High Wizardry New Millennium Edition (20 page)

“Why do you transfer data so slowly?”

That surprised her for a moment, until she considered the rate at which the computer and the motherboard had been talking: and this was in fact the motherboard she was talking to now. To something that had been taught to reckon its time in milliseconds, conversation with her must seem about as fast as watching a tree grow. “For my kind of life, I’m pretty quick,” Dairine said. “It just looks slow to you.”

“There is more—slowlife?”

“Lots more. In fact, you and the Apple there are about the only, uh, ‘quicklife’ there is here, as far as I know.” She paused and said, “Quicklife, as opposed to dumb machines that are fast, but not alive.”

“I see it, in the data the Lightbringer gave us,” said Gigo. Dairine glanced over at the computer. “Data transfer?”

“Sure,” Dairine said.

“What is the purpose of this new program run?”

Wow, its syntax is really shaping up. If this keeps up, it’s gonna be smarter than me!… Is that a good idea?
But then Dairine laughed. It was the
best
idea: a supercomputer faster than a Cray, with more data in it than thousands of libraries—what a friend to have! “When I’m gone,” Dairine said, “you’re going to need to be able to make your own changes in your world. So I’m making you mobiles that will be able to make the changes.”

“Data transfer! Define ‘gone’!”

Gigo’s urgency surprised Dairine. “I can’t stay here,” she said.
No, better simplify.
“My physical presence here must terminate soon,” she said. “But don’t worry. You guys won’t be alone.”

“We will!” cried Gigo, and the whole planet through him.

“No, you won’t,” Dairine said. “Don’t panic. Look, I’m taking care of it. You saw all the different bodies I wrote into the Make program for you? You saw how they’re all structured differently on the inside? That’s so they can have different personalities. There’ll be lots more of you.”

“How?”

Dairine hoped she could explain this properly. “You’ll split yourself up,” she said. “You’ll copy your basic programming in a condensed form into each one of them, and then run them all separately.”

There was a long, long silence. “Illegal function call,” said Gigo slowly.

“It’s not. Believe me. It sounds like it, but it works just fine for all the slowlife… it’ll work for you too. Besides,” Dairine said, “if you don’t split yourself up, you won’t have anybody to talk to, and play with!”

“Illegal function call…”

“Trust me,” Dairine said. “You’ve got to trust me… Oh, wow,
look
at that.”

The surface, which had been seething and rippling, had steadied down, slick and glassy again. Now it was bulging up, as it had before. There was no sound, but through each hunching, cracking hummock, glassy shapes pushed themselves upward, shook the fragments off, stood upright, walked, uncertain and ungainly as new foals. In the rose light of the declining sun they shone and glowed; some of them tall and stalky, some short and squat, some long and flowing and many-jointed, some rounded and bulky and strong; and one and all as they finished being made, they strode or stalked or glided over to where Dairine was.

She and Gigo and the first turtles were quickly surrounded by tens and twenties and hundreds of bright glassy shapes, a forest of flexing arms, glittering sensors, color in bold bands and delicate brushings—grace built in glass and gorgeously alive.
“Look
at them,” Dairine said, half lost in wonder herself. “It’ll be like being you… but a hundred times, a thousand times. Remember how the light looked the first time?”

“Data reacquired,” Gigo said, soft-voiced.

“Like that,” Dairine said. “But again and again and again. A thousand of you to share every memory with, and each one able to see it differently… and everyone else’ll see it better when the one who sees it differently tells all the others about it. You won’t be the only quicklife anymore. Copy your programming out, and there’ll be as many of you as you want to make. A thousand of you, a million of you to have the magic together….”

“The call is legal,” Gigo said after a moment. “Data transfer?”

“What?”

“Will there be pain? Like the Dark that Pulls?”

Dairine’s heart wrenched. She picked Gigo up and pulled him into her lap. “I don’t know, baby,” she said. “There might be. I’m here if it does. You just hold on to me, and don’t be scared.”

She turned to the computer. “You know how to describe this to the motherboard?” she said. “They’ve all got to have all the major programming you gave their mom, but you’re gonna have to pack the code down awful tight. And make sure they still don’t lose the connection to her once they’re autonomous.”

