Penn was gesturing and waving at the spell while he went on talking. Maybe he doesn’t so much sound like an infomercial as one of those telemarketers, Dairine thought, having occasionally picked up the house phone and wound up stuck talking to one. Like he’s reading the same script to everybody and couldn’t care less about making it personal. “ . . . With a nod to some traditional legacy structures that date back to the last major shift in the Sun’s internal dynamics, around the year 1010 and roughly coinciding with the period called the Oort Minimum, when the Sun’s subsurface speeds and flow patterns altered . . .”
Dairine rolled her eyes. Nice excuse for not finding a more elegant way to get rid of the legacy structures. It’s like I told Neets, this guy’s lazy . . .
“ . . . possibly secondary to missing structural or energic elements which have ‘aged themselves out’ of Solar structure as similar surface-weather elements have been aging out on Jupiter and Saturn. My wizardry takes those changes into account and adds a ‘total recall’ function that alerts a supervising wizard while at the same time autonomously amending the boilerplate on the fly if there’s any kind of reassertion shift toward the older subsurface states. Not that anything like that’s happened for a while, but good wizardly practice suggests it should be taken into account in spell construction. But it’s just a safety feature. Let’s look instead at these power structures . . .”
Which are still too fragile, Dairine thought, slipping around to the far side to check out that section of the wizardry. Dammit, he needs to stop this thing rotating. Is he afraid someone’s going to get a close look at it? If the judges get that idea, they’re gonna chuck him out on his ear. Hope he has the sense to stop it and lay it out flat when they come along.
She examined the power structures and saw changes that had been made, but wasn’t at all sure they’d been strengthened enough not to snap off when submerged in the Sun’s roiling structure. Well . . . not my problem. Unquestionably, the guy had some good ideas, but he seriously needed a teacher, someone who’d shake him out of his bad habits. The thought of what Nelaid would do to him made Dairine grin.
She turned away: she’d seen enough. Put him up one to one against Mehrnaz and she wins, Dairine thought, walking quietly away around the far side of the crowd, while Penn carried on with his one-man show. She’s got five times the smarts that he has and easily ten times the sincerity. Her spell looks like her personality, like they’re connected somehow. His, even after Kit and Nita got him to tidy it . . . it’s all over the place, scattered. It’s like it has nothing to do with him. Or not enough to do with him. She made a face as she walked off, wanting to be more engaged with the other projects around her; but her thoughts kept drifting back to work she’d been doing with Nelaid on the management of solar radiation before it got to the surface of the star and started getting out of hand. Wonder why Thahit’s management wizardry doesn’t have something like that—these legacy structures that remember previous physical states. Is it too stable to need these? But that seemed unlikely. The main problem with Wellakh’s primary lay in how unstable it was.
Or maybe there’s something like that buried in the stellar simulator back on Wellakh, and now it’s taken for granted. Which was likely enough. Even if she’d built it herself, once a spell was in place, Dairine didn’t often bother looking twice at its diagramming unless something had stopped working or needed to be changed or debugged. And the interactive simulator on which she worked with Nelaid was a going concern, one that generations of wizards before him had fine-tuned before it had been settled into its present configuration. Tinkering around under its hood would have been the last thing on Dairine’s mind, especially when she and Nelaid first got started, for the Sunlord-in-Abeyance had been touchy enough about Dairine and about her connection to his very missing son. They’d got past the worst of it eventually, but at all times the thought of the third party in the relationship, the one who was not there, hovered over all their dealings with each other.
Dairine finally shrugged as she kept walking. He’d love this, she thought. Roshaun would be stalking around through this and approving the good projects in that oh-so-high-and-mighty way of his, and disdaining the bad ones. And what he’d make of Penn . . .
She had to snicker then, imagining the most likely response: the scornfully raised eyebrow, the long, thoughtful, judging gaze down Roshaun’s lengthy, slightly nostril-flared nose . . . and then the crunch of another lollipop destroyed in a moment’s princely (no, kingly now) irritability at everything that was wrong about Penn. The guy’s a dork, she thought, unwilling to waste any more time on analysis. He’ll get culled, and everybody’ll be relieved, especially Nita, it sounds like. Because he seems like such an overentitled, underperforming dork.
Why do you dislike him so much? something said in the back of Dairine’s head.
Not just something: Spot. He was still over on the side of the room, but he would have had to have been light-years and light-years away before he couldn’t hear her think.
Dairine laughed. “Don’t know,” she said. “Don’t care. Did you see that skyscraper thing next to him, though? They had a smart computer working as part of that.”
I’ll have a look.
“Right. Meet you up by the gate hex afterward? I’ll go see how Mehrnaz is doing.”
Right.
She wandered on down the concourse to pause in front of another display, something to do with making schools safe against attacks by people with firearms. But as she looked the project précis over, it occurred to Dairine that she’d been speaking to Spot in English, and what she’d said to him might not have been strictly true. She did care. And the question was a fair one, if a little annoying.
Why do I dislike Penn so much?
Over on the opposite side of the concourse, Kit was making his final pass through the exhibits, checking out a last couple of possibilities for token dropping. As time had started to get short before the formal judging began, he and Nita had split up to handle separately the picks that they couldn’t agree on. As a result, Kit kept running into other people who were also immersed in last-minute choices, and kept accidentally eavesdropping on conversations that even in this context were unusual. Some of the oddest ones—and the least inhibited—occurred when the competitor wasn’t onsite to explain things.
“Why would you want to do that to water?”
“To show off?”
“Yeah, well, an eighth matter-state sounds interesting, but what’s it for?”
Or at another stand:
“. . . Well, if you ask them the earthworms will tell you they’re okay with this, but you have to wonder if they’re just sparing his feelings.”
“Yeah, this wouldn’t constitute quality time for them, would it?” And leaning over the tank, a whisper: “Come on guys, come clean . . .”
And at another:
“Just think about it, though. It’s an idea whose time has come. Lightning as an antimissile weapon . . .”
“Won’t help you with ICBMs.”