A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (16 page)

“Hard to tell,” Tom said. “There are lots of creatures all over the universe who both use the Speech and work to oppose the Lone Power without being wizards.” He shrugged. “For the time being, I’d keep trying to get through, I suppose, and see if you can work inward to a mode where there’s more clarity.”

“Yeah. I’m going to try the lucid dreaming again tonight, I think. So far, that’s where I’ve had the best results.” Nita frowned. “I guess that’s the other thing that’s worried me. The possibility of getting stuck in a dreamworld…”

“I’m not sure I see that as a danger for you,” Tom said. “I’d almost suggest the danger would lie in too much hardheaded practicality… in being too tough on yourself. For the time being, you seem to be okay. Let me know how you progress with your ‘alien,’ anyway.”

“Yeah.”

Nita got up and slipped into her parka, glancing at Tom’s stack of manuals again. “You have to learn that whole
thing
this year?”

“
And
keep Carl from blowing up the house,” Tom said. “Even wizardry may be insufficient to the task. See you later.”

***

“Kit,
querido,
” Kit’s mama said, “if you feed that dog so many dog biscuits, you’ll spoil his appetite for dinner.”

In the kitchen, adding a last few seasonings to what would shortly be a pot of minestrone soup, Kit’s father laughed out loud. “Impossible.”

Kit was sitting on the dining room sofa, trying to read one of the books on autism from the library: this one having to do with art by autistics. He’d picked it up on a hunch, and was finding it more useful than he’d thought, as what he was seeing and reading made some sense to him in terms of what he’d been getting from Darryl. Some of the art in the book was very architectural, preoccupied with scale and stillness: some of it very “representational”, mostly images of people or animals, some of these quite symbolic and some exquisitely detailed. The artists interviewed talked about their attempts to create and express beauty while also communicating the desire for relief from the world’s never-ending assault on their senses, or their understandable anger at a world that put so much stress on “being yourself” but refused to allow them to be who
they
were.

That whole thing,
Kit thought, that desert: it wasn’t Darryl’s mind as such.
It was something he’d
made
. Maybe even as a work of art — but either way, something built for a purpose. Ponch was right: he wouldn’t be
inside
that, except the way an artist gets ‘into’ his painting. The creator’s outside it, surrounding it
…

And I still have to find out why. Is this part of his Ordeal, all this interior building? Ponch said it wasn’t new. Is that whole construct maybe one big communication, a really detailed message?
Impossible to tell as yet: he was going to have to get back in there, track Darryl down when he wasn’t suffering the Lone Power’s attentions and get to the root of this.Meantime he was trying to finish the book, but unfortunately the reading was being made difficult, if not impossible, by the large black muzzle that kept insinuating itself between Kit and the open pages, and the big brown eyes that looked beseechingly up into Kit’s.
Just one more,
Ponch said.

“You’re gonna turn into a blimp,” Kit said.

I’ll be a
happy
blimp,
Ponch said.
What’s a blimp?

Kit’s mama laughed. Kit glanced up at her.

“He’s loud sometimes, honey,” his mama said, handing Kit’s papa the pepper shaker as he held his hand out for it. “I don’t know why
you
can’t hear it.”

Kit’s pop shook his head as he looked down into the pot, grinding pepper in. “From what Kit says, I don’t know why
you
can hear it at all. None of us should be able to.”

“Maybe it’s because I usually feed him in the mornings,” Kit’s mama said. “I’m used to hearing him complain that he’s not getting enough.” She made a kind of
rrrgh
noise that went up into a whine at the end, a fair imitation of Ponch’s reaction to an empty dish when there was someone around who could give him the rest of the can of dog food.

Ponch’s eyes moved at that, a sideways glance.
Her accent’s not bad. I could teach her Cyene.

“Let’s not deal with this right now,” Kit said. He could just see his mom going down the street to try to talk sense to Tinkerbell.

One more!
Ponch said.

“One,” Kit said. He gave Ponch the last dog biscuit in the box, put the book aside, and got up to throw the box away.

“The onions done yet?” his mama said.

“Nearly,” said Kit’s pop, as Kit stomped the box flat to make it take up less room in the recycling. Behind Kit, the emphatic crunching noises by the sofa came to an end, and Ponch ran into the kitchen.
Out?

