The computer had no reply for this.
“I just can’t,” she said. “Not right now. Not for a while. Make me some more air, please, and call me if they start chasing us again.”
“No problem,” said the computer.
Dairine lay down on the smooth glassy ground, gazing at the rounded, glittery thing that stood on its fourteen stumpy legs and gazed back at her. No more than six breaths later she was asleep.
So she did not see, an hour and a half later, the way the sun, at its meridian, began to pucker and twist out of shape, and for the best part of the hour lost half of itself, and shone only feebly, warped and dimmed. Her companion, though, did see it, and said to the computer:
“What?”
“Darkness,” said the computer: and nothing more.
Reserved Words
They got to Rirhath B early in the evening, arriving at the Crossings just after suns’ set and just as the sky was clearing. Nita and Kit stood there in the Nontypical Transit area for a few moments, staring up at the ceiling like the rankest tourists. Picchu sat on Kit’s shoulder, completely unruffled, and ignored everything with yawning scorn, though the view through the now-clear ceiling was worth seeing.
“My brains are rattled,” Kit said, breathing hard. “I need a minute.” So did Nita, and she felt vaguely relieved that Kit had said something about it first: so she just nodded, and craned her neck, and stared up. The view was worth looking at—this sudden revelation of Rirhath’s sky, a glorious concatenation of short-term variable stars swelling and shrinking like living things that breathed and whose hearts beat fire. All over the Crossings, people of every species passing through were pausing, looking up at the same sight, and admiring the completeness with which a perfectly solid-seeming ceiling now seemed to have simply gone away. Others, travelers who’d seen it all before or were just too tired to care, went about their business and didn’t even bother to look.
“We’ve only got a couple of days,” Picchu said, chewing on the collar of Kit’s shirt. “Don’t rush on my account.”
“Peach,” Nita said, “save the sarcasm. You better?” she said to Kit.
“Yeah,” he said. “You?”
“I was dizzy. It’s okay now.”
“Super.” He flipped through his manual, open in his hand, and came up with a map of the Crossings. “What do we need to find?”
“Stationmaster’s office.”
“Right.”
They checked out of Nontypical Transit, leaving their origin-and-destination information with the computer pedestal at the entrance, and set out across the expanse of the terminal floor, looking around them in calm wonder: for though neither of them had ever been there, both had read enough about the Crossings in their manuals to know what to expect. They knew there’d been a time when the Crossings itself was only a reed hut by a riverside, and the single worldgate nearby just a muddy spot in a cave that the first Master stumbled upon by accident, and claimed for its heirs (after waiting several years on Ererikh for the gate to reverse phase so that he could get home). Now, a couple of thousand years’ worth of technology later, worldgates were generated here at the drop of a whim, and the Stationmaster regulated inter-stellar commerce and transportation via worldgating for the entire Sagittarius Arm.
Its office was not off in some sheltered spot away from the craziness, but out in the very middle of the station floor: that being the spot where the hut had been, twenty-four hundred and thirty years before. It was only a single modest kiosk of tubular bluesteel, with a desk behind it, and at the desk, hung up in a rack that looked like a large upside-down stepstool, was a single Rirhait, banging busily on a computer terminal keypad and making small noises to itself as it worked.
Nita and Kit stopped in front of the desk, and the Rirhait looked up at them… or more or less up. Some of its stalked eyes looked down instead, and a few peered from the sides. It stopped typing. “Well?” it said, scratchy-voiced—understandable, Nita thought, when you’ve got a gullet full of sand.
“You’re the Stationmaster?” Kit said.
“Yes,” said the Rirhait, and the fact that it said nothing else, but looked at Kit hungrily, with its scissory mandibles working, made Nita twitch a little.
“We are on errantry, and we greet you,” Nita said: the standard self-introduction of a wizard on business. Sir or Madam, one normally added, but Nita wasn’t sure which the Master was, or even if either term applied.
“That too?” said the Master, looking at Picchu.
“Yes, that,” said Peach, all scorn.
