The Wizard's Dilemma

But that makes it worse. That was true, too. There'd been times when Kit was in some bad spot, and the terror had risen up and had nearly choked the breath out of her. And that was just Kit—

Just! said the back of her mind in shock. Nita shook her head. Kit was so important to her... but he wasn't her mother.

The door opened, and the sound made them all jump. "Mr. Callahan?" said the little woman in the white coat who was standing there. She was extremely petite and pretty, with short black hair, and had calm, knowledgeable eyes that for some reason immediately put Nita more at ease. "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. These are your daughters?"

"Nita," said Nita's dad, "and Dairine."

"I'm pleased to meet you." She shook their hands and sat down on the couch across from them. "Doctor, how's my wife? Is she any better?"

"She's resting," said the doctor. "I don't want to alarm you, but she had several minor seizures after we admitted her, and sedation was necessary to break the cycle and allow us to find out what's going on."

"Do you know?"

The doctor looked at the chart she was carrying, though she didn't open it. "We have some early indications, but first I want to talk to you about some things we didn't have time to discuss while we were admitting Mrs. Callahan. Has she been having any physical problems lately?"

"Physical problems—"

"Double vision, or problems with her sight? Headaches? Any trouble with coordination—a little more clumsiness than usual, perhaps?"

"She's been saying she needed to get reading glasses," Dairine said softly.

Nita looked at her dad. "Daddy, she's been taking a lot of aspirin lately. I didn't realize until just now."

Their father looked stricken. "She hadn't mentioned anything to me," he said to the doctor. "The hours I've been working lately, sometimes the kids have been seeing more of her than I have."

Dr. Kashiwabara nodded. "All right. I'll be going over these issues with Mrs. Callahan myself when she's more lucid. But what you've told me makes sense in terms of what we've found so far. There's been time to do an X ray, anyway, and there seems to be a small abnormal growth at the base of one of the frontal lobes of her brain."

Nita swallowed.

"What kind of growth?" her dad said.

"We don't know yet," said Dr. Kashiwabara. "I've scheduled her for a PET scan this evening, and an MRI scan tomorrow morning; those should tell us what we need to know."

"This is a brain tumor we're talking about," said Nita's father, his voice shaking. "Isn't it?"

Dr. Kashiwabara looked at him, then nodded. "What we need to do is find out what kind it is," she said, "so that we can work out how best to treat it. What we do know at this point is that the tumor seems to have grown large enough to put pressure on some nearby areas of Mrs. Callahan's brain. That's what caused the seizures. We've medicated her to prevent any more. She's going to be pretty woozy when you see her; please don't be concerned about that by itself. For the time being, while we run the tests, she's going to have to stay very quiet to keep excess pressure from building up in her skull and brain. It means she needs to stay flat on her back in bed, even if she feels like she's able to get up."

"For how long?" Dairine said.

"Depending on how the tests go, it may be only a couple of days," Dr. Kashiwabara said. "We'll do the scans that I mentioned, and then there'll have to be a biopsy of the growth itself—we'll remove a tiny bit of tissue and test it to see what kind it is. After that, we'll know what our next move needs to be."

The doctor folded her hands and rubbed them together a little, then looked up. "I'll be doing that procedure myself," she said. "I don't want to trouble your wife about signing the permissions, Mr. Callahan. Maybe we can take care of that before you leave."

"Yes," Nita's dad said, hardly above a whisper, "of course." "I want you to call me if you have any questions at all," Dr. Kashiwabara said, "or any concerns. I may not be able to get back to you immediately—I have a lot of other people to take care of—but I promise you I will always call you back. Okay?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"All right," said the doctor, and got up. "Why don't you go see her now? But, please, keep it brief. The seizures will have been very fatiguing and confusing for her, and she won't be fully recovered from them until tomorrow. Come with me; I'll show you the way."

They walked down the corridor together, and Dr. Kashiwabara led them into a room where there were four of those steel beds: two of them empty, the third with a cloth curtain pulled partway around it, under which they could see a nurse in white shoes and pink nursing sweats doing something or other. In the fourth bed, beyond the partway-pulled curtain, their mom lay under light covers, with one arm strapped to a board, and an IV running into that arm. She was in a hospital gown, and someone had tied her hair back and put it up under a paper cap. Her eyes suddenly looked sunken to Nita; it was the same tired look she had been wearing this morning, but much worse. Why didn't I notice? Nita's heart cried. Why didn't I see something was wrong?!

"Mrs. Callahan?" said Dr. Kashiwabara.

It took Nita's mom's eyes a few moments to open, and then they seemed to have trouble focusing. "What... oh." She moistened her lips. "Harry?"

It was as if she couldn't see him properly. "I'm here, honey," he said, and Nita was astonished at how strong he sounded. He took her hand and sat in the chair by the bed. "And the girls are here, too. How're you feeling?"

There was a long pause. "Like... bats."

Nita and Dairine looked at each other in poorly concealed panic. "Baseball bats," their mother said. "Very sore."

"Like somebody was hitting you with baseball bats, you mean?" Nita said. "Yeah."

From the seizures, Nita thought. Her mother turned her head toward her, across from her dad. "Oh, honey...," she said, "I'm sorry..."

"What're you sorry for, Mom? This isn't your fault!" Nita said. And even as she said it, she knew exactly whose fault it was.

There was only one of the Powers Who at the beginning of things had insisted on inventing something never contemplated before in the universe: entropy, disease... death. That Lone Power had been her enemy more than once, but suddenly it seemed to Nita that she hadn't done It nearly as much damage as she should have.

Dairine, next to Nita, leaned over the bed. "Mom, why didn't you tell us your head was hurting you?"

"Honey, I did." She shook her head on the pillow. "I thought... I thought it was stress." She smiled. "Seems I miscalculated..."

She drifted off then, her eyes closing. Nita and Dairine exchanged a glance. Nita took her mom's hand and closed her eyes, trying something she had never tried with her mother. She slipped her consciousness a little way into her mother's body, gingerly, carefully. Without a wizardry specifically built to the purpose, she could get nothing clear—just a fuzzy, muzzy feeling, a faint vague pain at the edge of things, an odd sense of dislocation...

... and one other thing. A small something. A lot of small somethings that were not her mom. They were all gathered together into something little and hot and strange, burning against the cooler, "normal" background: something alien... and malevolent.

Nita gulped, and opened her eyes. / could be wrong. I didn't do that exactly by the book. But boy... will I, later.

Her mother opened her eyes. "I don't want you to worry," she said, very clearly.

Her dad actually managed to laugh. "Listen to you," he said. "Worrying about us, as usual. You concentrate on getting rested up, and help these people do whatever they need to do."

"Don't have much choice," Nita's mother said. "Got me outnumbered." She closed her eyes again.

Nita met her dad's eyes across the bed. "We should go," he said softly. "Sleep's probably the best thing for her."

"Mom," Dairine said, "we'll see you tomorrow, okay? You have a nap." " 'nt to extremes... to get one," her mother whispered. "Sorry."

They sat there for a few minutes more, saying nothing. Finally one of the nurses looked in the door at them, put his finger to his lips, then gestured out into the hall with his head and raised his eyebrows. Nita got up, bringing Dairine with her. "Dad...," she said.

His eyes had been only for their mother's face. Now he turned, saw the nurse, who looked at their dad and tapped his watch. Nita's father nodded, got up. It was hard for him to let go of their mom's hand. Nita had to look away from that, as she felt the tears welling up in her. I'm not going to cry here, she thought. The whole world can hear me, and Dad—

She headed for the door. Behind her came her dad and Dairine, and they stood lost for a moment in the hall. There was nothing they could do but go home.

It was dark, it was late, when they got back. Where did the evening go? Nita thought as her dad locked the back door. Somehow hours had fleeted by as if in a few minutes, leaving only pain and a feeling of having been cheated of time, somehow... not that Nita wanted that particular slice of time back. Going through it once was enough. Dairine apparently agreed; she went upstairs to her room, and Nita heard the door shut.

"Daddy," Nita said.

He was sitting in his chair in the living room, with only one lamp on, everything else in shadow, his face rigid and stunned-looking in the dim light. "What?"

"Daddy...what they told us," Nita said softly, "it's scary, yeah... but maybe it's not what you were thinking."

He didn't ask how she knew. "Nita," her father said, reluctant, "you didn't see them when they first brought her in, after the X ray, before I came back. I saw the doctor looking at the X ray. I saw her face..."

Nita swallowed. Her dad put his face in his hands, then raised it again. His cheeks were wet. "They're being careful," he said. "They're right to be: They have to do the tests. But I saw the doctor's face." He shook his head. "It's not... it's not good."

Then he clenched his fists. "I shouldn't be frightening you," he said. "I could be wrong."

"You always say we have to tell each other when we're scared," she said. "You have to take your own advice, Dad."

He was silent for a long time. "It's stupid," he said. "I keep thinking, 'If I hadn't been working so hard, this wouldn't have happened. If she hadn't been working so hard on the accounts, this wouldn't have happened.' It's like it has to be all my fault, somehow. As if that would help." He laughed, a short, bitter sound. "And even when I know it's not... I feel like it is. Stupid."

Nita swallowed. "I keep thinking," she said, "I should have seen it, that she wasn't feeling okay." "So do I."

Nita shook her head. "But I guess that...when someone's been there forever... you stop looking at them, some ways. It's dumb, but it's what we do."

Her father wiped his hands on his pants and looked up at her with an expression that was considering, and full of pain. "You know," he said, "you sound a lot like your mom sometimes."

It was the best thing he could have said to her. It was the worst thing he could have said to her. When the shock wore off, all that Nita could say was "You should try to get some sleep."

Her father gave her a look that said, You must be kidding. But aloud he said, "You're right."

He got up, gave her a hug. "Good night, honey," he said. "Get me up at eight." He went off to the back bedroom and closed the door.

Nita went to bed, too, but there was nothing good about her night at all. She lay awake for hours, rerunning in her mind all kinds of things that had happened the previous week, especially conversations with her mother—trying to see what had gone wrong, what could have gone differently, how she could have predicted what had happened today, how she could have prevented it somehow. It was torment— and she didn't seem able to stop doing it—but it was better than going on to the next set of thoughts that Nita knew was lying in wait for her. The past, at least, was fixed. The only alternative was the future, in which any horrible thing could happen.

The sound of a hand turning the knob of her bedroom door brought Nita sitting up straight in bed in absolute terror. Of what? she thought a second later, scornful and angry with herself, while also trying to breathe deeply and slow down her pounding heart, which seemed to be shaking her whole body. But she knew what she was afraid of. Of hearing the phone ring downstairs in the middle of the night, of having her father come in and tell her... tell her—

Nita gulped and struggled for control. In the darkness, she heard a couple of steps on the floor. "Neets," said a small voice. Then the bedsprings creaked a little.

Dairine crept into Nita's bed, threw her arms around Nita, buried her face against her chest, and began to sob.

Nita suddenly found herself looking at a moment long ago: a small Dairine, maybe five years old, running down the sidewalk outside the house, oblivious— then tripping and falling. Dairine had pushed herself up on her hands and, after a long pause, started to cry... but then came the laughter of the kids down the street, the ones toward whom she'd been running. Nita had been struck then by the sight of Dairine's face working, puckering, as she tried to decide what to do, then steadying into a downturned mouth and thunderous frown, a scowl of furious determination. Dairine got up, and said just one thing: "No." Knees bleeding, she wiped her face, and walked slowly back to the house, shoulders hunched, her whole body clenched like a small fist with resolve.

I don't think I've seen her cry since, Nita thought. And so Dairine had gone on, for so long, expressing herself almost entirely through that toughness. But now the shell had cracked, and who would have ever known that there was such pain and fear contained inside it?

But Nita knew now, and there was nothing she could do but hang on to her sister and let Dairine sob herself silent. It's not fair, Nita thought, the tears leaking out as she hugged Dairine to her. Who do I get to cry on? Who's going to be strong for me?

If any Power listened, It gave her no answer.

Sunday Morning

BEFORE DAWN NITA FOUND herself awake and sitting up in bed, looking at the faint blue light outside her window. There had been no transition from sleeping to waking: just that unsettling consciousness, and a feeling that the world was wrong, that everything was wrong. She had no idea how long it had taken her to get to sleep last night after Dairine, silent and drained, had finally slipped away.

Drained. That was the word for how Nita felt, too. But some energy was beginning to coil back into that void as the shock wore off. Nita looked at her manual, and saw the words in front of her eyes without even having to touch it: / will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened—

She swallowed. I am a wizard. And if my mom's life isn't "threatened" right now, I don't know when it will be. There has to be another way to fight this than just what they've got in the hospital. And I'm going to find out what it is.

She got up, dressed, grabbed the manual, and took it back to bed with her. Its covers were fizzing. Nita settled herself up against the wall at the head of the bed and flipped the book open to read the message waiting for her, then glanced out the window at the bleak predawn light. I'll get in touch with him later. No point in waking him up early just to get him upset. I've done enough stupid stuff to him lately.

She paged through the manual to the section with information on the medical and healing-related wizardries. That section was much larger this morning than she had ever found it before. Nita began reading what was there with intensity and with a concentration she could hardly remember having expended since she first found this book and understood what it meant. She had a couple of hours to spare before the time her dad had told her to wake him up.

She used them, pausing only once, to go to the bathroom, taking the book with her when she did. To say that the subject was complex was understating badly. There was just too much information. She had the manual stop displaying everything that had to do with injuries and trauma, chronic diseases and afflictions... and though she narrowed and narrowed her focus, the section she was reading didn't get any thinner. Finally there was almost nothing between the covers except pages and pages of material concerning abnormal growths and lesions, and still she found more every time she targeted a specific condition. Nita also saw a lot of a word in the Speech that she didn't much like— a word that translated into English as intractable. There was a lot of discussion of theory here, but not many spells. Nita got nervous when she noticed that, but she didn't stop reading. There had to be a way. There was always a way, if you could just push through to the core of the matter...

The light grew in her room; she hardly noticed. Birds began singing the restrained songs of early autumn, but Nita shut their voices out. She read and read... and suddenly her alarm clock went off, at eight-thirty.

Nita scrambled out of bed, shut the noisy thing off, and went to see if her dad was up yet. Pausing outside the master bedroom, listening, she couldn't hear any sound of anyone stirring in there.

She knocked softly on the door. No answer. "Dad..."

Still nothing. Nita eased the door softly open and peeked in.

Her father was asleep in the reading chair in the corner between the two bedroom windows. He sat slumped over, his mouth hanging open a little, a slight snore emitting from him—almost the same sound Ponch made when he lay on his back with his feet in the air and snored; the thought almost made her smile. But smiling about anything right now seemed like some kind of betrayal.

She glanced at the bed, which had not been slept in, and let out an unhappy breath, then went over to her dad and crouched down beside the chair. "Daddy," she said.

His eyes opened slowly; he looked at her as if he couldn't understand what he was doing here.

Then it all came back to him. She saw the pain fill his eyes. Nita clenched her jaw and managed to keep from getting any weepier than she already felt. "It's eight-thirty, Dad," she said. "You said we should go to the hospital in an hour or so."

"Yeah." He slowly sat upright and rubbed his face. "Yeah." He looked at her then. "How are you doing, honey?"

"Better. Maybe better," she said. "Daddy, I guess I was so scared, I forgot for a minute." "Forgot what?"

"Maybe I can do something."

Her father looked at her, uncomprehending.

"Daddy," Nita said, "I am a wizard. In fact, we've got two of them in the house. And we know a bunch more of them, all over the place. Wizardry's about fixing broken things, healing hurt things... saving lives. We must be able to do something."

Her dad's expression went curiously neutral. "Honey," he said, sounding slightly embarrassed, "you know, that's the kind of thing I...try not to think about. It still seems like a fairy tale, sometimes. Even when everything's all right, I don't think about it much. And right now... now I'd be afraid it'll..."

Fail, Nita thought. It was the thought that had been nagging at her, too. "Dad, in Mom's case, it's really complicated. I've barely had time to start working out what to do. But there has to be something. I'm not going to do anything else until I find out what."

Her father rubbed his face again. "Well... all right. In the meantime, we'd better get ourselves over there. Have you had your shower?"

"Not yet."

"You go ahead. I'll make us some breakfast. Is Dairine up?" "I don't know. She had trouble getting to sleep last night." "She wasn't alone," her father said softly.

He reached out to Nita and hugged her. "Oh, honey..." He ran out of words for a few moments. Then he hugged her harder. "You hang in there. We'll all keep each other going somehow, and it'll be all right."

"Yeah," Nita said, hoping that it was true.

When they got to the hospital, Nita's mother was sleeping, having been up early for the MRI scan. "She was awake late last night," the head nurse, that large lady with the bun hairstyle, told Nita's dad, "and it seems like a good idea for her to get caught up on her sleep now. But her doctor's finishing another procedure, and she asked me if you could wait for half an hour or so. She'd like to see you."

"No problem," Nita's father said. In reality it wasn't even that long; after she and Dairine went up to take a quick look in at their mom, and Nita saw that she was indeed sleeping peacefully, Nita left Dairine there to have a moment with their mom by herself, and made her way back to the little waiting room, where she found her dad already talking to Dr. Kashiwabara. The doctor looked up as Nita came in.

"Good morning," she said as Nita sat down. "Well, your mom had a quiet night—except for the scans, of course. She's been doing the sensible thing, and sleeping when we weren't actually running her in and out of the machines. In fact, she fell asleep during the MRI this morning, which I wouldn't normally have thought possible; it's like sleeping in a garbage can while someone's banging on it."

"If you lived long with our daughters," Nita's dad said, "you'd be surprised what you'd learn to sleep through."

Dr. Kashiwabara smiled faintly. "Come to think of it," she said, "where's the younger one?"

Nita looked around in surprise. Dairine should have come back from their mom's room by now. "Be right back," she said.

Nita retraced her steps. Slipping quietly into the room, she found Dairine standing there, her back against the wall near the door, looking across the closer, empty bed at the curtained one where their mother lay. In her arms she was holding Spot—which Nita hadn't noticed Dairine bringing to the hospital in the first place—and the whole room was sizzling with the electric-air feel of a wizardry on the ebb, either newly dismantled or incomplete.

"What are you doing?" Nita whispered, and grabbed Dairine by the upper arm. "Come on\"

Dairine didn't resist her; she didn't have the energy. Nita was sure she knew why, but there was no dealing with it right now. She hustled Dairine back to the little conference room and sat her down.

Nita's father gave Dairine one of those looks that said, Misbehaving again, I see, but said nothing aloud. The doctor greeted Dairine, then turned back to their father.

"Well," she said, "Mrs. Callahan's status is pretty stable. And now we've had the scans that I wanted. I've had a chance to look at them, and this morning I had a couple of my colleagues look at the results. We're all in agreement."

She took a long breath. "Mr. Callahan," she said, "I don't know; you'll have to tell me whether you think it's better that you and I should discuss this alone first."

"Not a chance," Nita said. Dairine shook her head.

Her father swallowed. "They're both intelligent girls, Doctor," he said. "They're going to have to hear, anyway. Better they should get the explanation from you than secondhand from me."

The doctor nodded, then got up, shut the door to the corridor, and sat down again. "All right," she said. Her voice was measured, gentle. "Mr. Callahan, the growth in your wife's brain is definitely a tumor. We're ninety percent sure that it's a growth of a type called glioblastoma multiform. This kind of growth is very invasive, very fast growing. It invades nearby tissue quickly and destructively. And it is usually malignant."

They all sat still as statues.

