High Wizardry

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. Why did I eat that thing at the Crossings!"

"That'll teach you not to eat anything you can't positively identify."

"Peach, it was that, or you. Shut up or you're next on the menu. If I ever eat again."

"Peach, 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 has 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." "Spank her?"

"Don't tempt me." A long pause. "I hope she's alive to spank." "Dairine?" A skeptical laugh. "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 suspected suddenly that the Lone One had spoken not aloud, but directly into her mind. And 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 was slightly put 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 is 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 manual 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 disk drive can't read a good disk. But the disk can be perfectly all right nonetheless."

"Though the disk 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. For 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. She could suddenly begin to appreciate why the Lone Power is sometimes referred to as

'the father of lies': It not only had 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 count for them and 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 the 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. 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-bum, 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 Fire-bringer'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 undercurrent 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 hit Logo with a rock. But no: that would play into Its hands, since It had already set her up as unreliable. And could she even destroy Logo if she tried? She had designed the mobiles to last, in heavier gravity than this and at great pressures. A rock would probably 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. She thought hard, for 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 useful to her.

She ambled 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 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 even to bend those laws 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, small stuff," 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. And 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."

They 're inside my head too. Physical contact Dairine felt the mere realization alert something else that was inside her head. That undercurrent of wicked laughter abruptly vanished, and the inside of her mind felt clean again. This is it, she thought, the only chance I'm gonna get. "Gigo," she said, "quick! Tie me into the motherboard the way the mobiles are tied in!"

"But you don't have enough memory to sustain such a contact-"

"Do it, just do it\"

"Done," she heard one of the Thinkers say, and then Logo said, hurriedly, angrily, "The mobiles are polled, and-" But it was too late. Even sentient individuals who reason in milliseconds, take ten or twelve of those to agree. It took only one for Gigo to close the contact, and make a mobile out of Dairine.

Somewhere someone struck a bass gong: the sound of it went on and on, and in the immense sound Dairine fell over, slowly, watching the universe tilt past her with preternatural slowness. Only that brief flicker of her own senses was left her, and the bass note of one of her heartbeats sounding and sounding in her ears. Other senses awakened, filled her full. The feeling of living in a single second that stretched into years came back to her again; but this time she could perceive the life behind the stretched-out time as more than a frantic, penned, crippled intelligence screaming for contact. The manual software had educated the motherboard in seconds as it would have educated Dairine in hours or months; the motherboard had vast knowledge now, endless riches of data about wizardry and the worlds. What it did not have was first-hand experience of emotion, or the effects of entropy… or the way the world looked to slowlife.

Take it. Take it all. Please take it! They have to choose, and they don't have the data, and I don't know how to give it to them, and if they make the wrong choice they'll all die! Take it!

And the motherboard took: reached into what she considered the memory areas of Dairine's data processor, and read them as it had read the manual. Dairine lay there helpless and watched her life, watched it as people are supposed to see it pass before they die, and came to understand why such things should happen only once. There are reasons, the manual says, for the selectiveness of human memory; the mercy of the Powers aside, experiencing again and again the emotions coupled with memory would leave an entity no time for the emotions of the present moment. . and then there is the matter of pain. But Dairine was caught in a situation the manual had never envisioned, a human being having her life totally experienced and analyzed by another form of life quite able to examine and sustain every moment of that life, in perfect recall. With the motherboard Dairine fell down into the dim twilight before her birth, heard echoes of voices, tasted for the first time the thumb it took her parents five years to get out of her mouth; lay blinking at a bright world, came to understand light and form; fought with gravity, and won, walking for the first time; smiled on purpose for the first time at the tall warm shape that held her close and said loving things to her without using sound: found out about words, especially No!; ecstatic, delighted, read for the first time; saw her sister in tears, and felt for the first time a kind of pain that didn't involve falling down and skinning your knees. .

