"Kit, you'll have to hurry," Tom said. "She's got a long lead on you, and the trail will get cold fast. Neets, where would Dairine want to go?"
Nita shook her head. "She reads a lot of science fiction."
Carl looked worried. "Has she been reading Heinlein?"
"Some," Nita said. "But she's mostly hot for Star Wars right now."
"That's something, at least. With luck she won't think of going much farther than a few galaxies over. Anything in particular about Star Wars?"
"Darth Vader," Kit said. "She wants to beat him up."
Tom groaned and ran one hand through his hair. "No matter what the reason," he said, "if she goes looking for darkness, she'll find it."
"But Darth Vader's not real!" said Nita's mother.
Tom glanced at her. "Not here. Be glad."
"A few galaxies over..." Nita's father said to no one in particular.
Carl looked grim. "We can track her, but the trail's getting cold; and at any rate Tom and I can't go with you."
"Now, wait a minute..." Nita's mother said.
Carl looked at her gently. "We're not allowed out of the Solar System," he said. "There are reasons. For one thing, would you step out the door of a car you were driving?"
Nita's mother stared at him.
"Yes, well," Tom said. "We'll get you support. Wizards everywhere we can reach will be watching for you. And as for a guide-"
"I'll go," said Picchu abruptly, from the computer table.
Everyone stared, most particularly Nita's mother and father.
"Sorry, I should have mentioned," Carl said. "Peach is an associate. Bird, isn't this a touch out of your league?"
"I told you I was needed," Picchu said irritably. "And I am. I can see the worst of what's going to happen before it does; so I should be able to keep these two out of most kinds of trouble. But you'd better stop arguing and move. If Dairine keeps throwing away energy the way she's doing, she's going to attract Someone's attention... and the things It sends to fetch her will make Darth Vader look like a teddy bear by comparison."
Nita's mother looked at Carl and Tom. "Whatever you have to do," she said, "do it!"
"Just one question," Tom said to Picchu. "What do They need her for?
"The Powers?" Picchu said. She shut her eyes.
"Well?"
"Reconfiguration," she said, and opened her eyes again, looking surly. "Well? What are you staring at? I can't tell you more than I know. Are we going?"
"Gone," Nita said. She headed out of the room for her manual.
"I'll meet you in the usual place when I'm done," Kit called after her, and vanished. Papers flew again, leaving Nita's mother and father looking anxiously at Carl and Tom.
"Powers," Nita heard her father say behind her. "Creation. Forces from before time. This is-this business is for saints, not children!"
"Even saints have to start somewhere," Carl said softly. "And it's always been the children who save the Universe from the previous generation, and remake the Universe in their own image."
"Just be glad yours are conscious of the fact that that's what they're doing," Tom said.
Neither of her parents said anything.
In her bedroom, Nita grabbed her manual, bit her lip, said three words, and vanished.
Chapter 6
Randomization
DAIRINE DID NOT GO straight out of the Galaxy from Mars. Like many other wizards when they first cut planet-loose, she felt that she had to do a little local sightseeing first.
She was some while about it. Part of this was caused by discomfort. The jump from Earth to Mars, a mere forty-nine million miles, had been unsettling enough, with its feeling of first being pinned to a wildly rolling ball and then violently torn loose from it. But it hadn't been too bad. Piece o' cake, Dairine had thought, checking the transit directory in the computer. Somewhere out of the Solar System next. What's this star system? R Leporis? It's pretty close.... But she changed her mind, and headed for the moons of Jupiter instead... and this turned out to be a good thing. From Mars to Jupiter, bypassing the asteroid belt, was a jump of three hundred forty-one million miles; and the huge differences between the two planets' masses, vectors, and velocities caused Dairine to become the first Terran to lose her lunch on Jupiter's outermost satellite, Ananke.
