“Okay. Thanks.”
“Hey, can’t have you looking bad out there.” Dairine sighed. “But what I don’t get is how you got this guy and I got Mehrnaz. Seems like a mismatch.”
Nita shrugged. “Take it up with the Powers,” she muttered. “I don’t pretend to get it! And frankly I’d sooner you had him than we did. But there’s no swapping out once you’ve accepted the assignment. I think we’re all stuck . . .”
Dairine nodded. “Right. Anyway, check your manual later,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve gotta go crash for a while. I need to be up at midnight again . . .”
Nita patted Dairine’s back absently as her sister turned around, yawning, and Spot came spidering along to her. “See you tomorrow, Kit,” she said. “Penn . . .” She waved amiably at him without looking at him. “Good luck. ’Cause you’re gonna need it!” And she wandered off toward the portal and vanished through it, Spot clambering after her.
Penn gazed after Dairine, looking both astonished and a bit surly. “Thinks she’s pretty hot stuff, doesn’t she,” he said. He was trying to make it sound like a joke.
“So did the Lone One,” Nita said, shaking her head. “It might have had a point, for once . . .”
Kit was looking at Penn as if he felt sorry for him. “Come on,” Kit said, “if you don’t want to run your spell now then we’ve done all we can for today. Let’s go ’round the corner to my place, have a soda or something, and make plans for tomorrow.”
Penn’s long, smooth face was pinched-looking, and what was left of his smile was anxious. “No, thanks but no, I have to get back home . . . there are some things to do before tomorrow.” The expression that had replaced his sulkiness looked to Nita like it was shading toward panic. “So, listen,” Penn went on, “I’ll message you guys in the morning, okay? And we can figure out where to meet then.”
“Uh, sure,” Nita said, and didn’t know whether Penn had heard her, because he was already out the portal. Barely a second later she heard the Bang! of someone in so great a hurry that he didn’t use his transit spell to control the noise of the air that slammed into where he’d just been.
Nita turned to look at Kit. “What the hell was that?” she said.
Kit shook his head. “The sound of our schedule for the next couple of weeks freeing up?” he said. “Because if he goes into this tomorrow like that, he’s finished. And so are we.”
8
Hempstead / Mumbai
IT WAS AN HOUR or so later before Dairine saw Nita again. To her credit, Nita had peered into Dairine’s room as quietly as she possibly could, opening the door just a crack. But all the same it was enough to snap Dairine out of the doze she’d fallen into, propped up against the pillows at the head of her bed. She’d skipped dinner and hadn’t bothered to get undressed—there was no point in it. I’ll do it after I get back from seeing Mehrnaz, she’d thought. Right then, nothing had been so attractive as the prospect of stretching out and being horizontal for a while. Even the weight of Spot, hugged to her chest as they communed before she dozed off, hadn’t bothered her.
“You asleep?” Nita said, barely above a whisper.
“I wish,” Dairine said, while Spot sprouted a couple of bleary-looking stalked eyes out of his lid to gaze at Nita.
“Did you even eat?”
Dairine rolled her head back and forth against the pillows as Nita slipped in and sat on the edge of her bed. “Too tired right now,” Dairine said. “And if I eat and fall asleep, it’ll lie there inside me like lead.” She sighed and pushed herself up straighter against the pillows.
“You shouldn’t get up,” Nita said. “You should sleep.” She started to stand up. “We can do this in the morning, when you get back.”
“No no, wait,” Dairine said, rubbing her face. “Let’s get it done now. There’s some chance your guy might have time to fix it tonight. Assuming he’s willing to take direction.”
Nita sighed. “Not sure my chromosomes are arranged in the right order for him to do that willingly,” she said. “He seems to have this ‘why should I listen to you, girly’ thing going on to the point where it interferes with his reasoning processes.”
Dairine groaned. “God, what year does he live in?”
“I don’t know,” Nita said, “but I think he has a rude awakening coming if he makes it past the Cull.”
“Well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it,” Dairine said. She yawned and stroked Spot’s lid. “Virtualize the space for us, would you?”
Instantly the walls, the ceiling, even the floor of Dairine’s room all went away, replaced by the appearance of a broad, smooth, pale plain, all airbrush-hazed with soft colors, and overarched by the gentle fire of a gigantic barred spiral galaxy.
She caught the sound of Nita taking a sudden breath, and smiled. “That’s a new trick,” Nita said, craning her neck to look around.
“Think of it as a 3D desktop,” Dairine said. “The Mobiles hooked it up for me. They’re experimenting with thoughtspeed communications; they need it for the backup they’re building.”
“You mentioned that a while back,” Nita said. “They’re trying to back up . . . the whole universe?”
“Only this one to start with,” Dairine said. “Right now the two main problems are speed and storage space. But at the communications end, they’ve built me an experimental signal tunnel. My end goes through a wormhole somewhere in local space, and the signal comes out at their end, umpty billion trillion light-years away. Then they encode it for storage on individual electrons in a spare universe full of hyperdense matter, I think they said.” She waved her hand. “Don’t ask me how the engineering works—I’m just the beta tester.”
Nita shook her head in amazement. “As long as they’re not asking you for help with their math homework, I guess you’re doing okay . . .”
Dairine snickered. “Yeah. Anyway, here’s what Spot got from your guy.”
Penn’s spell appeared spread out over the glassy superstrate a few yards away, the spell circle enlarged to about twenty feet across to bring up the detail. She pointed at one particularly troublesome spot in the spell construct that Penn planned to drop into the surface of the Sun. “Here’s his real problem,” she said, and as she pointed at the diagram, a representation of the actual matter/energy structure that the spell would build rose up in front of them: a long, thin, tubular structure with a sort of finny dumbbell head at one end and a trumpet-shaped opening at the other.
“The subsurface structure,” Dairine said, and the dumbbell end enlarged, “that’s where the trouble is. All those little pinwheely things sticking out of it . . . He wants to install those only a few thousand miles under the surface? Near the boundary layer, where the subsurface convection movement is nearly supersonic? Complete waste of time, because those are way too fragile to take plasma currents at that speed. They’d flame out within the first fifteen minutes or so . . . rip themselves up like windmills in a hurricane, and the whole thing would come to pieces.”
Dairine yawned again. “The basic idea he’s proposing doesn’t need to be so depth-specific. Or anything like so sensitive, either. I don’t know who he’s trying to impress—”
“The judges?”
“If they work with the Sun on a regular basis, they’ll just laugh. What you need to get him to do at the very least is redesign these pinwheels to be more robust. Cut their wings back by about half, you’d still get plenty of input off them. But better still, he should pull the fancy fiddly things off and retailor the wizardry to dump the power structures in way deeper.”