The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  The sound of a hand turning the knob of her bedroom door brought Nita sitting up straight in bed in absolute terror. Of what? she thought a second later, scornful and angry with herself, while also trying to breathe deeply and slow down her pounding heart, which seemed to be shaking her whole body. But she knew what she was afraid of. Of hearing the phone ring downstairs in the middle of the night, of having her father come in and tell her... tell her—

  Nita gulped and struggled for control. In the darkness, she heard a couple of steps on the floor. "Neets," said a small voice. Then the bedsprings creaked a little.

  Dairine crept into Nita's bed, threw her arms around Nita, buried her face against her chest, and began to sob.

  Nita suddenly found herself looking at a moment long ago: a small Dairine, maybe five years old, running down the sidewalk outside the house, oblivious— then tripping and falling. Dairine had pushed herself up on her hands and, after a long pause, started to cry... but then came the laughter of the kids down the street, the ones toward whom she'd been running. Nita had been struck then by the sight of Dairine's face working, puckering, as she tried to decide what to do, then steadying into a downturned mouth and thunderous frown, a scowl of furious determination. Dairine got up, and said just one thing: "No." Knees bleeding, she wiped her face, and walked slowly back to the house, shoulders hunched, her whole body clenched like a small fist with resolve.

  I don't think I've seen her cry since, Nita thought. And so Dairine had gone on, for so long, expressing herself almost entirely through that toughness. But now the shell had cracked, and who would have ever known that there was such pain and fear contained inside it?

  But Nita knew now, and there was nothing she could do but hang on to her sister and let Dairine sob herself silent. It's not fair, Nita thought, the tears leaking out as she hugged Dairine to her. Who do I get to cry on? Who's going to be strong for me?

  If any Power listened, It gave her no answer.

  Sunday Morning

  BEFORE DAWN NITA FOUND herself awake and sitting up in bed, looking at the faint blue light outside her window. There had been no transition from sleeping to waking: just that unsettling consciousness, and a feeling that the world was wrong, that everything was wrong. She had no idea how long it had taken her to get to sleep last night after Dairine, silent and drained, had finally slipped away.

  Drained. That was the word for how Nita felt, too. But some energy was beginning to coil back into that void as the shock wore off. Nita looked at her manual, and saw the words in front of her eyes without even having to touch it: / will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened—

  She swallowed. I am a wizard. And if my mom's life isn't "threatened" right now, I don't know when it will be. There has to be another way to fight this than just what they've got in the hospital. And I'm going to find out what it is.

  She got up, dressed, grabbed the manual, and took it back to bed with her. Its covers were fizzing. Nita settled herself up against the wall at the head of the bed and flipped the book open to read the message waiting for her, then glanced out the window at the bleak predawn light. I'll get in touch with him later. No point in waking him up early just to get him upset. I've done enough stupid stuff to him lately.

  She paged through the manual to the section with information on the medical and healing-related wizardries. That section was much larger this morning than she had ever found it before. Nita began reading what was there with intensity and with a concentration she could hardly remember having expended since she first found this book and understood what it meant. She had a couple of hours to spare before the time her dad had told her to wake him up.

  She used them, pausing only once, to go to the bathroom, taking the book with her when she did. To say that the subject was complex was understating badly. There was just too much information. She had the manual stop displaying everything that had to do with injuries and trauma, chronic diseases and afflictions... and though she narrowed and narrowed her focus, the section she was reading didn't get any thinner. Finally there was almost nothing between the covers except pages and pages of material concerning abnormal growths and lesions, and still she found more every time she targeted a specific condition. Nita also saw a lot of a word in the Speech that she didn't much like— a word that translated into English as intractable. There was a lot of discussion of theory here, but not many spells. Nita got nervous when she noticed that, but she didn't stop reading. There had to be a way. There was always a way, if you could just push through to the core of the matter...

  The light grew in her room; she hardly noticed. Birds began singing the restrained songs of early autumn, but Nita shut their voices out. She read and read... and suddenly her alarm clock went off, at eight-thirty.

