The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition

by Diane Duane

  The head nurse came in and stood by the bed. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like someone’s been taking out pieces of my brain,” Nita’s mother said, “but otherwise, just fine. When can I go home?”

  “The day after tomorrow, or the day after that,” said the nurse, “if the surgeons agree. You seem to be getting over the post-op trauma with unusual speed. If this keeps up, you’ll just need a private-duty nurse keep an eye on you for the first few days. After that, there’ll be other business—the targeted chemo, and evaluations to see if radiation would be indicated—and we’ll be seeing a fair amount of each other. But there’s time for you to deal with that when you’re feeling better and the surgery’s healed.”

  “You’re on,” Nita’s mother said. “Now let me talk to you about dinner.”

  “No dinner tonight,” said the nurse. “Just fluids, until tomorrow.”

  “I want a second opinion,” Nita’s mother said, unimpressed.

  The nurse laughed, and went out. “And a cheeseburger!” Nita’s mother called after her.

  Nita laughed; her mother got junk food cravings at the oddest times. Then she caught herself laughing, and stopped abruptly.

  “No,” her mother said. “Don’t. You’re right; it’s disgusting, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t laugh.” This she said as much to Nita’s dad as to Nita.

  Her father didn’t say anything. “Would you two excuse us a second?” Nita’s mother said to Kit and Nita.

  They went out. “Back in a moment,” Kit said, and walked away down toward the vending machine and the rest rooms—a little too quickly, Nita thought. She watched him turn the corner. It didn’t occur to me how much this was hurting him, too. If he’s going to be watching out for me, I’d better keep a close eye on him. Might get to be a full-time occupation.

  Nita leaned against the wall outside the room. She should not have been able to hear anything from where she was, but she could.

  “Harry,” she heard that soft voice say. “Cut it out and look at me. We’ve bought me some time. We’ll have more than enough time to say our good-byes. Beyond that, it’s all a gamble. But it always has been, anyway.”

  Nita could hear her dad breathing in the silence, trying to let it in.

  “But one thing, before I forget. You don’t need to waste any more time worrying about Kit.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  I shouldn’t he able to hear this, Nita thought. She closed her eyes and concentrated on not listening. It didn’t work. It has to have something to do with where I’ve just been.

  “But enough of that. We’ve got things to do. Listen to me! I don’t want you to start treating me like someone who’s about to die. I expect to spend every remaining moment living. There’s little enough time left, for any of us.”

  Nita could have sworn she heard her father gulp. “Oh, God, sweetheart, don’t tell me there’s going to be some kind of … of disaster!”

  “What? Of course not.” Her voice went soft and rough again, in a way that Nita had last heard just after her mom had dropped a handful of lightning. “But, Harry, being where I’ve just been, do you think that sixty years looks that much longer to me than six months? Or that anything that’s just time looks like it’s going to last? So shut up and kiss me. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  There was only silence then. Nita took herself away as quietly as she could. Down the corridor and around the corner, she found Kit leaning against the wall, his arms folded, waiting for her.

  “What are they up to in there?” he asked after a moment.

  “Don’t ask.” She gave him a thoughtful look. He didn’t ask. And I bet he doesn’t have to.

  “So, what now?”

  “Just for a little while,” Nita said, “we leave them alone.”

  Kit nodded. Together, they headed out.

  20: Dawn

  Nita went home after that, and slept the clock around. They would only need to go to the hospital once or twice more to pick up equipment that the visiting nurse would need, and to talk more to the doctors about her mom’s treatment plan, including the chemotherapy and so on. Nita was glad enough to let her dad take care of all that. For her own part, she and Dairine mostly just sat and held her mom’s hands, and listened to her complain about the hospital food, which she had been allowed to start eating that morning. It was a peculiar kind of happiness that Nita and Dairine were experiencing, and Nita was being careful to say nothing that might break it. Just under the surface of it lay a lot of pain. But right now, the simple joy of knowing that her mom would be home the next day was more than enough for Nita… and she knew Dairine agreed.

  They went home that evening, and Nita went off to her room and went straight to sleep again. She was getting caught up a little on her own weariness, enough to dream again, but the realization that she was dreaming coincided with a certain amount of confusion. The mountainous landscape towering all around her in a misty early morning sun wasn’t anyplace she recognized. Neither were the forests running up and up those slopes, all golden, or—as she turned, and paused, amazed—the vast, glittering, many-spired city that was looming out of the mist a mile or so away from her.

