Cephei IV / Tevaral 8 page

“Well, fine. And meanwhile, Powers forbid I should fail to cut you some slack when you so plainly need it,” said Ronan, not missing a beat. “Look at you, you’re the color of beetroot.”

Kit didn’t waste time trying to deny it, assuming that beetroot was the same as beets; sometimes with food from Ronan’s part of the world it wasn’t easy to tell. “So, things get boring over on your side, or was there a purpose for this visit?”

“I was just coming over to tell you that we’re on for the picnic tomorrow night, if your shiftmates are okay with it.”

“Oh God, I forgot to ask Djam this morning,” Kit said. “Doesn’t matter, he’ll be up shortly, and Cheleb will be back any minute: he’s a real on-time kind of guy. Sit down, get comfortable! When one or the other of them comes along we can let them know what’s on tap, and then take this guy back over there.” Kit pointed with his chin at the transients’ camp. “He’s nervous about going out there by himself, thinks he’ll get lost again. We’ll escort him over.”

“Cracker,” the sibik said, a touch cranky now that less attention was being paid to it.

Kit gave it a look. “What do we say?”

“Please,” it said. The sulky tone suggested it was embarrassed again, now that there was someone else watching it do what it was told.

Ronan fell over laughing, which didn’t help the sibik’s temper: it snatched the last cracker away from Kit and practically inhaled it, crumbs spraying everywhere.

It was into this tableau that Cheleb came strolling a moment or two later. Kit was spluttering with laughter: Ronan’s presence made it somehow impossible for him to keep his face straight. He pushed the sibik gently off to one side and onto the Stone Throne, brushing crumbs off himself. “Cheleb,” he said, “we’ve got a lost one here.”

“What a shame,” Cheleb said, looking sympathetically at Ronan. “Big well-grown specimen, doubtless someone misses their pet.”

Ronan stared at Cheleb, then collapsed again, hooting with laughter. Kit snickered. “Just be glad Carmela’s not here to agree,” Kit said. “Chel, this is my friend Ronan. Ronan, Cheleb—”

Dai stihós and arm-clasps were exchanged, at least as soon as Ronan could start himself breathing again and get up to do it properly. “Chel,” Kit said, “we were thinking we might invite some friends over here tomorrow evening, after your shift starts, for food and drink and himiniw.” The Speech-term exactly translated the English term “get-together”. “Would that bother you? Feel like taking part?”

“Glad to, not bothered at all,” Cheleb said. “Djam certainly will too, was complaining the other day about grinding boredom.”

“Relief from grinding boredom I can pretty much guarantee him,” Kit said. “So would you relieve me early? Got to return the prodigal squid to his proper sphere of influence before he eats all my food.”

The sibik had already climbed halfway up Kit’s arm and was in the process of festooning itself around his shoulders. “No problem,” Cheleb said. “How have gates been?”

“Mercifully quiet,” Kit said, “considering what else has been going on.”

“Entertainment still on for this evening as scheduled?”

“Oh yes. As soon as we dispose of Wandering Boy here.”

“Then relieving you, kehrutheh. Go restore lost one so can get started soon as Djam gets up. Don’t want to leave poor long-ago-far-away humanoid stuck in carbonite any longer than necessary.”

“Right. Back soon.”

Ronan threw Kit a look as the two of them headed out between the standing stones toward the encampment a mile or so across the plain. “What the everloving feck have you been doing to these poor innocents?”

Kit grinned as they struck out through the long turquoise grass. “Long story. Let’s deal with this first.”

Just outside the circle of stones Kit paused and rummaged inside his hoodie’s front pocket, handing the package of saltines to Ronan while he fished around for his manual. “Let’s make this easier for ourselves,” he said, flipping its pages open to one of the sections that had to do with biology and biochemistry.

“Tracking spell?” Ronan said.

“More or less.” Kit ran a finger down one page full of Speech-cursive, didn’t find what he was after; turned another page, and another. “The shiftmates have been saying there are scent trails involved, but I think there’s something else going on too. Some connection that started out just plain chemical, and then something happened. It got involved with something else, some other process…”

The next page had what he wanted: a spell that would key to a given set of chemical or olfactory signatures, analyze them, and track them visually. “Okay,” Kit said, “let’s see how this goes.” He made sure his own name in the Speech was locked into it correctly, then tugged one of the sibik’s tentacles loose, bringing it down to touch the page.

