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Cephei IV / Tevaral 2 page

There were a couple of ways Kit could take that, and they were both good; so he just nodded and smiled. Nita, meanwhile, was still gazing at Thesba, her glance going back and forth between the heads-up display and the moon itself, when her eyes narrowed in sudden concern. “That one flow just keeps getting bigger and bigger...”

“Where?”

“There, that big one. No, on the left.”

“This one?” Kit reached out to toggle one of the touch-sensitive controls on the heads-up display, changing its focus and angle.

“No, the next one over. Is that changing faster?”

“Hope not, because you just know someone’ll blame us for it, and I’m really not up for that!”

Nita braced herself on Kit’s shoulder for a moment to reach forward and swipe the display controls into focusing on the magma flow that was bothering her. But for the moment all Kit could pay attention to was the touch of her hand on his shoulder. The contact was completely innocent, yet also suddenly and irrationally charged. Kit took a deep breath and commanded his body not to do anything sudden.

For once it seemed likely to cooperate… possibly because the exterior view made him feel anything but safe or secure. But this kind of thing keeps happening lately, Kit thought. It was as if the day she said the B word, actually said boyfriend out loud, that Kit’s body decided that it was now okay to start dealing with a simple matter of fact that he’d been—maybe not exactly hiding from himself—but at the very least not taking all that seriously. Especially as regarded the physical implications.

Well, he was thinking about them now. Though it would really help if I had the slightest idea what to do about all of this next! Because on this matter, even the manual had been no help at all.

“It’s okay,” Nita said. Kit snapped back into paying attention to the real world with an inadvertent and unavoidable blush caused by the thought that what she was saying might have been in response to what he was thinking. Because these days you never can tell!… But all her attention was on the heads-up display. “Just a short term phenomenon,” she said, “it’ll die down in a few minutes…”

This phrasing wasn’t calculated to stop him blushing either. All Kit could do, finally, was open his mouth to say “Good, let’s get out of here before somebody starts thinking we’re involved”, but he never got the chance. His manual chose that moment to start pinging softly, a repeated insistent sound.

Nita’s head came up. “They’re paging us, Bobo says; they’ve got the portals to our assignment gates ready.”

Kit sighed. “Well, now that you’ve doomed us, of course they’re paging us. Let’s get right down there and see what screwed-up things start happening because we’re here.”

She snickered at him, and together they and the force field vanished.

***

 

When they got back to the reception pad on Tevaral the whole area was still alive with incoming humanoids, though the focus seemed to have changed to ones who weren’t from Earth. Right now the pad was flooded with tall gangly blue-skinned Wasath loping off the gate hexes in bright robes charged with the heraldries of their home cities, a big flock of their mini-pterodactyl-looking symbiotes flapping along around them. “They’re a long way from home,” Nita said as the two of them got off the pad.



“So are we,” Kit said, for delta Geminorum wasn’t that far from Sol. He glanced up again at Thesba, which had slid a good ways down the sky but not nearly enough for him, and at the red eye of mu Cephei, which was beginning to remind him uncomfortably of something from a classic fantasy novel. “Where to now?”

Nita had her manual open. “It says there’s an outbound dispatch area off on the far side of the reception pad, by that structure where Ronan went to plug his puptent in. We should go there and wait for transport to our postings.”

So they did. The whole area had the feel of some kind of public parkland that had been co-opted for temporary use; there were walking paths and what seemed like recreational areas, many of them featuring massive tree-like plants with curious ornate carved wooden structures half-hidden high up in their branches—all of these more or less circular, some nearly globular, but all oddly spiny. As they made their way among these Kit found himself wondering if these were meant for Tevaralti kids to play in, not merely treehouses but some kind of stylized nest—or maybe a reference to the way nests once used to be when the Tevaralti’s distant avian forebears actually lived in trees. He knew even from the brief reading he’d had a chance to do so far that the plan was to move as much as possible of the Tevaralti ecosystem to the new planets that had been prepared for them. But what about things like this—places people had loved, favorite spots to visit or play in? Houses, buildings? There was hardly going to be time to save many of those when just getting the people out alive was going to be an issue.

