The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (30 page)

Hang on! She’s coming!

Together they hung on, though the storm of molten fire tore at them and tried to blow them around like leaves in a wind. Pralaya was feeding her strength, and Nita was glad of it. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold on to the kernel, but abruptly the fire around her was disturbed by another presence, a swirl of color that wasn’t so blinding, and the crooked little claw fingers hidden under the bends of Kkirl’s wings caught hold of Nita’s hands and the kernel, both at once.

An eyeblink later Nita was seeing the kernel as Kkirl saw it: complex and dangerous, yes, but not so much so as never to be mastered. Kkirl had been studying this problem for a long time, and she was ready. Those delicate little claws sank deep into the force-crackling knot of that world’s heart and froze the kernel’s processes in place for just the few seconds it would take to enact what Kkirl had been planning all this while.

Nita could see and feel how she was doing it, how Kkirl was reshaping the way the kernel called for the planet’s upper mantle and lower crust to interact—thinning out some of the more massive areas near the core, redistributing the mass so that the planet’s continental plates would move more slowly and evenly and resist the uneven tidal effects of the planet’s moons. Nita watched Kkirl manipulate the kernel like a Rubik’s Cube, setting in place the changes she wanted one after another, but not actually triggering them until they were all set up. Nita realized this technique was what she would need for her mom—using the kernel inside her mother to reshape the malignant cells and render them harmless, or maybe even helpful.
I’m so glad I came!

Kkirl, better get on with it!
Nita heard Pralaya thinking. He was running out of power to feed them.

Ready in a moment,
Kkirl said.

I don’t think we have that long!
Nita said. She was still hanging on to the kernel along with Kkirl, but just barely; the thing was jerking and shaking in their hands and claws like a live thing, trying to tear free, resisting what was being done to it—

Now!

Kkirl turned loose the changes she had set into the kernel. A roar, a rumble all around as the old structures and energy flows tried to hang on just a little longer, as the new ones, shaky at first, started to assert themselves—then a terrible sudden shudder of that world, from the heart out, as everything started to fall into place.
Let’s get out of here!
Pralaya shouted from behind them, and Nita let go of the kernel and started to struggle back up through the fire toward the surface, as the planet began restructuring itself.

Getting up and out of the fiery turmoil seemed to take infinitely longer than getting down into it. The smoky fog of molten stone gradually lightened, then abruptly vanished as Nita broke up out of the ice and back into normal physical form, and her normal life-support sphere reasserted itself around her. She collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. The other wizards erupted out of the ice around her, each doing the same, as the reaction to the wizardry hit. Underneath them the ground shook, and the air was full of the groans, shrieks, and crashing noises of ice shattering for miles in every direction. Nita saw Kkirl stagger to her long thin feet, fling her wings up, and shout into the snowy air one long sentence in the Speech.

The ground reared up, and Nita found herself sliding sideways down a slab of ice. Everything went dark, then bright again, the recall spell grabbing Nita and all the others and dumping them unceremoniously back onto the floor of the playroom. There they all slumped, lay, sloshed, or rolled gently from side to side for some moments, until one by one they started to recover.

Kkirl was a bright, collapsed bundle of feathers, rising and falling gently in the middle with her breathing, but not moving otherwise. Nita managed to get to her feet, and went shakily over to put an arm around Kkirl. “You all right?”

A faint squeaking noise was all that came from inside the feathers, as Nita was joined by Pralaya, who put out a paw to one of Kkirl’s splayed-out wings. “Thanks,” Nita said to him. “I’d have dropped the kernel back there if you hadn’t helped.”

“At least you caught it before it fell straight down into the core,” Pralaya said.

Kkirl’s head came up on its long neck out of the huddle of bright feathers; she was blinking.

“I don’t know if that went the way it was supposed to,” Nita said, uncertain.

“Oh, it did! It did!” Kkirl said, staggering to her feet again. She shook her feathers out and back into place, looking unsteady but cheerful. “It’s going to take some hours for the planet’s crust to quiet down; it was never going to start looking better right away. But the intervention worked; that world’s saved at last! Thank you, cousins,” she said, turning to all the others. “Thank you all!”

