The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (37 page)

“Stop it right there,” Kit said to the world. The image froze.

He stood there, now the only thing that could move in that whole still reality, and turned slowly, taking it all in: weeds and flowers, summer sunshine, peace. It was perfection, of a kind. The moment, held captive—heart’s desire, caught in one place and unable to escape.

But moments aren’t meant to be held captive. They’re
meant
to escape. That’s what makes them matter.

But I could make perfection, anyway,
Kit thought as he turned, seeing a passing white cabbage butterfly caught in midair, in midstroke of its wings, trapped there as if in amber clearer than water.
I could go to live in it, if I wanted—the world where everything worked. I could even use this power to make myself believe that was where I’d always lived, the way things had always been.

He swallowed.
I could
make
Timeheart.
Another
one.

Kit held that moment for a long, long while, trapped in the grip of his mind, like a butterfly in his hand. He kept turning. The backyard with its backyard sassafras jungle, the long grass to lie in all through this lazy afternoon, looking up at the clouds—and standing there, frozen, but laughing, ready for anything: Nita. Not angry at him, not afraid, not troubled by any dark shadow hanging over her. Here it need never have happened. Here it was fine, had always been fine. He could be here the rest of his life if he liked, and everything, always, would be fine.

And if he could make that, then he could make anything.
Anything.

Maybe this was how it had all started. The manual was “sketchy on the first hundredth of a second,” Tom had said. “Privacy issues.” Was it possibly something as simple as this—that in some other region of space-time, some other being, no more or less powerful than Kit, had stumbled across a spark such as the one he held now, and had created?

If it had happened that way, maybe it could happen that way again?

Here he was. Here was the power. All Kit had to do was
use
it, and get everything right this time. Everything: a whole universe of universes, innumerable, unfolding themselves as he watched—the essence of creation running riot, running rampant, life exploding through it. For a single moment that included and encompassed all moments, stretching out endlessly around him, time without beginning or end; Kit was lost in the vision—

—and then he had to laugh. He started to laugh so hard, he could hardly stand it; his sides started to hurt.

Oh, yeah,
he thought.
Nice try. Gimme a break!

When he was able to breathe again, Kit straightened up and gazed around him. No matter how he created such a perfect place—or had this one been left for him to find?—no matter that he might even be able to delude himself into believing that it was reality, the truth was that it
wouldn’t
be. Elsewhere the real world would go on, people would hurt, life would be alternately happy and miserable—in the real places where wizards were needed to fight the fight, even if they might never see it won. And
this? This isn’t real enough for me,
Kit thought.
I want the kind of reality that surprises me. And, anyway, wizardry isn’t for getting out of reality, out of the world. It’s for getting further
into
it.

He gave that frozen pseudo-Nita one last glance. Then he turned away, back to the butterfly, embedded in air—and let it loose.

The moment resumed. “Kit,” Nita said, “Hey, whatcha—”

Kit squeezed his eyes shut and erased it all.

A moment later he was standing in the darkness again, listening only to the silence, and having a little trouble breathing.
This isn’t going to stop us,
he thought.
I know what the Lone Power trying to stop me feels like. We’ll go all the way through. One way or another, we’ll do what’s necessary.

***

They came to where the corner of Sixth and Thirty-eighth would have been if it hadn’t been just an intersection of two muddy, rushing rivers. There they stopped. Nita could feel the kernel more clearly now; it wasn’t too far away. But somehow this wasn’t making her feel any better. The darkness, that watching presence hidden in it, and the little swarming, clinging malignant cells were all beginning to wear her down. Pralaya was always there, companionable enough, but not really that much help. And again and again the words of the Wizard’s Oath kept coming back to Nita, as she slogged her way along through the dark, resisting water:
“I will guard growth and ease pain.
”

But does there come a time when you
stop
growing? And when you and the universe
agree
that you’re going to stop?

“
I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so…
”

Was there the slightest possibility, here and now, that it
wasn’t
right?

How could you tell, without being one of the Powers?

And if people can’t tell, then the game just isn’t fair!

But that didn’t matter right now. Nita stopped at the corner and looked down Sixth Avenue. The water seemed a little less deep down there; but that overshadowing dark presence seemed much stronger. “The kernel’s there,” she said to Pralaya. “I’m sure of it.”

“I think you’re right,” he said. “What is that—that tallest building there?”

“The Empire State,” Nita said. It struck her as a poor place to hide anything.
But then, Its purpose isn’t to keep the kernel hidden. It’s to let me find it and use it and fail. So that I’ll agree to the bargain—

“Come on,” she said, and splashed down Sixth Avenue with Pralaya swimming along beside her, uncertainty in his dark eyes.

***

Kit and Ponch were moving once more through the darkness. “It fooled us that time,” Ponch said. “But not twice.” The dog was angry.

“It’s not your fault,” Kit said. “It was after me.”

“I should have expected it. But now we know something.”

“What?”

“That you have something that can stop It.”

Kit took a couple of long breaths. That thought had occurred to him.

“I’m telling the darkness,” Ponch said, “to take us to where we’ll learn best what to do to find Nita, to help her.”

Kit’s mouth was dry; he was getting more nervous by the moment. “Are we going to have time for this?”

“All the time we need.”

How much longer they spent in the darkness, he wasn’t sure. Kit could feel in Ponch a terrible sense of urgency, of the darkness resisting, pushing against him, trying to slow him down. But Ponch wasn’t letting it stop him. He was pushing back, fierce, unrelenting. They slowed down, finally stopped, and Kit could feel Ponch pushing, pushing with all his strength against whatever was fighting him—

—until without warning they broke through into the light. Ponch surged forward, the leash-wizardry extending away in front of Kit, while Kit stood still and rubbed his eyes, which were watering in the sudden brilliant light.

