DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

Uh, sure, but

The connection between them didn t so much break as dissolve in a returning wave of sleep. Nita stared at the tea bag in her hand, bemused. Well, she said.

She made her tea and sat down at the dining room table with the mug, the manual, and a banana. Nita didn t go straight into the manual, partly because she wasn t yet clear on where she should start looking. She was still trying to sort out some things about her experience last night.

There had just been something about Darryl. Nita kept coming back to the impact she d felt when he d finally looked right at her. It wasn t power, not strength, in the usual sense. She was well down the cup of tea before she found the word she was looking for.

Innocence

Talk about the innocence of childhood tended to pass right over Nita these days. Her own childhoodwas behind her rather to her relief, because of all the beating up. And her memory ofDairine s childhood was too fresh; anyone putting that concept and the wordinnocence together in the same sentence would simply have made Nita laugh. Her sister s behavior aside, Nita knew perfectly well that most kids were no innocents.

But then most of the talk you heard on the subject came from adults, most of whom were entirely too hung up on the concept of childhood as this pure, untroubled thing that Nita wasn t sure had ever existed. Plainly, like the counselor thatDairine had been complaining about, too few of them reallyremembered what itwas 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 theirwhole 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, inDairine . 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 butit might be what shattered.

Boy,would I like to be there to seethat.

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

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 knowthat 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 takena 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 beendoing 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, yetanother 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 thatDairine 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 doinga 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. Thencame 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 something here. Who knows Maybe it s fun to be furniture .

Nita turned the page over.Pillars What is this First furniture, now architecture

Abdah/ Pillars Thiscategory of created being is independent of wizard status but still included because of the sharing of various functions and qualities across species and eschatological barriers. The sobriquet Pillars refers to the immense supportive strength inherent in these creatures wherever they appear. The physical and spiritual structure of the Universe and its contents is strengthened against the assaults of evil by the Pillars presence, and weakened by their loss. While they occasionally may also be wizards,abdals display no unusual aptitude for the Art: Their value lies elsewhere. Their status comes from direct endowment by the One; their power is derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality. Some have unusual abilities of perception reaching into other universes, while still seeing the entire physical world as mirage. Some have sufficient control over their physical natures to change their bodies at will, without recourse to normal wizardry, or to travel great distances, or to appear in two places at the same time

Certainty went straight through Nita like a lightning bolt, and not only because of the two-places-at-once line. It was everything else in combination with that. She thought of the knight, of the strength and bravery she d sensed in that version of Darryl, and of the power inherent in the robot. All those experiences were fragments of this bigger picture, pieces of the jigsaw. Nita glanced on down the page.

The Pillars are rarely recognized as such by their contemporaries. Should they become conscious of their own status asabdals , the realization itself renders them ineffective in their role, which is to channel the One s power without obstruction into the strengthening of the world. Their portion of that power is then lost to the Worlds, and with its loss, theabdal dies.

Nita slapped the manual shut and sat there, actually sweating, for a few moments. The language of the manual could be obscure sometimes, but this time Nita was sure she knew perfectly well what it was talking about when it said the Pillars power was derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality. It means what Darryl s got , she thought.Innocence.That plain, straightforward innocence that just goes right through whatever comes at it, like a knife, or bounces any attack off it, like a shield. And that really, really pisses off the Lone Power, so that It just keeps coming at him again and again, which is just the way Darryl wants it

Nita pushed back from the table a little, leaning back in the chair and considering. Normally when the Lone Power turnedIts attention to destroying a wizard during his or her Ordeal, It would lay out no moreenergy than It absolutely had to. The tendency not to waste energy unnecessarily was oneIt still shared with the other Powers. It didn t wasteIts time spending a lot of power on one wizard unless It knew that person was going to be something really special.Dairine, for example , Nita thought.It gave her a lot of grief because she was so young when her Ordeal hit. The kind of power she was going to have, even just for a while, was worth trying to knock out . But Darryl didn t give Nita the same impression of huge and abrupt power thatDairine had, and the manual confirmed his power levels as being, while not unusually low, not unusually high, either.