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“Hey, there’s somebody in the driveway! It’s a truck! Mom! Mom, the computer’s here!”
The first sound Nita heard that morning was her little sister’s shrieking. Nita winced and scrunched herself up into a ball under the covers. Then she muttered six syllables, a very simple spell, and soundproofed her room against her sister’s noise.
Blessed silence fell. Unfortunately the spell also killed the buzzing of the locusts and the singing of the birds outside the open window. And Nita liked birds. She opened her eyes, blinking at the bright summer sun coming in the window, and sighed.
Nita said one more syllable. The mute-spell came undone, letting in the noise of doors opening and shutting, and Dairine shrieking instructions and suggestions at the immediate planet. Outside the window a catbird was sitting in the elm tree, screaming, “Thief! Thief!” in an enthusiastic but substandard imitation of a blue jay.
So much for sleeping late, Nita thought. She got up and went over to the dresser by the window, pulled a drawer open and rummaged in it for a T-shirt and shorts. “Morning, Birdbrain,” she said as she pulled out a “Live Aid” T-shirt.
The catbird hopped down to a branch of the elm right outside Nita’s window. “Bob-white! Bob-white!” it sang at the top of its lungs.
“What’s a quail doing in a tree?” Nita said. She pulled the T-shirt on. “Listen to those locusts! Hot one today, huh?”
“Highs in the nineties,” the bird sang. “Cheer up! Cheer up!”
“Robins are for spring,” Nita said. “I’m more in the mood for penguins at the moment...”
“What’s up!”
“Enough with the imitations! I need you to take a message for me. Wizards’ business. I’ll leave you something nice. Half of one of Mom’s muffins? Huh?”
The catbird poured out several delighted bars of song that started as a phoebe’s call and ended as the five-note theme from E. T.
“Good,” Nita said. “Then here’s something new to sing.” She had been speaking all along in the Speech of wizards, the language everything alive understands. Now she added music to it, singing random notes with the words. “Kit, you wanna see a disaster? Come on over here and watch my folks try to hook up the Apple.”
The bird cocked an interested eye at her. “You need it again?” Nita said.
“ ‘Kit, you wanna see a disaster?’ “
“That’s my boy. You remember the way?”
In a whir of white-barred wings, the catbird was gone.
“Must be hungry,” Nita said to herself, pulling on her shorts, and then socks and sneakers. While pulling a sneaker on, she glanced at the top of the dresser. There among the stickers and the brushes and combs, under the new Alan Parsons album, lay her wizard’s manual.
That by itself wasn’t so strange; she’d left it there yesterday afternoon. But it was open; she didn’t remember having left it that way. Nita leaned over, tying the sneaker, and looked at the page. The Wizards’ Oath-Nita smiled. It didn’t seem like only a few months ago that she’d first read and taken that Oath herself: it felt more like years. February, was it? she thought. No, March. Joanne and her crew chased me into the library. And beat the crap out of me later. But I didn’t care. I’d found this.
Nita sighed and flipped the book back to the Oath. Trouble came with wizardry. But other things came too.
Whamwhamwham!
Nita didn’t even need to turn around to see who was pounding on her door as it banged open. “Come in!” Nita said, and glared at Dairine, who already was in.
“It’s here!”
“I would never have known,” Nita said, dropping the Parsons album back on top of the manual. “Dari, sometimes people like to sleep on a Saturday, y’know?”
“When there’s a computer here? Nita, sometimes you’re such a spud.”
Nita folded her arms and leaned against the dresser, ready to start a lecture. Her sister, unfortunately, took all the fun out of it by mocking Nita’s position and folded arms, leaning against the doorjamb. Funny how someone so little could look so threatening: a little red-haired eleven-year-old stick of a thing in an Admiral Ackbar T-shirt, with a delicate face and watery gray eyes.
Problem was, there was someone smart behind those eyes. Someone too smart.
Nita let out an annoyed breath. “I won’t kill you this time,” she said.
“I wasn’t worried about that,” Dairine said. “And you won’t turn me into a toad or anything, either, so don’t bother trying that line on me... C’mon, let’s watch Mom ‘n’ Dad mess it up.” And she was out the door.
Nita made a face. It didn’t help that Dairine knew she was a wizard. She would sooner have told her parents about her wizardry than have told Dairine.
Of course, her folks had found out too ...
Nita headed out the bedroom door and down the stairs.
The living room was full of boxes and packing material, loose-leaf books, and diskette boxes. Only the desk by the window was clean; and on it sat a cream-colored object about the size and shape of a phone book-the keyboard/motherboard console of a shiny new Apple IIIc+. “Harry,” Nita’s mother was saying, “don’t plug anything in, you’ll blow it up. Dairine, get out of that. Morning, Nita, there’s some pancakes on the stove.”
“Okay,” Nita said, and headed into the kitchen. While she was still spreading maple syrup between two pancakes, someone banged on the screen door.
“C’mon in,” Nita said, her mouth full. “Have a pancake.”
Kit came in: Christopher Rodriguez, her fellow-wizard, quick and dark and sharp-eyed, and at thirteen, a year younger than Nita. And also suddenly two inches taller, for he had hit a growth spurt over the summer. Nita couldn’t get used to it; she was used to looking down at him. She handed him a pancake.
“A little bird told me there’s about to be trouble,” Kit said.
“C’mon,” Dairine’s strident voice came from the living room, “I wanna play Lunar Landed.”
“ ‘About to be?’ “ Nita said.
Kit grinned around the mouthful of pancake and gestured with his head at the living room, raising his eyebrows.
Nita nodded agreement, her mouth full too, and they headed that way.
“Dairine,” Nita’s mother was saying, “leave your dad alone.” Her mother was sitting cross-legged in jeans and sweatshirt, in the middle of a welter of Styrofoam peanuts and paperwork, going through a loose-leaf binder. “And don’t get those manuals out of order, either. Morning, Kit! How’re your mom and dad?”
“Fine, Mrs. Callahan. Hi, Mr. Callahan.”
“Hi, Kit,” said Nita’s dad, rather muffled because he was under the desk by the living room window. “Betty, I’ve got the three-prong plugs in.”
“Oh, good. Then you can set up the external monitor ...”
“When can I play?” Dairine hollered.
“At this rate,” said her father, “sometime in the next century. Nita, do something with her, will you?”
“It’s a little late for birth control,” Kit said in Nita’s ear. Nita spluttered with laughter.
Dairine flew at her. “Was that something dirty? I’ll get you for that, you-“
Queep! something said. All heads turned; but it was just the computer, which Nita’s dad had plugged in. “Harry, you will blow it up,” Nita’s mother said calmly, from down among the cartons. “We haven’t finished reading the instructions yet.”
“We don’t have to, Betty. We didn’t connect the hard disk yet, so we-“
Dairine lost interest in killing Nita. “Can I play now?!”
“See, it says in this manual-“
“Yes, but this one is before that one, Harry-“
“But, look, Betty, it says right here-“
Dairine quietly slipped the plastic wrapping off the monitor and slipped it into its notch at the back of the computer, then started connecting the cables to the screen. Nita glanced at Kit, then back toward the kitchen. He grinned agreement.
“Your folks are gonna lock her in a closet or something,” Kit said as they got out of the combat zone.
“I hope so ... that’s probably the only way I’m gonna get at it. But it’s okay; she won’t blow it up. Her science class has a IIIc: that’s one of the reasons Mom and Dad got this one. Dari already knows more about it than the teacher does.”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh,” Nita said. “But I’m not gonna let her monopolize this toy, lemme tell you. It’s a neat little thing-it has the new foldout screen, and batteries-you could put it in a bookbag. I’ll show you later... Where’s Ponch?”
“Outside. C’mon.”
They went out and sat on the side steps. The locusts were buzzing louder than ever as Ponch, Kit’s big black mutt, part Border collie, part German shepherd, came bounding up the driveway to them through the green-gold early sunlight. “Oh, Lord, look at his nose,” Nita said. “Ponch, you got stung again, you loon.”
“I buried a bone,” Ponch said in a string of whines and barks as he came up to them. “The bad things bit me.”
“His favorite bone-burying place,” Kit said, sounding resigned, “has three yellowjacket nests spaced around it. He gets stung faster than I can heal him.”
“Brave,” Ponch said, resting his chin, with the swollen black nose, on Nita’s shoulder, and looking sideways at her for sympathy.
“Dumb,” Nita said, scratching him behind the ears. “But brave. Go get a stick, brave guy. I’ll throw it.” Ponch slurped Nita’s face and raced off.
Kit smiled to see him run.
“So what’re we doing today? Anything?”
“Well, there’s a new show at the planetarium in the city. Something about other galaxies. My folks said I could go if I wanted to.”
“Hey, neat. You got enough money?”
“Just.”
“Great. I think I’ve got enough-let me check.”
Nita went back into the house, noticing as she passed through the living room that Dairine was already slipping a diskette into the Apple’s built-in disk drive, while her oblivious mother and father were still sitting on the floor pointing at different pages in three different manuals, and arguing cheerfully. Queep! the computer said from the living room, as Nita got into her room and upended the money jar on the dresser.
There was no pause in the arguing. Sometimes I think they like it, Nita thought, counting the bills. She had enough for the planetarium, and maybe a couple of hot dogs afterward. Nita stuffed the money in her pocket and pushed the jar to the back of the dresser.
And her eye fell on the record album again. She tipped it up by one corner to look at her wizard’s manual, still open to the Oath. She pulled the book out, idly touching the open pages as she held it. In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, began the small block of type on the right-hand page, I say that I will use this art only in service of that Life ...
Dairine was in here yesterday, Nita thought, skimming down over the words of the Oath... And she was reading this. For a moment Nita was furious at the idea of her sister rummaging around in her things; but the anger didn’t last. Maybe, she thought, this isn’t so bad after all. She’s been pestering me with questions about wizardry ever since she found out there really is such a thing. She thinks it’s all excitement. But the Oath is heavy stuff. Maybe it threw a little scare into her with all the stuff about “time’s end” and doing what you have to, no matter what. Be a good thing if it did make her back off a little. She’s too young for this...
Nita shut the manual, tucked it under her arm and headed out into the living room. Dairine was standing in front of the computer, keying in instructions; the Apple logo came up on the monitor, followed by a screenful of green words too small for Nita to read from across the room. Her mother and father were still deep in the manual. “Mom,” Nita said, “Kit and I want to go into the city, to the planetarium, is it okay? Kit’s folks said he could.”
Nita’s mother glanced at her, considering. “Well ... be back before dark.”
“Stay out of Times Square,” her father said without looking up, while paging through a manual open in his lap.
“Do you have enough money for the train?” her mother said.
“Mom,” Nita said, hefting her wizard’s manual in one hand, “I don’t think we’re going to take the train.”
“Oh.” Her mother looked dubiously at the book. She had seen more than enough evidence of her daughter’s power in the past couple of months: but Nita knew better than to think that her mother was getting comfortable about wizardry, or even used to it. “You’re not going into the city to, uh, do something, are you?”
“We’re not on assignment, Mom, no. Not for a while, I think, after last time.”
“Oh. Well ... just you be careful, Neets. Wizards are a dime a dozen as far as I’m concerned, but daughters ...”
Nita’s father looked up at that. “Stay out of trouble,” he said, and meant it.
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Betty, look right here. It says very plainly, ‘Do not use disk without first-‘ “
“That’s software, Harry. They mean the diskette, not the disk drive-“
Nita hurried out through the kitchen before her folks could change their minds. Kit was evidently thinking along the same lines, since he was standing in the middle of the sandy place by the backyard gate, using the stick Ponch had brought him to draw a wizard’s transit circle on the ground. “I sent Ponch home,” he said, setting various symbols around the circumference of the circle.
“Okay.” Nita stepped in beside him. “Where you headed? The Grand Central worldgate?”
“No, there are delays there this morning. The book says to use Penn Station instead. What time have you got?”
Nita squinted up at the Sun. “Nine thirty-five.”
“Show-off. Use the watch; I need the Naval Observatory time.”
“Nine thirty-three and twenty seconds,” Nita said, scowling at her Timex, “now.”
“Not bad. Let’s haul it before-“
“What are you doing!” yelled Nita’s father, inside the house. Nita and Kit both jumped guiltily, then looked at each other. Nita sighed.
“Too late,” Kit said.
At nine thirty-three and twenty-eight seconds, the screen door opened and Dairine was propelled firmly out of it. Nita’s father put his head out after Dairine, and looked up the driveway. “Take her with you,” he said to Nita, and meant that too.
“Yes, sir,” Nita said, trying not to sound surly as the screen door slammed shut. Kit rolled his eyes and slowly began adding another set of symbols to those already inside the circle. Dairine scuffed over to them, looking at least as annoyed as Nita felt.
“Well,” Dairine said, “I guess I’m stuck with you.”
“Get in,” Kit said, sounding resigned. “Don’t step on the lines.”
“And try not to freak out too much, okay?” Nita said.
Dairine stepped over the bounds of the circle and stood there with her arms folded, glaring at Nita.
“What a great time we’re all going to have,” Kit said, opening his manual. He began to read in the wizardly Speech, fast. Nita looked away from her sister and let Kit handle it.
The air around them began to sing-the same note ears sing when they’ve been in a noisy place too long; but this singing got louder, not softer, as seconds passed. Nita had the mild satisfaction of seeing Dairine start to look nervous at that, and at the slow breeze beginning around them when everywhere else the summer air was still. The breeze got stronger, dust around them whipped and scattered in it, the sound scaled up until it blotted out almost everything else. And despite her annoyance, Nita suddenly got lost in the old familiar exhilaration of magic working. From memory-for she and Kit had worked this spell together many times-she lifted her voice in the last chorus of it, where the words came in a rush, and the game and skill of the spell lay in matching your partner’s cadence exactly. Kit dropped not a syllable as Nita came in, but flashed her a wry grin, matching her word for word for the last ten seconds; they ended together on one word that was half laugh, half shout of triumph. And on the word, the air around them cracked like thunder and struck inward from all directions, like a blow.
The wind stilled and the dust settled, and they found themselves in the last aisle of a small chain bookstore, next to a door with a hand-lettered sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY. Kit put his manual away, and he and Nita were brushing themselves off when that door popped open and a small sandy-haired man with inquiring eyes looked out at them. “Something fall down out here? No? ... You need some help?”
“Uh,” Nita and Kit said, still in unison.
“X-Men comics,” said Dairine, not missing a beat.
“Up front on the right, in the rack,” said the small man, and vanished through his door again.
“Hope they have the new annual,” Dairine said, brushing dust off her shorts and Admiral Ackbar shirt, and heading for the front of the store.
Kit and Nita glanced ruefully at each other and went after her. It looked like it was going to be a long day.
