“But they’ve got some new take on group work, it’s fabulous, it’s like time-sharing—”
“Holographic spell management—”
“But that’s just cool organizational stuff. Knowing you, you and Kit’ve scored yourself some kind of super-dangerous talent who needs controlling—”
Nita had to laugh. “No,” she said, “as far as we can tell it’s a rabid spacecraft fan who’s mostly interested in keeping communications satellites from being fried. In fact his précis was technical enough that I won’t mind an explanation.”
“Too technical for you?”
“Is the world ready?”
They were laughing together and deep in the midst of further gossip by the time Kit drifted back, and then there was more laughing and hugging and some teasing about height. “I thought I was gonna at least get taller than you!” Tuyet said to Kit in a tone of cheerfully aggrieved complaint, “and now what do I find but you’ve pulled this sneaky trick! There is no justice. None.”
“No one’s gonna care how tall I am next to you,” Kit said, “when you’re doing stuff like that with your tie. Wannabe fashion plate . . .”
“Bean pole!”
“Brain box! Having trouble finding oxygen all the way up here? Come on, breathe deep, assert yourself . . .”
Nita and Nguyet raised their eyebrows at each other as the boys got increasingly creative with their mockery, in the way that only people who’ve lived through life-or-death situations together can. “Do you have any idea . . .” Nita said.
“Who’re being pushed as the hot picks for winning?”
“Actually,” Nita said, “I was going to ask you if you knew what in the world a pitanga is. But seriously, how do you start picking a winner out of three hundred people whose projects the judges haven’t even looked at yet?”
Nguyet wiggled her high, slender eyebrows at Nita. “There are a lot of maths freaks and statistics wranglers in this group,” she said. “Some of them, I don’t even know names for what kinds of wizards they are . . . but they’re strong on the predictive end, and they’ve gotten real excitable since the individual prospectuses went up.” She gave Nita a sideways look. “Thought you might have stumbled across some inside stuff while reviewing the material.”
“For this? No, I wouldn’t even—”
A sudden flash of image went across Nita’s gaze, as if someone had swept the lens of a screen projector past her. An image of Carmela, very upset about something, looking at Nita with the oddest expression, almost disbelieving somehow—
“—begin to know how to make a noneducated guess . . .” her mouth kept saying, and then Nita ran out of steam, feeling shocked.
“You okay?” Nguyet said, and looked over her shoulder, then over Nita’s shoulder. “See somebody you know?”
“Uh, no.” Nita shook her head. “Just a weird moment—”
Around them the music started to fade, and the crowd started glancing around expectantly. “Uh oh, here we go!” Nguyet said, and a second or so later Kit and Tuyet were looking over their shoulders at the heart of the crowd.
It was pushing aside, people murmuring and melting back so as to leave a roughly circular space open inside it. A small blond woman stepped into the center of the group.
A silence fell around her. No one called for it—nothing so crass. All that was happening was everyone responding to the sense of sudden power in their midst. The Planetary Wizard for Earth just stood there quietly, looking at the crowd surrounding her at a more-than-respectful distance.
Nita was amused to see Irina Mladen for once not in the kind of floral housedress she’d seemed to favor the couple of times that their paths had last crossed, but in a very businesslike pantsuit, the type of thing you might wear to a job interview; navy blue, low heels, a white shirt. But Irina also had something at her neck, hard to see, that glinted sharply blue—exactly the shade of blue that Earth’s seas would look like from space. In a flower-patterned sling, her baby—must find out what his name is! Nita thought—hung at her side and gazed curiously around at the gathering. On her opposite shoulder perched the little yellow parakeet who seemed to go everywhere with her, peering around as alertly as the baby. It briefly stood on one leg to ruffle up the feathers behind its ear with one claw, made a quiet scratchy sound, and settled down against her neck again.
“Colleagues and cousins,” Irina said, “associates who’ve come from great distances and from just up the road—you’re all very welcome. In the names of the Powers with whom and for whom we work in overseeing this planet, I want to thank you for making the time in your busy schedules to be a part of this proceeding, which is probably the biggest since that famous one in Babylon—the one back ten millennia or so, when Julian dates hadn’t yet been invented and we were still reckoning everything in fractions of a Simurgh year.”
A soft laugh traveled around the room among some of the older attendees. “Your presence here,” Irina said, “is an indication of your commitment to help the rest of us do our work better—the most important work there is: serving Life in this world, and incidentally in others. But, like charity, the best work for others starts at home. Here, on your own ground, those of you who’re competing in the Invitational will have a chance to demonstrate to your peers, and to those working at more central levels, the best of what you’ve learned and engineered to make wizardry better.”
She began to stroll casually around the space that had opened up around her. “Today and tonight we’ll have a chance to get to know one another better. You’ll have an opportunity to meet up for the first time with the wizards you’re going to be working with for the next few weeks, and to get a sense of what others in the community are doing—a sense that we’re hoping will be helpful to you whether you make it through into the later competition stages, or are obliged to step aside due to criterion-based outsorting.”
And then Irina cracked a grin as she looked out into the crowd. “I spent nearly half a day looking for a slicker or at least kinder way to phrase ‘getting chucked out on your butt.’” She smiled. “Because that’s what it felt like to me when I was deselected from the Invitational in 1992. I went down in the eighth-finals, and at the time I didn’t think it was possible for anything worse to happen to me for the rest of my life. Of course, then I got made Planetary.” Another laugh went around the group, but there was a slightly uneasy edge to it. “So if you do get outsorted, please don’t assume that your life is over. A surprising number of our former competitors come back later as mentors . . . or are so busy with other things that happened to them secondary to the Invitational that they don’t have time to waste further angst on it.”
She walked around some more, looking into the sea of faces as she did. “As usual,” Irina said, “you know that the honor the Powers That Be have bestowed on us as wizards is not entirely without its challenges. That old saying that the Powers will not send you any challenge for which you are not prepared—” She shook her head. “Unfortunately that saying was invented by someone who wasn’t a wizard. We know perfectly well that the universe has never worried about sending us challenges for which we are not prepared. But the Powers that manage this universe bloody well expect us to get prepared, if we’re capable. All of wizardry, if looked at one way, is a never-ending game of catch-up. The Invitational, and similar events in other worlds near and far, are all attempts to get ahead of the game.”
Irina paused in her walking. “More to the point, it’s about encouraging you and other wizards like you not only to use the manual, to use the knowledge that we share in many modalities, but to contribute to it as well. We’re all of us together in a business that can wear you down, wear you out, or kill you dead, without a little help from your friends. And though thousands of wizards worldwide do independent networking every day, giving each other help and advice on their own initiative, we’ve found it useful to hothouse the process every now and then. Wizards who work actively with other wizards in a primary role of spell design and implementation need to be accustomed to working fast in crisis conditions—and so, in that sense, the next three weeks, for some of you, are going to read like one long crisis.”