Wizards At War

Roshaun stared at her in shock. “Then we are over our universe’s event horizon,” he said softly. “That galaxy there, and the one we’re in now… they would have intrinsic velocities faster than light. As far as our home galaxy is concerned, this place doesn’t even exist.”

“You got it,” Dairine said. “And for people here, our galaxy doesn’t exist. Except they know it does, because I came from there.” She stood up cautiously. Despite the size of the planet, the gravity here was less than that of Earth; the effect was like being on Mars, and left you light enough to bounce if you weren’t careful. Roshaun looked around at the curious surface—slick as glass and dappled with faint drifts of color buried under the perfectly level surface. Here and there across the surface were scattered various sharp cone shapes. “Volcanic,” Roshaun said.

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “The volcanoes laid down the surface structure, all these layers of silicon and trace elements. It goes down for miles; the whole place is one big computer chip. But it’s a lot quieter now than I remember it.” “Quieter” had more than one meaning, for the place to which she and Roshaun had transited had been the birthplace of the mobile species, the scene of the end of her Ordeal, and the site of a battle that had cratered or reduced to slag a deal of the surrounding real estate. Those craters remained, as did glass heaped and humped by the terrible forces that had melted it and spattered it for miles around. Elsewhere, the surface looked much as it had when she had first arrived—like the surface of a gigantic billiard ball, except where the cones of the ancient volcanoes pointed at the sky. And it was as empty. Dairine looked around in vain for any sign of a welcoming committee.

Roshaun had turned his attention to the planet’s star. “There’s something odd about the primary’s flare pattern.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Dairine said. “I chucked a black hole into it.”

Roshaun put his eyebrows up. “Stars in your neighborhood seem to have a rough time of it.”

“If ours acts weird, talk to Nita,” Dairine said, rather annoyed. “First time it went out was on her watch.”

Roshaun slipped out of the gauzy overrobe he had been wearing on Wellakh and folded it up. “You know quite well the Isolate was to blame,” he said, reaching sideways for access to the space pocket in which he stored things while on the road. He stuffed his formal overrobe into the claudication’s opening, then came out with that oversized T-shirt of Carmela’s again, and slipped into it. “That brief snuffing may be the cause of your star’s recent instability.”

Dairine got up, too. “Well, I still want to know why, when the Sun was talking to us, I couldn’t understand what it was saying, even though we were all working in the Speech.”

Roshaun shook his head. “The situations we have been dealing with have been unusual for all of us,” he said. “And you were under considerable strain. If you—”

“Are you saying I couldn’t cope with the stress?” Dairine said. “I seem to remember that you—”

Then she stopped, seeing his expression. “Sorry,” Dairine said, turning away. “Sorry. Why do I have to bite you every time you say something that might be useful?”

Very quietly, Roshaun said, “When you find out, do let me know. It’s information I might find useful as well.”

Dairine let out a breath and looked around. “But where is everybody? I don’t get it; this is where I saw them last.”

She turned, scanning that impossibly distant horizon. In all that huge space, nothing moved. Dairine let out a long breath and got ready to drop to her knees and get in closer circuit with the Motherboard, to send a message she hadn’t thought she of all people would have had to send: Hey, guys, I’m here. Anybody home?

“Wait,” Roshaun said. “What is that?”

Dairine turned to look. A single small shape came steadily toward them across the pale, pink-glazed surface of the world, light from the whirlpool of stars glancing off its shiny shell. It was apparently just a hemisphere about half a meter wide, scooting along the floor of the world like a windup toy—the impression made that much stronger because of the movement of all the little legs around its outer edges. The dome was a pale translucent white, striated in cross section with thin bands and layers of many colors. And it glowed as if between some of the layers a faint light burned, illuminating the layers above and below like moonlight through stained glass.

Dairine grinned and took off at a trot toward the little scurrying shape, being careful about the gravity. Shortly the leading edge of the bubble of air she took with her “ran over” the little approaching dome; and the instant it did, the dome began to decelerate, looking at her with many-lensed eyes that bubbled out in a breath’s time on its forward surface.

“With?” it said in the Speech, and then burst out laughing.