Games Wizards Play

6

Mumbai

IT WAS PECULIAR, Dairine thought, that as a wizard you could go thousands of light-years away from home, even millions, and not get all that nervous about it. But go halfway across your own planet and you started to twitch.

Her own nervousness annoyed her. I’ve traveled distances that some human beings can’t even conceive of, she thought. I’ve been out practically to the information event horizon, the place beyond which things can barely be said to exist. I have buddies out there. And now I’ve got someone I know in Bombay—no, Mumbai, she corrected herself—and I’m losing my grip. What’s the matter with me?

Dairine stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom, finishing up the business of getting dressed. The unusual thing for her was that she was doing it at midnight, and was already resisting the temptation to yawn.

“You ought to give us timeslides,” she’d said to Tom when she’d gone over to his place to discuss this visit with him.

He’d given her a look of incredulous amusement. “Let me get this straight. You want us to selectively derange the structure of local space-time and risk a cascade of possible temporal paradoxes so that you don’t have to have your personal sleep schedule messed up?”

“You gave Nita and Kit one for their Ordeal when they asked!”

“Actually, that was because they were on their Ordeal,” Tom replied. He was leaning against his dining room table with his arms folded and his legs crossed at the ankle, and his whole demeanor radiated a disinclination to take Dairine seriously. “And the suggestion came from us. Carl has latitude to offer such instrumentalities to probationary wizards if he thinks it’s appropriate, which he did—as the Powers gave him to understand that Nita and Kit’s ability to return from their trip at the same time they left would prove useful. And as it happens, it did. In your case, however, a timeslide would serve no such purpose. And seeing that you were the one who suggested that the two of you meet up at your mentee’s place—”

“The orientation pack said that was a good thing, because people are more comfortable on their own ground!”

“That is completely true,” Tom said. “It was very smart of you to pick up on that suggestion. And no, the Powers are not going to give you a timeslide as a reward for being considerate. In fact if I were acting for them and I were going to give you anything right about now, it would be be a recommendation that you start stocking up on coffee.”

Frustrated, Dairine had scowled at him. “I thought coffee was supposed to stunt your growth.”

“Urban myth,” Tom said, heading over to sit down at his desk in the living room again. He flipped his laptop open, his expression intimating he’d had about enough of Dairine for one day. “Invented by a guy at the beginning of the twentieth century who was trying to sell people on his new grain-based coffee substitute. There are various other reasons why someone your age might want to avoid overdoing the caffeine-based beverages, but stunting your growth would not be one of them.”

“Tom,” Dairine whined, “they’re nine and a half hours ahead of us!”

“And you did that without even looking at the manual!” Tom said, tapping at his laptop’s keyboard and not looking up. “My faith in young people’s ability to do mind math is completely restored.”

Dairine paused, frowning. “What happened to the other half-hour?”

Tom shook his head. “Lost in translation? Take it up with the world temporal steering commitee. Maybe one of them has some time-share scam going.”

She sighed. When Tom got snarky like this, it was impossible to get anything useful out of him.

“I can hear you thinking how nonforthcoming I’m being at the moment,” Tom said. “But spare a thought for the other thirty or forty people who’ve been in here this morning already, looking for advice and assistance with Invitational issues.” He sighed. “And the thirty or forty who’ll come after you’ve left, before I get anywhere near my lunch. I’m a very popular man today . . .”

Dairine had to laugh at that. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get off your case now.”

“Please and thank you!”

She was heading for the door when Tom paused in his typing, staring at the laptop screen. “One thought,” he said, “just in passing. You might find it useful to have a personal invisibility spell loaded up for when you arrive.”

She studied him curiously. “Okay,” she said. “Anything else?”

“There’s a Dutch instant coffee that’s nice,” Tom said, still not looking up. “Sort of a big coffee crystal, very smooth. Can’t think of the name right now, Carl always buys it. Glass jar. If you look in the cupboard . . .”

“Thanks so very much,” Dairine said, rolling her eyes, and got out of there.