  Away beyond the city was a faint glimmer, as of the sea unseen in the overshadowing light. Nita thought of the roil and shimmer of the light on Jones Inlet, and let out a long breath of wonder. “Where is this?” she said aloud.

  “The inside, honey,” Nita’s mother said. “The heart of things… what’s at the core. Don’t you ever dream about this?”

  “Uh. Yeah, sometimes. But it never looked exactly like this.”

  “Oh, well, this is my part of the territory. That’s yours over there; of course, it’d be here, too. It’s part of me, like you are.” Her mother, in that beat-up denim skirt and T-shirt again, waved a hand back at the glittering towers, half veiled in radiant mist. “I know you’ll live there, eventually. Have your own children there.” She smiled slightly. “What is it they say? Your grandchildren are your revenge on your kids?” And Nita’s mother laughed. “Well, at least you’ll know what to expect from them. Partly. But this…”

  Her mom turned her back on the towers, looking toward the mountains. “This is mine. When you grow up at the edge of the Continental Divide, there’s always this wall towering up over you. When you’re little, you look at it and say, ‘I’m going to go there someday. Right to the top of that mountain.’ Or else you imagine mountains that don’t have any tops. The places that just go right up and up, into the center of things, forever.”

  “Yeah,” Nita said.

  They stood there a while together, looking at those mountains, and then began to walk slowly down through the flower-starred meadow below where they’d been standing. “It’s not fair,” Nita said softly. “How come I only get to really know you now, when I’m going to lose you?”

  “I don’t know if you can ever lose me, honey. I’m your mother. There’s a bond neither of us can break unless we want to. And it doesn’t have to hurt.”

  Nita wasn’t sure about that as yet. But still, there was no lying here….

  “So this is it?” Nita’s mother said, gazing around her with a look of awe and appreciation. “What you told me about, a while back: Timeheart?”

  “Uh,” Nita said. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure how nonwizards see it.”

  “After all that,” Nita’s mom said, “am I a non-wizard?”

  Nita had no answer for her, but her heart lifted, and she felt a twinge of something that until now she had been afraid to feel: hope.

  And it wasn’t even hope that her mother would somehow miraculously survive. Nita would hurt for a long while every time she remembered all those dark little creatures dying, and the feeling of many of them not dying, hidden away where even the flush of power from the glede couldn’t reach. But Nita had reason to believe that she and her mom would have enough time to get to know each other very well before the hardest moment—the moment of final par
ting—had to be faced.

  And when that came… there still would, eventually, be Timeheart, where no matter what you dreamed might await you, there was always more.

  If she could just last through the testing that would follow, just keep faith long enough to find out what that more would be.

  “I could definitely get used to this,” her mother said.

  You will, Nita thought; or heard. With the words came a pang of relief mingled with pain, the two impossible to separate. It would be a long time before Nita would get used to the pain, she knew. But the relief was there regardless. And here, in this place, there was no matching echo of grief to suggest that the relief was somehow false or illusory. Nothing that happened here could fail to be real. If she felt relief here, it was justified.

  “No,” Nita’s mother said, “I don’t think I’m going to let anyone throw me out of here.”

  “I don’t think they can,” Nita said, the tears coming to her eyes, even here. She knew, as all wizards know if they know nothing else, that in Timeheart everything worth having, everything that is loved, or of love, is preserved in perfection.

  And everyone? As usual there were no concrete answers; the place was itself an answer before which all questions faded.

  Except, suddenly, one. “Honey,” her mother said, “not that I object to the idea, or anything. But can you tell me why there would normally be pigs in heaven?”

  “Uh, Mom, this isn’t—” But Nita stopped herself; she wasn’t sure. And then there was still the question of the Pig, wandering along through the meadow not too far from them and gazing, as they did, at the mountains. The Pig looked, if anything, more transcendent than usual. It didn’t so much glow as seem to illuminate everything around it, if indeed the luminous surroundings could be any more illuminated than they already were.

  “So you’re here, too?” Nita said to the Transcendent Pig.

  The Pig gave her an amused look. “The annoying thing about omnipresence,” it said, “is that everybody keeps asking you that question. At least you didn’t ask me what was the meaning of life.”

  Nita made a face. “I forgot.”

  It chuckled. “You’re here and you need to ask?”

