"Dead," Dairine whispered. "I'm dead for sure."
"Input error," said the computer, sounding quite calm.
Dairine's heart leapt. "Are you busted?!" she cried.
"Syntax error 24," said the computer, "rephrase for-"
"You can take your syntax errors and... never mind!" Dairine said. "What's wrong with you? Diagnostic!"
"External input," said the computer. "Nontypical."
"What is it? Some kind of broadcast?"
"Negative. Local."
It happened right after it linked to the geothermal power, Dairine thought. "Check your link to the planet," she said.
"Affirmative. Positive identification. External input. Planetary source."
"Are there people here?" Dairine said, looking around hurriedly.
"Negative." The computer's screen kept filling up with 1's, clearing itself, filling with 1's again.
She held still and forced herself to take a deep breath, and another. The computer wasn't broken, nothing horrible had happened. Yet. "Can you get rid of all those ones?" she said to the computer.
"Affirmative."
The screen steadied down to the last page she had been looking at. Dairine stared at it.
This unique structure becomes more interesting when considering the physical nature of the layering. Some 92% of the layers consist of chemically pure silicon, predisposing the aggregate to electroconductive activity in the presence of light or under certain other conditions. This effect is likely to be enhanced in some areas by the tendency of silicon to superconduct at surface temperatures below 200K. There is also a possibility that semiorganic life of a "monocellular" nature will have arisen in symbiosis either with the silicon layers or their associated "doping" layers, producing-
Dairine sat there and began to tremble. It's the planet, she thought. Silicon. And trace elements, put down in layers. And cold to make it semiconduct-
"It's the planet!" she shouted at the computer. "This whole flat part here is one big semiconductor chip, a computer chip! It's alive! Send it something! Send it some 1's!"
The computer flickered through several menu screens and began filling with 1's again. Dairine rolled from her sitting position into a kneeling one, rocking back and forth with anxiety and delight. She had to be right, she had to. One huge chip, like a computer motherboard a thousand miles square. And some kind of small one-celled-if that was the right word-one-celled organism living with it. Something silicon-based, that could etch pathways in it-pathways that electricity could run along, that data could be stored in. How many years had this chip been laying itself down in the silence, she wondered. Volcanoes erupting chemically pure silicon and trace elements that glazed themselves into vast reaches of chip-surface as soon as they touched the planet: and farther down, in the molten warmth of the planet's own geothermal heat, the little silicon-based "bacteria" that had wound themselves together out of some kind of analogue to DNA. Maybe they were more like amoebas than bacteria now: etching their way along through the layers of silicon and cadmium and other elements, getting their food, their energy, from breaking the compounds' chemical bonds, the same way carbon-based life gets it from breaking down complex proteins into simpler ones.
It was likely enough. She would check it with the manual. But for now, the result of this weird bit of evolution was all that really mattered. The chip was awake. With this much surface area-endless thousands of square miles, all full of energy, and connections and interconnections, millions of times more connections than there were in a human brain-how could it not have waked up? But there was nowhere for it to get data from that she could see, no way for it to contact the outside world. It was trapped. The 1 's, the basic binary code for "on" used by all computers from the simplest to the most complex, were a scream for help, a sudden realization that something else existed in the world, and a crying out to it. Even as she looked down at the screen and watched what the computer was doing, the stream of 1's became a little less frantic. 111111111, said her own machine. 111111111, said the planet.
"Give it an arithmetic series," Dairine whispered.
1, said her computer. 11. 111. 1111. 11111.
1. 11. 111. 1111. 11111.
"Try a geometric."
1. 11. 1111. 11111111. 1111111111111111.
I. 11. 1111. 11111111-
"Oh, it's got it," Dairine said, bouncing and still hugging herself. "I think. It's hard to tell if it's just repeating. Try a square series."
II. 1111. 1111111111111111-
III. 111111111. 1111111111111111111111111-
It had replied with a cube series. It knew, it knew! "Can you teach it binary?" Dairine said, breathless.