The thought of the children who would never play in these trees again—assuming it was all kids doing the playing—left Kit briefly feeling a strange unfocused melancholy. Going to have to get a grip on that, he thought. Otherwise it’s going to make it hard to concentrate on being useful here. But he suspected that over time the feeling would likely reassert itself, and would make work more challenging no matter what he did. Might as well be ready for it…

The big circular reception-and-support building off to one side was alive with activity, as could be seen even from outside its glass walls; Tevaralti hurrying in all directions, appearing and disappearing off interior transport hexes, but no one in the place apparently paying any attention whatsoever to Kit and Nita as they came in. “Our pickup’s busy, probably,” Nita said.

Kit nodded. “Hurry up and wait…” There was no sense of where Ronan might have vanished to, or Dairine, or Tom and Carl; so they just found themselves a seating area—one of a series of benches that seemed made of some kind of metallic wood, as stark and plain as anything to be found in an airport on Earth—and made themselves comfortable. For a while they had nothing much to do but watch the passersby. These were mostly Tevaralti for the time being, as it seemed like humanoids of other species who came through the reception-support building were being hurried on to other destinations.

Having some time to people-watch, or in this case Tevaralti-watch, was interesting enough for Kit; getting a sense of the physical look of a new species was something that he always enjoyed. In their work at the Crossings both he and Nita had had quite a while to get used to aliens who covered up all over, aliens who didn’t cover up at all, and aliens who came down somewhere between the two extremes.

The Tevaralti seemed to come down on the “clothing optional” side of the discussion. Some of them were wearing various kinds of harness that might or might not have something like fabric or leather draped from this or that part of it (apparently never the same part, as far as Kit could tell, so this was no reliable hint as to what parts of themselves they might consider appropriate to keep covered. Maybe it’s just fashion…). Others seemed to simply wear their feathers—which came in all kinds of lengths and colors—along with various belts or straps meant to hold equipment they wanted with them. Even the amount of feather coverage seemed to vary, so that some Tevaralti seemed to have only head feathers (though these might be quite long) and others were as completely covered with feathers as most birds might be on Earth. It was very interesting, or would have been if Kit wasn’t primarily concerned with making sure enough Tevaralti got off this planet for him to have a conversation with one about this later.

Beside him, Nita was alternating between paging through her manual and watching the Tevaralti around them go by. But she didn’t seem able to concentrate for long on either. Finally she slapped her manual shut and let out a long, annoyed breath. “I’m so twitchy. Why am I so twitchy?”

“Millions of lives at stake?” Kit said. “The fate of a world hanging in the balance?”

“Oh great,” Nita said. “Like I needed to feel any more like I was a disaster movie.” She put one hand over her eyes. “And we know how well that always turns out for at least some of the stars.”

“Wait. With seventeen thousand wizards from Earth alone out on this jaunt with us?” Kit said. “We’re hardly the stars.”

“Oh good, then we’re the bit parts. And we know how that turns out! We’re the guys heading down some side street in Manhattan when Godzilla comes jaywalking along in front of us and starts biting chunks out of the Chrysler Building.”

Kit had to laugh. “We’ve had worse. Because you know we could talk Godzilla out of it. As opposed to—”

“Callahan?” said a voice nearby. “Juanita Llll?”

She threw Kit a look as they both stood up, turning to face the Tevaralti who was approaching their bench from behind them. “I really need to see if I can get the manual to drop that middle initial,” she muttered, “it’s nothing but trouble…”

For the tenth or twentieth time Kit made a mental note to ask Nita later what it was about her middle name that had her so annoyed. He always forgot, though, and so had little hope that this time would be any different. Meanwhile the Tevaralti coming around the bench was looking from one of them to the other, possibly unsure of what gender of person he or she or it was looking for.

“I’m Callahan,” Nita said. “Dai stihó, cousin. Where do you need me?”