  Nita scrambled out of bed, shut the noisy thing off, and went to see if her dad was up yet. Pausing outside the master bedroom, listening, she couldn't hear any sound of anyone stirring in there.

  She knocked softly on the door. No answer. "Dad..."

  Still nothing. Nita eased the door softly open and peeked in.

  Her father was asleep in the reading chair in the corner between the two bedroom windows. He sat slumped over, his mouth hanging open a little, a slight snore emitting from him—almost the same sound Ponch made when he lay on his back with his feet in the air and snored; the thought almost made her smile. But smiling about anything right now seemed like some kind of betrayal.

  She glanced at the bed, which had not been slept in, and let out an unhappy breath, then went over to her dad and crouched down beside the chair. "Daddy," she said.

  His eyes opened slowly; he looked at her as if he couldn't understand what he was doing here.

  Then it all came back to him. She saw the pain fill his eyes. Nita clenched her jaw and managed to keep from getting any weepier than she already felt. "It's eight-thirty, Dad," she said. "You said we should go to the hospital in an hour or so."

  "Yeah." He slowly sat upright and rubbed his face. "Yeah." He looked at her then. "How are you doing, honey?"

  "Better. Maybe better," she said. "Daddy, I guess I was so scared, I forgot for a minute." "Forgot what?"

  "Maybe I can do something."

  Her father looked at her, uncomprehending.

  "Daddy," Nita said, "I am a wizard. In fact, we've got two of them in the house. And we know a bunch more of them, all over the place. Wizardry's about fixing broken things, healing hurt things... saving lives. We must be able to do something."

  Her dad's expression went curiously neutral. "Honey," he said, sounding slightly embarrassed, "you know, that's the kind of thing I...try not to think about. It still seems like a fairy tale, sometimes. Even when everything's all right, I don't think about it much. And right now... now I'd be afraid it'll..."

  Fail, Nita thought. It was the thought that had been nagging at her, too. "Dad, in Mom's case, it's really complicated. I've barely had time to start working out what to do. But there has to be something. I'm not going to do anything else until I find out what."

  Her father rubbed his face again. "Well... all right. In the meantime, we'd better get ourselves over there. Have you had your shower?"

  "Not yet."

  "You go ahead. I'll make us some breakfast. Is Dairine up?" "I don't know. She had trouble getting to sleep last night." "She wasn't alone," her father said softly.

  He reached out to Nita and hugged her. "Oh, honey..." He ran out of words for a few moments. Then he hugged her harder. "You hang in there. We'll all keep each other going somehow, and it'll be all right."

  "Yeah," Nita said, hoping that it was true.

  When they got to the hospital, Nita's mother was sleeping, having been up early for the MRI scan. "She was awake late last night," the head nurse, that large lady with the bun hairstyle, told Nita's dad, "and it seems like a good idea for her to get caught up on her
sleep now. But her doctor's finishing another procedure, and she asked me if you could wait for half an hour or so. She'd like to see you."

  "No problem," Nita's father said. In reality it wasn't even that long; after she and Dairine went up to take a quick look in at their mom, and Nita saw that she was indeed sleeping peacefully, Nita left Dairine there to have a moment with their mom by herself, and made her way back to the little waiting room, where she found her dad already talking to Dr. Kashiwabara. The doctor looked up as Nita came in.

  "Good morning," she said as Nita sat down. "Well, your mom had a quiet night—except for the scans, of course. She's been doing the sensible thing, and sleeping when we weren't actually running her in and out of the machines. In fact, she fell asleep during the MRI this morning, which I wouldn't normally have thought possible; it's like sleeping in a garbage can while someone's banging on it."

  "If you lived long with our daughters," Nita's dad said, "you'd be surprised what you'd learn to sleep through."

  Dr. Kashiwabara smiled faintly. "Come to think of it," she said, "where's the younger one?"

  Nita looked around in surprise. Dairine should have come back from their mom's room by now. "Be right back," she said.

