Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  She stretched again, lacing her fingers together behind her head. “So what’s the plan for tonight?”

  “I think everybody just comes over starting around sunset,” Kit said. “The general idea seems to be that everybody should bring food and drinks, and we’ll set up a buffet, and sit around and talk and maybe watch some video. Also, possibly, have a campfire—a real campfire, not one of these electronic things. One of my shiftmates is all excited… hae thinks this is going to be a genuine Earth togetherness ceremonial.” He grinned: he could still see the excitement on Cheleb’s face. “Hae asked me if there were special clothes hae had to wear. I said ‘no, this is a come as you are thing’. And hae got incredibly excited and started spouting a whole bunch of really serious and deep stuff about the revelation of true selves and I don’t know what else.” Kit had to laugh. “You have to watch out for Cheleb. Hae’s got a little trouble with idiom…”

  “Okay,” Nita said, straightening up. “Tell me what kind of food you want me to bring, and then I’m going to throw you out of here. Bobo advises me that the number three gate is about to get goofy again, and I have to remind it who’s running this show…”

  It took longer than an hour for her to throw him out, but it was an enjoyable hour, as simply having him there apparently greatly increased Nita’s confidence in gate handling. Or maybe it just makes her feel more aggressive and more like showing off, Kit thought. Either way, the gate that had been giving her trouble calmed itself down in fairly short order. And if it felt me looking over her shoulder, Kit thought, grimly amused, and that look was really dirty, well, this isn’t about how she feels, or how I feel. It’s about making sure all these people get out of here safely…

  Shortly after that, her Natih frilly-dinosaur shiftmate turned up, and he and Kit got into a friendly but somewhat strange discussion about what humans sometimes did over campfires, and the possibility that barbecue was a sign of moral decay. “Beautiful, raw meat like the One intended,” Mr. Frilly cried, gesticulating wildly with his claws and wriggling his whole, beautifully tiger-striped body and shaking his neck-frill and snapping his long, sharp jaws, “what sacrilege is this, to set it on fire?!” It occurred to Kit that here was somebody who would get even more overexcited than his mama—who was one of the “when I stick a fork in it I want to see it bleed” persuasion—about a steak being overdone. He grinned. They have got to meet…

  Eventually Kit and Mr. Frilly—whose name Kit kept mangling until he begged to be allowed to use the nickname—agreed that their cultural differences could and should for the time being be set aside in the name of interstellar amity, and pending further discussion over drinks that evening. Kit caught himself rubbing his eyes again at that point, so he said to Nita, “I’ve got kind of a free day because of the excitement last night, so I think I’m going to go back and have a nap so later on I don’t fall asleep in the buffet.”

  Nita was presently standing with arms akimbo, deep in an increasingly assertive three-way conversation involving herself, Bobo, and one of the feeder gates that she hadn’t previously disciplined but was about to show the error of its ways. She just nodded at Kit and reached out with one arm to squeeze him around the waist, bumping hips with him while looking off into the distance like someone preparing to tell off the party at the other end of a mobile call. “Sunset?” she said to him.

  “Or just after,” Kit said.

  She gave him a thumbs up and went back to staring into space. “Now listen to me—” she said, in that tone of voice that Kit had learned over time meant that what you absolutely needed to do, if you had any brains at all or any desire for a quiet life, was listen to her. Kit grinned, waved at her and Mr. Frilly, who was leaning over her shoulder and giving her advice, and took himself back to the short-jump transport pad.

  A few moments later he was walking back into the stone circle in early afternoon light. Cheleb was sitting there watching streaming video on one levitating screen and monitoring the gates on another. “Everything behaving itself?” Kit said, pausing by the gate monitors.

  “Perfectly quiet,” Cheleb said. “Planning to get more rest?”

  “Does it show that much?” Kit said, yawning.

  Cheleb gave him an amused look. “Postural, mostly. Djam doing the same. Go on! Will get you up before sunset.”

  “No, it’s okay, I’ll tell my manual to handle it.”