"The only way we're going to be a hundred percent sure of the assessment is to do a biopsy," Dr. Kashiwabara said. "We'll do that in a day or two, so that we can determine our course of action. But I want to stress to you that the tumor itself can be removed. That will relieve the pressure on the surrounding structures." "But that's not everything, is it?" Nita said.

The doctor shook her head. "I said that this kind of growth is invasive. It has a tendency to spread—to seed itself throughout the body, to other organs: the lymph nodes, the liver and spleen, the bone marrow. Because glioblastomas grow so quickly at this stage in their development, it's hard to tell how long the tumor may have been there in 'silent' mode, seeding itself. The important thing is going to be to start chemotherapy as soon as possible after the surgery to remove the tumor. Possibly radiotherapy as well."

Nita's father nodded. "Have you discussed this with my wife?" he said.

"Not yet," said the doctor. "That comes next. I wanted a chance to prepare you first, since you two will want to talk about it together, and it's important that you both have all the facts."

"The 'seeding,'" her father said. "It's cancer that you mean. Spreading." "Yes," said Dr. Kashiwabara.

Nita felt as if she had been turned to ice where she sat. Cancer was a word that she had come across repeatedly in her reading that morning, but she had been trying to ignore it. Now she realized her folly, for the most basic tool of wizardry is words, and a wizard who ignores words willfully is only sabotaging herself.

"What are her chances?" Nita's father said. "It's too soon to tell," said the doctor. "Right now our priority is to get that tumor out of there. Afterward there'll be time to look at the long-term options." "Is the operation dangerous?" Nita said.

Dr. Kashiwabara looked at her. "There's a certain risk," she said. "As in any surgical procedure. But the tumor's in an area where it won't be too hard to get at, and for this kind of surgery, we use a technique that's more like the way we fix people's noses than anything else. It's not nearly as invasive or traumatic as brain surgery was years ago. I'll sit down with you and show you some diagrams, if you like."

"Thanks," Nita said. "Yes."

The doctor turned back to their dad. "Is there anything else you want to ask me?" "Only when you think the surgery will be scheduled."

"As soon as possible. There's a team of local specialists that we put together for this kind of surgery. I'm getting everyone's schedules sorted out now. I think it'll be Wednesday or Thursday."

"Okay," Nita's dad said. "Thanks, Doctor."

The doctor went off, leaving them together. I saw her face, Nita remembered her dad saying. She was shaking. He was right.,.

"There's no point in us hanging around here," her father said. "Why don't we look at the diagrams Dr. Kashiwabara has for us. Then I'll drop you two home, and come back a little bit later, so I can talk to Mom."

"Daddy, no!" Dairine said. "I want to stay and—"

Dart, Nita said silently, shut up. We need to see Tom, in a hurry. And you and I need to talk. "No, honey," their father said. "I want to see her first. Okay?"

"All right," Dairine said, subdued, but she shot Nita a rebellious look. "Let's go."

Nita held her fire until they were home, and all had had something to eat. When her father was getting ready to go out, she stopped him at the door and said, "We may be going out, Dad. Don't be surprised if we're not here when you get back. There are visiting hours tonight, right?"

"Yes, I think so. You can go then." Her dad exhaled. "I guess it's a good thing that the surgery will happen quickly. We can start... coping, I guess."

"Yeah. And we'll do more than that." She gave him a hug. "Give that to Mom for me." "I will."

She watched him pull out of the driveway and drive off.

Nita started up the stairs and met Dairine halfway down them, shrugging into her jacket, with Spot under her arm. "Not so fast," Nita said. "I want you to tell me what you were doing in there."

"Something," Dairine said. "Which was more than you were."

Nita was tempted to hit her sister—to really hit her, which shocked her. Dairine brushed by her and headed for the back door. Nita grabbed her own jacket and her manual, locked the back door, and went after her.

Dairine was halfway down the driveway already. "Were you crazy, doing a wizardry right there?" Nita whispered as she caught up with her. "And you bombed, didn't you? You crashed and burned."

Dairine was walking fast. "I don't want to talk about it."

"You'd better talk about it! She's my mother, too! What were you trying to do?" "What do you think? I was trying to cure her!"

Nita gulped. "Just like that? Are you nuts? Without even knowing exactly what kind of growth you were operating on yet? Without—"

"Neets, while I've still got the power, I've got to try to do something with it," Dairine said. "Before I lose the edge!"

"That doesn't mean you just do any old thing before you're prepared!" Nita said. "That wizardry just came apartl What if some piece of it got loose and affected someone else in there? What if—"

"It doesn't matter," Dairine muttered, furious. "It didn't work." Nita looked at her, as they crossed the street and headed down the road that led to Tom and Carl's, and saw the tears starting to fill Dairine's eyes again. "It didn't work," Dairine said, more quietly. "How can it not have worked? This isn't even anything like pushing a planet around; this isn't even a middle-sized wizardry— It..." She went quiet.

Nita could feel the tension building all through Dairine, like a coil winding tighter and tighter. "Come on," she said.

When they rang Tom's doorbell, it was a few moments before he answered, and as he opened the screen door, Nita wasn't quite sure what to make of his expression. "It's Grand Central Station around here this morning," Tom said, "in all kinds of ways. Come on in."

"Is this a bad time?" Nita asked timidly.

"Oh, no worse than usual," said Tom. "Come on in; don't just stand there."

He quickly closed the front door behind Nita and Dairine as they went by, which was probably just as well, because otherwise a passerby might have seen the six-foot-long iridescent blue giant slug sitting in the middle of the living-room floor, deep in conversation with Carl. At least it would have looked like a giant slug to anyone who hadn't been to Alphecca VI, but slugs weren't usually encrusted with rubies of such a size. "Hey, ladies," Carl said as they passed, and then went back to his conversation with his guest.

Tom led them into the big combined kitchen-dining room. "Are you two all right?" Tom said. "No, I can tell you're not; it's just about boiling off you. What's happened?"

Briefly Nita told him. Tom's face went blank with shock.

"Oh, my God," he said. "Nita, Dairine, I'm so sorry. This started happening when?" "Yesterday afternoon."

Tom sat down at the table. "Please," he said, gesturing them to seats across from him. "And you say they've got the scans done already. That helps." He looked up then. "It also explains something Carl noticed an hour or so ago..."

Carl had just said good-bye to the Alpheccan, who had vanished most expertly, without even enough disturbance of the air to rustle the curtains. "Yeah, I thought that was you earlier," Carl said, coming over to sit down at the table and looking at Dairine. "It had your signature, with that kind of power expenditure. But something went real wrong, didn't it?"

"It didn't work," Dairine said softly.

"There are only about twenty reasons why it shouldn't have," Carl said, sounding dry. "Inadequate preparation, no concrete circle when so many variables were involved, insufficiently defined intervention locus in both volume and tissue type, other unprotected living entities in the field of possible effects, inadequate protection for the wizardry against 'materials' memory of past traumas in the area; shall I go on? Major screwup, Dairine. I expect better of you." He was frowning.

Nita tried to remember if she'd ever seen Carl frown before, and failed, and got the shivers. "I thought I could just^zx it," Dairine said, looking pale. "I mean—I've done that kind of thing before."

Carl shook his head. "Yes, but you can't go on that way forever. Your power levels are down nine, maybe ten points from mid-Ordeal levels. That's just as it should be. But hasn't it occurred to you that there's another problem? You started very big. This is a small wizardry by comparison—and you haven't yet mastered the reduction in scale to make you much good at the small stuff. Sorry, Dairine, but that's the price you pay for such a spectacular debut. Right now Nita's the only one in your house who's got the kind of control to attempt any kind of intervention on your mother at all. You're going to have to let her handle it. And I warn you not to interfere in whatever intervention Nita may elect. It could kill all three of you. It's going to be hard for you to sit on your hands and watch, but that's just what you're going to have to do."

"It's not fair," Dairine whispered.

"No," said Tom. "So let's agree that it's not, then move past that to some kind of solution. If indeed there is one."

"//'"Nita said.

Tom looked at her steadily, an expression inviting her to calm herself down. "Maybe a Coke or something?" Carl said.

"Please," Nita said. Carl got up to get the drinks. To Tom, Nita said, "I was doing a lot of reading this morning. I kept running into references to spells that had to do with cancer being difficult because the condition is 'intractable,' or 'recalcitrant.'" She shook her head. "I don't get it. A spell always works."

"Except when the problem keeps reconstructing itself afterward," Tom said, "in a different shape. It's like that intervention you and Kit were working on, the Jones Inlet business. If the pollution coming out of the inner waters was always the same, the wizardry would be easy to build. But it's changing all the time."

Nita grimaced. "Yeah, well," she said, "I blew a whole lot of time on detail work on that one, and the spell worked just fine without it. I think I'm having a lame-brain week." She rubbed her face. "Just when I most seriously don't need one!"

"There's not much point in beating yourself up about that right now," Tom said. "The foundations of the wizardry were sound, and it did the job, which is what counts. And you may be able to recycle the subroutines for something else eventually."

Carl came back with four bottles of Coke, distributed them, and sat down. He exchanged glances with Tom for a second longer than absolutely necessary, as information passed from mind to mind.

"Oh boy," Carl said. "Nita, Tom's right. The basic problem is the structure of the malignancy itself—"

"Look, let's take this from the top," Tom said. "Otherwise there are going to be more misunderstandings." He held out his hand, and a compact version of his manual dropped into it. He put it down on the table and started leafing through it. "You've done some medical wizardry in the past," he said to Nita.

"Yeah. Minor healings. Some not so minor."

Tom nodded. "Tissue regeneration is fairly simple," he said. "Naturally there's always a price. Blood, either in actual form or expressed by your agreement to suffer the square of the pain you're intending to heal—that's the normal arrangement. But when you start involving nonhuman life in the healing, things get complicated."

Nita blinked. "Excuse me? My mother was human the last time I looked!"

Carl gave Tom an ironic look. "What my distracted colleague here means is that it's not just your mother you have to heal, but also whatever's attacking her. If you don't heal the cause of the tumor or the cancer, it just comes back somewhere else, in some worse form."

"What could be worse than a brain tumor?!" Dairine said.

"Don't ask," Tom said, still leafing through the manual. "There are too many ways the Lone Power could answer that question." He glanced up then. "Your main problem is that cancer cells are tough for wizards to treat because they're neither all inanimate nor all biological life. They're a hybrid.. .which causes problems when trying to write a spell that will eradicate them without hurting normal cells. It's exactly the same thing that makes chemotherapy slightly dangerous. It poisons the good cells as well as the bad ones unless it's very carefully managed."

"The other part of the problem," Carl said, "is that the viruses and malignant cells mutate as they spread. That makes cancer as intractable for wizards to treat as for doctors. Even if you could wave your hands in the air and say, 'Disease go away!' all you can do is make the disease go away that's there today. After that, all it takes is one virus that you missed, hidden away in just one cell somewhere, to start breeding again. They get smarter and nastier after an incomplete eradication. What comes back will kill you faster than what was there originally. Worse, you can never get them all. A spell complex enough to do that, accurately naming and describing each and every cell, and what you think might be hiding in it, would take you years to write. By which time..." He shook his head.

"I thought maybe you did spells like that," Nita said in a small voice.

Tom smiled, even though the smile was sad. "That's a much higher compliment than I deserve. No, a wizardry that complex is well beyond my competence... which is a shame, because if it wasn't, I wouldn't rest by day or night until I had it for you."

Nita gulped.

"A lot of wizards have spent a lot of time on this one, Nita," said Carl. "There are ways to attempt a cure, but the price is high. If it weren't, there wouldn't be much cancer; we'd be stomping it out with ease wherever we found it. As it is, look at the world around you, and see how far we've got."

That thought wasn't one she cared for. "You say there are ways to 'attempt' a cure," Nita said. "It sounds like it doesn't work very often."

"That's because of the most basic part of the problem," Carl said. "It leaves us, in some ways, even less able to do anything than the medical people. We're wizards. Viruses, though they're not exactly organic life, are life regardless. And we cannot just go around killing things without dealing with the consequences, at every level."

"Oh, come onl" Dairine said.

"Not at all," Carl said. "Where do you draw the line, Dairine? Where in the Oath does it say, Til protect this life over here but not that one, which is just a germ and happens to be annoying me at the moment?' There's no such dichotomy. You respect all life, or none of it. Of course, that doesn't mean that wizards never kill. But killing increases entropy locally, and it's always to be resisted. Sometimes, yes, you must kill in order to save another life. But you must first make your peace with the life-form you're killing."

"If I'm just going to be killing a bunch of viruses," Nita said, "I should be able to manage that."

Carl shook his head. "It may not be so easy. Viruses have their own worldview: 'Reproduce at any cost.' Which also can mean 'kill your host.' In dealing with that kind of thing, a wizard is handicapped right from the start."

"Blame the Speech," Tom said. "It's the basis on which every wizardry is predicated... but here, it's also our weak spot, if this is a weakness. Everything that lives knows the Speech and can use it to tell you how life feels for it, how its universe makes it behave..."

Nita stared at the table, her heart sinking. Tom was right. It was hard to be angry at something—a rock, a tree—that you could hear saying to you, This is how I'm made; it's not my fault; you see how the world is, the way things are; what else can I do? And for the simplest things—and viruses are about as simple as things get—it would be hard to explain to them why they shouldn't be doing this, why they should all just stop reproducing themselves and essentially commit suicide so that your mother didn't have to die. Their world was such a simple one, it wouldn't allow for much in the way of—

Nita's eyes went wide.

She slowly looked up from the table at Tom. "What about— Tom, is it possible to change a cancer virus's perception of the world—change the way the universe seems for them, is for them—so that they're more sentient? So that a wizard could deal with them to best effect? Talk them out of being there... talk them out of killing? Something like that?"

Tom and Carl looked at each other. Tom's look was dubious. But Carl's expression was strangely intrigued. He nodded slowly.

"You know the rules," he said. "'If they're old enough to ask...'" "'... they're old enough to be told.'"

Tom folded his hands and looked at them. "Nita," he said, "I couldn't ask about this before. Who are you thinking of doing this wizardry for? Your mother or you?"

Nita sat silent, then she opened her mouth.

"Don't," Carl said. "You're still in shock; you can't possibly have a clear answer to the question yet. You're going to have to find out as you do your work. But the question matters. Wizardry, finally, is about service to other beings. Our own needs come second. If you start fooling yourself about that, the deception is going to go straight to the heart of any spell you write, and ruin it. And maybe you as well."

"Okay," Tom said. "Let that rest for the moment." To Nita he said, "Are you clear about what you're suggesting you want to do?"

"I guess it would mean changing the way things behave in the universe, locally," Nita said. "Inside my mom." And she gulped. When she put it that way, it suddenly became clear how many, many ways there were to screw it up.

"Changing the structure of the universe itself," Tom said. "Yes. You get to play God on a local level." "You're going to tell me that it's seriously dangerous," Nita said, "and the price is awful."

"Anything worth having demands a commensurate price," Carl said. "What is your mother's life worth to you?... And yes, this option has dangers. But I see that's not likely to stop you in the present situation."

He leaned back a little in his chair, folding his arms, looking at Nita. "We have to warn you clearly," Carl said. "You think you've been through a lot in your career so far. I have news for you. You haven't yet played with anything like this. When you start altering the natural laws of universes, it's like throwing a rock into a pond. Ripples spread, and the first thing in the local system to be affected, the first thing the ripples hit, is you. You're going to need practice handling that, keeping yourself as you are in the face of everything changing, before trying it for real... and unfortunately, in this universe, everything is for real."

"I don't care," Nita said. "If there's a chance I might be able to save my mom, I have to try. What do I need to do?"

"Go somewhere it's not for real," Carl said. "One of the universes where you can practice." Nita stared at him, confused. "Like learning to fly a plane in a simulator?"

"It wouldn't be a simulation," Tom said. "It'll be real enough. As Carl said, figures of speech aside, it's always for real. But if you have to make mistakes while you're learning how to manipulate local changes in universal structure, there are places set aside where you can make them and not kill anybody in the process."

"Or where, if you kill yourself making one of those mistakes, you won't take anyone else with you," said Carl.

There was a moment's silence at that. "Where?" Nita said. "I want to go."

"Of course you do, right this minute," Carl said, rubbing his face. "It's going to take time to set up." "There may not be a lot of time, Carl! My mom—"

"Is not going to die today, or tomorrow," Tom said, "as far as the doctors can tell. Isn't that so?"

"Yes, but—" Nita stopped. For a moment she had been ready to shout that they weren't being very considerate of her. But that would have been untrue. As her Senior wizards, their job was to be tough with her when she needed it. Anything else would have been really inconsiderate.

"Good," Carl said. "Get a grip. You're going to need it, where you're going. The aschetic continua, the 'prac- I tice' universes, are flexible places—at least the early ones in the sequence—but if you indulge yourself in sloppy thinking while you're in one, it can be fatal."

"Where are they?" Nita said. "How do I get there?"

"It's a worldgating," Tom said. "Nonstandard, but you'd be using existing gates." He glanced at Carl. "Penn Station?"

"Penn's down right now. It'd have to be Grand Central."

Nita nodded; she had a fair amount of experience with the worldgates there. "What do I do when I get there?"

"Your manual will have most of the details," Carl said. "You'll practice changing the natures and rules of the nonpopulated spaces that the course makes available to you. You'll start with easy ones, then move up to universes that more strenuously resist your efforts to change them, then ones that will be almost impossible to change."

"It's like weight lifting," Nita said. "Light stuff first, then heavier." "In a way."

"When you finish the course," Tom said, "if you've done it correctly, you'll be in a position to come back and recast your mother's physical situation as an alternate universe... and change its rules. If you still want to."

If? Nita decided not to press the point. She'd noticed over time that sometimes Tom and Carl spent a lot of effort warning you about things that weren't going to happen. "Yes. I want to do it."

Tom and Carl looked at each other. "All right," Tom said. "You're going to have to construct a carrying matrix for the spells you'll take with you—sort of a wizardry backpack. Normally you'd read the manual and construct the spells you need, on the spot, but that won't work where you're going. In the practice universes, time runs at different speeds, so the manual can be unpredictable about updating... and you can't wait for it when you're in the middle of some wizardry where speed of execution is crucial. Your manual will have details on what the matrix needs to do. What it looks like is up to you."

"And one last thing," Carl said. He looked sad but also stern. "If you go forward on this course, there's going to come a time when you're going to have to ask your mother whether this is a price she wants you to pay."

"I know that," Nita said. "I'm used to asking my mom for permission for stuff. I don't think this'll be a problem." She looked up at them. "But what is the price?"

Tom shook his head. "You'll find out as you go along." "Yeah," Nita said. "Okay. I'll get started as soon as I get home."

And then, to Nita's complete shock, she broke down and began to cry. Tom and Carl sat quietly and let her, while Dairine sat there looking stricken. After a moment Tom got up and got Nita a tissue, and she blew her nose and wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, "that keeps happening all of a sudden."

"Don't be sorry," Tom said. "It's normal. And so is not giving up."

She sniffed once or twice more and then nodded.

"Go do what you have to," Tom said. She and Dairine got up. "And Nita," Carl said. On her way to the front door, she looked back at him.

"Be careful," Carl said. "There are occupational hazards to being a god."

Sunday Afternoon and Evening

NITA AND DAIRINE WALKED home, and Nita went up to her room and settled in to work. The moment she sat down at her desk, she saw that her manual already had several new sections in it, subsequent to the usual one that dealt with worldgatings and other spatial and temporal dislocations.

