The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  Nita took a breath, made sure her own personal atmosphere was in place around her and secured by the wizardry attached to her charm bracelet. Then she joined in the chorus of other voices, birdlike, moaning, chiming, growling. The sound of the Speech rose up in their conjoined voices and leaned in close around them, pressing in on all of them as the power built, down on them, squeezing them out of this space and, with a sudden explosive release, into another—

  The sourceless radiance of the playroom space vanished, replaced by the high, hard, bright light of a sun high in a pale blue sky, all streaked with wind-torn, sulfurously yellow cloud. Nita and the other wizards stood in a saffron-stained wilderness of ice and blowing snow. Around them blasted a screaming wind that would have been not only bitterly cold—if a temperature-opaque forcefield hadn't been holding

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  Nita's air around her—but also unbreathable, laden with a stinging acid sleet.

  The other wizards looked around with dismay. "There has been a lot of discharge of poisonous gas into the atmosphere because of the earthquakes," Kkirl said. "It's getting worse all the time."

  "This isn't the seismically active area," Pont said, their spheres dividing up into numerous smaller ones and rolling out of the diagram.

  "No, this is where I left the kernel," Kkirl said. "I was hoping it would stay anchored near the planet's magnetic pole. But as you see, it's gone again."

  Nita looked out into that snow and listened once more. The wind was screaming in her ears, distracting her, and she wasn't perceiving this universe as artificially compressed, like the ones she'd practiced in. It stretched out all around her, vast to both her normal and her wizardly senses, real and challenging. At the same time, Nita was aware of Pralaya's eyes on her, thoughtful but also a little impatient and challenging, and she was reminded of Dairine again. Nita concentrated on listening. In the shriek of the wind, or behind it, something caught Nita's ear, and she looked over at Kkirl in confusion.

  "Are you sure it's not here?" Nita shouted over the wind.

  "What?"

  "There's— I don't know, it's kind of an echo. Can you hear it?" Kkirl listened. "No..."

  Late Tuesday Night, 'Wednesday Morning

  Nita turned, looking all around her. There was nothing to see in this howling wilderness, but she could hear it now, she was sure. "Pont," she said, "can you give me a— Can you help me out here?" for Pont were short of hands. "Do what you did before?"

  "What? Oh—"

  Font's surface shimmered. Suddenly overlying Nita's own perceptions was that odd, tightly curved view of the world: downcurving sky, the golden-hued ice curving away and down all around them, the wind blasting the snow past the wizards and away from them in great chilly clouds. Nita didn't fight the perception but leaned into the curvatures, staring around her, listening.

  All the others were doing so, too, Nita could tell, though her perceptions of them were conditioned by Font's. All the other wizards looked spherical, though all in different ways, as distinctive as basketballs from soccer balls from baseballs. Some hint of Kkirl's flamboyant colors showed, in the tight and elegant way she curved space around her; as did Mmemyn's slightly slow and scattered personality, in a sphere that was a little diffuse in the way it reflected its surroundings; as did Pralaya's, in a neat and compact roundness. Nita could sense everyone using their own wizardry-altered senses to search through the space around them for the kernel, as she was doing. Again Nita thought she felt a prickling tangle of unseen power rolling away from her, not far away, in a slow twisting path, downward—

  Is it moving? Pralaya said in her mind.

  That's what I thought, Nita said. Pralaya, can you do what Font's doing here? If three of us, or you and I 283

  and however many of Pont there are, all look at the same time— Fes.

  And the look of the world changed again. The icy golden surface underneath them was still the same, as was the wind howling past, but now the wind had a voice, eloquent, upset. Nita's companions were once more wearing forms that looked much like Nita's own way of seeing them, but with something added. Now there were depths of texture and mind that hadn't been there before, as if you could put out a hand and feel thought, warm like fur—a livelier, more animate sense of the others than Font's slightly chilly perception. Maybe it's because Pralaya and I are both mammals, Nita thought. Or something like mammals...

