The teacher’s mouth dropped open.
There was another pause. “So can I go home now?” Darryl said, and smiled.
Chapter 10: Liberations
The explanations to parents, Advisories and others, as usual, took nearly as long as the events themselves had done, so it was several days before Nita and Kit found time to go off and relax. The chosen spot was a favorite one, by the edge of a crater close to a well-known site in Mare Tranquillitatis. They were leaning back against the very top of the upper crater wall, looking down over at the rising half-Earth, while Ponch lay on his back in the moondust, snoring, with his feet in the air.
A fourth figure suddenly stepped into the vacuum nearby, looking around him.
“Wow,” Darryl said. He wandered over to where Nita and Kit sat, bouncing a little as first-timers tended to do, because of the lighter gravity.
There was a pause. “Are we really allowed to be up here?” Darryl said, looking about half a mile away, toward where the feet and base of Apollo 11’s lunar lander sat.
“As long as we don’t mess it up,” Kit said. “This is a heritage area.”
Hearing that, Darryl burst out laughing, looking in mischievous admiration at the rough sculptures Kit had been doing on this site for some years. After a few moments he said, “This is what you do in a heritage area?”
“I’ll clean it up before they build the hotel here,” Kit said. “After that, I guess I’ll have to amuse myself carving rocks on Mars into faces.”
Darryl snickered.
“How are your folks doing?” Nita said.
Another pause. Nita was getting used to this now: Darryl routinely needed a few moments extra to compose a spoken sentence, though anything that was a joke or that he personally found funny seemed to take less time. “You kidding? They’re in shock,” Darryl said. He sat down on the rock beside Kit. “They were hoping all along that I’d pull through the burnout, but
“I wouldn’t have thought they’d let you out of their sight right now,” Kit said.
“…They haven’t,” Darryl said. “I’m home in bed.”
“Oh,” Nita said, and laughed. “Wow, that two-for-one deal really does come in handy, doesn’t it?”
She’d already had a word with Kit about the genuine source of Darryl’s ability to be in two places at once. They’d agreed that there was no need to be too cagey about mentioning Darryl’s ability to co-locate, as long as they stayed away from discussing the reasons for it. If Darryl just thought it was a personal talent, that was fine.
Darryl nodded. “I looked at the transit spells,” he said after a moment. “But except for the air, they looked like a waste of energy. We’re not supposed to waste. And besides, why go to all that trouble when I can just do this?”
For a moment he was standing behind a large boulder some feet away, while also sitting on the rock beside Kit. Kit shook his head in admiration.
“Slick trick,” Kit said. “I’ll do it my way for the time being, though. Seriously … are your parents coping?”
“They’re coping great.” Darryl’s eyes shone. It was plain to Nita that this was an understatement. “My mom and dad are…” He broke off, shook his head. This was another thing about his speech: strongly emotional content seemed to take a moment longer to compose. “Kind of freaked out, I guess. And I can’t tell them what happened, or why it’d be okay not to be freaked out.”
“Will you ever, you think?” Nita said.
Darryl thought about it. “…Eventually,” he said. “I’m pretty sure. But right now wizardry’d be one shock too many. They’d probably think I was developing some new kind of trouble because of coming out of the burnout so fast.” He produced a wry smile. “They’re still having trouble with that as it is. Not much in the literature about there being any kind of precedent for this.”
“Give them time,” Kit said. “Neither of us came right out to our parents, either. I think you’re probably right, though. Too much strange at once isn’t a good thing for them. There’s going to be enough of that later, once you start getting into your serious work, whatever that turns out to be. For now, just enjoy how happy they are, and take it easy.”
“Well, happy’s good, but the ‘take it easy’ part’s not going to last,” Darryl said, and grinned. “I heard my mom thinking that if I was really going to be this much more functional this fast, she was going to start giving me chores again.”
Nita and Kit groaned in unison.
“But she was still nervous about it,” Darryl said. “I think I get a few weeks of being lazy before they really start expecting me to step up.”
“Take advantage of it while it lasts,” Kit said, and grinned.
Darryl nodded, looked over at the Earth. “So now we get to take care of that,” he said.
“That’s the job,” Nita said.
“I’d better get on with it then,” Darryl said. “You guys come up here often?”
“Often enough,” Kit said.
“I might be needing some advice as I work into this job,” Darryl said.
“Then call any time,” Nita said.
Darryl nodded and threw them a casual salute. “Dai stihó—” And a second later he was gone.
“That is one nice kid,” Kit said after a moment.
“No argument there,” Nita said. “Come on, your mom said dinner was at six.”
Kit was looking over at the Earth. “It really is the best job, isn’t it?” he said.
Nita nodded, and stood up. “None better. And the company’s good, too.”
“The best,” Kit said. “Welcome back.”
Nita smiled. “Come on,” she said. “I want some of that chicken you’re always raving about.”
Kit stood up as well, dusting floury pumice dust off him. “Yeah, well, if you think you’re going to get a bigger portion than I am, think again! C’mon, Ponch.”
Ponch rolled over and bounced to his feet in a cloud of silvery dust. Kit and Nita vanished.
