I finished fixing the TV, Kit said, determined to keep the conversation going, no matter how uncomfortable it made him. Someone around here had to try to keep at least the appearance of normalcy going. Now I’m bored again, and I feel like getting out of here before something happens to break the mood. Wanna go to the moon?
There was a pause. No, Nita said. Thanks. I just don’t feel up to it today. And there it was, the sudden hot feeling of eyes filling with tears, without warning; and Nita frowning, clenching her eyes shut, rather helplessly, unable to stop it, determined to stop it. You go ahead. Thanks, though.
She turned away in thought, breaking off the silent communication between them. Kit found that he, too, was scowling against the pain, and he let out a long breath of aggravation at his own helplessness. Why is it so embarrassing to be sad? he thought, annoyed. And not just for me. Nita’s overwhelming pain embarrassed her as badly as it did him, so Kit had to be careful not to “notice” it. Yet there wasn’t anything he seemed able to do for her at the moment. He felt like an idiot—unable to think of anything useful to say, and just as idiotic when he was tempted to keep saying the same things over and over: “It’ll pass,” “You’ll come out of it eventually.” They all sounded heartless and stupid. And besides, how quick would I come out of it if it were my mama who died?
Kit let out a long breath. There was nothing to do but keep letting Nita know that he was there, one day at a time. So he’d taken care of today’s responsibility.
The phone rang, mercifully relieving Kit of his guilt for thinking that doing the right thing for his best friend was some kind of awful burden.
“Igotitlgotitlgotit!” Carmela shrieked from upstairs. “HolaMiguelque—” A pause. “Oh. Sorry. Kit!!”
“What?”
“Tomás El Jefe.”
“Oh.” Kit went to get the portable phone from its cradle in the kitchen. His mother, deep in the business of deboning a chicken, glanced at him as he passed and said nothing, but her smile had a little edge of ruefulness about it. She was still getting her head around the concept that a man she routinely saw at hospital fund-raisers, a successful writer for commercial television and a pillar of the community, was also one of two Senior wizards for the New York metropolitan area. Ponch, Kit’s big black Labrador-cum-Border-collie-cum-whatever, was now lying on the floor with his head down on his paws, carefully watching every move Kit’s mother made that had anything to do with the chicken. As Kit stepped over him, the dog spared him no more than an upward glance, then turned his attention straight back to the food.
Kit smiled slightly, picked up the phone and hit the “go” button. His sister was saying, “And so then I told him—Oh, finally! Kit, don’t hog the line; I’m expecting a call. Why can’t you two just do the magic telepathy thing like you do with Nita? It’d be cheaper!”
“Vamos,” Kit said, trying not to sound too severe.
“Bye, sweetie,” Tom Swale said on the other end.
“Bye-bye, Mr. Tom,” Carmela said, and hung up the upstairs phone.
Kit grinned. “‘Magic telepathy,’” he said. “Like she cares that much about the phone bill.”
Tom laughed. “Explaining the differences of communications between you and me and you and Nita might make more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “Better let her get away with it just this once. Am I interrupting anything?”
“I just finished dealing with a hardware conflict,” Kit said. “Handled now, I think. What’s up?”
“I wouldn’t mind a consultation, if you have the time.”
He wants a consultation from me? That’s new. “Sure,” Kit said. “I’ll be right over.”
“Thanks.”
Kit hung up, and saw the look his mother was giving him. “When’s it going to be ready, Mama?” he said. “I won’t be late. Not too late, anyway.”
“About six. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little late… It’ll keep.” She gave him a warning look. “You’re not going anywhere sudden, are you?” This had become her code phrase for Kit leaving on wizardly business.
“Nope,” Kit said. “Tom just needs some advice, it looks like.”
His father wandered back into the kitchen. “The TV working okay now?” Kit said.
“Working?” his pop said. “Well, yeah. But possibly not the way the manufacturer intended.”
