by Diane Duane
“I don’t think so,” Ken said as they crossed the last street onto the block they were heading for. “But there’s an alien connection to the chocolate. Do you believe in UFOs?”
Ana stared at him, completely flummoxed. “I have no idea. I haven’t given it much thought.”
“But you know a lot of other people do.”
“Well, sure.”
“But doesn’t it seem a little strange when you think of it?” He glanced down at the PDA, turned to his left down the block. “Here we are right out at the edge of our galaxy: a nothing-special little star system out by itself. Why would aliens be coming all the way out here to see us?”
She gave Ken a rather cockeyed look. “You’re going to tell me, I suspect.”
“Oh, never tell,” Ken said. “Suggest, though. I’m going to suggest that we are the only source of something worth coming thousands of lightyears out of your way for. Cocoa beans…”
Ana burst out laughing. “You are completely nuts!”
“Possibly,” Ken said. “But you’re the one with the store called ‘Theobroma’. Food of the Gods, huh? Well, what if the Great Space Gods that some people carry on about, only came here for the chocolate? There’s your question for the day.” He stopped by a wire-fence doorway, slipping the PDA into his pocket. He didn’t need its help now. “What’s back there?”
She peered through the grating. “A convenience store. No, wait, there’s a bakery there too: the back door’s down at the end of the alley.” Ana shook the gate slightly, frustrated. “No use, it’s locked.”
“Not for long,” Ken said. He bent down as if to look through the keyhole. “Buddy,” he whispered in the Speech, “do me a favor here, will you? We’re on a mission of mercy.”
The lock’s bolt threw itself. Ken pushed the gate open very softly, trying to keep it from creaking, and held it open for Ana: she slipped through, staring at him again. “How did you do that?”
“I asked nicely,” Ken said.
“Magic!” Ana said.
“Same thing,” Ken said. “Ssh! Come on.”
They made their way down the alley, past the piled-up trash outside the back of the convenience store. “Smell that?”
“Wish I didn’t,” Ana said.
“No argument. But I don’t mean the garbage. There’s something else here…”
Her eyes got wider as she sniffed. “Cocoa…?”
“Your xoco’s been down here,” Ken said. “Come on.”
They went on past the steel back door of the convenience store. , further down the alley. More garbage—”You’re kidding about the UFOs, though, right?”
“You’re just not going to take me seriously, are you?” Ken shook his head, smiling slightly. The smile was only partly for her: inside his head he could feel what they’d been looking for, that slow, dark, bittersweet tone of mind. “We’re getting close now. Just follow my lead—”
He paused in front of the last steel door in the alley, knocked. After a moment bolts were thrown, and the door opened a crack.
To the face that looked out, Ken simply held up the PDA, knowing that its Manual function was causing it to display itself as whatever ID would be most useful in this situation. “Can we come in?”
The door opened. As he tucked the PDA away, Ken snuck a peek and saw that it was pretending to be a New York City Health Department ID. He repressed a grin as the head baker came to meet them. He was a large, florid Italian gentleman of the kind usually depicted in standup signs outside pizzerias, the only difference being that he was wearing a gauze-backed black-and-white-checked foodservice cap, and whites that were even whiter in places with flour. “You guys were in here three days ago, we had a clean bill of health, what now?”
“We’re looking for lizards,” Ken said.
“Lizards?”
“There are some loose in the neighborhood,” Ken said. “They’re fond of food service environments like this—nice warm places with quiet spots to hide. Mostly brown, about a foot long, look like iguanas. Won’t take more than a few minutes to check the place. Do you mind?”
He was ready to drop into the Speech for extra persuasiveness, if he had to, but there was no need: what the PDA looked like was already enough to do the job. “Quiet!” the boss snorted, for across the room a gigantic kneading machine was roaring away and making enough noise for a cement mixer.
“Thanks,” Ken said, and made his way in, with Ana close behind him. The staff got out of their way, looking at them with wary interest.