Pain. There was enough of it. Frustration, rage at the world that wouldn't do what she wanted, fear at all kinds of things that she didn't understand: fear of things she heard on the news at night, a world full of bombs that can kill everything, full of people hungry, people shooting at each other and hating each other; hearing her parents shouting downstairs while she huddled under the covers, feeling like the world was going to end-will they shoot each other now? Will they have a divorce? Finding out that her best friend is telling other kids stories about how she's weird, and laughing at her behind her back; finding that she's alone in the world; making new friends, but by force, by cleverness and doing things to make her popular, not because friends come to her naturally; making herself slightly feared, so that people! will leave her alone to do the things she wants to without being hassled! beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there's more, more| but she can't figure out what it is, then finding out that someone knows the secret. Wizardry. And it doesn't come fast enough, it never comes fas enough, nothing ever does. . and now the price is going to be paid forj that, because she doesn't know enough to save these lovely glassy creature her buddies, that she watched be born. . helped be born. . her chil-j dren, sort of… she doesn't know how to save them, and they're going to be dead, everything's going to be dead: pain!

It hurts too much, Dairine thought, lying there listening to her heartbeat! slowly begin to die away, it hurts, I didn't want them to get hurt! But it was! part of the data, and it was too late now: the motherboard had it, and all thel mobiles would have it too, the second she released Dairine. Why should theyl care about slowlife now? she thought in anguish and shame at the bitter! outrush of what her life had been. Cruelty, pettiness, selfishness almost in-1 credible- But too late now. The motherboard was saving the last and newest I of the data to permanent memory. Any minute now the mobiles would start I the program running and entropy would freeze, and life would stop being a word that had a meaning.

The last nanosecond crawled by, echoes of the save rolled in the link. Nothing ever comes fast enough: end of file. .

Dairine lay still and waited for it all to end.

And lightning struck her. The flow of data reversed. She would have screamed, but trapped in the quicklife time of the motherboard, everything happened before the molasses-slow sparks of bioelectricity even had time to jump the motor synapses on the beginning of their journey down her nerves. The motherboard was pouring data into her as it had poured it into the mobiles under Dairine's tutelage: but not the mercifully condensed version of the manual programming that it had given them. The whole manual, the entire contents of the software, which in book form can be as small as a paperback or larger than a shelf full of telephone books: it poured into her, and she couldn't resist, only look on in a kind of fascinated horror as it filled her, and filled her, and never overflowed, just filled and filled. . The dinosaurs could have died while it filled her, life could have arisen on a hundred worlds and died of boredom in the time it took to fill her. She forgot who and what she was, forgot everything but this filling, filling, and the pain it cost her, like swallowing a star and being burnt away by it from the inside while eternally growing new layers on the outside: and finally not even the pain made sense anymore. .

She lay there on her side and stared at the ground, and was astonished not to see the crumbs from her sandwich in front of her nose. She could not move, or speak, and she could just barely think, with great pain and effort. There was something wrong with the way time was flowing, except that every time she tried to think what it was exactly, the timeflow seemed perfectly all right. Shapes were moving in front of her, and voices were speaking, either in vast soft drawls or light singing voices that seemed familiar.

Slowly names attached themselves to the voices.

"Now we see what these 'heart' things she gave us are for." That was Gigo. Good kid, she thought weakly, good baby. You tell 'em.

"And what entropy does, and what it cannot touch, ever." That was Beanpole, the silly-looking thing: where did he get such a voice? "Not all the evils and deaths it makes possible can touch the joys that run through it. We will have those too."

"We will not stop that joy," said Monitor. "Not for a nanosecond."

"It may be slow," said one of the mobiles, one whose name Dairine couldn't remember. "But it is life.

And it brought us life. We do nothing to harm that."

"And if you are against that," said Gigo, "your programming is in error, and we are against you."

They all sounded more complete than they had. The one voice she did not hear was Logo's. But she did hear something stranger: a murmur of astonishment that went up from the thousands of mobiles. And was there a trace of fear in it? She couldn't move, couldn't see what was happening. .

"Your choice," said another voice. At the sound of it, Dairine struggled with all her might to move, and managed to do no more than lever herself up half an inch or so and then flop down flat again, limp as a filleted fish. "Enjoy it. You will make no more choices. . but first, to pay for the one you have made, you will watch what the entropy you love so much will do to her."

Dairine lay still, waiting for the lightning to strike.

And another voice spoke.

"Wanna bet?" it said.

It didn't feel us arrive right when we did, Nita thought. How distracted It is! What's she been doing to It?

