“Still running.”
“How much longer?”
“Three point two minutes.”
Dairine sat back to wait, absently rubbing the surface she sat on. The smoothness of it was strange: not even the maria on the Moon were this smooth. Volcanic eruption, maybe. But not the way it usually happens, with the lava flowing down the volcano’s sides and running along the surface. Not enough gravity for it to do that, I guess. Maybe it’s like the volcanoes on Io: the stuff goes up high in tiny bits or droplets, then comes down slowly in the low gravity and spreads itself out very smooth and even. It must go on all the time… or else there can’t be much in this system in the way of even tiny meteors. Maybe both. She shook her head. It spoke of an extremely ancient planet—which made sense this far out in space….
“Ready,” the computer said, and Dairine hunkered over it to listen. “Local system stats. System age: close order of eight billion years. One primary, type S6 star, off main sequence, time from fusion ignition: close order of five billion years. One associated micro-black hole in variable orbit. One planet, distance from primary: six hundred twelve million miles. Planet diameter: fifty-six thousand miles. Planet circumference: one hundred seventy-five thousand miles—” And Dairine gulped, understanding now why that horizon ran so high. The planet was almost seven times the size of Earth. “Atmosphere: monatomic hydrogen, less than one fifty-millionth psi Terran sea level. Planetary composition: eighty percent silicon in pure form and compounds, ten percent iron and mid-sequence metals, seven percent heavy metals, one percent boron, one percent oxygen, one percent trace elements including frozen gases and solid-sequence halogens. Power advisory—”
The screen, which had been echoing all this, went blank. Dairine’s stomach flip-flopped, from fear this time. “What’s the matter?”
“System power levels nearing critical. Range to alternative-power claudication exceeded. Outside power source required.”
Dairine paused, feeling under her hand that oddly non-cold surface. “Can you use geothermal?” she said.
“Affirmative.”
“Is there some way you can tap what’s in this planet, then?”
“Affirmative,” said the computer. “Authorization for link.”
“Granted,” Dairine said, mildly surprised: she couldn’t remember the computer ever asking her for permission to do anything before. Maybe it’s a safety feature. Then she began to sweat a little. Maybe such a safety feature was wise. If the computer fried its chips somehow and left her without life support, sitting here naked to vacuum at heaven knew how many degrees below zero…
Dairine watched the screen nervously as scrambled characters flashed on it, and for several awful seconds the screen blanked. Then the menu screen reasserted itself, and Dairine breathed out, slowly, while the computer went back to running the program it had been working on. “Link established,” said the computer in absolute calm. “Planetary history—”
“Just display it onscreen, I’ll read it,” Dairine said, and started to pick the computer up: then paused. “Is it all right to move you? Will that hurt the link?”
“Negative effect on link.”
She lifted the computer into her lap and went on reading. It was as she had thought. The planet periodically became volcanically active, and the volcanoes spewed a fine mist of lava all over the landscape, airbrushing the glassy surface on a gigantic scale with vividly colored trace elements. Subsequent layering muted the colors, producing the dappled translucence she sat on. Dairine stroked the touchpad to scroll into another screenful of data, and the screenful slid upward—and her stomach flipped again.
PLANETARY HISTORY (page 2 of 16)
HELP/g/rl 18655
This unique structure becomes more interesting when considering the physical nature of the layering. Some 92 % of the layers consilt of chemically pure sillcol,! predlspollng thl agllllate to elelllllllductilllllllllllllllllllllllllll111111 11111 11111111 111 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
“I blew it up,” Dairine whispered, horrified. “Oh, no, oh, no, I fried its brains. I blew it up.”
She took a deep breath, not sure how many more of them she was going to get, and gingerly left-clicked a couple of times to see what would happen….
Pattern Recognition
Nita popped out into a canopy of starlit darkness and a carpet of dim light, breathing very hard. Earth’s gravity well was no joke: pushing her own mass and enough air to breathe for a while up out of that heavy pull was a problem. She walked over to a boulder, dusted it off, and sat down, panting, to admire the view while she waited for Kit.
The “usual place” where they met was, of course, the Moon. Nita liked it there; working, and thinking, were always easy in the great silence that no voices but astronauts’ and wizards’ had broken since the Moon’s dust was made. This particular spot, high in the mountain chain called the lunar Carpathians, was a favorite of Kit’s—a relatively flat-topped peak in a wild, dangerous country of jagged gray-white alps, cratered and pocked by millennia of meteoric bombardment. Piles of rocktumble lay here and there, choking the steep valleys where the sheer heat and cold of the lunar days had been enough to flake solid rock away from itself in great glassy or pumicey chunks. Off to one side, the pallid rim of some small unnamed crater scraped razor-sharp against the sky, and above it hung the Earth.
The Moon was at first quarter, so the Earth was at third, a blinding half-world: blazing blue-green, almost painful to look at until the eyes got used to it. It shed a cool faint blue-white light over everything. A curl of white stormweather lay over the northwestern Pacific, and there vanished; for down the middle of it the terminator ran, the edge of night, creeping ever so slowly toward the west. Most of North America lay in the darkness, and city lights lay golden in faint glittering splashes and spatters with brighter sparkling Patches under the Great Lakes and on the California coast.
