The Wizard's Dilemma Read online

  Kit's father came up the stairs from the basement into the kitchen—a big brawny broad-shouldered man, dark eyed, and dark haired except around the sideburns, where he claimed his work as a pressman at a Nassau County printing plant was starting to turn him gray. "He's gonna take that screen door off its hinges some day, son," Kit's father said, watching Ponch recover himself and start bouncing around the kitchen.

  "Might not be a bad idea," said Kit's mother from the next room. "It's as old as the house. It looks awful." "It's not broken yet," Kit's father said. "Though every time that dog hits it, you get your hopes up, huh?"

  Kit's mother came into the kitchen and didn't say anything, just smiled. She was taller than Kit's dad, getting a little plump these days, but not so much that she worried about it. Her dark hair was pulled back tight and bunned up at the back, and Kit was slightly surprised to see that she was still in one of her nurse's uniforms—pink top and white pants. Though maybe it's not "still," he thought as she paused to give Kit a one-armed hug and sat down at the end of the table.

  "You have to work night shift tonight, Mama?"

  She bent over to slip one of her shoes onto one white-stockinged foot, then laced the shoe up. "Just evening shift," she said. "They called from work to ask if I could swap a shift with one of the other nurses in the med-surg wing; he had some emergency at home. I'll be home around two. Popi'll feed you." "Okay. Did anybody feed Ponch?"

  "I did," said Kit's mother.

  "Thanks, Mama," Kit said, and bent over to kiss her on the cheek. Then he looked down at Ponch, who was now sitting and gazing up at Kit with big soulful eyes and what was supposed to pass for a wounded look. You didn't believe me!

  Kit gave him a look. "You," he said. "You fibber. You need a walk?" "YEAH- YEAH- YE AH-YE AH-YE AH-YE AH!"

  His mother covered her ears. "He's deafening," she said. "Tell him to go out!" Kit laughed. "You tell him! He's not deaf."

  "I'm glad for him, because / will be shortly! Pan-cho! Gooutr

  Delighted, Ponch turned himself in three or four hurried circles and launched himself at the screen door again. Thump, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham, CRASH!

  "I see," Kit's father said as he paused by the spaghetti pot, "that he's figured out how to push the latch with his paw."

  "I noticed that, too," Kit said. "He's getting smart." And then he made an amused face, though not for his father to see. Smart didn't begin to cover the territory.

  "So how did your magic thing go tonight?" his dad said. Kit sat down with only about half a groan. "It's not magic, Pop. Magic is when you wave your hand and stuff happens without any good reason or any price. Wizardry's the exact opposite, believe me."

  His father looked resigned. "So my terminology's messed up. It takes a while to learn a new professional vocabulary. The thing with the fish, then, it went okay?"

  Kit started to laugh. "You call S'reee a fish to her face, Pop, you're likely to remember it for a while," he said. "It wasn't the fish; it was the water. It was dirty."

  "Not exactly news."

  "It's gonna start getting cleaner. That'll be news." Kit allowed himself a satisfied grin. "And you heard it here first."

  "I imagine Nita must be pleased," his mother said. "I imagine," Kit said, and got up to go to the fridge.

  He could feel his mother looking at him, even without turning to see. He could hear her looking at his pop, even without so much as a glance in her direction. Kit grimaced, and hoped they couldn't somehow sense the expression without actually seeing it themselves. The problem was that they were parents, possessed of strange unearthly powers that even wizards sometimes couldn't understand.

  "I thought maybe she was going to come over for dinner," said his pop. "She usually does, after you've been out doing this kind of work."

  "Uh, not tonight. She had some other stuff she had to take care of," Kit said. Like chewing the heads off her unsuspecting victims!

  The sudden image of Nita as a giant praying mantis made Kit snicker. But then he dismissed it, not even feeling particularly guilty. "Where's Carmela?"

  "Tonight's a TV night for her," Kit's pop said. "A reward for that math test. I let her take the other portable and the VCR; she's upstairs pigging out on Japanese cartoons."

