Interim Errantry

Diane Duane

Errantry Press

County Wicklow

Republic of Ireland

Interim Errantry

Diane Duane

Published by Errantry Press, an imprint of EbooksDirect.co, Co. Wicklow, Ireland: a division of the Owl Springs Partnership

Interim Errantry © 2015 Diane Duane: all rights reserved. This work may not be republished or reproduced by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

Not On My Patch © 2011 Diane Duane

How Lovely Are Thy Branches © 2014 Diane Duane

Lifeboats © 2015 Diane Duane

Not On My Patch, How Lovely Are Thy Branches, and Lifeboats are all canonical works in the Young Wizards universe and conform to the timeline established in the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions.

Content advisory: How Lovely Are Thy Branches contains an incident featuring drunkenness and strong language. Lifeboats contains several brief scenes in which non-explicit age-appropriate discussions of human sexuality appear. Parental discretion may be advisable where younger readers are involved.

Type set in Palatino Linotype

Cover created by the author using Terragen 3.0 and DAZ 3D

Ebook version history:

v1.00 (18 October 2015): EbooksDirect.co release

v1.01 (19 October 2015): Amazon.com version: formatting adjustments and front matter edits

Time fix

All three of these works fall between Young Wizards book 9, A Wizard of Mars, and the forthcoming book 10, Games Wizards Play.*

Not On My Patch** takes place on October 31, 2010.

How Lovely Are Thy Branches** takes place between November and late December of 2010.

Lifeboats begins on February 2nd, 2011, and takes place between JD 2455595.5118 and JD 2455602.2003 respectively… depending on where you’re standing.

*Available 2/2/2016 from Amazon.com and at major chains and independent booksellers

**Available in ebook format at EbooksDirect.co and soon at Amazon.com

Not On My Patch

Nita Callahan was standing by the dining room table, scowling at it and having second thoughts about the items laid out ready on it for her…especially the big sharp knife.

I don’t know, she thought. I really don’t know if I want to do this. But now that it’s here, I guess I have to.

I guess—

She picked up the knife, toyed with it for a moment, warily tested its edge with her thumb… then looked for about the twentieth time at the thing she was preparing to stab.

The doorbell rang.

“Pff,” she said, rolling her eyes, for this had been happening all afternoon: every time she worked her courage up to do the deed, she got interrupted. Except maybe I think I want to be interrupted where this is involved…

“You want to get that one, honey?”  her dad said from somewhere toward the back of the house.

“Yeah, no problem.” Nita headed for the front door, picked up a couple of trick-or-treat bags from the little table her dad had put by the doorway, and opened the door.

There was a tallish young guy standing there in a long plum-colored eighteenth-century frock coat that had with lace spilling out of the sleeves and collar. He was also wearing a tricorn hat jammed down onto a long dreadlocked wig, tight breeches and thigh boots, and carrying a silver plastic cutlass, which he waved at her jauntily. “ARR,” he said.

Nita looked Kit up and down, and finally had to laugh. “The mustache,” she said. “It’s crooked…”

Kit’s eyes widened and he reached up to push the stuck-on mustache back into place. “This thing’s stability,” he said, “leaves a lot to be desired.”

“So do a spell and stick it on that way.”

Kit laughed. “Waste a wizardry on this? Pass,” he said as he headed past Nita into the living room.  “I’ve got spirit gum. Somewhere here...” He stuffed the plastic cutlass through his belt and started going through the frock coat’s pockets.

Nita’s big silver-haired dad came out of his bedroom at the back, just finishing the act of pulling on a pulling a sweatshirt decorated with flapping bats. As his head popped out of the neck of it, he ruffled his hair back into place and looked Kit up and down. “Cristoforo Rodriguez the Scourge of Tortuga, huh?”

“Hey, Mr. C. Yeah, more or less.”

“Looks good,” said Nita’s dad. “So how soon can we have this stuff off the table, honey? There are some other things I need to be doing here while I get ready for the slavering hordes.”

Nita sighed. “I’m working on it,” she said, and followed him into the dining room.

“That is one beat up pumpkin,” Kit said, looking at what sat on the table where the newspapers were thickest.

