A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (6 page)

Kit nodded. “Or maybe the One’s just saying, ‘Don’t be so sure you know it all.’”

Tom stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Could be…” And he smiled. “See that? Being a wizard makes philosophers out of most of us eventually. As long as that’s not
all
it makes of you, you’re okay. Anyway, now you have to plan how to approach Darryl.” Tom chewed one lip briefly. “You may have to go to his home, secretly. But maybe you’d have better luck at his school.”

“I’m not wild about sneaking around in his house,” Kit said. “School, yeah. I’d thought about that, too. But there are still too many ways to be noticed. I was considering another option.”

“Oh?”

“Ponch has been able to treat someone’s interior landscape like an exterior universe before,” Kit said. “He can go into Darryl’s head and take me with him … and maybe Darryl will find it easier to talk to me that way.”

Tom brooded over that for a moment. “My initial reaction,” he said, “would be to say no. We’re uncertain enough about how the heck Ponch does what he does. Add that set of imponderables to whatever’s going on inside Darryl’s head…” He shook his head. “It starts getting uncomfortably complex.”

“We’re wizards,” Kit said. “We’re supposed to learn how to get comfortable with the uncomfortably complex.”

Tom gave Kit a look that would have seemed annoyed if there hadn’t been a resigned quality to it as well. “In theory,” he said, “of course, you’re right. But turning theory into practice without taking due care and attention can screw things up big-time.”

Kit sat quietly, knowing better than to argue his case too hard with a Senior: that was a sure way to make it seem like he had some kind of ulterior motive.

Tom looked off into the middle distance, pondering. “Yet here’s this atypically prolonged Ordeal,” he said, “and we can’t just let the kid go on suffering unnecessarily for the sake of caution and correctness. Some more information gathering, at least, seems prudent. But I want you to be very,
very
cautious, and watch yourself at least as carefully as you’re watching him. Even normal Ordeals are subjective, and getting another entity’s subjectivity involved with one, even temporarily, brings considerable dangers with it.
This
Ordeal, where the candidate is an autistic—” He shook his head. “He’ll very likely have unique coping mechanisms in place that it might not be easy to recognize as such, at first glance. I have to be concerned about the possibility of disturbing those, or adding to whatever trauma he may already be suffering secondary to the Ordeal.” Tom rubbed his eyes. “I really hate this kind of judgment call. It’s tough to know whether
anything
you do might be dangerous.”

“If you don’t judge, though,” Kit said, “or at least decide to do
something,
nothing gets done!”

Tom sat still and looked out the window, where a cold wind was rattling some brown, unfallen beech leaves in the hedge beside his house. “There you’re right,” he said. “Not that that makes me any happier. But judgment calls are one of the other things we’re here for: the One has better things to do than micromanage us.”

He looked back at Kit. “So go do what you can,” Tom said. “Let me know how it comes out. But I want to really emphasize that you need to stay in the observer’s role. An Ordeal this prolonged is strange enough to get extremely dangerous, especially if you stray out of your appropriate role.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Tom’s expression got slightly less severe. “I’ve heard that one before,” he said. “From myself, among many others. But, particularly, I want you to watch yourself when you’re inside his head. Talking to Darryl is a good idea… but getting too synced to his worldview may make that more difficult, not less. Especially since when you’re inside someone else’s head and using wizardry, no matter how careful you are, there’s always the danger of rewriting his name in the Speech. Do that in such a way that Darryl buys into the rewrite, and you take the risk of excising something that makes the difference between him passing his Ordeal and him never coming out of it. Walk real softly, Kit.”

“We will.”

***

Kit left Tom’s by way of another transit spell, one that let him out in a sheltered spot by the town library. He located a few useful-looking books and checked them out, then went home and got on the computer in the living room and started websurfing, pulling up weblogs written by autistics and their families. His mother was up when he got home, showering; by the time she came out, wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair, Kit was hunched over the desk lying on the living room floor with papers and books all around him. His mama paused, looking over his shoulder at one of the printouts he was reading. “Autism?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She headed past him into the kitchen to find her big mug, filled it with the coffee that Kit’s pop had left in the pot for her, sugared it, and came back in to sit down on the sofa behind him. “Big subject, son,” she said.