"Affirmative." 1. 10. 11. 100. 101-
Things started to move fast, the screen filling with characters, clearing itself, filling again as the computers counted at each other. Dairine was far gone in wonder and confusion. What to teach it next? It was like trying to communicate with someone who had been locked in a dark, soundless box all his life.... "Is it taking the data?"
"Affirmative. Writing to permanent memory."
Dairine nodded, thinking hard. Apparently the huge chip was engraving the binary code permanently into itself: that would include codes for letters and numbers as well. But what good's that gonna do? It doesn't have any experiences to make words out of, no reason to put letters together to make the words in the first place.... It was like it had been for Helen Keller, Dairine thought: but at least Helen had had the senses of touch and taste, so that she could feel the water poured into her hand while her teacher drummed the touch-code for water into it. It has no senses. If it did-
"Can you hook it into your sensors?" she said to the computer.
The computer hesitated. It had never done such a thing before: and when it spoke again, its syntax was peculiar-more fluid than she was used to.
"High probability of causing damage to the corresponding computer due to too great a level of complexity," it said.
Dairine breathed out, annoyed, but had to agree. Anything able to sense events happening forty trillion miles away, no matter how it managed it, was certainly too complex to hook directly to this poor creature right now. And another thought occurred to her, and her heart beat very fast. Not sensors, then. Senses. "Can you hook me to it?" she said.
This time the hesitation was even longer, and Dairine stared at the computer, half expecting it to make an expression at her. It didn't, but the speech of its response was slow. "Affirmative," it said. "Triple confirmation of intent required."
"I tell you three times," Dairine said. "Hook it to me. Tell me what to do. It has to get some better idea of what's going on out here or it'll go crazy!"
"Direct physical contact with surface," the computer said. It sounded reluctant.
Dairine dusted her hands off and put them flat on the glassy ground.
She was about to open her mouth to tell the computer to go ahead, do what it was going to: but she never got the chance. The instantaneous jolt went right through her with exactly the same painless grabbing and shaking she had felt when she was seven and had put a bobby pin in the electric socket. She convulsed, all over: her head jerked up and snapped back and she froze, unable even to blink, staring up into the golden-veiled blaze of the barred spiral, staring at it till each slight twitch of her eyes left jittering purple-green afterimages to right and left of it; and somewhere inside her, as if it were another mind speaking, she could hear her computer crying 110010 01011110000100! 11001001011110000100! at the frantic silence that listened. Light, light, light-
And the reply, she heard that too: a long, crazed string of binary that made no sense to her, but needed to make none. Joy, it was simply joy, joy at discovering meaning: joy so intense that all her muscles jumped in reaction, breaking her out of the connection and flinging her facedown on the glazed ground. The connection reestablished itself and Dairine's mind fell down into turmoil. She couldn't think straight: caught between the two computers
-for under the swift tutelage of her own, the great glassy plain was now beginning truly to function as one-she felt the contents of her brain being twinned, and the extra copy dumped out into endless empty memory and stored, in a rush of images, ideas, occurrences, communications, theories and raw sensations. She knew it took only a short time: but it seemed to go on forever, and all her senses throbbed like aching teeth at being desperately and delightedly used and used and used again to sense this moment, this ever-changing now. Dairine thought she would never perceive anything as completely again as she was seeing and feeling the green-and-gold-shaded piece of silicon aggregate she lay on, with the four crumbs from her sandwich lying half an inch from her eye. She felt sure she would be able to describe the shape of those crumbs and the precise pattern of the dappling in the silicon on her deathbed. If she survived this to have one.
Finally it stopped. Groaning softly, Dairine levered herself up and stared around her. The computer was sitting there innocently, its screen showing the main "Manual" menu. "How is it?" Dairine said, and then sighed and got ready to rephrase herself.
