The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (13 page)

“Yeah. Well, they have this—I mean, there’s a—” Then Dairine made a wry face at how ineffective English was for describing this kind of problem. She dropped into the Speech for a couple sentences’ worth of description of something that seemed to be happening to the gravity on Europa. Apparently the sea bottom far down under the surface ice was being catastrophically shifted in ways that were destroying some of the
hnlt
habitats.

After a moment, Nita nodded. “Nasty. So what did you do?”

Dairine looked glum. “I suggested they wait a little while and see what happens,” she said. “The Sun’s more active than usual right now, and the activity’s pushing Jupiter’s atmosphere around a lot harder than usual, even the densest parts down deep. That’s what’s causing the gravitational and magnetic anomalies. It’ll probably quiet down by itself when the sunspot cycle starts to taper off.”

“Makes sense. Good call.”

“But Neets, what’s the
point
? I couldn’t do anything. I
couldn’t!”
Dairine waved her arms in frustration. “Only a few months ago I could—I could do everything up to and including pushing planets around! But that’s over. And now, because I
can’t
do that kind of thing, a lot of the
hnlt
are going to die before the Sun quiets down. All I can do is help them relocate their habitats elsewhere on Europa. But those other places are going to be just as vulnerable. No matter what I do, I’m not going to be able to save them all…”

Nita shook her head; not that she didn’t feel sorry for her sister. “Dari, it’s just the way things go. You started at a higher-than-usual power level? You’re having a bigger-than-usual crash.”

“Why don’t you try finding some
more
awful way of putting that?” Dairine muttered. “Take your time.”

Nita sighed. “You’ll be finding your next few years’ working power level in a while. But as for the way you were last month, three months ago…” Nita sighed at the memory of the way
she’d
been when she got started. “Entropy’s running. The energy runs out of everything, even us. We have to learn not to blow it all over the landscape, that’s all.”

Dairine was silent for a few moments. Finally she leaned against the wall and nodded. “I guess I’ll just have to keep working on it. Where’s Mom?”

“Late,” Nita said. “She’s probably still looking for Dad’s paperwork. She said he started burying it all in those old carnation boxes in the back again.”

“Uh-oh. And after she got him the new filing cabinets.” Dairine snickered. “I bet he got yelled at.”

They heard someone pulling into the driveway. Nita cocked an ear at her bedroom window, which was right above the driveway, and could tell from the sound that it was her dad’s car. Her mom had walked to town. Nita glanced at the clock. It was a little before five, the time their dad usually shut the store on Saturdays. “There they are. Bet he closed up early to get her to stop giving him grief.”

The back door opened, closed again. Nita got up, yawning; even after the sandwich, dinner was beginning to impinge on her mind, and her stomach was making sounds that though they could have passed for a polite greeting on Rirhath B, had more to do with a serious food deficit here. “Mom say anything to you about what she was going to make tonight? Maybe we can get a head start.”

“I don’t remember,” Dairine said as they headed through the living room. This answer was no surprise; Dairine’s normal response to food was to eat it first and ask questions later.

“Huh,” Nita said. “Dad—”

She stopped. Her father stood in the kitchen, looking down at the counter by the stove as if he expected to find something there, but the counter was bare, and her father’s expression was odd. “You forget something, Daddy?” Nita said.

“No,” he said. And then Nita saw his face working not to show what it felt, his hands not so much resting on the edge of the counter as holding it, holding on to it, and heard his voice, which pushed its way out through a throat tight with fear. “No—”

“Where’s Mom?” Dairine said.

Nita’s stomach instantly tied itself into a horrible knot. “Is she all right?” she said.

“She’s—” her father said. And then immediately after that, “No. Oh, honey—”

Dairine pushed her way up beside Nita, her face suddenly as pale as her father’s. “Daddy,
where’s Mom?!
”

“She’s in the hospital.” He turned to them, but he didn’t let go of the counter, still hanging on to it. As his eyes met Nita’s, the fear behind them hit her so hard that she almost staggered. “She’s very sick, they think—”

He stopped, not because he didn’t know what to say, but because he refused to say it, to think it—it was impossible. Nonetheless Nita heard it, as her dad heard it, repeating over and over in his head:

They think she might die.

