Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  This was getting a bit beyond Kit. Kernel theory was more Nita’s specialty, and even at her level of study—which in her more frustrated moods she described as “well-meaning but clueless beginner”—she tended to lose him when she started talking kernel business. “So you really think this is why so many of the Tevaralti don’t want to leave?”

  “It could very well be,” Mamvish said, and blew out a breath. “But without being sure, there’s no way we can safely do anything about it. Now there’s no time to be sure. And even if we were sure… it’s not like this is something one would dare try to operate on from outside. It’s far too dangerous, especially at a crisis time like this. Assuming we knew for certain that this was what was going on with the Tevaralti kernel, not even their Planetary would willingly touch the problem without extended study. And by that time…” She angled her head toward the lowering glow of Thesba, now half-set and only partially visible through the blowing clouds.

  “Yeah,” Kit muttered.

  “Best we concentrate on handling the problem we can handle,” Mamvish said. “Though it’s so frustrating…”

  She sighed, sounding somewhat downhearted. I wish there was something I could do to make her feel better… Kit thought

  But then something occurred to him. “Mamvish,” Kit said, “I’ve got something for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It’s back in my puptent.” He got up to walk back. “I’ll go get it. Just wait here—”

  “What in the worlds for?” she said, levering herself up again on all those legs, her hide suddenly running blue-hot with Speech-characters.

  And between one blink and the next the two of them were standing behind the stone circle. Kit shook his head and laughed. “You are so smooth when you do that,” he said. “Just wait here, I’ll get the thing.”

  It only took him a few moments in his puptent to find it. She might as well have it, Kit thought, because at this rate there won’t be enough saltines to use much of it on. And if I’m right about this…

  He popped out again and trotted back through the circle to her, holding out a plastic bottle for her to examine. “Here,” Kit said, “I thought maybe you might like this.”

  Mamvish rotated that eye at it curiously, then sniffed. And that eye suddenly fixed on the red container with its white label with much, much more interest. “What… Wait. This smells like…” She blinked at him. “Is this made… of tomatoes?”

  “Well, yeah. A lot of ketchup is.” Originally he’d thought all of it was, but his Mama had started pulling down cookbooks to set him straight on the concept. Apparently tomato ketchup was a relatively recent development.

  “And this is… for me?”

  “Well, yeah, Mam, why not?”

  She stamped all her feet in sequence in what Kit realized from the sunny yellow of the Speech-characters suddenly roiling under her hide was a gesture of flummoxed delight. “Why are you all so good to me?!”

  Kit had to laugh. “Well, why wouldn’t we be?” And then the laugh turned rueful. “You do so much, you work so hard… I have a feeling people don’t say thank you to you enough.”

  “The Powers thank me,” Mamvish said. “The work thanks me. That’s as it should be.”

  “Yeah,” Kit said, “but other people should do it too. A lot more. So… Here. You want to try some?”

  “Do you think I should?” The barely-repressed excitement in her voice made her sound like a kid who’d been invited to open presents early on Christmas.

  “Sure,” Kit said. And then, looking at the bottle in his hand and turning it over to look at the back label, he paused. “Then again, it’s not pure tomatoes. Might be smart if you checked the other ingredients. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they put in our food…”

  “Well, naturally.”

  “Okay, let me talk these out…” Kit pulled out his manual, paged through it to one of the active analysis pages, and laid the ketchup bottle on top of the page. Immediately the various molecules and compounds involved in the ketchup began laying themselves out in structural form just above the ground around them, a bright spill of glowing stick-and-ball structures. “So that complex over there,” Kit said pointing at one of these while he read down the text readout on the page, “that’s the tomatoes. It’s a concentrate—they render them down first. Then this is the vinegar—”

  “Is there a generic name?”

  “Oh, yeah. Acetic acid. Then the salt—that’s sodium chloride—”

  “A fair amount of it in there.”

  “Yeah, you should hear my mama about it. The people who make these prepared foods use it as a flavor enhancer. Kind of overuse it, actually. Is that okay for you?”

  Mamvish waved her tail around. “It’s all right, I can instruct my metabolism to pay extra attention to it on the way through. It won’t cause any trouble.”

  “Okay. And then these—” Kit waved his hand at another series of compounds. “They’ve just said ‘natural flavorings’ here, I think to keep their competition from finding out what they put in this stuff to make it taste the way it does. They’re all vegetable extracts, looks like. “

  “Those all look fine,” Mamvish said. “And then this one—”

  “Onion powder,” Kit said. “An onion’s a vegetable too, kind of a sharp flavored one. This thing,” and he pointed at another molecule—a couple of benzene rings with various hydrocarbons hanging off them—“this is a sweetener, it replaces one that has more calories.” He squinted at the manual. “One, six-dichloro, one, six-di-deoxy… whatever! The short name’s sucralose. And this last one, ‘spices’, that’s the company who made this getting all secretive again. Looks like there’s paprika in it, that comes from another vegetable—”

  “Kit.”

  “And this one’s harder to be sure about, but I think it’s—”

  “Kit.”

