by Diane Duane
“Thanks,” Nita said. “Dai, big guy.”
“Dai,” Urruah said to her and Kit, and waved his tail at Ponch as he turned.
“Auhw heei u’uuw lau’hwu rrrhh’uiu,” Ponch said to Urruah.
Urruah paused in midturn, and Nita’s eyes widened slightly as she caught sight of the look on Urruah’s face. It was always dangerous to judge animals’ expressions by comparing them with human ones, but wizards’ knowledge of the subverbal modes of the Speech lent them some slight latitude in reading nonhuman expressions—at least those of creatures from their own worlds that were not too far removed from them in basic psychology. Whatever Ponch had said, it had been in Ailurin, the cats’ language, and it hadn’t been something Urruah had been expecting. It had also gone by too quickly for Nita to “listen” in the Speech and hear what it had meant.
“Uh, yes, certainly,” Urruah said, recovering himself. He waved his tail at them all once more, then strolled off across the Main Concourse, weaving from side to side to avoid the commuters, who couldn’t see him.
They turned away, and Kit looked at Ponch with some surprise. “What was that about?” Kit said. “I didn’t know you spoke cat.”
Correspondence course, said Ponch, and kept on walking.
Nita threw Kit a glance. Have I told you recently, she said silently, that your dog is getting strange?
You and the rest of the world…
The three of them made their way to the gate for platform eighteen and, once through it, slipped to the right of it, away from the main part of the platform, where they wouldn’t be seen disappearing. Hurry up, Ponch said as Kit’s invisibility spell came down over him, too. It itches!
“So stop complaining and come on,” Kit said. They walked down the length of the platform, staying to the left side, where there was no train. People went tearing past them on the right as down at the end of the platform the 2:20’s conductor yelled ‘“Boarrrrrrrrrrrd!” Those last few people made it onto the train, its doors closed, and with a great revving roar of engines, deafening in that confined space, it slowly began to pull out.
Kit and Nita and Ponch stayed off to the side while a few more people came running down the platform, saw that the train was already on its way out, and slowed to a stop, then turned and went back down toward the Main Concourse to find out when the next train was. “We’re clear,” Nita said softly. “Come on.”
The three of them made their way down to the end of the platform, where steps led down to the track level. The steps were of no interest to them, though. They looked to their left, where no train stood… but where the air just past the platform’s edge, to a wizard’s eye, rippled gently, as if with uprising heat.
“It’s patent,” Kit said. “Let’s go. Ponch, jump it, the edge is sharp… ”
I know that!
Kit grinned, took a deep breath, glanced at Nita. She nodded. They stepped forward together, into the empty air, into the dark, as Ponch jumped past them…
… and the three of them stepped out again a long second later, ditching their invisibility spells in the process, into the white brilliance of the Nontypical Transit area at the Crossings Hypergate Facility on Rirhath B.
The inbound gating was a “hardwired” one, long-established and with a lot of comfort features built in for the convenience of the wizards who used it every day on business. Nita and Kit came out on the other side without feeling the unsettling effects usually associated with moving several light-years between worlds, which were not only spinning in different directions and velocities but being dragged through interstellar space by their home stars along wildly differing vectors. Regardless of having no need to settle their stomachs or wait for their inner ears to recover, the three of them took a moment to just stand there on the shining white floor and look around; for the place was worth looking at.
Nontypical Transit was a wide empty space about the size of a football field, and around it that wide white floor went on and on for so far around on all sides that Nita was fairly sure she ought to have been able to see the curvature of the planet, had it not been so completely covered with people of a thousand different species. “Is it rush hour?” she said.
“Probably. Let’s get out of here before something materializes on top of us.”
