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? She hadn’t squirreled anything away in her claudication: she was going to have to find water. More to the point, there were no bathrooms here. Dairine wished heartily that she had taken time in the Crossings, or even back at Natural History, to use the facilities for something other than programming interstellar jumps. The memory of what sometimes seemed to be her mother’s favorite line, “You should have gone before we left!” made her grin ruefully.

She got up to improvise what she could. Her turtle started to go with her. “No,” she said, as she might have to Ponch. “Stay!” The turtle’s response to this was the same as Ponch’s would have been: It went after her anyway.

Dairine sighed and headed off to a little outcropping of rock about half a mile away. When she had finished, and started back to where the computer lay, she could already see small shapes moving on the horizon. She sat down with her bread and bologna, started making a sandwich, and waited for them.

Pretty soon she was knee-deep in turtles, or would have been had she been standing up. After the first few walked into her as her lapturtle had, she asked the computer to get them to hold still when they reached her. Something like two hundred of them were shortly gathered around her. They were all exact copies of her friend, even to the striations and banding inside them. She sighed a little as she looked at them.

“This isn’t gonna work, you guys,” she said. “There’s more to life than walking around, and none of you have anything like hands. ...”

“Hi!” said all the turtles, simultaneously. She couldn’t hear the ones that were outside her bubble of air, but the ones that were inside made racket enough.

She had to laugh at that. “Look,” she said to the computer, pushing her first turtle out of her lap and putting the computer there instead, “where did the mind behind these critters get the design for them?”

“Probably from one of the design templates in the “Make” utility,” said the computer.

“Okay, let’s get into that. If these guys are going to be the arms and legs for the mind that’s running them, they need arms!”

The computer’s screen flicked obediently to the opening screen for the “Make” utility. Dairine frowned at the menu for a while. The computer had a machine-assisted drafting utility: she chose that, while her turtle tried to climb back into her lap.

“No,” she said. “No, honey!” ‘ It was no use. “With!” said the turtle. “With, with, with, with-“

She laughed helplessly. “Boy, are you ever GIGO,” she said.

“Yes,” the turtle said, and sat down next to her abruptly, folding all its legs under it like a contented mechanical cat.

Dairine put her eyebrows up at that. Was that all it wanted? A name? “Gigo,” she said, experimentally.

“Yes!”

It sounds happy, she thought. Can it have emotions?

“Good baby,” she said, and patted it. “Good Gigo.”

“Yes!”said Gigo, and “Yes!” said several of the other turtles around, and it began to spread through the crowd to the limits of her air: “Yes, yes, yes-“

“Okay,” she said, “he’s good, you’re all good, now put a cork in it!”

They fell silent. But there had been no mistaking the sound of joy.

“I can see I’m gonna have to find names for all of you,” she said. “Can’t have the whole bunch of you answering to that.”

She turned her attention to the blank graphics screen. “Bring up the design that ...” She paused. “I can’t just keep banging on the ground. Does what you were talking to have a name for itself?”

“No.”

Dairine sighed. “Okay, just let’s call it a motherboard for the moment. Bring up the design it was using for Gigo and his buddies.”

The screen flickered, showing Dairine a three-dimensional diagram, which the computer then rotated to show all the turtle’s surfaces. “Good,” she said. “How do I make changes?”

“The screen is touch-sensitive. Touch a line and state what you want done with it.”

Dairine spent a cheerful hour or so there, pausing for bites of sandwich, as she started to redesign the turtles. She wasn’t shy about it. The original design had its points, but as the mobile units of an intelligence, the turtles were sadly lacking in necessary equipment. She built several of the legs into arms, with six claws apiece at the end of them, four “fingers” and two opposable “thumbs”; this hand she attached to the arm by a ball-and-socket joint so that it could rotate completely around without having to stop. As an afterthought, she put another pair of arms on the turtle’s back end, so that it wouldn’t have to turn around to pick something up if it didn’t want to.

She took the turtle’s rather simplistic visual sensor, barely more than a photosensitive spot, and turned it into something of a cross between the human retina and a bee’s faceted eye-a multiple-lensed business equally good for close work and distant vision. She placed several of these around the turtle’s perimeter, and a couple on top, and then for good measure added a special-purpose lens that was actually something like a small Cassegrain telescope, focusing on a mirror-polished bit of silicon buried a ways into the turtle’s “brain.” She added infrared and ultraviolet sensing. Ears for sound they already had; she considered that it might be wise to give them something to hear radio with, too, but couldn’t decide on which frequency to work with, and let the idea go for the moment. They could work it out themselves.

