Lifeboats

Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Version history

Time fix

Young Wizards: Lifeboats

Rubrics

ONE: JD 2455600.4380

TWO: Sol III: 2/2/2011

THREE: Rirhath B / the Crossings

FOUR: 11848 Cephei IV / Tevaral

FIVE: Thursday

SIX: Friday

SEVEN: Saturday

EIGHT: Sunday

NINE: Monday

TEN: Tuesday

ELEVEN: Wednesday

TWELVE: February 14, 2011: Tevaral

THIRTEEN: February 14, 2011: Earth

Afterword

Now available for preorder: GAMES WIZARDS PLAY

Young Wizards New Millennium Editions

Young Wizards:

Lifeboats

Diane Duane

Errantry Press

County Wicklow

Republic of Ireland

Young Wizards: Lifeboats

Diane Duane

Published by Errantry Press, an imprint of EbooksDirect.dianeduane.com, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

A division of the Owl Springs Partnership

© 2015 Diane Duane: all rights reserved. This work may not be republished or reproduced by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

This ebook is version / edition 1.01 of the work, dated 21 September 2015.

Young Wizards: Lifeboats is a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe and conforms to the timeline established in the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions.

Content advisory: Please note that this work contains several brief scenes in which non-explicit age-appropriate discussions of human sexuality appear. Parental discretion may be advisable where younger readers are involved.

Revisions: Should an updated version of this ebook become available, the Ebooks Direct store will send revision information and download links to the email address you used to make your purchase. Downloads of revised versions are free.

Version history

v1.00 (6 September 2015): Initial Ebooks Direct release

v1.01 (21 September 2015): Correction of typographical errors; formatting adjustments.

Time fix

This work falls between Young Wizards book 9, A Wizard of Mars, and the forthcoming book 10, Games Wizards Play.*

Its events follow those of the Young Wizards novellas Not On My Patch and How Lovely Are Thy Branches, and occur on February 2nd, 2011, and between JD 2455595.5118 and JD 2455602.2003 respectively… depending on where you’re standing.

*coming February 2, 2016 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Click here to preorder at Amazon.com.

Young Wizards: Lifeboats

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any [long-term] survival value.

— Arthur C. Clarke (amendment via Stephen Hawking)

You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.

— Edwin Louis Cole

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

— Thornton Wilder

ONE:

JD 2455600.4380

In the pursuit of the business of errantry, most wizards who walk the High Road past the borders of atmosphere swiftly become used to looking up into strange skies—nights with extra moons, days with extra suns, skies with (compared to the observer’s homeworld) too many stars or not nearly enough. Rings arching overhead, their complex detail blunted and tinted by atmosphere in a hundred shades of pastel; multicolored nebula-veils flung crumpled and glowing across tens of millions of miles of darkness; comet-tails painting the endless night with the palest and most attenuated of brushstrokes—all these become relatively commonplace.

Over the busy few years since Kit Rodriguez had passed his Ordeal and become a wizard, he’d seen all these and more. One or two such sights had become familiar enough that he hardly noticed them any more. But what hung over Kit now was something he knew would be haunting his dreams for a long time to come.

Across the broad, shadowy twilit landscape where he sat, down from the distant mountains edging the horizon, a chill wind blew. Out before him in the darkness, a broad plain faintly suffused with bloody light, uneasy with the distant half-seen movement of thousands of people, lay glittering with the lights of hundreds of scattered electronic campfires—the most visible sign of people sharing their last meals, and their last moments of warmth together, before their lives ended. A quarter of the sky above him was blotted out by a great lowering mass of darkness and fire: horribly convex and claustrophobic, seemingly pressing downwards from the sky like a burning roof about to collapse on everyone trapped underneath it. The appearance was at least partly an illusion, Kit knew, but the reality it hinted at was deadly enough. All around him a world was ending—was literally in its death-throes—and nothing he could do was going to stop it.

Kit sat there shivering in that thin cold wind, feeling (for the moment anyway) both helpless and very much alone. And then even the shivering stopped, very suddenly, as he realized that very near him, something was moving in that darkness. He could hear the rustle of it as it made its way toward him through the wind-shaken grass… could see a hint of its movement, indistinct, bizarre.

Kit forced himself to stay absolutely still, waiting, watching, as darkly shining tentacles slowly came oozing along toward him out of the smoky twilight. And along with them, wide and staring, came the eyes… so many eyes fixed on him: alien, unreadable, strange.

As the creature crept toward him and more and more of those weird cold eyes became apparent every moment, Kit sat still and gripped his antenna-wand and tried to keep himself calm, waiting to see what would happen. But the main thought running through his mind at the moment was:

When they asked me to do this job… why exactly didn’t I wait a few moments before I said yes?

TWO:

Sol III: 2/2/2011

About a thousand years ago, it now felt like, it had been five in the afternoon, and gray outside: just gray.

It was cold. It was cloudy. It was getting dark already. It was the beginning of February, and there was going to be a math test two days from now, on Friday, and Kit was going to flunk it. Massively, he thought. Horribly. In ways that no human being has ever flunked before. I’m about to make history. Future generations will laugh at the sound of my name.

Kit was sitting upstairs at the desk in his room, leaning on his elbows, his head propped in his hands. Normally the desk was comfortably cluttered with piled-up books and old CDs and DVDs and stick drives and scrap paper and soft drawing pencils; but all that had been cleared away in a desperate attempt to help focus his concentration. Now the desk was unnaturally tidy, and on it in front of him Kit had his math book open and a workbook open and a notebook open, and a calculator app up and running on his phone. He was gazing in an unfocused way at all of these while he played with a fairly hard-leaded pencil he’d just sharpened for the fourth time—the pencil being a mute and miserable acknowledgment of the fact that this was not going to be homework he could do using a pen. All over the floor around Kit were ripped-out, crumpled-up pages from the notebook, the most recent ones crumpled up a whole lot harder than the earlier ones, and thrown a lot further away.

Also open in front of him was his manual, which was not helping, not even slightly. Neither was the person using it to talk to him.

“I really can’t do this,” Kit muttered.

You really can, said his manual: or rather, that was what it said on the text page of his manual, which was displaying the texts Nita was sending him. Just take your time.

“I really wish you’d just, you know, give me a hint about this…”

You mean do it for you. He was sure she was laughing at him.

“Why not? Isn’t this what—” He was going to say what friends are for, and then had an instantaneous moment of panic, because of course that’s what we are, friends, except of course it’s kind of—more, and if I just say ‘friend’ what if she misunderstands me and she thinks that—

Nope, Nita said.

Kit rubbed his eyes, ridiculously grateful to have been let off the hook so easily. At the same time he was annoyed by it, and at the moment couldn’t really figure out why. So he fell back on annoyance at the math, which was a lot easier to rationalize. “Why do I even need this? I am never going to need calculus for anything!”

You might need it for wizardry.

“And if I do, the manual will do it for me!”

Except you can’t bring your manual into the test on Friday.

“I could! I could disguise it as a calculator!”

It won’t let you. It’ll know you’re doing it to cheat.

“This is so unfair.”

What, that I won’t do it for you? Or that wizardry won’t let you cheat?

“You could have a word with Bobo! Bobo would change the rules for me.”

In your dreams, but nowhere else, something breathed in Kit’s ear.

All the hair on Kit’s neck abruptly stood up, for what he’d heard was no voice of a living thing. It sounded like his own thoughts, happening inside his own head, except it wasn’t anything that Kit had been thinking. —What? Kit thought, and “What?!” he said.

What? Nita said.

“Uh. I heard something. I think—” Kit dropped the much-chewed pencil on his much-erased notebook page and shook his head, because this shouldn’t be possible, at least not as far as he knew. “I think I heard Bobo!” Which was leaving him seriously freaked out, because having Wizardry itself in his head was definitely not his department, it was Nita’s. Does this mean that we—is this something that’s happening because we’re— Kit broke out in a sweat.

But when the text field on his manual started filling up again, the feeling he got from the message was perhaps a touch annoyed, but otherwise unconcerned. Oh great, not you too.

Kit opened his mouth, closed it again. Then said, “Wait. Me too?”

Yeah, Ronan heard him once a couple of weeks ago.

His immediate reaction was Oh what a relief!… instantly followed by Wait a minute, how does he rate? Then Kit rolled his eyes at himself. Get a grip. “Really?”

Yeah. We were having a conversation about some girl Ronan said he was having trouble with, and then he said he heard Bobo tell him to ‘stop acting the maggot.’

Kit blinked. “What?”

You’re asking me what it means? How do I know what maggots act like in Ireland? All I know is that Ronan messaged me afterwards and told me that the Spirit of Wizardry was going to get its head punched in if somebody didn’t put some manners on it.

That made Kit snicker. “You sure Bobo’s not trying to pick up some overtime working as the voice of people’s consciences or something?”

Please. He’s been snarky enough lately that I’m wondering what’s going on with him. Like somebody took Jiminy Cricket and replaced him with Jon Stewart.

Kit laughed harder.

Meanwhile, look, you’ve just got to loosen up about this… You’re just making it harder for yourself. Calculus is just a way of describing change; of modeling systems that’ll show the way things move through space and time.

“I have a manual for that!” Kit said. “And as for this, I want to kick whoever invented it.”

That would be Sir Isaac Newton, Nita said, and tracking him down to kick him’s probably gonna take a lot more moving through space and time than either of us wants right now. Just go back and read the chapter on differentials again. Seriously, it’s not that bad.

Kit groaned and dropped his head onto his folded arms, rolling it back and forth. Yes it is! Why are you so optimistic?

Because you’re smart, and I know you’ll get it if you work on it.

“Oh please,” Kit muttered. “Only if you do find Isaac Newton and lock him in here with me.”

Anyway, this shouldn’t be so hard for you! How come you’re having so much trouble concentrating lately?

There were about fifty answers to that, Kit thought. The problem was trying to figure out which one was affecting him today. The Christmas holidays had been good—in fact, unusually good, because of aliens coming to camp out “in the basement,” a truly memorable holiday party and sleepover, and other wizardly incursions into the normal events of the season. It had all been so terrific that Kit almost didn’t mind going back to school afterwards, due to being kind of wrung out by all the happy excitement.

But that hadn’t lasted long. School had without warning turned mind-numbingly boring. It was the contrast, maybe, Kit thought, with all the stuff that happened in December. All of a sudden everything went back to normal. Too much normal. Nothing that interesting’s come up for me and Neets at the errantry end, these last few weeks. And the other wizards we know have all been busy with stuff: too busy to have time to hang out. Kit rubbed his eyes. Then this calculus unit started, and life hasn’t been worth living ever since. It’s like it’s all in some other language that even knowing the Speech can’t help…

Which was part of the problem, maybe. Kit wasn’t used to feeling helpless, these days. What he was used to was figuring things out—for wizardry was all about working your way through to the answers—and about depending on stubbornness to get him to and through the places where figuring things out wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, calculus seemed to be gazing with faint amusement at his stubbornness and just barely resisting the urge to burst out laughing.

And then of course there was the other issue, which Kit absolutely wasn’t going to mention to Nita at the moment. Twelve days yet. Twelve days… Kit started chewing on the pencil again.

Earth to Rodriguez? the text in the manual said. Come in, Rodriguez!

Kit dropped the pencil in annoyance. “Neets, seriously,” Kit said, “what’s with the texting? You coming down with laryngitis or something?”

There was a pause. Busy, she said after a moment.

“With what? Or is Dairine hanging over your shoulder?” Because that was always a possibility. If that was the case, what she was doing made sense: the manual could take a wizard’s subvocalizations, or even raw thought, and render them as text when necessary.

Another pause, longer this time. Well…

Kit picked up the pencil again and started twiddling it as another pause ensued, even longer—

Then a sudden noise at the other end of his room made Kit jump right up out of his chair as the big framed picture of him and Ponch on the far wall leaped away from that wall and landed with a thump face down on his bed.

A second later, a head—a pebbly-scaled, goggle-eyed saurian head, a hugely toothy head nearly four feet wide—appeared out of nothing, apparently sticking itself right through that wall and filling most of that end of the room. It looked around it with interest.

Kit stared. “What the—?” he said. It came out more as a squeak than a word, his voice breaking, but just for this once Kit was too stunned to be embarrassed by that. “…Mamvish?”

If what Kit was looking at was a projection, it was a most unusual one: it gave a general sense of not so much coexisting with the local reality as overriding it. Makes sense, though, Kit thought, for the shape looking at him belonged to one of the most powerful wizards in this part of the galaxy: someone with power ratings so high that the Lone Power had apparently elected to sit out her Ordeal, claiming to have been indisposed. If despite this Mamvish also acted generally like a very gifted eight-year-old with a very short fuse, well, that was more or less what she was, comparing her present age—just a couple of Earth millennia—against her own very long-lived people’s lifespans.

The main question now was what she was doing projecting an eidolon of herself through Kit’s bedroom wall. Normally, when Mamvish’s insanely busy schedule made it possible for her to grace this planet with her presence, she came in via personal worldgating and concealed herself somewhere convenient until people could come meet up with her. That was the way Kit had last seen her, for about thirty seconds, at Christmas—cheerfully stamping around in the snow in his temporarily spell-shielded driveway while wizards and assorted others fought for the chance to hug her hello before she had to teleport away again, heading back to the business of saving some threatened species light years away.

Now, though, Mamvish looked harried and worried: her conical eyes, so much like those of an iguana or chameleon, were revolving out of phase with one another, in directions Kit had never seen them go before. And a layer or two down in her extraordinary hide, always an indicator of what was going on in her thoughts and emotions, such a violently-colored whirl and blaze of crimson and golden Speech-characters was roiling under the surface that she looked like she might be about to catch fire.

Kit was so flummoxed by all of this that he didn’t even think to say “Dai stihó” to her before anything else. What came out instead was, “Mamvish, would you hold still, you’re knocking all my stuff down!”

“Oh,” Mamvish said, looking around her in shock. Her eyes bugged out a bit more than usual then, the expression fairly abashed, as she tried to move as little as possible. Nonetheless she managed to jostle the bookshelf at the far end of the room, right by the left side of her massive head, and knock some of Kit’s older model airplanes off the top shelf. “Sorry, Kit. Sorry! Kind of in a hurry here—!”

Kit winced as the models hit the floor and shattered, then tried to get control of himself: there certainly had to be more important things to think about than assorted busted plastic when Mamvish’s head was sticking through his wall. More or less… “It’s okay,” Kit said. “What’s up?”

Mamvish rolled her iridescent eyes some more—always a sight worth watching, even when she appeared to be mostly annoyed at herself—and went entirely still except for the storm of Speech-symbols swirling under her skin. “Christopher Kellen Rodriguez,” she said, “well met in haste and on the business of the Powers we jointly serve! In my capacity as Species Archivist to the Powers that Be and chief among senior rafting coordinators for the galactic subregion locally referred to as the Orion Arm, by seniority granted and Wizard’s Right asserted, I formally request and require your assistance in an intervention classified as physically and temporally urgent for the survival of a significant portion of a sentient species ranked at aggregated centrality-level two hundred or above. Said intervention will for logistical purposes be staged out of the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility at Rirhath B, and will take place in and around the immediate neighborhood of a star manual-designated as ‘Sendwathesh’ and locally identified as 11848 Cephei, a type A8 star in a circumstellar microassociation with the star locally identified as mu Cephei, also known as Erakis. This intervention’s duration is estimated to be on the close order of seventy-two to ninety-six hours local time, plus or minus twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The anticipated level of difficulty does not exceed ‘moderately dangerous’, though instabilities in the local situation may at short notice require its reclassification to ‘critical’, ‘extremely critical’, or ‘disaster’. Will you assist?”

Then Mamvish stopped, panting, and her eyes rolled desperately around as if she was concerned about moving any other part of her, for fear she’d accidentally make something else fall down.

