DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

Nita looked at this and was tempted to shred the note right down to its component atoms.What in the worldsmade me say that to him , she thought, shoving the note into the pocket of her jeans and stalking off down the hall.

By the time she got to the cafeteria, though, she d shrugged off the annoyance and was once again worrying at the clown-robot-knight problem. Nita got herself a sandwich and a fruit juice, sat down by herself off to one side, and spent another half hour studying how species that didn t understand plurals handled the Speech. It was complex. Mostly they wound up repeating singular forms with aredactive or virtual plural, which

It s sounding a little dry in there,Neets

Nita smiled.You have no idea , she said, and shut the manual. Nita disposed of her lunch tray and went out of the cafeteria, into the small side parking lot. Kit was leaning against the chain-link fence on the far side, hugging himself a little against the cold, watching a boys gym class out in the athletic field running easy laps to cool down after soccer practice.

Nita went to lean against the fence beside him. You know any card tricks she said under her breath.

He looked at her oddly. No. Why

I did something incredibly stupid. I mentioned magic toMillman at our last meeting. He thought I meant magician stuff, though, the sawing-people-in-half kind of magic. Now he wants me to show him some.

Kit stared at Nita,then burst out laughing. You should do some wizardry, and let him thinkit s magic. I bet you can do all kinds of fancy card tricks when you canreally make them vanish.

I hadn t thought of it that way. Nita frowned. I m not sure I like the idea, though. Making the real thing look like somethingfake It s too much like lying.

Kit nodded. What made you mention magic to him at all, though

I wish I could remember. It was an impulse, and I felt like such a dork afterward. She sighed. Never mind. Now I have to learn card tricks in my endless free time.

Kit raised his eyebrows. You make any headway with your aliens

Yeah.Or rather, I m not sure.

Not sure they re aliens

Not sure they re aliens, plural. Then again, let s not get into the plural thing. I m having enough trouble with it. Nita rubbed her face. I seem to have been talking to the same one at least twice. I m not sure if I was talking to him, or it, the first time, the time with the clown on the bike.

But you understood him this time, anyway.

I m not sure of that, either. I think I did but I keep thinking he was holding something back, or having trouble saying something. And it could have been important. She sighed. I m just going to have to keep trying. What about you Did you have time to go after your Ordeal kid again

Not yet.Ponch is still worn-out from the last time. I m going to try to get in touch with Darryl again tonight, maybe tomorrow. You sure you don t want to come along

He sounded almost wistful. Nita gave it a moment s thought, but then shook her head: She mightfeel more like working today, but she still wasn t sure of her ability to be of use in a crisis situation. Give me a little more time, she said. I want to work on this Speech problem for the moment. I think if I bear down on it hard enough, I may make a breakthrough.

I wouldn t want to derail you, Kit said. But keep me posted.

You okay Nita said.

Kit looked at her a little strangely. Why

You lookkinda worn-out yourself.

He looked surprised at that,then shrugged. WhatPonch does, he said, it takes a lot out of me, too, maybe more than I realize. I do feel a little run-down.It s okay: I ll get a good night s sleep tonight and be fine tomorrow.

Whatis going on withPonch Nita said. You were still looking for answers to that

Kit shook his head. I think I m going to be looking for answers for a while. Trouble is, every time I try to settle down to work it out with the manual, something new goes wrong with the TV. Or something else interrupts me.

The bell rang. See that The story of my life, Kit said.

Not just yours, Nita said. Look, call me later.

You ought to take a look at what I m working on from the inside ; maybe you can make some sense of it.

Right, Kit said.

They parted company and went off to their classes. Nita more or less sleepwalked through her afternoon algebra and statistics class, grateful not to be called on. Her mind was still tangled up in virtual plurals, non-pronominal pronouns, and the question of what could bethat wrong with Kit s TV that it would prove a distraction to him. The second-to-last period that afternoon was a study hall, and Nita got no more than three sentences into an essay on the abandonment of the gold standard before ditching the essay to return to the manual again; the gold standard made even virtual plurals look good by comparison.

Toward the end of that period, though, and during the next one a music appreciation class full ofjangly , early twentieth-century twelve-tone music, which Nita found impossible foranyone to appreciate she started wondering exactly what was going on with her. Sure, she might occasionally detest her homework more than occasionally, especially in the case of her present social studies class: Her teacher had a great love of saddling her students with essays on apparently useless subjects. But detesting the homework didn t mean Nita didn t get it done.

Oh, come on. It s not like the universe is going to come apart because I m less than excited about the gold standard and feel more like working on wizardry.

Yet the excuse sounded hollow. More to the point, it sounded like an excuse. When the bell rang for the last time that day, at two-forty-five, Nita walked out through the exuberant Friday afternoon rush to the lockers in a somber mood. She looked for Kit in the parking lot, didn t see him, and wasn t surprised: He had quicker, quieter ways of getting home than the other kids here.

