Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

In a living room of a suburban house on Long Island, a wizard sat with a TV remote control in his hand, and an annoyed expression on his face. “Come on,” he said to the remote. “Don’t give me grief.”

The TV showed him a blue screen and nothing more.

Kit Rodriguez sighed. “All right,” he said, “we’re on the record now. You made me do this.” He reached for his wizard’s manual on the sofa next to him, paged through it to its hardware section — which had been getting thicker by the minute this afternoon — found one page in particular, and keyed into the remote a series of characters that the designers of both the remote and the TV would have found unusual.

The screen stayed mostly blue, but the nature of the white characters on it changed. Until now they had been words in the Roman alphabet. Now they changed to characters in a graceful and curly cursive, the written form of the wizardly Speech. At the top of the screen they showed the local time and the date expressed as a Julian day, that being the Earth-based system most closely akin to what the manual’s managers used to express time. In the middle of the blue screen appeared a single word:

WON’T.

Kit let out a long breath of exasperation. “Oh, come on,” he said in the Speech. “Why not?”

The screen remained blue, staring at him mulishly. Kit wondered what he’d done to deserve this.

“It can’t be that bad,” he said. “You two even have the same version number.”

VERSIONS AREN’T EVERYTHING!

Kit rubbed his eyes.

“I thought a six-year-old child was supposed to be able to program one of these things,” said a voice from the next room.

“I sure feel like a six-year-old at the moment,” Kit muttered. “It would work out about the same.”

Kit’s father wandered in and stood there staring at the TV. Not being a wizard himself, he couldn’t see the Speech written there, and wouldn’t have been able to make sense of it if he had, but he could see the blue screen well enough. “So what’s the problem?”

“It looks like they hate each other,” Kit said.

His father made a rueful face. “Software issues,” he said. He was a pressman for one of the bigger news-papers on the Island, and in the process of the company converting from hot lead to electronic and laser printing, he had learned more than most people cared to know about the problems of converting from truly hard “hardware” to the computer kind.

“Nope,” Kit said. “I wish it were that simple.”

“What is it, then?”

Kit shook his head. Once upon a time, not so long ago, getting mechanical things to see things his way had been Kit’s daily stock-in-trade. Now everything seemed to be getting more complex by the day. “ Issues they’ve got, all right,” he said. “I’m not sure they make sense to me yet.”

His father squeezed his shoulder. “Give it time, son,” he said. “You’re a brujo; nothing can withstand your power.”

“Nothing that’s not made of silicon, anyway,” Kit said.

His father rolled his eyes. “Tell me all about it,” he said, and went away.

Kit sat there staring at the blue screen, trying to sort through the different strategies he’d tried so far, determining which ones hadn’t worked, which ones had worked a little bit, and which ones had seemed to be working just fine until without warning they crashed and burned. The manual for the new remote said that the new DVD player was supposed to look for channels on the TV once they were plugged into each other, but the remote and the DVD player didn’t even want to acknowledge each other’s existence so far, let alone exchange information. Neither the DVD’s manual nor the remote’s was any help. The two pieces of equipment both came from the same company, they were both made in the same year and, as far as Kit could tell, in the same place. But when he listened to them with a wizard’s ear, he heard them singing two different songs — in ferocious rivalry — and making rude noises at each other during the pauses, when they thought no one was listening.

“Come on, you guys,” he said in the Speech. “All I’m asking for here is a little cooperation—”

“No surrender!” shouted the remote.

“Death before dishonor!” shouted the DVD player.

Kit covered his eyes and let out a long, frustrated breath.

From the kitchen came a sudden silence, something that was as arresting to Kit as a sudden noise, and that made him look up in alarm. His mother had been cooking. Indeed, she was making her arroz con polio , a dinner that visiting heads of state would consider themselves lucky to eat.

When without warning it got quiet in the kitchen in the middle of that process, Kit reacted as he would have if he’d heard someone say, “Oops!” during the countdown toward a space shuttle launch: with held breath and intense attention.

“Honey?” Kit’s mom said.

“What, Mama?”

“The dog says he wants to know what’s the meaning of life.”

Kit rubbed his forehead, finding himself tempted to hide his eyes. “Give him a dog biscuit and tell him it’s an allegory,” Kit said.

“What, life?”

“No, the biscuit!”

“Oh, good. You had me worried there for a moment.”

Kit’s mother’s sense of humor tended toward the dry, and the dryness sounded like it was set at about medium at the moment, which was just as well. His mother was still in the process of getting used to his wizardry. Kit went back to trying to talk sense into the remote and the DVD player. The

DVD player blued the TV’s screen out again, pointedly turning its attention elsewhere.

“Come on, just give each other a chance.”

“Talk to that thing? You must have a chip loose.”

“Like I would listen!”

“Hah! You’re a tool, nothing but a tool! I entertain!”

“Oh yeah? Let’s see how well you entertain when I turn you off like a light!”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Listen to me, you two! You can’t get hung up on the active-role-passive-role thing. They’re both just fine, and there’s more to life—”

“Like what?!”

Kit’s mama came drifting in and looked over Kit’s shoulder as he continued to speak passionately to the remote and the DVD player about the importance of cooperation and teamwork, the need not to feel diminished by acting, however briefly, as part of a whole. But the remote refused to do anything further, and the screen stayed blue. Kit started to think he must be turning that color in the face.

“It sounds like escargot,” his mother said, leaning her short, round self over him to look at the

TV.

“What?”

“Sorry. Esperanto. I don’t know why the word for snails always comes out first.”

Kit looked at his mother with some interest. “You can hear it?” he said. It was moderately unusual for nonwizards to hear the Speech at all. When they did, they tended to hear it as the language they spoke themselves — but because the Speech contained and informed all languages, being the seed from which they grew, this was to be expected.