She spent some time before she left consulting both her manual and the Internet to see how people dressed in Mumbai. After all, she and Mehrnaz might wind up going out somewhere; there wasn’t any point in sticking out or looking like a tourist. After checking some images online, Dairine spent a while rummaging around in her closet and her drawers and finally settled on a light, high-collared, long-sleeved summery white tunic from a few years back. It still fit, even if it was shorter on her than it used to be. Over jeans it would be okay.

She hadn’t really started to get ready until her dad came back from the shop around nine that night, quite late for him: apparently he had to start getting himself together for a Tuesday night wedding. At the rate he’s going, Dairine thought, he’s gonna have to hire somebody else to help in the store. Mike won’t be enough. She was grateful, though, that business had picked up so much lately. After their mom had died, when he’d got past the initial shock, there had been a time when her dad had insisted on being in the shop all day, handling every order, burying himself in the work. He’d lost weight and worn himself out. Both Nita and Dairine had worried a lot about him, because simply telling him that he needed to slow down had had no effect.

It had been a bad time for all of them, but slowly their lives had worked themselves into a new kind of normalcy—insofar as anything about life could be normal when two of the three people in a family were wizards—and their dad’s work habits had evened out, too. As much because he just couldn’t keep doing that any more, I guess. His body wouldn’t put up with it. And, Dairine had suspected at the time, it had also occurred to their dad that if he put himself in the hospital by abusing himself, he wouldn’t be taking very good care of his daughters. Shortly he’d hired Mike, and started training him in what needed to be done in the store. Mike was smart and he liked the work, and (as important, to Dairine’s way of thinking) liked their dad. So that part of life had started to get normal, at least.

She grabbed her hairbrush off her dresser, brushed her hair back, and fumbled around in her dresser drawer to find a scrunchie for it: better not have it flapping around in the breeze when you’re in a strange new place where you might want to move fast. In the midst of putting her hair up, Spot came spidering in. “Ready?” she said.

Of course. You?

“Nearly.” And then she looked at herself in the mirror, and dropped her hands. “No . . .”

No?

Dairine sighed. “I kind of feel like I’m leaving Nelaid flat. You know what I mean?”

I’m not very sure. As I remember, he told you that you ought to do this thing.

“Yeah, well. When he and Dad get in one of those tag-teaming moods, sometimes it’s not so easy to figure out what they’re thinking separately.”

She gave the scrunchie one final twist and sat down on her bed while Spot clambered up onto it and looked at her thoughtfully with several stalked-up eyes. Stopping your work with him right now troubles you, he said.

She nodded. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. So much of what he’s teaching me, I started out having to parrot it back to him. Do what he was doing. But it’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to understand the theory.” She reached up and fiddled with her hair again. “I keep seeing something he does, or sometimes I’ll be hearing something Nelaid’s talking about, truly hearing it instead of just listening to it, and it’ll remind me of something or other Roshaun said to me once.”

Something specific?

“No . . . Except yes. Once or twice,” Dairine murmured, her gaze going unfocused as in her mind she saw herself walking around the stellar simulator, staring at it, at its many readouts of the subtle and complex forces in play inside Thahit or Earth’s Sun, and listening to what Nelaid was telling her about them. And something he said would unexpectedly trigger the sound of Roshaun’s voice saying something very similar. Then her insides would flare up with the thought, That, that was something important. But why was it important? And then half the time she’d lose the thread of whatever it was about in a flood of sheer relief that she could remember what his voice sounded like, that she hadn’t forgotten how he sounded. The thought of forgetting Roshaun’s voice woke Dairine up sweating cold, some nights.

But you can’t remember what it was about, Spot said.

“No,” she said, and sighed. “I wonder sometimes, am I imagining it? But I don’t think so.” Dairine frowned. “There’s something . . . something useful that I’ve been missing. Something we’ve been getting close to, when I’m working with the simulator. We’ve been doing a lot of work on stellar kernel stuff, the star’s software . . .” She sighed again. “There’s so much data, though, it keeps piling up, and every time I think I might have time to start reviewing it, something else happens and I get distracted . . .”

You don’t have to do this, you know. They said you didn’t.

“But yeah, I do, because I said I was going to,” Dairine said. “If I was going to pull out, I should have done it before the meet-and-greet the other night . . . I’m in it now. It’s only for a few weeks. And who knows, maybe something’ll happen to jog my memory.”