Ponch stood there, looking thoughtfully at the half-Earth for some moments; then wagged his tail.
Chicken! he said silently, leaped up, and vanished.
***
The next morning Nita walked to school quietly by herself, noticing a lot of things that had passed her by recently: the snow, the slush (of which there was a great deal), the icicles hanging down, glittering, from the eaves of people’s houses; the color of the sky, the sound of people’s voices as they said good-bye to each other on their way to work. If it wasn’t for what’s been going on this past week or so, she thought, how much of this would I have noticed? She had been locked up in her grief as surely as Darryl had locked himself up in the landscapes he’d been constructing to confine the Lone Power.
But he was free now. And as for me…
Nita mused as she turned the corner, thinking of Carl’s mention of the concept that right across the fields of existence “all is done for each.” As far as she could tell, that meant that every good thing that happened to everybody had some effect on all the rest of everybody, from here to the edges of the universe. It was like that saying about the chaos-theory butterfly in the rainforest, which, just by waving its little wings, contributes to the hurricane half a hemisphere away—if not actually causing the hurricane. But more specifically, the “all done for each” principle seemed to mean that the Powers That Be had designed the world so that everything that happened in it—every victory, every sacrifice, from the largest to the smallest—was pointed specifically at every separate living thing. At first Nita had found this almost impossible to imagine. Now she found herself wondering if what she’d just been through, besides assisting in Darryl’s self-liberation, had been about helping her find her way out of her own pain as well. And if he was sent to help me, way more than the other way around.
Better concentrate on making sure he didn’t go through all that for nothing, then.
Nita shrugged as she walked in through the gates that led into the parking lot.
There was plenty of time to get into the theoretical stuff later. For now, she had work to catch up on. And there was other business to finish.
She went down to the temporary office where she usually found Mr. Millman. There he was, sitting behind the desk and reading something on his smartphone while eating the last couple of bites of a bagel with cream cheese.
He glanced up as Nita came in. “Morning,” he said.
Nita sat down, put her book bag on the floor, reached into her jacket, and came out with the cards.
“Before you start in with those,” Mr. Millman said, “one thing. We left on a slightly jangly note the other day.”
“Did we?” Nita said, refusing for the moment to smile at him, refusing to let him off the hook.
“I think we did. Especially since you cut half your classes shortly thereafter.”
Nita shrugged. Millman’s eyebrows went up as he took note of the gesture. “I just wanted you to know something,” he said. “Whatever the secret is about what’s going on in your life right now—I want you to know that there’s no need for you to tell me, ever, and I have no intention of pressing you.”
Nita looked at him with surprise, because this wasn’t what she’d been thinking. She also looked at him with amused suspicion. “What is this, some kind of reverse psychology?”
Mr. Millman looked at her in shock, and then laughed. “What? Like you’re a three-year-old and you’ll do the opposite of what I suggest? Spare me. This is supposed to have been counseling, not brain surgery. I was merely saying that my intent was just to counsel you—not dig around in your skull for juicy tidbits like something out of a horror movie about bad Far Eastern food.”
Nita snickered. “Okay,” she said. “I thought you were going to say something about my anger.”
“Anything that needs to be said,” said Mr. Millman, “I’m sure you’ll take care of it.”
Nita slipped the cards out of their pack and started to shuffle them. It was surprising how easy the false shuffles were when you were really paying attention to them. “Name a card,” she said.
“Five of diamonds,” he said.
Nita nodded, put the deck down on the desk, and cut it twice, to the right, to make three piles. “Turn one card over,” she said.
Millman reached out and turned over the top card of the leftmost deck. The top card was the five of diamonds.
“Not bad at all,” Millman said. “Do I get to pick another?”
Nita gave him a look. “I wouldn’t push your luck if I were you,” she said.
He grinned a little and sat back. “You look a whole lot better,” he said.
“I feel a whole lot better,” Nita said. “And I think I don’t need to be here anymore.”
“What, school?” Millman said, raising his eyebrows.
“Not school here. Here here,” Nita said.
“Oh, you’re cured then?” he said.
Nita cracked up. “Cured of what?”
“You’d be the one to tell me that,” Millman said.
Nita was quiet for a moment. “Not sure anything’s been going that needed curing,” she said at last. “If you mean, am I over my mom dying? …No way. She’ll always be part of me. It’s going to hurt for a long time that she’s not somewhere I can grab her and hug her. But nothing can take her out of my life. Am I over wanting to just sit and suffer and let life go by?” She swallowed. “Probably. Yeah.”
“Then I would say,” Mr. Millman said, “that my work here is done. Insofar as any of it was my work. Which is debatable.”
He reached out and turned over the top card on the middle pack. It was the ace of spades. “Aha,” he said.
“What?”
“Highly symbolic.”
“Of what?”
“Well, that would be a long story. That little leafshaped thing, the ‘spade’..,” Mr. Millman picked up the card, looked closely at it. “The history of the word is tangled. But it goes back at least as far as the Greek spatha. That was a sword, once upon a time. Of the four suits, that’s the one that has most to do with power. Air, the sound the sword makes in the air, the spoken word; the weapons held by the Power that faces down the Power That Fell…”
He picked up the ace and the three cut packs, shuffling them together again.
