Rirhath B / the Crossings 3 page

“What?”

“What I’m looking for.”

“…Which you can’t remember.”

“If I feel it I will!”

Kit opened his mouth and then shut it again, suspecting that his feelings about this approach to memory management wouldn’t be welcomed right now. After a few moments more Nita sighed and pulled her arm out, and zipped her otherspace pocket closed. “Never mind,” she said, “I’ll remember it when we’re in the middle of something and I can’t come back here for days and days. That’ll teach me…”

She flipped her manual open to the page where she had the full version of the transit circle’s spell stored, waiting to be activated. “Preflight,” she said. “Check your name…”

Kit rolled his eyes. “What for? You know you’ve got it right.”

“Check it,” Nita said, giving him a look.

But of course she was right. It didn’t do to play fast and loose with a language that could change your inner nature—or your outer one—if in a distracted moment you’d misspelled something. Kit glanced down at the small permanent-parameters circle where his name was spelled out in the graceful curling Speech-characters, and looked it over. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”

“Thank you,” Nita said. She closed her eyes and said the three syllables that triggered the partially-executed transit spell, and they vanished.

THREE:

Rirhath B / the Crossings

Grand Central was going to be a madhouse this time of day, but then it was the middle of rush hour; and the two of them weren’t going to have to deal with the rush and press of people out in the Main Concourse, anyway. Their personal gating’s target was off to the right-hand side of the transit-secured area at the far end of Platform 23. There the Grand Central gating team had installed a spell-shielded area at the concrete platform’s end, invisible to ordinary commuters but handy to the worldgate that was usually tethered there.

What really surprised Kit was how incredibly crowded half of that shielded space was when they appeared in it. Normally it would be a surprise if you met one or two other wizards coming or going through this gate at any given time when you were there. But there had to be fifty or sixty other wizards, young and old, gathered down around the furthest end of the shielded area, waiting for the gate to go patent again after the last group of wizards to pass through were clear of the receptor site on the other side. Also, the gate’s transit interface was stretched unusually wide. In normal operation, the gating team wouldn’t allow it to be much wider open then a yard or so. But now the portal interface was dilated to at least ten feet across, and wizards were going through in crowds of five or six instead of by, at most, ones and twos.

“Wow,” Nita said, shaking her head. “I have never seen it like this—”

As their transit circle winked out, the concrete under their feet began buzzing in an ominous way, suggesting strongly that they get off the target spot right now. “Uh oh, let’s move!” Kit said, and they both hurried out of the defining blue hex that glowed in the concrete and onto safer ground.

Right behind them another few wizards popped into the space—a big tattooed man in motorcycle leathers, a business-suited lady with a briefcase, and a skinny black guy in jeans and a puffy parka with three silvery-grey Malamutes straining at their leashes. The skinny guy went by them fast, the Malamutes more or less dragging him; but as they went all three of the dogs turned long enough to grin big dog-grins at Kit, and then pulled their boss away into the crowd of wizards waiting by the gate.

There was a glint in all those dogs’ eyes as they looked at Kit that he immediately recognized. He smiled to see it, though the smile was sad. Once upon a time Ponch had looked at him like that every day. Now a lot of the other dogs he met did: a side effect of what Ponch had become after being exposed to wizardry for some years, and then to a sequence of events that had pushed him out of the categories not only of mere wizardry but mere mortality. As always, Kit wished Ponch could be here with them. But in a way he was—just not the old way—and Kit had to be content with that.

He looked at the wizards milling around the gate, all of them looking and sounding excited but kind of tense. “There are times you realize that there are a lot more of us in this part of the world than you thought,” Kit said under his breath.

“And times that makes you real glad,” Nita said, looking at the gate to the Crossings as another five or six wizards went through it and vanished together. “Like this.”

She sounded grim. Kit suspected that this was because Neets had, as usual, managed to ingest at least three times as much of the mission précis material as Kit had in the same time. ‘How is it fair that you read so much faster than me?” he said as they joined the outer fringes of that crowd.

“Who ever said anything was fair? Or supposed to be.”

“You’re sounding more like Tom every day.”

