The Wizard's Dilemma

"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."

277

"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

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

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...! 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."

279

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

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

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

281

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 challenging, 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..."

Late Tuesday Night, 'Wednesday Morning

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—"

Font'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 Font'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 Font's doing here? If three of us, or you and I 283

and however many of Pont there are, all look at the same time— Fes.

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 Font'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 it was 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—

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

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

285

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.

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

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?

Hang on. She's coming.

Together they hung on, though the storm of molten fire tore at them and tried to blow them around like leaves in a wind. Pralaya was feeding her strength, and Nita was glad of it. She wasn't sure how much longer she could hold on to the kernel, but abruptly the fire around her was disturbed by another presence, a swirl of color that wasn't so blinding, and the crooked little claw fingers hidden under the bends of Kkirl's wings caught hold of Nita's hands and the kernel, both at once.

An eyeblink later Nita was seeing the kernel as Kkirl saw it, complex and dangerous, yes, but not too much so to never be mastered. Kkirl had been studying this problem for a long time, and she was ready. Those delicate little claws sank deep into the force-crackling knot of that world's heart and froze the kernel's processes in place for just the few seconds it would

287

take to enact what Kkirl had been planning all this while.

Nita could see and feel how she was doing it, how Kkirl was reshaping the way the kernel called for the planet's upper mantle and lower crust to interact— thinning out some of the more massive areas near the core, redistributing the mass so that the planet's continental plates would move more slowly and evenly and resist the uneven tidal effects of the planet's moons. Nita watched what Kkirl was doing— manipulating the kernel like a Rubik's Cube and setting in place the changes she wanted, one after another, but not actually triggering them until they were all set up. Nita realized this technique was what she would need for her mom—using the kernel inside her mother to reshape the cancer viruses and render them harmless, or maybe even helpful. I'm so glad I came.

Kkirl, better get on with it! Nita heard Pralaya thinking. He was running out of power to feed them. Ready in a moment, Kkirl said.

/ don't think we have that long! Nita said. She was still hanging on to the kernel along with Kkirl, but just barely; the thing was jerking and shaking in their hands and claws like a live thing, trying to tear free, resisting what was being done to it—

Now I

Kkirl turned loose the changes she had set into the kernel. A roar, a rumble all around as the old structures and energy flows tried to hang on just a little longer, as the new ones, shaky at first, started to assert themselves—then a terrible sudden shudder of that world, from the heart out, as everything started to fall into place. Let's get out of here! Pralaya shouted from behind them, and Nita let go of the kernel and started to struggle back up through the fire toward the surface, as the planet began restructuring itself.

Getting up and out of the fiery turmoil seemed to take infinitely longer than getting down into it. The smoky fog of molten stone gradually lightened, then abruptly vanished as Nita broke up out of the ice and back into normal physical form, and her normal life-support sphere reasserted itself around her. She collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. The other wizards erupted out of the ice around her, each doing the same, as the reaction to the wizardry hit. Underneath them the ground shook, and the air was full of the groans, shrieks, and crashing noises of ice shattering for miles in every direction. Nita saw Kkirl stagger to her long thin feet, fling her wings up, and shout into the snowy air one long sentence in the Speech.

The ground reared up, and Nita found herself sliding sideways down a slab of ice. Everything went dark, then bright again, the recall spell grabbing Nita and all the others and dumping them unceremoniously back onto the floor of the playroom. There they all slumped, lay, sloshed, or rolled gently from side to side for some moments, until one by one they started to recover.

Kkirl was a bright, collapsed bundle of feathers, rising and falling gently in the middle with her breathing, but not moving otherwise. Nita managed to get to her feet, and went shakily over to put an arm around Kkirl. "You all right?"

289

A faint squeaking noise was all that came from inside the feathers, as Nita was joined by Pralaya, who put out a paw to one of Kkirl's splayed-out wings. "Thanks," Nita said to him. "I'd have dropped the kernel back there if you hadn't helped."

"At least you caught it before it fell straight down into the core," Pralaya said. Kkirl's head came up on its long neck out of the huddle of bright feathers; she was blinking. "I don't know if that went the way it was supposed to...," Nita said, uncertain.

"Oh, it did! It did!" Kkirl said, staggering to her feet again. She shook her feathers out and back into place, looking unsteady but cheerful. "It's going to take some hours for the planet's crust to quiet down; it was never going to start looking better right away. But the intervention worked; that world's saved at last! Thank you, cousins," she said, turning to all the others. "Thank you all!"

There was a gradually rising hubbub of voices as the group who'd gone out with Kkirl recovered from what they'd done and other wizards still in the playroom came over to congratulate them. Nita, standing next to Pralaya, said to him, "I should head home... They're gonna be wondering what happened to me."

"Don't be a stranger, cousin," Pralaya said. "We haven't had much time to deal with your problem today, after all."

"Don't worry about that," Nita said. "I'll be back here tomorrow... I want to try out what I saw Kkirl do. I think it may work for my mom."

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

"Then maybe I'll see you," Pralaya said, patting her with one of the middle paws. "Go well... and I hope you find her better."

Nita nodded, shook out her transit-circle spell, and took herself home.

After what she'd been through, her bedroom looked almost too ordinary and normal to be believed—so much so that tired and hungry as she was, and though she plopped right down onto her bed, she couldn't go to sleep. She tried briefly to get in touch with Kit but found that he was asleep. Then, out of curiosity, Nita paged through the manual to see what the listings on the other wizards looked like. They were all interesting enough—she had a brief chuckle over the concept of Pralaya having had thirty-six pups with his mate, nine at a time. But even after twenty minutes or so of reading, she didn't feel sleepy.

Finally, still feeling listless and jangly, Nita got up again and went downstairs to get something to drink. As she turned the corner into the dining room, she was unnerved to find her dad sitting in a dining-room chair, in the dark, with the phone's receiver in his hand. It was beeping disconsolately, in the manner of a phone that should have been hung up a long time before.

Nita swallowed hard with sudden fear, took the receiver away from him, and hung it up. "Daddy, what is it?"

He looked up at her, as scared as she was. "It was the hospital." Nita's stomach instantly tied itself into a

r

291

knot. "Mom had some more seizures after we left," her father said.

"Oh no," Nita said. Whatever small feelings of success she had had after the long evening's work had run out of her in about a second, leaving her completely terrified again. "Is she okay?"

"They got them to stop, yeah," her father said. "But it took longer this time. Honey, she's got to have that surgery as soon as she can."

"It's still going to be Saturday?"

"Yes. But is that going to be soon enough?"

Nita didn't know what to say. Her father looked up at her. "How was... whatever you were doing?"

"It was pretty good," Nita said, but now she wasn't so sure. "I need some more practice before Saturday, but I think I'm going to be able to help."

Her father didn't answer, just rubbed his face with both hands. He doesn't believe me, Nita thought. But he doesn't want to say so. "Daddy," she said, "you should go to bed. If Mom sees you're tired out, it's gonna get her worried."

He sighed, looked up at her. "You really do remind me of her sometimes," he said. "You two nag in exactly the same way."

"Thanks loads," Nita said. "Go on, Dad. Get some sleep. We'll go see her tomorrow afternoon." He nodded, got up, went off to bed. But he won't sleep, Nita thought.

And for a long time, neither did she.

Wednesday

NITA MORE OR LESS sleepwalked through school the next day. She got spoken to several times for not paying attention. All she could really think about during school was seeing her mom in the hospital that afternoon, and then getting back into the practice universes and following up on what she'd seen Kkirl do with the kernel the day before.

She looked for Kit during the day but didn't see him, and there was no sign of him at the school gates when she started for home, and no note for her in the manual. Maybe he's at the other gates, Nita thought, and retraced her steps to the gates on the north side of the school. But he wasn't there, either. She'd tried shooting him a thought earlier, without response; now she tried it again. Still nothing...

For a change of pace, and on the off chance she might find Kit coming back from one of his other friends' houses, Nita went home the back way. It was a slightly longer route than her usual one, but it gave her a little time to mull over what she'd seen and felt Kkirl doing with the kernel. But there's no way to tell if Mom's kernel is going to behave like that one did, Nita thought. She really hoped it wouldn't. Without Pralaya's help and Kkirl's, she wouldn't have been able to hold the kernel for long—and Kkirl had had lots of time to plan what she was going to do. Help is going to be a real good idea on this, she thought. Glad Kit's gonna be there.

Yet she remembered Kkirl's initial reluctance to let the other wizards help with her own intervention, and Nita could understand where it had come from. Suppose the one helping you messes up somehow? It would be awful being in a situation where you might wind up blaming someone you knew well for... for —

She wouldn't even think it. But it would be better if there was no one to blame but yourself if something •went wrong. Or no one you were close to...

Nita paused at the corner, gazing across the street while waiting for traffic to pass. Pralaya wanted to help, Nita thought. And Pralaya's entry in the manual, when she'd taken a look at it, had been impressive. He was old as wizards went—a part-time local Advisory on his planet, with a lot of experience. But still... It was hard to let anybody else get involved in this, whether she knew them or not. There was so much riding on it, so much that could go wrong.

She let out a long breath. There was no more traffic, and across the street from her was the church where Nita's mom went on Sundays.

Wednesday

Nita paused, then crossed the street. When she and Dairine had been much younger, they had routinely been dragged here. Then Nita's mother had had some kind of change of heart and had stopped insisting the kids go. "I don't think it's right to try to make you believe what I believe just because 7 believe it," she'd said. "When you're old enough, I want you to make up your own minds." And so church had become a matter of choice in the years that followed. Sometimes Nita didn't go to church with her mom, and sometimes, for reasons she found hard to describe to herself, she did— possibly it was exactly because her mother had made it optional. The things she heard in church sometimes seemed exactly right and true to Nita, and sometimes seemed so incredibly stupid and wrong that she was tempted to snicker, except that she knew better. And also, she had no desire for her mother, when they got home, to pull her head off and beat her around the shoulders with it for acting so rude. But by and large the issue of belief or disbelief in what went on in church didn't seem as important to Nita as the issue of just sometimes being there with her mom. It was simply part of the way they were with each other.

As a result of this Nita didn't go to the church by herself all that often. Now, though, as she came down the sidewalk in front of it, she stopped and stood there.

Why not, Nita thought. After all, it's the One. And no wizard worthy of the name could fail to acknowledge his or her most basic relationship with the uttermost source of wizardry, the Power most central to the Powers, Their ancient source.

She went in. She was half terrified that she would run into somebody her family knew or that, indeed, she would run into anybody at all. But there was no one there this time of the afternoon.

The place was fairly modern: high white ceiling, stained glass with a modern-art look to it, simple statues, and an altar that was little more than a table. Generally Nita didn't pay much attention to the statues and pictures; she knew they were all just symbols of something bigger, as imperfect as matter and perception were liable to make such things. But today, as she found a pew near the back and slipped into it, everything seemed, somehow, to be looking at her.

Nita pulled down the kneeler and knelt, folding her hands on the back of the pew in front of her. Then after a moment, she put her head down against her hands.

Please, please, don't let my mother die. I'll do whatever it takes. Whatever.

But if You do let her die—

She stopped herself. Threatening the One was fairly stupid, not to mention useless, and (possibly worst of all) rude. Yet her fear was slopping back and forth into anger, about once every five minutes, it seemed. Nita couldn't remember a time when her emotions had seemed so totally out of her control. She tried to get command of herself now. It was hard.

Just.. .please. Don't let her die. If You don't, I'll do... whatever has to be done. I don't care what it is. I'm on Your side, remember? I haven't done so badly before. I

Wednesday

can do this for her. Let what I'm going to do work,.. let me help her. Help me help her.

I haven't asked You for much, ever. Just give me this one thing. I'll do whatever it takes if You just let me save her, help me save her, let her live!

The cry from her heart left her trembling with her emotion. But the silence around her went on, went deep, continued. No answers were forthcoming.

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 door... 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. Jef

297

ferson 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

Wednesday

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—

299

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 lastminute 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,

Wednesday

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

301

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,"

Wednesday

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. "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—" 303

"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, 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.

Wednesday

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...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 skyscraperpeak 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 viruses in a large area of it, but only by brute force, rather than talking them out of what they were doing. There had been billions of them, as many of them as there had been grains of sand, and their response to Nita had been furious, a storm of selfpreservation. More than once they had almost buried her under dune after rolling dune... and when she had 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

r

305

could feel the rest of it 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.

/ 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.

"Problems?" Pralaya said quietly. Nita paused, then nodded.

"I'm getting scared," Nita said. "I'm beginning to think... 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."

"It hurts," Nita said softly. "Knowing there's wizardry... knowing that it can do so much...but not

Wednesday

this. It would almost have been better not to know at all." "That can happen," Pralaya said to her.

She looked up, shocked, for his tone was not precisely cautionary.

"Wizardry doesn't live in the unwilling heart," Pralaya said, again with that slightly remote tone, "as you know. If it starts to hurt too much, you can always give it up."

Nita sat silent in the unchanging radiance. "If I do that," she said, "then what's been given to me's been wasted. The universe would die a little faster because I threw away what the Powers gave me to work with."

"Of course, you're the only one who can say whether it's worth it," Pralaya said. "And afterward, you wouldn't know. Forgetfulness would come soon enough. Your mother might still die, but at least you wouldn't feel guilty that you couldn't stop it."

Nita didn't answer. She was beginning to hear more clearly something in Pralaya's voice that she hadn't been able to identify, really, until now, when they were alone here, in the quiet.

"But also," Pralaya said, "you're acting as if your mother was doing something she wasn't going to do, anyway."

"What?"

"Die," Pralaya said.

Nita just looked at him. There's something about his eyes, she thought. At first she had dismissed it as just another part of his alienness. Now, though...

"We're all mortal," Pralaya said. "Even the longest

307

lived of us. Sooner or later, the bodies give up, wear out, run down. Matter-energy systems have that problem, in the universes where living beings reside. I don't know of any solutions for that problem that are likely to do your species—or mine, for that matter—much good."

"But it wasn't supposed to happen now\" Nita cried. "I'm just a kid! My sister's even more of one! She's going to be..." She trailed off. It was indeed going to be worse for Dairine, as if Nita could even imagine, yet, how bad it was going to be for her. "She's going to be completely miserable," Nita said.

"'Wasn't supposed to happen'?" Pralaya said. "According to whom?" I Nita couldn't think of an answer to that.

"Twist and turn as we may," Pralaya said softly, "sooner or later we all come up against it. We do our service to the Powers That Be... but They do not always treat us in return as we feel we deserve to be treated. And then... then we look around us and begin .

to consider the alternatives." |

Nita looked at Pralaya, uneasy again. He looked at her with those great dark eyes, and Nita saw a change in expression, as if someone else was looking out at her.

And suddenly she knew, understood, and her mouth went dry.

"I know who you are," Nita said, not caring now whether she was wrong or would feel stupid about it afterward.

"I thought you'd work it out eventually," the Lone One said.

They sat there in the silence for a few moments. "So that's it?" the Lone One said after a long pause. "You're not going to go all hostile on me?"

