Diane Duane - The Wizard's Dilemma

Kit walked on, wondering if there was something he could do for her. Then he grinned sourly. "What a laugh! I don't even know what to do about Neets.

All at once he changed his mind about letting things wait until the next day. Kit reached into his pocket and pulled out the manual. Among many other functions, it had a provision for print messaging for times when wizards were having trouble getting in touch with each other directly—a sort of wizardly pager system. He flipped to the back pages where such messages were written and stored. "New message," he said. "For Nita—"

The page glowed softly in the dusk and displayed the long string of characters in the Speech that was Nita's name, and the equivalent string for her manual.

There the book sat, ready to take down his message ... and Kit couldn't think what to say. I'm sorry? Friday Evening

For what? I didn't run her down. I told her what I thought. I don't think I was nasty about it. And I was right, too.

He was strongly tempted to tell her so, but then Kit came up against a bizarre notion that doing that under the present circumstances would be somehow unfair. He spent another couple of minutes trying to find something useful to say. But he wasn't sure what was bothering Nita, and he was still annoyed enough at the way she'd behaved to feel like it wasn't his job to be the understanding one.

Kit frowned, opened his mouth...and closed it again, discarding that potential message as well. Finally all he could find to say was, "If you need some time by yourself, feel free." He looked at the page as the words recorded themselves in the Speech.

More?

"No more," Kit said. "Send it"

Sent.

He stood there for a moment, half hoping he would get an answer right back. But there was no response, no hint of the subtle fizz or itch of the manual's covers that indicated an answer. Maybe she's out. Maybe she's busy with something else.

Or maybe she just doesn't want to answer...

He closed the manual and shoved it back into his pocket. Then Kit started walking again. When he reached the streetlight where Jackson Street met Con-Ion, he looked around. "Ponch?" he said, then listened for the jingle of Ponch's chain collar and tags.

Nothing.

Now where'd he go? Sweat started to break out all over Kit at the thought that Ponch might have gotten into someone's backyard and caught something he shouldn't have. Ponch's uncertain grasp of the difference between squirrels—which he hunted constantly with varying success—and rabbits—which he chased and almost always caught—had made him disgrace himself a couple of months back when one of the neighbor's tame rabbits had escaped from its hutch and wandered into Kit's backyard. Ponch's enthusiastic response had cost Kit about a month's allowance to buy the neighbor a new rabbit of the same rare lop-eared breed... a situation made more annoying by the fact that wizards are enjoined against making money out of nothing except in extreme emergencies connected with errantry, which this was not. Kit had yelled at Ponch only once about the mistake; Ponch had been completely sorry. But all the same, every time Ponch's whereabouts couldn't be accounted for, Kit began to twitch.

Kit started to jog down the street toward the entrance to the school, where Ponch liked to chase rabbits in the big fields to either side. But then he stopped as he heard a familiar sound, claws on concrete, and the familiar jingle, as Ponch came tearing down the sidewalk at him. Kit had just enough warning to sidestep slightly, so that Ponch's excited jump took him through air, instead of through Kit. Ponch came down about five feet behind where Kit had been standing, spun around, and started jumping up and down in front of him again, panting with excitement, "Come see it! Come see, look, I found it, c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon, comeseecomeseecomesee!"

"Come see what?" Kit said in the Speech. "I found something."

Kit grinned. Normally, with Ponch, this meant something dead. His father was still getting laughs out of the story about Ponch and the very mummified squirrel he had hidden for months under the old beat-up blanket in his doghouse. "So what is it?"

"It's not a what. It's a where."

Kit was confused. There was no question of his having misunderstood Ponch; the dog spoke perfectly good Cyene, which anyone who knew the Speech could understand. And as a pan-canine language, Cyene might not be strong on abstract concepts, but what Ponch had said was fairly concrete.

"Where?" Kit asked. "I mean, what where?" Then he had to laugh, for he was sounding more incoherent by the moment, and making Ponch sound positively sophisticated by comparison. "Okay, big guy, come on, show me."

"It's right down the street."

Kit was still slightly nervous. "It's not anybody's rabbit, is it?"

Ponch turned a shocked look on him. "Boss! I promised. And I said, it's not a whatl" "Uh, good," Kit said. "Come on, show me, then."

"Look," Ponch said. He turned and ran away from Kit, down the middle of the dark, empty, quiet side street...

... and vanished. Kit stared. Uhbb... what the—/

Astonished, Kit started to run after Ponch, into the darkness... and vanished, too.

Nita had come back from the Jones Inlet jetty that evening to find that her mother had left to go shopping. Her dad was in the kitchen making a large sandwich; he looked at Nita with mild surprise. "You just went out. Are you done for the day already?"

"Yup," Nita said, heading through the kitchen. "Kit coming over?"

"Don't think so," Nita said, dropping her manual on the dining-room table.

Her father raised his eyebrows and turned back to the sandwich he was constructing. Nita sat down in the chair where she'd been sitting earlier and looked out the front window. She was completely tired out, even though she hadn't done anything, and she was thoroughly pissed off at Kit. The day felt more than exceptionally ruined. Nita put her head down in her hands for a moment.

As she did, she caught sight of a sticky-note still stuck to the table. "Uh-oh—" "What?"

"Mom forgot her list—"

"You mean her 'lint'?" Her dad chuckled. "Yeah. It's still stuck here."

"She'll call and get me to read it to her, probably." There was a soft bang! from the backyard—a sound Friday Evening

that could have been mistaken for a car backfiring, except that there weren't likely to be cars back there. "Is that Dairine?" Nita's dad said.

"Probably," said Nita. It hadn't taken her parents long to learn the sound of suddenly displaced air—a sign of a wizard in a hurry or being a little less than slick about appearing out of nothing. At first it seemed to Nita as if her folks, after they'd found out she was a wizard, spent nearly all their time listening for that sound in varying states of nervousness. Now they were starting to get casual about it, which struck her as a healthy development.

But wait a minute. Maybe it's Kit, coming back to apologize— Nita started to get up.

The screen door opened and Dairine came in. Nita sat down again. "Hey, runt," she said. "Hey," said Dairine, and went on past.

Nita glanced after her, for this was not Dairine's normal response to being called runt. Her little sister paused by the table just long enough to drop her own book bag onto a chair, then went into the living room, pushing that startling red hair out of her eyes. It was getting longer, and, as a result, her resemblance to their mother was stronger than ever. Has she started noticing boys? Nita wondered. Or is something else going on?

Something scrabbled at the back door. Dairine sighed, came back through the dining room and the kitchen, went to the screen door, and pushed it open. A clatter of many little feet followed, as what appeared to be a little silvery-shelled laptop computer, about the