by Diane Duane
Oh, come on, Dairine told herself in disgust. Just because they’re ugly doesn’t mean they’re bad. Maybe it’s just some kind of military expedition, like soldiers coming through the airport on their way home for leave.
—but with their guns?
“Father’s name,” said the computer.
“Harold Edward Callahan,” said Dairine. She was looking with a combination of interest and loathing at one of the warty creatures, which was working its way toward her. In one arm it was cradling a gun that looked big enough to shove a hero sandwich down. In its other hand, a knobby three-fingered one, it held the end of a leash, and straining at the leash’s far end was a something that looked more like the reonstructed deinonychus at Natural History than anything Dairine had ever seen. A skinny little dinosaur it was, built more or less along the lines of a Tyrannosaurus, but lithe and small and fleet. This one went all on its hind legs, its long thin tail stretched out behind it for balance: it walked with a long-legged ostrichy gait that Dairine suspected could turn into an incredible sprint.
The dinosaur on the warty alien’s leash was dappled in startling shades of iridescent red and gold, and it had its face down to the floor as it pulled its master along, and the end of that long whiplike tail thrashed. And then it looked up from the floor, and looked right at Dairine, with eyes that were astonishingly innocent, and as blue as a Siamese cat’s. It made a soft mewling noise that nonetheless pierced right through the noise of the terminal.
The warty thing looked right at Dairine too—and cried out in some lan-guage she couldn’t understand, a bizarre soprano singing of notes like a synthesizer playing itself. Then it yanked the leash sharply and let the deinonychus go.
Dairine scrambled to her feet as the deinonychus loped toward her. Terrified as she was, she knew better than to try to run away from this thing. She slammed the computer’s screen closed and waited. No kicks, she told herself, if one kick doesn’t take this thing out, you’ll never have time for a second— It leapt at her, but she was already swinging: Dairine hit the deinonychus right in the face with the computer and felt something crunch. Oh, please don t let it be the plastic! she thought, and then the impetus of the deinonychus carried it right into her. Its broken jaw knocked against her face as it fell, and she almost fell with it. Dairine stumbled back, found her footing, turned, and began to run.
Behind her more voices were lifted. Dairine ran like a mad thing, pushing through crowds wherever she could. Who are they, why are they after me? And where do I run…?
She dodged through a particularly dense crowd and paused, looking for a corridor to run down, a place to hide. Nothing. This part of the Crossings was one huge floor, very few niches to take advantage of. But farther on, about half a mile away, it looked like the place narrowed….
She ran. The noise behind her was deafening. There was some shooting: she heard the scream of blasterbolts in the air, the sound that had set her blood racing in the movies. But now it wasn’t so exciting. One bolt went wide over her head. It hit a low-floating bit of the ceiling off to one side of her, and she smelled the stink of scorched plastic and saw a glob of it fall molten to splat on the floor. Dairine sprinted past it, panting. She was a good runner, but she couldn’t keep this up for much longer.
Bug-eyed monsters! her brain sang at her in terror. These weren’t what I had in mind! “What are they—”
“Emissaries,” said the computer, in a muffled voice since its screen was shut over its speaker.
Dairine kept running. “From where?”
“Indeterminate. Continue run?”
“If it’ll get me out of here, yes—!”
“Last level of education finished—”
She told it, gasping, as she ran. She told it her mother’s maiden name, and how much money her father made, and at what age she had started reading, and much more useless information…. And then while she was telling the computer what she thought of boys, something caught her by the arm.
It was a three-fingered hand, knobby, a slick dark green, and strong with a terrible soft strength that pulled her right out of her run and around its owner as if she were spinning around a pole. Dairine cried out at her first really close look at a bug-eyed monster. Its eyes were an awful milky red that should have meant it was blind, but they saw her too well entirely—and it sang something high at her and grabbed her up against it with its other hand, the nonchalant don’t-hurt-it upper-arm hold that too many unthinking adults use on children, not knowing how they hate it… or not caring. Dairine abruptly recognized the BEM’s song as laughter, once removed from the horrible low laughing she had seemed to hear in transit. And suddenly she knew what these things were, if not who. “No!” she screamed.
“Intervention subroutine?” said the computer, utterly calm.
Dairine struggled against the thing, couldn’t get leverage: all the self-defense she had been taught was for use on humans, and this thing’s mass was differently distributed. Not too far away she heard more of the horrid fluting—BEMs with guns, coming fast. Half her face was rammed up against the thing’s horrible hide, and her nose was full of a stink like old damp coffee grounds. Dairine’s revulsion was choking her: the thing’s grasp on her was as unhuman as if she were being held by a giant cockroach… and Dairine hated bugs. “Kill it!” she screamed.
And something threw her back clear a good twenty feet and knocked her head against the floor.
Half-dazed, Dairine scrambled up. The BEM was gone. Or rather, it wasn’t a BEM anymore. It was many many little pieces of BEM, scattered among splatters of dark liquid all over the floor, and all over everything else in the area, including her. Everything smelled like an explosion in a Starbuck’s.
