“…On the news last night,” Kit said, “did you see that thing about the car in Northern Ireland?”
“No.”
“Something about one of those paramilitary groups over there that won’t go away, even though hardly anyone wants them —” Kit said. “They hijack cars as a protest, or to commit some crime.” There was something about his voice that made Nita look at him hard. “Sometimes they set the cars on fire after they hijack them.” Kit sat looking in front of him at nothing in particular, looking tired. “You know the kind of wire screen you get for station wagons, so your dog can be in the back and not get into everything?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone hijacked a car with one of those in it, the other night. With the dog in it, in the back. Then they set the car on fire. With the dog in it.”
Nita went ashen. Kit just kept looking at nothing in particular, and she knew what he was thinking of: Ponch, in Kit’s dad’s station wagon, lying around in the back too contented and lazy even to try to get into the grocery bags all around him. And someone coming up to the car—”Neets,” Kit said, after a while, “It’s just the Lone Power all over again, that kind of thing. If we really have a chance to stop that kind of thing, I’d do… whatever. I don’t care. Anything.”
She looked at him. “Anything?”
He was quiet for a long time. “Yeah.”
Eventually Nita nodded. “Me too.”
“I know,” he said.
She looked at him in surprise. “Well, look at what you did with the whales,” he said.
Nita’s mouth had gone dry. She tried to swallow. It didn’t work.
“I mean, you did that already. That’s what it was about. The Power got redeemed, a little: we know that much. Or at least It got the option to change. You did it for that. You almost got yourself killed, and you knew that might happen, and you did it anyway. Oh, I know you did it for me, some.” He said this as if it were unimportant. “I was in trouble, you got me out of it. But mostly you did it to have things in the world be safe, and work.”
She nodded, completely unable to speak.
“It seems like the least I can do,” he said, and went no further, as if Nita should know perfectly well what he meant.
“Kit,” she said.
“Look, I mean, I don’t know if I can be that brave, but—”
“Kit, shut up.”
He shut, rather astonished.
I’m always one step closer, sang memory at her from the Moon. “Look,” she said, “I didn’t do it for you ‘some.’ I did it for you ‘pretty much.’”
Kit looked at her with an expression that at first made Nita think Kit thought she was angry with him. But then it became plain that he was embarrassed too. “Well,” he said, “okay. I—thought maybe you did. But I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t know for sure. And I would have felt real stupid if I was wrong.” He had been looking away. Now he looked at her. “So?”
“So,” and her voice stuck again, and she had to clear her throat to unstick it. “I like you, that’s all. A lot. And if you start liking somebody that much, well, I still want to keep the team going. If you do. That’s all.”
He didn’t say anything. Nita stood there burning in a torment of embarrassment and anger at herself.
“Neets. Cut me some slack. You’re my best friend.”
Her head snapped up. “Thought it was Richie Sussman.”
Kit shrugged. “We just play World of Warcraft a lot. But it’s the truth.” He looked at her. “Isn’t it true for you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“So why does that have to change? Look, we’ve got junk to do. Let’s shake on it. We’ll be best friends forever. And a team.”
He said it so casually. But then that was how Kit did things: the only thing that wasn’t casual was the way he worked to do what he said he would. “What if something happens?” Nita said. “What if—”
Kit finished one symbol inside the circle, shut the book, and stood up. “Look,” he said, “something always happens. You still have to promise stuff anyway. If you have to work to make the promises true…” He shrugged, hefted the manual. “It’s like a spell. You have to say the words every time you want the results. Neets, come on.” And he held out a hand.
They shook on it. Nita felt oddly light, as if her knapsack had been full of rocks and someone had come up behind her and dumped them out.
“Okay,” Kit said. “Peach, where—oh, God.”
Picchu was sitting in the water receptacle across the birthing-room floor, flapping around and showering everything within range. “Do you mean I’m going to have to go halfway across the Galaxy with a soggy bird sitting on me?” Kit said. “No way. Neets, it’s your turn to carry her.”
“You’re getting a lot like Tom,” said Picchu.
“Thanks!”
“Wasn’t intended as a compliment.” And Peach shook her feathers, scattering water and glaring at Kit. “So stop your complaining. Powers only know when I’m going to have another chance for a bath.” She stepped up onto the edge of the low basin and shook herself again, all over.
Nita wiped a drop out of her eye. “Come on,” she said, and bent down to get Peach off the edge of the basin, settling her on her shoulder. “Kit, we set?”
“Yup. You want to do a defense spell, do it now. Peach? Any bad feelings about what’s coming up?”
“All of them,” Picchu said, “but nothing specific. Let’s go.”
