A Wizard Alone yw[n&k-6

by Diane Duane

  The kid looked at her with an expression that wasn’t entirely convinced. “It’s tried a lot of costumes in Its time,” he said. “It looks out of everybody’s eyes. I tried looking back for so long… but I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to get away by myself.” He looked away from Nita again. “At least when I’m all by myself, It can’t get at me. Everybody wants me to come out, I know… but every time I do, It’s waiting, and I just can’t. It hurts too much.”

  Nita said nothing. Finally, after what seemed ages of silence, he turned toward her. He didn’t quite look at her as he said, “It’s looking out of your eyes, too. It’s always been close to you. Lately It’s been closer than ever.”

  Nita swallowed hard. This would not be the moment to break down. “You’re not the only one It chases around, you know,” she said. “It’s after everybody else, too, one way or another. Eventually It gets us all. But if we pay attention to what we’re doing, we can make a whole lot of trouble for It along the way.” And Nita couldn’t help grinning a little, however strange that felt. If she had one satisfaction in her life these days, it was the knowledge that the Lone Power found her a personal pain in the butt, annoying enough to try to do one of Its crooked deals with.

  The kid looked up at Nita with startling suddenness, and she caught the force of his glance fullon as he grinned back. “I know,” he said.

  Nita actually had to stagger back a step to keep her balance, mentally and physically. Meeting his gaze was like being hit over the head with a brick, but a good brick — an abrupt, concentrated, overwhelming onslaught of cheerful power with a slight edge of mischief in it. Nita had hardly ever felt so intense a wash of emotion or attitude from any being, human or otherwise.

  “I know,” he said again. “I’m doing just that. I do it all the time, now.” If anything, his grin got more jubilant, though he looked away again. “And it’s a whole lot of fun.”

  Nita was on the point of saying, Don’t start enjoying it too much—and then stopped herself as she saw his smile start to fade. The sight pierced her to the heart. “But I always have to make sure I stop having the fun before It notices,” he said. “Every time I find out again that I’m not alone, I let the knowledge go.”

  That explains it. That’s why he keeps forgetting things, and has to ask questions over and over.

  “But why?” Nita said.

  “Because it’s what always happened when things got bad for me,” the boy said, “when It first turned up in my life, the way It turns up at the bottom of everything bad. I was fine, I always knew who I was… until the world started screaming at me, making it impossible to think, to be with people… to be. I would forget myself, again and again. I couldn’t help myself. I would forget everything that hurt… and everything that didn’t. But then that started to change. I started to remember again, for a while. And It was still in here with me.”

  His eyes glinted with brief amusement. “Then I saw how to repay the little ‘favor’ It did me. It can’t stop coming back to deal with me… and I never let It close the deal.” He grinned. “The only problem is that I keep getting better, keep sliding back toward the way things used to be when I was normal. And every time, to keep It interested, I have to let go of a world that has other people in it…”

  “Don’t let it go!” Nita said. “Not being alone is the best part of being a wizard!” She swallowed.

  “Or just being a person.”

  “Am I a wizard?” he said, a little sadly.

  Nita shook her head in admiration. “If you can speak in the Enactive Recension, you’re sure on the right track!”

  The growl out in the dark sounded more annoyed now, and it prolonged itself, not fading away.

  “It’s been following me around,” he said. “Around and around… It’s really funny. Especially when I forget.”

  I can’t get off

  , Nita remembered the clown crying in the dark. Now she began to wonder whether the despairing voice was all the boy’s… or some frustrated aspect of the Lone One’s.

  And her eyes widened. It’s been chasing him… and he runs and runs. All the time I’ve been assuming that it’s the Lone Power in control here. And maybe it’s not…!

  He started to fade out. “Wait! Don’t leave yet!” Nita cried.

  “I have to. It’ll realize something different is happening if I stay here too long.”

  “Then at least don’t let yourself go again!”

  “I have to,” he said. “If I don’t, It’ll realize what’s happening, and all this will have been for nothing.”