She gave him an annoyed look. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Nita muttered. For some time now she’d been doing biweekly sessions with their local Supervisory—tutorials intended to sharpen her handling of her visionary abilities. Lately, though, she’d repeatedly been claiming that for all the good it was doing her, she got more mileage out of talking to Carl’s koi. “I know Tom doesn’t mean to get on my nerves, but… He keeps saying ‘You’re making this harder than it needs to be’, and I keep saying, ‘Funny, I was about to say the same thing to you!’ And then he just laughs and starts some story about how hard he had it with his coach when he was studying.” She snickered. “Sometime during the Pleistocene…”

Kit had to laugh at that, while more wizards came crowding in behind them from the transit hex and more vanished away in front. “I bet you didn’t actually say that to him…”

“I was so tempted, though.” She blew a breath out as they edged forward. “How far did you get in the reading?”

“Uh, the bit about the planet’s moon falling down…”

“Tevaral,” Nita said. “The moon’s Thesba. If everything wasn’t going to pieces around there, it’d be kind of an interesting area—”

“Excuse me,” said someone behind Kit.

He turned around and saw a young woman in pink sweats and pink sneakers and pink headphones and a blonde pony tail peering over their heads, looking from the gate to the smartphone in her hands and back again. “Sorry,” she said to Kit, “this is for the Crossings, yeah?”

“That’s right,” Kit said.

“Thanks…” She immediately turned away and started texting someone at great speed.

He and Nita looked at each other. Nita shrugged. “‘Kind of’ interesting?” Kit said.

“Yeah, well, there are a lot of really hot stars in Tevaral’s neighborhood. An OB association, they call it, because it’s mostly made up of stars in those classes. But there’s a landmark star there too, the kind astronomers use as a class definer for the way its light curve changes.” Nita had cracked her manual open and now showed Kit a double-page spread with a long scatter of blue, white and blue-white stars laid out across it, all annotated with symbols showing data about them and arrows showing which way each star was traveling.

“The sky must really be something around there,” Kit said.

“Yeah,” Nita said as their part of the waiting crowd inched forward again. “Not just because of those. But this…”

She tapped the page of her manual, and the view changed, shrank, veered off to one side of the OB association. Not too far away, as stellar distances went, there was a star that stood out among the neighboring blues and blue-whites, for it was vividly, dazzlingly red; as deeply red as a burning coal.

“That’s the landmark,” Nita said. “Mu Cephei, astronomers on Earth call it. Or Erakis. It’s been on the radar for a long time. Herschel ID’d it as a red giant in seventeen-something… called it the Garnet Star because it was so red.” She shrugged, snapped the manual shut and tucked it away in her otherspace pocket again. “Anyway, where we’re headed, at least the star’s not the problem.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Kit said. “I saw Dairine on the outbound list too, and I thought maybe that had something to do with why they were sending for her.”

Nita shook her head. “Nope. She’s on this job for the same reason we are: because we’re hominids.”

“Well, that much I got. But I didn’t get through as far as any explanations of why they need so many of us.”

“The problem’s the planet, looks like. The précis got into a lot of detail about this—”

“I noticed.”

Nita gave Kit an amused look at his annoyed tone. “It’s something to do with their psychology,” she said. “But it’s physiological too. It’s not like any species that evolved on a planet won’t be really attached to it and unwilling to leave if it’s going to be destroyed!… But it looks like this is something more.”

“So they’ve enlisted lots and lots of hominids to… what? Try to figure out why so many of the people there don’t want to go?”

Nita nodded. “That’s some of it. But also, when you’re dealing with a species in emergency mode—some disaster, or a catastrophic relocation situation like this—best practice is to send wizards who’re as close to their physiology as possible.” She looked uneasy. “The Tevaralti aren’t mammalian, it looks like, but we’re close enough to their kind of humanoid. We’ve got more or less the same body symmetry, and the manual says our psychologies aren’t too different…”

The crowd in front of them moved forward a bit again, and now Nita and Kit were right behind the four or five wizards who would go next. Kit looked around him and behind him, and Nita gave him a bemused look. “What?”

