“Morning, Mr. M.” She sat down in front of the desk and took the rings he offered her. Fortunately Nita knew how the puzzle worked, and she handed the rings back to him, braided together, in about fifteen seconds.
He looked at the puzzle with helpless amusement. “Halfway to a doctorate,” he said, “and I still have no grasp of spatial relationships. Remind me not to go into rocket science. How’ve your last couple of days been?”
“Not the best,” Nita said. “I had to throw my sister out of bed this morning. She didn’t want to go to school again.”
“That seems to be turning into a routine,” Mr. Millman said. “And from your expression, I get the feeling she didn’t appreciate it. She try the line about your mother again?”
Nita nodded.
“And you didn’t punch her out?”
Nita allowed herself a slight smile. “The temptation was there…”
They talked for maybe twenty minutes. Millman’s style wasn’t so much that of a shrink as that of a coach, Nita had decided: no long silences, no mmm-hmms that transparently tried to draw you out and get you to talk about things. You talked or not, as you pleased, and Mr. Millman did the same. You asked questions or answered them, or didn’t answer them, also as you pleased. It was all very leisurely and casual, and Nita was sure that Mr. Millman was getting a lot more out of what she said than she suspected. But, possibly because of the way he handled their sessions, she found that this wasn’t bothering her. “Any more of those nightmares?” Mr. Millman said at one point.
“Some weird dreams,” Nita said.
“Scary?”
“Not the one this morning. I felt more useless than anything else.” Nita wasn’t going to go too far into the specifics.
“Goes along with the rest of the symptoms at this point,” Mr. Millman said. “The loss of appetite, the sleep troubles, and the mood swings—”
“Depression,” Nita said.
Mr. Millman nodded. “That feeling of weight,” he said. “Or of being weighted down … of feeling like your face’ll crack if you smile.”
“I wish I could make it go away,” Nita said.
“Fighting it probably won’t make it go away faster. May prolong it, in fact. Let it be there, and do your best to work around it, or through it, and do what you usually do. Work on things you would normally enjoy.” Mr. Millman leaned back in the chair and stretched. “I would say play, but no one wants to hear that word at a time like this: it makes them feel guilty, even if it’s what they need. If you have projects you work on, hobbies, keep them alive. You’ll be glad you did, later—the work you do at a time like this is likely to be worth keeping. You do have hobbies?”
“Astronomy,” Nita said. “Gardening—I help my dad.” And then she added, “Magic.”
And instantly panicked. Now why did I say that?
Millman raised his eyebrows.
Oh, god, no. What have I done?! Nita thought. I’m gonna have to wash his brains now! And that’s a bad thing to do to your shrink—
“Ah, legerdemain,” Millman said. “An interesting field. Not enough women in it. Some kind of gender bar there; don’t ask me why all the famous magicians have been men. Anyway, it has to be good for your hand-eye coordination. Show me some card tricks, someday.” He looked at his watch. “Not now, though—someone else will be here shortly.”
“Thanks, Mr. M.,” Nita said, and escaped from his office as quickly as she could, wondering if, despite all Mr. Millman’s casual reassurances, she was actually going crazy.
***
Kit had spent most of the previous day recovering from the exertions of following Ponch into the interior otherworld where they’d found Darryl. It wasn’t as if he’d actually done so much wizardry himself, but it seemed to Kit that Ponch drew on his own power somewhat. And then there’s the leash, Kit thought, as he headed into the kitchen to snatch a hurried breakfast. He’d overslept, partly in reaction to maintaining the leash-wizardry and the shield-spell, partly just because of physical tiredness from toiling up and down all those dunes. His calf muscles certainly ached badly enough. But just as wearying, in their own way, were the events he’d seen taking place.
And also tiring, in a different way, was the amount of time he’d had to spend comforting Ponch afterward. The dog had seemed all right when they first got back, and had gone through the promised dog biscuits as if he hadn’t eaten anything for days. But as the afternoon passed, Ponch started to look unhappy. And just after dinner, when Kit was helping his mama clear the table, they were both startled by a sound coming from outside. Ponch was howling.
