There was a long, long darkness between the world winking out and flashing back into existence again. Nita could never remember its having taken so long before-but then the jump from Earth to Rirhath had been a short one no more than fifteen or twenty light-years. She held her breath and maintained control, even while the back of her brain was screaming frantically, He made a mistake in the spell somewhere, you distracted him and he misspelled something else: you're stuck in this and you're never going to get out, never-
It broke. Nita was as dizzy as she had been the last time, but she was determined not to wobble. Her ears stopped ringing as she blinked and tried to get her bearings. "Heads up, Neets," Kit was saying.
It was dark. They stood on some barren unlit moon out in the middle of space. Nothing was in the sky but unfamiliar stars and the flaming, motionless curtain of an emission nebula, flung across the darkness like a transparent gauze burning in hydrogen red and oxygen blue. Kit pointed toward the horizon where the nebula dipped lowest. Amid a clutter of equipment and portable shelters of some kind, there stood a small crowd of Satrachi. They had apparently not noticed their pursuers' appearance.
"Right," Nita said. "Let's do this-"
"Move us!" Picchu screeched. "Do it now!"
Kit's eyes widened. He started rereading the spell, changing the end coordinates by a significant amount. Peach was still flapping her wings and screaming. "No, that's not far enough-"
Nita snatched the gimbal up from the ground and tied it into her shield-spell. Can it take the strain of two spells at once? We'll find out. It'll abort the one it can't manage, anyway. She gulped. Physical forces-She started reciting in the Speech, naming every force in the universe that she could think of, tying their names into her shield and forbidding them entrance. Can I pull this off? Is this one of the spells that has a limit on the number of added variables? Oh Lord, I hope not-
"Light," Peach was screaming at her, "light, light!"
Nita told the shield to be opaque-and then wondered why it wasn't, as the brightest light she had ever imagined came in through it anyway. She had been to a Shuttle launch, once, and had come to understand that sound could be a force, a thing that grabbed you from inside your chest and shook you effortlessly back and forth. Now she wondered how she had never thought that light might be able to do the same, under some circumstances. It struck her deaf and dumb and blind, and she went sprawling. Heat scorched her everywhere; she smelled the rotten-egg stink of burning hair. She clutched the gimbal: she couldn't have dropped it if she'd tried.
Much later, it seemed, it began to get dark. She opened her eyes and could not be sure, for a few minutes, that they were open, the world was so full or afterimages. But the purple curtain between her and everything else eventually went away. She and Kit and Peach were hanging suspended, weightless in empty space. At least it was empty now. There was no sign of any moonlet -only off to one side, a blinding star that slowly grew and grew and grew and grew, toward them. They were out of its range now. They had not been before.
"Didn't know the gimbal could handle both those spells," Kit said, rubbing his eyes. "Nice going."
"It won't do it twice," Nita said. There was just so much power one could milk out of a physical aid, and she had been pushing her odds even trying it once. "Where are we?"
"I haven't the faintest. Somewhere a light-month out from our original position. And those Satrachi were bait," he said. "For us. Look at it, Neets."
She looked. "I could have sworn I opaqued this shield."
"It is opaqued," Kit said. "But a shield doesn't usually have to put up with a nova at close range. H-bombs are about the most one can block out without leakage, if I remember."
Nita stared at the raging star, all boiling with huge twisted prominences. For all its brilliance, there was a darkness about its heart, something wrong with the light. In a short time this terrible glory would be collapsed to a pallid dwarf star, cooling slowly to a coal. She shivered: one of the oldest epithets for the Lone Power was "Starsnuffer." It blew a whole star, just to kill us, because we were going to help Dairine.... "Did this system have other planets?" she said.
"I don't know. I doubt It cared."
And this was what was going after her little sister.
The anger in Nita got very, very cold. "Let's go find her," she said.
Together they began to read.
Chapter 11
Fatal Error
DAIRINE WOKE UP STIFF and aching all over. What's wrong with the bed? was her first thought: it felt like the floor. Then she opened her eyes, and found that she was on the floor... or a surface enough like one to make no difference. The cool, steady stars of space burned above her. She sat up and rubbed her sticky eyes.
I feel awful, she thought. I want a bath, I want breakfast, I want to brush my teeth! But baths and toothbrushes and any food but bologna sandwiches with mustard were all a long way away.
She dropped her hands into her lap, feeling slow and helpless, and looked about her. A sense of shock grew in her: all around, in what had been the absolutely smooth surface of the planet, there were great cracked holes, as if the place had had a sudden meteor shower while she was asleep. But the debris lying around wasn't the kind left by meteor strikes. "Sheesh," she muttered.
Something poked her from behind.
Dairine screamed and flung herself around. She found herself staring at the small, turtlelike glassy creature that had been the last straw the night before. It had walked into her, and was continuing to do so, its short jointed legs working busily though it was getting nowhere: like a windup toy mindlessly walking against a wall. "With," it said.
