Nita went down the hall, down by the soft-drink machine, and Dairine followed her slowly.
“Is it gonna be all right?” Dairine said. Suddenly she didn’t sound like her usual competent self. Suddenly she sounded very young and scared, really wanting her older sister to tell her that things were going to work.
“Yeah,” Nita said. “One way or another.”
And there was nothing else to say and nothing else to do but wait for the morning.
18: Friday Morning
HOW NITA SLEPT THAT night she never knew; she assumed it must have been exhaustion. At six that morning, her dad, fully dressed and ready to leave, awakened her.
“Dad,” Nita said, and got out of bed.
He looked at her with a terrible stillness. She would almost have preferred him to cry or yell; but he was now reduced to simply waiting.
“Are you ready?” he said.
There was almost no way to answer him and still tell the truth. “I’m going to start work when they do,” Nita said. “It may take me as long as Mom spends in the OR, or even longer, so don’t panic if I’m not here when you get home.”
“All right,” her father said.
He reached out and put his arms around her. All Nita could do was bury her face in his shoulder and hang on, hang on hard, trying not to cry, much though she wanted to; she was sure it would frighten him if she lost her control now.
“Be careful, honey,” he said, still with that terrible control. “I don’t want to—” He stopped. Lose you both, she clearly heard him think.
“I’ll be careful,” Nita said. “Go on, Daddy. I’ll see you later.”
She let go of him and turned away, waiting for him to leave. He went out the back door; a moment later, Dairine came into her room.
“Did you hear from Kit?” she asked.
Nita nodded. Oh, please, don’t ask me any more.
Dairine didn’t say anything. “Look,” she said then, as outside, their dad started the car. “Come back,” Dairine said. “Just come back.”
Nita was astonished to see tears in her sister’s eyes. For a split second she wanted desperately to tell Dairine that she was afraid she might not come back; or that she might come back and not be a wizard anymore. Nita wasn’t sure which possibility was more awful. But she didn’t dare say anything. If Dairine got any real sense of what was going on inside Nita’s head, there was too much of a danger that she might interfere— and Tom and Carl had been emphatic about what would happen then.
Nita just nodded and hugged Dairine. “You ready to give the surgeons whatever energy they need?”
“All set.”
“Then go on,” she said. “Dad’s waiting. Keep an eye on him, Dari.” She swallowed. “Keep him from getting desperate. It’s going to matter.”
Dairine nodded and went downstairs.
Nita waited to hear the car drive away. Then she got herself ready, checking the charm bracelet one last time for the spells stored there. A couple of openings remained, and she spent a few minutes considering what she might add. Finally, thinking of that first meeting with Pont and the other wizards, she added the subroutine that let the wizard using it walk on water. If there was ever a day I needed to believe I could do that, she thought, it’s today.
Then she opened her manual to the pages involving access to the practice universes.
Let’s go, she said to the manual. The playroom first. Then the main event.
The page she was looking at shimmered, and then the print on it steadied down to a new configuration, a more complex one than she’d seen so far. It flickered, and then said: Secondary access to nonaschetic “universe” analog has been authorized. Caution: This “universe” is inhabited. Population: 1.
Nita pulled her transit-circle spell out of the back of her mind, dropped it to the floor, took one last deep breath, and stepped through.
***
At seven-fifteen that morning, Kit was sitting on the beat-up kitchen sofa, eating cornflakes out of an ancient beat-up Scooby-Doo bowl in a studied and careful way. It was partly to steady his stomach—cornflakes were comfort food for him, inherently reassuring on some strange level—and partly his standard preparation for a wizardry. All your power wouldn’t do you much good if your brains weren’t working because your blood sugar was down in your socks somewhere.
He finished the bowl he was working on, contemplated a second one, and decided against it. Kit took his mom’s favorite bowl to the sink and washed it out carefully, going over his preparations one last time in his head. He knew as much about the aschetic universes as the manual would tell him without approval from a Senior. He knew that Nita’s authority and agreement would be enough to get him inside her mother with her; and beyond that, he had every power-feeding technique he could think of ready to go in the back of his head.
“I want to come along,” Ponch said from behind him.
Kit sighed as he finished washing the spoon, and he put it in the rack, too. “I don’t think you can,” he said. “It’s going to be complicated enough as it is.”
“I want to be with you. And I want to see her.”
Kit sighed again. Ponch had caught some of his boss’s nervousness about what Nita had gotten herself into. “Look,” Kit said. “You can come over and see her off, okay? Then you have to go home and wait for me.”
Ponch wagged his tail. “And no coming after me once I’ve left you,” Kit said. “You have to stay here.”
Ponch drooped his head, depressed that Kit had anticipated what he’d been thinking.
Kit went to get his jacket from the hooks behind the door. He checked his jacket pocket for his manual, though he wasn’t sure how useful it would be inside Nita’s mom. Better to have it, though. As he was running through his checks one last time, his mom, wearing what his dad referred to as the “Tartan Bathrobe of Doom,” wandered into the kitchen, looked back at Kit and Ponch, and caught the dog’s sad expression. “He hasn’t been bad again, has he?” she said.
