Her father looked at her, uncomprehending.
“Daddy,” Nita said, “I am a wizard! In fact, we’ve got two of them in the house. And we know a bunch more of them, all over the place. Wizardry’s about fixing broken things, healing hurt things… saving lives. We must be able to do something.”
Her dad’s expression went curiously neutral. “Honey,” he said, sounding slightly embarrassed, “you know, that’s the kind of thing I’ve—been trying not to think about. It still seems like a fairy tale, sometimes. Even when everything’s all right, I don’t think about it much. And right now, now I’d be afraid it’ll…”
Fail, Nita thought. It was the thought that had been nagging at her, too. “Dad, in Mom’s case, it’s really complicated. I’ve barely had time to start working out what to do. But there has to be something. I’m not going to do anything else until I find out what.”
Her father rubbed his face again. “Well. All right. In the meantime, we’d better get ourselves over there. Have you had your shower?”
“Not yet.”
“You go ahead. I’ll make us some breakfast. Is Dairine up?”
“I don’t know. She had trouble getting to sleep last night.”
“She wasn’t alone,” her father said softly.
He reached out to Nita and hugged her. “Oh, honey…” He ran out of words for a few moments. Then he hugged her harder. “You hang in there. We’ll all keep each other going somehow, and it’ll be all right.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, hoping that it was true.
***
When they got to the hospital, Nita’s mother was sleeping, having had her PET scan. “She was awake late last night,” the head nurse, that large lady with the bun hairstyle, told Nita’s dad, “and it seems like a good idea for her to get caught up on her sleep now. But her doctor’s finishing another procedure, and she asked me if you could wait for half an hour or so. She’d like to see you.”
“No problem,” Nita’s father said. In reality it wasn’t even that long; after she and Dairine went up to take a quick look in at their mom, and Nita saw that she was indeed sleeping peacefully, Nita left Dairine there to have a moment with their mom by herself, and made her way back to the little waiting room, where she found her dad already talking to Dr. Kashiwabara. The doctor looked up as Nita came in.
“Good morning,” she said as Nita sat down. “Well, your mom had a quiet night, except for the scan, of course. She’s been doing the sensible thing, and sleeping when we weren’t actually running her in and out of the machines. In fact, she fell asleep during the PET scan, but it’s not noisy like the MRI would have been—and Mrs. Callahan managed to fall asleep during that, too. Which I wouldn’t normally have thought possible. It’s like sleeping in a garbage can while someone’s banging on it.”
“If you lived long with our daughters,” Nita’s dad said, “you’d be surprised what you’d learn to sleep through.”
Dr. Kashiwabara smiled faintly. “Come to think of it,” she said, “where’s the younger one?”
Nita looked around in surprise. Dairine should have come back from their mom’s room by now. “Be right back,” she said.
Nita retraced her steps. Slipping quietly into the room, she found Dairine standing there, her back against the wall near the door, looking across the closer, empty bed at the curtained one where their mother lay. In her arms she was holding Spot—which Nita hadn’t noticed Dairine bringing to the hospital in the first place—and the whole room was sizzling with the electric-air feel of a wizardry on the ebb, either newly dismantled or incomplete.
“What are you doing?” Nita whispered, and grabbed Dairine by the upper arm. “Come on!”
Dairine didn’t resist her: she didn’t have the energy. Nita was sure she knew why, but there was no dealing with it right now. She hustled Dairine back to the little conference room and sat her down.
Nita’s father gave Dairine one of those looks that said, Misbehaving again, I see, but said nothing aloud. The doctor greeted Dairine, then turned back to their father.
“Well,” she said, “Mrs. Callahan’s status is pretty stable. And now we’ve had the scans that I wanted. I’ve had a chance to look at them, and this morning I had a couple of my colleagues look at the results. We’re all in agreement.”
She took a long breath. “Mr. Callahan,” she said, “I don’t know; you’ll have to tell me whether you think it’s better that you and I should discuss this alone first.”
“Not a chance,” Nita said. Dairine shook her head.
