by Diane Duane
! Ponch said.
“One,” Kit said. He gave Ponch the last dog biscuit in the box, put the book aside, and got up to throw the box away.
“The onions done yet?” his mama said.
“Nearly,” said Kit’s pop, as Kit stomped the box flat to make it go in the trash can. Behind Kit, the emphatic crunching noises by the sofa came to an end, and Ponch ran into the kitchen. Out?
“Sure,” Kit said, opening the door. A fierce cold wind came in as Ponch shot out.
“Shut that, sweetie. It’s freezing!” Kit’s mama said.
“Gonna snow tonight, they said on the TV,” said Kit’s pop, picking up the frying pan in which the onions had been sizzling, and scraping them out into the soup as Kit shut the door.
“A lot?” Kit said.
“Six to eight inches.”
Kit sighed. It wouldn’t be anything like enough to make them keep school closed on Monday.
That would take at least a few feet. Not for the first time he wished that it wasn’t unethical to talk a snowstorm into dumping three feet of snow onto his immediate neighborhood. It was fun to think about, but the trouble he would have gotten into with Tom and Carl, not to mention the Powers That Be, would have made the pleasure short-lived.
Still, if I told the snowstorm to dump, say, twelve feet of snow just on the school, and then only enough everywhere else so that everybody could have fun for a day; say six inches or so…
Kit sighed again. Though such a course of action would be less trouble to the snowplow crews, the emergency services, and everybody else who wanted to go on about their lives, something like that would cause a whole lot of talk, and still get him in trouble. But the image of his school completely buried under a giant snowdrift made him smile. “By the way, Pop,” Kit said, “is the TV still okay?”
“Seems fine,” his pop said. “Every now and then the thing insists on showing me a news program from some other planet, but…” He shrugged. “As long as nothing happens to interfere with the basketball games over the weekend, I don’t mind seeing who’s grown a new head or whatever.
Darlin‘, you know what I need?”
“Less time on the couch watching basketball?” Kit’s mama suggested.
“Dream on. Celery seed.”
“We’re out of it.”
“You’re just saying that because you hate celery.”
“I know celery seed is different from celery, or celery salt. But we’re still out of it. Look for yourself.”
Kit’s pop went to the cupboard to look. Kit, looking at his mama, thought that her expression was far too innocent. She caught him looking at her, and said, “Isn’t Ponch a long time out, Kit? He hates being out this long when it’s cold. But he hasn’t scratched.”
She had a point there, though Kit thought she was more intent on him not saying anything incriminating about celery seed. Kit grinned. “I’ll go see what he’s doing,” he said, and got his winter jacket off the hook.
He went out, shutting the door hurriedly behind him, and looked up and down the driveway for Ponch. To his surprise, Ponch was sitting at the street end of the driveway, looking up at the sky.
Kit walked down to him, looking up, too. The clouds were, indeed, coming in low and fast from the south on that wind. Past and above the houses across the street, only a few streaks and scraps of the low sunset remained in the west, a bleak, bleached peach color against the encroaching stripes of dark gray. Westward, the reddish spark of Mars could just be seen through the filmy front edges of one of the incoming banks of cloud.
Ponch looked over his shoulder at Kit as Kit came to stand next to him. “You okay?” Kit said to him in the Speech.
Pretty much.
Kit wondered about that. “I mean, about what happened the other day.” He reached down to scratch the dog’s head.
I think so.
The clouds drew together in the west, blanking Mars out, slowly shutting down the last embers of the sunset. “What did happen?”
I saw something.
“Yeah? What was it?”
Not that way
, Ponch said. I mean, I noticed something. I never really noticed it before.
Kit waited.
You get hurt sometimes
, Ponch said. That makes me sad.
“Yeah, well, I get sad when you’re hurt, too.”
That’s right. And your dam and your sire and your littermates, they hurt sometimes, too. So does Nita. I noticed that. But it didn’t seem to matter as much as you hurting.
