'Negative effect on link.'
She lifted the computer into her lap and went on reading. It was as she had thought. The planet periodically became volcanically active, and the volcanoes spewed a fine mist of lava all over the landscape, airbrushing the glassy surface on a gigantic scale with vividly colored trace elements.
Subsequent layering muted the colors, producing the dappled translucence she sat on. Dairine hit the carriage return for another screenful of data, and the screenful appeared-and her stomach flipped again.
PLANETARY HISTORY (page 2 of 16) HELP/g/rl 18655
This unique structure becomes more interesting when considering the physical nature of the layering.
Some 92 % of the layers consilt of chemically pure sillcol,! predlspollng thl agllllate to
elelllllllductilllllllllllllllllllllllllll 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
'I blew it up,' Dairine whispered, horrified. 'Oh, no, oh, no, I fried its brains. I blew it up.' She took a deep breath, not sure how many more of them she was going to get, and gingerly hit the carriage return to see what would happen. .
Pattern Recognition
Nita popped out into a canopy of starlit darkness and a carpet of dim light, breathing very hard. Earth's gravity well was no joke: pushing her own mass and enough air to breathe for a while up out of that heavy pull was a problem. She walked over to a boulder, dusted it off, and sat down, panting, to admire the view while she waited for Kit.
The 'usual place' where they met was, of course, the Moon. Nita liked it there; working, and thinking, were always easy there, in the great silence that no voices but astronauts' and wizards' had broken since the Moon's dust was made. This particular spot, high in the lunar Caucasus mountain chain, was a favorite of Kit's-a flat- topped peak in a wild, dangerous country of jagged gray-white alps, cratered and pocked by millennia of meteoric bombardment. Piles of rocktumble lay here and there, choking the steep valleys where the sheer heat and cold of the lunar days had been enough to flake solid rock away from itself in great glassy or pumicey chunks. Off to one side, the pallid rim of the little crater Calippus scraped razor-sharp against the sky, and over it hung the Earth.
The Moon was at first quarter, so the Earth was at third, a blinding half-world: blazing blue-green, almost painful to look at until the eyes got used to it. It shed a cool faint blue-white light over everything.
A curl of white stormweather lay over the northwestern Pacific, and there vanished; for down the middle of it the terminator ran, the edge of night, creeping ever so slowly toward the west. Most of North America lay in the darkness, and city lights lay golden in faint glittering splashes and spatters with brighter sparkling Patches under the Great Lakes and on the California coast.
Nita shrugged out of her knapsack, opened it and rechecked the contents. It was a good assortment: varied enough to handle several different classes of sPell, specific enough to those classes to let her save some power for herself.
She pulled her manual out and started paging through it for the 'tracker' spell that she and Kit would need when he got here. It was actually a variant of the one he had threatened to put on Dairine in the city: this one hunted for the characteristic charged 'string residue' left in space by the passage of a wizard's transit spell through it. Nita's specialty was astronomy, so she had been shocked to find that 'empty' space wasn't actually empty, and even the hardest vacuum had in it what physicists called 'strings,' lines of potential force that have nothing to do with any of the forces physicists understand. Wizards, of course, could use them: much of what passes for telekinesis turns out in fact to be string manipulation.
The tracker spell made most elegant use of it. And once we find her, Nita thought, I'm gonna tie a few of those strings around her neck. .
But it didn't do to start a wizardry in such a mood. Nita pulled her space pen out of her pocket, kicked some of the larger rocks out of her way-they bounced off down the mountain as slowly as soap bubbles-and began drawing the circle for the transit spell.
It was becoming an old familiar diagram, this one. The basic circle, knotted with the wizard's knot: her own personal data, reduced by now (after much practice) to one long scrawl in the precise and elegant shorthand version of the Speech: Kit's data, another scrawl, over which she took even more care than her own. What a wizard names in the Speech, is defined so: inaccurate naming can alter the nature of the named, and Nita liked Kit just the way he was. A third long scrawl of shorthand for Picchu: Nita looked oddly at some of the variables in it, but Tom had given her the data, and he certainly knew what he was doing. Then the internal diagrams, the 'intent' factors. The point of origin, the intended point of arrival or vector of travel; the desired result; the time parameters and conditional statements for life-support; the balloon-diagram for the ethical argument. .
Nita wiped sweat and grit off her face, and muttered at the incessant hissing in the background. Dust flew freely in one-sixth gravity, and got in everything: after you went to the Moon, you took a shower, for the same reasons you take one after a haircut. But there wasn't much more to do here. She finished the last few strokes of the notations in the environmental-impact statement and stood up, rubbing her back and checking her work for spelling errors.
It was all in order. But that hissing. .
She sat down again, feeling nervous. Facility with the Speech, as with any other language, increases with time. After several months of working in a sort of pidgin Speech, Nita was finally beginning to think in it, and the results were sometimes upsetting. Once upon a time, it had been quiet on the Moon when she visited. But no more. Her more accustomed mind heard a sound in the darkness now: a low low sound like a breath being let out, and out, and out forever. The astronomer part of her knew what it was-the so-called four-degree radiation that was all that was left of the universe's birth. Normally only radio telescopes set to the right frequency could hear it. But Nita wasn't normal. Nor was the sound just a sound to her. In it she could hear the sound of consciousness, life, as plainly as she had used to be able to hear Kit think. That sensitivity had decreased over time; but this one was increasing, it seemed in the deep silence, by the minute. It upset her. Suddenly the universe, that had seemed so empty, now felt crammed full of powers and intelligences that might not need planets, or bodies. And Dairine was out there in the middle of them, mucking around in her inimitable fashion. . Nita found herself wishing that Kit would hurry up. She very much wanted to see that cheerful face, to hear at least his voice, if not his sassy, loud cast of thought, always with that slight Hispanic accent to it…
Long time since we heard each other think. .
She had been wondering about that. Idly she began flipping through the manual, turning pages. Maybe the index- But the index did her no good: she couldn't think what heading to look under. 'Come on,' she muttered to the book, 'give me a hand here, I don't have all day.'
It was that hissing that was making her ill-tempered, she realized. A thought occurred to her, and she was glad she hadn't completely cleaned out her knapsack the other day. She reached into it and pulled out a tangle of cord, and a pair of earphones, and her Walkman. It was a Christmas present from her mother-the best of any present Nita had gotten last year, for she loved music and liked walking through her day with a soundtrack. Now she riffled through the pages of her manual, squinting at them in the pale Earth-light, while rock sang softly in the earphones.
