The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  How is he doing this? Kit wondered. "Ponch?"

  Ponch let off a volley of frustrated barks at the squirrel he was chasing, which had gone halfway up one of the massive tree boles and was now clinging to it head down and chattering at him. Kit couldn't make out specific Skioroin words at this point, but the tone was certainly offensive. Ponch barked at the squirrel more loudly. "Yeah, okay, get over it," Kit yelled. "There are about five thousand more like him out there! Can you give it a rest so we can have a few words, please?"

  Ponch came galloping back to Kit a few seconds later. "Isn't it great, do you like it, do you want to chase some, I can make some more for you..."

  "Sit down. Your tongue's gonna fall off if it waves around much more than that," Kit said. Ponch sat down beside him and leaned on Kit in a companionable manner, looking entirely satisfied with life, and panting energetically. "Look," Kit said. "How are you doing this?"

  "I don't know."

  "You must know a little," Kit said. "You told me yesterday, 'You're not there until you do something.' What did you do?"

  "I wanted you."

  "Yes, but that was the first time." "That's what I did."

  Kit sighed and put his head down on his knees, thinking. "This," he said, "what you did just now. How did you do this? Where did all these squirrels come from?"

  "I want squirrels."

  "Yeah, and boy, have you got them," said Kit, looking around him in amusement. The two of them were completely surrounded by squirrels, an ever growing crowd of them, all sitting up on their little hind legs and staring at Ponch, all intent and quiet... as if someone in a whimsical mood had swapped them for the seagulls in The Birds. "Where did they all come from?"

  Ponch sat quiet for a moment, and stopped panting as a look of intense concentration came over his face. Then he looked at Kit and said, "I wanted them here."

  Suddenly Kit got it. The way Ponch used wanted was not the way it would have been used in Cyene; it was the form of the word used in the Speech. And in the wizardly language, the verb was not passive. The closest equivalent in English would be willed; in the Speech, the word implies not just desire but creation.

  "You made them," Kit said.

  "I wanted them to be here. And here they are." The dog jumped up and began to bounce for sheer joy.

  "Isn't it great^l"

  Kit rubbed his nose and wondered about that. "What happens when you catch them?" he asked, to buy himself time.

  "I shake them around a lot," Ponch said, "and then I'm sorry for them."

  Kit grinned, for this was more or less the way things went in the real world. But then he paused, surprised. He'd slipped and spoken to Ponch in English, but the dog had understood him.

  "Are you able to understand me when I'm not using the Speech?" Kit asked. Ponch looked amused. "Only here. I made it so I would always know what you're saying." "Wow," Kit said. He looked around him again at the patient squirrels. "Have you made anything else?" "Lots of things. Why don't you make something?"

  "Uh...," Kit said, and stopped. The ramifications of this were beginning to sink in, and he wanted to make some preparations. "Not right this minute. Look, you wanna go see Tom and Carl?"

  Ponch began to bounce around again. "Dog biscuits!"

  "Yeah, probably they'll give you some. And if they have a spare clue for me to chew on, that wouldn't hurt, either." Kit got up. "You done with these guys?"

  "Sure. They wait for me. Even if they didn't, I can always make more." "Okay. Let's go home."

  Ponch acquired a look of concentration. A second later, the landscape went out, as if a light had simply been turned off behind it, and Kit felt a tug on the leash. He followed it—

  —and they stepped out again into early morning in Kit's backyard: birdsong, dew, the sound of a single station wagon going down the street in front of the house as the newspaper guy threw the morning paper into people's driveways...

  Kit took a deep breath of the morning air and relaxed. From above them came an annoyed chattering noise. Ponch wheeled around and began dancing on his hind legs and barking.

  "Didn't you just have enough of those?" Kit said. "Shut up; you're going to wake up the whole neighborhood! Come on... We need to go see Tom."

  Nita rolled over in her bed that morning, feeling strangely achy. At first she wondered if she was catching a cold; but it didn't seem to be that. Probably it's just from being upset, she thought. Hey, I wonder...

