Games Wizards Play

Antarctica and Daedalus

“TO DESCRIBE THIS WHOLE EVENT as unbelievably witless and profoundly distasteful would probably be an understatement of considerable magnitude.”

The Planetary Wizard for Earth lived in a third floor apartment in a very average suburb of Prague. The flat had beautiful high ceilings and a hardwood floor and five or six rooms that opened in and out of one another through tall double doors. The living room had six tall windows, a fireplace in the far wall, and shag rugs and brightly colored baby toys scattered across the floor. Over on one side was a crib, in which a baby in a diaper and a T-shirt with a picture of Donald Duck was lying on his back, sound asleep. The rest of the room was filled with comfortable furniture, none of which Kit or Penn was sitting on. They were standing in the middle of that hard wooden floor, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, while the woman who was arguably the most powerful wizard on Earth glowered at them from across the dining room table where she was working.

She sighed the exasperated sigh of someone with too many chores to do in too short a time. All around her on the table were piles of paperwork, books that might or might not have been wizards’ manuals, and empty coffee cups. With one hand Irina was rubbing her forehead. With the other she held a pen she was using to tap more or less constantly on a legal pad, where many notes were written in a tiny, neat hand.

“You,” Irina said, pointing at Kit. “I’m sure I don’t know why I need to keep having these talks with you. You came to me very highly recommended. Tom Swale, whose opinion I trust implicitly, spoke very highly of you. But now I have to go back to Tom and say, ‘How can you be sending me this person to work with when he behaves the way he behaved last night?’ You’ve embarrassed Tom, you’ve embarrassed me, and as for what the Powers That Be make of it—” She stared at the ceiling as if begging for help.

“And about you,” she said, pointing at Penn, “I’ve no particular reports at all. You do your work, you go on errantry when it’s required of you, and generally speaking you do an okay job! But the problem seems to be that when you’re not on errantry, you feel yourself at liberty to share your opinions about things. And some of these opinions . . .” She shook her head rather helplessly. “I’m not sure what century they come from. They remind me more of ancient Babylon than anything else. And the Babylonians may have had some terrific wizards, but as a civilization they had a long way to go before they started treating people like human beings.”

Irina glared at them both again. “Wizards are in general expected by the Powers That Be to exhibit good sense. Courteous behavior. Intelligence! But I’m looking in vain for any sign of any of those from you two after—” and she glanced at the legal pad she’d been writing on—“9:48 Canberra time last night. You could’ve done serious damage to the convention center. You could’ve done serious damage to each other. The spell you were using, yes, it’s very well known, and if you’re familiar with it and careful with it one can usually recover from it even under fairly dire circumstances, but I question whether either of you was being careful last night. At least you had the smidgen of good sense to ask for a force field. I wish that Ronan had exerted more pressure on you to to stop what you were doing, but it’s possible he correctly perceived that at that point there was no stopping either of you, short of dropping the roof on your heads.”

She dropped the pen on her legal pad so that she could rub her forehead with both hands. “There’s no point in asking either of you what you were thinking, as you plainly weren’t thinking,” Irina said, as with a whirr of wings the parakeet flew onto the table, wobbled over to the pad, and picked up the pen in its beak. It started to walk off with it, and Irina reached out and took the pen back, then dropped it on the legal pad again. “Thought was in fact the furthest thing from either of your minds. Other organs appear to have been in play that are not very useful for thought. Yes, I know that at your age everyone gets very hormonal, there’s no way to avoid it. But combining that particular set of hormones with wizardry can be as irresponsible and counterproductive as combining wizardry with alcohol or drugs.” And she glared at Penn. “Understand me: We have room for passionate wizards, we have room for sexual wizards, we have room for wizards who act on impulse—because sometimes impulse is the right thing to act on. But we have no room, none, for idiotic wizards. And you two have somehow managed to combine cleverness about the way you use spells and manage your wizardly practice with occasional flashes of the most extraordinary idiocy. I really begin to wonder if it might not be smartest to take you out of circulation for a while.”

Kit and Penn stared at each other in confusion and dread.

Irina let them stand there like that for a few moments. “You have to understand,” she said, “that because of my position as Planetary, I have wide latitude over the practice of wizardry on this planet. I am sometimes in a position to recommend to the Powers That Be that they offer wizardry to a specific person. And I’m also in a position, sometimes with the greatest regret, to request the Powers to withdraw wizardry from a person. The withdrawal can be very short-term, or very, very long, if necessary.”