She and Kit actually had a second to collect themselves when they appeared, and Nita looked around her in a hurry. Another barren world, a great flaming barred-spiral galaxy flung across its night, an old tired star high in the sky, type N or S from the look of it, and a crowd of robots, crowded around Dairine and looking at her-and them- and the Lone One.

As with any other of the Powers, though there will be general similarities of vision among the like-minded, no two people ever see the Lone One in exactly the same way. Nita saw the good-looking young red-haired man she had seen in a skyscraper in the alternate otherworld the Lone One called his own. He was not wearing the three-piece suit he had affected there. Now he was dark-clad and dark-cloaked, unarmed and needing no armor: a feeling of cold and power flowed from him and ran impossibly along the ground, as if carried on a chill air. As the sight sank in, Nita shook like a leaf. What Kit might see, what Dairine and the robots might be seeing, Nita wondered briefly, then put the thought aside. She had other business.

It turned and looked at them. Nita stood as straight as she could under the circumstances, her manual in one hand, the other hand clutched on the gimbal in her pocket; beside her Kit stood almost the same way, except that Picchu sat on his wrist, making him look like a king's falconer. "Fairest and fallen," Nita said, "greeting and defiance." It was the oldest courtesy of wizards, and the most dangerous, that line: one might be intending to cripple or destroy that Power, but there was no need to be rude about it.

"You two," said the Lone One. "And a pet for company. Adorable. . and well met. You are off your own ground and well away from help at last. It took me long enough to set up this trap, but it was worth it."

Kit glanced at Nita and opened his mouth, but Picchu beat him to it. "And that's all you're going to get out of it," Peach said, "since the real prize you hoped to catch in that trap has obviously slipped out of it."

Peach began to laugh. "You never learn, do you? You're not the only one who can structure the future. The other Powers will sometimes scruple to do it. Not often. . but They took a special interest in this case. The first time you've completely lost a Choice, from the beginning."

"And the last," said the Lone One. It made an angry sweeping gesture at them. But Nita had been waiting for something of the kind. She clenched her hand on the gimbal and thought the last syllable of the spell she had been holding ready.

The bolt that hit their shields was like lightning, but more vehement, and dark. It was meant to smash the shield like a rock thrown at an egg, leaving them naked to the quick horrid death of explosive decompression. But it bounced. No shock was transmitted to them directly: but Nita, fueling the spell directly, felt the jolt go through her as if that thrown rock had hit her right in the head. She staggered. Kit steadied her.

The Lone One looked at them in cold astonishment. "Hate won't be enough this time," Nita said. "Care to try a nuke?"

It didn't move, but that cold fierce force struck the shield again, harder. Dust and fragments of the surface flew all around them, and the ground shook. When the dust settled, it was plain that the shieldspell produced a spherical effect, because through the bottom of the sphere they could see the molten stuff underneath them pressing against it. They were standing in a small crater that seethed and smoked.

Nita sagged against Kit: this time he had to hold her up for a moment. "Why are we alive?" he said in her ear. "The gimbal's not enough to be holding that off! What are you fueling that shield with?"

"A year of my life per shot," she said, giddy.

Kit stared at her. "Are you out of your mind? Suppose you were scheduled to be hit by a truck in three years or something?"

She shrugged. "I better watch where I cross the street, that's all. Kit, heads up, there's more important stuff to think about!"

"Yes indeed," Picchu said to the Lone One. "The last time you lose a Choice. Let your own words ordain the truth… as usual."

Its face got so cold that Nita for a moment wondered whether the shield was leaking. Impossible. But enough of that, and enough sitting around and waiting for It to do stuff! "I'm warning you now," she said, "I don't know what you've been up to here, but I bet you're the reason my sister's lying there on the ground. I don't want to hurt you, particularly; you hurt enough as it is. But I'm giving you just one chance to get out of here."

She thought she had seen rage before. . but evidently the Lone Power did not care for being pitied.

"Or you will do what?"

"This," Nita said, and dropped the gimbal on the ground, knowing what would happen to it, and let loose the other spell she had been preparing, the other one Kit would not have liked to hear about. The one word she spoke to turn it loose struck her down to her knees as it went out of her.