Like so many other human beings, Dairine had made her first major decision about life and the world quite early; at the age of three, in fact. She had seen Nita (then six years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time, and at the end of the day come back crying because she hadn’t known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her.
Nita’s crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine’s three-year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn’t know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones.
So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything; not surprisingly, Dairine’s senses became abnormally sharp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four ... just how, she never remembered: but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it-reading aloud to herself from a Britannica article on taxonomy, and sounding out the longer words-her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn’t understand why. It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things ... perhaps even to make them do things.
For fear of her parents being upset, and maybe stopping her, until she was six or so she kept her reading out of their sight as much as she could. The thought of being kept away from books terrified her. Most of what moved Dairine was sheer delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn’t free to explore the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything. Dairine sat home and busied herself with conquering the world.
Eventually it came time for her to go off to kindergarten. Remembering Nita, her parents were braced for the worst, but not at all for Dairine’s scowling, annoyed response when she came home. “They won’t listen to what I tell them,” Dairine said. “Yet.” And off she went to read, leaving her mother and father staring at each other.
School went on, and time, and Dairine sailed her way up through the grades. She knew (having overheard a couple of her mother’s phone conversations with the school’s psychiatrist) that her parents had refused to let her skip grades. They thought it would be better for her to be with kids of her own age. Dairine laughed to herself over this, since it made school life utterly easy for her: it also left her more free time for her own pursuits, especially reading. As soon as she was old enough to go to the little local library for herself, she read everything in it: first going straight through the kids’ library downstairs at about six books a day, then (after the concerned librarian got permission from Dairine’s parents) reading the whole adult collection, a touch more slowly. Her mom and dad thought it would be a shame to stifle such an active curiosity. Dairine considered this opinion wise, and kept reading, trying not to think of the time-not too far away-when she would exhaust the adult books. She wasn’t yet allowed to go to the big township library by herself.
But she had her dreams, too. Nita was already being allowed to go into New York City alone. In a few years, she would too. Dairine thought constantly of the New York Public Library, of eight million books that the White Lions guarded: rare manuscripts, books as old as printing, or older. It would take even Dairine a while to get through eight million books. She longed to get started.
And there were other dreams more immediate. Like everyone else she knew, Dairine had seen the Star Wars movies. Magic, great power for good and evil, she had read about in many other places. But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her with a terrible immediacy that the books had not; with a picture of power available even to untrained farmboys on distant planets in the future, and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present. And if you could learn that supreme knowledge, and master the power that filled and shaped the universe, how could the world ever hurt you? For a while Dairine’s reading suffered, and her daydreams were full of the singing blaze of lightsabers, the electric smell of blasterfire, and the shadow of ultimate evil in a black cloak, which after terrible combat she always defeated. Her sister teased her a lot less about it than Dairine expected.
Her sister... Their relationship was rather casual, not so much a relative-relationship as the kind you might have with someone who lived close enough for you to see every day. When both Dairine and Nita were little, they had played together often enough. But where learning came in, for a while there had been trouble. Sometimes Nita had shown Dairine things she was learning at school. But when Dairine learned them almost immediately, and shortly was better at them than Nita was, Nita got upset. Dairine never quite understood why. It was a victory for them both, wasn’t it, over the world, which would get you if you didn’t know things? But Nita seemed not to understand that.
Eventually things got better. As they got older, they began to grow together and to share more. Possibly Nita was understanding her better, or had simply seen how much Dairine liked to know things; for she began to tutor Dairine in the upper-grade subjects she was studying, algebra and so forth. Dairine began to like her sister. When they started having trouble with bullies, and their parents sent them both off to self-defense school, Dairine mastered that art as quickly as anything else she’d ever decided to learn; and then, when a particularly bad beating near home made it plain that Nita wasn’t using what they’d learned, she quietly put the word out that anyone who messed with Nita would have Dairine to deal with. The bullying stopped, for both of them, and Dairine felt smugly satisfied.
That is, she did until one day after school she saw a kid come at Nita to “accidentally” body-block her into the dirt of the playground she was crossing. Dairine started to move to prevent it-but as the kid threw himself at Nita, he abruptly slid sideways off the air around her as if he had run into a glass wall. No one else seemed to notice. Even the attacker looked blank as he fell sideways into the dust. But Nita smiled a little, and kept on walking ... and suddenly the world fell out from under Dairine, and everything was terribly wrong. Her sister knew something she didn’t.
Dairine blazed up in a raging fire of curiosity. She began watching Nita closely, and her best friend, Kit, too, on a hunch. Slowly Dairine began to catch Nita at things no one else seemed to notice; odd words muttered to empty air, after which lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things came loose.
There was one day when their father had been complaining about the crabgrass in the front lawn, and Dairine had seen an odd, thoughtful look cross Nita’s face. That evening her sister had sat on the lawn for a long time, talking under her breath. Dairine couldn’t hear what was said; but a week and a half later their father was standing on and admiring a crabgrass-free lawn, extolling the new brand of weedkiller he’d tried. He didn’t notice, as Dairine did, the large patch of crabgrass under the apple trees in the neighbor’s yard next door ... carpeting a barren place where the neighbor had been trying to get something green to grow, anything, for as long as Dairine could remember. It was all stuff like that ... little things, strange things, nothing Dairine could understand and use.
Then came summer vacation at the beach-and the strangeness started to come out in the open. Nita and Kit started spending a lot of time away from home, sneaking in and out as if there were something to hide. Dairine heard her mother’s uneasy conversations about this with her father, and was amused; whatever Nita was doing with Kit, Dairine knew sex wasn’t involved. Dairine covered for Nita and Kit, and bided her time, waiting until they should owe her something.
The time came soon enough. One night the two of them went swimming and didn’t come back when it got dark, as they’d agreed to. Dairine’s mom and dad went out looking for Nita and Kit on the beach, and took Dairine with them. She got separated from them, mostly on purpose, and was a quarter-mile down the beach from them when, with a rush of water and noisy breath, a forty-foot humpback whale breached right in front of her, ran itself aground-and turned into Nita.
Nita went white with shock at the sight of Dairine. Dairine didn’t care. “You’re going to tell me everything,” she said, and ran down the beach to distract her parents just long enough for Nita and Kit-also just changed back from a whale-to get back into their bathing suits. And after the noisy, angry scene with their parents that followed, after the house was quiet, Dairine went to Nita’s room, where Kit was waiting, too, and let them tell her the whole story.
Wizards’ manuals, oaths, wizardry, spells, quests, terrible dangers beyond the world, great powers that moved unseen and unsuspected beneath the surface of everyday existence, and every now and then broke surface- Dairine was ecstatic. It was all there, everything she had longed for. And if they could have it, she could have it too...
Dairine saw their faces fall, and felt the soft laughter of the world starting behind her back again. You couldn’t have this magic unless you were offered it by the Powers that controlled it. Yes, sometimes it ran in families, but there was no guarantee that it would ever pass to you...
At that point Dairine began to shut their words out. She promised to keep their secret for the time being, and to cover for them the best she could. But inside she was all one great frustrated cry of rage: Why them, why them find not me! Days later, when the cry ebbed, the frustration gave way to blunt, stubborn determination. I’ll have it. I will.
She had gone into Nita’s room, found her wizard’s manual, and opened it-The last time she’d held it it had looked like a well-worn kid’s book from the library and, when she’d borrowed it, had read like one. Now the excitement, the exultation, flared up in Dairine again; for instead of a story she found pages and pages of an Arabic-looking script she couldn’t read ... and near the front, many that she could, in English.
She skimmed them, turning pages swiftly. The pages were full of warnings and cautions, phrases about the wizard’s responsibility to help slow down the death of the universe, paragraphs about the price each wizard paid for his new power, and about the terrible Ordeal-quest that lay before every novice who took the Wizards’ Oath: sections about old strengths that moved among the worlds, not all of them friendly. But these Dairine scorned as she’d scorned Nita’s cautions. The parts that spoke of a limitless universe full of life and of wizards to guard it, of “the Billion Homeworlds,” “the hundred million species of humanity,” those parts stayed with her, filled her mind with images of strangeness and glory and adventure until she was drowning in her own thought of unnumbered stars. I can do it, she thought. I can take care of myself. I’m not afraid. I’ll matter, I’ll be something...
She flipped through the English section to its end, finding there one page, with a single block of type set small and neat.
In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life’s service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so-looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded...
It was the Oath that Nita had told her about. Not caring that she didn’t understand parts of it, Dairine drew a long breath and read it out loud, almost in triumph. And the terrible silence that drew itself down around her as she spoke, blocking out the sounds of day, didn’t frighten her; it exhilarated her. Something was going to happen, at last, at last...
She went to bed eagerly that night.
Nita and Kit and Dairine made their way among the shops of the lower level of Penn Station and caught the C train for the Upper West Side, coming up at Eighty-first and Central Park West. For a little bit they stood there just getting their bearings. It was warm, but not uncomfortable yet. The park glowed green and golden.
Dairine was fidgeting. “Now where?”
“Right here,” Nita said, turning around. The four-block stretch behind them, between 77th and 81st streets, was commanded by the huge, graceful bulk of the American Museum of Natural History, with its marble steps and beast-carved pediment, and the great bronze equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt looking eastward across at the park. Tucked into a corner of the building on 81st Street stood the art deco-looking brick cube of the Hayden Planetarium, topped with a greened-copper dome.
“It looks like a tomb,” Dairine said. “Shove that. I’m going to Natural History and look at the stuffed elephants.”
“Climb on the stuffed elephants, you mean,” Nita said. “Forget it. You’re staying with us.”
“Oh? What makes you think you can keep track of me if I decide to-“
“This,” Kit said grimly, hefting his wizard’s manual. “If we have to, we can put a tracer on you. Or a leash ...”
“Oh, yeah? Well, listen, smart guy-“
“Kit,” Nita said under her breath, “easy. Dari, are you out of your mind? This place is full of space stuff. The new Shuttle mock-up. A meteorite ten feet long.” She smiled slightly. “A store with Star Wars books ...”
Dairine stared at Nita. “Well, why didn’t you say so? Come on.” She headed down the cobblestone driveway toward the planetarium doors.
“You never catch that fly with vinegar,” Nita said quietly to Kit as the two of them followed at a safe distance.
“She’s not like my sisters,” Kit said.
“Yeah. Well, your sisters are human beings...”
They snickered together and went in after Dairine. To Nita’s mild relief- because paying for her little sister’s ticket would have killed her hot-dog money-Dairine already had admission money with her. “Dad give you that?” Nita said as she paid.
“No, this is mine,” said Dairine, wrapping the change up with the rest of a wad, and sticking it back in her shorts.
“Where’d you get all that?”
“I taught a couple guys in my class to play poker last month,” said Dairine. And off she went, heading for the souvenir store.
“Neets?” Kit said, tossing his manual in one hand.
Nita thought about it. “Naah,” she said. “Let her go. Dairine!”
“What?”
“Just don’t leave the building!”
“Okay.”
“Is that safe?” Kit said.
“What, leaving her alone? She’ll get into the Shuttle mock-up and not come out till closing time. Good thing there’s hardly anyone here. Besides, she did say she wouldn’t leave. If she were going to weasel out of it, she would’ve just grunted or something.”
The two of them paused to glance into the souvenir store, full of books and posters and T-shirts and hanging Enterprises-both shuttle and starship. Dairine was browsing through a Return of the Jedi picture book. “Whatcha gonna get, hotshot?” Kit said, teasing.
“Dunno.” She put the book down. “What I really need,” she said, looking down at a set of Apollo decals, “is a lightsaber.”
“And what would you do with it once you had it?”
“Use it on Darth Vader,” Dairine said. “Don’t you two have somewhere to be?”
Nita considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and felt sorry for Vader. “C’mon,” she said to Kit. They ambled down the hall a little way, to the Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal- thirty-four tons of nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese. Nita laid her hands and cheek against it; on a hot day in New York, this was the best thing in the city to touch, for its pleasant coolness never altered, no matter how long you were in contact with it. Kit reached out and touched it too.
“This came a long way,” he said.
“The asteroid belt,” Nita said. “Two hundred fifty million miles or so ...”
“No,” Kit said. “Farther than that.” His voice was quiet, and Nita realized that Kit was deep in the kind of wizardly “understanding” with the meteorite that she had with trees and animals and other things that lived. “Long, long dark times,” Kit said, “nothing but space, and the cold. And then slowly, light growing. Faster and faster-diving in toward the light, till it burns, and gas and water and metal boil off one after another. And before everything’s gone, out into the dark again, for a long, long time. ...”
“It was part of a comet,” Nita said.
“Until the comet’s orbit decayed. It came in too close to the Sun on one pass, and shattered, and came down-“ Kit took his hand away abruptly. “It doesn’t care for that memory,” he said.
“And now here it is ...”
“Tamed,” Kit said. “Resting. But it remembers when it was wild, and roamed in the dark, and the Sun was its only tether...”
Nita was still for a few seconds. That sense of the Earth being a small safe “house” with a huge backyard, through which powers both benign and terrible moved, was what had first made her fall in love with astronomy. To have someone share the feeling with her so completely was amazing. She met Kit’s eyes, and couldn’t think of anything to say; just nodded.
“When’s the sky show?” he said.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Let’s go.”
They spent the afternoon drifting from exhibit to exhibit, playing with the ones that wanted playing with, enjoying themselves and taking their time. To Nita’s gratification, Dairine stayed mostly out of their way. She did attach herself to them for the sky show, which may have been lucky; for Dairine got fascinated by the big Zeiss star projector, standing under the dome like a giant lens-studded dumbbell, and only threats of violence kept her out of the open booth that contained the computer-driven controls.
When the sky show was done, Dairine went off to the planetarium store to add a few more books to the several she’d already bought. Nita didn’t see her again until late in the afternoon, when she and Kit were trying out the scales that told you your weight on various planets. Nita had just gotten on the scale for Jupiter, which weighed her in at twenty-one hundred pounds.
“Putting on a little weight, there, Neets,” Dairine said behind her. “Especially up front.”
Nita almost turned around and decked her sister. Their mom had just taken Nita to buy her first bra, and her feelings about this were decidedly mixed-a kind of pride combined with embarrassment, because none of the girls she hung out with had one yet, and she had become the focus of some slight envy. It all made her uncomfortable, and Dairine, sensing this, had been running the subject into the ground for days.
She can stuff it right up! Nita thought fiercely, I am not going to let her get to me! “All muscle, Dair,” she said. “Besides, it’s where you are that counts. Check this out.” She sidestepped to the Mars scale, the needle of which stopped at seven pounds. “Less than the Moon, even.”
“But it’s bigger than the Moon,” Dairine said.
“But not as dense. That’s why its atmosphere’s so thin even though Mars is that big; its mass is too small to hold it-“ Nita heard footsteps, turned around, and saw that she had lost her audience. “Dairine? Where you headed?”
