Ronan stood leaning on the Spear, his free hand resting on his hip, his shadow lying pooled black behind him from the Spear’s radiance. It might have seemed a casual stance at first. But as Ronan gazed up into that unhealthy, seething dark, Nita started to sense how tightly he was controlling himself, like someone working hard not to run away. His face was very still, though, and Nita for the first time actually saw someone else look out of Ronan’s eyes. The expression was one of recognition coupled with a very controlled anger. The one who looked out had seen something like this before.
She went over to him. “Something familiar about this?” she said.
Ronan nodded. “From a long, long time back,” he said. “When the Lone One first revealed that new thing it had invented, entropy. This was one of the early side effects.”
“And the Champion stopped it?” Kit said, coming over with Ponch to join them.
Ronan shook his head. “No. It’s weird, but when the Pullulus first began to occur, it was the Lone Power Itself that stopped it.”
Nita found that bizarre. “Something too dangerous for even It to manage?”
Ronan shook his head. “I used to think I knew My brother’s mind,” said the Champion with Ronan’s voice, “but that issue was never clear to Me or any of the other Powers. Whatever, this perversion of dark matter hasn’t been seen since. To see it again now … I find that troubling.”
“Troubling” didn’t come close to describing Nita’s feelings. “I am really not wild about the idea of sleeping here,” Nita said. She looked down at Ponch. “Couldn’t you walk us a little way, just enough to get us out of here?”
I’m tired, Ponch said. And he lay down and put his head down on his paws, though Nita saw him watching the sky with an expression of concern.
Nita let out an annoyed breath. “Look, we’ve got our pup tents,” Kit said. “We’ll be comfortable enough for a few hours.”
Nita nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.” No point in making a scene about it. I’ll cope.
Sker’ret and Filif came over to them, getting out their pup-tent interfaces. Sker’ret reared up on his rearmost legs, hung the silvery rod of the spell interface on the empty air, and pulled on the little string of characters in the Speech that hung down from the rod. A subtle shimmer of wizardry a few feet wide followed it down, like a roller shade following its pull cord. Sker’ret “fastened” down the spell-surface that acted as gateway to the room-sized pocket of space, waggled a few eyes at Nita and Kit, and poured himself inside, vanishing. Past him, Filif was doing the same; he slid in through his own doorway and was gone.
Nita let out a long breath. “Ronan?” she said.
He shook his head. “I’m okay,” he said. “My partner’s got energy to spare. We’ll stand guard.”
Nita set up her own pup tent, then glanced at that awful unstarred sky again. For some time now she had been getting into the habit of trusting her hunches, and her hunch right now was to be worried. What’s going on back home? she thought. What’s going on with Daddy? And Tom and Carl? And Dairine, what’s she getting into? Is she under a sky like this someplace?
And is she as freaked out as I am?
Nita stepped into her pup tent and looked around, checking out the space that had become her home away from home while she and Kit had been away before. Everything was as it should be. There were a few pieces of spare furniture from home—a TV table and a spare desk chair, along with a beat-up old sofa that had been down in the basement until her dad had it recovered and suggested she move it into the pup tent; over the back of the sofa, a multicolored wool throw that her mom had crocheted a few years back; off to one side, some boxes of dry snacks and cereal, some six-packs of fruit drinks and mineral water. A pile of books to read at bedtime, some notebooks and assorted school supplies. It all should have been very comforting … except it wasn’t. She couldn’t get rid of the image of the darkness outside.
Then suddenly Nita got angry. I may be freaked, but I’m not going to just roll over and let the fear run the way I act! She turned around and put her head out through the interface again, staring defiantly up at that evil sky. Above her, the dark Pullulus seethed and heaved against itself, blocking away the stars. Looking at it a second time didn’t make it any easier. It probably isn’t ever going to be easy, Nita thought. And I don’t care.
She glanced to one side and saw Kit leaning out through his own pup-tent interface. Past him, Ronan stood leaning on the Spear, looking up at the darkness. He, too, turned his gaze away from it now, looking at Nita.
