A Wizard Alone yw[n&k-6

by Diane Duane

  Nita was laughing, too, but there was an edge of pain on the laughter. “I’m not sure I was bluffing,” she said. “I was just so angry right then that I believed it.”

  “You must have,” Kit said. “There’s no lying in the Speech. But Darryl…”

  He turned to Darryl in concern. “That’s the problem for you, guy. You promised to stay here.”

  “I did,” Darryl said.

  Nita let out a long, unhappy breath.

  “But this isn’t the only place I can be at the same time,” Darryl said softly.

  Nita’s head jerked up.

  “I thought I was hallucinating at first,” Darryl said. “Now I know it’s no hallucination. When the two of you started coming into my worlds, I was with you both at once.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if this is something most wizards can do—”

  “It’s not,” Kit and Nita said simultaneously.

  “But it’s real useful,” Kit said after a moment, intrigued. “Just think. If you were—”

  “Kit, maybe we should save it for later,” Nita said. This was a line of reasoning she didn’t want him to go too far down just now. “Why don’t we all get out of here first?”

  Darryl looked at Nita in shock. “But I can’t leave,” Darryl said. “The Ordeal isn’t over.”

  Nita looked at Kit, wondering if he’d realized the truth yet. From his blank look, it seemed he hadn’t. Then she looked at Darryl, and laughed out loud for sheer delight.

  “Sure it is!” Nita said. “You passed your Ordeal weeks ago! You passed it the minute you managed to say the Oath.”

  “Remember how you had to fight to get it out, word by word, phrase by phrase?” Kit said, slowly starting to grin. “How you kept losing it, forgetting it, having to start over again and again?”

  “That was the Lone One interfering,” Darryl said softly. He was wearing a listening look, as the Silence spoke to him.

  Slowly, his face changed, and the joy in it was so dazzling that Nita found it hard to bear, and had to look away.

  “That was the real battle,” he said. “And I won it! I won…”

  Nita had to smile, and for the first time in a long time, the smile didn’t feel like it would crack her face.

  Kit looked at Nita in some surprise. “I thought the Lone One only starts noticing a wizard when he first says the Oath.”

  “That’s how it is for most of us,” Nita said. “But it looks like not all Ordeals are alike.” She was still treading cautiously around anything that would get too close to the subject of abdals, until she could get Kit somewhere private and give him the lowdown. I’m pretty sure that since the Lone Power knew Darryl was an abdal, It wanted to keep him from taking the Oath any way It could, because who could tell how powerful he might become once he was a wizard? Maybe that’s even why Darryl became autistic in the first place; maybe the Lone One did that to him. But I’d better not get into that just now…

  “And just the act of saying the Oath, accepting it, for someone autistic…” Nita looked at Darryl with renewed admiration. “You have to accept the concept of the Other, that there are others, to do it at all. It must have been like eating broken glass.”

  Darryl stood there looking as if a whole new world was opening up before him, as if his past pain was retreating into the shadows. “It was hard,” he said. “The whole Oath is about doing things for other people…”

  “But, Neets,” Kit said. “Your manual, Tom’s, mine, they all say that Darryl’s still stuck in his Ordeal.”

  “Because he hadn’t realized it was over,” Nita said. “And because he just kept hitting the reset button in his brain, and losing his sense of self over and over again to keep the Lone One trapped in here, he never had time to let himself realize it. So his manual, the Silence, stayed stuck, too, and it couldn’t update to the manual network outside.”

  Nita nodded. “The ones you couldn’t look at, the ones you were afraid of because you saw It in their eyes, you had to promise the One and the Powers That Be that you would come out and do stuff for them. What could possibly have been harder?”

  “This,” Darryl said.

  Nita and Kit glanced at each other.

  “That,” Darryl said, changing his mind. “In here… it’s been safe. In here I never have to look, never have to be afraid I’ll see what might be there. Rejection. The one who sees me and doesn’t want to look back. Because he’s bored with me, or I’ve hurt him, or…”

  “I will put aside fear for courage,” Kit said.

