The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (12 page)

“I think we need more milk.”

“I think we need to buy your sister a cow,” her mother said, and went off to get dressed.

Nita went up to her room to kill some time until she could reach Kit. It was annoying to be mad at someone, but it was even worse to discover that you were wrong to be mad at them, and worse yet not to be able to apologize to them and get it over with.
I’m never gonna make
this
mistake again!

Or at least I sure hope I won’t … because it just hurts too much.

***

When Kit got over to Tom and Carl’s place with Ponch, he wasn’t surprised to find Tom already working—sitting out on the patio in jeans and T-shirt and a light jacket, typing away on his netbook at the table next to the big square koi pond. “It’s the only quiet time I get before the phone starts ringing,” Tom said, letting Kit in the side gate. “Come on in, tell me what you found…”

Over a cup of tea, while Ponch sprawled under the table, Kit described what Ponch had been doing, and Tom looked at the “hard” report in his Senior’s version of the manual, which was presently about the size of a phone book. Tom shook his head, turning over pages and reading what Kit could see even from across the table was a very abstruse analysis indeed, in very small print.

“This is a new one on me,” he said at last. “I’ll ask Carl to have a look later; the worldgating and timesliding end of things is more his department. But I’m not even sure that what Ponch is doing
is
either of those. And I can’t find any close cognates to this kind of behavior in any other wizards’ reports.”

“Really?” Kit said. “How far does that go back?”

“All the way,” Tom said absently. “Well, nearly. Some of the material before the first hundredth of a second of the life of this universe is a little sketchy. Privacy issues, possibly.”

He shook his head and closed the book. “Kit, I’m not sure
where
you were. I’m not sure it can even be classified as a
where,
as a physical universe that, given the right geometries, can be described in terms of its direction and distance from other neighboring universes. Ponch’s place might be another dimension, another continuum even, completely out of the local sheaf of universes. Or an entirely different state of being, not physical the way we understand it at all.” He shrugged. “He’s found something very unusual that’s going to take some exploring before we begin to understand it. At least your whole experience is stored in the manual, and you’ll want to add notes to it later. It’ll help the other wizards who’ll be starting analysis on it.”

“I thought your version of the manual was going to be able to explain this.”

Tom leaned back. “There’s never any guarantee of that. We’re told new things
about
the universe all the time. But we’re not routinely told what they
mean.
Wizardry is like science that way. We’re expected to figure out the meaning of the raw data ourselves.”

“So what do I do?”

“Well, what were you thinking of doing?”

“What Ponch suggested,” Kit said. “Going into that, that ‘state,’ I guess, and seeing if I could do what he was doing: make things.”

“Probably not a bad idea,” Tom said. “You seem to have come out of this all right. But don’t get careless. Exploratory wizardry can be dangerous, even though you
are
working for the Good Guys.”

The patio door slid open, and there was Carl, in jeans and flip-flops and an NYPD T-shirt. “I heard voices,” he said.

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to disturb you—”

“Not
your
voices,” Carl said, rueful. “The voices of certain fur-bearing persons who’re in the kitchen right now, eating anything that doesn’t run away fast enough.”

“Dog biscuits!” Ponch said, and immediately got up and went over to jump on Carl in a neighborly way.

“Go on in. They’ll show you where the box is,” Carl said, and Ponch ran into the house. “If there’s anything they know, it’s that.”

“Where’s
ours?
” came a chorus of voices from the koi pond.

“It’s too early. And you’re all overweight, anyway,” Carl said, sitting down at the table.

A noise of boos and bubbly razzes came from the pond.

“Everybody’s a critic,” Carl said. “What have we got?”

“Take a look,” Tom said, and pushed his copy of the manual over to Carl.

“Huh,” Carl said after a moment’s reading. Then he looked over his shoulder in the direction of the continuing racket. “Will you guys hold it
down?
” He glanced over at Kit. “See, if you’d waited half an hour, you could have had all the fish breath you wanted.”

Kit laughed. “What do you make of this?” Tom said.