“Noted,” said the computer. “Override protocols require that I confirm with you what parts of the wizardly programming are to be passed on to each individual, and to what number of individuals.”

She looked at it in surprise. “All of it, of course. And all of them.”

“Reconfirmation, please. This far exceeds the median distribution and percentage.”

“Oh? What is it on Earth?”

“Ratio of potential wizards to nonpotential: one to ten. Ratio of practicing wizards to potential wizards: one to one hundred. Ratio of—”

“Are you trying to tell me that there are six hundred million practicing wizards on Earth?”

“Six hundred fifty-four million, four hundred and—”

Dairine paused to consider the condition the world was in. “Well, it’s nowhere near enough! Make all these guys wizards. Yes, I confirm it three times, just get on with it, they’re getting twitchy.” And indeed Gigo was trembling in her lap, which so astonished Dairine that she cuddled him close and put her chin down on the top of him.

Instantly all his legs jerked spasmodically. Dairine held on to him, held on to all of them through him. Maybe some ghost of that first physical-contact link was still in place, for she went briefly blind with sensations that had nothing to do with merely human sensoria. To have all one’s life and knowledge, however brief, ruthlessly crushed down into a tiny packet, with no way to be sure if the parts you cherished the most would be safe, or would be the same afterward—and then to multiply that packet a thousand times over, till it pushed your own thoughts screaming into the background, and your own voice cried out at you in terror a thousand times, inescapable—and then, worst of all, the silence that follows, echoing, as all the memories drain away into containers that may or may not hold them— Dairine was in the midst of it, felt the fear for all of them, and had nothing to use against it but the knowledge that it could be all right,
would
be all right. She hung on to that as she hung on to Gigo through his frenzied kicking, her eyes squeezed shut, all her muscles clenched tight against the terror in her arms and the terror in her heart….

Silence, silence again, at last. Dairine dared at last to open her eyes, lifted her head a little to look around her. Gigo was still. The glittering ranks around her shifted a little—a motion here, a motion there, as if a wind went through glass trees at sunset. The light faded, slipped away, except for the chill gleam of the bright stars over everything: the sun had set.

“It hurt,” Gigo said.

He moved, twitching a little. Dairine let him clamber down out of her lap.

He turned and looked at her. “It hurt,” Gigo said.

“But it was worth it,” said one of the taller mobiles, one of the heavy-labor types, in a different voice.

The voices began to proliferate. Motion spread further through the crowd. Mobiles turned and spoke to one another in a chorus of voices like tentative synthesizers, changing pitch and tone as if looking for the right ones. Outside the area where there was air, communication passed by less obvious means. Dairine sat in the midst of it, heard words spoken with the delight of people tasting a new food for the first time, heard long strings of binary recited as if the numbers were prayers or poems, saw movement that even to a human eye was plainly dance, being invented there in front of her.

She grinned until it felt like her face might split, and put her hand down on the Apple’s case. “Nice job,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“We did good, huh?”

“Indeterminate,” said the computer.

Dairine shrugged and got up to wander among the mobiles and get a closer look at them. They clustered around her as she went, touching her, peering at her, speaking to her again and again, as if to make sure they really could.

The cacophony of voices delighted her, especially since so many of them said the same thing to her at first: “Save, please!” Dairine knew what they wanted, now, and so she named them. She started out with programmers’ puns, and shortly the glassy plain was littered with people named Bit and Buffer, Pinout and Ascii, Peek and Poke, Random, Cursor, String, Loop, Strikeout, Hex, and anything else she could think of. But she ran out of these long before she ran out of mobiles, and shortly the computer types were joined by Toms, Dicks and Harrys, not to mention Georges, Roberts, Richards, Carolyns, and any other name she could think of. One group wound up named after her entire gym class, and another after all her favorite teachers. Dairine ran through comic-book heroes, numerous Saturday morning cartoon characters, the bridge crew of the Starship Enterprise, every character named in The Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars movies (though she did not name any of them “Darth Vader”), the names and capitals of all fifty states, all the presidents, and all the kings and queens of England she could think of. By the time she was finished, she wished she had had a phone book. She was hungry and thirsty, but satisfied to think that somewhere in the universe, a thousand years from now, there would be a world that contained both Elizabeth the First and Luke Skywalker.

