by Diane Duane
“What?” Kit said. “What happened?”
Djam laughed and gestured at the big seat-like stone in the center of the circle. “I was sitting in the hot seat there keeping an eye on the gates till Cheleb here got back from an errand, and one of them came creeping along and decided to see if I was edible.”
“Not what he said,” said Cheleb. “Wanted you for nesting material.”
“Well, he bit me first,” said Djam. “Then he started trying to pull my fur out.”
Kit laughed. “Okay,” he said, “so they bite, but they’re not really harmful, and you can talk to them in the Speech.”
“Not great conversationalists,” Cheleb said. “Mostly interested in food and reproduction.”
“Kind of interested in food myself, at this point,” said Djam. “Come on, Kit, we’ll have a drink and a bite of our own and show you what you’ll be doing.”
There followed some bustling around after supplies, and finally all three of them wound up sitting together on the big flat central rock, working on self-sealing-and-unsealing boxes of a brand of multi-species iron ration that Kit had often seen in shops at the Crossings. “Noisome harkh,” said Cheleb, digging into one container, “but useful…”
Kit made a note to check the manual and find out exactly what harkh was in Cheleb’s local dialect: his understanding of the Speech seemed to simply render it as “food”, but something else could be going on. The ration was in the form of bars of more or less breakfast-bar size, and the three of them sat chewing on these and passing a water bottle back and forth. “So what they have us doing here, cousin,” Djam said as he finished up one bar and waved the wrapper on a second one open, “it’s not that it’s difficult work.”
“Not exciting though,” said Cheleb, as Djam bit half off the new bar while reaching into his body fur and pulling out, from somewhere or other, a long slender shiny metal rod that Kit at first mistook for a wand. “Sit around for a long time, wait for something to go wrong. Then when it does, panic, go crazy fixing it. Say bad things about Oldest Outlier. Then repeat. Often.”
Djam tilted his head back and forth in what Kit suspected was an Alnilamev version of a nod and touched a control at one side of the rod, then pulled. A see-through page of light followed the gesture out into the air; a projection or hologram of a manual page, with centered on it a very detailed graphic of the gating complex, and scrolling columns of readout associated with each of the feeder gates. “All the locations that feed into these gate interfaces are located elsewhere on this continent, usually in big cities,” Djam said. “But each of these accepts incoming transits from a spread of between six and twelve locations in each planet day. Every time one of the gates at our end closes down its connection to a remote location and starts opening a connection to a different one, this area experiences a series of energy fluctuations and local temporospatial derangements.”
“Unavoidable,” Cheleb growled around haes mouthful. “Space hates gates. Always a problem.”
Another back-and-forth head tilt from Djam. “We’ve been given prewritten spell routines to compensate for these flux events,” he said. “They’re independently powered and they’re automatic; they cut in every time a feeder gate closes down and starts going through the process of locking onto a new remote location. But you have to watch them, because sometimes something goes wrong at the far end—not enough people ready to move, some kind of problem with their own feeder gates—”
“Logistics,” Cheleb said, finishing haes ration bar and reaching for another. “Always the weak spot. Mass transport intervention’s a tree.” Hae reached out to the manual “page” Djam was holding open and tapped it with one beige-hided claw. Immediately the view shifted, showing a structural schematic of small individual pathways melding together to form larger branches, always in multiples of five or six to one, through two or three layers of gate connections, until the broadest of these converged into single final trunks fading away at their bases—the light pulsing there indicating the jump to another world. “Little gates all over this continent feed bigger ones, groups of bigger ones feed bigger ones still. That one—” Hae flicked his claw at the largest gate out in the complex across the plain. “On-planet terminus gate. Goes only one place, refuge world called Dallavei, three hundred ninety-four light years from here. Resettlement plan tries to keep people from same continent together unless they request otherwise.”
“Dallavei’s the second most distant of the six refuge worlds,” Djam said, “so all the gates debouching on it are the second highest-powered ones in the network. They need a lot of watching.”
