A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition

by Diane Duane

  Oh my god, Nita thought.

  It really is him—the kid Kit’s been hunting. It’s Darryl!

  And now I think I understand “the Silence”! she thought. Wizards got their information from the universe in many different ways. On Earth alone, the manual in either its printed or online versions was merely one of many methods. Whale-wizards heard the Sea speak to them; the feline wizards had told Nita about something called the Whispering. What Darryl’s got has to be like that…

  But she was still left with entirely too many mysteries to solve. Nita stood there wondering what in the worlds to do next… then shook her head.

  Waking up would probably be a good idea.

  It took Nita a few seconds to remember the way to break the dream without waiting for a normal awakening. When she opened her eyes, she was looking sideways at the wall beside her desk, having put her arms down on the desk and her head down on her arms as she initially slid into sleep.

  Nita rubbed her eyes, blinked, stretched. I’m completely wiped out, she thought. I’ve got to get some real sleep, now, or I’ll be useless tomorrow. But Kit’s got to hear about this.

  She glanced down at her manual. “What time is it?” she said.

  The page cleared and showed her the time in every zone on Earth, as a Julian date, and on all the planets in Sol system.

  “Show-off,” she said softly, glancing at the local time for New York. The readout said, “0223.”

  It was late, but this was important. Kit? Nita said silently.

  Nothing. But it wasn’t the “asleep” kind of nothing: Kit was missing.

  “Message him,” she said to the manual.

  The page blanked itself, then showed Nita the words, “Subject is out of ambit.”

  That “error” message she now recognized. Kit and Ponch were off world-walking somewhere, out of this universe proper. Nita sighed. I’ll have to catch him in the morning, she thought. But bed first…

  ***

  She slept hard and deep, and for a change woke up not in the dark, but just after dawn. I still wish spring would hurry up, Nita thought as she swung her feet out of bed and rubbed her eyes. This winter seems to he lasting forever. But at the same time, it was hard to dislike a morning like this, when there was what looked like six inches of new snow outside, and it was Saturday as well. The snow was wet, clinging delicately to the bare branches of the trees out in the backyard, and everything was very still, the sky a pure, clean blue behind the white branches. Who knows? Maybe I’ll sneak out there, make a snowball or two, and stick them in Dairine’s bed. Give her about three seconds of thinking I’ve had second thoughts about her and the bed and Pluto.

  Nita threw last night’s sweatshirt and jeans on and went downstairs to the kitchen, manual in hand. Her father was there, making his own coffee for a change. He looked at Nita with some surprise when she came in. “You’re up early for a Saturday,” he said.

  “Not that early. I got some sleep for a change.”

  “You don’t look like it.”

  Nita yawned and stretched. “Don’t feel like it, either.”

  “Just a long week at school, maybe?”

  “I don’t know.” She went over to put the kettle on for herself. She ached all over, as if she’d had a particularly bad gym class, and she just felt generally weary. As if I was a long, long way away last night.

  But if that really was Darryl, then I was only two towns away, in his mind.

  Or possibly in an alternate universe he created, one a whole lot further away than that—

  “How are you coming with what you were working on yesterday morning?” Nita’s dad said. “Any progress?”

  “Yeah,” Nita said, “but I don’t understand it.” She opened a cupboard and tried to decide what kind of tea she wanted. She finally decided on mint, and got the tea box down, fishing around in it for the right tea bag.

  “Your alien, or the progress?”

  “Both. And it looks like it wasn’t even an alien, if I’m right. It’s a little kid who lives over in Baldwin.”

  Her father looked surprised at that as he went to get his coat from the rack by the door. “Another wizard?”

  “Theoretically, not yet,” Nita said. “Assuming this is the person who I think it is. I have to check with Kit.” But that brought up another odd problem for Nita to consider. From her own experience, Nita knew that being on Ordeal imparted a certain tentative feel to your wizardry, even when your power levels were at their highest. Even Dairine’s use of wizardry, when she was on Ordeal, had exhibited that new-and-uncertain quality. But it was completely missing in Darryl. Something else to ask Tom and Carl about.