  Kit smiled. It was unusual for things to be so quiet while his sister was conscious, and the thought of sitting down and letting the weariness from the evening's wizardry catch up with him in conditions of relative peace and quiet was appealing. But Ponch needed walking first. "Okay," Kit said. "I'm gonna take Ponch out now."

  "Dinner in about twenty minutes," his dad said.

  "We'll be back," Kit said. As he went out the back door, he took Ponch's leash down off the hook where the jackets hung behind the door. Out in the driveway he paused and looked for Ponch. He was nowhere to be seen.

  "Huh," Kit said under his breath, and yawned. The post-wizardry reaction was starting to set in now. If he didn't get going, he was going to fall asleep in the spaghetti. Kit went down to the end of the driveway, looked both ways up and down the street. He could see a black shape snuffling with intense interest around the bottom of a tree about halfway down Conlon.

  Kit paused a moment, looking down where Conlon Avenue met East Clinton, wondering whether he might see a shadow a little taller than him standing at the corner, looking his way. But there was no sign of her. He

  made a wry face at his own unhappiness. Just a fight. Nonetheless, he and Nita had had so few that he wasn't really sure about what to do in the aftermath of one. In fact, Kit couldn't remember a fight they'd had that hadn't been over, and made up for, in a matter of minutes. This was hours, now, and it was getting uncomfortable. What if I really hurt her somehow? She's been so weird since she got back from Ireland. What if she's so pissed at me that she—

  He stopped himself. No point in standing here making it worse. Either go right over there now and talk to her or wait until tomorrow and do it then, but don't waste energy obsessing over it.

  Kit sighed and turned the other way, toward the end of the road that led to the junior-senior high school. He saw Ponch sniffing and wagging his tail near the big tree in front of the Wilkinsons' house. Ponch cocked a leg at the tree and, after a few seconds' meditation, bounded off down the street. Kit went after him, swinging the leash in the dusk.

  From farther down the street came a sound of furious yapping. It was the Akambes' dog, whose real name was Grarrhah but whose human family had unfortunately decided to call her Tinkerbell. She was one of those tiny, delicate, silky-furred terriers who looked like she might unravel if you could figure out which thread to pull, but her personality seemed to have been transplanted from a dog three or four times her size. She was never allowed out of the backyard, and whenever one of the other neighborhood dogs went by, she would claw at the locked gate and yell at them in Cyene, "You lookin' at me? I can take you! Come over here and say that! Stop me before I tear 'im apart!" and other such futile provocations.

  Kit sighed as Ponch went past and as he followed, and the noise scaled up and up. There was no point in going over and talking to Grarrhah. She took her watchdog role terribly seriously, and would work herself into such a lather that she would already be lying there foaming at the mouth from overexcitement and frustration by the time you got to the gate. Making a poor creature like this more crazy than she was already was no part of a wizard's business, so Kit just walked by as Grarrhah shrieked at him from behind the gate, "Thief! Thief! Burglars! Joyriders, ram raiders, walk-by shooters; lemme at 'em, I'll rip 'em to shreds!"

  Kit walked on, wondering if there was something he could do for her. Then he grinned sourly. "What a laugh! I don't even know what to do about Neets.

  All at once he changed his mind about letting things wait until the next day. Kit reached into his pocket and pulled out the manual. Among many other functions, it had a provision for print messaging for times when wizards were having trouble getting in touch with each other directly—a sort of wizardly pager sys
tem. He flipped to the back pages where such messages were written and stored. "New message," he said. "For Nita—"

  The page glowed softly in the dusk and displayed the long string of characters in the Speech that was Nita's name, and the equivalent string for her manual.

  There the book sat, ready to take down his message ... and Kit couldn't think what to say. I'm sorry? Friday Evening

  For what? I didn't run her down. I told her what I thought. I don't think I was nasty about it. And I was right, too.

  He was strongly tempted to tell her so, but then Kit came up against a bizarre notion that doing that under the present circumstances would be somehow unfair. He spent another couple of minutes trying to find something useful to say. But he wasn't sure what was bothering Nita, and he was still annoyed enough at the way she'd behaved to feel like it wasn't his job to be the understanding one.