The Tevaralti had ruffled brown feathers all over and a sort of long darker brown webby-looking tunic that the feathers stuck through in patterns, and a crest that was twitching up and down while she—at least Kit got the feeling it was a she—looked down at some kind of tablet-like reference device flowing with notations in the Speech. “They’re ready for you at your posting,” she said to Nita. “Your shiftmates will give you a brief orientation and then you’re off duty for six of your hours: your first shift on gatewatch is after that. So if you’ll come over this way, your hex is waiting.” And off she went.

They followed Nita’s guide over to the small hex complex inside the reception-support building—a set of twelve hexes, each offset a bit from the others and all in constant activity. One of them was pulsing softly, empty and waiting. “You’ve got everything you need in your puptent?” Kit said as the guide-wizard led them over to it.

“Way too much, my Dad says,” Nita muttered. “And probably you do too. But there were all these things I was working on, I couldn’t just leave them home…”

“I bet. But did you bring food?”

“Of course I brought food.” And she looked at him sideways as their guide gestured her toward the waiting hex. “Anyway, you’ll have brought enough for two of us. If I run short, all I have to do is raid your supply.”

Kit smiled. But then, as she was about to step into the hex, Nita stopped.

“Did you remember what you forgot?”

“No,” she said, annoyed. “But, you know… If it’s okay—”

“Of course it’s okay,” Kit said, confused. “What, the food? Or what?”

She turned around, walked straight out of the hex again, more or less plowed into Kit, and hugged him until his ribs nearly cracked.

When did she get so strong? Kit thought, and hugged her back. “That’s always okay,” he said, wheezing.

“Just thought I should check.”

“Checking’s okay,” Kit said, “but don’t expect a lot of change in the answer.”

Shortly Nita let him go… or at least it seemed like ‘”shortly”. Kit realized after a moment that she was looking up at him oddly. “Is it all right if I’m weird about this? The checking, and—”

Nita didn’t do uncertainty all that often, in Kit’s experience anyway, and when she did there was only one smart response to it. “Sure, but when are you not weird?”

She gave him a look that suggested the concept of punching him might just have occurred to her, and immediately let go of him and stepped back into the hex, as if intent on not allowing herself the opportunity. “Right,” she said. “Just, you know, be careful.”

“Why? What could happen?”

Her expression went both amused and sarcastic. “Okay, now you’ve doomed us. Because where we’re concerned, when would that ever be a safe thing to say?”

“Hmm,” Kit said. “Might have a point there.”

Nita shook her head at him in a sort of “what am I going to do with you” way: but still she smiled, even if it looked a bit uneasy. “Text me when you’re settled in,” she said.

“Okay.”

She nodded at the Tevaralti wizard. A moment later the hex pulsed blue around her, and she was gone.

The guide-wizard flicked her crest politely at Kit, then turned and hurried away. He stood there for a moment looking at the empty hex, then turned to make his way back to the seating area.

It’s not as though she’s not worth listening to most of the time, Kit said to himself as he went. In fact, nearly all of the time. But these days… These days Nita’s visionary gift was changing and growing, was kicking in in odd and unexpected ways. And something she said to you very casually, even offhandedly, might turn out days later to have been incredibly important. The problem was telling the ordinary things from the ones that were going to turn extraordinary. And most of the time there was just no way for Kit tell. Listen, sometimes I can’t tell, Nita had complained to him some days back. Sometimes these things just sneak up on me and pop out. Or something that I thought meant one thing turns out later to have meant something completely different. Sorry, but till I get some more control over this, we all get to be confused about this together…

There being nothing better to do, Kit flopped down on the bench and looked around him at this space full of busy people hurrying to and fro, people from this world, people from others, wizards and non-wizards, all with one thing on their minds. He saw their many glances up toward the reception center’s glass-domed ceiling, but he wasn’t going to look that way himself: not right this minute.

And in the middle of all this hurry and urgency, here he was, all by himself, one kid from Sol III, one Earth guy—not in control of anything, with nothing to do but sit and wait: all alone. It was unnerving, but Kit sat with it… let the weight of it settle on him, and concentrated on bearing up.

