Yet the page just sat there with its bald black-and-white words, as if it had nothing to prove. And a sudden fierce feeling rose up inside Nita and said, But who cares! If only it could be true! Even with all the things that were wrong with it, a world with truths like that in it would be really worth living in….
She turned her attention back to the book and went on reading. Nita was doing her best to hang onto her skepticism, trying to treat this whole concept as if it was a joke or a game. But abruptly it stopped being a game, with one paragraph:
Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world—a tree, say, or a stone—that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skillfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing, or into it—freeze fire, burn rain—even slow down the death of the Universe.
That, of course, being the reason there are wizards. See the next chapter.
Nita looked up from the page and stared unseeing at a Big Bird poster hanging between the bookshelves across from her. The universe was running down; all the energy in it was slowly being used up. She knew that from studying astronomy. The process was called entropy. But she’d never heard anyone talk about slowing it down before.
She shook her head in amazement and went on to the “correlation” section at the end of that chapter, where all the factors involved in the makeup of a potential wizard were listed. Nita worked her way down the checklist. I’ve got a lot of these. More than half. If that means I could be a wizard…!
In slowly rising excitement, she turned to the next chapter. “Theory and Implications of Wizardry,” the heading said. “History, Philosophy, and the Wizards’ Oath.”
Fifty or sixty eons ago, when Life brought itself about, it also brought about to accompany it many Powers and Potentialities to manage the business of creation. One of the greatest of these Powers held aloof for a long time, watching its companions work, not wishing to enter into Creation until it could contribute something unlike anything the other Powers had made, something completely new and original. Finally the Lone Power found what it was looking for. Others had invented planets, light, gravity, space. The Lone Power invented death, and bound it irrevocably into the worlds. Shortly thereafter the other Powers joined forces and cast the Lone One out.
Many versions of this story are related among the many worlds, assigning blame or praise to one party or another. But none of the stories change the fact that entropy and its symptom, death, are here now. To attempt to halt or remove them is as futile as attempting to ignore them.
Therefore there are wizards—to handle them.
A wizard’s business is to conserve energy—to keep it from being wasted. On the simplest level this involves such unmagical-looking actions as paying one’s bills on time, turning off the lights when you go out, and supporting the people around you in getting their lives to work. It also involves a lot more.
Because wizardly people tend to be good with language, they can also become skillful with the Speech, the magical tongue in which objects and living creatures can be described with more accuracy than in any human language. And what can be so accurately described can also be preserved—or freed to become yet greater. A wizard can cause an inanimate object or animate creature to grow, or stop growing; to be what it is, or something else. A wizard, using the Speech, can cause death to slow down, or go somewhere else and come back later—just as the Lone Power caused it to come about in the first place. Creation, preservation, destruction, transformation—all are a matter of getting the fabric of being to do what you want it to. And the Speech is the key.
Nita stopped to think this over for a moment. It sounds like, if you know what something is, truly know, you don’t have any trouble working with it. Like my telescope—if it acts up, I know every piece of it, and it doesn’t take long to get it working again. To have that kind of control over live things – over the world, even… She took a deep breath and looked back at the book, beginning to get an idea of what kind of power was implied there.
The power conferred by use of the Speech has, of course, one insurmountable limitation: the existence of death itself. As one renowned Senior Wizard has remarked, “Entropy has us outnumbered.” No matter how much preserving we do, the Universe will eventually die. But it will last longer because of our efforts. And since no one knows for sure whether another Universe can or will be born from the ashes of this one, the effort seems worthwhile.
No one should take the Wizards’ Oath who is not committed to making wizardry a lifelong pursuit. The energy invested in a beginning wizard is too precious to be thrown away. Yet there are no penalties for withdrawal from the Art except the knowledge that the Universe will die a little faster because of energy lost. On the other hand, there are no prizes for the service of Life—except life itself. The wizard gets the delight of working with the only true magic, and routinely getting a good look at the foundations of the Universe and the way things really work. It should be stated here that some people consider the latter more of a curse than a blessing. Such wizards usually lose their art. Magic does not live in the unwilling soul.
Should you decide to go ahead and take the Oath, be warned that an ordeal will follow — a test of aptitude. If you pass, wizardry will ensue….
Yeah ? Nita thought. And what if you don’t pass?
“Nita?” Mrs. Lesser’s voice came floating down the stairs, and a moment later she came through the door. “You still alive?”
“I was reading.”
“So what else is new? Anyway, they’re gone.”
“Thanks, Mrs. L.”
“What was all that about?”
“Just Joanne picking another fight.”
Mrs. Lesser raised an eyebrow at Nita.
Nita smiled back at Mrs. Lesser shamefacedly. She didn’t miss much. “Okay… I might have helped her a little.”
“I guess it’s hard to resist,” Mrs. Lesser said. “I always had trouble just taking it when the mean kids went after me. Fighting back ought to be the right answer, but it can backfire… and trying to be nice and not descend to their level can be tough when a bunch like that is on your back.” She sighed, glanced down at the book Nita was holding. “That the only one you want today, or should I just have the nonfiction section boxed and sent over to your house?”
