Diane Duane - The Wizard's Dilemma

familiar fizz on the skin. Part of her was afraid; it shouldn't have been this easy to find. And she knew why it had been so easy...

They went in through the doors at the top of the steps and found themselves in a vast gray hall full of shadows. Standing up, here and there in the dimness, were many banks of steely doored elevators, which Nita saw were intended to go in only one direction: down. All around the great floor of the place were a number of square pools, and Nita looked at them and decided not to step into any of them. They had that black-water depth that suggested they had no real bottoms.

"Right," Nita said. She glanced once at her charm bracelet, made sure that the spells on it were active, and began walking through the place, listening.

Pralaya followed, pausing by each of the elevator banks and cocking his head to listen. "I'm not sure," he said.

"I am," Nita said. "Not up, but down." She paused by one of the pools, listening.

"Not here," she said softly. "But this is the right direction." She passed between two more of the great square pools, listening again. That faint fizz on her skin got more pronounced.

"That one," she said softly, and walked over to it. She knelt by the edge of the water, listening, then got up again and moved around to the other side of the pool. Right there, she thought. The kernel was well down in the black water, but not out of reach. Nita shook the charm bracelet around to check the status of her personal shields again, twiddled with one charm to adjust the shield just slightly, and then with the other arm reached down into the water.

It was freezing cold, so cold she could hardly breathe, and she could feel her fingers going numb. But she groped, and reached deeper, though she felt the buzzing and stinging of little dark lancets against her skin. None of them was getting through... yet.

There.

Slowly she reached under what she'd felt—the jabbing of the little black needles against her skin increased, but Nita forced herself not to rush—slowly she closed her fingers around what was waiting there for her. Slowly she drew it up.

It was an apple.

Nita stood up with it in her hands. It dripped black water, and as that water fell into the pool, the pool's surface came alive with more of the ugly little hexagonal virus shapes that had swarmed around her and Pralaya outside. These, though, were bigger, and somehow nastier. They had no eyes, but they were nonetheless looking at her and seeing prey, the kind they already knew the taste of.

"Okay," she said softly, and turned the "apple" over in her hands, feeling for the way its control structures were arranged. She found the outermost level quickly, let her hands sink into what now stopped being an apple and started being that familiar tangle of light.

All around, the shadows leaned in to watch what she was doing. Nita gulped and looked down into the pool, where those awful little black shapes had now

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put their "heads" up out of the water and were looking at her, hating her.

Guys, Nita said, I'd like you to stop doing what you're doing to my mother. The buzzing, snarling chorus said, No! We have a right to live!

I mean it, Nita said. It's really got to stop. It's going to stop, one way or another. It can be with your cooperation, or without it.

No! they snarled. We are her. We are of her. We live in her. She gave us birth. Not on purpose!

That does not matter. We have rights here. We were born. We have a, right to do what we were created to do. The snarling was getting louder, more threatening. You are also of her. What we do to her, we can do to you, given time.

Nita didn't like the sound of that. Guys, she said, last chance. Agree to stop doing what you're doing, or I must abolish you. It was the formal phrasing of a wizard who, however reluctantly, discovers that he or she must kill.

The snarling scaled up; the waters in the pools all around her roiled. Shaking, Nita squeezed and manipulated the power-strands in the kernel until she found the one control sequence that managed the shapes of proteins in this internal space. She stroked it slowly and carefully into a shape that would forbid this kind of viral shape to exist in the local space-time.

One last chance, guys, she said.

The snarling only got louder.

Nita took a deep breath, flicked the charm bracelet around to bring the power-feed configuration she'd designed into place, then brought it together with the kernel. I'm sorry! she said, and pushed the power in...

And nothing happened.

Nita stared at the kernel, horrified. She tried feeding the necessary power into the kernel again, twisted that particular strand of power until it bit into her fingers—

But that spell is now invalid, said a dark voice inside her. It uses a version of your name that is no longer operational. Your name has changed; you have changed. When you were looking at your mother in the hospital last night, you made up your mind to pay my price, and therefore the spell cannot work.

Nita stood still in utter shock and terror. She wanted to shout No! but she couldn't, because she was suddenly horribly certain that, just this once, the Lone Power was telling the truth. The fact that the spell hadn't worked simply confirmed it.

And because I agreed, I'm going to lose my wizardry ... and my mom will die.

Standing there with the kernel, realizing once and for all that she'd done everything she could and there was nothing else she knew that would make the slightest difference, Nita's world simply started to come undone. She could do nothing to stop the tears of fear and grief and frustration that began to run down her face.

It told me it wouldn't work. What made me think I might somehow be able to manage it anyway?

"Pralaya," she said.

"This is beyond my competence," Pralaya said. "I wish I could help you, but..."

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Nita nodded once, and the grief started to give way to anger. "Just what I thought," she said. "So much for any help fromyou"

He looked shocked.

"But that would hardly be the Lone One's preferred method," she said. "No way It's going to give me any help at all, if it can be avoided."

Pralaya looked more stunned than before, if possible. "What are you talking about?"

"You don't know what's living inside you," Nita said. "Well, I bet you're about to find out. Come on," she said to the One she knew was listening. "This is the moment you've been waiting for, isn't it?"

"Not with any possible doubt of the outcome," said that huge dark satisfied voice.

The Lone Power was standing there looking at her; and for just the briefest second, Pralaya coexisted with Its newly chosen form. It looked human, like a young man—though an inhumanly handsome one— and shadows wrapped around It like an overcoat, shadows that reached out and now wrapped themselves around Pralaya, dragged him, struggling and horrified, into themselves, and hid him away.

"Now, you shouldn't really have said that," said the young man. "While he didn't actually know what was happening, I could have let him live. But you had to come right out and tell him, at which point his usefulness to me vanished."

Nita stood there horrified. "You just killed him!"

"No," the Lone One said, "you did. Not a bad start, but then you were intent enough on killing something."

All around Nita, the snarling of the viruses was getting louder and louder. "Anyway, don't be too concerned about Pralaya; I'll find another of his people to replace him if there's need. Now, though, matters stand as I told you they stood. AIL we need is your conscious answer to the question. Can we do business?"

Nita stood there, frozen.

And another voice spoke out of the darkness.

"Fairest and Fallen," Kit said, "one more time... greeting and defiance." Beside him, Ponch just bared his teeth and growled.