Games Wizards Play

by Diane Duane

  Better move now or you’ll get run over, Spot said.

  Dairine got bumped from behind, causing consternation among those who stumbled against and into someone who wasn’t there, and then against and into each other. A fistfight very nearly broke out behind her, and there was yelling and screaming in several languages, all of which she was able to understand in the Speech. “Wow, people, seriously, language,” she said under her breath, and snickered as she slipped out into the space between a couple of parked cars; then, when there was a break in the traffic, across the road.

  Dairine’s career in wizardry had been eventful enough that a fair number of aliens and hostile others had tried at one time or another to kill her, but when she was safely up on the sidewalk again she found herself thinking that all of them could have taken lessons from the traffic in Mumbai. “Oh God, not even the Crossings at rush hour . . . !” She stood there and got her gasping under control.

  That may be so, said Spot, but if you keep standing here you’re going to start another fistfight . . .

  Dairine laughed softly and made her way down the side of the half-circle drive that served the front of the hotel, along to where an ornately carved arch in more pink marble sheltered a side entrance and the further drive down into the parking lot behind the building. She slipped behind one of several SUVs parked to one side of the driveway, ducked down, and said the words that would decommission the invisibility spell; then stood up again and headed for the door.

  It was large and impressive, carved wood under its own small marble arch. There was a box with a button and an intercom grille set in the side of the arch, and Dairine pressed it.

  But instead of a voice speaking, the door opened. Dairine found herself looking up and up at a gentleman in a business suit and a turban. “Yes?”

  “I’m here to see Mehrnaz,” she said. “I’m Dairine Callahan.”

  “You’re expected, miss,” the man said. “Please come in.”

  He opened the door and Dairine went in past him into a vestibule done in both pink marble and white, with tables up against the walls on which sculptures and huge vases of flowers stood. The effect was still much like being in a hotel, and Dairine wondered if there was some mistake, but the man who now closed the door behind her nodded toward a stairway at the end of the vestibule. “Please go up, miss,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, and headed up the stairs.

  At the top she paused and looked around in astonishment. The room she’d entered was easily the size of the bottom floor of her whole house. Up here all the marble was white, and between the wide windows that let in the morning light there were framed prints and paintings—modern art, mostly, though there were some portraits as well—and at least one gigantic flat-screen TV down at the far end, with a huge U-shaped white couch in front of it. And from the couch Mehrnaz, in another of her silky overcoat-like tops but without her headscarf, had just jumped up and was coming over to Dairine. “There you are! I was worried about you, why didn’t you teleport straight in?”

  “Thought I’d walk some of the way,” Dairine said. “Local color . . .”

  “In this traffic? It’s such an awful time for that, and it’s hot already. And it’s got to be the middle of the night for you, you must be exhausted! How about some tea?”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  She followed Mehrnaz back to the couch, looking around the big room. Another stairway led up to a higher level: more closed doors of dark carved wood were set into the room’s rear wall. Inside the U of the couch was a glass coffee table, scattered with magazines and TV remotes. Mehrnaz picked up one of the remotes, fiddled with it a moment, put it down. “Did you bring your friend?”

  “Never go anywhere without him,” Dairine said, sitting down and unbuckling the bag.

  One of the doors beside the huge TV opened up, and a petite woman in a light- and dark-gold sari came out. “Yes, miss?”

  “Lakshmi, will you bring us some tea, please? Thank you.”

  The woman disappeared. My God, servants? Dairine thought. And did she just use the remote to call her? That’s a new one. But for the moment she simply pulled Spot out of the bag—he having pulled in all legs and eyes and anything that made him look like something besides a laptop—and put him down on the table. Then she looked over the back of the sofa at the huge space. “Seriously, Mehrnaz, you ever consider playing football in here?”

  Mehrnaz gave her a thoughtful look. “American football or football football?”

  Dairine burst out laughing. “You could go either way. This is . . . Well, this is incredible! You didn’t tell me you lived in the Taj Mahal.”

