Cephei IV / Tevaral 5 page

It took Kit about ten minutes to fix the problem—speaking kindly to the hardware of the gate in question and reasserting the need to have a nice, steady gravitational constant running in the area affected by its portal field when so many people were using it, even if they weren’t all using it right this minute. The gate settled down, though not without a certain amount of what Kit’s sense of dealing with mechanical things translated as grumpy muttering. What Cheleb had said to him about gates hating each other did seem to be true... and the problem seemed to be exacerbated when the hardware attached to the gate proper was so subtle and sophisticated. The gates seemed to become not only more sentient, but more sensitive. Which is probably going to be a pain in the butt, Kit thought. But let’s see how this goes.

It was late afternoon when Cheleb came back from haes away-time and sat down on the Stone Throne with Kit to look over the logs of the last ten hours’ operation and hear Kit’s report on anything that hae thought needed attention. Hae leaned over Kit’s manual, looking at it thoughtfully, and tapped the log entry that described Kit’s conversation with the gate. “Have gift for this,” Cheleb said, looking up at Kit with those strange elongated eyes of haes. “Would’ve taken me hour, maybe more, to produce same result. Those Who Keep Stable only know what would’ve happened in meantime.” Hae looked over the dialogue as it streamed by on the manual page, and bared haes teeth at Kit in an expression of approval. “Not just persuasive: smart about how to persuade. Ever consider getting into gate tech?”

The thought had genuinely never crossed Kit’s mind. “Um, no, not really.”

“Ought to,” Cheleb said. “Know any gate supervisors back on Dirt?”

Kit grinned; he knew when he was being teased. “A few, yeah.”

“Surprised they haven’t co-opted you already.”

Kit shrugged. “Our Supervisories are pretty easygoing about specialty guidance. May think it’s early in my case.” Or else, Kit thought, Tom’s not willing to start me wondering about possibly changing specialties when Neets is uncertain, too. “Another problem, though. Wizards of my species aren’t as good at seeing hyperstring structure as Earth wizards of other species.”

“Ah,” Cheleb said. “Still—should give it some thought. Always a shame to waste talent.” Hae got up. “Going to go fetch a bite to eat. Need carbs?”

“No, I’m good,” Kit said. “Had some protein a while back. Thanks, though.”

Cheleb vanished off into haes puptent. Just a few moments after hae did, Djam appeared and wandered over, rubbing at his eyes. “So how was your shift?”

“Pretty quiet,” Kit said. “A little excitement an hour or so ago.”

Djam sat down by him and glanced at the manual. “You weren’t long about sorting it out, though.”

Kit made a rueful face. “Worked better than trying to sort out the sibik that climbed up my world-cousin’s leg,” he said.

“What?”

Kit told him the story. Djam rocked back and forth where he sat, bubbling with amusement. “Well, at least it wasn’t one of the mhilimai ones.”

“Sorry?” Kit said. It was a Speech-word, but one he didn’t remember having heard before.

“Ah. The word’s for when you have a species that lives with you, but isn’t independent, or isn’t an equal. Sometimes both at once. One species likes the other to be around for company; or there can be other motives. Do you have such things in your world?”

“Pets,” Kit said. “A pet.”

“That would be it, yes. Well, the wild sibik, they leave a scent trail, did you know? That’s how they notify each other where food is—pheromonal signaling. Which is why we have to keep the puptents sealed all the time.” Djam bubbled a bit. “We’ve tried removing the scent by wizardry, but the little beasts have excellent memories, too, and they just come back and lay the trails again.”

Djam gestured with one elbow toward the gate complex. “Anyway, the people over there—a lot of them passing through have their mhilimai with them. Only right, after all; they’re all going to their new lives together. But so do some of the people who’re encamped out there, the ones who don’t want to go. Either way, sometimes one of the domesticated sibik gets adventurous, comes across a scent trail, follows it over here…” Djam shrugged: that gesture his kind of human and Kit’s had in common. “We find out who they belong to and return them. Mostly there’s no problem with that; they’re good at leading you to who they belong to, once they’re not distracted by food. They’ve a link of some kind, a sense of where their companion-person is. The one you were dealing with—it didn’t ask you to tell it where someone was?”

