Nita stared down into the maelstrom, shaking her head, fascinated and awestruck as always by the huge, uncaring beauty of it. And this isn’t even a very exciting specimen, as stars go, she thought. But still so cool . . . if that’s the word we’re looking for. She grinned, glanced over at Penn to see his reaction.
He was standing there staring down, frozen, his face blank. It took Nita a moment to realize that the expression was one of terror.
For a moment she couldn’t move either. How’s he frightened by the environment he designed his spell for? Why would you build something that was going to take you someplace that scared you? You build something you like. The way Dairine did with her volcano at school, that time . . .
“How big is that?” Penn said in a hoarse whisper.
“Full size,” Nita said, staying matter-of-fact to see if it would calm him down. “Eight hundred and fifty thousand miles across, give or take . . . Probably about as wide as three and a half trips to the Moon laid end to end. Though I might need to check my math on that.”
“But it’s not real—”
“It is real,” Nita said. “It’s real here. That’s the whole point of the aschetic spaces. I told the space to make me a star, and fed it the necessary qualities and coordinates, and it made it.”
Penn was holding himself still. Anyone who couldn’t see his face might have believed he wasn’t longing to turn and flee out the portal. Nita saw him throw a glance at it. But then he turned his head away, scowling. Hanging on hard, she thought. But why’s he freaking out like this?
She looked over at Kit to see if he saw what she was seeing: but he was still gazing down at the view beneath their feet. “The sound on this is really good,” Kit said, impressed.
“If you could stand there in the coronal medium without a shield,” Nita said, trying to sound casual, “it’s exactly what you’d hear . . . for the fifty or sixty milliseconds before you were burnt to ash.”
Possibly Kit caught something odd in Nita’s voice at that point. He looked over at her, saw her watching Penn staring down into the fire. Well, this is weird, his expression said. Now what?
She shook her head at him, looked over at Penn again. I could kill this, Nita thought. But Penn hasn’t said anything, and I don’t get what’s going on. Is this something he never expected to see, didn’t think through? Sure, his presentation says this wizardry’s meant to be dropped into the Sun from a distance. But a wizard who did a spell like this would have to go there at least once and watch it from up close. Watch it go in, and make sure it was doing what you expected . . .
Never mind. Let’s see what he wants to do. “So Penn,” Nita said. “If you want to do your spell right now and see how it runs, we could do that. Whatever happens here, it can’t hurt us and it can’t do anything to Earth.”
That finally brought his head up, and Penn looked at Nita with an expression that was nowhere near calm, but at least wasn’t frozen in horror. “I, uh,” he said after a moment, “I think I might want to work on it some more first.”
Uncertainty? From him? Wow. But Nita made sure none of her surprise showed. “Okay,” she said. “No problem with that. But when you’re ready, this’ll be a good place to test, and it’s no trouble to bring up—”
“Well,” said a voice from near the portal, “isn’t this an unusual development . . . !”
Oh God, talk about the wrongest moment possible, Nita thought, as Kit’s and Penn’s heads swung around toward the newcomer. Silhouetted against both the daylight shining in through the portal and the much closer and fiercer daylight coming from right under their feet, Dairine and Spot were ambling across the floor of the practice space side by side, Dairine peering down at the duplicate Sun as she came.
“This is nice,” Dairine said. “And not a simulation, either. Real.”
“Cloned,” Nita said, trying to sound casual.
“Such a good idea,” Dairine said. “Gotta talk to Nelaid about this! There could be things you could do with this setup that you could never do with a scaled simulator . . .”
She wandered over to where the three of them were standing around Penn’s spell diagram, the glowing multicolor lines of which were nearly invisible against the blast of light from below. Spot came along behind her, having put up a number of stalked eyes to look over the diagram. Nita held her breath: the last thing she needed was for Dairine to start dissecting Penn’s work at the moment. And what a laugh. Ten minutes ago I might not have minded . . .
“Hmm” was all Dairine said. She turned away toward Nita, digging around in her pockets. “Listen,” she said, “I was over at Tom’s and he asked me to drop these off for you.”
She handed Nita a small, circular token glowing faintly blue on a key ring, then made her way around to Kit. “It’s your marker for the Mentors’ Picks event tomorrow morning,” Dairine said, handing him a twin to what Nita held. “You walk through and drop it into the spells you like the look of. It stamps them with your mentor ID and gives them points toward their selection.”
“Thanks,” Nita said, pocketing hers.
Dairine, meanwhile, had paused by Kit to take in the diagram again, and then glanced up at Penn. “And you are?”
“Penn Shao-Feng,” he said. And then he gave Dairine one of those smarmy smiles, though to Nita’s eye there was a more strained quality to it now. “Don’t know how much time Juanita’s going to have for upchecking other people’s spells, though. She’ll be too busy getting everyone else to drop their markers on mine.”
Why was I even worrying about how he was? Nita thought. He’s fine. For Penn . . . But Dairine was now looking over at Nita with barely concealed amusement. Juanita? she mouthed.
Nita shrugged. “Penn,” she said, “my sister, Dairine. She’s mentoring too.”
