A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (12 page)

“Do you think you could talk to him, sweetie? You know.” She wiggled her fingers in what she imagined was a vaguely wizardly gesture.

Kit raised his eyebrows while he put the bread in the toaster. “I can try. But, Mama, just because I talk to him doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to listen. The dog’s a head case. He thinks I’m a crook. But then he thinks
everybody
who doesn’t live in his house is a crook.”

“Dogs get like their owners, they say…”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, sweetie,” his mother said, looking suddenly guilty.

Kit kept the smile off his face while he waited for the toast to come up. It was going to be fun to be middle-aged, someday, and be told the things his mother was
really
thinking, with no more need for the kid-filter that parents routinely seemed to self-install.

“What about the youngster whose head you were going to get into?” his mother said. “Were you able to talk to him?”

Kit shook his head. “He was real busy,” Kit said. “Ponch and I are going to have to try again when things are quieter.”
If they
get
any quieter,
he thought.
And what if they don’t?

Then something else occurred to him. “Mom, you have any more trouble with the TV?”

“What?” She looked at Kit as if she couldn’t understand what he was talking about, and then blinked. “Oh. No, it’s been all right.”

“Good,” Kit said, and started buttering the toast.

“Except now that you mention it…”

Kit braced himself.

“Your dad told me you weren’t joking. About the cooking shows…”

Kit sat down with his toast and tried desperately not to look as if he was about to have a panic attack. “Yeah.”

His mother sat down across from Kit, looking thoughtfully at her coffee cup. “Honey, none of these people have ever tried to eat
you,
have they?”

“Aliens? No.” That, at least, was the truth. “They might have
thought
about it, though. But so far it’s not a crime to think about it. At least, not most places.”

His mother’s expression relaxed a little. “No, I guess I can see where it might not be. I just worry about you, that’s all.”

Kit finished one piece of toast. “Mama, it’s kind of like crossing the street. You know you have to watch out for traffic. So you look both ways before you cross. In some parts of the universe, you know that the locals think of you as a potential snack food, and you’re just careful when you visit them not to act like a snack. But mostly”—and Kit grinned—“wizards are nobody’s snack. Dealing with those species mostly isn’t any more dangerous than crossing the street. Also, some of them owe us.”

His mama looked surprised. “What, humans?”

“No, wizards.” Kit took a bite of the next piece of toast. “One of those species, the—” He paused; he wasn’t used to saying their name except in the Speech, since their own word for themselves was hard to say. “Let’s call them the Spinies, because they’ve got a lot of spines. They had a problem a while back: their sun was going to go nova. One of us went in there and kept that from happening. It’s not like they don’t have their own wizards—they do. But a wizard from another species was passing through, caught the problem before any of them did, and fixed it.” He shook his head. The story ranked as a hero-tale even among wizards, who, because of their line of work, were more or less used to saving the world, or worlds. “It was real time-critical stuff. The one who saved them came from one of the species that they normally would have thought of as food: humanoid, like us. The wizardry was a big one, complex—messing with the carbon cycle inside a star isn’t for beginners. Doing the wizardry killed her. And the word got out. Now all the Spinies have something else to think about. ‘Be nice to your food; it might save your life.’”

Kit worked on the second piece of toast while his mother thought about that.

“She was how old?” his mother said suddenly.

Kit had been hoping this wouldn’t come up. “If you did it in human years,” he said, “she’d have been about my age.”

His mother’s gaze rested on him as if a suspicion had been confirmed. “Does this kind of thing happen often?” she said.

It was so tempting to lie… but no temptation was more fatal for a wizard. “Every day, Mama,” Kit said. “There aren’t enough of us to do the job. Probably there never will be. Lots of us die of old age, in our beds.” He sighed. “But not all.”

His mother looked at him, and her expression changed. It became less confused, but the look that replaced it troubled Kit more, for reasons he couldn’t understand. “I don’t know why this surprises me,” she says. “I’m a nurse, after all. It looks like we’re both in a service profession. I just keep thinking you should have been offered a choice when you were old enough to understand what you were choosing.”

