by Diane Duane
“In the later stages, yeah. It’s a big deal, and the Earth worldgates are kind of special in the master gating system: he’ll be wanting to make sure that Chur doesn’t get overloaded again.”
“Let’s go, then. Can’t keep the talented new intake of wizards waiting.”
“Are you kidding?” Carmela said. “They can’t start till we get there.”
They popped out together into an area that looked suspiciously like a gating cluster at the Crossings—a shining white floor, patterned with glowing blue hexagonal shapes, each one big enough to hold five or six people comfortably. Nita glanced around, trying to get a grasp of the space around them. The central part was roughly circular, about the size of the main concourse in Grand Central Terminal; the ceiling was much higher, and translucent. It let in the light of the bright Antarctic day, and it was intricately carved with shapes whose fine details were mostly lost at this distance. But somebody had plainly spent a whole lot of time doing those carvings. Figures of animals and aliens and heaven knew what else were spread out over it in groups and clusters, while between them the ceiling surface was delicately patterned with geometric shapes and what might have been long sentences in the Speech, carved into the ice. “Holy cow,” Nita said under her breath. “Somebody’s got a lot of time on their hands . . .”
“Not that anybody’s paying much attention to it,” Carmela observed. She waved an arm. Nita turned toward the center of the big space—the gating hexes having been emplaced well off to one side, where they wouldn’t interfere with people socializing—and saw that a whole lot of that was going on under the highest part of the ice dome. There were easily a thousand people milling around, the cacophony of their voices rattling off the ice in the enclosed space. “Wow,” Nita said again. “This is a big deal, isn’t it?”
“You’d know better than I would,” Carmela said. “But look who’s here!”
Nita smiled as she caught sight of the low-slung shape breaking away from the crowd, because for a change it was almost easy to see him coming. Normally when you met the Master of the Crossings these days, it was in the midst of thousands of other aliens of every kind. But here there was nobody but the humans, and him. Sker’ret came pouring himself along the white-ice floor toward them, stalked eyes gazing all around him as he came, segmented legs working, and a glimpse of his gleaming segmented magenta carapace reflecting itself in the icy surface. You’d think he’d be slipping around on this more, Nita thought, and scuffed one shoe against the floor. But no, looks like they’ve put a high-friction field on this. Good. Somebody’s thought it through . . .
And then he was in among the hexes with them, rearing up half his body to throw a bunch of those segmented legs around Nita. She laughed, and hugged him back. It was like getting into a clinch with a very friendly coat rack. “Sker’ret, baby,” she said, “are you getting bigger again? Have you had another molt?”
“Two,” Sker’ret said, “but who’s counting?” He chuckled, producing a sound like pebbles rattling in a tin can. “We’ve loosened up dietary regulations at the Crossings for my people since I’ve been running things. And after all, the Stationmaster has to set a good example . . .”
“Well, I’d say you haven’t been slow about that,” Carmela said, taking her turn to hug him. “You have to be twice the size you were this time last year. You’re going to be taller than Filif soon!”
“That’ll take some doing,” Sker’ret said, “because—have you seen him recently?”
“Don’t tell me I need to take him ornament shopping again,” Carmela said, with entirely too much relish.
“But I’m surprised to see you at one of these dos,” Nita said, reaching out to rub the top of Sker’ret’s head between the eyestalks. “Has to seem like the Little League from your point of view.”
“Oh, no,” Sker’ret said. “This is the type of professional engagement that needs serious legs-on handling. When subsidized worldgating transport on a given world picks up for short periods, the way it’s going to pick up here—especially a world with Crossings-legacy worldgates, old naturally occurring ones like Chur that’re finicky to deal with—then I have to be here to keep some eyes on things. At least until I’m sure the ancillary systems I’ve installed, the automation and so forth, are running smoothly.” And then he laughed again. “Besides, I have friends involved in this competition. People whose basement I’ve lived in. Couldn’t miss that for the worlds! Though I can’t let other worlds in our work group know about that, because they’d get jealous and start screaming that I was showing favoritism—”
“Well, let them scream,” Carmela said, looking smug. “Their problem if they can’t cope with the realities of interstellar politics.”
