Lifeboats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I bet. But did you bring food?”

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

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

“Did you remember what you forgot?”

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

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

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

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

“Just thought I should check.”

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

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

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

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

“Why? What could happen?”

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed yes. This way—”

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

“Go,” Kit said.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Neither actually. Kit works better.”

“Kiht. And you’re a he, then?”

“Uh, yeah.”

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

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

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

“All right. Well, Cheleb’s a ‘hae’—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kiht, this is Cheleb,” said Djam.

“Dai, cousin!” Kit said. “Well met.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other two wizards looked at him rather oddly. Kit, though, was staring at the standing stone and pointing, and trying to recover himself, because he felt like an idiot. Nonetheless, something was clinging to the side of the stone, staring back at him with numerous strange, dark eyes. “What the hell is that?”

To his complete chagrin, both Djam and Cheleb started laughing, one high, one low. Djam hurried over to him, saying, “Come on, Chel, I thought you said you got rid of them all!”

“Got rid of all the ones that were there then,” Cheleb said, still gasping with laughter. “Might’ve needed to tweak the duration element in the spell.”

“Do that!” Djam said. Meanwhile he slipped past Kit, waving his arms at the dark thing that was clinging to the stone. “Oh, go on, you! Go on, little cousin, get on out of it, go away—”

Kit was feeling like an idiot about the way he’d reacted, and now came up beside Djam to have a closer look at the creature. It looked like nothing so much as an octopus, though a rather small one—maybe only a couple of feet across when all its tentacles were spread out. It was dappled and patched in soft brown and the blue-green that was typical of Tevaralti foliage; the tentacles didn’t have suckers, but instead a soft, rough undersurface in a darker color. The baggy body looked very much like that of an octopus, but instead of just having one pair of eyes, one on each side, the whole abdomen—assuming it was an abdomen—was peppered with dark hemispherical eyes, each one featuring a peculiar four-branched pupil. The annoyed-looking attention of all these eyes was fixed on Kit and the gesturing Djam, and the creature stared angrily at them as it began to shuffle down the standing stone with a faint cranky hissing sound.

“So what is it?” Kit said.

“It’s a sibik.”

Kit watched the way it was moving its tentacles—once again very octopus-like, graceful and very certain about how it moved. “Where does it come from?”

“Everywhere,” Cheleb said. “All over planet. Two, three hundred species in water, on dry land, especially up in trees. Some have wings, not on this continent thank the Singularity. Plains and prairie species particularly numerous.”

“Sounds like you’ve been doing your research,” Kit said.

“Not much choice,” Cheleb said. “Things are everywhere.”

“Are they smart?”

Djam made one of his laughs, a kind of a bubbly sound. “Smart enough to get into your portal if you leave it open, and eat everything in sight! You want to be careful about that.”

“Okay. What do they eat?” Kit said, watching with interest as the sibik got itself down into the grass that surrounded the standing stones and began to slither away.

“Anything they can get those little tentacles on,” Djam said. “Though they do seem to favor carbohydrates over flesh protein. Just as well—there are a lot of unusual body chemistries on this planet, and it’s probably a survival mechanism to stick to what you can be fairly sure won’t kill you.”

“Weren’t so sure they didn’t eat flesh when that one got its little clingers around you,” Cheleb said.

“What?” Kit said. “What happened?”

Djam laughed and gestured at the big seat-like stone in the center of the circle. “I was sitting in the hot seat there keeping an eye on the gates till Cheleb here got back from an errand, and one of them came creeping along and decided to see if I was edible.”

“Not what he said,” said Cheleb. “Wanted you for nesting material.”

“Well, he bit me first,” said Djam. “Then he started trying to pull my fur out.”

Kit laughed. “Okay,” he said, “so they bite, but they’re not really harmful, and you can talk to them in the Speech.”

“Not great conversationalists,” Cheleb said. “Mostly interested in food and reproduction.”

“Kind of interested in food myself, at this point,” said Djam. “Come on, Kit, we’ll have a drink and a bite of our own and show you what you’ll be doing.”

There followed some bustling around after supplies, and finally all three of them wound up sitting together on the big flat central rock, working on self-sealing-and-unsealing boxes of a brand of multispecies iron ration that Kit had often seen in shops at the Crossings. “Noisome harkh,” said Cheleb, digging into one container, “but useful…”

Kit made a note to check the manual and find out exactly what harkh was in Cheleb’s local dialect: his understanding of the Speech seemed to simply render it as “food”, but something else could be going on. The ration was in the form of bars of more or less breakfast-bar size, and the three of them sat chewing on these and passing a water bottle back and forth. “So what they have us doing here, cousin,” Djam said as he finished up one bar and waved the wrapper on a second one open, “it’s not that it’s difficult work.”

“Not exciting though,” said Cheleb, as Djam bit half off the new bar while reaching into his body fur and pulling out, from somewhere or other, a long slender shiny metal rod that Kit at first mistook for a wand. “Sit around for a long time, wait for something to go wrong. Then when it does, panic, go crazy fixing it. Say bad things about Oldest Outlier. Then repeat. Often.”

Djam tilted his head back and forth in what Kit suspected was an Alnilamev version of a nod and touched a control at one side of the rod, then pulled. A see-through page of light followed the gesture out into the air; a projection or hologram of a manual page, with centered on it a very detailed graphic of the gating complex, and scrolling columns of readout associated with each of the feeder gates. “All the locations that feed into these gate interfaces are located elsewhere on this continent, usually in big cities,” Djam said. “But each of these accepts incoming transits from a spread of between six and twelve locations in each planet day. Every time one of the gates at our end closes down its connection to a remote location and starts opening a connection to a different one, this area experiences a series of energy fluctuations and local temporospatial derangements.”

“Unavoidable,” Cheleb growled around haes mouthful. “Space hates gates. Always a problem.”

Another back-and-forth head tilt from Djam. “We’ve been given prewritten spell routines to compensate for these flux events,” he said. “They’re independently powered and they’re automatic; they cut in every time a feeder gate closes down and starts going through the process of locking onto a new remote location. But you have to watch them, because sometimes something goes wrong at the far end—not enough people ready to move, some kind of problem with their own feeder gates—”

“Logistics,” Cheleb said, finishing haes ration bar and reaching for another. “Always the weak spot. Mass transport intervention’s a tree.” Hae reached out to the manual “page” Djam was holding open and tapped it with one beige-hided claw. Immediately the view shifted, showing a structural schematic of small individual pathways melding together to form larger branches, always in multiples of five or six to one, through two or three layers of gate connections, until the broadest of these converged into single final trunks fading away at their bases—the light pulsing there indicating the jump to another world. “Little gates all over this continent feed bigger ones, groups of bigger ones feed bigger ones still. That one—” Hae flicked his claw at the largest gate out in the complex across the plain. “On-planet terminus gate. Goes only one place, refuge world called Dallavei, three hundred ninety-four light years from here. Resettlement plan tries to keep people from same continent together unless they request otherwise.”

“Dallavei’s the second most distant of the six refuge worlds,” Djam said, “so all the gates debouching on it are the second highest-powered ones in the network. They need a lot of watching.”

“So we sit all through a shift,” Kit said, “and just watch the unlock-and-lock sequences execute.”

“That’s right,” Djam said. “Sometimes nothing happens… everything runs perfectly smoothly. But every six minutes, or ten, or more, depending on what the transit schedule is doing upstream, one of those five feeders closes and hunts its new target. And you watch it. Mostly, eight times out of ten, everything goes smoothly, nothing happens.”

“Or ninth and tenth times,” Cheleb said, “just when think things will be quiet—things act up. Smaller portals have traffic problems. Or start throwing gravitational anomalies.” Hae shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Gates hate each other as much as space hates them. Pack so many gates so close together, even small ones, they throw mass-substrate errors, or else time and local space get out of synch. Act quickly, adjust local gravitational constant, gates don’t rip each other out of ground and ruin whole day.” Hae rolled his eyes most expressively, making Kit smile: he’d noticed more than once on trips to the Crossings that the gesture was surprisingly common among humanoid species, though it could mean really different things depending on cultural influences.

“Is there a control center,” Kit said, “or anywhere in particular we need to be while we’re monitoring all this?”

“I’m a nervous type,” Djam said. “I like doing it here.” He thumped his furry two-thumbed hand on the stone they sat on. “Makes me feel better to be able to see what’s going on without using remote sensors.”

“Personal preference,” Cheleb said, and shivered. “Can do it just fine from inside portable cave. Weather here’s terrible even when not dropping water all over everything from cold chilly sky.” Hae shivered again.

“Or else you just don’t care to look at that all day,” said Djam, and cast his eyes upward.

For a moment they all looked up at Thesba, now approaching the zenith. After a moment, “Wouldn’t try claiming otherwise in the Speech,” said Cheleb.

“Me either,” said Kit.

Djam sighed, got up. “Nor I. Kiht, we should get your puptent set up so you can get some rest. Your—manual?—will have a guide for you on how to handle the monitoring: I’ll sit with you for some of your first shift, give you pointers. After that we should sort ourselves a schedule, see whose planet’s day matches this one best, who does what best and when… because we’re going to be doing this for days.”

Cheleb got up too. “Have early-day shift tomorrow,” hae said, “need to go curl up now. Later, cousins…” And hae got up and went off to haes puptent’s portal, vanishing through it.

Kit looked up at Thesba, shivered one more time in that cold wind, and got up to go after Djam and get his puptent sorted out.

***

It was another hour or so before Kit was anywhere near ready to settle down. There was always so much sorting and settling to do; the things he’d fired into the pup tent at high speed when he was packing and getting out of the house now needed to be stacked up out of the way. And then of course he had to make his bed—literally make it, constructing the spell that would be substituting for a mattress. In fact he had to make it three times, because he kept getting the size of the air mattress wrong (and in order to get the mattress to the right level of firmness, the spell defining the volume of the air which was being “hardened” into the mattress was particularly rigorous). But finally he was standing there in the middle of the eggshell-white half dome that was the way the inside of the puptent expressed itself, looking at the neatly-made bed with his striped bedspread on it, and the boxes and containers of food piled up all around the edges of the space, and the stacks of books and other things he’d brought with him, and all of a sudden the weight of everything that had happened over the course of the day came down on Kit’s shoulders all at once and left him feeling desperately tired.

The temptation to simply flop face down on the bed and pass out right then and there was huge. Unfortunately there were still things that needed to be done. For the moment, Kit just sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for his manual, thinking nervously about what it was going to be like for him in the morning when he sat down on that flat rock outside and it was his turn to ride herd on a flock of cranky worldgates. He thought about Djam sitting up there now with his sleek little pull-out manual, and Cheleb, asleep in haes own “portable cave”, and was relieved that they were so nice and that he got along so well with them. Though that’s probably no accident, Kit thought. Some ways the Powers will be behind a lot of this, and mostly we’ll be put where we’ll work best…

He flipped through the pages to the messaging section and tapped on Nita’s last text message to him. “You conscious?” he said.

It went out as a text, since that was what he was responding to, but it was her voice that answered. “Nngh, barely,” Nita said. “What about you?”

“Getting ready to turn in,” Kit said, piling his pillows on top of each other and flopping back against them. “How is it where you are?”

She sighed. “It’s a mess. Six gates, funneling into one about halfway up the transit tree. So the team here has both incoming and outgoing schedules to worry about, and just after I arrived they had to shut down two of their incoming gates because of some kind of gravitational problem upstream. I’m just so very happy that they think I’m actually going to be good at keeping an eye on this thing when I have my first shift tomorrow.”

“This is all because we’re friends with Rhiow, isn’t it,” Kit said.

“Don’t know about all,” Nita said. “For all I know, it’s because you use your beam-me-up-Scotty spell more than anyone else on Earth.”

“Oh yeah,” Kit said. “Blame me.”

“Whenever possible.”

Kit laughed at her. “Are your teammates nice?”

“Nice? You have no idea. They were acting as if it was a big deal when I arrived… I have no idea why. Though maybe,” she added, as if the idea was just occurring, “they’re thinking that having a visionary on site would be useful if something starts to go wrong.”

She sounded uneasy. Kit knew why: Nita’s visioning abilities were going through changes, and right now they didn’t always work the way she wanted them to, or (sometimes) at all. “Look,” Kit said, “the monitoring equipment and spells they’ve got set up on these gates are really sensitive. I had a look at one of the basic readout arrays a while ago, and I doubt it’ll need a visionary to let people know if one of these things starts getting twitchy.” In fact it had better not, because I’m no visionary…

Nita sighed. “Okay.”

