by Diane Duane
Nita sighed at the sight of the big flakes coming gently down. The first really decent snowfall of the winter, and her mother wasn’t here to see it. First snowfalls had always been an event for her mom. She would bundle herself up and go out and play in the snow like a crazy thing until she was worse soaked than either Nita or Dairine ever let themselves get. Over the past few years, Nita had heard her mom complain more than once to her dad that the greenhouse effect was screwing up the winter weather. “We just don’t get snow like we used to, Harry,“ she would say. ”We have to do something, or future generations won’t know what it’s like to get slush in their socks.“
Nita held still a moment longer, listening to the quiet of the house around her. Her dad and Dairine were both in bed, and outside the snow kept on falling. After a few moments, Nita sighed again and pushed her manual away. For hours now she had been up to her eyes in more research on the contextual variations of the Speech — in noun paradeclensions, and judicial imperatives, and the history and use of the Enactive Recension. It was all fascinating, and she had no idea how she was going to stomp all this information into her head soon enough to be of any use. At any rate, it was late, and she wasn’t going to get any more of it into her head tonight.
Nita got up… and her bedroom went away, fading around her into a darkness through which, bizarrely, snow continued to fall.
Standing there in jeans and one of her dad’s big sweatshirts, Nita looked all around her in shock, and then realized what had happened. Her hand went to her throat, where the “necklace” of the lucid-dreaming wizardry rested. I forgot about this. I turned it on, and then I fell asleep while I was reading
, she thought. I’m dreaming already. Isn’t that wild?
Nita glanced around at the endless dark stretching away from her on all sides. Off in the distance she saw light coming from somewhere to fall on the dark surface on which she stood. The source of the light was it-self invisible, but in its beam she could see more snow gently falling.
Okay
, she thought, and for lack of anything better to do, she started walking toward the light. As she went, Nita became aware of a low mutter of sound out in the further reaches of the darkness. It took some minutes of walking through the dark before she recognized it as human voices speaking: a slow, muted sound of conversation, coming from somewhere else, but not seeming to matter, particularly. It was as if Nita was hearing these voices through someone else, filtered, and the filter made it all seem not so much unimportant, but simply unreal, unrelated to anything that mattered, as if a TV show about some subject that bored you was blathering away in the background, while you were too busy with other things to turn it off.
She shivered a little, recognizing the kinship of this filter with the one she’d been seeing life through lately. Can something like this get stuck in place? Nita wondered. It wasn’t an idea she much liked. And suddenly it made that don’t-care, don’t-feel-like-it attitude seem not so much like a self-indulgence as a danger. What kind of wizard doesn’t care? she thought. What kind of wizard—
The sound of the voices began to dwindle, just as Nita thought she was about to understand what they were saying. She breathed out in frustration, and kept on walking. The light was a little closer now, and she could see the white spotlight it made on the black floor; the snow kept gently falling through the light, though as far as Nita could see, it vanished as soon as it came in contact with the ground. “Hello?” she said. “Anybody here?”
No answer came back. She kept on walking. That spot of light had been about a quarter mile away when she noticed it. Now it was maybe a short block away, and as she peered at it, Nita thought she saw something sitting in it, a starkly illuminated shape — mostly white and black and red, with discordant splashes of other colors — sitting there in a pool of its own shadow.
It was the clown.
How about that
, Nita thought. She didn’t hurry. That was a good way to wake up prematurely.
She just kept on walking, and when she was about ten yards away, what seemed like a polite distance to her, Nita stopped.
“Hello?” she said again.
The clown sat in the middle of the spotlight and didn’t look up.
“I talked to you the other night, right?” Nita said. “Or you tried to talk to me, anyway.”
The clown just sat there. Its face was immobile. The big red nose, the bizarre purple wig sticking out from under the absurd little derby hat, the painted tear, all were exactly the same as they had been before. The clown sat there cross-legged in brightly patched, baggy pants, rocking very slightly in the stillness, while the snow falling all around began to taper off.
“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”
Nothing. The clown sat there, didn’t even turn its head toward her.
What’s the matter with you
? Nita thought. I’m going out of my way to help you get through to me, here
She thought for a moment, and then tried the on-duty wizards’ identification phrase in another of its commoner forms. “I am on the Powers’ business,” Nita said, “walking the worlds as do They; well met on the common journey!”
The clown just sat there with its head turned away, rocking. Nita started to get annoyed. Okay, she thought Let’s try this. Nita thought for a moment about what she was about to say in the Speech, wanting to make sure she got it right the first time, as she wasn’t sure what would happen if she mispronounced it.
“In Life’s name and the One’s,” Nita said, “I adjure you to speak to me!”
It was astonishing how just uttering the phrase made a kind of shocked silence after it. The manual had said there was no resisting such an injunction. Nonetheless, there followed one of the longest silences Nita could remember hearing. It took a long time before the clown looked up. Its eyes didn’t come to rest exactly on Nita, but looked a little way over her shoulder, and the voice that replied, not from the clown itself but from the darkness all around, was absolutely flat.
