Wizards At War

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 horizon 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 Tranquillity, 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.

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 circle 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.

“How many of those things do you have?” Dairine said.

“Not nearly enough,” Roshaun said.

Dairine sighed and took it. “Fine, we’ll rot together.”

She stuck the lollipop in her mouth and worked on it quietly for a few minutes, glad that it was one of the fudgy ones that she preferred. The neighboring galaxy rose slowly behind the spires of the mobiles’ city while the two of them watched, and the stately, silent immensity of its going started to settle and calm Dairine’s mind the way the rising of the Moon did at home. Before her eyes, something endlessly bigger and older than she was going about its ancient business as usual. The thought came to Dairine after some moments that no matter what the abnormal expansion might do to the universe, even though all life might be destroyed, somehow, someday, there would be another awakening. It might take uncountable years, but the Life that wizards served was just too permanent, too tenacious, too wily. It would outlast its enemy, no matter how long it took. And suddenly Dairine got a flicker-glimpse of a new morning somewhere, somewhen—dew on long grass, and low sunlight turning it all to diamonds; an overturned game board, the pieces scattered in the fresh wet green; and hands reaching down to pick the pieces up and put the game back in order again—

The image fled. Dairine shook her head, uncertain where it had come from.

“I have seen that, too,” Roshaun said after a moment.

Dairine looked at him sidewise. “You’ve been hearing me think?”

He tilted his head in the odd way that Wellakhit used for “yes.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

Roshaun just gazed up at the rising galaxy.

“It can mean,” Dairine said, unable to leave it alone, “that wizards are getting—”

“Too close?” He still didn’t look at her, but Dairine felt that he was still, somehow, considering her very closely. “How close is too close? Neither of us thinking of doing anything… inappropriate.”

“Huh,” Dairine said. She moved the lollipop from right to left in her mouth, and then from left to right again, and finally said, “I don’t know how ‘inappropriate’ looks to your people.”

“You should read the manual more,” Roshaun said.

“Seemed simpler to ask you.”

“And possibly more embarrassing.”

“Maybe I just like yanking your chain,” Dairine said, “as much as you like yanking mine.”

Roshaun’s expression was bemused. “The idiom is peculiar,” he said after a few moments, “except insofar as it implies we’re linked.”

Dairine stayed quiet.

“My father’s concerns about the two of us,” Roshaun said, “I take as an indication of other things that were going on with him right then. Wellakhit are not moved to seek unionbond with another until at least a third of the way along in our life span. I am nowhere near that, and you, if I’m right, would be only about a sixth of a way along, as your people reckon time.”

Dairine did the multiplication. “Sounds about right,” she said. “You do have the idea of being ‘just good friends?’”

He gave her a sidewise look. “For so high and honorable an estate,” Roshaun said, “‘just’ seems a poor modifier to choose.”

Crunch! went the lollipop Roshaun was working on, and Dairine flinched.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“You are always hearing trouble before it happens,” Roshaun said. “Some might say it was a sign of a lack of faith in the benevolence of the universe. Or of dysfunction.”

Dairine glared at him. “You keep this up, I’ll give you a dysfunction where you’ll have trouble finding it again,” she muttered.

“Now there you have it,” Roshaun said. “All this aggressiveness! I wonder about you sometimes.”

You wonder about me! Dairine thought.

Yes, Roshaun said in the back of her head.

Dairine saw that Roshaun was wearing a brooding look. “And what’s the matter with you?” she said.

Roshaun let out an annoyed breath. “My father,” he said at last. “My business with him did not go as I thought it would.”

“What? You expected him to just roll over and agree with whatever you told him?”

“On the contrary,” Roshaun said. “I expected a great fight with storming and shouting. Then everything would have been over with, and in a short time we would have been set at rights with one another again. But this—this calm complaisance—” Roshaun shook his head. “It sounded nothing like the way he usually does. It troubles me.”

“Well, I was sure troubled,” Dairine said, “and if that was him being calm—”

Roshaun laughed. “And you thought I was so lucky to have a wizard for a parent.”

“Is it possible for me to admit you might have been right without you rubbing it in?” Dairine said.