“Rodriguez—?” said a voice, mispronouncing it a bit, which wasn’t unusual. Using the Speech mostly guaranteed understanding, but didn’t necessarily do a thing about pronunciation.

Kit stood up, turned to greet the Tevaralti coming towards him: pale-feathered head, a long sharp face, actual clothes—sort of a kilt and a tunic—and another of the data pads. “Dai stihó, cousin,” he said. “Ready for me?”

“Indeed yes. This way—”

They walked over to the short-jump hexes while his guide gave him the rundown, essentially the same as Nita’s, though his location was different; somewhere in the center of Continent Three, a multiple intake gate presently staffed by two other wizards who’d be standing watch with him. “Right there please, cousin. Ready?”

“Go,” Kit said.

The hex pulsed and the world flicked dark around him—but not before Kit tilted his head back and got one last glimpse of Thesba. We’re just getting started, he said silently. You may think you’re going to kill all these people, but we’re not going to let it be that way.

Now all Kit and everyone else had to do was make it true.

***

 

When the darkness lifted again, it was still nighttime; but now Kit was outside, standing on a hexagonal-shaped stone in a very open place, with a chilly wind rippling through grass-like growths that were growing all around him. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the dark, but not very long. Thesba was still hanging overhead, significantly further down the sky. Kit watched it for just a few seconds and realized that it was rising, not setting. “Oh great,” Kit said under his breath, “now I get to have that all over again.”

Nonetheless, he was going to be seeing a whole lot more of Thesba whether he liked it or not, so he just shook his head and turned away, glancing around to get a sense of his surroundings. He was standing not far from the edge of a circle of rough stones, all longer than they were wide and rooted deeply in the ground. At the center of the circle stood one more stone taller than the rest, with a flatter stone of the same width half-buried in the ground at its feet. Sitting by that central stone was a small clear box with a round sphere of pale blue-white light centered in it, and that light laid the shadows of the surrounding stones out behind them for three or four meters until they faded away into the darkness that surrounded everything. All around the stones, the ground stretched away in a broad prairie-like plain, where the same blue-green grass seemed to be growing much taller, so that it rippled in that wind. The dull amber of Thesba’s light gilded the grass as it bent and flowed in that wind, so that out toward the line of distant hills or low mountains that edged the horizon, the whole vista indistinctly shivered and rippled like water.

There was another sound, though, deeper than the wind, lower than the wind, and with a more localized source. Kit turned to see where was coming from. In the direction away from moonrise, low against the horizon of hills that seem to surround this whole area, was a faint glitter of light: a distant city. From here it was hard to tell whether it was large or small, but it seemed not to feature any particularly tall buildings. Then again, skyscrapers weren’t exactly a pan-cultural phenomenon; lots of very advanced species saw no particular reason to build tall buildings unless space in a chosen building area was at a premium. And it doesn’t look like it’s at a premium here, Kit thought.

The city, though, was not the source of the sound Kit was hearing. Between it and the spot where he stood, maybe a mile or so away across the flat ground, there were half a dozen spherical light sources hanging suspended in the air. Antigravity, Kit thought. Or levitation: or both. Under their blue-white light, like that from the nearby sphere-in-a-cube but much brighter, Kit could make out maybe a dozen tall standards or poles of some glinting metal, either silvery-blue themselves or just shining that way under the light from overhead. Five pairs of them were set relatively close together, in an arc that approximated a half circle. The sixth pair was at least half again taller than the others, and set nearly three times as far apart. And between the pairs of standards—

At first Kit thought he was looking at some kind of projection into the air between the five smaller standards and the sixth one, which from this angle appeared empty. But then he got it. They were worldgate portals—but not small, tightly irised-down ones like the gate hanging off Platform 23 in Grand Central. Between those standards, the gate orifices were stretched widely and continuously open—a configuration that he knew from conversations with Rhiow wasn’t terribly safe. But this whole situation is more about speed than safety, isn’t it? And out of the five smaller gates, people were hurrying into the great open space between the smaller portals and the larger one.