“Oh no,” Kit said. “All it was interested in was my friend Ronan’s hamburger.”

Djam tilted his head back, sniffed. Kit smiled a bit; there was something about the movement and the profile that once more reminded him of a Wookiee. “Oh, is that what I was smelling,” Djam said. “Might ask him about those myself, if he comes back.”

Kit laughed. “You can still smell that?”

“Of course. Can’t you?”

Kit thought sadly of someone who’d most likely still have been able to smell it if he was here. “No, my nose isn’t that good. But I think I can get you one. He says he has plenty.”

Cheleb came around the throne rock again and sat down by Kit. “Kehrutheh, I relieve you,” hae said, gesturing over the stone seat, and a copy of the array monitoring graphs glowed there.

Kit smiled at the Speech-word for “colleague”. “Thanks, Cheleb,” Kit said, “glad to be relieved.” He stood up, stretched, and snapped the manual shut. “Might try out the jump pad and go visit my friend later… see if he’ll let me have a few of those burgers for you guys.”

He headed for his puptent, Djam walking with him. “Kiht, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe it’s just a kinesics thing…”

“What?”

Djam bubbled a bit. “You keep looking at my fur. Is fur unusual where you come from?”

“Huh? Oh! No.” He was about to start explaining about animals on Earth and some of Homo sapiens’ simian relatives when he realized what the problem was. “No, it’s just…” Kit had to laugh, then. “Look, I’m sorry, this is really idiotic of me.”

Djam looked bemused. “What?”

“You remind me of somebody.”

“A friend? A colleague?”

Kit laughed again. “No! Somebody in, uh, it’s sort of an entertainment.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, somebody famous.”

“Really! Is it a good kind of famous?”

“Yeah, he’s a good guy. A hero type.”

“Oh, well that’s all right then,” Djam said. “I don’t think I could cope with being a villain.”

“I could show you if you like,” Kit said. There were ways to get access to Earth-based streaming services via the manual’s functions—some of them secondary to Dairine’s special relationship with her planet full of devoted mechanically-wizardly minions. The Mobiles were presently engaged in backing up all Earth’s data for her, as a convenience, and therefore considered archiving all Earth’s entertainment not to be a particularly big deal.

Then Kit had a second thought. “I mean, if it’s okay with you,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn’t think it was appropriate.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Kit paused in front of his puptent. “It came up for me when Ronan was here,” Kit said. “It feels, I don’t know, just strange, to be doing things for enjoyment when something like this is going on all around you. I mean…” He waved toward the portals, unwilling to look at them for the moment. “This is so awful for them. While I was on watch I was doing other things sometimes, I got distracted… and felt kind of bad that I wasn’t busy being sorry for them. You know what I mean?”

Djam looked thoughtful. “I think the Powers want us to do what we have to to work well,” he said, fiddling his fingers together in a gesture that Kit had seen him using the night before when he was uncertain about something. “But also maybe they want us to… not to be afraid to be ourselves while we’re here? Of course you don’t thoughtlessly make merry right in front of those who’re grieving: it’d be like eating in front of starving people! But if you’re sharing the food with them… that’s another story, surely?”

“Well…” Kit said, considering that.

“After all, it’s not like you can just pack your whole life away in a box, is it, when you go out on an intervention. What are you sent for if it’s not to bring you along? And there’s this too—there’s something about how our kind of people are, humanoids anyway, that made the Powers tell the intervention designers to post us on this world instead of just any species that was available!” Djam’s expression was surprisingly intense. “What would be the point of shutting that away if it’s what’s going to help them?”

There was something to be said for that line of reasoning. “I guess,” Kit said.

“And anyway, you have to do what you need to do to keep yourself running well. It’s not as if stopping yourself from being happy will make any of this any better.”

“No,” Kit said after a moment. “It’s just that… I don’t know.” He laughed helplessly. “I get guilty.”

