The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (14 page)

He had the hang of it now.
Just let the mind run free,
let the images flow.

A few steps more and Kit came out into the middle of a vast plane of what looked like black marble, stretching away to infinity in all directions, and above it light glinted, reflected in the surface: not a sun or a moon, but an artificial light of some kind, almost like a spotlight. Far away, on a patterned place in the floor, small figures stood, some of them human, some not—some of them alien species that Kit had seen before in his travels, others of which he had never seen the like. One moved, then another. There was a pause, and then several moved at once, and one of them vanished. Kit started to go closer, until he saw the great shadowy shapes bending in all around him in the upward-towering dimness, to look more closely at the one piece that seemed to have escaped the game board.

Kit smiled slightly, waved at them, and took another step.

The darkness descended, then rose once more on some long, golden afternoon on a rise of land overlooking a lake. A pointy-towered palace lay all sun-gilded down by the water, banners flying from every sharp-peaked roof, and knights on horses clattered along a dusty road toward the castle gate, the late sun glittering sharp off lance heads and armor, the colors of the knights’ surcoats as vivid as enamel. Another step, quicker, as Kit started pushing the pace: out into the aquamarine light of some underwater place, white sand under his feet, lightwaver playing in broad patterns across it, and an odder, bluer light glimmering against the depths ahead of him as the rippling, ribbony creatures of some alien abyss came up out of shadows ten miles deep to peer curiously at the intruder.

Kit found he could do without the darkness between worlds. It was a new vista at every step now, and Ponch padded along beside him on the wizardly leash as calmly as any dog being taken for a walk in the park. Forests of massive trees, all drowned in shadow, bare sand stretching away to impossible distances and suggesting planets much larger than Earth, gleaming futuristic cityscapes covering entire continents; a step, and night under some world’s overarching greenish rings, a single voice chanting in the air, like a nightingale saluting them; a step, and the time before dawn in a vast waste of reedy waters reflecting the early peach-pink of the sky, everything still except for the flop of a fish turning, then putting its head up to look thoughtfully at them as they waded past; a step, and the blurring, whirling uncertainty of the vast space between an atom’s nucleus and the silvery fog of its innermost electron shell—

—and a step out into a place where, if he had taken another step, Kit would have fallen some thousands of feet straight down. There, on the top of a mountain imperially preeminent among its fellows, Kit paused, looking down through miles of blue-hazed air at lakes held between neighboring peaks like silent jewels under a rosette of suns—three small pinkish stars riding high in a morning sky—and all the snow on all the mountains from here to the horizon stained warm rose, so they all looked lit from within. Kit breathed that high chill air—which no one besides him and Ponch had ever breathed before, the air of a world made new that moment—and shook his head, smiling the smallest smile.

He thought of the darkness.
What a place to play. Neets has got to see this.

He stood there looking down on the immense vista for a few moments longer. “We should get back,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure about the time difference yet,” Kit said. “And I don’t want to worry Mom.”

Another thought niggling at the back of Kit’s mind was:
If this—state—is as easy to shape and reshape as it seems, it’d be real easy to get hooked on it.
He’d had a phase, years and years back, when he’d been hooked enough on a favorite arcade game to give himself blisters playing it and blow truly unreasonable amounts of his allowance money in the process. Now Kit remembered that time with embarrassment, thinking of all the hours he’d spent on something that now bored him, and he watched himself, in a casual way, for signs that something similar might happen again.

But I almost forgot.
Kit reached down and picked up something from the mossy rocks at his feet: a single flower, a little five-petaled thing like a white star. Kit slipped it into his pocket, and farther in, right down into his space-time claudication, sealing it there. Then he turned around to glance at Ponch—the top of the peak was so narrow that they hadn’t had room to stand side by side. “Ready?”

“Yes, because I don’t think I can hold it in much longer.”

Together they stepped straight out into the air, out into the darkness—

—and out into Kit’s backyard.

