A Wizard Alone

But still not there

, Ponch said.

Then where, exactly?

It’s hard to tell from here. I need to get a better scent. We should go in.

Kit nodded. No point in going all the way back to the doors, he said, and flipped through the manual for yet another spell. This spell, too, Kit had prepared the night before, knitting both his and Ponch’s names and descriptions into it. The wizardry included a variant of the Mason’s Word, which involves a very detailed description, in wizardly terms, of the structure of stone. As both wizards and physicists know, even the densest stone — indeed, almost all kinds of matter perceived as solid — is mostly empty space. Now as Kit and Ponch walked toward the wall of the school, all the atoms in their bodies and the atoms of the wall engaged in a brief, complex, stately little dance, carefully avoiding one another in droves as wizard and dog passed through brick and mortar and reinforcing metal. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing inside the classroom.

The room was carpeted, which made it easy to walk softly. Kit and Ponch made their way carefully around the edge of the room, toward the side where Darryl sat on the floor, looking at the book. Or is he really? Kit thought, as his point of view changed and he could see more clearly that Darryl was looking in the general direction of the book, but not at it, more through it. His face was not quite expressionless: There was a shadow of a smile there, but it was hard to tell what he was smiling at.

They paused near him, behind him, while the teacher kept reading, something about the seven wonders of the ancient world. Ponch stood looking intently at Darryl, his nose working, while Kit looked over the boy’s shoulder, trying to make something of that remote expression. Definitely his body’s here

, Kit said. But as for the rest of him…

Far away

, Ponch said. I can show you where now, though. The scent’s strong.

Okay-In a moment

Ponch sat down and started scratching.

Unfortunately, in this small quiet space, a sound that Kit heard all the time, so often that he didn’t pay attention to it anymore, suddenly made itself apparent. It was Ponch’s dog-license tag and name tag, on his collar, jingling together. Just about everybody in the classroom, except for Darryl, looked up in surprise, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.

Uh-oh

, Kit thought. That was dumb! To Ponch he said hurriedly, and silently, Now would be a good time!

Right—

Ponch stepped forward, pulling the leash tight, and vanished, just as Darryl’s teacher got up from the floor with a mystified look and headed toward them.

Kit stepped forward after Ponch and vanished, too, relieved—

The wind hit him then, so that Kit staggered, staring around him, half-blinded by the sudden blazing light after the soft fluorescents of the classroom.

“Where are we?”

Inside his mind. He’s here somewhere

, Ponch said.

Here was a landscape right out of the depths of the Sahara. Kit and Ponch were perched precariously on the crest of a dune so sharply wind-sculpted that its edge could have been used for a razor… except that every second, the wind stripped grains off it, eroding it, and whipping sand off the other dunes that stretched out all around them. A hard blue sky came down to the horizon on all sides, featureless; it held not a wisp of cloud, only the fierce sun… yet there was something mysteriously indistinct about that sun, as if, even in that sky, dust obscured it.

“Just look at all this,” Kit said, gazing around him. “Did Darryl’s autism make this? Or did he?”

I don’t know.

Kit shook his head. “I’ve seen an interior landscape or two in my time,” he said, “but this one…

Look how empty it is.” He scanned the horizon. “If this is the inside of Darryl’s mind, then where is he?”

Maybe he’s hiding?

Kit thought about that, and about what his mother had said about the autistic people who found life simply too intense to bear. “From himself, too?” Kit said.

I don’t know. But he is here. Look! Ponch said. Kit looked where Ponch’s nose pointed.

Footsteps led down from the dune-crest, dug in deep where someone had had to dig his heels in to stop sliding, and then had kept on sliding anyway. Down at the bottom of the dune, in the space sheltered from the wind, the footsteps were better preserved, better defined. They reminded Kit of certain footsteps left in the moondust of Tranquillity Base, except that those were now being eroded by micrometeorites. These footsteps were still sharp, and they had a familiar sneaker company’s logo scored across them, one that Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s boot soles had definitely been missing.

“Weird,” Kit said softly. The footsteps led away across that blazing wilderness, up the next dune and into the unremitting day. “Where’s he going?” Kit said.

Away from the Other One

, Ponch said. Can’t you feel It? It’s here, too. It’s following him. Ponch scented the air. It’s been following him for a long time.

“Three months?” Kit said.

I think longer.

“How can that be?”

I don’t know. But Its scent is strong in Darryl’s neighborhood. I’ve smelled it often enough when It’s been chasing after you

Ponch shook himself all over… and this time it had nothing to do with feeling itchy; it was his version of a shudder. He flees — It pursues. Ponch’s nose worked; he looked bemused. And not just here.

“Then where?”

I’m not sure. Come on.

The sand they slid down was more pink than golden. Kit looked at it and thought of the book that Darryl’s teacher had been reading him. It had been open to a page about the pyramids. Something of the world’s getting through to him

, he thought. The question is, what’s he making of it?

The heat from the sun was oppressive. Kit pulled off his parka, rolled it up, and stuck it into his otherspace pocket. Then he and Ponch reached the bottom of the dune and started the climb up the side of the next one. “We could airwalk it…” Kit said.

He didn’t

, Ponch said. His trail’s down here. We need to go the way he went, for now.

Kit nodded, put his head down to try to keep the wind-whipped sand out of his eyes, and went up the next dune in Ponch’s wake. That way, Ponch said as he came up to the top of the dune.

Kit looked across the sand, following Ponch’s gaze. Maybe eight or ten miles away, almost obscured by the height of the farther dunes and the haze of sand and dust in the air, a low line of jagged stone rose against the horizon. “Are those hills?” Kit said.

I think so. He’s there somewhere. Come on.

Ponch led, and Kit followed. Once or twice, Ponch was certain enough of the trail to let Kit use a transit spell to cover some distance, but more often he insisted on doing it on foot, so Kit simply had to slog after him, for the time being unwilling to use any spells to protect him from the wind and the sand, on the off chance that they would somehow interfere with Ponch’s tracking sense. The sand seemed to get into everything — down Kit’s shirt and up his pants, into the bends of his knees and elbows. It rubbed him raw around the neck and even under his socks. I