  “As pleases you.” Cheleb reached out to touch some control on the streaming-video screen. “One thing before you go: watching some Earth children’s entertainment. Amazing your people make it past latency, considering lurking developmental challenges.”

  “Oh?” Kit peered around the edge of the floating screen and saw that the image there was paused on the title frame of A Nightmare On Elm Street.

  “Most resilient species, your people,” Cheleb said. “No wonder have been invaded so rarely.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Kit said, and went to take his nap before he started finding out anything else he didn’t want to know.

  By sunset Kit had had enough of a nap to leave him feeling energized again, and he came out of his puptent to find Cheleb and the newly awakened Djam setting up the Stone Throne as a food service area and laying out their own contributions to the buffet. Kit snagged himself a plastic cup of the blue “milk” and had a look at the gate-monitoring chart matrix, which Cheleb had used haes wizardry to embed into the back of the Stone Throne so that everyone could see it without trouble.

  All the gates were running perfectly. Kit paused by Cheleb when hae was checking over the display; the streaming video screen was blank for the moment. “Finished with Freddy?”

  “Oh yes,” Cheleb said. “Following some other lines of investigation now. When you have a moment, need a context-positive explication of Plan Nine From Outer Space.”

  Kit spluttered into his sekoldra juice. What have I done! “You’re such a culture junkie,” was all he could say, and went off hurriedly to get some paper plates from his puptent.

  Quite shortly people started wandering in from the short-transport pad—Ronan, levitating a deck chair behind him, along with a cooler full of assorted bottles: Dairine, with Spot behind her and toting a couple of Safeway bags full of sandwich makings and assorted junk food; and finally Nita, changed into a flowery blue minidress and leggings and flats, in company with Mr. Frilly, and also carrying some small bags the contents of which weren’t immediately obvious. Everyone gathered in around the “buffet” and started peppering Cheleb and Djam with questions about the food they’d brought, and nabbing the best bits of the Earth food for themselves.

  The talk became very eclectic very quickly, but Kit noticed how for the time being at least conversation seemed to be avoiding anything to do with the reason they were all here. For the time being, that suited Kit fine. People sat down on the chairs they’d brought themselves, or on the bits of the Stone Throne that weren’t occupied by food or other people, and ate and drank and talked while the evening grew darker around them.

  Djam and Ronan were in the middle of a lively discussion of whether anybody in their right mind should bother watching the three prequel movies of the series he and Kit and Cheleb had just finished—Ronan holding down the “Hell No” position quite strongly, and referring particularly to the first one as ‘a steaming heap of shite’—when a voice from the darkness said, “Well, I know opinion’s divided on that one, but don’t you think that’s a tad harsh?”

  Heads snapped up all around the stone circle. “Tom?”

  Kit was surprised to see Tom, normally very much the suburban polo-shirt-and-chinos type, come wandering in out of the dark in clothes more like Ronan’s than anything else: dark parka, black jeans, hiking boots, with a long dark slender something over his shoulder, hard to see by only the light of the electric campfire. Ronan looked him up and down in mild approbation. “Going stealthy tonight while you check up on the troops?”

  “Worked pretty well for Henry the Fifth,” Tom said. “Just passin
g through: I’ve got a fair number of people to check on tonight. But I heard rumors of what was going on over here, and Carl sent me to see how the potato salad was.”

  “That green stuff’s as close as you’re getting,” Dairine said, pointing at a bowl of one of Djam’s vegetarian goodies. “Kind of spicy. If you like wasabi, you’ll be okay…”

  “Sounds lovely. May I?”

  “Please, Supervisory,” Djam said, “anything you like!”

  Shortly Tom was sitting down with a paper plate and digging in, having put down what he was carrying when he arrived. “Is that a wand I see?” Ronan said. “Would’ve thought you were above that kind of thing, the age you are.”

  “Yeah, and it looks just like… a magic wand,” Dairine said in a tone halfway between mystification and scorn. But she had a point. It looked like the classic stage magician’s wand, black with a white tip, though considerably longer than usual.