“Well, it’s about time you people got here,” said the Master, and left off what it was doing, standing up. “Standing” was an approximation: a Rirhait is shaped more like a giant centipede than anything else, so that when it got off its rack and came out from behind the desk, its long, shiny silver-blue body only stood a foot or so off the ground, and all its stalky eyes looked up at them together. “We had more of an untidiness here this afternoon than we’ve had for a greatyear past, and I’ll be glad to see the end of it.”
Nita began to sweat. “The wizard who came through here earlier was on Ordeal,” Kit said. “We’ll need your help to find the spot from which she went farther on, so that we can track her: there are too many other worldgates here, and they’re confusing the trail.”
“She didn’t cause any trouble, did she?” Nita said.
“Trouble?” said the Stationmaster, and led them off across the bright floor, and showed them the place where several large pieces of the ceiling had been shot down. “Trouble?” it said, pointing out the places where the floors were melted, indicating the blaster scars in the kiosks, and the large cordoned-off area where maintenance people of various species were scraping and scrubbing coffee-ground-smelling residue off the floor. “Oh, no trouble. Not really.”
Picchu began to laugh, a wicked and appreciative sound.
Nita blushed ferociously and didn’t say anything for several minutes. The Rirhait led them off to another area of the floor which was closed in on itself by an arrangement of bluesteel kiosks. This was Crossings security; various desks stood about inside it, with creatures of several species working at them. The Master led them to one of the unoccupied desks, a low flat table full of incomprehensible equipment. “Here,” it said, and reared up on its back ten legs to touch the machinery in several places.
Small and clear, an image appeared above the table: remote, but equally clear, sound accompanied it. Nita and Kit found themselves looking at the Crossroads equivalent of a video recording, but in three dimensions, with neat alien characters burning in the lower corner of it to show the time and location at which the recording was made. They watched a group of toadlike BEMs make their way across the terminal floor, spot Dairine, head off in pursuit. They watched Dairine deal with the deinonychus, and afterward with the BEM that grabbed her. Nita gulped.
“They look like Satrachi,” Kit said, astonishingly cool-voiced.
Nita’s eyebrows went up. Alien species were her specialty: evidently Kit had been doing some extra research. “They are, as far as we can tell,” said the Master. “The one of them whom we have in custody has valid Satra identification.”
“We’ll need to see this person, then,” Nita said. The video ran. Nita watched Dairine’s dive into the bar, and from another camera angle, her sister’s reemergence into the terminal and dash into the restroom. Nita groaned, recognizing the room by the symbol on its door as a spawning room for any one of several species that gave birth to their young on the average of once every few days, and were likely to be caught short while traveling on business. Nita hoped that Dairine hadn’t introduced one of the species involved to a completely new kind of birth trauma.
“That was the spot she gated out from?”
“Yes, Emissary.” It was the first time Nita had ever been formally called by one of the twenty or so titles commonly used for wizards on errantry, but she was too busy and unnerved now to really enjoy it.
/> She glanced at Kit. He was frowning at the image hanging in the air: finally his concentration broke and he glanced at her. “Well?” he said. “You want to take the Satrachi?”
“I’d better,” Nita said, though she very much wanted not to—the looks of the Satrachi gave her the creeps. But dealing with live things was her specialty right now, as the handling of machinery and inanimate objects was Kit’s. “You go ahead and check the room out, see what the physical evidence looks like. Stationmaster, can you have someone show me where the Satra’s being held?”
“Step on that square there,” said the Master, pointing one eye at a spot on the floor: “it’s direct transit to Holding.” The Master turned to Kit. “missary, I’ll show you to the room in question….”
Nita stepped on the block quickly, before she’d have time to change her mind.
