Lifeboats

The little one meanwhile caught the sibik in mid-leap and clutched it to him as if it was the only stable thing in a world gone mad. “Weegie, oh Weegie, I felt you! I felt you and you were sad and you couldn’t come back and now you’re here—!”

Moments later Kit and Ronan were surrounded by a crowd of Tevaralti all of whom seemed to be talking at the two of them in different languages (understandable via the Speech, but still aurally confusing in such numbers), and Kit was being hugged around his waist by the little boy, who was wearing a kilt and very raggedy feathers, mostly brown ones. The sibik meanwhile concentrated on wrapping itself more and more tightly around the little boy’s shoulders as if intent on melting into his body.

Kit was still trying to get control of his breathing, and also trying to recover from his perception of the sibik’s ecstatic certainty that here, in the middle of a refugee camp, with the world about to be destroyed, it was finally home and safe and everything was all right, in fact absolutely perfect. Kit was shaking with the echoes of the feeling, rocked to his core. He was also determined not to have to start wiping his eyes, especially with all these people looking at him. Though would they even know what that meant? Maybe wiping your eyes for no reason is perfectly normal behavior for some weird featherless humanoid species from Powers only know where.

He pulled away from Ronan, enough to let him know that he was okay, and Ronan let him go, patting him on the back. To the Tevaralti around them—especially the three who’d come up behind the young boy, who were apparently his parents or at least his guardians—Ronan simply said, “We’re on errantry, and we greet you.”

While there were any any number of more specific phrases you could use as a wizard on assignment and greeting nonwizardly people from astahfrith cultures, Kit saw the point of simplicity right now—specifically because after the emotional gutpunch he’d just received, he didn’t feel he was up to anything that complex. He just looked down into the big birdlike eyes of the little Tevaralti hanging onto him, and said, “Your friend here wanted to come home.”

The three parents-or-guardians were looking in astonishment at Kit and Ronan. “Honorable Interveners,” one of them said, “how do you come by our child’s sibik? We were in such pain for him, our child was in such pain, and— We’d thought in this great crowd the sibik had maybe come to harm, or, or been lost forever—”

With the Tevaralti’s glance toward the gates came a sudden sense of fear and distrust. Kit held himself still, not sure where this was coming from or what to do about it.

Fortunately Ronan showed no sign of being similarly affected. “We’re posted near here,” Ronan said, turning to gesture away back toward the ring of stones. “Our business is monitoring the gate complex to make sure it’s working correctly. And while we were doing that, your sibik found us—”

Kit restrained himself from adding And started eating us out of house and home. “And once we’d given him something to eat, he was able to start showing us the way back to where he belonged,” Kit said.

The little one who had Kit by the waist looked up at him again. They moult while they’re growing, these people, Kit thought, seeing feathers still in their narrow cylindrical casings scattered all through the downier feathers they were replacing on the youngster’s head and shoulders. Under his feather-coat the little boy was thin and gangly, and Kit found himself thinking back to when he was small and skinny and getting picked on a lot, and Ponch was the only friend he had—before wizardry, before Nita, before any of the other people he knew now who accepted him for exactly what he was.

“Thank you for finding him,” the little boy said. “He was sad and he was hungry and I was afraid he might starve.”

“No, he seemed to have been doing all right,” Kit said. “Sibiks seem pretty good at finding food. In fact I may have overfed him a little.”

One of the eyes on the back of the sibik—all of them having been squeezed shut until now—opened and regarded Kit. “Cracker,” the sibik said.

“What’s ‘cracker’?” the little boy said.

“Something he’s not going to get any more of, I’d say,” Ronan said. “Special food from a planet two thousand light years away.”

The parents-or-guardians looked impressed. The little boy looked suspicious. “It won’t make him sick, will it?”

“No, it’s all right for him,” Kit said. “I checked.”

“And having said as much, we should probably get back,” Ronan said, “because our pet-feeding duties are strictly unofficial.”

“Interveners for the One,” the tallest of the three adult Tevaralti said, “we’re deeply in your debt. Thank you for being so kind, for helping our child!”

Kit nodded to them as the youngster unwound himself from him, and the sibik threw him one last glance, closed its single open eye, and cuddled down into the boy’s shoulder again. “It’s our pleasure, cousins,” he said. He was about to say “Go well,” but then it occurred to him that this was possibly not the best idea: these people weren’t going anywhere.

Ronan turned away: Kit started to follow him. But the Tevaralti beside the tall one, a fluffier-feathered one in a long netlike garment, reached out to stop him. “Intervener— I’m guessing you don’t understand what’s going on.” The voice was distressed. “You’ve come a long way to help, we know you have.”

“Uh, yes,” Kit said.

The shorter parent looked regretful. “We can’t go, though. It’s not right for us. These others of our people, they feel that it is right, right for them anyway. But it’s not how we feel. We have to be of one mind, and we’re not… We’re just not.” There was terrible sorrow layered under the words, and a sense that there was nothing to be done about the problem… and the cold frightened certainty that there wouldn’t be much longer for it to be a problem.

Kit could think of about a hundred things he wanted to say to that at the moment: but none of them were a wizard’s business to let out of his mouth in such a situation. Finally, “I’m sorry,” was all he could find to say. “But I hope everything works out all right for you.”

The three parents-or-guardians bowed their heads to him. Kit turned away, feeling forlorn, knowing the hope was an empty one. He caught a last glimpse of the little Tevaralti boy hugging his sibik to him as his parents shepherded him away: then they vanished into the crowd.

Kit and Ronan made their way out into the grassland again, toward where the stone circle stood up alone against the northern horizon like fingers reaching up from the ground into the twilight. It was some while before Ronan said anything, which suited Kit. He was feeling extremely unsettled.

“That’s the first explanation I’ve really heard about from any of those people about what’s going on with them,” Ronan muttered at last, “and maybe it’s just that my interplanetary people skills are shite, but I still don’t get it.”

Kit sighed. “Neither do I.”

They walked on into the growing twilight. Inside the stone circle ahead of them, a light came on, spilling shadows out across the grassland from the stones: Cheleb had brought out one of the electric campfires. “I guess they have to do what they think is right for them,” Ronan said. “But it doesn’t make it suck any less, from where I’m standing.”

Kit shook his head. “Nope.”

They reached the circle of stones, and for a moment Kit just put a hand out and leaned on the nearest one, breathing out. He suddenly felt very tired in a way that didn’t have anything to do with a full day of gate monitoring.

“You sure you’re all right now?” Ronan said. “You really took a hit of some kind back there.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “But I’m okay. I think I was just picking up something from the sibik because I was holding it. It was really glad to be back…”

“I got that feeling,” Ronan said, grabbing Kit by the shoulder and shaking him. “You make sure you’re all right now, yeah? Get some food in you tonight instead of feeding it to every bloody octopus that comes along.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Kit said. “Gonna stay for the video portion of the evening?”

“No, gotta go,” Ronan said, “I’m taking an extra shift this evening: my daytime shiftmate gave me some extra time to come over here and I’ve got to get back there now. He has to take some time off.” Ronan looked over his shoulder. “All this has been getting to him. I can see why.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay. Look, text me later if you feel— You know.”

“Like kicking somebody?” Ronan said, amused.

“Like dumping,” Kit said.

Ronan took a big breath, sighed it out. “Yeah,” he said. “Same from your end.”

Kit nodded. “Let’s see how it goes.”

Ronan lifted a hand, a slightly weary wave, and headed back for the short-transit pad. Kit watched him go, then turned inward to go sit on the Stone Throne with Cheleb and give him a more complete shift debriefing before finding some food that no tentacles would now be grabbing for.

***

A cheerful enough evening ensued, though under the circumstances it took a good while for Kit’s mind and mood to settle. At least part of this is blood sugar, he thought. After all, he hadn’t really had all that much of anything today but coffee and crackers and a croissant, and bearing in mind everything he’d been up to, that wasn’t much.

Kit ducked into his puptent and pulled together a selection of snacks, avoiding the saltines, which really were seriously diminished; he was going to have to take inventory to see what he had left and start rationing them. Instead he fished out the box of Ritz crackers, along with some more of the spray-can cheese and a can of deviled ham and one of deviled chicken (so that he wouldn’t keep hearing his Mama yelling at him in his head, “Man is not meant to live on carbs alone, eat some protein!”). There was also some of the regular, plastic-wrapped sliced yellow cheese that his Mama sniffed at and pronounced “barely worthy of the name”. But Kit liked it, and it was protein, so for the time being he pulled out some slices of that too and decided to see what Cheleb and Djam made of it.

When he got out again, Djam already had his floating holographic screen display up and running, and had laid out some of his own homeworld’s food and drink. His people were essentially vegetarian as far as Kit could tell, and what he set out on a few hovering trays was a batch of strange-shaped fruits and giant berries and drupes patterned in a rainbow of colors, and slabs of processed fruit and vegetable snacks. There was also a large product-labeled jug of something that looked so much like Star Wars “blue milk” that Kit burst out laughing when he saw it. “Did you bring this out on purpose after yesterday? What is it?”

“Sekoldra juice,” Djam said. “Extremely healthy, or so my parents insist.”

“Any truth to rumor?” Cheleb said.

Djam shrugged. “Could be,” he said, “but I’d be slow to admit it. They run too much of my life as it is. No point in letting them think I agree with their food choices.”

The three of them laughed together, each after his or haes own fashion, and shared some of the blue milk, which Kit took to immediately. It tasted a lot like a Creamsicle might have if you melted it down, and had a slight fizz. “So, ready for more entertainment now?” Cheleb said as they pooled the rest of their various foods and started divvying them up.

“Absolutely. At the very least we can finish up the first trilogy,” Kit said. “…Though as I said, actually it’s the second. But it came out first.”

Cheleb threw haes arms up in a shrug-like gesture. “Temporal discontinuities,” hae said, “story of our lives for wizards. Got some questions before we start, though.”

“Sure, shoot,” Kit said, getting himself comfortable on the cushion he’d brought out to the Stone Throne and reaching for his manual to bring the streaming-video linkage up.

Cheleb gave him a bemused look. “With what? Not armed.”

“Sorry,” Kit said. He’d dropped into English for the moment. “It’s an idiom. Ask away.” He started pulling up the streaming-video settings on his manual so that Djam could screen the content from them as they had yesterday.

“Humanoid people we saw in first two entertainments yesterday,” Cheleb said, “main characters; some localized hominomorphism there perhaps? Guessing they’re based on some of your species’ major physical/gender arrangements.”

“Safe guess,” Kit said. He guessed that this was more of Cheleb’s ongoing inquiry into the biology of every species hae ran into. It had something to do with haes specialty, which was life-science based, Kit knew; but the small amount of research he’d done on it so far had just confused him.

“So,” Cheleb said. “Those were all ‘he’?”

“Well, not all. A lot of them.”

“But the Wookiee was one?” Djam said. He had taken an interest in the character and had started casually referring to him as his “counterpart.”

“Uh, he’s a male, yeah. Everybody calls him ‘he’, anyway.”

“And person we saw in white clothes all the time,” Cheleb said, “small one with hair like wheels in the first entertainment, arguing with vested fellow all the time—that was a ‘she’?”

“That’s right,” Kit said, wondering where this was going.

“Your errantry-partner also,” Cheleb said, “similarly a ‘she’?”

“Uh, yeah,” Kit said.

“Aha!” Cheleb said. “Thought so. Reminds me; meant to ask you. Conducted traditional fertility-confirmation ritual as yet?”

Kit stared at him, taken aback. “Sorry?”

“Impregnation,” Cheleb said. “You’re ‘he’, that one’s ‘she’, both well past latency now according to Knowledgebase, both of you entering prime fertility period, when does impregnation ritual happen?”

“Uh,” Kit said, as his brain more or less whited out. Immediately after that came the thought, I have got to keep Neets away from here somehow till I get this guy settled or we are going to have such a demonstration of Callahan’s Unfavorable Instigation…!

“Researched your species/culture in Knowledge last night,” said Cheleb with considerable relish, and exuding that particular kind of satisfaction that comes of having done your homework and of being absolutely ready to give a report on it. “Many highly nuanced traditions and rituals for such a simple sex/gender setup, most creative from culture to culture, all delightfully inventive.”

“What?”

“And all interleaving to greater or lesser extent with Earth-human fertilization procedure,” Cheleb said. “Some ambiguities in Knowledge material. Perhaps explain how works? Just highlights of course.”

“Uh,” Kit said again, as his brain threatened to overload again at the very thought of where even to begin such an explanation. And one not aimed at a three-year-old whom you could foist off with a vaguely third-person when-two-people-love-each-other-very-much explanation, either, but a curious fellow wizard who was going to want the details from an intelligent adult of another species. Just the highlights! All of a sudden the inside of Kit’s head sounded like the outline for a sex-ed course. Sperm, ova, gametes, zygotes, developmental stages, gestation, labor, childbirth, no, nope, no way! I have got to get him off this line of inquiry. Otherwise there’s going to be so much trouble.

And at the same time, backing completely away from the whole concept seemed somehow like cowardice. Also, Kit suspected it might just make Cheleb more eager to find out what was really going on. There has to be a way I can spoof haem into thinking hae’s found out everything he needs to. But somehow I’ve also got to do it without haem realizing hae’s being spoofed… and without fibbing. Lying in the Speech was, after all, even when possible, very, very unwise.

Yet Kit knew that if you were careful, it was possible to tell someone something in the Speech and allow them to draw the wrong conclusions from it… And all the wrong conclusions, I hope. Oh please.

He was well into several interminable seconds’ worth of desperate mental flailing among ineffective possible solutions when, completely without warning, the idea came to him—so quickly that at first Kit mistrusted it. But a moment later he found himself having to actually had to hold his face still to keep his jaw from dropping at how good the idea was. It could… It could just work.