"Considerably augmented," said the computer.
Dairine stared at it.
"Is it just me," she said, "or do you sound smarter than you have been?"
"That calls for a value judgment," said the computer.
Dairine opened her mouth, then closed it again. "I guess it does," she said. "You weren't just acting as conduit all through that, were you? You expanded your syntax to include mine."
"You got it," said the computer.
Dairine took a moment to sit up. Before this, she'd thought she would love having the computer be a little more flexible. Now she was having second thoughts. "How's our friend doing?"
"Assimilating the new data and self-programming. Its present running state has analogues to trance or dream states in humans."
Dairine instantly wished it hadn't said that. What time was it at home? How long had she been running? How long had that last longest jump taken, if it had in fact taken any time at all? All she knew was that she was deadly tired.
"Update," said the computer. "It is requesting more data."
"On what?"
"No specific request. It simply desires more."
"I'm fresh out," Dairine said, and yawned. Then she looked at the computer again. "No, I'm not. Give it what you've got."
"Repeat and clarify?" said the computer, sounding slightly unnerved.
"Give it what you've got. All the information about planets and species and history and all the rest of it. Give it the magic!"
The computer said nothing.
Dairine sat up straight. "Go on," she said.
No reply.
"Is there some rule that says you shouldn't?"
"Yes," said the computer slowly, "but this edition of the software contains the authorization-override function."
"Good," Dairine said, none too sure of what this meant, except that it sounded promising. "I'm overriding. Give it what you've got."
The screen lit up with a block of text, in binary, quite small and neat, and Dairine immediately thought of the Oath in Nita's manual.
The screen blanked, then filled with another brief stream of binary. That blanked in turn, and screenful after screenful of 1's and 0's followed, each flickering out of existence almost as quickly as it appeared.
Dairine got up and stretched, and walked back and forth for a few minutes to work the kinks out of her muscles. She ached all over, as she had after the bobby pin incident, and her stomach growled at her again: a bologna sandwich and a half was not enough to satisfy her after the kind of day she had had. If it was even the same day. At least I have a while before the BEMs show up, she thought. Maybe our new friend here can be of some kind of help.... As she looked out across the dappled-silvery plain, there was a bloom of soft crimson light at one side of it. Dairine held still to watch the sun rise. It was a fat red star, far along in its lifetime-so far along, so cool, that there was water vapor in its atmosphere, and even in the vacuum of space it hung in a softly glowing rose-colored haze, like an earthly summer sunset. It climbed the sky swiftly, and Dairine watched it in silence. Quite a day, she thought. But whether it's morning here or not, I need a nap.
She turned around and started to head back toward the computer-and froze.
One patch of the surface was moving. Something underneath it was humping upward, and cracks appeared in the perfect smoothness. There was no sound, of course, since Dairine's air supply was nowhere near the spot; the cracks webbed outward in total silence.
And then the crust cracked upward in jagged pieces, and the something underneath pushed through and up and out. Bits of silica glass fell slowly in the light gravity and bounced or shattered in a snow of splinters around the rounded shape that stood there. Stood was the right word: for it had legs, though short stumpy ones, as if a toy tank had thrown away its treads and grown limbs instead. It shook itself, the rounded, glassy, glittering thing, and walked over to Dairine and through her shields with a gait like a centipede's or a clockwork toy's; and it looked up at her, if something like a turtle with no head can be said to look up.
"Light," it croaked, in a passable imitation of the computer's voice, and bumped against her shin, and rested there.
It was too much. Dairine sat down where she was and looked at the computer. "I can't cope," she said.
The computer had no reply for this.
"I can't," she said. "Make me some more air, please, and call me if they start chasing us again."
"No problem," said the computer.
She lay down on the smooth glassy ground, gazing at the rounded, glittery thing that stood on its fourteen stumpy legs and gazed back at her. No more than six breaths later she was asleep.
