On Friday evening she's due to fly out, crash in a Stanford grad student's house overnight, interview on Saturday, and fly home that evening. She bikes for the airport, black leather gold-studded saddlebags over Tegu's back wheel carrying her luggage.
[Running the world,] Bella suggests. [How many hexes do you think it would take to render, say, malaria, extinct? I'm not sure I can even do it with hexes, not without investing a lot of time in travel and finding people who have it and mosquitoes that carry it. That kind of thing might take a star.]
[Yep. Also, things on the scale of eradicating malaria will attract attention, and I bet you a clever wishcoiner could find me via some divinatory power as soon as they knew to look. I have to find out more, I have to be more secure and informed. Even though people are dying of malaria right now.] She does not like this.
[People aren't replaceable like that. Everyone knows this about people they've actually met; you just have to extend it - I mean, there are more people where I came from. I would assume you don't want me to die, at least given that it doesn't appeal to me.]
He would suffer a lot, but suffering is not exactly new and different for him. And there are seven billion more people on the planet, and odds are there's at least one or two more that he could love this much. If he stuck around long enough to find them.
People, as individuals, aren't replaceable. Everyone is exactly themselves. The loss of a person is a loss. But except in a very few cases, it's not a loss that Alice personally cares about, and even for those—even for the one he knows would completely take him apart—he doesn't think they are irreplaceable in the sense that the world becomes a permanently worse place every time someone leaves it. It just keeps on being the world, with these people instead of those ones.
[I lose you around the part where you don't think the world is worse when people are dying of malaria regularly, than it would be if people were not doing that,] Bella says. [I don't individually care about everyone personally - it's just shitty that they have to die, so I care about them impersonally and will see that they stop doing that.]
[You're into autoerotic asphyxiation too?] Bella sighs. [Well, you could always decouple the two things - attach the sense of needing to breathe only to how much breathing you've been doing lately, not to how much oxygen that's been getting you. And have oxygenation and de-carbonization handled magically.]
He'd much rather have it work more like the healing power: make a change that always works, except while he is telling it not to. So he can safely enjoy, say, drowning, and as soon as he stops holding off the magical gas exchange, his lungs become irrelevant again; but for things like this flight, he won't be constantly distracted by the thinness of the air.
[Well, how are you planning to get the water out? Just coughing and coughing for a few minutes? And it can't be good for salinity either.] She's poking his medical skill now. [Whether it's freshwater or salt. If you just refrain from breathing, you don't have that problem. If you want to be able to inhale any random substance and suffer pleasantly and then cease at a moment of your choosing, you're looking at something more complicated.]
[I couldn't reasonably have guessed that,] Bella points out. [Putting a swimming pool in your lair and drowning five times a day, six on Sundays, is exactly the sort of thing you would do. Anyway. I still think it makes the most sense to tie your subjective sensations to how much breathing you've been getting done - make that the state of affairs when you suppress the power, so normally it won't trouble you, normally you'll feel fine and oxygenated - and meanwhile render breathing biologically irrelevant.]
[How about this: three states for the power,] Bella says. [By default, you don't need to breathe, but you will anyway if you're not paying attention, so you don't freak out observers. Change it on purpose, and you can inhale whatever you want, suffer the usual effects uninhibited, fun stuff. Fall unconscious, and you don't need to breathe anymore and your body will not automatically try to do it in case that would make things worse, but will expel whatever's in your lungs at the time.]
It's a medium-sized flight. Bella gets off at the San Francisco airport and meets the helpful grad student who's hosting her overnight. [Blue Camry,] she informs Alice, when said grad student has showed Bella to her car in the parking lot. [Parking lot A.]
He burns the hex, focuses on Bella, and follows his shiny new directional sense to the car in question.
[What are you going to do overnight?] Bella asks Alice.
[Well,] Bella says. [Would Myra and her roommates want you on the roof? If you did it visibly, would they tell you to come down, and call the cops if you wouldn't? You're thinking it's an apartment in an apartment building, but we don't know that; what if she has a shared house thing? If it's an apartment building it's probably against some rule but not creepy, I suppose.]
Bella handles the interview very well.
She pentagoned interviewing skills first thing in the morning.
"If I can," Bella says earnestly. "I like Forks, but it's small - there's not a lot of resources there. I can only do so much without a lot of other people - world-class people - to learn from. Besides, I don't feel really challenged by high school work. I do it, but I'd rather be stretching myself more."
"Mm," says the interviewer. "All right, Bella, we'll get back to you in a few weeks."
"Thanks for your time," she says politely, and she gets up.
[Now I have an hour to wander around looking at stuff and grab lunch,] Bella says, [and then I'm supposed to meet the soccer coach real quick because I don't have enough of a game record to substantiate my claims of fantastic talent, and then I audition for the orchestra conductor.] She hefts her bag, which contains her flute, and swings it onto her back.
[Maybe. They're paying me lots of attention, so they at least think I'm in, but there could be bad luck, or a necessary recommender who takes a dislike to me, or a dozen more ridiculously qualified people who play basketball and violin and also spent two years working with tsunami victims or something.]
[Well, yes,] Bella says. [I assure you that if I went to a tiny, terrible community college in Port Angeles, all I would have to demonstrate would be basic literacy. Maybe they'd want to make sure I could add. The good schools are good because they're selective - people want to go there so they can get the best teachers, and fraternize with the best classmates. There aren't enough bests to go around for everyone.]
[Well, she looks a lot like me, but we're not that similar in personality] Bella says. [She has no long-term attention span. I think the only reason she can teach kindergarten is that she gets to forget she was doing it once a year. Hobbies and stuff she's intense about for a few months, then drops. In a lot of ways she's very childlike - she used to screw up things like depositing her paychecks, never bad enough that we went hungry or couldn't pay the mortgage if the bank called to yell at her, but bad enough to be scary, so I learned how to help her with that sort of thing as soon as I could. She's good at her job, she's never embarrassed not to know how to do something new, she's often very insightful about people and how they relate to each other while completely missing plenty of relevant implications of whatever she's spotted.]
The soccer coach is in the soccer field with the soccer players.
Bella waits politely for her attention, and then introduces herself.
"So you're some kind of prodigy now that your ear's fixed, I hear," says the coach.
"I've only had a chance to play against high schoolers, but I think so," Bella says modestly.
"Great. You're a forward? Go shoot goals against Mackenzie."
Bella goes and shoots goals against Mackenzie. Bella has only excellent-human-level soccer skills and Mackenzie is pretty good, so Bella misses one of twenty goals. She does not miss the other nineteen.
"Damn," says the coach. "I had some other stuff for you to do but I think I'm done."
[I suppose I probably shouldn't feel any worse than people who really do have this level of genetic gift do. I mean, I'll actually show up to practices; I don't have the history of putting the effort in but I will in the future. Still. Seems vaguely like doping or something.]
He seems suitably impressed, though he doesn't cut off the audition partway through like the soccer coach did.