A Wizard Alone

Elucidations

Nita looked up from her reading and glanced out the window into the darkness to see that snow was just beginning to fall. She sat still in the pool of light at her desk, for the first time in hours really paying attention to the silence that had been settling down outside— that particular muffling effect, possibly something to do with the low clouds, that always seemed to accompany a heavy snowfall from the very first.

Nita sighed at the sight of the big flakes coming gently down. The first really decent snowfall of the winter, and her mother wasn’t here to see it. First snowfalls had always been an event for her mom. She would bundle herself up and go out and play in the snow like a crazy thing until she was worse soaked than either Nita or Dairine ever let themselves get. Over the past few years, Nita had heard her mom complain more than once to her dad that the greenhouse effect was screwing up the winter weather. “We just don’t get snow like we used to, Harry,“ she would say. ”We have to do something, or future generations won’t know what it’s like to get slush in their socks.“

Nita held still a moment longer, listening to the quiet of the house around her. Her dad and Dairine were both in bed, and outside the snow kept on falling. After a few moments, Nita sighed again and pushed her manual away. For hours now she had been up to her eyes in more research on the contextual variations of the Speech — in noun paradeclensions, and judicial imperatives, and the history and use of the Enactive Recension. It was all fascinating, and she had no idea how she was going to stomp all this information into her head soon enough to be of any use. At any rate, it was late, and she wasn’t going to get any more of it into her head tonight.

Nita got up… and her bedroom went away, fading around her into a darkness through which, bizarrely, snow continued to fall.

Standing there in jeans and one of her dad’s big sweatshirts, Nita looked all around her in shock, and then realized what had happened. Her hand went to her throat, where the “necklace” of the lucid-dreaming wizardry rested. I forgot about this. I turned it on, and then I fell asleep while I was reading

, she thought. I’m dreaming already. Isn’t that wild?

Nita glanced around at the endless dark stretching away from her on all sides. Off in the distance she saw light coming from somewhere to fall on the dark surface on which she stood. The source of the light was it-self invisible, but in its beam she could see more snow gently falling.

Okay

, she thought, and for lack of anything better to do, she started walking toward the light. As she went, Nita became aware of a low mutter of sound out in the further reaches of the darkness. It took some minutes of walking through the dark before she recognized it as human voices speaking: a slow, muted sound of conversation, coming from somewhere else, but not seeming to matter, particularly. It was as if Nita was hearing these voices through someone else, filtered, and the filter made it all seem not so much unimportant, but simply unreal, unrelated to anything that mattered, as if a TV show about some subject that bored you was blathering away in the background, while you were too busy with other things to turn it off.

She shivered a little, recognizing the kinship of this filter with the one she’d been seeing life through lately. Can something like this get stuck in place? Nita wondered. It wasn’t an idea she much liked. And suddenly it made that don’t-care, don’t-feel-like-it attitude seem not so much like a self-indulgence as a danger. What kind of wizard doesn’t care? she thought. What kind of wizard—

The sound of the voices began to dwindle, just as Nita thought she was about to understand what they were saying. She breathed out in frustration, and kept on walking. The light was a little closer now, and she could see the white spotlight it made on the black floor; the snow kept gently falling through the light, though as far as Nita could see, it vanished as soon as it came in contact with the ground. “Hello?” she said. “Anybody here?”

No answer came back. She kept on walking. That spot of light had been about a quarter mile away when she noticed it. Now it was maybe a short block away, and as she peered at it, Nita thought she saw something sitting in it, a starkly illuminated shape — mostly white and black and red, with discordant splashes of other colors — sitting there in a pool of its own shadow.

It was the clown.

How about that

, Nita thought. She didn’t hurry. That was a good way to wake up prematurely.

She just kept on walking, and when she was about ten yards away, what seemed like a polite distance to her, Nita stopped.

“Hello?” she said again.

The clown sat in the middle of the spotlight and didn’t look up.

“I talked to you the other night, right?” Nita said. “Or you tried to talk to me, anyway.”

The clown just sat there. Its face was immobile. The big red nose, the bizarre purple wig sticking out from under the absurd little derby hat, the painted tear, all were exactly the same as they had been before. The clown sat there cross-legged in brightly patched, baggy pants, rocking very slightly in the stillness, while the snow falling all around began to taper off.

“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”

Nothing. The clown sat there, didn’t even turn its head toward her.

What’s the matter with you

? Nita thought. I’m going out of my way to help you get through to me, here

She thought for a moment, and then tried the on-duty wizards’ identification phrase in another of its commoner forms. “I am on the Powers’ business,” Nita said, “walking the worlds as do They; well met on the common journey!”

