Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  He got himself dressed and had some more water, then reached for his manual, flipping it open to the messaging section. “You there?”

  Unavailable, said Nita’s status listing on that page. On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading.

  “Wow,” Kit said under his breath. “Already? At this hour?” But there was no telling what had come up at her end of things. “Just checking in,” Kit said. “Message me when you’re free.”

  He dropped the manual on his bed and went out to take care of the most immediate physical need out back behind the standing stones. He was almost startled by how different the landscape looked in morning light. It was actually a nice morning; the sky was an unusual shade of pale green-gold dappled with little, feathery cirrus clouds, and a very bright white sun was shining from off to the left of the gating complex, low in the eastern sky—Kit decided to think of it as eastern to avoid confusion—throwing the standing stones’ shadows out stark behind them. In his opinion, the view was improved because for the moment Thesba was nowhere to be seen. It would be along soon enough; it circled Tevaral twice a day. But at least I don’t have to see it before breakfast.

  On slipping back between the stones and coming around the side of the flat “throne rock” in the middle, Kit found Djam sitting there, leaning against the three-meter-high back of the throne but otherwise apparently hardly moved from when Kit had left him here last night. “How’s it been going?” Kit said, wandering over to sit down next to him.

  “All quiet,” Djam said. “In fact, quieter than it’s been for the last couple nights. Makes me wonder if the complex has decided to behave better now that we have a full team on site.” Then he laughed. “Or whether it’s planning to start misbehaving once it’s lulled us into a false sense of security.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Kit said, looking down at the page with the sensor array that Djam had laid out now on the stone beside him. “But it does look good at the moment…”

  “Might be a good time for you to synch up your own instrumentality,” Djam said. “I can show you what you need to be looking for.”

  Kit nodded and headed back into his puptent. When he came out again, he saw that Djam had lengthened his metallic wand and heightened and broadened the manual page extruded from it so that it was nearly the size of a small flat screen monitor.

  Kit laid the manual down next to it, opening it out to the pages having to do with his own assignment in the intervention and the locality where they were based. Immediately the manual’s double-page spread shifted to mirror the display that Djam’s page was showing. There at the top of the display were five small spell-circles, one for each of the feeder gates, interlaced with a webwork of lines indicating power conduits and control structures. At the bottom of the display was the larger terminus gate, its circular diagram pulsing softly as it reported in second by second on the energy flow between it and its target gate light years away, along with the number of people passing through it. More readouts reflected local gravitational stresses caused by all the gates’ operation, the interaction of the larger gate’s portal interface with local space-time, and the status of incoming traffic from the aggregate of portals upstream.

  “There’s no point in trying to read any of it too closely,” Djam said. “The little changes that happen from minute to minute aren’t so important. It’s when you start noticing a trend over a few minutes, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, that you have to start paying attention. The system has its own alarms built-in, and they’re pretty sensitive. If something really starts to misbehave, it’ll give you warning. The art of it is to catch these things before they happen. And, as our seniors have been telling us since we got here, if the alarms go off, don’t waste time; yell for help and get the heavyweight talent in here.” Djam pointed at a softly red-glowing set of characters in the Speech that spelled out EMERGENCY. He touched it, and a list of names or similar personality identifiers popped up. “Whoever is at the top of that list,” Djam said, “just touch it and describe your problem, and they’ll gate straight in here so fast you won’t feel the wind of them arriving before you see their hands, claws, or tentacles getting right into the display and manipulating the gate structure.”

  “That’s happened to you?” Kit said.

  Djam tilted his head left and right. “Twice now,” he said. “Scared the fur off me the first time. The second time, they could’ve taken the fur for all I cared: I was just glad to get the big gate settled.” He shook himself all over, and his fur fluffed out. “Gravitational anomaly—something triggered by something going on in Thesba’s core. Not my fault, but I was glad when it was over.”

  Kit nodded. “All right,” he said, “give me a second. I’ll go back and get some breakfast and you can help me get a handle on this.”

  It took them something like an hour—along with a box of Pop Tarts and two cans of cappuccino, one of which Djam sampled and pronounced “awful in a strangely attractive way”— before Djam was satisfied that Kit knew what to look for and Kit was satisfied he was getting enough of a feel for the gate-monitoring interface to be left alone with it. Picking up the finest points of the way the gates interacted, Kit thought, was probably going to take another day or so. There was one proto-emergency after they’d been at it for about half an hour, and Kit was pleased that he had seen the pattern starting to build before the manual’s own alarm had time to go off. For a few moments it had looked as if he was going to get to call in his first assistant from the next level up, but it didn’t happen. The gravitational fluctuations associated with the number three feeder gate calmed down when Kit instructed the manual to boost the gate’s power feed enough to reinforce its own damping mechanisms, spoofing the gravitational field in its immediate neighborhood into ignoring the neighboring four gates and the way they were warping the gravity in space around them.

  “That’s it,” Djam said, sounding very pleased as he rubbed his eyes and leaned against the back of the throne. “I’d say you’ve got the eye for this… inasmuch as any of us can have ‘an eye for it’ after we’ve only been doing it for a few days.”

