But she was afraid. It'd be dumb not to admit that, Nita thought. All I have to do is push through the fear. And at least Kit'll be there to help.
The kernel in her hands sang softly, like a plucked string, as someone else came into the playroom. She turned to see who it was. Way back among the furniture, a golden-furred form sat up on its haunches and peered around. "Pralaya?" Nita called.
Abruptly he was right beside her. "That was quick," Nita said.
"Microtransit," Pralaya said, dropping down on all six feet again. "When you know a kernel's signature, if it's not too complex or unstable, you can home on it. Most of us learn this one pretty quickly; it's fairly simple." He yawned.
"You sound tired," Nita said as they started to walk back toward the furniture. "I just finished a next-to-last workout," Pralaya
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said. "Shortly I'll have to do the real piece of work, but not right this moment. I'm considering a few last options. What about you?"
"I've got to do my next-to-last, too," Nita said. "Or I think it will be. There's not much time left. They're going to be operating on my mom the day after tomorrow."
"How are you holding up?"
There were moments when the darkness here seemed to press in unusually closely around Nita. This was one of them. "Not so well," she said. "I'm scared a lot of the time. It makes it hard to work." She made a face. "Just another of the Lone One's favorite tactics—to use your own fear to make what you do less effective."
"It's a tactic that has another side, though," Pralaya said. "One you can use to your advantage. Fear can keep you sharp and make you sensitive to solutions you might not have seen otherwise."
"I guess. But I could do without Its tactics, at the moment, or Its inventions. Especially the first one It came up with."
"Death...," Pralaya said, musing. "Well, it's struck me that the Powers have been fairly philosophical about Their dealings with death and entropy. What They can't cure, we must endure, or so They say."
Nita nodded. "I guess we all wonder about why sometimes. Why the Powers That Be didn't just reverse what the Lone Power had done. Or trash everything and start all over if They couldn't repair the damage."
They got back to the furniture, and Nita dropped the kernel to its more usual place on the table. "Well,"
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Pralaya said, "the manual is sparing with the details. But I think the other Powers had only a limited amount of energy left to Them afterward. The Lone One wasn't just another Power; It was first among equals, mightiest of all the Subcreators. Terrible energies were entrusted to It when things got started, and when It had expended those energies, they weren't available for use elsewhere by the Others."
Nita looked down at the kernel. "The Lone Power's changing now, though," she said. "Ever so slowly..."
"So they say. Not that that does us much good, here and now. Falling's easy. Climbing's hard, and It has a long climb ahead. And meantime, we have to keep on fighting Its many shadows among the worlds, and in our own hearts, as if no victory'd been won."
"The shadows in our hearts...," Nita said softly. She'd had too close a look at her own shadows when
Dairine passed through her Ordeal, and since then she had wished often enough that there were some way to get rid of them. But there wasn't; not even wizards can make things happen just by wishing.
"I've got to get going," she said. "I'll stop in when I've finished my run."
"I'll probably still be here," Pralaya said. "I wanted to talk to Pont about a couple of things." "Or..." Nita hesitated. "No, never mind; you're tired."
Pralaya gave her an amused look. "You're thinking that another point of view to triangulate with might not be a bad idea."
"Seriously, if you're tired, though—" 303
"You are, too," Pralaya said, "and you're not letting it stop you." He got up. "Why not, if you like? I may as well spend the time, till Pont shows up, doing something useful."
Nita hesitated just a moment more, then smiled. "Yeah," she said. "Let's go."
She got her transit circle ready. Lucky he was here, she thought. While Pont was friendly enough, there was a congenial quality about Pralaya that made him easier to work with, and the sharpness of his mind and the way he saw the aschetic universes were advantages.
Luck, though? said something at the back of her mind, something faintly uneasy. Is there really such a thing?
"Ready?" Pralaya said, dropping his own transit circle to the ground. "Ready," Nita said.
They vanished.
Two hours by the playroom's time, much later by Nita's watch, she and Pralaya returned to the playroom —and Nita was never so glad to see such a boring, bland worldscape in her life, after the turbulent one she and Pralaya had just come out of. And that one had been, so her manual had warned her, more like the inside of a human body than anything else she'd worked with.
"I still feel silly for having expected to see tubes and veins and things," Nita said, as she flopped down into one of the chairs, which, though made for a hominid, had legs that bent in different places than hers did.
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Pralaya reached over to the table, picked up the kernel in two paws, and tossed it to her. Nita turned it over in her hands, found the mass-manipulation part of the construct, and twiddled with it until the chair changed shape beneath her. "And I wasn't expecting all that sand," she said.
"The symbolism's a good-enough reflection of how a malignant illness like your mother's works," Pralaya said, curling up on the lounger next to Nita's chair. "Scrape it away in one place...the cells just keep breeding, filling in the gaps. And as for the tubes and organs and so on, working with them as such wouldn't help you. It's not your mother's tubes you're trying to cure; it's all of her. A big job."
Nita nodded, and rubbed her eyes. Finding the kernel had not been difficult, much to her relief, though it had been hidden in what seemed a world's worth of desert, with only the occasional eroded skyscraperpeak sticking up out of the sand.
But the practice malignancy that the aschetic universe had created for her had been much more than she could handle. She had managed to get rid of the viruses in a large area of it, but only by brute force, rather than talking them out of what they were doing. There had been billions of them, as many of them as there had been grains of sand, and their response to Nita had been furious, a storm of selfpreservation. More than once they had almost buried her under dune after rolling dune... and when she had run out of both energy and time that could be spent in that universe, even after blasting clean a large part of that huge waste, she
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could feel the rest of it lying under the scorching, unfriendly sky, simply waiting for her to leave so that it could get on with what it had been doing... killing someone.
/ can't give up now, Nita thought. Yet the thought of her mother's situation was really starting to scare her.
What if it's all for nothing? she thought. What if even this—
She hadn't wanted to say it to her mother, hadn't wanted to hear it said. But half the power inherent in wizardry lay in telling the truth about things. To deny the truth was to deny your own power.
"Problems?" Pralaya said quietly. Nita paused, then nodded.
"I'm getting scared," Nita said. "I'm beginning to think... think that if what's wrong with my mom is as bad as things were in that last universe, then I may not be able to do it." It was hard to say, but it had to be said.