The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (22 page)

But she didn’t have time for its beauty right this moment.
Next time I’ll have more time to just look at one of these,
Nita thought.
Right now I have to affect the local environment somehow.

The longer she held the kernel in her hands, the more clearly Nita could begin to feel, as if in her bones, how this core of energy interacted with everything around it, and was at the heart of it all. Squeeze it a little this way, push it a little that way, and this whole universe would change—

Nita squeezed it, and the sphere of light and power grew, and her hand sank into it a little, the “control structures” of the kernel fitting themselves to her. Her mind lit up inside with a sudden inrush of power, a webwork of fire—the graphic representation of the natural laws of this universe, of its physics, mathematics, and all the mass and energy inside it—and she knew that it was hers to command.

For a moment Nita stood there just getting the feel of it. It was almost too much. All that kept her in control was the fact that this was not a full-fledged universe but an aschetic one, purposely kept small and simple for beginners like her—a kindergarten universe with all the building blocks labeled in large bright letters, the corners on all the blocks rounded off so she couldn’t hurt herself.

Still, the taste of the power was intoxicating.
And now to use it.
Through the kernel, Nita could feel the way all energy and matter in this universe interrelated, from here out to the farthest stars … and while she held what she held, she owned all that power and matter. She
ruled
it. Nita smiled and squeezed the kernel harder, felt her pulse increase as that of local space did—energy running down the tight-stranded webwork, obedient to her will.

Overhead, in that clear afternoon sky, the clouds started to gather. The day went gray in a rush; the humidity increased, and the view of the traffic lights down the street misted, went indistinct. Nita could feel the scorch and sizzle of positive ionization building in the air above the skyscrapers as the storm came rolling and rumbling in.

She held the growing power in check for a while, let the clouds in that dark sky build and curdle. They jostled together, their frustrated potential building, but they couldn’t do anything until Nita let them. Finally the anticipation and the growing sense of power was too much for her.
Do it!
she said to the storm, and turned it loose.

Lightning flickered and danced among the skyscrapers and from cloud to cloud as the rain, released, came instantly pouring down. The Empire State Building got hit by lightning, as it usually did, and then got hit several more times as Nita told the storm to go ahead and enjoy itself. Thunderclaps like gigantic gunfire crashed and rattled among the steel cliffs and glass canyons, and where Nita pointed her finger, the lightning struck to order. She made the water bursting from the sky rain down in patterns and pour down in buckets, but not a drop of it soaked through her clothes—the water had no power over
her.
And when some of the electrical signs started to jitter and spark because of all the water streaming down them, Nita changed the behavior of the laws governing electricity, so that current leaped and crept up the rain and into the sky, a slower kind of lightning, sheeting up as well as down.

In a burst of triumph Nita splashed and jumped in the flooding gutters like a little kid. Then finally she ran right out into the middle of the empty Times Square and whirled there in the wet gleam and glare all alone—briefly half nuts with the delight of what she’d done, as the brilliant colors of the lights painted the puddles and wet streets and sidewalks with glaring electric pigment, light splashing everywhere like Technicolor water. The feeling of power was a complete blast… though Nita reminded herself that this was just a step on the way to something much bigger. Curing her mother was going to be a lot more delicate, a lot more difficult: and the wizardry was going to cost her. But the innocent pleasure of doing exactly as she pleased with the power she’d come so far to find was something she badly needed.

The novelty took a while to wear off. Finally Nita banished the storm, sweeping the clouds away and right out of the sky with a couple of idle gestures—exactly the kind of thing a wizard normally couldn’t do in the real world, where storms had consequences and every phrase of every spell had to be evaluated in terms of what it might accidentally harm or what energy it might waste.
It’d be great if wizardry were like this all the time,
Nita thought.
Find the heart of power, master it, and do what you like; just command it and it happens; just wish it and it’s done…

But that was a dream. Reality would be more work. And it would be more satisfying, though not all that different—for bioelectricity was just lightning scaled down, after all, and every cell in the body was mostly water. Now Nita stood there in the cool air, as the sun started to set in the cleared sky behind the skyscrapers, and looked again at the tangle of power that she held, this whole universe’s soul. On a whim as she looked down at it, Nita altered its semblance, as she’d altered the look of the spell matrix she wore. Suddenly it wasn’t a tight-packed webwork of light she was holding, but a shiny red apple.

