So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page B

never get enough of; she began bringing them with her when she visited. The dog spoke the Speech with a Spanish accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they discussed who should do what in the spelling. Kit wound up with most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies.
    Late on Friday afternoon, Nita was in a little antiques-and-junk store on Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in search of a fork that was made of real silver instead of stainless steel. Fred was hanging over her shoulder, almost invisible, a faint red point lazily emitting heat. “You ever swallow anything accidentally before, Fred?” Nita said under her breath.
    Not for a long time, he said, glancing curiously at a pressed-glass saltshaker Nita was holding. Not since I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes swallow everything, but a white hole’s business is emission. Within limits, he added, and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered. I don’t ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen went down. Some of those things hurt on the way out. And anyway, all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing and I could blow my quanta.
    She looked up at him, worried. “Really? Have you emitted that much stuff that you’re in danger of blowing up?”
    Oh, not really—I’d have to lose a lot more mass first. After all, before I was a black hole, I was a respectable-sized blue-white star, and even these days I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn’t worry about it—I’m nowhere near the critical threshold yet.
    “’Cute’?’” Nita said.
    Well, it is … And I suppose there’s no harm in getting better at emissions. I have been improving a lot. What’s that?
    Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with a battered old fork. It was scratched and its tines were bent out of shape, but it was definitely silver, not stainless steel. “That’s what I needed,” she said under her breath. “Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood, and then tonight I go over my part of the spells again…”
    You sound worried.
    “Well, yeah, a little,” Nita murmured, getting up. All that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the more sense the bushes and trees made. “It’s just—the rowan branch has to come off a live tree, Fred, and I can’t just pick it—that’d be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers off. I have to ask for it. And if the tree won’t give it to me…”
    Then you don’t get your pen back, at least not for a while. Fred shimmered with colors and a feeling like a sigh. I am a trouble to you.
    “Fred, no. I have to hush for a moment now. Put your light out a moment so we can get out of here…”
    Nita interrupted the shopkeeper’s intense concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred was pacing her again. “If you’re trouble,” Nita said under her breath, “you’re the best trouble that’s happened around here for a while. You’re good to talk to, you’re good company—when you don’t forget and start emitting cosmic rays…”
    Fred winked momentarily bright in a blush at Nita’s teasing. In an excited moment the night before he had forgotten himself and emitted a brief blast of ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up Nita’s backyard a good deal, ionized the air for miles around, and produced a local but brilliant aurora. Well, it’s an old habit, and old habits die hard. I’m working on it.
    “Heat we don’t mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the longwave kind that doesn’t hurt people’s eyes.”
    You fluoresce when I use that, though…
    Nita laughed softly. “I don’t mind fluorescing. Though