The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  The back door opened, closed again. Nita got up, yawning; even after the sandwich, dinner was beginning to impinge on her mind, and her stomach was making sounds that could have passed for a polite greeting on Rirhath B. "Mom say anything to you about what she was going to make tonight? Maybe we can get a head start."

  "I don't remember," Dairine said as they headed through the living room. This answer was no surprise; Dairine's normal response to food was to eat it first and ask questions later.

  "Huh," Nita said. "Dad—"

  She stopped. Her father stood in the kitchen, looking down at the counter by the stove as if he expected to find something there, but the counter was bare, and her father's expression was odd. "You forget something, Daddy?" Nita said.

  "No," he said. And then Nita saw his face working not to show what it felt, his hands not so much resting on the edge of the counter as holding it, holding on to it, and heard his voice, which pushed its way out through a throat tight with fear.

  "Where's Mom?" Dairine said.

  Nita's stomach instantly tied itself into a horrible knot. "Is she all right?" she said. "She's—" her father said. And then immediately after that, "No. Oh, honey—"

  Dairine pushed her way up beside Nita, her face suddenly as pale as her father's. "Daddy, wbere's Mom} "

  "She's in the hospital." He turned to them, but he didn't let go of the counter, still hanging on to it. As his eyes met Nita's, the fear behind them hit her so hard that she almost staggered. "She's very sick, they think—"

  He stopped, not because he didn't know what to say, but because he refused to say it, to think it—it was impossible. Nonetheless Nita heard it, as her dad heard it, repeating over and over in his head:

  They think she might die.

  Saturday Afternoon and Evening

  IN A PLACE WHERE directions and distances made no sense, Kit and Ponch stood in the endless, soundless dark, the leash spell hanging loose between them and glowing with silent power.

  So here we are. You feel okay?

  I feel fine.

  So what should I make?

  Anything, Ponch said, as he had before.

  Kit thought about that... and discovered that he couldn't decide what to do first. Typical, he thought. Presented with the possibility to create any thing you can think of, your mind goes blank.

  He tried to take a breath and found that his breathing now seemed to be working properly. "Am I getting used to this place?" Kit said softly in the Speech, and found that he could actually hear himself.

  No answer; but then if one had come, he'd have jumped out of his skin.

  Saturday Afternoon and Evening

  "Okay," he said then. "Lights..."

  And suddenly Kit found himself standing unsupported in the midst of interstellar glory. "Wow," he said softly. He and Ponch were apparently somewhere in the fringes of a gigantic globular cluster, all the nearby darkness blazing with stars of every possible color—and the farther darkness was peppered with not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of galaxies, little globes and ovals and spirals everywhere, a megacluster of the kind that astronomers were sure existed but had never seen.

  It's bright, Ponch said.

  "No argument there," said Kit, as he wondered why producing all this had been so easy. He was used to wizardry taking a good deal more effort. Is this even wizardry? he wondered. It had needed no construction of spells, no careful and laborious plugging in of words and variables, and no sudden drain of energy after the wizardry was fueled from your own power and turned loose. That last factor was what made Kit mistrust this process. He was used to the concept that every wizardry had its price, and one way or another, you paid; and its corollary: that any wizardry that doesn't charge you a decent admission fee usually isn't worth anything.

  All the same, it would be smart to play around in here a little and see what it was worth. Kit also thought he could guess why Carl wanted him to try to bring back some small physical artifact. It would confirm whether or not this space was simply some kind of illusion or mirage, amusing but otherwise not terribly useful. "Okay," he said, "let's take this from the top. A sun, first..."

  And one appeared, though he hadn't even asked for it in the Speech: a deep yellow-orange star, a vast, roiling, heaving landscape of blinding flame, directly below his feet. For a second Kit flinched at the roar and turmoil of burning gas beneath him, all dancing with prominences and loops and arches of radiant plasma— inexhaustible fountains of fire half a million miles high, leaping away from the star's seething limb and pouring themselves back into the surface again in slow-motion grace. In vacuum you wouldn't normally get sound, I guess, Kit thought. But he seemed to be in some kind of peculiar rapport with this space that let him sense things he ordinarily wouldn't, and the tearing basso wind-roar of superheated ions blasting upward past him was strangely satisfying. Ponch, sitting beside him, squinted down at the ravening brilliance but didn't comment.

