The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (29 page)

“See something that doesn’t work?” Kkirl said, coming around behind her and looking over Nita’s shoulder at the diagram.

“No.” Nita said. “It looks fine.”

“I’m glad. It’s taken awhile. But the conditional statements there were the worst part. Fortunately the solution is adjudged to be ethical—see the GO/NO GO toggle down at the end? If that one tiny little knot won’t knot, you might as well give up and go home.”

Nita nodded. “Okay,” she said, and reached into the back of her mind to pull out the constantly updated graphic version of her personal description. It manifested itself in the usual long graceful string of glowing writing in the Speech, but as she ran it briefly through her hands, Nita noticed some changes here and there, particularly in the sections that had to do with family and emotional relationships.
Mom
, she thought. She let the written version of her name slide glowing to the floor and snug itself into the spot waiting for it in Kkirl’s wizardry.

Then, suddenly getting the feeling that someone was behind her, Nita looked over her shoulder. Dazel was towering up behind her and leaning over her, looking down at her with a number of its eyes, while its many, many pink and dark-violet tentacles wreathed slowly in the air. It said nothing. The rest of its eyes were arching down over her to look carefully at her name in the Speech.

“Uh, hi,” Nita said.

“Yes,” Dazel said. It said nothing further, but more and more of its eyes curled down in front of her to look at her name, where it lay glowing against the white floor, until only eye was left still looking at Nita, hanging there on its thin, shiny pink stalk about three inches in front of her nose. The eye’s pupil was triangular, and the rest of the eye was bloodshot, if blood were purple.

“Uh, right. Excuse me,” Nita said, and slowly and carefully edged sideways out from underneath all those overarching eyes, trying hard not to make it look as if she was creeped out.

The eyes watched her go, but otherwise Dazel didn’t move, except for those tentacles, which never seemed to stop their silent wreathing and twisting in the air. Nita made her way over to where Pralaya and Pont were settling some final details with Kkirl and a couple of other wizards, and sat down on a little stepstool-looking piece of furniture near Pralaya. As several of Pont rolled off to say something to a couple of wizards on the other side of the gathering, Nita bent over with her elbows on her knees and looked sideways at Pralaya. “Is it just me,” Nita said softly, “or is there something a little, I don’t know…
unusual
about him?” She glanced at Dazel.

Pralaya looked casually over his shoulder, then back toward Nita, scrubbing his face thoughtfully with one paw. “I don’t really know,” he said. “He does have this way of just standing there and looking at you with all those eyes for minutes on end. I mean, it’s not as if there’s anything
wrong
with lots of eyes. Or none, for that matter. Maybe it’s the multiple brains.” Pralaya started scrubbing the other side of his face. “I did ask him once if there was something bothering him, but the answer didn’t make much sense.”

Nita shook her head. “But the Speech
always
makes sense.”

“If you’re using it with the intent to be understood, yes,” Pralaya said. He waggled his whiskers, an expression Nita took as a shrug. “Whatever; it’s not my business.”

Nita was starting to feel boorish at having even mentioned it. These people were, after all, wizards, except for the Pig, and had all been extremely kind to her. “Never mind,” she said, “probably it
is
just me. So much has been happening—”

“Now what was
that
about?” said one of Pont, rolling out from under another of the tables.

“
That
what?” Nita said.

“Dazel there,” said Pont, and a couple of them split apart in an uneasy way and then recombined, while “looking” across at Dazel. “They’re leaving, apparently. We said to them, ‘Go well,’ and they said, ‘Some of us may, but one of us will not.’”

Nita and Pralaya and all of Pont looked across at Dazel. It gazed back at them with some of those waving eyes, and then vanished.

“Ready now,” Kkirl said, straightening up from checking the wizardry one last time. “Shall we?”

