“I mean,” Penn said, “isn’t he afraid you’re going to get in trouble?”
“All the time,” Nita said. And she grinned. “But he knows not to interfere with that, since the job keeps getting done. That’s how we work.”
“It seems—dangerous.”
“It’s dangerous for him, too,” Nita said. “And believe me, I’ve got nothing on him when he gets in trouble. That’s when I get my worrying done. But somehow we come out all right. At least so far . . .” She flipped through her manual, found the spot she needed, and scanned down the page. All the necessary permissions were there. “One thing I need you to do,” Nita said, and handed him the manual. “Check your name here and make sure I’ve got all the other details right.”
Penn took the book and looked curiously at the subdiagram that contained his name. He stood quietly for a moment, tracing the long curve of Speech-characters with one finger. “Yeah,” he said, “it looks fine.”
“You sure?”
“It’s fine,” Penn said, and passed Nita back her manual with an expression that looked faintly uneasy. It was the first time she could recall the cocky expression falling off his face. She liked him a lot better without it; he had nice eyes, and they were nicer still when that set expression of certainty wasn’t squeezing them small. “Okay,” Nita said, and was even more amused by Penn’s look of concern as she slapped the manual shut.
“Wait, aren’t you going to—”
“Not with that,” Nita said, tucking the manual under her arm and taking hold of one of the charms on the bracelet she was wearing. In it, the activator phrase of the spell she needed was stored; at her touch it awakened, waiting for her to speak the trigger phrase. “Ready? Here we go.”
She began to speak the long trigger phrase, and glanced around her with satisfaction to see things darkening down around them, to hear that silence settling over the space where she and Penn stood—the sound of the world listening to a wizardry, getting ready to make it come true. When all sound had fallen away, when the light and the trees around them seemed to be dissolving into darkness, Nita spoke the last word of the spell—the one she’d said often enough, when her mother was ill, that she didn’t need to read it from her manual anymore.
And with that one word, light flooded back everywhere except in one wide, vertically poised circle of darkness right before them. Through that circle, a shining white surface stretching away into the distance could be seen: nothing else.
Penn was staring. “Here’s where we’ll be working,” Nita said. “Come on.”
She stepped through and stood there once again on that surface that could have been mistaken for a floor, except that it reached seemingly to infinity, as far as the eye could see, and was a condition of that space rather than any made or built thing. Even that place’s horizon, out at the edge of vision, was peculiar—the air was perfectly clear, so there was no haze to obscure the distance.
Penn stepped through the doorway behind her, staring around him. “Where is this?”
“Not sure the question means anything in terms of location,” Nita said. “It’s another dimension. A space where wizards come to practice dangerous spells without endangering other people’s lives. Thought you might find it useful. Once we’re started I’ll show you what I made you.”
“How big is this place?” Penn said from behind her as Nita headed farther into the space.
She spun around once as she walked, considering. “Not sure. Probably the question has an answer—I mean, the space isn’t infinite, I don’t think. But you’d be a long, long time trying to find the other side. If there is another side; if there’s anything but horizon out past the horizon.” Nita smiled. “I’d pack a lunch.”
“It’s really . . . flat.”
“Perfect Euclidean surface,” Nita said. “I keep wanting to bring a bike in here sometime and just ride. You’d never have to worry about hills. It’s funny, though, the way when you look at it you keep trying to see some kind of bump or rough spot. But there aren’t any. It’s not like our space. No curvature at all.”
When they were about a hundred yards in through the portal, Nita paused and took the opportunity, as she turned again, to glance at Penn. He wasn’t exactly green around the gills, but his look of overconfidence was gone.
Almost against her will she felt sorry for him. “This can be a little weird visually,” Nita said. “How about if I do a kind of tile floor thing in here? It’ll make it easier to focus.”
“Okay,” Penn said.
There was a strained tone to his voice that made Nita think hurrying up would be a good idea. The physical eccentricity of this space had made her feel ill once or twice when she’d been working here for long periods. It didn’t surprise her that Penn might be having a similar response. And is there the slightest possibility, she thought as she reached out to the air for the otherspace pocket in which the Playroom’s kernel was stored, that I was sort of hoping that would happen? Shame on me.