The page held the tentacle in place as if it was glued there, and Kit could feel the sibik go stiff with alarm. “No, no, it’s okay,” Kit said. “Ro, pet it a little, I need to concentrate on this.”

“Good thing nobody else we know is here,” Ronan muttered, “because adding ‘octopoid wrangler’ to my CV at this stage isn’t something I’d anticipated. Might never live this down. Where’s okay to pet it?”

“Probably smart to avoid the eyes,” Kit said, reading down the spell to get the structure and the rhythm of it. “Otherwise most places should be all right.”

Kit was surprised to feel the sibik start going rather limp. “Oho, that’s where it is,” Ronan said, sounding smug.

“Where what is?”

“The good spot. Doubt there’s an animal alive that doesn’t have one. The spot that would be the one back a bit and between the ears, if it was a dog.”

Kit smiled: he knew that spot. “Great, hold that thought…”

“You need me to move anywhere?”

“Nope, you’re fine. Just a sensor spell, doesn’t need a circle.” Or rather, the circle had spread itself across the manual page. All Kit needed to do was verbally tag the scent cues that the manual was picking up from the sibik and tell the wizardry to locate and visually identify them.

Kit began to read the spell—fairly slowly and carefully, as the Speech-names for some of the aromatic esters and other chemicals involved in the sibik’s scent were fairly complicated, and misplacing a syllable could render the tracker function ineffective. All around him and the sibik and Ronan, for a few moments the world went dim and quiet as the Universe leaned in around them and listened to see what Kit wanted done. Kit finished the recitation of the spell’s power-feed component—which flared up and extinguished itself on the page quick and bright as a struck match bursting into flame, and seemed to cost Kit no more energy than it took to breathe out at the end of the phrase. I can not get used to that, he thought as he finished the spell proper and recited the shorthand verbal version of the Wizard’s Knot to close the spell and set it working: seven syllables in four groups.

Kit experienced no final burst of energy leaving him to fuel the triggering of the spell; his intervention allowance had so increased his normal power levels that for so relatively minor a spell there was almost nothing to feel. So weird, Kit thought as he closed the manual and watched the spell work. A tangled strand of pale blue light started laying itself down across the ground from near where he and Ronan stood, weaving off southward through the long turquoise grass, more or less in the direction of the transients’ encampment. But Kit could already see where it started to angle away to the westward, a few hundred yards ahead of them. Other trails, fainter than their sibik’s, crossed it and smudged it and made it wander.

“Can you see that okay?” Kit said to Ronan.

Ronan glanced around them, immediately picked up the track, and nodded. “No wonder he couldn’t figure out how to get back,” he said. “Must have been a dozen of them cluttering up the picture. Repeatedly.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, tugging the sibik’s tentacle loose from the manual and tucking it back up onto his shoulder. “With any luck we won’t find his people too far from where they lost touch with him. From the time-stamping on this, doesn’t look like he’s been gone too long.” The complex chemical signatures that the sibik emitted and the spell was tracking all had clearly defined “expiration dates”. Another sibik could judge by their strength exactly when and how quickly another of its kind had passed this way, not to mention a lot about what it had been eating and even a certain amount about its emotional state. There’s so much information encoded in these, Kit thought. Maybe I can figure out which compound is signaling the presence of saltines, so I can work out a way to spoof it and make them stop coming here and looking for more…

But right now that wasn’t the main problem. Kit and Ronan struck out across the grassy plain, following the trail, while the sibik peered past Kit’s ear with most of its tentacles wrapped around his shoulders and throat and a few spare ones playing with his hair. Kit tilted his head back to smell the wind, just letting himself enjoy it for a moment: the strange scents, the clearing weather (it had been gray for a lot of the day but hadn’t ever gotten around to actually raining), the sound of the wind itself and the quiet that underlay it. “You know what’s weird?” Kit said after a moment. “The Tevaralti are avian-descended, but I haven’t seen a single bird here. Are there even any? Because I haven’t seen anything that flies at all.”

