DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

Nothing.But it wasn t the  asleepkind of nothing: Kit was missing.

 Message him,  she said to the manual.

The page blanked itself,then showed Nita the words,  Subject is out of ambit.

That  error  message she now recognized. Kit andPonch were off world-walking somewhere, out of this universe proper. Nita sighed.I ll have to catch him in the morning , she thought.But bed first 

She slept hard and deep, and for a change woke up not in the dark, but just after dawn. Istill wish spring would hurryup, Nita thought as she swung her feet out of bed and rubbed her eyes.This winter seems to be lasting forever . But at the same time, it was hard to dislike a morning like this, when there was what looked like six inches of new snow outside, and it was Saturday as well. The snow was wet, clinging delicately to the bare branches of the trees out in the backyard, and everything was very still, the sky a pure, clean blue behind the white branches.Who knows  Maybe I ll sneak out there, make a snowball or two, and stick them inDairine s bed. Give her about three seconds of thinking I ve had second thoughts about her, her bed, and Pluto .

Nita threw last night s sweatshirt and jeans on and went downstairs to the kitchen, manual in hand. Her father was there, making his own coffee for a change. He looked at Nita with some surprise when she came in.  You re up early for a Saturday,  he said.

 Not that early. I got some sleep for a change.

 You don t look like it.

Nita yawned and stretched.  I don t feel like it, either,  she said.

 Just a long week at school, maybe 

 I don t know.  She went over to put the kettle on for herself. She ached all over, as if she d had a particularly bad gym class, and she just felt generally weary.As if I was a long, long way away last night .

But if that really was Darryl, then I was only two towns away, in his mind.

Or possibly in an alternate universe he created, one a whole lot further away than that

 How are you coming with what you were working on yesterday morning   Nita s dad said. Any progress 

 Yeah,  Nita said,  but I don t understand it.  She opened a cupboard and tried to decide what kind of tea she wanted. She finally decided on mint, and got the tea box down, fishing around in it for the right tea bag.

 Youralien, or the progress 

 Both. And it looks like it wasn t even an alien, if I m right. It s a little kid who lives over inBaldwin .

Her father looked surprised at that as he went to get his coat from the rack by the door. Another wizard 

 Supposedly not yet,  Nita said.  Assuming this is the person who I think it is. I have to check with Kit.  But that brought up another odd problem for Nita to consider. From her own experience, Nita knew that being on Ordeal imparted a certain tentative feel to your wizardry, even when your power levels were at their highest. EvenDairine s use of wizardry, when she was on Ordeal, had exhibited that tentative quality. But it was completely missing in Darryl.That s something else to ask torn and Carl about .

Her dad put on his coat.  Well, that sounds encouraging, anyhow,  he said. He came over, gave her a hug and a kiss.  Leave me a note if you have to go anywhere. IsDairine going to be getting involved in this 

 Jeez, I hope not,  Nita said.  It s confusing enough already.

 Okay,  her dad said.  She has some school project she s supposed to be working on this weekend. If you want to just have a look at one point or another and make sure she s staying on track 

This was, in fact, thelast thing Nita wanted, but she nodded.  I will.

 Thanks, baby girl. See you later.

Nita wasn t sure, as her father went out, whether to bristle or smile.When s the last time he called me  baby girl   she thought. It was one of those nicknames that Nita had complained about forcefully for years when she was younger, until her dad finally stopped using it.And now I m not even sure I mind anymore , she thought. Iwonder if somehow he s trying to remind himself of how things were when Mom was still here .

After a moment she laughed at herself for thinking such  shrinkly  thoughts.Millmanis affecting me , Nita thought.

She made a face then, as the kettle came to a boil.Oh god Millmanand the card tricks. But how long can it take to learn a card trick  I ll do it later. I have other things to think about right now .

Nita glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It read 7:48. A little early, but then Kit did tend to get up early on the weekends.Kit  she said.

For a moment there was no response.

Hnnnhhh

I m not sure, but I think I may have found your guy.

A pause.When he answered, he still didn t sound incredibly awake.When 

Last night. The time s hard to judge, but I think it would ve been around two-thirty.

There was a much longer pause that made Nita think Kit might have gone back to sleep. Finally he said,Itcouldn t have been . Iwas with Darryl around then .