  “And death for life,” Nita said, very softly. She swallowed. “When it’s right to do so.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “If it isn’t right now, then when will it be?”

  “We need you out in the real world with us, guy,” Kit said. “We need all the wizards we can get…now more than ever. Entropy’s running…”

  “But I can’t go out there!” Darryl cried. “It’s in me! If I go out there, It’ll be loose in the world in the worst possible way!”

  Nita’s heart squeezed inside her. “It’s loose out there already,” she said. “Your coming out, or not coming out, won’t make the slightest difference to that. You can die with It at the bottom of your heart, out in the world with the rest of us, or you can die with It at the bottom of your heart, in here, alone.”

  He stood there, silent, his eyes averted.

  “It’s better not to do it alone,” Nita said.

  Darryl didn’t look up.

  “There’s strength in numbers, Darryl,” Kit said. “It’s easy to forget that.” He glanced at Nita a little shamefacedly. She gave him an amused look and raised her eyebrows. He turned back to Darryl. “There are a whole lot of us out in the world, giving It a hard time.

  You were real good at doing that just when you were stuck inside and didn’t have any clues about how the rest of us manage it. Come on out and give It a run for Its money! When you get right down to the bottom of it, that’s nearly all we do. Which wizardries we use to do it… that’s the cool part.“

  Darryl was silent for a long while. Eventually he looked up again, and as Darryl slowly started to let himself believe that this was the right thing to do, that innocent joy and delight in life simply poured off him, so that once more Nita had to brace herself against it.

  She saw Kit wobble, too. Only Ponch stood there untroubled, wagging his tail.

  “All right,” Darryl said. “I’ll come.”

  Ponch started to bark for joy.

  Nita had to smile. “But one thing,” Nita said, glancing at the kernel, “before you do anything final with that.”

  Darryl looked up at her, confused.

  “If you have to leave part of you here,” Nita said, “think about which part you might leave.”

  Darryl looked at her in confusion. “Which part?” he said. “I know I can be in both places with all of me, but splitting parts off—”

  “Don’t make reasons you can’t do stuff, Darryl,” Kit said. “Find reasons you can.”

  “You made this world,” Nita said. “That’s powerful stuff. And you can make the rules in here.

  You made them so strongly, without even being clear on what you were doing, that the Lone Power Itself got stuck in here with you and couldn’t get out until you let It.

  Now It’s gone… and you’re fully conscious, with the operating system for your own universe in your hands. You’re not just inside the game anymore: You’re outside it, too, now — you’re in control of it when you’ve got the kernel. Even from in here, you can make this world anything you want!“

  Darryl looked from Nita to Kit, and slowly, surmise dawned in his eyes.

  “The autism…”

  “Why not? You started ditching it the first chance you got,” Nita said. “You ditched it on Kit, for example.”

  Darryl looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to…”

  “Darryl, I know you didn’t mean it personally,” Kit said. “It’s okay. You were doing a sane thing, getting
rid of it!” Then he glanced at Nita. “I still don’t know why you didn’t get it.”

  “It could have been that a lot more boys are autistic than girls,” Nita said. “Or that Darryl and I already had something in common.”

  She wouldn’t say it out loud. She didn’t have to.

  The pain

  , Darryl said silently. The pain of being alone.

  Nita had to glance away.

  “Yeah,” Darryl said. “But giving it up…” He looked distressed. “I don’t know if I can! It’s part of me.”

  “So?” Kit said. “Is it a part you need?”

  ‘No! Darryl said.

  And then he fell silent.

  “I hear a but coming,” Nita said.

  “I don’t know if I know how to live without it,” Darryl said.

  They were all silent for a few breaths.