“Here we go,” Nita said, finding the spot she wanted and plunging both arms in it up to the elbow. Sometimes habitués of the Playroom hid the kernel from each other as a combination exercise and game—kernel management being one of the main reasons they came here in the first place. But the last user had left the kernel in its default position, convenient to whatever ingress the next user employed to get into the space, and immediately available on demand. Nita pulled the cantaloupe-sized kernel out of the otherspace pocket where it was stored and turned it over in her hands, feeling with slight satisfaction the faint burn and tingle of the energy involved in confining this place’s physical laws to one tightly interlaced and exceedingly complex bundle of phrases and statements in the Speech. It looked like a big tangle of yarn made of burning light, and in a hundred colors. Everything a space required in terms of physical constants was here—gravity, mass, distance, time, the control structures for all of them arranged in one handy management bundle.
She turned the kernel over until she caught sight of the one command-strand she wanted, then reached two fingers in and teased it out. The strand had a number of minuscule nodes dotted along it, like beads on a string: presets, some of them featuring bumps or scratches as tactile indicators of what they held. Nita ran her fingers down the strand until she found a node she wanted, on which she could feel the tiny crosshatch markings that indicated the “tiled floor” routine. She squeezed the node, gave it a half twist.
Immediately, the floor right out to the horizons was covered in perfectly symmetrical black and white tiles, glowing in the Playroom’s sourceless light. Penn, who had been standing hunched over, now straightened up tentatively and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s better.”
“No problem,” Nita said. She tucked the kernel under one arm and felt around in her jeans pocket for her smartphone. “Funny, though, Kit should be here by now. What time is it?”
Penn pulled his iPhone out, and Nita turned away to hide her smile. He’s got a watch, but why would he look at that . . . But then Penn’s expression turned surprised. “I’ve got service. Five bars . . . !”
“Why not?” Nita said. “This space is very malleable: it’ll do exactly what the managing wizard tells it. And why would I want to disable that nice suite of networking-spell apps that the Invitational gave us? Especially when we’re so close to the Cull. What if somebody needed to get hold of us?”
“Yeah, I guess . . .”
“There you are,” Kit said as he stepped in through the portal from Nita’s backyard. “Hey, Penn. How do you like it?”
“It’s very nice.” Penn turned slowly, assessing everything in an amused way. “Kind of minimalist, I guess.” His tone of voice suggested that as a decorating strategy, “minimalist” had been declared to be over.
About a minute and a half’s worth of off balance, Nita thought. Not too bad for Penn, I guess. “I got rid of the furniture for the time being,” she said, pulling open the empty air beside her and pushing th
e kernel into it, out of sight. “Most of it’s not for humans, and we can use the extra space.”
Kit nodded as he came ambling along and stood next to her. “Thought maybe you’d started without me.”
“I thought maybe you’d stopped for dinner.”
“Not tonight,” Kit said. “Tonight’s pizza night. Mama’s cooking tomorrow, though.” He sighed. “Arroz con pollo. She would do it when we’re busy.”
Nita sighed. Kit’s mama didn’t cook that much because her work hours were irregular and left her too tired. But a few things, when she had the energy, she cooked brilliantly, and the arroz was one of them. “You couldn’t get her to change the day?”
“I tried. No.”
They shook their heads more or less in unison and turned back to Penn. “So,” Kit said. “This is our last chance for a close look before tomorrow. There were a lot of blanks to fill in when we last sat down, day before yesterday. How do you like where you are now?”
“I like it fine,” Penn said, folding his arms. Nita was beginning to loathe that pose; it was a sign that Penn was about to get indignant about something.
Kit waved one arm out at the space. “So let’s have a look, then. The floor’s yours.”
Penn reached into the pocket of his leather jacket, pulled out his manual, flipped it open, peeled a layer of diagram and Speech-charactery off the revealed double-page spread, and dropped it to the floor. The complex diagram that flowed out across the floor from what he dropped did so in flat format, this time, and in a tangle of multiple colors indicating successive revisions and additions.
