So You Want to Be a Wizard

by Diane Duane

  "You'll be all right," Carl said, scuffing away the chalk marks on the floor. "Though as I said, that pen is still in there with the rest of your mass, at the other end of your claudication, and you'll need Grand Central to get it out."

  (Have you stopped my emissions entirely?) Fred said.

  "No, of course not. I couldn't do that: you'll still emit from time to time. Mostly what you're used to, though. Radiation and such."

  "Grand Central!" Kit was looking worried. "I don't think my mother and father are going to want me in the city alone. I could sneak in, I guess, but they'd want to know where I'd been all that while."

  "Well," Tom said, looking thoughtful, "you've got school. You couldn't go before the weekend anyway, right? Carl could sell you a piece of Saturday or Sunday—"

  Kit and Nita looked at each other, and then at the two men. "Uh, we don't have much money."

  "Who said anything about money?" Carl said. "Wizards don't pay each other cash. They pay off in service—and sometimes the services aren't done for years. But first let's see if there's any time available this weekend. Saturdays go fast, even though they're expensive; especially Saturday mornings."

  He picked up another book and began going through it. Like all the other books, it was printed in the same type as Nita's and Kit's manuals, though the print was much smaller and arranged differently. "This way," Tom said, "if you buy some time, you could be in the city all day, all week if you wanted—but once you activate the piece of time you're holding, you're back then. You have to pick a place to anchor the time to, of course, a twenty-foot radius. But after you've finished whatever you have to do, you bring your marked time to life, and there you are. Maybe five minutes before you started for the city, back at home. Or anywhere and any when else along the path you'll follow that day."

  "Huh," Carl said suddenly. "Callahan, J., and Rodriguez, C., is that you two?" They nodded. "You have a credit already," Carl said, sounding a little surprised. "What have you two been doing to rate that?"

  "Must have been for bringing Fred through," Tom said. "I didn't know that Upper Management had started giving out door prizes, though."

  From her perch on Tom's shoulder, Picchu snorted. "Oh? What's that mean?" Tom said. "Come on, bird, be useful. Is there something you know that these kids ought to?"

  "I want a raise," Picchu said, sounding sullen.

  "You just had one. Talk!"

  "'Brush your teeth twice a day, and see your dentist regularly,'" the macaw; began, in a commercial announcer's voice. Tom made a fist and stared at her. "All right, all right," Picchu muttered. She looked over at Kit and Nita, and though her voice when she spoke had the usual good-natured annoyance about it, her eyes didn't look angry or even teasing—they looked anxious. Nita got a sudden chill down her back. "Don't be afraid to make corrections," Picchu said. "Don't be afraid to lend a hand." She fell silent, seeming to think for a moment. "And don't look down."

  Tom stared at the macaw. "Can't you be a little more specific?"

  "Human lives," Picchu said irritably, "aren't much like the Dow-Jones average. No, I can't."

  Tom sighed. "Sorry. Kids, if she says it, she has a reason for saying it—so remember."

  "Here you go," Carl said. "Your piece of time is from 10:45 to 10:47 on this next Saturday morning. There aren't any weekend openings after that until sometime in July"

  "We'll take this one," Kit said. "At least I can—Nita, will your folks let you go?"

  She nodded. "I have some allowance saved up, and I'd been thinking about going into the city to get my dad a birthday present anyhow. I doubt there'll be any trouble."

  Kit looked uncomfortable for a moment. "But there's something I'm not sure about. My spell—our spell brought Fred here. How are we going to get him back where he belongs?"

  (Am I a problem?) Fred said, sounding concerned.

  "Oh, no, no—it's just that, Fred, this isn't your home, and it seemed as if sooner or later you might want to go back where you came from."

  "As far as that goes," Tom said, "if it's your spell that brought him here, you'll be able to send him back. The instructions are in your book, same as the instructions for opening the Grand Central worldgate."

  "Stick to those instructions," Carl said. "Don't be tempted to improvise. That claudication is the oldest one in New York, and it's the trickiest because of all the people using it all the time. One false syllable in a spell and you may wind up in Schenectady."

  (Is that another world?) Fred asked.

  . "Nearly." Carl laughed. "Is there anything else we can do for you?"

  Nita and Kit shook their heads and got up to leave, thanking Tom and Carl and Picchu. "Let us know how things turn out," Tom said. "Not that we have any doubts—two wizards who can produce a white hole on the first try are obviously doing all right. But give us a call. We're in the book."

  The two men saw Nita and Kit as far as the patio door, said their good-byes, and went back into the house. Nita started off across the lawn the way she had come, but Kit paused for a moment by the fishpond, staring down into it. He pulled a penny out of his pocket, dropped it in.

  Nita saw the ripples spread—and then suddenly another set of ripples wavered away from the head of a very large goldfish, which spat the penny back at Kit and eyed him with distaste. "Do I throw money on your living-room floor?" it said, and then dived out of sight.