  He looked at her, concerned by Mamvish’s tone, which was both alarmed and somehow strangely surprised. “That one,” she said. “The sweetener, you called it—”

  Oh no, don’t tell me she’s allergic! “Here,” Kit said, and squinted at the manual for a moment as he worked out how to get it to display the molecule in a higher level of detail.

  The molecule spread itself out across the ground around them, and Mamvish turned in a slow circle and stared at the diagram. “Oh my,” she said. “Your world. Your world…!”

  “Uh, look, this isn’t the regular kind,” Kit said, turning the squeeze bottle over with some annoyance. “My Mama started getting it because they put this fructose syrup in the regular ketchup. And she’s really annoyed about that stuff, it’s like the food makers in our part of the world put it in everything. I can get you some that doesn’t have the sucralose in it—”

  “What? No!!”

  Mamvish was shaking all over, and only Kit’s ability to read her skin colors—now swirling with violet and pink—told him that the emotion underneath the shaking was delight: she was aglow with it. “I can’t believe it,” Mamvish murmured. “How could it possibly have gotten any better? Except this way. It’s absolutely true what they say, that what the Powers have made, what they keep on making, is not only more amazing than you imagine but more amazing than you can imagine—”

  “Um, okay,” Kit said.

  She was turning her head from side to side so she could take turns staring at some parts of the diagram with alternate eyes. “Seriously, you put this in food? Truly yours is a planet of wonders! If it wasn’t for the bloody Idiot Dragons of the South Sea, it would be a perfect place, perfect beyond any possible belief…”

  Kit didn’t quite have the heart right now to disillusion her. “Okay,” he said again. “So this molecule is all right with you?”

  Mamvish looked at him in astonishment. “Absolutely! Oh, Kit, you are my thelef’ indeed! Can I really take this with me?”

  “That’s what it’s for,” Kit said.

  “And you’re sure you don’t need it for… other p
urposes?”

  The look she trained on Kit as she said that gave him a whole new meaning for the term “side-eye”.

  “Uh,” he said, none too sure of where this was going. “…I put it on crackers.”

  The goggliness of the eye on that side got, if anything, more goggly. “Yeah, I know, it’s kind of weird,” Kit said. “I did it accidentally when I was little and I started to like it, and every now and then I get the urge again. It’s a comfort thing for me, kind of.”

  “‘Crackers,’” Mamvish said.

  “Yeah, I know, it’s not what you’re usually supposed to use it on, but I kind of—”

  “And crackers are… a portion of your anatomy?”

  Kit stopped dead. “What?”

  Mamvish’s underhide started swirling with all kinds of hasty, crowded Speech-text in all kinds of colors, to the point where she started looking like an unnerved mobile fireworks display. “Oh please don’t take offense, I mean, you’ll have to forgive me but I haven’t really had time to look into, you know, these subjects, in enough depth… and the manual functions suggest that Earth humans have this whole range of unusual names for reproduction-associated organs, really so unlikely-sounding, some of them, and I do understand that this gets into the territory of privacy issues, and I…”

  “Mamvish,” Kit said, and started to laugh. Ronan, and then Cheleb, and now this… what is this, Tevaral Planetary Innuendo Day or something? “No. Crackers are not part of my anatomy. Anybody’s anatomy. It’s okay, they’re just food.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely sure.” He stopped laughing, but it wasn’t easy.

  “Oh,” Mamvish said.

  “So why would you be thinking that crackers had anything to do with… what you were thinking about?”

  “Um…” Mamvish shuffled her feet.

  This is so funny, but no one will ever believe me if I tell them about it. And somehow I don’t think I should. “Mamvish,” Kit said, trying to sound firm, “if you don’t tell me exactly what the sucralose does, I’m going to get really frustrated here. …And not in that sense.” It seemed smart to add that.

  “Oh,” Mamvish said. “Well. There are certain reproductive events in my species that the compound would very much…” She trailed off, sounding both embarrassed and anticipatory. “Enhance.”

  Kit rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Oooookay,” he said. I have to keep reminding myself: as wizards go, she’s young, really young. And also incredibly smart and powerful. Neither of which necessarily answers the question, how mature is she? Reproductively speaking. However she does that. Because however we have it wired up on Earth, she’s not from Earth…

  Suddenly Kit’s life seemed more than usually surreal. I’m two thousand light years from home, standing around in a field on a doomed planet in the middle of the night, trying to discuss saurian sex. Or trying not to discuss it. And I’m not sure which is worse.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me any more about this just now,” Kit said. “I mean…”

  “It’s late for you—”

  “Yeah. But look, I’m glad you like it, okay? I thought it was mostly the tomatoes that’d be interesting.”

  “Oh, they are. To have that compound… associated with tomatoes…” Mamvish was absolutely gleeful. “When the right time comes I’m going to be so very popular.”

  “Uh, that’s good then,” Kit said. “Good.”

  “Just for my own information, though… what exactly is a cracker? So I don’t make that mistake again.”

  Kit chuckled and got his manual to show her a view of the inside of his puptent, then zeroed in on one of the remaining open packages.