Djam made a noise exactly like a horse snorting, so that Kit had to keep himself from laughing at that, anyway. “Guilt! Guilt’s what the Abnegate uses to keep us from doing our work, my advice-master says. After the fact, when it comes as fear we’ve done something wrong; or before the fact, to make us afraid we’re about to do something wrong. The food metaphor— When you’re working, why would you starve yourself of what will keep you doing your work well? That makes no sense. We’ve come a long way to do this, so let’s do it right. If taking some time off from the distress helps us do our work better, so be it. Yes?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. He let out a breath. “Djam, come on… let me get some snacks for you, this time: I must’ve eaten half yours last night. And we’ll have a look at the beginning of the story I want you to see.” Then another thought struck him. “You think Cheleb would want to see it too?”

“I think hae’ll be annoyed if hae doesn’t,” Djam said. “Hae’s big on alien cultural experience. But we can ask.”

Kit ducked into his puptent. “There might be some other people who’d want to look at this stuff with us in a day or two,” he said over his shoulder. “In fact Ronan was talking about having people over here for a picnic.”

“What’s a picnic?”

Kit laughed. “Come on,” he said, coming out of the puptent with an armful of soft drinks and crackers and cheese-in-a-can. “This may take some explaining…”

***

It was hard to tell where the next ten hours went. There had been some confusion at first when Kit explained what was going to be happening, and why. (“There are three more parts of the story before this one—kind of before, anyway—but I think we should start here…”) But soon enough they worked out how to transfer the streaming settings from Kit’s manual to the large, floating projection interface that was the way Cheleb’s version of the manual manifested itself. Within a very short time the three of them were watching the events of “a long time ago” unfold on Tatooine and at Alderaan, and Cheleb was roaring with laughter and pointing at Djam and crowing, “Does look like him! Does!”, and Djam was laughing too, until they all got swept away in the story together.

When the first film was over, both of Kit’s shiftmates were full of questions. These had to be set aside briefly when the middle feeder gate got rambunctious again; when Cheleb was unable to quiet it quickly, hae pulled Kit in to assist. It took the two of them nearly an hour to talk the gate down and get the gravitational anomalies it was throwing, one after another, to stop. Then there was some more eating and drinking to recover from that, and the questions started again.

“You said your people don’t believe that there are other intelligent species living on other planets.”

“Officially, they don’t. They believe there might be, but so far the mainstream culture hasn’t found any evidence that they’re able to accept.”

“And your planet is sevarfrith.”

“Mostly, yeah.”

“All right. But they still tell stories like this? How do they reconcile the two positions?”

“Because they’re just stories. And because they don’t automatically connect wizardry with the existence of other species.”

“That is so strange,” Djam said.

“Selective delusionality,” Cheleb said. “Evidence either of extreme intelligence or of species to be avoided at all costs, because can talk themselves into anything.” Hae was grinning that bared-teeth grin at Kit, which Kit for the time being took as approval.

“Maybe the second,” Djam said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A species like that could be incredibly effective with the Speech.”

Kit theatrically dusted his nails on his shirt. “We like to think that’s the case,” he said loftily. “Next movie?”

“More supplies first,” Cheleb said, “and double-check gates.”

The gates were fine, apparently having for the time being taken to heart the talk that Kit and Cheleb had given them. Nonetheless Cheleb kept a long and careful eye on the gate-array monitor that hae’d tucked into the upper right-hand corner of the large floating display that was now showing scenes of the snowy landscapes of Hoth. Meanwhile supplies were exchanged, and Kit opened one of his packages of saltines, just one, and split them between him and Djam and Cheleb. “I need to go easy on these, they’re all I’ve got… You guys okay with sodium chloride?”

They were. Shortly the tale once more unfolded itself, and Tevaral’s sun set a while before the Millennium Falcon dove away into intergalactic darkness in search of a man frozen in carbonite. And lacking any further interference by malfunctioning gates, as Tevaralti evening set in there ensued much more argument, and discussion, and confusion, and a lot of laughter, bubbling or trilling or Earth-style. The trilling, though, started getting mixed up with strange wheezy hissing noises. Kit was alarmed by this at first, but Djam knew what he was hearing.

“Cousin,” Djam said to Cheleb, shaking haem by one shoulder, “look at you, you’re fading. Go get some rest.”

“Start third one,” Cheleb said, even though hae could hardly keep his long eyes open.

“And anyway it’s my shift now, almost. And Kit needs to rest too. You don’t want to mess up his schedule just when he’s getting it started.”