Roshaun gazed out into the darkness as if giving a strange new concept some thought. “Perhaps,” he said. “Next time I’ll try.”

They leaned back in their chairs again and looked at the silently rising galaxy. “Forgive us,” said a voice down on the ground between their feet, “but we’re ready for you now.”

They both looked down. Logo was there, and his back was roiling with Speech charactery, a brilliantly blending muddle of symbols and figures. Dairine looked down at the shifting patterns chasing themselves across Logo’s hide and suddenly, unreasonably, found them threatening. She swallowed. “What do you need us to do?” she said, and got up.

“We’ll be setting up the diagram out here,” Logo said. “You’ll want to check it, of course, to make sure that your personal information is complete and correct.”

Logo trundled out into the very center of the huge open area inside the circle of towers. The mobiles all around drew back and left the great space empty; under Dairine’s and Roshaun’s feet, the surface went dark, and that darkness ran straight up the surrounding towers and extinguished their fire.

Dairine could feel the jolt of power that passed between Logo and the surface. From the low dome of his back, a multilobed diagram far more complex and more densely interlaced than anything Dairine had seen so far raced out across to the towers and up them. Light in many colors burned bright and dim through the pattern as it established itself, the color and brightness of every line and curve signaling the relative importance of the part of the spell involved.

Dairine gulped at the immensity of it. “Wow,” she said. “Even you guys couldn’t have built this whole wizardry just now!”

“No,” Logo said. “We had help. You’ll see.” He sprouted an arm and waved it across the expanse of the wizardry. Three relatively dark patches had been left open in the diagram, each of them a many-sided polygon with a minimum of inscribed words in the Speech inside. “There are your spots,” Logo said. “Yours over there, Dairine. Roshaun, yours there.”

The two spots in question were perhaps ten meters apart. Dairine went to hers and stood in it; the diagram around her started to glow brighter as she took her place. She knelt down, found the wizard’s knot that marked the beginning and ending of her name in the Speech, and began to trace the many-branched curve of it right around the circle.

Spot scurried out of the crowd of mobiles to settle himself in the third, smaller dark patch that had opened up. “I’ll be storing the proceedings,” he said, “so that if you need to refer to them later, you’ll have everything handy.”

“Okay,” she said, turning a little to get a better view of the next part of her name. “How’re you feeling?”

Spot paused. “Different,” he said.

He’s not the only one, Dairine thought. She traced along one section of the long sequence of Speech-characters, which made up the description of her that was crucial to a working wizardry. Some of its elements spoke more of the machine than the human. She’d seen those growing slowly since her Ordeal, and during her affiliation with Spot, but today some of them were crowding the strictly human qualities somewhat. “You feel better?” Dairine said to Spot.

“I think so,” Spot said. “Clearer, anyway.”

“Good,” she said, and turned to Roshaun. “You ready for it?”

“Yes,” Roshaun said, and looked down at her with an amused expression. “Always assuming you don’t need time to compose yourself because you have been panicked by the sheer size of the impending wizardry. Even I am impressed.”

Dairine smiled a half smile. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you are,” she said.

Most of the mobiles who had gathered to see their arrival had now crowded back out of the space, but not because they weren’t participating. Underneath every mobile Dairine could see, a small circle of power was flaring—each one’s own name and a power-conduit linking it to the central wizardry. Logo, Gigo, Beanpole, and Hex made their way out into the center of the master spell diagram, where similar circles flared under each of them. They were followed by the rest of the core imaging team, who arranged themselves around the inner four at the vertices of a hexagon.

“We are nearly ready,” said Beanpole.

“But one question,” Logo said. He turned toward Roshaun. “What’s that you bear?”

Roshaun looked around him in confusion. “What—Oh, this,” he said, looking down at the great stone around his neck. “It’s a token of my office as Sunlord.”

“Its structure is unusual; it needs to be a separate part of the spell,” Beanpole said.