“Bathroom.” Dairine’s voice came from halfway down the stairs to the lower level.
“Well, hurry up, it’s almost closing time.”
Kit, on the Saturn scale, moved over to the Jupiter. “What was that all about?” he said. “I don’t often hear you think these days, but if your dad had heard your mind right after she said that, he would’ve washed your head out with soap.”
“Oh, crap.” She tried the scale for Mercury: three and a half pounds. “I’m growing.”
“You don’t look any taller.”
“Kit!”
“Oh.” He looked at her chest. “Oh. I guess.” He shrugged. “I didn’t notice.”
Oh, thank heaven, Nita thought, and immediately after that, He didn’t notice? She swallowed and said, “Anyway, she’s been riding me. I’m gonna kill her if she keeps it up.”
“Maybe she’s jealous.”
Nita laughed. “Her? Of me?”
“Sure.” Kit got off the scales and began to pace off the space between the scales and the doors to the planetarium proper. “Neets, wake up. You’re a wizard. Here Dairine’s been hot for magic since she was a little kid-any kind, Star Wars, you name it-and all of a sudden, not only does it turn out that there really is such a thing, but you turn up with it. From what you had to tell her to keep her quiet after she found out, Dari knows that you and I do big stuff. She wishes she could get her hands on the power. And there’s no guarantee she ever will.”
“She was into my manual over the last couple of days, I think...”
“So there you are. If she can’t have the magic, she’s gonna twist you around whatever other way she can. I hate to say this, Neets, but she’s a real brat.”
That agreed too well with thoughts Nita had been having, but had rejected. “Well...”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a woman’s voice from the ceiling speakers down the hall, “the planetarium is now closing. Thank you.”
Nita sighed. Kit punched her lightly in the arm. “Come on,” he said “don’t let her get you down. Let’s go over to the park and get hot dogs. She starts getting on our nerves, we’ll tell her we’ll turn her into a fire hydrant and call in every dog in Manhattan to try her out.”
“Too late,” Nita said. “She already knows we don’t do that kind of thing.”
“She knows you don’t do that kind of thing,” Kit said. “She doesn’t know that I don’t...”
Nita looked at his grim expression and wondered briefly whether the grimness was all faked. “I am starved.”
“So c’mon.”
They headed down the stairs together and came out on the ground floor, by the front doors. In the stairwell, under an arrow pointing toward the basement level, was a sign they had seen earlier that day, and laughed at:
TO MARS, VENUS, AND LADIES’ ROOM
“Wait for me,” Nita said. “She’s probably trying to break into that Venus exhibit to see where the ‘lava’ comes from.”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Being a fire hydrant may be too good for her.”
Nita went down the stairs. “Dari?” she called, annoyed. “Come on before they lock us in.”
It was considerably cooler down here. Nita turned right at the bottom of the stairs and walked quickly through the Venus exhibit, rubbing her upper arms at the chill, which went right through her thin T-shirt. Someone had turned off the sluggishly erupting Venerian volcano behind its murky glass wall; no one was to be seen anywhere else, all the way down to the temporary plasterboard wall with the sign that said MARS CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.
“Don’t tell me she’s still in the toilet,” Nita muttered, annoyed. Reading, probably. One of these days she’s gonna fall in. She went back the way she had come, past the stairs, to the ladies’ room. It was not only cold down here, there was a draft. She grabbed the handle of the door and pulled; it resisted her slightly, and there was a faint hoo noise, air sliding through the door crack as she tugged. “Dari? Come on, we’re leaving!” Nita pulled harder, the door came open-
Air blew hard past her and ruffled her hair into her eyes. Bitter cold smote the front of her, and in it the humidity in the air condensed out instantly, whipping past Nita through the sucking air as stinging, dust-fine snow.
Nita was looking through the doorway into a low rust-red wasteland: nothing but stones in all sizes, cracked, tumbled, piled, with dun dust blowing between them. Close, much too close to be normal, lay a horizon hazed in blood-brown, shading up through translucent brick color, rose, violet, a hard dark blue, and above everything, black with stars showing. Low in the crystalline rose burned a small pinkish sun, fierce, distant-looking, and cold. Nita flinched from the unsoftened sight of it, from the long, harsh shadows it laid out behind every smallest stone. She slammed the ladies’ room door shut. Air kept moaning past her, through the cracks, out into the dry red wasteland. “Mars,” she breathed, and terror grabbed her heart and squeezed. “She went to Mars... ”
That morning Dairine had awakened with the Oath’s words ringing in her ears to find herself not in a galaxy far far away, but in her own bed. She had lain there for a long few minutes in bitter annoyance before she heard the wheels of the truck in the driveway. It was the computer, of course: and to this lesser excitement she had gratefully surrendered herself.
Dairine was good with computers. It was just one more kind of knowledge, good for using to keep people and the World off your back; and computers were really surprisingly easy to work with once you got it through your head that they were utterly stupid things, unable to do anything you didn’t tell them how to do, in language they understood. In her few months’ work with the Apples at school, Dairine had become an accomplished hacker.
She utterly disdained the “phreaking,” the breaking and entering of electronic bulletin boards and systems that interested a few of her malicious classmates. It could get you thrown in jail. What fascinated Dairine was advanced programming, the true hacking-getting a computer to sing, or talk, or play involved and clever games, or make you a sandwich. All these things were possible, with the right peripherals and a smart programmer. That she was; and the computer-tireless listener, absolutely obedient to orders, and endlessly forgiving of mistakes-was the perfect companion. They worked well together. Even her teachers had noticed that the machines “behaved” better around Dairine than around anyone else. She never noticed this herself, having taken it for granted.
So while her mother and father sat arguing over the manuals, of course Dairine took matters into her own hands. The Apple IIIc+ was easy to set up: a plug and cable for the screen, the printer cable attached to the printer port and the computer’s interface; the power cord to the wall. Dairine slipped a system disk into the drive, shut the drive door, and turned the computer on, “booted it up”-ready to look for the “Copy” utility in the disk’s directory. The first thing you always did with a brand-new system disk full of programs was copy it; working on the original disk could cost you a lot of money to replace if you hurt or wiped it accidentally.
The Apple logo came up on the screen, and below it the A> prompt that said the computer’s basic operating system, called DOS, was ready to accept commands to its “A” or onboard disk drive and the disk inside it. Dairine was about to start typing when something about the logo caught her eye. It was the famous striped Apple, all right: but it had no bite out of it.
She stared for a second. Pirated software? she thought, but that was ridiculous. Her dad had bought the computer and its system software from an approved dealer, and the various warranties, manuals and end-user agreements were all over the floor. Huh. Maybe they changed the logo. Oh, well. Let’s see the directory...
DIR A: , she typed on the keyboard, and hit the carriage return.
PASSWORD? said the screen, and sat there apparently waiting for a response, for the A> prompt hadn’t come back.
That was no response she’d ever seen on the machines at school, DIR A: , she typed, again, and the carriage return.
PASSWORD?
“Huh,” she said to herself, as possibilities flickered through her head. Did Dad have the software encrypted somehow so that Nita and I can’t get into it? But why? He wants us to use it. She let out a breath. Maybe it just wants an ID code for the user-there’re some programs that do that. She squinted at the screen a moment, then smiled and typed in a private joke: the code name that a certain untrained farmboy used in his fighter run on the Death Star, a name that suited Dairine since she had inherited her mother’s red hair. RED FIVE, she typed, and hit the carriage return.
PASSWORD RED FIVE ACCEPTED. A>
Weird, Dairine thought, and typed again.
DIR A:
The disk drive whirred. The screen wiped itself and displayed a list: mostly Program command files, or data files holding information for the programs, to judge by their suffixes.
ASSIST.COM CHANGE. COM
COPY. COM
COPY. DAT
GO.COM
GO. DAT
HIDE.COM
MANUAL.COM
MANUAL.DAT08K 2310K 1032K 4404K 5048K 3580K 1244K 3248K62K
MBASIC.COM
MENU.COM
SEEK.COM
SUPPORT.COM
SUPPORT.DAT
A>2K 256K 6608K 5120K 3218K
Dairine gazed at the screen, perplexed. A K was a kilobyte, a thousand little pieces or bytes of information; and the disk drive itself was supposed to hold only 800 K. How could the disk possibly have all these files on it, and such big ones?
Maybe this is a bad disk, Dairine thought. It happened sometimes, that a disk was damaged on its way from the factory. Or maybe something was wrong with the directory. Well, let’s see if something’ll run. Beside the A> prompt she typed “COPY” and hit the carriage return.
The disk drive whirred. The screen wiped itself again, then said:
IIIC COPY UTILITY 5430K FREE RADIUS?
Dairine stared again. Radius meant nothing to her. She hit the carriage return, hoping the computer would (as some programs did) supply its own data as a result.
DEFAULT RADIUS, the screen said. It was all right, then; the program had been instructed to supply a value of its own if the user didn’t specify one. Dairine let out a breath, and resolved to have a look at this thing’s manual. Maybe the company had made changes in the software.
COPY UTILITY READY, said the screen. PRESS <CR> TO BEGIN.
Dairine hit the carriage return. The disk drive whirred.
There were two computers on the desk.
She gaped. Hesitantly she put out a hand to the second computer, which was sitting next to the first, and sticking over the edge of the desk a little. It was solid, and its screen matched that of the original computer exactly. They both said:
COPY SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED. DESCRIPTION FILE “APPLIIIC.DSC” CREATED HARD COPY “APPLIIIC.CPY” CREATED A>
Oh, Lord! Dairine thought. She didn’t dare turn around or make any outward sign: behind her, her mother and father were arguing peaceably over the contents of the Apple manuals. Desperately, Dairine brought up the directory again, stared at it, and then, for lack of any better idea, typed:
HIDE
The disk drives whirred again. Dairine thought she had never heard such a loud noise in her life, but her parents still didn’t notice anything. The screen cleared itself, then said:
IIIC HIDE UTILITY
Choose one:
(1) Hide from COPY utility
(2) Hide from CHANGE utility
(3) Hide from MBASIC
(4) Exit to system
Dairine typed “1.” The screen cleared again.
HIDE FROM “COPY” UTILITY
Last copy description file in memory: “APPLIIIC.DSK”
Last hard copy created: “APPLIIIC.CPY”
Name of hard copy to hide?
Dairine hurriedly typed “APPLIH.CPY.” The screen said:
HIDE OPTIONS:
(a) Hide in realspace (invisibility option)
(b) Hide in realspace (size reduction)
(c) Hide in otherspace (retrievable pocket)
(d) Discard in otherspace (nonretrievable pocket)
(e) Timed storage (coordinate-specific claudication)
(f) Exit to main menu
Dairine typed “c.”
PASSWORD FOR RETRIEVAL?
Dairine swallowed: behind her, her father was muttering about getting some coffee. “RED FIVE,” she typed.
CHOOSE INPUT OPTION: VERBAL OR KEYBOARD?
“VERBAL,” she typed, very fast. The drives whirred.
HIDING HARD COPY OF FILE “APPLIIIC.CPY.”
As silently as it had come, the second computer vanished.
A>
Dairine’s father turned around and saw her at the computer. “What are you doing!”
“Uh,” Dairine said. She couldn’t remember when she had last been at a loss for words. Her father, though, wasn’t even slightly concerned with this. Several seconds later Dairine found herself going to New York with Nita and Kit.
At the moment, even the thought of the New York Public Library seemed a bit tame.
It took her hours to get free of Nita and Kit. All the while her mind was raging, turning over and over the thought of what power she had been offered when she took the Oath, and when she finally got down to the ladies’ room and sat down in one of the stalls, her heart was hammering with excitement and sweat stood out on her.
“Red five,” she whispered, and held her breath.
There was a computer in her lap.
She flipped up the little liquid-crystal screen and was shocked to find the A> prompt staring at her: shocked partly because she hadn’t booted the computer up, and partly because it couldn’t be running-there were no batteries in it yet-or were there? But Dairine wasn’t one to argue the point. She typed hurriedly, using the HIDE.COM program to put the books she’d bought in a “pocket” and get them out of her way. Then she brought up the directory again. ASSIST.COM, said the first entry. Maybe that was a “help menu,” a series of screens that would explain how to get the most out of the computer. She typed “ASSIST” and the carriage return.
The screen cleared, then said at the top:
ACTIVE OR PASSIVE MODE?
Dairine was out of her depth again. “ACTIVE,” she typed, on a guess, and entered it. The screen cleared again.
UTILITY OPTIONS:
(1) General Data & Logistics-MANUAL, MENU
(2) Travel-GO.COM
(3) Intervention-CHANGE (see also MANUAL)
(3a) Duplication-COPY
(3b) Preservation-HIDE, SEEK
(4) Outside assistance-(routine) SUPPORT
(4a) (emergency) ASSIST
(5) Other programming-MBASIC
(6) Exit to system
Dairine chewed her lip and thought. Just to see what would happen, she hit “2” and the carriage return. The screen cleared.
TRAVEL UTILITY
Input? (1) keyboard, (2) verbal
“2,” Dairine typed.
“Inside solar system or outside solar system?” the computer said very quietly, but so suddenly that Dairine almost dropped it.
“Inside,” she said, and swallowed.
“Planet?”
She gazed at the ladies’ room door, thinking of the dioramas outside with a sudden terrible desire. “Mars,” Dairine said.
The disk drive chirred briefly. “Coordinates?”
Dairine knew that aerographers used some kind of latitude-longitude system for Mars, but she knew nothing else about it. “Default,” she said, on a hunch.
“Default coordinates confirmed,” said the computer, “last recorded transit. Atmosphere?”
Last recorded- “Uh, atmosphere? Yes,” she said.
“Parameters?”
“Umm... Fifteen percent oxygen, eighty percent nitrogen, five percent carbon dioxide.”
“Mix proportions approximate Terran sea-level parameters. Default to those?”
“Mmm ... Yes.”
“Estimated time in transit?”
She thought. “One hour.”
“Data complete,” said the computer. “Ready to transit. Transit command ‘run.’ “
“Run,” Dairine said.
And everything slewed sideways and upside down. Or no, the world stayed the same-but Dairine’s frame of reference suddenly became huger than the whole Earth and the space that contained it, so that her planet seemed only one moving, whirling point plunging along its path through a terrible complexity of forces, among which gravity was a puny local thing and not to be regarded. Up was some other way now; down had nothing to do with the floor. Her stomach rebelled.