“No kidding!” Penn said brightly. “You don’t look old enough to have even had your Ordeal yet—”
Not quite the worst thing you could say to my sister right off the bat, but a real strong contender, Nita thought, her heart sinking for Penn’s sake.
“You must be quite the powerful one!”
Aaaand he’s two for two. Between the patronizing tone and the significant reduction in Dairine’s power levels since her Ordeal—Oh God, she’ll simply destroy him now.
Dairine looked very deliberately from Penn, to the diagram, to Penn again. “Well, Penn,” she said, with the slow, measured delivery one might use when broaching an advanced subject with a five-year-old, “as far as your spell goes, I sort of think that one of the two wizards who brought back the Book of Night with Moon from where the Lone Power had it stashed has better things to do than run around the Invitational shilling for you, y’know? Especially since she knows perfectly well—though she probably hasn’t told you so yet, she’s so kindhearted—that if people are looking at your wizardry and it’s not generating its own buzz, you’re doing it wrong.”
Dairine turned away again. “A wizardry has to stand on its own merits. And at first glance, this one doesn’t so much stand on its merits as sort of lie there.” She looked up. “Neets, do me a favor and kill the background noise?”
Penn stood there with his mouth open, probably at least partly due to the effrontery of someone who could casually refer to the overwhelming visual and aural splendor dominating the practice space as “noise.”
“Sure, no problem,” Nita said. She reached into the otherspace pocket and turned off the Sun. And look at that. All of a sudden he’s so much more relaxed . . .
“Interesting,” Dairine said, once more starting to stroll around the perimeter of the spell, now laid out as it had been before on the black and white tiles: and as she walked around it, Spot stepped delicately out into the diagram, carefully avoiding any of the lines or Speech-phrases, and looked it over with all his eyes. “Coronal redirection, huh,” Dairine said. “Not easy to do with something this minimalistic. Going to have to pump a lot of power into this for it to function.”
“The star powers it,
” Penn said. “If you noticed the accumulators, they’re very—”
“Fancy,” Dairine said. “If structurally fragile. Well, the overall design has some merit. This could possibly make it through to the quarter-finals, who knows? I kind of hope it does . . .” She was coming around to Nita’s side of the diagram now, and she grinned at her sister. “As it’ll give my mentee a chance to whip your mentee’s butt.”
Nita smiled and said nothing.
Penn continued to stand there in shock. “Aren’t you going to defend me?” he said, turning from Nita to Kit.
Kit was hanging his head and pinching the bridge of his nose as if he was trying to stop himself from sneezing, but Nita knew what he was suppressing and was intent on not triggering him by cracking up herself. She shook her head at Penn. “I’ve heard that from everybody from the Lone Power on down,” Nita said. “But where Dairine’s involved, we all get to take our chances.”
Dairine grinned and put her head next to Nita’s. “I don’t want to second-guess you in front of your guy,” she said very softly, “but this thing reinvents the wheel a couple of times, and he’s probably gonna get called on it.”
“That could be my fault,” Nita said as softly. “I did an analysis on this some days back, and a lot of the work he’s done since then has been about doing what I told him . . .”
Dairine shook her head. “I recognize your style in there. But he’s got problems elsewhere. Doubt there’ll be time to fix it before tomorrow, but Spot’s grabbing the design at the moment. I’ll give you some notes later.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Hey, can’t have you looking bad out there.” Dairine sighed. “But what I don’t get is how you got this guy and I got Mehrnaz. Seems like a mismatch.”
Nita shrugged. “Take it up with the Powers,” she muttered. “I don’t pretend to get it! And frankly I’d sooner you had him than we did. But there’s no swapping out once you’ve accepted the assignment. I think we’re all stuck . . .”
Dairine nodded. “Right. Anyway, check your manual later,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve gotta go crash for a while. I need to be up at midnight again . . .”
Nita patted Dairine’s back absently as her sister turned around, yawning, and Spot came spidering along to her. “See you tomorrow, Kit,” she said. “Penn . . .” She waved amiably at him without looking at him. “Good luck. ’Cause you’re gonna need it!” And she wandered off toward the portal and vanished through it, Spot clambering after her.
Penn gazed after Dairine, looking both astonished and a bit surly. “Thinks she’s pretty hot stuff, doesn’t she,” he said. He was trying to make it sound like a joke.
“So did the Lone One,” Nita said, shaking her head. “It might have had a point, for once . . .”
Kit was looking at Penn as if he felt sorry for him. “Come on,” Kit said, “if you don’t want to run your spell now then we’ve done all we can for today. Let’s go ’round the corner to my place, have a soda or something, and make plans for tomorrow.”
Penn’s long, smooth face was pinched-looking, and what was left of his smile was anxious. “No, thanks but no, I have to get back home . . . there are some things to do before tomorrow.” The expression that had replaced his sulkiness looked to Nita like it was shading toward panic. “So, listen,” Penn went on, “I’ll message you guys in the morning, okay? And we can figure out where to meet then.”
“Uh, sure,” Nita said, and didn’t know whether Penn had heard her, because he was already out the portal. Barely a second later she heard the Bang! of someone in so great a hurry that he didn’t use his transit spell to control the noise of the air that slammed into where he’d just been.
