Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (18 page)

Roshaun stared at her in shock. “Then we are over our universe’s event horizon,” he said softly. “That galaxy there, and the one we’re in now… they would have intrinsic velocities faster than light. As far as our home galaxy is concerned, this place doesn’t even exist.”

“You got it,” Dairine said. “And for people here,
our
galaxy doesn’t exist. Except they know it does, because I came from there.” She stood up cautiously. Despite the size of the planet, the gravity here was less than that of Earth; the effect was like being on Mars, and left you light enough to bounce if you weren’t careful. Roshaun looked around at the curious surface—slick as glass and dappled with faint drifts of color buried under the perfectly level surface. Here and there across the surface were scattered various sharp cone shapes. “Volcanic,” Roshaun said.

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “The volcanoes laid down the surface structure, all these layers of silicon and trace elements. It goes down for miles; the whole place is one big computer chip. But it’s a lot quieter now than I remember it.” “Quieter” had more than one meaning, for the place to which she and Roshaun had transited had been the birthplace of the mobile species, the scene of the end of her Ordeal, and the site of a battle that had cratered or reduced to slag a deal of the surrounding real estate. Those craters remained, as did glass heaped and humped by the terrible forces that had melted it and spattered it for miles around. Elsewhere, the surface looked much as it had when she had first arrived—like the surface of a gigantic billiard ball, except where the cones of the ancient volcanoes pointed at the sky. And it was as empty. Dairine looked around in vain for any sign of a welcoming committee.

Roshaun had turned his attention to the planet’s star. “There’s something odd about the primary’s flare pattern.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Dairine said. “I chucked a black hole into it.”

Roshaun put his eyebrows up. “Stars in your neighborhood seem to have a rough time of it.”

“If ours acts weird, talk to Nita,” Dairine said, rather annoyed. “First time it went out was on
her
watch.”

Roshaun slipped out of the gauzy overrobe he had been wearing on Wellakh and folded it up. “You know quite well the Isolate was to blame,” he said, reaching sideways for access to the space pocket in which he stored things while on the road. He stuffed his formal overrobe into the claudication’s opening, then came out with that oversized T-shirt of Carmela’s again, and slipped into it. “That brief snuffing may be the cause of your star’s recent instability.”

Dairine got up, too. “Well, I still want to know why, when the Sun was talking to us, I couldn’t understand what it was saying, even though we were all working in the Speech.”

Roshaun shook his head. “The situations we have been dealing with have been unusual for all of us,” he said. “And you were under considerable strain. If you—”

“Are you saying I couldn’t cope with the stress?” Dairine said. “I seem to remember that
you—
”

Then she stopped, seeing his expression. “Sorry,” Dairine said, turning away. “Sorry. Why do I have to bite you every time you say something that might be useful?”

Very quietly, Roshaun said, “When you find out, do let me know. It’s information I might find useful as well.”

Dairine let out a breath and looked around. “But where
is
everybody? I don’t get it; this is where I saw them last.”

She turned, scanning that impossibly distant horizon. In all that huge space, nothing moved. Dairine let out a long breath and got ready to drop to her knees and get in closer circuit with the Motherboard, to send a message she hadn’t thought she of all people would have had to send:
Hey, guys, I’m here. Anybody home?

“Wait,” Roshaun said. “What is that?”

Dairine turned to look. A single small shape came steadily toward them across the pale, pink-glazed surface of the world, light from the whirlpool of stars glancing off its shiny shell. It was apparently just a hemisphere about half a meter wide, scooting along the floor of the world like a windup toy—the impression made that much stronger because of the movement of all the little legs around its outer edges. The dome was a pale translucent white, striated in cross section with thin bands and layers of many colors. And it glowed as if between some of the layers a faint light burned, illuminating the layers above and below like moonlight through stained glass.

Dairine grinned and took off at a trot toward the little scurrying shape, being careful about the gravity. Shortly the leading edge of the bubble of air she took with her “ran over” the little approaching dome; and the instant it did, the dome began to decelerate, looking at her with many-lensed eyes that bubbled out in a breath’s time on its forward surface.