They all three got into the spell circle. Kit knotted it closed with the figure-eight Wizard’s Knot, dropped the gimbal into the circle on the spot marked out for it, then picked up his manual and began to read. Nita silently recited her favorite shieldspell, the one that could stop anything from a thrown punch to an ICBM, and for safety’s sake set it at ICBM level. Then she got her own manual open and caught up with Kit. The air began to sing the note ears sing in silence; the air pushed in harder and harder around them, Nita’s ears popped, and the spell took hold and threw them off the planet—not before Nita saw a portly Me!thai gentleman peek in the door to see if it was safe to come in and have his child…
*
There was a long, long darkness between the world winking out and flashing back into existence again. Nita could never remember its having taken so long before—but then the jump from Earth to Rirhath had been a short one, no more than fifteen or twenty light-years. Nita held her breath and maintained control, even while the back of her brain was screaming frantically, He made a mistake in the spell somewhere, you distracted him and he misspelled something else: you’re stuck in this and you’re never going to get out, never—
It broke. Nita was as dizzy as she had been the last time, but she was determined not to wobble. Her ears stopped ringing as she blinked and tried to get her bearings. “Heads up, Neets,” Kit was saying.
It was dark. They stood on some barren unlit moon out in the middle of space. Nothing was in the sky but unfamiliar stars and the flaming, motionless curtain of an emission nebula, flung across the darkness like a transparent gauze burning in hydrogen red and oxygen blue. Kit pointed toward the horizon where the nebula dipped lowest. Amid a clutter of equipment and portable shelters of some kind, there stood a small crowd of Satrachi. They had apparently not noticed their pursuers’ appearance.
“Right,” Nita said. “Let’s do this—”
“No! Move us!” Picchu screeched. “Do it now!”
Kit’s eyes widened. He started rereading the spell, changing the end coordinates by a significant amount. Peach was still flapping her wings and screaming. “No, no, not far enough—”
Nita snatched the gimbal up from the ground and tied it into her shield-spell. Can it take the strain of two spells at once? We’ll find out. It’ll abort the one it can’t manage, anyway. She gulped. Physical forces— She started reciting in the Speech, naming every force in the universe that she could think of, tying their names into her shield and forbidding them entrance. Can I pull
this off? Is this one of the spells that has a limit on the number of added variables? Oh God, I hope not—
“Light,” Peach was screaming at her, “light, light!”
Nita told the shield to be opaque—and then wondered why it wasn’t, as the brightest light she had ever imagined came in through it anyway. When she was very little and the family had been on vacation she’d been taken to a Space Shuttle launch, and remembered how she’d come to understand that sound could be a force, a thing that grabbed you from inside your chest and shook you effortlessly back and forth. Now Nita wondered how it had never occurred to her that light might be able to do the same, under some circumstances. The blast of it struck her deaf and dumb and blind, and she went sprawling. Heat scorched her everywhere; she smelled the rotten-egg stink of burning hair. She clutched the gimbal: with her nerves seemingly struck useless by the unbearable brilliance, she couldn’t have dropped it if she’d tried.
Much later, it seemed, it finally began to get dark. Nita opened her eyes and couldn’t be sure, for a few minutes, that they were open, the world was so full or afterimages. But the glaring purple curtain between her and everything else eventually went away. She and Kit and Peach were hanging suspended, weightless in empty space… or at least it was empty now. There was no sign left of any moonlet: only, off to one side, a blinding star that slowly grew and grew and grew and grew, toward them. They were out of its range now. They had not been before.
“Didn’t know the gimbal could handle both those spells,” Kit said, rubbing his eyes. “Nice going.”
“It won’t do it twice,” Nita said. There was just so much power one could milk out of a physical aid, and she had been pushing her odds even trying it once. “Where are we?”
“Haven’t the faintest. Somewhere a light-month out from our original position. And those Satrachi were bait,” he said. “For us. Look at it, Neets.”
She looked. “I could have sworn I opaqued this shield.”
“It is opaqued,” Kit said. “But a shield doesn’t usually have to put up with a nova at close range. H-bombs are about the most one can block out without leakage, if I remember.”
Nita stared at the raging star, all boiling with huge twisted prominences. For all its brilliance, there was a darkness about its heart, something wrong with the light. In a short time this terrible glory would collapse into a pallid dwarf star, eventually cooling down to a coal.Nita shivered: one of the oldest epithets for the Lone Power was “Starsnuffer.” It blew a whole star, just to kill us, because we were going to help Dairine…
“Did this system have other planets?” Nita said.
“I don’t know. I doubt It cared.”
And this is what’s going after my little sister.
The anger in Nita got very, very cold. “Let’s go find her,” she said.
Together she and Kit began to read.
Fatal Error
Dairine woke up stiff and aching all over. What’s wrong with the bed? was her first thought: it felt like the floor. Then she opened her eyes, and found that she was on the floor… or a surface enough like one to make no difference. The cool, steady stars of space burned above her. She sat up and rubbed her sticky eyes.
I feel awful, she thought. I want a bath, I want breakfast, I want to brush my teeth! But baths and toothbrushes and any food but bologna sandwiches with mustard were all a long way away.
Dairine dropped her hands into her lap, feeling slow and helpless, and looked about her. A sense of shock grew in her. All around, dotting what had been the absolutely smooth surface of the planet, there now lay a scattering of great cracked holes, as if the place had had a sudden meteor shower while she was asleep. But the debris lying around wasn’t the sort left by meteor strikes. The cracked places weren’t depressions, but upward bursts.