  She got up and padded over to the desk, where her manual lay. Nita picked it up and flipped to the back page, hoping to see some long angry rant from Kit. But there was nothing.

  She broke out in a sweat at the sight of the page with not a thing on it but the previous two communications. He must be completely furious, she thought. This is gonna be awful... and when Dairine hears about it, she's going to laugh herself sick. I'll probably have to kill her.

  Nita put the manual down, pulled open a drawer in her dresser and extracted a clean T-shirt, then pulled it on along with yesterday's jeans and turned back to the desk. / wonder what he's up to, though. Maybe he's out working on the water with S'reee.

  Nita flipped through to Kit's listing in the directory and glanced at it. Last project: mesolittoral waterquality intervention, for details see reference MSI-B14-/XHU/ Py66384-67/1141-2211/ABX6655/3: other participants, Callahan, Juanita L, hominid / Sol III, S'reee alhruuni-Aoul-mmeiihnhwiii!r, cetacean / Sol HI; intervention status complete /functioning...

  Nita's mouth dropped open.

  ... anentropia rate 0.047255-E8; effectiveness rating 3.5 +/- .10; review scheduled Julian date 2451809.5

  —

  Oh, my God. It's working!

  The initial reaction of sheer delight at the solution of a problem that had had them all literally running in circles for so long was now drowned by a nearly intolerable wave of combined embarrassment and annoyance.

  They got it working without me. He was right.

  I was wrong.

  Nita sat there in shock. / am so stupid!

  Yet she couldn't quite bring herself to believe it. And she was still listed as a participant in the spell. Nita paged back to the section where intervention references were kept, and shortly found a copy of the spell diagram that Kit and S'reee had been using.

  Nita traced the curves and circles of it, all apparent in an enlarged hologrammatic format when you looked at the page closely. The basic structure of the wizardry was derived broadly from the last pattern she and Kit had worked on together, before they started disagreeing about the details. It was missing any of the extra subroutines she had insisted were absolutely necessary to make the spell work right. The detailed versions of the effectiveness figures were at the bottom of the page, updating themselves as she watched, demonstrating that the water coming out of Jones Inlet was indeed getting cleaner by the second—

  Nita sat there in the grip of an attack of complete chagrin. What an utter dork I've been, she thought. I'm going straight over there to apologize. No, I'm not going to wait even that long.

  She flipped back to the messaging pages, touched the message from Kit to wake up the reply function. "Kit?" she said in the Speech. "Can we talk?"

  Send?

  "Send it," Nita said.

  Then she waited. But to her complete astonishment, the page just flashed once, leaving her message sitting where it was. Message cannot be dispatched at this time. Please try again later.

  What?? "How come?"

  The notification blanked out, replaced by the words: Addressee is not in ambit. Please try again later. Nita stared. She had never seen such a description before and didn't have any idea what it meant.

  She put the manual down on the desk. "Keep trying," Nita said, and went downstairs. It was quiet; there was no smell of anyone having been making breakfast down there. / may be the only one up.

  Nita picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Kit's number. It rang a couple of times, then someone picked up. "Hello?"

  It was Kit's siste
r. "Hola, Carmela!"

  "'Ola, Nita," said Carmela, in a somewhat odd voice—she had her mouth full. There was a pause while she swallowed. "You missed him; he's not here."

  "Where'd he go, do you know?"

  "Nope. He left a note on the fridge; must've been early... said he was going out to do some wizard thing and he'd be back later."

  "Today, you think?"

  "Oh yeah, today. If he was gonna be gone longer than tonight, he sure would have told Pop and Mama, and they would've screamed, and I would've heard it."

  Nita had to chuckle. "Okay, Mela. If he comes in, tell him I called?" "Sure, Neets. No problem."

  "Thanks. Bye-bye."

  "Byeeee..."

  Nita hung up. He's out on errantry... but where? I should have been able to find him. It shouldn't matter if he was on the Moon, or even halfway out of the galaxy. His manual still would have taken the message. It's not like the manuals care about light speed, or anything like that.

