Kit glanced at Nita and opened his mouth, but Picchu beat him to it. "And that's all you're going to get out of it," Peach said, "since the real prize you hoped to catch in that trap has obviously slipped out of it." Peach began to laugh. "You never learn, do you? You're not the only one who can structure the future. The other Powers will sometimes scruple to do it. Not often... but They took a special interest in this case. The first time you've completely lost a Choice, from the beginning."
"And the last," said the Lone One. It made an angry sweeping gesture at them. But Nita had been waiting for something of the kind. She clenched her hand on the gimbal and thought the last syllable of the spell she had been holding ready.
The bolt that hit their shields was like lightning, but more vehement, and dark. It was meant to smash the shield like a rock thrown at an egg, leaving them naked to the quick horrid death of explosive decompression. But it bounced. No shock was transmitted to them directly: but Nita, fueling the spell directly, felt the jolt go through her as if that thrown rock had hit her right in the head. She staggered. Kit steadied her.
The Lone One looked at them in cold astonishment. "Hate won't be enough this time," Nita said. "Care to try a nuke?"
It didn't move, but that cold fierce force struck the shield again, harder. Dust and fragments of the surface flew all around them, and the ground shook. When the dust settled, it was plain that the shieldspell produced a spherical effect, because through the bottom of the sphere they could see the molten stuff underneath them pressing against it. They were standing in a small crater that seethed and smoked.
Nita sagged against Kit: this time he had to hold her up for a moment. "Why are we alive?" he said in her ear. "The gimbal's not enough to be holding that off! What are you fueling that shield with?"
"A year of my life per shot," she said, giddy.
Kit stared at her. "Are you out of your mind? Suppose you were scheduled to be hit by a truck in three years or something?"
She shrugged. "I better watch where I cross the street, that's all. Kit, heads up, there's more important stuff to think about!"
"Yes indeed," Picchu said to the Lone One. "The last time you lose a Choice. Let your own words ordain the truth... as usual."
Its face got so cold that Nita for a moment wondered whether the shield was leaking. Impossible. But enough of that, and enough sitting around and waiting for It to do stuff! "I'm warning you now," she said, "I don't know what you've been up to here, but I bet you're the reason my sister's lying there on the ground. I don't want to hurt you, particularly; you hurt enough as it is. But I'm giving you just one chance to get out of here."
She thought she had seen rage before... but evidently the Lone Power did not care for being pitied. "Or you will do what?"
"This," Nita said, and dropped the gimbal on the ground, knowing what would happen to it, and let loose the other spell she had been preparing, the other one Kit would not have liked to hear about. The one word she spoke to turn it loose struck her down to her knees as it went out of her.
The figure of the Lone One writhed and twisted as something odd happened to the light and space around it. Then it was gone. And the gimbal fell to powder, which sifted into a little pile on the ground.
Kit shook Picchu off and reached down frantically to grab Nita. "What did you do?"
She panted for breath.
"Sent it home," she said. "We know the coordinates for its dimension. It's a worldgate, like the one Dairine did for Mars-"
"That's two years of your life, maybe five," Kit said, furious, dragging her to her feet. "Why don't you tell me this crap when you're planning it?"
"You'd get mad. You're mad now!"
"We could have shared the time, you stupid- Never mind! It's gone, let's get Dairine and haul out of here before It-"
Whatever hit them, hit them from behind. The shield broke. They went sprawling. And the cold exploded in. Nita shut her eyes in terror: that was all that saved them from freezing over on the spot. She recited the spell carefully in her mind, and didn't breathe, didn't move, though her ears roared and she could feel the prickle in her skin caused by capillaries popping. Four more words, two more, one...
Air again, but little warmth. Nita took a breath: it stabbed her nose and mouth like knives. She opened her eyes and tried to see: her vision was blurred, shock perhaps-she didn't think her corneas had had time to freeze. Beside her she faintly heard Kit move among the shattered bits of the poor molten, refrozen, broken surface. "I changed my mind," he muttered. "Instead of being dead, can I just throw up some more?"
"Oh, no," said the Lone One from somewhere nearby, "no indeed. You have laid hands upon my person. No one does that and lives to boast of it. Though you'll live a while yet, indeed you shall. I shan't let you go quickly... unlike your mouthy friend."
Nita blinked and looked around her-then saw. An explosion of scarlet and blue feathers lying among the broken rubble; red wetness already frozen solid, frosted over.
Her insides seized. I was always counting on someone to come and get us out of this. Peach or somebody. We've been lucky that way before. But not this time. She got to her hands and knees, the tears running down her face with the pain of bruises and the worse pain of fear inside. Not this time. I guess the luck couldn't hold-
There were hands on her. It's not fair! she thought. When you give everything you've got, it's supposed to turn out okay in the end! The hands pulled at her. Her eyes went back to the poor pile of feathers sticking up in the rocks. She didn't even have a chance to do anything brave before she went. It's not fair!
"Neets. Come on."
"Yes," mocked the other voice, the cruel one, "come on, Neets. One more time. For my amusement."
