by Diane Duane
“Same here.” She sniffled. The tears wouldn’t seem to stop. Very unheroic, she felt, with her nose running and her knees made of rubber. It was almost funny: she could almost have laughed at it. But there was no time for that now, with that dark regard trained on them like the end of everything; that dark shape moving slowly toward them, smiling.
“Kit,” she said, “it’s been the best.”
“See you in Timeheart,” he said.
And another voice spoke; an unfamiliar one—or was it?
“Touch them,” it said, “and you’re dead meat.”
*
Dairine scrabbled to her knees, looking across the broken waste at her sister, and at the tears on Nita’s face as she and Kit stood there holding each other up. Until now, she’d have shrugged and turned her thoughts to something else. But now memory was alive in Dairine as it had never been before, and she saw in utter clarity that first time so long ago, and heard herself make that decision on seeing Nita’s tears: The way to keep from getting hurt is to know things. The resolve had only worked sometimes, before. But now Dairine knew things, in a way no one ever had. Now she was going to stop the hurting once and for all….
Beside her Gigo and some of the other mobiles stirred to support her as she struggled to stand. Finally Dairine managed it, using one of the big heavy-work mobiles to lean against after she hauled herself back to her feet. Yards away stood a human-like figure, and the Lone One turned to gaze at her, that dark regard astonished. “You again?” It said. “I see I’ll have to do away with you more quickly than these two. You’re getting to be a nuisance.”
Dairine grinned, a predatory look that had made more than one kid decide not to bother her on the playground, or in a poker game. “Really?” she said softly. “Okay, Lame Power. Bring it.”
She felt Its mind working, readying a bolt like the one that had crumpled Nita’s shields, but many times worse, a killing blow that would cause a long lifetime’s worth of pain before it snuffed life out. Must still be some connection to it through the motherboard, Dairine thought. I wonder where? Unless the presence of entropy in the board is enough. Wherever entropy is, It is…. Oh, well. She turned her mind to hunt a spell to stop the bolt; a millisecond later she had it. She did not need to look in the manual. She was the manual now.
As if in slow motion she watched the bolt head for her, invisible though it was. Effortlessly, Dairine struck it away from her and back at the sender, like a batter hitting a nasty ground ball straight back into the pitcher’s gut.
The Lone One didn’t react physically—the blow was too small to affect It—but Its face grew terrible. “You think you can match power with me?” It said softly, turning away from Nita and Kit.
Dairine laughed. “Think so?” she said. “Come on, you poor fool. Take your best shot.”
It raised up a wash of power that would fall on the planet’s surface and melt every one of the mobiles to magma. Dairine saw it coming, found the spell she needed, caught the incoming tide of death and threw it off to one side, where a large area of the plain began to bubble and seethe. “Naughty, naughty,” Dairine said. “Let them be. I’m the one you’ve got business with today… if you’ve got the stones for it.”
The Lone One grew even larger, Its shape becoming less human, more shadowed, Its darkness a bottomless pit of hate. It looked up into the darkness. “Insolence,” it said, “I will never tolerate. I may not be able to touch you, but I will level your planet. You cannot stay awake to guard it from me forever. One night the sirens will begin, and the next morning, only mushroom clouds will grow on Earth anymore. It will not take much doing.”
“It wouldn’t if I ever intended to let you off this planet,” Dairine said, quite calmly. “I’m in the motherboard as much as it’s in me. They know all the wizardry there is to know. And even if my human brain starts to lose it eventually, they won’t. Get used to this place. You’re not leaving.”
“Bets?” said the huge shadowy form, growing huger. Its cold eyes glanced up into the darkness.
High up, the red sun began to waver and pucker. “A significant amount of this planet’s energy,” said the Lone One, “comes from solar power. More than from geothermal. Much of this plain is solar cell: surely you noticed. That black hole’s orbit can be changed without too much effort. It need no longer transit the star. It can be permanently placed in front of it….”
The sun’s disk puckered in on itself, dwindled, died away completely.
The mobiles gazed up in horror.
“Oh, come on, they’ve got a little power stored,” Dairine said. “Enough to stop that kind of blackmail.” She took a breath: this was going to take some power, but she had that to spare at the moment—what with the whole motherboard behind her, all the mobiles, all their intent turned toward giving her whatever she needed.
The spell was intricate, but the natural laws being worked with were simple enough: gravity was one of the easiest of all laws to rewrite for brief periods. Dairine reached out without moving, spoke the words that grasped the forces and spun them together, flung them outward. The net found the shape destined for it, the tiny dark mass around which space bent so awry. The mass was snagged into the net, caught. Dairine described the direction she wanted it to go in, turned the spell loose. The whole business had taken sixteen milliseconds.
The tiny black hole slung into the red sun, which immediately flared up in outrage. None of this was visible, nor would it be for some minutes, until the light reached the planet from the star; but Dairine felt it happen, and so did the Lone One.
