So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (7 page)

What in the worlds—?
said a voice that neither of them recognized.

Out!!
Kit said, and hooked the spell into the added power that the newcomer provided, and
pulled.

Plain pale daylight fell down around them, heavy as a collapsed tent. Gravity yanked at them. Kit fell over sideways in the dirt and lay there panting on the ground like someone who’s run a race. Nita sagged, covered her face, bent over double right down to the ground, struggling for breath.

Eventually she began to recover, but she put off moving or opening her eyes. The book had warned that spelling had its prices, and one of them was the physical exhaustion that goes along with any large, mostly mental work of creation. Nita felt as if she had just been through about a hundred English tests with essay questions, one after another. “Kit?” she said, worried by his silence.

“Nnngggg,” Kit said, and rolled over into a sort of crouch, holding his head in his hands. “Ooooh. Turn off the
Sun.
”

“It’s not that bad,” Nita said, opening her eyes. Then she winced and shut them in a hurry. It was.

“How long’ve we been here?” Kit muttered. “The Sun shouldn’t be showing here yet.”

“It’s—” Nita said. She opened her eyes again to check her watch and was distracted by a bright light to her right that was entirely too low to be the Sun. She squinted at it and then forgot what she had started to say.

Hanging in midair about three feet away, inside the circle, was a spark of eye-searing white fire. It looked no bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion to its size, and was giving off light as bright as that of a two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in midair, up and down, looking like a will-o’-the-wisp plugged into too powerful a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open and
stared.

The bright point dimmed slightly, appeared to describe a small tight circle so that it could take in Kit, the drawn circle, trees and leaves and sky; then it came to rest again, staring back at Nita. Though she couldn’t catch what Kit was feeling, now that the spell was over, she could feel the light’s emotions quite clearly—amazement, growing swiftly into unbelieving pleasure. Suddenly it blazed up white-hot again.

Dear Artificer,
it said in bemused delight,
I’ve blown my quanta and gone to the Good Place!

Nita sat there in silence for a moment, thinking a great many things at once.
Uhh,
… she thought. And,
So I wanted to be a wizard, huh? Serves me right. Something falls into my world and thinks it’s gone to Heaven. Boy, is
it
gonna get a shock.
And,
What in the world
is
it, anyway?

“Kit,” Nita said. “Excuse me a moment,” she added, nodding with abrupt courtesy at the light source. “Kit.” She turned slightly and reached down to shake him by the shoulder. “Kit. C’mon, get up. We have company.”

“What?” Kit said, scrubbing at his eyes and starting to straighten up. “Oh no, the binding didn’t blow, did it?”

“Nope. It’s the extra power you called in. I think it came back with us.”

“Well, it—
oh,”
Kit said, as he finally managed to focus on the sedately hovering brightness.

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ And it says it’s blown its quanta. Is that dangerous?” she asked the light.

Dangerous?
It laughed inside, a crackling sound like an overstimulated Geiger counter.
Artificer, child, it means I’m
dead
.
“Child” wasn’t precisely the concept it used; Nita got a fleeting impression of a huge volume of dust and gas contracting gradually toward a common center, slow, confused, and nebulous. She wasn’t flattered.

“I hate to tell you this,” Nita said, “but I’m not sure this is the Good Place. It sure doesn’t seem that way to
us
.”

The light drew a figure eight in the air, a shrug.
But it looks that way to me,
it said.
Look how orderly everything is! And how much life there is in just one place! Where I come from, even a spore’s worth of life is scarcer than atoms in a comet’s tail.

“Sorry,” Kit said, “but what
are
you?”

The light said something Nita could make little sense of. The concept she got looked like page after page of mathematical equations. Kit raised his eyebrows. “It uses the Speech,” he commented as he listened.

That Nita could tell, but she couldn’t make much of the terminology as yet. “So what is it?”

Kit looked confused. “Its name says that it came from way out in space somewhere, and it has a mass equal to—wow, to five or six blue-white giant stars and a few thousand planets. And emits all up and down the matter-energy spectrum, all kinds of light and radiation and even some subatomic particles.” He shrugged. “You have any idea what that is?”