Roshaun raised his eyebrows, and lifted the great torc from his throat. “If you need a description of its physical properties—”

“There,” said Beanpole, indicating a newly appearing empty spot in the wizardry, just to one side of Roshaun. A “container” for the collar bloomed there in the surface—a hollow sphere of pale filigree fire, constructed of numerous long phrases in the Speech all knitted together and burning. Roshaun went to the glowing sphere and looked it over carefully, tracing several of the longer curves of Speech with one finger. Finally he slipped the collar into the sphere. It hung there, gleaming in the white fire, turning slightly.

“Is the description accurate?” Hex said.

“So far as I can tell,” Roshaun said, making his way back to his own circle.

“Very well,” Logo said, and looked out toward Dairine, Spot, and Roshaun. “Does the ground suit?”

It was one of several traditional queries for a wizard proposing a potentially dangerous solution to a problem. Dairine looked at Roshaun, who tilted his head “yes,” and then at Spot. “Yes,” he said.

“On the Powers’ business, all ground suits,” Dairine said. “Let’s do Their work, and the One’s.”

A rustle of tension and expectation went around the huge circle. “All right,” Gigo said. “If you two would get into circuit with the Motherboard? Skin to skin, to begin with.”

Dairine sat down cross-legged in the middle of her spell diagram, and put her hands flat down on the cool surface on either side of her. The sudden jolt of power, of connectedness to everyone around her, took her completely by surprise. She wobbled as she looked back at herself through thousands of other eyes. Then she heard a voice she hadn’t directly heard until now, a rumble in the bones.

You’ve come back, the Motherboard said to Dairine. You’ve come home!

Yes, Dairine said, feeling a little embarrassed, as if she’d been out late and hadn’t let her mom know beforehand.

And you’re much more than you were, the Motherboard said.

Now Dairine started to feel the faint discomfort of someone being praised for something they haven’t actually earned. Uh—

But you are, the Motherboard said. No need to dissemble. I may be a mother, but you are mine. And you know that we never feel like we’re enough for our children, whose job is to surpass us. Ours is simply to make sure they work hard enough at it that they feel they’ve earned it when it happens.

There was a smile in the voice that Dairine would never have suspected. She grinned, too. You think we got the job done?

Without any possible question, the Motherboard said. Now let’s take on the next one.

“Okay,” she said, glancing up and over at Roshaun.

He had been looking a little blank; now he broke out of it, looked over at Dairine. “She is—quite something,” he said after a moment, sounding strangely out of breath.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Dairine said.

This wizardry must take place in two parts, the Motherboard said. We must first extract the information that our mother is carrying. After that, the implementation’s hers to direct: we’ll merely assist.

A wave of agreement went around the vast assemblage. Ready? the Motherboard said to Dairine.

Go, Dairine said.

The power started to build. Dairine felt “taps” from this world into other universes open up, spilling unimaginable amounts of force into the wizardry. Time began to stretch as the mobiles’ perception of what was happening swamped her own. Dairine started to see herself as the mobiles did—a life-form seemingly frozen in time, and as a spell diagram, tidily compartmentalized. The combined intention of the Motherboard and the mobiles sought down through her structure and focused on one of those compartments, an obscurely glowing area easily lost among other, brighter ones surrounding it in Dairine’s mind—

That compartment grew until every intricacy of its contents was made plain in a delicate lacework spattering of pale light, like nightside cities seen from space. The mobiles and the Motherboard spent what seemed like a long time examining the compartment and the data inside it. Finally, the Motherboard spoke. This is the information the Defender left, she said. It can’t be decrypted without breaking the container open.

Right, Dairine said. For the moment, she was part mobile, and could act at their speed. She reached out a hand. In this darkness all spangled with light, a hand of light reached out, laced fingers through the webwork of darkness surrounding the data, and pulled. It came away in her hand like a fistful of cobwebs. The data burst out of prison like a storm of silver bees—

The mobiles threw a net of Speech-words around them. The light of the data ran down the strands of the net, particles shifting, moving themselves into a different order. Then everything went dark again.

Logo’s voice seemed to come from somewhere far off. And now the information Spot was holding, he said. Distantly, Dairine saw another container’s contents trying to flee into the darkness—then being netted and contained, as her data had been.

The world came back. Dairine took a few breaths, stood up and stretched. It felt like she’d been sitting in the same place for an hour, though she knew it had been only a matter of seconds.

