The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (9 page)

Nita gave her mother a sidelong look. “But, Mom, if it really
is
a life-or-death issue—”

“Sweetie, at your age, a lot of things look like life-and-death. Don’t get that look; I’m not patronizing you,” her mother added. “Or what you do—I know it’s been terribly important sometimes. But think of the problem as a graph, where you plot the intensity of experience against total time. You’ve had less total time to work with than, say, your dad or I have. Things look a lot more important when the ‘spreadsheet’ is only a page long instead of four or five.”

Nita considered that to see if it made sense. To her annoyance, it did. “I
hate
it when you sneak up on me by being objective,” she said.

Her mother produced a weary smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment. But it’s accidental, honey. It’ll take me days to get this sorted out, and right now my whole life is beginning to look like a grid. I don’t see why yours shouldn’t, too.”

Nita smiled and put her head down on her arms. “Okay. But, Mom, what do you do if you find out that you’re
wrong?
”

“Same thing,” her mother said. “Apologize immediately. Why change a tactic that works?”

“Because it makes you look like a wimp.”

Her mother glanced up from the papers again, raising her eyebrows. “Excuse me, I must have missed something. It’s
not
right to apologize when you’re wrong?”

Nita saw immediately why Dairine refused to play chess with their mother anymore. She was cornered. “Thanks, Mom,” she said, and got up.

Her mother let out a long breath. “Nothing worthwhile is easy, honey,” she said, and looked down ruefully at the papers, rubbing her eyes. “This, either. Come to think of it, I could probably use an aspirin about now.” And she got up and went to get one.

Nita was starting to feel like she could use one herself.
She’s probably right.

…And something’s got to be done. The water situation out there isn’t going to just fix itself—

But what am I supposed to do? I can’t work with Kit when I’m pissed off at him! It’s going to have to wait. The Powers That Be understand that wizards need room to be human, too.

But even as she thought it, Nita felt guilty. A wizard knew that the energy had been running slowly out of the universe for millennia. Viewed in that context, no delay was worthwhile. Every quantum of energy lost potentially could have been used to make some fragment of the cosmos work better. A relationship, for example…

Nita got up and wandered back to her room, thinking about what she might do to make herself useful, besides the project she and Kit and S’reee had been working on in the bay. It wasn’t as if there weren’t projects she’d been interested in that Kit hadn’t been enthusiastic about. This would be a good time to start one of those.

Yet as Nita shut the door of her room, Dairine’s point came back to her.
Is it possible that Kit and I really
do
still have unfinished business about Ronan?
Before, Nita wouldn’t have thought it likely. Now she wondered. Dairine could be cunning and sly, and a pain in the butt… but she was also a wizard. She wouldn’t lie.

But why wouldn’t Kit have told me?

Unless he thought the idea was stupid. Or unless he really didn’t think it was a problem.

She sat down at the desk and put her feet up on it, and picked up the manual, hoping to feel that fizz… but there was nothing. Nita dropped it in her lap and stared at the dark window.
I was stupid with him,
she thought.
But he wasn’t being terribly open-minded, either. Or real tactful
.

She opened the manual idly. Life had changed so much since she’d found it; it now seemed as if she’d had the manual within reach all her life—or all the life that mattered. In some ways it seemed to Nita as if all her childhood had simply been an exercise in marking time, waiting for the moment when this book would snag her hand as she trailed it idly down a shelf full of books in the local children’s library. It was always handy now, either in her book bag or tucked away in her personal claudication. A couple years’ use had taught Nita that the manual wasn’t the infallibly omniscient resource she’d taken it for at the beginning. It
did
contain everything you needed to know to do your work … but it left deciding what the work
was
to you. You might make mistakes, but they were yours. The manual made it all possible, though. It was compendium, lifeline, communications device, encyclopedia, weapon, and silent adviser all rolled into one. Nita couldn’t imagine what wizardry would be like without it.

