The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  Friday Morning

  "So?" Kit said.

  The Pig lay down with a thoughtful air. "Well," it said, "if I were you—which could happen, transcendence being what it is—I'd listen carefully to my hunches, when everything goes dark. You never know, you might hear something useful."

  "Okay," Kit said. "Thanks."

  "That's iti" the Pig said. "Thanks a lot" Kit said.

  "Well, I can't fault your manners," the Pig said. "Be being you, youngster. Go well!" And it got up and wandered away, the floor rippling uncertainly after it as it went. A moment or so later it was simply gone, without doing a transit or gating as such.

  I guess if you're transcendent, you don't need to, Kit thought. He looked down at Ponch. "What do you make of that?" he said.

  Ponch produced a feeling like a shrug. "I think maybe it's cheating. It shouldn't be that easy."

  "I wish I felt better," Kit said. Yet there was something about what the Pig had said, something that was eluding him—

  "It's all right," Ponch said. "I know her scent. I got it fresh yesterday; it hasn't changed that much. And the trail is fresh. I can track her."

  Changed, Kit thought, confused. How could it change?

  "Come on!" Ponch said. "The longer we stand here, the farther away she goes." "Let's go," Kit said. "There's not much time."

  The leash was still around Ponch's neck. Kit picked it up and wound it around his wrist. The two of them stepped into the darkness and were gone.

  Grand Central was in shadow as Nita came out of the gate by track twenty-four, and as she put her foot down, she heard a splash. There was so little light in the space around her that Nita spent some power to produce a small wizard's candle, a glimmer of light that rode above her shoulder as she looked around.

  The tracks were ail under water, and water lapped at the piers that held up the platforms—a bizarre sight. Even the platforms were an inch deep or so in water, like black glass, the surface of it rippling gently, silent and intimidating. Beside her, Pralaya slipped into the water, ducking under it, and coming up again down by the place where the platforms tapered in, down where the tracks ducked more deeply under Forty-sixth Street. "This would be a wonderful swimmery," she heard him say from down in the darkness, "but I think perhaps it shouldn't be this way?"

  "You got that in one," Nita said. Already she was trying to sense around her for this micro-universe's kernel, and she couldn't feel anything. What's the matter? I should be able to at least get a hint. It's my mother, after all! But it felt wrong somehow; she couldn't hear that faint buzz or whine that she'd learned to associate with a kernel, the sound of life doing its business. "Can you feel anything?" she said.

  Pralaya surfaced in front of her, twisting and rolling in the dark water. "I'm not sure," he said. "There's... a darkness..."

  Friday Morning

  Nita was all too aware of this darkness. Listening, watching, she could feel it all around her. It bent in; it pressed against her; and worst of all was the sense that at any moment Pralaya's innocent, merry personality could be twisted out of shape by the Lone Power suddenly looking out of his eyes at her, offering her the bargain she could not refuse.

  It's here, she thought, feeling that heavy, dark presence leaning in all around her. It's waiting for me to make a mistake. And maybe she already had.

  "Come on," she said to Pralaya, "let's get out into the open."

  Together they made their way toward what would have been the Main Concourse in her own world. "What does this look like to you?" Nita said to Pralaya as they made their way through the wet.

  "In my world? This is the Meeting of the Waters," Pralaya said. "The place where the rivers come together before they run to the Sea."

  Nita thought of the Sea and immediately was sad, seeing in her mind's eye Jones Inlet, and the Sun over the water, leaning westward in the afternoon, and the long, broad golden sunset light over the Great South Bay, where she had screwed things up so seriously with Kit. But now they came out under what should have been the ceiling of the Main Concourse...