  “Oh,” she said, peering at the manual with the eye on that side. “It doesn’t look like much. What’re those crystals?”

  “Salt.”

  “More of the sodium chloride?” she said, bemused. “Your kind seem really fond of this stuff.”

  “Well, we do need it, it’s an electrolyte thing. But sometimes we like too much of it. Or so my mama keeps saying.”

  Mamvish rolled her eyes. “Egg-dams,” she said. “Always fretting. I swear, they all go to the same school.”

  The image of Kit’s Mama and Mamvish’s dam going to the same school to learn how to fret professionally made Kit burst out laughing again. It was surprising how good it felt.

  But then Mamvish’s head went up. “Ah me,” she said, “they’re paging me. Kit, I have to go back up there and continue explaining to Thesba why it isn’t allowed to fall apart just yet.”

  “Just yet,” Kit said. There was a question he was nervous about asking.

  She gave him a weary look. “How long will it take once we take the restraint wizardries off,” she said, “is that what you’re wondering?”

  Kit nodded. “Yeah.”

  Her underhide colors went quite somber. “Not very long,” she said. “When you repeatedly enact wizardries that restrain a natural process from occurring, the reaction when the restraint is removed can be significantly increased. If there was going to be no one here, the result would be interesting to watch for scientific purposes. As it is…” She swung her tail slowly from side to side. “We will watch, of course. We must watch; we’re responsible for the outcome here. But as for it being exciting, or pleasant, under the circumstances…”

  “I know,” Kit said. “Look, get going. But thanks for coming all this way to see me!”

  “Thelef’,” Mamvish said, “if not you, then who? Especially now.” She dropped her jaw in a grin, levitated the squeeze bottle up into a suddenly-open otherspace pocket, and vanished it. “Later—!”

  And she was gone.

  Kit stood there for a while after her departure, still with his back turned to the gate complex and the stone circle, letting the strangely-scented wind ruffle his hair in the near-darkness and cool him down again. He was definitely tired enough to sleep now: it seemed likely that he might be able to grab at least a few hours before he had to go on shift. I’m going to be sort of wired when people start turning up for this picnic or whatever we’re having, but I guess for that there’s always that canned cappuccino. Good thing I brought a lot of it…

  He stood quiet and let the wind whisper. It wasn’t as strong as it had been earlier. Morning’s coming, Kit thought. There wasn’t a lot of sign of it just yet: the latitude here was close enough to Tevaral’s equator that morning and night seemed to come very suddenly by comparison with the slower twilights of Kit’s latitude on Earth. The cloud overhead had thickened, so that everything above was shut away. All the plain before Kit was drowned in a strange slowly-lightening half-gloom, in which nothing was certain. Even looking down at his own hands in that light they looked indefinite, almost insubstantial.

  Kit laughed down his nose at himself and turned to go back to the circle and his puptent.… and stopped.

  Something was standing there, between him and the circle and just four or five meters away, looking at him.

  A hot-cold wave of adrenaline ran through Kit’s body at the sight of it. His first impulse was to reach for his back pocket, where his wand normally rode when he was bothering to carry it. But it wasn’t there, and whatever was standing and watching him… just stood there and kept watching.

  It was astonishing how hard it was to see whatever was examining him. Yet Kit knew right down to his bones that his inability to clearly make out any details about the being looking at him had nothing at all to do with the lighting. And though he wanted to see clearly, his eyes were flatly refusing to do so. He could make out an upright shape, longer than it was wide, broader in its top half than its bottom. But beyond that—

  Kit blinked, rubbed his eyes. His vision didn’t improve. Past the being who watched him, the stones of the circle were perfectly clear, silhouetted by the soft light of the electric campfire that Djam had brought out with him. But the being itself remained a mere tangle of shadow in an upright shape. And not even that, Kit thought. Shadow would be mor
e definite than this.

  He couldn’t think what else to do, so Kit simply said, “Dai stihó. I’m on errantry, and I greet you.”

  The tangle of indefinite there-ness regarded him.

  “Mamvish was here,” it said.

  There was something extremely peculiar about its voice, or rather, about the way it used the Speech. It wasn’t that the phrasing was in any way unusual. But the sound of the words themselves seemed to strike Kit’s ear differently, as if there was a great deal of meaning underneath the bare statement that was somehow being held in reserve. And the voice seemed somehow almost to be coming out of the ground—a mineral sort of voice, seemingly having nothing to do with sound-producing organs or air. The whole effect was incredibly unnerving.

  Still, no point in just standing here being unnerved, Kit thought. “Yes, she was,” he said. And as he spoke he suddenly remembered the group of people from the three other Temal species that he’d seen while he and the rest of the inbound group had been passing through the Crossings. Kit was now sure, without knowing exactly how, that this was a member of the remaining Temal species, the one for whom there was no name but “Fourth”.

  “When?” the Fourth said.

  The sound of the voice left Kit shivering, though he had no idea why. It wasn’t as if he felt threatened by the being. It was strange, yes, but he’d experienced a lot of strange since his Ordeal. This, though—this was different, somehow. And he couldn’t even describe to himself exactly how, which made matters worse.