She sat back and sighed then, and unfolded her cramped legs, and reached down for her sandwich, which had gone stale on top while she worked. "Okay," she said to the computer. "Ask the motherboard to run off a few of those and let's see what happens."
"Considerable reprogramming will be necessary," said the computer.
"I know," said Dairine, between bites of the sandwich, making a face at the taste of it. "I'm in no rush."
The computer's screen filled with binary as it began conferring with the motherboard in machine language. What do I mean I'm in no rush? Dairine thought, momentarily distracted while Gigo climbed into her lap again. "Did you finish that analysis run about the Lone One for me?"
"Yes," said the computer. "Do you want it displayed?"
"Yeah, please."
The binary went away from the screen, replaced by print. Dairine didn't look at it immediately. She leaned back and gazed up. The galaxy was all set but for one arm, trailing up over the far, far horizon, a hook of light. The dull red sun was following it down as if attached to the hook by an invisible string. An old, old star, Dairine thought. Not even main-sequence anymore. This could have been one of the first stars created in this universe.... Might have been, considering how far out this galaxy-
The thought was shocked out of her. Something other than her voice was making a sound. It was a rumbling, very low, a vibration in the surface she sat on. "What the- You feel that?" she said to the computer.
"Vibration of seismic origin," the computer said. "Intensity 2.2 Richter and increasing."
There was precious little on the planet's surface to shake. Dairine stood up, alarmed, and watched the turtles. For all their legs, they were having trouble keeping their footing on the slick surface. Gigo hooked a leg around Dairine's and steadied itself that way. "Is this gonna get worse?" Dairine said.
"Uncertain. No curve yet. Richter 3.2 and increasing. Some volcanic eruption occurring in planet's starward hemisphere."
Got to do something about their leg design if this happens a lot, Dairine thought-and then was distracted again, because something was happening to the light: It wavered oddly, dimming from the clear rose that had flooded the plain to a dark dry color like blood. She stared upward.
The sun was twisting out of shape. There was no other way to describe it. Part of its upper right-hand quarter seemed pinched on itself, warped like a round piece of paper being curled. Prominences stretched peculiarly, snapped back to tininess again: the warping worsened, until the star that had been normal and round was squeezed small, as if in a cruel fist, to a horizontal, fluctuating oval, then to a sort of tortured heart-shape, then to an oval bent the other way, leftward. Sunspots stretched like pulled taffy, oozed back to shape again, and the red light wavered and shifted like that of a candle about to be blown out in the wind.
Dairine stood with a terrible sickness at the heart of her, for this was no kind of eclipse or other astronomical event that she had ever heard of. It was as if she was seeing the laws of nature broken in front of her.
"What is that?" she whispered.
"Transit of systemic object across primary," said the computer. "The transiting object is a micro black hole."
Dairine sat down again, feeling the rumbling beneath her start to die away. The computer had mentioned the presence of that black hole earlier, but in the excitement she had forgotten it. "Plot me that thing's orbit," she said. "Is that going to happen every day?"
"Indeterminate. Working."
"I don't like that," said Gigo with sudden clarity.
Dairine looked over at it with surprise and pulled it into her lap. "You're not alone, small stuff," she said. "It gives me the shakes too." She sat there for a second, noticing that she was sweating. "You're getting smart, huh?" she said. "Your mom down there is beginning to sort out the words?"
"It hurts," said Gigo, sounding a little mournful.
"Hurts..." Dairine wasn't sure whether this was a general statement or an answer to her question. Though it could be both. A black hole in orbit in the star system would produce stresses in a planet's fabric that the planet-if it were alive, like this one-could certainly feel. Line the black hole up with its star, as it would be lined up in transit, and the tidal stresses would be that much worse. What better cause to learn to tell another person that something was hurting you?... Now that there was another person to tell.
Dairine patted Gigo absently. "It's all over, Gigo," she said.
"Gigo, yes."
She grinned faintly. "You really like having a name, huh?"
"A program must be given a name to be saved," Gigo said quite clearly, as if reciting from memory-but there was also slight fear in its voice, and great relief.
"Well, it's all over," Dairine said... while surreptitiously checking the sky to make sure. Tiny though it was-too small to see-a micro black hole was massive enough to bend light toward it. That was what had made the sun look so strange, as the gravity center of the black hole's field bent the round image of the sun forward onto itself. The realization made Dairine feel a lot better, but she didn't particularly want to see the sun do that again. She turned back to the computer. "Let's get back to work."
"Which display first," the computer said, "the black hole's orbit or the research run on the Lone Power?"
"The orbit."
It drew it for her on the screen, a slowly moving graphic that made Dairine's insides crawl. The black hole's orbit around its primary was irregular. These transits occurred in twenty out of every thirty orbits, and in the middle five orbits the hole swung much closer to the planet and appeared to center more closely on the sun. This last one had been a grazing transit: the micro hole had only passed across the upper limb of the star. Dairine did not want to see what a dead-center transit would look like, not at all. But in the midst of her discomfort, she still found a little room to be fascinated. Apparently the black hole was the cause of the planet's many volcanoes: the tidal stresses it produced brought up molten silicon, which erupted and spread over the surface. Without the frequent passages of the hole near the planet, the millions of layers of the motherboard would never have been laid down, and it would never have reached the critical "synapse" number necessary for it to come alive....
