A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (13 page)

Nita nodded. Over at the school building, the end-of-period bell rang. “Let me know when you’re going to go looking for him again,” Nita said. “At least I can keep the time free for you if you do need me for something.”

“Right. And let me know what you find out about your mystery messages.” The two of them started to walk back toward the school doors. “Be funny if it’s some rogue intelligence trying to figure out whether it’s okay to invade the Earth. Whatever you do, don’t give them our address.”

“The way things are going in my life at the moment,” Nita said, “it’s more likely to be some alien kid making crank calls, or trying to order a pizza.” And she actually smiled slightly.

Kit knocked his fist against hers, and went to his next class.

***

Nita walked home from school that afternoon with the “robot” problem still very much occupying her mind. She found Dairine sitting outside on the back steps, staring idly down the driveway.

“Dad didn’t come back early?” Nita said.

Dairine shook her head as Nita got out her house key. “What’re you doing out here?” Nita said.

Her sister gave her a look. “Didn’t seem to be much point in going into the house when you’ve left a live teleport spell going.”

Nita opened the door. “Dair,” she said, “maybe I’m cruel, but I’m not a sadist. Besides, why waste energy? The spell expired at the end of your school day.”

They went in. Nita hung up her parka and went to the fridge to find something to eat. Dairine stood there looking out the back door as she took off her own coat. “Close the door. You’re going to let all the heat out,” Nita said. “So how did the meeting with the principal go?”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “I made an agreement with him and Dad to stop cutting, if that’s what you’re asking about,” she said, closing the door. She went through the kitchen toward the living room.

“That’s not exactly what I was asking about,” Nita said. “What about Dad? How did he handle it?”

“He was okay,” Dairine said from the living room.

There was something about her sister’s tone of voice that made Nita forget about food for the moment. She went into the living room after her. “Was he upset?” Nita said.

“No,” Dairine said.

“He should have been,” Nita said.

“If things were normal, he probably would have been. But nothing
is
normal.”

Dairine sat down very abruptly on a hassock in front of one of the easy chairs. “Neets,” she said, so softly that Nita could barely hear her, “school sucks. It sucks so completely that even the Speech barely has words for it. It doesn’t feel like any of it
matters
anymore. And everyone who looks at me is thinking either ‘Aww, poor little kid’ or ‘She’s just trying to get sympathy by looking so sad; why doesn’t she just get over it?’ If I can’t actually hear them thinking it, I can see it in their faces. Every day of this is like Chinese water torture. The seconds just fall on your head one after another, and every one is just like the last one. The minutes just crawl by, and nothing gets better. Everything just keeps hurting. And you have to sit there, in the middle of all this meaningless junk, and put up with it, and act like it matters. Like
anything
matters.”

Nita found herself thinking of the weary, repetitive feeling she’d sensed in the robot when she’d been confronted with it. Moment following moment, all of them the same… There were similarities. She sighed, shook her head sadly. “Dair—”

“I’ve thought of leaving,” Dairine said, barely above a whisper. “Running away.”

Nita flushed first cold, then hot. “It would
kill
Dad,” she said. “You know it would.”

Dairine was quiet for a few moments. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t done it. But it doesn’t make it any easier, Neets. And just when I could actually use some help dealing with … with
stuff,
the woman they’ve got assigned as my counselor is a complete waste of time. She’s some girl just out of college who’s more nervous about the kids at school than they are about her. What kind of good can
she
do anybody? Least of all me. She doesn’t even have a clear memory of what it’s like to be a kid anymore. I
know
she doesn’t: That part of her brain might just as well have a big sign on it saying, ‘Your message here.’ She’s completely relieved not to remember what it was like to be one of us poor, powerless creatures.” Dairine’s expression went fierce with contempt. “Just having to look at her makes my brain hurt.”

“I wonder if they could give you Millman, instead,” Nita said. “He’s good.”

“I don’t care,” Dairine said. “I’ll put up with her, with school, with whatever. For Dad’s sake. And I will not let this break me. But I am going to hate every single water-torture-drop second of it, and I may just let you know about that every now and then.”