“I was,” Kit said. He pushed the plate away. “You told me you decided to be a nurse when you were eight.”

His mama’s expression turned first shocked, then annoyed: the look of someone who doesn’t expect to have her own revelations turned against her. “Yes, but—”

“You’re gonna say that you didn’t know everything that’d be involved in being a nurse, when you were eight,” Kit said. “And right then being a nurse mostly looked to you like a pink plastic kit with a toy stethoscope and a toy thermometer in it. But you decided, anyway, because you wanted to help people. So when you were old enough you went to nursing school, and look, now you’re a nurse. And it’s not so bad. Right?”

His mother looked at him.

“That’s what it’s like to be a wizard,” Kit said. “I promise, I’ll keep letting you know what it looks like as I get older. But when I ‘signed up,’ I knew this was what I wanted to do. I knew right away. Sure, it gets more complicated as you go on. But doesn’t everything?”

His mama gave him a long look. Then she smiled again, very slowly, and just half a smile: the kind of expression she gave his pop when she was admitting he’d been right about something, but didn’t want to admit it out loud. “You should finish up your last piece of toast,” she said. “And don’t forget to rinse the plate.”

She went to get dressed. Kit smiled nearly the same slow half smile, pulled the plate back, finished his toast, and then left for school.

***

At lunchtime, after he’d finished eating, Kit headed out to the front of the school for a breath of fresh air, and was irrationally pleased to see Nita out there waiting for him, in the parking lot, not too far from the doors.

He walked over to her, and together they strolled off some distance through the parking lot, away from the crowd of kids who always seemed to be standing around the main doors, watching who came in and went out, and who seemed to be doing what with whom. It was a game that Kit found both boring and dumb, but a lot of his classmates seemed to spend most of their time at it, so Kit enjoyed frustrating it as much as he could.

“How’re you doing?” he said.

Nita frowned. “Okay,” she said, “but something weird’s going on.”

Kit couldn’t recall Nita having said that she felt “okay” for weeks now, and the sound of it encouraged him, but at the same time he didn’t dare get too excited about it. “Like what?”

They paused by the chain-link fence that defined the school’s boundary on the north side of the parking lot. On the other side of the fence was a cypress hedge too thick to see through, thick enough that it put hopeful green fronds through the fence; Nita idly took hold of one of these and ran it through her fingers while she told Kit about the strange robot-dream she’d had. “Everything’s supposed to understand the Speech,” she said at last, when she’d given him all the details. “At least in theory…”

“I don’t think it’s theory,” Kit said. “Everything that was made, was made using the Speech. Not being understood when you speak it is about as likely as matter not understanding gravity. Or light not understanding light speed.”

Nita shook her head and looked out into the day as if seeing something at a great distance. “I know,” she said. “But knowing the Speech also usually helps you understand what’s being said… and it’s sure not doing the job for me at the moment.”

“Really weird,” Kit said. “You have any idea what’s going on?”

Nita heaved a long sigh and bounced her shoulders idly against the fence a couple of times. “I think that dream at least, and maybe another one I had a few days ago, were alien intelligences trying to get hold of Dairine.”

Kit had to blink. “That happen to her a lot?”

Nita nodded. “On and off,” she said. “It’s mostly to do with her relationship with the mechanical sort of wizards—the computer intelligences and so on. She keeps getting feelers from life-forms that are half machine and half organic, and from a lot of the silicon-based types… some that I can’t make anything of. She told me she’s been doing a lot of work mediating between organic and inorganic lifestyles, and it’s specialized stuff. It even gives
her
trouble sometimes, translating between the ways they see life and the way we see it.” Nita sighed. “So it’s no surprise that I don’t understand contacts from these guys right off the bat—I mean, as a species, in terms of their feelings and motivations and so on. But I should at least be able to understand them when they communicate about very basic things. And until now, I’ve always been able to. This last one, though…”

Kit waved a hand to stop her. “Time out for a minute. Why didn’t Dairine take this contact, if it was her they were trying to reach?”