  He smiled that delighted smile as he turned away. Then he was gone. Nita found herself standing alone in the darkness, and nearby a spotlight out of nowhere shone on the dark floor: just a pool of light. What briefly had made the light special was now gone.

  Oh my god

  , Nita thought.

  It really is him — the kid Kit’s been hunting. It’s Darryl! And now I think I understand “the Silence”

  ! she thought. Wizards got their information from the universe in a lot of different ways. On Earth alone, the manual in either its printed or online versions was only one method. Whale-wizards heard the Sea speak to them; the feline wizards had told Nita about something called the Whispering. This has to be like that…

  But she was still left with entirely too many mysteries to solve. Nita stood there wondering what in the worlds to do next, then shook her head.

  Waking up would probably be a good idea.

  It took Nita a few seconds to remember the way to break the dream without waiting for a normal awakening. When she opened her eyes, she was looking sideways at the wall beside her desk, having put her arms down on the desk and her head down on her arms as she initially slid into sleep.

  Nita rubbed her eyes, blinked, stretched. I’m completely wiped out, she thought. I’ve got to get some real sleep, now, or I’ll be useless tomorrow. But Kit’s got to hear about this.

  She glanced down at her manual. “What time is it?” she said.

  The page cleared and showed her the time in every zone on Earth, as a Julian date, and on all the planets in Sol system.

  “Show-off,” she said softly, glancing at the local time for New York. The readout said, “0223.”

  It was late, but this was important. Kit? Nita said silently.

  Nothing. But it wasn’t the “asleep kind of nothing: Kit was missing.

  “Message him,” she said to the manual.

  The page blanked itself, then showed Nita the words, “Subject is out of ambit.”

  That “error” message she now recognized. Kit and Ponch were off world-walking somewhere, out of this universe proper. Nita sighed. I’ll have to catch him in the morning, she thought. But bed first

  …

  She slept hard and deep, and for a change woke up not in the dark, but just after dawn. I still wish spring would hurry up

  , Nita thought as she swung her feet out of bed and rubbed her eyes. This winter seems to be lasting forever

  But at the same time, it was hard to dislike a morning like this, when there was what looked like six inches of new snow outside, and it was Saturday as well. The snow was wet, clinging delicately to the bare branches of the trees out in the backyard, and everything was very still, the sky a pure, clean blue behind the white branches. Who knows? Maybe I’ll sneak out there, make a snowball or two, and stick them in Dairine’s bed. Give her about three seconds of thinking I’ve had second thoughts about her, her bed, and Pluto.

  Nita threw last night’s sweatshirt and jeans on and went downstairs to the kitchen, manual in hand. Her father was there, making his own coffee for a change. He looked at Nita with some surprise when she came in. “You’re up early for a Saturday,” he said.

  “Not that early. I got some sleep for a change.”

  “You don’t look like it.”

  Nita yawned and stretched. “I don’t feel like it, either,” she said.

  “Just a long week at school,
maybe?”

  “I don’t know.” She went over to put the kettle on for herself. She ached all over, as if she’d had a particularly bad gym class, and she just felt generally weary. As if I was a long, long way away last night.

  But if that really was Darryl, then I was only two towns away, in his mind.

  Or possibly in an alternate universe he created, one a whole lot further away than that —

  “How are you coming with what you were working on yesterday morning?” Nita’s dad said.

  “Any progress?”

  “Yeah,” Nita said, “but I don’t understand it.” She opened a cupboard and tried to decide what kind of tea she wanted. She finally decided on mint, and got the tea box down, fishing around in it for the right tea bag.

  “Your alien, or the progress?”

  “Both. And it looks like it wasn’t even an alien, if I’m right. It’s a little kid who lives over in Baldwin.”

  Her father looked surprised at that as he went to get his coat from the rack by the door. “Another wizard?”

