All of it? Kit said. Wow. Didn’t think you were gonna go that far. The Lone Power’s gonna be real surprised when It finds out you let It off the hook.
His tone was dry, but not angry… as far as she could tell. Please, Nita said. I’d like to be let off it, too.
There was a pause at Kit’s end. Where’ve you been? I’ve got stuff to show you.
It’s, uh, it’s been busy. I—
Look, Kit said, save it for later. Wait for me after school, okay?
Okay.
She felt him turn away in mind to become engrossed in the test paper that had just been put down in front of him. Nita turned her attention back to what Mr. Neary was doing at the blackboard… and was astonished to find that she could. Just that brief contact had suddenly lifted from her mind a kind of grayness that had been hanging over it since before her mom went into the hospital. And now, she thought, even if Dairine can’t help, maybe Kit can.
But could he? And what even makes me think that after the pain in the butt I’ve been, he’s going to want anything to do with what I’m planning? She desperately wanted to believe that he would want something to do with it, but she’d been pretty good at being wrong about things lately. And even if I asked him, would he think I was just asking because—
“Nita?”
Her head jerked up again. This time there was some subdued laughter from the kids around her. “Uh,” she said, “sorry. What was the question?”
“Gettysburg,” said Mr. Neary. “Got a date?”
“Yeah, but he’ll have to stand on a box to reach,” said a voice in the back of the room, just loud enough for Nita to hear, and for the kids around her to snicker at.
“July first through July third, eighteen sixty-three,” Nita said, and blushed again, but more in annoyance this time. There were a number of guys in her classes who thought it weird or funny that Nita hung around so constantly with Kit rather than playing the field, and Ricky Chan was the tallest and handsomest of this particular crowd. His dark good looks annoyed her almost as much as his attitude, and Nita couldn’t think which satisfied her more: the fact that everyone around her knew she thought he was intellectually challenged—which drove Ricky nuts—or that if he ever really annoyed her, she could at any moment grab him by his expensive black leather jacket and dump it, and him, into one of several capacious pockets of otherspace that numerous alien species were presently using as a garbage dump.
Except that wizards don’t do that kind of thing.
But boy, wouldn’t it be fun to do it just once!
Mr. Neary turned his attention elsewhere, and Nita went on taking notes. That class, and the rest of the day, passed without further event; and when the last bell rang at three-thirty and she went out into the parking lot, Nita saw Kit loitering by the chain-link fence near the main gate.
Nita headed for the gate, ignoring the voices behind her, even the loudest one: “Hey, Miss WAH-Neeta, where’d you send away for those legs?”
“Yeah, nice butt, nice face. Shame about the giant bulging brain!”
The usual laughter from behind ensued. Nita began to regret her belief that changing out of jeans was going to make the slightest difference to her life at school.
Do you want to, or should I?
Want to what? Nita asked silently. We’re supposed to be above this kind of thing.
Kit’s expression, as she caught up with him, was neutral. There are species who would love these guys, he said. As a condiment.
She made a face as they walked up to the corner together, turning out of sight and out of range of the guys behind them. “Yeah,” she said, “I was thinking about that. Among other things. Such as that I’m a complete idiot.”
Kit waved the sentiment away.
“No,” Nita said, “I mean it. You’re not supposed to make this easier for me.”
“Oh,” Kit said. “Okay, suffer away.”
She glared at him. Then when Kit favored her with an expression of idiot expectancy, like someone waiting to see a really good pratfall, she managed to produce a smile—yet another one that to her surprise didn’t feel somehow illegal. “You won’t even let me do that right,” Nita said.
“My sister won’t let me do it, either,” Kit said. “I don’t see why you should get to.” He lowered his voice. “Now, what the heck have you been doing that you’re sound asleep at eight o’clock?”
All the things she’d been intending to say when this subject came up now went out of her head. “My mother has a brain tumor,” Nita said.
Kit stopped short and stared at her in the most complete shock she’d ever seen on his face. “What?”