“You know much about it?”

She shook her head. “It’s not a specialty,” she said, which he’d suspected: his mama worked mostly in med-surg. She drank some coffee and sighed. “There are a lot of categories strung all along a long spectrum of neural issues and deficits. There’s a lot of argument about the causes—differences in brain chemistry, rogue antibodies, God knows what all—but I really think we know more about what
isn’t
responsible than what
is
.” She raised one hand in a “who knows” gesture, then let it fall. “But it’s definitely nothing to do with vaccines, or raising your children wrong. …What’s this about? Is this something for school?”

“No. It’s what Tom wanted to see me about.”

His mama’s eyes went wide. “Your missing person? He’s autistic? Oh, my God. His parents must be out of their minds with worry. Do you think you’re going to be able to find him?”

“I already have,” Kit said, sitting down at the table and tilting his chair back to rock on its rear legs. “He’s at school. Centennial, over in Baldwin.”

“What? Well, that’s a relief! I thought you’d meant he’d
vanished
. So how is he missing?”

“Just a figure of speech, Mama.” Kit had been wondering for a while how much detail he should give his parents about his wizardry. Now it occurred to him that he should have been giving them a lot more, if only to keep them from worrying. “When the wizardry first comes to you, it doesn’t come all at once. You get a test first: your Ordeal. If you pass, you’re a wizard. If you don’t…”

Immediately, the look on his mother’s face suggested to him that he might have misstepped. “You
die?” his
mother said.

“Not always,” Kit said. “Sometimes you just lose the power that was given you to take the test with.” His mama was looking at him rather narrowly now, and Kit realized that she would immediately detect any attempt to soften this. “But it’s true that some kids don’t come back,” Kit said. “Some disappearances are failed Ordeals. Maybe a few percent.”

His mother sat, quietly digesting that, and had another drink of her coffee. “So this Ordeal,” she said. “He’s having some kind of problem with it?”

“He’s been in the middle of it for a long time,” Kit said. “He may need help. And I can’t help thinking the autism has something to do with it.” He sighed. “I’ve been reading all kinds of stuff, but it’s all been written by nonwizards, and they’re not much help for working out what might be going on with him. And he might not be able to tell me… in which case I’m going to have to get in there and take a look myself.”

“In his
head?
” His mother looked alarmed. “Kit, my love, I don’t claim to understand the details of what you’re doing… but wouldn’t that be a violation of his privacy?”

“It might be,” Kit said. “But couldn’t you make a case that CPR is, too, if someone’s in a dangerous condition and they can’t tell you to go ahead? You’d do it anyway.”

“To save a life, yes.”

“That’s what this might be,” Kit said. “I have to find out. Ordeals are crucial by definition, Mama. I had some help on mine. Maybe now I get to pay those favors forward.”

“So you get inside his head how, exactly?” his mama said. “Is this what Carmela keeps describing as ‘magic telepathy’?”

Kit shook his head. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “I’m still working out how to describe it. Ponch sees it as making a new world to go to… or finding that world ready-made. Once you make it, or find it, you go there.”

“
Ponch
sees it…” His mother shook her head, sloshed the coffee around in her cup, drank some, and made a face: it was going cold.

“We’ll go there and look around,” Kit said. “We’ll see what his world looks like to him. Assuming we can get in. If that doesn’t work … I’ll have to think of something else. But at least this is a place to start.”

His mother put the cup down and pushed it away. “If you do actually get to talk to him,” she said, looking thoughtful, “I seem to remember that there’s a theory about some autistics having trouble with interactions, not because they’re out of contact with what’s going on around them, but because they’re too
much
in contact, because it’s too intense to take. And structure’s really important to them then… the structures they’ve built up over time to deal with the pressure. If theirs has been violated by recent events, communication might be tougher than usual. There might be a lot of ways the communication could look that you wouldn’t necessarily be expecting, so you’d need to be willing to dump your preconceptions about that.”