  Nita retraced her steps. Slipping quietly into the room, she found Dairine standing there, her back against the wall near the door, looking across the closer, empty bed at the curtained one where their mother lay. In her arms she was holding Spot—which Nita hadn't noticed Dairine bringing to the hospital in the first place—and the whole room was sizzling with the electric-air feel of a wizardry on the ebb, either newly dismantled or incomplete.

  "What are you doing?" Nita whispered, and grabbed Dairine by the upper arm. "Come on"

  Dairine didn't resist her; she didn't have the energy. Nita was sure she knew why, but there was no dealing with it right now. She hustled Dairine back to the little conference room and sat her down.

  Nita's father gave Dairine one of those looks that said, Misbehaving again, I see, but said nothing aloud. The doctor greeted Dairine, then turned back to their father.

  "Well," she said, "Mrs. Callahan's status is pretty stable. And now we've had the scans that I wanted. I've had a chance to look at them, and this morning I had a couple of my colleagues look at the results. We're all in agreement."

  She took a long breath. "Mr. Callahan," she said, "I don't know; you'll have to tell me whether you think it's better that you and I should discuss this alone first."

  "Not a chance," Nita said. Dairine shook her head.

  Her father swallowed. "They're both intelligent girls, Doctor," he said. "They're going to have to hear, anyway. Better they should get the explanation from you than secondhand from me."

  The doctor nodded, then got up, shut the door to the corridor, and sat down again. "All right," she said. Her voice was measured, gentle. "Mr. Callahan, the growth in your wife's brain is definitely a tumor. We're ninety percent sure that it's a growth of a type called glioblastoma multiform. This kind of growth is very invasive, very fast growing. It invades nearby tissue quickly and destructively. And it is usually malignant."

  They all sat still as statues.

  "The only way we're going to be a hundred percent sure of the assessment is to do a biopsy," Dr. Kashiwabara said. "We'll do that in a day or two, so that we can determine our course of action. But I want to stress to you that the tumor itself can be removed. That will relieve the pressure on the surrounding structures." "But that's not everything, is it?" Nita said.

  The doctor shook her head. "I said that this kind of growth is invasive. It has a tendency to spread—to seed itself throughout the body, to other organs: the lymph nodes, the liver and spleen, the bone marrow. Because glioblastomas grow so quickly at this stage in their development, it's hard to tell how long the tumor may have been there in 'silent' mode, seeding itself. The important thing is going to be to start chemotherapy as soon as possible after the surgery to remove the tumor. Possibly radiotherapy as well."

  Nita's father nodded. "Have you discussed this with my wife?" he said.

  "Not yet," said the doctor. "That comes next. I wanted a chance to prepare you first, since you two will want to talk about it together, and it's important that you both have all the facts."

  "The 'seeding,'" her father said. "It's cancer that you mean. Spreading." "Yes," said Dr. Kashiwabara.

  Nita felt as if she had been turned to ice where she sat. Cancer was a word that she had come across repeatedly in her reading that morning, but she had been trying to ignore it. Now she realized her folly, for the most basic tool of wizardry is words, and a wizard who ignores words willfully is only sabotaging herself.

  "What are her chances?" Nita's father said. "It's too soon to tell," said the doctor. "Right now our priority is to get that tumor out of there. Afterward there'll be time to look at the long-term options." "Is the operation dangerous?" Nita said.

  Dr. Kashiwabara looked at her. "There's a certain risk," she said. "As in any surgical procedure. But the tumor's in an area where it won't be too hard to get at, and for this kind of surgery, we use a technique that's more like the way we fix people's noses than anything else. It's not nearly as invasive or traumatic as brain surgery was years ago. I'll sit down with you and show you some diagrams, if you like."

  "Thanks," Nita said. "Yes."

  The doctor turned back to their dad. "Is there anything else you want to ask me?" "Only when you think the surgery will be scheduled."