"Oh, heck," Dairine said in relief. She sagged with embarrassment. Two days ago she would have thought scorn to scream because of anything, up to and including Darth Vader himself... but the world looked a little different today.
She grabbed the steadily pedaling little thing and held it away from her to look at it. It was all made of the same silicon as the surface; the inside of its turtlish body was a complex of horizontal layers, the thickest of them about half an inch across, the thinnest visible only as tiny colored lines no thicker than a hair... thousands of them packed together, at times, in delicate bandings that blended into one subtle color. Dairine knew she was looking at a chip or board more complex than anything dreamed of on Earth. She could see nothing identifiable as a sensor, but it had certainly found her right away last night: so it could see. She wondered if it could hear.
"Well, how about it, small stuff?" she said. It was rather cute, after all. "Say hi."
"Hi," it said.
She put her eyebrows up, and looked over her shoulder at the computer, which was sitting where she had left it the night before. "Did you teach this guy to talk?"
"There is very little I did not teach the mind that made them," said the computer calmly.
Dairine looked around at the many, many jagged holes in the surface. "I bet. Where are they all?"
"Indeterminate. Each one began walking around the surface in a random fashion as soon as it was produced."
"Except for this one," Dairine said, and lifted the creature into her lap. It was surprisingly light. Once there, the creature stopped trying to walk, and just rested across her knees like a teatray with a domed cover on it. "Good baby," Dairine said. She touched one of the legs carefully, maneuvering the top joint gently to see how it worked. There were three joints: one ball-and-socketlike joint where it met the body, and two more spaced evenly down the leg, which was about six inches long. The legs were of the same stuff as the outer shell of the body dome: translucent, like cloudy glass, with delicate hints of color here and there. "Why didn't you go walking off with everybody else, huh?" she said as she picked it up to flip it over and examine its underside.
Its legs kicked vigorously in the air. "With," it said.
Dairine put the creature down, where it immediately walked into her again and kept walking, its legs slipping on the smoo
th surface.
" 'With,' huh? Okay, okay, 'with' already." She picked it up again and put it in her lap. It stopped kicking.
She glanced up at the sky. The galaxy was rising again. For a few seconds she just held still, watching the curving fire of it. "How long is the day here?" she said.
"Seventeen hours," said the computer.
"Fast for such a big planet," she said. "Mostly light elements, though. I guess it works. How long was I asleep?"
"Fourteen hours."
Dairine made an annoyed face. There went that much of her research time. She felt fairly certain that if the BEMs didn't catch up with her shortly, someOne else would. She didn't like the thought. "I've got to get some work done," she said, and glanced down at the turtly, glassy creature in her lap. "What about you? You can't sit here all day. Neither can I."
"Hi," said the glass turtle.
She had to laugh. "Are you still talking to"-she didn't know what to call it: she patted the glassy ground-"our friend here?"
"Yes," the computer said. "Response is slow. It is still assimilating and coordinating the data."
"Still?" Dairine let out a breath. If there was so much information in the manual functions that a computer with this much memory was still sorting it, what hope did she have of finding the information she needed in time to be able to do anything useful to the Lone One with it? She was going to have to help it along somehow. "Can you ask it to call back this little guy's friends? I want to look at them."
"Working."
Dairine stretched and considered that the next time she went out to space, she was going to plan things a little more carefully. Or stay at a hotel. Where, for example, was she going to find something to drink? She hadn't squirreled anything away in her claudication: she was going to have to find water. More to the point, there were no bathrooms here. Dairine wished heartily that she had taken time in the Crossings, or even back at Natural History, to use the facilities for something other than programming interstellar jumps. The memory of what sometimes seemed to be her mother's favorite line, "You should have gone before we left!" made her grin ruefully.
She got up to improvise what she could. Her turtle started to go with her. "No," she said, as she might have to Ponch. "Stay!" The turtle's response to this was the same as Ponch's would have been: It went after her anyway.
Dairine sighed and headed off to a little outcropping of rock about half a mile away. When she had finished, and started back to where the computer lay, she could already see small shapes moving on the horizon. She sat down with her bread and bologna, started making a sandwich, and waited for them.
Pretty soon she was knee-deep in turtles, or would have been had she been standing up. After the first few walked into her as her lapturtle had, she asked the computer to get them to hold still when they reached her. Something like two hundred of them were shortly gathered around her. They were all exact copies of her friend, even to the striations and banding inside them. She sighed a little as she looked at them.
"This isn't gonna work, you guys," she said. "There's more to life than walking around, and none of you have anything like hands...."
"Hi!" said all the turtles, simultaneously. She couldn't hear the ones that were outside her bubble of air, but the ones that were inside made racket enough.
She had to laugh at that. "Look," she said to the computer, pushing her first turtle out of her lap and putting the computer there instead, "where did the mind behind these critters get the design for them?"
"Probably from one of the design templates in the "Make" utility," said the computer.
"Okay, let's get into that. If these guys are going to be the arms and legs for the mind that's running them, they need arms!"