And her eyes were seeing things they had never been made to see. Lines and sparks and traces of white fire seemed to tear through her head from her eyes to the back of her skull; they pinned her to the rolling Earth like a feebly fluttering moth to a card. A terrible silence with a deadly sea-roar at the bottom of it, more terrible than the stillness of her Oathtaking, flattened her down with its sheer cold ancientness, a vast weight of years without sound or light or life. Cosmic rays, she thought desperately, clutching at reason: faster-than-light particles, maybe that’s what the light is. But the dark-it’s death, death itself, I’m going to die- and the wizardry let her go. Dairine got shakily to her feet. The first crunch of stones and gravel under her sneakers, instead of tile floor, went through her in a rush of adrenaline as fierce as fire. Her vision cleared. Red wasteland stretched away under a cold rose sun, a violet sky arched over her; the wind sang chill. She turned slowly, looking around. High up in the cold violet day, something small and bright fled across the sky, changing phase as it did so.
“Deimos,” Dairine whispered. Or maybe it was Phobos, the other of Mars’s two little moons. Whichever it was, it went through half its month in a few minutes, sliding down toward the horizon and down behind something that stood up from it. It was a mountain peak, upraised as if on a pedestal, and so tall that though it came up from far behind the foreshortened horizon, its broad flat base spanned half that horizon easily. “What is that?” she said.
“Syntax error 24,” said the Apple dispassionately. “Rephrase for precision.”
“That mountain. What is it? Identify.”
“Earth/IAU nomenclature ‘Olympus Mons.’ “
Dairine took in a sharp breath. It was an ancient volcano, long extinct, and the highest mountain in the Solar System. “How do I get up there?”
“Reference short-transit utilities.”
She did. Five minutes later she stood in a place where the wind no longer sang, for it was too thin to do so; where carbon dioxide lay frozen on the rust- red stones, and the fringes of her protective shell of air shed a constant snow of dry ice and water vapor as she moved; a place from which she could see the curvature of the world. Dairine stood twelve miles high atop Olympus Mons, on the ridge of its great crater, into which Central Park could have been dropped entire, and looked out over the curve of the red world at what no nonwizardly child of Earth had seen with her or his own eyes before: the asteroid belt rising like a chain of scattered stars, and beyond them, the tiniest possible disk, remote but clear.
“Jupiter,” she whispered, and turned around to look for Earth. From here it would look like a morning or evening star, just a shade less bright than Venus. But in mid-movement she was distracted. There was something down in the mile-deep crater, a little light that shone.
“What’s that?” she said, holding up the Apple.
“Syntax error 24-“
“Yeah, yeah, right. That light! Identify.”
“A marker beacon. Provenance uncertain at this range.”
“Get us down there!”
With Dairine’s help, it did. Shortly she was staring at a pole with a light on it, streamlined and modern-looking, made of some dark blue metal she couldn’t identify. Set in the ground beside the pole was a plate of dull red metal with strange markings on it. “What’s it say?”
“Error trap 18. Sense of query: semantic value?”
“Right.”
“First (untranslatable) climbing expedition. Ascent of (untranslatable proper name): from (date uncertain) to (date uncertain). We were here. Signed, (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name).”
“People,” Dairine whispered.
“Affirmative.”
She looked up at the stars in the hard violet sky. “I want to go where they came from!”
“Reference transit utility.”
She did, and spent some minutes tapping busily at the keys. In the middle of it, selecting coordinates, delightedly reading through planet names-she stopped and bit her lip. “This is going to take longer than an hour,” she said to herself. Come to think of it, she might want to be away for quite some time. And seeing all the problems Nita had started having with their folks when she told them she was a wizard, it wouldn’t do for Dairine to let them know that she was one too. Not just yet.
She thought about this, then got out of the “travel” utility and brought up the directory again-taking more time with it, examining the program menus with great care. In particular she spent a great deal of time with the “Copy” and “Hide” utilities, getting to know their ins and outs, and doing on finicky piece of copying as a test. The test worked: she sent the copy home
“That should do it,” she said, got back into the “Travel” utility, and with the program’s prompting started to lay in coordinates. “Darth Vader,” muttered under her breath, “look out. Here I come.”
Shortly thereafter there was nothing on Olympus Mons but rocks, and dry ice snow, and far down in the crater, the single blinking light.
“We’re dead,” Nita mourned, sitting on the planetarium steps with her head in her hands. “Dead. My mother will kill me.”
Kit, sitting beside her, looked more bemused than upset. “Do you know how much power it takes to open a gateway like that and leave it open? Usually it’s all we can do to keep one open long enough to jump through it.”
“Big deal! Grand Central gate and the World Trade Center portals are open all the time.” Nita groaned again. “Mars!”
“Each of those gates took a hundred or so wizards working together to open, though.” Kit leaned back on the steps. “She may be a brat, but boy, has she got firepower!”
“The youngest wizards always do,” Nita said, sitting up again and picking up Kit’s manual from beside her. “Lord, what a horrible thought.”
“What? The gate she made? We can close it, but-“
“No. This. Look.” She held out his manual. It was turned to one of the directory pages. The page said:
CALLAHAN, Juanita T. 243 E. Clinton Avenue, Hempstead, NY 11575 (516) 555-6786
Journeyman rating (RL +4.5 +/- .15) Available/limited (summer vacation)
That was Nita’s usual directory listing, and normal enough. But above it, between her and CAHANE, Jak, whose listing was usually right above hers, there was something new.
Novice rating
(RL +9.8 +/- .2) on Ordeal: no calls
CALLAHAN, Dairine E. 24? E. Clinton Avenue, Hempstead, NY 11575 (516) 555-6786
“Oh, no,” Kit said. “And look at that rating level.”
Nita dropped the book beside her. “I don’t get it. She didn’t find a manual, how could she have-“
“She was in yours,” Kit said.
“Yeah, but the most she could have done was take the Oath! She’s smart but not smart enough to pull off a forty-million-mile transit without having the reference diagrams and the words for the spell in front of her! And the manuals can’t be stolen; you know that. They just vanish if someone tries.” Nita put her head down in her hands again. “My folks are gonna pitch a fit! We’ve got to find her!”
Kit breathed out, then stood up. “Come on,” he said. “We’d better start doing things fast or we’ll lose her. There’s a phone over there. Call home and tell them we’re running a little behind schedule. The planetarium’s all locked up by now: so no one’ll be around to notice if I walk through a couple of walls and close that gate down.”
“But what if she tries to come back and finds it closed behind her?”
“Somehow I can’t see that slowing her down much,” Kit said. “And besides, maybe she’s supposed to find it closed. She is on Ordeal.”
Nita stood up too. “And we’d better call Tom and Carl. They’ll want the details.”
“Right. Go ahead; I’ll take care of the gate.”
Kit turned around, looked at the bricks of the planetarium’s outer wall. He stepped around the corner of the doorway wall, out of sight of the street, and laid one hand on the bricks, muttering under his breath. His hand sank into the wall as if into water. “There we go,” he said, and the bricks rippled as he stepped through them and vanished.
Nita headed for the phone, feeling through her pockets for change. The thought of her sister running around the universe on Ordeal made her hair stand up on end. No one became a wizard without there being some one problem that their acquisition of power would solve. Nita understood from her studies that normally a wizard was allowed to get as old as possible before being offered the Oath: the Powers, her manual said, wanted every wizard who could to acquire the security and experience that a normal childhood provides. But sometimes, when problems of an unusual nature came up, the Powers would offer the Oath early-because the younger children, not knowing (or caring) what was impossible, had more wizardry available to them.
That kind of problem was likely to be a killer. Nita’s Ordeal and Kit’s had thrown them out of their universe into another one, a place implacably hostile to human beings, and run by the Power that, according to the manual, had invented death before time began-and therefore had been cast out of the other Powers’ society. Every world had stories of that Lone Power, under many names. Nita didn’t need the stories; she had met It face-to-face now, and both times only luck-or the intervention of others-had saved her life. And Nita had been offered her wizardry relatively early, at thirteen: Kit even earlier, at twelve. The thought of what problem the Powers must need solved if They were willing to offer the Oath to someone years younger-and the thought of her little sister in the middle of it-
Nita found some quarters, went to a phone and punched in her number. What was she going to tell her mother? She couldn’t lie to her: that decision, made at the beginning of the summer, had caused her to tell her folks that she was a wizard, and had produced one of the great family arguments of her life. Her mother and father still weren’t pleased that their daughter might run off anywhere at a moment’s notice, to places where they couldn’t keep an eye on her and protect her. Nor did it matter that those places tended to be the sort where anyone but an experienced wizard would quickly get killed. That made it even worse...
At the other end, the phone rang. Nita’s throat seized up. She began clearing it frantically.
Someone answered. “Hello?”
It was Dairine.
Nita’s throat unseized itself. “Are you all right? Where are you?” she blurted, and then began swearing inwardly at her own stupidity.
“I’m fine,” Dairine said. “And I’m right here.”
“How did you get back? Never mind that, how did you get out? And you left the gate open! Do you know what could have happened if some poor janitor went in that door without looking? It’s sixty below this time of year on Mars-“
“Nita,” Dairine said, “you’re babbling. Just go home. I’ll see you later.” And she hung up.
“Why that rotten little-“ Nita said, and hung up the phone so hard that people on the street corner turned to look at her. Embarrassed and more annoyed than ever, she turned and headed back to where Kit was sitting. “Babbling,” she muttered. “That rotten, thoughtless, I’m gonna-“
She shut her mouth. Babbling? That didn’t sound like Dairine. It was too simple an insult. And why “just go home” instead of “just come home”? There’s something wrong-
She stopped in front of Kit, who looked up at her from his seat on the step and made no move to get up. He was sweating and slightly pale. “That gate was fastened to Mars real tight,” he said. “I thought half of Mariner Plain was going to come with it when I uprooted the forcefields. What’s the matter with you? You look awful.”
“Something’s wrong,” Nita said. “Dairine’s home.”
“What’s awful about that? Good riddance.” Then he looked at her sharply. “Wait a minute. Home? When she’s on Ordeal?”
That hadn’t even occurred to Nita. “She sounded weird,” Nita said. “Kit, it didn’t sound like her.”
“We were at home for our Ordeal-at least, at the beginning ...” She shook her head. “Something’s wrong. Kit, let’s go see Tom and Carl.” He stood up, wobbling a little. “Sounds good. Grand Central?”
“Rockefeller Center gate’s closer.”
“Let’s go.”
A Senior wizard usually reaches that position through the most strenuous kind of training and field experience. All wizards, as they lose the power of their childhood and adolescence, tend to specialize in one field of wizardry or another; but the kind of wizard who’s Senior material refuses to specialize too far. They are the Renaissance people of sorcery, every one of them tried repeatedly against the Lone Power, in both open combat and the subtler strife of one Power-influenced human mind against another. Seniors are almost never the white-bearded wizards of archetype ... mostly because of their constant combats with the Lone One, which tend to kill them young. They advise other wizards on assignment, do research for them, lend them assistance in the losing battle to slow down the heat-death of the universe.
Few worlds have more than thirty or forty Seniors. At this point in Kit’s and Nita’s practice, Earth had twenty-four: six scattered through Asia, one in Australia and one (for the whales) in the Atlantic Ocean; three in Europe, four in Africa, and nine in the Americas-five in Central and South America (one of whom handled the Antarctic) and four in the north. Of these, one lived in Santa Cruz, one lived in Oklahoma City, and the other two lived together several miles away, in Nassau County.
Their house in Nita’s town was very like their neighbors’ houses … perhaps a little bigger, but that wasn’t odd, since Carl worked as chief of sales for the big CBS flagship TV station in New York, and Tom was a moderately well-known freelance writer of stories and movie scripts. They looked like perfectly average people-two tall, good-looking men, one with a mustache, one without; Carl a native New Yorker, Tom an unrepentant Californian. They had all the things their neighbors had-mortgages and phone bills and pets and occasional fights: they mowed the lawn and went to work like everybody else (at least Carl did: Tom worked at home). But their lawn had as few weeds as Nita’s did these days, their pets understood and sometimes spoke English and numerous other languages, their phone didn’t always have a human being on the other end when it rang, and as for their fights, the reasons for some of them would have made their neighbors’ mouths drop open.
Their backyard, being surrounded by a high hedge and a wall all hung with plants, was a safe place to appear out of nothing: though as usual there was nothing to be done about the small thundercrack of air suddenly displaced by two human bodies. When Nita’s and Kit’s ears stopped ringing, the first thing they heard was someone shouting, “All right, whatcha drop this time?” and an answering shout of “It wasn’t me, are the dogs into something?” But they weren’t: the two sheepdogs, Annie and Monty, came bounding out from around the corner of the house and leapt delightedly onto Kit and Nita, slurping any part of them not covered with clothes. A little behind them came Dudley the terrier, who contented himself with bouncing around them as if he were spring-loaded and barking at the top of his little lungs.
“Had dinner yet?” Carl called from the kitchen door, which, like the dining room doors, looked out on the backyard. “Annie! Monty! Down!”
“Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!” screamed another voice from the same direction: not surprising, since its source was sitting on Carl’s shoulder. This was Machu Picchu the macaw, also known (to her annoyance) as “Peach”: a splendid creature all scarlet and blue, with a three-foot tail, a foul temper, and a precognitive talent that could read the future for months ahead-if Peach felt like it. Wizards’ pets tend to become strange with time, and Seniors’ pets even stranger than usual; and Peach had been with them longer than any of the others. It showed.
“Come on in,” called one last voice: Tom. Kit and Nita pushed Annie and Monty more or less back down to dog level, and made their way into the house through the dining room doors. It was a pleasant, open place, all the rooms running freely into one another, and full of handsome functional furniture: Tom’s desk and computer sat in a comfortable corner of the living room. Kit pulled a chair away from the dining table and plopped down in it, still winded from his earlier wizardry. Nita sat down next to him. Carl leaned over the table and pushed a pair of bottles of Coke at them, sitting down and cracking a third one himself. Tom, with a glass of iced coffee, sat down too.
“Hot one today,” Carl said at last, putting his Coke down. Picchu sidled down his arm from his shoulder and began to gnaw thoughtfully on the neck of the bottle.
“No kidding,” Kit said.
“You look awful,” said Tom. “What’ve you two been up to?”
For answer Nita opened Kit’s manual to the directory and pushed it over to Tom and Carl’s side of the table. Tom read it, whistled softly, and nudged the manual toward Carl. “I saw this coming,” he said, “but not this soon. Your mom and dad aren’t going to be happy. Where did she go?”
“Mars,” Kit said.
“Home,” Nita said.
“Better start at the beginning,” said Carl.
When they came to the part about the worldgate, Carl got up to go for his supervisory manual, and Tom looked at Kit with concern. “Better get him an aspirin too,” Tom called after Carl.
“I’m allergic to aspirin.”
“A Tylenol, then. You’re going to need it. How did you manage to disalign a patent gateway all by yourself? ... But wait a minute.” Tom peered at Kit. “Are you taller than you were?”