“So we sit all through a shift,” Kit said, “and just watch the unlock-and-lock sequences execute.”
“That’s right,” Djam said. “Sometimes nothing happens… everything runs perfectly smoothly. But every six minutes, or ten, or more, depending on what the transit schedule is doing upstream, one of those five feeders closes and hunts its new target. And you watch it. Mostly, eight times out of ten, everything goes smoothly, nothing happens.”
“Or ninth and tenth times,” Cheleb said, “just when think things will be quiet—things act up. Smaller portals have traffic problems. Or start throwing gravitational anomalies.” Hae shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Gates hate each other as much as space hates them. Pack so many gates so close together, even small ones, they throw mass-substrate errors, or else time and local space get out of synch. Act quickly, adjust local gravitational constant, gates don’t rip each other out of ground and ruin whole day.” Hae rolled his eyes most expressively, making Kit smile: he’d noticed more than once on trips to the Crossings that the gesture was surprisingly common among humanoid species, though it could mean really different things depending on cultural influences.
“Is there a control center,” Kit said, “or anywhere in particular we need to be while we’re monitoring all this?”
“I’m a nervous type,” Djam said. “I like doing it here.” He thumped his furry two-thumbed hand on the stone they sat on. “Makes me feel better to be able to see what’s going on without using remote sensors.”
“Personal preference,” Cheleb said, and shivered. “Can do it just fine from inside portable cave. Weather here’s terrible even when not dropping water all over everything from cold chilly sky.” Hae shivered again.
“Or else you just don’t care to look at that all day,” said Djam, and cast his eyes upward.
For a moment they all looked up at Thesba, now approaching the zenith. After a moment, “Wouldn’t try claiming otherwise in the Speech,” said Cheleb.
“Me either,” said Kit.
Djam sighed, got up. “Nor I. Kiht, we should get your puptent set up so you can get some rest. Your—manual?—will have a guide for you on how to handle the monitoring: I’ll sit with you for some of your first shift, give you pointers. After that we should sort ourselves a schedule, see whose planet’s day matches this one best, who does what best and when… because we’re going to be doing this for days.”
Cheleb got up too. “Have early-day shift tomorrow,” hae said, “need to go curl up now. Later, cousins…” And hae got up and went off to haes puptent’s portal, vanishing through it.
Kit looked up at Thesba, shivered one more time in that cold wind, and got up to go after Djam and get his puptent sorted out.
It was another hour or so before Kit was anywhere near ready to settle down. There was always so much sorting and settling to do; the things he’d fired into the pup tent at high speed when he was packing and getting out of the house now needed to be stacked up out of the way. And then of course he had to make his bed—literally make it, constructing the spell that would be substituting for a mattress. In fact he had to make it three times, because he kept getting the size of the air mattress wrong (and in order to get the mattress to the right level of firmness, the spell defining the volume of the air which was being “hardened” into the mattress was particularly rigorous). But finally he was standing there in the m
iddle of the eggshell-white half dome that was the way the inside of the puptent expressed itself, looking at the neatly-made bed with his striped bedspread on it, and the boxes and containers of food piled up all around the edges of the space, and the stacks of books and other things he’d brought with him, and all of a sudden the weight of everything that had happened over the course of the day came down on Kit’s shoulders all at once and left him feeling desperately tired.
The temptation to simply flop face down on the bed and pass out right then and there was huge. Unfortunately there were still things that needed to be done. For the moment, Kit just sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for his manual, thinking nervously about what it was going to be like for him in the morning when he sat down on that flat rock outside and it was his turn to ride herd on a flock of cranky worldgates. He thought about Djam sitting up there now with his sleek little pull-out manual, and Cheleb, asleep in haes own “portable cave”, and was relieved that they were so nice and that he got along so well with them. Though that’s probably no accident, Kit thought. Some ways the Powers will be behind a lot of this, and mostly we’ll be put where we’ll work best…
He flipped through the pages to the messaging section and tapped on Nita’s last text message to him. “You conscious?” he said.