Ponch paused for a long time. But then I saw him: Darryl. And what That One was doing to him, and how it hurt him. And he didn’t do anything to deserve that. It was awful, the way he was hurting.
And that started to hurt me. And then I thought, Why doesn’t the others’ hurt make me feel like this?
And then I felt bad about myself.
Kit hardly knew what to say. It wasn’t that it was a bad thing for his dog to learn about compassion, but that the lesson would come all at once, like this, came as a surprise.
And the others didn’t deserve to be hurt, either
, Ponch said, looking up at Kit. Nita didn’t do anything bad, for her mother to die. Why should she be hurt like that? Why should Dairine? Or your sire or dam?
They’re good. Why do they have to suffer when they haven’t been bad? It’s not fair!
Kit bowed his head. This line of reasoning all too closely reflected some of his own late-night thoughts over the past couple of months. And all the easy answers — about the Powers That Be and the Lone Power, and all the other additional theories or answers that might be suggested by either religion or science— suddenly sounded hollow and pathetic.
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I really don’t know.”
I felt sad for them all, Ponch said. Sad for everything, because it shouldn’t have to be that way.
All of a sudden I had to howl, that’s all
He looked embarrassed.
Kit couldn’t think of anything to do but get down on one knee and hug Ponch, and ruffle his fur.
After a moment Ponch said, I’m not going to howl now. It’s all right.
“I know,” Kit said. But he wasn’t sure that it was “all right.”
Ponch looked at him again. 5b what do we do? he said. To make it right?
That answer, at least, Kit was sure of. “Just get on with work,” he said. “That’s what wizards do.”
And their dogs.
“And their dogs,” Kit said. “After dinner tonight, huh? We’ll go looking for Darryl again. We’ll see if we can’t get a word with him… find out what’s going on. Then he can get himself out of there, and we can get back to doing what we usually do.”
Right.
They walked back up the driveway together, and Kit let Ponch into the house, hurriedly shutting the door. The wind outside was beginning to rise. He ditched his coat in a hurry, because his pop had already carried the soup pot to the table, setting it on a trivet, and his mama was putting out bowls and spoons. “No Carmela tonight?” Kit said, because there were only three bowls.
“No, she’s over at Miguel’s with some of the other kids. A homework thing.” His mama sat down, took her spoon, and tasted the soup as Kit’s pop sat down.
“Oh, honey, that’s so good!” his mama said. “Even without the celery seed. Who’d believe most of it came out of a can? What else did you put in there?”
“Genius,” Kit’s father said, and grinned.
Kit was inclined to agree. He finished his first bowl in record time, and reached for the ladle to serve himself some more.
“Another satisfied customer,” his pop said.
Kit nodded, already working on the second bowl.
“You’ve got that fueling-up look,” his pop said, as he chased the last few spoonfuls of soup around his own bowl. “You going out on business tonight, son?”
“Yup.”
“How long?”
“Not late,” Kit said. “I don
’t think, anyway. Back by bedtime.”
“Yours, or mine?”
“Mine, Pop.”
“Good,” his dad said. “What you’re doing is important… and so is getting your rest.” His father gave him what Kit usually thought of as “the eye,” a faintly warning look. “You’re looking a little pooped, this past day or so. Try to relax a little over the weekend, okay?”
“If I can,” Kit said.
His pop looked like he was going to say something, then changed his mind, and reached for the ladle himself. “Hey, who took all the beans?”
“That would be me,” Kit’s mama said.
“Now I’m going to have to make another pot of this!”
“How terrible for us all,” she said.
Kit finished his own bowlful and, smiling, got up and put his bowl in the sink. Then he went to get his parka and Ponch’s “leash.”
They stood out in the backyard a little while later, in the near darkness, and Kit looked down at Ponch. “Ready?” he said.
All ready.
“You’ve got Darryl’s scent?”
It’s faint
, Ponch said. We’re going to have to walk for a while.