Again the angle wasn’t quite right to see the whole process happening. Kit could see those big crowds of Tevaralti pouring slowly out of the smaller worldgates, pausing to look around them… and then making their way more slowly toward the biggest gate, the one Kit could see through almost as clearly as if it was a window stretched between the two tallest standards. The crowds of Tevaralti moved toward that gate’s interface, and vanished from sight. And poured toward it, and vanished… over and over and over again, never stopping. More people came through the five feeder portals every moment, and paused in the space between them and the great gate, and then moved toward it and were gone.

It was partly from that unending, moving multitude that the sound came which had first attracted Kit’s attention. But there was more movement in the darkness than that. Gathered around the gating complex were many, many more Tevaralti, indistinct in the darkness. There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them there, some settled, some moving restlessly among smaller structures that might be tents of some kind, and among very many more of the little box-and-globe lights that Kit was starting to think of as electronic campfires, some of these bigger, some smaller.

Kit had known since he’d left home how huge the numbers were of the people who were moving off the planet every moment. But there was something else going on with the people in this huge encampment. These were some of the people the Tevaralti Planetary had spoken of—the ones who felt they couldn’t leave just yet, and maybe wouldn’t leave at all. The dull gold of Thesba shone down on them as on the rippling of the wind through the alien grass, so that the whole plain seemed alive with half-seen, uneasy movement, with the muttering of the wind and the murmur of countless distant voices.

Kit shivered. And behind him, much closer to him, a high clear voice said, “Oh no, you’re early!”

He turned. Someone was coming toward him from inside the circle of stones—jogging toward him, in fact. The figure was tall and slender and bipedal, but for a few moments Kit couldn’t make out any further detail on it at all; the light behind it was too bright, the light from Thesba above and from the gate complex behind him too faint. Then as it got closer, his eyes adjusted, and Kit realized the reason he couldn’t make anything of the one who was approaching was that he was covered all over with something dark: in fact, dark fur.

“I’m so sorry, they said you wouldn’t be here for another hour yet, dai stihó cousin!” said the one who slowed and came to a stop in front of him, and a tiny wizard-light flicked on over his shoulder and caught Kit in the eyes, so he had to blink and laugh while they adjusted again.

“Dai stihó!” Kit said. “It’s all right, there’s a lot going on at the other end. Maybe they swapped somebody else’s schedule with mine…”

“Well, it’s sad!” said the wizard who’d come to meet him. Kit looked him up and down as the other did the same with him. Fur, definitely: a blunt flat muzzle, round dark eyes, ears small and round and set far back—the general effect made Kit think of the face of one of the big cats, maybe a panther. But there was nothing predatory about these eyes, and they were quick and clever. “Here you are standing about in the dark all by yourself like no one cares you’re here!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kit said.”I’m just glad to get where I’m going, finally.”

“We’re glad to have you too,” the other wizard said. “The gate’s been acting up and we can use your help. But I’m sorry, you don’t even know my name! It’s Djam. There’s a lot more of it, but there’s no point in worrying about that now.”

“Djam,” said Kit said, trying it out. “That right?”

“Quite right. Which is right for you, cuz, Rodriguez or Christopher?”

“Neither actually. Kit works better.”

“Kiht. And you’re a he, then?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“All right, thanks,” Djam said. “Just curious. Actually, just curious because Cheleb’s curious about it, that’s our watchmate, coming out in a moment. I never paid much attention to it before but that one’s such a stickler…”

Kit chuckled. “What,” Djam said, looking concerned, “did I say it wrong?”

“Oh no! It’s just, my wizardly partner and I have a friend—” Kit’s thought went immediately to Sker’ret, not rushed off all his feet as he was today, but in calmer times. “He calls her that all the time, a stickler. And she kind of is…”

“All right. Well, Cheleb’s a ‘hae’—”

Kit took a moment to work out the word he’d just heard in the Speech, and then realized it was a different gender pronoun, structured somewhat like the way the words for “he” and “she” were in the Earth-based Speech recensions. “Okay,” he said, because for the moment he hadn’t the slightest idea how the word mapped onto Earth-based Speech-words about sex and gender, and also had no idea if it was even going to matter all that much. “Is it okay to ask where you’re from?” That was usually a smart question to get out of the way, as some species were sensitive about discussing the locations of their home star systems, or even saying where they came from at all.

