle of it all — selecting coordinates, delightedly reading through planet names—Dairine stopped and bit her lip. “This is going to take longer than an hour,” she said to herself.
    …Come to think of it, she might want to be away for quite some time. And seeing all the problems Nita had started having with their folks when she told them she was a wizard, it wouldn’t do for Dairine to let them know that she was one too. Not just yet.
    She thought about this for a while. Then Dairine backed out of the transit utility and brought up the main manual window again—taking more time with it, examining the menu trees with great care. In particular she spent a great deal of time with the Copy and Cloaking utilities, getting to know their ins and outs, and doing one particularly finicky piece of copying as a test. The test worked: she sent the copy home.
    “That should do it,” Dairine said at last. She got back into the Transport utility, and with the program’s prompting started to lay in coordinates. “Darth Vader,” muttered under her breath, “look out. Here I come.”
    Shortly thereafter there was nothing on Olympus Mons but rocks, and dry- ice snow, and far down in the crater, the single blinking light.

Search and Retrieval

    “We’re dead,” Nita mourned, sitting on the planetarium steps with her head in her hands. “Deader than dead. Mom is going to kill me.”
    Kit, sitting beside her, looked more bemused than upset. “Do you know how much power it takes to open a gateway like that and leave it open? Usually it’s all we can do to keep one open long enough to jump through it.”
    “Big deal! The Grand Central and Penn gates are open all the time.” Nita groaned again. “Mars!”
    “Each of those gates took a hundred or so wizards working together to open, though.” Kit leaned back on the steps. “She may be a brat, but boy, has she got firepower!”
    “The youngest wizards always do,” Nita said, sitting up again and picking up Kit’s manual from beside her. “God, what a horrible thought.”
    “What? The gate she made? We can close it, but—”
    “No. This. Look.” She held out his manual. It was turned to one of the directory pages. The page said:

    CALLAHAN, JUANITA L. Rating: Journeyman
    243 E. Clinton Avenue (RL +4.5 +/- 0.15)
    Hempstead NY 11575 Available/limited
    (516) 555-6786 (summer vacation)

    That was Nita’s usual directory listing, and normal enough. But above it, between her and CAHANE, JAK, whose listing was usually right above hers, there was something new.

    CALLAHAN, DAIRINE R. Rating: Novice
    243 E. Clinton Avenue (RL +9.8 +/- 0.2)
    Hempstead NY 11575 On Ordeal: no calls
    (516) 555-6786

    “Oh God, no,” Kit said. “And look at that rating level!”
    Nita dropped the book beside her. “I don’t get it. She didn’t find a manual, how could she have—”
    “She was in yours,” Kit said.
    “Yeah, but the most she could have done was take the Oath! She’s smart but not smart enough to pull off a forty-million-mile transit without having the reference diagrams and the words for the spell in front of her! And you know the manuals can’t be stolen. If someone tries, they just vanish.” Nita put her head down in her hands again. “My folks are gonna pitch every kind of fit! We’ve got to find her!”
    Kit breathed out, then stood up. “Come on,” he said. “We have to get moving fast or we’ll lose her. Call home and tell , I don’t know, that we’re running behind schedule. The planetarium’s all locked up by now, so no one’ll