High Wizardry

  Nita began to sweat. "The wizard who came through here earlier was on Ordeal," Kit said. "We'll need your help to find the spot from which she went farther on, so that we can track her: there are too many other world-gates here, and they're confusing the trail."

  "She didn't cause any trouble, did she?" Nita said.

  "Trouble?" said the Stationmaster, and led them off across the bright floor, and showed them the place where several large pieces of the ceiling had been shot down. "Trouble?" it said, pointing out the places where the floors were melted, indicating the blaster scars in the kiosks, and the large cordoned-off area where maintenance people of various species were scraping and scrub­bing coffee ground-smelling residue off the floor. "Oh, no trouble. Not re­ally."

  Picchu began to laugh, a wicked and appreciative sound.

  Nita blushed ferociously and didn't say anything for several minutes. The Rirhait led them off to another area of the floor which was closed in on itself by an arrangement of bluesteel kiosks. This was Crossings security; various desks stood about inside it, with creatures of several species working at them. The Master led them to one of the unoccupied desks, a low flat table full of incomprehensible equipment. "Here," it said, and reared up on its back ten legs to touch the machinery in several places.

  Small and clear, an image appeared above the table: remote, but equally clear, sound accompanied it. Nita and Kit found themselves looking at the Crossroads equivalent of a videotape, but in three dimensions, with neat alien characters burning in the lower corner of it to show the time and location at which the recording was made. They watched a group of toadlike BEMs make their way across the terminal floor, spot Dairine, head off in pursuit. They watched Dairine deal with the deinonychus, and afterward with the BEM that grabbed her. Nita gulped.

  "They look like Satrachi," Kit said, astonishingly cool-voiced.

  Nita's eyebrows went up. Alien species were her specialty: evidently Kit had been doing some extra research. "They are, as far as we can tell," said the Master. "The one of them whom we have in custody has valid Satra identifi­cation."

  "We'll need to see this person, then," Nita said. The tape ran: Nita watched Dairine's dive into the bar, and from another camera angle, her sister's reemergence into the terminal and dash into the rest room. Nita groaned, recognizing the room by the symbol on its door as a spawning room for any one of several species that gave birth to their young on the average of once every few days, and were likely to be caught short while traveling on business. Nita hoped that Dairine hadn't introduced one of the species in­volved to a completely new kind of birth trauma.

  "That was the spot she left from?"

  "Yes, Emissary." It was the first time Nita had ever been formally called by one of the twenty or so titles commonly used for wizards, but she was too busy now to enjoy it. She glanced at Kit. He was frowning at the image hanging in the air: finally his concentration broke and he glanced at her.

  "Well?" he said. "You want the Satrachi?"

  "I'd better," she said, though she very much wanted not to-the looks of the Satrachi gave her the creeps. But dealing with live things was her depart­ment: the handling of machinery and inanimate objects was Kit's. "You go ahead and check the room out. Stationmaster, can you have someone show me where it's being held?"

  "Step on that square there," said the Master, pointing one eye at a spot on the floor: "it's direct transit to Holding. Emissary, I'll show you to the room in question...."

  Nita stepped on the block quickly before she would have time to change her mind.

  Fifteen minutes with it told her all she needed to know: the Satra was a dupe, it and its friends-a small paramilitary club-deluded into pursuing Dairine by some agent of the Lone One. It's the usual thing, she thought as she headed back to Kit and the Stationmaster. The Power never comes out in the open if it can find some way to make someone else do Its dirty work. Preferably an innocent: that way it's more of a slap in the Bright Powers' face. Unusual, though, that it used a whole group this time. Normally it's hard to keep that subtle a grip on a whole group's mind: one of them slips free, or perceives it as control... and when that happens, odds are that the whole group is useless for Its purposes.

  She strolled among aliens and their luggage and finally came to the little Grand Central-size alcove where Dairine's rest room was. Its door was frozen in the dilated mode. Nita slipped in and found Kit and Picchu and the Master off to one side, examining one particular birthing-booth. It seemed to have had its door burned off, and the back of the booth was blistered and pocked with an ugly rash of blaster scars.