  Her dad put on his coat. “Well, that sounds encouraging, anyhow,” he said. He came over, gave her a hug and a kiss. “Leave me a note if you have to go anywhere. Is Dairine going to be getting involved in this?”

  “Jeez, I hope not,” Nita said. “Things are confusing enough already.”

  “Okay,” her dad said. “She has some school project she’s supposed to be working on this weekend. If you want to just have a look at one point or another and make sure she’s staying on track…”

  This was, in fact, the last thing Nita wanted, but she nodded. “I will.”

  “Thanks, baby girl. See you later.”

  Nita wasn’t sure, as her father went out, whether to bristle or smile. When’s the last time he called me “baby girl”? she thought. It was one of those nicknames that Nita had complained about forcefully for years when she was younger, until her dad finally stopped using it. And now I’m not even sure I mind anymore, she thought. I wonder if somehow he’s trying to remind himself of how things were when Mom was still here.

  After a moment she laughed at herself for thinking such “shrinkly” thoughts. Millman’s affecting me, Nita thought.

  She made a face then, as the kettle came to a boil. Oh god. Millman and his card tricks. …But how long can it take to learn a card trick? I’ll do it later. Got some other things to think about right now.

  Nita glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It read 7:48. A little early, but then Kit did tend to get up early on the weekends. Kit? she said.

  For a moment there was no response.

  Hnnnhhh?

  I’m not sure, but I think I may have found your guy.

  A pause. When he answered, he still didn’t sound incredibly awake. When?

  Last night. Time’s hard to judge, but I think it would’ve been around two-thirty.

  There was a much longer pause that made Nita think Kit might have gone back to sleep. Finally he said, It couldn’t have been. I was with Darryl around then.

  Nita blinked at that. You sure? she said.

  Yes I’m sure. He sounded cranky. Neets, look, I’m completely wrecked, and I had big trouble with my folks last night. I want to go back to sleep. Call me back, okay?

  Uh, sure, but—

  The connection between them didn’t so much break as dissolve in a returning wave of sleep. Nita stared at the tea bag in her hand, bemused. “Well,” she said.

  She made her tea and sat down at the dining room table with the mug, the manual, and a banana. Nita didn’t go straight into the manual, partly because she wasn’t yet clear on where she should start looking. She was still trying to sort out some things about her experience last night.

  There had just been something about Darryl. Nita kept coming back to the impact she’d felt when their eyes had met. It wasn’t strength, or not in the usual sense. And if it was power, it had something else added that made it more significant than usual. She was well down the cup of tea before she found the word she was looking for.

  Innocence…

  Talk about the innocence of childhood tended to make Nita roll her eyes. Her own childhood was behind her—mostly to her relief, because of all the beating up. And her memory of Dairine’s childhood was way too fresh. Anyone putting that whole set of experiences and the word innocence together in the same sentence would simply h
ave made Nita laugh. Her sister’s behavior aside, Nita knew perfectly well that most kids were no innocents.

  But then most of the talk you heard on the subject came from adults, most of whom had some bizarre concept of childhood as this pure, untroubled thing that Nita wasn’t sure had ever existed. Plainly, like the counselor that Dairine had been complaining about, too few of them really remembered what it was like to be seven, or nine, or twelve.

  Nita could understand that perfectly. Large parts of childhood hurt, and adults did with that remembered pain exactly what kids did when they could: let whatever good memories they had bury it. Oh, the moments of delight, of pure joy, they were there all right, but what adults seemingly couldn’t bear was the idea that their whole childhoods hadn’t been that way: that the trouble and sorrow that were the result of the Lone Power’s meddling in the worlds weren’t something they’d always had to deal with, right from the start. So despite whatever kids tried to tell them, adults just kept on reinventing childhood as something that was supposed to be happy all the time, a paradise lost in the past.

