by Diane Duane
The two of them pulled their manuals out to check for notifications on exactly where they were supposed to go from here. The nearby gate-herald post, which was scrolling long Speech-sentences from top to bottom under its metallic skin, was presently displaying the stats for the gating hex connected to the Platform Twenty-three gate. Nita looked up at it, reading the most recent stats, and shook her head. “This thing has had more than eight thousand wizards through it in the past hour,” she muttered. “Is it even rated for that kind of traffic?”
“It must be,” Kit said, “or it wouldn’t be doing it. Rhiow and her team wouldn’t let it.”
Nita looked over her shoulder as yet another group of five wizards came through together and hurried out of the hex, followed no more than a few seconds later by another four. “If they keep doing that for another hour or or so,” she said, “something like twenty percent of the wizards in the New York metropolitan area are going to be in here...”
“And bearing in mind how many may be coming in to Grand Central from other gating complexes elsewhere,” Kit said, “probably a whole lot more…” He paged through his manual to find one of the Crossings maps in the intervention section. ”Okay,” Kit said, “looks like they want us to head down to the big auditorium space near the 400-group of hexes. They’re doing an orientation routine in there once every half hour. We should be able to catch the next one if we start walking now.”
Nita nodded and stuffed her manual back in its otherspace pocket. “Kind of weird that we didn’t see Rhiow in Grand Central…”
“That would be because I haven’t been there for the past hour,” said the slightly weary voice from away behind them and much closer to the floor. “But what are the odds that I would run into you two despite all this traffic?”
“Rhi!” Kit said as the two of them turned toward where the head of the New York worldgating teams had come trotting up behind them from further down the concourse: a small black cat with an unusually harried look. “Dai stihó! Are you coming along on this thing too?”
“Oh no,” Rhiow said, “not me! They’ve got plenty of people working the Tevaralti side of this gating project, believe me. You probably won’t ever again see so much high-powered gate-management talent pulled together in one place. At least I hope you won’t!” She sighed and lashed her tail a bit. “You’ll hear all about it shortly. But some of us have to stay home and make sure the feeder gates work correctly to get everybody here.” She looked over her shoulder at the gate as it went dark again, then patent again and spat out five or six more wizards. “We’ve shifted about eighty percent of our scheduled local-traffic load at this point, but that doesn’t mean the New York gates are off the hook just yet; we’re going to start taking a lot of incoming pressure from Europe and Asia shortly as they route through us.”
“Have you seen Sker’ret?” Nita said.
“An hour or so ago,” Rhiow said, “but if I were you I wouldn’t expect to see him on this run. He’s juggling several different administrative roles at the moment, and he’s desperately busy doing liaison work with the ten or twelve other hominid planets who are feeding personnel into this intervention.” Then she purred with amusement. “He did tell me, though, that if I saw you I should greet you. At the time I said I didn’t think that was likely, but now I see it’s better leaving the visionary talent to those to whom it comes naturally.”
Nita said something under her breath and rubbed her eyes. Kit grinned. “It’s just really weird, though,” he said, “seeing all these—people people here.” He waved a hand at the crowds around them.
“I know, isn’t it odd?” Rhiow flirted her tail in bemusement. “But this is a hominids-only party for a change. Haven’t had a lot of time to get into the details in the mission précis, this all came up so quickly. But as far as the affected Tevaralti go, all I know is that there’s some kind of perception problem compromising their willingness to leave. Apparently the intervention management team feels that if enough other hominids are loaded on top of this, either the Tevaralti will find a way to tell us what the problem is, or the Powers will, and then we can take a shot at solving it.” Her tail started lashing. “Though apparently there are some intracultural issues that’ll make finding a solution more challenging than usual….”
Rhiow threw another look back at the gate. “My cousins, I’m herding a lot of mice right now, so I should get back to it. And if you’re going to make that next briefing there’s not much time, so you two go well—” She flirted her tail at them a last time, then trotted back to the gate. As it went patent again she leapt through it and to the platform on the other side, immediately going over to some human wizards who’d just arrived and starting to talk to them urgently. The gate went dark.
“Wow,” Nita said. “Come on… let’s go find out what we’re here for.”
It was a longish walk down to the auditorium, but they had a lot of company: hundreds of other wizards who’d arrived from Earth earlier than they had, and many hundreds of others from different humanoid species. “It’s so odd,” Nita murmured as they went along, looking at all the members of hominid species they didn’t immediately recognize, while trying not to be caught looking. “I really can’t get used to it...”
Kit just nodded, as his attention was partly elsewhere at the moment. He was keeping an eye on the time as they made their way along the shining white floor and past a number of familiar shopfronts.
“…Don’t even think about it,” Nita said.
“What?” said Kit, doing the best he could to look completely innocent.
“Blue food,” Nita said.