  “Supposedly not yet,” Nita said. “Assuming this is the person who I think it is. I have to check with Kit.” But that brought up another odd problem for Nita to consider. From her own experience, Nita knew that being on Ordeal imparted a certain tentative feel to your wizardry, even when your power levels were at their highest. Even Dairine’s use of wizardry, when she was on Ordeal, had exhibited that tentative quality. But it was completely missing in Darryl. That’s something else to ask torn and Carl about.

  Her dad put on his coat. “Well, that sounds encouraging, anyhow,” he said. He came over, gave her a hug and a kiss. “Leave me a note if you have to go anywhere. Is Dairine going to be getting involved in this?”

  “Jeez, I hope not,” Nita said. “It’s confusing enough already.”

  “Okay,” her dad said. “She has some school project she’s supposed to be working on this weekend. If you want to just have a look at one point or another and make sure she’s staying on track…”

  This was, in fact, the last thing Nita wanted, but she nodded. “I will.”

  “Thanks, baby girl. See you later.”

  Nita wasn’t sure, as her father went out, whether to bristle or smile. When’s the last time he called me “baby girl”

  ? she thought. It was one of those nicknames that Nita had complained about forcefully for years when she was younger, until her dad finally stopped using it. And now I’m not even sure I mind anymore

  , she thought. I wonder if somehow he’s trying to remind himself of how things were when Mom was still here.

  After a moment she laughed at herself for thinking such “shrinkly” thoughts. Millman is affecting me

  , Nita thought.

  She made a face then, as the kettle came to a boil. Oh god… Millman and the card tricks. But how long can it take to learn a card trick? I’ll do it later. I have other things to think about right now.

  Nita glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It read 7:48. A little early, but then Kit did tend to get up early on the weekends. Kit? she said.

  For a moment there was no response.

  Hnnnhhh?

  I’m not sure, but I think I may have found your guy.

  A pause. When he answered, he still didn’t sound incredibly awake. When?

  Last night. The time’s hard to judge, but I think it would’ve been around two-thirty.

  There was a much longer pause that made Nita think Kit might have gone back to sleep. Finally he said, It couldn’t have been. I was with Darryl around then.

  Nita blinked at that. You sure? she said.

  Yeah, I’m sure

  He sounded cranky. Neets, look, I’m completely wrecked, and I had trouble with my folks last night. I want to go back to sleep. Call me back, okay?

  Uh, sure, but —

  The connection between them didn’t so much break as dissolve in a returning wave of sleep.

  Nita stared at the tea bag in her hand, bemused. “Well,” she said.

  She made her tea and sat down at the dining room table with the mug, the manual, and a banana.

  Nita didn’t go straight into the manual, partly because she wasn’t yet clear on where she should start looking. She was still trying to sort out some things about her experience last night.

  There had just been something about Darryl. Nita kept coming back to the impact she’d felt when he’d finally looked right at her. It wasn’t power, not strength, in the usual sense. She was well down the cup of tea before she found the word she was looking for.

  Innocence…

  Talk about the innocence of childhood tended to pass right over Nita these days. Her own childhood was behind her — rather to her relief, because of all the beating up. And her memory of Dairine’s childhood was too fresh; anyone putting that concept and the word innocence together in the same sentence would simply have made Nita laugh. Her sister’s behavior aside, Nita knew perfectly well that most kids were no innocents.

  But then most of the talk you heard on the subject came from adults, most of whom were entirely too hung up on the concept of childhood as this pure, untroubled thing that Nita wasn’t sure had ever existed. Plainly, like the counselor that Dairine had been complaining about, too few of them really remembered what it was like to be seven, or nine, or twelve.

  Nita could understand that perfectly. Large parts of childhood hurt, and adults did with that remembered pain exactly what kids did when they could: Let whatever good memories they had bury it. Oh, the moments of delight, of pure joy, were there, all right, but what adults seemingly couldn’t bear was the idea that their whole childhoods hadn’t been that way, that the trouble and sorrow of their adult lives, the result of the Lone Power’s meddling in the worlds, wasn’t something they’d always had to deal with, right from the start. So despite whatever kids tried to tell them, adults just kept on reinventing childhood as something that was supposed to be happy all the time, a paradise lost in the past.