“He’s got a point there,” Kit said. “Probably I should think about starting to wind down. Chel, look, we’ll all watch the third one together tomorrow, huh?”

Cheleb wheezed with weariness. “Should have triggered hormonal waking aids. Even without those, normally have better staying power than this.”

“There’s nothing normal about this situation, no matter how you come at it,” Djam said. “You had a long day yesterday, and the day before. So come on now, kehrutheh. Don’t bother reporting off to me; I’ve seen everything that happened, and you’re relieved.”

“Under protest, kehrutheh,” Cheleb said, and wheezed again as he got up, actually staggering against Kit.

“Come on, buddy,” Kit said, and put an arm around Cheleb as they headed back toward his puptent. Kit found himself wondering whether his perception of Cheleb as somewhat reptilian was predisposing him to think of his fellow wizard as unusually tough. Plainly this wasn’t the case. “You get some rest, all right? Part three can wait.”

Cheleb wheezed again as hae slapped the standing stone with one long-clawed hand and his puptent’s portal popped open. “No cheating and watching it without me,” hae said as hae vanished through into the darkness.

“Promise,” Kit said as the portal closed.

The twilight was deepening rapidly to darkness, and the wind was picking up as the local temperature dropped. Kit stood where he was for a few moments, and recited under his breath the small, brief spell that created a small spark of wizard-light hanging behind his left shoulder. With the light following him, he made his way back to the Stone Throne. Djam was already tucked up against the back of the Throne, his silver manual-Rod in one hand and his gate-array monitor rolled out of it. He glanced up at Kit. “Forgot something?”

Kit shook his head. “Just tidying up.” One of the things that Tom and Carl had drilled into him fairly hard regarding off-planet work was the need for the responsible wizard to pack out his trash and dispose of it correctly on his own turf. So now, as always, Kit gathered up the various wrappings and so forth from his snacking, wrapped up the four or five saltines that were left over, brushed the crumbs off onto the ground, and headed back for his puptent, where he had a few garbage bags stowed away.

He had to dig around to find them, as they’d gotten themselves folded up and stuffed underneath a small pile of books. Kit put the unfinished saltines aside with the other stacked-up food, shook out one of the garbage bags, stuffed the trash in it, and then fired it across the puptent to the back wall, where the faint shimmer of light defined the area that had a stasis field laid over it to keep anything inside it from going bad. And these shouldn’t be here, Kit thought, picking up the books and repositioning them off to one side of the non-perishable food boxes. And what’s this stuff doing down here, I thought I straightened all this up, did something fall over? Under some more books and a couple of sweaters and T-shirts he caught sight of a glint of metal: his antenna-wand. What’re you doing down there, huh? He collapsed it down to its shortest size and stuffed it in his back pocket. Gotta find you a better place. And here were more books, hiding under more clothes. …Seriously, why did I bring these, I was already getting bored with reading that one last week—

Outside the portal Djam said, “Kiht?”

Kit wasn’t sure how well Djam could hear him when he was in here; he went to the portal interface and stuck his head out. “What?”

“I’ve got a physical thing I have to handle before I settle in… could you take the throne for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Kit said, grabbing his manual just in case Djam’s interface gave him some kind of trouble reading what was going on with the gate array. He grabbed a jacket, too, and slung it around his shoulders. Physical things, yeah, that’s definitely another issue. I need to find out what Ronan’s doing about that: maybe I can duplicate his solution here, or use whatever facilities he’s turned up. Don’t want to cause some kind of local sanitation incident…

He summoned his spark of wizard-light again to light his way and headed back to the throne. It was empty: Djam had taken his interface with him. He’s dead serious about this, Kit thought. Always good to see…

Kit parked himself on the throne and laid the manual down beside him, open to the array page. As far as the inner workings of the gating complex went, all was quiet over there. His gaze drifted out to the complex itself, bright under its hovering antigrav lights. The scene over there was the same as at any time since he’d come: the same dark flow of Tevaralti crowds in through the feeder gates, out through the terminus gate, waves and waves of people. And far less distinct, between the gate complex and the stone circle, there lay the great gathering of thousands of Tevaralti who would not pass the gates, the shadow of their presence starred with their tiny sphere-in-cube electronic campfires, the lights twinkling as fitfully as stars as people moved among them. Thesba had risen bloated in the east and was climbing the sky, golden and dull fire-red. Its light touched faintly on the Tevaralti camped beyond the glare of the gating complex, a sullen dim glow red as blood.

