The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition Read online

  It took a few moments for her to hear the answer: even with the Speech, there was no dropping instantly into a tree’s time sense from a human life’s speed. Not bad this time out, not bad at all, the tree said modestly. Going on assignment?

  “Just a quick one,” Nita said. “I hope.”

  Need anything from met?

  “No, that last replacement’s still in good shape. Thanks, though.”

  You’re always welcome. Go well, then.

  She leaned for a moment more to let her time sense come back up to its normal speed, then patted the rowan tree’s trunk and went out into the open space by the birdbath. There she paused for a little to just listen to it all: life, going about its business all around her—the scratchy self-absorbed noise of the grass growing, the faint rustle and hum of bugs and earthworms contentedly digging in the ground, the persistent little string music of a garden spider fastening web strand to web strand in a nearby bush—repetitive, intense, and mathematically precise. Everything was purposeful. Everything was, if not actually intelligent, then at least aware (if not necessarily self-aware)—even things that science didn’t usually think were aware, because science didn’t yet know how to measure or overhear the kinds of consciousness they had.

  Nita took a deep breath, let it out again. This was the core of wizardry for her: hearing it all going, and keeping it all going—putting in a word in the Speech here or a carefully constructed spell there, fixing broken things, helping what was hurt to heal and get going again… and being astonished, delighted, sometimes scared to death in the process, but never, ever bored.

  Nita said a single word in the Speech, at the same time stroking one hand across the empty air in search of the access to the little pinched-in pocket of time space where she kept some of her wizardly equipment.

  Responsive to the word she’d spoken, a little tab of clear air went hard between her fingers. She pulled it from left to right like a zipper, and then slipped her hand into the opening and felt around. A second later she came out with a piece of equipment she usually kept ready, a peeled rod of rowan wood that had been left out in full moonlight. She touched the claudication closed again, then looked around her and said to the grass, “Excuse me…”

  The grass muttered, unconcerned; it knew the drill. Nita lifted the rod and began, with a speed born of much practice, to write out the single long sentence of the short-haul transit spell in the air around her.

  The symbols came alive as a delicate thread of pale white fire, stretching around her from the point of the rowan wand as she turned: a chord of a circle, an arc, then the circle almost complete as she came to the end of the spell, writing in her “signature,” her name in the Speech, the long chain of syllables and symbols that described who and what she was today.

  With a final figure-eight flourish, she knotted the spell closed, pulled the wand back, and let the transit circle drop to the grass around her, an arabesqued chain of light. Turning slowly, Nita began to read the sentence, feeling the power lean in around her as she did so. The pressure and attention of local space started focusing in on what Nita was saying she wanted of it: relocation to this set of spatial coordinates, life support set to planet-surface defaults—

  The silence began to build around her, the sound of the world listening. Nita read faster, feeling the words of the Speech reach down their roots to the Power That had first spoken them and taught them what they meant. The lightning of that first intention struck up through them and then through Nita, as she said the last word, completed the spell, and flung it loose to work—

  Wham! The displacement of transported air always sounded loud on the inside of the spell, even if you’d engineered the wizardry to keep it from making a lot of noise on the outside. The crack of sound, combined with the sudden blazing column of light from the activated transit, left Nita momentarily blind and deaf.

  Only for a moment, though. A second later the light died back, and she was standing near the end of a long jetty of big rough black stones, all spotted and splotched with seagull guano and festooned with washed-up seaweed in dull green ribbons and flat brown bladdery blobs. The sun hung blinding over the water to the west, silhouetting the low flat headlands that were all she could see of the Rockaway Beach peninsula from this angle. Somewhere beyond them, lost in mist and sun glare and half submerged beneath the horizon line, lay the skyline of New York.

