Cephei IV / Tevaral 11 page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Better?” Nita said after a while.

“Better,” Kit said. “You?”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

She stretched again, lacing her fingers together behind her head. “So what’s the plan for tonight?”

“I think everybody just comes over starting around sunset,” Kit said. “The general idea seems to be that everybody should bring food and drinks, and we’ll set up a buffet, and sit around and talk and maybe watch some video. Also, possibly, have a campfire—a real campfire, not one of these electronic things. One of my shiftmates is all excited… hae thinks this is going to be a genuine Earth togetherness ceremonial.” He grinned: he could still see the excitement on Cheleb’s face. “Hae asked me if there were special clothes hae had to wear. I said ‘no, this is a come as you are thing’. And hae got incredibly excited and started spouting a whole bunch of really serious and deep stuff about the revelation of true selves and I don’t know what else.” Kit had to laugh. “You have to watch out for Cheleb. Hae’s got a little trouble with idiom…”

“Okay,” Nita said, straightening up. “Tell me what kind of food you want me to bring, and then I’m going to throw you out of here. Bobo advises me that the number three gate is about to get goofy again, and I have to remind it who’s running this show…”

***

It took longer than an hour for her to throw him out, but it was an enjoyable hour, as simply having him there apparently greatly increased Nita’s confidence in gate handling. Or maybe it just makes her feel more aggressive and more like showing off, Kit thought. Either way, the gate that had been giving her trouble calmed itself down in fairly short order. And if it felt me looking over her shoulder, Kit thought, grimly amused, and that look was really dirty, well, this isn’t about how she feels, or how I feel. It’s about making sure all these people get out of here safely…

Shortly after that, her Natih frilly-dinosaur shiftmate turned up, and he and Kit got into a friendly but somewhat strange discussion about what humans sometimes did over campfires, and the possibility that barbecue was a sign of moral decay. “Beautiful, raw meat like the One intended,” Mr. Frilly cried, gesticulating wildly with his claws and wriggling his whole, beautifully tiger-striped body and shaking his neck-frill and snapping his long, sharp jaws, “what sacrilege is this, to set it on fire?!” It occurred to Kit that here was somebody who would get even more overexcited than his mama—who was one of the “when I stick a fork in it I want to see it bleed” persuasion—about a steak being overdone. He grinned. They have got to meet…

Eventually Kit and Mr. Frilly—whose name Kit kept mangling until he begged to be allowed to use the nickname—agreed that their cultural differences could and should for the time being be set aside in the name of interstellar amity, and pending further discussion over drinks that evening. Kit caught himself rubbing his eyes again at that point, so he said to Nita, “I’ve got kind of a free day because of the excitement last night, so I think I’m going to go back and have a nap so later on I don’t fall asleep in the buffet.”

Nita was presently standing with arms akimbo, deep in an increasingly assertive three-way conversation involving herself, Bobo, and one of the feeder gates that she hadn’t previously disciplined but was about to show the error of its ways. She just nodded at Kit and reached out with one arm to squeeze him around the waist, bumping hips with him while looking off into the distance like someone preparing to tell off the party at the other end of a mobile call. “Sunset?” she said to him.

“Or just after,” Kit said.

She gave him a thumbs up and went back to staring into space. “Now listen to me—” she said, in that tone of voice that Kit had learned over time meant that what you absolutely needed to do, if you had any brains at all or any desire for a quiet life, was listen to her. Kit grinned, waved at her and Mr. Frilly, who was leaning over her shoulder and giving her advice, and took himself back to the short-jump transport pad.

A few moments later he was walking back into the stone circle in early afternoon light. Cheleb was sitting there watching streaming video on one levitating screen and monitoring the gates on another. “Everything behaving itself?” Kit said, pausing by the gate monitors.

“Perfectly quiet,” Cheleb said. “Planning to get more rest?”

“Does it show that much?” Kit said, yawning.

Cheleb gave him an amused look. “Postural, mostly. Djam doing the same. Go on! Will get you up before sunset.”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll tell my manual to handle it.”

