by Diane Duane
His pop looked down at this, frowning, while Kit’s mama turned a stricken expression on Kit. “And we have problems getting a few hundred thousand people away from a war or a disaster,” she said. “But a hundred million and more…!”
“How do you even move that many people?” his pop said.
“Worldgates,” Kit said. “A lot of them. Which is why Mamvish is involved—”
“Wait,” Kit’s mama said, “the Mamvish who was here at Christmas, the Spin-The-Dreidelsaur, she’s in on this?”
“Yeah, she just delivered the summons in person. Stuck her head in through my bedroom wall.”
The coffee machine clicked. “The life we live,” Kit’s pop said, watching it spit coffee into his cup. “No structural damage?”
“She knocked down my Spitfire, but it’s better now.”
“Magic,” his pop said, shaking his head and staring at the machine, from which the flow of coffee had suddenly stopped. “Where’s the rest of the coffee?”
Kit’s mama peered past him at the buttons on top of the machine. “You left it set for espresso again.”
“Anyway,” Kit said, “Mamvish specializes in this kind of thing; she’s the Species Archivist to the Powers that Be. Her whole work is saving threatened species. If she can’t get them all safely off their planet alive and move them somewhere else—it’s called ‘rafting’—she’ll put them in stasis until she can get them out. But this time it looks like something else is going on.” What, exactly, he’d had no time to discover as yet, there was so much briefing material to read. “That’s why she’s requisitioned…” Kit flipped another page in his manual and then stopped, not sure he was reading the Speech-numeral correctly, but yeah, there’s the thousands-separator— “Eighteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine wizards from Earth to go there…”
“Eighteen thousand!!” Kit’s mama said. “Who’s going to stay home and keep an eye on Earth then?”
“Everybody else,” Kit said. “There are a lot more wizards on Earth than that, mama. But Mamvish is picking the ones she thinks will be best for this. The younger ones, the more powerful ones…”
“The smarter ones,” his pop said, as if it was simply a given that his son would be one of these. He pulled his coffee cup off the capsule machine’s little ledge and stared down regretfully at the half cup of coffee in it. “Son, you think you could have a word with this guy for me? Whatever I want to make, it always makes the opposite..”
“Uh, popi, I think I might have to teach it mindreading for that. Don’t know if its chip can take the strain…”
“Might work better if someone just learned to check the buttons first,” Kit’s mama said, while pulling her phone out of her scrubs pocket and starting to make a note to herself: “Buy… more… capsules…”
“Everybody’s a critic,” Kit’s pop said. “All right. Nita’s going too?”
“Yeah.” She’d have messaged Kit by now if there were any problems with that.
“And how far away is this?”
Kit glanced down at the manual, flicked a couple of pages back to the precis. “Just nineteen hundred light years. Barely out of the neighborhood.”
Kit’s father rubbed his eyes. “One of these days I’m going to be used to you saying things like that. Are Tom or Carl going to be along on this joyride?”
“Uh, I don’t know—” Kit flipped hastily through to the substantial part of the mission description that had to do with personnel assignments: but his heart was sinking as he did so, because Supervisories didn’t that often leave the planet for errantry unless—
“Oh,” Kit said. “Yeah, Tom is—” He flipped back a few pages. “And Carl. And…” He ran a finger down the page: the list was actually getting longer as he read. “And a lot of other Senior wizards, Supervisories… Wow.”
“It’s not like you need babysitting,” his pop said, “it’s just, you know, reassuring to know you’ve got backup if something happens.” Kit opened his mouth, and his Pop actually laughed and said, “Kit, seriously. With you something always happens. You think I’ve forgotten how before you could even walk straight we had to tie another playpen on top of yours to keep you from escaping and running away to seek your fortune? Come on.”
Kit blushed at this. Every now and then pictures of the (multiple) incidents in question got trotted out, and he lived in hope that Nita had never seen them—though with his Mama, you could never tell.