  Nita stood there and took in a long breath of shock, and let out another long one of sorrow. The whole place was under water, five feet deep, and the beautiful cream-colored stone walls of the terminal, to the four compass points, were striped with green-brown tide-marks of high water from other times, and still flooded deep in an unhealthy dark water that lapped and sucked at the walls. The whole place smelled of damp and cold and weed and chilly pain, and Nita shuddered as she splashed out of the platform arcade into the center of the terminal. She looked up at what should have been a warm, summery, Mediterranean-sky ceiling, and instead saw nothing but watery stars and autumn constellations, all fish and dolphins and sea serpents—not to mention poor Andromeda shackled to the rock, waiting to be eaten by the monster from the waves. It was not a view that filled Nita with confidence.

  "Is it always so dark here?" Pralaya said.

  Nita thought of fire gaping out of the depths of this space, not so long ago; yet now that scenario seemed positively preferable, for it had put only her own life at stake, not her mom's. "Not usually," she said, and led Pralaya up out of the Main Concourse, up the ramp to what normally would have been the street.

  It was no improvement. The sky was clouded, dark and heavy; this was a city in shadow and under threat, with the waters rising all around. Some of the skyscrapers around them were in good-enough shape, but many of them were crumbling. Too many, Nita thought, knowing that she was seeing what her own mind could most effectively make of her mother's physical condition. Things were already going wrong here, and her doubt rose up and choked her.

  "We have to go where it's worst, don't we?" Nita said.

  Friday Morning

  Pralaya nodded. "It would be the only way."

  They stood there in the thunder-colored water, in the flooded street, and gazed up and down it. All of Forty-second Street was a river, and no traffic light, or any other light, burned on it anywhere; buildings cliffed out above the street, dark and forbidding, their lower stories wet and scummed with mold, their upper windows dulled with the residue of recent storms. Overhead, the roiling gray sky was like an unhealed wound, uncomfortable, unwell, unresolved. Nita closed her eyes and swallowed. Somewhere here was the kernel, the software of her mother's soul. She held still and listened, listened.

  "Do you have time for this?" said the voice behind her, a little provocative. "Yup," Nita said, fierce. "Don't joggle my elbow, Pralaya, or I'll chew one of your legs off."

  There was a pause. In a hurt voice Pralaya said, "I wouldn't have thought I'd have deserved that from you, Nita."

  "Yeah, well," Nita said. "Sorry, cousin." Assuming you're really my cousin at the moment, and not That One.

  The trouble was, there was no telling— Never mind that. Nita held still and listened with all of her. It's my mother, for heaven's sake! I should be able to hear her. But it was hard, suddenly.

  And who's making it hard? Or is it just tough to sense your own mother when you're on business, as opposed to when you're at home? She becomes like water, like air, like anything else you get used to and take for granted.

  Beside her, in the water, Pralaya paddled along as they worked their way down Forty-second Street. "Sorry," Nita said again. She would have said, I didn't mean that, except at the time she bad meant it, cruel as it was, and a wizard did not lie in the Speech—that was fatal. More fatal than what I'm about to do?

  Nita stood at the spot where Forty-second normally crossed the Vanderbilt Avenue underpass, saw the drowned canal that the under-running road had become, and wished that Kit were here. It seemed to her that if only he were here, everything would be all right.

  Yet she had constructed the circumstances in which he couldn't be here. She stood there in the muddy, westward-flowing water...

  ... and something bit her in the leg.

  Nita yelped and jumped. "What was that!" she said.

  Pralaya had already clambered up onto
a pillar of the west side of Grand Central, sticking up out of the water. "We're not alone here," he said. "What would these be? They have teeth—"

  "Cancer viruses," Nita said. "I wouldn't let them get too friendly with your extremities, if I were you."

  Peering down into the muddy water, Nita could see them: little dark blocky hexagonal shapes with fierce straight little tails or stingers, cruising around. The water was teeming with them, large and small, like the little dark minnows in one of the local freshwater creeks. So many! Nita thought. How am I going to persuade all these things to do anything? The Lone Power was right. It was right.

