The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition

  Nita swallowed hard with sudden fear, took the receiver away from him, and hung it up. “Daddy, what is it?”

  He looked up at her, as scared as she was. “It was the hospital.” Nita’s stomach instantly tied itself into a knot. “Mom had some more seizures after we left,” her father said.

  “Oh no,” Nita said. Whatever small feelings of success she had had after the long evening’s work had run out of her in about a second, leaving her completely terrified again. “Is she okay?”

  “They got them to stop, yeah,” her father said. “But it took longer this time. Honey, she’s got to have that surgery as soon as she can.”

  “It’s still going to be Saturday?”

  “Yes. But is that going to be soon enough?”

  Nita didn’t know what to say. Her father looked up at her. “How was… whatever you were doing?”

  “It was pretty good,” Nita said, but now she wasn’t so sure. “I need some more practice before Saturday, but I think I’m going to be able to help.”

  Her father didn’t answer, just rubbed his face with both hands. He doesn’t believe me, Nita thought. But he doesn’t want to say so. “Daddy,” she said, “you should go to bed. If Mom sees you’re tired out, it’s gonna get her worried.”

  He sighed, looked up at her. “You really do remind me of her sometimes,” he said. “You two nag in exactly the same way.”

  “Thanks loads,” Nita said. “Go on, Dad. Get some sleep. We’ll go see her tomorrow afternoon.”

  He nodded, got up, went off to bed. But he won’t sleep, Nita thought.

  And for a long time, neither did she.

  16: Wednesday

  Nita more or less sleepwalked through school the next day. She got spoken to several times for not paying attention. All she could really think about during school was seeing her mom in the hospital that afternoon, and then getting back into the practice universes and following up on what she’d seen Kkirl do with the kernel the day before.

  She looked for Kit during the day but didn’t see him, and there was no sign of him at the school gates when she started for home, and no note for her in the manual. Maybe he’s at one of the other gates, Nita thought, and retraced her steps to the gates on the north side of the school. But he wasn’t there, either. She’d tried shooting him a thought earlier, without response; now she tried it again. Still nothing…

  For a change of pace, and on the off chance she might find Kit coming back using that route, Nita went home from school the back way. It was a slightly longer route than her usual one, but it gave her a little time to mull over what she’d seen and felt Kkirl doing with the kernel. But there’s no way to tell if Mom’s kernel is going to behave like that one did, Nita thought. She really hoped it wouldn’t. Without Pralaya’s help and Kkirl’s, she wouldn’t have been able to hold the kernel for long—and Kkirl had had lots of time to plan what she was going to do. Help is going to be a real good idea on this, she thought. Glad Kit’s gonna be there.

  Yet she remembered Kkirl’s initial reluctance to let the other wizards help with her own intervention, and Nita could understand where it had come from. Suppose the one helping you messes up somehow? It would be awful being in a situation where you might wind up blaming someone you knew well for, for—

  She wouldn’t even think the words. But it would be better if there was no one to blame but yourself if something went wrong. Or no one you were close to…

  Nita paused at the corner, gazing across the street while waiting for traffic to pass. Pralaya wanted to help, Nita thought. And Pralaya’s entry in the manual, when she’d taken a look at it, had been impressive. He was old as wizards went—a part-time local Advisory on his planet, with a lot of experience. But still… It was hard to let anybody else get involved in this, whether she knew them or not. There was so much riding on it, so much that could go wrong.

  She let out a long breath. There was no more traffic, and across the street from her was the church where Nita’s mom went on Sundays.

  Nita paused, then crossed the street. When she and Dairine had been much younger, they had routinely been dragged here. Then Nita’s mother had had some kind of change of heart and had stopped insisting the two of them go. “I don’t think it’s right to try to make you believe what I believe just because I believe it,” she’d said. “When you’re old enough, I want you to make up your own minds.” And so church had become a matter of choice in the years that followed.

  Sometimes Nita didn’t go to church with her mom, and sometimes, for reasons she found hard to describe to herself, she did—possibly it was exactly because her mother had made it optional. The things she heard in church sometimes seemed exactly right and true to Nita, and sometimes seemed so incredibly stupid and wrong that she was tempted to snicker, except that she knew better (and also had no desire for her mother, when they got home, to pull her head off and beat her around the shoulders with it for being so rude). But by and large the issue of belief or disbelief in what went on in church didn’t seem as important to Nita as the issue of just sometimes being there with her mom. It was simply part of the way they were with each other.

  As a result of this Nita didn’t go to the church by herself all that often. Now, though, as she came down the sidewalk in front of it, she stopped and stood there. …Why not? Nita thought. After all, it’s the One. No wizard worthy of the name could fail to acknowledge his or her most basic relationship with the uttermost source of wizardry, the Power most central to the Powers, Their ancient source.

  She went in. She was half terrified that she would run into somebody her family knew or that, indeed, she would run into anybody at all. But there was no one there this time of the afternoon.

