Irina looked around at the contestants. “We’ll start with the usual random number selection to determine the order of presentation. Each competitor’s manual or similar instrumentation has been requested to generate a random number. Low number goes first, next to lowest number goes next, and so forth. Will you please display your manuals.”
They did. Irina walked down the line of five finalists, regarding the book or roll or device that each one held out to her.
“All right,” she said. “First will be Rick Maxwell, who will be demonstrating a magma management and redirection technique for volcanoes located near urban centers, intended to prevent pyroclastic flow and similar dangerous phenomena.” Rick waved at the crowd and the cheering began.
After a moment the crowd settled down. “Presenting second will be Joona Tiilikainen, who will demonstrate a new Atlantic conveyor protocol for deep ocean convection management.” Joona waved and jogged around a little like a Rocky clone, which produced some laughter and more cheering.
“Presenting third will be Penn Shao-Feng—”
“Third,” Penn was muttering, “third is good, third is a great spot—”
“Yes it is,” Kit murmured. “Now just hang onto yourself, don’t lose it. You’re gonna be fine, right? Stay focused.”
“Presenting fourth,” Irina said, “will be Mehrnaz Farrahi, who will demonstrate an energy cancellation and displacement protocol for management of slipstrike and similar earthquake faults—” Kit saw Dairine put both hands on Mehrnaz’s shoulders from behind, holding her down as if she was likely to ascend into the air; and she leaned over and whispered something in her ear.
“Third,” Penn was saying. “Gives me a little extra time to get ready.”
“Yeah it does,” Kit said. “So get into your head, not too deeply now, start going through the outer inclusion circles of the spell—”
“And presenting fifth will be Susila Pertiwi with a planned-subterfuge microgravity acquisition program for release into the wild.” Applause for that.
“Can I now ask all but the first contestant to take their seats. Will the implementation support team please set up for the first presentation?”
A group of wizards in casual dress came in from one side and arranged themselves around the cleared central space. “I need to remind the spectators,” Irina said, “that the effects you’re about to see are physical-force virtual duplicates of real effects on Earth, manufactured here by wizardry with one-to-one correspondence in terms of mass, weight, and other physical qualities. They are reproduced here so that there’s no chance of endangering or alarming communities on Earth, and they will look and feel real. Even though these effects can be classified as an amazing reproduction, they are not immaterial . . . And since the human mind is a funny thing, in this next demonstration in particular, we urge you not to play with the lava.”
That produced some slightly unnerved laughter from the audience.
The unnerved noises got considerably louder when a smallish but terribly real, full-size volcano appeared in the middle of the cleared space and began to erupt. And then Rick Maxwell, in his polo shirt and jeans and loafers, walked over in front of the foot of the volcano, threw his arms wide, and began to chant in the Speech.
The lava slid directly down at him, and gasps went up all around; but Rick paid the lava no particular attention, just kept speaking the trigger phrases for his predesigned wizardry. The spell that began to spread out around him was a masterwork of structure, elegantly constructed to trap and hold stone in solid form by way of clever temperature changes and gas nullification routines. Kit watched it with admiration. Penn watched it too . . .
And then Kit was horrified to hear Penn mutter under his breath, “This was a horrible idea. I can’t compete with that.”
“Yes, you can,” Kit said. “It’s nice, Penn, but you’re in another league. You’re dealing with much bigger natural forces . . .”
“A very bad idea . . .” Penn was whispering. “I can’t do it.”
Kit looked at Nita with dismay.
She crossed over to them from where she’d been standing off to one side. “Penn . . .” she said.
“I can’t!”
Kit and Nita stared at each other.
Oh God, Kit said silently to Nita. He’s freezing up again. Now what??
“Look at that,” Mehrnaz was murmuring. “It’s fabulous.”
“It is,” Dairine said, watching with pleasure as the lava ran down, slowed, and was halted by wizardry and will. She laughed at the sight of it, reminded of the toy volcano she’d built for one of her school science fairs a long time ago. “But you know what? What you’ve got is hotter.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Mehrnaz said.
“Absolutely.”
“And when I make it work,” Mehrnaz continued, “my aunt is simply going to bust a blood vessel somewhere.”
“Ideally at the end of her nose,” Dairine said.
Mehrnaz snickered softly. “I’m done with her,” she said. “After this . . . we’re all finished.”
“Finished how?”
“I was thinking about moving out.”
“Kind of a big concept right away,” Dairine said. “Don’t worry about her right this minute. Or the family. Pay attention to what you came to deal with. The spell.”
“But that’s part of it,” Mehrnaz said. “My auntie always wanted to do this, Dairine. The other relatives all convinced her she never could, and she fell in line.”
“But not you,” Dairine said. “Trendsetter.” She grinned.
“This is my dream now,” Mehrnaz said, low and fierce. “She gave hers up. I found this one and I’m not going to let it go.”
