Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

“He’s got you trained already,” Kit said. Nita caught his eye. Here it comes…

After a moment Quelt looked up at him. “Nita says you were down in the Display when it failed,” she said.

“Yes,” Kit said.

Ponch looked up into Quelt’s eyes. I think it was my fault, he said. Please don’t he angry at Kit.

Quelt produced a strange, unhappy smile and roughed up Ponch’s ears some more. “I can’t let him try to take the blame for this,” Kit said. “I asked him to alter

the way the Display was working. I wanted to hear what Druvah actually said to Esemeli.”

Quelt didn’t look up. “And what did you hear?”

Kit told her.

It took a long while. Kit’s memory was excellent, Nita thought; the phrasing he was using was that of an older time, and she could almost hear the ancient wizard speaking through him. All the time, though, Quelt’s expression never changed. She sat looking down at the sand until Kit finished.

“So then,” she said, “having heard that, you went to see Esemeli.”

“Yes,” Nita said. Now, she figured, it was her turn. She told Quelt everything the Lone One had said to them, leaving out not a word. It was surprisingly easy for her, for she had been turning all those words over again and again in her mind, looking for anything dangerous hidden under them that she might have missed the first time around.

Once again, Quelt held very still, kept very silent, while Nita told her what the Lone Power had said about the Alaalids’ need to evolve. And then Nita fell silent herself, waiting to see what Quelt would do.

The silence lasted a long while, and Nita forced herself to listen to the water slipping up and down the beach, and the little hissing noises that happened when air got trapped in the sand and bubbled out. When she looked at Quelt again, she found the Alaalid gazing at her with an indrawn expression very unlike anything Nita had seen on her before.

“And you believe this?” Quelt said at last. “You believe these things It told you?”

Nita took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said.

“Because of the Oath you made It swear?”

“Not just that,” Nita said. “After I started hearing the whispering, it seemed to me that there was something”—she paused—”not wrong about it, not as such. But there was something missing about the world. I went looking for your world’s kernel. It’s not here, Quelt. It’s been separated from your world—and it shouldn’t be.”

“Or it wouldn’t be in your own world,” Quelt said, her voice very strange. “Is that it? That you think my world should be more like yours?”

Nita gulped. “Not at all,” she said. “But your world’s kernel—”

“Enough of that for a moment,” Quelt said. “I must come back to this. You believe what the Lone One told you?

“Yes, because this once, It had no choice but to tell the truth,” Kit said. “Not after Nita was finished with It, anyway.”

“And we ought to make the best of it,” Nita muttered, “because this is the last time I’m going to be able to manage that stunt. One per customer…”

Quelt was silent. Finally, she looked up again, but not at either of them: out to sea. “I want to say this without being rude,” she said. “You’re our guests, and Those Who Are sent you here. But—”

She shook herself all over, like someone under intolerable pressure, and leaped up. “What makes you so sure you’re right?” Quelt said, standing very stiffly, with her back turned to them. “How dare you think you can interfere with something

like this, with our Choice? What gives you the right to tell me that my people should repeal it—just throw away everything we have here and start over? What makes you think you know better than we do how we should be growing as a species, what we should be doing with ourselves?”

Nita couldn’t think of anything to say right away. “Quelt,” Kit said, “it might just be that we have more experience with this kind of thing, with the Lone One, than you do.”

“I think perhaps you do!” Quelt said as she turned back toward them. She was shaking all over as she stood there. “I asked the wind to tell me about your world! I had to, because every time I asked you, you’d always stop and say that it was going to take a long time to explain. Well, it did! It seemed like it took forever for the wind to tell me everything I wanted to know. And there was always more. I thought it would never stop.” She was nearly in tears, but she was hanging on to her control…just. “I didn’t know what a war was, until it told me about one. I’d never heard of murder. Or plague. Or a hundred other awful things.”

Nita wanted to say something…and couldn’t for the life of her think where to begin. And it was questionable, she thought, whether she could have stopped Quelt anyway. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Quelt said. “I thought, Those Who Are wouldn’t send us wizards who would hurt us, who were dangerous. It’s not their fault their world is so horrible. But now I have to ask. What’s the matter with you people? What happened in your Choice that you got it so wrong, that you kill each other all the time?”

“We’re not sure,” Nita said. “We spend a lot of time wondering about that ourselves.”

“Is that true?”

Kit looked at her in shock. “Why would we lie?”

“Because when you’re not using the Speech, you can?” Quelt said.

Nita and Kit were stunned silent.

“Your world seems to be full of that kind of thing,” Quelt said. “I was terrified when I found out about it! It’s got to be one of the worst things that’s wrong there. How awful it has to be for people in your world when you can never know for sure whether something someone tells you is true?”

“That’s one reason we use the Speech,” Nita said. “It’s one less question to ask—”

“But then you have to go on to the next one,” Quelt said. “Yes, people can’t lie in the Speech. Fine. But if they’re confused, they can say what they believe to be the truth, conversationally, and what they say will still be wrong. How do I know It hasn’t somehow tricked you into believing all the things It told you are true?”

Nita looked helplessly up at Kit. She couldn’t think of an answer to that.

“Or worse yet,” Quelt said, “how do I know you’re not working for that one?”

Kit went ashen. “Wizards can’t,” he said. “Or not willingly!”

“Not here, no,” Quelt said. “But in other worlds, they can be ‘overshadowed’—unwilling accomplices. And what about in your world? What are things really like there? The Lone One practically runs that place, it seems! I never knew It could do things like that to a world. And here It sits on our planet, and we

made It welcome here—” She was pacing back and forth on the beach, her fists clenched, like someone afraid she’d explode into some terrible action that she’d regret.

Finally Quelt laughed, and the bitterness in the laughter pained Nita terribly. It was so alien for an Alaalid, and it echoed, in an awful way, Esemeli’s laughter. “Well, at least this excursus has done something good for me,” Quelt said. “It’s taught me what a monster Esemeli can be, once people start really believing in her!” She was actually angry, and it frightened Nita a little: She’d never seen any Alaalid angry before. “But for my own part, I’m my people’s only wizard. We beat Ictanikë once: I will not give her another chance at my people, just on a stranger’s say-so. Repeal our Choice? Why ever would we do that? Just because the Lone One says we might possibly turn into something better? It’s madness. And you’re mad, or deluded, to believe It, no matter what wizardry you worked on It. The Lone One tried to sell us our own destruction once, and we warded It off. Now it sends you to try to get us to throw away what we have and buy our destruction from a different source, instead?”