The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (31 page)

And I was expecting what, exactly?
Nita thought, getting angry—at herself, now—and getting up off her knees. A wave of embarrassment, of annoyance at her own gullibility and hopelessness, went through her.

She got up and went out the front doo … and stopped. A long black hearse had driven up and was now parking down at the end of the church sidewalk. Someone was getting ready for a funeral.

For a moment Nita stood there transfixed with horror. Then she hurried away past the hearse, refusing to look at it more than once, and more determined than ever to make all of this work.

***

That afternoon when she and her dad and Dairine got to the hospital, they made it no farther than the nursing station. The head nurse there, Mrs. Jefferson, came out from behind the desk and took them straight into that little room across the hall, which Nita irrationally was now beginning to fear.

“What’s the matter?” Nita’s father said, as soon as the door was closed.

“Your wife’s had another bout of seizures,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “About an hour ago. They were quickly controlled again—no damage was done as far as we can tell—but she’s exhausted. The doctor wanted her kept sedated for the rest of the day, so she’s sleeping again. She’ll be better tomorrow.”

“But she won’t be
that
much better until the surgery happens,” Nita’s dad said, sounding bleak.

Mrs. Jefferson just looked at him. “It’s been scheduled for Friday now,” she said. “Did Dr. Kashiwabara get through to you?”

“About that? Yes.” Nita’s father swallowed. “But between now and then—”

“We’re keeping a close eye on her,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “One of us was with her when it started this morning, which is why we were able to stabilize her so quickly.” She paused. “She’d been hallucinating a little…”

Nita’s dad rubbed his eyes, looking even more stricken. “Hallucinating how?”

The nurse hesitated. “Is Mrs. Callahan interested in the space program? Or astronomy?”

“Uh, yes, somewhat,” Nita’s father said warily.

“Oh, good.” The nurse looked slightly relieved. “She was talking about the Moon a lot, when she first came to, after the seizures last night. Something about walking on the Moon. And she also kept repeating something about looking for the light, needing to use the light, and how ‘all the little dark things’ were trying to hide the light from her. That seems to have something to do with some of the guided imagery work that her crisis counselor was doing with her, or it may have been a response to some of the optical symptoms she’s been having.” The nurse shook her head. “Anyway, it’s common enough for people to be confused afterward. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

Nita’s heart was cold inside her.

“Can we sit with her for just a few minutes?” Nita’s father said. “We won’t try to wake her up.”

The head nurse was about to say no… but then she stopped. “All right,” she said. “Please keep it brief. If the doctor finds out that I let you—”

“We won’t be long.”

The three of them slipped into the room where Nita’s mom was staying. Her roommates were gone; there was just the single bed now that had its curtains drawn around it. They slipped in through the curtains, stood there quietly.

Nita looked silently at her mom and thought about how drawn her face looked, almost sunken in; there were circles under her eyes. It was painful to see her like this.
Got to hurry with what I’m doing
, Nita thought, though she felt as tired as her mother looked.
Got to.

Her dad was looking down at her mom as if she was the only thing in the world that mattered. Her mom and dad had known each other for a long time before they got married; apparently it had been a joke among their friends, that all of them knew her mom and dad were an item long before they knew it themselves. Here were two old friends, and suddenly one of them was really sick, might even—

Nita forcibly turned away from the thought and looked at her father’s face.
No,
she thought.
No.

***

She was back in the practice universes almost as soon as she could get upstairs to her room and through her transit circle to Grand Central. Now that she knew where the playroom was, too, she made that space her first stop. On her next-to-last chance to practice, having another wizard along to give her a few last-minute pointers would be welcome.

But the playroom was empty when she got there. The central area still shone with that sourceless pale radiance, and the assorted alien furniture still sitting around glinted in the light. As she walked, Nita felt around her for the kernel and sensed it immediately. It had wandered away from the seating area, rolling out into the huge white expanse of the floor.