Dairine sat staring at the screen, musing. The newly awakened intelligence had made all its mobiles alike: probably because it didn’t understand the concept of otherness yet. She would make them different from one another. But they were going to have to be different on the inside, too, to do any good. If some danger comes along that they have to cope with, it’s no use their information processors being all the same: whatever it is could wipe them all out at once. If they’re as different as they can be, they’ll have a better chance of surviving.

She paused in her design to look closely at the structure of the chip layering in the turtles-not so much at what the layers were made of, but what their arrangement meant. At the molecular level she found the basic building-block of the chips, as basic as DNA in humans: not a chain molecule, but a sort of tridimensional snowflake of silicon atoms and atoms of other elements. DNA was simple beside these. Any given silicon molecule hooked with up to fourteen others, using any one of fifty different chemical compounds to do it; and every different arrangement of hookups between molecules or layers had a specific meaning, as each arrangement has in DNA. With the help of the computer she began to sort out the code buried in the interconnected snowflakes. Hours, it took her, and she was perfectly aware that even with the computer’s help she couldn’t hope to deal with more than the tip of this iceberg of information. Some parts of the chip structure she did manage to identify as pure data storage, others as sensor array, associative network, life support, energy management.

Dairine began devising layering arrangements different from those in the turtles. She designed creatures that would have more associative network and so could specialize in problem solving: others with more data stacks, turtles that would be good at remembering; mobiles more richly endowed with sensors, and senses, than some of the others, that would see and hear and feel most acutely. One arrangement of layers, the one that the computer identified for her as the seat of the turtles’ emotions, seemed an awfully tiny thing to Dairine. She expanded it to about three times its original size, and allowed it to interconnect at will with the other associative areas, with data memory and with the senses. Finally, to every model she designed, Dairine added a great deal of latent memory area, so that each mobile would have plenty of room to store what it experienced and to process the data it accumulated.

Having done all these things, she went back to her original design and copied it several times, making a number of different “models”: a large, strong one for heavy work; a small one with extra hands in various sizes, from human-hand size to tiny claws that could have done microsurgery or precision work almost on the molecular level. And she added the necessary extra sensor arrays or materials reinforcement that these changes would need to support them.

She sat back and sighed then, and unfolded her cramped legs, and reached down for her sandwich, which had gone stale on top while she worked. “Okay,” she said to the computer. “Ask the motherboard to run off a few of those and let’s see what happens.”

“Considerable reprogramming will be necessary,” said the computer.

“I know,” said Dairine, between bites of the sandwich, making a face at the taste of it. “I’m in no rush.”

The computer’s screen filled with binary as it began conferring with the motherboard in machine language. What do I mean I’m in no rush? Dairine thought, momentarily distracted while Gigo climbed into her lap again. “Did you finish that analysis run about the Lone One for me?”

“Yes,” said the computer. “Do you want it displayed?”

“Yeah, please.”

The binary went away from the screen, replaced by print. Dairine didn’t look at it immediately. She leaned back and gazed up. The galaxy was all set but for one arm, trailing up over the far, far horizon, a hook of light. The dull red sun was following it down as if attached to the hook by an invisible string. An old, old star, Dairine thought. Not even main-sequence anymore. This could have been one of the first stars created in this universe... Might have been, considering how far out this galaxy- The thought was shocked out of her.

Something other than her voice was making a sound. It was a rumbling, very low, a vibration in the surface she sat on. “What the- You feel that?” she said to the computer.        

“Vibration of seismic origin,” the computer said. “Intensity 2.2 Richter and increasing.”

There was precious little on the planet’s surface to shake. Dairine stood up, alarmed, and watched the turtles. For all their legs, they were having trouble keeping their footing on the slick surface. Gigo hooked a leg around Dairine’s and steadied itself that way. “Is this gonna get worse?” Dairine said.

“Uncertain. No curve yet. Richter 3.2 and increasing. Some volcanic eruption occurring in planet’s starward hemisphere.”