The first new section had general information about the practice universes: their history, their locations relative to the hundreds of thousands of known alternate universes, their qualities. They're playpens, Nita thought as she read. Places where the structure that holds science to matter, and wizardry to both of them, has some squish to it; where the hard corners on things aren't so hard, so you can stretch your muscles and find out how to exploit the squish that exists elsewhere. There was no concrete data about how the practice universes had been established, but they were very old, having apparently been sealed off to prevent settlement at a time almost too ancient to be conceived. One of the Powers That Be, or Someone higher up, foresaw the need.

While it was useful that no one lived in those universes to get hurt by wizards twisting natural laws around, there seemed to be a downside as well. You couldn't stay in them for long. The manual got emphatic about the need not to exceed the assigned duration of scheduled sessions—

Universes not permanently inhabited by intelligent life have only a limited toleration for the presence of sentients. The behavior of local physics within these universes can become skewed or deranged when overloaded by too many sentient-hours of use in a given period. In extreme cases such over-inhabition can cause an aschetic continuum to implode—

Boy, there's a 'welcome I won't overstay, Nita thought, though not without a moment's curiosity about what it was like inside a universe when it imploded. Something to get Dairine to investigate, maybe. Nita managed just a flicker of a grim smile at the thought.

Access scheduling is arranged through manual functions from the originating universe. Payment for the gating is determined by duration spent in the aschesocontinuum and deducted from the practitioner at the end of each session. Access is through local main-line gating facilities of complexity level XI or better; the gating type is a diazo-Riemannian timeslide, which, regardless of duration spent in the aschetic continuum, returns practitioners to the originating universe an average of +.10 planetary rotations along duration axis, variation +/- .005 rotation.

Nita did the conversion from the decimal timings, raised her eyebrows, So you go in, then come out more Sunday Afternoon and Evening

or less two hours after you went...no matter how much time you spend there. Could get tiring.

Ask me if I care!

There were many other details. Nita spent the rest of an hour or so absorbing them, then passed on to what seemed the most important part of the work in front of her: constructing the matrix to hold the spells she'd be using in the practice universes. The matrix would hold a selection of wizardries ready for use until she could get back to where the manual could be depended on for fast use.

The thought of a place where you couldn't depend on the manual made Nita twitch a little. But that was where she had to go to do her mother any good, so she got over it and started considering the structure of the matrix. It was complex; it had to be in order to hold whole ready-to-run spells apart from one another, essentially in stasis, so that they couldn't get tangled. The matrix structure that the manual suggested was straightforward enough to build but fiddly—like putting chain mail together, ring by ring and rivet by rivet, each ring going through three others.

Nita cleared her desk and laid the manual out where she could keep her eye on the guide diagram it provided. Then she put out her hands and pronounced eighty-one syllables in the Speech. Once complete, the sentence took physical form, drifting like a glowing thread into her hands. She said the sentence again, and again, until she had nine of the strands. Then Nita wound them together and knotted the ends of the ninefold strand together with a wizard's knot, creating a single sealed loop, which she scaled down in size. The next loop of nine strands was laced through that one, as were the next two. When it was finished, there would be three-to-the-sixth links in the matrix: seven hundred twenty-nine of them...

Nita didn't allow the numbers to freak her out. She kept at it, making each set of nine strands, winding them together, looping them, linking them through the other available links, and fastening them closed. The work was as hypnotic in its way as crocheting—a hobby that Nita had taken up a couple of years ago at her mother's instigation, then promptly dumped because the constant repetition of motions made her hands cramp. But this was not about making a scarf. This was about saving her mother's life... so Nita found it a lot easier to ignore the cramps.

Gradually the delicate structure began to grow. Several times Nita missed hooking one of the substructures into all the others it had to be connected to, and the diagram in the manual flashed insistently until she went back and fixed it. Slowly, though, she started to get the rhythm down pat, and the eighty-one syllables, repeated again and again, came out perfectly every time, though they started becoming meaningless with the repetition. I'm going to be saying these things in my sleep, Nita thought, finishing one more unit and moving on to the next.

About an hour into this work, Nita heard her dad come home. The back door shut, and she heard him moving around downstairs in the kitchen, but she kept doing what she was doing. A few minutes later there was a knock at her door, and he came in.

Nita looked up at him, grateful for the interruption, and flexed her hands to get rid of the latest bout of cramps. The steady energy drain that came with doing a repetitive wizardry like this was really tiring her out, but that couldn't be helped. "How's Mom?" she said.

"She's fine," her father said, and sat down wearily on her bed. "Well, not fine; of course not. But she's not in pain, and she's not so full of the drugs this afternoon ... We talked about the surgery. She's okay about that."

"Really?" Nita said.

Her father rubbed his face. "Well, of course not, honey," he said. "Who wants anybody monkeying around with their brain? But she knows it's got to be done."

"And the rest of it?"

Her dad shook his head. "She's not exactly happy about the possibility that the cancer might have spread. But there's nothing we can do about that, and there's no point in worrying about it when there's something so much more important happening in a few days."

He looked at the faint line of light lying on Nita's desk. "What's that?"

She picked it up, handed it to him. "Go ahead," she said when he hesitated. "You can't hurt it." He reached out and took the delicate linkage of loop after loop of light into his hands. "What's it for?" "Helping Mom."

"You talked to Tom and Carl?"

"Yeah." Nita wondered whether to get into the details, then decided against it. When he's ready to ask, I'll be ready to tell. I hope. "There are places I can go," she said, "where I can learn the skills I need to deal with the... cancer." She had trouble saying the word. I'm going to have to get over that. "I won't be gone for long, Dad, but I'll be going to places where time doesn't run the same way. I may be pretty tired when I get back."

He handed back the partly made matrix. "You really think this has a chance of making a difference? Of making your mom well?"

"It's a chance," Nita said. "I won't know until I try, Daddy." "Is Dairine going with you?"

Nita shook her head. "She's got to sit this one out."

Her father nodded. "All right. Sweetheart...you know what I'm going to say." "Be careful."

He managed just the slightest smile. "When are you going to tell Mom about this?"

"When I've tried it once. After I see how it goes, I'll tell her. No point in getting her worried, or excited, until I know for sure that I can get where I have to go and do what I have to."

"One other thing, hon..."

Nita looked at her father with concern.

"For tomorrow and Tuesday, anyway, I think you and Dairine should go to school as usual. It's better for us all to stick to our normal routines than to sit around home agonizing over what's going on."

Nita wasn't wild about this idea, but she couldn't find it in her heart to start arguing the point with her father right now. "Okay," she said after a moment.

"Then I'll go get us something to eat," her father said, and went out.

Nita turned back to the desk, let out a long sad breath at the pain and worry in her dad's face, and said the eighty-one syllables one more time...

Kit spent the day adding notes to his manual on where he had been. Once or twice during the process he checked the back of the book to see if there was anything from Nita but found nothing. At first he thought, Maybe she's busy. It's not like she doesn't have her own projects to work on. But as the evening approached, Kit began to wonder what she was up to. / guess I could always shoot her a thought.

He pushed back in his desk chair, leaned back— Ow!"

Kit turned around hurriedly and realized that Ponch was lying right behind him, half asleep... or formerly half asleep. He wasn't now; not with one of Kit's chair legs shoved into his gut. "Sorry," Kit said, pulling the chair in a little.

"Hmf," Ponch said, and put his head down on his paws again. Kit sighed and closed his eyes once more. Neets?..,

... Nothing. Well, not quite. She was there, but she wasn't in receiving mode right now, or just wasn't receptive. Additionally, coming from her direction, Kit could catch a weird sort of background noise, like someone saying something again and again—a fierce in-turned concentration he'd never felt in her before. What's she doing?... The noise had a faint taste of wizardry about it, but there was also an emotional component, a turmoil of extreme nervousness, but blocked, stifled—he couldn't make anything of it.

Weird, he thought. Neets? Anybody home?

Still no reply. Finally Kit sighed and leaned forward to his work again. The manual had presented him with a detailed questionnaire about his experiences in the places he'd been, and there were still a lot of sections to fill in. /'// walk over there after I'm done and see what the story is.

It was after eight before Kit got up. He went downstairs to get his jacket, for it was chilly; fall was setting in fast. As Kit went by, his pop looked up from the living-room chair where he was reading, and said, "Son, it's a school day tomorrow. Don't be out late."

"I won't," Kit said. "Just gonna drop in on Nita real fast."

With a scrabble of claws on the stairs, Ponch threw himself down them and turned the corner into the living room."Whereyagoin'-whereyagoin'-whereyagoin'!"

"Mr. Radar Ears strikes again," Kit's father said. "Can't move around here without that dog demanding you take him out for a walk."

"He has his reasons," Kit said, amused, and headed out.

The streetlight at the corner was malfunctioning again, sizzling as its light jittered on and off. Kit didn't mind the "off; as he crossed the street with Ponch, he could see more plainly the stars of autumn evening climbing through the branches of the trees. Already there were fewer leaves to hide them. At the rate this fall had been going, with sharp frosts every night, there would be few leaves, or none, left in a couple of weeks. Past the faint glints of Deneb and Altair in that sky were Uranus and Neptune. Kit couldn't see them with the naked eye, but to a wizard's senses they could be felt, even at this distance, as a distant tang of mass in the icy void. Kit smiled at the thought that they seemed even more like the local neighborhood than usual, compared to the places he'd been today.

He came to Nita's house and, to his surprise, found it dark and Nita's dad's car gone. Maybe they all went out somewhere, to the movies or to visit somebody* something like that. Oh well, Mela said she called. And she got my message. She'll get back to me.

Kit walked Ponch for a little while more, then went home and settled once again at his desk to finish that report in the manual, but first he used it to leave Nita another message. Tried to reach you earlier, but you sounded busy. Call when you can. He would have added See you at school tomorrow, except that this was less likely than it used to be. Their classes were all different, and at the moment they didn't even have the same lunch period.

He sent the message, then paged through the manual to finish his report. Ponch curled up behind Kit's chair, muttering a little to himself as he groomed his paws after their walk. "If you were going to tell someone your gut feeling about the places where we went yesterday," Kit said to Ponch, reading him one of the questions he still had to answer, "what would it be?"

"They smelled nice," Ponch said slowly. "But smell isn't everything..." Kit raised his eyebrows, made a note of that, and went back to work.

Monday Morning and Afternoon

NITA SAW DAWN COME in again...this time because she hadn't bothered to go to sleep after coming back from the hospital. She had been too busy working on the spell matrix. Now, worn out, she sat at her desk in the vague morning light and looked at it as it lay in her hands.

To a wizard far enough along in her learning to think in the Speech, and used to seeing the underpinnings of power beneath mere appearance, it looked two ways. One was a complex, interwoven glitter and shimmer of strands of light with nine prominent "knots" showing, each one a receptor site into which a "free" wizardry could be offered up. But the other semblance, which had made it easier for Nita to work with the wizardry in its later stages, was a charm bracelet, though one with no charms on it as yet. The manual suggested it would take time for her to choose the spells she needed and mate them successfully to the matrix. Nita hoped it wouldn't take as long as the manual suggested it might. She needed to hurry.

She poured it through her fingers, feeling the virtual mass she had bound into the matrix's structure. It now looked and felt enough like an ordinary charm bracelet that no one would find it strange Nita was wearing it. It was also a convenient shape; she wouldn't have to keep it in a pocket.

"Didn't think you'd be done with it already," Dairine said from right behind her.

Nita started, nearly falling right out of her chair, then looked over her shoulder. "Yeah, well, think about that the next time you accuse me of not doing anything."

Dairine nodded. She looked wan, in that early light, and her dad's big T-shirt hanging off her made her look more waiflike and fragile than usual. Nita regretted having spoken sharply to her. "You okay?"

"No," Dairine said, "and why should I be? Terrible things are happening, and there's nothing I can do. Worse, I have to sit around and hope that you get it right." She glowered.

This, at least, was a more normal mode of operation for Dairine. Nita poked her genially. "We'll see what Carl says," she said. "Go on."

Dairine went off. Nita got up and opened a drawer, to choose her clothes for that day, picked up that new skirt and almost decided not to wear it. Then she thought, Why not? If I get sent home, it'll just give Mom an excuse to feel like she was right. Probably cheer her up, too. She fished around for a top to go with it, then went off for her shower.

Half an hour later, showered and dressed, Nita felt slightly better, almost as if she hadn't been up all night. She went downstairs to have a bite of breakfast and found her father finishing a bowl of cereal. He glanced at Nita as she rummaged in the fridge, and said, "Isn't that a little short?"

Nita snickered. "Mom bought it, Dad. It was long enough for her."

Her father raised his eyebrows. He normally left this kind of issue to Nita and her mom to resolve; now he seemed to be having second thoughts. "Well, I suppose ... Come by the store when you're out of school and we'll go straight over and see Mom."

"Okay." She put the milk down and hugged him. "See you later."

Her father went out, and Nita watched him get into the car and drive off. It felt to her as if he was just barely holding it all together, and that tore at Nita. Well, if I can make this work, he won't need to be that way for long.

Please, God, let it work!

She drank a glass of milk and then sat down at the kitchen table with her manual, flipping to the back of it. There she saw the new message from Kit and was immediately guilt stricken. /'// catch up with him at school today, she thought. Right now, though, I've gotta take care of this first. She opened a new message on a clean page. Carl?

The answer came straight back; he was using his manual, too. Good morning. Got a moment?

If it's just a moment, yes. I'm done. Want to check it out? Okay. Come on over.

Nita reached into her claudication-pocket, pulled out the transit spell she used for Tom and Carl's backyard, and tweaked the ingress parameters so that there'd be no air-displacement bang. Then she dropped it to the floor and stepped through.

Carl was standing in the doorway from the house to the patio, tying his tie and looking out at the garden. Nita paused for just a moment to admire him; she didn't often see him dressed for work. "Nice tie, Carl."

He glanced down at it. It was patterned all over with bright red chilies, a surprising contrast to the sober charcoal of the suit. "Yeah, it was a gift from my sister. Her ideas of business wear are unique. What've you got for me?"

"Here," Nita said, going over to hand him the charm bracelet. He raised his eyebrows, amused by the shape, and then dissolved the appearance to show the matrix itself, enlarged until it stretched a couple of feet in length, shimmering and intricate, between his hands.

"Yeah," Carl said, examining it section by section. "Right..." He showed her one spot where the linked strands didn't come together quite the same way they did elsewhere. "Open receptor site there..."

"I know. I left it that way on purpose, in case I need to expand it later." Nita pointed at the spell strands around the spot. "See, there's reinforcement around it, j|

and a blocker."

"Hmm..." He looked at the rest of the matrix.

Monday Morning and Afternoon

"Yeah, I see what you've done; it makes sense. Okay, I'll sanction it."

Carl took the two ends of the matrix strand and knotted them with a slightly more involved version of the wizard's knot. The whole length of the matrix flashed briefly with white fire as Carl set his Senior's authorization into the structure of the wizardry. Though the flash died away quickly, for a few moments the whole backyard hummed with released and rebound power. Nita was distracted from the sight of a small, complex structure now hanging from the strand, like a tangled knot of light, by a sudden annoyed voice that said:

"Any chance you might

hold it down out there? People in here are still sleeping."

Nita looked around. One of the koi in the fishpond had put its head up out of the water and was giving them both a cranky look.

Carl sighed. "Sorry, Akagane-sama." He bowed slightly in the fish's direction.

The koi, a big handsome one spotted in dark orange-gold and white, rolled halfway over on the edge of the pool, and caught sight of Nita with one golden eye. It looked at her thoughtfully, then said:

"If half a loaf is better than no bread, then at least I want the crumbs now."

"It's blackmail, that's what it is," Carl said, and vanished into the house. A few moments later he came back out and dropped some koi pellets and toast crumbs into the water.

The fish let out a bubble of breath, glancing at what Carl was holding. "All the drawing lacks," it said, "is the final touch: to add eyes to the dragon..."

Then it slipped back into the water with a small splash, and started eating.

Nita glanced at Carl. He shrugged. "Sometimes I don't know whether I have koi or koans," he said. "Anyway, you're all set now. The Grand Central gate will acknowledge this when it comes in range." He handed Nita the matrix, and it looked like a charm bracelet again. But there was something added: a single golden charm—a tiny fish. "So when're you going to start?"

"Uh, this afternoon, if I can stay awake that long."

"Go well, then," Carl said. "Speaking of which, I have to go, too." He patted her on the shoulder. "Good luck, kiddo." He went into the house.

Nita slipped the bracelet onto her wrist, and headed back to her transit circle.

Kit went to school that morning still excited about what he'd brought back from his dog walk. He'd transited the little flower, still in stasis, over to Tom's Sunday night, and he spent all his morning classes wondering what Tom would make of it. At lunchtime Kit managed to get out to where the pay phones were ranked in front of the Conlon Road entrance, and waited in line for nearly ten minutes before one was free.

Tom answered right away. "You get it okay?" Kit said.

"Yup. And I've been going through a precis of the raw data from your walk—the whole capture is about a thousand pages, maybe more. The really interesting thing about your jaunt, though, is that the places you went, the places you made, are still there."

Kit wasn't sure what to make of that. "I thought they would just go away afterward." "Seems not."

"What does that mean?"

"That I need an aspirin, mostly," Tom said. "Well, it means a few other things, too."

Kit glanced around—none of the other kids nearby was paying him the slightest attention—and whispered, "But...you can't just make things—planets, whole universes—out of nothingl"

"Strangely enough, that's how it was originally done. What's unusual is that it's not usually done that way anymore. Received wisdom had it that the grouped khiliocosms, or 'sheaf of sheaf of universes,' the whole aggregate of physical existence, had a stable and unchanging amount of matter and energy. What you and Ponch have been doing would seem to call that into question."

"Uh, then I guess we're sorry," Kit said. "We didn't mean to make trouble for anybody."

Tom burst out laughing. "The only ones it's trouble for are the theoretical wizards, most of whom are probably now pulling out their hair, scales, or tentacles. You get transitory changes in the structure and nature of wizardry every now and then. Mostly they're situa-tional ripples in the fabric of existence, and mostly they pass. But they're going to have a party explaining this one."

"Is it going to be a problem?" Kit said.

"For the average wizard in the street? No," Tom said. "But I think you should have a talk with Ponch to keep him from running off and creating universes on his own. We don't know how stable these universes are... and we don't know if they might not be able to proliferate."

"Proliferate?"

"Breed," said Tom.

Kit was taken aback. "Universes can breed!" he whispered.

"Oh yes. I could get into the geometries of it, the mechanics of isoparthenogenetic n-dimensional rotations and so on, but then I'd need three aspirins, and my stomach'll get upset. Just have a word with Ponch, okay? I'd rather not wake up and discover that one of Ponch's creations has self-rotated and left our home space hip-deep in squirrels. It would cause talk."

"Uh, yeah."

"Meanwhile, what you brought back is safe, and lots of people are going to want to look at it. So on behalf of research wizards everywhere, thanks a lot. What's the rest of your day look like?"

"Geometry, social studies... and gym." Kit made a face. He was not a big gym fan; wizardry can keep you from falling off the parallel bars, but it can't make you good at them.

"Uh-oh," Tom said, picking up on Kit's tone of voice. "Every now and then I think, In the service of my Art I may accidentally drown in liquid methane or have my living-room rug slimed by giant slugs, but no one can ever make me climb one of those ropes again."

"Must be nice," Kit said.

"It will be, you'll see. Meanwhile, I think you've impressed Somebody with how you handled yourself out there. I was told to authorize you for further exploration. When you two go for your next walk, though, leave the manual on verbose reporting. It'll be useful for the researchers."

