Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  Kit looked at him. “So?”

  “It's like this,” said Djam. “In this version of Liver? Everybody dies… and they don't come back.” He laughed nervously. “Isn't that edgy?”

  Kit shook his head in wonder. “Groundbreaking,” he said. “So when can we see it? Doesn’t seem to be much else going on here today…”

  “I’ll set it up for us in a while,” Djam said. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No, not really. I had so many crackers last night… I'm still working them off.” He sighed. “And then again, if my mama heard me saying that, first she'd yell at me for the crackers, and then she’d yell at me for not having any protein. And if I go home looking like I’ve lost weight or something, I’m never gonna hear the end of it. What’ve you got that has some protein?”

  “Let me go see. I’ve still got plenty of things left over from the—what was it you called? Buffet?”

  They had breakfast together, Djam fetching out some of his people’s more interesting processed foods. “I can't believe these are all vegetables,” Kit said, shaking his head. “It's a shame we can't get these on Earth. So many of our vegetables are—” He waved a hand. “Boring.” He sighed. “Or maybe that’s just the way my culture prepares them or something. I should look into the way other people do it. Maybe I’m missing something.”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine a place where food doesn’t taste good,” Djam said. “The two concepts would seem to be mutually exclusive. You’re going to have to let me try some of the stuff you don’t like and find out for myself.”

  “I await your opinion on broccoli,” Kit said. “I know you’re enthusiastic, but it’d take somebody from another planet to be that enthusiastic.”

  After breakfast, or probably it was more like brunch, the two of them settled in to watch the new version of The Faded Liver. Kit had to admit that it was a shade darker than the more classic one, though there was still a general sense that the actors, and the writers of the entertainment, didn’t entirely believe in death and weren’t sure how to handle it as a permanent phenomenon.

  They were eventually distracted from this, though, by a general trend that Djam noticed late that afternoon. It hadn’t been anything that triggered any of the alarms in their matrix-analysis system, but Djam had a sharp eye for small variations in what was going on with the gates. “Kiht,” he said, “are you seeing this?”

  Kit leaned over the readout to see if he could tell what the problem was. “Looks like the numbers passing through are… dropping off some? Ronan mentioned to me that he’d seen something like that this morning. Maybe somebody upstream doing some maintenance or something.”

  “I could believe that on one gate,” Djam said, “but on three? And they usually tell us if they’re going to slow down the throughput to tweak something.”

  Cheleb had emerged, and wandered over to look over their shoulders at the readouts. He shook his head. “Starting to run out of people to transport,” Cheleb said sorrowfully. “Had to start happening eventually. Job getting finished. No surprise there, I suppose; numbers were straightforward enough. Move fifteen, twenty million people per day, eventually even here start running out of them.”

  “I didn’t look at the daily bulletin with the project progress report this morning,” Kit said. “Just went straight off for my shower. As of yesterday they had moved…”

  “Something like a hundred and ten million,” Djam said. “They were expecting to move what looked like the final ten or fifteen million today and tomorrow. After that…”

  “Some gates supposed to be left in place and operational,” Cheleb said. “Hoping transient encampments’ populations might change mind at last minute.” Hae shrugged, a rather hopeless gesture. “Not much chance of that, or so seems.”

  They all stood a while looking at the gate management matrix. Slowly the bar graphs for transport numbers began to edge upwards again. Djam shook his head. “No,” he said, “the numbers are coming up again. A blip.” He sighed. “Probably it was one of those load-balancing things they were doing in the first couple of days, before you got here. Lots of flow without warning, then it would back down…”

  They all looked sorrowfully at the graphs, and then Djam sat back down on the Stone Throne and picked up his reading again. “So,” Cheleb said to Kit, “See he’s getting you into his entertainments now. Still waiting for explanation why shouldn’t have a look at first entertainment in long series. Friend was very emphatic the other night.”