Got to do something about their leg design if this happens a lot, Dairine thought-and then was distracted again, because something was happening to the light: It wavered oddly, dimming from the clear rose that had flooded the plain to a dark dry color like blood. She stared upward.

The sun was twisting out of shape. There was no other way to describe it. Part of its upper right-hand quarter seemed pinched on itself, warped like a round piece of paper being curled. Prominences stretched peculiarly, snapped back to tininess again: the warping worsened, until the star that had been normal and round was squeezed small, as if in a cruel fist, to a horizontal, fluctuating oval, then to a sort of tortured heart-shape, then to an oval bent the other way, leftward. Sunspots stretched like pulled taffy, oozed back to shape again, and the red light wavered and shifted like that of a candle about to be blown out in the wind.

Dairine stood with a terrible sickness at the heart of her, for this was no kind of eclipse or other astronomical event that she had ever heard of. It was as if she was seeing the laws of nature broken in front of her.

“What is that?” she whispered.

“Transit of systemic object across primary,” said the computer. “The transiting object is a micro black hole.”

Dairine sat down again, feeling the rumbling beneath her start to die away. The computer had mentioned the presence of that black hole earlier, but in the excitement she had forgotten it. “Plot me that thing’s orbit,” she said. “Is that going to happen every day?”

“Indeterminate. Working.”

“I don’t like that,” said Gigo with sudden clarity.

Dairine looked over at it with surprise and pulled it into her lap. “You’re not alone, small stuff,” she said. “It gives me the shakes too.” She sat there for a second, noticing that she was sweating. “You’re getting smart, huh?” she said. “Your mom down there is beginning to sort out the words?”

“It hurts,” said Gigo, sounding a little mournful.

“Hurts ...” Dairine wasn’t sure whether this was a general statement or an answer to her question. Though it could be both. A black hole in orbit in the star system would produce stresses in a planet’s fabric that the planet—if it were alive, like this one-could certainly feel. Line the black hole up with its star, as it would be lined up in transit, and the tidal stresses would be that much worse. What better cause to learn to tell another person that something was hurting you? ... Now that there was another person to tell.

Dairine patted Gigo absently. “It’s all over, Gigo,” she said.

“Gigo, yes.”

She grinned faintly. “You really like having a name, huh?”

“A program must be given a name to be saved,” Gigo said quite clearly, as if reciting from memory-but there was also slight fear in its voice, and great relief.

“Well, it’s all over,” Dairine said ... while surreptitiously checking the sky to make sure. Tiny though it was-too small to see-a micro black hole was massive enough to bend light toward it. That was what had made the sun look so strange, as the gravity center of the black hole’s field bent the round image of the sun forward onto itself. The realization made Dairine feel a lot better, but she didn’t particularly want to see the sun do that again. She turned back to the computer. “Let’s get back to work.”

“Which display first,” the computer said, “the black hole’s orbit or the research run on the Lone Power?”

“The orbit.”

It drew it for her on the screen, a slowly moving graphic that made Dairine’s insides crawl. The black hole’s orbit around its primary was irregular. These transits occurred in twenty out of every thirty orbits, and in the middle five orbits the hole swung much closer to the planet and appeared to center more closely on the sun. This last one had been a grazing transit: the micro hole had only passed across the upper limb of the star. Dairine did not want to see what a dead-center transit would look like, not at all. But in the midst of her discomfort, she still found a little room to be fascinated. Apparently the black hole was the cause of the planet’s many volcanoes: the tidal stresses it produced brought up molten silicon, which erupted and spread over the surface. Without the frequent passages of the hole near the planet, the millions of layers of the motherboard would never have been laid down, and it would never have reached the critical “synapse” number necessary for it to come alive...

“Okay,” she said. “Give me the research run, and let me know when the motherboard’s ready to make some more of these guys.”

“Working.”

Dairine began to read, hardly aware of it when Gigo sneaked into her lap again and stared curiously at the screen. She paged past Nita’s and Kit’s last run-in with the Lone Power and started skimming the precis before it for common factors. Odd tales from a hundred planets flicked past her, and sweat slowly began to break out on Dairine as she realized she could not see any common factors at all. She could see no pattern in what made the Lone    Power pick a specific world or group or person to attack, and no sure pattern or method for dealing with It. Some people seemed to beat the Lone One off by sheer luck. Some did nothing that she could see, and yet ruined Its plans utterly. One wizard on a planet of Altair had changed the whole course of his world’s history by inviting a person he knew to be inhabited by the Lone One to dinner ... and the next day, the Altairans’ problem (which Dairine also did not understand except that it had something to do with the texture of their fur) simply began to clear up, apparently by itself.

