The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (2 page)

“Oh, come on, Betty, they’re not that bad!”

“You put
your
head in our closet, take a sniff, and tell me that again. Assuming you make it out of there alive… If you can even
tell
anymore. I think all those flowers you work with are killing your sense of smell—”

“You don’t complain about them when I bring home roses.”

“It counts for more when somebody brings roses home if he’s not also the florist!”

Nita’s dad laughed and started to sing in off-key imitation of Neil Diamond, “Youuu don’t bring me floooooowerrrs…,” as he headed for the back bedroom.

Nita’s mom raised her eyebrows. “Harold Edward Callahan,” she said as she turned her attention back to her list making, “you are potentially shortening your lifespan…”

The only answer was louder singing, in a key that her father favored but few other human beings could have recognized. Nita hid her smile until her mother was sufficiently distracted, and then went back to her own business, making a few more notes on the clean page. After some minutes of not being able to think of anything to add, she finally closed the notebook and pushed it away. She’d done as much with the spell as she could do on paper. The rest of it was going to have to wait to be tested out in the real world.

She sighed as she picked up her copy of the wizard’s manual and dropped it on top of her notebook. Her mother glanced over at her. “Finished?”

“In a moment. The manual’s acquiring what I just did.”

Her mother raised her eyebrows. “Doesn’t it go the other way around? I thought you got the spells out of the book in the first place.”

“Not all of them. Sometimes you have to build something completely new if there’s no precedent spell to help you along. Then when you test the new spell out and it works okay, the manual picks it up and makes it available for other wizards to use. Tons of what’s in here originally came from other wizards, over a lot of years.” She gave the wizard’s manual a little nudge. “Some wizards don’t do anything much
but
write spells and construct custom wizardries. Tom, for example.”

“Really,” Nita’s mother said, looking down at her grocery list again. “I thought he wrote things for TV.”

“He does that, too. Even wizards have to pay the bills,” Nita said. She got up and stretched. “Mom, I should get going.”

Her mother gave her a thoughtful look. “You know what I’m going to say…”

“‘Be careful.’ It’s okay, Mom. This spell isn’t anything dangerous.”

“I’ve heard
that
one before.”

“No, seriously. It’s just taking out the garbage, this one.”

Her mother’s expression went suddenly wicked. “While we’re on the subject—”

“It’s Dairine’s turn today,” Nita said hurriedly, shrugging into the denim jacket she’d left over the chair earlier. “See ya later, Mom…” She kissed her mom, grabbed the manual from on top of her notebook, and headed out the door.

In the backyard, she paused to look around. Long shadows trailed from various dusty lawn furniture; it was only six-thirty, but the sun was low. The summer had been short for her in some ways—half of it lost to the trip to Ireland and the rush of events that had followed. Now it seemed as if, within barely a finger-snap of summer, the fall was well under way. All around her, with a wizard’s ear Nita could hear the murmur of the birches and maples beginning to relax toward the winter’s long rest, leaning against the earth and waiting with mild expectation for the brief brilliant fireworks of leaf-turn; the long lazy conversation of foliage moving in wind beginning to slow as the foliage started getting ready to let go and the hectic immediacy of summer wound down.

She leaned against the trunk of the rowan tree in the middle of the backyard and looked up through the down-drooping branches with their stalks of slender oval leaves, the green of them slowly browning now, the dulled color only pointing up the many heavy clusters of glowing BB-sized fruit that glinted scarlet from every branch in the late, brassy light. “Nice berries this year, Liused,” Nita said.

It took a few moments for her to hear the answer: even with the Speech, there was no dropping instantly into a tree’s time sense from a human life’s speed.
Not bad this time out, not bad at all,
the tree said modestly.
Going on assignment?

“Just a quick one,” Nita said. “I hope.”

Need anything from met?

“No, that last replacement’s still in good shape. Thanks, though.”

You’re always welcome. Go well, then.