In a place where directions and distances made no sense, Kit and Ponch stood in the endless, soundless dark, the leash spell hanging loose between them and glowing with silent power.

So here we are. You feel okay?

I feel fine.

So what should I make?

Anything,
Ponch said, as he had before.

Kit thought about that, and discovered that he couldn’t decide what to do first.
Typical,
he thought.
Presented with the possibility to create anything you can think of, your mind goes blank.

He tried to take a breath and found that his breathing now seemed to be working properly. “Am I getting used to this place?” Kit said softly in the Speech, and found that he could actually hear himself.

No answer; but then if one
had
come, he’d have jumped out of his skin.

“Okay,” he said then. “Lights…”

And suddenly Kit found himself standing unsupported in the midst of interstellar glory. “Wow,” he said softly. He and Ponch were apparently somewhere in the fringes of a gigantic globular cluster, all the nearby darkness blazing with stars of every possible color—and the farther darkness was peppered with not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of galaxies, little globes and ovals and spirals everywhere, a megacluster of the kind that astronomers were sure existed but had never seen.

It’s bright,
Ponch said.

“No argument there,” said Kit, as he wondered why producing all this had been so easy. He was used to wizardry taking a good deal more effort. Is
this even wizardry?
he wondered. It had needed no construction of spells, no careful and laborious plugging in of words and variables, and no sudden drain of energy after the wizardry was fueled from your own power and turned loose. That last factor was what made Kit mistrust this process. He was used to the concept that every wizardry had its price, and one way or another, you paid—and the concept’s corollary, that any wizardry that doesn’t charge you a decent admission fee usually isn’t worth anything.

All the same, it would be smart to play around in here a little and see what it
was
worth. Kit also thought he could guess why Carl wanted him to try to bring back some small physical artifact. It would confirm whether or not this space was simply some kind of illusion or mirage, amusing but otherwise not terribly useful.

“Okay,” he sad, “let’s take this from the top. A sun, first…”

And one appeared, though he hadn’t even asked for it in the Speech: a deep yellow-orange star, a vast, roiling, heaving landscape of blinding flame, directly below his feet. For a second Kit flinched at the roar and turmoil of burning gas beneath him, all dancing with prominences and loops and arches of radiant plasma—inexhaustible fountains of fire half a million miles high, leaping away from the star’s seething limb and pouring themselves back into the surface again in slow-motion grace.
In vacuum you wouldn’t normally get sound, I guess,
Kit thought. But he seemed to be in some kind of peculiar rapport with this space that let him sense things he ordinarily wouldn’t, and the tearing basso wind-roar of superheated ions blasting upward past him was strangely satisfying. Ponch, sitting beside him, squinted down at the ravening brilliance but didn’t comment.

“Not bad, huh?” Kit sad.

Ponch yawned. “The squirrels are more fun.”

“You’ve got a one-track mind,” Kit said. “Okay, now we need a planet…”

And the star receded into the distance, reducing itself to proper sunlike size. Below Kit was his planet, all covered in cloud, muttering softly to itself as it rotated, already coasting away from them along its orbit Kit thought he could actually feel the heat pouring off it, a feverish sensation.
A lot of heat trapped under those clouds,
he thought.
It’s a ‘supergreenhouse’, like Venus…
There was no telling how big this world was, without anything to give him a frame of reference.
Have to go down there and take a closer look,
Kit thought—

—and suddenly he was standing on a rocking, shaking, stony surface. All around him rocks tumbled down low cracked cliffs, and a wind as brutal as the solar one but laden with a stinging drizzle of acid instead of fire shrieked past him. In a more normal reality, Kit knew this terrible supersonic fog would have flayed the unprotected flesh off his bones in seconds, but here he seemed immune.
Because I imagined it?

Kit grinned and waved one hand in front of him airily. “Lose the acid,” he said, “lose the wind, lose the clouds.” The instant he spoke, the air went clear, fell silent, and the dull, overarching, brassy canopy faded away to dark clarity. The stars showed through again, and the high, hot, golden sun. But sound vanished as well, and it started to get very cold.

“No, no; atmosphere is okay!” Kit said. “Something I can breathe. Landscape?”

