"No, I will not move your planet! What do you want to move it for? It's fine right where it is!"
I have some reading for you today!
I keep a queue of books on my shelf, lined up for when I finish whatever I'm reading at the moment. Right around Christmas of last year this queue turned into something I had to actively manage instead of something that ran in the background. I got a bunch of new books for Christmas and smiled to myself because I knew that my queue was about to lengthen substantially, even though that meant I wouldn't be able to get to these new books for a while.
And then somehow--I still don't remember what the chain of causation was that linked me to the first one--I started reading Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series. And very quickly reached the conclusion that my entire queue would have to be put on hold, because I absolutely had to own everything ever penned by this woman.
I've talked before about how I love coherent fictional universes, and Young Wizards is exactly that. It's a series about people who take care of the universe. Multiverse, actually. They graft realities onto each other to repair damage. They do maintenance on stars. They talk to trees and sidewalks to learn their histories and write spells to clean up pollution. They fight against and on behalf of the Powers that run the universe to try and keep the galaxy turning for one more day. And it's not just awesome ideas and adventures--Diane Duane writes with wisdom and power that's totally unexpected for what at first seems to be a kid's book.
Diane Duane--who I've talked with a couple times via Twitter; I love living in a world where we can do that!--has written in many different universes (her Star Trek books are especially worth checking out) but the Young Wizards universe is where she shines the most, IMO. The series started in 1983; book 9 comes out next month. YW has a spin-off series about the cats who run the worldgates (wizardly mass-transit system), several one-shots going in different directions, and a couple of short stories that have been published in various places. One such story--"Uptown Local"--is freely available in audio form, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants something great to listen to. What I have for you here, though, is one of my favorite passages: the story of how Dairine Callahan found wizardry.
So You Want To Be A Wizard is the first book in the series; it introduces Nita Callahan and her best friend Kit, details their introduction to wizardry, and describes their first mission into an alternate New York alongside a sentient white hole named Fred. Book 2 is Deep Wizardry; it shows them starting to grow into their powers and helping whale-wizards to solve an age-old problem on the ocean floor. Book 3, High Wizardry, brings Dairine, Nita's younger sister, in as a major character and describes her wizardly Ordeal (including the obtaining of her personal Wizard's Manual, an Apple IIIc+ laptop). As it turns out, though, Dairine has her own unique reasons for wanting to be a wizard...
// High Wizardry, chapter 2: "Passwords"
// © 1990 by Diane Duane
Like so many other human beings, Dairine had made her first major decision about life and the world quite early. She had seen Nita (then five years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time and at the end of the day come back crying because she hadn’t known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her.
Nita’s crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine’s three-year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn’t know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones.
So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything; not surprisingly, Dairine’s senses became abnormally sharp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four…just how, she never remembered; but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it-reading aloud to herself from a Britannica article on taxonomy and sounding out the longer words-her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn’t understand why. It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things…perhaps even to make them do things.
For fear of her parents being upset, and maybe stopping her, until she was five or so she kept her reading out of their sight as much as she could. The thought of being kept away from books terrified her. What moved Dairine most was sheer delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn’t free to explore the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything. Dairine sat home and busied herself with conquering the world.
Eventually it came time for her to go off to kindergarten. Remembering Nita, her parents were braced for the worst, but not at all for Dairine’s scowling, annoyed response when she came home. “They won’t listen to what I tell them,” Dairine said. "Yet." And off she went to read, leaving her mother and father staring at each other.
School went on, and time, and Dairine sailed her way up through the grades. She knew (having overheard a couple of her mother’s phone conversations with the school’s psychiatrist) that her parents had refused to let her skip grades. They thought it would be better for her to be with kids her own age. Dairine laughed to herself over this, since it made school life utterly easy for her.
It also left her more free time for her own pursuits, especially reading. As soon as she was old enough to go to the little local library for herself, she read everything in it: first going straight through the kids’ library downstairs at about six books a day, then (after the concerned librarian got permission from Dairine’s parents) reading the whole adult collection, a touch more slowly. Her mom and dad thought it would be a shame to stifle such an active curiosity. Dairine considered this opinion wise and kept reading, trying not to think of the time-not too far away-when she would exhaust the adult books. She wasn’t yet allowed to go to the big township library by herself.
But she had her dreams, too. Nita was already being allowed to go into New York City alone. In a few years Dairine would, too. She thought constantly of the New York Public Library, of the eight million books that the White Lions guarded: rare manuscripts, books as old as printing, or older. It would take even Dairine a while to get through eight million books. She longed to get started.