He turned his attention back to the manual, trying not to look too rattled. “And they’ve authorized energy allowances for puptents too—” Parental concerns aside, this was sounding more serious by the moment. When They send even Supervisories out on the High Road? For the first time in a long while, Kit felt something strange creeping up his spine: uncertainty. Am I going to be up to this?
“Oh, wait!” Kit’s mama said. “The puptents, that’s what you called what you had at the holiday party, isn’t it? When our favorite Christmas tree and Mr. Legs were all down in the basement, except they weren’t really, because they’d brought little packages of other spaces with them and attached them to the inside of the house? If you’ll have one of those, then you can come upstairs and just be home whenever you want to.” She looked at Kit’s pop. “That sounds okay…”
“Oh,” Kit said, “uh, no. This is the kind you take with you, like we took to Alaalu when we were going to be away for a couple of weeks. See, when you’re timesliding—”
“Wait,” Kit’s pop said, “that was the next question.” He gave Kit one of those slightly-narrowed-eyes looks that suggested there might trouble coming. “How long is this thing going to take? Not that I’m running down the importance of saving all those lives, and I can see where it would take a while even with wizardry. But in case you haven’t noticed, this is a school week, and somebody has a calculus test on Friday if I remember right…”
“Fifteen minutes,” Kit’s mama said.
Kit scrunched up his face in a wince, wishing he could just agree with her and leave it at that. But if he tried, it was going to cause serious trouble with his pop later. “Yeah, but also somewhere between a few days and ten,” he said.
“Oh now,” Kit’s pop said, shaking his head.
“But the other way I will just be gone fifteen minutes,” Kit said. “It’s not hard, popi. In fact Neets and I did it on my Ordeal! Our Ordeal, I mean. We were away for hours and hours, as far as we could tell. Long enough for a whole lot to happen…”
“Yes,” his dad said, turning away just long enough to hunt around on the counter for the sugar bowl, “I seem to remember something about the Sun going out…”
He got a spoon and put (to Kit’s way of thinking) way too much sugar in his coffee, and stood there stirring for a moment. “So in a way,” he said, “in terms of the timing, this is like you being away for spring break that time. But more dangerous. Though with a lot of supervision. And still only for fifteen minutes.” He shook his head.
“Though you could still come back and check in with us every few minutes, couldn’t you?” Kit’s mama said. “Legs has all those worldgates he runs, after all. I bet he’d do you a favor and let you just run back for a minute or two if you asked him…”
“Uh,” Kit said, “Mama, no, not really. If we’re going to be timesliding back to right after we leave, in local time, it means we can’t do intraliminal sidetiming back into this temporospatial frame while we’re away. Because when we come back, having been in this time here and somewhere else can cause local temporal discontinuities if you’re not really careful. And if that happened and things also got screwed up enough by all the timesliding activity in the area, you could wind up with two of me, or maybe more, which is bad, because the quantum resonance between two—”
He saw their confused expressions and had to stop for a moment and rub his face. “See, this is why the Speech has all these extra tenses for time travel…” Kit said. And then he stopped rubbing his face, because his pop was doing it too, the exact s
ame way. “Let’s try it this way. If you—”
Kit’s mama started waving her hands in the air. “No, it’s okay, stop,” she said. “Stop. You had me convinced at ‘two of me’. Go do your thing. Juan, stop making his life difficult.”
“I’m making his life difficult?” Kit’s pop said. “Anyway.” He took a long drink of his coffee and looked up at Kit. “It’s a rescue mission, I can understand that much. And some kinds of math matter more than others. Finding a hundred fifty million people somewhere else to be when the sky starts falling? That beats calculus hands down. If you flunk your test I’ll ask to meet your teacher, tell her that something stressful came up; you’ll retake it.” Another drink of the coffee. “So go. But look,” he added as Kit picked up the manual and was turning to run upstairs and start packing, “that tinkering you did with my phone so you can call me from Mars or wherever? You could maybe text me on that once a day or so, your time? Just to let me know how you’re getting on. You know your Mama worries.”
