High Wizardry

Escape Key

That morning Dairine had awakened with the Oath's words ringing in her ears to find herself not in a galaxy far far away, but in her own bed. She had lain there for a long few minutes in bitter annoyance before she heard the wheels of the truck in the driveway. It was the computer, of course: and to this lesser excitement she had gratefully surrendered herself.

Dairine was good with computers. It was just one more kind of knowledge, good for using to keep people and the World off your back; and computers were really surprisingly easy to work with once you got it through your head that they were utterly stupid things, unable to do anything you didn't tell them how to do, in language they understood. In her few months' work with the Apples at school, Dairine had become an accomplished hacker.

She utterly disdained the "phreaking," the breaking and entering of electronic bulletin boards and systems that interested a few of her malicious classmates. It could get you thrown in jail. What fascinated Dairine was advanced programming, the true hacking-getting a computer to sing, or talk, or play involved and clever games, or make you a sandwich. All these things were possible, with the right peripherals and a smart programmer. That she was; and the computer-tireless listener, absolutely obedient to orders, and endlessly forgiving of mistakes-was the perfect companion. They worked well together. Even her teachers had noticed that the machines "behaved" better around Dairine than around anyone else. She never noticed this herself, having taken it for granted.

So while her mother and father sat arguing over the manuals, of course Dairine took matters into her own hands. The Apple IIIc+ was easy to set up: a plug and cable for the screen, the printer cable attached to the printer port and the computer's interface; the power cord to the wall. Dairin. slipped a system disk into the drive, shut the drive door, and turned the computer on, "booted it up"-ready to look for the "Copy" utility in the disk's directory. The first thing you always did with a brand-new system disk full of programs was copy it; working on the original disk could cost you a lot Of money to replace if you hurt or wiped it accidentally.

The Apple logo came up on the screen, and below it the A> prompt that said the computer's basic operating system, called DOS, was ready to accept commands to its "A" or onboard disk drive and the disk inside it. Dairine was about to start typing when something about the logo caught her eye. It was the famous striped Apple, all right: but it had no bite out of it.

She stared for a second. Pirated software? she thought, but that was ridiculous. Her dad had bought the computer and its system software from an approved dealer, and the various warranties, manuals and end-user agreements were all over the floor. Huh. Maybe they changed the logo. Oh, well. Let's see the directory. .

DIR A:, she typed on the keyboard, and hit the carriage return.

PASSWORD? said the screen, and sat there apparently waiting for a response, for the A> prompt hadn't come back.

That was no response she'd ever seen on the machines at school, DIR A:, she typed, again, and the carriage return.

PASSWORD?

"Huh," she said to herself, as possibilities flickered through her head. Did Dad have the software encrypted somehow so that Nita and I can't get into it? But why? He wants us to use it. She let out a breath. Maybe it just wants an ID code for the user-there're some programs that do that. She squinted at the screen a moment, then smiled and typed in a private joke: the code name that a certain untrained farmboy used in his fighter run on the Death Star, a name that suited Dairine since she had inherited her mother's red hair. RED FIVE, she typed, and hit the carriage return.

Weird, Dairine thought, and typed again.

The disk drive whirred. The screen wiped itself and displayed a list: mostly Program command files, or data files holding information for the programs, to judge by their suffixes.

Dairine gazed at the screen, perplexed. A K was a kilobyte, a thousand little pieces or bytes of information; and the disk drive itself was supposed to hold only K. How could the disk possibly have all these files on it, and such big ones?

Maybe this is a bad disk, Dairine thought. It happened sometimes, that a disk was damaged on its way from the factory. Or maybe something was wrong with the directory. Well, let's see if something'll run.

Beside the A> prompt she typed "COPY" and hit the carriage return.

The disk drive whirred. The screen wiped itself again, then said:

Dairine stared again. Radius meant nothing to her. She hit the carriage return, hoping the computer would (as some programs did) supply its own data as a result.

DEFAULT RADIUS, the screen said. It was all right, then; the program had been instructed to supply a value of its own if the user didn't specify one. Dairine let out a breath, and resolved to have a look at this thing's manual. Maybe the company had made changes in the software.