Hooting noises began to fill the air. Oh, no, Dairine thought as she grabbed the computer up from the floor and began to run again. Now this place’s own security people were going to start coming after her. They would ask her questions. And no matter how little a time they did that for, the BEMs would be waiting… if they waited. If they didn’t just come and take her away from the port’s security. And even if she killed every BEM in the place, more would come. She knew it.
Dairine ran. People looked at her as she ran. Some of them were hominid, but not even they made any move to stop her or help her: they looked at her with the blank nervousness of innocent bystanders watching a bank robber flee the scene of the crime. On Dairine ran, desperate. It was like some nightmare of being mugged in a big city, where the streets are full of people and no one moves to help.
The blaster-screams were a little farther behind her. Maybe the one BEM’s fate had convinced the others it would be safer to pick her off from a distance. But then why didn’t they do that before?
Unless they wanted me alive…
She ran and ran. That laughter in the dark now pounded in her pulse, racing, and in the pain in the side that would shortly cripple her for running. Something she’d read in Nita’s manual reoccurred to her: the thought of old Powers, not friendly to what lives: and one of the oldest and strongest, that invented death and was cast out… Part of Dairine, playing cold and logical, rejected this, insisted she had no data, just a feeling. But the feeling screamed Death! and told logic to go take a hike. These creatures belonged to that old Power. Dairine needed a safe place to think what to do. Home… But no. Take these things home with her? Her mom, her dad, these things would—
But maybe Nita and Kit could help—
But admit that she needed help?
Yes. No. Yes—
But without resetting the transit program, she couldn’t even do that. No time…
“Can you run subroutines of that program before you finish plugging in the variables?” Dairine said, gasping as she ran.
“Affirmative.”
“Then do it, do it as soon as you can!”
“Affirmative. Name of best friend—”
She wondered for a second whether ‘Shash Jackson was still her best friend after she had cleaned hi
m out of his record money three days ago. Then she gave his name anyway. Red lines of light lanced over her head as she ran. And here the ceiling was getting lower, the sides of the building were closer, there were smaller rooms, places to go to ground….
The stitch in her side was killing her. She plowed through a crowd of what looked like ambulatory giant squid on a group tour, was lost among them for a moment, in a sea of waving purple tentacles, tripping over their luggage, which crowded aside squawking and complaining—then came out the other side of them and plunged into a smaller corridor about the size of Grand Central Station.
Dairine kept giving the computer inane information as she ran down the corridor, pushing herself to the far side of the stitch in her side, so that she could just get somewhere that she’d be safe for a minute. There were more gates here, more signs and seating areas, and off to one side, a big shadowy cul-de-sac. She ran for it, any cover being better than none.
At the very end of her energy, she half ran, half stumbled in. It was unmistakably a bar. If she’d had any breath to spare, she’d have laughed with the dear familiarity of it, for it looked completely like other bars she’d seen in airports when traveling with her folks and Nita—a fairly dim place, crowded with tables and chairs and people and their bags. But no mere airport bar had ever had the kind of clientele that this place did. Tall furry things with too many arms, and squat many-legged things that looked to be wearing their organs on the outside, and one creature that seemed totally made of blinking eyes, all stared at Dairine over their snacks and drinks as she staggered in and past them, and not one of them moved.
Dairine didn’t care. Her only thought was to hide. But she realized with horror that she could see no back way out of the place—only a dark red wall and a couple of what might have been abstract sculptures, unless they were aliens too. She heard the cries out in the terminal getting closer, and utter panic overcame her. Dairine shouldered and stumbled her way frantically among strange bodies and strange luggage in the semidarkness, hardly caring what she might or might not be touching. Impetus and blind terror crashed her right into a little table at the back of the room, almost upsetting both the table and the oddly shaped, half-full glass on it. And then something caught her and held her still.
After her experience out in the terminal, Dairine almost screamed at the touch. But then she realized that what held her were human hands. She could have sobbed for relief, but had no breath to spare. So rattled was she that though she stared right at the person who was steadying her, it took her precious seconds to see him. He was built slight and strong, wearing a white shirt and sweater and a long fawn-colored jacket: a fair-haired young man with quick bright eyes and an intelligent face. “Here now,” he said, helping her straighten up, “careful!” And he said it in English!
Dairine opened her mouth to beg for help, but before she could say a word, those wise sharp eyes had flickered over her and away, taking everything in. “Who’s after you?” the man said, quiet-voiced but urgent, glancing back at Dairine.
“I don’t know what they are,” she said, gasping, “but someone—someone bad sent them. I can lose them, but I need time to finish programming—”
Alarm and quick thought leapt behind those brown eyes. “Right. Here then, take these.” The young man dug down in his jacket pocket, came up with a fistful of bizarrely shaped coins, and pressed them hurriedly into Dairine’s free hand. “There’s a contact transfer disk behind the bar. Step on it and you should materialize out in the service corridor. Follow that to the right and go out the first blue door you see, into the terminal. If I’m not mistaken, the pay toilets will be a few doors down on your left. Go in one of the nonhuman ones.”
“The nonhuman—!” Dairine said, absolutely horrified.
