by Diane Duane
Kit nodded gravely. “I should write to the company about that,” he said. “I’ll make a note in the manual.”
Between them they managed to maneuver the hearts back into the box without dropping more than a few in the grass. Kit recovered them and ate them one by one, pausing over each for Cheleb’s benefit. One by one they vanished: ‘Rock On,” “Hold Hands,” and “Boogie.”
Cheleb looked bemused over that last one, apparently pausing to consult his wizardly Knowledge. “Part of nose?” hae said, looking a bit dubious.
“What?” At that point Kit was beyond being able to suppress the laughter. “No!” he said, when he was able to find enough spare breath to gasp the word out. “No, no. It’s dancing, something to do with dancing…”
“Oh. Relieved,” Cheleb said. “Know some species do go in for post-conjunction cannibalism, but seemed like unusual behavior for humanoids.”
It occurred to Kit that there were some well-known Earth movies it might be smarter to make sure Cheleb didn’t find out about. “Never mind,” he said, closing the box. “Let’s get this show started, yeah? I’ll put these away.”
Kit popped back to his puptent with the box full of hearts. And now I’ve got a problem. If I eat all of these, Cheleb’ll start thinking Neets and I are going to go ahead with the— He could hardly even think it with a straight face. The Impregnation Ritual. But if I don’t keep eating them, Cheleb might get suspicious. Hae might think I’m stalling on purpose.
He thought about that as he sealed the puptent up again. Well, I can make it take a long time to eat these. A really long time. If I’m smart…
Kit got back to the Stone Throne to find that Djam already had the frozen frame of the LucasFilms logo cued up and waiting on the floating screen. Moments later, under the blazingly starry sky of a world that (while in the same galaxy) was still far, far away from its birthplace, a great orchestra cried out the single triumphant opening chord of a defiant fanfare into an alien night, and the three of them settled in to watch the tale unfold.
For Kit there was something surprisingly comforting about this in the wake of the day he’d had—watching something much loved and reliable that had a known happy ending; and watching it with new friends who knew absolutely nothing about it in advance. It was like seeing it for the first time all over again. There were cries of shock and shouts of laughter and gasps of excitement and fear and groans of pain and anticipation and yells of delight (“Told you about ‘I Know!’ Told you!”). And then came the lines that always made Kit’s hair stand up on end: “You’ve failed, your Highness! I am a Jedi—like my father before me!”—and everything that followed: the destruction and the redemption and the final joy.
After the singing and dancing and the final glimpse into “a larger world” had blackscreened into the end titles, Djam and Cheleb sat babbling to each other and to Kit about what they’d seen for a good while afterwards. Favorite lines were repeated, disliked characters dissected. Cheleb got surprisingly heavily into the politics of it (“Empire apparently inherently unstable,” he said, “would have fallen to Rebel Alliance eventually regardless of Jedi intervention!”), while Djam remained most interested in Chewbacca, and became repeatedly and cheerfully scornful about the Ewoks (“What adorable dolts. Plainly the Powers have a soft spot for fools and fuzzy creatures”).
The long discussion pleased Kit for another reason besides his shiftmates’ evident enjoyment. He’d been half afraid that they’d immediately want to start another movie after that, and he couldn’t really get into it, which both annoyed and saddened him. But with the adrenaline fading down now after the film’s end, he was starting to feel wasted. Even though it’s not like today’s been all that strenuous... Still, there’s more than one kind of strain.
Kit wasn’t alone, though: Cheleb kept yawning. His gatewatch shift was more than over when they finished, and Djam took Cheleb’s report—not that he really needed to, for they’d all been keeping an eye on the complex-monitoring readouts while watching the film, and the gates been perfectly quiet and well-behaved all evening. “Go on, cousin, I see you’re tired,” Djam said, as Cheleb yawned yet again, more cavernously than ever and displaying teeth Kit hadn’t seen before. “This world’s day is closer to mine in length than yours, and I can tell how this is starting to wear on you.”
“Me too,” Kit said, getting up and stretching. “I’m ready to turn in.”
“Into what?” Cheleb said.
