“How many of those things do you have?” Dairine said.
“Not nearly enough,” Roshaun said.
Dairine sighed and took it. “Fine, we’ll rot together.”
She stuck the lollipop in her mouth and worked on it quietly for a few minutes, glad that it was one of the fudgy ones that she preferred. The neighboring galaxy rose slowly behind the spires of the mobiles’ city while the two of them watched, and the stately, silent immensity of its going started to settle and calm Dairine’s mind the way the rising of the Moon did at home. Before her eyes, something endlessly bigger and older than she was going about its ancient business as usual. The thought came to Dairine after some moments that no matter what the abnormal expansion might do to the universe, even though all life might be destroyed, somehow, someday, there would be another awakening. It might take uncountable years, but the Life that wizards served was just too permanent, too tenacious, too wily. It would outlast its enemy, no matter how long it took. And suddenly Dairine got a flicker-glimpse of a new morning somewhere, somewhen—dew on long grass, and low sunlight turning it all to diamonds; an overturned game board, the pieces scattered in the fresh wet green; and hands reaching down to pick the pieces up and put the game back in order again—
The image fled. Dairine shook her head, uncertain where it had come from.
“I have seen that, too,” Roshaun said after a moment.
Dairine looked at him sidewise. “You’ve been hearing me think?”
He tilted his head in the odd way that Wellakhit used for “yes.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
Roshaun just gazed up at the rising galaxy.
“It can mean,” Dairine said, unable to leave it alone, “that wizards are getting—”
“Too close?” He still didn’t look at her, but Dairine felt that he was still, somehow, considering her very closely. “How close is too close? Neither of us thinking of doing anything… inappropriate.”
“Huh,” Dairine said. She moved the lollipop from right to left in her mouth, and then from left to right again, and finally said, “I don’t know how ‘inappropriate’ looks to your people.”
“You should read the manual more,” Roshaun said.
“Seemed simpler to ask you.”
“And possibly more embarrassing.”
“Maybe I just like yanking your chain,” Dairine said, “as much as you like yanking mine.”
Roshaun’s expression was bemused. “The idiom is peculiar,” he said after a few moments, “except insofar as it implies we’re linked.”
Dairine stayed quiet.
“My father’s concerns about the two of us,” Roshaun said, “I take as an indication of other things that were going on with him right then. Wellakhit are not moved to seek unionbond with another until at least a third of the way along in our life span. I am nowhere near that, and you, if I’m right, would be only about a sixth of a way along, as your people reckon time.”
Dairine did the multiplication. “Sounds about right,” she said. “You do have the idea of being ‘just good friends?’”
He gave her a sidewise look. “For so high and honorable an estate,” Roshaun said, “‘just’ seems a poor modifier to choose.”
Crunch! went the lollipop Roshaun was working on, and Dairine flinched.
“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“You are always hearing trouble before it happens,” Roshaun said. “Some might say it was a sign of a lack of faith in the benevolence of the universe. Or of dysfunction.”
Dairine glared at him. “You keep this up, I’ll give you a dysfunction where you’ll have trouble finding it again,” she muttered.
“Now there you have it,” Roshaun said. “All this aggressiveness! I wonder about you sometimes.”
You wonder about me! Dairine thought.
Yes, Roshaun said in the back of her head.
Dairine saw that Roshaun was wearing a brooding look. “And what’s the matter with you?” she said.
Roshaun let out an annoyed breath. “My father,” he said at last. “My business with him did not go as I thought it would.”
“What? You expected him to just roll over and agree with whatever you told him?”
“On the contrary,” Roshaun said. “I expected a great fight with storming and shouting. Then everything would have been over with, and in a short time we would have been set at rights with one another again. But this—this calm complaisance—” Roshaun shook his head. “It sounded nothing like the way he usually does. It troubles me.”
“Well, I was sure troubled,” Dairine said, “and if that was him being calm—”
Roshaun laughed. “And you thought I was so lucky to have a wizard for a parent.”
“Is it possible for me to admit you might have been right without you rubbing it in?” Dairine said.
Roshaun gazed out into the darkness as if giving a strange new concept some thought. “Perhaps,” he said. “Next time I’ll try.”
They leaned back in their chairs again and looked at the silently rising galaxy. “Forgive us,” said a voice down on the ground between their feet, “but we’re ready for you now.”
