"Working," said the computer, and its screen went to the usual menu configuration while it sat silently, getting the information for her.
"Can you multitask now?" Dairine said.
"Affirmative."
"Good."
She selected the "Manual" function and began sorting through it for background material on the Lone One. There has to be something I can use against It, she thought, a weapon of some kind, a weakness. .
She instructed the manual's research facility to sort for past conflicts of wizards with the Lone Power or its representatives, and was shocked and horrified to find the equivalent of twenty or thirty thousand pages' worth of abstracts. She skimmed ten or fifteen of them in reverse order, on a hunch, and was momentarily surprised to find an abstract of Nita's last active mission. Fascinated, Dairine began to read.
. and became horrified again. There had been some kind of ceremony in the waters off Long Island, a sort of underwa ter passion play with whales as the celebrants-and Nita, to save the East Coast and make this ceremony work, had volunteered to be eaten by a shark! Nita? My sister? Do anything braver than cross the street? The idea was ridiculous. . but Dairine knew that this computer had better things to do than lie to her. She read the rest of the abstract with her insides turning cold. Nita had knowingly taken on that Lone Power face-to-face and had managed to come out of it alive. Whereas Dairine had been glad enough to run away and lose things that couldn't be more than Its lesser henchmen. .
Dairine pushed that thought away resolutely. She was helped by her stomach, which growled at her.
When did I last eat? she wondered. She told the computer to sort through and save the descriptions of encounters with the Power that had been successful, and then got out of the "Manual" into the "Hide" facility. A moment's poking around among the options, and she had retrieved her loaf of bread, bologna, and mustard. Dairine sat there in cheerful anticipation for a few seconds, undoing the bread and bologna, and it wasn't until she got the mustard jar lid unscrewed that she realized she had no knife. "Oh, well," she said, and went back into the "Hide" facility to snitch one from the silverware drawer at home. But "Illegal function call," said the computer: a little sullenly, she thought.
"Explain."
"Out of range for transit function from stated location."
Dairine made a face. She had no idea of the coordinates of any closer silverware drawer. "Cancel," she said, and made do with her fingers.
Some minutes later she had a sandwich and a half inside her, and was thinking (as she finished getting herself more or less clean) that it was a good thing she liked mustard. Dairine brushed the crumbs off onto the slick surface she sat on and looked at it, mildly curious. It wasn't freezing cold to sit on, like the stones of Mars or Pluto: yet her shields were still snowing water vapor gently into the vacuum around her whenever she moved, telling her that the above-surface temperature was the usual cold of deep space.
Geo-thermal? she wondered. Maybe some volcanic activity-that would explain those funny conical shapes against the horizon. . She thumped the computer in a friendly fashion. "You done yet?" she said.
"Specify."
Dairine rolled her eyes. But there was no escaping the GIGO principle- "garbage in, garbage out," as the programmers said. Give the poor machine incomplete questions or instructions and you would get incomplete answers back. This thing might be magic, but it was still a computer. "Are you done with the survey of this area?"
"Still running."
"How much longer?"
"Three point two minutes."
Dairine sat back to wait, absently rubbing the surface she sat on. The smoothness of it was strange: not even the maria on the Moon were this smooth. Volcanic eruption, maybe. But not the way it usually happens, with the lava flowing down the volcano's sides and running along the surface. Not enough gravity for it to do that, I guess. Maybe it's like the volcanoes on Io: the stuff goes up high in tiny bits or droplets, then comes down slowly in the low gravity and spreads itself out very smooth and even. It must go on all the time… or else there can't be much in this system in the way of even tiny meteors. Maybe both. She shook her head. It spoke of an extremely ancient planet-which made sense this far out in space. .
"Ready," the computer said, and Dairine hunkered over it to listen. "Local system stats. System age: close order of eight billion years. One primary, type S6 star, off main sequence, time from fusion ignition: close order of five billion years. One associated micro-black hole in variable orbit. One planet, distance from primary: six hundred twelve million miles. Planet diameter: fifty-six thousand miles. Planet circumference: one hundred seventy-five thousand miles-" And Dairine gulped, understanding now why that horizon ran so high. The planet was almost seven times the size of Earth. "Atmosphere: monatomic hydrogen, less than one fifty-millionth psi Terran sea level. Planetary composition: eighty percent silicon in pure form and compounds, ten percent iron and mid-sequence metals, seven percent heavy metals, one percent boron, one percent oxygen, one percent trace elements including frozen gases and solid-sequence halogens. Power advisory-"
The screen, which had been echoing all this, went blank. Dairine's stomach flip-flopped, from fear this time. "What's the matter?"
"System power levels nearing critical. Range to alternative-power claudica-tion exceeded. Outside power source required."
Dairine paused, feeling under her hand that oddly non-cold surface. "Can you use geothermal?" she said.
"Affirmative."
"Is there some way you can tap what's in this planet, then?"
"Affirmative," said the computer. "Authorization for link."
"Granted," Dairine said, mildly surprised: she couldn't remember the computer ever asking her for permission to do anything before. Maybe it was a safety feature. Then she began to sweat a little. Maybe such a safety feature was wise. If the computer fried its chips somehow and left her without life support, sitting here naked to vacuum at heaven knew how many degrees below zero. .
She watched the screen nervously as scrambled characters flashed on it, and for several awful seconds the screen blanked. Then the menu screen reasserted itself, and Dairine breathed out, slowly, while the computer went back to running the program it had been working on. "Link established " said the computer in absolute calm. "Planetary history-"
"Just print it to the screen, I'll read it," Dairine said, and started to pick the computer up: then paused. "Is it all right to move you? Will that hurt the link?"
"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
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