“More idiom,” Djam said, bubbling at Kit. “Your milk tongue’s rich with it. Chel, just mind these gates for these few minutes. I want to fetch out my night’s reading.”
He and Kit walked around the back of the Stone Throne toward the stones that held their puptents’ portals. Djam put his head down by Kit’s and said very low, “Colleague. Earlier, about your errantry-partner. Was Cheleb… inappropriate with you?”
Kit started helplessly snickering. “Djam…”
Djam’s eyes went wide. “Oh no. Hae crossed some kind of taboo line, didn’t hae. Your people aren’t allowed to discuss it.”
“Oh no, we are, it’s just… Just.” Kit had absolutely no idea where to begin. “Djam, do me a favor.”
“Cousin! Whatever you like.”
“If hae starts having that conversation with me again… please do whatever you can to help me not have it. Seriously. Some kind of emergency would be useful. Any kind of emergency you can think of.”
Djam started bubbling quietly again “I can’t think of any time of the day or night,” he said, “when it wouldn’t be useful to have you talk to these gates, Kiht. They behave so well after you’ve had a word with them! Indeed one might want to do it proactively. At a moment’s notice. To prevent problems later in the shift…”
“That’s the spirit,” Kit said, intensely relieved. “Don’t hesitate.”
“Trust me,” Djam said, and patted Kit on the arm. “Go rest now.”
Still laughing as quietly as he could, Kit went.
Bed, though, didn’t turn out to be the easy solution to the day’s stresses that Kit had been hoping for. Without the entertainment and his two colleagues to distract him, the sights and sounds of the day, and of the transients’ encampment, kept coming back to haunt him.
Initially Kit tried to do routine things, or at least the things that were starting to become routine, to settle himself. He changed into nightclothes and tidied up in the puptent a little, and texted his pop (”INTERESTING DAY BUT VERY TIRED. SPENT A LOT OF IT FEEDING A SPACE OCTOPUS AND WENT TO VISIT SOME NICE BUT VERY UPSET BIRD HUMANOIDS. MISS YOU AND WISH YOU WERE HERE WITH ABOUT TEN BOXES OF SALTINES”).
Then he tried to reach Nita again but didn’t have any luck: her profile in the manual simply said Unavailable. Kit flopped down on his bed and rubbed his eyes. Is she working? At this hour? Though she was having a lot of trouble with her gates…
“Wait, wait, I’m here!” her voice said from the manual.
He grabbed it, pushed himself up against his pillows and propped the manual in his lap. “No picture?” He said.
“Oh God,” Nita said. “You really don’t want to see me right now.”
From someone whom Kit had seen over the past few years in almost every state of dress and some kinds of undress, that said a lot about Nita’s state of mind. “Yes I do,” Kit said. “But it’s okay.”
He heard her sigh, and after a second her image appeared on the page—or an image of her head, anyway. Her hair was all over the place and she looked a bit drawn, and Kit thought maybe there were dark circles starting to form under her eyes. From the page Nita caught his glance, and smiled. “Yeah, well, you don’t look all that great yourself right now.”
“Makes sense,” Kit said. “Kind of a long day over here.”
“Yeah,” she said. “For me too.”
“Gate trouble?”
Kit could hear her trying not to admit it. Finally she gave in. “Quite a bit, actually. Thesba’s dynamo layer is really screwed up, and for
some reason our gate-branch seems a lot more susceptible to the magnetic-field aberrations than others. Nothing we can do except ride it out and keep all the gates working.” She sighed. “It’s fiddly work. Fix this thing, then something else breaks. Fix that thing, and something breaks back where you started. Getting pretty sick of it, to be honest.”
Kit nodded and didn’t ask whether she wanted him to come over and have a talk with her gate; if she wanted that, she wouldn’t be shy about it. Nita was too straightforward to let her own feelings interfere with what needed doing about wizardly work. “We had to go over to the transients’ camp today,” Kit said after a moment.
“Really? Mostly we’re supposed to avoid that—”
“I know,” Kit said. “Lost pet problem.”
Nita laughed at that. “You know, I didn’t think there was going to be any way to keep you away from people’s pets. Funny to find out it’s true.”