They both looked down. Logo was there, and his back was roiling with Speech charactery, a brilliantly blending muddle of symbols and figures. Dairine looked down at the shifting patterns chasing themselves across Logo’s hide and suddenly, unreasonably, found them threatening. She swallowed. “What do you need us to do?” she said, and got up.
“We’ll be setting up the diagram out here,” Logo said. “You’ll want to check it, of course, to make sure that your personal information is complete and correct.”
Logo trundled out into the very center of the huge open area inside the circle of towers. The mobiles all around drew back and left the great space empty; under Dairine’s and Roshaun’s feet, the surface went dark, and that darkness ran straight up the surrounding towers and extinguished their fire.
Dairine could feel the jolt of power that passed between Logo and the surface. From the low dome of his back, a multilobed diagram far more complex and more densely interlaced than anything Dairine had seen so far raced out across to the towers and up them. Light in many colors burned bright and dim through the pattern as it established itself, the color and brightness of every line and curve signaling the relative importance of the part of the spell involved.
Dairine gulped at the immensity of it. “Wow,” she said. “Even you guys couldn’t have built this whole wizardry just now!”
“No,” Logo said. “We had help. You’ll see.” He sprouted an arm and waved it across the expanse of the wizardry. Three relatively dark patches had been left open in the diagram, each of them a many-sided polygon with a minimum of inscribed words in the Speech inside. “There are your spots,” Logo said. “Yours over there, Dairine. Roshaun, yours there.”
The two spots in question were perhaps ten meters apart. Dairine went to hers and stood in it; the diagram around her started to glow brighter as she took her place. She knelt down, found the wizard’s knot that marked the beginning and ending of her name in the Speech, and began to trace the many-branched curve of it right around the circle.
Spot scurried out of the crowd of mobiles to settle himself in the third, smaller dark patch that had opened up. “I’ll be storing the proceedings,” he said, “so that if you need to refer to them later, you’ll have everything handy.”
“Okay,” she said, turning a little to get a better view of the next part of her name. “How’re you feeling?”
Spot paused. “Different,” he said.
He’s not the only one, Dairine thought. She traced along one section of the long sequence of Speech-characters, which made up the description of her that was crucial to a working wizardry. Some of its elements spoke more of the machine than the human. She’d seen those growing slowly since her Ordeal, and during her affiliation with Spot, but today some of them were crowding the strictly human qualities somewhat. “Yo
u feel better?” Dairine said to Spot.
“I think so,” Spot said. “Clearer, anyway.”
“Good,” she said, and turned to Roshaun. “You ready for it?”
“Yes,” Roshaun said, and looked down at her with an amused expression. “Always assuming you don’t need time to compose yourself because you have been panicked by the sheer size of the impending wizardry. Even I am impressed.”
Dairine smiled a half smile. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you are,” she said.
Most of the mobiles who had gathered to see their arrival had now crowded back out of the space, but not because they weren’t participating. Underneath every mobile Dairine could see, a small circle of power was flaring—each one’s own name and a power-conduit linking it to the central wizardry. Logo, Gigo, Beanpole, and Hex made their way out into the center of the master spell diagram, where similar circles flared under each of them. They were followed by the rest of the core imaging team, who arranged themselves around the inner four at the vertices of a hexagon.
“We are nearly ready,” said Beanpole.
“But one question,” Logo said. He turned toward Roshaun. “What’s that you bear?”
Roshaun looked around him in confusion. “What—Oh, this,” he said, looking down at the great stone around his neck. “It’s a token of my office as Sunlord.”
“Its structure is unusual; it needs to be a separate part of the spell,” Beanpole said.
Roshaun raised his eyebrows, and lifted the great torc from his throat. “If you need a description of its physical properties—”
“There,” said Beanpole, indicating a newly appearing empty spot in the wizardry, just to one side of Roshaun. A “container” for the collar bloomed there in the surface—a hollow sphere of pale filigree fire, constructed of numerous long phrases in the Speech all knitted together and burning. Roshaun went to the glowing sphere and looked it over carefully, tracing several of the longer curves of Speech with one finger. Finally he slipped the collar into the sphere. It hung there, gleaming in the white fire, turning slightly.
“Is the description accurate?” Hex said.
“So far as I can tell,” Roshaun said, making his way back to his own circle.
“Very well,” Logo said, and looked out toward Dairine, Spot, and Roshaun. “Does the ground suit?”
