Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  There were only a few more goodnights after that as people went back on shift or headed back to their puptents to rest. Ronan was last to go. He and Djam made it through most of The Phantom Menace before Djam ran out of energy and Ronan ran out of sardonic epithets (temporarily) for Jar Jar Binks. Finally there was just Cheleb again, stretched out on the tidied Throne Rock and keeping an eye on the glowing matrix of gate-function graphs.

  Kit paused by the display and looked it over. “No problems?”

  “Nothing at all,” Cheleb said. “Go rest, cousin. Had busy day, you have.” Haes expression was difficult to read, but Kit had the feeling Cheleb felt hae’d been part of something special.

  And hae was, Kit thought, but maybe not the way hae thinks. Doesn’t matter.

  He walked back to his puptent’s portal and considered staying up just long enough to head over to Ronan’s gate complex for a pre-bedtime shower… then decided against it. In the morning. Right now I’m about ready to crash.

  Wearily Kit stepped through into his puptent, sealed it up behind him, and just stood there for a moment in the soft light, looking around at the mess the sibiks had made of things. Fortunately it wasn’t too bad: the packaging had mostly defeated them. The saltines, though, as Nita said, had suffered. There was just one package left. Kit picked it up and stuffed it into his otherspace pocket before anything else happened to it, and then tidied some other rubbish away before getting undressed, pulling on pajamas and flopping down on the bed again.

  The moment he was horizontal Kit realized that he wasn’t going to be conscious long: he was still feeling run down after his encounter with the Fourth. He stuffed his manual under his pillow in the usual place and felt around under there to find his phone and text his dad.

  LONG DAY, BUT WE HAD A CAMPFIRE PICNIC AT THE END OF IT. MET SORT OF A DINOSAUR WHO LIKES HIS STEAK EVEN RARER THAN MAMA. DISCOVERED THAT MARSHMALLOW FLUFF IS NO GOOD IN S’MORES, & MINI MARSHMALLOWS ARE ALSO USELESS. NITA STOPPED A FLOOD, MY PUPTENT WAS INVADED BY MORE SPACE OCTOPUSES, AND RONAN IS TEACHING INNOCENT ALIENS IRISH SWEAR WORDS. IN OTHER WORDS, EVERYTHING NORMAL. WORLD STILL ENDING.

  He looked at the text, considering adding the words “I’m tired”, but then decided not to: his Mama might fret. The image of her and Mamvish’s egg-dam doing so in unison, though, made him smile.

  Kit shoved the phone under his pillow with the manual and buried his face in the pillow… and for a long time, knew nothing more.

  EIGHT

  Sunday

  Later, but no telling exactly how much later, Kit was standing out in the dark, fuming, because it really annoyed him that Thesba was following him even into his dreams.

  This is a real pain in the ass, he said to himself. Who do I complain to about this?

  Kit was one of those people who didn’t often remember his dreams, but when he did, what he remembered was detailed and vivid. His dreams arrived in IMAX and Dolby THX surround sound. If there was a downside to this, it was that his dreams usually weren’t terribly coherent. Irrational and sheerly idiotic things had a way of happening without a lot of logic being involved.

  This was the case right now, for example, because Thesba was leaning over him and staring. Kit found this offensive, especially from an entire moon: the attention seemed disproportionate. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re going to destroy this whole place, right? Fine. But when I’m sleeping, at least, can you please let me be?” And then he started to get angry. “…Except no, you know what? It’s not fine, and somebody needs to tell you. Everyone here is really pissed off at you, and I just think you should know.”

  Not everyone, said the person standing next to him.

  Annoyed, Kit turned to regard him. His companion was watching Thesba with as much interest as Kit was, and he was human—or at least Kit thought he was. The general height and shape was right, but it was hard to tell in more detail because of the clothes. The person was dressed in long dark robes and had on a broad-brimmed, slouchy hat, also charcoal-dark. Thesba’s light falling across the hat’s wide brim cast his face in shadow.

  Great, Kit thought. Just what I needed: a cartoon wizard. “Oh really?” Kit said.