Ponch drooped his head some more and wagged his tail again, an abject look that fooled Kit not at all. “Not in any of the usual ways, Mama,” he said. “Look, I’m going to help Nita, and this is a serious one. I may not be back for a while.”
“Okay, brujito.”
He had to smile at that His mom had taken longer than his father to come to terms with Kit’s wizardry; his father had been surprisingly enthusiastic about it, once he got over the initial shock. “Hey, my son’s a brujo,” he’d started saying to Kit’s mother. “What’s the matter with that?” His pop wore his pride in a way that seemed to suggest that he thought he was somehow responsible for Kit’s talent. And who knows? Maybe he is, Kit thought. So far he didn’t have any data on which side of the family his wizardly tendencies descended from; he’d been much too busy lately to look into it.
At least the situation was presently working in his favor. “Come on,” Kit said to Ponch. As they went out into the backyard together, Kit glanced over in the general direction of Nita’s house and in thought said, Neets?
There was no answer.
Kit stood still, hoping against hope that she was just distracted for a moment.
Nita!
Nothing.
It was the matter of a second to throw a transit circle around himself and Ponch, and it took no more than another second to make sure it would be silent in operation. A moment later Kit and Ponch were standing in Nita’s bedroom.
It was empty. Kit stood there, listening to the sounds of an empty house, feeling for the presence of other human beings, and knowing immediately that Nita was already gone.
He felt just a flash of anger, replaced almost immediately by fear. She left early because she was afraid for me, he thought.
Yet another error in judgment. Now what? Kit thought, going cold with fear. Go over to see Tom and Carl, get permission to follow her—
Why? I can find her, Ponch said in Kit’s head.
Kit looked at Ponch in astonishment. How
?
The way I found the squirrels.
“But that was making a new universe,” Kit said. “Neets is in an old one, a universe that exists already!”
“We can make some of that one as if it’s new,” Ponch said, in a tone of voice suggesting that he was surprised this wasn’t obvious. “The part she’s in.”
Kit couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I know her scent,” Ponch said, impatient. “We can be where she’s gone. Let’s go!”
Kit was uncertain, but time was short. He reached into his claudication and rummaged around it to find the wizardly leash, then slipped it around Ponch’s neck and said, “Okay, big guy, give it your best shot.”
Ponch stepped forward, and together they vanished.
***
They walked for a long time in the dark, an experience Kit was glad no longer unsettled him. Every now and then would come a flicker of light, and he could just see, or sense, Ponch putting his head out into that light and sniffing, the way he might have put his head out a dog door, then pulling back again, turning away. Having trouble? Kit asked silently, the third or fourth time this happened.
No. The world just twists, is all. And something doesn’t want us to be where she is.
Kit swallowed on hearing that. But finally they came out into the light and stayed there, and Kit looked around him in surprise, even though his experience of alternate universes had been expanded a lot lately. It was a huge place, a flat space, and its emptiness made it seem to echo in the mind. The sourceless lighting and the shining floor with the assortment of weird chairs, beds, hammocks, frames, and tables in the middle of it made it all look a lot like a furniture showroom.
Ponch pulled Kit toward the furniture, still sniffing. There were some people there: aliens, which didn’t surprise Kit particularly—hominids were not at all in the majority in his home universe. As he approached, a few of them looked at him with slight surprise, and one of them pointed a greater than usual number of eyes at him. It was a Sulamid, Kit noticed, an alien native to the far side of his own galaxy, one of a people who—unusually—were almost all wizards, a fact that apparently had something to do with the way their brains were divided.
The looks they were giving him—furred people, one tall cadaverous hominid, a four-legged alien, another one that looked like five or six oversized blue ball bearings in company, and the Sulamid with its many stalky eyes—were speculative. “I’m on errantry,” Kit said, “and I greet you.”
Ponch barked. To Kit’s bemusement, every wizard present looked in what seemed to be surprise at Ponch. The Sulamid bent over in half and then straightened up again, its eyes and various of its tentacles tying themselves in graceful knots.
“I’m looking for another of my species,” Kit said. “My colleague thinks she was just here. Have you seen her?”
Various looks were exchanged. “You just missed them,” said the ball bearings. “They were here with more of us: Pralaya. They just left. They were on an intervention. Pralaya was going to assist them.”
The whole group of them were still looking at him. Kit started to feel uneasy, for he thought he knew what they were thinking: This other wizard is trying to interfere somehow. “Did she say anything about what she was going to be doing?” Kit said, somehow knowing that it was useless to do so. These other wizards were not going to help him; they were uncertain why he was here, uncertain whether he might somehow foul an intervention in progress.
“No,” said first the ball-bearing wizard and then the others.
“She has gone into the dark,” said the Sulamid, “all too accompanied. And her destination is an unknown.”
The other wizards threw the Sulamid an odd look and began, one after another, to vanish. Shortly the space was empty except for Kit and Ponch and the Sulamid, which was standing not far away, its tentacles wreathing gently, looking at Kit with a lot of its eyes.
“How do you know?” Kit said after a moment.
“Vision is useless without comprehension,” said the Sulamid. “Comprehension is bootless without compassion.”
