any experiences to make words out of, no reason to put letters together to make the words in the first place… It was like it had been for Helen Keller, Dairine thought: but at least Helen had had the senses of touch and taste, so that she could feel the water poured into her hand while her teacher drummed the touch-code for water into it. It has no senses. If it did.
'Can you hook it into your sensors?' she said to the computer.
The computer hesitated. It had never done such a thing before: and when it spoke again, its syntax was peculiar-more fluid than she was used to.
'High probability of causing damage to the corresponding computer due to too great a level of complexity,' it said.
Dairine breathed out, annoyed, but had to agree. Anything able to sense events happening forty trillion miles away, no matter how it managed it, was certainly too complex to hook directly to this poor creature right now. And another thought occurred to her, and her heart beat very fast. Not sensors, then. Senses.
'Can you hook me to it?' she said.
This time the hesitation was even longer, and Dairine stared at the computer, half expecting it to make an expression at her. It didn't, but the speech of its response was slow. 'Affirmative,' it said. 'Triple confirmation of intent required.'
'I tell you three times,' Dairine said. 'Hook it to me. Tell me what to do. It has to get some better idea of what's going on out here or it'll go crazy!'
'Direct physical contact with surface,' the computer said. It sounded reluctant.
Dairine dusted her hands off and put them flat on the glassy ground.
She was about to open her mouth to tell the computer to go ahead, do what it was going to: but she never got the chance. The instantaneous jolt went right through her with exactly the same painless grabbing and shaking she had felt when she was seven and had put a bobby pin in the electric socket.
She convulsed, all over: her head jerked up and snapped back and she froze, unable even to blink, staring up into the golden-veiled blaze of the barred spiral, staring at it till each slight twitch of her eyes left jittering purple-green afterimages to right and left of it; and somewhere inside her, as if it were another mind speaking, she could hear her computer crying 110010 01011110000100! 11001001011110000100! at the frantic silence that listened. Light, light, light-
And the reply, she heard that too: a long, crazed string of binary that made no sense to her, but needed to make none. Joy, it was simply joy, joy at discovering meaning: joy so intense that all her muscles jumped in reaction, breaking her out of the connection and flinging her facedown on the glazed ground.
The connection reestablished itself and Dairine's mind fell down into turmoil. She couldn't think straight: caught between the two computers -for under the swift tutelage of her own, the great glassy plain was now beginning truly to function as one-she felt the contents of her brain being twinned, and the extra copy dumped out into endless empty memory and stored, in a rush of images, ideas, occurrences, communications, theories and raw sensations. She knew it took only a short time: but it seemed to go on forever, and all her senses throbbed like aching teeth at being desperately and delightedly used and used and used again to sense this moment, this ever-changing now. Dairine thought she would never perceive anything as completely again as she was seeing and feeling the green-and-gold-shaded piece of silicon aggregate she lay on, with the four crumbs from her sandwich lying half an inch from her eye. She felt sure she would be able to describe the shape of those crumbs and the precise pattern of the dappling in the silicon on her deathbed. If she survived this to have one.
Finally it stopped. Groaning softly, Dairine levered herself up and stared around her. The computer was sitting there innocently, its screen showing the main 'Manual' menu. 'How is it?' Dairine said, and then sighed and got ready to rephrase herself.
'Considerably augmented,' said the computer.
Dairine stared at it.
'Is it just me,' she said, 'or do you sound smarter than you have been?'
'That calls for a value judgment,' said the computer.
Dairine opened her mouth, then closed it again. 'I guess it does,' she said. 'You weren't just acting as conduit all through that, were you? You expanded your syntax to include mine.'
'You got it,' said the computer.
Dairine took a moment to sit up. Before this, she'd thought she would love having the computer be a little more flexible. Now she was having second thoughts. 'How's our friend doing?'
'Assimilating the new data and self-programming. Its present running state has analogues to trance or dream states in humans.'
Dairine instantly wished it hadn't said that. What time was it at home? How long had she been running?
How long had that last longest jump taken, if it had in fact taken any time at all? All she knew was that she was deadly tired.
'Update,' said the computer. 'It is requesting more data.'
'On what?'
'No specific request. It simply desires more.'
'I'm fresh out,' Dairine said, and yawned. Then she looked at the computer again. 'No, I'm not. Give it what you've got.'
'Repeat and clarify?' said the computer, sounding slightly unnerved.
'Give it what you've got. All the information about planets and species and history and all the rest of it.
Give it the magic!'
The computer said nothing.
Dairine sat up straight. 'Go on,' she said.
No reply.
'Is there some rule that says you shouldn't?'
'Yes,' said the computer slowly, 'but this edition of the software contains the authorization-override function.'
'Good,' Dairine said, none too sure of what this meant, except that it sounded promising. 'I'm overriding. Give it what you've got.'
The screen lit up with a block of text, in binary, quite small and neat, and Dairine immediately thought of the Oath in Nita's manual.
The screen blanked, then filled with another brief stream of binary. That blanked in turn, and screenful after screenful of 1's and O's followed, each flickering out of existence almost as quickly as it appeared.
Dairine got up and stretched, and walked back and forth for a few minutes to work the kinks out of her muscles. She ached all over, as she had after the bobby pin incident, and her stomach growled at her again: a bologna sandwich and a half was not enough to satisfy her after the kind of day she had had. If it was even the same day. At least I have a while before the BEMs show up, she thought. Maybe our new friend here can be of some kind of help… As she looked out across the dappled-silvery plain, there was a bloom of soft crimson light at one side of it. Dairine held still to watch the sun rise. It was a fat red star, far along in its lifetime-so far along, so cool, that there was water vapor in its atmosphere, and even in the vacuum of space it hung in a softly glowing rose-colored haze, like an earthly summer sunset. It climbed the sky swiftly, and Dairine watched it in silence. Quite a day, she thought. But whether it's morning here or not, I need a nap.
She turned around and started to head back toward the computer-and froze.
One patch of the surface was moving. Something underneath it was humping upward, and cracks appeared in the perfect smoothness. There was no sound, of course, since Dairine's air supply was nowhere near the spot; the cracks webbed outward in total silence.
And then the crust cracked upward in jagged pieces, and the something underneath pushed through and up and out. Bits of silica glass fell slowly in the light gravity and bounced or shattered in a snow of splinters around the rounded shape that stood there. Stood was the right word: for it had legs, though short stumpy ones, as if a toy tank had thrown away its treads and grown limbs instead. It shook itself, the rounded, glassy, glittering thing, and walked over to Dairine and through her shields with a gait like a centipede's or a clockwork toy's; and it looked up at her, if something like a turtle with no head can be said to look up.
'Light,' it croaked, in a passable imitation of the computer's voice, and bumped against her shin, and rested there.
