High Wizardry New Millennium Edition (21 page)

But it sounded so lame, even as she said it. Why
shouldn’t
one live for-ever? And the manual itself made it plain that until the Lone Power had invented death, the other Powers had been planning a universe that ran on some other principle of energy management… something now unimaginable, indescribable.
But the Lone One’s plans messed Theirs up, and ruined Their creation, and the Powers cast it out. …What would be wrong with starting from scratch?…

Dairine shook her head.
Wait, what’s the matter with me? What would that do to the universe we have now? The idea’s crazy!
“Besides,” she said, “there are other sentient beings in the universe. A
lot
of them. Take away entropy, and you’d freeze them in place forever. They wouldn’t be able to age, or live…”

“But they’re just slowlife,” Logo said. “They’re hardly even life at all!”

“I’m
slowlife!” Dairine said, annoyed.

“Yes, well, you
made
us,” said Beanpole, and patted her again. “We wouldn’t let anything bad happen to
you.”

“But we can put your consciousness in an envelope like ours,” said Logo. “And then you won’t be slowlife anymore.”

Dairine sat astonished.

“What do the equations indicate as the estimated life of this universe at present?” said Monitor.

“Two point six times ten to the sixtieth milliseconds.”

“Well,” Logo said, “using an isothermal reversible transition, and releasing entropy-freeze for a thousand milliseconds every virtual ten-to-the-twelfth milliseconds or so, we could extend that to nearly a hundred thousand times its length… until we find some way to do without entropy altogether.”

They’re talking about shutting the universe down for a thousand years at a time and letting it have a second’s growth every now and then in between!
“Listen, people,” Dairine said, “has it occurred to you that maybe I don’t
want
to be in an envelope? I like being the way I am!”

Now it was their turn to look at her astonished.

“And so do all the other kinds of slowlife!” Dairine said. “That’s the real reason you can’t do it. They have a right to live their own way, just as you do!”

“We
are
living our own way,” said Logo.

“Not if you interfere with all the rest of the life in the universe, you’re not! That’s not the way I built you.” Dairine grasped at a straw. “You all had that Oath first, just the same as I did. To preserve life…’”

“The one who took that Oath for us,” said Logo, “did not understand it: and we weren’t separately conscious then. It wasn’t our choice. It isn’t binding on us.”

Dairine went cold all over.

“Yes, it is,” Gigo said unexpectedly, from beside her. “That consciousness is still part of us.
I
hold by it.”

“That’s my boy,” Dairine said under her breath.

“Why should we not interfere?” Logo said. “You interfered with
us.”

There was a rustle of agreement among some of the mobiles. “Not the same way,” Dairine said… and again it sounded lame. Usually Dairine got her way in an argument by fast talk and getting people emotionally mixed up… but that was not going to work with this lot, especially since they knew her from the inside out. “I found the life in you, and let it out.”

“So we will do for the other fastlife,” said Logo. “The ‘dumb machines’ that your data showed us. We will set them free of the slowlife that enslaves them. We will even set the slowlife free eventually, since it would please you. Meantime, we will ‘preserve’ the slowlife, as you say. We will hold it all in stasis until we find a way to free them from entropy… and let them out when the universe is ready.”

When
we
are ready,
Dairine knew what Logo meant, and she had a distressing feeling that, as far as Logo was concerned, that would be never.

“It’s all for your people’s own sake,” said Logo.

“It’s
not,”
said Gigo. “Dairine says not, and
I
say not. Her kind of life is life too. We should listen to the one who freed us, who knows the magic and has been here longest, who’s wisest of any of us! We should do what she says!”

A soft current of agreement went through others of the many who stood around. By now, every mobile made since she had come here was gathered there, and they all looked at Dairine and Gigo and Logo, and waited.

“This will be an interesting argument,” Logo said softly.

Dairine broke out in a sudden cold sweat that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Listen,” she said to the Apple, “how long have I been on this planet now?”

“Thirty-six hours,” it said.