  “What?” Mehrnaz laughed at her. “This? You should see some of our neighbors’ houses. This is just a flat! And not such a big one.”

  Dairine shook her head. “You think this is small?”

  “My mother won’t let me say ‘small,’” Mehrnaz said. “She insists on ‘modest’ . . . ”

  The door beside the TV opened again and the lady in the sari reappeared, this time with a tray holding a teapot and cups and saucers and milk and sugar. She put the tray on the table, smiled at Dairine, and flitted away again, closing the door behind her.

  Mehrnaz poured a cup for Dairine. “How do you like it?”

  “A lot of sugar.”

  “Brown or white?”

  “I’ll try the brown. Yeah, two’s enough, thanks.”

  Dairine accepted the cup gratefully, noticed the china in passing—extraordinarily thin and fine with a delicate rose pattern—and took a few sips while thinking, It’s no use, I’ve got to ask, this is going to drive me crazy. “Mehrnaz, before we start getting down to work . . . please get me straight on one thing. Are you rich?”

  Mehrnaz’s face went thoughtful while she considered that. That she had to stop to consider it said more to Dairine than almost anything else. “I guess we are,” she said. “Not that some of our neighbors would think so! They’d say we’re just moderately well-to-do. And some of the older ones wouldn’t think much of us because they’d say we ‘came up from trade.’ Worked for money, instead of inheriting it. The nonwizardly side of the family is into IT and cellular telephony.”

  Dairine shook her head. “I don’t get it. How is getting rich from your own work not good?”

  Mehrnaz shrugged. “It’s sort of a class thing, I suppose.”

  “Is it like the caste system?”

  “Mmm, in a way.” Mehrnaz made a helpless expression. “Or just snobbery, maybe. But I don’t think most of the family cares about that one way or the other, because the nonwizardly side of the family is very, very small. Most of us are wizards. Aunts and uncles and grandparents for a few generations back, and all these cousins—” She laughed. “Not cousins the hrasht way. Just cousins. There was a wedding, a couple years back, my second-oldest sister, and we sat around and tried to count them all. It was hopeless. We had to stop at two hundred.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if big families are all the fun they’re supposed to be . . .” Dairine said.

  Mehrnaz put her teacup down, leaned back against the cushion of the sofa, and rolled her eyes. “Funny you should mention football, because that’s what it’s like, being stuck in a football match all the time. Everybody running around in all directions, pursuing all these different goals, chasing after all these projects. And everybody who’s not doing that themselves is standing on the sidelines and cheering for some of them and booing at the others. It’s so exhausting.” She covered her face, rubbed it. “What’s it like, having just one sister? How many aunts and uncles have you got? Tell me it’s only three or four.”

  “Three, now,” Dairine said. “We lost a couple of them young.” She sighed. Their uncle Joel had been a particular favorite of hers and Nita’s, the source of the Space Pen that Nita loved so much and that had in some ways been at the heart of her getting into wizardry.

  “That’s such a shame! I’m so sorry,” Mehrnaz said.

  “It’s o
kay,” Dairine said. “It’s a long time ago now. Or it seems that way. And as for having just one sister—” She had to smile. “It can still be pretty intense. Especially when she’s a wizard and you’re not.”

  “Oh, dear Powers, were you jealous of her?”

  Dairine grinned. “You have no idea. But it got better after she was almost eaten by a shark.”

  Mehrnaz stared.

  “No, I don’t mean that being eaten by a shark was going to make it better! I mean, after that, They came for me. And I found out that I was being jealous of the wrong things, and that being almost eaten by a shark could be the least of your worries.”

  Mehrnaz sat there on the sofa shaking her head. “Some of this was in the manual,” she said in a hushed voice. “But it sounds so much more interesting when you tell it. . . . And yet not so scary.”

  “It could be scary enough,” Dairine said. “Believe me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” She finished her tea and put the cup down, already feeling better from the hit of caffeine. Though I can see I’m going to have to take Tom’s advice . . . “So you’ve got to tell me how things work here first. You say most of your family’s wizardly . . . so what about the rest of them? Do they know about you?”