And there were other dreams more immediate. Like everyone else she knew, Dairine had seen the Star Wars movies. Magic, great power for good and evil, she had read about in many other places. But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her with a terrible immediacy that the books had not-with a picture of power available even to untrained farm boys on distant planets in the future and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present. And if you could learn that supreme knowledge and master the power that filled and shaped the universe, how could the world ever hurt you? For a while Dairine’s reading suffered, and her daydreams were full of the singing blaze of lightsabers, the electric smell of blasterfire, and the shadow of ultimate evil in a black cloak, which after terrible combat she always defeated. Her sister teased her a lot less about it than Dairine expected.
Her sister…Their relationship was rather casual, not so much a sibling relationship as the kind you might have with someone who lived close enough for you to see every day. When both Dairine and Nita were little, they had played together often enough. But where learning came in, for a while there had been trouble. Sometimes Nita had shown Dairine things she was learning at school. But when Dairine learned them almost immediately, and shortly was better at them than Nita was, Nita got upset. Dairine never quite understood why. It was a victory for them both-wasn’t it?-over the world, which would get you if you didn’t know things. But Nita seemed not to understand that.
Eventually things got better. As they got older, they began to grow together and to share more. Possibly Nita was understanding her better, or had simply seen how much Dairine liked to know things; for she began to tutor Dairine in the upper-grade subjects she was studying-algebra and so forth. Dairine began to like her sister. When they started having trouble with bullies and their parents sent them both off to self-defense school, Dairine mastered the art as quickly as anything else she’d ever decided to learn; and then, when a particularly bad beating near home made it plain that Nita wasn’t using what they’d learned, she quietly put the word out that anyone who messed with Nita would have Dairine to deal with. The bullying stopped, for both of them, and Dairine felt smugly satisfied.
That is, she did until one day after school she saw a kid come at Nita to “accidentally” body-block her into the dirt of the playground she was crossing. Dairine started to move to prevent it-but as the kid threw himself at Nita, he abruptly slid sideways off the air around her as if he had run into a glass wall. No one else seemed to notice. Even the attacker looked blank as he fell sideways into the dust. But Nita smiled a little and kept on walking…and suddenly the world fell out from under Dairine, and everything was terribly wrong. Her sister knew something she didn’t.
Dairine blazed up in a raging fire of curiosity. She began watching Nita closely, and her best friend Kit, too, on a hunch. Slowly Dairine began to catch Nita at things no one else seemed to notice: odd words muttered to empty air, after which lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things became loose.
There was one day when their father was complaining about the crabgrass in the front lawn, and Dairine saw an odd, thoughtful look cross Nita’s face. That evening her sister had sat on the lawn for a long time, talking under her breath. Dairine couldn’t hear what was said; but a week and a half later their father was standing on and admiring a crabgrass-free lawn, extolling the new brand of weedkiller he’d tried. He didn’t notice, as Dairine did, the large patch of crabgrass under the apple trees in the neighbor’s yard next door…carpeting a barren place where the neighbor had been trying to get something green to grow, anything, for as long as Dairine could remember. It was all stuff like that…little things, strange things, nothing Dairine could understand and use.
Then came summer vacation at the beach--and the strangeness started to come out in the open. Nita and Kit started spending a lot of time away from home, sneaking in and out as if there were something to hide. Dairine heard her mother’s uneasy conversations about this with her father and was amused; whatever Nita was doing with Kit, Dairine knew sex wasn’t involved. Dairine covered for Nita and Kit and bided her time, waiting until they should owe her something.
The time came soon enough. One night the two of them went swimming and didn’t come back when it got dark, as they’d agreed to. Dairine’s mom and dad went out looking for Nita and Kit on the beach and took Dairine with them. She got separated from them, mostly on purpose, and was a quarter mile down the beach from them when, with a rush of water and noisy breath, a forty-foot humpback whale breached right in front of her, ran itself aground-and turned into Nita.
Nita went white with shock at the sight of Dairine. Dairine didn’t care. “You’re going to tell me everything,” she said, and ran down the beach to distract her parents just long enough for Nita and Kit-also just changed back from a whale-to get back into their bathing suits. And after the noisy, angry scene with their parents that followed, after the house was quiet, Dairine went to Nita’s room, where Kit was waiting, too, and let them tell her the whole story.
Wizard’s manuals, oaths, wizardry, spells, quests, terrible dangers beyond the world, great powers that moved unseen and unsuspected beneath the surface of everyday existence and every now and then broke surface-Dairine was ecstatic. It was all there, everything she had longed for. And if they could have it, she could have it too…
Dairine saw their faces fall and felt the soft laughter of the world starting behind her back again. You couldn’t have this magic unless you were offered it by the Powers that controlled it. Yes, sometimes it ran in families, but there was no guarantee that it would ever pass to you…
At that point Dairine began to shut their words out. She promised to keep their secret for the time being and to cover for them the best she could. But inside she was all one great frustrated cry of rage: Why them-why them and not me! Days later, when the cry ebbed, the frustration gave way to blunt, stubborn determination. I’ll have it. I will.
She had gone into Nita’s room, found her wizard’s manual, and opened it. The last time she’d held it, it had looked like a well-worn kid’s book from the library and, when she’d borrowed it, had read like one. Now the excitement, the exultation, flared up in Dairine again; for instead of a story she found pages and pages of an Arabic-looking script she couldn’t read…and near the front, many that she could, in English.
She skimmed them, turning pages swiftly. The pages were full of warnings and cautions; phrases about the wizard’s responsibility to help slow down the death of the universe; paragraphs about the price each wizard paid for his new power and about the terrible Ordeal-quest that lay before every novice who took the Wizard’s Oath; sections about old strengths that moved among the worlds, not all of them friendly. But these Dairine scorned as she’d scorned Nita’s cautions. The parts that spoke of a limitless universe full of life and of wizards to guard it, of “the Billion Homeworlds,” “the hundred million species of humanity,” those parts stayed with her, filled her mind with images of strangeness and glory and adventure until she was drowning in her own thoughts of unnumbered stars. I can do it, she thought. I can take care of myself. I’m not afraid. I’ll matter; I’ll be something…
She flipped through the English section to its end, finding there one page, with a single block of type set small and neat:
In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life’s service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To those ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so-looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded…
It was the Oath that Nita had told her about. Not caring that she didn’t understand parts of it, Dairine drew a long breath and read it out loud, almost in triumph. And the terrible silence that drew itself down around her as she spoke, blocking out the sounds of day, didn’t frighten her; it exhilarated her. Something was going to happen, at last, at last…
She went to bed eagerly that night.
I keep a queue of books on my shelf, lined up for when I finish whatever I'm reading at the moment. Right around Christmas of last year this queue turned into something I had to actively manage instead of something that ran in the background. I got a bunch of new books for Christmas and smiled to myself because I knew that my queue was about to lengthen substantially, even though that meant I wouldn't be able to get to these new books for a while.
And then somehow--I still don't remember what the chain of causation was that linked me to the first one--I started reading Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series. And very quickly reached the conclusion that my entire queue would have to be put on hold, because I absolutely had to own everything ever penned by this woman.
I've talked before about how I love coherent fictional universes, and Young Wizards is exactly that. It's a series about people who take care of the universe. Multiverse, actually. They graft realities onto each other to repair damage. They do maintenance on stars. They talk to trees and sidewalks to learn their histories and write spells to clean up pollution. They fight against and on behalf of the Powers that run the universe to try and keep the galaxy turning for one more day. And it's not just awesome ideas and adventures--Diane Duane writes with wisdom and power that's totally unexpected for what at first seems to be a kid's book.
Diane Duane--who I've talked with a couple times via Twitter; I love living in a world where we can do that!--has written in many different universes (her Star Trek books are especially worth checking out) but the Young Wizards universe is where she shines the most, IMO. The series started in 1983; book 9 comes out next month. YW has a spin-off series about the cats who run the worldgates (wizardly mass-transit system), several one-shots going in different directions, and a couple of short stories that have been published in various places. One such story--"Uptown Local"--is freely available in audio form, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants something great to listen to. What I have for you here, though, is one of my favorite passages: the story of how Dairine Callahan found wizardry.
So You Want To Be A Wizard is the first book in the series; it introduces Nita Callahan and her best friend Kit, details their introduction to wizardry, and describes their first mission into an alternate New York alongside a sentient white hole named Fred. Book 2 is Deep Wizardry; it shows them starting to grow into their powers and helping whale-wizards to solve an age-old problem on the ocean floor. Book 3, High Wizardry, brings Dairine, Nita's younger sister, in as a major character and describes her wizardly Ordeal (including the obtaining of her personal Wizard's Manual, an Apple IIIc+ laptop). As it turns out, though, Dairine has her own unique reasons for wanting to be a wizard...
// High Wizardry, chapter 2: "Passwords"
// © 1990 by Diane Duane
Like so many other human beings, Dairine had made her first major decision about life and the world quite early. She had seen Nita (then five years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time and at the end of the day come back crying because she hadn’t known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her.
Nita’s crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine’s three-year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn’t know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones.
So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything; not surprisingly, Dairine’s senses became abnormally sharp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four…just how, she never remembered; but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it-reading aloud to herself from a Britannica article on taxonomy and sounding out the longer words-her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn’t understand why. It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things…perhaps even to make them do things.
For fear of her parents being upset, and maybe stopping her, until she was five or so she kept her reading out of their sight as much as she could. The thought of being kept away from books terrified her. What moved Dairine most was sheer delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn’t free to explore the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything. Dairine sat home and busied herself with conquering the world.
Eventually it came time for her to go off to kindergarten. Remembering Nita, her parents were braced for the worst, but not at all for Dairine’s scowling, annoyed response when she came home. “They won’t listen to what I tell them,” Dairine said. "Yet." And off she went to read, leaving her mother and father staring at each other.
School went on, and time, and Dairine sailed her way up through the grades. She knew (having overheard a couple of her mother’s phone conversations with the school’s psychiatrist) that her parents had refused to let her skip grades. They thought it would be better for her to be with kids her own age. Dairine laughed to herself over this, since it made school life utterly easy for her.
It also left her more free time for her own pursuits, especially reading. As soon as she was old enough to go to the little local library for herself, she read everything in it: first going straight through the kids’ library downstairs at about six books a day, then (after the concerned librarian got permission from Dairine’s parents) reading the whole adult collection, a touch more slowly. Her mom and dad thought it would be a shame to stifle such an active curiosity. Dairine considered this opinion wise and kept reading, trying not to think of the time-not too far away-when she would exhaust the adult books. She wasn’t yet allowed to go to the big township library by herself.
But she had her dreams, too. Nita was already being allowed to go into New York City alone. In a few years Dairine would, too. She thought constantly of the New York Public Library, of the eight million books that the White Lions guarded: rare manuscripts, books as old as printing, or older. It would take even Dairine a while to get through eight million books. She longed to get started.
And there were other dreams more immediate. Like everyone else she knew, Dairine had seen the Star Wars movies. Magic, great power for good and evil, she had read about in many other places. But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her with a terrible immediacy that the books had not-with a picture of power available even to untrained farm boys on distant planets in the future and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present. And if you could learn that supreme knowledge and master the power that filled and shaped the universe, how could the world ever hurt you? For a while Dairine’s reading suffered, and her daydreams were full of the singing blaze of lightsabers, the electric smell of blasterfire, and the shadow of ultimate evil in a black cloak, which after terrible combat she always defeated. Her sister teased her a lot less about it than Dairine expected.
Her sister…Their relationship was rather casual, not so much a sibling relationship as the kind you might have with someone who lived close enough for you to see every day. When both Dairine and Nita were little, they had played together often enough. But where learning came in, for a while there had been trouble. Sometimes Nita had shown Dairine things she was learning at school. But when Dairine learned them almost immediately, and shortly was better at them than Nita was, Nita got upset. Dairine never quite understood why. It was a victory for them both-wasn’t it?-over the world, which would get you if you didn’t know things. But Nita seemed not to understand that.
Eventually things got better. As they got older, they began to grow together and to share more. Possibly Nita was understanding her better, or had simply seen how much Dairine liked to know things; for she began to tutor Dairine in the upper-grade subjects she was studying-algebra and so forth. Dairine began to like her sister. When they started having trouble with bullies and their parents sent them both off to self-defense school, Dairine mastered the art as quickly as anything else she’d ever decided to learn; and then, when a particularly bad beating near home made it plain that Nita wasn’t using what they’d learned, she quietly put the word out that anyone who messed with Nita would have Dairine to deal with. The bullying stopped, for both of them, and Dairine felt smugly satisfied.
That is, she did until one day after school she saw a kid come at Nita to “accidentally” body-block her into the dirt of the playground she was crossing. Dairine started to move to prevent it-but as the kid threw himself at Nita, he abruptly slid sideways off the air around her as if he had run into a glass wall. No one else seemed to notice. Even the attacker looked blank as he fell sideways into the dust. But Nita smiled a little and kept on walking…and suddenly the world fell out from under Dairine, and everything was terribly wrong. Her sister knew something she didn’t.
