Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  Kit sighed. Probably the gate again. Oh well.

  He tapped the manual again to bring up his own gate complex’s array of controls and make sure that whatever was going on at Nita’s end wasn’t something that was manifesting system-wide. An event like that was what everyone had been watching for, and even more of a concern than the local anomalies. But a look across their graphs told Kit that all the gates were running well within their nominal ranges.

  He sighed, and thought for a moment about home, and life at home, which suddenly seemed incredibly calm and attractive. Except there were problems even with that at the moment. Pop’s new job, Kit thought. Calculus. Valentine’s Day. What, what, what am I going to do about Valentine’s Day?… Shame the candy hearts don’t work.

  When Kit had been in the grocery store that day and his glance had fallen on them, the idea had (so briefly) seemed so brilliant. Get candy hearts, use wizardry to erase sayings they came with, replace with cute brief sayings in the Speech… job done. Unfortunately the idea worked better in concept than in execution. Even such a simple message as BE MINE created complications in the Speech. Possessives in particular involved a range of words that in turn invoked a whole range of agency/patiency issues, not least important the concept of whether “ownership” was actually code for a consensual relationship with a fellow sentient being, and if not, what exactly it involved. (Even using ownership words with inanimate objects could prove problematic in the Speech in practice. “Does anyone truly own their car keys?” he’d heard Carl remark once when this subject came up. “Try claiming that you do and see what happens.”)

  It was always possible to string a pick-n-mix group of Speech-words together to suggest what you meant, but it was complicated work. Kit had sat back after the third or fourth attempt to render BE MINE and thought, I should try something else. But that might be even worse. And anyway, what if she thinks this is too much? Or is it going to seem like too little? What if she thinks I’m making a joke out of it? Or that it’s way too serious? Oh crap. And then the whole thing had started seeming impossibly complicated and not nearly as clever as it’d seemed in the store, and Kit had shoved the candy-hearts box in the kitchen cupboard and forgotten about it.

  Well, he thought, not today’s problem. Next week’s, maybe. Right now we’ve got other things to think about.

  He boosted the manual up onto his lap and sagged against the back of the throne rock, crossing his legs and glancing idly eastward as he settled himself. Away across the plain and past the low hills that defined the local horizon, Kit saw a hump or curve through the midday haze and squinted at it before he realized what it was: Thesba, starting to ease its way up over the horizon again for its first pass of the day. Its rising limb looked for the moment almost innocuously pale and golden against the green-gold of the sky.

  He scowled at it, almost glad to let his gaze drift back to the gates—not their schematic diagrams, but the gates themselves—and the streams of Tevaralti flowing out of the feeder portals and into the terminus gate that led offplanet, carrying all their worldly belongings with them. Granted, the carts and carrying vehicles they were using were all extremely futuristic, all of them levitating, no one having to actually bear those burdens themselves. But they’re bearing plenty of others, Kit thought as he watched them flowing by. They reminded him of too many images from the TV news—migrants and refugees, desperate people, fleeing from war zones and trying to find somewhere safe.

  But at least there’s nobody where they’re going who’s going to argue with them about whether they have a right to be there. Kit had trouble enough imagining what it was like for human refugees fleeing an endangered homeland—everything left behind you, not knowing whether you were ever going to be able to go back. These people, though, knew it was for the last time. There would be no returning. Even after less than a day here, he was beginning to understand better how there might be people who were terribly conflicted about the idea of going away at all. Even though there’s something else going on with them, he thought. Something a lot more urgent, more compelling… whatever that is. The Tevaralti Planetary hadn’t been able to shed much light on exactly what was going on. It was entirely possible that everyone from offworld would finish this job and go home and still be none the wiser afterwards.

  Or after we finish as much of the job as we can, Kit thought, looking across the plain to the hazy blot on the landscape that was the campsite of the people who had not gone through the terminus gate… who maybe never would go through.

