Free Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page A

really? Where to?”
    “Sixty-two thousand light-years away,” Kit said casually. “The other side of the galaxy.”
    “Great!” Carmela said. “I’ll give you a shopping list.”
    “You do your own shopping,” Kit said as he and Nita went into his room. He glanced over at Nita and saw her grinning. “What’s so funny?”
    “Your whole family teases you,” Nita said. “I’ve never seen them get so coordinated about it before.”
    “Neither have I,” Kit said. “I don’t know whether I should be worried or not.”
    “This is new,” Nita said, looking up at a double-hemisphere map of the Moon on the wall at the head of Kit’s bed. The map had a lot of different-colored pins stuck in it, in both hemispheres, though there were about twice as many on the “near side” of the Moon as on the “far side.” “Are you trying to win a Visited Every Crater competition or something?”
    Kit threw her a look. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said. “I’m trying to get to know the Moon before it becomes just another tourist destination.” But his attention was on his desk by the window.
    It was covered with schoolbooks brought home over spring break (the school did locker cleaning then) and notebooks and pens and DVDs and various other detritus. What it was not strewn with were the three objects that had just appeared, between one breath and the next, and were floating a few inches above the cluttered surface. They were silvery packages about the size of paperback books, wrapped with “sheet” force fields that sizzled slightly blue at the corners; and they were bobbing slightly in the draft from the nearby window, as its weather stripping had come loose again. “When are you going to fix that?” Nita said.
    “Later,” said Kit. He inspected the little floating packages to see if they had notations on them. One did. A single string of characters in the Speech was attached to it and was waving gently in the draft: read this first.
    “Is this what you got?” Kit said.
    Nita nodded. “That one’s the mission statement,” she said.
    Kit took hold of the wizardly package, pulled it into the middle of the room, and pulled the string of characters out until the normally curved characters of the Speech went straight with the tension of the pull. As they did, the package unfolded itself in the air, a sheet of semishadow on which many more characters in the Speech swiftly spread themselves in blocks of text and columns, small illustrations and diagrams, and various live and still images.
    SPONSORED ELECTIVE/NONINTERVENTIONAL EXCURSUS PROGRAM , said the header, NOMINEE AUTHORIZATIONS AND ANCILLARY DATA. NOTE: WHERE CULTURAL CORRESPONDENCES ARE NOT EXACT, LOCAL ANALOGUES ARE SUBSTITUTED . Beneath the header, divided into various sections, was a tremendous amount of other information about the world where they’d be staying, the family they’d be staying with, the culture, the locality where the family lived, the planet’s history, the climate, the flora and fauna, on and on and on…
    “It’s gonna take me all night to read this!” Kit said.
    “Relax,” Nita said. “It’s not like there’s a test! You don’t have to inhale it all at once. We’ve got a little time for that.”
    “Yeah,” Kit said. It was just beginning to sink in how very far from home they were going. Kit was delighted —but at the same time all of a sudden it was making him twitch.
    He scanned down the data. Addendum to authorization: You may be accompanied by your adjunct Talent if desired. “Hey,” Kit said, “I can bring Ponch!”
    “Great! And there are the dates,” Nita said, pointing to one side where the duration of the trip was expressed, as usual on Earth, in Julian-day format—2455290.3333 to 2455304.3333, it said. She had her manual out and was paging through it.
    “It sounds close,” Kit said.
    Nita raised her eyebrows. “No kidding,” she said. “That first date’s tomorrow at three in the afternoon. Didn’t