  After a few moments Nita went back upstairs to see what the manual might be showing. The last page still hadn't changed.

  / don't believe this, Nita thought. I ought to call Tom and Carl and see what they say. Where is he that the manual can't find him?!

  She picked up the manual and started to take it downstairs to the phone with her, then stopped. She would have to tell Tom and Carl what had been going on, and she was too embarrassed.

  But where was Kit?

  Down the hall Dairine's door opened, and her sister wandered down toward her in the direction of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a huge Fordham T-shirt of their dad's. She looked at Nita vaguely. "What's for breakfast?"

  "Confusion," Nita said, rather sourly. "What?"

  "Nothing yet. Nobody's up. And I can't find Kit."

  Dairine stopped and stared at her, pushing the hair out of her eyes and yawning. "Why? Where is he?" "Somewhere the manual can't find him."

  "What?"

  "Look at this!" Nita was concerned enough to show Dairine her manual, even though it meant she would see the messages above the strange new notification. Dairine looked at the back page and shook her head.

  "I've never seen that before," she said. "You sure it's not a malfunction or something?" Nita snorted. "Have you ever seen a manual malfunction?"

  "I have to admit," Dairine said slowly, "if I did, I'd get worried... considering What powers them. Come on, let's see if mine's doing the same thing."

  Nita followed Dairine to her room and glanced at where the pile of stuff from yesterday had mostly been dumped on the floor. "You'd better take care of this before Mom gets up," Nita said. "She'll have some new and never-before-seen species of cow."

  "Plenty of time for that," Dairine said, going over to her desk and knocking one knuckle on the outside of the laptop's case. "She was up till half past forever last night with Dad's stuff."

  The laptop sprouted its legs again and stood up on them, stretching them one after another like a centipede that thought it was a cat. "Morning, Spot," Dairine said.

  "Mmg," said the laptop in a small scratchy voice.

  "Manual functions?"

  "Spcfy."

  "Messaging," Dairine said.

  The laptop popped open its lid, and its screen flickered on, showing the usual apple-without-the-bite logo, then blanking down again. A moment later the operating system herald displayed, a stylized representation of a book open to a small block of text. This was then replaced by a messaging menu, overlaid on a shimmering blue background subtly watermarked with the manual logo. "Main address list," Dairine said. "Test message." The screen blanked. "To Kit Rodriguez. Where are you? Send."

  The words displayed themselves on the screen exactly as they had in Nita's manual, blinked out, and then reappeared with a little blue box underneath them in which was written in the Speech, Error 539426010: Recipient is not in ambit. Please resubmit message later.

  "Huh," Dairine said. "More information."

  The blue box enlarged slightly. No further information available. "We'll see about that," Dairine muttered. "Thanks, cutie."

  "Yr wlcm," said the laptop, and sat down on the desk again, stretching out its legs. "Doesn't waste his words, does he?" Nita said, smiling.

  "He's shy," Dairine said, with a wry expression. "You should hear him when we're alone. Let's try this."

  She went over to the sleek cube of the new computer and waved a hand over the top of it. The light behind the apple came on. Nita cocked an ear. "Is its fan broken?"

  "No, it doesn't have one. There's just some kind of little chimney that convects out the heat, so it doesn't need a fan."

  "Or a plug..."

  Dairine grinned, and waved over the top of the silvery case again. A second later the monitor, a suitably slick flat-screen model on a Lucite base, appeared to one side of the main processor case. "Mom may have some problems with that," Nita said.

  "Oh, it won't do that when I get all the normal software installed and put it out downstairs. Meantime, I don't see why it should have to sit on the desk when there's umpteen billion cubic parsecs of perfectly good otherspace to stick it in."

  On the screen appeared a manual herald like the one that had been displaying on the laptop, but this one had a discreet Greek letter (3 blazoned across the image of the book. Dairine waved once more over the top of the processor case, and the keyboard, also in brushed stainless steel, appeared. "What do you need that for?" Nita asked.

