The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (6 page)

“It’s not a
what.
It’s a
where
. It’s a
where!”

Kit was confused. There was no question of his having misunderstood Ponch; the dog spoke perfectly good Cyene, which anyone who knew the Speech could understand. And as a pan-canine language, Cyene might not be strong on abstract concepts, but what Ponch had said was fairly concrete.

“Where?” Kit asked. “I mean,
what
where?” Then he had to laugh, for he was sounding more incoherent by the moment, and making Ponch sound positively sophisticated by comparison. “Okay, big guy, come on, show me.”

“It’s right down the street.”

Kit was still slightly nervous. “It’s not anybody’s rabbit, is it?”

Ponch turned a shocked look on him. “Boss! I promised. And I said, it’s not a
what
!”

“Uh, good,” Kit said. “Come on, show me, then.”

“Look,” Ponch said. He turned and ran away from Kit, down the middle of the dark, empty, quiet side street…

…and vanished.

Kit stared.

Uhhh… what the—!

Astonished, Kit started to run after Ponch, into the darkness … and vanished, too.

***

Nita had come back from the Jones Inlet jetty that evening to find that her mother had left to go shopping. Her dad was in the kitchen making a large sandwich; he looked at Nita with mild surprise. “You just went out. Are you done for the day already?”

“Yup,” Nita said, heading through the kitchen.

“Kit coming over?”

“Don’t think so,” Nita said, dropping her manual on the dining-room table.

Her father raised his eyebrows and turned back to the sandwich he was constructing. Nita sat down in the chair where she’d been sitting earlier and looked out the front window. She was completely tired out, even though she hadn’t done anything, and she was thoroughly pissed off at Kit. The day felt more than exceptionally ruined. Nita put her head down in her hands for a moment.

As she did, she caught sight of a sticky-note still stuck to the table. “Uh-oh—”

“What?”

“Mom forgot her list—”

“You mean her ‘lint’?” Her dad chuckled.

“Yeah. It’s still stuck here.”

“She’ll call and get me to read it to her, probably. Or I’ll phonecam it to her.”

There was a soft
bang!
from the backyard—a sound that could have been mistaken for a car backfiring, except that there weren’t likely to be cars back there. “That Dairine?” Nita’s dad said.

“Probably,” said Nita. It hadn’t taken her parents long to learn the sound of suddenly displaced air—a sign of a wizard in a hurry or being a little less than slick about appearing out of nothing. At first it seemed to Nita as if her folks, after they’d found out she was a wizard, spent nearly all their time listening for that sound in varying states of nervousness. Now they were starting to get casual about it, which struck her as a healthy development.

But wait a minute. Maybe it’s Kit, coming back to apologize
—Nita started to get up.

The screen door opened and Dairine came in.

Nita sat down again. “Hey, Dair,” she said.

“Hey,” said Dairine, and went on past.

Nita glanced after her, for Dairine wasn’t usually so terse after a day out. Her little sister paused by the table just long enough to drop her own book bag onto a chair, then went into the living room, pushing that startling red hair out of her eyes. It was getting longer, and, as a result, her resemblance to their mother was stronger than ever.
Has she started noticing boys?
Nita wondered.
Or is something else going on?

Something scrabbled at the back door. Dairine sighed, came back through the dining room and the kitchen, went to the screen door, and pushed it open. A delicate clatter of many little feet followed, as what appeared to be a slim black-skinned laptop computer came spidering into the kitchen on multiple spindly legs. On the lid of the laptop glowed a white apple with no bite out of it.

Nita peered at the laptop as it followed Dairine back into the living room. “Am I confused,” she said, “or is he shiny all of a sudden?”

“You’re always confused,” said Dairine as she headed for her room, “but yeah. Just molted. Probably he’ll go matte later.”

