by Diane Duane
Outside the portal Djam said, “Kiht?”
Kit wasn’t sure how well Djam could hear him when he was in here; he went to the portal interface and stuck his head out. “What?”
“I’ve got a physical thing I have to handle before I settle in… could you take the throne for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” Kit said, grabbing his manual just in case Djam’s interface gave him some kind of trouble reading what was going on with the gate array. He grabbed a jacket, too, and slung it around his shoulders. Physical things, yeah, that’s definitely another issue. I need to find out what Ronan’s doing about that: maybe I can duplicate his solution here, or use whatever facilities he’s turned up. Don’t want to cause some kind of local sanitation incident…
He summoned his spark of wizard-light again to light his way and headed back to the throne. It was empty: Djam had taken his interface with him. He’s dead serious about this, Kit thought. Always good to see…
Kit parked himself on the throne and laid the manual down beside him, open to the array page. As far as the inner workings of the gating complex went, all was quiet over there. His gaze drifted out to the complex itself, bright under its hovering antigrav lights. The scene over there was the same as at any time since he’d come: the same dark flow of Tevaralti crowds in through the feeder gates, out through the terminus gate, waves and waves of people. And far less distinct, between the gate complex and the stone circle, there lay the great gathering of thousands of Tevaralti who would not pass the gates, the shadow of their presence starred with their tiny sphere-in-cube electronic campfires, the lights twinkling as fitfully as stars as people moved among them. Thesba had risen bloated in the east and was climbing the sky, golden and dull fire-red. Its light touched faintly on the Tevaralti camped beyond the glare of the gating complex, a sullen dim glow red as blood.
Kit shook his head as the wind rose and hissed in the grass around him. In the face of what lay before him, all the afternoon’s good cheer was fading to something thin and pale. He hunched his shoulders inside his jacket and sighed. Beside him, on the stone, the bar graphs illustrating the power levels of the gates rose and fell, rose and fell again, beating like small hearts. But it won’t last, Kit thought. Sooner or later these people will say, It doesn’t matter what you do, we’re not leaving: you can turn them all off now. Sooner or later the hearts will stop. His gaze drifted up to Thesba again. And I really hate that—
That was when he heard the rustling noise.
Suddenly, here by himself, alone in the dark, Kit remembered what Ronan had been saying about apex predators. Now why haven’t I looked into that? he thought, reaching behind him for the antenna-wand, as much as a security blanket-equivalent as anything else. This wand and its near-identical predecessors were more than mere channels for the power Kit funneled into his spells: they were noon-forged steel, with their own potency—formidable weapons in their own right. For the moment, though, Kit stood up and concentrated on staying still while he waited to discover which way he was likely to wind up using the wand in the next few minutes.
His breathing sped up, but he held still and waited. And slowly, in a rustle of slithery motion under the dim golden-red light that lay over the plain, glinting with eyes and curling with tentacles, the sibik came crawling along from between two of the standing stones and crouched down against the ground, staring at Kit with every eye it had on the back of its big baggy body.
This was a different one from the sibik he’d laughingly pulled off Ronan’s leg: much bigger, more like the size of a large dog than a rabbit, and darker in color—a vague soft patchwork of cobalt and jade. Kit found himself thinking about the sibik that Djam had told him about, the one that bit him before starting to try to pull his fur out. He knew perfectly well that he could keep this one from hurting him… even kill it, if necessary. He’d killed much more dangerous things in his time, when he’d had to. But in his mind’s eye Kit kept seeing the smaller sibik from earlier, the stubborn, hungry, near-comical one, and the idea of doing anything terminal to any of them felt very unpleasant.
So there Kit stood for a few seconds, and there the sibik sat, or crouched, or lay, its tentacles twitching a bit as it looked at him.
It made a surprisingly small hissing grunt at him, for something of its size. At least that was what the sound was like, when it came out: but Kit’s understanding of the Speech rendered this as words.
“Hello help?”
Well, that’s unusual, Kit thought. “Dai stihó, cousin," he said to the sibik. “How can I help?”