“Dairine wasn’t up for it last night,” Nita said. She let out a long breath. “Or most nights lately. Kit, she and my mom were even closer than Mom and I were, in some ways. She’s taking everything way harder than I am. She’s been missing a lot of school, and my dad’s really worried about it.” Nita’s expression was that of someone purposefully putting a painful subject to one side. “Anyway, she was asleep when the ‘call’ came, and she didn’t wake up to take it, the way she usually would. She was too tired, or else she just didn’t want to. So I got it, somehow or other. But I couldn’t understand it.”

Kit shook his head. “You mean, whoever was on the other end wasn’t using the Speech?”

Nita shook her head. “No, it was. But not the usual way. It was almost like it didn’t know it was speaking: there was something … I don’t know …
accidental
about the communication. Like whoever it was hadn’t actually meant to call. Except it also felt kind of urgent.”

Kit shook his head. “Were you able to get a location, a place of origin?”

“Just a sense that it was somewhere way out at the edge. I didn’t have time for a proper trace,” Nita said. “It didn’t last long enough. Besides, I was asleep myself. Maybe the message got garbled with something I was dreaming. But normally I would have woken up when something like that came in.”

“You were tired, too,” Kit said.

Nita sighed. “I’m tired all the time,” she said. “It’s just part of the depression, the shrink says. It’ll go away someday.”

“What a big help,” Kit muttered.

Nita laughed then, an oddly wistful sound that startled Kit. “No,” she said. “Really, it is a help. Knowing that someday it
will
go away makes it a little easier now. Not a lot … but every little bit helps, at the moment.”

“So you got a call from the outer limits,” Kit said. “And you’re not sure what it was about … But at least a little of its message got through.”

“Not a whole lot,” Nita said. “I’m just hoping it ‘calls back’ and either gets Dairine this time, or gets me when I’m awake and can make something out of what it’s saying.” She leaned against the fence. “If the first message was from the same person, or people, it didn’t make sense, either. At least not beyond ‘I can’t get off.’”

“‘I can’t get off…’” Kit thought about it, then shook his head. “Maybe it’s just one of those situations where your brain takes a really alien concept and makes the best translation it can until you have more information.”

“I really don’t know,” Nita said. “I’m going to sit down with the manual later and see if I can find something that’ll throw some light on why I’m not able to understand more clearly what’s coming through.”

“It couldn’t have anything to do with—You know.”

Nita shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think this is just something different that I need to grow into learning how to do. It’s not like even people who’ve been wizards for a long time know
every
word in the Speech. I may just need to do some vocabulary building.” She shrugged, glanced absently at her watch: the lunch period would be over shortly. “More research… How about you, though?” She looked up again. “I saw your listing, and Tom’s note on it. You found the kid you were looking for?”

“Yeah, but not so that I could make any real contact with him. Another weird situation.”

He told Nita in words, and a few images shared mind to mind, about where he had found Darryl and lost him again. At the sight of the indistinct shape twisting in a halo of lightnings, and the Lone Power standing there watching in the shadows, Nita sucked in a soft, concerned breath, and shook her head. “Poor guy,” she said.

“Poor him, yeah, and poor me, if our ‘old friend’ had decided to shift Its interest elsewhere,” Kit said. “I could have used you there, if only for moral support.”

Nita looked at the ground for a few moments. “Are you sure I’d do you much good at this point?” she said. “I’m not exactly… stable right now. If I lost my grip in the middle of something important, don’t know what I’d do afterward.”

Kit wasn’t sure what to say to that. Nita was too good a wizard to understate or overstate the problem. If she wasn’t confident enough to work actively at the moment, maybe she was wiser to sideline herself somewhat until she felt more sure of herself. That certainty of what to do and how to do it had saved them both more than once. If her certainty should fail at a crucial moment…

“Your call, Neets,” Kit said. “I don’t want to push you.”

“If you really need me,” Nita said, “all you have to do is yell. You know I’ll be there in a second, if I can figure out how to get to where you are.”

“Ponch can find you,” Kit said. He grinned. “I’m beginning to think there’s not much he
can’t
find… if I can just figure out how to ask him for it.”