  Nita pulled her jacket a little more tightly around her in the chilly spray-laden wind and turned to look over her shoulder. Down at the landward end of the quarter-mile-long jetty, where it came up against the farthest tip of West End Beach, was a squat white box of a building with an antenna sticking up from it: the Jones Inlet navigational radio beacon. Beyond it there was no one in sight—the weather had been getting too cool for swimming, especially this late in the day. Nita turned again, looking southward, toward the bay. At the seaward end of the jetty was the black-and-white painted metal tower that held up the flashing red Jones Inlet light, and at its base a small shape in a dark blue windbreaker and jeans was lying flat on the concrete pediment to which the tower was fastened, looking over the edge of the pediment, away from Nita.

  She headed down the jetty toward him, picking her way carefully over the big uneven rocks and wondering at first, Is he all right? But as she came near, Kit looked up over his shoulder at her with an idle expression. “Hey,” he said.

  Nita climbed up onto the cracked guano-stained concrete beside him and looked down over the edge, where the rocks fell steeply away. “What’re you doing?” she said. “The barnacles complaining about the water temperature again?”

  “Nope, just keeping a low profile,” Kit said. “I don’t feel like spending the effort to be invisible right now, with work coming up, and there’ve been some boats going through the inlet. Might be something happening at the Marine Theater later… it’s been a little busy.”

  “Okay.” She sat down next to him. “Any sign of S’reee yet?”

  “Nothing so far, but it’s only a few minutes after when we were supposed to meet. Maybe she got held up. Whatcha got?”

  “Here,” Nita said, and opened her manual. Kit sat up and flipped his open, too, then paged through it until he came to the “blank” pages in the back where research work and spells in progress stored themselves.

  Nita looked over his shoulder and saw the first blank page fill itself in with the spell she had constructed that afternoon, spilling itself down the page, section by section, until that page was full, and the continued-on-next-page symbol presented itself in the lower right-hand corner, blinking slowly. “I had an idea,” she said, “about the chemical-reaction calls. I thought that maybe the precipitates weren’t going to behave right—”

  “Okay, okay, give me a minute to look at it,” Kit said. “It’s pretty complicated.”

  Nita nodded and looked out to sea, gazing at the blinding golden roil and shimmer of light on the Great South Bay. These waters might look pretty, but they were a mess. New York and the bedroom communities around it, all up and down Long Island and the Jersey shore, pumped terrible amounts of sewage into the coastal waters, and though the sewage was supposed to be treated, the treatment wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. There was also a fair amount of illegal dumping of garbage and sewage going on. Various wizards, independently and in groups, had worked on the problem over many years; but the nature of the problem kept changing as the population of the New York metropolitan area increased and the kinds of pollution shifted.

  Nita and Kit were more than usually concerned about the problem, as they had friends who had to live in this water. Since shortly before Nita had had to go away for the summer, they’d been trying to construct a wizardry to pull the pollution out of the local waters on an ongoing basis. If it worked, maybe the scheme could be extended up and down the coast. But the problem was getting it to work in the first place. Their efforts so far hadn’t been incredibly successful.

  Kit was looking at the second f
ull page of Nita’s work. Now he turned it over and looked at the third page, the last one. “This,” he said, tapping a section near the end, “is pretty slick.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But the rest of this—” Kit shook his head, turned back to the first two pages, and touched four or five other sections, one after another, so that they grayed out. “I don’t see why we need these. This whole contrareplication routine would be great—if the chemicals in the pollution knew how to reproduce themselves. But since they don’t, it’s a lot of power for hardly any return. And implementing these is going to be a real pain. If you just take this one—” he touched another section and it brightened—”and this, and this, and you—”

  Nita frowned. “But look, Kit, if you leave those out, then there’s nothing that’s going to deal with the sewer outfall between Zachs Bay and Tobay Beach. That’s tons of toxic sludge every month. Without those routines—”

  Kit closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose in a way Nita had seen Tom, their local advisory wizard, do more than once when the world started to get to him. “Neets, this is all just too involved. Or involved in the wrong way. You’re making it more complicated than it needs to be.”