  "Not bad, huh?" Kit said.

  Ponch yawned. "The squirrels are more fun."

  "You've got a one-track mind," Kit said. "Okay, now we need a planet..."

  And the star receded into the distance, reducing itself to proper sunlike size. Below Kit was his planet, all covered in cloud, muttering softly to itself as it rotated, already coasting away from them along its orbit. Kit thought he could actually feel the heat pouring off it, a feverish sensation. A lot of heat trapped under those clouds, he thought. It's a Ksupergreenhouse," like Venus... There was no telling how big this world was, without anything to give him a frame of reference. Have to go down there and take a closer look, Kit thought—

  —and suddenly he was standing on a rocking, shaking, stony surface. All around him rocks tumbled down low cracked cliffs, and a wind as brutal as the solar one but laden with a stinging drizzle of acid instead of fire shrieked past him. In a more normal reality, Kit knew this terrible supersonic fog would have eaten the unprotected flesh off his bones in seconds, but here he seemed immune. Because I imagined it?

  Kit grinned and waved one hand in front of him airily. "Lose the acid," he said, "lose the wind, lose the clouds." The instant he spoke, the air went clear, fell silent, and the dull, overarching, brassy canopy faded away to dark clarity. The stars showed through again, and the high, hot, golden sun. But sound vanished as well, and it started to get very cold.

  "No, no; atmosphere is okay!" Kit said. "Something I can breathe. Landscape..."

  Green rolling grassland spread itself away in every direction under a blue, blue sky. Ponch leaped up in delight. "Squirrels!"

  "No squirrels," Kit said. "Don't overdo them or you'll get bored." He rubbed his hands together in delight. "You know what this is, Ponch? It's magic-crayon country."

  "Crayons? Where?" Ponch had conceived a weird fondness for the taste of crayons when Kit was younger, and had always gone out of his way to steal and eat them.

  "Not that way," Kit said, turning around and gazing all about him at the total wilderness. "But if I thought of an elephant with three hairs in its tail here— Uh-ob."

  Ponch began barking deafeningly. The elephant, large and purple-gray, as in the original illustration from that old children's book, looked around in surprise, then looked over at Ponch and said, a little scornfully, "Do you have a problem?"

  "Sorry," Kit said. "Uh, can I do something for you?"

  "Trees are generally better for eating purposes than grass," the elephant said. "A little more variation in the landscape would be nice. And so would company."

  Kit thought about that. A second later the grassland looked much more like African veldt, with a scattering of trees and an impressive mountain range in the distance, and another elephant stood next to the first one. They looked each other up and down, twined their trunks together, and walked off into the long grass, swinging their three-haired tails as they went.

  Kit paused then, wondering whether they were a boy and a girl, and then wondering whether it mattered. Maybe it's better not to
get too hung up on the minor details right now, he thought.

  He glanced down at Ponch. "Want to try another one?"

  "You sure you don't want to think again about the squirrels?"

  "Yes, I'm sure." Kit folded his arms, thinking. He took a step forward, opened his mouth to speak—

  —and found he didn't have to do even that. The two of them were standing in a waste littered with reddish rocks; an odd springy green mosslike growth was scattered here and there around them. The strangely foreshortened landscape ran up to a horizon hazed in red-violet dust, where low mountains reared up jagged against an amethyst sky; and so did an outcropping of delicate towers, apparently built of green glass or metal, gleaming faintly in the setting of a small, remote-seeming, pinky-white marble of a sun.

  "Yes," Kit said softly. It was Mars, but not the Mars of the real world, which nowadays, as he'd seen for himself, was unfortunately short on cities. This was the romantic Mars of stories written a hundred years ago, where fierce eight-legged thoats ran wild across dead sea bottoms, and displaced, sword-swinging warriors from Earth ran around after very, very scantily clad Martian princesses.