Kit took a deep breath and said, “Well… let me tell you.”

He lowered his head conspiratorially close to Cheleb’s. “It just so happens there’s a really important ritual coming up shortly. We call it Valentine’s Day. And a lot of our kind feel it’s really important for two people who’re, you know, interested in each other to give each other special presents then. Otherwise there won’t be any…” He waggled his eyebrows at Cheleb, hoping the gesture would be read correctly. “Satisfaction.” He’d spent a few moments hunting around for a word in the Speech that would both accurately complete the sentence and yet have a completely different meaning from what Cheleb was considering… without seeming to.

“Truly,” Cheleb breathed, fascinated.

Kit grinned. “And we have these special tokens that we exchange…” He jumped up. “Wait, I’ll show you.”

He trotted across the stone circle, waved open the portal in the stone and headed into his puptent, where he spent a few moments digging hurriedly through his supplies until he finally found the little package that he’d thrown in here so casually while packing. Oh I am glad I brought this, so glad so glad so glad…

Kit headed out to the Throne Rock again, plopped himself down next to Cheleb and showed haem the box. “See these?”

And he took Cheleb’s clawed hand, turned it palm-upwards and poured a bunch of candy hearts out into it.

Cheleb poked them with a claw, saw that they had words written on them, and started examining them closely, one by one, reading the English-language sentiments via the Speech. “Oh my,” hae said, actually sounding shocked. “Quite intense.”

Kit was surprised. He’d been hoping for a reaction that would make Cheleb back off a little, but this was beyond what he had in mind. “Um, well,” he said, “this is sort of an important event.” Which was true enough.

But Cheleb’s long eyes went way wider as hae turned the hearts over one by one, gazing at them with some trepidation, as if they might explode if mishandled. “Seriously. Look at these! ‘Be Mine.’” Hae looked at Kit with an expression that suggested hae too was considering the ramifications of Speech-possessives as they applied to other sentient beings, and finding them as daunting as Kit had. And if hae’s projecting those concepts onto English words, Kit thought, that’s hardly my fault, is it? “And this. ‘You’re Cute.’ —And this!” And Cheleb sucked in his breath. “‘Text Me’!”

Kit was about to ask what was so dangerous about that sentiment, and then changed his mind. Don’t make haem tell you! Just go with it.

“And this one. ‘Be Good!’” Cheleb looked at Kit in a strange combination of approval and nervousness. “Most profound commitment to wizardly principles…!”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “And what these are for is to be… internalized.”

And he picked that heart up from Cheleb’s hand, flipped it up in the air, tilted his head back, caught it in his mouth and crunched it up.

Cheleb’s jaw dropped: not in his usual smile, which didn’t normally involve allowing his slightly forked tongue to hang out. This was astonishment. For his own part, Kit was simply relieved that he’d caught the heart without choking himself.

But Cheleb was still struggling for words. “And all must be internalized before…”

Don’t let haem go any further! Hae might just mean ‘before the use-by date’! Which would be true! “Yes.”

Cheleb’s jaw just worked for a moment. “Amazing,” he said at last. “Unique mindsets of other species never cease to astonish.”

“Cousin, that is so true,” Kit said, and had rarely meant it more.

“When finish internalizing them?” Cheleb said.

Kit concentrated on looking thoughtful. “Might take a while,” he said. “Can’t rush these things, after all— every one of them has to be given proper consideration. They have to be mulled over. The emotional context has to be right. And in a situation like this—” He spread his hands, glancing around them; the gates, the refugees, Thesba. Kit shook his head. “It can’t always happen as fast as you wanted to.” He kept his face very straight, very somber. This was something of a challenge, since he’d reached a point in the conversation where he wasn’t entirely sure what “it” was any more. And maybe that’s just as well!

Cheleb glanced at Kit for permission, picked up the box and poured the rest of the hearts it held into haes hand, reading through every one. After a while hae found one that said LOVE YOU and examined it thoughtfully. “Considering yesterday,” hae said, nodding one of haes sideways nods at the streaming-video display, “strange there isn’t one of these saying ‘I KNOW.’ Seems an omission.”

Kit nodded gravely. “I should write to the company about that,” he said. “I’ll make a note in the manual.”

Between them they managed to maneuver the hearts back into the box without dropping more than a few in the grass. Kit recovered them and ate them one by one, pausing over each for Cheleb’s benefit. One by one they vanished: ‘Rock On,” “Hold Hands,” and “Boogie.”

Cheleb looked bemused over that last one, apparently pausing to consult his wizardly Knowledge. “Part of nose?” hae said, looking a bit dubious.

“What?” At that point Kit was beyond being able to suppress the laughter. “No!” he said, when he was able to find enough spare breath to gasp the word out. “No, no. It’s dancing, something to do with dancing…”

“Oh. Relieved,” Cheleb said. “Know some species do go in for post-conjunction cannibalism, but seemed like unusual behavior for humanoids.”

It occurred to Kit that there were some well-known Earth movies it might be smarter to make sure Cheleb didn’t find out about. “Never mind,” he said, closing the box. “Let’s get this show started, yeah? I’ll put these away.”

Kit popped back to his puptent with the box full of hearts. And now I’ve got a problem. If I eat all of these, Cheleb’ll start thinking Neets and I are going to go ahead with the— He could hardly even think it with a straight face. The Impregnation Ritual. But if I don’t keep eating them, Cheleb might get suspicious. Hae might think I’m stalling on purpose.

He thought about that as he sealed the puptent up again. Well, I can make it take a long time to eat these. A really long time. If I’m smart…

Kit got back to the Stone Throne to find that Djam already had the frozen frame of the LucasFilms logo cued up and waiting on the floating screen. Moments later, under the blazingly starry sky of a world that (while in the same galaxy) was still far, far away from its birthplace, a great orchestra cried out the single triumphant opening chord of a defiant fanfare into an alien night, and the three of them settled in to watch the tale unfold.

For Kit there was something surprisingly comforting about this in the wake of the day he’d had—watching something much loved and reliable that had a known happy ending; and watching it with new friends who knew absolutely nothing about it in advance. It was like seeing it for the first time all over again. There were cries of shock and shouts of laughter and gasps of excitement and fear and groans of pain and anticipation and yells of delight (“Told you about ‘I Know!’ Told you!”). And then came the lines that always made Kit’s hair stand up on end: “You’ve failed, your Highness! I am a Jedi—like my father before me!”—and everything that followed: the destruction and the redemption and the final joy.

After the singing and dancing and the final glimpse into “a larger world” had blackscreened into the end titles, Djam and Cheleb sat babbling to each other and to Kit about what they’d seen for a good while afterwards. Favorite lines were repeated, disliked characters dissected. Cheleb got surprisingly heavily into the politics of it (“Empire apparently inherently unstable,” he said, “would have fallen to Rebel Alliance eventually regardless of Jedi intervention!”), while Djam remained most interested in Chewbacca, and became repeatedly and cheerfully scornful about the Ewoks (“What adorable dolts. Plainly the Powers have a soft spot for fools and fuzzy creatures”).

The long discussion pleased Kit for another reason besides his shiftmates’ evident enjoyment. He’d been half afraid that they’d immediately want to start another movie after that, and he couldn’t really get into it, which both annoyed and saddened him. But with the adrenaline fading down now after the film’s end, he was starting to feel wasted. Even though it’s not like today’s been all that strenuous… Still, there’s more than one kind of strain.

Kit wasn’t alone, though: Cheleb kept yawning. His gatewatch shift was more than over when they finished, and Djam took Cheleb’s report—not that he really needed to, for they’d all been keeping an eye on the complex-monitoring readouts while watching the film, and the gates been perfectly quiet and well-behaved all evening. “Go on, cousin, I see you’re tired,” Djam said, as Cheleb yawned yet again, more cavernously than ever and displaying teeth Kit hadn’t seen before. “This world’s day is closer to mine in length than yours, and I can tell how this is starting to wear on you.”

“Me too,” Kit said, getting up and stretching. “I’m ready to turn in.”

“Into what?” Cheleb said.

“More idiom,” Djam said, bubbling at Kit. “Your milk tongue’s rich with it. Chel, just mind these gates for these few minutes. I want to fetch out my night’s reading.”

He and Kit walked around the back of the Stone Throne toward the stones that held their puptents’ portals. Djam put his head down by Kit’s and said very low, “Colleague. Earlier, about your errantry-partner. Was Cheleb… inappropriate with you?”

Kit started helplessly snickering. “Djam…”

Djam’s eyes went wide. “Oh no. Hae crossed some kind of taboo line, didn’t hae. Your people aren’t allowed to discuss it.”

“Oh no, we are, it’s just… Just.” Kit had absolutely no idea where to begin. “Djam, do me a favor.”

“Cousin! Whatever you like.”

“If hae starts having that conversation with me again… please do whatever you can to help me not have it. Seriously. Some kind of emergency would be useful. Any kind of emergency you can think of.”

Djam started bubbling quietly again “I can’t think of any time of the day or night,” he said, “when it wouldn’t be useful to have you talk to these gates, Kiht. They behave so well after you’ve had a word with them! Indeed one might want to do it proactively. At a moment’s notice. To prevent problems later in the shift…”

“That’s the spirit,” Kit said, intensely relieved. “Don’t hesitate.”

“Trust me,” Djam said, and patted Kit on the arm. “Go rest now.”

Still laughing as quietly as he could, Kit went.

***

Bed, though, didn’t turn out to be the easy solution to the day’s stresses that Kit had been hoping for. Without the entertainment and his two colleagues to distract him, the sights and sounds of the day, and of the transients’ encampment, kept coming back to haunt him.

Initially Kit tried to do routine things, or at least the things that were starting to become routine, to settle himself. He changed into nightclothes and tidied up in the puptent a little, and texted his pop (”INTERESTING DAY BUT VERY TIRED. SPENT A LOT OF IT FEEDING A SPACE OCTOPUS AND WENT TO VISIT SOME NICE BUT VERY UPSET BIRD HUMANOIDS. MISS YOU AND WISH YOU WERE HERE WITH ABOUT TEN BOXES OF SALTINES”).

Then he tried to reach Nita again but didn’t have any luck: her profile in the manual simply said Unavailable. Kit flopped down on his bed and rubbed his eyes. Is she working? At this hour? Though she was having a lot of trouble with her gates…

“Wait, wait, I’m here!” her voice said from the manual.

He grabbed it, pushed himself up against his pillows and propped the manual in his lap. “No picture?” He said.

“Oh God,” Nita said. “You really don’t want to see me right now.”

From someone whom Kit had seen over the past few years in almost every state of dress and some kinds of undress, that said a lot about Nita’s state of mind. “Yes I do,” Kit said. “But it’s okay.”

He heard her sigh, and after a second her image appeared on the page—or an image of her head, anyway. Her hair was all over the place and she looked a bit drawn, and Kit thought maybe there were dark circles starting to form under her eyes. From the page Nita caught his glance, and smiled. “Yeah, well, you don’t look all that great yourself right now.”

“Makes sense,” Kit said. “Kind of a long day over here.”

“Yeah,” she said. “For me too.”

“Gate trouble?”

Kit could hear her trying not to admit it. Finally she gave in. “Quite a bit, actually. Thesba’s dynamo layer is really screwed up, and for some reason our gate-branch seems a lot more susceptible to the magnetic-field aberrations than others. Nothing we can do except ride it out and keep all the gates working.” She sighed. “It’s fiddly work. Fix this thing, then something else breaks. Fix that thing, and something breaks back where you started. Getting pretty sick of it, to be honest.”

Kit nodded and didn’t ask whether she wanted him to come over and have a talk with her gate; if she wanted that, she wouldn’t be shy about it. Nita was too straightforward to let her own feelings interfere with what needed doing about wizardly work. “We had to go over to the transients’ camp today,” Kit said after a moment.

“Really? Mostly we’re supposed to avoid that—”

“I know,” Kit said. “Lost pet problem.”

Nita laughed at that. “You know, I didn’t think there was going to be any way to keep you away from people’s pets. Funny to find out it’s true.”

“Wasn’t my fault!” Kit said. “He came over here and started eating my food. Had to do something to get him out of here.”

Nita laughed, and then yawned as the laugh was trailing off. “I’m keeping you up,” Kit said, guilty.

“I’m keeping you up,” she said. “Tell me all about this tomorrow, okay? Because you look like you need to tell somebody.”

Kit nodded. “Yeah. Have a good night.”

“Yeah, you too.” Her picture vanished and her profile grayed out again.

Kit shut his manual and dimmed down the lights in the puptent, and settled back under the covers and closed his eyes.

An hour later he was in exactly the same place, and just as awake. Reading hadn’t helped; music hadn’t helped. He just didn’t seem able to relax. Finally Kit sat up. No point in just lying here when it’s not doing any good, he thought. He threw on the clothes he’d been wearing earlier, stuffed his manual in his vest pocket, and went out again.

Djam was sitting there on on the Stone Throne as always, reading from a small roll-shaped device that looked like a more compact version of his manual interface. “What’s the matter?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Kit said. He looked out toward the gates again, seeing them, as he’d seen them every day, with people streaming in through the feeder gates and out through the terminus gate, and just shook his head and turned away.

Djam looked at him and let out a breath, and said, “I know, cousin. Believe me, I know.”

Kit nodded. “I’m going to go walk a while,” he said. “It might help.” He didn’t say what he was thinking: that what would really have helped was to have Ponch with him. He could have taken him for a good, long walk and gotten his head cleared. Well… Maybe the walk by itself will be enough. He waved at Djam and headed out through the stone circle in the direction away from the view toward the gates, making his way out into the broad, empty plain and however much was left of the night.

