“Got ’em,” Kit said. Nita nodded.
“Then go on in and start fulfilling your function.” He looked over his shoulder toward the curtain, then turned back to them. “You want to watch out . . . it’s a little busted loose in there. Some of the youngest ones are bouncing off the walls.” He grinned. “Personally, I think hardhats would do you guys more good than the lanyards, but . . .” He shrugged and waved a hand back toward the curtain.
“Thanks!” they both said, and headed in.
As they passed through the curtain, the sound inside the room burst all around them as if someone had hit the unmute button on a remote. Kit froze for a moment—feeling slightly relieved when Nita did, too—as he found himself looking across the biggest crowd of wizards he’d ever seen when the world wasn’t ending.
The space itself was sixty or seventy feet wide and easily more than a couple of hundred feet long, and almost entirely full of people. Full of wizards! Kit told himself. It was too easy, in normal times, to think of other wizards either in small groups or scattered all over the planet in the abstract, the way you might think of acquaintances on the Internet: mostly invisible and distant. But they’re not distant now! Kit thought. The place was alive with them, and all up and down that huge space, from floor to ceiling, the air glowed and flashed with wizardries laid out on show or now in progress, like a small but very enthusiastic fireworks displays.
Next to him, Nita let out a breath. “My God . . .”
“Yeah,” Kit murmured. “Come on!”
They started making their way through the crowds. There were as many older wizards as young ones there, gathering in groups down the length of the room to watch contestants who were doing presentations, or to examine setups from which the presenting wizards had stepped away. Kit could see some people standing well up over the heads of the crowd, as if they were on ladders. It took him a moment to realize that levitation was being extensively employed by people looking for someone or something in particular.
“What a zoo!” Nita muttered beside him. “And it’s like this now? What’s it going to turn into later?”
“No kidding. If we’re supposed to pick favorite projects, we’d better get going before you can’t even move in here anymore.”
Nita stared around them. “There has to be some kind of directory . . .”
As it happened, a pair of them hung transparently in the air, one on each side of that end of the room—tall, immaterial signs that could have been mistaken for holograms, except that they were constructs of wizardry. Each was densely lettered in two columns, one in the Speech and one that shifted into English as they approached. “It must have felt our manuals getting close,” Kit said.
“Yeah, nice . . .”
Three hundred and twelve names of competitors were listed on the floating directory, along with the names of their mentors’ and their projects. The great majority of these were highlighted with overlaying green bars that (according to the key at the bottom of the display) meant the competitor was onsite. A brighter green meant they were actively presenting. As Kit and Nita watched, a pair of lines flared brighter than all the others, the upper one the brighter of the pair.
“Wait,” Kit said, reading it. “Penn’s here already?”
Nita’s eyes widened. “Mr. Laid-Back, No Hurry? You’re kidding.” Nita peered at the list. “What number is he?”
The directory promptly faded out all the other listings, enlarged Penn’s name and the name of his project, and displayed a map of the floor of the exhibition space with Penn’s spot highlighted. He was about a third of the way down on the right-hand side.
Kit peered around the directory. “Yeah, you can just make him out past that—what is that? Looks like somebody’s got a bunch of scale-model skyscrapers down there. Wonder what that’s about . . .” But sure enough, a couple of spaces past that competitor’s display, there was Penn, his spell set out in its showier spherical 3D configuration, rotating gently into and out of the floor. He was talking animatedly to a group of adult and younger wizards gathered around him, and gesturing at his spell in a very smooth and choreographed manner, like a game-show host indicating the virtues of Door Number One.
“I can’t believe it,” Nita said. “It’s got to be eight in the morning for him. Didn’t think getting up this early was his style. If he’s showing some initiative finally . . .” She shrugged, and turned her attention back to the directory. “As for Dair . . .”
A second later the directory was showing them the space set aside for Dairine and her mentee; but it was dimmed down to show that they weren’t there yet, and a countdown clock over their spot showed an ETA of about an hour later. “Well, who knows,” Nita said under her breath. “Lunchtime’s when they said contestants should plan to be here, and there’s a lot of time zones between here and India. They might be stopping at home first.”
Kit nodded. “So which side first?”
“This one,” Nita said.
Because you want to have a look at Penn right now and get him over with, Kit thought. And if Nita by chance overheard the thought, she gave no sign of it.
They started wandering down the right-hand side of the big room, taking in the competitors’ exhibits. Some of them at first glance looked like the kinds of displays you might see at a high school science fair—a desk- or table-like space with a sign overhead saying what it was supposed to be. But in most of these cases, the signs were floating in the air unsupported, and so were some of the tables. Much more work, however, was being displayed on the beige-and-brown-patterned tile of the floor, or hovering in the air . . . and there, any resemblance to a mundane science fair ended in a hurry. “Is that a mobile meteor shield?” Nita said. “That’s a pick right there!”
“What, the first thing you see?”
“Why not? It’s not like we’ve got a limit on how many of these things we can give.”
“Oh come on, at least wait till you’ve seen a few!”
But soon enough Kit found that holding back from dropping one Mentors’-Picks token after another was harder than it looked. Some of the spells and wizardly projects were amazingly ambitious, all of them were wildly creative, and the young wizards who were presenting them were across the board so cheerfully excited about their work that it was almost impossible for Kit to walk past without stopping. And every time he stopped, he wanted to drop another token.
The names of the projects alone were enough to do it, sometimes. “Burning the Rain: Why Not? Desalinization with a Side of Subterfuge,” for example. That one was about using controlled wizardry-driven ionization and aerosol redirection spells to help make it rain where rain was needed, while also fooling drought-stricken desert countries into thinking that their gradual (and carefully supervised) climatic recovery was an unanticipated, idiosyncratic function of world climate change. The competitor responsible, a dark-skinned blond-dreadlocked twelve-year-old boy in a tank top and surfer jams, stood there laughing and explaining his floor-spread spell diagram to the people gathered around it, while overhead a six-foot-wide cloud like something out of a cartoon continually rained gently down on them all (and an uptake spell underneath the spectators recycled the water and kept it from running all over the floor). Kit saw at least one pair of wizards vanish from in front of the “water feature” and reappear a couple of minutes later in swimsuits.
Then there was “Don’t Look Now!” which was a new take on stealth shielding for wizards who needed to hide some crucial work in progress. The shield spell, once activated, synced up with a very tightly constrained conditional timeslide wizardry and superimposed a perfect 3D “playback” of what that given area had been like at a previous time of one’s choosing—ideally a time when nothing was happening there. But for demonstration purposes the “shielded” area on the exhibition floor was now set to loop back to two minutes before. As a result, spectators were dodging in and out of the project demonstration space like people standing in front of an electronics shop’s window to see themselves in the view of a camera—but they were doing it so they could stand next to themselves as they’d been two minutes previously. There was a lot of laughter and joking (“Didn’t I tell you how those jeans looked from behind? Didn’t I tell you?”), and almost constant flashing from held-up phones as wizards took selfies with themselves. While this went on, the competitor—a calm, smiling Aboriginal girl—leaned against her “stand” with her arms folded, explaining the intricacies of intratemporal visualization manifestation to anyone who’d hold still long enough.