Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

"I see I will have to do away with you more quickly than these two. You're getting to be a nuisance."

Dairine grinned, a predatory look that had made more than one kid decide not to bother her on the playground, or in a poker game. "Do your worst, you poor turkey," she said.

She felt Its mind working, readying a bolt like the one that had crumpled Nita's shields, but many times worse, a killing blow that would cause a long lifetime's worth of pain before it snuffed life out. Must still be some connection to it through the motherboard, Dairine thought. I wonder where? Unless the presence of entropy in the board is enough. Wherever entropy is, It is… Oh, well. She turned her mind to hunt a spell to stop the bolt; a millisecond later she had it. She did not need to look in the manual. She was the manual now.

As if in slow motion she watched the bolt head for her, invisible though it was. Effortlessly, Dairine struck it away from her and back at the sender, like a batter hitting a nasty ground ball straight back into the pitcher's gut. The Lone One didn't react physically-the blow was too small to affect It-but Its face grew terrible.

"You think you can match power with me?" It said softly, turning away from Nita and Kit.

Dairine laughed. "Think so? I can wring you out and hang you up to dry. Come on, you poor fool. Take your best shot."

It raised up a wash of power that would fall on the planet's surface and melt every one of the mobiles to magma. Dairine saw it coming, found the spell she needed, caught the incoming tide of death and threw it off to one side, where a large area of the plain began to bubble and seethe. "Naughty, naughty," Dairine said. "Let my buddies be."

The Lone One stood looking at her, Its rage beginning to affect Its physical form. It seemed larger than it had: not so much the young, handsome human shape anymore, but a larger shape, shadowed, burning, its eyes light-less pits of hate. "Insolence," it said, "I will never tolerate. I may not be able to touch you, but I will level your planet. You cannot stay awake to guard it from me forever. One night the sirens will start, and the next morning, only mushroom clouds will grow on Earth anymore. It will not take much doing."

"It wouldn't if I ever intended to let you off this planet," Dairine said, quite calmly. "I'm in the motherboard as much as it's in me. They know all the wizardry there is to know. . and even if my human brain starts to lose it eventually, they won't. Get used to this place. You're not leaving."

"Bets?" said the huge shadowy form, growing huger. Its cold eyes glanced up into the darkness.

High up, the red sun began to waver and pucker. "A significant amount of this planet's energy," said the Lone One, "comes from solar power. More than from geothermal. Much of this plain is solar cell: surely you noticed. That black hole's orbit can be changed without too much effort. It need no longer transit the star. It can be permanently placed in front of it. . "

The sun's disk puckered in on itself, dwindled, di^d away completely.

The mobiles gazed up in horror.

"Oh, they have a little power stored," Dairine said. "Enough to stop that kind of blackmail." She took a breath: this was going to take some power, but she had that to spare at the moment-the whole motherboard behind her, all the mobiles, all their intent turned toward giving her whatever she needed.

The spell was intricate, but the natural laws being worked with were simple enough: gravity was one of the easiest of all laws to rewrite for brief periods. Dairine reached out without moving, spoke the words that grasped the forces and spun them together, flung them outward. The net found the shape destined for it, the tiny dark mass around which space bent so awry. The mass was snugged into the net, caught.

Dairine described the direction she wanted it to go in, turned the spell loose. The whole business had taken sixteen milliseconds.

The tiny black hole slung into the red sun, which immediately flared up in outrage. None of this was visible, nor would it be for some minutes, until the light reached the planet from the star; but Dairine felt it happen, and so did the Lone One.

"So much for that," Dairine said. "Now you and I are going to talk." At the same time she was thinking furiously about something else that nagged at her, as if it were important. How was it she was able to hear what was going on in Its head

— and she was distracted, for here came something else, a wave of power so awful that she shrank from it, even though it wasn't directed at her or anything on the planet's surface.

All those millions of miles away, she felt the star go dead.

Starsnuffer: she knew the Lone Power was called by that name as well.

"I am through playing," It said. "If it is not you who pay the price, elsewhere others will. Think on it." It looked upward. There was hardly anything human about it anymore-only a great tall darkness, like a tree made of night, no limbs, no eyes, just awful watchfulness and a cold to freeze the heart. Dairine looked up too.

She felt darkness eating at the fringes of the risen galaxy. "Here are your choices," said the Lone Power out of Its darkness, as Dairine and Nita and Kit watched in horror. "Keep on defying me, and watch me kill and kill as the price of your defiance. The blood of all these billions of entities will be on your souls forever. Or give yourselves up to me."

"No way," Nita said. "You're the one doing the killing. We'd do worse by the Universe if we gave up, rather than if we kept on fighting you."

Dairine stood silent, refusing to be rattled, thinking. There has to be a way to get it to stop this! I can't fight it forever! At least, I don't want to…

And how can I hear It? The connection through Logo! She glanced over among the mobiles, but Logo lay on his side, empty-minded. No. It has to be.

She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly. .

I'm a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It's in me too. .

Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning lightsaber, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable anymore. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It…

She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered; the thing that would save everybody-from Kit and Nita to the least little grain of dust in space and the tiniest germ on Earth. This was what the spell had brought her here to do. She would pen all of the Lone Power up inside herself, not just the treacherous little splinter of it that was her own; pen It up inside a mind that was large enough to hold It all. And then she would die, and take It out of the universe with her.

But she couldn't do it without consent. What about it, guys? she said to them silently, through the link that every mobile shared with every other. Let's take a vote.

Show us what to do, they said; and tears sprang to Dairine's eyes at the fierce love in their thought.

Dairine turned and bent down to pick up Logo, cradling the empty shell close in her arms. Gigo nuzzled up against her knee. This is the way to go out, Dairine thought. Who needs a lightsaber?. .

"Okay," she said to the Lone One. "Last warning. Cut it out."

It laughed at her.

Dairine struck. The mobiles struck with her through their own links to the Lone One, a great flow of valor that for the first time in all times, was without despair. They did not care about all the other attempts wizards had made on the Lone Power through history; as far as a computer is concerned, there is no program that cannot be debugged, or at worst, rewritten. They struck through Dairine, and with her, not knowing that defeat was possible.