Her father swallowed. “They’re both intelligent girls, Doctor,” he said. “They’re going to have to hear, anyway. Better they should get the explanation from you than secondhand from me.”
The doctor nodded, then got up, shut the door to the corridor, and sat down again. “All right,” she said. Her voice was measured, gentle. “Mr. Callahan, the growth in your wife’s brain is definitely a tumor. We’re ninety percent sure that it’s a growth of a type called glioblastoma multiforme. This kind of growth is very invasive, very fast growing. It invades nearby tissue quickly and destructively. And it is usually malignant.”
They all sat still as statues.
“The only way we’re going to be a hundred percent sure of the assessment is to do a biopsy,” Dr. Kashiwabara said. “We’ll do that in a day or two, once Mrs. Callahan is completely stable, so that we can determine our course of action. But I want to stress to you that the tumor itself can be removed. That will relieve the pressure on the surrounding structures.”
“But that’s not everything, is it?” Nita said.
The doctor shook her head. “I said that this kind of growth is invasive. It can also spread through other parts of the nervous system, though not usually beyond to other organs. But because glioblastomas grow so quickly at this stage in their development, it’s hard to tell how long the tumor may have been hiding there in ‘silent’ mode, seeding itself. The important thing is going to be to start chemotherapy as soon as possible after the surgery to remove the tumor. Possibly radiotherapy as well.”
Nita’s father nodded. “Have you discussed this with my wife?” he said.
“Not yet,” said the doctor. “That comes next. I wanted a chance to prepare you first, since you two will want to talk about it together, and it’s important that you both have all the facts.”
“The ‘seeding,’” her father said. “It’s cancer that you mean. Spreading.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Kashiwabara.
Nita felt as if she had been turned to ice where she sat. Cancer was a word that she had come across repeatedly in her reading that morning, but she had been trying to ignore it. Now she realized her folly, for the most basic tool of wizardry is words, and a wizard who ignores words willfully is only sabotaging herself.
“What are her chances?” Nita’s father said.
“It’s too soon to tell,” said the doctor. “Right now our priority is to get that tumor out of there. Afterward there’ll be time to look at the long-term options.”
“Is the operation dangerous?” Nita said.
Dr. Kashiwabara looked at her. “There’s a certain risk,” she said. “As in any surgical procedure. But the tumor’s in an area where it won’t be too hard to get at, and for this kind of surgery, we use a technique that’s more like the way we fix people’s noses than anything else. It’s not nearly as invasive or traumatic as brain surgery was years ago. I’ll sit down with you and show you some diagrams, if you like.”
“Thanks,” Nita said. “Yes.”
The doctor turned back to their dad. “Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
“Only when you think the surgery will be scheduled.”
“As soon as possible. There’s a team of local specialists that we put together for this kind of surgery. I’m getting everyone’s schedules sorted out now. I think it’ll be Wednesday or Thursday.”
“Okay,” Nita’s dad said. “Thanks, Doctor.”
The d
octor went off, leaving them together. I saw her face, Nita remembered her dad saying. She was shaking. He was right…
“There’s no point in us hanging around here,” her father said. “Why don’t we look at the diagrams Dr. Kashiwabara has for us. Then I’ll drop you two home, and come back a little bit later, so I can talk to Mom.”
“Daddy, no!” Dairine said. “I want to stay and—”
Dari, Nita said silently, shut up. We need to see Tom, in a hurry. And you and I need to talk.
“No, honey,” their father said. “I want to see her first. Okay?”
“All right,” Dairine said, subdued, but she shot Nita a rebellious look. “Let’s go.”
Nita held her fire until they were home, and all had had something to eat. When her father was getting ready to go out, she stopped him at the door and said, “We may be going out, Dad. Don’t be surprised if we’re not here when you get back. There are visiting hours tonight, right?”
“Yes, I think so. You can go then.” Her dad exhaled. “I guess it’s a good thing that the surgery will happen quickly. We can start—coping, I guess.”
“Yeah. And we’ll do more than that.” She gave him a hug. “Give that to Mom for me.”
“I will.”
She watched him pull out of the driveway and drive off.
