USER LOG?
"Yes, please," Carl said. "Authorization seven niner three seven one comma five one eight."
"Password?"
Carl leaned near the console and whispered something.
"Confirmed," said the computer politely, and began spilling its guts in screenful after screenful of green.
"Pause," Carl said at one point. "Harry, I think you'd better have a look at this."
"What, did we plug it in wrong-"
"No, not that." Nita's father got up, brushing himself off, and looked at the screen. Then he froze. He had seen the Speech in Nita's manual once or twice, and knew the look of it.
"Carl," Nita's father said, beginning to look stern, "what is this?"
Carl looked as if he would rather not say anything. "Harry," he said, "it wouldn't be fair to make Nita tell you this. But you seem to have another wizard in the family."
"What!"
"Yes," Carl said, "that was my reaction too. Translation," he said to the computer.
"Translation of protected material requires double authorization by ranking Seniors and justification filed with Chief Senior for planet or plane," said the computer, sounding stubborn.
"What've you done to my machine!"
"The question," Tom said, getting up off the floor, "is more like, what has Dairine done to it? Sorry, Harry. This is a hell of a way for you to find out."
Nita watched her father take in a long breath. "Don't call her yet, Harry," said Tom. He laid a hand on the computer. "Confirmed authorization one zero zero three oblique zero two. We'll file the justification with Irina later Translate."
The screen's contents abruptly turned into English. Nita's father bent over a bit to read it. " 'Oath accepted-' "
"This Oath," Carl said. "Type a-colon-heartcode."
The computer cleared its screen and displayed one small block of text in green. Nita was still while her father read the Wizards' Oath. There was movement behind her: she looked up and saw her mother, with a peppermill clutched forgotten in one hand, looking over her father's shoulder. Her face looked odd, and it wasn't entirely the green light from the computer screen.
"Dairine took that?" her father said at last.
"So did we, Daddy," Nita said.
"Yes, but-" He sat down on the edge of the desk, staring at the screen. "Dairine isn't quite like you two…"
"Exactly. Harry, this is going to take a while. But first, you might call in Dairine. She did something careless this afternoon and I want to make sure she doesn't do it again."
Nita felt sorry for her father; he looked so pale. Her mother went to him. "What did she do?" she said.
"She went to Mars and left the door open," said Tom.
Nita's dad shut his eyes. "She went to Mars."
"Just like that. . " said her mother.
"Harry, Nita tells me she took you two to the Moon once, to prove a point. Imagine power like that. . used irresponsibly. I need to make sure that's not going to happen, or I'll have to put a lock on some of her power. And there are other problems. The power may be very necessary for something. . " Carl looked stern but unhappy. "Where is she, Harry?"
"Dairine," Nita's dad said, raising his voice.
"Yo," came Dairine's voice from upstairs, her all-purpose reply.
"Come on down here a minute."
"Do I have to? I'm reading."
"Now."
The ceiling creaked a little, the sound of Dairine moving around her room. "What have I done to deserve this?" said Nita's father to the immediate universe.
"Harry," Carl said glancing at the computer screen and away again, "this may come as a shock to you. ."
"Carl, I'm beyond shocking. I've walked on the Moon without a spacesuit and seen my eldest daughter turn into a whale. That my youngest should go to Mars on a whim. ."
"Well, as to what you've done to deserve it… you have a right to know the answer. The tendency for wizardry comes down to the kids through your side of the family."
That was a surprise to Nita, and as for her father, he looked stricken, and her mother looked at him with an expression that was faintly accusing. Carl said, "You're related to the first mayor of New York, aren't you?"
"Uh, yeah… he was-"
"-a wizard, and one of the best to grace this continent. One of the youngest Seniors in Earth's history, in fact. The talent in your line is considerable; too bad it missed you, but it does skip generations without warning. Was there something odd about one of your grandparents?"
"Why, my-" Nita's father swallowed and looked as if he was suddenly remembering something. "I saw my grandmother disappear once. I was about six. Later I always thought I'd imagined it. . " He swallowed again. "Well, that's the answer to why me. The next question is, why Dairine?"
"She's needed somewhere," said Carl. "The Powers value the status quo too highly to violate it without need. It's what we're defending, after all. Somewhere out there is a life-or-death problem to which only Dairine is the answer."
"We just need to make sure she knows it," said Tom, "and knows to be careful. There are forces out there that aren't friendly to wizards-" He broke off suddenly as he glanced over at the computer screen.
"Carl, you should see this."
They all looked at the screen. USER LOG, it said, and under the heading were listed a lot of numbers and what Nita vaguely recognized as program names. "Look at that," Tom said, pointing to one. "Those are the spells she did today, using the computer. Eighty-eight gigabytes of storage, all in one session, the latest one-at : hours. What utility uses that kind of memory?"
"That's what. . about ten of five?" Nita's mother said. "She wasn't even here then…"
The stairs creaked as Dairine came down them into the living room. She paused a moment, halfway, as well she might have done with all those eyes and all those expressions trained on her. . her father's bewildered annoyance, her mother's indignant surprise, Tom's and Carl's cool assessment, and Nita's and Kit's expectant looks. Dairine hesitantly walked the rest of the way down.
"I came back," she said abruptly.
Nita waited for more. Dairine said nothing.
Nita's parents exchanged glances, evidently having the same thought: that a Dairine who said so little wasn't normal. "Baby. ." her mother said, sounding uncertain, "you have some explaining to do."
But Carl stepped forward and said, "She may not be able to explain much of anything, Betty. Dairine's had a busy day with the computer. Isn't that so Dairine?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Dairine said.
"I think it's more like you can't," said Carl.
"Look at the user log, Harry," Tom said from behind Nita and Kit. "Eighty-eight gigs spent on one program. A copy program. And run, as you say, when she wasn't even here. There's only one answer to that."
Slowly, as if he were looking at a work of art, Carl walked around Dairine. She watched him nervously.
"Even with unlimited available memory and a computer running wizard's software," Carl said, "there's only so much fidelity a copy can achieve. Making hard copies of dumb machinery, even a computer itself, that's easy. Harry, look at the log: you'll see that this isn't the machine you bought. It's an exact copy of it.
Dairine made it."
Carl kept walking around Dairine. She didn't move, didn't speak. "Carl, come on," Nita's father said from behind her, "cut it out. You're scaring her."
"I think not," Carl said. "There's only so much you can do with eighty gigs, as I said. Especially when the original is a living thing. The copy's responses are limited. See, there's something that lives inside the hardware, inside the meat and nervous tissue, that can't be copied. Brain can be copied. But mind-not so well. And soul-not at all. Those are strictly one to a customer, at least on this planet."
The air was singing with tension. Nita glanced at Kit, and Kit nodded, for he knew as well as she did the feel of a spell in the working. Carl was using no words or gestures to assist in the spell, nothing but the slow certain pressure of his mind as he thought in the Speech. "She copied the computer and took it to the city with her," Carl said, "and got away when she could. And when she left Earth, she decided-I'd imagine-that she wanted some time to sightsee. But, of course, you would object to that. So she copied something else, to buy herself some time."