Somewhere someone struck a bass gong: the sound of it went on and on, and in the immense sound Dairine fell over, slowly, watching the universe tilt past her with preternatural slowness. Only that brief flicker of her own senses was left her, and the bass note of one of her heartbeats sounding and sounding in her ears. Other senses awakened, filled her full. The feeling of living in a single second that stretched into years came back to her again; but this time she could perceive the life behind the stretched-out time as more than a frantic, penned, crippled intelligence screaming for contact. The manual software had educated the motherboard in seconds as it would have educated Dairine in hours or months; the motherboard had vast knowledge now, endless riches of data about wizardry and the worlds. What it did not have was first-hand experience of emotion, or the effects of entropy… or the way the world looked to slowlife.
Take it. Take it all. Please take it! They have to choose, and they don't have the data, and I don't know how to give it to them, and if they make the wrong choice they'll all die! Take it!
And the motherboard took: reached into what she considered the memory areas of Dairine's data processor, and read them as it had read the manual. Dairine lay there helpless and watched her life, watched it as people are supposed to see it pass before they die, and came to understand why such things should happen only once. There are reasons, the manual says, for the selectiveness of human memory; the mercy of the Powers aside, experiencing again and again the emotions coupled with memory would leave an entity no time for the emotions of the present moment. . and then there is the matter of pain. But Dairine was caught in a situation the manual had never envisioned, a human being having her life totally experienced and analyzed by another form of life quite able to examine and sustain every moment of that life, in perfect recall. With the motherboard Dairine fell down into the dim twilight before her birth, heard echoes of voices, tasted for the first time the thumb it took her parents five years to get out of her mouth; lay blinking at a bright world, came to understand light and form; fought with gravity, and won, walking for the first time; smiled on purpose for the first time at the tall warm shape that held her close and said loving things to her without using sound: found out about words, especially No!; ecstatic, delighted, read for the first time; saw her sister in tears, and felt for the first time a kind of pain that didn't involve falling down and skinning your knees. .
Pain. There was enough of it. Frustration, rage at the world that wouldn't do what she wanted, fear at all kinds of things that she didn't understand: fear of things she heard on the news at night, a world full of bombs that can kill everything, full of people hungry, people shooting at each other and hating each other; hearing her parents shouting downstairs while she huddled under the covers, feeling like the world was going to end-will they shoot each other now? Will they have a divorce? Finding out that her best friend is telling other kids stories about how she's weird, and laughing at her behind her back; finding that she's alone in the world; making new friends, but by force, by cleverness and doing things to make her popular, not because friends come to her naturally; making herself slightly feared, so that people! will leave her alone to do the things she wants to without being hassled! beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there's more, more| but she can't figure out what it is, then finding out that someone knows the secret. Wizardry. And it doesn't come fast enough, it never comes fas enough, nothing ever does. . and now the price is going to be paid forj that, because she doesn't know enough to save these lovely glassy creature her buddies, that she watched be born. . helped be born. . her chil-j dren, sort of… she doesn't know how to save them, and they're going to be dead, everything's going to be dead: pain!
It hurts too much, Dairine thought, lying there listening to her heartbeat! slowly begin to die away, it hurts, I didn't want them to get hurt! But it was! part of the data, and it was too late now: the motherboard had it, and all thel mobiles would have it too, the second she released Dairine. Why should theyl care about slowlife now? she thought in anguish and shame at the bitter! outrush of what her life had been. Cruelty, pettiness, selfishness almost in-1 credible- But too late now. The motherboard was saving the last and newest I of the data to permanent memory. Any minute now the mobiles would start I the program running and entropy would freeze, and life would stop being a word that had a meaning.
The last nanosecond crawled by, echoes of the save rolled in the link. Nothing ever comes fast enough: end of file. .
Dairine lay still and waited for it all to end.
And lightning struck her. The flow of data reversed. She would have screamed, but trapped in the quicklife time of the motherboard, everything happened before the molasses-slow sparks of bioelectricity even had time to jump the motor synapses on the beginning of their journey down her nerves. The motherboard was pouring data into her as it had poured it into the mobiles under Dairine's tutelage: but not the mercifully condensed version of the manual programming that it had given them. The whole manual, the entire contents of the software, which in book form can be as small as a paperback or larger than a shelf full of telephone books: it poured into her, and she couldn't resist, only look on in a kind of fascinated horror as it filled her, and filled her, and never overflowed, just filled and filled. . The dinosaurs could have died while it filled her, life could have arisen on a hundred worlds and died of boredom in the time it took to fill her. She forgot who and what she was, forgot everything but this filling, filling, and the pain it cost her, like swallowing a star and being burnt away by it from the inside while eternally growing new layers on the outside: and finally not even the pain made sense anymore. .
She lay there on her side and stared at the ground, and was astonished not to see the crumbs from her sandwich in front of her nose. She could not move, or speak, and she could just barely think, with great pain and effort. There was something wrong with the way time was flowing, except that every time she tried to think what it was exactly, the timeflow seemed perfectly all right. Shapes were moving in front of her, and voices were speaking, either in vast soft drawls or light singing voices that seemed familiar.
Slowly names attached themselves to the voices.
"Now we see what these 'heart' things she gave us are for." That was Gigo. Good kid, she thought weakly, good baby. You tell 'em.
"And what entropy does, and what it cannot touch, ever." That was Beanpole, the silly-looking thing: where did he get such a voice? "Not all the evils and deaths it makes possible can touch the joys that run through it. We will have those too."
"We will not stop that joy," said Monitor. "Not for a nanosecond."
"It may be slow," said one of the mobiles, one whose name Dairine couldn't remember. "But it is life.
And it brought us life. We do nothing to harm that."
"And if you are against that," said Gigo, "your programming is in error, and we are against you."
They all sounded more complete than they had. The one voice she did not hear was Logo's. But she did hear something stranger: a murmur of astonishment that went up from the thousands of mobiles. And was there a trace of fear in it? She couldn't move, couldn't see what was happening. .
"Your choice," said another voice. At the sound of it, Dairine struggled with all her might to move, and managed to do no more than lever herself up half an inch or so and then flop down flat again, limp as a filleted fish. "Enjoy it. You will make no more choices. . but first, to pay for the one you have made, you will watch what the entropy you love so much will do to her."