The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  "What?" His sister pulled one of the earphones out.

  "Nothing," Kit said. "I heard something going 'sssssssss' in here. Thought maybe it was your brains escaping."

  His sister rolled her eyes.

  "Isn't that kind of stuff a little below your age group?" Kit said.

  Carmela ostentatiously put the earphone back in. "Not when you're using it to learn Japanese. Now go away."

  Kit closed her door and, for once, did what she told him. Carmela was no more of a nuisance to Kit than she had to be at her age. She had even taken his wizardry pretty calmly, for an otherwise excitable fifteen-year-old, when Kit had told the family about it. After the shock wore off, "I always knew you were weird" had been Carmela's main response. Still, Kit kept an eye on her, and always put his manual away where she wouldn't find it; the thought of her turning into an older version of Dairine terrified him. Still, wizardry finds its way. If it's gonna, happen, there's no way I can stop it. His older sister, Helena, seemed safe from this fate, being too old for even late-onset wizardry. She had just left for her first year of college at Amherst, apparently relieved to get out of what she described as "a genuine madhouse." Kit loved her dearly but was also slightly (and guiltily) relieved to be seeing less of her, for she was the only member of the family who seemed to be trying to pretend that Kit's wizardry had never really happened.

  Maybe she'll sort it out over the next year or so.

  Meantime, I have other problems—

  He pushed his door open and looked around at his room. It was a welter of bookshelves; the usual messy bed; a worktable, where he made models; the desk, where his ancient computer sat; and some rock posters, including one from a hilariously overcostumed and overmade-up metal group, which had been a present from Helena when she cleared out her room —"a souvenir," she'd said, "of a journey into the hopelessly retro."

  Kit tossed his jacket onto the bed and plopped down into the desk chair, where he put out his hand and whistled for his manual. It dropped into his hand from the little pouch of otherspace where he kept it. Kit pushed the PC's keyboard to one side and opened the manual.

  First he turned to the back page, the messaging area. There was nothing there, but he'd known there wouldn't be; he hadn't felt the "fizz" of notification when he picked up the manual. Then Kit paged backward to the active wizards' listing for the New York area. Yes, there it was, between CAILLEBERT, ARMINA, and CALLANIN, EOIN:

  CALLAHANJuanitaL.

  243 E. Clinton Avenue Hempstead, NY 11575 (516) 555-6786

  power rating: 6.08 +/-.5 status: conditional active

  independent assignment / research:

  subject classification withheld period: indeterminate

  Apparently the Powers had something planned for her... or were maybe just cutting her some slack.

  Sounds like she can use it, too, Kit thought, feeling brief irritation again at the memory of the afternoon. Well, okay.

  He paused and then flipped back to a spot a few pages after Nita's listing, running his finger down one column. There it was: RODRIGUEZ, CHRISTOPHER R. Address, phone number, power rating, status, last assignment, blah, blah, blah... . But there was something else after his listing.

  Notes: adjunct talent in training

  Kit sat back. Now what the heck does that mean?

  He heard thumping on the stairs down the hall and glanced up in time to see Ponch hit his door, push it open, and wander in, waving his tail. The dog turned around a few times in the middle of the floor, then lay down with a thump.

  Kit looked at him thoughtfully. Ponch banged his tail on the floor a few times, then yawned. "You tired, big guy?" Kit said, and then yawned as well. "Guess I am, too." "It's like chasing squirrels when I do what we did," Ponch said. "I want to sleep afterward." "I understand that, all right," Kit said. "Got a little while to talk?"

  "Okay."

  "Good boy. Ponch, just where exactly were we?" "I don't know."

  "But that wasn't the first time you did that, was it?"

  "Uh..." Ponch looked as if he thought he was about to confess to something that would get him in trouble.

  "It's okay," Kit said, "I'm not mad. How long have you been doing that?" "You went away," Ponch said. "I went looking for you."

  Kit sighed. When Nita had been in Ireland over the summer, he'd "beamed over" there several times to help her out. Once or twice he'd been there long enough to get a mild case of gatelag, and he remembered Ponch's ecstatic and relieved greetings when he came back. "So... when? End of July, beginning of August?"

