High Wizardry

Randomization

Dairine did not go straight out of the Galaxy from Mars. Like many other wizards when they first cut planet-loose, she felt that she had to do a little local sightseeing first.

She was some while about it. Part of this was caused by discomfort. The jump from Earth to Mars, a mere forty-nine million miles, had been unsettling enough, with its feeling of first being pinned to a wildly rolling ball and then violently torn loose from it. But it hadn't been too bad. Piece o' cake, Dairine had thought, checking the transit directory in the computer. Somewhere out of the Solar System next. What's this star system? R Leporis? It's pretty close. . But she changed her mind, and headed for the moons of Jupiter instead. . and this turned out to be a good thing. From Mars to Jupiter, bypassing the asteroid belt, was a jump of three hundred forty-one million miles; and the huge differences between the two planets' masses, vectors, and velocities caused Dairine to become the first Terran to lose her lunch on Jupiter's outermost satellite, Ananke.

The view did more than anything else to revive her-the great banded mass of Jupiter swiftly traversing the cold night overhead, shedding yellow-red light all around on the methane snow. Dairine sat down in the dry, squeaky snow and breathed deeply, trying to control her leftover heaves. Where she sat, mist curled up and snowed immediately down again as the methane sublimated and almost instantly recrystallized to solid phase in the bitter cold. Dairine decided that getting used to this sort of travel gradually was a good idea.

She waited until she felt better, and then began programming-replenishing her air and planning her itinerary. She also sat for a while examining the transit programs themselves, to see if she had been doing something wrong t° cause her to feel so awful. . and to see if perhaps she could rewrite the programs a little to get rid of the problem. The programs were written in a form of MBASIC that had many commands which were new to her, but were otherwise mostly understandable. They were also complex: they had to be. Earth spins at seventeen thousand miles an hour, plows along its orbital path at a hundred seventy-five thousand, and the Sun takes it and the whole Solar System off toward the constellation Hercules at a hundred fifteen thousand miles an hour. Then the Sun's motion as one of innumerable stars in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy sweeps it along at some two million miles an hour, and all the while relationships between individual stars, and those of stars to their planets, shift and change. .

It all meant that any one person standing still on any planet was in fact traveling a crazed, corkscrewing path through space, at high speed: and the disorientation and sickness were apparently the cause of suddenly, and for the first time, going in a straight line, in a universe where space itself and everything in it is curved. Dairine looked and looked at the transit programs, which could (as she had just proved) leave you standing on the surface of a satellite three hundred fifty million miles away from where you started-not half embedded in it, not splatted into it in a bloody smear because of some forgotten vector that left you still moving a mile a second out of phase with the surface of the satellite, or at the right speed, but in the wrong direction. . Finally she decided not to tamper. A hacker learns not to fix what works… at least, not till it's safe to try. Maybe the transits'll get easier, she thought. At least now I know not to eat right before one. .

That brought up the question of food, which needed to be handled. Dairine considered briefly, then used the software to open a storage pocket in otherspace. By means of the transit utility she then removed a loaf of bread, a bottle of mustard, and half a pound of bologna from the refrigerator back home, stuffing them into local otherspace where she could get at them. Mom 'n' Dad won't notice, she thought, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it? Spank my copy? Be interesting if they did. I wonder if I'd feel it…

But there were a lot of more interesting things to consider today. Dairine stood up, got the computer ready, and headed out again, more cautiously this time. She stopped on lo, another one of Jupiter's moons, and spent a while (at a safe distance) watching the volcanoes spit white-hot molten sulfur ten miles out from the surface; sulfur that eventually came drifting back down, as a leisurely dusty golden snow, in the delicate gravity. Then she braced herself as best she could and jumped for Saturn's orbit, four hundred three million miles farther out, and handled it a little better, suffering nothing worse than a cold sweat and a few dry heaves, for the two planets were similar in mass and vectors.

Here there were twenty moons-too many for Dairine at the moment but she did stop at Titan, the biggest satellite in the Solar System, and spent a while perched precariously on a peak slick with hydrogen snow, looking down thoughtfully at the methane oceans that washed the mountain's feet. Several times she thought she saw something move down there-something that was not one of the peculiar, long, high methane waves that the light gravity made possible. But the light was bad under the thick blue clouds, and it was hard to tell. She went on.

The jump to Uranus's orbit was a touch harder-six hundred sixty million miles to a world much smaller and lighter than the greater gas giants. Dairine had to sit down on a rock of Uranus's oddly grooved moon Miranda and have the heaves again. But she recovered more quickly than the last time, and sat there looking down on the planet's blurry green-banded surface for a long time. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had both been gravity-slung off toward alpha Centauri and were plunging toward the radiopause, the border of the Solar System, whistling bravely in the endless dark. Sitting here she could hear them both, far away, as she could hear a lot that the Sun's radio noise made impossible to hear closer in. That silent roar, too-the old ruinous echo of the Big Bang-was more audible here. How can I even hear it? she wondered briefly. But Dairine quickly decided it was just another useful side effect of the wizardry, and she got up and headed out as soon as she was better.