“As pleases you.” Cheleb reached out to touch some control on the streaming-video screen. “One thing before you go: watching some Earth children’s entertainment. Amazing your people make it past latency, considering lurking developmental challenges.”

“Oh?” Kit peered around the edge of the floating screen and saw that the image there was paused on the title frame of A Nightmare On Elm Street.

“Most resilient species, your people,” Cheleb said. “No wonder have been invaded so rarely.”

“Uh, yeah,” Kit said, and went to take his nap before he started finding out anything else he didn’t want to know.

***

By sunset Kit had had enough of a nap to leave him feeling energized again, and he came out of his puptent to find Cheleb and the newly awakened Djam setting up the Stone Throne as a food service area and laying out their own contributions to the buffet. Kit snagged himself a plastic cup of the blue “milk” and had a look at the gate-monitoring chart matrix, which Cheleb had used haes wizardry to embed into the back of the Stone Throne so that everyone could see it without trouble.

All the gates were running perfectly. Kit paused by Cheleb when hae was checking over the display; the streaming video screen was blank for the moment. “Finished with Freddy?”

“Oh yes,” Cheleb said. “Following some other lines of investigation now. When you have a moment, need a context-positive explication of Plan Nine From Outer Space.”

Kit spluttered into his sekoldra juice. What have I done! “You’re such a culture junkie,” was all he could say, and went off hurriedly to get some paper plates from his puptent.

Quite shortly people started wandering in from the short-transport pad—Ronan, levitating a deck chair behind him, along with a cooler full of assorted bottles: Dairine, with Spot behind her and toting a couple of Safeway bags full of sandwich makings and assorted junk food; and finally Nita, changed into a flowery blue minidress and leggings and flats, in company with Mr. Frilly, and also carrying some small bags the contents of which weren’t immediately obvious. Everyone gathered in around the “buffet” and started peppering Cheleb and Djam with questions about the food they’d brought, and nabbing the best bits of the Earth food for themselves.

The talk became very eclectic very quickly, but Kit noticed how for the time being at least conversation seemed to be avoiding anything to do with the reason they were all here. For the time being, that suited Kit fine. People sat down on the chairs they’d brought themselves, or on the bits of the Stone Throne that weren’t occupied by food or other people, and ate and drank and talked while the evening grew darker around them.

Djam and Ronan were in the middle of a lively discussion of whether anybody in their right mind should bother watching the three prequel movies of the series he and Kit and Cheleb had just finished—Ronan holding down the “Hell No” position quite strongly, and referring particularly to the first one as ‘a steaming heap of shite’—when a voice from the darkness said, “Well, I know opinion’s divided on that one, but don’t you think that’s a tad harsh?”

Heads snapped up all around the stone circle. “Tom?”

Kit was surprised to see Tom, normally very much the suburban polo-shirt-and-chinos type, come wandering in out of the dark in clothes more like Ronan’s than anything else: dark parka, black jeans, hiking boots, with a long dark slender something over his shoulder, hard to see by only the light of the electric campfire. Ronan looked him up and down in mild approbation. “Going stealthy tonight while you check up on the troops?”

“Worked pretty well for Henry the Fifth,” Tom said. “Just passing through: I’ve got a fair number of people to check on tonight. But I heard rumors of what was going on over here, and Carl sent me to see how the potato salad was.”

“That green stuff’s as close as you’re getting,” Dairine said, pointing at a bowl of one of Djam’s vegetarian goodies. “Kind of spicy. If you like wasabi, you’ll be okay…”

“Sounds lovely. May I?”

“Please, Supervisory,” Djam said, “anything you like!”

Shortly Tom was sitting down with a paper plate and digging in, having put down what he was carrying when he arrived. “Is that a wand I see?” Ronan said. “Would’ve thought you were above that kind of thing, the age you are.”

“Yeah, and it looks just like… a magic wand,” Dairine said in a tone halfway between mystification and scorn. But she had a point. It looked like the classic stage magician’s wand, black with a white tip, though considerably longer than usual.