  Yes, really. This is merely an operation of the natural. It is what is.

  “Well,” Kit said quite forcefully, “maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still suck.”

  True. Yet such operations are incapable of altering their actions when nothing is brought to bear against them save perception. Perception without comprehension can have little effective result.

  “Um, okay,” Kit said. That just meant that there was something he was supposed to be comprehending. Unfortunately right now he had no idea what that was.

  He turned more fully toward the robed figure and noticed that in one hand—at least he assumed it was a hand; he couldn’t quite make it out under the long baggy sleeve of the robe—it was holding by a rounded wire handle one of those old-style Coleman camping lanterns, the kind that ran on kerosene and that you had to pump up to pressure and then light with a match. The lantern was lit, but someone had turned it right down so that the fabric-like mantle inside the clear glass chimney was just glowing a faint orange, almost the same shade or color temperature as Thesba’s glow from above. “That’s not going to do you much good in the dark if you don’t turn it up,” Kit said.

  Seer for the seer in the dark, said the figure beside him, you say true. But if any light is to be shed here, you must shed it.

  This seemed to Kit like a huge imposition. “Listen, when I signed up for this nobody told me I was going to have to be all that luminous! Would’ve been nice if I’d been warned.”

  There is never warning, the figure said. All is surprise. In surprise alone lies solution, and salvation. And very suddenly the figure brought up the Coleman lantern and held it up between them, so that the light of it, even turned down so low, briefly blinded Kit as it was held right in front of his face.

  Kit flinched back and blinked and grabbed the lantern’s handle to pull it to one side and out of his eyes. But even with the light so high up and so close, he could for a moment see nothing of his companion’s face but a tangle of shadow. Except not even shadow, Kit thought, with the idea that this should remind him of something. At the moment, though, he couldn’t think what.

  Then suddenly he could see his companion’s face—except it wasn’t one. There were eyes, though, quite a few of them, with a nubbly green-blue hide surrounding them. When the eyes realized Kit was looking at them, most of them squeezed themselves shut. But a couple of them stayed open, just a crack, as if what lived inside them was pretending to be asleep.

  For some reason that made Kit want to laugh. He held the lamp up closer, peering at those eyes. And doing so, he saw a glint in them, something familiar, someone he knew.

  Kit’s own eyes widened in sudden recognition. He opened his mouth to say the name—

  And just like that, Kit’s eyes were open and he was staring up into the dimness of his puptent.

  The image of the last moments of that dream, though, was perfectly clear, still hanging in front of the eyes of his mind. Sibik eyes.

  Except what was in them? That wasn’t any sibik.

  Kit swallowed, swallowed again. It wasn’t easy. Apparently he’d been sleeping with his mouth open; his mouth was dry and tasted terrible.

  Ponch…

  Kit kicked the bed clothes off, got up, and went across to the open package of bottled water—cracked one of them, took a long drink, swooshed it around in his mouth to try to get rid of the something-died-in-my-mouth-overnight taste, swallowed. He took another drink and held it in his mouth for a moment, feeling/listening to the bubbles, and swallowed again as things continued putting themselves together in his head.

  He thought of the Fourth, and shivered. It wasn’t fear causing that response: just the strangeness of the experience. Some echoes of his contact with the being—if “contact” was the right word—were still echoing in Kit’s body.
He could just feel a shadow of the odd, odd feeling that had pressed against his nerves while he’d stood there bearing the weight of its regard. And since then, even before Nita had yesterday mentioned the Playroom—that peculiar “aschetic” universe set aside for as a testing space for wizards learning to manipulate matter/energy kernels—the word “pathfinder” had been niggling at Kit, reminding him that he’d heard it before.