Kit shook his head as the wind rose and hissed in the grass around him. In the face of what lay before him, all the afternoon’s good cheer was fading to something thin and pale. He hunched his shoulders inside his jacket and sighed. Beside him, on the stone, the bar graphs illustrating the power levels of the gates rose and fell, rose and fell again, beating like small hearts. But it won’t last, Kit thought. Sooner or later these people will say, It doesn’t matter what you do, we’re not leaving: you can turn them all off now. Sooner or later the hearts will stop. His gaze drifted up to Thesba again. And I really hate that—

That was when he heard the rustling noise.

Suddenly, here by himself, alone in the dark, Kit remembered what Ronan had been saying about apex predators. Now why haven’t I looked into that? he thought, reaching behind him for the antenna-wand, as much as a security blanket-equivalent as anything else. This wand and its near-identical predecessors were more than mere channels for the power Kit funneled into his spells: they were noon-forged steel, with their own potency—formidable weapons in their own right. For the moment, though, Kit stood up and concentrated on staying still while he waited to discover which way he was likely to wind up using the wand in the next few minutes.

His breathing sped up, but he held still and waited. And slowly, in a rustle of slithery motion under the dim golden-red light that lay over the plain, glinting with eyes and curling with tentacles, the sibik came crawling along from between two of the standing stones and crouched down against the ground, staring at Kit with every eye it had on the back of its big baggy body.

This was a different one from the sibik he’d laughingly pulled off Ronan’s leg: much bigger, more like the size of a large dog than a rabbit, and darker in color—a vague soft patchwork of cobalt and jade. Kit found himself thinking about the sibik that Djam had told him about, the one that bit him before starting to try to pull his fur out. He knew perfectly well that he could keep this one from hurting him… even kill it, if necessary. He’d killed much more dangerous things in his time, when he’d had to. But in his mind’s eye Kit kept seeing the smaller sibik from earlier, the stubborn, hungry, near-comical one, and the idea of doing anything terminal to any of them felt very unpleasant.

So there Kit stood for a few seconds, and there the sibik sat, or crouched, or lay, its tentacles twitching a bit as it looked at him.

It made a surprisingly small hissing grunt at him, for something of its size. At least that was what the sound was like, when it came out: but Kit’s understanding of the Speech rendered this as words.

“Hello help?”

Well, that’s unusual, Kit thought. “Dai stihó, cousin," he said to the sibik. “How can I help?”

The sibik lay there looking at him with all those eyes, and then said, “Want?”

Does it mean it didn’t understand me, or does it think I know what it wants? Kit couldn’t be sure. “Cousin,” he said in the Speech, “tell me what you need.”

It just looked at him.

Maybe I didn’t phrase that right. Or something. “What can I do for you?” Kit said.

The sibik rustled. “Salt flat,” it said.

What? Kit said. His second thought was, Wait. First things first. “What should I call you, cousin?”

“Sibik.”

“Yeah, I know that’s what you’re all called, but what should I call you?”

“Sibik.”

“So it’s a personal name as well as a species one?” Kit said. “Okay.” Kit had discovered over time that that approach wasn’t so uncommon among animals. “I’m Kit.”

“Kt,” the sibik said, turning it into a sound like someone snapping a pencil in two.

“Fine. Now what did you want again?”

“Salt flat.”

Kit scratched his head and thought about that. I haven’t really looked into the local terrain that much, he thought. This is all grassland, as far as I can tell, for miles. At least if there were any salt flats in the neighborhood, they struck Kit as very well concealed. “I'm, uh, I’m not sure what you're asking me for.”

The sibik edged just slightly closer, watching Kit carefully, holding its abdomen up so that all the eyes on it were positioned to see Kit clearly. When it spoke again, it did so quite slowly, as if speaking to someone it considered somewhat simple. “Salt,” it said, “flat.”