  Tom picked it up and held it out for her. Hesitantly, Dairine took it. “Present from a friend,” Tom said. “Don’t scratch the finish.”

  “I thought that wasn’t allowed,” Kit said. “Doesn’t everybody have to make their own wand? And from donated material?”

  “There are exceptions to the rule,” Tom said as Dairine handed the wand back. “Certain heirloom wands are exempt. Happens this is one.” He put his plate down, braced the wand end-to-end between his hands, then collapsed it between his hands and vanished it.

  “Snazzy,” Ronan said.

  “And you’ve been doing what?” Dairine said. “Besides checking up on us.”

  “Same as you,” Tom said, rubbing his legs. “Gate management. Spent the last eight hours in the middle of one of the big cities on Continent Four, watching thousands and thousands of people pouring by.” He sighed. “Makes me remember that I keep promising myself to get more exercise. Spending eight hours on your feet…” He shook his head. “A little different from sitting around writing spells all day.”

  “And you came all this way to see us on your off time!” Ronan said.

  “‘Off time?’” Tom laughed at him. “As if a Supervisory gets any of that in a situation like this. I’m just here making sure you lot aren’t getting into trouble.”

  “Us?” Ronan said, with a hilariously manufactured expression of disbelief and shock. “The very thought!”

  “Please, spare me,” Tom said, amused. “After what happened with you and Kit on Mars? Now any time the two of you are posted on some new planet together, I get a tagged travel advisory in my manual.”

  Kit reddened with embarrassment, as this was probably true. “Yeah, I’m such a bad influence,” Ronan said, and laughed. “Well, not here. This situation’s too edgy to have much fun with.”

  “Fun aside,” Tom said, “I know you’re serious about what you’re doing here. So does Irina, otherwise she wouldn’t have let you onto the ‘go’ list. Rafting’s too serious to let any potential loose cannons on deck, believe me.”

  “Irina signed off on us being here?” Nita said, sounding surprised.

  “Oh yes. You didn’t know? Well, now you do.”

  “Where’s Carl?” Dairine said.

  “Other side of the planet,” said Tom. “He’ll be off shift shortly. There’s a particularly difficult gate over there in the middle of one of the capital cities… a terminus gate, one of the biggest-aperture ones. Because of the size of it and the number of people using it per hour, it needs more watching than usual. Gravitic anomalies…”

  A sympathetic groan went up from most of the picnic guests. Tom sighed. “He’s working double shifts on this one. I feel for him: he’s going to be a wreck when he gets off. Thanks,” he said as Ronan, without comment, shoved a bottle of not-quite-draft Guinness into his hand.

  “Thought that stuff doesn’t travel,” Kit said.

  “If you put it in stasis inside an otherspace pocket, the bottled kind does,” Ronan said. “But it’s inherently inferior. Keep meaning to talk to Sker’ret about finding a way to stabilize the draft kind. A problem for another day.”

  While Tom was assaying the Guinness, Ronan stood chafing his upper arms. “Getting kinda nippy, yeah? Time to get the campfire part of the evening going.”

  “Oh, we are having that?” Kit said.

  “I did some prep while others were snoring,” Ronan said as he slipped out between two of the standing stones. A few moments later he came back with an armful of bent and twisted branches of various sizes.

  “Where’d you find those?” Djam said.

  “Got a fair amount of the stuff over by our gates,” said Ronan. “Old cuttings left from when they were removing some of the local fauna, I’m guessing.” He paused, eyeing a spot down at the far end of the oblong that made the “seat” of the Stone Throne. “Here be okay?”

  “Should work fine,” Cheleb said, helping Djam clear away some of the plates and food containers that were closest. Ronan arranged the wood in an artful pyramid on the spot, then looked toward Kit. “Do the honors?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.” Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket and pulled out his wand, stowed in there earlier when he’d been tidying. He smiled slightly in a moment of nostalgia: the spell for summoning fire from noon-forged steel was one of the first ones he’d learned. Kit whispered the fourteen Speech-words necessary for activation, braced the Edsel-antenna wand over his forearm, and fired. The piled-up firewood burst instantly into flame.