Tom picked it up and held it out for her. Hesitantly, Dairine took it. “Present from a friend,” Tom said. “Don’t scratch the finish.”

“I thought that wasn’t allowed,” Kit said. “Doesn’t everybody have to make their own wand? And from donated material?”

“There are exceptions to the rule,” Tom said as Dairine handed the wand back. “Certain heirloom wands are exempt. Happens this is one.” He put his plate down, braced the wand end-to-end between his hands, then collapsed it between his hands and vanished it.

“Snazzy,” Ronan said.

“And you’ve been doing what?” Dairine said. “Besides checking up on us.”

“Same as you,” Tom said, rubbing his legs. “Gate management. Spent the last eight hours in the middle of one of the big cities on Continent Four, watching thousands and thousands of people pouring by.” He sighed. “Makes me remember that I keep promising myself to get more exercise. Spending eight hours on your feet…” He shook his head. “A little different from sitting around writing spells all day.”

“And you came all this way to see us on your off time!” Ronan said.

“‘Off time?’” Tom laughed at him. “As if a Supervisory gets any of that in a situation like this. I’m just here making sure you lot aren’t getting into trouble.”

“Us?” Ronan said, with a hilariously manufactured expression of disbelief and shock. “The very thought!”

“Please, spare me,” Tom said, amused. “After what happened with you and Kit on Mars? Now any time the two of you are posted on some new planet together, I get a tagged travel advisory in my manual.”

Kit reddened with embarrassment, as this was probably true. “Yeah, I’m such a bad influence,” Ronan said, and laughed. “Well, not here. This situation’s too edgy to have much fun with.”

“Fun aside,” Tom said, “I know you’re serious about what you’re doing here. So does Irina, otherwise she wouldn’t have let you onto the ‘go’ list. Rafting’s too serious to let any potential loose cannons on deck, believe me.”

“Irina signed off on us being here?” Nita said, sounding surprised.

“Oh yes. You didn’t know? Well, now you do.”

“Where’s Carl?” Dairine said.

“Other side of the planet,” said Tom. “He’ll be off shift shortly. There’s a particularly difficult gate over there in the middle of one of the capital cities… a terminus gate, one of the biggest-aperture ones. Because of the size of it and the number of people using it per hour, it needs more watching than usual. Gravitic anomalies…”

A sympathetic groan went up from most of the picnic guests. Tom sighed. “He’s working double shifts on this one. I feel for him: he’s going to be a wreck when he gets off. Thanks,” he said as Ronan, without comment, shoved a bottle of not-quite-draft Guinness into his hand.

“Thought that stuff doesn’t travel,” Kit said.

“If you put it in stasis inside an otherspace pocket, the bottled kind does,” Ronan said. “But it’s inherently inferior. Keep meaning to talk to Sker’ret about finding a way to stabilize the draft kind. A problem for another day.”

While Tom was assaying the Guinness, Ronan stood chafing his upper arms. “Getting kinda nippy, yeah? Time to get the campfire part of the evening going.”

“Oh, we are having that?” Kit said.

“I did some prep while others were snoring,” Ronan said as he slipped out between two of the standing stones. A few moments later he came back with an armful of bent and twisted branches of various sizes.

“Where’d you find those?” Djam said.

“Got a fair amount of the stuff over by our gates,” said Ronan. “Old cuttings left from when they were removing some of the local fauna, I’m guessing.” He paused, eyeing a spot down at the far end of the oblong that made the “seat” of the Stone Throne. “Here be okay?”

“Should work fine,” Cheleb said, helping Djam clear away some of the plates and food containers that were closest. Ronan arranged the wood in an artful pyramid on the spot, then looked toward Kit. “Do the honors?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.” Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket and pulled out his wand, stowed in there earlier when he’d been tidying. He smiled slightly in a moment of nostalgia: the spell for summoning fire from noon-forged steel was one of the first ones he’d learned. Kit whispered the fourteen Speech-words necessary for activation, braced the Edsel-antenna wand over his forearm, and fired. The piled-up firewood burst instantly into flame.

