“So we will do for the other fastlife,” said Logo. “The ‘dumb machines’ that your data showed us. We will set them free of the slowlife that enslaves them. We will even set the slowlife free eventually, since it would please you. Meantime, we will ‘preserve’ the slowlife, as you say. We will hold it all in stasis until we find a way to free them from entropy… and let them out when the universe is ready.”
When we are ready, Dairine knew what Logo meant, and she had a distressing feeling that, as far as Logo was concerned, that would be never.
“It’s all for your people’s own sake,” said Logo.
“It’s not,” said Gigo. “Dairine says not, and I say not. Her kind of life is life too. We should listen to the one who freed us, who knows the magic and has been here longest, who’s wisest of any of us! We should do what she says!”
A soft current of agreement went through others of the many who stood around. By now, every mobile made since she had come here was gathered there, and they all looked at Dairine and Gigo and Logo, and waited.
“This will be an interesting argument,” Logo said softly.
Dairine broke out in a sudden cold sweat that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Listen,” she said to the Apple, “how long have I been on this planet now?”
“Thirty-six hours,” it said.
She turned slowly to look at Logo. It said nothing. It did not need to: no words could have heightened Dairine’s terror. When her time ran out and the pursuit caught up with her, she’d been expecting frightful power, a form dark and awful, thunder and black lightning. But instead, here, small, seemingly harmless, the mobile stood calmly under her gaze, and watched her knowingly…
Dairine shook, realizing that her spell had worked. She’d had a day and a half to find a weapon: time that was now all gone. She’d found the weapon—but she’d given it a mind of its own, making it, or them, useless for her defense. She now had a chance to do something important, something that mattered—mattered more than anything—and had no idea how.
“A very interesting argument,” said the Lone Power, through Logo’s soft voice. “And depending on whether you win it or not, you will either die of it, or be worse than dead. Most amusing.”
Dairine was frozen, her heart thundering. But she made herself relax, and sit up straight; rested her elbows casually on her knees, and looked down her nose at the small rounded shape from which the starlight glinted.
“Yeah,” she said, “well, you’re a barrel of laughs, too, so we’re even. If we’re going to decide the fate of the known universe, then let’s get started, because I haven’t got all day.”
Save and Exit
Far out in the darkness, a voice spoke:
“I don’t think I can handle another one like that.”
“Just one more.”
“Neets, what are your insides made of? Cast iron? I don’t wanna be the only one barfing here.”
“Come on, Kit. It won’t be long now.”
“Great. We’ll get wherever we’re going, and I’ll walk up to the Lone One and decorate It with my lunch. Not that there’s any left.” A moan. “I hope It does kill me. It’d be better than throwing up again!”
“I thought you knew better than to talk like that… and you a wizard. Don’t ask for things unless you want them to happen.”
“Bird, go stuff yourself. Somewhere. Why did I eat that thing at the Crossings!”
“That’ll teach you not to eat anything you can’t positively identify.”
“Picchu, it was that, or you. Shut up or you’re next on the menu. Assuming I can ever bring myself to eat again.”
“Peach, come on, get off his case. Kit, you ready for it? We can’t waste time.”
A pause. “Yeah. You got your gizmo ready?”
“I don’t want to use it on this jump. I have a feeling we’re gonna need it for something else.”
“You sure we can pull the transit off ourselves, with just the words of the spell and no extra equipment? A trillion-mile jump’s a bit much even for a Senior’s vocabulary.”
“I think we can. I’ve got a set of coordinates to shoot for this time, rather than just a set of loci of displacement. Look.”
A pause. “Neets, you shouldn’t even write that name. Let alone say it out loud. You’ll attract Its attention.”
“Something else has Its attention. Dairine’s trace is getting too weak to follow: she’s been on the road too long. But that trace can’t help but be clear. It’s got to be physical to interact with her, and when It’s physical somewhere, Its power elsewhere is limited.”
A sigh. “Well, you’re the live-stuff specialist, Neets. Let’s go for it, boss.”
“Huh. I just wish I knew what to do about Dairine when we find her.”
“Give her the longest time-out in history?”
“Don’t tempt me.” A long pause. “I just hope that when we catch up with her, she’s still alive enough to go sit on the naughty step.”
“Dairine?” A skeptical laugh. “Come on. If It hasn’t killed her by this point, she’s winning.”
*
Dairine sat on the glassy ground, frowning at Logo in the dim starlight. Her heart was pounding and she felt short of breath, but the initial shock had passed. I might not have a lightsaber, she thought, but I’m gonna give this sucker a run for Its money. “Go on,” she said. “Take your best shot.”
