"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 kneeling position and just watched it, watched it rise.
She weighed just a little less than she would have on Earth; but the spiral rose quickly, for a planet of this size. Must not be a very dense planet, Dairine thought. All light elements-though most of her paid no attention to the analysis, being busy with more important matters. . this light, the terror and the wonder of it. This, was what she had come for. The computer had hit it right on. This planet's sun must be in one of the galaxy's satellite globular clusters… As such distances went, she was close to that spiraclass="underline" no more than ten or twenty thousand light-years above its core. But the thought of distances broke her mood. She pulled the computer close. "Did we lose them?" she said to it.
"Pursuit has halted forty trillion light-years from this location and is holding there."
"Forty trillion…" That was beyond the reach of the farthest telescopes, over the event horizon generated by the Big Bang itself: galaxies past that point were traveling with intrinsic velocities faster than light, and so could not be seen. It was questionable whether such bodies could even really be considered in the same universe as Earth.
"Long way from home," she said softly. "Okay. I have at least a couple days to rest and do some research, huh?"
"Affirmative."
She sat back on her heels and watched the light rise until the last delicate streamers of light from the barred spiral arms were all the way above the horizon. "I want all the details about this star system," she said. "Planets, what kind of star, who lives here if anybody, who's been here before. Get to work."