  Kit picked up his penny and went after Nita and Fred as they pushed through the poplar hedge again. The blue Mercedes, which had been half in the street and half on the sidewalk, was now neatly parked by the curb. In front of it sat Annie, with her tongue hanging out and a satisfied look on her face. There were teeth marks deep in the car's front fender. Annie grinned at them as Nita and Kit passed, and then trotted off down the street, probably to "find" something else.

  "If my dog starts doing things like that," Kit muttered, "I don't know how I'm going to explain it to my mother."

  Nita looked down the street for signs of Joanne. "If we can just get home without being killed, I wouldn't care what the dog found. Uh-oh—" A good ways down the street, four or five girls were heading toward them, and Nita saw Joanne's blond hair. "Kit, we'd better split up. No reason for them to come after you too."

  "Right. Give me a call tonight. I'm in the book..." He took off down a side street.

  She looked around, considering the best direction to run in—and then thought of the book she was carrying. There wasn't much time, though. She forced herself to calm down even while she knew they were coming for her, made herself turn the pages slowly to the place Kit had shown her that morning, the spell that made blows slide off. She read through it slowly in the Speech, sounding out the syllables, taking the time to look up the pronunciation of the ones she wasn't sure of, even though they were getting close and she could hear Joanne's laugh.

  Nita sat down on the curb to wait for them. They let her have it when they found her, as they had been intending to all day; and she rolled around on the ground and fell back from their punches and made what she hoped were horrible groaning noises. After a while Joanne and her four friends turned away to leave, satisfied that they had taught her a lesson. And Nita stood up and brushed herself off, uncut, unbruised, just a little dirty. "Joanne," she called after them. In what looked like amazement, Joanne turned around.

  Nita laughed at her. "It won't work anymore," she said.

  Joanne stood dumb.

  "Never again," she said. She felt like turning her back on them, but instead she walked toward them, watching the confusion in their eyes. On a sudden urge, she jumped up in the air and waved her arms crazily. "BOO!" she shouted.

  They broke and ran, all of them. Joanne was the first, and then the rest followed her in a ragged tail down Rose Avenue. Not a word, not a taunt. They just ran.

  Nita stopped short. The feeling of triumph that had been growing in her withered almost instantly. Some victory, she thought. It took so little, so little to scare them. Maybe I could hav
e done that at any time, without a shield. Maybe. And now I'll never know for sure.

  (Are you all right?) Fred said quietly, bobbing again by her shoulder. (They didn't hurt you this time.)

  (No,) Nita said slowly; She was thinking of all the glorious plans she'd had to use her newfound wizardry on Joanne and her bunch, to shame them, confuse them, hurt them. And look what so small and inoffensive thing as a body shield had done to them. They would hate her worse than ever now.

  I've got to be careful with this, she thought. I thought it was going to be all fun.

  (Come on, Fred,) she said, (let's go home.)

  Temporospatial Claudications:

  USE AND ABUSE

  THE WEEK WENT BY quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to suspect that he'd been doing it so long that it actually seemed that way to him. It wasn't simple, as her book told her as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter, which was forty pages long in small print.

  Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements: specific supplies and objects that had to be present at an opening so that space would be properly bent, spells that had to be learned just so. The phone calls flew between Nita's house and Kit's for a couple of days, and there was a lot of visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also got to see a lot of Kit's mother and father and sisters, all of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita couldn't speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it in self-defense. Kit's dog told her the brand of dog biscuits it could never get enough of; she began bringing them with her when she visited. The dog spoke the Speech with a Spanish accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they discussed who should do what in the spelling. Kit wound up with most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies.

  Late Friday afternoon, Nita was in a little antiques-and-junk store on Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in search of a real silver fork. Fred was hanging over her shoulder, almost invisible, a faint red point lazily emitting heat. (You ever swallow anything accidentally before, Fred?) Nita said under her breath.

  (Not for a long time,) he said, glancing curiously at a pressed-glass saltshaker Nita was holding. (Not since I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes swallow everything, but a white hole's business is emission. Within limits,) he added, and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered. (I don't ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen went down. Some of those things hurt on the way out. And anyway, all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing and I could blow my quanta.)

  She looked up at him, worried. (Really? Have you emitted that much stuff that you're in danger of blowing up?)

  (Oh, not really—I'd have to lose a lot more mass first. ¡After all, before I was a black hole, I was a respectable-sized blue-white star, and even these days I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn't worry about it—I'm nowhere near the critical threshold yet.)

  ('Cute'?) Nita said.

  (Well, it is ... And I suppose there's no harm in getting better at emissions. I have been improving a lot. What's that?)

  Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with a battered old fork. It was scratched and its tines were bent out of shape, but it was definitely silver, not stainless steel. (That's what I needed,) she said. (Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood, and then tonight I go over my part of the spells again.)

