by Diane Duane
Dairine’s mood, which had been wobbly in response to Mehrnaz’s nervousness, now started to veer toward the foul end of the spectrum. Blood sugar? she wondered. Ought to do something about that.
But she didn’t. Instead she headed straight toward Nita’s guy. And sure enough, just past a project about covert parasitic wizardly use of the “waste” wind power between city skyscrapers, there he was, with his solar management wizardry rotating flashily in and out of the floor as a big bright glowing globe.
She came quietly up behind the crowd that was watching him. Which is the problem, Dairine thought. It’s the spell they should be looking at . . . not that he’s making it as easy as it should be. Penn was extravagantly kitted out in dark skinny jeans and a blindingly bright orange and green urban-camo shirt under a tuxedo jacket that was about a size too small for him, and . . . Is that a top hat? He looks like a clown. Who dresses like that when they’re doing a serious presentation? Dairine thought. Come on. It’s gonna take you five minutes to stop analyzing his dress sense and pay any attention to the spell he’s laid out.
And the thing that was the most distracting after his clothes was his presentation—which was as slick as that of a late-night talk show host trying to sell you some kind of slice ’n’ dice gadget—and the way he played constantly to the crowd. They should be looking at the spell, Dairine thought, not so much at him. It’s like no one paid attention to him when he was little and he’s making up for it now . . .
But for the moment that was fine, as Penn was so preoccupied with the responsiveness of the people in front of him that he never noticed Dairine slipping quietly around the side and behind him to take a closer look at the wizardry proper. It was tidier than it had been, which was certainly Nita’s work: she’d told the guy at least part of what needed doing, and he’d done it. So he’s at least that smart. But it’s a shame his delivery doesn’t at all match the style of the spell. There’s this . . . disconnect somehow . . .
Penn was gesturing and waving at the spell while he went on talking. Maybe he doesn’t so much sound like an infomercial as one of those telemarketers, Dairine thought, having occasionally picked up the house phone and wound up stuck talking to one. Like he’s reading the same script to everybody and couldn’t care less about making it personal. “ . . . With a nod to some traditional legacy structures that date back to the last major shift in the Sun’s internal dynamics, around the year 1010 and roughly coinciding with the period called the Oort Minimum, when the Sun’s subsurface speeds and flow patterns altered . . .”
Dairine rolled her eyes. Nice excuse for not finding a more elegant way to get rid of the legacy structures. It’s like I told Neets, this guy’s lazy . . .
“ . . . possibly secondary to missing structural or energic elements which have ‘aged themselves out’ of Solar structure as similar surface-weather elements have been aging out on Jupiter and Saturn. My wizardry takes those changes into account and adds a ‘total recall’ function that alerts a supervising wizard while at the same time autonomously amending the boilerplate on the fly if there’s any kind of reassertion shift toward the older subsurface states. Not that anything like that’s happened for a while, but good wizardly practice suggests it should be taken into account in spell construction. But it’s just a safety feature. Let’s look instead at these power structures . . .”
Which are still too fragile, Dairine thought, slipping around to the far side to check out that section of the wizardry. Dammit, he needs to stop this thing rotating. Is he afraid someone’s going to get a close look at it? If the judges get that idea, they’re gonna chuck him out on his ear. Hope he has the sense to stop it and lay it out flat when they come along.
She examined the power structures and saw changes that had been made, but wasn’t at all sure they’d been strengthened enough not to snap off when submerged in the Sun’s roiling structure. Well . . . not my problem. Unquestionably, the guy had some good ideas, but he seriously needed a teacher, someone who’d shake him out of his bad habits. The thought of what Nelaid would do to him made Dairine grin.
She turned away: she’d seen enough. Put him up one to one against Mehrnaz and she wins, Dairine thought, walking quietly away around the far side of the crowd, while Penn carried on with his one-man show. She’s got five times the smarts that he has and easily ten times the sincerity. Her spell looks like her personality, like they’re connected somehow. His, even after Kit and Nita got him to tidy it . . . it’s all over the place, scattered. It’s like it has nothing to do with him. Or not enough to do with him. She made a face as she walked off, wanting to be more engaged with the other projects around her; but her thoughts kept drifting back to work she’d been doing with Nelaid on the management of solar radiation before it got to the surface of the star and started getting out of hand. Wonder why Thahit’s management wizardry doesn’t have something like that—these legacy structures that remember previous physical states. Is it too stable to need these? But that seemed unlikely. The main problem with Wellakh’s primary lay in how unstable it was.
Or maybe there’s something like that buried in the stellar simulator back on Wellakh, and now it’s taken for granted. Which was likely enough. Even if she’d built it herself, once a spell was in place, Dairine didn’t often bother looking twice at its diagramming unless something had stopped working or needed to be changed or debugged. And the interactive simulator on which she worked with Nelaid was a going concern, one that generations of wizards before him had fine-tuned before it had been settled into its present configuration. Tinkering around under its hood would have been the last thing on Dairine’s mind, especially when she and Nelaid first got started, for the Sunlord-in-Abeyance had been touchy enough about Dairine and about her connection to his very missing son. They’d got past the worst of it eventually, but at all times the thought of the third party in the relationship, the one who was not there, hovered over all their dealings with each other.