*
Fifteen minutes with the alien told her all she needed to know. The Satra was a dupe. It and its friends—a small paramilitary club—had been deluded into pursuing Dairine by some agent of the Lone One. It’s the usual thing, Nita thought as she headed back to Kit and the Stationmaster. The Power never comes out in the open if it can find some way to make someone else do Its dirty work. Preferably an innocent: that way it’s more of a slap in the Bright Powers’ face. Unusual, though, that it used a whole group this time. Normally it’s hard to keep that subtle a grip on a whole group’s mind: one of them slips free, or perceives it as control… and when that happens, odds are that the whole group’s useless for Its purposes.
She strolled among aliens and their luggage and finally came to the little Grand Central-size alcove where Dairine’s rest room was. Its door was frozen in the dilated mode. Nita slipped in and found Kit and Picchu and the Master off to one side, examining one particular birthing-booth. It seemed to have had its door burned off, and the back of the booth was blistered and pocked with an ugly rash of blaster scars.
For a good second or so Nita’s breath refused to come. “She jumped after that?” Nita finally managed to say.
Kit looked over his shoulder at her. “Neets, relax, there are no blood-stains.”
“There wouldn’t be, with blasters,” Nita said. “They cauterize.”
“Any really big wound would spurt anyway,” Kit said, straightening up and starting to page through his manual. “I think they missed her. The tiles don’t remember her screaming, and not even Dairine’s that stoic.” He kept turning over pages.
“How far did she go?”
“A long jump,” Kit said. “Multistage, from the feel of it. They must have freaked her out pretty good.” He looked up. “That laptop she’s carrying leaves a definite sense of what it’s been doing behind it. Can you feel it?”
Nita let her eyes go unfocused for a moment and blanked her mind out, as she might do to hear the thinking of some particularly quiet tree. Some residue of Dairine’s emotion still hung about the strings in the space-time configuration of the area, like tatters on a barbed-wire fence: fear and defiance, all tangled up together. But alongside Dairine’s tatters, Nita could also sense others, ordered and regular, a weave less vivid and complex in different ways. “It feels alive,” Nita said to Kit after a while. “Do computers usually feel that way?”
“I don’t know,” Kit said, sounding annoyed. “I never tried feeling one before this. … You got your widget? We’re gonna need it to catch up with her and her friends.”
“Yeah.” She unslung her pack and started rummaging for the gimbal.
“Well, I have things to do,” said the Master. “If you need anything, ask one of the security people, they’re all over.” And without staying for farewells, it went flowing out the door in a hundred-legged scurry.
Nita glanced after it, then back at Kit, and shrugged. “Here,” she said, and tossed Kit the gimbal. “Which spell are you thinking of using?”
“That dislocator on page eleven sixty.”
She got out her own manual and found the page. “That’s awful long-range, isn’t it? Her next jump must have been shorter than that.”
“Yeah, but Neets, who wants to leapfrog one step behind the things that are chasing her! We want them, right now. We want to get them off her case so that Dairine can go do whatever it is she needs to do without interference.” He looked grim. “And when we find ‘em—”
Nita sighed. “Forget it,” she said, “they’re dupes.”
Kit looked up at her while getting a grease pencil out of his pack. “Oh, don’t tell me. The Lone One suckered them in…”
“The old story.” Nita filled him in on what the Satrachi had told her as Kit got down on the tiles and began drawing their transit circle. At the end of the story, Kit sighed. “I was hoping it was some of the Lone One’s own people,” he said, “so we could just trash ‘em and not feel guilty.”
Nita had to smile at that. Picchu climbed down from the partition between the booths, where she had been sitting, and clambered onto Nita’s shoulder. “Make sure you get mine right,” she said to Kit. “I don’t want to come out the other side of this transit with fur.”
Kit shot a look at Peach and didn’t need to comment; Nita could imagine what he was thinking. “Come sit over here, then, if you’re so worried,” he said.
To Nita’s amusement Peach did just that, climbing backward down her arm and over onto Kit’s back, where she peered over his shoulder. “Not bad,” she said, looking at the diagram.
Kit ignored this. “So make yourself useful. Is anything bad going to happen to us?”
“Of course it is,” Picchu said.
“You might be more specific.”