“Two inches.”
“That would explain it, then. It’s a hormonal surge.” Tom cleared his throat and looked at Nita. “You, too, huh?”
“Hormones? Yes. Unfortunately.”
Tom raised his eyebrows. “Well. Your wizardry will be a little more accessible to you for a while than it has since you got started. Just be careful not to overextend yourself ... it’s easy to overreach your strength just now.”
Carl came back with his supervisory manual, a volume thick as a phone book, and started paging through it. Annie nosed Kit from one side: he looked down in surprise and took the bottle of Tylenol she was carrying in her mouth. “Hey, thanks.”
“Lord,” Carl said. “She did a tertiary gating, all by herself. Your body becomes part of the gateway forcefields,” he said, looking up at Nita and Kit. “It’s one of the fastest and most effective kinds of gating, but it takes a lot of power.”
“I still don’t get it,” Nita said. “She doesn’t have a manual!”
“Are you sure?” Carl said; and “Have you gotten a computer recently?” said Tom.
“Just this morning.”
Tom and Carl looked at each other. “I thought only Advisory levels and above were supposed to get the software version of the manual just yet,” Carl said.
“Maybe, but she couldn’t have stolen one of those any more than she could have stolen one of the regular manuals. You’re offered it ... or you never see it.”
Nita was puzzled. “ ‘Software version’?”
Tom gave her a wry look. “We’ve been beta-testing it,” he said. “Sorry, testing the ‘beta’ version of the software, the one that’ll be released after we’re sure there are no bugs in it. You know the way you normally do spell: You draw your power diagrams and so forth as guides for the way you want the spell to work, but the actual instructions to the universe are spoken aloud in the Speech?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And it takes a fair amount of practice to learn to do the vector diagrams and so forth without errors, and a lot of time, sometimes, to learn to speak the Speech properly. More time yet to learn to think in it. Well ...” Ton sat down again and began turning his empty glass around and around on the table. “Now that technology has proceeded far enough on this planet for computers to be fairly widespread, the Powers have been working with the Senior wizards to develop computer-supported wizards’ manuals. The software draws the necessary diagrams internally, the way a calculator does addition, for example; you get the solution without seeing how it’s worked out. The computer also synthesizes the Speech, though of course there are tutorials in the language as you go along.”
“The project has both useful and dangerous sides,” Carl said. “For one thing, there are good reasons why we use the Speech in spelling. It contains words that can accurately describe things and conditions that no Earthly language has words for. And if during a spell you give the computer instructions that’re ambiguous in English, and it describes something inaccurately ... well.” He looked grim. “But for the experienced wizard, who already knows the theory he’s working with, and is expert in the Speech, it can be a real timesaver.”
“A lifesaver, too, under special circumstances,” Tom said, looking somber. “You two know how many children go missing in this country every year.”
“Thousands.”
“It’s not all kidnappings and runaways,” Tom said. “Some of those kids are out on their Ordeal ... and because they don’t have time to become good with the Speech, they get in trouble with the Lone Power that they can’t get out of. And they never come back.” He moved uneasily in the chair. “Providing them with the wizard’s software may save some of their lives. Meantime ...”
Carl turned over a page or two in his manual, shaking his head. “Meantime, I want a look at Dairine’s software; I need to see which version of it she got. And I want a word with her. If she lights out into the middle of nowhere on Ordeal without meaning the Oath she took, she’s going to be in trouble up to her neck... Anyway, your folks should know about all this. Easier if we tell them, I think. How ‘bout it, partner?” He looked over at Tom.
“I was about to suggest it myself.”
Nita sagged with relief.
“Good. Your folks busy this afternoon, Neets?”
“Just with the computer.”
“Perfect.” Carl put out his hand, and from the nearby kitchen wall the phone leapt into his hand. Or tried to: the phone cord brought it up short, and there it hung in the air, straining toward Carl like a dog at the end of a leash. “I thought you were going to put a longer cord on this thing,” Carl said to Tom, pushing his chair back enough to get the phone up to his face, and hitting the autodialer in the handpiece. “This is ridiculous.”
“The phone store was out of them again.”
“Try that big hardware store down in Freeport, what’s its name- Hi Harry. Carl Romeo... Nothing much, I just heard from Nita that you I got the new computer... Yeah, they stopped in on the way home. . Yeah. What did you decide on? ... Oh, that’s a sweet little machine. A lot of nice software for that.” Carl listened for a few seconds to the soft squeaking of the phone, while Picchu left off chewing on Carl’s Coke bottle and began nibbling delicately on the phone cord.
Carl smacked her gently away, and his eyebrows went up as he listened. “Okay. Fine... Fine. See you in a bit. Bye now.”
He hung up. “That was your mom in the background,” he said to Nita, “insisting on feeding us again. I think she’s decided the best thing to do with adult wizards is tame them with kindness and gourmet cuisine.”
“Magic still makes her nervous,” Nita said.
“Or we still make her nervous,” Tom said, getting up to shut the doors.
“Well, yeah. Neither of them can quite get used to it, that you were their neighbors for all these years and they never suspected you were wizards...”
“Being out in the open,” Tom said, “causes even more problems than ‘passing’ ... as you’ll have noticed. But the truth works best. The front door locked?” he said to Carl.
“Yup,” said Carl. He looked down at his side in surprise: from the table, Picchu was calmly climbing beak over claw up the side of his polo shirt. “Bird-“
“I’m going,” said Picchu, achieving Carl’s shoulder with a look of calm satisfaction, and staring Carl right in the eye. “I’m needed.”
Carl shrugged. It was difficult and time-consuming to start fights with a creature who could rip your ear off faster than you could remove her. “You do anything nasty on their rug,” he said, “and it’s macaw croquettes for lunch tomorrow, capeesh?”
Picchu, preening a wing feather back into place, declined to answer.
“Then let’s motor,” Tom said. They headed for the garage.
“Lord,” Tom said, “who writes these manuals, anyway? This is better than most, but it still might as well be in Sanskrit. Harry, where’s that cable?” Nita watched with barely suppressed amusement as Tom and her father dug among the manuals all over the floor, and Tom went headfirst under the desk. “Computer seems to be running, anyway,” Carl said.
“Had to drag Dairine away from it before she blew it up,” said Mr. Callahan, peering under the desk to see what Tom was doing.
“Where is she, Daddy?” said Nita.
“In her room. You two must really have run her down for her to come home so early.”
“Which train did she take?” Kit said.
“She didn’t say. She looked a little tired when she got in ... said she was going to go read or something. Tom, is that plug really supposed to go in there? It looks too big.”
“They always do. See, this little bit inside the casing is all that actually goes in. Mmmf ...”
Carl, standing beside Nita, reached around the back of the Apple and hit the reset button. The A> prompt that had been there vanished: the Apple logo came up again. It had no bite out of it.
Nita stared. “Uh huh,” Carl said, and hit the CONTROL key and the letter C to boot up the system. The A> prompt came back. Then Carl typed a string of numbers and figures, too quickly for them to register for Nita as anything but a green blur. They disappeared, and a message appeared in the graceful Arabic-looking letters of the wizardly Speech.
USER LOG?
“Yes, please,” Carl said. “Authorization seven niner three seven one comma five one eight.”
“Password?”
Carl leaned near the console and whispered something.
“Confirmed,” said the computer politely, and began spilling its guts in screenful after screenful of green. “Pause,” Carl said at one point. “Harry, I think you’d better have a look at this.”
“What, did we plug it in wrong-“
“No, not that.” Nita’s father got up, brushing himself off, and looked at the screen. Then he froze. He had seen the Speech in Nita’s manual once or twice, and knew the look of it.
“Carl,” Nita’s father said, beginning to look stern, “what is this?”
Carl looked as if he would rather not say anything. “Harry,” he said, “it wouldn’t be fair to make Nita tell you this. But you seem to have another wizard in the family.”
“What!”
“Yes,” Carl said, “that was my reaction too. Translation,” he said to the computer.
“Translation of protected material requires double authorization by ranking Seniors and justification filed with Chief Senior for planet or plane,” said the computer, sounding stubborn.
“What’ve you done to my machine!”
“The question,” Tom said, getting up off the floor, “is more like, what has Dairine done to it? Sorry, Harry. This is a hell of a way for you to find out.”
Nita watched her father take in a long breath. “Don’t call her yet, Harry,” said Tom. He laid a hand on the computer. “Confirmed authorization one zero zero three oblique zero two. We’ll file the justification with Irina later. Translate.”
The screen’s contents abruptly turned into English. Nita’s father bent over a bit to read it. “ ‘Oath accepted-‘ “
“This Oath,” Carl said. “Type a-colon-heartcode.”
The computer cleared its screen and displayed one small block of text in green. Nita was still while her father read the Wizards’ Oath. There was movement behind her: she looked up and saw her mother, with a peppermill clutched forgotten in one hand, looking over her father’s shoulder. Her face looked odd, and it wasn’t entirely the green light from the computer screen.
“Dairine took that?” her father said at last.
“So did we, Daddy,” Nita said.
“Yes, but-“ He sat down on the edge of the desk, staring at the screen. “Dairine isn’t quite like you two. ...”
“Exactly. Harry, this is going to take a while. But first, you might call in Dairine. She did something careless this afternoon and I want to make sure she doesn’t do it again.”
Nita felt sorry for her father; he looked so pale. Her mother went to him. “What did she do?” she said.
“She went to Mars and left the door open,” said Tom.
Nita’s dad shut his eyes. “She went to Mars.”
“Just like that...” said her mother.
“Harry, Nita tells me she took you two to the Moon once, to prove a point. Imagine power like that ... used irresponsibly. I need to make sure that’s not going to happen, or I’ll have to put a lock on some of her power. And there are other problems. The power may be very necessary for something...” Carl looked stern but unhappy. “Where is she, Harry?”
“Dairine,” Nita’s dad said, raising his voice.
“Yo,” came Dairine’s voice from upstairs, her all-purpose reply.
“Come on down here a minute.”
“Do I have to? I’m reading.”
“Now.”
The ceiling creaked a little, the sound of Dairine moving around her room. “What have I done to deserve this?” said Nita’s father to the immediate universe.
“Harry,” Carl said glancing at the computer screen and away again, “this may come as a shock to you ...”
“Carl, I’m beyond shocking. I’ve walked on the Moon without a spacesuit and seen my eldest daughter turn into a whale. That my youngest should go to Mars on a whim ...”
“Well, as to what you’ve done to deserve it ... you have a right to know the answer. The tendency for wizardry comes down to the kids through your side of the family.”
That was a surprise to Nita, and as for her father, he looked stricken, and her mother looked at him with an expression that was faintly accusing. Carl said, “You’re related to the first mayor of New York, aren’t you?”
“Uh, yeah ... he was-“
“-a wizard, and one of the best to grace this continent. One of the youngest Seniors in Earth’s history, in fact. The talent in your line is considerable; too bad it missed you, but it does skip generations without warning. Was there something odd about one of your grandparents?”
“Why, my-“ Nita’s father swallowed and looked as if he was suddenly remembering something. “I saw my grandmother disappear once. I was about six. Later I always thought I’d imagined it...” He swallowed again. “Well, that’s the answer to why me. The next question is, why Dairine?”
“She’s needed somewhere,” said Carl. “The Powers value the status quo too highly to violate it without need. It’s what we’re defending, after all. Somewhere out there is a life-or-death problem to which only Dairine is the answer.”
“We just need to make sure she knows it,” said Tom, “and knows to be careful. There are forces out there that aren’t friendly to wizards-“ He broke off suddenly as he glanced over at the computer screen. “Carl, you should see this.”
They all looked at the screen. USER LOG, it said, and under the heading were listed a lot of numbers and what Nita vaguely recognized as program names. “Look at that,” Tom said, pointing to one. “Those are the spells she did today, using the computer. Eighty-eight gigabytes of storage, all in one session, the latest one-at 16:52 hours. What utility uses that kind of memory?”
“That’s what ... about ten of five?” Nita’s mother said. “She wasn’t even here then. ...”
The stairs creaked as Dairine came down them into the living room. She paused a moment, halfway, as well she might have done with all those eyes and all those expressions trained on her ... her father’s bewildered annoyance, her mother’s indignant surprise, Tom’s and Carl’s cool assessment, and Nita’s and Kit’s expectant looks. Dairine hesitantly walked the rest of the way down.
“I came back,” she said abruptly.
Nita waited for more. Dairine said nothing.
Nita’s parents exchanged glances, evidently having the same thought: that a Dairine who said so little wasn’t normal. “Baby ...” her mother said, sounding uncertain, “you have some explaining to do.”
But Carl stepped forward and said, “She may not be able to explain much of anything, Betty. Dairine’s had a busy day with the computer. Isn’t that so Dairine?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Dairine said.
“I think it’s more like you can’t,” said Carl.
“Look at the user log, Harry,” Tom said from behind Nita and Kit. “Eighty-eight gigs spent on one program. A copy program. And run, as you say, when she wasn’t even here. There’s only one answer to that.”
Slowly, as if he were looking at a work of art, Carl walked around Dairine. She watched him nervously. “Even with unlimited available memory and a computer running wizard’s software,” Carl said, “there’s only so much fidelity a copy can achieve. Making hard copies of dumb machinery, even a computer itself, that’s easy. Harry, look at the log: you’ll see that this isn’t the machine you bought. It’s an exact copy of it. Dairine made it.”
Carl kept walking around Dairine. She didn’t move, didn’t speak. “Carl, come on,” Nita’s father said from behind her, “cut it out. You’re scaring her.”
“I think not,” Carl said. “There’s only so much you can do with eighty gigs, as I said. Especially when the original is a living thing. The copy’s responses are limited. See, there’s something that lives inside the hardware, inside the meat and nervous tissue, that can’t be copied. Brain can be copied. But mind-not so well. And soul-not at all. Those are strictly one to a customer, at least on this planet.”
The air was singing with tension. Nita glanced at Kit, and Kit nodded, for he knew as well as she did the feel of a spell in the working. Carl was using no words or gestures to assist in the spell, nothing but the slow certain pressure of his mind as he thought in the Speech. “She copied the computer and took it to the city with her,” Carl said, “and got away when she could. And when she left Earth, she decided-I’d imagine-that she wanted some time to sightsee. But, of course, you would object to that. So she copied something else, to buy herself some time.”
The spell built and built in power, and the air sang the note ears sing in silence, but much louder. “Nothing not its own original can exist in this room,” Carl said, “once I turn the spell loose. Harry, you’re having trouble believing this, are you? You think I would treat your real daughter this way?”
Nita’s father said nothing.
“Run,” Carl said softly.