The parakeet was attempting to make off with Irina’s ballpoint pen again. She took it back and once more began tapping on the legal pad with it while the parakeet made grabs for it.

“I hate doing that to younger wizards,” she said, “because all their good habits and expertise they’ve acquired during the early practice tend to get mislaid during a prolonged ban. Often they’re never again quite the wizards they were. And you can guess what such a ban does to relationships that these individuals might have with other wizards.”

Kit had never had a referent before for the phrase “his blood ran cold,” but he had one now.

“I wouldn’t like Nita to suffer as a result of such a ban,” Irina said. “She’s done nothing but try hard to keep you two on an even keel. But the way you work with each other, or I should say fail to do so, is making that effort increasingly difficult. I need to find a solution to this problem fairly quickly, because the finals of the Invitational are fast approaching. And we have never, never yet had a finalist chucked out for behavioral issues. Other reasons, sometimes, yes. But not that.”

She paused. “If either of you has anything useful to say to me here that does not involve some imbecilic attempt to blame the other guy, I’d be happy to hear it now. Anything.”

Kit fought with his own urges briefly before finally saying, “Nita’s been seeing some kinds of disturbing things in her dreams. And I think maybe I’ve been getting kind of disturbed by them too.”

Irina sat looking thoughtfully at him.“You two are fairly close,” she said.

Kit blushed, twitched a bit where he stood, and looked away. “Not like that,” Irina said. “I have no interest in where you are in that regard. It’s not my business. But your mental connection has sometimes been quite strong. I understand that that’s in flux right now—which is normal for this age, and for this type of relationship. But how have your dreams been?”

Kit shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Usually I don’t remember most of my dreams. But right at the moment—I’m not remembering any of them.”

“Is that so,” Irina said. “Then may I make a suggestion? If at some point in the near future you have a dream that you do remember more vividly than usual—please share it with one or the other of your Supervisories. I’d like to have it screened. She made a note. “But this isn’t germane to the immediate problem. There is no question that the piece of work that you have brought to us—” and she pointed at Penn—“is superior. We weren’t kidding when we wrote our evaluation. This is one of a possible suite of solutions to a problem that’s going to become more and more of an issue as Earth becomes ever more surrounded by fancy electronics on which the daily lives of billions and billions of people rely.”

Irina leaned back in her chair. “You have a right to be credited for that work and to continue to do it—so I’m reluctant to ban you. But I’m not yet entirely decided whether I want to let you present in the Invitational. Your behavior has not been best representative of the kind of talent and mastery both of oneself and one’s art that we expect of people who function at this level. And as for you, Kit, I mean—”

She shook her head again. “You’ve come through in the past under extremely peculiar circumstances. Yet I have to ask myself whether it is wise for me to keep sending you into situations in which one day your impulsiveness may mean you don’t come back. If that were to happen to you because I cleared you for errantry in the face of evidence that you can’t be relied on to act wisely, your blood would be on my hands.”

She looked at one of those hands. “There’s enough of that as there is,” she said very softly. “On my instructions wizards go to their deaths—not exactly every day, but it would be rare for a couple of weeks to pass during which someone out on errantry does not wind up in Timeheart because I sent them into harm’s way. Bad enough when it happens to adults. When it happens to our younger wizards . . .”

She looked away and let them stand there for a few minutes more while she folded her hands, rested her head on them, and stared at the legal pad.

After another moment she stood up, walked past Kit and Penn to the crib, and leaned over it. The baby had awakened and was looking at her with clear gray eyes. Irina picked him up and put him over her shoulder, then walked back to the table. She leaned against it while the baby made little gurgling noises. “Sasha here,” she said, “might not be alive right now except that a wizard working closely on human blood chemistries was able to cure him of neonatal leukemia. That wizard was a presenter at the last Invitational. He found a way to leak some of the nonwizardly modalities of his treatment into the public domain, and as a result, neonatal leukemia death rates are starting to drop.” She rubbed Sasha’s back. “So I very much dislike keeping any particular piece of work out of the Invitational once it’s past the semifinal stage. There tend to be reasons why such works wind up there . . . reasons we don’t always understand. Sometimes the Powers don’t understand them either.”