The clown just sat there with its head turned away, rocking. Nita started to get annoyed. Okay, she thought Let’s try this. Nita thought for a moment about what she was about to say in the Speech, wanting to make sure she got it right the first time, as she wasn’t sure what would happen if she mispronounced it.

“In Life’s name and the One’s,” Nita said, “I adjure you to speak to me!”

It was astonishing how just uttering the phrase made a kind of shocked silence after it. The manual had said there was no resisting such an injunction. Nonetheless, there followed one of the longest silences Nita could remember hearing. It took a long time before the clown looked up. Its eyes didn’t come to rest exactly on Nita, but looked a little way over her shoulder, and the voice that replied, not from the clown itself but from the darkness all around, was absolutely flat.

“I am One,” it said.

Chills ran up and down Nita’s back at the sound of a phrase unnervingly close to the one reputed to have caused the Big Bang, and much else. “Uh, I doubt that very much,” Nita said. “At least not the way I understand the term.”

“Then you are One.”

Nita’s expression was rueful. “Not by a long shot,” she said. “I’m just one more mortal… and a wizard.”

The clown still didn’t look right at her. But Nita felt a change coming over the darkness around the clown, or in the way she saw it. Instead of being frightening, now the shadows outside the light were filled with potential and promise, and the light now seemed painful and arid, an expression of everything stuck and hopeless — a scorching-bright loneliness that didn’t even have a word for itself.

The clown looked at her helplessly, and though it seemed frozen in place, except for the rocking, the painted tear was real. All the darkness shivered with its pain.

“What’s a mortal?” it said.

Nita actually winced. That was a question the answer to which she’d had entirely too much of lately. Yet Nita also could sense that out here, pinned down in the unforgiving light, was someone or something as vulnerable as a butterfly with glass wings. An angry or thoughtless answer could shatter it.

She thought about her response for a moment. “We’re the impermanent ones,” she finally said.

“The world may last, but we don’t.”

The eyes in the painted face widened.

The painted mouth went wide, and a great cry of anguish burst out of the clown. Nita took a breath, terrified that she’d screwed up, despite her caution.

Then she caught her breath again, because without warning there was suddenly another clown there, identical to the first one. It was standing, not sitting, and with an interested expression it watched the first clown scream. “I heard about the impermanence thing,” said the second clown.

“The Silence told me. What went wrong?”

Nita was finding all of this unusually weird, even for a dream. The Silence? What’s that supposed to mean

? She sat down outside the circle of the spotlight, not far from where the second clown stood in the “twilight zone,” halfway between the light and the shadow. “There are a lot of answers to that one,” Nita said. “One of them’s simple. Somebody invented Death.”

As she mentioned It, Nita heard that low menacing growl coming from somewhere out there in the shadows. Invoking the Lone Power, however obliquely, and even in dream, always had its dangers. But the growl seemed to have no real teeth in it. It sounds almost tired, Nita thought.

Weird

But of much more interest to her, though the second clown wouldn’t look directly at her, either, was the sudden live look in its eyes — a flash of recognition, a scowl of rejection.

“I know,” the second clown said. Its voice, his voice, was fighting with that robotic quality, the life in it struggling to get out.

Just for a moment it succeeded. Nita got a quick flicker-rush of images and sounds: dawns and sunsets, objects shaped roughly like the clown all rushing hither and yon on unfathomable errands, shouting at one another about incomprehensible things. All kinds of pain were tangled up with the rush and roar of perception, but strangest of all, it was pain that the one who experienced it actually welcomed. For the clown, that pain was a lifeline, something it clung to — as a way to temporarily mask out sensations it couldn’t bear, and as something that could sometimes pierce through the muffling blanket of nonfeeling that kept draping itself over the clown’s body and mind. Nita could feel that the clown hoped there might be more to life than hurting… but it was also willing to suffer the hurt if that meant staying alive to get its own job done.

The storm of pictures and feelings faded, leaving Nita staring down into a roiling, scary darkness. But the darkness was oddly ambivalent, as filled with possibility as with terror.

And I’m the one who finds that strange, not him

, Nita thought. Whoever this was, however simplistic or not his view of the universe might be, he was braver about it than she was.

“I didn’t know everything was like this for you,” Nita said.

The clown winced, as if something had pained it. “I? But I did know. There is no other.”

Nita blinked. It was remarks like this that kept making her wonder if she was dealing with a human or an alien — that, and the way the clown seemed able to cope with some concepts one moment, and then would lose them again the next. Yet again she had to remind herself that there was still no guarantee she was dealing with a human. All the imageries so far — the clown, the robot, the knight — were ones this entity could have pulled out of her own head as possible ways to communicate. And she still needed to be careful not to hurt whatever it was.