  Kit tucked the wand away and watched the firelight dance over the faces of his friends and the ancient stones of another world, and shivered for a moment with the strangeness of it all. If someone had told me five years ago where I’d be now…

  Tom sat back and chuckled. “And now what? Songs around the fire? Scary stories?”

  “Got enough scary to be going on with at the moment, thanks,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes in the general direction of Thesba.

  “Dessert,” Nita said. She’d set her lawn chair down next to where Kit had perched himself at one end of the Stone Throne; now she got up and started rummaging in one of the bags she’d brought with her but hadn’t yet opened. “Here,” she said to Djam, and held out a Creamsicle. “If you like that juice, I bet you’ll like this.”

  “Ice cream,” Ronan said, impressed. “How do you have ice cream?!”

  “With the power allowances they’ve given us for this, why wouldn’t I bring ice cream? I have a stasis field running in my puptent,” Nita said. “And one right here in this bag.”

  “I hope you brought enough for everybody,” Tom said.

  Nita snickered. “I brought enough for me,” she said, “for about a week. So that should be enough for everybody. Nothing fancy, just the usual mass market stuff. I would have brought Ben & Jerry’s, but some people apparently ate it all before we left home.”

  Dairine looked angelically unconcerned by this accusation. To Kit’s surprise, Nita just gave her an annoyed look, and then shrugged. “Here, help me pass these out.”

  Kit passed a fudgsicle over to Tom and an orange popsicle over to Cheleb, who needed some assistance with packaging concepts (”No, wait, don’t eat the paper!”) and then rather overenthusiastically disposed of the popsicle in three bites, spending the next several minutes groaning and clutching haes head due to the most emphatic case of brain freeze any of them had ever seen.

  Kit had trouble not laughing at Cheleb being reduced to speechlessness for that long, but he just managed it. “Shame none of us thought we might have have a campfire before we came,” he said as he sat down again. “We could have brought stuff to make s’mores.”

  Djam looked up in interest from his third plateful of multicolored veggies. “What’s a s’more?”

  The conversation that ensued immediately got very tangled, and Kit saw Djam and Cheleb reacting with fascination and concern, since once or twice it seemed as if violence might be about to break out.

  “Oh God. How are we supposed to show him?”

  “Did anybody br
ing graham crackers?”

  “What in the Powers’ sweet fecking names is a graham cracker?”

  Laughter from Dairine. “How can you not know this?”

  Ronan rolled his eyes. “Why should I bother when I know you’re going to enlighten me?”

  “It’s brown, and flat, and it’s got wheat in it.”

  “Well it’s a biscuit for feck’s sake, or a ‘cracker’ as you benighted language-fossilized creatures keep calling it—” Kit hid his eyes briefly at the mention of the word “cracker”: the last thirty-odd hours had left him with a new set of referents for it that he would probably never forget. “—and with a biscuit the odds are better than ninety percent that it’s got wheat in it…”

  “No, whole wheat.”

  “Kind of malty tasting…”

  “Like a digestive biscuit?”

  “What’s a digestive biscuit?”

  “It’s not like one of those. Flatter,” Nita remarked around the remnant of the ice cream sandwich she’d almost finished. “Also they put honey in them.”

  Dairine stared at Nita in growing horror. “Wait. Wait. Who uses honey grahams for s’mores? Who uses them for anything?”

  “I like them,” Nita said. “I eat them all the time. You haven’t noticed?”

  “I never— I thought it was Dad—” Dairine’s mouth opened and closed as if in a fairly high-quality imitation of a fish. “You’ve been the one who keeps buying those? You actually like them? Oh God how are we even related?!” She looked around at the group and waved her hands in a gesture of generalized rejection. “Either I’m adopted or she is.”

  “I not only have honey grahams,” Nita said, “but I have—” She looked faintly embarrassed. “Marshmallow fluff.”

  Ronan looked mystified. “Powers preserve us, what’s that now? Something else I don’t need to know about.”