Kit shook his head. “I think I’m going to be looking for answers for a while. Trouble is, every time I try to settle down to work it out with the manual, something new goes wrong with the TV. Or something else interrupts me.”
The bell rang. “See that? The story of my life,” Kit said.
“Not just yours,” Nita said. “Look, call me later. You ought to take a look at what I’m working on from the ‘inside’; maybe you can make some sense of it.”
“Right,” Kit said.
They parted company and went off to their classes. Nita more or less sleepwalked through her afternoon algebra and statistics class, grateful not to be called on. Her mind was still tangled up in virtual and non-pronominal pronouns, and the question of what could be that wrong with Kit’s TV that it would prove a distraction to him. The second-to-last period that afternoon was a study hall, and Nita got no more than three sentences into an essay on the abandonment of the gold standard before ditching the essay to return to the manual again; the gold standard made even virtual pronouns look good by comparison.
Toward the end of that period, though, and during the next one—a music appreciation class full of jangly, early twentieth-century twelve-tone music, which Nita found impossible for anyone to appreciate—she started wondering exactly what was going on with her. Sure, she might occasionally detest her homework—more than occasionally, especially in the case of her present civics class: Her teacher had a great love of saddling her students with essays on apparently useless subjects. But detesting the homework didn’t mean Nita didn’t get it done.
Oh, come on. It’s not like the universe is going to come apart because I’m less than excited about the gold standard and feel more like working on wizardry.
Yet the excuse sounded hollow. More to the point, it sounded like an excuse. When the bell rang for the last time that day, at two-forty-five, Nita walked out through the exuberant Friday afternoon rush to the lockers in a somber mood. She looked for Kit in the parking lot, didn’t see him, and wasn’t surprised: he had quicker, quieter ways of getting home than the other kids here.
She could have taken that same way home, but didn’t. She walked home slowly, thinking. Nita paused only long enough in her house to dump her books and change out of her school clothes into something more comfortable—looser jeans, a floppier sweatshirt—and to check on Dairine. Her sister was lying on her stomach, on her bed, with Spot lying on the bed next to her; the little computer had put out a couple of stalky eyes to look at a book Dairine was reading.
“School okay?” Nita said.
Dairine gave Nita the kind of look that someone in the Middle Ages might have given a relative who asked if the black plague was okay. Her only other answer was to bounce herself up and down on the mattress a little. The bed creaked loudly.
“Did not,” Nita said, and went downstairs again to get her parka.
“Where you going?” came the voice from upstairs.
“Tom’s.”
***
Tom and Carl’s backyard was already going twilit, this time of year, even so soon after school. Nita paused there a moment, looking up at the sky, which was clear for a change after several days’ worth of cloudy weather, and wished that spring would hurry up—she hated these short days. She meandered over to the koi pond and glanced down into it. The pond wasn’t heated, but it didn’t freeze, either; into the pond and the ground beneath it, Carl had set a small utility wizardry that acted on the same general principle as a heat pump, keeping the water at an even sixty degrees Fahrenheit. All the same, at this time of the year the koi were naturally a little sluggish. Right now they were mostly gathered together under the weeds and water lilies down at one end of the pond. Nita peered down, able to see nothing but the occasional flick of tail or fin, and once a coppery eye glancing back up at her.
“Hey,” she said. “Got any words of wisdom?”
The single koi that had looked back, a white one with an orange patch on its head, drifted up to just beneath the surface and regarded her. Then it stuck its mouth up into the air.
“Seen in plain daylight the firefly’s just one more bug; but night restores it—”
Nita raised her eyebrows. The koi gave her a look that suggested she was a waste of its time, and drifted straight back under the lily pads again.
“If you listen to them for too long,” Tom said as he pushed open the patio door, “you won’t be able to say anything that takes more than seventeen syllables.”
“I should send Dairine over,” Nita said.
“Even their powers have limits,” Tom said, as Nita came in. “I just made tea. Can I interest you?”