The sibik lay there looking at him with all those eyes, and then said, “Want?”
Does it mean it didn’t understand me, or does it think I know what it wants? Kit couldn’t be sure. “Cousin,” he said in the Speech, “tell me what you need.”
It just looked at him.
Maybe I didn’t phrase that right. Or something. “What can I do for you?” Kit said.
The sibik rustled. “Salt flat,” it said.
What? Kit said. His second thought was, Wait. First things first. “What should I call you, cousin?”
“Sibik.”
“Yeah, I know that’s what you’re all called, but what should I call you?”
“Sibik.”
“So it’s a personal name as well as a species one?” Kit said. “Okay.” Kit had discovered over time that that approach wasn’t so uncommon among animals. “I’m Kit.”
“Kt,” the sibik said, turning it into a sound like someone snapping a pencil in two.
“Fine. Now what did you want again?”
“Salt flat.”
Kit scratched his head and thought about that. I haven’t really looked into the local terrain that much, he thought. This is all grassland, as far as I can tell, for miles. At least if there were any salt flats in the neighborhood, they struck Kit as very well concealed. “I'm, uh, I’m not sure what you're asking me for.”
The sibik edged just slightly closer, watching Kit carefully, holding its abdomen up so that all the eyes on it were positioned to see Kit clearly. When it spoke again, it did so quite slowly, as if speaking to someone it considered somewhat simple. “Salt,” it said, “flat.”
Kit stood there a moment with his hands on his hips. “Okay,” he said, “I really have no idea what you—” And then his eye fell on something near to where he was standing: a bit of cellophane, a scrap of the wrapping from his saltines that he’d missed when he was tidying up.
“I get it,” Kit said, and laughed. “Sorry, it’s been a long day. You want a cracker.”
“Cracker!” the big sibik said, and rustled closer still, a few of its tentacles waving in the air.
“Sorry, I took longer than I thought,” Djam said from behind Kit, “but after I was finished I had to—” He paused, his glance going from Kit to what was watching him from a yard or so away.
“It’s all right,” Kit said. “Word seems to have got around that the food here is good.”
“Well,” Djam said, coming around slowly to sit on the Stone Throne, “we did give them a fair amount of stuff the other night.”
“No, he’s after my saltines,” Kit muttered, and stood there rubbing his forehead for a moment. “Because I promised, didn’t I…”
The sibik simply looked up at him and said, quite distinctly, “Cracker.”
“Djam, would you do me a favor?” Kit said. “Go in my puptent and off on the right hand side you’ll see a bunch of strange-shaped containers off by themselves. On top of those there’s a clear-wrapped package with a few of those crackers left in it…”
“One moment,” Djam said, and went off.
“How did you find out about the ‘salt flats?’” Kit said to the sibik.
It tilted its abdomen slightly so that it was regarding him from a slightly different angle. “Knew,” the sibik said.
That told Kit nothing of any real use. “Did you meet the sibik who was here before?”
The big sibik tilted its
belly even further forward, angling more eyes toward Kit. “Smelled,” it said after a moment. “Smelled it.”
So maybe somehow that information was encoded in the scent trail the other one left? Kit thought. How would that even work? Yet it wouldn’t surprise him. Over the past few years he’d run into a lot of impossible-seeming situations and events that nonetheless turned out to be completely possible. Sometimes fatally so… sometimes marvelously.
“Here,” Djam said, returning with the almost-finished cracker package. Kit took it from him and took one out of the package, showed it to the sibik.
“Cracker,” it said in the pleased but still impatient tone of voice of someone seeing the dinner they’d ordered finally being brought to the table after an annoying delay.
“Right,” Kit said. He got down on one knee and held out the saltine. The sibik started making grabby tentacles at it, though it was also holding back from Kit as if it thought he might do something sudden.
“It’s all right, cousin,” Kit said. “Come on, take it. I won’t bite.”