Dairine got up, looked herself over in the mirror one last time, and on a hunch reached into the top dresser drawer to rummage around. She pulled out a big dark blue scarf in light, cheap silk, something of her mom’s. She kept remembering that Mehrnaz had had her head covered. What religion she might be wasn’t any of Dairine’s business at this point, but if Mehrnaz felt she needed to wear something like that when she was out in public, then Dairine might wind up in the same situation. And it wouldn’t do to differ from her mentee in any way that would attract people’s attention. She wound the scarf around her neck a couple of times, knotted it, shoved the ends down her collar, and then turned to pick Spot up off the bed. “Ready to go undercover?”

Ready.

Down at the bed’s end was one last thing she thought she might need: a plain brown leather messenger bag with a long strap. Her mom had bought it for her some years back thinking it would be good for schoolbooks, but her mother’s concept of what you needed to carry your books to school in was plainly from the distant past, when schools didn’t believe in giving you quite so much homework. Dairine slid Spot into the bag and buckled it shut. “Got those coordinates I selected?”

Located. Ready to initialize.

“Then let’s go!”

They popped out in a place Dairine had carefully preselected with the manual, an alleyway within a few minutes’ walk of Mehrnaz’s family’s apartment. It was a strange sort of halfway-to-Oz moment: the pavement of the alley where she stood all scattered with rubbish, barred doors and screen doors opening off it, walls full of windows reaching up high on either side and blocking out the light, so that it was almost dim here, with the hum of overtaxed air-conditioners drifting down from above. But at the alley’s end, everything was people and vehicles and bikes rushing by in both directions in full sunlight, a gaudy hot morning light completely unlike what morning light far north of here would be.

On target? Spot said in her mind. He could most likely see it through her eyes, but out of courtesy he often acted as if he couldn’t.

“Yeah,” Dairine said.

She walked down the alley and out into the street. But this took her longer than she expected, because that street—which she’d selected because it seemed quiet—was extremely busy and crowded. Dairine had walked New York streets at lunch hour more than once, but this was far worse than anything she remembered. There seemed to be different rules for how you walked here: people seemed willing to be pushed a lot closer together than they’d been even in the worst crush Dairine could remember at rush hour in the subway. The smells here were different, too: car exhaust, of course—the traffic was crazy—but also bizarre scents and unexpected stinks, people’s perfumes and bodies and the smell of food seemingly everywhere. For me it’s the middle of the night, she thought, her stomach growling emphatically as she went by a storefront where they were frying something spicy-smelling, so why am I hungry?

And the whole picture was complicated by the way people stared at her . . . specifically, the way men were staring at her. It wasn’t as if that had never happened before, but the gawking she was experiencing now was different from the usual kind. From some of the guys, there was an unpleasant owning quality to the gaze they fastened on her: as if they felt they had a right to stare.

At first Dairine handled this exactly the way she would’ve handled it at home. As she walked, she stared back to let them know she wasn’t afraid. But shortly she began to notice that this didn’t help. At home, glances would’ve shifted, eyes would’ve looked away. Here a lot of them just kept on looking, and some of the men smiled. Dairine did not find the smiles at all nice.

Her first impulse was to use some wizardry to give them something else to think about—like falling on their faces in the crowded street—and see if they could smile at that. But she could imagine what Tom’s response would be to that kind of behavior. I’m not here to cause trouble, she thought. I’m here to get a job done, and help somebody out, and keep a low profile. If there’s some kind of culture-shocky thing going on, for the moment my job is to cope.

Annoyed, Dairine stepped to one side of the street into the narrow space between a news kiosk and a sweetshop, and said the last few words of the spell she’d been holding ready on Tom’s advice. A second later, she was invisible and moving away from there, while one of the nearest men who’d been staring and grinning at her now blinked and tried to figure out what had happened.

Dairine snickered quietly and kept moving, while at the same time being fairly resentful at having to disappear. It was a challenge, moving in circumstances like these when nobody else could see her, but, she reminded herself, it was a challenge she was up for.

She glanced at her watch as they went. “Nearly nine thirty . . .”

Nine twenty-eight. We’re close.

