by Diane Duane
Dairine smiled at that. I think I like the snotty Mehrnaz a lot better than the suck-up one or the shy uncertain one, she thought. Then again, that might say more about me than about her . . . Because behind the idea lay the constant thought of someone else who was snotty but whose style Dairine liked a lot.
She let the thought drop for a moment. “Gaia . . .”
“Yes, Gaia, but this isn’t some lovely sweet-natured mommy-Earth wandering around in flowery meadows wearing a big hat and a pretty frock.” Mehrnaz’s face twisted a bit with disdain. “This is Earth. This is power. She moves. She demands the right to move. And sometimes you have to talk her out of it. But to do that you have to leave space not just for how she is right now, but how she might be in ten minutes, an hour, a week. That’s part of why earthquake prediction is so hard. She moves, all over, everything is moving all the time: it’s all uncertainty. And setting aside a single bit of the Earth to analyze and intervene in is dangerous. It leaves out all that other movement. And when you construct an equation where some of the variables are going to have to go unspecified at construction time, you’d bloody well better leave some space open. Otherwise the wizardry comes undone like soggy toilet paper.”
“Not sure I needed that image.”
“It’s accurate, though.”
Dairine nodded. “Okay. So if the kernel is the ego, sort of, and the affective bundle, the spirit, is the superego . . . then there’s sort of an id in here somewhere, too?”
Mehrnaz shuddered. “Yeah, but maybe we don’t want to go there right this second. We allow for it in the equation.” She pointed at a very dark and tangled set of Speech-symbols over to one side of the spell diagram, bunched up tightly in their own subset circle. “Anyway, you have to leave the lacuna in there to allow for changes in the affective bundle.”
“And that’s the space over there.” Dairine paced over to look at it—a round area in the diagram, not even defined by a circle, but only by the presence of the other structures around it: an empty spot. “That’s it? It doesn’t look complicated.”
“It doesn’t need to be. Sometimes a space is just a space. The Earth’s full of emptiness, in places. It’s not all packed tight, like at the core: not solid. There are real lacunae, huge caves that no one will ever see. Some of them contain kinds of life we’re not meant to interact with, except very sparsely, very carefully. But most of them are just empty.” She smiled, and there was something mysterious about the look. “So much of solidity is empty space, right down to the atomic level. The universe is full of holes, and some of the solidest-seeming stuff is the emptiest . . .”
“Sounds kind of Zen.”
Mehrnaz sniffed at her. “Zen! Newbie stuff. It’s in the Bhagavad Gita,” she said. “And the holy Qur’an. Emptiness comes first. Solidity is a later invention. Emptiness has primacy. It’s the most senior thing there is.”
Dairine laughed and watched Spot spidering along the lines of the spell diagram, checking it for flaws, examining the tangents and junctures. “You’ve really got the theory down on this, don’t you?”
“It’s been on my mind for a long while . . .”
“Well, it’s time this got into other people’s minds, too.”
“It’s nice of you to say that.” Mehrnaz sat down on a nearby hassock and looked out across the spell diagram the way someone looks across a landscape they’re only visiting but would like to live in. “There’s only one problem.” She sighed deeply. “It’s not going to happen.”
There was something so hopeless about the words that Dairine couldn’t simply refuse to take them seriously. She looked at Merhnaz. “Why not?”
“Because I know I’m probably going to get dropped out at the eighth-finals stage.”
Dairine stared at her. “What?” She wasn’t going to say that the odds were on Mehrnaz being right: there were, after all, three hundred competitors, and the eighth-finals, “the Cull” as that stage was called casually, was where at least half the weakest projects would be winnowed out.
“I just know I am. Things . . . don’t usually work out for me.”
The sudden air of dejection that Mehrnaz was now wearing seemed to have come out of nowhere; now she sat looking at the spell diagram with an odd expression of annoyance. Dairine finished looking at the last few elements of the spell under her feet, then made her way over to her.