She could have taken that same way home, but didn t. She walked home slowly, thinking. Nita paused only long enough in her house to dump her books and change out of her school clothes into something more comfortable looser jeans, a floppier sweatshirt and to check onDairine . Her sister was lying on her stomach, on her bed, with Spot lying on the bed next to her; the little computer had put out a couple ofstalky eyes to look at a bookDairine was reading.

School okay Nita said.

Dairinegave Nita the kind of look that someone in theMiddle Ages might have given a relative who asked if the black plague was okay. Her only other answer was to bounce herself up and down on the mattress a little. The bed creaked loudly.

Didnot , Nita said, and went downstairs again to get her parka.

Where you going came the voice from upstairs.

Tom s.

Tom and Carl s backyard was already going twilit, this time of year, even so soon after school. Nita paused there a moment, looking up at the sky, which was clear for a change after several days worth of cloudy weather, and wished that spring would hurry up she hatedthese short days. She meandered over to thekoi pond and glanced down into it. The pond wasn t heated, but it didn t freeze, either; into the pond and the ground beneath it, Carl had set a small utility wizardry that acted on the same general principle as a heat pump, keeping the water at an even sixty degrees Fahrenheit. All the same, at this time of the year thekoi were naturally a little sluggish. Right now they were mostly gathered together under the weeds and water lilies down at one end of the pond. Nita peered down, able to see nothing but the occasional flick of tail or fin, and once a coppery eye glancing back up at her. Hey, she said. Got any words of wisdom The singlekoi that had looked back, a white one with an orange patch on its head, drifted up to just beneath the surface and regarded her. Then it stuck its mouth up into the air.

Seen in plain daylight

thefirefly s just one more bug;

butnight restores it

Nita raised her eyebrows. Thekoi gave her a look that suggested she was a waste of its time, and drifted straight back under the lily pads again.

If you listen to them for too long, Tom said as he pushed open the patio door, you won t be able to say anything that takes more than seventeen syllables.

I should sendDairine over, Nita said.

Eventheir powers have limits, Tom said, as Nita came in. I just made some tea. Can I interest you

Yeah.It s cold. Nita slipped out of her parka, draped it over one of Tom s dining room chairs.

They re predicting snow, Tom said, pouring each of them a mug of tea and bringing them over to the table.

That s funny. It s clear.

For the moment.There s a storm working its way up the coast, though. Four to six inches, they said.

Nita gave him a wry look. Why couldn t this happen on Monday and get us a day off from school she said.

There are about thirty different answers to that, from the strictly meteorological mode down to the ethical, Tom said, looking equally wry, but they all factor down more or less to mean, Just because. So cope with it.

Nita nodded and smiled a little, but the smile fell off almost immediately. I need to ask you something.

That s what I m here for, Tom said, though Annie and Monty doubtless have a different opinion. Anyway, what s up

She looked at him across the table. Am I using wizardry to avoid life Nita said.

Tom raised his eyebrows. Wizardryis Life, he said. Or, at the very least, in service of Life.By definition. So, equally by definition, the answer to that question is no. Want to try rephrasing

Nita sat for a moment and thought. I ve been spending a lot of time with the manual.

So dowe all.

No, I mean alot of time.For me, anyway.

And this means

Nita paused, wondering how to phrase this. My last really big wizardry, she said, didn t work.

Uh, there we d have to disagree.

I don t mean in terms of wizardry, Nita said. I mean in terms of what the pissed-off places in the back of my brain think about it. My mom still died.

Mmm, Tom said. His expression was noncommittal.

What I want to know is is it possible to use research as a way to put off doing other stuff you should be doing

Again, anything s possible. What is it you think you should be doing

Nita shook her head, pushed her teacup back and forth on the table mat. I don t know.Something more active.

You think research is passive

Compared to what I ve been doing up until now, yeah.

Nita reached sideways into the air for her manual, came out with it, opened it to the listings area, and pushed it over to Tom, tapping on her listing. Optional , Nita said. I m not real wild about that.

I m not sure I read that construct the same way, Tom said. I d translate it more as meaning your options are open: that you re not concretely assigned to anything at the moment. Maybe a better rendering would be freelance. He glanced at her manual. But then you seem to be taking a look at the vocabulary end of things at the moment.

Please, Nita said. I feel so ignorant.Me with my whole six hundred and fifty words.

Maybe it ll be some consolation to you that the average English-speaking person s day-to-day vocabulary is only a thousand or fifteen hundred words, Tom said. But I understand how you feel. And the Speech is so much more complex than English in terms ofspecialized vocabulary. It has to be, if you re going to name things properly. And so that means doing vocabulary-building all the time.

He knocked one knuckle on the tabletop a couple of times. Immediately his version of the manual appeared on the table seven or eight thick volumes like phone books. This one, Tom said, pulling a single volume out of the stack while the ones above it considerately remained hovering in place over where the middle one had been this one ismy vocabulary work for this year.