Kit looked at his pop, uncomprehending. His father went back into the living room. Kit followed.
Where the TV normally would have shown a channel number, the screen was now displaying the number 0000566478. The picture seemed to be of a piece of furniture that looked rather like a set of chrome parallel bars. From the bars hung a creature with quite a few tentacles and many stalky eyes, none of these in the usual places. The creature was talking fast and loud in a voice like a fire engine’s siren, while waving around a large, shiny object that might have been an eggbeater; except that, in Kit’s experience, eggbeaters didn’t usually have pulse lasers built into them. Characters flashed on the screen, both in the Speech and in other languages.
Kit stood and looked at this with complete astonishment. His father, next to him, was doing the same. “You didn’t hack into that new premium movie channel or something, did you?” his pop said. “I don’t want the cops in here.”
“No way,” Kit said, picking up the remote and looking at it accusingly. The remote sat there in his hand as undemonstratively as any genuinely inanimate object might … except that Kit was less certain than ever that there really were any such things as inanimate objects.
He shook the remote to see if anything rattled. Nothing did. “I told you to behave,” he said in the Speech.
“But not like what,” the remote said in a sanctimonious tone.
His father was still watching the creature on the parallel bars, which pointed the laser eggbeater at what looked like a nearby abstract sculpture. This vanished in a flare of actinic green light, leaving Kit uneasily wondering what kind of sculpture screamed. “Nice special effects,” Kit’s father said, though he sounded a little dubious. “Very realistic.”
“It’s not special effects, Pop,” Kit said. “It’s some other planet’s cable.” He hit the reveal control on the remote, but nothing was revealed except, at the bottom of the screen, many more strings of characters flashing on and off in various colors. “Shopping channel, looks like.” Kit handed the remote back to his father.
“This is a shopping channel?” his pop said.
Kit headed for the coat hooks by the kitchen door and pulled his parka off one of them. “Popi, I’ve got to get to Tom’s. Be back in a while. It’s okay to look at that, but if any phone numbers that you can read appear—do me a big favor? Don’t order anything!”
Kit opened the back door. Ponch threw one last longing look at what Kit’s mama was doing with the chicken, then threw himself past Kit, hitting the screen door with a bang! and flying out into the driveway.
Kit followed him. At the driveway’s end, he paused, looking up briefly. It was almost dark already; the bare branches of the maples were showing black against an indigo sky. January was too new for any lengthening of days to be perceptible yet, and the shortness of the daylight hours was depressing. But at least the holidays were over. Kit could hardly remember a year when he’d been less interested in them. For his own family’s sake, he’d done his best to act as if he was, but his heart hadn’t been in the celebrations, or the presents. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the one present Nita most desperately wanted, one that not even the Powers That Be could give her.
Kit sighed and looked down the street. Ponch was down there near curbside in the rapidly falling dark, saluting one of the neighbor’s trees. “Back this way, please?” he said, and waited until Ponch was finished and came galloping back up the street toward him.
Kit made his way into the backyard again, with Ponch bouncing along beside him, wagging his tail. “Where did the ‘meaning of life’ thing come from all of a sudden?” Kit said.
br />
I heard you ask about it, Ponch said.
The question had, indeed, come up once or twice recently in the course of business, around the time Ponch started talking regularly. “So?” Kit said, as they made their way past the beat-up birdbath into the tangle of sassafras at the back of the yard, where they were out of sight of the houses on either side. “Come to any conclusions?”
Just that your mama’s easy to shake down for dog biscuits.
Kit grinned. “You didn’t need to start talking to her to find that out,” he said. He reached into his pocket, felt around for the “zipper” in it that facilitated access to the alternate space where he kept some of his spells ready, and pulled one out—a long chain of strung-together words in the Speech that glowed a very faint blue in the swiftly falling darkness. “I’d keep it in the family, though,” Kit said to Ponch. “Don’t start asking strangers complicated philosophical questions … It’ll confuse them.”
