Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  Kit sat considering that for a bit. Dairine nodded. “The weird thing,” she said, “like there’s only one weird thing about Temalbar, is that the other three species don’t know where the Fourth came from. And there’s nothing about that in the manual, either. They didn’t evolve there; there’s no evidence of them in the fossil record. They just turned up.”

  Carl nodded. “And thereby hangs a tale,” he said. “Whether their appearance was due to an accident in transport or an experiment that went wrong, or they were explorers from somewhere a lot further away who went astray and wound up on Temalbar… at this end of time there’s no telling. But it was a good thing for all of us that they did wind up here, because one way or another they saved us a lot of time.”

  “Problem is,” Tom said, “we tend to think of worldgating as something commonplace, a normal function of wizardry. And at the wizardly end of things, naturally it is. But worldgating in the mechanical sense is much harder to achieve—very energy intensive, and requiring a very high level of technological expertise.”

  “Which the Fourth seemed to have brought with them from wherever they came from,” Carl said. “Which no one’s sure of, and no one’s managed to find out. Not even they seem terribly certain—insofar as anyone can really figure out what they’re thinking.”

  “Well, we’ve got the Speech,” Nita said, looking puzzled. “It’s not like we can’t ask them.”

  Tom gave her a thoughtful look. “I invite you to try,” he said, “when you meet up with one or more of them. Let me know how that turns out.” There was something to his voice that seemed to suggest he was both amused at the possibility and genuinely wondering what Nita might turn up.

  She rubbed her eyes. “Tell me that somehow or other this isn’t going to mean I wind up doing more paperwork.”

  Tom shook his head and smiled, looking rueful. “No guarantees… just see how you do.” He looked over at Dairine again. “Sorry,” he said. “Do go on.”

  Dairine gave him another annoyed look, but Kit glanced at Nita for a moment and saw from her expression that she was amused at how restrained Dairine was being. “Anyway!” Dairine said. “So the Fourth started sharing their expertise at mechanical worldgating with the other three species. And all together they made all kinds of breakthroughs, so that their technology started spreading all over among the spacefaring species in that part of space. Gating tech got really small and compact, and implementing the basic equations got easier and easier. Then one or another of the four Temal species got the idea of starting to build a standalone network of ‘hard’ worldgates among planets in their part of the galaxy. One or two of those gates were on Earth; early explorers used them to look the place over. There wasn’t that much interest in us, because this was… maybe twenty thousand years ago, this first bit? And there wasn’t a lot going on back home, so they just sort of classified us and went away.”

  Ronan grunted. “Only because they didn’t know yet that there was chocolate there.”

  Kit pursed his lips and did his best to keep his expression otherwise neutral. Ronan and Kit’s sister Carmela were still in the early stages of working out the kinks in the business plan for their interstellar chocolate-trading company. Half the time the very idea of this joint venture left Kit full of a nameless dread. The rest of the time it left him profoundly relieved that Carmela wasn’t getting into intergalactic arms trading instead. Kit had lately begun to realize that his sister had a near-piratical instinct for where profit lay, and apparently—after a long weekend spent examining a couple of years’ worth of figures from the cocoa futures markets based on Rirhath B and on Earth—had decided there was a lot more profit in chocolate running than in gunrunning. …Thank God.

  “That could even be true,” Dairine said. “Anyhow, as they kept improving the tech, the Temal got to the point where they could not only move small numbers of living beings great distances almost instantly, but they could move very large numbers of beings shorter distances without requiring the kind of energy outlay that would cripple a whole planet.” Dairine reached down to Spot, flipped his lid open. “And that was where the Interconnect Project began—”

  “Would group 5611GH,” a mechanical voice said in the Speech, echoing in the air all around them—

  Everyone’s heads snapped up together.

  “—please report to the 500 hexes; your outward transport is programmed and ready. Group 5611GH to the 500 hexes please…”

  “Okay, a bit closer than planned,” Tom said, pushing away from the counter. “No complaints about that…”

  Everybody grabbed their bags or whatever else they’d come with, thanked the Rirhait who’d been taking care of them, and headed off after Tom and Carl. “So I’m sure we can finish this another time…” Dairine said, falling in behind them next to Ronan.

