“No,” Kit said. “It’s funny. I’m glad I got this last job done. It’s useful. But now I don’t know what to do next. And Neets always knows; she always has an idea for something else that needs doing. Sometimes it drives me nuts. Now it feels weird not to have her bugging me about ‘the next thing.’”
“You’ll work it out,” Carl said. “Sorting out the details of your practice in the early part of your wizardly career is the exciting part.”
“Yeah.” Kit got up. “I’ll let you know how it comes out”
“Right.”
He recovered Ponch from pigging out on dog biscuits and walked home from Tom and Carl’s, giving Ponch a chance to run ahead and lose some of the excitement. The route took Kit past Nita’s, not entirely accidentally. He knew that sometimes she got up early. But all the curtains at her house were still drawn, all the doors were closed, and the car was in the garage. Kit reached into his jacket pocket, slipped his hand around the manual. There was no fizz about its cover.
He sighed and went on by, and a few minutes later they were back at Kit’s house. It was still quiet inside as he went down the driveway and into the back, and he and Ponch took themselves into the back of the yard, among the sassafras trees, where they were out of view from the Macarthurs’ and Kings’ houses.
“You ready?” Kit said to Ponch,
“Let’s go!”
And they stepped together once more into the dark.
***
For Nita, the afternoon took its own sweet time going by. There was still no sign of Kit. Her mother had gone off to the shop after lunch, and Dairine went off, too, and took Spot with her. Nita sighed and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. She tried to do some work with the manual, but every time she touched it, its cover was still and fizzless under her hands, and she put it down as quickly as she picked it up. She even dallied with the idea of doing some work on a science report that was due in a couple of weeks, but the thought of actually starting it before she needed to was repulsive. When I first got into wizardry, I’d never have thought it was possible to be bored again, Nita thought, but it seems that a wizard really can do anything, given enough time.
Around four o’clock she was back in her bedroom, having just finished a bologna sandwich, when she heard a whoomp! of displaced air in the backyard. Nita looked hurriedly out the back window but saw that it was only Dairine, with Spot spidering along behind her. She sighed, slumped a little, and took down a book to read.
She had read no more than a page or two when Dairine came in, looking out of sorts. “Where’ve you been?” Nita asked, chucking the book away, since it was obvious she wasn’t going to get any reading done, either.
“Europa.”
“Again?”
Dairine frowned. “Neets,” she said wearily, and sat on her bed, “I’m having some problems.”
“You?”
“Please,” Dairine said. She was staring at the bedspread as if it were written over with the secrets of the universe instead of a slightly faded stars-and-moons pattern. After a while she said in a low voice, as if embarrassed, “I’m not getting the kind of results I should be. And nothing like the kind I was getting a while ago.”
Nita pushed back from her desk and folded her arms, putting her feet up. Well, she thought, here it is at last. The urge to gloat was definitely there: but to her own surprise, Dairine looked too unhappy for Nita to feel like indulging it. Or maybe it’s not just her unhappiness in the local space, she thought. There are too many ways to increase entropy, and that’s not a thing we do…
Nita shook her head at last. “Dair, it happens to all of us. You lose your initial edge and your first big blast of power: it’s inevitable. Then you move on to the next stage, start feeling your way to where your specialty’s going to be. It’s not always what you first thought it’d be. Tom says it’s real common for a first specialty to shift, and for your power levels to jump around a lot when you’re new to the Art.”
Her sister sat there, still staring at the quilt. This worn-down look wasn’t something Nita was used to seeing in her sister. Dairine’s energy levels were usually such that you wanted to hook her up to storage batteries and start making serious money selling power into the national electrical grid. “I don’t care if it is normal,” Dairine said at last. “I hate it.”
“You think you’re the only one? I wasn’t wild about my first flush wearing off, either. But you get used to it.”
“Why do we have to get used to it?” Dairine burst out “What good am I if I’m not effective?”
“You mean, what good are you if you can’t solve every problem you come up against in three seconds?” Nita said. “Well, obviously, none at all. Guess you’d better go straight to the bathroom and flush yourself.”
Dairine stared at her sister.
“Or find a black hole and jump in,” Nita said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “Tom says there’s a lot of interest in the time-dilation effects, especially on the middle-sized ones. Be sure to file a report with the Powers when you get back. Assuming this universe is still here.”
Nita waited for the explosion. There wasn’t one. She opened her eyes again to find Dairine staring at her as if she were something from Mars. Actually, Dairine had stared at things from Mars with a lot less astonishment
“What?” Dairine said.
Nita had to smile, even though Dairine’s whining was annoying her. “Sorry. I was going to say, you remind me of me when I was your age.”
Dairine made a face. “There’s a horrible thought.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, and put her face down against them. “The last thing I want is to be that normal again.” She produced an elaborate shudder, turning normal into a swear word.
“You want to watch that, Dari,” Nita said. “Just because we’re wizards doesn’t mean we’re any better than ‘normal’ people. The minute you start acting like there’s a ‘them’ and an ‘us,’ you’re in trouble. The only thing that makes wizards different is that we have the power to do more than usual to help. And helping other people, as part of keeping the world running, is the only reason the power exists in the first place.” It was a lesson Nita had learned at some cost, having done enough dumb things in her time until she got it straight.
