Games Wizards Play Read online

  “We were lucky!”

  “You were smart,” S’reee said. “The research kind of smart, the preparedness kind of smart. Smart is six-tenths of luck. And you played to your strengths, and you took your chances where you could find them. You weren’t afraid to improvise, or go for broke.”

  “I also have a partner,” Nita said, “who knows how to be smart for two when my smarts break down.”

  “So there you are,” S’reee said. “You understand it. Individually and as a team, the two of you have data and experience worth passing on, wouldn’t you say? You could make the difference between some other wizards living or dying because you knew how to help someone hammer the rough edges off the spell that someday was going to help them, or somebody else, survive.”

  Nita sighed as they turned left and passed slowly by Point Lookout, heading inshore toward the northern side of the waters running inside the Fire Island barrier. “This is a ‘pay it forward’ thing, isn’t it.”

  “Of course it is. What isn’t?”

  She could see the low roofs of Freeport and Bay Shore jutting up against the afternoon sky ahead of them. A lot of things have started out like this, Nita thought, really innocently . . . and then turned into something way different before they were done. Yet she had to admit there was no guarantee that this was going to be one of them. “Well, what do I do now?”

  “I’d guess you want to make sure your transport allowance is properly implemented, and check out the apps they’ve set up for you. Take a few minutes to talk to your Advisories, of course: Sea knows they’ll have been down this road before. In fact they probably recommended you for this, so you may want to talk to them about that.”

  “Take a baseball bat to them, you mean!”

  S’reee whistled with amusement as the two of them headed as close toward shore as it was wise for S’reee to go. “And then shove everything else you’ve got going on into a claudication and forget about it for a while, because you’re about to be the busiest you’ve ever been when you weren’t actually saving the universe.”

  3

  Wellakh / Hempstead

  THE HUGE HIGH-CEILINGED SPACE was dark, walled in by rough stone. Only its floor was smooth, and mostly dark except where hot orange light fell on it in the center of the room. There, floating perhaps a meter above the floor, hung what appeared to be a giant burning globe of gas twenty meters across, turning slowly and gently in the air. Swarms of sunspots crept slowly across its surface in big clusters and patches: prominences arched out from it into the dark empty air, strained at what seemed to be gravity, fell back again.

  In all the ways that mattered, it looked like a sun: specifically, a dark golden-orange subgiant star somewhere between types G and K, perhaps a G6. The only odd thing about it was the way it was throbbing—its surface blooming outward, shivering, then falling back again, shifting the big dark patches of sunspots around so that they drifted farther from one another briefly when the burning surface expanded, then flocked closer together when it collapsed back again.

  The only other immediately peculiar aspect of the situation would have been the thin young redheaded girl in capri pants and sneakers and a long floppy purple print top who came stomping around from the far side of the huge burning globe, waving her arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, “Okay, that was completely out of bounds, there was no need to do that, and you may think it was cute, but pulling a cheap stunt like that absolutely and completely sucks!”

  After a few moments’ silence, from behind the stellar simulator two other figures emerged: a big blocky silver-haired man in jeans and a polo shirt, and a much taller and slenderer man with tied-back red hair nearly down to his knees, wearing soft dark-amber trousers and boots and a long open vestlike robe a shade darker. The taller man folded his arms across his chest in a resigned manner and looked at the shorter one, who had shoved his hands into his pockets and was gazing at the far-off ceiling and shaking his head.

  “Harold,” the taller man said, “pray advise me. Would this be an appropriate response to what we’ve just seen?”

  Dairine’s father shrugged. “Was what happened just there something that was supposed to happen?”

  “No, no, no, no, NO!” Dairine shouted, and stalked away from them, waving her arms in the air. “Don’t you two start trying to tag-team me, now, this is the last thing I need—”

  “I mean, I don’t see what the fuss is about,” Dairine’s dad said. “It didn’t blow up anything like as hard as it did the time before last. This looks more like heavy breathing, and it seems to be settling down. So relatively speaking, what you’re doing looks like an overreaction.”

  “If I had been prepared for it, it’d never have happened!”

  “Precisely the point,” Nelaid said. “This is about how you react when you are not prepared.”

  Dairine whirled and threw a look at Nelaid that (if being a wizard was good for anything) should have vaporized him. Then she whirled away and went stomping off again.

  The two men exchanged glances. “Harold,” said Nelaid, “is it, do you think, appropriate to discuss anger management strategies at some future date?”

  “Nel,” said Dairine’s dad, sounding completely resigned, “you’re on.” They watched Dairine with their arms folded, in nearly matching poses, with nearly matching faces.

  She stopped herself from coming around for another bout of stomping and paused long enough for a familiar shape to come pacing out of the shadows on numerous mechanical legs. Spot’s laptop-body was moving close to the ground and nothing like the normal number of stalked eyes were in evidence: he looked like he was purposely trying to keep a low profile.

  No need for you to be doing that, she said silently as she scooped him up.

  Yes there is, Spot said, and pulled his eyes in tightly enough to his upper carapace that they vanished into it.