“I am One,” it said.
Chills ran up and down Nita’s back at the sound of a phrase unnervingly close to the one reputed to have caused the Big Bang, and much else. “Uh, I doubt that very much,” Nita said. “At least not the way I understand the term.”
“Then you are One.”
Nita’s expression was rueful. “Not by a long shot,” she said. “I’m just one more mortal… and a wizard.”
The clown still didn’t look right at her. But Nita felt a change coming over the darkness around the clown, or in the way she saw it. Instead of being frightening, now the shadows outside the light were filled with potential and promise, and the light now seemed painful and arid, an expression of everything stuck and hopeless — a scorching-bright loneliness that didn’t even have a word for itself.
The clown looked at her helplessly, and though it seemed frozen in place, except for the rocking, the painted tear was real. All the darkness shivered with its pain.
“What’s a mortal?” it said.
Nita actually winced. That was a question the answer to which she’d had entirely too much of lately. Yet Nita also could sense that out here, pinned down in the unforgiving light, was someone or something as vulnerable as a butterfly with glass wings. An angry or thoughtless answer could shatter it.
She thought about her response for a moment. “We’re the impermanent ones,” she finally said.
“The world may last, but we don’t.”
The eyes in the painted face widened.
The painted mouth went wide, and a great cry of anguish burst out of the clown. Nita took a breath, terrified that she’d screwed up, despite her caution.
Then she caught her breath again, because without warning there was suddenly another clown there, identical to the first one. It was standing, not sitting, and with an interested expression it watched the first clown scream. “I heard about the impermanence thing,” said the second clown.
“Th
e Silence told me. What went wrong?”
Nita was finding all of this unusually weird, even for a dream. The Silence? What’s that supposed to mean
? She sat down outside the circle of the spotlight, not far from where the second clown stood in the “twilight zone,” halfway between the light and the shadow. “There are a lot of answers to that one,” Nita said. “One of them’s simple. Somebody invented Death.”
As she mentioned It, Nita heard that low menacing growl coming from somewhere out there in the shadows. Invoking the Lone Power, however obliquely, and even in dream, always had its dangers. But the growl seemed to have no real teeth in it. It sounds almost tired, Nita thought.
Weird
But of much more interest to her, though the second clown wouldn’t look directly at her, either, was the sudden live look in its eyes — a flash of recognition, a scowl of rejection.
“I know,” the second clown said. Its voice, his voice, was fighting with that robotic quality, the life in it struggling to get out.
Just for a moment it succeeded. Nita got a quick flicker-rush of images and sounds: dawns and sunsets, objects shaped roughly like the clown all rushing hither and yon on unfathomable errands, shouting at one another about incomprehensible things. All kinds of pain were tangled up with the rush and roar of perception, but strangest of all, it was pain that the one who experienced it actually welcomed. For the clown, that pain was a lifeline, something it clung to — as a way to temporarily mask out sensations it couldn’t bear, and as something that could sometimes pierce through the muffling blanket of nonfeeling that kept draping itself over the clown’s body and mind. Nita could feel that the clown hoped there might be more to life than hurting… but it was also willing to suffer the hurt if that meant staying alive to get its own job done.
The storm of pictures and feelings faded, leaving Nita staring down into a roiling, scary darkness. But the darkness was oddly ambivalent, as filled with possibility as with terror.
And I’m the one who finds that strange, not him
, Nita thought. Whoever this was, however simplistic or not his view of the universe might be, he was braver about it than she was.
“I didn’t know everything was like this for you,” Nita said.
The clown winced, as if something had pained it. “I? But I did know. There is no other.”
Nita blinked. It was remarks like this that kept making her wonder if she was dealing with a human or an alien — that, and the way the clown seemed able to cope with some concepts one moment, and then would lose them again the next. Yet again she had to remind herself that there was still no guarantee she was dealing with a human. All the imageries so far — the clown, the robot, the knight — were ones this entity could have pulled out of her own head as possible ways to communicate. And she still needed to be careful not to hurt whatever it was.
Well, I wonder if the version of the Speech I’ve been using is too local, too humanoid? I could try one of the broader recensions. Or the broadest one.
She pulled out her manual to make extra sure of the phrasing. The Enactive Recension was the form in which it was said the One did Its business. Nita was a little nervous about using it, because she could, apparently, make serious changes in her local environment if she was careless while speaking in Enactive. According to an old joke, the asteroid belt had been a planet once, until one of the Powers That Be misconjugated a verb—
Well, I can’t blow anything up if I keep the phrasing simple enough
, Nita thought. This phrasing should be real inoffensive.
“There are more than one of us,” she said.
There was the briefest pause — and this time both clowns put their heads up and screamed. While Nita watched, her mouth open, the first one actually shredded away on the air, in torment and shock.
