'I'm going too,' said Kit.
Carl, still ashen from the exertion of his spell, shook his head. 'Kit, your folks don't know you're a wizard. You might have to be gone for quite a while — and I can't sell you two a time warp as I did once before. My time- jurisdiction stops at atmosphere's edge.'
'I'll tell them what I am,' Kit said.
Nita turned and stared at him.
'I've been thinking about doing it for a while, since you told your folks,' he said to her. 'You handled it pretty well,' he said to Nita's parents. 'I should give my mom and dad the benefit of the doubt.' The words were brave: but Nita noticed that Kit looked a little worried.
'Kit, you'll have to hurry,' Tom said. 'She's got a long lead on you, and the trail will get cold fast. Neets, where would Dairine want to go?'
Nita shook her head. 'She reads a lot of science fiction.'
Carl looked worried. 'Has she been reading Heinlein?'
'Some,' Nita said. 'But she's mostly hot for Star Wars right now.'
'That's something, at least. With luck she won't think of going much farther than a few galaxies over.
Anything in particular about Star Wars?'
'Darth Vader,' Kit said. 'She wants to beat him up.'
Tom groaned and ran one hand through his hair. 'No matter what the reason,' he said, 'if she goes looking for darkness, she'll find it.'
'But Darth Vader's not real!' said Nita's mother.
Tom glanced at her. 'Not here. Be glad.'
'A few galaxies over…' Nita's father said to no one in particular.
Carl looked grim. 'We can track her, but the trail's getting cold; and at any rate Tom and I can't go with you.'
'Now, wait a minute…' Nita's mother said.
Carl looked at her gently. 'We're not allowed out of the Solar System,' he said. 'There are reasons. For one thing, would you step out the door of a car you were driving?'
Nita's mother stared at him.
'Yes, well,' Tom said. 'We'll get you support. Wizards everywhere we can reach will be watching for you. And as for a guide-'
'I'll go,' said Picchu abruptly, from the computer table.
Everyone stared, most particularly Nita's mother and father.
'Sorry, I should have mentioned,' Carl said. 'Peach is an associate. Bird, isn't this a touch out of your league?'
'I told you I was needed,' Picchu said irritably. 'And I am. I can see the worst of what's going to happen before it does; so I should be able to keep these two out of most kinds of trouble. But you'd better stop arguing and move. If Dairine keeps throwing away energy the way she's doing, she's going to attract Someone's attention. . and the things It sends to fetch her will make Darth Vader look like a teddy bear by comparison.'
Nita's mother looked at Carl and Tom. 'Whatever you have to do,' she said, 'do it.'
'Just one question,' Tom said to Picchu. 'What do They need her for?
'The Powers?' Picchu said. She shut her eyes.
'Well?'
'Reconfiguration,' she said, and opened her eyes again, looking surly. 'Well? What are you staring at? I can't tell you more than I know. Are we going?'
'Gone,' Nita said. She headed out of the room for her manual.
'I'll meet you in the usual place when I'm done,' Kit called after her, and vanished. Papers flew again, leaving Nita's mother and father looking anxiously at Carl and Tom.
'Powers,' Nita heard her father say behind her. 'Creation. Forces from before time. This is-this business is for saints, not children!'
'Even saints have to start somewhere,' Carl said softly. 'And it's always been the children who save the Universe from the previous generation, and remake the Universe in their own image.'
'Just be glad yours are conscious of the fact that that's what they're doing,' Tom said.
Neither of her parents said anything.
In her bedroom, Nita grabbed her manual, bit her lip, said three words, and vanished.
Randomization
Dairine did not go straight out of the Galaxy from Mars. Like many other wizards when they first cut planet- loose, she felt that she had to do a little local sightseeing first.
She was some while about it. Part of this was caused by discomfort. The jump from Earth to Mars, a mere forty-nine million miles, had been unsettling enough, with its feeling of first being pinned to a wildly rolling ball and then violently torn loose from it. But it hadn't been too bad. Piece o' cake, Dairine had thought, checking the transit directory in the computer. Somewhere out of the Solar System next. What's this star system? R Leporis? It's pretty close. . But she changed her mind, and headed for the moons of Jupiter instead. . and this turned out to be a good thing. From Mars to Jupiter, bypassing the asteroid belt, was a jump of three hundred forty-one million miles; and the huge differences between the two planets' masses, vectors, and velocities caused Dairine to become the first Terran to lose her lunch on Jupiter's outermost satellite, Ananke.
The view did more than anything else to revive her-the great banded mass of Jupiter swiftly traversing the cold night overhead, shedding yellow-red light all around on the methane snow. Dairine sat down in the dry, squeaky snow and breathed deeply, trying to control her leftover heaves. Where she sat, mist curled up and snowed immediately down again as the methane sublimated and almost instantly recrystallized to solid phase in the bitter cold. Dairine decided that getting used to this sort of travel gradually was a good idea.
She waited until she felt better, and then began programming-replenishing her air and planning her itinerary. She also sat for a while examining the transit programs themselves, to see if she had been doing something wrong t° cause her to feel so awful. . and to see if perhaps she could rewrite the programs a little to get rid of the problem. The programs were written in a form of MBASIC that had many commands which were new to her, but were otherwise mostly understandable. They were also complex: they had to be. Earth spins at seventeen thousand miles an hour, plows along its orbital path at a hundred seventy-five thousand, and the Sun takes it and the whole Solar System off toward the constellation Hercules at a hundred fifteen thousand miles an hour. Then the Sun's motion as one of innumerable stars in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy sweeps it along at some two million miles an hour, and all the while relationships between individual stars, and those of stars to their planets, shift and change. .
It all meant that any one person standing still on any planet was in fact traveling a crazed, corkscrewing path through space, at high speed: and the disorientation and sickness were apparently the cause of suddenly, and for the first time, going in a straight line, in a universe where space itself and everything in it is curved. Dairine looked and looked at the transit programs, which could (as she had just proved) leave you standing on the surface of a satellite three hundred fifty million miles away from where you started-not half embedded in it, not splatted into it in a bloody smear because of some forgotten vector that left you still moving a mile a second out of phase with the surface of the satellite, or at the right speed, but in the wrong direction. . Finally she decided not to tamper. A hacker learns not to fix what works… at least, not till it's safe to try. Maybe the transits'll get easier, she thought. At least now I know not to eat right before one. .
That brought up the question of food, which needed to be handled. Dairine considered briefly, then used the software to open a storage pocket in otherspace. By means of the transit utility she then removed a loaf of bread, a bottle of mustard, and half a pound of bologna from the refrigerator back home, stuffing them into local otherspace where she could get at them. Mom 'n' Dad won't notice, she thought, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it? Spank my copy? Be interesting if they did. I wonder if I'd feel it…