“Wow,” Kit said, and for some moments didn’t know what to say: it had been quite a while since (in the wizardly sense) he’d been drafted. As always, the Powers left the final choice to participate in a Wizard’s Right situation with the wizard being requisitioned for the project. But the truth was that a responsible wizard didn’t refuse such a call when it came. No one invoked Wizard’s Right unless there was the prospect of serious loss of life, and a plan to keep it from happening.

Kit went ever so briefly hot with pride at the thought that there was something going on in which he’d somehow been identified as important. “Mamvish, sure, of course,” he said, and paused to start doing the kind of math in his head that he mercifully didn’t have trouble with. “…But wait. Four days? And it might be six or seven, but it also might be just two?”

“I wouldn’t bet on the two,” Mamvish said, sounding very annoyed for a moment. “Nothing about this project has gone the way it was expected to so far—” Her projection twitched in frustration, and another model, a World War II Spitfire that Kit was particularly fond of, fell off the top of the bookshelf and crashed to the floor.

Kit sighed. It’s a good thing I can restore those to their previous energy state with a little work… he thought. Or a lot… “Mam, what’s this about?” he said. “Who else is in on this?”

Her eyes revolved faster. “Everyone, nearly,” she said.

Kit blinked, not very sure how to take that.

“It’s so annoying because there’s just no time for personal briefings!” Mamvish said. “I’m requisitioning everybody else on this planet who’s qualified for this and not otherwise occupied, right this minute, and then I have five or six other planets to visit before I can get back to the Crossings and start holding the orientations—we’re going to have to do them a couple or few thousand beings at a time, there’s no other way. Right now speed’s of the essence: the sooner we can get all the necessary wizards emplaced, the better it’s going to be for everybody. How soon can you be there?”

Oh God, this is going to get complicated.

“Mamvish,” Kit said, “obviously this is incredibly serious and I really want to come—” He glanced back at his math notebook with complete loathing: anything that would get him away from this, up to and including a planetary disaster, was welcome. “But we’re in the middle of the school week and I really doubt my folks are going to let me take four days off…”

“Oh no, it’s all right, I know you’re in a time-structured learning situation! And the sooner that’s done with, the happier I’ll be… we could use you out here full time! But for this intervention, your local timeflow won’t be a problem. Timeslides have been authorized for everyone who participates: you’ll be away from your local time coordinates for a maximum of ten minutes. Ideally less, depending on the strain on local temporality due to multiple slides terminating in your area. Call it fifteen minutes at most.”

“Whoa,” Kit said. Senior wizards tended to be very twitchy about handing out free passes for what was essentially personal time travel. Whatever was going on out there must be pretty dire. “But I’ve still got to talk to my mama and pop, I can’t do this without them saying it’s okay—”

“You do that,” Mamvish said. “If you need me to, I’ll talk to them as well.”

What is going on? Kit thought. Well, never mind, better get busy. “Popi’ll be home pretty soon,” Kit said. “Mama hasn’t left for work yet—I’ll talk to her now.”

“Very well,” Mamvish said. “I’ve dropped a preliminary precis in your manual. Very preliminary: everything’s changing so fast… Dai stihó, cousin. And hurry!”

And she was gone. Kit stared at the far wall, where the photo of him and Ponch was hanging again: and at his bookshelf, where the model planes were sitting as if nothing had happened to them at all, probably right down to the placement of the individual grains of dust that had coated them (because even with wizardry, Kit was terrible at dusting).

He sat back down in his chair and looked at his manual. The text page was blank.

“Neets?” he said.

There was a pause: and then a voice spoke from the page. “Well,” Nita said, “somehow I don’t think I’m all that busy any more…”

“Giant saurian wizard head just got stuck through your wall?” Kit said.

Nita snickered. “She was in so much of a rush she messed up her coordinates. I got her butt end first.”

Kit burst out laughing. “Never mind. Gotta go talk to the folks. Catch you afterwards? ”

“Me too. Say an hour or so.”

***

Before he went downstairs, Kit took just long enough to have a very brief glance at the précis Mamvish had dumped into his manual. It was going to have to be brief, because the red-highlighted section of pages which had appeared in the book was about as thick as his finger. “Jeez,” he said under his breath as he looked over the abstract on the first page of the section. Speech-words of a severity that he’d never seen before were peppered all through it, including the one thorny phrase corresponding to “species/environment extinction event” that somehow managed to look as if it was crouching on the page and preparing to leap at your throat.

Kit shivered with a sudden chill down his back and realized that he’d actually started sweating again just looking at the précis. The basics of it were bad enough, quickly grasped as he looked at the diagram displaying itself at the top of the manual page and cycling through several different views and modes. A relatively Earthlike world circling a distant star; a moon of that world’s, much larger than Earth’s moon; a schematic of a set of tectonic lines underlying the crust of that moon, all flaring and flowing red with violent stresses—

He shook his head, not really needing the following view of the inevitable next stage in the process, the moon’s breakup. Doesn’t much matter where the pieces go after that, Kit thought, sucking breath in. Bust up one of a pair like that and the other one’s gonna be uninhabitable pretty quick… And that was the problem, because there were a lot of people living on that planet. Which is where Mamvish comes in. Question is, what’s she got planned?

Kit slapped the manual shut and headed out of his room and down the stairs, fairly twitching with unease and excitement. It was interesting how news of a major interstellar disaster could within seconds make your own problems seem so amazingly small, so utterly petty. Especially since for these last few hours, Kit’s mind had been bouncing back and forth in helpless discomfort from one to another of three subjects, trapped among them like a pinball trying to bounce out of the machine. They were (in repeatedly-changing order of importance) his dad’s job troubles, calculus, and Valentine’s Day.

Well, there are sure better things to think about now…

Except (some unconvinced fraction of his head insisted as he thumped down the stairs) maybe Valentine’s Day…

“If you keep on running down the stairs like that you’re going to break a leg some day,” said a voice from the kitchen as Kit came down into the living room.

“Maaaamaaa,” Kit said in profound annoyance as he headed into the kitchen. His little plump brunette mama was in scrubs—pink pants and a flowery pink top—and cleaning up after herself, having just made and eaten a pre-work sandwich.

“You will!” his mama said, turning to him and grabbing a paper towel to dry her hands on. “And I will have absolutely no pity on you when it happens.” She reached up to open a cupboard and put away the washed plate she’d just been eating from.

“Got much more important stuff to worry about than that,” Kit said.

His mama leaned back against the counter and eyed Kit. “I told you to stop worrying,” she said. “Your pop’s coping just fine.”

Kit sighed. His father’s promotion into a senior manager’s position at the regional newspaper’s printing plant had caught them all by surprise. It had also left Kit’s pop in something of a state of shock for a couple of weeks, especially when it became apparent that he was going to have to do a lot of extra training to replace the guy who’d had to leave the company because of an injury, and whose position he’d been promoted into. Kit couldn’t remember ever seeing his pop get so thrown by anything, and it had disturbed him more than he’d expected.

“It’s not that,” Kit said, and found that he suddenly felt strangely guilty that it wasn’t. “Something’s just come up.”

“Uh oh,” his mama said. “Magic stuff?”

“Uh, yeah. An end of the world thing.”

His mama’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“What? Hey, no no no, not ours!”

“Oh good,” his mama said, leaning back against the counter. “I mean, I had plans for the weekend…”

“Yeah. Well, some other people had plans too, but their world’s about to end, so we need to go save them.”

“I don’t know if I even want to know the details about how that’s going to happen,” Kit’s mama said. “…Though I see I’m going to have to. How long were you planning to be gone?”

“About ten minutes.”

His mama rubbed her eyes. “You’re saving a very small world?”

“Well, the population’s just a hundred fifty million or so, yeah…”

“And you’re going to do that in ten minutes?”

“No,” Kit said, popping his manual open again and dropping it on the counter beside his mama. “Looks more like about a week. But we’ll only be gone for ten minutes.”

She looked down at the diagram on the changing page—visible to her because Kit wanted it to be—and shook her head. “More magic…”

“Timeslides,” Kit said. “When you’ve got something serious like this going on, the Powers that Be aren’t stingy with the energy allowances for the people handling it.”

At the sound of a car in the driveway, both their heads came up. “Hmm, running early,” Kit’s mama said, “wonder what that’s about?”

As he heard the engine in his Pop’s station wagon shut down, Kit thought—not at all for the first time—of one of the basic premises of wizardry, and the way it worked in wizards’ lives: “there are no coincidences.” This is really serious. The universe is trying to make this simpler for me… The question, as always, was whether the attempt was going to work.

Bundled up in his parka and not merely one but two scarves, Kit’s Pop came in the back door and stood there a moment stamping his feet on the back mat as he started peeling himself out of the layers of cold-weather gear. “All this slush,” he muttered, “it freezes and it thaws and then it freezes again, and it gets dirtier all the time…”

“Just so it doesn’t come in here,” Kit’s mama said. “I just mopped an hour ago.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t…” He sighed as he pulled off the last layer, a heavy sweater that he wore in this weather so he wouldn’t have to keep putting on his coat and taking it off when running back and forth between the hangarlike press buildings and the newspaper’s offices down the street from them.

“Is there a problem at work?” Kit’s mama said. “You’re early.”

“No, everything’s fine. My training guy just had to leave early today, so I’m done early too.” He shook his head. “He’s as stressed about this whole thing as I am. He and Telly were good friends, and now suddenly I’m where Telly is and neither of us want me to be there, really…” He leaned against the counter where Kit’s mama was leaning, and she leaned against him while he looked down at Kit’s manual. “So what’s going on? Anything interesting?

“Kit has to go save the world,” his mama said, sounding resigned.

His pop glanced up at him from under his eyebrows. “Again?”

Kit had to grin at that. Though being a wizard caused a lot of problems, he was well beyond grateful that one of them wasn’t having to hide what was going on from his family.

“Not ours,” Kit’s mama said.

“Not that ours doesn’t need saving,” his Pop said, and turned away for a moment to go get a cup. Kit knew immediately where he was headed: the new capsule-coffee machine that Kit’s mama had given him for Christmas. “I see more of the headlines in one day than most human beings, so believe me, I know…” He went hunting in the little bin on the counter by the fridge for the capsule he wanted. “So what is it this time?”

“There’s a planet with a big moon that’s blowing up,” Kit said. “Well, not blowing at the moment. Getting ready to come apart. Though there’ll probably be some blowing up in the later stages…”

“Wonderful,” his dad said as he fiddled with the coffee machine. “And there are people living there?”

“A hundred fifty million, plus or minus. We’ve got to get them off before stuff starts happening—especially before the pieces of moon start falling out of orbit.” Kit turned a page over in the manual to a double-page spread that illustrated part of the celestial mechanics involved, and the long accelerating spiral of debris that would start to hammer down onto the surface of the planet when the moon began breaking up.

His pop looked down at this, frowning, while Kit’s mama turned a stricken expression on Kit. “And we have problems getting a few hundred thousand people away from a war or a disaster,” she said. “But a hundred million and more…!”

“How do you even move that many people?” his pop said.

“Worldgates,” Kit said. “A lot of them. Which is why Mamvish is involved—”

“Wait,” Kit’s mama said, “the Mamvish who was here at Christmas, the Spin-The-Dreidelsaur, she’s in on this?”

“Yeah, she just delivered the summons in person. Stuck her head in through my bedroom wall.”

The coffee machine clicked. “The life we live,” Kit’s pop said, watching it spit coffee into his cup. “No structural damage?”

“She knocked down my Spitfire, but it’s better now.”

“Magic,” his pop said, shaking his head and staring at the machine, from which the flow of coffee had suddenly stopped. “Where’s the rest of the coffee?”

Kit’s mama peered past him at the buttons on top of the machine. “You left it set for espresso again.”

“Anyway,” Kit said, “Mamvish specializes in this kind of thing; she’s the Species Archivist to the Powers that Be. Her whole work is saving threatened species. If she can’t get them all safely off their planet alive and move them somewhere else—it’s called ‘rafting’—she’ll put them in stasis until she can get them out. But this time it looks like something else is going on.” What, exactly, he’d had no time to discover as yet, there was so much briefing material to read. “That’s why she’s requisitioned…” Kit flipped another page in his manual and then stopped, not sure he was reading the Speech-numeral correctly, but yeah, there’s the thousands-separator— “Eighteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine wizards from Earth to go there…”

“Eighteen thousand!!” Kit’s mama said. “Who’s going to stay home and keep an eye on Earth then?”

“Everybody else,” Kit said. “There are a lot more wizards on Earth than that, mama. But Mamvish is picking the ones she thinks will be best for this. The younger ones, the more powerful ones…”

“The smarter ones,” his pop said, as if it was simply a given that his son would be one of these. He pulled his coffee cup off the capsule machine’s little ledge and stared down regretfully at the half cup of coffee in it. “Son, you think you could have a word with this guy for me? Whatever I want to make, it always makes the opposite..”

“Uh, popi, I think I might have to teach it mindreading for that. Don’t know if its chip can take the strain…”

“Might work better if someone just learned to check the buttons first,” Kit’s mama said, while pulling her phone out of her scrubs pocket and starting to make a note to herself: “Buy… more… capsules…”

“Everybody’s a critic,” Kit’s pop said. “All right. Nita’s going too?”

“Yeah.” She’d have messaged Kit by now if there were any problems with that.

“And how far away is this?”

Kit glanced down at the manual, flicked a couple of pages back to the precis. “Just nineteen hundred light years. Barely out of the neighborhood.”

Kit’s father rubbed his eyes. “One of these days I’m going to be used to you saying things like that. Are Tom or Carl going to be along on this joyride?”

“Uh, I don’t know—” Kit flipped hastily through to the substantial part of the mission description that had to do with personnel assignments: but his heart was sinking as he did so, because Supervisories didn’t that often leave the planet for errantry unless—

“Oh,” Kit said. “Yeah, Tom is—” He flipped back a few pages. “And Carl. And…” He ran a finger down the page: the list was actually getting longer as he read. “And a lot of other Senior wizards, Supervisories… Wow.”

“It’s not like you need babysitting,” his pop said, “it’s just, you know, reassuring to know you’ve got backup if something happens.” Kit opened his mouth, and his Pop actually laughed and said, “Kit, seriously. With you something always happens. You think I’ve forgotten how before you could even walk straight we had to tie another playpen on top of yours to keep you from escaping and running away to seek your fortune? Come on.”

Kit blushed at this. Every now and then pictures of the (multiple) incidents in question got trotted out, and he lived in hope that Nita had never seen them—though with his Mama, you could never tell.

He turned his attention back to the manual, trying not to look too rattled. “And they’ve authorized energy allowances for puptents too—” Parental concerns aside, this was sounding more serious by the moment. When They send even Supervisories out on the High Road? For the first time in a long while, Kit felt something strange creeping up his spine: uncertainty. Am I going to be up to this?

“Oh, wait!” Kit’s mama said. “The puptents, that’s what you called what you had at the holiday party, isn’t it? When our favorite Christmas tree and Mr. Legs were all down in the basement, except they weren’t really, because they’d brought little packages of other spaces with them and attached them to the inside of the house? If you’ll have one of those, then you can come upstairs and just be home whenever you want to.” She looked at Kit’s pop. “That sounds okay…”

“Oh,” Kit said, “uh, no. This is the kind you take with you, like we took to Alaalu when we were going to be away for a couple of weeks. See, when you’re timesliding—”

“Wait,” Kit’s pop said, “that was the next question.” He gave Kit one of those slightly-narrowed-eyes looks that suggested there might trouble coming. “How long is this thing going to take? Not that I’m running down the importance of saving all those lives, and I can see where it would take a while even with wizardry. But in case you haven’t noticed, this is a school week, and somebody has a calculus test on Friday if I remember right…”

“Fifteen minutes,” Kit’s mama said.

Kit scrunched up his face in a wince, wishing he could just agree with her and leave it at that. But if he tried, it was going to cause serious trouble with his pop later. “Yeah, but also somewhere between a few days and ten,” he said.

“Oh now,” Kit’s pop said, shaking his head.