Kit was not fooled about who was going to be doing the worrying. He hugged his Pop one-armed while bopping him lightly on top of his head with the manual in his free hand. “Yeah, no problem.” He headed out. “I’ll get out of here, and then I’ll see you in…”
“Fifteen minutes?” said his pop.
“Give or take,” Kit said from the living room.
“Just one of you!” his mama called after him.
“Nag, nag, nag!” Kit shouted back, and ran up the stairs.
Things became something of a blur for a while after that. Kit decamped into the bathroom and locked the door, as much to have a few moments’ peace as to take care of physical business—as early as his Ordeal he’d discovered that his Mama’s favorite line, “You should have gone before you left”, could acquire whole new levels of meaning when you were out on errantry.
He was horrified to find, when after a few minutes he cracked the manual again, that the intervention section was even thicker than it had been when he’d shown it to his folks just now. What is going on up there? He leafed once more through the first few pages, more slowly this time, intent on getting at least the basic facts straight before he walked into the next scheduled briefing at the Crossings. Yet at the same time he was still having trouble concentrating because of the issues that had already been dogging his afternoon: or at least, with one of them.
I still have no idea what to do about Valentine’s Day. Or if I should do anything! There had been more than enough things to be confused about since the nature of his and Nita’s relationship had begun to shift, but this was an unwelcome addition to the list. Based on the preparations Kit had heard other kids at school making—or not making—it seemed like any gesture on V-Day could be construed as too much or too little. Flowers? For someone whose dad’s a florist? Maybe not. Jewelry? That could wind up loaded with dangerous symbolism that Kit didn’t care to get tangled up in. Hardware? Yeah, right, buy that for someone who can go to the Crossings and get whatever gadget she wants, from this planet or not, discounted a hundred percent…
Kit slapped the manual shut and stuck it on the windowsill, scowling. Maybe something really simple would be best. Something personal. Or homemade. Yeah, like what? Somehow Kit didn’t think Nita was going to be interested in cut-out construction paper hearts. Not that he’d thought she’d been interested in those for some time now. But what if she thinks this isn’t anything we need to be doing? Or what if she thinks that this is something we really should be doing, and I can’t figure out what she wants? Because Kit had gotten a sense more than once that Nita was as confused about the whole issue as he was. It was all making him incredibly uncomfortable.
Well, thank God there are other things to think about now, Kit thought, picking up the manual and starting to riffle through it again. Are we even going to be on this planet on Valentine’s Day? Because the numbers Mamvish had given him seemed solid enough, but before now Kit had seen time estimations that sounded just as good go way south in a matter of hours, or minutes. Ten days, plus or minus… We might be back. We might not. Either way, even if I can figure out what to do, is there going to be time enough to do it? Oh God.
…But this can wait. Somewhere up there a moon’s about to fall on a bunch of people! I need to get packed.
Kit flipped through the red-glowing crisis section of the manual in search of the page that would list the spell data for his puptent—particularly the Speech-based password that would give him access to the small cubic of living space that would follow him wherever he went. After a few moments he found it, glanced down the page to see if the parameters had changed significantly since he last used it. They hadn’t. Good, he thought, and tapped the page.
Immediately a three inch wide black spot developed on the middle of the page. Won’t need furniture for this run, Kit thought. I’ll just talk some air solid to sleep on at nights: the general energy supplement they’re giving us should be enough to cover that even when I’m sleeping…
With one hand Kit peeled the dark spot off the page—the portal to the puptent space not being active yet, there was no danger of cutting his fingers on the inside boundary of the interface—and stood distracted for a moment as he flipped a page or so along to where there were details of what extra power he was being given for this intervention. He ran a finger down the page, and stopped, and stared.
That can’t be right. Somebody must have misplaced a decimal point…
Except it had to be right. This was the manual: it was always right. Kit looked at the number written there in the Speech and did the math in his head, and realized that for as long as this intervention lasted, he’d have something like ten times his normal power level. He’d be able to coast through doing spells that would normally leave him limp as a wet rag and spending a day nursing a migraine-level headache.