“Well, you mentioned Dairine. Where is she? Thought she might be coming with us.”

Nita shrugged. “No idea. Went ahead of us, maybe. I messaged her just after Mamvish stuck her butt through my bedroom wall, but I haven’t heard anything back. Not unusual; sometimes she doesn’t pay attention to her texts if she’s distracted…”

They were close enough to the wide, oval interface of the gate hanging in the air to see that it was running in safe mode—flickering briefly into patency long enough for the group ahead of them to step through, then going dark for a second or so while the wizards who’d just stepped through it were getting themselves out of the transit space on the other side. Nita and Kit stepped forward, waiting for it, and along with them the girl in the pink sweats came up on their left, and another couple of older wizards—a tall woman in a long dark winter coat and a shorter man in actual ski gear—came up on the right. They all exchanged glances and nods: the same kind of look that people getting into an elevator give each other in token of a brief moment of doing something together even though they’re complete strangers. Then the gate went patent.

Through it they could see the vast main gating concourse in the Crossings. Quickly they stepped forward into the twenty foot wide hex on the far side, stepping high as usual over the lower threshold of the gate hanging just off the edge of the train platform (because even though it had a safety on it to keep from cutting anybody’s feet off at the ankles, it was smart to be cautious). Behind them it went dark, a wide black oval hanging in midair. All of them hustled to get off the gate hex, and the second all of them were beyond the blue lines, the gate went patent again and the next group of wizards started coming through.

Kit and Nita walked off to one side, pausing by one of the tall silvery “information herald” posts that automatically located themselves near active gate hexes. “This is so weird,” Nita said, glancing around them.

“What?” Not that the Crossings couldn’t set the weird level pretty high on a regular basis.

“I have never seen so many humanoids here in all my life,” Nita said. “It’s bizarre. Not nearly enough aliens.”

Kit glanced around and had to agree with her. Normally any crowd you might see in the Crossings’ vast main concourse would be a very mixed bag—traveling members of hundreds if not thousands of oxygen-breathing species passing through on their way from one place to another, hurrying from hex-hub to hex-hub and mingling under the vast floating-segmented ceiling in a great hubbub of voices and noises impossible for humanoid life to make. And that doesn’t even begin to suggest what’s going on over in the methane-breathing and hypercold sections, Kit thought. But now, as far as the eye could see, they were surrounded by hominids of every imaginable kind—tall and short, broad and thin, mostly bilaterally symmetrical but not always, mostly with two arms and two legs but not always, furred or feathered or scaled or skinned in a hundred colors, and sporting an assortment of sensorial organs usually impossible to classify at first glance. It was all alien enough, but not as alien as they were used to… and that by itself was very odd.

And there was something else going on that Kit found a bit disturbing. This place was always busy, day and night, twenty-eight hours a day, but the normal level of busy-ness was very much like that of an airport at home: people running for close worldgate connections, people lazing along among the shops and restaurants in no particular hurry while killing time until their gate was ready to go patent, people making their way purposefully to some one gate to meet a friend or a business connection. Now, though, something else had been added to the mix: a tremendous sense of urgency. Even without the increased sensitivity to such matters that a wizard was likely to pick up in the course of practice, the feeling of thousands of people in this space hurrying in largeish groups toward four or five different destinations couldn’t be missed—the pattern impressed itself on the alert mind more or less immediately. That was something unnerving about it, but also something exhilarating. It’s not like being on errantry can’t get dangerous, Kit thought. But it doesn’t usually feel that way right at the beginning. Usually things take a while to get dangerous. But here you can feel that they’re dangerous now. Or about to be…

The two of them pulled their manuals out to check for notifications on exactly where they were supposed to go from here. The nearby gate-herald post, which was scrolling long Speech-sentences from top to bottom under its metallic skin, was presently displaying the stats for the gating hex connected to the Platform Twenty-three gate. Nita looked up at it, reading the most recent stats, and shook her head. “This thing has had more than eight thousand wizards through it in the past hour,” she muttered. “Is it even rated for that kind of traffic?”

“It must be,” Kit said, “or it wouldn’t be doing it. Rhiow and her team wouldn’t let it.”

