by Diane Duane
She took the phone from her dad. “Mrs. Rodriguez? It’s Nita. I just called him, but I don’t get any answer. And the manual says he’s not in this universe. He’s gone again.”
There was a long, frightened pause on the other end of the phone. “He said he wasn’t going to do that until Tom and Carl gave him the word,” Kit’s mama said. “But he really hasn’t been… himself, these past couple of days.”
That was exactly Nita’s worry at the moment: that Kit wasn’t himself, but somebody else. She had started wondering last night, as she wrestled with the cards, what possible effect autism might have on an abdal’s ability to be two places at one time. If that ability could start “slopping over” onto another party, one already susceptible to the abdal’s worldview, from having been inside it a few times—
She held still. I have got to keep my cool here, she thought. It’s the only way I’m going to find him
. “I’m going to go look for him,” Nita said. “It may take me a while to find him. I can’t do it the way he does it with Ponch; I’ve got to be asleep.”
She heard Kit’s mama take a long breath, the sound of someone else controlling herself as tightly as Nita was having to right now. “I have to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be back around midnight. But if you hear anything before then, will you call me? I think Kit gave you my work number.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Mrs. Rodriguez, please… don’t worry.” It’s going to he all right, Nita wanted most desperately to say, but she couldn’t say it: It might not be true.
“Okay,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “Thank your dad for me, sweetie. Good-bye.”
Nita hung up the phone. Outside, faint but clear, the howling continued. Her father was looking at her in distress.
“Where is he?” he said.
Nita shook her head. “I don’t have a name for it, Daddy. It’s not another planet or anything like that. I wish it were, because it’d be easier to get to. It’s somewhere inside of Darryl, which means it’s closer to us in some ways, but in some ways much further off than anything that would just be way out in conventional space. And it’s a lot more dangerous, in its way. If Kit’s stuck in there, and I can’t get him out…“
She began to shake. Here it was, full-blown, what she’d been most afraid of — a crisis that she was terrified she wasn’t going to be able to handle. And you’re all alone on this one, she thought.
Dairine may be able to offer some support, but you’re going to be the one who has to figure out what to do with it. And if you can’t figure it out…
Her father saw the look on her face and came over to her, put his arms around her. “Nita,” he said. “Listen to me.”
She looked up at him, rather shocked at his tone of voice. It was unusually stern for him.
“You’re tough,” her dad said. “You’re tougher than you think. That’s what you need to hang on to now. That’s what I’ve been hanging on to the best I can, and as far as I can tell, it turns out to be true every time if you just don’t let the idea go. What you have to do now is take one thing at a time — don’t let the stress overload you. Will Tom or Carl know what to do? Call them.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, and went back to the phone, dialed it hurriedly. A moment later, Carl’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Carl,” Nita said, “we’ve got trouble. He couldn’t hold it. He’s gone again.”
Wizards tend not to swear, since the results are likely to be unfortunate if they slip into the Speech while doing it. Nita, however, distinctly heard several swearwords in Carl’s silence. “When did he leave?”
“It might have been just a few minutes ago.”
“Okay. Wait a second.”
Carl put the phone down. She could hear him going to the table, where his version of the manual usually lay hidden. She heard him flip one volume open and start going through it. Listening carefully, she could hear a hiss, the little breath-between-teeth noise that Carl made when there was trouble.
A moment later he picked up the phone again. “He’s out of ambit, all right,” Carl said. “And the energy signatures are too vague to track him with, in terms of getting an ID on a specific universe… even assuming I could do that. The universes Ponch has been finding are nontypical, as is his mode of transit; the normal wizardry-tracking routines won’t work. But this much we do have in our favor.
Ponch went with Eat.”
“I bet Ponch made Kit take him,” Nita said, feeling sure of this without knowing why. “Carl, I’ll go try to find them.”
“I wouldn’t do that right this minute,” Carl said. “They might still be in transit. I can’t tell. Give the situation an hour or two to settle.”
Nita could see his point, but she didn’t like it. “Carl, he’s been really spaced-out since he came back from his last time in Darryl's universe. Anything could happen to him in a few minutes, let alone an hour!”
“Nita,” Carl said, “take a breath or two and get a grip on yourself. I know how you feel, but even if you’d already done the presleep preparation you need to do for a lucid dreaming session — which I don’t think you have — you’d still need to get to sleep after that. And you know you can’t induce it with a sleep spell when you’re going lucid. You’re going to have to relax a little, enough to sleep, or you won’t be able to do anything.”
She let out a long breath. “I hate it when you’re right,” Nita said. “Okay. I’ll call you later and let you know what I find.”
“Do that. I’ll be up late.”
She hung up, looked at her father. Dairine had come downstairs and was leaning in the dining room doorway, looking alert, with Spot peering into the kitchen from behind her legs. To Dairine, Nita said, “He’s gone. Let’s start building that power-feed spell; I’m going to need it in a couple of hours.”
She and Dairine headed up the stairs.