"No problem."

"Thanks again..." Tom hung up.

Then there was nothing to do with the rest of the day but go through classes as usual. While changing periods, Kit looked for Nita but didn't see her. Once, as he was just going into his math classroom before the bell rang, he caught sight of someone from behind, way down the hall, who he thought was her. But then Kit dismissed the idea; Neets didn't wear skirts that short. And it's a shame, said some unrepentant part of his mind.

Kit made an amused face. That part of his mind had been getting outspoken lately. His dad had reassured him that this was nothing to be concerned about— "revving up," he called it—but he wouldn't say much more. That made Kit want to laugh. His father, big and tough and worldly wise though he was, had a core of absolute shyness that few people outside the family recognized—but Kit knew it was the source of his own quiet side. He suspected that when it came to the facts of life, he was going to have to ask his dad to sit down and explain it all, to get the chore out of the way.

Kit went through the rest of the day, looking around for Nita again when school finished, but he couldn't find her. He went home, checked his manual, and found no new message from her, so he walked over to her house but found no one home. It made Kit want to laugh as he looked at the empty driveway. There'd occasionally been times when he didn't want to see Nita about anything specific, and she couldn't be avoided. Now, when he did want to talk to her, she couldn't be found—

Kit went home, had dinner, and did his homework. By the time he was finished with the miserable geometry, he was ready to take all the blame for their fight, if only to get things back the way they ought to be—anything to distract himself from the horror of cosines and the Civil War. He pushed all the schoolbooks on his desk aside and shot her a thought: Neets! Earth to Nita!

Nothing. But this time it was a nothing he recognized—a faint mutter of distant low-level brain activity.

Monday Morning and Afternoon

Nita was deeply asleep. Kit glanced at the clock in mild bemusement. At eight at night?! Never mind. Tomorrow morning early I'll meet her before she goes to school; we'll walk over together.

He wandered down the hall to his sister's room, peered in. Carmela was not there, but the TV and the tape deck were, and from the earphones lying on the bed, he could faintly hear someone singing in Japanese. The VCR was running, and on the TV, some kind of cartoon singing group—three slender young men with very long ponytails—seemed to be appearing in concert, while searchlights and lasers swept and flashed around them. It's not like the house isn't full of her weird J-pop half the time to start with, Kit thought, but she's got cartoon J-pop, too? Oh well. It's an improvement on the heavy metal.

Carmela emerged from the upstairs bathroom and brushed past him. "Looking lonely, little brother," she said, flopping down on her stomach and putting the earphones back in. "Where's Miss Juanita been lately?"

"Good question," Kit said, and headed down the stairs. "Where ya goin'?" she shouted after him.

He smiled. "Out to walk the dog."

Monday Night, Tuesday Morning

NITA WOKE UP AFTER midnight. She felt a flash of guilt for having fallen asleep straight after coming home from the hospital. But no matter how much she might have felt that precious time was slipping by, she'd been completely worn out, and there was no point in trying to do anything wizardly. Now the charm bracelet was satisfyingly heavy around her wrist, glinting in the light of the lamp on her desk, and she was rested and ready. So let's get to work...

She went downstairs to check where people were, and found that her dad had gone to bed. Nita made herself a sandwich and brought it back upstairs with her, pausing by Dairine's door to listen.

Silence. Softly Nita eased the door open, peered inside. In the darkness she could make out a tangle of limbs, pillows, and T-shirt on the bed—Dairine, in her usual all-night fight with the bedding. Nita shut the door and went into her room again.

She ate the sandwich with workmanlike speed and changed into jeans and sneakers and a dark jacket. Then she went to her desk to pick up the few small standalone wizardries that she thought would be useful for this exercise. One at a time she hooked each of them to a different link of the charm bracelet: a small gold house key, a little silvery disc with the letters GCT intertwined on one side and the number twenty-five on the other, a tiny stylized lightning bolt, a pebble, a little megaphone.

Nita pulled out her transit wizardry and changed its time-space coordinates, triggering the fail-safe features that would abort the spell if anyone was standing in the target area. Then she dropped the circle to the floor and stepped through, pulling it after her as she went.

The side doorway into which Nita stepped normally serviced one of the food stands in the Graybar Passage on one side of the terminal. Now there were only some black plastic garbage bags there, and Nita stepped over them and came out into the big archway dividing the passage from the Main Concourse. It would be a while before Grand Central shut down; a few trains were still moving in and out... and so was other traffic. Nita made her way to the right of the big octagonal brass information center, heading for the doorway that led to track twenty-five.

No train stood at the platform this late. Nita paused under the archway at the bottom of the platform, behind some iron racks and out of view of the control center far down the track on the right. She felt around in the back of her mind for another wizardry she'd prepared earlier, lying there almost ready to go. Nita said the thirty-fifth word, and the air around her rippled and misted over in a peculiar half-mirrored way. Whoever looked at her would see only what was directly behind her; she was effectively invisible now.

Nita walked on down the platform. Grand Central's most-used worldgate was down here, hanging in the space between tracks twenty-five and twenty-six, and accessible from either side for those who knew how to pull it over to the platform. Quite a few wizards used it for long-distance transport in the course of any one day—

Nita stumbled. "Auuw!" said someone down by her feet.

She recovered herself and stood still, looking around but unable to see what she'd tripped on. "Uh... sorry!"

"Oh," a voice said. "I see what you're doing. Wait a minute."

Suddenly there was a small black cat standing down by her foot, looking up at her. "Better," the cat said in the Speech. "Sorry about that. We were invisible two different ways."

"Dai, Rhiow," Nita said. Rhiow was the leader of the Grand Central worldgate supervision group, all of whose members were cats, since only feline wizards can naturally see the hyperstring structures on which worldgates are constructed. "I'm on errantry, and I greet you—"

"Aren't we all?" Rhiow said. "Nice to see you, too." She was looking at the opening in the air, filled with an odd shimmering darkness, which had manifested itself at Nita's approach. "Now, there's a configuration you don't see every day." "Carl okayed it."

"Of course he did. It wouldn't be here otherwise. Good timing on your part, though." Rhiow looked back toward the scurrying people in the Main Concourse with a put-upon expression. "This gate's been getting three times the usual use while the others are moving around."

"Moving!" Nita's eyes widened. She'd seen more than once now what happened when a worldgate dislocated itself improperly. The results could vary from simply disastrous to extremely fatal.

"No, it's all right; it's our idea, not the gates'!" Rhiow said. "But Penn Station is being moved into a new building, across Eighth Avenue, and the gates have to go, too. We've had our paws full."

"It was nice of you to take the time to see me off."

"Not a problem, cousin," Rhiow said. "I wanted to make sure this behaved itself when you brought it online. Meanwhile, watch how you go, and watch how you handle what you find. We can bring danger with us even to a training session, so you be careful."

"I will."

"Dai stibo then, cousin."

Dai...'

Manual in hand, Nita stepped through.

At first there was only a second's worth of darkness and the usual feel of the brushing of the worldgate across and through her, a feathers-on-mind feeling— strange as always but swiftly over. And then she broke out into light again, as if through the surface of water...

... and found herself on the opposite platform, next to track twenty-six.

Nita glanced around, confused. Uh-oh. Am I still invisible? She was. But then she realized that she needn't have worried. There was no one in sight at all.

She walked slowly back up the platform under the long line of fluorescent lights, going softly to avoid attracting any attention in this great quiet. Now where'd Rhiow go? Nita thought, glancing back at the platform to make sure she hadn't missed her somehow. But there was no sign of her, no movement, no sound anywhere—nothing but the soft cool breath of the draft coming up out of the dark depths of the tunnel through which the trains came into the station from under Park Avenue.

In the archway that led out into the Main Concourse, Nita paused, looking around her cautiously. There was no one out there, and all the lights were low. That was really bizarre, for even when the station was closed in the middle of the night, the lights were always up full, and there were always some people here: cleaners, transit police, workers doing maintenance on the trains and tracks. The lightbulb stars still burned, distant, up in the great blue backward sky of the terminal's ceiling, but below them the terminal was empty, drowned in a silence even more peculiar than the twilight now filling it.

Nita stood there and listened hard... not just with the normal senses, but with those that came with wizardry and were sharpened by its use. She tried to catch any hint of something wrong, the influence of the Lone Power or other forces inimical to a wizard. But there was no glimmer of danger to be sensed, no whisper of threat. Okay, she thought. Mere weirdness I can handle.

Softly Nita went out across the huge cream-colored expanse of the Main Concourse floor and up the ramp to the doors that led out onto Forty-second Street. She pushed one brass door open, stepped out onto the sidewalk.

There was no one here, either, and it wasn't one in the morning. It was midafternoon. The sun was angling westward, not even out of sight behind the skyscrapers yet.

Nita looked up and down Forty-second. No traffic, no cars, no people anywhere in sight; only the traffic lights hung out over the street, turning from red to green as she watched. A thin chill wind poured down the street past her, bearing no smells of hot-dog vendors, no voices, no honking horns... no sounds at all.

This was so creepy that Nita could hardly bear it. Once before she'd been in a New York that was nearly this empty... and she and Kit had had a bad time there. But here Nita got no sense of the Lone Power being in residence. She'd have instantly recognized that cold hostile tang in the air, the sense of being watched and overshadowed by something profoundly unfriendly.

Nita reached into her pocket of space, pulling out her manual and flipping it open to the new section ™ about the practice universes. Aschetic Spaces Habitua- 4 tion and Manipulation Routine, it said: Introduction: m

You have now successfully entered the first of a series of "aschesis" or "live proof" continua that have been made available to you. Successful handling and manipulation of this continuum will result in your being offered the next one in the series.

You are cautioned not to remain past your assigned time. Time warnings embedded in your manual may not function correctly.

A smaller block of text appeared underneath:

A timepiece based on the vibratory frequency of one or more crystalline compounds or elements has been detected on your person. Please use this timepiece for temporal measurements until further advice is given. Please do not change the vibratory frequency of [QUARTZ] in this universe.

"Gee, that was the first thing on my list," Nita muttered, glancing at her watch. She did a double take; the face of the watch, which until then had been plain white with black numerals, was now showing a red half-arc around the face, from the numbers 1 to 7. Nita glanced back at her manual.

Your total permitted time for this session has been marked. YOUR GOAL:

Each universe or continuum possesses a "kernel," or core, which contains a master copy of its physical laws and the local laws of wizardry. This master copy is a single complex statement in the Speech that lists all properties of matter and energy in the local universe, and the values for which these properties are set. To manipulate physical law on a universal scale, whether temporarily or permanently, the universe- or continuum-kernel first must be located.

To avoid easy alteration of natural laws by local species, world-kernels are normally hidden. This universe's kernel has been concealed in a routine manner. You must find the kernel before your allotted time elapses. You must then use the kernel to change the local environment. If you cannot find the kernel within the time allowed, this assignment will be offered to you again in one planetary rotation of your home world or one idiopathic cycle appropriate to your species...

Just once a. day. Nita swallowed. Wednesday was coming fast. "All right," she said to the manual, "the meter's running; let's go!"

The red arc on her watch began to flash softly; as she watched, it subtracted a tiny bit of itself from the point at which it had started.

Okay, she thought, where do you begin?

Nita walked away from the terminal, down that empty street, to pause at the corner of Forty-second and Lexington, looking up and down the avenue. Nothing moved anywhere. She leaned her head back to look up at the spire of the Chrysler Building, glittering in the westering sun against an unusually clear blue sky.

If I were this universe's heart, where would I be?

If it was a riddle, it was one whose answer wasn't obvious. So for a long time Nita walked north on Lexington Avenue through the windy afternoon, looking, listening, trying to get the feel of the place. It was missing something basic that her own version of New York had, but she couldn't put her ringer on what was missing. At Eighty-fourth Street, on a hunch, she turned westward, heading crosstown, and started to page through the manual again for some hint of what she was doing wrong. She found a lot of information about the structures of aschetic universes, and one piece of this caught her attention, for she'd been wondering about it.

Entire universes and continua are by definition too large and often too alien to allow quick kernel assessment and location while their genuine physical structures are displaying. Wizards on assessment/location duties therefore routinely avail themselves of a selective display option that screens out distracting phenomena, condenses the appearance and true distances of the space being investigated, and identifies the structure under assessment with a favorite structural paradigm already familiar to the wizard. Early assessment exercises default to this display option...

So it gave me someplace I'm used to working, Nita thought. Probably just as well. She paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fourth, looking across the street and downtown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then went across the street and into Central Park, continuing to read through the manual. There were no more hints, and two hours were gone already. Nita looked at some of the spells she'd used for detection in the past, but they didn't seem much good for this. They were mostly for finding physical things, not other spells.

And the spells in the book don't seem to be working right, anyway, Nita thought as she came out at Eighty-sixth and Central Park West, turning south. She wasn't getting the usual slight tingle of the mind from the wizardries as she read. It was as she'd been warned: The manual's normal instant access to the fabric of wizardry didn't seem to be working here.

Either way, Nita started to feel that spells weren't the answer. If that's not it, there has to be another way. Besides just wandering around! But the silent streets in which nothing moved—no sound but the wind— made everything seem a little dreamlike, the stuff of a fairy tale, not a real place at all.

But it is real. The only thing missing...

...is the sound.

Nita stopped at the southwest corner of Central Park West and Eighty-first and thought. Then she went down the path from the corner to the planetarium doors, and cut across the dog run to go up the steps to the nearby terrace, where the "astronomical" fountain was. There she sat on a bench under the ginkgo trees, near where the water ran horizontally over the constellation-mosaicked basin, and looked at her watch. She had only two hours left. Part of her felt like panicking. This isn't working; I don't have time to spend another day doing this; what about Mom! But Nita held herself quiet, and sat there, and listened.

Water and the wind; nothing else. But even those sounds were superfluous. She could tune them out, the way she tuned out Dairine's CD player when she didn't want to hear it. That didn't take a spell.

And maybe I don't need to tune them out, anyway. For this place to be normal, for real, she needed to tune things in. She needed those sounds, the sounds that to her spelled out what life was like in the city, what made it its own self.

Traffic, for example. The horns that everybody honked even though it was illegal. The particular way the tires hissed on the road in hot weather, when the surface got a little sticky in the sun. The sound of trucks backing up and making that annoying high-pitched beep-beep-beep. Air brakes hissing. Car engines revving as the lights changed. Sirens in the distance. One by one, in her mind, she added the sounds to the silence. There was a kind of music to it, a rhythm. Footsteps on the road and on the sidewalks created some of that; so did the rattle of those bikes with the little wagons attached that the guys from the stores used to deliver groceries.

And so did the voices. People talking, laughing, shouting at one another in the street; those sounds blended with the others and started to produce that low hush of sound, like a river. It wasn't a steady sound. It ebbed, then flowed again, rising and falling, slowly becoming that long, slow, low, rushing throb that was the sound of the city breathing.

Not even breath. Something more basic. A pulse...

Nita held still. She could hear it now. It was not a pulse as humans thought of such things. It was much too slow. You would as soon hear a tree's pulse or breathing as this. But Nita was used to hearing trees breathe, and besides, their breath was part of this bigger one. Slowly and carefully, as if the perception was something she might break if she moved too suddenly, she turned her head.

The "sound" was louder to the south. If this place had a heart, it was south of her.

Nita got up carefully and, concentrating on not losing the way she was hearing things now, made her way back to the stairs and down from the fountain terrace, back toward Central Park West, then started heading south again. Within a block she knew she was going the right way. It's stronger.

Within another block she was so sure of what and how she was hearing that she didn't need to walk carefully anymore. Nita began to alternate jogging and walking, heading for the source of that heartbeat. Even in the silence, now that she'd let that recur, she could hear that slow rush of cityness underneath everything, like the sound she'd once heard of blood flow in an artery, recorded and much slowed down, a kind of windy growl. She got as far as Central Park South and realized that the source of the pulse was to her right and ahead of her: downtown, on the West Side somewhere.

Nita followed the pulse beat, feeling it get stronger all the time, as if it was in her bones as well as the city's. She went west as far as Seventh Avenue, then knew she was on the right track. The pulse came from her left, and it was much closer now. Another ten blocks maybe?

It turned out to be fifteen, but the closer Nita got, the less she cared about the distance, or the fact that she was dog tired. I'm going to do it. It's going to be okay. Mom's going to be okay!

She came out in Times Square, and smiled as she perceived the joke—there were lots of people who would have claimed that this was the city's heart. But her work wasn't done yet. The kernel was hidden here somewhere. Now that she knew what to listen for, Nita could feel the force of it beating against her skin, like a sun she couldn't see. Nita stopped there in the middle of a totally empty Times Square, all blatant with neon signs and garish, gaudy electric billboards along which news of strange worlds crawled and flashed in letters of fire, in the Speech and in other languages, which she didn't bother to translate. She turned slowly, listening, feeling...

There. A blank wall of a building. It was white marble, solid. But Nita knew better than to be bothered by mere physical appearance, or even some kinds of physical reality. She went to the wall, passed her hands over it.

It was stone, all right But stone was hardly a barrier to a wizard. Nita jiggled the charm bracelet around on her wrist until it showed one spell she had loaded there, the charm that looked like a little house key. It was a molecular dissociator, a handy thing for someone who'd locked themselves out or needed to get into something that didn't have doors or windows. Nita gripped the charm; it fed the wizardry into her mind, ready to go. All she had to do was speak the words in the Speech. She said them, put her hands up against the stone, feeling the molecules slip aside... then reached her hands through the stone, carefully, since she wasn't sure if what she was reaching for was fragile.

She needn't have worried. Her first sense of it as her fingers brushed it was that it was not only stronger than

Monday Night, Tuesday Morning

the stone behind which it was hidden but stronger than anything else in this universe, which might reach who knew how many lightyears from here in its true form rather than this condensed semblance-ofconvenience. What Nita pulled out through the fog that she had made of the stone was a glittering tangle of light about the size of a grapefruit, a structure so complex that she could make nothing of it in a single glance... and that was just as it should be. This was a whole universe's worth of natural law—the description of all the matter and energy it contained and how they worked together—gathered in one place the same way that you could pack all of space into a teacup if only you took the time to fold it properly. The kernel burned with a tough, delicate fire that was beautiful to see.

But she didn't have time for its beauty right this moment. Next time I'll have more time to just look at one of these, Nita thought. Right now I have to affect the local environment somehow.

The longer she held the kernel in her hands, the more clearly Nita could begin to feel, as if in her bones, how this core of energy interacted with everything around it, was at the heart of it all. Squeeze it a little this way, push it a little that way, and this whole universe would change—

Nita squeezed it, and the sphere of light and power grew, and her hand sank into it a little, the "control structures" of the kernel fitting themselves to her. Her mind lit up inside with a sudden inrush of power, a webwork of fire—the graphic representation of the natural laws of this universe, of its physics, mathematics, and all the mass and energy inside it—and she knew that it was hers to command.

For a moment Nita stood there just getting the feel of it. It was almost too much. All that kept her in control was the fact that this was not a full-fledged universe but an aschetic one, purposely kept small and simple for beginners like her—a kindergarten universe with all the building blocks labeled in large bright letters, the corners on all the blocks rounded off so she couldn't hurt herself.

Still, the taste of the power was intoxicating. And now to use it. Through the kernel, Nita could feel the way all energy and matter in this universe interrelated, from here out to the farthest stars... and while she held what she held, she owned all that power and matter. She ruled it. Nita smiled and squeezed the kernel harder, felt her pulse increase as that of local space did—energy running down the tight-stranded web-work, obedient to her will.