  “What, you can’t walk and lecture us at the same time?” Tom said. “Nelaid will be sorry to hear that.”

  “Not to mention skeptical,” said Carl. “With so much evidence to the contrary.”

  Behind Dairine and Ronan, Kit glanced over at Nita, who glanced back, biting her lip to keep from laughing. Kit carefully kept his face straight, but even so Nita had to turn away from him to keep from losing it. Meanwhile Dairine was leveling a look at Tom’s back that should have burned through it like a pulse rifle, but the effect was somewhat ruined by Tom casually turning toward her and walking backwards for a bit as they all made their way toward the 500 hexes.

  Dairine rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Not much more to tell, anyway. All the Temal species realized that a really great way to use the technology would be to remove whole planetary populations from endangered venues, where before you’d have had no choice but to do potentially world-saving interventions with the whole population stuck on site. And with the SunTap technology they developed, you could install large-aperture mass-movement gates on the surface of any planet close enough to its primary, and get everybody who was in danger out of there—and not have to do something invasive and really taxing in terms of wizardly power like full-species archival.”

  “Like what Mamvish does,” Nita said.

  Carl nodded. “You need a very high-powered wizard for that kind of work,” he said, “the kind who’s not born all that often and has an intuitive grasp of how to archive life and matter without them losing their connection to each other. Or else you need hundreds of wizards who don’t mind taking a fifty-fifty chance that they can save half a million or two million or ten million lives at the cost of their own.” He shook his head. “Lifeprice is never cheap…”

  For a change Dairine didn’t protest at the interruption, just looked down rather somberly at Spot, presently tucked under her arm. “So they started putting together a force to do that,” she said. “Not of wizardly people, mostly, though there were wizards involved. That was the beginning of the Interconnect Project. And it got bigger, and spread all through that part of inhabited space… which is when things got ugly.”

  Tom, who’d turned around as they started getting near the 500 hexes, nodded and sighed.

  “Because all of a sudden a black hole came sailing through the Alterf system,” Dairine said. “A lot of people got the idea that maybe the Lone Power thought too many lives were getting saved due to the species based there. So the story goes that in a fit of spite It chucked a singularity through the system…”

  “Well, it is just a story,” Carl said. “We’re short on data about the actual causes. And you can’t blame the Lone Power for everything—”

  “Yes we can,” came an immediate chorus of unified opinion.

  Dairine just smiled grimly. “Whatever… that singularity blew through the system and pulled a huge long tail of matter out of Alterf. Since it was a type K1 orange giant, kind of amazing that the star didn’t blow. But if the Lone One did do that on purpose, then it got sloppy about it, because the singularity came through the system too slowly for the star to either go nova right then or collapse fast enough to
do It any good. The Temal species had just time enough to get away, and the same tech they’d used to save so many other species saved them. They evacuated all their people from Temalbar before Alterf collapsed, and rafted them out to new homeworlds in the neighborhood of Rirhath B. The four species stayed together, though, and relocated the Interconnect Project to the new worlds. And to here: this is their main administrative center in this part of the Galaxy, and the Master of the Crossings sits on their governing board.” She sighed. “And here we are…”

  The concourse opened out to their left, at this point, into the wide semicircular space that held the 500 hexes: a broad tightly-packed pattern of them in blue on white, running nearly to the edges of the semicircle in a space perhaps three hundred meters in diameter. What caught Kit by surprise, though, was that none of the hexes were showing the subdued glow that meant they were about to go active, and there was no one else waiting for them to do so.

  Ronan glanced around in surprise. “Feck,” he said, “are we even in the right place? There’s nobody here.”

  “Did we miss an announcement?”

  “Not possible,” Dairine said, looking around. “They’re targeted to your manuals: they follow you.”

  “Best wait a few minutes,” Carl said. “We may be waiting for someone else to arrive.”

