Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

"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.

Geo-thermal? she wondered. Maybe some volcanic activity-that would explain those funny conical shapes against the horizon. . She thumped the computer 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 claudica-tion 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 was 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. .

She 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 print it to the screen, 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 hit the carriage return for another screenful of data, and the screenful appeared-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

elelllllllductilllllllllllllllllllllllllll 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

"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 hit the carriage return 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 there, 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 lunar Caucasus mountain chain, was a favorite of Kit's-a 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 the little crater Calippus scraped razor-sharp against the sky, and over it hung the Earth.

The Moon was at first quarter, so the Earth was at third, a blinding half-world: blazing blue-green, almost painful to look at until the eyes got used to it. It shed a cool faint blue-white light over everything.

A curl of white stormweather lay over the northwestern Pacific, and there vanished; for down the middle of it the terminator ran, the edge of night, creeping ever so slowly toward the west. Most of North America lay in the darkness, and city lights lay golden in faint glittering splashes and spatters with brighter sparkling Patches under the Great Lakes and on the California coast.