They’re inside my head too. Physical contact—
Dairine felt the mere realization alert something else that was inside her head. That undercurrent of wicked laughter abruptly vanished, and the inside of her mind felt clean again —
This is it, she thought, the only chance I’m gonna get. “Gigo,” she said, “quick! Tie me into the motherboard the way the mobiles are tied in!”
“But you don’t have enough memory to sustain such a contact—”
“Do it, just do it!”
“Done,” she heard one of the Thinkers say, and then Logo said, hurriedly, angrily, “The mobiles are polled, and—”
But it was too late. Even sentient individuals who reason in milliseconds will still need ten or twelve of those to agree. It took only one for Gigo to close the contact, and make a mobile out of Dairine.
*
Somewhere someone struck a bass gong: the sound of it went on and on, and in the immense sound Dairine fell over, slowly, watching the universe tilt past her with preternatural slowness. Only that brief flicker of her own senses was left her, and the bass note of one of her heartbeats sounding and sounding in her ears. Other senses awakened, filled her full. The feeling of living in a single second that stretched into years came back to her again; but this time she could perceive the life behind the stretched-out time as more than a frantic, penned, crippled intelligence screaming for contact. The manual software had educated the motherboard in seconds as it would have educated Dairine in hours or months; the motherboard had vast knowledge now, endless riches of data about wizardry and the worlds. What it did not have was first-hand experience of emotion, or the effects of entropy… or the way the world looked to slowlife.
Take it. Take it all. Please take it! They have to choose, and they don’t have the data, and I don’t know how else to give it to them, and if they make the wrong choice they’ll all die! Take it!
And the motherboard took: reached into what she considered the memory areas of Dairine’s data processor, and read her total life memory as it had read the manual.
Dairine lay there helpless and watched her life—watched it as people are supposed to see it pass before they die—and came to understand why such things should happen only once. There are reasons, the manual says, for the selectiveness of human memory; the mercy of the Powers aside, experiencing again and again the emotions coupled with memory would leave an entity no time for the emotions of the present moment. And then there is also the matter of pain.
But Dairine was caught in a situation the manual had never envisioned—a human being having her life totally experienced and analyzed by another form of life quite able to examine and sustain every moment of that life, in perfect recall. With the motherboard Dairine fell down into the dim twilight before her birth, heard echoes of voices, tasted for the first time the thumb it took her parents five years to get out of her mouth; lay blinking at a bright world, came to understand light and form; fought with gravity, and won, walking for the first time; smiled on purpose for the first time at the tall warm shape that held her close and said loving things to her without using sound: found out about words, especially No!; ecstatic, delighted, read words for the first time; saw her sister in tears, and felt for the first time a kind of pain that didn’t involve falling down and skinning your knees….
Pain. There was enough of it. Frustration, rage at the world that wouldn’t do what she wanted, fear of all kinds of things that she didn’t understand: fear of things she heard on the news at night, a world full of bombs that can kill everything, full of people hungry, people shooting at each other and hating each other; hearing her parents shouting downstairs while she huddled under the covers, feeling like the world was going to end—will they shoot each other now? Will they have a divorce? Finding out that her best friend is telling other kids stories about how she’s weird, and laughing at her behind her back; finding that she’s actually alone in the world when she thought she had at least a couple of people to stand beside; making new friends, but by force, by cleverness and doing things to make her popular, not because friends come to her naturally; making herself slightly feared, so that people would leave her alone to do the things she wants to without being hassled. Beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there’s more, more, but she can’t figure out what it is: then finding out that someone knows the secret. Wizardry. And it doesn’t come fast enough, it never comes fast enough, nothing ever does…. and now the price is going to be paid for that, because she doesn’t know enough to save these lovely glassy creature, her buddies, that she watched be born… helped be born… her children, sort of. She doesn’t know how to save them, and they’re going to be dead, everything’s going to be dead: pain!
It hurts too much, Dairine thought, lying there listening to her heartbeat slowly begin to die away. It hurts, I didn’t want them to get hurt! But it was part of the data, and it was too late now: the motherboard had it, and all the mobiles would have it too, the second she released Dairine. Why should they care about slowlife now? she thought in anguish and shame at the bitter outrush of what her life had been. Cruelty, pettiness, selfishness almost incredible— But too late now. The motherboard was saving the last and newest of the data to permanent memory. Any minute now the mobiles would start the program running and entropy would freeze, and life would stop being a word that had a meaning. The last nanosecond crawled by, echoes of the save rolled in the link. Nothing ever comes fast enough: end of file…
Dairine lay still and waited for it all to end.
And lightning struck her. The flow of data reversed. She would have screamed, but trapped in the quicklife time of the motherboard, everything happened before the molasses-slow sparks of bioelectricity even had time to jump the motor synapses on the beginning of their journey down her nerves. The motherboard was pouring data into her as it had poured it into the mobiles under Dairine’s tutelage—but not the mercifully condensed version of the manual programming that it had given them. The whole manual, the entire contents of the software, which in book form can be as small as a paperback or larger than a shelf full of telephone books: it poured into Dairine, and she couldn’t resist, only look on in a kind of fascinated horror as it filled her, and filled her, and never overflowed, just filled and filled… The dinosaurs could have died while it filled her, life could have arisen on a hundred worlds and died of boredom in the time it took to fill her. She forgot who and what she was, forgot everything but this filling, filling, and the pain it cost her, like swallowing a star and being burnt away by it from the inside while eternally growing new layers on the outside: and finally not even the pain made sense anymore….