Nita shrugged out of her knapsack, opened it and rechecked the contents. It was a good assortment: varied enough to handle several different classes of spell, specific enough to those classes to let her save some power for herself. Between those, and various memorized spells that needed no extra equipment to run she as well equipped.
She pulled her manual out and started paging through it for the “tracker” spell that she and Kit would need to activate when he got here. It was actually a variant of the one he’d threatened to put on Dairine in the city. This one hunted for the characteristic charged “string residue” left in space by the passage of a wizard’s transit spell through it. Nita’s specialty was astronomy, so she’d been surprised some time back to find that “empty” space wasn’t actually empty, and even the hardest vacuum had in it what physicists called “strings,” lines of potential force that have nothing to do with any of the forces physicists understand. Wizards, of course, could use them: much of what passes for telekinesis turns out in fact to be string manipulation. The tracker spell made most elegant use of it. And once we find her, Nita thought, I’m gonna tie a few of those strings around her neck….
But it didn’t do to start a wizardry in such a mood. Nita pulled her Space Pen out of her pocket, kicked some of the larger rocks out of her way—they bounced off down the mountain as slowly as soap bubbles—and began using the blunt end of the pen to draw the circle for the transit spell.
It was becoming an old familiar diagram, this one. The basic circle, knotted with the terminator symbol called the Wizard’s Knot: her own personal data, reduced by now (after much practice) to one long scrawl in the precise and elegant shorthand version of the
Speech: Kit’s data, another scrawl, over which she took even more care than her own. What a wizard names in the Speech, is defined so: inaccurate naming can alter the nature of the named, and Nita liked Kit just the way he was. A third long scrawl of shorthand for Picchu: Nita looked oddly at some of the variables in it, but Tom had given her the data, and he certainly knew what he was doing. Then the internal diagrams, the “intent” factors. The point of origin, the intended point of arrival or vector of travel; the desired result; the time parameters and conditional statements for life support; the balloon-diagram for the ethical argument…
Nita wiped sweat and grit off her face, and muttered at the incessant hissing in the background. Dust flew freely in one-sixth gravity, and got in everything: after you went to the Moon, you took a shower, for the same reasons you take one after a haircut. But there wasn’t much more to do here. Nita finished the last few strokes of the notations in the environmental-im-pact statement and stood up, rubbing her back and checking her work for spelling errors.
It was all in order. But that hissing….
She sat down again, feeling nervous. Facility with the Speech, as with any other language, increases with time. After several months of working in a sort of pidgin Speech, Nita was finally beginning to think in it, and the results were sometimes upsetting. Once upon a time, it had been quiet on the Moon when she visited… but no more. Her more accustomed mind heard a sound in the darkness now: a long low sound like a breath being let out, and out, and out forever. The astronomer part of her knew what it was—the so-called four-degree radiation that was all that was left of the universe’s birth.
Normally only radio telescopes set to the right frequency could hear it. But Nita wasn’t normal any more. Nor was the sound just a sound to her. In it she could hear the sound of consciousness, life, as plainly as she’d initially been able to hear Kit think. That sensitivity had decreased over time; but this one was increasing, it seemed in the deep silence, by the minute. It upset her. Suddenly the universe, which had seemed so empty, now felt crammed full of powers and intelligences that might not need planets, or bodies. And Dairine was out there in the middle of them, mucking around in her inimitable fashion…. Nita found herself wishing that Kit would hurry up. She very much wanted to see that cheerful face, to hear at least his voice, if not his sassy, loud cast of thought, always with that slight Hispanic accent to it….
Long time since we heard each other think….
She’d been wondering about that for a while. Idly she began flipping through the manual, turning pages. Maybe the index— But the index did her no good: she couldn’t think what heading to look under. “Come on,” she muttered to the book, “give me a hand here, I don’t have all day.”
It was that hissing that was making her ill-tempered, she realized. A thought occurred to her, and she was glad she hadn’t completely cleaned out her knapsack the other day. She reached into it and pulled out a tangle of earphone cord, and a pair of earphones, and her MP3 player. It was a Christmas present from her mother—the best of any present Nita had gotten last year, for she loved music and liked walking through her day with a soundtrack. Now she riffled through the pages of her manual, squinting at them in the pale Earth-light, while rock sang softly in the earphones.
Diagrams… She skipped that whole section, not without another glance over at Kit’s name scrawled in the motionless, powdery lunar dust. He was all there. Or at least, he seemed to think so: it was mostly the description of himself he had carefully worked out. Of course, after their first few spells Nita had looked over his shoulder and suggested a couple additions to the data—his preference for vanilla ice cream (which he had instantly admitted), and his craziness for poetry, especially Shakespeare (which embarrassed him, and which he had refused to admit to for several days). The look on his face when I caught him reading The Tempest. Still, he admitted it, finally… She smiled a little then. Kit hadn’t taken long to point out that her data said nothing about the fact that she devoured horse books one after another, or that he had once caught her with a long stick in hand, having an energetic swordfight with one of the trees in the vacant lot….