  “It is not fair that you won’t let me use Spot!” she said to Nelaid, hugging Spot to her as Nelaid and her father headed over to her.

  “Fairness does not enter into it,” Nelaid said, “because, as I thought I surely must have made plain to you by now, while your mech-based colleague may indeed be specialized hardware, he is not specialized enough for this task. And we have been over this a good number of times. The Sunstone is more specialized and far more suitable to purpose when it comes to everyday maintenance of a star than even Spot’s most carefully tailored wizardly routines, regardless of how assiduously you have been attempting to alter them to suit your needs. Which are mostly impelled by laziness,” he said to Dairine’s dad.

  “Tell me about it,” her dad said, rolling his eyes. “I blame these smartphones, myself. Nobody knows how to just remember anything anymore.”

  Nelaid flashed what Dairine suspected was a very precisely calculated half-smile. “Wellakhit wizards have been looking for alternate modalities to the Stone for longer than people on your planet have known how to do algebra, and have yet to find anything as suitable as this particular orthorhombic silicate crystal for the work of mapping wizardry onto the fine structures of a solar interior. That you expect that you will be able to do so simply so that you can allow Spot to handle the imaging and patterning routines for you, rather than learning to build the spell interface inside your own mind while using the Sunstone for templating, is, well, ambitious at the very least. But also rather self-deluding.”

  “You think ‘stubborn’ might fit into the description somewhere?” said her dad.

  “Oh God, what have I done to deserve this?” Dairine muttered.

  “That is possibly an issue you will want to take up with Roshaun at some later date,” Nelaid said.

  Dairine froze.

  There was a time, she thought, when if he’d said something like that to me, I’d either have broken down and cried or punched him out. Now, though—But how can he say his name as if he’s just stepped out of the room, as if what happened to him hadn’t—? Dairine’s throat went achy in the space of a breath.
She hated it when that happened and there was no way to control it—

  I can’t wait until I’m so much better at this that I can safely tell him just what I think of him! And she let out a breath of exasperation, more at herself than at him.—Sometime in the next century, at this rate. But in the meantime, Spot was squirming to get down. Dairine puffed out an angry breath and crouched down to put him on the floor and let him skitter away. “My son took some time to master the fine detail of structuring the plasma management routines,” Nelaid said, sounding completely unaware of Dairine’s anger, or (worse) uncaring of it. “It is neither fun nor easy, and it is never going to be. If as you have been saying you intend to fulfill some of his functions for our world as well as his, the technique must be learned as taught before you can go on to try to improve it.”

  “If it’s worth doing,” Dairine’s dad said, “it’s worth doing right. Even when it’s a pain in the ass . . .”

  One of his favorite sayings, and one she’d been sick of hearing since she was nine. Dairine had been furious at Nelaid, and now she was getting furious at her dad as well. Exponentially furious, she thought. But when they’re like this they’re more than the sum of their parts, so I get at least the square of how angry I normally am. If we could just have a huge blowup it’d be great, but they just keep calming each other down.

  “Leaving aside the issue of how you operate on the simulator, or the star it represents,” said Nelaid, “I see I also still need to impress on you that just because one starts to feel more comfortable with a given star’s attributes and characteristics, that is no reason to allow the comfort or familiarity to bleed into one’s treatment of other stars that are overtly similar.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t sneakily just change the simulator’s settings so that—”

  “And why would a star on which you are operating normally take the trouble of notifying you before it is about to do something unexpected? The unexpectedness is the whole point. There is no more dangerous scenario than the one in which you are absolutely certain that you know what will happen. You were plainly quite certain of how the oblique shockfront was going to propagate in that last run, so much so that when the pressure densities of the plasma in the chromosphere underneath it started to change, you discounted the change entirely . . .”

  “She did catch it before it blew, though,” Dairine’s dad said.

  “True enough, Harold, but if she had been so careless with your star, the resultant derangement of its upper atmosphere, transient though it was, would shortly have done significant damage to the delicate upper levels of your planet’s atmosphere. Your climate would have suffered significantly as a result, and the survivors of the weather difficulties that would inevitably have followed would not have thanked Dairine for the increase in skin cancers and the cascade effects such as selective extinctions of species too fragile to cope with the change in lower-atmosphere UV levels.”

  “Mmm, I take your point.”

  “I dropped a decimal point, okay?” Dairine yelled, clutching at her hair as she swung away from them.

  “Pretty heavy one, looks like,” her dad said, with a complete lack of sympathy.

  It was bad enough when Nelaid got underhanded on her. But when her dad ganged up on her with him . . . “Aaaaaaaagh!!”

  Her dad and Nelaid sighed and gazed at each other with that here-she-goes-again expression. How is this my life? Dairine thought, as she struggled to calm herself down. How can everything be so screwed up when I’m a wizard? And when I have a computer who’s also a wizard? And even my sister’s a wizard? And my dad’s okay with all this? And when I also now somehow have a space dad?! Which—not that she would have admitted it to anybody—was incredibly cool, especially since he was also a wizard, might as well be considered the king of his planet, and was deemed so powerful and scary by some of his own people that they routinely tried to assassinate him—

  “Dairine.”