She crouched, wobbling, staring at the bits of bright scarlet scattered all over the pale plain. "Kit," she said softly, "what are we going to tell Tom?..."
"Never mind that now. Neets, snap out of it! Think of Belfast."
She thought of Belfast, and dogs in the backs of cars. She thought of rocket fire in Beirut, and the silence of Chernobyl, plowed rain forests in Brazil, and the parched places in Africa, and all the street corners in America where people were selling crack, and other corners where people begged, or lay hungry on steam vents in the shadow of windows full of gems: she thought of needless fear, and pain, and rage, and prolonged and terrified death; and she thought of ending all of these forever-not right this minute, perhaps, but sooner or later. Somehow or other, everything that happened on this planet was supposed to contribute to that ending... whether she survived it or not. Slowly, slowly Nita dragged herself to her feet, and leaned on Kit without worrying who would think what about it. "What have you got?" she said.
"Not a thing. I couldn't do enough of a spell to butter my bread. But damned if I'm going out lying on the ground."
"Same here." She sniffled. The tears would not seem to stop. Very unheroic, she felt, with her nose running and her knees made of rubber. Almost it was funny: almost she could have laughed at it. But there was no time for that now, with that dark regard trained on them like the end of everything, that dark shape moving slowly toward them, smiling.
"Kit," she said, "it's been the best."
"See you in Timeheart," he said.
And another voice spoke; an unfamiliar one-or was it?
"Touch them," it said, "and you're dead meat."
Dairine scrabbled to her knees, looking across the broken waste at her sister, and at the tears on Nita's face as she and Kit stood there holding each other up. Until now, she would have shrugged and turned her thoughts to something else. But now memory was alive in Dairine as it had never been before, and she saw in utter clarity that first time so long ago, and heard herself make that decision. The way to keep from getting hurt is to know things. The resolve had only worked sometimes, before. But now she knew things, in a way no one ever had; and she was going to stop the hurting once and for all....
Beside her Gigo and some of the othe
r mobiles stirred to help her up. She stood, using one of the big heavy-work mobiles to lean against after she hauled herself back to her feet. Yards away stood a human-like figure. The Lone One turned to gaze at her, that dark regard astonished. "You again?" It said. "I see I will have to do away with you more quickly than these two. You're getting to be a nuisance."
Dairine grinned, a predatory look that had made more than one kid decide not to bother her on the playground, or in a poker game. "Do your worst, you poor turkey," she said.
She felt Its mind working, readying a bolt like the one that had crumpled Nita's shields, but many times worse, a killing blow that would cause a long lifetime's worth of pain before it snuffed life out. Must still be some connection to it through the motherboard, Dairine thought. I wonder where? Unless the presence of entropy in the board is enough. Wherever entropy is, It is.... Oh, well. She turned her mind to hunt a spell to stop the bolt; a millisecond later she had it. She did not need to look in the manual. She was the manual now.
As if in slow motion she watched the bolt head for her, invisible though it was. Effortlessly, Dairine struck it away from her and back at the sender, like a batter hitting a nasty ground ball straight back into the pitcher's gut. The Lone One didn't react physically-the blow was too small to affect It-but Its face grew terrible.
"You think you can match power with me?" It said softly, turning away from Nita and Kit.
Dairine laughed. "Think so? I can wring you out and hang you up to dry. Come on, you poor fool. Take your best shot."
It raised up a wash of power that would fall on the planet's surface and melt every one of the mobiles to magma. Dairine saw it coming, found the spell she needed, caught the incoming tide of death and threw it off to one side, where a large area of the plain began to bubble and seethe. "Naughty, naughty," Dairine said. "Let my buddies be."
The Lone One grew even larger, Its shape becoming less human, more shadowed, Its darkness a bottomless pit of hate. It looked up into the darkness. "Insolence," it said, "I will never tolerate. I may not be able to touch you, but I will level your planet. You cannot stay awake to guard it from me forever. One night the sirens will start, and the next morning, only mushroom clouds will grow on Earth anymore. It will not take much doing."
"It wouldn't if I ever intended to let you off this planet," Dairine said, quite calmly. "I'm in the motherboard as much as it's in me. They know all the wizardry there is to know... and even if my human brain starts to lose it eventually, they won't. Get used to this place. You're not leaving."
"Bets?" said the huge shadowy form, growing huger. Its cold eyes glanced up into the darkness.
High up, the red sun began to waver and pucker. "A significant amount of this planet's energy," said the Lone One, "comes from solar power. More than from geothermal. Much of this plain is solar cell: surely you noticed. That black hole's orbit can be changed without too much effort. It need no longer transit the star. It can be permanently placed in front of it...."
The sun's disk puckered in on itself, dwindled, died away completely.
The mobiles gazed up in horror.