And there was something else associated with wizardry that she couldn’t imagine being without, either.

She riffled through the pages, let her hand drop. The manual fell open at a spot near its beginning, and as Nita looked down, she wondered why she should even be surprised that she found herself looking at this particular page.

In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art, which is Its gift, in Life’s service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened or threaten another. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded….

She let out a long unhappy breath as she gazed at the words.
I will ease pain….

Nita had made her share of mistakes during her practice, but if there was one thing she prided herself on, it was taking the Oath seriously.
But lately maybe I haven’t been doing a very good job. On the large things, yeah. But have they been blocking my view of the small ones?

And what makes me think that being friends with Kit is something small?

Nita closed the book, put it down on the desk, and pushed it away.
It’s too late tonight Tomorrow. I’ll go over and see him tomorrow, and we’ll see what happens.

Sleeping in turned out to be an idle fantasy. Kit rolled over just after dawn, feeling muzzy and wondering what had managed to jolt him out of a peculiar dream, when suddenly he realized what it was. A cold wet nose had been stuck into his ear.

“Ohh,
Ponch
…” Kit rolled over and tried to hide his head under the pillow. This was a futile gesture. The nose followed him, and then the tongue.

Finally he had no choice but to get up. Kit sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes, while Ponch jumped up and washed the back of Kit’s neck as if he hadn’t a worry in the world. Kit, for his own part, ached as if someone had run him over lightly with a truck, but this was a normal side effect of doing a large, complex wizardry; it would pass.

“Awright, awright,” Kit muttered, trying to push Ponch away. He glanced at the clock on his dresser—
Ten after six?! … What have I done to deserve this?
—and then looked over at the desk. His manual sat where he had left it, last thing. Closing it, finally getting ready to turn in, he had felt the covers fizz, had opened the book to the backpage, and had seen Nita’s response.

Fine.

He got up, went over to the desk, and opened the manual again. Nothing had been added since. Nita was plainly too pissed off even to yell at him. But Tom had been pretty definite about letting her be if she was working on some other piece of business.
Okay. Let her get on with it.

He shut the manual and went to root around in his dresser for jeans and a polo shirt. Ponch was jumping for joy around him, his tongue lolling out and making him look unusually idiotic. “What’re
you
so excited about?” Kit asked in the Speech.

“Out, we’re gonna go out, aren’t we?” Ponch said in a string of muffled woofs and whines. “We’re gonna go
there
again, you can go with me, this is great, let’s go out!” And Ponch abruptly sat down and licked his chops. “I’m hungry,” he said.

‘There,’
Kit thought, and shuddered. But now that the experience was half a day behind him, he was feeling a little less freaked out by it, and more curious about what had happened.

He put his head out his bedroom door. It was quiet; nobody in his house got up this early on a Saturday, unless it was his dad, who was an occasional surfcasting nut and would sometimes head out before dawn to fish the flood tide down at Point Lookout or Captree.
No sign of that happening today, though.

“Okay,” he said to Ponch. “You can have your breakfast, and then I want a shower … and then we’ll go out. After I take care of something.”

Ponch spun several times in a tight circle and then launched himself out into the hall and down the stairs.

Kit went after him, fed him, and then went back upstairs to take a shower and make his plans. When he came downstairs, Ponch was waiting at the side door to be let out.

“In a minute,” Kit said. “Don’t I get something to eat, too?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ You big nutcase.” Kit grabbed a quart of milk out of the fridge and drank about half of it, then opened one of the nearby cupboards and found a couple of the awful muesli-based breakfast bars that Carmela liked. He stuck them in his pocket and then went to the write-on bulletin board stuck to the front of the fridge. The pen, as usual, wasn’t in the clip where it belonged; Kit found it behind the sink. On the board he wrote: GONE OUT
ON BUSINESS
, BACK LATER. This was code, which Kit’s family now understood. To Ponch he said, “You go do what you have to first … I have something to get ready.”

