Okay, she thought, and for lack of anything better to do, she started walking toward the light. As she went, Nita became aware of a low mutter of sound out in the further reaches of the darkness. It took some minutes of walking through the dark before she recognized it as human voices speaking: a slow, muted sound of conversation, coming from somewhere else, but not seeming to matter, particularly. It was as if Nita was hearing these voices through someone else, filtered, and the filter made it all seem like something that couldn’t be allowed to interrupt you right now because something else really important was going on. It was like having the TV on in the background with a show you’d have liked to watch, but something had come up and you couldn’t pay attention right now…
The sound of the voices began to dwindle, just as Nita thought she was about to understand what they were saying; so she kept walking. The light was a little closer now, and she could see the white spotlight it made on the black floor. The snow kept gently falling through the light, though as far as Nita could see, it vanished as soon as it came in contact with the ground. “Hello?” she said. “Anybody here?”
No answer came back. She kept on walking. That spot of light had been about a quarter mile away when she noticed it. Now it was maybe a short block away, and as she peered at it, Nita thought she saw something sitting in it, a starkly illuminated shape—mostly white and black and red, with discordant splashes of other colors—sitting there in a pool of its own shadow.
It was the clown.
How about that, Nita thought.
She didn’t hurry. That was a good way to wake up prematurely. She just kept on walking, and when she was about ten yards away, what seemed like a polite distance to her, Nita stopped.
“Hello?” she said again.
The clown sat in the middle of the spotlight and didn’t look up.
“I talked to you the other night, right?” Nita said. “Or you tried to talk to me, anyway.”
The clown just sat there. Its face was immobile. The big red nose, the bizarre purple wig sticking out from under the absurd little derby hat, the painted tear, all were exactly the same as they had been before. The clown sat there cross-legged in brightly patched, baggy pants, rocking very slightly in the stillness, while the snow falling all around began to taper off.
“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”
Nothing. The clown sat there, didn’t even turn its head toward her.
What’s the matter with you? Nita thought. I’m going out of my way to help you get through to me, here. She thought for a moment, and then tried the on-duty wizards’ identification phrase in another of its commoner forms. “I am on the Powers’ business,” Nita said, “walking the worlds as do They; well met on the common journey!”
The clown just sat there with its head turned away, rocking. Nita started to get annoyed. Okay, she thought. Let’s try this. Nita thought for a moment about what she was about to say in the Speech, wanting to make sure she got it right the first time, as she wasn’t sure what would happen if she mispronounced it.
“In Life’s name and the One’s,” Nita said, “I adjure you to speak to me!”
It was astonishing how just uttering the phrase made a kind of shocked silence after it. The manual had said there was no resisting such an injunction. Nonetheless, there followed one of the longest silences Nita could remember hearing. It took a long time before the clown looked up. Its eyes met Nita’s—
She staggered a step back, caught her breath. It was hard, for in just that flash those eyes had taken her in and known her, instantly, impossibly, unnervingly. Another longer glance, Nita felt, and the being who owned those eyes would know all her secrets, everything that was wrong with her. And the thought of the rejection that might well follow was surprisingly painful: a lancet of pain, a jab, a very different sensation from the slow grey ache that her days had increasingly become.
“You’re so sad,” the clown said. “I wish you wouldn’t be.”
You and me both, would normally have been her first bitter thought. But to her absolute shock, Nita realized that she suddenly absolutely was not sad. The sudden lack of something that had been with her waking and sleeping for many long terrible weeks made Nita feel competely imbalanced: as if a literal weight was missing from inside her chest.
“Wow,” she said softly.
The clown merely nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Nita said. “It’s kind of… something I’ve been going through at the moment.”
“I’m sorry too. It hurt.”
That made her blink. It somehow hadn’t occurred to her that her own pain could be painful to someone else from just such a brush of contact. “I didn’t mean to hurt you with it,” she said. “Please pardon me.”
“All right,” the clown said after a moment. “Who are you?”
“I’m a wizard.” Her thoughts went back for a moment to her dream of the knight. “I’m one of the ones who fight the Lone Power. The One who invented entropy.”
The clown still didn’t look right at her. But Nita felt a change coming over the darkness around the clown, or in the way she saw it. Instead of feeling frightening, now the shadows outside the light were starting to fill with potential and promise.
“What’s the point?” said the clown.
Nita sighed, as that was a question that had been coming up a lot for her lately. “Well,” she said finally, “if we don’t, the world won’t last. And if it doesn’t, well… at least we tried.”
The eyes in the painted face widened.
The painted mouth went wide, and a great cry of anguish burst out of the clown. Nita took a breath, terrified that she’d screwed up, despite her caution.
Then she caught her breath again, because without warning there was suddenly another clown there, identical to the first one. It was standing, not sitting, and with an interested expression it was watching the first clown scream. “I heard about the whole heat-death thing,” said the second clown. “The Silence told me. What exactly went wrong?”
Nita was finding all of this unusually weird, even for a dream. The Silence? What’s that supposed to mean?
