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?”