It was windy out but not actually that cold; very like an April night might have been at home. Some cloud cover had rolled in since Kit had initially tried to get to bed—enough to obscure most of the sky overhead, including Thesba, which was now well on its way to setting again. The light of it still glowed ruddy golden on the upper cloud deck to the westward, and occasionally bloomed into shape when the clouds thinned enough: but mostly the great moon was hidden.

That suited Kit’s mood at the moment. He’d seen more than enough of Thesba for the moment, even if the conditions also meant he was denied the sight of the fiercely burning stars of the local OB association, or of the burning, staring eye of Erakis. For a long time he just walked and walked, to the point where the lights of the gate complex had dwindled to a faint bright patch that the stones of the stone circle would obscure if you kept them right between you and the gate. Kit did that, only rarely looking back, mostly walking further and further away and just letting the rhythm of his walk and the swish of the tall grass against his boots take him away from actually thinking about anything. There was nothing going on out here but the wind blowing, muttering in his ears. He was feeling a lot more tired than he had, but at least he was also feeling a bit more peaceful.

His thoughts had been drifting for a while when he suddenly felt a breeze that had nothing to do with the local weather. Kit halted and looked around. Not too far ahead of him, glowing faintly in the indistinct light, Kit saw a huge long saurian shape making its way across the plain toward him from the spot where she’d appeared, all elbows and lashing tail and big toothy head.

“Mam!” Kit said as she came up to him. “What’re you doing here?”

“Came to see you,” Mamvish said. “I have a little time off. Nita and I were talking this afternoon while I was making rounds on all the gate complexes, and she made me promise to stop by.”

Kit smiled. “Well, okay. How’re you holding up?”

Mamvish slumped down onto the grassy ground beside him. “All right, I suppose,” she said. “It’s so amazing to have a few minutes to myself, I can hardly remember what it’s like. It’s been power feed, power feed, day and night: keeping that thing in one piece for the moment.” She rotated an eye in Thesba’s direction. “Not much thinking in that kind of work, not much challenge…”

Kit sat down beside her head and looked in the direction from which he’d been walking. He’d gotten off his original line, so that the distant light of the gating complex wasn’t blocked. “Mamvish,” he said, “why?”

Mamvish hissed out a sigh. “Everybody’s question at this point,” she said, “for a thousand values of ‘why’. Which one are you chasing?”

“The ‘why’ as in ‘why don’t all these Tevaralti want to get out of here?’”

Another long sigh, a sound like a steam train venting. “It’s hard to be absolutely certain,” Mamvish said, “but I think it’s most likely something to do with the way their species interacts with the planet’s kernel.”

She put her head down on her foreclaws, a weary gesture, and cocked her portside eye at Kit. “It’s always unique,” she said, “a species’ connection to its world, and to the One. The Tevaralti had a seshtev, a perceived-revelation-of-intent, some time back—”

The Speech-word she used to translate the Tevaralti word “seshtev”, methenlet, was the shortest of the formulations that the Speech used to designate what on Earth people might have called a “group religious experience”. “I looked into it once when I first started consulting here, but it doesn’t seem to translate well, even into the Speech,” Mamvish said. “That’s not unusual, though: often these things don’t.”

“‘Some time back?’” Kit said.

Mamvish waved her tail. “A millennium or so. Not that long ago really, when you consider the age of their civilization. Anyway, the core of this experience seemed to be a sort of realization that the species needed to be ‘of one mind’.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “One of them said that to me today.”

“Now there are a lot of ways that can look…”

“Especially depending on who’s making the mind up.”

“True,” Mamvish said. “But this particular opinion, or set of opinions about the way they should live their lives, seemed to spread fairly quickly across the planet—probably secondary to their empathic-symbiotic linkage with one another. That’s been in place for many millennia, and it’s probably one of the major factors in their planetary civilization as a whole being so long-lived. Probably it originally developed very early in the evolution of the Tevaralti species as a survival mechanism. Tevaralti who were part of the linkage were better protected against predators, perhaps, or better able to find places where food was plentiful and living conditions otherwise favored them.”

“So more of them survived to have more Tevaralti who had the symbiotic linkage, yeah?” Kit said. “And now they all do.”

“To greater or lesser degrees, yes.” Mamvish said. “There’s some variation in its presence and prevalence among world populations. Some clans or nation-regions possess the symbiotic sense more acutely, some less. But local variations aside, in the long run it’s been advantageous for them. Cultural changes that on other planets would most likely only have taken effect secondary to warfare, on Tevaral would take hold simply because of the symbiotic connection among groups that were in relatively close physical proximity to one another—say on the same continent.”

“So this religious experience spread through the linkage?”

“Partly. But also by normal cultural exchange. Overall, the concept of ‘being of one mind’ settled in without too much fuss. And it seems not to have been a bad thing for them, by and large. Certainly they’ve not had a war since it happened.”

“Okay,” Kit said. He could see the attractions of that.

“But after this seshtev, something unusual happened,” Mamvish said. “That aspect of the Tevaralti mindset actually set itself into the planet’s kernel, as part of the bundle of structures defining what life here meant for the resident species.” She cocked that left-hand eye at Kit again. “Maybe this isn’t all that surprising, in retrospect; their star flared when their civilization was quite young.”

Kit’s mouth went dry. “Like Wellakh?”

“Oh, no, nothing like! Not at all a serious flare, by comparison with that, Powers be thanked.” Mamvish shook herself all over. “Yet enough to cause fairly uncomfortable climatic alterations in the short term. Now perhaps you know that the Tevaralti cultures, worldwide, had already shared a very deep sense that this world was made for them—that it was the right place for them to be.”

“I was looking at their history,” Kit said. “For a species who developed space travel pretty early on, it surprised me that they weren’t doing more of it.”

Mamvish swung her tail in agreement. “That’s true. There are a number of scales that we used to grade the tendency of a species to walk the High Road, and this particular sense of attachment has positioned them toward the lower end of these scales. But after that flare event, the Tevaralti’s sense of how close their world had been to being changed forever set in very deep, and started manifesting itself as an intention not to let their world be hurt that way again. There was also a sense that they had a more general caretaker role that they’d been neglecting: a feeling that they needed to take better care of the other species sharing this world with them. So when such a widespread belief, shared and grown over many generations, settled itself into the planet’s kernel, well, probably nobody should have been surprised. And because the Tevaralti got very close to some of the more actively sentient species here over that period of time, the kernel-based aspects of the seshtev communicated themselves to these other species too.”

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 purposes?”

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, it’s 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 cappucino. 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 more 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.

“Only a few minutes ago,” Kit said. “Maybe five. Is there something I can help you with?”

A long silence followed. Kit got the sense that the Fourth’s attention was focused on him in some way he’d never been looked at before, something profoundly revelatory in ways he couldn’t understand. It made him very, very uncomfortable. But even in his short wizardly career Kit had withstood the regard of beings of terrible power who were intent on his immediate destruction, and whatever this felt like, it didn’t feel like that. This felt like curiosity; and yes, danger, in some mode or other. But it was danger that meant him well—so strange a concept, in this intensity, that he could hardly get his head around it.

“Kiht?” he heard Djam calling. He wasn’t on the Stone Throne any more: he’d come out with a wizard-light hovering over his shoulder to see what was going on behind the circle. And then he caught sight of the Fourth. Djam stopped as if struck still, and stared.

The peculiarly indefinite figure didn’t move, but Kit knew it had briefly turned its attention to Djam. Then, a few moments later, that attention was back on Kit again. He could practically feel it on his skin, like a heatlamp, except that the sensation had nothing to do with heat or cold or anything else so mundane. Kit’s nerves tried to work out how to render the sensation and then apparently simply gave up, so that he felt nothing but a vague dull tingle along the front of him.

“Pathfinder,” the Fourth said, as if musing… but not so much for Kit’s benefit: for someone else’s. Not Djam’s, though.

“Sorry?” Kit said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

The Fourth leaned toward Kit just a little. That gesture he felt more clearly now: a pressure, almost a test. As if something was saying, Can you take it? Can you take this?

Kit frowned at that and leaned forward against what was pushing him: pushed back.

For a long, long few moments there was no response. Kit just kept pushing back. Then suddenly the pressure let up, so that Kit staggered when it was released. He was aware again of that strange dangerous attention bent on him; but something about the quality of it had changed. It seemed somehow more multiple; as if the attention of more than one being was bent on Kit now.

“Yes,” the Fourth said. “You know half the way. The other half will know the other half.”

A huge odd silence drew itself around the two of them… or however many of them there were. And then the Fourth said: “Yes yes.”

And without any further sign or movement, it was gone.

Kit swayed where he stood. Djam hurried over to him, braced him from one side and looked at him in concern. “Cousin, are you all right?”

Kit nodded and rubbed his eyes, and was astonished to find that his hand was shaking. “Yeah. I think. Wow was that weird.”

“You are just ordained to be having one of those interesting days, aren’t you?” Djam said.

Kit blinked his eyes a few times: they suddenly felt very tired. “Yeah, I’d say you’re right there.” He stared at the spot where the Fourth had been. “Djam, were you seeing what I was seeing?”

“When I figure out what I was seeing,” Djam said, “I’ll let you know.” He bubbled softly in his throat. “Pity Cheleb wasn’t here too so we could all compare notes. His night vision’s better than mine.”

“I don’t know whether broad daylight would’ve made any difference,” Kit said. “I think maybe my species just isn’t equipped to see those guys.”

“Most of ours wouldn’t be,” Djam said. “If that was a Fourth—”

“It was.” Kit was as sure as if the information had been communicated to him directly.

“They have a paraphysical extension into a higher-numbered dimension. Supposedly part of their nervous system and some of their physical components are positioned out there.” Djam waved a hand in an indefinite way, as if trying to suggest in which direction the fifth through eleventh dimensions were located. “And because they’re not all here here—meaning in our own dimension—your eyes and your brain can’t understand some of what they’re seeing. So they just make the best guess they can…”

“That sounds about right,” Kit said, still wobbling as they started to make their way back toward the circle.

“They’re handy to have around, though,” Djam said, putting a furry arm around Kit as Kit stumbled. “One of the things that is known about the Fourth is that worldgates just work better when they’re in the vicinity.”

“Maybe he was here to pick up a few tips,” Kit said, and laughed. But the laugh came out weakly, as if the joke was more on Kit than anyone else.

Djam laughed too, also sounding a touch nervous. “What was it doing here, though?”

“Not sure. It was asking for Mamvish. She left a few minutes before.”

Djam shook his head, bubbled again. “I know. My codex informed me she was arriving, but the visit was tagged as private, so I stayed where I was.” He looked at Kit with renewed interest. “You have interesting friends,” Djam said. “I look forward to meeting your partner.”

“So does Cheleb,” Kit said, and laughed again. It was halfway to a giggle, now; he was actually feeling lightheaded.

Djam made a soft sound of agreement and led Kit over to his portal, touched it open. “You should really try to get that rest now, cousin. Too much excitement for one day.”

Kit was inclined to agree with him. After just those few moments under the Fourth’s regard, he felt as if he’d been repeatedly running up and down flights of stairs till he was short of breath and actually aching. And that’s with this increase in my power levels. What would it have been like to meet that when I was running at my normal level? He didn’t want to know.

He made his way over to his bed and flopped down onto it. “Thanks, Djam,” Kit said.

And within no more than a few seconds both the puptent’s lights, and Kit’s, went out.

SEVEN:

Saturday

Kit woke later than planned, sprawled face first on his bed, hardly having moved an inch from the way he’d fallen onto it. His annoyance at realizing he hadn’t been able to stay awake even long enough to get his clothes off was only exceeded by his horror at realizing what time it was: easily two hours into his shift. “Djammmm,” Kit said under his breath, suspecting that his shiftmate had decided to let him sleep late after the unsettling events of the predawn period. But it doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t the alarm in my manual go off? I don’t get it…

Then something occurred to Kit. He knew somebody who worked closely with the power that ran the wizards’ manuals: in fact, someone who had that instrumentality (apparently) inside her head.

“Bobo?” Kit said.

Nothing.

He sighed. “Never mind,” Kit said out loud. “Looks like weird’s the keyword for this whole damn intervention…”

Kit got dressed in fresh clothes, put his head out the puptent’s portal and saw that the wind was up again; so he reached back in for his vest and threw it on before he venturing outside.

To his surprise, Djam was not sitting on the Stone Throne: Cheleb was. “Earlier than I thought I’d see you,” Cheleb said, sounding quite cheerful. “Plainly name of planet Earth should be more correctly translated as Stone. Seems to be what you’re made of.”

“Always nice to be complimented,” Kit said, “assuming I can figure out why. And whether I deserved it. Where’s Djam?”

“Asleep,” Cheleb said. “Apparently visitor last night had same effect on him as had on you; just took longer to set in.” Hae shook haes head. “So sorry to have missed it. Never had a chance to see a Fourth before, probably never will again.”

Kit didn’t know what to make of this, so he just went and sat down by Cheleb for a moment and looked over his shoulder at the gate-monitoring diagrams laid out on the stone. “They behaving themselves?”

“Even better than when being shouted at by your good self,” Cheleb said. “Didn’t think it was possible. But then again, Fourth…”

Kit shook his head. “How’s the sibik situation?”

“Not even one.”

“Yet,” Kit said.

“All right, so far. But pleasant change, frankly. Cute things, but can get a bit overbearing.” Cheleb sighed and stretched. “Any advancement on token-internalization side of things?”

“What? Oh.” Kit smiled. “Been working on it. I’ll be thinking more about it over the course of the day.”