It took Nita nearly four hours to get ready to go after Kit, and even then she couldn’t sleep. Part of the problem was that she was very much a daytime person and found it tough to get to sleep before eight in the evening. The rest of the problem was her nerves.
When Nita first lay down, Dairine was still sitting in the chair by Nita’s desk, looking over the lifeline spell she’d constructed. At any other time, Nita would have been annoyed enough by the elegance and speed with which Dairine had constructed it to try to find at least some fault with it.
But there wasn’t time for that, and right now she was simply grateful that Dairine was so talented in this kind of work. The bed was surrounded by a long, tightly knitted cord of words in the Speech, rather like Kit’s leash for Ponch, but both more intricate and thicker. The wizardry had to handle much higher power levels than the leash did, and had no life-support functions as such — those Nita would be carrying with her on her charm bracelet, in a suite of interconnected shielding and atmosphere-maintenance spells.
Nita was also more heavily armed than usual, not knowing how many friends the Lone Power might have skulking around the borders of Darryl’s mind, intent on keeping enemies out and friends in. From Nita’s bracelet dangled a number of charms, each of which represented a spell almost ready to go, needing only one thought or pronounced syllable to set it going. It was wearying to carry this much nearly released power around, but Nita was beyond caring how much energy she had to expend. Her fear for Kit was growing by the minute.
After she’d finished looking over the lifeline wizardry and lay down on the bed, Nita took a last moment or three to check out the weaponry — the lightning bolt of the quark-level dissociator, the little closed spiral of a pinch-off utility that could seal a designated attacker or group of attackers into a “pocket” space, the little “magic wand” charm that contained a one-off terawatt particle-beam generator. Even in her present nervous state, Nita looked at that one with slight relish and wished she might have a chance to use it — the manual had been explicit about how dangerous it was, and how effective. The manual itself was slipped into her own otherspac
e pocket, inside the lifeline wizardry with her. Last of all she checked her throat, where the thin fine chain of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was fastened, and made sure it was charged and active. It buzzed slightly against her fingers, acknowledging that it was ready to go.
Nita settled herself back against the pillows. “How long’s the lifeline good for?” she said to Dairine.
“You get six hours,” Dairine said. “Then it’s got to be dismantled and rebuilt, and I have to recharge it. It’s…” She glanced at Spot, who was sitting on the desk with his screen up, running manual functions, among them a Julian date clock. “It’s just past three-oh-three-point-three. You get until point-fifty-five, then you snap back here, no matter what you’re doing. So keep an eye on your manual.”
Nita nodded. She wiggled against the pillows a little and closed her eyes.
After about five minutes, she opened them again, and sighed. “Dari…”
“Is there something wrong with the spell?”
Nita made a face. “This is really dumb, but I can’t fall asleep with you sitting there watching me.
You’re going to have to stay in your room, for a while anyway.”
Dairine shrugged. “No problem,” she said, and reached down to pick up one of the lines of light that was trailing away from the lifeline spell. Dairine walked out the door with the power-feed line in her hand. The line of light, the single character for connection in the Speech, stretched and stretched after her as she went.
Then Dairine stuck her head back in the room. “Good luck, Neets,” she said.
“Thanks,” Nita said. I may need it…
At first Nita concentrated on doing the breathing exercises that often helped her get to sleep when she was having trouble doing so, but tonight all they seemed to do was make her uncomfortably aware of her breathing. Finally she gave up on that and just stared at the ceiling, fixing her attention on one spot, the little flawed place where Dairine had once bounced a Superball too high and flaked off the ceiling paint. After a while, as Nita had expected, her eyes started tiring.
Eventually she found herself standing in the dark. That darkness was nearly complete: There were no spotlights now, no signs of anything being in this universe but her, and only the faintest, not-quite-black “background” radiance from the sky above. Did I miss them? Nita wondered. Have they gone somewhere else?
She looked around. It did no good standing still in one of these dreams, she’d found. You had to walk around to get anywhere worth being. So Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and came out with a favorite tool, a moonlight-steeped rowan wand lent her by Liused, the tree in her backyard.
This one was getting close to its “use by” date — such wands routinely lasted for only three full moons and an intercalary day, unless burned out by overuse before then — and wasn’t much good for anything but light at this point. But light was just what Nita needed. As she touched it and pulled it out, the wand came afire with a blaze of secondhand moonlight, enough to show Nita that she was standing on the same plain black surface that she’d seen here before, when meeting the clown, the robot, and the knight. But there was nothing else to be seen at all, in any direction.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s see.”
One of the ready-made spells on her bracelet had a charm that looked like a miniature radar screen. Knowing before she left who she was going to be looking for, Nita had wound Kit’s name in the Speech into it. Now she reached down to that charm and, touching it, saw in her mind the single word needed to activate the spell.
She said the word. Immediately Nita was standing in the middle of a pool of faint light, very much like the big radar that air traffic controllers use. It was a life-sign detector, one that would tag any specific personality it had been keyed to. Nita looked down at it. Even though the steady glow of it was soft, it was hard to make out any specific indication from it. Nita whispered the light of the rowan wand down to nothing and stared at the detector for many long moments, until her eyes watered.
