Wizards At War

Roshaun gave her what was meant to be a cutting look, and with apparent regret pulled off the floppy T-shirt that had been covering him nearly to his knees. Has Carmela got a thing going for him? Dairine wondered. But no, now it’s Ronan. She had to smile a little. Wait till she figures out the ramifications of that one. Dairine spared a second for an entirely clinical appreciation of the lean look of Roshaun’s upper body above the soft golden-fabric “sweatpants” he was wearing. How old is he in “real” years, I wonder? If there’s even an approximation that makes any sense. Officially, as his people see age, he can’t be much older than Nita or Kit.

Roshaun carefully draped the T-shirt over an ornately carved chaise longue. “I shall return momentarily,” he said. “Do you require refreshment?”

Somehow Dairine didn’t think Roshaun was likely to have a supply of her favorite soft drink on hand. “I’m okay,” she said. “You go do what needs doing.”

He vanished behind an intricately carved and gilded screen. Dairine glanced over into the middle of the floor, where Spot was still watching everything with all his eyes.

“How are you feeling?” she said.

“Peculiar.”

That made her twitch a little. “Is that something new?”

“Not since this morning, if that’s what you’re asking,” Spot said. “I don’t feel like I’m losing my mind. But then again, I haven’t ‘felt’ any of these strange fugues you tell me I’m experiencing, either.”

That was one of the things bothering Dairine the most. A computer that was losing memory or files was enough cause for concern by itself. But when the computer was sentient, and at least partly wizardly, and was forgetting things it was saying or thinking from one moment to the next—

“I haven’t lost any spell data,” Spot said, sounding to Dairine’s trained ear faintly annoyed. “I’ve been running diagnostics constantly since this started to happen.”

“And they haven’t been showing anything?”

“No.” Spot sounded even more annoyed.

Dairine sighed. “In the old days, we wouldn’t have had these problems.”

“These are not the old days,” Spot said. “You are no longer half human, half manual. I am no longer just a machine with manual access. Both of us have become more, and less. And the new increased power levels do not make us who we were again. They only make us more powerful versions of who we are now.”

Dairine looked out the doors at the setting Wellakhit sun. It looked like a huge shield of beaten copper, sliding down toward the sea-flat horizon. It seemed like an age ago, now, that time when she’d come home from her Ordeal with the constant soft whisper of a whole new species’ ideation running under all her conscious thought, like water under the frozen surface of a winter stream. They had always instantly had the answers to any question—or had seemed to, the mobiles’ time sense being so much swifter than that of the human kind of computer that was built of meat instead of space-chilled silicon. And the answers they’d come up with, she had always been able to implement with staggering force, since she’d come into her power young.

But slowly that power had faded to more normal levels, and the connection to the computer wizards of what Dairine thought of as the “Motherboard World” had stretched thin, carrying less power, less data. It never entirely failed. That whisper of machine thought still ran at the bottom of her dreams, and if she listened hard while waking, she could find it without too much trouble. But nothing now was as easy as it had been in the beginning. Knowing that this was the fate of wizards everywhere didn’t make it any easier. I thought I wasn’t wizards everywhere. I thought I was different.

Roshaun came out from behind the screen. Dairine’s jaw actually dropped. And I thought he looked a little too formal before.

Those long golden trousers had been exchanged for others completely covered with thousands of what looked like star sapphires but were orange-golden and as tiny as beads. The upper garment was, by contrast, a simple gauzy thing, like a knee-length vest of pale golden mist. Under it Roshaun was bare-chested except for a massive collar of red gold with a huge amber-colored stone set in it, a smooth and massive thing the width of Dairine’s clenched fist.

The stone shifted as Roshaun swallowed. “How do I look?” he said.

Between the realization that he was actually nervous and the total effect, Dairine was for once sufficiently impressed to tell him the truth. “Great,” she said. “Tiffany’s would want you for their front window. Why is it always gold with you people?”

“It’s Life’s color,” Roshaun said. “In this way we do Life honor. What about you?”