Dairine vanished. Air imploded into the place where she had been: manuals ruffled their pages in the sudden wind, papers flew up and slowly settled. Behind them, the Apple simply went away; its monitor fell two inches to the desk with a loud thump, its screen gone dark, and the hard-drive cable slithered off the desk like a stunned snake and fell in coils to the floor.
Nita’s father put his face in his hands.
Her mother looked sharply at Tom and Carl. “I’ve known you two too long to think you were toying with us,” she said as Carl sat down slowly on the sofa, looking a bit pale. “You said something a moment ago about forces that weren’t friendly ...”
“Nita’s told you some of what wizards are for,” Tom said, looking at Carl in concern, then up again. “Balance. Maintenance of the status quo; protecting life. There are forces that are ambivalent toward life. One in particular that held Itself aloof from creation, a long time ago, and when everyone else was done, created something none of the other forces had thought of: death. And the longest Death ... the running-down of the Universe. The other Powers cast It out ... and they’ve been dealing with the problem, and the Lone Power, ever since.”
“Entropy,” Nita’s mother said, looking thoughtful. “That’s an old story.”
“It’s the only story,” Tom said. “Every sentient species has it, or learns it.” He looked over at Nita’s father, who was recovering somewhat. “I’m not about to pass judgment on whether the Lone One’s invention was a good idea or not. There are cases for both sides, and the argument has been going on since time was set running. Every being that’s ever lived has argued the case for one side or the other, whether it’s been aware of it or not. But wizards fight the great Death, and the lesser ones, consciously ... and the Entity that invented death takes our interference very personally. New wizards always meet it in one form or another, on their Ordeals. Some survive, if they’re careful. Nita and Kit were careful ... and they had each other’s help.”
“ ‘Careful’ is not Dairine’s style,” Nita’s mother said, sounding rueful. “And she’s alone.”
“Not for long,” Tom said. “We’ll track her, and see that she has help. But I think Nita will have to go. She knows Dairine’s mind fairly well.”
“I’m going too,” said Kit.
Carl, still ashen from the exertion of his spell, shook his head. “Kit, your folks don’t know you’re a wizard. You might have to be gone for quite a while -and I can’t sell you two a time warp as I did once before. My time-jurisdiction stops at atmosphere’s edge.”
“I’ll tell them what I am,” Kit said.
Nita turned and stared at him.
“I’ve been thinking about doing it for a while, since you told your folks,” he said to her. “You handled it pretty well,” he said to Nita’s parents. “I should give my mom and dad the benefit of the doubt.” The words were brave: but Nita noticed that Kit looked a little worried.
“Kit, you’ll have to hurry,” Tom said. “She’s got a long lead on you, and the trail will get cold fast. Neets, where would Dairine want to go?”
Nita shook her head. “She reads a lot of science fiction.”
Carl looked worried. “Has she been reading Heinlein?”
“Some,” Nita said. “But she’s mostly hot for Star Wars right now.”
“That’s something, at least. With luck she won’t think of going much farther than a few galaxies over. Anything in particular about Star Wars?”
“Darth Vader,” Kit said. “She wants to beat him up.”
Tom groaned and ran one hand through his hair. “No matter what the reason,” he said, “if she goes looking for darkness, she’ll find it.”
“But Darth Vader’s not real!” said Nita’s mother.
Tom glanced at her. “Not here. Be glad.”
“A few galaxies over ...” Nita’s father said to no one in particular.
Carl looked grim. “We can track her, but the trail’s getting cold; and at any rate Tom and I can’t go with you.”
“Now, wait a minute ...” Nita’s mother said.
Carl looked at her gently. “We’re not allowed out of the Solar System,” he said. “There are reasons. For one thing, would you step out the door of a car you were driving?”
Nita’s mother stared at him.
“Yes, well,” Tom said. “We’ll get you support. Wizards everywhere we can reach will be watching for you. And as for a guide-“
“I’ll go,” said Picchu abruptly, from the computer table.
Everyone stared, most particularly Nita’s mother and father.
“Sorry, I should have mentioned,” Carl said. “Peach is an associate. Bird, isn’t this a touch out of your league?”
“I told you I was needed,” Picchu said irritably. “And I am. I can see the worst of what’s going to happen before it does; so I should be able to keep these two out of most kinds of trouble. But you’d better stop arguing and move. If Dairine keeps throwing away energy the way she’s doing, she’s going to attract Someone’s attention ... and the things It sends to fetch her will make Darth Vader look like a teddy bear by comparison.”
Nita’s mother looked at Carl and Tom. “Whatever you have to do,” she said, “do it!”
“Just one question,” Tom said to Picchu. “What do They need her for?”
“The Powers?” Picchu said. She shut her eyes.
“Well?”
“Reconfiguration,” she said, and opened her eyes again, looking surly. “Well? What are you staring at? I can’t tell you more than I know. Are we going?”
“Gone,” Nita said. She headed out of the room for her manual.
“I’ll meet you in the usual place when I’m done,” Kit called after her, and vanished. Papers flew again, leaving Nita’s mother and father looking anxiously at Carl and Tom.
“Powers,” Nita heard her father say behind her. “Creation. Forces from before time. This is-this business is for saints, not children!”
“Even saints have to start somewhere,” Carl said softly. “And it’s always been the children who save the Universe from the previous generation, and remake the Universe in their own image.”
“Just be glad yours are conscious of the fact that that’s what they’re doing,” Tom said.
Neither of her parents said anything.
In her bedroom, Nita grabbed her manual, bit her lip, said three words, and vanished.
Dairine did not go straight out of the Galaxy from Mars. Like many other wizards when they first cut planet-loose, she felt that she had to do a little local sightseeing first.
She was some while about it. Part of this was caused by discomfort. The jump from Earth to Mars, a mere forty-nine million miles, had been unsettling enough, with its feeling of first being pinned to a wildly rolling ball and then violently torn loose from it. But it hadn’t been too bad. Piece o’ cake, Dairine had thought, checking the transit directory in the computer. Somewhere out of the Solar System next. What’s this star system? R Leporis? It’s pretty close... But she changed her mind, and headed for the moons of Jupiter instead ... and this turned out to be a good thing. From Mars to Jupiter, bypassing the asteroid belt, was a jump of three hundred forty-one million miles; and the huge differences between the two planets’ masses, vectors, and velocities caused Dairine to become the first Terran to lose her lunch on Jupiter’s outermost satellite, Ananke.
The view did more than anything else to revive her-the great banded mass of Jupiter swiftly traversing the cold night overhead, shedding yellow-red light all around on the methane snow. Dairine sat down in the dry, squeaky snow and breathed deeply, trying to control her leftover heaves. Where she sat, mist curled up and snowed immediately down again as the methane sublimated and almost instantly recrystallized to solid phase in the bitter cold. Dairine decided that getting used to this sort of travel gradually was a good idea.
She waited until she felt better, and then began programming-replenishing her air and planning her itinerary. She also sat for a while examining the transit programs themselves, to see if she had been doing something wrong to cause her to feel so awful ... and to see if perhaps she could rewrite the programs a little to get rid of the problem. The programs were written in a form of MBASIC that had many commands which were new to her, but were otherwise mostly understandable. They were also complex: they had to be. Earth spins at seventeen thousand miles an hour, plows along its orbital path at a hundred seventy-five thousand, and the Sun takes it and the whole Solar System off toward the constellation Hercules at a hundred fifteen thousand miles an hour. Then the Sun’s motion as one of innumerable stars in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy sweeps it along at some two million miles an hour, and all the while relationships between individual stars, and those of stars to their planets, shift and change ...
It all meant that any one person standing still on any planet was in fact traveling a crazed, corkscrewing path through space, at high speed: and the disorientation and sickness were apparently the cause of suddenly, and for the first time, going in a straight line, in a universe where space itself and everything in it is curved. Dairine looked and looked at the transit programs, which could (as she had just proved) leave you standing on the surface of a satellite three hundred fifty million miles away from where you started-not half embedded in it, not splatted into it in a bloody smear because of some forgotten vector that left you still moving a mile a second out of phase with the surface of the satellite, or at the right speed, but in the wrong direction... Finally she decided not to tamper. A hacker learns not to fix what works ... at least, not till it’s safe to try. Maybe the transits’ll get easier, she thought. At least now I know not to eat right before one...
That brought up the question of food, which needed to be handled. Dairine considered briefly, then used the software to open a storage pocket in otherspace. By means of the transit utility she then removed a loaf of bread, a bottle of mustard, and half a pound of bologna from the refrigerator back home, stuffing them into local otherspace where she could get at them. Mom ‘n’ Dad won’t notice, she thought, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it? Spank my copy? Be interesting if they did. I wonder if I’d feel it. ...
But there were a lot of more interesting things to consider today. Dairine stood up, got the computer ready, and headed out again, more cautiously this time. She stopped on Io, another one of Jupiter’s moons, and spent a while (at a safe distance) watching the volcanoes spit white-hot molten sulfur ten miles out from the surface; sulfur that eventually came drifting back down, as a leisurely dusty golden snow, in the delicate gravity. Then she braced herself as best she could and jumped for Saturn’s orbit, four hundred three million miles farther out, and handled it a little better, suffering nothing worse than a cold sweat and a few dry heaves, for the two planets were similar in mass and vectors.
Here there were twenty moons-too many for Dairine at the moment-but she did stop at Titan, the biggest satellite in the Solar System, and spent a while perched precariously on a peak slick with hydrogen snow, looking down thoughtfully at the methane oceans that washed the mountain’s feet. Several times she thought she saw something move down there-something that was not one of the peculiar, long, high methane waves that the light gravity made possible. But the light was bad under the thick blue clouds, and it was hard to tell. She went on.
The jump to Uranus’s orbit was a touch harder-six hundred sixty million miles to a world much smaller and lighter than the greater gas giants. Dairine had to sit down on a rock of Uranus’s oddly grooved moon Miranda and have the heaves again. But she recovered more quickly than the last time, and sat there looking down on the planet’s blurry green-banded surface for a long time. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had both been gravity-slung off toward Alpha Centauri and were plunging toward the radiopause, the border of the Solar System, whistling bravely in the endless dark. Sitting here she could hear them both, far away, as she could hear a lot that the Sun’s radio noise made impossible to hear closer in. That silent roar, too-the old ruinous echo of the Big Bang-was more audible here. How can I even hear it? she wondered briefly. But Dairine quickly decided it was just another useful side effect of the wizardry, and she got up and headed out as soon as she was better.
From Uranus to Neptune was one billion, one million miles. To her own surprise Dairine took it in stride, arriving standing up on Triton, one of Neptune’s two largest moons, and with no desire to sit. Better! she thought, and looked around. There was very little to see: the planet was practically a twin of Uranus, except for its kinky partial rings, and the moons were barren. Dairine rubbed her arms. It was getting cold, even in the protective shell she had made for herself; her forcefields couldn’t long stand this kind of chill. Out here the Sun was just one more star, bright, but not like a sun at all. The jump to Pluto was brief: she stood only for a minute or so in the barren dark and could hardly find the Sun at all, even by radio noise. Its roar was muted to a chilly whisper, and the wind on Pluto-it was summer, so there was enough atmosphere thawed to make a kind of wind-drank the heat away from her forcefields till in seconds she was shivering. She pulled the computer out. “Extrasystemic jump,” she said hurriedly.
“Coordinates?”
“Read out flagged planets.”
“Andorgha/beta Delphini, Ahaija/R Leporis, Gond/kappa Orionis, Ir-mrihad/Ross 614, Rirhath B/epsilon Indi-“
“The closest,” said Dairine, feeling a touch nervous about this.
“Rirhath B. Eleven point four light-years.”
“Atmosphere status?”
“Earthlike within acceptable parameters.”
“Let’s go,” Dairine said.
“Syntax error 24,” said the computer sweetly, “rephrase for accuracy.”
“Run!”
A galaxy’s worth of white fire pinned her to the rolling planet; then the forces she had unleashed tore Dairine loose and flung her out into darkness that did not break. For what seemed like ages, the old, old echoes of the Big Bang breaking over her like waves were all Dairine had to tell her she was still alive. The darkness grew intolerable. Eventually she became aware that she was trying to scream, but no sound came out, nothing but that roar, and the terrible laughter behind it. Laughter? And light pierced her, and the universe roared at her, and she hit the planet with a feeling like dreaming of falling out of bed-
Then, silence. True silence this time. Dairine sat up slowly and carefully, taking a moment to move everything experimentally, making sure nothing was broken. She ached in every bone, and she was angry. She hated being laughed at under the best of circumstances, even when it was family doing it. Whatever had been laughing at her was definitely not family, and she wanted to get her hands on it and teach it a lesson...
She looked around her and tried to make sense of things. It wasn’t easy. She was sitting on a surface that was as slick white as glare ice in some places, and scratched dull in other spots, in irregularly shaped patches. Ranked all around her in racks forty or fifty feet high were huge irregular objects made of blue metal, each seeming made of smaller blocks stuck randomly together. The block things, and the odd racks that held them, were all lit garishly by a high, glowing green-white ceiling. What is this, some kind of warehouse? Dairine thought, getting to her feet.
Something screamed right behind her, an appalling electronic-mechanical roar that scared her into losing her balance. Dairine went sprawling, the computer under her. It was lucky she did, for the screaming something shot by right over her head, missing her by inches though she was flat on her face. The huge wind of its passing whipped her hair till it stung her face, and made her shiver all over. Dairine dared to lift her head a little, her heart pounding like mad, and stared after the thing that had almost killed her. It was another of the bizarre cube-piles, which came to a sudden stop in midair in front of one of the racks. A metal arm came out of the Tinkertoy works of the rack, snagged the cube-pile and dropped it clanging onto an empty shelf in the rack’s guts.
Dairine pulled the computer out from under her and crawled carefully sideways out of the middle of the long white corridorlike open space, close to one of the metal racks. There she simply lay still for a moment, trying to get her wits back.
There was another scream. She held still, and saw another of the cubes shoot by a foot and a half above the white floor, stop and hover, and get snagged and shelved. Definitely a warehouse, she thought; and then part of the cube seemed to go away, popped open, and people came out.
They had to be people, she thought. Surely they didn’t look at all like people; the four of them came in four different burnished-metal colors and didn’t look like any earthly insect, bird or beast. Well, she said to herself, why should they? Nonetheless she found it hard to breathe as she looked at them, climbing down from their-vehicle?-was that their version of a car, and this a parking lot? The creatures-no, people, she reminded herself-the people were each different from all the others. They had bodies that came in four parts, or five, or six; they had limbs of every shape and kind, claws and tentacles and jointed legs. If they had heads, or needed them, she couldn’t tell where they were. They didn’t even look much like the same species. They walked away under the fluorescent sky, bleating at one another.