Dairine gave Nita a noncommittal look. “Edgy, aren’t we? Still nothing from Kit?”
Nita made a face. “No. But just let it sit for the time being, okay? Meanwhile, what was their problem? The amoebas or whatever they are on Europa?”
“They call themselves hnlt,” Dairine said. “And how they manage to do that when they’ve only got one cell each, I don’t know.”
“‘Life knows its way,’” Nita said, quoting a proverb commonplace to wizards in more than one star system. “And personality arrives right behind it. Sooner than you’d think, a lot of the time.”
“Yeah. Well, they have this—I mean, there’s a—” Then Dairine made a wry face at how ineffective English was for describing this kind of problem. She dropped into the Speech for a couple sentences’ worth of description of something that seemed to be happening to the gravity on Europa. Apparently the sea bottom far down under the surface ice was being catastrophically shifted in ways that were destroying some of the hnlt habitats.
After a moment, Nita nodded. “Nasty. So what did you do?”
Dairine looked glum. “I suggested they wait a little while and see what happens,” she said. “The Sun’s more active than usual right now, and the activity’s pushing Jupiter’s atmosphere around a lot harder than usual, even the densest parts down deep. That’s what’s causing the gravitational and magnetic anomalies. It’ll probably quiet down by itself when the sunspot cycle starts to taper off.”
“Makes sense. Good call.”
“But Neets, what’s the point? I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t!” Dairine waved her arms in frustration. “Only a few months ago I could—I could do everything up to and including pushing planets around! But that’s ove
r. And now, because I can’t do that kind of thing, a lot of the hnlt are going to die before the Sun quiets down. All I can do is help them relocate their habitats elsewhere on Europa. But those other places are going to be just as vulnerable. No matter what I do, I’m not going to be able to save them all…”
Nita shook her head; not that she didn’t feel sorry for her sister. “Dari, it’s just the way things go. You started at a higher-than-usual power level? You’re having a bigger-than-usual crash.”
“Why don’t you try finding some more awful way of putting that?” Dairine muttered. “Take your time.”
Nita sighed. “You’ll be finding your next few years’ working power level in a while. But as for the way you were last month, three months ago…” Nita sighed at the memory of the way she’d been when she got started. “Entropy’s running. The energy runs out of everything, even us. We have to learn not to blow it all over the landscape, that’s all.”
Dairine was silent for a few moments. Finally she leaned against the wall and nodded. “I guess I’ll just have to keep working on it. Where’s Mom?”
“Late,” Nita said. “She’s probably still looking for Dad’s paperwork. She said he started burying it all in those old carnation boxes in the back again.”
“Uh-oh. And after she got him the new filing cabinets.” Dairine snickered. “I bet he got yelled at.”
They heard someone pulling into the driveway. Nita cocked an ear at her bedroom window, which was right above the driveway, and could tell from the sound that it was her dad’s car. Her mom had walked to town. Nita glanced at the clock. It was a little before five, the time their dad usually shut the store on Saturdays. “There they are. Bet he closed up early to get her to stop giving him grief.”
The back door opened, closed again. Nita got up, yawning; even after the sandwich, dinner was beginning to impinge on her mind, and her stomach was making sounds that though they could have passed for a polite greeting on Rirhath B, had more to do with a serious food deficit here. “Mom say anything to you about what she was going to make tonight? Maybe we can get a head start.”
“I don’t remember,” Dairine said as they headed through the living room. This answer was no surprise; Dairine’s normal response to food was to eat it first and ask questions later.
“Huh,” Nita said. “Dad—”
She stopped. Her father stood in the kitchen, looking down at the counter by the stove as if he expected to find something there, but the counter was bare, and her father’s expression was odd. “You forget something, Daddy?” Nita said.
“No,” he said. And then Nita saw his face working not to show what it felt, his hands not so much resting on the edge of the counter as holding it, holding on to it, and heard his voice, which pushed its way out through a throat tight with fear. “No—”
“Where’s Mom?” Dairine said.
Nita’s stomach instantly tied itself into a horrible knot. “Is she all right?” she said.
“She’s—” her father said. And then immediately after that, “No. Oh, honey—”
Dairine pushed her way up beside Nita, her face suddenly as pale as her father’s. “Daddy, where’s Mom?!”
“She’s in the hospital.” He turned to them, but he didn’t let go of the counter, still hanging on to it. As his eyes met Nita’s, the fear behind them hit her so hard that she almost staggered. “She’s very sick, they think—”
He stopped, not because he didn’t know what to say, but because he refused to say it, to think it—it was impossible. Nonetheless Nita heard it, as her dad heard it, repeating over and over in his head:
They think she might die.
6: Saturday Afternoon and Evening
In a place where directions and distances made no sense, Kit and Ponch stood in the endless, soundless dark, the leash spell hanging loose between them and glowing with silent power.
So here we are. You feel okay?
I feel fine.
So what should I make?
Anything, Ponch said, as he had before.
Kit thought about that, and discovered that he couldn’t decide what to do first. Typical, he thought. Presented with the possibility to create anything you can think of, your mind goes blank.