  “Oh yes,” Mehrnaz said. “Everybody knows from when they’re little that a lot of the family does magic. It’s kind of taken for granted.”

  “What about the, uh . . .”

  “The household staff? Oh, they know. But they really, really like their jobs, so they don’t discuss it. In return we take very good care of them—very favorable salaries and benefits packages.”

  Dairine’s eyebrows went up. This was a whole style of management of the interface between wizardly life and the nonwizardly that she’d never imagined. “Okay. So we don’t have to worry about hiding what we’re doing.”

  “In here, not at all. Of course I wouldn’t do it in the street—”

  Dairine flushed hot. “Uh. Maybe this isn’t a great thing, but I just did do it in the street.”

  Mehrnaz looked alarmed. “Do what?”

  “Vanished once or twice. I was careful about it . . .”

  “Oh, that.” She sighed. “We all do that sometimes. Half the time no one even notices. The rest of the time . . .” Mehrnaz shrugged. “What’re people going to say? ‘I saw some girl disappear in the street today’? Anyone they told would just think they were drunk or on drugs.”

  “Yeah,” Dairine said, “true.” She wasn’t going to get into the issue of why she’d felt freaked enough to need to do such a thing: they had other things to be thinking about. “Okay,” she said, “so we’re all set then.”

  She tapped Spot’s lid; he lifted it, and from the sides of his carapace two pairs of eyes came out to look at Dairine and Mehrnaz. Mehrnaz leaned in to peer at him, fascinated and smiling. “Hello!”

  Hello, Spot said.

  That surprised Dairine somewhat: Spot could sometimes be quite silent with people he didn’t know well. “Spot, would you bring up the abstract of Mehrnaz’s spell again?”

  His screen went dark, then brought it up: the text page in the Speech that described in general terms what the wizardry was supposed to do. “A strategy for the redirection and diffusion of hypocentric slipstrike fault discharge preexecution by way of selective paradoxical standing wave amplification,” Dairine read.

  Mehrnaz nodded. “That’s it.”

  “So tell me if I’m getting this right. You’re suggesting stopping an earthquake from going off by creating a virtual earthquake that exactly cancels out the way the original’s vibrating? And the spell’s going to alter itself on the fly to match whatever the quake’s doing?”

  “Yes! Exactly.”

  Dairine whistled softly. Wow, so many variables. And so complicated. She may look sweet and unassuming but she is ambitious. “Okay. Spread it out for me and let’s take a look,” Dairine said, standing up, “and you can talk me through it the way you’ll talk the judges through when they come by your stand.”

  Mehrnaz jumped up from the couch, went out into the middle of the floor, and reached sideways into the air. Half her arm vanished as she felt around inside a pocket temporospatial claudication much like the ones both Dairine and Nita used sometimes. After that she came out with what, to Dairine’s surprise, looked like a young girl’s locked diary, bound in plastic and splashed with bright colors, most of them shades of pink.

  She caught Dairine’s expression, and giggled and blushed. “I know what it must look like . . .”

  “Don’t give it a thought!” Dairine said, laughing too. “Did you see the guy the other night carrying around the controls for an old PlayStation as his manual access? Not to mention that one Canadian guy with the Magic 8 Ball. How you access wizardry is between you and the Powers, and so’s what the interface looks like. When you want something different, you’ll find it.”

  Mehrnaz just nodded, looking relieved. “Okay . . .”

  She unclasped the book’s little strap-lock, riffled through the manual to one particular page, and then reached down into the manual as she’d reached into her otherspace pocket. Out of it she pulled up a glittering webwork of words and lines and diagrams, all swirling softly together like glowing gauze. With a practiced flick of the wrist she cast it shining and spreading out into the air, where it unrolled itself and slowly floated down to settle on the floor.

  Dairine grinned. “Slick!” she said. “You get an eight for presentation.”