“Yeah. It’s cold.” Nita slipped out of her parka, draped it over one of Tom’s dining room chairs.
“They’re predicting snow,” Tom said, pouring each of them a mug of tea and bringing them over to the table.
“That’s funny. It’s clear.”
“For the moment. There’s a storm working its way up the coast, though. Four to six inches, they said.”
Nita gave him a wry look. “Why couldn’t this happen on Monday and get us a day off from school?” she said.
“There are about thirty different answers to that, from the strictly meteorological mode down to the ethical,” Tom said, looking equally wry, “but they all factor down more or less to mean, ‘Just because. So cope with it.’”
Nita nodded and smiled a little, but the smile fell off almost immediately. “I need to ask you something.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Tom said, “though Annie and Monty doubtless have a different opinion. Anyway, what’s up?”
She looked at him across the table. “Am I using wizardry to avoid life?” Nita said.
Tom raised his eyebrows. “Wizardry is Life,” he said. “Or, at the very least, in service of Life. By definition. So, equally by definition, the answer to that question is no. Want to try rephrasing?”
Nita sat for a moment and thought. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with the manual.”
“So do we all.”
“No, I mean a lot of time. For me, anyway.”
“And this means—?”
Nita paused, wondering how to phrase this. “My last really big wizardry,” she said, “didn’t work.”
“Uh, there we’d have to disagree.”
“I don’t mean in terms of wizardry,” Nita said. “I mean in terms of what the pissed-off places in the back of my brain think about it. My mom still died.”
“Mmm,” Tom said. His expression was noncommittal.
“What I want to know is—is it possible to use research as a way to put off doing other stuff you should be doing?”
“Again, anything’s possible. What is it you think you should be doing?”
Nita shook her head, pushed her teacup back and forth on the table mat. “I don’t know. Something more … active.”
“You think research is passive?”
“Compared to what I’ve been doing up until now, yeah.”
Nita reached sideways into the air for her manual, came out with it, opened it to the listings area, and pushed it over to Tom, tapping on her listing. “‘Optional,’” Nita said. “I’m not real wild about that.”
“I’m not sure I read that construct the same way,” Tom said. “I’d translate it more as meaning your options are open: that you’re not concretely assigned to anything at the moment. Maybe a better rendering would be ‘freelance.’” He glanced at her manual. “But then you seem to be taking a look at the vocabulary end of things at the moment.”
“Please,” Nita said. “I feel so ignorant. Me and my six hundred and fifty words.”
“Maybe it’ll be some consolation to you that the average English-speaking person’s day-to-day vocabulary is only a thousand or fifteen hundred words,” Tom said. “But I understand how you feel. And the Speech is so much more complex than English in terms of specialized vocabulary. It has to be, if you’re going to name things properly
. And so that means doing vocabulary-building all the time.”
He knocked one knuckle on the tabletop a couple of times. Immediately his version of the manual appeared on the table—seven or eight thick volumes like phone books. “This one,” Tom said, pulling a single volume out of the stack—while the ones above it considerately remained hovering in place over where the middle one had been— “this one is my vocabulary work for this year.”
Nita looked at it in horror as Tom dropped it to the table and flipped it open. “Remind me never to become a Senior,” she said.
“Like you can avoid it when it happens,” Tom said, sounding resigned. “Nita, you wouldn’t be the first wizard to get confused about the apparent differences between active and passive work in wizardry. But the Powers That Be don’t see the distinction—or They see it as largely illusory.” He paged through the book, stopping about halfway through to glance at something. “If you go through this, you’ll see often enough where it says that wizards are told only what they need to know ‘for the work at hand.’ Which leaves you with the question: What do they find in it when there is no work at hand—no official assignment? You’d be surprised. But it’s never anything that goes to waste. Sooner or later, every wizard’s work, however minor, does someone, somewhere, some good. It’s an extension of the ‘all is done for each’ principle.”