Well, I wonder if the version of the Speech I’ve been using is too local, too humanoid? I could try one of the broader recensions. Or the broadest one.

She pulled out her manual to make extra sure of the phrasing. The Enactive Recension was the form in which it was said the One did Its business. Nita was a little nervous about using it, because she could, apparently, make serious changes in her local environment if she was careless while speaking in Enactive. According to an old joke, the asteroid belt had been a planet once, until one of the Powers That Be misconjugated a verb—

Well, I can’t blow anything up if I keep the phrasing simple enough

, Nita thought. This phrasing should be real inoffensive.

“There are more than one of us,” she said.

There was the briefest pause — and this time both clowns put their heads up and screamed. While Nita watched, her mouth open, the first one actually shredded away on the air, in torment and shock.

The second one stood there screaming away, and Nita watched, wide-eyed, wondering if it was going to shred, too. But it didn’t. The scream didn’t stop, either. After a few moments, as her own shock wore off, the noise began to remind Nita of her earliest encounters with Dairine… or rather, with Dairine after she’d first become aware that Nita might possibly be in competition with her for their parents’ attention. Dairine’s lung power at the age of two had initially caused Nita some innocent wonder, but this was a phase that had lasted about five minutes, and now, as the scream just kept on going, Nita let out a long breath and invoked the remedy she’d learned way back then. “All right,” she shouted in the Speech. “Shut UP!”

The second clown fell silent in complete amazement.

“There is more than one of us,” Nita said, into the abruptly echoing silence. “Are. Whatever. I’m sorry if this poses some kind of problem for you. But screaming’s not going to make all the rest of us go away.”

There was another of those long, long pauses.

“Tried that before, huh?” Nita said, not without some amusement.

“And ignoring you,” the clown said, looking past her, and looking annoyed. “That didn’t work, either.”

Nita found herself remembering how desperately she had wanted to ignore the preparations for her mother’s funeral, to the point where she had actually partly succeeded and the funeral itself had begun to seem unreal, like a bad dream. It was after that that the remoteness began to sink into her.

That feeling of nothing mattering, of not wanting to deal with anything

, she thought, the filter I’ve been stuck with… that’s what this guy and I have in common. That’s what’s been drawing us together… even when he’s tried to break the link himself. But somehow it seems important for it not to get broken now

. “Why ignore everybody?” she said.

“Because you’re a distraction.”

“As for the first part of that,” Nita said, “sorry, but you’re confused. I’m here, believe me. And as for the second — a distraction from what?”

The clown looked around at the darkness. “This.”

“Meaning what?”

Out of the darkness, ever so softly, came that growl again.

Nita glanced out into the dark, slightly unnerved. But this is still my dream, she thought. If It tries something cute, I can just slip out. I hope

. “Now there are some contradictions in what you’ve been saying,” she said. “I thought you said you were all by yourself.”

“I am.” This time the phrase, in the Speech, was identical with the Self-declaration of Life. Nita, even more unnerved now, half expected to hear thunder, but none came. The One was either otherwise occupied, or not particularly concerned about having Its lines stolen. “But That, out there… That’s different.”

Nita wasn’t sure that the clown was able to perceive the contradictions. Maybe it can’t. Or maybe different and other don’t mean the same thing for it. Certainly they were different words in the Speech.

“All right,” Nita said. “I won’t argue that.” She noted that the clown wasn’t wincing quite so badly now when she said “I.” “But, look, you don’t have to stay here.”

And suddenly there were two clowns again. One of them was back in the middle of the spotlight.

Nita made a silent bet with herself as to which one would shred next. The spotlit clown said, “But this is all there is.” The one standing in shadow said, “If I go there… That’s waiting.”

One more tiger growl sounded from out in the darkness: Nita’s dream-image of the Lone Power, patient, hungry, willing to wait. But still a little tired, Nita thought. Interesting…

“Yeah, well, so is What’s older,” Nita said. “And doesn’t die, no matter what one of Its older kids intended for the rest of creation.”

This time the screaming didn’t surprise Nita when it started. This time it was the clown in the shadows that shredded. The one in the spotlight looked at Nita in genuine shock. “Where’d you come from?” it said.

“Don’t ask me,” Nita said. “Theoretically, I’m asleep. Look, now that you’re over not being the only thing in existence — for the moment — do you wear that costume all the time?”

The clown looked at her in astonishment. “You can tell it’s a costume?”

“Under the costumes,” Nita said, “even clowns have lives. Outside the circus, anyway.”