“But the other way I will just be gone fifteen minutes,” Kit said. “It’s not hard, popi. In fact Neets and I did it on my Ordeal! Our Ordeal, I mean. We were away for hours and hours, as far as we could tell. Long enough for a whole lot to happen…”

“Yes,” his dad said, turning away just long enough to hunt around on the counter for the sugar bowl, “I seem to remember something about the Sun going out…”

He got a spoon and put (to Kit’s way of thinking) way too much sugar in his coffee, and stood there stirring for a moment. “So in a way,” he said, “in terms of the timing, this is like you being away for spring break that time. But more dangerous. Though with a lot of supervision. And still only for fifteen minutes.” He shook his head.

“Though you could still come back and check in with us every few minutes, couldn’t you?” Kit’s mama said. “Legs has all those worldgates he runs, after all. I bet he’d do you a favor and let you just run back for a minute or two if you asked him…”

“Uh,” Kit said, “Mama, no, not really. If we’re going to be timesliding back to right after we leave, in local time, it means we can’t do intraliminal sidetiming back into this temporospatial frame while we’re away. Because when we come back, having been in this time here and somewhere else can cause local temporal discontinuities if you’re not really careful. And if that happened and things also got screwed up enough by all the timesliding activity in the area, you could wind up with two of me, or maybe more, which is bad, because the quantum resonance between two—”

He saw their confused expressions and had to stop for a moment and rub his face. “See, this is why the Speech has all these extra tenses for time travel…” Kit said. And then he stopped rubbing his face, because his pop was doing it too, the exact same way. “Let’s try it this way. If you—”

Kit’s mama started waving her hands in the air. “No, it’s okay, stop,” she said. “Stop. You had me convinced at ‘two of me’. Go do your thing. Juan, stop making his life difficult.”

“I’m making his life difficult?” Kit’s pop said. “Anyway.” He took a long drink of his coffee and looked up at Kit. “It’s a rescue mission, I can understand that much. And some kinds of math matter more than others. Finding a hundred fifty million people somewhere else to be when the sky starts falling? That beats calculus hands down. If you flunk your test I’ll ask to meet your teacher, tell her that something stressful came up; you’ll retake it.” Another drink of the coffee. “So go. But look,” he added as Kit picked up the manual and was turning to run upstairs and start packing, “that tinkering you did with my phone so you can call me from Mars or wherever? You could maybe text me on that once a day or so, your time? Just to let me know how you’re getting on. You know your Mama worries.”

Kit was not fooled about who was going to be doing the worrying. He hugged his Pop one-armed while bopping him lightly on top of his head with the manual in his free hand. “Yeah, no problem.” He headed out. “I’ll get out of here, and then I’ll see you in…”

“Fifteen minutes?” said his pop.

“Give or take,” Kit said from the living room.

“Just one of you!” his mama called after him.

“Nag, nag, nag!” Kit shouted back, and ran up the stairs.

***

Things became something of a blur for a while after that. Kit decamped into the bathroom and locked the door, as much to have a few moments’ peace as to take care of physical business—as early as his Ordeal he’d discovered that his Mama’s favorite line, “You should have gone before you left”, could acquire whole new levels of meaning when you were out on errantry.

He was horrified to find, when after a few minutes he cracked the manual again, that the intervention section was even thicker than it had been when he’d shown it to his folks just now. What is going on up there? He leafed once more through the first few pages, more slowly this time, intent on getting at least the basic facts straight before he walked into the next scheduled briefing at the Crossings. Yet at the same time he was still having trouble concentrating because of the issues that had already been dogging his afternoon: or at least, with one of them.

I still have no idea what to do about Valentine’s Day. Or if I should do anything! There had been more than enough things to be confused about since the nature of his and Nita’s relationship had begun to shift, but this was an unwelcome addition to the list. Based on the preparations Kit had heard other kids at school making—or not making—it seemed like any gesture on V-Day could be construed as too much or too little. Flowers? For someone whose dad’s a florist? Maybe not. Jewelry? That could wind up loaded with dangerous symbolism that Kit didn’t care to get tangled up in. Hardware? Yeah, right, buy that for someone who can go to the Crossings and get whatever gadget she wants, from this planet or not, discounted a hundred percent…

Kit slapped the manual shut and stuck it on the windowsill, scowling. Maybe something really simple would be best. Something personal. Or homemade. Yeah, like what? Somehow Kit didn’t think Nita was going to be interested in cut-out construction paper hearts. Not that he’d thought she’d been interested in those for some time now. But what if she thinks this isn’t anything we need to be doing? Or what if she thinks that this is something we really should be doing, and I can’t figure out what she wants? Because Kit had gotten a sense more than once that Nita was as confused about the whole issue as he was. It was all making him incredibly uncomfortable.

Well, thank God there are other things to think about now, Kit thought, picking up the manual and starting to riffle through it again. Are we even going to be on this planet on Valentine’s Day? Because the numbers Mamvish had given him seemed solid enough, but before now Kit had seen time estimations that sounded just as good go way south in a matter of hours, or minutes. Ten days, plus or minus… We might be back. We might not. Either way, even if I can figure out what to do, is there going to be time enough to do it? Oh God.

…But this can wait. Somewhere up there a moon’s about to fall on a bunch of people! I need to get packed.

Kit flipped through the red-glowing crisis section of the manual in search of the page that would list the spell data for his puptent—particularly the Speech-based password that would give him access to the small cubic of living space that would follow him wherever he went. After a few moments he found it, glanced down the page to see if the parameters had changed significantly since he last used it. They hadn’t. Good, he thought, and tapped the page.

Immediately a three inch wide black spot developed on the middle of the page. Won’t need furniture for this run, Kit thought. I’ll just talk some air solid to sleep on at nights: the general energy supplement they’re giving us should be enough to cover that even when I’m sleeping…

With one hand Kit peeled the dark spot off the page—the portal to the puptent space not being active yet, there was no danger of cutting his fingers on the inside boundary of the interface—and stood distracted for a moment as he flipped a page or so along to where there were details of what extra power he was being given for this intervention. He ran a finger down the page, and stopped, and stared.

That can’t be right. Somebody must have misplaced a decimal point…

Except it had to be right. This was the manual: it was always right. Kit looked at the number written there in the Speech and did the math in his head, and realized that for as long as this intervention lasted, he’d have something like ten times his normal power level. He’d be able to coast through doing spells that would normally leave him limp as a wet rag and spending a day nursing a migraine-level headache.

Kit sagged against the edge of his desk for a moment, briefly stunned by the idea of the kind of spells he could do. Then he got annoyed with himself because he had absolutely no idea of what he wanted to do with all this extra power.

“Except get my butt out on errantry,” he muttered after a moment. “Because that’s what it’s for…”

He turned his attention to the little black circle of nothing in his hand and hung it up on the air. “Stay there,” Kit told it in the Speech, and then grabbed its sides and started stretching it until it was about three feet wide. When it was wide enough he took it by both sides and slapped it up against his closet door, where it adhered.

Kit half-turned to the manual on his desk and carefully read out the long password phrase; then turned back to the pitch-black circle and pushed a hand up against it. The hand sank in to the wrist.

Right, Kit thought, turning to the bed and pulling off the topmost blanket and the pillow and chucking them through the portal. Reading material…? Am I going to have time to read? There was no way to tell. Kit shrugged and pulled down the copies of The Guns of August and Longitude and The Eagle of the Ninth he was reading at the moment, and tossed them in after the bed linens. Okay.

He turned to his desk. More books, some that he hadn’t had time for over the last few weeks and absolutely none of them having anything to do with math. Drawing pad, a few pencils, rubber-banded together. His antenna-wand, because why not, it might be useful. Earbuds for his phone in case he felt like music.

Then his dresser. Sweats, underwear, socks. Tshirts. A couple of sweaters. Spare jeans. A backpack in case I need to tote anything small around… All these were chucked into the portal.

Kit pulled his closet open, yanked out a down vest and his hiking boots, shrugged into the vest, sat down on his bed and pulled the boots on; then kicked the closet door closed again, yanked the portal off the closet door, grabbed his manual and his phone off his desk and headed downstairs.

The next ten minutes or so were predictable, but he’d gone through this before and his Mama and Pop knew the drill. Nonetheless he had to put up with the inevitable comments as he opened up the portal again in the kitchen, and opened the door of the fridge.

”Kit. Everything in the fridge?”

“Mama, no, just these cold cuts… and that cheddar spread… and the cream cheese, yeah, and the soda… no I won’t take Carmela’s, stop hovering… Canned cappucino. Milk. Yeah, and those chilies…”

“Kit, won’t this go bad? Or do you have a fridge in your puptent?”

“Nope, there’s a stasis-capable partition. In there this stuff couldn’t go bad if it tried. Right.” He turned his attention to the cupboard next to the fridge. “That cereal… This half loaf of bread, that’ll be enough…”

“It wouldn’t be if you didn’t just eat the cold cuts with your fingers.”

“…Which breakfast bars are those?”

“The oatmeal ones.”

“Okay. Pretzel nuggets, yeah… And the ketchup. Aw, Mama, isn’t there any regular ketchup?” The squeeze bottle he was holding contained the less-sugar-than-usual kind: his mother was on some kind of take-no-prisoners crusade against corn syrup.

“What you see is what we’ve got.”

Kit rolled his eyes and tossed it into the portal. “And bottled water. There’s a few sixpacks down in the bottom cupboard, yeah? And crackers, I need crackers. Where are my saltines?…”

He found two boxes of those, and chucked them both into the portal. And the Ritz, too, he thought, throwing in a box of those even though they weren’t his favorite. Then he spent a while more rifling the next cupboard along: plastic cups, a bag of potato chips he’d hidden from himself, along with a couple of Three Musketeers bars. Right at the back of that shelf he came across a box of candy hearts that he’d grabbed on impulse at the grocery store last week, thinking he might do something Valentine-ish with them for Nita—but by the time they got the groceries in the back door he’d already dumped the idea as too boring. Can’t throw them out, Mama’ll yell that I wasted them… I’ll eat them for a sugar hit when I need one. He chucked them through the portal after the crackers and candy bars, then went digging in the cupboard again. Paper plates, some mismatched plastic cutlery…

Finally his mama just sighed and kissed him. “Some of us have to go to work,” she said.

“No no no, just wait!” Kit said, throwing an arm out to stop her, then hugging her one-armed. “Fifteen minutes and you can smooch me goodbye when I get back. Or hello. Where’s Popi?”

“He went to change.”

“Okay, I’ll see him then too.” Kit pulled the portal off the pantry door where he’d stuck it and recited the passphrase again to deactivate it; then rolled it up and stuffed it in his pocket, aching at the memory of the time he’d done this last, when they’d had to go to Rashah. Then he’d packed almost more dog food and dog biscuits than regular food for himself…

No time for thinking about that now. Gotta get moving. He’d laid the manual out on the kitchen counter, and now flipped through it to the dedicated messaging pages in the front.

A message from Nita was already flashing for his attention there. Kit prodded it with a forefinger. “You ready?”

“Yeah, been waiting for you,” her voice said from the page.

“Where are we meeting?”

“My back yard. Transit circle’s ready.”

“Right, be right there.”

Kit kissed his Mama again, grabbed his manual and trotted out the back door. He could have done a beam-me-up-Scotty spell to transit over to Nita’s, but he felt the need for a few minutes’ physical exercise to calm him down. “Okay,” he said under his breath. “Time marker…”

The manual vibrated slightly in his hand, acknowledging that it had logged the exact hour, minute and second he’d left the house.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s hit the road…”

Down the street, past the patches of melting snow and through the dirty slush his Pop had been complaining about, up the driveway of Nita’s house and through the gate into her back yard, down along the muddy path through the snow that led to the small jungle of barren sassafras trees at the far end of the garden. Through the mud and the slush the electric blue of a transit circle could be seen faintly shining on the ground, and in the middle of it stood Nita in a short winter jacket and jeans and boots, wearing a faintly annoyed expression and with half of one arm apparently missing.

Kit slowed down and stopped beside her. The illusion of the missing arm was due to her standing there and feeling around in her otherspace pocket with an abstracted look. “You ready?” she said.

“All set. Any trouble with your dad?”

“Huh? Oh, no. He saw the alert come through on his phone—since I had Spot put the Let Dad Snoop wizardry app on Dairine’s manual, I did it on mine too; he loves to know too much about what’s going on. Thinks he’s keeping a better eye on us.” She laughed under her breath. “But this time he just looked at the formal written notification from Mamvish and went kind of quiet, and then said, ‘I guess you have to go.’” She shook her head, kept feeling around.

Kit sighed, thinking it would be nice when his own folks got to that point. Still, they could have been a lot worse about it than they had been. “You know what’s weird?” he said. “I still can not get used to them actually getting used to this.”

“What? Oh. Yeah.” She was still groping around in the pocket, but for just a second she flashed Kit an amused look. “But sometimes I just want to say ‘Listen, aren’t you more worried about this? Because I am!’ And then I realize what would happen if I ever said that, and I just shut up…”

But her mind was plainly less on what she was saying than on whatever it was she was feeling around for. After a moment, “What?” Kit said.

Nita scowled. “I just know I’ve forgotten something. You know how it is, when you’re going away on a trip and you know you didn’t pack something that you’re gonna need, but can’t put your finger on it, and everybody sitting in the car is all impatient and saying ‘If it’s important you’d have remembered it by now…!’”

“I’m not impatient,” Kit said.

“Well I am!” Nita muttered. “Bobo, what did I forget?”

A brief pause, during which Kit felt a bit nervous at the thought of what he might hear but didn’t want to. It wasn’t as if he and Nita didn’t hear each other’s thoughts sometimes, particularly in moments of stress. But Kit hearing Bobo suggested that this closeness might be entering a new stage that Kit didn’t understand and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to—

“Great, thanks loads,” Nita said, scowling harder as she thrust her arm into her personal claudication right up to the shoulder.

“No good?” Kit said.

“He says he’s the spirit of wizardry, not a to-do list, and I should write things down more often,” Nita muttered. “Somebody really needs his snark settings adjusted.” She closed her eyes and kept on feeling around. “It’s in here somewhere, I know it is…”

“What?”

“What I’m looking for.”

“…Which you can’t remember.”

“If I feel it I will!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE:

Rirhath B / the Crossings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me,” said someone behind Kit.

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

“That’s right,” Kit said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I noticed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you seen Sker’ret?” Nita said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Blue food,” Nita said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not all that far…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Nita, sweetie!”

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

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

“Enough for two people, my mama says…”

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

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

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

“Well, okay, but where were you?”

“Down a mine.”

“A mine?”

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

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

“Okay!”

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

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

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

“Is she… dating?”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“Unless it’s Dairine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So let me first explain the nature of our intervention and what’s caused us to upgrade it to emergency status.”

The walls of the auditorium at that point simply seemed to vanish, leaving the audience apparently sitting suspended in empty space. It was an effect that could have been produced by a particularly good planetarium, but the absolute precision and clarity of it made it clear to Kit that this was a live view of space quite distant from here.

They were looking at a bright blue-white star in the middle distance, and much closer to the point of view, the broad, partly shadowed limb of a green-golden planet. “This is Tevaral,” Mamvish said. “Tevaral has been home to the Tevaralti species for approximately eight hundred and seventy thousand years, and to its avian forebears for significantly longer. While hardly the oldest species in this part of the galaxy, they are certainly one of the oldest, and also a species of unusual longevity in comparison to other humanoid cultures and civilizations.

“Tevaral is a so-called ‘dual world’ that revolves around a common center of gravity with its very large satellite Thesba, a capture that settled into its present relationship with Tevaral approximately two point nine billion years ago, when Tevaral was still cooling after forming up around its primary star, Sendwathesh.”

The view switched to one of Thesba, a badly pockmarked and deeply fissured world splattered with big patches in dun and brown that Kit suspected were leftovers from old violent volcanic activity. Nita leaned toward him. “Look at that atmosphere,” she whispered.

“Sooner look at it than breathe it,” Kit whispered back. It was curdled yellow with what were almost certainly noxious gases from an oxygen-breather’s point of view.

