by Diane Duane
“Oh come on, at least wait till you’ve seen a few!”
But soon enough Kit found that holding back from dropping one Mentors’-Picks token after another was harder than it looked. Some of the spells and wizardly projects were amazingly ambitious, all of them were wildly creative, and the young wizards who were presenting them were across the board so cheerfully excited about their work that it was almost impossible for Kit to walk past without stopping. And every time he stopped, he wanted to drop another token.
The names of the projects alone were enough to do it, sometimes. “Burning the Rain: Why Not? Desalinization with a Side of Subterfuge,” for example. That one was about using controlled wizardry-driven ionization and aerosol redirection spells to help make it rain where rain was needed, while also fooling drought-stricken desert countries into thinking that their gradual (and carefully supervised) climatic recovery was an unanticipated, idiosyncratic function of world climate change. The competitor responsible, a dark-skinned blond-dreadlocked twelve-year-old boy in a tank top and surfer jams, stood there laughing and explaining his floor-spread spell diagram to the people gathered around it, while overhead a six-foot-wide cloud like something out of a cartoon continually rained gently down on them all (and an uptake spell underneath the spectators recycled the water and kept it from running all over the floor). Kit saw at least one pair of wizards vanish from in front of the “water feature” and reappear a couple of minutes later in swimsuits.
Then there was “Don’t Look Now!” which was a new take on stealth shielding for wizards who needed to hide some crucial work in progress. The shield spell, once activated, synced up with a very tightly constrained conditional timeslide wizardry and superimposed a perfect 3D “playback” of what that given area had been like at a previous time of one’s choosing—ideally a time when nothing was happening there. But for demonstration purposes the “shielded” area on the exhibition floor was now set to loop back to two minutes before. As a result, spectators were dodging in and out of the project demonstration space like people standing in front of an electronics shop’s window to see themselves in the view of a camera—but they were doing it so they could stand next to themselves as they’d been two minutes previously. There was a lot of laughter and joking (“Didn’t I tell you how those jeans looked from behind? Didn’t I tell you?”), and almost constant flashing from held-up phones as wizards took selfies with themselves. While this went on, the competitor—a calm, smiling Aboriginal girl—leaned against her “stand” with her arms folded, explaining the intricacies of intratemporal visualization manifestation to anyone who’d hold still long enough.
And as for “Taub-NUT Space Seen as an Answer to Practically Everything” . . . The competitor responsible for it, someone called Marit Horowitz, wasn’t minding his or her stand when Kit and Nita passed by. Laid out on a floating table, and flowing over the edges of it to hang down like some kind of glowing lacy tablecloth, was a spell packed so insanely tight with delicate detail that figuring out its major structures at first glance was impossible. The Speech-phrases in it were so fine that they looked like they’d been woven into the structure by a spider with particularly good handwriting and a fondness for heavy theoretical work.
Kit stopped and read the project’s prospectus—or as much of it as he could, since it was mostly mathematical symbols—and then read what he could of it again. Next to him, Nita was doing the same thing. Kit was intensely relieved when she heaved a sigh and shook her head.
“It’s something to do with diagnosing the status of local hyperspace, right?” Kit said.
There was a pause. “Yeah, I think so.”
Nita’s hesitation made Kit feel better. “Most of it, though, I’m not getting. Tell me it’s just me.”
Nita stood there for the space of a few breaths and then looked at Kit. “Nope,” she said, shaking her head. She leaned over the “table” and read the competitor-wizard’s personal profile, which was embedded in it. “And he’s eight.”
Kit opened and closed his mouth. “How do you even have an Ordeal at eight?”
Nita shook her head again. “As soon as I can find somebody to explain this to me in baby words,” she said, sounding fairly put out, “either him or someone else, I’m giving him a token.” And she wandered off down the exhibition space.
Kit waited until Nita was out of sight behind some people in the crowd . . . then dropped his round, Speech-initialed token, glowing, onto the table. The token twinned itself: the twin vanished into the table and the original leaped back into Kit’s hand. Kit grinned and went after Nita.