And wait. Did he just speak to me in the Enactive Recension? Because— She shook her head. Enactive might be the oldest recension of the Speech, and was possibly the most powerful; supposedly it was what the One had used to create the universe. The joke had it that the One once miscontrued a verb in Enactive and the result was the asteroid belt. So…just wow. It seemed like a really good time to hold still and take stock of whatever was going on here.
Nita sat down outside the circle of the spotlight, not far from where the second clown stood in the “twilight zone,” halfway between the light and the shadow. “There are a lot of answers to that one,” Nita said. “But in the end it all comes down to somebody inventing Death.”
As she mentioned It, Nita heard that low menacing growl coming from somewhere out there in the shadows. Invoking the Lone Power, however obliquely, and even in dream, always had its dangers. But the growl seemed to have no real teeth in it here. It sounds almost tired, Nita thought. Weird.
The second clown turned to look at her, and Nita almost flinched, remembering the impact of their eyes’ first meeting. But this was different: the second clown was restraining himself for her sake, and all she could see in his eyes for the moment was a quick lively reaction to the growl—a flash of recognition, a scowl of rejection.
“That much of the story I know,” the second clown said. “It’s got itself inside most things, hasn’t it.”
“Yes it has,” Nita says. “Just keeps on finding ways to make life something that you wish was over with….”
“Oh yeah,” said the second clown. He gave her one more brief glance and Nita was splashed with a quick flicker-rush of images and sounds: dawns and sunsets running confusedly together, people rushing hither and yon, daily life like something that flogged you with too much light and color and detail and noise, speech that read as shouting??
? everything tangled in a rush of painful, hard-to-manage perception. But for the clown the pain was welcome, a lifeline of sorts. Things aren’t perfect, but I’m here. I’ve hung on this long because I knew something was coming. And now it’s arrived, I’m not going away without a fight —
The storm of pictures and feelings faded, leaving Nita staring out into a roiling, scary darkness. But the darkness was oddly ambivalent, as filled with possibility as with terror.
And I’m the one who finds that strange, not him, Nita thought. Whoever this was, however different from hers his view of the universe might be, he was braver about it than she was. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” said the clown. “It’s what I’ve got. And I’m going to keep making the most of it, because it really has its moments.”
The screaming of the other clown had tapered off now, and he was now sitting still and simply looking distracted. “So listen,” Nita said, “what’s all this about? Do you need help with something?”
The second clown looked away. The first one stared at her, shocked, and began to scream again.
This could make you start feeling really reluctant to say anything, Nita thought as the volume increased. After a few moments, though, as her own shock wore off, the noise began to remind Nita of her earliest encounters with Dairine… or rather, with Dairine after she’d first become aware that Nita might possibly be in competition with her for their parents’ attention. Dairine’s lung power at the age of two had initially caused Nita some innocent wonder, but this was a phase that had lasted about five minutes, and now, as the scream just kept on going, Nita let out a long breath and invoked the remedy she’d learned way back then. “All right,” she shouted in the Speech: not Enactive, maybe, but it’d do. “Shut up!”
The first clown fell silent in complete amazement.
“Thank you. And sorry.” She turned back to the second clown. “What’s his problem?”
“His? Same as mine. But then he’s me. And ‘problem’ may not be the right word.”
Nita blinked. “Wait. You’re him—? Okay, wait, that can keep. All I asked was if I could give you a hand with something…”
“It’s, uh. Unnerving. To have someone else offer, anyway. I’m all alone in here.”
Just a touch of sadness there? “Well, screaming’s not going to stop that kind of thing, if you start letting other wizards in.”
The clown gave her an amused look that the greasepaint had no power to interfere with. “Apparently not. Ignoring the visitors doesn’t seem to have worked work either.”
“Why would you ignore them?”
“Because you’re a distraction.”
“From what?”
The clown looked around at the darkness. “This.”
“Meaning what?”
Out of the darkness, ever so softly, came that growl again.
Nita glanced out into the dark, slightly unnerved. But this is still my dream, she thought. If It tries something cute, I can just slip out. I hope. “Now there’s a contradiction to what you’ve been saying. Didn’t you just say you were all by yourself?”
“I am.” This time the phrase, in the Speech, was identical with the Self-declaration of Life. Nita, even more unnerved now, half expected to hear thunder, but none came. The One was either otherwise occupied, or not particularly concerned about having Its lines stolen. “But That, out there? That’s different.”
“I won’t argue that,” Nita said. “But, look, why do you have to stay here?”
The spotlit clown said, “This is all there is.”
The one standing in shadow said, “If I try to leave… That’s waiting.”
One more tiger growl sounded from out in the darkness: Nita’s dream-image of the Lone Power, patient, hungry, willing to wait. But still a little tired, Nita thought. Interesting…
“Yeah, well, so is What’s a whole lot older,” Nita said. “And doesn’t die, no matter what one of Its older kids intended for the rest of creation.”
This time the screaming from the seated clown didn’t surprise Nita when it started. The other one looked at Nita in genuine shock. “Where exactly did you come from?” it said.
