toward her.
'No way!' Dairine shrieked. 'Run another subroutine!'
'Running,' said the computer, but it took its sweet time about it-and just as the world blinked out and the spell tore her loose from the hillside, Dairine felt wind on her skin-a wind that smelled of coffee grounds.
The BEMs had popped right in behind her.
She popped out again, this time in the middle of a plain covered with sky. j blue grass under a grass-green sky. She shook the computer in frustration.
'Program running,' the computer insisted.
'Sure, but they're following us! How are they doing it? Are we leaving a I trail somehow?'
'Affirmative,' said the computer calmly, as if Dairine should have known | this all along.
'Well, do something about it!'
'Advisory,' said the computer. 'Stealth procedures will decrease running speed. Stealth procedures are not one hundred percent effective due to inherent core-level stability of string functions-'
'I'll settle! And if we don't have to keep wasting time running subroutines,' Dairine said, exasperated, 'you'll have more time to run the main program, won't you!'
'Affirmative. Execute stealth?'
'Before someone executes me, yeah!'
Once again the spell took hold of Dairine and ripped her free of gravity and light. At least, she thought, this time the BEMs hadn't appeared before she vanished herself. Maybe we can gain a little ground.
We'd better. .
Another reality flicked into being around her. She was in the middle of a city: she got a brief impression of glassy towers that looked more grown than built, and people rushing around her and avoiding her in the typical dance of city dwellers. This might almost have been New York, except that New Yorkers had only a small percentage of the legs these people had. 'Don't stop,' she said. 'How much range have you got?'
'Infinite,' said the computer, quite calmly.
'While still running the main program?'
'Affirmative.'
She thought for a second. 'The edge of the Local Group might be far enough. Go.'
The spell seized her out of the crowd and flung her into the dark again. Over and over Dairine jumped, becoming less and less willing to stop, until finally strange vistas were flickering past her with the speed of some unutterably strange slide show being run in fast-forward by a bored lecturer. She passed right through the coronation parade of one of the Anarchs of Deleian IV and never noticed it: she stood for only a second on a chilly little planetoid being fought over by two desperate interstellar empires (and also missed the nova bomb that turned the planetoid into plasma several minutes later); she stood on the metallic upper floors of a planet that was one great library full of three galaxies' knowledge, and she never knew what it was, and probably at that point would not have cared. Only once Dairine paused for more than a few seconds, on a red sandstone promontory with a pinkish sea crash ing at its foot, and no signs of life anywhere under the bloated red sun that dyed the water. 'Are they still following?' she said.
'Probability high, but at a greatly increased distance.'
'You have enough time to finish the main program?'
'Affirmative.'
'Do it, then.'
She sat down on a rock and looked out at the water, while the computer's disk drive chirred softly to itself. The fat red sun slipped horizonward as she watched, and Dairine looked at it and noticed through the sunset haze that it had a companion, a little blue-white dwarf star that was slowly sucking the red giant's matter out of it in an accretion spiral of tarnished gold. She shook her head. Once she would have given anything to sit here and watch this. Now, though, the hair was rising on the back of her neck, and her back prickled, and all she wanted in the world-the worlds-was to get out of here and end up where she could hide.
She shivered. I never want to smell coffee again, she thought. They had unquestionably been sent after her by what had laughed at her in the dark. The Lone Power, the manual utility had called It. Well, at least she didn't hear It laughing anymore while she was in transit. Then again, that might not be good. I'm running pretty fair rings around Its people. It's probably real annoyed at me.
And then she tossed her head and grinned, her nasty grin. Let It be, then. I'm not going to be running for long. I'm going to turn around and give It something to think about.
If I can just figure out what to do, and find a weapon. .
'Done,' said the computer.
'Is this going to be a bad jump?' Dairine said.
'Transit may have significant physiological effects,' said the computer.
'Okay,' Dairine said. 'Go for it.' And she clenched her jaw.
The computer was understating. The jump was a hundred times worse than the first long one, an eternity of being torn, squeezed out of shape, pulled, hammered on, sliced by lines of force thinner than any hair and sharp as swords. Dairine hung on, unable even to scream. The transit broke for an instant on the surface of some planet as the program finished one jump subroutine, in a frozen flash of light and time too sudden to let any of the scream out, then pushed Dairine outside the universe and crushed her under its weight again. Then flash, and again; flash, and again: flash, flash, flash, flash, through a voiceless darkness a trillion years heavy and empty as entropy's end. This was the worst after all, the aloneness, total, no one to hear the scream she could not utter, not even the One who laughed-flash, flash, flash
— and then the crushing ceased, and the spell flung Dairine down on something flat and hard and chill, and she flopped down like a puppet with its strings cut and just lay there as she had not done since Ananke. Her stomach flipped, but this was becoming so commonplace that Dairine was able to ignore it and just lie there and pant for a few seconds.
Silence. Not that awful emptiness, but a more normal one: probably just lack of air. Dairine levered herself up painfully on her elbows and looked at the surface under her hands. It was dimly lit, and smooth as the garage floor on Rirhath B had been. Smoother, in fact. It was hard to tell colors in this dimness, but the surface wasn't plain white. Dapples of various shades seemed to overlap and shade one another in the depths of it, as delicately as if they had been airbrushed: and there was a peculiar translucence to the surface, as if it were glass of some kind.
Cautiously, Dairine got up to a kneeling position and straightened to look around. Now this is weird, she thought, for the surface on which she knelt, stretched on so far into the distance that she scrubbed at her eyes briefly, not quite believing them. The horizon seemed much farther away than it could ever be on
Earth. Must be a much bigger planet, she thought. But the thought did not make that immense vista any easier to grasp. It seemed to curve up after a while, though she was sure it was perfectly flat: the illusion was disturbing. Over the horizon hung starry space, the stars close and bright. Off to the sides the view was the same: here and there conical outcroppings of rock might break the pure and perfect flatness of it all, looking as if Picasso had dropped them there. . but otherwise there was nothing but that endless, pale, slick-smooth surface, dappled with touches of dim subtle color, in huge patches or small ones.
Dairine stood up and turned around to look for the computer. It was behind her, at her feet: she bent to pick it up
— and forgot about doing so. Before her, past the razory edge of that impossibly distant horizon, the galaxy was rising.
It was not her own. The Milky Way is a type SO spiral, a pinwheel of stars. This was a barred spiral, type SBO, seen almost face-on: an oval central core, two bars jutting from its core, one from each end of the starry oval, and each bar having a long curved banner or stream of stars curling away from it. Dairine had seen a hundred pictures of them and had mostly been fascinated by that central bar, wondering what gravitational forces were keeping it in place. But now she was seeing such a galaxy as few, even wizards, ever see one — not as a flat, pale far-off picture but as a three-dimensional object near at hand, rich with treasuries of stars in a spectrum's worth of colors, veiled about with diamonded dust on fire with ions and glowing, dominating a third of even that immense horizon, seeming frozen though in the midst of irresistible motion, its starry banners streaming back in still and complex glory from the eye-defeating blaze of the core. Dairine slowly folded back down to the