  For a good second or so her breath refused to come. "She jumped after that?" Nita finally managed to say.

  Kit looked over his shoulder at her. "Neets, relax, there are no blood­stains."

  "There wouldn't be, with blasters," Nita said. "They cauterize."

  "Any really big wound would spurt anyway," Kit said, straightening up and starting to page through his manual. "I think they missed her. The tiles don't remember her screaming, and not even Dairine's that stoic." He kept turning over pages.

  "How far did she go?"

  "A long jump," Kit said. "Multistage, from the feel of it. They must have freaked her out pretty good." He looked up. "That computer she's got leaves a definite sense of what it's been doing behind it. Can you feel it?"

  Nita let her eyes go unfocused for a moment and blanked her mind out, as she might do to hear the thinking of some particularly quiet tree. Some residue of Dairine's emotion still hung about the strings in the space-time configuration of the area, like tatters on a barbed-wire fence: fear and defi­ance, all tangled up together; and alongside her tatters, others, ordered and regular, a weave less vivid and complex in different ways. "It feels alive," Nita said to Kit after a while. "Do computers usually feel that way?"

  "I don't know," Kit said, sounding annoyed. "I never tried feeling one before this.... You got your widget?" he said. "We're gonna need it to catch up with her and her friends."

  "Yeah." She unslung her pack and started rummaging for the gimbal.

  "Well, I have things to do," said the Master. "If you need anything, ask one of the security people, they're all over." And without staying for farewells, it went flowing out the door in a hundred-legged scurry.

  Nita glanced after it, then back at Kit, and shrugged. "Here," she said, and tossed him the gimbal. "Which spell are you thinking of using?"

  "That dislocator on page eleven hundred sixty."

  She got out her own manual and found the page. "That's awful long-range, isn't it? Her next jump must have been shorter than that."

  "Yeah, but Neets, who wants to leapfrog one step behind the things that are chasing her! We want them, right now-we want them off her rear end, so she can do whatever it is she needs to do without interference." He looked grim. "And when we find 'em-"

  Nita sighed. "Forget it," she said, "they're dupes."

  Kit looked up at her while getting a grease pencil out of his pack. "It suckered them in?"

  She filled him in on what the Satrachi had told her as Kit got down on the tiles and began drawing their transit circle. Kit sighed a little. "I was hoping it was some of the Lone One's own people," he said, "so we could just trash 'em and not feel guilty."

  Nita had to smile a little at that. Picchu climbed down from the partition between the booths, where he had been sitting, and clambered onto Nita's shoulder. "Get mine right," she said to Kit. "I don't want to come out the other side of this transit with fur."

  Kit shot a look at Picchu, and didn't need to comment; Nita could imagine what he was thinking. "Come sit over here, then, if you're so worried," he said.

  To Nita's amusement Peach did just that, climbing backward down her arm and over onto Kit's back, where she peered over his shoulder. "Not bad," she said, looking at the diagram.

  Kit ignored this. "So make yourself useful. Is anything bad going to hap­pen to us?"

  "Of course it is," Picchu said.
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  "You might be more specific."

  "And I might not need to. The Power that invented death is going to be on your tails shortly. Our tails," she added, looking over her shoulder at the splendid three-foot sweep of scarlet feathers behind her. "Even you two should be able to see that coming."

  Kit changed position suddenly, and Picchu scrabbled for balance, flapping her wings and swearing. "Like you should have seen that?"

  Nita grinned a little, then let it go: her mind was back on the train of thought she had been playing with out in the terminal. "I was wondering about that, a while back," she said to Kit. "It invented death, when things were first started. But that wasn't enough for It. It had to get people to buy into death-not just the dying itself: the fear of it."

  Kit nodded. "But a lot of species have opted out, one way or another. I mean, we're scared to die. But we still suspect there are reasons not to be scared. A lot of people do. Its hold isn't complete anymore."

  "I know. Kit, do you think-Tom said something was about to 'tip over.' Some major change. Do you think what he meant was that the Lone One was about to lose completely somewhere?"