  In the moment it took her to see through Pralaya's eyes and mind, Nita perceived many things quickly: glimpses of a blue-green forested home world with much water running under the shadows of the trees, a golden-eyed mate with an amused look, pups tumbling and squeaking in some dimly lighted den—a warm and affable outlook on a world that felt challenging and complex but basically friendly. Then everything steadied down to ice and snow and complaining wind again, and one more sense of the kernel, sharper and more precisely targeted: something trickling, running, down under the ice, where it was warmer and liquid was possible, where heat and other energy channeled narrowly up through veins in the crust, and that fizzing, writhing, unbalanced knot of local law was burrowing down in deep—

  Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

  Down! Nita said.

  The others looked down with her, inside the glacier on which they all stood, through it to the underlying stone, through that to the first boundary layer where the stone changed—and Kkirl laughed angrily, and said, Powers' names, trust it to more or less stay put this one time! Come on, cousins, if it gets itself down into the mantle in this state, it'll derange the whole place before we can operate on it!

  They all knew the Mason's Word spell. That word gives new life to stone, but the more complex version of the spell reminds stone of previous states of being, times when the fourth element was mostly air or fire, or stone in some other phase—dust floating in space before coalescing into a planet, only an atom or two sticking together here and there. Nita used that spell now, pulling the words out of storage in the "pebble" charm on her bracelet, telling the ice and stone beneath her that their atoms were far enough apart for hers to slip between with no trouble.

  The ice rose past Nita and swallowed her up like a blur of fog, and the stone like darker fog, hotter, resisting a little, as the whole group dropped down in pursuit of the kernel. Further down they plunged, the shadowy mist of stone rushing up past Nita as if she'd jumped feet first into dark water. But it wasn't happening fast enough; the kernel was well ahead.

  Nita turned herself, swimming through the stone, diving through it as if it were the water off Jones Inlet, where she'd spent so much time lately. Far behind, she could sense the kernel more clearly, dropping toward

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  the discontinuity level, where the crust became the mantle and the lava under the planet's skin seethed. Can't let it get in there! Nita laid her arms back along her sides and let the increasing pull of gravity take her, worked to make an arrow or torpedo of herself. She was the smallest, the lightest of the pursuing wizards— Or maybe just being the youngest is enough, she thought, as slowly, slowly she got closer to the kernel's tangle of light. It was losing speed, as if the stone through which it sank was getting denser. It felt that way to Nita now, the stone more like water than mist, and then more like mud than water, but she didn't let that stop her. The kernel was just ahead of her now, just out of reach. The others were nowhere near it. Don't wait for them; they're not going to be here in time, just get it!

  With difficulty, as she arrowed down through the seething, thickening, darkening fire, Nita got her arms down and in front of her again, reached out. The kernel was slowing more... but so was she, and then the shock waves started to hit her. She'd known the boundary between crust and mantle would be like a wall, but she hadn't expected it to be as much a wall of violent vibration as one of heat. Now Nita could feel how the world shook where the rotating stony liquid of the upper core dragged itself against the underside of the relatively static crust in small rotating storms of liquid fire, like the spots in th
e atmosphere of Jupiter, just as dense, just as furious. The worst earthquakes imaginable were just the side effects of these, and Nita went straight through one after the kernel, blinded by the roaring swirling tumult of the fire.

  Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

  Something caught her from behind, braced her for just a precious moment and lent her power. The world went clear and hard and sharp as it had done earlier, and so did the kernel, a bright fierce tangle of power, just long enough for Nita to grab it in both hands. It fought her, unstable and willful as Kkirl had warned her, jumping and bucking and stinging in her hands as if trying to get away. Nita wouldn't let it, wouldn't drop it.

  Pralaya, Nita thought, knowing where that jolt of power had come from and not sure whether there was another one available. Where's Kkirl? What does she want to do with this thing?

  Hang on. She's coming.