“I think there are some,” Ronan said, “but I don’t know about what would normally live on this continent. And anyway a lot of the local wildlife’s been removed already, and a lot more is just weirded out by what’s been going on with the magnetic fields and so forth.” He looked around him, shook his head with a frown. “This would be a really nice place if it wasn’t about to wind up somewhere between mostly and completely destroyed.”

Kit nodded.

“Speaking of which,” Ronan said, “I guess I should be grateful that certain other wizards working on this planet with access to that streaming video system didn’t see any of what I was looking at last night—”

“Because ‘somewhere between mostly and completely destroyed’ might in that case be an accurate description of your general status today?” Kit said.

“Or yours, if you’d started looking at the wrong channel and her manual noticed that…”

The issue of what Nita’s manual (or the power that ran it) was capable of noticing, and how much of that it chose to share with her, was somewhat on Kit’s mind right now. “Between you and me,” Kit said, “I think it might be smart to stay out of the Jacuzzi Channel for the time being.”

“Heard and understood,” Ronan muttered. “Oh wow, look at this…”

They stopped and looked at the grass around them. The whole area was an incredible tangle of scent trails. Kit’s sibik’s trail here turned into something like an extremely tight and complex knot about a meter wide, probably the result of it shuffling around in excitement as it ran across a crowd of wild sibik who’d probably been tracking it.

“Okay, this is where you started getting lost, isn’t it,” Ronan said to the sibik. It gave him a reproachful look and then hid all its eyes against Kit’s head.

“Yeah, you can see why…” Kit said. “Must’ve been five, six, maybe eight of them here.”

“I can also see what is probably somebody’s butthole,” Ronan said, covering his eyes for a moment. “Holy Powers, there’s two of them. No, three! Sure you’re oversubscribed in the bottomly wonderfulness department, fella. But nobody else needs to see that, you’ll just embarrass the lot of us who can’t compete, ah jeez would you ever stop waving it about and just sit yourself down!”

The sibik put its body back down on Kit’s shoulder again, giving Ronan a sidelong look out of several eyes. Kit’s laughter almost got away from him before he managed to strangle it. “Okay,” he said. “Looks like a few meters further along this pretty much straightens out. Seems like they all actually did physically meet up, and then the others ran off for some reason…”

“Maybe not enough buttholes?” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.

Kit snickered as they once more started along the sibik’s trail. There were several more of these ball-of-yarn knots ahead of them, apparently more artifacts of yet more excited small wild sibik groups running across the domesticated one. Kit had a sudden mental image of a slightly nervous Labrador or Great Dane wandering through a strange dog park and being repeatedly mobbed by gangs of excited Chihuahuas.

“These lads just seem to come from all directions,” Ronan said, turning to look along some of the wild sibiks’ tracks out into the plain. “I guess they’re out foraging for whatever it is they usually eat. Have to be all kinds of wee things in the grass…”

Kit nodded. “And when they run across other sibik and check their scent trails, they know if they found anything, and they know what direction they found it in. Kind of like ants, one way.”

“Or bees, without the dancing.”

“Yeah.” It was funny that Ronan should mention bees just now, as Kit had been registering a faint humming at the edge of hearing. As they walked, though, Kit realized that what he was hearing had nothing to do with insect life. He was hearing, at a distance, the sound of movement and voices from the transients’ encampment ahead of them; and it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

It’s not like we haven’t been within visual distance of them for a couple of days, Kit thought. But the motion at that distance had been indistinct, sort of an average of many movements seen together; and sometimes, even under Thesba’s light when darkness fell, difficult to see at all. Now he could see people, or the individual shapes of people anyway, moving around, moving among one another, clothed or not-so-clothed over their feathers; sitting outside the small tentlike structures scattered throughout the encampment, standing and talking, and sometimes pausing to look up at Thesba as it slid across the sky.

Kit and Ronan followed the sibik’s track past another tangle of knotted light in the grass, while the hum became louder and started turning into a huge low murmur of voices in many Tevaralti languages. The path began to angle to their right, somewhat toward the encampment’s western edge, now just a couple hundred meters ahead of them. That was when the wind that had been blowing at their backs dropped off for a few moments, and then changed, swinging around to gust toward them from the encampment.

