A Wizard Alone

“Mmm,” Tom said. His expression was noncommittal.

“What I want to know is — is it possible to use research as a way to put off doing other stuff you should be doing?”

“Again, anything’s possible. What is it you think you should be doing?”

Nita shook her head, pushed her teacup back and forth on the table mat. “I don’t know.

Something more… active.”

“You think research is passive?”

“Compared to what I’ve been doing up until now, yeah.”

Nita reached sideways into the air for her manual, came out with it, opened it to the listings area, and pushed it over to Tom, tapping on her listing. “ ‘Optional,’” Nita said. “I’m not real wild about that.”

“I’m not sure I read that construct the same way,” Tom said. “I’d translate it more as meaning your options are open: that you’re not concretely assigned to anything at the moment. Maybe a better rendering would be ‘freelance.’” He glanced at her manual. “But then you seem to be taking a look at the vocabulary end of things at the moment.”

“Please,” Nita said. “I feel so ignorant. Me with my whole six hundred and fifty words.”

“Maybe it’ll be some consolation to you that the average English-speaking person’s day-to-day vocabulary is only a thousand or fifteen hundred words,” Tom said. “But I understand how you feel.

And the Speech is so much more complex than English in terms of specialized vocabulary. It has to be, if you’re going to name things properly. And so that means doing vocabulary-building all the time.”

He knocked one knuckle on the tabletop a couple of times. Immediately his version of the manual appeared on the table — seven or eight thick volumes like phone books. “This one,” Tom said, pulling a single volume out of the stack — while the ones above it considerately remained hovering in place over where the middle one had been—“this one is my vocabulary work for this year.”

Nita looked at it in horror as Tom dropped it to the table and flipped it open. “Remind me never to become a Senior,” she said.

“As if you can avoid it when it happens,” Tom said, sounding resigned. “Nita, you wouldn’t be the first wizard to get confused about the apparent differences between active and passive work in wizardry. But the Powers That Be don’t see the distinction — or They see it as largely illusory.” He paged through the book, stopping about halfway through to glance at something.

“If you go through this, you’ll see often enough where it says that wizards are told only what they need to know ‘for the work at hand.’ Which leaves you with the question: What do they find in it when there is no work at hand — no official assignment? You’d be surprised. But it’s never anything that goes to waste. Sooner or later, every wizard’s work, however minor, does someone, somewhere, some good. It’s an extension of the ‘all is done for each’ principle.”

“So what I’m doing isn’t like… withdrawal or anything?” Nita said. “Not… unhealthy?”

“Oh, no. Don’t forget, there are wizards who do nothing but read the manual.” Tom looked thoughtful. “I wouldn’t be that far down the road. My job tends more toward focused research. But I still spend maybe seventy percent of my theoretically ‘inactive’ time reading these things. It’s a big universe out there. Just this planet, for example: Think how much you can discover about it just by going to the library, or rummaging around on the Web. Then imagine you have access to a book that contains most of the salient facts about your universe. Wouldn’t you spend a lot of time between the covers?”

“Uh,” Nita said. “Well, I guess I have been.”

“So, at the very least, even if you didn’t have a goal you were working toward, which I think you have, I wouldn’t consider your time wasted,” Tom said. “As for you not being on active assignment, that’s between you and the Powers. They value the work we do sufficiently to avoid pushing us to function when it wouldn’t be appropriate to the wizard’s own best interests.

Emergencies do come up; but routinely, if being on duty would impair your own status, you’re not called up.“ He eyed Nita. ”If you’re starting to feel the need to get back into the saddle, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’d be the one to tell me.“

Nita examined the floor in some detail for a few moments before she said anything. “It’s not like I actually feel all that much better,” she said, hardly above a whisper. She was watching herself with great care to see if she was going to start crying again; she couldn’t have borne it right this minute.

“Every now and then I forget to hurt… but the rest of the time… I keep seeing those last few hours with my mom, over and over.” Then she frowned. “But I can’t just sit around. It’s not bringing my mother back. And I keep getting the feeling she’d be annoyed with me for, I don’t know, for indulging myself in just sitting around and feeling bad when I should be busy with something important. Because this is important.”

Tom nodded. “I don’t think I can argue with that,” he said. “Meanwhile, tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Nita spent a few minutes describing the contacts she’d been having from the aliens, especially the last one — the knight — and the cryptic message he, or it, had left her.

When she was finished, Tom shook his head. “‘What fights the Enemy…’” he said. “You’re right, the phrasing’s interesting.”

“You think this alien’s a wizard?”

“Hard to tell,” Tom said. “There are lots of creatures all over the universe who both use the Speech and work to oppose the Lone Power without being wizards.“ He shrugged. ”For the time being, I’d keep trying to get through, I suppose, and see if you can work inward to a mode where there’s more clarity.“

“Yeah. I’m going to try the lucid dreaming again tonight, I think. So far, that’s where I’ve had the best results.” Nita frowned. “I guess that’s the other thing that’s worried me. The possibility of getting stuck in a dreamworld…”

“I’m not sure I see that as a danger for you,” Tom said. “I’d almost suggest the danger would lie in too much hardheaded practicality… in being too tough on yourself. For the time being, you seem to be okay. Let me know how you progress with your ‘alien,’ anyway.”

“Yeah.”

Nita got up and slipped into her parka, glancing at Tom’s stack of manuals again. “You have to learn that whole thing this year?”

“And keep Carl from blowing up the house,” Tom said. “Even wizardry may be insufficient to the task. See you later.”

“Kit, querido,” Kit’s mama said, “if you feed that dog so many dog biscuits, you’ll spoil his appetite for dinner.”

In the kitchen, adding a last few seasonings to what would shortly be a pot of minestrone soup, Kit’s father laughed out loud. “Impossible.”

Kit was sitting on the dining room sofa, trying to read one of the books on autism his mom had brought home for him. The language was pretty technical sometimes, but he was more than willing to struggle through it; the analysis of autism in this book was making some sense to him in terms of what he’d been getting from Darryl. There were apparently autistic people who found the complications of life and emotion so threatening, the book said, that when they did artwork, it often featured landscapes that looked sterile and empty to a casual viewer — but the artists’ intent was to express a desire for a little peace, for relief from the assault on their senses that caused them such pain. Since coming across this idea in the book, Kit had been doing his best to get the whole thing read, mining it for ways to make sure that he actually got some good out of his conversation with Darryl, when it finally happened.

Unfortunately the reading was being made difficult, if not impossible, by the large black muzzle that kept insinuating itself between Kit and the open pages, and the big brown eyes that looked beseechingly up into Kit’s. Just one more, Ponch said.

“You’re gonna turn into a blimp,” Kit said.

I‘ll be a happy blimp, Ponch said. What’s a blimp?

Kit’s mama laughed. Kit glanced up at her.

“He’s loud sometimes, honey,” his mama said, handing Kit’s papa the pepper shaker as he held his hand out