Nita's mind was in a turmoil. She knew her enemy... and at the same time, she'd never seen It like this before. It has been changing, she thought. We gave It the chance to do that, right from the start. But there was more to her reaction than just that realization. She had to admit that even through her fear and unease she was curious.

"Not right this minute," Nita said. "Not until I understand some things. I was in Pralaya's mind, once or twice. He's a real wizard. He has a real life. He has a mate, and pups, and..." She shook her head. "How can you be you... and Pralaya, too?"

It looked at her with mild amusement in those big dark eyes. "The same way I do it with you," the Lone One said.

Nita gulped.

"You know the rule: 'Those who resist the Powers... yet do the will of the Powers. Those who serve the Powers... themselves become the Powers.' And if you serve Them... then, if you're not careful, you also sometimes may serve me. I'm still one of Them, no matter what They say."

Nita didn't move, didn't say anything. She was remembering some more of the stricture It had quoted: Beware the Choice! Beware refusing it! She hadn't been quite clear about what that had meant before. Now she was beginning to get an idea.

"Sooner or later," It said, "every wizard leaves me a

r

309

loophole through which I can enter. Sooner or later every wizard just wants to make a deal, just one time. Sooner or later every wizard gets tired of always having it go the way the Powers That Be—the other Powers, I mean—insist it has to go. No room for flexibility in Their way of thinking. No room for compromise. So unreasonable of Them. But wizards have free will, and they don't always see things the Powers' way. When they come around to that line of thinking, I'm always here."

It stretched and scratched Itself. "For Pralaya, the loophole was curiosity. It still is; we've coexisted for some time. His people's minds are constructed differently from yours. They don't see an inexorable enemy when they see me, but part of the natural order of things. They've learned to accept death. Very civilized people."

Nita had her own ideas about that.

"He's useful," the Lone One said. "Pralaya is a very skilled, experienced wizard. He's had a long life; during it, various trouble* have avoided him. That's been my doing. In return, occasionally I can exploit his acceptance of me, to slip in when he lets his guard down, and handle some business of my own."

"Like dealing with me," Nita said.

She was controlling herself as tightly as she could, waiting for any sense that her mind was being overshadowed by the Lone One's power against her will. But she couldn't feel any such thing.

"Among other things," the Lone Power said. "And if there's going to be a deal, the structure of it is simple

Wednesday

enough. One less wizard in the world is worth something to me. Your mother's life is worth something to you." Pralaya shrugged. "Over your short career, you've been something of an irritant to me. But not so much so that I'm not willing to do you a favor in order to get rid of you."

Nita stared at it. "You're telling me that if I give up my wizardry... you'll save my mother's life." "Yes."

Nita swallowed. "Why do I have a real hard time believing you?"

It gave her a whimsical look. "So I bend the truth sometimes. One of the minor uses of entropy. What do you expect of me? I use what tools I've been left... and the one I invented always works the best. It's working here and now, while we sit here talking. The cancer cells are spreading all through your mother's body right this minute, eating her alive." It smiled slightly. "Cute little machines that they are. Life thinks it can overcome every thing... but in some ways, it's too strong for its own good. This is one of them."

Nita's mouth was bone-dry with fear. "Why should you keep your word once you've given it?" It laughed. "Why shouldn't I? You think one ordinary mortal's life means that much to me? But a wizard ... that's another story. You people cause me no end of grief, even over your little lifetimes. I run around and try again and again to kill you, or just to keep you from undoing my best work. It takes up too much of my time. Now here's a thing that's easy for me to do. You come to terms with me, and I call off the viruses.

Because you've willingly, consciously come to terms with me, by the Oath you swore, you then lose your wizardry. One less problem for me in the universe, afterward. Maybe more than just one less."

"It's a trick," Nita said.

"Not at all," the Lone Power said. "You don't believe me? Fine. You go right on inside your mother as planned. Take Pralaya with you, even; he'll be glad to help. But I'm telling you, you're still going to find it too much for you. The viruses will win in the end." The Lone One shrugged again. "But I'm even willing to let you try to beat me fair and square, and fail, and I'll still do you that last favor afterward... if you agree to the price."

The price. The words echoed. Suddenly Nita found herself wondering whether this encounter itself was the price that the manual had so far failed to specify.

And she was becoming cold inside at the thought that perhaps just by sitting here this long and listening to the Lone One, she had already paid it.

"What if I refuse?" Nita said.

"I couldn't care less," the Lone Power said. "Stretch your power to the uttermost. It won't help. The operation will end, and the doctors will get that tumor out, all right. But even in the short run it won't matter, because the viruses in your mother's body won't have listened to anything you have to say, and the secondary tumors will already be forming in her bone marrow and her pancreas and her liver. You'll have maybe a few more weeks with her. Or maybe you'll overextend yourself in the wizardry and leave your mother having

Wednesday

to deal with the reality of your death, while her own is creeping up on her. Nice going-away present, that."

If Nita had felt cold before, it was nothing to how she felt now. She could find nothing to say.

"Don't make up your mind right away," the Lone Power said. "Think about it. You've got plenty of time... until the morning after next, at least. And then you can slip inside your mother, find her kernel, the software of her soul, and do your best." "And you'll make sure I fail!"

"Far be it from me to be so unfair," the Lone Power said, and folded Pralaya's middle arms, leaning back in the lounger. "There's, oh, a chance in a million or two that you can save her... but your inexperience means that you'll have to do it by brute power, fueled by despair ... and you'll almost certainly die, either doing it or trying to."

Nita was silent.

"It'll be a lot easier my way," the Lone Power said. "You go in, you fail... and then you agree to my price and I call off my little friends. Spontaneous remission, the doctors will all say afterward. Miracle cure. Everybody will be happy... most especially your dad." Nita gulped again. "And as for you, you just don't do any more wizardry. Your mother doesn't even have to know about it. Or you can tell her that you had to use up all the wizardry in you for this one big job, while you still remember what you were, anyway. And you'll be amazed how soon she stops bringing up the subject at all."

313

Pralaya scratched his tummy with his middle legs. "But then mortals always get so twitchy about magic, anyway. No matter what you've told your mother since she found out about it, she's never been entirely sure that you didn't get the wizardry somewhere... let's just say, somewhere unhealthy." It smiled at her, and the look was supremely ironic. "You'll be able to relieve her and your father of their concerns once and for all. And indirectly, their concerns about your little sister. I doubt even Dairine is going to rub their noses in her continued practice of wizardry when you've forgotten all about it. She'll go undercover and you'll all be just a normal happy family again."

Except for all the things that will never again be right ...no matter how normal we seem.

Nita sat there feeling numb. "Just how are the other Powers letting you get away with this kind of thing?" she asked at last.

"They can't stop me," It said. "Not without undoing all of creation. And They're not willing to do that. Oh, there are some pocket universes where They have one or another of my aspects bound. You've seen one of those—on your Ordeal." It shrugged. "But I can't be confined to such places. The power of creation was given into my hands, once, and the willing gifts of Gods cannot be taken back after they are given... so I am still part of everything created, one way or another. And will be, until it all ends. But that's a long way ahead of us." It stretched. "There are more immediate concerns. You'll let me know what you decide, sooner or later... and if you pay my price, your mother will live."

It got up and stretched again. "I'll take my host home," the Lone One said. "It doesn't do for me to overshadow him for too long at a time; he might get suspicious. You'll decide what to do. And when you head out to do your final intervention, you'll find Pralaya waiting for you, ready to help you out—one way or the other."

Pralaya's transit circle appeared at his feet. "But one way or another," the Lone Power said, "I suggest you make your peace with the other Powers That Be. Your relationship with them isn't likely to last in its present form for much longer."

And Pralaya stepped through his circle, and vanished.

Nita sat there alone in stunned silence for a long, long while, thinking. Finally she got up and prepared her own transit circle, wanting more than anything else just to go home, where things would seem normal again, where she could get a little rest and try to work out where the truth lay.

But the image of her mother lying pale and stricken in the hospital bed kept coming before her eyes, and Nita was afraid that she had already made up her mind.

It was late when she got back, and the sight of her darkened bedroom seemed to suck the energy out of heti Nita fell onto the bed and lay there in desperate weariness, while her mind raced. For what seemed like hours, though it was probably only a few minutes, she

315

tried to find a way out of the bargain she was being offered ... any way out. She couldn't find one. / need another viewpoint, she thought. But it was too late to talk to Kit.

And I need Pralaya, she thought. That extra dose of ability, his talent at seeing and analyzing the alternate universes. He was good at it, there was no question of that. She was going to need all the help she could get.

But Kit is going to want to come, she thought. / can't stop him. And, oh, I do need his help.

But he was even less experienced at this business of manipulating kernels than she was. And if he does come along, when he sees Pralaya, what if he realizes who's hiding inside him?

The details of this bizarre relationship were still making her head go around in circles. Up until now the Lone Power usually had manifested itself in displays of brutal and destructive power. Nita knew perfectly well that It could be subtle when It pleased. But she hadn't pictured anything like this. And regardless of the mechanism by which It had subverted this wizard, if Kit recognized Its presence in Pralaya, he was going to be furious that Nita was still working with him. He's not going to understand what I'm up against here, she thought.

He will if you explain it to him, said the back of her mind.

But Nita was already beginning to try to frame that explanation in her head, and the more she tried, the more it sounded like something that would simply make Kit think she had sold out to the Lone Power.

Wednesday

And what if he's right?

She turned over and stared at the ceiling, her mind noisy with tentative dialogue, and with anguish. To save her mother... and lose her wizardry.

Was it worth it? Once, when Nita's wizardry was new, maybe she would have said No! right away. The Oath seemed so clear-cut then, the lines between good and evil very thickly drawn.

But now...

Her mother.

She simply could not imagine a life without that serene, dancing presence sailing through it. Her mother was always there, behind everything, involved in everything. The idea of a life without her, of an emptiness where she had been: never again to hear her voice, joking, yelling, singing to herself, never again.

Not this side of Timeheart, anyway.

Normally it was a comfort thinking of Timeheart, where everything that existed was preserved in perfection, close to the center of things. But the Heart of Time was remote—a remote certainty at best, a remote possibility when you were in a more cynical or suspicious "taood. It was an abstract, nothing like the concrete reality of the woman who had been genially cursing at her Cuisinart just a week or so ago. The woman who had always been there with a hug for Nita, who had been able to understand about everything—about being bullied, about doing well or badly at school—even, to a certain extent, about wizardry itself.

And now ...if I do this... I'll have to give that up. But she would still be here.

Yet... to give it up— The idea was bitter. A window on a hundred thousand other worlds, and a most intimate window on this one, closed forever—even the memory of it slowly ebbing away until there was just a small nameless ache at the bottom of her that she would learn to ignore with time, the place where wizardry had been and wasn't anymore. So many people had that ache and thought it was normal. Eventually Nita would be just one more of them. She would remember—if she remembered anything —"those great games she used to play with Kit." That was all they would be: memories of childhood fantasies.

And he would still remember the reality, while Nita would pass him on the street, maybe, or in school, and not know what he had been to her... not really.

But at least nobody would be dead.

Except the part of you that the Powers gave the wizardry to, Nita thought. Murdered, just as if you'd shot it with a gun. How could it possibly be a good thing to do that, no matter whose life it saved?

She put her face in her hands. It was a dilemma.

But, then, that's what a dilemma is, Nita thought. A two-horned problem. A thing split in two.

Like me.

Like me and Kit, whispered a thought that had been lying unspoken in the back of her mind for a while now, for fear that speaking it might make it come true.

She moaned out loud with the sheer unfairness of it. Yet what use was keeping wizardry and partnership, and all the rest of it, when her mother wouldn't be

Wednesday

there to see it and roll her eyes and insist that she do her homework? All the hospital talk of chemotherapy and radiotherapy and so on, after the surgery, could not hide from her what it took no wizardry at all to see: the looks on the faces of the doctors and nurses who were caring for her mom.

They usually would not even say the name of the thing that had attacked her mother from within. They merely said "C.A." or used long Latin and Greek words, all of which had the ominous "oma" ending clinging to them, like a dark shadow trailing away behind. The doctors were as afraid of what was going to happen to her mom as Nita was. For all the magic that was medical science, there was precious little hope in their eyes.

If anything'* going to save her, Nita thought, it's going to have to be something I do. But which something?

The weariness was beginnning to catch up with her. Nita put her face into her pillow. She wanted to cry, but she felt too tired to do even that.

Mom. Kit. Her mind went back and forth between the two of them. I'm just going to have to go ahead and get what help I can get out ofPralaya. And then... if it doesn't work...

She was afraid now to try to see that far ahead in her life. But she was considering the options—and the idea of what Kit would think of this scared Nita. Yet she knew that keeping her options open was the right thing.

319

Like you were right about Jones Inlet? said another small voice in the back of her mind.

She gripped the pillow with both hands and ground her face into it. Tell me what to do! she begged whoever might be listening. Give me a hint!

But the night was silent around her, and no answers came. And the only Power That had spoken to her so far had been the One she had sworn never to deal with.

Finally sleep took her. But her dreams were all bad, and even in the midst of them, she knew that when she woke up, things would be no better.

Thursday

THE AWAKENING WAS SUDDEN, and Nita lay there with her heart pounding, knowing something was wrong but unable to work out what it was. Finally her eyes focused as she looked over at her alarm clock, and she realized it was eleven-thirty in the morning.

Didn't it go off? What happened? she thought, sitting bolt upright in bed.

"Dad called school," Dairine's voice said. Nita looked up and saw Dairine sitting in her chair with her feet up on Nita's desk, wearing nothing but one of her dad's T-shirts, and looking small and miserable. "He asked them to let us both off today because of the operation tomorrow."

Nita lay down again, wishing that she could just go back to sleep... except that it was hardly any better than being awake.

"Dair," she said, "if giving up your wizardry would make Mom better, would you do it?"

,

321

Her sister looked at her in complete shock and didn't say anything for at least a minute. For Dairine this was something of a record.

"Is that what you're going to have to do?" she said at last. "I don't know."

"I'd...," Dairine said. "I'd..." And she trailed off, her eyes going haunted. Nita nodded.

"Are you sure it would work?" Dairine said after a while. Nita shook her head. "Nothing's sure," she said.

Dairine pulled her knees up under the baggy T-shirt and hugged them to her for a long time. Then she looked up.

"And then it would all be gone?"

"Everything," Nita said. "All the magic, gone forever."

Dairine sat with her forehead on her knees, minute after minute. When she looked up, her face was wet.

"If you were sure..."

Nita shook her head again. "I'd miss you," Dairine said. "I wouldn't be gone," Nita said. "You know what I mean."

Nita nodded. "Yeah," she said. "I'd miss you, too."

And Dairine got up and went out of Nita's room, heading downstairs.

Nita could do little else that day but work with the manual, trying to evaluate the effectiveness of her work with the kernels and fine-tuning the spells she

Thursday

would have with her while working on her mother. But the problem that she could not solve kept intruding itself between her and her preparation, and there was no respite from it, nowhere to hide.

The sound of the discreet bang! in the backyard brought Nita's head up—almost a welcome distraction. But then her heart went cold. Kit. How am I going to explain this to him?

It just isn't fair, she thought. What's happened to Mom has spoiled everything. Even things I should be glad about hurt now.

