The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (17 page)

Dairine was halfway down the driveway already. “Were you crazy, doing a wizardry right there?” Nita whispered as she caught up with her. “And you
bombed
, didn’t you? You crashed and burned.”

Dairine was walking fast. “I don’t want to talk about it!”

“You’d
better
talk about it! She’s my mother, too! What were you trying to do?”

“What do you think? I was trying to cure her!”

Nita gulped. “
Just like that?
Are you
nuts
? Without even knowing exactly what
kind
of growth you were operating on yet? Without—”

“Neets, while I’ve still got the power, I’ve got to try to do something with it,” Dairine said. “Before I lose the edge!”

“That doesn’t mean you just do any old thing before you’re prepared!” Nita said. “That wizardry just came
apart!
What if some piece of it got loose and affected someone else in there? What if—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dairine muttered, furious. “It didn’t work.” Nita looked at her as they crossed the street and headed down the road that led to Tom and Carl’s, and saw the tears starting to fill Dairine’s eyes again. “It didn’t work,” Dairine said, more quietly. “
How can it not have worked?
This isn’t even anything
like
pushing a planet around; this isn’t even a middle-sized wizardry! It…” She went quiet.

Nita could feel the tension building all through Dairine, like a coil winding tighter and tighter. “Come on,” she said.

***

When they rang Tom’s doorbell, it was a few moments before he answered, and as he opened the screen door, Nita wasn’t quite sure what to make of his expression. “It’s Grand Central Terminal around here this morning,” Tom said, “in all kinds of ways. Come on in.”

“Is this a bad time?” Nita asked timidly.

“Oh, no worse than usual,” said Tom. “Come on in; don’t just stand there.”

He quickly closed the front door behind Nita and Dairine as they went by, which was probably just as well, because otherwise a passerby might have seen the six-foot-long iridescent-blue giant slug sitting in the middle of the living room floor, deep in conversation with Carl. At least it would have looked like a giant slug to anyone who hadn’t been to Alphecca VI, but slugs weren’t usually encrusted with rubies of such a size. “Hey, ladies,” Carl said as they passed, and then went back to his conversation with his guest.

Tom led them into the big combined kitchen-dining room. “Are you two all right?” Tom said. “No, I can tell you’re not; it’s just about boiling off you. What’s happened?”

Briefly Nita told him. Tom’s face went blank with shock.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Nita, Dairine, I’m so sorry. This started happening when?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

Tom sat down at the table. “Please,” he said, gesturing them to seats across from him. “And you say they’ve got the scans done already. That helps.” He looked up then. “It also explains something Carl noticed an hour or so ago…”

Carl had just said good-bye to the Alpheccan, who had vanished most expertly, without even enough disturbance of the air to rustle the curtains. “Yeah, I thought that was you earlier,” Carl said, coming over to sit down at the table and looking at Dairine. “It had your signature, with that kind of power expenditure. But something went real wrong, didn’t it?”

“It didn’t work,” Dairine said softly.

“There are only about twenty reasons why it shouldn’t have,” Carl said, sounding dry. “Inadequate preparation, no concrete circle when so many variables were involved, insufficiently defined intervention locus in both volume and tissue type, other unprotected living entities in the field of possible effects, inadequate protection for the wizardry against ‘materials’ memory of past traumas in the area; shall I go on?
Major
screwup, Dairine. I expect better of you.” He was frowning.

Nita tried to remember if she’d ever seen Carl frown before, and failed, and got the shivers.

“I thought I could just
fix
it,” Dairine said, looking pale. “I mean—I’ve done that kind of thing before.”

Carl shook his head. “Yes, but you can’t go on that way forever. Your power levels are down nine, maybe ten points from mid-Ordeal levels. That’s just as it should be. But hasn’t it occurred to you that there’s another problem? You started very big. This is a small wizardry by comparison—and you haven’t yet mastered the reduction in scale to make you much good at the small stuff. Sorry, Dairine, but that’s the price you pay for such a spectacular debut. Right now Nita’s the only one in your house who’s got the kind of control to attempt any kind of intervention on your mother at all. You’re going to have to let her handle it. And I warn you not to interfere in whatever intervention Nita may elect. It could kill all three of you. It’s going to be hard for you to sit on your hands and watch, but that’s just what you’re going to have to do.”