In that clear afternoon sky, the clouds started to gather. The day went gray in a rush; the humidity increased, and the view of the traffic lights down the street misted, went indistinct. She felt the scorch and sizzle of positive ionization building in the air above the skyscrapers as the storm came rolling and rumbling in.

Nita held it in check for a while, let the clouds in that dark sky build and curdle. They jostled together, their frustrated potential building, but they couldn't do anything until Nita let them. Finally the anticipation and the growing sense of power was too much for her. Do it! she said to the storm, and turned it loose.

Monday Night, Tuesday Morning

Lightning flickered and danced among the skyscrapers and from cloud to cloud as the rain, released, came instantly pouring down. The Empire State Building got hit by lightning, as it usually did, and then got hit several more times as Nita told the storm to go ahead and enjoy itself. Thunderclaps like gigantic gunfire crashed and rattled among the steel cliffs and glass canyons, and where Nita pointed her finger, the lightning struck to order. She made it rain in patterns, and pour down in buckets, but not a drop of it soaked through her clothes—the water had no power over her. And when some of the electrical signs started to jitter and spark because of all the water streaming down them, Nita changed the behavior of the laws governing electricity, so that current leaped and crept up the rain and into the sky, a slower kind of lightning, sheeting up as well as down.

In triumph Nita splashed and jumped in the flooding gutters, like a kid, then finally ran right out into the middle of the empty Times Square and whirled there in the wet gleam and glare all alone—briefly half nuts with the delight of what she'd done, as the brilliant colors of the lights painted the puddles and wet streets and sidewalks with glaring electric pigment, light splashing everywhere like Technicolor water. The feeling of power was a complete blast... though Nita reminded herself that this was just a step on the way to something much bigger. Curing her mother was going to be a lot more delicate, a lot more difficult... and the wizardry was going to cost her. But the innocent pleasure of doing exactly as she pleased with the power

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she'd come so far to find was something she badly needed.

The novelty took a while to wear off. Finally Nita banished the storm, sweeping the clouds away and right out of the sky with a couple of idle gestures—exactly the kind of thing a wizard normally couldn't do in the real world, where storms had consequences and every phrase of every spell had to be evaluated in terms of what it might accidentally harm or what energy it might waste. It'd be great if wizardry were like this all the time, Nita thought. Find the heart of power, master it, and do what you like; just command it and it happens; just wish it and it's done...

But that was a dream. Reality would be more work. And it would be more satisfying, though not all that different—for bioelectricity was just lightning scaled down, after all, and every cell in the body was mostly water. Now Nita stood there in the cool air, as the sun started to set in the cleared sky behind the skyscrapers, and looked again at the tangle of power that she held, this whole universe's soul. On a whim as she looked down at it, Nita altered its semblance, as she'd altered the look of the spell matrix she wore. Suddenly it wasn't a tight-packed webwork of light she was holding, but a shiny red apple.

Nita looked at it with profound satisfaction, and resisted the urge to take a bite out of it. Probably blow me from here to the end of things., she thought. She brought the kernel back over to where she'd found it, and held it up to the stone wall. It didn't leap out of her hand back to its place, as she'd half expected it would;

Monday Night, Tuesday Morning

it was reluctant. It enjoys this kind of thing, she thought. It likes being mastered... being used. It likes not being alone.

Nita smiled. She could understand that. Carefully she said the words that would briefly dissolve the stone, and slipped the kernel back in.

Wait till Kit sees this, she thought, pulling her hands out of the stone and dusting them off, when it's all over and Mom is better at last. He's gonna love it.

She checked her watch. Half an hour to spare; not too bad. I'll do better next time. She turned the charm bracelet on her wrist to show the little disc that said GCT/25, her quick way back to the ingress gate. "Home," Nita said, and vanished.

She came out on the platform at Grand Central, invisible again; a good thing, for just as she stepped out of the gate, a guy went by driving a motorized sweeper, cleaning the platform for the rush hour that would start in just a couple of hours. Nita glanced at her watch. It was three in the morning; as predicted, the return gating routine had dropped her here two hours after she'd left. But she was six hours' worth of tired. She fished around in her pocket and came up with her transit circle...

...and couldn't bear to use it for a second or so yet. Nita walked off the platform out into the Main Concourse—where a guy with a wide pad-broom was pushing some sweeping compound along the shiny floor—and out past him, invisible, and up the ramp, to push open the door and stand on Fortysecond Street

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again. This time there was traffic, and garbage in the gutter, and horns honking; this time the streetlights were bright; this time the sidewalks were full of people, hurrying, heading home from clubs or a meal after the movies, hailing cabs, laughing, talking to each other. As Nita dropped her transit circle onto the sidewalk, out of the way of the pedestrians, the wind coming down Forty-second flung a handful of rain at her, like a hint of something happening somewhere else, or about to happen.

Nita grinned, stepped through her circle, and came out in her bedroom. She pulled the circle up after her, and had just enough energy to pull her jeans off, crawl into bed, and pull the covers up before the darkness of sheer exhaustion came down on her like a bigger, heavier blanket.

"Nita?"

"Huh?!" She sat up in bed, shocked awake. Her father stood in the doorway, drying his hands on a dish towel, looking at her with concern.

"Honey, it's eight-thirty."

"Omigosh!!" She leaped out of bed, and a second later was amazed at how wobbly she felt.

"Don't panic; I'll drive you," her dad said. "But Kit was here ten or fifteen minutes ago. I thought you'd gone already—you don't usually oversleep—and then he went so he wouldn't be late." Her dad looked at her alarm clock. "Didn't it go off? We'll have to get you another one."

"No, it's okay," Nita said, rummaging hurriedly in

Monday Night, Tuesday Morning

her drawer. "What time are we going to see Mom today?" "When you get back from school."

"Good. I've got something to tell her." And Nita smiled. It was the first time in days that she'd smiled and it hadn't felt wrong.

It's going to work. It's going to be okay!

ornng and Afternoon

NITA'S FATHER TOOK THE blame for her lateness when he delivered her to the school's main office, and when her dad left, Nita went to her second-period social studies class feeling more or less like she'd been rolled over by a steam shovel—she was nowhere near recovered from the previous night's exertions. She waved at Jane and Melissa and a couple other friends in the same class, sat down, and pulled out her notebooks, intent on staying awake if nothing else.

This was going to be a challenge, as the Civil War was still on the agenda, and the class had been stuck in 1863 for what now seemed about a century. Mr, Neary, the social studies teacher, was scribbling away on the blackboard, as illegibly as ever. He really should have been a, doctor, Nita thought, and yawned.

Neets?

She sat up with a jerk so sudden that her chair scraped on the floor, and the kids around her looked at

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her in varying states of surprise or amusement. Mr. Neary glanced around, saw nothing but Nita writing industriously, and turned back to the blackboard, talking about Abraham Lincoln at his usual breakneck speed while he wrote.

Nita, for her own part, was bending as far over as she could while she wrote, trying to conceal the fact that she was blushing furiously. Kit—was starting to think you were avoiding me!

No,I—

Where've you been? Don't you answer your manual anymore?

She could have answered him sharply... then put the urge aside. That was what had started this whole thing. Look, she said silently. I'm really sorry. It was all my fault.

All of it? Kit said. Wow. Didn't think you were gonna go that far. The Lone Power's gonna be real surprised when It finds out you let It off the hook.

His tone was dry but not angry... as far as she could tell. Please, Nita said. I'd like to be let off it, too. There was a pause at Kit's end. Where've you been? I've got some stuff to show you. It's, ub, it's been busy. I—

Look, Kit said, save it for later. Wait for me after school, okay? Okay.

She felt him turn away in mind to become engrossed in the test paper that had just been put down in front of him. Nita turned her attention back to what her social studies teacher was doing at the blackboard... and was

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astonished to find that she could. Just that brief contact had suddenly lifted from her mind a kind of grayness that had been hanging over it since before her mom went into the hospital. And now, she thought, even if Dairine can't help, maybe Kit can.

But could he? And what even makes me think that after the pain in the butt I've been, he's going to want anything to do with what I'm planning? She desperately wanted to believe that he would want something to do with it, but she'd been pretty good at being wrong about things lately. And even if I asked him, would he think I was just asking because—

"Nita?"

Her head jerked up again. This time there was some subdued laughter from the kids around her. "Uh," she said, "sorry... what was the question?"

"Gettysburg," said Mr. Neary. "Got a date?"

"Yeah, but he'll have to stand on a box to reach," said a voice in the back of the room, just loud enough for Nita to hear, and for the kids around her to snicker at.

"July first through July third, eighteen sixty-three," Nita said, and blushed again, but more in annoyance this time. There were a number of guys in her classes who thought it weird or funny that Nita hung around with a boy younger than she was, and Ricky Chan was the tallest and handsomest of them. His dark good looks annoyed her almost as much as his attitude, and Nita couldn't think which satisfied her more: the fact that everyone around her knew she thought he was intellectually challenged—which drove Ricky nuts— or that if he ever really annoyed her, she could at any

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moment grab him by his expensive black leather jacket and dump it, and him, into one of several capacious pockets of otherspace that numerous alien species were presently using as a garbage dump.

Except that wizards don't do that kind of thing.

But boy, wouldn 't it be fun to do it just once!

Mr. Neary turned his attention elsewhere, and Nita went on taking notes. That class, and the rest of the day, passed without further event; and when the last bell rang at three-thirty and she went out into the parking lot, Nita saw Kit loitering by the chain-link fence near the main gate.

Nita headed for the gate, ignoring the voices behind her, even the loudest one: "Hey, Miss WAH-Neetz, where'd you send away for those legs?"

"Yeah, nice butt, nice face... shame about the giant bulging brain!"

The usual laughter from behind ensued. Nita began to regret her belief that changing out of jeans was going to make the slightest difference to her life at school.

Do you want to, or should I?

Want to what? Nita asked silently. We're supposed to be above this kind of thing.

Kit's expression, as she caught up with him, was neutral. There are species who would love these guys, he said. As a condiment.

She made a face as they walked up to the corner together, turning out of sight and out of range of the guys behind them. "Yeah," she said, "I was thinking about that. Among other things. Such as that I'm a complete idiot."

Kit waved the sentiment away.

"No," Nita said, "I mean it. You're not supposed to make this easier for me." "Oh," Kit said. "Okay, suffer away."

She glared at him. Then when Kit turned an expression on her of idiot expectancy, like someone waiting to see a really good pratfall, she managed to produce a smile—yet another one that to her surprise didn't feel somehow illegal. "You won't even let me do that right," Nita said.

"My sister won't let me do it, either," Kit said. "I don't see why you should get to." He lowered his voice. "Now, what the heck have you been doing that you're sound asleep at eight o'clock?"

All the things she'd been intending to say when this subject came up now went out of her head. "My mother has a brain tumor," Nita said.

Kit stopped short. "What?"

She told him, fighting to keep her face from crumpling toward tears as she did so. She'd meant to keep walking while she told him, but she found it impossible. Everything came out in a rush that paradoxically seemed to take her entire attention. Kit just stood there staring at Nita until she ran down.

"Oh, my God," he said in a strangled voice.

"Hey, lookit, he's not wasting any time," said a voice from down the street behind them. Other voices laughed. "Yeah, where's the box for him to stand on?" said one. The laughter increased.

Kit frowned. The laughter suddenly broke off in what sounded like a number of simultaneous coughing fits.

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"Kit! "Nita said.

Kit didn't stop frowning, just took Nita discreetly by the elbow and started to walk. "If they're gonna sneak out behind the bleachers in the field at lunchtime and smoke," he said, "it's not all my fault if it starts catching up with them. Come on— Neets, why didn't you tell me?"

"I just did," she said, confused.

"I mean, when you found out!" «Uh—"

"God, you weren't kidding; you are an idiot! Why didn't you call me? Even if you were mad at me!" "I wasn't mad at you! I mean—"

"Then, why didn't you—"

"I didn't want to call you just because I needed you!"

Then Nita stopped. Earlier that had seemed to make some kind of sense. Now it seemed inexpressibly stupid.

"You're right," she said then. "I've been having a complete brain holiday. Sorry, sorry—"

"No," Kit said. They turned the next corner, into Kit's street, and he shook his head, looking more furious than before. "They didn't tell me. They didn't even tell me. I'm gonna—"

"Who?"

"Tom and Carl. I'm gonna—"

"Gonna what}" Nita said, exasperated. "They're our Seniors. They couldn't tell you anything. It was private stuff; you know that has to be kept confidential, and they can't even deal with it at all unless it affects a wizardry. They didn't tell me what you were doing, either. So forget it."

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Kit was silent as they walked down the street. Finally he said, "What're we going to do?"

We.

Nita held out her arm to show him the charm bracelet. Kit looked at it, seeing what was under the semblance. "That's what I heard you making. How'd you get it done so fast?"

Fear, Nita thought. "You need it for the practice universes," she said, "and I don't have much time. They operate tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest. That's the best time to do the wizardry, when she's not awake —"

"You're going to need someone to backstop you," Kit said.

That thought had been on Nita's mind. Strange, though, how she now felt some resistance to the idea. "Look, if I can just—"

"Neets." Kit stopped, looked at her. "This is your mom. You can't take chances. You're gonna have to spend almost all your free time in those other universes, and you're gonna be wrecked. And I bet Tom and Carl told Dairine to butt out, didn't they?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Well?"

"Yeah, of course.. .yeah." What was I going to do, tell him I don't want his help? What's the matter with me? "Thanks."

Suddenly Nita felt more tired than she'd been even in school. "Look, we're going to the hospital to see her as soon as I get home. You want to come to the hospital with us?"

Tuesday Morning and Afternoon

Kit looked stricken. "I can't today. We have to go clothes shopping; can you believe it? Dad says we absolutely have to. But you'll go tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah, we go every day. Dad goes a couple of times."

"So I'll go with you then. It'll give me time to read up on what you've been doing." They stopped outside Kit's house. "As long as it's okay with you," he said suddenly.

"Huh? Yeah," Nita said.

"Okay. You going to go straight off and practice when you get back?" "Yeah, I have to."

"All right. Just call me when you get back in, okay? Don't forget." He punched her in the arm. "Ow! I won't forget."

"Then tell your mom I'll see her tomorrow."

And Kit headed up the driveway and vanished into the house.

Nita let out a long breath of something that was not precisely relief, and went home.

Her dad was hanging up the phone in the kitchen. He looked unhappy. "Daddy," Nita said, "are you okay?"

Dairine came around the corner as her dad got his jacket off one of the dining-room chairs. "Yes," he said, "but I could be happier. That was Dr. Kashiwabara. She says they're going to have to reschedule Mom's surgery for Friday or Saturday. One of the specialists they need—the doctor who does the imaging—had

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some kind of emergency and had to fly to Los Angeles." He sighed. "He'll be back in a day, they said, but I'm not wild about the idea of your mother being operated on by someone who might be jetlagged."

Nita threw a look at Dairine, who just nodded once. There were ways to add so much energy to another human being that they might have a whole solar system's worth of lag and not be affected. This was one of the simplest wizardries, and not beyond Dairine's abilities right now, no matter what else might be going on. "I think it'll be okay, Daddy," Nita said, dumping her schoolbooks on the table. "Let's go see Mom."

They drove to the hospital and found her mother, surrounded by a large pile of paperbacks, talking brightly to the lady in the next bed. "The only good thing about this," her mom said as they pulled the curtain around her bed for some privacy, "is that I'm really getting caught up on my reading."

Nita was about to throw a small silence-circle around them all, until she noticed that Dairine was walking quietly around the bed, doing it already. She made a mental note to herself to let Dairine do everything wizardly that she was capable of right now. As her dad pulled a chair over to the bed, Dr. Kashi-wabara stuck her head in past the curtain and greeted them all, and Nita's dad immediately went out into the hall with her.

Nita sat down in the chair, looking idly at the books as she took her mom's hand. Many of them were of a type of techno-thriller that her mother didn't usually read. "Your tastes changing, Mom?"

Tuesday Morning and Afternoon

"No, honey." Her mother's smile was a little rueful. "I just read the parts with all the shooting and blowing things up, and then I imagine doing that to the tumor...when I'm not hitting it with lightning bolts and setting it on fire. Guided imagery's a good tool to use to help deal with this, they say. Whether it actually makes it go away or not, it's a way to constructively use the tension. One of the therapists has been coaching me in how to do it. It gives me something to do when my eyes give out."

Nita nodded, feeling her mom's pulse as Dairine sat down on the other side of the bed. There was a faint resonance to that other pulse she'd felt and heard in the practice universe, not merely a sound or sensation but a direct sensation of the inner life—under threat, but still strong. "So what have you been doing?" her mother said.

"A lot." Nita explained to her mother as quickly and simply as she could about the practice universes, and the work she was doing there so that she could learn how to rewrite the rules inside the miniuniverse that was her mom's body, and then talk the cancer cells out of what they were doing. Her mother nodded as she listened.

"In a way it sounds like what the therapist's been showing me how to do," said Nita's mom. "Though your version might be more effective. Okay, honey, I don't see that it can hurt... You go ahead. But you realize that they're still going to have to operate."

"Yeah, I know. I thought about trying to take the 223

tumor out, but it makes more sense to let the doctors do it. They've had more practice."

Her mother gave her a slightly cockeyed look. "Well, I think it's considerate of you to let them do something." She reached over to the other side of the bed and ruffled Dairine's hair. "Are you helping with this, sweetie?"

"No," Dairine said, and abruptly got up and went out through the curtain. Her mother looked after Dairine with concern. "Oh no... what did I say?"

"Uhm," Nita said. "Mom, she can't help." Softly she . explained the problem. "She's really upset; she feels useless. And helpless." j.

"That I can sympathize with," Nita's mother said, squirming a little in the bed. "Poor baby." She sighed. "I guess it's tougher to deal with than running around from planet to planet, having fun."

Nita found this idea more than usually exasperating. "Uh, excuse me... 'fun'? Mom, I've nearly had a ton of bricks dropped on me by a white hole, I've nearly been eaten by a great white shark, and the Lone Power's nuked me, dropped a small star on me, and tried to r

have me ripped apart by perytons. And Dairine may I

have had even more 'fun' than I have, not that I'd admit it to her. Wizardry has its moments, but it's not just fun. So gimme a break!"

Nita's mother looked at her thoughtfully. "If I haven't been taking it seriously enough, I'm sorry. It's still kind of hard to get used to. But, honey... if wizardry is

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so scary for you, so painful... why do you keep on doing it?"

Nita shook her head, not knowing where to begin. The rush you got from talking the universe out of acting one way and into acting another, with only the Speech and your intention for tools; to know what song the whales sing, and to help them sing it; to stand in the sky and look down on the world where you worked, and to be able to make a difference to it, and to know that you did—even in the Speech there were no words for that. And helping others do the same thing—particularly when spelling with a partner — "It doesn't always hurt," Nita said. "There's so much about it that's terrific. Remember when we took you to the Moon?"

Her mother's gaze went remote with memory. "Yes," she said. Her glance went back to Nita then. "You know, sweetie, sometimes I wake up and think I just dreamed that. Then Dairine comes in with that computer walking behind her..."

Nita smiled. "Yeah. There's a lot more like the Moon where that came from, Mom. And here, too. Life on Earth isn't a finished thing. New kinds of life keep turning up all the time. We have to be here for them, to help them get settled in."

"New kinds of life," her mother murmured. "It just keeps on finding a way," Nita said.

And so does death, said a small cold voice in the back of her mind.

Nita gulped. "The hurt—I guess it balances out, even though you have to work at seeing it that way.