This wasn’t really a concern, Nita knew, as the manual made it plain that the whole NT area was programmed not to allow two different transportees, whether using wizardry or another form of worldgating, to occupy the same space. All the same, she and Kit and Ponch made their way toward the edge of the Nontypical Transit area, looking up at what every tourist passing through the Crossings spent some time admiring: the ceiling. Or rather, the ceilings, for there were thousands of them, real and false, interpenetrating one another or floating under or over one another, in a myriad of airy, randomly shaped structures of glass and metal and other materials that Nita didn’t immediately recognize. The effect was like a shattered, miles-wide, horizontal stained glass window, eternally looking for new and interesting ways to assemble itself, and then eternally changing its mind. It was morning at the moment, and the violent silver-gilt light of Rirhath B, only slightly softened by the eternal green-white cloud of daylight hours, burned through the glass high above them and cast bright, sliding shadows on the vast floor in a thousand colors, all changing every moment as ceilings high up in the tremendous structure briefly eclipsed one another and parted company again.
“It’s different from last time,” Kit said.
Nita nodded as they finally reached the end of the NT area. It had been night the last time they’d been here, and at night the ceilings simply seemed to go away, appearing to leave the whole vast terminal floor open to the view of Rirhath B’s astonishing night sky—a crowded vista of short-period variable stars, all swelling and shrinking like living things that breathed light. “This is nice, too,” Nita said, and then had to laugh at herself as they headed out into the main terminal floor. Nice was a poor word for this tremendous space, for its many cubic miles of stacked-up glass and metal galleries, holding offices, stores, restaurants, and a hundred other kinds of facilities for which English has no words.
Nita and Kit and Ponch made their way down the main drag toward the core of the terminal structure, taking their time. There were three main wings to the Crossings, each several miles long, and there were small intergates strung all down the length of each wing, marked on the floor by single or clustered hexagons that glowed in various visible and invisible colors. There was also a selective-friction slidewalk down one side of each wing, which, while looking no different than the rest of the polished white floor, would scoot you along at high speed if you were in a hurry. But Nita was in no rush, and neither was Kit. Ponch paced along beside them, plainly enjoying himself, looking at all the strange people and smelling the strange smells, and amiably wagging his tail.
Scattered down the length of the mile-wide wing before them, in the middle of the floor, were platforms and daises and kiosks and counters of various shapes and sizes, each with a long, tall, cylindrical black sign on a black metal pole. These were gate indicators, flashing their destinations and patency times in hundreds of languages and hundreds of colors. Kit paused by one of these as they came up to it, a ring-fenced area where a number of people who looked like huge furbearing turtles striped in orange and gray were waiting for their gate to go patent. Kit put his hand on the pole and said in the Speech, “Information for Alaalu?”
On the side facing him and Nita, the jarring red symbols that had previously been showing there blanked out and were replaced by a long string of symbols in blue, in the Speech. The string of characters uncurled itself gracefully down the length of the sign. “Wing three,” Nita said, “gate five-oh-six… ”
“In a little more than an hour,” Kit said.
“Great,” Nita said. “We can sit down somewhere near the gate and have a snack.”
Kit got a dubious look. “Uhh… ”
Nita laughed at him:
Kit had had a major problem with some of the local food their last time through. “This time,” she said, “just don’t eat anything you don’t recognize, and you’ll be fine.”
“Same rule as for the school cafeteria, I guess,” Kit said. “Yeah, why not? But let’s get that errand done for Urruah first.”
“Yeah.”
They made their way to the central area for which the whole facility was named: the original Crossings. Once upon a time, two and a half millennia before, it had been just a muddy spot by a riverbank—one that became a crossroads over time as its own native species learned to exploit it. Then, much later, it became an interplanetary and interstellar crossroads as well. In more recent centuries it had become an informal hub for intergalactic transport within the Local Group as well. With the opening of the new fourth-wing extension, its hub status for inter-Group transit would be formalized. But regardless of the expansion of its role, the Crossings would remain paramount among the Milky Way’s intragalactic hubs — its local space having about it a particularly high concentration of those forces that, when entwined with certain relatively rare planetary characteristics, made gating easier than anywhere else.