She looked at the baby. Sasha turned in her arms, put his hand on her mouth, and stuck a finger up her nose. “. . . So I think I’m going to let you present,” she said, looking at Penn. “But if I hear so much as a whisper about you being any less than unfailingly polite—”

“But I am polite!”

“Only in the most offensive way possible,” Irina said. “Truly, it’s a gift! But so is what you’ve been building. So present it. And while you’re doing that, you will do whatever Nita and Kit tell you to do. If they say ‘Jump,’ the only answer I expect from you is ‘Into which dimension?’ I expect your presentation to go off without a hitch. Otherwise, all kinds of hell will break loose. Am I understood?”

“Yes, Planetary,” Penn said.

“And as for you,” she said to Kit, “stay grounded, all right? Nita is at a pivotal place in terms of her wizardly career. She needs someone solid behind her. The element of earth you chose last night—?” Irina laughed ironically. “Well, you got that right. Stick with it.”

She sat down at the table again, still holding Sasha. “So I’ll see you in four days, on the Moon. Now go away, and let me get on with—” she waved one hand in the air—“the rest of the planet. Go well, you two.”

And they vanished.

The crater Daedalus on the Moon’s far, “dark” side is one of the largest craters on the body, if not the largest, and is positioned almost exactly in the middle of the side that’s permanently turned away from Earth. Its floor is surprisingly smooth, broken only by a scatter of small flattish, central peaks; and the neatness of the crater’s positioning has caused some earthbound astronomers to suggest that this would be a perfect location for an installation of radio telescopes, protected by the Moon from the never-ending racket of radio emissions from Earth, or even a vast liquid-mirror optical telescope that could see farther away in space, and farther back in time, than any other.

Wizards, of course, have had other uses for it. Not too long ago it had been used to stage the last defense of Earth against the inbound darkness of the Pullulus: the inhabitants of the defended planet could see nothing of the heroism or tragedy that ensued. Now, though, the space had been prepped and reclaimed for the Invitational, as it had been a number of times before.

Up on the mountainous rim of the crater, a teenager in a personal force field shield looked down into the heart of the crater and saw something shining and iridescent as a soap bubble resting over the peaks at the crater’s center. An area about the size of Manhattan Island, in terms of square mileage, had been domed over with wizardry, filled with air, and warmed: and in that space she could see the movement of the Invitational’s spectators, getting themselves settled.

There were other things going on. Much closer to the rim, near where Nita was standing, someone had laid out a baseball field in the gray regolith, and batting practice was in progress.

“Come on, put it over the plate—”

“No hitter, no hitter!”

Nita watched one solidly hit fastball arch up and out into the darkness, wondering idly how hard you had to hit a ball up here to make sure it reached escape velocity.

Two point three eight kilometers per second, Bobo said.

“Thanks for that,” Nita said. “I have no idea what that’s going to feel like when you’re batting . . .”

Probably about like a triple against the centerfield wall.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Nita said.

She became aware that someone was standing beside her. An older teenager, wearing a portable mechanical force field generator belted into the small of her back, was holding up a sleek black tablet-camera and photographing the batting practice.

“If I didn’t know better,” Nita said to Carmela, “I’d think you were stalking me.”

“Kind of too busy for that,” Carmela said, turning the tablet in her hands from portrait to landscape orientation and grabbing another shot of the baseball field.

Nita gazed at the device admiringly. “Where did you get that?”

“At the Crossings,” Carmela said. “Sker’ret got it for me. Take a look at this—” She flashed its shiny black front face at Nita. “That whole thing is a camera. Perfect definition, like looking through a window. Standalone 3D, you name it . . . it’s fabulous. Sker’ret wants lots of video.”

“Want me to give you a lift down to the center?” Nita said. “My dad’s down there . . . I want to check on him before I go back down to Antartica.”

“I’ll give you one if you like,” Carmela said. “Sker’s given me a point-and-shoot gating locus, it hooks into the hex he’s installed down there.”

“Sure.”

A few minutes later they were stepping out of the bold blue tracery of the Daedalus gate hex and looking around at the crowds. The center section, closest to one of the in-crater peaks, was empty at the moment, reserved for the competitors, their support teams, and the wizardries that would be worked there. But around the reserved center, a huge crowd of people were standing, sitting, lounging, or just hanging around, waiting for the event to begin.

