“Easy then,” Dairine said. “Just develop a wizardry that targets that one mutant gene—”
“‘And swaps in a clean copy, or destroys only the cells that have the mutant’?” Carl said, rubbing his eyes. “Yes, of course, completely easy. So with as many wizards as we’ve got running around the planet, why’s there still so much cancer running loose, do you think?”
Dairine opened her mouth and shut it again.
“It’d be lovely if everything was so binary,” Carl said. “So open and shut. But the problem’s way more subtle. Not all the bad copies are going to be identical. The mutation’s not a one-off: it continues, it shifts again and again. Target one form with a wizardry based—as a wizardry should be—on exact description, and you’ll miss other new ones that, in the way of smart cells everywhere, will get even cleverer about concealing themselves from detection, and from the wizardry. They’ll lie low and start growing later on when your back is turned. Kill them some more, they’ll mutate again, hide themselves again. They’ll get smarter and nastier with every incomplete eradication, and what comes back will be five times, ten times as fast and deadly.”
“Also, not all the bad copies of the gene are bad bad copies,” said Tom. “Millions of those brain cells with the busted gene will be functioning perfectly well and benignly in situ without ever having displayed the malignant reproductive behavior. Want to burn out a small but significant percentage of your mom’s useful functioning brain capacity by being too aggressive about clearing out the busted genetic copies? That’s a good way. Kill the malignancy, but leave her with the equivalent of brain damage, or a stroke. You’ve cured her of cancer, and also the ability to speak, or move. …Or let’s say you get lucky and leave her with no worse than generalized memory loss. Will she remember you’re a wizard, afterwards? Will she remember your dad, or Nita? Or you? Ever?”
Nita watched Dairine going progressively more pale. “Those,” Tom said softly, “are just a couple of any number of possible results had you had your original power levels to hand during your ill-advised little attempted intervention. So count yourself extremely lucky that the whole poorly-constructed edifice simply fell apart because wizardry itself couldn’t support you doing something quite so stupid.”
The ensuing quiet lasted for a long, long minute during which there wasn’t much for Nita to do except sit and watch Dairine twitch. “Our problems as wizards working with cancer almost exactly parallel those of modern medical professionals,” Carl finally said. “In the end, it’s always about sorting the undesirable cells from the desirable ones, and the undesirable effects from the desirable ones. And it’s always going to be a balancing act. It can’t ever be perfect… and every case has to be evaluated carefully before you just start jumping in and changing things. But the ongoing mutations in cancers of this type make them as intractable for wizards to treat as for doctors.” He rubbed his face. “Because there’s the simple problem of interventional scale. Any spell complex enough to accurately and safely name and describe every negatively impacted cell, and what you think might be hiding in it, would take you years to write. By which time…” He shook his head.
“I thought maybe you did spells like that,” Nita said in a small voice.
Tom smiled, even though the smile was sad. “That’s a much higher compliment than I deserve. No, a wizardry that complex is well beyond my competence. Which is a shame, because if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t rest by day or night until I had it for you.”
Nita gulped.
“A lot of wizards have spent a lot of time on this problem, Nita,” said Carl. “The price of attempting cures is high. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be much cancer; we’d be stomping it out with ease wherever we found it. As it is, look at the world around you, and see how far we’ve got.”
That thought wasn’t one she cared for. “You say there are ways to ‘attempt’ a cure,” Nita said. “It sounds like it doesn’t work very often.”
Carl sighed. “That’s because of a part of the problem that leaves us, in some ways, even less able to do anything than the medical people. We’re wizards, after all Malignant cellular life, deranged from its original purpose though it might be, is life regardless. And we cannot just go around killing things without dealing with the consequences, at every level.”
“Oh, come on!” Dairine said.
“Not at all,” Carl said. “Where do you draw the line, Dairine? Where in the Oath does it say, ‘I’ll protect this life over here but not that one, which happens to be annoying me at the moment?’ There’s no such dichotomy. You respect all life, or none of it. Of course that doesn’t mean that wizards never kill. But killing increases entropy locally, and it’s always to be resisted. Sometimes, yes, you must kill in order to save another life. But you must first make your peace with the life-form you’re killing.”
“If I’m just going to be killing a bunch of tumor cells,” Nita said, “I should be able to manage that.”
Carl shook his head. “It may not be so easy. Malignant cells have their own worldview: ‘Reproduce at any cost.’ Which also can mean ‘kill your host.’ In dealing with that kind of thing, a wizard is handicapped right from the start.”
“Blame the Speech,” Tom said. “It’s the basis on which every wizardry is predicated … but here, it’s also our weak spot, if this is a weakness. Everything that lives knows the Speech and can use it to tell you how life feels for it, how its universe makes it behave…”
Nita stared at the table, her heart sinking. Tom was right. It was hard to be angry at something—a rock, a tree—that you could hear saying to you, This is how I’m made; it’s not my fault; you see how the world is, the way things are for me; what else can I do? And for the simplest things—and single cells are about as simple as things get—it would be hard to explain to them why they shouldn’t be doing this, why they should all just stop reproducing themselves and essentially commit suicide so that your mother didn’t have to die. Their world was such a simple one, it wouldn’t allow for much in the way of—
Nita’s eyes went wide.
