Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

“Oh, no,” Nita said immediately.

S’reee bubbled a laugh into the water. “All right, and kind of a challenge too! But you can turn it down if you want to.”

Nita had her own thoughts about that, even though she’d hardly heard anything yet. The Powers had a sneaky way of getting you to do things for them even when you’d sworn you absolutely weren’t going to. “Okay,” she said as they slipped into the barrier-island waters just east of Coney Island, “what’s it about?”

“Well. You know that not everything one hears from the Sea, or that you get from your manuals, comes straight from the Powers That Be.”

“Sure,” Nita said. “Wizards contribute lots of spells and raw data. General knowledge, reports on local conditions . . .”

“Of course. Well, it’s important that such contributions don’t just happen by accident, or under stress. Wizards have a responsibility to further the Art, and part of that is making sure the new up-and-coming talent is getting the support it needs.”

“At wizardry in general? That’s what the Advisory- and Senior-level wizards were for, I thought.”

“That’s only part of it. Because when you’re a younger wizard, who wants to be listening to Advisories all the time? They’re so old. ”

Nita burst out laughing at that. “Oh, yeah, look at you! Who was a Senior just now, oh ancient one?”

“As if I didn’t get rid of that title as fast as I could!” S’reee said. “And good riddance. But even among cetaceans, when it comes to long-term learning, we tend to retain better what we learn either by ourselves or from others our own age. Or close to it, anyway.”

“So they want us to—what? Start teaching other wizards stuff?”

“Not so much teaching. Well, yes, to a certain extent . . . but it’s a mentoring program at heart. Just because someone’s incredibly talented doesn’t necessarily mean they know what to do with it.”

“Please,” Nita moaned. “Dairine.”

S’reee bubbled with amusement. “I wasn’t going to mention . . .”

The image of a whole crowd of Dairines gathered together in one place was already making Nita twitch. “Anyway,” S’reee said, “an Invitational is probably the biggest gathering of wizards you’re ever likely to see on a regular basis. Certainly the biggest noncrisis gathering. Once every eleven years the new intake of wizardly talent comes together to show what they can do.”

“What, to do spells?”

“Oh, among other things, yes. But not wizardries that’ve been around for a while. This is as much about new spell design as anything else. The participating wizards display new ways they’ve found to exploit the forces and elements of the universe. And the Speech, of course.”

“Huh,” Nita said. “Sounds like some kind of science fair.”

S’reee briefly looked puzzled. “I’m not getting a meaningful translation into the Speech on that phrase.”

Nita frowned, because she wasn’t sure how much of what was involved in a science fair would make sense to a whale even if she found a way to just put it into S’reee’s dialect of humpback, let alone the Speech. “It’s an educational thing. You do projects that demonstrate some scientific principle. Or else you show how you’d solve a problem using science. The best projects get a prize, usually.”

“Oh,” S’reee said. “All right, this could be like that. Except while you’re doing your demonstration, it’s okay to rewrite the laws of science a little bit . . .”

“Well, fine. But why am I getting invited to this thing? Is it because of Kit? I see he got an invite too.”

“Isn’t it obvious? They want you to come in and mentor.”

“What?” Nita stared down at that little eye. “Why me?”

“I keep talking to you, hNii’t, about not going so unconscious about your own credentials,” said S’reee. “You dealt with the Lone Power one-on-one, on Its own turf, on your Ordeal. You survived the Song of the Twelve, which isn’t exactly a given for any of the participants. Not to mention various other minor skirmishes. Mars, just now. Alaalu. The Hesper business.”

“We were lucky!”

“You were smart,” S’reee said. “The research kind of smart, the preparedness kind of smart. Smart is six-tenths of luck. And you played to your strengths, and you took your chances where you could find them. You weren’t afraid to improvise, or go for broke.”

“I also have a partner,” Nita said, “who knows how to be smart for two when my smarts break down.”

“So there you are,” S’reee said. “You understand it. Individually and as a team, the two of you have data and experience worth passing on, wouldn’t you say? You could make the difference between some other wizards living or dying because you knew how to help someone hammer the rough edges off the spell that someday was going to help them, or somebody else, survive.”

Nita sighed as they turned left and passed slowly by Point Lookout, heading inshore toward the northern side of the waters running inside the Fire Island barrier. “This is a ‘pay it forward’ thing, isn’t it.”

“Of course it is. What isn’t?”

She could see the low roofs of Freeport and Bay Shore jutting up against the afternoon sky ahead of them. A lot of things have started out like this , Nita thought, really innocently . . . and then turned into something way different before they were done. Yet she had to admit there was no guarantee that this was going to be one of them. “Well, what do I do now?”

“I’d guess you want to make sure your transport allowance is properly implemented, and check out the apps they’ve set up for you. Take a few minutes to talk to your Advisories, of course: Sea knows they’ll have been down this road before. In fact they probably recommended you for this, so you may want to talk to them about that.”

“Take a baseball bat to them, you mean!”

S’reee whistled with amusement as the two of them headed as close toward shore as it was wise for S’reee to go. “And then shove everything else you’ve got going on into a claudication and forget about it for a while, because you’re about to be the busiest you’ve ever been when you weren’t actually saving the universe.”

3

Wellakh / Hempstead

THE HUGE HIGH-CEILINGED SPACE was dark, walled in by rough stone. Only its floor was smooth, and mostly dark except where hot orange light fell on it in the center of the room. There, floating perhaps a meter above the floor, hung what appeared to be a giant burning globe of gas twenty meters across, turning slowly and gently in the air. Swarms of sunspots crept slowly across its surface in big clusters and patches: prominences arched out from it into the dark empty air, strained at what seemed to be gravity, fell back again.

In all the ways that mattered, it looked like a sun: specifically, a dark golden-orange subgiant star somewhere between types G and K, perhaps a G6. The only odd thing about it was the way it was throbbing—its surface blooming outward, shivering, then falling back again, shifting the big dark patches of sunspots around so that they drifted farther from one another briefly when the burning surface expanded, then flocked closer together when it collapsed back again.

The only other immediately peculiar aspect of the situation would have been the thin young redheaded girl in capri pants and sneakers and a long floppy purple print top who came stomping around from the far side of the huge burning globe, waving her arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, “Okay, that was completely out of bounds, there was no need to do that, and you may think it was cute, but pulling a cheap stunt like that absolutely and completely sucks! ”