  Mehrnaz smiled back at her, though there was something uncertain beneath it. “Really?”

  “Absolutely! It’s not easy to keep all the linkages together when you’re working with a spell graphically like that. If you’re not holding the main structures in your head, too, hearing and seeing the words in the Speech, the whole thing comes undone half the time.”

  “It took a long time to work out how,” Mehrnaz said, sounding rather unhappy about that, “and it did keep unraveling . . .”

  Dairine shook her head. “Not your problem now. So tell me about it. It’s okay to walk on this?”

  “Yes, of course. So the idea is this. An earthquake happens when stresses between seismically sensitive structures build up to the point where they have to discharge themselves. Detection via wizardry of faults likely to do significant damage when they discharge has come a long way, as it has in the mainstream scientific scholia. But prediction, even in the very short term, remains troublesome because there are so many variables involved at both the overtly and covertly scientific ends of the spectrum.”

  Mehrnaz walked around the spell, pointing at various parts of the diagram as she moved. “So this strategy involves installing monitoring routines on one specific type of fault, the oblique—typically the most damaging type of earthquake fault—as its activation heralds tend to be more easily read. It then activates a first-strike sine-mirroring intervention that cancels the worst of the kinetic energy in its earliest possible stages, then siphons off as much as possible of what escapes cancellation into a neutral ‘sink space’ while alerting supervising wizards to intervene personally and in more detail . . .”

  She’s good, Dairine thought. She knows her stuff and she doesn’t have trouble with talking about it. While Mehrnaz spoke, Dairine walked around the edges of her spell and then started working inward, while Spot did the same from the other side, looking the wizardry over for both sense and structure. Though the diagram was extremely intricate, everything looked very tightly knit and grounded. Well, geomancy, it makes sense . . .

  And her personal style’s good. In working with the manual for some time and seeing spells built by other wizards in it, Dairine had realized that there were some people whose spell diagrams were so structurally odd that it was hard to tell what they were doing—sometimes to the point where she needed to ask the manual to redisplay their spell in a default format. Mehrnaz, thankfully, wasn’t one of those. Her spell diagram was cleanly laid out, the power structures were offset and isolated fro
m the “executing” structures of the wizardry in what was considered best practice, and the flow of power through the working parts and outward into the executive sections was straightforward and easy to trace. While every spell was supposed to resemble an equation in that all the elements of its exchange of energy with the universe should balance, some spells did this with more grace than others, and Mehrnaz’s definitely came down on the graceful side.

  Still, there were some unfinished-looking areas and a few peculiarities of design, and Dairine’s attention was drawn to one of these fairly quickly. “Okay, hold up a moment. What’s that hole over there?”

  Mehrnaz peered where she was pointing. “Oh. The lacuna.”

  “What?”

  “You always leave an empty space in one of these spells. The world might want to assert itself.”

  Dairine restrained a laugh. “Thought the world asserting itself was precisely what you wanted to stop.”

  “What? No! It doesn’t work that way. You always have to leave some wiggle room when you’re dealing with the elemental presences . . .”

  “ . . . I have no idea what that means.” Only by making them sound like a joke would Dairine ever allow those words out of her mouth.

  Mehrnaz raised her eyebrows, perhaps starting to become aware of how rarely such phrases were going to come out of her mentor. “Well. You know how there’s a physical expression of a planet’s laws and tendencies . . .”

  “The kernel, yeah. Sort of a combined firmware-software bundle. My sister works with those.”

  “Right. Well, there’s also an emotional aspect or expression of a planet’s tendencies bound into that: the affective bundle, it’s called. What people think about the physical world, how they feel about it, and how the planet itself expresses and channels those thoughts and feelings.”

  “Like the whole idea of the Earth being alive—”

  “Well of course it’s alive,” Mehrnaz said, sounding annoyed. “Even popular culture has that concept, which shouldn’t be a surprise really.” She threw Dairine a look that suggested a private opinion that her mentor seriously needed educating.