This is all so amazing, he thought as he gradually caught up. There were people redesigning ocean currents and tweaking the Jet Stream, there were young wizards playing around with superconductivity and others building microscopic worldgates into computers to act as concrete data transfer mechanisms; there were kids Kit’s age or younger, seriously younger—at least by three or four years—playing with dangerous natural forces as if they were Tinkertoys. Why didn’t it feel so dangerous when I was doing it? Kit thought.
Though maybe having company helps . . .
He wandered past a brawny dark-haired guy in a long white robe who was displaying something that had to do with dynamically changing atmospheric density. It apparently had applications for restoring the ozone layer, but most of the kids gathered around the display were using the custom-redensified air so they could quack-talk like people who’d been breathing helium. Avoiding a couple of these who were doubled over with laughter, Kit bumped into Nita from behind. She was standing there with arms folded at the back of a crowd of people, and she wasn’t making any move to slip through them.
The reason was Penn, who was walking his tall self up and down the front of the crowd and waving his arms as the spectators examined the spherical-structure version of his spell while it rotated gently up out of the floor and down into it. “Absolutely no way it can miss, my cousins! Drop your tokens here and vote for what three out of four passing wizards have already declared to be the best thing since sliced bread, the best way to redirect the solar wind that anyone’s ever come up with, not least because voting for it makes you . . . look . . . great!”
And with a series of grand curving gestures he traced a flaming Wizard’s Knot in the air and started the mockup of his spell running. Its 3D version flared out of view, to be instantly replaced by an underfloor view of the Earth as seen from low Earth orbit. An incoming flood of charged particles from the distant Sun came shooting and sparkling in, blinding-bright as rain caught by lightning—a sudden splendor of inbound solar wind made visible. But at a gesture from Penn the spell went active, and the reality of it as it would appear in operation, rather than the schematic, came burning to life above him. The power conduit between the spell and the Sun started pulling energy into the space around the Earth as the wizardry went fully active. Penn flung his arms up over his head, and an invisible half-dome of repelling power sprang up above him, matching the Earth’s curvature, so that the high-energy particles bounced off it like hailstones off a tin roof in dancing curves of light.
Penn stood there with his eyes squeezed shut and a triumphant grin plastered over his face as the crowd gave him a round of applause. Some of them pushed forward to drop pick-tokens in a hot spot at his feet, a glowing circle with pointing neon arrows and a label that said (first in the Speech, but then switching every second to English and other languages) SHOW YOUR SMARTS HERE!
As the crowd started to move on, Penn bowed effusively to them, and bowed again to the new group that was moving up to see what was going on. “Thank you, thankyouverymuch, I’ll be here all week . . .”
Kit laughed under his breath. “This is so like him.”
“Yeah, it is,” Nita said, very low. It was almost a growl. Kit found himself entertaining two very different thoughts as she moved away from him and toward Penn: If I were him I’d watch what I said to her right now, and Why is it that when she sounds like that it’s ki
nd of hot?
A break developed in the crowd in front of them and Nita was already slipping forward to where the basic spell, once again in 3D spherical mode, had reappeared and was once more rotating in and out of the floor. “Ah, Juanita,” Penn said, beaming at her, “I see you’ve been getting the vote out for me. Lots of interest, nice to see you’re getting the job done . . .”
“I haven’t done a single thing,” Nita said. “Ask Kit.”
Kit produced the most neutral expression he could manage and focused on the spell diagram, because he knew that tone of voice; it might sound casual, but he knew better. “Looks like you were busy last night, though. Thought you might have decided to sleep in instead . . .”
“Sleep? Sleep is for the weak. Did some light spell work along the lines of some of the stuff you mentioned, watched the Sun come up, decided to come in early and wow the crowds.”
Nita smiled. “Think you’re gonna have enough energy to carry on like that all day?”