“—both Tevaralti scientific investigation and manual data concur that Thesba was probably acquired from one of the shorter-lived stars in the local OB association. This large star became unstable within several billion years of formation and violently blew off a significant portion of its mass in the form of energetic plasma shells, thereby also dislodging various minor planets that were still in relatively early formative stages.”

“Uh oh…” Nita muttered.

The view shifted to a three-dimensional view of the interior of Thesba, produced either by wizardry or some technology more advanced than anything Kit was familiar with. Or possibly both… He squinted at it. “Wait. Has that got two cores?”

“Almost three,” Nita whispered back. “Wait till it rotates again. See that third lobe? What a mess.”

“—the irregularly formed core makes it immediately plain why Thesba’s rotational relationship with its primary has in the past been problematic,” Mamvish was saying. “The irregularity of the core masses imparts a significant wobble to the body, and its interactions with Tevaral’s mass have for many millennia involved long cycles of relative stability alternating with equally long cycles of unstable behavior in the volcanic and tectonic modes. Therefore ever since wizardry arose on Tevaral, its Planetaries have spent a great deal of time over millennia attempting to manipulate Thesba’s core masses into more stable, or at least more manageable configurations.”

“Oh no.” Nita shook her head. “Can’t have got them much of anywhere…”

The view backed off into a wider one of the two bodies, the green-gold planet and the dun-and-gold moon, swinging uneasily around one another. “These worlds have circled one another in this mode for the last few millennia without any serious alteration of their mutual status,” Mamvish said, “but over the last several hundred years both of them have become increasingly tectonically active. Indications are that Thesba’s mass irregularities have slowly been inducing non-ephemeral deep level weaknesses in Tevaral’s inner mantle structure, and these weaknesses have been becoming more serious over the course of the last century. Noting this, the then-Planetary Wizard of Tevaral urgently requested the assistance of the Interconnect Project based here at Rirhath B. It was decided that a number of world-surrogates should be located and terraformed to serve as relocation loci for the planet’s ecosystems, and possibly also as temporary havens for the planetary population when it was decided how best to intervene to stabilize Thesba’s core once and for all—since naturally the planetary population could not be left in place when so dangerous an intervention was being enacted.”

The imagery shifted to show one after another of a series of six planets, all orbiting stars similar to Sendwathesh and barren to begin with, as they were quickly altered by teamed science and wizardry to suit the Tevaralti climatic, atmospheric and soil requirements. The dominant blue-green of Tevaralti foliage crept across them, burgeoning, and all of those worlds then settled in to “cure”, waiting for their guest species to arrive. “However,” Mamvish said, sitting down dispiritedly on her back two sets of legs, “events have now unfortunately started moving faster than anyone was expecting. Approximately ten years ago, volcanic activity on both Thesba and Tevaral began spiking irregularly. More generalized tectonic activity began to spike as well. Since Tevaral is astahfrith and has been for many thousands of years, the various nations and clan/territory affiliations on Tevaral met with the Planetary to investigate possible interventional action. But the last two years have produced numerous disastrous earthquakes on Tevaral that have killed millions of Tevaralti, and it became plain that there was no alternative to a full-fledged rafting operation. The planet was going to have to be evacuated.”

Mamvish stood up again, her eyes revolving in what Kit recognized as distress. “And then, eleven days ago—”

The view flicked back once more to that image of Thesba’s interior. As suddenly as cracks in ice running across a frozen lake bed from some dropped rock, massive discontinuities picked out in blood-red in the diagram began stitching themselves across the underside of Thesba’s mantle layer. In places, the crust of the great moon began to wrinkle and crack, while underneath it the mantle writhed and shivered unpredictably. Kit winced just looking at it, finding it impossible to understand how Thesba hadn’t blown up already.

Mamvish looked down into the space occupied by the simulation of Thesba, her head weaving from side to side in a gesture of distress. “There’d been some hope of saving Thesba, or at least stabilizing it long enough to allow an orderly evacuation taking weeks or even months. But that’s now impossible. The last ten days’ work has shown us that Thesba’s internal integrity has been too severely damaged for any such intervention to succeed, no matter how powerful the wizards associated with it. Also considered was the possibility of opening a very large spatial portal through which Thesba could be removed from orbit around Tevaral, followed by the insertion of a stable substitute mass as a temporary solution. But the extreme delicacy of choreographing such an intervention, and the substantial damage already done to Tevaral’s tectonics, means there’s no guarantee the result wouldn’t be just as severe as leaving Thesba in place to do this.”

With terrible inevitability the diagram of Thesba shuddered massively apart into five huge jagged chunks, and tens of thousands of smaller ones—both old solid material, and vast volumes of new magma spewed into space and swiftly chilled to stone—began raining down onto the planet. And quite exclusive of the destruction caused by chunks of the moon falling out of the sky, the view now extended to Tevaral and showed how the ensuing tidal effects from Thesba’s breakup would devastate that world. All the coastal cities and conurbations below were drowned or wrecked by earthquakes and tsunamis, quickly or slowly: food sources were wiped out in the short term by terrible storms and weather disruptions, water tables were disrupted and the composition of the entire atmosphere denatured by volcanic activity.

Tevaral was going to die. It was just a matter how of how quickly, and whether all or even most of its population could be evacuated before it did.

Kit realized that he’d stopped breathing for a short time. Beside him, Nita had stopped watching and was actually hiding her eyes.

“So, my cousins,” Mamvish said as the auditorium’s normal interior and lighting came back. “You see the problem. Our choice of ways to intervene has been drastically curtailed. Normally, in situations like this where threat to a planetary population is extreme, we install sufficient numbers of very-wide-aperture worldgates on the planet to evacuate the entire planetary population within hours, not days. Such gates can remove terrain as well as the beings living on it, and can relocate both nonliving and living matter great distances with tremendous accuracy when wizardry is guiding them. But in this situation, that solution is denied us. Very-wide-aperture gating is only possible when powered by a SunTap conduit system that pulls energy directly from the nearest star, and Tevaral is too far from its primary for a SunTap conduit to reach the planet’s surface. Therefore we must fall back to a more old-fashioned type of intervention in order to successfully move all these people off Tevaral quickly enough to save their lives. We’ve already installed a hundred and twenty terminus gates on the planet, with their far sides anchored on each of the six new homeworlds. Each of the terminus gates is served by a transport tree of feeder gates eight to ten layers deep. Locked in open configuration, and operating at full capacity—which they must—the terminus gates will channel between fifty and a hundred thousand Tevaralti per hour off the planet to their new homes. The feeder gate trees are not yet complete; hundreds more feeder complexes will be installed on Tevaral over the course of the next several days. And as we shepherd the Tevaralti population through them to safety, you will be gatekeeping those new worldgate installations for us.”

“Oh my God,” Kit muttered under his breath.

“Archivist,” someone behind Nita and Kit said. “A question? Isn’t it normally quite dangerous to have too many world gates open on a planet at the same time, especially if they’re artificial? Something to do with disturbances in the local spacetime continuum?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Mamvish said. “There would always be a question as to whether or not the tectonics of the host body could remain undamaged by the presence of so many gates for very long, due to the gravitic anomalies routinely associated with gate function when portal interfaces are open for prolonged periods. There’ll be an entire team of wizards monitoring the planet for problems of that kind. But right now time is so much of the essence that the presence of the anomalies is a risk we unfortunately must take, because there’s a biological component to this problem that we hadn’t anticipated.”

Silence fell across the room, as no one seemed to have any ideas as to what this might be. “It turns out,” Mamvish said, “that there’s a complication as regards the cooperation of the dominant species.”

Kit could hear people in the audience turning to one another in confusion. Mamvish’s tail had begun lashing, and she sat down rather abruptly again on her back two pairs of legs again, this time apparently in an attempt to get the tail under control. The attempt was only partly successful.

“The Tevaralti are quite scientifically advanced, and perfectly able to perceive what’s going on with their moon,” Mamvish said. “And in the earliest stages of this intervention, they were quite willing to be moved out of harm’s way until Thesba could be stabilized. But when the situation changed, and it became plain that the relocation was probably not going to be temporary, but permanent, the opinion of a significant percentage of Tevaralti regarding the intervention, approaching nearly ten percent, shifted as well.” She blew out a long, annoyed breath. “They have revealed themselves to be far more… attached than anyone anticipated.”

The Speech-word she used for “attached”, lavemuist’hei, was obscure enough that Kit had to pull his manual open to get a reading on it. He blinked at the length of the entry on the faintly glowing page as he realized how profoundly nuanced the word was. Everybody was attached to their homeworld, their own culture, their own “earth”, their own sky: that was naturally taken for granted. But lavemuist’hei indicated something well past that—a relationship that more closely resembled the symbiotic.

“The affected percentage of the Tevaralti have expressed a desire not to leave their home world, regardless of its imminent fate,” Mamvish was saying when Kit looked up again. “While the Troptic Stipulation allows us some latitude in interfering with or constraining the actions of life forms further down on the sentience scale when the system of which they are part is threatened, it does not allow us to force fellow sentients of this level into actions that violate their sense of personal validity or dignity. If they choose to die with dignity, then that’s their right, and we need to leave them the opportunity to do that.” Her face screwed itself into a very pained expression. “And all too soon, those whose intention is bent that way will have more than enough opportunity.”

The room was very still. “As yet we aren’t clear about what has so exacerbated their normal sense of lavemuist’hei,” Mamvish said. “We hope to discover that, so as to make it possible to save more lives. There are some early indications that because the Tevaralti are humanoid, that other humanoids may be able to discover what’s going on with them and share it with us so that we can apply that discovery to this problem and save them all. But in the meantime, we must concentrate on saving those from the planet who presently consent to be saved… And that’s where all of you come in.”

Mamvish gazed around the room. “Each one of you will be either supervising or assisting in managing one of the worldgates presently being installed. Many of you were asked to participate in this in the intervention because you have previous experience, sometimes significant experience, with worldgating in your daily work, especially off planet or elsewhere on the High Road—”

Kit looked over at Nita in shock, suddenly realizing why they were there. Nita looked back at him, shaking her head, and whispered, “We are so screwed.”

“Others of our cousins will either be accompanying you or are already on site,” Mamvish said, “to support you in doing what needs to be done to help you micromanage these gates. I use the word purposefully here, because though they’ll be very automated and carefully tailored to match the locations where they’re installed, they’ll also require constant supervision while in use.”

Mamvish looked around the room in what Kit thought was meant to be a reassuring way. He was not reassured. “All your manuals or other errantry-sensitive information storage instrumentalities will be supplied with a set of nominal-operation parameters for the gate you’ll be managing. If its behavior starts to slide outside those parameters, or exhibits other atypical behaviors, don’t waste time; call for help at once. There’ll be plenty of it around… lots of wizards involved in this intervention who are specialists in gate management. Many members of the four species of the Interconnect Group, specialists in gatings and in rafting projects big and small, will also be on Tevaral, ready to assist. So don’t err on the side of caution, cousins. If something starts looking strange to you, get assistance immediately, as in this situation we have no margin for error. The last thing we need right now is for one gate to start malfunctioning in such a way as to affect those around it with portal contagion.”

The term made Kit suck in breath at a sudden memory. Rhiow had mentioned portal contagion to him once when he’d been passing through Grand Central and they were standing around on Platform 23, idly chatting and waiting for the gate there to go patent. At the time her description of the phenomenon had made him flash on a scene from a long-ago science show he’d seen. It had featured a single ping-pong ball dropping onto a big floor covered with mousetraps all loaded with more ping-pong balls. The dropped ball set one off, and that ball a couple of others, and then ten were going off, fifty, a hundred, more…

The demonstration had originally been a paradigm for nuclear fission, and while it had been amusing to watch at the time, Kit was having trouble finding the humor in it now. Especially when each of those “mousetraps” was a worldgate that had been working correctly a moment before, until the contagion effect from the nearest gate nearest it hit and made the portal explode uncontrollably wide, killing everybody who was near the gate and anyone presently in transit. And the effect would spread and spread—

Kit shivered. “Beyond that,” Mamvish said, “all you have to do is help the Tevaralti who are going through your gates, and keep them going through your gates. We have excellent support waiting for them on the far side, on their new homeworlds. Just help them make it through. That’s the whole of your job in this intervention: keep your gate running, get them through. When we’ve gotten as many people off the planet as will go, our work will be done. If the Powers are kind, it will be everybody, all the Tevaralti; that’s what we’re striving for. But until we find the key to that result—the reason behind the resistance of those who won’t leave—our job is to get the ones out who are ready to go.”

The whole room sat quiet for a few moments.

“You’ll find that your manuals and other instrumentalities have been loaded with coordinates on Tevaral corresponding to the gates you’ll be managing,” Mamvish said. “I regret that some of you who are used to working together must be separately assigned for this work: it’s numbers working individually that we need, with personnel in possession of higher power levels or proficiency levels being assigned to assist those with lower ones. You’ll be assigned gating hexes here to take you within the next hour or so to your initial staging points on Tevaral. Check your various instrumentalities for your gate assignment, and please be patient with us as regards transit times; we’re spacing the traffic load to avoid putting too much stress on the reception area on Tevaral. Down the concourse, close to the gates that have been signed for Tevaral transit, you’ll find a large hologlobe tagged with all the gate locations, both those emplaced and those pending, with coordinates for your own assignment areas so that you can keep in touch with your cousins while we’re all working there. And as I said, any of you can reach me virtually during this intervention; so don’t hesitate. I won’t be sleeping until this business is complete, and your contact will be welcome.” She looked around. “In the Powers’ names, then, and the One’s, let’s go forward and do the work before us.”

A low murmur went through the room. “And one last thing, cousins,” Mamvish said. “The Planetary of Tevaral has asked to speak to you before you go.”

She moved off to one side of the stage and turned toward the center, waiting.

A moment later, there was a small man standing there looking out at them, brightly lit as if spotlighted. He was wearing a sort of woven red kilt, and what seemed to be leather leggings reaching down to clawed feet; an ornate harness of polished leather was wrapped around his feathered chest. His head, too, was shaggily feathered in dull pale gold, and he held a short brassy-colored rod in his hands, possibly a wand. His was a sharp face, a fierce one, with big orange-golden eyes set above a nose that reminded Kit of a beak without actually being one; and for all his narrow waist he was broad-chested, like someone whose ancestors you could believe had had wings once. Kit looked at him and immediately thought of Irina Mladen, even though Earth’s Planetary and this one were physically nothing alike. What was immediately evident about them both was a sense of their personal power—of the passion with which they held the position and the intensity that they brought to their work.

“My cousins,” the Tevaralti Planetary said in a soft scratchy voice, “my name is Hesh; I serve and speak for Tevaral. I beg your indulgence for not addressing you in person, but right now my world needs me at home, concentrating on my work.”

He looked down at the floor, then up again. “I can’t briefly express the grief that this intervention is causing us. We know it must be done; we know we have no recourse. There is no greater anguish than to know that your world is coming to an end, and you must leave it. Very many of my people understand this necessity and are more than willing to comply: on their behalf I thank you. Very many others of them understand the need to leave, but their compliance… is subject to change without notice. Many of my folk are bitterly torn, as yet undecided whether to leave their world, or die with it.”

Once more Hesh looked down, then up. “I would not have you think them ungrateful for your pains. They know they must leave if they want to live. The problem right now is that many of them are not sure which option they prefer… and that choice, as we all know, is between them and the One.”

Hesh gazed out across the auditorium’s assemblage of wizards as if he could see them all. As he turned, seemingly taking in the room, the gaze of those round fierce eyes swept across Kit’s in passing, and it was genuinely as if the Planetary was there, looking at him. “We’ve been a long time living on Tevaral as a species,” Hesh said, “as have the commensals who share it with us. Our parting with Tevaral comes hard. I understand well that some of you will find difficulty in grasping why, when our world is dying around us, we cannot bear to go. Yet still I ask that you will be as gentle with my kind as you would be with your own, were your people in such case.”