  "I guess. Right after you went the first time." "Okay. But where did you go? Since you didn't find me."

  "I tried, I really tried!" Ponch whimpered. "I missed you. You were gone too much." "It's okay; I'm not mad that you didn't find me! It was just an observation." "Oh." Ponch licked his nose in relief.

  "So where did you go?"

  "It was dark."

  "You're right there," Kit said. "The same place we were together?"

  "We weren't there together all the time," Ponch said. "You're not there until you do something."

  Kit wasn't terribly clear about what Ponch meant. He was tempted to push for more information, but Ponch yawned at him again. "Can we go there another time?"

  "Sure." Ponch put his head down on his paws. "Whenever you want. Can I go to sleep now?" "Yeah, go ahead," Kit said. "I wish 7 could."

  Shortly, Ponch had rolled over on his side and was

  emitting the tiny little snore that always sounded so funny coming from such a big dog. Kit stood up, yawning again. He couldn't put off the reaction to the evening's wizardry much longer, but first he wanted to look into a couple of things. Fortunately, tomorrow was Saturday, and he could sleep late. Kit sat down again, opened the manual once more, and soon found the section he wanted. Tracking and location protocols.. . isodimensional... exodimensional...

  Kit found a pen and a pad and started making notes.

  The mall was crowded that evening, but not so much so that Nita and her mother had any trouble getting their shopping done. The clothes came first, for Nita's mother was concerned that Nita didn't have anything decent to wear to school; and privately Nita agreed with her. At the first shop they went into, though, some differences emerged between their definitions of decent.

  Nita's mom walked among the racks, shaking her head and trying to avoid looking at the two tops and three skirts Nita was carrying. "They're all so expensive," her mother said under her breath. "And they're not terribly well made, either. Such a rip-off..."

  Nita knew this wasn't the problem. She trailed along behind, not saying anything. As she finished looking at the racks, her mother stopped and looked at Nita. "Honey, tell me the truth. Are the other girls really wearing stuff like this?" From the nearest rack, she picked up a black skirt identical to one of the ones Nita was carrying, holding it up with a critical expression.

  "Stuff exactly like this, Mom. Some of them are shorter. This one's a little conservative." Because I chickened out on the really short one.

  "And the principal hasn't been sending people home for wearing skirts this short? Really?" "Really."

  "You wouldn't be bending the truth in the service of fashion, here?"

  Nita had to laugh at that. "If I was gonna lie to you about anything, Mom, don't you think I would have done it when it was about much bigger stuff? Great white sharks? Saving the world?" And she grinned.

  "I begin to wonder," her mom said, putting the skirt back on the rack, "exactly how much you aren't telling me that I ought to know about."

  "Tons of things," Nita said. "Where should I start? Did I tell you about the dinosaurs in Central Park?"

  Her mother looked over her shoulder with one of those expressions that suggested she wasn't sure whether Nita was joking. But the expression shaded into one that meant her mom had realized this wasn't a joke and she didn't like the idea. "Is this something recent?"

  "Uh, kind of. Except we made it so it never happened,
and maybe recent isn't the right word."

  Nita's mother frowned, perplexed. Nita ignored this; the translation of what she'd said was bothering her. "Potentially recent?" Nita said, to see how the substitution sounded. Unfortunately English lacked the right kind of verb tenses to describe a problem that could be easily expressed in the Speech. "No, it can't happen anymore, I don't think. At least, not that time, it can't. Formerly recent?"

  "Stop now," Nita's mother said, "before this takes you, me, and the dinosaurs many places that none of us wants to go, and let's get back to the skirt." She picked it up again. "Honey, your poor old mom tries hard not to live entirely in the last century, but this thing's hardly more than a wide belt."

  "Mom, remember when you trusted me about the shark?"

  "Yeeees...," her mother said, sounding dubious. "So trust me about the skirt!"

  Her mother gave her a cockeyed look. "It's not the sharks I'm worried about," she said. "It's the wolves."

