The Wizard's Dilemma-young wizards 5 by Diane Duane

Author:Diane Duane [Duane, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy & Magic, Fiction, Fantasy, General, Action & Adventure, Fantasy Fiction, Family, Parents, Wizards, Medical, Cancer, Oncology
ISBN: 1435248538
Google: 3_ZUyWaPSHwC
Amazon: 015205491X
Barnesnoble: 015205491X
Publisher: Sandpiper
Published: 2000-12-31T06:00:00+00:00

"I still feel silly for having expected to see tubes and veins and things," Nita said, as she flopped

down into one of the chairs, which, though made for a hominid, had legs that bent in different places

than hers did.

Wednesday

Pralaya reached over to the table, picked up the kernel in two paws, and tossed it to her. Nita turned

it over in her hands, found the mass-manipulation part of the construct, and twiddled with it until the

chair changed shape beneath her. "And I wasn't expecting all that sand," she said.

"The symbolism's a good-enough reflection of how a malignant illness like your mother's works,"

Pralaya said, curling up on the lounger next to Nita's chair. "Scrape it away in one place...the cells

just keep breeding, filling in the gaps. And as for the tubes and organs and so on, working with them

as such wouldn't help you. It's not your mother's tubes you're trying to cure; it's all of her. A big job."

Nita nodded, and rubbed her eyes. Finding the kernel had not been difficult, much to her relief,

though it had been hidden in what seemed a world's worth of desert, with only the occasional eroded

skyscraper-peak sticking up out of the sand.

But the practice malignancy that the aschetic universe had created for her had been much more than

she could handle. She had managed to get rid of the viruses in a large area of it, but only by brute

force, rather than talking them out of what they were doing. There had been billions of them, as

many of them as there had been grains of sand, and their response to Nita had been furious, a storm

of self-preservation. More than once they had almost buried her under dune after rolling dune... and

when she had run out of both energy and time that could be spent in that universe, even after blasting

clean a large part of that huge waste, she

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could feel the rest of it lying under the scorching, unfriendly sky, simply waiting for her to leave so

that it could get on with what it had been doing... killing someone.

/ can't give up now, Nita thought. Yet the thought of her mother's situation was really starting to

scare her.

What if it's all for nothing? she thought. What if even this—

She hadn't wanted to say it to her mother, hadn't wanted to hear it said. But half the power inherent

in wizardry lay in telling the truth about things. To deny the truth was to deny your own power.

"Problems?" Pralaya said quietly.

Nita paused, then nodded.

"I'm getting scared," Nita said. "I'm beginning to think... think that if what's wrong with my mom is

as bad as things were in that last universe, then I may not be able to do it." It was hard to say, but it

had to be said.

Pralaya made a little sideways tilt of his sleek head, which Nita had started to recognize as the way

his people nodded.

"And willpower may not be enough," Nita said softly. "Trying my best... still may not be enough."

She swallowed hard. "Loving her...no matter how much... it doesn't matter.

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