“So who’s on your team, then?”

“Oh. A sort-of-a-girl from Alya, that’s one of the star’s names, anyway—it’s a binary, over in Serpens someplace. I should know where but…” She yawned. “Ask me tomorrow. They’re sort of shelly all over, but the shell’s segmented, like what an armadillo has. And so pretty! She’s all inlaid with gems and metal and stuff; Carmela’s going to try to steal her look the minute she sees it. The other one’s a guy from Natih, you know the ones I mean, we’ve seen them at the Crossings a couple times. The little dinosaury ones with the neck frills and the unpronounceable names. Anyway, all very nice people. But they’re really tired out: this gate’s been running them ragged.” She yawned again.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “I get a feeling these guys have been having trouble too. …Well, here we are. We’ll see if we can get things to work a little better.” He yawned too.

“Listen to you,” Nita said. “You should crash.”

“You’re the one who got me started,” said Kit. And then he could feel another yawn on its way, and started to think she had a point. “And know what? You’ve convinced me. I’m done.”

“That was too easy,” Nita said, and laughed. “When are you getting up?”

He glanced at his watch, which was still running on New York time. “Uh… six hours from now, maybe. It’s late back home but I want to get used to the local time as quick as I can.”

“Okay. Setting an alarm?”

“Definitely.”

“Good. Call me then?”

“No point in suffering alone.”

He knew she could hear his smile. “Later,” Nita said, and the manual page grayed itself out as she closed the connection.

Kit just sat smiling at it for a moment, then felt around under his pillows for where he’d stuck his phone: there was one more thing to do before he could shut down. He woke up the screen, touched a couple of icons, and the text function came up.

Normally there would have been no limit on a text’s length when it was working as a manual function. But the screen of his phone was saying, in a very no-nonsense font, DUE TO INCREASED ENERGY REQUIRED FOR INFRATEMPORAL MESSAGING, 500 CHARACTERS PER LOCAL DAY ONLY. SORRY, NO AUDIO / IMAGE MESSAGING.

Kit sighed, but it made sense. Doing anything that messed with the arrow of time was inevitably extremely power-intensive. For all Kit knew, each character of the message was going to have to be inscribed on a separate tachyon, which would then have to be pushed backwards in time, or sideways, or something more complex. It was the kind of technical detail that probably would set Nita off into a long fascinating discussion with Bobo, but right now the whole idea just made Kit’s head hurt.

GOT HERE OK, Kit typed. VERY VERY— He deleted the extra “very.” —BIG CREEPY MOON OVERHEAD. NOW TO MAKE SURE IT STAYS THERE, AT LEAST UNTIL WE’VE GOTTEN EVERYBODY OUT. IF WE CAN.

He sat there a moment with his mind full of the image of Thesba, and paused: partly because that would have been the normal length of a short text or a tweet at home, and partly because the thought came to him once more that he simply couldn’t understand what was going on with the Tevaralti. How could anybody stay here with that hanging over their heads, ready to shatter and fall at any moment? Probably he’d get a better sense of whatever answers there might be over the days to come: but right now it seemed beyond strange.

PEOPLE I’M WORKING WITH ARE FRIENDLY, YOU WOULD LIKE THEM EVEN IF NOT AS INTERESTING TO LOOK AT AS FILIF OR SKER’RET. FIRST DAY ON THE JOB TOMORROW, BEDTIME NOW, LOVE YOU BOTH.

Kit yawned and hit “send”, then rearranged the pillows, shoved the phone under them again, and got up to go outside and take care of some before-bedtime physical things—carefully looking around both before and after to avoid stepping on any stray sibik that might’ve been in the neighborhood. Before he went back in he paused and glanced over at the throne-like center stone, where Djam was keeping an eye on things. Kit gave Djam a wave. The Alnilamev nodded at Kit, dropped his jaw in what Kit guessed might be his people’s version of a smile, and went back to intently watching his out-rolled manual page.

Kit nodded back, went into his puptent, secured the portal, and got undressed, yawning. Something to read?… But he was really too tired, and he knew he ought to get to sleep—tomorrow would come early and involve serious stuff. He put on pajama bottoms, for his own comfort if not his watchmates’, in case something that needed his presence happened between now and the morning. Then, flopping onto the bed, Kit flipped the manual open to the page that handled the settings for the puptent, and spoke the Speech-word that reduced the lighting to near-darkness. Not total: when he went on an away-jaunt like this, Kit preferred to leave some ambient light running in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night for something. Not a nightlight, he thought. Nothing like one, absolutely not…

He tossed and turned for a while, but couldn’t settle. Finally, though, it came for him: that strange moment when your body—now lying still in silence and dimness and having leisure to actually feel what’s going on around it—somehow finally understands that despite the presence of some basic comforts, your own food and your own bedding, the right kind of air and the right kind of gravity, you’re still not camping out in your back yard. The physical realization settled into Kit’s bones that he was hundreds and hundreds of light years from home, someplace completely strange… and in this case, someplace doomed. A shiver went right down him.

Sleep couldn’t come quickly enough for him: and didn’t.

FIVE:

Thursday

When the manual’s alarm woke him, Kit’s eyes snapped immediately open as if his body had been waiting for it. He moaned to himself and rubbed the graininess out of his eyes, then rolled over and tried to get himself oriented.

It took some minutes, as usual. Kit had noticed that when he slept offplanet on errantry, getting himself operational on the first away day was always more of a challenge than usual—partly because his normal morning routines couldn’t go ahead the way they did at home, and partly because he was always both buzzed and nervous about what was going on. Today was no exception, but he didn’t have time to indulge his wish that he could take things more slowly.

Kit headed straight over to his stash of food and drinks, cracked a bottle of water and chugged half of it, and then pulled his pajamas off and recited a useful spell that Ronan had shared with him. When you were in a place where there were no shower facilities—which this appeared to be—the wizardry in question simply stripped all the dead cells, dried sweat, and other detritus off the very topmost level of your skin, all over your body. Kit closed his eyes and stood there while the spell fizzed and tickled all over him, and then dusted himself off when it finished.

Got to talk to Djam and Cheleb about what they do about waste management, Kit thought. Technologically this is a pretty advanced planet; what do the Tevaralti do? Maybe we can get in a porta-potty or something… But as problems went, for the moment that was a relatively minor one.

He got himself dressed and had some more water, then reached for his manual, flipping it open to the messaging section. “You there?”

Unavailable, said Nita’s status listing on that page. On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading.

“Wow,” Kit said under his breath. “Already? At this hour?” But there was no telling what had come up at her end of things. “Just checking in,” Kit said. “Message me when you’re free.”

He dropped the manual on his bed and went out to take care of the most immediate physical need out back behind the standing stones. He was almost startled by how different the landscape looked in morning light. It was actually a nice morning; the sky was an unusual shade of pale green-gold dappled with little, feathery cirrus clouds, and a very bright white sun was shining from off to the left of the gating complex, low in the eastern sky—Kit decided to think of it as eastern to avoid confusion—throwing the standing stones’ shadows out stark behind them. In his opinion, the view was improved because for the moment Thesba was nowhere to be seen. It would be along soon enough; it circled Tevaral twice a day. But at least I don’t have to see it before breakfast.

On slipping back between the stones and coming around the side of the flat “throne rock” in the middle, Kit found Djam sitting there, leaning against the three-meter-high back of the throne but otherwise apparently hardly moved from when Kit had left him here last night. “How’s it been going?” Kit said, wandering over to sit down next to him.

“All quiet,” Djam said. “In fact, quieter than it’s been for the last couple nights. Makes me wonder if the complex has decided to behave better now that we have a full team on site.” Then he laughed. “Or whether it’s planning to start misbehaving once it’s lulled us into a false sense of security.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Kit said, looking down at the page with the sensor array that Djam had laid out now on the stone beside him. “But it does look good at the moment…”

“Might be a good time for you to synch up your own instrumentality,” Djam said. “I can show you what you need to be looking for.”

Kit nodded and headed back into his puptent. When he came out again, he saw that Djam had lengthened his metallic wand and heightened and broadened the manual page extruded from it so that it was nearly the size of a small flat screen monitor.

Kit laid the manual down next to it, opening it out to the pages having to do with his own assignment in the intervention and the locality where they were based. Immediately the manual’s double-page spread shifted to mirror the display that Djam’s page was showing. There at the top of the display were five small spell-circles, one for each of the feeder gates, interlaced with a webwork of lines indicating power conduits and control structures. At the bottom of the display was the larger terminus gate, its circular diagram pulsing softly as it reported in second by second on the energy flow between it and its target gate light years away, along with the number of people passing through it. More readouts reflected local gravitational stresses caused by all the gates’ operation, the interaction of the larger gate’s portal interface with local spacetime, and the status of incoming traffic from the aggregate of portals upstream.

“There’s no point in trying to read any of it too closely,” Djam said. “The little changes that happen from minute to minute aren’t so important. It’s when you start noticing a trend over a few minutes, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, that you have to start paying attention. The system has its own alarms built-in, and they’re pretty sensitive. If something really starts to misbehave, it’ll give you warning. The art of it is to catch these things before they happen. And, as our seniors have been telling us since we got here, if the alarms go off, don’t waste time; yell for help and get the heavyweight talent in here.” Djam pointed at a softly red-glowing set of characters in the Speech that spelled out EMERGENCY. He touched it, and a list of names or similar personality identifiers popped up. “Whoever is at the top of that list,” Djam said, “just touch it and describe your problem, and they’ll gate straight in here so fast you won’t feel the wind of them arriving before you see their hands, claws, or tentacles getting right into the display and manipulating the gate structure.”

“That’s happened to you?” Kit said.

Djam tilted his head left and right. “Twice now,” he said. “Scared the fur off me the first time. The second time, they could’ve taken the fur for all I cared: I was just glad to get the big gate settled.” He shook himself all over, and his fur fluffed out. “Gravitational anomaly—something triggered by something going on in Thesba’s core. Not my fault, but I was glad when it was over.”

Kit nodded. “All right,” he said, “give me a second. I’ll go back and get some breakfast and you can help me get a handle on this.”

It took them something like an hour—along with a box of Pop Tarts and two cans of cappuccino, one of which Djam sampled and pronounced “awful in a strangely attractive way”— before Djam was satisfied that Kit knew what to look for and Kit was satisfied he was getting enough of a feel for the gate-monitoring interface to be left alone with it. Picking up the finest points of the way the gates interacted, Kit thought, was probably going to take another day or so. There was one proto-emergency after they’d been at it for about half an hour, and Kit was pleased that he had seen the pattern starting to build before the manual’s own alarm had time to go off. For a few moments it had looked as if he was going to get to call in his first assistant from the next level up, but it didn’t happen. The gravitational fluctuations associated with the number three feeder gate calmed down when Kit instructed the manual to boost the gate’s power feed enough to reinforce its own damping mechanisms, spoofing the gravitational field in its immediate neighborhood into ignoring the neighboring four gates and the way they were warping the gravity in space around them.

“That’s it,” Djam said, sounding very pleased as he rubbed his eyes and leaned against the back of the throne. “I’d say you’ve got the eye for this… inasmuch as any of us can have ‘an eye for it’ after we’ve only been doing it for a few days.”

It was as much as Kit could’ve hoped for. “I think I’m okay,” he said. “You should try to get some rest— you’ve really had a long shift. You’ll be close if I need to yell, and anyway—” He pointed at the red “emergency” herald on his manual pages, most carefully not touching it. “It’s not like they’re far away.”

“They’re absolutely not,” Djam said, “believe me.” He stretched and made a different bubbling noise, his version of a yawn, picked up the metal rod from which his energy-based manual page was extruded, and sucked the page back in.

Kit looked away from the manual across the grassy plain toward the masses of people streaming out of the feeder gates and into the terminus gate, so much more visible than they had been last night… but just as constant as they had been last night, the flow never stopping. “What about them?” he said. “Are we ever supposed to go over there and see how they’re doing?”

“Well,” Djam said, “if there was some kind of emergency, of course. But they’ve got Tevaralti wizards handling that side of it, mostly, and nonwizards too—people from their own clans or national emergency services. Mostly we’re expected to keep our eyes on the gates. After all, that’s what they brought us here for; because we’ve got some previous gate expertise.”

“And because we’re humanoid.”