“With?” it said in the Speech, and then burst out laughing.

Dairine skidded to a stop, laughing, too, at the reminder of the first thing this mobile, or any other, had said to her. She reached down, picked him up, and swung him around. “
Gigo!
”

“As always,” the mobile said, wiggling his legs a little, and exuding the same innocent pleasure that had been his specialty since he was born. “Dairine, it’s good to have you back in the flesh!”

“Sorry it took so long,” she said, feeling guilty. “It wasn’t easy to come, right after my Ordeal. There was so much to do. And then my power levels changed…”

“We know,” Gigo said. “But you had business to do closer to home. And not even at power levels like your first ones would it be easy for a wizard to come all this way out to the Edge of Things, especially just to be social! It doesn’t matter. We knew you’d come back when you could.”

She hugged Gigo again. “You always were good at understanding,” Dairine said, putting him down. “Look, I brought a friend. Roshaun—”

Roshaun slipped into Dairine’s air bubble and paused to gaze down at the mobile. “We know him very well,” Gigo said. “We looked at him through you a long time ago. Sunlord, you’re welcome.”

Roshaun bowed. “An honor, Designate,” he said. “And well met on our common journey.”

“You are, indeed,” Gigo said. “And here is our oldest colleague.”

Spot came ambling along. Gigo stepped over to him, and the two of them paused, shell to laptop case, silent for a moment while they communed. “
Dataaaaaa…
” Spot said under his breath.

“The breath of life,” Gigo said. “We’ll be trading a lot more of that. Dairine, come on, there’s much to do.”

“Yeah,” she said, and glanced around. “Where
is
everybody?”

Gigo looked around as if confused. “Where is—” And then he laughed. “Oh, they wouldn’t have come
here!
This is the birthplace, where we began. We try to keep it as it was, the way you do with this one—” And the undersurface of the ground under their feet abruptly flashed out of translucence into imagery, coming alive with a vast glowing image of the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity, and the place where the first lunar module had landed. The four of them seemed to stand in the middle of one corrugation of a single immense boot-print pressed into the powdery dust.

Dairine broke up laughing. “Wow!” she said, turning right around to see how far the imagery effect went; it flooded straight out to the horizon. “What have you guys been
doing
to this place?”

“Remaking it in our image,” Gigo said. “Though we’re still working out just what that is.”

“Okay. Where do we go from here?”

“Oh, we don’t have to
go
anywhere,” Gigo said. The boot-print flickered out, to be replaced by a sudden tide of multicolored light that rushed away in all directions, tracing a myriad of glowing lines and curves under the glassy surface—the outlines of geometrical figures, and deeper down the three-dimensional shapes of solids; spheres and cubes and hypercubes, interlocking, interacting in sizzling bursts of light that were also words and characters in the Speech.

Roshaun looked out across the spreading plain of light and let out another long breath of astonishment. “This is all one great spell diagram,” he said, as the patterning fled toward the horizons, and past them. “The whole planet!”

Gigo grew a ball-jointed handling arm and gestured off toward one side. There, amid the lines of light, an empty circle grew: a gating nexus. “If you’ll stand over here—”

Dairine and Roshaun and Spot made their way over, stepped over the boundary, and stood inside. “At least this worldgating won’t make me feel like the last one,” she said to Gigo.

“Almost certainly not,” Gigo said.

And to Dairine’s astonishment, the circle started to slide across the vast spell diagram as a mobile inclusion, skating across it the way a drop of water scoots across a hot frying pan. The rest of the spell slid and slipped around it, letting the circle pass. Slowly it began to accelerate, and the spell diagram around them poured past more and more quickly until it was one great multicolored blur.

Dairine kept wanting to brace herself against something as the acceleration increased, but there was nothing to hold on to—and there didn’t seem to be any need to brace. Though the glowing spell diagram landscape slid more and more quickly past, she and Roshaun and Spot and Gigo might have been standing perfectly still in the middle of the plain. “Are you guys messing around with
inertia
somehow?” Dairine said to Gigo.