They all stepped into position, each into his, her, or its allotted place in the diagram. Nita gulped as she realized she was about to do a wizardry with almost no preparation, with beings she’d met hardly an hour before. But it was too late now. There were Pont, in their part of the circle, their five spheres bumping into one another and chiming a little nervously; Pralaya, sitting up on his haunches, his four other paws with their delicate little fingers now folded, expectantly, over his tummy; Neme, the fish-wizard, hanging in its globe of water like a Siamese fighting fish in a bowl, all gauzy silver fins and big eyes; Mmemyn, standing there seemingly eyeless and expressionless, like a giant, badly upholstered gymnastics horse; and Kkirl, her wings spread a little as she stepped into the control circle of the transit wizardry and began reciting the triggering sequence in the Speech, the words drowning out all other sound, including the tiny hissing feel of the playroom space’s own kernel.

Nita took a breath, made sure her own personal atmosphere was in place around her and secured by the wizardry attached to her charm bracelet. Then she joined in the chorus of other voices, birdlike, moaning, chiming, growling. The sound of the Speech rose up in their conjoined voices and leaned in close around them, pressing in on all of them as the power built, down on them, squeezing them out of this space and, with a sudden explosive release, into another—

The sourceless radiance of the playroom space vanished, replaced by the high, hard, bright light of a sun high in a pale blue sky, all streaked with wind-torn, sulfurously yellow cloud. Nita and the other wizards stood in a saffron-stained wilderness of ice and blowing snow. Around them blasted a screaming wind that would have been not only bitterly cold—if a temperature-opaque forcefield hadn’t been holding Nita’s air around her—but also unbreathable, laden with a stinging acid sleet.

The other wizards looked around with dismay. “There has been a lot of discharge of poisonous gas into the atmosphere because of the earthquakes,” Kkirl said. “It’s getting worse all the time.”

“This isn’t the seismically active area,” Pont said, their spheres dividing up into numerous smaller ones and rolling out of the diagram.

“No, this is where I left the kernel,” Kkirl said. “I was hoping it would stay anchored near the planet’s magnetic pole. But as you see, it’s gone again.”

Nita looked out into that snow and listened once more. The wind was screaming in her ears, distracting her, and she wasn’t perceiving this universe as artificially compressed, like the ones she’d practiced in. It stretched out all around her, vast to both her normal and her wizardly senses, real and challenging. At the same time, Nita was aware of Pralaya’s eyes on her, thoughtful but also a little impatient, and she was reminded of Dairine again. Nita concentrated on listening. In the shriek of the wind, or behind it, something caught Nita’s ear, and she looked over at Kkirl in confusion.

“Are you
sure
it’s not here?” Nita shouted over the wind.

“What?”

“There’s—I don’t know, it’s kind of an echo. Can you hear it?”

Kkirl listened. “No…”

Nita turned, looking all around her. There was nothing to see in this howling wilderness, but she could hear it now, she was sure. “Pont,” she said, “can you give me a— Can you help me out here?” For Pont were short of hands. “Do what you did before?”

“What? Oh—”

Pont’s surface shimmered. Suddenly overlying Nita’s own perceptions was that odd, tightly curved view of the world: downcurving sky, the golden-hued ice curving away and down all around them, the wind blasting the snow past the wizards and away from them in great chilly clouds. Nita didn’t fight the perception but leaned into the curvatures, staring around her, listening.

All the others were doing so, too, Nita could tell, though her perceptions of them were conditioned by Pont’s. All the other wizards looked spherical, though all in different ways, as distinctive as basketballs from soccer balls from baseballs. Some hint of Kkirl’s flamboyant colors showed, in the tight and elegant way she curved space around her; as did Mmemyn’s slightly slow and scattered personality, in a sphere that was a little diffuse in the way it reflected its surroundings; as did Pralaya’s, in a neat and compact roundness. Nita could sense everyone using their own wizardry-altered senses to search through the space around them for the kernel, as she was doing. Again Nita thought she felt a prickling tangle of unseen power rolling away from her, not far away, in a slow twisting path, downward—

Is it moving?
Pralaya said in her mind.

That’s what I thought,
Nita said.
Pralaya, can you do what Pont’s doing here? If three of us, or you and I
and however many of Pont there are, all look at the same time—

Yes.

