She got the sense that Gigo was grinning. “For transits like this,” he said, “we temporarily rewrite the kernel that manages local gravity and mass in our solar system. It’s no big deal.”
“Oh, listen to you,” Dairine said, and snickered. “‘No big deal.’”
“They certainly take after you,” Roshaun said.
“I’d like to think it’s mutual,” Dairine said. Certainly for a while after she’d come back from her Ordeal, she’d often awakened in the middle of the night and not been quite certain whether she was human or machine anymore—mortal creature or living manual. To find herself looking at her bedroom ceiling, and not this remote and spectacular sky, had sometimes come as a shock to a mind still filled with the glowing afterimages of spells being built faster than any human being could think. Now here was the concrete reality behind the images, spreading itself out before her—a world of true computer wizards, already evolved far past anything she would have had the brains to create, and still evolving at speeds Dairine couldn’t grasp, mired as she was in the kind of thoughtspeed mandated by a brain made of carbon compounds and water. Any comparison between the mobiles and me has got to be flattering. Or it will be later, assuming we can all figure out something to help us have there be a later.
Ahead of the transit circle, something poked up above the horizon. At first Dairine thought it was more volcanoes. But these shapes were more regular than volcanoes, far more pointed, and much too tall. As the transit circle shot toward them, Dairine realized that she was looking at huge needlelike towers, all of the same glossy silicon as the planet’s surface. No tower on Earth could have been so tall; only the low gravity here made such buildings possible… along with a little magic. The towers glittered where the setting red sun’s light caught them, high up, and every one was etched with the white fire of wizardry in endless moving patterns of words in the Speech and symbols from spell diagrams.
The place was one huge wizardry endlessly in progress, the typical shimmer of a working spell wavering around every tower like a halo of pale fire. The whole vast interlinked structure hummed with a faint vibration, its own version of the silence that leaned in around a wizardry as you said the words of the spell in the Speech. But here, Dairine knew, the words were being spoken by the planet’s interlinked machine intelligences faster than any noncomputer being could utter them. Working in “quicklife” time, thousands of times faster than any Earthbound computer, the intricacy of the mobiles’ spells would be far beyond anything a human wizard could ever live long enough to construct. At the thought, Dairine’s heart leaped; it was the first time she’d dared to feel real hope in their present situation. If anybody can help us find a way to stop the darkness, she thought, it’s these guys.
The towers just kept rearing up and up, and time and time again Dairine had to readjust her sense of scale. Part of the problem was the planet’s size; it was bigger than Earth, and the more distant look of the horizon played tricks on her. But as the transit circle drew closer to the towers, and their bases proved to be as wide as the base of the Empire State Building but their peaks more than four times as tall, Dairine gave up trying to work out from moment to moment how big things were. Just really, really big, she thought. My guys have been busy!
As she looked ahead and the transit circle started slowing down, it seemed to Dairine that the ground at the feet of the towers was darker than elsewhere. They got closer, and the effect started to look strangely granular—
And then Dairine saw what was causing it, and her mouth went dry. The diagram was exactly as it had been all the way across the planet’s surface. The difference here was that it was obscured by the bodies of shifting mobiles—thousands of them; hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe millions…
The transit circle slowed; the obscuring shapes became more distinct as they approached the edge of the central ring of towers. Crowded around the towers’ bases were many shapes that Dairine had invented—mobiles with all kinds of manipulating devices and oculars, sporting locomotors of every kind, from legs to wheels to treads. But there were also countless new shapes more involved and outré than anything she could have thought of. The transit circle slipped between two of the towers, heading for the center of the mile-wide ring of spires. The waiting mobiles concentrated in that great space drew aside to let it pass, a great crowd of tall slim shapes like trees of glass, low broad mobiles like domes or cylinders, all glittering with reflected wizard-fire.
“Just look at all of you,” Dairine said to Gigo, astonished.
“You said that we should make more of ourselves to share the world with,” Gigo said. “So, after you left, we did.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought you could find enough energy to do all this.”
“We’ve found other ways to draw power since you went away,” Gigo said. “We found out how to sink wizardly conduits into alternate spaces empty of anything but physical energy. Now we have power that never runs out, and we’ve passed the conduit technology back to the Powers That Be.”
The tremendous crowd of mobiles gathered close around the transit circle. Dairine couldn’t see past the first few layers of surrounding mobiles, but through her contact with the surface she could feel the building wave of emotion running back and forth through the substrate that connected them all. The mobiles were as afraid of the building darkness as she was; they had seen it growing for what seemed like far longer. They were as angry as she was about what that darkness was doing. But they were also filled with resolve, and a strange joyful certainty of success that had roots in nothing but the fact that Dairine was there. “Welcome!” they all shouted, with voices, or silently, through the Motherboard: “Welcome, Mother, welcome, Creator, welcome here, welcome home!”
Dairine started to fill up with tears, and didn’t care. Out here on the fringes of this universe’s life, at the edge of the longest night of all, the mobiles she had created had made themselves into a lighthouse in the dark—the most distant home of wizardry, and possibly the most powerful. She scrubbed her eyes dry and stood up straight.