She leaned for a moment more to let her time sense come back up to its normal speed, then patted the rowan tree’s trunk and went out into the open space by the birdbath. There she paused for a little to just listen to it all: life, going about its business all around her—the scratchy self-absorbed noise of the grass growing, the faint rustle and hum of bugs and earthworms contentedly digging in the ground, the persistent little string music of a garden spider fastening web strand to web strand in a nearby bush—repetitive, intense, and mathematically precise. Everything was purposeful. Everything was, if not actually intelligent, then at least aware (if not necessarily
self
-aware)—even things that science didn’t usually think were aware, because science didn’t yet know how to measure or overhear the kinds of consciousness they had.

Nita took a deep breath, let it out again. This was the core of wizardry for her: hearing it all going, and keeping it all going—putting in a word in the Speech here or a carefully constructed spell there, fixing broken things, helping what was hurt to heal and get going again… and being astonished, delighted, sometimes scared to death in the process, but never,
ever
bored.

Nita said a single word in the Speech, at the same time stroking one hand across the empty air in search of the access to the little pinched-in pocket of time space where she kept some of her wizardly equipment.

Responsive to the word she’d spoken, a little tab of clear air went hard between her fingers. She pulled it from left to right like a zipper, and then slipped her hand into the opening and felt around. A second later she came out with a piece of equipment she usually kept ready, a peeled rod of rowan wood that had been left out in full moonlight. She touched the claudication closed again, then looked around her and said to the grass, “Excuse me…”

The grass muttered, unconcerned; it knew the drill. Nita lifted the rod and began, with a speed born of much practice, to write out the single long sentence of the short-haul transit spell in the air around her.

The symbols came alive as a delicate thread of pale white fire, stretching around her from the point of the rowan wand as she turned: a chord of a circle, an arc, then the circle almost complete as she came to the end of the spell, writing in her “signature,” her name in the Speech, the long chain of syllables and symbols that described who and what she was today.

With a final figure-eight flourish, she knotted the spell closed, pulled the wand back, and let the transit circle drop to the grass around her, an arabesqued chain of light. Turning slowly, Nita began to read the sentence, feeling the power lean in around her as she did so. The pressure and attention of local space started focusing in on what Nita was saying she wanted of it: relocation to
this
set of spatial coordinates, life support set to planet-surface defaults—

The silence began to build around her, the sound of the world listening. Nita read faster, feeling the words of the Speech reach down their roots to the Power That had first spoken them and taught them what they meant. The lightning of that first intention struck up through them and then through Nita, as she said the last word, completed the spell, and flung it loose to work—

Wham!
The displacement of transported air always sounded loud on the inside of the spell, even if you’d engineered the wizardry to keep it from making a lot of noise on the outside. The crack of sound, combined with the sudden blazing column of light from the activated transit, left Nita momentarily blind and deaf.

Only for a moment, though. A second later the light died back, and she was standing near the end of a long jetty of big rough black stones, all spotted and splotched with seagull guano and festooned with washed-up seaweed in dull green ribbons and flat brown bladdery blobs. The sun hung blinding over the water to the west, silhouetting the low flat headlands that were all she could see of the Rockaway Beach peninsula from this angle. Somewhere beyond them, lost in mist and sun glare and half submerged beneath the horizon line, lay the skyline of New York.

Nita pulled her jacket a little more tightly around her in the chilly spray-laden wind and turned to look over her shoulder. Down at the landward end of the quarter-mile-long jetty, where it came up against the farthest tip of West End Beach, was a squat white box of a building with an antenna sticking up from it: the Jones Inlet navigational radio beacon. Beyond it there was no one in sight—the weather had been getting too cool for swimming, especially this late in the day. Nita turned again, looking southward, toward the bay. At the seaward end of the jetty was the black-and-white painted metal tower that held up the flashing red Jones Inlet light, and at its base a small shape in a dark blue windbreaker and jeans was lying flat on the concrete pediment to which the tower was fastened, looking over the edge of the pediment, away from Nita.