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head, I’ll be pacing myself.” He turned his back on her, and so missed the way her eyes went wide. “Kit, my man—”
“Penn,” Kit said. If he fist-bumped with Penn, it was reflex. It also distracted Penn from noticing Kit’s glance over Penn’s shoulder at the disbelieving expression on Nita’s face. “That looked pretty good there.”
“Yeah, they’ve been eating it up. Got something like—” Penn picked up his manual, glanced down at one page where a bar graph was showing. “Sixty-eight tokens already. And it’s not even lunchtime! If it keeps going like this, there’ll be three or four hundred by the time the judging’s done. I am gonna sweep this thing!”
“Long time between lunchtime and five p.m.,” Kit said, “but let’s see how it goes.” He glanced at his watch as if he had some reason to. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover . . . we should go. But we’ll look in on you every now and then.”
“Aw, come on, stay for one whole run-through and bask in the reflected glory, huh?”
Reflected. Glory. Kit grinned, and hoped it didn’t look too fake. “We wouldn’t want to distract anyone from the idea that what you’re doing’s all yours,” he said. “Go right on ahead.”
“Wouldn’t want to deprive you of any reflection, either . . .” Nita said, heading down toward the next exhibitor’s space with a slight smile on her face.
Penn turned to watch her go. “Kit,” he said after a moment, with the air of someone asking a delicate question among Just Us Guys, “do you find her kind of . . . hard to understand sometimes?”
“Well, every now and then,” Kit said, “yeah. But you know what? The Lone Power has exactly the same problem.”
And he gave Penn what he hoped would be mistaken for a conspiratorial look and went after Nita.
When Kit caught up with her, Nita was thoughtfully looking over a very compact and elegant spell diagram that was about a tenth the size of Penn’s. Kit quietly leaned over her from behind and whispered in her ear, “I’m so sad now.”
She didn’t turn around. “Sad why?”
“Thought you were gonna pretty-little-head-butt him into another time zone. I was getting ready to put the manual on record.”
Nita gave him a sideways look as they moved on together. “I had something else in mind.”
“Oh?”
“Chilling him out a little. Pluto’s nice this time of year.”
Kit snickered. “That place where you dumped Dairine’s bed that time . . .”
“Nice crevasse,” Nita said. “Dark. Deep. Cold.” Then she sighed. “Kit, he’s not worth it. I want to wander around here and look at all these other wizardries.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “And drop a bunch more tokens.”
Nita nodded, but didn’t say anything else for a few moments. Kit stayed quiet.
“I’m done with him,” Nita said. “Absolutely done.”
“Which could be a problem, since as far as he goes we’ve barely started.” Then it was Kit’s turn to sigh. “You know, though, I just had this awful thought.”
“Yeah?”
“Think what he’s going to be like if he makes it through to the quarter-finals.”
Nita covered her eyes briefly. “It is bad to secretly wish your mentee will get deselected with extreme prejudice,” she said. “So bad.”
“When we’re supposed to be helping him win? I guess.”
“Great. On top of everything else, guilt. I needed guilt so much.”
She rubbed her face, then looked up at Kit almost challengingly. “Never mind. He doesn’t need us hanging around; we’ve done everything we can for him. And we’ve got more things to think about than Penn.”
“Yeah. Like where’s Dairine?”
Nita laughed. “I really am that transparent, aren’t I.”
“Lucky guess. Come on, let’s go admire everyone’s stuff and drop tokens all over them to make up for Elvis back there.”
10
Javits Center: The Cull
DAIRINE AND MEHRNAZ and Spot popped out in the sheltered green space at the far end of the Callahans’ backyard and made their way up through the garden toward the house. At least it’s not raining, Dairine thought. The weather forecast had mentioned a chance of showers, but there didn’t seem to be any in the neighborhood right now. Nothing showed through the leaves of the trees but blue sky and sunshine.
Mehrnaz was staring at everything with absolute delight, and spun around once as they walked toward the back of the house, as if trying to take in everything at once. “Everything’s so small and pretty!” she said. “It’s like something out of a storybook!”