  Kit rubbed his face and laughed, looking out sadly into the afternoon light. “If I show you that thing,” he said, “it’s just going to make me angry.”

  “If distracts you from being sad,” Cheleb said, “might not be a bad thing.”

  “Oh God,” Kit said. “All right! On your own scaly head be it.”

  It did make Kit angry: incredibly so, as he hated some of the characters in the first sequence of the movies with a pure, white-hot flame. When he was home, Carmela knew that the quickest way to get Kit angry about almost anything was to start imitating Jar Jar Binks. Tonight, though, even though it made Kit angry, there was a strange kind of relief in it. The old familiar anger was distracting him from his own foolish hopes that something that couldn’t really happen here might’ve started happening anyway.

  So he willingly lost himself as best he could in the intensely frustrating and unsatisfying display that was Phantom Menace. The only things making it tolerable were Djam’s delighted scorn—he described Qui-Gon Jinn as “a wise man who’s wise about everything but himself” and “the least effective wizard ever seen”—and Cheleb’s unremitting mockery of the Gungans and the pod race. (“Child only successful because machines love him as much as they love you!”)

  It got dark, and Thesba rose over them, and things might’ve gone on in that mode well into the night, if Cheleb hadn’t gone into haes puptent at one point to bring out some of a sour-sweet fizzy drink that haes people favored, and then paused before sitting down on the Stone Throne with the other two. For some moments hae stood looking out across the plain.

  “Come on, Cheleb, I’m dry here!” Djam said.

  But Cheleb’s response was to stand there a little longer, and then say, as if hae doubted the evidence of haes own eyes, “…Fewer campfires out there than last night, cousin? Check me on this.”

  Djam got up and went over to where Cheleb was, between two of the standing stones. He peered out into the dark. “It’s hard to tell,” Djam said.

  “Broadcast power source over there having problems, perhaps?”

  Kit looked up. “No,” he said “that would show on the monitor readout. Remember the other day? We saw that right away.”

  And suddenly Kit’s mouth was going dry again. He reached for his manual, started flipping pages.

  “Another blip?” Djam said.

  Kit found his own gate monitoring readout, studied it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Something’s wrong with the numbers.”

  “What?” said Cheleb.

  “They’re…” Kit peered at his manual for a few moments. “Show me what yesterday’s minima and maxima were like?” he said to it. “Thanks.”

  The display altered, steadied down. No question, yesterday’s numbers were far lower. This morning’s had been similar. But now— Now they were scaling up again. They were heading for local throughput numbers that looked nearly ten percent higher than they had been.

  “We should call Shask,” Djam said, that being their upstream Advisory, the Tevaralti wizard responsible for the management of the whole transport tree that culminated in their terminus gate. “Make sure this isn’t something going wrong.”

  “Yeah,” Kit said. To his own surprise, his hands were shaking. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. “Djam,” he said, “call him. If this is just us, I want to know.”

  But it wasn’t just them.

  All over the planet, wherever gate teams had transient camps nearby, the wizards managing them were seeing simila
r spikes in their local transport numbers. The increase had started very slowly, just that morning, early in the day, and had been growing steadily all day ever since. The Transients were picking up their belongings and had begun passing through the gates to the refuge worlds.

  Most of them, it seemed, hadn’t made any particular fuss about it; they had simply moved through the nearest gates to those gates’ next destinations. Only a very few, late in the day, had spoken to the wizards and support staff at the gate complexes proper; and those who’d taken the time had simply said, “It’s all right, we’re of one mind now.” As the upstream supervisors started collecting reports to analyze them, and Kit and Djam and Cheleb, like many other wizards around the planet, read the incoming data and tried to understand it, one report jumped out and caught Kit’s attention. “Our sibik said we had to go,” one Tevaralti sire had said. “That the One had said that life was better. And so of course, then, we had to go.”

  When he read that, Kit went hot and cold with terror and delight.