  She smiled then. “Mom, this is the Transcendent Pig. Chao, this is my mother.”

  “We’ve met,” said the Pig, nodding in a friendly way to Nita’s mom.

  Nita’s mother smiled back. “You know, we have,” she said, “but for the life of me I can’t remember when.”

  “You will,” said the Pig. It glanced at Nita. “She has a lot of remembering to do. Not right away… but soon.”

  Nita’s mother nodded as well, gazing at the Pig with an odd expression of slowly dawning recognition. It glanced at Nita. “They all remember me eventually,” it said. “The way they all remember the Lone One. We have history.”

  The three of them walked along through the meadow together for a little ways. “Mom,” Nita said, “I really don’t want to lose you.”

  “I don’t think we get much choice on this one,” Nita’s mother said. “Honey, our ways are going to part, one way or another.” She looked at Nita with an expression that was sorrowful but tender. “Parents and kids do it all the time, as they both grow up. You and I are just going to have to do it faster than we planned. And more permanently. Since there’s no way out of it, let’s enjoy every day. Heaven only knows what may happen afterward, but they can’t take away from us what we make, one day at a time, just all of us together. That, we keep. And anything else…” Her mother looked up at the mountains. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Nita nodded. “But oh, Mom … I’m going to miss you so much! Always!”

  “I’m going to miss you too, honey. But it won’t be forever. Or not the kind of forever that matters. If this is where I’m going to be, I think everything will be just fine.”

  “It won’t be the same, though,” Nita said softly. “It won’t be like being able to talk to you.”

  “You’ll usually know what I’d have said, if you think about it,” her mother said. “We know each other that well, at least. Other than that, I’ll always be around, even though you won’t hear much from me. I mean, sweetheart, you started out inside me. Don’t you think at the end of the process, things sort of go the other way around?”

  Nita wiped her eyes and looked over at the Pig, which was regarding her mother with quiet approval. “Can’t add much to that,” it said.

  Nita just hugged her mom; it was all she could do. “Go well!” she said.

  “As long as you do, sweetheart… I always will.”

  Nita’s mother slowly let her go, then looked over her shoulder, up at those mountains, towering skyward into another kind of eternity, and began to walk toward them, through the mist.

  Nita stood there with the Pig and watched her mom vanish, shining, into the mist. “What happens now?” Nita said.

  “What usually does. Life, for a while. Then the usual brief defeat,” said the Pig. “But victory’s certain. Never think otherwise. There is loss, and there is pain, and in your home frame of reference, they’re real enough, not to be devalued. But today the energy’s running out of things just a little more slowly … for those who trust their hearts as a measure.”

  Nita swallowed hard. “You’ll keep an eye on her,” she said.

  “Of course I will. I always do. But somehow,” said the Pig, looking at Nita’s mother, who was moving higher and higher up the hillside, almost lost in the ever-growing light, “I don’t think she’ll need it.”

  ***

  The light on the bedroom ceiling woke Nita, glinting through her window from a car pulling into the driveway below. Nita sat up in bed, wiped her face, and tried on a smile. To her astonishment, it didn’t feel like such a terrible fit.

  She got up, threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and went downstairs to tell her mom hello.

  By the same author

  In the Young Wizards Series

  So You Want to Be a Wizard • Deep Wizardry

  High Wizardry • A Wizard Abroad

  The Wizard’s Dilemma • A Wizard Alone

  Wizard’s Holiday • Wizards at War

  A Wizard of Mars

  The Middle Kingdoms Series (for adult readers)

  The Door into Fire • The Door into Shadow

  The Door into Sunset

  Other standalone adult fantasy:

  Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South

  Stealing The Elf-King's Roses

  In the Star Trek (TM) universe:

  The Wounded Sky • My Enemy, My Ally

  Spock’s World • Doctor's Orders

  Dark Mirror • Intellivore

  The "Rihannsu Quartet"

  The Romulan Way • Swordhunt

  Honor Blade

  (omnibus edtion: Star Trek: The Bloodwing Voyages)

  The Empty Chair

  Collected short fiction:

  Uptown Local and Other Interventions

  Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales

  ***

  For ebook editions of many books above

  and others not listed here,

  please visit

  EbooksDirect.dianeduane.com

  or the Books page at the author's site:

  DianeDuane.com

  ***

  Visit the author on Tumblr:

  dduane.tumblr.com

  Or follow her on Twitter:

  @dduane

  *****