Nita shook her head and went back to looking at her mom’s list. Dairine’s version of the wizard’s manual had arrived as software for the household’s first computer, and had been through some changes during the course of her Ordeal. Finally she’d wound up with this machine… if
machine
was the right word for something that was clearly alive in its own right. In the meantime the household’s main computer continued to go through periodic changes, which made some of the neighbors suspect that Nita’s father was making more money as a florist than he really was. For his own part, Nita’s dad shrugged and said, “Your mom says it does the spreadsheets just fine. I don’t want to know what else it might do … and as long as I don’t have to pay extra for it…”

The phone on the counter rang. Her dad went over and picked it up. “Aha, here she is. Hey, guess what
you
forgot? Yeah. You want me to read it to you? Or I’ll take a pic and SMS it— Oh. Well, okay, sure. No, she just came in. No, both of them. Sure, I’ll ask.”

Nita’s dad put his head around the corner. “Honey, your mom forgot a couple other things, too, so she’s coming back. She says, do you want to go clothes shopping? They’re having sales at a couple of the stores in the mall.”

Nita couldn’t think of anything else to do at the moment. “Sure.”

Her dad turned his attention back to the phone. Nita went back to her room to change into a top that was easier to get in and out of in a hurry. From upstairs she could hear faint thumping and bumping noises.
What’s she doing up there?
she thought, and when she finished changing, Nita went up the stairs to Dairine’s room.

It was never the world’s tidiest space—full of books and entirely too many stuffed animals—but now it was even more disorganized than usual. Everything that had been on Dairine’s desk, including chess pieces and chessboard, schoolbooks, notebooks, pens, papers, paintbrushes, watercolor pads, a digital drawing tablet, a smartphone/MP3 player and its headphones, and much less classifiable junk, was now all over Dairine’s bed. The desk was solely occupied by a truly huge computer monitor sitting up on an angled aluminum base. Centered on the front of the white fascia under the monitor proper was what appeared to be the more normal form of that famous fruity logo, glowing demurely: a good trick, as that there was no sign of any cord leading from the computer to any wall plug, and there were no other cables either. As Nita took it all in, the “bite” in the logo faded away.

“Whaddaya think?” Dairine said.

“Looks like a newer version of Dad’s,” Nita said, sitting down on Dairine’s bed. “Way bigger screen, though: you’ll make him jealous. How’d you score this?”

“Connections,” Dairine said.

Nita rolled her eyes, for Dairine’s wizardly connections had been getting on her nerves for months. Her sister’s crazy post-Ordeal power levels and the extremely unusual events and creatures associated with the Ordeal itself had attracted a lot of attention since last year, and meant that strange offers and privileges were dropped on Dairine with boring regularity.
It’s going to be so interesting to see how she takes being a
normal
wizard when that finally comes her way,
Nita thought… though with some resignation, because it was hard to tell when that would happen: Dairine’s power levels were only now starting to settle. “Is it online?”

Dairine threw Nita a
you-must-be-joking, way-more-than-just-
that look. Wizards had been bound together by a vast worlds-spanning informational web centuries before one small planet’s machine-based version of networking had started calling itself World Wide. “Oh, yeah, wirelessly,” Dairine said, “but the real action’s on the four-W side. Got access to the developers’ side of the wizardly WWW, and the beta group on the online version of the manual.” She glanced fondly over at her laptop, who had scrambled up onto the desk chair and was scratching itself with some of its legs.
“They
voted me in. …Spot, cut it out.”

Nita raised her eyebrows and leaned back. “Coming from the machine intelligences, that sounds like a compliment. Just make sure you don’t mess up Dad’s accounting software when you port it over.” She cocked an eye at the laptop, which was still scratching. “Is that because of the molting?”

“Yeah, bad habit….” Dairine leaned down, picked Spot up off the chair and put him up on the desk, where he scratched a bit more, then settled. “He starts scratching when the old skin’s ready to go and it takes him a few days to cut it out.” Dairine leaned against the desk. “He’s been acting more like an organic life-form lately. I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or not, but there’s nothing wrong with his processing functions, or his implementation of the manual, and he’s okay when we talk.” Dairine looked at the laptop thoughtfully. “I thought Kit was going to be with you. He said he wanted to see the new machine when it came in.”

“Huh?”

Dairine sat in her desk chair, gave Nita a look. “Something going on?”

Nita didn’t answer immediately.

“Oh, come on. You know it’s no use, Neets! Mom and Dad you might be able to hide it from for a while, but where I’m concerned, you might as well have it tattooed on your forehead.”