“Well. If we do have to interact with Tevaralti people when they’re losing their world…” Djam sounded uncomfortable. “You can imagine how it would be. The more like you the people who’re helping you are, the less it’s going to upset you. And Powers only know, these people have enough to be upset about right now. Probably it’s best to keep all the on-planet help looking as humanoid as possible, even if we might not be interacting with Tevaralti all that often.”

“That’s excuse we’re given anyway,” said Cheleb from behind them, as hae came around to sit on the seat-stone of the throne on the other side of Djam. Hae shook all haes layers of clothing around haem in a big fabric-heavy shrug. “Who knows what Above-And-Beyonders really have in mind?” Hae stretched where hae sat, looked over at Kit. “Sleep well, cousin?”

Kit nodded. “Yes, thanks.”

“Plying colleague with exotic food, one sees,” Cheleb said, reaching across Djam to pick up the empty Pop-Tart box. “What is ‘raspberry’?”

“Um, it’s a fruit,” Kit said.

Cheleb wrinkled haes gum-flaps away from haes very, very sharp upper teeth. It was like having a crocodile make a distasteful face. “Not part of usual diet,” he said. “Contains carbohydrate, though?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Starch, sugar…”

Cheleb elongated haes eyes at Kit and got up again. “Trade you some of mine later, perhaps? For experimentation. Have places to be, meanwhile.”

Djam looked up. “Where are you headed?”

“Got cousin on other side of planet. Cousin cousin, not hrasht.” Cheleb shook haes layers again, this time apparently to settle them into place. “Helping with small upstream gate. Might as well go see, not on shift until nearly sunset.”

“All right,” Djam said.

“If needed, call right away,” Cheleb said to Kit, patting a pouch slung under haes jacket layer: Kit supposed that was where hae had haes manual stowed, or whatever hae used for one. “Don’t hesitate. Sudden disappearance on Important Job will just impress cousin more.”

There was something so sly about the way he said it that Kit just had to snicker. “Okay,” he said. “Dai, cousin.”

Cheleb raised a claw to them and went off toward the little local-gating pad. Djam stood up too, stretching and bubble-yawning again. “So you’re sure you’re all right with this?” Djam said.

“As sure as I can be right now,” Kit said.

“All right. Call me right away if you need anything, or you’re not sure about a reading.”

“Will do.”

And Djam headed back to his standing stone, waved his portal open, and vanished into it.

Kit looked down at his manual, touched the control at the corner of the double-page spread that brought it into “active-for-intervention” mode, and got busy watching the gates.

***

It took Kit most of the morning to fall into a monitoring rhythm he found comfortable. To some extent this had to do with getting the analysis array on his manual page set up correctly. Too sensitive a setting and it kept giving him false alarms about gravitational anomalies around the feeder gates; but settings not sensitive enough just sat there unchanging for long minutes at a time and made him more nervous than the false alarms had, because he was afraid he was missing something.

Finally he found a happy medium—setting a baseline in the manual for the kind of fluctuations in the local gravitational field that he’d been seeing over the last ten minutes or so, and then revisiting that baseline ten minutes later. Shortly Kit got to the point where he felt confident about glancing at the manual just once every ten minutes or so to make sure that everything was all right. Initially he tended to underestimate the time—it was surprising how long ten minutes could feel while you were waiting for something to go wrong—but finally, around local noon, he got the hang of it enough to start to relax.

He spent the time on either side of local noon delving into the manual for information on his two watchmates’ homeworlds and people, and finishing the business of going through the readings in the manual that had to do with the Tevaral intervention. The more Kit read, the more there seemed to be—the complexity of a full-on rafting project, the movement of not only a planetary population but as much of its biosphere as possible, was terrifying. There was the preparation of the refuge planet or planets, beginning with terraforming and atmosphere configuration and continuing through the transplantation of the threatened biosphere from the viral and microbial level upwards. Then came the duplication of species-typical infrastructure, from the siting of new cities in relationships as closely matching their old ones as possible to the building of new roads, ports, airports or spaceports.

The list of tasks to be handled went on and on. The transfer or rebuilding of new economic resources: factories, agriculture, communications. The rafting and preservation of irreplaceable cultural and artistic buildings and artifacts. Culture-specific disaster counseling, weather management and control, mass data archival, political stabilization… No matter how quickly Kit and Nita and all the other humanoid wizards who’d been brought in finished up their emergency work here and went home, the much larger team of Interconnect Project wizards and technicians would be working on this particular relocation for years if not decades to come.

And this is what Mamvish specializes in, Kit thought. This is what she runs. Not just one or two of these projects: lots of them. The image of Mamvish as a short-tempered saurian kid who turned up on Earth every now and then to trash-talk recalcitrant Komodo dragons had without warning considerably broadened itself out.

Will we see her, I wonder? Kit thought. It didn’t make sense to expect it. She had to be incredibly busy. And more to the point, even if she’s got time for visiting around, what’re the odds it’ll coincide with any of us Earth-based types being conscious? Tevaral’s day, after all, was thirty-one and a half hours long. This fortunately mapped fairly closely onto the Crossings day of thirty-three hours—a schedule that Kit had occasionally had to come to grips with while on errantry. But for an Earth-human used to a twenty-four hour day, sleep and waking schedules could get pretty messed up after only a few of the thirty-plus-hour cycles. Kit suspected he’d have to adjust his own sleep schedule after four or five days of this, and the others might too.

At any rate, the length of the Tevaralti day meant that he and Cheleb and Djam were going to be doing more or less ten hours each of gate-monitoring, with ten hours off and ten hours to sleep. Assuming nothing really awful happens that needs us all at once, Kit thought.

For his own purposes, though, he really hoped this intervention wasn’t going to go on too much longer than Mamvish had predicted… as being on a thirty-hour-or-better schedule for too long wasn’t kind to Earth-human physiologies. You could try to tweak your own body clock with wizardry, but it was delicate work and you usually wound up having to pay for it in more than just your personal energy after you’d tried.

Energy, Kit thought. Now that I think of it… He got up and stretched, and went back to his puptent with the manual open in one hand for something to drink and a snack. Shortly thereafter he was back in place again with some saltines and the manual spread out again, looking over the information about the refuge planet on which this terminus gate was targeted.

Hardly had Kit gotten settled when the manual’s messaging pages started to flash. Oh, now what? he thought as he had the incoming-messages page overlay its content on the gate-monitoring array… and then with a grin he saw from the flashing profile that it was Nita. “You’re just now free?” he said. “What’s going on over there?”

“One of the feeder gates misbehaving,” her voice said from the manual pages. “Started up right during my orientation, which was handy. In a very nasty and unnecessary way. Not what I needed first thing in the morning.” She sounded as if she was still fairly aggrieved. “Or for five or six hours after. How’s your day been so far?”

“Not bad. Had a couple of hiccups while I was being oriented, but nothing like yours.”

“Just as well,” Nita said. “Still, my guys were really good with me. They showed me how to ride it out, and at the same time they kept saying, ‘it’s not your fault! You’re doing fine!’” She laughed.

“Yeah, you’d like mine too,” Kit said. “Both of them. One of them looks like sort of a sly lizard guy who seriously believes in layering, and the other one—” He had to laugh at himself, because he’d caught Djam looking strangely at him a couple of times before Kit realized he’d been staring and cut it out. “He looks like a Wookiee.”

“What?”

“It’s the fur. And something about his face. But there’s no howling or warbling or anything, just this really cultured accent, like something off the BBC. Anyway, they’re both friendly, and the furry one, Djam, is really easy to work with.”

“How old are they?”

“Hard to tell,” Kit said, and flipped some pages in his manual to where Djam’s and Cheleb’s profiles appeared along with his own as this gate’s supervising team. “Uh… ‘Close post-latency’, it says. So…”

“More or less our age.”

“I think. Why?”

He could practically hear her shrugging. “Just curious. The Natih guy here, you remember, Mr. Frilly Dino? He’s pretty old, a thousand years or so our time, but he’s like a little kid some ways.”

“So a lot like Mamvish, then,” Kit said.

“Without the tomatoes, yeah.” She laughed. “Though they’ve got some neat food of their own. We were swapping breakfasts this morning and he gave me these sort of, I don’t know, vegetable sticks, and they tasted exactly like salted caramel! I said to him, ‘I can’t believe this, something that tastes like salted caramel that’s actually good for me?’ And he said, all surprised, ‘Wait! Isn’t all the food on your planet that’s good for you nice to eat?’” She laughed a very rueful laugh. “I didn’t know how to even begin explaining broccoli…”

Nita trailed off. The pause was odd. “Maybe start with cauliflower and work up from there?” Kit said.

“Um,” Nita said, and Kit knew instantly that it wasn’t a good “um”. “Uh oh, gotta go, I’ll call you later, yeah? Right, bye!”

And she was gone. Kit broke out in a sweat as he tapped on the manual page again. It said only, On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading…

Kit sighed. Probably the gate again. Oh well.

He tapped the manual again to bring up his own gate complex’s array of controls and make sure that whatever was going on at Nita’s end wasn’t something that was manifesting system-wide. An event like that was what everyone had been watching for, and even more of a concern than the local anomalies. But a look across their graphs told Kit that all the gates were running well within their nominal ranges.

He sighed, and thought for a moment about home, and life at home, which suddenly seemed incredibly calm and attractive. Except there were problems even with that at the moment. Pop’s new job, Kit thought. Calculus. Valentine’s Day. What, what, what am I going to do about Valentine’s Day?… Shame the candy hearts don’t work.

When Kit had been in the grocery store that day and his glance had fallen on them, the idea had (so briefly) seemed so brilliant. Get candy hearts, use wizardry to erase sayings they came with, replace with cute brief sayings in the Speech… job done. Unfortunately the idea worked better in concept than in execution. Even such a simple message as BE MINE created complications in the Speech. Possessives in particular involved a range of words that in turn invoked a whole range of agency/patiency issues, not least important the concept of whether “ownership” was actually code for a consensual relationship with a fellow sentient being, and if not, what exactly it involved. (Even using ownership words with inanimate objects could prove problematic in the Speech in practice. “Does anyone truly own their car keys?” he’d heard Carl remark once when this subject came up. “Try claiming that you do and see what happens.”)

It was always possible to string a pick-n-mix group of Speech-words together to suggest what you meant, but it was complicated work. Kit had sat back after the third or fourth attempt to render BE MINE and thought, I should try something else. But that might be even worse. And anyway, what if she thinks this is too much? Or is it going to seem like too little? What if she thinks I’m making a joke out of it? Or that it’s way too serious? Oh crap. And then the whole thing had started seeming impossibly complicated and not nearly as clever as it’d seemed in the store, and Kit had shoved the candy-hearts box in the kitchen cupboard and forgotten about it.

Well, he thought, not today’s problem. Next week’s, maybe. Right now we’ve got other things to think about.

He boosted the manual up onto his lap and sagged against the back of the throne rock, crossing his legs and glancing idly eastward as he settled himself. Away across the plain and past the low hills that defined the local horizon, Kit saw a hump or curve through the midday haze and squinted at it before he realized what it was: Thesba, starting to ease its way up over the horizon again for its first pass of the day. Its rising limb looked for the moment almost innocuously pale and golden against the green-gold of the sky.

He scowled at it, almost glad to let his gaze drift back to the gates—not their schematic diagrams, but the gates themselves—and the streams of Tevaralti flowing out of the feeder portals and into the terminus gate that led offplanet, carrying all their worldly belongings with them. Granted, the carts and carrying vehicles they were using were all extremely futuristic, all of them levitating, no one having to actually bear those burdens themselves. But they’re bearing plenty of others, Kit thought as he watched them flowing by. They reminded him of too many images from the TV news—migrants and refugees, desperate people, fleeing from war zones and trying to find somewhere safe.

But at least there’s nobody where they’re going who’s going to argue with them about whether they have a right to be there. Kit had trouble enough imagining what it was like for human refugees fleeing an endangered homeland—everything left behind you, not knowing whether you were ever going to be able to go back. These people, though, knew it was for the last time. There would be no returning. Even after less than a day here, he was beginning to understand better how there might be people who were terribly conflicted about the idea of going away at all. Even though there’s something else going on with them, he thought. Something a lot more urgent, more compelling… whatever that is. The Tevaralti Planetary hadn’t been able to shed much light on exactly what was going on. It was entirely possible that everyone from offworld would finish this job and go home and still be none the wiser afterwards.

Or after we finish as much of the job as we can, Kit thought, looking across the plain to the hazy blot on the landscape that was the campsite of the people who had not gone through the terminus gate… who maybe never would go through.