  Yet in very small children, there was something that Nita had to admit she’d seen… even, occasionally, in Dairine. Last night, in her dream, Nita had looked at Darryl and had seen the same thing in his eyes, unalloyed — a sense of living in the morning of the world, a time or place either uncorrupted or redeemed; unafraid, and with no reason to be afraid; a person grounded immovably in the sense that the world worked, was just fine, would always be fine—

  Poor kid

  , Nita thought. Wait till reality hits him. Yet, remembering the look in those fearless eyes, she found herself having an unaccustomed second thought. Reality might hit him, might, indeed, have hit him hard already — but it might be what shattered.

  Boy, would I like to be there to see that.

  Nita began to peel the banana. But all that aside, Kit said he was with Darryl when I was, Nita thought. So if he’s right, then who was I with?

  She took a bite of the banana and considered. And that’s not the only thing about this that’s strange. It’s Kit who’s been looking for him. If this really is Darryl, then why have I been seeing him, too?

  But now she thought she had an answer to that. The filter, Nita thought. We’ve both been holding the world at arm’s length… trying to get it to leave us alone

  She shook her head. And making ourselves more alone while we do it. But the wizardry knew what it was doing better than we did.

  One wizard alone found another one

  …

  Nita sat there for a moment, staring at the banana without really seeing it. Okay. But that brings up another question. If this is Darryl, then how come my visits to his world are so different from Kit’s?

  She had another bite of the banana, reflecting. Unless it’s just that I didn’t know that the person trying to contact me was autistic. I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about what the world would look like to him. So maybe I got something that was more like Darryl’s own ideas about himself…just translated into my own images: the uncomplicated, scared-kid
stuff. Whereas Kit’s been getting stuff that looks more like it belongs to someone really troubled… maybe because he’s known from the beginning that Darryl’s autistic.

  To Nita this sounded so commonsense that it seemed very likely to be true. So now if I could just figure out how Darryl can be with both me and Kit at the same time.

  Maybe he was time-slipping somehow

  ? Nita thought. But that would have taken a wizardry, and a considerable amount of power to fuel it. And the only thing Nita was now certain about, as far as her dream went, was that Darryl hadn’t actually been doing any wizardry at the time.

  No. Something else was going on…

  Nita finished the banana, got up to dump the skin in the kitchen garbage can, and came back to her tea and the manual again. What other ways are there for someone to be in two places at one time?

  She had to laugh at herself a little as she reached for the manual. It would be a great trick if you had a busy schedule

  , Nita thought. Or you could be in school taking a test while you were also lying on the beach with a good book, working on your tan.

  She started paging through the manual again, idly at first, then with more concentration. After about fifteen minutes of this, as the sun got brighter on the snow outside and the dining room filled with its light, Nita realized that she still wasn’t sure exactly how to find what she needed. She went to the back of the manual, to the page that handled search functions.

  “I need all the references that have to do with being in two places at one time,” she said.

  The page cleared itself, and new words appeared. “Apparition or co-location?”

  There it was, yet another word Nita hadn’t ever heard of before today. “Apparition first,” she said.

  “See highlighted section,” the page said, and her manual was abruptly about an inch thicker.

  “Oh, no,” Nita said. “I think I need another banana.”

  It took three more. Nita was grateful that Dairine seemed to be sleeping late, as she was the big banana fan in the house and would not have been pleased that Nita had made such inroads into the supply. The three bananas gave Nita time to discover, mostly by skimming the material as fast as she could, that there were an unnerving number of ways to appear in two places at once, if you felt like spending the energy. But that was the factor that kept everyone from doing it all the time. The universe had a basic bias against the same thing being in more than one place at once — this singularity of location being one of the ways that matter defined itself to begin with — and if you wanted to bend that bias in your favor, you would be heavily penalized, in terms of having to use a huge amount of effort to build a very complex spell.