Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

"Better? Dairine?" her mother said, sounding a touch dry. Nita's smile began to feel less broken, for that sounded more like her mother.

"Oh, c'mon, Mom, she's not that bad-" Then Nita stopped herself. What am I saying! "Look, Mom," she said, "she's real smart. Sometimes that makes me want to stuff her in the toilet, but it's going to come in handy for her now. She's not stupid, and if the wizards' software in the computer is anything like our manuals, she'll have some help if she can keep her head and figure out what to ask for. If we get a move on, we'll catch up with her pretty quick."

"If you can find her."

Nita's father loomed up in the doorway in the darkness, a big silver-haired shadow.

Nita swallowed. "Daddy, she'll leave a trail. Using wizardry changes the shape of the space-time continuum. . it's like cutting through a room full of smoke with a knife. You can see where the knife's been. Knowing Dairine, she won't be making any effort to cover her trail… at least not just yet-We can follow her. If she's in trouble, we'll get her out of it. But I can't stay to talk about it. Kit needs me quick, and I can't do a lot for Dari without him. Some. . but not as much. We work best as a team."

Her mother gave her father a look that Nita could make nothing of. "When do you think you three will be back?" said her father.

"I don't know," Nita said. She thought to say something, stopped herself, then realized that they had a right to know. "Mums, Dad, look. We might not be able to bring her back right away. It's her Ordeal.

Until she solves the problem she's supposed to be the answer to, if we pull her back, awful things could happen. If we'd copped out of ours, this whole world would be different. And believe me, you wouldn't have liked the difference." She swallowed at the thought of something like that leaning, threatening darkness waiting for Dairine to confront it… something like that, but much worse.

They stood and looked at her.

"I've gotta go," she said, and slung her knapsack on, and hugged them hard, first her dad and then her mom again. Her father took a long time to let her go. Her mother's eyes were still troubled, and there was nothing Nita could do about it, nothing at all.

"I'll clean up in here as soon as I get home," Nita said, "I promise."

The trouble didn't go out of her mother's face, but half her mouth made a smile.

Nita said three words, and was gone.

Our home Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across, five thousand light-years thick at the core.

The billion stars that make it up are scattered through some four quadrillion cubic miles of space. It is so vast that a thought can take as long as two seconds to cross it.

But Dairine was finding the entirety of the Milky Way much too small to get lost in. She got out of it as soon as she could.

The program the computer was still writing to take her to safety was a multiple-jump program, and that suited her fine: her pursuers seemed to have trouble following her. But not enough trouble. She came out, after that first jump from Rirhath B, on some cold world whose sky she never saw: only a ceiling of gray.

She was standing in a bleak place, full of what at first sight looked like old twisted, wind-warped trees, barren of any leaves, all leaning into a screaming wind that smelled of salt water. Dairine clutched the computer to her and stared around her, still gasping from her terror in a rest room twelve trillion miles away.

With a slow creaking sound, one of the trees pulled several of its roots out of the ground and began to walk toward her.

"No way!" Dairine shrieked. "Run another subroutine!"

"Running," said the computer, but it took its sweet time about it-and just as the world blinked out and the spell tore her loose from the hillside, Dairine felt wind on her skin-a wind that smelled of coffee grounds.

The BEMs had popped right in behind her.

She popped out again, this time in the middle of a plain covered with sky. j blue grass under a grass-green sky. She shook the computer in frustration.

"Program running," the computer insisted.

"Sure, but they're following us! How are they doing it? Are we leaving a I trail somehow?"

"Affirmative," said the computer calmly, as if Dairine should have known | this all along.

"Well, do something about it!"

"Advisory," said the computer. "Stealth procedures will decrease running speed. Stealth procedures are not one hundred percent effective due to inherent core-level stability of string functions-"

"I'll settle! And if we don't have to keep wasting time running subroutines," Dairine said, exasperated, "you'll have more time to run the main program, won't you!"

"Affirmative. Execute stealth?"

"Before someone executes me, yeah!"

Once again the spell took hold of Dairine and ripped her free of gravity and light. At least, she thought, this time the BEMs hadn't appeared before she vanished herself. Maybe we can gain a little ground.

We'd better. .

Another reality flicked into being around her. She was in the middle of a city: she got a brief impression of glassy towers that looked more grown than built, and people rushing around her and avoiding her in the typical dance of city dwellers. This might almost have been New York, except that New Yorkers had only a small percentage of the legs these people had. "Don't stop," she said. "How much range have you got?"

"Infinite," said the computer, quite calmly.

"While still running the main program?"

"Affirmative."

She thought for a second. "The edge of the Local Group might be far enough. Go."

The spell seized her out of the crowd and flung her into the dark again. Over and over Dairine jumped, becoming less and less willing to stop, until finally strange vistas were flickering past her with the speed of some unutterably strange slide show being run in fast-forward by a bored lecturer. She passed right through the coronation parade of one of the Anarchs of Deleian IV and never noticed it: she stood for only a second on a chilly little planetoid being fought over by two desperate interstellar empires (and also missed the nova bomb that turned the planetoid into plasma several minutes later); she stood on the metallic upper floors of a planet that was one great library full of three galaxies' knowledge, and she never knew what it was, and probably at that point would not have cared. Only once Dairine paused for more than a few seconds, on a red sandstone promontory with a pinkish sea crash ing at its foot, and no signs of life anywhere under the bloated red sun that dyed the water. "Are they still following?" she said.

"Probability high, but at a greatly increased distance."

"You have enough time to finish the main program?"

"Affirmative."

"Do it, then."

She sat down on a rock and looked out at the water, while the computer's disk drive chirred softly to itself. The fat red sun slipped horizonward as she watched, and Dairine looked at it and noticed through the sunset haze that it had a companion, a little blue-white dwarf star that was slowly sucking the red giant's matter out of it in an accretion spiral of tarnished gold. She shook her head. Once she would have given anything to sit here and watch this. Now, though, the hair was rising on the back of her neck, and her back prickled, and all she wanted in the world-the worlds-was to get out of here and end up where she could hide.

She shivered. I never want to smell coffee again, she thought. They had unquestionably been sent after her by what had laughed at her in the dark. The Lone Power, the manual utility had called It. Well, at least she didn't hear It laughing anymore while she was in transit. Then again, that might not be good. I'm running pretty fair rings around Its people. It's probably real annoyed at me.