The feeling of the sheer power running through her astounded Dairine. I’d forgotten it could be like this… The throb of it ran up her arms and into her brain; she stood up slowly, let it build. If it wasn’t for how desperate all this is, I could really enjoy this.
And she was enjoying it. There was no use pretending otherwise. Dairine started to speak the words in the Speech that were the search coordinates. The sound of them going out of her was like thunder. They shook her from side to side as she spoke them, streaking out into the structure of the wizardry to build its fire higher, second by second.
Across the diagram, Roshaun knelt at his focus point, his expression full of the terror and exaltation of the power that was suddenly his by virtue of his connection to the wizardry and the Motherboard. Dairine couldn’t remember ever having seen so naked and open an expression on his face before. Past him, in its container, the Sunstone blazed the orange-gold of Wellakh’s star.
You okay? Dairine said silently.
He lifted his eyes to hers. The look slammed into Dairine with force that felt like it should have knocked her down. The world whited out. It was as if the two of them stood in Earth’s Sun again, working the spell that drained off the excess energy which would have made the Sun flare up and roast the side of Earth facing toward it. But this time the roiling sea of power above which they stood was partly the Motherboard, and partly Dairine—or, rather, the surface of Dairine’s mind as Roshaun saw it.
From Roshaun, Dairine got the sense of someone standing on a narrow bridge over what looked like untameable, furious chaos paired with infinite power. That power was speaking to him, too, tempting him to get a little closer to the edge. Don’t get any ideas! Dairine said silently.
The answer was a strange low garbled roar, one she instantly recognized, since it had shocked her so when first she’d heard it. The Sun said something, and I didn’t understand. But now it was Roshaun saying something in the Speech, and once again Dairine wasn’t getting it. Impossible. Everything understands the Speech!
She shook her head. No time for it now, she thought. It’s some weirdness to do with him; we’ll figure it out later. The rest of the Speech was working just fine; the spell lay before her, ready to implement.
Dairine took a breath and said the single word in the Speech that is the shorthand for the wizard’s knot, the “go” word of the spell.
Everything went dark. Then images began to superimpose themselves on the darkness, blotting out even the viewer’s sense of being at the center of a point of view, so that Dairine felt more like a bodiless presence than an observer. She saw the strange slick cloud of some atom’s shell, from the inside, an undersky fuzzy with probabilities. The “sky” rushed toward her, blew past her like fog, leaving her gazing out on interstitial space alive with the neon ripples of “strong force” between a seemingly infinite latticework of atoms. Another few breaths, and the view was a solid mass of chains of molecules, writhing among one another like a nest of snakes. Another blurring outward rush, and reddish lightning rattled and sizzled everywhere, whip-cracking down the length of strange bumpy textures like a child’s blocks strung on rope. Another rush, and everything went milky and crystalline, with a faint strange movement going on outside the surface of the crystal.
One last blur of fog descended, and the image resolved itself into a peculiar view seen through eyes that fringed every object with brilliant rainbows of color. It was a landscape, all in flat dark reds, the sky black with heat; and finally there was a point of view associated with it. This is it, Dairine said, exultant. This is what the world looks like for the person who’s got the Instrumentality. Now all we need to find is where they are.
The envisioning routine backed out several steps farther. A smallish, ocean-girdled planet circled a giant white sun, the fourth of its eight worlds. Another jump, and the star dwindled down to just one of a drift of thousands in an irregular galaxy’s core.
Several long strings of characters in the Speech appeared by that galaxy, tagging it and numerous others around it that were visible only as tiny cloudy whorls or disks.
Okay, Dairine said. Store that. And she waited until the data was stored, and then said the word that cut the wizard’s knot and dissolved the spell.
The space between the towers reappeared. Slowly the spell diagram faded, leaving only the image of the “found” galaxy, and the outlines of the circles in which all the spell’s participants had stood. Dairine let out a long breath. She was a little tired, but nothing like as exhausted as she should have been after such an effort.
“I can’t get over that,” Dairine said, as Beanpole and Logo and the others made their way over toward her and Roshaun. “It was like the wizardry was helping me, somehow…”
“It’s the power-increase effect, the peridexis,” Beanpole said. “We’ve been taking advantage of it, too.”
Dairine walked out of her circle to where the image of the tagged galaxy burned just under the surface. She bent down to look at the annotations. “It’s fairly close to our own galaxy. At least we won’t have any more really big transits to deal with when we get back.”
“That’s well enough,” Roshaun said, settling the torc with the Sunstone about his neck. “We may know where the person with access to the Instrumentality can be found. But if we can’t get them to give it to us, or learn how to use it to stop the expansion, this will all have been for nothing.”
“I’m not gonna throw our own universe in the trash just yet,” Dairine said. She peered down at the tagging characters next to the galaxy. “Good, it’s got a New General Catalog number: NGC 5518. It’s in Boötes, somewhere.” Then she stopped. “What’s this?” she said over her shoulder to the mobiles.
Spot came over to her from his own circle, and put out several eyes to examine the word in the Speech that Dairine was indicating. “Enthusiasmic,” he said.
Dairine frowned. “You mean enthusiastic.”
“It says enthusiasmic,” Spot said.
“That’s not a word!”
“It is now,” said Spot.
Roshaun came to look over Dairine’s shoulder. “And what is that word next to it supposed to be?” he said. “Incorporation?” He looked bemused.
“So this is a word that didn’t have a meaning until just recently?” Dairine said to Spot. “A word for something new.”
“So I believe,” Spot said.
Dairine shook her head. “Enthusiasmic incorporation,” she said. “Of the hesper—” Then Dairine blinked, and a moment later her eyes widened.
“That’s not a word in the Speech,” said Gigo, sounding perplexed.
“No,” Dairine said. “It’s not. But it’s a word we know in English. Or part of one.” She swallowed. “Enthusiasmic incorporation of the Hesper—”
She hurriedly bent down and picked Spot up. “Quick,” she said. “You have to message Nita for me. Or one of the others. I don’t care where they are. Just get me one of those guys!”
The ground underneath all their various feet or treads or wheels came alive with the kind of display that would have shown on Spot’s screen, had it been open—the apple-without-a-bite imagery of the manual software’s Earth-sourced version, rippling bluely under the surface. And then the message, both written in the Speech and seemingly speaking itself into their bones: Messaging refused. Please try again later.