Ken held still for a moment, listening hard, and finally found what he was looking for: then checked the cupboards down the side of one wall, first, before opening the middle one and seeing, as if surprised, the patterned shape back in the shadows. “I’m here to take you home, fella,” he said.
I don’t know you. You go ‘way and leave me be, said the xocolotl.
He looked over his shoulder. “Ana?”
She came over, got down beside him, looked into the cupboard curiously. “Is that—”
Ken nodded. The short-spined iguana-head turned, and one eye regarded Ana, chameleon-like, from several angles, one after another.
I missed you, it said.
Her eyes went wide. “I heard that!”
“It’s not unusual,” Ken said, “once you believe you can.”
Let’s go back, the xocolotl said. The chocolate here is bad.
“See that? No problem at all,” Ken said. “Here, stick him in here and we’ll take him home.” He held out the courier bag.
“Do they bite?” Ana said.
“If he bites you,” Ken said, “I’d be astonished.”
Carefully Ana reached in and picked up the xocolotl. The bakery staff, standing at a safe distance to watch, made impressed noises as Ana brought him out. “Not poisonous, huh?” said the head baker.
Ken stood up. “Not to her, anyway,” he said.
Ana slipped the xocolotl into the bag. Ken caught another glimpse of that roving eye, which finally fixed on Ana again. No more fighting, it said.
She looked at Ken with a slightly stricken expression. “How do I explain—” she whispered.
He shook his head. “One thing at a time,” Ken said. He helped her up. Behind them, the head baker was nodding in the resigned manner of a man who’s glad that he’s not to be cited for having a concealed lizard on the premises. “Thanks, goodbye, you want a cake to take with you? No? Okay, goodbye—”
The door slammed behind them. “Why didn’t you want the cake?” Ken said, amused.
“Because he’s right about one thing,” Ana said as they made their way back down to the alley gate.
“Oh?”
“The chocolate there is bad.”
*
As they walked up in front of Theobroma again, Ana suddenly stopped, looking at the door. The shades were down inside the windows, still: but Ken could see the one inside the door moving, as if someone had closed that door hastily, or brushed against it.
“Oh no,” Ana said softly. “Not another break-in! We had one last month! And in the middle of the day—”
“No,” Ken said, “somehow I don’t think so.” But just in case— he said to the PDA.
I’ve got three defensive spells ready, the PDA said. Normal shield, high-yield shield, and ramrod—
Set up number two, Ken said, for two people and a lizard. Ready?
Go.
Ken went to the door, softly spoke the lock open, looked over his shoulder at Ana. She nodded.
They went in.
There was no one in the front of the store. But in the back, in the kitchen, someone was moving around.
Ana went past Ken into the kitchen so quickly that he couldn’t stop her—could only follow, in a hurry, getting ready to use that shield if need be. But in the doorway he stopped, still a few feet behind Ana.
In the middle of the kitchen stood a large, broad-shouldered man possessing the kind of dark and improbably good looks that normally left K
en feeling annoyed, as their presence usually meant that some pretty lady he’d been hitting on was going to waltz out the door with their owner. But in this case, the guy looked both infuriated and embarrassed, much defusing the initial effect of his rampant handsomeness.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I had to come back. There was something I had to take care of, something missing—”
“Could it possibly,” Ana said, “have been this?”
She had dropped the courier bag, and was holding out the xocolotl.
Rodrigo stared. “Where did you find him?”
“Under a proofing cabinet, down in Richter’s,” she said. “He was upset.”
Rodrigo stared at her. “But how could you tell that he—I mean, he can’t—”
“I called in a consultant,” Ana said. “Not the kind I thought I was getting, I can tell you that…”
Rodrigo stared at Ken.
“I am on errantry,” Ken said, “and I greet you.”
Rodrigo’s mouth dropped open. “You know the words!”
Now it was Ana’s turn to stare. “What words?”
