A Wizard Alone

“greenhouse” layer like Venus’s upper atmosphere. But there was always the possibility that this wasn’t a planet at all — just some kind of Euclidean space, another dimension that just went on eternally in all directions. Whichever it is, he thought, it has weather, and the weather’s bad. Even Titan’s weather is better than this.

Kit glanced at the manual page again, read the words in the Speech that began to spell themselves out there.

Nitrogen atmosphere. No oxygen. Methane and some other hydrocarbons frozen out to make the snow

… Kit shivered despite the force field: The temperature outside was about two hundred degrees below zero centigrade.

“I’m glad I brought a coat,” he said softly.

I wish I could grow mine thicker, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. I didn’t like that other place, the hot one, but it was better than this.

“Believe me, we won’t stay long,” Kit said. “Just long enough to talk to Darryl.” The contrast between the room-temperature range that the two of them needed to function and the temperature of the space around them was as extreme as the difference between room temperature and a blowtorch… and this meant that keeping his own environment and Ponch’s tolerable would require Kit to spend a lot of energy in a hurry. He was going to have to keep a close eye on the energy levels of the force field; this was no kind of place to have it fail suddenly. Whether they were genuinely in some other universe or just inside Darryl’s mind, the cold would kill them both in seconds if their protection failed. “Let’s get going. Where in all this is he?” Kit said to Ponch.

That way

, Ponch said, turning. The contrast in temperatures stands out. But so do other things.

There’s company here.

“The same company as last time?”

The same. A heart of cold.

“Great,” Kit said under his breath. “Well, let’s head that way. I’ll put the stealth spell up around us again, though in these conditions, it may not work a hundred percent.”

If you could make the wind drop…

It was worth a try. Kit paged quickly through his manual to the environmental management section and looked for the spells that involved short-term weather control. He found one that looked likely, started to recite it— And then stopped, shocked. Something that had accompanied every spell he’d ever done, that growing, listening silence — as the universe started to pay attention to the Speech used in its creation — was suddenly missing.

Blocked

, Kit thought. But how?! Not even the Lone Power Itself should have been able to keep a wizardry from executing. Once executed, of course, it might fail, but—

Kit tried the spell again, and again got no result. Yet his force field was working fine. If it hadn’t been, he and Ponch would both have been frozen solid by now.

“Weird,” Kit said, closing the manual for the moment. “Looks like this environment’s been instructed not to let itself be altered.”

Could the Lone One have done that?

Kit shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Never mind

, Ponch said. I don’t need to see, to lead us. And as for the Lone One… Ponch’s nose worked. It’s distracted, Ponch said. And Darryl’s moving. Come on.

Ponch pulled on the leash, and Kit followed him across the squeaking blue snow, while every now and then a new and ferocious gust of wind blue-whited everything out. “Snow tonight,” a voice said from somewhere immeasurably distant.

“You heard it that time, right?” Kit said.

I heard something

, Ponch said. And then he paused in midstep. I hear something besides that, too.

Kit waited.

Wings—

Kit listened, but couldn’t make anything out except that the wind was rising, the hiss scaling up to a soft roar. The last time he’d heard a wind like this was when the hurricane had come through three years ago. The hurricane, though, had at least sounded impersonal in its rage. The sound of this wind had a more intimate quality, invasive, as if it was purposely pointed at Kit. And the voices were part of it.

“—won’t be able to—”

“—and in local news tonight—

“—wish I could understand why, but there’s no point in even asking, I guess—”

“—come on, love, we need to get this on you. No, don’t do that. Remember what we talked about—”

The voices somehow both spoke at normal volume and screamed in Kit’s ears, intrusive, grating, maddening. He couldn’t shut them out. He opened his manual and hurriedly went through it to the section that would allow him to soundproof the force field, for the voices were scaling up into the deafening range now, an ever increasing roar. The noise wasn’t just made up of voices, either. Music was part of it, too, but music gone horribly wrong, screeching at him, and also sounds that might have come from Kit’s own house, a door closing, someone opening a drawer, sounds that were magnified past bearing, intolerable—

Kit recited the wizardry, having to do it nearly at the top of his lungs to hear himself think. To his great relief, it took; he could tell that the sound all around him outside the force field was still rising, but now at least it was muted to a tolerable level. “Wow,” he said to Ponch, who was shaking his own head, also troubled by the noise.

I lost him, Ponch said. He moved again. He moves very fast sometimes. He—

Ponch’s head whipped around. Kit looked the way his dog was looking, through the blowing blue snow, just in time to catch sight of the thin young shape running past them, dressed in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt, running through the terrible cold and wind, running headlong, a little sloped forward from the waist as Kit had seen him running for the van at school.

“Darryl!” Kit shouted. “Hey, Darryl, wait up!”

Darryl turned his head for just a flash, looking toward Kit. For a fraction of a second, their eyes met.

Darryl ran on. Kit reeled back as if someone had hit him across the face, and staggered with shock and pain. He had felt, for that second, what Darryl had felt: the unbearable pain of another person’s regard.

Kit had sometimes found it hard to look into someone else’s eyes, but that was nothing like this.

This pain denied even the existence of the one who looked back. For Darryl, even meeting the gaze of his own eyes in the mirror was impossible, nonsensical, painful. Yet Kit also thought of the blind looks of the statues at the edge of the world of dunes, and suddenly realized that maybe it was only to him that their blindness seemed creepy. To Darryl, in his autism, maybe they were as close as he could comfortably get to the experience of being looked at by another being. It’s something he wants, even though it hurts.

At least he wants it, though. If he didn’t—

Kit shook his head. “Where’d he go?”

That way.

“Come on!”

Kit and Ponch ran after him. But it seemed as if, in this world, Darryl could run a lot faster than they could. “The wind’s filling in his tracks,” Kit gasped.

I don’t need them. Listen, though!

Kit could hear very little now that he’d turned the sound down inside the force field.

“What?”