Nita parted company with Carmela and went wandering along toward where she’d left her dad and Nelaid. As she was getting close to their location, some activity off to one side caught her eye, and when the figures causing it got close enough she could see Matt at the head of them, bounding along through the gray dust of the crater toward her. Like a kangaroo, she thought, amused. A crowd of others came along with him, among them the twychild Tuyet and Nguyet and Matt’s small dark Egyptian boyfriend Doki, whom Nita was glad to meet at last.

“Looking for the best spot?” Matt said. “You might try up the crater’s slope a ways, the view’s a bit more panoramic . . .”

“Nope,” Nita said, “I’ve got my people settled. If I can just keep my dad from filling every available container with Moon rocks to take home, everything’ll be fine.”

Matt laughed, then looked at Nita keenly. “And how are you holding up? You were having some weird dreams, I hear.”

“You on the clock for medical support already?”

“Not yet. Soon, though. And anyway, thought I’d check.”

She shrugged. “Just par for the course, lately.”

“Okay,” Matt said. “You know, though, anything starts bothering you, you shouldn’t hesitate to call.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Irina sent along a message about that after she got done reaming Kit and Penn out.”

“Would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall for that one,” Matt said.

Nita smiled sourly. “You’re not alone.”

“Where’s Kit?”

“Down in the Blue Room right now. Mostly he’s keeping Penn calm.”

Matt raised his eyebrows. “Wow, kind of a role switch. That was your job, I thought.”

“Well, Kit’s gotten better at doing it. Fortunately they won’t have to keep it up much longer . . . they’re both going crazy being kind to each other to stay on Irina’s good side. I’m scared one of them’s going to sprain something.” Matt snorted. “Meanwhile, Irina sent me up to have a look at the crowd and see if they were settled in.” Nita looked out across the expanse of the crater. “I have to confess, all these lawn chairs make me laugh.”

And there were a lot of them. Nita’s manual told her that three thousand, eight hundred and sixty-three humans were up here to see the Invitational’s final phase, along with various cats, dogs, dolphins, and a few stray whales. Since the whole center of the crater had been domed over and climate-controlled with wizardry, the human visitors had been extremely proactive about bringing the comforts of home with them: the whole place had the look of a rather monochrome tailgate picnic. Even Nita’s dad had made arrangements to bring supplies when he came up with Nelaid, and had arrived with his own lawn chairs and a beer cooler.

“It is kind of crazy,” Matt said. “Worth enjoying while it lasts. But listen, before you go, I’ve got something to show you—”

Doki and the twychild were suddenly all attention. Matt pulled his jacket open. Inside it was a dark blue T-shirt that said in white letters:

HI THERE

I’M HERE TO

SAVE YOUR LIFE

AND BY THE WAY

I’M GAY

Nita covered her face and laughed helplessly. “Oh, God, Matt. You’re wearing this to torment me. Take it off!”

The Twychild laughed uproariously. “Ooooo, Nita!”

“I might have to explain!”

“When two guys—”

“Or girls—”

“Or whatever—”

“Love each other a whole lot—”

“Then they get snuggly—”

“And sometimes if one of them asks the other to, you know, take their clothes off—”

“It could be misunderstood!”

“Which is why you should always use the Speech in such discussions—”

“Because then you can use the phrase me’hei tha sam’te instead of ‘take it off’—”

“Which there are just too many ways to misunderstand in what’s laughably called Our Common Tongue.”

“Yeah, ask about the time I knocked Kit up—”

“Matt,” Nita said.

“Mmm?”

“Kindly shut them up.”

The twychild dissolved in laughter and took themselves away.

Nita had to wipe her eyes, she’d been laughing so hard. “Okay,” she said. “I should get down there again. I think we’re probably about ready to start. You going to stick around afterward?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Matt said. “Cleanup’s half the fun. I’ll see you up here after your guy kicks ass.”

Nita high-fived him. “We’ll see how it goes,” she said. Matt and Doki waved and headed off.

Nita went bouncing along a ways farther until she found her dad’s spot. He and Nelaid were already stretched out on the loungers—Nelaid hanging out somewhat over the end of his: no one on Earth had yet made a lounger long enough to take a Wellakhit—and both looked extremely relaxed.

