Диана Дуэйн: High Wizardry

COPY SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED. DESCRIPTION FILE "APPLIIIC.DSC" CREATED

HARD COPY "APPLIIIC.CPY" CREATED A>

Oh, Lord! Dairine thought. She didn't dare turn around or make any outward sign: behind her, her mother and father were arguing peaceably over the contents of the Apple manuals. Desperately, Dairine brought up the directory again, stared at it, and then, for lack of any better idea, typed:

HIDE

The disk drives whirred again. Dairine thought she had never heard such a loud noise in her life, but her parents still didn't notice anything. The screen cleared itself, then said:

IIIC HIDE UTILITY

Choose one:

(1) Hide from COPY utility

(2) Hide from CHANGE utility

(3) Hide from MBASIC

(4) Exit to system

Dairine typed "1." The screen cleared again.

HIDE FROM "COPY" UTILITY

Last copy description file in memory: "APPLIIIC.DSK"

Last hard copy created: "APPLIIIC.CPY"

Name of hard copy to hide?

Dairine hurriedly typed "APPLIH.CPY." The screen said:

HIDE OPTIONS:

(a) Hide in realspace (invisibility option)

(b) Hide in realspace (size reduction)

(c) Hide in otherspace (retrievable pocket)

(d) Discard in otherspace (nonretrievable pocket)

(e) Timed storage

(coordinate-specific claudication)

(f) Exit to main menu

Dairine typed "c."

PASSWORD FOR RETRIEVAL?

Dairine swallowed: behind her, her father was muttering about getting some coffee. "RED FIVE," she typed.

CHOOSE INPUT OPTION: VERBAL OR KEYBOARD?

"VERBAL," she typed, very fast. The drives whirred.

HIDING HARD COPY OF FILE "APPLIIIC.CPY."

As silently as it had come, the second computer vanished.

A>

Dairine's father turned around and saw her at the computer. "What are you doing!"

"Uh," Dairine said. She couldn't remember when she had last been at a loss for words. Her father, though, wasn't even slightly concerned with this. Several seconds later Dairine found herself going to

New York with Nita and Kit.

At the moment, even the thought of the New York Public Library seemed a bit tame.

It took her hours to get free of Nita and Kit. All the while her mind was raging, turning over and over the thought of what power she had been offered when she took the Oath, and when she finally got down to the ladies' room and sat down in one of the stalls, her heart was hammering with excitement and sweat stood out on her.

"Red five," she whispered, and held her breath.

There was a computer in her lap.

She flipped up the little liquid-crystal screen and was shocked to find the A> prompt staring at her: shocked partly because she hadn't booted the computer up, and partly because it couldn't be running-there were no batteries in it yet-or were there? But Dairine wasn't one to argue the point. She typed hurriedly, using the HIDE.COM program to put the books she'd bought in a "pocket" and get them out of her way. Then she brought up the directory again. ASSIST.COM, said the first entry. Maybe that was a "help menu," a series of screens that would explain how to get the most out of the computer. She typed "ASSIST" and the carriage return.

The screen cleared, then said at the top:

ACTIVE OR PASSIVE MODE?

Dairine was out of her depth again. "ACTIVE," she typed, on a guess, and entered it. The screen cleared again.

UTILITY OPTIONS:

t (1) General Data & Logistics-MANUAL, MENU

"it (2) Travel-GO.COM

>;' (3)Intervention-CHANGE (see also MANUAL)

••n (3 a)Duplication-COPY

(3b) Preservation-HIDE, SEEK

"!i (4) Outside assistance-(routine) SUPPORT

(4a) (emergency) ASSIST

'-' (5) Other programming-MBASIC

"" (6) Exit to system

Dairine chewed her lip and thought. Just to see what would happen, she hit "2" and the carriage return.

The screen cleared.

TRAVEL UTILITY

Input? (1) keyboard, (2) verbal

"2," Dairine typed.

"Inside solar system or outside solar system?" the computer said very quietly, but so suddenly that Dairine almost dropped it.

"Inside," she said, and swallowed.

"Planet?"

She gazed at the ladies' room door, thinking of the dioramas outside with a sudden terrible desire.

"Mars," Dairine said.

The disk drive chirred briefly. "Coordinates?"

Dairine knew that aerographers used some kind of latitude-longitude system for Mars, but she knew nothing else about it. "Default," she said, on a hunch.

"Default coordinates confirmed," said the computer, "last recorded transit. Atmosphere?"

Last recorded- "Uh, atmosphere? Yes," she said.

"Parameters?"

"Umm. . Fifteen percent oxygen, eighty percent nitrogen, five percent carbon dioxide."

"Mix proportions approximate Terran sea-level parameters. Default to those?"

"Mmm. . Yes."

"Estimated time in transit?"

She thought. "One hour."

"Data complete," said the computer. "Ready to transit. Transit command 'run.' "

"Run," Dairine said.

And everything slewed sideways and upside down. Or no, the world stayed the same-but Dairine's frame of reference suddenly became huger than the whole Earth and the space that contained it, so that her planet seemed only one moving, whirling point plunging along its path through a terrible complexity of forces, among which gravity was a puny local thing and not to be regarded. Up was some other way now; down had nothing to do with the floor. Her stomach rebelled.

And her eyes were seeing things they had never been made to see. Lines and sparks and traces of white fire seemed to tear through her head from her eyes to the back of her skull; they pinned her to the rolling Earth like a feebly fluttering moth to a card. A terrible silence with a deadly sea-roar at the bottom of it, more terrible than the stillness of her Oathtaking, flattened her down with its sheer cold ancientness, a vast weight of years without sound or light or life. Cosmic rays, she thought desperately, clutching at reason: faster-than-light particles, maybe that's what the light is. But the dark-it's death, death itself, I'm going to die

— and the wizardry let her go. Dairine got shakily to her feet. The first crunch of stones and gravel under her sneakers, instead of tile floor, went through her in a rush of adrenaline as fierce as fire. Her vision cleared. Red wasteland stretched away under a cold rose sun, a violet sky arched over her; the wind sang chill. She turned slowly, looking around. High up in the cold violet day, something small and bright fled across the sky, changing phase as it did so.

"Deimos," Dairine whispered. Or maybe it was Phobos, the other of Mars's two little moons. Whichever it was, it went through half its month in a few minutes, sliding down toward the horizon and down behind something that stood up from it. It was a mountain peak, upraised as if on a pedestal, and so tall that though it came up from far behind the foreshortened horizon, its broad flat base spanned half that horizon easily. "What is that?" she said.

"Syntax error 24," said the Apple dispassionately. "Rephrase for precision."

"That mountain. What is it? Identify."

"Earth/IAU nomenclature 'Olympus Mons.' "

Dairine took in a sharp breath. It was an ancient volcano, long extinct, and the highest mountain in the Solar System. "How do I get up there?"

"Reference short-transit utilities."

She did. Five minutes later she stood in a place where the wind no longer sang, for it was too thin to do so; where carbon dioxide lay frozen on the rust red stones, and the fringes of her protective shell of air shed a constant snow of dry ice and water vapor as she moved; a place from which she could see the curvature of the world. Dairine stood twelve miles high atop Olympus Mons, on the ridge of its great crater, into which Central Park could have been dropped entire, and looked out over the curve of the red world at what no nonwizardly child of Earth had seen with her or his own eyes before: the asteroid belt rising like a chain of scattered stars, and beyond them, the tiniest possible disk, remote but clear.