She heard the back door open and the faint sound of Kit saying something to Dairine in the kitchen, then his footsteps on the stairs, and a scrambling noise behind him as Ponch ran up. The dog was first into her room; he burst past Kit and ran up to Nita and put his forepaws up on her. "We went bang!" he said.

"Yeah, I heard you, big guy," Nita said, and looked at Kit as he came in and sat down on the bed. "How'd it go?" Kit said. "You get your practice done?"

"Yeah... the last one, I think."

He looked concerned. "Is that going to be enough? Are you ready?"

At that she had to put her face in her hands, rubbing her eyes in an attempt to keep from looking like she was hiding her face. "I don't know," she said. "But it can't wait any longer."

"I guess you couldn't really put it off," Kit said, sounding like he could tell perfectly well that Nita wanted to.

"No," she said, unhappy. "When Mom's anesthetized is the best time to do this; even during sleep there's a chance she could be conscious enough to get caught up in what's going on, and that'd be a problem."

"Well," Kit said, "if you've done all the preparation you can... I guess there's nothing to do now but wait." "Yup," she said.

"And while we're doing that, we can talk about exactly what you want me to be doing to help."

She didn't answer right away. Kit looked at her sharply, and she noticed Ponch's eyes on her, too, an expression more subtle and considering than you usually got from him. "Neets," Kit said, "why're you so twitchy all of a sudden?"

"Well, why on Earth wouldn't I be twitching!" Nita said.

Kit and Ponch just looked at her. "Neets," Kit said, "give me a break. This is me, remember? You're twitching more than usual. More than makes sense even for what you're going through, not that it's not awful enough. What's happened to you since we talked last?"

"Kit...," Nita said at last. "We've saved a lot of lives in our time. A lot." "Millions," Kit said. There might have been some pleasure in the way he said it, but no pride.

"So how come I may not be able to save the one who matters?"

"Like those other times didn't matter, really," Kit said, with mild scorn. "But Neets, the key word here is we. You don't have to go through this alone."

She didn't say anything for a long while. "You don't

Thursday

understand," Nita said at last. "This time, I think I have to do it alone." And she tightly controlled her mind so that he wouldn't hear her thought: Because I couldn't stand it if somehow you wound up paying the same price I might have to... and losing your wizardry, too!

Kit's look got suddenly even more concerned. "Neets. Tell me what you've been doing. I don't want a precis. I want the details. All of them."

She was silent for some moments. Then Nita told him.

It took a while, though doing some of the explaining mind to mind sped things up. But toward the end of it, as she began telling him about Pralaya, Kit's expression turned grave. When she told him about that last conversation she and Pralaya had had, Kit's eyes went cold. He didn't say anything for a good while.

"I'm still not sure how He was doing that," Nita said.

"As an avatar," Kit said. "Neets, all the. Powers That Be can do that when They need to, when They're on the job. For cripes' sake, if the One's Champion can live inside a macaw for years at a time, why should it surprise you that the Lone Power can pull the same stunt every now and then?"

Slowly she nodded, feeling cold inside.

"Neets, I hate to say it, but this really looks like the Lone One's been getting at you. Even before It fell, It preferred to work by Itself. Then It got isolated and proud, and after that came the Fall...and now that

325

pride is still Its favorite way of tripping people up. It makes them think they can handle everything by themselves."

"Kit, in this case there's actually something to it! You just don't have the experience at what I'm going to have to be doing—*

"As if that matters! Neets, you're not thinking straight right now. You even missed something as simple as the mechanism the Lone One's using to hide inside Pralaya. How can you be so sure about your thinking on everything else?"

That was something she couldn't bear to hear. Followed to its logical conclusion, that line of reasoning would suggest that everything Nita had been planning was possibly useless, doomed to failure from the start.

"If you accept Its help," Kit said, "you're probably going to lose your wizardry! But what's more important is that doing that is just wrong."

Now she did hide her face in her hands. "Kit," she said softly, "it looks more and more like, to save my mom, I'm going to lose it no matter what I do. Or die trying. But I have to try."

"Not alone," Kit said. "And not this way, Neets! You come to any kind of deal with that One, it's gonna backfire somehow. Believe me!"

"All this is real easy for you to say, butjowr mother's not dyingl"

Kit's expression was pained, but he just shook his head. "You think I haven't imagined about a hundred times how this must be for you? But it doesn't change

Thursday

the rights and wrongs of it, Neets. It says right there in the Oath, 'I will defend life when it is right to do so.' It's never right to do it on the Lone Power's terms, and if you let It sucker you into this—"

"Kit, you've got to believe me. It's not like that. You don't really understand what's going on here."

"I understand that you're messing around with the Lone Power, and you're going to get burned! What makes you think It has the slightest intention of doing what It says It's going to? It's gonna find some loophole to exploit, just the way It always does, and leave you out in the cold."

He stopped. There was a long, long silence as he and Ponch watched her.

Nita discovered that she was actually starting to shake. He's right. But I'm right, too. What do I do—? "Look," she said. "I can't take much more of this right now. Tomorrow morning is getting closer every minute, and I'm not sure I'm ready yet."

"When are you going to start work in the morning?" Kit said.

Nita rubbed her eyes again. "Around eight. The doctors said that's when they're starting."

"I'll be here," Kit said. "Neets, please... Get some rest. Get your brains straightened out. You're not going to do this alone."

He got up and headed out hurriedly, almost as if something was making him nervous. Ponch licked her hand and trotted out after Kit.

Nita sat there for a long while. There's no way I'm going to be able to keep him from coming along...... if I wait for him.

But Nita did want to wait for him. She knew his help would be invaluable. At the same time, she knew that the minute Kit set eyes on Pralaya, there would be trouble. She would lose Pralaya's help. And she needed that, too, regardless of who might live inside Pralaya from time to time.

And at the end of it all, if she could not cure her mother herself, then Pralaya had to be there to implement the bargain.

There were no answers, and time was running out. The only consolation was for Nita to keep telling herself that tomorrow around this time, it would all be over. Her mother would have been saved or else she wouldn't have been, and if she hadn't, Nita wouldn't be in any position to worry about anything else.

It was not much consolation at all.

The rest of the day was a waking nightmare. Nita was tempted to go back into the practice universes one last time, but she wasn't sure what difference that would make—and she was tired, tired. She needed her rest but couldn't seem to get any. Details of the spells she would need to take with her, last-minute ideas, and the constantly returning thought that Kit might be right and she might be completely wrong kept going around and around in her head, and gave her no peace.

It seemed like about five minutes after Kit had come over that Nita's dad came home from work, and they all went to the hospital together. Her mother hadn't had any more seizures, for which Nita was profoundly

Thursday

thankful. Except the thought kept creeping in: Is this the Lone One just giving me more time to think... and to be grateful to It? The idea made her shudder.

When they went into Nita's mom's room, Nita saw that a number of machines had been moved in by the bed. One apparently was to make sure there was warning if she had any more seizures—there were ugly little pink and blue contact pads glued all over her head, with the hair held down around them in a hopeful sort of way by one of the "turbans" Nita had seen some of the nurses wearing. Her mom looked unnatural, drawn, more tired than ever, and her smile was wearing thin at the edges.

"Oh, honey, don't look at me like that," her mom said, seeing Nita's expression. "I look like the bride of Frankenstein, I know that. It's all right. I was due for another haircut, anyway."

Two things hit Nita at once. The first thing was that, as always, her mother was trying to take care of her, even when she herself was sick. The second, which struck Nita with a terrible inevitability, was that what her mother was saying was not true: It would never be all right, never again. Her mom was really going to die.

For several long seconds, Nita could find nothing at all to do or say, and she didn't dare look her mom in the eye; she knew her mother would see instantly what was the matter. Fortunately, Dairine got between her and her mom, and Nita disentangled herself and turned away, never more grateful for her sister's inborn ability to get in the way.

But the moment decided her. Kit or no Kit, Lone One or not, she would do anything she had to do to save her mother: give up her wizardry, agree to whatever had to be agreed to. She was lost.

But at least I know now, she thought. The rest of the visit passed in a kind of cheerful fog of small talk, all of it forced; none of them felt much like discussing what was going to happen the next day. After a while Nita's dad asked Nita and Dairine to give him a few moments alone with their mom.

Nita went down the hall, down by the soft-drink machine, and Dairine followed her slowly.

"Is it gonna be all right?" Dairine said. Suddenly she didn't sound like her usual competent self. Suddenly she sounded very young and scared, really wanting her older sister to tell her that things were going to work.

"Yeah," Nita said. "One way or another."

And there was nothing else to say and nothing else to do but wait for the morning.

Friday Morning

How NITA SLEPT THAT night she never knew; she assumed it must have been exhaustion. At six that morning, her dad, fully dressed and ready to leave, awakened her.

"Dad," Nita said, and got out of bed.

He looked at her with a terrible stillness. She would almost have preferred him to cry or yell; but he was now reduced to simply waiting.

"Are you ready?" he said.

There was almost no way to answer him and still tell the truth. "I'm going to start work when they do," Nita said. "It may take me as long as Mom spends in the OR, or even longer, so don't panic if I'm not here when you get home."

"All right," her father said.

He reached out and put his arms around her. All Nita could do was bury her face in his shoulder and hang on, hang on hard, trying not to cry, much though she wanted to; she was sure it would frighten him if she lost her control now.

"Be careful, honey," he said, still with that terrible control. "I don't want to—" He stopped. Lose you both, she heard him think.

"I'll be careful," Nita said. "Go on, Daddy. I'll see you later."

She let go of him and turned away, waiting for him to leave. He went out the back door; a moment later, Dairine came into her room.

"Did you hear from Kit?" she asked.

Nita nodded. Ob, please, don't ask me any more.

Dairine didn't say anything. "Look," she said then, as outside, their dad started the car. "Come back," Dairine said. "Just come back."

Nita was astonished to see tears in her sister's eyes. For a split second she wanted desperately to tell Dairine that she was afraid she might not come back... or that she might come back and not be a wizard anymore—and Nita wasn't sure which possibility was more awful. But she didn't dare say anything. If Dairine got any real sense of what was going on inside Nita's head, there was too much of a danger that she might interfere... and Tom and Carl had been emphatic about what would happen then.

Nita just nodded and hugged Dairine. "You ready to give the surgeons whatever energy they need?" "All set."

"Then go on," she said. "Dad's waiting. Keep an eye

Friday Morning

on him, Dari." She swallowed. "Keep him from getting desperate. It's going to matter." Dairine nodded and went downstairs.

Nita waited to hear the car drive away. Then she got herself ready, checking the charm bracelet one last time for the spells stored there. A couple of openings remained, and she spent a few minutes considering what she might add. Finally, thinking of that first meeting with Pont and the other wizards, she added the subroutine that let the wizard using it walk on water. If there was ever a day I needed to believe I could do that, she thought, it's today.

Then she opened her manual to the pages involving access to the practice universes. Let's go, she said to the manual. The playroom first... and then the main event.

The page she was looking at shimmered, and then the print on it steadied down to a new configuration, a more complex one than she'd seen so far. It flickered, and then said: Secondary access to nonaschetic "universe" analog has been authorized. Caution: This "universe" is inhabited. Population: 1.

Nita pulled her transit-circle spell out of the back of her mind, dropped it to the floor, took one last deep breath, and stepped through.

At seven-fifteen that morning, Kit was sitting on the beat-up kitchen sofa, eating cornflakes out of an ancient beat-up Scooby-Doo bowl in a studied and careful way. It was partly to steady his stomach— cornflakes were

333

comfort food for him, inherently reassuring on some strange level—and partly his standard preparation for a wizardry. All your power wouldn't do you much good if your brains weren't working because your blood sugar was down in your socks somewhere.

He finished the bowl he was working on, contemplated a second one, and decided against it. Kit took his mom's favorite bowl to the sink and washed it out carefully, going over his preparations one last time in his head. He knew as much about the aschetic universes as the manual would tell him without approval from a Senior. He knew that Nita's authority and agreement would be enough to get him inside her mother with her; and beyond that, he had every power-feeding technique he could think of ready to go in the back of his head.

"I want to come along," Ponch said from behind him.

Kit sighed as he finished washing the spoon, and he put it in the rack, too. "I don't think you can," he said. "It's going to be complicated enough as it is."

"I want to be with you. And I want to see her."

Kit sighed again. Ponch had caught some of his boss's nervousness about what Nita had gotten herself into. "Look," Kit said. "You can come over and see her off, okay? Then you have to go home and wait for me."

Ponch wagged his tail. "And no coming after me once I've left you," Kit said. "You have to stay here." Ponch drooped his head, depressed that Kit had anticipated what he'd been thinking. Kit went to get his jacket from the hooks behind the

Friday Morning

door. He checked his jacket pocket for his manual, though he wasn't sure how useful it would be inside Nita's mom. Better to have it, though. As he was running through his checks one last time, his mom, wearing what his dad referred to as the "Tartan Bathrobe of Doom," wandered into the kitchen, looked back at Kit and Ponch, and caught the dog's sad expression. "He hasn't been bad again, has he?" she said.

Ponch drooped his head some more and wagged his tail again, an abject look that fooled Kit not at all. "Not in any of the usual ways, Mama," he said. "Look, I'm going to help Nita, and this is a serious one. I may not be back for a while."

"Okay, brujito."

He had to smile at that. His mom had taken longer than his father to come to terms with Kit's wizardry; his father had been surprisingly enthusiastic about it, once he got over the initial shock. "Hey, my son's a brnjo" he started saying to Kit's mother. "What's the matter with that?" His pop wore his pride in a way that seemed to suggest that he thought he was somehow responsible for Kit's talent. Maybe he is, Kit thought. So far he didn't have any data on which side of the family his wizardly tendencies descended from; he'd been much too busy lately to look into it.

At least the situation was presently working in his favor. "Come on," Kit said to Ponch. As they went out into the backyard together, Kit glanced over in the general direction of Nita's house and in thought said, Neets?

There was no answer.

335

Kit stood still, hoping against hope that she was just distracted for a moment.

Nita

Nothing.

It was the matter of a second to throw a transit circle around himself and Ponch, and it took no more than another second to make sure it would be silent in operation. A moment later Kit and Ponch were standing in Nita's bedroom.

It was empty. Kit stood there, listening to the sounds of an empty house, feeling for the presence of other human beings, and knowing immediately that Nita was already gone.

He felt just a flash of anger, replaced almost immediately by fear. She left early because she was afraid for me, he thought.

One more error in judgment. Now what? Kit thought, going cold with fear. Go over to see Tom and Carl, get permission to follow her—

Why? I can find her, Ponch said in Kit's head. Kit looked at Ponch in astonishment. How? The way I found the squirrels.

"But that was making a new universe," Kit said. "Neets is in an old one, a universe that exists already!"

"We can make some of that one as if it's new," Ponch said, in a tone of voice suggesting that he was surprised this wasn't obvious. "The part she's in."

Kit couldn't think of anything to say.