  “It’s how I stood being alive,” Darryl said. “It’s how I didn’t have to see the Lone Power at the bottom of everyone’s soul, all the time. If I go back without it, I’m going to have to see that. Every day. Every time I look at my mom, or my dad…”

  “Believe me,” Nita said, very softly, “I’d look at my mom all day and every day no matter how much It looked out of her, if she were here to look at. Some things are a lot more important than others, Darryl.”

  “We all see It sometimes,” Kit said. “We all run into It every day, in the people we know, in the things that happen around us. There’s no escape. That’s life. That’s Life: what we serve. It’s worth it.”

  Darryl was silent. “I don’t know if I can stand how much it’s going to hurt,” he said. “I might lose it. I might fall back into being that way… and that would kill my folks.”

  “I’m guessing your folks are tougher than you think,” Nita said, remembering the voices she’d heard on the way in. “Give them a chance. Give yourself a chance. If it does happen…” She grinned.

  “You’re a wizard. Listen to the Silence. Pick yourself up and do what it tells you. You’ll get out again… because you’re tough, too. Tougher than you think.”

  Darryl looked at Nita with eyes that were beginning to believe. “Besides,” Kit said, “imagine how funny it’ll be when It finally gets back in here, and locks Itself in, and then discovers that what It’s locked in with isn’t you. It’s your autism.“

  Darryl looked from Kit to Nita with that expression of absolute delight, edged again with mischief.

  “Yeah,” he whispered. “Let’s do it.”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot of ‘let’s’ about this,” Kit said. “I think you get to do this part yourself.

  Otherwise, it’s not going to take.”

  “Use the kernel,” Nita said. “You set the configuration into it for the way you want this world to behave. The Silence will show you how. I had to take classes to find out, but this is your own world that you made. You’re not going to need authorizations to work with it.”

  Darryl nodded, looking down at the kernel for a moment.

  Then, “Oh,” he said. “Oh!”

  He was quiet for a long time. While he was concentrating, Kit bent his head over to Nita’s and said, “Thanks.”

  “It was my turn to save you,” Nita said, “that’s all. Now I want a few weeks off.”

  Kit smiled a crooked smile at her.

  Nita looked down at Ponch. “I thought you said you weren’t going to take the boss out again without me,” Nita said.

  Ponch dropped his head a little. He went, he said. So I had to go, too. Then he brightened. But you got here when I thought you would, so it’s all right!

  Nita gave Kit a look. “Your dog has me on a schedule” she said.

  Kit shrugged. “He has a very well-developed time sense,” Kit said. “Ask him about feeding time, for example.”

  Ponch began to jump up and down in excitement.

  “Speaking of time,” Darryl said suddenly, “I think this looks right…”

  Nita glanced over at the kernel in his hands, judging the way the tangle of light looked and felt.

  “The parameters feel right,” she said. “You ready?”

  Darryl nodded, looking nervous and elated.

  “Do it!” Nita said.

  Slowly, all around them, the brightness dimmed down. “I left you a space to slip through,” Darryl said, as the space darkened, like a stage at the end of a play. “Just behind you there. But this is what’U be left inside.”

  Darkness, and a spotlight.

  In the spotlight, a clown rode a tiny bicycle around and around, never stopping, never looking up. Its eyes were empty. It was a machine, just a fragment of personality without the soul that had once animated it: hopeless, mindless, animate but insensate. Kit looked at it and thought of a windup mouse going around and around in little circles, waiting for the cat.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Kit said. “Darryl? You know the way back?”

  “In my sleep,” he said, and grinned.

  Kit held out a hand. “Welcome to the Art, brother,” he said.

  Darryl took the hand, then pulled Kit close and hugged him hard. He let go, turned to Nita. He hugged her, too.

  “Later,” she said. “Go home.”

  Darryl vanished with the ease of someone who’s been doing it for years.

  Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Your place or mine?” Nita said.

  “My folks are going to yell at me,” Kit said, “so let’s do mine first.”

  Nita smiled a small wry smile. “You just want me to help you take the heat.”

  Mind reader

  , Kit said. Come on.

