Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

After a few moments’ silence, from behind the stellar simulator two other figures emerged: a big blocky silver-haired man in jeans and a polo shirt, and a much taller and slenderer man with tied-back red hair nearly down to his knees, wearing soft dark-amber trousers and boots and a long open vestlike robe a shade darker. The taller man folded his arms across his chest in a resigned manner and looked at the shorter one, who had shoved his hands into his pockets and was gazing at the far-off ceiling and shaking his head.

“Harold,” the taller man said, “pray advise me. Would this be an appropriate response to what we’ve just seen?”

Dairine’s father shrugged. “Was what happened just there something that was supposed to happen?”

“No, no, no, no, NO! ” Dairine shouted, and stalked away from them, waving her arms in the air. “Don’t you two start trying to tag-team me, now, this is the last thing I need—”

“I mean, I don’t see what the fuss is about,” Dairine’s dad said. “It didn’t blow up anything like as hard as it did the time before last. This looks more like heavy breathing, and it seems to be settling down. So relatively speaking, what you’re doing looks like an overreaction.”

“If I had been prepared for it, it’d never have happened!”

“Precisely the point,” Nelaid said. “This is about how you react when you are not prepared.”

Dairine whirled and threw a look at Nelaid that (if being a wizard was good for anything) should have vaporized him. Then she whirled away and went stomping off again.

The two men exchanged glances. “Harold,” said Nelaid, “is it, do you think, appropriate to discuss anger management strategies at some future date?”

“Nel,” said Dairine’s dad, sounding completely resigned, “you’re on.” They watched Dairine with their arms folded, in nearly matching poses, with nearly matching faces.

She stopped herself from coming around for another bout of stomping and paused long enough for a familiar shape to come pacing out of the shadows on numerous mechanical legs. Spot’s laptop-body was moving close to the ground and nothing like the normal number of stalked eyes were in evidence: he looked like he was purposely trying to keep a low profile.

No need for you to be doing that , she said silently as she scooped him up.

Yes there is , Spot said, and pulled his eyes in tightly enough to his upper carapace that they vanished into it.

“It is not fair that you won’t let me use Spot!” she said to Nelaid, hugging Spot to her as Nelaid and her father headed over to her.

“Fairness does not enter into it,” Nelaid said, “because, as I thought I surely must have made plain to you by now, while your mech-based colleague may indeed be specialized hardware, he is not specialized enough for this task. And we have been over this a good number of times. The Sunstone is more specialized and far more suitable to purpose when it comes to everyday maintenance of a star than even Spot’s most carefully tailored wizardly routines, regardless of how assiduously you have been attempting to alter them to suit your needs. Which are mostly impelled by laziness,” he said to Dairine’s dad.

“Tell me about it,” her dad said, rolling his eyes. “I blame these smartphones, myself. Nobody knows how to just remember anything anymore.”

Nelaid flashed what Dairine suspected was a very precisely calculated half-smile. “Wellakhit wizards have been looking for alternate modalities to the Stone for longer than people on your planet have known how to do algebra, and have yet to find anything as suitable as this particular orthorhombic silicate crystal for the work of mapping wizardry onto the fine structures of a solar interior. That you expect that you will be able to do so simply so that you can allow Spot to handle the imaging and patterning routines for you, rather than learning to build the spell interface inside your own mind while using the Sunstone for templating, is, well, ambitious at the very least. But also rather self-deluding.”

“You think ‘stubborn’ might fit into the description somewhere?” said her dad.

“Oh God, what have I done to deserve this?” Dairine muttered.

“That is possibly an issue you will want to take up with Roshaun at some later date,” Nelaid said.

Dairine froze.

There was a time , she thought, when if he’d said something like that to me, I’d either have broken down and cried or punched him out. Now, though—But how can he say his name as if he’s just stepped out of the room, as if what happened to him hadn’t—? Dairine’s throat went achy in the space of a breath. She hated it when that happened and there was no way to control it—

I can’t wait until I’m so much better at this that I can safely tell him just what I think of him! And she let out a breath of exasperation, more at herself than at him. —Sometime in the next century, at this rate. But in the meantime, Spot was squirming to get down. Dairine puffed out an angry breath and crouched down to put him on the floor and let him skitter away. “My son took some time to master the fine detail of structuring the plasma management routines,” Nelaid said, sounding completely unaware of Dairine’s anger, or (worse) uncaring of it. “It is neither fun nor easy, and it is never going to be. If as you have been saying you intend to fulfill some of his functions for our world as well as his, the technique must be learned as taught before you can go on to try to improve it.”

“If it’s worth doing,” Dairine’s dad said, “it’s worth doing right. Even when it’s a pain in the ass . . .”

One of his favorite sayings, and one she’d been sick of hearing since she was nine. Dairine had been furious at Nelaid, and now she was getting furious at her dad as well. Exponentially furious , she thought. But when they’re like this they’re more than the sum of their parts, so I get at least the square of how angry I normally am. If we could just have a huge blowup it’d be great, but they just keep calming each other down.

“Leaving aside the issue of how you operate on the simulator, or the star it represents,” said Nelaid, “I see I also still need to impress on you that just because one starts to feel more comfortable with a given star’s attributes and characteristics, that is no reason to allow the comfort or familiarity to bleed into one’s treatment of other stars that are overtly similar.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t sneakily just change the simulator’s settings so that—”

“And why would a star on which you are operating normally take the trouble of notifying you before it is about to do something unexpected? The unexpectedness is the whole point. There is no more dangerous scenario than the one in which you are absolutely certain that you know what will happen. You were plainly quite certain of how the oblique shockfront was going to propagate in that last run, so much so that when the pressure densities of the plasma in the chromosphere underneath it started to change, you discounted the change entirely . . .”

“She did catch it before it blew, though,” Dairine’s dad said.

“True enough, Harold, but if she had been so careless with your star, the resultant derangement of its upper atmosphere, transient though it was, would shortly have done significant damage to the delicate upper levels of your planet’s atmosphere. Your climate would have suffered significantly as a result, and the survivors of the weather difficulties that would inevitably have followed would not have thanked Dairine for the increase in skin cancers and the cascade effects such as selective extinctions of species too fragile to cope with the change in lower-atmosphere UV levels.”