  Oh no, here we go again. I thought he was going to get it this time, I really did…! “But if you don’t name all the chemicals, if you don’t describe them accurately—”

  “The thing is, you don’t have to name them all. If you just take a look at the spell I brought with—”

  “Kit, look. That stripped-down version you’re suggesting isn’t going to do the job. And the longer we don’t do something, the worse the problem gets! Everything that lives along this shoreline is being affected… whatever’s still alive, anyway. Things are dying out there. And every time we go back to the drawing board on this, more things die. Getting this wizardry running has taken too long already.”

  “Tell me about it,” Kit said in a tone that struck Nita as a lot more ironic than it needed to be.

  And after all the work I did! she thought. Nonetheless she tried to calm down. “Okay. What do you think we should do?”

  “Maybe,” Kit said, and paused, “maybe it would be good if we let S’reee take a look at both versions. If she thinks—”

  Nita’s eyes widened. “Since when do we need a third opinion on something this straightforward? Kit, it’ll either do what it’s supposed to or it won’t. Let’s test it and find out!”

  He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I can tell already, it’s not going to do what we need.”

  She stared at Kit, not knowing what to say, and then after a moment she got up and stared down at him, trying to keep from clenching her fists. “Well, if you’re so sure you’re right, why don’t you just do it yourself? Since my advice plainly isn’t worth jack to you.”

  “It’s not that it’s not worth anything, it’s that—”

  “Oh, now you apologize.”

  “I wasn’t apologizing.”

  “Well, maybe you need to!”

  “Neets,” Kit said, also frowning now, “what do you want me to do? Tell you that I think it’s gonna be fine, when I don’t really think so?”

  Nita flushed. When you were working with the Speech, in which what you described would come to pass, lying could be fatal … and you quickly learned that even talking about spells less than honestly was dangerous.

  “Energy’s precious,” Kit said. “Neither of us can just throw it around the way we used to a couple years ago. It’s a nuisance, but it’s something we have to consider.”

  “Do you think I wasn’t considering it? I took my time over that. I didn’t even put it through the spell checker. I checked all the syntax, all the balances, by hand. It took me forever, but—”

  “Maybe the ‘forever’ was a hint, Neets,” Kit said.

  She had been trying to hang on to her temper, but now Nita got so furious that her eyes felt hot. “Fine,” she said tightly. “Then you go right ahead and handle this yourself. And just leave me out of it until you find something you feel is simplistic enough to involve me in, okay?”

  Kit’s expression was shocked, and Nita didn’t care. Who needs this? she thought. No matter what I try to do, it’s not good enough! So maybe it’s time I stopped trying. Let him work it out himself, if he can.

  Nita turned and made her way back down the jetty, her eyes narrowed in annoyance as she slapped her claudication open and pulled out the rowan wand. In one angry, economical gesture, she whipped the wand around her, dropping her most frequently used transit circle to the stones, the one that would take her home. It was a little harder to speak the spell than usual. Nita’s throat was tight, but not so much so that she couldn’t say the words that would get her out of there. In a clap of imploding air, she was gone, and spray from a wave that crashed against the jetty went through the place where she’d been.

  2: Friday, Early Evening

  Kit Rodriguez just sat there on the concrete platform at the bottom of the Jones Inlet light tower for some minutes, looking at the spot where Nita had vanished, listening to the hiss of the surf, and trying to work out what the heck had just happened.

  What did I say? Kit went over their conversation a couple of times in his head and couldn’t find any reason for her to have gotten so upset. What is her problem these days? It can’t be school. Nobody bothers her anymore; she does okay.

  It was a puzzle, and one he’d been having no luck solving. Maybe it was because he’d been so busy… and not just during the last couple of months, either. Granted, lately he’d been spending a lot of time on the bottom of the Great South Bay. And over the past couple of years, he’d visited spots on or near most of the planets in the solar system, though only on the way to places much farther out, including some places that weren’t exactly planets. Europe had more or less registered as an afterthought in the wake of the outer solar system: and even Kit’s mother, who’d initially been really nervous about his wizardry, had admitted that all the travel was proving educational, and might actually be making him, if not smarter, at least more mature. But Kit was beginning to have his doubts. For the past few weeks, any time he hadn’t been in school, in bed, or a few hundred feet deep in water, he’d been spending a lot of his spare time sitting on a particular rock in the Lunar Carpathians, looking down on the green-blue gem that was Earth from three hundred thousand kilometers out, and coming back again and again to the question, Are girls another species?

