They stood and looked at her.
"I've gotta go," she said, and slung her knapsack on, and hugged them hard, first her dad and then her mom again. Her father took a long time to let her go. Her mother's eyes were still troubled, and there was nothing Nita could do about it, nothing at all.
"I'll clean up in here as soon as I get home," Nita said, "I promise."
The trouble didn't go out of her mother's face, but half her mouth made a smile.
Nita said three words, and was gone.
Our home Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across, five thousand light-years thick at the core. The billion stars that make it up are scattered through some four quadrillion cubic miles of space. It is so vast that a thought can take as long as two seconds to cross it.
But Dairine was finding the entirety of the Milky Way much too small to get lost in. She got out of it as soon as she could.
The program the computer was still writing to take her to safety was a multiple-jump program, and that suited her fine: her pursuers seemed to have trouble following her. But not enough trouble. She came out, after that first jump from Rirhath B, on some cold world whose sky she never saw: only a ceiling of gray. She was standing in a bleak place, full of what at first sight looked like old twisted, wind-warped trees, barren of any leaves, all leaning into a screaming wind that smelled of salt water. Dairine clutched the computer to her and stared around her, still gasping from her terror in a rest room twelve trillion miles away.
With a slow creaking sound, one of the trees pulled several of its roots out of the ground and began to walk toward her.
"No way!" Dairine shrieked. "Run another subroutine!"
"Running," said the computer, but it took its sweet time about it-and just as the world blinked out and the spell tore her loose from the hillside, Dairine felt wind on her skin-a wind that smelled of coffee grounds. The BEMs had popped right in behind her.
She popped out again, this time in the middle of a plain covered with sky. j blue grass under a grass-green sky. She shook the computer in frustration.
"Program running," the computer insisted.
"Sure, but they're following us! How are they doing it? Are we leaving a trail somehow?"
"Affirmative," said the computer calmly, as if Dairine should have known this all along.
"Well, do something about it!"
"Advisory," said the computer. "Stealth procedures will decrease running speed. Stealth procedures are not one hundred percent effective due to inherent core-level stability of string functions-"
"I'll settle! And if we don't have to keep wasting time running subroutines," Dairine said, exasperated, "you'll have more time to run the main program, won't you!"
"Affirmative. Execute stealth?"
"Before someone executes me, yeah!"
Once again the spell took hold of Dairine and ripped her free of gravity and light. At least, she thought, this time the BEMs hadn't appeared before she vanished herself. Maybe we can gain a little ground. We'd better....
Another reality flicked into being around her. She was in the middle of a city: she got a brief impression of glassy towers that looked more grown than built, and people rushing around her and avoiding her in the typical dance of city dwellers. This might almost have been New York, except that New Yorkers had only a small percentage of the legs these people had. "Don't stop," she said. "How much range have you got?"
"Infinite," said the computer, quite calmly.
"While still running the main program?"
"Affirmative."
She thought for a second. "The edge of the Local Group might be far enough. Go."
The spell seized her out of the crowd and flung her into the dark again. Over and over Dairine jumped, becoming less and less willing to stop, until finally strange vistas were flickering past her with the speed of some unutterably strange slide show being run in fast-forward by a bored lecturer. She passed right through the coronation parade of one of the Anarchs of Deleian IV and never noticed it: she stood for only a second on a chilly little planetoid being fought over by two desperate interstellar empires (and also missed the nova bomb that turned the planetoid into plasma several minutes later); she stood on the metallic upper floors of a planet that was one great library full of three galaxies' knowledge, and she never knew what it was, and probably at that point would not have cared. Only once Dairine paused for more than a few seconds, on a red sandstone promontory with a pinkish sea crashing at its foot, and no signs of life anywhere under the bloated red sun that dyed the water. "Are they still following?" she said.
"Probability high, but at a greatly increased distance."
"You have enough time to finish the main program?"
"Affirmative."
"Do it, then."
She sat down on a rock and looked out at the water, while the computer's disk drive chirred softly to itself. The fat red sun slipped horizonward as she watched, and Dairine looked at it and noticed through the sunset haze that it had a companion, a little blue-white dwarf star that was slowly sucking the red giant's matter out of it in an accretion spiral of tarnished gold. She shook her head. Once she would have given anything to sit here and watch this. Now, though, the hair was rising on the back of her neck, and her back prickled, and all she wanted in the world-the worlds-was to get out of here and end up where she could hide.
She shivered. I never want to smell coffee again, she thought. They had unquestionably been sent after her by what had laughed at her in the dark. The Lone Power, the manual utility had called It. Well, at least she didn't hear It laughing anymore while she was in transit. Then again, that might not be good. I'm running pretty fair rings around Its people. It's probably real annoyed at me.
And then she tossed her head and grinned, her nasty grin. Let It be, then. I'm not going to be running for long. I'm going to turn around and give It something to think about.
If I can just figure out what to do, and find a weapon....
"Done," said the computer.
"Is this going to be a bad jump?" Dairine said.
"Transit may have significant physiological effects," said the computer.
"Okay," Dairine said. "Go for it." And she clenched her jaw.