  Ponch glanced around, looking for something.

  "What?" Kit said.

  "No trees."

  "You can hold it in till we get home. Come on..."

  He took another step forward, thinking. One step and he and Ponch were in the darkness; another, and they were in what looked like New York City but wasn't, because New York City was not under a huge glass dome, floating through space.

  "Aha," Ponch said, immediately heading toward a fire hydrant.

  "Uh-uh," Kit said. Another few steps and they were in darkness; another step after that, in a landscape all veiled in blowing white, whiteness crunching underfoot, and up against an indigo sky, great crackling curtains of aurora, green and blue and occasionally pinkish red, hissing in the ferociously cold air. Something shuffled past in the blowing snow, some yards away, paused to swing its massive head around toward Kit, looking at him out of little dark eyes: a polar bear. But a polar bear the size of a mammoth... Ponch jumped and strained at the leash, barking. "Oh, come on; let him live," said Kit, and he took another step, into the dark. Reluctantly, Ponch followed. Kit was getting the rhythm of it now. A few steps in darkness, to do a few moments' worth of thinking... and then one step out into light, into another landscape or vista or place. The last step, this time, and he and Ponch were wading up to Kit's knees and Ponch's neck in some kind of long, harsh-edged beach grass clothing a vista of endless dunes. Off to their right the sea rolled up to a long black beach in an endless muted roar. Kit looked up into the shadow of immense wings going over, ruffling his hair and making the grass hiss around him with their passing—one huge shape silhouetted against the twilight, then two, five, twenty, with wings that seemed to stretch across half the sky. They soared in echelon toward a horizon over which a long violet evening was descending, and beyond which the distant and delicate fire of a barred spiral galaxy, seen almost face on, was rising slowly behind a glittering haze of nearer, lesser stars.

  He had the hang of it now./## let the mind run free, let the images flow.

  A few steps more and Kit came out into the middle of a vast plane of what looked like black marble, stretching away to infinity in all directions, and above it light glinted, reflected in the surface: not a sun or a moon, but an artificial light of some kind, almost like a spotlight. Far away, on a patterned place in the floor, small figures stood, some of them human, some not— some of them alien species that Kit had seen before in his travels, others of which he had never seen the like. One moved, then another. There was a pause, and then several moved at once, and one of them vanished. Kit started to go closer, until he saw the great shadowy shapes bending in all around him in the upward-towering dimness, to look more closely at the one piece that seemed to have escaped the game board.

  Kit smiled slightly, waved at them, and took another step. The darkness descended, then rose once more on some long, golden afternoon on a rise of land overlooking a lake. A pointy-towered palace lay all sun gilded down by the water, banners flying from every sharp-peaked roof, and knights on horses clattered along a dusty road toward the castle gate, the late sun glittering sharp off lance heads and armor, the colors of the knights' surcoats as vivid as enamel. Another step, quicker, as Kit started pushing the pace: out into the aquamarine light of some underwater place, white sand under his feet, lightwaver playing in broad patterns across it, and an odder, bluer light glimmering against the depths ahead of him as the rippling, ribbony creatures of some alien abyss came up out of shadows ten miles deep to peer curiously at the intruder.

  Kit found he could do without the darkness between worlds. It was a new vista at every step now, and Ponch padded along beside him on the wizardly leash as calmly as any dog being taken for a walk in the park. Forests of massive trees, all drowned in shadow, bare sand stretching away to impossible distances and suggesting planets much larger than Earth, gleaming futuristic cityscapes covering entire continents; a step, and night under some world's overarching greenish rings, a single voice chanting in the air, like a nightingale saluting them; a step, and the time before dawn in a vast waste of reedy waters reflecting the early peach-pink of the sky, everything still except for the flop of a fish turning, then putting its head up to look thoughtfully at them as they waded past; a step, and the blurring, whirling uncertainty of the vast space between an atom's nucleus and the silvery fog of its innermost electron shell— —and a step out into a place where, if he had taken another step, Kit would have fallen some thousands of feet straight down. There, on the top of a mountain imperially preeminent among its fellows, Kit paused, looking down through miles of blue-hazed air at lakes held between neighboring peaks like silent jewels under a rosette of suns—three small pinkish stars riding high in a morning sky—and all the snow on all the mountains from here to the horizon stained warm rose, so they all looked lit from within. Kit breathed that high chill air— which no one besides him and Ponch had ever breathed before, the air of a world made new that moment—and shook his head, smiling the smallest smile.