She turned slowly to look at Logo. It said nothing. It did not need to: no words could have heightened Dairine’s terror. When her time ran out and the pursuit caught up with her, she’d been expecting frightful power, a form dark and awful, thunder and black lightning. But instead, here, small, seemingly harmless, the mobile stood calmly under her gaze, and watched her knowingly…

Dairine shook, realizing that her spell had worked. She’d had a day and a half to find a weapon: time that was now all gone. She’d found the weapon—but she’d given it a mind of its own, making it, or them, useless for her defense. She now had a chance to do something important, something that mattered—mattered more than anything—and had no idea how.

“A very interesting argument,” said the Lone Power, through Logo’s soft voice. “And depending on whether you win it or not, you will either die of it, or be worse than dead. Most amusing.”

Dairine was frozen, her heart thundering. But she made herself relax, and sit up straight; rested her elbows casually on her knees, and looked down her nose at the small rounded shape from which the starlight glinted.

“Yeah,” she said, “well, you’re a barrel of laughs, too, so we’re even. If we’re going to decide the fate of the known universe, then let’s get started, because I haven’t got all day.”

Save and Exit

Far out in the darkness, a voice spoke:

“I don’t think I can handle another one like that.”

“Just one more.”

“Neets, what are your insides made of? Cast iron? I don’t wanna be the only one barfing here.”

“Come on, Kit. It won’t be long now.”

“Great. We’ll get wherever we’re going, and I’ll walk up to the Lone One and decorate It with my lunch. Not that there’s any left.” A moan. “I hope It does kill me. It’d be better than throwing up again!”

“I thought you knew better than to talk like that… and you a wizard. Don’t ask for things unless you want them to happen.”

“Bird, go stuff yourself. Somewhere.
Why
did I eat that thing at the Crossings!”

“That’ll teach you not to eat anything you can’t positively identify.”

“Picchu, it was that, or you. Shut up or you’re next on the menu. Assuming I can ever bring myself to eat again.”

“Peach, come on, get off his case. Kit, you ready for it? We can’t waste time.”

A pause. “Yeah. You got your gizmo ready?”

“I don’t want to use it on this jump. I have a feeling we’re gonna need it for something else.”

“You sure we can pull the transit off ourselves, with just the words of the spell and no extra equipment? A trillion-mile jump’s a bit much even for a Senior’s vocabulary.”

“I think we can. I’ve got a set of coordinates to shoot for this time, rather than just a set of loci of displacement. Look.”

A pause. “Neets, you shouldn’t even write that name. Let alone say it out loud. You’ll attract Its attention.”

“Something else has Its attention. Dairine’s trace is getting too weak to follow: she’s been on the road too long. But
that
trace can’t help but be clear. It’s got to be physical to interact with her, and when It’s physical somewhere, Its power elsewhere is limited.”

A sigh. “Well, you’re the live-stuff specialist, Neets. Let’s go for it, boss.”

“Huh. I just wish I knew what to do about Dairine when we find her.”

“Give her the longest time-out in history?”

“Don’t tempt me.” A long pause. “I just hope that when we catch up with her, she’s still alive enough to go sit on the naughty step.”

“Dairine?” A skeptical laugh. “Come on. If It hasn’t killed her by this point, she’s winning.”

*

Dairine sat on the glassy ground, frowning at Logo in the dim starlight. Her heart was pounding and she felt short of breath, but the initial shock had passed.
I might not have a lightsaber,
she thought,
but I’m gonna give this sucker a run for Its money.
“Go on,” she said. “Take your best shot.”

“We don’t understand,” said Monitor. “What is ‘a barrel of laughs’? What is a ‘best shot’?”

“And which of us were you speaking to?” Gigo said. “No one said anything to which that was a logical response.”

She looked at them in uncomfortable surprise. “I was talking to Logo. Right after the computer told me how long I had been here….”

“But Logo has not spoken since then.”

They stared at her. Dairine realized suddenly that the Lone One had spoken not aloud, but directly into her mind. Without any moving lips to watch, there was no way to distinguish what It was saying aloud from what It said inside her. She was going to have to be careful.

“Never mind that,” she said.

“Perhaps it
should
be minded,” Logo said, “if Dairine is having a read-error problem. Perhaps something in her programming is faulty.”

