by Diane Duane
Damn straight I’m not, Nita thought.
“It’s not a good thing, not a bad thing, just what’s so,” Millman said. “But you might want to think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past. Or might produce again in the future.”
“Right,” Nita said. Whatever good humor had come and gone during the course of the morning’s session, it was gone for good now. She picked up the cards, got up, and stalked out, making her way to her first-period class.
Right through history class, and right through the English literature class that followed it, Nita stewed. She was furious with herself for having lost her temper over Millman and the card tricks.
She was furious that she had let him see how furious she was. She was furious over the maddeningly calm and evenhanded way he had dissected her anger. She would almost have preferred that he yell at her. At least she would have had an excuse to walk out of there ready to, as her mother used to put it, “chew nails and spit rust.” She was so madNita stopped, literally, in midthought.
“What result this kind of emotion has produced in the past…”
She thought of the fury and desperation that had driven her, in the time before her mother’s death, to try the most impossible things to stop what was happening. And they still didn’t stop.
But some amazing things happened, anyway.
She had gone from world to world and finally from universe to universe, learning to hunt down and manipulate the kernels that controlled those universes‘ versions of natural law. And now she had to admit that it had been her grief and anger at what was happening to her mother that had made her as effective as she’d become.
The thought unnerved her. Nita wasn’t used to thinking of anger as a tool. It had always seemed like something you didn’t want to get accustomed to using, in case it started to become a habit, or started twisting you and your wizardry in directions you didn’t want to go. But if you’re careful, she thought, if you stay in control, if you manage it carefully enough — maybe it’s okay to use it just every now and then. Maybe managing it, rather than letting it manage you, is the whole idea—
Nita sat there staring fixedly at the blackboard. Her English teacher was illustrating the scansion of a sonnet there, but Nita wasn’t really seeing it. Okay, she thought. I forgive Millman his dumb card tricks. He’s given me something useful here. Now I just have to use it…
The bell rang, and her English class filtered out, muttering about the pile of sonnets they’d been given to analyze by the end of the week. Nita’s next class was statistics; she shouldered her book bag and wandered out into the hall, unfocused. Her anger was still running high, but it was strangely mixed with a sense of readiness. Nita couldn’t get rid of the feeling that time was suddenly of the essence, that she had to make the best of her present emotional state — in which she had been given a weapon that was primed and ready to go, a weapon too good to waste.
I don’t want to lose this
, Nita thought, making a sudden decision. This is important. I’m going to ditch the rest of my classes. I don’t care if they call Dad. He’ll know what’s going on.
Meanwhile, I need somewhere private to teleport from.
Nita hurried for the girls’ room. Between periods it was always full of people who didn’t feel like going through the hassle of getting a hall pass in their next period, and as Nita pushed into the smaller of the two girls’ rooms on that floor, she saw a couple of girls she knew there: Janie from her chemistry class and Dawn from gym. She nodded and said hi to them, found herself a stall, and sat down on the rim of the toilet, keeping the stall door pushed closed with her foot.
Well
, this is one of the less dignified moments in my practice of the Art, Nita thought, resigned.
Nonetheless, she sat and waited. As the five-minute period between classes went by, the room outside the stall door got very briefly busy, then less busy… then the room emptied out altogether. A few seconds later, the beginning-of-period bell rang. Okay, Nita thought, standing up, here’s my opportunity.
The door to the hallway pushed open a little. “Room check,” said an adult voice.
Nita flushed hot with annoyance. It was one of the teachers who checked the toilets after the change-of-class bell to make sure no one was hiding in there and smoking or doing something even less healthy. Who needs this? Nita thought, getting furious all over again. Her hand went to her charm bracelet just as the teacher pushed open the stall door.
The teacher — it turned out to be one of the gym teachers, Ms. Delemond, a tall, blond, willowy lady— stared in at Nita, but saw nothing, because Nita had just climbed up on the toilet seat, to avoid the door, and had availed herself of the simplest way to be invisible. A second or so later, Ms.
Delemond turned away, went to check the next stall, and the next. Finally she went outside again, and Nita could hear her footsteps going down the hall.
Nita got down off the toilet and let out one small breath of annoyed laughter. Then she reached into her claudication pocket, came out with the long chain of the ready-made transit spell she kept there, and dropped it on the floor around her. The chain of words knotted itself closed and blazed with light…
Nita came out in a sheltered part of her backyard, ankle-deep in snow, and the air-pressure change caused by the air she had brought with her from school made snow fall off the trees above her and onto her head. She spluttered as the snow got down her collar, finding it funny and getting angrier by the second. Good. Use it. It’s a tool—
Nita’s house keys were inside her locker at school, along with her coat and her boots. Forget it, she thought as she went around into the driveway and up to her back door. She pulled the screen door open and put her hand against the wood of the inside door. “I just need to walk through you, if you don’t mind,” she said in the Speech, while she reached down to the charm bracelet for another wizardry she’d been keeping there, this one with a charm like a little cloud. “Is that okay? Thanks, just bear with me.”