“You, too, huh?” Kit said.
Nita looked at him for a moment, then gave him a quick, angry smile, and vanished back into her own space… feeling, once again, not quite so alone.
7: High-Value Target
DAIRINE BECAME CONSCIOUS THAT she was lying curled up on a chill, smooth surface. She then became conscious that she had been unconscious, and had no idea for how long. Ohmygosh, the shields! she thought. But as she took an involuntary breath, she realized that the force field protecting her and Roshaun was running exactly as it should. Otherwise, the two of them would have been freezing cold, not to mention smothering in a next-to-nothing hydrogen atmosphere.
She opened her eyes and blinked to get focus. The only thing to be seen at the moment was the ground on which she lay: almost perfectly smooth and flat, shining like a polished floor, softly dappled with subdued shades of gold and rust underneath the slick surface. Well, we’re where we ought to be, Dairine thought. But how come every time I arrive here, I do it flat on my face?
Dairine found that she had her arms wrapped around Spot. You okay? she said silently.
No problems.
Good. She pushed him carefully away from her onto the planet’s surface and rolled over onto her stomach. Then she immediately wished she hadn’t; her stomach rebelled. Dairine lay there and started to retch, thoroughly miserable. It’s not fair! I thought I was done with this kind of thing. I didn’t think a subsidized worldgate would act this way. But the tremendous difference between the vectors and accelerations of Wellakh and this extremely distant world was just too much for humanoid bodies to take no matter how sophisticated or powerful the worldgate was.
Dairine was distracted from the sickness, though, by an upscaling sound in the back of her mind—a muted roar of life lived at a three-quarter beat, rushing, as quick and strong as a waterfall in spate. I’m back in circuit with the Motherboard! It was an astonishing sensation, after having become used over time to the faint rumble of trinary data that was normally all that reached Dairine down her linkage to the mobiles’ world.
She also realized that her clothes had changed again, back to her T-shirt and jeans. What happened to that dress? Dairine said.
I replaced it with your normal clothes while in transit, Spot said.
Okay. However, Dairine put a hand up to her throat and found that big emerald still there; she smiled slightly. Good call. Come on.
She levered herself up on her hands and knees and looked around, holding still again because her stomach was still roiling. “Roshaun?”
He had come down on the surface behind her, sprawled; now he lifted his head, and winced. “That was not,” Roshaun said, “the usual sort of transit.”
“Nope. You all right? Besides your injured dignity, I mean.”
Roshaun rolled over and slowly sat up, grimacing—then looked ashen all of a sudden, and had to put his head down on his knees. Normally such a sudden show of vulnerability in Roshaun would have delighted Dairine, except that she was too busy keeping herself from throwing up. I am not going to barf a second before he does, she thought, breathing deeply.
Roshaun, however, did not throw up. Very slowly he straightened again, looking up and around… and then let out a long breath of wonder. Dairine got up on her knees, looking up at the vista she remembered so well.
It was worth looking at, even in the daytime. Halfway up the sky from the high and strangely distant-seeming horiz
on was a small, dull red star, so dim that you could look at it directly. But beyond the planet’s sun, undimmed by it, standing high and spreading across half the sky, was the delicate shimmer of a barred-spiral galaxy, the wide-flung arms richly gemmed in the soft golden gleam of an immensely old stellar population. Roshaun sat looking up at that still splendor for a good while before he stood up.
“Transits by subsidized gate are normally instantaneous,” Roshaun said, still looking up at the distant glory. “We seemed to be in that one for quite a long time. How long?”
Dairine glanced at her watch. It said eight thirty, but she’d forgotten to set it to handle gating-transit time, and now its second hand wasn’t moving. “I’ve got to reconfigure this thing,” she said. “I’ll get a reading off Spot and let you know in a while.”
“How far from your own world is this one?”
“At least forty trillion light-years,” Dairine said. “Maybe more, but I’ve never done the math. I don’t know about you, but when I start getting into the trillions, I find that forty and forty-five look pretty much alike.”
