Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

"Who's after you?" the man said, quiet-voiced but urgent, glancing back at Dairine.

"I don't know what they are," she said, gasping, "but someone-someone bad sent them. I can lose them, but I need time to finish programming-"

Alarm and quick thought leapt behind those brown eyes. "Right. Here then, take these." The young man dug down in his jacket pocket, came up with a fistful of bizarrely shaped coins, and pressed them hurriedly into Dairine's free hand. "There's a contact transfer disk behind the bar. Step on it and you should materialize out in the service corridor. Follow that to the right and go out the first blue door you see, into the terminal. If I'm not mistaken, the pay toilets will be a few doors down on your left. Go in one of the nonhuman ones."

"The nonhuman-!" Dairine said, absolutely horrified.

"Quite so," the man said. "Right across the universe, that's one of the strongest taboos there is." And he grinned, his eyes bright with mischief. "No matter who's after you, it'll take them a bit to think of looking for you in there. And the locks will slow them down." He was on his feet. "Off you go now!" he said, and gave Dairine a fierce but friendly shove in the back.

She ran past a trundling robot barman, under the hinged part of the bartop and onto the transfer circle.

On the other side of the bar, as Dairine began to vanish, she saw the fair man glance over at her to be sure she was getting away, and then pick up the iced tea he had been drinking. Glass in hand, he went staggering cheerfully off across the barroom in the most convincing drunk act Dairine could imagine, accidentally overturning tables, falling into the other patrons, and creating a mess and confusion that would slow even the BEMs up somewhat.

Dairine materialized in the service corridor, followed her instructions to the letter, and picked a rest room with a picture sign so weird, she couldn't imagine what the aliens would look like. She found out soon enough. She spent the next few minutes hastily answering the computer's questions while sitting on what looked like a chrome-plated lawn mower, while the tiled room outside her locked booth echoed with the bubbling screams of alien ladies (or gentlemen) disturbed in the middle of who knew what act.

Then the screams became quiet, and were exchanged for a horrible rustling noise, thick soft footfalls, and high fluting voices. The computer had asked Dairine whether she preferred Coke or Pepsi, and had then fallen silent for some seconds. "Are you done?" she hissed at it.

"Running. Data in evaluation."

"Get a move on!"

"Running. Data in evaluation."

The air filled with the scorch of burning plastic again. They were burning the lock of the booth.

"Can you do something to a few of them?" she whispered, her mouth going dry.

"Negative multitasking ability," said the computer.

Dairine put her head down on the computer, which was on her knees, and took what she suspected might be her last breath.

The lock of the booth melted loose and the door fell in molten globs to the floor. Dairine sat up straight, determined to look dirty at the BEMs, if she could do nothing else.

The door swung open.

And "Multiple transit," said the computer, "executing now," and the jump-sickness grabbed Dairine and twisted her outside in. Perhaps not understanding, the BEMs fluted in rage and triumph and reached into the booth. But Dairine's insides went cold as dimly she felt one of them swing a huge soft hand through where her middle was: or rather, where it no longer was completely-the transit had begun. A second later, heat not wholly felt stitched through her arms and legs as shots meant to cripple her tore through where they almost were, and fried the back of the stall like an egg. Then starlight and the ancient black silence pierced through her brain; the spell tore Dairine free of the planet and flung her off Rirhath B into the long night.

She never found out anything about the man who helped her. Nor did he ever find out anything more about her. Pausing by the door of the pay toilet, after being released from station security some hours later, and being tele-Pathically sensitive (as so many hominids are), he could sense only that some considerable power had been successfully exercised there. Satisfied with that, he smiled to himself and went on about his travels, just one more of the billions of hominids moving about the worlds. But many millions of light-years later, in some baking wilderness under a barren, brilliant sky, a bitterly weary Dairine sat down on a stone and cried for a while in shock at the utter strangeness of the universe, where unexpected evil lives side by side with unexpected kindness, and neither ever seems quite overcome by the other. .

It took Nita a few minutes to pull her supplies together and get ready for the trip. Every wizard has favorite spells, so familiar and well used that diagrams and physical ingredients like eye of newt aren't needed for them. But most spells, and particularly the most powerful ones, need help in bending spacesome specific kind of matter placed in specific relationship to the wizard and the words being used and the diagram or formula asserting the wizard's intent. Some of the kinds of matter used for these purposes can be odder even than eye of newt (which used to be used for teleportation spells until polyethylene was invented). And this being the case, most wizards have a cache, a place where they keep the exotica necessary in their work.

Nita's cache was buried in a vacant lot next door to her house, all carefully wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. Being a wizard, she had no need to dig the bag up: a variant of the spell Kit had used on the bricks let her feel around under the ground for the moment it took her to find what she wanted. The objects didn't look like much-half a (seemingly) broken printed-circuit board; a plastic packet containing about two teaspoonsful of dirt; and a gimbal from a 6 Philco Pilot television set.

That last piece she juggled appreciatively from hand to hand for a moment. It was certainly unlikely looking, a busted bit of junk that any normal Person would trash without a second thought. But the configuration into which the space-time continuum bent itself around this gimbal was unique, and invested with a power that the informed wizard could exploit. Everything bent spacetime, of course: anything consisting of either matter or energy had no choice. But some things bent it in ways that produced specific physical effects. . and no one, not even the wizards specializing in theoretical research, had any idea yet as to why. The atoms and mass and inherent sPatiotemporal configuration of, say, water, bent existence around them to produce an effect of wetness. The electrons and plasma and matter and gravity of a star produced effects of heat and light. And a busted-off piece of gimbal from an ancient TV set…

Nita smiled a bit, put the gimbal carefully in her pocket, and said three more words.

Her room was dark. She flipped the light on and went digging in the mess off to one side for her knapsack. Into it she stuffed her manual, the gimbal and packet and circuit board.

"Nita?"

"Uh-huh," she said.

The stairs creaked. Then her mother was standing in the doorway, looking upset.

"You said you were going to clean your room today," her mother said in a tired voice.

Nita looked up… then went hurriedly to her mother and grabbed her and hugged her hard. "Oh, thanks," she said, "thanks, thanks for saying something normal!"

Her mother laughed, a sound that had no happiness about it at all, and hugged her back. After a moment her mother said, "She won't be normal when she gets back, will she?"

Nita took a moment to answer. "She won't be like she was, not completely. She can't. She's on Ordeal, Mums: it changes you. That's what it's about." Nita tried to smile, but it felt broken. "She might be better."