Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

“Gone!” the Lone Power cried. “Gone again!

“Find him!!”

With a vast wind-rush rustling of terror, the shadows vanished. The Lone One, furious, swept Its darknesses about Itself. They writhed like an angry cloak, wrapped in close around their master. A second later, It was gone.

And Kit and Ponch stood there at the edge of it all, behind the door, in the dark, shaking.

It didn’t even notice you

, Ponch said, confused but relieved. That’s good .

No argument. But what about Darryl

? Kit was seriously confused. How could he be there and not he there at the same time ?

I don’t know

, Ponch said. But I want to go home now. And when we get home, I want a biscuit .

Five biscuits

, Kit said. Maybe ten. Let’s get out of here .

They started making their way back through the carved corridors of the hill. “Where did he go?”

Kit said after a while, when he started to get his breath back, for he’d held it again and again.

The Lone One? He didn’t “go” anywhere. He’s still where he always is: here

One side of Ponch’s mouth curled again in a soft growl.

“No, I meant Darryl.”

Oh. It may take me a little while to find out

Ponch’s nose was working again. But I don’t think this is the first time he’s done this maneuver; he did it too quickly. I can scent the change. I can find where he goes next .

They came out of the dark, back into that pitiless day. “What I don’t get is, why’s he doing it?”

Kit said, looking out across the endless, scorched, barren waste. “Why doesn’t he get it over with?

Not that he didn’t look like he was having a bad time. But running away from the Lone One is no way to end an Ordeal. Sooner or later you have to tackle It head-on… before It catches you from behind, when you’re not looking, and finishes you off.”

I don’t know. I’m not a wizard. But I know what it’s like to be scared .

Kit heard the pity in his dog’s voice, and was slightly surprised. Normally Ponch saved his concern for members of the family, or friends. “You’re sure you can pick up the trail again?”

Any time. But not right now

Ponch trotted away from the bottom of the cliff, purposeful, not looking back. I’m tired .

But Ponch is sad, too

, Kit thought. And that makes it worse . “Come on, big guy,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Together, they vanished.

Nita looked up out of darkness at the giant robot that was staring down at her.

At the time this seemed like the most natural thing in the world. There she stood, barefoot, in her long, pink-striped nightshirt, and there stood the robot, glittering in the single spotlight that shone down on the dark floor. The gleam of the downfalling light on the metal of the robot’s skin was nearly blinding. What kind of metal is that, I wonder ? Nita thought, for the skin sheened a number of colors, from a hot blue through magenta to a greenish yellow, depending on how the robot moved.

Right now it was shifting idly from foot to foot, as if it was waiting for something to happen.

Titanium

, Nita thought, recalling some jewelry she’d seen one of her classmates wearing to school recently; it had had the same hot-colored sheen as the robot’s skin.

Or was it palladium? I forget

. “Hello?” Nita called up to the robot.

There was no reply. But the robot did hold still, then, and incline its head a little to look down in Nita’s general direction. There was no telling whether it was actually looking at her: Where eyes normally would have been, there was a horizontal slit, which probably had sensors behind it. The robot strongly resembled the kind of giant robot that kept turning up on Saturday morning television, and Nita found herself wondering whether this one might suddenly start breaking apart into jet fighters and tanks and other such paraphernalia. But for the moment, it just stood there.

Nita started to get a strange, repetitive, ticktock feeling in the back of her head — an emotion or thought recurring, again and again, as regular and inevitable as clockwork, but recurring at a distance, in a muffled kind of way. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, either — it was a kind of thought or emotion that you would suffer from, rather than experience with any particular pleasure. Fortunately, it wasn’t so acute that Nita had to pay much attention to it, though she felt vaguely sorry for the robot, if this weary feeling did, indeed, belong to it.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Nita called, more loudly this time. There was no question of speaking to the robot more conversationally: Its head was at least fifty feet above the ground. This is like having a conversation with a flagpole

, Nita thought.

The robot took a clunky step toward her, then another, then suddenly hunkered down in front of her with a great groan and screech of complaining, over-stressed metal. Nita thought at first that it might fall over, it looked so unsteady, and it wobbled and leaned from left to right to left again. It was intent on her, though again Nita couldn’t be sure how she knew that: The metal face was blank, and it had no way to change its expression even if one had been there.

“So what is it?” Nita said. “Give me a clue!”

It loomed over her, possibly considering what to say. As machine intelligences went, the robot already seemed pretty reticent: Nita’s limited experience with mechanical life-forms suggested that they were big talkers, but this one didn’t seem to be so inclined. It just leaned over her, the size of a small apartment building, and a tongue-tied one at that.

“Oh, wait a minute, now I know what it is,” Nita said. “You want to talk to my sister, right? I’m really sorry, but she’s asleep right now.”

No response from the shining form. “Asleep?” Nita said. “Temporarily nonfunctional? Offline?”

The robot suddenly began emitting what Nita thought at first were more metal-stress sounds, but after she got past how deafening they were, she found she could catch the occasional word through them, and the words were in the Speech. Oh good , Nita thought, for there were quite a few alien species scattered throughout the Local Group of galaxies who knew the Speech, using it as a convenient common tongue.

“ [Grind, groan, screech] difficulty [screech-moan-crash] entropy [moan, moan, clunk-crash] communications,” the robot said. And then said nothing more, but just wobbled back and forth amid a whine of gyros, trying to keep its balance.

Nita was getting confused. Why can’t I understand it ? “Uh, okay,” she said in the Speech, “I think I got a little of that. Something’s interfering with your communications. What exactly did you want to communicate about? Do you have some other kind of problem that needs to be solved?”

The robot just crouched there, wobbling, for several moments. Then it said, “Solve [scream-ofmetal, grind, ratchet] problem [moan, moan, much higher moan, crash] cyclic-insoluble [grind, grind] time [extremely long-duration whirly-noisemaker sound, crash, clunk] no solution [screeeeeeech, crash crash crash] trap [boom] .”

Nita revised her original opinion about having conversations with flagpoles. This was more like a dialogue with a garbage truck, that being the only other thing in her immediate experience that sounded anything like this. “I’m really sorry,” she said, “but I’m having a lot of trouble understanding you. It’s my fault, probably. Can you tell me more clearly how I can help you? Just what is it that you need?”