And I just don’t get it. Nor, to judge from manual chatter around the planet, did a lot of other people. Why didn’t so large a segment of the Tevaralti population want to leave? Seriously, Kit thought, if the Moon was going to fall on the Earth and destroy it, I would not hang around. I’d be upset, sure. Furious! I’d do everything I could to try to stop it. But if it couldn’t be stopped, I wouldn’t say ‘Nothing else is good enough, I want to die with my world…’

There seemed to be a lot of other wizards working here who agreed with him. But Kit was entirely aware that that didn’t necessarily make it right. And the simple mystery of the why of it kept teasing at his thoughts.

Never mind. It may be one of those things that really just doesn’t cross the species barrier, even with the Speech…

Yet all these humanoids had been brought here in hopes that something might leak across that barrier, might eventually make sense for one side or the other, enough to help. The Powers, Kit knew, were gamblers. Trouble is, Kit thought as he bit into a saltine, there’s no telling for sure whether the gamble will pay off…

From off to one side came a sudden soft thump, a sound Kit had learned to recognize over time as the way an inbound nonpersonal gating often sounded in an open area. And here comes one now, Kit thought, and what’s this about?

Kit gave his manual a glance, then stood up and started to head over to the pad, half expecting the visitor to be a Tevaralti or other Interconnect Project official passing through; they’d had one earlier this morning on a routine check. But instead what he saw kicking casually along toward him through the green-blue grass was a long lean figure in black denim and a black parka, which in turn was unzipped to show a black t-shirt underneath that said U2 GLASTONBURY 2010.

Kit watched him come with some astonishment, for two reasons: first, that Ronan was actually wearing a color other than black—specifically, a pair of beautifully tanned and beat-up brown cowboy boots—and second, that he was eating a hamburger. “You busy?” Ronan said. “No, don’t answer that.” He eyed the saltine in Kit’s hand. “I see you’re completely overworked right now.”

Kit snickered and shoved the saltine away into a pocket as Ronan paused to look around. “I take it you’re not on shift until later.”

“You take it right,” Ronan said. “Just making the rounds. Nothing better to do for a couple hours.” The hamburger forgotten for the moment, he looked around him at the broad fields, the wind stroking through the rippling waves of turquoise grassland. “Very pastoral, this…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Could be pretty nice without what’s going on in the background.” He glanced toward the gating complex.

“Though in some other ways a bit unusual,” Ronan said, looking down at one of his boots.

Kit did too, and his mouth dropped open at the sight of brown tentacles reaching up out of the grass and wrapping around the boot as a sibik about the size of a small bunny rabbit started hauling itself up it.

“Friend of yours?” Ronan said.

“Uh, no!” Kit said as the sibik headed up Ronan’s leg. It had twisted the main part of its sacklike body around so that all its little eyes were fixed upwards on the burger in Ronan’s hand.

“Now then my lad, this is not for you,” Ronan said in the Speech, holding the burger higher. “In fact it’s probably not good for you. Come to think of it, it probably won’t even taste any good…”

“My shiftmates don’t seem to think that’s a problem for these guys,” Kit said, as the sibik kept climbing. “Omnivorous.” Which was also on his mind as he reached down to grab the creature, mindful of what Djam had said about being bitten. “And I’m not sure it’ll believe the part about it not tasting good. Come on, let go, little fella… come on!”

The sibik wiggled its upper body sideways enough to look at Kit with a few extra eyes, but it didn’t let go of Ronan’s leg; the tentacles wrapped around it just stretched, rubbery in their stubbornness. Ronan, meanwhile, had burst out laughing, which wasn’t helping matters, mostly because Kit felt like joining him. “No, now,” Kit said to the sibik, “come on, just let go…” He didn’t want to hurt the little thing, so he just kept pulling gently until he started to feel the tentacles give. “Yeah, that’s right, look, we’ll give you something later, okay, but you can’t… have… that!”

The sibik let go all at once and Kit staggered back a step or so, then turned to toss it as gently as he could a short ways off into the grass. “Here,” Kit said as the sibik stretched its head up out of the grass. He fished the remains of the half-saltine out of his pocket and tossed it in the sibik’s general direction. A breath of wind kicked the cracker off to one side and out of sight: the sibik instantly vanished into the grass after it.

Ronan was nearly doubled over laughing, though one hand was still holding the hamburger safely up out of range. “Okay, that’s me done for,” he said, straightening with difficulty as he tried to get control over his laughter. “I’ve lived to see you nearly vanquished in single combat with a tentacle monster!” He managed to take another bite of his hamburger and get it down his face before he doubled over again, waving the remaining third of a burger helplessly in the air. “Sweet Powers that Be, feck me, I’m writ off.”

Kit wasn’t sure what to make of this cryptic sentiment, but he was sure he wanted to check his manual again. “Come on,” he said, “be ‘writ off’ over here…” And he headed back to the throne rock.

It took no more than a glance down at the manual to tell Kit that the gates were perfectly fine. He plopped down on the seat of the throne and Ronan collapsed beside him, still wheezing for air. After a few moments spent alternating between gasping and finishing his burger, Ronan recovered himself enough for words. “So is there anything else living around here I ought to know about? Like, anything bigger? If it’s anything like Tentacle Boy there, I’d rather not run into the regional apex predator.” He finished the hamburger and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “…Boy? Or girl? Or what’s the closest approximation?”

“You’d have to ask him-her-or-it. Or Cheleb, if hae turns up while you’re still here,” Kit said. “Hae seems to be our team sex-and-gender specialist.”

“Do I even want to know more about that?” Ronan said. “Never mind, doubtless eventually I will whether I want to or not.”

Kit, who so far today hadn’t had even a bite of anything hot, gave Ronan an annoyed side-eye. “And while we’re looking for answers to burning questions, where exactly did you get a hamburger?”

Ronan gave him a superior look. “My puptent contains wonders the likes of which your tiny mind may never be able to grasp.”

“Okay, so that was some ready-made thing,” Kit said. “But it was hot.”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “Am I or am I not a wizard,” he said, “and am I or am I not capable of politely asking an object to speed up the rate at which its molecules are presently vibrating? And what the feck else do you conceive heat to be? I think your encounter with the Giant Tentacle Monster’s thrown you off your game. Care for one?”

Kit hesitated. “Only if you’re sure you can spare it.”

“Of course I can spare one, my tent’s full of the things. And as it just so happens…” He reached out one hand with a flourish, stuck it into the empty air—his own otherspace pocket—and came out with another, this one in a cellophane wrapper. “I keep extras on hand in case I run into somebody who’s worn out from wrestling with a just-released kraken.”

Kit gave him a look and took the burger, then started hastily juggling it between his hands, as Ronan had apparently put it into stasis still hot. “Never gonna hear the end of this, am I?”

“Not till there’s no more mileage to be got out of it,” Ronan said. “Eat up or it’ll get cold and the bun’ll go to rubber. Sad sort of end for something that’s come the guts of a kiloparsec to get here.”

Kit pulled off the wrapper and tucked into the burger. It wasn’t half bad: he was tempted to go get some more ketchup for it—there was already some in there, and a slightly soggy but acceptable pickle—and then decided not to bother and just concentrated on eating. Ronan leaned against the back of the throne rock and gazed around him with interest. “If you’re extra nice to me,” he said after a moment, “I’ll come back later and let you have a couple burritos. Not perfect, mind you, could use some more heat in them, but every now and then the Tesco justifies its continued existence.”

Kit’s eyebrows went up: the Tesco Ronan was referring to was a grocery chain. “Wait. Grocery stores in Ireland carry burritos?”

Ronan just laughed. “Seriously, where the feck do you imagine Ireland is, in the Oort Cloud somewhere? Why would we not have burritos when we have hamburgers? I worry about the state of your brains sometimes.”

“Okay, don’t rub it in…” Kit had another bite of the burger. “Anyway, thanks. This is good.”

“The sausage rolls are better,” Ronan said. “Got anything to drink?”

Kit threw a look at his manual to check the gate monitoring array. “Water, milk, cola,” he said. “Some Mountain Dew—”

Ronan looked at Kit as if he’d grown tentacles himself. “What in feck’s name is Mountain Dew?”

Kit grinned and vanished into his puptent.

A few minutes later Ronan was staring suspiciously at a can of it after having taken his first drink. “This has caffeine in it? You could fool me. Tastes like liquid Gummi Bears.”

Kit shrugged, not having a lot of experience with Gummi Bears to start with. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said, pulling the manual back over next to him as they sat with their backs against the throne rock. “Anyway… kind of surprising to see you here. Or anybody else, without more warning.” The language in the manual about doing private worldgating spells in this already-gate-crowded environment had been unusually stern.

Ronan had another drink, shook his head. “Naah, as long as you use the interveners-only pad transport system, it’s okay. It’s pretty low-power, and it’s natively shielded against interfering with the implanted mass-transport gates. Find out the gate address of where you want to go, have the manual input it into the transport pad, and bang, you’re there. Like that TV show but without the fancy water effects.”

Kit nodded. “Seen Neets?”

Ronan shook his head. “Knowledge said she’s very occupied. No point in going where you’re not going to be welcome. Or a distraction.” He uncrossed his legs, crossed them again into what was apparently a more comfortable configuration. “Looks like they stuck her onto one of the more active gates…”

“Yeah, she mentioned.”

Ronan chuckled. “Probably they mean to have her lose her temper with it and terrify it into submission.”

Kit wondered whether there might not be something to that concept. “What about Dairine?”

“Seems quiet where she is.” Ronan shrugged. “Though I haven’t been over there yet.” He sighed and looked around. “This place you’ve got, though… it’s nicer than anybody’s that I’ve seen so far. We should all come over here in our spare time and have a picnic.”

Kit laughed. “You’re always trying to find fun ways to slack off.”

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” Ronan said. “Doesn’t it make sense to stay on an even keel when we’re in this situation?” He looked out toward the gating complex. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been looking at that… or that fecking thing…” His glance went to Thesba, now almost entirely risen above the horizon. “…and thinking about how hard it’s going to be to make a difference to these people. The difference we want to make, anyway.”

There was no point in denying it: Ronan knew him too well. “If the difference we want for them isn’t the difference they want…” Kit said.

“Normally I’d be tempted to agree with you,” Ronan said. “But the Powers seem to be going to a lot of trouble to try to shift that perception somehow—”

He paused, his eyebrows going up. “Feck, so much for my break time,” Ronan said, getting up and dusting his jeans off. “They need me for something on site. Anyway, think about that picnic.” He glanced around him. “Could be fun. Assuming we can keep your little friends out of the potato salad.”

Kit snickered around a bite of the burger. “And look into the protocol for these, yeah?” Ronan said, heading back through the circle of stones and gesturing toward the single-user gating pad. “No point in you being marooned out here.”

“I should ask the shiftmates,” Kit called after him. “See how they feel about it.”

“Can’t see why they’d disapprove,” Ronan said. “Who knows, maybe they’ll bring something blue…”

Kit laughed. “Thanks for this!” he said, waving the burger.

Ronan waved an arm, not turning around: trotted off to the pad, hopped up onto it, and vanished.

***

Kit spent the afternoon getting caught up on his reading and his snacking, chatting with Nita once or twice, and making sure the check-the-gate-complex-every-ten-minutes habit became thoroughly ingrained. Only once did the complex act up—when Thesba was setting for the first time, and the number three feeder gate threw a small gravitational conniption. The fluctuation appeared to have something to do with that gate having had significantly fewer Tevaralti passing through it for a ten-minute period during which the gates on either side of it were at much higher pass-through levels. Or something like that, Kit thought. At the moment he was fairly vague about the finer details of the theory behind the way gates in close proximity to one another behaved. But here his affinity with mechanical systems served him well, and at any rate he’d been warned about this kind of problem and knew what to do about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“Pets,” Kit said. “A pet.”

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

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

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

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

Kit laughed. “You can still smell that?”

“Of course. Can’t you?”

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

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

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

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

“Sure.”

“Maybe it’s just a kinesics thing…”

“What?”

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

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

Djam looked bemused. “What?”

“You remind me of somebody.”

“A friend? A colleague?”

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

“Oh?”

“Yeah, somebody famous.”

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

“Yeah, he’s a good guy. A hero type.”

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

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

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

“I’m not sure I understand.”

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

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

“Well…” Kit said, considering that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s a picnic?”

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

***

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

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

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

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

“And your planet is sevarfrith.”

“Mostly, yeah.”

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

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

“That is so strange,” Djam said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Promise,” Kit said as the portal closed.

