A Wizard Alone

up on the concept of childhood as this pure, untroubled thing that Nita wasn’t sure had ever existed. Plainly, like the counselor that Dairine had been complaining about, too few of them really remembered what it was like to be seven, or nine, or twelve.

Nita could understand that perfectly. Large parts of childhood hurt, and adults did with that remembered pain exactly what kids did when they could: Let whatever good memories they had bury it. Oh, the moments of delight, of pure joy, were there, all right, but what adults seemingly couldn’t bear was the idea that their whole childhoods hadn’t been that way, that the trouble and sorrow of their adult lives, the result of the Lone Power’s meddling in the worlds, wasn’t something they’d always had to deal with, right from the start. So despite whatever kids tried to tell them, adults just kept on reinventing childhood as something that was supposed to be happy all the time, a paradise lost in the past.

Yet in very small children, there was something that Nita had to admit she’d seen… even, occasionally, in Dairine. Last night, in her dream, Nita had looked at Darryl and had seen the same thing in his eyes, unalloyed — a sense of living in the morning of the world, a time or place either uncorrupted or redeemed; unafraid, and with no reason to be afraid; a person grounded immovably in the sense that the world worked, was just fine, would always be fine—

Poor kid

, Nita thought. Wait till reality hits him. Yet, remembering the look in those fearless eyes, she found herself having an unaccustomed second thought. Reality might hit him, might, indeed, have hit him hard already — but it might be what shattered.

Boy, would I like to be there to see that.

Nita began to peel the banana. But all that aside, Kit said he was with Darryl when I was, Nita thought. So if he’s right, then who was I with?

She took a bite of the banana and considered. And that’s not the only thing about this that’s strange. It’s Kit who’s been looking for him. If this really is Darryl, then why have I been seeing him, too?

But now she thought she had an answer to that. The filter, Nita thought. We’ve both been holding the world at arm’s length… trying to get it to leave us alone

She shook her head. And making ourselves more alone while we do it. But the wizardry knew what it was doing better than we did.

One wizard alone found another one

…

Nita sat there for a moment, staring at the banana without really seeing it. Okay. But that brings up another question. If this is Darryl, then how come my visits to his world are so different from Kit’s?

She had another bite of the banana, reflecting. Unless it’s just that I didn’t know that the person trying to contact me was autistic. I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about what the world would look like to him. So maybe I got something that was more like Darryl’s own ideas about himself…just translated into my own images: the uncomplicated, scared-kid stuff. Whereas Kit’s been getting stuff that looks more like it belongs to someone really troubled… maybe because he’s known from the beginning that Darryl’s autistic.

To Nita this sounded so commonsense that it seemed very likely to be true. So now if I could just figure out how Darryl can be with both me and Kit at the same time.

Maybe he was time-slipping somehow

? Nita thought. But that would have taken a wizardry, and a considerable amount of power to fuel it. And the only thing Nita was now certain about, as far as her dream went, was that Darryl hadn’t actually been doing any wizardry at the time.

No. Something else was going on…

Nita finished the banana, got up to dump the skin in the kitchen garbage can, and came back to her tea and the manual again. What other ways are there for someone to be in two places at one time?

She had to laugh at herself a little as she reached for the manual. It would be a great trick if you had a busy schedule

, Nita thought. Or you could be in school taking a test while you were also lying on the beach with a good book, working on your tan.

She started paging through the manual again, idly at first, then with more concentration. After about fifteen minutes of this, as the sun got brighter on the snow outside and the dining room filled with its light, Nita realized that she still wasn’t sure exactly how to find what she needed. She went to the back of the manual, to the page that handled search functions.

“I need all the references that have to do with being in two places at one time,” she said.

The page cleared itself, and new words appeared. “Apparition or co-location?”

There it was, yet another word Nita hadn’t ever heard of before today. “Apparition first,” she said.

“See highlighted section,” the page said, and her manual was abruptly about an inch thicker.

“Oh, no,” Nita said. “I think I need another banana.”

It took three more. Nita was grateful that Dairine seemed to be sleeping late, as she was the big banana fan in the house and would not have been pleased that Nita had made such inroads into the supply. The three bananas gave Nita time to discover, mostly by skimming the material as fast as she could, that there were an unnerving number of ways to appear in two places at once, if you felt like spending the energy. But that was the factor that kept everyone from doing it all the time. The universe had a basic bias against the same thing being in more than one place at once — this singularity of location being one of the ways that matter defined itself to begin with — and if you wanted to bend that bias in your favor, you would be heavily penalized, in terms of having to use a huge amount of effort to build a very complex spell.

It doesn’t matter

, Nita thought as she turned over the last twenty pages of the section, doing little more than glancing at them. I’m sure he wasn’t doing a wizardry last night, so none of this stuff applies

She turned back to the search page again. “Give me the co-location stuff now,” she said, not seeing any great point in it, but unwilling to stop until she’d read everything that could have a bearing on the problem.

The manual reduced itself to something more like its normal size, and laid itself open at a much shorter section. Nita glanced at the title page and table of contents for the section, momentarily confused. It was a classifications section on the Orders of Being.

Huh

? she thought. Nita had been through this section every now and then. The time she’d been most interested in it was just after passing her Ordeal, when she was trying to sort out some of the finer details of how wizardry was organized. That version of the information had been thinner than this one, a sort of beginner’s guide; this one was considerably more detailed.

Nita turned the pages, glancing at the master classification listing of created beings in the universe. The listing didn’t go by species, but by type. Good old-fashioned mortals naturally had all the other types outnumbered, but there were still a surprising number of modified mortals and other conditionals. Then came wizards, of which there were hundreds of different types, even within single species. Among her own species, with which Nita would have thought she was moderately familiar by now, there were more classes of wizard than she’d realized.

The standard classes — probationary, post-Ordeal, full wizard, expert wizard, Advisory Senior, Regional, Planetary, Sector — those she’d known about for long enough. But there were also splinter classifications, some categories that didn’t quite fit among either mortal wizards or the Powers That Be. The Transcendent Pig, of course, Nita knew. She smiled slightly as she turned past his page. The picture doesn’t do him justice. Maybe it’s old

But there were many other classifications in this section, too, some of them most obscure. Principalities, thrones, dominations— Thrones? Who wants to be a chair? But maybe I’m missing