Kit checked the force-field spell, which he had integrated into the leash-wizardry, and saw that it was charged, up and running; it would keep hostile environments out for a good while, and protect the two of them from deadly force for at least long enough to come up with a better, more focused defense. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Ponch pulled the bright leash of wizardry taut, stepped forward, and vanished into a darkness deeper than anything in Kit’s backyard. Kit stepped after him; the blackness folded in all around.
They did, indeed, have to walk for some time. Kit kept a careful eye on the line of wizardry stretching between him and Ponch, watching to make sure that it was drawing power correctly, and that the faint “diagnostic” glow of light running up and down it was doing so regularly. Beyond that, there wasn’t much for Kit to do for a long while except keep walking through the dark, watching the ever-so-faintly illuminated shape of his dog as Ponch led the way.
A whispering sound — very faint, seemingly very far away — was the first thing that Kit started to notice as differing from the darkness and silence surrounding them. It was incessant, a soft whitenoise hiss at a high frequency, but every now and then Kit thought he heard words in it. Am I just imagining that
? he thought as the hiss got louder around them. “You hear that?” he said to Ponch.
The wind
? Ponch said. Yes. It’s up ahead, where Darryl is. We’ll be there soon.
“I mean, do you hear something besides the wind? The voices?”
Ponch paused a moment, cocked his head to one side. No, he said. Not right now, anyway. Let’s get there and see if I hear it then.
They started walking again. Quite suddenly, as if they’d walked through a curtain, Kit and Ponch were surrounded by blue-white light. Kit stopped, looking around him, blinking. After the darkness, this brilliance was dazzling.
At least there was gravity, though it felt lighter than Earth’s; and he knew there was an atmosphere, because Kit could hear sound from outside his force field: the hiss of the wind. But he wasn’t convinced that the atmosphere was breathable, especially because he could feel the cold outside, even through the force field. The air on the far side of the force field was full of blue-white smoke, or fog, moving fast, blown by the wind, and there was more blue-white stuff underfoot. “It’s like being inside a lightbulb,” Kit said.
If it is, then I’ll avoid it in the future
, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. It smells bad here.
The wind dropped off briefly, and Kit was able to look out of the lightbulb and see that the two of them had stepped into a snowfield. Except that snow isn’t blue, Kit thought. Ponch, though insulated from the cold around them by the force field, nonetheless shifted uncertainly from foot to foot in the robin’s-egg blue stuff. Kit felt the odd soft squeak of it under his sneakers, and understood Ponch’s confusion. It feels more like talcum powder than snow. Or, no, more like cornstarch — for that strange squeaky sensation persisted no matter how the stuff packed under Kit’s feet.
The wind rose again, reducing the visibility to nothing as it picked the snow up and started blowing it around in the air. The snow was as fine as powder on the wind, finer than any powdery snow that Kit had ever seen, even in blizzard conditions. The stuff piled and drifted in spherical sections around Kit’s force field, gathering like swirls of smoke, abruptly dissipating again like smoke blown away. Suddenly Kit realized what he was seeing, and realized, too, why the snow’s texture was so strange. This isn’t water snow. It’s too cold here for that. This is methane…
The wind howling around them gusted for a few breaths more, blowing the blinding snow shrieking past Kit and Ponch, and then dropped off once more, just briefly giving Kit the wider view again as the snow drifted back out of the air to the ground. We might as well call it air, Kit thought, though he knew that if he tried to breathe it at this temperature, it would freeze his lungs to solid blocks of blood and water ice. He popped his manual open to a premarked page for reading environmental conditions and let it take a moment to do its sensing while he turned in a circle, looking at the landscape.
There wasn’t much of it. Nearby, black crags of stone stood up here and there, shining with blue ice that seemed almost to glow on its own in this fierce sourceless light. Kit glanced up at the sky, wondering whether there was a star up there somewhere, on the far side of what might be a
“greenhouse” layer like Venus’s upper atmosphere. But there was always the possibility that this wasn’t a planet at all — just some kind of Euclidean space, another dimension that just went on eternally in all directions. Whichever it is, he thought, it has weather, and the weather’s bad. Even Titan’s weather is better than this.
