Read Online Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane - Free Book Online

about the newspaper he worked for as a pressman. “Carmela, what are they doing there?”
    “Grenfelzing.”
    “Really. What’s the fire hose for?”
    “I don’t think it’s a fire hose, Popi… ”
    A pause. “Oh, my lord —” Kit’s pop said.
    The phone rang again. Halfway to the living room, Kit dived back into the kitchen for the wireless phone on the counter, and managed to pick it up and hit the talk button before Carmela could pick up the phone in the living room.
    “Rodriguez residence.”
    “It’s me,” Nita said.
    “Oh, good. Thanks for not being yet another of the thundering herd.”
    Click. “I heard that!”
    “Get off, ‘Mela! It’s for me!”
    “Wow, I’ll call the media.” Click.
    “She giving you a hard time?”
    “Always.” Kit let out a harassed-sounding breath. “Please, please, please, come over and give me something to do besides keep my sister off the phone. That chicken’s gonna be ready soon, anyway.”
    “Be over in a few. But you need to hear about this first. My dad wants me to go away on this exchange thing!”
    “You gonna go?” Kit immediately began to itch with something that felt embarrassingly like envy.
    “Yeah. And when we got back from shopping, my manual was about half an inch thicker than when we’d left, and a whole bunch of sealed claudication packages were sitting on my desk.”
    “Hey, super,” Kit said, and was instantly annoyed at himself for not sounding as enthusiastic as he thought he should have. “This’ll be so great for you! You should get out there and have a good time—”
    “What do you mean, I should go?” And Nita burst out laughing. “You’re so pitiful when you’re trying to be a good loser, you know that? I was going to tell you that my dad doesn’t want me to go alone. Tom still has an opening, and he’s holding it for you!”
    “Wow,” Kit said. The envy instantly dissolved, first in delight, then in mild outrage. “Hey, and you let me stew for a whole, I don’t know, five seconds, thinking I was going to have to sit here while you were gone?”
    “That’s to get you back for the chicken thing,” Nita said, and started imitating Kit. “ ‘Oh, I don’t know. I might want it myself… ’” She broke up laughing again.
    “Cut it out!” But Kit had to laugh, too. “Okay,” he said. “I have to figure out how to handle this. Where’re we supposed to be going?”
    “The manual says it’s some planet called Alaalu.”
    “Never heard of it,” Kit said. He put out a hand and felt around for something only he would be able to feel, the tag of a wizardly “zipper” in the air, which controlled entry to the personal otherspace pocket that followed him around. Kit found the tag, pulled it down, and pushed his hand into the opening so that it appeared to vanish while he felt around for his manual. “Alaalu… Our galaxy, or somewhere else?”
    “Ours,” Nita said, and Kit heard manual pages rustling again at her end. “Outer Arm Four, around radian one-sixty.”
    Kit thought about that for a moment as he felt around and found his manual, then pulled it out of the claudication into local space. “That’s, uh… the Scutum Arm, right? Straight across the Bar from us.”
    “Yeah,” Nita said as Kit zipped the pocket up again. “The mirror of the arm we’re in. The system’s a little more than sixty thousand light-years from here.”
    Kit put his manual down on the counter and started flipping through it to the galaxography section. “Alaalu, Alaalu,” he muttered, paging through to the section dealing with the Scutum Arm. Kit ran one finger down the long column of planet names and coordinates on the index page and found Alaalu there.
    “Got it,” Kit said, and riffled along to the page in question, which had an image of the planet’s star system. Apparently there was only one inhabited planet in the system, an exception to the usual rule. The star around which Alaalu IV circled was about the same