Before her, spread out in a new dark area that had opened up a couple of meters away, was a single long line of characters in the Speech. Dairine read them slowly.

“They’re coordinates,” she said then. “But not to a place. To a person. This’ll tell us who has the Instrumentality—the thing that’ll save the universe—”

“If we can find it in time,” Roshaun said. “And work out how to use it.”

“Let’s go,” Dairine said. “You guys ready?”

Show us what to do, said the Motherboard and the mobiles together.

“We need an imaging routine,” Dairine said, and knelt down in her circle again, sitting back on her heels. She put a hand down on the surface again, getting back into more direct contact with the Motherboard. In her mind a series of possible imaging routines presented themselves. Close-range out-of-atom, long-range out-of-atom—

That one looks about right, Dairine thought. She glanced down at the set of coordinates burning just under the surface before her.

Light blasted out and away from her through the surface, curving and twining away in all directions as long sentences in the Speech etched themselves under it in living fire. She had a peculiar sense that someone else was in the spell with her. Not the Motherboard, not the mobiles, not Spot or Roshaun: nothing living—or at least not with the usual kind of life. All around her, the mobiles glowed more brightly by the moment as the spell drew on the Motherboard’s manual functions and showed Dairine what to say.

The feeling of the sheer power running through her astounded Dairine. I’d forgotten it could be like this… The throb of it ran up her arms and into her brain; she stood up slowly, let it build. If it wasn’t for how desperate all this is, I could really enjoy this.

And she was enjoying it. There was no use pretending otherwise. Dairine started to speak the words in the Speech that were the search coordinates. The sound of them going out of her was like thunder. They shook her from side to side as she spoke them, streaking out into the structure of the wizardry to build its fire higher, second by second.

Across the diagram, Roshaun knelt at his focus point, his expression full of the terror and exaltation of the power that was suddenly his by virtue of his connection to the wizardry and the Motherboard. Dairine couldn’t remember ever having seen so naked and open an expression on his face before. Past him, in its container, the Sunstone blazed the orange-gold of Wellakh’s star.

You okay? Dairine said silently.

He lifted his eyes to hers. The look slammed into Dairine with force that felt like it should have knocked her down. The world whited out. It was as if the two of them stood in Earth’s Sun again, working the spell that drained off the excess energy which would have made the Sun flare up and roast the side of Earth facing toward it. But this time the roiling sea of power above which they stood was partly the Motherboard, and partly Dairine—or, rather, the surface of Dairine’s mind as Roshaun saw it.

From Roshaun, Dairine got the sense of someone standing on a narrow bridge over what looked like untameable, furious chaos paired with infinite power. That power was speaking to him, too, tempting him to get a little closer to the edge. Don’t get any ideas! Dairine said silently.

The answer was a strange low garbled roar, one she instantly recognized, since it had shocked her so when first she’d heard it. The Sun said something, and I didn’t understand. But now it was Roshaun saying something in the Speech, and once again Dairine wasn’t getting it. Impossible. Everything understands the Speech!

She shook her head. No time for it now, she thought. It’s some weirdness to do with him; we’ll figure it out later. The rest of the Speech was working just fine; the spell lay before her, ready to implement.

Dairine took a breath and said the single word in the Speech that is the shorthand for the wizard’s knot, the “go” word of the spell.

Everything went dark. Then images began to superimpose themselves on the darkness, blotting out even the viewer’s sense of being at the center of a point of view, so that Dairine felt more like a bodiless presence than an observer. She saw the strange slick cloud of some atom’s shell, from the inside, an undersky fuzzy with probabilities. The “sky” rushed toward her, blew past her like fog, leaving her gazing out on interstitial space alive with the neon ripples of “strong force” between a seemingly infinite latticework of atoms. Another few breaths, and the view was a solid mass of chains of molecules, writhing among one another like a nest of snakes. Another blurring outward rush, and reddish lightning rattled and sizzled everywhere, whip-cracking down the length of strange bumpy textures like a child’s blocks strung on rope. Another rush, and everything went milky and crystalline, with a faint strange movement going on outside the surface of the crystal.