"I know her scent," Ponch said, impatient. "We can be where she's gone. Let's go!" Kit was uncertain, but time was short. He reached

Friday Morning

into his claudication and rummaged around it to find the wizardry leash, then slipped it around Ponch's neck and said, "Okay, big guy, give it your best shot." Ponch stepped forward, and together they vanished.

They walked for a long time in the dark, an experience Kit was glad no longer unsettled him. Every now and then would come a flicker of light, and he could just see, or sense, Ponch putting his head out into that light and sniffing, the way he might have put his head out a dog door, then pulling back again, turning away. Having trouble? Kit asked silently, the third or fourth time this happened. No. The world just twists, is all And something doesn't want us to be where she is.

Kit swallowed. But finally they came out into the light and stayed there, and Kit looked around him in surprise, even though his experience of alternate universes had been expanded a lot lately. It was a huge place, a flat space, and its emptiness made it seem to echo in the mind. The sourceless lighting and the shining floor with the assortment of weird chairs, beds, hammocks, frames, and tables in the middle of it made it all look much like a furniture showroom.

Ponch pulled Kit toward the furniture, still sniffing. There were some people there: aliens, which didn't surprise Kit particularly—hominids were not at all in the majority in his home universe. As he approached, a few of them looked at him with slight surprise, and one of them pointed a greater than usual number of eyes at him. It was a Sulamid, Kit noticed, an alien native to

337

the far side of his own galaxy, one of a people who— unusually—were almost all wizards, a fact that apparently had something to do with the way their brains were divided.

The looks they were giving him—furred people, one tall cadaverous hominid, a four-legged alien, another one that looked like five or six oversized blue ball bearings in company, and the Sulamid with its many stalky eyes—were speculative. "I'm on errantry," Kit said, "and I greet you."

Ponch barked. To Kit's bemusement, every wizard present looked in what seemed to be surprise at Ponch. The Sulamid bent over in half and then straightened up again, its eyes and various of its tentacles tying themselves in graceful knots.

"I'm looking for another of my species," Kit said. "My colleague thinks she was just here. Have you seen her?"

Various looks were exchanged. "You just missed them," said the ball bearings. "They were here with more of us: Pralaya. They just left. They were on an intervention. Pralaya was going to assist them."

The whole group of them were still looking at him. Kit started to feel uneasy, for he thought he knew what they were thinking: This other wizard is trying to interfere somehow. "Did she say anything about what she was going to be doing?" Kit said, somehow knowing that it was useless to do so. These other wizards were not going to help him; they were uncertain why he was here, uncertain whether he might somehow foul an intervention in progress.

No," said first the ball-bearing wizard and then the others.

"She has gone into the dark," said the Sulamid, "all too accompanied. And her destination is an unknown."

The other wizards threw the Sulamid an odd look and began, one after another, to vanish. Shortly the space was empty except for Kit and Ponch and the Sulamid, which was standing not far away, its tentacles wreathing gently, looking at Kit with a lot of its eyes.

"How do you know?" Kit said after a moment.

"Vision is useless without comprehension," said the Sulamid. "Comprehension is bootless without compassion."

"Uh, yeah," Kit said.

The Sulamid bowed once again, if a bow was what it was. It was not directed at Kit but at Ponch. "Pathfinder, seer for the seer in the dark," said the Sulamid, "tracker in the night-places, wait."

And it vanished, too.

Kit could only stand there and look around him at the light and the empty furniture. "Well, thanks loads, guys," he said. 'Why were they all so freaked out? What's the matter with them?

But he and Ponch were not quite alone; not everyone who'd been there originally had left. Behind Kit someone coughed, or maybe it was more like a snort. He and Ponch both turned.

Behind them, looking at them thoughtfully, was what Kit had initially mistaken for a four-footed alien of some kind. But it was actually a pig.

Kit looked at it in astonishment. Ponch instantly

339

barked once, excitedly, and started to run toward the pig, possibly thinking that it could be chased like a squirrel. Kit hurriedly grabbed Ponch by the collar and made him sit down. And to the Pig he said, "What's the meaning of life?"

"You know, a friend of yours was asking me the same thing the other day," said the Transcendent Pig, ambling over, sitting down, and looking Ponch over in an amiable way. "Is asking," it added.

The statement was slightly confusing, even taking into account the multidirectional time tenses in the Speech. At least Kit knew that he wasn't the only one confused by the Pig. Every other wizard was, too, and even the Powers That Be weren't sure where the Pig had come from, and tended to describe it as a concrete expression of the universe's innate sense of humor, a sort of positive chaos.

"Is she?" was all Kit could think to say.

"Yes. And you know," said the Pig, "it's all just a big plot, isn't it? You're all just hoping that I might actually slip and answer the question, and tell one of you."

Kit blinked at that. "Uh, well—"

"Or else it's a practical joke planted by Someone high up," the Pig muttered, settling down with its trotters under it, a position that made it look peculiarly like a cat. "Wouldn't put it past Them. Or Their Boss."

Kit gave the Pig a look. "Oh, come on! The Powers ..." His voice trailed off as the Pig gave him the same look right back. "I mean, the One... wouldn't play jokes—"

Friday Morning

"Wouldn't It?" said the Transcendent Pig. "Been out in the real world lately?" "Uh..."

"Right. Life being all the other things it is, if it's not funny sometimes, what's it worth? But you changed the subject."

"No, I didn't."

"Maybe you didn't," the Pig said. "I'll allow you that one. You were saying?"

Kit took a long breath. Beside him Ponch lay down but never took his eyes off the Pig. "You're really well traveled," Kit said.

"Omnipresence will do that for you," said the Pig, and it yawned.

"You said you'd seen Nita—" Kit wondered why such simple terms as my friend and my fanner kept sticking in his throat. What's the matter with me?

Because one might not be true anymore. And— He absolutely refused to deal with the thought that the other might not be, either. "Yes. I'm with her now, in fact." "You are?"

The Pig gave Kit a wry look. "It wouldn't be a terribly useful kind of transcendence if I wasn't. Being everywhere at once is part of the job description."

"Where is she? What's she doing?" Kit said after a moment.

The Pig gave him another of those long dry looks. "Oh, come on, now. You know the drill, or you should. You tell me three truths that I don't know, and I tell you one."

341

Kit raised his eyebrows. "That doesn't sound real fair."

"If you knew how much trouble a human being can get into with just one truth," the Pig said, "you wouldn't be asking for more."

"Got a point there," Kit said. In a flash the thought went through his head that it was possible he didn't need to venture his time or his power on this gamble. Yet somehow he felt that the time spent would be worth his while. "So let's get going."

"An admirable attitude," said the Transcendent Pig. "First truth." "I'm looking for the wizard who's meant to be my partner," Kit said.

"The first part I know perfectly well. The second part is conditional. 'Meant'? What exactly would it be that's doing the meaning?"

"I think the day we find that out for sure," Kit said, only half joking, "it might all be over."

The Pig raised its eyebrows. "I'm tempted to give you that one," it said. "From a member of Homo sapiens, the secondary insight is relatively unusual these days." It acquired a considering look. "But a half-truth is a half-truth. Give me a whole one this time."

Kit thought for a little while more, wondering what he would add on at the end of all this to make an extra half-truth. Worry about it shortly. He said, "My dog makes alternate universes, ones that no one's ever seen before. They're new."

The Pig blinked. "That is news. Continuous creation?" Friday Morning

"You've got me."

"Yes, but let's leave that issue out of it for the moment."

Kit blinked, too. "I thought continuous creation had been discredited, though."

The Pig smiled. "The moment any scientist says any-thing's impossible, you should start wondering. Science, like life, finds ways. But, anyway, you own a brain, and you still think continuous creation's been discredited? So where did your last bright idea come from?"

"Uh...," Kit said.

"Right," said the Pig. "Next truth."

"I think," Kit said, with the utmost reluctance, "that my partnership with Nita is about to get totally screwed up if I don't do something, and I'm not sure what to do. I have to find her, I know that. It's vital. But after that—"

"I'll grant you that," the Pig said. "So that's two and a half. What else have you got?"

Kit sat there scouring his mind for some moments, unable to think of even one truth, let alone two. The Pig started to get up.

"Wait a minute!" Kit said, and the Pig looked at him.

It was a desperate move, but it was all Kit could think of. "Here," Kit said.

He looked all around then. For some reason he felt like he didn't want anyone but the Pig to see this.

"It's all right," said the Transcendent Pig. "We're alone. Yes, I'm sure; don't give me that look. What is it?"

Kit pulled his personal claudication open, slipped his hand into it, and came out with that little spark, carefully cupped in both hands. He held the hands just a little bit apart so that the Pig could see in.

It peered between his fingers, and looked at Kit with an odd, speculative expression. "Now, isn't that something," it said. "A glede."

"A what?"

"A glede. Or a dragon's eye, it's called sometimes." The Pig turned its head this way and that, looking at the little spark. "The idea was, you might draw a dragon, but the eyes were where the soul was—some people thought—and the drawing wouldn't come to life until the eyes were added."

The Pig let out a thoughtful breath. "Fine, put it away. Where'd you find it?"

"In the dark," said Kit. "When I stopped making things, and just let the night be what it was." He tucked the glede away.

When he finished doing that, Kit found the Pig watching him closely. "Over time," the Pig said, "and outside it, too, other beings have moved over and through that darkness one way or another. Some of them have found or brought back... objects like that— what the void brings forth in silence. The question, afterward, has always been what to do with them."

"What do I do with it?" Kit said.

The Transcendent Pig shrugged a transcendently porcine shrug, glancing away. "That's hardly one of the traditional questions."

Kit snorted. "Don't you get tired of the traditional questions?" Friday Morning

It glanced back at him, its eyes squinted closed a little in what Kit realized was the beginnings of a smile. "Tired? I can't get tired," the Pig said. "But bored? Hooboy."

"So?"

The Pig was quiet for a little while. "Now, if I was a stinker," it said at last, "I would demand a whole third truth from you, and then tell you one of the truths you originally asked for: where she is. But there's the glede to consider; things like that don't turn up often. And besides, I've always been a sucker for young—well, for people in your situation."

Kit waited, not able to make much of this.

The Pig raised its eyebrows. "You got lucky today, but don't try to take advantage. So think for a moment, and then ask your question."

Kit thought for what seemed to him like hours but was probably no more than a matter of minutes. Finally he looked up and said, "How can I save her?"

The Pig rolled its eyes. "Her her, or her, her mother?" Kit merely smiled.

The Transcendent Pig let out an exasperated breath. "The last time someone asked me a question phrased that way," said the Pig, "Atlantis sank. You know that story?"

"Several versions of it. And don't change the subject!" Kit said, severe.

The Pig gave him a shocked look, and then laughed out loud. "You simian-descended, equivocating, pronoun-starved litrV mortal twerp," it said. "Maybe the universe does favor young wizards because they

345

haven't properly mastered the Speech's plurals yet. We really have to look into that."

It chuckled briefly, then composed itself. "All right. As you know," the Pig said, "Nita is attempting an intervention to save her mother's life. Unfortunately that intervention has been contaminated by the Lone Power from the start and therefore has little chance of succeeding, and much chance of backfiring. With results such as you should be able to imagine."

Kit swallowed, or tried to; his mouth had suddenly gone dry. "Oh, my God," Kit said. "Yes," the Pig said.

Then all of a sudden something boiled over in the back of Kit's head. "Now just wait a minute," he said, annoyed. "First of all, I knew that. And second, you knew the Lone One was talking to her? And you didn't tell her?"

"She didn't ask," the Pig said. "Questions are important, and there's not a lot I can do without them. Don't look so shocked! The Powers That Be have the same problem. But it wasn't my business to tell her. For one thing, on some level, she knows. That One can never make Itself completely unrecognizable... and that's Its own fault. You set yourself apart from all previous creation, fine, but you're going to look and feel different to all creation afterward. What's more important is that the way she deals with the realization, when she comes up with it herself, is likely to be crucial to what she's working on. That I wouldn't interfere with, even if I could." It gave Kit a look. "And if you were smart, neither would you."

Friday Morning

"So?" Kit said.

The Pig lay down with a thoughtful air. "Well," it said, "if I were you—which could happen, transcendence being what it is—I'd listen carefully to my hunches, when everything goes dark. You never know, you might hear something useful."

"Okay," Kit said. "Thanks."

"That's iti" the Pig said. "Thanks a lot" Kit said.

"Well, I can't fault your manners," the Pig said. "Be being you, youngster. Go well!" And it got up and wandered away, the floor rippling uncertainly after it as it went. A moment or so later it was simply gone, without doing a transit or gating as such.

I guess if you're transcendent, you don't need to, Kit thought. He looked down at Ponch. "What do you make of that?" he said.

Ponch produced a feeling like a shrug. "I think maybe it's cheating. It shouldn't be that easy."

"I wish I felt better," Kit said. Yet there was something about what the Pig had said, something that was eluding him—

"It's all right," Ponch said. "I know her scent. I got it fresh yesterday; it hasn't changed that much. And the trail is fresh. I can track her."

Changed, Kit thought, confused. How could it change?

"Come on!" Ponch said. "The longer we stand here, the farther away she goes." "Let's go," Kit said. "There's not much time."

The leash was still around Ponch's neck. Kit picked it up and wound it around his wrist. The two of them stepped into the darkness and were gone.

Grand Central was in shadow as Nita came out of the gate by track twenty-four, and as she put her foot down, she heard a splash. There was so little light in the space around her that Nita spent some power to produce a small wizard's candle, a glimmer of light that rode above her shoulder as she looked around.

The tracks were ail under water, and water lapped at the piers that held up the platforms—a bizarre sight. Even the platforms were an inch deep or so in water, like black glass, the surface of it rippling gently, silent and intimidating. Beside her, Pralaya slipped into the water, ducking under it, and coming up again down by the place where the platforms tapered in, down where the tracks ducked more deeply under Forty-sixth Street. "This would be a wonderful swimmery," she heard him say from down in the darkness, "but I think perhaps it shouldn't be this way?"

"You got that in one," Nita said. Already she was trying to sense around her for this micro-universe's kernel, and she couldn't feel anything. What's the matter? I should be able to at least get a hint. It's my mother, after all! But it felt wrong somehow; she couldn't hear that faint buzz or whine that she'd learned to associate with a kernel, the sound of life doing its business. "Can you feel anything?" she said.

Pralaya surfaced in front of her, twisting and rolling in the dark water. "I'm not sure," he said. "There's... a darkness..."

Friday Morning

Nita was all too aware of this darkness. Listening, watching, she could feel it all around her. It bent in; it pressed against her; and worst of all was the sense that at any moment Pralaya's innocent, merry personality could be twisted out of shape by the Lone Power suddenly looking out of his eyes at her, offering her the bargain she could not refuse.

It's here, she thought, feeling that heavy, dark presence leaning in all around her. It's waiting for me to make a mistake. And maybe she already had.

"Come on," she said to Pralaya, "let's get out into the open."

Together they made their way toward what would have been the Main Concourse in her own world. "What does this look like to you?" Nita said to Pralaya as they made their way through the wet.

"In my world? This is the Meeting of the Waters," Pralaya said. "The place where the rivers come together before they run to the Sea."