  Kit frowned, opened his mouth...and closed it again, discarding that potential message as well. Finally all he could find to say was, "If you need some time by yourself, feel free." He looked at the page as the words recorded themselves in the Speech.

  More?

  "No more," Kit said. "Send it"

  Sent.

  He stood there for a moment, half hoping he would get an answer right back. But there was no response, no hint of the subtle fizz or itch of the manual's covers that indicated an answer. Maybe she's out. Maybe she's busy with something else.

  Or maybe she just doesn't want to answer...

  He closed the manual and shoved it back into his pocket. Then Kit started walking again. When he reached the streetlight where Jackson Street met Con-Ion, he looked around. "Ponch?" he said, then listened for the jingle of Ponch's chain collar and tags.

  Nothing.

  Now where'd he go? Sweat started to break out all over Kit at the thought that Ponch might have gotten into someone's backyard and caught something he shouldn't have. Ponch's uncertain grasp of the difference between squirrels—which he hunted constantly with varying success—and rabbits—which he chased and almost always caught—had made him disgrace himself a couple of months back when one of the neighbor's tame rabbits had escaped from its hutch and wandered into Kit's backyard. Ponch's enthusiastic response had cost Kit about a month's allowance to buy the neighbor a new rabbit of the same rare lop-eared breed... a situation made more annoying by the fact that wizards are enjoined against making money out of nothing except in extreme emergencies connected with errantry, which this was not. Kit had yelled at Ponch only once about the mistake; Ponch had been completely sorry. But all the same, every time Ponch's whereabouts couldn't be accounted for, Kit began to twitch.

  Kit started to jog down the street toward the entrance to the school, where Ponch liked to chase rabbits in the big fields to either side. But then he stopped as he heard a familiar sound, claws on concrete, and the familiar jingle, as Ponch came tearing down the sidewalk at him. Kit had just enough warning to sidestep slightly, so that Ponch's excited jump took him through air, instead of through Kit. Ponch came down about five feet behind where Kit had been standing, spun around, and started jumping up and down in front of him again, panting with excitement, "Come see it! Come see, look, I found it, c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon, comeseecomeseecomesee!"

  "Come see what?" Kit said in the Speech. "I found something."

  Kit grinned. Normally, with Ponch, this meant something dead. His father was still getting laughs out of the story about Ponch and the very mummified squirrel he had hidden for months under the old beat-up blanket in his doghouse. "So what is it?"

  "It's not a what. It's a where."

  Kit was confused. There was no question of his having misunderstood Ponch; the dog spoke perfectly good Cyene, which anyone who knew the Speech could understand. And as a pan-canine language, Cyene might not be strong on abstract concepts, but what Ponch had said was fairly concrete.

  "Where?" Kit asked. "I mean, what where?" Then he had to laugh, for he was sounding more incoherent by the moment, and making Ponch sound positively sophisticated by comparison. "Okay, big guy, come on, show me."

  "It's right down the street."

  Kit was still slightly nervous. "It's not anybody's rabbit, is it?"

  Ponch turned a shocked look on him. "Boss! I promised. And I said, it's not a whatl" "Uh, good," Kit said. "Come on, show me, then."

  "Look," Ponch said. He turned and ran away from Kit, down the middle of the dark, empty, quiet side street...

  ... and vanished. Kit stared. Uhbb... what the—/

  Astonished, Kit started to run after Ponch, into the darkness... and vanished, too.

  Nita had come back from the Jones Inlet jetty that evening to find that her mother had left to go shopping. Her dad was in the kitchen making a large sandwich; he looked at Nita with mild surprise. "You just went out. Are you done for the day already?"

  "Yup," Nita said, heading through the kitchen. "Kit coming over?"

  "Don't think so," Nita said, dropping her manual on the dining-room table.

  Her father raised his eyebrows and turned back to the sandwich he was constructing. Nita sat down in the chair where she'd been sitting earlier and looked out the front window. She was completely tired out, even though she hadn't done anything, and she was thoroughly pissed off at Kit. The day felt more than exceptionally ruined. Nita put her head down in her hands for a moment.

  As she did, she caught sight of a sticky-note still stuck to the table. "Uh-oh—" "What?"