  The place was fairly modern: high white ceiling, stained glass with a modern-art look to it, simple statues, and an altar that was little more than a table. Generally Nita didn’t pay much attention to the statues and pictures. She knew they were all just symbols of something bigger, as imperfect as matter and perception were liable to make such things. But today, as she found a pew near the back and slipped into it, everything seemed, somehow, to be looking at her.

  Nita pulled down the kneeler and knelt, folding her hands on the back of the pew in front of her. Then after a moment, she put her head down against her hands.

  Please, please, don’t let my mother die. I’ll do whatever it takes. Whatever!

  But if You do let her die—

  She stopped herself. Threatening the One was fairly stupid, not to mention useless, and (possibly worst of all) rude. Yet her fear was slopping back and forth into anger, about once every five minutes, it seemed. Nita couldn’t remember a time when her emotions had seemed so totally out of her control. She tried to get command of herself now. It was hard.

  Just… please. Don’t let her die. If You don’t, I’ll do… whatever has to be done. I don’t care what it is. I’m on Your side, remember? I haven’t done so badly before. I can do this for her. Let what I’m going to do work… let me help her. Help me help her.

  I haven’t asked You for much, ever! Just give me this one thing. I’ll do whatever it takes if You just let me save her, help me save her, let her live!

  The cry from her heart left her trembling with her emotion. But the silence around her went on, went deep, continued. No answers were forthcoming.

  And I was expecting what, exactly? Nita thought, getting angry—at herself, now—and getting up off her knees. A wave of embarrassment, of annoyance at her own gullibility and hopelessness, went through her.

  She got up and went out the front doo … and stopped. A long black hearse had driven up and was now parking down at the end of the church sidewalk. Someone was getting ready for a funeral.

  For a moment Nita stood there transfixed with horror. Then she hurried away past the hearse, refusing to look at it more than once, and more determined than ever to make all of this work.

  ***

  That afternoon when she and her dad and Dairine got
to the hospital, they made it no farther than the nursing station. The head nurse there, Mrs. Jefferson, came out from behind the desk and took them straight into that little room across the hall, which Nita irrationally was now beginning to fear.

  “What’s the matter?” Nita’s father said, as soon as the door was closed.

  “Your wife’s had another bout of seizures,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “About an hour ago. They were quickly controlled again—no damage was done as far as we can tell—but she’s exhausted. The doctor wanted her kept sedated for the rest of the day, so she’s sleeping again. She’ll be better tomorrow.”

  “But she won’t be that much better until the surgery happens,” Nita’s dad said, sounding bleak.

  Mrs. Jefferson just looked at him. “It’s been scheduled for Friday now,” she said. “Did Dr. Kashiwabara get through to you?”

  “About that? Yes.” Nita’s father swallowed. “But between now and then—”

  “We’re keeping a close eye on her,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “One of us was with her when it started this morning, which is why we were able to stabilize her so quickly.” She paused. “She’d been hallucinating a little…”

  Nita’s dad rubbed his eyes, looking even more stricken. “Hallucinating how?”

  The nurse hesitated. “Is Mrs. Callahan interested in the space program? Or astronomy?”

  “Uh, yes, somewhat,” Nita’s father said warily.

  “Oh, good.” The nurse looked slightly relieved. “She was talking about the Moon a lot, when she first came to, after the seizures last night. Something about walking on the Moon. And she also kept repeating something about looking for the light, needing to use the light, and how ‘all the little dark things’ were trying to hide the light from her. That seems to have something to do with some of the guided imagery work that her crisis counselor was doing with her, or it may have been a response to some of the optical symptoms she’s been having.” The nurse shook her head. “Anyway, it’s common enough for people to be confused afterward. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

  Nita’s heart was cold inside her.

  “Can we sit with her for just a few minutes?” Nita’s father said. “We won’t try to wake her up.”

  The head nurse was about to say no… but then she stopped. “All right,” she said. “Please keep it brief. If the doctor finds out that I let you—”

  “We won’t be long.”

  The three of them slipped into the room where Nita’s mom was staying. Her roommates were gone; there was just the single bed now that had its curtains drawn around it. They slipped in through the curtains, stood there quietly.

  Nita looked silently at her mom and thought about how drawn her face looked, almost sunken in; there were circles under her eyes. It was painful to see her like this. Got to hurry with what I’m doing, Nita thought, though she felt as tired as her mother looked. Got to.

  Her dad was looking down at her mom as if she was the only thing in the world that mattered. Her mom and dad had known each other for a long time before they got married; apparently it had been a joke among their friends, that all of them knew her mom and dad were an item long before they knew it themselves. Here were two old friends, and suddenly one of them was really sick, might even—

  Nita forcibly turned away from the thought and looked at her father’s face. No, she thought. No.

  ***

  She was back in the practice universes almost as soon as she could get upstairs to her room and through her transit circle to Grand Central. Now that she knew where the playroom was, too, she made that space her first stop. On her next-to-last chance to practice, having another wizard along to give her a few last-minute pointers would be welcome.

  But the playroom was empty when she got there. The central area still shone with that sourceless pale radiance, and the assorted alien furniture still sitting around glinted in the light. As she walked, Nita felt around her for the kernel and sensed it immediately. It had wandered away from the seating area, rolling out into the huge white expanse of the floor.