“It’s not fair,” Dairine whispered.

“No,” said Tom. “So let’s agree that it’s not, then move past that to some kind of solution. If indeed there is one.”

“If!”
Nita said.

Tom looked at her steadily, an expression inviting her to calm herself down. “Maybe a Coke or something?” Carl said.

“Please,” Nita said. Carl got up to get the drinks. To Tom, Nita said, “I was doing a lot of reading this morning. I kept running into references to spells that had to do with cancer being difficult because the condition is ‘intractable,’ or ‘recalcitrant.’” She shook her head. “I don’t get it. A spell
always
works.”

“Except when the problem keeps reconstructing itself afterward,” Tom said, “in a different shape. It’s like that intervention you and Kit were working on, the Jones Inlet business. If the pollution coming out of the inner waters was always the same, the wizardry would be easy to build. But it’s changing all the time.”

Nita grimaced. “Yeah, well,” she said, “I blew a whole lot of time on detail work on that one, and the spell worked just fine without it. I think I’m having a lame-brain week.” She rubbed her face. “Just when I most seriously don’t need one!”

“There’s not much point in beating yourself up about that right now,” Tom said. “The foundations of the wizardry were sound, and it did the job, which is what counts. And you may be able to recycle the subroutines for something else eventually.”

Carl came back with four bottles of Coke, distributed them, and sat down. He exchanged glances with Tom for a second longer than absolutely necessary, as information passed from mind to mind.

“Oh boy,” Carl said. “Nita, Tom’s right. The basic problem is the structure of the malignancy itself—”

“Look, let’s take this from the top,” Tom said. “Otherwise there are going to be more misunderstandings.” He held out his hand, and a compact version of his manual dropped into it. He put it down on the table and started leafing through it. “You’ve done some medical wizardry in the past,” he said to Nita.

“Yeah. Minor healings. Some not so minor.”

Tom nodded. “Tissue regeneration is fairly simple,” he said. “Naturally there’s always a price. Blood, either in actual form or expressed by your agreement to suffer the square of the pain you’re intending to heal—that’s the normal arrangement. But when you start involving nonhuman life in the healing, things get complicated.”

Nita blinked. “
Excuse
me? My mother was human the last time I looked!”

Carl gave Tom an ironic look. “What my distracted colleague here means is that it’s not just your mother you have to heal, but also whatever’s attacking her. If you don’t heal the
cause
of the tumor or the cancer, it just comes back somewhere else, in some worse form.”

“What could be worse than a brain tumor?!” Dairine said.

“Don’t ask,” Tom said, still leafing through the manual. “There are too many ways the Lone Power could answer that question.” He glanced up then. “Your main problem is that cancer cells in general are tough for wizards to easily treat because their abnormality has shifted them away from the definition of what normally constitutes human tissue… but not far enough away to be really useful.”

Tom sighed. “I’ve been trying to avoid the loaded term ‘mutant’, but in the case of the sort of tumor your mother seems to have been diagnosed with, it fits best. The brain cells in the tumor got out of control and started replicating uncontrollably because they developed a mutated copy of a growth factor gene that’s normally perfectly benign. Now as to
how
they did that…?” Tom shook his head. “There are all kinds of possible causes, everything from a stray bit of cosmic radiation snapping the strand of the original gene, on down to much less dramatic environmental causes. Pollution, food additives, just simple structural weakness in the gene, all of the above… But the result is the same. A combination gets put together wrong, proves unusually robust despite the wrongness, and starts pushing other cells out of the way and reproducing itself as fast as it can.”

“Easy then,” Dairine said. “Just develop a wizardry that targets that one mutant gene—”

“‘And swaps in a clean copy, or destroys only the cells that have the mutant’?” Carl said, rubbing his eyes. “Yes, of course, completely easy. So with as many wizards as we’ve got running around the planet, why’s there still so much cancer running loose, do you think?”

Dairine opened her mouth and shut it again.