She slowly looked up from the table at Tom. “What about—Tom, is it possible to change a tumor cell’s perception of the world—change the way the universe seems for them, is for them—so that they’re more sentient? So that a wizard could deal with them to best effect? Talk them out of being there… or talk them out of killing?”
Tom and Carl looked at each other. Tom’s look was dubious. But Carl’s expression was strangely intrigued. He nodded slowly.
“You know the rules,” he said. “‘If they’re old enough to ask…’”
“‘…they’re old enough to be told.’” Tom folded his hands and looked at them. “Nita,” he said, “I couldn’t ask about this before. Who are you thinking of doing this wizardry for? Your mother or you?”
Nita sat silent, then she opened her mouth. “Don’t,” Carl said. “You’re still in shock; you can’t possibly have a clear answer to the question yet. You’re going to have to find out as you do your work. But the question matters. Wizardry, finally, is about service to other beings. Our own needs come second. If you start fooling yourself about that, the deception is going to go straight to the heart of any spell you write, and ruin it. And maybe you as well.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “Let that rest for the moment.” To Nita he said, “Are you clear about what you’re suggesting you want to do?”
“I guess it would mean changing the way things behave in the universe, locally,” Nita said. “Inside my mom.” And she gulped. When she put it that way, it suddenly became clear how many, many ways there were to screw it up.
“Changing the structure of the universe itself,” Tom said. “Yes. You get to play God on a local level.”
“You’re going to tell me that it’s seriously dangerous,” Nita said, “and the price is awful.”
“Anything worth having demands a commensurate price,” Carl said. “What is your mother’s life worth to you? …And yes
, this option has dangers. But I see that’s not likely to stop you in the present situation.”
He leaned back a little in his chair, folding his arms, looking at Nita. “We have to warn you clearly,” Carl said. “You think you’ve been through a lot in your career so far. I have news for you. You haven’t yet played with anything like this. When you start altering the natural laws of universes, it’s like throwing a rock into a pond. Ripples spread, and the first thing in the local system to be affected, the first thing the ripples hit, is you. You’re going to need practice handling that, keeping yourself as you are in the face of everything changing, before trying it for real. And unfortunately, in this universe, everything is for real.”
“I don’t care,” Nita said. “If there’s a chance I might be able to save my mom, I have to try. What do I need to do?”
“Go somewhere it’s not for real,” Carl said. “One of the universes where you can practice.”
Nita stared at him, confused. “Like learning to fly a plane in a simulator?”
“It wouldn’t be a simulation,” Tom said. “It’ll be real enough. As Carl said, figures of speech aside, it’s always for real. But if you have to make mistakes while you’re learning how to manipulate local changes in universal structure, there are places set aside where you can make them and not kill anybody in the process.”
“Or where, if you kill yourself making one of those mistakes, you won’t take anyone else with you,” said Carl.
There was a moment’s silence at that.
“Where?” Nita said. “I want to go.”
“Of course you do, right this minute,” Carl said, rubbing his face. “It’s going to take time to set up.”
“There may not be a lot of time, Carl! My mom—”
“Is not going to die today, or tomorrow,” Tom said, “as far as the doctors can tell. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes, but—” Nita stopped. For a moment she had been ready to shout that they weren’t being very considerate of her. But that would have been untrue. As her Senior wizards, their job was to be tough with her when she needed it. Anything else would have been really inconsiderate.
“Good,” Carl said. “Get a grip. You’ll need it where you’re going. The aschetic continua, the ‘practice’ universes, are flexible places—at least the early ones in the sequence—but if you indulge yourself in sloppy thinking while you’re in one, it can be fatal.”
“Where are they?” Nita said. “How do I get there?”
“It’s a worldgating,” Tom said. “Nonstandard, but you’d be using existing gates.” He glanced at Carl. “Penn Station?”
“Penn’s down right now. It’d have to be Grand Central.”
Nita nodded; she had a fair amount of experience with the worldgates there. “What do I do when I get there?”
“Your manual will have most of the details,” Carl said. “You’ll practice changing the natures and rules of the nonpopulated spaces that the course makes available to you. You’ll start with easy ones, then move up to universes that more strenuously resist your efforts to change them, then ones that will be almost impossible to change.”
“It’s like weight lifting,” Nita said. “Light stuff first, then heavier.”
“In a way.”
“When you finish the course,” Tom said, “if you’ve done it correctly, you’ll be in a position to come back and recast your mother’s physical situation as an alternate universe, and change its rules. If you still want to.”
If? Nita decided not to press the point. She’d noticed over time that sometimes Tom and Carl spent a lot of effort warning you about things that weren’t going to happen. “Yes. I want to do it.”