He tried to take a breath and found that his breathing now seemed to be working properly. “Am I getting used to this place?” Kit said softly in the Speech, and found that he could actually hear himself.
No answer; but then if one had come, he’d have jumped out of his skin.
“Okay,” he said then. “Lights…”
And suddenly Kit found himself standing unsupported in the midst of interstellar glory. “Wow,” he said softly. He and Ponch were apparently somewhere in the fringes of a gigantic globular cluster, all the nearby darkness blazing with stars of every possible color—and the farther darkness was peppered with not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of galaxies, little globes and ovals and spirals everywhere, a megacluster of the kind that astronomers were sure existed but had never seen.
It’s bright, Ponch said.
“No argument there,” said Kit, as he wondered why producing all this had been so easy. He was used to wizardry taking a good deal more effort. Is this even wizardry? he wondered. It had needed no construction of spells, no careful and laborious plugging in of words and variables, and no sudden drain of energy after the wizardry was fueled from your own power and turned loose. That last factor was what made Kit mistrust this process. He was used to the concept that every wizardry had its price, and one way or another, you paid—and the concept’s corollary, that any wizardry that doesn’t charge you a decent admission fee usually isn’t worth anything.
All the same, it would be smart to play around in here a little and see what it was worth. Kit also thought he could guess why Carl wanted him to try to bring back some small physical artifact. It would confirm whether or not this space was simply some kind of illusion or mirage, amusing but otherwise not terribly useful.
“Okay,” he sad, “let’s take this from the top. A sun, first…”
And one appeared, though he hadn’t even asked for it in the Speech: a deep yellow-orange star, a vast, roiling, heaving landscape of blinding flame, directly below his feet. For a second Kit flinched at the roar and turmoil of burning gas beneath him, all dancing with prominences and loops and arches of radiant plasma—inexhaustible fountains of fire half a million miles high, leaping away from the star’s seething limb and pouring themselves back into the surface again in slow-motion grace. In vacuum you wouldn’t normally get sound, I guess, Kit thought. But he seemed to be in some kind of peculiar rapport with this space that let him sense things he ordinarily wouldn’t, and the tearing basso wind-roar of superheated ions blasting upward past him was strangely satisfying. Ponch, sitting beside him, squinted down at the ravening brilliance but didn’t comment.
“Not bad, huh?” Kit sad.
Ponch yawned. “The squirrels are more fun.”
“You’ve got a one-track mind,” Kit said. “Okay, now we need a planet…”
And the star receded into the distance, reducing itself to proper sunlike size. Below Kit was his planet, all covered in cloud, muttering softly to itself as it rotated, already coasting away from them along its orbit Kit thought he could actually feel the heat pouring off it, a feverish sensation. A lot of heat trapped under those clouds, he thought. It’s a ‘supergreenhouse’, like Venus… There was no telling how big this world was, without anything to give him a frame of reference. Have to go down there and take a closer look, Kit thought—
—and suddenly he was standing on a rocking, shaking, stony surface. All around him rocks tumbled down low cracked cliffs, and a wind as brutal as the solar one but laden with a stinging drizzle of acid instead of fire shrieked past him. In a more normal reality, Kit knew this terrible supersonic fog would have flayed the unprotected flesh off his bones in seconds, but here he seemed immune. Because I imagined it?
Kit grinned and w
aved one hand in front of him airily. “Lose the acid,” he said, “lose the wind, lose the clouds.” The instant he spoke, the air went clear, fell silent, and the dull, overarching, brassy canopy faded away to dark clarity. The stars showed through again, and the high, hot, golden sun. But sound vanished as well, and it started to get very cold.
“No, no; atmosphere is okay!” Kit said. “Something I can breathe. Landscape?”
Green rolling grassland spread itself away in every direction under a blue, blue sky. Ponch leaped up in delight. “Squirrels!”
“No squirrels,” Kit said. “Don’t overdo them or you’ll get bored.” He rubbed his hands together in delight. “You know what this is, Ponch? It’s magic-crayon country.”
“Crayons? Where?” Ponch had conceived a weird fondness for the taste of crayons when Kit was younger, and had always gone out of his way to steal and eat them.
“Not that way,” Kit said, turning around and gazing all about him at the total wilderness. “But if I thought of an elephant with three hairs in its tail here— Uh-oh.”
Ponch began barking deafeningly. The elephant, large and purple-gray, as in the original illustration from that old children’s book, glanced around in surprise, then looked over at Ponch and said, a little scornfully, “Do you have a problem?”
“Sorry,” Kit said. “Uh, can I do something for you?”
“Trees are generally better for eating purposes than grass,” the elephant said. “A little more variation in the landscape would be nice. And so would company.”
Kit thought about that. A second later the grassland looked much more like African veldt, with a scattering of trees and an impressive mountain range in the distance, and another elephant stood next to the first one. They looked each other up and down, twined their trunks together, and walked off into the long grass, swinging their three-haired tails as they went.
Kit paused then, wondering whether they were a boy and a girl, and then wondering whether it mattered. Maybe it’s better not to get too hung up on minor details right now, he thought.