  Together they hung on, though the storm of molten fire tore at them and tried to blow them around like leaves in a wind. Pralaya was feeding her strength, and Nita was glad of it. She wasn't sure how much longer she could hold on to the kernel, but abruptly the fire around her was disturbed by another presence, a swirl of color that wasn't so blinding, and the crooked little claw fingers hidden under the bends of Kkirl's wings caught hold of Nita's hands and the kernel, both at once.

  An eyeblink later Nita was seeing the kernel as Kkirl saw it, complex and dangerous, yes, but not too much so to never be mastered. Kkirl had been studying this problem for a long time, and she was ready. Those delicate little claws sank deep into the force-crackling knot of that world's heart and froze the kernel's processes in place for just the few seconds it would

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  take to enact what Kkirl had been planning all this while.

  Nita could see and feel how she was doing it, how Kkirl was reshaping the way the kernel called for the planet's upper mantle and lower crust to interact— thinning out some of the more massive areas near the core, redistributing the mass so that the planet's continental plates would move more slowly and evenly and resist the uneven tidal effects of the planet's moons. Nita watched what Kkirl was doing— manipulating the kernel like a Rubik's Cube and setting in place the changes she wanted, one after another, but not actually triggering them until they were all set up. Nita realized this technique was what she would need for her mom—using the kernel inside her mother to reshape the cancer viruses and render them harmless, or maybe even helpful. I'm so glad I came.

  Kkirl, better get on with it! Nita heard Pralaya thinking. He was running out of power to feed them. Ready in a moment, Kkirl said.

  / don't think we have that long! Nita said. She was still hanging on to the kernel along with Kkirl, but just barely; the thing was jerking and shaking in their hands and claws like a live thing, trying to tear free, resisting what was being done to it—

  Now I

  Kkirl turned loose the changes she had set into the kernel. A roar, a rumble all around as the old structures and energy flows tried to hang on just a little longer, as the new ones, shaky at first, started to assert themselves—then a terrible sudden shudder of that world, from the heart out, as everything started to fall into place. Let's get out of here! Pralaya shouted from behind them, and Nita let go of the kernel and started to struggle back up through the fire toward the surface, as the planet began restructuring itself.

  Getting up and out of the fiery turmoil seemed to take infinitely longer than getting down into it. The smoky fog of molten stone gradually lightened, then abruptly vanished as Nita broke up out of the ice and back into normal physical form, and her normal life-support sphere reasserted itself around her. She collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. The other wizards erupted out of the ice around her, each doing the same, as the reaction to the wizardry hit. Underneath them the ground shook, and the air was full of the groans, shrieks, and crashing noises of ice shattering for miles in every direction. Nita saw Kkirl stagger to her long thin feet, fling her wings up, and shout into the snowy air one long sentence in the Speech.

  The ground reared up, and Nita found herself sliding sideways down a slab of ice. Everything went dark, then bright again, the recall spell grabbing Nita and all the others and dumping them unceremoniously back onto the floor of the playroom. There they all slumped, lay, sloshed, or rolled gently from side to side for some moments, until one by one they started to recover.

  Kkirl was a bright, collapsed bundle of feathers, rising and falling gently in the middle with her breathing, but not moving otherwise. Nita managed to get to her feet, and went shakily over to put an arm around Kkirl. "You all right?"

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  A faint squeaking noise was all that came from inside the feathers, as Nita was joined by Pralaya, who put out a paw to one of Kkirl's splayed-out wings. "Thanks," Nita said to him. "I'd have dropped the kernel back there if you hadn't helped."

  "At least you caught it before it fell straight down into the core," Pralaya said. Kkirl's head came up on its long neck out of the huddle of bright feathers; she was blinking. "I don't know if that went the way it was supposed to...," Nita said, uncertain.

  "Oh, it did! It did!" Kkirl said, staggering to her feet again. She shook her feathers out and back into place, looking unsteady but cheerful. "It's going to take some hours for the planet's crust to quiet down; it was never going to start looking better right away. But the intervention worked; that world's saved at last! Thank you, cousins," she said, turning to all the others. "Thank you all!"

