A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

tremendously high roof-sky seemingly absent and the whole concourse open to the huge, pulsating, many-colored stars of its home planet’s neighborhood.  After you’d been there as much as I have this last month, anything’d look small,  Nita thought.  That place has got to be the size of New Jersey. Well, Rhode Island, anyway...
    She went up the stairs to the back door, expecting to have to let herself in: but the inside door was open. Nita opened the screen door, braced it behind her so it wouldn’t slam, and dumped the bagged tomatoes on the drainer by the sink as she went through the kitchen. “Daddy?”
    “He had to go back to the shop for something,” came a voice from inside, and Nita grinned, because it wasn’t her sister’s voice coming from the living room, but someone else’s entirely. “He’ll be back in an hour, he said.”
    Nita went through the dining room into the living room. There Kit’s older sister Carmela was sitting on the floor amid a heap of cushions and a scatter of TV remotes. Nita looked at the remotes in bemusement, as she couldn’t remember their TV having quite  that  many. There was the VCR remote, sure, and the one for the TV, and the—
    “Ohaiyo gozaimas’!”  the TV yelled at her as she entered.
    Nita stopped still.  Oh no ... she thought. “Mela,” she said, “you didn’t—”
    “I brought our remote over,” Carmela said, and stretched her fluffy-sweatered self out among the cushions, toying with her single long dark braid. “Dairine said it might be smart to train your TV to get the alien cable channels, the way Kit did with ours. This is bargain-shopping season, after all! And we don’t want to freak out the visitors at home...”
    Nita perched briefly on the arm of her dad’s easy chair behind Carmela and looked at the TV. It wasn’t nearly as fancy or new a model as Kit’s new entertainment-center TV was, but all the same it was showing a channel-listing page as sleek and modern as anything Kit’s set could boast. And as Carmela punched the “scroll” button, the online guide shifted through page after page after page of channels that didn’t exist anywhere on  this  planet. The entries on the scrolling pages were all in the curving, curling characters of the wizardly Speech, which many worlds used as a common language of discourse. “Wait a minute,” Nita said. “ What  visitors?”
    “Ooh,” Carmela said, “you mean you haven’t heard? Guess who’s coming home from college!”
    “No, I did hear,” Nita said, easing herself down off the easy chair to flop down among the cushions, “but I thought that wasn’t till July...”
    Carmela shook her head until her braid flopped around. She punched the remote, which immediately changed the TV Guide channel to one of the many thousands of alien shopping channels available to users of GalacTrans or whatever other unearthly “cable” provider Carmela had hooked them into. “Nope,” she said, watching absently as some alien being apparently made entirely of wreathing chartreuse smoke did its best to demonstrate the virtues of what Nita thought was some kind of household appliance, maybe a food processor. It picked up one indecipherable “accessory” after another with tendrils of green smoke, waving them around. “That whole thing blew up,” Carmela said, leaning back and briefly looking at Nita upside down. “Helena had a fight with her boyfriend, so no Paris for them!  She’s already cashed in the plane tickets. She’s going to come back next week and stay here until her college choir’s trip to Romania or wherever they’re going...”
    “Slovenia, Kit said,” Nita said.
    “Whatever. At least she’ll have fun with the vampires!”
    Nita shook her head. “No vampires,” she said. “Some undead, yeah, and some confused Goth wannabes. But there haven’t been real turn-into-a-bat-and-flap-around vampires since 1652.”
    “Really? What happened in 1652?”
    “Some other