Green rolling grassland spread itself away in every direction under a blue, blue sky. Ponch leaped up in delight. “Squirrels!”

“No squirrels,” Kit said. “Don’t overdo them or you’ll get bored.” He rubbed his hands together in delight. “You know what this is, Ponch? It’s magic-crayon country.”

“Crayons? Where?” Ponch had conceived a weird fondness for the taste of crayons when Kit was younger, and had always gone out of his way to steal and eat them.

“Not that way,” Kit said, turning around and gazing all about him at the total wilderness. “But if I thought of an elephant with three hairs in its tail here—
Uh-oh.
”

Ponch began barking deafeningly. The elephant, large and purple-gray, as in the original illustration from that old children’s book, glanced around in surprise, then looked over at Ponch and said, a little scornfully, “Do you have a problem?”

“Sorry,” Kit said. “Uh, can I do something for you?”

“Trees are generally better for eating purposes than grass,” the elephant said. “A little more variation in the landscape would be nice. And so would company.”

Kit thought about that. A second later the grassland looked much more like African veldt, with a scattering of trees and an impressive mountain range in the distance, and another elephant stood next to the first one. They looked each other up and down, twined their trunks together, and walked off into the long grass, swinging their three-haired tails as they went.

Kit paused then, wondering whether they were a boy and a girl, and then wondering whether it mattered.
Maybe it’s better not to get too hung up on minor details right now,
he thought.

He glanced down at Ponch. “Want to try another one?”

“You sure you don’t want to think again about the squirrels?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Kit folded his arms, thinking. He took a step forward, opened his mouth to speak—

—and found he didn’t have to do even that. The two of them were standing in a waste littered with reddish rocks; an odd springy green mosslike growth was scattered here and there around them. The strangely foreshortened landscape ran up to a horizon hazed in red-violet dust, where low mountains reared up jagged against an amethystine sky; and so did an outcropping of delicate towers, apparently built of green glass or metal, gleaming faintly in the setting of a small, remote-seeming, pinky-white marble of a sun.

“
Yes,
” Kit said softly. It was Mars, but not the Mars of the real world, which nowadays, as he’d seen for himself, was unfortunately short on cities. This was the romantic Mars of stories written a hundred years ago, where fierce eight-legged thoats ran wild across dead sea bottoms, and displaced, sword-swinging warriors from Earth ran around after very, very scantily clad Martian princesses.

Ponch glanced around, looking for something.

“What?” Kit said.

“No trees.”

“You can hold it in till we get home. Come on…”

He took another step forward, thinking. One step and he and Ponch were in the darkness; another, and they were in what looked like New York City but wasn’t, because New York City was not under a huge glass dome, floating through space.

“Aha,” Ponch said, immediately heading toward a fire hydrant.

“Uh-uh,” Kit said. Another few steps and they were in darkness; another step after that, in a landscape all veiled in blowing white, whiteness crunching underfoot, and up against an indigo sky, great crackling curtains of aurora, green and blue and occasionally pinkish red, hissing in the ferociously cold air. Something shuffled past in the blowing snow, some yards away, paused to swing its massive head around toward Kit, looking at him out of little dark eyes: a polar bear. But a polar bear the size of a mammoth….

Ponch jumped and strained at the leash, barking. “Oh, come on; let him live,” said Kit, and he took another step, into the dark. Reluctantly, Ponch followed.

Kit was getting the rhythm of it now. A few steps in darkness, to do a few moments’ worth of thinking; and then one step out into light, into another landscape or vista or place. The last step, this time, and he and Ponch were wading up to Kit’s knees and Ponch’s neck in some kind of long, harsh-edged beach grass clothing a vista of endless dunes. Off to their right the sea rolled up to a long black beach in an endless muted roar. Kit looked up into the shadow of immense wings going over, ruffling his hair and making the grass hiss around him with their passing—one huge shape silhouetted against the twilight, then two, five, twenty, with wings that seemed to stretch across half the sky. They soared in echelon toward a horizon over which a long violet evening was descending, and beyond which the distant and delicate fire of a barred spiral galaxy, seen almost face on, was rising slowly behind a glittering haze of nearer, lesser stars.