Uh-oh, said that small voice again. Wait a minute, I know who that is…Nita stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, with half the sandwich in her hand, looking around. Spot, she said, looking around. Where are you Uh-oh, Spot said. She couldn t quite locate the sound. Is he invisible or something It s okay, Spot, Nita said. It s me. No answer came back. Nita glanced around the dining room for a moment or so, looking on the seats of the chairs, and briefly under them, but she still couldn t see anything. After a moment she shook her head. Spot was an unusually personal kind of personal computer he would speak to her and her father occasionally, but never at any length. Probably, Nita thought, this had to do with the fact that he was in some kind of symbiotic relationship with Dairine part wizard s manual, part pet, part…Nita shook her head and went back to her sandwich. Spot was difficult to describe accurately; he had been through a great deal in his short life. The part of this that Nita knew about Spot s participation in the creation of a whole species of sentient computers would have been enough to account for the weird way he sometimes behaved. But he had been constant companion to Dairine on all her errantry after that, and for all Nita knew, Spot had since been involved in stranger things. There were no further utterances from Spot. Okay, Nita said, straightening up. You stay where you are, then…She ll be back in a while. She sat down at the table and called her manual to her again. Two weeks of my own, she thought. Yeah! There were a hundred things to think about over the school holiday: projects she was working on with Kit, and things she was doing for her own enjoyment that she would finally have some time to really get into. She opened the manual to the area where she kept wizardries-in-progress and paged through it idly, pausing as she came to a page that was about half full of the graceful characters of the Speech.