She said the three words that turned the low-level dissociator loose. Nita waited a moment for the itching to set in — the sign that every atom in her body was willing to move aside for atoms of other substances. In this case, Nita wanted to walk through the atoms of the door. She went through it like so much smoke, itching fiercely all the way, and when she was standing inside the back door, she let the wizardry go, then just stood there and scratched for a few seconds until she felt like all her molecules had settled themselves back into place.
She headed upstairs to her room, got her manual, and lay down on the bed. This had better work, Nita thought, because Dad’s probably going to go intercontinental when he finds out I cut school.
But I can’t help it. What’s the use of behaving myself and losing my best friend?
She lay there and realized it was just too bright for her even to think about going to sleep. Nita opened her manual, went to the energy-management section, and turned pages until she found the wizardry she wanted.
She recited it, feeling the universe leaning in around her, paying attention, slowly muting down the light in her room as if someone was turning down a dimmer switch. Anyway, this is all my fault, she thought as the room got darker and darker. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own troubles, I’d have been with Kit on this job from the start. Yeah, okay, I have a right to grieve. But do I have a right to dump my friends until I’m finished with it, until it’s convenient to listen to them, to care about them again? If I’d listened to Kit—
“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Nita had said. And “Now you know how he felt before,” Dairine had said to her, as blunt as always, and accurate. Kit had come right out and said that he wished he had backup on this job. She’d ignored him, and he’d gone ahead with what he was doing and gotten in too deep. I should have been paying attention to what was going on around me, no matter how awful I felt. I’ve been indulging myself. I’ve almost been having fun hurting. That’s so stup
id.
Nita stopped herself. There was no point in rerunning the “guilt movies.” They always ended the same way. And a new guilt movie was no better than the old ones.
But she was still left with her anger at herself. Nita lay there just breathing, just feeling it, letting it build. Well, she’d been in too deep herself, not long ago, unable to see the trouble she was getting into… and Kit had pulled her out. Now she was going to be able to return the favor. But it wasn’t about scorekeeping at all; there were much more important issues. I’ve already lost one of the most important people in my life. I’m not going to lose another!
Nita was briefly distracted by the burning at her wrist and throat.
She glanced down in surprise. All the charms on her bracelet, the symbols for all the prefabricated spells she was carrying, were glowing considerably brighter than usual. And the necklace of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was running hot, too.
“Think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past,” Millman had said. “Or might produce again in the future.”
Nita smiled a small angry smile.
I could get to like this
, she thought. Maybe it’s better if I don’t But today… today, I’m going to like it a lot.
She closed her eyes and pushed all her available power into the lucid-dreaming spell.
Nita’s intention and the force of her anger briefly turbocharged the spell, and it drowned her consciousness in dream. The effect wouldn’t last, she knew, as she opened her eyes in a different darkness; the spell would relapse to its normal levels momentarily, but it wouldn’t matter. She’d stay asleep. The important thing was that she was dreaming now.
She stood there again by herself in that great dark space inside Darryl. Far off to one side, somewhere, she knew that the infinitely obstructive white wall was waiting. But this time she wasn’t going to waste her time: There was more important business.
For a long few moments Nita quieted herself, opening her mind to listen, as she’d been taught.
Then, eyes closed, self-blinded, she turned, waiting for the sensation she knew would come.
It took less time to find it than she’d hoped it would. Nita had been banking on the idea that Darryl’s grasp of worldbuilding was instinctive, not studied, and that if he even realized the heart of his universe for what it was, he wouldn’t have thought to hide it. And he hadn’t. When she finally sensed what she was looking for, Nita took the time to actually walk to it, not wanting to attract any possible unwanted attention by using a transit spell. She was glad that the spot she was hunting was only a couple of miles away, not a couple of light-years.
She knew it by feel when she reached it, which was just as well; physically and visually it was indistinguishable from any other part of that tremendous darkness. Nita grinned, though, as she came close, feeling up close the faint, lively, burning, buzzing sensation she’d been seeking. She rolled up her sleeve, thrust her arm elbow-deep into the darkness, felt around for a moment, and came out with a bright, tight, surprisingly large tangle of silvery light.
“Will you look at this,” Nita said under her breath, turning the kernel over in her hands and looking closely at it to identify its major structural elements. The complexity of this kernel was by and large on a par with other personal kernels Nita had seen before. A couple of its sections were devoted to the mere physical business of running a human body. One of them seemed oddly augmented. Maybe this is how an abdal does his co-location, Nita thought. He’s got an extra set of
“body software” in here. Interesting.
But the power conduits were the real surprise. They were huge, far bigger than a physical universe’s own conduits would have been, and they pulsed silently and blindingly with such force that Nita found it hard to look at them. This is what an abdal uses. Or doesn’t even have to use; just has. There’s enough power in here, of enough kinds, to do… incredible things.
