Wizards At War

“It’s great to meet all of you,” Dairine said. “What have you been looking at?”

“Everything,” said Cam.

Roshaun raised his eyebrows, looking skeptical. “That must take up a great deal of your time.”

Dairine just grinned. “You don’t get it, Roshaun,” she said. “They don’t just mean all kinds of things, or everything they have time for. They mean everything.”

“The more we became able to see,” Logo said, “the more we realized how we could be most useful. We decided we could store all the knowledge in the physical universe if we could just see it, find the places where it’s stored, learn how to read what’s written in every kind of information storage—everything from the heart on out. That’s what we do here, out at the edge. That’s our purpose.”

Dairine could only shake her head at the size of the vision. “Guys,” she said after a moment, “you make me proud.”

“That is our other purpose,” Beanpole said. “Our first one.”

Delight and embarrassment left Dairine briefly speechless. Roshaun eyed her, amused. “Cousin,” he said, “would the technologies make any sense to me?”

“Some might,” said Strontium, a low, domelike mobile whose whole surface was a pattern of lenses and mechanical eyes. “One is an in-matter viewing routine that lets us look out of the heart of any ‘lightmatter’ object from an atom to a star if we know its coordinates.”

“What about the dark matter?” Roshaun said.

“Long ago we tried using it for the same purposes,” Beanpole said. “Why not make use of something there’s so much of? But it couldn’t be spoken to until recently. Now something has spoken a word to it that we never could. Now it’s alive, but also hostile to life. It won’t stop its expansion until it’s destroyed every living thing across the worlds.”

“Our local wizards tried to stop it,” Dairine said, “and couldn’t.”

“We tried, too,” Gigo said. “We enacted a few local reversals, but the effect always reasserted itself more quickly every time. We realized we were teaching the dark matter how to expand faster, so we stopped wasting time with the symptoms and started hunting for the cause.”

“And now that you’re here,” Gigo said to Dairine, “we’ll shortly find it.”

Dairine swallowed as she looked around at them all, gazing at her in such certainty. They scared her worse than Roshaun’s people had—for they were all expecting the Mother of their Species to come up with the good idea that would save the universe.

“Let’s take this one step at a time,” Dairine said. “Or start with a smaller problem first, and warm up. Spot—”

“I am not the problem,” Spot said. “I’m the solution.”

Spot sounded more alive than he had until now. Beanpole looked at Dairine. “You’ve been in circuit with the Motherboard for only a little while,” he said, “and already you’re hearing us more clearly. As for Spot, we’ve been reprogramming him ever since he got here.”

“I asked for it,” Spot said to Dairine. “It was time for an upgrade. The ones you’ve been giving me have been all right; you’ve been doing the best you can. But there was something missing.”

“And something extra,” Beanpole said. “He’s been carrying data he hasn’t been able to process.”

“What?” Dairine said. “Where’d it come from?”

“Spot’s been in contact with an avatar of the Defender,” Hex said. “For some time, information seems to have been passing between him and the power inside your colleague Ronan that couldn’t have been parsed or detected by slowlife … not even slowlife as talented as our mother.” He bowed to Dairine, projecting an air of embarrassment. “And Spot hasn’t had the routines to parse it, either.”

“Hex, listen,” Dairine said, “it’s no big deal. Life’s all the time sending me messages I can’t read.” She flicked just a second’s glance at Roshaun, who she was starting to think was yet another of those messages.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Logo said, “because you, too, are carrying information of this kind.”

Dairine’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

“The One’s Champion has also used you as a courier,” Beanpole said. “For what, we can’t tell as yet; we must get you more securely into circuit with the Motherboard.”

What’s he stuck inside me? Dairine wondered, starting to feel twitchy. “You guys can help us get at this data and make sense of it?”

“Yes,” Gigo said.

“Good,” Dairine said. “Then let’s do it.”

Roshaun looked dubious. “You would think that the other Powers would simply communicate all of what they knew to the Winged Defender, so that straightforward action could be taken.”

Dairine shook her head. “Security,” she said.

Beanpole swayed from side to side in a gesture of agreement. “To give all the information in the clear to any one being,” he said to Roshaun, “would ensure that the Lone One would know all about it in a matter of days. But if you split it up and give only parts of it to those who need to know, and let them pursue the material separately…”