“No, this is enough,” Nita said. “If my father sees too many books he’ll just make me bring them back.”
Mrs. Lesser sighed. “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip,” she said. “Never mind, you’ll be back Monday. There’s more where that came from. I’ll check it out for you.”
Nita felt in her pockets hurriedly. “Oh, crap. Mrs. L, I don’t have my card.”
“When you’re in on Monday, I’ll stamp it then,” she said, handing Nita back the book as they reached the landing. “I trust you.”
“Thanks,” Nita said.
“Don’t mention it. Be careful going home,” Mrs. Lesser said, “and have a nice read.”
“I will.”
Nita went out and stood on the doorstep, looking around in the deepening gloom. Dinnertime was getting close, and the wind was getting cold, with a smell of rain to it. The book in her hand seemed to prickle a little, as if impatient to be read.
*
She started jogging toward home, taking a circuitous route—up Washington from Rose Avenue, then through town along Nassau Road and down East Clinton, a path meant to confound pursuit. She didn’t expect that they would be waiting for her only a block away from her house, where there were no alternate routes, no way to escape. And when they were through with her, the six of them, Nita’s non-black eye was
blackened, and the knee Joanne had so carefully stomped on felt swollen with liquid fire.
Nita just lay there for a long while, on the spot where they left her, behind the O’Donnells’ hedge; the O’Donnells were out of town. There she lay and just cried into the ground, as she would have died rather than do in front of Joanne and the rest, as she wouldn’t do again until she was safely in bed and out of her family’s earshot… though it was more likely that by then she would have settled down to a more tear-free form of misery. Whether she provoked these situations or not, they just kept happening. Joanne and her hangers-on had found out that Nita really didn’t like to fight, wouldn’t try until her rage broke loose—and then it was too late to fight well: the pain of getting beat up pushed all the self-defense lessons out of her head. Joanne and her crew knew it, too, so at least once a week they found a way to sucker her into a fight. Or if that failed, they’d simply ambush her for fun. All right, she’d purposely baited Joanne today, but there’d been a fight coming anyway, and she’d chosen to start it rather than wait, getting angrier and angrier, while they baited her. But this would keep happening, again and again, and there was nothing she could do about it. Oh, I wish we could move. I wish Dad would say something to Joanne’s father—no, that would just make it worse. If only something could just happen to make it stop!
But there was no chance of that, and the knowledge made her feel stupid for lying here crying. Finally she ran out of tears and pushed herself up on her forearms a little to squint painfully around and see where her glasses had gone after Joanne punched her in the eye. They were just a foot or two away, but they looked wrong somehow. Nita reached a hand out to them and picked them up by one earpiece. Her glasses immediately fell apart in two pieces, broken at the nose, and the shattered lenses rained down onto the wet grass in many small sharp pieces.
Nita moaned under her breath. Though her eyesight wasn’t incredibly bad, there was something weird about her eyes that meant she couldn’t have contacts, laser surgery was out of the question till she was older – not that the family could have afforded it – and her complicated prescription made the glasses expensive. Mom’s gonna kill me so dead, she thought, and dropped her forehead to her arms again in complete despair, simply not being willing to look at the world right now.
But as she did, underneath her, where it had fallen, the book from the library dug into Nita’s sore ribs. The memory of what she’d been reading suddenly flooded back through her pain and was followed by a wash of wild surmise. If there are spells to keep things from dying, then I bet there are spells to keep people from hurting you….
Then Nita scowled at herself in contempt for actually believing for a moment what couldn’t possibly be more than an elaborate joke. She put aside thoughts of the book and slowly got up, brushing herself off and discovering some new bruises. She also discovered something else. Her favorite pen was gone. Her space pen, a present from her Uncle Joel, the pen that could write on butter or glass or upside down, her pen with which she had never failed a test, even in math. She patted herself all over, checked the ground, searched in pockets where she knew the pen couldn’t be. No use; it was gone. Or taken, rather—for it had been securely clipped to her front jacket pocket when Joanne and her group jumped her. It must have fallen out, and one of them picked it up.
“Ohh…!” Nita moaned, feeling bitter enough to start crying again. But she was all cried out, and she ached too much, and it was a waste. She stepped around the hedge and limped the little distance home.
Her house was pretty much like any other on the block, a white frame house with fake shutters; but where other houses had their lawns, Nita’s had a beautifully landscaped garden. Ivy carpeted the ground, and the flowerbeds against the house had something blooming in every season except the dead of winter. Nita trudged up the driveway without bothering to smell any of the spring flowers, went up the stairs to the back door, pushed it open, and walked into the kitchen as nonchalantly as she could.
Her mother was elsewhere, but the delicious smells of her cooking filled the place; veal cutlets tonight. Nita peered into the oven, saw potatoes baking, lifted a pot lid and found corn on the cob in the steamer.