The clown was silent again, for even longer than before. Nita waited, untroubled. This far along in her practice, she had learned that a lot of wizardry wasn’t speech, but silence. “It seemed right,” the clown said. “The body I wear usually doesn’t work real well, and that makes people laugh. They may as well laugh for a good reason as for a bad one.”

And suddenly it wasn’t a clown standing there, but a boy of maybe eleven. He was handsome, in a little-kid way, skinny and sharp-faced, with a short, restrained Afro cut high in the back. But his eyes were younger than his body. “Nothing works,” he said, sounding abruptly matter-of-fact — or maybe it was just the loss of the clown suit that reinforced this effect. “Everybody laughs. Especially the ones who don’t do it out loud; they do it the loudest.”

Nita’s surprise at the change of clown-into-kid was muted a little by what he was saying, because she knew something about this, though not in regard to laughter. Some of the kids at school and family friends who’d tried over the past month to treat her as usual, as if nothing had happened, had hurt her far worse than those who’d let their discomfort show. “Well,” she said, “they’re idiots.”

“They’re all That,” the little kid said, pointing with his chin into the darkness. He didn’t move much; he stood with his hands hanging down by his sides, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them, and his face was fairly immobile. “The Thing out in the darkness, That’s been chasing me forever.”

Nita wasn’t sure what to make of this.

“I’m not sure you’re not That, too,” the kid said.

Nita raised her eyebrows. “Either I’m the One, or I’m That,” she said, frankly amused at the possibility that she could be either, “but I don’t think you get to have it both ways.”

The kid looked at her with an expression that wasn’t entirely convinced. “It’s tried a lot of costumes in Its time,” he said. “It looks out of everybody’s eyes. I tried looking back for so long… but I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to get away by myself.” He looked away from Nita again. “At least when I’m all by myself, It can’t get at me. Everybody wants me to come out, I know… but every time I do, It’s waiting, and I just can’t. It hurts too much.”

Nita said nothing. Finally, after what seemed ages of silence, he turned toward her. He didn’t quite look at her as he said, “It’s looking out of your eyes, too. It’s always been close to you. Lately It’s been closer than ever.”

Nita swallowed hard. This would not be the moment to break down. “You’re not the only one It chases around, you know,” she said. “It’s after everybody else, too, one way or another. Eventually It gets us all. But if we pay attention to what we’re doing, we can make a whole lot of trouble for It along the way.” And Nita couldn’t help grinning a little, however strange that felt. If she had one satisfaction in her life these days, it was the knowledge that the Lone Power found her a personal pain in the butt, annoying enough to try to do one of Its crooked deals with.

The kid looked up at Nita with startling suddenness, and she caught the force of his glance fullon as he grinned back. “I know,” he said.

Nita actually had to stagger back a step to keep her balance, mentally and physically. Meeting his gaze was like being hit over the head with a brick, but a good brick — an abrupt, concentrated, overwhelming onslaught of cheerful power with a slight edge of mischief in it. Nita had hardly ever felt so intense a wash of emotion or attitude from any being, human or otherwise.

“I know,” he said again. “I’m doing just that. I do it all the time, now.” If anything, his grin got more jubilant, though he looked away again. “And it’s a whole lot of fun.”

Nita was on the point of saying, Don’t start enjoying it too much—and then stopped herself as she saw his smile start to fade. The sight pierced her to the heart. “But I always have to make sure I stop having the fun before It notices,” he said. “Every time I find out again that I’m not alone, I let the knowledge go.”

That explains it. That’s why he keeps forgetting things, and has to ask questions over and over.

“But why?” Nita said.

“Because it’s what always happened when things got bad for me,” the boy said, “when It first turned up in my life, the way It turns up at the bottom of everything bad. I was fine, I always knew who I was… until the world started screaming at me, making it impossible to think, to be with people… to be. I would forget myself, again and again. I couldn’t help myself. I would forget everything that hurt… and everything that didn’t. But then that started to change. I started to remember again, for a while. And It was still in here with me.”

His eyes glinted with brief amusement. “Then I saw how to repay the little ‘favor’ It did me. It can’t stop coming back to deal with me… and I never let It close the deal.” He grinned. “The only problem is that I keep getting better, keep sliding back toward the way things used to be when I was normal. And every time, to keep It interested, I have to let go of a world that has other people in it…”

“Don’t let it go!” Nita said. “Not being alone is the best part of being a wizard!” She swallowed.

“Or just being a person.”

“Am I a wizard?” he said, a little sadly.

Nita shook her head in admiration. “If you can speak in the Enactive Recension, you’re sure on the right track!”