He stood there gripping his wand-rod, and for a moment his shoulders slumped and his claws clenched, a gesture that made Kit think of someone who was wishing he could start a fight with something he could win against. But then up went Hesh’s head again, and as if in defiance up went the crest of his head-feathers, too, that until now had been lying smooth. “But now we have work to do, my cousins. At any time, at any hour, if you need speech with me, don’t hesitate. If there are non-urgent messages that require my attention, direct them through the supervisory structure which will be laid out for you in your various versions of the Knowledge. The One willing, we’ll all get through this together. Though I will be very busy, I may yet be able to come to thank some of you. But whether or not I may, know that your names will become the matter of song in our history—all your names—for millennia to come.”

He bowed his head to them all, that bright crest catching the light that shone down on him. Then he was gone.

On Earth, Kit would half have expected the room to break into applause at the end of that. But the mood here was too somber. There was a sort of murmur around him, the release of held breath.

Mamvish’s eidolon looked out over the auditorium. “That’s it, my cousins,” she said. “Let’s get to our work, and the One be with us. Meanwhile, send in the next group, please?”

And her eidolon-projection vanished.

People started to stand up and head for the doors. Nita was already on her feet, standing and looking at the stage with her arms wrapped around her in a rather defensive gesture. It wasn’t the kind of thing Kit was used to seeing from her; he moved a little closer and nudged her with one elbow. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said after a moment, and let go of herself, pushing her hair back before she met his eyes. “This is going to be really intense, isn’t it?”

“Looking that way,” Kit said.

“Right,” Nita said. “Well. Let’s get out there and see where they’re sending us.”

***

They headed out and onward down the concourse to where the Tevaral transit gates had been emplaced. Even from down here they could see the huge holographic globe rotating gently in the middle of the concourse, with a huge crowd of wizards gathered around it, looking it over to identify the places to which they were being sent. Kit was very surprised when, way down there in that crowd, he could see Mamvish. “Look, she’s here too—”

Nita peered down in that direction. “Yeah,” she said, “but she’s moving pretty fast. If we want to say hi to her before she goes somewhere else, we’d better hurry.”

The two of them broke into a trot, dodging and weaving through the crowd. Mamvish came plowing along toward them at the same time, surrounded by people who drifted in from around about (or just appeared next to her), hurriedly asked or told her something, and went off or vanished again. “She’s so busy…” Kit said.

“She’s always so busy,” said Nita. “But she did say she was sorry to send an eidolon instead of being more personal with that message. Ought to let her know it was okay.”

“There you are,” Mamvish said as they got within earshot. “It’s good you’re here so soon!”

When they got close enough Nita grabbed Mamvish around the head and patted her. “Are you okay? You look like they’re running you ragged.”

Nita let go and both she and Kit reversed course so they could keep walking with her. “It’s always like this,” Mamvish said, breathless, her eyes revolving in opposite directions and her hide positively boiling with whole paragraphs in the Speech. “Nothing new. And you two, my thelefeih, are you all right?”

“Just fine,” Kit said, and patted her too, touched and surprised that she was using the specially-close form of “cousin” on him. Probably because of Nita bringing her tomatoes all the time. Still kind of an honor, though… “But Mam, is it just me or is does it seem like every time we see you you’re trying to get some species to let you save their lives and they’re giving you trouble about doing it?”

Mamvish abruptly stopped short—so suddenly that Kit wondered if he’d said something wrong—and spent the next few moments stamping all her feet, first in sequence and then alternately in several different patterns. “Yes,” she hissed, “yes, definitely yes, One-all-about-us yes!!” And though she sounded annoyed, she also seemed gleeful that someone else had noticed. “Seriously! It’s enough to drive you wild, sometimes I wonder why I bother…”

As Mamvish started walking again and kept on ranting about the way things weren’t working the way she’d expected, Kit felt less concerned about having misspoken. It wasn’t like it was hard to tease Mamvish into losing her temper. She came of a culture on her homeworld of Wimst in which hiding how you felt was seen as no particular advantage, and plainly she enjoyed venting with them. In fact, Kit thought, she does it every time she sees us. Maybe we’re an excuse? Because even though she’s a couple of thousand years old, and incredibly smart and gifted, she’s still really young for a lot of the wizards she works with, and we’re a lot closer to her age than most…

“But it doesn’t matter,” Mamvish was saying, “there’s no point in getting judgmental about it when we don’t even understand why it’s happening. And maybe we never will. Nothing to do but cope. Have you got your assignments yet? I’m so sorry the logistics team will have had to break you up, we’ve no choice but to maximize the effectiveness of the microgroups working on this…”

“Mam, it’s okay,” Nita said, “we work separately lots of times at home! We’ll be fine. Will we see you there?”

“It’s possible,” Mamvish said. “Depends on how Thesba behaves. I’ve spent endless hours holding the wretched thing together, this last tenday, and I expect to spend many hours more.” She hissed in annoyance. “Message me when you’re settled in your postings, I’ll get back to you if I can…”

And with a wave of her tail she was off down the concourse with other wizards of various ages following in her wake, all talking at her at once. Kit watched her go in slight amazement, shaking his head. “She’s always running around and being put under pressure like this,” he muttered. “When does she get time to just sit still?”

“Not sure she’d know what to do with that if she had any,” Nita said. “Come on, let’s see where they’ve stuck us…”

They turned to head back the way they’d come, making their way down the concourse again to the big holographic globe of Tevaral that was rotating gently in the center of the meeting area, all the planet’s five great continents gradually revealing themselves to them as the simulation turned. Kit was having trouble looking at this living, dynamic landscape, the beautiful greens and golds of it here and there touched with the white of snowcapped mountains and the glint of seas shining under the hot white light of its sun, and realizing that soon all of this would be uninhabitable…

“Big planet,” Nita said under her breath, walking around the display with her manual open in one hand. “Three times the size of Earth, nearly. Gravity’s a little less than Earth’s…” She paused, looking up at the simulator with some concern.

“What?” Kit said. He had his manual out too and was walking around the display, looking for the match to the flashing marker that was showing on his own assignment page.

“Well, it’s not great that Thesba’s so massive for its size,” Nita said, scowling at the page. “Depending on how it acts when it breaks up, it might not just fall all over Tevaral; it might rip it up too…”

Kit winced at the thought. “Like they don’t have enough problems.”

Nita shook her head. “Okay,” she said, “here I am…” She reached out an arm toward the middle of the “planet”, which was mostly girdled by two large continents. One of these looked like an elongated comma lying on its side, the other like a squashed, skinny ellipse, and Nita walked along with the elliptical continent as the simulator slowly rotated.

The north coast of the ellipse was broken up by numerous deep bays and gulfs and several extensive river deltas. “Right here,” Nita said, and pointed at one of the deltas. “There’s a city there… Neshek?” She squinted at the name glowing on the simulator. “And a big gate in the center of it, linked to the largest of the haven worlds.”

Kit peered over her shoulder at it. The outbound gates on Tevaral were tagged in various different colors, altered by the display depending on the species and culture of the wizard viewing them, so that the biggest or least stable gates were tagged in red, the more stable or lower-energy gates in orange, and the smallest and lowest-powered ones in green. Neshek was a red-tagged gate. “Uh oh…” Kit said.

“It’s not too bad,” Nita said, glancing down at her manual for more information. “I won’t be by myself, anyway. All the reds are being run in shifts by at least three wizards, sometimes four.”

“This is because you’ve got Bobo, isn’t it,” Kit said.

Nita shrugged. “Or because of my general aptitude levels, or because we’ve worked with Rhiow so often, or two or three other things. Who cares? They wouldn’t be giving me something they thought I couldn’t handle.”

Kit nodded and walked around the other side of the simulator, finally finding the indicator that was flashing for his posting. It was another red-tagged gate, this one positioned at the far end of the comma-shaped continent, where a small mountain range curved around a wide plain that ran down to the ocean. “Avaden,” he said, his manual page running through several sets of graphics—a contour map, a map of cities and roads, and finally a diagram showing a high-volume worldgate with a nearby array of five small ones feeding into it from elsewhere around the planet.

“Busy,” Kit said. He strolled around to where Nita was keeping pace with her own posting. “And almost exactly halfway around from where you are…”

“Yeah.” She threw him an annoyed look. “And it’s a red, too, so the assignment’s nothing to do with Bobo. Anyway, it’s not like we have to be out of touch. ”

“You two? Out of touch? Not bloody likely…”

Kit grinned at the south Dublin accent, turning to see a familiar rangy figure come easing through the crowd of wizards on the far side of the simulator. Ronan was all in black as usual, but this time the blacks were just normal winter clothes, parka and turtleneck and jeans and boots, with a backpack slung over it all. “Wondered when you’d show up, though! Taking your sweet time as usual…”

“Oh come on,” Kit said. “We dropped everything and came straight here.”

“And probably the only reason you were early was the Irish contingent got the word first because they’d be coming over in one big group to save wear and tear on the overlays,” Nita said.

Ronan rolled his eyes in extravagant fake annoyance. “Yes, yes, the Queen of Understanding Logistics wins again, what a surprise…”

“So where are you?” said Kit.

“About halfway between you and Her Royal Correctness. This bit over here—” Ronan pointed at the simulator and one of the smaller northern continents. “They gave me a nice little green gate in the middle of a town… nothing to worry about. Only open about half the day, from the looks of it; it’s low-power, and they’ve got it on limited hours because the terrain thereabouts has gravitic anomalies and they’re nervous about the city’s power grid getting disrupted.”

“Kindergarten stuff,” Kit said, smiling slightly.

Ronan gave Kit a look of genial disgust. “See now, I get no respect from you wee chiselers, none…”

“Oh please,” Nita said. “Try the age jokes on Mamvish and see where they get you. Seen Dairine anywhere?”

Ronan shook his head. “But then with that one, you hear her a long time before you see her. Not a peep.”

“Don’t suppose there’s any chance Darryl’s on this assignment…” Kit said.

Ronan shook his head. “No, don’t think the Powers want him off planet that much,” he said. “Especially on something this high-risk. Even if he wanted to go, I’m betting they’d start suggesting all kinds of good reasons why he should stay home.”

Kit nodded, for it made sense: an abdal’s value on his own world was sufficiently high that risking him coming to harm on other worlds would seem likely to be a low priority for the Powers. “Well, we should find out where our gates are and see if they’re ready yet…”

Ronan glanced at the distant, floating ceiling as if studying some sign that had been hung there for him: Kit recognized the look of a wizard consulting his version of the Knowledge. “The 400s,” he said, “and not yet. Still time for you to find something blue to eat…”

Nita snickered as Kit covered his eyes. “There’s one of your stalls about halfway down, isn’t there? We can grab something as we go by.”

Kit couldn’t see any reason to argue, especially when people were working so hard to get him to do something he wanted to do. “Come on,” he said, and he and Nita and Ronan started ambling down that way.

All around them the stream and bustle of thousands of humanoids coming and going went on, the wide concourse packed unusually full of people heading down to briefings or up toward the higher-power gate hexes reserved for large group transits or longer-distance jumps. “Funny,” Ronan said, “but normally you’d think seventeen thousand Earth people is a lot. With this lot all over Tevaral, though, we’ll be barely a spit in the ocean. Might feel kind of isolated…”

“We should try to get together while we’re there if we can,” Kit said.

Ronan shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem. It’s shift work, if I’m understanding the précis right: you get sort of eight or ten hours on and then eight hours off, and the rest of it’s sleep time. Pretty sure no one’ll care what we do with the off hours, as long as the people sharing your posting know where to find you if they need you in a hurry.”

Kit nodded as they continued on through the mostly-humanoid crowds, all along the way being paced by automatically-generated Speech-based Crossings information announcements targeted at the transient wizardly population.

“Tevaral Rafting Intervention transit group 1165RS, please note that you have a targeted information augment requiring your attention, please check your errantry-data modalities for more detail…”

“TRI transit group 1417TG, hex change advisory: your departure hex has been changed to 604, repeating, 604. Please make your way to the 600 hex group—”

“You know, we might have a group number too,” Nita said, and moved to pull her manual out again.

“5611GH,” Ronan said, without even breaking stride.

Kit shot him an amused look. There were occasions when Ronan’s organized side revealed itself more clearly than usual… usually when he was a bit unnerved, and going out of his way to conceal it.

“Okay,” Nita said. “Is that the place up there? Yeah, I think so…” She took the lead.

Kit and Ronan followed her through the crowds toward the kiosk she was targeting. “This is a general service announcement for entities involved in the Tevaral Rafting Intervention,” said the air in their immediate vicinity. “Please note that although for the duration of this intervention comestible selection options have been augmented at all food service outlets in the Main Concourse, you may experience occasional peak-period scarcity of supply for comestibles containing the following: manganese, technetium, zinc, arsenic, bromine, beryllium…”

Kit shook his head, amused, as the list went on.

“No?” Nita said, concerned, as they reached the kiosk and she paused by it. “You don’t want to eat at this one? I thought you liked these guys the last time.”

“What? Oh! No, this is fine,” Kit said. “Just scared for a moment there that I might not be getting enough arsenic in my diet…”

“Oh.” She grinned, and the three of them settled in at the kiosk. It was built along the normal Crossings lines for this kind of standalone structure: circular, with a glasslike table/ledge section that deformed or reformed itself upward, downward, inward or outward according to the stature of the species or beings using it. Above it all floated a slowly-rotating cylindrical signage structure covered with illuminated sliding 3-D images of food, and (alternating with the imagery) price lists in symbologies that changed from second to second in reflection of changing market values, availability, or the species or linguistic preferences of the viewer. Inside the counter was the being who ran the kiosk—a Rirhait, as so many Crossings service personnel were, this one with a bright metallic-blue carapace—and an assortment of food service machinery, mostly chromed and looking very sleek and industrial.

Kit knew the drill perfectly well by now. He dropped his manual onto the counter, the action immediately informing the Crossings data management and accounting systems that a wizard on active errantry was going to be ordering, and therefore (in line with best practice for gating facilities galaxy-wide) would be eating for free. Immediately the kiosk’s information management system pulled data from the manual regarding Kit’s species, likely food preferences, and sensitivities, correlated it with his past order history, and analyzed it all. A second later the counter presented him with a subsurface menu.

Beside him Nita had done the same and was studying the readout, flipping through its pages. Ronan merely laid a hand on the counter and got the same result, staring into the sudden parade of food and drink images that started flowing by. “Right,” he said under his breath, “let’s see…”

“What’re you looking for?” Kit said, tapping at a couple of possibilities as they went by.

“Anything that doesn’t say WARNING: CONTAINS FROGSPAWN.” Ronan shot Kit a wicked look. “For certain values of frog…”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Come on, that was an accident.”

“Somebody didn’t read the small print, you mean that kind of accident? So avoidable.”

“Hasn’t happened twice,” Kit said, flicking away a couple of the possibilities the menu had offered him and settling on one that closely resembled a meatloaf sandwich, as long as you understood that the meatloaf was going to be blue.

“Just as well,” Ronan said, “otherwise the Crossings’d have to assign you a mental health counselor every time you came through here to help you handle the shock of dealing with what you just ate…”

“Oh, the frogspawn again?” said a voice from down the concourse, laughing.

Nita looked up from the bowl of bright red and green noodles on which she’d just taken delivery and snorted a small laugh as Dairine came along from further up the concourse. She was dressed in jeans and boots and a parka, and Spot was spidering along behind her.

“You’ve told everyone about that, haven’t you,” Kit muttered as the Rirhait behind the counter put out a couple of small bowls of day-glo orange sauce for him to accompany the blue meatloaf.

Nita shrugged. “It’s a good story. Where’ve you been?” she said to Dairine.

“Here,” Dairine said as she bellied up to the kiosk, boosted Spot up onto the counter, and waited for the menu to come up on registering Spot’s presence. “Sker’ret wanted to talk to the Mobiles.”

Nita looked surprised. “They’re involved in this too?”

“Maybe as part of a contingency plan,” Dairine said, looking uneasy. “Species-fragment archival. Not gonna happen, though.”