“So much for that,” Dairine said. “Now you and I are going to talk.” At the same time she was thinking furiously about something else that nagged at her, as if it were important. How was it she was able to hear what was going on in Its head—
—and she was distracted, for here came something else, a wave of power so awful that she shrank from it, even though it wasn’t directed at her or anything on the planet’s surface.
All those millions of miles away, she felt the star go dead. Starsnuffer: she knew the Lone Power was called by that name as well.
“I am through playing,” It said. “If it is not you who pay the price, elsewhere others will. Think on it.” It looked upward. There was hardly anything human about it anymore—only a great tall darkness, like a tree made of night, no limbs, no eyes, just awful watchfulness and a cold to freeze the heart.
Dairine looked up too. She felt darkness eating at the fringes of the risen galaxy.
“Here are your choices,” said the Lone Power out of Its darkness, as Dairine and Nita and Kit watched in horror. “Keep on defying me, and watch me kill and kill as the price of your defiance. The blood of all these billions of entities will be on your souls forever. Or give yourselves up to me.”
“No way,” Nita said. “You’re the one doing the killing. We’d do worse by the Universe if we gave up, rather than if we kept on fighting you.”
Dairine stood silent, refusing to be rattled, thinking. There has to be a way to get it to stop this! I can’t fight it forever! At least, I don’t want to…
And how can I hear It? The connection through Logo? She glanced over among the mobiles, but Logo lay on his side, empty-minded. No. It has to be—
She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly….
I’m a product of this universe, after all, she’d said to the mobiles. It’s in me too….
Dairine’s heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy.
Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning lightsaber,. Not something outside to battle and cast down,… but inside: inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable anymore. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It….
Dairine was terrified. Yet this was wh
at she’d come looking for: the great thing, the thing that mattered, the thing that would save everybody—from Kit and Nita to the least little grain of dust in space and the tiniest germ on Earth. This was what the spell had brought her here to do. She would pen all of the Lone Power up inside herself, not just the treacherous little splinter of it that was her own; pen It up inside a vast machine mind that was large enough to hold It all. And then she would die, and take It out of the universe with her.
But she couldn’t do it without consent. What about it, guys? she said to them silently, through the link that every mobile shared with every other. Let’s take a vote.
Show us what to do! they said; and tears sprang to Dairine’s eyes at the fierce love in their thought.
Dairine turned and bent down to pick up Logo, cradling the empty shell close in her arms. Gigo nuzzled up against her knee. This is the way to go out, Dairine thought. Who needs a lightsaber…?
“Okay,” she said to the Lone One. “Last warning. Cut it out.”
It laughed at her.
Dairine struck. The mobiles struck with her through their own links to the Lone One, a great flow of valor that for the first time in all times, was without despair. They did not care about all the other attempts wizards had made on the Lone Power through history; as far as a computer is concerned, there is no program that cannot be debugged, or at worst, rewritten. They struck through Dairine, and with her, not knowing that defeat was even possible. Two thousand wizards, each a veritable library of wizardry, led by one at the peak of her power, and utterly committed, and all acting as one: in such circumstances anything seemed possible.
With them at her back, Dairine ran down the road into the dark places inside her, down into the scorn, the indifference, the selfishness, and found the Lone One there. All together they grasped It, and held It in the light, and wouldn’t let It. The screaming began, both from those who held It and from What they held… but It screamed louder, suspecting what was coming.
The darkness stopped eating the nearby galaxy, but that was not enough. The great pillar of dark that the Lone One had become was bent double, but not yet defeated. Dairine hunted desperately inside the vast store of knowledge that was the mobiles’ version of the manual, looking for a final strategy, for even she and the mobiles couldn’t hold the Lone One for much longer.
And then the answer presented itself: elegant, obvious. To fight darkness, the manual said, as so many other references have said before, light: for the darkness comprehendeth it not…
Light, Dairine thought. We need more. But the nova was gone, half the galaxy was out….
She rummaged for milliseconds or ages longer…and suddenly found her answer. Gonna be quite a spell. Dairine put down Logo’s empty shell, flung up her arms and felt for the forces she wanted, while the mobiles inside her kept the Lone One both inside and out pinned down. It was gravity she would be working with again, and time. Yes, gravity was weak as forces went, and time was not a force, but—from the wizardly point of view anyway—an ambiguous vector quality. The two of them knew things about each other, though… and Dairine was about to exploit that fact. A big spell. Complicated. Fairly power-intensive —
Don’t think about it, the mobiles said. Let us handle it. Let the spell handle it. A spell always works.
Dairine nodded and started speaking softly, naming everything she wanted to affect. One of the names was quite long, too long to waste time saying out loud; she slipped into machine language and machine time and spoke it there. It took four whole seconds, and made the whole planet tremble a little when she said it. Good, she thought, it’s working….
Then she said the last word of the spell, knotting it closed on itself, and told it to run.
And the Universe held still, and started remembering something.
*
The sound Dairine had heard first when she started this journey, the soft susurrus of the universe laughing at her, was still all about them. But that cold hopeless hiss was just a reminder of something that had happened earlier. Before the hiss had come the event of which it was the palest possible shadow, the whisper that could never do more than hint at the colossal shout of cosmic laughter that had preceded it.