It was one of several traditional queries for a wizard proposing a potentially dangerous solution to a problem. Dairine looked at Roshaun, who tilted his head “yes,” and then at Spot. “Yes,” he said.
“On the Powers’ business, all ground suits,” Dairine said. “Let’s do Their work, and the One’s.”
A rustle of tension and expectation went around the huge circle. “All right,” Gigo said. “If you two would get into circuit with the Motherboard? Skin to skin, to begin with.”
Dairine sat down cross-legged in the middle of her spell diagram, and put her hands flat down on the cool surface on either side of her. The sudden jolt of power, of connectedness to everyone around her, took her completely by surprise. She wobbled as she looked back at herself through thousands of other eyes. Then she heard a voice she hadn’t directly heard until now, a rumble in the bones.
You’ve come back, the Motherboard said to Dairine. You’ve come home!
Yes, Dairine said, feeling a little embarrassed, as if she’d been out late and hadn’t let her mom know beforehand.
And you’re much more than you were, the Motherboard said.
Now Dairine started to feel the faint discomfort of someone being praised for something they haven’t actually earned. Uh—
But you are, the Motherboard said. No need to dissemble. I may be a mother, but you are mine. And you know that we never feel like we’re enough for our children, whose job is to surpass us. Ours is simply to make sure they work hard enough at it that they feel they’ve earned it when it happens.
There was a smile in the voice that Dairine would never have suspected. She grinned, too. You think we got the job done?
Without any possible question, the Motherboard said. Now let’s take on the next one.
“Okay,” she said, glancing up and over at Roshaun.
He had been looking a little blank; now he broke out of it, looked over at Dairine. “She is—quite something,” he said after a moment, sounding strangely out of breath.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Dairine said.
This wizardry must take place in two parts, the Motherboard said. We must first extract the information that our mother is carrying. After that, the implementation’s hers to direct: we’ll merely assist.
A wave of agreement went around the vast assemblage. Ready? the Motherboard said to Dairine.
Go, Dairine said.
The power started to build. Dairine felt “taps” from this world into other universes open up, spilling unimaginable amounts of force into the wizardry. Time began to stretch as the mobiles’ perception of what was happening swamped her own. Dairine started to see herself as the mobiles did—a life-form seemingly frozen in time, and as a spell diagram, tidily compartmentalized. The combined intention of the Motherboard and the mobiles sought down through her structure and focused on one of those compartments, an obscurely glowing area easily lost among other, brighter ones surrounding it in Dairine’s mind—
That compartment grew until every intricacy of its contents was made plain in a delicate lacework spattering of pale light, like nightside cities seen from space. The mobiles and the Motherboard spent what seemed like a long time examining the compartment and the data inside it. Finally, the Motherboard spoke. This is the information the Defender left, she said. It can’t be decrypted without breaking the container open.
Right, Dairine said. For the moment, she was part mobile, and could act at their speed. She reached out a hand. In this darkness all spangled with light, a hand of light reached out, laced fingers through the webwork of darkness surrounding the data, and pulled. It came away in her hand like a fistful of cobwebs. The data burst out of prison like a storm of silver bees—
The mobiles threw a net of Speech-words around them. The light of the data ran down the strands of the net, particles shifting, moving themselves into a different order. Then everything went dark again.
Logo’s voice seemed to come from somewhere far off. And now the information Spot was holding, he said. Distantly, Dairine saw another container’s contents trying to flee into the darkness—then being netted and contained, as her data had been.
The world came back. Dairine took a few breaths, stood up and stretched. It felt like she’d been sitting in the same place for an hour, though she knew it had been only a matter of seconds.
Before her, spread out in a new dark area that had opened up a couple of meters away, was a single long line of characters in the Speech. Dairine read them slowly.
“They’re coordinates,” she said then. “But not to a place. To a person. This’ll tell us who has the Instrumentality—the thing that’ll save the universe—”
“If we can find it in time,” Roshaun said. “And work out how to use it.”
“Let’s go,” Dairine said. “You guys ready?”
Show us what to do, said the Motherboard and the mobiles together.
“We need an imaging routine,” Dairine said, and knelt down in her circle again, sitting back on her heels. She put a hand down on the surface again, getting back into more direct contact with the Motherboard. In her mind a series of possible imaging routines presented themselves. Close-range out-of-atom, long-range out-of-atom—
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 w
ith 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!