  (You sound worried.)

  (Well, yeah, a little,) Nita said, getting up. All that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the more sense the bushes and trees made. (It's just—the rowan branch has to come off a live tree, Fred, and I can't just pick it—that'd be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers, off. I have to ask for it. And if the tree won't give it to me...)

  (Then you don't get your pen back, at least not for a while.) Fred shimmered with colors and a feeling like a sigh. (I am a trouble to you.)

  (Fred, no. Put your light out a moment so we can get out of here.) Nita interrupted the shopkeeper's intense concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred was pacing her again. (If you're trouble, you're the best trouble that's happened around here for a while. You're good to talk to, you're good company—when you don't forget and start emitting cosmic rays...)

  Fred blazed momentarily, blushing at Nita's teasing. In an excited moment the night before he had forgotten himself and emitted a brief blast of ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up Nita's backyard a good deal, ionized the air for miles around, and produced a local but brilliant aurora. (Well, it's an old habit, and old habits die hard. I'm working on it.)

  (Heat we don't mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the longwave kind that doesn't hurt people's eyes.)

  (You fluoresce when I use that, though...)

  Nita laughed. (I don't mind fluorescing. Though on second thought, don't do that where anyone but Kit can see. I doubt my mother'd understand.)

  They walked home together, chatting alternately about life in the suburbs and life in a part of deep space close to the Great Galactic Rift. Nita felt more relaxed than she had for months. Joanne had been out of sight since Monday afternoon at Tom and Carl's. Even if she hadn't, Nita had been practicing with that body shield, so that now she could run through the syllables of the spell in a matter of seconds and nothing short of a bomb dropped on her could hurt her. She could even extend the spell to cover someone else, though it wasn't quite so effective; she had a harder time convincing the air to harden up. But even that lessened protection would come in handy if she and Kit should be in trouble together at some point and there was no time to cooperate in a spelling. Not that she was expecting any more trouble. The excitement of a trip into the city was already catching at her. And this wasn't just another shopping trip. Magic was loose in the world, and she was going to help work some....

  She ate supper and did her homework almost without thinking about either, and as a result had to do much of the math homework twice. By the time she was finished, the sun was down and the backyard was filling with a cool blue twilight. In the front of the house, her mother and father and Dairine were watching TV as Nita walked out the side door and stood on the step, letting her eyes get used to the dimness and looking east at the rising Moon. Canned laughter echoed inside the house as Fred appeared by her shoulder.

  (My, that's bright for something that doesn't emit heat,) Fred said, looking at the Moon too.

  (Reflected sunlight,) Nita said absently.

  (You're going to talk to the tree now?)

  (Uh-huh.)

  (Then I'll go stay with the others and watch that funny box emit. Maybe I'll figure out what it's trying to get across.)

  (Good luck,) Nita said as Fred winked out. She walked around into the backyard.

  Spring stars were coming out as she stood in the middle of the lawn and looked down the length of the yard at the rowan, a great round-crowned tree snowy with white flowers. Nita's stomach tightened slightly with nervousness. It had been a long time ago, according to her manual, that the trees had gone to war on humankind's behalf, against the dark powers that wanted to keep human intelligence from happening at all. The war had been a terrible one, lasting thousands of centuries—the trees and other plants taking more and more land, turning barren stone to soil that would support them and the animals and men to follow; the dark powers breaking the soil with earthquake and mountain building, scouring it with glaciers, climate-changing good ground for desert, and burning away forests in firestorms far more terrible than the small brushfires any forest needs to stay healthy. But the trees and the other plants had won at last.

  They
had spent many more centuries readying the world for men—but when men came, they forgot the old debts and wasted the forests more terribly than even the old dark powers. Trees had no particular reason to be friendly to people these days. Nita found herself thinking of that first tree that had spoken to her, angry over the destruction of its friend's artwork. Even though the rowan tree had always been well tended, she wasn't certain how it was going to respond to her. With the other ash trees, rowans had been in the forefront of the Battle; and they had long memories.

  Nita sighed and sat down under the tree, book in hand, her back against its trunk. There was no need to start right away, anyhow—she needed a little while to recover from her homework. The stars looked at her through the rowan's wind-stirred branches, getting brighter by the minute. There was that one pair of stars that always looked like eyes, they were so close together. It was one of the three little pairs associated with the Big Dipper. The Leaps of the Gazelle, the ancient Arabs had called them, seeing them as three sets of hoofprints left in the sky. "Kafza'at al Thiba," Nita murmured, the old Arabic name. Her eyes wandered down toward the horizon, finding a faint reddish gleam. "Regulus." And a whiter gleam, higher: "Arcturus." And another, and another, old friends, with new names in the Speech, that she spoke silently, remembering Carl's warning: (Eltháthtë...ur'Senaahel...) The distant fires flickered among shadowy leaves. (Lahirien...)