Two things happened. The grip of the sibik’s tentacles around Kit’s shoulders and head immediately tightened, and it made another of those little moans; of excitement this time, but strangely mixed with dread. And as it did, Kit got a strong whiff of something he hadn’t smelled since he came, or had mistaken it for part of this world’s larger, natural scent. It was a metallic aroma, or at least that was the way it read to him. But it wasn’t until he saw the small, cubelike sanitary arrangements that were set outside the edges of the encampment that he realized his error. The biology of human beings from Earth naturally arose from and was geared to a very specific biosphere, meaning that human bodies and senses were wired to read certain scents as unwholesome or noxious. Aromas from other planets would naturally mean nothing to them. If I’d smelled something recognizable as piss or crap, Kit thought, or both of those mixed up with chemicals meant to hide the odor—if it’d smelled like people crowded together in really basic conditions—

He wasn’t sure what was supposed to come after the ‘if.’ But it was funny, the way a smell could concentrate your mind when sound or sight hadn’t done so before.

“Kit,” Ronan said. “Stay focused.”

Kit looked at Ronan out of the corner of his eye. It was unusual enough for him to call Kit by his name instead of one of the endless series of rude nicknames he’d evolved over time. Ronan’s face looked unusually tight, the wide mobile mouth set thinner and harder than Kit was used to seeing it. It was unnerving.

“You okay?” Kit said.

Ronan nodded just once. “Trail’s swinging again,” he said.

So it was, further to their right, right off toward the encampment’s westward side, to a point where it amgled southward and dove straight into it. Kit and Ronan worked around the edge of the encampment’s boundary, more or less defined by a line of long low tents and the cubical structures that Kit’s nose now identified as the Tevaralti version of portable toilets—extremely advanced, yes, but not quite perfect at disguising their purpose or their contents. And then the wind shifted again, and the sibik grabbed Kit even tighter, almost throttling him with a tentacle that had been left around his neck, and shouted “Yes!”

Kit tried to ease the tentacle’s grip slightly as they followed the sibik’s trail into the encampment. All around them, Tevaralti in their many kinds of dress, from harnesses to kilts to robes and everything in between, in small groups or larger ones, were staring at him and Ronan as they made their way between the temporary buildings and among the lookers-on. Kit tried to smile at the ones who stared at him, but he wasn’t at all sure that they were prepared or even able to understand the expression as a gesture of friendliness.

And the way the Tevaralti around them were regarding him was peculiar. They didn’t seem hostile, but they did seem sad and afraid, afraid of them—as if Kit and Ronan somehow were symptoms of everything that was going wrong with the world right now. The people they passed most closely drew back from them, still staring; and as this happened again and again, even though he was perfectly safe, a wizard in company and in his power, out and about on the Powers’ business, Kit started feeling small and unsettled and strangely alone.

Fortunately he had something to distract him—the sibik, which was now yelling “Yes yes! Yes yes!” over and over again in response to something it was smelling. The rhythm was strangely like that of a dog barking. And as that thought crossed Kit’s mind, suddenly a peculiar unexpected wave of sensation washed over him, one that meant something: or rather, someone. Someone for whom the sibik didn’t have a name, nothing so advanced. It was a scent, or actually a whole bundle of scents bound up together, clothes and food and possessions and a personal aroma laden with meaning and safety and warmth and the reality of a place to be and someone to belong to, and oh, it missed them, it missed them—

The pang of its emotion pierced so profoundly through Kit that he actually staggered, and stumbled and might have gone down on his face if Ronan hadn’t caught him by one arm. “Are you okay, what the f—”

“No, it’s OK, I’m OK,” Kit said, “we’re here, he’s here, he’s home—”

Right in front of them, someone was crying in one of the Tevaralti languages something like, “Weegie? Weegie!” And the sibik undid all its tentacles from around Kit and more or less launched itself off him at the small feather-crested figure that was running toward them, and the next moment or so was taken up with Kit stumbling back into Ronan (who was still bracing him, and sharing Kit’s surprise at how much force a sibik that size could impart to you when using you as a launch platform).

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.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 566