From off to one side, some hard rock started echoing off the roof—something very metal-sounding, with a dark multivoiced rap overlay that sounded like it might have been in French. Beyond the area from which the music was coming, some large tables were spread out—probably the buffet, Nita thought. But her stomach was churning, and the thought of food just wasn’t working for her. Why am I so intimidated by this? she thought. I’ve been in much more dangerous places, seen a lot worse . . .
“Wondered when you were getting here,” came a voice from off to their left. “Did you come via the Galactic Rim or something? Oh, hi, Sker’—”
Nita turned, then stared at the apparition strolling up to them. Over dark leggings and dark flats and a long, silky, unconstructed above-the-knee tunic in a green that was so dark it was almost black, Dairine was wearing an ankle-length shawl-collared open vest—Wellakhit casual wear, in a heavier silky stuff of a more forest-green shade. It did nothing whatsoever to hide the heavy gold torc at her throat with its centered yellow gem, the gleam of it cooler than usual in this icelight. Dammit, Nita thought, and now all of a sudden I look underdressed. She also noted (and tried not to show that she noted) something Dairine was wearing wrapped twice around her narrow wrist as a bracelet. It was a double chain of emeralds strung on what at first glance appeared to be a faintly green-glowing chain. But the second glance showed this to be not a physical thing, but a construct of pure energy: simply a single sentence in the Speech, impossible to read for the smallness and fineness of the characters, and elegantly intertwined through itself like braided wire.
“Nice,” Nita said, glancing at the Sunstone again as Spot came ambling across the floor behind Dairine on his many legs, his lid-carapace burnished shining black and gleaming in the cool radiance from the skylight. “Pulling rank, are we?”
Dairine shrugged. “If you’ve got some pull somewhere, you may as well wear the trappings. It’s a qualification. And a pretty one, so why not?” She looked Nita up and down. “You don’t look too bad, anyway. But then you’ve got the Crossings’ best hominid stylist working you over.”
Nita had to laugh at that, and Carmela preened with the expression of someone who found the assessment accurate. “You didn’t sound last night like you were going to be in that much of a hurry getting here, with all the talk about ‘boring forced socialization.’ Surprised to find you here early.”
Dairine grinned mischievously. “Well, once I found out this was being held in the UFO Caves, no way was I going to be fashionably late . . .”
“The what?” Nita stared around her.
Dairine burst out laughing. “There were these conspiracy guys online . . . you know, the people who see a UFO under every rock . . .”
“And not the real ones.”
“Yeah. They were looking at some Google Earth imagery and decided they thought they saw ice caves down here with UFOs buried in them. Now naturally as soon as you hear something like that, you start wondering, so some wizards from Australia came down to check into it. Who knew, maybe somebody from off planet did get lost or confused and crash here, and need help. You have to check.” Dairine shrugged.
“It probably wouldn’t have been, though,” Nita said. “Who uses ships for interstellar travel if they can avoid i
t? When worldgating tech’s so widespread, it’s just silly.”
“Yeah, well, no accounting for taste, is there? Anyway, it turned out that the buried spaceship was just an optical illusion. Something to do with the angle of sunlight the day the satellite took the picture. But then the Aussie group thought this would be a great place to come down and party, where no one could see, and it was close to them.”
“A thousand miles is close?” Carmela said.
Dairine shrugged again. “It is if you’re Australian. So they did a tectonics study and an environmental assessment and they checked out the stability of the ice shelf, and it turned out to be okay for use as a temporary facility. So they built this.” She looked around in admiration. “Or hollowed it out, anyway. And then the artists got loose . . .”
“Kind of amazing,” Nita said.
“If you’ve only been in this part, you haven’t seen anything.” Dairine looked as smugly delighted as if it had all been her own work. “There’s a whole laser tag complex a level down. They’ve duplicated some of the sets from Alien, there’s a Hall of Statues . . .”
