Kit was having trouble believing what he was hearing. The Lone Powerwas frustrated . He saw the unbelievable saw the Power that invented death start hammering withIts fists on the upright coffin of ice. Come out! the Lone One cried, and thunder cracked in response, high up in the wind-torn air. The snow blew around again, hiding nearly everything but that relentless, furious, stymied darkness. Come out and let s finish it!Come out !
The thunder ofIts voice started to drown out even the thunder up in the turbulent atmosphere. How long this went on Kit wasn t sure, but finallyIt fell silent, looking once more at the small, unmoving shape in the ice.
It doesn t matter, the Lone One said. I can wait. I have all the time in all the worlds. Sooner or later, you ll drop this ploy and try another that s less effective.
Sooner or later, in life or after, you ll be forced to face me and when you finally do, you ll wish your soul had never been created. For that day, I ll wait as long as it takes.
It turned and walked away into the blue-white snow. Kit lost sight ofIt within seconds, and a few seconds after that, by a lightening of the spirit that was impossible to mistake, Kit knew that It had left this space. Next to him,Ponch was shivering with a combination of nervousness and amusement.
Wow, Kit said.
Yes. Let s get him out of there!Ponch said.
Absolutely.
Kit dismantled thedissociator , and he andPonch hurried over to the block of ice. But the closer Kit got to it, the stranger things started to seem. That weariness that Kit had been feeling, to a certain extent, since he got here, now got stronger with every step closer to Darryl.
He rubbed his eyes, staggered over to the block, put a hand on it. It was frozen methane, but the force field protected him from its touch. Darryl, Kit said. Daistiho, guy. I can t believe you heldIt off like that.Nice going.
But Darryl didn t so much as twitch an eyelid. And as Kit bent over the block, trying to figure out how to get rid of it, or at least how to rouse Darryl, he found himself having more and more trouble believing in any of this. It started to seem as if none of it was real: not the cold, not the wind, not the single small, still, cold shape standing there rigid in the ice, expressionless, unmoving,unseeing . And as for the concept of the Lone Power banging on the block of ice, not only frustrated but powerless that couldn t have happened, either.
Darryl, Kit said. Come on, buddy, this is no place for our kind of people.
But the feeling began to grow in Kit that this wasn t reallyDarryl, that he wasn t here which was somethingPonch had said the last time. Now, though, Kit could feel for himself whatPonch had meant. Darryl s presence here was illusory. None of this was real.What a relief, because this is all just too weird
Kit straightened up, passed his hand over his eyes. He was incredibly tired, and there was nothing he could do here. Outside the force field, the noise was scaling up again. Somehow it didn t seem to matter, though.
Kit.
What
We have to go.
Go where
Kit! We have to go home. The wizardry s failing. Come on!
What
Ponchturned, leaped at him,knocked him over. For a moment the two of them fell through darkness. Kit flailed for balance, found none, cried out
And came down,wham , into something cold and wet. At first Kit panicked, because with a terrible suddenness his mind became clear again about two things: that the force field had failed, and that he was lying inthe snow, which meant that in about another five seconds he would be dead. But then Kit realized that this snow was so much warmer and wetter than the snow where he d just been that it might as well have been steaming; and the silence surrounding them was so complete, compared to where they hadbeen, that Kit s ears rang with it.
Ponchwas lying on top of him, licking his face in apology and fear.Are you all right Boss! I had to get us out of there. Are you all right Kit !
Oh, wow, Kit whispered. Okay, yeah, I m okay. He pushed himself up on his elbows with some difficulty, dislodgingPonch in the process. Kit was lying in his driveway, in approximately three inches of snow, and as he looked over at the corner streetlight, he saw that more snow was falling, in big flakes, through still and silent air.
He turned around to look at his house and saw that all the lights were off except for the one in his parents bedroom. Oh,no , he said. What time is it
Kit looked at his watch. It was two-thirty in the morning.
Oh, god, the time flow in there wasn t what I was expecting. I m going to get it now, he muttered as he staggered to his feet. I m completely wrecked. And they re going to kill me.
Not if I can help it,Ponch said.
Buddy, Kit said, I don t think even the Powers That Be could prevent the massacre at this point. Let s go in and get it over with.
Together they made their way up the driveway.
Elucidations
Nita looked up from her reading and glanced out the window into the darkness to see that snow was just beginning to fall. She sat still in the pool of light at her desk, for the first time in hours really paying attention to the silence that had been settling down outside that particular muffling effect, possibly something to do with the low clouds, that always seemed to accompany a heavy snowfall from the very first.