Nita looked at it with profound satisfaction, and resisted the urge to take a bite out of it.
Probably blow me from here to the end of everything,
she thought. She brought the kernel back over to where she’d found it, and held it up to the stone wall. It didn’t leap out of her hand back to its place, as she’d half expected it would; it was reluctant.
It enjoys this,
she thought.
It likes being mastered, being used.

It likes not being alone.

Nita smiled. She could understand that. Carefully she said the words that would briefly dissolve the stone, and slipped the kernel back in.

Wait till Kit sees this,
she thought, pulling her hands out of the stone and dusting them off,
when it’s all over and Mom’s better at last. He’s gonna love it.

She checked her watch.
Half an hour to spare; not too bad. I’ll do better next time.
She turned the charm bracelet on her wrist to show the little disc that said
GCT/25,
her quick way back to the ingress gate. “Home,” Nita said, and vanished.

***

She came out on the platform at Grand Central, invisible again; a good thing, for just as she stepped out of the gate, a guy went by driving a motorized sweeper, cleaning the platform for the rush hour that would start in just a couple of hours. Nita glanced at her watch. It was three in the morning; as predicted, the return gating routine had dropped her here two hours after she’d left. But she was six hours’ worth of tired. She fished around in her pocket and came up with her transit circle…

…and couldn’t bear to use it for a second or so yet. Nita walked off the platform out into the Main Concourse—where a guy with a wide pad-broom was pushing some sweeping compound along the shiny floor—and out past him, invisible, and up the ramp, to push open the door and stand on Forty-second Street again.
This
time there was traffic, and garbage in the gutter, and horns honking; this time the streetlights were bright; this time the sidewalks were full of people, hurrying, heading home from clubs or a meal after the movies, hailing cabs, laughing, talking to each other. As Nita dropped her transit circle onto the sidewalk, out of the way of the pedestrians, the wind coming down Forty-second flung a handful of rain at her, like a hint of something happening somewhere else, or about to happen.

Nita grinned, stepped through her circle, and came out in her bedroom. She pulled the circle up after her, and had just enough energy to pull her jeans off, crawl into bed, and pull the covers up before the darkness of sheer exhaustion came down on her like a bigger, heavier blanket.

***

“Nita?”

“Huh?!” She sat up in bed, shocked awake. Her father stood in the doorway, drying his hands on a dish towel, looking at her with concern.

“Honey, it’s eight-thirty.”

“Omigosh!!” She leaped out of bed, and a second later was amazed at how wobbly she felt.

“Don’t panic; I’ll drive you,” her dad said. “But Kit was here ten or fifteen minutes ago. I thought you’d gone already—you don’t usually oversleep—and then he went so he wouldn’t be late.” Her dad looked at her alarm clock. “Didn’t it go off? We’ll have to get you another one.”

“No, it’s okay,” Nita said, rummaging hurriedly in her drawer. “I forgot to set my phone. What time are we going to see Mom today?”

“When you get back from school.”

“Good. I’ve got something to tell her.” And Nita smiled. It was the first time in days that she’d smiled and it hadn’t felt wrong.

It’s going to work. It’s going to he okay!

Nita’s father took the blame for her lateness when he delivered her to the school’s main office, and when her dad left, Nita went to her second-period history class feeling more or less like she’d been rolled over by a steam shovel—she was nowhere near recovered from the previous night’s exertions. She waved at Jane and Melissa and a couple other friends in the same class, sat down, and pulled out her notebooks, intent on staying awake if nothing else.