Dairine got up. She was still having trouble breathing. What’ve I been thinking of? She began to realize that all her ideas about meeting her first alien creatures had involved her being known, even expected. “Dairine’s here finally,” they were supposed to say, “now we can get something done”; and then she and they would set out to save the universe together. Because of her own blindness she’d gotten so excited that she’d jumped into a totally alien environment without orientation or preparation, and as a result she’d nearly been run over in a parking lot. My own fault, she thought, disgusted with herself. It won’t happen again.
But in the meantime people were still getting out of that car: these people shorter and blockier than the first group, with more delicate legs and brighter colors. She picked up the computer, looked both ways most carefully up and down the “road,” and went after them. “You still working?” she said to the computer.
“Syntax error 24-“
“Sorry I asked. Just keep translating.”
As she came up behind the second group of people, Dairine’s throat tightened. Everything she could think of to say to aliens suddenly sounded silly-Finally she wound up clearing her throat, which certainly needed it, as she walked behind them. Don’t want to startle them, she thought.
They did absolutely nothing. Maybe they can’t hear it. Or maybe I said something awful in their language! Oh, no- “Excuse me!” she said.
They kept walking along and said nothing.
“Uh, look,” Dairine said, panting a little as she kept up with them-they were walking pretty fast-“I’m sorry to interrupt you, I’m a stranger here-”
The computer translated what Dairine said into a brief spasm of bleating, but the spidery people made no response. They came to the end of the line of racks and turned the corner. Ahead of them was what looked like a big building, made in the same way as the cars, an odd aggregate of cubes and other geometrical shapes stuck together with no apparent symmetry or plan. The scale of the thing was astonishing. Dairine suddenly realized that the glowing green-white ceiling was in fact the sky-the lower layer of a thick cloudy atmosphere, actually fluorescing under the light of a hidden, hyperactive sun-and her stomach did an unhappy flip as her sense of scale violently reoriented itself. I wanted strange, she thought, but not this strange!
“Look,” she said to the person she was walking beside as they crossed another pathway toward the huge building, “I’m sorry if I said something to offend you, but please, I need some help getting my bearings-“
Dairine was so preoccupied that she bumped right into something on the other side of the street-and then yipped in terror. Towering over her was one of the first things to get out of the car, a creature seven feet high at least, and four feet wide, a great pile of glittering, waving metallic claws and tentacles, with an odd smell. Dairine backed away fast and started stammering apologies.
The tall creature bleated at her, a shocking sound up so close. “Excuse me,” said the computer, translating the bleat into a dry and cultured voice like a BBC announcer’s, “but why are you talking to our luggage?”
“Lip, I, uh,” said Dairine, and shut her mouth. There they were, her first words to a member of another intelligent species. Blushing and furious, she finally managed to say, “I thought they were people.”
“Why?” said the alien.
“Well, they were walking!”
“It’d be pretty poor luggage that didn’t do that much, at least,” said the alien, eyeing the baggage as it spidered by. “Good luggage levitates, and the new models pack and unpack themselves. You must have come here from a fair way out.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“My gate is about to become patent,” the alien said. “Come along, I’ll show you the way to the departures hall. Or are you meeting someone?”
They started to walk. Dairine began to relax a little: this was more like it. “No,” she, said, “I’m just traveling. But please, what planet is this?”
“Earth,” said the alien.
Dairine was surprised for a second, and then remembered having read somewhere that almost every sentient species calls its own planet “Earth” or “the world” or something similar. “I mean, what do other people call it?”
“All kinds of things, as usual. Silly names, some of them. There’ll be a master list in the terminal; you can check that.”
“Thanks,” Dairine said, and then was shocked and horrified to see a large triangular piece of the terminal fall off the main mass of the building. Except that it didn’t fall more than a short distance, and then regained its height and soared away, a gracefully tumbling pyramid. “Does it do that often?” she said, when she could breathe again.
“Once every few beats,” said the alien; “it’s the physical-transport shuttle. Are you on holiday? Mind the slide, now.”
“Yes,” Dairine started to say, until the alien stepped onto a stationary piece of pavement in front of them, and instantly began slipping away from her toward the bizarre mass of the terminal building at high speed. The surprise was too sudden to react to: her foot hit the same piece of paving and slipped from under her as if she had stepped on ice. Dairine threw her arms out to break her fall, except that there wasn’t one. She was proceeding straight forward, too, tilted somewhat backward, at about fifty miles an hour. Her heart hammered. It hammered worse when something touched her from behind; she whipped around, or tried to. It was only the alien’s luggage, reaching out to tilt her forward so she stood straight. “What is this!” she said.
“Slidefield,” the alien said, proceeding next to her, without moving, at the same quick pace. “Inertia-abeyant selectively frictionless environment. Here we go. Which gating facility are you making for?”
“Uh-“
It was all happening too fast. The terminal building swept forward swift as a leaping beast, rearing up a thousand stories high, miles across, blotting out the sky. The slidefield poured itself at what looked like a blank silvery wall a hundred feet sheer. Dairine threw her arms up to protect herself, and succeeded only in bashing her face with the computer; the wall burst like a thin flat cloud against her face, harmless, and they were through.
“The Crossings,” said the alien. “What do you think?”
She could not have told him in an hour’s talking. The Crossings Hypergate Facility on Rirhath B is renowned among the Million Homeworlds for its elegant classical Lilene architecture and noble proportions; but Dairine’s only cogent thought for several minutes was that she had never imagined being in an airline terminal the size of New Jersey. The ceiling-or ceilings, for there were thousands of them, layered, interpenetrating, solid and lacy, in steel and glass, in a hundred materials and a hundred colors-all towered up into a distance where clouds, real clouds, gathered; about a quarter-mile off to one side, it appeared to be raining. Through the high greenish air, under the softened light of the fluorescing sky that filtered in through the thousand roofs, small objects that might have been machines droned along, towing parcels and containers behind them. Beneath, scattered all about on the terminal floor, were stalls, platforms, counters, racks, built in shapes Dairine couldn’t understand, and with long, tall signs placed beside them that Dairine couldn’t begin to read. And among the stalls and kiosks, the whole vast white floor was full of people-clawed, furred, shelled or armored, upright or crawling, avian, insectile, mammalian, lizardlike, vegetable, mingling with forms that could not be described in any earthly terms. There were a very few hominids, none strictly human; and their voices were lost in the rustling, wailing, warbling, space-softened cacophony of the terminal floor. They hopped and stepped and leapt and walked and crawled and oozed and slid and tentacled and went in every imaginable way about their uncounted businesses, followed by friends and families and fellow travelers, by luggage floating or walking; all purposeful, certain, every one of them having somewhere to go, and going there.
Every one of them except Dairine, who was beginning to wish she had not come.
“There,” said the alien, and Dairine was glad of that slight warning, because the slidefield simply stopped working and left her standing still. She waved her arms, overcompensating, and her stomach did a frightened wrench and tried once or twice, for old times’ sake, to get rid of food that was now on Ananke.
“Here you are,” said the alien, gesturing with its various tentacles. “Arrivals over there, departures over that way, stasis and preservation down there, !!!!! over there”-the computer made a staticky noise that suggested it was unable to translate something- “and of course waste disposal. You enjoy your trip, now; I have to catch up with my fathers. Have a nice death!”
“But-“ Dairine said. Too late. The broad armored shape had taken a few steps into a small crowd, stepped on a spot on the floor that looked exactly like every other, and vanished.
Dairine stood quite still for a few minutes: she had no desire to hit one of those squares by accident. I’m a spud, she thought, a complete imbecile. Look at this. Stuck in an airport-something like an airport-no money, no ID that these people’ll recognize, no way to explain how I got here or how I’m gonna get out-no way to understand half of what’s going on, scared to death to move ... and pretty soon some security guard or cop or something is going to see me standing here, and come over to find out what’s wrong, and they’re gonna haul me off somewhere and lock me up. ...
The thought was enough to hurriedly start her walking again. She glanced around to try to make sense of things. There were lots of signs posted all over -or rather, in most cases, hanging nonchalantly in midair. But she could read none of them. While she was looking at one written in letters that at a distance seemed like Roman characters, something bumped into Dairine fairly hard, about shin-height. She staggered and caught herself, thinking she had tripped over someone’s luggage. But there was nothing in her path at all.
She paused, confused, and then tried experimentally to keep walking: the empty air resisted her. And then behind her someone said, “Your pardon “ and slipped right past her: something that looked more or less like a holly tree, but it was walking on what might have been stumpy roots, and the berries were eyes, all of which looked at Dairine as the creature passed. She gulped. The creature paid her no mind, simply walked through the bit of air that had been resisting Dairine, and vanished as the thing with the tentacles had earlier. Just as it blinked out of existence, air whiffing past Dairine into the place where it had been, she thought she caught sight of what looked like a little triangular piece of shiny plastic or metal held in one of the thing’s leaves.
A ticket, Dairine thought; and a little more wandering and watching showed her that this was the case. Wherever these little gates might lead, none of them would let you step on it unless you had the right ticket for it: probably the bit of plastic was a computer chip, programmed with the fact that you had paid your fare. So there was no need to fear that she might suddenly fall unshielded into some environment where they were breathing methane or swimming around in lava.
Dairine began to wander again, feeling somewhat better. I can always sit down in a corner somewhere and program another jump, she thought. Be smart to do that now, though. In case something starts to happen and I want to get out quick...
She looked for a place to sit. Off to one side was a big collection of racks and benches, where various creatures were hung up or lying on the floor. On a hunch she said to the computer, “Is it safe to sit over there?”
“Affirmative,” said the computer.
Dairine ambled over in the direction of the racks and started searching for something decent to sit in.
The creatures she passed ignored her. Dairine found it difficult to return the compliment. One of the racks had what looked like a giant blue vampire bat hanging in it. Or no, it had no fur: the thing was actually more like a pterodactyl, and astonishingly pretty-the blue was iridescent, like a hummingbird’s feathers. Dairine walked around it, fascinated, for quite a long time, pretending to look for a chair.
But there seemed to be no chairs in this particular area. The closest to a chairlike thing was a large low bowl that was full of what seemed to be purple Jell-O ... except that the Jell-O put up a long blunt limb of itself, the end of which swiveled to follow as Dairine passed. She hurried by; the effect was rather like being looked at by a submarine periscope, and the Jell-O thing had about as much expression. Probably wonders what the heck I am, she thought. Boy, is it mutual...
Finally she settled for the floor. She brought up the utilities menu and started running down the list of planets again... then stopped and asked for the “Help” utility.
“Nature of query,” said the computer.
“Uh ...” Dairine paused. Certainly this place was what she had thought she wanted-a big cosmopolitan area full of intelligent alien creatures. But at the same time there were hardly any hominids, and she felt bizarrely out of place. Which was all wrong. She wanted someplace where she would be able to make sense of things. But how to get that across to the computer? It seemed as though, even though it was magical, it still used and obeyed the laws of science, and was as literal and unhelpful as a regular computer could be if you weren’t sufficiently familiar with it to know how to tell it what you wanted.
“I want to go somewhere else,” she said to the machine.
“Define parameters,” said the computer.
“Define syntax.”
“Command syntax. Normal syntactical restrictions do not apply in the Help facility. Commands and appended arguments may be stated in colloquial-vernacular form. Parameters may be subjected to Manual analysis and discussion if desired.”
“Does that mean I can just talk to you?” Dairine said.
“Affirmative.”
“And you’ll give me advice?”
“Affirmative.”
She let out a breath. “Okay,” she said. “I want to go somewhere else.”
“Acknowledged. Executing.”
“No don’t!” Dairine said, and several of the aliens around her reacted to the shriek. One of the holly tree people, standing nearby in something like a flowerpot, had several eyes fall off on the floor.
“Overridden,” said the computer.
“ ‘Help’ facility!” Dairine said, breathing hard. Her heart was pounding.
“Online.”
“Why did you start doing that?!”
“ ‘OK’ is a system command causing an exit from the ‘Help’ facility and a return to command level,” said the computer.
“Do not run any program until I state the full command with arguments and end the sequence with ‘Run’!”
“Affirmative,” said the computer. “Syntax change confirmed.”
Oh, Lord, Dairine thought, I’ve started messing with the syntax and I don’t even understand it. I will never never use a program again till I’ve read the docs ... “Good,” she said. “The following is a string of parameters for a world I want to transit to. I will state ‘end of list’ when finished.”
“Affirmative. Awaiting listing.”
“Right. I want to go somewhere else.”
“Transit agenda, confirmed. Specific arguments, please.”
“Uhh ...” She thought. “I want to go somewhere where there are going to be people like me.”
“Noted. Next argument.”
What exactly was I looking for? Darth Vader ... She opened her mouth, then closed it again. I think I’ll wait a bit on that one. “I want to go somewhere where I’m expected,” she said.
“Noted. Next argument.”
“Somewhere where I can use some of this magic.”
“Argument already applies,” said the computer. “You are using wizardry at this time.”
Dairine made a face. “Somewhere where I can sit down and figure out what it means.”
“Argument already applies. Documentation is available at this time.”
Dairine sighed. “Somewhere where I will have time to sit down and figure out what it means.”
“Incomplete argument. State time parameter.”
“A couple of days. Forty-eight hours,” she said then, before it could correct her syntax.
“Noted. Next argument.”
“Somewhere-“ One more time she stopped, considering the wild number of variables she was going to have to specify. And the truth was, she didn’t know what she was after. Except ... She looked around her conspiratorially, as if someone might overhear her. Indeed, she would have died if, say, Nita, should ever hear this. “Somewhere I can do something,” she whispered. “Something big. Something that matters.”
“Noted,” said the computer. “Next argument.”
“Uh ...” The embarrassment of the admission out loud had driven everything out of her head. “End arguments,” she said.
“Advisory,” said the computer.
“So advise me.”
“Stated number of arguments defines a very large sample of destinations. Stated number of arguments allows for interference in transit by other instrumentalities. Odds of interference approximately ninety-six percent.”
That brought Dairine’s chin up. “Let ‘em try,” she said. “The arguments stand.”
“Instruction accepted. End advisory.”
“Fine. List program.”
“Transit program. Sort for Terran-type hominids along maximal space-time curvature. Sort for anticipated arrival, time continuum maximal but skewed to eliminate paradox. Sort for opportunity for intervention. Sort for data analysis period on close order, forty-eight hours. Sort for intervention curve skewed to maximal intervention and effect. End list.”
“You got it,” Dairine said. “Name listed program ‘TRIP!.’ “
“Named.”
“Save it. Exit ‘Help’ facility.”
“TRIP! saved. Command level,” said the computer.
“Run TRIP!.”
“Running. Input required.”
Dairine rolled her eyes at the mile-high ceiling. Nita doesn’t do it this way, she thought. I’ve watched her. She just reads stuff out of her book, or says it by heart. ... Oh well, someone has to break new ground. She stretched her legs out in front of her to keep them from cramping. “Specify,” she said.
