"Except when the problem keeps reconstructing itself afterward," Tom said, "in a different shape. It's like that intervention you and Kit were working on, the Jones Inlet business. If the pollution coming out of the inner waters was always the same, the wizardry would be easy to build. But it's changing all the time."
Nita grimaced. "Yeah, well," she said, "I blew a whole lot of time on detail work on that one, and the spell worked just fine without it. I think I'm having a lame-brain week." She rubbed her face. "Just when I most seriously don't need one!"
"There's not much point in beating yourself up about that right now," Tom said. "The foundations of the wizardry were sound, and it did the job, which is what counts. And you may be able to recycle the subroutines for something else eventually."
Carl came back with four bottles of Coke, distributed them, and sat down. He exchanged glances with Tom for a second longer than absolutely necessary, as information passed from mind to mind.
"Oh boy," Carl said. "Nita, Tom's right. The basic problem is the structure of the malignancy itself—"
"Look, let's take this from the top," Tom said. "Otherwise there are going to be more misunderstandings." He held out his hand, and a compact version of his manual dropped into it. He put it down on the table and started leafing through it. "You've done some medical wizardry in the past," he said to Nita.
"Yeah. Minor healings. Some not so minor."
Tom nodded. "Tissue regeneration is fairly simple," he said. "Naturally there's always a price. Blood, either in actual form or expressed by your agreement to suffer the square of the pain you're intending to heal—that's the normal arrangement. But when you start involving nonhuman life in the healing, things get complicated."
Nita blinked. "Excuse me? My mother was human the last time I looked!"
Carl gave Tom an ironic look. "What my distracted colleague here means is that it's not just your mother you have to heal, but also whatever's attacking her. If you don't heal the cause of the tumor or the cancer, it just comes back somewhere else, in some worse form."
"What could be worse than a brain tumor?!" Dairine said.
"Don't ask," Tom said, still leafing through the manual. "There are too many ways the Lone Power could answer that question." He glanced up then. "Your main problem is that cancer cells are tough for wizards to treat because they're neither all inanimate nor all biological life. They're a hybrid.. .which causes problems when trying to write a spell that will eradicate them without hurting normal cells. It's exactly the same thing that makes chemotherapy slightly dangerous. It poisons the good cells as well as the bad ones unless it's very carefully managed."
"The other part of the problem," Carl said, "is that the viruses and malignant cells mutate as they spread. That makes cancer as intractable for wizards to treat as for doctors. Even if you could wave your hands in the air and say, 'Disease go away!' all you can do is make the disease go away that's there today. After that, all it takes is one virus that you missed, hidden away in just one cell somewhere, to start breeding again. They get smarter and nastier after an incomplete eradication. What comes back will kill you faster than what was there originally. Worse, you can never get them all. A spell complex enough to do that, accurately naming and describing each and every cell, and what you think might be hiding in it, would take you years to write. By which time..." He shook his head.
"I thought maybe you did spells like that," Nita said in a small voice.
Tom smiled, even though the smile was sad. "That's a much higher compliment than I deserve. No, a wizardry that complex is well beyond my competence... which is a shame, because if it wasn't, I wouldn't rest by day or night until I had it for you."
Nita gulped.
"A lot of wizards have spent a lot of time on this one, Nita," said Carl. "There are ways to attempt a cure, but the price is high. If it weren't, there wouldn't be much cancer; we'd be stomping it out with ease wherever we found it. As it is, look at the world around you, and see how far we've got."
That thought wasn't one she cared for. "You say there are ways to 'attempt' a cure," Nita said. "It sounds like it doesn't work very often."
"That's because of the most basic part of the problem," Carl said. "It leaves us, in some ways, even less able to do anything than the medical people. We're wizards. Viruses, though they're not exactly organic life, are life regardless. And we cannot just go around killing things without dealing with the consequences, at every level."
"Oh, come onl" Dairine said.
"Not at all," Carl said. "Where do you draw the line, Dairine? Where in the Oath does it say, Til protect this life over here but not that one, which is just a germ and happens to be annoying me at the moment?' There's no such dichotomy. You respect all life, or none of it. Of course, that doesn't mean that wizards never kill. But killing increases entropy locally, and it's always to be resisted. Sometimes, yes, you must kill in order to save another life. But you must first make your peace with the life-form you're killing."
"If I'm just going to be killing a bunch of viruses," Nita said, "I should be able to manage that."
Carl shook his head. "It may not be so easy. Viruses have their own worldview: 'Reproduce at any cost.' Which also can mean 'kill your host.' In dealing with that kind of thing, a wizard is handicapped right from the start."
"Blame the Speech," Tom said. "It's the basis on which every wizardry is predicated... but here, it's also our weak spot, if this is a weakness. Everything that lives knows the Speech and can use it to tell you how life feels for it, how its universe makes it behave..."
Nita stared at the table, her heart sinking. Tom was right. It was hard to be angry at something—a rock, a tree—that you could hear saying to you, This is how I'm made; it's not my fault; you see how the world is, the way things are; what else can I do? And for the simplest things—and viruses are about as simple as things get—it would be hard to explain to them why they shouldn't be doing this, why they should all just stop reproducing themselves and essentially commit suicide so that your mother didn't have to die. Their world was such a simple one, it wouldn't allow for much in the way of—
Nita's eyes went wide.
She slowly looked up from the table at Tom. "What about— Tom, is it possible to change a cancer virus's perception of the world—change the way the universe seems for them, is for them—so that they're more sentient? So that a wizard could deal with them to best effect? Talk them out of being there... talk them out of killing? Something like that?"
Tom and Carl looked at each other. Tom's look was dubious. But Carl's expression was strangely intrigued. He nodded slowly.
"You know the rules," he said. "'If they're old enough to ask...'" "'... they're old enough to be told.'"
Tom folded his hands and looked at them. "Nita," he said, "I couldn't ask about this before. Who are you thinking of doing this wizardry for? Your mother or you?"
Nita sat silent, then she opened her mouth.
"Don't," Carl said. "You're still in shock; you can't possibly have a clear answer to the question yet. You're going to have to find out as you do your work. But the question matters. Wizardry, finally, is about service to other beings. Our own needs come second. If you start fooling yourself about that, the deception is going to go straight to the heart of any spell you write, and ruin it. And maybe you as well."
"Okay," Tom said. "Let that rest for the moment." To Nita he said, "Are you clear about what you're suggesting you want to do?"
"I guess it would mean changing the way things behave in the universe, locally," Nita said. "Inside my mom." And she gulped. When she put it that way, it suddenly became clear how many, many ways there were to screw it up.
"Changing the structure of the universe itself," Tom said. "Yes. You get to play God on a local level." "You're going to tell me that it's seriously dangerous," Nita said, "and the price is awful."