  "Mom, I promise you, none of the 'wolves' are going to touch me. I just want to look normal. If I can't be normal, let me at least simulate the effect!"

  Her mother looked at her with mild surprise. "You're not having problems at school, are you?" "No, I'm fine."

  "The homework—"

  "It's no big deal. There's more than there used to be, but so far I'm not overloaded." "You are having problems, though."

  "Mom—" Nita sighed. "Nobody beats me up anymore, if that's what you're worried about. They can't. But a lot of the kids still think I'm some kind of nerd princess." She grimaced. Once Nita had thought that when she got into junior high, reading would be seen as normal behavior for someone her age. She was still waiting for this idea to occur to some of her classmates. "It's nothing wizardry will cure. Just believe me when I tell you that dressing in style will help me blend in a little. I know I didn't care much about clothes in grade school, but now it's more of an issue. As for the length, if you're worried that moral rot will set in, I'll promise to let you know if I see any early warning signs."

  Her mother smiled slightly. "Okay," she said, put back the skirt she'd been holding, and reached out to take the one Nita was carrying. "Moral rot hasn't been much of a problem with you. So this is an experiment. But if I hear anything from your principal, I'm going to make you wear flour sacks down to your ankles until you graduate. You and the dinosaurs better make a note."

  "Noted, Mom," Nita said. "Thanks." She went off to put the other two skirts back where she'd found them. This one's a start. She'll soften up in a couple of weeks, and we can come back for the other ones.

  They went to the cash register and paid for the skirt. Then Nita's mom drove them to the supermarket, and as they tooled up and down the aisles with the cart, Nita began to feel normal, almost against her will. But then, while standing there with a bottle of mouthwash in her hand and working out if it was a better bargain than other bottles nearby, Nita's mother suddenly turned to her and said, "What kind of dinosaurs?"

  Boy, Nita thought, maybe it's a good thing I didn't mention the giant squid!

  When Nita and her mom got home, Nita and Dairine helped put away the groceries (and Nita helped her mom keep Dairine out of them); so it was half an hour before she could get up to her room and fish out her manual. As she picked it up, she felt a faint fizz about the covers, a silent notification that there was a message waiting for her. Hurriedly she flipped it open to the back page. At the top of the page was Kit's name and his manual reference. In the middle of the page were the words: If you need some time by yourself, feel free.

  Just that. No annotation, no explanation. Nita flushed hot and cold, then hot again. Why, that little— He wouldn't even pkk up the phone and call me! Or else he's really, really mad, and be doesn't trust himself to talk to me. Or maybe he just doesn't feel like it.

  Nita felt an immediate twinge of guilt... and then stomped on it. Why should I feel guilty when he's the one who's screwing up? And then can't take the heat when someone tries to straighten him out about it?

  Time by myself? Fine.

  "Fine," she said to the manual.

  Send reply?

  "Yeah, send it," Nita said.

  Her reply spelled itself out in the Speech on the page, added a time stamp, and archived itself. Sent.

  Nita shut the manual and chucked it onto her desk, feeling a second's worth of annoyed satisfaction... followed immediately by unease. She didn't like the feeling. Sighing, Nita got up and wandered back out to the dining room.

  Now that the groceries were gone, computer-printed pages were spread all over the dining-room table. While Nita looked at them, her mother came in from the driveway with a couple more folders' worth of paperwork, dropping them on top of one pile. "Stuff from the flower shop?" Nita said, going to the fridge to get herself a Coke.

  "Yup," her mother said. "It's put-Daddy's-incredibly-messed-up-accounts-into-the-computer night."

  Nita smiled and sat down at the table. Her father was no mathematician, which probably explained why he pushed her so hard about her math homework. Her mom went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of tea, and put it into the microwave. "You should make him do this," Nita said, idly paging through the incomprehensible papers, a welter of faxes and invoices and In-terflora order logs and many, many illegible, scribbly notes.