Why do I even bother? Kit rolled his eyes at her. “You know me too well…”
She sighed. “Like I wouldn’t like to stop in over there,” Nita said, glancing back at the entrance to one of the restaurants they’d just passed. “They have those great crunchy things.”
“Whatever those are.” Sometimes it didn’t do, when eating at the Crossings, to inquire too closely into exactly what the food was, as you could run afoul of alien cultural concepts that didn’t mesh particularly well with yours. If the manual or the restaurant’s own software flagged the food as safe for human physiologies, and if it smelled and tasted good, that was good enough for Kit. It was occasionally possible to find yourself in possession of too much information. Like that time with the fried frogspawn…
“But you know we don’t have time,” Nita was saying. “Maybe when all this is over…”
And when’s that going to be? Kit thought. He was still hearing Mamvish’s time estimate in his head. She sounded like she was really hoping it would be just a few days. But like she also thought things were going to go wrong. And he couldn’t get the crisis levels she’d mentioned out of his head, either…
“Are you freaking out?” Nita said, completely conversationally.
“What?”
“Because you’d really have reason right now.” She was looking ahead to where she saw a big crowd of humanoids hanging around the doors of the auditorium facility down the concourse. “And I’m fairly freaked as well. Just so you know.”
“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” Kit said.
Nita snickered. “Sarcasm,” she said. “Always a good sign. But seriously… even the Song of the Twelve was only estimated to go up to ‘critical’.”
And still nearly got us both killed, Kit thought, several different ways. “Yeah, that thought had occurred.”
“But there’s this,” Nita said. “It’s not like we’re exactly going to be alone out here, wherever we wind up.”
“No,” Kit said, while considering—though carefully not saying—that it sounded more like Nita was trying to convince herself about that than him. “How far down the assignment list did you make it?”
“Not all that far…”
“Well, Tom and Carl are here, too. Or they will be.”
They were much closer to the crowd waiting around the auditorium doors, now. “Unusual,” Nita said.
“They don’t let Supervisories do out-of-system errantry all that often.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. He was frankly excited about that. It wasn’t very often that you got to go out on errantry with your own Supervisories, even on your own planet. The chance to work side by side with them for a change, and the prospect of seeing how they handled the challenges of the High Road, couldn’t help but be interesting—
Up ahead of them the crowd was moving, shifting around. The auditorium doors had dilated and a lot of people were coming out; the people waiting outside were parting to let them get through.
“Is that who—” Nita was squinting ahead of them at that crowd.
“What?” Kit said. “Who? Tom? Carl?” He peered ahead too. “Dairine?”
“No!” Nita burst out laughing and broke into a run. “Aunt Annie!”
Kit saw the silver-haired shape in a down jacket and riding jodhpurs turn around at the edge of that crowd, look toward them, and break into a big grin.
“Oh, Nita, sweetie!”
There ensued some fairly heavy-duty hugging and kissing. “It’s so good to see you!”
“Yes, you too, darlin’! I was so sad I couldn’t make it for Christmas, but you know how it is… when the Powers call, we answer. And Kit, how are you, come here, honey!” There was no escaping the hug, not that he particularly wanted to. “God, you’re so much taller, what are they feeding you at home?”
“Enough for two people, my mama says…”
“I bet. Don’t let them guilt you out of it, now! Your body knows what you need.”
Nita laughed at her. “But Aunt Annie, listen, I kept checking the manual after Christmas and there wasn’t anything about what you were doing. I was worried about you!”
“Oh, Nita, it’s all right, there was a privacy lock on the listing until we were all done and debriefed. Heisenberg issues, it’s a long story…”
“Well, okay, but where were you?”
“Down a mine.”
“A mine?”
Her aunt laughed, a very dry and tired sound, as if she was sick of the subject. “You have no idea. Just check the manual… it’s all in there now. Have a look at the late December listings for ‘Kola Borehole management intervention.”
Then Aunt Annie glanced around as people of many species began to pile up behind her. “Pet, I can’t stay, our group’s on its way out. Look here, you message me when you get settled wherever they stick you on Tevaral, and if there’s time we’ll get together. Otherwise catch me when all this is over, yeah? Tualha’s been asking after you. She wants you to see the new kittens.”
“Okay!”
The two of them hugged and kissed again, and then Aunt Annie waved at Kit as one or two older wizards caught her eye and hustled her off. One of them, a tall brawny man with salt-and-pepper hair, caught Kit’s eye.
He leaned over Nita’s shoulder. “Look at him looking at her.”
“Yeah, well, I’m looking at her looking at him.”
“Is she… dating?”
“Don’t ask me,” Nita said. “Looks like we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” And then she gave Kit an amused look.
“What?”
“It’s just kind of weird,” Nita said. “For me at least. That before you get together with somebody, half the time you don’t even see it? And afterwards… all of a sudden everybody seems to be dating? It’s like it starts following you around.”