Carl shook his head. “Once again, the universes remind us of their most basic law; they’re not only stranger than we imagine, they’re stranger than we
can
imagine. Which is what makes them so much fun.” He turned a page. “I really don’t understand this, but there are a couple of people I can call later. You going to go back there?” he said to Kit.

“Yeah, when I get back home.”

“All right. Try an experiment Try to affect the space where you find yourself, the way Ponch did, and see how that works. But also, see if you can bring something back with you. It doesn’t have to be anything big. A leaf, a pebble. But something to analyze might help us determine the nature of the space, or whatever, that it comes from.”

“Just test it first to make sure it’s not antimatter,” Tom said.

“Uh,
yeah,
” Kit said. He had no desire to be totally annihilated.

“It’s just a thought,” Carl said. “Antimatter universes are well outnumbered by orthomatter ones, but you can’t tell just by looking.”

“I’ll make a note,” Kit said.

“Anything from Nita?” said Tom.

“Uh, not yet,” Kit said. “I think, besides whatever she’s working on, she may be wanting to take a little holiday from group spelling. We were having a rough time there for a while.”

“Happens all the time,” Carl said, leaning back in his chair. “You get stuck at different stages of mastery, and things can get a little bumpy. It passes, as a rule. But it can be tough when one partner or member of a group is working faster than the other, or in a different paradigm.”

Kit thought about that. “I, uh… Listen, do you guys ever fight?”

Carl and Tom looked at each other in astonishment, and then at Kit, and both laughed. “Oh, Kit! Constantly!” Tom said. “And it’s not just about the joint practice, either. There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the stuff we have to deal with. Finding time just to be friends can be tough, but it has to be made. And when we don’t make it, we get sore at each other more easily.”

“It always came so naturally with Neets,” Kit said. “I guess maybe I didn’t think much about having to work on it.”

“Believe it, you have to,” said Carl. “And then we have what we laughably call ‘normal lives’ as well. I have a job and an office to go to, Tom has to sit here and hit his deadlines, and there are bills to pay and work to do around the house and everything else. But first and foremost comes the wizardry, and keeping it part of ‘normal life’ is always a challenge. Sure, we bite each other sometimes. Sometimes it takes a while to patch things up. Don’t let it throw you. But don’t let it take too long, either.”

“No,” Kit said. “It’s funny. I’m glad I got this last job done. It’s useful. But now I don’t know what to do next. And Neets always knows; she always has an idea for something else that needs doing. Sometimes it drives me nuts. Now it feels weird not to have her bugging me about ‘the next thing.’”

“You’ll work it out,” Carl said. “Sorting out the details of your practice in the early part of your wizardly career is the exciting part.”

“Yeah.” Kit got up. “I’ll let you know how it comes out”

“Right.”

He recovered Ponch from pigging out on dog biscuits and walked home from Tom and Carl’s, giving Ponch a chance to run ahead and lose some of the excitement. The route took Kit past Nita’s, not entirely accidentally. He knew that sometimes she got up early. But all the curtains at her house were still drawn, all the doors were closed, and the car was in the garage. Kit reached into his jacket pocket, slipped his hand around the manual. There was no fizz about its cover.

He sighed and went on by, and a few minutes later they were back at Kit’s house. It was still quiet inside as he went down the driveway and into the back, and he and Ponch took themselves into the back of the yard, among the sassafras trees, where they were out of view from the Macarthurs’ and Kings’ houses.

“You ready?” Kit said to Ponch,

“Let’s go!”

And they stepped together once more into the dark.

***

For Nita, the afternoon took its own sweet time going by. There was still no sign of Kit. Her mother had gone off to the shop after lunch, and Dairine went off, too, and took Spot with her. Nita sighed and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. She tried to do some work with the manual, but every time she touched it, its cover was still and fizzless under her hands, and she put it down as quickly as she picked it up. She even dallied with the idea of doing some work on a science report that was due in a couple of weeks, but the thought of actually starting it before she needed to was repulsive.
When I first got into wizardry, I’d never have thought it was possible to be bored again,
Nita thought,
but it seems that a wizard really
can
do anything, given enough time.