One tentacle more daring than the rest reached out to Kit’s hand and very slowly and carefully wound itself around the saltine: then yanked it away. The sibik’s tentacles parted a bit in the front, and Kit saw where there was a sort of stoma behind them, with a rosette of little hard-looking dark brown plates, each one shaped more or less like the business end of a flat-head screwdriver. The tentacle guided the saltine toward the rosette of plate-teeth, which very delicately nipped at the corner of the saltine. Then, apparently satisfied that the flavor matched what it had somehow or other been expecting, the rest of it vanished straight inside. Much munching and crunching ensued, without a single crumb escaping.
Then the sibik looked pointedly at Kit, wiggling its abdomen. “More?”
“Well, I know this drill,” Kit said under his breath, and pulled out another saltine. “I wonder if I could teach you tricks?”
“More,” said the sibik, sounding unimpressed and grabbing with its longest tentacle at the cracker Kit was holding.
“Yeah, more, right,” Kit said, letting the sibik take the saltine from him and dispose of it the same way the first one had gone.
Djam, behind him, was watching this in amusement. “You're going to become very popular if this becomes a regular event,” he said, bubbling.
“I think it’s too late,” Kit said. “I’m popular already.” He shook his head. “This guy, though… he’s so much bigger than the other one. Easily three times its size. You said the domesticated sibiks come over here following the wild ones’ scent trails… Is this a domestic one? Somebody’s pet?”
Djam held his hands up. “Kiht, I have no idea.”
“I can see I’m going to be doing some research tomorrow,” Kit said as the sibik pushed itself closer to get a better look at the remaining two crackers in the package. Kit pulled out the third one, held it out. It was promptly snatched away and munched up. “Cheleb said there were a lot of different species of these. Might as well know what I’m dealing with…”
“More!” said the sibik.
“More what?” Kit said, pulling out the last saltine.
“More cracker!”
“Think we’re gonna need some education on what the magic words are, too,” Kit muttered. He handed the eagerly-grabbing tentacle the final saltine. The sibik stuffed it away, then lifted its abdomen to fix all its available eyes on Kit to see where the next one was. In response, Kit found himself doing exactly what he would've done with Ponch in these circumstances. He showed the sibik his hands, first the palms and then the backs, to demonstrate that there weren’t any more saltines being hidden from it.
“More cracker?” the sibik said, sounding mournful.
“All gone, buddy,” Kit said. “No more tonight.”
“No more cracker?”
“Nope. Sorry, big guy.”
The sibik gave Kit a seriously disappointed look from its many eyes. “Gone…” it said, and then slithered itself away between the standing stones and out into the darkness, where it vanished.
“Well,” Djam said, “that was unusual…”
“I guess,” Kit said, standing up and dusting a few crumbs off himself. “You okay, now? How’re the gates?”
“They’re fine,” Djam said. “Seriously, after you and Cheleb worked them over, they’ve been a lot quieter. It’d be nice if this was a trend.”
“We’ll see,” Kit said, and yawned. “Wow, I’m sorry. Have a quiet shift, kehrutheh, I’ll see you in the morning…”
“Right, Kiht. Rest well.”
Kit made his way back to his puptent and sealed it up behind him, waving the soft interior glow down. All of a sudden, now that he was by himself and off duty, he felt woozy with being up later than he should have. But Kit wouldn’t have traded the weariness for being more rested: he was feeling the strangeness of being here a lot less than he had last night.
He got undressed and crawled under the covers of his air bed, then grabbed for his manual and flipped it open to Nita’s profile page. “You still up?”
“Uhh,” the answer came back a moment later. “Just falling asleep. Are you done with whatever? The manual said you were busy.”
“There was a lot going on,” Kit said. “And then I was feeding an alien octopus.”
There was a pause at the other end. “I know that really ought to mean something,” Nita said, “and it doesn’t right now. At all. Tell me in the morning?”
“First thing.”
“Thanks,” she said, and her profile grayed out as the contact closed down.
Kit yawned and let his head thump back against the pillow. It felt ridiculously good to be horizontal, felt like he’d been waiting years for it. Busy day, he thought. That’s all. Same again tomorrow, probably.
And just as he was dozing off, he remembered one more thing he had to do. He felt around under his pillow for his phone and pulled it out, bringing up his pop’s profile.