“So what I’m doing isn’t like… withdrawal or anything?” Nita said.
“Oh, no. Don’t forget, there are wizards who do nothing but read the manual.” Tom looked thoughtful. “I wouldn’t be that far down the road. My job tends more toward focused research. But I still spend maybe seventy percent of my theoretically ‘inactive’ time reading these things. It’s a big universe out there. Just this planet, for example: think how much you can discover about it just by going to the library or rummaging around on the Web. Then imagine you have access to a book that contains most of the salient facts about your universe. Wouldn’t you spend a lot of time between the covers?”
“Uh,” Nita said. “Well, I guess I have been.”
“So, at the very least, even if you didn’t have a goal you were working toward, which I think you have, I wouldn’t consider your time wasted,” Tom said. “As for you not being on active assignment, that’s between you and the Powers. They value the work we do sufficiently to avoid pushing us to function when it wouldn’t be appropriate to the wizard’s own best interests. Emergencies do come up; but routinely, if being on duty would impair your own status, you’re not called up.” He eyed Nita. “If you’re starting to feel the need to get back into the saddle, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’d be the one to tell me.”
Nita examined the floor in some detail for a few moments before she said anything. “It’s not like I actually feel all that much better,” she said, hardly above a whisper. She was watching herself with great care to see if she was going to start crying again; she couldn’t have borne it right this minute. “Every now and then I forget to hurt. But the rest of the time… I keep seeing those last few hours with my mom, over and over.” Then she frowned. “But I can’t just sit around. It’s not bringing my mother back. And I keep getting the feeling she’d be annoyed with me for, I don’t know, for indulging myself in just sitting around and feeling bad when I should be busy with something important. Because this is important.”
Tom nodded. “I don’t think I can argue with that,” he said. “Meanwhile, tell me what you’ve been up to.”
Nita spent a few minutes describing the contacts she’d been having from the aliens, especially the last one—the knight—and the cryptic message he, or it, had left her.
When she was finished, Tom shook his head. “‘What fights the Enemy…,”’ he said. “You’re right, the phrasing’s interesting.”
“You think this alien’s a wizard?”
“Hard to tell,” Tom said. “There are lots of creatures all over the universe who both use the Speech and work to oppose the Lone Power without being wizards.” He shrugged. “For the time being, I’d keep trying to get through, I suppose, and see if you can work inward to a mode where there’s more clarity.”
“Yeah. I’m going to try the lucid dreaming again tonight, I think. So far, that’s where I’ve had the best results.” Nita frowned. “I guess that’s the other thing that’s worried me. The possibility of getting stuck in a dreamworld…”
“I’m not sure I see that as a danger for you,” Tom said. “I’d almost suggest the danger would lie in too much hardheaded practicality… in being too tough on yourself. For the time being, you seem to be okay. Let me know how you progress with your ‘alien,’ anyway.”
“Yeah.”
Nita got up and slipped into her parka, glancing at Tom’s stack of manuals again. “You have to learn that whole thing this year?”
“And keep Carl from blowing up the house,” Tom said. “Even wizardry may be insufficient to the task. See you later.”
***
“Kit, querido,” Kit’s mama said, “if you feed that dog so many dog biscuits, you’ll spoil his appetite for dinner.”
In the kitchen, adding a last few seasonings to what would shortly be a pot of minestrone soup, Kit’s father laughed out loud. “Impossible.”
Kit was sitting on the dining room sofa, trying to read one of the books on autism from the library: this one having to do with art by autistics. He’d picked it up on a hunch, and was finding it more useful than he’d thought, as what he was seeing and reading made some sense to him in terms of what he’d been getting from Darryl. Some of the art in the book was very architectural, preoccupied with scale and stillness: some of it very “representational”, mostly images of people or animals, some of these quite symbolic and some exquisitely detailed. The artists interviewed talked about their attempts to create and express beauty while also communicating the desire for relief from the world’s never-ending assault on their senses, or their understandable anger at a world that put so much stress on “being yourself” but refused to allow them to be who they were.
