Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

“But this isn’t the only place I can be at the same time,” Darryl said softly.

Nita’s head jerked up.

“I thought I was hallucinating at first,” Darryl said. “Now I know it’s no hallucination. When the two of you started coming into my worlds, I was with you both at once.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if this is something most wizards can do—”

“It’s not ,” Kit and Nita said simultaneously.

“But it’s real useful,” Kit said after a moment, intrigued. “Just think. If you were—”

“Kit, maybe we should save it for later,” Nita said. This was a line of reasoning she didn’t want him to go too far down just now. “Why don’t we all get out of here first?”

Darryl looked at Nita in shock. “But I can’t leave,” Darryl said. “The Ordeal isn’t over.”

Nita looked at Kit, wondering if he’d realized the truth yet. From his blank look, it seemed he hadn’t. Then she looked at Darryl, and laughed out loud for sheer delight.

“Sure it is!” Nita said. “You passed your Ordeal weeks ago! You passed it the minute you managed to say the Oath.”

“Remember how you had to fight to get it out, word by word, phrase by phrase?” Kit said, slowly starting to grin. “How you kept losing it, forgetting it, having to start over again and again?”

“That was the Lone One interfering,” Darryl said softly. He was wearing a listening look, as the Silence spoke to him.

Slowly, his face changed, and the joy in it was so dazzling that Nita found it hard to bear, and had to look away.

“That was the real battle,” he said. “And I won it! I won…”

Nita had to smile, and for the first time in a long time, the smile didn’t feel like it would crack her face.

Kit looked at Nita in some surprise. “I thought the Lone One only starts noticing a wizard when he first says the Oath.”

“That’s how it is for most of us,” Nita said. “But it looks like not all Ordeals are alike.” She was still treading cautiously around anything that would get too close to the subject of abdals, until she could get Kit somewhere private and give him the lowdown. I’m pretty sure that since the Lone Power knew Darryl was an abdal, It wanted to keep him from taking the Oath any way It could, because who could tell how powerful he might become once he was a wizard? Maybe that’s even why Darryl became autistic in the first place; maybe the Lone One did that to him. But I’d better not get into that just now…

“And just the act of saying the Oath, accepting it, for someone autistic…” Nita looked at Darryl with renewed admiration. “You have to accept the concept of the Other, that there are others, to do it at all. It must have been like eating broken glass.”

Darryl stood there looking as if a whole new world was opening up before him, as if his past pain was retreating into the shadows. “It was hard,” he said. “The whole Oath is about doing things for other people…”

“But, Neets,” Kit said. “Your manual, Tom’s, mine, they all say that Darryl’s still stuck in his Ordeal.”

“Because he hadn’t realized it was over,” Nita said. “And because he just kept hitting the reset button in his brain, and losing his sense of self over and over again to keep the Lone One trapped in here, he never had time to let himself realize it. So his manual, the Silence, stayed stuck, too, and it couldn’t update to the manual network outside.”

Nita nodded. “The ones you couldn’t look at, the ones you were afraid of because you saw It in their eyes, you had to promise the One and the Powers That Be that you would come out and do stuff for them . What could possibly have been harder?”

“This,” Darryl said.

Nita and Kit glanced at each other.

“ That ,” Darryl said, changing his mind. “In here… it’s been safe. In here I never have to look, never have to be afraid I’ll see what might be there. Rejection. The one who sees me and doesn’t want to look back. Because he’s bored with me, or I’ve hurt him, or…”

“I will put aside fear for courage,” Kit said.

“And death for life,” Nita said, very softly. She swallowed. “When it’s right to do so.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “If it isn’t right now, then when will it be?”

“We need you out in the real world with us, guy,” Kit said. “We need all the wizards we can get…now more than ever. Entropy’s running…”

“But I can’t go out there!” Darryl cried. “It’s in me! If I go out there, It’ll be loose in the world in the worst possible way!”

Nita’s heart squeezed inside her. “It’s loose out there already,” she said. “Your coming out, or not coming out, won’t make the slightest difference to that . You can die with It at the bottom of your heart, out in the world with the rest of us, or you can die with It at the bottom of your heart, in here, alone.”

He stood there, silent, his eyes averted.

“It’s better not to do it alone,” Nita said.

Darryl didn’t look up.

“There’s strength in numbers, Darryl,” Kit said. “It’s easy to forget that.” He glanced at Nita a little shamefacedly. She gave him an amused look and raised her eyebrows. He turned back to Darryl. “There are a whole lot of us out in the world, giving It a hard time.

You were real good at doing that just when you were stuck inside and didn’t have any clues about how the rest of us manage it. Come on out and give It a run for Its money! When you get right down to the bottom of it, that’s nearly all we do. Which wizardries we use to do it… that’s the cool part.“

Darryl was silent for a long while. Eventually he looked up again, and as Darryl slowly started to let himself believe that this was the right thing to do, that innocent joy and delight in life simply poured off him, so that once more Nita had to brace herself against it.

She saw Kit wobble, too. Only Ponch stood there untroubled, wagging his tail.

“All right,” Darryl said. “I’ll come.”

Ponch started to bark for joy.

Nita had to smile. “But one thing,” Nita said, glancing at the kernel, “before you do anything final with that.”

Darryl looked up at her, confused.

“If you have to leave part of you here,” Nita said, “think about which part you might leave.”

Darryl looked at her in confusion. “Which part?” he said. “I know I can be in both places with all of me, but splitting parts off—”

“Don’t make reasons you can’t do stuff, Darryl,” Kit said. “Find reasons you can .”

“You made this world,” Nita said. “That’s powerful stuff. And you can make the rules in here.

You made them so strongly, without even being clear on what you were doing, that the Lone Power Itself got stuck in here with you and couldn’t get out until you let It.

Now It’s gone… and you’re fully conscious, with the operating system for your own universe in your hands. You’re not just inside the game anymore: You’re outside it, too, now — you’re in control of it when you’ve got the kernel. Even from in here, you can make this world anything you want!“

Darryl looked from Nita to Kit, and slowly, surmise dawned in his eyes.

“The autism…”

“Why not? You started ditching it the first chance you got,” Nita said. “You ditched it on Kit, for example.”

Darryl looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to…”

“Darryl, I know you didn’t mean it personally,” Kit said. “It’s okay. You were doing a sane thing, getting rid of it!” Then he glanced at Nita. “I still don’t know why you didn’t get it.”