Beside her, Roshaun looked out across the tremendous crowd. And here I was telling you how to behave like a monarch, he said silently. Perhaps I spoke out of turn.
Familiar shapes pressed in out of the crowd toward her and Roshaun and Spot and Gigo—mobiles Dairine had designed herself, seen born from the planet’s crust, and named. Tall mobiles and short ones, fat round ones and low flat ones all crowded around. Some she knew instantly, from a distance. One was a tall gangly design that had always reminded her of a stork.
“Beanpole!” she yelled, and grabbed him … and then the shorter mobile behind him, all arms and lenses. “Hex! Oh, and Pinout, look at you!” And behind Pinout came Loop and Sulu and Storm and Truman and Augusta, String and Strikeout and Drive and Buffer and Peek and Poke … a crowd of mobiles through whom Dairine made her way, hugging them one after another until she felt like her front was one big bruise. Last of all came one of the smallest and plainest of the mobile models, just a dome with legs. It stood in front of Dairine, looking up almost shyly. It was Logo.
Dairine picked him up and hugged Logo with her eyes squeezed shut. The sight of him brought her Ordeal back in unusual clarity—a long, cold, nerve-racking time full of impromptu bologna sandwiches and the gleam of that red sun on the pale glass of the plain, the glitter of the plain as it shattered under the upward-heaving bodies of the newborn mobiles, the darkness that fell over them all as the Lone Power arrived to interfere in yet another species’ Choice. But the darkness had a completely different feel to it now.
She put him down after a moment. “You’re okay,” Dairine said.
“And so are you,” said Logo. “I was worried. You all by yourself, back on that little world, with nothing around you but slowlife.”
Dairine smiled. “It’s all right,” she said. “Slowlife has a good side.” She glanced over at Roshaun, and then looked around for a place to sit as the transit ci
rcle faded into the smooth glassy surface.
Immediately next to her, and so suddenly that it made Dairine jump, the ground grew a chair. Dairine bumped into Roshaun; he steadied her. “That was interesting,” he said, examining the chair, a sleek one-piece construction with a Danish-modern look to it.
“No kidding,” Dairine said, getting her balance back and bending over to have a closer look at the chair. It was banded with the usual striations of the planetary subsurface, and these had many faint layers of glow between them, like the mobiles. She glanced over at Gigo. “Does the world usually do this kind of thing since you started working on it?”
“Normally it requires more provocation,” Gigo said as Dairine sat down on the chair. “We’ve tailored it from the first to be responsive to desire. But until recently, you had to elucidate the desire first. These days the substrate’s been anticipating us.”
“The power increase,” Roshaun said.
“That’s right. We’re still mastering it. Here comes the imaging team—”
Several mobiles who’d been standing around now moved off to one side or another, and about twenty others, of all shapes and sizes, appeared scattered among them.
“Like any other wizards, we all have specialties,” Gigo said. “But some of us enjoy working in teams, and the imaging team is one of the oldest. They started work shortly after you left; now there are more than eighty thousand of them scattered around the planet. These are the team leaders: Cam, Mikhail, Strontium, Bunny—”
“It’s great to meet all of you,” Dairine said. “What have you been looking at?”
“Everything,” said Cam.
Roshaun raised his eyebrows, looking skeptical. “That must take up a great deal of your time.”
Dairine just grinned. “You don’t get it, Roshaun,” she said. “They don’t just mean all kinds of things, or everything they have time for. They mean everything.”
“The more we became able to see,” Logo said, “the more we realized how we could be most useful. We decided we could store all the knowledge in the physical universe if we could just see it, find the places where it’s stored, learn how to read what’s written in every kind of information storage—everything from the heart on out. That’s what we do here, out at the edge. That’s our purpose.”
Dairine could only shake her head at the size of the vision. “Guys,” she said after a moment, “you make me proud.”
“That is our other purpose,” Beanpole said. “Our first one.”
Delight and embarrassment left Dairine briefly speechless. Roshaun eyed her, amused. “Cousin,” he said, “would the technologies make any sense to me?”
“Some might,” said Strontium, a low, domelike mobile whose whole surface was a pattern of lenses and mechanical eyes. “One is an in-matter viewing routine that lets us look out of the heart of any ‘lightmatter’ object from an atom to a star if we know its coordinates.”
“What about the dark matter?” Roshaun said.
“Long ago we tried using it for the same purposes,” Beanpole said. “Why not make use of something there’s so much of? But it couldn’t be spoken to until recently. Now something has spoken a word to it that we never could. Now it’s alive, but also hostile to life. It won’t stop its expansion until it’s destroyed every living thing across the worlds.”
“Our local wizards tried to stop it,” Dairine said, “and couldn’t.”
“We tried, too,” Gigo said. “We enacted a few local reversals, but the effect always reasserted itself more quickly every time. We realized we were teaching the dark matter how to expand faster, so we stopped wasting time with the symptoms and started hunting for the cause.”