Roshaun stared at her in shock. “Then we are over our universe’s event horizon,” he said softly. “That galaxy there, and the one we’re in now… they would have intrinsic velocities faster than light. As far as our home galaxy is concerned, this place doesn’t even exist.”
“You got it,” Dairine said. “And for people here, our galaxy doesn’t exist. Except they know it does, because I came from there.” She stood up cautiously. Despite the size of the planet, the gravity here was less than that of Earth; the effect was like being on Mars, and left you light enough to bounce if you weren’t careful. Roshaun looked around at the curious surface—slick as glass and dappled with faint drifts of color buried under the perfectly level surface. Here and there across the surface were scattered various sharp cone shapes. “Volcanic,” Roshaun said.
“Yeah,” Dairine said. “The volcanoes laid down the surface structure, all these layers of silicon and trace elements. It goes down for miles; the whole place is one big computer chip. But it’s a lot quieter now than I remember it.” “Quieter” had more than one meaning, for the place to which she and Roshaun had transited had been the birthplace of the mobile species, the scene of the end of her Ordeal, and the site of a battle that had cratered or reduced to slag a deal of the surrounding real estate. Those craters remained, as did glass heaped and humped by the terrible forces that had melted it and spattered it for miles around. Elsewhere, the surface looked much as it had when she had first arrived—like the surface of a gigantic billiard ball, except where the cones of the ancient volcanoes pointed at the sky. And it was as empty. Dairine looked around in vain for any sign of a welcoming committee.
Roshaun had turned his attention to the planet’s star. “There’s something odd about the primary’s flare pattern.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Dairine said. “I chucked a black hole into it.”
Roshaun put his eyebrows up. “Stars in your neighborhood seem to have a rough time of it.”
“If ours acts weird, talk to Nita,” Dairine said, rather annoyed. “First time it went out was on her watch.”
Roshaun slipped out of the gauzy overrobe he had been wearing on Wellakh and folded it up. “You know quite well the Isolate was to blame,” he said, reaching sideways for access to the space pocket in which he stored things while on the road. He stuffed his formal overrobe into the claudication’s opening, then came out with that oversized T-shirt of Carmela’s again, and slipped into it. “That brief snuffing may be the cause of your star’s recent instability.”
Dairine got up, too. “Well, I still want to know why, when the Sun was talking to us, I couldn’t understand what it was saying, even though we were all working in the Speech.”
Roshaun shook his head. “The situations we have been dealing with have been unusual for all of us,” he said. “And you were under considerable strain. If you—”
“Are you saying I couldn’t cope with the stress?” Dairine said. “I seem to remember that you—”
Then she stopped, seeing his expression. “Sorry,” Dairine said, turning away. “Sorry. Why do I have to bite you every time you say something that might be useful?”
Very quietly, Roshaun said, “When you find out, do let me know. It’s information I might find useful as well.”
Dairine let out a breath and looked around. “But where is everybody? I don’t get it; this is where I saw them last.”
She turned, scanning that impossibly distant horizon. In all that huge space, nothing moved. Dairine let out a long breath and got ready to drop to her knees and get in closer circuit with the Motherboard, to send a message she hadn’t thought she of all people would have had to send: Hey, guys, I’m here. Anybody home?
“Wait,” Roshaun said. “What is that?”
Dairine turned to look. A single small shape came steadily toward them across the pale, pink-glazed surface of the world, light from the whirlpool of stars glancing off its shiny shell. It was apparently just a hemisphere about half a meter wide, scooting along the floor of the world like a windup toy—the impression made that much stronger because of the movement of all the little legs around its outer edges. The dome was a pale translucent white, striated in cross section with thin bands and layers of many colors. And it glowed as if between some of the layers a faint light burned, illuminating the layers above and below like moonlight through stained glass.
Dairine grinned and took off at a trot toward the little scurrying shape, being careful about the gravity. Shortly the leading edge of the bubble of air she took with her “ran over” the little approaching dome; and the instant it did, the dome began to decelerate, looking at her with many-lensed eyes that bubbled out in a breath’s time on its forward surface.