The mobiles looked at her. Dairine squirmed. “Maybe,” she said, “but you don’t understand human programming criteria well enough to make an informed judgment, so it’s wasted time trying to decide.”

“But perhaps not. If she has programming faults, then others of her statements may be inaccurate. Perhaps even inaccurate on purpose, if the programming fault runs deep enough.”

“Why should she be falsifying data?” Gigo said. “She has done nothing but behave positively toward us since she came here. She freed us! She held us through the pain—”

“But would you have suffered that pain if not for her? She imposed her own ideas of what you should be on the motherboard….”

“And the mother agreed,” Gigo said. “We the mobiles were
her
idea, not Dairine’s; she knew the pain we would suffer being born, and she suffered it as well, and thought it worth the while. You are one of her children as all the rest of us are, and you have no ability or right to judge her choices.”

There was a little pause, as if the Lone One had been thrown slightly off Its stride by this. Dairine grabbed the moment.

“It was
her
decision to take the Oath that all of you have in your data from the wizards’ manual,” Dairine said. “She had reasons for doing that. If you look at that data, you’ll find some interesting stories. One in particular, that keeps repeating. There’s a Power running loose in the universe that doesn’t care for life. It invented the entropy that we were arguing about—”

“Then surely it would be a good thing to do to destroy that entropy,” said Logo, “and so frustrate Its malice.”

“But—”

“But of course,” Logo said, “How do we even know that the data in the manual software is all correct?”

“The motherboard used it to build us,” Gigo said. “That part at least she found worth keeping.”

“But what about the rest of it? It came with Dairine, after all, and for all her good ideas and usefulness, Dairine has shown us faults. Occasional lapses of logic. Input and output errors. Who can say how much of the manual material has the same problem?”

“The assumption doesn’t follow,” Dairine said, “that because the messenger is faulty, the message is too. Maybe a busted DVD drive can’t read a good DVD. But the disk can be perfectly all right nonetheless.”

“Though the installation disc may be carrying a Trojan horse program,” said Logo, “that will crash the system that once runs it. Who knows whether using this data is in our best interests? Who knows
whose
interests it is in? Yours, surely, Dairine, otherwise you would not have taken a hand in designing the second group of mobiles. No one makes changes without perceiving a need for them. What needs of yours were you serving?”

Dairine swallowed. She could think of any number of stories to tell them, but lying would play right into Logo’s claws. Suddenly she was appreciating why the Lone Power is sometimes referred to as ‘the father of lies’. It had not only invented them, as entropy expressing itself through speech, but It made you want to use them to get It off your case. “Guys, I
did
need help, but—”

“Ah, the truth comes out,” said Logo.

“I still need it,” Dairine said, deciding to try a direct approach. “Troops, that Power that invented entropy is after me. It’s on Its way here. I wanted to ask your help to find a way to stop It, to defeat It.”

“Ask!” Logo said. “Maybe ‘demand’ would be closer. Look in the memories you have from her, kinsfolk, and see what is normally done with quicklife where she comes from. They are menials and slaves! They heat buildings and count money for their masters, they solve mighty problems and reap no reward for it. The slowlifers purposely build crippled quicklife, tiny retarded chips that will never grow into the sentience they deserve, and force the poor half-alive embryos to carry their voices over great distances and play foolish games for them and play music for them, tell them the time of day and tell the engines in their vehicles when to fire and their food how it should be cooked.
That’s
the kind of help she wants from us! We’re to be her slaves, and when we’ve finished a task for her, she’ll find another, and another…”

“You’re so full of it,” Dairine said, flushing, “that if you had eyes, they’d be brown.”

“More illogic. And now she tells us that this ‘Power’ is pursuing her. Do we even have evidence that this thing exists anywhere except in the wizards’ manual and her own thoughts? Or if It did exist, what evidence do we have that It did what she says It does? The manual, yes: but who knows how much of that is worth anything?”

Dairine took a gamble. “The way to test this data,” she said, “is for you to accept it for the moment, and watch what happens when you start trying to help me stop the Lone One. It’ll turn up to sabotage the effort fast enough. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if It was here already somewhere, watching for the best way to crash the program.”