She headed down the jetty toward him, picking her way carefully over the big uneven rocks and wondering at first,
Is he all right?
But as she came near, Kit looked up over his shoulder at her with an idle expression. “Hey,” he said.

Nita climbed up onto the cracked guano-stained concrete beside him and looked down over the edge, where the rocks fell steeply away. “What’re you doing?” she said. “The barnacles complaining about the water temperature again?”

“Nope, just keeping a low profile,” Kit said. “I don’t feel like spending the effort to be invisible right now, with work coming up, and there’ve been some boats going through the inlet. Might be something happening at the Marine Theater later… it’s been a little busy.”

“Okay.” She sat down next to him. “Any sign of S’reee yet?”

“Nothing so far, but it’s only a few minutes after when we were supposed to meet. Maybe she got held up. Whatcha got?”

“Here,” Nita said, and opened her manual. Kit sat up and flipped his open, too, then paged through it until he came to the “blank” pages in the back where research work and spells in progress stored themselves.

Nita looked over his shoulder and saw the first blank page fill itself in with the spell she had constructed that afternoon, spilling itself down the page, section by section, until that page was full, and the continued-on-next-page symbol presented itself in the lower right-hand corner, blinking slowly. “I had an idea,” she said, “about the chemical-reaction calls. I thought that maybe the precipitates weren’t going to behave right—”

“Okay, okay, give me a minute to look at it,” Kit said. “It’s pretty complicated.”

Nita nodded and looked out to sea, gazing at the blinding golden roil and shimmer of light on the Great South Bay. These waters might
look
pretty, but they were a mess. New York and the bedroom communities around it, all up and down Long Island and the Jersey shore, pumped terrible amounts of sewage into the coastal waters, and though the sewage was supposed to be treated, the treatment wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. There was also a fair amount of illegal dumping of garbage and sewage going on. Various wizards, independently and in groups, had worked on the problem over many years; but the nature of the problem kept changing as the population of the New York metropolitan area increased and the kinds of pollution shifted.

Nita and Kit were more than usually concerned about the problem, as they had friends who had to live in this water. Since shortly before Nita had had to go away for the summer, they’d been trying to construct a wizardry to pull the pollution out of the local waters on an ongoing basis. If it worked, maybe the scheme could be extended up and down the coast. But the problem was getting it to work in the first place. Their efforts so far hadn’t been incredibly successful.

Kit was looking at the second full page of Nita’s work. Now he turned it over and looked at the third page, the last one. “This,” he said, tapping a section near the end, “is pretty slick.”

“Thanks.”

“But the rest of this—” Kit shook his head, turned back to the first two pages, and touched four or five other sections, one after another, so that they grayed out. “I don’t see why we need these. This whole contrareplication routine would be great—if the chemicals in the pollution knew how to reproduce themselves. But since they don’t, it’s a lot of power for hardly any return. And implementing these is going to be a real pain. If you just take this one—” he touched another section and it brightened—”and this, and this, and you—”

Nita frowned. “But look, Kit, if you leave those out, then there’s nothing that’s going to deal with the sewer outfall between Zachs Bay and Tobay Beach. That’s tons of toxic sludge every month.
Without
those routines—”

Kit closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose in a way Nita had seen Tom, their local advisory wizard, do more than once when the world started to get to him. “Neets, this is all just too involved. Or involved in the wrong way. You’re making it more complicated than it needs to be.”

Oh no, here we go again. I thought he was going to get it this time, I really did…!
“But if you don’t name all the chemicals, if you don’t describe them accurately—”

“The thing is, you don’t
have
to name them all. If you just take a look at the spell I brought with—”

“Kit,
look.
That stripped-down version you’re suggesting isn’t going to do the job. And the longer we don’t
do
something, the worse the problem gets! Everything that lives along this shoreline is being affected… whatever’s still alive, anyway. Things are
dying
out there. And every time we go back to the drawing board on this,
more
things die. Getting this wizardry running has taken too long already.”