Even to keep the Lone Power shut up inside for a while…
Nita shook her head. This much power could be used for a lot more important things than that, though. And she noted one more thing, now that she had the kernel in her hands. She teased some of the power strands out a little and looked closely at one tightly braided chain of characters that glowed calmly right at the heart of the kernel. It was the core representation of the Wizard’s Oath, the heart of an Ordeal; and it was complete.
Nita grinned with sheer pleasure at having been right, remembering her earlier thought that Darryl didn’t have that tentative quality about his use of his wizardly abilities. So, she thought, he’s already passed his Ordeal. Let’s get moving!
She turned the kernel over in her hands once more, finding the little strand of light that was the spell Darryl had, however unwittingly, enacted to create the wall. Nita pulled it a little way out of the kernel, like someone teasing loose one strand from a ball of knitting wool, and twisted it in such a way as to cause that spot to become this one.
Instantly the internal laws of that universe changed accordingly, so that Nita looked up and found herself staring at the wall.
She walked right at it as if it wasn’t there. And when she touched it, it wasn’t. It evaporated in front of her. The wall knew that the key to the physical structure of its universe was right in front of it, in the possession of a living being. Cooperatively, it got out of her way.
“Thank you,” Nita said. She placed the kernel in her otherspace pocket and kept walking. In front of her the view opened up, distant and glittering, a view of what appeared to be a forest of glass trees, shining in that sourceless light she’d come to recognize.
Nita walked toward the forest, listening to the voices that she’d heard before in Darryl’s worlds, and that were here, too, louder than they’d been before, an endless rush of them. If she let them, they blended into a white-noise sound like wind or water, indecipherable. But if she concentrated, they did make sense.
“—get tired of waiting sometimes, you know?” said one of them, a man’s voice, Nita thought.
“Sometimes I wonder whether any of it matters at all.”
“Of course it matters,” said another voice, a softer one, sadder, but more certain of itself. “We have to keep doing what we’re doing. Someday…”
The voices got steadily more distinct as Nita got closer to the forest. Soon she saw that it wasn’t a forest of trees, but of mirrors. “Someday! But no one can tell us when that day’s going to be. No one has the slightest idea! And we’re the ones who know him best. We’re the ones who ought to be able to tell. For a while there it looked like it was working. A little. But since autumn, it’s like we’ve hit a brick wall or something. No change. I can’t help but think… can’t help but think that maybe there’s not going to be any more change. That this is as good as it’s ever going to get. That he’s going to be this way forever—”
The voice broke off, choked with pain.
“You know they told us this was likely to happen,” said the other voice. “That there’d be plateaus… times when nothing would seem to happen for a long time.”
“But this long?”
“Every case is different, they said. You know that, too.” A long pause. “We have to have faith, honey. If we don’t, if we lose it, no one else’s faith is going to help.”
The voices sounded two ways to Nita. On one hand, they were like any conversation she might have heard on the street. On the other, there was a terrible poignancy about them. Hearing their words was like being thrust through the heart with knives. I’m hearing this not just as I would, Nita thought, but as Darryl would. And possibly seeing his inner world as he does, too. Far from drawing her into Darryl’s trap for the Lone Power, this seemed to be giving her a kind of immunity. Good. If that just lets me see a way out
…
As she came closer to the fringes of the “forest,” Nita saw that the trees weren’t exactly just mirrored, either. They were half-mirrored. She could see partway through them, out
their other sides, to the shapes that walked among them. And there were only four of those.
Two of them she knew instantly: Her heart seized at the sight of them. Ponch and Kit were wandering, sightless — or rather, it was Kit who looked and walked like someone blind, or like someone afraid to look at what he saw around him. Ponch walked ahead of Kit like a Seeing Eye dog, seeing for both of them. But something about the way the light fell on him made Nita wonder whether Ponch somehow saw more, in this chilly and sterile landscape, than any of them. What is it with him
? she wondered. He hadn’t been able to tell her the other day. Nita remembered Carmela telling her what Kit had said, that there was some kind of “wizardry leakage” going on in his household. Suddenly she felt sure that what was happening with Ponch was more than just a symptom of this.
She paused, watching the other two figures wander around separately in the light shining on and reflecting from the half-mirrored trees. One of them was small and dark, in jeans and a polo shirt. He looked less lost than Kit and Ponch… or the final figure.
That last figure was tall and looked human. He was slender, well-built, and extremely handsome.
Nonetheless, Nita couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of the Fairest and Fallen, the Lone Power, looking, in the dark suit he was wearing, like a businessman lost in a strange city and doomed to wander around because he was too proud to ask for directions.
The shudder passed, though. Nita’s anger was still running high enough to wash it out and leave her mind clear. All right, she thought. Nothing bad has happened yet. Let’s think about what to do.
Let’s…
Nita’s head jerked up, looking for the source of the word, and her hand went to her bracelet again. A second later she was holding the linac weapon, ready to discharge.
I am on errantry