Diane Duane: A Wizard Alone

“I hear it a little,” his mother said. “Like someone talking in the next room. Which it was…”

“I wonder if the wizardry comes from your side of the family,” Kit said.

His mother’s broad and pretty face suddenly acquired a nervous quality. “Uh-oh, the chicken broth,” she said, and took herself back to the kitchen.

“What about Ponch?” Kit said.

“He ate the dog biscuit,” his mother said after a moment.

“And he didn’t ask you any more philosophical stuff?”

“He went out. I think he had a date with a biological function.”

Kit smirked, though he turned his face so she wouldn’t see it if she came back in. His mother’s work as a nurse expressed itself at home in two ways: either detailed and concrete descriptions of things you’d never thought about before and (afterward) desperately never wanted to think about again, or shy evasions regarding very basic physical operations that you’d think wouldn’t upset a six-year-old. Ponch’s business seemed mostly to elicit the second response in Kit’s mama, an effect that usually made Kit laugh.

At the moment he just felt too tired. Kit paused in his cheerleading and went rummaging through the paperwork on the floor for the DVD’s and remote’s manuals. We’re in trouble when even a remote control has its own manual , he thought. But if a wizard with a bent toward mechanical things couldn’t get this kind of very basic problem sorted out, then there really would be trouble.

He spent a few moments with the manuals, ignoring the catcalls and jeers that the recalcitrant pieces of equipment were trading. Then abruptly Kit realized, listening, that the DVD did have a slightly different accent than the remote and the TV. Now, I wonder , he thought, and went carefully through the DVD’s manual to see whether the manufacturer actually had made all the main parts itself.

The manual said nothing about this, being written in a broken English that assumed the system was, indeed, being assembled by the proverbial six-year-old. Resigned, Kit picked up the remote again, which immediately began shouting abuse at him. At first he was relieved that this was inaudible to everybody else, but the DVD chose that moment to take control of the entertainment system’s speakers and start shouting back.

“Oooh, what a nasty mouth,” said his sister Carmela as she walked through the living room, wearing her usual uniform of floppy jeans and huge floppy T-shirt, and holding a wireless phone in her hand. She had been studying Japanese for some months, mostly via watching anime, and had now graduated to an actual language course — though what she chiefly seemed interested in were what their father wryly called “the scurrilities.” “ Bakka aho kikai, bakka-bakka !”

Kit was inclined to agree. He spent an annoying couple of moments searching for the volume control on the DVD — the remote was too busy doing its own shouting to be of any use. Finally he got the DVD to shut up, then once again punched a series of characters into the remote to get a look at the details on the DVD’s core processor.

“Aha,” Kit said to himself. The processor wasn’t made by the company that owned the brand. He had a look at the same information for the remote. It also used the same processor, but it had been resold to the brand-name company by still another company.

“Now look at that!” Kit said. “You have the same processors. You aren’t really from different companies at all. You’re long-lost brothers. Isn’t that nice? And look at you, fighting over nothing!

She’s right, you are idiots. Now I want you guys to handshake and make up.”

There was first a shocked silence, then some muttering and grumbling about unbearable insults and who owed whom an apology. “You both do,” Kit said. “You were very disrespectful to each other. Now get on with it, and then settle down to work. You’ll have a great time. The new cable package has all these great channels.”

Reluctantly, they did it. About ten minutes later the DVD began sorting through and classifying the channels it found on the TV. “Thank you, guys,” Kit said, taking a few moments to tidy up the paperwork scattered all over the floor, while thinking longingly of the oncoming generation of wireless electronics that would all communicate seamlessly and effortlessly with one another. “See, that wasn’t so bad. But someday all this will be so much simpler,” Kit said, patting the top of the DVD player.

“No, it won’t,” the remote control said darkly.

Kit rolled his eyes and decided to let the distant unborn future of electronics fend for itself. “ You just behave,” he said to the remote, “or you’re gonna wind up in the Cuisinart.”

He walked out of the living room, ignoring the indignant shrieks of wounded ego from the remote. This had been only the latest episode in a series of almost constant excitements lately, which had begun when his dad broke down after years of resistance and decided to get a full-size entertainment center. It was going to be wonderful when everything was installed and everything worked. But in the meantime, Kit had become resigned to having a lot of learning experiences.

From the back door at the far side of the kitchen came a scratching noise: his dog letting the world know he wanted to come back in. The scratching stopped as the door opened. Kit turned to his pop, who had just come into the dining room again, and handed him the remote. “I think it’s fixed now,” he said. “Just do this from now on: Instead of using this button to bring the system up, the one the manual tells you to, press this, and then this.” He showed his pop how to do it.

“Okay. But why?”

“They may not remember the little talking-to I just gave them — it depends on how the system resets when you turn it off. This should remind them…I hardwired it in.”

“What was the problem?”

“Something cultural.”

“Between the remote and the DVD player?! But they’re both Japanese.”

“Looks like it’s more complicated than that.” There seemed to be no point in suggesting to his pop that the universal remote and the DVD were both unsatisfied with their active or passive modes.

Apparently doing what you had been built to do was a prospect no more popular among machines than it was among living things. Everything had its own ideas about what it really should be doing in the world, and the more memory you installed in the hardware, the more ideas it seemed to get.

Kit realized how thirsty all this talking to machinery had made him. He went to the fridge and rummaged around to see if there was some of his mom’s iced tea in there. There wasn’t, only a can of the lemon soft drink that Nita particularly liked and that his mom kept for her.

The sight of it made Kit briefly uncomfortable. But neither wizardry nor friendship was exclusively about comfort. He took the lemon fizz out, popped the can’s top, and took a long swig.

Neets

? he said silently.

Yeah

, she said in his mind.

There wasn’t much enthusiasm there, but there hadn’t been much enthusiasm in her about anything for some weeks. At least it wasn’t as bad for her now as it had been right after her mother’s funeral. But clearly Kit wondered whether the bitter pain she’d been in then was, in its way, healthier than her current gray, dull tone of mind, like an overcast that showed no signs of lifting.

Then he immediately felt guilty for even being tempted to play psychiatrist. She had a right to grieve at whatever speed was right for her.

Busy today?

Not really.

Kit waited. Normally Nita would now come forth with at least some explanation of what “not really” involved. But she wasn’t anything like normal right now, and no explanation came — just that sense of weariness, the same tired why-bother feeling that kept rearing up at the back of Kit’s mind.