  They vanished, too.

  Some distance away, in a special-ed classroom in Baldwin, the afternoon routine was proceeding as usual when one of the teachers saw something unusual happen.

  Darryl McAllister looked at him, looked at him straight on.

  The teacher went over to the boy, and got down beside him where he had been sitting on the floor and rocking. “Hey there, Darryl,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t think,” Darryl said, in a voice that cracked and creaked with not having been used for words for a long time, “I don’t think I need to be here anymore.”

  The teacher’s mouth dropped open.

  “Can I go home now?” Darryl said, and smiled.

  Liberations

  The explanations to parents, Seniors, and others, as usual, took nearly as long as the events themselves had done, so it was several days before Nita and Kit found time to go off and relax. The chosen spot was a favorite one, by the edge of a crater close to a well-known site in Mare Tranquillitatis. They were leaning back against the very top of the upper crater wall, looking down over at the rising half-Earth, while Ponch lay on his back in the moondust, snoring, with his feet in the air.

  A fourth figure suddenly stepped into the vacuum nearby, looking around him.

  “Wow,” Darryl said. He wandered over to where Nita and Kit sat, bouncing a little as first-timers tended to do, because of the lighter gravity.

  “Are we allowed to be up here?” Darryl said, looking about half a mile away, toward where the feet and base of Apollo 11 ‘s lunar lander sat.

  “As long as we don’t mess it up,” Kit said. “This is a heritage area.”

  Hearing that, Darryl burst out laughing, looking in mischievous admiration at the rough sculptures Kit had been doing on this site for some years. “This is what you do in a heritage area?”

  “I’ll clean it up before they build the hotel here,” Kit said. “After that, I guess I’ll have to amuse myself carving rocks on Mars into faces.”

  Darryl snickered.

  “How are your folks doing?” Nita said.

  “You kidding? They’re in shock,” Darryl said. He sat down on the rock beside Kit.

  “I wouldn’t have thought they’d let you out of their sight right now,” Kit said.

  “They haven’t,” Darryl said. “I’m home in bed.”

  “Oh,
” Nita said, and laughed. “Wow, that two-for-one deal really does come in handy, doesn’t it?”

  She’d already had a word with Kit about the genuine source of Darryl’s ability to be in two places at once. They’d agreed that there was no need to be too cagey about mentioning Darryl’s ability to co-locate, as long as they stayed away from discussing the reasons for it. If Darryl just thought it was a personal talent, that was fine.

  “I looked at the transit spells,” Darryl said. “But except for the air, they looked like a waste of energy. We’re not supposed to waste. And besides, why go to all that trouble when I can just do this?”

  For a moment he was standing behind a large boulder some feet away, while also sitting on the rock beside Kit. Kit shook his head in admiration.

  “It’s a slick trick,” Kit said. “I’ll do it my way for the time being, though. Seriously… are your parents coping?”

  “They’re coping great.” Darryl’s eyes shone. It was plain to Nita that this was an understatement.

  “My mom and dad are…” He broke off, shook his head.

  “It’s all new,” Darryl said after a moment. “They hardly dare to believe it. And I can’t really tell them why they can believe it, not yet. Eventually I will. But right now wizardry’d be one shock too many. They’d probably think I was coming down with some kind of nuts to replace the autism.”

  “Give them some time,” Kit said. “Neither of us came right out to our parents, either. I think you’re probably right, though. Too much strange at once isn’t a good thing for them. There’s going to be enough of that later, once you start getting into your serious work, whatever that turns out to be. For now, just enjoy how happy they are, and take it easy.”

  “Well, happy’s good, but the ‘take it easy’ part’s not going to last,” Darryl said, and grinned. “I heard my mom thinking that if I was really going to be better now, she was going to start giving me chores

  .”

  Nita and Kit groaned in unison.

  “She was kind of nervous about it,” Darryl said. “I think I get a few weeks of being lazy before they really start expecting me to be normal.”