Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (21 page)

That one looks about right,
Dairine thought. She glanced down at the set of coordinates burning just under the surface before her.

Light blasted out and away from her through the surface, curving and twining away in all directions as long sentences in the Speech etched themselves under it in living fire. She had a peculiar sense that someone else was in the spell with her. Not the Motherboard, not the mobiles, not Spot or Roshaun: nothing living—or at least not with the usual kind of life. All around her, the mobiles glowed more brightly by the moment as the spell drew on the Motherboard’s manual functions and showed Dairine what to say.

The feeling of the sheer power running through her astounded Dairine.
I’d forgotten it could be like this…
The throb of it ran up her arms and into her brain; she stood up slowly, let it build.
If it wasn’t for how desperate all this is, I could really enjoy this.

And she
was
enjoying it. There was no use pretending otherwise. Dairine started to speak the words in the Speech that were the search coordinates. The sound of them going out of her was like thunder. They shook her from side to side as she spoke them, streaking out into the structure of the wizardry to build its fire higher, second by second.

Across the diagram, Roshaun knelt at his focus point, his expression full of the terror and exaltation of the power that was suddenly his by virtue of his connection to the wizardry and the Motherboard. Dairine couldn’t remember ever having seen so naked and open an expression on his face before. Past him, in its container, the Sunstone blazed the orange-gold of Wellakh’s star.

You okay?
Dairine said silently.

He lifted his eyes to hers. The look slammed into Dairine with force that felt like it should have knocked her down. The world whited out. It was as if the two of them stood in Earth’s Sun again, working the spell that drained off the excess energy which would have made the Sun flare up and roast the side of Earth facing toward it. But this time the roiling sea of power above which they stood was partly the Motherboard, and partly Dairine—or, rather, the surface of Dairine’s mind as Roshaun saw it.

From Roshaun, Dairine got the sense of someone standing on a narrow bridge over what looked like untameable, furious chaos paired with infinite power. That power was speaking to him, too, tempting him to get a little closer to the edge.
Don’t get any ideas!
Dairine said silently.

The answer was a strange low garbled roar, one she instantly recognized, since it had shocked her so when first she’d heard it.
The Sun said something, and I didn’t understand.
But now it was Roshaun saying something in the Speech, and once again Dairine wasn’t getting it.
Impossible. Everything understands the Speech!

She shook her head.
No time for it now,
she thought.
It’s some weirdness to do with him; we’ll figure it out later.
The rest of the Speech was working just fine; the spell lay before her, ready to implement.

Dairine took a breath and said the single word in the Speech that is the shorthand for the wizard’s knot, the “go” word of the spell.

Everything went dark. Then images began to superimpose themselves on the darkness, blotting out even the viewer’s sense of being at the center of a point of view, so that Dairine felt more like a bodiless presence than an observer. She saw the strange slick cloud of some atom’s shell, from the inside, an undersky fuzzy with probabilities. The “sky” rushed toward her, blew past her like fog, leaving her gazing out on interstitial space alive with the neon ripples of “strong force” between a seemingly infinite latticework of atoms. Another few breaths, and the view was a solid mass of chains of molecules, writhing among one another like a nest of snakes. Another blurring outward rush, and reddish lightning rattled and sizzled everywhere, whip-cracking down the length of strange bumpy textures like a child’s blocks strung on rope. Another rush, and everything went milky and crystalline, with a faint strange movement going on outside the surface of the crystal.

One last blur of fog descended, and the image resolved itself into a peculiar view seen through eyes that fringed every object with brilliant rainbows of color. It was a landscape, all in flat dark reds, the sky black with heat; and finally there was a point of view associated with it.
This is it,
Dairine said, exultant.
This is what the world looks like for the person who’s got the Instrumentality. Now all we need to find is
where
they are.

The envisioning routine backed out several steps farther. A smallish, ocean-girdled planet circled a giant white sun, the fourth of its eight worlds. Another jump, and the star dwindled down to just one of a drift of thousands in an irregular galaxy’s core.