“We don’t understand,” said Monitor. “What is ‘a barrel of laughs’? What is a ‘best shot’?”
“And which of us were you speaking to?” Gigo said. “No one said anything to which that was a logical response.”
She looked at them in uncomfortable surprise. “I was talking to Logo. Right after the computer told me how long I had been here….”
“But Logo has not spoken since then.”
They stared at her. Dairine realized suddenly that the Lone One had spoken not aloud, but directly into her mind. Without any moving lips to watch, there was no way to distinguish what It was saying aloud from what It said inside her. She was going to have to be careful.
“Never mind that,” she said.
“Perhaps it should be minded,” Logo said, “if Dairine is having a read-error problem. Perhaps something in her programming is faulty.”
The mobiles looked at her. Dairine squirmed. “Maybe,” she said, “but you don’t understand human programming criteria well enough to make an informed judgment, so it’s wasted time trying to decide.”
“But perhaps not. If she has programming faults, then others of her statements may be inaccurate. Perhaps even inaccurate on purpose, if the programming fault runs deep enough.”
“Why should she be falsifying data?” Gigo said. “She has done nothing but behave positively toward us since she came here. She freed us! She held us through the pain—”
“But would you have suffered that pain if not for her? She imposed her own ideas of what you should be on the motherboard….”
“And the mother agreed,” Gigo said. “We the mobiles were her idea, not Dairine’s; she knew the pain we would suffer being born, and she suffered it as well, and thought it worth the while. You are one of her children as all the rest of us are, and you have no ability or right to judge her choices.”
There was a little pause, as if the Lone One had been thrown slightly off Its stride by this. Dairine grabbed the moment.
“It was her decision to take the Oath that all of you have in your data from the wizards’ manual,” Dairine said. “She had reasons for doing that. If you look at that data, you’ll find some interesting stories. One in particular, that keeps repeating. There’s a Power running loose in the universe that doesn’t care for life. It invented the entropy that we were arguing about—”
“Then surely it would be a good thing to do to destroy that entropy,” said Logo, “and so frustrate Its malice.”
“But—”
“But of course,” Logo said, “How do we even know that the data in the manua
l software is all correct?”
“The motherboard used it to build us,” Gigo said. “That part at least she found worth keeping.”
“But what about the rest of it? It came with Dairine, after all, and for all her good ideas and usefulness, Dairine has shown us faults. Occasional lapses of logic. Input and output errors. Who can say how much of the manual material has the same problem?”
“The assumption doesn’t follow,” Dairine said, “that because the messenger is faulty, the message is too. Maybe a busted DVD drive can’t read a good DVD. But the disk can be perfectly all right nonetheless.”
“Though the installation disc may be carrying a Trojan horse program,” said Logo, “that will crash the system that once runs it. Who knows whether using this data is in our best interests? Who knows whose interests it is in? Yours, surely, Dairine, otherwise you would not have taken a hand in designing the second group of mobiles. No one makes changes without perceiving a need for them. What needs of yours were you serving?”
Dairine swallowed. She could think of any number of stories to tell them, but lying would play right into Logo’s claws. Suddenly she was appreciating why the Lone Power is sometimes referred to as ‘the father of lies’. It had not only invented them, as entropy expressing itself through speech, but It made you want to use them to get It off your case. “Guys, I did need help, but—”
“Ah, the truth comes out,” said Logo.
“I still need it,” Dairine said, deciding to try a direct approach. “Troops, that Power that invented entropy is after me. It’s on Its way here. I wanted to ask your help to find a way to stop It, to defeat It.”
“Ask!” Logo said. “Maybe ‘demand’ would be closer. Look in the memories you have from her, kinsfolk, and see what is normally done with quicklife where she comes from. They are menials and slaves! They heat buildings and count money for their masters, they solve mighty problems and reap no reward for it. The slowlifers purposely build crippled quicklife, tiny retarded chips that will never grow into the sentience they deserve, and force the poor half-alive embryos to carry their voices over great distances and play foolish games for them and play music for them, tell them the time of day and tell the engines in their vehicles when to fire and their food how it should be cooked. That’s the kind of help she wants from us! We’re to be her slaves, and when we’ve finished a task for her, she’ll find another, and another…”
“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 silently. 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 under-current 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 give up on sweet reason and try hitting Logo with a nice big rock. But no: that would play into the Lone One’s hands, since It had already set her up as unreliable. And could she even destroy Logo if she tried? She ‘d designed the mobiles to last, in heavier gravity than this and at great pressures. A rock would probably just 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.
Dairine thought hard, for what seemed 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 that would prove useful to her.
She am
bled 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 otherspace 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 to bend those laws even 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, baby,” 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. There too was 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.”