“Sure,” Kit said, opening the door. A fierce cold wind came in as Ponch shot out.

“Shut that, sweetie. It’s freezing!” Kit’s mama said.

“Gonna snow tonight, they said on the TV,” said Kit’s pop, picking up the frying pan in which the onions had been sizzling, and scraping them out into the soup as Kit shut the door.

“A lot?” Kit said.

“Six to eight inches.”

Kit sighed. It wouldn’t be anything like enough to make them keep school closed on Monday. That would take at least a few feet. Not for the first time he wished that it wasn’t unethical to talk a snowstorm into dumping three feet of snow onto his immediate neighborhood. It was fun to think about, but the trouble he would have gotten into with Tom and Carl, not to mention the Powers That Be, would have made the pleasure short-lived.

Still, if I told the snowstorm to dump, say, twelve feet of snow just on the school, and then only enough everywhere else so that everybody could have fun for a day; say six inches or so
…

Kit sighed again. Though such a course of action would be less trouble to the snowplow crews, the emergency services, and everybody else who wanted to go on about their lives, something like that would cause a whole lot of talk, and still get him in trouble. But the image of his school completely buried under a giant snowdrift made him smile. “By the way, Pop,” Kit said, “is the TV still okay?”

“Seems fine,” his pop said. “Every now and then the thing insists on showing me a news program from some other planet, but…” He shrugged. “As long as nothing happens to interfere with the basketball over the weekend, I don’t mind seeing who’s grown a new head or whatever. Darlin’, you know what I need?”

“Less time on the couch watching basketball?” Kit’s mama suggested.

“Dream on. Celery seed.”

“We’re out of it.”

“You’re just saying that because you hate celery.”

“I know celery seed is different from celery, or celery salt. But we’re still out of it. Look for yourself.”

Kit’s pop went to the cupboard to look. Kit, looking at his mama, thought that her expression was far too innocent. She caught him looking at her, and said, “Isn’t Ponch a long time out, Kit? He hates being out this long when it’s cold. But he hasn’t scratched.”

She had a point there, though Kit thought she was more intent on him not saying anything incriminating about celery seed. Kit grinned. “I’ll go see what he’s doing,” he said, and got his parka off the hook.

He went out, shutting the door hurriedly behind him, and looked up and down the driveway for Ponch. To his surprise, Ponch was sitting at the street end of the driveway, looking up at the sky.

Kit walked down to him, looking up, too. The clouds were, indeed, coming in low and fast from the south on that wind. Past and above the houses across the street, only a few streaks and scraps of the low sunset remained in the west, a bleak, bleached peach color against the encroaching stripes of dark gray. Westward, the reddish spark of Mars could just be seen through the filmy front edges of one of the incoming banks of cloud.

Ponch looked over his shoulder at Kit as Kit came to stand next to him. “You okay?” Kit said to him in the Speech.

Pretty much.

Kit wondered about that. “I mean, about what happened the other day.” He reached down to scratch the dog’s head.

I think so.

The clouds drew together in the west, blanking Mars out, slowly shutting down the last embers of the sunset. “What
did
happen?”

I saw something.

“Yeah? What was it?”

Not that way,
Ponch said.
I mean, I noticed something. I never really noticed it before.

Kit waited.

You get hurt sometimes,
Ponch said.
That makes me sad.

“Yeah, well, I get sad when you’re hurt, too.”

That’s right. And your dam and your sire and your littermates, they hurt sometimes, too. So does Nita. I noticed that. But it didn’t seem to matter as much as
you
hurting.

Ponch paused for a long time.
But then I saw him: Darryl. And what That One was doing to him, and how it hurt him. And he didn’t do anything to deserve that. It was
awful,
the way he was hurting. And that started to hurt me. And then I thought, Why doesn’t the others’ hurt make me feel like this? And then I felt bad about myself.

Kit hardly knew what to say. It wasn’t that it was a bad thing for his dog to learn about compassion, but that the lesson would come all at once, like this, came as a surprise.