Dairine lay there on her side and stared at the ground, and was astonished not to see the crumbs from her sandwich in front of her nose. She could not move, or speak, and she could just barely think, with great pain and effort. There was something wrong with the way time was flowing, except that every time she tried to think what it was exactly, the timeflow seemed perfectly all right. Shapes were moving in front of her, and voices were speaking, either in vast soft drawls or light singing voices that seemed familiar. Slowly names attached themselves to the voices.
“Now we see what these ‘heart’ things she gave us are for.” That was Gigo. Good kid, Dairine thought weakly, good baby. You tell ‘em.
“And what entropy does, and what it cannot touch, ever.” That was Beanpole, the silly-looking thing—where did he get such a voice? “Not all the evils and deaths it makes possible can touch the joys that run through it. We will have those too.”
“We will not stop that joy,” said Monitor. “Not for a nanosecond.”
“It may be slow,” said one of the mobiles, one whose name Dairine couldn’t remember. “But it is life. And it brought us life. We do nothing to harm that.”
“And if you are against that,” said Gigo, “your programming is in error, and we are against you.”
They all sounded more complete than they had. Th
e one voice she did not hear was Logo’s. But she did hear something stranger: a murmur of astonish-ment that went up from the thousands of mobiles. And was there a trace of fear in it? She couldn’t move, couldn’t see what was happening….
“Your choice,” said another voice. At the sound of it, Dairine struggled with all her might to move, and managed to do no more than lever herself up half an inch or so and then flop down flat again, limp as a filleted fish. “Enjoy it. You will make no more choices… but first, to pay for the one you have made, you will watch what the entropy you love so much will do to her.”
Dairine lay still, waiting for the lightning to strike.
And another voice spoke.
“Wanna bet?” it said.
*
It didn’t feel us arrive right when we did, Nita thought. How distracted It is! What’s she been doing to It? She and Kit actually had a second to collect themselves when they appeared, and Nita looked around her in a hurry. Another barren world, a great flaming barred-spiral galaxy flung across its night, an old tired star high in the sky, type N or S from the look of it, and a throng of strange glassy-looking robots, crowded around Dairine and looking at her—and them—and the Lone One.
As with any other of the Powers, though there will be general similarities of vision among the like-minded, no two people ever see the Lone One in exactly the same way. Nita saw again the good-looking young ginger-haired man she had seen in a skyscraper in the alternate otherworld the Lone One called his own. But he wasn’t now wearing the three-piece suit he had affected there. Now he was dark-clad and dark-cloaked, unarmed and needing no armor: a feeling of cold and power flowed from him and ran impossibly along the ground, as if carried on a chill air. As the sight sank in, Nita shook like a leaf. What Kit might see, what Dairine and the robots might be seeing, Nita wondered briefly: then put the thought aside. She had other business.
It turned and looked at them. Nita stood as straight as she could under the circumstances, her manual in one hand, the other hand clutched on the gimbal in her pocket; beside her Kit stood almost the same way, except that Picchu sat on his wrist, making him look like some king’s runaway falconer. “Fairest and fallen,” Nita said, “greeting and defiance.” It was the oldest courtesy of wizards, and the most dangerous, that line. One might be intending to cripple or destroy that Power’s current avatar, but there was no need to be rude about it.
“You two,” said the Lone One. “And a pet for company. Adorable… and well met. You are off your own ground and well away from help at last. It took me long enough to set up this trap, but it was worth it.”
Kit glanced at Nita and opened his mouth, but Picchu beat him to it. “And that’s all you’re going to get out of it,” Peach said, “since the real prize you hoped to catch in that trap has obviously slipped out of it.” Peach began to laugh. “You never learn, do you? You’re not the only one who can structure the future. The other Powers will sometimes scruple to do it. Not often… but They took a special interest in this case. The first time you’ve completely lost a Choice, from the beginning.”
“And the last,” said the Lone One. It made an angry sweeping gesture at them. But Nita had been waiting for something of the kind. She clenched her hand on the gimbal and thought the last syllable of the spell she had been holding ready.
The bolt that hit their shields was like lightning, but more vehement, and dark. It was meant to smash the shield like a rock thrown at an egg, leaving them naked to the quick horrid death of explosive decompression. But it bounced. No shock was transmitted to them directly: but Nita, fueling the spell directly, felt the jolt go through her as if that thrown rock had hit her right in the head. She staggered. Kit steadied her.
The Lone One looked at them in cold astonishment. “Hate won’t be enough this time,” Nita said. “Care to try a nuke?”