It was a beach. He was standing at the water’s edge, and turning, he could see Jones Inlet behind him.

Is this another of Its tricks?
Kit thought, confused.
Another place where I’m supposed to get distracted by what could have been?

But somehow he knew it wasn’t so. Though this was Jones Inlet, it was also something else.

Kit turned, looking south again. It was the Sea: darkness and light under the Sun, Life and the home of Life—all potential, lying burning and swirling under the dawn. “The Sea,” Ponch was barking, shouting, as he ran down the beach and fought with the waves. “The Sea!” And it wasn’t just what dogs always said—
Oh boy, the water!
—but something else, both a question and an answer, a reference to the beginning of things, the oldest Sea from which Life arose.
And our blood’s like that Sea,
Kit thought
The same salinity. The same—

His eyes went wide. Ponch had been right. Here was the solution. This was what the Lone Power was counting on Nita not seeing, because she thought she’d messed it up so badly before.

“You’re right!” Kit yelled to Ponch. “You’re right! Come on, we’ve got to find her, before she starts!”

Ponch came running back, bounced around him a last few times, and then they leaped forward into the darkness together and vanished from the beach, leaving only footprints, which were shortly washed away.

***

Nita stood at the base of the Empire State Building and looked up at it. In this version of New York, there was a great flight of steps up to it, up from the water level, and she immediately went about halfway up them, glad to get out of the water, where the malignant cells were buzzing and swarming more thickly than they had anywhere else. Pralaya came flowing up the stairs along with her, shaking the water out of his golden fur and scratching himself all over. “Those things,” he said, “even though they didn’t really harm me, they make me itch.”

“Me, too,” Nita said. She stood there and craned her neck upward, looking at the terrible height of the tower. Even in her own New York, when you were this close to it, the Empire State always looked as if it was going to fall on you. But here, she wasn’t sure that it might not somehow be possible. And all around them was that terrible shadowy darkness, thicker in the air here than anywhere else, pressing in on them, looking at them.

“Let’s go in,” Nita said. She could hear the kernel now without actually having to listen to it: a buzz, that familiar fizz on the skin. Part of her was afraid; it shouldn’t have been this easy to find. And she knew why it had been so easy….

They went in through the doors at the top of the steps and found themselves in a vast gray hall full of shadows. Standing up, here and there in the dimness, were many banks of steely-doored elevators, which Nita saw were intended to go in only one direction: down. All around the great floor of the place were a number of square pools, and Nita looked at them and decided not to step into any of them. They had that black-water depth that suggested they had no real bottoms.

“Right,” Nita said. She glanced once at her charm bracelet, made sure that the spells on it were active, and began walking through the place, listening.

Pralaya followed, pausing by each of the elevator banks and cocking his head to listen. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“I am,” Nita said. “Not up, but down.” She paused by one of the pools, listening.

“Not here,” she said softly. “But this is the right direction.” She passed between two more of the great square pools, listening again. That faint fizz on her skin got more pronounced.

“That one,” she said softly, and walked over to it. She knelt by the edge of the water, listening, then got up again and moved around to the other side of the pool.
Right there,
she thought. The kernel was well down in the black water, but not out of reach. Nita shook the charm bracelet around to check the status of her personal shields again, twiddled with one charm to adjust the shield just slightly, and then with the other arm reached down into the water.

It was freezing cold, so cold she could hardly breathe, and she could feel her fingers going numb. But she groped, and reached deeper, though she felt the buzzing and stinging of little dark warped-RNA lancets against her skin. None of them was getting through … yet.

There.

Slowly she reached under what she’d felt; and the jabbing of the little poisonous black needles against her skin increased, but Nita forced herself not to rush. Slowly she closed her fingers around what was waiting there for her. Slowly she drew it up.

It was an apple.

Nita stood up with it in her hands. It dripped black water, and as that water fell into the pool, the pool’s surface came alive with more of the ugly warped little tumor-cell shapes that had swarmed around her and Pralaya outside. These, though, were bigger, and somehow nastier. They had no eyes, but they were nonetheless looking at her and seeing prey, the kind they already knew the taste of.

“Okay,” she said softly, and turned the “apple” over in her hands, feeling for the way its control structures were arranged. She found the outermost level quickly, let her hands sink into what now stopped being an apple and started being that familiar tangle of light.

All around, the shadows leaned in to watch what she was doing. Nita gulped and looked down into the pool, where those awful little black shapes had now put their “heads” up out of the water and were looking at her, hating her.

Guys,
Nita said,
I’d like you to stop doing what you’re doing to my mother.

The buzzing, snarling chorus said,
No! We have a right to live, a right to be the way we are!

I mean it,
Nita said.
It’s really got to stop. It’s
going
to stop, one way or another. It can be with your cooperation, or without it.

No!
they snarled.
We are her. We are of her. We live in her. She gave us birth.

Not on purpose!

That does not matter. We have rights here. We were born. We have a right to do what her body taught us to do, made us to do.
The snarling was getting louder, more threatening.
You are also of her. What we do to her, we can do to
you
, given time.

Nita didn’t like the sound of that.
Guys,
she said,
last chance. Agree to stop doing what you’re doing, or I must abolish you.
It was the formal phrasing of a wizard who, however reluctantly, discovers that he or she must kill.

The snarling scaled up; the waters in the pools all around her roiled. Shaking, Nita squeezed and manipulated the power-strands in the kernel until she found the one control sequence that managed the shapes of proteins in this internal space. She stroked it slowly and carefully into a shape that would forbid this kind of tissue structure and warped RNA-stranding to exist in the local space-time. It was an average, an imperfect solution, as Tom and Carl had warned it might have to be. But it was going to have to be enough.

One last chance, guys,
she said.