  It did happen! he thought. It couldn’t happen until someone who was humanoid helped them make the connection. Someone who was a different kind of humanoid, and had a connection to a sibik….

  …and to someone else.

  For quite some time Kit was practically speechless with relief. Gradually that state began to shift as the evening went on and Thesba left the sky, and he and Djam and Cheleb gazed out into the plain, watching the campfires very slowly continuing to wink out. They wouldn’t all go out at once, Kit knew. But he grinned helplessly into the dark and thought, Tomorrow night, maybe. Or the day after. They’ll all be gone then.

  And if his shiftmates caught sight of the wetness that once or twice went running down their strange Earth- companion’s face, neither of them said a thing.

  That evening, along with the usual daily bulletins from the intervention supervisors regarding the progress of the population transfer, all kinds of other announcements came down, mostly to do with aperture-size increases to accommodate the extra outbound flow from the transients’ camps. Then one came down that was so unexpected, wizards all across the planet stared at it dumbfounded. And in many places—at least where their cultures allowed for such reactions—they began to cheer.

  Word came down from Tevaral’s Planetary, and from the executive committee handling business for the interconnect group on Tevaralti, that the upstream gates were going to start to be decommissioned: that traffic from the less active gate trees was already low enough that their transport load could be transferred to others; that nearly seven-eighths of the Tevaralti species had been successfully moved to the refuge worlds, and with the swiftly-increasing mobilization of the remaining fifteen percent or so, the true end of this intervention was in sight. No one had ever expected such an announcement to be made.

  But then no one had been prepared for the attitudinal shift among the transients, or the way it had swept around the world. Nearly a million of them had already departed. Millions of others were in the process of being transferred to higher-capacity gates through which they could be moved more quickly. The transients’ encampments all over the planet were shutting down one by one.

  Cheleb volunteered to take the late shift that night, claiming that hae was too excited to sleep. Kit was just weary, and was glad to let haem take it. But he had enough energy to text his Pop before he collapsed on his bed.

  BUSY TODAY. GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING. BETTER THAN WE HOPED FOR. SO TIRED, NO TIME TO TELL YOU MORE, WILL TELL YOU ALL SOON. THINK WE MAY BE HERE ONLY ANOTHER DAY OR TWO. MAYBE NOT EVEN THAT. LOVE YOU BOTH, MORE SOON.

  TEN

  Tuesday

  As it turned out, it wasn’t even that long.

  Kit woke up and felt something so very strange when he did: the relief of that feeling of irremediable unease that he’d felt here since he came. It wasn’t that he’d gotten used to it. It was that it was gone. The context had shifted. It was still a terrible and tragic thing, what was happening here: but the best result that could be found was apparently now in train. Someone else knew that. Someone had communicated that feeling to him.

  And it felt incredible.

  He had barely even had time to shower and come back and eat breakfast before word came through to all their manuals or other instrumentalities that Djam and Cheleb and Kit were all being relieved by a single two-wizard team from elsewhere in the Interconnect Project, and were being released from their drafted-in status. If they chose to remain, they could, but they were no longer needed on this gate. Its upstream tree was being decommissioned, and the gate itself was expected to be closed down within the next thirty hours.

  This too had been expected… but nothing like so soon. “Good news for us,” Cheleb said to Djam and Kit in the early-evening light as hae peeled his puptent’s interface off the stone where it had been anchored. “Got the job done. Can go home with a clean conscience.”

  “But more than that,” Djam said. “I don’t know how closely you two looked at the statistical analysis that came down earlier today. The thing that started, the change in the numbers? It started here. It started yesterday morning, and began to spread.”

  And both of them looked thoughtfully at Kit.

  Kit’s problem was that at this point there was no way to be sure of anything. He had his suspicions, very strong suspicions, but he refused to take credit for what had been occurring around them until he had some kind of confirmation that the opinion was justified. “What?” Kit said. “Why would this necessarily have anything to do with me?”