The computer's screen flicked obediently to the opening screen for the "Make" utility. Dairine frowned at the menu for a while. The computer had a machine-assisted drafting utility: she chose that, while her turtle tried to climb back into her lap.
"No," she said. "No, honey!"
It was no use. "With!" said the turtle. "With, with, with, with-"
She laughed helplessly. "Boy, are you ever GIGO," she said.
"Yes," the turtle said, and sat down next to her abruptly, folding all its legs under it like a contented mechanical cat.
Dairine put her eyebrows up at that. Was that all it wanted? A name? "Gigo," she said, experimentally.
"Yes!"
It sounds happy, she thought. Can it have emotions?
"Good baby," she said, and patted it. "Good Gigo."
"Yes!" said Gigo, and "Yes!" said several of the other turtles around, and it began to spread through the crowd to the limits of her air: "Yes, yes, yes-"
"Okay," she said, "he's good, you're all good, now put a cork in it!"
They fell silent. But there had been no mistaking the sound of joy.
"I can see I'm gonna have to find names for all of you," she said. "Can't have the whole bunch of you answering to that."
She turned her attention to the blank graphics screen. "Bring up the design that..." She paused. "I can't just keep banging on the ground. Does what you were talking to have a name for itself?"
"No."
Dairine sighed. "Okay, just let's call it a motherboard for the moment. Bring up the design it was using for Gigo and his buddies."
The screen flickered, showing Dairine a three-dimensional diagram, which the computer then rotated to show all the turtle's surfaces. "Good," she said. "How do I make changes?"
"The screen is touch-sensitive. Touch a line and state what you want done with it."
Dairine spent a cheerful hour or so there, pausing for bites of sandwich, as she started to redesign the turtles. She wasn't shy about it. The original design had its points, but as the mobile units of an intelligence, the turtles were sadly lacking in necessary equipment. She built several of the legs into arms, with six claws apiece at the end of them, four "fingers" and two opposable "thumbs"; this hand she attached to the arm by a ball-and-socket joint so that it could rotate completely around without having to stop. As an afterthought, she put another pair of arms on the turtle's back end, so that it wouldn't have to turn around to pick something up if it didn't want to.
She took the turtle's rather simplistic visual sensor, barely more than a photosensitive spot, and turned it into something of a cross between the human retina and a bee's faceted eye-a multiple-lensed business equally good for close work and distant vision. She placed several of these around the turtle's perimeter, and a couple on top, and then for good measure added a special-purpose lens that was actually something like a small Cassegrain telescope, focusing on a mirror-polished bit of silicon buried a ways into the turtle's "brain." She added infrared and ultraviolet sensing. Ears for sound they already had; she considered that it might be wise to give them something to hear radio with, too, but couldn't decide on which frequency to work with, and let the idea go for the moment. They could work it out themselves.
Dairine sat staring at the screen, musing. The newly awakened intelligence had made all its mobiles alike: probably because it didn't understand the concept of otherness yet. She would make them different from one another. But they were going to have to be different on the inside, too, to do any good. If some danger comes along that they have to cope with, it's no use their information processors being all the same: whatever it is could wipe them all out at once. If they're as different as they can be, they'll have a better chance of surviving.
She paused in her design to look closely at the structure of the chip layering in the turtles-not so much at what the layers were made of, but what their arrangement meant. At the molecular level she found the basic building-block of the chips, as basic as DNA in humans: not a chain molecule, but a sort of tridimensional snowflake of silicon atoms and atoms of other elements. DNA was simple beside these. Any given silicon molecule hooked with up to fourteen others, using any one of fifty different chemical compounds to do it; and every different arrangement o
f hookups between molecules or layers had a specific meaning, as each arrangement has in DNA. With the help of the computer she began to sort out the code buried in the interconnected snowflakes. Hours, it took her, and she was perfectly aware that even with the computer's help she couldn't hope to deal with more than the tip of this iceberg of information. Some parts of the chip structure she did manage to identify as pure data storage, others as sensor array, associative network, life support, energy management.
Dairine began devising layering arrangements different from those in the turtles. She designed creatures that would have more associative network and so could specialize in problem solving: others with more data stacks, turtles that would be good at remembering; mobiles more richly endowed with sensors, and senses, than some of the others, that would see and hear and feel most acutely. One arrangement of layers, the one that the computer identified for her as the seat of the turtles' emotions, seemed an awfully tiny thing to Dairine. She expanded it to about three times its original size, and allowed it to interconnect at will with the other associative areas, with data memory and with the senses. Finally, to every model she designed, Dairine added a great deal of latent memory area, so that each mobile would have plenty of room to store what it experienced and to process the data it accumulated.
Having done all these things, she went back to her original design and copied it several times, making a number of different "models": a large, strong one for heavy work; a small one with extra hands in various sizes, from human-hand size to tiny claws that could have done microsurgery or precision work almost on the molecular level. And she added the necessary extra sensor arrays or materials reinforcement that these changes would need to support them.