It may be too late, Ponch said.
Kit wondered what that was supposed to mean, then shrugged. He dropped the spell-chain to the ground around them in a circle. The transit wizardry knotted itself together at the ends in the figure-eight wizard’s knot, and from it a brief shimmering curtain of light went up and blanked the night away as displaced air went thump! and Kit’s ears popped. A moment later he and Ponch were standing together in Tom’s backyard, behind the high privet hedge blocking the view from Tom’s neighbors’ houses. Across the patio, lights were on in the house, and banging noises were coming from the kitchen.
Kit and Ponch made their way past the stucco koi pond toward the sliding porch doors, Ponch shaking his head emphatically. “Are your ears bothering you?” Kit said, as the sound of barking came from further inside the house.
Only lately, Ponch said.
“Sorry. I’ll have a look at the spell later.” Kit pushed the patio door to one side and went into Tom’s dining room. That space flowed into the living room area, where Tom’s desk sat in a corner, past the sofas and the entertainment center. But at the moment all the action was in the kitchen, off to the left, where big, dark-haired Carl, Tom’s fellow Advisory wizard, was doing something to the strip lighting that ran below the upper kitchen cupboards. Tom was leaning against the refrigerator, holding a cup of coffee, with the expression of a man who wants nothing to do with whatever’s happening.
“Hi, Kit,” he said, as Ponch ran through the kitchen and out the other side, heading toward the bedrooms, where the sheepdogs Annie and Monty were barking at something. “Something to drink? Just got some orange smoothies in…”
“Yeah, thanks.” Kit sat down at the table and watched Carl, who was bent over sideways under the upper cupboards and making faces.
“I told him to call an expert,” Tom said as he fished a carton of pre-mixed smoothie out of the fridge and a glass out of a cupboard by the sink, and having poured it full sat down with Kit at the dining room table, where a number of volumes of the Senior version of the wizard’s manual were piled up.
“We’re expert enough to change the laws of physics temporarily,” Carl muttered. “How hard can wiring be?”
With a clunk! all the lights in the house went out.
Carl moaned. Kit could just see Tom make a flicking motion with one finger at the circuit-breaker box near the kitchen door, and the lights came back on again. “You should stick to physics,” Tom said.
“Just one more time,” Carl said, and went down the stairs to the basement.
“This will be the sixth ‘one more time’ in the past two hours,” Tom said. “I’m hoping he’ll see sense before he blows up the transformer at the end of the street. Or maybe the local power station.”
“I heard that!” said the voice from the basement.
Kit snickered, but not too loudly.
“Anyway,” Tom said, “thanks for coming over. Briefly, one of our wizards is missing, and I’d like you to look into it.”
This was a new one on Kit. “Missing? Anybody I know?”
“Hard for me to tell. Here’s the listing.” Tom pulled down the topmost manual and opened it; the pages riffled themselves to a spot he had bookmarked. It was a page in the master wizards’ address listing for the New York area, and one block of information glowed a soft rose. Kit leaned over to look at it. In the Speech, it said:
McALLISTER, Darryl
18355 Hempstead Turnpike
Baldwin, NY 11568
(516) 555-7384
power rating: 5.6 +/- .3
status: on Ordeal
initiation: 2455116.9625
completion:
duration to present date: 90.3
resolution: nil
Kit stared at the duration figure for a moment: there was something wrong with it. “That doesn’t look right,” he said at last. “Did a decimal point get misplaced or something? That looks like months.”
“It is months,” Tom said. “Just a whisker over three, which is why it came up for attention today. The manual normally flags such extended Ordeals to be audited by a Senior.”
