A Wizard Alone

for it. “I don’t know why you can’t hear it.”

Kit’s pop shook his head as he looked down into the pot, grinding pepper in. “From what Kit says, I don’t know why you can hear it at all. None of us should be able to.”

“Maybe it’s because I usually feed him in the mornings,” Kit’s mama said. “I’m used to hearing him complain that he’s not getting enough.” She made a kind of rrrgh noise that went up into a whine at the end, a fair imitation of Ponch’s reaction to an empty dish when there was someone around who could give him the rest of the can of dog food.

Ponch’s eyes moved at that, a sideways glance. Her accent’s not bad. I could teach her Cyene.

“Let’s not deal with this right now,” Kit said. He could just see his mom going down the street to try to talk sense to Tinkerbell.

One more

! Ponch said.

“One,” Kit said. He gave Ponch the last dog biscuit in the box, put the book aside, and got up to throw the box away.

“The onions done yet?” his mama said.

“Nearly,” said Kit’s pop, as Kit stomped the box flat to make it go in the trash can. Behind Kit, the emphatic crunching noises by the sofa came to an end, and Ponch ran into the kitchen. Out?

“Sure,” Kit said, opening the door. A fierce cold wind came in as Ponch shot out.

“Shut that, sweetie. It’s freezing!” Kit’s mama said.

“Gonna snow tonight, they said on the TV,” said Kit’s pop, picking up the frying pan in which the onions had been sizzling, and scraping them out into the soup as Kit shut the door.

“A lot?” Kit said.

“Six to eight inches.”

Kit sighed. It wouldn’t be anything like enough to make them keep school closed on Monday.

That would take at least a few feet. Not for the first time he wished that it wasn’t unethical to talk a snowstorm into dumping three feet of snow onto his immediate neighborhood. It was fun to think about, but the trouble he would have gotten into with Tom and Carl, not to mention the Powers That Be, would have made the pleasure short-lived.

Still, if I told the snowstorm to dump, say, twelve feet of snow just on the school, and then only enough everywhere else so that everybody could have fun for a day; say six inches or so…

Kit sighed again. Though such a course of action would be less trouble to the snowplow crews, the emergency services, and everybody else who wanted to go on about their lives, something like that would cause a whole lot of talk, and still get him in trouble. But the image of his school completely buried under a giant snowdrift made him smile. “By the way, Pop,” Kit said, “is the TV still okay?”

“Seems fine,” his pop said. “Every now and then the thing insists on showing me a news program from some other planet, but…” He shrugged. “As long as nothing happens to interfere with the basketball games over the weekend, I don’t mind seeing who’s grown a new head or whatever.

Darlin‘, you know what I need?”

“Less time on the couch watching basketball?” Kit’s mama suggested.

“Dream on. Celery seed.”

“We’re out of it.”

“You’re just saying that because you hate celery.”

“I know celery seed is different from celery, or celery salt. But we’re still out of it. Look for yourself.”

Kit’s pop went to the cupboard to look. Kit, looking at his mama, thought that her expression was far too innocent. She caught him looking at her, and said, “Isn’t Ponch a long time out, Kit? He hates being out this long when it’s cold. But he hasn’t scratched.”

She had a point there, though Kit thought she was more intent on him not saying anything incriminating about celery seed. Kit grinned. “I’ll go see what he’s doing,” he said, and got his winter jacket off the hook.

He went out, shutting the door hurriedly behind him, and looked up and down the driveway for Ponch. To his surprise, Ponch was sitting at the street end of the driveway, looking up at the sky.

Kit walked down to him, looking up, too. The clouds were, indeed, coming in low and fast from the south on that wind. Past and above the houses across the street, only a few streaks and scraps of the low sunset remained in the west, a bleak, bleached peach color against the encroaching stripes of dark gray. Westward, the reddish spark of Mars could just be seen through the filmy front edges of one of the incoming banks of cloud.

Ponch looked over his shoulder at Kit as Kit came to stand next to him. “You okay?” Kit said to him in the Speech.

Pretty much.

Kit wondered about that. “I mean, about what happened the other day.” He reached down to scratch the dog’s head.

I think so.

The clouds drew together in the west, blanking Mars out, slowly shutting down the last embers of the sunset. “What did happen?”

I saw something.

“Yeah? What was it?”

Not that way

, Ponch said. I mean, I noticed something. I never really noticed it before.

Kit waited.

You get hurt sometimes

, Ponch said. That makes me sad.

“Yeah, well, I get sad when you’re hurt, too.”

That’s right. And your dam and your sire and your littermates, they hurt sometimes, too. So does Nita. I noticed that. But it didn’t seem to matter as much as you hurting.

Ponch paused for a long time. But then I saw him: Darryl. And what That One was doing to him, and how it hurt him. And he didn’t do anything to deserve that. It was awful, the way he was hurting.

And that started to hurt me. And then I thought, Why doesn’t the others’ hurt make me feel like this?

And then I felt bad about myself.

Kit hardly knew what to say. It wasn’t that it was a bad thing for his dog to learn about compassion, but that the lesson would come all at once, like this, came as a surprise.

And the others didn’t deserve to be hurt, either

, Ponch said, looking up at Kit. Nita didn’t do anything bad, for her mother to die. Why should she be hurt like that? Why should Dairine? Or your sire or dam?

They’re good. Why do they have to suffer when they haven’t been bad? It’s not fair!

Kit bowed his head. This line of reasoning all too closely reflected some of his own late-night thoughts over the past couple of months. And all the easy answers — about the Powers That Be and the Lone Power, and all the other additional theories or answers that might be suggested by either religion or science— suddenly sounded hollow and pathetic.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I really don’t know.”

I felt sad for them all, Ponch said. Sad for everything, because it shouldn’t have to be that way.

All of a sudden I had to howl, that’s all

He looked embarrassed.