“Maybe I should buy It a hot dog,” Dairine muttered. That would make as much sense as most of these solutions. She was getting a feeling that there was something important about dealing with the Lone Power that the computer wasn’t telling her.

She scrolled back to Nita and Kit’s precis again and read it through carefully, comparing it with what she had seen them do or heard them say herself. Her conversation with Nita after she had seen her sister change back from being a whale was described in the precis as “penultimate clarification and choice.” Dairine scowled. What had Nita chosen? And why? She wished she had her there to ask her ... but no. Dairine didn’t think she could cope with Nita at the moment. Her sister would certainly rip into her for doing dumb things, and Dairine wasn’t in the mood ... considering how many dumb things she had done in the past day and a half.

Still, Dairine thought, a little advice would come in real useful around now...

“Ready,” said the computer suddenly.

“Okay. Ask it to go ahead.”

“Warning,” the computer said. “The spell being used requires major restructuring of the substrate. Surface stability will be subject to change without notice.”

“You mean I should stand back?”

“I thought that was what I said,” said the computer.

Dairine made a wry face, then picked it up and started walking. “C’mon, Gigo, all you guys,” she said. “Let’s get out of the way.”

They trooped off obediently after her. Finally, about a quarter-mile away, she stopped. “This far enough away, you think?” she said to the computer.

“Yes. Working now.”

She felt a rumbling under the surface again, but this was less alarming than that caused by the transit of the black hole-a more controlled and purposeful sound. The ground where Dairine had been sitting abruptly sank in on itself, swallowing the debris caused by the breaking-out of the turtles. Then slow ripples began to travel across the surface, as it turned itself into what looked like a bubbling pot of syrup, clear in places, swirled and streaked with color in others. Heat didn’t seem to be involved in the process. Dairine sat down to watch, fascinated.

“Unnamed,” Gigo said next to her, “data transfer?”

Dairine looked down at the little creature. “You want to ask me a question? Sure. And I have a name, it’s Dairine.”

“Dairrn,” it said. She chuckled a little. Dairine had never been terribly fond of her name-people tended to stumble over it. But she rather liked the way Gigo said it. “Close enough,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Why do you transfer data so slowly?”

That surprised her for a moment, until she considered the rate at which the computer and the motherboard had been talking: and this was in fact the motherboard she was talking to now. To something that had been taught to reckon its time in milliseconds, conversation with her must seem about as fast as watching a tree grow. “For my kind of life, I’m pretty quick,” Dairine said. “It just looks slow to you.”

“There is more-slowlife?”

“Lots more. In fact, you and the Apple there are about the only, uh, ‘quicklife’ there is, as far as I know.” She paused and said, “Quick life, as opposed to dumb machines that are fast, but not alive.”

“I see it, in the data the Lightbringer gave us,” said Gigo. Dairine glanced over at the computer. “Data transfer?”

“Sure,” Dairine said.

“What is the purpose of this new program run?”

Wow, its syntax is really shaping up. If this keeps up, it’s gonna be smarter than me! ... Is that a good idea? But Dairine laughed at it. It was the best idea: a supercomputer faster than a Cray, with more data in it than all the New York Public Library-what a friend to have! “When I’m gone,” Dairine said, “you’re going to need to be able to make your own changes in your world. So I’m making you mobiles that will be able to make the changes.”

“Data transfer! Define ‘gone’!”

Gigo’s urgency surprised Dairine. “I can’t stay here,” she said. No, better simplify. “My physical presence here must terminate soon,” she said. “But don’t worry. You guys won’t be alone.”

“We will!” cried Gigo, and the whole planet through him.

“No, you won’t,” Dairine said. “Don’t panic. Look, I’m taking care of it. You saw all the different bodies I wrote into the ‘Make’ program for you? You saw how they’re all structured differently on the inside? That’s so they can have different personalities. There’ll be lots more of you.”

“How?”