“Wasn’t my fault!” Kit said. “He came over here and started eating my food. Had to do something to get him out of here.”
Nita laughed, and then yawned as the laugh was trailing off. “I’m keeping you up,” Kit said, guilty.
“I’m keeping you up,” she said. “Tell me all about this tomorrow, okay? Because you look like you need to tell somebody.”
Kit nodded. “Yeah. Have a good night.”
“Yeah, you too.” Her picture vanished and her profile grayed out again.
Kit shut his manual and dimmed down the lights in the puptent, and settled back under the covers and closed his eyes.
An hour later he was in exactly the same place, and just as awake. Reading hadn’t helped; music hadn’t helped. He just didn’t seem able to relax. Finally Kit sat up. No point in just lying here when it’s not doing any good, he thought. He threw on the clothes he’d been wearing earlier, stuffed his manual in his vest pocket, and went out again.
Djam was sitting there on on the Stone Throne as always, reading from a small roll-shaped device that looked like a more compact version of his manual interface. “What’s the matter?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Kit said. He looked out toward the gates again, seeing them, as he’d seen them every day, with people streaming in through the feeder gates and out through the terminus gate, and just shook his head and turned away.
Djam looked at him and let out a breath, and said, “I know, cousin. Believe me, I know.”
Kit nodded. “I’m going to go walk a while,” he said. “It might help.” He didn’t say what he was thinking: that what would really have helped was to have Ponch with him. He could have taken him for a good, long walk and gotten his head cleared. Well… Maybe the walk by itself will be enough. He waved at Djam and headed out through the stone circle in the direction away from the view toward the gates, making his way out into the broad, empty plain and however much was left of the night.
It was windy out but not actually that cold; very like an April night might have been at home. Some cloud cover had rolled in since Kit had initially tried to get to bed—enough to obscure most of the sky overhead, including Thesba, which was now well on its way to setting again. The light of it still glowed ruddy golden on the upper cloud deck to the westward, and occasionally bloomed into shape when the clouds thinned enough: but mostly the great moon was hidden.
That suited Kit’s mood at the moment. He’d seen more than enough of Thesba for the moment, even if the conditions also meant he was denied the sight of the fiercely burning stars of the local OB association, or of the burning, staring eye of Erakis. For a long time he just walked and walked, to the point where the lights of the gate complex had dwindled to a faint bright patch that the stones of the stone circle would obscure if you kept them right between you and the gate. Kit did that, only rarely looking back, mostly walking further and further away and just letting the rhythm of his walk and the swish of the tall grass against his boots take him away from actually thinking about anything. There was nothing going on out here but the wind blowing, muttering in his ears. He was feeling a lot more tired than he had, but at least he was also feeling a bit more peaceful.
His thoughts had been drifting for a while when he suddenly felt a breeze that had nothing to do with the local weather. Kit halted and looked around. Not too far ahead of him, glowing faintly in the indistinct light, Kit saw a huge long saurian shape making its way across the plain toward him from the spot where she’d appeared, all elbows and lashing tail and big toothy head.
“Mam!” Kit said as she came up to him. “What’re you doing here?”
“Came to see you,” Mamvish said. “I have a little time off. Nita and I were talking this afternoon while I was making rounds on all the gate complexes, and she made me promise to stop by.”
Kit smiled. “Well, okay. How’re you holding up?”
Mamvish slumped down onto the grassy ground beside him. “All right, I suppose,” she said. “It’s so amazing to have a few minutes to myself, I can hardly remember what it’s like. It’s been power feed, power feed, day and night: keeping that thing in one piece for the moment.” She rotated an eye in Thesba’s direction. “Not much thinking in that kind of work, not much challenge…”
Kit sat down beside her head and looked in the direction from which he’d been walking. He’d gotten off his original line, so that the distant light of the gating complex wasn’t blocked. “Mamvish,” he said, “why?”
Mamvish hissed out a sigh. “Everybody’s question at this point,” she said, “for a thousand values of ‘why’. Which one are you chasing?”
“The ‘why’ as in ‘why don’t all these Tevaralti want to get out of here?’”