Her father looked up from the newspaper he was reading at the dining-room table. He was a big, blunt, good-looking man, with startling silver hair and large capable hands—”an artist’s hands!” he would chuckle as he pieced together a flower arrangement. He owned the smaller of the town’s two flower shops, and he loved his work dearly. He had done all the landscaping around the house in his spare time, and around several neighbors’ houses too, refusing to take anything in return but the satisfaction of being up to his elbows in a flowerbed. Whatever he touched grew. “I have an understanding with the plants,” he would say, and it certainly seemed that way. It was people he sometimes had trouble understanding, and particularly his eldest daughter.
“My Lord, Nita!” her father exclaimed, putting the paper down flat on the table. His voice was shocked. “What happened?”
As if you don’t know! Nita thought. She could clearly see the expressions going across her father’s face. My God, they said, not again! Why doesn’t she fight back? What’s wrong with her? He would get around to asking that question at one point or another, and Nita would try to explain it again, and as usual her father would try to understand and would fail. Nita turned away and opened the refrigerator door, peering at nothing in particular, so that her father wouldn’t see the grimace of impatience and irritation on her face. She was tired of the whole ritual, but she had to put up with it. It was as inevitable as being beaten up.
“I was in a fight,” she said, the second verse of the ritual, the second line of the scene. Tiredly she closed the refrigerator door, put the book down on the counter beside the stove, and peeled off her jacket, examining it for rips and ground-in dirt and blood.
“So how many of them did you take out?” her father said, turning his eyes back to the newspaper. His face still showed exasperation and puzzlement, and Nita sighed. He looks about as tired of this as I am. But really, he knows the answers. “I’m not sure,” Nita said. “There were six of them.”
“Six!” Nita’s mother came around the corner from the living room and into the bright kitchen—danced in, actually. Just watching her made Nita smile sometimes, and it did now, though changing expressions hurt. She had been a dancer before she married Dad, and the grace with which she moved made her every action around the house seem polished, endlessly rehearsed, lovely to look at. She glided with the laundry, floated while she cooked. “Loading the odds a bit, weren’t they?”
“Yeah.” Nita was hurting almost too much to feel like responding to the gentle humor. Her mother caught the pain in her voice and stopped to touch Nita’s face as she passed, assessing the damage and conveying how she felt about it in one brief gesture, without saying anything that anyone else but the two of them might hear.
“No sitting up for you tonight, kidlet,” her mother said. “Bed, and ice on that, before you swell up like a balloon. Look at these marks around your eye, what on earth made those?”
Nita pulled the busted glasses out of her pocket and put them sadly on the counter. Her mother looked at them with dismay.
“Oh, now this is just wrong,” she said softly. “Nita. What is it with these kids…”
“I couldn’t stop them, mom,” she said. “They think it’s fun to smash my stuff. Remember my MP3 player?”
Her mother sighed and pulled a paper towel off the roll, wrapped the bent frames in them, and slipped them quietly into a drawer. “We’re not going to be able to afford new ones this week,” she said. “Or maybe even next…”
“I can get by,” Nita said. “I’m not blind. Reading’s harder, that’s all…”
“Well, reading won’t be high on your agenda today, I don’t think,” her mom said, putting up a hand to stroke Nita’s hair a little away from her face, and picking a muddy leaf out of it.
Oh please, Nit
a thought, reading’s what I need more than anything just now! Even without the strangeness of the book she’d brought home, the thought of just being able to retreat from this world into some scenario more ordered and sane, just for a little while, was irresistible. But she wasn’t going to put up a fight and add the you-know-straining-your-eyes-gives-you-headaches element to this situation. Things were bad enough.
“What started it?” her dad asked from the dining room.
“Joanne Virella,” Nita said. “She has a new bike, and I didn’t get as excited about it as she thought I should.”
Nita’s father looked up from the paper again, and this time there was discomfort in his face, and regret: he could clearly hear what she hadn’t said. “Nita,” he said, “I couldn’t afford it, really. Earlier on I was so sure I could get that one you wanted, but you know how things’ve been at the shop lately… I just couldn’t. I wish I could have. Next time for sure.”
Nita nodded. “It’s okay,” she said… though it wasn’t. She’d wanted that bike, wanted it so badly. But Joanne’s father managed the big chain hardware store on Nassau Road, and could afford three-hundred-dollar bikes for his children at the drop of a birthday. Nita’s dad’s business was a lot smaller and prone to what he called (in front of most people) “cash-flow problems” or (at home with the family) “being broke most of the time.”
But what does Joanne care about cash flow, or any of the rest of it? I wanted that bike!
“Here, dreamer,” her mother said, tapping her on the shoulder and breaking her thought. She handed Nita an icepack inside a Zip-Loc bag and turned back toward the stove. “Go lie down or you’ll swell worse. I’ll bring you something in a while.”
“Shouldn’t she stay sitting up?” Nita’s father said. “Seems like the fluid would drain better or something.”
“You didn’t get beat up enough when you were younger, Harry,” her mother said. “If she doesn’t lie down and lose some of the tension, she’ll blow up like a balloon. Scoot, Nita.”