High Wizardry New Millennium Edition (19 page)

Ears for sound they already had. Dairine extended the ears’ sound somewhat to pick up vibration in physical obects, a sort of bargain-basement seismograph. Dairine considered that it might be wise to give them something to hear radio with, too, but couldn’t decide on which frequency to work with, and let the idea go for the moment.
They can work that out for themselves later.

For a while after that Dairine sat staring at the design screen, musing. The newly awakened intelligence had made all its mobiles alike: probably because it didn’t understand the concept of otherness yet. Dairine would start making them different from one another. But they were going to have to be different on the inside, too, to do any good.
If some danger comes along that they have to cope with, it’s no use their information processors being all the same: whatever it is could wipe them all out at once. If they’re as different as they can be, they’ll have a better chance of surviving.

She paused in her design to look closely at the structure of the chip layering in the turtles—not so much at what the layers were made of, but what their arrangement
meant.
At the molecular level she found the simplest building-block of the chips, as basic as DNA in humans: not a chain molecule, but a sort of tridimensional snowflake of silicon atoms and atoms of other elements.
God, DNA’s simple compared to these…
Any given silicon molecule hooked into from three to fifteen others, using any one of fifty different chemical compounds to do it; and every different arrangement of hookups between molecules or layers had a specific meaning, as each arrangement has in DNA.
Complicated. But let’s see what we can do —

With the help of the computer Dairine began to sort out the code buried in the interconnected snowflakes. Hours, it took her, and she was perfectly aware that even with the computer’s help she couldn’t hope to deal with more than the tip of this iceberg of information.
But I’ll get as much done as I can before we start running out of time here.
The thought of her pursuers kept intruding, but Dairine told herself to focus, and kept pushing it aside.

Some parts of the chip structure she did manage to identify as pure data storage, others as sensor array, associative network, life support, energy management. Dairine started devising layering arrangements different from those in the turtles. She designed creatures that would have more associative network and so could specialize in problem solving: others with more data stacks, turtles that would be good at remembering; mobiles more richly endowed with sensors, and senses, than some of the others, that would see and hear and feel most acutely.

And there was one particular arrangement of layers, the one that the computer identified for her as the seat of the turtles’ emotions, that seemed an awfully tiny thing to Dairine. She expanded it to about three times its original size, allowing it to interconnect at will with the other associative areas, with data memory and with the senses. Finally, to every model she designed, Dairine added a great deal of latent memory area, so that each mobile would have plenty of room to store what it experienced and to process the data it accumulated.

Dairine was running out of steam, and knew it: her eyes were burning with overuse in dim light, and she was all one big ache. But she kept on going, intent on dealing with one last task. She went back to her original design and copied it several times, making a number of different “models”—a large, strong one for heavy work; a small one with extra hands in various sizes, from human-hand size to tiny claws that could have done microsurgery or precision work almost on the molecular level. And she added the necessary extra sensor arrays or materials reinforcement that these changes would need to support them.

Then, at long last, she felt safe in sitting back and letting go a long sigh, unfolding her cramped legs, and reaching for her latest sandwich, which had gone stale on top while she worked. “Okay,” she said to the computer. “Ask the motherboard to run off a few of those and let’s see what happens.”

“Considerable reprogramming will be necessary,” said the computer.

“I know,” said Dairine, between bites of the sandwich, making a face at the taste of it: she was beginning to fall out of love with bologna, something she’d previously have thought impossible. “I’m in no rush.”

The computer’s communications window started filling with binary once again as it began conferring with the motherboard in machine language.
What do I mean I’m in no rush?
Dairine thought, momentarily distracted while Gigo climbed into her lap again. “Did you finish that analysis run about the Lone One for me?”

“Yes,” said the computer. “Do you want it displayed?”

“Yeah, please.”