Kit’s mama gave him a peculiar look. “What’s the matter with him?” she said. “Did the fire siren go off or something? I didn’t hear it.”
Kit shook his head. “I’ll go find out,” he said.
By the gate to the backyard, near the garage, Ponch was sitting in the grass of the yard, howling as if rehearsing for a part in The Call of the Wild. Kit opened the gate. “Ponch! What is it? You want to come in?”
No. Ponch kept on howling.
Kit was mystified. He went to sit down by his dog, who ignored him and howled on. “What’s the matter?” Kit said in the Speech, after a few moments more.
Ponch finished that howl and sat looking at the ground for a moment. How could It do that to him? Ponch said then. He couldn’t even do anything! And he was good.
Kit blinked at that. “It’s the Lone Power,” he said. “Unfortunately, It likes to hurt people … and likes to see them hurting. Which is why we keep running into It, since it’s our job to stop It from doing that whenever we can.”
It’s not fair, Ponch said. And he put his head up and howled again.
Down the street, Kit could hear one of the neighbors’ dogs start howling, too, in a little falsetto voice that would have made him laugh if he wasn’t rather concerned about Ponch. Soon every dog in the street was howling, and shortly there were some human shouts to go along with the noise: cries of “Shut up!” “Would you please shut your dog up?” and “Oh yeah, well, you shut yours up!”
Kit had no idea what to make of it all, and couldn’t think of anything to do but sit with Ponch. Eventually the dog stopped howling, and one after another, slowly, the other dogs in the neighborhood got quiet. Ponch got up, shook himself, and walked out the still-open gate into the driveway. He made his way to the back door, waited for Kit to open it, and then went in and trotted up the stairs to Kit’s bedroom.
Kit’s mother had looked at him curiously as he came back in and closed the door. “What was that about?”
“Ponch was upset about what we were doing this morning,” Kit had said. “I’d try to explain it to you, but I’m not sure I understand it myself.”
Now, the next morning, as he went looking for his cereal bowl, he wasn’t any closer to an answer. Ponch had been asleep when Kit had gotten up to his room, and he was sleeping still. I’ll talk to him about it later, he thought, opening the cupboard over the counter.
There were no cornflakes. There was one box of his pop’s shredded wheat, which Kit detested—whenever circumstances forced him to eat it, it always made him think he was eating a scrubbing pad. The only other box contained one of the cereals his sister liked, some kind of frosted, fruit-flavored, multicolored, marshmallow-infested, hyperpuffed, vitamin-reinforced starch construct, which was utterly inedible due to its being ninety-eight percent sugar—even though the word appeared on the box only once, in letters small enough for anyone without a magnifying glass to miss. “Mama,” Kit said, aggrieved, “we’re out of cereal!”
“Your kind, anyway. I know,” his mother said, coming into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, with the TV remote in her hand. “Take it up with your pop: he had a fit of wanting cornflakes late last night, and he finished the box. He said he’d get some more on his way home from work. Have some toast.”
“It’s not the same,” Kit muttered, but all the same he closed the cupboard and went to get the bread out of
the fridge.
“Is Ponch all right now?” his mother said as she poured more coffee and reached past Kit into the fridge for the milk.
“I think so. Still sleeping, anyway.”
His mama shook her head, and then smiled slightly. “All that noise last night… it reminded me. Is it just me, or has down-the-street’s dog been louder than usual the past week or so?”
“You mean Tinkerbell?” That was not the dog’s real name in the dogs’ own language, Cyene, and possibly reason enough for the down-the-street dog’s incessant barking. “I dunno, Mama. I’m so used to hearing him bark all the time, I don’t notice anymore.”
“Do you think you could talk to him, sweetie? You know.” She wiggled her fingers in what she imagined was a vaguely wizardly gesture.
