George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

“Are you under a spell? Like in a book?” But there was no answer, for Gan had let go, and now skin was not touching skin. Gan lay there as he had for all these years, slack-faced, inert, unable to move or speak or even show that he recognized you. But he was inside that body, just as Jam had always believed, just as Mother pretended to believe but didn’t anymore. Gan was alive and he had spoken and…

Jam sank to the floor beside Gan’s bed and cried.

Mama came into the room. Jam stopped himself from crying, but it was too late, she had seen.

“Oh, baby,” she said, “are you really sick? Or is there something wrong at school?”

“Gan,” said Jam. And then she thought she understood, and sat beside him on the floor, and cried with him for her great strong son Ghana, who had once been her friend and protector, and now lay on a bed in her living room like a corpse in a coffin, so her life was one long endless funeral. Jam understood now, and longed to tell her what was really going on. But Gan had told him not to, and so he didn’t. He just wept with his mother until they were worn out with weeping.

Then she went to work, and Jam went outside and watered the tomatoes and sprayed them for the fungus that wiped them out last year. They’d already had so many tomatoes this year, what with Jam spraying them every two weeks, that they’d been sharing with half the neighborhood. And Jam and Mother were so sick of tomatoes that they were giving them all away now. But Jam couldn’t stop watering and spraying them. It was as if having too many tomatoes this year made up for having almost none the last.

Jam thought about what Gan had told him. An emperor. Wizards. Gan involved in a war — a revolution? — and nobody knew it. How futile it was that Jam had worked so hard last year to learn the name and capital and location of every nation in the world — only to find that they don’t even matter. He wondered what the map would look like, if the cartographers knew who really ran things.

And yet the government still took taxes and controlled the cops and the army — that was power, it wasn’t nothing. Did the wizards meddle in the wars of ordinary people? Fiddle with the laws that Congress or the city council passed? Mess with zoning laws? Or bigger stuff, like the weather. Could they stop global warming if they felt like it? Or had the caused it? Or merely caused people to believe it was happening? What was real, now that a small part of the secret world had been revealed?

I have a stone in my hand.

Mr. Laudon showed up so soon after school let out that Jam suspected he dismissed class early. Or maybe his last period was free. Anyway, if he knocked on the door, Jam didn’t hear it. The first he knew Laudon was there was when he saw him standing near the gate to the front yard, watching as Jam pick the ready beans off the tall vines. Jam was carrying the picked beans in his shirt, holding the bottom of it out like a basket.

Jam couldn’t think of a thing to say. So he said, “Want some tomatoes?”

Laudon looked at the beans in his shirt. “That what you call a tomato?”

“No, we just got plenty of tomatoes. We ain’t sick of beans yet.”

He could see Laudon wince at “ain’t.” Laudon was the kind of teacher who would never catch on that whenever he wanted to, Jam spoke in the same educated accents and careful grammar as his mother. The kind of teacher who thought there was something morally wrong with speaking in the vernacular.

“I came for the stone,” said Laudon.

Jam rolled up the front of his shirt to hold the beans, then pulled it off over his head and set it on the back lawn. He pried off his shoes. Pulled off his socks. Pulled off his pants and tossed them to Laudon. Wearing only his jockeys, he said, “You want to sniff these, too, Mr. Laudon? That what you came over for?”

Laudon glared — but he went through the pockets of the pants. “This proves nothing. You’ve been home long enough to hide it anywhere.”

As if I’d let it out of my sight, now that I know what it can do. “What’s so important about this stone, Mr. Laudon?”

“It’s an antique.”

“A genuine philosopher’s stone.”

“A stone that people in the middle ages genuinely believed to be one.”

“That’s such a lie,” said Jam.

“Watch what you say to me.”

“You’re in my back yard, watching me strip my clothes off. I’ll say what I want, or you’ll be explaining to the cops what you’re doing here.”

Laudon threw the pants back at him. “I didn’t ask you to take your clothes off.”

“There were a lot of kids in that room, Mr. Laudon. I’m the one who was unconscious, remember? Why not search among the ones who were awake? What about Rhonda Jones? She’s the one who dropped it. Whatever’s in that stone, it bothered her, didn’t it? Maybe she took it.”

“You know she didn’t,” said Laudon. “You think I don’t know how to track the stone? Where it is, and who has it?”

“And yet you checked the pockets of my pants.”

Laudon glared. “Maybe I should go ask your brother.”

“Go ahead,” said Jam. But inside, he was wondering: Was Laudon the enemy who did this to Gan? Would he harm Gan, lying there helpless in bed?”

Laudon smirked. “You haven’t given it to him, I know that much. You don’t know how.”

Jam wondered what would happen if he touched Laudon. Not hit him, just touched him. Would Laudon get a jolt of power the way Gan did? Or would Jam have power over Laudon? How did this stuff work?

“You’ve got the fire in your eyes,” said Laudon. “Ambition. You’re wondering if you can use the power in the stone. The answer is, you can’t. It’s a collector. A battery of magic. Only someone with power can draw on it. And that’s not you.”

He said “you” with such contempt that it made Jam angry. He bent over and plunged both hands into the muddy soil around the tomatoes. But he did it while fending, so that when he pulled his hands out, they were clean — not a speck of dirt or mud clung to them. He showed his hands to Laudon and then walked toward him. “Does this look like ‘no power’ to you?”

“You can fend?” asked Laudon, glancing around. “Then why did you let me…. ” He clamped his mouth shut.

Why did I let him in here? Interesting. So the fending he did was supposed to work farther than just a micron’s depth of air surrounding his body. Jam had never tried to push things farther away than that. He tried to do it, to use the fending to push outward.

It was like when he decided to try to wiggle his ears. He had already noticed that when he grinned, his ears went up. So he stood in front of the mirror, grinning and then letting his face go slack, trying to feel the muscles that moved his ears. Then he worked at moving only those muscles, worked for days on it, and pretty soon he could do it — move either ear up and down, without stirring a muscle on the front of his face.

This was the same thing, in a way — not a muscle, but he did know how to fend a little. Now he isolated the feeling, the thing he did to make the fending happen, and pushed it outward from himself. At first he had to move his arms a little, but quickly he realized that this had nothing to do with it.

His shirt, twisted up on the ground with the beans inside, began to roll away from him. The garden hose snaked across the grass. Laudon took a step back. “You don’t know what you’re doing here, Jam. Don’t attract the attention of powers you don’t understand.”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” said Jam. “You said the stone was nothing but a collector, but that’s not true. That’s what you are, gathering whatever magical power your students have. Rhonda had a lot of it, didn’t she? But you don’t know what I have.”