"You're so full of it," Dairine said, flushing, "that if you had eyes, they'd be brown."
"More illogic. And now she tells us that this 'Power' is pursuing her. Do we even have evidence that this thing exists anywhere except in the wizards' manual and her own thoughts? Or if It did exist, what evidence do we have that It did what she says It does? The manual, yes: but who knows how much of that is worth anything?"
Dairine took a gamble. "The way to test this data," she said, "is for you to accept it for the moment, and watch what happens when you start trying to help me stop the Lone One. It'll turn up to sabotage the effort fast enough. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if It was here already somewhere, watching for the best way to crash the program."
She heard laughter in her heart: the same laughter she had heard, it seemed years ago, falling through spacetime on that first jump from Earth to Mars. Dairine forced herself to sit cool. "I wish It were here," Dairine said. "I'd love to ask It some questions." Like why It's so eager to see entropy destroyed, when It invented it in the first place!
The laughter increased. You know very well, It said. It's just another tool, at this point. These poor creatures could not implement timestop on more than a local scale. By so doing they will wreak enough havoc even if the timestop never spreads out of the local galaxy's area-though it might: that would be interesting too. All the stars frozen in mid-burn, no time for their light or for life to move through.... Darkness, everywhere and forever. The sheer hating pleasure in the thought shook Dairine. But more to the point, this is the mobiles' Choice. As always when a species breaks through into intelligence, the two Emissaries are here to put both sides of the case as best they can. You, for the Bright Powers. It laughed again. A pity they didn 't send someone more experienced. And for my side... let us say I have taken a personal interest in this case. These people have such potential for making themselves and the universe wretched... though truly I hardly need to help most species to manage that. They do it so well. Yours in particular.
Laughter shook It again: for all her good resolve, Dairine trembled with rage. And all this would never have happened if you hadn't made the Firebringer's old mistake, if you hadn't stolen fire from Heaven and given it to mortal matter to play with. They'll bum themselves with it, as always. And you and Heaven will pay the price the Firebringer did. What happens to them will gnaw at you as long as you live....
"I daresay you might ask It questions if It ever showed up," Logo was saying, "and if It even exists. But who knows how long we would have to wait for that to happen? Friends, come, we've wasted enough time. Let's begin the reprogramming to set this universe to rights. It will take a while as it is."
"Not until everyone has chosen," Dairine said. "You don't have a majority, buster, not by a long shot. And you're going to need one."
"Polling everyone will take time," said Beanpole. "Surely there's nothing wrong in starting to write the program now. We don't have to run it right away."
Voices were raised in approval: almost all of the voices, Dairine noted. The proposal was an efficient one, and the mobiles had inherited the 'Manual' program's fondness for efficiency.
"I don't think it's a good idea, guys," Dairine said.
"You have a few minutes to think of arguments to convince them," said Logo. "Think quickly. Or as quickly as slowlife can manage."
Gigo slipped close to her, with Monitor and several other of the mobiles. "Dairine, why isn't it a good idea?"
She shook her head. That laughter was running as almost a constant undercurrent to her thoughts now, as all of the thinker mobiles gathered together and began their work. "I can't explain it. But when you play chess, any move that isn't an attack is lost ground. And giving any ground to that One-"
She fell silent, catching sight of a sudden crimson light on the horizon. The sun was coming up again, fat, red, dim as if with an Earthly sunset, and the light that had looked gentle and rosy earlier now looked unspeakably threatening. "Gigo, you're connected to all our friends here. How many of them are on my side at the moment?"
"Six hundred twelve."
"How many are with Logo?"
"Seven hundred eighty-three."
"And the rest are undecided?"
"Five hundred and six."
She bit the inside of her mouth and thought. Maybe I should just hit Logo with a rock. But no: that would play into Its hands, since It had already set her up as unreliable. And could she even destroy Logo if she tried? She had designed the mobiles to last, in heavier gravity than this and at great pressures. A rock would probably bounce. No matter anyway: demonstrating death to the mobiles would be the best way to convince them to remove entropy from the scheme of things. Forget that. She thought hard, for a long time.
I'm out of arguments. I don't know what to do.
And even if I did... It's in my head. It can hear me thinking. Can't You?
Soft laughter, the color of a coalsack nebula.
This would never have happened if I'd read the docs. If I'd taken the time to learn the wizardry, the way Nita did.... The admission was bitter. Nonetheless... Dairine stared at the Apple, sitting alone not too far away from her. There was still a chance. She knew about too few spells as it was, but it occurred to her that the "Hide" facility might have something useful to her.
She ambled over to the computer, Gigo following her, and sat down and reached out to the keyboard.
The menu screen blanked and filled with garbage.
Dairine looked over her shoulder. Logo was sitting calmly some feet away. "The thinkers are using the 'Manual' functions to get the full descriptions of the laws that bind entropy into the universe," it said. "I doubt that poor little machine can multitask under such circumstances." And besides... you cannot wad up one of the Powers and shove It into a nonretrievable pocket like an empty cold-cut package. You are well out of your league, little mortal.
"Probably not," Dairine said, trying to sound casual, and got up again and ambled off.