From Uranus to Neptune was one billion, one million miles. To her own surprise Dairine took it in stride, arriving standing up on Triton, one of Neptune's two largest moons, and with no desire to sit. Better! she thought, and looked around. There was very little to see: the planet was practically a twin of Uranus, except for its kinky partial rings, and the moons were barren. Dairine rubbed her arms. It was getting cold, even in the protective shell she had made for herself; her forcefields couldn't long stand this kind of chill. Out here the Sun was just one more star, bright, but not like a sun at all. The jump to Pluto was brief: she stood only for a minute or so in the barren dark and could hardly find the Sun at all, even by radio noise. Its roar was muted to a chilly whisper, and the wind on Pluto-it was summer, so there was enough atmosphere thawed to make a kind of wind-drank the heat away from her forcefields till in seconds she was shivering. She pulled the computer out. "Extrasystemic jump," she said hurriedly.

"Coordinates?"

"Read out flagged planets."

"Andorgha/beta Delphini, Ahaija/R Leporis, Gond/kappa Orionis, Ir-mrihad/Ross , Rirhath B/epsilon Indi-"

"The closest," said Dairine, feeling a touch nervous about this.

"Rirhath B. Eleven point four light-years."

"Atmosphere status?"

"Earthlike within acceptable parameters."

"Let's go," Dairine said.

"Syntax error 24," said the computer sweetly, "rephrase for accuracy."

"Run!"

A galaxy's worth of white fire pinned her to the rolling planet; then the forces she had unleashed tore Dairine loose and flung her out into darkness that did not break. For what seemed like ages, the old, old echoes of the Big Bang breaking over her like waves were all Dairine had to tell her she was still alive.

The darkness grew intolerable. Eventually she became aware that she was trying to scream, but no sound came out, nothing but that roar, and the terrible laughter behind it.

- laughter?

- and light pierced her, and the universe roared at her, and she hit the planet with a feeling like dreaming of falling out of bed Then, silence. True silence this time. Dairine sat up slowly and carefully, taking a moment to move everything experimentally, making sure nothing was broken. She ached in every bone, and she was angry. She hated being laughed at under the best of circumstances, even when it was family doing it.

Whatever had been laughing at her was definitely not family, and she wanted to get her hands on it and teach it a lesson. .

She looked around her and tried to make sense of things. It wasn't easy. She was sitting on a surface that was as slick white as glare ice in some places, and scratched dull in other spots, in irregularly shaped patches. Ranked all around her in racks forty or fifty feet high were huge irregular objects made of blue metal, each seeming made of smaller blocks stuck randomly together. The block things, and the odd racks that held them, were all lit garishly by a high, glowing green-white ceiling. What is this, some kind of warehouse? Dairine thought, getting to her feet.

Something screamed right behind her, an appalling electronic-mechanical roar that scared her into losing her balance. Dairine went sprawling, the computer under her. It was lucky she did, for the screaming something shot by right over her head, missing her by inches though she was flat on her face. The huge wind of its passing whipped her hair till it stung her face, and made her shiver all over. Dairine dared to lift her head a little, her heart pounding like mad, and stared after the thing that had almost killed her. It was another of the bizarre cube-piles, which came to a sudden stop in midair in front of one of the racks. A metal arm came out of the Tinkertoy works of the rack, snagged the cube-pile and dropped it clanging onto an empty shelf in the rack's guts.

Dairine pulled the computer out from under her and crawled carefully sideways out of the middle of the long white corridorlike open space, close to one of the metal racks. There she simply lay still for a moment, trying to get her wits back.

There was another scream. She held still, and saw another of the cubes shoot by a foot and a half above the white floor, stop and hover, and get snagged and shelved. Definitely a warehouse, she thought; and then part of the cube seemed to go away, popped open, and people came out.

They had to be people, she thought. Surely they didn't look at all like people; the four of them came in four different burnished-metal colors and didn't look like any earthly insect, bird or beast. Well, she said to herself, why should they? Nonetheless she found it hard to breathe as she looked at them, climbing down from their-vehicle? — was that their version of a car, and this a parking lot? The creatures-no, people, she reminded herself-the people were each different from all the others. They had bodies that came in four parts, or five, or six; they had limbs of every shape and kind, claws and tentacles and jointed legs. If they had heads, or needed them, she couldn't tell where they were. They didn't even look much like the same species. They walked away under the fluorescent sky, bleating at one another.

Dairine got up. She was still having trouble breathing. What've I been thinking of? She began to realize that all her ideas about meeting her first alien creatures had involved her being known, even expected.

"Dairine's here finally," they were supposed to say, "now we can get something done"; and then she and they would set out to save the universe together. Because of her own blindness she'd gotten so excited that she'd jumped into a totally alien environment without orientation or preparation, and as a result she'd nearly been run over in a parking lot. My own fault, she thought, disgusted with herself. It won't happen again.