Nita sighed at the sight of the big flakes coming gently down. The first really decent snowfall of the winter, and her mother wasn t here to see it. First snowfalls had always been an event for her mom. She would bundle herself up and go out and play in the snow like a crazy thing until she was worse soaked than either Nita orDairine ever let themselves get. Over the past few years, Nita had heard her mom complain more than once to her dad that the greenhouse effect was screwing up the winter weather. We just don t getsnow like we used to, Harry, she would say. We have to do something, or future generations won t know what it s like to get slush in their socks.
Nita held still a moment longer, listening to the quiet of the house around her. Her dad andDairine were both in bed, and outside the snow kept on falling. After a few moments, Nita sighed again and pushed her manual away. For hours now she had been up to her eyes in more research on the contextual variations of the Speech in nounparadeclensions , and judicial imperatives, and the history and use of the EnactiveRecension . It was all fascinating, and she had no idea how she was going to stomp all this information into her head soon enough to be of any use. At any rate, it was late, and she wasn t going to get any more of it into her head tonight.
Nita got up and her bedroom went away, fading around her intoa darkness through which, bizarrely, snow continued to fall.
Standing there in jeans and one of her dad s big sweatshirts, Nita looked all around her in shock, and then realized what had happened. Her hand went to her throat, where the necklace of the lucid-dreaming wizardry rested.I forgot about this. I turned it on, and then I fell asleep while I was reading , she thought.I m dreaming already. Isn t that wild
Nita glanced around at the endless dark stretching away from her on all sides. Off in the distance she saw light coming from somewhere to fall on the dark surface on which she stood. The source of the light was it-self invisible, but in its beam she could see more snow gently falling.
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 not so much unimportant, but simply unreal, unrelated to anything that mattered, as if a TV show about some subject that bored you was blathering away in the background, while you were too busy with other things to turn it off.
She shivered a little, recognizing the kinship of this filter with the one she d been seeing life through lately.Can something like this get stuck in place Nita wondered. It wasn t an idea she much liked. And suddenly it made that don t-care, don t-feel-like-it attitude seem not so much likea self -indulgence as a danger.What kind of wizard doesn t care she thought.What kind of wizard
The sound of the voices began to dwindle, just as Nita thought she was about to understand what they were saying. She breathed out in frustration, and kept on 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 doThey ; well met on the common journey!
The clown just sat there with its head turned away, rocking. Nita started to get annoyed.Okay , she thoughtLet stry 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 didn t come to rest exactly on Nita, but looked a little way over her shoulder, and the voice that replied, not from the clown itself but from the darkness all around, was absolutely flat.
I amOne , it said.
Chills ran up and down Nita s back at the sound of a phrase unnervingly close to the one reputed to have caused the Big Bang, and much else. Uh, I doubt that very much, Nita said. At least not the way I understand the term.
Thenyou areOne .
Nita s expression was rueful. Not by a long shot, she said. I m just one more mortal and a wizard.
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 being frightening, now the shadows outside the light were filled with potential and promise, and the light now seemed painful and arid, an expression of everything stuck and hopeless a scorching-bright loneliness that didn t even have a word for itself. The clown looked at her helplessly, and though it seemed frozen in place, except for the rocking, the painted tear was real. All the darkness shivered with its pain.
What s a mortal it said.
Nita actually winced. That was a question the answer to which she d had entirely too much of lately. Yet Nita also could sense that out here, pinned down in the unforgiving light,was someone or something as vulnerable as a butterfly with glass wings. An angry or thoughtless answer could shatter it.
She thought about her response for a moment. We re the impermanent ones, she finally said. The world may last, but we don t.
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 watched the first clown scream. I heard about the impermanence thing, said the second clown. The Silence told me. What went wrong
Nita was finding all of this unusually weird, even for a dream.The Silence What s that supposed to mean She 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. One ofthem s simple. Somebody invented 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.It sounds almost tired , Nita thought.Weird. But of much more interest to her, though the second clown wouldn t look directly at her, either, was the sudden live look in its eyes a flash of recognition, a scowl of rejection.
I know, the second clown said. Its voice, his voice, was fighting with that robotic quality, the life in it struggling to get out.
Just for a moment it succeeded. Nita got a quick flicker-rush of images and sounds: dawns and sunsets, objects shaped roughly like the clown all rushing hither and yon on unfathomable errands, shouting at one another about incomprehensible things. All kinds of pain were tangled up with the rush and roar of perception, but strangest of all, it was pain that the one who experienced it actually welcomed. For the clown, that pain was a lifeline, something it clung to as away to temporarily mask out sensations it couldn t bear, and as something that could sometimes pierce through the muffling blanket ofnonfeeling that kept draping itself over the clown s body and mind. Nita could feel that the clown hoped there might be more to life than hurting but it was also willing to suffer the hurt if that meant staying alive to get its own job done.