“Wow,” Dairine said under her breath. “Somebody’s been busy…”
Which was when something poked her from behind.
Dairine let out a short scream of shock and flung herself around… only to find herself staring at the small, turtlelike glassy creature that had been the last straw for her the night before. It had walked into her, and was continuing to do so, its short jointed legs working busily though it was getting nowhere: like a windup toy mindlessly walking against a wall. “With,” it said.
“Oh God,” Dairine muttered, and sagged with embarrassment and relief. Two days ago she’ wouldn’t have thought she’d ever scream at anything, up to and including Darth Vader himself… but the world looked a little different today
She reached down and grabbed the steadily pedaling little creature, holding it away to look at it. It was made of the same silicon as the surface. The inside of its turtlish body was a complex of horizontal layers, the thickest of them maybe half an inch across, the thinnest visible only as tiny colored lines no thicker than a hair. In places there seemed to be thousands of them packed together in delicate bandings that blended into one subtle color. Dairine knew she was looking at a chip or board more complex than anything dreamed of on Earth. She could see nothing identifiable as a sensor, but the creature had certainly found her right away last night: so it could see. She wondered if it could hear.
“How about it, small stuff?” she said. It was rather cute, after all. “Say hi.”
“Hi,” it said.
She put her eyebrows up, and looked over her shoulder at the dark glossy shape of the laptop, which was sitting where she had left it the night before. “Did you teach this guy to talk?”
“There is very little I did not teach the mind that made them,” said the computer calmly.
Dairine looked around at the many, many jagged holes in the surface. “I bet. Where are they all?”
“Indeterminate. Each one began walking around the surface in a random fashion as soon as it was produced.”
“Except for this one,” Dairine said, and lifted the creature into her lap. It was surprisingly light. Once there, the creature stopped trying to walk, and just rested across her knees like a teatray with a domed cover on it. “Good baby,” Dairine said, and touched one of its legs carefully, taking hold of the top joint and maneuvering it gently to see how it worked. There were three joints: one ball-and-socket-like joint where it met the body, and two more spaced evenly down the leg, which was about six inches long. The legs were of the same stuff as the outer shell of the body-dome: translucent, like cloudy glass, with delicate hints of color here and there.
“Why didn’t you go walking off with everybody else, huh?” she said as she picked the creaure up to flip it over and examine its underside.
Its legs kicked vigorously in the air. “With,” it said.
Dairine put the creature down, where it immediately walked into her again and kept walking, its legs slipping on the smooth surface.
“‘With,’ huh? Okay, okay, ‘with’ already.” She picked it up again and put it in her lap. It stopped kicking.
Dairine sighed and glanced up at the sky, where the galaxy was rising again. For a few seconds she just held still, watching the curving fire of it. “How long is the day here?” she said.
“Seventeen hours,” said the laptop.
Dairine thought about that. “Fast for such a big planet,” she said finally. “Mostly light elements, though. I guess it works. How long was I asleep?”
“Fourteen hours.”
Dairine made an annoyed face. There went that much of her research time. She felt fairly certain that if the BEMs didn’t catch up with her shortly, someone else would. She didn’t like the thought. “I’ve got to get some work done,” she said, and glanced down at the turtly, glassy creature in her lap. “What about you? You can’t sit here all day. Neither can I.”
“Hi,” said the glass turtle.
She had to laugh. “Are you still talking to”—she didn’t know what to call it: she patted the glassy ground—”our friend here?”
“Yes,” the computer said. “Response is slow. It is still assimilating and coordinating the data.?
??
“Still?” Dairine let out a breath. If there was so much information in the manual functions that a computer with this much memory was still sorting it, what hope did she have of finding the information she needed in time to be able to do anything useful to the Lone One with it? She was going to have to help it along somehow. “Can you ask it to call back this little guy’s friends?” Dairine said. “I want to look at them.”
“Working.”
Dairine stretched and considered that the next time she went out to space, she was going to plan things a little more carefully. Or stay at a hotel! Where, for example, was she going to find something to drink? She hadn’t squirreled anything away in her claudication: she was going to have to find water. More to the point, there were no bathrooms here. Dairine wished heartily that she had taken time in the Crossings, or even back at Natural History, to use the facilities for something other than programming interstellar jumps. The memory of what sometimes seemed to be her mother’s favorite line, “You should have gone before we left!” now made her grin ruefully.
Dairine got up to improvise what she could. Her turtle started to go with her. “No,” she said, as she might have to Ponch. “Stay!” The turtle’s response to this was the same as Ponch’s would have been: it went after her anyway.
Dairine sighed and headed off to a little outcropping of rock about half a mile away. When she’d finished and was starting back to where the computer lay, she could already see small shapes moving on the horizon. She sat down with her bread and bologna, started making a sandwich, and waited for them.
Pretty soon Dairine was knee-deep in turtles, or would have been had she been standing up. After the first few walked into her as her initial lapturtle had, she asked the computer to get them to hold still when they reached her. Something like two hundred of them were shortly gathered around her. They were all exact copies of her friend, even to the striations and banding inside them.