“I’ll make a note,” Nita said. “Listen, have you seen—”
“Neets?”
The familiar voice brought her head up, and she looked around, not seeing him—
And then she saw him, and her mouth went dry. Kit had broken away from the crowd and was heading toward them. It’s just a blazer, she thought. And he had those jeans on yesterday—But now there was a white shirt open at the neck, and when did he get this tall, how have I been missing this, and he’d done something with his hair, and—
Nita swallowed, dry. “Hey,” she said.
Dairine, however, burst out laughing. “Kit, come on,” she said, “don’t you think the antenna sort of spoils the line?”
Kit, who had looked very cool and tall and unruffled until then, broke the spell by turning to look over his own shoulder at his own butt, or at least he tried to. His Edsel-antenna wand was sticking out of his pocket. “Yeah, well. Think of it as an icebreaker.” He looked over at Nita. “Didn’t mean to be late. I had the dryer set wrong, had to pull the jeans out and give them some help . . .”
Dairine snickered. “So domestic,” she said, and headed away. “I’m gonna hit the buffet until they start things going.”
“Wait for me!” Carmela said. “I missed my lunch!”
The two of them made their way back toward the crowd, vanished into it. “So how does this go now?” Nita said, eager to talk about something that would get her away from the subject of how tongue-tied she’d nearly gone just now at the sight of someone she’d seen nearly every day for years. I have got to manage this somehow, it’s all gotten so weird . . .
Kit shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels a little. “Well, I saw from my manual that you’d signed off on reading the orientation pack, so I thought you’d be ready to lecture me on what to do first . . .”
“Lecture!” Nita laughed at him. “Don’t push your luck.”
He grinned at her. “Okay. We know his name, we’ve seen his picture, we’ve read the title of his spell project—”
Nita smiled, unimpressed. “Don’t think I’ve seen a longer string of jargon in the Speech since I first cracked the manual,” she said. It had taken her nearly ten minutes of brain-bending effort and a bemused consultation with Bobo The Very Offended-Sounding Voice Of Wizardry to come up with a rough translation of their mentee’s project into English: An innovative approach to subversion of magnetohydrodynamic periodicity spikes in solar peak periods, with attention to robust crisis intervention in coronal oscillatory periods and spectrum tweaking, damage inhibition in Earth’s upper ionospheric layers, and LEO-inclusive derangement prevention. Bobo’s comment regarding some of the compound-word neologisms in the title when they’d finished working it out together had been succinct: You get a feeling he doesn’t think the Speech has long enough words.
Kit made an amused “Hmf” noise. “Like it’s not a tactic everybody tries once when they’re in a science fair. Or maybe twice.”
Nita threw him a look. “You’re never going to let me off the hook about that wind turbine thing, are you?”
“Not after what it did to Mr. Vasquez’s toupee,” Kit said, “nope.”
Nita snickered. “So what next then? Do we go hunt him down and accuse him of overstating his case, or wait till he finds us?”
“I don’t know about accusing him of anything just yet,” Kit said. “But the overview made it sound like they wanted us to wait on the introductions until the Powers That Be had had their say.”
Nita’s eyes widened. “You’re not saying that they’re—”
“What?” Kit grinned. “Going to be here? Hardly. Just the Planetary. After all, she’s the door prize . . .”
“Then come on and let’s go talk to some of these people.” Nita was starting to get her composure back. “Maybe we’ll see someone we know.”
They wandered around and did indeed find here and there a few people they knew: mostly other younger wizards the two of them had run into last year during the Pullulus crisis, when older wizards had lost their power and the business of running and saving the planet had devolved abruptly onto the “next generation.” During this process Nita had briefly misplaced Kit while in the act of picking up a bottle of some mysterious fruit-flavored mineral water from a buffet table (Pitanga flavor? What in the Powers’ name is a pitanga?) when behind her she heard a pair of voices that she recognized immediately both from their extreme similarity to each other and because half the time they were talking over each other and the rest of it they were speaking in near unison.