“With?” it said in the Speech, and then burst out laughing.
Dairine skidded to a stop, laughing, too, at the reminder of the first thing this mobile, or any other, had said to her. She reached down, picked him up, and swung him around. “Gigo!”
“As always,” the mobile said, wiggling his legs a little, and exuding the same innocent pleasure that had been his specialty since he was born. “Dairine, it’s good to have you back in the flesh!”
“Sorry it took so long,” she said, feeling guilty. “It wasn’t easy to come, right after my Ordeal. There was so much to do. And then my power levels changed…”
“We know,” Gigo said. “But you had business to do closer to home. And not even at power levels like your first ones would it be easy for a wizard to come all this way out to the Edge of Things, especially just to be social! It doesn’t matter. We knew you’d come back when you could.”
She hugged Gigo again. “You always were good at understanding,” Dairine said, putting him down. “Look, I brought a friend. Roshaun—”
Roshaun slipped into Dairine’s air bubble and paused to gaze down at the mobile. “We know him very well,” Gigo said. “We looked at him through you a long time ago. Sunlord, you’re welcome.”
Roshaun bowed. “An honor, Designate,” he said. “And well met on our common journey.”
“You are, indeed,” Gigo said. “And here is our oldest colleague.”
Spot came ambling along. Gigo stepped over to him, and the two of them paused, shell to laptop case, silent for a moment while they communed. “Dataaaaaa…” Spot said under his breath.
“The breath of life,” Gigo said. “We’ll be trading a lot more of that. Dairine, come on, there’s much to do.”
“Yeah,” she said, and glanced around. “Where is everybody?”
Gigo looked around as if confused. “Where is—” And then he laughed. “Oh, they wouldn’t have come here! This is the birthplace, where we began. We try to keep it as it was, the way you do with this one—” And the undersurface of the ground under their feet abruptly flashed out of translucence into imagery, coming alive with a vast glowing image of the surface of the Sea of Tranquil
lity, and the place where the first lunar module had landed. The four of them seemed to stand in the middle of one corrugation of a single immense boot-print pressed into the powdery dust.
Dairine broke up laughing. “Wow!” she said, turning right around to see how far the imagery effect went; it flooded straight out to the horizon. “What have you guys been doing to this place?”
“Remaking it in our image,” Gigo said. “Though we’re still working out just what that is.”
“Okay. Where do we go from here?”
“Oh, we don’t have to go anywhere,” Gigo said. The boot-print flickered out, to be replaced by a sudden tide of multicolored light that rushed away in all directions, tracing a myriad of glowing lines and curves under the glassy surface—the outlines of geometrical figures, and deeper down the three-dimensional shapes of solids; spheres and cubes and hypercubes, interlocking, interacting in sizzling bursts of light that were also words and characters in the Speech.
Roshaun looked out across the spreading plain of light and let out another long breath of astonishment. “This is all one great spell diagram,” he said, as the patterning fled toward the horizons, and past them. “The whole planet!”
Gigo grew a ball-jointed handling arm and gestured off toward one side. There, amid the lines of light, an empty circle grew: a gating nexus. “If you’ll stand over here—”
Dairine and Roshaun and Spot made their way over, stepped over the boundary, and stood inside. “At least this worldgating won’t make me feel like the last one,” she said to Gigo.
“Almost certainly not,” Gigo said.
And to Dairine’s astonishment, the circle started to slide across the vast spell diagram as a mobile inclusion, skating across it the way a drop of water scoots across a hot frying pan. The rest of the spell slid and slipped around it, letting the circle pass. Slowly it began to accelerate, and the spell diagram around them poured past more and more quickly until it was one great multicolored blur.
Dairine kept wanting to brace herself against something as the acceleration increased, but there was nothing to hold on to—and there didn’t seem to be any need to brace. Though the glowing spell diagram landscape slid more and more quickly past, she and Roshaun and Spot and Gigo might have been standing perfectly still in the middle of the plain. “Are you guys messing around with inertia somehow?” Dairine said to Gigo.