“Right,” Dairine said. “Look now. He’s almost finished. He did a great job with that. But not like you’re gonna do. Two more people and it’s your turn . . .”
A roar of applause was going up all around them for the perfectly stalled volcano. Rick Maxwell was taking a bow. The threat management wizards came forward and spoke a pre-prepared spell: the volcano promptly and obediently vanished.
“Next,” Irina said, “Joona Tiilikainen . . .”
Joona stepped forward into the newly cleared space, bowed his head, and waited.
Another group of threat management wizards came out, encircled the space: stood quietly for a moment, then started speaking.
And within seconds the whole space was a column of cold green seawater hundreds of feet across and at least a hundred feet high, with Joona buried under that terrible depth and weight of water, right at the bottom and standing there like a statue with only a thin force field protecting him.
Nita noted how the tagged hot and cold currents, lighter blue, darker green, were moving in the column. Joona, fighting the tremendous pressure slowly and with difficulty, held out his arms on both sides and began slowly forcing out the words of the spell he’d designed. Gradually, it flowed out from him, carpeting the bottom of that huge cylinder of water, then spreading upward into the water like a webwork or tangle of light, impelling the water into configurations that, once started, would self-manage and self-perpetuate. Cold water flowed under warmer current, warmer polluted water was sucked out where natural processes could decontaminate it . . .
This is fabulous, Nita thought. Her own work with water was mostly beginners’ stuff compared to this. He’s good, this guy. But Penn—
Penn was staring at what Joona was doing, and the look of upset on his face was getting worse by the second.
Nita leaned down to him. “Penn,” she said, urgently, “remember what happened to you in the semis. This is just that all over again.”
“But this is different,” he whispered. “Something’s coming. Something’s going to happen. I can’t do the spell—”
Nita’s mouth suddenly went dry, for she realizd that she could feel it, feel what he felt: that sense of impending danger. “I get it,” she said. “You saw it coming. You had a weird dream, didn’t you?”
>
Kit was looking at Nita with with growing concern. “You get what?”
She blinked, trying to stay anchored in the reality of the moment. “I can see why he freaked. I can feel why he freaked. He’s right, something’s coming—”
“But what?”
Out of nowhere there were too many answers. “Something awful,” Nita said. “But it’s not what he thinks.”
Then he’s just panicking again!
“Yeah, that’s part of it,” Nita said out loud.
And he’s expecting you to save him again, to give him the answer? He’s supposed to be doing this himself, but he knows you’ll drag him where he needs to be again—
And it was like a bolt of lightning jolting through her. The image from the dream of the Other who’d been wearing Roshaun’s body, saying No one looks at me across the board. And then the image of fire. Something burning, striving, trying to escape—
“Yes. Yes I have the answer, you’re absolutely right! Oh God, you are so perfect!” And she grabbed Kit and pulled him close to hug him. “How are you always right?!”
He was staring at her in total perplexity. “That’s not what you were saying before.”
“But you know. And it knows. The seeing knows, the vision . . .”
There was fear attached to this for her, too. If Kit was right about this, then he was also right about the danger that Nita had seen coming toward him and Carmela. Her mouth went even dryer as she realized there was no cherry-picking this scenario for an answer she liked better. You had to take the vision whole or not at all. Oh God—!
But one thing at a time. Just one!
The applause for Joona was starting up now as he finished his work and walked out the side of the column of water, waving at the crowd. The threat management wizards were already moving forward to decommission the water: a moment later the whole massive column of it was gone.
Penn was staring at where it had been. He whispered, “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can!” Kit repeated.
And Nita grabbed Penn by his shoulders and stared into his eyes.
“You have to,” she said.
“But in the dream I had—”
Nita swallowed. “I know what’s in that dream, a little. We’re all stuck in it now. If you don’t do this spell, something really bad is going to happen. Lives are going to be saved or lost because of you finishing this thing or not finishing it. Winning, losing, it doesn’t matter. The demonstration is what matters. You have got to produce the result.”
He sat there shaking his head. “But what if I can’t—”
“I’ve been down this road, believe me,” Nita said. “Once upon a time I had to produce a result after I swore to do it. It felt like it took me forever to do what I had to, to make up my mind to it. Good thing I had a lot of help, because I was seriously ready to fold. But the help was there.” She took a long breath. “And I just about got myself where I needed to be when someone stepped in . . .” Or swam, said her memory, in a darker voice. She could still see herself hanging in water that burned bright, somewhere else entirely, while overhead cruised a shape brighter than the water, glancing down at her with one dark dispassionate eye—Death passing her over, passing her by, in pleased and deadly dignity.
“And presenting next,” said Irina’s voice, “Penn Shao-Feng—”
“Get up,” Nita said, “and do it.”
Penn got up, shaking but suddenly determined, and walked out into the cleared circle. He looked like someone walking to his doom.