“Wait,” Kit said, pausing in the middle of dunking his sandwich. “You mean—”

“The Mobiles are alpha-testing a lot of different matter-archival methods right now,” Nita said, and the odd way she was looking at her sister made Kit uncomfortable. “They’re looking for ways to back up the universe.”

The first time this had come up, Kit had thought Nita was joking. But he could tell from Dairine’s face that it was no joke. “Whole-species archival is nothing new,” she said. “Mamvish has done it before. But the techniques she’s used previously are kind of a blunt instrument compared with what the Mobiles have been developing, and she can’t implement them anything like as fast. Sker’ wanted to find out if the Mobiles could supply her with something state-of-the-art if the stay-at-home Tevaralti types had a last-minute change of heart.”

“And can they?”

Dairine shrugged. “Sure they can. Gigo tells me they could pull a hundred million people off the planet and into safe storage within an hour. But it’s not gonna happen unless the Tevaralti change their minds about leaving real fast: it’s not a solution that you can employ on just fractions of the population, at least not right now. And if they wait much longer for their change of heart, the on-planet gates won’t be able to get them all out in time. The Mobiles wouldn’t have any choice but to render them down as storable data.”

“Not the best solution,” Ronan said.

That struck Kit as a pretty mild way to put it. “Especially if they’re still just in alpha testing…”

“Yeah,” Dairine said, and started scrolling along through the menu that had presented itself in front of her. “Oh, come on now, what is this, have they stopped carrying sildwif all of a sudden?”

Ronan peered around the counter at her menu, having taken delivery on something that looked like a burrito but smelled more like fish and chips. “You miss the announcement? They’re having a run on manganese today. Should have had some pumpkin seeds before you left.”

“Oh please spare me,” Dairine muttered. “How close can they get to bologna here?”

Sensitive to what she was discussing, the menu in front of her shifted immediately. Dairine peered at it.

“Don’t get the chifemda,” Nita said without even looking up from her noodles. “Doesn’t matter what the flavor algorithm says it’s going to be like. It always comes out tasting like clams.”

“Ewww, no thank you,” Dairine said. She glanced over at Kit. “Something blue again. What a surprise. How is it?”

Kit actually had to stop and think about that, despite the fact that he was in the middle of eating it. Describing alien flavors was always a problem for him, even more when they were ones he liked than when they were ones he didn’t, and it was all too easy to fall back on the “Tastes like chicken” solution. “Not bad,” he said. “Kind of a fish stick flavor, but spicy.”

“Fine, that’ll hold me,” Dairine said, and tapped on the menu.

Within a few moments everyone was eating, or getting back to it, while the louder-than-normal hubbub of the Crossings went on around them. But even through this, Earth-human voices stood out, especially when they were speaking English. Not far away, even through the din of voices talking in the Speech and in many other languages all up and down the vocal scale, Kit heard somebody down the concourse saying, “It was right around here the last time…”

“You could always just check the diagram.”

“No, seriously, it should be here. Or maybe just a little further up—”

“What is it with you and not wanting to look at the map?”

The voices were familiar. Kit had to smile. “When I don’t need the map and I know perfectly well where it was last time—”

“I know! Let’s ask them. They look like people who know where the good food is.”

And when Kit turned around, sure enough, there were Tom and Carl coming along up the concourse from the same direction he and Nita had come. Carl was in a dark suit, and over it a long dark navy-blue midlength coat of the kind a businessman might wear on a city street in the winter; he looked overdressed for someone going out on a rescue mission. Tom, on the other hand, was in hiking gear—waterproof trousers and a fleece shirt, and a down overvest with a big bold logo that said BANFF-JASPER ICEFIELDS PARKWAY.

Nita looked up from her noodles. “Thought you two would’ve been through here and gone by now,” she said.

Tom shook his head. “Late to the party, but not by choice. Carl had a late meeting in town this afternoon, and then he had to sort some Grand Central business out with Rhiow before we left. The usual drill when an Advisory goes off planet.” They leaned up against the counter. “So we’ve got a while yet—we know the gate’s been assigned, but it’s not ready. What looks good?”

“Try the blue meatloaf,” Dairine said.

Carl glanced innocently down at the menu that was presenting itself to him. “What, not the frogspawn?”

Kit leaned over and thumped his head gently a couple of times on the counter, causing the subsurface menu (possibly in an attempt to console him) to start displaying desserts. “Is there anybody on Earth who doesn’t know that story by now?”

“Possibly somebody in the Marianas Trench,” Tom said. “Those tubeworms, maybe. You should check with S’reee. Nita, where are those noodles from?”

She shook her head: he’d caught her with her mouth full, and it took a moment before she could say, “Sastaphare, I thought? I mean, the dish is always called that, but seems like a lot of the planets in the Sast Commodium have them…” She peered down at the menu. “Uh, sorry. ‘Produce of more than one planet…’”

Tom shrugged, hailed the Rirhait. “I’ll have what she’s having…”

For a while there wasn’t much conversation while people concentrated on stuffing their faces and watching the ever-changing crowds moving around them. Kit in particular was used to finding the Crossings a lot quieter, and the bustle was acting to keep him slightly on edge. For the moment, though, Tom and Carl seemed not to be paying it much mind. Carl acquired himself a bowl of some kind of vegetable stew in what struck Kit as alarming colors of yellow-green and orange, then glanced around that part of the concourse and back to Tom. “Coffee?”

Tom looked around in surprise. “Real coffee? Thought the Galactibucks or whatever it is was all the way up by the 600 hexes. By the Chur legacy gate or some such.”

Carl shook his head and nodded off to one side, where yet another kiosk was suddenly in evidence, having appeared without so much as a breath of displaced air (or if it had made one, Kit had missed it). “Crossings Retail has started doing some tailoring at the retail end. The popups have started targeting customer profiles. When they’re not busy they consult the master census system to seek out transients who match the kiosk’s product offerings, then transit to where they are.”

“That could get expensive…” Tom said.

“When you run a worldgating facility and can factor the energy cost into the retail overheads? Just another business expense.” Carl shrugged. “Meanwhile, what a surprise, there’s the coffee place’s pop-up, and yes, they have your mocha, and it’s real mocha for a change! You’d start to think we were getting preferential treatment because we’ve got an in with the local chocolate cartel.” He raised his eyebrows at Kit. “Or because we know somebody who shot the place up once.” He glanced sideways at Nita with a smile.

Still working on her noodles, Nita just shrugged and smiled. “Why would I complain about that?” Tom said. “As long as she doesn’t seem likely to start shooting again without reason. Yes, a large mocha, please. Anybody else?”

Heads were shaken generally, and Carl went off to see about it.

“He’s here a lot more than I am,” Tom said, “as he loves to remind me.”

“Maybe you should get out more,” Ronan said.

Tom chuckled at that. “When you make Advisory,” he said, “let’s see you manage it.”

“You said once it was like not wanting to get out of a car you were driving…” Nita said.

Tom sighed. “More like you’re not allowed to get out because the kids keep needing to be taken places. Soccer practice. Little League. Dancing lessons…”

Kit had to snicker at the put-upon act. “And then you have to help them with their homework,” Tom said, giving him a restrained side-eye. “Hundreds of them. Math, science, civics, saving the universe. It never ends…”

“Cut it out,” Carl said, coming up behind him and putting down a cup. “You know you love it. Wait, do you want sugar in yours?”

“In a mocha? No.”

“Right back.”

Tom leaned against the counter and looked down the concourse. “It really is strange,” he said, “seeing the place so humanoid-heavy…”

“With some exceptions,” Dairine said, glancing at a small party of aliens coming down from the direction of the 400 hexes, nearly swallowed up by the hominids surrounding them. Yet a couple of this group took some swallowing up. They were taller than any of the humanoids surrounding them, even those slender spindly ones from obviously light-gravity worlds. Of the pair, one had a hide that glinted metallically in a brilliant eye-hurting green, and it was strapped about with metallic adornments that could equally have been clothing, accessories, or badges of rank. The person had a lizardy look to it, though it was six-armed and bipedal. At the top of a long-snouted face, wide-set eyes were elongated toward the back of its skull, each with a pupil that ran its eye’s whole length. Behind these, on each side, long odd flaps of hide ran down toward the alien’s spine. The effect was somewhat like that of a very thin, spindly cross between a basset hound and a gecko.

Its companion was even taller and looked more insectile than anything else: nearly transparent in places, especially at the ends of the long small-clawed limbs. It had a small rhomboidal head fringed with feathery growths, possibly sense organs, and was compound-eyed and jeweled in intricate patterns over the upper half of its body, the chitin of its exoskeleton shimmering in the light of Crossings daytime as long beams from Rirhath B’s sun (just now coming out towards the end of a cloudy day) found their slanting way down to floor level past the floating panels of the ceiling.

The third of the trio, though, wasn’t anything like as visible until they were all much closer. It looked like nothing so much as a very large upended beefsteak mushroom that had escaped from the produce department in some grocery that catered to giants. Very small clawed feet, like those of a millipede, could be seen under the meter-wide mushroom-dome, zooming it along beside its companions. There was no sign of any eyes or other sensorial organ on the brown-and-beige dappled top, but naturally that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

The three beings went past the kiosk together, apparently deep in conversation; the green lizard-being fluting in rhythmic patterns, the chitinous mantid making brief soft sonorous melodies, a little on the atonal side, and the mushroom emitting a range of seemingly disconnected sounds like something from an old British science fiction show. And off down the concourse they went together, sounding for all the world like a wind instrument talking in undertones to a cello, with brief bursts of comment from their accompanying theremin down near floor level.

Kit turned away, embarrassed at himself for staring. But then everyone else had been doing the same, at least briefly. And Dairine in particular had a look on her face like that you’d expect from someone who’s seen something she hadn’t ever really expected to. “Huh,” she said under her breath, “isn’t that topical.” She turned back to finishing her sandwich, giving Spot a look that he returned out of a couple of spare stalky eyes while the others still followed the aliens as they more or less vanished into the crowd.

Nita put her empty bowl and chopsticks down on the counter: it promptly vanished them. “What is?”

“Those guys. They’re three-quarters of a bar joke. Or the beginning of a fairy tale, maybe.” She pushed her plate away, and the counter removed it. “‘Once upon a time there was a planet called Tarthak…’”

Tom looked surprised. “Oh indeed. What took you down that line of research?”

“Who, actually,” Dairine muttered. “Nelaid.” She looked up toward the floating segments of the high ceiling as if wishing some kindly deity would come down through it and help her escape from a subject she’d heard too much of lately.

“Makes perfect sense,” Tom said, “as significant portions of the population of Wellakh would have been rafted off the planet for a good while so that repairs on the planet’s ecosystem could get started. Way too problematic trying to keep them inside the forcebubble holding the atmosphere in place while the wizards there were trying to calm it down. Not to mention the storms secondary to inertial drag on the confined atmosphere, the cooling issues on the flare-blasted side…” He shook his head.

“So why are these guys so topical?” Ronan said, getting rid of his snack plate and tapping at the menu to bring up a drinks page. “Who are they, anyway?”

“Go on, enlighten us,” Tom said to Dairine. “Let’s see how much other detail you’ve retained.”

Dairine paused just long enough to look at Tom with an expression that suggested he was pushing his luck. “Are you giving me a quiz? Does this count toward my final grade?”

“It’ll count toward me telling your Dad you’re actually getting some serious work done in all your offplanet time when he next asks me about it,” Tom said.

Dairine made a face. “Blackmail? Fine. …So it’s not so much about Tarthak actually, which was just a gas giant, and not even a conscious one, but one of its moons. They all went around—well, they still go around, though nobody’s there—this star called Munak. It’s in Leo somewhere, three hundred thirty light years or so from Earth—”

“Oh, Alterf?” Carl said from behind them, putting down Tom’s mocha coffee beside him and leaning against the counter again.

Tom nodded and sipped at his coffee. “Lambda Leonis,” he said, and then made a face of his own. “Wait, how much sugar did you put in this?”

“Not me,” Carl said, “the counter guy. Too many arms, too much enthusiasm. Didn’t have the heart to stop him.”

Tom raised his eyebrows in a “what can you do” expression and kept on drinking the coffee. “Anyway,” Dairine said, “Tarthak had whole a lot of moons, and one of them, the biggest of them, was called Temalbar: nearly Earth-sized and massive enough to hold onto an oxygen-bearing atmosphere. There were four dominant species there: the Jejeev—that green guy, he was Jejeev—the Mathala, those are the preying-mantis looking ones: the Tesakyt—”

“The little dome-y guy,” Ronan said, as a tall dark drink with a light-colored head ascended through the counter in front of him.

“Is that what I think it is?” Carl said, suddenly bemused.

Ronan snorted. “Are you daft? Guinness doesn’t even like traveling from Dublin to New York. If you brought it this far by standard gating it’d need a biohazard label. This is a dandelion-and-burdock float.”

Nita covered her eyes. Seeing her expression, Kit made a note to ask her later what was going on.

“If I may continue…” Dairine said, annoyed.

“Do please,” Tom said.

“Okay. The Jejeev, the Mathala, the Tesakyt, and—” She paused. “Okay, you could make yourselves useful here,” Dairine said, looking accusingly at Tom and Carl, “because all the name the manual gives the other Temal species is Gevai.” Kit raised his eyebrows, since that was one of the ordinal number-forms in the Speech that simply meant “fourth”, without any suggestion of “fourth” what. “Isn’t it kind of weird not to see their own name for themselves?”

“That is their name for themselves,” Tom said, “and nobody knows why. It’s as if their image of themselves suggests that the other three species on the planet were somehow more important than they were. What’s really strange about it is that the other three species seem to think that the Fourth are far more important than any of them.”

Kit sat considering that for a bit. Dairine nodded. “The weird thing,” she said, “like there’s only one weird thing about Temalbar, is that the other three species don’t know where the Fourth came from. And there’s nothing about that in the manual, either. They didn’t evolve there; there’s no evidence of them in the fossil record. They just turned up.”

Carl nodded. “And thereby hangs a tale,” he said. “Whether their appearance was due to an accident in transport or an experiment that went wrong, or they were explorers from somewhere a lot further away who went astray and wound up on Temalbar… at this end of time there’s no telling. But it was a good thing for all of us that they did wind up here, because one way or another they saved us a lot of time.”

“Problem is,” Tom said, “we tend to think of worldgating as something commonplace, a normal function of wizardry. And at the wizardly end of things, naturally it is. But worldgating in the mechanical sense is much harder to achieve—very energy intensive, and requiring a very high level of technological expertise.”

“Which the Fourth seemed to have brought with them from wherever they came from,” Carl said. “Which no one’s sure of, and no one’s managed to find out. Not even they seem terribly certain—insofar as anyone can really figure out what they’re thinking.”

“Well, we’ve got the Speech,” Nita said, looking puzzled. “It’s not like we can’t ask them.”

Tom gave her a thoughtful look. “I invite you to try,” he said, “when you meet up with one or more of them. Let me know how that turns out.” There was something to his voice that seemed to suggest he was both amused at the possibility and genuinely wondering what Nita might turn up.

She rubbed her eyes. “Tell me that somehow or other this isn’t going to mean I wind up doing more paperwork.”

Tom shook his head and smiled, looking rueful. “No guarantees… just see how you do.” He looked over at Dairine again. “Sorry,” he said. “Do go on.”

Dairine gave him another annoyed look, but Kit glanced at Nita for a moment and saw from her expression that she was amused at how restrained Dairine was being. “Anyway!” Dairine said. “So the Fourth started sharing their expertise at mechanical worldgating with the other three species. And all together they made all kinds of breakthroughs, so that their technology started spreading all over among the spacefaring species in that part of space. Gating tech got really small and compact, and implementing the basic equations got easier and easier. Then one or another of the four Temal species got the idea of starting to build a standalone network of ‘hard’ worldgates among planets in their part of the galaxy. One or two of those gates were on Earth; early explorers used them to look the place over. There wasn’t that much interest in us, because this was… maybe twenty thousand years ago, this first bit? And there wasn’t a lot going on back home, so they just sort of classified us and went away.”

