Delight and embarrassment left Dairine briefly speechless. Roshaun eyed her, amused. “Cousin,” he said, “would the technologies make any sense to me?”
“Some might,” said Strontium, a low, domelike mobile whose whole surface was a pattern of lenses and mechanical eyes. “One is an in-matter viewing routine that lets us look out of the heart of any ‘lightmatter’ object from an atom to a star if we know its coordinates.”
“What about the dark matter?” Roshaun said.
“Long ago we tried using it for the same purposes,” Beanpole said. “Why not make use of something there’s so much of? But it couldn’t be spoken to until recently. Now something has spoken a word to it that we never could. Now it’s alive, but also hostile to life. It won’t stop its expansion until it’s destroyed every living thing across the worlds.”
“Our local wizards tried to stop it,” Dairine said, “and couldn’t.”
“We tried, too,” Gigo said. “We enacted a few local reversals, but the effect always reasserted itself more quickly every time. We realized we were teaching the dark matter how to expand faster, so we stopped wasting time with the symptoms and started hunting for the cause.”
“And now that you’re here,” Gigo said to Dairine, “we’ll shortly find it.”
Dairine swallowed as she looked around at them all, gazing at her in such certainty. They scared her worse than Roshaun’s people had—for they were all expecting the Mother of their Species to come up with the good idea that would save the universe.
“Let’s take this one step at a time,” Dairine said. “Or start with a smaller problem first, and warm up. Spot—”
“I am not the problem,” Spot said. “I’m the solution.”
Spot sounded more alive than he had until now. Beanpole looked at Dairine. “You’ve been in circuit with the Motherboard for only a little while,” he said, “and already you’re hearing us more clearly. As for Spot, we’ve been reprogramming him ever since he got here.”
“I asked for it,” Spot said to Dairine. “It was time for an upgrade. The ones you’ve been giving me have been all right; you’ve been doing the best you can. But there was something missing.”
“And something extra,” Beanpole said. “He’s been carrying data he hasn’t been able to process.”
“What?” Dairine said. “Where’d it come from?”
“Spot’s been in contact with an avatar of the Defender,” Hex said. “For some time, information seems to have been passing between him and the power inside your colleague Ronan that couldn’t have been parsed or detected by slowlife … not even slowlife as talented as our mother.” He bowed to Dairine, projecting an air of embarrassment. “And Spot hasn’t had the routines to parse it, either.”
“Hex, listen,” Dairine said, “it’s no big deal. Life’s all the time sending me messages I can’t read.” She flicked just a second’s glance at Roshaun, who she was starting to think was yet another of those messages.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Logo said, “because you, too, are carrying information of this kind.”
Dairine’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“The One’s Champion has also used you as a courier,” Beanpole said. “For what, we can’t tell as yet; we must get you more securely into circuit with the Motherboard.”
What’s he stuck inside me? Dairine wondered, starting to feel twitchy. “You guys can help us get at this data and make sense of it?”
“Yes,” Gigo said.
“Good,” Dairine said. “Then let’s do it.”
Roshaun looked dubious. “You would think that the other Powers would simply communicate all of what they knew to the Winged Defender, so that straightforward action could be taken.”
Dairine shook her head. “Security,” she said.
Beanpole swayed from side to side in a gesture of agreement. “To give all the information in the clear to any one being,” he said to Roshaun, “would ensure that the Lone One would know all about it in a matter of days. But if you split it up and give only parts of it to those who need to know, and let them pursue the material separately…”
“Everyone gets together and completes the puzzle,” Dairine said. “And if one of us is betrayed somehow, the rest of the information has a chance of staying safe.” Nita’s recent run-in with a wizard who had been overshadowed by the Lone One had left Dairine badly shaken, for until then, the idea that wizards were absolutely to be trusted had seemed something that you could always depend on. But life wasn’t as simple as it had once seemed.
“What we’re doing here is safe as well,” Beanpole said. “The One’s Champion was here briefly in the direct mode during your Ordeal and our Choice. It’s still here, integrated into the Motherboard in a format like an avatar, but less covert. It has the same power to protect us from being overheard as Ronan’s version of the Defender does. We can pursue our search for the Instrumentality without fear.”
“Okay,” Dairine said. “How are you going to get what you need from Spot?”
“They’ve already got it,” Spot said. Dairine’s eyes widened a little at the sound of his voice. It sounded even more alive than when he’d last spoken.
“The two of you needed to be here physically to make the transfer safely,” Logo said. “Now we can finish our preparations. We have to lay your personal information into the finding spell we’ve been constructing; that data has changed significantly since you came here first, and there have been other alterations.” He glanced at Spot, who hunched down a little as if the attention somehow unnerved him. “Brother, come with us and we’ll get you up to full speed again. Mother—”
They all bowed to her. Dairine rolled her eyes. “Guys,” she said, “give me a break. We’re all just wizards together, here.”
“Of course,” said Gigo and Logo and Beanpole together. But they were humoring her. The three of them and Spot vanished into the crowd of mobiles, who now mostly settled down onto the surface and sat quietly.
The stillness was an illusion. Dairine felt the tempo of their communication with and through the Motherboard increasing by the moment. “You look concerned,” Roshaun said from behind her.
Dairine scowled over her shoulder at him. “The whole universe is in danger,” she said, “and we’re not sure how to save it, assuming it can be saved. One of the Powers That Be has stuffed secret messages into my brain without telling me. And a friend of mine who happens to be my wizard’s manual is being reprogrammed with software that even these guys haven’t had time to beta test! Wow, Roshaun, why would I need to be concerned?”
Roshaun glanced at the ground. Another chair grew up for him, a slight distance from Dairine’s. He lowered himself into it, stretching his legs out with a sigh. “Sarcasm,” he said. “Amusing, if ineffective.” He leaned back, looking up at the golden glow of the rising barred-spiral galaxy, reached under his baggy T-shirt, and came out with a lollipop.
“At least if the universe does end in the next month,” Dairine muttered, “your teeth won’t have had time to rot.”
Roshaun raised his eyebrows and produced another lollipop, which he held out to her.
“How many of those things do you have?” Dairine said.
“Not nearly enough,” Roshaun said.
Dairine sighed and took it. “Fine, we’ll rot together.”
She stuck the lollipop in her mouth and worked on it quietly for a few minutes, glad that it was one of the fudgy ones that she preferred. The neighboring galaxy rose slowly behind the spires of the mobiles’ city while the two of them watched, and the stately, silent immensity of its going started to settle and calm Dairine’s mind the way the rising of the Moon did at home. Before her eyes, something endlessly bigger and older than she was going about its ancient business as usual. The thought came to Dairine after some moments that no matter what the abnormal expansion might do to the universe, even though all life might be destroyed, somehow, someday, there would be another awakening. It might take uncountable years, but the Life that wizards served was just too permanent, too tenacious, too wily. It would outlast its enemy, no matter how long it took. And suddenly Dairine got a flicker-glimpse of a new morning somewhere, somewhen—dew on long grass, and low sunlight turning it all to diamonds; an overturned game board, the pieces scattered in the fresh wet green; and hands reaching down to pick the pieces up and put the game back in order again—