The computer was understating. The jump was a hundred times worse than the first long one, an eternity of being torn, squeezed out of shape, pulled, hammered on, sliced by lines of force thinner than any hair and sharp as swords. Dairine hung on, unable even to scream. The transit broke for an instant on the surface of some planet as the program finished one jump subroutine, in a frozen flash of light and time too sudden to let any of the scream out, then pushed Dairine outside the universe and crushed her under its weight again. Then flash, and again; flash, and again: flash, flash, flash, flash, through a voiceless darkness a trillion years heavy and empty as entropy's end. This was the worst after all, the aloneness, total, no one to hear the scream she could not utter, not even the One who laughed-flash, flash, flash-
-and then the crushing ceased, and the spell flung Dairine down on something flat and hard and chill, and she flopped down like a puppet with its strings cut and just lay there as she had not done since Ananke. Her stomach flipped, but this was becoming so commonplace that Dairine was able to ignore it and just lie there and pant for a few seconds.
Silence. Not that awful emptiness, but a more normal one: probably just lack of air. Dairine levered herself up painfully on her elbows and looked at the surface under her hands. It was dimly lit, and smooth as the garage floor on Rirhath B had been. Smoother, in fact. It was hard to tell colors in this dimness, but the surface wasn't plain white. Dapples of various shades seemed to overlap and shade one another in the depths of it, as delicately as if they had been airbrushed: and there was a peculiar translucence to the surface, as if it were glass of some kind.
Cautiously, Dairine got up to a kneeling position and straightened to look around. Now this is weird, she thought, for the surface on which she kne
lt, stretched on so far into the distance that she scrubbed at her eyes briefly, not quite believing them. The horizon seemed much farther away than it could ever be on Earth. Must be a much bigger planet, she thought. But the thought did not make that immense vista any easier to grasp. It seemed to curve up after a while, though she was sure it was perfectly flat: the illusion was disturbing. Over the horizon hung starry space, the stars close and bright. Off to the sides the view was the same: here and there conical outcroppings of rock might break the pure and perfect flatness of it all, looking as if Picasso had dropped them there... but otherwise there was nothing but that endless, pale, slick-smooth surface, dappled with touches of dim subtle color, in huge patches or small ones.
Dairine stood up and turned around to look for the computer. It was behind her, at her feet: she bent to pick it up-
-and forgot about doing so. Before her, past the razory edge of that impossibly distant horizon, the galaxy was rising.
It was not her own. The Milky Way is a type SO spiral, a pinwheel of stars. This was a barred spiral, type SBO, seen almost face-on: an oval central core, two bars jutting from its core, one from each end of the starry oval, and each bar having a long curved banner or stream of stars curling away from it. Dairine had seen a hundred pictures of them and had mostly been fascinated by that central bar, wondering what gravitational forces were keeping it in place. But now she was seeing such a galaxy as few, even wizards, ever see one -not as a flat, pale far-off picture but as a three-dimensional object near at hand, rich with treasuries of stars in a spectrum's worth of colors, veiled about with diamonded dust on fire with ions and glowing, dominating a third of even that immense horizon, seeming frozen though in the midst of irresistible motion, its starry banners streaming back in still and complex glory from the eye-defeating blaze of the core. Dairine slowly folded back down to the kneeling position and just watched it, watched it rise.
She weighed just a little less than she would have on Earth; but the spiral rose quickly, for a planet of this size. Must not be a very dense planet, Dairine thought. All light elements-though most of her paid no attention to the analysis, being busy with more important matters... this light, the terror and the wonder of it. This, was what she had come for. The computer had hit it right on. This planet's sun must be in one of the galaxy's satellite globular clusters.... As such distances went, she was close to that spiral: no more than ten or twenty thousand light-years above its core. But the thought of distances broke her mood. She pulled the computer close. "Did we lose them?" she said to it.
"Pursuit has halted forty trillion light-years from this location and is holding there."
"Forty trillion..." That was beyond the reach of the farthest telescopes, over the event horizon generated by the Big Bang itself: galaxies past that point were traveling with intrinsic velocities faster than light, and so could not be seen. It was questionable whether such bodies could even really be considered in the same universe as Earth.
"Long way from home," she said softly. "Okay. I have at least a couple days to rest and do some research, huh?"
"Affirmative."
She sat back on her heels and watched the light rise until the last delicate streamers of light from the barred spiral arms were all the way above the horizon. "I want all the details about this star system," she said. "Planets, what kind of star, who lives here if anybody, who's been here before. Get to work."
"Working," said the computer, and its screen went to the usual menu configuration while it sat silently, getting the information for her.
"Can you multitask now?" Dairine said.
"Affirmative."
"Good."