Nita started up the stairs and met Dairine halfway down them, shrugging into her jacket, with Spot under her arm. “Not so fast,” Nita said. “I want you to tell me what you were doing in there.”
“Something,” Dairine said. “Which was more than you were.”
Nita was tempted to hit her sister—to really hit her, which shocked her. While she was standing there being horrified at herself, Dairine brushed right by Nita and headed for the back door. Nita grabbed her own jacket and her manual, locked the back door, and went after her.
Dairine was halfway down the driveway already. “Were you crazy, doing a wizardry right there?” Nita whispered as she caught up with her. “And you bombed, didn’t you? You crashed and burned.”
Dairine was walking fast. “I don’t want to talk about it!”
“You’d better talk about it! She’s my mother, too! What were you trying to do?”
“What do you think? I was trying to cure her!”
Nita gulped. “Just like that? Are you nuts? Without even knowing exactly what kind of growth you were operating on yet? Without—”
“Neets, while I’ve still got the power, I’ve got to try to do something with it,” Dairine said. “Before I lose the edge!”
“That doesn’t mean you just do any old thing before you’re prepared!” Nita said. “That wizardry just came apart! What if some piece of it got loose and affected someone else in there? What if—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dairine muttered, furious. “It didn’t work.” Nita looked at her as they crossed the street and headed down the road that led to Tom and Carl’s, and saw the tears starting to fill Dairine’s eyes again. “It didn’t work,” Dairine said, more quietly. “How can it not have worked? This isn’t even anything like pushing a planet around; this isn’t even a middle-sized wizardry! It…” She went quiet.
Nita could feel the tension building all through Dairine, like a coil winding tighter and tighter. “Come on,” she said.
***
When they rang Tom’s doorbell, it was a few moments before he answered, and as he opened the screen door, Nita wasn’t quite sure what to make of his expression. “It’s Grand Central Terminal around here this morning,” Tom said, “in all kinds of ways. Come on in.”
“Is this a bad time?” Nita asked timidly.
“Oh, no worse than usual,” said Tom. “Come on in; don’t just stand there.”
He quickly closed the front door behind Nita and Dairine as they went by, which was probably just as well, because otherwise a passerby might have seen the six-foot-long iridescent-blue giant slug sitting in the middle of the living room floor, deep in conversation with Carl. At least it would have looked like a giant slug to anyone who hadn’t been to Alphecca VI, but slugs weren’t usually encrusted with rubies of such a size. “Hey, ladies,” Carl said as they passed, and then went back to his conversation with his guest.
Tom led them into the big combined kitchen-dining room. “Are you two all right?” Tom said. “No, I can tell you’re not; it’s just about boiling off you. What’s happened?”
Briefly Nita told him. Tom’s face went blank with shock.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Nita, Dairine, I’m so sorry. This started happening when?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
Tom sat down at the table. “Please,” he said, gesturing them to seats across from him. “And you say they’ve got the scans done already. That helps.” He looked up then. “It also explains something Carl noticed an hour or so ago…”
Carl had just said good-bye to the Alpheccan, who had vanished most expertly, without even enough disturbance of the air to rustle the curtains. “Yeah, I thought that was you earlier,” Carl said, coming over to sit down at the table and looking at Dairine. “It had your signature, with that kind of power expenditure. But something went real wrong, didn’t it?”
“It didn’t work,” Dairine said softly.
“There are only about twenty reasons why it shouldn’t have,” Carl said, sounding dry. “Inadequate preparation, no concrete circle when so many variables were involved, insufficiently defined intervention locus in both volume and tissue type, other unprotected living entities in the field of possible effects, inadequate protection for the wizardry against ‘materials’ memory of past traumas in the area; shall I go on? Major screwup, Dairine. I expect better of you.” He was frowning.
Nita tried to remember if she’d ever seen Carl frown before, and failed, and got the shivers.
“I thought I could just fix it,” Dairine said, looking pale. “I mean—I’ve done that kind of thing before.”
