(3b) Preservation-HIDE, SEEK
'!i (4) Outside assistance-(routine) SUPPORT
(4a) (emergency) ASSIST
'-' (5) Other programming-MBASIC
'' (6) Exit to system
Dairine chewed her lip and thought. Just to see what would happen, she hit '2' and the carriage return.
The screen cleared.
TRAVEL UTILITY
Input? (1) keyboard, (2) verbal
'2,' Dairine typed.
'Inside solar system or outside solar system?' the computer said very quietly, but so suddenly that Dairine almost dropped it.
'Inside,' she said, and swallowed.
'Planet?'
She gazed at the ladies' room door, thinking of the dioramas outside with a sudden terrible desire.
'Mars,' Dairine said.
The disk drive chirred briefly. 'Coordinates?'
Dairine knew that aerographers used some kind of latitude-longitude system for Mars, but she knew nothing else about it. 'Default,' she said, on a hunch.
'Default coordinates confirmed,' said the computer, 'last recorded transit. Atmosphere?'
Last recorded- 'Uh, atmosphere? Yes,' she said.
'Parameters?'
'Umm. . Fifteen percent oxygen, eighty percent nitrogen, five percent carbon dioxide.'
'Mix proportions approximate Terran sea-level parameters. Default to those?'
'Mmm. . Yes.'
'Estimated time in transit?'
She thought. 'One hour.'
'Data complete,' said the computer. 'Ready to transit. Transit command 'run.' '
'Run,' Dairine said.
And everything slewed sideways and upside down. Or no, the world stayed the same-but Dairine's frame of reference suddenly became huger than the whole Earth and the space that contained it, so that her planet seemed only one moving, whirling point plunging along its path through a terrible complexity of forces, among which gravity was a puny local thing and not to be regarded. Up was some other way now; down had nothing to do with the floor. Her stomach rebelled.
And her eyes were seeing things they had never been made to see. Lines and sparks and traces of white fire seemed to tear through her head from her eyes to the back of her skull; they pinned her to the rolling Earth like a feebly fluttering moth to a card. A terrible silence with a deadly sea-roar at the bottom of it, more terrible than the stillness of her Oathtaking, flattened her down with its sheer cold ancientness, a vast weight of years without sound or light or life. Cosmic rays, she thought desperately, clutching at reason: faster-than-light particles, maybe that's what the light is. But the dark-it's death, death itself, I'm going to die
— and the wizardry let her go. Dairine got shakily to her feet. The first crunch of stones and gravel under her sneakers, instead of tile floor, went through her in a rush of adrenaline as fierce as fire. Her vision cleared. Red wasteland stretched away under a cold rose sun, a violet sky arched over her; the wind sang chill. She turned slowly, looking around. High up in the cold violet day, something small and bright fled across the sky, changing phase as it did so.
'Deimos,' Dairine whispered. Or maybe it was Phobos, the other of Mars's two little moons. Whichever it was, it went through half its month in a few minutes, sliding down toward the horizon and down behind something that stood up from it. It was a mountain peak, upraised as if on a pedestal, and so tall that though it came up from far behind the foreshortened horizon, its broad flat base spanned half that horizon easily. 'What is that?' she said.
'Syntax error 24,' said the Apple dispassionately. 'Rephrase for precision.'
'That mountain. What is it? Identify.'
'Earth/IAU nomenclature 'Olympus Mons.' '
Dairine took in a sharp breath. It was an ancient volcano, long extinct, and the highest mountain in the Solar System. 'How do I get up there?'
'Reference short-transit utilities.'
She did. Five minutes later she stood in a place where the wind no longer sang, for it was too thin to do so; where carbon dioxide lay frozen on the rust red stones, and the fringes of her protective shell of air shed a constant snow of dry ice and water vapor as she moved; a place from which she could see the curvature of the world. Dairine stood twelve miles high atop Olympus Mons, on the ridge of its great crater, into which Central Park could have been dropped entire, and looked out over the curve of the red world at what no nonwizardly child of Earth had seen with her or his own eyes before: the asteroid belt rising like a chain of scattered stars, and beyond them, the tiniest possible disk, remote but clear.
'Jupiter,' she whispered, and turned around to look for Earth. From here it would look like a morning or evening star, just a shade less bright than Venus. But in mid-movement she was distracted. There was something down in the mile-deep crater, a little light that shone.
'What's that?' she said, holding up the Apple.
'Syntax error 24-'
'Yeah, yeah, right. That light! Identify.'
'A marker beacon. Provenance uncertain at this range.'
'Get us down there!'
With Dairine's help, it did. Shortly she was staring at a pole with a light on it, streamlined and modern- looking, made of some dark blue metal she couldn't identify. Set in the ground beside the pole was a plate of dull red metal with strange markings on it. 'What's it say?'
'Error trap 18. Sense of query: semantic value?'
'Right.'
'First (untranslatable) climbing expedition. Ascent of (untranslatable proper name): from (date uncertain) to (date uncertain). We were here. Signed, (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name).'
'People,' Dairine whispered.
'Affirmative.'
She looked up at the stars in the hard violet sky. 'I want to go where they came from!'
'Reference transit utility.'
She did, and spent some minutes tapping busily at the keys. In the middle of it, selecting coordinates, delightedly reading through planet names-she stopped and bit her lip. 'This is going to take longer than an hour,' she said to herself. Come to think of it, she might want to be away for quite some time. And seeing all the problems Nita had started having with their folks when she told them she was a wizard, it wouldn't do for Dairine to let them know that she was one too. Not just yet.
She thought about this, then got out of the 'travel' utility and brought up the directory again-taking more time with it, examining the program menus with great care. In particular she spent a great deal of time with the 'Copy' and 'Hide' utilities, getting to know their ins and outs, and doing on finicky piece of copying as a test.
The test worked: she sent the copy home.
'That should do it,' she said, got back into the 'Travel' utility, and wit the program's prompting started to lay in coordinates. 'Darth Vader,' muttered under her breath, 'look out. Here I come.'
Shortly thereafter there was nothing on Olympus Mons but rocks, and dryl ice snow, and far down in the crater, the single blinking light.