The growl out in the dark sounded more annoyed now, and it prolonged itself, not fading away.

“It’s been following me around,” he said. “Around and around… It’s really funny. Especially when I forget.”

I can’t get off

, Nita remembered the clown crying in the dark. Now she began to wonder whether the despairing voice was all the boy’s… or some frustrated aspect of the Lone One’s.

And her eyes widened. It’s been chasing him… and he runs and runs. All the time I’ve been assuming that it’s the Lone Power in control here. And maybe it’s not…!

He started to fade out. “Wait! Don’t leave yet!” Nita cried.

“I have to. It’ll realize something different is happening if I stay here too long.”

“Then at least don’t let yourself go again!”

“I have to,” he said. “If I don’t, It’ll realize what’s happening, and all this will have been for nothing.”

He smiled that delighted smile as he turned away. Then he was gone. Nita found herself standing alone in the darkness, and nearby a spotlight out of nowhere shone on the dark floor: just a pool of light. What briefly had made the light special was now gone.

Oh my god

, Nita thought.

It really is him — the kid Kit’s been hunting. It’s Darryl! And now I think I understand “the Silence”

! she thought. Wizards got their information from the universe in a lot of different ways. On Earth alone, the manual in either its printed or online versions was only one method. Whale-wizards heard the Sea speak to them; the feline wizards had told Nita about something called the Whispering. This has to be like that…

But she was still left with entirely too many mysteries to solve. Nita stood there wondering what in the worlds to do next, then shook her head.

Waking up would probably be a good idea.

It took Nita a few seconds to remember the way to break the dream without waiting for a normal awakening. When she opened her eyes, she was looking sideways at the wall beside her desk, having put her arms down on the desk and her head down on her arms as she initially slid into sleep.

Nita rubbed her eyes, blinked, stretched. I’m completely wiped out, she thought. I’ve got to get some real sleep, now, or I’ll be useless tomorrow. But Kit’s got to hear about this.

She glanced down at her manual. “What time is it?” she said.

The page cleared and showed her the time in every zone on Earth, as a Julian date, and on all the planets in Sol system.

“Show-off,” she said softly, glancing at the local time for New York. The readout said, “0223.”

It was late, but this was important. Kit? Nita said silently.

Nothing. But it wasn’t the “asleep kind of nothing: Kit was missing.

“Message him,” she said to the manual.

The page blanked itself, then showed Nita the words, “Subject is out of ambit.”

That “error” message she now recognized. Kit and Ponch were off world-walking somewhere, out of this universe proper. Nita sighed. I’ll have to catch him in the morning, she thought. But bed first

…

She slept hard and deep, and for a change woke up not in the dark, but just after dawn. I still wish spring would hurry up

, Nita thought as she swung her feet out of bed and rubbed her eyes. This winter seems to be lasting forever

But at the same time, it was hard to dislike a morning like this, when there was what looked like six inches of new snow outside, and it was Saturday as well. The snow was wet, clinging delicately to the bare branches of the trees out in the backyard, and everything was very still, the sky a pure, clean blue behind the white branches. Who knows? Maybe I’ll sneak out there, make a snowball or two, and stick them in Dairine’s bed. Give her about three seconds of thinking I’ve had second thoughts about her, her bed, and Pluto.

Nita threw last night’s sweatshirt and jeans on and went downstairs to the kitchen, manual in hand. Her father was there, making his own coffee for a change. He looked at Nita with some surprise when she came in. “You’re up early for a Saturday,” he said.

“Not that early. I got some sleep for a change.”

“You don’t look like it.”

Nita yawned and stretched. “I don’t feel like it, either,” she said.

“Just a long week at school, maybe?”

“I don’t know.” She went over to put the kettle on for herself. She ached all over, as if she’d had a particularly bad gym class, and she just felt generally weary. As if I was a long, long way away last night.

But if that really was Darryl, then I was only two towns away, in his mind.

Or possibly in an alternate universe he created, one a whole lot further away than that —

“How are you coming with what you were working on yesterday morning?” Nita’s dad said.

“Any progress?”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “but I don’t understand it.” She opened a cupboard and tried to decide what kind of tea she wanted. She finally decided on mint, and got the tea box down, fishing around in it for the right tea bag.

“Your alien, or the progress?”

“Both. And it looks like it wasn’t even an alien, if I’m right. It’s a little kid who lives over in Baldwin.”

Her father looked surprised at that as he went to get his coat from the rack by the door. “Another wizard?”