Dairine hoped she could explain this properly. “You’ll split yourself up,” she said. “You’ll copy your basic programming in a condensed form into each one of them, and then run them all separately.”     

There was a long, long silence. “Illegal function call,” said Gigo slowly.

“It’s not. Believe me. It sounds like it, but it works just fine for all the slowlife ... it’ll work for you too. Besides,” Dairine said, “if you don’t split yourself up, you won’t have anybody to talk to, and play with!”

“Illegal function call ...”

“Trust me,” Dairine said, “you’ve got to trust me... Oh, look at that.”

The surface, which had been seething and rippling, had steadied down, slick and glassy again. Now it was bulging up, as it had before. There was no sound, but through each hunching, each cracking hummock, glassy shapes pushed themselves upward, shook the fragments off, stood upright, walked, uncertain and ungainly as new foals. In the rose light of the declining sun they shone and glowed; some of them tall and stalky, some short and squat, some long and flowing and many-jointed, some rounded and bulky and strong; and one and all as they finished being made, they strode or stalked or glided over to where Dairine was. She and Gigo and the first turtles were surrounded by tens and twenties and hundreds of bright glassy shapes, a forest of flexing arms, glittering sensors, color in bold bands and delicate brushings-grace built in glass and gorgeously alive. “Look at them,” Dairine said, half lost in wonder herself. “It’ll be like being you ... but a hundred times, a thousand times. Remember how the light looked the first time?”

“Data reacquired,” Gigo said, soft-voiced.

“Like that,” Dairine said. “But again and again and again. A thousand of you to share every memory with, and each one able to see it differently ... and everyone else’ll see it better when the one who sees it differently tells all the others about it. You won’t be the only quicklife anymore. Copy your programming out, and there’ll be as many of you as you want to make. A thousand of you, a million of you to have the magic together...”

“The call is legal,” Gigo said after a moment. “Data transfer?”

“What?”

“Will there be pain? Like the Dark that Pulls?”

Dairine’s heart wrenched. She picked Gigo up and pulled him into her lap. “I don’t know, small stuff,” she said. “There might be. I’m here if it does. You just hold on to me, and don’t be scared.”

She turned to the computer. “You know how to describe this to the motherboard?” she said. “They’ve all got to have all the major programming you gave their mom, but you’re gonna have to pack the code down awful tight. And make sure they still don’t lose the connection to her once they’re autonomous.”

“Noted,” said the computer. “Override protocols require that I confirm with you what parts of the wizardly programming are to be passed on to each individual, and to what number of individuals.”

She looked at it in surprise. “All of it, of course. And all of them.”

“Reconfirmation, please. This far exceeds the median distribution and percentage.”

“Oh? What is it on Earth?”

“Ratio of potential wizards to nonpotential: one to three. Ratio of practicing wizards to potential wizards: one to one hundred. Ratio of-“

“Are you trying to tell me that there are sixteen million practicing wizards on Earth?”

“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 temporarily. But the restructuring that the mobiles were discussing wasn’t temporary...

“Listen, guys,” she said, and silence fell abruptly as they turned to he “You can’t do this.”

“Of course we can,” Logo said.

“I mean, you shouldn’t.”

“Why?”

That stopped her for a second. It seemed so obvious. Stop entropy, and the flow of time stopped. And where was life then? But it occurred to Dairine that in everything she’d read in the manual, either in Nita’s version of it or on the computer, it never said anywhere that you should or shouldn’t do something. It might make recommendations, or state dangers ... but never more than that. Choice was always up to the wizard. In fact, there had been one line that had said, “Wizardry is choice. All else is mere mechanics...”

“Because,” she said, “you’ll sabotage yourselves. You need entropy to live. Without it, time can’t pass. You’ll be frozen, unable to think. And besides, you wouldn’t want to live forever ... not even if you could really live without entropy. You’d get bored...”

But it sounded so lame, even as she said it. Why shouldn’t one live forever? And the manual itself made it plain that until the Lone Power had invented death, the other Powers had been planning a universe that ran on some other principle of energy management ... something indescribable. But the Lone One’s plans messed Theirs up, and ruined Their creation, and the Powers had cast it out. What would be wrong with starting from scratch? ...

