“So what I’m doing isn’t like… withdrawal or anything?” Nita said. “Not… unhealthy?”
“Oh, no. Don’t forget, there are wizards who do nothing but read the manual.” Tom looked thoughtful. “I wouldn’t be that far down the road. My job tends more toward focused research. But I still spend maybe seventy percent of my theoretically ‘inactive’ time reading these things. It’s a big universe out there. Just this planet, for example: Think how much you can discover about it just by going to the library, or rummaging around on the Web. Then imagine you have access to a book that contains most of the salient facts about your universe. Wouldn’t you spend a lot of time between the covers?”
“Uh,” Nita said. “Well, I guess I have been.”
“So, at the very least, even if you didn’t have a goal you were working toward, which I think you have, I wouldn’t consider your time wasted,” Tom said. “As for you not being on active assignment, that’s between you and the Powers. They value the work we do sufficiently to avoid pushing us to function when it wouldn’t be appropriate to the wizard’s own best interests.
Emergencies do come up; but routinely, if being on duty would impair your own status, you’re not called up.“ He eyed Nita. ”If you’re starting to feel the need to get back into the saddle, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’d be the one to tell me.“
Nita examined the floor in some detail for a few moments before she said anything. “It’s not like I actually feel all that much better,” she said, hardly above a whisper. She was watching herself with great care to see if she was going to start crying again; she couldn’t have borne it right this minute.
“Every now and then I forget to hurt… but the rest of the time… I keep seeing those last few hours with my mom, over and over.” Then she frowned. “But I can’t just sit around. It’s not bringing my mother back. And I keep getting the feeling she’d be annoyed with me for, I don’t know, for indulging myself in just sitting around and feeling bad when I should be busy with something important. Because this is important.”
Tom nodded. “I don’t think I can argue with that,” he said. “Meanwhile, tell me what you’ve been up to.”
Nita spent a few minutes describing the contacts she’d been having from the aliens, especially the last one — the knight — and the cryptic message he, or it, had left her.
When she was finished, Tom shook his head. “‘What fights the Enemy…’” he said. “You’re right, the phrasing’s interesting.”
“You think this alien’s a wizard?”
“Hard to tell,” Tom said. “There are lots of creatures all over the universe who both use the Speech and work to oppose the Lone Power without being wizards.“ He shrugged. ”For the time being, I’d keep trying to get through, I suppose, and see if you can work inward to a mode where there’s more clarity.“
“Yeah. I’m going to try the lucid dreaming again tonight, I think. So far, that’s where I’ve had the best results.” Nita frowned. “I guess that’s the other thing that’s worried me. The possibility of getting stuck in a dreamworld…”
“I’m not sure I see that as a danger for you,” Tom said. “I’d almost suggest the danger would lie in too much hardheaded practicality… in being too tough on yourself. For the time being, you seem to be okay. Let me know how you progress with your ‘alien,’ anyway.”
“Yeah.”
Nita got up and slipped into her parka, glancing at Tom’s stack of manuals again. “You have to learn that whole thing this year?”
“And keep Carl from blowing up the house,” Tom said. “Even wizardry may be insufficient to the task. See you later.”
“Kit, querido,” Kit’s mama said, “if you feed that dog so many dog biscuits, you’ll spoil his appetite for dinner.”
In the kitchen, adding a last few seasonings to what would shortly be a pot of minestrone soup, Kit’s father laughed out loud. “Impossible.”
Kit was sitting on the dining room sofa, trying to read one of the books on autism his mom had brought home for him. The language was pretty technical sometimes, but he was more than willing to struggle through it; the analysis of autism in this book was making some sense to him in terms of what he’d been getting from Darryl. There were apparently autistic people who found the complications of life and emotion so threatening, the book said, that when they did artwork, it often featured landscapes that looked sterile and empty to a casual viewer — but the artists’ intent was to express a desire for a little peace, for relief from the assault on their senses that caused them such pain. Since coming across this idea in the book, Kit had been doing his best to get the whole thing read, mining it for ways to make sure that he actually got some good out of his conversation with Darryl, when it finally happened.
Unfortunately the reading was being made difficult, if not impossible, by the large black muzzle that kept insinuating itself between Kit and the open pages, and the big brown eyes that looked beseechingly up into Kit’s. Just one more, Ponch said.
“You’re gonna turn into a blimp,” Kit said.
I‘ll be a happy blimp, Ponch said. What’s a blimp?
Kit’s mama laughed. Kit glanced up at her.
“He’s loud sometimes, honey,” his mama said, handing Kit’s papa the pepper shaker as he held his hand out for it. “I don’t know why you can’t hear it.”
Kit’s pop shook his head as he looked down into the pot, grinding pepper in. “From what Kit says, I don’t know why you can hear it at all. None of us should be able to.”
“Maybe it’s because I usually feed him in the mornings,” Kit’s mama said. “I’m used to hearing him complain that he’s not getting enough.” She made a kind of rrrgh noise that went up into a whine at the end, a fair imitation of Ponch’s reaction to an empty dish when there was someone around who could give him the rest of the can of dog food.
Ponch’s eyes moved at that, a sideways glance. Her accent’s not bad. I could teach her Cyene.
“Let’s not deal with this right now,” Kit said. He could just see his mom going down the street to try to talk sense to Tinkerbell.
One more
! Ponch said.
“One,” Kit said. He gave Ponch the last dog biscuit in the box, put the book aside, and got up to throw the box away.
“The onions done yet?” his mama said.
“Nearly,” said Kit’s pop, as Kit stomped the box flat to make it go in the trash can. Behind Kit, the emphatic crunching noises by the sofa came to an end, and Ponch ran into the kitchen. Out?
“Sure,” Kit said, opening the door. A fierce cold wind came in as Ponch shot out.
“Shut that, sweetie. It’s freezing!” Kit’s mama said.
“Gonna snow tonight, they said on the TV,” said Kit’s pop, picking up the frying pan in which the onions had been sizzling, and scraping them out into the soup as Kit shut the door.
“A lot?” Kit said.
“Six to eight inches.”
Kit sighed. It wouldn’t be anything like enough to make them keep school closed on Monday.
That would take at least a few feet. Not for the first time he wished that it wasn’t unethical to talk a snowstorm into dumping three feet of snow onto his immediate neighborhood. It was fun to think about, but the trouble he would have gotten into with Tom and Carl, not to mention the Powers That Be, would have made the pleasure short-lived.