Carl shook his head. “Yes, but you can’t go on that way forever. Your power levels are down nine, maybe ten points from mid-Ordeal levels. That’s just as it should be. But hasn’t it occurred to you that there’s another problem? You started very big. This is a small wizardry by comparison—and you haven’t yet mastered the reduction in scale to make you much good at the small stuff. Sorry, Dairine, but that’s the price you pay for such a spectacular debut. Right now Nita’s the only one in your house who’s got the kind of control to attempt any kind of intervention on your mother at all. You’re going to have to let her handle it. And I warn you not to interfere in whatever intervention Nita may elect. It could kill all three of you. It’s going to be hard for you to sit on your hands and watch, but that’s just what you’re going to have to do.”
“It’s not fair,” Dairine whispered.
“No,” said Tom. “So let’s agree that it’s not, then move past that to some kind of solution. If indeed there is one.”
“If!” Nita said.
Tom looked at her steadily, an expression inviting her to calm herself down. “Maybe a Coke or something?” Carl said.
“Please,” Nita said. Carl got up to get the drinks. To Tom, Nita said, “I was doing a lot of reading this morning. I kept running into references to spells that had to do with cancer being difficult because the condition is ‘intractable,’ or ‘recalcitrant.’” She shook her head. “I don’t get it. A spell always works.”
“Except when the problem keeps reconstructing itself afterward,” Tom said, “in a different shape. It’s like that intervention you and Kit were working on, the Jones Inlet business. If the pollution coming out of the inner waters was always the same, the wizardry would be easy to build. But it’s changing all the time.”
Nita grimaced. “Yeah, well,” she said, “I blew a whole lot of time on detail work on that one, and the spell worked just fine without it. I think I’m having a lame-brain week.” She rubbed her face. “Just when I most seriously don’t need one!”
“There’s not much point i
n beating yourself up about that right now,” Tom said. “The foundations of the wizardry were sound, and it did the job, which is what counts. And you may be able to recycle the subroutines for something else eventually.”
Carl came back with four bottles of Coke, distributed them, and sat down. He exchanged glances with Tom for a second longer than absolutely necessary, as information passed from mind to mind.
“Oh boy,” Carl said. “Nita, Tom’s right. The basic problem is the structure of the malignancy itself—”
“Look, let’s take this from the top,” Tom said. “Otherwise there are going to be more misunderstandings.” He held out his hand, and a compact version of his manual dropped into it. He put it down on the table and started leafing through it. “You’ve done some medical wizardry in the past,” he said to Nita.
“Yeah. Minor healings. Some not so minor.”
Tom nodded. “Tissue regeneration is fairly simple,” he said. “Naturally there’s always a price. Blood, either in actual form or expressed by your agreement to suffer the square of the pain you’re intending to heal—that’s the normal arrangement. But when you start involving nonhuman life in the healing, things get complicated.”
Nita blinked. “Excuse me? My mother was human the last time I looked!”
Carl gave Tom an ironic look. “What my distracted colleague here means is that it’s not just your mother you have to heal, but also whatever’s attacking her. If you don’t heal the cause of the tumor or the cancer, it just comes back somewhere else, in some worse form.”
“What could be worse than a brain tumor?!” Dairine said.
“Don’t ask,” Tom said, still leafing through the manual. “There are too many ways the Lone Power could answer that question.” He glanced up then. “Your main problem is that cancer cells in general are tough for wizards to easily treat because their abnormality has shifted them away from the definition of what normally constitutes human tissue… but not far enough away to be really useful.”
Tom sighed. “I’ve been trying to avoid the loaded term ‘mutant’, but in the case of the sort of tumor your mother seems to have been diagnosed with, it fits best. The brain cells in the tumor got out of control and started replicating uncontrollably because they developed a mutated copy of a growth factor gene that’s normally perfectly benign. Now as to how they did that…?” Tom shook his head. “There are all kinds of possible causes, everything from a stray bit of cosmic radiation snapping the strand of the original gene, on down to much less dramatic environmental causes. Pollution, food additives, just simple structural weakness in the gene, all of the above… But the result is the same. A combination gets put together wrong, proves unusually robust despite the wrongness, and starts pushing other cells out of the way and reproducing itself as fast as it can.”