“Uh, yeah,” Kit said.
The Sulamid bowed once again, if a bow was what it was. It was not directed at Kit but at Ponch. “Pathfinder, seer for the seer in the dark,” said the Sulamid, “tracker in the night-places: wait.”
And it vanished, too.
Kit could only stand there and look around him at the light and the empty furniture. “Well, thanks loads, guys,” he said. Why were they all so freaked out? What’s the matter with them?
But he and Ponch were not quite alone; not everyone who’d been there originally had left. Behind Kit someone coughed, or maybe it was more like a snort. He and Ponch both turned.
Behind them, looking at them thoughtfully, was what Kit had initially mistaken for a four-footed alien of some kind. But it was actually a pig.
Kit looked at it in astonishment. Ponch instantly barked once, excitedly, and started to run toward the pig, possibly thinking that it could be chased like a squirrel. Kit hurriedly grabbed Ponch by the collar and made him sit down. And to the Pig he said, “What’s the meaning of life?”
“You know, a friend of yours was asking me the same thing the other day,” said the Transcendent Pig, ambling over, sitting down, and looking Ponch over in an amiable way. “Is asking,” it added.
The statement was slightly confusing, even taking into account the multidirectional time tenses in the Speech. At least Kit knew that he wasn’t the only one confused by the Pig. Every other wizard was, too, and even the Powers That Be weren’t sure where the Pig had come from, and tended to describe it as a concrete expression of the universe’s innate sense of humor, a sort of positive chaos.
“Is she?” was all Kit could think to say.
“Yes. And you know,” said the Pig, “it’s all just a big plot, isn’t it? You’re all just hoping that I might actually slip and answer the question, and tell one of you.”
Kit blinked at that. “Uh, well—”
“Or else it’s a practical joke planted by Someone high up,” the Pig muttered, settling down with its trotters under it, a position that made it look peculiarly like a cat. “Wouldn’t put it past Them. Or Their boss.”
Kit gave the Pig a look. “Oh, come on! The Powers…” His voice trailed off as the Pig gave him the same look right back. “I mean, the One… wouldn’t play jokes—”
“Wouldn’t It?” said the Transcendent Pig. “Been out in the real world lately?”
“Uh…”
“Right. Life being all the other things it is, if it’s not funny sometimes, what’s it worth? But you changed the subject.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” the Pig said. “I’ll allow you that one. You were saying?”
Kit took a long breath. Beside him Ponch lay down but never took his eyes off the Pig. “You’re really well traveled,” Kit said.
“Omnipresence will do that for you,” said the Pig, and it yawned.
“You said you’d seen Nita—” Kit wondered why such simple terms as my friend and my partner kept sticking in his throat. What’s the matter with me?
Because one might not be true anymore. And— He absolutely refused to deal with the thought that the other might not be, either.
“Yes. I’m with her now, in fact.”
“You are?”
The Pig gave Kit a wry look. “It wouldn’t be a terribly useful kind of transcendence if I wasn’t.Being everywhere at once is part of the job description.”
“Where is she? What’s she doing?” Kit said after a moment.
The Pig gave him another of those long dry looks. “Oh, come on, now. You know the drill, or you should. You tell me three truths that I don’t know, and I tell you one.”
Kit raised his eyebrows. “That doesn’t sound real fair.”
“If you knew how much trouble a human being can get into with just one truth,” the Pig said, “you wouldn’t be asking for more.??
?
“Got a point there,” Kit said. In a flash the thought went through his head that it was possible he didn’t need to venture his time or his power on this gamble. Yet somehow he felt that the time spent would be worth his while. “So let’s get going.”
“An admirable attitude,” said the Transcendent Pig. “First truth.”
“I’m looking for the wizard who’s meant to be my partner,” Kit said.
“The first part I know perfectly well. The second part is conditional. ‘Meant’? What exactly would it be that’s doing the meaning?”
“I think the day we find that out for sure,” Kit said, only half joking, “it might all be over.”
The Pig raised its eyebrows. “I’m tempted to give you that one,” it said. “From a member of Homo sapiens, the secondary insight is relatively unusual these days.” It acquired a considering look. “But a half-truth is a half-truth. Give me a whole one this time.”
Kit thought for a little while more, wondering what he would add on at the end of all this to make an extra half-truth. Worry about it shortly. He said, “My dog makes alternate universes, ones that no one’s ever seen before. They’re new.”
The Pig blinked. “That is news. Continuous creation?”
“You’ve got me.”
“Yes, but let’s leave that issue out of it for the moment.”
Kit blinked, too. “I thought continuous creation had been discredited, though.”
The Pig smiled. “The moment any scientist says anything’s impossible, you should start wondering. Science, like life, finds ways. But, anyway, you own a brain, and you still think continuous creation’s been discredited? So where did your last bright idea come from?”
“Um,” Kit said.
“Right,” said the Pig. “Next truth.”
Kit took a long deep breath. “I think,” he said, with the utmost reluctance, “that my partnership with Nita is about to get totally screwed up if I don’t do something, and I’m not sure what to do. I have to find her, I know that. It’s vital. But after that—”