Nita told him, fighting to keep her face from crumpling toward tears as she did so. She’d meant to keep walking while she told him, but she found it impossible. Just getting the words out seemed to be drowning her in a replay of her own original shock, leaving Nita no power to do anything else but stand there as frozen as Kit did, telling him all the things she desperately didn’t want to but also had no choice.
Kit, for his part, just stood there staring at Nita until she ran down. “Oh, my God,” he said at last in a strangled voice.
“Hey, lookit, he’s not wasting any time,” said a voice from down the street behind them.
Other voices laughed. “Yeah, where’s the box for him to stand on?” said one. The laughter increased.
Kit frowned. The laughter suddenly broke off in what sounded like a number of simultaneous coughing fits.
“Kit!” Nita said.
Kit didn’t stop frowning, just took Nita discreetly by the elbow and started to walk. “If they’re gonna sneak out at lunchtime and smoke,” he said, “it’s not all my fault if it starts catching up with them. Come on—” They started walking again. “Neets, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did,” she said, confused.
“I mean, when you found out!”
“Uh—”
“God, you weren’t kidding; you are an idiot! Why didn’t you call me? Even if you were mad at me!”
“I wasn’t mad at you! I mean—”
“Then, why didn’t you—”
“I didn’t want to call you just because I needed you!”
Then Nita stopped again. Earlier that had seemed to make some kind of sense. Now it seemed inexpressibly stupid.
“You’re right,” she said then. “I’ve been having a complete brain failure. Sorry,I am sorry—”
“No,” Kit said. They turned the next corner, into Kit’s street, and he shook his head, looking more furious than before. “They didn’t tell me. They didn’t even tell me. I’m gonna—”
“They? Who?”
“Tom and Carl. I’m gonna—”
“Gonna what?” Nita said, exasperated. “They’re our Seniors. They couldn’t tell you anything. It’s private stuff; you know that has to be kept confidential. They can’t even deal with it at all unless it affects a wizardry. They didn’t tell me what you were doing, either. So forget it.”
Kit was silent as they walked down the street. Finally he said, “What’re we going to do?”
We.
Nita held out her arm to show him the charm bracelet.
Kit looked at it closely and immediately saw what was under the semblance. “So that’s what I heard you making. How’d you get it done so fast?”
Fear, Nita thought. “You need it for the practice universes,” she said, “and I don’t have much time. They operate tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest. That’s the best time to do the wizardry, when she’s not awake—”
“You’re going to need someone to backstop you,” Kit said.
That thought had been on Nita’s mind. Strange, though, how she now felt some resistance to the idea. “Look, if I can just—”
“Neets.” Kit stopped, looked at her. “This is your mom. You can’t take chances. You’re gonna have to spend almost all your free time in those other universes, and you’re gonna be wrecked. And I bet Tom and Carl told Dairi
ne to butt out, didn’t they?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Well?”
“Yeah, of course. Yeah.” What was I going to do, tell him I don’t want his help? What’s the matter with me? “Thanks.”
Suddenly Nita felt more tired than she’d been even in school. “Look, we’re going to the hospital to see her as soon as I get home. You want to come with?”
Kit looked stricken. “I can’t today. We have to go clothes shopping; can you believe it? Dad says we absolutely have to. But you’ll go tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah, we go every day. Dad goes a couple of times.”
“So I’ll go with you then. It’ll give me time to read up on what you’ve been doing.” They stopped outside Kit’s house. “As long as it’s okay with you,” he said suddenly.
“Huh? Yeah,” Nita said.
“Okay. You going to go straight off and practice when you get back?”
“Yeah, I have to.”
“All right. Just call me when you get back in, okay? Don’t forget.” He nudged her shoulder with his.
“Yeah. I won’t.”
“Then tell your mom I’ll see her tomorrow.”
And Kit headed up the driveway and vanished into the house.
Nita let out a long breath of something that was not precisely relief, and went home.