“They about ready to start?” her dad asked.

“Very soon now,” Nita said. “You guys all set?”

“We have all the comforts of home,” Nelaid said. “It’s hard to think how our enjoyment could be enhanced.”

“Well, stay comfy,” Nita said, and bent down to smooch her dad on the head. “I’m going to go downside and make sure our bundle of nerves is ready to go.”

“You think he has a chance of winning?” her father said.

Nita shook her head. “One in five,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

And she vanished.

In Antarctica, on the Knox Coast, it was around sundown, under a rising full Moon.

“It’s not so much a green room as a blue room,” someone had said when the space was getting set up, and that observation had provoked an immediate change of name for the venue and a fair amount of laughter. But there wasn’t any laughter right now. The space that had been so full of cheerfulness and nerves when they’d all first met inside it weeks ago was now simply full of nerves: bundles of them. There were five of these, along with eight others, their mentors, and one woman with a baby and a parakeet.

Everyone was sitting over in one of the conversation pits that was big enough to take fifteen or twenty people. Centrally positioned in the group, standing, was Irina. “The first thing you all need to know,” she said, “is how extraordinarily proud I am of you. All five of you have risen superbly to the challenge. Wizards who’ve done the Invitational for a century and more are all agreed that this is the single best group of finalists’ spells they’ve ever seen. All of you are going in the manual; and all of your spells are going to be named after you, which as you know, in this business, is about as famous as anybody gets.” She smiled. “The work you’ve done is going to make a difference to people all over this planet, and in some cases to people on other planets as well, where the technologies can logically be extended so far. You have increased knowledge, and there is nothing in the world more valuable than that.”

Off to one side, Dairine was sitting beside Mehrnaz and rubbing her back to try to work a few of the knots out of it. Mehrnaz was thrumming with tension; her hands were clasped together until the knuckles went white, and there were circles under her eyes. She hadn’t slept well for the last few nights.

“I told you you should’ve come and stayed in my basement,” Dairine said. “Plenty of room, good food—”

“No bhajis,” Mehrnaz said.

“Which is fine.”

“I was afraid you’d get ruined for them . . .”

“My fault, not yours,” Dairine said. “Meanwhile, my sister makes pretty good pancakes when the stove’s not acting up. Promise me you’ll come.”

“I promise I will,” Mehrnaz said, “assuming I survive . . .”

Nita appeared quietly at the far end of the room and walked down toward the conversation pit. Irina turned toward her. “How is it up there?”

“I think they’re about as ready as they’re going to be,” Nita said. She looked over at Kit and Penn. Penn was hunched over, rubbing his hands together. Kit was watching him, not touching him or getting too close; but he had a concerned look in his eye as he glanced up at Nita.

“All right,” Irina said. “Roll call. Joona?”

Joona Tiilikainen, with his tilted dark eyes and his close-cropped dark hair, exchanged a glance with Susila Pertiwi next to him. “All set.”

“Rick?”

Rick Maxwell, a tall, raw-boned blond guy with a broad Midwest accent, nodded. “Ready when you are.”

“Susila?”

Susila threw her long dark hair back over her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Mehrnaz?”

Next to Dairine, Mehrnaz nodded hard twice. “Yes.”

“Penn?”

He raised his head, tilted his chin up. Dairine saw Nita smile at that for some reason. “Let’s do it.”

“Then let’s go topside,” Irina said. “Everybody into the transit hex: and the Powers be with you!”

A moment later, darkness full of stars was arching over them.

Kit took a deep breath. Beside him, Penn took one too, almost certainly for very different reasons.

A roar of welcome went up from the spectators at the sight of the group appearing in the hex. Kit looked all around, wondering where Nita’s dad and Nelaid might be. Three thousand people didn’t seem like a lot when you thought of a modern sports stadium; but packed into this bubbled-over intimate space, the crowd seemed huge.

“Cousins and friends and welcome guests.” Irina’s voice rang out, artificially amplified by wizardry. “Please acknowledge and greet the participants in the final round of the 1241^st Interventional Development, Assessment and Adjudication Sessions: the Wizards’ Invitational!”

A thunder of applause, a huge cheer.