Nita thought of the Sea and immediately was sad, seeing in her mind's eye Jones Inlet, and the Sun over the water, leaning westward in the afternoon, and the long, broad golden sunset light over the Great South Bay, where she had screwed things up so seriously with Kit. But now they came out under what should have been the ceiling of the Main Concourse...

Nita stood there and took in a long breath of shock, and let out another long one of sorrow. The whole place was under water, five feet deep, and the beautiful cream-colored stone walls of the terminal, to the four compass points, were striped with green-brown tide-marks of high water from other times, and still flooded deep in an unhealthy dark water that lapped and sucked at the walls. The whole place smelled of damp and cold and weed and chilly pain, and Nita shuddered as she splashed out of the platform arcade into the center of the terminal. She looked up at what should have been a warm, summery, Mediterranean-sky ceiling, and instead saw nothing but watery stars and autumn constellations, all fish and dolphins and sea serpents—not to mention poor Andromeda shackled to the rock, waiting to be eaten by the monster from the waves. It was not a view that filled Nita with confidence.

"Is it always so dark here?" Pralaya said.

Nita thought of fire gaping out of the depths of this space, not so long ago; yet now that scenario seemed positively preferable, for it had put only her own life at stake, not her mom's. "Not usually," she said, and led Pralaya up out of the Main Concourse, up the ramp to what normally would have been the street.

It was no improvement. The sky was clouded, dark and heavy; this was a city in shadow and under threat, with the waters rising all around. Some of the skyscrapers around them were in good-enough shape, but many of them were crumbling. Too many, Nita thought, knowing that she was seeing what her own mind could most effectively make of her mother's physical condition. Things were already going wrong here, and her doubt rose up and choked her.

"We have to go where it's worst, don't we?" Nita said.

Friday Morning

Pralaya nodded. "It would be the only way."

They stood there in the thunder-colored water, in the flooded street, and gazed up and down it. All of Forty-second Street was a river, and no traffic light, or any other light, burned on it anywhere; buildings cliffed out above the street, dark and forbidding, their lower stories wet and scummed with mold, their upper windows dulled with the residue of recent storms. Overhead, the roiling gray sky was like an unhealed wound, uncomfortable, unwell, unresolved. Nita closed her eyes and swallowed. Somewhere here was the kernel, the software of her mother's soul. She held still and listened, listened.

"Do you have time for this?" said the voice behind her, a little provocative. "Yup," Nita said, fierce. "Don't joggle my elbow, Pralaya, or I'll chew one of your legs off."

There was a pause. In a hurt voice Pralaya said, "I wouldn't have thought I'd have deserved that from you, Nita."

"Yeah, well," Nita said. "Sorry, cousin." Assuming you're really my cousin at the moment, and not That One.

The trouble was, there was no telling— Never mind that. Nita held still and listened with all of her. It's my mother, for heaven's sake! I should be able to hear her. But it was hard, suddenly.

And who's making it hard? Or is it just tough to sense your own mother when you're on business, as opposed to when you're at home? She becomes like water, like air, like anything else you get used to and take for granted.

Beside her, in the water, Pralaya paddled along as they worked their way down Forty-second Street. "Sorry," Nita said again. She would have said, I didn't mean that, except at the time she bad meant it, cruel as it was, and a wizard did not lie in the Speech—that was fatal. More fatal than what I'm about to do?

Nita stood at the spot where Forty-second normally crossed the Vanderbilt Avenue underpass, saw the drowned canal that the under-running road had become, and wished that Kit were here. It seemed to her that if only he were here, everything would be all right.

Yet she had constructed the circumstances in which he couldn't be here. She stood there in the muddy, westward-flowing water...

... and something bit her in the leg.

Nita yelped and jumped. "What was that!" she said.

Pralaya had already clambered up onto a pillar of the west side of Grand Central, sticking up out of the water. "We're not alone here," he said. "What would these be? They have teeth—"

"Cancer viruses," Nita said. "I wouldn't let them get too friendly with your extremities, if I were you."

Peering down into the muddy water, Nita could see them: little dark blocky hexagonal shapes with fierce straight little tails or stingers, cruising around. The water was teeming with them, large and small, like the little dark minnows in one of the local freshwater creeks. So many! Nita thought. How am I going to persuade all these things to do anything? The Lone Power was right. It was right.

She considered using the spell that would let her

Friday Morning

walk on water... but that took more energy than she now felt like using. I'm going to need everything I can possibly save for later, Nita thought. Better use the low-power one I tailored earlier. "I have a spell against these," she said to Pralaya. The spell would at least protect the two of them from the stings, but it couldn't stop the viruses from doing what they pleased with her mother.

She pulled the spell off her charm bracelet. With a little effort, she pulled the charm in two. It stretched like taffy then parted with a snap, leaving her holding two identical versions of the spell. Nita tossed Pralaya the clone, then dropped her version of it into the water.

Pralaya stretched out his version of the spell, adjusted it, and dropped it around him. Nita saw this happening and could not avoid thinking, Here is the Power That invented these things, indirectly; and I'm protecting Its servant against them.

Not that he knows...

Nita held still then, again, and listened. In this threatening light it was hard to think clearly. Everything seemed geared to leave you frightened, chilled, cowed, as slowly the livid sunset light behind those clouds shut down toward some final night.

Nita knew that day was waiting back there somewhere. If she could just find it, sense it, hear it. The sound of morning, of a dawn past all this leaden twilight. If she could just find it. If she could, it wouldn't matter if her wizardry departed her forever; it would be worth it.

And at the same time... She sloshed up Forty-second in the general direction of Fifth, listening with all of her, not hearing anything, and beginning, as predicted, to despair. Kit...

The bleak wind blew over the gray waters, and Nita walked on through it all, with Pralaya swimming beside her, and knew true desperation's colors at last.

"I THOUGHT YOU SAID you were going to be able to find her." "I should have been able to. But the scent's changed again."

"What?" Kit was confused, and stood still in the utter darkness where they had been walking. "How?"

Beside him Kit could feel Ponch gazing around him. "The One who doesn't want us to find Nita has changed it. The world she's gone to is twisted out of orientation with the usual ones."

Kit tried to put his own concerns aside; there was something more on his mind. "So where are they?" he said.

"Elsewhere." "Thanks loads."

"You don't have the words for it," Ponch said, a little sharply. "You can't smell what's happening the way I do. We have to backtrack. There's a scent... but there's also trouble." "What kind?"

Ponch shook himself. "Since we're not with Nita, it's going to be hard to convince the ones who guard the borders to let us in."

Kit let out a long nervous breath. "Never mind. Let's just keep going."

Nita and Pralaya kept making their way along through the dark waters, southward along Fifth Avenue. Nita had only a hunch to go on now, only the faintest sense of where her mother's kernel lay. Pralaya paused with her at the corner of Fifth and Fortieth, putting his head up out of the water and peering about him, while all around the two of them, the viruses darted and poked at their defense shields like angry little bees.

"Should we try it again?" Pralaya said.

Nita looked up and down the street—or rather the river, which the street had become—and nodded.

"Yeah..."

She let her mind fall toward Pralaya's again, adding his viewpoint of this place to hers. Everything quivered, changed.

The darkness around them became even more oppressive, an inward-leaning, watching, sullen nest of shadows. Nita could feel how the place was full of death and the anticipation of death, and wanted them out of there.

Friday Afternoon

But ifPralaya is the Lone One, why is It finding this so scary and upsetting? Nita thought. That was a question that she wasn't going to ask him out loud, though. She put it aside and did her best to feel around them for the kernel, listening.

A stronger hint this time. South and west; and not too far.

Nita let her mind drop away from Pralaya's again. He was lying there in the water, shivering. "You okay?" she said.

"Yes," he said, and shook himself all over, those big dark eyes troubled. "But, Nita, this is a terrible place. I wonder that you can bear it here."

She was shaking, too, but she couldn't let it stop her. "It's the one place I've been working to be," Nita said. "Let's go."

She set off westward, toward Sixth Avenue—splashing through water that was deeper and deeper—and Pralaya followed her, slowly, almost as if reluctant. Nita refused to spend any time trying to figure this out. She was tired, and very scared—both for herself and for her mother—and she simply wished that all this was over. The thought came to her: You are now so tired, you will make some terrible mistake.

And she was too tired even to care about that.

In the darkness between worlds, Kit felt Ponch pause and look at something.

"This is interesting," the dog said. Kit couldn't see anything. "What is it?" "Home," Ponch said in surprise.

"What?" Kit said, bemused. "Show me!"

"Here."

Suddenly they stepped out into Kit's backyard... except that the place had the feel of the universes that Kit and Ponch had been creating when Ponch first started taking Kit along on his walks—like something that Kit had made just now with whatever power lay between the worlds, ready to be used if you knew it was there. Kit looked around him in surprise at an utterly perfect summer day. Everything he could have wanted was there: the knowledge that school was out for the summer, the sound of Carmela's stereo blasting upstairs, his mother laughing with loving scorn at something his father was doing in the kitchen. The sky was flawlessly blue, the air just hot enough to make one think about going to the beach, but not having to do anything. The locusts were beginning to say zzzeeeeeeee in the trees. And just over there, the sudden whoomp! of air as Nita appeared out of nothing, turned toward him, grinning with excitement, her manual in her hand—

"Stop it right there," Kit said to the world. The image froze.

He stood there, now the only thing that could move in that whole still reality, and turned slowly, taking it all in: weeds and flowers, summer sunshine, peace. It was perfection, of a kind. The moment, held captive— heart's desire, caught in one place and unable to escape.

But moments aren't meant to be held captive. They're meant to escape. That's what makes them matter. But I could make perfection, anyway, Kit thought as he turned, seeing a passing white cabbage butterfly Friday Afternoon

caught in midair, in midstroke of its wings, trapped there as if in amber clearer than water. I could go to live in it, if I wanted—the world where everything worked. I could even use this power to make myself believe that was where I'd always lived, the way things had always been.

He swallowed. I could make Timeheart. Another one.

Kit held that moment for a long, long while, trapped in the grip of his mind, like a butterfly in his hand. He kept turning. The backyard with its backyard sassafras jungle, the long grass to lie in all through this lazy afternoon, looking up at the clouds—and standing there, frozen, but laughing, ready for anything: Nita. Not angry at him, not afraid, not troubled by any dark shadow hanging over her. Here it need never have happened. Here it was fine, had always been fine. He could be here the rest of his life if he liked, and everything, always, would be fine.

And if he could make that, then he could make anything. Anything.

Maybe this was how it had all started. The manual was "sketchy on the first hundredth of a second,"

Tom had said. "Privacy issues." Was it possibly something as simple as this—that in some other region of space-time, some other being, no more or less powerful than Kit, had stumbled across a spark such as the one he held now, and had created?

If it had happened that way, maybe it could happen that way again?

Here he was. Here was the power. All Kit had to do...was use it, and get everything right this time.

Everything: a whole universe of universes, innumerable, unfolding themselves as he watched—the essence of creation running riot, running rampant, life exploding through it. For a single moment that included and encompassed all moments, stretching out endlessly around him, time without beginning or end; Kit was lost in the vision—

—and then he had to laugh. He started to laugh so hard, he could hardly stand it; his sides started to hurt. Oh, yeah, he thought. Nice try. Gimme a, break!

When he was able to breathe again, Kit straightened up and gazed around him. No matter how he created such a perfect place—or had this one been left for him to find?—no matter that he might even be able to delude himself into believing that it was reality, the truth was that it wouldn't be. Elsewhere the real world would go on, people would hurt, life would be alternately happy and miserable... in the real places where wizards were needed to fight the fight, even if they might never see it won. And this... This isn't real enough for me, Kit thought. / want the kind of reality that surprises me. And, anyway, wizardry isn't for getting out of reality, out of the world. It's for getting further into it.

He gave that frozen pseudo-Nita one last glance, then turned away, back to the butterfly, embedded in air —and turned it loose.

The moment resumed. "Kit," Nita said, "Hey, whatcha—"

Kit squeezed his eyes shut and erased it all. A moment later he was standing in the darkness again,

Friday Afternoon

listening only to the silence... and having a little trouble breathing. This isn't going to stop us, he thought. / know what the Lone Power trying to stop me feels like. We'll go all the way through. One way or another, we'll do what's necessary.

They came to where the corner of Sixth and Thirty-eighth would have been if it hadn't been just an intersection of two muddy, rushing rivers, and stopped there. Nita could feel the kernel more clearly now; it wasn't too far away. But somehow this wasn't making her feel any better. The darkness, that watching presence hidden in it, and the little swarming, biting viruses were all beginning to wear her down. Pralaya was always there, companionable enough, but not really that much help. And again and again the words of the Wizard's Oath kept coming back to Nita, as she slogged her way along through the dark, resisting water: "I will guard growth and ease pain."

But does there come a time when you stop growing? And when you and the universe agree that you're going to stop? "will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so." Was there the slightest possibility, here and now, that it wasn't right? How could you tell, without being one of the Powers?

And if people can't tell, then the game just isn't fair!

But that didn't matter right now. Nita stopped at the corner and looked down Sixth Avenue. The water seemed a little less deep down there; but that overshadowing dark presence seemed much stronger. "The kernel's there," she said to Pralaya. "I'm sure of it."

"I think you're right," he said. "What is that—that tallest building there?"

"The Empire State," Nita said. It struck her as a poor place to hide anything. But then, Its purpose isn't to keep the kernel hidden. It's to let me find it and use it and fail So that I'll agree to the bargain—

"Come on," she said, and splashed down Sixth Avenue with Pralaya swimming along beside her, uncertainty in his dark eyes.

Kit and Ponch were moving once more through the darkness. "It fooled us that time," Ponch said. "But not twice." The dog was angry.

"It's not your fault," Kit said. "It was after me." "I should have expected it. But now we know something." "What?"

"That you have something that can stop It."

Kit took a couple of long breaths. That thought had occurred to him.

"I'm telling the darkness," Ponch said, "to take us to where we'll learn best what to do to find Nita, to help her."

Kit's mouth was dry; he was getting more nervous by the moment. "Are we going to have time for this?" "All the time we need."

How much longer they spent in the darkness, he wasn't sure. Kit could feel in Ponch a terrible sense of

Friday Afternoon

urgency, of the darkness resisting, pushing against him, trying to slow him down. But Ponch wasn't letting it stop him. He was pushing back, fierce, unrelenting. They slowed down, finally stopped, and Kit could feel Ponch pushing, pushing with all his strength against whatever was fighting him—

—until without warning they broke through into the light. Ponch surged forward, the leash wizardry extending away in front of Kit, while Kit stood still and rubbed his eyes, which were watering in the sudden brilliant light.

It was a beach. He was standing at the water's edge, and turning, he could see Jones Inlet behind him.

Is this another of Its tricks? Kit thought, confused. Another place where I'm supposed to get distracted by what could have been?

But somehow he knew it wasn't so. Though this was Jones Inlet, it was also something else.