“Good plan,” Cheleb said. “Had it strongly suggested to me by immediate gate-management supervisor upstream that you two should take day off, secondary to exciting events of last night. So maybe should go visit one’s errantry-partner and work on the project a little.”

Kit opened his mouth. “By suggested, I mean ordered,” said Cheleb. “Check own version of Knowledge.”

Kit stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Chel, I really, really want to take you up on this, but this ought to be my shift.”

“Isn’t anymore,” Cheleb said. “Made of stone Earth wizard may be, but should know that before arrival of you two, had been handling triple shifts myself. Tailored hormonal shift—easy to implement when there’s warning. Doing one hundred of your hours straight through not difficult when hormonal alteration protocol is in place, and using wizardry to augment it.” Cheleb grinned at him. “With heightened power levels, truly not a problem. Getting a lot done, time for much multitasking. Investigating more Earth entertainment as well.”

Oh boy, Kit thought. What have I done? “All right,” Kit said. “I’ll grab a bite to eat and go see Nita. How long?”

“As long as liked,” Cheleb said. “Will message you on manual if any problem. Go!” Hae made a shoo-ing gesture at Kit. “Eat, visit, get internalizing!”

So Kit did as he was told. He ate, took the short-transport pad over to Ronan’s gating complex to shower and take care of other necessities, changed clothes, padded back to the Stone Circle to drop the dirty clothes off in his puptent, and then went back to the pad, giving it the coordinates for Nita’s gating complex.

She had shown that to him briefly in a panorama she sent him via the manual, so Kit knew more or less where to find her without too much looking. Pragmatic as always, Nita had brought a couple of lawn chairs with her from home—or maybe she’d already had them in her puptent: Kit wasn’t sure. He found her sitting off to one side of a very large grassy area, probably a park, its boundaries surrounded by tall, handsome gleaming little skyscrapers and smaller buildings—all very elegantly and gracefully made in various kinds of glass and glazed metal.

And all soon to be abandoned, Kit thought sadly as he strolled across the park to her. Nita’s view was essentially the same as his: the several smaller, local Gates, all their portal orifices locked in continuously-open configuration, with Tevaralti endlessly streaming out of them into the long-jump gate on the far side of the park: people hurrying, shouting, pushing hovercarts or floating platforms, or driving larger vehicles, full of their personal effects. And here, too, Kit saw so many of them doing what he’d seen people doing at his own gate: taking that last, desperate look up into their own sky, or at the moon that was going to kill their world, just one last time before they vanished through into a new place forever. Nita’s gate-plaza, too, had its own transients’ encampment—its occupants watching the others go, staying where they were, and silently grieving.

He sighed and looked back at her. As if she felt him coming, Nita glanced up, closed the manual in her lap, dumped it in her chair, and got up to greet him. Suddenly, it seemed Kit as if everything he’d gone through in the past couple days came down on him at once. He went straight to Nita and grabbed her and hugged her very hard.

She hugged him back at least as hard, and buried her face in his shoulder for a moment. “What were you doing last night?” she muttered. “I can’t let you out of my sight for a moment without you getting in trouble.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Kit said. “The trouble came looking for me.”

“Oh yeah,” Nita said. “Sure.” She let go of him, and though she was smiling, there was some worry in it. “Maybe not trouble as such. But still… I read the précis of what happened. Your manual was recording.” She shook her head at him. “That was extremely bizarre.”

Kit took a long breath and let it out. “Yes it was.”

Nita reached down under her chair, pulled out a soda, and handed it to him. “Sit down and tell me everything.”

So he did. It was strange how rare such debriefings were for them, since they tended to be deployed together almost all the time. It was strange, too, how Kit kept stopping himself every now and then and go over what he was telling Nita to make sure that he wasn’t missing some specific detail that would be important for her to know. The problem was that he couldn’t always tell what was going to turn out to be important. Still, he did his best. And he found that it was making him feel better when he could make her laugh, because he saw the way her eyes kept straying across to the transients’ encampment on the far side of the park.

The story of the little Tevaralti boy’s greedy, naughty sibik made Nita laugh so hard that she almost couldn’t breathe. But then came the story of taking it home—or at least, what passed for home—and neither of them was able to laugh much at that. As Kit got to the point where there was no more to tell of that story, Nita pushed herself back against the back of her chair, and stretched her legs out in front of her, sighing.

She was wearing the extremely ragged jeans that she favored for times when she most needed to be comfortable and when whatever species she was working with wouldn’t have any cultural judgments to make about the rips and tears. Now, as she sometimes did when she was nervous or unhappy about something, Nita started unraveling one of the raggedy places just above her knee. Kit watched her doing this for a few moments before speaking again. “They told us that our main job was with the gates. And I understand that. I really do. But I keep feeling like I ought to have gone there before. Ought to go there again, talk to them more…”

“‘Ought to,’” Nita said. She sighed. “I think maybe our ‘oughts’ aren’t really what matters here. …I thought that too, Kit, you know? I thought ‘I really should be with these guys more.’ But then I realized, Hey, I’m an idiot. I don’t have anything to share that’s really going to help them. We’re all humanoids, yeah, but… right now the gap’s too big.”

She fell silent for a moment. “Look, when Mom died, yeah, that was the end of a world.” She gulped at her soda. “No question! But not the end of the world. This is so much bigger, so much worse. Anything I’d say to these people about what grief looks like would seem so stupid and small by comparison. Just the thought of it… I get all choked.” She shook her head. “Nope. I feel a lot better sitting still here and watching the gate. That’s how I’m helping them. This isn’t about me, or how I feel: it’s about them.”

She looked across at the streams of Tevaralti hurrying out of the feeder gates toward the downstream one. “And anyway, when you come right down to it, the stories they’re living right now are so much bigger than mine. Just look at them. Everything’s ending for them, and they’re being so brave. All the carts and trucks and floater pads, all loaded up with everything that matters to them, household stuff and artifacts and data and art. They’re trying to save everything they can, not just themselves. All their stories, all their culture, all their history: everything they can save, they’re taking away with them. But there’ll be so much they can’t save… that not all the wizards here can save. The moon’s going to fall down, and break it all up, and destroy everything. Hidden things, forgotten things: they’ll all be gone forever now. No matter what you do, things get lost…”

Kit heard the slight quiver in her voice, and didn’t have to look at Nita to know that there were tears in her eyes. He didn’t turn to look at her because he knew that would make them spill, and right now she was holding on tight. So he just put his hand out toward her, and she grabbed hold of it, squeezing it. Then they just sat together and were heavy-hearted for a bit, and Kit once more was astonished at how the pain did lessen slightly when someone was sharing it with you, clichéd though that should have been.

“Better?” Nita said after a while.

“Better,” Kit said. “You?”

“Yeah.”

Nita tipped her head back and stared straight up at the sky. “All I’m trying to figure out now,” she said, “is what the Fourth was there about.” She tilted her head back over to look at Kit. “Sure, he may really have been looking for Mamvish, but somehow I find it really hard to believe that’s the only reason he was there. These upper-dimensional guys—” She waved her hand in a way strangely reminiscent of the gesture that Djam had used. “They see things, patterns, that we can’t. The trouble is that because they are multidimensional, they don’t always know how to communicate what they’re trying to tell you so that you’re able to get it. Even in the Speech, they have trouble narrowing things down enough to be comprehensible.”

Kit looked at her in some surprise. “When did you meet one of these people? You never told me about this.”

“There were one or two of them who turned up in the Playroom when I was doing all that kernel work for my mom,” Nita said. “One guy—tall, a lot of eyes—he was really creepy. Or at least that was all I could make of him when I met him first. He always seemed to have a way of looking at you didn’t have anything to do with any of those eyes. Turns out that’s kind of a diagnostic, that feeling of being weirdly watched. If all of you lives in just one set of dimensions, then having somebody around who has footholds in more than one set kind of makes your skin crawl.” She shivered. “But it turns out it didn’t have anything to do with bad intent. It’s just the way our nervous systems react to their nervous systems. Later on, when I thought about some of the things he’d said to me, they were really useful. Or they would’ve been, if I just hadn’t been so freaked by him.” Nita laughed at herself. “Nothing I can do about it now, but at least now when I run into somebody who has that going on, I know what to make of it.”

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 passing 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 bring 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.”

“No matter how you try, that will never be a s’more,” Dairine said, indignant. “Not on the best day it ever has!”

“We could give it a shot, though…” Nita said. “Wait five. I’ll be back.” She headed out toward the short-jump pad.

“Why are these so important?” Djam said. “Is the ritual something to do with the fire?”

“Well, not exactly—”

“It’s more of a tradition…”

Ronan sniffed. “Not everywhere, because I’ve never heard of it!”

“Some of our people, when they go camping,” Tom said, “make these as a sweet, a last-course snack. A sort of dessert.”

Some discussion of camping ensued, and the tradition of singing around campfires, and why there would be none of that tonight (“My voice is wrecked from shouting at my gates all day,” Ronan insisted, “so if you think I’m going to wreck it some more recreationally…!”). This was still in full flow when Nita reappeared with a box of honey grahams and a jar of marshmallow fluff.

“I can’t believe this,” Ronan said, taking the jar, opening it, and testing a fingerful of the contents. He made a very dubious face. “…And your people have this myth about ours having terrible teeth? How do any of you even have teeth when you eat shite like this? Honestly.”

“I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got,” Nita said. “Which—” She produced a long thick paper-wrapped bar from under her arm. “Is not too badly, under the circumstances.”

Djam’s nostrils flickered and his eyes went wide. “Wait. You have chocolate? How do you have chocolate?”

Kit looked over at Nita, and Nita looked at Ronan, and all three of them burst out laughing. “Oh no,” Djam said, fluffing up his fur in what Kit was coming to recognize as an ironic gesture, “I forgot, you’re from there! That planet!”

“Distant, Fabulous Dirt,” Cheleb said. “Fabled Home of Chocolate.” Hae gave Kit an amused look that suggested hae was quoting a commercial hae’d heard, probably at the Crossings.

“My sister,” Kit said, “is going into business with that one as an intergalactic cocoa dealer.” He jerked his chin at Ronan. “It’s going to be so interesting to watch…” Privately he hoped “dealer” was the right word, and not “smuggler.” But the boundaries were liable to blur sometimes in intergalactic usage, and doubly so where Carmela was involved.

“Sorry,” Cheleb said. “Amazed again. Can’t get over idea of people actually eating it instead of depositing in financial institution.”

“Okay,” Nita said, “fine, let’s stop discussing the investment value of the stuff for the time being! We can supply you guys if you need some. Meanwhile let’s get busy putting it in us instead of a bank.”

Graham crackers were broken out, and broken to size: chocolate was snapped into the proper-sized squares, Marshmallow fluff was applied to the crackers.

“And now what?” Ronan said, having watched this whole process skeptically.

“Well, we toast this somehow…” Nita looked frustrated.

“Here,” Kit said, and pointed at the fluffed graham cracker. “I was pretty good at this when I did it last…” The cracker obediently levitated out of Nita’s hands, soared out over the fire, and rotated so that it hung there fluff-side down.

The fluff fell off it and into the fire, where it instantly went up in a brief burst of flame, a scorched smell and a trail of black smoke.

Ronan burst out laughing. “Um,” Nita said. “Maybe the fluff needs to go onto the cracker a little harder.”

“Why do you even have that stuff?” Kit said to her under his breath as she started working on another cracker.

“I eat it on the graham crackers, okay?” Nita muttered. “And since some people put ketchup on their saltines, I wouldn’t make too big a deal about it if I were them.”

Kit grinned and said nothing further. Nita finished with that cracker and turned it over to Kit. “Here. Don’t wiggle it around so much this time.”

With great care Kit levitated this cracker too, soared it out over the fire, and only very gradually started to tilt the marshmallow-fluffed side toward the heat. The fluff started to run almost immediately, so that Kit had to keep tilting it back and forth. Finally it was threatening to melt off the cracker entirely, so Kit got it out of there and guided it over to Nita to have the chocolate applied and the second graham cracker squished down on top. Unfortunately, the fluff lost its heat almost immediately and the chocolate refused to melt.

Dairine snickered, triumphant. “That is the least effective s’more in the history of s’mores.”

“They’ve got a history?” Ronan said. “If this is anything to go by, I’d say it’s just about over.”

Nita threw Ronan a withering look and bit into the s’more. “It’s not that bad,” she said. But she was plainly making the best of a bad situation.

“All we need now is cocoa and scary stories,” Tom said, amused.

“If we’re having cocoa, I want some,” said a new voice, and Carl appeared out of the darkness beyond the stones in very similar hiking clothes to Tom’s. “Beats making my own.”

Over the various shouts of greeting, Tom gave Carl a wry look. “Don’t tell me you brought that with you?!”

“’Course I did,” Carl said, sitting down by Tom. “We’re a long way from home in a taxing situation. Am I not allowed to have comfort food? Think carefully before you answer, because I didn’t say a single word about your Triscuits.”

“You have cocoa? Have you got marshmallows?” came the immediate demand from several people sitting around the circle.

“Only the mini ones,” Carl said, looking regretfully at the campfire. “They’re no good for toasting.”

“No, not for toasting,” Nita said. “For s’mores. The marshmallow fluff doesn’t really cut it.”

“No, I see that.” Carl made a face. He stood up. “Well, it’s worth a try. Be right back.”

He got up and headed off for the short-transport pad, and quickly returned with half a bag of the tiny marshmallows. “This,” Dairine said, eyeing them, “is absolutely going to be one of those problems that only wizardry can solve…”

This proved true, as no one had anything like a skewer thin enough to toast mini marshmallows on. They wound up levitating them over the fire in small groups, which was delicate business—the mass of each individual mini marshmallow was so small that managing them in such a way that they all toasted evenly within the same time period was extremely difficult. Routinely half of them got burnt black while the other half were still only the faintest brown, and finally even Carl had to admit that they weren’t that much better a solution to the s’mores problem then the marshmallow fluff had been.