But in the meantime people were still getting out of that car: these people shorter and blockier than the first group, with more delicate legs and brighter colors. She picked up the computer, looked both ways most carefully up and down the "road," and went after them. "You still working?" she said to the computer.

"Syntax error 24-"

"Sorry I asked. Just keep translating."

As she came up behind the second group of people, Dairine's throat tightened. Everything she could think of to say to aliens suddenly sounded silly-Finally she wound up clearing her throat, which certainly needed it, as she walked behind them. Don't want to startle them, she thought.

They did absolutely nothing. Maybe they can't hear it. Or maybe I said something awful in their language! Oh, no- "Excuse me!" she said.

They kept walking along and said nothing.

"Uh, look," Dairine said, panting a little as she kept up with them-they were walking pretty fast-"I'm sorry to interrupt you, I'm a stranger here-"

The computer translated what Dairine said into a brief spasm of bleating, but the spidery people made no response. They came to the end of the line of racks and turned the corner. Ahead of them was what looked like a big building, made in the same way as the cars, an odd aggregate of cubes and other geometrical shapes stuck together with no apparent symmetry or plan. The scale of the thing was astonishing. Dairine suddenly realized that the glowing green-white ceiling was in fact the sky-the lower layer of a thick cloudy atmosphere, actually fluorescing under the light of a hidden, hyperactive sun-and her stomach did an unhappy flip as her sense of scale violently reoriented itself. I wanted strange, she thought, but not this strange!

"Look," she said to the person she was walking beside as they crossed another pathway toward the huge building, "I'm sorry if I said something to offend you, but please, I need some help getting my bearings-"

Dairine was so preoccupied that she bumped right into something on the other side of the street-and then yipped in terror. Towering over her was one of the first things to get out of the car, a creature seven feet high at least, and four feet wide, a great pile of glittering, waving metallic claws and tentacles, with an odd smell. Dairine backed away fast and started stammering apologies.

The tall creature bleated at her, a shocking sound up so close. "Excuse me," said the computer, translating the bleat into a dry and cultured voice like a BBC announcer's, "but why are you talking to our luggage?"

"Lip, I, uh," said Dairine, and shut her mouth. There they were, her first words to a member of another intelligent species. Blushing and furious, she finally managed to say, "I thought they were people."

"Why?" said the alien.

"Well, they were walking!"

"It'd be pretty poor luggage that didn't do that much, at least," said the alien, eyeing the baggage as it spidered by. "Good luggage levitates, and the new models pack and unpack themselves. You must have come here from a fair way out."

"Yeah," she said.

"My gate is about to become patent," the alien said. "Come along, I'll show you the way to the departures hall. Or are you meeting someone?"

They started to walk. Dairine began to relax a little: this was more like it. "No," she, said, "I'm just traveling. But please, what planet is this?"

"Earth," said the alien.

Dairine was surprised for a second, and then remembered having read somewhere that almost every sentient species calls its own planet "Earth" or "the world" or something similar. "I mean, what do other people call it?"

"All kinds of things, as usual. Silly names, some of them. There'll be a master list in the terminal; you can check that."

"Thanks," Dairine said, and then was shocked and horrified to see a large triangular piece of the terminal fall off the main mass of the building. Except that it didn't fall more than a short distance, and then regained its height and soared away, a gracefully tumbling pyramid. "Does it do that often?" she said, when she could breathe again.

"Once every few beats," said the alien; "it's the physical-transport shuttle. Are you on holiday? Mind the slide, now."

"Yes," Dairine started to say, until the alien stepped onto a stationary piece of pavement in front of them, and instantly began slipping away from her toward the bizarre mass of the terminal building at high speed.

The surprise was too sudden to react to: her foot hit the same piece of paving and slipped from under her as if she had stepped on ice. Dairine threw her arms out to break her fall, except that there wasn't one.

She was proceeding straight forward, too, tilted somewhat backward, at about fifty miles an hour. Her heart hammered. It hammered worse when something touched her from behind; she whipped around, or tried to. It was only the alien's luggage, reaching out to tilt her forward so she stood straight. "What is this!" she said.

"Slidefield," the alien said, proceeding next to her, without moving, at the same quick pace.

"Inertia-abeyant selectively frictionless environment. Here we go. Which gating facility are you making for?"

"Uh-"

It was all happening too fast. The terminal building swept forward swift as a leaping beast, rearing up a thousand stories high, miles across, blotting out the sky. The slidefield poured itself at what looked like a blank silvery wall a hundred feet sheer. Dairine threw her arms up to protect herself, and succeeded only in bashing her face with the computer; the wall burst like a thin flat cloud against her face, harmless, and they were through.

"The Crossings," said the alien. '-What do you think?"

