Диана Дуэйн - Wizards At War

After that, the implementation's hers to direct: We'll merely assist. A wave of agreement went around the vast assemblage. Ready? the Motherboard said to Dairine. Go, Dairine said. The power started to build. Dairine felt "taps" from this world into other universes open up, spilling unimaginable amounts of force into the wizardry. Time began to stretch as the mobiles' perception of what was happening swamped her own. Dairine started to see herself as the mobiles did-a life-form seemingly frozen in time, and as a spell diagram, tidily compartmentalized. The combined intention of the Motherboard and the mobiles sought down through her structure and focused on one of those compartments, an obscurely glowing area easily lost among other, brighter ones surrounding it in Dairine's mind– That compartment grew until every intricacy of its contents was made plain in a delicate lacework spattering of pale light, like dark-side cities seen from space. The mobiles and the Motherboard spent what seemed like a long time examining the compartment and the data inside it. Finally, the Motherboard spoke. This is the information the Defender left, she said. It can't he decrypted without breaking the container open. Right, Dairine said. For the moment, she was part mobile, and could act at their speed. She reached out a hand. In this darkness all spangled with light, a hand of light reached out, laced ringers through the webwork of darkness surrounding the data, and pulled. It came away in her hand like a fistful of cobwebs. The data burst out of prison like a storm of silver bees– The mobiles threw a net of Speech-words around them. The light of the data ran down the strands of the net, particles shifting, moving themselves into a different order. Then everything went dark again. Logo's voice seemed to come from somewhere far off. And now the information Spot was holding, he said. Distantly, Dairine saw another container's contents trying to flee into the darkness-then being netted and contained, as her data had been. The world came back. Dairine took a few breaths, stood up and stretched. It felt like she'd been sitting in the same place for an hour, though she knew it had been only a matter of seconds. Before her, spread out in a new dark area that had opened up a couple of meters away, was a single long line of characters in the Speech. Dairine read them slowly. "They're coordinates," she said then. "But not to a place. To a person. This'll tell us who has the Instrumentality-the thing that'll save the universe-" "// we can find it in time," Roshaun said. "And work out how to use it." "Let's go," Dairine said. "You guys ready?" Show us what to do, said the Motherboard and the mobiles together. "We need an imaging routine," Dairine said, and knelt down in her circle again, sitting back on her heels. She put a hand down on the surface again, getting back into more direct contact with the Motherboard. In her mind a series of possible imaging routines presented themselves. Close-range out-of-atom, long-range out of atom That one looks about right, Dairine thought. She glanced down at the set of coordinates burning just under the surface before her. Light blasted out and away from her through the surface, curving and twining away in all directions as long sentences in the Speech etched themselves under it in living fire. She had a peculiar sense that someone else was in the spell with her. Not the Motherboard, not the mobiles, not Spot or Roshaun: nothing living-or at least not with the usual kind of life. All around her, the mobiles glowed more brightly by the moment as the spell drew on the Motherboard's manual functions and showed Dairine what to say. The feeling of the sheer power running through her astonished Dairine. I'd forgotten it could be like this.. The throb of it ran up her arms and into her brain; she stood up slowly, let it build. If it wasn't for how desperate all this is, I could really enjoy this. And she was enjoying it. There was no use pretending otherwise. Dairine started to speak the words in the Speech that were the search coordinates. The sound of them going out of her was like thunder. They shook her from side to side as she spoke them, streaking out into the structure of the wizardry to build its fire higher, second by second. Across the diagram, Roshaun knelt at his focus point, his expression full of the terror and exaltation of the power that was suddenly his by virtue of his connection to the wizardry and the Motherboard. Dairine couldn't remember ever having seen so naked and open an expression on his face before. Past him, in its container, the Sunstone blazed the orange-gold of Wellakh's star. You okay? Dairine said silently. He lifted his eyes to hers. The look slammed into Dairine with force that felt like it should have knocked her down. The world whited out. It was as if the two of them stood in Earth's Sun again, working the spell that drained off the excess energy which would have made the Sun flare up and roast the side of Earth facing toward it. But this time the roiling sea of power above which they stood was partly the Motherboard, and partly Dairine-or, rather, the surface of Dairine's mind as Roshaun saw it. From Roshaun, Dairine got the sense of someone standing on a narrow bridge over what looked like untameable chaos and fury paired with infinite power. That power was speaking to him, too, tempting him to get a little closer to the edge. Don't get any ideas! Dairine said silently. The answer was a strange low garbled roar, one she instantly recognized, since it had shocked her so when first she'd heard it. The Sun said something, and I didn't understand. But now it was Roshaun saying something in the Speech, and once again Dairine wasn't getting it. Impossible. Everything understands the Speech! She shook her head. No time for it now, she thought. It's some weirdness to do with him; we'll figure it out later. The rest of the Speech was working just fine; the spell lay before her, ready to implement. Dairine took a breath and said the single