Nita stared at the light in growing disbelief. “Where’s all your mass?” she asked. “If you’ve got that much, the gravity should have crushed us up against you the second you showed up.”

It’s elsewhere,
the light said offhandedly.
I have a singularity-class temporospatial claudication.

“A warp,” Nita whispered. “A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?”

It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory.
Do I look like a hole?

“Do I look like a cloud of lukewarm gas?” Nita snapped back, and then sighed—her mouth was getting the better of her again. “Uh, sorry. That’s just what we call your kind of—uh—creature. Because you act like a hole in the Universe that light and radiation come through. I know you’re not, really. But, Kit,” she said, turning, “where’s my pen? And where’s the power you were after? Didn’t the spell work?”

“Spells always work,” Kit said. “That’s what the manual says. When you ask for something, you always get back something that’ll help you solve your problem, or be the solution itself.” He looked entirely confused. “We asked for that power aura for me, and your pen for you—that was all. If we got a white hole, it means he’s the answer—”

“If he’s the answer,” Nita said, bemused, “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

This is all absolutely fascinating,
the white hole said,
but I have to find a functional-Advisory nexus in a hurry. I’ve learned that the
Naming of Lights
has gone missing, and I managed to find a paradimensional net with enough empty loci to get me to an Advisory in a hurry. But something seems to have gone wrong. I don’t think you’re Advisories.

“Uh, no,” Kit said. “I think we called you—”

Wait,
you
called
me? The white hole regarded Kit with mixed reverence and amazement.
You’re one of the Powers born of Life? Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize You—I know You can take any shape but somehow I’d always thought of You as being bigger. A quasar, or a mega-nova.
The white hole made a feeling of rueful amusement.
It’s
confusing
being dead!

“Oh, brother,” Kit said. “Look, I’m not—you’re not—just
not.
We made a spell and we called you. I don’t think you’re dead.”

If you say so,
the white hole said, polite but doubtful.
You called
me,
though? Me personally? I don’t think we’ve met before.

“No, we haven’t,” Nita said. “But we were doing this spell, and we found something, but something found us, too, and we wouldn’t have been able to get back here unless we called in some extra power—so we did, and it was you, I guess. You’re not mad, are, you?” she asked timidly. The thought of what a live, intelligent white hole might be able to do if it got annoyed scared her badly.

Mad? No. As I said, I was trying to get out of my own space to get the news about the Naming of Lights to someone who could use it, and then all of a sudden there was a paranet with enough loci to handle all the dimensions I carry, so I grabbed it.
The white hole made another small circle, looking around him curiously.
Maybe it did work. Are there Advisories in this—on this—What is this, anyway?

Kit looked at Nita. “What?”

This,
the white hole said,
all of this.
He made another circle.

“Oh! A planet,” Nita said. “See, there’s our star.” She pointed, and the white hole rotated slightly to look.

Artificer within us,
he said,
maybe I have blown my quanta, after all. I always wanted to see a planet, but I never got around to it. Habit, I guess. You get used to sitting around emitting X rays after a while, and you don’t think of doing anything else. You want to see some?
he asked suddenly. He sounded a little insecure.

“Uh, maybe you’d better not,” Nita said.

Why not? They’re really pretty.

“We’re not built to see them. And we’re also not built to take hard radiation. Our atmosphere shuts most of it out.”

An actual planet,
the white hole said, wondering and delighted,
with a genuine atmosphere. Well! If this is a planet, there definitely has to be an Advisory around somewhere. Could you help me find one?

“Uhh—” Kit looked uncertainly at the white hole. “Sure. But do you think you could help me find some power? And Nita get her pen back?”

The white hole looked Kit up and down.
Some potential, some potential,
he muttered.
I could probably have you emitting light pretty quickly, if we worked together on a regular basis. Maybe even some alpha. We’ll see. What’s a pen?

“What’s your name?” Kit asked. “I mean, we can’t just call you ‘hey you’ all the time.”