COPY UTILITY READY, said the screen. PRESS TO BEGIN.

Dairine hit the carriage return. The disk drive whirred.

There were two computers on the desk.

She gaped. Hesitantly she put out a hand to the second computer, which was sitting next to the first, and sticking over the edge of the desk a little. It was solid, and its screen matched that of the original computer exactly. They both said:

Oh, Lord! Dairine thought. She didn't dare turn around or make any outward sign: behind her, her mother and father were arguing peaceably over the contents of the Apple manuals. Desperately, Dairine brought up the directory again, stared at it, and then, for lack of any better idea, typed:

The disk drives whirred again. Dairine thought she had never heard such a loud noise in her life, but her parents still didn't notice anything. The screen cleared itself, then said:

Dairine typed "1." The screen cleared again.

Dairine hurriedly typed "APPLIH.CPY." The screen said:

Dairine typed "c."

Dairine swallowed: behind her, her father was muttering about getting some coffee. "RED FIVE," she typed.

"VERBAL," she typed, very fast. The drives whirred.

As silently as it had come, the second computer vanished.

Dairine's father turned around and saw her at the computer. "What are you doing!"

"Uh," Dairine said. She couldn't remember when she had last been at a loss for words. Her father, though, wasn't even slightly concerned with this. Several seconds later Dairine found herself going to

New York with Nita and Kit.

At the moment, even the thought of the New York Public Library seemed a bit tame.

It took her hours to get free of Nita and Kit. All the while her mind was raging, turning over and over the thought of what power she had been offered when she took the Oath, and when she finally got down to the ladies' room and sat down in one of the stalls, her heart was hammering with excitement and sweat stood out on her.

"Red five," she whispered, and held her breath.

There was a computer in her lap.

She flipped up the little liquid-crystal screen and was shocked to find the A> prompt staring at her: shocked partly because she hadn't booted the computer up, and partly because it couldn't be running-there were no batteries in it yet-or were there? But Dairine wasn't one to argue the point. She typed hurriedly, using the HIDE.COM program to put the books she'd bought in a "pocket" and get them out of her way. Then she brought up the directory again. ASSIST.COM, said the first entry. Maybe that was a "help menu," a series of screens that would explain how to get the most out of the computer. She typed "ASSIST" and the carriage return.

The screen cleared, then said at the top:

Dairine was out of her depth again. "ACTIVE," she typed, on a guess, and entered it. The screen cleared again.

Dairine chewed her lip and thought. Just to see what would happen, she hit "2" and the carriage return.

The screen cleared.

"2," Dairine typed.

"Inside solar system or outside solar system?" the computer said very quietly, but so suddenly that Dairine almost dropped it.

"Inside," she said, and swallowed.

"Planet?"

She gazed at the ladies' room door, thinking of the dioramas outside with a sudden terrible desire.

"Mars," Dairine said.

The disk drive chirred briefly. "Coordinates?"

Dairine knew that aerographers used some kind of latitude-longitude system for Mars, but she knew nothing else about it. "Default," she said, on a hunch.

"Default coordinates confirmed," said the computer, "last recorded transit. Atmosphere?"

Last recorded- "Uh, atmosphere? Yes," she said.

"Parameters?"

"Umm. . Fifteen percent oxygen, eighty percent nitrogen, five percent carbon dioxide."

"Mix proportions approximate Terran sea-level parameters. Default to those?"

"Mmm. . Yes."

"Estimated time in transit?"

She thought. "One hour."

"Data complete," said the computer. "Ready to transit. Transit command 'run.' "

"Run," Dairine said.

And everything slewed sideways and upside down. Or no, the world stayed the same-but Dairine's frame of reference suddenly became huger than the whole Earth and the space that contained it, so that her planet seemed only one moving, whirling point plunging along its path through a terrible complexity of forces, among which gravity was a puny local thing and not to be regarded. Up was some other way now; down had nothing to do with the floor. Her stomach rebelled.

