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

size as Earth’s Sun, and in the same general class, a little golden G0.
    “Not exactly next door,” Kit said, studying the star’s position about three-quarters of the way down the long arm on the other side of the galaxy’s spiral. He tapped on the image of the star system to zoom in on the planet. “Who lives there?”
    “Well, people. Who else? Humanoids, anyway: real tall people, all kind of a tan color.” Nita said. “Check page… ” She glanced at her own manual. “I have it on page nine-sixty-two.”
    “Right,” Kit said. For the moment his attention was on the image of the planet, banded blindingly around its equator with a white, two-way highway of swirling weather systems. The view was in real time, and the very slightest shift was visible as Alaalu turned in the amber light of its sun. The planet’s seas were as blue as Earth’s, and huge; there were only three landmasses, none of them large enough to be considered a continent. One was a big, rough-edged crescent, about a third of the way up from the equator toward Alaalu’s north pole—a three-quarter circle with the open end pointing more or less north. Kit wondered if he was looking at a remnant of some gigantic, ancient meteor strike—the rest of the “splash” rim damaged in some recent earthquake or plate movement. The other two landmasses were halfway around the planet from the crescent island. They were irregularly shaped blobs, long and narrow, with great chains of islands large and small strung out from them at either end, and each chain straddling Alaalu’s equator. One island chain ran almost vertically, pointing at the poles; the other crossed the equator more diagonally, like a sword stuck in the planet’s equatorial belt.
    At first Kit thought these were relatively short island chains, but then he got a look at the scale indicator plotted against the planet’s globe. “Neets,” he said, “those island chains are nine thousand miles long!”
    “I know,” Nita said. “I had to look twice, too. Check the main stats for the planet. Thirty-six thousand miles in diameter… ”
    “Wow,” Kit said. He put the manual aside for the moment. There was a ton of technical detail there to digest.
    “Looks like a nice place, anyway,” Nita said. “A peaceful planet, no recent wars, not a lot of intraspecies hostility of any kind. Warm climate at the equator, but not too hot.”
    “Somewhere that life really is a beach,” Kit said, starting to smile in anticipation. “Could this actually be a vacation for a change?”
    “Looks that way. Oh, there’d be some cultural stuff. We’d have to travel around on their planet, find out what it’s like living in one of their families. That kind of thing.”
    “Sounds boring. In a good way.”
    “I don’t know about you,” Nita said, sounding a little sharp, “but I could use some good boring about now.”
    “No argument there,” Kit said. Recent months had featured too many excitements by half.
    “But you know what’s really weird about this place?”
    “What, besides that it’s peaceful?”
    “Yeah. Know how many wizards it has?”
    “How many?”
    “One.”
    Kit blinked.
    “One?” he said. “For the whole planet?”
    “Yup.”
    “And how many people live there?”
    “It says a billion and a half.”
    Kit stared at the manual, not knowing what to make of this. “They haven’t had a big catastrophe or something that’s wiped out all their wizards?”
    “Nope. The manual says one wizard is all they need.”
    Kit shook his head. “Wow,” he said again. He had trouble even imagining any world so peaceful and orderly that one wizard was enough to help keep things running smoothly.
    “So go ask your folks! Wouldn’t they like to get rid of you for a couple of weeks?”
    Kit fell silent, listening to his home. The TV was now shouting with a cacophony of alien voices, the audio expression of yet another chat room, and his sister was alternately shouting at the