The figure of the Lone One writhed and twisted as something odd happened to the light and space around it. Then it was gone. And the gimbal fell to powder, which sifted into a little pile on the ground.

Kit shook Picchu off and reached down frantically to grab Nita. "What did you do?"

She panted for breath.

"Sent it home," she said. "We know the coordinates for its dimension. It's a worldgate, like the one Dairine did for Mars-"

"That's two years of your life, maybe five," Kit said, furious, dragging her to her feet. "Why don't you tell me this crap when you're planning it?"

"You'd get mad. You're mad now!"

"We could have shared the time, you stupid- Never mind! It's gone, let's get Dairine and haul out of here before It-"

Whatever hit them, hit them from behind. The shield broke. They went sprawling. And the cold exploded in. Nita shut her eyes in terror: that was all that saved them from freezing over on the spot. She recited the spell carefully in her mind, and didn't breathe, didn't move, though her ears roared and she could feel the prickle in her skin caused by capillaries popping. Four more words, two more, one. .

Air again, but little warmth. Nita took a breath: it stabbed her nose and mouth like knives. She opened her eyes and tried to see: her vision was blurred, shock perhaps-she didn't think her corneas had had time to freeze. Beside her she faintly heard Kit move among the shattered bits of the poor molten, refrozen, broken surface. "I changed my mind," he muttered. "Instead of being dead, can I just throw up some more?"

"Oh, no," said the Lone One from somewhere nearby, "no indeed. You have laid hands upon my person. No one does that and lives to boast of it. Though you'll live a while yet, indeed you shall. I shan't let you go quickly. . unlike your mouthy friend."

Nita blinked and looked around her-then saw. An explosion of scarlet and blue feathers lying among the broken rubble; red wetness already frozen solid, frosted over.

Her insides seized. I was always counting on someone to come and get us out of this. Peach or somebody. We've been lucky that way before. But not this time. She got to her hands and knees, the tears running down her face with the pain of bruises and the worse pain of fear inside. Not this time. I guess the luck couldn't hold.

There were hands on her. It's not fair! she thought. When you give everything you've got, it's supposed to turn out okay in the end! The hands pulled at her. Her eyes went back to the poor pile of feathers sticking up in the rocks. She didn't even have a chance to do anything brave before she went. It's not fair-

"Neets. Come on."

"Yes," mocked the other voice, the cruel one, "come on, Neets. One more time. For my amusement."

She crouched, wobbling, staring at the bits of bright scarlet scattered all over the pale plain. "Kit," she said softly, "what are we going to tell Tom?…"

"Never mind that now. Neets, snap out of it! Think of Belfast."

She thought of Belfast, and dogs in the backs of cars. She thought of rocket fire in Beirut, and the silence of Chernobyl, plowed rain forests in Brazil, and the parched places in Africa, and all the street corners in America where people were selling crack, and other corners where people begged, or lay hungry on steam vents in the shadow of windows full of gems: she thought of needless fear, and pain, and rage, and prolonged and terrified death; and she thought of ending all of these forever-not right this minute, perhaps, but sooner or later. Somehow or other, everything that happened on this planet was supposed to contribute to that ending. . whether she survived it or not. Slowly, slowly Nita dragged herself to her feet, and leaned on Kit without worrying who would think what about it. "What have you got?" she said.

"Not a thing. I couldn't do enough of a spell to butter my bread. But damned if I'm going out lying on the ground."

"Same here." She sniffled. The tears would not seem to stop. Very unher-oic, she felt, with her nose running and her knees made of rubber. Almost it was funny: almost she could have laughed at it. But there was no time for that now, with that dark regard trained on them like the end of everything, that dark shape moving slowly toward them, smiling.

"Kit," she said, "it's been the best."

"See you in Timeheart," he said.

And another voice spoke; an unfamiliar one-or was it?

"Touch them," it said, "and you're dead meat."

Dairine scrabbled to her knees, looking across the broken waste at her sister, and at the tears on Nita's face as she and Kit stood there holding each other up. Until now, she would have shrugged and turned her thoughts to something else. But now memory was alive in Dairine as it had never been before, and she saw in utter clarity that first time so long ago, and heard herself make that decision. The way to keep from getting hurt is to know things. The resolve had only worked sometimes, before. But now she knew things, in a way no one ever had; and she was going to stop the hurting once and for all. .