She could not have told him in an hour's talking. The Crossings Hypergate Facility on Rirhath B is renowned among the Million Homeworlds for its elegant classical Lilene architecture and noble proportions; but Dairine's only cogent thought for several minutes was that she had never imagined being in an airline terminal the size of New Jersey. The ceiling-or ceilings, for there were thousands of them, layered, interpenetrating, solid and lacy, in steel and glass, in a hundred materials and a hundred colors-all towered up into a distance where clouds, real clouds, gathered; about a quarter-mile off to one side, it appeared to be raining. Through the high greenish air, under the softened light of the fluorescing sky that filtered in through the thousand roofs, small objects that might have been machines droned along, towing parcels and containers behind them. Beneath, scattered all about on the terminal floor, were stalls, platforms, counters, racks, built in shapes Dairine couldn't understand, and with long, tall signs placed beside them that Dairine couldn't begin to read. And among the stalls and kiosks, the whole vast white floor was full of people-clawed, furred, shelled or armored, upright or crawling, avian, insectile, mammalian, lizardlike, vegetable, mingling with forms that could not be described in any earthly terms. There were a very few hominids, none strictly human; and their voices were lost in the rustling, wailing, warbling, space-softened cacophony of the terminal floor.

They hopped and stepped and leapt and walked and crawled and oozed and slid and tentacled and went in every imaginable way about their uncounted businesses, followed by friends and families and fellow travelers, by luggage floating or walking; all purposeful, certain, every one of them having somewhere to go, and going there.

Every one of them except Dairine, who was beginning to wish she had not come.

"There," said the alien, and Dairine was glad of that slight warning, because the slidefield simply stopped working and left her standing still. She waved her arms, overcompensating, and her stomach did a frightened wrench and tried once or twice, for old times' sake, to get rid of food that was now on Ananke.

"Here you are," said the alien, gesturing with its various tentacles. "Arrivals over there, departures over that way, stasis and preservation down there,!!!!! over there"-the computer made a staticky noise that suggested it was unable to translate something- "and of course waste disposal. You enjoy your trip, now; I have to catch up with my fathers. Have a nice death!"

"But-" Dairine said. Too late. The broad armored shape had taken a few steps into a small crowd, stepped on a spot on the floor that looked exactly like every other, and vanished.

Dairine stood quite still for a few minutes: she had no desire to hit one of those squares by accident. I'm a spud, she thought, a complete imbecile. Look at this. Stuck in an airport-something like an airport-no money, no ID that these people'll recognize, no way to explain how I got here or how I'm gonna get out-no way to understand half of what's going on, scared to death to move. . and pretty soon some security guard or cop or something is going to see me standing here, and come over to find out what's wrong, and they're gonna haul me off somewhere and lock me up….

The thought was enough to hurriedly start her walking again. She glanced around to try to make sense of things. There were lots of signs posted all over — or rather, in most cases, hanging nonchalantly in midair.

But she could read none of them. While she was looking at one written in letters that at a distance seemed like Roman characters, something bumped into Dairine fairly hard, about shin-height. She staggered and caught herself, thinking she had tripped over someone's luggage. But there was nothing in her path at all.

She paused, confused, and then tried experimentally to keep walking: the empty air resisted her. And then behind her someone said, "Your pardon " and slipped right past her: something that looked more or less like a holly tree, but it was walking on what might have been stumpy roots, and the berries were eyes, all of which looked at Dairine as the creature passed. She gulped. The creature paid her no mind, simply walked through the bit of air that had been resisting Dairine, and vanished as the thing with the tentacles had earlier. Just as it blinked out of existence, air whiffing past Dairine into the place where it had been, she thought she caught sight of what looked like a little triangular piece of shiny plastic or metal held in one of the thing's leaves.

A ticket, Dairine thought; and a little more wandering and watching showed her that this was the case.

Wherever these little gates might lead, none of them would let you step on it unless you had the right ticket for it: probably the bit of plastic was a computer chip, programmed with the fact that you had paid your fare. So there was no need to fear that she might suddenly fall unshielded into some environment where they were breathing methane or swimming around in lava.

Dairine began to wander again, feeling somewhat better. I can always sit down in a corner somewhere and program another jump, she thought. Be smart to do that now, though. In case something starts to happen and I want to get out quick. .

She looked for a place to sit. Off to one side was a big collection of racks and benches, where various creatures were hung up or lying on the floor. On a hunch she said to the computer, "Is it safe to sit over there?"

"Affirmative," said the computer.

Dairine ambled over in the direction of the racks and started searching for something decent to sit in.

The creatures she passed ignored her. Dairine found it difficult to return the compliment. One of the racks had what looked like a giant blue vampire bat hanging in it. Or no, it had no fur: the thing was actually more like a pterodactyl, and astonishingly pretty-the blue was iridescent, like a hummingbird's feathers. Dairine walked around it, fascinated, for quite a long time, pretending to look for a chair.