Finally, though, she spotted what she was looking for: a faint, faint patch of light, off in the two o’clock direction. The curling tracery of Kit’s initials in the Speech were beside it.
He’s a long way off Nita thought. But he’s here.
The trouble was that he seemed to be all by himself; there didn’t seem to be any indication of Darryl on the radar screen. He might still he by himself, Nita thought. Or if he has found Darryl, then Darryl's perception of his own isolation may have affected Kit so that he thinks he’s still alone.
It didn’t matter. At least now Nita had a direction to walk in.
She spoke the light of the rowan wand back up and spent what seemed like the better part of the next fifteen minutes walking toward Kit. But my time sense may be off, too, Nita thought, pausing briefly at about the fifteen-minute point to check her manual.
She was shocked to find that it was nearly.40. It’s been nearly three hours outside! she thought.
This is the problem Kit ran up against the other night. Time flow in here is getting strange.
Nita walked faster. After what seemed like another five minutes or so, she started to see something right against the very edge of the dark horizon, like a very faintly seen thread or line of some different color. The closer she got to it, the more distinct it became; it was starting to pick up the light of the rowan wand.
Within a few minutes she found that the line was growing thicker and taller with every step, and brighter, too. Shortly she was close enough to start to make out what it was.
It was a wall. Perfect, white, featureless, stretching away from her — seemingly to infinity — in great curves on either side, the wall towered over Nita as she approached it. A few feet away from it, Nita stopped, bent her neck back to look at it.
It was not a physical thing, she knew, but a representation of some power or force that had been put here to stop any intruder. And there was no telling who had put it here — Darryl, or the Lone Power.
Nita stepped forward and cautiously touched the wall with a fingertip, like someone gingerly testing an electric fence. She could tell immediately that this construction didn’t have anything to do with the Lone Power: There was none of the inimical burn she would have expected. Nothing else happened — no force attacked her — but Nita could tell by the feel of the wall that it was meant to be infinitely obstructive. She could try to levitate over it, but it would simply stretch up and up and up to match the height at which she attacked it; she could try to dig down under it, but it would extend that way, too. The only way to deal with this wall was to go through — if she had time.
Okay
, Nita thought. Let’s see what works.
She said the twelve words of a small-scale antigravity wizardry, wrapped them around the rowan wand, and hung it on the air to give her some light to work by; then turned the charm bracelet on her wrist. One of the charms, looking like a little lasso, was the representation of the lifeline spell.
Touching it, Nita could feel the power feeding down it, and could faintly feel Dairine, in circuit with it back at home.
You okay
? her sister said.
So far. I need some power now.
Take what you need. The wizardry’s fully charged.
Nita held the charm between her fingers and said the two words that released the clamp on the power flow at her end. Her right hand started filling with a hot white glow, the representation of what Dairine’s wizardry was sending her. Nita let it flow, squeezing the power down to compact it a couple of times and make room for more. Finally, after about a minute, she cut off the flow and stepped toward the wall, using pressure of hands and mind and a few sentences in the Speech to shape that power into a small, concentrated explosive charge of wizardry. She pushed it up against the bottom of the wall, like so much plastic explosive, instructing it to vent all its force away from her, and then retreated to a safe distance.
Nita spoke the air in front of he
r dark, and then said the explosive’s actuator word in the Speech.
The result was a dazzling flash and impact like lightning striking six feet away. Dark though the air had been, Nita still had to shake her head and blink a few times, trying to get rid of the afterimages. When she managed it, she looked up…
… and saw that the wall was standing right where it had been, without so much as a dent in it.
Nita stared. What?!
The amount of power she’d planted in that explosive had been huge. She felt somehow cheated and really angry at the same time. “Okay,” she said, “no more Miss Nice Girl. Let’s try something a little more emphatic.”
She reached down to the bracelet again and found the charm for the particle-beam accelerator.
As she touched it, the accelerator wizardry sprang into being in her hands, ready to fire — a long, narrow conical shape with a blunt stock. Nita snugged the stock of it up against her shoulder, and carefully took aim again at the base of the wall. She had invested a great deal of energy in this wizardry; now she would see what it was worth—
The world flickered, went abruptly bright. What? Nita thought.
Don’t shoot
! someone shouted into her mind. It was Dairine.
Nita looked around her in complete confusion. She was lying in bed, aiming the linac weapon at her ceiling.
Oh my god
, Nita thought. She hurriedly lowered the accelerator and let the wizardry relapse. She lay there for a few moments while her pulse got back to normal, and then sat up and looked over at the small figure slumped in the chair by her desk.
“Dairine, what am I doing here?.” Nita whispered.
“Giving me grief, apparently,” Dairine said, looking ragged. “I told you to watch your time. You spent a real long time getting wherever you were going.” She let out a long breath. “And you didn’t find any trace of Kit at all?”
Nita sagged against the pillows again, and shook her head. “I know he was there, but I couldn’t get near him. We’re going to need more power in that thing this time, Dari. Charge it up. I’m going out again.”