She looked up at Nita in defiance.

“Come here and gimme a hug,” Nita said.

Dairine gave her a look. “You’re just saying that because Mom would say it.”

“I’m saying it,” Nita said, furious, “because right now
I
need a hug.”

The nature of the look Dairine was giving Nita changed. She got up off the hassock, went over to Nita, and hugged her hard. Nita hung on to Dairine, not saying anything for a few moments, then let go of her and went back into the kitchen.

She assembled a sandwich, hardly paying attention to what went into it, put it on a plate, and started to take it up to her room. “By the way,” Nita said as she went, and Dairine went after her, “I think your machine buddies have been trying to reach you.”

“Huh?”

“Got a call from one of them this morning. At least I think that’s what it was.”

Nita went into her room and sat down at the desk. Dairine followed her in and sat on the bed. “I haven’t been expecting anything.”

“Then what was this?” In her mind, Nita showed Dairine the image of the clown, going around and around. “And this?” She showed her the image of the robot.

Dairine looked at the two images carefully, especially the second one, and shook her head. “Not for me, Neets,” she said. “Neither of those are any of my guys. These are organic in origin.”

“How can you be sure?”

“The silicon life-forms and the machine intelligences have a specific flavor,” Dairine said. “A couple different flavors, actually, but they’re similar. Like fudge ripple and rocky road.”

Nita gave her sister an amused look. Only Dairine would think of classifying other life-forms’ telepathic signatures in terms of ice cream. “Whatever got in touch with you is organic, all right,” Dairine said. “I’m not sure about the distance, though. But it feels really alone.” She sat silent for a moment, pondering. “Might be stuck in some kind of pinched-off space. It’s trying to reach out, anyway.”

“Trying to get out, maybe?” Nita said.

Dairine shook her head again. “No idea,” she said. She got up, stretched a little listlessly. “Anyway, Neets, that call wasn’t for me,” Dairine said. “It’s all yours.”

“Great,” Nita said. “All I have to do now is figure out what it wants.”

Dairine wasn’t even listening anymore, though. She was already wandering out the door. Nita watched her go, and let out one more of many quiet, worried breaths. Wandering anywhere wasn’t her sister’s style. Dairine, when she went somewhere, went full tilt, focused like a laser.

Until a month ago,
Nita thought.
Until the world changed.

She gulped, feeling the tears rise.
No,
Nita thought.
I am not going to do that right now. I am going to sit here with the manual, have a look at the tutorials in the Speech, and see if there’s something obvious I’m missing. Which is entirely possible, because there’s always more of the Speech to learn. But when whoever this is calls again, this time I’m going to understand it.

“Oh,” Dairine said. “By the way…”

Nita looked up to see Dairine standing in the doorway again. “Sorry about this morning,” Dairine said.

“Uh, okay,” Nita said.

“Really, Neets. Very sorry. I was being incredibly stupid.”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said, unwilling to agree too forcefully with this sentiment, no matter how true it was. “Thanks.”

“So would you kindly get off your butt and
bring my bed back from Pluto?
”

Nita smiled slightly and reached for her manual.

***

That night, when the call came again, while she was asleep, she was ready for it.

Nita had spent the better part of four rather frustrating hours buried in her manual after her talk with Dairine, and had been forced to realize that no matter how she might cram, she wasn’t going to be able to make a big difference in her vocabulary in the Speech in a single night, or for that matter, a single month. Like any other serious language study, it was going to take time. In the short term, it made more sense to concentrate on being able to make as much sense as possible of the next dream, when it came. That meant being in control of the dream, instead of just wandering around in it.

What people had come in recent years to call lucid dreaming had always been a useful tool for wizards. In some ways the mind was at its most flexible when unconscious, and therefore not insistently trying to make sense of everything. Human logic wasn’t the only kind, and it could get in the way. The dream-state’s ready acceptance of just about everything was often handy for understanding and getting comfortable with the thought processes of a species you didn’t know well.