“Birth date.”
“Twenty October nineteen seventy-eight,” she said, looking out across the floor at the great crowd of pushing and jostling aliens.
“Place of birth.”
“Three-eight-five East Eighty-sixth Street, New York City.” The hospital had long since burned down, but Dairine knew the address: her dad had taken them all there to a German restaurant now on the site.
“Time of birth.”
“Twelve fifty-five A.M.”
“Favorite color.”
“You have got to be kidding!” she said, looking at a particularly busy knot of aliens across the floor. Security guards, most likely: they were armed, in a big group, and looking closely at people.
“Favorite color.”
“Blue.” Or were these critters security guards? There had been other creatures walking around in the terminal wearing uniforms-as much or as little clothing of a particular shade of silvery green as each alien in question felt like wearing. And their weapons had been slim little blue-metal rods strapped to them. These creatures, though-they wore no uniforms, and their weapons were large and dark and looked nasty.
“Last book read,” said the computer.
“Look,” Dairine said, “what do you need to know this dumb stuff for?”
“Program cannot be accurately run without the enacting wizard’s personal data. You have no data file saved at this time.”
She made another face. Better not interfere, she thought, or you might wind up doing the breaststroke in lava after all. “Oh, go on,” she said.
“Last book read-“
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” said Dairine, looking with increasing unease at the armed bunch of aliens. They were not nice-looking people. Well, lots of the people in here didn’t look nice-that purple Jell-O thing for one-but none of them felt bad: just weird. But these creatures with the guns-they had an unfriendly look to them. Most of them were mud-colored warty-looking creatures like a cross between lizards and toads but upright, and not nearly as pretty as a lizard or as helplessly homely as any toad. They went about with a lumpish hunchbacked swagger, and their eyes were dark slitted bulges or fat crimson bloodshot goggle-eyes. They looked stupid, and worse, they looked cruel. ...
Oh, come on, Dairine told herself in disgust. Just because they’re ugly doesn’t mean they’re bad. Maybe it’s just some kind of military expedition, like soldiers coming through the airport on their way home for leave. But with their guns?
“Father’s name,” said the computer.
“Harold Edward Callahan,” said Dairine. She was looking with a combination of interest and loathing at one of the warty creatures, which was working its way toward her. In one arm it was cradling a gun that looked big enough to shove a hero sandwich down. In its other hand, a knobby three-fingered one, it held the end of a leash, and straining at the leash’s far end was a something that looked more like the stuffed deinonychus at Natural History than anything Dairine had ever seen. A skinny little dinosaur it was, built more or less along the lines of a Tyrannosaurus, but lithe and small and fleet. This one went all on its hind legs, its long thin tail stretched out behind it for balance: it went with a long-legged ostrichy gait that Dairine suspected could turn into an incredible sprint. The dinosaur on the warty alien’s leash was dappled in startling shades of iridescent red and gold, and it had its face down to the floor as it pulled its master along, and the end of that long whiplike tail thrashed. And then it looked up from the floor, and looked right at Dairine, with eyes that were astonishingly innocent, and as blue as a Siamese cat’s. It made a soft mewling noise that nonetheless pierced right through the noise of the terminal.
The warty thing looked right at Dairine too-and cried out in some language she couldn’t understand, a bizarre soprano singing of notes like a synthesizer playing itself. Then it yanked the leash sharply and let the deinonychus go.
Dairine scrambled to her feet as the deinonychus loped toward her. Terrified as she was, she knew better than to try to run away from this thing. She slammed the computer’s screen closed and waited. No kicks, she told herself, if one kick doesn’t take this thing out, you’ll never have time for a second-It leapt at her, but she was already swinging: Dairine hit the deinonychus right in the face with the computer and felt something crunch. Oh, please don t let it be the plastic, she thought, and then the impetus of the deinonychus carried it right into her, its broken jaw knocked against her face as it fell, she almost fell with it. Dairine stumbled back, found her footing, turned, and began to run.
Behind her more voices were lifted. Dairine ran like a mad thing, pushing through crowds wherever she could. Who are they, why are they after me? And where do I run ...
She dodged through a particularly dense crowd and paused, looking for a corridor to run down, a place to hide. Nothing. This part of the Crossings was one huge floor, very few niches to take advantage of. But farther on, about half a mile away, it looked like the place narrowed...
She ran. The noise behind her was deafening. There was some shooting: she heard the scream of blasterbolts, the sound that had set her blood racing in the movies. But now it wasn’t so exciting. One bolt went wide over her head. It hit a low-floating bit of the ceiling off to one side of her, and she smelled the stink of scorched plastic and saw a glob of it fall molten to splat on the floor. Dairine sprinted past it, panting. She was a good runner, but she couldn’t keep this up for much longer.
Bug-eyed monsters! her brain sang at her in terror. These weren’t what I had in mind! “What are they-“
“Emissaries,” said the computer, in a muffled voice since its screen was shut over its speaker.
Dairine kept running. “From where?”
“Indeterminate. Continue run?”
“If it’ll get me out of here, yes-!”
“Last level of education finished-“
She told it, gasping, as she ran. She told it her mother’s maiden name, and how much money her father made, and at what age she had started reading, and much more useless information... And then while she was telling it what she thought of boys, something caught her by the arm.
It was a three-fingered hand, knobby, a slick dark green, and strong with a terrible soft strength that pulled her right out of her run and around its owner as if she were spinning around a pole. Dairine cried out at her first really close look at a bug-eyed monster. Its eyes were an awful milky red that should have meant it was blind, but they saw her too well entirely-and it sang something high at her and grabbed her up against it with its other hand, the nonchalant don’t-hurt-it grasp of the upper arms that adults use on children, not knowing how they hate it ... or not caring. Dairine abruptly recognized the BEM’s song as laughter, once removed from the horrible low laughing she had seemed to hear in transit. And suddenly she knew what these things were, if not who. “No!” she screamed.
“Intervention subroutine?” said the computer, utterly calm.
Dairine struggled against the thing, couldn’t get leverage: all the self-defense she had been taught was for use on humans, and this thing’s mass was differently distributed. Not too far away she heard more of the horrid fluting, BEMs with guns, coming fast. Half her face was rammed up against its horrible hide, and her nose was full of a stink like old damp coffee grounds. Her revulsion was choking her: the grasp of the thing on her was as unhuman as if she were being held by a giant cockroach ... and Dairine hated bugs. “Kill it!” she screamed.
And something threw her back clear a good twenty feet and knocked her head against the floor ...
Dairine scrambled up. The BEM was gone. Or rather, it wasn’t a BEM anymore. It was many many little pieces of BEM, scattered among splatters of dark liquid all over the floor, and all over everything else in the area, including her. Everything smelled like an explosion in a coffeeshop.
Hooting noises began to fill the air. Oh, no, Dairine thought as she grabbed the computer up from the floor and began to run again. Now this place’s own security people were going to start coming after her. They would ask her questions. And no matter how little a time they did that for, the BEMs would be waiting. If they waited. If they didn’t just come and take her away from the port’s security. And even if she killed every BEM in the place, more would come. She knew it.
She ran. People looked at her as she ran. Some of them were hominid, but not even they made any move to stop her or help her: they looked at her with the blank nervousness of innocent bystanders watching a bank robber flee the scene of the crime. Dairine ran on, desperate. It was like some nightmare of being mugged in a big city, where the streets are full of people and no one moves to help.
The blasterscreams were a little farther behind her. Maybe the one BEM’s fate had convinced the others it would be safer to pick her off from a distance. But then why didn’t they do that before?
Unless they wanted me alive ...
She ran and ran. That laughter in the dark now pounded in her pulse, racing, and in the pain in the side that would shortly cripple her for running. Something she had read in Nita’s manual reoccurred to her: Old Powers, not friendly to what lives: and one of the oldest and strongest, that invented death and was cast out ... Part of her, playing cold and logical, rejected this, insisted she had no data, just a feeling. But the feeling screamed Death! and told logic to go stuff it somewhere. These things belonged to that old Power. She needed a safe place to think what to do. Home ... But no. Take these things home with her? Her mom, her dad, these things would-
But maybe Nita and Kit could help-
But admit that she needed help?
Yes. No. Yes-
But without resetting the transit program, she couldn’t even do that. No time ...
“Can you run subroutines of that program before you finish plugging in the variables?” Dairine said, gasping as she ran.
“Affirmative.”
“Then do it, as soon as you can!”
“Affirmative. Name of best friend-“
She wondered for a second whether Shash Jackson was still her best friend after she had cleaned him out of his record money three days ago. Then she gave his name anyway. Red lines of light lanced over her head as she ran. And here, the ceiling was getting lower, the sides of the building were closer, there were smaller rooms, places to go to ground...
The stitch in her side was killing her. She plowed through a crowd of what looked like ambulatory giant squid on a group tour, was lost among them for a moment, in a sea of waving purple tentacles, tripping over their luggage, which crowded aside squawking and complaining-then came out the other side of them and plunged into a smaller corridor about the size of Grand Central Station.
She kept giving the computer inane information as she ran down the corridor, pushing herself to the far side of the stitch, so that she could reach someplace to be safe for a minute. There were more gates here, more signs and seating areas, and off to one side, a big shadowy cul-de-sac. She ran for it, any cover being better than none.
At the very end of her energy, she half ran, half stumbled in. It was unmistakably a bar. If she had had any breath to spare, she would have laughed with the dear familiarity of it, for it looked completely like other bars she had seen in airports when traveling with her folks and Nita-fairly dim, and crowded with tables and chairs and people and their bags. But no mere airport bar had ever had the kind of clientele that this place did. Tall furry things with too many arms, and squat many-legged things that looked to be wearing their organs on the outside, and one creature that seemed totally made of blinking eyes, all stared at Dairine over their snacks and drinks as she staggered in and past them, and not one of them moved.
Dairine didn’t care. Her only thought was to hide. But she realized with horror that she could see no back way out of the place-only a dark red wall and a couple of what might have been abstract sculptures, unless they were aliens too. She heard the cries out in the terminal getting closer, and utter panic overcame her. Dairine shouldered and stumbled her way frantically among strange bodies and strange luggage in the semidarkness, hardly caring what she might or might not be touching. Impetus and blind terror crashed her right into a little table at the back of the room, almost upsetting both the table and the oddly shaped, half-full glass on it. And then something caught her and held her still.
After her experience out in the terminal, Dairine almost screamed at the touch. But then she realized that what held her were human hands. She could have sobbed for relief, but had no breath to spare. So rattled was she that though she stared right at the person who was steadying her, it took her precious seconds to see him. He was built slight and strong, wearing a white shirt and sweater and a long fawn-colored jacket: a fair-haired young man with quick bright eyes and an intelligent face. “Here now,” he said, helping her straighten up, “careful!” And he said it in English!
Dairine opened her mouth to beg for help, but before she could say a word, those wise, sharp eyes had flickered over her and away, taking everything in.
“Who’s after you?” the man said, quiet-voiced but urgent, glancing back at Dairine.
“I don’t know what they are,” she said, gasping, “but someone-someone bad sent them. I can lose them, but I need time to finish programming-“
Alarm and quick thought leapt behind those brown eyes. “Right. Here then, take these.” The young man dug down in his jacket pocket, came up with a fistful of bizarrely shaped coins, and pressed them hurriedly into Dairine’s free hand. “There’s a contact transfer disk behind the bar. Step on it and you should materialize out in the service corridor. Follow that to the right and go out the first blue door you see, into the terminal. If I’m not mistaken, the pay toilets will be a few doors down on your left. Go in one of the nonhuman ones.”
“The nonhuman-!” Dairine said, absolutely horrified.
“Quite so,” the man said. “Right across the universe, that’s one of the strongest taboos there is.” And he grinned, his eyes bright with mischief. “No matter who’s after you, it’ll take them a bit to think of looking for you in there. And the locks will slow them down.” He was on his feet. “Off you go now!” he said, and gave Dairine a fierce but friendly shove in the back.
She ran past a trundling robot barman, under the hinged part of the bartop and onto the transfer circle. On the other side of the bar, as Dairine began to vanish, she saw the fair man glance over at her to be sure she was getting away, and then pick up the iced tea he had been drinking. Glass in hand, he went staggering cheerfully off across the barroom in the most convincing drunk act Dairine could imagine, accidentally overturning tables, falling into the other patrons, and creating a mess and confusion that would slow even the BEMs up somewhat.
Dairine materialized in the service corridor, followed her instructions to the letter, and picked a rest room with a picture sign so weird, she couldn’t imagine what the aliens would look like. She found out soon enough. She spent the next few minutes hastily answering the computer’s questions while sitting on what looked like a chrome-plated lawn mower, while the tiled room outside her locked booth echoed with the bubbling screams of alien ladies (or gentlemen) disturbed in the middle of who knew what act.
Then the screams became quiet, and were exchanged for a horrible rustling noise, thick soft footfalls, and high fluting voices. The computer had asked Dairine whether she preferred Coke or Pepsi, and had then fallen silent for some seconds. “Are you done?” she hissed at it.
“Running. Data in evaluation.”
“Get a move on!”
“Running. Data in evaluation.”
The air filled with the scorch of burning plastic again. They were burning the lock of the booth.
“Can you do something to a few of them?” she whispered, her mouth going dry.
“Negative multitasking ability,” said the computer.
Dairine put her head down on the computer, which was on her knees, and took what she suspected might be her last breath.
The lock of the booth melted loose and the door fell in molten globs to the floor. Dairine sat up straight, determined to look dirty at the BEMs, if she could do nothing else.
The door swung open.
And “Multiple transit,” said the computer, “executing now,” and the jump-sickness grabbed Dairine and twisted her outside in. Perhaps not understanding, the BEMs fluted in rage and triumph and reached into the booth. But Dairine’s insides went cold as dimly she felt one of them swing a huge soft hand through where her middle was: or rather, where it no longer was completely-the transit had begun. A second later, heat not wholly felt stitched through her arms and legs as shots meant to cripple her tore through where they almost were, and fried the back of the stall like an egg. Then starlight and the ancient black silence pierced through her brain; the spell tore Dairine free of the planet and flung her off Rirhath B into the long night.
She never found out anything about the man who helped her. Nor did he ever find out anything more about her. Pausing by the door of the pay toilet, after being released from station security some hours later, and being telepathically sensitive (as so many hominids are), he could sense only that some considerable power had been successfully exercised there. Satisfied with that, he smiled to himself and went on about his travels, just one more of the billions of hominids moving about the worlds. But many millions of light-years later, in some baking wilderness under a barren, brilliant sky, a bitterly weary Dairine sat down on a stone and cried for a while in shock at the utter strangeness of the universe, where unexpected evil lives side by side with unexpected kindness, and neither ever seems quite overcome by the other...