'I know,' said Dairine, between bites of the sandwich, making a face at the taste of it. 'I'm in no rush.'
The computer's screen filled with binary as it began conferring with the motherboard in machine language. What do I mean I'm in no rush? Dairine thought, momentarily distracted while Gigo climbed into her lap again. 'Did you finish that analysis run about the Lone One for me?'
'Yes,' said the computer. 'Do you want it displayed?'
'Yeah, please.'
The binary went away from the screen, replaced by print. Dairine didn't look at it immediately. She leaned back and gazed up. The galaxy was all set but for one arm, trailing up over the far, far horizon, a hook of light. The dull red sun Svas following it down as if attached to the hook by an invisible string. An old, old star, Dairine thought. Not even main-sequence anymore. This could have been one of the first stars created in this universe. . Might have been, considering how far out this galaxy- The thought was shocked out of her.
Something other than her voice was making a sound. It was a rumbling, very low, a vibration in the surface she sat on. 'What the- You feel that?' she said to the computer.
'Vibration of seismic origin,' the computer said. 'Intensity 2.2 Richter and increasing.'
There was precious little on the planet's surface to shake. Dairine stood up, alarmed, and watched the turtles. For all their legs, they were having trouble keeping their footing on the slick surface. Gigo hooked a leg around Dairine's and steadied itself that way. 'Is this gonna get worse?' Dairine said.
'Uncertain. No curve yet. Richter 3.2 and increasing. Some volcanic eruption occurring in planet's starward hemisphere.'
Got to do something about their leg design if this happens a lot, Dairine thought-and then was distracted again, because something was happening to the light: It wavered oddly, dimming from the clear rose that had flooded the plain to a dark dry color like blood. She stared upward.
The sun was twisting out of shape. There was no other way to describe it. Part of its upper right-hand quarter seemed pinched on itself, warped like a round piece of paper being curled. Prominences stretched peculiarly, snapped back to tininess again: the warping worsened, until the star that had been normal and round was squeezed small, as if in a cruel fist, to a horizontal, fluctuating oval, then to a sort of tortured heart-shape, then to an oval bent the other way, leftward. Sunspots stretched like pulled taffy, oozed back to shape again, and the red light wavered and shifted like that of a candle about to be blown out in the wind.
Dairine stood with a terrible sickness at the heart of her, for this was no kind of eclipse or other astronomical event that she had ever heard of. It was as if she was seeing the laws of nature broken in front of her.
'What is that?' she whispered.
'Transit of systemic object across primary,' said the computer. 'The transiting object is a micro black hole.'
Dairine sat down again, feeling the rumbling beneath her start to die away. The computer had mentioned the presence of that black hole earlier, but in the excitement she had forgotten it. 'Plot me that thing's orbit,' she said. 'Is that going to happen every day?'
'Indeterminate. Working.'
'I don't like that,' said Gigo with sudden clarity.
Dairine looked over at it with surprise and pulled it into her lap. 'You're not alone, small stuff,' she said.
'It gives me the shakes too.' She sat there for a second, noticing that she was sweating. 'You're getting smart, huh?' she said. 'Your mom down there is beginning to sort out the words?'
'It hurts,' said Gigo, sounding a little mournful.
'Hurts. .' Dairine wasn't sure whether this was a general statement or an answer to her question.
Though it could be both. A black hole in orbit in the star system would produce stresses in a planet's fabric that the planet-if it were alive, like this one-could certainly feel. Line the black hole up with its star, as it would be lined up in transit, and the tidal stresses would be that much worse. What better cause to learn to tell another person that something was hurting you?. . Now that there was another person to tell.
Dairine patted Gigo absently. 'It's all over, Gigo,' she said.
'Gigo, yes.'
She grinned faintly. 'You really like having a name, huh?'
'A program must be given a name to be saved,' Gigo said quite clearly, as if reciting from memory-but there was also slight fear in its voice, and great relief.
'Well, it's all over,' Dairine said. . while surreptitiously checking the sky to make sure. Tiny though it was-too small to see-a micro black hole was massive enough to bend light toward it. That was what had made the sun look so strange, as the gravity center of the black hole's field bent the round image of the sun forward onto itself. The realization made Dairine feel a lot better, but she didn't particularly want to see the sun do that again. She turned back to the computer. 'Let's get back to work.'
'Which display first,' the computer said, 'the black hole's orbit or the research run on the Lone Power?'
'The orbit.'
It drew it for her on the screen, a slowly moving graphic that made Dairine's insides crawl. The black hole's orbit around its primary was irregular. These transits occurred in twenty out of every thirty orbits, and in the middle five orbits the hole swung much closer to the planet and appeared to center more closely on the sun. This last one had been a grazing transit: the micro hole had only passed across the upper limb of the star. Dairine did not want to see what a dead-center transit would look like, not at all.
But in the midst of her discomfort, she still found a little room to be fascinated. Apparently the black hole was the cause of the planet's many volcanoes: the tidal stresses it produced brought up molten silicon, which erupted and spread over the surface. Without the frequent passages of the hole near the planet, the millions of layers of the motherboard would never have been laid down, and it would never have reached the critical 'synapse' number necessary for it to come alive. .
'Okay,' she said. 'Give me the research run, and let me know when the motherboard's ready to make some more of these guys.'
'Working.' V
Dairine began to read, hardly aware of it when Gigo sneaked into her lap again and stared curiously at the screen. She paged past Nita's and Kit's last run-in with the Lone Power and started skimming the precis before it for common factors. Odd tales from a hundred planets flicked past her, and sweat slowly began to break out on Dairine as she realized she could not see any common factors at all. She could see no pattern in what made the Lone
Power pick a specific world or group or person to attack, and no sure pattern or method for dealing with It. Some people seemed to beat the Lone One off by sheer luck. Some did nothing that she could see, and yet ruined Its plans utterly. One wizard on a planet of Altair had changed the whole course of his world's history by inviting a person he knew to be inhabited by the Lone One to dinner. . and the next day, the Altairans' problem (which Dairine also did not understand except that it had something to do with the texture of their fur) simply began to clear up, apparently by itself.
'Maybe I should buy It a hot dog,' Dairine muttered. That would make as much sense as most of these solutions. She was getting a feeling that there was something important about dealing with the Lone Power that the computer wasn't telling her.
She scrolled back to Nita and Kit's precis again and read it through carefully, comparing it with what she had seen them do or heard them say herself. Her conversation with Nita after she had seen her sister change back from being a whale was described in the precis as 'penultimate clarification and choice.'
Dairine scowled. What had Nita chosen? And why? She wished she had her there to ask her. . but no.
Dairine didn't think she could cope with Nita at the moment. Her sister would certainly rip into her for doing dumb things, and Dairine wasn't in the mood. . considering how many dumb things she had done in the past day and a half.
Still, Dairine thought, a little advice would come in real useful around now. .
'Ready,' said the computer suddenly.
'Okay. Ask it to go ahead.'
'Warning,' the computer said. 'The spell being used requires major restructuring of the substrate.
Surface stability will be subject to change without notice.'