“Supposedly not yet,” Nita said. “Assuming this is the person who I think it is. I have to check with Kit.” But that brought up another odd problem for Nita to consider. From her own experience, Nita knew that being on Ordeal imparted a certain tentative feel to your wizardry, even when your power levels were at their highest. Even Dairine’s use of wizardry, when she was on Ordeal, had exhibited that tentative quality. But it was completely missing in Darryl. That’s something else to ask torn and Carl about.

Her dad put on his coat. “Well, that sounds encouraging, anyhow,” he said. He came over, gave her a hug and a kiss. “Leave me a note if you have to go anywhere. Is Dairine going to be getting involved in this?”

“Jeez, I hope not,” Nita said. “It’s confusing enough already.”

“Okay,” her dad said. “She has some school project she’s supposed to be working on this weekend. If you want to just have a look at one point or another and make sure she’s staying on track…”

This was, in fact, the last thing Nita wanted, but she nodded. “I will.”

“Thanks, baby girl. See you later.”

Nita wasn’t sure, as her father went out, whether to bristle or smile. When’s the last time he called me “baby girl”

? she thought. It was one of those nicknames that Nita had complained about forcefully for years when she was younger, until her dad finally stopped using it. And now I’m not even sure I mind anymore

, she thought. I wonder if somehow he’s trying to remind himself of how things were when Mom was still here.

After a moment she laughed at herself for thinking such “shrinkly” thoughts. Millman is affecting me

, Nita thought.

She made a face then, as the kettle came to a boil. Oh god… Millman and the card tricks. But how long can it take to learn a card trick? I’ll do it later. I have other things to think about right now.

Nita glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It read 7:48. A little early, but then Kit did tend to get up early on the weekends. Kit? she said.

For a moment there was no response.

Hnnnhhh?

I’m not sure, but I think I may have found your guy.

A pause. When he answered, he still didn’t sound incredibly awake. When?

Last night. The time’s hard to judge, but I think it would’ve been around two-thirty.

There was a much longer pause that made Nita think Kit might have gone back to sleep. Finally he said, It couldn’t have been. I was with Darryl around then.

Nita blinked at that. You sure? she said.

Yeah, I’m sure

He sounded cranky. Neets, look, I’m completely wrecked, and I had trouble with my folks last night. I want to go back to sleep. Call me back, okay?

Uh, sure, but —

The connection between them didn’t so much break as dissolve in a returning wave of sleep.

Nita stared at the tea bag in her hand, bemused. “Well,” she said.

She made her tea and sat down at the dining room table with the mug, the manual, and a banana.

Nita didn’t go straight into the manual, partly because she wasn’t yet clear on where she should start looking. She was still trying to sort out some things about her experience last night.

There had just been something about Darryl. Nita kept coming back to the impact she’d felt when he’d finally looked right at her. It wasn’t power, not strength, in the usual sense. She was well down the cup of tea before she found the word she was looking for.

Innocence…

Talk about the innocence of childhood tended to pass right over Nita these days. Her own childhood was behind her — rather to her relief, because of all the beating up. And her memory of Dairine’s childhood was too fresh; anyone putting that concept and the word innocence together in the same sentence would simply have made Nita laugh. Her sister’s behavior aside, Nita knew perfectly well that most kids were no innocents.

But then most of the talk you heard on the subject came from adults, most of whom were entirely too hung up on the concept of childhood as this pure, untroubled thing that Nita wasn’t sure had ever existed. Plainly, like the counselor that Dairine had been complaining about, too few of them really remembered what it was like to be seven, or nine, or twelve.

Nita could understand that perfectly. Large parts of childhood hurt, and adults did with that remembered pain exactly what kids did when they could: Let whatever good memories they had bury it. Oh, the moments of delight, of pure joy, were there, all right, but what adults seemingly couldn’t bear was the idea that their whole childhoods hadn’t been that way, that the trouble and sorrow of their adult lives, the result of the Lone Power’s meddling in the worlds, wasn’t something they’d always had to deal with, right from the start. So despite whatever kids tried to tell them, adults just kept on reinventing childhood as something that was supposed to be happy all the time, a paradise lost in the past.

Yet in very small children, there was something that Nita had to admit she’d seen… even, occasionally, in Dairine. Last night, in her dream, Nita had looked at Darryl and had seen the same thing in his eyes, unalloyed — a sense of living in the morning of the world, a time or place either uncorrupted or redeemed; unafraid, and with no reason to be afraid; a person grounded immovably in the sense that the world worked, was just fine, would always be fine—

Poor kid

, Nita thought. Wait till reality hits him. Yet, remembering the look in those fearless eyes, she found herself having an unaccustomed second thought. Reality might hit him, might, indeed, have hit him hard already — but it might be what shattered.