Another window popped up, full of English-language text, but Dairine didn’t look at it immediately. She leaned back and gazed up. The galaxy was all set but for one arm, trailing up over the far, far horizon, a hook of light. The dull red sun was following it down as if attached to the hook by an invisible string.
An old, old star,
Dairine thought.
Not even main-sequence anymore. This could have been one of the first stars created in this universe…. Might have been, considering how far out this galaxy—

The thought was shocked out of her. Something other than her voice was making a sound. It was a rumbling, very low, a vibration in the surface she sat on. “What the— You feel that?” she said to the computer.

“Vibration of seismic origin,” the computer said. “Intensity 2.2 Richter and increasing.”

Fortunately there was precious little on the planet’s surface to shake, but Dairine stood up, alarmed, and watched the turtles. For all their legs, they were having trouble keeping their footing on the slick surface. Gigo hooked a leg around Dairine’s and steadied itself that way. “Is this gonna get worse?” Dairine said.

“Uncertain. No curve yet. Richter 3.2 and increasing. Some volcanic eruption occurring in planet’s starward hemisphere.”

Got to do something about their leg design if this happens a lot,
Dairine thought—and then was distracted again, because something was happening to the light. It wavered oddly, dimming from the clear rose that had flooded the plain to a dark, dry color like blood.

She stared upward and saw the sun start twisting out of shape.

There was no other way to describe what was happening. Part of the red star’s upper right-hand quarter seemed pinched in on itself, warped like a round piece of paper being curled. Prominences stretched peculiarly, snapped back to tininess again: the warping worsened until the star that had been normal and round now looked squeezed small, as if in a cruel fist, to a horizontal, fluctuating oval, then to a sort of tortured heart-shape, then to an oval bent the other way, leftward. Sunspots stretched like pulled taffy, oozed back to shape again, and the red light wavered and shifted like that of a candle about to be blown out in the wind.

Dairine stood and felt a terrible sickness inside, for this was no kind of eclipse or other astronomical event that she had ever heard of. It was as if she was seeing the laws of nature broken right in front of her. “What
is
that?” she whispered.

“Transit of systemic object across primary,” said the computer. “The transiting object is a micro black hole.”

Dairine sat down again, feeling the rumbling beneath her start to die away. The computer had mentioned the presence of that black hole earlier, but in the excitement she’d forgotten about it. “Plot me that thing’s orbit,” she said. “Is that going to happen every day?”

“Indeterminate. Working.”

“I don’t like that,” said Gigo with sudden clarity.

Dairine looked over at it with surprise and pulled it into her lap. “You’re not alone, small stuff,” she said. “It gives me the shakes too.” She sat there for a second, noticing that she was sweating. “You’re getting smart, huh?” Dairine said. “Your mom down there is beginning to sort out the words?”

“It hurts,” said Gigo, sounding a little mournful.

“Hurts…” Dairine wasn’t sure whether this was a general statement or an answer to her question. Though it could be both. A black hole in orbit in the star system would produce stresses in a planet’s fabric that the planet—if it was alive, like this one—could certainly feel. Line the black hole up with its star, as it would be lined up in transit, and the tidal stresses would be that much worse. What better cause to learn to tell another person that something was hurting you?—now that there was another person to tell.

Dairine patted Gigo absently. “It’s all over, Gigo,” she said.

“Gigo, yes.”

She grinned faintly. “You really like having a name, huh?”

“A program must be given a name to be saved,” Gigo said quite clearly, as if reciting from memory. But there was also slight fear in its voice, and great relief.

“Well, it’s all over,” Dairine said… while surreptitiously checking the sky to make sure. Tiny though it was—too small to see—a micro black hole was massive enough to bend light toward it. That was what had made the sun look so strange, as the black hole’s gravitational field bent the round image of the sun forward onto itself. The realization made Dairine feel a little better, but she didn’t particularly want to see the sun do that again.

She turned back to the laptop. “Let’s get back to work.”

“Which display first,” the computer said, “the black hole’s orbit or the research run on the Lone Power?”

“The orbit.”