And her eyes were seeing things they had never been made to see. Lines and sparks and traces of white fire seemed to tear through her head from her eyes to the back of her skull; they pinned her to the rolling Earth like a feebly fluttering moth to a card. A terrible silence with a deadly sea-roar at the bottom of it, more terrible than the stillness of her Oathtaking, flattened her down with its sheer cold ancientness, a vast weight of years without sound or light or life. Cosmic rays, she thought desperately, clutching at reason: faster-than-light particles, maybe that's what the light is. But the dark-it's death, death itself, I'm going to die

— and the wizardry let her go. Dairine got shakily to her feet. The first crunch of stones and gravel under her sneakers, instead of tile floor, went through her in a rush of adrenaline as fierce as fire. Her vision cleared. Red wasteland stretched away under a cold rose sun, a violet sky arched over her; the wind sang chill. She turned slowly, looking around. High up in the cold violet day, something small and bright fled across the sky, changing phase as it did so.

"Deimos," Dairine whispered. Or maybe it was Phobos, the other of Mars's two little moons. Whichever it was, it went through half its month in a few minutes, sliding down toward the horizon and down behind something that stood up from it. It was a mountain peak, upraised as if on a pedestal, and so tall that though it came up from far behind the foreshortened horizon, its broad flat base spanned half that horizon easily. "What is that?" she said.

"Syntax error 24," said the Apple dispassionately. "Rephrase for precision."

"That mountain. What is it? Identify."

"Earth/IAU nomenclature 'Olympus Mons.' "

Dairine took in a sharp breath. It was an ancient volcano, long extinct, and the highest mountain in the Solar System. "How do I get up there?"

"Reference short-transit utilities."

She did. Five minutes later she stood in a place where the wind no longer sang, for it was too thin to do so; where carbon dioxide lay frozen on the rust red stones, and the fringes of her protective shell of air shed a constant snow of dry ice and water vapor as she moved; a place from which she could see the curvature of the world. Dairine stood twelve miles high atop Olympus Mons, on the ridge of its great crater, into which Central Park could have been dropped entire, and looked out over the curve of the red world at what no nonwizardly child of Earth had seen with her or his own eyes before: the asteroid belt rising like a chain of scattered stars, and beyond them, the tiniest possible disk, remote but clear.

"Jupiter," she whispered, and turned around to look for Earth. From here it would look like a morning or evening star, just a shade less bright than Venus. But in mid-movement she was distracted. There was something down in the mile-deep crater, a little light that shone.

"What's that?" she said, holding up the Apple.

"Syntax error 24-"

"Yeah, yeah, right. That light! Identify."

"A marker beacon. Provenance uncertain at this range."

"Get us down there!"

With Dairine's help, it did. Shortly she was staring at a pole with a light on it, streamlined and modern-looking, made of some dark blue metal she couldn't identify. Set in the ground beside the pole was a plate of dull red metal with strange markings on it. "What's it say?"

"Error trap 18. Sense of query: semantic value?"

"Right."

"First (untranslatable) climbing expedition. Ascent of (untranslatable proper name): from (date uncertain) to (date uncertain). We were here. Signed, (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name), (untranslatable proper name)."

"People," Dairine whispered.

"Affirmative."

She looked up at the stars in the hard violet sky. "I want to go where they came from!"

"Reference transit utility."

She did, and spent some minutes tapping busily at the keys. In the middle of it, selecting coordinates, delightedly reading through planet names-she stopped and bit her lip. "This is going to take longer than an hour," she said to herself. Come to think of it, she might want to be away for quite some time. And seeing all the problems Nita had started having with their folks when she told them she was a wizard, it wouldn't do for Dairine to let them know that she was one too. Not just yet.

She thought about this, then got out of the "travel" utility and brought up the directory again-taking more time with it, examining the program menus with great care. In particular she spent a great deal of time with the "Copy" and "Hide" utilities, getting to know their ins and outs, and doing on finicky piece of copying as a test.

The test worked: she sent the copy home.

"That should do it," she said, got back into the "Travel" utility, and wit the program's prompting started to lay in coordinates. "Darth Vader," muttered under her breath, "look out. Here I come."

Shortly thereafter there was nothing on Olympus Mons but rocks, and dryl ice snow, and far down in the crater, the single blinking light.