True,
the white hole said.
My name is Khairelikoblepharehglukumeilichephreidosd’enagouni—
and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colors that was evidently the visual translation.

“Ky—elik—” Nita began.

“Fred,” Kit said quickly. “Well,” he added as they looked at him again, “if we have to yell for help or something, the other way’s too long. And that was the only part I got, anyway.”

“Is that okay with you?” Nita asked.

The white hole made his figure-eight shrug again.
Better than having my truename mangled, I guess,
he said, and chuckled silently in another flicker of light.
Fred, then. And you are?

“Nita.”

“Kit.”

I see why you like your namings short,
Fred said.
All right. Tell me what a ‘pen’ is, and I’ll try to help you find it. But we really must get to an Advisory as fast as we can.

“Okay,” Kit said. “Let’s break the circle and go talk.”

“Sounds good,” Nita said, and began to erase the diagrams they had drawn. Kit cut the wizards’ knot and scuffed the circle open in a few places, while Nita took a moment to wave her hand through the now empty air. “Not bad for a first spell,” she said with satisfaction.

I meant to ask,
Fred said politely.
What’s a spell?

Nita sighed, and smiled, and picked up her book, motioning Fred to follow her over to where Kit sat. It was going to be a long afternoon, but she didn’t care. Magic was loose in the world.

The afternoon turned inevitably into evening, and as evening started to shade toward night Nita and Kit inevitably had to go their separate ways. It wasn’t that either of them precisely
hated
going home, even under these circumstances. Their family lives were fairly tolerable, and as they got around to discussing such things, it turned out that they both got around well enough with their parents and their sister or sisters (Kit, as it turned out, had two). But Nita in particular shortly started to discover that it was a nuisance to have to hide things… especially since Dairine had the nose of a bloodhound for concealment, and the clever nosiness of someone from CSI when it came to finding out what was really going on.

That Nita should turn up so late without having called or texted first was in itself interesting to Dairine, and when Nita finally came swinging in so long after dinner, she found her little sister actually lurking in the kitchen and (unusually for her) helping her mom clear up after those of the family who’d already eaten.

“Sorry, Mom,” Nita said as she came in and shrugged out of her backpack. “I got distracted…”

“No problem, honey,” her mother said. “It wasn’t anything fancy tonight, you can always microwave it. Just go wash up first.”

“Where were you?” Dairine demanded, following Nita through the kitchen.

“Out reading,” Nita said. This was true, insofar as it went. She found that all the business in the manual about it being important for a wizard not to play fast and loose with the truth wasn’t a problem in and of itself. But normally one of the ways she managed Dairine, when her sister got too curious about things, had been to simply lie through her teeth. With that option suddenly unavailable, life was going to get a little more complicated than usual.
Good thing I’ve got a secret weapon…

“New books? Lemme see!” Dairine said, making a grab for Nita’s backpack.

Nita swung it easily out of her reach as she headed through the kitchen and made for her room. “Mom, please get the dweebling off my case for five minutes while I go attend to my bodily functions?!”

“Dairine,” Nita’s mother said behind her in her patented patience-of-a-saint voice, “let your sister breathe for a few moments, she’s just in the door.”

“But Mom, I just want to
see…”

Nita made her escape at best speed and hurriedly shut her bedroom door. She pulled the manual out of the backpack and dropped it on her desk; then yanked her closet door open and tossed the backpack gently up onto the top shelf.

A second later Fred emerged from under the backpack’s flap. He hung there in midair above the top shelf, brilliantly illuminating the clothes and shoes and piled-up papers and books and other stuff in the closet as he looked around him.
What a charming… volume of space,
he said, rather in the tone of voice of someone who’s been expecting a Marriott and instead finds a Motel 6.

“More inner than outer, sorry,” Nita said very softly. “Look, here’s a little private place for you.” Also on the top shelf was an empty shoebox: she pushed the lid aside. “Stay in here, okay? And don’t let anybody but me see you. I’ll come get you out in a while.”