Free High Wizardry New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane

was—”
    “—a wizard, and a considerable talent. One of the youngest Seniors in recent history, in fact. The talent in your line’s 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. A huge amount of online memory used and storage invoked, in the yottabytes. A lot of it in one session, the latest one—at 16:52 hours—”
    “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, Nita’s and Kit’s expectant looks.
    Then 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’ve got 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?”
    “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. “Huge storage space spent on a single program run. 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. Dairine did that once before moving on to more advanced work.”
    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 a copy… especially when the original’s 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, sure, no problem copying that. But mind? That’s tougher work. And soul—there’s no copying that 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