Dairine finally shrugged as she kept walking. He’d love this, she thought. Roshaun would be stalking around through this and approving the good projects in that oh-so-high-and-mighty way of his, and disdaining the bad ones. And what he’d make of Penn . . .
She had to snicker then, imagining the most likely response: the scornfully raised eyebrow, the long, thoughtful, judging gaze down Roshaun’s lengthy, slightly nostril-flared nose . . . and then the crunch of another lollipop destroyed in a moment’s princely (no, kingly now) irritability at everything that was wrong about Penn. The guy’s a dork, she thought, unwilling to waste any more time on analysis. He’ll get culled, and everybody’ll be relieved, especially Nita, it sounds like. Because he seems like such an overentitled, underperforming dork.
Why do you dislike him so much? something said in the back of Dairine’s head.
Not just something: Spot. He was still over on the side of the room, but he would have had to have been light-years and light-years away before he couldn’t hear her think.
Dairine laughed. “Don’t know,” she said. “Don’t care. Did you see that skyscraper thing next to him, though? They had a smart computer working as part of that.”
I’ll have a look.
“Right. Meet you up by the gate hex afterward? I’ll go see how Mehrnaz is doing.”
Right.
She wandered on down the concourse to pause in front of another display, something to do with making schools safe against attacks by people with firearms. But as she looked the project précis over, it occurred to Dairine that she’d been speaking to Spot in English, and what she’d said to him might not have been strictly true. She did care. And the question was a fair one, if a little annoying.
Why do I dislike Penn so much?
Over on the opposite side of the concourse, Kit was making his final pass through the exhibits, checking out a last couple of possibilities for token dropping. As time had started to get short before the formal judging began, he and Nita had split up to handle separately the picks that th
ey couldn’t agree on. As a result, Kit kept running into other people who were also immersed in last-minute choices, and kept accidentally eavesdropping on conversations that even in this context were unusual. Some of the oddest ones—and the least inhibited—occurred when the competitor wasn’t onsite to explain things.
“Why would you want to do that to water?”
“To show off?”
“Yeah, well, an eighth matter-state sounds interesting, but what’s it for?”
Or at another stand:
“. . . Well, if you ask them the earthworms will tell you they’re okay with this, but you have to wonder if they’re just sparing his feelings.”
“Yeah, this wouldn’t constitute quality time for them, would it?” And leaning over the tank, a whisper: “Come on guys, come clean . . .”
And at another:
“Just think about it, though. It’s an idea whose time has come. Lightning as an antimissile weapon . . .”
“Won’t help you with ICBMs.”
“Depends on which way you’re pointing the lightning, doesn’t it?”
That was one of the last places where Kit dropped a token as he came to the far end of the exhibition hall, at the other end from where he and Nita had come in. That whole area down by the restrooms had been set aside as a casual meet-and-greet space, where people could deal with personal or medical needs, get a drink or a bite to eat without having to go out to the food court, and generally take a break from the chaos of the main space.
Kit went and got himself a cola, feeling that he could use a little kick from the caffeine, and moved over to one side to drink it and look at the people around him. There was something so terrific about being in a place full of wizards who weren’t in a life-or-death situation: you kept seeing unexpected things, or things that perhaps shouldn’t have been unexpected.
He found himself watching a couple of wizards doing what he at first mistook for the beginning of a dance, and then for a session of tai chi. But suddenly he realized they were signing. They were leaving long bright trails of power in the air as they traced out words and phrases in a Speech-recension he’d never seen before—something very condensed though no less fluid or graceful than the written forms of the Speech he was used to, and nonetheless looking completely different.
Of course there’s a way to use the Speech without speaking, Kit thought. Why would the Powers leave anybody out of wizardry just because they can’t hear? Why has this never occurred to me?
“I’m an idiot,” he said to himself.
“A moment of realization there?” came an amused voice from beside and behind him.
Kit turned to see Tom ambling over with something latte-looking in one hand. “Hey!”
“Been here a while, yeah?”
“How can you tell?”
“You’ve got that spell-shocked look.”
Kit laughed. “Yeah. At first we thought we’d come in early and beat the crowd . . .”
“Good luck with that,” Tom said. “I’m not absolutely sure, but if you asked the setup staff, I bet they’d tell you that some of these kids were lined up waiting to get in before dawn.”
“Wonder what the people who live around here made of that . . .”
Tom chuckled. “Probably not much. Some of the trade shows that come in here, like that big comics convention—they’ve got so many out-of-the-ordinary people attending them and wandering around outside that our group probably looks dull by comparison.”
“I guess so,” Kit said. “It’s just weird to be doing something wizardly right out in the open.”
“Well,” Tom said, gazing around, “it’s not like New York’s not a big tourist destination. Lots of wizards want to come to town for reasons that have nothing to do with the Art. And since all the contestants and mentors involved are on travel subsidy, it kind of makes sense to have this part of the event someplace they might not have the time or energy to spare to get to otherwise. If they’re going to take the time and effort to contribute, the supervisory structure may as well give them something back.”