And the others didn’t deserve to be hurt, either,
Ponch said, looking up at Kit.
Nita didn’t do anything bad, for her mother to die. Why should she be hurt like that? Why should Dairine? Or your sire or dam?
They’re good. Why do they have to suffer when they haven’t been bad? It’s not fair!

Kit bowed his head. This line of reasoning all too closely reflected some of his own late-night thoughts over the past couple of months. And all the easy answers—about the Powers That Be and the Lone Power, and all the other additional theories or answers that might be suggested by either religion or science—suddenly sounded hollow and pathetic.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I really don’t know.”

I felt sad for them all,
Ponch said.
Sad for everything, because it shouldn’t have to be that way. All of a sudden I had to howl, that’s all.
He looked embarrassed.

Kit couldn’t think of anything to do but get down on one knee and hug Ponch, and ruffle his fur. After a moment Ponch said,
I’m not going to howl now. It’s all right.

“I know,” Kit said. But he wasn’t sure that it was “all right.”

Ponch looked at him again.
So what do we do?
he said.
To make it right?

That answer, at least, Kit was sure of. “Just get on with work,” he said. “That’s what wizards do.”

And their dogs.

“And their dogs,” Kit said. “After dinner tonight, huh? We’ll go looking for Darryl again. We’ll see if we can’t get a word with him… find out what’s going on. Then he can get himself out of there, and we can get back to doing what we usually do.”

Right.

They walked back up the driveway together, and Kit let Ponch into the house, hurriedly shutting the door. The wind outside was beginning to rise. He ditched his coat in a hurry, because his pop had already carried the soup pot to the table, setting it on a trivet, and his mama was putting out bowls and spoons. “No Carmela tonight?” Kit said, because there were only three bowls.

“No, she’s over at Miguel’s with some of the other kids. A homework thing.” His mama sat down, took her spoon, and tasted the soup as Kit’s pop sat down.

“Oh, honey, that’s so good!” his mama said. “Even without the celery seed. Who’d believe most of it came out of a can? What else did you put in there?”

“Genius,” Kit’s father said, and grinned.

Kit was inclined to agree. He finished his first bowl in record time, and reached for the ladle to serve himself some more.

“Another satisfied customer,” his pop said.

Kit nodded, already working on the second bowl.

“You’ve got that fueling-up look,” his pop said, as he chased the last few spoonfuls of soup around his own bowl. “You going out on business tonight, son?”

“Yup.”

“How long?”

“Not late,” Kit said. “I don’t think, anyway. Back by bedtime.”

“Yours, or mine?”

“Mine, Pop.”

“Good,” his dad said. “What you’re doing is important … and so is getting your rest.” His father gave him what Kit usually thought of as “the eye,” a faintly warning look. “You’re looking a little pooped, this past day or so. Try to relax a little over the weekend, okay?”

“If I can,” Kit said.

His pop looked like he was going to say something, then changed his mind, and reached for the ladle himself. “Hey, who took all the beans?”

“That would be me,” Kit’s mama said.

“Now I’m going to have to make another pot of this!”

“How terrible for us all,” she said.

Kit finished his own bowlful and, smiling, got up and put his bowl in the sink. Then he went to get his parka and Ponch’s “leash.”

***

They stood out in the backyard a little while later, in the near darkness, and Kit looked down at Ponch. “Ready?” he said.

All ready.

“You’ve got Darryl’s scent?”

It’s faint,
Ponch said.
We’re going to have to walk for a while.

Kit checked the force-field spell, which he had integrated into the leash-wizardry, and saw that it was charged, up and running; it would keep hostile environments out for a good while, and protect the two of them from deadly force for at least long enough to come up with a better, more focused defense. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Ponch pulled the bright leash of wizardry taut, stepped forward, and vanished into a darkness deeper than anything in Kit’s backyard. Kit stepped after him; the blackness folded in all around.

They did, indeed, have to walk for some time. Kit kept a careful eye on the line of wizardry stretching between him and Ponch, watching to make sure that it was drawing power correctly, and that the faint “diagnostic” glow of light running up and down it was doing so regularly. Beyond that, there wasn’t much for Kit to do for a long while except keep walking through the dark, watching the ever-so-faintly illuminated shape of his dog as Ponch led the way.