The view did more than anything else to revive her-the great banded mass of Jupiter swiftly traversing the cold night overhead, shedding yellow-red light all around on the methane snow. Dairine sat down in the dry, squeaky snow and breathed deeply, trying to control her leftover heaves. Where she sat, mist curled up and snowed immediately down again as the methane sublimated and almost instantly recrystallized to solid phase in the bitter cold. Dairine decided that getting used to this sort of travel gradually was a good idea.
She waited until she felt better, and then began programming-replenishing her air and planning her itinerary. She also sat for a while examining the transit programs themselves, to see if she had been doing something wrong to cause her to feel so awful... and to see if perhaps she could rewrite the programs a little to get rid of the problem. The programs were written in a form of mbasic that had many commands which were new to her, but were otherwise mostly understandable. They were also complex: they had to be. Earth spins at seventeen thousand miles an hour, plows along its orbital path at a hundred seventy-five thousand, and the Sun takes it and the whole Solar System off toward the constellation Hercules at a hundred fifteen thousand miles an hour. Then the Sun's motion as one of innumerable stars in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy sweeps it along at some two million miles an hour, and all the while relationships between individual stars, and those of stars to their planets, shift and change...
It all meant that any one person standing still on any planet was in fact traveling a crazed, corkscrewing path through space, at high speed: and the disorientation and sickness were apparently the cause of suddenly, and for the first time, going in a straight line, in a universe where space itself and everything in it is curved. Dairine looked and looked at the transit programs, which could (as she had just proved) leave you standing on the surface of a satellite three hundred fifty million miles away from where you started-not half embedded in it, not splatted into it in a bloody smear because of some forgotten vector that left you still moving a mile a second out of phase with the surface of the satellite, or at the right speed, but in the wrong direction.... Finally she decided not to tamper. A hacker learns not to fix what works... at least, not till it's safe to try. Maybe the transits'll get easier, she thought. At least now I know not to eat right before one....
That brought up the question of food, which needed to be handled. Dairine considered briefly, then used the software to open a storage pocket in otherspace. By means of the transit utility she then removed a loaf of bread, a bottle of mustard, and half a pound of bologna from the refrigerator back home, stuffing them into local otherspace where she could get at them. Mom 'n' Dad won't notice, she thought, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it? Spank my copy? Be interesting if they did. I wonder if I'd feel it....
But there were a lot of more interesting things to consider today. Dairine stood up, got the computer ready, and headed out again, more cautiously this time. She stopped on Io, another one of Jupiter's moons, and spent a while (at a safe distance) watching the volcanoes spit white-hot molten sulfur ten miles out from the surface; sulfur that eventually came drifting back down, as a leisurely dusty golden snow, in the delicate gravity. Then she braced herself as best she could and jumped for Saturn's orbit, four hundred three million miles farther out, and handled it a little better, suffering nothing worse than a cold sweat and a few dry heaves, for the two planets were similar in mass and vectors.
Here there were twenty moons-too many for Dairine at the moment-but she did stop at Titan, the biggest satellite in the Solar System, and spent a while perched precariously on a peak slick with hydrogen snow, looking down thoughtfully at the methane ocea
ns that washed the mountain's feet. Several times she thought she saw something move down there-something that was not one of the peculiar, long, high methane waves that the light gravity made possible. But the light was bad under the thick blue clouds, and it was hard to tell. She went on.
The jump to Uranus's orbit was a touch harder-six hundred sixty million miles to a world much smaller and lighter than the greater gas giants. Dairine had to sit down on a rock of Uranus's oddly grooved moon Miranda and have the heaves again. But she recovered more quickly than the last time, and sat there looking down on the planet's blurry green-banded surface for a long time. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had both been gravity-slung off toward alpha Centauri and were plunging toward the radiopause, the border of the Solar System, whistling bravely in the endless dark. Sitting here she could hear them both, far away, as she could hear a lot that the Sun's radio noise made impossible to hear closer in. That silent roar, too-the old ruinous echo of the Big Bang-was more audible here. How can I even hear it? she wondered briefly. But Dairine quickly decided it was just another useful side effect of the wizardry, and she got up and headed out as soon as she was better.