Boy, would I like to be there to see that.

Nita began to peel the banana. But all that aside, Kit said he was with Darryl when I was, Nita thought. So if he’s right, then who was I with?

She took a bite of the banana and considered. And that’s not the only thing about this that’s strange. It’s Kit who’s been looking for him. If this really is Darryl, then why have I been seeing him, too?

But now she thought she had an answer to that. The filter, Nita thought. We’ve both been holding the world at arm’s length… trying to get it to leave us alone

She shook her head. And making ourselves more alone while we do it. But the wizardry knew what it was doing better than we did.

One wizard alone found another one

…

Nita sat there for a moment, staring at the banana without really seeing it. Okay. But that brings up another question. If this is Darryl, then how come my visits to his world are so different from Kit’s?

She had another bite of the banana, reflecting. Unless it’s just that I didn’t know that the person trying to contact me was autistic. I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about what the world would look like to him. So maybe I got something that was more like Darryl’s own ideas about himself…just translated into my own images: the uncomplicated, scared-kid stuff. Whereas Kit’s been getting stuff that looks more like it belongs to someone really troubled… maybe because he’s known from the beginning that Darryl’s autistic.

To Nita this sounded so commonsense that it seemed very likely to be true. So now if I could just figure out how Darryl can be with both me and Kit at the same time.

Maybe he was time-slipping somehow

? Nita thought. But that would have taken a wizardry, and a considerable amount of power to fuel it. And the only thing Nita was now certain about, as far as her dream went, was that Darryl hadn’t actually been doing any wizardry at the time.

No. Something else was going on…

Nita finished the banana, got up to dump the skin in the kitchen garbage can, and came back to her tea and the manual again. What other ways are there for someone to be in two places at one time?

She had to laugh at herself a little as she reached for the manual. It would be a great trick if you had a busy schedule

, Nita thought. Or you could be in school taking a test while you were also lying on the beach with a good book, working on your tan.

She started paging through the manual again, idly at first, then with more concentration. After about fifteen minutes of this, as the sun got brighter on the snow outside and the dining room filled with its light, Nita realized that she still wasn’t sure exactly how to find what she needed. She went to the back of the manual, to the page that handled search functions.

“I need all the references that have to do with being in two places at one time,” she said.

The page cleared itself, and new words appeared. “Apparition or co-location?”

There it was, yet another word Nita hadn’t ever heard of before today. “Apparition first,” she said.

“See highlighted section,” the page said, and her manual was abruptly about an inch thicker.

“Oh, no,” Nita said. “I think I need another banana.”

It took three more. Nita was grateful that Dairine seemed to be sleeping late, as she was the big banana fan in the house and would not have been pleased that Nita had made such inroads into the supply. The three bananas gave Nita time to discover, mostly by skimming the material as fast as she could, that there were an unnerving number of ways to appear in two places at once, if you felt like spending the energy. But that was the factor that kept everyone from doing it all the time. The universe had a basic bias against the same thing being in more than one place at once — this singularity of location being one of the ways that matter defined itself to begin with — and if you wanted to bend that bias in your favor, you would be heavily penalized, in terms of having to use a huge amount of effort to build a very complex spell.

It doesn’t matter

, Nita thought as she turned over the last twenty pages of the section, doing little more than glancing at them. I’m sure he wasn’t doing a wizardry last night, so none of this stuff applies

She turned back to the search page again. “Give me the co-location stuff now,” she said, not seeing any great point in it, but unwilling to stop until she’d read everything that could have a bearing on the problem.

The manual reduced itself to something more like its normal size, and laid itself open at a much shorter section. Nita glanced at the title page and table of contents for the section, momentarily confused. It was a classifications section on the Orders of Being.

Huh

? she thought. Nita had been through this section every now and then. The time she’d been most interested in it was just after passing her Ordeal, when she was trying to sort out some of the finer details of how wizardry was organized. That version of the information had been thinner than this one, a sort of beginner’s guide; this one was considerably more detailed.

Nita turned the pages, glancing at the master classification listing of created beings in the universe. The listing didn’t go by species, but by type. Good old-fashioned mortals naturally had all the other types outnumbered, but there were still a surprising number of modified mortals and other conditionals. Then came wizards, of which there were hundreds of different types, even within single species. Among her own species, with which Nita would have thought she was moderately familiar by now, there were more classes of wizard than she’d realized.