Kit tucked the wand away and watched the firelight dance over the faces of his friends and the ancient stones of another world, and shivered for a moment with the strangeness of it all. If someone had told me five years ago where I’d be now…

Tom sat back and chuckled. “And now what? Songs around the fire? Scary stories?”

“Got enough scary to be going on with at the moment, thanks,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes in the general direction of Thesba.

“Dessert,” Nita said. She’d set her lawn chair down next to where Kit had perched himself at one end of the Stone Throne; now she got up and started rummaging in one of the bags she’d brought with her but hadn’t yet opened. “Here,” she said to Djam, and held out a Creamsicle. “If you like that juice, I bet you’ll like this.”

“Ice cream,” Ronan said, impressed. “How do you have ice cream?!”

“With the power allowances they’ve given us for this, why wouldn’t I bring ice cream? I have a stasis field running in my puptent,” Nita said. “And one right here in this bag.”

“I hope you brought enough for everybody,” Tom said.

Nita snickered. “I brought enough for me,” she said, “for about a week. So that should be enough for everybody. Nothing fancy, just the usual mass market stuff. I would have brought Ben & Jerry’s, but some people apparently ate it all before we left home.”

Dairine looked angelically unconcerned by this accusation. To Kit’s surprise, Nita just gave her an annoyed look, and then shrugged. “Here, help me pass these out.”

Kit passed a fudgsicle over to Tom and an orange popsicle over to Cheleb, who needed some assistance with packaging concepts (”No, wait, don’t eat the paper!”) and then rather overenthusiastically disposed of the popsicle in three bites, spending the next several minutes groaning and clutching haes head due to the most emphatic case of brain freeze any of them had ever seen.

Kit had trouble not laughing at Cheleb being reduced to speechlessness for that long, but he just managed it. “Shame none of us thought we might have have a campfire before we came,” he said as he sat down again. “We could have brought stuff to make s’mores.”

Djam looked up in interest from his third plateful of multicolored veggies. “What’s a s’more?”

The conversation that ensued immediately got very tangled, and Kit saw Djam and Cheleb reacting with fascination and concern, since once or twice it seemed as if violence might be about to break out.

“Oh God. How are we supposed to show him?”

“Did anybody bring graham crackers?”

“What in the Powers’ sweet fecking names is a graham cracker?”

Laughter from Dairine. “How can you not know this?”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “Why should I bother when I know you’re going to enlighten me?”

“It’s brown, and flat, and it’s got wheat in it.”

“Well it’s a biscuit for feck’s sake, or a ‘cracker’ as you benighted language-fossilized creatures keep calling it—” Kit hid his eyes briefly at the mention of the word “cracker”: the last thirty-odd hours had left him with a new set of referents for it that he would probably never forget. “—and with a biscuit the odds are better than ninety percent that it’s got wheat in it…”

“No, whole wheat.”

“Kind of malty tasting…”

“Like a digestive biscuit?”

“What’s a digestive biscuit?”

“It’s not like one of those. Flatter,” Nita remarked around the remnant of the ice cream sandwich she’d almost finished. “Also they put honey in them.”

Dairine stared at Nita in growing horror. “Wait. Wait. Who uses honey grahams for s’mores? Who uses them for anything?”

“I like them,” Nita said. “I eat them all the time. You haven’t noticed?”

“I never— I thought it was Dad—” Dairine’s mouth opened and closed as if in a fairly high-quality imitation of a fish. “You’ve been the one who keeps buying those? You actually like them? Oh God how are we even related?!” She looked around at the group and waved her hands in a gesture of generalized rejection. “Either I’m adopted or she is.”

“I not only have honey grahams,” Nita said, “but I have—” She looked faintly embarrassed. “Marshmallow fluff.”

Ronan looked mystified. “Powers preserve us, what’s that now? Something else I don’t need to know about.”

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

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

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

“Well, not exactly—”

“It’s more of a tradition…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 468