"Oh, they have a little power stored," Dairine said. "Enough to stop that kind of blackmail." She took a breath: this was going to take some power, but she had that to spare at the moment-the whole motherboard behind her, all the mobiles, all their intent turned toward giving her whatever she needed. The spell was intricate, but the natural laws being worked with were simple enough: gravity was one of the easiest of all laws to rewrite for brief periods. Dairine reached out without moving, spoke the words that grasped the forces and spun them together, flung them outward. The net found the shape destined for it, the tiny dark mass around which space bent so awry. The mass was snagged into the net, caught. Dairine described the direction she wanted it to go in, turned the spell loose. The whole business had taken sixteen milliseconds.
The tiny black hole slung into the red sun, which immediately flared up in outrage. None of this was visible, nor would it be for some minutes, until the light reached the planet from the star; but Dairine felt it happen, and so did the Lone One.
"So much for that," Dairine said. "Now you and I are going to talk." At the same time she was thinking furiously about something else that nagged at her, as if it were important. How was it she was able to hear what was going on in Its head-
-and she was distracted, for here came something else, a wave of power so awful that she shrank from it, even though it wasn't directed at her or anything on the planet's surface.
All those millions of miles away, she felt the star go dead.
Starsnuffer: she knew the Lone Power was called by that name as well.
"I am through playing," It said. "If it is not you who pay the price, elsewhere others will. Think on it." It looked upward. There was hardly anything human about it anymore-only a great tall darkness, like a tree made of night, no limbs, no eyes, just awful watchfulness and a cold to freeze the heart.
Dairine looked up too. She felt darkness eating at the fringes of the risen galaxy.
"Here are your choices," said the Lone Power out of Its darkness, as Dairine and Nita and Kit watched in horror. "Keep on defying me, and watch me kill and kill as the price of your defiance. The blood of all these billions of entities will be on your souls forever. Or give yourselves up to me."
"No way," Nita said. "You're the one doing the killing. We'd do worse by the Universe if we gave up, rather than if we kept on fighting you."
Dairine stood silent, refusing to be rattled, thinking. There has to be a way to get it to stop this! I can't fight it forever! At least, I don't want to...
And how can I hear It? The connection through Logo! She glanced over among the mobiles, but Logo lay on his side, empty-minded. No. It has to be-
She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly....
I'm a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It's in me too....
Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning lightsaber, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable anymore. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It....
She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered; the thing that would save everybody-from Kit and Nita to the least little grain of dust in space and the tiniest germ on Earth. This was what the spell had brought her here to do. She would pen all of the Lone Power up inside herself, not just the treacherous little splinter of it that was her own; pen It up inside a mind that was large enough to hold It all. And then she would die, and take It out of the universe with her.
But she couldn't do it without consent. What about it, guys? she said to them silently, through the link that every mobile shared with every other. Let's take a vote.
Show us what to do, they said; and tears sprang to Dairine's eyes at the fierce love in their thought.
Dairine turned and bent down to pick up Logo, cradling the empty shell close in her arms. Gigo nuzzled up against her knee. This is the way to go out, Dairine thought. Who needs a lightsaber...?
"Okay," she said to the Lone One. "Last warning. Cut it out."
It laughed at her.
Dairine struck. The mobiles struck with her through their own links to the Lone One, a great flow of valor that for the first time in all times, was without despair. They did not care about all the other attempts wizards had made on the Lone Power through history; as far as a computer is concerned, there is no program that cannot be debugged, or at worst, rewritten. They struck through Dairine, and with her, not knowing that defeat was possible. Two thousand wizards, each a veritable library of wizardry, led by one at the peak of her power, and utterly committed, and a
ll acting as one: in such circumstances anything seemed possible. Dairine ran down the road into the dark places inside her, the scorn, the indifference, the selfishness, found the Lone One there, grasped It and would not let It go. The screaming began, both from those that held and from What they held.
The darkness stopped eating the galaxy, but that was not enough. The great pillar of dark that the Lone One had become was bent double to the ground, but not gone. Dairine hunted answers desperately: she couldn't hold It for long. To fight darkness, the manual said, as so many other references I have said before, light: the darkness comprehendeth it not...
Light, Dairine thought. We need more. But the nova was gone, half the galaxy was out....
She found her answer. It was going to be quite a spell. She put down Logo's shell, flung up her arms and felt for the forces she wanted, while the mobiles inside her kept the Lone One both inside and out pinned down. It was gravity she would be working with again, and the three laws of motion: nothing more involved. But there was a lot of matter to affect.... Don't think about it, Dairine told herself. Let the spell handle it. A spell always works. She spoke softly, naming everything she wanted to affect. One of the names was quite long, too long to waste time saying out loud; she slipped into machine language and machine time and spoke it there. It took four whole seconds, and made the whole planet tremble a little when she said it. Good, she thought, it's working.
She said the last word of the spell, knotting it closed on itself, and told it to run.
The Universe stopped expanding.
The backlash of the spell hit Dairine, but she refused to fall, waiting for what she knew would happen. The Lone One shrieked like a thing mortally wounded, a sound that made the planet shake almost as hard as it had before. Then It fled in the one direction left open to It: into the mortal souls of Kit and Nita and Dairine.
And then there was light.