! The problem was that, from the feel of it, Darryl’s interior space wasn’t allowing quick transits — just long slogs through forbidding or sterile terrain. It might even be intentional, Nita thought. Maybe he’s set it up that way so that every time the Lone Power comes after him, It gets drained by the effort… has to stay in there longer, and take longer to find him —
There Nita stopped abruptly, staring at her mug of tea, which was rapidly going cold. In either a real physical universe or an interior space, there were ways to briefly change the laws that ran that space. And the best of these was to get your hands on the universe’s “kernel,” the little tight-wound wizardly construct that encapsulated that universe’s physical laws. Lately Nita had had entirely too much experience manipulating those. Her work with the kernel of her mother’s personal universe had bought her mom a few extra months of life.
A stab of pain answered that thought almost immediately: It wasn’t enough to buy her anything else
But Nita pushed the pain aside for the moment. If she could get into Darryl’s interior world and find its kernel, she could at least temporarily make changes to the way its physical characteristics worked… enough to get her where she needed to be in a hurry: the wall. Maybe even beyond it.
Other changes would probably require Darryl’s permission before she could make them. But this would do for a start.
Nita glanced up as Dairine came downstairs, showered and dressed for school, but still looking fairly terrible.“Did you sleep at all?” Nita said, going to the fridge to get Dairine a glass of milk and a banana.
“Yeah,” Dairine said miserably. “I couldn’t help it.”
She stared at the milk. “Drink it,” Nita said. “I’ll be back home at three-thirty. We have to try again.”
“Yeah,” Dairine said.
“Will you have enough power?”
“Yeah,” Dairine said. “But— Neets, it should have worked last night! We were all set.”
“We didn’t realize how far there was to go to the wall,” Nita said. “I missed a trick last time: I’ll make better time today. And I’ll go more heavily armed. Now finish that stuff up and then go on.
You’re going to be late.”
Dairine nodded, finished her breakfast, and left. Nita was left in the quiet again, alone, a state that she preferred for the one task she had to do before she left: call Kit’s mother.
The phone there rang only once before someone answered. “Hello?”
“Mr. Rodriguez,” Nita said. “Hi.”
“Nita. Have you got any news?”
She had been hoping against impossible hope that Kit’s pop would tell her that Ponch had brought Kit home. Hearing the carefully controlled desperation in his voice, Nita felt even lower than she’d felt when she’d picked up the phone. “Not yet,” she said. “I tried to find him last night. I know sort of where he is, but I couldn’t get through to him. I’m going to try again this afternoon.”
Kit’s pop paused for a long moment. “Are you able to tell anything about whether he’s all right?” he said.
“Not yet,” Nita said. “I’m sorry. I’ll call you right away this afternoon, as soon as I know something. Bye.”
She hung up, heartsore, put on her boots and her coat, and headed off for school.
Nita went to her Monday morning meeting with Mr. Millman full of dread. He’s not blind: He’s going to see that something awful’s wrong with me
, Nita thought, and I’m not going to be able to tell him what it is. And then I’m going to have to do stupid card tricks. Can anything be worse than this?
She found him in the little bare office, on time as usual, stuffing a magazine back into his briefcase. In front of him were the remnants of the bagel with cream cheese that he’d brought along for his breakfast before their appointment. “Nita,” he said, “good morning.”
She didn’t answer immediately. He glanced up from closing his briefcase.
“I hate to say this,” he said, “but you look awful. I won’t insult your intelligence by asking if you’re all right.”
Nita raised her eyebrows in mild surprise at this opening gambit. “Thanks.”
“Dairine acting up again?”
“No, actually, she’s fine,” Nita said.
Mr. Millman just looked at her quizzically. Abruptly Nita wondered if near-total honesty might possibly be of some use.
“I really don’t feel like talking to you this morning,” Nita said. “I wish I could make up some dumb story and tell you that, instead.”
Mr. Millman shrugged and sat back in his chair with his arms behind his head. “Everyone else does. Why shouldn’t you?”
Entirely against her will, Nita had to smile at that. “Just as long as you don’t expect me to come up with something original.”
Mr. Millman allowed himself just a breath of laughter. “That’s the last thing I’d expect. Ten or fifteen billion of us, now, must have lived on this planet, and the more you look into the stories we tell one another, the more like each other they look. Everybody repeats the same basic themes.”
Nita said nothing.
Mr. Millman raised his eyebrows. “But maybe that’s how we know humanity is still in its childhood. You know how it is when you’re little, you want to hear the same story over and over again?”
“My sister used to do that.”
“So did mine. Partly it’s because they know how the story ends. There’s always tension when you’re not sure about the ending, and little kids don’t want too much of that tension… but they do want some. So this is a solution to the problem. When you know the ending, you get the tension of the middle and the relief at the end… theoretically. Did you have a book like that, that you kept wanting to hear at bedtime?”
Nita nodded. “It had a horse called Exploding Pop-Tart in it,” she said. “My dad said he wanted to explode every Pop-Tart he saw after a while, because he was so tired of that book.“
Millman nodded. “Mine was the one about the bat that wouldn’t go to bed,” he said. “My mother told me she hated bats for the next twenty years. Fortunately she didn’t see a lot of bats in her line of work.”
“What was her line of work?”
“She was a concert violinist.”
Nita had to laugh.
“One laugh, one smile,” Millman said. “Not bad for the way you looked when you came in.
Look, don’t bother to tell me any story if you don’t want to. You’d probably just repeat one of the favorite themes. Life, love, death…”
“Death,” Nita said softly.
The image of the Lone Power was suddenly before her eyes. She glanced at Millman then, wondering if she’d had time to cover over her expression.
“The same story,” Millman said. “And the only one we all know the end of, once we’re older than about three. But, boy, the way people behave, you wouldn’t think so! Adults refuse to talk about it… even with people your age, who really want to hear about it, and about the other important things — the beginning of life, the relationships in the middle. We try to distract ourselves by wasting our time on all the other less important stories, the incidentals — who ‘failed,’ who ‘succeeded.’ It’s a pity.” He shook his head. “We hardly ever do right by kids. All you want from us is to tell you how life works. And one way or another, the issue of life and death makes us so uncomfortable that we find a hundred ways to keep from telling you about it, until it’s too late.”
Nita swallowed. “My mom was good about telling me the rules,” she said. “She— My mom said…”
Nita stopped, waiting for her eyes to fill up. But it didn’t happen. And for a weird, bitter moment, that it wasn’t happening felt strange to her.