  "Mom forgot her list—"

  "You mean her 'lint'?" Her dad chuckled. "Yeah. It's still stuck here."

  "She'll call and get me to read it to her, probably." There was a soft bang! from the backyard—a sound Friday Evening

  that could have been mistaken for a car backfiring, except that there weren't likely to be cars back there. "Is that Dairine?" Nita's dad said.

  "Probably," said Nita. It hadn't taken her parents long to learn the sound of suddenly displaced air—a sign of a wizard in a hurry or being a little less than slick about appearing out of nothing. At first it seemed to Nita as if her folks, after they'd found out she was a wizard, spent nearly all their time listening for that sound in varying states of nervousness. Now they were starting to get casual about it, which struck her as a healthy development.

  But wait a minute. Maybe it's Kit, coming back to apologize— Nita started to get up.

  The screen door opened and Dairine came in. Nita sat down again. "Hey, runt," she said. "Hey," said Dairine, and went on past.

  Nita glanced after her, for this was not Dairine's normal response to being called runt. Her little sister paused by the table just long enough to drop her own book bag onto a chair, then went into the living room, pushing that startling red hair out of her eyes. It was getting longer, and, as a result, her resemblance to their mother was stronger than ever. Has she started noticing boys? Nita wondered. Or is something else going on?

  Something scrabbled at the back door. Dairine sighed, came back through the dining room and the kitchen, went to the screen door, and pushed it open. A clatter of many little feet followed, as what appeared to be a little silvery-shelled laptop computer, about the

  size of a large paperback book, spidered into the kitchen on multiple spindly legs.

  Nita peered at it as it followed Dairine back into the living room. "Am I confused," she said, "or is that thing getting smaller?"

  "You're always confused," said Dairine as she headed for her room, "but yeah, he's smaller. Just had an upgrade."

  Nita shook her head and went back to looking at her mom's list. Dairine's version of the wizard's manual had arrived as software for the household's first computer, and had been through some changes during the course of her Ordeal. Finally she'd wound up with this machine...if machine was the right word for something that was clearly alive in its own right. In the meantime the household's main computer continued to go through periodic changes, which made some of the neighbors suspect that Nita's father was making more money as
a florist than he really was. For his own part, Nita's dad shrugged and said, "Your mom says it does the spreadsheets just fine. I don't want to know what else it might do... and as long as I don't have to pay extra for it..."

  The phone on the wall rang. Her dad went over to it, picked it up. "Hello... Yes. Yes, you did, dopey... I am... Wait and I'll read it to you... Oh. Well, okay, sure... She just came in. No, both of them... Sure, I'll ask."

  Nita's dad put his head around the corner. "Honey, your mom forgot a couple other things, too, so she's coming back. She says, do you want to go clothes shopping? They're having sales at a couple of the stores in the mall."

  Nita couldn't think of anything else to do at the moment. "Sure."

  Her dad turned his attention back to the phone. Nita went back to her room to change into a top that was easier to get in and out of in a hurry. From upstairs she could hear faint thumping and bumping noises. What's she doing up there? she thought, and when she finished changing, Nita went up the stairs to Dairine's room.

  It was never the world's tidiest space—full of books and a ridiculously large collection of stuffed animals — but now it was even more disorganized than usual. Everything that had been on Dairine's desk, including chess pieces and chessboard, various schoolbooks, notebooks, calculators, pens, papers, paintbrushes, watercolor pads, compasses, rulers, a Walkman and its earphones, and much less classifiable junk, was now all over Dairine's bed. The desk was solely occupied by an extremely handsome, brushed stainless-steel cube, about a foot square, sitting on a clear Lucite base. Dairine looked over her shoulder at Nita as she came in. "Whaddaya think?" she said.

  "I think it's gorgeous," Nita said, "but what is it?"

  Dairine turned it around. There on one side was what could have been mistaken for the logo of a large computer company... but there was no bite out of the piece of fruit in question. The logo was inset into the side of the cube in frosted white and was glowing demurely. This by itself would not have been all that unusual, except that there was no sign of any cord plugged into any wall.