The spell to induce lucid dreaming was easy to construct—hardly more than an instruction in the Speech to one’s own brain to handle some of its chemistry, but only some, as if it were still awake. It took Nita about ten minutes and about the same effort as running up and down stairs a few times to knit the appropriate words of the Speech into a loose, glowing chain about a foot and a half long. This she fastened around her throat, necklace style, though the actual fastening took her several minutes: it was hard to do the wizard’s knot with both hands out of sight behind her neck.
Oh, the heck with this,
Nita finally thought, giving up. She pulled the loose ends of the spell out in front where she could see them, did the “knot” up that way to clasp the “necklace” shut, and got into bed.

After that, it was just a matter of getting to sleep.

This took longer than usual when she was expecting something to happen. But it was becoming so normal for it to take a long time, lately, that Nita was beginning to just accept this. Gradually, enough of the tension and anticipation slipped away to let the fatigue of the day do its job on Nita, dropping her over the edge of consciousness into sleep.

It was the nature of the spell not to activate until dreaming actually began. How long she actually spent in the preparatory space between falling asleep and dreaming, Nita had no idea. But the activation seemed to come very quickly.

She was standing in the dark again, in a place where light fell in one spot from some source she couldn’t see. The darkness was not entirely quiet; from outside it came a faint sound, blurred and confused, like traffic noise outside a closed window, or voices in another room with the door closed—a hum, a mutter that both sounded and felt remote. Alone in that faintly humming darkness, under the single source of light, lay a big slab or dais of some kind—and there was some kind of figure on it.

Slowly, Nita made her way through the darkness toward the patch of light. The feeling of this dream was entirely different from that of the previous ones. She could still taste metal in the air, somehow, but it now seemed to her less mechanical, less impersonal a flavor.
Maybe I’m just getting used to it,
Nita thought, as she passed through the immense darkness pressing down all around, heading slowly for the light.

It
was
a dais there, under the white radiance that seemed to fall on it from nowhere; and the figure kneeling there, in the center of the stone, glittered blindingly silver in the light. It was a knight, kneeling there on the pure white stone, completely covered from head to foot in plate armor, and holding before him, with its point resting on the stone, a sword in a metal scabbard that gleamed even more brightly than the armor did.

Nita tried to remember in what book she had seen this image, a long time ago. Yet at the same time she also thought of the robot she’d seen the previous night, for the knight’s helmet was the same in front—a perfectly smooth, blank surface, with just a single dark opening crossing it, for the eyes to look out through.

Quietly she stepped around in front of—him? There was no telling.

“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”

There was a long silence.

“Greetings also,” the answer came back. Though it was a human-sounding voice, it didn’t come from inside the armor. It was omnidirectional, and seemed to come out of nothing, the way the light did. And the armor did not move in the slightest, as Nita would have expected it to, at least a little, if there was someone inside it.

Nita was relieved. At least the spell was working insofar as it was making communication possible, or a lot more possible than it had been the night before. “Were you trying to talk to me last night?” Nita said.

“Many times,” the voice said.

“I couldn’t understand a lot of what you were saying to me then, but I think that may be fixed now,” Nita said. “What can I do for you?”

There was another long pause. “Nothing,” the voice said. “This is the vigil. There’s nothing to do but wait for the fight to begin again.”

“What fight?” Nita said.

“With the Enemy,” the knight said. “What else is there? Outside of the fighting, nothing exists but this.”

Nita glanced around her. There was no sign of anything else but the two of them in this whole place, which seemed to stretch away into a dark infinity “When will the fight start again?” she said.

“Soon.”

“What happens when you win?”

“There’s no winning this battle. But also no losing it, because for the Enemy, for the shadow that stalks this darkness, there’s no winning the fight, either.”

For the first time, the knight moved, lifting his head up into the light. There was no telling how she knew it, but Nita knew that inside the helmet, the knight was smiling. All the darkness sang with the force of his resolve, and with his amusement—a grim but good-natured cheerfulness that seemed very strange when taken together with what he’d just said.