"Okay," she said. "Give me the research run, and let me know when the motherboard's ready to make some more of these guys."
"Working."
Dairine began to read, hardly aware of it when Gigo sneaked into her lap again and stared curiously at the screen. She paged past Nita's and Kit's last run-in with the Lone Power and started skimming the précis before it for common factors. Odd tales from a hundred planets flicked past her, and sweat slowly began to break out on Dairine as she realized she could not see any common factors at all. She could see no pattern in what made the Lone Power pick a specific world or group or person to attack, and no sure pattern or method for dealing with It. Some people seemed to beat the Lone One off by sheer luck. Some did nothing that she could see, and yet ruined Its plans utterly. One wizard on a planet of Altair had changed the whole course of his world's history by inviting a person he knew to be inhabited by the Lone One to dinner... and the next day, the Altairans' problem (which Dairine also did not understand except that it had something to do with the texture of their fur) simply began to clear up, apparently by itself.
"Maybe I should buy It a hot dog," Dairine muttered. That would make as much sense as most of these solutions. She was getting a feeling that there was something important about dealing with the Lone Power that the computer wasn't telling her.
She scrolled back to Nita and Kit's précis again and read it through carefully, comparing it with what she had seen them do or heard them say herself. Her conversation with Nita after she had seen her sister change back from being a whale was described in the précis as "penultimate clarification and choice." Dairine scowled. What had Nita chosen? And why? She wished she had her there to ask her... but no. Dairine didn't think she could cope wit
h Nita at the moment. Her sister would certainly rip into her for doing dumb things, and Dairine wasn't in the mood... considering how many dumb things she had done in the past day and a half.
Still, Dairine thought, a little advice would come in real useful around now....
"Ready," said the computer suddenly.
"Okay. Ask it to go ahead."
"Warning," the computer said. "The spell being used requires major restructuring of the substrate. Surface stability will be subject to change without notice."
"You mean I should stand back?"
"I thought that was what I said," said the computer.
Dairine made a wry face, then picked it up and started walking. "C'mon, Gigo, all you guys," she said. "Let's get out of the way."
They trooped off obediently after her. Finally, about a quarter-mile away, she stopped. "This far enough away, you think?" she said to the computer.
"Yes. Working now."
She felt a rumbling under the surface again, but this was less alarming than that caused by the transit of the black hole-a more controlled and purposeful sound. The ground where Dairine had been sitting abruptly sank in on itself, swallowing the debris caused by the breaking-out of the turtles. Then slow ripples began to travel across the surface, as it turned itself into what looked like a bubbling pot of syrup, clear in places, swirled and streaked with color in others. Heat didn't seem to be involved in the process. Dairine sat down to watch, fascinated.
"Unnamed," Gigo said next to her, "data transfer?"
Dairine looked down at the little creature. "You want to ask me a question? Sure. And I have a name, it's Dairine."
"Dairrn," it said. She chuckled a little. Dairine had never been terribly fond of her name-people tended to stumble over it. But she rather liked the way Gigo said it. "Close enough," she said. "What's up?"
"Why do you transfer data so slowly?"
That surprised her for a moment, until she considered the rate at which the computer and the motherboard had been talking: and this was in fact the motherboard she was talking to now. To something that had been taught to reckon its time in milliseconds, conversation with her must seem about as fast as watching a tree grow. "For my kind of life, I'm pretty quick," Dairine said. "It just looks slow to you."
"There is more-slowlife?"
"Lots more. In fact, you and the Apple there are about the only, uh, 'quicklife' there is, as far as I know." She paused and said, "Quicklife, as opposed to dumb machines that are fast, but not alive."
"I see it, in the data the Lightbringer gave us," said Gigo. Dairine glanced over at the computer. "Data transfer?"
"Sure," Dairine said.
"What is the purpose of this new program run?"
Wow, its syntax is really shaping up. If this keeps up, it's gonna be smarter than me!... Is that a good idea? But Dairine laughed at it. It was the best idea: a supercomputer faster than a Cray, with more data in it than all the New York Public Library-what a friend to have! "When I'm gone," Dairine said, "you're going to need to be able to make your own changes in your world. So I'm making you mobiles that will be able to make the changes."
"Data transfer! Define 'gone'!"
Gigo's urgency surprised Dairine. "I can't stay here," she said. No, better simplify. "My physical presence here must terminate soon," she said. "But don't worry. You guys won't be alone."
"We will!" cried Gigo, and the whole planet through him.
"No, you won't," Dairine said. "Don't panic. Look, I'm taking care of it. You saw all the different bodies I wrote into the 'Make' program for you? You saw how they're all structured differently on the inside? That's so they can have different personalities. There'll be lots more of you."
"How?"
Dairine hoped she could explain this properly. "You'll split yourself up," she said. "You'll copy your basic programming in a condensed form into each one of them, and then run them all separately."
There was a long, long silence. "Illegal function call," said Gigo slowly.