She selected the Manual function and began sorting through it for background material on the Lone One. There has to be something I can use against It, she thought, a weapon of some kind, a weakness.... She instructed the manual's research facility to sort for past conflicts of wizards with the Lone Power or its representatives, and was shocked and horrified to find the equivalent of twenty or thirty thousand pages' worth of abstracts. She skimmed ten or fifteen of them in reverse order, on a hunch, and was momentarily surprised to find an abstract of Nita's last active mission. Fascinated, Dairine began to read... and became horrified again. There had been some kind of ceremony in the waters off Long Island, a sort of underwater passion play with whales as the celebrants-and Nita, to save the East Coast and make this ceremony work, had volunteered to be eaten by a shark! Nita? My sister? Do anything braver than cross the street? The idea was ridiculous... but Dairine knew that this computer had better things to do than lie to her. She read the rest of the abstract with her insides turning cold. Nita had knowingly taken on that Lone Power face-to-face and had managed to come out of it alive. Whereas Dairine had been glad enough to run away and lose things that couldn't be more than Its lesser henchmen...
Dairine pushed that thought away resolutely. She was helped by her stomach, which growled at her.
When did I last eat? she wondered. She told the computer to sort through and save the descriptions of encounters with the Power that had been successful, and then got out of the "Manual" into the "Hide" facility. A moment's poking around among the options, and she had retrieved her loaf of bread, bologna, and mustard. Dairine sat there in cheerful anticipation for a few seconds, undoing the bread and bologna, and it wasn't until she got the mustard jar lid unscrewed that she realized she had no knife. "Oh, well," she said, and went back into the "Hide" facility to snitch one from the silverware drawer at home. But "Illegal function call," said the computer: a little sullenly, she thought.
"Explain."
"Out of range for transit function from stated location."
Dairine made a face. She had no idea of the coordinates of any closer silverware drawer. "Cancel," she said, and made do with her fingers.
Some minutes later she had a sandwich and a half inside her, and was thinking (as she finished getting herself more or less clean) that it was a good thing she liked mustard. Dairine brushed the crumbs off onto the slick surface she sat on and looked at it, mildly curious. It wasn't freezing cold to sit on, like the stones of Mars or Pluto: yet her shields were still snowing water vapor gently into the vacuum around her whenever she moved, telling her that the above-surface temperature was the usual cold of deep space. Geothermal? she wondered. Maybe some volcanic activity-that would explain those funny conical shapes against the horizon.... She thumped the computer in a friendly fashion. "You done yet?" she said.
"Specify."
Dairine rolled her eyes. But there was no escaping the GIGO principle- "garbage in, garbage out," as the programmers said. Give the poor machine incomplete questions or instructions and you would get incomplete answers back. This thing might be magic, but it was still a computer. "Are you done with the survey of this area?"
"Still running."
"How much longer?"
"Three point two minutes."
Dairine sat back to wait, absently rubbing the surface she sat on. The smoothness of it was strange: not even the maria on the Moon were this smooth. Volcanic eruption, maybe. But not the way it usually happens, with the lava flowing down the volcano's sides and running along the surface. Not enough gravity for it to do that, I guess. Maybe it's like the volcanoes on Io: the stuff goes up high in tiny bits or droplets, then comes down slowly in the low gravity and spreads itself out very smooth and even. It must go on all the time... or else there can't be much in this system in the way of even tiny meteors. Maybe both. She shook her head. It spoke of an extremely ancient planet-which made sense this far out in space....
"Ready," the computer said, and Dairine hunkered over it to listen. "Local system stats. System age: close order of eight billion years. One primary, type S6 star, off main sequence, time from fusion ignition: close order of five billion years. One associated micro-black hole in variable orbit. One planet, distance from primary: six hundred twelve million miles. Planet diameter: fifty-six thousand miles. Planet
circumference: one hundred seventy-five thousand miles-" And Dairine gulped, understanding now why that horizon ran so high. The planet was almost seven times the size of Earth. "Atmosphere: monatomic hydrogen, less than one fifty-millionth psi Terran sea level. Planetary composition: eighty percent silicon in pure form and compounds, ten percent iron and mid-sequence metals, seven percent heavy metals, one percent boron, one percent oxygen, one percent trace elements including frozen gases and solid-sequence halogens. Power advisory-"
The screen, which had been echoing all this, went blank. Dairine's stomach flip-flopped, from fear this time. "What's the matter?"
"System power levels nearing critical. Range to alternative-power claudication exceeded. Outside power source required."
Dairine paused, feeling under her hand that oddly non-cold surface. "Can you use geothermal?" she said.
"Affirmative."
"Is there some way you can tap what's in this planet, then?"
"Affirmative," said the computer. "Authorization for link."
"Granted," Dairine said, mildly surprised: she couldn't remember the computer ever asking her for permission to do anything before. Maybe it was a safety feature. Then she began to sweat a little. Maybe such a safety feature was wise. If the computer fried its chips somehow and left her without life support, sitting here naked to vacuum at heaven knew how many degrees below zero...
She watched the screen nervously as scrambled characters flashed on it, and for several awful seconds the screen blanked. Then the menu screen reasserted itself, and Dairine breathed out, slowly, while the computer went back to running the program it had been working on. "Link established " said the computer in absolute calm. "Planetary history-"
"Just print it to the screen, I'll read it," Dairine said, and started to pick the computer up: then paused. "Is it all right to move you? Will that hurt the link?"