As she looked ahead and the transit circle started slowing down, it seemed to Dairine that the ground at the feet of the towers was darker than elsewhere. They got closer, and the effect started to look strangely granular—
And then Dairine saw what was causing it, and her mouth went dry. The diagram was exactly as it had been all the way across the planet’s surface. The difference here was that it was obscured by the bodies of shifting mobiles—thousands of them; hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe millions…
The transit circle slowed; the obscuring shapes became more distinct as they approached the edge of the central ring of towers. Crowded around the towers’ bases were many shapes that Dairine had invented—mobiles with all kinds of manipulating devices and oculars, sporting locomotors of every kind, from legs to wheels to treads. But there were also countless new shapes more involved and outré than anything she could have thought of. The transit circle slipped between two of the towers, heading for the center of the mile-wide ring of spires. The waiting mobiles concentrated in that great space drew aside to let it pass, a great crowd of tall slim shapes like trees of glass, low broad mobiles like domes or cylinders, all glittering with reflected wizard-fire.
“Just look at all of you,” Dairine said to Gigo, astonished.
“You said that we should make more of ourselves to share the world with,” Gigo said. “So, after you left, we did.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought you could find enough energy to do all this.”
“We’ve found other ways to draw power since you went away,” Gigo said. “We found out how to sink wizardly conduits into alternate spaces empty of anything but physical energy. Now we have power that never runs out, and we’ve passed the conduit technology back to the Powers That Be.”
The tremendous crowd of mobiles gathered close around the transit circle. Dairine couldn’t see past the first few layers of surrounding mobiles, but through her contact with the surface she could feel the building wave of emotion running back and forth through the substrate that connected them all. The mobiles were as afraid of the building darkness as she was; they had seen it growing for what seemed like far longer. They were as angry as she was about what that darkness was doing. But they were also filled with resolve, and a strange joyful certainty of success that had roots in nothing but the fact that Dairine was there. “Welcome!” they all shouted, with voices, or silently, through the Motherboard: “Welcome, Mother, welcome, Creator, welcome here, welcome home!”
Dairine started to fill up with tears, and didn’t care. Out here on the fringes of this universe’s life, at the edge of the longest night of all, the mobiles she had created had made themselves into a lighthouse in the dark—the most distant home of wizardry, and possibly the most powerful. She scrubbed her eyes dry and stood up straight.
Beside her, Roshaun looked out across the tremendous crowd. And here I was telling you how to behave like a monarch, he said silently. Perhaps I spoke out of turn.
Familiar shapes pressed in out of the crowd toward her and Roshaun and Spot and Gigo—mobiles Dairine had designed herself, seen born from the planet’s crust, and named. Tall mobiles and short ones, fat round ones and low flat ones all crowded around. Some she knew instantly, from a distance. One was a tall gangly design that had always reminded her of a stork.
“Beanpole!” she yelled, and grabbed him … and then the shorter mobile behind him, all arms and lenses. “Hex! Oh, and Pinout, look at you!” And behind Pinout came Loop and Sulu and Storm and Truman and Augusta, String and Strikeout and Drive and Buffer and Peek and Poke … a crowd of mobiles through whom Dairine made her way, hugging them one after another until she felt like her front was one big bruise. Last of all came one of the smallest and plainest of the mobile models, just a dome with legs. It stood in front of Dairine, looking up almost shyly. It was Logo.
Dairine picked him up and hugged Logo with her eyes squeezed shut. The sight of him brought her Ordeal back in unusual clarity—a long, cold, nerve-racking time full of impromptu bologna sandwiches and the gleam of that red sun on the pale glass of the plain, the glitter of the plain as it shattered under the upward-heaving bodies of the newborn mobiles, the darkness that fell over them all as the Lone Power arrived to interfere in yet another species’ Choice. But the darkness had a completely different feel to it now.
She put him down after a moment. “You’re okay,” Dairine said.
“And so are you,” said Logo. “I was worried. You all by yourself, back on that little world, with nothing around you but slowlife.”
Dairine smiled. “It’s all right,” she said. “Slowlife has a good side.” She glanced over at Roshaun, and then looked around for a place to sit as the transit circle faded into the smooth glassy surface.
Immediately next to her, and so suddenly that it made Dairine jump, the ground grew a chair. Dairine bumped into Roshaun; he steadied her. “That was interesting,” he said, examining the chair, a sleek one-piece construction with a Danish-modern look to it.
“No kidding,” Dairine said, getting her balance back and bending over to have a closer look at the chair. It was banded with the usual striations of the planetary subsurface, and these had many faint layers of glow between them, like the mobiles. She glanced over at Gigo. “Does the world usually do this kind of thing since you started working on it?”
“Normally it requires more provocation,” Gigo said as Dairine sat down on the chair. “We’ve tailored it from the first to be responsive to desire. But until recently, you had to elucidate the desire first. These days the substrate’s been anticipating us.”
“The power increase,” Roshaun said.
“That’s right. We’re still mastering it. Here comes the imaging team—”
Several mobiles who’d been standing around now moved off to one side or another, and about twenty others, of all shapes and sizes, appeared scattered among them.
“Like any other wizards, we all have specialties,” Gigo said. “But some of us enjoy working in teams, and the imaging team is one of the oldest. They started work shortly after you left; now there are more than eighty thousand of them scattered around the planet. These are the team leaders: Cam, Mikhail, Strontium, Bunny—”
“It’s great to meet all of you,” Dairine said. “What have you been looking at?”
“Everything,” said Cam.
Roshaun raised his eyebrows, looking skeptical. “That must take up a great deal of your time.”
Dairine just grinned. “You don’t get it, Roshaun,” she said. “They don’t just mean all kinds of things, or everything they have time for. They mean everything.”
“The more we became able to see,” Logo said, “the more we realized how we could be most useful. We decided we could store all the knowledge in the physical universe if we could just see it, find the places where it’s stored, learn how to read what’s written in every kind of information storage—everything from the heart on out. That’s what we do here, out at the edge. That’s our purpose.”
Dairine could only shake her head at the size of the vision. “Guys,” she said after a moment, “you make me proud.”
“That is our other purpose,” Beanpole said. “Our first one.”