Kit turned, looking south again. It was the Sea: darkness and light under the Sun, Life and the home of Life—all potential, lying burning and swirling under the dawn. "The Sea," Ponch was barking, shouting, as he ran down the beach and fought with the waves. "The Sea!" And it wasn't just what dogs always said —Oh boy, the water!—but something else, both a question and an answer, a reference to the beginning of things, the oldest Sea from which Life arose. And our blood's like that Sea, Kit thought. The same salinity. The same—

His eyes went wide. Ponch had been right. Here was the solution... the one that the Lone Power was counting on Nita not seeing, because she had messed it up so badly before.

"You're right!" Kit yelled to Ponch. "You're right! Come on, we've got to find her, before she starts!"

Ponch came running back, bounced around him a last few times, and then they leaped forward into the darkness together and vanished from the beach, leaving only footprints, which were shortly washed away.

Nita stood at the base of the Empire State Building and looked up at it. In this version of New York, there was a great flight of steps up to it, up from the water level, and she immediately went about halfway up them, glad to get out of the water, where the viruses were swarming and snapping more thickly than they had anywhere else. Pralaya came flowing up the stairs along with her, shaking the water out of his golden fur and scratching himself all over. "Those things," he said, "even though they didn't really bite me, they make me itch."

"Me, too," Nita said. She stood there and craned her neck upward, looking at the terrible height of the tower. Even in her own New York, when you were this close to it, the Empire State always looked as if it was going to fall on you. But here, she wasn't sure that it might not somehow be possible. And all around them was that terrible shadowy darkness, thicker in the air here than anywhere else, pressing in on them, looking at them.

"Let's go in," Nita said. She could hear the kernel now without actually having to listen to it: a buzz, that

Friday Afternoon

familiar fizz on the skin. Part of her was afraid; it shouldn't have been this easy to find. And she knew why it had been so easy...

They went in through the doors at the top of the steps and found themselves in a vast gray hall full of shadows. Standing up, here and there in the dimness, were many banks of steely doored elevators, which Nita saw were intended to go in only one direction: down. All around the great floor of the place were a number of square pools, and Nita looked at them and decided not to step into any of them. They had that black-water depth that suggested they had no real bottoms.

"Right," Nita said. She glanced once at her charm bracelet, made sure that the spells on it were active, and began walking through the place, listening.

Pralaya followed, pausing by each of the elevator banks and cocking his head to listen. "I'm not sure," he said.

"I am," Nita said. "Not up, but down." She paused by one of the pools, listening.

"Not here," she said softly. "But this is the right direction." She passed between two more of the great square pools, listening again. That faint fizz on her skin got more pronounced.

"That one," she said softly, and walked over to it. She knelt by the edge of the water, listening, then got up again and moved around to the other side of the pool. Right there, she thought. The kernel was well down in the black water, but not out of reach. Nita shook the charm bracelet around to check the status of her personal shields again, twiddled with one charm to adjust the shield just slightly, and then with the other arm reached down into the water.

It was freezing cold, so cold she could hardly breathe, and she could feel her fingers going numb. But she groped, and reached deeper, though she felt the buzzing and stinging of little dark lancets against her skin. None of them was getting through... yet.

There.

Slowly she reached under what she'd felt—the jabbing of the little black needles against her skin increased, but Nita forced herself not to rush—slowly she closed her fingers around what was waiting there for her. Slowly she drew it up.

It was an apple.

Nita stood up with it in her hands. It dripped black water, and as that water fell into the pool, the pool's surface came alive with more of the ugly little hexagonal virus shapes that had swarmed around her and Pralaya outside. These, though, were bigger, and somehow nastier. They had no eyes, but they were nonetheless looking at her and seeing prey, the kind they already knew the taste of.

"Okay," she said softly, and turned the "apple" over in her hands, feeling for the way its control structures were arranged. She found the outermost level quickly, let her hands sink into what now stopped being an apple and started being that familiar tangle of light.

All around, the shadows leaned in to watch what she was doing. Nita gulped and looked down into the pool, where those awful little black shapes had now

Friday Afternoon

put their "heads" up out of the water and were looking at her, hating her.

Guys, Nita said, I'd like you to stop doing what you're doing to my mother. The buzzing, snarling chorus said, No! We have a right to live!

I mean it, Nita said. It's really got to stop. It's going to stop, one way or another. It can be with your cooperation, or without it.

No! they snarled. We are her. We are of her. We live in her. She gave us birth. Not on purpose!

That does not matter. We have rights here. We were born. We have a, right to do what we were created to do. The snarling was getting louder, more threatening. You are also of her. What we do to her, we can do to you, given time.

Nita didn't like the sound of that. Guys, she said, last chance. Agree to stop doing what you're doing, or I must abolish you. It was the formal phrasing of a wizard who, however reluctantly, discovers that he or she must kill.

The snarling scaled up; the waters in the pools all around her roiled. Shaking, Nita squeezed and manipulated the power-strands in the kernel until she found the one control sequence that managed the shapes of proteins in this internal space. She stroked it slowly and carefully into a shape that would forbid this kind of viral shape to exist in the local space-time.

One last chance, guys, she said.

The snarling only got louder.

Nita took a deep breath, flicked the charm bracelet around to bring the power-feed configuration she'd designed into place, then brought it together with the kernel. I'm sorry! she said, and pushed the power in...

And nothing happened.

Nita stared at the kernel, horrified. She tried feeding the necessary power into the kernel again, twisted that particular strand of power until it bit into her fingers—

But that spell is now invalid, said a dark voice inside her. It uses a version of your name that is no longer operational. Your name has changed; you have changed. When you were looking at your mother in the hospital last night, you made up your mind to pay my price, and therefore the spell cannot work.

Nita stood still in utter shock and terror. She wanted to shout No! but she couldn't, because she was suddenly horribly certain that, just this once, the Lone Power was telling the truth. The fact that the spell hadn't worked simply confirmed it.

And because I agreed, I'm going to lose my wizardry ... and my mom will die.

Standing there with the kernel, realizing once and for all that she'd done everything she could and there was nothing else she knew that would make the slightest difference, Nita's world simply started to come undone. She could do nothing to stop the tears of fear and grief and frustration that began to run down her face.

It told me it wouldn't work. What made me think I might somehow be able to manage it anyway?

"Pralaya," she said.

"This is beyond my competence," Pralaya said. "I wish I could help you, but..."

Friday Afternoon

Nita nodded once, and the grief started to give way to anger. "Just what I thought," she said. "So much for any help fromyou"

He looked shocked.

"But that would hardly be the Lone One's preferred method," she said. "No way It's going to give me any help at all, if it can be avoided."

Pralaya looked more stunned than before, if possible. "What are you talking about?"

"You don't know what's living inside you," Nita said. "Well, I bet you're about to find out. Come on," she said to the One she knew was listening. "This is the moment you've been waiting for, isn't it?"

"Not with any possible doubt of the outcome," said that huge dark satisfied voice.

The Lone Power was standing there looking at her; and for just the briefest second, Pralaya coexisted with Its newly chosen form. It looked human, like a young man—though an inhumanly handsome one— and shadows wrapped around It like an overcoat, shadows that reached out and now wrapped themselves around Pralaya, dragged him, struggling and horrified, into themselves, and hid him away.

"Now, you shouldn't really have said that," said the young man. "While he didn't actually know what was happening, I could have let him live. But you had to come right out and tell him, at which point his usefulness to me vanished."

Nita stood there horrified. "You just killed him!"

"No," the Lone One said, "you did. Not a bad start, but then you were intent enough on killing something."

All around Nita, the snarling of the viruses was getting louder and louder. "Anyway, don't be too concerned about Pralaya; I'll find another of his people to replace him if there's need. Now, though, matters stand as I told you they stood. AIL we need is your conscious answer to the question. Can we do business?"

Nita stood there, frozen.

And another voice spoke out of the darkness.

"Fairest and Fallen," Kit said, "one more time... greeting and defiance." Beside him, Ponch just bared his teeth and growled.

Nita stared in astonishment at Kit and Ponch. The Lone Power gave them an annoyed look.

" You again," the Lone One said. "Well, I suppose it was to be expected. You'll do anything to try to run her life for her, won't you?"

Nita's eyes widened in shock. "The chance that she might possibly pull something off without your assistance drives you crazy," the Lone Power said conversationally. "Well, fortunately you're not going to see anything like that today. She's decided to turn to someone else for her last gasp at a partnership." Its smile made it plain Who that was meant to be.

"We know better, so don't try this stuff on us," Kit said. " You think you know better," It said.

It looked at Nita. "Does he?" It said. "Or are you perhaps a little tired of him ordering you around?" Nita stood silent, trembling.

"Might you possibly, just this once, know better? Know best? Actually make the sacrifice?"

"Neets, don't pay any attention to It," Kit said. "You know why I came—"

"To keep her Oath from being contaminated," said the Lone One dryly. "Too late for that. The deal is done, and she's made her choice at last. Without you."

Nita saw Kit flinch at that, but he straightened up again. "I wouldn't write me off as useless just yet," Kit said. "And I wouldn't bet that Neets is just going to dump me."

"I would," the Lone One said. "I hold the only betting token that matters at all in the present situation. Only with my help can she save her mother's life."

"It's not true, Neets!" Kit shouted. "It tried pretty hard to keep Ponch and me from getting here. It must have a reason!"

"I can do without further interference," said the Lone One. "That's reason enough. Now, though, if I thought you might possibly accept a different version of the same bargain..." It stood musing. "Suppose Nita here keeps her wizardry—even despite the mistake she's just made. I even save her mother, in the bargain—"

Kit shook his head, and Ponch growled again. "I serve Life, and the Powers That Be That cast you out, and the One, the Power beyond Them. And so does Neets, whatever you've done to her. So just get used to it!"

The brief silence that followed was terrible. "I've been used to it for too long," said the Lone Power. "Here and there, I stop mortals from incessantly reminding me." The shadow wrapped around It, already huge, grew longer and darker; and inside it moved things that Nita emphatically did not want to see. It had been a long time since her bedroom shadows had been full of their little legs and their blind front ends, and their fangs, the little jaws that moved...

Kit, though, laughed. "Been there, seen them," he said. "Millipedes? Is that all you've got? What a yawn."

His tone was astonishing. It banished the shadows, all by itself. Nita remembered how she had dreaded those things when she was little, and now found herself thinking, to her amazement, Can someone else really show you how to kill the fears? Is it that easy? I thought they always said you had to do it yourself.

But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe others' strengths weren't their own property— —if they offered...

"Kit," Nita said. "I know what you want to do, and after how stupid I've been with you, it's great that you even tried, but you've got to get out of here—"

"And leave you alone with That'} Not a chance."

The Lone Power laughed. "Well, anyone can see where this is going. Unless you throw him out of here yourself, it looks like you're going to let someone else die for you again. I wouldn't have thought you were such a coward."

The flush of fury and embarrassment and pain struck through Nita like fire. She opened her mouth to say, You think I wanted it that way the last time? You think I'm not brave enough to do it now? Okay, here—

She didn't get a chance, for another shape leaped through the shadows and hit Nita about chest high.

She came crashing down hard beside one of the pools. "Don't!" Ponch barked at her. "Don't do it!"

Nita rolled over and tossed Ponch off to one side. Ob, the good pooch; I love him, but I can't let him stop me. There's still time, I can still save her. Nita pushed herself up on her hands and knees, and opened her mouth again. But as she did, the greater darkness that had hung about her since she came to this place— that leaning, inward-pressing obscurity—came wrapping down around her, squeezing the breath right out of her, and it spoke.

Don't I get something to say about this?

That darkness leaned in ever closer around all of them, even the Lone One. It was a different kind of darkness than the Lone Power's enwrapping shadows. Nita stared up into it, confused, frightened...

... and then realized she had no reason to be. Nita knew this darkness... from a long time ago... from the inside. Some memories, she realized, are recovered only under very special circumstances. This dark, immense presence, completely surrounding her, owning the world, being the world...

"Mom?" Nita whispered.

"I do get something to say about this," said that voice, not just suspected now but actually heard. "Nothing that matters," said the Lone Power, though it sounded just slightly uncertain. "The only thing that matters," said her mother's voice.

"It's too late," the Lone One said. "She's made the bargain."

"She's made nothing," said Nita's mother's voice, "because this is my universe, and say what goes here, and she does not have my permission."

And Nita's mother was standing there, in the dark, between Nita and the Lone Power, in her T-shirt and her denim skirt, with her arms folded, and her red hair a spot of brightness even in this gloom. "This is my body," said Nita's mother. "If this is going to be a battleground, make the rules."

"For a mortal," said the Lone One, "you're unusually assured. With little reason. You believe everything some part-time psychologist tells you?"

"For an immortal," said Nita's mother, "you're unusually dumb. The therapist, as it happens, was plainly more right than she knew. There they are, the nasty little things, just the way I imagined them." She glanced at the shadowy pools, roiling full of viral death. "In here somewhere, to match the darkness, there has to be light... and that's my weapon, for the darkness comprehendeth it not. On that point, I have sources of reassurance other than any therapist—much older ones. They say that you cannot command a soul that's firmly opposed to you."

"But bodies are not souls."

"At this level," Kit said, "just how sure are you?" There was a slightly unnerved silence at that.

Nita's mother looked over her shoulder at Nita. "My daughter and I," she said, "are fighting the same battle. Maybe I do it in more ordinary ways. But we're on the same side. And you, if I recognize you correctly, are no friend of mine. Get off my turf!"

She talks a good fight, Kit thought. But it's gonna take more than that.

Nita was almost breathless with tension, yet she suddenly realized that this was the first time in a good while that she'd overheard Kit think. In any case, she had to agree with him. She's tougher than she looks, Nita thought. But then she was a dancer. Dancers are tough. Maybe what we need to be doing is feeding her power—

"You have no power to order me around," said the Lone One. "I've been part of 'your turf since the beginning of things. I have my own rights here."

"I've heard that line before," Nita's mother said. "I reject it. 7 choose who shares my body with me... as I chose my children... and my husband. / choose! You think you have any rights here that I don't grant you? Maybe you can live inside people who don't look at themselves closely. But those who fight with you every day and have an idea of what they're wrestling with? Let's just find out."

She stood up tall. Nita gulped. She had seen her mother looking ethereal, in her tutu and swan feathers and dinky little crown, in the poster from a Denver Opera Ballet production—looking like something you could break in two. But looking over her shoulder one day and seeing Nita eyeing dubiously that old framed poster, her mother had said, "Honey, take my advice. Don't mess around with swans. One of those pretty white wings could break your leg in three places." And off she had gone with the laundry basket, sailing past, graceful and strong, with the danger showing only around the edges of the chuckle. But just bravery isn't going to be enough. Not here—

"And just what do you plan to fight me with?" the Lone One said. "You have no weapons to equal my power. Not even the diluted form of it that's killing you now."

"She may not have anything but guts and intention," Kit said, "but that's half of wizardry to start with. And we're carrying." He reached into his claudi-cation and came up with a long string of symbols in the Speech.

Nita looked at it, uncomprehending. The Lone One laughed.

"That won't work," It said. "Certainly not for her. And not even for Nita anymore, as you've seen. You think that by plugging an older version of Nita's name into this spell, she will no longer be mine? It won't work. It takes more power than either of you have to reverse the kind of changes she's been through. She knows me now. She's willing to pay my price to keep her mother alive... and, sorry, Mom, but permission or no permission, it's Nita's choice that finally counts."