  "He always said," Kit said, "that what happens one place, spreads every­place else. Everything affects everything, sooner or later. The manual says so too. A few times."

  Nita nodded, thinking how unusual it was for the manual to repeat itself about anything. "And the pattern started shifting, a couple thousand years ago," Kit said. "The Lone Power had always won completely before. Then It started having wins taken away from It after the fact."

  Kit looked reflective. "If somewhere or other, It's about to lose-right from the start..."

  Nita looked at him sidewise. "Then It starts losing at home, too, in all the little daily battles. Eventually."

  Kit nodded. "Dairine," he said.

  Nita shook her head, still having trouble believing it-but having to admit the likelihood. Somehow, her sister had a chance of actually defeating the Lone Power. She must have a chance: It wouldn't be wasting energy on her otherwise. "Why her?" Nita said softly.

  "Why you?" said Picchu, cranky. "What makes either of you so special, that you can even come away from an encounter with That alive? Don't flatter yourself: It's eaten stars and seduced whole civilizations in Its time. You were simply exactly the right raw material for that particular situation to use to save Itself."

  "I didn't mean that, I guess," she said. "I meant, why now? The Lone Power has been pulling this kind of stunt on planets for as long as intelligence has been evolving. It comes in, It tries to get people to accept entropy willingly, and then It bugs off and leaves them to make themselves more miserable than even It could do if It worked at it. Fine. But now all of a sudden It can be beaten. How come?"

  Picchu began chewing on Kit's top button. "You know," she said, "that's part of the answer. Granted, It's immortal. But It doesn't have infinite power. It's peer to all the Powers, but not to That in Which they move. And even an immortal can get tired."

  Nita thought about that. Five billion years, maybe ten, of constant strife, of incomplete victories, of rage and frustration-and yes, loneliness: for the Lone One, she had discovered to her shock, was ambivalent about Its role- after all that, surely one might not be as strong as one had been at the start of things....

  Kit got the button out of Picchu's mouth, and was nipped for his trouble. "So, after all these near losses, It's tired enough to be beaten outright?"

  Picchu got cranky again. "Of course! It was that tired long ago. The Powers wouldn't need Dairine for just that. They could do it Themselves, or with the help of older wizards. But haven't you got it through your head? They can't want to just beat the Lone One. They must think there's a better option."

  Nita looked at Picchu, feeling half frightened. "They want It to surren­der," she said.

  "I think so," said Picchu. "I suspect They think she could get the Lone One to give in and come back to Its old allegiance. If It does that... the effect spreads. Slowly. But it spreads everywhere."

  Picchu climbed down off Kit's shoulder and pigeon-toed across the floor, heading for a receptacle with some water in it. Kit and Nita both sat silent. The possibility seemed a long way from coming true. A world in which the universe's falling into entropy slowly stopped, affecting people's relationships with one another, a world gradually losing the fear of death, a world losing hatred, losing terror, losing evil itself... it was ridiculous, impossible, too much to hope for. But still, Nita thought, if there was any chance at all...

  "...On the news last night," Kit said, "did you see that thing about the car in Northern Ireland?"

  "No."

  "They hijack cars over there sometimes, as a protest," he said. "One side or the other." There was something about his voice that made Nita look at him hard. "Sometimes they set the cars on fire after they hijack them." Kit sat looking in front of him at nothing in particular, looking tired. "You know the kind of wire screen you get for station wagons, so that your dog can be in the back and not get into everything?"

  "Yeah."

  "Someone hijacked a car with one of those in it, the other night. With the dog in it, in the back. Then they set the car on fire. With the dog in it."

  Nita went ashen. Kit just kept looking at nothing in particular, and she knew what he was thinking of: Ponch, in Kit's dad's station wagon, lying around in the back too contented and lazy even to try to get into the grocery bags all around him. And someone coming up to the car-"Neets," Kit said, after a while, "Bad enough that they kill children, and grown-ups, and don't even care. But the poor dogs too-if we really have a chance to stop that kind of thing, I'll do... whatever. I don't care. Anything."