LONG DAY TODAY, he typed. GOT TO DO SOME GOOD WIZARDRY, SEEMS I’M GOING TO BE USEFUL HERE. ONLY THING I’M REGRETTING IS THAT I DIDN’T BRING MORE SALTINES. HAVE A FEELING I’M GOING TO RUN OUT SOONER THAN I THOUGHT. LOVE YOU BOTH. NIGHT.
SIX
Friday
When Kit woke up the next morning, it happened exactly the way it did at home when things were going normally: his eyes snapped open five minutes before the alarm went off. It’d be really great if this meant that I’d already made the change to this time zone, this schedule, he thought. But it was too soon to tell.
He stretched under the covers, pleased; he had a couple of hours to go before he was due on shift. However, the moment Kit got out of bed, the resolution he’d made the day before to speak to Ronan about sanitary arrangements asserted itself at full strength. He grabbed for his manual, flipped it open, found Ronan’s profile page, and tapped on it. “Ro?”
“You’re up early,” said the voice from the page.
“Not half as early as I wish I’d been. I forgot to ask you yesterday—do you have anything like a toilet over there?”
“Feck yeah, we’re in the middle of town here and they’ve got all the amenities laid on.”
“Can I come over real quick and use what you’ve got? I hate to keep just taking leaks in the grass over here—I’d rather my shiftmates didn’t accidentally walk into a wet spot. And as for anything else—”
“Say no more,” Ronan said hastily. “Just get to the pad and have it seek on my coordinates. I’ll meet you at my end.”
Kit was in enough of a rush that he did no more than pull on a hoodie and the same jeans he’d worn yesterday and go jogging straight out to the local-transport pad, waving at the still-enthroned Djam in passing. Everything he’d drunk before going to bed last night was now incredibly eager to be recycled, and as a result he paid precious little attention to the gleaming urban landscape in which he appeared a few moments later—a broad plaza surrounded by sleek and shining buildings five or ten stories ta
ll. Fortunately, Ronan was right there waiting for him, as promised, all in his everyday black jeans and sweatshirt and parka among many humanoids and Tevaralti much more brightly dressed, or at least feathered. “Right this way,” Ronan said, and led Kit through the ground floor entrance into one of the nearby buildings.
Ronan pointed off to one side of the broad bright entry hall. “Straight through that door,” he said. “They’ve got the same plumbing as we have, and the same way of handling it. And some forward-looking cousin had them put a sonic shower in there for us unfeathered types, if you feel the need.”
“If!”
Half an hour later Kit was out in the plaza again, much relieved in a number of ways, and his skin tingling hard due to underestimating the assertiveness of the “scrub” setting on the shower. For a few minutes he stood there in bright sunlight watching the crowds of Tevaralti heading out of Ronan’s feeder gates and into the larger, waiting downstream portal. These crowds might be smaller than those at his own gate, but all around him Kit could feel the same sense of urgency and sorrow: and here too, off to one side, a group of Tevaralti maybe a couple of thousand strong was gathered around various temporary-looking structures, watching the others go.
“We don’t really need to be watching them,” said Ronan’s voice from beside him, “I know that. But I don’t seem able to stop either.” And he handed Kit a cellophane-wrapped croissant and a small plastic cup that Kit realized was full of espresso.
Kit stared into the cup. “Where are you getting this?”
“When we were over for the Christmas party your mama showed me the capsule-coffee machine she was giving your pop,” Ronan said. “Cute wee thing. Got one for myself in the January sales. I like espresso.” He knocked back the contents of the cup he was holding, crumpled the cup up and shoved it in his pocket.
“You’d better have made me one,” came a familiar voice from not too far away. “Especially after I gave you half the sugar I brought and saved your butt.”
Ronan was snickering and reaching into his otherspace pocket before Nita, newly appeared on the single-transport pad, could get over to them. “Eat your croissant before she takes it off you, she’s mad for these,” he said to Kit under his breath. “So I forgot my sugar,” Ronan said, raising his voice again. “I’m busy trying to save a species here. What about those doughnuts you’re trading me?”