And as for “Taub-NUT Space Seen as an Answer to Practically Everything” . . . The competitor responsible for it, someone called Marit Horowitz, wasn’t minding his or her stand when Kit and Nita passed by. Laid out on a floating table, and flowing over the edges of it to hang down like some kind of glowing lacy tablecloth, was a spell packed so insanely tight with delicate detail that figuring out its major structures at first glance was impossible. The Speech-phrases in it were so fine that they looked like they’d been woven into the structure by a spider with particularly good handwriting and a fondness for heavy theoretical work.
Kit stopped and read the project’s prospectus—or as much of it as he could, since it was mostly mathematical symbols—and then read what he could of it again. Next to him, Nita was doing the same thing. Kit was intensely relieved when she heaved a sigh and shook her head.
“It’s something to do with diagnosing the status of local hyperspace, right?” Kit said.
There was a pause. “Yeah, I think so.”
Nita’s hesitation made Kit feel better. “Most of it, though, I’m not getting. Tell me it’s just me.”
Nita stood there for the space of a few breaths and then looked at Kit. “Nope,” she said, shaking her head. She leaned over the “table” and read the competitor-wizard’s personal profile, which was embedded in it. “And he’s eight.”
Kit opened and closed his mouth. “How do you even have an Ordeal at eight?”
Nita shook her head again. “As soon as I can find somebody to explain this to me in baby words,” she said, sounding fairly put out, “either him or someone else, I’m giving him a token.” And she wandered off down the exhibition space.
Kit waited until Nita was out of sight behind some people in the crowd . . . then dropped his round, Speech-initialed token, glowing, onto the table. The token twinned itself: the twin vanished into the table and the original leaped back into Kit’s hand. Kit grinned and went after Nita.
This is all so amazing, he thought as he gradually caught up. There were people redesigning ocean currents and tweaking the Jet Stream, there were young wizards playing around with superconductivity and others building microscopic worldgates into computers to act as concrete data transfer mechanisms; there were kids Kit’s age or younger, seriously younger—at least by three or four years—playing with dangerous natural forces as if they were Tinkertoys. Why didn’t it feel so dangerous when I was doing it? Kit thought.
Though maybe having company helps . . .
He wandered past a brawny dark-haired guy in a long white robe who was displaying something that had to do with dynamically changing atmospheric density. It apparently had applications for restoring the ozone layer, but most of the kids gathered around the display were using the custom-redensified air so they could quack-talk like people who’d been breathing helium. Avoiding a couple of these who were doubled over with laughter, Kit bumped into Nita from behind. She was standing there with arms folded at the back of a crowd of people, and she wasn’t making any move to slip through them.
The reason was Penn, who was walking his tall self up and down the front of the crowd and waving his arms as the spectators examined the spherical-structure version of his spell while it rotated gently up out of the floor and down into it. “Absolutely no way it can miss, my cousins! Drop your tokens here and vote for what three out of four passing wizards have already declared to be the best thing since sliced bread, the best way to redirect the solar wind that anyone’s ever come up with, not least because voting for it makes you . . . look . . . great!”
And with a series of grand curving gestures he traced a flaming Wizard’s Knot in the air and started the mockup of his spell running. Its 3D version flared out of view, to be instantly replaced by an underfloor view of the Earth as seen from low Earth orbit. An incoming flood of charged particles from the distant Sun came shooting and sparkling in, blinding-bright as rain caught by lightning—a sudden splendor of inbound solar wind made visible. But at a gesture from Penn the spell went active, and the reality of it as it would appear in operation, rather than the schematic, came burning to life above him. The power conduit between the spell and the Sun started pulling energy into the space around the Earth as the wizardry went fully active. Penn flung his arms up over his head, and an invisible half-dome of repelling power sprang up above him, matching the Earth’s curvature, so that the high-energy particles bounced off it like hailstones off a tin roof in dancing curves of light.
Penn stood there with his eyes squeezed shut and a triumphant grin plastered over his face as the crowd gave him a round of applause. Some of them pushed forward to drop pick-tokens in a hot spot at his feet, a glowing circle with pointing neon arrows and a label that said (first in the Speech, but then switching every second to English and other languages) SHOW YOUR SMARTS HERE!
As the crowd started to move on, Penn bowed effusively to them, and bowed again to the new group that was moving up to see what was going on. “Thank you, thankyouverymuch, I’ll be here all week . . .”
Kit laughed under his breath. “This is so like him.”
“Yeah, it is,” Nita said, very low. It was almost a growl. Kit found himself entertaining two very different thoughts as she moved away from him and toward Penn: If I were him I’d watch what I said to her right now, and Why is it that when she sounds like that it’s kind of hot?
A break developed in the crowd in front of them and Nita was already slipping forward to where the basic spell, once again in 3D spherical mode, had reappeared and was once more rotating in and out of the floor. “Ah, Juanita,” Penn said, beaming at her, “I see you’ve been getting the vote out for me. Lots of interest, nice to see you’re getting the job done . . .”
“I haven’t done a single thing,” Nita said. “Ask Kit.”
Kit produced the most neutral expression he could manage and focused on the spell diagram, because he knew that tone of voice; it might sound casual, but he knew better. “Looks like you were busy last night, though. Thought you might have decided to sleep in instead . . .”
“Sleep? Sleep is for the weak. Did some light spell work along the lines of some of the stuff you mentioned, watched the Sun come up, decided to come in early and wow the crowds.”
Nita smiled. “Think you’re gonna have enough energy to carry on like that all day?”
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head, I’ll be pacing myself.” He turned his back on her, and so missed the way her eyes went wide. “Kit, my man—”