Nita looked over her shoulder as yet another group of five wizards came through together and hurried out of the hex, followed no more than a few seconds later by another four. “If they keep doing that for another hour or or so,” she said, “something like twenty percent of the wizards in the New York metropolitan area are going to be in here...”

“And bearing in mind how many may be coming in to Grand Central from other gating complexes elsewhere,” Kit said, “probably a whole lot more…” He paged through his manual to find one of the Crossings maps in the intervention section. ”Okay,” Kit said, “looks like they want us to head down to the big auditorium space near the 400-group of hexes. They’re doing an orientation routine in there once every half hour. We should be able to catch the next one if we start walking now.”

Nita nodded and stuffed her manual back in its otherspace pocket. “Kind of weird that we didn’t see Rhiow in Grand Central…”

“That would be because I haven’t been there for the past hour,” said the slightly weary voice from away behind them and much closer to the floor. “But what are the odds that I would run into you two despite all this traffic?”

“Rhi!” Kit said as the two of them turned toward where the head of the New York worldgating teams had come trotting up behind them from further down the concourse: a small black cat with an unusually harried look. “Dai stihó! Are you coming along on this thing too?”

“Oh no,” Rhiow said, “not me! They’ve got plenty of people working the Tevaralti side of this gating project, believe me. You probably won’t ever again see so much high-powered gate-management talent pulled together in one place. At least I hope you won’t!” She sighed and lashed her tail a bit. “You’ll hear all about it shortly. But some of us have to stay home and make sure the feeder gates work correctly to get everybody here.” She looked over her shoulder at the gate as it went dark again, then patent again and spat out five or six more wizards. “We’ve shifted about eighty percent of our scheduled local-traffic load at this point, but that doesn’t mean the New York gates are off the hook just yet; we’re going to start taking a lot of incoming pressure from Europe and Asia shortly as they route through us.”

“Have you seen Sker’ret?” Nita said.

“An hour or so ago,” Rhiow said, “but if I were you I wouldn’t expect to see him on this run. He’s juggling several different administrative roles at the moment, and he’s desperately busy doing liaison work with the ten or twelve other hominid planets who are feeding personnel into this intervention.” Then she purred with amusement. “He did tell me, though, that if I saw you I should greet you. At the time I said I didn’t think that was likely, but now I see it’s better leaving the visionary talent to those to whom it comes naturally.”

Nita said something under her breath and rubbed her eyes. Kit grinned. “It’s just really weird, though,” he said, “seeing all these—people people here.” He waved a hand at the crowds around them.

“I know, isn’t it odd?” Rhiow flirted her tail in bemusement. “But this is a hominids-only party for a change. Haven’t had a lot of time to get into the details in the mission précis, this all came up so quickly. But as far as the affected Tevaralti go, all I know is that there’s some kind of perception problem compromising their willingness to leave. Apparently the intervention management team feels that if enough other hominids are loaded on top of this, either the Tevaralti will find a way to tell us what the problem is, or the Powers will, and then we can take a shot at solving it.” Her tail started lashing. “Though apparently there are some intracultural issues that’ll make finding a solution more challenging than usual….”

Rhiow threw another look back at the gate. “My cousins, I’m herding a lot of mice right now, so I should get back to it. And if you’re going to make that next briefing there’s not much time, so you two go well—” She flirted her tail at them a last time, then trotted back to the gate. As it went patent again she leapt through it and to the platform on the other side, immediately going over to some human wizards who’d just arrived and starting to talk to them urgently. The gate went dark.

“Wow,” Nita said. “Come on… let’s go find out what we’re here for.”

It was a longish walk down to the auditorium, but they had a lot of company: hundreds of other wizards who’d arrived from Earth earlier than they had, and many hundreds of others from different humanoid species. “It’s so odd,” Nita murmured as they went along, looking at all the members of hominid species they didn’t immediately recognize, while trying not to be caught looking. “I really can’t get used to it...”

Kit just nodded, as his attention was partly elsewhere at the moment. He was keeping an eye on the time as they made their way along the shining white floor and past a number of familiar shopfronts.

