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.“
Kit left Tom’s by use of another transit spell, one that let him out in a sheltered spot by the town library. He spent a while there Web surfing, printing out what he’d found, and then located a few books and checked them out. His mother was up when he got home, showering; by the time she came out, wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair, Kit was lying on the living room floor with papers and books all around him. His mama paused, looking over his shoulder at one of the printouts he was reading. “Autism?” she said.
“Yeah.”
She headed past him into the kitchen to find her big mug, filled it with the coffee that Kit’s pop had left in the pot for her, sugared it, and came back in to sit down on the sofa behind him. “Big subject, son,” she said.
“You know much about it?”
“Enough to get by.” She drank some coffee. “There are a lot of different kinds, and we’re still feeling our way around to the causes. Once they thought autism was caused by being raised wrong, by having parents who were cold or abusive. That theory got thrown out a long time ago. But there are still a lot of possible causes, and some of them seem to include each other. Some autism may be too little of one chemical or another in the brain. Or it may be caused by an enzyme that’s missing, so that certain chemicals build up in the nervous system and damage it, or make it behave erratically.
It may be caused by something wrong with the immune system, or rogue antibodies that attack brain and neural tissue, or even a virus, or pollution, or vitamin A deficiency…” She raised one hand in a
“who knows” gesture, then let it fall. “There’re a hundred answers, maybe all of them right sometimes… Is this for school?”
“No. It’s what Tom wanted to see me about.”
His mama’s eyes went wide. “Your missing person? He’s autistic? Oh, honey, that’s terrible!
His parents must be heartbroken. Do you think you’re going to be able to find him?”
“I already have,” Kit said, sitting down at the table and tilting his chair back to rock on its rear legs. “He’s at school. Centennial, over in Baldwin.”
“What? Well, that’s a relief! I thought you’d meant he’d vanished. So how is he missing?”
“It was just a figure of speech, Mama.” Kit had been wondering for a while how much detail he should give his parents about his wizardry. Now it occurred to him that he should have been giving them a lot more, if only to keep them from worrying. “When the wizardry first comes to you, it doesn’t come all at once. You get a test first: your Ordeal. If you pass, you’re a wizard. If you don’t…”
Immediately, the look on his mother’s face suggested to him that he might have misstepped.
“You die” his mother said.
“Not always,” Kit said. “Sometimes you just lose the power that was given you to take the test with.” His mama was looking at him rather narrowly now, and Kit realized that she would immediately detect any attempt to soften this. “But it’s true that some kids don’t come back,” Kit said. “Some disappearances are failed Ordeals. Maybe a few percent.”
His mother sat, quietly digesting that, and had another drink of her coffee. “So this Ordeal,” she said. “He’s having some kind of problem with it?”