Around four o’clock she was back in her bedroom, having just finished a bologna sandwich, when she heard a
whoomp!
of displaced air in the backyard. Nita looked hurriedly out the back window but saw that it was only Dairine, with Spot spidering along behind her. She sighed, slumped a little, and took down a book to read.

She had read no more than a page or two when Dairine came in, looking out of sorts. “Where’ve you been?” Nita asked, chucking the book away, since it was obvious she wasn’t going to get any reading done, either.

“Europa.”

“Again?”

Dairine frowned. “Neets,” she said wearily, and sat on her bed, “I’m having some problems.”

“You?”

“Please,” Dairine said. She was staring at the bedspread as if it were written over with the secrets of the universe instead of a slightly faded stars-and-moons pattern. After a while she said in a low voice, as if embarrassed, “I’m not getting the kind of results I should be. And nothing like the kind I was getting a while ago.”

Nita pushed back from her desk and folded her arms, putting her feet up.
Well,
she thought,
here it is at last.
The urge to gloat was definitely there: but to her own surprise, Dairine looked too unhappy for Nita to feel like indulging it.
Or maybe it’s not just
her
unhappiness in the local space,
she thought.
There are too many ways to increase entropy, and that’s not a thing we do…

Nita shook her head at last. “Dair, it happens to all of us. You lose your initial edge and your first big blast of power: it’s inevitable. Then you move on to the next stage, start feeling your way to where your specialty’s going to be. It’s not always what you first thought it’d be. Tom says it’s real common for a first specialty to shift, and for your power levels to jump around a lot when you’re new to the Art.”

Her sister sat there, still staring at the quilt. This worn-down look wasn’t something Nita was used to seeing in her sister. Dairine’s energy levels were usually such that you wanted to hook her up to storage batteries and start making serious money selling power into the national electrical grid. “I don’t care if it is normal,” Dairine said at last. “I
hate
it.”

“You think you’re the only one? I wasn’t wild about my first flush wearing off, either. But you get used to it.”

“Why do we
have
to get used to it?” Dairine burst out “What good am I if I’m not effective?”

“You mean, what good are you if you can’t solve every problem you come up against in three seconds?” Nita said. “Well, obviously, none at all. Guess you’d better go straight to the bathroom and flush yourself.”

Dairine stared at her sister.

“Or find a black hole and jump in,” Nita said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “Tom says there’s a lot of interest in the time-dilation effects, especially on the middle-sized ones. Be sure to file a report with the Powers when you get back. Assuming this universe is still here.”

Nita waited for the explosion. There wasn’t one. She opened her eyes again to find Dairine staring at her as if she were something from Mars. Actually, Dairine had stared at things from Mars with a lot less astonishment

“What?” Dairine said.

Nita had to smile, even though Dairine’s whining was annoying her. “Sorry. I was going to say, you remind me of me when I was your age.”

Dairine made a face. “
There’s
a horrible thought.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, and put her face down against them. “The last thing I want is to be that normal again.” She produced an elaborate shudder, turning
normal
into a swear word.

“You want to watch that, Dari,” Nita said. “Just because we’re wizards doesn’t mean we’re any better than ‘normal’ people. The minute you start acting like there’s a ‘them’ and an ‘us,’ you’re in trouble. The only thing that makes wizards different is that we have the power to do more than usual to help. And helping other people, as part of keeping the world running, is the only reason the power exists in the first place.” It was a lesson Nita had learned at some cost, having done enough dumb things in her time until she got it straight.

Dairine gave Nita a noncommittal look. “Edgy, aren’t we? Still nothing from Kit?”

Nita made a face. “No. But just let it sit for the time being, okay? Meanwhile, what was their problem? The amoebas or whatever they are on Europa?”

“They call themselves
hnlt
,” Dairine said. “And how they manage to do that when they’ve only got one cell each, I don’t know.”

“‘Life knows its way,’” Nita said, quoting a proverb commonplace to wizards in more than one star system. “And personality arrives right behind it. Sooner than you’d think, a lot of the time.”