“Make a note,” Ronan said on being handed first even vaguely viable s’more and regarding it with mild resignation as it started falling apart in his hand, “the next time we go to evacuate an entire planetary population, bring full-sized marshmallows.”

“Not that I want to have to help do this again anytime soon,” Nita said, glancing in Thesba’s general direction with an annoyed look. “But then I can’t imagine this happens all that often…”

“You’d be surprised how often it happens,” Tom said, stretching his legs out. “This is kind of a special situation—it’s rare that a planet has this specific problem with getting its population offworld, or that it has to happen so quickly. Normally planets don’t just haul off and blow up the way Krypton was supposed to have; they tend to give you plenty of warning. But I’d say that the Interconnect Project winds up moving, oh, at least one or two populations a year entirely off their home worlds, ecosystems and all.”

Some of the wizards sitting around the fire exchanged concerned glances at that. “After all, we live in a fairly small, quiet suburb of the galaxy,” Carl said. “In closer to the core, and in the more populous arms, there are tens of millions of worlds inhabited by intelligent species, and of that number a small percentage come under catastrophic threat in any given year—solar disasters, black holes wandering through, local gravitic disturbances… A very small percentage, sure. And wherever possible, Planetaries and resident wizards keep a close eye on things and managed to derail at least some of the conditions that threaten inhabited worlds before they get out of hand. But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. This is one of those times…” He ran a hand through his hair. “The big projects are always subject to logistical problems: it can’t be helped. It’s the small single-planet projects that’re usually the most successful.”

“And as a result you hardly ever hear about them after the fact,” Tom said. “Atlantis…”

“Well, that was a bit of a mixed result,” Carl said, and sighed.

Tom laughed a short sardonic laugh. “You think?”

“This something happened on Earth?” said Cheleb.

“The Aphthonic Intervention,” Tom said. “It’s in the manual. There was a continent in the planet’s early developmental stages that was one of the first homes of one of several ancestor species—”

Kit smiled, remembering a brief conversation he’d had on this subject with a most unusual pig. “I know four different versions of this story,” he said, “but not which one is true.”

“Only four?” Tom raised his eyebrows at Kit, amused. “I’d have said eight at least. But as for how many of them are true? All of them, of course. You should know by now, though, how different the truth can look depending on what angle you’re examining it from.”

“Oh God,” said Ronan, “it’s one of those Rashomon things, isn’t it.”

“Well, no. What sank the continent isn’t disputed. Atlan Seamount was the biggest underwater volcano this planet has ever produced, and the Atlantis continent lay right on top of it; its main volcanic neck and pre-volcanic basement cone came up straight up through the middle of the Atlan land mass. When the big eruption went off at last, the resulting explosion was like the one they expect to hit Yellowstone some day, except a hundred times worse. It cracked the body of the continent straight through in five places.”

“See, the wizards there had unfortunately tried to throttle the volcano,” Carl said, “and that never works. Then when it went off at last, they initiated a last-ditch backtiming intervention to go back and keep the triggering event from happening.” He shook his head. “Timesliding living beings on a surface is one thing. But timesliding the surface itself, especially when that involves a significant portion of the Earth’s crust—that’s something else entirely. It… tends not to work well. The continent was completely shattered, and the crustal structure underneath it was shredded.”

“And when the timeslide intervention failed,” Tom said, “the backlash saturated the whole area with uncontrolled temporal anomalies. As a result there’s no magnetic data stored in the present crustal record to confirm that any of it ever happened at all. Not that there’s much of that crust material left, anyway, in the upper layers. Afterwards, other continental plates were pushed in over the subducted, damaged plates, and…” He lifted his arms, let them fall. “That was that.”

“But what did work,” Carl said, “was the project put together by some wizards who were intent on getting as much of the unique animal life as possible off Atlan, and onto other continents, before it was destroyed. That worked extremely well—a guided export of breeding stock to environments where they’d prosper. So we still have fireworms and basilisks and a lot of other unique creatures that turn up in fairy tales. Without the Aphthonic Intervention, the only place they’d turn up is fairy tales.”

“Well,” Ronan said, “that’s all very well, as long as the basilisks stay away from me. Not so sure why they went to so much trouble to save that species. Nasty little buggers.”

“Now now,” Tom said, “mustn’t judge.”

“Watch me,” Ronan said. “But I hope we’ve got a bigger action plan in case anything larger goes wrong.”

“Of course we do,” Tom said.

“After all,” Carl said, “it’s not like our Moon isn’t going to do this eventually.”

Almost all the Earth-based participants’ heads snapped up at that—everyone’s except Nita’s, Kit noticed. She merely bowed her head over the s’more she was trying to assemble, smiling an odd little smile.

“It’s moving away from the Earth right now,” Tom said, “a few inches further every year. But that’s not going to go on forever. Sooner or later it’s going to start spiraling back in. It’ll get closer and closer, and start dipping toward the Roche limit, the point where Earth’s tidal forces and gravitation start really messing with anything that gets too close.” He stretched out his legs in front of him, leaned back against his rock. “When it gets down to about eighteen thousand miles over the surface, that’s when the real excitement starts as far as the lunar structure is concerned. At that point the gravitational and tidal forces of the Earth begin actually deforming the Moon, stretching it out of shape. Much closer than that, say around ten thousand miles out, and the Moon simply breaks in pieces like an egg that’s been dropped on the floor.”

Nita was still fiddling with her s’more, wearing that slight smile. “You knew about this before, didn’t you?” Carl said. “Remiss of you not to mention.”

She looked up with mischief in her eyes. “Well,” she said, “it’s maybe half a million years from now this’ll happen, give or take. Might be twice that: no one’s sure. Doesn’t seem to be much point in yelling ‘fire’ when the building hasn’t really even started burning yet.”

Tom smiled slightly. “We know a lot more about what the Moon’s made of these days,” he said, “but if I remember rightly the jury’s still out on what happens after it breaks up. Does it simply fall down on us, or are the pieces shredded by the tidal effects into small enough chunks for us to wind up with rings?”

Nita leaned back against her own rock and sighed. “It is still out,” she said. “But more on the yes-to-rings side than the other way. Seems there are density anomalies that may make the shredding easier.”

“Assuming there are any human beings left on Earth at that point,” Ronan said. “And not just gone because we’ve destroyed our environment, or evolved into something different, or simply left.”

Carl nodded. “Half a million years is a good while yet,” he said. “Anything can happen…”

Everyone got quiet. But Kit was for the moment lost in another vision. “Imagine what that would look like, though,” he said. Gradually he became aware of the others looking at him strangely. “But seriously. When we look up at that moon from home, it’s nearly a quarter million miles away. Imagine how it would look at twenty thousand miles away. It would fill half the sky.”

A lot of eyes went up to the darkly burning, lowering presence that was easily taking up a third of the sky here. “And then,” he said, “rings…”

Kit realized that Nita’s gaze was fixed on him, and when their eyes met, the look he saw there said something he’d occasionally seen there before: you see this vision, too. And you see what it would be like. I thought I was the only one…

“But it still leaves us with a problem,” Tom says. “Or rather, it leaves somebody with a problem. Not me, not any of you; this won’t happen on any of our watches. But when that inward spiral starts, assuming there are people left, and you’re Earth’s Planetary… what do you do? Do you allow nature to take its course? Do you start the process of stabilizing the Moon’s orbit so that doesn’t descend any further? Granted, the choice becomes a bit simpler if there’s nobody left but the Planetary, or the small group of wizards who’ve been left behind as caretakers. Oh yes,” Tom said, putting his hands behind his head and leaning against them, “there are worlds where that’s exactly what’s happened. The dominant species has moved away, or changed beyond their need to keep that world any longer—yet they feel sentimental about it, and so they keep it exactly as it was before they left.”

“Kind of like keeping somebody’s room just like it was when they died,” Ronan said. “Little bit creepy, if you ask me.”

“I wouldn’t argue,” Tom said. “Nonetheless, it happens. Attachment’s a strange thing. Sometimes a being, or a species, will get very attached indeed. And the urge towards inertia, towards preservation as opposed to the urge towards change, is very common.” He looked out across the plain toward the gating complex. “So is the urge towards nostalgia.” He looked at their campfire. “But is allowing entropy to have its way with physical matter always necessarily an evil choice? Might there not be examples of entropically-grounded change that aren’t negatively connoted—that don’t necessarily mean the Lone Power is standing somewhere in the background going ‘Nya-ah-ah’ at us like Dishonest John?”

This produced some confused looks among the audience. Carl, who’d settled himself crosslegged across the fire from Tom with his back to another rock, raised his eyebrows and said, “You’re dating yourself again.”

“Hardly,” Tom said, smiling slightly and taking a drink of his Guinness. “It’s widely known my personal history reaches back to at least the Pleistocene. No one’s going to care if I reference the Saturday morning cartoons we had back then.”

He gave absolutely no sign of noticing Nita’s sudden red-hot blush. “I’ll grant you, at this end of time and causality it’s hard to imagine what the form of change and growth that the Powers that Be originally intended would have looked like in operation. Impossible for us to tell, of course; before the other Powers got their version of change fully up and running, the Lone Power installed its own more toxic version over the top, and that’s what we’re stuck with. But the rest of the Powers seem to have accepted some of Its forms of change, at this end of time, as part of nature. Must we keep entire ecosystems running past the time at which they’d have relatively gracefully expired, merely out of the urge to stick it to the Lone One? If everything must die, can’t we allow some of it to die with dignity?”

Kit saw that some of the group around the campfire were looking at Tom rather strangely. “I know,” Tom said. “You’re young in your practices yet… used to fighting the Lone One tooth and nail, and even winning. Which is as it should be. That’s why wizardry was given into your hands, into all our hands, when young. Yet even when you’re young, you have to learn to pick your fights. Then you start learning to leverage your experience against your power levels.” His glance rested on Dairine for a moment. “Some of us learn that earlier than others. There are people who waste time feeling sorry for wizards whose power levels took a dive after they come off their Ordeals, never suspecting how much smarter and more effective those wizards are now they’ve realized how to make the most of what they’ve got.”

“That was a compliment,” Dairine said. “Accepted with thanks.”

“And on that note,” Carl said, “especially speaking of power levels taking a dive, even the ones we’re working with here… Someone has a few other stops to make before he heads off for his own shift pretty soon.” He neatly deprived Tom of the Guinness bottle and drained it.

Tom laughed and shook his head. “Hate to admit it, but he has a point…”

The Supervisories got up and wandered around making their goodnights to everyone, and finally waved and vanished into the dark in the direction of the short-transport pad. Everybody else made themselves comfortable around the Stone Throne for a while, enjoying the fire, snacking casually on what food remained of the buffet that had been laid out, and just generally relaxing and ignoring Thesba, now standing fairly high overhead and occasionally obscured by drifting cloud. Ronan had renewed his discussion of the “first” of the Star Wars films with Cheleb and Djam and Mr. Frilly; he’d started that one running on the streaming video with the purpose of freezing it on every scene he didn’t like, one after another, and mocking them all mercilessly. Dairine was sitting in the grass with her back against one of the standing stones and Spot in her lap, smiling slightly and watching this performance unfold.

Kit strolled over to the remains of the buffet to get himself some beef jerky—Ronan had brought that, and it was surprisingly good—and glanced around him. Just about then Nita wandered up by him, watching the video-screening action with an expression of dry amusement that suggested she had absolutely no intention of getting involved. “You know,” she said, “that Creamsicle juice has been really nice but I would kill for some fizzy water just about now.”

“I’ve got some,” Kit said. “Come on back.”

He led her around to the standing stone where his puptent was anchored, opened the portal, and stepped through, waving the lights up. Glancing around at the place, he got annoyed with himself: his supplies were a lot more disorganized than he thought he’d left them. I guess I didn’t really do that good a job tidying yesterday, he thought. Too much on my mind… “Sorry,” he said, “it’s kind of messy in here.” He went over to the far side of the puptent where he had a few six packs of bottled water stacked up, and started pulling the plastic off one of them.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nita said. “You should see mine.” She sighed and leaned against the curved puptent wall.

Kit fought with the plastic until he could find the right place to get it to rip. “I meant to ask,” he said. “When I couldn’t reach you for hours and hours the other day—what was that about?”

“What, yesterday?”

“No.” Kit paused once again to try to remember what day it was. “Uh, Thursday.”

“Oh.” Nita rubbed her face, looking tired for a moment. “I had to go off site to deal with a flood.”

“What?” He handed her the bottle.

“They were running short of hydromages to do emergency response work, and I was handy to substitute in. But what embarrasses me is that it was kind of a relief. There are times—”

Nita broke off and looked away, as if whatever admission she’d been about to make was painful enough that she didn’t even like sharing it with Kit. “Well, anyway,” she said, looking back again. “There was an earthquake down on the south side of the continent somewhere, don’t ask me where, Bobo knows the coordinates, and it destroyed a local dam, and all the water started flooding the plain around one of the bigger gating complexes. And they couldn’t stop the flowthrough in time—the gates were being really adversarial and kept jamming each other open while all these thousands of people kept moving through. One of the local Supervisories just turned up on my doorstep, literally outside my puptent, a big fluffy guy and honestly he reminds me of a giant chicken, and said ‘Get down here now.’ And so I got down there now.”

“God,” Kit said.

Nita shrugged. “It wasn’t too tough to stop, really. I had to reroute a big reservoir’s worth of water all over the flood plain, but it wasn’t anything like as heavy a job as Mars was. Not that that would have been a big deal either right now, with our power levels the way they are.”