Several long strings of characters in the Speech appeared by that galaxy, tagging it and numerous others around it that were visible only as tiny cloudy whorls or disks.

Okay,
Dairine said.
Store that.
And she waited until the data was stored, and then said the word that cut the wizard’s knot and dissolved the spell.

The space between the towers reappeared. Slowly the spell diagram faded, leaving only the image of the “found” galaxy, and the outlines of the circles in which all the spell’s participants had stood. Dairine let out a long breath. She was a little tired, but nothing like as exhausted as she should have been after such an effort.

“I can’t get over that,” Dairine said, as Beanpole and Logo and the others made their way over toward her and Roshaun. “It was like the wizardry was helping me, somehow…”

“It’s the power-increase effect, the peridexis,” Beanpole said. “We’ve been taking advantage of it, too.”

Dairine walked out of her circle to where the image of the tagged galaxy burned just under the surface. She bent down to look at the annotations. “It’s fairly close to our own galaxy. At least we won’t have any more really big transits to deal with when we get back.”

“That’s well enough,” Roshaun said, settling the torc with the Sunstone about his neck. “We may know where the person with access to the Instrumentality can be found. But if we can’t get them to give it to us, or learn how to use it to stop the expansion, this will all have been for nothing.”

“I’m not gonna throw our own universe in the trash just yet,” Dairine said. She peered down at the tagging characters next to the galaxy. “Good, it’s got a New General Catalog number: NGC 5518. It’s in Boötes, somewhere.” Then she stopped. “What’s this?” she said over her shoulder to the mobiles.

Spot came over to her from his own circle, and put out several eyes to examine the word in the Speech that Dairine was indicating. “Enthusiasmic,” he said.

Dairine frowned. “You mean enthusiastic.”

“It says enthusiasmic,” Spot said.

“That’s not a word!”

“It is now,” said Spot.

Roshaun came to look over Dairine’s shoulder. “And what is that word next to it supposed to be?” he said. “Incorporation?” He looked bemused.

“So this is a word that didn’t have a meaning until just recently?” Dairine said to Spot. “A word for something new.”

“So I believe,” Spot said.

Dairine shook her head. “Enthusiasmic incorporation,” she said. “Of the hesper—” Then Dairine blinked, and a moment later her eyes widened.

“That’s not a word in the Speech,” said Gigo, sounding perplexed.

“No,” Dairine said. “It’s not. But it’s a word we know in English. Or part of one.” She swallowed. “Enthusiasmic incorporation of the Hesper—”

She hurriedly bent down and picked Spot up. “Quick,” she said. “You have to message Nita for me. Or one of the others. I don’t care where they are. Just get me one of those guys!”

The ground underneath all their various feet or treads or wheels came alive with the kind of display that would have shown on Spot’s screen, had it been open—the apple-without-a-bite imagery of the manual software’s Earth-sourced version, rippling bluely under the surface. And then the message, both written in the Speech and seemingly speaking itself into their bones:
Messaging refused. Please try again later.

“Refused?” Roshaun said.

“They’re somewhere where they can’t take an incoming communication, because they’re scared they might be overheard,” Dairine said. She bit her lip.

“Perhaps we should simply go to them,” Roshaun said.

“You’re exactly right,” Dairine said, putting Spot down again. She turned to the mobiles. “Guys, I hate to spell and run, but we’ve got to find them right away—because if they don’t realize what they’re dealing with, they’re going to mess it up. And if it gets messed up this once, then the whole universe is screwed up forever.”

“Even more screwed up than it is at the moment?” Roshaun said.

“You have no idea,” Dairine said. “Come on, let’s open up a gate and
get going
!”

Kit came half awake to the sound of something bumping on the floor, very fast, and something jingling. He opened one eye.

Dim light—the wizard-light he’d left hovering near the ceiling in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night—showed him Ponch, sitting by where the door of the pup tent would be when Kit spoke it open. Ponch was scratching behind his collar, turning it around and around as he scratched.