Her dad was hanging up the phone in the kitchen. He looked unhappy. “Daddy,” Nita said, “are you okay?”
Dairine came around the corner as her dad got his jacket off one of the dining-room chairs. “Yes,” he said, “but I could be happier. That was Dr. Kashiwabara. She says they’re going to have to reschedule Mom’s surgery for Friday or Saturday. One of the specialists they need—the doctor who does the imaging—had some kind of emergency and had to fly to Los Angeles.” He sighed. “He’ll be back in a day, they said, but I’m not wild about the idea of your mother being operated on by someone who might be jetlagged.”
Nita threw a look at Dairine, who just nodded once. There were ways to add so much energy to another human being that they might have a whole solar system’s worth of lag and not be affected. This was one of the simplest wizardries, and not beyond Dairine’s abilities right now, no matter what else might be going on. “I think it’ll be okay, Daddy,” Nita said, dumping her schoolbooks on the table. “Let’s go see Mom.”
***
They drove to the hospital and found her mother, surrounded by a large pile of paperbacks, talking brightly to the lady in the next bed. “The only good thing about this,” her mom said as they pulled the curtain around her bed for some privacy, “is that I’m really getting caught up on my reading.”
Nita was about to throw a small silence-circle around them all, until she noticed that Dairine was walking quietly around the bed, doing it already. She made a mental note to herself to let Dairine do everything wizardly that she was capable of right now. As her dad pulled a chair over to the bed, Dr. Kashiwabara stuck her head in past the curtain and greeted them all, and Nita’s dad immediately went out into the hall with her.
Nita sat down in the chair, looking idly at the books as she took her mom’s hand. Many of them were of a type of techno-thriller that her mother didn’t usually read. “Your tastes changing, Mom?”
“No, honey.” Her mother’s smile was a little rueful. “I just read the parts with all the shooting and blowing things up, and then I imagine doing that to the tumor—when I’m not hitting it with lightning bolts and setting it on fire. Guided imagery’s a good tool to use to help deal with this, they say. Whether it actually makes it go away or not, it’s a way to constructively use the tension. One of the therapists has been coaching me in how to do it. It gives me something to do when my eyes give out.”
Nita nodded, feeling her mom’s pulse as Dairine sat down on the other side of the bed. There was a faint resonance to that other pulse she’d felt and heard in the practice universe, not merely a sound or sensation but a direct sensation of the inner life—under threat, but still strong. “So what have you been doing?” her mother said.
“A lot.” Nita explained to her mother as quickly and simply as she could about the practice universes, and the work she was doing there so that she could learn how to rewrite the rules inside the mini-universe that was her mom’s body, and then talk the cancer cells out of what they were doing. Her mother nodded as she listened.
“In a way it sounds like what the therapist’s been showing me how to do,” said Nita’s mom. “Though your version might be more effective. Okay, honey, I don’t see that it can hurt. You go ahead. But you do realize that they’re still going to have to operate.”
“Yeah, I know. I thought about trying to take the tumor out, but it makes more sense to let the doctors do it. They’ve had more practice.”
Her mother gave her a slightly cockeyed look “Well, I think it’s considerate of you to let them do something.” She reached over to the other side of the bed and ruffled Dairine’s hair. “Are you helping with this, sweetie?”
“No,” Dairine said, and abruptly got up and went out through the curtain.
Her mother looked after Dairine with concern. “Oh no. What did I say?”
“Um,” Nita said. “Mom, she can’t help.” Softly she explained the problem. “She’s really upset; she feels useless. And helpless.”
“That I can sympathize with,” Nita’s mother said, squirming a little in the bed. “Poor baby.” She sighed. “I guess it’s tougher to deal with than running around from planet to planet, having fun.”
