Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

, she thought. The quick vocabulary test she’d taken before her dad came down for his coffee had suggested that Nita was readily familiar with about 650 terms in the Speech… out of a possible 750,000. And more words were being rediscovered or coined every day by wizards of every species. There were even regional dialects and variants, alternate recensions used by species whose physiologies or brain structure, or sometimes even the structure of their home universe, meant that the most basic forms of the Speech had to be altered to make sense. I’ve been treating this like it was a dead language

, Nita thought. But it’s alive. It’s the language of Life Itself: How could it not be ?

And then, no matter how many of the words you might know, there was always the question of context… the way a species used the Speech. Some species understood it clearly, but meant very different things by their usage of it than other species did. Some members of other species, too, whether wizards or not, might have only a beginner’s acquaintance with the Speech, a most basic understanding of how to use it. Like it looks like I have , Nita thought, turning the manual’s pages ruefully.

So the question is: Was I the one being incompetent the other day, or was the robot? Or the clown

? Because of the way she felt lately, Nita thought the incompetence was a lot more likely to have been on her side. And how come I got so little from the knight ? Nita remembered Dairine’s line about the robot, about how the species contacting Nita seemed to have no plurals, possibly even no personal pronouns. What she’d heard last night seemed to confirm the idea. He never said “we ,” she thought. But then, he never said “I,” either. There was something so…I don’t know … so limited about the way he was expressing himself. Was that just because I was having trouble dealing with the way he used the Speech? Or was he hiding something ?

And why?

She leaned there on her folded arms for a while, looking rather glumly at the manual, and didn’t even bother looking up when Dairine came padding in wearing one of their dad’s T-shirts, hunting her breakfast. “Morning.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, turning over another page covered with necessary vocabulary that she didn’t know.

Dairine stuck her head in the refrigerator. “My bed creaks now,” she said.

“It’s always creaked,” Nita said as Dairine came out with the milk. “That’s because you jump on it.”

“I think it’s because it just spent the better part of a day down a crevasse full of liquid nitrogen,” Dairine said, getting a bowl for her cereal.

“If it spent any time in liquid nitrogen, it wouldn’t just creak,” Nita said. “It’d shatter.”

“Yeah, well, I’m thinking your wizardry wasn’t temperature-tight,” Dairine said, pouring first cereal and then milk. “I think you dropped a variable.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I bet you did.”

“Didn’t.”

Dairine gave Nita a look that said, Yes, you did, you idiot , and went out into the dining room with her cereal.

Nita smiled slightly as she turned another page. At least Dairine seemed to be back to normal for the moment. Of course, it might be a ploy to lull me into a false sense of security . But Nita thought her sister knew better than to bother trying to mislead her just now, when Nita’s fuse was shorter than usual. Next time, it might not be just Dairine’s bed that wound up down a crevasse… and Dairine’s present power levels weren’t what they had been a while ago. Nita’s couple of years’ more experience as a wizard might be enough temporarily to keep Dairine in line.

She raised her eyebrows and went back to the vocabulary list. I really wish there were ways to just magically make all this information go into my head

, Nita thought. Oh well …

Dairine finished her cereal and went to get dressed, and Nita kept reading, turning page after page in the manual, looking for a hint as to what she might have been missing. It was at least an hour later when Dairine came by again, dressed, with the backpack she used as a book bag over her shoulder; Nita glanced up just long enough to see Dairine putting her coat on, and to notice the small, glowing, rose-colored eye looking at her from inside the bag.

“Have you been upgrading Spot again?” Nita said.

“He’s been upgrading himself,” Dairine said. “Wireless, optical… some other stuff.” She looked affectionately at the bag as she shouldered it, and the little eye on its silvery stalk disappeared back down between the backpack and its flap.

“I wouldn’t let anybody see him, if I were you,” Nita said.

“They can’t. But he can see them. Gotta go, Neets.”

“See you…”

Dairine left. Nita spent some moments more reading the manual in the quiet, until suddenly she realized that if she didn’t get out of there, she was the one who was going to be in trouble for being late. She ran off to get her own backpack, and her manual went floating after her.

The rest of the day went by fairly quickly, partly because Nita’s concerns about the communications between her and “her aliens” kept bringing Nita back to the manual in every free moment that wasn’t taken up with class work. She hardly thought seriously about anything else until just before her lunch period, when Nita suddenly remembered that today was when the time and day for her next session with Mr. Millman would be posted.

When the bell rang, she made her way down into the corridor in the south wing of the school, where the administrative offices were, and from there into the main office, where the bulletin board for the special services messages was located. Nita found the pinned-up folded message that said N.

CALLAHAN, pulled it off the board, and headed out into the corridor, opening it.

The message said, “Dear Nita: 7:30 A.M., Monday. Hope the magic’s going okay. Don’t forget to bring some cards. I want to find out how to keep them from falling out of my sleeve. R. Millman.“

Nita looked at this and was tempted to shred the note right down to its component atoms. What in the worlds made me say that to him , she thought, shoving the note into the pocket of her jeans and stalking off down the hall.

By the time she got to the cafeteria, though, she’d shrugged off the annoyance and was once again worrying at the clown-robot-knight problem. Nita got herself a sandwich and a fruit juice, sat down by herself off to one side, and spent another half hour studying how species that didn’t understand plurals handled the Speech. It was complex. Mostly they wound up repeating singular forms with a redactive or “virtual” plural, which—

It’s sounding a little dry in there, Neets…

Nita smiled. You have no idea , she said, and shut the manual. Nita disposed of her lunch tray and went out of the cafeteria, into the small side parking lot. Kit was leaning against the chain-link fence on the far side, hugging himself a little against the cold, watching a boys’ gym class out in the athletic field running easy laps to cool down after soccer practice.

Nita went to lean against the fence beside him. “You know any card tricks?” she said under her breath.

He looked at her oddly. “No. Why?”

“I did something incredibly stupid. I mentioned magic to Millman at our last meeting. He thought I meant magician stuff, though, the sawing-people-in-half kind of magic. Now he wants me to show him some.”

Kit stared at Nita, then burst out laughing. “You should do some wizardry, and let him think it’s magic. I bet you can do all kinds of fancy card tricks when you can really make them vanish.”