Nita looked at him.
“So,” Mr. Millman said, putting the deck down on the desk and doing a credible riffle—much too credible, now that Nita thought of it, for a man who claimed that he couldn’t get the cards to stay up his sleeve. “Any last questions before we finish up here?”
She looked at him, thought for a moment, and found a question it would never before have occurred to her to ask him. The answer would have been in her manual, but she wasn’t going to consult that right now. Considering the question, Nita first made sure that she had the wizardry she wanted ready in the back of her head. If you were going to remove someone’s memory, the less time you spent dithering over it, the better.
“Are you on errantry?” Nita said.
He raised his eyebrows again in that expression she’d learned could mean almost anything but surprise.
“No,” Mr. Millman said. “But I know some people who are.”
Nita sat there, astonished, trying not to exhibit it. Millman sat there and kept shuffling.
“You don’t have to be a wizard to know one,” Millman said, “once you know what you’re looking for. And when you’re willing to see what you’re looking at. Not many people are, but that’s humans for you.” He fanned out the cards for her. “Pick a card, any card.”
Nita picked one, turned it over. It was the joker.
Mr. Millman grinned, folded the hand up, tapped the cards back into order, and pushed the deck back toward Nita, meanwhile glancing at the door. “You know where to find me if you need me,” he said. “And I’ve had a word with your sister’s counselor: she’ll be introducing me to Dairine later in the week. Meanwhile, go well.”
Nita got up and took back her pack of cards, grinning, too. She headed for the door.
There she paused as something occurred to her. “‘Supposed to have been counseling?’” she said.
Mr. Millman shrugged.
Nita shook her head again. “Dai stihó,” she said, and left.
***
That night Nita had a dream. In the dream she stood at the edge of darkness, looking in. Out there in the dark was a spotlight shining on a dark gleaming floor. In the light, something was wobbling around and around, while somewhere off in the near distance a single drum held a drumroll.
The thing in the spotlight was a clown doll on a little bicycle. The doll had purple clown hair, and a little derby hat, and baggy patched pants, and it was riding around and around in circles. It had a painted black tear running down its face, and its red-painted mouth was turned up in a lopsided grin. But the eyes in the doll’s white “greasepaint” face were alive, and pale with fury. The expression in them shouted, I can’t make it stop! I can’t make it stop!
Nita watched this with dry amusement. Just couldn’t resist, could you, she thought. And there you are, so very very stuck! Wonder how long he can get away with keeping you sidelined? Probably not nearly long enough to teach you a lesson.
…Probably not, the answer came back. Got way too much to do right now, and it’s a nuisance to spend the power it takes to bottle even just this avatar up. But who knows… maybe things’ll be just a little quieter around here until I have to turn It loose.
The drumroll went on and on. Beyond the light, a heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. But there was no sound of growling now, no tiger waiting to pounce. Its pouncing days were over, in this tiny territory anyway: and the clown was no longer victim, but cage.
Nita woke up to the bright daylight, reflected from snow onto the ceiling of her bedroom, let out a long breath, and smiled.
***
The doorbell rang. Kit glanced up from the business of throwing books into his book bag and would have started
moving to get the door himself, except that his sister plunged past him. “What?” Kit said, looking all around to try to understand why Carmela was suddenly so hot to answer the door.
No answer came back. Kit could do little but shrug and finish packing his book bag. He stood up from the sofa just in time to look out the window and see the UPS truck pull away.
His sister closed the front door and nearly danced past him into the kitchen. “What?” Kit said.
Carmela got a particularly large knife out of the knife rack and began slitting the packing tape on the large box she’d been carrying. Kit fastened his bag and wandered over.
“It has to be clothes,” Kit said, resigned. After a childhood during which Carmela’s major occupation had been ruining the OshKosh overalls that were all their parents dared buy her, Carmela had suddenly discovered clothing as something besides protection from the elements. Now all her pocket money went in this direction, either down at the mall or via various strange mail-order firms. “Nothing but clothes gets you this excited anymore,” Kit said. “Except maybe Miguel.”
And having said that, Kit prepared to protect himself from the explosion that was sure to follow. I can’t believe I said that to her while she was holding a knife!
But the explosion didn’t follow. Carmela, grinning all over her face and singing a little la-la song, put the knife aside, opened the top of the box, and started removing the contents. These seemed to be only a shower of escaping Styrofoam peanuts for the first thirty seconds or so. But then Carmela reached in and lifted out something wrapped in bubblewrap.
“It’s not clothes,” Kit said, astonished.
“Nope,” Carmela said. “Much better.”
This statement left Kit completely confused. Carmela carefully started unwrapping the bubblewrap from around the object.
“It’s some hair thing,” Kit said. “One of those hot curlers.”
Carmela just smiled and kept on unwrapping.
The last bit of wrapping fell away. Carmela held the object up delightedly, admiring it in the morning light, and then thrust it into Kit’s hands.