  The first time the thought had occurred to him, he’d felt embarrassed. He had been in places where members of other species had been present in their hundreds—sometimes in their thousands—tentacles and oozy bits and all. None of them had at the time struck him as all that alien; they were, when you got right down to it, just people. And though their differences from human beings were tremendous, sometimes making them completely incomprehensible, that still didn’t undermine his affection for them. He liked the aliens he met, even when they were weird. Come to think of it, I like them because they’re weird. But Nita, who theoretically was just as human as Kit was, had been pushing the weirdness-and-incomprehensibility envelope pretty hard lately. Her behavior was hard to understand, from someone who was usually so rational—

  Something dark broke the dazzle of the water about a quarter mile away. Kit cocked an ear and heard a long high whistle, slightly muffled, and after that first shape—a short stumpy barnacle-pocked dorsal fin—came the sleek dark shining shape of the back of a humpback whale, rolling in the water as she breached and blew. One small eye set way down at the end of the long, long jaw regarded Kit as S’reee slid toward the jetty, back-finning expertly to keep from coming to grief on the rocks. “Dai stihó, K!t,” she whistled and clicked in the Speech. “Sorry I’m late. Traffic…”

  Uneasy as he was, Kit had to chuckle. “I know. I can hear it even up here.” The main approaches to New York Harbor ran straight through this part of the Great South Bay, and for a whale, keeping clear of the ever-increasing number of
ships—not so much the ships themselves but the inescapable sound of their engines and machinery, always a nuisance for a creature that worked extensively with sonar—was a problem and made getting around quickly a lot more trouble than it used to be. Noise pollution in the bay was as much a problem for the many species who lived there as was the sewage, and would probably be a much tougher one to solve. It was one of a number of projects S’reee had been forced to tackle since her abrupt promotion to the position of senior cetacean wizard for these waters.

  S’reee rolled idly in the water, looking down the jetty. “It’s my fault; I should have left the Narrows earlier. But never mind. Where’s hNii’t?”

  “I don’t think she’s going to be with us today,” Kit said.

  S’reee didn’t reply immediately, but that thoughtful little eye dwelt on Kit. As whales went, S’reee wasn’t that much older than Kit or Nita, but the increased responsibilities she’d been pushed into had been making her perceptive—maybe more perceptive than Kit exactly cared for right now, especially since he still wasn’t sure that he hadn’t misstepped somehow.

  “Well,” S’reee said after a moment, “is that a problem? Can we manage, or should we reschedule?”

  Kit thought about that. “I’ve got something that might be worth looking at,” he said. “We might as well lay it out in place, have a look at it.”

  “All right.”

  Kit reached into the pocket of his jeans, which was also the way into his own otherspace storage pocket, and came out with a little ball of light, a spell in compacted form, which he dropped to the concrete he was standing on. As the compaction routine came loose and let the spell expand, Kit shoved his manual down into the otherspace pocket, then picked up the spell and shook it out.

  It was a webwork of interconnected statements in the Speech, all of which briefly flared bright and then, dimming, settled and spread themselves into a form that could have been mistaken for a cloak made of plastic wrap. Kit whirled it around him, then held still while the spell sealed itself shut all about him and completed its access to its air supply, also tucked away in the spatiotemporal claudication in his pocket. Normally this spell was used as a simple space suit, for occasions when moving or working in a large “bubble” of air wasn’t desirable, but Kit had adapted it for use as a wet suit. He glanced back at the beach to make sure no one was watching—the last thing he wanted was for someone to think some kid out here was suicidal—and jumped well away from the rocks, into the water next to S’reee.