But, Mom, a lot of energy goes into making wizards what they are. We have a responsibility to life, to What made it possible for us to be wizards in the first place. If you just take that power and use it while everything's going okay, and then, afterward, decide you don't like the hard part, and just dump it all and walk off—" She shook her head. "Things die faster if you do that. And it does happen. 'Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart.' But sometimes... sometimes it's real hard to stay willing."

"Like now," her mother said.

"I am not going to just let this thing kill you without doing something to stop it," Nita said to her mother in the Speech, in which it is, if not impossible, at least most unwise to lie.

Her mother shivered. "I heard that. Good trick when it's not in a language I know."

"But you do know it," Nita said. "Everything knows it. On some level, even your cancer knows it... and I'm gonna do everything I can to talk it out of what it's doing to you." Nita tried hard to sound certain of what she was doing.

Her mother looked at her. "That's why you're looking so tired."

"Uh, yeah. You spend time in those other universes, which you don't spend here... and it wears you out a little."

"I suppose I shouldn't ask you if you've been doing your homework," her mother said. Nita swallowed. "Mom, right now I'm doing the only homework that matters."

Tuesday Morning and Afternoon

Her mother was silent. Then, softly, she said, "Honey, what if—what you're planning—"

Doesn't work? Nita couldn't bear to hear it, wouldn't have it said. "Mom, we won't know if that's a problem till I've done it. Meanwhile, let the doctors do their thing. If nothing else—"

"It might buy you some time?"

Nita's smile was slightly lopsided with pain. "I've bought too much time as it is," she said. "It's how I spend it that counts now."

Just then one of the nurses put her head in the door. "Mrs. Callahan, your medication..."

"Laura, can it wait half an hour? I still haven't seen my husband and my other daughter, and I'd like to be able to speak English to them, for a little while at least."

The nurse looked at her watch. "I'll check. I think that'll be all right." She went off. "Is this the stuff to prevent the seizures?"

Her mother winced. "It's not just that now, honey. My eyes are bothering me, and the headaches are getting bad. They try to keep me from reading, but if I can't at least do that, I'll go completely nuts just lying here. Do me a favor? Go find Dairine and let me spend some time with her before Daddy comes back."

A nervous expression passed across her mother's face, which she wasn't able to hide. "It's about the biopsy, isn't it?" Nita said.

Her mother closed her eyes, and Nita felt the fear that went right through her. "Yup," her mother said. Nita didn't even have to ask, Was it positive? She knew. "I'll go find her," Nita said. But she didn't let go 227

of her mother's hand. "Mom," she said, "I really hate this." "I hate it, too."

"All I want is for you to be home again."

Her mother opened her eyes and gave Nita a sly look. "Yelling at you to clean your room?" "Sounds like paradise."

"I'm going to remind you of that later." Nita found a smile somewhere. "You do that."

"I will. Go on, sweetie. Do your work... and we'll see what happens."

Nita kissed her mom and got out of there in a hurry, before the mood changed. She went out into the hall and saw Dairine leaning in the doorway of a little alcove where there were some vending machines—her gaze trained on the floor, her arms folded.

Thanks for the circle, she said silently to Dairine as she went over to her. You got a couple of minutes? Mom wants to talk to you.

About what? I can't do anything. Dairine didn't look up. All this power, and it's not enough.

Nita leaned against the same wall, folded her arms, stared down at the same undistinguished gray linoleum. I know, she said. It'd be nice to be able to just make this vanish... but...

But what can I do?/

Don't let her go through this alone was all Nita could think of to say.

Dairine nodded and went off down the hall. Nita watched her sister go, small and quick and tense, shoulders hunched, into their mother's room.

Tuesday Evening

WHEN KIT GOT HOME at last and lugged his share of the shopping into the kitchen, it was nearly seven.

Neets? Kit said silently as he started unpacking the contents of too many plastic bags onto the sofa. There were some T-shirts and some new jeans, but mostly the contents of these bags seemed to be socks, socks, and more socks.

Nothing. Nope, sloe's off doing her training-universe stuff already. Can't blame her.

"...and it's all got to be washed separately," his mother said, sounding less than enthusiastic, as she came in from the car. "Kit, honey, just make two piles, dark stuff and light stuff. This is going to take me forever."

Ponch came bounding in from outside, released from the backyard. "I think certain people want a walk," Kit's dad said as he entered and started unpacking another bag onto the kitchen table. "You go do that, son; I'll take care of these— Did you leave any socks in the store for the rest of humanity?" he called after Kit's mother.

"No. You're going to be wearing these till you die. Where did you hide the laundry basket?"

Kit gladly left his father in the company of all the world's socks, went to the back door, looked at the leash... then picked up the other one he'd left hanging beside it, invisible to nonwizardly eyes. "Ponch?"

"Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah!"

They went down the street together, Ponch running ahead to take care of business while Kit went along behind him, paging through his manual as twilight deepened toward full dark. He found a good-sized section discussing the theory and structure of the practice universes but no information on how to get into them. Access to the aschetic continua and to more detailed information is released on a need-to-go basis, the manual said. Consult your Area Advisory or Senior for advice and assessment.

Yeah, and what if they say no? Kit closed the manual and shoved it into his "pocket." And what ifNita gets pissed about my asking, because she thinks I think she can't handle it?

Better not to get involved.

But I am involved.

It wasn't just that he liked Nita's mother. He couldn't imagine a world without her, and knew Nita couldn't, either. The shock of finding out what was happening was giving way to the fear of what life would be like afterward... after—

Tuesday Evening

He didn't even want to think it. And neither does Neets...

Her fear was on Kit's mind. The two of them had been in some frightening situations. Mostly, though, these hadn't involved the kind of fear that lingered; they'd been over with in a hurry. What Kit had felt in Nita today, by contrast, had settled deep into her and made her something of a stranger. And there's nothing I can do to help, really. She's got to get over it herself.

If she can.

Ponch came running back to Kit. Let's go!

They headed down the street, to the side gate of the school. It was usually locked, but this was hardly a problem for Kit; he and the padlock through the gate's latch were old friends. As he reached the gate he reached out and held the padlock briefly. "Hey there, Yalie," he said in the Speech.

It wasn't as if inanimate objects were intelligent, as such, but they didn't mind being treated that way.

Who goes there?

"Like you don't know."

The padlock popped open in his hand. Kit slipped it out, softly opened the gate and let himself and Ponch through, then locked up again. "You keep an eye on things now."

You can depend on me.

Kit smiled. Ponch had launched himself away across the grass, in the general direction of the school buildings. Kit let him run awhile, then whistled to call him back. All the lights in the school were off except for the exit lights at the ends of the hallways, and the houses

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nearby were all screened from the road and parking lot on this side by hedges. No one could see them in the near-darkness.

He shook out the wizardly leash and put the shorter loop around his wrist. Ponch ran back to him, jumped up, and put his forepaws against Kit; Kit braced himself and slipped the bigger loop around the dog's neck.

"Ready?" "Ready."

Together they stepped into the deeper dark—

—and walked several steps more through it before breaking out into the light. There wasn't much light, though. A dim gray illumination inhabited the space, a thunderstorm twilight, with a greenish tinge like a bruise. A fog swirled around them, too, of the same color as the light. Where is this? Kit said silently to Ponch, down the leash. / wasn't thinking of this.

Neither was I. I don't always come out where I'd planned to.

They walked on through the grayness together. Ponch was sniffing at the featureless ground as they went. Not very exciting, Kit said. How about if we—

Not yet.

This assured tone from his dog was strange enough, but there was also something urgent about it. You smell something?

Always. But here—Ponch smelled the air, then went forward again with his nose to the ground—it's something different.

Like what?

Tuesday Evening

Like— The light was getting dingier, fading away— an odd, slow effect, as if the universe were hooked up to a dimmer, and the whole thing were being turned slowly, slowly down. It's you, but it's not you, Ponch said, perturbed.

Dimmer and dimmer...and then Kit caught his first sight of them in the dark. A rustling, a shifting in the shadowless light that was fading away all around him... and the sudden thought, as the hair went up on the back of his neck was: / don't want to be in the dark with them/

He had never really seen them, when he was little. Well, of course not! I was imagining them. But his early childhood had been haunted by these creatures themselves by night, and the fear of them by day. Kit took a step backward. Beside him Ponch held his ground, but he whimpered softly, the same eager sound he made when he had a squirrel in his sights.

The rustling sound got louder and seemed to come from all around him. Kit glanced about, getting more nervous by the minute. His childhood night fears hadn't been anything like what some adults seemed to expect: unlikely things hiding somewhere specific—under the bed, in the closet, or behind a dresser. They'd been nowhere near so easy to nail down, or to ridicule. Silly monster-shapes would have been infinitely preferable to his tormentors, which had had no shapes at all. Shadow had been their element, twilight their breeding place; and if summer had been Kit's favorite season when he was little, it was because in summer the nights were shortest and the twilight a long time coming. It

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had been years since he'd thought of these creatures. But maybe they haven't forgotten me. And now, in a place where things that weren't real could become that way, his fears had come looking for him.

But have they? Kit thought. Or did I find them... make them ...the way I made those other worlds?

He clenched his jaw as the scrabbling sound of jaws munching and chewing around him got louder. It doesn't matter, he thought. run away now, they win. No way I'm going to let that happen. His eyes narrowed. I'm a wizard. And more than that, I'm thirteen/ / got over these things years ago!

But would that make a difference? The shadows grew deeper, the scrabbling noises louder than before, closer. The thought of dead eyes staring at him out of the dark, no-color eyes that were black holes even in the night, brought the hair up on the back of his neck. Kit turned, thinking he saw something—the old familiar way the shadow turned and writhed against his bedroom wall when a car went by in the street, flinching from the headlights, then wavering up and out into the dark again when the lights died, the shape towering up against the wall and dissolving its features. Kit gasped, felt around in the back of his mind for a wizardry that would save him—

—then abruptly stopped, because nothing was towering up anywhere. The scrabbling noises were still going on all around him and getting louder, but whatever these things were, they weren't his night terrors. Now he caught the first real glimpse of one of them as it came close enough to be clearly seen through the

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dimness... and what Kit saw was something that looked more like a giant centipede than anything else. It didn't seem to have a front or back end, just a middle, and about a million legs, but that was all.

Millipede, Kit corrected himself, watching the shiny gray-black creature, about a yard long, come chittering and skittering along this space's streaky gray floor, at the head of a group of maybe twenty of them. This whole scenario was looking more and more like a bug's-eye view of a kitchen floor late in the day, before anyone turned the lights on. The surface on which he and Ponch and the millipedes stood even started to look like linoleum.

Kit listened to his pulse starting to go back to normal as the first millipede came cruising along toward him, all those little feet whispering against the floor— a completely innocuous sound, now that he knew what it was. Ponch looked suspiciously at the creature, and a growl stirred down in his throat.

No, it's okay, Kit said. Let it go. It won't hurt MS.

Are you sure?

Kit had a spell ready just in case. I think it's all right, he said. Just let it go. Unless— "I'm on errantry, and I greet you," Kit said in the Speech.

The millipede creature paused, reared half its body up off the ground, and faced the two of them, its little legs working in midair. But there was no sense of recognition, no reply. The creature dropped down again and went flowing on past him and Ponch, all those legs making a tickly shuffling sound as it went. All its friends went flowing away after it, the little legs rustling and bustling softly along on the floor. Kit watched them vanish into the still-growing shadows, and slowly relaxed.

Now why did you make those? Ponch said, looking after them with a disapproving expression. Did I make them?

I know I didn't, Ponch said in a reproachful tone. And I don't care for the way they smelled. Don't make any more, all right?

I think we're in agreement on that. Kit went forward, walking but not with intention to make another universe, or anything else, right this second. He just wanted to recover a little.

Ponch padded along beside him, his tongue hanging out. Those were like the things I see sometimes when I'm asleep and it doesn't go right.

Kit knew that Ponch dreamed, but it hadn't occurred to him that dogs might have nightmares. So what do you usually do when you see them?

Bite them... and then run away.

Kit laughed. / think if I bit one of those, it wouldn't have tasted real wonderful. But once he'd seen the creature clearly, it hadn't seemed terribly threatening. In the past he'd seen aliens that had looked much more horrendous. If it was a nightmare, it was someone else's.

Though if things had gone a little differently, it could have been mine. If I'd run, for example. Kit was suddenly certain of that. / need to watch what I think in here, not let my mind wander.

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He looked down at Ponch. You want to make something first? Squirrels, Ponch said.

Kit rolled his eyes. Look, I changed my mind. Let me go first. We can do the squirrels last, and you can have yourself a big run around while I rest. All right.

They walked through fifteen or twenty universes more. It was getting easier for Kit now to imagine them quickly, but despite that he spent a little more time in each one, making sure the small details looked correct. After all, if these things are going to be here after I'm gone, I should take a little more care. In one of them he spent a long while under that world's Saturn-like rings, watching to make sure they behaved as they really should when they rose and set. In another he stood on a long narrow spit of land pushing out into a turbulent sea, while the waves crashed all around him, and waited what seemed like nearly an hour for what he knew was coming: a fleet of huge-sailed ships that came riding up out of a terrible storm and with difficulty made landfall by that strange new shore.

As the last of the strangers came up out of the sea and into their new home, bearing their black banner with its single white tree, Kit glanced down at Ponch, who sat beside him, supremely unconcerned, scratching behind one ear.

The dog looked up as he finished scratching. Aren't you done yet? Why don't you find one you like and stay there?

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Kit had to laugh. Like you want to. Well, yes!

Come on, then. Squirrels...

Ponch leaped forward, and the sea and sky vanished as that universe flowed around them, full-formed— a great grove of those huge trees suddenly standing around the two of them as if it had been there forever. A veritable carpet of squirrels shrieked and leaped away as Ponch came plunging down into the middle of them.

Kit chuckled and went strolling off among the trees while the barking and squeaking and chattering scaled up behind him. Maybe Neets'll be back by the time I get home, he thought, heading into the depths of the green shade. She's got to see this.

The greenness went darker around him, the trees becoming fewer but much taller, and their high canopy becoming more solid. Kit stuffed his hands into his pockets and gazed down at the grass as he scuffed through it. He was feeling oddly uncomfortable. Until now any thought of Nita would have been perfectly ordinary. But now thinking about her unavoidably brought up the image of her mother... . It was as unavoidable as the idea of what might happen to her.

Imagine if it was my mama. Or my pop...

But Kit couldn't imagine it. His mouth went dry just at the thought. It's no wonder she didn't call me. She's been completely freaked out.

The shadows fell more deeply around him as he went, and though Kit could still feel the grass under his feet, he noticed that it was becoming indistinct. At least

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Neets is working on an answer, he thought. But there was no avoiding the thought that no matter what any of them did for Nita's mother, wizards or not... finally, there was always the possibility that nothing would work.

He passed the last of the trees and came to a place where there was only the vaguely seen grass left. Kit walked slowly toward the edge of this, and slowly the light around him faded down toward darkness again—a clean plain empty darkness, not like the place where the millipedes had been: simply space with nothing in it. He paused there, turned to look behind him. Distant, as if seen through a reducing lens, all the trees were gathered together in their little halo of sunlight and glowing green grass, and Kit could just make out a small black shape running back and forth and being avoided, and then chased, by many little gray forms.

Kit turned around and looked out into the dark again. Now it was just an innocent void—no millipedes, and no ghosts of childhood fears, either. / wonder how I got so scared of the dark, anyway? It all seemed such a long time ago, and that phase of his life had come to an end, without warning, when he was eight. He could remember it vividly, those first heady nights when he realized that he wasn't afraid anymore and could lie there in the dark and stare at the ceiling of his room and not be afraid of falling asleep—not have to lie there shaking at the thought of what lay waiting for him on the other side of dream.

Before that, the sight of this would have left me

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scared to death. But now there was something intriguing about this imageless emptiness. Kit stood there for a long while, and then felt something cold and wet touch his hand. He looked down. Ponch was sitting there beside him, gazing up at him.

Bored already?

Bored? Oh, no. But it isn 't good to leave you by yourself a long time. It's rude.

Kit smiled. It's okay... I coped. He looked back toward the trees. There was a gray line beneath the nearest trees: the squirrels, looking for Ponch.

Ponch looked back, too. It happened faster that time, Ponch said, this world. Yeah, Kit said.

I think it was because you'd seen it before.

Kit looked down at his dog, briefly distracted. It wasn't as if Ponch wasn't normally fairly smart. But this kind of thought, or interaction, even when the Speech was involved, wasn't exactly what Kit would have expected. Is he getting smarter? Or am I just getting better at understanding him?

Or is it a little of both?

There was no telling. Now Kit looked back into the darkness again and found not even the shadows of fear in it. The only things that now seemed to lie hidden there were wonder and possibility. What Kit found inexpressibly sad, considered together with this, was the thought of what was happening to Nita's mother, the limits of possibility in his own world all too clearly delineated.

Are we done? Ponch asked after a moment.

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Not just yet, Kit said. / think I want to take it a little further. 'What will you make?

Kit thought about that, and then, for no particular reason, about the millipedes.

If I can make fears real...

... could I make hopes real, too?

He looked out into the dark, and found nothing there for the moment but uncertainty. Kit shook his head. / don't want to make anything just yet, he said to Ponch. Let's just walk.

They headed into the darkness. Kit let the light fade slowly behind them, until the two of them went forward together in utter blackness. There was no way to judge how far they went except by counting paces. Kit soon lost count, and stopped caring about it. There was something liberating about not knowing where you were going, just surrendering yourself to the night— and not making anything, either, but just being there, and letting the darkness be there, too, not trying to fill it with form but letting it exist on its own terms.

The blackness pressed in around them until it seemed to Kit to almost have a texture, like water, becoming a medium in its own right—not something unfriendly, just something there. It slowly became enjoyable. /// had any scared-of-the-dark left in me, Kit thought, it's definitely cured now. But after a while he began to lose interest, and once again he prepared to say good-bye to the dark for the time being.

Then Kit paused, for he thought he saw something.

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Often enough, on this trip and the last, he'd had the illusion of seeing something in the blackness when nothing was there. Now Kit tried to see more clearly, and couldn't get that tiny glitter of light—for it was light—to resolve. Not in front of us, though.

Under us?

He couldn't be sure. Ponch, you smell anything? No. What is it?

Look down there.

Kit got down on his hands and knees. This brought him closer to the minuscule glint of light, but not close enough. He passed his hands over the surface he'd been walking on. The light was underneath it... inches down, or miles, he couldn't tell.

/ wonder...

Kit pressed against the surface. Did it give a little? It hadn't ever actually felt springy under his feet, but now Kit found himself wondering if this was because he'd been taking it for granted as a hard surface, and it had accommodated him.

He pressed harder against it. A strange feeling, as if the surface was giving under his hands, or under his will. Let's see...

Slowly, slowly Kit's hands sank into the darkness as he pushed. He slipped one out, rested it where the surface was still hard, and concentrated on the other hand, sliding it further and further down into that cool, resistant darkness. Faintly he could see the glow from that tiny spark or grain of light silhouetted against his fingers. He reached even further down, having to lie

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flat on the surface now, pushing his arm in up to the shoulder. Got it—

Kit closed his fist on the light, started to withdraw his arm. It was difficult. The blackness resisted him. As he exerted himself, beginning to breathe hard, he felt a faint stinging sensation between two of his fingers. Looking down, he saw the spark escape between them and slip down into the dark again.

He pushed his hand down into the darkness once more, recovering the spark. It did sting, a sharp little sizzle like licking the end of a battery. Kit closed his hand again, pulled upward. Once more the spark slipped free, drifting lower, out of his reach.