“You’ve done a whole lot of work here for someone who’s sure they’re going to fail out,” Dairine said. “This thing . . .” She shook her head. “I can see a few places you might want to polish, but seriously, they’re minor. If they threw the eighth-finals in here right now—” Dairine looked around. “And there might be room for it—” Mehrnaz gave her a wan smile. “Then I’d say you had at least an even chance of going through. Which is good, as I’d like to see someone test this live.”
Mehrnaz shook her head. “It’s very nice of you to say that. I just wish I could believe it.”
Dairine pulled over another hassock and sat down by her. “Look, Mehrnaz. If you’re so sure you’re going to fail, then why bother entering? You could have turned them down if you didn’t feel like putting yourself through this. Why are you in this thing?”
She shrugged. “I have to be,” she said.
Dairine took a breath, tried to figure out what was going on. Which brings me back to: why am I not in this thing?
The ironic answer Peaked too soon . . . breathed through the back of her mind in soft mockery. Dairine could remember a time when Nothing ever happens fast enough . . . was the theme song of her life. Now she found herself looking back at that earlier incarnation of herself and saying, Believe it or not, a time’s going to come when you’ll beg for things not to happen so fast. For your mom to stick around a while longer. For your power to stay at the levels they were when you started. For that particular friend to stay right where he is, exactly the way he is. Crazy-making, a pain in the butt . . .
“Tell me something,” Dairine said. “Why’d you get into geomancy in the first place? Because you’re seriously good at this.”
“You think so? You really think so?”
Dairine held still for a moment. Who’s left you in a state that you’re asking questions like that? she thought. Because I think I’d like to kick them. “Yeah, I really think so! Look, Mehrnaz, if there’s something you need to get through your head right now, it’s that I’m not going to jerk you around, because neither of us has time to waste on that. If something’s working, I’ll say so, believe me. If it’s not, you’ll know about it in a heartbeat. But where wizardry’s involved, and where somebody’s working at this level, tiptoeing around what needs to be said isn’t going to help anyone. And the meter’s running: it’s only—what, four days now until New York, until the eighth-finals?”
“Yes,” Mehrnaz murmured.
“So forgive me if I don’t waste any more time buttering you up, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So why are you in this, then? Because it might help if I understood.”
“Well.” Mehrnaz looked embarrassed, but not terminally so. “It was the endgame, really. Irina.”
“Yeah,” Dairine said, “I could see the point.”
“No, not just that,” Mehrnaz said. “It was—You don’t understand. It was Irina a long time before this.”
Oh no, Dairine thought. Is this some kind of crush issue? Not that there’d be anything wrong with that, but—
“How much do you know about her?” Mehrnaz said.
“Well, she’s the Planetary—”
“No, no. Not that.” Mehrnaz’s eyes went wide. “You don’t know, do you? Not what she does: what she’s done. You don’t know about San Francisco. You don’t know about La Paz. Or Sydney Marianas.”
“Wait, how do you mean—?”
“You don’t know about the earthquakes. The ones she stopped. By herself.” And Mehrnaz’s voice dropped. “You don’t know about Mazandaran! That’s the one that hit where I used to live, whe
n I was little. It’s why we moved here from Iran. So much was destroyed, our whole town was flattened. It broke windows all the way to Tehran. But it could have been so much worse, it could have spread and set off half the faults in the East. But it didn’t, because of Irina! She is so amazing. You have no idea what kind of wizardry that was, what kind of wizard she is.”
Oh God, Dairine thought, it’s worse than a crush, it’s a hero-worship sandwich with gratitude filling. And I thought when we met the other night that I was getting it bad from her!
. . . So possibly this is not the time to tell her that Irina was in my backyard not long ago, wheedling my dad for his burger recipe. “Well—” Dairine said.