  There was a gradually rising hubbub of voices as the group who'd gone out with Kkirl recovered from what they'd done and other wizards still in the playroom came over to congratulate them. Nita, standing next to Pralaya, said to him, "I should head home... They're gonna be wondering what happened to me."

  "Don't be a stranger, cousin," Pralaya said. "We haven't had much time to deal with your problem today, after all."

  "Don't worry about that," Nita said. "I'll be back here tomorrow... I want to try out what I saw Kkirl do. I think it may work for my mom."

  Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

  "Then maybe I'll see you," Pralaya said, patting her with one of the middle paws. "Go well... and I hope you find her better."

  Nita nodded, shook out her transit-circle spell, and took herself home.

  After what she'd been through, her bedroom looked almost too ordinary and normal to be believed—so much so that tired and hungry as she was, and though she plopped right down onto her bed, she couldn't go to sleep. She tried briefly to get in touch with Kit but found that he was asleep. Then, out of curiosity, Nita paged through the manual to see what the listings on the other wizards looked like. They were all interesting enough—she had a brief chuckle over the concept of Pralaya having had thirty-six pups with his mate, nine at a time. But even after twenty minutes or so of reading, she didn't feel sleepy.

  Finally, still feeling listless and jangly, Nita got up again and went downstairs to get something to drink. As she turned the corner into the dining room, she was unnerved to find her dad sitting in a dining-room chair, in the dark, with the phone's receiver in his hand. It was beeping disconsolately, in the manner of a phone that should have been hung up a long time before.

  Nita swallowed hard with sudden fear, took the receiver away from him, and hung it up. "Daddy, what is it?"

  He looked up at her, as scared as she was. "It was the hospital." Nita's stomach instantly tied itself into a

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  knot. "Mom had some more seizures after we left," her father said.

  "Oh no," Nita said. Whatever small feelings of success she had had after the long evening's work had run out of her in about a second, leaving her completely terrified again. "Is she okay?"

  "They got them to stop, yeah," her father said. "But it took longer this time. Honey, she's got to have that surgery as soon as she can."

  "It's still going to be Saturday?"

  "Yes. But is that going to be soon enough?"r />
  Nita didn't know what to say. Her father looked up at her. "How was... whatever you were doing?"

  "It was pretty good," Nita said, but now she wasn't so sure. "I need some more practice before Saturday, but I think I'm going to be able to help."

  Her father didn't answer, just rubbed his face with both hands. He doesn't believe me, Nita thought. But he doesn't want to say so. "Daddy," she said, "you should go to bed. If Mom sees you're tired out, it's gonna get her worried."

  He sighed, looked up at her. "You really do remind me of her sometimes," he said. "You two nag in exactly the same way."

  "Thanks loads," Nita said. "Go on, Dad. Get some sleep. We'll go see her tomorrow afternoon." He nodded, got up, went off to bed. But he won't sleep, Nita thought.

  And for a long time, neither did she.

  Wednesday

  NITA MORE OR LESS sleepwalked through school the next day. She got spoken to several times for not paying attention. All she could really think about during school was seeing her mom in the hospital that afternoon, and then getting back into the practice universes and following up on what she'd seen Kkirl do with the kernel the day before.

  She looked for Kit during the day but didn't see him, and there was no sign of him at the school gates when she started for home, and no note for her in the manual. Maybe he's at the other gates, Nita thought, and retraced her steps to the gates on the north side of the school. But he wasn't there, either. She'd tried shooting him a thought earlier, without response; now she tried it again. Still nothing...

  For a change of pace, and on the off chance she might find Kit coming back from one of his other friends' houses, Nita went home the back way. It was a slightly longer route than her usual one, but it gave her a little time to mull over what she'd seen and felt Kkirl doing with the kernel. But there's no way to tell if Mom's kernel is going to behave like that one did, Nita thought. She really hoped it wouldn't. Without Pralaya's help and Kkirl's, she wouldn't have been able to hold the kernel for long—and Kkirl had had lots of time to plan what she was going to do. Help is going to be a real good idea on this, she thought. Glad Kit's gonna be there.