  And now something extra had been added to the mere word, as if someone knew that Kit needed confirmation that the hint was worth following up. Seer for the seer in the dark…

  He could see himself standing there on the Playroom’s peculiar, endlessly-Euclidean, white-shining floor. He’d followed Nita’s trail there with Ponch’s help, after Neets had vanished while working on healing the kernel of her mother’s body. Having found his way there, Kit had run into some of the colleagues that she’d been working with. Now he thought of the one with all the eyes and all the tentacles—an alien called a Sulamid—and how at the time it had spoken to him and looked at him so strangely, and had used that phrase. He was so distracted then by his worry for Nita that he’d hardly given thought to the peculiar way he felt when the Sulamid looked at him. Now, though, he had a referent for that. It was very like the bizarre, unclassifiable sensations he’d experienced the other day with the Fourth.

  Another of these creatures with a metabolic extension into a higher-numbered dimension, then. What they certainly seemed to have in common so far was a gift for being obscure. But from what Nita had said, it sounded as if this was just a side effect of their particular style of being. Apparently it was hard to make sense to a creature living exclusively in one set of dimensions when you lived in more than one.

  Standing there with his bottle in his hand, Kit laughed once under his breath. If I got into a conversation with Mr. A. Square from Flatland, he thought, probably a lot of what I might wind up saying to him would seem obscure too. And if there was a multidimensional take just on physical things, there was no reason to think there wouldn’t be a similar angle on mental ones, emotional ones, philosophical ones, as well.

  He put the bottle down and started putting on clothes. I need to start making some kind of sense out of this, Kit thought. But first I want a shower, and some food. And I want to talk to Neets.

  First, though, he waved the puptent’s portal orifice open and stepped out. It was dark, but the light was growing. Not even dawn yet, Kit thought, and made a face. The clouds had moved on, though; the predawn sky was a clear, intense, dark blue-green, and many stars of the neighboring OB association were blazingly bright in it, a scatter of white and blue-white jewels. And most to the point, the sky was empty of Thesba. The moon’s absence made the sky look healthier, less oppressive somehow.

  Kit breathed out in the cold, clear air and leaned against his standing stone. His breath actually smoked, the temperature having dropped lower than usual over the course of the night. Kit tilted his head back against the stone and just rested there, feeling the cold, breathing out, relaxing into the feeling of looking up into a sky that didn’t have a horrible, crushing weight lowering down from it.

  Pathfinder. Kit turned the word over in his mind. Maybe it meant more than just being a tracker, a physical locator—though Ponch had been that, too, while hunting for Nita. They both had.

  Or maybe it meant not just finding physical paths, but virtual ones: metaphorical ones. Finding a path, a way, as in a way to do something. To fix something, Kit thought. Solve something.

  But what? And how, exactly?

  No answer came.

  A moment later Kit laughed quietly at himself. This was part of what being a wizard was: when you asked the universe for answers, often you expected to get them. But that approach made sense, since so much of the universe would talk to you, once you started the conversation. That was what the Speech was all about, after all. Not commanding things to happen; convincing them to. You could command if you had to… but persuasion always worked better. Conversation was the whole point of the exercise.

  Kit shivered again, but now it was for a different reason. The sensation that made the hair rise on the back of Kit’s neck now was the beginning of excitement, a hint of exhilaration. There was something he was needed for here, some purpose above and beyond just minding a gate. In the face of that realization, everything suddenly got… not easy to bear, but at least easier. A little less hopeless.

  Okay, Kit thought. What now?

  No answer came. That’s fine with me, he thought. I need a shower anyway.

  And sometimes, maybe, all you can do is wait.

  So Kit got busy doing that, and meanwhile did his job: the things that over recent days had started to become routine, and some things that hadn’t.

  He went over to Ronan’s gate complex to shower and touch base with him. He came back to the circle of stones and had some breakfast (dry cereal that promised it was fortified with vitamins and minerals, which made him feel just a shade less guilty about his eating habits over the past few days). Then for the next four hours or so he shared the Stone Throne with Djam, who had taken over from Cheleb a few hours before dawn, and gatewatched with him while idly chatting some more about Earth entertainment, as well as some Alnilamev media-based “ritualized storytelling” that looked to Kit like a strangely jazzy cross between kabuki theater and a sort of interactive Cartoon Network.