Kit nodded. “This is all kind of strange…”

“Not as such,” said his mother. “Different, yes. But the difference, maybe that’s key, in its way. There are so many different ways that autism affects people: it’s a spectrum, after all. I wonder if a lot of the trouble with helping them is caused by trying to pigeonhole them into narrow categories to make it easier. When there are probably as many kinds of autism as there are autistics.”

That was a theme that Kit had already spotted in the reading. “Well… I don’t have to do anything instantly. But as soon as I can…” He sighed. “I just don’t want to take the chance of screwing him up somehow.” And then he remembered something. “One thing, though. I really need to take tomorrow off to work on this. Can you call school and get me off?”

She scowled at him. “You don’t have a test or anything tomorrow?”

“Huh? No.”

“I’m not going to make a habit of this…”

“I’m not asking you to, Mama! But it’s going to take more than just lunch hour to make a start on this, and I don’t want to have to run off all of a sudden in the middle of something that’s going to make a difference.”

His mother sat thinking. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. You can have a stomach bug or something.”

“No, Mama! Don’t lie to them. Just tell them I need a personal day.”

She gave him a slightly approving look. “Okay.”

“Thanks, Mama. You’re the best.” He got up and kissed her, and took her coffee cup. “Want some more?”

“Yes.” His mother leaned back on the sofa. “Two sugars. And then I want you to explain to me why I can hear the DVD player and the remote yelling at each other in Japanese in the middle of the night.”

Kit shut his eyes briefly in horror, and went to get the coffee.

Quite early the next morning, Kit came downstairs to find his sister sitting in front of the TV with a plate of half-finished toast, and a most peculiar expression on her face. “Brother dear…” Carmela said.

This tone of voice usually meant that something bad was going to happen.
And I haven’t even had my cornflakes yet,
Kit thought. “What?”

“I need to talk to you about the TV.”

“Uh … what about it?” He went into the kitchen to make a start at least on the cornflakes, before she really got rolling.

“Why did Pop tell me not to watch it?”

“Uh,” Kit said, “maybe I should ask you first—if Pop told you not to watch it, then what’re you doing?”

If he hoped that taking the offensive with his sister would help him even a little, the hope was misplaced. “Why do what they say until you can figure out why?” Carmela said from the living room. “And with Pop at work and Mama asleep, there’s no way I’m going to find out the
whys
from
them
for hours. So I ask you, instead … while having a look myself.”

Kit said nothing, just rummaged enthusiastically in the fridge for the milk.

“Most of the shows don’t make much sense,” Carmela said. “And a lot of others are in weird languages. This has to do with all the yelling in Japanese the other day, am I right?”

“To a certain extent,” Kit said, getting a bowl out of the cupboard and then opening a drawer for a spoon.

His sister sighed. “You know,” she said, “you’re bad at covering your tracks when you’ve busted something. Hey, that’s a local phone number!”

Kit’s eyes widened with shock. He hurried in to find his sister goggling at a screen full of billowing white smoke and a number with a 516 area code … both of which, to his vast relief, then dissolved into whangy guitar music and an offer for cut-rate Elvis CDs.

Carmela looked up at Kit, registering his reaction, and shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re into this retro stuff,” she said, changing channels to her more usual morning fare, the channel with all the cartoons. “It’s a good thing you’ve got Nita, because it’s gonna be a long time before anybody else wants to date you, the taste you’ve got.”

“I have not ‘got’ Nita,” Kit said through gritted teeth. “And as for taste, you shouldn’t be talking. Tom and Jerry cartoons? Give me a break.”

“I’m waiting for the Road Runner,” Carmela said, managing to sound both pitying and incredibly stuck-up. “A symbol of innocence endlessly pursued by the banality of evil.”

Kit went back to his cornflakes. “I wish the evil
I
keep running into was a little more banal,” he muttered as he picked up his bowl and started eating. The Lone Power’s favorite tool, entropy, had already struck locally: his cornflakes had gone soggy.

Resigned, he sat down and ate them anyway. Shortly Carmela came wandering into the kitchen and stuck her head in the refrigerator. “You got today off, huh?”