Kit took a deep breath, not sure why he had to have this thing... but I'm going to, and that's all there is to it. He reached down as far as possible, but couldn't quite reach it. Finally he took a breath, held it, and pushed his face and upper body right down into that cool liquid blackness. By stretching his arm down as far as it would go, Kit just managed to get his hand underneath the spark. This time he didn't try to grasp it, just cupped it in his palm, and slowly, slowly brought his hand up through the pliant darkness. After a few seconds Kit dared to lift his face out, gasping, and pushed himself to his knees, while ever so slowly lifting his cupped hand.

The little glint of light almost slipped out of his hand, just under the surface. Kit stopped, let it settle, then slowly pulled his hand up toward him. The liquid

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darkness drained out of his hand, pouring away, and abruptly the spark flowed away with it...

... into Kit's other hand, which he'd put under the one that had the spark in it. As the last ribbons of darkness flowed away, there that tiny glint of light remained.

Kit sat down on the dark surface, getting his breath back. He could feel Ponch's breath on his neck as the dog looked curiously over his shoulder. What is it?

I don't know, Kit said. But I'm going to take it home.

They both gazed at it. It was not bright: an undif-ferentiated point source of light, faint, with a slight cool green cast to its radiance, like that of a firefly. Kit was briefly reminded of an old friend, and smiled at the memory. On a whim, he leaned in close to the little spark, breathed on it. It didn't brighten, as a spark of fire would have, but it stung his hand more emphatically.

Kit reached sideways to his claudication, pulled it open, and with the greatest care slipped the little spark in. When he was sure it was safe, he closed the pocket again and got to his feet, wobbling.

You all right, boss?

I think so. That took a lot out of me. Let's go home.

All right. The leash wizardry tightened as Ponch pulled Kit forward. 'What was that about?

Kit shook his head. I'm not sure, he said. The light of the normal world, nearly blinding by contrast to where they'd been, broke loose around them. I think it was because it was ...all alone.

They stood there under the streetlight, and then Kit

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undid the leash and let Ponch go sprinting down the road. A late blackbird repeated a few solitary notes up in a tree. Just me, it sang,;#s£ me.

Kit stood listening in the dark... then went after Ponch.

I

LateTuesday Evening

IT WAS A QUIET drive home from the hospital for Nita and Dairine and their dad. It was as if they'd all been hoping that when the tumor was removed, a closer look at it would prove the diagnosis wrong. But it wasn't going to happen that way. I can't waste a minute, now, Nita thought. Every second I'm not working on this, those things are multiplying inside her. Kit'll understand. I've got to get going... and I can't wait for him.

Nonetheless she tried to contact Kit before she left. She couldn't find him; the manual gave her the same subject-is-not-in-ambit message as before. He never did get a, chance to tell me just where he was, or how he's doing that, she thought, dropping her transit circle to the floor and watching it flare with the brief shiver of life and light that meant the spell was ready. Gotta find out...

Along with several other wizardries, Nita had added her invisibility spell to her charm bracelet, as a small

Late Tuesday Evening

dangling ring with nothing inside it. Now she activated it and a moment later stepped through the transit ring, popping out once more in that vacant doorway in Grand Central. This time of day there were a lot more people around, and a fair number of trains coming in and out. It took Nita some minutes to get down to the worldgate end of the platform, as she had to sidestep in one direction or another about every three paces to keep from being run over by commuters who couldn't see her. At least the gate was idle and ready for her when she reached it. She went through in a hurry.

On the other side she found the platform empty again, and everything quiet. Nita walked down to the gateway on the Main Concourse and paused there to look at the painted sky. The figures of all the constellations were strange—the center of the "sky" not a bull, here, but a strange cat-shape, like a jaguar leaping with outstretched paws. Other odd forms shared the ecliptic with it: lizards and frogs and birds with long curling tails. Even this sky's color was different, a deep violet blue rather than the creamy Mediterranean color of the ceiling that Nita was familiar with.

She went up the ramp across the empty, shining floor and past the information booth—which was a brass ziggurat here—and came out into what at first she took for early evening. Then Nita got a glimpse of the sun and realized that it was afternoon... but in a Manhattan that was definitely not her usual one.

The skyscrapers all around were capped with stepped pyramids of the kind she had just seen substituted for the usual information booth inside the terminal. Uni

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formly the buildings seemed to be made of a golden stone—or maybe this was just the effect produced by that strange sun, which was bigger than it should have been, and was orange gold, though it stood at a height more like that of noon than sunset.

Down the center of the street ran a green strip of grass that reminded Nita of the built-up flower beds running down the middle of each block of Park Avenue. She looked across the street, and up; from high on the tops of some of the buildings south of Forty-second, Nita saw blinding orange light reflecting back. Mirrors? she thought. And the sky was very dark blue, almost a violet color. She was reminded of the way the sky looked on Mars. Maybe not as much oxygen in the atmosphere? Nita thought. An old Earth, maybe; a tired one...

It didn't matter. Her job was to find the place's kernel. And it would be better hidden, here.

She sat down on the curb of that empty Forty-second Street and listened. A slower pulse this time, fainter... like a place running down, a heart beating more out of habit than from any desire to go on living. Resignation? Could a whole universe feel resigned, ready to let go of life? It was an odd sensation. But ours is old, too. Does it feel that way?

After a few seconds she put the thought aside. There was something about the light here that was affecting her, maybe, or just the influence of this place's great age. But the realization itself could be useful. She'd listen for a slower pulse, a more leisurely beat...

Nita closed her eyes, held still, and felt for the kernel, the heart. She had no idea what this city sounded

Late Tuesday Evening

like when it was inhabited. But the wind, breathing down between the skyscrapers, didn't change. She listened to it, and let it give her hints.

Very slowly, they came. Strange hornlike sounds, not the wind but something else... also the muted cries of birds and animals, the clatter of machinery. Nita put her hands flat down on the sidewalk on either side of her, feeling it, listening through the touch.

The sidewalk was stone, not concrete. Its gray-black basalt was quarried out of the island itself—brought here in great slabs by mechanical means of which Nita got glimpses—then carved to size, set in place, and fastened by some physical process that she didn't understand, again sensed only obscurely and at a great distance in time. There was a characteristic scent to the stone, sharp, hot—They used lasers on it, maybe?— then a glimpse of some kind of crystal, maybe not exactly the lasers Nita understood but similar enough.

She started to think that this approach might have been typical of the people who built this place, simple techniques and very advanced ones combined—an "old science," more like wizardry than anything else, and a "new science," far ahead of anything her own world had. And this world would have been that way because of the way its own universal law ran, a combination of some kind of science actually left over from some other universe—That's weird!—with something newer, homegrown: the two sorts of law tangled together but never perfectly melded, the ancient tension between them defining a particular feeling, unique to this world, a vibration like what a wizard could hear in a crystal's heart, a pulse not slow but actually very fast— Then Nita heard it, a buzz, a faint whine like a bee going by. Got it!

She opened her eyes and turned slowly where she sat, checking what she "heard" and felt against the evidence of her other senses—

—and caught a sudden motion of something down the street. Nita stared in surprise. Something moved there, going across Forty-second Street and heading uptown; crossing the street, low...

... rolling across the street? Nita stood up to see better but got only a glimpse as whatever it was went up Lexington Avenue and vanished behind the building at the corner. If what she'd seen was a machine, it was one the likes of which Nita had never seen before. And while there was some machine-based life that had become sentient, this didn't look like any member of the various mechlife species with which Nita was familiar. From where she'd been sitting, this looked more like a long stretched-out Rollerblade —

Weird, but it can wait. Nita stood still and listened again, shutting everything out but this place's own pulse. Uptown.., The sense was fainter this time, which didn't surprise her; she knew the tests would be getting harder. Nonetheless, it was clear enough to follow, and whatever Nita had seen down the road was heading in the same direction.

She went after it, not with any concern for her safety—after all, the practice universes were limited to wizards—but with considerable curiosity. As she came

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around the corner of Forty-second and Lex, Nita looked uptown, where the ground rose slightly, and saw something rolling up the sidewalk on the left-hand side of the avenue. It wasn't a single object at all, but a number of them, rolling away from her in a loose cluster. In this strange, rich light, they gleamed a dark bluish metallic color. Most of them looked about the size of tennis balls, at this distance, but there were two or three of them that were larger, maybe soccer-ball size. They were approaching the corner of Forty-fourth and Lex. As Nita watched, they rolled out onto the ornate pavement of Lexington Avenue, here all covered up and down its shining white length with characters in some alien language, then crossed the avenue and headed east down the side street.

Nita began to jog after them, crossing Lexington and looking down as she did at the huge colored characters inlaid in slabs of stone into the surface of the street. The workmanship was beautiful; you couldn't see so much as a crack between the inlay and the road itself, all done in a pearly white stone like alabaster. / wonder what this looks like from a height, she thought. And what the letters say... She grinned as she headed toward the corner where the blue spheres had turned. Be funny if it wasn't some incredibly significant message, but just the name of the street. She came to the corner of Forty-fourth, headed around it at a run—and instantly found herself tripping over several perfectly spherical shiny blue objects, which had been in the act of rolling back up the sidewalk toward her.

Nita spent the next three seconds trying not to fall,

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trying not to bang into the beautifully and bizarrely carved wall of the building to her left, and trying not to step on the spheres, several of which were still rolling toward her. She finally got her balance back and stood there bracing herself against the wall and breathing hard for a few seconds, while the five spherical things, like blue-metal ball bearings of various sizes, rolled around her and then paused, one after another.

"Dai stibeh," they said to her, five times over. Nita's jaw dropped.

"Uh, dai" she said.

The giant blue ball bearings looked at her with mild interest. At least Nita felt that she was being looked at, but with exactly what, there was no telling. The spheres had no features of any kind; the only thing she could see in them was the reflection of the skyscrapers behind her, the sky, and her own face, wearing an embarrassed expression.

"Where's the rest of you?" said one or another of the ball bearings.

Confused, Nita looked around her. "'The rest'? There's just one of me. I mean, I have a—I mean, there's another wizard I work with, but he's—*

"'He'? There's just one of them?" The ball bearings sounded disappointed. "Uh, yeah," she said. "We come in ones, where I come from."

The ball bearings seemed to be regarding her with faint disappointment. "But there are more of you," one said.

Nita hadn't previously heard the Speech spoken with nothing but plural endings, even on the adjectives, and she was getting more confused every moment. "Well, in general, yes."

"Look, it's another singleton, that's all," one of them said to the others. "Looks like we're unusual in this neighborhood; the rest of us need to get used to it. It doesn't matter, anyway. We're all wizards together... that's the important thing."

"Uh, yes," Nita said. "Sorry, but what exactly are you?" "People," said the blue ball bearings, in chorus.

Nita smiled. "Something else we have in common. Do you have something that other people call you?"

The spheres bumped into one another in sequence, and with their striking produced a little chiming chord, like a doorbell saying hello.

Nita took a breath and tried to sing it back at them. After a pause the spheres bumped together again, creating a soft jangling noise, which Nita realized was a regretful comment on her accent. "Sorry," she said. "Sometimes I'm not much good at staying in one key."

The spheres jangled again, but there was a humorous sound to it. "So call us Pont," one of them said.

Nita grinned a little; in the Speech it was one of the adjectival forms of the word for the number five. "Sure. It's nice to meet you. I'm Nita."

The spheres bumped themselves cordially into her ankles. "You guys here to practice looking for the kernel?" she said.

"Yes," one of them said. "Well, no," said another. 253

"What we mean is, we've done this one already," said a third. "But the others have a head start, and they're running against time, so if you want to get in on it, you'd better hurry."

Pont started to roll down the street, and Nita followed them. "Others? How many more people are here?"

"Oh, just a few on this run," Pont said. "Some of them are repeating a secondary exercise—their time wasn't good enough the last cycle out."

"I haven't done this one before," Nita said. "Is it hard?"

The spheres looked at her. Two of them, to Nita's surprise, melded into one, running together exactly the way two drops of water become one, without even ceasing to roll. "How many of these have vou done before?"

"Just one."

"Huh," Pont said. Nita couldn't repress a snort of laughter; the spheres' tone of voice was almost identical to one of Dairine's. "That's not bad. Usually you get a couple between this one and the starter scenario. You must have found the first one pretty quickly."

"I don't know," Nita said. "The manual was vague about the projected solution times—"

"Oh, the manuals," they said, and a couple of them bounced up and down in midroll, a shrug. "They're not much good in these spaces...and even outside them, they don't always correctly predict what's going to happen in here. You learn not to pay too much attention to them in testing mode. And you figure things

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out yourselves... but you're doing that already." They were looking up at Nita's charm bracelet, she could tell.

They paused at the corner of Third and Forty-fourth, and Nita looked up and down the street, listening. That high whining buzz was still perfectly audible if she stopped to listen for it, and still coming from the north, but also east a little more. "At least another block over," she said.

"Lead the way."

She trotted across Third and looked down at the patterns in the pavement again. "You know what these mean, Pont?"

"Not a clue," Pont said as they rolled across the avenue after her. "I think we're lacking the necessary cultural referents."

"You're not alone." They headed northward again, past the sleek, polished goldstone frontages of the buildings. It was odd that though these had doorways every now and then, there were no windows at street level, or lower than about thirty feet off the ground. This feature was doubtless expressive of some truth about this universe, but Nita didn't have the slightest idea what that might be.

"This is definitely one of the odder practice universes," Pont said as they made their way across Fortyfifth and on past more blind walls.

Nita raised her eyebrows. "Oh? What makes you say that?"

"Well, the way the space here is curved is unusually acute. The lack of entasis makes it—"

2J5

"Oh, come on, the entasis level is fine. It's just that everything looks odd to you," said another of the balls.

"It does not. It's perfectly obvious that you just don't know—" "You're both crazy," yet another of the balls chimed in. "If you just—"

Nita had had plenty of arguments with herself in her head, but now she thought she was hearing one in a form she'd never imagined. "Look, don't fight about it," she said. "It wastes time. Pick just one of you to tell me, or something."

This astonished Pont so much that they stopped rolling and stared at one another. Nita stood still and waited for them to sort themselves out, while making a mental note that when she got back to where the manual worked at its normal speed, she was going to look up this life-form in a hurry.

"Well?" Nita said.

One of the five—the two who had combined themselves had come apart again as they were all crossing Forty-fifth—now said, "You could put it this way—"

Its surface shimmered. Without any warning at all, Nita found herself seeing the world the way Pont, or one of it, did—a landscape so alien that she could make almost nothing of it. Everything had a metallic sheen to it, and everything was fluid and in constant motion, running or rolling down one surface or another. And every surface was curved. It was like a world made of mercury, not just silvery but in a hundred different colors. Every single thing Nita could see was shaped like some version of a sphere, tiny or massive, everything

Late Tuesday Evening

either already perfectly spherical or working hard to get that way. There were no straight lines anywhere. Where it could be seen, even the horizon was curved.

Nita blinked. More than mere vision was involved in what she was perceiving. This space was acutely curved, so that its sky seemed to bend down and cover you like an umbrella. It was a perspective both claustrophobic and oddly big, giving you the illusion that you could wrap that universe around you like an overcoat, an absolutely huge one.

"Wow," Nita said. At first she was eager to break out of this way of seeing things. But then she caught herself, and looked a little harder. This is weird, but—7 wonder... She held still, watched, and listened. Listening didn't do much good in this worldview; all the motion happened in silence. But the motion had a trend in one general direction. Everything Nita could see, everything that slid or rolled or pulsated around her, had a slight drift toward the direction in "front" of her—northward and eastward, though a little more eastward than the way she'd originally been heading.

Aba, Nita thought. One point of view is good, but a second one from another mind helps you fine-tune your first one. It's like triangulating. "Okay, okay," Nita said, and the image of the world-as-mercury oozed and flowed away, leaving her looking around her again, with relief, at edges and straight lines. She listened again for that buzz, heard it, and put it together with the direction in which things had been slipping and oozing.

"Are you all right?" Pont asked, sounding anxious.

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Nita smiled; the "y°u" was plural. "I'm okay. Come on; you helped. We're closer than I thought—"

She headed down Forty-fifth at a trot and turned the corner onto Second Avenue, and paused there. All of Pont ran into her ankles, she'd stopped so suddenly. "What?"

Nita looked up and down Second, perplexed, for she hadn't expected it to be a canal. Where the curb would normally have been was now a sheer drop, and water reflecting that dark blue sky ran down between the white stone walls of the two sides of the avenue.

"We could roll across," said one of Pont.

"No, we couldn't. We left the wizardry home," said another. "I told you we should have brought it," said the third.

"You said we should bring the multistate compressor," said the fourth, "and so we did. We were the one that wanted to bring the solidifier, but—"

Nita began to wonder what these creatures' family life was like. Just by themselves, if that was the right term, they seemed to have trouble getting along. "Look, guys," she said, "there's a bridge across at Fortysecond."

"We'll have to go all the way down there and retrace our tracks."

"Better than going all the way up to Fifty-seventh," Nita said, peering up the avenue-cum-canal, "because that's the next one. Or we could swim."

Pont looked at her with all of itself. " 'Swim'?"

Late Tuesday Evening

She looked at the spheres. They lacked anything to swim with. "Okay, maybe not. Come on."

Nita jogged downtown as far as Forty-second, with Pont rolling after her, fast. The bridge arched up in a smooth ramp across the water, coming down on the opposite sidewalk, and they all headed north again. Nita could hear the little buzzing whine at the back of her mind getting stronger and stronger and followed it more quickly, while checking her progress against her memory of Font's view of the world. Pont rolled along behind, arguing genially about their last timing in "the exercise" and how it might have been improved.

Just north of Fifty-fourth, Street Nita realized that she had come a little too far north. "East from here," she said to Pont, as they came up behind her.

The spheres looked at themselves, and made a little musical sound that translated itself, via the Speech, into "Uh-oh."

"What's the matter?" Nita said. She backtracked to the corner of Fifty-fourth, and headed east toward First Avenue.

"Nothing."

"That's easy for you to say," said another of Pont. "Yes, well, you didn't like it much last time," said a third.

"And we don't like it much now, either," said the fifth one, which surprised Nita; she'd been starting to think of it as the quiet one. "We thought they would have moved it significantly. It almost always gets moved for a redo. But it looks like somebody has a little surprise for us."

Nita gave up trying to figure out what they were talking about, and headed toward First Avenue. She stopped at the corner, Pont rolling up alongside her. Nita's sense of the location of the kernel placed it right out in front of her, near where the block of Fifty-fourth between First and York should have been. But here there were no more streets at all. Directly in front of them was a huge stepped pyramid of golden stone, incomplete at its top, and behind it the East River flowed by. Sticking out into the river from one side of the pyramid was a long jetty or pier of that white stone.

"There they are," Pont said. "They didn't waste their time."

Nita squinted down at the jetty, bright in the sun, and saw down near the end of it what appeared to be a woolly mammoth, a second object of roughly cylindrical shape that wavered oddly around the edges, and a third small shape, elongated and six-legged, which was heading toward the end of the jetty while the other two faced off against each other.

"It's down there," Nita said. "Down in the water."

"We told you we should have left the compressor home," said Pont to one of themselves. "And what we said was—"

"Come on, guys," Nita said. "Give it a rest. I can do water." She headed past the pyramid, toward the jetty.