“And now that you’re here,” Gigo said to Dairine, “we’ll shortly find it.”
Dairine swallowed as she looked around at them all, gazing at her in such certainty. They scared her worse than Roshaun’s people had—for they were all expecting the Mother of their Species to come up with the good idea that would save the universe.
“Let’s take this one step at a time,” Dairine said. “Or start with a smaller problem first, and warm up. Spot—”
“I am not the problem,” Spot said. “I’m the solution.”
Spot sounded more alive than he had until now. Beanpole looked at Dairine. “You’ve been in circuit with the Motherboard for only a little while,” he said, “and already you’re hearing us more clearly. As for Spot, we’ve been reprogramming him ever since he got here.”
“I asked for it,” Spot said to Dairine. “It was time for an upgrade. The ones you’ve been giving me have been all right; you’ve been doing the best you can. But there was something missing.”
“And something extra,” Beanpole said. “He’s been carrying data he hasn’t been able to process.”
“What?” Dairine said. “Where’d it come from?”
“Spot’s been in contact with an avatar of the Defender,” Hex said. “For some time, information seems to have been passing between him and the power inside your colleague Ronan that couldn’t have been parsed or detected by slowlife … not even slowlife as talented as our mother.” He bowed to Dairine, projecting an air of embarrassment. “And Spot hasn’t had the routines to parse it, either.”
“Hex, listen,” Dairine said, “it’s no big deal. Life’s all the time sending me messages I can’t read.” She flicked just a second’s glance at Roshaun, who she was starting to think was yet another of those messages.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Logo said, “because you, too, are carrying information of this kind.”
Dairine’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“The One’s Champion has also used you as a courier,” Beanpole said. “For what, we can’t tell as yet; we must get you more securely into circuit with the Motherboard.”
What’s he stuck inside me? Dairine wondered, starting to feel twitchy. “You guys can help us get at this data and make sense of it?”
“Yes,” Gigo said.
“Good,” Dairine said. “Then let’s do it.”
Roshaun looked dubious. “You would think that the other Powers would simply communicate all of what they knew to the Winged Defender, so that straightforward action could be taken.”
Dairine shook her head. “Security,” she said.
Beanpole swayed from side to side in a gesture of agreement. “To give all the information in the clear to any one being,” he said to Roshaun, “would ensure that the Lone One would know all about it in a matter of days. But if you split it up and give only parts of it to those who need to know, and let them pursue the material separately…”
“Everyone gets together and completes the puzzle,” Dairine said. “And if one of us is betrayed somehow, the rest of the information has a chance of staying safe.” Nita’s recent run-in with a wizard who had been overshadowed by the Lone One had left Dairine badly shaken, for until then, the idea that wizards were absolutely to be trusted had seemed something that you could always depend on. But life wasn’t as simple as it had once seemed.
“What we’re doing here is safe as well,” Beanpole said. “The One’s Champion was here briefly in the direct mode during your Ordeal and our Choice. It’s still here, integrated into the Motherboard in a format like an avatar, but less covert. It has the same power to protect us from being overheard as Ronan’s version of the Defender does. We can pursue our search for the Instrumentality without fear.”
“Okay,” Dairine said. “How are you going to get what you need from Spot?”
“They’ve already got it,” Spot said. Dairine’s eyes widened a little at the sound of his voice. It sounded even more alive than when he’d last spoken.
“The two of you needed to be here physically to make the transfer safely,” Logo said. “Now we can finish our preparations. We have to lay your personal information into the finding spell we’ve been constructing; that data has changed significantly since you came here first, and there have been other alterations.” He
glanced at Spot, who hunched down a little as if the attention somehow unnerved him. “Brother, come with us and we’ll get you up to full speed again. Mother—”
They all bowed to her. Dairine rolled her eyes. “Guys,” she said, “give me a break. We’re all just wizards together, here.”
“Of course,” said Gigo and Logo and Beanpole together. But they were humoring her. The three of them and Spot vanished into the crowd of mobiles, who now mostly settled down onto the surface and sat quietly.
The stillness was an illusion. Dairine felt the tempo of their communication with and through the Motherboard increasing by the moment. “You look concerned,” Roshaun said from behind her.
Dairine scowled over her shoulder at him. “The whole universe is in danger,” she said, “and we’re not sure how to save it, assuming it can be saved. One of the Powers That Be has stuffed secret messages into my brain without telling me. And a friend of mine who happens to be my wizard’s manual is being reprogrammed with software that even these guys haven’t had time to beta test! Wow, Roshaun, why would I need to be concerned?”
Roshaun glanced at the ground. Another chair grew up for him, a slight distance from Dairine’s. He lowered himself into it, stretching his legs out with a sigh. “Sarcasm,” he said. “Amusing, if ineffective.” He leaned back, looking up at the golden glow of the rising barred-spiral galaxy, reached under his baggy T-shirt, and came out with a lollipop.
“At least if the universe does end in the next month,” Dairine muttered, “your teeth won’t have had time to rot.”
Roshaun raised his eyebrows and produced another lollipop, which he held out to her.