“Quite so,” the man said. “Right across the universe, that’s one of the strongest taboos there is.” And he grinned, his eyes bright with mischief. “No matter who’s after you, it’ll take them a bit to think of looking for you in there. And the locks will slow them down.” He was on his feet. “Off you go now!” he said, and gave Dairine a fierce but friendly shove in the back.
She ran past a trundling robot barman, under the hinged part of the bar top and onto the transfer circle. On the other side of the bar, as Dairine began to vanish, she saw the fair man glance over at her to be sure she was getting away, and then pick up the iced tea he had been drinking. Glass in hand, he went staggering cheerfully off across the barroom in the most convincing drunk act Dairine could imagine, accidentally overturning tables, falling into the other patrons, and creating a mess and confusion that would slow even the BEMs up somewhat.
Dairine materialized in the service corridor, followed her instructions to the letter, and picked a rest room with a picture sign so weird, she couldn’t imagine what the aliens would look like. She found out soon enough. She spent the next few minutes hastily answering the computer’s questions while sitting on what looked like a chrome-plated lawn mower, while the tiled room outside her locked booth echoed with the bubbling screams of alien ladies (or gentlemen) disturbed in the middle of who knew what act.
Then the screams became quiet, and were exchanged for a horrible rustling noise, thick soft footfalls, and high fluting voices. The computer had asked Dairine whether she preferred Coke or Pepsi, and had then fallen silent for some seconds. “Are you done?” she hissed at it.
“Running. Data in evaluation.”
“Get a move on!”
“Running. Data in evaluation.”
The air filled with the scorch of burning plastic again. They were burning the lock of the booth.
“Can you do something to a few of them?” she whispered, her mouth going dry.
“Negative multitasking ability while compiling,” said the computer.
Dairine put her head down on the computer, which was on her knees, and took what she suspected might be her last breath.
The lock of the booth melted loose and the door fell in molten globs to the floor. Dairine sat up straight, determined to look dirty at the BEMs, if she could do nothing else.
The door swung open.
And “Multiple transit,” said the computer, “executing now—” And the jump-sickness grabbed Dairine and twisted her outside in.
Perhaps not understanding, the BEMs fluted in rage and triumph and reached into the booth. Dairine’s insides went cold as dimly she felt one of them swing a huge soft hand through where her middle was: or rather, where it no longer was completely, for the transit had begun. A fraction of a second later, heat not wholly felt stitched through her arms and legs as shots meant to cripple her tore through where they almost were, and fried the back of the stall like an egg. But then starlight and the ancient black silence pierced through her brain as the spell tore Dairine free of the planet and flung her off Rirhath B into the long night.
She never found out anything about the man who helped her. Nor did he ever find out anything more about her. Pausing by the door of the pay toilet, after being released from station security some hours later, and being telepathically sensitive (as so many hominids are), he could sense only that some considerable power had been successfully exercised there. Satisfied with that, he smiled to himself and went on about his travels, just one more of the billions of hominids moving about the worlds.
But many millions of light-years later, in some baking wilderness under a barren, brilliant sky, a bitterly weary Dairine sat down on a stone and cried for a while in shock at the utter strangeness of the universe, where unexpected evil lives side by side with unexpected kindness, and neither ever seems quite overcome by the other….
Variables
It took Nita a few minutes to pull her supplies together and get ready for the trip. Every wizard has favorite spells, so familiar and well-used that diagrams and physical ingredients like eye of newt aren’t needed for them. Some of these spells, and particularly the most powerful ones, need help in bending space— some specific kind of matter placed in speci
fic relationship to the wizard, the words being used, and the diagram or formula asserting the wizard’s intent. Some of the kinds of matter used for these purposes can be odder even than eye of newt (which used to be used for teleportation spells until polyethylene was invented). And this being the case, most wizards have a cache, a place where they keep the exotica necessary in their work.
Nita’s cache was buried in a vacant lot next door to her house, everything carefully wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. Being a wizard, she had no need to dig the bag up: a variant of the spell Kit had used on the bricks let her feel around under the ground for the moment it took her to find what she wanted. The objects didn’t look like much—half a (seemingly) broken printed-circuit board; a plastic packet containing about two teaspoonsful of dirt; and a gimbal from a 1956 Philco Pilot television set.
That last piece she juggled appreciatively from hand to hand for a moment. It was certainly unlikely looking, a busted bit of junk that any normal person would trash without a second thought. But the configuration into which the space-time continuum bent itself around this gimbal was unique, and invested with a power that the informed wizard could exploit. Everything bent spacetime, of course: anything consisting of either matter or energy had no choice. But some things bent it in ways that produced specific physical effects… and no one, not even the wizards specializing in theoretical research, had any idea yet as to why this should be. The atoms and mass and inherent spatiotemporal configuration of, say, water, bent existence around them to produce an effect of wetness. The electrons and plasma and matter and gravity of a star produced effects of heat and light. And a busted-off piece of gimbal from an ancient TV set…
Well, that would have to wait. Nita smiled, put the gimbal carefully in her pocket, and said three more words.
Her room was dark. She flipped the light on and went digging in the mess off to one side for her knapsack. Into it she stuffed her manual, the gimbal and packet and circuit board.