But there seemed to be no chairs in this particular area. The closest to a chairlike thing was a large low bowl that was full of what seemed to be purple Jell-O. . except that the Jell-O put up a long blunt limb of itself, the end of which swiveled to follow as Dairine passed. She hurried by; the effect was rather like being looked at by a submarine periscope, and the Jell-O thing had about as much expression. Probably wonders what the heck / am, she thought. Boy, is it mutual. .

Finally she settled for the floor. She brought up the utilities menu and started running down the list of planets again. . then stopped and asked for the "Help" utility.

"Nature of query," said the computer.

"Uh. ." Dairine paused. Certainly this place was what she had thought she wanted-a big cosmopolitan area full of intelligent alien creatures. But at the same time there were hardly any hominids, and she felt bizarrely out of place. Which was all wrong. She wanted someplace where she would be able to make sense of things. But how to get that across to the computer? It seemed as though, even though it was magical, it still used and obeyed the laws of science, and was as literal and unhelpful as a regular computer could be if you weren't sufficiently familiar with it to know how to tell it what you wanted.

"I want to go somewhere else," she said to the machine.

"Define parameters," said the computer.

"Define syntax."

"Command syntax. Normal syntactical restrictions do not apply in the Help facility. Commands and appended arguments may be stated in colloquial-vernacular form. Parameters may be subjected to

Manual analysis and discussion if desired."

"Does that mean I can just talk to you?" Dairine said.

"Affirmative."

"And you'll give me advice?"

"Affirmative."

She let out a breath. "Okay," she said. "I want to go somewhere else."

"Acknowledged. Executing."

'Wo don't!" Dairine said, and several of the aliens around her reacted to the shriek. One of the holly tree people, standing nearby in something like a flowerpot, had several eyes fall off on the floor.

"Overridden," said the computer.

" 'Help' facility!" Dairine said, breathing hard. Her heart was pounding.

"Online."

"Why did you start doing that?!"

" 'OK' is a system command causing an exit from the 'Help' facility and a return to command level," said the computer.

"Do not run any program until I state the full command with arguments and end the sequence with 'Run'!"

"Affirmative," said the computer. "Syntax change confirmed."

Oh, Lord, Dairine thought, I've started messing with the syntax and I don't even understand it. I will never never use a program again till I've read the docs. . "Good," she said. "The following is a string of parameters for a world I want to transit to. I will state 'end of list' when finished."

"Affirmative. Awaiting listing."

"Right. I want to go somewhere else."

"Transit agenda, confirmed. Specific arguments, please."

"Uhh. ." She thought. "I want to go somewhere where there are going to be people like me."

"Noted. Next argument."

What exactly was I looking for? Darth Vader. . She opened her mouth, then closed it again. I think I'll wait a bit on that one. "I want to go somewhere where I'm expected," she said.

"Noted. Next argument."

"Somewhere where I can use some of this magic."

"Argument already applies," said the computer. "You are using wizardry at this time."

Dairine made a face. "Somewhere where I can sit down and figure out what it means."

"Argument already applies. Documentation is available at this time."

Dairine sighed. "Somewhere where I will have time to sit down and figure out what it means."

"Incomplete argument. State time parameter."

"A couple of days. Forty-eight hours," she said then, before it could correct her syntax.

"Noted. Next argument."

"Somewhere-" One more time she stopped, considering the wild number of variables she was going to have to specify. And the truth was, she didn't know what she was after. Except. . She looked around her conspiratori-ally, as if someone might overhear her. Indeed, she would have died if, say, Nita, should ever hear this. "Somewhere I can do something," she whispered. "Something big. Something that matters."

"Noted," said the computer. "Next argument."

"Uh. ." The embarrassment of the admission out loud had driven everything out of her head. "End arguments," she said.

"Advisory," said the computer.

"So advise me."

"Stated number of arguments defines a very large sample of destinations. Stated number of arguments allows for interference in transit by other instrumentalities. Odds of interference approximately ninety-six percent."

That brought Dairine's chin up. "Let 'em try," she said. "The arguments stand."

"Instruction accepted. End advisory."

"Fine. List program."

"Transit program. Sort for Terran-type hominids along maximal space-time curvature. Sort for anticipated arrival, time continuum maximal but skewed to eliminate paradox. Sort for opportunity for intervention. Sort for data analysis period on close order, forty-eight hours. Sort for intervention curve skewed to maximal intervention and effect. End list."

"You got it," Dairine said. "Name listed program 'TRIP!.' "

"Named."

"Save it. Exit 'Help' facility."

"TRIP! saved. Command level," said the computer.

"Run TRIP!."

"Running. Input required."

Dairine rolled her eyes at the mile-high ceiling. Nita doesn't do it this way, she thought. I've watched her.

She just reads stuff out of her book, or says it by heart… Oh well, someone has to break new ground.

She stretched her legs out in front of her to keep them from cramping. "Specify," she said.

"Birth date."

"Twenty October nineteen seventy-eight," she said, looking out across the floor at the great crowd of pushing and jostling aliens.

"Place of birth."