Beside her Gigo and some of the other mobiles stirred to help her up. She stood, using one of the big heavy-work mobiles to lean against after she hauled herself back to her feet. Yards away stood a human-like figure. The Lone One turned to gaze at her, that dark regard astonished. "You again?" It said.

"I see I will have to do away with you more quickly than these two. You're getting to be a nuisance."

Dairine grinned, a predatory look that had made more than one kid decide not to bother her on the playground, or in a poker game. "Do your worst, you poor turkey," she said.

She felt Its mind working, readying a bolt like the one that had crumpled Nita's shields, but many times worse, a killing blow that would cause a long lifetime's worth of pain before it snuffed life out. Must still be some connection to it through the motherboard, Dairine thought. I wonder where? Unless the presence of entropy in the board is enough. Wherever entropy is, It is… Oh, well. She turned her mind to hunt a spell to stop the bolt; a millisecond later she had it. She did not need to look in the manual. She was the manual now.

As if in slow motion she watched the bolt head for her, invisible though it was. Effortlessly, Dairine struck it away from her and back at the sender, like a batter hitting a nasty ground ball straight back into the pitcher's gut. The Lone One didn't react physically-the blow was too small to affect It-but Its face grew terrible.

"You think you can match power with me?" It said softly, turning away from Nita and Kit.

Dairine laughed. "Think so? I can wring you out and hang you up to dry. Come on, you poor fool. Take your best shot."

It raised up a wash of power that would fall on the planet's surface and melt every one of the mobiles to magma. Dairine saw it coming, found the spell she needed, caught the incoming tide of death and threw it off to one side, where a large area of the plain began to bubble and seethe. "Naughty, naughty," Dairine said. "Let my buddies be."

The Lone One stood looking at her, Its rage beginning to affect Its physical form. It seemed larger than it had: not so much the young, handsome human shape anymore, but a larger shape, shadowed, burning, its eyes light-less pits of hate. "Insolence," it said, "I will never tolerate. I may not be able to touch you, but I will level your planet. You cannot stay awake to guard it from me forever. One night the sirens will start, and the next morning, only mushroom clouds will grow on Earth anymore. It will not take much doing."

"It wouldn't if I ever intended to let you off this planet," Dairine said, quite calmly. "I'm in the motherboard as much as it's in me. They know all the wizardry there is to know. . and even if my human brain starts to lose it eventually, they won't. Get used to this place. You're not leaving."

"Bets?" said the huge shadowy form, growing huger. Its cold eyes glanced up into the darkness.

High up, the red sun began to waver and pucker. "A significant amount of this planet's energy," said the Lone One, "comes from solar power. More than from geothermal. Much of this plain is solar cell: surely you noticed. That black hole's orbit can be changed without too much effort. It need no longer transit the star. It can be permanently placed in front of it. . "

The sun's disk puckered in on itself, dwindled, di^d away completely.

The mobiles gazed up in horror.

"Oh, they have a little power stored," Dairine said. "Enough to stop that kind of blackmail." She took a breath: this was going to take some power, but she had that to spare at the moment-the whole motherboard behind her, all the mobiles, all their intent turned toward giving her whatever she needed.

The spell was intricate, but the natural laws being worked with were simple enough: gravity was one of the easiest of all laws to rewrite for brief periods. Dairine reached out without moving, spoke the words that grasped the forces and spun them together, flung them outward. The net found the shape destined for it, the tiny dark mass around which space bent so awry. The mass was snugged into the net, caught.

Dairine described the direction she wanted it to go in, turned the spell loose. The whole business had taken sixteen milliseconds.

The tiny black hole slung into the red sun, which immediately flared up in outrage. None of this was visible, nor would it be for some minutes, until the light reached the planet from the star; but Dairine felt it happen, and so did the Lone One.

"So much for that," Dairine said. "Now you and I are going to talk." At the same time she was thinking furiously about something else that nagged at her, as if it were important. How was it she was able to hear what was going on in Its head

— and she was distracted, for here came something else, a wave of power so awful that she shrank from it, even though it wasn't directed at her or anything on the planet's surface.