  They all stood there at loose ends, looking around at the crowds of hominids passing them by. “So all the Temal species left,” Kit said to Dairine. “But what about Temalbar?”

  Dairine shook her head. “Dead and frozen. There’s still hydrogen-based life in Tarthak’s atmosphere; the collapse didn’t bother them so much. There’s enough heat from ‘collapse decay’ in the gas giant’s core to keep things going there for at least the next couple of millennia or so. If things change there, they can be relocated too. Alterf’s finally stable now: still officially an orange giant, though it’s a lot cooler and fainter than it was twenty-odd thousand years ago.”

  “Core’s probably dead, with a history like that,” Nita said. “Though if it hasn’t burned all its helium, it might brighten up before it fades down for good.”

  Dairine nodded. “But the Temal moved everything that could be moved to the new worlds: all their animal life, even as much of their plant life as they could get off in time before the collapse got serious. Maybe not as good as living peacefully in your own world. But it’s better to live a little less peacefully somewhere else than to go extinct.”

  “Except when,” Carl said, “as in our present circumstances, there are some people who seem to think otherwise.” He shook his head, gazing up at the amazing ceiling above them as if hoping some kind of help might descend through it.

  Except we’re the help… Kit thought.

  “Just another way we have the most exciting job in the worlds,” Tom said.

  “Will group 5611GH,” said the voice in the air—and Kit’s head snapped up. Then he looked at Nita, who even through her nervousness was smiling: she too recognized Sker’ret’s voice. “Group 5611GH please note; you have a hex complex change. But then doesn’t everybody, today? You’re now departing from the 300 hexes in ten minutes. Please step into the hex now flashing for you to avail yourselves of in-house transport to staging for hex 306.”

  “And when the Master of the Crossings says ‘jump,’” Tom said, “you don’t waste time asking him how high. Let’s go.”

  Everybody jumped up and started trooping over to the hex at the side of the cluster that was cycling through bright-to-dark blue, the standard beside it showing a sixty-second countdown. Kit watched with amusement as Dairine leaned close to Nita. “How do you not kill them when they interrupt you all the time?” Dairine muttered as Tom and Carl and Ronan stepped into the hex.

  Nita snorted. “Either by remembering that they enjoy teasing us as much as we enjoy teasing them,” she said, “or by adding together all the times their advice has saved my life and then dividing by ‘shut up’. Come on, let’s get where we’re going….”

  FOUR

  11848 Cephei IV / Tevaral

  The countdown ended. Everything around all of them went dark.

  Then things brightened up again, at least somewhat. Kit looked around them, getting an initial impression that was a bit muddled. The sky above them was dark. It was nighttime: the hex under their feet fading away against smooth pale stone, the stone illuminated in a pale warm gold, their shadows leaning and stretching away from them all across the polished surface of it. But the shadows weren’t quite dark; they seemed to be filled in with a subtle blush of red. Out at the edge of things, past the huge slab of stone, a lot of shortish humanoid people with shaggy feathery hair were moving to and fro, some carrying artificial light sources with them, some followed by what was clearly wizard-light in the form of generalized glows or small point sources.

  Under Kit’s feet, the smooth stone surface buzzed and jumped. At first he thought, Oh, it’s like at the Crossings; time to get off the hex. But the jumping didn’t stop, just got worse… and he saw Nita next to him put her arms out to balance herself, and Tom and Carl bumped into each other with their shoulders, Tom laughing uneasily. “I’ve never cared for that kind of thing,” he said under his breath.

  Dairine looked around her, Spot in her arms, and scowled at the surroundings as the extremely unnerving slippy-slidy feeling of the earth under Kit’s feet finally calmed down. “An earthquake,” she said, sounding disgusted, “is such a bad way to say hello...”

  Nita turned toward Kit, laughing, and the sound was as uneasy as Tom’s had been. “Wow, they weren’t kidding about the tectonic instability, huh?” she said, and looked up.

  And her mouth fell open.