  And I just don’t get it. Nor, to judge from manual chatter around the planet, did a lot of other people. Why didn’t so large a segment of the Tevaralti population want to leave? Seriously, Kit thought, if the Moon was going to fall on the Earth and destroy it, I would not hang around. I’d be upset, sure. Furious! I’d do everything I could to try to stop it. But if it couldn’t be stopped, I wouldn’t say ‘Nothing else is good enough, I want to die with my world…’

  There seemed to be a lot of other wizards working here who agreed with him. But Kit was entirely aware that that didn’t necessarily make it right. And the simple mystery of the why of it kept teasing at his thoughts.

  Never mind. It may be one of those things that really just doesn’t cross the species barrier, even with the Speech…

  Yet all these humanoids had been brought here in hopes that something might leak across that barrier, might eventually make sense for one side or the other, enough to help. The Powers, Kit knew, were gamblers. Trouble is, Kit thought as he bit into a saltine, there’s no telling for sure whether the gamble will pay off…

  From off to one side came a sudden soft thump, a sound Kit had learned to recognize over time as the way an inbound nonpersonal gating often sounded in an open area. And here comes one now, Kit thought, and what’s this about?

  Kit gave his manual a glance, then stood up and started to head over to the pad, half expecting the visitor to be a Tevaralti or other Interconnect Project official passing through; they’d had one earlier this morning on a routine check. But instead what he saw kicking casually along toward him through the green-blue grass was a long lean figure in black denim and a black parka, which in turn was unzipped to show a black t-shirt underneath that said U2 GLASTONBURY 2010.

  Kit watched him come with some astonishment, for two reasons: first, that Ronan was actually wearing a color other than black—specifically, a pair of beautifully tanned and beat-up brown cowboy boots—and second, that he was eating a hamburger. “You busy?” Ronan said. “No, don’t answer that.” He eyed the saltine in Kit’s hand. “I see you’re completely overworked right now.”

  Kit snickered and shoved the saltine away into a pocket as Ronan paused to look around. “I take it you’re not on shift until later.”

  “You take it right,” Ronan said. “Just making the rounds. Nothing better to do for a couple hours.” The hamburger forgotten for the moment, he looked around him at the broad fields, the wind stroking through the rippling waves of turquoise grassland. “Very pastoral, this…”

  “Yeah,” Kit said. “Could be pretty nice without what’s going on in the background.” He glanced toward the gating complex.

  “Though in some other ways a bit unusual,” Ronan said, looking down at one of his boots.

  Kit did too, and his mouth dropped open at the sight of brown tentacles reaching up out of the grass and wrapping around the boot as a sibik about the size of a small bunny rabbit started hauling itself up it.

  “Friend of yours?” Ronan said.

  “Uh, no!” Kit said as the sibik headed up Ronan’s leg. It had twisted the main part of its sacklike body around so that all its little eyes were fixed upwards on the burger in Ronan’s hand.

  “Now then my lad, this is not for you,” Ronan said in the Speech, holding the burger higher. “In fact it’s probably not good for you. Come to think of it, it probably won’t even taste any good…”

  “My shiftmates don’t seem to think that’s a probl
em for these guys,” Kit said, as the sibik kept climbing. “Omnivorous.” Which was also on his mind as he reached down to grab the creature, mindful of what Djam had said about being bitten. “And I’m not sure it’ll believe the part about it not tasting good. Come on, let go, little fella… come on!”

  The sibik wiggled its upper body sideways enough to look at Kit with a few extra eyes, but it didn’t let go of Ronan’s leg; the tentacles wrapped around it just stretched, rubbery in their stubbornness. Ronan, meanwhile, had burst out laughing, which wasn’t helping matters, mostly because Kit felt like joining him. “No, now,” Kit said to the sibik, “come on, just let go…” He didn’t want to hurt the little thing, so he just kept pulling gently until he started to feel the tentacles give. “Yeah, that’s right, look, we’ll give you something later, okay, but you can’t… have… that!”

  The sibik let go all at once and Kit staggered back a step or so, then turned to toss it as gently as he could a short ways off into the grass. “Here,” Kit said as the sibik stretched its head up out of the grass. He fished the remains of the half-saltine out of his pocket and tossed it in the sibik’s general direction. A breath of wind kicked the cracker off to one side and out of sight: the sibik instantly vanished into the grass after it.