He looked around. Twilight was falling.
Guess I was right to be a little concerned about the time,
Kit thought.
Looks like it wasn’t running at the same rate in all those places. Something else to tell Tom…

He took the leash off Ponch, wound up the wizardry, and stuffed it into his pocket. Ponch immediately headed off toward the biggest of the sassafras trees to give it a good “watering.”

Kit went into the house. His mother and father were eating; his dad looked up at Kit, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Son, can’t you give us a hint on how long you’re going to be when you go out on one of these runs? Tom couldn’t tell me anything.”

“Sorry, Pop,” Kit said as he went past his dad, patting him on the shoulder. “I wasn’t sure myself. I didn’t think it’d be this long, though. Now I know what the problem is, I’ll watch it next time.”

“Okay. You want some macaroni and cheese?”

“In a minute.”

Kit headed up the stairs in a hurry; Ponch hadn’t been the only one with “holding it in” on his mind. Then he went into his room to check his pocket and was delighted to find the flower right where he’d put it. Kit placed it carefully on his desk, traced a line around it with his finger, and said the six words of a spell that would hold the contents aloof from the local progress of time for twenty-four hours.

This was not a cheap spell, and the pang of the energy drain the spell cost him went straight through him. Kit had to sit down in his desk chair and get his breath back. While he sat there, he reached farther into his pocket, touched his manual… and felt the fizz.

He grinned, pulled it out, paged to the back of it, and let out a long breath. The manual was showing a message that had come in only a few minutes before. I
can’t talk now. But can we talk later? I’ve got some apologizing to do.

All right,
Kit thought, relieved.
She’s seen sense at last, and I’m not gonna rub her nose in it. There’s too much serious neatness going on here.
“Reply,” he said to the manual. “Call me any time: I’m ready.”

And he ran down the stairs, exhilarated, to feed Ponch and have his own dinner.
Just wait till she sees! Whatever’s been going on with her, this is gonna take her mind off it.

And I can’t wait!

How she and Dairine got their dad into the dining room and sat him down, Nita couldn’t afterward remember, except for a flash of horror at the awful topsy-turviness of things. It was the parents who were supposed to be strong when the kids were scared. But now there were just the three of them, sitting there close, all of them equally scared together. Her father was hanging on to his control, and Nita held on to hers as much out of her own fear as out of sympathy; if she broke down, he might, too.

“She collapsed as she was leaving the store,” her father said, staring at the table. “I thought she was kneeling down to look at one of the plants in the window, you know how she would always fuss over the display not being just right. She just seemed to kneel down … and then she leaned against the doorsill. And she didn’t get up.”

“What was it?” Dairine cried. “What happened to her?”

“They’re not sure. She just passed out, and she wouldn’t wake up. The ambulance came, and we took her over to the county hospital. They did some physical tests, and then they X-rayed her chest and her head, and put her in the ICU…” Her father trailed off. Nita saw the frightened look in his eyes as he relived some memory that terrified him. “They said they’d be doing an MRI scan in an hour or so, and they’d call when they had some news.”

“I’m not waiting for that!” Dairine said. “We have to go to the hospital. Right now!” She turned as if intending to go get her jacket.

Her father caught hold of her. “
Not
right now, honey. The doctor told me that they need a few hours to get her stable. She’s okay, but they need to do some tests, and—”

“Dad,” Nita said.

He looked at her.

The terror in his eyes was awful, worse than what Nita was feeling. She wanted to grab him and hold him and pat his back and say, “It’s going to be all right.” But she had no idea whether it was going to be all right or not. Nita settled for grabbing him and holding him, and Dairine, too.

Then they began to wait.

***

The time until they went to the hospital passed in a kind of horrible disturbed silence, the disturbance coming from the house phone and their dad’s cellphone as they took turns ringing and beeping and ringing again. Every time, Nita’s father lunged for the handset or his phone in desperate hope that it was the hospital calling, only to see instantly from caller ID or the name on a text that it wasn’t. There were always people calling or texting who’d heard about Nita’s mom from someone they knew, or someone who’d seen the ambulance at the shop. Every time Nita’s dad had to explain to someone what had happened, he got more upset.

