A Wizard Alone

wakes up, make sure he gets in touch with me, all right?”

“Sure. I want to talk to him, too, because I found Darryl last night, and I think he’s an abdal.”

“You think he’s a what?”

“An abdal. You know… one of the Pillars.”

There was a brief silence at that. “Would you mind coming over here and telling me how you came to that conclusion?” Carl said.

There was something peculiar about his tone of voice. “I’m not in trouble, am I?” Nita said.

“What? No. But do me a favor? Bring your manual with you.”

“Okay. See you in a while.”

Nita pulled on her boots and parka and then made her way over to Tom and Carl’s house the quick way, popping out into six inches of untouched snow, and was very glad she’d remembered the boots. Carl was standing inside the door, looking out at the backyard, as Nita came up to the sliding doors. He pushed one aside for her. “It’s pretty out there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But cold.” She came in and stomped her boots on the tile floor of the kitchen to get rid of the snow as Carl closed the door. “Where’d Tom go? Anything important?”

“He’s meeting with the Sector Advisories,” Carl said. “Administrative business… something to do with reorganizing some planets’ worldgating systems. Nothing wildly exciting, but he’ll be gone for a couple of days.”

Nita went to the table, taking off her coat and hanging it over one of the chairs. “You’ve got some wires hanging down there,” she said as she sat down, noting the tangle extending from underneath the cupboards.

“Yeah. I’ve made a mess, and now I have to clean it up. Does your mom or dad know a good electrician?” Carl said wearily. And then stopped, and looked at Nita in shock, and passed a hand over his eyes.

“Oh, Nita,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Habit…”

“I know,” she said. “I know.” She swallowed. “It’s okay. I'll ask Dad. He just had a guy doing some stuff to our garage. He thinks he’s pretty good.”

“Thanks.”

Nita reached into the empty air beside her and pulled her manual out of the claudication that followed her around. “Here,” she said. “Is something wrong with it?”

Carl sat down. “I don’t think so,” he said, “but there’s something I want to check. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Carl opened Nita’s manual, turned to one particular page, and spoke to it softly under his breath.

Nita watched this curiously. The page filled up with characters in the Speech, cleared itself, and filled again, while Nita told Carl about the dreams she’d started having, how she’d decided to look into them more closely, and what she’d found. Well before she was finished, Carl had pushed her manual to one side and was giving Nita his undivided attention. When she finished, he let out a long breath.

“Well,” he said.

“What were you looking for?” Nita said, feeling slightly nervous.

“It’s all right. It’s nothing bad.” Carl folded his arms and sat back in the chair. “It’s just that the information you’ve been given normally isn’t made public.”

“Been given?” Nita said.

Carl nodded. “But someone at a higher level has seen to it that you got it. So I see from the authorization logs.”

Nita thought about that for a moment. “So he is an abdal?” she said.

Carl got a brooding look. “Tell me how he seemed to you, in twenty-five words or less.”

“Innocent,” Nita said. “He’s absolutely innocent. But he’s fierce about it. It just rolls off him.”

She shook her head. The impact of his personality, as communicated by just that one brief direct glance of Darryl’s eyes, was difficult to describe without sounding silly. If it was light, it would have been blinding. “And it’s not just the innocence. Even when he was screaming, I still liked him a lot.

He’s really good. And he just doesn’t notice, doesn’t seem to get it…”

“That would seem to clinch it, wouldn’t it?” Carl said. “The definition out of the manual, practically word for word.”

“That’s what I thought. And it scared me somehow.” Carl smiled a little. “Possibly a healthy response,” he said. “And one that convinces me you’re right. You met him out of the flesh, without the protective coloration that a body provides for a spirit like that. At such times you would get the full impact…and I imagine it’s an eye- opener.”

Nita nodded. “I never thought goodness could be so tough,” she said. “So strong. But then again…I guess goodness isn’t something I’d think about a whole lot, anyway. Nobody uses the word much unless it’s in a commercial, and then they’re just trying to convince you that something has a lot of milk in it.”

Carl nodded, looking wry. “Virtue,” he said. “The real thing. It’s not some kind of cuddly teddy bear you can keep on the shelf until you need a hug. It’s dangerous, which is why it makes people so nervous. Virtue has its own agenda, and believe me, it’s not always yours. The word itself means strength, power. And when it gets loose, you’d better watch out.” “Something bad might happen…”

“Impossible. But possibly something painful.” Carl fell silent for a moment. “The manual makes the abdals sound like saints,” Nita said.

“Oh, they are saints,” Carl said. “That aspect of their power doesn’t have anything to do with wizardry as such, though it can coexist with it, the same way you could be, say, a mathematician and a really nice person at the same time.”

Nita made a face. “You haven’t met my statistics teacher.”

“I hear you. I still hate anything more complex than long division. But the trouble with sainthood these days is the robe-and-halo imagery that gets stuck onto it.” Carl got that brooding look again.

“People forget that robes were street clothes once… and still are, in a lot of places. And halos are to that fierce air of innocence what speech balloons in comics are to the sound of the voice itself.

Shorthand. But most people just see an old symbol and don’t bother looking behind it for the meaning. Sainthood starts to look old-fashioned, unattainable… even repellent. Actually, you can see it all around, once you learn to spot it.”

“You make it sound like there are saints all over the place.”

“Of course there are. You don’t think it’s just wizards that keep the universe running, do you?

But saints tend not to be obvious. For one thing, they don’t want to draw the Lone One’s attention to them. Also, they tend to be too busy. Mostly sainthood involves hard work.”

Carl leaned forward to pick up Nita’s manual again, paging through it. “Anyway, I think you can understand why information about the abdals would be pretty carefully controlled, most of the time.

The whole point of the way they function is that they’re not supposed to know what they are. And the more mortals who do know, the more might let it slip. Darryl is important. Far more important, in the larger scheme of things, than you or I, or than just about anybody else I know, or am likely to know. Abdals don’t exactly grow on trees.“ Carl looked suddenly thoughtful. ”Well, actually, some places they do. What I mean is, they’re not commonplace. The One invests a lot of power in them.

There wouldn’t be many of them on a given planet at any one time… and we want to keep the ones we’ve got. Or the one we’ve got, because as far as Earth goes at the moment, Darryl may well be it.

And his presence here, even when he doesn’t seem to be doing anything, is important for the world, because through him, the One channels into the world some of the power we use. If you’ll pardon the plumbing analogy, think of us as faucets and Darryl as the reservoir, or the well. Cut that off, and—“ Carl shook his head.

Nita was silent for some moments, digesting this. “So what do I do now?” she said at last. “I don’t want Kit to think I’m horning in on his assignment or something because I’m worried about him. But I think maybe I am. He was okay when he started this, pretty much… as far as I was able to tell anything clearly about his state of mind when I was so stuck in my own. But now… he doesn’t feel like he usually does. And I can’t tell for sure whether that’s good or bad.”