Ronan grunted. “Only because they didn’t know yet that there was chocolate there.”

Kit pursed his lips and did his best to keep his expression otherwise neutral. Ronan and Kit’s sister Carmela were still in the early stages of working out the kinks in the business plan for their interstellar chocolate-trading company. Half the time the very idea of this joint venture left Kit full of a nameless dread. The rest of the time it left him profoundly relieved that Carmela wasn’t getting into intergalactic arms trading instead. Kit had lately begun to realize that his sister had a near-piratical instinct for where profit lay, and apparently—after a long weekend spent examining a couple of years’ worth of figures from the cocoa futures markets based on Rirhath B and on Earth—had decided there was a lot more profit in chocolate running than in gunrunning. …Thank God.

“That could even be true,” Dairine said. “Anyhow, as they kept improving the tech, the Temal got to the point where they could not only move small numbers of living beings great distances almost instantly, but they could move very large numbers of beings shorter distances without requiring the kind of energy outlay that would cripple a whole planet.” Dairine reached down to Spot, flipped his lid open. “And that was where the Interconnect Project began—”

“Would group 5611GH,” a mechanical voice said in the Speech, echoing in the air all around them—

Everyone’s heads snapped up together.

“—please report to the 500 hexes; your outward transport is programmed and ready. Group 5611GH to the 500 hexes please…”

“Okay, a bit closer than planned,” Tom said, pushing away from the counter. “No complaints about that…”

Everybody grabbed their bags or whatever else they’d come with, thanked the Rirhait who’d been taking care of them, and headed off after Tom and Carl. “So I’m sure we can finish this another time…” Dairine said, falling in behind them next to Ronan.

“What, you can’t walk and lecture us at the same time?” Tom said. “Nelaid will be sorry to hear that.”

“Not to mention skeptical,” said Carl. “With so much evidence to the contrary.”

Behind Dairine and Ronan, Kit glanced over at Nita, who glanced back, biting her lip to keep from laughing. Kit carefully kept his face straight, but even so Nita had to turn away from him to keep from losing it. Meanwhile Dairine was leveling a look at Tom’s back that should have burned through it like a pulse rifle, but the effect was somewhat ruined by Tom casually turning toward her and walking backwards for a bit as they all made their way toward the 500 hexes.

Dairine rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Not much more to tell, anyway. All the Temal species realized that a really great way to use the technology would be to remove whole planetary populations from endangered venues, where before you’d have had no choice but to do potentially world-saving interventions with the whole population stuck on site. And with the SunTap technology they developed, you could install large-aperture mass-movement gates on the surface of any planet close enough to its primary, and get everybody who was in danger out of there—and not have to do something invasive and really taxing in terms of wizardly power like full-species archival.”

“Like what Mamvish does,” Nita said.

Carl nodded. “You need a very high-powered wizard for that kind of work,” he said, “the kind who’s not born all that often and has an intuitive grasp of how to archive life and matter without them losing their connection to each other. Or else you need hundreds of wizards who don’t mind taking a fifty-fifty chance that they can save half a million or two million or ten million lives at the cost of their own.” He shook his head. “Lifeprice is never cheap…”

For a change Dairine didn’t protest at the interruption, just looked down rather somberly at Spot, presently tucked under her arm. “So they started putting together a force to do that,” she said. “Not of wizardly people, mostly, though there were wizards involved. That was the beginning of the Interconnect Project. And it got bigger, and spread all through that part of inhabited space… which is when things got ugly.”

Tom, who’d turned around as they started getting near the 500 hexes, nodded and sighed.

“Because all of a sudden a black hole came sailing through the Alterf system,” Dairine said. “A lot of people got the idea that maybe the Lone Power thought too many lives were getting saved due to the species based there. So the story goes that in a fit of spite It chucked a singularity through the system…”

“Well, it is just a story,” Carl said. “We’re short on data about the actual causes. And you can’t blame the Lone Power for everything—”

“Yes we can,” came an immediate chorus of unified opinion.

Dairine just smiled grimly. “Whatever… that singularity blew through the system and pulled a huge long tail of matter out of Alterf. Since it was a type K1 orange giant, kind of amazing that the star didn’t blow. But if the Lone One did do that on purpose, then it got sloppy about it, because the singularity came through the system too slowly for the star to either go nova right then or collapse fast enough to do It any good. The Temal species had just time enough to get away, and the same tech they’d used to save so many other species saved them. They evacuated all their people from Temalbar before Alterf collapsed, and rafted them out to new homeworlds in the neighborhood of Rirhath B. The four species stayed together, though, and relocated the Interconnect Project to the new worlds. And to here: this is their main administrative center in this part of the Galaxy, and the Master of the Crossings sits on their governing board.” She sighed. “And here we are…”

The concourse opened out to their left, at this point, into the wide semicircular space that held the 500 hexes: a broad tightly-packed pattern of them in blue on white, running nearly to the edges of the semicircle in a space perhaps three hundred meters in diameter. What caught Kit by surprise, though, was that none of the hexes were showing the subdued glow that meant they were about to go active, and there was no one else waiting for them to do so.

Ronan glanced around in surprise. “Feck,” he said, “are we even in the right place? There’s nobody here.”

“Did we miss an announcement?”

“Not possible,” Dairine said, looking around. “They’re targeted to your manuals: they follow you.”

“Best wait a few minutes,” Carl said. “We may be waiting for someone else to arrive.”

They all stood there at loose ends, looking around at the crowds of hominids passing them by. “So all the Temal species left,” Kit said to Dairine. “But what about Temalbar?”

Dairine shook her head. “Dead and frozen. There’s still hydrogen-based life in Tarthak’s atmosphere; the collapse didn’t bother them so much. There’s enough heat from ‘collapse decay’ in the gas giant’s core to keep things going there for at least the next couple of millennia or so. If things change there, they can be relocated too. Alterf’s finally stable now: still officially an orange giant, though it’s a lot cooler and fainter than it was twenty-odd thousand years ago.”

“Core’s probably dead, with a history like that,” Nita said. “Though if it hasn’t burned all its helium, it might brighten up before it fades down for good.”

Dairine nodded. “But the Temal moved everything that could be moved to the new worlds: all their animal life, even as much of their plant life as they could get off in time before the collapse got serious. Maybe not as good as living peacefully in your own world. But it’s better to live a little less peacefully somewhere else than to go extinct.”

“Except when,” Carl said, “as in our present circumstances, there are some people who seem to think otherwise.” He shook his head, gazing up at the amazing ceiling above them as if hoping some kind of help might descend through it.

Except we’re the help… Kit thought.

“Just another way we have the most exciting job in the worlds,” Tom said.

“Will group 5611GH,” said the voice in the air—and Kit’s head snapped up. Then he looked at Nita, who even through her nervousness was smiling: she too recognized Sker’ret’s voice. “Group 5611GH please note; you have a hex complex change. But then doesn’t everybody, today? You’re now departing from the 300 hexes in ten minutes. Please step into the hex now flashing for you to avail yourselves of in-house transport to staging for hex 306.”

“And when the Master of the Crossings says ‘jump,’” Tom said, “you don’t waste time asking him how high. Let’s go.”

Everybody jumped up and started trooping over to the hex at the side of the cluster that was cycling through bright-to-dark blue, the standard beside it showing a sixty-second countdown. Kit watched with amusement as Dairine leaned close to Nita. “How do you not kill them when they interrupt you all the time?” Dairine muttered as Tom and Carl and Ronan stepped into the hex.

Nita snorted. “Either by remembering that they enjoy teasing us as much as we enjoy teasing them,” she said, “or by adding together all the times their advice has saved my life and then dividing by ‘shut up’. Come on, let’s get where we’re going….”

FOUR:

11848 Cephei IV / Tevaral

The countdown ended. Everything around all of them went dark.

Then things brightened up again, at least somewhat. Kit looked around them, getting an initial impression that was a bit muddled. The sky above them was dark. It was nighttime: the hex under their feet fading away against smooth pale stone, the stone illuminated in a pale warm gold, their shadows leaning and stretching away from them all across the polished surface of it. But the shadows weren’t quite dark; they seemed to be filled in with a subtle blush of red. Out at the edge of things, past the huge slab of stone, a lot of shortish humanoid people with shaggy feathery hair were moving to and fro, some carrying artificial light sources with them, some followed by what was clearly wizard-light in the form of generalized glows or small point sources.

Under Kit’s feet, the smooth stone surface buzzed and jumped. At first he thought, Oh, it’s like at the Crossings; time to get off the hex. But the jumping didn’t stop, just got worse… and he saw Nita next to him put her arms out to balance herself, and Tom and Carl bumped into each other with their shoulders, Tom laughing uneasily. “I’ve never cared for that kind of thing,” he said under his breath.

Dairine looked around her, Spot in her arms, and scowled at the surroundings as the extremely unnerving slippy-slidy feeling of the earth under Kit’s feet finally calmed down. “An earthquake,” she said, sounding disgusted, “is such a bad way to say hello…”

Nita turned toward Kit, laughing, and the sound was as uneasy as Tom’s had been. “Wow, they weren’t kidding about the tectonic instability, huh?” she said, and looked up.

And her mouth fell open.

Kit turned to see what she was looking at… and froze.

The open countryside around the paved place where they stood was relatively flat. Away against the horizon, some gentle hills rose up against the sky, clothed in haze and some rags and tatters of low cloud. Higher cloud was being driven across the sky in long streams and banners. But these were nothing like thick enough to hide what seemed to stare down through them through the darkness, leaning menacingly over the fragile, trembling world below.

A quarter of the sky above them was obscured by a vast bloated sphere that, even though it obviously wasn’t moving, nonetheless seemed to be pressing itself down toward the world beneath it, so that despite how stupid the urge made Kit feel, he still felt like he should duck. That huge glowing mass seemed to be pushing the whole sky overhead downward under its weight, an illusion somehow compounded by the way the hastily-blown clouds looked as they fled across its face—seemingly thinning away to nothing as if squeezed flat by pressure from above. Toward the horizon the clouds reflected the moon’s light a bit on their upper sides—an unhealthy yellow like the final stages of a healing bruise, the moon’s extensive cloud deck afire with the sulfurous color in the light of Tevaral’s sun. Wherever the toxic soup of airborne sulfides and upthrown volcanic ash in that cloud deck didn’t cover the moon’s surface, mostly what could be seen was the flickering restless red of burning stone: dully-glowing lava flows covering tens of thousands of square kilometers, the great moon’s surface scabbed and scorched black, and here and there huge cracks welling up through the burnt and ravaged crust with bleeders of fresh lava, brightening, fading, brightening again. And all the time that sense of the fire and the darkness kept on pressing down, endlessly threatening to fall out of the sky and crush you flat.

“Thesba,” Nita said from right behind Kit, very soft.

He was glad she was so close, because (irrational though the sense was) Kit felt like he needed backup—like he’d never been so comprehensively loomed over by anything in his life. He stared up at this awful apparition and tried to imagine what it would have been like before everything started to go wrong here, when it was still quiet and benign; when it didn’t look like it was going to come to pieces right this minute and start raining itself down in fire and brimstone on your head. But his imagination kept coming up blank, images of what had been or might have been driven out by this terrible threatening now.

“It’s like… like it shouldn’t be possible,” Kit said under his breath.

“Yeah,” Nita said. The two of them stood there a moment longer, then let out a joint breath and glanced around. The others, just as transfixed as they’d been, were finally moving off the hex now: they followed them. “The orbital mechanics is weird,” Nita said under her breath. “The way their masses are balanced—the rotational speed and so forth, obviously it does all work out… though it definitely looks like it shouldn’t. We’re used to a moon that’s a lot further away, moves a lot more slowly…”

Kit nodded. There was a lot more to experience here—a thin chill wind laden with strange new scents and smells, a deluge of them, and a half-lit night edged all around with peculiar animal calls and many less identifiable sounds. But he was having trouble right now doing anything but ignoring the mental and spiritual weight of what hung in the sky above them. It seemed to Kit that the smartest thing to do at the moment was keep his eyes away from that: so as they made their way toward the edge of the gating slab and toward the small broad Tevaralti who seemed to be heading directly toward them, that was what he did.

“Cousins,” the being called to them, “you’re from Sol III—or Earth, is it? Which do you prefer?”

“Earth will do fine,” Tom said. “Dai stihó, rank-kin—”

Kit recognized a supervisory-level greeting intended for another of the same wizardly rank. “Well met in an ill time,” said the Tevaralti as he came up to them. He was broader and rounder than the Planetary, and was wearing the same kind of strappy-looking harnesswork; and he was shaggier-feathered, too, with a rounder, blunter face. “I’m called Vesh.” He crooked out an arm, bent at the feather-fringed elbow.

“Tom Swale,” Tom said, and moved next to Vesh and hooked his own crooked elbow through Vesh’s for a moment, then let go. “My associate Carl Romeo—” Carl followed suit. “These wizards with us are in our immediate and secondary supervisory groups, as well as sharing a vicinity locus.”

“Cousins, you’re all very welcome…” Vesh said, flicking his crest up at Kit and Nita and Dairine and Ronan in turn. “Let me orient you all briefly in place and time: you’ll have leisure for finer assessments for your own purposes when you’re settled by the gates you’ll be attending. This is one of forty main offplanet reception areas scattered around Tevaral. Its exact location’s been stored for you in your codices or other errantry-specific references for later use if you need to return to the Crossings in an emergency. But speaking more generally, right now you’re on the southern shore of the northeast continent, Chaish or Methneveh as it’s called in its primary languages. We’re halfway through the autumn months in this hemisphere, and about halfway through the local night. We’re asking you all to stay within call of this area for the next—” He paused, apparently searching briefly for a Speech-translation of the time interval into Earth idiom. “The next hour. Our transit circles to the population-rafting gates you’ll be tending are rather congested at the moment and we have to relieve that before sending you on.”

Everyone nodded or murmured agreement. “You two gentlebeings,” Vesh said, turning to Tom and Carl, “I was sent to brief specifically, as many more of your sub-supervisory wizards are here, and you’ll want to find some time once you’re settled to advise us as regards fine details of their assignments. For the rest of you, there’s a facility just beyond the gating substrate with refreshments and places to rest for a short time or erect your temporary-stay facilities if you like, while you wait for your further gatings. Supervisories?…”

He drew Tom and Carl off to one side, while behind everybody else the hex they’d vacated abruptly filled up with more incoming wizards, and other Tevaralti moved out to meet them. “Be nice to just get where we’re going and settle in,” Ronan said under his breath, looking around. “Pity we can’t just gate to wherever it is on our own.”

“I don’t think they’d thank you for that,” Dairine said, putting Spot down. “Too many gates open on this planet at once: you heard Mamvish. In fact I bet if you tried it, you’d find personal gatings are being disallowed…”

She glanced down at Spot, who was turning slowly in place, and then stopped, his stalked eyes fixed on one spot in the sky, distant over the hills. As long as it’s nothing to do with Thesba… Kit thought, watching Dairine as she too turned. Gonna take a while to get used to that…

At first he couldn’t see what the two of them were looking at, partly because there was a fair amount of low cloud over that way, clinging to the tops of the distant hills. But then through the cloud Kit got a glimpse of something. Aircraft light? he thought. Or some kind of satellite maybe?

But what he could see of it through the cloud was brighter than he’d have expected an aircraft light to be, and it didn’t move, just held still. And then the cloud gave way before it, and it leapt out sharp to see, distant in the darkness: a glittering shivering point of light, piercingly bright and deeply red, like a watching, baleful eye.

Kit sucked in a breath. It was a star. But it was so bright and so vividly colored that you were convinced you could see it as a disc, though he knew that would be impossible. “It looks like Mars,” he said. “But so much brighter…”

Nita came up to stand beside him, rubbing her upper arms because of the chill. “That’s the star I told you about: mu Cephei. One of the biggest and brightest red supergiants anybody knows about. Maybe the reddest star in this part of the galaxy. Possibly the reddest star anywhere in this galaxy.”