  Yet in very small children, there was something that Nita had to admit she’d seen … even, occasionally, in Dairine. Last night, in her dream, Nita had looked at Darryl and had seen flashes of the same thing in his eyes, unalloyed—a sense of living in the morning of the world, a time or place either uncorrupted or redeemed; unafraid, and with no reason to be afraid; a person grounded immovably in the sense that the world worked, was just fine, would always be fine….

  Poor kid, Nita thought. Wait till reality hits him. Yet, remembering the look in those fearless eyes, she found herself having an unaccustomed second thought. Reality might hit him; might, indeed, have hit him hard already—but he wasn’t the one who’d shatter.

  Boy, would I like to be there to see that.

  Nita began to peel the banana. But all that aside, Kit said he was with Darryl when I was, Nita thought. So if he’s right, then who was I with?

  She took a bite of the banana and considered. And that’s not the only thing about this that’s strange. It’s Kit who’s been looking for him. If this really is Darryl, then why’ve I been seeing him, too?

  But now she thought she had an answer to that. We’ve both been holding the world at arm’s length...though for way different reasons. Trying to get it to leave us alone. She shook her head. And making ourselves more alone while we did it. But the wizardry knew what it was doing better than we did. One wizard alone found another one…

  Nita sat there for a moment, staring at the banana without really seeing it. Fine. But still… if this is Darryl, then why’re my visits to his world so different from Kit’s?

  She had another bite of the banana, reflecting. Unless it’s just that I didn’t know that the person trying to contact me was an autistic. So maybe I got something that was more like Darryl’s own ideas about himself … just translated into my own idiom. Whereas Kit’s known from the beginning that Darryl’s an autistic, and so maybe he’s been projecting his own ideas about that onto what’s been happening.

  To Nita this sounded so commonsense that it might be true. It’s worth checking out. Now I just wish I could figure out how Darryl can be with both me and Kit at the same time. Maybe he’s time-slipping somehow?

  But that would take the kind of wizardry that would need a ton of power to fuel it: not to mention (as a rule) authorization from above. Though maybe not always. Didn’t Ronan timeslide a little when he was in the middle of his Ordeal? Maybe on-Ordeal status itself functions as authorization sometimes. And the only thing Nita was now certain about, as far as her dream went, was that Darryl hadn’t actually been doing any wizardry at the time.

  No. Something else was going on…

  Nita finished the banana, got up to dump the skin in the kitchen garbage can, and came back to her tea and the manual again. What other ways are there for someone to be in two places at one time?

  She had to laugh at herself a little as she reached for the manual. Be a great trick if you had a busy schedule, Nita thought. Or you could be in school taking a test while you were also lying on the beach with a good book, working on your tan.

  She started paging through the manual again, idly at first, then with more concentration. After about fifteen minutes of this, as the sun got brighter on the snow outside and the dining room filled with its light, Nita realized that she still wasn’t sure exactly how to find what she needed. She went to the back of the manual, to the page that handled search functions.

  “I need all the references that have to do with being in two places at one time,” she said.

  The page cleared itself, and new words appeared. “Apparition or co-location?”

  There it was, yet another word Nita hadn’t ever heard of before today “Apparition first,” she said.

  “See highlighted section,” the page said, and her manual was abruptly about an inch thicker.

  “Oh, no,” Nita said. “I think I need another banana.”

  ***

  In the end, it took three more. Nita was grateful that Dairine seemed to be sleeping late, as she was the big banana fan in the house and would not have been pleased that Nita had made such inroads into the supply. The extra bananas gave Nita time to discover, mostly by skimming the material as fast as she could, that there were a truly unnerving number of ways to appear in two places at once, if you felt like spending the energy.

  But that was the factor that kept everyone from doing it all the time. The universe had a deeply ingrained bias against the same thing being in more than one place at once—this singularity of location being one of the ways that matter defined itself to begin with—and if you wanted to bend that bias in your favor, you would be heavily penalized, in terms of having to use a huge amount of effort to build a very complex spell.