  Ronan was nearly doubled over laughing, though one hand was still holding the hamburger safely up out of range. “Okay, that’s me done for,” he said, straightening with difficulty as he tried to get control over his laughter. “I’ve lived to see you nearly vanquished in single combat with a tentacle monster!” He managed to take another bite of his hamburger and get it down his face before he doubled over again, waving the remaining third of a burger helplessly in the air. “Sweet Powers that Be, feck me, I’m writ off.”

  Kit wasn’t sure what to make of this cryptic sentiment, but he was sure he wanted to check his manual again. “Come on,” he said, “be ‘writ off’ over here…” And he headed back to the throne rock.

  It took no more than a glance down at the manual to tell Kit that the gates were perfectly fine. He plopped down on the seat of the throne and Ronan collapsed beside him, still wheezing for air. After a few moments spent alternating between gasping and finishing his burger, Ronan recovered himself enough for words. “So is there anything else living around here I ought to know about? Like, anything bigger? If it’s anything like Tentacle Boy there, I’d rather not run into the regional apex predator.” He finished the hamburger and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “…Boy? Or girl? Or what’s the closest approximation?”

  “You’d have to ask him-her-or-it. Or Cheleb, if hae turns up while you’re still here,” Kit said. “Hae seems to be our team sex-and-gender specialist.”

  “Do I even want to know more about that?” Ronan said. “Never mind, doubtless eventually I will whether I want to or not.”

  Kit, who so far today hadn’t had even a bite of anything hot, gave Ronan an annoyed side-eye. “And while we’re looking for answers to burning questions, where exactly did you get a hamburger?”

  Ronan gave him a superior look. “My puptent contains wonders the likes of which your tiny mind may never be able to grasp.”

  “Okay, so that was some ready-made thing,” Kit said. “But it was hot.”

  Ronan rolled his eyes. “Am I or am I not a wizard,” he said, “and am I or am I not capable of politely asking an object to speed up the rate at which its molecules are presently vibrating? And what the feck else do you conceive heat to be? I think your encounter with the Giant Tentacle Monster’s thrown you off your game. Care for one?”

  Kit hesitated. “Only if you’re sure you can spare it.”

  “Of course I can spare one, my tent’s full of the things. And as it just so happens…” He reached out one hand with a flourish, stuck it into the empty air—his own otherspace pocket—and came out with another, this one in a cellophane wrapper. “I keep extras on hand in case I run into somebody who’s worn out from wrestling with a just-released kraken.”

  Kit gave him a look and took the burger, then started hastily juggling it between his hands, as Ronan had apparently put it into stasis still hot. “Never gonna hear the end of this, am I?”

  “Not till there’s no more mileage to be got out of it,” Ronan said. “Eat up or it’ll get cold and the bun’ll go to rubber. Sad sort of end for something that’s come the guts of a kiloparsec to get here.”

  Kit pulled off the wrapper and tucked into the burger. It wasn’t half bad: he was tempted to go get some more ketchup for it—there was already some in there, and a slightly soggy but acceptable pickle—and then decided not to bother and just concentrated on eating. Ronan leaned against the back of the throne rock and gazed around him with interest. “If you’re extra nice to me,” he said after a moment, “I’ll come back later and let you have a couple burritos. Not perfect, mind you, could use some more heat in them, but every now and then the Tesco justifies its continued existence.”

  Kit’s eyebrows went up: the Tesco Ronan was referring to was a grocery chain. “Wait. Grocery stores in Ireland carry burritos?”

  Ronan just laughed. “Seriously, where the feck do you imagine Ireland is, in the Oort Cloud somewhere? Why would we not have burritos when we have hamburgers? I worry about the state of your brains sometimes.”

  “Okay, don’t rub it in…” Kit had another bite of the burger. “Anyway, thanks. This is good.”

  “The sausage rolls are better,” Ronan said. “Got anything to drink?”

