The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  "You mean this is a computer"} Is this what you're replacing the old downstairs one with?" Nita said, sitting down on the bed. "It looks really cool. One of your custom jobs?"

  "Nope, it's their new one," Dairine said. "Almost. I mean, the newest one in the stores looks like this. But those don't do what this one does."

  Nita sighed. "Internet access?"

  Dairine threwNitzzyou-must-be-joking, of-coarse-it-has-that look. Wizards had had a web that spanned worlds for centuries before one small planet's machine-based version of networking had started calling itself World Wide. But that didn't mean they had to be snobbish about it; and local technology, and ideas based on it, routinely got adapted into the business of wizardry as quickly as was feasible. "All the usual Net stuff, sure," Dairine said, "but there's other business... the new version of the online manual, mostly. I'm in the beta group." She glanced over fondly at her portable, which was sitting on the desk chair, scratching itself with some of its legs. "They voted me in."

  Nita raised her eyebrows and leaned back. "Coming from the machine intelligences, that sounds like a compliment. Just make sure you don't mess up Dad's accounting software when you port it over." She cocked an eye at the portable, which was still scratching. "Spot here have some kind of problem?"

  "If you're smart, you won't suggest he's got bugs!"

  "No, of course not..."

  Dairine leaned against the desk. "His shell's itching him from the last molt. But he's also been getting more like an organic life-form lately. I don't know whether it's a good thing or not, but there's nothing wrong with his processing functions, or his implementation of the manual, and he seems okay when we talk." Dairine looked at the laptop thoughtfully. "I thought Kit was going to be with you. He said he wanted to see the new machine when it came in."

  "Huh?"

  Nita's heart sank a little at the look Dairine was giving her. But her sister just picked the laptop up off the chair and put it on the desk. The laptop reared itself up on some of its legs and went up the side of the new computer's case like a spider, clambering onto the top and crouching there. Somehow it managed to look satisfied, a good trick for something that didn't have a face. Dairine sat on the end of the bed. "Something going on?"

  Nita didn't answer immediately.

  "Uh-huh," her sister said. "Neets, it's no use. Mom and Dad you might be able to hide it from for a while, but where I'm concerned, you might as well have it tattooed on your forehead. What's the problem?"

  Nita stared at the bedspread, what she could see of it. "I had a fight with Kit. I can't believe him. He's gotten so—I don't know—he doesn't listen, and he—"

  "Neets," Dairine said. "Level with me. By any chance... are you on the rag?" Nita's jaw dropped. Dairine fell over laughing. Nita gave Dairine an annoyed look until she quieted down. At last, when Dairine was wiping her eyes, she muttered, "I don't have that problem. Anyway, it's the wrong time."

  "Well, you do a real good imitation of it," Dairine said. "If that's not it, what is the problem?"

  Nita crossed her legs, frowning at the floor. "I don't know," she said. "Since I got back, it's like...like Kit doesn't trust me anymore. In the old days—"

  "When dinosaurs walked the earth."

  "Nobody likes a smart-ass, Dairine. Before I went away, if I'd given him the spell I gave him today, after all that work, he'd have said, fine, let's do it! Now, all of a sudden, everything's too much trouble. He doesn't even want to try."

  "Maybe he doesn't want to blow energy on something that looks like it's going to fail," Dairine said.

  "Boy, and I thought he was the winner of the tactlessness sweepstakes right now," Nita said. "You should call him up and offer to coach him."

  "He'll have to make an appointment," Dairine said, pushing the pillows into a configuration she could lean on. "I've been busy." But her face clouded as she said it.

  Aha, Nita thought. "I was going to ask you about that—"

  The open window let in the sound of a car pulling into the driveway below. Dairine looked out the window. Below, a car door opened and shut, though the car's engine didn't turn off. "There's Mom," Dairine said.

  Nita sighed and got up.

  "But one thing," Dairine said. "Was Kit clear that the guy you were seeing over there—" "I wasn't seeing him!"

  "Yeah, right. Ronan. You sure Kit isn't confused about that?" Nita stared. "Of course he isn't."