  She considered using the spell that would let her

  Friday Morning

  walk on water... but that took more energy than she now felt like using. I'm going to need everything I can possibly save for later, Nita thought. Better use the low-power one I tailored earlier. "I have a spell against these," she said to Pralaya. The spell would at least protect the two of them from the stings, but it couldn't stop the viruses from doing what they pleased with her mother.

  She pulled the spell off her charm bracelet. With a little effort, she pulled the charm in two. It stretched like taffy then parted with a snap, leaving her holding two identical versions of the spell. Nita tossed Pralaya the clone, then dropped her version of it into the water.

  Pralaya stretched out his version of the spell, adjusted it, and dropped it around him. Nita saw this happening and could not avoid thinking, Here is the Power That invented these things, indirectly; and I'm protecting Its servant against them.

  Not that he knows...

  Nita held still then, again, and listened. In this threatening light it was hard to think clearly. Everything seemed geared to leave you frightened, chilled, cowed, as slowly the livid sunset light behind those clouds shut down toward some final night.

  Nita knew that day was waiting back there somewhere. If she could just find it, sense it, hear it. The sound of morning, of a dawn past all this leaden twilight. If she could just find it. If she could, it wouldn't matter if her wizardry departed her forever; it would be worth it.

  And at the same time... She sloshed up Forty-second in the general direction of Fifth, listening with all of her, not hearing anything, and beginning, as predicted, to despair. Kit...

  The bleak wind blew over the gray waters, and Nita walked on through it all, with Pralaya swimming beside her, and knew true desperation's colors at last.

  "I THOUGHT YOU SAID you were going to be able to find her." "I should have been able to. But the scent's changed again."

  "What?" Kit was confused, and stood still in the utter darkness where they had been walking. "How?"

  Beside him Kit could feel Ponch gazing around him. "The One who doesn't want us to find Nita has changed it. The world she's gone to is twisted out of orientation with the usual ones."

  Kit tried to put his own concerns aside; there was something more on his mind. "So where are they?" he said.

  "Elsewhere." "Thanks loads."

  "You don't have the words for it," Ponch said, a little sharply. "You can't smell what's happening the way I do. We have to backtrack. There's a scent... but there's also trouble." "What kind?"

  Ponch shook himself. "Since we're not with Nita, it's going to be hard to convince the ones who guard the borders to let us in."

  Kit let out a long nervous breath. "Never mind. Let's just keep going."

  Nita and Pralaya kept making their way along through the dark waters, southward along Fifth Avenue. Nita had only a hunch to go on now, only the faintest sense of where her mother's kernel lay. Pralaya paused with her at the corner of Fifth and Fortieth, putting his head up out of the water and peering about him, while all around the two of them, the viruses darted and poked at their defense shields like angry little bees.

  "Should we try it again?" Pralaya said.

  Nita looked up and down the street—or rather the river, which the street had become—and nodded.

  "Yeah..."

  She let her mind fall toward Pralaya's again, adding his viewpoint of this place to hers. Everything quivered, changed.

  The darkness around them became even more oppressive, an inward-leaning, watching, sullen nest of shadows. Nita could feel how the place was full of death and the anticipation of death, and wanted them out of there.

  Friday Afternoon

  But ifPralaya is the Lone One, why is It finding this so scary and upsetting? Nita thought. That was a question that she wasn't going to ask him out loud, though. She put it aside and did her best to feel around them for the kernel, listening.

  A stronger hint this time. South and west; and not too far.

  Nita let her mind drop away from Pralaya's again. He was lying there in the water, shivering. "You okay?" she said.

  "Yes," he said, and shook himself all over, those big dark eyes troubled. "But, Nita, this is a terrible place. I wonder that you can bear it here."

  She was shaking, too, but she couldn't let it stop her. "It's the one place I've been working to be," Nita said. "Let's go."

  She set off westward, toward Sixth Avenue—splashing through water that was deeper and deeper—and Pralaya followed her, slowly, almost as if reluctant. Nita refused to spend any time trying to figure this out. She was tired, and very scared—both for herself and for her mother—and she simply wished that all this was over. The thought came to her: You are now so tired, you will make some terrible mistake.