“The words the old brujo spoke to me when I told him I was looking for a place in this strange city where a xocolotl lived, there had to be one place at least, and he said, Search all these places till you find the one where someone smiles at you—”
Ana was staring at Rodrigo. “Whoa, whoa, time out, you were dating me for my lizard?”
“No, of course not, but you were here too, and when we started to work together, and I got to know you, I—”
“And we worked so closely together all that time, and you never told me about the xocolotl! We got so close, and—”
“I couldn’t tell you! How could I tell you?”
“You said you could tell me anything! Everything!”
“But not this! This is crazy! This is magic! How could I tell you, you would have thought I was—”
“Never mind, where did you go, why did you just go storming off like that, where have you been—”
“Nowhere, without you, nowhere, I—”
Suddenly the xocolotl had been deposited on one of the nearby spreading slabs, and the two were very much together in the middle of the room. Ken turned away, scribbling at the PDA. The voices behind him fell silent.
Tell me when it’s safe to turn around.
You mean you’re not listening, Mister I Can Hear Everything?
Ken blushed. No. So you just keep an eye on things.
The clinch broke. “I am so, so sorry. I didn’t mean any of those things I said.”
“Oh, neither did I! I’m so sorry too.”
“I panicked, that was all. I didn’t know what to say—”
“I panicked too. That was why I ran, and I—”
“And I—Yes. That’s all: yes.”
“Oh, I am so glad. So glad—”
It was once again turning into the kind of conversation that left you feeling that you needed a scorecard, not to mention a comfortable sofa and a sixpack. “Excuse me!” Ken said.
They both looked at him.
“I take it,” Ken said to Rodrigo, “that that’s the end of this particular work stoppage on your part?”
“It will never happen again,” Rodrigo said, fervent.
“And I take it,” Ken said to Ana, “that you’re willing to take him back on?”
She smiled slowly, turned back to Rodrigo. “Permanently,” she said.
The xocolotl, ignored, climbed slowly down from the spreading slab and vanished under the pedestal of the tempering bath. From inside the wall, Ken heard a faint insectile cheer.
“Then my work here is done,” Ken said. And the two embracing figures in the back kitchen never even noticed as Ken eased his way out the locked front door, whispered the lock shut again behind him, and went to find the inevitable cab that would be waiting to take him back uptown.
*
“No sale, boss,” he said as he walked in the door twenty minutes later.
“No?” Malesha came out of the back, pulling her scarf off and shaking the cornrowed braids down with an expression of weary relief. She plunked herself down in her chair. “You had to do an intervention, though...?”
“One of your big flashy spells, I bet,” Tik said, leaning over the counter and disposing of the last of a hamburger from the bar-and-grill up the street. “Probably met the Lone Power in single combat and kicked His sorry butt right down to the Bowery.”
Ken dumped his bag by his desk, shook his head. “Nope. Talked a couple of locks open, did some remote sensing, faked my way into a bakery. Oh, and found a lost xocolotl.”
He expected some kind of response at that, but got nothing. “And what about the thing that was missing?” Malesha said.
Ken’s eyes went wide. He stared at Malesha in a moment’s panic that he had missed something. “You mean there was something missing besides the xocolotl?”
“Only the loooooove, baby,” Malesha said, and put her feet up on the counter. “Nothing but the looooove…”
Tik guffawed. Ken just looked at her as she beckoned to her coffee cup and it sailed across the room to her.
“I bow, Leesh,” he said. “I bow to the master.” And he turned back to his desk before she could see the grin: because she was right, as usual.
And the bells…those too turned out to be nothing but an echo of what was to come: for three months later he was standing outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, helping about five hundred other people throw rice at Ana and Rodrigo.
And the wedding cake was chocolate.