Nita scowled down at the bottle she was holding. “So I got the water out of there, and went down to report off to Big Fluffy Chicken Guy. And while this was happening some Tevaralti people came along to say thank you. You know how that goes.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. Those moments always embarrassed him too. He was so used to keeping wizardry secret, at least at home, that it was hard to get used to being thanked out in the open.

“And a few of them were Tevaralti who didn’t want to move on to the refuge worlds, but they came and said thank you anyway. Which was nice enough, I guess.” He could feel her annoyance growing. “And I think they knew I couldn’t understand it, because one of them said, ‘It’s just that we need to be of one mind, we can’t go unless we’re of one mind—’”

“Yeah, somebody said that to me the other day.”

“And another one said ‘If the One desired us to go, It would have changed all minds so that all minds are one, It would have acted Itself.’ And I just got so mad.” She actually grabbed some of her hair in her fists and waved it around. “I wanted to grab him and say, ‘Well, what are we, chopped liver?’ Like we’re not what the Powers use to fix things.” She let go of her hair and flapped her arms in helpless anger. “Honestly.”

Kit laughed, and the laugh came out a little broken. “I know,” he said. “Though I don’t think they’d get the chopped liver part.”

She laughed at that, which was just as well, because despite the gravity of what they’d been discussing, the reminder of Mars had taken Kit by surprise in a way that had occasionally happened before. Just the image was enough: Nita standing there facing down a scheming Martian vizier and a rebellious and dangerous Martian princess while she held a huge threatening wave of water over their city like a giant attack dog straining at its leash. Nita taut and furious and absolutely in command, looking extremely dangerous as she explained to the people who were more or less holding Kit hostage that if they didn’t do what she told them right now she was going to excuse the whole lot of them from existence.

Actually, Nita looking absolutely smoking hot, Kit thought, realizing that his mouth had gone dry. Though it might have had something to do with the Martian daywear, which tended toward the filmy and skimpy and… Seriously, seriously I need to stop thinking about this right now, Kit thought. Before something… uh, well, yeah, maybe too late—

She’d turned her head aside for a moment, which was just as well, as it gave Kit just enough time to adjust his clothes and make things less visible while she dropped her gaze to the water bottle and started fighting with the top of it. “Ever since they changed the caps on these it takes forever to get them open,” she said, scowling at it. “I swear, you need to be a wizard to—”

The bottletop popped off and fizzy water bubbled up and hissed out of it, spraying everywhere. Nita nearly dropped the bottle, then said, “Oh no you don’t, you stop that!”

The water stopped right where it was in the air, frozen in mid-spray like something caught by strobe photography.

“Come on, let’s get this out of here,” Nita said, and headed out the portal with the bottle and all the stasis-held water. Kit followed her, trying hard to make sure he wasn’t walking strangely enough for her to notice. “Boy,” she was saying, “somebody must have been in a real hurry when he was packing!”

Kit gulped as he followed her out into the cool darkness and around behind the standing stone. Oh thank you, he said to the night, thank you for being dark! Because sometimes no matter how carefully you tried to walk, things just got worse. “Well, weren’t you?”

Nita released the water-stasis spell and let the bottle finish fizzing enthusiastically over the grass. “Yeah, but I didn’t shake my drinks up! I bet you just brought the portal interface down into the kitchen and started firing things into it…”

“Um,” Kit said. While this was true, it wasn’t worth even breathing the suggestion that the way Nita’d been hanging onto the bottle when she flapped her arms around might also have had something to do with it.

“Yeah, there you go,” Nita said, and took a swig out of the now much calmer bottle. “Thought so.” She gave him a sidewise look. “You didn’t bring any of Carmela’s soda, did you?”

“What? Of course not.”

“Shame,” Nita said, “I like that…” She took another drink, sighed, handed Kit the bottle.

He drank, ever so glad to have something to do to take his mind off things. After several long swallows Kit sighed at the realization that personal matters were now subsiding to more manageable levels, and allowed himself to look at Nita again.

Which was of course exactly the moment she caught him at it. “What’re you looking at?”

“You,” he said in the Speech.

She spent a long moment looking at him the same way, and opened her mouth.

Then her shoulders slumped and she closed her mouth and twisted it into a very annoyed expression. “I don’t believe this,” Nita said. “Bobo says I’ve got to get back. The gate I yelled at before is acting up again; they need me to settle it…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay.”

She looked at him shyly. “Hug?”

Kit went nearly white-hot as the reason not to want Nita to get any closer, the reason he’d thought had stood itself down, now stood itself right up again. Yes! one part of his mind was yelling, and Bad idea, bad idea, shouted another—

But it was too late, Nita was already turning toward him, reaching for him. And, But I need a hug! some idiotically needy part of him was yelling.

Oh God. Okay, maybe if I turn a little bit, that might be enough to—

Too late. Nita’s face was against his neck. And she was shaking.

Kit instantly started to get upset, which on top of the blushing was hard to take. “Wait, what’s the matter, are you—what’re you—”

“Why,” Nita said, taking a breath as if she needed to get some control of herself, “why… do you even bother?”

“What?”

And then Kit realized she was laughing.

“We are such idiots,” Nita said, pulling away. And her eyes were wet, but they were tears of laughter. “Look at us!”

It was just as well there was no one else around to witness the moment, because Kit would have simply died. …Yet it was also funny, impossibly funny. There they stood in the middle of an alien mass migration, under a moon that was so far from being romantic that it was genuinely ridiculous, and they were having a physiology-based personal-crisis moment. At least Kit was. It was hard to work out what Nita was having, and he was both chagrined that he couldn’t read her mind and desperately glad that she couldn’t read his. At least I don’t think she can…

She was still shaking with laughter, though. “Kit. Do you honestly think I don’t notice this stuff?”

“Uh,” Kit said in a desperate moment of honesty, “I was kind of praying for that, yeah.”

“Well I hate to tell you this, but plainly the One is on another call at the moment.”

Kit burst out laughing. And then Nita was laughing again too, and…

“Uh, that hug. Can I have one not contaminated by…”

“Undue boner action?”

“Oh shut up.”

“Besides,” she whispered in his ear after as she slipped her arms around him again, “…could be it’s kinda late for that.”

Kit’s eyes widened.

“Because it’s not like you’re the only one who—”

And that was when the cry came from behind them:

“Oh no! Wait! Is this impregnation event? Didn’t want to miss it!”

Kit froze as he realized there was something really important he had forgotten to tell Nita about. Completely forgotten. Cheleb. Biology. And the candy hearts.

Oh God!

Cheleb stopped where hae was as hae saw that they’d stopped what they were doing and both had their gazes fixed on haem. “Chel,” Kit said, and couldn’t for the life of him work out where to go from there.

Nita pulled back and gave Kit a look. “Is this conversation one I should be part of?” she said.

“Uh, no. Well, yes. Not now okay?” he whispered desperately in her ear.

“Wow,” Nita murmured, plainly impressed by a display of truly world-class ambiguity and indecisiveness.

Kit groaned softly to himself and turned his attention to Cheleb again. “Cheleb. You were saying?”

“Ah. Well.” Cheleb shifted from one clawed foot to another. “Didn’t have time to tell you earlier. After you left for Nita’s gate complex, had… an incursion here.”

“Oh brother,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me…”

“Well, all right,” said Cheleb, “but failing to do so will leave you in data vacuum—”

“No, it’s an idiom,” Kit said, just a touch exasperated, because he was afraid he knew what was coming. “Do tell me. Sibiks?”

“Many,” said Cheleb. “Among other things, very interested in place where food got dropped around Stone Throne. Took a while to get rid of them but were almost all gone and then found that portal on your puptent had been open a while, maybe since you left…”

Kit covered his eyes.

“Couldn’t find command interface to shut portal interface right away, had to go in and then chase some of them out.” Kit blinked: Cheleb was practically babbling. “Was looking for last one to get rid of it, hiding under some boxes, and then found this—”

Embarrassed, Cheleb proffered the empty heart-candy box.

Kit took the box and immediately understood what had happened. One of the sibiks had found the open box and eaten all the hearts. But Cheleb didn’t know that. Hae thought that Kit had eaten them, and of course that would mean—

Kit stopped, because Nita was looking at him very strangely. He was trying to come up with some creative excuse for having a box of candy hearts at all when Nita simply reached out and took the box away from him.

“They’re all gone,” she said. It was astonishing how she could make a simple declarative sentence sound so much like it meant about five other things, all at once.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “they are.” He swallowed. “And that’s really terrific.”

Nita looked at him carefully and then started nodding. “Yes it is!” she said. “Isn’t it!”

“And Cheleb is really excited for us,” Kit said, “because hae’s pretty sure that since all these are gone, that means…”

“That we really like each other in a very special way!” Nita said. Her eyes were had gone theatrically wide in a way that Kit recognized, and both made him nervous and made him want to laugh.

“And that because of that,” Kit said, “we’re going to do something about it—”

“Right this minute!” Nita said, with increasingly terrifying enthusiasm.

Kit just kept quiet after that and waited with some trepidation to see what would happen.

“You did tell haem, I hope,” Nita said, very seriously indeed, “that among members of our species this gesture has to be reciprocated by the other party—”

“In a similar manner,” Kit said.

“—on or around February 14th.”

“I, uh, might have neglected to mention.”

“And so of course we can’t do anything right now,” Nita said, “not only because February 14th is a while away yet, but because we’re in the middle of a planetary disaster and it would be incredibly inappropriate to distract one another from our Wizardly Duties.”

He could actually hear the capitalization. Kit merely nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s so sad.”

“But duty comes first,” Nita said, nodding in unison with him. “Still, we will be strong.”

“Yes, we will,” Kit said with all the sincerity he could muster.

Nita gestured with her eyes in Cheleb’s direction, and then turned her head to look at haem. Warned, Kit did it in unison with her.

Cheleb was practically vibrating with emotion. “So beautiful,” hae said, positively starry-eyed—which with haes eyes, took a lot of work.

“Thank you,” Kit said.

“But we really ought to be alone right now,” Nita said.

“Yes, yes, of course!” Cheleb said, and vanished back into the stone circle, overjoyed.

Nita waited until he was safely gone, and then said, “Sometime real soon, tomorrow maybe, I’m going to need you to explain what that was all about,” she said. Her voice was shaking with laughter that she was refusing to let out.

“I will,” Kit said. “But first I need to tell you that you are so smart.”

She grinned. “Takes one to know one.” Then she sighed. “Shame, though. If your tentacly guys got in there and ate your candy, they probably got all the rest of the saltines, too…”

Kit sighed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Besides, I gave Mamvish my ketchup. Not much point in getting all hung up about the saltines when there’s no ketchup to put on them…”

She pulled him close again. Kit cooperated, wholeheartedly. After a moment she said, a bit breathlessly, “When we get home, after all this crap is handled… let’s talk about this, yeah? A long, long talk.”

“Yeah.”

And Nita vanished back into the circle to pick up her things and make for the short-transport pad.

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 see 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—

Kit found himself wondering where the first truly deadly crack would form… the one that would go straight down into Thesba’s mantle and release the pressure that had been building up there for so many thousands of years. He tried to imagine it: the explosive spray of vast amounts of magma into vacuum, the brief blue-tinted destroying flame around the edges of the extrusion while close to the moon’s surface the blast of molten stone and metal shot up through the murky atmosphere at supersonic speeds, setting fire to the hydrogen and nitrogen there. Then the misshapen chunks of suddenly supercooled magma either starting to rain down on Tevaral—depending on the initial explosion’s dominant vectors—or settling into brief uneasy orbit around the planet, orbits that would soon decay…

And what about that, he thought, gazing past Thesba’s darkside limb to something as unnerving in its way: the hot red coal of mu Cephei, so many light years distant. But not nearly distant enough. From what Dairine had said about it, in the long term, it was another part of this world’s problem… even a more definitive one, in its way, than Thesba. Why go crazy trying to keep a planet running as a going concern when sooner or later, that’s going to go off and destroy everything in the near neighborhood?

And suddenly Kit found himself wondering: where does Earth stand as regards that thing? If it goes off—when it goes off—what’s the wavefront going to do to our world when it gets there?

Great, one more thing to worry about. He rubbed his eyes. Not in our lifetimes, anyway. No more than what’s going to happen with the Moon. But sooner or later…

Kit leaned his head against the back of the Stone Throne in the twilight and felt a sudden strange sense of relief that most of the errantry he’d been sent on involved relatively short-term problems, with relatively short-term solutions—and that most of the solutions had produced relatively positive results. I mean, sure, positive’s relative. You don’t get sent outon errantry unless it’s to make something better.

But there’s nothing we can really do about this. This world’s going to be destroyed, and a lot of Tevaralti are going to be destroyed along with it, no matter what we do…

Kit sighed as the twilight deepened and the stars shone more fiercely, actually casting faint shadows from the standing stones. Am I really cut out for this kind of work? he thought. What happens when I run into wizardries like this closer to home, things I’m needed for, that are more like unsuccessful surgery than anything else? Or like amputations? Where you’ve saved a life, but it’s never going to be the same for that person again, no matter how hard you tried?

The thought trailed off. Kit was more than aware that the universe didn’t come with happy endings installed as standard. Wizards were not omnipotent, and wizardry couldn’t fix everything, or stop everything. Sometimes there’s just not enough energy, he thought, or things happen too fast to stop, or you find out about them too late. Things like this, where no matter how much power you bring to bear on the problem, it still won’t help. Inevitable things…

The sorrow that rose up in Kit surprised him as he gazed across the plain, where the lighting hovering above the gating complex was now a beacon to the southward, and the distant glitter of electronic campfires coming on was like starlight to a sun. All those people, he thought, shaking his head, and tilted his head back to look at Thesba again, and let out a long pained breath, his eyes stinging. All this way we’ve come for them, and there’s nothing we can do…

From down by where Kit’s feet were stretched out on the long wide seat of the Throne, something rustled. And then a voice spoke.

