Dairine smiled a half smile. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you are,” she said.
Most of the mobiles who had gathered to see their arrival had now crowded back out of the space, but not because they weren’t participating. Underneath every mobile Dairine could see, a small circle of power was flaring—each one’s own name and a power-conduit linking it to the central wizardry. Logo, Gigo, Beanpole, and Hex made their way out into the center of the master spell diagram, where similar circles flared under each of them. They were followed by the rest of the core imaging team, who arranged themselves around the inner four at the vertices of a hexagon.
“We are nearly ready,” said Beanpole.
“But one question,” Logo said. He turned toward Roshaun. “What’s that you bear?”
Roshaun looked around him in confusion. “What—Oh, this,” he said, looking down at the great stone around his neck. “It’s a token of my office as Sunlord.”
“Its structure is unusual; it needs to be a separate part of the spell,” Beanpole said.
Roshaun raised his eyebrows, and lifted the great torc from his throat. “If you need a description of its physical properties—”
“There,” said Beanpole, indicating a newly appearing empty spot in the wizardry, just to one side of Roshaun. A “container” for the collar bloomed there in the surface—a hollow sphere of pale filigree fire, constructed of numerous long phrases in the Speech all knitted together and burning. Roshaun went to the glowing sphere and looked it over carefully, tracing several of the longer curves of Speech with one finger. Finally he slipped the collar into the sphere. It hung there, gleaming in the white fire, turning slightly.
“Is the description accurate?” Hex said.
“So far as I can tell,” Roshaun said, making his way back to his own circle.
“Very well,” Logo said, and looked out toward Dairine, Spot, and Roshaun. “Does the ground suit?”
It was one of several traditional queries for a wizard proposing a potentially dangerous solution to a problem. Dairine looked at Roshaun, who tilted his head “yes,” and then at Spot. “Yes,” he said.
“On the Powers’ business, all ground suits,” Dairine said. “Let’s do Their work, and the One’s.”
A rustle of tension and expectation went around the huge circle. “All right,” Gigo said. “If you two would get into circuit with the Motherboard? Skin to skin, to begin with.”
Dairine sat down cross-legged in the middle of her spell diagram, and put her hands flat down on the cool surface on either side of her. The sudden jolt of power, of connectedness to everyone around her, took her completely by surprise. She wobbled as she looked back at herself through thousands of other eyes. Then she heard a voice she hadn’t directly heard until now, a rumble in the bones.
You’ve come back, the Motherboard said to Dairine. You’ve come home!
Yes, Dairine said, feeling a little embarrassed, as if she’d been out late and hadn’t let her mom know beforehand.
And you’re much more than you were, the Motherboard said.
Now Dairine started to feel the faint discomfort of someone being praised for something they haven’t actually earned. Uh—
But you are, the Motherboard said. No need to dissemble. I may be a mother, but you are mine. And you know that we never feel like we’re enough for our children, whose job is to surpass us. Ours is simply to make sure they work hard enough at it that they feel they’ve earned it when it happens.
There was a smile in the voice that Dairine would never have suspected. She grinned, too. You think we got the job done?
Without any possible question, the Motherboard said. Now let’s take on the next one.
“Okay,” she said, glancing up and over at Roshaun.
He had been looking a little blank; now he broke out of it, looked over at Dairine. “She is—quite something,” he said after a moment, sounding strangely out of breath.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Dairine said.
This wizardry must take place in two parts, the Motherboard said. We must first extract the information that our mother is carrying. After that, the implementation’s hers to direct: we’ll merely assist.
A wave of agreement went around the vast assemblage. Ready? the Motherboard said to Dairine.
Go, Dairine said.
The power started to build. Dairine felt “taps” from this world into other universes open up, spilling unimaginable amounts of force into the wizardry. Time began to stretch as the mobiles’ perception of what was happening swamped her own. Dairine started to see herself as the mobiles did—a life-form seemingly frozen in time, and as a spell diagram, tidily compartmentalized. The combined intention of the Motherboard and the mobiles sought down through her structure and focused on one of those compartments, an obscurely glowing area easily lost among other, brighter ones surrounding it in Dairine’s mind—
That compartment grew until every intricacy of its contents was made plain in a delicate lacework spattering of pale light, like nightside cities seen from space. The mobiles and the Motherboard spent what seemed like a long time examining the compartment and the data inside it. Finally, the Motherboard spoke. This is the information the Defender left, she said. It can’t be decrypted without breaking the container open.
Right, Dairine said. For the moment, she was part mobile, and could act at their speed. She reached out a hand. In this darkness all spangled with light, a hand of light reached out, laced fingers through the webwork of darkness surrounding the data, and pulled. It came away in her hand like a fistful of cobwebs. The data burst out of prison like a storm of silver bees—
The mobiles threw a net of Speech-words around them. The light of the data ran down the strands of the net, particles shifting, moving themselves into a different order. Then everything went dark again.
Logo’s voice seemed to come from somewhere far off. And now the information Spot was holding, he said. Distantly, Dairine saw another container’s contents trying to flee into the darkness—then being netted and contained, as her data had been.
The world came back. Dairine took a few breaths, stood up and stretched. It felt like she’d been sitting in the same place for an hour, though she knew it had been only a matter of seconds.
Before her, spread out in a new dark area that had opened up a couple of meters away, was a single long line of characters in the Speech. Dairine read them slowly.
“They’re coordinates,” she said then. “But not to a place. To a person. This’ll tell us who has the Instrumentality—the thing that’ll save the universe—”
“If we can find it in time,” Roshaun said. “And work out how to use it.”
“Let’s go,” Dairine said. “You guys ready?”
Show us what to do, said the Motherboard and the mobiles together.
“We need an imaging routine,” Dairine said, and knelt down in her circle again, sitting back on her heels. She put a hand down on the surface again, getting back into more direct contact with the Motherboard. In her mind a series of possible imaging routines presented themselves. Close-range out-of-atom, long-range out-of-atom—
That one looks about right, Dairine thought. She glanced down at the set of coordinates burning just under the surface before her.
Light blasted out and away from her through the surface, curving and twining away in all directions as long sentences in the Speech etched themselves under it in living fire. She had a peculiar sense that someone else was in the spell with her. Not the Motherboard, not the mobiles, not Spot or Roshaun: nothing living—or at least not with the usual kind of life. All around her, the mobiles glowed more brightly by the moment as the spell drew on the Motherboard’s manual functions and showed Dairine what to say.