Nita went after it, only partly to have a little more practice in manipulating it. The glance she had had at her manual before leaving had made it plain that the next practice universe she encountered was going to be much more difficult, more closely tailored to her own problem. Whatever Power handled access to the practice universes had noticed Nita’s looming deadline and was forcing the pace… and she was feeling the tension. She was also aware that she was stalling.
But only a little,
she thought, as she spotted the kernel’s vague little star of light, maybe a quarter mile away.

Nita hiked toward it, hearing nothing but its faint buzz in all that great, flat empty space. In this darkness, bare of the sounds of fellow wizards, it was all too easy to hear other things: the machines around her mother’s bed in the hospital, the whisper of the nurses saying things to each other that they thought—incorrectly—Nita and Dairine couldn’t hear. Nita reached the kernel, picked it up, and turned it over in her hands, holding it carefully; for all its power, it looked like such a fragile thing. Holding it she could feel how every little detail of this “pocket” universe was anchored in it, endlessly malleable. The more you believed in that malleability, the more easily the kernel could be changed.
That’s something I’ve got to exploit
, she thought.
Not be afraid to improvise.

But she
was
afraid.
It’d be dumb not to admit that,
Nita thought.
All I have to do is push through the fear. And at least Kit’ll be there to help.

The kernel in her hands sang softly, like a plucked string, as someone else came into the playroom. She turned to see who it was. Way back among the furniture, a golden-furred form sat up on its haunches and peered around. “Pralaya?” Nita called.

Abruptly he was right beside her. “That was quick,” Nita said.

“Microtransit,” Pralaya said, dropping down on all six feet again. “When you know a kernel’s signature, if it’s not too complex or unstable, you can home on it. Most of us learn this one pretty quickly; it’s fairly simple.” He yawned.

“You sound tired,” Nita said as they started to walk back toward the furniture.

“I just finished a next-to-last workout,” Pralaya said. “Shortly I’ll have to do the real piece of work, but not right this moment. I’m considering a few last options. What about you?”

“I’ve got to do my next-to-last, too,” Nita said. “Or I think it will be. There’s not much time left. They’re going to be operating on my mom the day after tomorrow.”

“How are you holding up?”

There were moments when the darkness here seemed to press in unusually closely around Nita. This was one of them. “Not so well,” she said. “I’m scared a lot of the time. It makes it hard to work.” She made a face. “Just another of the Lone One’s favorite tactics—to use your own fear to make what you do less effective.”

“It’s a tactic that has another side, though,” Pralaya said. “One you can use to your advantage. Fear can keep you sharp and make you sensitive to solutions you might not have seen otherwise.”

“I guess. But I could do without Its tactics, at the moment, or Its inventions. Especially the first one It came up with.”

“Death,” Pralaya said, musing. “Well, it’s struck me that the Powers have been fairly philosophical about Their dealings with death and entropy. What They can’t cure, we must endure, or so They say.”

Nita nodded. “I guess we all wonder about
why
sometimes. Why the Powers That Be didn’t just reverse what the Lone Power had done. Or trash everything and start all over if They couldn’t repair the damage.”

They got back to the furniture, and Nita dropped the kernel to its more usual place on the table. “Well,” Pralaya said, “the manual is sparing with the details. But I think the other Powers had only a limited amount of energy left to Them afterward. The Lone One wasn’t just another Power; It was first among equals, mightiest of all the Subcreators. Terrible energies were entrusted to It when things got started, and when It had expended those energies, they weren’t available for use elsewhere by the Others.”

Nita looked down at the kernel. “The Lone Power’s changing now, though,” she said. “Ever so slowly…”

“So they say. Not that that does us much good, here and now. Falling’s easy. Climbing’s hard, and It has a long climb ahead. And meantime, we have to keep on fighting Its many shadows among the worlds, and in our own hearts, as if no victory’d been won.”

“The shadows in our hearts…” Nita said softly. She’d had too close a look at her own shadows when Dairine passed through her Ordeal, and since then she had wished often enough that there were some way to get rid of them. But there wasn’t; not even wizards can make things happen just by wishing.