  Kit threw a look at his manual to check the gate monitoring array. “Water, milk, cola,” he said. “Some Mountain Dew—”

  Ronan looked at Kit as if he’d grown tentacles himself. “What in feck’s name is Mountain Dew?”

  Kit grinned and vanished into his puptent.

  A few minutes later Ronan was staring suspiciously at a can of it after having taken his first drink. “This has caffeine in it? You could fool me. Tastes like liquid Gummi Bears.”

  Kit shrugged, not having a lot of experience with Gummi Bears to start with. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said, pulling the manual back over next to him as they sat with their backs against the throne rock. “Anyway… kind of surprising to see you here. Or anybody else, without more warning.” The language in the manual about doing private worldgating spells in this already-gate-crowded environment had been unusually stern.

  Ronan had another drink, shook his head. “Naah, as long as you use the interveners-only pad transport system, it’s okay. It’s pretty low-power, and it’s natively shielded against interfering with the implanted mass-transport gates. Find out the gate address of where you want to go, have the manual input it into the transport pad, and bang, you’re there. Like that TV show but without the fancy water effects.”

  Kit nodded. “Seen Neets?”

  Ronan shook his head. “Knowledge said she’s very occupied. No point in going where you’re not going to be welcome. Or a distraction.” He uncrossed his legs, crossed them again into what was apparently a more comfortable configuration. “Looks like they stuck her onto one of the more active gates…”

  “Yeah, she mentioned.”

  Ronan chuckled. “Probably they mean to have her lose her temper with it and terrify it into submission.”

  Kit wondered whether there might not be something to that concept. “What about Dairine?”

  “Seems quiet where she is.” Ronan shrugged. “Though I haven’t been over there yet.” He sighed and looked around. “This place you’ve got, though… it’s nicer than anybody’s that I’ve seen so far. We should all come over here in our spare time and have a picnic.”

  Kit laughed. “You’re always trying to find fun ways to slack off.”

  “You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” Ronan said. “Doesn’t it make sense to stay on an even keel when we’re in this situation?” He looked out toward the gating complex. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been looking at that… or that fecking thing…” His glance went to Thesba, now al
most entirely risen above the horizon. “…and thinking about how hard it’s going to be to make a difference to these people. The difference we want to make, anyway.”

  There was no point in denying it: Ronan knew him too well. “If the difference we want for them isn’t the difference they want…” Kit said.

  “Normally I’d be tempted to agree with you,” Ronan said. “But the Powers seem to be going to a lot of trouble to try to shift that perception somehow—”

  He paused, his eyebrows going up. “Feck, so much for my break time,” Ronan said, getting up and dusting his jeans off. “They need me for something on site. Anyway, think about that picnic.” He glanced around him. “Could be fun. Assuming we can keep your little friends out of the potato salad.”

  Kit snickered around a bite of the burger. “And look into the protocol for these, yeah?” Ronan said, heading back through the circle of stones and gesturing toward the single-user gating pad. “No point in you being marooned out here.”

  “I should ask the shiftmates,” Kit called after him. “See how they feel about it.”

  “Can’t see why they’d disapprove,” Ronan said. “Who knows, maybe they’ll bring something blue…”

  Kit laughed. “Thanks for this!” he said, waving the burger.

  Ronan waved an arm, not turning around: trotted off to the pad, hopped up onto it, and vanished.

  Kit spent the afternoon getting caught up on his reading and his snacking, chatting with Nita once or twice, and making sure the check-the-gate-complex-every-ten-minutes habit became thoroughly ingrained. Only once did the complex act up—when Thesba was setting for the first time, and the number three feeder gate threw a small gravitational conniption. The fluctuation appeared to have something to do with that gate having had significantly fewer Tevaralti passing through it for a ten-minute period during which the gates on either side of it were at much higher pass-through levels. Or something like that, Kit thought. At the moment he was fairly vague about the finer details of the theory behind the way gates in close proximity to one another behaved. But here his affinity with mechanical systems served him well, and at any rate he’d been warned about this kind of problem and knew what to do about it.