A Wizard Alone

“Did you get a scent on him?” Kit said.

Yes. I can find him again, wherever he goes. Even when he’s not here, like a few moments ago

, Ponch added.

Kit gave his dog a look. “What? He was right in front of us.”

Some of him. Not all.

Ponch wasn’t given to making cryptic statements without reason: He was still developing the language skills to tell Kit what he was perceiving, and there were sometimes misunderstandings as a result. “Okay,” Kit said. “We’ll figure out what that means later. For the moment, at least we know what he looks like… and we can start making a plan to find a way to talk to him.”

If he can talk at all…

He glanced at the timekeeper inside the front cover of the manual. “Come on,” Kit said. “I have to get back to school.”

And you have to feed me.

Normally Kit would have laughed at this, yet another of Ponch’s stratagems to get an extra meal.

But the laughter had been knocked out of him by the unexpectedness of what he’d just seen. Since when do the Powers That Be dump an autistic kid into an Ordeal?

“Come on,” Kit said to Ponch. They went home.

After school Kit went straight to Tom and Carl’s, the discreet way, to tell him what he’d found.

“Physically, he’s there all right… mostly,” Kit said, sitting at the table with Tom again. “Or so Ponch says. I’m still working on what he meant by that conditional description he gave me. But Darryl’s problem… Why didn’t anything about it turn up in the manual before?”

“Need-to-know restrictions, possibly,” Tom said. “And often enough the manual’ll let you find out something for yourself, rather than just tell you about it. That approach can keep you from prejudging a situation.“ He paged through his own manual to Darryl’s entry. ”Certainly it confirms that he has an individualized type of autistic disorder. The manual says it’s a fairly recent development. He hasn’t been autistic from a very young age: It seems to have come on him suddenly, shortly after he turned eight.“

“So the Ordeal itself didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“I don’t know that for sure. It wouldn’t seem to be connected… but we could be wrong there. At any rate, because the manual doesn’t say anything further, it suggests that the Powers That Be don’t think we need any more detail on that particular facet of the situation. Or that what you discover during investigation may be more valuable than what They already know.”

“It doesn’t seem fair somehow,” Kit said after a moment, trying to find words for what was making him so uncomfortable. “You’d think he has enough problems. Why’s he been stuck in the middle of an Ordeal, on top of everything else?”

Tom shook his head. “If he’s been offered wizardry, that means that there’s some problem to which be is the solution. But he can’t merely have been offered wizardry; he also has to have been able to agree to the offer. He found the Wizard’s Oath, in some form or another, and he accepted it.

Now we have to find out how we can assist…without removing the basic challenge.”

Kit nodded. “It makes you wonder, though,” he said. “If he’s the answer, what’s the question?”

“I think I know what you mean,” Tom said. “He does seem an unlikely candidate. But even in what we laughably refer to as ‘normal’ life, all too often the unlikely people turn out to be the ones who have the answers; the objects you would have thrown away are the ones you find you can’t do without. ‘The stone rejected by the builder becomes the cornerstone.’” Tom got a wry look then. “It happens too often to be accidental. Is the universe trying to tell us something important about the way it works — that sometimes even what we call fate has an element of unpredictability?”

Kit nodded. “Or maybe the One’s just saying, ‘Don’t be so sure you know it all.’”

Tom stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Could be. There are people in our world who’ve made a tremendous difference but who would have died in another time. In this time, people every day are making choices of who should live and die on the basis of criteria like whether you’re going to be the ‘right’ sex, or whether your whole body is going to work perfectly. Who knows how we may damage ourselves if we insist too hard on what, this week, looks like perfection.”

He stopped, a somewhat rueful expression coming over his face. “Sorry,” Tom said. “But being a wizard makes philosophers out of most of us eventually. As long as that’s not all it makes of you, you’re okay… Anyway, now you have to plan how to approach him.” Tom chewed one lip briefly.

“You may have to go to his home, secretly. But maybe you’d have better luck at his school.”

“I’m not wild about sneaking around in his house,” Kit said. “School, yeah. I’d thought about that, too. But there are still too many ways to be noticed. I was considering another option.”

“Oh?”

“Ponch has been able to treat someone’s interior landscape like an exterior universe before,” Kit said. “He can go into Darryl’s head and take me with him… and maybe Darryl will find it easier to talk to me that way.”

Tom brooded over that for a moment. “My initial reaction,” he said, “is to say no. We’re uncertain enough about how the heck Ponch does what he does. Add that set of imponderables to whatever’s going on inside Darryl’s head…” He shook his head. “It starts getting uncomfortably complex.”

“We’re wizards,” Kit said. “We’re supposed to learn how to get comfortable with the uncomfortably complex.”

Tom gave Kit a look that would have seemed annoyed if there hadn’t been a resigned quality to it as well. “In theory,” he said, “of course, you’re right. But turning theory into practice without taking due care and attention can screw things up big-time.”

Kit sat quietly, knowing better than to argue his case too hard with a Senior: That was a sure way to make it seem like he had some kind of ulterior motive.

Tom looked off into the middle distance, pondering. “Yet here’s this very atypical Ordeal,” he said, “and we can’t just let the kid go on suffering unnecessarily for the sake of caution and correctness. Some more information gathering, at least, seems prudent. But I want you to be very, very cautious, and watch yourself at least as carefully as you’re watching him. Even normal Ordeals are subjective, and getting another entity’s subjectivity involved with one, even temporarily, brings considerable dangers with it. This Ordeal, where the candidate is autistic—“ He shook his head. ”It might be an attempt to resolve the autism, which is likely to be incredibly traumatic for Darryl whether it works or not…or it might simply be about some mode of wizardry we haven’t seen before, one that involves Darryl staying autistic. What looks like our idea of ‘normal’ function may not, in the One’s eyes, be the best function. Judgment calls in these cases can get dangerous.“

“If you don’t judge, though,” Kit said, “or at least decide to do something, nothing gets done!”

Tom sat still and looked out the window, where a cold wind was rattling some brown, unfallen beech leaves in the hedge beside his house. “There you’re right,” he said. “Not that that makes me any happier. But judgment calls are one of the other things we’re here for: The One has better things to do than micro-manage us.”

He looked back at Kit. “So go do what you can,” Tom said. “Let me know how it comes out. But I want to really emphasize that you need to stay in the observer’s role. This Ordeal is strange enough to get extremely dangerous, especially if you stray out of your appropriate role.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Tom’s expression got slightly less severe. “I’ve heard that one before,“ he said. ”From myself, among many others. But, particularly, I want you to watch yourself when you’re inside his head.

Talking to Darryl is a good idea… but getting too synced to his worldview may make that more difficult, not less. Talking is something you do to other people; if he has trouble with that concept, you could get in trouble, too. And when you’re inside someone else’s head and using wizardry, no matter how careful you are, there’s always the danger of rewriting his name in the Speech. Do that in such a way that Darryl buys into the rewrite, and you take the risk of excising something that makes the difference between him passing his Ordeal and him never coming out of it. Walk real softly, Kit.“ ”We will.“