Dairine shook her head. What’s the matter with me? What would that do to the universe we have now? Crazy! “And there are other sentient beings,” she said. “A lot of them. Take away entropy and you freeze them in place forever. They wouldn’t be able to age, or live. ...”

“But they’re just slowlife,” Logo said. “They’re hardly even life at all!”

“I’m slowlife!” Dairine said, annoyed.

“Yes, well, you made us,” said Beanpole, and patted her again. “We wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you.”

“We can put your consciousness in an envelope like ours,” said Logo. “And then you won’t be slowlife anymore.”

Dairine sat astonished.

“What do the equations indicate as the estimated life of this universe at present?” said Monitor.

“Two point six times ten to the sixtieth milliseconds.”

“Well,” Logo said, “using an isothermal reversible transition, and releasing entropy-freeze for a thousand milliseconds every virtual ten-to-the-twelfth milliseconds or so, we could extend that to nearly a hundred thousand times its length ... until we find some way to do without entropy altogether...”

They’re talking about shutting the universe down for a thousand years at a time and letting it have a second’s growth every now and then in between! “Listen,” Dairine said, “has it occurred to you that maybe I don’t want to be in an envelope? I like being the way I am!”

Now it was their turn to look at her astonished.

“And so do all the other kinds of slowlife!” she said. “That’s the real reason you can’t do it. They have a right to live their own way, just as you do!”

“We are living our own way,” said Logo.

“Not if you interfere with all the rest of the life in the universe, you’re not! That’s not the way I built you.” Dairine grasped at a straw. “You all had that Oath first, just the same as I did. To preserve life ...’ “

“The one who took that Oath for us,” said Logo, “did not understand it: and we weren’t separately conscious then. It wasn’t our choice. It isn’t binding on us.”

Dairine went cold.

“Yes, it is,” Gigo said unexpectedly, from beside her. “That consciousness is still part of us. I hold by it.”

“That’s my boy,” Dairine said under her breath.

“Why should we not interfere?” Logo said. “You interfered with us.”

There was a rustle of agreement among some of the mobiles. “Not the same way,” Dairine said ... and again it sounded lame. Usually Dairine got her way in an argument by fast talk and getting people emotionally mixed up ... but that was not going to work with this lot, especially since they knew her from the inside out. “I found the life in you, and let it out.”

“So we will for the other fastlife,” said Logo. “The ‘dumb machines’ that your data showed us. We will set them free of the slowlife that enslaves them. We will even set the slowlife free eventually, since it would please you. Meantime, we will ‘preserve’ the slowlife, as you say. We will hold it all in stasis until we find a way to free them from entropy ... and let them out when the universe is ready.”

When we are ready, Dairine knew what Logo meant, and she had a distressing feeling that would be never.

“It’s all for your people’s own sake,” said Logo.

“It’s not,” said Gigo. “Dairine says not, and I say not. Her kind of life is life too. We should listen to the one who freed us, who knows the magic and has been here longest, is wisest of any of us! We should do what she says!”

A soft current of agreement went through others of the many who stood around. By now, every mobile made since she had come here was gathered there, and they all looked at Dairine and Gigo and Logo, and waited.

“This will be an interesting argument,” Logo said softly.

Dairine broke out in a sudden cold sweat that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Listen,” she said to the Apple, “how long have I been on this planet now?”

“Thirty-six hours,” it said.

She turned slowly to look at Logo. It said nothing. It did not need to: no words could have heightened Dairine’s terror. She had been expecting frightful power, a form dark and awful, thunder and black lightning. Here, blind, small, seemingly harmless, the mobile stood calmly under her gaze. And Dairine shook, realizing that her spell had worked. She had had a day and a half to find a weapon-time that was now all gone. She had found the weapon-but she had given it a mind of its own, and made it, or them, useless for her defense. She now had a chance to do something important, something that mattered-mattered more than anything-and had no idea how.

“A very interesting argument,” said the Lone Power, through Logo’s soft voice. “And depending on whether you win it or not, you will either die of it, or be worse than dead. Most amusing.”

Dairine was frozen, her heart thundering. But she made herself relax, and sit up straight; rested her elbows casually on her knees, and looked down her nose at the small rounded shape from which the starlight glinted. “Yeah,” she said, “well, you’re a barrel of laughs, too, so we’re even. If we’re going to decide the fate of the known universe, let’s get started. I haven’t got all day.”