Nita stared at the bedspread, what she could see of it. “I had a fight with Kit. I can’t
believe
him sometimes. He’s gotten so—I don’t know—he doesn’t listen, and he—”

“Neets,” Dairine said. “Level with me. PMS?”

Nita’s jaw dropped. Dairine snickered. “No,” Nita said when Dairine finally ran down.

“Well, if that’s not it, what
is
the problem?”

Nita crossed her legs, frowning at the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “Since I got back, it’s like … like Kit doesn’t trust me anymore. In the old days—”

“When dinosaurs walked the earth.”

“Dair… nobody likes a smart-ass.” Nita sighed. “Before I went away, if I’d given him the spell I gave him today, after all that work, he’d have said, fine, let’s do it! Now, all of a sudden, everything’s too much trouble. He doesn’t even want to try.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to blow energy on something that looks like it’s going to fail,” Dairine said.

“Boy, and I thought
he
was the winner of the tactlessness sweepstakes right now,” Nita said. “You should call him up and offer to coach him.”

“He’ll have to make an appointment,” Dairine said, pushing the pillows into a configuration she could lean on. “I’ve been busy.” But her face clouded as she said it.

Aha,
Nita thought. “I was going to ask you about that—”

The open window let in the sound of a car pulling into the driveway below. Dairine looked out the window. Below, a car door opened and shut, though the car’s engine didn’t turn off. “There’s Mom,” Dairine said.

Nita shook her head, rubbed her eyes, got up.

“But one thing,” Dairine said. “Was Kit clear that the guy you were seeing over there—”

“I wasn’t
seeing
him!”

“Yeah, right. Ronan. You sure Kit isn’t confused about that?”

Nita stared. “Of course he isn’t.”

“You sure
you’re
not confused about it?”

For that, Nita had no instant answer.

“Nita?” her mother called up the stairs.

“Later,” Nita said to Dairine. “And don’t think you’re getting off easy. I want a few words with you about ‘busy.’”

Dairine made a noncommittal face and got up to do something to the new computer as Nita went out.

***

In the darkness, Kit stood very still. He had never seen or experienced a blackness so profound; and with it came a bizarre, anechoic silence in which not even his ears rang.

“Ponch?” he said.

Or tried to say. No sound came out. Kit tried to speak again, tried to shout … and heard nothing, felt nothing. It was the kind of effect you might expect from being in a vacuum. But he knew that feeling, having been there once or twice. This was different, and creepier by far.

Well, hang on,
Kit thought.
Don’t panic. Nothing bad has happened yet.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to. Come to think of it, am I even
breathing? Kit couldn’t feel the rise of his chest, couldn’t feel or hear a pulse.
What
happens if there’s nothing to breathe here? What happens if I suffocate?

True, he didn’t feel short of breath.
Yet,
said the back of his mind. Kit tried to swallow, and couldn’t feel it happening. Slowly, old fears were creeping up his spine, making his neck hairs stand on end in their wake. It was a long time since Kit had gotten over being afraid of the dark… but no dark he’d had to cope with as a little kid had ever been as dark as
this.
And those darknesses had been scary because of the possibility that there was something hiding in them. This one was frightening, and getting more so by the minute, because of the sheer certainty that there was
nothing
in it.

I’ve had enough of this. Which way is out?!

…But no!
Kit thought then.
I’m not leaving without my dog. I’m not leaving Ponch here and running away!

But how do you run away when you can’t move? And how do you find something when you can’t go after it? The horror of being trapped here, wherever
here
was, rose in him.
I’m not going to put up with this,
Kit thought.
I’m not going to just stand here and be terrified!
He tried to strain every muscle, tried to strain even
one,
and couldn’t move any of them. It was as if his body suddenly belonged to someone else.

So I can’t move. But I can still think—

There was a spell Kit knew as well as his transit spells, so well that he didn’t even bother keeping it in compacted form anymore; he could say it in one breath. It was the spell he used to make a small light for reading books that weren’t his manual under the covers at night. Kit could see the spell in his mind, fifty-nine characters in the Speech, twenty-one syllables. Kit pronounced them clearly in his mind, said the last word that tied the knot in the spell, and turned it loose—