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

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

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

Outside the portal Djam said, “Kiht?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was when he heard the rustling noise.

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello help?”

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

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

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

It just looked at him.

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

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

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

“Sibik.”

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

“Sibik.”

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

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

“Fine. Now what did you want again?”

“Salt flat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“More!” said the sibik.

“More what?” Kit said, pulling out the last saltine.

“More cracker!”

“Think we’re gonna need some education on what the magic words are, too,” Kit muttered. He handed the eagerly-grabbing tentacle the final saltine. The sibik stuffed it away, then lifted its abdomen to fix all its available eyes on Kit to see where the next one was. In response, Kit found himself doing exactly what he would’ve done with Ponch in these circumstances. He showed the sibik his hands, first the palms and then the backs, to demonstrate that there weren’t any more saltines being hidden from it.

“More cracker?” the sibik said, sounding mournful.

“All gone, buddy,” Kit said. “No more tonight.”

“No more cracker?”

“Nope. Sorry, big guy.”

The sibik gave Kit a seriously disappointed look from its many eyes. “Gone…” it said, and then slithered itself away between the standing stones and out into the darkness, where it vanished.

“Well,” Djam said, “that was unusual…”

“I guess,” Kit said, standing up and dusting a few crumbs off himself. “You okay, now? How’re the gates?”

“They’re fine,” Djam said. “Seriously, after you and Cheleb worked them over, they’ve been a lot quieter. It’d be nice if this was a trend.”

“We’ll see,” Kit said, and yawned. “Wow, I’m sorry. Have a quiet shift, kehrutheh, I’ll see you in the morning…”

“Right, Kiht. Rest well.”

***

Kit made his way back to his puptent and sealed it up behind him, waving the soft interior glow down. All of a sudden, now that he was by himself and off duty, he felt woozy with being up later than he should have. But Kit wouldn’t have traded the feeling for being more rested: he was feeling the strangeness of being here a lot less than he had last night.

He got undressed and crawled under the covers of his air bed, then grabbed for his manual and flipped it open to Nita’s profile page. “You still up?”

“Uhh,” the answer came back a moment later. “Just falling asleep. Are you done with whatever? The manual said you were busy.”

“There was a lot going on,” Kit said. “And then I was feeding an alien octopus.”

There was a pause at the other end. “I know that really ought to mean something,” Nita said, “and it doesn’t right now. At all. Tell me in the morning?”

“First thing.”

“Thanks,” she said, and her profile grayed out as the contact closed down.

Kit yawned and let his head thump back against the pillow. It felt ridiculously good to be horizontal, felt like he’d been waiting years for it. Busy day, he thought. That’s all. Same again tomorrow, probably.

And just as he was dozing off, he remembered one more thing he had to do. He felt around under his pillow for his phone and pulled it out, bringing up his pop’s profile.

LONG DAY TODAY, he typed. GOT TO DO SOME GOOD WIZARDRY, SEEMS I’M GOING TO BE USEFUL HERE. ONLY THING I’M REGRETTING IS THAT I DIDN’T BRING MORE SALTINES. HAVE A FEELING I’M GOING TO RUN OUT SOONER THAN I THOUGHT. LOVE YOU BOTH. NIGHT.

SIX:

Friday

When Kit woke up the next morning, it happened exactly the way it did at home when things were going normally: his eyes snapped open five minutes before the alarm went off. It’d be really great if this meant that I’d already made the change to this time zone, this schedule, he thought. But it was too soon to tell.

He stretched under the covers, pleased; he had a couple of hours to go before he was due on shift. However, the moment Kit got out of bed, the resolution he’d made the day before to speak to Ronan about sanitary arrangements asserted itself at full strength. He grabbed for his manual, flipped it open, found Ronan’s profile page, and tapped on it. “Ro?”

“You’re up early,” said the voice from the page.

“Not half as early as I wish I’d been. I forgot to ask you yesterday—do you have anything like a toilet over there?”

“Feck yeah, we’re in the middle of town here and they’ve got all the amenities laid on.”

“Can I come over real quick and use what you’ve got? I hate to keep just taking leaks in the grass over here—I’d rather my shiftmates didn’t accidentally walk into a wet spot. And as for anything else—”

“Say no more,” Ronan said hastily. “Just get to the pad and have it seek on my coordinates. I’ll meet you at my end.”

Kit was in enough of a rush that he did no more than pull on a hoodie and the same jeans he’d worn yesterday and go jogging straight out to the local-transport pad, waving at the still-enthroned Djam in passing. Everything he’d drunk before going to bed last night was now incredibly eager to be recycled, and as a result he paid precious little attention to the gleaming urban landscape in which he appeared a few moments later—a broad plaza surrounded by sleek and shining buildings five or ten stories tall. Fortunately, Ronan was right there waiting for him, as promised, all in his everyday black jeans and sweatshirt and parka among many humanoids and Tevaralti much more brightly dressed, or at least feathered. “Right this way,” Ronan said, and led Kit through the ground floor entrance into one of the nearby buildings.

Ronan pointed off to one side of the broad bright entry hall. “Straight through that door,” he said. They’ve got the same plumbing as we have, and the same way of handling it. And some forward-looking cousin had them put a sonic shower in there for us unfeathered types, if you feel the need.”

“If!”

Half an hour later Kit was out in the plaza again, much relieved in a number of ways, and his skin tingling hard due to underestimating the assertiveness of the “scrub” setting on the shower. For a few minutes he stood there in bright sunlight watching the crowds of Tevaralti heading out of Ronan’s feeder gates and into the larger, waiting downstream portal. These crowds might be smaller than those at his own gate, but all around him Kit could feel the same sense of urgency and sorrow: and here too, off to one side, a group of Tevaralti maybe a couple of thousand strong was gathered around various temporary-looking structures, watching the others go.

“We don’t really need to be watching them,” said Ronan’s voice from beside him, “I know that. But I don’t seem able to stop either.” And he handed Kit a cellophane-wrapped croissant and a small plastic cup that Kit realized was full of espresso.

Kit stared into the cup. “Where are you getting this?”

“When we were over for the Christmas party your mama showed me the capsule-coffee machine she was giving your pop,” Ronan said. “Cute wee thing. Got one for myself in the January sales. I like espresso.” He knocked back the contents of the cup he was holding, crumpled the cup up and shoved it in his pocket.

“You’d better have made me one,” came a familiar voice from not too far away. “Especially after I gave you half the sugar I brought and saved your butt.”

Ronan was snickering and reaching into his otherspace pocket before Nita, newly appeared on the single-transport pad, could get over to them. “Eat your croissant before she takes it off you, she’s mad for these,” he said to Kit under his breath. “So I forgot my sugar,” Ronan said, raising his voice again. “I’m busy trying to save a species here. What about those doughnuts you’re trading me?”

“I’ve got doughnuts but not the ones you want,” Nita said, sounding annoyed. “Because certain little sisters have figured out a way to use Spot to pilfer my supplies even though my puptent’s portal was secured and the interior discontinuity rotated forty-five degrees out of true with this space. I had a whole large-sized box of the Entenmann’s Chocolate Lovers assortment and a box of the devil’s food frosted ones, and she took them both and left me nothing but a box of the miniature ones with the powdered sugar.” She scowled at Ronan. “So don’t complain to me, because this is your fault.”

Ronan produced an expression of exaggerated innocence. “Mine?”

“My money says she’s secretly trading the chocolate to some wizard she’s working with for diamonds or transuranian isotopes or something,” Nita said. “So you’d better hope she doesn’t trigger some kind of diplomatic incident.” She leaned her shoulder against Kit’s, and her head against his. “I’m awake now,” she added, giving him a most pointed look. “So you can tell me whatever you were supposed to tell me as soon as you got up.”

“Forgive me for wanting to pee first!” Kit said.

Nita waved a hand at him. “Too much info way too soon,” she said, reaching out for the espresso that Ronan handed her. “Is there sugar in this?”

“Yes, your royal highness and ruler of all you survey, there is sugar in it for feck’s sake, pray allow your servant to go on living and drawing breath in your service, at least until you’re carbed up enough,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.

Nita snickered and drank about half the espresso at a gulp. “It’s okay,” she said to Kit. “I use the toilet here too. The one over by my gates is really basic, and they don’t have a shower—they’ve got an automated dust bath. Great if you’re Tevaralti, but for humans—” She shook her head. “If you stumble into one by accident, you’d better like sneezing.”

They went off to lean against the plate-glass wall of the building where Kit had been using the facilities. Kit juggled his croissant around, ready to unwrap it but not sure what to do with the espresso in the meantime.

“You should just levitate it,” Nita said, looking out at the feeder gates. “For the time being you’ve got the power to burn…”

That was something that Kit kept forgetting. “…Still,” he said, and tucked the croissant into the crook of his arm until the espresso was gone.

“Old habits are hard to break,” Ronan said, looking where Nita did, toward the unending flow of the crowds.

Nita nodded. “You see something like this,” she said, “and you start thinking we’ve been really lucky.”

Kit glanced at her. “How do you mean?”

“Well, think about it. Since we got started, most of the jobs we’ve been sent on have been pretty easy to solve.” Kit and Ronan both turned incredulous expressions on her, which Nita ignored. “Relatively speaking, okay? Mostly we’ve been sent on errands that we could handle by ourselves. Sometimes we haven’t known we’ve been sent, but we were still able to work out what we needed to do to fix the problems, and then we did that. Without help, or sometimes with it. We haven’t always had happy endings, as such….”

She trailed off, and Kit knew that Nita’s mother was on her mind, even though neither of them had any doubts that her mom was okay. “But things have always worked out,” she said. “This ending, though? It’s not going to be happy no matter what we do, not really. Even if all those Tevaralti there—” She gestured at them with her chin. “Even if all of them right this minute said, ‘Hey, you know what, we’ve been all wrong about this, shove over because we’re going too’… we still don’t get a happy ending. We still get a destroyed planet, and millions of people really unhappy because their home that they loved is gone forever. All we can do is the job we’ve been given until the Powers or whoever tell us we’re done, and then go home.”

Ronan blew out a frustrated breath. “Yeah,” he said, “there are things about this that aren’t ideal. And yeah, the thing about being just another cog in the machine… Go here, do that—”

“A little too much like school,” Kit said.

Nita threw him a dirty look. “Please. You had to remind me? You’re not the only one who has a test coming up.” Kit smiled slightly: in between trying to get him and calculus to make friends, she’d spent a lot of time lately ranting about the upcoming test on her modern history unit. (“Asia! No more Asia! I want to bang all those people’s heads together.”) “And another thing: no matter how this ends up, the minute we go home, tomorrow will still be a school day.”

“Ugh,” Kit said under his breath. “Thanks, we’re even now.”

“I know you hate letting me suffer alone,” Nita said. “Could be it’s mutual.”

Kit almost smiled. “Problem is, I keep having this idea…”

He trailed off. Ronan threw him a look. “Sounds like it’s an idea you don’t much like.”

Kit folded his arms, leaning against the glass wall behind them. “I’m wondering whether we’re going to start getting more of this kind of job because the Powers think we’re grown up enough to take it. And I start wondering if most of wizardry might be like this. If we’re being eased in slowly to a kind of errantry that isn’t—” Kit stopped himself.

“Isn’t going to be as much fun?” Ronan said.

The three of them were quiet for a moment. Kit wasn’t sure what was going on in their heads, but right now he was hating the idea.

“Might be too soon to jump to that conclusion,” Nita said. “But we’ve done group work with other wizards before, and sometimes lately it’s definitely been kind of edgy. Maybe the Powers, or whoever handles assignment logistics for them, are thinking we’re ready to expand our boundaries?”

“Or that it’s time they pushed us out of our comfort zones, you mean,” Ronan said.

Kit threw a glance eastward past the buildings that surrounded them. Thesba wasn’t yet visible, but he could just feel it there, creeping up towards the horizon. “Alaalu and Mars and the Pullulus War,” he muttered, “those comfort zones? Terrific.”

Nita looked at him sidelong. “Wow, listen to that blood sugar. Eat your croissant.”

Kit snorted softly and unwrapped the croissant, which turned out to be surprisingly good and flaky for something cellophane-wrapped. “Seriously,” he said to Ronan, “this comes from a grocery store?”

Ronan shrugged. “You should come along shopping sometime,” he said. “Be a nice change from wee Darryl. He always makes me push him in the trolley.”

Kit sprayed crumbs everywhere. “I want in on that!” Nita said, grinning.