One last blur of fog descended, and the image resolved itself into a peculiar view seen through eyes that fringed every object with brilliant rainbows of color. It was a landscape, all in flat dark reds, the sky black with heat; and finally there was a point of view associated with it. This is it, Dairine said, exultant. This is what the world looks like for the person who’s got the Instrumentality. Now all we need to find is where they are.

The envisioning routine backed out several steps farther. A smallish, ocean-girdled planet circled a giant white sun, the fourth of its eight worlds. Another jump, and the star dwindled down to just one of a drift of thousands in an irregular galaxy’s core.

Several long strings of characters in the Speech appeared by that galaxy, tagging it and numerous others around it that were visible only as tiny cloudy whorls or disks.

Okay, Dairine said. Store that. And she waited until the data was stored, and then said the word that cut the wizard’s knot and dissolved the spell.

The space between the towers reappeared. Slowly the spell diagram faded, leaving only the image of the “found” galaxy, and the outlines of the circles in which all the spell’s participants had stood. Dairine let out a long breath. She was a little tired, but nothing like as exhausted as she should have been after such an effort.

“I can’t get over that,” Dairine said, as Beanpole and Logo and the others made their way over toward her and Roshaun. “It was like the wizardry was helping me, somehow…”

“It’s the power-increase effect, the peridexis,” Beanpole said. “We’ve been taking advantage of it, too.”

Dairine walked out of her circle to where the image of the tagged galaxy burned just under the surface. She bent down to look at the annotations. “It’s fairly close to our own galaxy. At least we won’t have any more really big transits to deal with when we get back.”

“That’s well enough,” Roshaun said, settling the torc with the Sunstone about his neck. “We may know where the person with access to the Instrumentality can be found. But if we can’t get them to give it to us, or learn how to use it to stop the expansion, this will all have been for nothing.”

“I’m not gonna throw our own universe in the trash just yet,” Dairine said. She peered down at the tagging characters next to the galaxy. “Good, it’s got a New General Catalog number: NGC 5518. It’s in Boötes, somewhere.” Then she stopped. “What’s this?” she said over her shoulder to the mobiles.

Spot came over to her from his own circle, and put out several eyes to examine the word in the Speech that Dairine was indicating. “Enthusiasmic,” he said.

Dairine frowned. “You mean enthusiastic.”

“It says enthusiasmic,” Spot said.

“That’s not a word!”

“It is now,” said Spot.

Roshaun came to look over Dairine’s shoulder. “And what is that word next to it supposed to be?” he said. “Incorporation?” He looked bemused.

“So this is a word that didn’t have a meaning until just recently?” Dairine said to Spot. “A word for something new.”

“So I believe,” Spot said.

Dairine shook her head. “Enthusiasmic incorporation,” she said. “Of the hesper—” Then Dairine blinked, and a moment later her eyes widened.

“That’s not a word in the Speech,” said Gigo, sounding perplexed.

“No,” Dairine said. “It’s not. But it’s a word we know in English. Or part of one.” She swallowed. “Enthusiasmic incorporation of the Hesper—”

She hurriedly bent down and picked Spot up. “Quick,” she said. “You have to message Nita for me. Or one of the others. I don’t care where they are. Just get me one of those guys!”

The ground underneath all their various feet or treads or wheels came alive with the kind of display that would have shown on Spot’s screen, had it been open—the apple-without-a-bite imagery of the manual software’s Earth-sourced version, rippling bluely under the surface. And then the message, both written in the Speech and seemingly speaking itself into their bones: Messaging refused. Please try again later.

“Refused?” Roshaun said.

“They’re somewhere where they can’t take an incoming communication, because they’re scared they might be overheard,” Dairine said. She bit her lip.

“Perhaps we should simply go to them,” Roshaun said.

“You’re exactly right,” Dairine said, putting Spot down again. She turned to the mobiles. “Guys, I hate to spell and run, but we’ve got to find them right away—because if they don’t realize what they’re dealing with, they’re going to mess it up. And if it gets messed up this once, then the whole universe is screwed up forever.”

“Even more screwed up than it is at the moment?” Roshaun said.

“You have no idea,” Dairine said. “Come on, let’s open up a gate and get going!”