I've got a little time. Maybe a few minutes. The mobiles could process data faster than the fastest supercomputers on Earth. But even they would take a few minutes at what they intended. Of all governing time and space, the three laws of thermodynamics would be hardest to restructure: their Makers had intended them to be as solid a patch on the poor marred Universe as could be managed. Wizards had spent whole lifetimes to create the spells that managed even to bend those laws a little. But relatively speaking, the mobiles had lifetimes; data processing that would take a human years would be achieved in a couple of milliseconds. So I need to do something. Something fast... and preferably without thinking about it. Dairine shook.
"You're going back and forth," Gigo said from down beside Dairine's knee.
Dairine bit one knuckle. Admit fear, admit weakness? But Gigo had admitted it to her. And what harm could it do, when she would likely never think another thought after a few minutes from now? Better the truth, and better late than never. She dropped down beside Gigo and pulled it close. "I sure am, small stuff," she said. "Aunt Dairine has the shakes in a bad way."
"Why? What will happen if we do this?"
Dairine opened her mouth to try to explain a human's terror of being lost into endless nonbeing: that horror at the bottom of the fear of anesthesia and death. And the image of countless stars going out, as the Lone One had said, in mid-fire, their light powerless to move through space without time: a universe that was full and alive, even with all its evil, suddenly frozen into an abyss as total as the cold before the Big Bang. She would have tried to talk about this, except that in her arms Dairine felt Gigo shaking as hard as she was shaking-shaking with her own shaking, as if synchronized. "No," she heard it whisper. "Oh, no."
They 're inside my head too. Physical contact-
Dairine felt the mere realization alert something else that was inside her head. That undercurrent of wicked laughter abruptly vanished, and the inside of her mind felt clean again. This is it, she thought, the on
ly chance I'm gonna get. "Gigo," she said, "quick! Tie me into the motherboard the way the mobiles are tied in!"
"But you don't have enough memory to sustain such a contact-"
"Do it, just do it!"
"Done," she heard one of the Thinkers say, and then Logo said, hurriedly, angrily, "The mobiles are polled, and-" But it was too late. Even sentient individuals who reason in milliseconds, take ten or twelve of those to agree. It took only one for Gigo to close the contact, and make a mobile out of Dairine.
Somewhere someone struck a bass gong: the sound of it went on and on, and in the immense sound Dairine fell over, slowly, watching the universe tilt past her with preternatural slowness. Only that brief flicker of her own senses was left her, and the bass note of one of her heartbeats sounding and sounding in her ears. Other senses awakened, filled her full. The feeling of living in a single second that stretched into years came back to her again; but this time she could perceive the life behind the stretched-out time as more than a frantic, penned, crippled intelligence screaming for contact. The manual software had educated the motherboard in seconds as it would have educated Dairine in hours or months; the motherboard had vast knowledge now, endless riches of data about wizardry and the worlds. What it did not have was first-hand experience of emotion, or the effects of entropy... or the way the world looked to slowlife.
Take it. Take it all. Please take it! They have to choose, and they don't have the data, and I don't know how to give it to them, and if they make the wrong choice they'll all die! Take it!
And the motherboard took: reached into what she considered the memory areas of Dairine's data processor, and read them as it had read the manual. Dairine lay there helpless and watched her life, watched it as people are supposed to see it pass before they die, and came to understand why such things should happen only once. There are reasons, the manual says, for the selectiveness of human memory; the mercy of the Powers aside, experiencing again and again the emotions coupled with memory would leave an entity no time for the emotions of the present moment... and then there is the matter of pain. But Dairine was caught in a situation the manual had never envisioned, a human being having her life totally experienced and analyzed by another form of life quite able to examine and sustain every moment of that life, in perfect recall. With the motherboard Dairine fell down into the dim twilight before her birth, heard echoes of voices, tasted for the first time the thumb it took her parents five years to get out of her mouth; lay blinking at a bright world, came to understand light and form; fought with gravity, and won, walking for the first time; smiled on purpose for the first time at the tall warm shape that held her close and said loving things to her without using sound: found out about words, especially No!; ecstatic, delighted, read for the first time; saw her sister in tears, and felt for the first time a kind of pain that didn't involve falling down and skinning your knees....
Pain. There was enough of it. Frustration, rage at the world that wouldn't do what she wanted, fear at all kinds of things that she didn't understand: fear of things she heard on the news at night, a world full of bombs that can kill everything, full of people hungry, people shooting at each other and hating each other; hearing her parents shouting downstairs while she huddled under the covers, feeling like the world was going to end-will they shoot each other now? Will they have a divorce? Finding out that her best friend is telling other kids stories about how she's weird, and laughing at her behind her back; finding that she's alone in the world; making new friends, but by force, by cleverness and doing things to make her popular, not because friends come to her naturally; making herself slightly feared, so that people would leave her alone to do the things she wants to without being hassled! beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there's more, more, but she can't figure out what it is, then finding out that someone knows the secret. Wizardry. And it doesn't come fast enough, it never comes fast enough, nothing ever does.... and now the price is going to be paid for that, because she doesn't know enough to save these lovely glassy creature, her buddies, that she watched be born... helped be born... her children, sort of... she doesn't know how to save them, and they're going to be dead, everything's going to be dead: pain!