“We’ll discuss it later.” Ronan turned his head to regard the gating complex on the other side of the complex, and briefly got an unfocused look: probably consulting his internal manual to see how his gates were behaving. “Very quiet at the moment,” he said. “I wonder if they’re plotting something. Or maybe this just has something to do with you being here.” He looked at Kit.

Nita shot Ronan a bemused look. “What?”

“He seems to have a calming effect on gates. I was looking at his intervention logs this morning.”

“Now wait a minute,” Kit said, “isn’t that stuff supposed to be privacy-locked?”

“Not when we’re all on the same intervention,” Ronan said, “and when gates’ behaviors tend to get interlinked. I take it you got the lecture from Rhiow on portal contagion.”

Kit nodded, getting busy with what remained of the croissant. Nita rolled her eyes. “Well, we should be grateful almost all the rest of the gating’s done,” she said, “the heavy-duty stuff—”

“Oh bollocks,” Ronan said. “As if moving however many million people doesn’t count as heavy-duty.”

Nita laughed at him. “Compared with moving the biosphere? Half the planet’s been scraped bare over the last month, right down through the lithosphere. Huge populations and communities of animals, plants… whole big chunks of the ecology already transplanted to the refuge worlds. You want to look at the logs for that—they’re something else.” Nita shook her head. “But you know what’s really interesting? The further down the biological hierarchy you go, the more eager life is to get out of here. The plants, especially, aren’t arguing the point. They can feel the change in the local gravity, the magnetic fields. They know what’s coming. So do most of the animals.” She frowned. “What’s weird is the way the ones closer to the Tevaralti, the domesticated ones and the animals in their food chain… they’re a lot less eager. There’s more conflict about going, and when you ask them what’s going on, they can’t tell you.”

“Something to do with this symbiotic thing the Tevaralti have going on, I guess,” Ronan said. “But they will go if you tell them to?”

“Yeah. The Planetary’s had words with the less volitional parts of the biosphere; that pretty much settles it. If they can be gotten out, they’ll cooperate.”

Kit finished his croissant, crumpled up the cellophane and stuck it in his pocket. “You could really wish the Planetary could do the same for the people,” he said, looking at the little crowd of encamped Tevaralti across the plaza and thinking of the huge crowd of them back at his own gates.

“Wouldn’t be just you,” Nita said. “I don’t get how they know what’s going to happen and they just want to sit here and let it happen. There are moments when…” She trailed off, as if she wasn’t entirely happy with what she was about to say. “‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake…’” She shook her head. “Supposedly that’s what it’s all about. Life. Saving it. How are we supposed to stand around and let it just throw itself away?”

Kit had no answers. For the moment his mindscape was rebelling against getting to grips with the huge numbers of Tevaralti who might not survive. Instead in his mind’s eye he suddenly saw the tentacled shape he’d been feeding saltines last night. “You said they were half done with the biosphere,” he said. “What about my part of the continent? There are still a lot of animals running around.”

Ronan stretched himself against the glass wall. His mouth had gone tight. “If the research I’ve been doing on rafting is right,” he said, “only two hundred and twelve rafting projects in all the Interconnect Project’s history have ever achieved one hundred percent clearance of a planet. In all those projects they had decades to work in, not months or days. And even so, that number only works when they leave bacteria and viruses and the smallest in-soil or in-water organisms out of the count.”

He looked away. “Rafting’s about preservation… not total rescue. At least that’s what the docs say. You pull the best case you can out of a worst-case scenario—try to get enough life forms out of a planetary-extinction scenario for them to reproduce themselves, continue as a species… reconstruct their cultures, if they have cultures, somewhere else. Saving every single one of them, it’s a goal all right, something to shoot for. But then so’s perfection.” And Ronan too looked toward the edge of the plaza in the direction where Thesba would be rising. “With a half-busted moon hanging over our heads and getting more fragile every orbit, there may just not be enough time…”

That hopelessness that Kit had been trying to deal with earlier came back for him, in spades. Yet he wasn’t going to give in to it: not yet. We’re just getting started here. “I guess,” he said aloud, “all we can do is do our jobs and try to make sure what we’re doing goes as well as it can.”

“There you go,” Nita said. “We’re on the same page.” She stretched too, bumped her hip against his again. “So what was that you were going to tell me last night?”

Ronan glanced over at them. “I’ll go pretend to do something else so as not to have to stand here and listen to you two embarrassing each other, shall I?”

“No, you don’t have to go anywhere, it’s not embarrassing! Have you seen the local octopuses?”

Nita looked at Kit in bemusement. “Okay,” Ronan said, “I admit that’s not how I imagined your next sentence coming out.”

“And what do you mean ‘octopuses’?” Nita said. “I thought you were somewhere landlocked.”

“We are. They’re kind of field octopuses. They can climb, too: I think maybe some of them live in trees.”

Ronan rubbed his face. “If I wasn’t grateful to be in a city on this planet before,” Ronan said, “I am bloody grateful now. Having octopus things drop on me out of trees is not something I’d be excited about.”

“They wouldn’t hurt you!” Kit said. “You saw the one yesterday. They’re pretty friendly.”

“Tell me about it. If he’d have climbed up me any further, that lad would’ve got friendly with bits of me I really prefer to reserve for humans. And now we’re talking octopus-things that’ll drop out of trees on me and get friendly?” Ronan shook his head incredulously. “Janey mack, there’s something I really don’t need when the fecking moon’s already trying to drop out of the sky on my head.”

Nita gave Ronan’s histrionics an amused look. “But what’re they doing around your gates?”

“There are wild ones running around out in the grasslands,” Kit said, “but sometimes pet ones wander over from the people who’re not using the gates.” He gestured with his head at the gathering across the plaza. “Aren’t you seeing them here?”

“I wasn’t looking for them,” Ronan said, “because it never occurred to me I needed to be looking for octopuses.”

“Sibik,” Kit said. “They’re called sibik.”

“You know,” Nita said, “there’ve been Tevaralti going through my gates with little boxes, and now that I think of it they do look kind of like those dog carriers people at home have to use for their dogs when they’re flying them somewhere.” She stood up a bit and stretched as if her back was bothering her. “So what about them?”

“Well, nothing specific,” Kit said. “Except they seem to have their own version of the symbiosis thing going on, which is interesting. I fed one of them a saltine yesterday, and last night a completely different one came along and asked me for crackers.”

“Asked you?” Ronan said.

“Well, more like demanded. And he knew the language I’d used with the first guy. It’s kind of weird.”

“Think they’ll come back later?” Nita said. “I might come see them if I can get the scheduling to work.”

“I don’t know. I can message you if one shows up. My shiftmates say that sometimes a lot of them turn up, looking for food mostly.”

“Speaking of shiftmates,” Nita muttered, looking over to the short-jump transport pad, “I need to get moving.”

“Before you bugger off,” Ronan said. “We were thinking of having a picnic out at Kit’s place.”

“We?” Kit said, amused.

“In our off time,” Ronan said. “It’s nice out there. Fresh air, peace and quiet…”

“Mr. Party Organizer here hasn’t mentioned that I haven’t cleared it with my two colleagues…”

“You think there’d be a problem?” Nita said. “If we’re in our own downtime, and we’re well away from—” She waved a hand at the transients moving through the square. “—people who might be bothered… don’t see why they’d object.”

Her immediate acceptance of the idea surprised Kit. “Um, okay. When?” He looked at Ronan.

“Don’t ask me right this minute!” Ronan said. “I may have the Knowledge in my head, but that doesn’t turn me into a scheduling app. Maybe you can help, though,” he said, glancing at Nita. “Your silent partner—”

Nita looked vague for a moment; then her eyes snapped back into focus. “Maybe Saturday?” she said to Kit.

He frowned. “Wait, what’s today? So much has been happening…”

“Tell me about it. It’s Friday. So… tomorrow, in the evening in your timezone? Bobo says he needs to do some checking, but that might work, if the people we invite feel like it. Us, Dairine, Tom and Carl if they can make it, some of the shiftmates…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “We can bring some of our supplies to trade around… kick back a little.”

“Sounds good.” She pushed herself away from the glass wall, headed off across the plaza. “Call me about your sibik-y guys if they turn up. At least I can look at them with the manual, even if I can’t come out.”

“I will.”

And off Nita went across the plaza. “I should go too,” Kit said, watching Nita jump up onto the pad, all business, and promptly vanish. “Look, about the picnic: I’ll shoot you a note when I have a chance to talk to Cheleb and Djam. But, listen, thanks… I really needed that shower. And other things.”

“Any time,” Ronan said. “As long as we keep the gates running smoothly, nobody here cares what we’re up to, really. Their minds are pretty much elsewhere.” He looked across the plaza at the crowds pouring from the feeder gates into the downstream one.

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Later.”

He headed back for his puptent to find Djam still enthroned, almost without having even changed his position. “Hey, sorry, that took longer than I thought,” Kit said. “Just let me change and I’ll be right with you.”

“Nothing’s happening here,” Djam said, yawning one of his small bubbling yawns: “don’t rush on my behalf.”

Kit hurried about about changing anyway, picking up some Pop-Tarts and a bottle of water and a can of one of the milder energy drinks to hold him until he could settle in and assemble a more meal-like meal. Because if Mama looks at my supplies when I get home and sees I haven’t eaten anything but junk food while I was away, I’m really gonna be in for it…

He headed back for the Throne Rock and was surprised to see the long grass in front of him waving. Except it wasn’t the wind producing the movement. It was sibiks, a small crowd of them, all humping and slithering along toward him. The one in the lead of the crowd had its abdomen up to see better, and when those eyes spotted Kit approaching, it shouted in a small sibik voice, sort of a squeak, “Cracker!”

“Cracker, cracker!” all the sibiks behind it started shouting. They swarmed to meet Kit and began bouncing up and down around him as he made his way over to the Throne Rock, and a few of them started trying to climb up his legs. “Cracker cracker cracker!”

Kit had a lot of trouble not bursting out laughing at them: if squeaky-toys could shout, this was what they would sound like. “Are you kidding?” Kit said to them as he waded through them, trying hard not to step on any tentacles. “I haven’t even had my cracker yet. What makes you think you’re getting any?”

He sat himself down by Djam and more or less immediately found himself shoving sibiks off his lap. “They weren’t bothering you earlier, were they?”

“Not at all,” Djam said. “In fact I haven’t seen any of them until just now, when you turned up again.”

Kit shook his head. “No, you guys!” he said, as one of the shoved-off sibiks started climbing up his leg. “Not now! You all just behave yourselves until I tell you I’m ready for you.”

“Then cracker?” came the chorus from ankle height.

“Jeez, yeah, then cracker but not now cracker! Now go on, all of you. Outside the circle.”

Some of them started moving off. Others moved a few feet and then crouched down in the long blue-green grass, flattening their little eye-studded abdomens down and looking back sidelong at Kit as if expecting him to forget they were there.

“Outside the circle,” Kit said, waving his arms at them. “Go on! Shoo!”

Reluctantly, even sulkily, the remaining sibiks slunk away, and gathered along with all the others just outside of the circle of stones.

Kit sighed. “Okay,” he said, “tell me how it’s been overnight. Pop-Tart?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

They sat and ate and chatted for a few moments, and then Djam started going over the night’s logs with Kit. The gates had been relatively well-behaved—a few minor gravitational fluctuations around the portal interfaces, but nothing worse. “Indeed they seem quite docile after you and Cheleb spoke to them last night,” Djam said. “Maybe we should make this a daily ritual. You two get together in the evening between your shifts and tell them how to behave, and then I have a nice quiet shift.” He bubbled softly, the laugh turning into a yawn a moment later.

“You should go get some rest,” Kit said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Djam stretched and stood. “But remember, you promised us more of that entertainment, so don’t forget to wake me when you’re ready to start. We left those wizard-knights and their friends with much unfinished business…”

Kit grinned: if Dairine heard that description applied to Jedi she’d be most amused. As Djam got up, Kit caught motion from the corner of his eye. A few sibik were trying to sneak in through the circle of stones without being noticed.

Kit held up a warning finger. “Ah ah!”

The foremost sibik immediately crouched themselves down into the grass again, and one of them said defiantly, “Mealtime!”

Others took up the cry: “Mealtime! Mealtime!” Kit looked at Djam in bemusement. “Now how do they all know this word all of a sudden? I only told it to one of them, and he’s not here.”