All alone in the middle of a great expanse of floor was the spot where a reed hut had stood by the river-bank, not far from the ancient cave that contained a natural worldgate. At the cave’s entrance, a sequence of footprints in the mud had suddenly stopped without warning—an image as famous on Rirhath B as the corrugated bootprint of an astronaut in the moondust was famous on Earth. But both cave and hut were long gone. In their place stood a cubical structure of tubular bluesteel, no different from many of the other kiosks that stood around the Crossings. This one had nothing in it but a desk, its surface covered with inset, illuminated input patches of many shapes and colors—the shapes and colors shifting every second, like those in the virtual displays hanging in the air around it and drifting around and over one another in a small-scale imitation of the elective ceiling overhead.
Behind the desk was a meter-high rack of thinner bluesteel tubing, shaped somewhat like the kind of kickable step stool to be found in libraries. And inside the rack, more or less—except where its many jointed legs hung out of the structure, or were curled around the racking for support—was the Stationmaster.
Nita and Kit walked up to the desk. Nita was calm enough about it at first: she’d been here before. But then she had a sudden panic attack. What do we say to it? she thought, looking at the silvery-blue giant centipede, which was busily banging away with its front four or six legs at the input patches on the desk. When you were on wizardly business, the same phrase did the job no matter where you were: “I am on errantry, and I greet you!” But they weren’t on errantry this time out.
Kit and Nita paused in front of the desk, and the Rirhait behind it looked at them with several stalky eyes: the others kept their attention on what it was doing. “Oh,” the Stationmaster said. “You again.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Kit said.
Ponch sat down beside Kit, looking at the Stationmaster with an expression that suggested he wasn’t sure whether to chase it or run away. The Master, in its turn, turned an eye in Ponch’s direction, and the eye’s oval pupil dilated and contracted a couple of times.
“They’re hard on their associates, these two,” the Stationmaster said to Ponch. “And on the surroundings. Where they go, things tend to get trashed. Are you insured?”
Ponch yawned. I’m not too worried about it, he said.
“It wasn’t our fault, the last time,” Kit said, sounding just slightly annoyed. “We weren’t the ones who chased Nita’s sister through the terminal with blasters!”
“Not to mention the dinosaurs!” Nita said.
“No, I suppose not,” the Stationmaster said, waving a casual claw in the air. “Well, the facility’s general fund handled it, and all the damage caused by your broodmate’s incursion and departure has been repaired now.” It tapped away at the desk a little more. “I assume this isn’t a social call… ”
“No, actually,” Kit said, and pulled out his manual. “The New York gating team asked us to deliver a message, since we were passing this way.”
At that, six of the Stationmaster’s eight eyes fixed on Kit, all their pupils dilating at once. The effect was disconcerting. “New York,” it said. “That would be Earth.”
It sounded actively annoyed. “That’s right,” Kit said, throwing Nita a glance as he flipped open his manual. “Here’s what they say—” He read Urruah’s message aloud.
The Stationmaster’s antennae worked while Kit read, the equivalent of a nod. “Very well,” it said. “I’ll message them when I have a moment. Let’s move on. You have your departure data?”
“Yes,” Kit said.
“Excellent. Don’t let the gate constrict on your fundament on the way out,” the Master said. It poured itself out of its rack, whisked around and out of the kiosk, and went hastening away across the concourse, on all those legs, without another word.
A few moments’ worth of silence passed as Nita and Kit watched him go.
“Maybe I’m from a little backwater planet at the outside edge of the Arm,” Kit said, “but where I come from, we would call that rude.”
“Oh, come on, you can’t be judgmental,” Nita said.
“It didn’t even say thank you!”
“Well… ”
“You agree with me,” Kit said with some satisfaction.
Nita sighed and turned to start walking in the general direction of their gate. “Yeah,” she said. “Even though I’m probably wrong to.”