It hurts too much, Dairine thought, lying there listening to her heartbeat! slowly begin to die away. It hurts, I didn't want them to get hurt! But it was part of the data, and it was too late now: the motherboard had it, and all the mobiles would have it too, the second she released Dairine. Why should they care about slowlife now? she thought in anguish and shame at the bitter outrush of what her life had been. Cruelty, pettiness, selfishness almost incredible- But too late now. The motherboard was saving the last and newest of the data to permanent memory. Any minute now the mobiles would start the program running and entropy would freeze, and life would stop being a word that had a meaning. The last nanosecond crawled by, echoes of the save rolled in the link. Nothing ever comes fast enough: end of file....
Dairine lay still and waited for it all to end.
And lightning struck her. The flow of data reversed. She would have screamed, but trapped in the quicklife time of the motherboard, everything happened before the molasses-slow sparks of bioelectricity even had time to jump the motor synapses on the beginning of their journey down her nerves. The motherboard was pouring data into her as it had poured it into the mobiles under Dairine's tutelage: but not the mercifully condensed version of the manual programming that it had given them. The whole manual, the entire contents of the software, which in book form can be as small as a paperback or larger than a shelf full of telephone books: it poured into her, and she couldn't resist, only look on in a kind of fascinated horror as it filled her, and filled her, and never overflowed, just filled and filled.... The dinosaurs could have died while it filled her, life could have arisen on a hundred worlds and died of boredom in the time it took to fill her. She forgot who and what she was, forgot everything but this filling, filling, and the pain it cost her, like swallowing a star and being burnt away by it from the inside while eternally growing new layers on the outside: and finally not even the pain made sense anymore....
She lay there on her side and stared at the ground, and was astonished not to see the crumbs from her sandwich in front of her nose. She could not move, or speak, and she could just barely think, with great pain and effort. There was something wrong with the way time was flowing, except that every time she tried to think what it was exactly, the timeflow seemed perfectly all right. Shapes were moving in front of her, and voices were speaking, either in vast soft drawls or light singing voices that seemed familiar. Slowly names attached themselves to the voices.
"Now we see what these 'heart' things she gave us are for." That was Gigo. Good kid, she thought weakly, good baby. You tell 'em.
"And what entropy does, and what it cannot touch, ever." That was Beanpole, the silly-looking thing-where did he get such a voice? "Not all the evils and deaths it makes possible can touch the joys that run through it. We will have those too."
"We will not stop that joy," said Monitor. "Not for a nanosecond."
"It may be slow," said one of the mobiles, one whose name Dairine couldn't remember. "But it is life. And it brought us life. We do nothing to harm that."
"And if you are against that," said Gigo, "your programming is in error, and we are against you."
They all sounded more complete than they had. The one voice she did not hear was Logo's. But she did hear something stranger: a murmur of astonishment that went up from the thousands of mobiles. And was there a trace of fear in it? She couldn't move, couldn't see what was happening....
"Your choice," said another voice. At the sound of it, Dairine struggled with all her might to move, and managed to do no more than lever herself up half an inch or so and then flop down flat again, limp as a filleted fish. "Enjoy it. You will make no more choices... but first, to pay for the one you have made, you will watch what the entropy you love so much will do to her."
/> Dairine lay still, waiting for the lightning to strike.
And another voice spoke.
"Wanna bet?" it said.
It didn't feel us arrive right when we did, Nita thought. How distracted It is! What's she been doing to It? She and Kit actually had a second to collect themselves when they appeared, and Nita looked around her in a hurry. Another barren world, a great flaming barred-spiral galaxy flung across its night, an old tired star high in the sky, type N or S from the look of it, and a crowd of robots, crowded around Dairine and looking at her-and them-and the Lone One.
As with any other of the Powers, though there will be general similarities of vision among the like-minded, no two people ever see the Lone One in exactly the same way. Nita saw the good-looking young red-haired man she had seen in a skyscraper in the alternate otherworld the Lone One called his own. He was not wearing the three-piece suit he had affected there. Now he was dark-clad and dark-cloaked, unarmed and needing no armor: a feeling of cold and power flowed from him and ran impossibly along the ground, as if carried on a chill air. As the sight sank in, Nita shook like a leaf. What Kit might see, what Dairine and the robots might be seeing, Nita wondered briefly, then put the thought aside. She had other business.
It turned and looked at them. Nita stood as straight as she could under the circumstances, her manual in one hand, the other hand clutched on the gimbal in her pocket; beside her Kit stood almost the same way, except that Picchu sat on his wrist, making him look like a king's falconer. "Fairest and fallen," Nita said, "greeting and defiance." It was the oldest courtesy of wizards, and the most dangerous, that line: one might be intending to cripple or destroy that Power, but there was no need to be rude about it.
"You two," said the Lone One. "And a pet for company. Adorable... and well met. You are off your own ground and well away from help at last. It took me long enough to set up this trap, but it was worth it."