“I thought nobody was allowed to interfere with a wizard’s Ordeal,” Kit said. “It’s what determines whether you ought to be a wizard in the first place. Whether you can run into the Lone Power and survive…”
“Normally that’s true,” Tom said. “But Ordeals aren’t always so clear-cut; they do sometimes go wrong. A resolution can get delayed somehow, or there can be local interference that keeps the resolution from happening. An area’s Seniors are allowed a certain amount of information about Ordeals among probationary wizards who’d be in their catchment area if things went right, especially if something goes wrong in a specific sort of way—a stuck Ordeal, or a contaminated one. We have some latitude to step in and try to kick that Ordeal back into operation again. While interfering as little as possible.”
Kit nodded, glancing to one side as Carl came up from the basement with a very large roll of duct tape. “Ah,” Tom said. “The substance that binds the universe together.”
“We’ll see,” Carl said, and bent himself over sideways again.
“It’s a brute force solution,” Tom said. “Inelegant. The phone’s right there!”
Carl ignored him and started doing something with the duct tape.
“So now we come to this kid,” Tom said, indicating the highlighted listing again.
Clunk! went the circuit breaker, and the house went dark again; only the text on the page in front of them continued to glow, while in the back bedroom the dogs paused, then went on barking. Tom gestured once more at the breaker box, and the lights came on. “It’s not like he’s been physically absent from the area for all this time, as far as I can tell,” Tom said. “If he were, certainly there’d have been something about it in the news; there’s been nothing. But at the same time, this isn’t a normal duration for a human Ordeal. We need to find out what’s going on, but quietly. Do you or Nita know him well enough to look in on him and see what’s happening? Or do you know anyone who does?”
Kit shook his head. “I can check with Neets, but she’s sure never mentioned him to me,” Kit said. “Why bring me in on this, though? You’re a Senior; you’d probably be able to tell a lot better than I can what’s going on with him.”
“Well,” Tom said, “let’s put it this way. How come you chose to do a direct transit here rather than just walk over and knock on the front door?”
Kit was briefly surprised that Tom would bother asking so obvious a question. “It’s not exactly like you’ve got any kids of your own,” he said. “And if the neighbors keep seeing kids wandering in and out of here every five minutes—”
“Say no more,” Tom said. “We’re on the same wavelength. It’s just another facet of the way wizards have to behave in our culture. Attracting attention to yourself is usually unwise. In this particular situation, if people start noticing you in the neighborhood around the object of our mutual interest, they won’t think too much about it—it’s not far enough
from your own stamping grounds to provoke suspicion. Whereas if Carl or I went to investigate personally, notice might be taken. This kind of initial fact-finding is better suited to a wizard of your age.”
“Besides,” Carl said, peering up at the bottom of the cupboard, “lately you’ve been evincing a certain talent for finding things.”
“Well, Ponch has,” Kit said.
“I’m not sure he’d be producing these results without you as part of the team,” Carl said, as he applied duct tape liberally to the cupboard’s underside. “Let’s not get overly tangled up in details at the moment.”
“From a man in your position, that has a hollow ring,” Tom said.
“Sure, go ahead, mock me in my torment.”
“Anyway, are you willing?” Tom said. “To go over there during the next couple of days? See what the kid’s doing, physically, talk to him if you can, try to get a sense of what his state of mind is.”
“Sure,” Kit said. “Am I allowed to tell him I’m a wizard, if he asks?”
“I’ll leave that up to you,” Tom said. “Normally I would suggest you try to avoid it if possible. You don’t want to take the chance of altering his perception of his Ordeal, maybe even making him think you’re supposed to be involved in it somehow. But if you can come by any sense of why his Ordeal’s taking him so long, I’d be glad to hear it.”
Carl straightened up. “Okay,” he said. The strip lights under the cupboards were now actually on. He looked at the light they cast on the counter with some satisfaction. “At least now I’m going to be able to see what I’m cooking without getting blinded.” He went over to the wall, turned the dimmer switch.
Clunk!
“I could stop by the supermarket on the way home and get you some candles,” Kit said as he got up. “Fire still works.”
“Very funny,” Carl said. “I hope that someday, when duct tape is sticking to your gray hairs—”