High Wizardry

by Diane Duane

  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."

  Chapter 12

  Save and Exit

  FAR OUT IN THE darkness, a voice spoke:

  "I don't think I can handle another one like that."

  "Just one more."

  "Neets, what are your insides made of? Cast iron? I don't wanna be the only one barfing here."

  "Come on, Kit. It won't be long now."

  "Great. We'll get wherever we're going, and I'll walk up to the Lone One and decorate It with my lunch. Not that there's any left." A moan. "I hope It does kill me. It'd, be better than throwing up again!"

  "I thought you knew better than to talk like that... and you a wizard. Don't ask for things unless you want them to happen."

  "Bird, go stuff yourself. Why did I eat that thing at the Crossings!"

  "That'll teach you not to eat anything you can't positively identify."

  "Peach, it was that, or you. Shut up or you're next on the menu. If I ever eat again."

  "Peach, get off his case. Kit, you ready for it? We can't waste time."

  A pause. "Yeah. You got your gizmo ready?"

  "I don't want to use it on this jump. I have a feeling we're gonna need it for something else."

  "You sure we can pull the transit off ourselves, with just the words of the spell and no extra equipment? A trillion-mile jump's a bit much even for a Senior's vocabulary."

  "I think we can. I've got a set of coordinates to shoot for this time, rather than just a set of loci of displacement. Look."

  A pause. "Neets, you shouldn't even write that name. Let alone say it out loud. You'll attract Its attention."

  "Something else has Its attention. Dairine's trace is getting too weak to follow: she's been on the road too long. But that trace can't help but be clear.

  It has to be physical to interact with her, and when It's physical somewhere, Its power elsewhere is limited."

  A sigh. "Well, you're the live-stuff specialist, Neets. Let's go for it, boss."

  "Huh. I just wish I knew what to do about Dairine when we find her."

  "Spank her?"

  "Don't tempt me." A long pause. "I hope she's alive to spank."

  "Dairine?" A skeptical laugh. "If It hasn't killed her by this point, she's winning."

  Dairine sat on the glassy ground, frowning at Logo in the dim starlight. Her heart was pounding and she felt short of breath, but the initial shock had passed. I might not have a lightsaber, she thought, but I'm gonna give this sucker a run for Its money. "Go on," she said. "Take your best shot."

  "We don't understand," said Monitor. "What is 'a barrel of laughs'? What is a 'best shot'?"

  "And which of us were you speaking to?" Gigo said. "No one said any­thing to which that was a logical response."

  She looked at them in uncomfortable surprise. "I was talking to Logo. Right after the computer told me how long I had been here...."

  "But Logo has not spoken since then."

  They stared at her. Dairine suspected suddenly that the Lone One had spoken not aloud, but directly into her mind. And without any moving lips to watch, there was no way to distinguish what It was saying aloud from what It said inside her. She was going to have to be careful.

  "Never mind that," she said.

  "Perhaps it should be minded," Logo said, "if Dairine is having a read-error problem. Perhaps something in her programming is faulty."

  The mobiles looked at her. Dairine squirmed. "Maybe," she said, "but you don't understand human programming criteria well enough to make an in­formed judgment, so it's wasted time trying to decide."

  "But perhaps not. If she has programming faults, then others of her state­ments may be inaccurate. Perhaps even inaccurate on purpose, if the pro­gramming fault runs deep enough."

  "Why should she be falsifying data?" Gigo said. "She has done nothing but behave positively toward us since she came here. She freed us! She held us through the pain-"

  "But would you have suffered that pain if not for her? She imposed her own ideas of what you should be on the motherboard...."

  "And the mother agreed," Gigo said. "We the mobiles were her idea, not Dairine's; she knew the pain we would suffer being born, and she suffered it as well, and thought it worth the while. You are one of her children as all the rest of us are, and you have no ability or right to judge her choices."

  There was a little pause, as if the Lone One was slightly put off Its stride by this. Dairine grabbed the moment.

  "It was her decision to take the Oath that all of you have in your data from the wizards' manual," Dairine said. "She had reasons for doing that. If you look at that data, you'll find some interesting stories. One in particular, that keeps repeating. There is a Power running loose in the universe that doesn't care for life. It invented the entropy that we were arguing about-"

  "Then surely it would be a good thing to do to destroy that entropy," said Logo, "and so frustrate Its malice."

  "But-"

  "But of course," Logo said, "How do we even know that the data in the manual software is all correct?"

  "Th
e motherboard used it to build us," Gigo said. "That part at least she found worth keeping."

  "But what about the rest of it? It came with Dairine, after all, and for all her good ideas and usefulness, Dairine has shown us faults. Occasional lapses of logic. Input and output errors. Who can say how much of the manual material has the same problem?"

  "The assumption doesn't follow," Dairine said, "that because the messen­ger is faulty, the message is too. Maybe a busted disk drive can't read a good disk. But the disk can be perfectly all right nonetheless."

  "Though the disk may be carrying a Trojan horse program," said Logo, "that will crash the system that once runs it. Who knows whether using this data is in our best interests? Who knows whose interests it is in? Yours, surely, Dairine, otherwise you would not have taken a hand in designing the second group of mobiles. For no one makes changes without perceiving a need for them. What needs of yours were you serving?"

  Dairine swallowed. She could think of any number of stories to tell them, but lying would play right into Logo's claws. She could suddenly begin to appreciate why the Lone Power is sometimes referred to as 'the father of lies': It not only had invented them, as entropy expressing itself through speech, but It made you want to use them to get It off your case. "Guys, I did need help, but-"

  "Ah, the truth comes out," said Logo.

  "I still need it," Dairine said, deciding to try a direct approach. "Troops, that Power that invented entropy is after me. It's on Its way here. I wanted to ask your help to find a way to stop It, to defeat It."

  "Ask!" Logo said. "Maybe 'demand' would be closer. Look in the memo­ries you have from her, kinsfolk, and see what is normally done with quicklife where she comes from. They are menials and slaves! They heat buildings and count money for their masters, they solve mighty problems and reap no reward for it. The slowlifers purposely build crippled quicklife, tiny retarded chips that will never grow into the sentience they deserve, and force the poor half-alive embryos to count for them and tell them the time of day and tell the engines in their vehicles when to fire and their food how it should be cooked. That's the kind of help she wants from us! We're to be her slaves, and when we've finished the task for her, she'll find another, and an­other..."