There was a gradually rising hubbub of voices as the group who’d gone out with Kkirl recovered from what they’d done, and other wizards still in the playroom came over to congratulate them. Nita, standing next to Pralaya, said to him, “I should head home … They’re gonna be wondering what happened to me.”

“Don’t be a stranger, cousin,” Pralaya said. “We haven’t had much time to deal with
your
problem today, after all.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Nita said. “I’ll be back here tomorrow— I want to try out what I saw Kkirl do. I think it may work for my mom.”

“Then maybe I’ll see you,” Pralaya said, patting her with one of the middle paws. “Go well! And I hope you find her better.”

Nita nodded, shook out her transit-circle spell, and took herself home.

***

After what she’d been through, her bedroom looked almost too ordinary and normal to be believed—so much so that tired and hungry as Nita was, and though she plopped right down onto her bed, she couldn’t go to sleep. She tried briefly to get in touch with Kit, but found that he was asleep. Then, out of curiosity, Nita paged through the manual to see what the listings on the other wizards looked like. They were all interesting enough—she had a brief chuckle over the concept of Pralaya having had thirty-six pups with his mate, nine at a time. But even after twenty minutes or so of reading, she didn’t feel sleepy.

Finally, still feeling listless and jangly, Nita got up again and went downstairs to get something to drink. As she turned the corner into the dining room, she was unnerved to find her dad sitting in a dining-room chair, in the dark, with the phone’s receiver in his hand. It was beeping disconsolately to itself, in the manner of a phone that should have been hung up a long time before.

Nita swallowed hard with sudden fear, took the receiver away from him, and hung it up. “Daddy, what is it?”

He looked up at her, as scared as she was. “It was the hospital.” Nita’s stomach instantly tied itself into a knot. “Mom had some more seizures after we left,” her father said.

“Oh no,” Nita said. Whatever small feelings of success she had had after the long evening’s work had run out of her in about a second, leaving her completely terrified again. “Is she okay?”

“They got them to stop, yeah,” her father said. “But it took longer this time. Honey, she’s got to have that surgery as soon as she can.”

“It’s still going to be Saturday?”

“Yes. But is that going to be soon enough?”

Nita didn’t know what to say. Her father looked up at her. “How was… whatever you were doing?”

“It was pretty good,” Nita said, but now she wasn’t so sure. “I need some more practice before Saturday, but I think I’m going to be able to help.”

Her father didn’t answer, just rubbed his face with both hands.
He doesn’t believe me,
Nita thought.
But he doesn’t want to say so.
“Daddy,” she said, “you should go to bed. If Mom sees you’re tired out, it’s gonna get her worried.”

He sighed, looked up at her. “You really do remind me of her sometimes,” he said. “You two nag in exactly the same way.”

“Thanks loads,” Nita said. “Go on, Dad. Get some sleep. We’ll go see her tomorrow afternoon.”

He nodded, got up, went off to bed.
But he won’t sleep,
Nita thought.

And for a long time, neither did she.

Nita more or less sleepwalked through school the next day. She got spoken to several times for not paying attention. All she could really think about during school was seeing her mom in the hospital that afternoon, and then getting back into the practice universes and following up on what she’d seen Kkirl do with the kernel the day before.

She looked for Kit during the day but didn’t see him, and there was no sign of him at the school gates when she started for home, and no note for her in the manual.
Maybe he’s at one of the other gates
, Nita thought, and retraced her steps to the gates on the north side of the school. But he wasn’t there, either. She’d tried shooting him a thought earlier, without response; now she tried it again. Still nothing…

For a change of pace, and on the off chance she might find Kit coming back using that route, Nita went home from school the back way. It was a slightly longer route than her usual one, but it gave her a little time to mull over what she’d seen and felt Kkirl doing with the kernel.
But there’s no way to tell if Mom’s kernel is going to behave like that one did,
Nita thought. She really hoped it wouldn’t. Without Pralaya’s help and Kkirl’s, she wouldn’t have been able to hold the kernel for long—and Kkirl had had lots of time to plan what she was going to do.
Help is going to be
a
real good idea on this,
she thought.
Glad Kit’s gonna be there.

