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.