She grinned and turned. “Is that Tu and Ngu?!” Nita said, turning to find the twychild arguing cheerfully and enthusiastically over a plate of some kind of alien hors d’oeuvres that was hovering in the air between them. (At least it seemed likely these were alien: Earth was short on blue food. And the minute Kit finds these here, it’s going to be even shorter on it . . . !)
Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet had each shot up by about a foot, and where the last time she’d seen them they had been in a sort of tunic-like Vietnamese casual wear, now Nguyet had gone for a hoodie-and-skirt-over-jeans look, and Tuyet was wearing a suit (though apparently just a T-shirt under it, and a tie just vaguely knotted and thrown over his shoulder). Their heads came up in unison and the two of them swung toward Nita with broad smiles on their faces.
“Is that Nita?!”
“Powers That Be in a bucket, are you mentoring?”
“You ancient thing!”
“Look at all her gray hairs.”
“Well, look at yours then,” Nita said, laughing, and there was some truth to it, since Nguyet had installed a prominent and showy silver streak in her long dark hair above her forehead and off to one side of her part. The hors d’oeuvres plate was waved away to drift lonely in the air while the twins grabbed her and hugged her, and Nita hugged them back. “Come on, you two are such babies, I thought you’d be competing!”
“Hah!”
“Nope, none of that for us.”
“We’re mentoring a group—”
“A set of quadruplets from Chile, would you believe?”
“—not twychild-twins, of course, they don’t do the augmentative-wizardry thing—”
“But they’ve got some new take on group work, it’s fabulous, it’s like time-sharing—”
“Holographic spell management—”
“But that’s just cool organizational stuff. Knowing you, you and Kit’ve scored yourself some kind of super-dangerous talent who needs controlling—”
Nita had to laugh. “No,” she said, “as far as we can tell it’s a rabid spacecraft fan who’s mostly interested in keeping communications satellites from being fried. In fact his précis was technical enough that I won’t mind an explanation.”
“Too technical for you?”
“Is the world ready?”
They were laughi
ng together and deep in the midst of further gossip by the time Kit drifted back, and then there was more laughing and hugging and some teasing about height. “I thought I was gonna at least get taller than you!” Tuyet said to Kit in a tone of cheerfully aggrieved complaint, “and now what do I find but you’ve pulled this sneaky trick! There is no justice. None.”
“No one’s gonna care how tall I am next to you,” Kit said, “when you’re doing stuff like that with your tie. Wannabe fashion plate . . .”
“Bean pole!”
“Brain box! Having trouble finding oxygen all the way up here? Come on, breathe deep, assert yourself . . .”
Nita and Nguyet raised their eyebrows at each other as the boys got increasingly creative with their mockery, in the way that only people who’ve lived through life-or-death situations together can. “Do you have any idea . . .” Nita said.
“Who’re being pushed as the hot picks for winning?”
“Actually,” Nita said, “I was going to ask you if you knew what in the world a pitanga is. But seriously, how do you start picking a winner out of three hundred people whose projects the judges haven’t even looked at yet?”
Nguyet wiggled her high, slender eyebrows at Nita. “There are a lot of maths freaks and statistics wranglers in this group,” she said. “Some of them, I don’t even know names for what kinds of wizards they are . . . but they’re strong on the predictive end, and they’ve gotten real excitable since the individual prospectuses went up.” She gave Nita a sideways look. “Thought you might have stumbled across some inside stuff while reviewing the material.”
“For this? No, I wouldn’t even—”
A sudden flash of image went across Nita’s gaze, as if someone had swept the lens of a screen projector past her. An image of Carmela, very upset about something, looking at Nita with the oddest expression, almost disbelieving somehow—
“—begin to know how to make a noneducated guess . . .” her mouth kept saying, and then Nita ran out of steam, feeling shocked.