  It was as much as Kit could’ve hoped for. “I think I’m okay,” he said. “You should try to get some rest— you’ve really had a long shift. You’ll be close if I need to yell, and anyway—” He pointed at the red “emergency” herald on his manual pages, most carefully not touching it. “It’s not like they’re far away.”

  “They’re absolutely not,” Djam said, “believe me.” He stretched and made a different bubbling noise, his version of a yawn, picked up the metal rod from which his energy-based manual page was extruded, and sucked the page back in.

  Kit looked away from the manual across the grassy plain toward the masses of people streaming out of the feeder gates and into the terminus gate, so much more visible than they had been last night… but just as constant as they had been last night, the flow never stopping. “What about them?” he said. “Are we ever supposed to go over there and see how they’re doing?”

  “Well,” Djam said, “if there was some kind of emergency, of course. But they’ve got Tevaralti wizards handling that side of it, mostly, and non-wizards too—people from their own clans or national emergency services. Mostly we’re expected to keep our eyes on the gates. After all, that’s what they brought us here for; because we’ve got some previous gate expertise.”

  “And because we’re humanoid.”

  “Well. If we do have to interact with Tevaralti people when they’re losing their world…” Djam sounded uncomfortable. “You can imagine how it would be. The more like you the people who’re helping you are, the less it’s going to upset you. And Powers only know, these people have enough to be upset about right now. Probably it’s best to keep all the on-planet help looking as humanoid as possible, even if we might not be interacting with Tevaralti all that often.”

  “That’s excuse we’re given anyway,” said Cheleb from behind them, as hae came a
round to sit on the seat-stone of the throne on the other side of Djam. Hae shook all haes layers of clothing around haem in a big fabric-heavy shrug. “Who knows what Above-And-Beyonders really have in mind?” Hae stretched where hae sat, looked over at Kit. “Sleep well, cousin?”

  Kit nodded. “Yes, thanks.”

  “Plying colleague with exotic food, one sees,” Cheleb said, reaching across Djam to pick up the empty Pop-Tart box. “What is ‘raspberry’?”

  “Um, it’s a fruit,” Kit said.

  Cheleb wrinkled haes gum-flaps away from haes very, very sharp upper teeth. It was like having a crocodile make a distasteful face. “Not part of usual diet,” he said. “Contains carbohydrate, though?”

  “Yeah,” Kit said. “Starch, sugar…”

  Cheleb elongated haes eyes at Kit and got up again. “Trade you some of mine later, perhaps? For experimentation. Have places to be, meanwhile.”

  Djam looked up. “Where are you headed?”

  “Got cousin on other side of planet. Cousin cousin, not hrasht.” Cheleb shook haes layers again, this time apparently to settle them into place. “Helping with small upstream gate. Might as well go see, not on shift until nearly sunset.”

  “All right,” Djam said.

  “If needed, call right away,” Cheleb said to Kit, patting a pouch slung under haes jacket layer: Kit supposed that was where hae had haes manual stowed, or whatever hae used for one. “Don’t hesitate. Sudden disappearance on Important Job will just impress cousin more.”

  There was something so sly about the way he said it that Kit just had to snicker. “Okay,” he said. “Dai, cousin.”

  Cheleb raised a claw to them and went off toward the little local-gating pad. Djam stood up too, stretching and bubble-yawning again. “So you’re sure you’re all right with this?” Djam said.

  “As sure as I can be right now,” Kit said.

  “All right. Call me right away if you need anything, or you’re not sure about a reading.”

  “Will do.”

  And Djam headed back to his standing stone, waved his portal open, and vanished into it.

  Kit looked down at his manual, touched the control at the corner of the double-page spread that brought it into “active-for-intervention” mode, and got busy watching the gates.

  It took Kit most of the morning to fall into a monitoring rhythm he found comfortable. To some extent this had to do with getting the analysis array on his manual page set up correctly. Too sensitive a setting and it kept giving him false alarms about gravitational anomalies around the feeder gates; but settings not sensitive enough just sat there unchanging for long minutes at a time and made him more nervous than the false alarms had, because he was afraid he was missing something.

  Finally he found a happy medium—setting a baseline in the manual for the kind of fluctuations in the local gravitational field that he’d been seeing over the last ten minutes or so, and then revisiting that baseline ten minutes later. Shortly Kit got to the point where he felt confident about glancing at the manual just once every ten minutes or so to make sure that everything was all right. Initially he tended to underestimate the time—it was surprising how long ten minutes could feel while you were waiting for something to go wrong—but finally, around local noon, he got the hang of it enough to start to relax.

  He spent the time on either side of local noon delving into the manual for information on his two watchmates’ homeworlds and people, and finishing the business of going through the readings in the manual that had to do with the Tevaral intervention. The more Kit read, the more there seemed to be—the complexity of a full-on rafting project, the movement of not only a planetary population but as much of its biosphere as possible, was terrifying. There was the preparation of the refuge planet or planets, beginning with terraforming and atmosphere configuration and continuing through the transplantation of the threatened biosphere from the viral and microbial level upwards. Then came the duplication of species-typical infrastructure, from the siting of new cities in relationships as closely matching their old ones as possible to the building of new roads, ports, airports or spaceports.