All those millions of miles away, she felt the star go dead.

Starsnuffer: she knew the Lone Power was called by that name as well.

"I am through playing," It said. "If it is not you who pay the price, elsewhere others will. Think on it." It looked upward. There was hardly anything human about it anymore-only a great tall darkness, like a tree made of night, no limbs, no eyes, just awful watchfulness and a cold to freeze the heart. Dairine looked up too.

She felt darkness eating at the fringes of the risen galaxy. "Here are your choices," said the Lone Power out of Its darkness, as Dairine and Nita and Kit watched in horror. "Keep on defying me, and watch me kill and kill as the price of your defiance. The blood of all these billions of entities will be on your souls forever. Or give yourselves up to me."

"No way," Nita said. "You're the one doing the killing. We'd do worse by the Universe if we gave up, rather than if we kept on fighting you."

Dairine stood silent, refusing to be rattled, thinking. There has to be a way to get it to stop this! I can't fight it forever! At least, I don't want to…

And how can I hear It? The connection through Logo! She glanced over among the mobiles, but Logo lay on his side, empty-minded. No. It has to be.

She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly. .

I'm a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It's in me too. .

Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning lightsaber, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable anymore. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It…

She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered; the thing that would save everybody-from Kit and Nita to the least little grain of dust in space and the tiniest germ on Earth. This was what the spell had brought her here to do. She would pen all of the Lone Power up inside herself, not just the treacherous little splinter of it that was her own; pen It up inside a mind that was large enough to hold It all. And then she would die, and take It out of the universe with her.

But she couldn't do it without consent. What about it, guys? she said to them silently, through the link that every mobile shared with every other. Let's take a vote.

Show us what to do, they said; and tears sprang to Dairine's eyes at the fierce love in their thought.

Dairine turned and bent down to pick up Logo, cradling the empty shell close in her arms. Gigo nuzzled up against her knee. This is the way to go out, Dairine thought. Who needs a lightsaber?. .

"Okay," she said to the Lone One. "Last warning. Cut it out."

It laughed at her.

Dairine struck. The mobiles struck with her through their own links to the Lone One, a great flow of valor that for the first time in all times, was without despair. They did not care about all the other attempts wizards had made on the Lone Power through history; as far as a computer is concerned, there is no program that cannot be debugged, or at worst, rewritten. They struck through Dairine, and with her, not knowing that defeat was possible.

Two thousand wizards, each a veritable library of wizardry, led by one at the peak of her power, and utterly committed, and all acting as one: in such circumstances anything seemed possible. Dairine ran down the road into the dark places inside her, the scorn, the indifference, the selfishness, found the Lone One there, grasped It and would not let It go. The screaming began, both from those that held and from What they held.

The darkness stopped eating the galaxy, but that was not enough. The great pillar of dark that the Lone One had become was bent double to the ground, but not gone. Dairine hunted answers desperately: she couldn't hold It for long. To fight darkness, the manual said, as so many other references

/ have said before, light the darkness comprehendeth it not. .

Light, Dairine thought. We need more. But the nova was gone, half the galaxy was out. .

She found her answer. It was going to be quite a spell. She put down Logo's shell, flung up her arms and felt for the forces she wanted, while the mobiles inside her kept the Lone One both inside and out pinned down. It was gravity she would be working with again, and the three laws of motion: nothing more involved. But there was a lot of matter to affect. . "Don't think about it," Dairine told herself. "Let the spell handle it. A spell always works." She spoke softly, naming everything she wanted to affect. One of the names was quite long, too long to waste time saying out loud; she slipped into machine language and machine time and spoke it there. It took four whole seconds, and made the whole planet tremble a little when she said it. Good, she thought, it's working.

She said the last word of the spell, knotting it closed on itself, and told it to run.

The Universe stopped expanding.

The backlash of the spell hit Dairine, but she refused to fall, waiting for what she knew would happen.

The Lone One shrieked like a thing mortally wounded, a sound that made the planet shake almost as hard as it had before. Then It fled in the one direction left open to It: into the mortal souls of Kit and Nita and Dairine.

And then there was light.