“You don’t understand.” The tremor in Mehrnaz’s voice was impossible to mistake for anything but real passion. “I’d do anything, anything at a chance to study with her, to work with her. I want to do what she did, I want to keep people’s lives from being destroyed like that! Because I’ve been there.” Mehrnaz stared at the floor. “You have no idea what it’s like when you wake up in the dark and have to run, run out, and things start falling, and when the shaking stops all you want to do is sit down on the couch and cry. But there’s no couch, and no house . . . nothing but a pile of bricks and tiles with your whole life buried under them. And past that, nothing but roads twisted up and thrown around like toy car-racing tracks. And then the screaming starts.”
Mehrnaz fell silent. “It took me a long time to get the dreams to go away,” she said. “The sounds, the aftershocks. The way things smelled afterward.” She swallowed. “Not until after my Ordeal. I did some work on my head.” She looked grim, but very satisfied, and the expression made her face look completely different: younger, fiercer. “But once that was over, I knew what I wanted to do. This. And when I found out about the Invitational . . .” She shrugged. “Here I am.”
There’s something else going on, though. Dairine thought, something that scares you more than earthquakes. And that’s what the problem is. You’re going to fail yourself out of this somehow, fail yourself out of a chance at getting something you seriously want, because you’re so scared of whatever that other thing is that you’re going to make sure you’re pushed to one side.
Well, not if I can help it.
“Okay,” Dairine said. “Look. If you’ve come this far, then you need to stay in, okay? Because it’s not just you at stake here: it’s other wizards. If you last through the Cull, this spell—” she pointed at the floor—“will go into everybody’s manuals as a positively rated prospective intervention. Even if you never take it any further, other people will be able to. You’ll have a good chance at saving lives even if you get Culled, because your presentation will get heard. If you give yourself half a chance and work like you think you’re going to make it through, the spell will get even more attention, and that’s that many more lives you have a chance to save. So you have to stay in, Mehrnaz. It’s what you swore to do. It’s serving Life.” She sighed. “Not always easy . . .” God, I’m starting to sound like Nita. Let’s see if she swallows it, though . . .
Mehrnaz spent a few moments simply looking at Dairine. “Okay,” she said at last.
“Good.” Dairine sighed, and Spot, off to one side, shifted and made a soft muttering noise. “Then let’s talk about these few rough spots I noticed. I want to make sure I understand everything that’s going on before I make you start a polish . . .”
7
Hempstead / Elsewhere
IT WAS JUST BEFORE eight in the morning, and Nita was standing in the kitchen doing the dishes. Partly this was because there weren’t enough of them to bother putting in the dishwasher. Or there are, Nita thought, but they’ll sit there all day waiting for a full wash to build up, and what if somebody wants to use them?
The real reason, though, was that she wanted time to think. Since she and Kit had agreed to get involved in the Invitational, things seemed to have gotten very hectic—more so than could be accounted for by what they’d done. She and Kit had had two more sessions with Penn—Or rather, Kit had spent a total of nearly eight hours over two days getting him to fill in the multiple sketchy, incomplete, or half-baked parts of his coronal management spell, while Nita prowled around the edges ignoring Penn’s smart remarks and inept attempts to get on her good side.
The trouble is, she thought, that he has no idea where my good side is. Or why he’s on my bad side. For someone who saw himself as a very cool dude, it was surprising how Penn’s attempts to present himself that way kept backfiring. I still can’t believe that he actually kissed my hand. She rubbed it against her jeans in slightly grossed-out memory, something she’d caught herself doing before. If he tries that again, I’m going to have to explain things to him.
. . . Ideally, before Kit does.
She considered that notion, then laughed at herself. Not really his style, Nita thought. What is this, the Middle Ages? But all the same, she kept running up against behaviors of Penn’s that came across as immature. And he’s almost the same age as us. Doesn’t he have enough friends at school to help him get a sense of what works with people? Or does he not have enough friends, period?
. . . Or the wrong kinds of friends, it occurred to Nita after a moment. It was easy enough for things to go either way at school. Often enough she’d caught herself sitting through a long afternoon’s classes and thinking, I can’t wait for my senior year. Because once I’m there, I will be able to look at most of these people and think, ‘In just nine months I’ll be done with you and I’ll never have to see you again!’