Nita blinked at that.You sure she said.

Yeah, I m sure. He sounded cranky.Neets,look, I m completely wrecked, and I had trouble with my folks last night. I want to go back to sleep. Call me back, okay 

Uh, sure, but

The connection between them didn t so much break as dissolve in a returning wave of sleep. Nita stared at the tea bag in her hand, bemused.  Well,  she said.

She made her tea and sat down at the dining room table with the mug, the manual, and a banana. Nita didn t go straight into the manual, partly because she wasn t yet clear on where she should start looking. She was still trying to sort out some things about her experience last night.

There had just been something about Darryl. Nita kept coming back to the impact she d felt when he d finally looked right at her. It wasn t power, not strength, in the usual sense. She was well down the cup of tea before she found the word she was looking for.

Innocence

Talk about the innocence of childhood tended to pass right over Nita these days. Her own childhoodwas behind her rather to her relief, because of all the beating up. And her memory ofDairine s childhood was too fresh; anyone putting that concept and the wordinnocence together in the same sentence would simply have made Nita laugh. Her sister s behavior aside, Nita knew perfectly well that most kids were no innocents.

But then most of the talk you heard on the subject came from adults, most of whom were entirely too hung up on the concept of childhood as this pure, untroubled thing that Nita wasn t sure had ever existed. Plainly, like the counselor thatDairine had been complaining about, too few of them reallyremembered what itwas like to be seven, or nine, or twelve.

Nita could understand that perfectly. Large parts of childhood hurt, and adults did with that remembered pain exactly what kids did when they could: Let whatever good memories they had bury it. Oh, the moments of delight, of pure joy, were there, all right, but what adults seemingly couldn t bear was the idea that theirwhole childhoods hadn t been that way, that the trouble and sorrow of their adult lives, the result of the Lone Power s meddling in the worlds, wasn t something they d always had to deal with, right from the start. So despite whatever kids tried to tell them, adults just kept on reinventing childhood as something that was supposed to be happy all the time, a paradise lost in the past.

Yet in very small children, there was something that Nita had to admit she d seen  even, occasionally, inDairine . Last night, in her dream, Nita had looked at

Darryl and had seen the same thing in his eyes, unalloyed a sense of living in the morning of the world, a time or place either uncorrupted or redeemed; unafraid, and with no reason to be afraid; a person grounded immovably in the sense that the world worked, was just fine, would always be fine

Poor kid, Nita thought.Wait till reality hits him . Yet, remembering the look in those fearless eyes, she found herself having an unaccustomed second thought. Reality might hit him, might, indeed, have hit him hard already butit might be what shattered.

Boy,would I like to be there to seethat.

Nita began to peel the banana.But all that aside, Kit said hewas with Darryl when I was , Nita thought.So if he s right, then who was Iwith 

She took a bite of the banana and considered.And that s not the only thing about this that s strange. It s Kit who s been looking for him. If this really is Darryl, then why have I been seeing him, too 

But now she thought she had an answer to that.The filter , Nita thought.We ve both been holding the world at arm s length  trying to get it to leave us alone . She shook her head.And making ourselves more alone while we do it.But the wizardry knew what it was doing better than we did. One wizard alone found another one 

Nita sat there for a moment, staring at the banana without really seeing it.Okay. But that brings up another question. If this is Darryl, then how come my visits to his world are so different from Kit s 

She had another bite of the banana, reflecting.Unless it s just that I didn t knowthat the person trying to contact me was autistic. I didn t have any preconceived ideas about what the world would look like to him. So maybe I got something that was more like Darryl s own ideas about himself just translated into my own images: the uncomplicated, scared-kid stuff. Whereas Kit s been getting stuff that looks more like it belongs to someone really troubled  maybe because he s known from the beginning that Darryl s autistic .

To Nita this sounded so commonsense that it seemed very likely to be true.So now if I could just figure out how Darryl can be with both me and Kit at the same time .

Maybe he was time-slipping somehow  Nita thought. But that would have takena wizardry , and a considerable amount of power to fuel it. And the only thing Nita was now certain about, as far as her dream went, was that Darryl hadn t actually beendoing any wizardry at the time.