Kit let the dog out and locked the door behind them. Then he and Ponch went out into the backyard. It wasn’t nearly as tidy or decorative as Nita’s. Kit’s father wasn’t concerned about it except as somewhere to sit outside on weekends, and so while the lawn got mowed regularly, the back of the yard was a jungle of sassafras saplings and blackberry bushes. Into this little underbrush forest Ponch vanished while Kit sat down on a creaking old wooden lounger and opened his manual.

He knew in a general way what he wanted—a spell that would keep him connected to Ponch in mind, letting him share the dog’s perceptions. It also needed to be something that would keep them within a few yards of each other, so that if physical contact became important, Kit could have it in a hurry. He paged through the manual, looking for one particular section and finding it:
Bindings, ligations, and cinctures
—wizardries that dealt with holding energy or matter in place, in check, or in alignment with something else.
Simplex, multiplex… Here’s one. First-degree complex aelysis… proof strength in m-dynes… to the minus four…
The original formula for the spell, Kit saw, had called for fish’s breath, women’s beards, and various other hard-to-find ingredients. But over many years the formula had been refined so that all you needed to build it now were knowledge, intention, a basic understanding of paraphysics, and the right words in the Speech.

Yeah, this is what I need
. “All right,” Kit said softly in the Speech. “This is a beta-class short-term interlocution.” He pronounced the first few sentences, and the spell started to build itself in the air in front of him—a twining and growing chain of light, word linking to word in a structure like a chain of DNA, but with three main strands instead of two.

After a couple of minutes he was finished, and the structure nearly complete. Kit plucked it out of the air, tested it between his hands. It looked faintly golden in the early morning light, and felt at least as strong as a steel chain would, though in his hands it was as light and fine as so much spun silk.

Not bad,
Kit thought. But there was still one thing missing. The place down at one end of the spell where his own name and personal information went was now full; Kit had pasted it in from the wizardry he and S’reee had just done. But as for Ponch…

It embarrassed him to have to turn to his dog, who’d now returned from the bushes and was sitting and watching Kit with great interest. “Ponch,” he said, “I can’t believe I’ve never asked you this before. But what’s your name?”

The dog laughed at him. “You just said it.”

“But Grrarhah down the street uses a Cyene name.”

“If the people you lived with named
you
Tinkerbell,” Ponch said, sounding dry, “so would
you.
”

Kit had to grin at that “I don’t mind the name you gave me,” Ponch said. “I use that. It says who I am.” He stuck his nose in Kit’s ear again and started to wash it.

“Euuuu, Ponch!” Kit pushed him away… but not very hard. “Give it a rest. I have to finish something here.”

“Let me see.”

Kit showed him the wizardry. As Ponch watched, Kit pronounced the fifteen or sixteen syllables of the Speech that wound themselves into the visible version of Ponch’s name, containing details like his age and his breed (itself a tightly braided set of links with about ten strands involved). Ponch nosed at the leash; it came alive with light as he did so. “There’s the collar,” Kit said, looping the end of the spell through the wizard’s knot he had tied there, then holding the wide loop up. The similar loop at the other end, made up of Kit’s name and personal information, would go around his wrist.

Ponch slipped his head through the wider of the two loops, then shook himself. The loop tightened down.

“That feel okay?” Kit said. “Not too tight?”

“It’s fine. Let’s go.”

“Okay,” Kit said, and stood up. He slipped his wrist through the other loop and pronounced the six words that got the environmental and tracking functions of the wizardry going, the parts that would snap them back here if anything life threatening happened. The “chain” flickered, showing that the added functions were working. “Right. Show me how.”

“Like this—”

Ponch took no more than a step forward, and without a moment’s hesitation that darkness slammed silently down around them again. This time at least Kit was sure he had air around him and Ponch, and he had oxygenation routines ready to kick in if their bodies were affected by any kind of paralysis. Nonetheless, Kit still couldn’t move, couldn’t see anything.