"It's not. Believe me. It sounds like it, but it works just fine for all the slowlife... it'll work for you too. Besides," Dairine said, "if you don't split yourself up, you won't have anybody to talk to, and play with!"
"Illegal function call..."
"Trust me," Dairine said, "you've got to trust me.... Oh, look at that."
The surface, which had been seething and rippling, had steadied down, slick and glassy again. Now it was bulging up, as it had before. There was no sound, but through each hunching, each cracking hummock, glassy shapes pushed themselves upward, shook the fragments off, stood upright, walked, uncertain and ungainly as new foals. In the rose light of the declining sun they shone and glowed; some of them tall and stalky, some short and squat, some long and flowing and many-jointed, some rounded and bulky and strong; and one and all as they finished being made, they strode or stalked or glided over to where Dairine was. She and Gigo and the first turtles were surrounded by tens and twenties and hundreds of bright glassy shapes, a forest of flexing arms, glittering sensors, color in bold bands and delicate brushings-grace built in glass and gorgeously alive. "Look at them," Dairine said, half lost in wonder herself. "It'll be like being you... but a hundred times, a thousand times. Remember how the light looked the first time?"
"Data reacquired," Gigo said, soft-voiced.
"Like that," Dairine said. "But again and again and again. A thousand of you to share every memory with, and each one able to see it differently... and everyone else'll see it better when the one who sees it differently tells all the others about it. You won't be the only quicklife anymore. Copy your programming out, and there'll be as many of you as you want to make. A thousand of you, a million of you to have the magic together...."
"The call is legal," Gigo said after a moment. "Data transfer?"
"What?"
"Will there be pain? Like the Dark that Pulls?"
Dairine's heart wrenched. She picked Gigo up and pulled him into her lap. "I don't know, small stuff," she said. "There might be. I'm here if it does. You just hold on to me, and don't be scared."
She turned to the computer. "You know how to describe this to the motherboard?" she said. "They've all got to have all the major programming you gave their mom, but you're gonna have to pack the code down awful tight. And make sure they still don't lose the connection to her once they're autonomous."
"Noted," said the computer. "Override protocols require that I confirm with you what parts of the wizardly programming are to be passed on to each individual, and to what number of individuals."
She looked at it in surprise. "All of it, of course. And all of them."
"Reconfirmation, please. This far exceeds the median distribution and percentage."
"Oh? What is it on Earth?"
"Ratio of potential wizards to nonpotential: one to three. Ratio of practicing wizards to potential wizards: one to one hundred. Ratio of-"
"Are you trying to tell me that there are sixteen million practicing wizards on Earth?"
"Sixteen million, four hundred and-"
Dairine paused to consider the condition the world was in. "Well, it's not anywhere near enough! Make them all wizards. Yes, I confirm it three times, just get on with it, these guys are getting twitchy." And indeed Gigo was trembling in her lap, which so astonished Dairine that she cuddled him close and put her chin down on the top of him.
Instantly all his legs jerked spasmodically. Dairine held on to him, held on to all of them through him. Maybe some ghost of that first physical-contact link was still in place, for she went briefly blind with sensations that had nothing to do with merely human sensoria. To have all one's life and knowledge, however brief, ruthlessly crushed down into a tiny packet, with no way to be sure if the parts you cherished the most would be safe, or would be the same afterward-and then to multiply that packet a thousand times over, till it pushed your own thoughts screaming into the background, and your own voice cried' out at you in terror a thousand ti
mes, inescapable-and then, worst of all, the silence that follows, echoing, as all the memories drain away into containers that may or may not hold them- Dairine was in the midst of it, felt the fear for all of them, and had nothing to use against it but the knowledge that it would be all right, could be all right. She hung on to that as she hung on to Gigo through his frenzied kicking, her eyes squeezed shut, all her muscles clenched tight against the terror in her arms and the terror in her heart....
Silence, silence again, at last. She dared to open her eyes, lifted her head a little to look around her. Gigo was still. The glittering ranks around her shifted a little-a motion here, a motion there, as if a wind went through glass trees at sunset. The light faded, slipped away, except for the chill gleam of the bright stars over everything: the sun had set.
"It hurt," Gigo said.
He moved. Dairine let him clamber down out of her lap.
He turned and looked at her. "It hurt," he said.
"But it was worth it," said one of the taller mobiles, one of the heavy-labor types, in a different voice.
The voices began to proliferate. Motion spread farther through the crowd. Mobiles turned and spoke to one another in a chorus of voices like tentative synthesizers, changing pitch and tone as if looking for the right ones. Outside the area where there was air, communication passed by less obvious means. Dairine sat in the midst of it, heard words spoken with the delight of people tasting a new food for the first time, heard long strings of binary recited as if the numbers were prayers or poems, saw movement that even to a human eye was plainly dance, being invented there in front of her. She grinned like a loon. "Nice job," she said to the Apple.
"Thank you."
"We did good, huh?"
"Indeterminate," said the computer.
Dairine shrugged and got up to wander among the mobiles and get a closer look at them. They clustered around her as she went, touching her, peering at her, speaking to her again and again, as if to make sure they really could.