Nita glanced at Kit out of the corner of her eye, noting without comment that he had finally gotten Penn to stop using 3D versions of the spell diagram for debugging. While they were handsome and impressive, it was too easy to turn your back on some part of one and miss something important—particularly something missing that, when the spell executed, would blow up in your face. “So this is the version you’re going to use for the walk-by judging?” Nita said, beginning to stroll around it.
“Yep,” Penn said, sounding very pleased with himself.
This diagram was far simpler and clearer than the one Penn had shown them first, which was a good thing. Going by her reading of the judging criteria, the Senior and assessing wizards who’d be examining the spell diagrams of some three hundred contestants were not going to be impressed by presentations that suggested a wizard was more concerned with style than substance. Not that style’s not good, Nita thought. But a small, clear, compact spell was going to impress them much more than a big, sprawling, splashy one that made you waste time understanding it.
Kit started walking around the diagram from the other direction. “It looks a lot better than it did,” he said. “You’re still going to want to clean up all these stacked-up revisions, though.”
“Sure. That gets done last. Tomorrow morning.”
Kit nodded. “And you’ve got a short, recorded version of your explanation for when you have to be away from this?”
“Yeah. Let me play it for you—”
“Don’t bother right now,” Kit said. “Let us have it live, because what’s going to count most tomorrow night is your presentation. All kinds of people are going to come up and start asking questions about this when you’ve got it laid out—people our age, people older—and any of them might be judges. The more practice you get, the better. So let’s hear the spiel.”
Penn brushed his sleeves off and stood up straight. He then beamed the kind of smile that Nita had seen on the hosts of late-night infomercials, and started in. “Esteemed Seniors and assessors, thanks for your time. The spell I’ve brought for evaluation today is unique in that it proposes an unusually simple and elegant solution to the problem of plasma storms secondary to the Sun’s active periods. Now that Earth is surrounded with a halo of vulnerable satellites and a permanently manned space station, it becomes more important than ever to attempt to protect them undetectably from radiation storms that could otherwise cause huge disruptions to modern life on Earth and tragic loss of life in space. If I can direct your attention to the core redistribution assembly partition . . .”
And he was off. Nita listened to him rattle out his introduction very comfortably, as if he’d had a lot of time to think about it and was completely at ease with the details. And the first part of that might even be true, she thought. For the moment, though, she turned to a blank page in the messaging portion of her manual as she walked around the spell, and with one finger wrote a note for Kit: If he’s going to work in English instead of the Speech, better make sure he doesn’t use the name of that core part as an acronym . . .
Kit, casually paging through his manual, gazed down, threw Nita a sidelong look, and smiled.
Completely without warning, that smile made her insides squeeze. Oh cut that out, she told herself, annoyed. Do I need to start distracting myself from him now? God, I’m hopeless. Never mind, let’s mix this up a little. “What’s that part over there do?” Nita said, pointing.
Penn stopped and looked at Kit with an aggrieved expression. “Nobody’s going to interrupt me like that, are they?”
“Think you’d better count on it,” Kit said. “Not everybody there’s going to be a judge. Some of the attendees won’t have a clue what this is about, and if they see you standing there, they’re going to ask you. And if a judge is around and hears you fudging an answer, or blowing somebody off, you’ll lose points. Or maybe get deselected on the spot. So better practice being nice to the hecklers.”
Penn grimaced. “So what is that?” Nita said.
“I’m glad you asked me that, Juanita,” Penn said, and turned the infomercial smile on her full force. “It’s a legacy function that has featured in solar intervention wizardries for nearly a thousand years—”
Nita looked at Kit and widened her eyes, mouthing at him, Juanita?!
“—and dates back to the time when there was a fairly major shift in the Sun’s internal dynamics, around the year 1010. That coincides with something called the Oort Minimum. Now you have to understand that the Sun has active periods and quiet periods . . .”