  Nita went after it, only partly to have a little more practice in manipulating it. The glance she had had at her manual before leaving had made it plain that the next practice universe she encountered was going to be much more difficult, more closely tailored to her own problem. Whatever Power handled access to the practice universes had noticed Nita’s looming deadline and was forcing the pace… and she was feeling the tension. She was also aware that she was stalling. But only a little, she thought, as she spotted the kernel’s vague little star of light, maybe a quarter mile away.

  Nita hiked toward it, hearing nothing but its faint buzz in all that great, flat empty space. In this darkness, bare of the sounds of fellow wizards, it was all too easy to hear other things: the machines around her mother’s bed in the hospital, the whisper of the nurses saying things to each other that they thought—incorrectly—Nita and Dairine couldn’t hear. Nita reached the kernel, picked it up, and turned it over in her hands, holding it carefully; for all its power, it looked like such a fragile thing. Holding it she could feel how every little detail of this “pocket” universe was anchored in it, endlessly malleable. The more you believed in that malleability, the more easily the kernel could be changed. That’s something I’ve got to exploit, she thought. Not be afraid to improvise.

  But she was afraid. It’d be dumb not to admit that, Nita thought. All I have to do is push through the fear. And at least Kit’ll be there to help.

  The kernel in her hands sang softly, like a plucked string, as someone else came into the playroom. She turned to see who it was. Way back among the furniture, a golden-furred form sat up on its haunches and peered around. “Pralaya?” Nita called.

  Abruptly he was right beside her. “That was quick,” Nita said.

  “Microtransit,” Pralaya said, dropping down on all six feet again. “When you know a kernel’s signature, if it’s not too complex or unstable, you can home on it. Most of us learn this one pretty quickly; it’s fairly simple.” He yawned.

  “You sound tired,” Nita said as they started to walk back toward the furniture.

  “I just finished a next-to-last workout,” Pralaya said. “Shortly I’ll have to do the real piece of work, but not right this moment. I’m considering a few last options. What about you?”

  “I’ve got to do my next-to-last, too,” Nita said. “Or I think it will be. There’s not much time left. They’re going to be operating on my mom the day after tomorrow.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  There were moments when the darkness here seemed to press in unusually closely around Nita. This was one of them. “Not so well,” she said. “I’m scared a lot of the time. It makes it hard to work.” She made a face. “Just another of the Lone One’s favorite tactics—to use your own fear to make what you do less effective.”

  “It’s a tactic that has another side, though,” Pralaya said. “One you can use to your advantage. Fear can keep you sharp and make you sensitive to solutions you might not have seen otherwise.”

  “I guess. But I could do without Its tactics, at the moment, or Its inventions. Especially the first one It came up with.”

  “Death,” Pralaya said, musing. “Well, it’s struck me that the Powers have been fairly philosophical about Their dealings with death and entropy. What They can’t cure, we must endure, or so They say.”

  Nita nodded. “I guess we all wonder about why sometimes. Why the Powers That Be didn’t just reverse what the Lone Power had done. Or trash everything and start all over if They couldn’t repair the damage.”

  They got back to the furniture, and Nita dropped the kernel to its more usual place on the table. “Well,” Pralaya said, “the manual is sparing with the details. But I think the other Powers had only a limited amount of energy left to Them afterward. The Lone One wasn’t just another Power; It was first among equals, mightiest of all the Subcreators. Terrible energies were entrusted to It when things got sta
rted, and when It had expended those energies, they weren’t available for use elsewhere by the Others.”

  Nita looked down at the kernel. “The Lone Power’s changing now, though,” she said. “Ever so slowly…”

  “So they say. Not that that does us much good, here and now. Falling’s easy. Climbing’s hard, and It has a long climb ahead. And meantime, we have to keep on fighting Its many shadows among the worlds, and in our own hearts, as if no victory’d been won.”

  “The shadows in our hearts…” Nita said softly. She’d had too close a look at her own shadows when Dairine passed through her Ordeal, and since then she had wished often enough that there were some way to get rid of them. But there wasn’t; not even wizards can make things happen just by wishing.

  “I’ve got to get going,” she said at last. “I’ll stop in when I’ve finished my run.”

  “I’ll probably still be here,” Pralaya said. “I wanted to talk to Pont about a couple of things.”

  “Or…” Nita hesitated. “No, never mind; you’re tired.”

  Pralaya gave her an amused look. “You’re thinking that another point of view to triangulate with might not be a bad idea.”

  “Seriously, if you’re tired, though—”

  “You are, too,” Pralaya said, “and you’re not letting it stop you.” He got up. “Why not, if you like? I may as well spend the time till Pont shows up in doing something useful.”

  Nita hesitated just a moment more, then smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  She got her transit circle ready. Lucky he was here, she thought. While Pont was friendly enough, there was a congenial quality about Pralaya that made him easier to work with, and the sharpness of his mind and the way he saw the aschetic universes were advantages.

  Luck, though? said something at the back of her mind, something faintly uneasy. Is there really such a thing?

  “Ready?” Pralaya said, dropping his own transit circle to the ground.