“Our competitors are the best of the best, chosen by a rigorous testing and evaluation scheme from among a field of more than three hundred of the best and brightest young wizards from around the world. Over the past fourteen days they and their custom-designed interventions have passed through day-long all-comers evaluations and viva voce panel judgings designed to reveal weaknesses and hidden strengths, and determine how effective these spells will be when used in daily practice. The contestants will now demonstrate their spells live, activating for the first time what have until now been strictly theoretical interventions untested at full scale in physical reality.”

Irina looked around at the contestants. “We’ll start with the usual random number selection to determine the order of presentation. Each competitor’s manual or similar instrumentation has been requested to generate a random number. Low number goes first, next to lowest number goes next, and so forth. Will you please display your manuals.”

They did. Irina walked down the line of five finalists, regarding the book or roll or device that each one held out to her.

“All right,” she said. “First will be Rick Maxwell, who will be demonstrating a magma management and redirection technique for volcanoes located near urban centers, intended to prevent pyroclastic flow and similar dangerous phenomena.” Rick waved at the crowd and the cheering began.

After a moment the crowd settled down. “Presenting second will be Joona Tiilikainen, who will demonstrate a new Atlantic conveyor protocol for deep ocean convection management.” Joona waved and jogged around a little like a Rocky clone, which produced some laughter and more cheering.

“Presenting third will be Penn Shao-Feng—”

“Third,” Penn was muttering, “third is good, third is a great spot—”

“Yes it is,” Kit murmured. “Now just hang onto yourself, don’t lose it. You’re gonna be fine, right? Stay focused.”

“Presenting fourth,” Irina said, “will be Mehrnaz Farrahi, who will demonstrate an energy cancellation and displacement protocol for management of slipstrike and similar earthquake faults—” Kit saw Dairine put both hands on Mehrnaz’s shoulders from behind, holding her down as if she was likely to ascend into the air; and she leaned over and whispered something in her ear.

“Third,” Penn was saying. “Gives me a little extra time to get ready.”

“Yeah it does,” Kit said. “So get into your head, not too deeply now, start going through the outer inclusion circles of the spell—”

“And presenting fifth will be Susila Pertiwi with a planned-subterfuge microgravity acquisition program for release into the wild.” Applause for that.

“Can I now ask all but the first contestant to take their seats. Will the implementation support team please set up for the first presentation?”

A group of wizards in casual dress came in from one side and arranged themselves around the cleared central space. “I need to remind the spectators,” Irina said, “that the effects you’re about to see are physical-force virtual duplicates of real effects on Earth, manufactured here by wizardry with one-to-one correspondence in terms of mass, weight, and other physical qualities. They are reproduced here so that there’s no chance of endangering or alarming communities on Earth, and they will look and feel real. Even though these effects can be classified as an amazing reproduction, they are not immaterial . . . And since the human mind is a funny thing, in this next demonstration in particular, we urge you not to play with the lava.”

That produced some slightly unnerved laughter from the audience.

The unnerved noises got considerably louder when a smallish but terribly real, full-size volcano appeared in the middle of the cleared space and began to erupt. And then Rick Maxwell, in his polo shirt and jeans and loafers, walked over in front of the foot of the volcano, threw his arms wide, and began to chant in the Speech.

The lava slid directly down at him, and gasps went up all around; but Rick paid the lava no particular attention, just kept speaking the trigger phrases for his predesigned wizardry. The spell that began to spread out around him was a masterwork of structure, elegantly constructed to trap and hold stone in solid form by way of clever temperature changes and gas nullification routines. Kit watched it with admiration. Penn watched it too . . .

And then Kit was horrified to hear Penn mutter under his breath, “This was a horrible idea. I can’t compete with that.”

“Yes, you can,” Kit said. “It’s nice, Penn, but you’re in another league. You’re dealing with much bigger natural forces . . .”

“A very bad idea . . .” Penn was whispering. “I can’t do it.”

Kit looked at Nita with dismay.

She crossed over to them from where she’d been standing off to one side. “Penn . . .” she said.

“I can’t!”

Kit and Nita stared at each other.

Oh God, Kit said silently to Nita. He’s freezing up again. Now what??

“Look at that,” Mehrnaz was murmuring. “It’s fabulous.”

“It is,” Dairine said, watching with pleasure as the lava ran down, slowed, and was halted by wizardry and will. She laughed at the sight of it, reminded of the toy volcano she’d built for one of her school science fairs a long time ago. “But you know what? What you’ve got is hotter.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Mehrnaz said.