Kit nodded. “Anyway,” Tom went on, “seen anything particularly worthwhile? The end of pick time is upon us. Not much more than five minutes now . . .”
“A lot of things.” And then Kit had to laugh. “You know what kept distracting me, though? Wondering if someone was about to slip somehow and blow everything up.”
Tom’s grin was edged with good-natured irony. “As if working with you two when you got started wasn’t like juggling chainsaws sometimes,” he said. “And don’t even get me started on Dairine.” He took another swig of his coffee. “But don’t worry yourself too much. There’s a proctoring task force full of very smart Senior Wizards hidden away under the surface of every Invitational. They’ve signed off on every wizardry individually, and all of the projects taken together, before any of them are allowed into the same room.”
Kit put his eyebrows up as the thought occurred to him that Tom’s expertise was writing specialized spells and debugging them. “And if I wondered if maybe you were one of the proctors . . .”
Tom smiled slyly. “If I thought you were going to run around announcing the fact, I’d refuse to confirm or deny. But why would you bother? Since the proctors aren’t involved in the judging, none of the contestants are going to care.”
Kit grinned. “Okay. But seriously . . . how much effect do our picks have on the judging?”
“Exactly what it says in the rules description in the manual,” Tom said. “‘Picks may come to constitute significant weighting on the judges’ choice.’”
“May.”
“Look, we may be wizards but we’re not omniscient, any more than the Powers are,” Tom said. “If something about some spell snags the attention of a whole lot of wizards, even for reasons they can’t fully articulate, it merits extra attention from the judges. Any spell may have a secret message buried in it: a hint at something else useful that that wizard’s doing. Or something they’re not doing that they ought to be—that we all ought to be. You can’t tell until you look closely, sometimes in a group. Or sometimes only when someone drags you over to a wizardry and makes you look at it extra hard. So we make sure that can happen, if people feel strongly enough about it.”
Kit nodded. “Neets did that to me once or twice. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Well, you know by now that sometimes she’s worth listening to.”
“Uh, don’t let her hear you say ‘sometimes.’”
Tom smiled lightly. “I hear you there.”
“So what now?”
“Besides the judging?”
“No—I mean, are they going to throw us out of here for that?”
“No need . . . it’d only increase the stress. Not to mention the ferocity of the last-minute politicking.” He gulped down the last of his coffee and chucked the empty cup into a nearby wet-recycle bin. “Because nothing’s more dangerous than a wizard who feels passionately about something. And in this crowd . . .”
He looked down the length of the hall. Kit, following his glance, noticed something else: the noise level was rising. It was already considerably louder than when he’d started talking to Tom. Additionally, he could see people on both sides standing around some spell-displays and arguing.
“I’d say there’s some passion,” Tom said.
The sound of a soft chime echoing through the huge room made everything a touch quieter for a few seconds . . . and immediately, as it faded, the noise of the crowd rose again, louder this time. “Five-minute warning?” Kit said.
Tom nodded.
Over the heads of some people arguing down by one of the nearest exhibits, the one with the lightning, Kit caught sight of Nita and waved at her. She nodded at him, with an amused sideways glance at the people who were more and more loudly arguing the pros and cons of the antimissile defense. Nita rolled her eyes as she passed them. Directly behind her, some other wizard, a swarthy teen in a three-piece suit, walked by and said
in a carrying voice, “Increasing entropyyyyy, people . . . !”
The argument got only marginally quieter as Nita walked by it, then started to scale up again. She came over to Kit and Tom, shaking her head.
“I’m ready for a break,” she said.
“You’ll be getting one,” Tom said, “and so will they. Half an hour.”
“They’re going to judge all this in half an hour?”
“The judges have been working all day,” Tom said. “This is just the crosscheck session, where last-minute developments get dealt with and the picks are factored in. If you’re going to get something to drink and find a quiet place, this is the time to do it, because it’ll get pretty unquiet back here for that half-hour.”
He glanced around him. “Catch you two at the party later?”
“Sure,” Nita said.
Tom vanished.
Over at what Kit was now thinking of as the Tame Lightning stand, the argument was getting even louder. Nita was observing this with dubious interest: two wizards, one a big broad-shouldered weightlifting kind of guy and one slimmer and shaggy-haired, were standing almost chest to chest and waving their arms and alternately pointing at the spell and shouting at each other. The argument seemed to have something to do with ionization. The stand’s owner, perhaps fortunately, didn’t seem to be anywhere close by.
“Have you ever seen anything like that before?” Nita said, sounding scandalized.
“In the middle of a baseball game maybe,” Kit said. “Not with wizards.”
Nita shook her head. “Don’t think anyone’s planning to kick dirt over anybody’s shoes . . .”
Kit wondered if it would break out into a full-fledged shoving match before or after the prejudging session ended. “Can it be that all these enlightened, magical people we’ve been working with are actually just human beings after all?”