Kit watched him go, and abruptly realized that he was shaking too. Beside him, Nita was trembling as well with the force of something that hadn’t happened yet but was about to.
“What happens now?” he whispered.
Nita shook her head. “It all depends on him . . .”
The threat management wizards were standing around the borders of the circle now, reciting together. Above the space where they were working, the solar wind slowly became visible, spilling past the Moon in great waves and folds like the curtains of aurorae in Earth’s upper atmosphere: but these were white, not green or blue, because there were no atmospheric gases for them to react with. They lashed and rippled close to the Moon’s surface as dangerous solar storm weather would lash and lick at the Earth when the solar wind was too strong.
Penn took a huge breath, closed his eyes, and held out his arms to either side. All around him, blue-glowing on the dusty ground, it began to appear—the spell Kit and Nita had seen and debugged a hundred times now, the one Kit thought he could probably draw in his sleep.
Very quietly, almost in a whisper, Penn began to recite the spell.
From the diagram, long, graceful, frondlike golden structures began to rear up, the local wavefront guides that would push the solar radiation away from the Moon for demonstration purposes. And from the core of the spell came winding upward another, bigger structure, wavering gracefully: the spell’s power conduit, the part that was meant to be sunk into the Sun to power the redirection. The fins at the top of it, the power collectors, looked like the broad petals of a flower, and the main power conduit that would enable the redirection of the solar wind was its stem.
Slowly and lazily the gigantic, glowing, immaterial flower of energy began to twine upward . . .
And then it started to move faster. And faster. It burst upward through the sheltering dome and out past it, curving around the lunar horizon, heading with terrible speed into space . . . and toward the glow of the Sun, away past the dark circle of the new Earth.
There were shouts of alarm from some of the wizards in the audience and on the staff, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening. The integrity of the wizardly dome was holding—it had been designed to allow energy constructs to pass. But the amount of energy now passing upward through it was already frightening, far more than expected, even though—the wizardry not being impeded by minor matters such as light speed—the conduit was still barely halfway to the Sun. And shortly the incoming energy would be more appalling still, for the power collectors on their ever-stretching conduit were arrowing toward the solar surface with ever-increasing speed. They would sink into the Sun, they would pull power from it, and that awful power would be conducted back here to the surface of the Moon—
“Shut it down!” Irina shouted.
But Penn had finished the recitation and was now frozen where he stood. Irina moved forward, sudden power trembling about her hands as she flung them up and with one huge gesture brought another force shield into being between Penn’s spell circle and the surrounding audience.
Barely a second later, a horrifying spill of raw plasma came blasting down the conduit from its far end, already inside Mercury’s orbit, and slagged down the lunar surface for hundreds of yards around. Penn fell, vanished away in a blaze of eye-hurting white fire.
And Nita realized that while she stood here watching this terror in the waking world, she was also standing inside one of her dreams.
16
Sol IIIa, Sol, Sol III
OH NO. IT’S STARTING. It’s starting now.
I’m not ready for this!
And then Nita got a grip. Of course I’m ready for this. I’m a visionary. I will handle this thing, because I can see at least some of what’s going to happen. Which is more than most of the people here can do . . .
And then, instantaneously, she had that terrible sensation she’d experienced occasionally before—that she was standing on a knife-edge, and huge forces were waiting to see which way she moved. This is how it was the first time, she thought, remembering what happened to Kit’s first Edsel-antenna in Grand Central Terminal all that while ago, at the end of the Ordeal that first made them wizards: the smoking abyss full of terrible, hungry eyes anticipating their fall, the sword-bridge that the noon-forged steel became and that they both had to cross. They had been over that bridge in other forms many times since.
Now everything was different, everything was changing. But some things
are still the same, Nita thought. Have to be. Have to be!
She lifted her gaze to Kit. Their eyes locked.
“Whatever you have to do,” Kit said, “do it. I’m with you.”
She turned away from Kit and went over to Penn and took his hands. He gasped in air and stared at her in shock.
“I am looking at you,” she said. “I am looking at you across the board. Do you see me here? Do you understand me? I’m looking at you. If you’re going to do something, if what you said to me was for real, this would be the moment.”
Penn stared at Nita in astonishment and terror, uncomprehending. Close behind her, she could feel Kit staring at her, not understanding either, and very afraid.
But still not moving. Not saying a word, holding still, letting her keep her balance. Trusting her—
“Just hold still,” she said to Penn, and closed her eyes.
Because you have to see this. I can see it now. Everything’s come together and I can see it at last. The choice to see became the vision, and it blinded her and spilled over out of her. Fire, fire everywhere, flurrying like wings, like something trapped in a cage and beating its wings against the bars of the cage to get out. And crying out in a voice like fire, the voice from her dreams, Let me out, let me go—
Fire, fire that flies. All the stories about the phoenix, the fire that burned out and then rekindled itself in a blaze of magic: this force was the source of them. Not stories after all, and not just magic. The nearest star, the Sun—