“I’ve got to get going,” she said at last. “I’ll stop in when I’ve finished my run.”

“I’ll probably still be here,” Pralaya said. “I wanted to talk to Pont about a couple of things.”

“Or…” Nita hesitated. “No, never mind; you’re tired.”

Pralaya gave her an amused look. “You’re thinking that another point of view to triangulate with might not be a bad idea.”

“Seriously, if you’re tired, though—”

“You are, too,” Pralaya said, “and you’re not letting it stop you.” He got up. “Why not, if you like? I may as well spend the time till Pont shows up in doing something useful.”

Nita hesitated just a moment more, then smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She got her transit circle ready.
Lucky he was here,
she thought. While Pont was friendly enough, there was a congenial quality about Pralaya that made him easier to work with, and the sharpness of his mind and the way he saw the aschetic universes were advantages.

Luck, though?
said something at the back of her mind, something faintly uneasy.
Is there really such a thing?

“Ready?” Pralaya said, dropping his own transit circle to the ground.

“Ready,” Nita said.

They vanished.

***

Two hours by the playroom’s time, much later by Nita’s watch, she and Pralaya returned to the playroom—and Nita was never so glad to see such a boring, bland worldscape in her life, after the turbulent one she and Pralaya had just come out of. And that one had been, so her manual had warned her, more like the inside of a human body than anything else she’d worked with.

“I still feel silly for having expected to see tubes and veins and things,” Nita said, as she flopped down into one of the chairs, which, though made for a hominid, had legs that bent in different places than hers did.

Pralaya reached over to the table, picked up the kernel in two paws, and tossed it to her. Nita turned it over in her hands, found the mass-manipulation part of the construct, and twiddled with it until the chair changed shape beneath her. “And I wasn’t expecting all that sand,” she said.

“The symbolism’s a good-enough reflection of how a malignant illness like your mother’s works,” Pralaya said, curling up on the lounger next to Nita’s chair. “Scrape it away in one place, and the cells just keep breeding, filling in the gaps. And as for the tubes and organs and so on, working with them as such wouldn’t help you. It’s not your mother’s tubes you’re trying to cure; it’s all of her. A big job.”

Nita nodded, and rubbed her eyes. Finding the kernel had not been difficult, much to her relief, though it had been hidden in what seemed a world’s worth of desert, with only the occasional eroded skyscraper-peak sticking up out of the sand.

But the practice malignancy that the aschetic universe had created for her had been much more than she could handle. She had managed to get rid of the malignant cells in a large area of it, but only by brute force, rather than talking them out of what they were doing. There had been millions of them, as many of them as there had been grains of sand, and their response to Nita had been furious, a storm of self-preservation. More than once they had almost buried her under dune after rolling dune. And when she’d run out of both energy and time that could be spent in that universe, even after blasting clean a large part of that huge waste, she could feel the rest of the malignancy lying under the scorching, unfriendly sky, simply waiting for her to leave so that it could get on with what it had been doing: killing someone.

I can’t give up now
, Nita thought. Yet the thought of her mother’s situation was really starting to scare her.

What if it’s all for nothing
? she thought.
What if even this—

She hadn’t wanted to say it to her mother, hadn’t wanted to hear it said. But half the power inherent in wizardry lay in telling the truth about things. To deny the truth was to deny your own power at its source.

“Problems?” Pralaya said quietly.

Nita paused, then nodded.

“I’m getting scared,” Nita said. “I’m beginning to think— that if what’s wrong with my mom is as bad as things were in that last universe, then I may not be able to do it.” It was hard to say, but it had to be said.

Pralaya made a little sideways tilt of his sleek head, which Nita had started to recognize as the way his people nodded.

“And willpower may not be enough,” Nita said softly. “Trying my best still may not be enough.” She swallowed hard. “Loving her, no matter how much… it doesn’t matter. It still may not be enough.”

There was a long silence. In a slightly remote-sounding voice, Pralaya said, “Running into that hard wall of impossibility is something we all do eventually.”