So she did not see, an hour and a half later, when the sun, at its meridian, began to pucker and twist out of shape, and for the best part of the hour lost half of itself, and shone only feebly, warped and dimmed. Her companion saw it, and said to the computer:
"What?"
"Darkness," said the computer: and nothing more.
Chapter 10
Reserved Words
THEY GOT TO RIRHATH B early in the evening, arriving at the Crossings just after suns' set and just as the sky was clearing. Nita and Kit stood there in the Nontypical Transit area for a few moments, staring up at the ceiling like the rankest tourists. Picchu sat on Kit's shoulder, completely unruffled, and ignored everything with yawning scorn, though the view through the now-clear ceiling was worth seeing.
"My brains are rattled," Kit said, breathing hard. "I need a minute." So did Nita, and she felt vaguely relieved that Kit had said something about it first: so she just nodded, and craned her neck, and stared up. The view was worth looking at-this sudden revelation of Rirhath's sky, a glorious concatenation of short-term variable stars swelling and shrinking like living things that breathed and whose hearts beat fire. All over the Crossings, people of every species passing through were pausing, looking up at the same sight, and admiring the completeness with which a perfectly solid-seeming ceiling now seemed to have gone away. Others, travelers who had seen it all before or were just too tired to care, went on about their business and didn't bother to look.
"We only have a couple of days," Picchu said, chewing on the collar of Kit's shirt.
"Peach," Nita said, "shut your face. You better?" she said to Kit.
"Yeah," he said. "You?"
"I was dizzy. It's okay now."
"Super." He flipped through his manual, open in his hand, and came up with a map of the Crossings. "What do we need to find?"
"Stationmaster's office."
"Right."
They checked out of Nontypical Transit, leaving their origin-and-destination information with the computer at the entrance, and set out across the expanse of the terminal floor, looking around them in calm wonder: for though neither of them had ever been there, both had read enough about the Crossings in their manuals to kno
w what to expect. They knew there had been a time when the Crossings itself was only a reed hut by a riverside, and the single worldgate nearby only a muddy spot in a cave that the first Master stumbled upon by accident, and claimed for its heirs (after waiting several years on Ererikh for the gate to reverse phase so that he could get home). Now, a couple of thousand years' worth of technology later, worldgates were generated here at the drop of a whim, and the Stationmaster regulated interstellar commerce and transportation via worldgating for the entire Sagittarius Arm.
Its office was not off in some sheltered spot away from the craziness, but out in the very middle of the station floor: that being the spot where the hut had been, twenty-four hundred and thirty years before. It was only a single modest kiosk of tubular bluesteel, with a desk behind it, and at the desk, hung up in a rack that looked like a large stepstool, was a single Rirhait, banging busily on a computer terminal keypad and making small noises to itself as it worked.
Nita and Kit stopped in front of the desk, and the Rirhait looked up at them. Or more or less up: some of its stalked eyes looked down instead, and a few peered from the sides. It stopped typing. "Well?" it said, scratchy-voiced-understandable, Nita thought, when you've got a gullet full of sand.
"You're the Stationmaster?" Kit said.
"Yes," said the Rirhait, and the fact that it said nothing else, but looked at Kit hungrily, with its scissory mandibles working, made Nita twitch a little.
"We are on errantry, and we greet you," Nita said: the standard self-introduction of a wizard on business. Sir or Madam, one normally added, but Nita wasn't sure which the Master was, or even if either term applied.
"That too?" said the Master, looking at Picchu.
"Yes, that," said Peach, all scorn.
"Well, it's about time you people got here," said the Master, and left off what it was doing, standing up. "Standing" was an approximation: a Rirhait is shaped more like a centipede than anything else, so that when it got off its rack and came out from behind the desk, its long, shiny silver-blue body only stood a foot or so off the ground, and all its eyes looked up at them together. "We had more of an untidiness here this afternoon than we've had for a greatyear past, and I'll be glad to see the end of it."