Right. So let’s have that again, shall we? Dairine said, as all the power of the mobiles massed behind her to implement a moment of most profound memory at the universal level. Because a good joke never gets old.
She said the trigger word, and the spell began to run.
Its backlash hit Dairine in a massive wave, but she refused to fall, not wanting to miss what was about to happen, though she might die for it. Behind her, the mobiles had her back: they braced her, indomitable, and waited for the result.
Sensing the nature of the spell before it was even fairly started, the Lone One shrieked like a thing mortally wounded, a sound that made the planet shake almost as violently as it had before. Then It fled in the one direction left open to It: into the mortal souls of Kit and Nita and Dairine.
And then there was light.
Reconfiguration
Nita stood in terror, hanging on to Kit, and watched the flowering start. It took her a few minutes to recognize what she was seeing.
The sky began to grow bright. It did it vaguely at first, from no specific source, as if the planet were suddenly developing an atmosphere and sunlight were beginning to diffuse itself through it. But there was no atmosphere, and anyway the brief burst of nova light from the planet’s own primary hadn’t had time to reach this world yet. All the same the light grew, inevitably, invincibly becoming brighter second by second. As Nita looked up into it, she found herself shivering. Not from exhaustion or fear, as would have made perfect sense: but from something more elemental. What was spreading above them was an entirely new kind of light, and mortal flesh trembled to see it: for when this light had first blazed out at the heart of the universe, nothing strictly mortal had existed to behold it.
First light, Nita thought, in terror and awe: but really, really not the usual kind of first light at all. And then, unbelieving, she started to laugh. Because only my sister could pull off something like this!
Dairine wasn’t moving: she was frozen in mid-gesture, arms upflung, her fists clenched as if she were holding on to something by main force. The sky grew brighter. Space that had been black began to turn milky and misty; stars that had been bright, and the damaged swirl of the nearby barred-spiral galaxy, swam in the light and began to vanish.
Beside Nita, Kit was trembling too, and some of it was fear because he didn’t understand what was happening. “What’s she doing? What is this?”
Nita laughed, a shaky sound but still. “She’s rerunning the lightshow from the first few seconds after the Big Bang.”
Kit’s eyes widened. “What??”
“Look at it! You’ll know what’s happening. You’ll feel it. Just look!”
“I am looking,” Kit said, sounding uneasy. “And you know, this is amazing, but somehow… I really want to leave.”
Nita felt the same way. Despite knowing what was happening, there was something inside her that was making her feel cold. More than anything, she wanted to get out of this light. She knew in her bones that it was happening everywhere in existence. Earth would be going crazy, just about now, and wizards would be needed there to keep anything sudden from happening….
“Neets, c’mon. Let’s hustle. Dairine’s okay.”
Nita shuddered all over, shook her head, stood her ground. “No.”
“Neets, come on, people back home are gonna look up and think there’s a nuclear war or something! If someone doesn’t warn them what’s really happening—”
“Kit,” Nita said. “I’m not leaving. I want to, too. Or rather, I think something else wants to.” She turned her face up to the light. “What are you feeling?”
He looked at her, stunned. “Scared…”
“Of what?”
She glanced over at Kit. He was rubbing his head: it was always headaches, wi
th Kit. “The light. But that’s crazy.”
“You bet. Stand your ground. And look!”
They looked. The light got brighter: it was impossible to understand how it could. The broad glassy plain shone unbearably, the mobiles glittered. The only thing that did not shine in that light was the great length of darkness, like a shadow with nothing to cast it, that crouched over on itself in the midst of the plain and writhed like a tortured thing.
The light still grew. There was no seeing anything by it anymore, but that brief blot of darkness that refused and refused the light, twisting, moaning. The light hammered at it. Slowly, the urge to leave withdrew. Nita, blinded, elbowed Kit lightly in the side, a get-a-load-of-this gesture; for now another level of recognition was setting in. Both of them had seen this light before or something very like it, outside the realms of the merely physical. It was the light of Timeheart, which had always been there, which did not change but grew every second, and made the ability to bear it grow too. Turn from it, and it blinded: stare into it till it blinded, and you could see.
They stared around them, stared at each other. “Have we died?” Kit whispered.
“Not that I noticed.”
“Think we’re gonna?” He sounded as bemused as Nita felt.
“You got me.” It didn’t seem important.
The light whited out everything but that long, prone core of darkness, that grew less as they looked at it, as if the light dissolved it. It went flat. It lay against the burning ground and misted away. It was barely more than a gray shadow. Finally it was not even that.
And Dairine fell down.
*
I told you we were going to talk.
Dairine felt the Lone Power scrabbling in Nita’s and Kit’s souls for a foothold. She felt them refuse to flee and take It to safety; she felt It slip. She held the light, held It in the light. Through Its connection to the motherboard and Logo and through her own heart, she heard the Lone One’s screams of recognition. It knew that light of old —the light It forswore forever at the beginning of everything, and fled into the dark, determined to do without rather than subject Itself to the other Powers that had asserted ownership of it.