  "I type faster than I talk." "Impossible."

  Dairine gave Nita a dirty look and started typing, while Nita looked in interest at the keyboard, the standard North American QWERTY type. "Not much good for the Speech."

  Dairine hit the carriage return and shook her head. "Come on, Neets, really." She flicked a finger in the air over the keyboard; the keyboard stretched, and the keys shimmered and reconfigured themselves to display the 418 characters of the Speech. "Eventually we won't need this, but the wireless transparent neuro-translation routines are still in pre-alpha." She looked at Nita with a mischievous expression. "Getting interested finally? I can copy Spot for you and give you his twin, if you like."

  "Thanks, but I'll stick with the manual I know."

  Dairine shook her head in poorly concealed pity. "Luddite."

  "Technodweeb," Nita said. "Call me sentimental. I like books. They don't crash."

  "Huh," Dairine said, as the monitor blanked and then brought up a long, long list. Dairine glanced over at Spot. "You wanna pass it that last error?"

  A moment later that same little blue screen appeared on the monitor. "Right," Dairine said. She glanced over her shoulder at Nita. "Sometimes the beta shows background information that the normal release version doesn't have in it yet, or doesn't routinely release. Any additional information on this?" she said to the desktop machine.

  The blue box was partly overlapped by another one, in a lighter shade of blue. It contained the words:

  For accurate and secure message storage and delivery, manual messaging functions require each party's manual to supply a coordinate based on the intersection between each wizard's personal description in the Speech and his present physical location in a given universe. Message dispatch and storage cannot be achieved when one or both addressees are in transit or experiencing transitory states between universes. Please remessage when the condition no longer obtains.

  "Oh, well, I guess that's okay, then," Dairine said in astonishment heavily tinged with irony. She looked at Nita. "Another universe? That's normally not a transit you make without permission from seriously high up."

  "Yeah," Nita said. She opened her manual again and paged through to where Kit's status report was.

  Dairine hit a couple of keys; the monitor changed to show the same view. Under the listing for the water wizardry, Kit's status report said:

  Present project: access-routine investigation and stabilization, training assignment with adjunct talent; situation presently in development. Detail reference: in abeyance due to possible Heise
nberg-related effects; update expected c. Julian day 2451796.6.

  "Adjunct?" Dairine muttered.

  The thought went through Nita like a spear: He's working with someone else! At first it seemed ridiculous. But considering how I treated him... why shouldn't he want to work with other people? I've brought this on myself. Idiot! Idiot!

  "Whatever else is going on," Dairine said, "the Powers That Be know about it. Look, here's an authorization code. They must have some way of keeping tabs on him if They've even got a projected update time in there. Point six... that's after dinner, I guess. Try again then."

  Nita closed her manual, feeling slightly relieved. "Yeah..."

  "But Neets, look," Dairine said, "if you're worried, why not just try to shoot him a thought? No matter what the manual's doing, it's not like your brain is broken."

  "Unusual sentiment from you," Nita said.

  Dairine's smile was slightly sardonic. "So maybe I'm mellowing in my old age," she said. There was more of an edge than usual on the expression, but Nita got the feeling it wasn't directed at her... for a change.

  She sat down on the bed, pushing the area rug around with her feet. "Never mind. If he's in another universe, I doubt I've got the range to reach him."

  "Probably you're right," Dairine said. "But that's not the reason you're not going to try, is it?"

  Nita looked at her sister and found Dairine regarding her with an expression that actually could have been described as understanding. "You're afraid you're gonna find that he's shut you out on purpose," Dairine said, "and you couldn't stand it."

  Nita didn't say anything. Dairine glanced away, looking at the computer, and hit a key to clear the screen. "Well...," Nita said at last, "lately it's been harder than usual to hear him thinking, anyway. And he's been having the same trouble with me."

  There were things that that could mean for wizards, especially if they'd been working closely together for some time... and Nita knew Dairine understood the implications. "Neets," Dairine said at last, "if you're really that worried, you should take the chance, anyway. It's better than sitting here busting a gut."