“Of course it is,” said Djam. “Alnilam.”

Kit nodded, though for the time being he couldn’t think where that might be, except that the star’s name sounded familiar. At least it was one he’d run across at some point in his casual manual reading, which meant that it was most likely somewhere fairly close to earth in the great Galactic scheme of things—probably no more than a few thousand light-years away. “We’re neighbors, then.”

“I’d say so,” Djam said, “though don’t ask me right now in which direction, or how close.” He rubbed at the longer fur on top of his head as if his head ached. “It’s been a long day…”

“This the him?” said another voice, a soft scratchy one, and out from behind the biggest of the rocks in the stone circle came another humanoid, taller than Djam and broader too; big-shouldered and wide in the chest, long-waisted but surprisingly short-legged, and moving very fast and light. The approaching figure came hastening over to them and stopped right by Kit, looming over him.

“This is the him,” Djam said, and the newcomer leaned in more closely, near enough to sniff at Kit’s hair. Apparently hae didn’t have anything like a human’s sense for personal space, but that was something Kit had run into before, and so he looked haem over in return without feeling too freaked about it. Hae was wearing several layers of clothing, with something like a biker’s heavy jacket over the top of it all, each layer made of very different fibers or hides. Hae had a long neck and an elongated skull covered in rough, dappled skin, a pair of big, forward-set eyes, and a large, toothy grin that apparently meant the same for haes species as it did for Earth-humans, as Kit could practically feel the good cheer and interest boiling off haem. Kit liked haem on sight.

“Kiht, this is Cheleb,” said Djam.

“Dai, cousin!” Kit said. “Well met.”

“And I,” Cheleb said. “Mebsuta’s home for me. Yours, though— Looked in the Knowing, got confused. Planet called Ground in milk tongue? Or possibly Dirt? Translation into Speech equivocal.”

Kit laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “the home cultures haven’t really settled on a formal name for the planet because they don’t know there are other species who’re going to want to know what to call it. ‘Earth’ gets used a lot at home. Some of our scientists call it Sol III. Some people use Terra: that’s older. Or Tellus… Not so popular, but it has kind of a ring to it. Or Gaia…”

“Come sit down, drink water, eat food, get briefed, then tell us more names later and we’ll pick one we like,” Cheleb said, laughing.

The three of them headed back toward the circle. “‘Him’, huh?” said Cheleb as they went.

Kit gave the Mebsuth an amused look. “Yeah, that’s right. What’s so interesting about the gender words?”

Cheleb did a sort of arm flap that Kit thought might have been a shrug. “Just like to be polite. Going to be doing long hours together sometimes on this job, don’t want to get anyone annoyed.”

That made a certain kind of sense. “So first things first. Where should I put my pup tent?” Kit said as they passed through a gap between stones into the circle.

“Pick a rock, slap your portal up against it,” Djam said, pointing at one of the nearby stones that had a portal adhering to it, active—to judge by the faint glow around the edges—but not patent at the moment. “That’s mine. Cheleb’s is across the circle. Maybe you want to be in between?”

“Makes sense,” Kit said, and headed over to do it. The outer stones of the circle were all wider than they were thick and were fairly rough-hewn on three sides; the inner side was the only one that was smooth. I wonder why, Kit thought, making a mental note to have a look at the manual later to see if it threw any light on this. Now where did I stick the portal interface… He started to reach for his otherspace pocket, then thought, wait a minute, of course it’s not there—it being a very bad idea to put a collapsible “pinched space” inside another one. It’s in my regular pocket. He leaned one-handed on the standing stone while with the other he started rummaging in his jeans. Nope, house keys, wallet, other pocket—

And then something soft and strong and weird wrapped suddenly around the hand that was leaning on the stone, and reflexively Kit pushed himself violently away from it and didn’t quite scream.


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 555


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