  She looked at him. "Anything?"

  He was quiet for a long time. "Yeah."

  Eventually she nodded. "Me too."

  "I know," he said.

  She looked at him in surprise. "Well, look at what you did with the whales," he said.

  Nita's mouth was very dry. She tried to swallow. It didn't work.

  "I mean, you did that already. That's what it was about. The Power got redeemed, a little: we know that much. Or at least It got the option to change. You did it for that. You almost got yourself killed, and you knew that might happen, and you did it anyway. Oh, I know you did it for me, some." He said this as if it were unimportant. "I was in trouble, you got me out of it. But mostly you did it to have things in the world be safe, and work."

  She nodded, completely unable to speak.

  "It seems like the least I can do," he said, and went no further, as if Nita should know perfectly well what he meant.

  "Kit," she said.

  "Look, I mean, I don't know if I can be that brave, but-"

  "Kit, shut up."

  He shut, rather astonished.

  I'm always one step closer, sang memory at her from the Moon. "Look," she said, "I didn't do it for you 'some.' I did it for you 'pretty much.' "

  Kit looked at her with an expression that at first made Nita think Kit thought she was angry with him. But then it became plain that he was embarrassed too. "Well," he said, "okay. I-thought maybe you did. But I didn't want to say anything because I didn't know for sure. And I would have felt real stupid if I was wrong." He had been looking away. Now he looked at her. "So?"

  "So," and her voice stuck again, and she had to clear her throat to unstick it. "I like you, that's all. A lot. And if you start liking somebody that much, well, I still want to keep the team going. If you do. That's all."

  He didn't say anything. Nita stood there burning in a torment of embar­rassment and anger at herself.

  "Neets. Cut me some slack. You're my best friend."

  Her head snapped up. "...I thought it was Richie Sussman."

  Kit shrugged. "We just play pool a lot. But it's the truth." He looked at her. "Isn't it true for you?"

  "Yeah, but-"

  "So why does that have to change? Look, we've got junk to do. Let's shake on it. We'll be best friends forever.
And a team."

  He said it so casually. But then that was how Kit did things: the only thing that wasn't casual was the way he worked to do what he said he would. "What if something happens?" Nita said. "What if-"

  Kit finished one symbol inside the circle, shut the book, and stood up. "Look," he said, "something always happens. You still have to promise stuff anyway. If you have to work to make the promises true..." He shrugged, hefted the manual. "It's like a spell. You have to say the words every time you want the results. Neets, come on. Shake on it."

  They shook on it. Nita felt oddly light, as if her knapsack had been full of rocks and someone had come up behind her and dumped them out.

  "Okay," Kit said. "Peach, where-good Lord."

  Picchu was sitting in the water receptacle on the floor, flapping around and showering everything within range. "Do you mean I'm going to have to go halfway across the Galaxy with a soggy bird sitting on me?" Kit said. "No way. Neets, it's your turn to carry her."

  "You're getting a lot like Tom," said Picchu.

  "Thanks!"

  "That wasn't intended as a compliment."

  Peach shook her feathers, scattering water. "Stop your complaining," she said to Kit. "The Powers only know when I'm going to have another chance for a bath." She stepped out of the low basin and shook herself again all over.

  Nita wiped a drop out of her eye. "Come on," she said, and got Peach off the edge of the basin. "Kit, we set?"

  "Yup. You want to do a defense spell, do it now. Peach? Any bad feelings?"

  "All of them," Picchu said, "but nothing specific. Let's go."

  They all three got into the circle. Kit knotted it closed with the figure-eight wizard's knot, dropped the gimbal into the circle on the spot marked out for it, then picked up his manual and began to read. Nita silently recited her favorite shieldspell, the one that could stop anything from a thrown punch to an ICBM, and for safety's sake set it at ICBM level. Then she got her own manual open and caught up with Kit. The air began to sing the note ears sing in silence; the air pushed in harder and harder around them, Nita's ears popped, and the spell took hold and threw them off the planet-not before Nita saw a portly Me!thai gentleman peek in the door to see if it was safe to come in and have his child....