“Powers about us, I don’t know! Telepathy? Sign language? Maybe it’s something chemical. The Telling does say something about them using a form of DNA-based learning, and you see a lot of them sucking on others’ tentacles. They could be passing DNA back and forth that way…”

Kit shook his head. “This is so strange. Before I got here, did any of these things even speak to you at all?”

“Not to me,” Djam said. “Perhaps to Cheleb, but if they did, he hasn’t mentioned. I didn’t think much about it, anyway. You know how it differs from world to world. Some animals don’t like aliens because they look or feel or smell strange. Others don’t care for species they’re not commensal with, and so won’t talk to them.”

“I was saying to Nita just now, they’ve got some kind of connection,” Kit said. “This scent trail thing…”

“Might be more than that,” Djam said. “The Tevaralti have a low-level mindlink among themselves, a symbiotic thing. Why not the animals? Especially if some of them are pets.”

“The first one the other day wasn’t, though,” Kit said. “Or the one last night. At least I don’t think it was.”

Djam yawned again. “I don’t think either of us has really thought to make a study of the issue. We’ve been kind of distracted…”

“Well, yeah…” Kit said. “Kehrutheh, go on, I relieve you. Go get some rest and I’ll see what I can find out.”

Djam took himself off to bed, and Kit settled in with his manual open, watching the power levels of the feeder gates closely; but they were running steady, almost exactly at the center of their nominal operations range. Good, he thought: stay that way, cousins.

He kept the sibik waiting where they were for a while, as there were a few other things Kit wanted to check before relaxing—if that was the right word—into the day’s monitoring. Along with probably every other wizard on the planet, he took a few moments to check the status of Thesba.

It was holding together—which was really all that could be said for it. A team of around two hundred wizards, some days more and some less, all of them specialists in geology and geomancy, were doing nothing but patch the moon’s interior structure together every evening in those regions that had come under most stress during the previous day’s orbits. Their comments on their work and their debriefing documents were attached to the daily status report on the moon for anyone who cared to look at them… and it was fair to say they were depressing. “It’s exactly like bailing out a leaky boat,” said one of the wizards in charge of doing stress relief on the region between Thesba’s deformed cores and the “dynamo regions” of the deepest inner mantle. “You know it would be idiocy to stop bailing, so of course you don’t… but you know that at the last, the ocean has you outnumbered. This moon wants so much to come apart. And of course we must do what we’re doing; this world’s life must have time to escape. But it’s going to be a relief to let Thesba go at last.”

Kit sat looking at that page for a while before turning his manual back to the two-page spread that displayed his own gates’ parameters. It was strange how that comment about letting Thesba go led him back to Nita’s remark about there being no happy endings in this situation. Even if all the Tevaralti could be convinced to leave, Thesba would still fall and either render Tevaral uninhabitable or entirely destroy it; and that, Kit thought, was why he was experiencing this constant strange ache of unfulfillment.

That unreasonable ache for some reason also left Kit feeling annoyed. What, am I six? he thought. This isn’t a fairy tale. This isn’t magic we’re doing: it’s wizardry. It’s not like everything’s always going to turn out right.

Yet some part of Kit seemed unwilling to get to grips with this truism, wanted to cling to the concept that things might still work out somehow… and he didn’t know what to do with that. Trying to squash it seemed cruel.

Hope, he thought. Even when it’s ridiculous. Why would anybody want to kill that? Leave it alone.

Glancing up past the standing stones toward the gate complex again, Kit watched the crowds flowing through from the feeder gates into the terminus gate as they’d been doing since he came: a steady flow, unceasing… and between the complex and his circle, the silent encampment, the Tevaralti there shifting restlessly about, watching their species leave them behind—

And closer to him, something else shifting, and making a muted squeaking noise. Kit looked between the circle’s upright stones and saw tentacles inching in his direction, and eyes fixed on him, hopeful and hungry.

He sighed, glanced at the monitor spread in his manual, and then got up, glad to have an excuse to push the whole subject of his interior unease aside. “Okay, you guys,” he said, heading in the direction of his puptent. “Cracker.”

“Cracker!!”

“But only the Ritz crackers,” he said under his breath. “Not the saltines. Because I know I’m gonna need some comfort food before we’re done…”

***

The day went on. Kit shooed the gathered sibik away after they’d had about a third of the box of Ritz, and spent the following couple of hours watching the feeder gates’ sensor readings for some recurring gravitational-field fluctuations that had started to worry him. He installed some extra alerts in his manual’s monitoring display of the arrays to try to predict those patterns early. He chatted with Nita: he touched base with Ronan. He went through a couple more energy drinks and got himself a pillow from his puptent, because the Stone Throne really wasn’t very kind to the humanoid butt. Well, this humanoid’s butt, anyway.

Just before local noon Kit had another serious discussion—actually, more of a pep talk—with the number-three gate’s electronic and submolecular-machine control systems, which the gate’s portal field seemed to be trying to subvert so that it could throw some more gravitational anomalies without the systems giving warning. (“Do not let it push you around. And don’t let it pull that energy-is-more-senior-than-matter crap with you, either! You are of equal status. And anyway, you and I are both matter together, and we’re not gonna let it get all high and mighty with us, are we? If it gets snotty with you again you just tell the gate that if it keeps making trouble I’m going to have a consult with my friend who runs Grand Central, and then I’m going to come over there and give its strings such a yanking, it’ll unravel like an old sweater. Yeah? Yeah. Just tell it that.”)

After that Kit went and got himself a lunch that for once wasn’t junk food (a salami sandwich) and was working on it when Cheleb got up and prepared to go off once again about haes pre-shift business. Curious as always, Cheleb paused to examine Kit’s food and drink. “Composition?” hae said, pointing at the sandwich.

“Uh, bread. A grain derivative. Some seasonings—that’s mustard, it comes from a seed. And that’s meat.” Kit opened the sandwich to show him.

Cheleb poked the salami hesitantly with one claw. “This from animal? Strange looking one.”

Kit flirted with the idea of telling haem how sausage was made, and then wasn’t sure whether this might unduly strain interstellar amity. “You have no idea,” Kit said.

“Entertainment later?”

“When Djam gets up,” Kit said, “you bet.”

Cheleb went off to see haes other-side-of-the-planet cousin, and Kit visited his puptent again, stuffing more food and some books and other supplies into a backpack so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth. Once back at the Stone Throne with this, he settled into a rhythm that swung between gate monitoring and reading up in the manual about sibiks. He spent nearly three hours on this endeavor, afraid of missing something important. But except for the information that there were hundreds of species, which he’d already known, Kit came away from the effort only slightly better informed than when he’d started.

The manual did say that the ancestors of the dominant Tevaralti species and the ancestor species of the sibik had forged their initial partnership when they were both still up in the trees together—the sibik using their acute vision and sense of smell, and their own intraspecies-based link gift, to lead the tool-using Tevaralti to prey so that both species could then share the spoils. But the manual had almost no data on exactly how the sibik transmitted data even within each of its many single species, let alone across species boundaries. The Tevaralti seemed never to have done any serious research on the subject, and no one else seemed to have considered it of importance enough to contribute any information about it to the manual. Some kind of cultural blind spot, maybe…?

“Weird,” Kit muttered as he leaned against the back of the Throne and looked up through the streaky cirrus clouds overhead at Thesba, which was now well past the zenith and heading for its day’s first setting. “Wonder if anybody’s asked the sibik…”

He soon found that there was going to be opportunity enough for him to do that, if he could keep other things from happening. Kit had gotten up briefly to take a leak behind one of the big standing stones—he was less concerned about this when both his shiftmates were likely to be off-site for a while—when in the middle of zipping up he started hearing unexpected clunking and rustling noises. A few seconds later he came around the standing stone to see a sibik, dappled in green and blue and quite large, hastily pulling things out of his backpack and throwing them over its shoulder, or where its shoulder would’ve been if it had had a shoulder. Or just one, Kit thought. How many tentacles do these guys actually have? They move so fast it’s hard to get a count…

“Hey!” Kit yelled he hurried back to the Stone Throne. The sibik startled at his shout, hitching its abdomen up enough to give Kit what seemed a fairly guilty look, and dug through the backpack faster, flinging away whatever it didn’t want—full cans of soda or cappucino, mostly—as it dug for things that looked more appetizing. Its grasp of what to do about Tupperware was fortunately non-existent; it tossed away a sealed-up plastic container of cheese slices without a second thought. But someone seemed to have passed it the word about cellophane, even when it was hidden inside cardboard. The sibik went straight for the second of Kit’s saltine boxes and ripped it open, yanking out one of the packages of stacked saltines.

Kit dove for the saltines and snatched them out of the tentacles, which grabbed at the package as Kit pulled it up out of reach. “Now stop it!” he said. “Who told you that you could just take whatever you wanted—”

“Cracker!” The sibik promptly dug into the saltine box, yanked out the second package, and pulled it open. Saltines flew everywhere.

“Oh come on, you’re making a mess…!” Kit moaned. Then he heard what he’d just said, and snickered both at having unconsciously quoted the original scene from the movie they’d been watching yesterday evening and at the memory of Djam bubbling at the scene in amusement. “Right, that’s it…”

Kit tossed the saltine package he was holding into the air and said to it in the Speech, “You, just stay there, okay?” It hung there, levitating at the high point of his toss. Kit gestured at the saltines that had fallen all over the Stone Throne and the ground. “You guys, up you go.” Up they went, and hung there in a scatter of little squares.

The sibik, meanwhile, was making off with the half-empty package. The method was interesting: a couple of tentacles hugged the package to the underside of its body, while the rest on either side of its body ran it hurriedly away through the grass. “Nope,” Kit said, pointing at it. “Up.” And up went the sibik, its tentacles working comically against the air, like something out of a cartoon, as it lost contact with the ground.

“Nope,” the sibik squeaked, “nope nope nope nope!”, flailing around in the air while still doggedly hanging onto the package of saltines. For his part, Kit had to stand still for a moment as a shiver ran through him with the realization of just high his personal power levels were running at the moment—so high that merely using the Speech with full intention was, with simple things at least, enough to produce a result without needing to explicitly build a spell. This is really something… But strangely enough, he found that he wasn’t really liking it.

Kit shook his head and went over to the sibik. He tugged the half-empty package of saltines out of its tentacles and shoved them in his hoodie’s front pocket, then reached up and plucked the sibik out of the air. It grunted and thrashed and tried to get away.

“Now cut that out,” Kit said. “Calm down. Okay? Stop it now, just stop it…” He had to pull back his head a bit to avoid being lashed across the face with panicked tentacles. “Cut it out. Just relax. Okay? I’m not going to hurt you, but we have to have a talk about not taking people’s stuff without permission.”

The sibik thrashed and wriggled and waved itself around for some seconds more, and Kit just hung onto it until all of a sudden it made an upset giving-up noise like a half-inflated balloon losing all its air, and went limp in his arms.

“Okay,” Kit said. “Now come on and let’s sit down and talk like reasonable people.”

He headed back over to the Stone Throne and sat down with the sibik in his lap. Nine tentacles, Kit thought as he tried to arrange the creature so that it looked less disheveled. But despite his best efforts it still wound up looking like some kind of limp and extremely peculiar mop, and the eyes on the back of its abdomen were all dark and squinted, as if avoiding looking at Kit. It was sulking.

“Okay now,” he said. “Let’s not be like this. Tell me what brought you here.”

The response was sullen silence. “Come on,” Kit said, “how’d you find your way?”

If possible, the sibik went even flatter.

Kit rubbed his face. “Let’s start this over, yeah?”

He beckoned over one of the saltines floating in the air. “Look,” he said, “this is what you were after. You might as well have one…”

It snatched the saltine out of his hand with a pair of tentacles and shoved it hurriedly into its between-tentacles stoma, as if afraid Kit might have been about to change his mind. Crumbs sprayed everywhere; apparently annoyed or upset sibik were messy eaters. “Okay. Better?”

“No,” the sibik said with some force. “More cracker better.”

Interesting the way it’s picking up Speech vocabulary, Kit thought. It doesn’t just acquire it from other sibiks who’ve heard it; it gets it from me too, at least a little. Is it hearing it in Tevaralti, though, the way a human hears the Speech like it’s their milk language, or as Speech-words proper? …Something to look into later. “Okay,” Kit said, “more cracker.” He gestured the little cloud of saltines over to him and plucked another one out of the air.

The sibik grabbed at it. “Hungry!”

Kit held the saltine up out of the way and held the sibik down against his lap when it tried to climb up him to gain altitude. “Fine, but we’re gonna teach you another word first,” Kit said. “‘Please.’”