“Yeah,” Nita’s dad said as he went on into the kitchen. “I went over to that pick-your-own place between here and Uniondale: you know the one. I shouldn’t have left it so late, I guess—they’d been cleaned out of the biggest ones. All the pumpkins that were left were either on the small side, or lopsided or dented one way or another. Still,”  he said, giving it a glance from the kitchen door, “this one has character.”         

Nita was inclined to agree with him.  The pumpkin was about a foot and a half across, and had probably been growing somewhere exposed, to judge by the dried-out veining all over the top of it. She ran a hand over the top of it, as she’d already done a bunch of times this afternoon, feeling the crinkly texture and reflecting that it was definitely more interesting than the smooth picture-perfect pumpkins she’d seen a few days ago in the grocery store but had gotten distracted and forgotten to pick up. More avoidance… she thought.

She sighed. “I guess I should get on with this,” she said, and picked up the knife.

The doorbell rang.

“Aaaagh!” Nita said. “This is never going to get done! And everybody’s showing up so early. I thought we were finished with the little kids now…” She went off into the living room, picked up the same pair of candy bags she’d picked up before, and opened the door.  

Nita found herself staring at a tall gangly black-haired guy wearing a shaggy Alley-Oop style caveman skin over a green-and-white-striped soccer jersey that said SPORTS WORLD in big letters, and in smaller ones, around a little badge on the breast, BRAY WANDERERS F.C. The guy had more splotchy piebald skins bound around his legs and over his Doc Martens, and he was balancing a truly huge caveman club over one shoulder. “Hey, be happy,” he said, “it’s Samhain!”

She laughed at the sight of him. Ronan had purposely grimed himself up and punked his hair out into weird Celto-Goth points with some kind of hair wax that appeared to have the holding power of dried concrete, and he was carrying a rough burlap sack with a very dysfunctional one-eyed Jack-o-Lantern face painted on it.  “Come on in,” Nita said. “But why so formal? Thought you were going to just appear out of nothing in the back yard, like normal people.”

“Because I prefer to yank your chain,” Ronan said as he came in,  “as is traditional. And speaking of which… get a load of you. That’s a new look…” 

Nita grinned, though she found herself blushing at the same time. “Not so new,” she said, brushing at the skirt—if that was the word for it—of her costume. “It was big on Mars, once upon a time.”  …if “big’s” the right word to describe something there’s so little of!  In its Martian incarnation the costume, heavy on gems and gleaming metal and filmy translucent drapery, could still have been described as fairly minimal—and more so depending on which Mars you were talking about. The wizardly jury was still out on exactly how Edgar Rice Burroughs had come so close to describing what the real First Race of Mars considered decent daywear. Nita had been less concerned about that issue than about how to adjust the design so that she wouldn’t get arrested for indecent exposure or scandalize her Dad. She’d opaqued the long sheer skirt down and added an underskirt, as well as short filmy sleeves and a fair amount of coverage to the bodice, and then had sent the whole designs off to one of the retailers at the Crossings who owed both her and Carmela some large favors. The overall result was satisfying, even though she was still going to want a jacket if the temperature dropped too low.

“I got kind of used to it while I was working up there,” Nita said. She didn’t mention what she thought Ronan might be perfectly able to guess: that Kit had liked it on her, and had been too shy to say as much. “So if anybody asks, I’m an alien princess or something.”

“But as I understand it, you kind of were,” Ronan said, and smiled. It was a less jokey or edgy smile than she usually saw from him, and Nita blushed again. What is the matter with me stop it stop it stop it! she thought, but as usual the blush was ignoring her and would plainly be taking its own sweet time about burning out. Nothing to do but carry on…

“It got better,” Nita said, and grinned at him. “Anyway, why’re we standing here? Come on in…”

He followed her into the living room, where Kit had come out to see who was there. “Hey, look, it’s the Dread Pirate Rodriguez,” he said as the two of them clasped hands overarm. Then Ronan started snickering.  “Jeez Louise, Kit! Worst… mustache… ever! Why didn’t you just give it up and grow one?”

“Don’t think he hasn’t been trying,” said a voice from the bathroom at the back of the house. 

Kit turned a weary glance on Nita. “Is it all right if I destroy your sister a little?”