“Daddy,
stop answering them
!” Nita cried at one point

“They’re your mother’s friends!” was all he would say. “And mine. They have a right to know.”

“Then just let us do it!” Dairine said.

“No,” said their dad. “Things are hard enough for you two. You let me handle it.” The house phone rang again, and picked up the handset and answered it.

And it kept going that way for what seemed like all evening.

Nita was terrified. She wasn’t used to not knowing what was happening, not being able to
do
anything—and her shock was such that she wasn’t even able to make any kind of plan about what to do next. Dairine paced around the house like a caged creature, her face alternately frightened and furious, and she wouldn’t talk to anybody, not even Spot, who crouched mutely near one of the chairs in the living room and simply watched her go back and forth. Nita felt actively sorry for him but didn’t know what to do; Spot’s relationship was exclusively with Dairine, and she didn’t know how it would take to being comforted by someone else.

If
comforted
is even the word
, Nita thought,
because I wouldn’t know what to say or do to make it
comfortable … any more than I know what to say to Dairine. Or Dad.
That was the worst of it: not being able to do anything for either of them. Again and again, after her dad hung up one or another of the phones, that deadly quiet would descend, emphasizing the voice that was
not
there, all of a sudden. And then one phone or another would ring into the silence again, and Nita felt certain that if it rang once more, she’d scream.

But finally the hospital called.

Nita watched her father answer, his face naked in its changes, shifting every second between fear and uncertainty and greater fear. “Yes. This is he. Yes.” He paused, turning away from where Nita sat at the dining-room table.

“She is?”

Nita’s heart seized.

“Uh, good.”

She breathed again.
And I don’t even know why; I don’t even know what’s happening!

“Yes, sure we can. About half an hour. Yes. Thanks.”

He hung up, turned to Nita. Dairine was standing there by the living-room door, as intently as Nita had been. “She’s still in intensive care,” her dad said, “but they say she’s stable now, whatever that means. Let’s go.”

***

Shortly, Nita found herself walking into a setting entirely too familiar to her from too many TV shows: all the people in pastel uniforms with stethoscopes hanging around their necks and shoved into their breast pockets, all the white jackets, the metal beds and the stretcher-trolleys in the corridors, people going places in a hurry and doing important but inexplicable things. What the TV shows had never gotten across, and what now struck itself deeply into Nita’s mind, was the
smell
of the place. It wasn’t a bad smell. It was clean enough , but that cleanliness was cold, a chilly distancing scent of disinfectant and other chemicals. The faces of the people working there were kind, mostly, but a lot of them had a strange preoccupied quality, unlike the faces of the actors on the TV shows. These people weren’t acting.

Nita and Dairine stuck close to their father as they made their way through the hospital corridors and to the reception desk, where someone could tell them where to go. “They’ve moved her out of the general ICU, Mr. Callahan,” the lady at the desk said. “She’s over in Neurological Intensive Care now. If you go down that hall and turn right—”

Her father nodded and led them off down the hall. About three minutes’ walking brought them through swinging doors and up to a nurses’ station.

One of the nurses there, a large, cheerful-looking lady in a pink scrub-style uniform, with her brown hair pulled back tight in a bun, looked up as they approached. “Mr. Callahan?”

“Yes.”

“The doctor would like to see you—that’s Dr. Kashiwabara, she’s the senior neurologist on duty. If you can go into that room across the hall and wait for a few minutes, she’ll be with you shortly.”

They went into the plain little room—white walls, beige tile floor, noisy orange sofa that was also literally noisy, with plastic-covered cushions that wheezed when you sat down on them—and waited, in silence. Nita’s dad put an arm around her and Dairine, and Nita hoped she didn’t look as stiff with fear as she felt. I
can’t believe this,
she thought, bizarrely angry with herself.
I’m so scared, I can’t even think. I wasn’t this afraid when I thought a
shark
might eat me! And this isn’t even about
me.
It’s someone else—