Yet she remembered Kkirl’s initial reluctance to let the other wizards help with her own intervention, and Nita could understand where it had come from.
Suppose the one helping you messes up somehow?
It would be awful being in a situation where you might wind up blaming someone you knew well for, for—

She wouldn’t even think the words.
But it would be better if there was no one to blame but yourself if something went wrong. Or no one you were close to…

Nita paused at the corner, gazing across the street while waiting for traffic to pass.
Pralaya wanted to help,
Nita thought. And Pralaya’s entry in the manual, when she’d taken a look at it, had been impressive. He was old as wizards went—a part-time local Advisory on his planet, with a lot of experience.
But still
… It was hard to let
anybody
else get involved in this, whether she knew them or not. There was so much riding on it, so much that could go wrong.

She let out a long breath. There was no more traffic, and across the street from her was the church where Nita’s mom went on Sundays.

Nita paused, then crossed the street. When she and Dairine had been much younger, they had routinely been dragged here. Then Nita’s mother had had some kind of change of heart and had stopped insisting the two of them go. “I don’t think it’s right to try to make you believe what I believe just because
I
believe it,” she’d said. “When you’re old enough, I want you to make up your own minds.” And so church had become a matter of choice in the years that followed.

Sometimes Nita didn’t go to church with her mom, and sometimes, for reasons she found hard to describe to herself, she did—possibly it was exactly
because
her mother had made it optional. The things she heard in church sometimes seemed exactly right and true to Nita, and sometimes seemed so incredibly stupid and wrong that she was tempted to snicker, except that she knew better (and also had no desire for her mother, when they got home, to pull her head off and beat her around the shoulders with it for being so rude). But by and large the issue of belief or disbelief in what went on in church didn’t seem as important to Nita as the issue of just sometimes being there with her mom. It was simply part of the way they were with each other.

As a result of this Nita didn’t go to the church by herself all that often. Now, though, as she came down the sidewalk in front of it, she stopped and stood there. …
Why not?
Nita thought.
After all, it’s the One.
No wizard worthy of the name could fail to acknowledge his or her most basic relationship with the uttermost source of wizardry, the Power most central to the Powers, Their ancient source.

She went in. She was half terrified that she would run into somebody her family knew or that, indeed, she would run into anybody at all. But there was no one there this time of the afternoon.

The place was fairly modern: high white ceiling, stained glass with a modern-art look to it, simple statues, and an altar that was little more than a table. Generally Nita didn’t pay much attention to the statues and pictures. She knew they were all just symbols of something bigger, as imperfect as matter and perception were liable to make such things. But today, as she found a pew near the back and slipped into it, everything seemed, somehow, to be looking at her.

Nita pulled down the kneeler and knelt, folding her hands on the back of the pew in front of her. Then after a moment, she put her head down against her hands.

Please,
please,
don’t let my mother die. I’ll do whatever it takes.
Whatever!

But if You
do
let her die—

She stopped herself. Threatening the One was fairly stupid, not to mention useless, and (possibly worst of all) rude. Yet her fear was slopping back and forth into anger, about once every five minutes, it seemed. Nita couldn’t remember a time when her emotions had seemed so totally out of her control. She tried to get command of herself now. It was hard.

Just… please. Don’t let her die. If You don’t, I’ll do… whatever has to be done. I don’t care what it is. I’m on Your side, remember? I haven’t done so badly before. I
can do this for her. Let what I’m going to do work… let me help her. Help me help her.

I haven’t asked You for much, ever! Just give me this one thing. I’ll do whatever it takes if You just let me
save her, help me save her,
let her live!

The cry from her heart left her trembling with her emotion. But the silence around her went on, went deep, continued. No answers were forthcoming.