And the look of the world changed again. The icy golden surface underneath them was still the same, as was the wind howling past, but now the wind had a voice, eloquent, upset. Nita’s companions were once more wearing forms that looked much like Nita’s own way of seeing them, but with something added. Now there were depths of texture and mind that hadn’t been there before, as if you could put out a hand and feel thought, warm like fur—a livelier, more animate sense of the others than Pont’s slightly chilly perception.
Maybe it’s because Pralaya and I are both mammals,
Nita thought.
Or something like mammals…

In the moment it took her to see through Pralaya’s eyes and mind, Nita perceived many things quickly: glimpses of a blue-green forested home world with much water running under the shadows of the trees, a golden-eyed mate with an amused look, pups tumbling and squeaking in some dimly lighted den—a warm and affable outlook on a world that felt challenging and complex but basically friendly. Then everything steadied down to ice and snow and complaining wind again, and one more sense of the kernel, sharper and more precisely targeted: something trickling, running, down under the ice, where things were warmer and liquid was possible, where heat and other energy channeled narrowly up through veins in the crust, and that fizzing, writhing, unbalanced knot of local law was burrowing down in deep—

Down!
Nita said.

The others looked down with her, inside the glacier on which they all stood, through it to the underlying stone, through that to the first boundary layer where the stone changed—and Kkirl laughed angrily, and said,
Powers’ names, trust it to more or less stay
put
this one time! Come on, cousins, if it gets itself down into the mantle in this state, it’ll derange the whole place before we can operate on it!

They all knew the Mason’s Word spell. That word gives new life to stone, but the more complex version of the spell reminds stone of previous states of being, times when the fourth element was mostly air or fire, or stone in some other phase—dust floating in space before coalescing into a planet, only an atom or two sticking together here and there. Nita used that spell now, pulling the words out of storage in the “pebble” charm on her bracelet, telling the ice and stone beneath her that their atoms were far enough apart for hers to slip between with no trouble.

The ice rose past Nita and swallowed her up like a blur of fog, and the stone like darker fog, hotter, resisting a little, as the whole group dropped down in pursuit of the kernel. Further down they plunged, the shadowy mist of stone rushing up past Nita as if she’d jumped feet first into dark water. But it wasn’t happening fast enough; the kernel was well ahead.

Nita turned herself, swimming through the stone, diving through it as if it were the water off Jones Inlet, where she’d spent so much time lately. Far behind, she could sense the kernel more clearly, dropping toward the discontinuity level, where the crust became the mantle and the lava under the planet’s skin seethed.
Can’t let it get in there!

Nita laid her arms back along her sides and let the increasing pull of gravity take her, worked to make an arrow or torpedo of herself. She was the smallest, the lightest of the pursuing wizards—
Or maybe just being the youngest is enough,
she thought, as slowly, slowly she got closer to the kernel’s tangle of light. It was losing speed, as if the stone through which it sank was getting denser. It felt that way to Nita now, the stone more like water than mist, and then more like mud than water, but she didn’t let that stop her. The kernel was just ahead of her now, just out of reach. The others were nowhere near it.
Don’t wait for them; they’re not going to be here in time, just
get
it!

With difficulty, as she arrowed down through the seething, thickening, darkening fire, Nita got her arms down and in front of her again, reached out. The kernel was slowing more… but so was she. And then the shock waves started to hit her. She’d known the boundary between crust and mantle would be like a wall, but she hadn’t expected it to be as much a wall of violent vibration as one of heat. Now Nita could feel how the world shook where the rotating stony liquid of the upper core dragged itself against the underside of the relatively static crust in small rotating storms of liquid fire, like the spots in the atmosphere of Jupiter: just as dense, just as furious. The worst earthquakes imaginable were just the side effects of these, and Nita went straight through one after the kernel, blinded by the roaring swirling tumult of the fire.

Something caught her from behind, braced her for just a precious moment and lent her power. The world went clear and hard and sharp as it had done earlier, and so did the kernel, a bright fierce tangle of power, just long enough for Nita to grab it in both hands.

It fought her, unstable and willful as Kkirl had warned her, jumping and bucking and stinging in her hands as if trying to get away. Nita wouldn’t let it, wouldn’t drop it.

Pralaya,
Nita thought, knowing where that jolt of power had come from and not sure whether there was another one available.
Where’s Kkirl? What does she want to do with this thing?