“Cracker?”

Kit stared through the dimness and then—he couldn’t help it—just started laughing. “Oh no,” he said. “Not you again. Seriously, no…”

“Cracker please?” it said.

Kit rubbed his eyes. “You’re a clever guy, aren’t you,” he said. “You know a good racket when you see one. Sneak away from home, track down soft-hearted aliens, shake them down for food, then get carried home and welcomed like a returning hero.”

There was no immediate response to this assessment, just more rustling.

“Oh, come on,” Kit said. “Come up here.”

After a moment or so the long green-blue tentacles started curving up over the end of the Throne’s seat, and with a couple of jumping wiggles the sibik hoisted itself up onto the stone and then hunched itself down against it, abdomen raised so that it could look at Kit with all those hopeful eyes.

Kit rolled his eyes at his own inability to resist being taken for a sucker. “Come on,” he said, “I’ve got what you want right here…” He reached sideways to the opening of his otherspace pocket, found it, reached in, and pulled out the very last package of saltines.

Kit sighed as he turned it over in his hands. “Do you have any idea how far these have come? Huh?”

“Very far,” the sibik said, creeping closer.

“Yes, that’s right! Very far. Two thousand light years, nearly.” Kit pulled the cellophane at the top of the package apart. “And you and I are going to finish them up, right?”

“Please,” said the sibik, creeping closer.

Kit smiled, because he knew this move. At home it had once meant that in a few moments you wound up with a dog’s nose on your knee. And then sniffing at the bottom of the saltine package… and then in the saltine package.

“And thank you,” the sibik said, sliding over his knees. It was surprisingly heavy.

“Wow,” Kit said, “you’re better at talking than you were yesterday, aren’t you.”

“I think so,” said the sibik.

Kit thought of that intense wave of experience, of emotion, that had washed over him before and after the little Tevaralti boy seizing his pet again and cuddling it close. Something’s happened. To it? To me? Or both? Who even knows, right now? He turned his attention back to the sibik. “You remember what these are called?”

“Saltines.”

“That’s right. Now we’ll learn a new word, yeah?”

“Yeah please.”

“Good. We’re going to share.”

“Yes share, please and thank you,” said the sibik with enthusiasm, hauling itself up wholly into Kit’s lap.

Kit laughed. “Okay. Do you know what share means?”

It eyed him. “Tell me?”

“It means you get some, and I get some.”

“That sounds good,” the sibik said. “Who gets more?”

Kit snickered, then shook his head. “We both get the same. That’s what sharing is.” At least most of the time, Kit thought. Certainly the definition broke down somewhat with Nita where Ben ‘n’ Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” ice cream was involved.

“Okay,” said the sibik, sounding just slightly regretful. “Please share the saltine crackers now.”

It was very demurely keeping its tentacles to itself, though they were twitching. There was no way Kit could delay rewarding such good behavior. “So this is how we do it,” he said. “I give you one. Then I give me one. And that’s the way it goes until we’re done and they’re all gone.”

“That will be sad,” said the sibik solemnly, its eyes not leaving the saltine package for a moment.

“Yes it will,” Kit said. He pulled the first cracker out and looked at it with a sigh. “Just so long as you’re clear that these are the very last saltines on this planet, and the next nearest ones are…”

“A long way away,” said the sibik.

“That’s right. So here.” He handed the sibik the first saltine.

It took it reverentially, stuffed it into that blunt-toothed, half-hidden eating orifice, and started crunching.

Kit took out the next one and crunched it up too, sighing just once at the thought of the ketchup which would not be going on any of these. Oh well, he thought. Mamvish’ll be putting that to good use. Some good use. One of these days, when all this was over, he was going to find out exactly what good use. I just hope it’s something that won’t make me need to reach for the brain bleach afterward.

“So,” Kit said. “Want another?”

“I would like another saltine please,” said the sibik.

“Your syntax is really improving, you know that?” Kit said as he pulled out another saltine.

“What’s syntax?” said the sibik as it reached out and took the cracker.

“The way you speak. Sort of.”

It stuffed the second cracker into the eating orifice and started crunching again. “All right,” the sibik said perfectly clearly.

“Interesting,” Kit said. “Whatever you use to talk, it’s not the mouth you eat with…” He had his next cracker, and looked out past the sibik toward the plain, trying to work out in his head approximately where he and Ronan had found this one’s people the other day. I could take the pad over instead of walking all that way, he thought. The manual will have rough coordinates for the edge of the encampment…

“Another please?”

“Oh yeah, sorry. Here.” Kit handed the sibik its next cracker while feeling faint amusement at the roles that the Powers that Be appeared to have dropped him into here. Official Shouter at Machinery, he thought, pulling out a cracker for himself. Provider of Probably Controlled Substances to Species Archivists. And Freelance Animal Control Officer and Rehomer. …For certain values of rehoming.

But that thought made Kit pause. This entire project—the whole business of rafting life away from a doomed world—was in its way a gigantic rehoming effort. If no one was paying attention to the effect it had on the pets, if everybody was concentrating on the dominant species, maybe that was reason enough for his presence here, gates or no gates. Even if I can only help one of them. ‘All is done for each,’ isn’t that the saying about wizardry?

And anyway, what makes me think I know what job’s most important for me here? Kit thought about the little moulting Tevaralti boy, desperate to have his lost pet back, overjoyed to have him in his arms again. If somebody had sent a wizard to help Ponch if he’d been in trouble when I was just a kid, I’d have thought that wizard was the most important one in the world… no matter what the wizard thought he was doing.

“You’re not eating yours,” said the sibik.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

“If you gave it to me,” the sibik said thoughtfully, “I could have more.”

More dog biscuits, said a familiar voice in Kit’s memory, yay!

Kit absently gave the cracker to the sibik, smiling slightly. Yet still he found himself wondering. He’s spoken to me before, often enough, through other people’s pets. Especially the doggy ones. These guys are doggy enough. Why’s he being so quiet? It was strange. Once Ponch had found out that he could communicate with Kit, when he was still a dog, it had been impossible to shut him up. Even now, when off about his newer, much larger business, he often found time to break through to Kit and have a word.

But not here, not now. Not directly.

Something’s definitely going on.

“You could let me have another more,” said the sibik pointedly.

“So I could,” Kit said, and handed the sibik another saltine to buy himself time to think.

Sometimes the Powers have refused to do anything but whisper when they didn’t dare discuss something in the open, Kit thought. In the Pullulus War, they couldn’t tell us about the Hesper. They could only hint and give us clues, because if we knew for certain who was coming, the Lone Power would’ve known what we knew, and would have moved against her. Not even the Winged Defender was sure what was going on until nearly the end.

Kit took a cracker for himself. But if the Powers could whisper… then the One could too. It, or one of Its avatars. Leaving the one who heard the whispers to work out what they meant, forge the connections: find the way through.

Pathfinder.

Kit ate his cracker and swallowed with some difficulty: his mouth was dry. He wished he could get up and fetch some water from his puptent, but he didn’t dare move. The sudden certainty of all this being intended had fallen across Kit’s mind like having a heavy wet coat dropped on him, and the effect was much the same: it made him shiver.

Yet after a moment he found himself sitting up straighter in response. He wasn’t in this alone. He had help: the very best help imaginable… even if for some reason that help wasn’t able to come out into the open and make itself available directly.

Now all he had to do was figure out exactly how to use it.

“Okay,” Kit said, “who’s ahead?”

“I am,” the sibik said. “You should take a more now.”

“Thank you,” Kit said, and had another cracker, while the sibik’s eyes all followed it with stark interest. When he finished the cracker, he said to the sibik, “Ready for another one?”

“Yes please.”

“Then here’s yours… and here’s mine.”

They ate their crackers together. “These are very good,” the sibik said.

“Yes they are,” Kit said, looking mournfully at the half-empty package. And soon I’ll be sitting here with a space octopus in my lap and no crackers left but Ritz. It was a bleak prospect. “Another?”

“Another more.”

“So you mean you want two.”

“I thought I said that.”

“Not exactly,” Kit said. “But here.” He gave the sibik two crackers, which it took from him each in a separate tentacle. Then it began regarding them alternately, unable to make up its mind which to eat first.

He couldn’t help snickering as the sibik abruptly shoved both the crackers into its eating orifice at once, with the result that crumbs started getting sprayed around again. “You’ve barely started working out how to talk,” Kit said; “learning how to count can probably wait until tomorrow.” Kit had another cracker himself. “Maybe we can get Nita over to tutor you. She’ll probably have you up to calculus by the end of the week…”

Dark eyes looked at him with interest. “What’s a calculus?”

“God, don’t ask,” Kit said.

They alternated crackers again a few times, until they were left looking at the last six in the package.

“Those are all there are?” the sibik said.

“Those are all,” Kit said.

“I am very sad,” the sibik said.

“So am I,” said Kit.

“Not because of the crackers.”

Add ‘Alien Pet Psychologist’ to the list, Kit thought. “Why are you so sad?”

“I couldn’t find them.”

The sorrow in its voice was unmistakable, and definitely had nothing to do with crackers. “Your people?” Kit said.

“My people. My person. He’s lost.”

“Well, this is the same problem you had yesterday, isn’t it?”

“No. That was just outside-smelling finding them. This is inside-smelling finding them.”

Kit held quite still.

“My person doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know where home is any more. And my person’s sires and dam are so very sad. Because everything’s ending.”

“I know,” Kit said softly.

“They came so they could see their friends one last time,” the sibik said. “The ones who’re going away, who aren’t going to end.”

Kit’s insides clenched with sorrow, for that was a thought that had occurred to him before: How many of those little campfires are hosting last meals? Some parts of a family who think it’s okay to go, and some who don’t?

Kit swallowed again. “Are you sad because you’re—” He had to say it: there was no point in not saying it, in this landscape full of thousands of people who were thinking it right this minute. “Because you’re going to die?”

“No!” the sibik said, and pulled its tentacles in around it. “Everything dies! I don’t mind dying, as long as it’s with him.”

The previous stab of pain was nothing compared to this one. And as if feeling it too, the sibik made the most pitiful small noise Kit thought he’d ever heard in his life, as if it wanted to cry but was holding it in. “But he doesn’t want to die. They don’t want to die. Yet they don’t want to leave either, they don’t feel like they can. And they’re scared, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Oh, baby,” Kit said, which was probably the least likely thing he’d ever imagined himself saying to a space octopus, and gathered it in and hugged it close. It threw all its arms around him and squeezed him desperately.

“Believe me, you’re not the only one who’s sad,” Kit said.

The sibik pulled itself away from him so it could angle its abdomen up and study him with those odd eyes. “Why are you sad?”

“It’s just—” Kit sighed and shook his head, and leaned back against the Stone Throne. “Maybe because I’m really, really frustrated and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The sibik cocked even more of its eyes at him. “What’s ‘frustrated’?”

“Upset at something that’s making me unhappy. Something I can’t change.”

“Why does it make you unhappy?”

Kit closed his eyes for a moment, all too willing to block it all out—the lights down by the patent gates and the hopeless glitter of the electronic campfires, the downward-crushing weight of Thesba hanging up there in the sky and waiting, waiting to fall. “It’s hard to explain.”

But the sibik was waiting too. Finally Kit opened his eyes again and looked down at the ridiculous tentacly thing in his lap. “My pop told me this story once and the other day I started thinking about it—”

“Your pop,” the sibik said, “is that like a sire?”

You get hurt sometimes, said a memory, a whisper: your sire and your dam and your littermates… That makes me sad.

“Yeah,” Kit said, and swallowed with slight difficulty. I am going to drink a whole bottle of water after this. But the connection, the connection was there right now, tenuous, maybe fragile. The water could wait.

“All right. What’s a story?”

“It’s telling how a thing happened once.” Kit laughed at himself. “This is isn’t even a story, it’s more of a joke…”

“What’s a joke?”

His laugh this time was more sardonic. “Me,” he said. “All of this. Might as well be a joke, ‘cause if we don’t laugh, we’re all going to cry.”

“What’s cry?” the sibik said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kit said. “I don’t think you’ve got the plumbing. Anyway, you comfy there?”

The sibik in his lap shifted a bit and wrapped some more tentacles around his legs. “Now I am.”

“Okay,” Kit said. “So once upon a time there was this guy—”

“What’s a guy?”

“A person,” Kit said. “A human being. One of my people.”

“All right.”

“So there was this guy, and he lived in a house not too far from a river—”

“What’s a house?”

Kit smiled, realizing that this was going to be one of those storytelling sessions. But he’d had enough of these with Ponch over the years to know that all you could do was just keep on answering the questions until the audience ran out of them. Sometimes it took a while.

“A house is a kind of building where you stay most of the time, eat and sleep and so on,” Kit said. “My people live in houses, in a lot of places.”

“Okay,” the sibik said. “I know what that is. My people had a house.”

Had, Kit thought, with yet another pang of sorrow. “And one time the weather got bad and it was going to rain a whole lot, and there was going to be a flood.”

There was no “What’s a flood?”, so Kit paused. “You know what a flood is?”

“A lot of water,” the sibik said, with profound distaste. “Everything floats away.”

“Okay, good, you get it. Well, when the people who know about weather realized that was going to happen, the local government put out notices on TV and the radio and the Internet telling everybody—”

“What’s a government?”

Kit could just hear some of the suggestions his pop would make. “Uh, the people in charge of making sure that the things people need to share work right.” At least that’s the theory.

“Like giving people food?”