“Don’t ask me,” Nita said. “Theoretically, I’m asleep. Look, now that he’s over not being alone in here —or you’re not, rather—” The screaming scaled up. “Assuming I haven’t spoken too soon…” And then she actually laughed, because the second clown was grinning ruefully. “Do you wear that costume all the time?”
The clown looked at her in pleased surprise. “You can tell it’s a costume?”
“Under the costumes,” Nita said, “even clowns have lives. Outside the circus, anyway.”
The clown stood quiet for a moment. Nita waited, untroubled; this far along in her practice, she had learned that a lot of wizardry wasn’t speech, but silence. “It seemed right,” the clown said. “Sometimes the body I wear gets clumsy… makes people laugh. Might as well laugh for a good reason as for a bad one.”
And suddenly it wasn’t a clown standing there, but a boy of maybe eleven. He was handsome, in a little-kid way, skinny and sharp-faced, with a short, restrained Afro cut high in the back. But his eyes were both younger and somehow older than his body: an effect that made you stop and think. Nita’s surprise at the change of clown-into-kid was also muted a little by what he was saying, because she knew what he meant. Some of the kids at school and family friends who’d tried over the past month to treat her as usual, as if nothing had happened, had hurt her far worse than those who’d let their discomfort show. “Well, listen,” she said, “the ones who laugh at you and not with you? They’re idiots.”
“They’re all That, in their way,” the little kid said, pointing with his chin into the darkness. He didn’t move much; he stood with his hands hanging down by his sides, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them, and his face was fairly immobile. “The Thing out in the darkness That’s been chasing me forever.”
Nita wasn’t sure what to make of this.
The kid looked at her with an expression that wasn’t entirely convinced. “It looks out of everybody’s eyes, doesn’t it? I could always see It, from when I was really young, though I didn’t realize it at first. Sometimes it would get too tough, seeing It all the time, and I’d need to pull back.” He looked away from Nita again. “And it’s tough to re-engage after that. Hurts a lot.”
Nita said nothing. Finally, after what seemed ages of silence, he turned toward her. He didn’t quite look at her as he said, “It’s looking out of your eyes, too. It’s always been close to you, hasn’t It? And lately, closer than ever.”
Nita swallowed hard. This would not be the moment to break down. “Well, you’re not the only one It chases around,” she said. “It’s after everybody else, too, one way or another. Eventually It gets us all. But if we pay attention to what we’re doing, we can make a whole lot of trouble for It along the way.” And Nita couldn’t help grinning a little. If she had one satisfaction in her life these days, it was the knowledge that the Lone Power found her a personal pain in the butt, annoying enough to try to do one of Its crooked deals with.
The kid looked over at Nita again, full force, grinning back. “I know,” he said.
Nita actually had to brace herself again. Meeting his gaze was like being hit over the head with a brick, but a good brick—an abrupt, concentrated, overwhelming onslaught of cheerful power with a slight edge of mischief in it. Nita had hardly ever felt so intense a wash of emotion or attitude from any being, human or otherwise.
“I definitely know,” he said again. “I’m doing just that. I do it all the time, now.” If anything, his grin got more jubilant, though he looked away again. “And it’s a whole lot of fun.”
Nita was on the point of saying, Don’t start enjoying it too much—and then stopped herself as she saw his smile go a touch rueful. “That’s why I’m spending so much time in here,” he said. “It keeps coming along to try to deal with me once and for all.” Th
at smile went sly. “It can’t stop doing it… and I never let It close the deal.” Then he glanced away once more, his eyes going sad. “Only problem is, when it gets easier to function out there, because sometime it does, I keep having to… I don’t know… pry myself away. Step back from a world that has so much going on in it. And then it starts seeming like too much again. Too much of other people’s stuff…”
“Don’t step too far back!” Nita said. “Being out and about in a world full of cool people is the best part of being a wizard.” She swallowed. “Or just a person.”
“Am I a wizard?” he said, a little sadly.
Nita shook her head in admiration. “Are you kidding? If you can speak in the Enactive Recension, you’re sure on the right track!”
The growl out in the dark sounded more annoyed now, and it prolonged itself, not fading away. “Things got a lot worse lately,” the boy said, “and real fast—all at once. I think It was trying to take me out of the game before something happened.” He frowned. “But I think that might have backfired, because It’s been following me around,” he said, his tone lightening, that edge of humor coming back into it. “Around and around… It’s really funny.”
I can’t get off, Nita remembered the clown crying in the dark. And it hit her that the despairing voice hadn’t been the boy’s. Her eyes widened. The Lone Power’s been chasing him, all right, and he’s been running… but not because he’s scared…!
He started to fade out. “Wait! Don’t leave yet!” Nita cried.
“If I stay with you much longer, it’ll realize the equation’s changed. Gotta go.”
“Just make sure you come back!”
“That’s the plan,” he said. “But I can’t stop till this is settled, or all this hard work’ll have been for nothing. Can’t let that happen!”
He smiled that slightly wicked smile again as he turned away. Then he was gone.
There Nita sat alone in the darkness, while nearby a spotlight out of nowhere shone on the dark floor: just a pool of light. What briefly had made the light special was now gone.