The standard classes — probationary, post-Ordeal, full wizard, expert wizard, Advisory Senior, Regional, Planetary, Sector — those she’d known about for long enough. But there were also splinter classifications, some categories that didn’t quite fit among either mortal wizards or the Powers That Be. The Transcendent Pig, of course, Nita knew. She smiled slightly as she turned past his page. The picture doesn’t do him justice. Maybe it’s old

But there were many other classifications in this section, too, some of them most obscure. Principalities, thrones, dominations— Thrones? Who wants to be a chair? But maybe I’m missing something here. Who knows? Maybe it’s fun to be furniture.

Nita turned the page over. Pillars? What is this? First furniture, now architecture…

Abdah/“Pillars”

— This category of created being is independent of wizard status but still included because of the sharing of various functions and qualities across species and eschatological barriers. The sobriquet “Pillars” refers to the immense supportive strength inherent in these creatures wherever they appear. The physical and spiritual structure of the Universe and its contents is strengthened against the assaults of evil by the Pillars’ presence, and weakened by their loss. While they occasionally may also be wizards, abdals display no unusual aptitude for the Art: Their value lies elsewhere. Their status comes from direct endowment by the One; their power is derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality. Some have unusual abilities of perception reaching into other universes, while still seeing the entire physical world as mirage. Some have sufficient control over their physical natures to change their bodies at will, without recourse to normal wizardry, or to travel great distances, or to appear in two places at the same time…

Certainty went straight through Nita like a lightning bolt, and not only because of the twoplacesat-once line. It was everything else in combination with that. She thought of the knight, of the strength and bravery she’d sensed in that version of Darryl, and of the power inherent in the robot.

All those experiences were fragments of this bigger picture, pieces of the jigsaw. Nita glanced on down the page.

The Pillars are rarely recognized as such by their contemporaries. Should they become conscious of their own status as abdals, the realization itself renders them ineffective in their role, which is to channel the One’s power without obstruction into the strengthening of the world. Their portion of that power is then lost to the Worlds, and with its loss, the abdal dies.

Nita slapped the manual shut and sat there, actually sweating, for a few moments. The language of the manual could be obscure sometimes, but this time Nita was sure she knew perfectly well what it was talking about when it said the Pillars’ power was “derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality.” It means what Darryl’s got, she thought. Innocence. That plain, straightforward innocence that just goes right through whatever comes at it, like a knife, or bounces any attack off it, like a shield. And that really, really pisses off the Lone Power, so that It just keeps coming at him again and again, which is just the way Darryl wants it —

Nita pushed back from the table a little, leaning back in the chair and considering. Normally when the Lone Power turned Its attention to destroying a wizard during his or her Ordeal, It would lay out no more energy than It absolutely had to. The tendency not to waste energy unnecessarily was one It still shared with the other Powers. It didn’t waste Its time spending a lot of power on one wizard unless It knew that person was going to be something really special. Dairine, for example, Nita thought. It gave her a lot of grief because she was so young when her Ordeal hit. The kind of power she was going to have, even just for a while, was worth trying to knock out

But Darryl didn’t give Nita the same impression of huge and abrupt power that Dairine had, and the manual confirmed his power levels as being, while not unusually low, not unusually high, either.

So these repeated attacks suggest that the Lone Power knows Darryl’s one of the Pillars

, Nita thought. And killing an abdal has to be worth more to the Lone Power than just killing a wizard on Ordeal. Getting two for the price of one must look like an awful lot of fun to It.

But the game’s changed. Darryl’s not the only stuck one now!

Nita sat looking out into the front yard, watching the maple tree there shed little sparkles of snow into the air as a faint breeze moved its branches. If the Lone One finds out about this, It’s going to go ballistic

, Nita thought. It’s been having so much fun toying with Darryl that It doesn’t realize he’s turned the tables on It.

The Enemy will fight and fight again. I will hold It here, he said. He’s prolonging his Ordeal on purpose, running the Lone Power ragged —

But that can’t last forever. If there’s one thing the Lone Power hates worse than anything else, it’s someone laughing at It. The minute It discovers that Darryl’s tricking It, It’ll just kill him outright in the nastiest way It can.

Nita bit her lip. And that would be for It to make Darryl find out that he’s one of the Pillars. He loses the power. He dies. And the Lone Power gets back at the One, too, through Darryl’s death.

Her eyes narrowed as she remembered that mischievous smile, the courage in those dark eyesand thought of how long Darryl had been alone there in one or another of his worlds, righting, forgetting, fighting again, an endless battle with no hope of relief, no way to win… but with that valor always there, like shining armor.

Well, It’s not going to get Its way this time, Nita thought.

She got up and started picking up the banana skins lying around the dining room table. There’s been enough dying around here

, she thought. No more of it! As soon as Kit gets up, we’re going to sit down and make apian.

She headed upstairs to get dressed.