Kit stood there a moment with his hands on his hips. “Okay,” he said, “I really have no idea what you—” And then his eye fell on something near to where he was standing: a bit of cellophane, a scrap of the wrapping from his saltines that he’d missed when he was tidying up.

“I get it,” Kit said, and laughed. “Sorry, it’s been a long day. You want a cracker.”

“Cracker!” the big sibik said, and rustled closer still, a few of its tentacles waving in the air.

“Sorry, I took longer than I thought,” Djam said from behind Kit, “but after I was finished I had to—” He paused, his glance going from Kit to what was watching him from a yard or so away.

“It’s all right,” Kit said. “Word seems to have got around that the food here is good.”

“Well,” Djam said, coming around slowly to sit on the Stone Throne, “we did give them a fair amount of stuff the other night.”

“No, he’s after my saltines,” Kit muttered, and stood there rubbing his forehead for a moment. “Because I promised, didn’t I…”

The sibik simply looked up at him and said, quite distinctly, “Cracker.”

“Djam, would you do me a favor?” Kit said. “Go in my puptent and off on the right hand side you’ll see a bunch of strange-shaped containers off by themselves. On top of those there’s a clear-wrapped package with a few of those crackers left in it…”

“One moment,” Djam said, and went off.

“How did you find out about the ‘salt flats?’” Kit said to the sibik.

It tilted its abdomen slightly so that it was regarding him from a slightly different angle. “Knew,” the sibik said.

That told Kit nothing of any real use. “Did you meet the sibik who was here before?”

The big sibik tilted its belly even further forward, angling more eyes toward Kit. “Smelled,” it said after a moment. “Smelled it.”

So maybe somehow that information was encoded in the scent trail the other one left? Kit thought. How would that even work? Yet it wouldn’t surprise him. Over the past few years he’d run into a lot of impossible-seeming situations and events that nonetheless turned out to be completely possible. Sometimes fatally so… sometimes marvelously.

“Here,” Djam said, returning with the almost-finished cracker package. Kit took it from him and took one out of the package, showed it to the sibik.

“Cracker,” it said in the pleased but still impatient tone of voice of someone seeing the dinner they’d ordered finally being brought to the table after an annoying delay.

“Right,” Kit said. He got down on one knee and held out the saltine. The sibik started making grabby tentacles at it, though it was also holding back from Kit as if it thought he might do something sudden.

“It’s all right, cousin,” Kit said. “Come on, take it. I won’t bite.”

One tentacle more daring than the rest reached out to Kit’s hand and very slowly and carefully wound itself around the saltine: then yanked it away. The sibik’s tentacles parted a bit in the front, and Kit saw where there was a sort of stoma behind them, with a rosette of little hard-looking dark brown plates, each one shaped more or less like the business end of a flat-head screwdriver. The tentacle guided the saltine toward the rosette of plate-teeth, which very delicately nipped at the corner of the saltine. Then, apparently satisfied that the flavor matched what it had somehow or other been expecting, the rest of it vanished straight inside. Much munching and crunching ensued, without a single crumb escaping.

Then the sibik looked pointedly at Kit, wiggling its abdomen. “More?”

“Well, I know this drill,” Kit said under his breath, and pulled out another saltine. “I wonder if I could teach you tricks?”

“More,” said the sibik, sounding unimpressed and grabbing with its longest tentacle at the cracker Kit was holding.

“Yeah, more, right,” Kit said, letting the sibik take the saltine from him and dispose of it the same way the first one had gone.

Djam, behind him, was watching this in amusement. “You're going to become very popular if this becomes a regular event,” he said, bubbling.

“I think it’s too late,” Kit said. “I’m popular already.” He shook his head. “This guy, though… he’s so much bigger than the other one. Easily three times its size. You said the domesticated sibiks come over here following the wild ones’ scent trails… Is this a domestic one? Somebody’s pet?”

Djam held his hands up. “Kiht, I have no idea.”

“I can see I’m going to be doing some research tomorrow,” Kit said as the sibik pushed itself closer to get a better look at the remaining two crackers in the package. Kit pulled out the third one, held it out. It was promptly snatched away and munched up. “Cheleb said there were a lot of different species of these. Might as well know what I’m dealing with…”

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 567