“And I might not need to. The Power that invented death is going to be on your tails shortly! Our tails,” she added, looking over her shoulder at the splendid three-foot sweep of scarlet feathers behind her. “Even you two should be able to see that coming.”
Kit changed position suddenly, and Picchu scrabbled for balance, flapping her wings and swearing. “Like you should have seen that?”
Nita grinned a little, then let it go: her mind was back on the train of thought she had been playing with out in the terminal. “I was wondering about that, a while back,” she said to Kit. “It invented death, when things were first started. But that wasn’t enough for It. It had to get people to buy into death—not just the dying itself: the fear of it.”
Kit nodded. “But a lot of species have opted out, one way or another. I mean, we’re scared to die. But we still suspect there are reasons not to be scared. A lot of people do. Its hold’s not complete anymore.”
“I know. Kit, do you think—Tom said something was about to ‘tip over.’ Some major change. Do you think what he meant was that the Lone One was about to lose completely somewhere?”
“He always said,” Kit said, “that what happens one place, spreads everyplace else. Everything affects everything, sooner or later. The manual says so too, in various places.”
Nita nodded, thinking how unusual it was for the manual to repeat itself about anything. “And the pattern started shifting, a couple thousand years ago,” Kit said. “The Lone Power had always won completely before. Then It started having wins taken away from It after the fact.”
Kit looked reflective. “If somewhere or other, It’s about to lose—right from the start…”
Nita looked at him sidewise. “Then It starts losing at home, too, in all the little daily battles. Eventually.”
Kit nodded. “Dairine…” he said.
Nita shook her head, still having trouble believing it—but having to admit the likelihood. Somehow, her sister had a chance of actually defeating the Lone Power. She’s got to be in with a chance: It wouldn’t be wasting energy on her otherwise. “But why her?” Nita said softly.
“Why you?” said Picchu, cranky. “What makes either of you so special, that you can even come away from an encounter with That alive? Don’t flatter yourself: It’s eaten stars and seduced whole civilizations in Its time. You were simply exactly the r
ight raw material for that particular situation to use to save Itself.”
“I didn’t mean that, I guess,” Nita said. “I meant, why now? The Lone Power’s been pulling this kind of stunt on planets for as long as intelligence has been evolving. It comes in, It tries to get people to accept entropy willingly, and then It bugs off and leaves them to make themselves more miserable than even It could do if It worked at it. Fine. But now all of a sudden It can be beaten. How come?”
Picchu began chewing on Kit’s top button. “You know,” she said, “that’s part of the answer. Granted, It’s immortal. But It doesn’t have infinite power. It’s peer to all the Powers, but not to That in Which they move. And even an immortal can get tired.”
Nita thought about that. Five billion years, maybe ten, of constant strife, of incomplete victories, of rage and frustration—and yes, loneliness: for the Lone One, she had discovered to her shock, was ambivalent about Its role— After all that, surely one might not be as strong as one had been at the start of things….
Kit got the button out of Picchu’s mouth, and was nipped for his trouble. “So, after all these near losses, It’s tired enough to be beaten outright?”
Picchu got cranky again. “Of course! It was that tired long ago. The Powers wouldn’t need Dairine for just that. They could do it Themselves, or with the help of older wizards. But haven’t you got it through your head? They can’t want to just beat the Lone One. They must think there’s a better option.”
Nita looked at Picchu, feeling half frightened. “They want It to surrender,” she said.
“I think so,” said Picchu. “I suspect They think Dairine could do something thta would get the Lone One to give in and come back to Its old allegiance. If It does that… the effect spreads. Slowly. But it spreads everywhere.” And Picchu climbed down off Kit’s shoulder and pigeon-toed across the floor, heading for a receptacle with some water in it.
Kit and Nita both sat silent for a little. The possibility seemed a long way from coming true. A world in which the universe’s falling into entropy slowly stopped, affecting people’s relationships with one another, a world gradually losing the fear of death, a world losing hatred, losing terror, losing evil itself… it was ridiculous, impossible, too much to hope for. But still, Nita thought, if there was any chance at all…