  The list of tasks to be handled went on and on. The transfer or rebuilding of new economic resources: factories, agriculture, communications. The rafting and preservation of irreplaceable cultural and artistic buildings and artifacts. Culture-specific disaster counseling, weather management and control, mass data archival, political stabilization… No matter how quickly Kit and Nita and all the other humanoid wizards who’d been brought in finished up their emergency work here and went home, the much larger team of Interconnect Project wizards and technicians would be working on this particular relocation for years if not decades to come.

  And this is what Mamvish specializes in, Kit thought. This is what she runs. Not just one or two of these projects: lots of them. The image of Mamvish as a short-tempered saurian kid who turned up on Earth every now and then to trash-talk recalcitrant Komodo dragons had without warning considerably broadened itself out.

  Will we see her, I wonder? Kit thought. It didn’t make sense to expect it. She had to be incredibly busy. And more to the point, even if she’s got time for visiting around, what’re the odds it’ll coincide with any of us Earth-based types being conscious? Tevaral’s day, after all, was thirty-one and a half hours long. This fortunately mapped fairly closely onto the Crossings day of thirty-three hours—a schedule that Kit had occasionally had to come to grips with while on errantry. But for an Earth-human used to a twenty-four hour day, sleep and waking schedules could get pretty messed up after only a few of the thirty-plus-hour cycles. Kit suspected he’d have to adjust his own sleep schedule after four or five days of this, and the others might too.

  At any rate, the length of the Tevaralti day meant that he and Cheleb and Djam were going to be doing more or less ten hours each of gate-monitoring, with ten hours off and ten hours to sleep. Assuming nothing really awful happens that needs us all at once, Kit thought.

  For his own purposes, though, he really hoped this intervention wasn’t going to go on too much longer than Mamvish had predicted… as being on a thirty-hour-or-better schedule for too long wasn’t kind to Earth-human physiologies. You could try to tweak your own body clock with wizardry, but it was delicate work and you usually wound up having to pay for it in more than just your personal energy after you’d tried.

  Energy, Kit thought. Now that I think of it… He got up and stretched, and went back to his puptent with the manual open in one hand for something to drink and a snack. Shortly thereafter he was back in place again with some saltines and the manual spread out again, looking over the information about the refuge planet on which this terminus gate was targeted.

  Hardly had Kit gotten settled when the manual’s messaging pages started to flash. Oh, now what? he thought as he had the incoming-messages page overlay its content on the gate-monitoring array… and then with a grin he saw from the flashing profile that it was Nita. “You’re just now free?” he said. “What’s going on over there?”

  “One of the feeder gates misbehaving,” her voice said from the manual pages. “Started up right during my orientation, which was handy. In a very nasty and unnecessary way. Not what I needed first thing in the morning.” She sounded as if she was still fairly aggrieved. “Or for five or six hours after. How’s your day been so far?”

  “Not bad. Had a couple of hiccups while I was being oriented, but nothing like yours.”

  “Just as well,” Nita said. “Still, my guys were really good with me. They showed me how to ride it out, and at the same time they kept saying, ‘it’s not your fault! You’re doing fine!’” She laughed.

  “Yeah, you’d like mine too,” Kit said. “Both of them. One of them looks like sort of a sly lizard guy who seriously believes in layering, and the other one—” He had to laugh at himself, because he’d caught Djam looking strangely at him a couple of times before Kit realized he’d been staring and cut it out. “He looks like a Wo
okiee.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the fur. And something about his face. But there’s no howling or warbling or anything, just this really cultured accent, like something off the BBC. Anyway, they’re both friendly, and the furry one, Djam, is really easy to work with.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Hard to tell,” Kit said, and flipped some pages in his manual to where Djam’s and Cheleb’s profiles appeared along with his own as this gate’s supervising team. “Uh… ‘Close post-latency’, it says. So…”

  “More or less our age.”

  “I think. Why?”

  He could practically hear her shrugging. “Just curious. The Natih guy here, you remember, Mr. Frilly Dino? He’s pretty old, a thousand years or so our time, but he’s like a little kid some ways.”

  “So a lot like Mamvish, then,” Kit said.

  “Without the tomatoes, yeah.” She laughed. “Though they’ve got some neat food of their own. We were swapping breakfasts this morning and he gave me these sort of, I don’t know, vegetable sticks, and they tasted exactly like salted caramel! I said to him, ‘I can’t believe this, something that tastes like salted caramel that’s actually good for me?’ And he said, all surprised, ‘Wait! Isn’t all the food on your planet that’s good for you nice to eat?’” She laughed a very rueful laugh. “I didn’t know how to even begin explaining broccoli…”

  Nita trailed off. The pause was odd. “Maybe start with cauliflower and work up from there?” Kit said.

  “Um,” Nita said, and Kit knew instantly that it wasn’t a good “um”. “Uh oh, gotta go, I’ll call you later, yeah? Right, bye!”

  And she was gone. Kit broke out in a sweat as he tapped on the manual page again. It said only, On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading…