A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition Read Free Page A

channel number, the screen was now displaying the number 0000566478. The picture seemed to be of a piece of furniture that looked rather like a set of chrome parallel bars. From the bars hung a creature with quite a few tentacles and many stalky eyes, none of these in the usual places. The creature was talking fast and loud in a voice like a fire engine’s siren, while waving around a large, shiny object that might have been an eggbeater; except that, in Kit’s experience, eggbeaters didn’t usually have pulse lasers built into them. Characters flashed on the screen, both in the Speech and in other languages.
    Kit stood and looked at this with complete astonishment. His father, next to him, was doing the same. “You didn’t hack into that new premium movie channel or something, did you?” his pop said. “I don’t want the cops in here.”
    “No way,” Kit said, picking up the remote and looking at it accusingly. The remote sat there in his hand as undemonstratively as any genuinely inanimate object might … except that Kit was less certain than ever that there really were any such things as inanimate objects.
    He shook the remote to see if anything rattled. Nothing did. “I told you to behave,” he said in the Speech.
    “But not like what, ” the remote said in a sanctimonious tone.
    His father was still watching the creature on the parallel bars, which pointed the laser eggbeater at what looked like a nearby abstract sculpture. This vanished in a flare of actinic green light, leaving Kit uneasily wondering what kind of sculpture screamed. “Nice special effects,” Kit’s father said, though he sounded a little dubious. “Very realistic.”
    “It’s not special effects, Pop,” Kit said. “It’s some other planet’s cable.” He hit the reveal control on the remote, but nothing was revealed except, at the bottom of the screen, many more strings of characters flashing on and off in various colors. “Shopping channel, looks like.” Kit handed the remote back to his father.
    “This is a shopping channel?” his pop said.
    Kit headed for the coat hooks by the kitchen door and pulled his parka off one of them. “Popi, I’ve got to get to Tom’s. Be back in a while. It’s okay to look at that, but if any phone numbers that you can read appear—do me a big favor? Don’t order anything! ”
    Kit opened the back door. Ponch threw one last longing look at what Kit’s mama was doing with the chicken, then threw himself past Kit, hitting the screen door with a bang! and flying out into the driveway.
    Kit followed him. At the driveway’s end, he paused, looking up briefly. It was almost dark already; the bare branches of the maples were showing black against an indigo sky. January was too new for any lengthening of days to be perceptible yet, and the shortness of the daylight hours was depressing. But at least the holidays were over. Kit could hardly remember a year when he’d been less interested in them. For his own family’s sake, he’d done his best to act as if he was, but his heart hadn’t been in the celebrations, or the presents. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the one present Nita most desperately wanted, one that not even the Powers That Be could give her.
    Kit sighed and looked down the street. Ponch was down there near curbside in the rapidly falling dark, saluting one of the neighbor’s trees. “Back this way, please?” he said, and waited until Ponch was finished and came galloping back up the street toward him.
    Kit made his way into the backyard again, with Ponch bouncing along beside him, wagging his tail. “Where did the ‘meaning of life’ thing come from all of a sudden?” Kit said.
    I heard you ask about it, Ponch said.
    The question had, indeed, come up once or twice recently in the course of business, around the time Ponch started talking regularly. “So?” Kit said, as they made their way past the beat-up birdbath into the tangle of sassafras at the back