“Absolutely.”

“And when I make it work,” Mehrnaz continued, “my aunt is simply going to bust a blood vessel somewhere.”

“Ideally at the end of her nose,” Dairine said.

Mehrnaz snickered softly. “I’m done with her,” she said. “After this . . . we’re all finished.”

“Finished how?”

“I was thinking about moving out.”

“Kind of a big concept right away,” Dairine said. “Don’t worry about her right this minute. Or the family. Pay attention to what you came to deal with. The spell.”

“But that’s part of it,” Mehrnaz said. “My auntie always wanted to do this, Dairine. The other relatives all convinced her she never could, and she fell in line.”

“But not you,” Dairine said. “Trendsetter.” She grinned.

“This is my dream now,” Mehrnaz said, low and fierce. “She gave hers up. I found this one and I’m not going to let it go.”

“Right,” Dairine said. “Look now. He’s almost finished. He did a great job with that. But not like you’re gonna do. Two more people and it’s your turn . . .”

A roar of applause was going up all around them for the perfectly stalled volcano. Rick Maxwell was taking a bow. The threat management wizards came forward and spoke a pre-prepared spell: the volcano promptly and obediently vanished.

“Next,” Irina said, “Joona Tiilikainen . . .”

Joona stepped forward into the newly cleared space, bowed his head, and waited.

Another group of threat management wizards came out, encircled the space: stood quietly for a moment, then started speaking.

And within seconds the whole space was a column of cold green seawater hundreds of feet across and at least a hundred feet high, with Joona buried under that terrible depth and weight of water, right at the bottom and standing there like a statue with only a thin force field protecting him.

Nita noted how the tagged hot and cold currents, lighter blue, darker green, were moving in the column. Joona, fighting the tremendous pressure slowly and with difficulty, held out his arms on both sides and began slowly forcing out the words of the spell he’d designed. Gradually, it flowed out from him, carpeting the bottom of that huge cylinder of water, then spreading upward into the water like a webwork or tangle of light, impelling the water into configurations that, once started, would self-manage and self-perpetuate. Cold water flowed under warmer current, warmer polluted water was sucked out where natural processes could decontaminate it . . .

This is fabulous, Nita thought. Her own work with water was mostly beginners’ stuff compared to this. He’s good, this guy. But Penn—

Penn was staring at what Joona was doing, and the look of upset on his face was getting worse by the second.

Nita leaned down to him. “Penn,” she said, urgently, “remember what happened to you in the semis. This is just that all over again.”

“But this is different,” he whispered. “Something’s coming. Something’s going to happen. I can’t do the spell—”

Nita’s mouth suddenly went dry, for she realizd that she could feel it, feel what he felt: that sense of impending danger. “I get it,” she said. “You saw it coming. You had a weird dream, didn’t you?”

Kit was looking at Nita with with growing concern. “You get what?”

She blinked, trying to stay anchored in the reality of the moment. “I can see why he freaked. I can feel why he freaked. He’s right, something’s coming—”

“But what?”

Out of nowhere there were too many answers. “Something awful,” Nita said. “But it’s not what he thinks.”

Then he’s just panicking again!

“Yeah, that’s part of it,” Nita said out loud.

And he’s expecting you to save him again, to give him the answer? He’s supposed to be doing this himself, but he knows you’ll drag him where he needs to be again—

And it was like a bolt of lightning jolting through her. The image from the dream of the Other who’d been wearing Roshaun’s body, saying No one looks at me across the board. And then the image of fire. Something burning, striving, trying to escape—

“Yes. Yes I have the answer, you’re absolutely right! Oh God, you are so perfect!” And she grabbed Kit and pulled him close to hug him. “How are you always right?!”

He was staring at her in total perplexity. “That’s not what you were saying before.”

“But you know. And it knows. The seeing knows, the vision . . .”

There was fear attached to this for her, too. If Kit was right about this, then he was also right about the danger that Nita had seen coming toward him and Carmela. Her mouth went even dryer as she realized there was no cherry-picking this scenario for an answer she liked better. You had to take the vision whole or not at all. Oh God—!

But one thing at a time. Just one!

The applause for Joona was starting up now as he finished his work and walked out the side of the column of water, waving at the crowd. The threat management wizards were already moving forward to decommission the water: a moment later the whole massive column of it was gone.