“…Don’t even think about it,” Nita said.

“What?” said Kit, doing the best he could to look completely innocent.

“Blue food,” Nita said.

Why do I even bother? Kit rolled his eyes at her. “You know me too well…”

She sighed. “Like I wouldn’t like to stop in over there,” Nita said, glancing back at the entrance to one of the restaurants they’d just passed. “They have those great crunchy things.”

“Whatever those are.” Sometimes it didn’t do, when eating at the Crossings, to inquire too closely into exactly what the food was, as you could run afoul of alien cultural concepts that didn’t mesh particularly well with yours. If the manual or the restaurant’s own software flagged the food as safe for human physiologies, and if it smelled and tasted good, that was good enough for Kit. It was occasionally possible to find yourself in possession of too much information. Like that time with the fried frogspawn…

“But you know we don’t have time,” Nita was saying. “Maybe when all this is over…”

And when’s that going to be? Kit thought. He was still hearing Mamvish’s time estimate in his head. She sounded like she was really hoping it would be just a few days. But like she also thought things were going to go wrong. And he couldn’t get the crisis levels she’d mentioned out of his head, either…

“Are you freaking out?” Nita said, completely conversationally.

“What?”

“Because you’d really have reason right now.” She was looking ahead to where she saw a big crowd of humanoids hanging around the doors of the auditorium facility down the concourse. “And I’m fairly freaked as well. Just so you know.”

“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” Kit said.

Nita snickered. “Sarcasm,” she said. “Always a good sign. But seriously… even the Song of the Twelve was only estimated to go up to ‘critical’.”

And still nearly got us both killed, Kit thought, several different ways. “Yeah, that thought had occurred.”

“But there’s this,” Nita said. “It’s not like we’re exactly going to be alone out here, wherever we wind up.”

“No,” Kit said, while considering—though carefully not saying—that it sounded more like Nita was trying to convince herself about that than him. “How far down the assignment list did you make it?”

“Not all that far…”

“Well, Tom and Carl are here, too. Or they will be.”

They were much closer to the crowd waiting around the auditorium doors, now. “Unusual,” Nita said. “They don’t let Supervisories do out-of-system errantry all that often.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. He was frankly excited about that. It wasn’t very often that you got to go out on errantry with your own Supervisories, even on your own planet. The chance to work side by side with them for a change, and the prospect of seeing how they handled the challenges of the High Road, couldn’t help but be interesting—

Up ahead of them the crowd was moving, shifting around. The auditorium doors had dilated and a lot of people were coming out; the people waiting outside were parting to let them get through.

“Is that who—” Nita was squinting ahead of them at that crowd.

“What?” Kit said. “Who? Tom? Carl?” He peered ahead too. “Dairine?”

“No!” Nita burst out laughing and broke into a run. “Aunt Annie!”

Kit saw the silver-haired shape in a down jacket and riding jodhpurs turn around at the edge of that crowd, look toward them, and break into a big grin.

“Oh, Nita, sweetie!”

There ensued some fairly heavy-duty hugging and kissing. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Yes, you too, darlin’! I was so sad I couldn’t make it for Christmas, but you know how it is… when the Powers call, we answer. And Kit, how are you, come here, honey!” There was no escaping the hug, not that he particularly wanted to. “God, you’re so much taller, what are they feeding you at home?”

“Enough for two people, my mama says…”

“I bet. Don’t let them guilt you out of it, now! Your body knows what you need.”

Nita laughed at her. “But Aunt Annie, listen, I kept checking the manual after Christmas and there wasn’t anything about what you were doing. I was worried about you!”

“Oh, Nita, it’s all right, there was a privacy lock on the listing until we were all done and debriefed. Heisenberg issues, it’s a long story…”

“Well, okay, but where were you?”

“Down a mine.”

“A mine?”

Her aunt laughed, a very dry and tired sound, as if she was sick of the subject. “You have no idea. Just check the manual… it’s all in there now. Have a look at the late December listings for ‘Kola Borehole management intervention.”