"Three-eight-five East Eighty-sixth Street, New York City." The hospital had long since burned down, but Dairine knew the address: her dad had taken them all there to a German restaurant now on the site.

"Time of birth."

"Twelve fifty-five A.M."

"Favorite color."

"You have got to be kidding!" she said, looking at a particularly busy knot of aliens across the floor.

Security guards, most likely: they were armed, in a * big group, and looking closely at people.

"Favorite color."

"Blue." Or were these critters security guards? There had been other creatures walking around in the terminal wearing uniforms-as much or as little clothing of a particular shade of silvery green as each alien in question felt like wearing. And their weapons had been slim little blue-metal rods strapped to them.

These creatures, though-they wore no uniforms, and their weapons were large and dark and looked nasty.

"Last book read," said the computer.

"Look," Dairine said, "what do you need to know this dumb stuff for?"

"Program cannot be accurately run without the enacting wizard's personal data. You have no data file saved at this time."

She made another face. Better not interfere, she thought, or you might wind up doing the breaststroke in lava after all. "Oh, go on," she said.

"Last book read-"

"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," said Dairine, looking with increasing unease at the armed bunch of aliens. They were not nice-looking People. Well, lots of the people in here didn't look nice-that purple Jell-O thing for one-but none of them felt bad: just weird. But these creatures with the guns-they had an unfriendly look to them. Most of them were mud-colored warty-looking creatures like a cross between lizards and toads but upright, and not nearly as pretty as a lizard or as helplessly homely as any toad.

They went about with a lumpish hunchbacked swagger, and their eyes were dark slitted bulges or fat crimson bloodshot goggle-eyes. They looked stupid, and worse, they looked cruel….

Oh, come on, Dairine told herself in disgust. Just because they're ugly doesn't mean they're bad. Maybe it's just some kind of military expedition, like soldiers coming through the airport on their way home for leave.

-but with their guns?

"Father's name," said the computer.

"Harold Edward Callahan," said Dairine. She was looking with a combination of interest and loathing at one of the warty creatures, which was working its way toward her. In one arm it was cradling a gun that looked big enough to shove a hero sandwich down. In its other hand, a knobby three-fingered one, it held the end of a leash, and straining at the leash's far end was a something that looked more like the stuffed deinonychus at Natural History than anything Dairine had ever seen. A skinny little dinosaur it was, built more or less along the lines of a Tyrannosaurus, but lithe and small and fleet. This one went all on its hind legs, its long thin tail stretched out behind it for balance: it went with a long-legged ostrichy gait that Dairine suspected could turn into an incredible sprint. The dinosaur on the warty alien's leash was dappled in startling shades of iridescent red and gold, and it had its face down to the floor as it pulled its master along, and the end of that long whiplike tail thrashed. And then it looked up from the floor, and looked right at Dairine, with eyes that were astonishingly innocent, and as blue as a Siamese cat's. It made a soft mewling noise that nonetheless pierced right through the noise of the terminal.

The warty thing looked right at Dairine too-and cried out in some language she couldn't understand, a bizarre soprano singing of notes like a synthesizer playing itself. Then it yanked the leash sharply and let the deinonychus go.

Dairine scrambled to her feet as the deinonychus loped toward her. Terrified as she was, she knew better than to try to run away from this thing. She slammed the computer's screen closed and waited. No kicks, she told herself, if one kick doesn't take this thing out, you'll never have time for a second-It leapt at her, but she was already swinging: Dairine hit the deinonychus right in the face with the computer and felt something crunch. Oh, please don t let it be the plastic, she thought, and then the impetus of the deinonychus carried it right into her, its broken jaw knocked against her face as it fell, she almost fell with it. Dairine stumbled back, found her footing, turned, and began to run.

Behind her more voices were lifted. Dairine ran like a mad thing, pushing through crowds wherever she could. Who are they, why are they after me? And where do I run. .

She dodged through a particularly dense crowd and paused, looking for a corridor to run down, a place to hide. Nothing. This part of the Crossings was one huge floor, very few niches to take advantage of.

But farther on, about half a mile away, it looked like the place narrowed. .

She ran. The noise behind her was deafening. There was some shooting: she heard the scream of blasterbolts, the sound that had set her blood racing in the movies. But now it wasn't so exciting. One bolt went wide over her head. It hit a low-floating bit of the ceiling off to one side of her, and she smelled the stink of scorched plastic and saw a glob of it fall molten to splat on the floor. Dairine sprinted past it, panting. She was a good runner, but she couldn't keep this up for much longer.

Bug-eyed monsters! her brain sang at her in terror. These weren't what I had in mind! "What are they-"

"Emissaries," said the computer, in a muffled voice since its screen was shut over its speaker.

Dairine kept running. "From where?"

"Indeterminate. Continue run?"

"If it'll get me out of here, yes-!"