It wasn’t that she disliked a lot of her fellow students. It was simply that for the most part she had so little in common with them that she might as well have been going to school with members of an alien species. In fact, generally speaking, I get along better with alien species than I do with a lot of these guys.
Nita laughed at herself as she picked up another small sandwich plate and started scrubbing at it with the abrasive side of the dish sponge. Then she sighed yet again and wondered what she and Kit were going to do about Penn. It’s not that he’s not a fairly competent wizard, she thought. He made it through his Ordeal, he goes on errantry when he’s sent, and he gets the job done. But beyond that, he didn’t seem to be much of a self-starter. Nita had checked her manual with an eye to having a look at Penn’s independent projects. What surprised her was that there weren’t any.
That had left her shaking her head. What does he do for fun? The answer seemed to be, not wizardry. He liked baseball, and ice hockey, which was slightly remarkable for someone from California; he sang with the choir at his church; he listened to a lot of rock and jazz. And all of these things he would talk about endlessly if you didn’t stop him. There were times when you’d be working with him and Penn would want to talk about anything except the wizardry you were debugging.
Or, Nita thought, times when Kit will be working with him. She was still having trouble trying to understand what possible reason Penn might have for not wanting to engage with her except as a girl. Or his image of a girl, Nita thought, and put the plate she was washing on the dish rack. Someone kind of sweet and friendly but not particularly dangerous. And as she picked up another dish and started scrubbing it, she had to snicker, because if that was Penn’s image of her, he was delusional. It’s not like I go around menacing people, exactly. But I’ve been dangerous enough on occasion. Does that bother him for some reason? And if it does, why?
She shook her head, rinsed the plate, and added it to the rack. Then she paused, having heard a floorboard creak in the upstairs hall. Dairine’s up . . . Or wait, maybe she’s just back. Her sister’s normal working hours had been badly thrown off by her own Invitational work: she’d been in India until nearly breakfast time today.
Nita heard the bathroom door upstairs shut, and reached out to grab the kettle, then filled it up and put it on the stove. From nowhere in particular Dairine had manifested a yen for coffee, and had even gone to the supermarket herself t
o buy it. Something her mentee’s got her onto, maybe? I should ask.
Nita went back to the sink and picked up the last dish. Meanwhile . . . Penn. They had another meeting set up with him for this afternoon, his time. On this side of things, thank heaven. I’m getting bored with being three hours out of whack half the time. Going off-world is so much easier, you don’t have to worry about zonelag . . . Nita stood there scrubbing, and sighed. There must be some spells that are good against that . . . I’ll look it up.
Don’t bother, Bobo said. There are several. But they’re energy-intensive, and I don’t recommend you start using them unless it’s an emergency. Fiddling around with your melatonin levels is dicey business.
Dairine came thumping down the stairs and leaned against the kitchen door, looking blearily at Nita. She was dressed in jeans and a long T-shirt—again, or still? Nita wondered. “Water’s about to boil,” she said.
“Thank you,” Dairine said, sounding like she’d prefer to go to sleep right where she stood.
“Go sit down before you fall down,” Nita said.
Dairine did that without discussion, which shocked Nita more than almost anything else her sister could’ve done. Then Dairine put her head down on her arms and blinked at Nita like someone who was finding it too much strain to think, let alone talk.
“You want some of your coffee?”
“Yes.”
Nita put the last dish on the rack, pulled two mugs down from the cupboard, and turned off the burner under the kettle. “How much sugar?”
“A lot. Two. Three if you’re using a small spoon.” She didn’t even look up. “Is Daddy here?”
“Nope, left for the shop around seven,” Nita said as she got herself a teabag and dropped it in one mug.
Dairine rolled her head on her arms and groaned. “Why do I feel like this?” she said to the table. “I’ve fought the Lone Power and I haven’t felt this tired.”