Nita found this idea more than usually exasperating. “Uh, excuse me. ‘Fun’?” She laughed, and couldn’t care that it sounded a little annoyed. “Mom, I’ve nearly had a ton of bricks dropped on me by a white hole, I’ve nearly been eaten by a great white shark, and the Lone Power’s nuked me, dropped a small star on me, and tried to have me ripped apart by perytons. And Dairine may have had even more ‘fun’ than I have, not that I’d admit it to her. Wizardry has its moments, but it’s not just fun. So gimme a break!”
Nita’s mother looked at her thoughtfully. “If I haven’t been taking it seriously enough, I’m sorry. It’s still kind of hard to get used to. But, honey, if wizardry is so scary for you, so painful—why do you keep on doing it?”
Nita shook her head, not knowing where to begin. The rush you got from talking the universe out of acting one way and into acting another, with only the Speech and your intention for tools; to know what song the whales sing, and to help them sing it; to stand in the sky and look down on the world where you worked, and to be able to make a difference to it, and to know that you did—even in the Speech there were no words for that. And helping others do the same thing, particularly when spelling with a partner— “It doesn’t always hurt,” Nita said. “There’s so much about it that’s terrific. Remember when we took you to the Moon?”
Her mother’s gaze went soft and remote with memory. “Yes,” she said. Her glance went back to Nita then. “You know, sweetie, sometimes I wake up and think I just dreamed that. Then Dairine comes in with that computer walking behind her…”
Nita smiled. “Yeah. There’s a lot more like the Moon where that came from, Mom. And here, too. Life on Earth isn’t a finished thing. New kinds of life keep turning up all the time. We have to be here for them, to help them get settled in.”
“New kinds of life,” her mother murmured.
“It just keeps on finding a way,” Nita said.
And so does death, said a small cold voice in the back of her mind.
Nita gulped. “The hurt—I guess it balances out, even though you have to work at seeing it that way. But, Mom, a lot of energy goes into making wizards what they are. We have a responsibility to life, to What made it possible for us to be wizards in the first place. If you just take that power and use it while everything’s going okay, and then, afterward, decide you don’t like the hard part, and just dump it all and walk off—” She shook her head. “Things die faster if you do that. And it does
happen. ‘Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart.’ But sometimes… sometimes it’s real hard to stay willing.”
“Like now,” her mother said.
“I am not going to just let this thing kill you without doing something to stop it,” Nita said to her mother in the Speech, in which it is, if not impossible, at least most unwise to lie.
Her mother shivered. “I heard that. Good trick when it’s not in a language I know.”
“But you do know it,” Nita said. “Everything knows it. On some level, even your cancer knows it. And I’m gonna do everything I can to talk it out of what it’s doing to you.” Nita tried hard to sound certain of what she was doing.
Her mother looked at her. “That’s why you’re looking so tired.”
“Uh, yeah. You have to spend serious time in those other universes, time you don’t spend here. It kind of wears you out.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t ask you if you’ve been doing your homework,” her mother said.
Nita swallowed. “Mom, right now I’m doing the only homework that matters.”
Her mother was silent. Then, softly, she said, “Honey, what if—what you’re planning—”
Doesn’t work? Nita couldn’t bear to hear it, wouldn’t have it said. “Mom, we won’t know if that’s a problem till I’ve done it. Meanwhile, let the doctors do their thing. If nothing else—”
“It might buy you some time?”
Nita’s smile was slightly lopsided with pain. “I’ve bought too much time as it is,” she said. “It’s how I spend it that counts now.”
Just then one of the nurses put her head in the door. “Mrs. Callahan, your medication…”
“Laura, can it wait half an hour? I still haven’t seen my husband and my other daughter, and I’d like to be able to speak English to them, for a little while at least.”
The nurse looked at her watch. “I’ll check. I think that’ll be all right.” She went off.
“Is this the stuff to prevent the seizures?”
Her mother winced. “It’s not just that now, honey. My eyes are bothering me, and the headaches are getting bad. They try to keep me from reading, but if I can’t at least do that, I’ll go completely nuts just lying here. Do me a favor? Go find Dairine and let me spend some time with her before Daddy comes back.”