“Uh, yeah, sometimes.”

“Good, I’m still hungry, may I have a cracker, please?”

“Aren’t we asking nicely,” Kit said. “Very good.” He fished out another saltine, which the sibik accepted gravely and stuffed into its eating orifice. Five crackers… “Anyway, the government sent messages to everybody saying that the rain was going to flood everything and they should leave and go up to high ground where the water wouldn’t reach.” He paused. “You with me so far?”

“I have been with you for some time,” said the sibik with a peculiar dignity; and Kit shivered with the thought that he might be hearing someone else whispering through the words.

“Right,” Kit said, his throat getting tight for a moment. He ahem-ed a little to clear it and went on. “Well, the guy we’re talking about heard the news, and he said to himself, ‘This sounds like it’s going to be really bad, this flood. But I trust God—’”

“What’s God?”

Kit laughed and covered his eyes. “Uh, yeah. You know about the One?”

The sibik actually drew away from him and stared at Kit in astonishment. “Of course.”

“Okay. God is the One, more or less. Or the other way around. Anyway, this guy said, ‘I trust God, God’ll keep me safe and see me through this.’ And then he felt better.”

“This would be a good time for another cracker,” the sibik said.

“Of course it would,” Kit said, and gave the sibik another, and looked sadly at the emptying package. Four…

“So then it started to rain,” Kit said. “And there was more and more water, and it got deeper and deeper. All the ground down by the river got flooded. And then water started rising up from where the river was, and flooding everything nearby. And pretty soon it rose up so high it was all around the guy’s house. And some of the people from the National Guard—those are some people whose job it is to protect other people in their area,” Kit added hurriedly, because he could feel the sibik twitching with the next question—“they drove by his house in a big vehicle. And one of them shouted to him, ‘Hey buddy, the water’s not gonna stop rising. So come on with us, jump in our truck and we’ll get you out of here!’ And the guy said, ‘No, it’s all right, God’s going to see me through this, I’m okay. You go ahead and help someone else who needs it.’ So when they realized they weren’t going to be able to get him to go with them, the National Guard people went away.”

“The crackers are going away too,” said the sibik, not entirely mournfully.

“Yeah, I see that,” Kit said, and gave the sibik another. Three… “So all that night the flood waters kept rising, and they rose so high that they came in the doors and the downstairs windows of the guy’s house, so that he had to go up to the second floor. And later that day some people came along who were from the Coast Guard. They usually take care of people who go out on the water on purpose. Now, though, because it was an emergency, they came along in a boat—” Kit paused. “You know what a boat is?”

“It goes on top of the water,” said the sibik. “My person has a small one he plays with.”

“Well, imagine a bigger one, like twice as long as this stone, okay?” Kit said, indicating the seat of the Stone Throne. “And maybe twice as wide, with room for people in it. So the Coast Guard people came and called to the guy in the house. They said, ‘Buddy, come on, the water’s going to be rising all night and all tomorrow and the day after; you can’t stay here or you’ll drown! Get in the boat and we’ll get you out of here.’ But when the guy looked at them, he thought, ‘I don’t know—this doesn’t look all that much like God saving me.’ So he called back to the Coast Guard folks from his upstairs window, and he said, ‘It’s okay, God’s going to see me through this, so I don’t need a lifeboat! You should go on ahead and help somebody else.’ And they couldn’t get him to come with them, so they revved up the motor of the boat and went away.”

“Like the crackers…”

Kit took the hint and gave the sibik another one. Two… “So then the water rose and rose even faster than it had before. And it got so high that it started coming into the man’s house through the second-floor windows. So to get away from the water, the guy climbed up on his roof—”

“What’s a roof?”

“Uh, the top of his house.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, he sat there for a while, and late in the day he heard something noisy in the sky, and he looked up and saw a helicopter coming. That’s a flying craft,” Kit said, feeling the sibik start twitching again. “It came from the local TV station—”

“What’s a TV station?”

Kit covered his eyes for a moment. “Something you don’t need to know about. Have a cracker.” One… “Anyway, a man from the TV station leaned out of the helicopter and yelled to the guy who was sitting on top of his house, ‘Buddy, we thought everybody was evacuated from here! The water’s going to keep rising, so here, climb up this ladder and we’ll get you out of here!’ But the guy said, ‘No, it’s okay, I have faith in God, He’s going to see me safely through this! You go ahead and help someone else if they need it.’ And they couldn’t convince him to come with them, so the helicopter flew away.”

The sibik sat looking at the last remaining cracker. Then it said, “What happened to Buddy next?”

Kit sighed. “Well, the water rose and rose, and it rose over the top of the guy’s house, so he had to swim away. But he couldn’t keep swimming forever, so finally he sank in the water and he drowned. And after he was dead, there he was all of a sudden standing before the One. And he was very disappointed: the guy, I mean. He said to God, ‘You know, I had faith in you! I waited for you to save me, to see me through! What went wrong?’”

Kit snorted softly, partly because his Pop had at this point in the story. “And the One said to the guy, “Well, I sent you a truck. I sent you a boat. I sent you a helicopter. How obvious do I have to be?…”

The sibik rustled. The sound might have been laughter.

On the other hand, Kit thought, it might have more to do with the last cracker— On which all the sibik’s eyes were presently fixed.

He sighed, pulled the cracker out of the cellophane sleeve, and handed it over to the sibik.

The sibik munched it up. “And then what happened?” it said.

Kit stared at it for a moment… then began to laugh helplessly as he looked out toward the plain and the gating complex. “I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly. It’s how what’s going on here might end, if somebody doesn’t do something!” Kit rubbed his face, feeling his eyes start to sting again. “And that would be really sad, because whether everybody’s of one mind or not, when it comes down to dying or living, in a situation like this, life is better!”

And his shoulders sagged and the breath went out of him. “Life’s just better,” he said, almost inaudibly.

A moment or so later he realized the sibik was looking at him very intently. “What?” Kit said.

The sibik was regarding the cellophane that was tightly crumpled up in Kit’s fist. “Is that good to eat?”

Kit stared at the cellophane. “Uh, not for me. You want to try it?” He held it out.

The sibik took it from him in two tentacles and introduced it carefully to its eating stoma, nibbled at it. Then it said, very clearly, “Bleah,” and spat it out.

All Kit could do was laugh.

“Can you take me home to my person now, please?” the sibik said.

Kit glanced at the gate-monitoring matrix display in his manual. All was quiet, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t do maintenance on the gates from anywhere in this neighborhood. “Sure, why not?” he said. “Up you come.”

He boosted the sibik up onto his shoulders and let it hang onto him with its tentacles. “Don’t strangle me again, now!” Kit said as it settled in place. “I breathe through this throat.”

“What’s a throat?” the sibik said.

Kit sighed. “Yeah, that would’ve been the cause of that problem…”

It was just then that Cheleb popped out of his puptent, glanced around with an air of concern, and spotted Kit. “Cousin, how long been here? Didn’t Djam say to wake me? Shouldn’t be on shift now!”

“Chel, don’t worry about it, everything’s all screwed up since last night,” Kit said. “And you had three shifts one after another yesterday, nearly. Djam probably just forgot to mention. But would you take over monitoring now? I have to take Wandering Boy here back to his people.”

“Feel free,” Cheleb said, eyeing the sibik with some concern. “Surprised to see him back.”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Crackers.”

“Crackers?” said the sibik brightly.

“Not the slightest chance,” said Kit. “You are going home.”

***

In the event, the sibik’s second rehoming was quite anticlimactic. Its young Tevaralti, whose name was Besht, was asleep when Kit arrived; it was possible that he’d already been asleep before the sibik had left. The youngster’s parents, when called to the front of the large communal tent structure they were sharing with fifty or so others of the transient Tevaralti, had certainly been surprised to see Kit again, and more than happy (though with some scolding of the erring pet) to take the sibik off Kit’s hands. However, the slighter-built of the three parents—possibly the mama, though Kit wasn’t sure about that; he might have it backwards—gave Kit a look that suggested she (if it was a she) might be about to scold him, too. “It keeps asking us for ‘crackers’—!”

“I’m so sorry about that,” Kit said. “I’m sure he’ll get over it…” And he said dai stihó to them all, and got away before anyone started bringing up any more embarrassing details that were somehow going to be his fault and that he was going to wind up having to deal with.

The long walk back to the stone circle left him feeling pleasantly tired, and what with one thing and another he was weary enough when he returned to simply say to Cheleb, “I’ll see you in the morning.” Kit took himself straight back to his puptent, got undressed, stretched out on his bed with a pile of pillows behind him and a bottle of water and some of Ronan’s beef jerky, and lay there for maybe an hour blissfully doing nothing more challenging then eating and drinking and reading The Eagle of the Ninth, letting the stress slowly drain out of his mind and his muscles. As he started to feel drowsy, Kit interrupted this process only long enough to reach for his phone and text his pop.

BUSINESS AS USUAL TODAY, OR AS UNUSUAL. WATCHED ALIEN MOVIE WITH WORK BUDDY WHO LOOKS LIKE CHEWBACCA, VERY INTERESTING CULTURAL EXPERIENCE BUT NO ROOM TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU HERE, WILL WAIT TILL I GET HOME. THINK GEORGE LUCAS HAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, THOUGH. RETURNED LOST PET TO OWNER AGAIN. ACTUAL LOSTNESS OF PET IN QUESTION, THIS GUY JUST THINKS I’M A SOFT TOUCH—

Kit was tempted to mention Ponch, but he paused and then didn’t do it. It wasn’t actually as if something whispered in his ear, don’t, but after a second the idea simply began to seem somehow unwise. Finally Kit just added to the text, NIGHT NIGHT, and hit “send.”

He dropped the phone on the floor beside him and picked up the manual, once more paging through to Nita’s profile. It was grayed out, and simply said, Scheduled rest period, unavailable; estimated time of next availability, six hours.

Sounds about right, Kit thought. “Wake me up when she comes online, would you?” he said to the manual.

The page grayed down further; a small box appeared saying CONDITIONAL ALARM NOTED: OPERATIONAL.

“Thanks,” Kit said to the manual, and dropped it on the floor beside the phone. He picked up Eagle again and started reading, but realized a short time later that the reading had been broken by a couple of those “long blinks” that are actually five or ten minutes apart. He closed the book and dropped it on top of his manual; then reached down to flip Eagle’s back cover open and see when the library wanted it back. FEBRUARY 3—

Whoops, Kit thought. Really overdue now. Except that when I get back with it, it won’t be… He let the cover fall shut again and flopped back among the pillows. “Lights down,” he said in the Speech.

Down they went, and he was asleep in minutes.

NINE:

Monday

Minutes later, it seemed, Kit’s eyes snapped open and he was staring at the ceiling. It was very strange. The waking position, the lighting, were all nearly identical to yesterday’s. Yesterday might almost never have happened.

Kit lay there blinking as he realized that what he’d just had was his least favorite kind of sleep—the kind that left you feeling like you hadn’t had any at all. He rubbed his face and moaned, feeling somehow vaguely cheated. It also didn’t help that he had to go to the bathroom really badly.

He got up and put on his clothes, and once again made his way out to the short-transport pad, where he jumped to Ronan’s gates, used the toilets there, and ducked into the shower. As he came out, he ran into Ronan strolling across the plaza. “How are things going over here?”

“Transit numbers are down a bit this morning,” Ronan said. “Some of the transport streams are beginning to slow a bit. Looks like we’ve actually crossed the three-quarter stage for the people who are going to go, so the upstream feeds are cutting back a bit on the inbound traffic.” He looked across at the transients’ camp with a sorrowful expression. “Meanwhile, what’s going on with you? You look terrible.”

“I had a weird night,” Kit said. “You know how that is when you fall asleep and when you wake up again it’s as if it’s only five minutes later? Or not even five minutes later. And it just doesn’t seem fair somehow.”

“I know all about that,” Ronan said. “I had one of those earlier the week. Nasty buggers, always takes me another night’s sleep to recover. And God forbid you get two nights like that in a row. You might as well just be shot and put out of your misery right there.” He shook his head. “How’s the beef jerky?”

“That was really good,” Kit said. “If you’ve got any more…”

“Running a bit low, but I can spare you some.”

“You are a true friend,” Kit said.

“Don’t forget handsome and a devil with the ladies,” Ronan said.

Kit laughed at him. “Like you let anybody forget it,” he said. “I’ll see you later on.”

He made his way back to the short-transport pad and then to the stone circle, feeling better every minute, in fact almost human again by the time he got back there. There was just something about having had a shower, especially one of the extremely aggressive Tevaralti ones, that made Kit feel altogether better.

Yet he couldn’t quite get rid of the feeling that something else was going on too. Something had shifted, and Kit had no way of describing to himself just what that was. It was inexplicable, the feeling: not as if something was about to happen, but as if it already had. There was a lightness about it, like what he’d felt on seeing Thesba not in the sky. Yet there Thesba was—it could be seen setting in the west, bloated by atmospheric magnification but paled by being up in daylight and so close to the horizon—and he still felt light.

Reaction, Kit thought. Or something. Because actually everything’s the same… He looked across the field to where the transients’ encampment was right where it had been, a vague blot of dark almost-unseen movement.

He shook his head and made his way back to the Stone Throne, where Djam had his manual interface spread out as usual. When Kit sat down by him, Djam said, “You know, after what we watched yesterday… I had this idea.” He actually looked slightly guilty.

“Yeah?” Kit said, mystified by the apparent guilt.

“Well,” said Djam. “There’s this version of The Faded Liver that… well, a lot of people don’t know about it, because it’s kind of controversial. Maybe even a bit scandalous.” His gaze shifted briefly from side to side, as if he expected some of those people to turn up right now.

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…”