Kit raised his eyebrows while he put the bread in the toaster. “I can try. But, Mama, just because I talk to him doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to listen. The dog’s a head case. He thinks I’m a crook. But then he thinks everybody who doesn’t live in his house is a crook.”
“Dogs get like their owners, they say…”
“Huh?”
“Nothing, sweetie,” his mother said, looking suddenly guilty.
Kit kept the smile off his face while he waited for the toast to come up. It was going to be fun to be middle-aged, someday, and be told the things his mother was really thinking, with no more need for the kid-filter that parents routinely seemed to self-install.
“What about the youngster whose head you were going to get into?” his mother said. “Were you able to talk to him?”
Kit shook his head. “He was real busy,” Kit said. “Ponch and I are going to have to try again when things are quieter.” If they get any quieter, he thought. And what if they don’t?
Then something else occurred to him. “Mom, you have any more trouble with the TV?”
“What?” She looked at Kit as if she couldn’t understand what he was talking about, and then blinked. “Oh. No, it’s been all right.”
“Good,” Kit said, and started buttering the toast.
“Except now that you mention it…”
Kit braced himself.
“Your dad told me you weren’t joking. About the cooking shows…”
Kit sat down with his toast and tried desperately not to look as if he was about to have a panic attack. “Yeah.”
His mother sat down across from Kit, looking thoughtfully at her coffee cup. “Honey, none of these people have ever tried to eat you, have they?”
“Aliens? No.” That, at least, was the truth. “They might have thought about it, though. But so far it’s not a crime to think about it. At least, not most places.”
His mother’s expression relaxed a little. “No, I guess I can see where it might not be. I just worry about you, that’s all.”
Kit finished one piece of toast. “Mama, it’s kind of like crossing the street. You know you have to watch out for traffic. So you look both ways before you cross. In some parts of the universe, you know that the locals think of you as a potential snack food, and you’re just careful when you visit them not to act like a snack. But mostly”—and Kit grinned—“wizards are nobody’s snack. Dealing with those species mostly isn’t any more dangerous than crossing the street. Also, some of them owe us.”
His mama looked surprised. “What, humans?”
“No, wizards.” Kit took a bite of the next piece of toast. “One of those species, the—” He paused; he wasn’t used to saying their name except in the Speech, since their own word for themselves was hard to say. “Let’s call them the Spinies, because they’ve got a lot of spines. They had a problem a while back: their sun was going to go nova. One of us went in there and kept that from happening. It’s not like they don’t have their own wizards—they do. But a wizard from another species was passing through, caught the problem before any of them did, and fixed it.” He shook his head. The story ranked as a hero-tale even among wizards, who, because of their line of work, were more or less used to saving the world, or worlds. “It was real time-critical stuff. The one who saved them came from one of the species that they normally would have thought of as food: humanoid, like us. The wizardry was a big one, complex—messing with the carbon cycle inside a star isn’t for beginners. Doing the wizardry killed her. And the word got out. Now all the Spinies have something else to think about. ‘Be nice to your food; it might save your life.’”
Kit worked on the second piece of toast while his mother thought about that.
“She was how old?” his mother said suddenly.
Kit had been hoping this wouldn’t come up. “If you did it in human years,” he said, “she’d have been about my age.”
His mother’s gaze rested on him as if a suspicion had been confirmed. “Does this kind of thing happen often?” she said.
It was so tempting to lie… but no temptation was more fatal for a wizard. “Every day, Mama,” Kit said. “There aren’t enough of us to do the job. Probably there never will be. Lots of us die of old age, in our beds.” He sighed. “But not all.”
His mother looked at him, and her expression changed. It became less confused, but the look that replaced it troubled Kit more, for reasons he couldn’t understand. “I don’t know why this surprises me,” she says. “I’m a nurse, after all. It looks like we’re both in a service profession. I just keep thinking you should have been offered a choice when you were old enough to understand what you were choosing.”