  It doesn’t matter, Nita thought as she turned over the last twenty pages of the section, doing little more than glancing at them. I’m sure he wasn’t doing a wizardry last night, so none of this stuff applies. She turned back to the search page again. “Give me the co-location stuff now,” she said, not seeing any great point in it, but unwilling to stop until she’d read everything that could have a bearing on the problem.

  The manual reduced itself to something more like its normal size, and laid itself open at a much shorter section. Nita glanced at the title page and table of contents for the section, momentarily confused. It was a classifications section on the Orders of Being.

  Huh? she thought. Nita had been through this section every now and then. The time she’d been most interested in it was just after passing her Ordeal, when she was trying to sort out some of the finer details of how wizardry was organized. That version of the information had been thinner than this one, a sort of beginner’s guide; this one was considerably more detailed.

  Nita turned the pages, glancing at the master classification listing of created beings in the universe. The listing didn’t go by species, but by type. Good old-fashioned mortals naturally had all the other types outnumbered, but there were still a surprising number of modified mortals and other conditionals. Then came wizards, of which there were hundreds of different types, even within single species. Among her own species, with which Nita would have thought she was moderately familiar by now, there were more classes of wizard than she’d realized.

  The standard classes—probationary, mid-Ordeal, full wizard, expert wizard, Advisory/Senior, Regional, Planetary, Sector—those she’d known about for long enough. But there were also splinter classifications, some categories that didn’t quite fit among either mortal wizards or the Powers That Be. The Transcendent Pig, of course, Nita knew. She smiled slightly as she turned past his page. The picture doesn’t do him justice. Maybe it’s old. But there were many other classifications in this section, too, some of them most obscure. Principalities, Thrones, Dominations— She raised her eyebrows. ‘Thrones?’ Who wants to be a chair? But maybe I’m missing something here. Who knows? Maybe it’s fun to be furniture.r />
  Nita turned the page over. Pillars? What is this? First furniture, now architecture…

  Abdals / “Pillars” — This state or condition of created being does not necessarily imply wizardly status but is still routinely included as associated with the classification because of the sharing of various functions and qualities across species and eschatological barriers. The sobriquet “Pillars” refers to the immense supportive strength inherent in these beings wherever they appear. The physical and spiritual structure of the Universe and its contents is strengthened against the assaults of evil by the Pillars’ presence, and weakened by their loss. While they occasionally may also be wizards, abdals display no unusual aptitude for the Art: their value lies elsewhere. Their status comes from direct endowment by the One; their power is derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality. Some have unusual abilities of perception reaching into other universes, or are able to so clearly perceive details of the innate structure of their home universe that the entire physical world can seem a mirage by contrast. Some have sufficient control over their physical natures to change their bodies at will without recourse to normal wizardry, or to travel great distances or appear in two places the same time….

  Certainty went straight through Nita like a lightning bolt, and not only because of the two-places-at-once line. It was everything else in combination with that. She thought of the knight, of the strength and bravery she’d sensed in that version of Darryl, and of the power inherent in the robot. All those experiences were fragments of this bigger picture, pieces of the jigsaw. Nita glanced on down the page.

  The Pillars are rarely recognized as such by their contemporaries. Should they become conscious of their own status as abdals, the realization itself renders them ineffective in their role, which is to channel the One’s power without obstruction into the strengthening of the world. Their portion of that power is then lost to the Worlds, and with its loss, the abdal dies.

  Nita slapped the manual shut and sat there, actually sweating, for a few moments. The language of the manual could be obscure sometimes, but this time Nita was sure she knew perfectly well what it was talking about when it said the Pillars’ power was “derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality.” It means what Darryl’s got, she thought. Innocence. That plain, straightforward innocence that just goes right through whatever comes at it, like a knife, or bounces any attack off it, like a shield. And that really, really pisses off the Lone Power, so that It just keeps coming at him again and again. Which is just the way Darryl wants it—