  "You sure you're not confused about it?" For that, Nita had no instant answer. "Nita?" her mother called up the stairs.

  "Later," Nita said to Dairine. "And don't think you're getting off easy. I want a few words with you about 'busy.'"

  Dairine made a noncommittal face and got up to do something to the new computer as Nita went out.

  In the darkness, Kit stood very still. He had never seen or experienced a blackness so profound; and with it came a bizarre, anechoic silence in which not even his ears rang.

  "Ponch?" he said.

  Or tried to say. No sound came out. Kit tried to speak again, tried to shout...and heard nothing, felt nothing. It was the kind of effect you might expect from being in a vacuum. But he knew that feeling, having been there once or twice. This was different, and creepier by far.

  Well, hang on, Kit thought. Don't panic. Nothing bad has happened yet.

  But that doesn't mean that it's not going to. Come to think of it, am I even breathing? Kit couldn't feel the rise of his chest, couldn't feel or hear a pulse. What happens if there's nothing to breathe here? What happens if I suffocate?

  True, he didn't feel short of breath. Yet, said the back of his mind. Kit tried to swallow, and couldn't feel it happening. Slowly, old fears were creeping up his spine, making his neck hairs stand on end in their wake. It was a long time since Kit had gotten over being afraid of the dark... but no dark he'd had to cope with as a little kid had ever been as dark as this. And those darknesses had been scary because of the possibility that there was something hiding in them. This one was frightening, and getting more so by the minute, because of the sheer certainty that there was nothing in it. I've had enough of this. Which way is out?!

  ... But no! Kit thought then. I'm not leaving without my dog. I'm not leaving Ponch here and running away!

  But how do you run away when you can't move? And how do you find something when you can't go after it? The horror of being trapped here, wherever here was, rose in him. I'm not going to put up with this, Kit thought. I'm not going to just stand here and be terrified! He tried to strain every muscle, tried to strain even one, and couldn't move any of them. It was as if his body suddenly belonged to someone else.

  So / can't move. But I can still think—

  There was a spell Kit knew as well as his transit spells, so well that he didn't even bother keeping it in compacted form anymore; he could say it in one breath. It was the spell he used to make a small light for reading under the covers at night. Kit could see the spell in his mind, fifty-nine characters in the Speech, twenty-one syllables. Kit pronounced them clearly in his mind, said the last word that tied the knot in the spell, and turned it loose—

  Light. Just a single source of light, pale and silvery. There was no way to tell for sure if it was coming from near or far; it looked small, like a streetlight seen from blocks away. Just seeing it relieved Kit tremendously. It was the first change he had managed to make in this environment. And if he could do that, he could do something else. Just take a moment and think what to do—

  Kit realized he was gasping for breath. He also realized that he was able to feel himself gasping. He tried to move his arms, but it was like trying to swim in taffy. As he concentrated on that light, he thought he saw a change in it. The light's moving— But that was wrong. Something dark was moving in front of it. Oh no, what's that—

  Suddenly he could move his hand a little. He reached toward his pocket to fish out something he could use as a weapon if he had to protect himself. It was taking too long. The dark thing was blocking the light, ge
tting closer. Kit strained as hard as he could to get his hand into his pocket, but there was no time, and the dark object got closer, flailing its way toward him. Kit felt around in his mind for one other spell he'd used occasionally when he had to. Not one that he liked to use, but when it came to the choice between surviving and going down without a fight...

  The dark shape blotted out the light, leaving it visible only as a faint halo around whatever was coming. Kit said the first half of the spell in his mind and then waited. He wasn't going to use it unless he absolutely had to, for killing was not something a wizard did unless there was no choice.

  The dark shape was closer. Kit felt the spell lying ready in his mind, turning and burning and wanting to get out and do what it had been built for. But not yet, Kit thought, setting his teeth. Not just yet. I want to see—

  The black shape was right in front of him now. It launched itself at him. Kit got ready to think the last word of the spell—

  —and the dark thing hit him chest high, and started washing his face as it knocked him over backward.