It wasn’t as if Kit didn’t hear this jingling nearly every day. What had awakened him was the utter silence into which the sound fell: a silence devoid of the little creaks and breathing noises that every house made, of wind or rain or weather outside the house, and of the normal world in which it all existed. Kit lay there for several moments just listening to that barren stillness. There was nothing but vacuum and cold outside.
Well, that’s all there is on the Moon, too,
Kit thought. But the Moon was different. It was within sight of home. And it didn’t have that roiling, growing darkness above it, shutting out the stars.

Kit felt around for the zipper of his sleeping bag and pulled it down, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. His pup tent was sparsely furnished compared to Nita’s. Besides his sleeping bag and some essential toiletries, mostly it seemed to contain dog food. “
You
can starve when you have to,” his mother had said to him, “but your pet won’t understand why his meals are late, whether he can talk or not! So you make sure your dog always eats before you do. And whether you do or not.” And when Kit’s mother finished with it, the “short wall” of Kit’s pup tent was half obscured by a stack of cans and bags about four feet high, not to mention five or six big bottles of watercooler water. His own supplies seemed meager by comparison—mostly beef jerky and fruit jerky and trail bars, and one or two of the kinds of cereal he didn’t mind eating straight from the box, since finding milk while out on errantry was usually a problem.

I have to go out,
Ponch said, standing up and shaking himself.

“Okay,” Kit said, reaching for his manual. “I’ll make you an air bubble.”

No, it’s all right,
Ponch said.
I can take air with me, if I think about it.

Kit stood up and stretched.
Maybe it’s not just our power that’s getting boosted,
he thought.

Would you open the door?
Ponch said.
I have to go!

“Okay, just a minute.” Kit pulled on his jeans and had to hunt for his sweatshirt before he found it had somehow managed to get under his sleeping bag.

Kit pulled it on. Ponch had started turning in circles on the pup-tent floor, either in excitement or because he really needed to be out of there. “Okay, okay,” Kit said, and reached down for the door’s little spell tab, which acted like the pull on a zipper. A long spill of words in the Speech came up on the plain gray wall, showing him details about the outside environment: some words flashed urgently on and off to remind Kit that there was hard vacuum outside.

Kit just pulled up on the tab. Like a blind going up, the silvery-gray surface of the pup tent gave way to a view of the barren surface of the planetoid where they had camped. Ponch burst out through the interface, galloping away across the surface and bouncing in the lower gravity. Kit watched him go, noting idly that this place wasn’t as dusty as the Moon, even though it felt much older.

He went back to the sleeping bag and rooted around for his socks, put them on, and his sneakers, and then picked up his manual. “Bookmark, please?” he said to it.

The manual’s pages riffled through to an image of the world to which Ponch had brought them. The world had no name that living beings had ever given it. Nonetheless, it had its own name in the Speech, Metemne, and the manual showed its location, well out toward the edge of a small irregular galaxy some hundreds of thousands of light-years past the Local Group.
A long way from home…

Kit paged through the manual to his routines for vacuum management, found the one that he’d been using on the Moon, and spoke the words that would activate his personal bubble. Then he stepped out through the pup-tent door onto the rough dark gray surface.

Except for the position of the planet’s little star, now high in the sky, nothing had changed; the dark shifting and swarming of the Pullulus continued.
I didn’t think I could hate something just because of the way it looked,
Kit thought,
but I think I hate that. Maybe because I feel so much like it hates me.

Kit glanced off to his left. There was a little rise off in that direction, and he could see the soft slow wreathing of the fire about the head of the Spear of Light, jutting up from behind a massive boulder at the top of the rise. Ronan was still on guard, or if he wasn’t, the Defender in him was.
It has to be weird,
Kit thought,
to have something, someone, like that, sharing brain space with you. But at least He’s on our side. I think…

Kit sighed. Once it hadn’t been so complicated. If someone was a wizard, they were on your side, on the right side. But these days, the mere exercise of wizardry wasn’t a guarantee. You found yourself wondering about people’s motives all the time. And if you didn’t know them well, you started to be less certain about turning your back on them in a tight situation.