"Last level of education finished-"

She told it, gasping, as she ran. She told it her mother's maiden name, and how much money her father made, and at what age she had started reading, and much more useless information. . And then while she was telling it what she thought of boys, something caught her by the arm.

It was a three-fingered hand, knobby, a slick dark green, and strong with a terrible soft strength that pulled her right out of her run and around its owner as if she were spinning around a pole. Dairine cried out at her first really close look at a bug-eyed monster. Its eyes were an awful milky red that should have meant it was blind, but they saw her too well entirely-and it sang something high at her and grabbed her up against it with its other hand, the nonchalant don't-hurt-it grasp of the upper arms that adults use on children, not knowing how they hate it… or not caring. Dairine abruptly recognized the BEM's song as laughter, once removed from the horrible low laughing she had seemed to hear in transit. And suddenly she knew what these things were, if not who. "No!" she screamed.

"Intervention subroutine?" said the computer, utterly calm.

Dairine struggled against the thing, couldn't get leverage: all the self-defense she had been taught was for use on humans, and this thing's mass was differently distributed. Not too far away she heard more of the horrid fluting, BEMs with guns, coming fast. Half her face was rammed up against its horrible hide, and her nose was full of a stink like old damp coffee grounds. Her revulsion was choking her: the grasp of the thing on her was as unhuman as if she were being held by a giant cockroach. . and Dairine hated bugs. "Kill it!" she screamed.

And something threw her back clear a good twenty feet and knocked her head against the floor. .

Dairine scrambled up. The BEM was gone. Or rather, it wasn't a BEM anymore. It was many many little pieces of BEM, scattered among splatters of dark liquid all over the floor, and all over everything else in the area, including her. Everything smelled like an explosion in a coffeeshop.

Hooting noises began to fill the air. Oh, no, Dairine thought as she grabbed the computer up from the floor and began to run again. Now this place's own security people were going to start coming after her.

They would ask her questions. And no matter how little a time they did that for, the BEMs would be waiting. If they waited. If they didn't just come and take her away from the port's security. And even if she killed every BEM in the place, more would come. She knew it.

She ran. People looked at her as she ran. Some of them were hominid, but not even they made any move to stop her or help her: they looked at her with the blank nervousness of innocent bystanders watching a bank robber flee the scene of the crime. Dairine ran on, desperate. It was like some nightmare of being mugged in a big city, where the streets are full of people and no one moves to help.

The blasterscreams were a little farther behind her. Maybe the one BEM's fate had convinced the others it would be safer to pick her off from a distance. But then why didn't they do that before?

Unless they wanted me alive. .

She ran and ran. That laughter in the dark now pounded in her pulse, racing, and in the pain in the side that would shortly cripple her for running. Something she had read in Nita's manual reoccurred to her: Old Powers, not friendly to what lives: and one of the oldest and strongest, that invented death and was cast out. . Part of her, playing cold and logical, rejected this, insisted she had no data, just a feeling. But the feeling screamed Death! and told logic to go stuff it somewhere. These things belonged to that old Power. She needed a safe place to think what to do. Home. . But no. Take these things home with her? Her mom, her dad, these things would.

But maybe Nita and Kit could help.

But admit that she needed help?

Yes. No. Yes.

But without resetting the transit program, she couldn't even do that. No time. .

"Can you run subroutines of that program before you finish plugging in the variables?" Dairine said, gasping as she ran.

"Affirmative."

"Then do it, as soon as you can!"

"Affirmative. Name of best friend-"

She wondered for a second whether 'Shash Jackson was still her best friend after she had cleaned him out of his record money three days ago. Then she gave his name anyway. Red lines of light lanced over her head as she ran. And here, the ceiling was getting lower, the sides of the building were closer, there were smaller rooms, places to go to ground. .

The stitch in her side was killing her. She plowed through a crowd of what looked like ambulatory giant squid on a group tour, was lost among them for a moment, in a sea of waving purple tentacles, tripping over their luggage, which crowded aside squawking and complaining-then came out the other side of them and plunged into a smaller corridor about the size of Grand Central Station.

She kept giving the computer inane information as she ran down the corridor, pushing herself to the far side of the stitch, so that she could reach someplace to be safe for a minute. There were more gates here, more signs and seating areas, and of? to one side, a big shadowy cul-de-sac. She ran for it, any cover being better than none.

At the very end of her energy, she half ran, half stumbled in. It was unmistakably a bar. If she had had any breath to spare, she would have laughed with the dear familiarity of it, for it looked completely like other bars she had seen in airports when traveling with her folks and Nita-fairly dim, and crowded with tables and chairs and people and their bags. But no mere airport bar had ever had the kind of clientele that this place did. Tall furry things with too many arms, and squat many-legged things that looked to be wearing their organs on the outside, and one creature that seemed totally made of blinking eyes, all stared at Dairine over their snacks and drinks as she staggered in and past them, and not one of them moved.

