desk, where her manual lay. Nita picked it up and flipped to the back page, hoping to see some long angry rant from Kit. But there was nothing.
She broke out in a sweat at the sight of the page with not a thing on it but the previous two communications. He must be completely furious, she thought. This is gonna be awful … and when Dairine hears about it, she’s going to laugh herself sick. I’ll probably have to kill her.
Nita put the manual down, pulled open a drawer in her dresser and extracted a clean T-shirt, then pulled it on along with yesterday’s jeans and turned back to the desk. I wonder what he’s up to, though. Maybe he’s out working on the water with S’reee.
Nita flipped through to Kit’s listing in the directory and glanced at it. Last project: mesolittoral water-quality intervention, for details see reference MSI-B14-/XIiii-βγ66384-67/1141-2211-ABX6655/3: other participants, Callahan, Juanita L., hominid / Sol III, S’reee a/hruuni-Aoul-mmeiihnhwiiilr, cetacean / Sol III; intervention status complete / functioning…
Nita’s mouth dropped open.
…anentropia rate 0.047255-E 8 ; effectiveness rating 3.5 +/- .10; review scheduled Julian date 2455105.5—
Oh, my God. It’s working!
The initial reaction of sheer delight at the solution of a problem that had had them all literally running in circles for so long was now drowned by a nearly intolerable wave of combined embarrassment and annoyance.
…And they got it working without me.
He was right.
I was wrong.
Nita sat there in shock.
I am so stupid!
Yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. And she was still listed as a participant in the spell. Nita paged back to the section where intervention references were kept, and shortly found a copy of the spell diagram that Kit and S’reee had been using.
Nita traced the curves and circles of it, all apparent in an enlarged hologrammatic format when you looked at the page closely. The basic structure of the wizardry was derived broadly from the last pattern she and Kit had worked on together, before they started disagreeing about the details. It was missing any of the extra subroutines she had insisted were absolutely necessary to make the spell work right. The detailed versions of the effectiveness figures were at the bottom of the page, updating themselves as she watched, demonstrating that the water coming out of Jones Inlet was indeed getting cleaner by the second.
And she somehow still just couldn’t believe it. Nita tapped the page so that the diagram would spring up out of it and hang there glowing in the air in front of her, and then she sat and stared at it as it rotated gently, displaying all the curves and tangles of the spell diagram. It works. He was right.
Nita sat there in the grip of an attack of complete chagrin. What an utter dork I’ve been, she thought. I’m going straight over there to apologize. No, I’m not going to wait even that long.
She flipped back to the messaging pages, touched the message from Kit to wake up the reply function. “Kit?” she said in the Speech. “Can we talk?”
Send?
“Send it,” Nita said.
Then she waited. But to her complete astonishment, the page just flashed once, leaving her message sitting where it was. And down the page a little notification appeared:
Message cannot be dispatched at this time. Please try again later.
What ?? “How come?”
The notification blanked out, replaced by the words: Addressee is not in ambit. Please try again later.
Nita stared. She had never seen such a description before and didn’t have any idea what it meant.
She put the manual down on the desk. “Keep trying,” Nita said, and started rummaging around on her desk for her phone. Where is that thing? Lately she’d got out of the habit of leaving it in one usual place when it wasn’t in one of her pockets or her bags or stuffed in her claudication. Gotta stop doing that. Did I leave it down on the table again?
Nita pulled on
She broke out in a sweat at the sight of the page with not a thing on it but the previous two communications. He must be completely furious, she thought. This is gonna be awful … and when Dairine hears about it, she’s going to laugh herself sick. I’ll probably have to kill her.
Nita put the manual down, pulled open a drawer in her dresser and extracted a clean T-shirt, then pulled it on along with yesterday’s jeans and turned back to the desk. I wonder what he’s up to, though. Maybe he’s out working on the water with S’reee.
Nita flipped through to Kit’s listing in the directory and glanced at it. Last project: mesolittoral water-quality intervention, for details see reference MSI-B14-/XIiii-βγ66384-67/1141-2211-ABX6655/3: other participants, Callahan, Juanita L., hominid / Sol III, S’reee a/hruuni-Aoul-mmeiihnhwiiilr, cetacean / Sol III; intervention status complete / functioning…
Nita’s mouth dropped open.
…anentropia rate 0.047255-E 8 ; effectiveness rating 3.5 +/- .10; review scheduled Julian date 2455105.5—
Oh, my God. It’s working!
The initial reaction of sheer delight at the solution of a problem that had had them all literally running in circles for so long was now drowned by a nearly intolerable wave of combined embarrassment and annoyance.
…And they got it working without me.
He was right.
I was wrong.
Nita sat there in shock.
I am so stupid!
Yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. And she was still listed as a participant in the spell. Nita paged back to the section where intervention references were kept, and shortly found a copy of the spell diagram that Kit and S’reee had been using.
Nita traced the curves and circles of it, all apparent in an enlarged hologrammatic format when you looked at the page closely. The basic structure of the wizardry was derived broadly from the last pattern she and Kit had worked on together, before they started disagreeing about the details. It was missing any of the extra subroutines she had insisted were absolutely necessary to make the spell work right. The detailed versions of the effectiveness figures were at the bottom of the page, updating themselves as she watched, demonstrating that the water coming out of Jones Inlet was indeed getting cleaner by the second.
And she somehow still just couldn’t believe it. Nita tapped the page so that the diagram would spring up out of it and hang there glowing in the air in front of her, and then she sat and stared at it as it rotated gently, displaying all the curves and tangles of the spell diagram. It works. He was right.
Nita sat there in the grip of an attack of complete chagrin. What an utter dork I’ve been, she thought. I’m going straight over there to apologize. No, I’m not going to wait even that long.
She flipped back to the messaging pages, touched the message from Kit to wake up the reply function. “Kit?” she said in the Speech. “Can we talk?”
Send?
“Send it,” Nita said.
Then she waited. But to her complete astonishment, the page just flashed once, leaving her message sitting where it was. And down the page a little notification appeared:
Message cannot be dispatched at this time. Please try again later.
What ?? “How come?”
The notification blanked out, replaced by the words: Addressee is not in ambit. Please try again later.
Nita stared. She had never seen such a description before and didn’t have any idea what it meant.
She put the manual down on the desk. “Keep trying,” Nita said, and started rummaging around on her desk for her phone. Where is that thing? Lately she’d got out of the habit of leaving it in one usual place when it wasn’t in one of her pockets or her bags or stuffed in her claudication. Gotta stop doing that. Did I leave it down on the table again?
Nita pulled on
Similar Books
