The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition

by Diane Duane

  Nita didn’t allow the numbers to freak her out. She kept at it, making each set of nine strands, winding them together, looping them, linking them through the other available links, and fastening them closed. The work was as hypnotic in its way as crocheting—a hobby that Nita had taken up a couple of years ago at her mother’s instigation, then promptly dumped because the constant repetition of motions made her hands cramp. But this was not about making a scarf. This was about saving her mother’s life… so Nita found it a lot easier to ignore the cramps.

  Gradually the delicate structure began to grow. Several times Nita missed hooking one of the substructures into all the others it had to be connected to, and the diagram in the manual flashed insistently until she went back and fixed it. Slowly, though, she started to get the rhythm down pat, and the eighty-one syllables, repeated again and again, came out perfectly every time, though they started becoming meaningless with the repetition. I’m going to be saying these things in my sleep, Nita thought, finishing one more unit and moving on to the next.

  About an hour into this work, Nita heard her dad come home. The back door shut, and she heard him moving around downstairs in the kitchen, but she kept doing what she was doing. A few minutes later there was a knock at her door, and he came in.

  Nita looked up at him, grateful for the interruption, and flexed her hands to get rid of the latest bout of cramps. The steady energy drain that came with doing a repetitive wizardry like this was really tiring her out, but that couldn’t be helped. “How’s Mom?” she said.

  “She’s fine,” her father said, and sat down wearily on her bed. “Well, not fine; of course not. But she’s not in pain, and she’s not so full of the drugs this afternoon… We talked about the surgery. She’s okay about that.”

  “Really?” Nita said.

  Her father rubbed his face. “Well, of course not, honey,” he said. “Who wants anybody monkeying around with their brain? But she knows it’s got to be done.”

  “And the rest of it?”

  Her dad shook his head. “She’s not exactly happy about the possibility that the cancer might have spread. But there’s nothing we can do about that, and there’s no point in worrying about it when there’s something so much more important happening in a few days.”

  He looked at the faint line of light lying on Nita’s desk. “What’s that?”

  She picked it up, handed it to him. “Go ahead,” she said when he hesitated. “You can’t hurt it.”

  He reached out and took the delicate linkage of loop after loop of light into his hands. “What’s it for?”

  “Helping Mom.”

  “You talked to Tom and Carl?”

  “Yeah.” Nita wondered whether to get into the details, then decided against it. When he’s ready to ask, I’ll be ready to tell, I hope. “There are places I can go,” she said, “where I can learn the skills I need to deal with the… cancer.” She had trouble saying the word. I’m going to have to get over that. “I won’t be gone for long, Dad, but I’ll be going to places where time doesn’t run the same way. I may be pretty tired when I get back.”

  He handed back the partly made matrix. “You really think this has a chance of making a difference? Of making your mom well?”

  “It’s a chance,” Nita said. “I won’t know until I try, Daddy.”

  “Is Dairine going with you?”

  Nita shook her head. “She’s got to sit this one out.”

  Her father nodded. “All right. Sweetheart … you know what I’m going to say.”

  “Be careful.”

  He managed just the slightest smile. “When are you going to tell Mom about this?”

  “When I’ve tried it once. After I see how it goes, I’ll tell her. No point in getting her worried, or excited, until I know for sure that I can get where I have to go and do what I have to.”

  “One other thing, hon…”

  Nita looked at her father with concern.

  “For tomorrow and Tuesday, anyway, I think you and Dairine should go to school as usual. It’s better for us all to stick to our normal routines than to sit around home agonizing over what’s going on.”

  Nita wasn’t wild about this idea, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to start arguing the point with her father right now. “Okay,” she said after a moment.

  “Then I’ll go get us something to eat,” her father said, and went out.

  Nita turned back to the desk, let out a long sad breath at the pain and worry in her dad’s face, and said the eighty-one syllables one more time.

  ***

  Kit spent the day adding notes to his manual on where he had been. Once or twice during the process he checked the back of the book to see if there was anything from Nita, but found nothing. At first he thought, Maybe she’s busy. It’s not like she doesn’t have her own projects to work on. But as the evening approached, Kit began to wonder what she was up to. I guess I could always shoot her a thought.

  He pushed back in his desk chair, leaned back—

  “Ow!”

  Kit turned around hurriedly and realized that Ponch was lying right behind him, half asleep… or formerly half asleep. He wasn’t now; not with one of Kit’s chair legs shoved into his gut. “Sorry,” Kit said, pulling the chair in a little.

  “Hmf,” Ponch said, and put his head down on his paws again.

  Kit sighed and closed his eyes once more. Neets?…

  …Nothing. Well, not quite. She was there, but she wasn’t in receiving mode right now, or just wasn’t receptive. Additionally, coming from her direction, Kit could catch a weird sort of background noise, like someone saying something again and again—a fierce in-turned concentration he’d never felt in her before. What’s she doing? … The noise had a faint taste of wizardry about it, but there was also an emotional component, a turmoil of extreme nervousness, but blocked, stifled—he couldn’t make anything of it.

  Weird, he thought. Neets? Anybody home?