“Yeah, it’s real pretty, for all the good that does us,” Dairine said. “Just as well we’re getting these people out of here.” She was regarding the star with an expression that Kit found unnervingly expert. “Because that thing’s so massive that when it goes, it’ll go supernova, and there won’t be much left around here afterwards.”

“Not likely to happen now, is it?”

Dairine shrugged, and for some reason the casual quality of the gesture ran a chill down Kit’s spine. “Today? Naah, with wizardry we’d notice the signs from this close. Tomorrow? Doubt it. Next month? Next year? Who knows?” She shook her head as Tom headed back toward them, leaving Carl discussing something with Vesh. “Tell you, though, it’ll take more than a wizard to stop it. Or any crowd of wizards alive, because nobody’s got that kind of power. People have tried to keep supernovae from going off in the past. Mostly it makes it worse.” She looked up thoughtfully at the “eye” in the sky. “We’ll see it from Earth, though. About two thousand years after it’s destroyed everything in this neighborhood…”

“Probably,” Tom said quietly as he joined them, “that would have come up in the viability study before this particular rafting project entered the implementation stage. You’d think twice about committing huge amounts of energy to ‘heroic measures’ in order to keep a planetary system alive in situ when its medium-term viability is balanced on a knife-edge anyway…”

Kit shivered.

Ronan had turned around to look up at Thesba again, and was regarding it with an an expression that suggested he really would have liked to be elsewhere. “Know what,” he said, “I’m really on the wrong side of the gatelag at the moment: I was about to turn in when they called me up. If they’re offering us someplace to plug the pup tents in, I wouldn’t mind popping into mine and having a kip. Assuming nobody needs me for anything vital…”

Kit shook his head. “Go on,” Nita said, “we’ll message you if anything exciting happens.”

Ronan lifted a hand and headed off toward the complex of low, softly lit buildings that the Tevaralti had positioned off to the side of the gating area. “Not such a bad idea,” Dairine said, watching him go: “Spot wants to go talk to their computers. We’ll go over and get him jacked in for a while.”

“Yell if you need me,” Nita said. Dairine waved a hand at her and took herself off in Ronan’s wake.

Vesh had come back to confer with Tom again, and when Tom moved away from him to go after Carl, Kit said, “Vesh. You’re busy right now, but…”

“Cousins, there’s no one on the planet right now who’s not busy,” Vesh said, sadly but not without humor. “We’ve got a few moments: ask what’s on your mind.”

“The people who won’t go…”

Vesh shook his crest-feathers, a gesture Kit wasn’t sure what to make of as yet. “Why won’t they?” he said. “I’m Tevaralti and I don’t know. It’s no matter of pride… though it’d be easy enough to mistake it for such. I think it’s more that some of them are…” He shook his crest in a different way, and squeezed his eyes shut briefly. “Some are uneasy about from what sources they’ll accept assistance; they’re afraid they might somehow be tricked, or led astray. And not to have that happen is very important to them. That’s as close as I can come to it.”

Vesh opened his eyes again and looked unhappy—at least that was what Kit made of the expression. Tevaralti expressions seemed to live more in the eyes than in any part of the face, which was fairly immobile due to a bone structure that seemed to mirror what would have been various shapes or types of beaks in earlier evolutionary periods. “They’re not ungrateful, cousins; never think it. But uncertain… that they are, yes.”

Then his crest went up as if he was hearing something the rest of them couldn’t. “I’m needed,” he said. “Hold me excused, if you would…” And he headed off.

During this, Nita had turned to gaze up at Thesba again. Kit swallowed and did the same, determined to start getting himself used to the sight of it.

She gave him a look. “You want to go up top for a quick look?”

“Get the lay of the land?” Kit said. “Sure, why not?”

“Okay, come on.”

It took a few minutes to find another of the Tevaralti wizards who had time to listen to an explanation of what they wanted to do, which by itself caused some confusion. (”You want to gate up into space? Up into cisThesban space…?!”) But after a few moments Nita closed her eyes and then opened them again and said, very firmly, “Distancing maneuver.”

The Tevaralti wizard they were talking to, a tall slender one clothed in shaggy dark feathers and not much else, opened his golden eyes quite wide at that and said, “Oh. Of course!”—and led them over to one of a number of small side hexes arranged around the edges of the main pattern on the big reception slab. “Do you have coordinates you prefer?”

Nita rattled off a string of characters and numbers in the Speech. The pattern was broadly similar to the coordinate system that they used on Earth, but the numbers were significantly larger. Immediately, the little hex near them lit up blue, and the edges of the hex’s outline began to pulse softly.

“It’s intention-triggered,” said the Tevaralti wizard. “Just tell it when you’re ready to go. It’ll provide your outgoing wizardry with return-location coordinates. And you have an alert mechanism hooked up to your instrumentality, yes?”

“That’s right,” Nita said. “It’s all handled. Thanks, cousin.”

“Go well, then—” And immediately the Tevaralti wizard was off, feathers fluttering, to tend to somebody else.

“Brainstorm?” Kit murmured.

Nita gave him an amused side-eye. “Bobo can be really helpful sometimes. Bubble us up?”

Kid had had the necessary wizardry ready within moments of Nita suggesting they go topside. He said the last few words of the spell. Things went very briefly dark and silent around them as the universe leaned in to hear what Kit was asking of it, and then obligingly made it happen. A few seconds later they were standing exactly where they had been, but surrounded by a transparent forcefield bubble two meters wide. Kit just stood there for a moment waiting for the usual feeling of the personal energy leaving him, the price for having done such a spell, and was surprised to feel it so very much less than usual. “They said about an hour,” Kit said. “So I packed air for two hours…”

Nita nodded. “Because you never can tell.”

“Gravity?”

She considered for a moment. “Nah, why bother? We won’t be there that long.”

“Okay.”

“Personal fields?” The skinfields were an optional addition, meant as kind of a failsafe in case something went wrong with the forcefield bubble. Not that anything ever had, but—

“Because you never can tell.”

Kit nodded and said the twelve extra words necessary to implement the personal shields. Once more he hardly even felt the deduction of his personal energy. I could get used to this… “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

The reception pad winked out.

And then they were hanging in space. The thing that struck Kit immediately was how different the light balance was, once you were up here. Down on the planet surface, on the night side at least, Thesba’s hot sullen glow and lowering, downpressing presence dominated everything. Up here Tevaral had a chance to shine on its own.

It was worth seeing. Far greener than home—partly because of the way its atmosphere scattered light and partly due to the dominant green-blue color of the vegetation—and nearly twice as big as Earth, the effect was striking. If the look of Earth from space was along the lines of a turquoise or sapphire, then Tevaral came down more along the emerald or opal side of the equation, its seas more golden from the angle of the place in space where he and Nita hung suspended. Their forcefield was anchored to this one set of coordinates, so that underneath them the planet’s rotation could just barely be seen, if you fixed your eyes on one spot and watched how it approached the terminator and slid under. And the slow swing of Thesba around its primary was visible too, a leisurely movement toward moonset, sliding at the same kind of speed that the Sun’s light seen through blinds at home might creep down the wall late in the day.

Kit held still and quiet as he watched this, waiting for Nita to get past the first few moments of physical discomfort that came of being in space without gravity. The Moon wasn’t too hard to deal with, as a rule: even as little as one-sixth gee gave your gut and your inner ear enough gravity to keep them feeling relatively normal. However, the balance-weirdness and orientation problems that came with microgravity were another story. Kit had been lucky enough to find he could get over these pretty quickly. But Nita (like the vast majority of astronauts) had had a fair amount of trouble with it her first few times, and even now had to hold still and not be too active for the first few minutes in zero-gee until her brain managed to talk her inner ear out of misbehaving.

She floated there with her eyes closed for a few seconds, apparently waiting for her inner ear to get the news about where they were, and then cracked one eye open, taking in the view.

“Okay?” Kit said.

“Okay.”

Kit reached into his otherspace pocket for his manual and flipped it open, pulling up a spell that he normally kept ready and partially executed for situations like this. He spoke the last five words of the spell, and the inside of the forcefield came alive with a heads-up display of the most prominent bodies within range.

The image of Thesba’s inner structure in the display was seriously unnerving. Peculiar stresses and striations revealed themselves in the moon’s inner mantle—numerous many-forked streaks of pulsing red light in the display, running outward through the upper mantle and radiating toward the crust from the thin, deformed boundary regions outside that peculiar lumpy triple inner core. The outer crust was a patchwork of restless magma leakage, broad wounds torn through the outermost discontinuity level and bleeding giant lakes of superheated molten stone and metal up to the surface, where they cooled fitfully to stone and then tore and bled again.

Kit stared at all this in fascinated horror. “What a mess.”

“Scenic,” Nita murmured. “But not for long.”

Kit just laughed and ran a hand through his hair, which as usual when he hadn’t put anything on it to keep it in line, his hair stood up a bit in the almost-zero gee. “Definitely not the kind of moon you’d want to go up to and sit around on, watching your home planet…”

Nita shook her head, her hair immediately rising in a cloud around her in the microgravity. She pushed it back. “Not unless you wanted to burn your butt right off. And assuming you could even see it through that atmosphere.”

“Yeah.”

“But then the whole thing’s pretty much of a write-off. All the flows in the dynamo layer are changing, which means Thesba’s magnetic field’s going to be completely screwed up real soon. Meaning Tevaral’s magnetic field will get screwed up too, and if radiation starts getting into the lower atmosphere from space, that’ll be bad for everybody on the Tevaralti surface pretty quick…” Nita sighed. “Possibly one of the reasons that the cousin down there wasn’t very happy about the idea of us coming up here.”

“Or else he took a look at our personal profiles and got worried that we might be coming up here to start messing around with it on our own.”

Nita had to snicker at that as she pushed her hair out of her face again. “Yeah,” she said, “guess that might have been an idea that could’ve occurred. But…”

“I am absolutely not going any closer to that than this,” Kit said. “Right here’s close enough. It looks like it’d blow if you sneezed at it.”

“Like other things might,” Nita said, glancing upwards and away from Thesba, over Tevaral’s dark limb. Distant in the deep sky but not nearly distant enough, a pitiless, red-burning eye, Erakis laid crimson highlights over everything it touched, filling in shadows that should have been quite dark with an uneasy, bloody glow. As Nita pressed a hand against the forcefield to turn herself so she could look at Erakis more directly, her hair fluffed up again and got in her face, and the red giant’s light set all the tendril-ends of it on fire.

“This is getting to be such a nuisance,” Nita muttered. She pulled the hair back with one hand, twisted it together, and stuffed the end of the attempted ponytail down the back of her shirt. It promptly came out again and fluffed up in all directions like a dandelion head gone to seed.

Kit didn’t comment, having noticed over the past couple of months that Nita had been letting her hair get longer, and uncertain about both why, and what would be safe to say. Is it because Dairine started getting hers cut shorter, I wonder? But then again, who knew if there was even any connection? Maybe this was all in his head.

“Why did I not bring a scrunchie?” Nita was muttering. “Oh God, Bobo, make a note for me. When in space, always have a scrunchie!”

Kit didn’t hear any response, which again left him feeling strangely relieved. “Was this the thing you were trying to remember before we left?”

“Uh,” Nita said, and paused. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

There was a moment’s quiet as if she was listening to something, and then Nita frowned. “Yes, fine, I’ll try that memory routine when we get home, but for the moment will you do me a favor and just make my hair lie down?”

Kit tried not to look as if it was at all funny that Nita was annoyed enough to be having this conversation out loud. “I don’t care,” she said, “a touch of localized gravity will do just fine if it’s not too much trouble!”

Kit knew that tone of voice, and winced. Nita’s hair very quickly laid itself down flat.

“Thank you,” she said, and blew out a breath.

“Better?” Kit said.

She nodded, pushing against the force field with one foot to turn back toward him. “Yeah. …But not just that. Being up here, seeing this this way… that’s better, too.”

“You lost me.”

“Don’t ask me why. It ought to look worse.” She was gazing down on Tevaral now. “But after popping out down there, I needed to recover a little before we get down to work…”

“Not just you,” Kit said under his breath. It wasn’t an admission he’d thought he was going to make just yet, but… Too late now.

“Oh good,” Nita said, sounding relieved. “I didn’t know if it was just me. I could feel that…” She glanced at Thesba. “Just leaning on me.”

Kit nodded. “But there’s something else,” he said. “This isn’t how we’ve worked, usually. Mostly it’s been small teams, little groups, except for the Pullulus War.”

“Yeah. Except for that, never a big deal like this,” Nita said, gazing down at Tevaral. “It could throw you off.”

It already has, Kit thought, but he had enough control over himself to avoid saying that for the moment.

“And we’re so used to doing this on our own terms,” Nita said. “Getting called in on a Wizards’ Right declaration… you don’t really want to even think about refusing. They’re too important. The last time…”

“The Song of the Twelve.”

Nita sighed. “Yeah. Well, I don’t think this is going to be anything like that. There are a whole lot more participants, for one thing. The odds of us winding up in any situation even remotely similar to that seem…” She waved a hand.

“Remote?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, there are how many thousands of us here just from Earth? And a whole lot from all kinds of other places.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, and couldn’t help twitching. Nita looked at Kit for several long moments, apparently having picked up on this.

Then she burst out laughing helplessly. “…Oh God. Have I just doomed us?”

Kit had to laugh too. “Yeah, probably.”

“Oh great, well, that’s out of the way…” Nita turned her attention back to Tevaral. “Then it doesn’t matter that I really, really wish there was nothing wrong with mindchanging some of those people so we could get them all out of here.”

Her voice had gone a lot quieter. Kit sighed, shook his head. “You heard Mamvish… Troptic Stipulation. We have to let them do what they’re going to do.”

“We don’t have to like it, though,” Nita muttered. “I’m not wild about it and I haven’t even started doing what we’re here for yet. And I can just imagine how Dairine’s going to be after a few days.”

Kit could imagine too, and almost wished he couldn’t. The subject of fatality and what one would dare doing to stop it was sensitive enough even just between the two of them, in the wake of Nita’s mother’s death. The thought of how those tensions could wind up playing out here between Nita and Dairine was less than pleasant. “Let me know if she starts getting on your nerves…”

Nita sighed. “I wouldn’t wish her on you. I can deal.”

“Yeah, but you may need somebody to vent on afterwards.”

She gave him a sideways smile that said both Thank you and Oh really? “And who do you vent on after I’m done with you?”

Kit thought about that. “Ronan, usually. Then he tells me I’m a gobshite, or some other rude Irish thing, and we move on.”

“Oh well,” Nita said, “as long as there’s a protocol, that’s okay then.”

“Also…” He wasn’t sure how to say this and not have it sound either overbearing or needy. “I kind of hate being split up, this time.”

“Why? Nothing bad’s going to happen. We’ll be fine.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant. “I mean… It’s easier to cope when you’re around. When we’re on errantry. And because of all these people who don’t want to go, even though we’re trying to help them… I think it might be harder than usual to cope.”

“For you and for me, is what you’re saying.” She gave Kit a penetrating look.

“Look, I’m not trying to get into a contest with you about who’s going to have more trouble with this…” Because I’m having trouble with it already!

Nita scowled: but it wasn’t an angry expression… more the one Kit had seen Nita turn on problems she was trying to solve. “Listen, I don’t like being split up either! It’s what you said before: you get used to working one way and then it makes you nervous when you get shoved out of your comfort zone. Or into something big and complicated like this, where it’s already running at full speed like some big machine.”

“And you don’t feel like a cog…”

Nita laughed, though it sounded as if the joke was at her own expense. “Maybe not. But that’s what I am today. What we both are. And I doubt anybody’d thank the cogs if they started deciding they didn’t like where they’d been installed, and just relocated themselves somewhere else in the machinery.”

“Back into the comfort zone…”

“And someplace where they make everything else grind to a halt. Not the kind of thing a wizard does…” Her eyes drifted back to Thesba. “It’s an honor to be involved in this, you know? That’ll help me cope. And you too.”

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.