“Won’t,” the sibik said, and pulled all its tentacles in tight around itself until it was more or less hugging itself with all of them in a furious ball.

“Your call, buddy,” Kit said. “You say ‘please’ or there’s no cracker for you.”

The balled-up sibik glared at him with all the eyes on the top of its abdomen, and then squeezed them shut in annoyance.

Amused, Kit then tried what would with Ponch have been a most transparent ploy, one that would normally have provoked nothing but scornful eyerolling. “Mmm,” he said in a tone of exaggerated pleasure, “goooooood.” And he started eating the saltine he was holding.

The first crunch made the sibik twitch visibly. Uh huh, Kit thought, and went out of his way to make the second crunch much louder.

One eye squinted open: just one. Kit watched this happening out of the corner of his own eye, doing his best to seem to be idly regarding the scenic landscape of beautiful plainsland Tevaral and paying no attention whatsoever to the put-out ball of sibik in his lap. The eye-squinting was interesting, as there weren’t any eyelids as such: the closing of the eyes, or maybe shuttering was a better word, was being done by musculature in the top of the abdomen that actually pulled the eye slightly down into the body mass and pinched the hide closed over it.

There were only a couple of loud crunches available in a single saltine. Kit reached up for another one. The single open sibik-eye watched the movement and was joined by another that opened, and another; and a tiny miserable moan came out of somewhere in the middle of the sibik’s body. Is what they make noise with even associated with how they breathe? Kit wondered as he bit into the next saltine. Crunch! “Mmmmm…”

The sibik loosened its frustrated grip on itself somewhat, melted slightly into a less rigorously spherical bundle of body and tentacles, and made another of those sad little moaning noises. Kit felt sorry for it, but not sorry enough to give it the second half of the saltine without at least a gesture of willingness toward the behavior he was trying to teach. He looked from the saltine to the sibik’s two and a half open eyes and said firmly, “Please.”

Several more eyes opened and glared at him. The musculature that had pulled them down into the body of its abdomen now pushed them a bit out, so that they looked like shiny hemispherical pebbles. Up this close, it was possible to see that they were more than just dark solids. Except for the darkness of the four-branched pupil, a faint luminescence could be seen swimming in the eyes if your angle to the sun was right: a pale pinkish glow like the green glint you might catch in a cat’s eyes at night, except this was more milky, and less plainly located at the back of the eye.

At least it could be seen if the eyes didn’t squint themselves down tighter at you again in annoyance. “No.”

Kit shrugged and ate the rest of the saltine, making more noise than he would ever have been comfortable making at home; his Mama would have had his head for chewing like that. More of the sibik’s eyes were open now, maybe five or six and a half. Call it seven. They watched his hand carefully as it lifted to pick another saltine out of the air, judging distances—

Kit had seen that look on Ponch before, especially on one memorable occasion when his pop had thought that the piece of steak he was holding up for Ponch to jump for was out of his reach. (It hadn’t been.) Against his lap Kit could feel the sibik gathering its tentacles together, and just as it was getting ready to launch itself at the saltines Kit wasn’t holding, he simply said “Higher, guys, if you would…?” And all the loose saltines whisked themselves up to about fifteen feet over Kit’s head.

The sibik collapsed into a frustrated heap on Kit’s lap and hissed like an angry cat.

“See now,” Kit said, “if you don’t cooperate, they’re all just going to go to waste. By which I mean I’ll get them all and you won’t get any.” He bit into the one he was holding: crunch!—and all the sibik’s tentacles clenched.

“You want one,” Kit said, “you say ‘please.’” He held still and waited to see what the next move would be.

The sibik shuffled its tentacles around and for a few moments actually covered all its eyes with them. The gesture suddenly so bizarrely reminded Kit of his pop’s favorite gesture of frustration that he had to actually bite his lip to keep himself from laughing.

But then the sibik took the tentacles away, and every eye was trained on Kit, round and wide open and pleading.

He shook his head in sheer admiration, for he had never had puppy eyes made at him by something with so many eyes. Fortunately, the effect was more amusing than heartrending.

Kit worked to control his laughter. “No,” he said at last. “Nice try, guy, seriously. But it’s no good. Give up and just say ‘please!’”

“Hungry,” the sibik whimpered.

Kit shook his head. “Please.”

The sibik trembled all over. “Cracker!”

“Please.”

It collapsed flat in his lap as if too famished to support itself. All its tentacles went limp and hung down like so many rubbery toy snakes, and the sibik sucked most of its eyes down into its body again in what appeared to be a gesture of utter hopelessness.

Kit regarded the sibik sympathetically while finishing the saltine he was eating. When it was done he beckoned another one down.

With the three eyes that remained visible, the sibik watched Kit pluck the cracker out of the air and just hold it there. Kit waited until its gaze left the saltine and met his.

“So what’s the magic word?” Kit said.

It trembled all over several times in his lap, one after another, as it repeatedly started to gather its tentacles under it and then each time abandoned the gesture.

“You know what it is. Come on.”

The three eyes still open now angled in three different directions as if looking for help to come from one of them. Kit thought with amusement of Mamvish, who sometimes did something similar with her eyes—she might have only the two, but she got the maximum effect out of them—and simply waited.

Finally the sibik squeezed the remaining three eyes shut and said, distinctly and in utter disgust, “Please.”

“There you go,” Kit said, and held out the saltine.

All eyes flew open and the cracker was instantly snatched out of Kit’s hand and stuffed into the sibik’s eating stoma. This time there was less spraying of crumbs.

Now we’ll see if he can do it twice, Kit thought. Assuming ‘he’ is the word we’re looking for here…

“Another?” Kit said.

“Please!”

“You’re a smart guy,” Kit said. He pulled down another cracker and handed it right over.

The next few minutes were devoted to repeated administrations of positive reinforcement on Kit’s side, and shameless stoma-stuffing on the sibik’s. “You should slow down,” Kit said eventually. “You’ll get indigestion or something.”

“Cracker,” the sibik said, waving its tentacles at him.

“I think you missed a word there..”

“Cracker please!”

“Absolutely,” Kit said, and handed it another. “Question is now, how long’s my supply going to last me? I thought I brought enough for a week, but at this rate…”

“Still hungry,” the sibik remarked.

“Yeah, well, that kind of seems like the default state for you guys, doesn’t it,” Kit said. “So do you think you can tell me something, now that our little power struggle’s over with? You knew there was food here. You even knew it was called ‘cracker’. How did you know?”

“Just knew,” the answer came back after a few moments; and some of the eyes looked at Kit as if he was an idiot for asking.

Well, let’s see if we can’t get at this some other way. “Where did you come from?”

“Don’t know. With people.”

So definitely somebody’s pet, Kit thought. Also, however, through the words, he picked up a faint metallic scent and a feeling that was like feathers, though strangely scratchy.

Useful, Kit thought. A fair number of creatures, when you dealt with them in the Speech, would also pass you back sensory information associated with the data being discussed. The sibik was apparently one of these, which could make things simpler. “So,” he said. “Where do you usually go for food?”

“Don’t go. It comes.”

“People give it to you?”

“Yes.”

“The same people all the time?”

“Yes.” And suddenly there was emotion there: sorrow. Kit might have wonderful new food, but he was not those people.

“You’re lost,” Kit said. “You got lost.”

The sibik made that unhappy deflated-balloon sound again.

“The people who brought you here,” Kit said. “Do you know where they are?”

“Not sure.” There was a sudden sense of entwined scents, astonishingly directional, as Ponch’s combined senses of smell and hearing had sometimes seemed to Kit when they were communicating in a similar mode. The impression he was now getting from the sibik rendered itself visually. It was like a trace or track, a thin red line or a thread, that led away from here across the plain in the general direction of the gating complex. But the track was obscured in places, tangled or rubbed out, and when one was at ground level one couldn’t see the way back clearly. All that could be clearly seen was the place where the straight track faded out.

It’s partly using scent trails, Kit thought. But partly something else too. And it looks like there’s something wild sibik do when they’re communicating with each other that interferes with a pet sibik’s link to its owner, if it’s in the area. Maybe it’s just numbers? Maybe they drown it out or something?

He breathed out. Never mind that now. First let’s see how much of a problem we’ve got. “When you came,” Kit said, “did your people stop a while, or did they go straight from one portal to another?”

There was some confusion over the “portal” concept, but once that was resolved the answer came back promptly. “They stayed.”

“Good,” Kit said.

“They were sad,” the sibik said.

“Yeah,” Kit murmured, looking up and across the plain, “I bet they were. Are.”

“Cracker!”

Yeah, I imagine you’d feel the need for some comfort food too right about now. “Forgot a word there, big guy,” Kit said.

“Please.”

The capitulation was immediate: the sibik had other things on its mind now. Kit fed it another of the few remaining floating saltines. “Let me get clear about one thing,” Kit said. “You didn’t run away from them on purpose, did you? You want to go back to them.”

“Want to go back, yes. But did run away on purpose! Smelled/tasted/wanted food others had, wanted cracker!”

“Oh great,” Kit muttered, “just what I needed about this. Guilt.” …Yet he couldn’t be held responsible for what the wild sibik were up to in their spare time—which doubtless included investigating the transient-Tevaralti campsite and shaking them down for food, as well as coming back here to do the same. It was probably a wonder that there weren’t more escaped pet sibik over here, seduced by the covertly-communicated scent of exotic alien foodstuffs.

“Possibly a good reason for us to find something else for you guys to eat when you turn up here,” Kit muttered. “Something less fancy. I mean, besides generic wizard rations and Earth crackers, I mean. If lots of Tevaralti keep you guys as pets, then somebody here must make, I don’t know, sibik chow…”

But it appeared what this sibik was mostly interested in chowing on was Kit’s crackers: it was trying to climb up his arm for one right now. “Sorry,” Kit said, giving it the cracker. “And I’ll take you back to your people and you’ll be all spoiled, and it’ll all be my fault. I can just hear your boss now. ‘What did that nasty Earthling do to you, your appetite’s all ruined!’”

The sibik ate the latest cracker and ignored this line of reasoning, apparently finding it beneath its notice. But, “Yes, what is the nasty Earthling doing with that creature?” said a familiar voice from behind him. “I can think of any number of media outlets who’d love an answer. Preferably with video.”

Kit snickered as Ronan came strolling around one of the standing stones and stood there for a moment, shaking his head at Kit in huge amusement. “Jaysus, this is so suggestive.”

“Of what?” Kit said.

“Oh, come on, finding somebody with a lapful of tentacles? What an innocent you are. And there’s not even any point talking to you about cartoon smut, is there? Or even smut in general. It just rolls right off.”

Kit managed to look faintly offended. “Excuse me! I know about smut, thanks.”

“Oh yeah? What kind?”

Kit opened his mouth and then closed it again, briefly stifled by the complete disconnect that came with the prospect of sitting here, in the middle of a refugee crisis on an alien planet, preparing to talk about porn. Yet Kit knew if he didn’t do something about this right now, Ronan was going to get the wrong idea.

“I don’t know,” Kit said, “why don’t we start with whatever kind you’re thinking about right now?” A sudden image flashed into his mind, and almost as if his mouth had decided to go ahead without consulting his brain, he found himself saying, “Maybe that thing you were looking at on your manual with Dairine’s streaming plug-in last night, the one about the hotel Jacuzzi and the two— Uh, that.” Kit stopped, as the image he’d glimpsed was way too interesting to describe any further without possibly starting to produce a result that would betray his own interest.

Meanwhile, Ronan’s mouth had fallen open. Kit was concentrating on not letting his own do the same. Now where the hell did that come from?

Consider it a favor, something whispered in the back of his mind. Strictly a one-off, of course.

Kit’s mouth went dry with shock. Bobo??

No response.

And to Kit’s complete amazement, Ronan was blushing. Kit couldn’t recall ever having seen this happen before. “Or maybe not,” Kit said, instantly following up on the momentary advantage. “Never mind, wouldn’t want to embarrass you when Dairine’s messed up the security settings somehow. Neets keeps telling her to stop tweaking the connection parameters, but she just won’t quit.” He shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

Kit gave it a look. “What do we say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Entertainment still on for this evening as scheduled?”

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

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

“Right. Back soon.”

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

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

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

“Tracking spell?” Ronan said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where what is?”

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

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

“You need me to move anywhere?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kit nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Or bees, without the dancing.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Kit,” Ronan said. “Stay focused.”

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

“You okay?” Kit said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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