  “Because you were the one who was always doing something different,” Djam said. “Entertainment. Strange ideas about food.”

  “Feeding sibiks,” Cheleb said. “Repeatedly. Thought you were a bit eccentric at first. Have to wonder now whether you were onto something.”

  Kit wanted to believe it was true. But without more data… “Look,” he said. “If what’s been happening is something to do with me, then… I’m really happy. But I’m just one more wizard doing my job. You did your jobs too. Without you two, maybe I wouldn’t have had time to do what I did… assuming I did anything. Maybe what I did wouldn’t have been possible without you two.”

  “Maybe we were emplaced here,” Djam said, “to make it possible for you to do what you did. Whatever that was.”

  “If that’s true,” Kit said “then it’s as much your success as mine. Don’t go handing me credit that’s partly yours.”

  Djam was looking at his manual interface. He pulled it out and let it snap back into the silver rod that housed it. “Pad’s been programmed and it’s waiting for us,” he said. “They’re taking the gates off-line until the decommissioning team comes through.”

  The three of them turned to look at into the plain and saw it happening, what they had never yet seen, any of them—the space between the spinney of gate standards suddenly going empty and showing nothing but the further plain beyond.

  “So where to now?” Kit said, as the three of them walked together toward the short-transport pad.

  “Reception center,” Cheleb said. “Then—” he grinned. “Home. Unexpectedly happy ending. Some celebration.” Hae poked Kit as they jumped up onto the pad together. “Probably not enough entertainment to match quality of recent offerings.”

  A few moments later they were all in the reception area together. It was astonishing how empty it looked by comparison to the bustle and crush of the place when Kit had arrived. There were only a few Tevaralti wandering around now, taking care of whatever last-minute administrative tasks were their responsibility; all the rest of the people in it were wizards of other species making their way to outbound gates and off planet. Most specifically, though, the pressure-cooker feeling of a week ago was gone. There was still a sense of sorrow, of something sad coming to an inevitable end. But it had changed. Though the world was ending, it was doing so with much less tragedy than had been anticipated.

  Kit and Djam and Cheleb stood there for a moment looking a
t each other a bit strangely, all somewhat at a loss. None of them had been expecting to say goodbye quite this soon, or under circumstances so much more positive than anyone had anticipated for the end of this intervention. Finally, Kit just stuck out an arm to each of them, and had it grasped, hand-to-elbow, in the way that so many humanoids did when saying hello or goodbye. “Cousins,” Kit said. “When you’ve had a chance to recover, come to Earth and visit!”

  “Have to,” Cheleb said, grinning. “Too much culture to investigate.”

  “And someone’s got to keep you eating right,” Djam said. “Anyway, I never did get enough of those saltines.” He bubbled softly. “The makers are going to get some great publicity off this. The Snack That Saved A Species…”

  “Not all of it,” Kit said in protest.

  “Save a single being,” Cheleb said, “in the One’s eyes, supposedly like saving the world entire.” Hae shrugged. “Wouldn’t start quibbling over numbers with the One who invented them. Only one result looks possible…”

  Kit grinned at him. “There’s never any arguing with you, is there?” Kit said.

  “Not by any reasoning being,” Cheleb said, smirking.

  “I think you need to meet my sister,” Kit said. “Djam—”

  They hugged. “If she’s not interested in him,” Djam said, “ask her if she’d like to date a Wookiee’s cousin.”

  “Oh God,” Kit said, imagining what kind of crush Carmela might attach to an alien with beautiful, soft, fluffy fur. “I’ll have to get back to you on that. Djam, go well!” He looked at Cheleb. “And both of you, stay in touch!”

  “Have to,” Cheleb said as the two of them turned off toward their own homeward gates. “Without you, won’t have the slightest idea what to make of Attack of the Clones.”

  Kit snickered, watching them go. Then, for a few moments, he just stood there and let it all sink in.

  It worked, he thought. It did work…