Finally Dairine flopped down and started to make another sandwich. During the naming, Gigo had followed her through the crowd. Now he sat beside her, looking with interest at the sandwich. “What’s that?” he said.

Dairine opened the mustard jar, made a resigned face, and dug a finger in. “It’s going to be food,” she said. “You’ve got that in your memory.”

“Yes.” Gigo was quiet for a moment. “From this one acquires energy.”

“Yup.” Dairine took the last few slices of bologna out of the package, looked at them regretfully, and put them on the bread.

Various others of the mobiles were drifting in to stand or crouch or sit around where Dairine was. “Dairine,” said Gigo, “why is this necessary for you?”

She shrugged. “That’s the way people are built. We get tired, get hungry… we have to refuel sometimes. You guys do it, though you do it through contact with the motherboard: I had the computer build in the same kind of wizardry-managed energy transfer it used to get in touch with your mom in the first place. There’s loads of geothermic. It’ll be ages before you’re in any danger of running down.”

She munched on the sandwich. One of the tall, leggy mobiles, a storkish one that she remembered naming Beanpole, said, “Why should we run down?”

She glanced up at that, between bites. Another of the mobiles, one of the first ones she had named, a stocky one called Monitor, said, “There is something wrong with the energy in this universe.”

“dS = dQ/T,”
said a third, one of the original turtles, named Logo.

Dairine began to feel uneasy. That was indeed the equation that expressed entropy, the tendency of any system to lose its energy into the void. “It’s not that anything’s wrong,” she said. “That’s just the way things are.”

“It is poor design,” Beanpole said.

“Uh, well,” Dairine said. This was something that had occurred to her on occasion, and none of the explanations she’d heard had ever satisfied her. “It’s a little late to do anything about it.”

“Is it?” said Gigo.

Dairine stared at him.

“Things shouldn’t run down,” Monitor said. “Something should be done about it.”

“What if
you
run down some day?” said Beanpole, sounding stricken.

“Uh,” Dairine said. “Guys, I will, eventually. I’m part of this universe, after all.”

“We won’t let you run down,” said Monitor, and patted her arm timidly.

“We have to do something about this,” Logo said.

That was when the conversation began to get complex. More and more of the mobiles drifted into it, until Dairine was surrounded by a crowd of the robots she had built the most data processing ability into. Phrases like “quasi-static transitions” and “deformation coordinates” and “the zeroth law” and “diathermic equilibrium” flew around until Dairine, for all her reading, was completely lost. She knew generally that they were talking about the laws of thermodynamics, but unless she was much mistaken, they were talking about them not so much as equations but as programs… as if they were something that could be rewritten….

But they can be,
she thought suddenly, with astonishment. The computer’s manual functions dealt with many natural laws that way. Wizards had access to the whole of the nature and content of a physical law. Able to name such a law completely, a wizard can control it, restructuring it slightly and temporarily.

But the restructuring that the mobiles were discussing wasn’t temporary.

“Listen, guys,” Dairine said, and silence fell abruptly as they turned to her and did just that. “You can’t do this.”

“Of course we can,” Logo said.

“I mean, you
shouldn’t.”

“Why?”

That stopped her for a second. It seemed so obvious. Stop entropy, and the flow of time stopped. And where was life then? But it occurred to Dairine that in everything she’d read in the manual, either in Nita’s version of it or on the computer, it never said anywhere that you should or shouldn’t do something. It might make recommendations, or state dangers… but never more than that. Choice was always up to the wizard. In fact, there’d been one line that had said, “Wizardry is choice. All else is mere mechanics….”

“Because,” she said, “you’ll sabotage yourselves. You need entropy to live. Without it, time can’t pass. You’ll be frozen, unable to think. And besides, you wouldn’t want to live forever… not even if you could really live without entropy. You’d get bored….”