  The two of them came down hard together on blacktop. Suddenly everything seemed bright as day in the single light of the streetlight down at the end of the side street. There Kit lay in the road, with a bump that was going to be about the size of a phoenix's egg starting to form on the back of his head, and on top of him Ponch washed his face frantically, saying, "Did you see it? Did you see what I found? Did you? Did you?"

  Kit didn't do anything at first but grab his dog and hug him, thinking, Oh, God, I almost blew him up; thank you for not letting me blow him up! Then he sat up, looking around him, and pushed Ponch off with difficulty. "Uh, yeah," he said, "I think so... But why are you all wet?"

  "It was wet there."

  "Not where / was," Kit said. "But am I glad you came along when you did. Come on, let's get out of the street before someone sees us." Fortunately this was a quiet part of town, without much traffic in the evening, and the two of them had the additional protection that most people didn't recognize wizardry even when it happened right in front of them. Any onlooker would most likely just have seen a kid and his dog suddenly fall over in the middle of the street, where they'd probably been playing, unseen, a moment before.

  Kit got up and brushed himself off, feeling weird to be able to move. "Home now?" said Ponch, bouncing around him.

  "You better believe it," Kit said, and they started to walk back down the street. "I'm hungry!"

  "We'll see about something for you when we get in." "Dog biscuits!" Ponch barked, and raced down the street. Kit went after him. When he came in the back door, his father was just taking the spaghetti pot over to the sink to drain it. "Perfect timing," he said.

  Kit looked in astonishment at the beat-up kitchen wall clock. It was only fifteen minutes since he'd left. His father looked at him strangely. "Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost."

  Kit shook his head. "Uh...I'm okay. I'll explain later. Leave mine in the pot for me for a few minutes, will you, Pop?" He headed into the living room and sat down by the phone.

  That was when the shakes hit him. He just sat there and let it happen—not that he had much choice—and meanwhile enjoyed the wonderful normality of the living room: the slightly tacky lamps his mother refused to get rid of, the fact that the rug needed to be vacuumed. At least there was a rug, and a floor it was nailed to—not that terrifying empty nothingness under his feet. Finally Kit composed himself enough to pick up the phone and dial a local number.

  After a few rings someone picked up. A voice said, "Tom Swale." "Tom, it's Kit."

  "Hey there, fella, long time no hear. What's up?"

  "Tom—" Kit paused, not exactly sure how to start this. "I need to ask you something about your dogs." "Oh no," Tom said, sounding concerned. "What have they done now?"

  "Nothing," Kit said. "And I want to know how they do it."

  There was a pause. "Can we start this conversation again?" Tom said. "Because you lost me somewhere. Like at the beginning."

  "Uh, right. Annie and Monty—" "You're saying they didn't do anything?" "Not that I know of."

  "Okay. This conversation now makes sense to Sherlock Holmes, if no one else. Keep working on me, though."

  Kit laughed. "Okay. Tom, your dogs are always turning up in your backyard with... you know. Weird things."

  "Including you, once, as I recall." "Hey, don't get cute," Kit said.

  He was then immediately mortified by the tone he had taken with his Senior wizard, a genuinely nice man who had a lot to do in both his jobs and didn't need thirteen-year-olds sassing him. But Tom simply burst out laughing. "Okay, I deserved that. Are you asking me how they do it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then it's my reluctant duty to tell you that I'm not sure. Wizards' pets tend to get strange. You know that."

  "But do they always?"

  "Well, except for our macaw—who was strange to start with and who then turned out to be one of the Powers That Be in a bird suit—yes, mostly they do."

  "Are there any theories about why?"

  "Loads. The most popular one is that wizards bend the shape of certain aspects of space-time awry around them, so that we're sort of the local equivalent of gravity lenses... and creatures associated with us for long periods tend to acquire some wizardly qualities themselves. Is this helping you?"

  There was a lot of barking going on in the background. "I think so."

  "Good, because as you can probably hear, the non-weird part of our local canines' lifestyle has kicked in with a vengeance, and they say they want their dinners. But they can wait a few minutes. As far as wizards' dogs are concerned, the development of 'finding' behaviors seems to be relatively common. It may be an outgrowth of the retrieving or herding behaviors that some dogs have had bred into them. Does Ponch have any Labrador in him?"