  This wound up distracting Kit for a good while, as shortly after that Djam got very excited about showing Kit a 3D recording of an entertainment called The Faded Liver—at least that was how it seemed to translate into the Speech. Together they spent easily two hours on it while Djam waved his arms and went on and on about characterization and plot and resonances to other stories in the same cycle, and the talents of the performers of this entertainment, several of whom had volunteered to discorporate for maximum verisimilitude in the event…

  Kit nodded and asked questions and did his best to get into what was going on, since Djam seemed so enthusiastic. But by the time Djam was ready to report off to Kit on the gate complex and formally go off duty, all Kit could make of it all was that The Faded Liver seemed like a somewhat bizarre version of Romeo and Juliet, featuring a whole lot more violence and an eventual, if ambiguous, happy ending that left you wondering which of the happy trio was alive, which was dead, and which was in a sort of nonconnoted limbo state like that of Schrödinger’s Cat. This made a lot more sense when Kit realized that Djam’s people came of one of those species that had done a fairly unusual form of deal with the Lone Power during their Choice, so that death was for them a more temporary than usual phenomenon—like someone on Earth having a job and agreeing to take a brief cut in pay until the local economic picture improved. Probably, Kit thought, Romeo and Juliet would strike an Alnilamev audience as a romantic comedy hinging on a series of madcap misunderstandings that would be resolved after story’s end when everyone got bored enough with being dead.

  After Djam took himself off to rest, the number three inbound gate started to get cranky again, and Kit sat there with the manual and spoke sharply to it for fifteen or twenty minutes until it behaved once more. He spent the next hour watching the power levels of the other four feeder gates as they jumped around and threw minor gravitic anomalies. These Kit shut down one after one as they popped up, judging the behavior to be a transparent attention-getting ploy from submolecular gate machinery that wanted Kit to prove that he liked it as much as the other guy who got yelled at an hour ago.

  He paused afterwards for a very late lunch featuring one of Ronan’s weird ready-made supermarket hamburgers, gazing out at the plain as Thesba rose into the a sky where late afternoon was giving way to early evening, and wondering anew at the concept of selling people individual cooked hamburgers that were made and then chilled and wrapped up, buns and all, and served like ready meals. And probably pumped full of preservatives and God knows what to keep them from going inedible, Kit thought. I can just imagine what Mama would say if she could se
e one of these things. He grinned. Maybe I can trick Ro into bringing one of them around…

  After that he tried once again to get in touch with Nita, as he’d done several times that day already. He wanted to talk to her about the situation with Cheleb and the candy hearts, as he’d suddenly had a thought about one of the mottoes that had caused Cheleb the most astonishment, possibly even distress: TEXT ME. Between one blink and the next, Kit found himself thinking, Did he think that meant I was asking Neets to change my name or something? My name in the Speech? Or maybe hers? Oh wow.

  He laughed again at that idea as he flipped through the manual to Nita’s profile. But it still said what it had been saying all day: On active intervention, messages storing for later access— This time at least the manual showed Kit a location for her, once again an area that had had some severe seismic activity that morning. They’ve got her water-wrangling again, then. Kind of amazing we haven’t had any earthquakes here, actually. He realized that even after days spent here, he knew almost nothing about the arrangement of tectonic plates on Tevaral, so that now he wound up spending a while consulting the manual on the subject, and getting twitchier all the time, for the area had been quite active. Finally Kit just shut the manual and gazed out into the plain once more, watching the shifting, dimming light as the hot white disc of Sendwathesh slid down westwards into gathering blue cloud, the shadows of the standing stones swinging across the surrounding blue-green fields as if from the gnomons of a multiplex sundial, slowly fading away against the grass as the day declined.

  Kit sat there on the Stone Throne watching Sendwathesh go down behind the bumpy horizon in a glory of aquamarine and turquoise and peacock blue, while the high sky shaded to an intense green-tinged cobalt and the fierce brilliance of the nearer blue-white stars pricked through it, Thesba hanging high among them, lowering and burning red: death in a physical shape. It made Kit shiver. Yet at the same time, Tevaral’s moon still looked somehow beautiful even in its deadliness. And when it goes—