"Oh yeah?" Kit said. "Neets," he said to her then, holding out his hand, looking at her urgently. "Quick

"Oh, of course, give him all your power, why don't you." The Lone One laughed. "So much for your doing anything useful by yourself."

Nita swallowed. In Its voice she heard too many

thoughts of her own, roiling in its darkness the way the viruses were boiling around in the pools.

Can't cope.

No independence.

Scared to make a move without her fanner. Doesn't have the nerve to strike out on her own— Nita swallowed... and took off the charm bracelet. —going to let him do all the dangerous stuff. Going to prove him right again, and you wrong— She hesitated one last time...

... and then threw the bracelet to Kit.

Kit caught it and quickly attached the old version of Nita's name he'd saved from the Jones Inlet wizardry. Then he reached into the air beside him and brought something else out.

A small pale spark of light—

The light it gave at first seemed little, but swiftly it lit up all that place, and even chased the shadows briefly from the Lone One's face... a sight that made Nita turn away—for the terror of It, to some extent, she could stand, but the beauty of It, seen together with that ancient deathliness, was difficult to bear. Around the Lone One, the darkness hissed with Its alarm, as if suddenly full of snakes. A glede—

"The dragon's eye," Kit said as he hooked the glede into an empty link of the charm bracelet, and the whole chain came alive with sudden fire. "Something brand new, something you've never touched.

Something born after the change happened to you, the chance to be otherwise. Something you can't affect —"

"Not true!" It cried. "All creation, even the void from which things are created anew, has my power at the bottom of it."

"Not here, it doesn't! Not in this! Whether you like it or not, even while you're killing people, the world is starting to heal... and so are you\"

Nita swallowed hard, watching Kit and suddenly remembering Tom and Carl's backyard and a fish looking up out of the water at her.

All the drawing lacks

is the final touch: to add eyes to the dragon—

She desperately wanted to shout to Kit that yes, this had to be the answer—but she didn't dare. She'd been wrong about so many things lately. What if her certainty, her desperation, got Kit killed, too? And the Lone One's right, that's not who I am anymore—

—but the other memory that came back to her, the amused piggy voice saying, "That is, assuming you're into sequential time... you can handle it however you like..."

That blazing spark of light on the bracelet Kit held glittered at her like possibility made visible.

Why in the world not? Nita thought. If you can't put together what yon were with what you are now— so you. can make up for your mistakes and not make the same ones again—then what's the point? This isn't about reversing anything. It's about going forward!

"Kit! "she cried.

He threw her the charm bracelet. Nita snatched it out of the air, and almost dropped it as the added power of the glede jolted up her arm like an electric shock.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you!" the Lone One cried. "You'll destroy your mother, and yourself, here and now!"

Nita hesitated for just a second... then put the charm bracelet back on, taking hold of the two versions of her name that hung from it, side by side. "Well, guess what?" she said. "You're not me!" And in the single quick gesture she'd had entirely too much practice with lately, she knotted the names tight together with the wizard's knot.

The blast of power that went through her was like being hit by lightning. Whether because of her remade name or the presence of the glede, suddenly Nita could comprehend all those little darknesses in the water much more fully than just by using the kernel. Those stinging, buzzing little horrors were right about being, in their own twisted way, part of her mother. But now she could see exactly what to do about them. The solution was the same as what she had been trying to do with Kit and S'reee at Jones Inlet...

... except that, where she'd been wrong about how to use her part of the wizardry before, here and now she was right. Her wizardly fix for Jones Inlet had been too complicated. "This whole contrareplication routine would be great," Kit had said, "if the chemicals in the pollution knew how to reproduce themselves." Of course, they hadn't. But viruses were just very smart chemicals in a protein shell that did know how to reproduce themselves...which made the solution perfect for her mother.

It set me up, Nita thought in growing fury. The Lone One made sure I came tip against a problem where my solution would fail—and fail painfully—and where I fought with Kit. So that when I came to this moment, I'd be too hurt, too scared to try this solution again, too scared even to see it!

She trembled with rage. But to waste time on being angry now would only play into Its hands. Nita's eyes narrowed in concentration as she channeled the power from the glede through both the kernel and her memory of her part of the Jones Inlet wizardry, and into the dark waters around her...

Every pool around them roiled in agitation as all the viruses thrust their heads up out of the lapping darkness, like blind fish gasping in the air, desperately crying no!

For many of them it was already too late. All around them, the sea of her mother's blood was churning as if in a storm with the power that washed through it— and from all around came countless little dark explosions as the viruses' shells unraveled. The wizardry was reminding the human blood of how it had once been part of an older, purer, uncontaminated Sea, one that was the outside of a world rather than the inside.

Yet Nita could feel through the kernel that there were some places where, for all the glede's power, that cleansing Sea didn't, couldn't quite reach. Scattered through her mother's inner world, little knots of

Friday Afternoon

darkness still lay, waiting... and there were many, many of them. Too many...

Nita fell to her knees, defeated.

All for nothing...

"I told you," the Lone One said. "You should have done it my way. Too late now—" And it began to laugh.

Nita began to cry. It was all over... all over... A deathly silence fell.

And an angry whisper broke it.

"With me," it said, "you can do what you like. But not with my daughter!" And then another whisper.

"Mrs. Callahan—"

A moment later, someone took hold of Nita's bracelet. Nita looked up, gasping.

"You need this, sweetie," her mother said, her voice controlled despite her anger as she turned the bracelet past the new-made version of Nita's name. "But Kit's right. This is what I've been looking for!"

With a roar of fury, the Lone One moved toward the three of them, a terrible wave of shadow rearing up above It, ready to break. All around them, the waters of the pools rose up, to drown them, to destroy...

... and then suddenly fell back as if they had struck a wall. Everything kindled to blinding fire around them, the water glittering as it splashed away, the walls of the great hall shining, the Lone One standing there aghast in the blaze and terror of that light as Nita's mother pulled the glede free of Nita's bracelet, stood up, and squeezed the glede tight in her upheld fist, a gesture both frightened and fierce.

She was lost in the resultant violent blast of fire, and Nita tottered sideways and clutched at Kit, watching her mother in amazement and terror: a goddess with a handful of lightning, imperial and terrible, rearing up into the darkness and towering over them all, even over the Lone One, and—to Nita's astonishment and concern—paying It no mind at all. All her mother's attention now was on what she gripped in her hand, a writhing struggling knot of lightnings growing and lashing outward all the time, until it crowned her with thunder and robed her in fire, and there were no shadows left to be seen anywhere.

The fear and pain in her face were awful to see, as Nita's mother struggled with the glede, trying to keep from being consumed by its power as other mortal women had been consumed, in old stories, by fire from beyond the worlds. But her eyes were ferocious with concentration, and the look of terror and anguish slipped away as she started to get the better of the Power she held.

Slowly she straightened, looking down at all of them—a woman in a T-shirt and a faded denim skirt, blazing with the fire from heaven, and with sudden certainty.

"The Light shone in the darkness," she said softly, and the whole little universe that was Nita's mom shook with it. "And the darkness comprehended it not. This light! But you never learn, do you? Or only real slowly."

The Lone Power stared at her with at least as much incredulity as Kit and Nita. After a second, It turned away.

"Oh, no you don't," Nita's mother said. And the lightning blasted out from her, and struck It down into the nearest pool.

Nita's mother looked at the Lone Power dispassionately as it struggled in the water. "If I am going to go anywhere," she said, "first you're going to find out up close and physical what the things you've done to me all this while have felt like." It struggled to get up out of the water. Nita's mom flung out her hand, and the lightning knocked It back in again.

"Having fun with that?" her mother said. "Doesn't feel like so much fun from inside my body, does it? You should have thought of that before you came in here. Just feel all those broken bones and strains, those six weeks off for tendonitis, the bruises and infections and herniated muscles and all the rest of it. Oh, we knew about pain, all right! Dance is two hours' worth of childbirth every weekday evening at eight, and a Saturday matinee!"

The Lone Power writhed and splashed in the water, stricken with the experience of her agony. "And then how about this?" her mother said. "Now that I've got your attention—"

Nita flinched, for this was the phrase that most often preceded the tongue-lashing you got when you hadn't cleaned your room properly—and to a certain extent she could feel what her mother was imposing on the Lone One. Here the experience inflicted on It was all the more intense for being recent, fresh in the sufferer's mind—the blurred vision, the growing pain, the uncomfortable and unhappy sense that, hey, this isn't supposed to be happening, what's the matter with me?—the loss of control, of mastery over a body that was always precisely mastered in the old days; the slowly growing fury, inexpressible, bottled up, that things weren't working the way they should.

In fact, that nothing was working the way it should.

For in this place, under these circumstances, Nita's mother now knew that if matters had somehow gone otherwise, death itself wouldn't have happened. It was an additive, an afterthought, somebody's "good idea." And here was the somebody, right here, within reach... and available, just this once, for spanking.

Not liking it, either, Nita thought.

"Fun, huh?" Nita's mother said softly. "But even with your inventions, this Life that you hate so much is still too much for you. It was always too much for you. Whatever you do, it just keeps finding a way. Maybe even this time."

The Lone One writhed and floundered in the water, and couldn't get away. Nita's mom looked down at It from what seemed a great distance. Under that majestic regard, as It finally managed to drag itself out of the pool, the Lone One seemed crumpled into a little sodden shape of shadow, impotent in this awful blaze of wrathful fire. Beaten, Nita thought, and her heart went up in a blaze of triumph to match the blinding light.

"But no," said her mother then, in a much more mortal voice, and hearing it, Nita's heart fell from an impossible height, and kept on falling. "That's what you're expecting, isn't it? You want me to win this battle. And after that, when we're all off our guard, comes the betrayal."

The light began to fade. No, Nita thought. M>, not like this! Mom!

But her mother had her own ideas... as usual. There was no longer any great distance between her and the much diminished darkness that was now the Lone Power in what she had made of her interior world. "No," Nita's mother said, "not even at that price. You've really been stuck playing this same old game for a long time, haven't you? And you just don't believe a mortal could refuse the opportunity."

From that sodden darkness there now came no answer. Nita's mother stood there looking down at the Lone Power as if at a daughter who'd turned up in particularly grimy clothes just after the laundry had all been done.

"No," Nita's mother said. "I can guess where this is going. How many times have I heard my daughters wheedle me to let them stay up late, just this once? It starts there, but that's never where it stops. And if I was firm with them, I have to be the same way with myself when my turn comes, too." She was looking entirely less like a furious goddess, entirely more like a slightly tired woman. "Because I'm up against my own time limit, now, aren't I? Override the body now, and we'll all be sorry for it later. If not personally, then in the lives of the people around us."

Nita was horrified. "Mom, no!"

"Honey." Nita's mother chucked the lightning away, careless, and came over to her. The lightning hit the floor, lay there burning, and then came slowly humping back toward Nita's mom, like some animate and terrible toy. "Believe me, if there was ever a time for the phrase 'Don't tempt me,' this is it."

"But, Mom, we're winningl"

"We're supposed to think so," she said. "Look at It there; what a great 'beaten' act." She gave the Lone Power a look that was both clinical and thoroughly unimpressed. "The point being to encourage us to go home in 'triumph,' and to distract me, at any cost, from doing what I know is right. If It can't ruin my life, and yours, straightforwardly, by killing me, It'll try it another way."

She walked a little way over to It, the lightning following her. "Can't you see it, honey? If we carry this to its logical conclusion, I live, all right. I survive this— and what the things in my body are doing to me now— because of what you kids have done here. And then I live and live, and live some more, and I get to like it so much that my whole life becomes about not dying. What kind of life is that going to be?

Because sooner or later, no matter what any of us do, it's going to happen anyway. Finally—who knows how many years from now—I get to die, all bitter and furious and scared, and doing everything I can to make everybody around me miserable—including you, assuming you are still around, and I haven't driven you and Dairine and your dad away with the sheer awfulness of my wanting to keep on living. That's what that One has in mind. Well, I won't do it, sweetie. Not even for this." The persistent tangle of lightning was rubbing against her leg like a cat; she gave it a sideways nudge with her foot, and turned away from the Lone One, coming back toward Nita and Kit. "Not even because I love you, and I'm afraid to leave your dad and you and Dairine, and I don't know what comes afterward for me, and I love my life, and I hate the thought of leaving all of you alone, in pain, and I'm not ready, and I just don't want to go!"

It was a cry of utter anguish, and the air all around them trembled with it, rent as if by thunder. That shadow, crouched down off to the side, stirred just slightly, crouched down further. "Not even for that," her mother said, a lot more quietly, unclenching her fists. "It is not going to happen."

"Mom...," Nita said, and could find no other words.

Her mother just shook her head. For a moment, she seemed too choked up to speak. She pulled Nita close and held her, and then, her voice rough, she said, "Sweetie, I may not be what you are, but this I know. There's a power in what we are as mortal beings that even that One can't match. If we throw it away, we stop being human. I won't do it. And certainly not when doing it plays into the enemy's hands."

She let go of Nita and turned around. "So as for you," Nita's mother said to the Lone Power, her eyes narrowing in what Nita recognized as her mother's most dangerous kind of frown, "you'll get what you incorrectly consider your piece of me soon enough. But in the meantime, I'm tired of looking at you. So you just take yourself straight on out of here before I kick your poor deluded rear end from here to eternity."

The Lone Power slowly picked Itself up, towered up before them all in faceless darkness... and vanished without a sound.

"Mom..." Nita shook her head, again at a loss for words. "Wow," Kit said. "Impressive."

Her mother smiled slightly, shook her head. "It's all in the documentation, honey," she said to Nita. "It says it plain enough: 'Have I not said to you, "you are gods"?' So we may as well act like them when it's obviously right to and the power's available."

They all turned to look around at the sound of a splash. Ponch had jumped into one of the now-cleansed pools and was paddling around.

Nita's mom smiled, then looked at the surroundings, once again dark and wet, then she glanced down at what Nita still held in her hands. "Is that what I think it is?"

Nita nodded and handed it over. Her mother tossed the apple in her hand, caught it again, looking at it thoughtfully, and polished it against her skirt. "Are we done here?" she said.

Nita looked around her sorrowfully. "Unless you can think of anything to add."

Her mother shook her head. "No point in it now," she said. She looked at the apple with an expression of profound regret, turning it over in her hands. For a moment Nita saw through the semblance, saw the kernel as it was, the tangle of intricate and terrible forces that described a human body with a human mind and soul inside it, infinitely precious, infinitely vulnerable. Then her mother sighed and chucked the apple over her shoulder into one of the nearby pools. It dropped into the waters and sank, glowing, and was lost.

Nita let out a long breath that became a sob at the end. There was no getting it back now, nothing more that could be done.

"Better this way," her mother said, sounding sad. "You don't often get a chance like this; be a shame to ruin it. Come on, sweetie." She looked around at the darkness and the water. "We should either call the plumber or get out of the basement. How do we do that, exactly?"

"I don't think you have to do anything but wake up," Kit said. "But Nita and I should go."

"Don't forget Ponch," Nita's mother said, as the dog clambered out of the pool he'd been swimming in and came over to the three of them. "If I come out of the anesthesia barking, the doctors are going to be really confused."