Most of my stories are presents for somebody or other. When Jane Yolen asked me to write something for her anthology Dragons and Dreams, the recipient I had in mind was Robert Heinlein—who (to my complete astonishment and delight) was a fan of the Young Wizards books. It’s been impossible to forget the time he brought up Deep Wizardry in the middle of one phone conversation. “I’m a Navy man,” he said. “We don’t like sharks. You made me like that shark.” A pause. “That was a dirty trick.” And his laughter…
I miss him.
Uptown Local
Any wizard will tell you that there are two sorts of places where, without being put there on purpose, magic naturally comes to live. It favors the sort of empty places, far from the homes of men, on which people gaze with longing and wonder: lonely mountains, empty wastes of ice or fire, and of course that greatest, deepest emptiness, outer space. But magic also prefers the places where people have crowded together the most closely, for the longest time, to change one another and be changed themselves. On Earth right now, of the many such spots, three in particular are famous both here and in other worlds for their power and the lives they’ve changed. One is Westminster Abbey in London, where lay the Sword and the Stone, the tool and the seat of half a hundred kings and queens. The Stone has gone back to Scotland, but even in these modern days the power is undiminished, and the trampling tourists hush when they pass the chair that once held the plain rock, and :he rusty blade hanging not far away. Another spot is the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where of old the Senate met to wield an empire’s force over all the world they knew, and humans from three continents gathered to hear them. But of the Three Great Places, more renowned than either of these for its wizardly potential is the New York City subway system.
This may sound odd at first, since the subway isn’t one place, one spot, but a network. It will seem odd, too, because any adult and most kids you know who’ve ridden the subway will tell you instantly that much of it is ancient, dirty, and run down. And they’ll be right. The danger lies in thinking that because the ugly part of his (or any other) story is true, the rest of it doesn’t count.
Wizards try not to make this mistake. But even they have to work at it.
Nita and Kit were wizards. How they got that way has been told elsewhere, and isn’t really so much of a big deal, seeing that one out of every hundred people you meet is a wizard of some persuasion anyway.
All you really need to know about Kit and Nita is that they could do magic, usually by reading it out of the wizards’ manuals they’d found. They had been to the Moon and the bottom of the Atlantic (without using spaceships, submarines, or other artificial aids); had talked to trees and sharks, and even to an Edsel; had brought statues to life, saved the world, and walked on water. But since Nita was thirteen and Kit was twelve, and both of them were at the height of their power and could do practically anything they set their minds to, they sometimes got incredibly bored. They were incredibly bored now.
“There’s nothing on TV,” Kit muttered, lying on Nita’s living room floor and scowling at the TV Guide. “It’s a desert.”
“Yeah.” Nita was curled up on the couch, looking just as grim as Kit, and they both held their positions for several minutes.
Finally Kit pitched the TV Guide across the room. “Let’s go bug Tom and Carl,” he said, without much energy.
“Okay.” Nita got up and they went outside together, walking down their suburban street because they were so bored that even teleporting seemed like too much trouble. Tom and Carl were the local Senior Wizards, whose business it was to advise the other wizards in the area; and as usual, if you didn’t know they were wizards by being told, you would probably never know, because they both seemed perfectly normal. They shared a big house in a quiet part of town, and one of them worked for the big CBS station in the city, and the other one wrote stories and articles for his living. They had dogs, and a macaw, and a garden with too many snails in it (as Tom would repeatedly tell you when he was out picking them off the daisies), and cars that broke down sometimes, and every thing else that people usually had.
Plus wizardry, which one out of a hundred people have anyway.
Carl’s sports car was missing when they walked up the driveway; that was normal enough, because sometimes he had to go in to the station or to a business lunch on weekends. They rang the front doorbell. “It’s open!” said a voice from inside.
In they went, through the very nifty living room with the huge TV (Carl made a lot of money) and into the back room, where Tom’s office was. Annie the sheepdog jumped up and licked their faces and got dirt all over them as they came in. Tom was at his computer: a tall, clean-cut-looking man hammering away furiously at the keyboard, while the screen in front of him filled up with words.
