Penn grimaced. “So what is that?” Nita said.
“I’m glad you asked me that, Juanita,” Penn said, and turned the infomercial smile on her full force. “It’s a legacy function that has featured in solar intervention wizardries for nearly a thousand years—”
Nita looked at Kit and widened her eyes, mouthing at him, Juanita?!
“—and dates back to the time when there was a fairly major shift in the Sun’s internal dynamics, around the year 1010. That coincides with something called the Oort Minimum. Now you have to understand that the Sun has active periods and quiet periods . . .”
“Sunspot maxima and minima, thank you, I’m perfectly familiar with those,” Nita said. “It’s not the Little Ice Age period we’re talking about, but seven hundred years or so before. I get it.”
“Oh good, that makes this easier. Well, there were some changes in the Sun’s subsurface atmospheric speeds and flow patterns then, and the diagram reflects those and ‘remembers’ them in case those patterns reassert themselves without warning. It’s boilerplate, of course, nothing like that’s happened for a while, but we leave it in as a nod to a legacy state, on the off chance that it might reassert itself.”
Nita nodded. “Okay, good. Let’s move on . . .”
Penn picked up smoothly where he’d left off, and kept talking. I wish we could do something about his delivery, Nita thought. I keep thinking he’s going to sell me car wax, or a revolutionary new food processor. Like he’s afraid to let go and be excited, or enthusiastic in a natural way. But despite the overly slick delivery, Penn spoke very knowledgeably about what his spell was supposed to do, and how it was supposed to do it. Random questions he handled less gracefully; he really did hate being interrupted. For one fifteen-minute period, Kit and Nita took turns being hecklers, and Nita noticed with interest that Penn hated it even more from Kit than he did from her. But she also noticed that he rose to the challenge, and though she and Kit both got more disruptive and abusive than they could imagine anyone being in this situation, Penn not only kept going, but he started treating it as a joke and actually being funny about it. That might wind up helping him . . .
Finally she and Kit ran out of things to pick at, and let Penn finish his presentation. He spoke with such relish about how great it would be to have this thing installed in the Sun and working that when he was done, Nita found herself clapping, and Kit joined in. “Bravo!” Kit said.
Penn bowed theatrically. “Thank you, thankyouverymuch, I’ll be here all week.” He bobbed up again, looking smug.
Nita strolled around the diagram toward him, giving it one last look. “Penn, you actually have me convinced about this thing now.”
He headed toward her in turn, laughing at her with the aren’t-you-a-funny-heckler chuckle that he’d been using, and for the moment Nita didn’t mind. “You weren’t convinced before? I’m wounded.”
“Let’s just say it’s a family thing,” Nita said. “When it comes to tinkering with the local star, I take some convincing. But I think you’ve done a good job here.”
“So do I get some kind of reward for that?” Penn said, grinning.
“Well. Maybe we ought to let you run this spell.”
He laughed as if he thought Nita was joking. “Too soon for that, maybe. How would we do it, anyway?”
“There might be a way,” Nita said. “Though it would probably be kind of technical.”
Kit raised his eyebrows at Nita, the expression saying, You haven’t explained this to him yet? Oh boy.
“Come to think of it,” Penn said, “didn’t you say when I came in here that you’d made something for me? Haven’t seen anything yet.”
“You’re right,” Nita said. “Here.” She reached sideways into the otherspace pocket in the air, felt around for the kernel, found that one tagged strand that she’d left hanging out of it, made sure she had the right one, and gently pulled.
Instantly the checkerboard under their feet vanished, leaving the three of them standing above a roiling, roaring sea of fire that stretched from one impossibly distant horizon to the other.
“I made you a Sun,” Nita said.
It was as if they stood no more than a few hundred miles above the solar surface. At this height, vast glowing bubbles of boiling red-golden plasma rose up beneath them, slow, huge, impersonally deadly, shouldering up out of the convection layer to jostle and squeeze against one another, give up their heat, and then be pushed down into the depths again. Between the plasma granules, fountains of terrible fire, straight upward-splashing spicules and broadly curved prominences, reared up again and again out of the solar surface, strained away, and were swallowed back into the near-blinding conflagration. From where the three of them seemed to be poised, the corona was far too high above them to see—but the whip-crack hiss and lash of it through near-solar space echoed deafeningly in the emptiness around them, along with the low, furious roar, unending, of the body of the Sun breathing its heat and light and other radiation out into space. For a second it stirred a brief memory for Nita from a recent dream, a voice like the soft roar of fire, but the sound around her quickly drowned the memory out.
Nita stared down into the maelstrom, shaking her head, fascinated and awestruck as always by the huge, uncaring beauty of it. And this isn’t even a very exciting specimen, as stars go, she thought. But still so cool . . . if that’s the word we’re looking for. She grinned, glanced over at Penn to see his reaction.
He was standing there staring down, frozen, his face blank. It took Nita a moment to realize that the expression was one of terror.
For a moment she couldn’t move either. How’s he frightened by the environment he designed his spell for? Why would you build something that was going to take you someplace that scared you? You build something you like. The way Dairine did with her volcano at school, that time . . .
“How big is that?” Penn said in a hoarse whisper.
“Full size,” Nita said, staying matter-of-fact to see if it would calm him down. “Eight hundred and fifty thousand miles across, give or take . . . Probably about as wide as three and a half trips to the Moon laid end to end. Though I might need to check my math on that.”
“But it’s not real—”
“It is real,” Nita said. “It’s real here. That’s the whole point of the aschetic spaces. I told the space to make me a star, and fed it the necessary qualities and coordinates, and it made it.”
Penn was holding himself still. Anyone who couldn’t see his face might have believed he wasn’t longing to turn and flee out the portal. Nita saw him throw a glance at it. But then he turned his head away, scowling. Hanging on hard, she thought. But why’s he freaking out like this?
She looked over at Kit to see if he saw what she was seeing: but he was still gazing down at the view beneath their feet. “The sound on this is really good,” Kit said, impressed.
“If you could stand there in the coronal medium without a shield,” Nita said, trying to sound casual, “it’s exactly what you’d hear . . . for the fifty or sixty milliseconds before you were burnt to ash.”
Possibly Kit caught something odd in Nita’s voice at that point. He looked over at her, saw her watching Penn staring down into the fire. Well, this is weird, his expression said. Now what?
She shook her head at him, looked over at Penn again. I could kill this, Nita thought. But Penn hasn’t said anything, and I don’t get what’s going on. Is this something he never expected to see, didn’t think through? Sure, his presentation says this wizardry’s meant to be dropped into the Sun from a distance. But a wizard who did a spell like this would have to go there at least once and watch it from up close. Watch it go in, and make sure it was doing what you expected . . .