Please
, Ponch said in a somewhat offended tone. Kit smiled in slight amusement as they headed for the doors. Once upon a time, his dog wouldn’t have been quite so focused during a wizardry, but lately, since Ponch had started actively finding things — like other universes — this had changed.
They went up to the doors together. They were all closed — no surprise, in this weather — and Kit was unwilling just to pull one of them open: Someone might be watching. Never mind. We can just walk through the glass
, he thought. But then, through the glass of the door, Kit saw the van driver coming back toward them. “Okay,” Kit said softly to Ponch, “he can let us in. Just step back and don’t let him bump into you. We’ll slip past before the door closes behind him.”
Fine.
The van driver, a small, slender man in a big parka, pushed the door open right in front of Kit’s nose, and then reached up to the closing mechanism to pull down the little toggle that would hold the door open. Convenient, Kit thought, and slipped through the door with Ponch close behind him.
In the main tile-and-terrazzo corridor of the school, a number of people were moving around; some of them were coming toward the doors — some students, Kit thought, heading for the van with a few teachers. Field trip? he wondered. Then Kit paused, for the locator spell said in his head, Proximity alert — subject of search within fifty meters. Forty meters—
That’s them
, Kit thought. “Ponch, come on,” Kit whispered. “Over here—” Together they moved off to one side of the hallway as the group approached. Kit started examining them for signs of that faint, glowing halo.
There were five kids in the group. Three of them were girls of different ages, one quite short and round, the other two taller and thinner; they went by Kit in silence, not speaking to each other, though one of them was smiling a placid smile. Two teachers followed close behind, then came the two boys and a third teacher.
One was a thin, small, blond guy, who went past with a very uneven gait. But Kit’s attention was on the boy behind him. Visible only to Kit and Ponch, the locator halo clung to him. He was, perhaps, eleven years old, an African American kid with a handsome, sharp little face. He was slender, and was dressed in jeans and a bright T-shirt and beat-up sneakers. Handsome his face was, but also expressionless, flat and as still as a mask, his eyes looking only at the ground. He held his body tilted slightly forward, and he went past Kit fast, breaking almost into a run as he headed through the doors out into the cold, gray day.
Kit turned and followed him back outside. The teachers helped the other kids into the van: Darryl was the last one in. One of the teachers was helping him with his seat belt. This took some moments. And while the teachers were sitting down, while the van driver came back to let the school door close again, Darryl began, very slowly and steadily, to bang his head against the window of the van.
Kit’s heart seized. Next to him, Ponch stood looking. The driver started up the van, and slowly drove away.
That was him
, Ponch said.
“That was him,” Kit said softly. But what’s the matter with him? Though he thought perhaps he had a clue. The manual would be able to confirm it… now that Kit knew what kinds of questions he needed to ask.
“Did you get a scent on him?” Kit said.
Yes. I can find him again, wherever he goes. Even when he’s not here, like a few moments ago
, Ponch added.
Kit gave his dog a look. “What? He was right in front of us.”
Some of him. Not all.
Ponch wasn’t given to making cryptic statements without reason: He was still developing the language skills to tell Kit what he was perceiving, and there were sometimes misunderstandings as a result. “Okay,” Kit said. “We’ll figure out what that means later. For the moment, at least we know what he looks like… and we can start making a plan to find a way to talk to him.”
If he can talk at all…
He glanced at the timekeeper inside the front cover of the manual. “Come on,” Kit said. “I have to get back to school.”
And you have to feed me.
Normally Kit would have laughed at this, yet another of Ponch’s stratagems to get an extra meal.
But the laughter had been knocked out of him by the unexpectedness of what he’d just seen. Since when do the Powers That Be dump an autistic kid into an Ordeal?
“Come on,” Kit said to Ponch. They went home.
After school Kit went straight to Tom and Carl’s, the discreet way, to tell him what he’d found.
“Physically, he’s there all right… mostly,” Kit said, sitting at the table with Tom again. “Or so Ponch says. I’m still working on what he meant by that conditional description he gave me. But Darryl’s problem… Why didn’t anything about it turn up in the manual before?”
“Need-to-know restrictions, possibly,” Tom said. “And often enough the manual’ll let you find out something for yourself, rather than just tell you about it. That approach can keep you from prejudging a situation.“ He paged through his own manual to Darryl’s entry. ”Certainly it confirms that he has an individualized type of autistic disorder. The manual says it’s a fairly recent development. He hasn’t been autistic from a very young age: It seems to have come on him suddenly, shortly after he turned eight.“
“So the Ordeal itself didn’t have anything to do with it?”
“I don’t know that for sure. It wouldn’t seem to be connected… but we could be wrong there. At any rate, because the manual doesn’t say anything further, it suggests that the Powers That Be don’t think we need any more detail on that particular facet of the situation. Or that what you discover during investigation may be more valuable than what They already know.”
“It doesn’t seem fair somehow,” Kit said after a moment, trying to find words for what was making him so uncomfortable. “You’d think he has enough problems. Why’s he been stuck in the middle of an Ordeal, on top of everything else?”
Tom shook his head. “If he’s been offered wizardry, that means that there’s some problem to which be is the solution. But he can’t merely have been offered wizardry; he also has to have been able to agree to the offer. He found the Wizard’s Oath, in some form or another, and he accepted it.
Now we have to find out how we can assist…without removing the basic challenge.”
Kit nodded. “It makes you wonder, though,” he said. “If he’s the answer, what’s the question?”
“I think I know what you mean,” Tom said. “He does seem an unlikely candidate. But even in what we laughably refer to as ‘normal’ life, all too often the unlikely people turn out to be the ones who have the answers; the objects you would have thrown away are the ones you find you can’t do without. ‘The stone rejected by the builder becomes the cornerstone.’” Tom got a wry look then. “It happens too often to be accidental. Is the universe trying to tell us something important about the way it works — that sometimes even what we call fate has an element of unpredictability?”
Kit nodded. “Or maybe the One’s just saying, ‘Don’t be so sure you know it all.’”
Tom stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Could be. There are people in our world who’ve made a tremendous difference but who would have died in another time. In this time, people every day are making choices of who should live and die on the basis of criteria like whether you’re going to be the ‘right’ sex, or whether your whole body is going to work perfectly. Who knows how we may damage ourselves if we insist too hard on what, this week, looks like perfection.”