The smallest of the creatures was slipping into the water. Nita jogged down the jetty, and saw that the bigger of the two creatures looked like a woolly mammoth only in terms of the bulk of its body. Seen up

Late Tuesday Evening

close, it looked much more like a giant three-legged football with green-and-brown shag carpeting stapled to it. Its companion, which faced it silently, was a bundle of bright purple tentacles about six feet high, waving gently, and changing colors as they did.

"Dai stiho, guys," Nita said as she went by the two wizards. They gazed at her as she passed—the tentacly wizard with one of several stalked eyes attached to the top of it, and the furry football apparently with its fur, which "followed" Nita as she went by.

She went to the end of the jetty, where the other wizard had vanished, and looked down at the water. Down there she could clearly feel the kernel's tight small buzz of power. It wasn't even all that far down. No point in floating, Nita thought. She flicked the charm bracelet around on her wrist, came up with the charm that was shaped like a little glass bubble, took hold of it, and jumped in.

As Nita sank, the air-and-mass spell came to life around her, holding the water away but at the same time counteracting the buoyancy of the air she'd brought with her to breathe. Because it was so compact, the spell's validity was limited, but she was sure she'd have time to do what she needed to do. It's almost right underneath me. All I have to do is—

—and then she saw, right under her, the sleek form swimming up toward her. Her first thought was It's an otter—and indeed it looked like one. But otters have fewer legs. This creature, golden-pelted, was stroking strongly along toward Nita with its front and back paws; and in the middle ones it held a tangle of light

and power, small and bright, from which came the singing whine she'd been tracking.

As the creature flashed past, dark cheerful eyes blinked at her, and it grinned. Then it was heading toward the blue-lighted roil of surface. Nita let out a breath of slight annoyance and went after it, bobbing up to the surface in her bubble of air.

The other wizard was already clambering up out of the water with the kernel. This it showed to the other wizards, and one of them said, "All right, you've proved your point."

"Twenty-four minutes," the otter creature said to the furry three-legged wizard. "But it nearly didn't do me any good!" It turned its long sleek head to look at Nita as she climbed up onto the jetty and banished the bubble wizardry. "Look what I passed on the way up!"

"Dai stiho," Nita said. "Hey, you beat me fairly. I just got here late."

"Didn't think They were going to let anybody else in here, this cycle," said the furry creature. "Oh well. Dai, cousin!"

"Here's Pralaya," said Pont, indicating the "otter." "And that's Mmemyn"—one of Pont rolled over to the massive three-legged creature with the strange fur— "and here's Dazel. What was the matter with you two?" Pont said to them. "Why'd you just let Pralaya take the kernel?"

I did not wish to dissolve, said a slow silent voice that seemed to come from Mmemyn in a diffuse sort of way. / did not anticipate the replay of this scenario putting the kernel under water.

Late Tuesday Evening

Nita realized that Mmemyn's voice came from the weird patchy fur that mostly covered it. "Neither did I," said Dazel. "But it was plain by the time I got here that no effort would have brought me to the kernel before Pralaya got to it. Next time out, though, the outcome will be different."

"It will if Nita here does as well next time as they did on this run," Pont said. "They got the scent of that kernel right away and went straight across the city—a downhill roll all the way. Very direct."

"In this continuum, that's not easy," Pralaya said, putting down the kernel on the stone, where it lay glowing. "You've made a good start, cousin! What project are you working on that They've let you in for practice?"

"I'm... I'm trying to save my mother's life," Nita said. And suddenly the strangeness of it all caught up with her, as it hadn't done almost since she first became a wizard—the alien feel of another space and creatures all around her who were strangers to her in a way that few humans ever had to deal with. She found it hard to look at them; she couldn't do anything but stand there, trying to hang on to her composure.

The other wizards looked at one another, silent. Pont said, "In the Five's names, why are we keeping them standing here like this when they're distressed? It's all too new for them! Come on, everyone—if this run's done, let's go to the playpen for a while. We can show them the rest of us, and replay a couple of other runs, and let them get a feel for how it's done."

Pont bumped against Nita's legs. She looked down. 263

They said, "Come with us, Nita. There's more to this sheaf of universes and dimensions than just places to play hunt-the-kernel. Come relax; tell us the why of what you're hunting, and maybe we can help with the how."

Pont are right, said Mmemyn. Will you come? «Uh, yes," Nita said. "Sure, let's go."

And instantly the world faded around them all and vanished. Late Tuesday Alight, Wednesday Morning

NITA BLINKED AND LOOKED around her. It was dark.

Not entirely dark, though. It was as if she and Pont and the others were standing on a shining white dance floor—one that was miles and miles from one side to the other. If the curvature of the last space had surprised Nita, this place had a similar effect, but exactly in reverse. You could feel the flatness of this place in the air, on your skin, in your bones. You could practically see the ruler lines embedded in everything.

Next to her, sitting up on his hind legs, Pralaya made a little raspy chuckle. "Yes, it's a good thing it never rains here," he said, glancing around. "You'd go crazy waiting for the water to run off."

"Don't know what you're complaining about," Pont said, rolling past them toward a light source off to one side, where Nita could see shapes silhouetted. "Lovely

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place, this: no ups, no downs. Paradise." The rest of Pont went past Nita, making a feeling like a shrug. "You always could find a square thing where a round one should be, Pralaya."

"Just a natural talent," Pralaya said, looking after Pont with amusement. He gave Nita a wry look.

The two of them went after Pont, Dazel and Mmemyn bringing up the rear. "You two obviously have history," Nita said.

"Oh, some," Pralaya said, pattering along six-footedly beside Nita as they made their way toward the light. "We're neighbors. Their home universe isn't too far from mine, the way the local sheaf of worlds is presently structured. We started running into one another pretty frequently in here when I began this series of workouts. If you're here more than once or twice, you'll start recognizing the present batch of regulars pretty quickly."

"I think it's going to be more than once or twice," Nita said. "I don't have much time left, and I'm a long way from where I need to be."

"You're new at this, to be so sure," Pralaya said, as they got closer to the light. "Feel the kernel?" "Huh?" Nita paused. She hadn't realized this was another practice universe.

"Don't stop," Pralaya said. "Some places you're not going to have the leisure. You have to learn to sense on the move. Come on!"

Nita tried "listening" as they went. It was hard to do while your other senses were interfering, but this

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

discovery obscurely annoyed her; she could just hear Dairine saying, Can't walk and chew gum at the same time, huh?

The annoyance focused her just enough to let Nita "hear" the kernel, just for a second, as a sort of difference in texture in the feel of the local space. "It's right there in front of us," Nita said, surprised. "Right in the middle of everybody."

"Not bad," Pralaya said. "This kernel's tough to sense; it's a fairly low-power one. We usually keep it locked in one spot—there are so many of us in and out of this space that no one feels like hunting for it every time."

"I thought everybody's time here was really limited."

"Oh, in the aschesis-universes proper, of course it is," Pralaya said. He paused for just a moment to scratch behind his ear with the middle set of paws, bending himself nearly into a half circle as he did so, then picked up the pace again. "But this isn't one of those. This is a pocket of space pinched off from the main aschesis sheaf. The Powers let us use it to relax in between finishing up a seeking run and going home again. It's useful, since sometimes when you finish a run, you're almost too tired to gate straight..."

They came to the fringes of the lighted area. Fifteen or twenty creatures of various sorts were standing or sitting around on what would have passed for nice furniture on several planets Nita knew. On one piece of furniture, an ordinary-looking occasional table done in shiny metal, sat this space's kernel, a brilliant and compact little webwork of light about the size of a baseball.

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Pont were presently rolling under that table toward a group standing together and talking on the far side of the table, and the wizards assembled there had turned toward them and were greeting them.

"We've got more victims," Pont were saying to them. "Look, all; here's Nita."

All those strange eyes turned on her, and there were polite bows and limbs waving and wings flapping and a lot of voices saying "Dai stiho, cousin!"

"Uh, I'm on errantry, and I greet you," she said.

A chorus of replies, mostly amused variants on the theme "So are we!' went up around the group. Pont came rolling back to her ard said, "You're in luck: a lot of the present class of practicers are here. Here are Lalezh; they're from Dorint. And that's Nirissaet; they're from Algavred XI—watch the tails! And that's Buerti, they're from lit. And this is Kiv..."

It went on that way for a while, and Nita despaired of remembering more than a few of the wizards' names, let alone those of planets or universes. But shortly she was surrounded by people talking in the Speech and arguing amiably about the best way to find a world kernel in a hurry, and someone brought her what she at first thought was a glass of water, except that there was no glass involved—just the water, holding a tumbler shape by itself. Pralaya raised his eyebrows in amusement as he caught her glance, waggling them in the general direction of the kernel where it sat on the coffee table. Apparently the kernel hi the playroom often was used for just that: play.

While Nita was working out where the rim of her

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

invisible glass was, she heard a lot of information and gossip from the alien wizards around her, and she quickly realized that in even a fairly short time she could find out all kinds of useful things, any one of which could possibly help her save her mother. Nita actually had worked up her courage enough to ask a few questions of the most senior of the group that had collected around her—a wizard called Evrysss, who looked more like a giant spiny python than anything else—when her attention was suddenly grabbed by someone walking by at the edge of the group. But what really got Nita's attention was that it wasn't an alien. It was a pig. It wasn't one of the spotty breeds, but plain pink-white, with bristles that looked slightly silvery in this light, so that it glinted a little.

"—and so I said to Hvin, 'Now, just look here, if you keep straining your shael out of shape trying to get the kernel to deform its laws like that, you're never going to—'" Evrysss blinked at Nita's sudden astonished look. "Oh, haven't you been introduced? Chao?" The pig stopped, looked at the group, glanced up at Nita. "He'neet', this is the Transcendent Pig."

Nita's eyes opened wide as the pig stepped toward her, and she saw that little shining ripples seemed to spread out in the floor from where it stepped, as if solid things went briefly uncertain where it trod. About six possible responses to what Evrysss had said now went through Nita's head, but fortunately, before she blurted one of them out, she remembered the right one. She looked down at the Pig, and said, "What's the meaning of life?"

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The other wizards chuckled, or hissed or bubbled with laughter, and the Pig gave Nita a wry look out of its little piggy eyes "I'll tell you the meaning of my life," it said, "if you'll tell me the meaning of yours."

"Uh... that might take a while. Even assuming I knew."

"It would for me, too," said the Pig, "so let's put it aside for the moment. Come on, sit down, make yourself comfortable."

She did, settling onto a nearby chromy framework that looked more or less like a human chair. Nita had first come across a reference to the Transcendent Pig when she was doing her earliest reading in the manual, just before she went on Ordeal. The Pig was classified as one of the "insoluble enigmas," a sort of creature that fell somewhere between wizards and the Powers That Be. Indeed the term creature was possibly inaccurate, for (so the manual said) no one responsible for creation could exactly remember having created it in the first place. At least the Pig's motives appeared to be benign, and it had been proved again and again to be immensely and inexplicably knowledgeable. Nita thought this was why the manual insisted that every wizard immediately ask the meaning-of-life question when meeting the Pig. There was always a chance the Pig might slip and actually answer it.

Well, not this time, she thought. "Do you come here often?" Nita said, and then cracked up at herself; hearing it, it seemed like about the most witless thing she could have found to say.

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

"Don't feel too silly," the Pig said dryly. "Everybody tends to concentrate so hard on the mandated question that their minds go blank on anything else. But I wander in and out of here every now and then. I like being at the cutting edge, and out here where no one has to be too afraid of making a mistake, some interesting work's being done. Not all of it as personal as yours, maybe, but it's all valuable."

"You mean you know?" Nita suddenly felt slightly embarrassed.

"Knowing is most of my job," the Transcendent Pig said. "But then there's a long tradition of oracular pigs. I should know: I started it." It paused. "That is, assuming you're into sequential time."

"It works all right for me," Nita said, rather cautiously.

"Well, preference is everything, as far as time's concerned; you can handle it however you like." Nita had to smile at that. "You can, maybe. But you're built to be everywhen at once."

It gave her a sly look. "I suppose you might be right," the Pig said. "If everyone started to believe they could handle it the way I do, everywhen might get crowded."

Nita laughed. There was something about the Pig that put her at her ease—one thing being that, to her astonishment, it had a New York accent. She spent a while chatting with it about Earth and then about various other planets where her errantry had taken her, and soon realized there was absolutely nowhere she'd been that the Pig didn't know—it had been there, seen

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that, and left the T-shirt behind. "Or, rather, I'm there now," it said. "Or have been there now."

Nita smiled, reminded of trying to explain the tenses of conditional time to her mother. "My own language isn't much good for this kind of thing. Guess we should keep it in the Speech."

"No problem. Who did you come in with?"

"A bunch of people," Nita said. "Mostly Pralaya and, uh, Pont."

The Pig smiled at Nita's slightly embarrassed look as she used the "slang" version of Font's name. "Oh," the Pig said, "you're another one who can't manage the music of the spheres? Don't worry about it, cousin. No one expects anybody else to handle home languages perfectly. The Speech is all anyone here really needs."

Nita nodded. "You hear that word so much around here," she said then, "and with wizards generally: hrasbt..." It was the word in the Speech that translated as "cousin."

"Oh, the term's accurate enough," the Pig said. "We're all children of brothers and sisters, of kindred creatures who're children of that odd couple Life and Time. All related, mostly by just trying to live our lives and get by in the face of tremendous odds. But in a lot of cases, trying to do more than just get by." The Transcendent Pig looked around. "This is one of the places where you come to push past the usual definitions of what's possible." It gave her a thoughtful look. "And if you're lucky, you both pull off what you're seeking and get to enjoy it afterward."

"That's what I'm here for," Nita said.

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

"Trying to save a life is always worthwhile," said the Pig. "But the bigger work can be a lot easier sometimes. Nonetheless, I'd say you're in the right place for advice." It looked over at the wildly assorted group of beings standing around a tall table, all in the light, waving their manipulatory appendages at one another and talking at high speed.

"Got any to spare?" Nita said.

The Transcendent Pig waggled its eyebrows at her. "Not for free. You know the price."

"Uh, yeah. I'll pass." Nita still wasn't completely clear about the price she would pay for this particular work of wizardry. Taking on another obligation seemed unwise, especially when it was known to be— in wizardly terms—an extremely expensive one.

"So will we all," the Pig said, and got up, quirking its tail at her. "Keep your ears open, all the same. You never know what one of your cousins'll mention that could turn out to be really useful later on."

The Transcendent Pig wandered off. In her turn Nita got up off the more-or-less chair she'd been sitting on and went over to listen again to some of the other wizards who were talking in a group. What she had come to think of as "the kernel," they were calling by as many other names as there were species in the group: the World-Soul, the Cosmic Egg, the Shard, and numerous others. Some of the wizards were knowledgeable about the structure of the kernel itself, in ways Nita was certain she would never have time to master. Pont, in particular, were in the midst of a long talk with one of the other wizards—a storklike alien about six feet tall who seemed to have had some kind of accident in a paint store, one where they sold iridescent paint that didn't keep the same color for more than a minute. "If you're having so much trouble dealing with the place's kernel," Pont were saying, "you should get help. Go in as a team! It's always an option for any of us, once we're done with the orientation runs."

The other wizard, Kkirl, stretched her wings in a sudden blaze of scarlet and green, then folded them again. "I have concerns," she said. "The kernel of the planet in question is unstable. It won't stay where it's put; whether the turmoil on that world is itself a reflection of the kernel's instability, or the other way around, I cannot tell, though I have been working with it for many cycles now—"

"Planets have kernels?" Nita said.

"Not of the same power and complexity you would find in a universe-type kernel," Kkirl said, "but much smaller, more delicate ones, easily deranged if mishandled. I've spent as long as I dare assessing the situation and trying to make small adjustments. There's no more time, for the planet is inhabited by some hundreds of thousands of my people, and if that world's destruction by earthquakes and crustal disturbances is to be avoided, something must be done now. In the past two cycles, the quakes have become severe enough to threaten large parts of the surface of the planet. The Powers sanctioned an intervention that would deal with the kernel itself, and I was here to prepare one final test sequence. I don't really need it. But I'm still

Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning

not sure it's safe to go on with the intervention by myself, let alone with—"

"Kkirl, what use is a meeting like this unless you use it to your advantage?" Pont said. "The Powers Themselves might have thrown us in your way. Let us—some of us, anyway—help you out! You can tell us how to proceed, and we'll be guided by you. Or, if nothing else, we can just lend you power. These aren't circumstances where anyone would be tempted to improvise."

Kkirl looked around, her feathers a little ruffled, uncertain. Several other wizards had been listening to their conversation, Pralaya among them. Now Pralaya stood up on its hindmost legs in order to look Kkirl in the eye more easily, and said, "Cousin, if your people's lives are in danger, letting your uncertainty hobble you is playing right into the Lone Power's desires. And delay could be fatal. Judging from what you've told us, it's becoming fatal already. You have to move past the uncertainty. What else are we all here for?"

Kkirl stood there silent. Finally she looked up, rustled her wings, and said, "You're right. I see no other way. And there's no point putting it off anymore. Who will come?"

"We will," Pont said. "What about you others?"

"I'll come," Pralaya said. "Of course. Who else?"

Mmemyn said, / am free to come; and another wizard that Nita had met only briefly, a long graceful silvery fishlike creature in a bubble of water, said, "I, too."

"Well enough. I'll draw up the transit circle, then," Kkirl said. "You will want to plug in your names and 275

bring appropriate breathing media: The atmosphere is a reducing one, and there's a lot of oxygen." She glanced over at the "fish." "Not a problem for you, Neme, except for the acid in the air."

The various wizards started to get ready, adjusting their life-support wizardries, and Nita was surprised when one of Pont rolled over to her. "You know," it said, "you might come along as well."

Nita looked down at it, and over at the others, surprised. "Me? I'm just getting started. I didn't even get the kernel this time."

"Just an accident of timing," Pralaya said, glancing up.

Kkirl paused in the act of starting to pace out the circle. "And you're probably the youngest of us here," said Kkirl, "so that whatever you might lack in expertise, you'd surely make up in power. Do come, hNeet. The kernel won't be where I left it in any case; looking for it will be extra practice for you."

Her mother's predicament went through Nita's mind. But these people were trying to help her, to help her mom. It was the least she could do to help them. "Yeah," she said. "Sure, I'll come."

Kkirl went back to pacing out her transit circle, and it appeared on the floor before them. The wizards who were going produced their names in the Speech and started plugging them into the spell, in the empty spots Kkirl was now adding for them.

Nita looked over the diagram carefully as it completed itself. The coordinates for the solar system in question had an additional set of vector and frame coordinates in front of it, which Nita thought must be the determinators for an entirely different universe. Otherwise the diagram made perfect sense, and the long-form description of the planet itself made it plain why Kkirl was working on it. It's tearing itself apart, Nita thought, bending down to look at it closely. The planet was big to start with, and then it captured all these moons, even a, little "wandering planet" passing through its solar system... and now the gravitational stresses from some of the more massive moons have thrown everything out of whack. This was a problem of the same kind as Dairine's, just as insoluble by brute force. Inherent in the transit circle, though, and written as an adjunct to it, Nita could see Kkirl's intended solution. The planet itself was going to have both its crust structure and its gravitational and magnetic fields reorganized and rebalanced. That could be done only by using the kernel, which when itself rewritten would in turn rewrite the whole under-crust stucture of the planet. It's like the kernel is the master copy of a DNA molecule. Rewrite it and turn it loose, and every other molecule in a body gets changed in response. This was fairly close to what Nita had in mind for her mother, and her heart leaped as she saw from Kkirl's diagram that she'd been on the right track, and began to see how she could implement a similar solution herself.