From Uranus to Neptune was one billion, one million miles. To her own surprise Dairine took it in stride, arriving standing up on Triton, one of Neptune's two largest moons, and with no desire to sit. Better! she thought, and looked around. There was very little to see: the planet was practically a twin of Uranus, except for its kinky partial rings, and the moons were barren. Dairine rubbed her arms. It was getting cold, even in the protective shell she had made for herself; her forcefields couldn't long stand this kind of chill. Out here the Sun was just one more star, bright, but not like a sun at all. The jump to Pluto was brief: she stood only for a minute or so in the barren dark and could hardly find the Sun at all, even by radio noise. Its roar was muted to a chilly whisper, and the wind on Pluto-it was summer, so there was enough atmosphere thawed to make a kind of wind-drank the heat away from her forcefields till in seconds she was shivering. She pulled the computer out. "Extrasystemic jump," she said hurriedly.
"Coordinates?"
"Read out flagged planets."
"Andorgha/beta Delphini, Ahaija/R Leporis, Gond/kappa Orionis, Irmrihad/Ross 614, Rirhath B/epsilon Indi-"
"The closest," said Dairine, feeling a touch nervous about this.
"Rirhath B. Eleven point four light-years."
"Atmosphere status?"
"Earthlike within acceptable parameters."
"Let's go," Dairine said.
"Syntax error 24," said the computer sweetly, "rephrase for precision."
"Run!"
A galaxy's worth of white fire pinned her to the rolling planet; then the forces she had unleashed tore Dairine loose and flung her out into darkness that did not break. For what seemed like ages, the old, old echoes of the Big Bang breaking over her like waves were all Dairine had to tell her she was still alive. The darkness grew intolerable. Eventually she became aware that she was trying to scream, but no sound came out, nothing but that roar, and the terrible laughter behind it.
-Laughter?
-and light pierced her, and the universe roared at her, and she hit the planet with a feeling like dreaming of falling out of bed-
Then, silence. True silence this time. Dairine sat up slowly and carefully, taking a moment to move everything experimentally, making sure nothing was broken. She ached in every bone, and she was angry. She hated being laughed at under the best of circumstances, even when it was family doing it. Whatever had been laughing at her was definitely not family, and she wanted to get her hands on it and teach it a lesson....
She looked around her and tried to make sense of things. It wasn't easy. She was sitting on a surface that was as slick white as glare ice in some places, and scratched dull in other spots, in irregularly shaped patches. Ranked all around her in racks forty or fifty feet high were huge irregular objects made of blue metal, each seeming made of smaller blocks stuck randomly together. The block things, and the odd racks that held them, were all lit garishly by a high, glowing green-white ceiling. What is this, some kind of warehouse? Dairine thought, getting to her feet.
Something screamed right behind her, an appalling electronic-mechanical roar that scared her into losing her balance. Dairine went sprawling, the computer under her. It was lucky she did, for the screaming something shot by right over her head, missing her by inches though she was flat on her face. The huge wind of its passing whipped her hair till it stung her face, and made her shiver all over. Dairine dared to lift her head a little, her heart pounding like mad, and stared after the thing that had almost killed her. It was another of the bizarre cube-piles, which came to a sudden stop in midair in front of one of the racks. A metal arm came out of the Tinkertoy works of the rack, snagged the cube-pile and dropped it clanging onto an empty shelf in the rack's guts.
Dairine pulled the computer out from under her and crawled carefully sideways out of the middle of the long white corridorlike open space, close to one of the metal racks. There she simply lay still for a moment, trying to get her wits back.
There was another scream. She held still, and saw another of the cubes shoot by a foot and a half above the white floor, stop and hover, and get snagged and shelved. Definitely a warehouse, she thought. And then part of the cube seemed to go away, popped open, and people came out.