“Seriously?” Dairine said, and laughed at the thought of anyone considering a suburban New York tract house surrounded by chain-link fencing as being at all charming or cute. “Well, let’s get our butts into the storybook house, because I’ve got to change out of this.” She pulled her tunic away from her waist, making a face as she felt it peel away. “I thought I didn’t mind humidity. I mean, it gets humid here, but wow, in your part of the world it’s been raised to an art form. Five minutes outside and look at me!”
“Well, you were the one who wanted more bhajis!”
“Yeah, thanks for reminding me of that, and you are in so much trouble for getting me hooked on the ones with the chilies—”
“Oh, this is my fault, is it?”
“It is, and I’ll tell the world, so don’t play innocent.” They went out the side gate to the driveway, and Dairine led the way up the steps to the house and unlocked the back door. “Come on, I’ll just be a few minutes . . .”
Mehrnaz followed her through the kitchen and dining room, and looked around in wonder. “It’s all so snug! I could wear it like a coat.”
Dairine snickered as she headed up the stairs to her room, because sometimes when the house got full of people, or wizards, or both, it felt that tight. “You seriously don’t like having all that extra space?”
“Sometimes,” Mehrnaz said, following her up. “There are a lot of us, sometimes the place gets awfully full. But it’s so empty when everyone’s out doing things. I start feeling like a bean in a gourd, rattling around . . .”
They chatted while Dairine rifled through her closet for a tank top and a loose shirt to throw over it, now that she was out of an environment where she didn’t feel the need to cover up so completely. Mehrnaz bounced on her bed and gazed around at Dairine’s desk and books and posters, and Spot clambered up on the bed beside her and watched them both curiously. As she ducked out and down the hall to the bathroom to change, Dairine caught a glance from one of his spare eyes as it stalked around to follow her.
She likes you.
Possibly a good thing, Dairine said silently to Spot as she closed the bathroom door.
And she thinks you might be a friend.
Yeah, I was getting that. The funny thing about it was that Dairine didn’t have many of those who were local. All the people I like are from far away, she thoug
ht. And sometimes it seems like the farther away they are, the better I like them.
There’s a message there somewhere, Spot said.
Dairine wondered about that while she got out of her sweaty clothes and into the fresh ones. No question, she’s nice. But I don’t want to hurt her feelings, don’t want her expecting anything from me that’s not going to happen. Need to make sure she knows that after this is over, I have to get back to business. Got somebody to find . . .
She paused long enough to splash some water on her face and scrub it dry, then headed back to her room. Mehrnaz had gotten up again and was peering out the side window, past the neighbors’ driveway and into their messy yard, with the kind of rapt and wistful expression Dairine would normally have expected to see on someone looking through a window into Shangri-La or Middle-earth.
“You ready?” Dairine said. “It’s almost twelve-thirty . . . we should get going.”
Mehrnaz turned and suddenly Dairine was thrown off balance by the nervousness in those dark eyes. “Is this going to work?” she said. “Truly?”
Is this going to work . . . ? It was a question Dairine remembered from what seemed too long ago. The stakes had been much higher then. But how do I know what this feels like for her? Except by looking at her.
“I told you it will,” Dairine said. “And I told you I didn’t have time to BS you, Mehrnaz. Let’s go show ’em how it’s done.”
She headed for the stairs, and heard Mehrnaz follow her down, and Spot ticking along on all his legs after her. “Spot, set up the transport spot in the back for Javits, we can pop out in their dedicated transport hot spot—”
But from behind her, as she passed through the dining room, came the sound of a soft chime. It was nothing associated with Dairine’s phone, or with Spot. She turned around. “Was that yours?”
“Uh, yeah,” Mehrnaz said. She’d stopped in the living room, and was staring at her phone and looking a bit shocked. “I lost track of the time, it’s Isha already! Is it all right if we go in about fifteen minutes?”