“Uh, yeah,” Kit said. Because he had noticed that, to his considerable discomfort. He’d wondered if it was something wrong with him.
They walked on toward the doors. “I didn’t know you were so worried about her,” Kit said after a moment. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know. It seemed kind of silly at the time. But at least now I know she’s OK.” Nita shrugged. “I just get paranoid sometimes when I don’t hear back from people right away.”
“Unless it’s Dairine.”
“Oh well, Dairine…” Nita laughed. “I hear from her all day and all night, sometimes, when she’s conscious. At least it seems that way. I don’t mind a little peace and quiet where she’s involved! And anyway, if she was in some kind of trouble, Bobo would hear about it from the Mobiles. They’re pretty protective of their ‘mom’... they’ve got her tagged somehow so they know where she is all the time.”
Kit threw Nita a sideways glance as they came up to the auditorium doors, now dilated as widely as they could go to make entrance easy for the large crowd of assorted humanoids heading in. “And how’s she taking that?”
“I think she thinks it’s cute,” Nita said. “And I don’t want to be in the neighborhood the day she stops thinking about it that way, so I’m not rocking the boat. Either way, our Dad likes it, though he’s not saying anything about that to her out loud either…”
Kit nodded and looked around the huge space as they headed in. The two of them had been in here before, every now and then, usually between assignments or secondary to some business Sker’ret had going on that he wanted them to sit in on. But it was very strange to see all the seating configured for humanoids. instead of the usual bizarre assortment of racks and platforms and cradles and other less classifiable shapes.
They found themselves some seating not too close to the front dais, a big open space large enough to take a good-sized crowd of people, and made themselves comfortable between a small group of scaly-skinned four-armed semi-saurian Muthhallat, glittering all emerald-green in the auditorium lighting, and a furry five-person Khelevite clone-clan from beta Ophiuchi, relatively close neighbors to Earth by Crossings standards. They were still exchanging greetings (it could seem a touch repetitive with clones until you were used to it) when the lights went down a bit, at least in the Earth-human visible spectrum. Suddenly Mamvish was standing up on the dais, or seeming to, and things went quiet.
“My cousins from near and far,” Mamvish said, “first of all: I want to thank all of you who’ve dropped whatever you were doing to join us in this intervention. I want you all to know that despite the very large number of fellow wizards here, every one of you singly is going to make a difference. It’s not all that often that we run into a situation that requires so very much hands-on work… and each one of you individually is going to be responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives, if not many more. It’s not like the Powers need reminding of this. They know. But sometimes we need reminding.”
Her projection—for Kit could recognize it as exactly the same kind of apparition that had stuck itself through his bedroom wall—turned to look around the room. “I’m hoping you’ll forgive me appearing here in eidolon format, but my corporally-present time is being split about equally between Tevaral and Thesba at the moment. Both bodies are requiring repeated stabilization, and right now the best use of my power levels is feeding the circles of wizards who are presently concentrating on holding the primary and its moon together. This clone of me can handle questions, but I’d ask that you hold the most complicated ones until the end of the prepared presentation—or better still, until you get to Tevaral. I’ll be available at all times for consult while we’re all there.
“So let me first explain the nature of our intervention and what’s caused us to upgrade it to emergency status.”
The walls of the auditorium at that point simply seemed to vanish, leaving the audience apparently sitting suspended in empty space. It was an effect that could have been produced by a particularly good planetarium, but the absolute precision and clarity of it made it clear to Kit that this was a live view of space quite distant from here.
They were looking at a bright blue-white star in the middle distance, and much closer to the point of view, the broad, partly shadowed limb of a green-golden planet. “This is Tevaral,” Mamvish said. “Tevaral has been home to the Tevaralti species for approximately eight hundred and seventy thousand years, and to its avian forebears for significantly longer. While hardly the oldest species in this part of the galaxy, they are certainly
one of the oldest, and also a species of unusual longevity in comparison to other humanoid cultures and civilizations.
“Tevaral is a so-called ‘dual world’ that revolves around a common center of gravity with its very large satellite Thesba, a capture that settled into its present relationship with Tevaral approximately two point nine billion years ago, when Tevaral was still cooling after forming up around its primary star, Sendwathesh.”
The view switched to one of Thesba, a badly pockmarked and deeply fissured world splattered with big patches in dun and brown that Kit suspected were leftovers from old violent volcanic activity. Nita leaned toward him. “Look at that atmosphere,” she whispered.
“Sooner look at it than breathe it,” Kit whispered back. It was curdled yellow with what were almost certainly noxious gases from an oxygen-breather’s point of view.
“—both Tevaralti scientific investigation and manual data concur that Thesba was probably acquired from one of the shorter-lived stars in the local OB association. This large star became unstable within several billion years of formation and violently blew off a significant portion of its mass in the form of energetic plasma shells, thereby also dislodging various minor planets that were still in relatively early formative stages.”