  "As soon as possible. There's a team of local specialists that we put together for this kind of surgery. I'm getting everyone's schedules sorted out now. I think it'll be Wednesday or Thursday."

  "Okay," Nita's dad said. "Thanks, Doctor."

  The doctor went off, leaving them together. I saw her face, Nita remembered her dad saying. She was shaking. He was right.,.

  "There's no point in us hanging around here," her father said. "Why don't we look at the diagrams Dr. Kashiwabara has for us. Then I'll drop you two home, and come back a little bit later, so I can talk to Mom."

  "Daddy, no!" Dairine said. "I want to stay and—"

  Dart, Nita said silently, shut up. We need to see Tom, in a hurry. And you and I need to talk. "No, honey," their father said. "I want to see her first. Okay?"

  "All right," Dairine said, subdued, but she shot Nita a rebellious look. "Let's go."

  Nita held her fire until they were home, and all had had something to eat. When her father was getting ready to go out, she stopped him at the door and said, "We may be going out, Dad. Don't be surprised if we're not here when you get back. There are visiting hours tonight, right?"

  "Yes, I think so. You can go then." Her dad exhaled. "I guess it's a good thing that the surgery will happen quickly. We can start... coping, I guess."

  "Yeah. And we'll do more than that." She gave him a hug. "Give that to Mom for me." "I will."

  She watched him pull out of the driveway and drive off.

  Nita started up the stairs and met Dairine halfway down them, shrugging into her jacket, with Spot under her arm. "Not so fast," Nita said. "I want you to tell me what you were doing in there."

  "Something," Dairine said. "Which was more than you were."

  Nita was tempted to hit her sister—to really hit her, which shocked her. Dairine brushed by her and headed for the back door. Nita grabbed her own jacket and her manual, locked the back door, and went after her.

  Dairine was halfway down the driveway already. "Were you crazy, doing a wizardry right there?" Nita whispered as she caught up with her. "And you bombed, didn't you? You crashed and burned."

  Dairine was walking fast. "I don't want to talk about it."

  "You'd better talk about it! She's my mother, too! What were you trying to do?" "What do you think? I was trying to cure her!"

  Nita gulped. "Just like that? Are you nuts? Without even knowing exactly what kind of growth you were operating on yet? Without—"

  "Neets, while I've still got the power,
I've got to try to do something with it," Dairine said. "Before I lose the edge!"

  "That doesn't mean you just do any old thing before you're prepared!" Nita said. "That wizardry just came apartl What if some piece of it got loose and affected someone else in there? What if—"

  "It doesn't matter," Dairine muttered, furious. "It didn't work." Nita looked at her, as they crossed the street and headed down the road that led to Tom and Carl's, and saw the tears starting to fill Dairine's eyes again. "It didn't work," Dairine said, more quietly. "How can it not have worked? This isn't even anything like pushing a planet around; this isn't even a middle-sized wizardry— It..." She went quiet.

  Nita could feel the tension building all through Dairine, like a coil winding tighter and tighter. "Come on," she said.

  When they rang Tom's doorbell, it was a few moments before he answered, and as he opened the screen door, Nita wasn't quite sure what to make of his expression. "It's Grand Central Station around here this morning," Tom said, "in all kinds of ways. Come on in."

  "Is this a bad time?" Nita asked timidly.

  "Oh, no worse than usual," said Tom. "Come on in; don't just stand there."

  He quickly closed the front door behind Nita and Dairine as they went by, which was probably just as well, because otherwise a passerby might have seen the six-foot-long iridescent blue giant slug sitting in the middle of the living-room floor, deep in conversation with Carl. At least it would have looked like a giant slug to anyone who hadn't been to Alphecca VI, but slugs weren't usually encrusted with rubies of such a size. "Hey, ladies," Carl said as they passed, and then went back to his conversation with his guest.

  Tom led them into the big combined kitchen-dining room. "Are you two all right?" Tom said. "No, I can tell you're not; it's just about boiling off you. What's happened?"

  Briefly Nita told him. Tom's face went blank with shock.