A Wizard Alone

“Not yet. Ponch is still worn-out from the last time. I’m going to try to get in touch with Darryl again tonight, maybe tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come along?”

He sounded almost wistful. Nita gave it a moment’s thought, but then shook her head: She might feel more like working today, but she still wasn’t sure of her ability to be of use in a crisis situation.

“Give me a little more time,” she said. “I want to work on this Speech problem for the moment. I think if I bear down on it hard enough, I may make a breakthrough.”

“I wouldn’t want to derail you,” Kit said. “But keep me posted.”

“You okay?” Nita said.

Kit looked at her a little strangely. “Why?”

“You look kinda worn-out yourself.”

He looked surprised at that, then shrugged. “What Ponch does,” he said, “it takes a lot out of me, too, maybe more than I realize. I do feel a little run-down. It’s okay: I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight and be fine tomorrow.”

“What is going on with Ponch?” Nita said. “You were still looking for answers to that…”

Kit shook his head. “I think I’m going to be looking for answers for a while. Trouble is, every time I try to settle down to work it out with the manual, something new goes wrong with the TV. Or something else interrupts me.”

The bell rang. “See that? The story of my life,” Kit said.

“Not just yours,” Nita said. “Look, call me later.

You ought to take a look at what I’m working on from the ‘inside’; maybe you can make some sense of it.“

“Right,” Kit said.

They parted company and went off to their classes. Nita more or less sleepwalked through her afternoon algebra and statistics class, grateful not to be called on. Her mind was still tangled up in virtual plurals, non- pronominal pronouns, and the question of what could be that wrong with Kit’s TV that it would prove a distraction to him. The second-to-last period that afternoon was a study hall, and Nita got no more than three sentences into an essay on the abandonment of the gold standard before ditching the essay to return to the manual again; the gold standard made even virtual plurals look good by comparison.

Toward the end of that period, though, and during the next one — a music appreciation class full of jangly, early twentieth-century twelve-tone music, which Nita found impossible for anyone to appreciate — she started wondering exactly what was going on with her. Sure, she might occasionally detest her homework— more than occasionally, especially in the case of her present social studies class: Her teacher had a great love of saddling her students with essays on apparently useless subjects. But detesting the homework didn’t mean Nita didn’t get it done.

Oh, come on. It’s not like the universe is going to come apart because I’m less than excited about the gold standard and feel more like working on wizardry.

Yet the excuse sounded hollow. More to the point, it sounded like an excuse. When the bell rang for the last time that day, at two-forty-five, Nita walked out through the exuberant Friday afternoon rush to the lockers in a somber mood. She looked for Kit in the parking lot, didn’t see him, and wasn’t surprised: He had quicker, quieter ways of getting home than the other kids here.

She could have taken that same way home, but didn’t. She walked home slowly, thinking. Nita paused only long enough in her house to dump her books and change out of her school clothes into something more comfortable — looser jeans, a floppier sweatshirt — and to check on Dairine. Her sister was lying on her stomach, on her bed, with Spot lying on the bed next to her; the little computer had put out a couple of stalky eyes to look at a book Dairine was reading.

“School okay?” Nita said.

Dairine gave Nita the kind of look that someone in the Middle Ages might have given a relative who asked if the black plague was okay. Her only other answer was to bounce herself up and down on the mattress a little. The bed creaked loudly.

“Did not,” Nita said, and went downstairs again to get her parka.

“Where you going?” came the voice from upstairs.

“Tom’s.”

Tom and Carl’s backyard was already going twilit, this time of year, even so soon after school.

Nita paused there a moment, looking up at the sky, which was clear for a change after several days’ worth of cloudy weather, and wished that spring would hurry up — she hated these short days. She meandered over to the koi pond and glanced down into it. The pond wasn’t heated, but it didn’t freeze, either; into the pond and the ground beneath it, Carl had set a small utility wizardry that acted on the same general principle as a heat pump, keeping the water at an even sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

All the same, at this time of the year the koi were naturally a little sluggish. Right now they were mostly gathered together under the weeds and water lilies down at one end of the pond. Nita peered down, able to see nothing but the occasional flick of tail or fin, and once a coppery eye glancing back up at her. “Hey,” she said. “Got any words of wisdom?” The single koi that had looked back, a white one with an orange patch on its head, drifted up to just beneath the surface and regarded her.

Then it stuck its mouth up into the air.

“Seen in plain daylight the firefly’s just one more bug; but night restores it

—”

Nita raised her eyebrows. The koi gave her a look that suggested she was a waste of its time, and drifted straight back under the lily pads again.

“If you listen to them for too long,” Tom said as he pushed open the patio door, “you won’t be able to say anything that takes more than seventeen syllables.”

“I should send Dairine over,” Nita said.

“Even their powers have limits,” Tom said, as Nita came in. “I just made some tea. Can I interest you?”

“Yeah. It’s cold.” Nita slipped out of her parka, draped it over one of Tom’s dining room chairs.

“They’re predicting snow,” Tom said, pouring each of them a mug of tea and bringing them over to the table.

“That’s funny. It’s clear.”

“For the moment. There’s a storm working its way up the coast, though. Four to six inches, they said.”

Nita gave him a wry look. “Why couldn’t this happen on Monday and get us a day off from school?” she said.

“There are about thirty different answers to that, from the strictly meteorological mode down to the ethical,” Tom said, looking equally wry, “but they all factor down more or less to mean, ‘Just because. So cope with it.’”

Nita nodded and smiled a little, but the smile fell off almost immediately. “I need to ask you something.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Tom said, “though Annie and Monty doubtless have a different opinion. Anyway, what’s up?”

She looked at him across the table. “Am I using wizardry to avoid life?” Nita said.

Tom raised his eyebrows. “Wizardry is Life,” he said. “Or, at the very least, in service of Life.

By definition. So, equally by definition, the answer to that question is no. Want to try rephrasing?”

Nita sat for a moment and thought. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with the manual.”

“So do we all.”

“No, I mean a lot of time. For me, anyway.”

“And this means—?”

Nita paused, wondering how to phrase this. “My last really big wizardry,” she said, “didn’t work.”

“Uh, there we’d have to disagree.”

“I don’t mean in terms of wizardry,” Nita said. “I mean in terms of what the pissed-off places in the back of my brain think about it. My mom still died.”