Penn was staring at where it had been. He whispered, “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can!” Kit repeated.

And Nita grabbed Penn by his shoulders and stared into his eyes.

“You have to,” she said.

“But in the dream I had—”

Nita swallowed. “I know what’s in that dream, a little. We’re all stuck in it now. If you don’t do this spell, something really bad is going to happen. Lives are going to be saved or lost because of you finishing this thing or not finishing it. Winning, losing, it doesn’t matter. The demonstration is what matters. You have got to produce the result.”

He sat there shaking his head. “But what if I can’t—”

“I’ve been down this road, believe me,” Nita said. “Once upon a time I had to produce a result after I swore to do it. It felt like it took me forever to do what I had to, to make up my mind to it. Good thing I had a lot of help, because I was seriously ready to fold. But the help was there.” She took a long breath. “And I just about got myself where I needed to be when someone stepped in . . .” Or swam, said her memory, in a darker voice. She could still see herself hanging in water that burned bright, somewhere else entirely, while overhead cruised a shape brighter than the water, glancing down at her with one dark dispassionate eye—Death passing her over, passing her by, in pleased and deadly dignity.

“And presenting next,” said Irina’s voice, “Penn Shao-Feng—”

“Get up,” Nita said, “and do it.”

Penn got up, shaking but suddenly determined, and walked out into the cleared circle. He looked like someone walking to his doom.

Kit watched him go, and abruptly realized that he was shaking too. Beside him, Nita was trembling as well with the force of something that hadn’t happened yet but was about to.

“What happens now?” he whispered.

Nita shook her head. “It all depends on him . . .”

The threat management wizards were standing around the borders of the circle now, reciting together. Above the space where they were working, the solar wind slowly became visible, spilling past the Moon in great waves and folds like the curtains of aurorae in Earth’s upper atmosphere: but these were white, not green or blue, because there were no atmospheric gases for them to react with. They lashed and rippled close to the Moon’s surface as dangerous solar storm weather would lash and lick at the Earth when the solar wind was too strong.

Penn took a huge breath, closed his eyes, and held out his arms to either side. All around him, blue-glowing on the dusty ground, it began to appear—the spell Kit and Nita had seen and debugged a hundred times now, the one Kit thought he could probably draw in his sleep.

Very quietly, almost in a whisper, Penn began to recite the spell.

From the diagram, long, graceful, frondlike golden structures began to rear up, the local wavefront guides that would push the solar radiation away from the Moon for demonstration purposes. And from the core of the spell came winding upward another, bigger structure, wavering gracefully: the spell’s power conduit, the part that was meant to be sunk into the Sun to power the redirection. The fins at the top of it, the power collectors, looked like the broad petals of a flower, and the main power conduit that would enable the redirection of the solar wind was its stem.

Slowly and lazily the gigantic, glowing, immaterial flower of energy began to twine upward . . .

And then it started to move faster. And faster. It burst upward through the sheltering dome and out past it, curving around the lunar horizon, heading with terrible speed into space . . . and toward the glow of the Sun, away past the dark circle of the new Earth.

There were shouts of alarm from some of the wizards in the audience and on the staff, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening. The integrity of the wizardly dome was holding—it had been designed to allow energy constructs to pass. But the amount of energy now passing upward through it was already frightening, far more than expected, even though—the wizardry not being impeded by minor matters such as light speed—the conduit was still barely halfway to the Sun. And shortly the incoming energy would be more appalling still, for the power collectors on their ever-stretching conduit were arrowing toward the solar surface with ever-increasing speed. They would sink into the Sun, they would pull power from it, and that awful power would be conducted back here to the surface of the Moon—

“Shut it down!” Irina shouted.

But Penn had finished the recitation and was now frozen where he stood. Irina moved forward, sudden power trembling about her hands as she flung them up and with one huge gesture brought another force shield into being between Penn’s spell circle and the surrounding audience.

Barely a second later, a horrifying spill of raw plasma came blasting down the conduit from its far end, already inside Mercury’s orbit, and slagged down the lunar surface for hundreds of yards around. Penn fell, vanished away in a blaze of eye-hurting white fire.

And Nita realized that while she stood here watching this terror in the waking world, she was also standing inside one of her dreams.