  Kit turned to see what she was looking at… and froze.

  The open countryside around the paved place where they stood was relatively flat. Away against the horizon, some gentle hills rose up against the sky, clothed in haze and some rags and tatters of low cloud. Higher cloud was being driven across the sky in long streams and banners. But these were nothing like thick enough to hide what seemed to stare down through them through the darkness, leaning menacingly over the fragile, trembling world below.

  A quarter of the sky above them was obscured by a vast bloated sphere that, even though it obviously wasn’t moving, nonetheless seemed to be pressing itself down toward the world beneath it, so that despite how stupid the urge made Kit feel, he still felt like he should duck. That huge glowing mass seemed to be pushing the whole sky overhead downward under its weight, an illusion somehow compounded by the way the hastily-blown clouds looked as they fled across its face—seemingly thinning away to nothing as if squeezed flat by pressure from above. Toward the horizon the clouds reflected the moon’s light a bit on their upper sides—an unhealthy yellow like the final stages of a healing bruise, the moon’s extensive cloud deck afire with the sulfurous color in the light of Tevaral’s sun. Wherever the toxic soup of airborne sulfides and upthrown volcanic ash in that cloud deck didn’t cover the moon’s surface, mostly what could be seen was the flickering restless red of burning stone: dully-glowing lava flows covering tens of thousands of square kilometers, the great moon’s surface scabbed and scorched black, and here and there huge cracks welling up through the burnt and ravaged crust with bleeders of fresh lava, brightening, fading, brightening again. And all the time that sense of the fire and the darkness kept on pressing down, endlessly threatening to fall out of the sky and crush you flat.

  “Thesba,” Nita said from right behind Kit, very soft.

  He was glad she was so close, because (irrational though the sense was) Kit felt like he needed backup—like he’d never been so comprehensively loomed over by anything in his life. He stared up at this awful apparition and tried to imagine what it would have been like before everything started to go wrong here, when it was still quiet and benign; when it didn’t look like it was going to come to pieces right this minute and start raining itself down in fire and brimstone on your head. But his imagination k
ept coming up blank, images of what had been or might have been driven out by this terrible threatening now.

  “It’s like… like it shouldn’t be possible,” Kit said under his breath.

  “Yeah,” Nita said. The two of them stood there a moment longer, then let out a joint breath and glanced around. The others, just as transfixed as they’d been, were finally moving off the hex now: they followed them. “The orbital mechanics is weird,” Nita said under her breath. “The way their masses are balanced—the rotational speed and so forth, obviously it does all work out… though it definitely looks like it shouldn’t. We’re used to a moon that’s a lot further away, moves a lot more slowly…”

  Kit nodded. There was a lot more to experience here—a thin chill wind laden with strange new scents and smells, a deluge of them, and a half-lit night edged all around with peculiar animal calls and many less identifiable sounds. But he was having trouble right now doing anything but ignoring the mental and spiritual weight of what hung in the sky above them. It seemed to Kit that the smartest thing to do at the moment was keep his eyes away from that: so as they made their way toward the edge of the gating slab and toward the small broad Tevaralti who seemed to be heading directly toward them, that was what he did.

  “Cousins,” the being called to them, “you’re from Sol III—or Earth, is it? Which do you prefer?”

  “Earth will do fine,” Tom said. “Dai stihó, rank-kin—”

  Kit recognized a supervisory-level greeting intended for another of the same wizardly rank. “Well met in an ill time,” said the Tevaralti as he came up to them. He was broader and rounder than the Planetary, and was wearing the same kind of strappy-looking harnesswork; and he was shaggier-feathered, too, with a rounder, blunter face. “I’m called Vesh.” He crooked out an arm, bent at the feather-fringed elbow.

  “Tom Swale,” Tom said, and moved next to Vesh and hooked his own crooked elbow through Vesh’s for a moment, then let go. “My associate Carl Romeo—” Carl followed suit. “These wizards with us are in our immediate and secondary supervisory groups, as well as sharing a vicinity locus.”