High Wizardry New Millennium Edition (13 page)

—and then the crushing ceased, and the spell flung Dairine down on something flat and hard and chill, and she flopped down like a puppet with its strings cut and just lay flat and still as she had not done since Ananke. Her stomach flipped, but this was becoming so commonplace that Dairine was able to ignore it and just lie there and pant for a few seconds.

Silence. Not that awful emptiness, but a more normal one: probably just lack of air. Dairine levered herself up painfully on her elbows and looked at the surface under her hands. It was dimly lit, and smooth as the garage floor on Rirhath B had been. Smoother, in fact. It was hard to tell colors in this dimness, but the surface wasn’t plain white. Dapples of various shades seemed to overlap and shade one another in the depths of it, as delicately as if they had been airbrushed: and there was a peculiar translucence to the surface, as if it was glass of some kind.

Cautiously, Dairine got up to a kneeling position and straightened to look around. Now this is weird, she thought, for the surface on which she knelt, stretched on so far into the distance that she scrubbed at her eyes briefly, not quite believing them. The horizon seemed much farther away than it could ever be on Earth.
Must be a much bigger planet,
she thought. But the thought did not make that immense vista any easier to grasp. It seemed to curve up after a while, though Dairine was sure it was perfectly flat: the illusion was disturbing. Over the horizon hung starry space, the stars close and bright. Off to the sides the view was the same: here and there conical outcroppings of rock might break the pure and perfect flatness of it all, looking as if Picasso had dropped them there… but otherwise there was nothing but that endless, pale, slick-smooth surface, dappled with touches of dim subtle color, in huge patches or small ones.

Dairine stood up and turned around to look for the computer. It was behind her, at her feet: she bent to pick it up—

—and forgot about doing so. Before her, past the razory edge of that impossibly distant horizon, the galaxy was rising.

It was not her own, though there were similarities. This galaxy, like the Milky Way, was a barred spiral, type SB0, turned almost face-on to her: an oval central core, two bars jutting from its core, one from each end of the starry oval, and each bar having a long curved banner or stream of stars curling away from it. Dairine had seen a hundred pictures of such galaxies and had mostly been fascinated by that central bar, wondering what gravitational forces were keeping it in place.

But now she was seeing such a galaxy as few, even wizards, ever see one—not as a flat, pale far-off picture but as a three-dimensional object near at hand, rich with treasuries of stars in a spectrum’s worth of colors, veiled about with diamonded dust on fire with ions and glowing, dominating a third of even that immense horizon, seeming frozen though in the midst of irresistible motion, its starry banners streaming back in still and complex glory from the eye-defeating blaze of the core. Dairine slowly folded back down to the kneeling position and just watched it, watched it rise.

She weighed just a little less here than she would have on Earth; but the spiral rose quickly, for a planet of this size.
Must not be a very dense planet,
Dairine thought.
All light elements—
But she was less concerned than usual with that kind of analysis at the moment. The forefront of her mind was busy with more important matters… this light, the terror and the wonder of it.
This
was what she had come for. The computer had hit it right on.
This planet’s sun must be in one of the galaxy’s satellite globular clusters….
As such distances went, she was close to that spiral: perhaps no more than ten or twenty thousand light-years above its core.

But the thought of distances broke her mood. She pulled the computer close. “Did we lose them?” she said to it.

“Pursuit has halted forty trillion light-years from this location and is holding there.”

“Forty trillion…” That was beyond the reach of the farthest telescopes, over the event horizon generated by the Big Bang itself. Galaxies past that point were traveling with intrinsic velocities faster than light, and so could not be seen. It was questionable whether such bodies could even really be considered in the same universe as Earth.

“Long way from home,” Dairine said softly. “Okay. I have at least a couple days to rest and do some research, huh?”

“Affirmative.”

She sat back on her heels and watched the light rise until the last delicate streamers of light from the barred spiral arms were all the way above the horizon. “I want all the details about this star system,” she said. “Planets, what kind of star, who lives here if anybody, who’s been here before. Get to work.”

“Working,” said the computer, and its screen went to the usual menu configuration while it sat silently, getting the information for her.

“Can you multitask now?” Dairine said.

“Affirmative.”

“Good.”

She selected the Manual function and began sorting through its many folders for files that would have background material on the Lone One.
There has to be something I can use against It,
she thought,
a weapon of some kind, a weakness….
She instructed the manual’s research facility to sort for past conflicts of wizards with the Lone Power or its representatives, and was shocked and horrified to find the equivalent of twenty or thirty
thousand
pages’ worth of abstracts. She skimmed ten or fifteen of them in reverse order, on a hunch, and was momentarily surprised to find an abstract of Nita’s last active mission.

Fascinated, Dairine began to read… and became horrified again. There had been some kind of ceremony in the waters off Long Island, a sort of underwater passion play with whales as the celebrants—and Nita, to save the East Coast and make this ceremony work, had volunteered to be eaten by a shark!
Nita?
My
sister? Do anything braver than cross the street?
The idea was ridiculous… but Dairine knew that this computer had better things to do than lie to her. She read the rest of the abstract with her insides turning cold. Nita had knowingly taken on that Lone Power face-to-face and had managed to come out of it alive. Whereas Dairine had been glad enough to run away and lose things that couldn’t be more than Its lesser henchmen…

Dairine pushed that thought away resolutely. She was helped by her stomach, which growled at her.

When did I last eat?
she wondered. She told the computer to sort through and save the descriptions of encounters with the Lone Power that had been successful, and then got out of the Manual into the Hide facility. A moment’s poking around among the options, and she had retrieved her loaf of bread, bologna, and mustard. Dairine sat there in cheerful anticipation for a few seconds, undoing the bread and bologna, and it wasn’t until she got the mustard jar lid unscrewed that she realized she had no knife. “Oh, well,” she said, and went back into the Transport facility to grab one from the silverware drawer at home. But “Illegal function call,” said the computer: a little sullenly, she thought.

“Explain.”

“Out of range for transit function from stated location.”

Dairine made a face. She had no idea of the coordinates of any closer silverware drawer. “Cancel,” she said, and made do with her fingers.

Some minutes later she had a sandwich and a half inside her, and was thinking (as she finished getting herself more or less clean) that it was a good thing she liked mustard. Dairine brushed the crumbs off onto the slick surface she sat on and looked at it, mildly curious. It wasn’t freezing cold to sit on, like the stones of Mars or Pluto: yet her shields were still snowing water vapor gently into the vacuum around her whenever she moved, telling her that the above-surface temperature was the usual cold of deep space.
Geothermal?
she wondered.
Maybe some volcanic activity—that would explain those funny conical shapes against the horizon…
Dairine knocked the side of the computer’s case in a friendly fashion. “You done yet?” she said.

“Specify.”

Dairine rolled her eyes. But there was no escaping the GIGO principle- “garbage in, garbage out,” as the programmers said. Give the poor machine incomplete questions or instructions and you would get incomplete answers back. This thing might be magic, but it was still a computer. “Are you done with the survey of this area?”

“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….

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.