A Wizard Alone

“No, actually, she’s fine,” Nita said.

Mr. Millman just looked at her quizzically. Abruptly Nita wondered if near-total honesty might possibly be of some use.

“I really don’t feel like talking to you this morning,” Nita said. “I wish I could make up some dumb story and tell you that, instead.”

Mr. Millman shrugged and sat back in his chair with his arms behind his head. “Everyone else does. Why shouldn’t you?”

Entirely against her will, Nita had to smile at that. “Just as long as you don’t expect me to come up with something original.”

Mr. Millman allowed himself just a breath of laughter. “That’s the last thing I’d expect. Ten or fifteen billion of us, now, must have lived on this planet, and the more you look into the stories we tell one another, the more like each other they look. Everybody repeats the same basic themes.”

Nita said nothing.

Mr. Millman raised his eyebrows. “But maybe that’s how we know humanity is still in its childhood. You know how it is when you’re little, you want to hear the same story over and over again?”

“My sister used to do that.”

“So did mine. Partly it’s because they know how the story ends. There’s always tension when you’re not sure about the ending, and little kids don’t want too much of that tension… but they do want some. So this is a solution to the problem. When you know the ending, you get the tension of the middle and the relief at the end… theoretically. Did you have a book like that, that you kept wanting to hear at bedtime?”

Nita nodded. “It had a horse called Exploding Pop-Tart in it,” she said. “My dad said he wanted to explode every Pop-Tart he saw after a while, because he was so tired of that book.“

Millman nodded. “Mine was the one about the bat that wouldn’t go to bed,” he said. “My mother told me she hated bats for the next twenty years. Fortunately she didn’t see a lot of bats in her line of work.”

“What was her line of work?”

“She was a concert violinist.”

Nita had to laugh.

“One laugh, one smile,” Millman said. “Not bad for the way you looked when you came in.

Look, don’t bother to tell me any story if you don’t want to. You’d probably just repeat one of the favorite themes. Life, love, death…”

“Death,” Nita said softly.

The image of the Lone Power was suddenly before her eyes. She glanced at Millman then, wondering if she’d had time to cover over her expression.

“The same story,” Millman said. “And the only one we all know the end of, once we’re older than about three. But, boy, the way people behave, you wouldn’t think so! Adults refuse to talk about it… even with people your age, who really want to hear about it, and about the other important things — the beginning of life, the relationships in the middle. We try to distract ourselves by wasting our time on all the other less important stories, the incidentals — who ‘failed,’ who ‘succeeded.’ It’s a pity.” He shook his head. “We hardly ever do right by kids. All you want from us is to tell you how life works. And one way or another, the issue of life and death makes us so uncomfortable that we find a hundred ways to keep from telling you about it, until it’s too late.”

Nita swallowed. “My mom was good about telling me the rules,” she said. “She— My mom said…”

Nita stopped, waiting for her eyes to fill up. But it didn’t happen. And for a weird, bitter moment, that it wasn’t happening felt strange to her.

She looked up. Mr. Millman was simply looking at her.

“My mom said it was important to die well,” Nita said at last, “so she wouldn’t be embarrassed later.”

Mr. Millman just nodded.

For a few moments they sat there in the quiet. “She had it right, I think,” he said. He paused, then, looking at Nita. “Now it makes sense to ask. Are you all right?”

Nita thought about it. “Yeah,” she said. “For the time being.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s cut it short for today. One thing, though.”

“What?”

“What about the card tricks?”

In the face of the more important things that were presently on her mind, the question seemed so annoying that Nita nearly hollered at him, “Don’t you think I have better things to do than card tricks

?” But she caught herself.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got one here…”

She fished around in her book bag and got out the deck of cards. Nita slipped it out of its packet and began to shuffle, hoping that the motion would help her hide the fact that her hands were actually trembling with rage. Okay, she thought. Calm down. You knew he was going to ask.

But Kit—!

“Am I supposed to pick a card or something?” Mr. Millman said.

“In a minute,” Nita said. She shuffled, then said, “Okay, name one.”

“The five of clubs.”

Nita knew where that one was because the deck had been stacked when she took it out of its little packet. She put the shuffled deck down on the desk, wondering whether she’d protected the back end of the deck well enough. Then she realized she should have asked him what card he wanted before she started shuffling. The trick wasn’t going to work.

I don’t care if it does or not

! Nita thought, I should make him play Fifty-Two Pickup with the whole deck.

She controlled herself, though with difficulty. She finished the shuffle and cut the cards into three piles. Then she narrowed her eyes and did a single small wizardry that she had sworn to herself she wasn’t going to use.

Mr. Millman turned over the third card. It was the five of clubs.

“That was fairly obvious,” Mr. Millman said, “that anger. And fairly accessible. We were talking about the stages of grieving earlier, how they don’t always run in sequence. Let me just suggest that when anger runs so close to the surface that it’s easily provoked by unusual circumstances, you’re quite possibly not done with it yet.”

Damn straight I’m not, Nita thought.

“It’s not a good thing, not a bad thing, just what’s so,” Millman said. “But you might want to think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past. Or might produce again in the future.”

“Right,” Nita said. Whatever good humor had come and gone during the course of the morning’s session, it was gone for good now. She picked up the cards, got up, and stalked out, making her way to her first-period class.

Right through history class, and right through the English literature class that followed it, Nita stewed. She was furious with herself for having lost her temper over Millman and the card tricks.

She was furious that she had let him see how furious she was. She was furious over the maddeningly calm and evenhanded way he had dissected her anger. She would almost have preferred that he yell at her. At least she would have had an excuse to walk out of there ready to, as her mother used to put it, “chew nails and spit rust.” She was so madNita stopped, literally, in midthought.

“What result this kind of emotion has produced in the past…”

She thought of the fury and desperation that had driven her, in the time before her mother’s death, to try the most impossible things to stop what was happening. And they still didn’t stop.

But some amazing things happened, anyway.

She had gone from world to world and finally from universe to universe, learning to hunt down and manipulate the kernels that controlled those universes‘ versions of natural law. And now she had to admit that it had been her grief and anger at what was happening to her mother that had made her as effective as she’d become.