“I was,” Kit said. He pushed the plate away. “You told me you decided to be a nurse when you were eight.”
His mama’s expression turned first shocked, then annoyed: the look of someone who doesn’t expect to have her own revelations turned against her. “Yes, but—”
“You’re gonna say that you didn’t know everything that’d be involved in being a nurse, when you were eight,” Kit said. “And right then being a nurse mostly looked to you like a pink plastic kit with a toy stethoscope and a toy thermometer in it. But you decided, anyway, because you wanted to help people. So when you were old enough you went to nursing school, and look, now you’re a nurse. And it’s not so bad. Right?”
His mother looked at him.
“That’s what it’s like to be a wizard,” Kit said. “I promise, I’ll keep letting you know what it looks like as I get older. But when I ‘signed up,’ I knew this was what I wanted to do. I knew right away. Sure, it gets more complicated as you go on. But doesn’t everything?”
His mama gave him a long look. Then she smiled again, very slowly, and just half a smile: the kind of expression she gave his pop when she was admitting he’d been right about something, but didn’t want to admit it out loud. “You should finish up your last piece of toast,” she said. “And don’t forget to rinse the plate.”
She went to get dressed. Kit smiled nearly the same slow half smile, pulled the plate back, finished his toast, and then left for school.
***
At lunchtime, after he’d finished eating, Kit headed out to the front of the school for a breath of fresh air, and was irrationally pleased to see Nita out there waiting for him, in the parking lot, not too far from the doors.
He walked over to her, and together they strolled off some distance through the parking lot, away from the crowd of kids who always seemed to be standing around the main doors, watching who came in and went out, and who seemed to be doing what with whom. It was a game that Kit found both boring and dumb, but a lot of his classmates seemed to spend most of their time at it, so Kit enjoyed frustrating it as much as he could.
“How’re you doing?” he said.
Nita frowned. “Okay,” she said, “but something weird’s going on.”
Kit couldn’t recall Nita having said that she felt “okay” for weeks now, and the sound of it encouraged him, but at the same time he didn’t dare get too excited about it. “Like what?”
They paused by the chain-link fence that defined the school’s boundary on the north side
of the parking lot. On the other side of the fence was a cypress hedge too thick to see through, thick enough that it put hopeful green fronds through the fence; Nita idly took hold of one of these and ran it through her fingers while she told Kit about the strange robot-dream she’d had. “Everything’s supposed to understand the Speech,” she said at last, when she’d given him all the details. “At least in theory…”
“I don’t think it’s theory,” Kit said. “Everything that was made, was made using the Speech. Not being understood when you speak it is about as likely as matter not understanding gravity. Or light not understanding light speed.”
Nita shook her head and looked out into the day as if seeing something at a great distance. “I know,” she said. “But knowing the Speech also usually helps you understand what’s being said… and it’s sure not doing the job for me at the moment.”
“Really weird,” Kit said. “You have any idea what’s going on?”
Nita heaved a long sigh and bounced her shoulders idly against the fence a couple of times. “I think that dream at least, and maybe another one I had a few days ago, were alien intelligences trying to get hold of Dairine.”
Kit had to blink. “That happen to her a lot?”
Nita nodded. “On and off,” she said. “It’s mostly to do with her relationship with the mechanical sort of wizards—the computer intelligences and so on. She keeps getting feelers from life-forms that are half machine and half organic, and from a lot of the silicon-based types… some that I can’t make anything of. She told me she’s been doing a lot of work mediating between organic and inorganic lifestyles, and it’s specialized stuff. It even gives her trouble sometimes, translating between the ways they see life and the way we see it.” Nita sighed. “So it’s no surprise that I don’t understand contacts from these guys right off the bat—I mean, as a species, in terms of their feelings and motivations and so on. But I should at least be able to understand them when they communicate about very basic things. And until now, I’ve always been able to. This last one, though…”