Nita turned to look at Kit. “What the hell was that?” she said.
Kit shook his head. “The sound of our schedule for the next couple of weeks freeing up?” he said. “Because if he goes into this tomorrow like that, he’s finished. And so are we.”
8
Hempstead / Mumbai
IT WAS AN HOUR or so later before Dairine saw Nita again. To her credit, Nita had peered into Dairine’s room as quietly as she possibly could, opening the door just a crack. But all the same it was enough to snap Dairine out of the doze she’d fallen into, propped up against the pillows at the head of her bed. She’d skipped dinner and hadn’t bothered to get undressed—there was no point in it. I’ll do it after I get back from seeing Mehrnaz, she’d thought. Right then, nothing had been so attractive as the prospect of stretching out and being horizontal for a while. Even the weight of Spot, hugged to her chest as they communed before she dozed off, hadn’t bothered her.
“You asleep?” Nita said, barely above a whisper.
“I wish,” Dairine said, while Spot sprouted a couple of bleary-looking stalked eyes out of his lid to gaze at Nita.
“Did you even eat?”
Dairine rolled her head back and forth against the pillows as Nita slipped in and sat on the edge of her bed. “Too tired right now,” Dairine said. “And if I eat and fall asleep, it’ll lie there inside me like lead.” She sighed and pushed herself up straighter against the pillows.
“You shouldn’t get up,” Nita said. “You should sleep.” She started to stand up. “We can do this in the morning, when you get back.”
“No no, wait,” Dairine said, rubbing her face. “Let’s get it done now. There’s some chance your guy might have time to fix it tonight. Assuming he’s willing to take direction.”
Nita sighed. “Not sure my chromosomes are arranged in the right order for him to do that willingly,” she said. “He seems to have this ‘why should I listen to you, girly’ thing going on to the point where it interferes with his reasoning processes.”
Dairine groaned. “God, what year does he live in?”
“I don’t know,” Nita said, “but I think he has a rude awakening coming if he makes it past the Cull.”
“Well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it,” Dairine said. She yawned and stroked Spot’s lid. “Virtualize the space for us, would you?”
Instantly the walls, the ceiling, even the floor of Dairine’s room all went away, replaced by the appearance of a broad, smooth, pale plain, all airbrush-hazed with soft colors, and overarched by the gentle fire of a gigantic barred spiral galaxy.
She caught the sound of Nita taking a sudden breath, and smiled. “That’s a new trick,” Nita said, craning her neck to look around.
“Think of it as a 3D desktop,” Dairine said. “The Mobiles hooked it up for me. They’re experimenting with thoughtspeed communications; they need it for the backup they’re building.”
“You mentioned that a while back,” Nita said. “They’re trying to back up . . . the whole universe?”
“Only this one to start with,” Dairine said. “Right now the two main problems are speed and storage space. But at the communications end, they’ve built me an experimental signal tunnel. My end goes through a wormhole somewhere in local space, and the signal comes out at their end, umpty billion trillion light-years away. Then they encode it for storage on individual electrons in a spare universe full of hyperdense matter, I think they said.” She waved her hand. “Don’t ask me how the engineering works—I’m just the beta tester.”
Nita shook her head in amazement. “As long as they’re not asking you for help with their math homework, I guess you’re doing okay . . .”
Dairine snickered. “Yeah. Anyway, here’s what Spot got from your guy.”
Penn’s spell appeared spread out over the glassy superstrate a few yards away, the spell circle enlarged to about twenty feet across to bring up the detail. She pointed at one particularly troublesome spot in the spell construct that Penn planned to drop into the surface of the Sun. “Here’s his real problem,” she said, and as she pointed at the diagram, a representation of the actual matter/energy structure that the spell would build rose up in front of them: a long, thin, tubular structure with a sort of finny dumbbell head at one end and a trumpet-sh
aped opening at the other.
“The subsurface structure,” Dairine said, and the dumbbell end enlarged, “that’s where the trouble is. All those little pinwheely things sticking out of it . . . He wants to install those only a few thousand miles under the surface? Near the boundary layer, where the subsurface convection movement is nearly supersonic? Complete waste of time, because those are way too fragile to take plasma currents at that speed. They’d flame out within the first fifteen minutes or so . . . rip themselves up like windmills in a hurricane, and the whole thing would come to pieces.”
Dairine yawned again. “The basic idea he’s proposing doesn’t need to be so depth-specific. Or anything like so sensitive, either. I don’t know who he’s trying to impress—”
“The judges?”
“If they work with the Sun on a regular basis, they’ll just laugh. What you need to get him to do at the very least is redesign these pinwheels to be more robust. Cut their wings back by about half, you’d still get plenty of input off them. But better still, he should pull the fancy fiddly things off and retailor the wizardry to dump the power structures in way deeper.”
Nita nodded, reaching up to pull her manual out of the air.
“Don’t bother with that,” Dairine said. “I’ll have Spot copy it to you.”
“Thanks,” Nita said. She didn’t put her manual away, though; she sat with it in her lap, looking at Dairine. “You’re being very helpful.”