Another long sigh, a sound like a steam train venting. “It’s hard to be absolutely certain,” Mamvish said, “but I think it’s most likely something to do with the way their species interacts with the planet’s kernel.”
She put her head down on her foreclaws, a weary gesture, and cocked her portside eye at Kit. “It’s always unique,” she said, “a species’ connection to its world, and to the One. The Tevaralti had a seshtev, a perceived-revelation-of-intent, some time back—”
The Speech-word she used to translate the Tevaralti word “seshtev”, methenlet, was the shortest of the formulations that the Speech used to designate what on Earth people might have called a “group religious experience”. “I looked into it once when I first started consulting here, but it doesn’t seem to translate well, even into the Speech,” Mamvish said. “That’s not unusual, though: often these things don’t.”
“‘Some time back?’” Kit said.
Mamvish waved her tail. “A millennium or so. Not that long ago really, when you consider the age of their civilization. Anyway, the core of this experience seemed to be a sort of realization that the species needed to be ‘of one mind’.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “One of them said that to me today.”
“Now there are a lot of ways that can look…”
“Especially depending on who’s making the mind up.”
“True,” Mamvish said. “But this particular opinion, or set of opinions about the way they should live their lives, seemed to spread fairly quickly across the planet—probably secondary to their empathic-symbiotic linkage with one another. That’s been in place for many millennia, and it’s probably one of the major factors in their planetary civilization as a whole being so long-lived. Probably it originally developed very early in the evolution of the Tevaralti species as a survival mechanism. Tevaralti who were part of the linkage were better protected against predators, perhaps, or better able to find places where food was plentiful and living conditions otherwise favored them.”
“So more of them survived to have more Tevaralti who had the symbiotic linkage, yeah?” Kit said. “And now they all do.”
“To greater or lesser degrees, yes.” Mamvish said. “There’s some variation in its presence and prevalence among world populations. Some clans or nation-regions possess the symbiotic sense more acutely, some
less. But local variations aside, in the long run it’s been advantageous for them. Cultural changes that on other planets would most likely only have taken effect secondary to warfare, on Tevaral would take hold simply because of the symbiotic connection among groups that were in relatively close physical proximity to one another—say on the same continent.”
“So this religious experience spread through the linkage?”
“Partly. But also by normal cultural exchange. Overall, the concept of ‘being of one mind’ settled in without too much fuss. And it seems not to have been a bad thing for them, by and large. Certainly they’ve not had a war since it happened.”
“Okay,” Kit said. He could see the attractions of that.
“But after this seshtev, something unusual happened,” Mamvish said. “That aspect of the Tevaralti mindset actually set itself into the planet’s kernel, as part of the bundle of structures defining what life here meant for the resident species.” She cocked that left-hand eye at Kit again. “Maybe this isn’t all that surprising, in retrospect; their star flared when their civilization was quite young.”
Kit’s mouth went dry. “Like Wellakh?”
“Oh, no, nothing like! Not at all a serious flare, by comparison with that, Powers be thanked.” Mamvish shook herself all over. “Yet enough to cause fairly uncomfortable climatic alterations in the short term. Now perhaps you know that the Tevaralti cultures, worldwide, had already shared a very deep sense that this world was made for them—that it was the right place for them to be.”
“I was looking at their history,” Kit said. “For a species who developed space travel pretty early on, it surprised me that they weren’t doing more of it.”
Mamvish swung her tail in agreement. “That’s true. There are a number of scales that we used to grade the tendency of a species to walk the High Road, and this particular sense of attachment has positioned them toward the lower end of these scales. But after that flare event, the Tevaralti’s sense of how close their world had been to being changed forever set in very deep, and started manifesting itself as an intention not to let their world be hurt that way again. There was also a sense that they had a more general caretaker role that they’d been neglecting: a feeling that they needed to take better care of the other species sharing this world with them. So when such a widespread belief, shared and grown over many generations, settled itself into the planet’s kernel, well, probably nobody should have been surprised. And because the Tevaralti got very close to some of the more actively sentient species here over that period of time, the kernel-based aspects of the seshtev communicated themselves to these other species too.”