Maybe sixty yards ahead of her, Dairine could see the street where she needed to turn. She passed ten or fifteen more storefronts, some shining and modern and some unbelievably ramshackle, bizarrely standing side by side. It was as if the place had history that it was both trying to hang on to and eager to get rid of. Up near the corner where the crazy-busy street met a crazier-busier boulevard, Dairine pressed herself briefly into a doorway out of the relentless flow of people and stood there for a moment to get her breath, shaking her head at the shouting, blazing multilingual cacophony of it all.

Straight ahead on your right, Spot said.

Got it. Let’s be uninvisible for a few moments. Not being seen here has its uses, but crossing the street that way strikes me as kind of death wish-y. In particular, a very few moments watching the intersection from here had suggested to Dairine that traffic lights in Mumbai were considered more of a hint or guideline than an actual requirement that anyone stop.

Fading in now. Find a spot to be less conspicuous on the other side and I’ll fade us out again.

Dairine waited a few seconds for the fade to be complete before shouldering herself out into the crowd of people waiting at the corner for the lights to change. In a matter of seconds she was surrounded by more people coming up on her from behind, and was about to tell herself Now, don’t get all paranoid when Spot observed, At five o’clock behind you, someone who wants the bag—

She felt a hand on the strap even as everyone started to move out in unison into the intersection. For that she had a wizardry ready, one which had come highly recommended in the manual for wizards on the go in public places when thieves were about. Smiling, Dairine whispered the last few words of the spell and kept walking. She couldn’t feel any difference, but to the person tugging fruitlessly on the strap of her bag, it now had a virtual weight of several hundred pounds.

Dairine then spun around to walk backwards for a pace or three, smiling what she hoped was a most evil and eldritch smile right into the shocked and uncomprehending face of the thin little woman who’d been attempting to relieve her of Spot’s bag. Then Dairine turned back again in the direction in which she’d been headed, pushing farther into the crowd as it crossed the street. As soon as she got up on the sidewalk on the far side she spotted another alleyway not too far ahead, and when she reached it turned into it, giving it just enough of a glimpse to make sure it was empty. Okay, fade . . .

A few moments later she peered out of the alley, waiting for a tiny gap in the crowd to slip into. The trick of it seemed to be to make sure you were always moving faster than the people who might bump into you from behind. Only a couple hundred more yards, right?

A hundred and fifty-three.

She kept going. This street, though it looked more upmarket and modern than the one she’d turned off of, still had something of that between-periods struggle going on. But it was hard to say which looked grander—the glossy new shops and apartments, all glass and chrome, or the older buildings, most of which were of carved stone and had a solider, more impressive look to them. That’s probably because they were built to let you know where the money and power were, Dairine thought. Though her world history unit last year had touched only briefly on India, she had a fairly clear sense of the complexity of the relationship between this country and the power that had once run everything here but now insisted that these days they were both absolutely the best of friends. Dairine made an amused face at the idea. If she knew anything about friendship at all, it was that even when it was true and deep, it was never uncomplicated.

A hundred yards, Spot said. On your left. There’s a sort of little driveway circle in front.

Dairine nodded: up ahead she saw something that might have been a taxi pull into it. She forged ahead, and as she did so an errant breeze—welcome enough in this heat—blew across in front of her and brought her a smell of something else frying. I don’t know what that is, she thought, but I really want some. It smelled like sauteed onions, and it was already talking her stomach out of the idea that it was bad for her to eat so late at night.

Scent analysis, Spot said. Onion bhaji.

Oh, God, Dairine said silently. Make a note of that! Whatever else we do, I’m going out for some of that later.

Noted. Fifty yards.

Dairine sighed at her growling stomach and kept on walking. And after a few more shiny shopfronts, Right there, Spot said. Across the street.

Dairine stared at the building. “But that’s a hotel!”

Only part of it, Spot said. There’s a private dwelling on the top floor. You’ll want to go around the side: there’s a private entrance under the archway that leads back toward the parking lot.

Dairine stared at the building, amazed. The whole front of it was faced in rose-colored marble, with a colonnade of paler marble pillars stretching across the facade. The place was huge, and rose up in about five stories more of carved pink marble, like something out of a film set.

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 okay,” 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 from 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.

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, when 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 . . .”