It displayed it for her in a separate window: a slowly moving graphic that made Dairine’s insides crawl. The black hole’s orbit around its primary was irregular. These transits occurred in twenty out of every thirty orbits, and in the middle five orbits the hole swung much closer to the planet and appeared to center more closely on the sun. This last one had been a grazing transit: the micro hole had only passed across the upper limb of the star. Dairine found herself thinking that she really didn’t want to see what a dead-center transit would look like, not at all.

But in the midst of her discomfort, she still found a little room to be fascinated. Apparently the black hole was the cause of the planet’s many volcanoes; the tidal stresses it produced brought up molten silicon, which erupted and spread over the surface. Without the frequent passages of the hole near the planet, the millions of layers of the motherboard would probably never have been laid down, and it would never have reached the critical “synapse” number necessary for it to come alive….

“Okay,” Dairine said. “Give me the research run, and let me know when the motherboard’s ready to make some more of these guys.”

“Working.”

Dairine began to read, hardly aware of it when Gigo sneaked into her lap again to stare stared curiously at the laptop’s screen. She paged past Nita’s and Kit’s last run-in with the Lone Power, and started skimming the précis before it for common factors. Odd tales from a hundred planets flicked past her, and sweat slowly began to break out on Dairine as she realized she couldn’t see any common factors at all. She could see no pattern in what made the Lone Power pick a specific world or group or person to attack, and no sure pattern or method for dealing with It. Some people seemed to beat the Lone One off by sheer luck. Some did
nothing
that she could see, and yet ruined Its plans utterly. One wizard on a planet of Altair had changed the whole course of his world’s history by inviting a person he knew to be inhabited by the Lone One to dinner… and the next day, the Altairans’ problem (which Dairine also did not understand except that it had something to do with the texture of their fur) simply began to clear up, apparently by itself.

“Maybe I should buy It a hot dog,” Dairine muttered. That would make as much sense as most of these solutions. She was getting a feeling that there was something important about dealing with the Lone Power that the computer wasn’t telling her.

Finally she scrolled back to Nita and Kit’s précis again and read it through more carefully, comparing it with what she had seen them do or heard them say herself. Her conversation with Nita after she had seen her sister change back from being a whale was described in the précis as “penultimate clarification and choice.” Dairine scowled. What had Nita chosen? And why? She wished she had her there to ask her… but no. Dairine didn’t think she could cope with Nita at the moment. Her sister would certainly rip into her for being an idiot, and Dairine wasn’t in the mood… considering how many idiotic things she had done in the past day and a half.

Still,
Dairine thought,
a little advice would come in real useful around now…

“Ready,” said the computer suddenly.

“Okay. Ask it to go ahead.”

“Warning,” the computer said. “The spell being used requires major re-structuring of the substrate. Surface stability will be subject to change without notice.”

“You mean I should stand back?”

“I thought that was what I said,” said the computer.

Dairine made a wry face, then picked it up and started walking. “C’mon, Gigo, all you guys,” she said. “Let’s get out of the way.”

They trooped off obediently after her. Finally, about a quarter-mile away, she stopped. “This far enough away, you think?” she said to the computer.

“Yes. Working now.”

She felt a rumbling under the surface again, but this was less alarming than that caused by the transit of the black hole—a more controlled and purposeful sound. The ground where Dairine had been sitting abruptly sank in on itself, swallowing the debris caused by the breaking-out of the turtles. Then slow ripples began to travel across the surface, as it turned itself into what looked like a bubbling pot of syrup, clear in places, swirled and streaked with color in others. Heat didn’t seem to be involved in the process. Dairine sat down to watch, fascinated.

“Unnamed,” Gigo said next to her, “data transfer?”

Dairine looked down at the little creature. “You want to ask me a question? Sure. And I have a name, it’s Dairine.”

“Dairrn,” it said.

She chuckled a little. Dairine had never been terribly fond of her name—people tended to stumble over it. But she rather liked the way Gigo said it. “Close enough,” she said. “What’s up?”