Tom and Carl looked at each other. “All right,” Tom said. “You’re going to have to construct a carrying matrix for the spells you’ll take with you—sort of a wizardly backpack. Normally you’d read the manual and construct the spells you need, on the spot, but that won’t work where you’re going. In the practice universes, time runs at different speeds, so the manual can be unpredictable about updating—and you can’t wait for it when you’re in the middle of some wizardry where speed of execution is crucial. Your manual will have details on what the matrix needs to do. What it looks like is up to you.”
“And one last thing,” Carl said. He looked sad but also stern. “If you go forward on this course, there’s going to come a time when you’re going to have to ask your mother whether this is a price she wants you to pay.”
“I know that,” Nita said. “I’m used to asking my mom for permission for stuff. I don’t think this’ll be a problem.” She looked up at them. “But what is the price?”
Tom shook his head. “You’ll find out as you go along.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Okay. I’ll get started as soon as I get home.”
And then, to Nita’s complete shock, she broke down and began to cry.
Tom and Carl sat quietly and let her, while Dairine sat there looking stricken. After a moment Tom got up and got Nita a tissue, and Nita blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that keeps happening all of a sudden.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Tom said. “It’s normal. And so is not giving up.”
She sniffed once or twice more and then nodded.
“Go do what you have to,” Tom said.
She and Dairine got up. “And Nita,” Carl said.
On her way to the front door, she looked back at him.
“Be careful,” Carl said. “There are occupational hazards to being a god.”
9: Sunday Afternoon and Evening
Nita and Dairine walked home, and Nita went up to her room and settled in to work. The moment she sat down at her desk, she saw that her manual already had several new sections in it, subsequent to the usual one that dealt with worldgatings and other spatial and temporal dislocations.
The first new section had general information about the practice universes: their history, their locations relative to the hundreds of thousands of known alternate universes, their qualities.They’re playpens, Nita thought as she read. Places where the structure that holds science to matter, and wizardry to both of them, has some squish to it; where the hard corners on things aren’t so hard, so you can stretch your muscles and find out how to exploit the squish that exists elsewhere. There was no concrete data about how the practice universes had been established, but they were very old, having apparently been sealed off to prevent settlement at a time almost too ancient to be conceived. One of the Powers That Be, or Someone higher up, foresaw the need.
While it was useful that no one lived in those universes to get hurt by wizards twisting natural laws around, there seemed to be a downside as well. You couldn’t stay in them for long. The manual got emphatic about the need not to exceed the assigned duration of scheduled sessions—
Universes not permanently inhabited by intelligent life have only a limited toleration for the presence of sentients. The behavior of local physics within these universes can become skewed or deranged when overloaded by too many sentient-hours of use in a given period. In extreme cases such over-inhabition can cause an aschetic continuum to implode….
Boy, there’s a welcome I won’t overstay, Nita thought, though not without a moment’s curiosity about what it was like inside a universe when it imploded. Something to get Dairine to investigate, maybe. Nita managed just a flicker of a grim smile at the thought.
Access scheduling is arranged through manual functions from the originating universe. Payment for the gating is determined by duration spent in the aschesocontinuum and deducted from the practitioner at the end of each session. Access is through local main-line gating facilities of complexity level XI or better; the gating type is a diazo-Riemannian timeslide, which, regardless of duration spent in the aschetic continuum, returns practitioners to the originating universe an average of +.10 planetary rotations along duration axis, variation +/- .005 rotation.
Nita did the conversion from the decimal tim
ings, raised her eyebrows. So you go in, then come out more or less two hours after you went … no matter how much time you spend there.
Could get tiring.
Ask me if I care!
There were many other details. Nita spent the rest of an hour or so absorbing them, then passed on to what seemed the most important part of the work in front of her: constructing the matrix to hold the spells she’d be using in the practice universes. The matrix would hold a selection of wizardries ready for use until she could get back to where the manual could be depended on for fast use.
The thought of a place where you couldn’t depend on the manual made Nita twitch a little. But that was where she had to go to do her mother any good, so she got over it and started considering the structure of the matrix. It was complex; it had to be in order to hold whole ready-to-run spells apart from one another, essentially in stasis, so that they couldn’t get tangled. The matrix structure that the manual suggested was straightforward enough to build, but fiddly—like putting chain mail together, ring by ring and rivet by rivet, each ring going through three others.
Nita cleared her desk and laid the manual out where she could keep her eye on the guide diagram it provided. Then she put out her hands and pronounced in the Speech the eighty-one syllables of a single basic matrix structure.
Once complete, the sentence took physical form, drifting like a glowing thread into her hands. She said the sentence again, and again, until she had nine of the strands. Then Nita wound them together and knotted the ends of the ninefold strand together with a wizard’s knot, creating a single sealed loop, which she scaled down in size. The next loop of nine strands was laced through that one, as were the next two. When it was finished, there would be three-to-the-sixth links in the matrix: seven hundred twenty-nine of them….