So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page B

squinted at it and then forgot what she had started to say.
    Hanging in midair about three feet away, inside the circle, was a spark of eye-searing white fire. It looked no bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion to its size, and was giving off light as bright as that of a two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in midair, up and down, looking like a will-o’-the-wisp plugged into too powerful a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open and stared.
    The bright point dimmed slightly, appeared to describe a small tight circle so that it could take in Kit, the drawn circle, trees and leaves and sky; then it came to rest again, staring back at Nita. Though she couldn’t catch what Kit was feeling, now that the spell was over, she could feel the light’s emotions quite clearly—amazement, growing swiftly into unbelieving pleasure. Suddenly it blazed up white-hot again.
    Dear Artificer, it said in bemused delight, I’ve blown my quanta and gone to the Good Place!
    Nita sat there in silence for a moment, thinking a great many things at once. Uhh, … she thought. And, So I wanted to be a wizard, huh? Serves me right. Something falls into my world and thinks it’s gone to Heaven. Boy, is it gonna get a shock. And, What in the world is it, anyway?
    “Kit,” Nita said. “Excuse me a moment,” she added, nodding with abrupt courtesy at the light source. “Kit.” She turned slightly and reached down to shake him by the shoulder. “Kit. C’mon, get up. We have company.”
    “What?” Kit said, scrubbing at his eyes and starting to straighten up. “Oh no, the binding didn’t blow, did it?”
    “Nope. It’s the extra power you called in. I think it came back with us.”
    “Well, it— oh,” Kit said, as he finally managed to focus on the sedately hovering brightness.
    “Yeah, ‘oh.’ And it says it’s blown its quanta. Is that dangerous?” she asked the light.
    Dangerous? It laughed inside, a crackling sound like an overstimulated Geiger counter. Artificer, child, it means I’m dead . “Child” wasn’t precisely the concept it used; Nita got a fleeting impression of a huge volume of dust and gas contracting gradually toward a common center, slow, confused, and nebulous. She wasn’t flattered.
    “I hate to tell you this,” Nita said, “but I’m not sure this is the Good Place. It sure doesn’t seem that way to us .”
    The light drew a figure eight in the air, a shrug. But it looks that way to me, it said. Look how orderly everything is! And how much life there is in just one place! Where I come from, even a spore’s worth of life is scarcer than atoms in a comet’s tail.
    “Sorry,” Kit said, “but what are you?”
    The light said something Nita could make little sense of. The concept she got looked like page after page of mathematical equations. Kit raised his eyebrows. “It uses the Speech,” he commented as he listened.
    That Nita could tell, but she couldn’t make much of the terminology as yet. “So what is it?”
    Kit looked confused. “Its name says that it came from way out in space somewhere, and it has a mass equal to—wow, to five or six blue-white giant stars and a few thousand planets. And emits all up and down the matter-energy spectrum, all kinds of light and radiation and even some subatomic particles.” He shrugged. “You have any idea what that is?”
    Nita stared at the light in growing disbelief. “Where’s all your mass?” she asked. “If you’ve got that much, the gravity should have crushed us up against you the second you showed up.”
    It’s elsewhere, the light said offhandedly. I have a singularity-class temporospatial claudication.
    “A warp,” Nita whispered. “A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?”
    It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. Do I look like a hole?
    “Do I look like a cloud of lukewarm gas?” Nita snapped back, and then