  "Uh, there might be some in there." This had been a topic of idle discussion around Kit's house for a long time, his father mostly referring to Ponch, when the subject came up, as "the Grab Bag." "But he's mostly Border collie. Some German shepherd, too."

  "Sounds about right."

  "But Tom—" Kit was wondering how to phrase this. "That the dogs might be able to find things, that I can understand. But how can they findplaces? Because Ponch has started finding them."

  There was quite a long pause. "That could be interesting," Tom said. "Has he taken you to any of these places?"

  "Just once. Just now." "Are you all right?"

  "Now I am. I think," Kit said, starting to shake again. "You sure?"

  "Yeah," Kit said. "It's all right. It was just.. .nothing. No sound, no light or movement. But Ponch got in there, and he knew how to get out again. He got me out, in fact, because I couldn't do much of anything."

  "That's interesting," Tom said. "Would you consider going there again?"

  "Not right now!" Kit said. "But later on, yeah. I want to find out where that was! And how it happened."

  "Well, pack animals do prefer to work in groups. From Ponch's point of view, you two probably constitute a small pack, and maybe that's why he's able to share his new talent with you. But until now, to the best of my knowledge, no wizard's found out exactly

  where the dogs go to get the things they bring back, because no one's been able to go along. If you really want to follow up on this—"

  "Yeah, I do."

  "Then be careful. You should treat this as an unstable worldgating; you may not be able to get back the same way you left. Better check the manual for a tracing-and-homing spell to keep in place. And make sure you take enough air along. Even though Ponch seems unaffected after short jaunts, there's no guaranteeing that the two of you will stay that way if you linger." "Okay. Thanks."

  "One other thing. I'd confine the wizardry to just the two of you."

  Kit was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You're saying that I should leave Nita out of this..."

  Tom paused, too. "Well, it's possible that the only one who's goin
g to be safe with Ponch as you start investigating this will be you. The semisymbiotic relationship might be what got you out of your bad situation last time. You don't want to endanger anyone else until you're sure what's going on."

  "Yeah, I guess so."

  "But there's something else," Tom said. "I just had a look at the manual. Nita's assignment status has changed. It says, 'independent assignment, indeterminate period, subject confidential.' You know what that's about?"

  "I have an idea," Kit said, though he was uncertain. "It sounds like she's chasing down something of her own," Tom said. "Usually when there's a formal status change like that, it's unwise to interrupt the other person unless you need their help on something critical to an ongoing project."

  "Uh, yeah," Kit said. Now, how much does he know? "We just wound up a project, so nothing's going on." He felt guilty at the way he'd put that—but there were lots of things that "we" could mean.

  "Okay. I saw the precis on that last one, though. Nice work; we'll see how it holds up. But as regards Ponch, let me know when you find something out. The manual will want an annotation from you on the subject, though it'll 'trap' the raw data as you go. And if you find anything in Ponch's behavior that has to do with more-normal worldgating, tell the gating team in New York—though the fact that a dog's involved is probably going to make them laugh, if it doesn't actually ruffle their fur..."

  "So to speak. Okay, Tom. Thanks!"

  "Right. Best to Nita." And Tom hung up, to the sound of more impatient barking. Ouch, Kit thought. The last few words made him hurt inside.

  But he took a moment to get over it, then got up and went back into the kitchen to see about some spaghetti.

  Friday Night

  AFTER DINNER KIT WENT upstairs to his bedroom, pausing by the door to Carmela's room, at the sound of a faint hissing noise coming from inside. He knocked on the door.

  "Come in!" his sister shouted.

  Slightly surprised, Kit stuck his head in the door. His sister was lying on her bed, on her stomach, and the source of the hissing was the earphones she was wearing. On the TV, it looked as if a young boy in a down vest and baseball cap was being electrocuted by a long-tailed yellow teddy bear. "Oh," Kit said, now understanding why Carmela had shouted.