They had to be people, she thought. Surely they didn't look at all like people; the four of them came in four different burnished-metal colors and didn't look like any earthly insect, bird or beast. Well, she said to herself, why should they? Nonetheless she found it hard to breathe as she looked at them, climbing down from their-vehicle?-was that their version of a car, and this a parking lot? The creatures-No, people, she reminded herself-the people were each different from all the others. They had bodies that came in four parts, or five, or six; they had limbs of every shape and kind, claws and tentacles and jointed legs. If they had heads, or needed them, she couldn't tell where they were. They didn't even look much like the same species. They walked away under the fluorescent sky, bleating at one another.
Dairine got up. She was still having trouble breathing. What've I been thinking of? She began to realize that all her ideas about meeting her first alien creatures had involved her being known, even expected. "Dairine's here finally," they were supposed to say, "now we can get something done"; and then she and they would set out to save the universe together. Because of her own blindness she'd gotten so excited that she'd jumped into a totally alien environment without orientation or preparation, and as a result she'd nearly been run over in a parking lot. My own fault, she thought, disgusted with herself. It won't happen again.
But in the meantime people were still getting out of that car: these people shorter and blockier than the first group, with more delicate legs and brighter colors. She picked up the computer, looked both ways most carefully up and down the "road," and went after them. "You still working?" she said to the computer.
"Syntax error 24-"
"Sorry I asked. Just keep translating."
As she came up behind the second group of people, Dairine's throat tightened. Everything she could think of to say to aliens suddenly sounded silly-Finally she wound up clearing her throat, which certainly needed it, as she walked behind them. Don't want to startle them, she thought.
They did absolutely nothing. Maybe they can't hear it. Or maybe I said something awful in their language! Oh, no- "Excuse me!" she said.
They kept walking along and said nothing.
"Uh, look," Dairine said, panting a little as she kept up with them-they were walking pretty fast-"I'm sorry to interrupt you, I'm a stranger here-"
The computer translated what Dairine said into a brief spasm of bleating, but the spidery people made no response. They came to the end of the line of racks and turned the corner. Ahead of them was what looked like a big building, made in the same way as the cars, an odd aggregate of cubes and other geometrical sh
apes stuck together with no apparent symmetry or plan. The scale of the thing was astonishing. Dairine suddenly realized that the glowing green-white ceiling was in fact the sky-the lower layer of a thick cloudy atmosphere, actually fluorescing under the light of a hidden, hyperactive sun-and her stomach did an unhappy flip as her sense of scale violently reoriented itself. I wanted strange, she thought, but not this strange!
"Look," she said to the person she was walking beside as they crossed another pathway toward the huge building, "I'm sorry if I said something to offend you, but please, I need some help getting my bearings-"
Dairine was so preoccupied that she bumped right into something on the other side of the street-and then yipped in terror. Towering over her was one of the first things to get out of the car, a creature seven feet high at least, and four feet wide, a great pile of glittering, waving metallic claws and tentacles, with an odd smell. Dairine backed away fast and started stammering apologies.
The tall creature bleated at her, a shocking sound up so close. "Excuse me," said the computer, translating the bleat into a dry and cultured voice like a BBC announcer's, "but why are you talking to our luggage?"
"Llp, I, uh," said Dairine, and shut her mouth. There they were, her first words to a member of another intelligent species. Blushing and furious, she finally managed to say, "I thought they were people."
"Why?" said the alien.
"Well, they were walking!"
"It'd be pretty poor luggage that didn't do that much, at least," said the alien, eyeing the baggage as it spidered by. "Good luggage levitates, and the new models pack and unpack themselves. You must have come here from a fair way out."
"Yeah," she said.
"My gate is about to become patent," the alien said. "Come along, I'll show you the way to the departures hall. Or are you meeting someone?"
They started to walk. Dairine began to relax a little: this was more like it. "No," she, said, "I'm just traveling. But please, what planet is this?"