Ponch shook himself, and all three of them got splattered. "Kit needed me to get in," Ponch said. "Without me, I don't think he can get out. I'll see him safely home."

Nita's mother blinked at that. "Sounds fair," she said. "Meantime, what about this?" She bent over to pick up the dwindling knot of lightning that was all that was left of the glede.

The question answered itself, as it faded away in her hands. "One use only, I think," Kit said.

"I think I got my money's worth," Nita's mother said. "But thanks for the hint, Kit; you made the difference."

"Just a suggestion someone gave me," Kit said. "To listen to my hunches when it all went dark..." "That one sure paid off. Go on, you kids, get out of here."

Nita hugged her mom while Kit put the leash on Ponch. Then Kit offered Nita his arm. She paused a moment, took it, and they stepped forward into the darkness.

The two of them came out in Kit's backyard. Nita saw Kit looking around him with an odd expression. "Something wrong?" she said. "Or is it just that reality looks really strange after what we've been through?"

"Some of that, maybe," he said. He took the leash off Ponch and let the dog run toward the house. "Kit—"

He looked at her.

"You saved my butt," she said. Kit let out a breath. "You let me." She nodded.

"Anyway," Kit said, "you've saved mine a few times. Let's just give up keeping score, okay? It's a distraction."

Nita nodded. "Come on," she said. "Let's go to the hospital." Between transit circles and the business of appearing far enough away from the hospital not to upset anybody, it took them about fifteen minutes to get there. Down in that awful little waiting room, Nita found her dad and Dairine—and the look on her father's face nearly broke Nita's heart. There was hope there, for the first time in a long, long week.

Nita sat down while Kit shut the door. "Are they done?" Nita said.

Her father nodded. "They got the tumor out," he said. "All of it. It went much better than they hoped, in fact. And they think... they think maybe it hasn't spread as far as they thought. They have to do some tests."

"Is Mom awake yet?"

"Yeah. The trouble with her eyes is clearing up already, the recovery room nurses said, but they want us to leave her alone till this evening; it's going to take her a while to feel better. We were just waiting here for you to catch up with us." He looked at her. "What about you?"

Nita swallowed. "I think we did good," she said, "but I'm not sure how good yet. It's gonna take a while to tell."

Her dad nodded. "So let's go home...and we'll come back after dinner."

As much as Nita felt like she really needed a nap, she couldn't sleep. Kit went home for a while, but when Nita's dad was starting the car, Kit appeared again in the backyard, and Nita went downstairs to meet him.

As she was walking across the yard, there was another bang, less discreet: Dairine. She stalked out of the air with an annoyed expression. "Where've you been?" Nita said.

"The hospital."

"You weren't supposed to go yet!"

"I know. I sneaked in. They just found me and threw me out."

She looked at the two of them. "Have you seen the precis in the manual?" she said. Nita shook her head.

"I have," Dairine said softly. "I owe you guys one."

Kit shook his head. "Dari, if you read the precis, then you know—"

"I know what's probably going to happen to her," Dairine said. "Yeah. But I know what you guys did. You gave it your best shot. That's what matters."

She turned and went into the house.

"She's mellowing," Kit said quietly.

"She's in shock," Nita said. "So am I. But, Kit-Thanks for not letting me go through it alone." She gulped, trying to keep hold of her composure. "I'm not— I mean, I'm going to need a lot of help."

"You know where to look," Kit said. "So let's get on with it."

In the hospital they found Nita's mother already sitting up in bed. She had a blackening eye and some bruising around her nose, but that was all; and the sticky contacts and wires and machines were all gone, though she now had an IV running into her arm. Nita thought her mom looked very tired, but as they came in, her face lit up with a smile that was otherwise perfectly normal.

She looked at Kit. "Woof," she said.

Kit cracked up.

"Does this have some profound secret meaning," Nita's dad said, sitting down and taking his wife's hand, "or is it a side effect of the drugs?"

Nita's mother smiled. "No drug on the planet could have produced the trip I've just been through," she said.

There was a long silence. "Did it work?" Nita's father said then. "In the only way that matters," her mother said. "Thank you, kids." Nita blinked back tears. Kit just nodded.

The head nurse came in and stood by the bed. "How're you feeling?"

"Like someone's been taking out pieces of my brain," Nita's mother said, "but otherwise, just fine. When can I go home?"

"The day after tomorrow," said the nurse, "if the surgeons agree. It's not like the surgery itself was all that major, and you seem to be getting over the post-op trauma with unusual speed. If this keeps up, we can send you home and have a private-duty nurse keep an eye on you for the first few days. After that, there'll be other business, and we'll be seeing a fair amount of each other. But there's time for you to deal with that when you're feeling better and the surgery's healed."

"You're on," Nita's mother said. "Now let me talk to you about dinner." "No dinner tonight," said the nurse. "Just the bottle, until tomorrow." "I want a second opinion," Nita's mother said, unimpressed. The nurse laughed, and went out.

"And a cheeseburger!" Nita's mother called after her.

Nita chuckled; her mother got junk food cravings at the oddest times. Then she caught herself chuckling, and stopped abruptly.

"No," her mother said. "Don't. You're right; it's disgusting, and there's no reason you shouldn't laugh." This she said as much to Nita's dad as to Nita.

Her father didn't say anything.

"Would you two excuse us a second?" Nita's mother said to Kit and Nita.

They went out. "Back in a moment," Kit said, and walked away down toward the vending machine and the rest rooms—a little too quickly, Nita thought. She watched him turn the corner. It didn't occur to me how much this was hurting him, too. If he's going to be watching out for me, I'd better keep a close eye on him.

Might get to be a full-time occupation.

Nita leaned against the wall outside the room. She should not have been able to hear anything from where she was, but she could.

Harry," she heard that soft voice say. "Cut it out and look at me. We've bought me some time. We have time to say our good-byes—enough for that, at the

Friday Afternoon

least. Beyond that, it's all a gamble. But it always has been, anyway." Nita could hear her dad breathing in the silence, trying to let it in.

"But one thing, before I forget. You don't need to waste any more time worrying about Kit." "No?"

"No."

I shouldn't be able to hear this, Nita thought. She closed her eyes and concentrated on not listening. It didn't work. It has to have something to do with where I've just been.

"But enough of that. We've got things to do. Listen to me! I don't want you to start treating me like someone who's about to die. I expect to spend every remaining moment living. There's little enough time left, for any of us."

Nita could have sworn she heard her father gulp. "Oh, God, sweetheart, don't tell me there's going to be some kind of... of disaster!"

"What? Of course not." Her voice went soft and rough again, in a way that Nita had last heard just after her mom had dropped a handful of lightning. "But, Harry, being where I've just been, do you think that sixty years looks any longer to me than six months? Or that anything that's just time looks like it's going to last? So shut up and kiss me. We've got a lot to do."

There was only silence then. Nita took herself away as quietly as she could. Down the corridor and around the corner, she found Kit leaning against the wall, his arms folded, waiting for her.

"What are they up to in there?" he asked after a moment.

"Don't ask." She gave him a thoughtful look. He didn't ask. And 1 bet be doesn't have to. "So, what now?"

"Just for a little while," Nita said, "we leave them alone." Kit nodded. Together, they headed out.

Dawn

NITA WENT HOME AFTER that, and slept the clock around. They would only need to go to the hospital once or twice more to pick up equipment that the visiting nurse would need, and to talk to the doctors about chemotherapy and so on. Nita was glad enough to let her dad take care of all that. For her own part, she and Dairine mostly just sat and held her mom's hands, and listened to her complain about the hospital food, which she had been allowed to start eating that morning. It was a peculiar kind of happiness that Nita and Dairine were experiencing, and Nita was being careful to say nothing that might break it. Just under the surface of it lay a lot of pain. But right now, the simple joy of knowing that her mom would be home the next day was more than enough for Nita... and she knew Dairine agreed.

They went home that evening, and Nita went off to her room and went straight to sleep again. She was getting caught up a little on her own weariness, enough to dream again, but the realization that she was dreaming coincided with a certain amount of confusion. The mountainous landscape towering all around her in a misty early morning sun wasn't anyplace she recognized. Neither were the forests running up and up those slopes, all golden, or—as she turned, and paused, amazed—the vast, glittering, manyspired city that was looming out of the mist a mile or so away from her. Beyond it was a faint glimmer, as of the sea unseen in the overshadowing light. Nita thought of the roil and shimmer of the light on Jones Inlet, and let out a long breath of wonder. "Where is this?" she said aloud.

"The inside, honey," Nita's mother said. "The heart of things... what's at the core. Don't you ever dream about this?"

"Uh.. .yeah, sometimes. But it never looked exactly like this."

"Oh, well, this is my part of the territory. That's yours over there; of course, it'd be here, too. It's part of me, like you are." Her mother, in that beat-up denim skirt and T-shirt again, waved a hand back at the glittering towers, half veiled in radiant mist. "I know you'll live there, eventually. Have your own children there." She smiled slightly. "What is it they say? Your grandchildren are your revenge on your kids?" And Nita's mother laughed. "Well, at least you'll know what to expect from them. Partly. But this..." She turned her back on the towers, looking toward the mountains. "This is mine. When you grow up at the edge of the Continental Divide, there's always this wall towering up over you... and when you're little, you look at it and say, 'I'm going to go there someday. Right to the top of that mountain.' Or else you imagine mountains that don't have any top. The places that just go right up and up, into the center of things... forever."

"Yeah," Nita said.

They stood there a while together, looking at those mountains, and then began to walk slowly down through the flower-starred meadow below where they'd been standing. "It's not fair," Nita said softly. "How come I only get to really know you now, when I'm going to lose you?"

"I don't know if you can ever lose me, honey. I'm your mother. There's a bond neither of us can break unless we want to. And it doesn't have to hurt."

Nita wasn't sure about that as yet. But still, there was no lying here...

"So this is it?" Nita's mother said, gazing around her with a look of awe and appreciation. "What you told me about: Timeheart?"

"Uh," Nita said. "I'm not sure. I'm not sure how nonwizards see it." "After all that" Nita's mom said, "am I a non-wizard?"

Nita had no answer for her, but her neart lifted, and she felt a twinge of something that until now she had been afraid to feel: hope.

And it wasn't even hope that her mother would somehow miraculously survive. Nita would hurt for a long while every time she remembered all those dark little creatures dying, and the feeling of many of them not dying, hidden away where even the flush of power from the glede couldn't reach. But Nita had reason to believe that she and her mom would have enough time to get to know each other very well before the hardest moment—the moment of final parting—had to be faced.

And when that came...

... there would, eventually, be Timeheart, where no matter what you dreamed might await you, there was always more.

If she could just last through the testing that would follow, just keep faith long enough to find out what that more would be.

"I could definitely get used to this," her mother said.

You will, Nita thought... or heard. With the words came a pang of relief mingled with pain, the two impossible to separate. It would be a long time before Nita would get used to the pain, she knew. But the relief was there regardless, and here, in this place, there was no matching echo of grief to suggest that the relief was somehow false or illusory. Nothing that happened here could fail to be real. If she felt relief here, it was justified.

"No," Nita's mother said, "I don't think I'm going to let anyone throw me out of here."

"I don't think they can," Nita said, the tears coming to her eyes, even here. She knew, as all wizards know if they know nothing else, that in Timeheart everything worth having, everything that is loved, or of love, is preserved in perfection.

And everyone?...

As usual there were no concrete answers; the place was itself an answer before which all questions faded. Except, suddenly, one.

"Honey," her mother said, "not that I object to the idea, or anything. But can you tell me why there would normally be pigs in heaven?"

"Uh, Mom, this isn't—" But Nita stopped herself; she wasn't sure. And then there was still the question of the Pig, wandering along through the meadow not too far from them and gazing, as they did, at the mountains. The Pig looked, if anything, more transcendent than usual; it did not so much glow as seem to illuminate everything around it, if indeed the luminous surroundings could be any more illuminated than they already were.

"You're here, too?" Nita said to the Transcendent Pig.

"The annoying thing about omnipresence," the Pig said, "is that everybody keeps asking you that question. At least you didn't ask me what was the meaning of life."

Nita made a face. "I forgot."

It chuckled. "You're here and you need to ask?"

She smiled then. "Mom, this is the Transcendent Pig. Chao, this is my mother." "We've met," said the Pig, nodding in a friendly way to Nita's mom.

Nita's mother smiled back. "You know, we have," she said, "but for the life of me I can't remember when."

"You will," said the Pig. It glanced at Nita. "She has

a lot of remembering to do. Not right away...but soon."

Nita's mother nodded as well, gazing at the Pig with an odd expression of slowly dawning recognition. It glanced at Nita. "They all remember me eventually," it said. "The way they all remember the Lone One. We have history."

The three of them walked along through the meadow together for a little ways. "Mom," Nita said, "I really don't want to lose you."

"I don't think we get much choice on this one," Nita's mother said. "Honey, our ways are going to part, one way or another." She looked at Nita with an expression that was sorrowful but tender. "Parents and kids do it all the time, as they both grow up. You and I are just going to have to do it faster than we planned... and more permanently. Since there's no way out of it, let's enjoy every day. Heaven only knows what may happen afterward, but they can't take away from us what we make, one day at a time, just all of us together. That, we keep...and anything else..." Her mother looked up at the mountains. "We'll find out soon enough."

Nita nodded. "But oh, Mom... I'm going to miss you so much! Always!"

"I'm going to miss you too, honey. But it won't be forever... not the kind of forever that matters. If this is where I'm going to be, I think everything will be just fine."

"It won't be the same, though," Nita said softly. "It won't be like being able to talk to you."

"You'll usually know what I would have said, if you think about it," her mother said. "We know each other that well, at least. Other than that, I'll always be around, even though you won't hear much from me. I mean, sweetheart, you started out inside me... Don't you think at the end of the process, things sort of go the other way around?"

Nita wiped her eyes and looked over at the Pig, which was looking at her mother with quiet approval. "Can't add much to that," it said.

Nita just hugged her mom; it was all she could do. "Go well," she said. "As long as you do, sweetheart... I always will."

Nita's mother slowly let her go, then looked over her shoulder, up at those mountains, towering skyward into another kind of eternity, and began to walk toward them, through the mist.

Nita stood there with the Pig and watched her mom vanish, shining, into the mist. "What happens now?" Nita said.

"What usually does. Life... for a while. Then the usual brief defeat," said the Pig. "But victory's certain. Never think otherwise. There is loss, and there is pain, and in your home frame of reference, they're real enough, not to be devalued. But today the energy's running out of things just a little more slowly... for those who trust their hearts as a measure."

Nita swallowed hard. "You'll keep an eye on her," she said.

"Of course I will. I always do. But somehow," said the Pig, looking at Nita's mother, who was moving higher and higher up the hillside, almost lost in the ever-growing light, "I don't think she'll need it."

...The light on the bedroom ceiling woke Nita, glinting through her window from a car pulling into the driveway below. Nita sat up in bed, wiped her face, and tried on a smile. To her astonishment, it didn't feel like such a terrible fit.

She got up, threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and went downstairs to tell her mom hello.