Then Aunt Annie glanced around as people of many species began to pile up behind her. “Pet, I can’t stay, our group’s on its way out. Look here, you message me when you get settled wherever they stick you on Tevaral, and if there’s time we’ll get together. Otherwise catch me when all this is over, yeah? Tualha’s been asking after you. She wants you to see the new kittens.”

“Okay!”

The two of them hugged and kissed again, and then Aunt Annie waved at Kit as one or two older wizards caught her eye and hustled her off. One of them, a tall brawny man with salt-and-pepper hair, caught Kit’s eye.

He leaned over Nita’s shoulder. “Look at him looking at her.”

“Yeah, well, I’m looking at her looking at him.”

“Is she… dating?”

“Don’t ask me,” Nita said. “Looks like we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” And then she gave Kit an amused look.

“What?”

“It’s just kind of weird,” Nita said. “For me at least. That before you get together with somebody, half the time you don’t even see it? And afterwards… all of a sudden everybody seems to be dating? It’s like it starts following you around.”

“Uh, yeah,” Kit said. Because he had noticed that, to his considerable discomfort. He’d wondered if it was something wrong with him.

They walked on toward the doors. “I didn’t know you were so worried about her,” Kit said after a moment. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t know. It seemed kind of silly at the time. But at least now I know she’s OK.” Nita shrugged. “I just get paranoid sometimes when I don’t hear back from people right away.”

“Unless it’s Dairine.”

“Oh well, Dairine…” Nita laughed. “I hear from her all day and all night, sometimes, when she’s conscious. At least it seems that way. I don’t mind a little peace and quiet where she’s involved! And anyway, if she was in some kind of trouble, Bobo would hear about it from the Mobiles. They’re pretty protective of their ‘mom’... they’ve got her tagged somehow so they know where she is all the time.”

Kit threw Nita a sideways glance as they came up to the auditorium doors, now dilated as widely as they could go to make entrance easy for the large crowd of assorted humanoids heading in. “And how’s she taking that?”

“I think she thinks it’s cute,” Nita said. “And I don’t want to be in the neighborhood the day she stops thinking about it that way, so I’m not rocking the boat. Either way, our Dad likes it, though he’s not saying anything about that to her out loud either…”

Kit nodded and looked around the huge space as they headed in. The two of them had been in here before, every now and then, usually between assignments or secondary to some business Sker’ret had going on that he wanted them to sit in on. But it was very strange to see all the seating configured for humanoids. instead of the usual bizarre assortment of racks and platforms and cradles and other less classifiable shapes.

They found themselves some seating not too close to the front dais, a big open space large enough to take a good-sized crowd of people, and made themselves comfortable between a small group of scaly-skinned four-armed semi-saurian Muthhallat, glittering all emerald-green in the auditorium lighting, and a furry five-person Khelevite clone-clan from beta Ophiuchi, relatively close neighbors to Earth by Crossings standards. They were still exchanging greetings (it could seem a touch repetitive with clones until you were used to it) when the lights went down a bit, at least in the Earth-human visible spectrum. Suddenly Mamvish was standing up on the dais, or seeming to, and things went quiet.

“My cousins from near and far,” Mamvish said, “first of all: I want to thank all of you who’ve dropped whatever you were doing to join us in this intervention. I want you all to know that despite the very large number of fellow wizards here, every one of you singly is going to make a difference. It’s not all that often that we run into a situation that requires so very much hands-on work… and each one of you individually is going to be responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives, if not many more. It’s not like the Powers need reminding of this. They know. But sometimes we need reminding.”

Her projection—for Kit could recognize it as exactly the same kind of apparition that had stuck itself through his bedroom wall—turned to look around the room. “I’m hoping you’ll forgive me appearing here in eidolon format, but my corporally-present time is being split about equally between Tevaral and Thesba at the moment. Both bodies are requiring repeated stabilization, and right now the best use of my power levels is feeding the circles of wizards who are presently concentrating on holding the primary and its moon together. This clone of me can handle questions, but I’d ask that you hold the most complicated ones until the end of the prepared presentation—or better still, until you get to Tevaral. I’ll be available at all times for consult while we’re all there.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 737