Dairine didn't care. Her only thought was to hide. But she realized with horror that she could see no back way out of the place-only a dark red wall and a couple of what might have been abstract sculptures, unless they were aliens too. She heard the cries out in the terminal getting closer, and utter Panic overcame her. Dairine shouldered and stumbled her way frantically among strange bodies and strange luggage in the semidarkness, hardly caring what she might or might not be touching. Impetus and blind terror crashed her right into a little table at the back of the room, almost upsetting both the table and the oddly shaped, half-full glass on it. And then something caught her and held her still.

After her experience out in the terminal, Dairine almost screamed at the touch. But then she realized that what held her were human hands. She could have sobbed for relief, but had no breath to spare. So rattled was she that though she stared right at the person who was steadying her, it took her precious seconds to see him. He was built slight and strong, wearing a white shirt and sweater and a long fawn-colored jacket: a fair-haired young man with quick bright eyes and an intelligent face. "Here now," he said, helping her straighten up, "careful!" And he said it in English!

Dairine opened her mouth to beg for help, but before she could say a word, those wise, sharp eyes had flickered over her and away, taking everything in.

"Who's after you?" the man said, quiet-voiced but urgent, glancing back at Dairine.

"I don't know what they are," she said, gasping, "but someone-someone bad sent them. I can lose them, but I need time to finish programming-"

Alarm and quick thought leapt behind those brown eyes. "Right. Here then, take these." The young man dug down in his jacket pocket, came up with a fistful of bizarrely shaped coins, and pressed them hurriedly into Dairine's free hand. "There's a contact transfer disk behind the bar. Step on it and you should materialize out in the service corridor. Follow that to the right and go out the first blue door you see, into the terminal. If I'm not mistaken, the pay toilets will be a few doors down on your left. Go in one of the nonhuman ones."

"The nonhuman-!" Dairine said, absolutely horrified.

"Quite so," the man said. "Right across the universe, that's one of the strongest taboos there is." And he grinned, his eyes bright with mischief. "No matter who's after you, it'll take them a bit to think of looking for you in there. And the locks will slow them down." He was on his feet. "Off you go now!" he said, and gave Dairine a fierce but friendly shove in the back.

She ran past a trundling robot barman, under the hinged part of the bartop and onto the transfer circle.

On the other side of the bar, as Dairine began to vanish, she saw the fair man glance over at her to be sure she was getting away, and then pick up the iced tea he had been drinking. Glass in hand, he went staggering cheerfully off across the barroom in the most convincing drunk act Dairine could imagine, accidentally overturning tables, falling into the other patrons, and creating a mess and confusion that would slow even the BEMs up somewhat.

Dairine materialized in the service corridor, followed her instructions to the letter, and picked a rest room with a picture sign so weird, she couldn't imagine what the aliens would look like. She found out soon enough. She spent the next few minutes hastily answering the computer's questions while sitting on what looked like a chrome-plated lawn mower, while the tiled room outside her locked booth echoed with the bubbling screams of alien ladies (or gentlemen) disturbed in the middle of who knew what act.

Then the screams became quiet, and were exchanged for a horrible rustling noise, thick soft footfalls, and high fluting voices. The computer had asked Dairine whether she preferred Coke or Pepsi, and had then fallen silent for some seconds. "Are you done?" she hissed at it.

"Running. Data in evaluation."

"Get a move on!"

"Running. Data in evaluation."

The air filled with the scorch of burning plastic again. They were burning the lock of the booth.

"Can you do something to a few of them?" she whispered, her mouth going dry.

"Negative multitasking ability," said the computer.

Dairine put her head down on the computer, which was on her knees, and took what she suspected might be her last breath.

The lock of the booth melted loose and the door fell in molten globs to the floor. Dairine sat up straight, determined to look dirty at the BEMs, if she could do nothing else.

The door swung open.

And "Multiple transit," said the computer, "executing now," and the jump-sickness grabbed Dairine and twisted her outside in. Perhaps not understanding, the BEMs fluted in rage and triumph and reached into the booth. But Dairine's insides went cold as dimly she felt one of them swing a huge soft hand through where her middle was: or rather, where it no longer was completely-the transit had begun. A second later, heat not wholly felt stitched through her arms and legs as shots meant to cripple her tore through where they almost were, and fried the back of the stall like an egg. Then starlight and the ancient black silence pierced through her brain; the spell tore Dairine free of the planet and flung her off Rirhath B into the long night.

She never found out anything about the man who helped her. Nor did he ever find out anything more about her. Pausing by the door of the pay toilet, after being released from station security some hours later, and being tele-Pathically sensitive (as so many hominids are), he could sense only that some considerable power had been successfully exercised there. Satisfied with that, he smiled to himself and went on about his travels, just one more of the billions of hominids moving about the worlds. But many millions of light-years later, in some baking wilderness under a barren, brilliant sky, a bitterly weary Dairine sat down on a stone and cried for a while in shock at the utter strangeness of the universe, where unexpected evil lives side by side with unexpected kindness, and neither ever seems quite overcome by the other. .