Kit and Penn stared at each other in confusion and dread.
Irina let them stand there like that for a few moments. “You have to understand,” she said, “that because of my position as Planetary, I have wide latitude over the practice of wizardry on this planet. I am sometimes in a position to recommend to the Powers That Be that they offer wizardry to a specific person. And I’m also in a position, sometimes with the greatest regret, to request the Powers to withdraw wizardry from a person. The withdrawal can be very short-term, or very, very long, if necessary.”
The parakeet was attempting to make off with Irina’s ballpoint pen again. She took it back and once more began tapping on the legal pad with it while the parakeet made grabs for it.
“I hate doing that to younger wizards,” she said, “because all their good habits and expertise they’ve acquired during the early practice tend to get mislaid during a prolonged ban. Often they’re never again quite the wizards they were. And you can guess what such a ban does to relationships that these individuals might have with other wizards.”
Kit had never had a referent before for the phrase “his blood ran cold,” but he had one now.
“I wouldn’t like Nita to suffer as a result of such a ban,” Irina said. “She’s done nothing but try hard to keep you two on an even keel. But the way you work with each other, or I should say fail to do so, is making that effort increasingly difficult. I need to find a solution to this problem fairly quickly, because the finals of the Invitational are fast approaching. And we have never, never yet had a finalist chucked out for behavioral issues. Other reasons, sometimes, yes. But not that.”
She paused. “If either of you has anything useful to say to me here that does not involve some imbecilic attempt to blame the other guy, I’d be happy to hear it now. Anything.”
Kit fought with his own urges briefly before finally saying, “Nita’s been seeing some kinds of disturbing things in her dreams. And I think maybe I’ve been getting kind of disturbed by them too.”
Irina sat looking thoughtfully at him.“You two are fairly close,” she said.
Kit blushed, twitched a bit where he stood, and looked away. “Not like that,” Irina said. “I have no interest in where you are in that regard. It’s not my business. But your mental connection has sometimes been quite strong. I understand that that’s in flux right now—which is normal for this age, and for this type of relationship. But how have your dreams been?”
Kit shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Usually I don’t remember most of my dreams. But right at the moment—I’m not remembering any of them.”
“Is that so,” Irina said. “Then may I make a suggestion? If at some point in the near future you have a dream that you do remember more vividly than usual—please share it with one or the other of your Supervisories. I’d like to have it screened. She made a note. “But this isn’t germane to the immediate problem. There is no question that the piece of work that you have brought to us—” and she pointed at Penn—“is superior. We weren’t kidding when we wrote our evaluation. This is one of a possible suite of solutions to a problem that’s going to become more and more of an issue as Earth becomes ever more surrounded by fancy electronics on which the daily lives of billions and billions of people rely.”
Irina leaned back in her chair. “You have a right to be credited for that work and to continue to do it—so I’m reluctant to ban you. But I’m not yet entirely decided whether I want to let you present in the Invitational. Your behavior has not been best representative of the kind of talent and mastery both of oneself and one’s art that we expect of people who function at this level. And as for you, Kit, I mean—”
She shook her head again. “You’ve come through in the past under extremely peculiar circumstances. Yet I have to ask myself whether it is wise for me to keep sending you into situations in which one day your impulsiveness may mean you don’t come back. If that were to happen to you because I cleared you for errantry in the face of evidence that you can’t be relied on to act wisely, your blood would be on my hands.”
She looked at one of those hands. “There’s enough of that as there is,” she said very softly. “On my instructions wizards go to their deaths—not exactly every day, but it would be rare for a couple of weeks to pass during which someone out on errantry does not wind up in Timeheart because I sent them into harm’s way. Bad enough when it happens to adults. When it happens to our younger wizards . . .”
She looked away and let them stand there for a few minutes more while she folded her hands, rested her head on them, and stared at the legal pad.
After another moment she stood up, walked past Kit and Penn to the crib, and leaned over it. The baby had awakened and was looking at her with clear gray eyes. Irina picked him up and put him over her shoulder, then walked back to the table. She leaned against it while the baby made little gurgling noises. “Sasha here,” she said, “might not be alive right now except that a wizard working closely on human blood chemistries was able to cure him of neonatal leukemia. That wizard was a presenter at the last Invitational. He found a way to leak some of the nonwizardly modalities of his treatment into the public domain, and as a result, neonatal leukemia death rates are starting to drop.” She rubbed Sasha’s back. “So I very much dislike keeping any particular piece of work out of the Invitational once it’s past the semifinal stage. There tend to be reasons why such works wind up there . . . reasons we don’t always understand. Sometimes the Powers don’t understand them either.”
She looked at the baby. Sasha turned in her arms, put his hand on her mouth, and stuck a finger up her nose. “. . . So I think I’m going to let you present,” she said, looking at Penn. “But if I hear so much as a whisper about you being any less than unfailingly polite—”
“But I am polite!”
“Only in the most offensive way possible,” Irina said. “Truly, it’s a gift! But so is what you’ve been building. So present it. And while you’re doing that, you will do whatever Nita and Kit tell you to do. If they say ‘Jump,’ the only answer I expect from you is ‘Into which dimension?’ I expect your presentation to go off without a hitch. Otherwise, all kinds of hell will break loose. Am I understood?”
“Yes, Planetary,” Penn said.
“And as for you,” she said to Kit, “stay grounded, all right? Nita is at a pivotal place in terms of her wizardly career. She needs someone solid behind her. The element of earth you chose last night—?” Irina laughed ironically. “Well, you got that right. Stick with it.”
She sat down at the table again, still holding Sasha. “So I’ll see you in four days, on the Moon. Now go away, and let me get on with—” she waved one hand in the air—“the rest of the planet. Go well, you two.”
And they vanished.
The crater Daedalus on the Moon’s far, “dark” side is one of the largest craters on the body, if not the largest, and is positioned almost exactly in the middle of the side that’s permanently turned away from Earth. Its floor is surprisingly smooth, broken only by a scatter of small flattish, central peaks; and the neatness of the crater’s positioning has caused some earthbound astronomers to suggest that this would be a perfect location for an installation of radio telescopes, protected by the Moon from the never-ending racket of radio emissions from Earth, or even a vast liquid-mirror optical telescope that could see farther away in space, and farther back in time, than any other.