This was going to be a challenge, as the Civil War was still on the agenda, and the class had been stuck in 1863 for what now seemed about a century. Mr. Neary, the history teacher, was scribbling away on the blackboard, as illegibly as ever.
He really should have been a doctor,
Nita thought, and yawned.

Neets?

She sat up with a jerk so sudden that her chair scraped on the floor, and the kids around her looked at her in varying states of surprise or amusement. Mr. Neary glanced around, saw nothing but Nita writing industriously, and turned back to the blackboard, talking about Abraham Lincoln at his usual breakneck speed while he wrote.

Nita, for her own part, was bending as far over as she could while she wrote, trying to conceal the fact that she was blushing furiously.
Kit—

I was starting to think you were avoiding me!

No, I—

Where’ve you
been?
Don’t you answer your manual anymore?

She could have answered him sharply … then put the urge aside. That was what had started this whole thing.
Look,
she said silently.
I’m really sorry. It was all my fault.

All of it
? Kit said.
Wow. Didn’t think you were gonna go
that
far. The Lone Power’s gonna be real surprised when It finds out you let It off the hook.

His tone was dry, but not angry… as far as she could tell.
Please,
Nita said.
I’d like to be let off it, too.

There was a pause at Kit’s end.
Where’ve you been? I’ve got stuff to show you.

It’s, uh, it’s been busy. I—

Look,
Kit said,
save it for later. Wait for me after school, okay?

Okay.

She felt him turn away in mind to become engrossed in the test paper that had just been put down in front of him. Nita turned her attention back to what Mr. Neary was doing at the blackboard… and was astonished to find that she
could.
Just that brief contact had suddenly lifted from her mind a kind of grayness that had been hanging over it since before her mom went into the hospital.
And now,
she thought,
even if Dairine can’t help, maybe Kit can.

But could he?
And what even makes me think that after the pain in the butt I’ve been, he’s going to want anything to do with what I’m planning
? She desperately wanted to believe that he
would
want something to do with it, but she’d been pretty good at being wrong about things lately.
And even if I asked him, would he think I was just asking because—

“Nita?”

Her head jerked up again. This time there was some subdued laughter from the kids around her. “Uh,” she said, “sorry. What was the question?”

“Gettysburg,” said Mr. Neary. “Got a date?”

“Yeah, but he’ll have to stand on a box to reach,” said a voice in the back of the room, just loud enough for Nita to hear, and for the kids around her to snicker at.

“July first through July third, eighteen sixty-three,” Nita said, and blushed again, but more in annoyance this time. There were a number of guys in her classes who thought it weird or funny that Nita hung around so constantly with Kit rather than playing the field, and Ricky Chan was the tallest and handsomest of this particular crowd. His dark good looks annoyed her almost as much as his attitude, and Nita couldn’t think which satisfied her more: the fact that everyone around her knew she thought he was intellectually challenged—which drove Ricky nuts—or that if he ever
really
annoyed her, she could at any moment grab him by his expensive black leather jacket and dump it, and him, into one of several capacious pockets of otherspace that numerous alien species were presently using as a garbage dump.

Except that wizards don’t do that kind of thing.

But boy, wouldn’t it be fun to do it just once!

Mr. Neary turned his attention elsewhere, and Nita went on taking notes. That class, and the rest of the day, passed without further event; and when the last bell rang at three-thirty and she went out into the parking lot, Nita saw Kit loitering by the chain-link fence near the main gate.

Nita headed for the gate, ignoring the voices behind her, even the loudest one: “Hey, Miss
WAH
-Neeta, where’d you send away for those legs?”

“Yeah, nice butt, nice face. Shame about the giant bulging brain!”

The usual laughter from behind ensued. Nita began to regret her belief that changing out of jeans was going to make the slightest difference to her life at school.

Do you want to, or should I?

Want to what
? Nita asked silently.
We’re supposed to be above this kind of thing.

Kit’s expression, as she caught up with him, was neutral.
There are species who would love these guys,
he said.
As a condiment.