It went out as a text, since that was what he was responding to, but it was her voice that answered. “Nngh, barely,” Nita said. “What about you?”
“Getting ready to turn in,” Kit said, piling his pillows on top of each other and flopping back against them. “How is it where you are?”
She sighed. “It’s a mess. Six gates, funneling into one about halfway up the transit tree. So the team here has both incoming and outgoing schedules to worry about, and just after I arrived they had to shut down two of their incoming gates because of some kind of gravitational problem upstream. I’m just so very happy that they think I’m actually going to be good at keeping an eye on this thing when I have my first shift tomorrow.”
“This is all because we’re friends with Rhiow, isn’t it,” Kit said.
“Don’t know about all,” Nita said. “For all I know, it’s because you use your beam-me-up-Scotty spell more than anyone else on Earth.”
“Oh yeah,” Kit said. “Blame me.”
“Whenever possible.”
Kit laughed at her. “Are your teammates nice?”
“Nice? You have no idea. They were acting as if it was a big deal when I arrived… I have no idea why. Though maybe,” she added, as if the idea was just occurring, “they’re thinking that having a visionary on site would be useful if something starts to go wrong.”
She sounded uneasy. Kit knew why: Nita’s visioning abilities were going through changes, and right now they didn’t always work the way she wanted them to, or (sometimes) at all. “Look,” Kit said, “the monitoring equipment and spells they’ve got set up on these gates are really sensitive. I had a look at one of the basic readout arrays a while ago, and I doubt it’ll need a visionary to let people know if one of these things starts getting twitchy.” In fact it had better not, because I’m no visionary…
Nita sighed. “Okay.”
“So who’s on your team, then?”
“Oh. A sort-of-a-girl from Alya, that’s one of the star’s names, anyway—it’s a binary, over in Serpens someplace. I should know where but…” She yawned. “Ask me tomorrow. They’re sort of shelly all over, but the shell’s segmented, like what an armadillo has. And so pretty! She’s all inlaid with gems and metal and stuff; Carmela’s going to try to steal her look the minute she sees it. The other one’s a guy from Natih, you know the ones I mean, we’ve seen them at the Crossings a couple times. The little dinosaury ones with the neck frills and the unpronounceable names. Anyway, all very nice people. But they’re really tired out: this gate’s been running them ragged.” She yawned again.
“Yeah,” Kit said, “I get a feeling these guys have been having trouble too. …Well, here we are. We’ll see if we can get things to work a little better.” He yawned too.
“Listen to you,” Nita said. “You should crash.”
“You’re the one who got me started,” said Kit. And then he could feel another yawn on its way, and started to think she had a point. “And know what? You’ve convinced me. I’m done.”
“That was too easy,” Nita said, and laughed. “When are you getting up?”
He glanced at his watch, which was still running on New York time. “Uh… six hours from now, maybe. It’s late back home but I want to get used to the local time as quick as I can.”
“Okay. Setting an alarm?”
“Definitely.”
“Good. Call me then?”
“No point in suffering alone.”
He knew she could hear his smile. “Later,” Nita said, and the manual page grayed itself out as she closed the connection.
Kit just sat smiling at it for a moment, then felt around under his pillows for where he’d stuck his phone: there was one more thing to do before he could shut down. He woke up the screen, touched a couple of icons, and the text function came up.
Normally there would have been no limit on a text’s length when it was working as a manual function. But the screen of his phone was saying, in a very no-nonsense font, DUE TO INCREASED ENERGY REQUIRED FOR INFRATEMPORAL MESSAGING, 500 CHARACTERS PER LOCAL DAY ONLY. SORRY, NO AUDIO / IMAGE MESSAGING.
Kit sighed, but it made sense. Doing anything that messed with the arrow of time was inevitably extremely power-intensive. For all Kit knew, each character of the message was going to have to be inscribed on a separate tachyon, which would then have to be pushed backwards in time, or sideways, or something more complex. It was the kind of technical detail that probably would set Nita off into a long fascinating discussion with Bobo, but right now the whole idea just made Kit’s head hurt.
