Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

"Sixteen million, four hundred and-"

Dairine paused to consider the condition the world was in. "Well, it's not anywhere near enough! Make them all wizards. Yes, I confirm it three times, just get on with it, these guys are getting twitchy." And indeed Gigo was trembling in her lap, which so astonished Dairine that she cuddled him close and put her chin down on the top of him.

Instantly all his legs jerked spasmodically. Dairine held on to him, held on to all of them through him.

Maybe some ghost of that first physical-contact link was still in place, for she went briefly blind with sensations that had nothing to do with merely human sensoria. To have all one's life and knowledge, however brief, ruthlessly crushed down into a tiny packet, with no way to be sure if the parts you cherished the most would be safe, or would be the same afterward-and then to multiply that packet a thousand times over, till it pushed your own thoughts screaming into the background, and your own voice cried' out at you in terror a thousand times, inescapable-and then, worst of all, the silence that follows, echoing, as all the memories drain away into containers that may or may not hold them- Dairine was in the midst of it, felt the fear for all of them, and had nothing to use against it but the knowledge that it would be all right, could be all right. She hung on to that as she hung on to Gigo through his frenzied kicking, her eyes squeezed shut, all her muscles clenched tight against the terror in her arms and the terror in her heart. .

Silence, silence again, at last. She dared to open her eyes, lifted her head a little to look around her.

Gigo was still. The glittering ranks around her shifted a little-a motion here, a motion there, as if a wind went through glass trees at sunset. The light faded, slipped away, except for the chill gleam of the bright stars over everything: the sun had set.

"It hurt," Gigo said.

He moved. Dairine let him clamber down out of her lap.

He turned and looked at her. "It hurt," he said.

"But it was worth it," said one of the taller mobiles, one of the heavy-labor types, in a different voice.

The voices began to proliferate. Motion spread farther through the crowd. Mobiles turned and spoke to one another in a chorus of voices like tentative synthesizers, changing pitch and tone as if looking for the right ones. Outside the area where there was air, communication passed by less obvious means. Dairine sat in the midst of it, heard words spoken with the delight of people tasting a new food for the first time, heard long strings of binary recited as if the numbers were prayers or poems, saw movement that even to a human eye was plainly dance, being invented there in front of her. She grinned like a loon. "Nice job," she said to the Apple.

"Thank you."

"We did good, huh?"

"Indeterminate," said the computer.

Dairine shrugged and got up to wander among the mobiles and get a closer look at them. They clustered around her as she went, touching her, peering at her, speaking to her again and again, as if to make sure they really could.

The cacophony of voices delighted her, especially since so many of them said the same thing to her at first: "Save, please!" She knew what they wanted, now, and so she named them. She started out with programmers' puns, and shortly the glassy plain was littered with people named Bit and Buffer, Pinout and Ascii, Peek and Poke, Random, Cursor, String, Loop, Strikeout, Hex, and anything else she could think of. But she ran out of these long before she ran out of mobiles, and shortly the computer types were joined by Toms, Dicks and Harrys, not to mention Georges, Roberts, Richards, Carolyns, and any other name she could think of. One group wound up named after her entire gym class, and another after all her favorite teachers. Dairine ran through comic-book heroes, numerous Saturday morning cartoon characters, the bridge crew of the Starship Enterprise, every character named in The Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars movies (though she did not name any of them "Darth Vader"), the names and capitals of all fifty states, all the presidents, and all the kings and queens of England she could think of. By the time she was finished, she wished she had had a phone book. She was hungry and thirsty, but satisfied to think that somewhere in the universe, a thousand years from now, there would be a world that contained both Elizabeth the First and Luke Skywalker.

She finally flopped down and started to make another sandwich. During the naming, Gigo had followed her through the crowd. Now he sat beside her, looking with interest at the sandwich. "What's that?" he said.

Dairine opened the mustard jar, made a resigned face, and dug a finger in. "It's going to be food," she said. "You have that in your memory."

"Yes." Gigo was quiet for a moment. "From this one acquires energy."

"Yup." Dairine took the last few slices of bologna out of the package, looked at them regretfully, and put them on the bread.

Various others of the mobiles were drifting in to stand or crouch or sit around where Dairine was.

"Dairine," said Gigo, "why is this necessary for you?"

She shrugged. "That's the way people are built. We get tired, get hungry… we have to refuel sometimes.

You guys do it, though you do it through contact with the motherboard: I had the computer build in the same kind of wizardry-managed energy transfer it used to get in touch with your mom in the first place.

There's loads of geothermic. It'll be ages before you run down."

She munched on the sandwich. One of the tall, leggy mobiles, a storkish one that she remembered naming Beanpole, said, "Why should we run down?"

She glanced up at that, between bites. Another of the mobiles, one of the first ones she had named, a stocky one called Monitor, said, "There is something wrong with the energy in this universe."

"dS = dQ/T," said a third, one of the original turtles, named Logo.

Dairine began to feel uneasy. That was indeed the equation that expressed entropy, the tendency of any system to lose its energy into the void. "It's not that anything's wrong," she said. "That's just the way things are."

"It is poor design," Beanpole said.

"Uh, well," Dairine said. This was something that had occurred to her on occasion, and none of the explanations she had heard had ever satisfied her. "It's a little late to do anything about it."

"Is it?" said Gigo.

Dairine stared at him.

"Things shouldn't run down," Monitor said. "Something should be done about it."

"What if you run down some day?" said Beanpole, sounding stricken.

"Uh," Dairine said. "Guys, I will, eventually. I'm part of this universe, after all."

"We won't let you run down," said Monitor, and patted her arm timidly.

"We have to do something about this," Logo said.

That was when the conversation began to get complex. More and more of the mobiles drifted into it, until Dairine was surrounded by a crowd of the robots she had built the most dataprocessing ability into.

Phrases like quasi-static transitions and deformation coordinates and the zeroth law and diathermic equilibrium flew around until Dairine, for all her reading, was completely lost. She knew generally that they were talking about the laws of thermodynamics, but unless she was much mistaken, they were talking about them not so much as equations but as programs. As if they were something that could be rewritten…

But they can be, she thought suddenly, with astonishment. The computer's "Manual" functions dealt with many natural laws that way. Wizards knew the whole of the nature and content of a physical law. Able to name one completely, a wizard can control it, restructuring it slightly and tempo rarily. But the restructuring that the mobiles were discussing wasn't temp rary. .