Kit glanced at the manual page again, read the words in the Speech that began to spell themselves out there.
Nitrogen atmosphere. No oxygen. Methane and some other hydrocarbons frozen out to make the snow
… Kit shivered despite the force field: The temperature outside was about two hundred degrees below zero centigrade.
“I’m glad I brought a coat,” he said softly.
I wish I could grow mine thicker, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. I didn’t like that other place, the hot one, but it was better than this.
“Believe me, we won’t stay long,” Kit said. “Just long enough to talk to Darryl.” The contrast between the room-temperature range that the two of them needed to function and the temperature of the space around them was as extreme as the difference between room temperature and a blowtorch… and this meant that keeping his own environment and Ponch’s tolerable would require Kit to spend a lot of energy in a hurry. He was going to have to keep a close eye on the energy levels of the force field; this was no kind of place to have it fail suddenly. Whether they were genuinely in some other universe or just inside Darryl’s mind, the cold would kill them both in seconds if their protection failed. “Let’s get going. Where in all this is he?” Kit said to Ponch.
That way
, Ponch said, turning. The contrast in temperatures stands out. But so do other things.
There’s company here.
“The same company as last time?”
The same. A heart of cold.
“Great,” Kit said under his breath. “Well, let’s head that way. I’ll put the stealth spell up around us again, though in these conditions, it may not work a hundred percent.”
If you could make the wind drop…
It was worth a try. Kit paged quickly through his manual to the environmental management section and looked for the spells that involved short-term weather control. He found one that looked likely, started to recite it— And then stopped, shocked. Something that had accompanied every spell he’d ever done, that growing, listening silence — as the
universe started to pay attention to the Speech used in its creation — was suddenly missing.
Blocked
, Kit thought. But how?! Not even the Lone Power Itself should have been able to keep a wizardry from executing. Once executed, of course, it might fail, but—
Kit tried the spell again, and again got no result. Yet his force field was working fine. If it hadn’t been, he and Ponch would both have been frozen solid by now.
“Weird,” Kit said, closing the manual for the moment. “Looks like this environment’s been instructed not to let itself be altered.”
Could the Lone One have done that?
Kit shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Never mind
, Ponch said. I don’t need to see, to lead us. And as for the Lone One… Ponch’s nose worked. It’s distracted, Ponch said. And Darryl’s moving. Come on.
Ponch pulled on the leash, and Kit followed him across the squeaking blue snow, while every now and then a new and ferocious gust of wind blue-whited everything out. “Snow tonight,” a voice said from somewhere immeasurably distant.
“You heard it that time, right?” Kit said.
I heard something
, Ponch said. And then he paused in midstep. I hear something besides that, too.
Kit waited.
Wings—
Kit listened, but couldn’t make anything out except that the wind was rising, the hiss scaling up to a soft roar. The last time he’d heard a wind like this was when the hurricane had come through three years ago. The hurricane, though, had at least sounded impersonal in its rage. The sound of this wind had a more intimate quality, invasive, as if it was purposely pointed at Kit. And the voices were part of it.
“—won’t be able to—”
“—and in local news tonight—
“—wish I could understand why, but there’s no point in even asking, I guess—”
“—come on, love, we need to get this on you. No, don’t do that. Remember what we talked about—”
The voices somehow both spoke at normal volume and screamed in Kit’s ears, intrusive, grating, maddening. He couldn’t shut them out. He opened his manual and hurriedly went through it to the section that would allow him to soundproof the force field, for the voices were scaling up into the deafening range now, an ever increasing roar. The noise wasn’t just made up of voices, either. Music was part of it, too, but music gone horribly wrong, screeching at him, and also sounds that might have come from Kit’s own house, a door closing, someone opening a drawer, sounds that were magnified past bearing, intolerable—