No. Something else was going on

Nita finished the banana, got up to dump the skin in the kitchen garbage can, and came back to her tea and the manual again.What other ways are there for someone to be in two places at one time 

She had to laugh at herself a little as she reached for the manual.It would be a great trick if you had a busy schedule , Nita thought.Or you could be in school taking a test while you were also lying on the beach with a good book, working on your tan .

She started paging through the manual again, idly at first, then with more concentration. After about fifteen minutes of this, as the sun got brighter on the snow outside and the dining room filled with its light, Nita realized that she still wasn t sure exactly how to find what she needed. She went to the back of the manual, to the page that handled search functions.

 I need all the references that have to do with being in two places at one time,  she said.

The page cleared itself, and new words appeared. Apparition or co-location 

There it was, yetanother word Nita hadn t ever heard of before today.  Apparition first,  she said.

 See highlighted section,  the page said, and her manual was abruptly about an inch thicker.

 Oh, no,  Nita said.  I think I need another banana.

It took three more. Nita was grateful thatDairine seemed to be sleeping late, as she was the big banana fan in the house and would not have been pleased that Nita had made such inroads into the supply. The three bananas gave Nita time to discover, mostly by skimming the material as fast as she could, that there were an unnerving number of ways to appear in two places at once, if you felt like spending the energy. But that was the factor that kept everyone from doing it all the time. The universe had a basic bias against the same thing being in more than one place at once this singularity of location being one of the ways that matter defined itself to begin with and if you wanted to bend that bias in your favor, you would be heavily penalized, in terms of having to use a huge amount of effort to build a very complex spell.

It doesn t matter, Nita thought as she turned over the last twenty pages of the section, doing little more than glancing at them.I m sure he wasn t doinga wizardry last night, so none of this stuff applies . She turned back to the search page again.  Give me the co-location stuff now,  she said, not seeing any great point in it, but unwilling to stop until she d read everything that could have a bearing on the problem.

The manual reduced itself to something more like its normal size, and laid itself open at a much shorter section. Nita glanced at the title page and table of contents for the section, momentarily confused. It was a classifications section on the Orders of Being.

Huh she thought. Nita had been through this section every now and then. The time she d been most interested in it was just after passing her Ordeal, when she was trying to sort out some of the finer details of how wizardry was organized. That version of the information had been thinner than this one, a sort of beginner s guide; this one was considerably more detailed.

Nita turned the pages, glancing at the master classification listing of created beings in the universe. The listing didn t go by species, but by type. Good old-fashioned mortals naturally had all the other types outnumbered, but there were still a surprising number of modified mortals and other conditionals. Thencame wizards, of which there were hundreds of different types, even within single species. Among her own species, with which Nita would have thought she was moderately familiar by now, there were more classes of wizard than she d realized.

The standard classes probationary, post-Ordeal, full wizard, expert wizard, Advisory Senior, Regional, Planetary, Sector those she d known about for long enough. But there were also splinter classifications, some categories that didn t quite fit among either mortal wizards or the Powers That Be. The Transcendent Pig, of course, Nita knew. She smiled slightly as she turned past his page.The picture doesn t do him justice. Maybe it s old . But there were many other classifications in this section, too, some of them most obscure.Principalities, thrones, dominations  Thrones  Who wants to be a chair  But maybe I m missing something here. Who knows  Maybe it s fun to be furniture .

Nita turned the page over.Pillars What is this  First furniture, now architecture 

Abdah/ Pillars  Thiscategory of created being is independent of wizard status but still included because of the sharing of various functions and qualities across species and eschatological barriers. The sobriquet  Pillars  refers to the immense supportive strength inherent in these creatures wherever they appear. The physical and spiritual structure of the Universe and its contents is strengthened against the assaults of evil by the Pillars  presence, and weakened by their loss. While they occasionally may also be wizards,abdals display no unusual aptitude for the Art: Their value lies elsewhere. Their status comes from direct endowment by the One; their power is derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality. Some have unusual abilities of perception reaching into other universes, while still seeing the entire physical world as mirage. Some have sufficient control over their physical natures to change their bodies at will, without recourse to normal wizardry, or to travel great distances, or to appear in two places at the same time