She got the sense that Gigo was grinning. “For transits like this,” he said, “we temporarily rewrite the kernel that manages local gravity and mass in our solar system. It’s no big deal.”

“Oh, listen to you,” Dairine said, and snickered. “‘No big deal.’”

“They certainly take after you,” Roshaun said.

“I’d like to think it’s mutual,” Dairine said. Certainly for a while after she’d come back from her Ordeal, she’d often awakened in the middle of the night and not been quite certain whether she was human or machine anymore—mortal creature or living manual. To find herself looking at her bedroom ceiling, and not this remote and spectacular sky, had sometimes come as a shock to a mind still filled with the glowing afterimages of spells being built faster than any human being could think. Now here was the concrete reality behind the images, spreading itself out before her—a world of true computer wizards, already evolved far past anything she would have had the brains to create, and still evolving at speeds Dairine couldn’t grasp, mired as she was in the kind of thoughtspeed mandated by a brain made of carbon compounds and water.
Any comparison between the mobiles and me has got to be flattering. Or it will be later, assuming we can all figure out something to help us
have
there be a later.

Ahead of the transit circle, something poked up above the horizon. At first Dairine thought it was more volcanoes. But these shapes were more regular than volcanoes, far more pointed, and much too tall. As the transit circle shot toward them, Dairine realized that she was looking at huge needlelike towers, all of the same glossy silicon as the planet’s surface. No tower on Earth could have been so tall; only the low gravity here made such buildings possible… along with a little magic. The towers glittered where the setting red sun’s light caught them, high up, and every one was etched with the white fire of wizardry in endless moving patterns of words in the Speech and symbols from spell diagrams.

The place was one huge wizardry endlessly in progress, the typical shimmer of a working spell wavering around every tower like a halo of pale fire. The whole vast interlinked structure hummed with a faint vibration, its own version of the silence that leaned in around a wizardry as you said the words of the spell in the Speech. But here, Dairine knew, the words were being spoken by the planet’s interlinked machine intelligences faster than any noncomputer being could utter them. Working in “quicklife” time, thousands of times faster than any Earthbound computer, the intricacy of the mobiles’ spells would be far beyond anything a human wizard could ever live long enough to construct. At the thought, Dairine’s heart leaped; it was the first time she’d dared to feel real hope in their present situation.
If anybody can help us find a way to stop the darkness,
she thought,
it’s these guys.

The towers just kept rearing up and up, and time and time again Dairine had to readjust her sense of scale. Part of the problem was the planet’s size; it was bigger than Earth, and the more distant look of the horizon played tricks on her. But as the transit circle drew closer to the towers, and their bases proved to be as wide as the base of the Empire State Building but their peaks more than four times as tall, Dairine gave up trying to work out from moment to moment how big things were.
Just really, really big,
she thought.
My guys have been busy!

As she looked ahead and the transit circle started slowing down, it seemed to Dairine that the ground at the feet of the towers was darker than elsewhere. They got closer, and the effect started to look strangely granular—

And then Dairine saw what was causing it, and her mouth went dry. The diagram was exactly as it had been all the way across the planet’s surface. The difference here was that it was obscured by the bodies of shifting mobiles—thousands of them; hundreds of thousands of them.
Maybe millions…

The transit circle slowed; the obscuring shapes became more distinct as they approached the edge of the central ring of towers. Crowded around the towers’ bases were many shapes that Dairine had invented—mobiles with all kinds of manipulating devices and oculars, sporting locomotors of every kind, from legs to wheels to treads. But there were also countless new shapes more involved and outré than anything she could have thought of. The transit circle slipped between two of the towers, heading for the center of the mile-wide ring of spires. The waiting mobiles concentrated in that great space drew aside to let it pass, a great crowd of tall slim shapes like trees of glass, low broad mobiles like domes or cylinders, all glittering with reflected wizard-fire.

“Just
look
at all of you,” Dairine said to Gigo, astonished.

“You said that we should make more of ourselves to share the world with,” Gigo said. “So, after you left, we did.”