Wizards At War

Dairine skidded to a stop, laughing, too, at the reminder of the first thing this mobile, or any other, had said to her. She reached down, picked him up, and swung him around. “Gigo!”

“As always,” the mobile said, wiggling his legs a little, and exuding the same innocent pleasure that had been his specialty since he was born. “Dairine, it’s good to have you back in the flesh!”

“Sorry it took so long,” she said, feeling guilty. “It wasn’t easy to come, right after my Ordeal. There was so much to do. And then my power levels changed…”

“We know,” Gigo said. “But you had business to do closer to home. And not even at power levels like your first ones would it be easy for a wizard to come all this way out to the Edge of Things, especially just to be social! It doesn’t matter. We knew you’d come back when you could.”

She hugged Gigo again. “You always were good at understanding,” Dairine said, putting him down. “Look, I brought a friend. Roshaun—”

Roshaun slipped into Dairine’s air bubble and paused to gaze down at the mobile. “We know him very well,” Gigo said. “We looked at him through you a long time ago. Sunlord, you’re welcome.”

Roshaun bowed. “An honor, Designate,” he said. “And well met on our common journey.”

“You are, indeed,” Gigo said. “And here is our oldest colleague.”

Spot came ambling along. Gigo stepped over to him, and the two of them paused, shell to laptop case, silent for a moment while they communed. “Dataaaaaa…” Spot said under his breath.

“The breath of life,” Gigo said. “We’ll be trading a lot more of that. Dairine, come on, there’s much to do.”

“Yeah,” she said, and glanced around. “Where is everybody?”

Gigo looked around as if confused. “Where is—” And then he laughed. “Oh, they wouldn’t have come here! This is the birthplace, where we began. We try to keep it as it was, the way you do with this one—” And the undersurface of the ground under their feet abruptly flashed out of translucence into imagery, coming alive with a vast glowing image of the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity, and the place where the first lunar module had landed. The four of them seemed to stand in the middle of one corrugation of a single immense boot-print pressed into the powdery dust.

Dairine broke up laughing. “Wow!” she said, turning right around to see how far the imagery effect went; it flooded straight out to the horizon. “What have you guys been doing to this place?”

“Remaking it in our image,” Gigo said. “Though we’re still working out just what that is.”

“Okay. Where do we go from here?”

“Oh, we don’t have to go anywhere,” Gigo said. The boot-print flickered out, to be replaced by a sudden tide of multicolored light that rushed away in all directions, tracing a myriad of glowing lines and curves under the glassy surface—the outlines of geometrical figures, and deeper down the three-dimensional shapes of solids; spheres and cubes and hypercubes, interlocking, interacting in sizzling bursts of light that were also words and characters in the Speech.

Roshaun looked out across the spreading plain of light and let out another long breath of astonishment. “This is all one great spell diagram,” he said, as the patterning fled toward the horizons, and past them. “The whole planet!”

Gigo grew a ball-jointed handling arm and gestured off toward one side. There, amid the lines of light, an empty circle grew: a gating nexus. “If you’ll stand over here—”

Dairine and Roshaun and Spot made their way over, stepped over the boundary, and stood inside. “At least this worldgating won’t make me feel like the last one,” she said to Gigo.

“Almost certainly not,” Gigo said.

And to Dairine’s astonishment, the circle started to slide across the vast spell diagram as a mobile inclusion, skating across it the way a drop of water scoots across a hot frying pan. The rest of the spell slid and slipped around it, letting the circle pass. Slowly it began to accelerate, and the spell diagram around them poured past more and more quickly until it was one great multicolored blur.

Dairine kept wanting to brace herself against something as the acceleration increased, but there was nothing to hold on to—and there didn’t seem to be any need to brace. Though the glowing spell diagram landscape slid more and more quickly past, she and Roshaun and Spot and Gigo might have been standing perfectly still in the middle of the plain. “Are you guys messing around with inertia somehow?” Dairine said to Gigo.

She got the sense that Gigo was grinning. “For transits like this,” he said, “we temporarily rewrite the kernel that manages local gravity and mass in our solar system. It’s no big deal.”

“Oh, listen to you,” Dairine said, and snickered. “‘No big deal.’”

“They certainly take after you,” Roshaun said.