  Still no reply. Finally Kit sighed and leaned forward to his work again. The manual had presented him with a detailed questionnaire about his experiences in the places he’d been, and there were still a lot of sections to fill in. I’ll walk over there after I’m done and see what the story is.

  It was after eight before Kit got up. He went downstairs to get his jacket, for it was chilly; fall was setting in fast. As Kit went by, his pop looked up from the living-room chair where he was reading, and said, “Son, it’s a school day tomorrow. Don’t be out late.”

  “I won’t,” Kit said. “Just gonna drop in on Nita real fast.”

  With a scrabble of claws on the stairs, Ponch threw himself down them and turned the corner into the living room. “Whereyagoin’-whereyagoin’-whereyagoin’!”

  “Mr. Radar Ears strikes again,” Kit’s father said. “Can’t move around here without that dog demanding you take him out for a walk.”

  “He has his reasons,” Kit said, amused, and headed out.

  The streetlight at the corner was malfunctioning again, sizzling as its light jittered on and off. Kit didn’t mind the “off”; as he crossed the street with Ponch, he could see more plainly the stars of autumn evening climbing through the branches of the trees. Already there were fewer leaves to hide them. At the rate this fall had been going, with sharp frosts every night, there would be few leaves, or none, left in a couple of weeks. Past the faint glints of Deneb and Altair in that sky were Uranus and Neptune. Kit couldn’t see them with the naked eye, but to a wizard’s senses they could be felt, even at this distance, as a distant tang of mass in the icy void. Kit smiled at the thought that they seemed even more like the local neighborhood than usual, compared to the places he’d been today.

  He came to Nita’s house and, to his surprise, found it dark and Nita’s dad’s car gone. Maybe they all went out somewhere, to the movies or to visit somebody, something like that. Oh well, Mela said she called. And she got my message. She’ll get back to me.

  Kit walked Ponch for a little
while more, then went home and settled once again at his desk to finish that report in the manual, but first he used it to leave Nita another message. Tried to reach you earlier, but you sounded busy. Call when you can. He would have added See you at school tomorrow, except that this was less likely than it used to be. Their classes were all different, and at the moment they didn’t even have the same lunch period.

  He sent the message, then paged through the manual to finish his report. Ponch curled up behind Kit’s chair, muttering a little to himself as he groomed his paws after their walk.

  “If you were going to tell someone your gut feeling about the places where we went yesterday,” Kit said to Ponch, reading him one of the questions he still had to answer, “what would it be?”

  “They smelled nice,” Ponch said slowly. “But smell isn’t everything…”

  Kit raised his eyebrows, made a note of that, and went back to work.

  10: Monday Morning and Afternoon

  Nita saw dawn come in again … this time because she hadn’t bothered to go to sleep after coming back from the hospital. She had been too busy working on the spell matrix. Now, worn out, she sat at her desk in the vague morning light and looked at the matrix lying in her hands.

  To a wizard far enough along in her learning to think in the Speech, and used to seeing the underpinnings of power beneath mere appearance, it looked two ways. One was a complex, interwoven glitter and shimmer of strands of light with nine prominent knots showing, each one a receptor site into which a wizardry could be offered up. But the other semblance, which had made it easier for Nita to work with the wizardry in its later stages, was a charm bracelet— though one with no charms on it as yet. The manual suggested it would take time for her to choose the spells she needed and mate them successfully to the matrix. Nita hoped it wouldn’t take as long as the manual suggested it might. She needed to hurry.

  She poured it through her fingers, feeling the virtual mass she had bound into the matrix’s structure. It now looked and felt enough like an ordinary charm bracelet that no one would find it strange Nita was wearing it. It was also a convenient shape; she wouldn’t have to keep it in a pocket.

  “Didn’t think you’d be done with it already,” Dairine said from right behind her.

  Nita started, nearly falling right out of her chair, then looked over her shoulder. “Yeah, well, think about that the next time you accuse me of not doing anything.”

  Dairine nodded. She looked wan, in that early light, and her dad’s big T-shirt hanging off her made her look more waiflike and fragile than usual. Nita regretted having spoken sharply to her. “You okay?”

  “No,” Dairine said, “and why should I be? Terrible things are happening, and there’s nothing I can do. Worse, I have to sit around and hope that you get it right.” She glowered.

  This, at least, was a more normal mode of operation for Dairine. Nita poked her genially. “We’ll see what Carl says,” she said. “Go on.”

  Dairine went off. Nita got up and opened a drawer, to choose her clothes for that day, picked up that new skirt and almost decided not to wear it. Then she thought, Why not? If I get sent home, it’ll just give Mom an excuse to feel like she was right. Probably cheer her up, too.She fished around for a top to go with it, then went off for her shower.

  Half an hour later, showered and dressed, Nita felt slightly better, almost as if she hadn’t been up all night. She went downstairs to have a bite of breakfast and found her father finishing a bowl of cereal. He glanced at Nita as she rummaged in the fridge, and said, “Isn’t that a little short?”

  Nita snickered. “Mom bought it, Dad. It was long enough for her.”