word in the Speech that is the shorthand for the wizard's knot, the "go" word of the spell. Everything went dark. Then images began to superimpose themselves on the darkness, blotting out even the viewer's sense of being at the center of a point of view, so that Dairine felt more like a bodiless presence than an observer. She saw the strange slick cloud of some atom's shell, from the inside, an undersky fuzzy with probabilities. The "sky" rushed toward her, blew past her like fog, leaving her gazing out on interstitial space alive with the neon ripples of "strong force" between a seemingly infinite latticework of atoms. Another few breaths, and the view was a solid mass of chains of molecules, writhing among one another like a nest of snakes. Another blurring outward rush, and reddish lightning rattled and sizzled everywhere, whip– cracking down the length of strange bumpy textures like a child's blocks strung on rope. Another rush, and everything went milky and crystalline, with a faint strange movement going on outside the surface of the crystal. One last blur of fog descended, and the image resolved itself into a peculiar view seen through eyes that fringed every object with brilliant rainbows of color. It was a landscape, all in flat dark reds, the sky black with heat; and finally there was a point of view associated with it. This is it, Dairine said, exultant. This is what the world looks like for the person who's got the Instrumentality. Now all we need to find is where they are. The envisioning routine backed out several steps farther. A smallish, ocean-girdled planet circled a giant white sun, the fourth of its eight planets. Another jump, and the star dwindled down to just one of a drift of thousands in an irregular galaxy's core. Several long strings of characters in the Speech appeared by that galaxy, tagging it and numerous others around it that were visible only as tiny cloudy whorls or disks. Okay, Dairine said. Store that. And she waited until the data was stored, and then said the word that cut the wizard's knot and dissolved the spell. The space between the towers reappeared. Slowly the spell diagram faded, leaving only the image of the "found" galaxy, and the outlines of the circles in which all the spell's participants had stood. Dairine let out a long breath. She was a little tired, but nothing like as exhausted as she should have been after such an effort. "I can't get over that," Dairine said, as Beanpole and Logo and the others made their way over toward her and Roshaun. "It was like the wizardry was helping me, somehow…" "It's the power-increase effect, the peridexis," Beanpole said. "We've been taking advantage of it, too." Dairine walked out of her circle to where the image of the tagged galaxy burned just under the surface. She bent down to look at the annotations. "It's close to our own galaxy. At least we won't have any more really big transits to deal with when we get back." "That's well enough," Roshaun said, settling the tore with the Sunstone about his neck. "We may know where the person with access to the Instrumentality can be found. But if we can't get them to give it to us, or learn how to use it to stop the expansion, this will all have been for nothing." "I'm not gonna throw our own universe in the trash just yet," Dairine said. She peered down at the tagging characters next to the galaxy. "Good, it's got a New General Catalog number: NGC 5518. It's in Bootes, somewhere." Then she stopped. "What's this?" she said over her shoulder to the mobiles. Spot came over to her from his own circle, and put out several eyes to examine the word in the Speech that Dairine was indicating. "Enthusiasmic," he said. Dairine frowned. "You mean enthusiastic." "It says enthusiasmic," Spot said. "That's not a word!" "It is now," said Spot. Roshaun came to look over Dairine's shoulder. "And what is that word next to it supposed to be?" he said. "Incorporation?" He looked bemused. "So this is a word that didn't have a meaning until just recently?" Dairine said to Spot. "A word for something new." "So I believe," Spot said. Dairine shook her head. "Enthusiasmic incorporation," she said. "Of the hesper-" Then Dairine blinked, and a moment later her eyes widened. "That's not a word in the Speech," said Gigo, sounding perplexed. "No," Dairine said. "It's not. But it's a word we know in English. Or part of one." She swallowed. "Enthusiasmic incorporation of the Hesper-" She hurriedly bent down and picked Spot up. "Quick," she said. "You have to message Nita for me. Or one of the others. I don't care where they are. Just get me one of those guys!" The ground underneath all their various feet or treads or wheels came alive with the kind of display that would have shown on Spot's screen, had it been open-the apple-without-a-bite imagery of the manual software's Earth-sourced version, rippling bluely under the surface. And then the message, both written in the Speech and seemingly speaking itself into their bones: Messaging refused. Please try again later. "Refused?" Roshaun said. "They're somewhere where they can't take an incoming communication, because they're scared they might be overheard," Dairine said. She bit her lip. "Perhaps we should simply go to them," Roshaun said. "You're exactly right," Dairine said, putting Spot down again. She turned to the mobiles. "Guys, I hate to spell and run, but we've got to find them right away-because if they don't realize what they're dealing with, they're going to mess it up. And if it gets messed up this once, then the whole universe is screwed up forever." "Even more screwed up than it is at the moment?" Roshaun said. "You have no idea," Dairine said. "Come on, let's open up a gate and get goingl" Kit came half awake to the sound of something bumping on the floor, very fast, and something jingling. He opened one eye. Dim light-the wizard-light he'd left hovering near the ceiling in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night-showed him Ponch, sitting by where the door of the pup tent would be when Kit spoke it open.Читать дальше