“Oh, wary, well, I’m wary of the water I drink, it might be poisoned,” said Glinda. “That doesn’t mean I stop drinking water.”
“Well, I don’t even think it’s so big an issue,” said Elphaba. “I think sorcery is trivial. It’s concerned with itself mostly, it doesn’t lead outward.”
Glinda concentrated very hard and tried to make Elphaba’s leftover sandwich elevate outward over the canal. She only succeeded in exploding the thing in a small combustion of mayonnaise and shredded carrot and chopped olives. Nessarose lost her balance laughing, and Nanny had to prop her up again. Elphaba was covered in bits of food, which she picked off herself and ate, to the disgust and laughter of everyone else. “It’s all effects, Glinda,” she said. “There’s nothing ontologically interesting about magic. Not that I believe in unionism either,” she protested. “I’m an atheist and an aspiritualist.”
“You say that to shock and scandalize,” said Nessarose primly. “Glinda, don’t listen to a word of her. She always does this, usually to make Father irate.”
“Father’s not around,” Elphaba reminded her sister.
“I stand in for him and I am offended,” said Nessarose. “It’s all very well to turn your nose up at unionism when you have been given a nose by the Unnamed God. It’s quite funny, isn’t it, Glinda? Childish.” She looked spitting angry.
“Father’s not around,” said Elphaba again, in a tone that verged on the apologetic. “You needn’t rush to public defense of his obsessions.”
“What you term his obsessions are my articles of faith,” she said with a chilly clarity.
“Well you’re not a bad sorceress, for a beginner,” said Elphaba, turning to Glinda. “That was a pretty good mess you made of my lunch.”
“Thank you,” Glinda said. “I didn’t mean to pelt you with it. But I am getting better, aren’t I? And out in public.”
“A shocking display,” Nessarose said. “That’s exactly what Father would have deplored about sorcery. The allure is all in the surface.”
“I agree, it still tastes like olives,” Elphaba said, finding a clump of black olive in her sleeve and holding it out on the tip of her finger to her sister’s mouth. “Taste, Nessa?”
But Nessarose turned her face away and lost herself in silent prayer.
3
A few days later Boq managed to catch Elphaba’s eye at the break of their life sciences class, and they met up in an alcove off the main corridor. “What do you think of this new Doctor Nikidik?” he asked.
“I find it hard to listen,” she said, “but that’s because I still want to hear Doctor Dillamond and I can’t believe he’s gone.” On her face was a look of gray submission to impossible reality.
“Well that’s one of the things I’m curious about,” he said. “You told me all about Doctor Dillamond’s breakthrough. Do you know if his lab has been cleared out yet? Maybe there’s something there worth finding. You took the notes for him, couldn’t they be the basis of some proposal, or at least some further study?”
She looked at him with a wiry, strong expression. “Do you think I’m not way ahead of you?” she asked. “Of course I went tramping through there the day his body was found. Before anyone could lace up the door with padlocks and binding spells. Boq, do you take me for a fool?”
“No, I don’t take you for a fool, so tell me what you found,” he said.
“His findings are well hidden away,” she said, “and though there are colossal holes in my training, I am studying it on my own.”
“You mean you’re not going to show me?” He was shocked.
“It was never your particular interest,” she said. “Besides, until there’s something to prove, what’s the point? I don’t think Doctor Dillamond was there yet.”
“I am a Munchkinlander,” he answered proudly. “Look, Elphie, you’ve more or less convinced me what the Wizard is up to. The confining of Animals back onto farms—to give the dissatisfied Munchkinlander farmers the impression he’s doing something for them—and also to provide forced labor for the sinking of useless new wells. It’s vile. But this affects Wend Hardings and the towns that sent me here. I have a right to know what you know. Maybe we can figure it out together, work to make a change.”
“You have too much to lose,” she said. “I’m going to take this on myself.”
“Take what on?”
She only shook her head. “The less you know the better, and I mean for your sake. Whoever killed Doctor Dillamond doesn’t want his findings made public. What kind of a friend would I be to you if I put you at risk too?”
“What kind of friend would I be to you if I didn’t insist?” he retorted.
But she wouldn’t tell him. When he sat next to her during the rest of the class and passed her little notes, she ignored them all. Later he thought that they might have developed a genuine impasse in their friendship had the odd attack on the newcomer not occurred during that very session.
Doctor Nikidik had been lecturing on the Life Force. Entwining around each wrist the two separate tendrils of his long straggly beard, he spoke in falling tones so that only the first half of each sentence made it to the back of the room. Hardly a single student was following. When Doctor Nikidik took a small bottle from his vest pocket and mumbled something about “Extract of Biological Intention,” only the students in the front row sat up and opened their eyes. For Boq and Elphaba, and everyone else, the patter ran—“A little sauce for the soup mumble mumble, as if creation were an unconcluded mumble mumble mumble, notwithstanding the obligations of all sentient mumble mumble mumble, and so as a little exercise to make those nodding off in the back of the mumble mumble mumble, behold a little mundane miracle, courtesy of mumble mumble mumble.”
A frisson of excitement had woken everyone up. The Doctor uncorked the smoky bottle and made a jerky movement. They could all see a small puff of dust, like an effervescence of talcum powder, jostle itself in a swimming plume in the air above the neck of the bottle. The Doctor rowed his hands a couple of times, to start the air currents eddying upward. Keeping some rare sort of spatial coherence, the plume began to migrate upward and over. The ooohs that the students were inclined to make were all postponed. Doctor Nikidik held a finger out to them to shush them, and they could tell why. A vast intake of breath would change the pattern of air currents and divert the floating musk of powder. But the students began to smile, despite themselves. Above the stage, amid the standard ceremonial stags’ horns and brass trumpets on braid, hung four oil portraits of the founding fathers of Ozma Towers. In their ancient garb and serious expressions they looked down on today’s students. If this “biological intention” were to be applied to one of the founding fathers, what would he say, seeing men and women students together in the great hall? What would he have to say about anything? It was a grand moment of anticipation.