GOT HERE OK, Kit typed. VERY VERY— He deleted the extra “very.” —BIG CREEPY MOON OVERHEAD. NOW TO MAKE SURE IT STAYS THERE, AT LEAST UNTIL WE’VE GOTTEN EVERYBODY OUT. IF WE CAN.
He sat there a moment with his mind full of the image of Thesba, and paused: partly because that would have been the normal length of a short text or a tweet at home, and partly because the thought came to him once more that he simply couldn’t understand what was going on with the Tevaralti. How could anybody stay here with that hanging over their heads, ready to shatter and fall at any moment? Probably he’d get a better sense of whatever answers there might be over the days to come: but right now it seemed beyond strange.
PEOPLE I’M WORKING WITH ARE FRIENDLY, YOU WOULD LIKE THEM EVEN IF NOT AS INTERESTING TO LOOK AT AS FILIF OR SKER’RET. FIRST DAY ON THE JOB TOMORROW, BEDTIME NOW, LOVE YOU BOTH.
Kit yawned and hit “send”, then rearranged the pillows, shoved the phone under them again, and got up to go outside and take care of some before-bedtime physical things—carefully looking around both before and after to avoid stepping on any stray sibik that might’ve been in the neighborhood. Before he went back in he paused and glanced over at the throne-like center stone, where Djam was keeping an eye on things. Kit gave Djam a wave. The Alnilamev nodded at Kit, dropped his jaw in what Kit guessed might be his people’s version of a smile, and went back to intently watching his out-rolled manual page.
Kit nodded back, went into his puptent, secured the portal, and got undressed, yawning. Something to read?… But he was really too tired, and he knew he ought to get to sleep—tomorrow would come early and involve serious stuff. He put on pajama bottoms, for his own comfort if not his watchmates’, in case something that needed his presence happened between now and the morning. Then, flopping onto the bed, Kit flipped the manual open to the page that handled the settings for the puptent, and spoke the Speech-word that reduced the lighting to near-darkness. Not total: when he went on an away-jaunt like this, Kit preferred to leave some ambient light running in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night for something. Not a nightlight, he thought. Nothing like one,
absolutely not…
He tossed and turned for a while, but couldn’t settle. Finally, though, it came for him: that strange moment when your body—now lying still in silence and dimness and having leisure to actually feel what’s going on around it—somehow finally understands that despite the presence of some basic comforts, your own food and your own bedding, the right kind of air and the right kind of gravity, you’re still not camping out in your back yard. The physical realization settled into Kit’s bones that he was hundreds and hundreds of light years from home, someplace completely strange… and in this case, someplace doomed. A shiver went right down him.
Sleep couldn’t come quickly enough for him: and didn’t.
FIVE
Thursday
When the manual’s alarm woke him, Kit’s eyes snapped immediately open as if his body had been waiting for it. He moaned to himself and rubbed the graininess out of his eyes, then rolled over and tried to get himself oriented.
It took some minutes, as usual. Kit had noticed that when he slept off-planet on errantry, getting himself operational on the first away day was always more of a challenge than usual—partly because his normal morning routines couldn’t go ahead the way they did at home, and partly because he was always both buzzed and nervous about what was going on. Today was no exception, but he didn’t have time to indulge his wish that he could take things more slowly.
Kit headed straight over to his stash of food and drinks, cracked a bottle of water and chugged half of it, and then pulled his pajamas off and recited a useful spell that Ronan had shared with him. When you were in a place where there were no shower facilities—which this appeared to be—the wizardry in question simply stripped all the dead cells, dried sweat, and other detritus off the very topmost level of your skin, all over your body. Kit closed his eyes and stood there while the spell fizzed and tickled all over him, and then dusted himself off when it finished.
Got to talk to Djam and Cheleb about what they do about waste management, Kit thought. Technologically this is a pretty advanced planet; what do the Tevaralti do? Maybe we can get in a porta-potty or something… But as problems went, for the moment that was a relatively minor one.