Kit made a face as they turned away. “Okay,” he said, “and you’re probably right that I shouldn’t judge it by human standards. Maybe there was something else on its mind.”
“Maybe. Though… it might be possible that Rirhait are just naturally rude.”
Kit shrugged “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We did the errand. Let’s go get some lunch.”
He still didn’t sound as if he was entirely happy about the idea. “You’ve still got your bag lunch if you want it,” Nita said.
Kit laughed. “Nah. What’s the point of going to alien worlds if you’re not going to at least try to eat their junk food on the way? Let’s go down by the gate and see what’s there.”
An hour later, they made their way over to the pre-transit area by their gate. “That wasn’t so bad,” Kit said. “A lot better than last time… ”
“Last time you didn’t read the menu,” Nita said. She had to grin, though, because this time the problem had been to get Kit to stop reading it.
Ponch was wandering along beside them looking as satisfied as Kit. They’d found a little snack bar a hundred yards or so along from gate 506, and once they’d figured out how to convert the seating system to suit bipedal humanoids, they discovered that all the tables had an embedded, programmable menu of a type new to Nita. You told the table, or touched in, the long version of the ten-letter acronym for your species—adding eight letters that concerned themselves only with your body chemistry—and the menu embedded in the tabletop changed itself to show only things that wouldn’t disagree with you. Kit, having tested one dish that looked like blue pasta, had been so taken with the flavor that he’d gone on a “blue binge” and eaten six more blue things, sharing them with Ponch.
“Can’t believe you pigged out like that,” Nita said under her breath as they made their way over to the pretransit lounge for their gate.
“Why not? It was good!”
“It was free,” Nita said.
“Oh, come on. Nothing’s free. You know that.”
“Of course I do. I mean, you didn’t have to pay for it…”
They had both been prepared to pay for what they ate. Typically, when a wizard was on errantry, the transfer of energy to pay for things was handled by the manual, to be deducted later if deferment was appropriate. But when they’d tried to take care of the bill early, putting their manuals down on the table
’s deduction patch, the table had simply said CHARGED TO GENERAL FUND—EXCURSUS. Once they’d realized that the cultural exchange program was taking care of their expenses, Kit had gone, to Nita’s way of thinking, a little bit nuts.
Now, walking along beside them, Ponch burped happily and wagged his tail. When can we come back?
“You’ve done it now,” Nita said. “You’ve got him spoiled for alien food. Your mom’s going to have words with you… ”
“Aw, he knows it’s a vacation. Don’t you, Ponch?”
Yes. But we can come back other times! And Ponch paused. I can come here by myself, too.
Nita shook her head as they made their way over to the transit gate. “From now on you’ll know where to find him when he’s missing,” she said. “Shaking down alien tourists for blue stuff.”
Their gate was like many others in that part of the terminal: an information kiosk with a big, flat, vertical screen, a tall cylindrical standard with the gate number, and the outline of a hexagon embedded in the floor, constantly shifting colors and wavelengths of light as it tried to make itself visible to as many species’ visual senses as possible. By the kiosk, a gate technician was standing—a tall bipedal humanoid in a green glass jumpsuit cut down the back to allow her rudimentary wings room to move.
Nita went up to her and held out her manual. “We’re scheduled for a gating to Alaalu,” she said.
“Alaalu?” whistled the gate technician in a cordial tone as she took Nita’s manual, waved it in front of the data screen. “Never heard of it. Where is it?”
“Radian one-sixty somewhere,” Nita said.
The gate tech’s feathered crest went up and down as the display brought up an abbreviated version of Nita’s name and identity information in the Speech, along with a little bare-bones schematic of the galaxy. “Oh, I see. Thank you, Emissary,” she said, handing Nita back her manual. “How interesting… I’ve never gated anyone there before. It doesn’t seem to get much traffic. But then that’s quite a jump; it’s nice for you that it’s subsidized, isn’t it?”