And where is he?!
She sighed and glanced down at the pages that had fallen open in her hand. One of them said:
Wizards in the closest relationships, leading toward permanent partnership, usually find that nonverbal communication becomes rare or difficult. Other conditions obtain for other species, but for human wizards, intimacy is meaningless without barriers to overcome—and to lower. Wizards usually have little need for such in the early stages of their careers. But as this situation changes, as the wizard becomes more adept at accurate description in the Speech, and therefore more adept at evaluating the people he or she works with, the wizard’s mind typically adapts to the new requirements by gradually shutting out the person most—
—permanent partnership?
No. Oh, no—
Nita swallowed with a throat suddenly gone dry, and slapped the book shut. For a moment she tried to do nothing but listen to the tape. It was something of Journey’s—their distinctive sweet keyboards and synthesizers, wistful, singing down toward silence. And then the vocal:
“Looking down I watch the night
running from the sun;
orphan stars and city lights
fading one by one….
Oh, sweet memories, I call on you now…”
Of course, Nita thought, there was a lot of it going around school. Dating, going steady, talk about hooking up, sexting, all the other silliness. Her mother had forbidden Nita to date or to even talk about going steady yet, telling her she was way too young. Nita didn’t mind: it all seemed idiotic to her. Sometimes, seeing how crazed some of the other girls her age were over the boy question, she wondered if she was normal. She was too busy, for one thing. She had something solider than going steady. When you were a wizard—
—with a partner—
Oh, come on. It’s not as if they’re going to make you marry him or something! Look at Tom and Carl, they’re just buddies, they work together because they enjoy doing it….
But I don’t want…
Nita trailed off. She didn’t know what she wanted. She put her head down in her hands, trying to think, but no answers came: only more problems. Thoughts of Kit backing her up when she was terrified, cheering her up when she was annoyed, Kit being the solid, reliable voice in the other half of a spell, the presence on the far side of the circle, matching her cadence exactly, for the fun and the challenge of it. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with having a best friend?
He’s a boy, that’s what. And it’s starting to change. I’m starting to change.
And I’m scared.
She gazed up through unending night, down at oncoming morning, and tried to work out what to do. Has he noticed this happening to him too? And suppose he starts liking someone else better than me? Will he want to keep the team going? If only I knew what he was thinking….
Then she let out a sad and annoyed breath. It’s probably nothing, Nita thought. Everything is probably fine….
“…oh, so much is wasted,” sang the earphones,
“and oh so little used!—
but the trick of the dreamer
is keeping yourself from the blues—”
Hah, Nita thought. I wish it were that simple….
And the voice that sang cried out at her, so sudden and defiant that she sat erect with startlement—
“Everyone’s a hero
if you want to be!
Everyone’s a prisoner
holding their own key!
And every step I take,
every move I make,
I’m always one step closer—
I don’t mind running alone!”
It was Steve Perry’s fierce, clear voice, uplifted in almost angry encouragement, hitting the chorus hard. He went on, singing something about children and concrete canyons, but Nita was still full of that start
lement and hardly heard. Even Dairine, she thought. There’s some job out there that only she can do… She hadn’t thought of the situation in this light before, and the thought of Dairine as a hero staggered her, and annoyed her for a moment. Her? The troublemaker, the endless nuisance?
But then Nita felt ashamed. What had she been herself, not more than a few months ago? Basically a coward, afraid of everything, including herself— friendless, quiet and smart but with no one to do any good by being so. Things were different now: but who was she to deny Dairine her chance at being more than she had been? And every step I take, every move I make, I’m always one step closer….
…And if she can do that, Nita thought after a moment, I can sure ask him what he thinks about things—
A sudden movement off to one side brought Nita’s head around with a snap. In utter silence, silvery-white dust was kicking up in a vague pale cloud from where a tall man in a polo shirt and shorts was standing. Tom bounced over to where Nita sat, being careful of his footing. Nita admired the way he bounced: he had obviously had a lot of practice at the kangaroo hop that works well in low gravities.
Tom paused not too far from Nita to let her shieldspell recognize his and allow it to infringe, then sat down beside Nita on the boulder, casting an analytical eye over her spell diagram. “Very neat,” he said. “Nice structure. Carl has been contaminating you, I see.”
“Thanks.”
“Kit just called me,” Tom said, brushing dust off himself. “He’ll be up in a few… he’s just settling things with his folks. I’m going to be talking to them later.” Tom smiled wearily. “This seems to be my night.”
“Yeah.”
More silver dust kicked up, closer and to the right. There was Kit, with his knapsack over his back and Picchu on one shoulder. “All set,” he said to Tom when he’d gotten close enough to get in-shield with the two of them.
“You okay?” Nita said.
Kit shrugged, nodded. “There was a lot of hollering. But I think my dad’s proud, even though he made so much noise. Mom was surprisingly calm about it.” Then he laughed, a little wickedly. “My sisters are in shock.”