The second one stood there screaming away, and Nita watched, wide-eyed, wondering if it was going to shred, too. But it didn’t. The scream didn’t stop, either. After a few moments, as her own shock wore off, the noise began to remind Nita of her earliest encounters with Dairine… or rather, with Dairine after she’d first become aware that Nita might possibly be in competition with her for their parents’ attention. Dairine’s lung power at the age of two had initially caused Nita some innocent wonder, but this was a phase that had lasted about five minutes, and now, as the scream just kept on going, Nita let out a long breath and invoked the remedy she’d learned way back then. “All right,” she shouted in the Speech. “Shut UP!”
The second clown fell silent in complete amazement.
“There is more than one of us,” Nita said, into the abruptly echoing silence. “Are. Whatever. I’m sorry if this poses some kind of problem for you. But screaming’s not going to make all the rest of us go away.”
There was another of those long, long pauses.
“Tried that before, huh?” Nita said, not without some amusement.
“And ignoring you,” the clown said, looking past her, and looking annoyed. “That didn’t work, either.”
Nita found herself remembering how desperately she had wanted to ignore the preparations for her mother’s funeral, to the point where she had actually partly succeeded and the funeral itself had begun to seem unreal, like a bad dream. It was after that that the remoteness began to sink into her.
That feeling of nothing mattering, of not wanting to deal with anything
, she thought, the filter I’ve been stuck with… that’s what this guy and I have in common. That’s what’s been drawing us together… even when he’s tried to break the link himself. But somehow it seems important for it not to get broken now
. “Why ignore everybody?” she said.
“Because you’re a distraction.”
“As for the first part of that,” Nita said, “sorry, but you’re confused. I’m here, believe me. And as for the second — a distraction from what?”
The clown looked around at the darkness. “This.”
“Meaning what?”
Out of the darkness, ever so softly, came that growl again.
Nita glanced out into the dark, slightly unnerved. But this is still my dream, she thought. If It tries something cute, I can just slip out. I hope
. “Now there are some contradictions in what you’ve been saying,” she said. “I thought you said you were all by yourself.”
“I am.” This time the phrase, in the Speech, was identical with the Self-declaration of Life. Nita, even more unnerved now, half expected to hear thunder, but none came. The One was either otherwise occupied, or not particularly concerned about having Its lines stolen. “But That, out there… That’s different.”
Nita wasn’t sure that the clown was able to perceive the contradictions. Maybe it can’t. Or maybe different and other don’t mean the same thing for it. Certainly they were different words in the Speech.
“All right,” Nita said. “I won’t argue that.” She noted that the clown wasn’t wincing quite so badly now when she said “I.” “But, look, you don’t have to stay here.”
And suddenly there were two clowns again. One of them was back in the middle of the spotlight.
Nita made a silent bet with herself as to which one would shred next. The spotlit clown said, “But this is all there is.” The one standing in shadow said, “If I go there… That’s waiting.”
One more tiger growl sounded from out in the darkness: Nita’s dream-image of the Lone Power, patient, hungry, willing to wait. But still a little tired, Nita thought. Interesting…
“Yeah, well, so is What’s older,” Nita said. “And doesn’t die, no matter what one of Its older kids intended for the rest of creation.”
This time the screaming didn’t surprise Nita when it started. This time it was the clown in the shadows that shredded. The one in the spotlight looked at Nita in genuine shock. “Where’d you come from?” it said.
“Don’t ask me,” Nita said. “Theoretically, I’m asleep. Look, now that you’re over not being the
only thing in existence — for the moment — do you wear that costume all the time?”
The clown looked at her in astonishment. “You can tell it’s a costume?”
“Under the costumes,” Nita said, “even clowns have lives. Outside the circus, anyway.”
The clown was silent again, for even longer than before. Nita waited, untroubled. This far along in her practice, she had learned that a lot of wizardry wasn’t speech, but silence. “It seemed right,” the clown said. “The body I wear usually doesn’t work real well, and that makes people laugh. They may as well laugh for a good reason as for a bad one.”
And suddenly it wasn’t a clown standing there, but a boy of maybe eleven. He was handsome, in a little-kid way, skinny and sharp-faced, with a short, restrained Afro cut high in the back. But his eyes were younger than his body. “Nothing works,” he said, sounding abruptly matter-of-fact — or maybe it was just the loss of the clown suit that reinforced this effect. “Everybody laughs. Especially the ones who don’t do it out loud; they do it the loudest.”
Nita’s surprise at the change of clown-into-kid was muted a little by what he was saying, because she knew something about this, though not in regard to laughter. Some of the kids at school and family friends who’d tried over the past month to treat her as usual, as if nothing had happened, had hurt her far worse than those who’d let their discomfort show. “Well,” she said, “they’re idiots.”
“They’re all That,” the little kid said, pointing with his chin into the darkness. He didn’t move much; he stood with his hands hanging down by his sides, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them, and his face was fairly immobile. “The Thing out in the darkness, That’s been chasing me forever.”
Nita wasn’t sure what to make of this.
“I’m not sure you’re not That, too,” the kid said.
Nita raised her eyebrows. “Either I’m the One, or I’m That,” she said, frankly amused at the possibility that she could be either, “but I don’t think you get to have it both ways.”
