A Wizard Alone

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 kind of 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. “But you’re right about the distance. A long way off… And it’s thinking — I don’t know — more like an organ than an organism. It doesn’t seem to have any plurals in its thoughts, any sense of existing in relationship to a larger world. It’s all alone.“ She sat silent for a moment, pondering. ”I wonder if it even understands the concept of communication, as such. It might be all by itself in its own pinched-off space. Yet now it’s trying to reach out.“

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

Dairine shook her head again. “I don’t know,” she said. “If you don’t know you’re by yourself, in your own universe, how do you know there’s anyone else to try to reach… anywhere to get out to? Really weird.”

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. “I’m 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 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 often was a useful tool for understanding and getting comfortable with the thought processes of a species you didn’t know well.

The spell to induce lucid dreaming was very 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. Assuming there really are eyes in there, she thought.

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.