“Sunspot maxima and minima, thank you, I’m perfectly familiar with those,” Nita said. “It’s not the Little Ice Age period we’re talking about, but seven hundred years or so before. I get it.”
“Oh good, that makes this easier. Well, there were some changes in the Sun’s subsurface atmospheric speeds and flow patterns then, and the diagram reflects those and ‘remembers’ them in case those patterns reassert themselves without warning. It’s boilerplate, of course, nothing like that’s happened for a while, but we leave it in as a nod to a legacy state, on the off chance that it might reassert itself.”
Nita nodded. “Okay, good. Let’s move on . . .”
Penn picked up smoothly where he’d left off, and kept talking. I wish we could do something about his delivery, Nita thought. I keep thinking he’s going to sell me car wax, or a revolutionary new food processor. Like he’s afraid to let go and be excited, or enthusiastic in a natural way. But despite the overly slick delivery, Penn spoke very knowledgeably about what his spell was supposed to do, and how it was supposed to do it. Random questions he handled less gracefully; he really did hate being interrupted. For one fifteen-minute period, Kit and Nita took turns being hecklers, and Nita noticed with interest that Penn hated it even more from Kit than he did from her. But she also noticed that he rose to the challenge, and though she and Kit both got more disruptive and abusive than they could imagine anyone being in this situation, Penn not only kept going, but he started treating it as a joke and actually being funny about it. That might wind up helping him . . .
Finally she and Kit ran out of things to pick at, and let Penn finish his presentation. He spoke with such relish about how great it would be to have this thing installed in the Sun and working that when he was done, Nita found herself clapping, and Kit joined in. “Bravo!” Kit said.
Penn bowed th
eatrically. “Thank you, thankyouverymuch, I’ll be here all week.” He bobbed up again, looking smug.
Nita strolled around the diagram toward him, giving it one last look. “Penn, you actually have me convinced about this thing now.”
He headed toward her in turn, laughing at her with the aren’t-you-a-funny-heckler chuckle that he’d been using, and for the moment Nita didn’t mind. “You weren’t convinced before? I’m wounded.”
“Let’s just say it’s a family thing,” Nita said. “When it comes to tinkering with the local star, I take some convincing. But I think you’ve done a good job here.”
“So do I get some kind of reward for that?” Penn said, grinning.
“Well. Maybe we ought to let you run this spell.”
He laughed as if he thought Nita was joking. “Too soon for that, maybe. How would we do it, anyway?”
“There might be a way,” Nita said. “Though it would probably be kind of technical.”
Kit raised his eyebrows at Nita, the expression saying, You haven’t explained this to him yet? Oh boy.
“Come to think of it,” Penn said, “didn’t you say when I came in here that you’d made something for me? Haven’t seen anything yet.”
“You’re right,” Nita said. “Here.” She reached sideways into the otherspace pocket in the air, felt around for the kernel, found that one tagged strand that she’d left hanging out of it, made sure she had the right one, and gently pulled.
Instantly the checkerboard under their feet vanished, leaving the three of them standing above a roiling, roaring sea of fire that stretched from one impossibly distant horizon to the other.
“I made you a Sun,” Nita said.
It was as if they stood no more than a few hundred miles above the solar surface. At this height, vast glowing bubbles of boiling red-golden plasma rose up beneath them, slow, huge, impersonally deadly, shouldering up out of the convection layer to jostle and squeeze against one another, give up their heat, and then be pushed down into the depths again. Between the plasma granules, fountains of terrible fire, straight upward-splashing spicules and broadly curved prominences, reared up again and again out of the solar surface, strained away, and were swallowed back into the near-blinding conflagration. From where the three of them seemed to be poised, the corona was far too high above them to see—but the whip-crack hiss and lash of it through near-solar space echoed deafeningly in the emptiness around them, along with the low, furious roar, unending, of the body of the Sun breathing its heat and light and other radiation out into space. For a second it stirred a brief memory for Nita from a recent dream, a voice like the soft roar of fire, but the sound around her quickly drowned the memory out.