  He thought of the darkness. What a place to play. Neets has got to see this.

  He stood there looking down on the immense vista for a few moments longer. "We should get back," he said.

  "Why?"

  "I'm not sure about the time difference yet," Kit said. "And I don't want to worry Mom."

  Another thought niggling at the back of Kit's mind was: If this... state. ..is as easy to shape and reshape as it seems, it'd be real easy to get hooked on it. He'd had a phase, a couple years back, when he'd been hooked enough on a favorite arcade game to give himself blisters and blow truly unreasonable amounts of his allowance money in the process. Now Kit remembered that time with embarrassment, thinking of all the hours he'd spent on something that now bored him, and he watched himself, in a casual way, for signs that something similar might happen again.

  But I almost forgot. Kit reached down and picked up something from the mossy rocks at his feet: a single flower, a little five-petaled thing like a white star. Kit slipped it into his pocket, and farther in, right down into the space-time claudication, sealing it there. Then he turned around to glance at Ponch— the top of the peak was so narrow that they hadn't had room to stand side by side. "Ready?"

  "Yes, because I don't think I can hold it in much longer."

  Together they stepped straight out into the air, out into the darkness—

  —and out into Kit's backyard.

  He looked around. Twilight was falling. Guess I was right to be a little concerned about the time, Kit thought. Looks like it wasn't running at the same rate in all those places. Something else to tell Tom...

  He took the leash off Ponch, wound up the wizardry, and stuffed it into his pocket. Ponch immediately headed off toward the biggest of the sassafras trees to give it a good "watering."

  Kit went into the house. His mother and fathe
r were eating; his dad looked up at Kit, raised his eyebrows, and said, "Son, can't you give us a hint on how long you're going to be when you go out on one of these runs? Tom couldn't tell me anything."

  "Sorry, Pop," Kit said as he went past his dad, patting him on the shoulder. "I wasn't sure myself. I didn't think it'd be this long, though, and now I know what the problem is... I'll watch it next time."

  "Okay. You want some macaroni and cheese?"

  "In a minute."

  Kit headed up the stairs in a hurry; Ponch hadn't been the only one with "holding it" on his mind. Then he went into his room to check his pocket and was delighted to find the flower right where he'd put it. Kit placed it carefully on his desk, traced a line around it with his finger, and said the six words of a spell that would hold the contents aloof from the local progress of time for twenty-four hours.

  This was not a cheap spell, and the pang of the energy drain the spell cost him went straight through him. Kit had to sit down in his desk chair and get his

  Saturday Afternoon and Evening

  breath back. While he sat there, he reached farther into his pocket, touched his manual... and felt the fizz.

  He grinned, pulled it out, paged to the back of it... and let out a long breath. The manual was showing a message that had come in only a few minutes before. / can't talk now. But can we talk later? I've got some apologizing to do.

  All right, Kit thought, relieved. She's seen sense at last, and I'm not gonna rub her nose in it. There's too much serious neatness going on here. "Reply," he said to the manual. "Call me anytime: I'm ready."

  And he ran down the stairs, exhilarated, to feed Ponch and have his own dinner. Just wait till she sees! Whatever's been going on with her, this is gonna take her mind off it.

  I can't wait.

  Saturday Evening

  How SHE AND DAIRINE got their dad into the dining room and sat him down, Nita couldn't afterward remember, except for a flash of horror at the awful topsy-turviness of things. It was the parents who were supposed to be strong when the kids were scared. But now there were just the three of them, sitting there close, all of them equally scared together. Her father was hanging on to his control, and Nita held on to hers as much out of her own fear as out of sympathy; if she broke down, he might, too.