  And she was too tired even to care about that.

  In the darkness between worlds, Kit felt Ponch pause and look at something.

  "This is interesting," the dog said. Kit couldn't see anything. "What is it?" "Home," Ponch said in surprise.

  "What?" Kit said, bemused. "Show me!"

  "Here."

  Suddenly they stepped out into Kit's backyard... except that the place had the feel of the universes that Kit and Ponch had been creating when Ponch first started taking Kit along on his walks—like something that Kit had made just now with whatever power lay between the worlds, ready to be used if you knew it was there. Kit looked around him in surprise at an utterly perfect summer day. Everything he could have wanted was there: the knowledge that school was out for the summer, the sound of Carmela's stereo blasting upstairs, his mother laughing with loving scorn at something his father was doing in the kitchen. The sky was flawlessly blue, the air just hot enough to make one think about going to the beach, but not having to do anything. The locusts were beginning to say zzzeeeeeeee in the trees. And just over there, the sudden whoomp! of air as Nita appeared out of nothing, turned toward him, grinning with excitement, her manual in her hand—

  "Stop it right there," Kit said to the world. The image froze.

  He stood there, now the only thing that could move in that whole still reality, and turned slowly, taking it all in: weeds and flowers, summer sunshine, peace. It was perfection, of a kind. The moment, held captive— heart's desire, caught in one place and unable to escape.

  But moments aren't meant to be held captive. They're meant to escape. That's what makes them matter. But I could make perfection, anyway, Kit thought as he turned, seeing a passing white cabbage butterfly Friday Afternoon

  caught in midair, in midstroke of its wings, trapped there as if in amber clearer than water. I could go to live in it, if I wanted—the world where everything worked. I could even use this power to make myself believe that was where I'd always lived, the way things had always been.

  He swallowed. I could make Timeheart. Another one.

  Kit held that moment for a long, long while, trapped in the grip of his mind, like a butterfly in his hand. He kept turning. The backyard with its backyard sassafras jungle, the long grass to lie in all through this lazy afternoon, looking up at the clouds—and standing there, frozen, but laughing, ready for anything: Nita. Not angry at him, not afraid, not troubled by any dark shadow hanging over her. Here it need never have happened. Here it was fine, had always been fine. He could be here t
he rest of his life if he liked, and everything, always, would be fine.

  And if he could make that, then he could make anything. Anything.

  Maybe this was how it had all started. The manual was "sketchy on the first hundredth of a second,"

  Tom had said. "Privacy issues." Was it possibly something as simple as this—that in some other region of space-time, some other being, no more or less powerful than Kit, had stumbled across a spark such as the one he held now, and had created?

  If it had happened that way, maybe it could happen that way again?

  Here he was. Here was the power. All Kit had to do...was use it, and get everything right this time.

  Everything: a whole universe of universes, innumerable, unfolding themselves as he watched—the essence of creation running riot, running rampant, life exploding through it. For a single moment that included and encompassed all moments, stretching out endlessly around him, time without beginning or end; Kit was lost in the vision—

  —and then he had to laugh. He started to laugh so hard, he could hardly stand it; his sides started to hurt. Oh, yeah, he thought. Nice try. Gimme a, break!

  When he was able to breathe again, Kit straightened up and gazed around him. No matter how he created such a perfect place—or had this one been left for him to find?—no matter that he might even be able to delude himself into believing that it was reality, the truth was that it wouldn't be. Elsewhere the real world would go on, people would hurt, life would be alternately happy and miserable... in the real places where wizards were needed to fight the fight, even if they might never see it won. And this... This isn't real enough for me, Kit thought. / want the kind of reality that surprises me. And, anyway, wizardry isn't for getting out of reality, out of the world. It's for getting further into it.

  He gave that frozen pseudo-Nita one last glance, then turned away, back to the butterfly, embedded in air —and turned it loose.