  Her father raised his eyebrows. He normally left this kind of issue to Nita and her mom to resolve; now he seemed to be having second thoughts. “Well, I suppose … Come by the store when you’re out of school and we’ll go straight over and see Mom.”

  “Okay.” She put the milk down and hugged him. “See you later.”

  Her father went out, and Nita watched him get into the car and drive off. It felt to her as if he was just barely holding it all together, and that tore at Nita. Well, if I can make this work, he won’t need to be that way for long.

  Please, God, let it work!

  She drank a glass of milk and then sat down at the kitchen table with her manual, flipping to the back of it. There she saw the new message from Kit and was immediately guilt stricken. I’ll catch up with him at school today, she thought. Right now, though, I’ve gotta take care of this first. She opened a new message on a clean page. Carl?

  The answer came straight back; he was using his manual, too. Good morning.

  Got a moment?

  If it’s just a moment, yes.

  I’m done. Want to check it out?

  Okay. Come on over.

  Nita reached into her claudication-pocket, pulled out the transit spell she used for Tom and Carl’s backyard, and tweaked the ingress parameters so that there’d be no air-displacement bang. Then she dropped it to the floor and stepped through.

  Carl was standing in the doorway from the house to the patio, tying his tie and looking out at the garden. Nita paused for just a moment to admire him; she didn’t often see him dressed for work. “Nice tie, Carl.”

  He glanced down at it. It was patterned all over with bright red chilies, a surprising contrast to the sober charcoal of the suit. “Yeah, it was a gift from my sister. Her ideas of business wear are unique. What’ve you got for me?”

  “Here,” Nita said, going over to hand him the charm bracelet.

  Carl raised his eyebrows, amused by the shape, and then dissolved the appearance to show the matrix itself, enlarged until it stretched a couple of feet in length, shimmering and intricate, between his hands.

  “Yeah,” Carl said, examining it section by section. “Right…” He paused, then showed Nita one spot where the linked strands didn’t come together quite the same way they did elsewhere. “Open receptor site there…”

  “I know. I left it that way on purpose, in case I need to expand it later.” Nita pointed at the spell strands around the spot. “See, there’s reinforcement around it, and a blocker.”

  “Hmm…” He looked at the rest of the matrix. “Yeah, I see what you’ve done; it makes sense. Okay, I’ll sanction it.”

  Carl took the two ends of the matrix strand and knotted them with a slightly more involved version of the wizard’s knot. The whole length of the matrix flashed briefly with white fire as Carl set his Senior’s authorization into the structure of the wizardry. Though the flash died away quickly, for a few moments the whole backyard hummed with released and rebound power. Nita was distracted from the sight of a small, complex structure now hanging from the strand, like a tangled knot of light, by a sudden annoyed voice that said:

  “Any chance you might hold it

  down out there? People in

  here are still sleeping.”

  Nita looked around. One of the koi in the fishpond had put its head up out of the water and was giving them both a cranky look.

  Carl sighed. “Sorry, Akagane-sama.” He bowed slightly in the fish’s direction.

  The koi, a big handsome one spotted in dark orange-gold and white, rolled halfway over on the edge of the pool, and caught sight of Nita with one golden eye. It looked at her thoughtfully, then said:

  “If half a loaf is better

  than no bread, then at least

  I want the crumbs now.”

  “It’s blackmail, that’s what it is,” Carl said, and vanished into the house. A few moments later he came back out and dropped some koi pellets and toast crumbs into the water.

  The fish let out a bubble of breath, glancing at what Carl was holding. “All the drawing lacks,” it said,

  “is the final touch: to add

  eyes to the dragon…”

  Then it slipped back into the water with a small splash, and started eating.

  Nita glanced at Carl. He shrugged. “Sometimes I
don’t know whether I have koi or koans,” he said. “Anyway, you’re all set now. The Grand Central gate will acknowledge this when it comes in range.” He handed Nita the matrix, and it looked like a charm bracelet again. But there was something added: a single golden charm—a tiny fish. “So when’re you going to start?”

  “Uh, this afternoon, if I can stay awake that long.”

  “Go well, then,” Carl said. “Speaking of which, I have to go, too.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Good luck, kiddo.” He went into the house.

  Nita slipped the bracelet onto her wrist, and headed back to her transit circle.

  ***

  Kit went to school that morning still excited about what he’d brought back from his dog walk. He’d transited the little flower, still in stasis, over to Tom’s Sunday night, and he spent all his morning classes wondering what Tom would make of it. At lunchtime Kit managed to get out to a quiet fence-side spot off to the side of the school’s Conlon Road entrance, where nobody could get close enough to hear him without him having plenty of warning, and pulled out his phone to call Tom.

  Tom answered right away. “You get it okay?” Kit said.

  “Yup. And I’ve been going through a précis of the raw data from your walk—the whole capture’s about a thousand pages, maybe more. The really interesting thing about your jaunt, though, is that the places you went, the places you made, are still there.”

  Kit wasn’t sure what to make of that. “I thought they’d just go away afterward.”

  “Seems not.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That I need an aspirin, mostly,” Tom said. He laughed, sounding completely bemused. “…Well, okay, it means a few other things, too.”