It didn’t move, but that cold fierce force struck the shield again, harder. Dust and fragments of the surface flew all around them, and the ground shook. When the dust settled, it was plain that the shieldspell produced a spherical effect, because through the bottom of the sphere they could see the molten stuff underneath them pressing against it. They were standing in a small crater that seethed and smoked.
Nita sagged against Kit: this time he had to brace her upright for a moment. “Why’re we even alive?” he said in her ear. “The gimbal’s not enough to be holding that off! What are you fueling that shield with?”
“A year of my life per shot,” she said, giddy.
Kit stared at her. “Are you out of your mind? Suppose you were scheduled to be hit by a truck in three years or something?”
She shrugged. “I better watch where I cross the street, that’s all. Kit, heads up, there’s more important stuff to think about!”
“Yes indeed,” Picchu said to the Lone One. “The last time you lose a Choice. Let your own words ordain the truth… as usual.”
The Lone One’s face got so cold that Nita for a moment wondered whether the shield was leaking. Impossible. But enough of that, and enough sitting around and waiting for It to do stuff! “I’m warning you now,” she said, “I don’t know what you’ve been up to here, but I bet you’re the reason my sister’s lying there on the ground. I don’t want to hurt you, particularly; you hurt enough as it is. But I’m giving you just one chance to get out of here.”
Nita thought she’d seen rage before… but evidently the Lone Power did not care for being pitied. “Or you will do what?”
“This,” Nita said, and dropped the gimbal on the ground, knowing what would happen to it, and let loose the other spell she had been preparing, the other one Kit would not have liked to hear about. The one word she spoke to turn it loose struck her to her knees as it went out of her.
The figure of the Lone One writhed and twisted as something odd happened to the light and space around it.
Then it was gone: and the gimbal fell to powder, which in turn sifted into a little flat pile on the ground.
Kit shook Picchu off and reached down frantically to grab Nita. “What did you do?”
She panted for breath.
“Sent it home,” she said. “We know the coordinates for its dimension. It’s just a worldgating like the one Dairine did for Mars—”
“That’s three years of your life, maybe five,” Kit said, furious, dragging Nita to her feet. “Why don’t you tell me this crap when you’re planning it?”
“You’d get mad. You’re mad now!”
“We could have shared the time, you dumb— Never mind! It’s gone, let’s get Dairine and haul out of here before It—”
Whatever hit them, hit them from behind. The shield broke: they went sprawling… and the cold exploded in.
Nita shut her eyes in terror: that was all that saved them from freezing over on the spot. She recited the next waiting spell carefully in her mind, and didn’t breathe, didn’t move, though her ears roared and she could feel the prickle in her skin caused by capillaries popping. Four more words, two more, one…
Air again, but precious little warmth. Nita took a breath: the bitter chill of it stabbed her nose and mouth like knives. She opened her eyes and tried to see. Her vision was blurred, shock perhaps—she didn’t think her corneas had had time to freeze. Beside her she faintly heard Kit move among the shattered bits of the poor molten, refrozen, broken surface. “Okay, changed my mind,” he muttered. “Instead of being dead, can I just throw up some more?”
“Oh, no,” said the Lone One from somewhere nearby, “no indeed. You’ve laid hands upon my person. No one does that and lives to boast of it. Though you’ll live a while yet, indeed you shall! I shan’t let you go quickly… unlike your mouthy friend.”
Nita blinked and looked around her—then saw. An explosion of scarlet and blue feathers lying among the broken rubble; red wetness already frozen solid, frosted over.
Her insides seized. I was always counting on someone to come and get us out of this. Peach or somebody. We’ve been lucky that way
before. But not this time. She got to her hands and knees, the tears running down her face with the pain of bruises and the worse pain of fear inside. Not this time. I guess the luck couldn’t hold—
There were hands on her. It’s not fair! she thought. When you give every-thing you’ve got, it’s supposed to turn out okay in the end! The hands pulled at her. Her eyes went back to the poor pile of feathers sticking up in the rocks. She didn’t even have a chance to do anything brave before she went. It’s not fair!
“Neets. Come on.”
“Yes,” mocked the other voice, the cruel one, “come on, Neets. One more time. For my amusement.”
She crouched, wobbling, staring at the bits of bright scarlet scattered all over the pale plain. “Kit,” she said softly, “what are we going to tell Tom?…”
“Never mind that now. Neets, snap out of it! Think of Belfast.”
She thought of Belfast, and dogs in the backs of cars. She thought of rocket fire in Beirut, and the hot green silence of Chernobyl, plowed rain forests in Brazil, and the parched places in Africa, and all the street corners in America where people were selling crack, and other corners where people begged, or lay hungry on steam vents in the shadow of windows full of gems. She thought of needless fear, and pain, and rage, and prolonged and terrified death; and she thought of ending all of these forever—not right this minute, perhaps, but sooner or later. Somehow or other, everything that happened on this planet was supposed to contribute to that ending… whether she survived it or not.
Slowly, slowly Nita dragged herself to her feet, and leaned on Kit without worrying who would think what about it. “What now? Got a spell?” she said.
“Spell?” Kit laughed. “Right now I couldn’t spell ‘cat’! But damned if I’m going out lying on the ground.”