Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

Nita told the shield to be opaque-and then wondered why it wasn't, as the brightest light she had ever imagined came in through it anyway. She had been to a Shuttle launch, once, and had come to understand that sound could be a force, a thing that grabbed you from inside your chest and shook you effortlessly back and forth. Now she wondered how she had never thought that light might be able to do the same, under some circumstances. It struck her deaf and dumb and blind, and she went sprawling.

Heat scorched her everywhere; she smelled the rotten-egg stink of burning hair. She clutched the gimbal: she couldn't have dropped it if she'd tried.

Much later, it seemed, it began to get dark. She opened her eyes and could not be sure, for a few minutes, that they were open, the world was so full or afterimages. But the purple curtain between her and everything else eventually went away. She and Kit and Peach were hanging suspended, weightless in empty space. At least it was empty now. There was no sign of any moonlet — only off to one side, a blinding star that slowly grew and grew and grew and grew, toward them. They were out of its range now. They had not been before.

"Didn't know the gimbal could handle both those spells," Kit said, rubbing his eyes. "Nice going."

"It won't do it twice," Nita said. There was just so much power one could milk out of a physical aid, and she had been pushing her odds even trying it once. "Where are we?"

"I haven't the faintest. Somewhere a light-month out from our original position. And those Satrachi were bait," he said. "For us. Look at it, Neets."

She looked. "I could have sworn I opaqued this shield."

"It is opaqued," Kit said. "But a shield doesn't usually have to put up with a nova at close range.

H-bombs are about the most one can block out without leakage, if I remember."

Nita stared at the raging star, all boiling with huge twisted prominences. For all its brilliance, there was a darkness about its heart, something wrong with the light. In a short time this terrible glory would be collapsed to a pallid dwarf star, cooling slowly to a coal. She shivered: one of the oldest epithets for the Lone Power was "Starsnuffer." It blew a whole star, just to kill us, because we were going to help Dairine. . "Did this system have other planets?" she said.

"I don't know. I doubt It cared."

And this was what was going after her little sister.

The anger in Nita got very, very cold. "Let's go find her," she said.

Together they began to read.

Fatal Error

Dairine woke up stiff and aching all over. . 's wrong with the bed? was her first thought: it felt like the floor. Then she opened her eyes, and found that she was on the floor… or a surface enough like one to make no difference. The cool, steady stars of space burned above her. She sat up and rubbed her sticky eyes.

I feel awful, she thought. I want a bath, I want breakfast, I want to brush my teeth! But baths and toothbrushes and any food but bologna sandwiches with mustard were all a long way away.

She dropped her hands into her lap, feeling slow and helpless, and looked about her. A sense of shock grew in her: all around, in what had been the absolutely smooth surface of the planet, there were great cracked holes, as if the place had had a sudden meteor shower while she was asleep. But the debris lying around wasn't the kind left by meteor strikes. "Sheesh," she muttered.

Something poked her from behind.

Dairine screamed and flung herself around. She found herself staring at the small, turtlelike glassy creature that had been the last straw the night before. It had walked into her, and was continuing to do so, its short jointed legs working busily though it was getting nowhere: like a windup toy mindlessly walking against a wall. "With," it said.

"Oh, heck," Dairine said in relief. She sagged with embarrassment. Two days ago she would have thought scorn to scream because of anything, up to and including Darth Vader himself. . but the world looked a little different today.

She grabbed the steadily pedaling little thing and held it away from her to look at it. It was all made of the same silicon as the surface; the inside of its turtlish body was a complex of horizontal layers, the thickest of them about half an inch across, the thinnest visible only as tiny colored lines no thicker than a hair. . thousands of them packed together, at times, in delicate bandings that blended into one subtle color. Dairine knew she was looking at a chip or board more complex than anything dreamed of on Earth. She could see nothing identifiable as a sensor, but it had certainly found her right away last night: so it could see. She wondered if it could hear.

"Well, how about it, small stuff?" she said. It was rather cute, after all. "Say hi."

"Hi," it said.

She put her eyebrows up, and looked over her shoulder at the computer, which was sitting where she had left it the night before. "Did you teach this guy to talk?"

"There is very little I did not teach the mind that made them," said the computer calmly.

Dairine looked around at the many, many jagged holes in the surface. "I bet. Where are they all?"

"Indeterminate. Each one began walking around the surface in a random fashion as soon as it was produced."

"Except for this one," Dairine said, and lifted the creature into her lap. It was surprisingly light. Once there, the creature stopped trying to walk, and just rested across her knees like a teatray with a domed cover on it. "Good baby," Dairine said. She touched one of the legs carefully, maneuvering the top joint gently to see how it worked. There were three joints: one ball-and-socketlike joint where it met the body, and two more spaced evenly down the leg, which was about six inches long. The legs were of the same stuff as the outer shell of the body dome: translucent, like cloudy glass, with delicate hints of color here and there. "Why didn't you go walking off with everybody else, huh?" she said as she picked it up to flip it over and examine its underside.

Its legs kicked vigorously in the air. "With," it said.

Dairine put the creature down, where it immediately walked into her again and kept walking, its legs slipping on the smooth surface.

"With, huh. Okay, okay, 'with' already." She picked it up again and put it in her lap. It stopped kicking.

She glanced up at the sky. The galaxy was rising again. For a few seconds she just held still, watching the curving fire of it. "How long is the day here?" she said.

"Seventeen hours," said the computer.

"Fast for such a big planet," she said. "Mostly light elements, though. I guess it works. How long was I asleep?"

"Fourteen hours."

Dairine made an annoyed face. There went that much of her research time. She felt fairly certain that if the BEMs didn't catch up with her shortly, someOne else would. She didn't like the thought. "I've got to get some work done," she said, and glanced down at the turtly, glassy creature in her lap. "What about you? You can't sit here all day. Neither can I."

"Hi," said the glass turtle.

She had to laugh. "Are you still talking to"-she didn't know what to call it: she patted the glassy ground-"our friend here?"

"Yes," the computer said. "Response is slow. It is still assimilating and coordinating the data."

"Still?" Dairine let out a breath. If there was so much information in the manual functions that a computer with this much memory was still sorting it, what hope did she have of finding the information she needed in time to be able to do anything useful to the Lone One with it? She was going to have to help it along somehow. "Can you ask it to call back this little guy's friends? I want to look at them."

"Working."

Dairine stretched and considered that the next time she went out to space, she was going to plan things a little more carefully. Or stay at a hotel. Where, for example, was she going to find something to drink?