Kit sagged against the edge of his desk for a moment, briefly stunned by the idea of the kind of spells he could do. Then he got annoyed with himself because he had absolutely no idea of what he wanted to do with all this extra power.
“Except get my butt out on errantry,” he muttered after a moment. “Because that’s what it’s for…”
He turned his attention to the little black circle of nothing in his hand and hung it up on the air. “Stay there,” Kit told it in the Speech, and then grabbed its sides and started stretching it until it was about three feet wide. When it was wide enough he took it by both sides and slapped it up against his closet door, where it adhered.
Kit half-turned to the manual on his desk and carefully read out the long password phrase; then turned back to the pitch-black circle and pushed a hand up against it. The hand sank in to the wrist.
Right, Kit thought, turning to the bed and pulling off the topmost blanket and the pillow and chucking them through the portal. Reading material…? Am I going to have time to read? There was no way to tell. Kit shrugged and pulled down the copies of The Guns of August and Longitude and The Eagle of the Ninth he was reading at the moment, and tossed them in after the bed linens. Okay.
He turned to his desk. More books, some that he hadn’t had time for over the last few weeks and absolutely none of them having anything to do with math. Drawing pad, a few pencils, rubber-banded together. His antenna-wand, because why not, it might be useful. Earbuds for his phone in case he felt like music.
Then his dresser. Sweats, underwear, socks. T-shirts. A couple of sweaters. Spare jeans. A backpack in case I need to tote anything small around… All these were chucked into the portal.
Kit pulled his closet open, yanked out a down vest and his hiking boots, shrugged into the vest, sat down on his bed and pulled the boots on; then kicked the closet door closed again, yanked the portal off the closet door, grabbed his manual and his phone off his desk and headed downstairs.
The next ten minutes or so were predictable, but he’d gone through this before and his Mama and Pop knew the drill. Nonetheless he had to put up with the inevitable comments as he opened up the
portal again in the kitchen, and opened the door of the fridge.
”Kit. Everything in the fridge?”
“Mama, no, just these cold cuts… and that cheddar spread… and the cream cheese, yeah, and the soda… no I won’t take Carmela’s, stop hovering… Canned cappuccino. Milk. Yeah, and those chilies...”
“Kit, won’t this go bad? Or do you have a fridge in your puptent?”
“Nope, there’s a stasis-capable partition. In there this stuff couldn’t go bad if it tried. Right.” He turned his attention to the cupboard next to the fridge. “That cereal… This half loaf of bread, that’ll be enough…”
“It wouldn’t be if you didn’t just eat the cold cuts with your fingers.”
“…Which breakfast bars are those?”
“The oatmeal ones.”
“Okay. Pretzel nuggets, yeah… And the ketchup. Aw, Mama, isn’t there any regular ketchup?” The squeeze bottle he was holding contained the less-sugar-than-usual kind: his mother was on some kind of take-no-prisoners crusade against corn syrup.
“What you see is what we’ve got.”
Kit rolled his eyes and tossed it into the portal. “And bottled water. There’s a few sixpacks down in the bottom cupboard, yeah? And crackers, I need crackers. Where are my saltines?…”
He found two boxes of those, and chucked them both into the portal. And the Ritz, too, he thought, throwing in a box of those even though they weren’t his favorite. Then he spent a while more rifling the next cupboard along: plastic cups, a bag of potato chips he’d hidden from himself, along with a couple of Three Musketeers bars. Right at the back of that shelf he came across a box of candy hearts that he’d grabbed on impulse at the grocery store last week, thinking he might do something Valentine-ish with them for Nita—but by the time they got the groceries in the back door he’d already dumped the idea as too boring. Can’t throw them out, Mama’ll yell that I wasted them… I’ll eat them for a sugar hit when I need one. He chucked them through the portal after the crackers and candy bars, then went digging in the cupboard again. Paper plates, some mismatched plastic cutlery…