Dairine blazed up in a raging fire of curiosity. She began watching Nita closely, and her best friend Kit, too, on a hunch. Slowly Dairine began to catch Nita at things no one else seemed to notice: odd words muttered to empty air, after which lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things became loose.
There was one day when their father was complaining about the crabgrass in the front lawn, and Dairine saw an odd, thoughtful look cross Nita’s face. That evening her sister had sat on the lawn for a long time, talking under her breath. Dairine couldn’t hear what was said; but a week and a half later their father was standing on and admiring a crabgrass-free lawn, extolling the new brand of weedkiller he’d tried. He didn’t notice, as Dairine did, the large patch of crabgrass under the apple trees in the neighbor’s yard next door…carpeting a barren place where the neighbor had been trying to get something green to grow, anything, for as long as Dairine could remember. It was all stuff like that…little things, strange things, nothing Dairine could understand and use.
Then came summer vacation at the beach--and the strangeness started to come out in the open. Nita and Kit started spending a lot of time away from home, sneaking in and out as if there were something to hide. Dairine heard her mother’s uneasy conversations about this with her father and was amused; whatever Nita was doing with Kit, Dairine knew sex wasn’t involved. Dairine covered for Nita and Kit and bided her time, waiting until they should owe her something.
The time came soon enough. One night the two of them went swimming and didn’t come back when it got dark, as they’d agreed to. Dairine’s mom and dad went out looking for Nita and Kit on the beach and took Dairine with them. She got separated from them, mostly on purpose, and was a quarter mile down the beach from them when, with a rush of water and noisy breath, a forty-foot humpback whale breached right in front of her, ran itself aground-and turned into Nita.
Nita went white with shock at the sight of Dairine. Dairine didn’t care. “You’re going to tell me everything,” she said, and ran down the beach to distract her parents just long enough for Nita and Kit-also just changed back from a whale-to get back into their bathing suits. And after the noisy, angry scene with their parents that followed, after the house was quiet, Dairine went to Nita’s room, where Kit was waiting, too, and let them tell her the whole story.
Wizard’s manuals, oaths, wizardry, spells, quests, terrible dangers beyond the world, great powers that moved unseen and unsuspected beneath the surface of everyday existence and every now and then broke surface-Dairine was ecstatic. It was all there, everything she had longed for. And if they could have it, she could have it too…
Dairine saw their faces fall and felt the soft laughter of the world starting behind her back again. You couldn’t have this magic unless you were offered it by the Powers that controlled it. Yes, sometimes it ran in families, but there was no guarantee that it would ever pass to you…
At that point Dairine began to shut their words out. She promised to keep their secret for the time being and to cover for them the best she could. But inside she was all one great frustrated cry of rage: Why them-why them and not me! Days later, when the cry ebbed, the frustration gave way to blunt, stubborn determination. I’ll have it. I will.
She had gone into Nita’s room, found her wizard’s manual, and opened it. The last time she’d held it, it had looked like a well-worn kid’s book from the library and, when she’d borrowed it, had read like one. Now the excitement, the exultation, flared up in Dairine again; for instead of a story she found pages and pages of an Arabic-looking script she couldn’t read…and near the front, many that she could, in English.
She skimmed them, turning pages swiftly. The pages were full of warnings and cautions; phrases about the wizard’s responsibility to help slow down the death of the universe; paragraphs about the price each wizard paid for his new power and about the terrible Ordeal-quest that lay before every novice who took the Wizard’s Oath; sections about old strengths that moved among the worlds, not all of them friendly. But these Dairine scorned as she’d scorned Nita’s cautions. The parts that spoke of a limitless universe full of life and of wizards to guard it, of “the Billion Homeworlds,” “the hundred million species of humanity,” those parts stayed with her, filled her mind with images of strangeness and glory and adventure until she was drowning in her own thoughts of unnumbered stars. I can do it, she thought. I can take care of myself. I’m not afraid. I’ll matter; I’ll be something…
She flipped through the English section to its end, finding there one page, with a single block of type set small and neat:
In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life’s service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To those ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so-looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded…
It was the Oath that Nita had told her about. Not caring that she didn’t understand parts of it, Dairine drew a long breath and read it out loud, almost in triumph. And the terrible silence that drew itself down around her as she spoke, blocking out the sounds of day, didn’t frighten her; it exhilarated her. Something was going to happen, at last, at last…
She went to bed eagerly that night.