  She blinked. Nelaid had glanced away from her father and was holding a tiny spark of white fire between thumb and forefinger. It was his manifestation of the wizard’s manual, and he was studying it the way someone would look at an interesting new bug. “I wonder if this might perhaps be a wise time to finish up.” He looked back to her father. “You dislike letting these sessions run too late into afternoon of your local day, which I believe is now well advanced . . .”

  Her dad checked his watch. “Closing time’s coming on at the shop, yeah,” he said, “and there are a couple of things I want to check up on before we lock up for the evening.”

  Suddenly Dairine felt very tired. It had been a long work session today, partly because her spring break period was ending and this would be the last day for a while that her schedule and Nelaid’s would coincide for more than a few hours at once. “Yeah,” Dairine said. “Okay.”

  “I will set up the homeward transport for you outside, then.”

  “Fine,” her dad said. “Come on back with us?” he asked Nelaid. “You did want to have a look at that rhododendron I was telling you about.”

  “I will see you home, certainly, and after that I am at your disposal. Just give me a few seconds to collapse this.”

  She and her dad headed for the barred gates that led out onto the terrace as Nelaid turned to decommission the stellar simulator. “And why not?” her dad murmured as they made their way out. “Got some shopping to do as well. No point in boring you with it when he likes to come along.”

  Dairine snickered and went to lean against the chest-high balustrade at the far side of the terrace that surrounded this level of the Sunlords’ towering stone-spire palace. It wasn’t so long ago that the relationship had seemed not just ridiculous but unlikely. “Perhaps I would understand your personal situation more clearly if I were to see you more often in your own environment?” Nelaid had said. And that had unfortunately seemed too sensible for Dairine to object much, especially if she wanted to keep doing this work with him—the work Roshaun had done and that she wanted to learn, too, as a possible way to find out what had happened to him, and to get him back. So Dairine had said “Okay” and not thought too much more about it, except to hope that her father wouldn’t have too much trouble with their home life being occasionally invaded by someone who was more or less equivalent to an alien king.

  Then, when her dad and Nelaid met, they not only liked each other a whole lot but knew it instantly, and Dairine realized her problems were even more complex than she’d feared. She’d wondered whether wizardry had been involved somehow, except that she knew Nelaid would never stoop to any such thing. He was way too serious and straightforward a wizard to even consider doing anything as potentially invasive as tampering with someone’s mind without consent.

  He came visiting often enough that they’d begun passing him off as an uncle. Or, not ‘we’ did, Dairine thought. He did. “My brother,” Dairine had heard her dad say casually to a customer in the shop one afternoon, when she’d walked in after school. Nelaid was standing there with an armful of chrysanthemums, looking around in apparent confusion, while her dad stood behind the counter wrapping some kind of dish arrangement in white-and-gold gift paper. And what was extremely peculiar was that as they stood there—the tall broad-shouldered man with the prematurely silver hair and the very tall slim man with the longish hair that was almost exactly the red-gold of Dairine’s own—they really did look like they were related. And it’s not just the disguise-wizardry Nelaid’s wearing, Dairine had thought at the time. Something else is going on. Whatever it was, it made the relationship show in their eyes. It was so extremely odd, the whole idea that you could have family on other planets: or that it could have been lying there waiting for you for years and years without you ever expecting it . . .

  Except that this isn’t the relationship I’m interested in having on another planet! This is just complicating things.

  Things got even more complicated after that when her dad and Nelaid started going out shoppi
ng together. “If there’s a better way to teach you about our culture in a hurry,” her dad had said, “I don’t know what it’d be.” And off they’d gone to the Pathmark supermarket in Baldwin, and if there had been any sight that could spin your brain right around in your head, it was your father the florist standing in front of a heap of cantaloupes with the most senior wizard of a planet hundreds of light-years away, discussing seasons and the way axial tilt affects an area’s mean solar radiation, and how to use the little depression at the bottom of the melon that you pressed into to make sure it was ripe. It was weird enough to Dairine that Nelaid considered her father to be some kind of potential spiritual leader because he worked with plants. Though Wellakh people have always been a bit plant crazy. I guess you have to be when that’s where the oxygen comes from and the vegetation’s all that’s kept your planet habitable after a flare . . .

  “So,” said Nelaid as he came through the gate into the body of the peak and waved it shut after him, heading out across the terrace to them. He had changed into charcoal trousers, a white shirt, and a navy blazer, with his hair still tied back but looking much shorter, thanks to a fairly simple concealment spell. Dairine had to turn away to hide her amusement—he looked like some kind of rock promoter heading for a casual business lunch.

  As Nelaid walked, the polished redstone floor came alive with buried lines and circles and ellipses in blue light: a complex worldgating spell, densely interwritten with the Speech’s long flowing characters and spreading out from where they stood for about twenty meters on either side. “When next we meet collegially, Dairine, we need to spend some more time on the way you have been handling the relationship between the spectral radiance and solar wind mass loss. The sooner this is handled, the sooner we can avoid having to revisit this scenario and go on to something more, well, challenging.”