That whole thing, Kit thought, that desert: it wasn’t Darryl’s mind as such. It was something he’d made. Maybe even as a work of art — but either way, something built for a purpose. Ponch was right: he wouldn’t be inside that, except the way an artist gets ‘into’ his painting. The creator’s outside it, surrounding it…
And I still have to find out why. Is this part of his Ordeal, all this interior building? Ponch said it wasn’t new. Is that whole construct maybe one big communication, a really detailed message? Impossible to tell as yet: he was going to have to get back in there, track Darryl down when he wasn’t suffering the Lone Power’s attentions and get to the root of this.Meantime he was trying to finish the book, but unfortunately the reading was being made difficult, if not impossible, by the large black muzzle that kept insinuating itself between Kit and the open pages, and the big brown eyes that looked beseechingly up into Kit’s. Just one more, Ponch said.
“You’re gonna turn into a blimp,” Kit said.
I’ll be a happy blimp, Ponch said. What’s a blimp?
Kit’s mama laughed. Kit glanced up at her.
“He’s loud sometimes, honey,” his mama said, handing Kit’s papa the pepper shaker as he held his hand out for it. “I don’t know why you can’t hear it.”
Kit’s pop shook his head as he looked down into the pot, grinding pepper in. “From what Kit says, I don’t know why you can hear it at all. None of us should be able to.”
“Maybe it’s because I usually feed him in the mornings,” Kit’s mama said. “I’m used to hearing him complain that he’s not getting enough.” She made a kind of rrrgh noise that went up into a whine at the end, a fair imitation of Ponch’s reaction to an empty dish when there was someone around who could give him the rest of the can of dog food.
Ponch’s eyes moved at that, a sideways glance. Her accent’s not bad. I could teach her Cyene.
“Let’s not deal with this right
now,” Kit said. He could just see his mom going down the street to try to talk sense to Tinkerbell.
One more! Ponch said.
“One,” Kit said. He gave Ponch the last dog biscuit in the box, put the book aside, and got up to throw the box away.
“The onions done yet?” his mama said.
“Nearly,” said Kit’s pop, as Kit stomped the box flat to make it take up less room in the recycling. Behind Kit, the emphatic crunching noises by the sofa came to an end, and Ponch ran into the kitchen. Out?
“Sure,” Kit said, opening the door. A fierce cold wind came in as Ponch shot out.
“Shut that, sweetie. It’s freezing!” Kit’s mama said.
“Gonna snow tonight, they said on the TV,” said Kit’s pop, picking up the frying pan in which the onions had been sizzling, and scraping them out into the soup as Kit shut the door.
“A lot?” Kit said.
“Six to eight inches.”
Kit sighed. It wouldn’t be anything like enough to make them keep school closed on Monday. That would take at least a few feet. Not for the first time he wished that it wasn’t unethical to talk a snowstorm into dumping three feet of snow onto his immediate neighborhood. It was fun to think about, but the trouble he would have gotten into with Tom and Carl, not to mention the Powers That Be, would have made the pleasure short-lived.
Still, if I told the snowstorm to dump, say, twelve feet of snow just on the school, and then only enough everywhere else so that everybody could have fun for a day; say six inches or so…
Kit sighed again. Though such a course of action would be less trouble to the snowplow crews, the emergency services, and everybody else who wanted to go on about their lives, something like that would cause a whole lot of talk, and still get him in trouble. But the image of his school completely buried under a giant snowdrift made him smile. “By the way, Pop,” Kit said, “is the TV still okay?”
“Seems fine,” his pop said. “Every now and then the thing insists on showing me a news program from some other planet, but…” He shrugged. “As long as nothing happens to interfere with the basketball over the weekend, I don’t mind seeing who’s grown a new head or whatever. Darlin’, you know what I need?”