  "I've tried, honey. The last time he did the accounts, it took me a year to get them straightened out. Never again." The microwave dinged; her mother retrieved the cup, added sugar, and came back in to sit at the end of the table, sipping the tea. "Besides, I don't like to nag your dad. He works hard enough... Why should I make it hard for him when he comes home, too?"

  Nita nodded. This was why she didn't mind spending a lot of time at home; with the possible exception of Kit, she seemed to be the only person she knew who had an enjoyable home life. Half the kids in school seemed to be worrying that their parents were about to divorce, but Nita had never even heard her parents raise their voices to each other. She knew they fought — they would vanish into their bedroom, sometimes, when things got tense—but there was no yelling or screaming. That suited Nita entirely. It was possibly also the reason her present fight with Kit was making her so twitchy.

  Her mother paged through the paperwork and came up with a bunch of paper-clipped spreadsheet printouts. "Though privately," she muttered as she took the papers apart and started sorting them by month, "there are times I wish I'd never given up ballet. Sure, you get sprains and strains and pulled muscles, and your feet stop looking like anything that ought to be at the end of a human leg, but at least there was never much eye-strain." She smiled slightly. "But if I ever went back to that, there would be all those egos to deal with again. 'Creative differences'... that being code for everybody shouting at one another all day." She shook her head. "This is better. Now where did the pen go?"

  Nita fished it out from under the papers and handed it over. Her mother started writing the names of months on top of the spreadsheets. "How many days in May, honey?"

  "Thirty-one." Nita started looking around under the papers and came up with another pen. "Mom..." "Hmm?"

  "If you had a fight with somebody... and they were incredibly wrong, and you were right... what would you do?"

  "Apologize immediately," her mother said.

  Nita looked at her in astonishment.

  "If they mattered to me at all, anyway," her mother said, glancing up as she put one page aside. "That's what I always do with your dad. Particularly if circumstances have recently proved me to be correct."

  "Uh...," Nita said, seriously confused.

  Her mom labeled another page and turned it over. "Works for me," she said. "I mean, really, honey..." She glanced at the next page, turned it over, too. "Unless it's about a life-and-death issue, why make a point of being right? Of getting all righteous about it? All it does is make people less likely to listen to you. Even more so if they're close to you."

  Nita gave her mother a sidelong look. "But, Mom, if it real
ly is a life-or-death issue—"

  "Sweetie, at your age, a lot of things look like life-and-death. Don't get that look; I'm not patronizing you," her mother added. "Or what you do—I know it's been terribly important sometimes. But think of the problem as a graph, where you plot the intensity of experience against total time. You've had less total time to work with than, say, your dad or I have. Things look a lot more important when the 'spreadsheet' is only a page long instead of four or five."

  Nita considered that to see if it made sense. To her annoyance, it did. "I hate it when you sneak up on me by being objective," she said.

  Her mother produced a weary smile. "I'll take that as a compliment. But it's accidental, honey. It'll take me days to get this sorted out, and right now my whole life is beginning to look like a grid. I don't see why yours shouldn't, too."

  Nita smiled and put her head down on her arms. "Okay. But, Mom... what do you do if you find out that you're wrong?"

  "Same thing," her mother said. "Apologize immediately. Why change a tactic that works?" "Because it makes you look like a wimp."

  Her mother glanced up from the papers again, raising her eyebrows. "Excuse me, I must have missed something. It's not right to apologize when you're wrong?"

  Nita saw immediately why Dairine refused to play chess with their mother anymore. She was cornered. "Thanks, Mom," she said, and got up.

  Her mother let out a long breath. "Nothing worthwhile is easy, honey," she said, and looked down ruefully at the papers, rubbing her eyes. "This, either. Come to think of it, I could probably use an aspirin about now." And she got up and went to get one.

  Nita was starting to feel like she could use one herself. She's probably right. And something's got to be done. The water situation out there isn't going to just fix itself—

  But what am I supposed to do? I can't work with Kit when I'm pissed off at him! It's going to have to wait. The Powers That Be understand that wizards need room to be human, too.

  But even as she thought it, Nita felt guilty. A wizard knew that the energy had been running slowly out of