“It’d be lovely if everything was so binary,” Carl said. “So open and shut. But the problem’s way more subtle. Not all the bad copies are going to be identical. The mutation’s not a one-off: it continues, it shifts again and again. Target one form with a wizardry based—as a wizardry should be—on exact description, and you’ll miss other new ones that, in the way of smart cells everywhere, will get even cleverer about concealing themselves from detection, and from the wizardry. They’ll lie low and start growing later on when your back is turned. Kill them some more, they’ll mutate again, hide themselves again. They’ll get smarter and nastier with every incomplete eradication, and what comes back will be five times,
ten
times as fast and deadly.”

“Also, not all the bad copies of the gene are
bad
bad copies,” said Tom. “Millions of those brain cells with the busted gene will be functioning perfectly well and benignly
in situ
without ever having displayed the malignant reproductive behavior. Want to burn out a small but significant percentage of your mom’s useful functioning brain capacity by being too aggressive about clearing out the busted genetic copies? That’s a good way. Kill the malignancy, but leave her with the equivalent of brain damage, or a stroke. You’ve cured her of cancer, and also the ability to speak, or move. …Or let’s say you get lucky and leave her with no worse than generalized memory loss. Will she remember you’re a wizard, afterwards? Will she remember your dad, or Nita? Or you?
Ever?”

Nita watched Dairine going progressively more pale. “Those,” Tom said softly, “are just a couple of any
number
of possible results had you had your original power levels to hand during your ill-advised little attempted intervention. So count yourself extremely lucky that the whole poorly-constructed edifice simply fell apart because wizardry itself couldn’t support you doing something quite so stupid.”

The ensuing quiet lasted for a long, long minute during which there wasn’t much for Nita to do except sit and watch Dairine twitch. “Our problems as wizards working with cancer almost exactly parallel those of modern medical professionals,” Carl finally said. “In the end, it’s always about sorting the undesirable cells from the desirable ones, and the undesirable effects from the desirable ones. And it’s always going to be a balancing act. It can’t ever be perfect… and every case has to be evaluated carefully before you just start jumping in and changing things. But the ongoing mutations in cancers of this type make them as intractable for wizards to treat as for doctors.” He rubbed his face. “Because there’s the simple problem of interventional scale. Any spell complex enough to accurately and safely name and describe
every
negatively impacted cell, and what you think might be hiding in it, would take you years to write. By which time…” He shook his head.

“I thought maybe
you
did spells like that,” Nita said in a small voice.

Tom smiled, even though the smile was sad. “That’s a much higher compliment than I deserve. No, a wizardry
that
complex is well beyond my competence. Which is a shame, because if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t rest by day or night until I had it for you.”

Nita gulped.

“A lot of wizards have spent a lot of time on this problem, Nita,” said Carl. “The price of attempting cures is high. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be much cancer; we’d be stomping it out with ease wherever we found it. As it is, look at the world around you, and see how far we’ve got.”

That thought wasn’t one she cared for. “You say there are ways to ‘attempt’ a cure,” Nita said. “It sounds like it doesn’t work very often.”

Carl sighed. “That’s because of a part of the problem that leaves us, in some ways, even less able to do anything than the medical people. We’re wizards, after all Malignant cellular life, deranged from its original purpose though it might be, is life regardless. And we cannot just go around killing things without dealing with the consequences, at every level.”

“Oh, come
on!
” Dairine said.

“Not at all,” Carl said. “Where do you draw the line, Dairine? Where in the Oath does it say, ‘I’ll protect this life over here but not
that
one, which happens to be annoying me at the moment?’ There’s no such dichotomy. You respect
all
life, or none of it. Of
course
that doesn’t mean that wizards never kill. But killing increases entropy locally, and it’s always to be resisted. Sometimes, yes, you must kill in order to save another life. But you must first make your peace with the life-form you’re killing.”

“If I’m just going to be killing a bunch of tumor cells,” Nita said, “I should be able to manage that.”

Carl shook his head. “It may not be so easy. Malignant cells have their own worldview: ‘Reproduce at any cost.’ Which also can mean ‘kill your host.’ In dealing with that kind of thing, a wizard is handicapped right from the start.”