“Knock yourself out,” Nita said. “But even the Lone One’s had a run at that and didn’t get far…”

Kit sighed and leaned over the living room candy table, picking up one of the newly filled orange and black paper trick-or-treat packages and peering into it. “Problem is that if you use wizardry to get your beard growing, you’re stuck with it.”

“And you don’t want to start shaving yet. Fair play to you there,” Ronan said, rubbing his own face, which was adorned under the makeup-grime with what looked like about three days’ worth of stubble.  “Believe me, I don’t mind having a little holiday from the face scraping every now and then…”

“How did you get here, though?” Nita said, taking the bag away from Kit and putting it back on the candy table. “I thought you’ve still got trouble with doing single teleports out of Ireland, because of all the old spell residue built up in the ground. Did you hitch over with somebody who had an authorized transit?”

“Nope. No problems at all with single transits today,” Ronan said. “Because in the enlightened land in which I dwell, Halloween is an official government holiday… and this being the case, the local senior wizards always open some ‘safe transport’ spots so people celebrating The Day That’s In It can spelljump in and out of the place without too much trouble.” He glanced around. “But speaking of my usual ride, where’s wee Darryl? Thought he’d be here.”

“He had a change of plans,”  Kit said. “Decided to stay over in Baldwin this year. It’s not that long really since he finished up his Ordeal, and his folks are still a little freaked out by it all. He doesn’t want to push them too hard on the letting-him-be-out-by-himself issue, so he’s letting them ride herd on him at Halloween this time.”

“Pity,” Ronan said. “And he didn’t want to do one of his be-two-places-at-once tricks?”

Kit shook his head. “Tom and Carl told him to cut back on the colocation stuff for a while till his power levels settle down. I think they’re afraid he’ll strain something.” 

“Or find out something about himself he shouldn’t know?” Ronan said. “Oh well. Too bad: always like having his smiling face around. So what’s on the agenda?” He looked over the table and picked up the trick-or-treat bag Kit had just put down. “We doing the same drill he coached me on? Go door to door, say the magic words, get people to give us sweets for nothing?”

“That’s it,” Nita said, deftly reaching in as he was starting to open the bag, taking it away from him, and putting it back on the table. “And then over to Tom and Carl’s to see what their ‘haunted house’ looks like: it’s their turn to do one for the town this year. We’re just finishing up some last details here.”

“Meaning stuff that should have been done two or three nights ago,” Kit said.

Nita sighed: Kit had been teasing her about this for a couple of days. “Come on, it’s all in the dining room…” Nita said, and led the way through.

The dining room table was covered with newspapers, and the newspapers were covered with the remains of prep for the night’s trick or treaters. There were about sixty or seventy more of the little paper bags decorated in orange and black, all now stuffed with candy and twisted closed: and there, still untouched, was the pumpkin.

Ronan looked it over. “Not as big as some I’ve seen around here,” he said, sitting down at the table and picking up one of the bags. “Some of your neighbors’ ones are the size of beach balls.”

Nita considered taking this bag too away from Ronan, and then shrugged. “Yeah, well,” she said, and leaned on the table, gazing at the pumpkin.  “We’re kind of working our way back in gradually.”

“Back in?” Ronan said, opening the bag and peering into it curiously.

“Yeah. The way school around here used to be, when you were twelve or so everybody started thinking that that was too old to be trick or treating any more, so I stopped. And then the year after that, Kit and I had our Ordeal, and I got distracted. Halloween didn’t seem like such a big deal all of a sudden, and except for Dairine, the family kind of went off it for a while. And then after Mom…”  Nita sighed and shrugged. “That year no one felt much like it anyway. But this year, Dad was saying, ‘Why don’t we revive the tradition. Mom always liked it…’ And it seemed like a good idea. Dairine even got into it.”

“Goodness,”  Ronan said. “Will she be honoring us with her presence eventually, do you think?”

“Don’t get snotty, Nolan!” said the voice from the back bathroom. “Unlike some people, who just throw themselves together with hair product and any old spare cowhide they have lying around, I like to make sure I look right before I go out.”

Nita snickered very softly, but then turned her attention back to the pumpkin. Better get on with this… she thought.  She picked up the knife, and then hesitated yet again.

“What’s with you?” Ronan said as he emptied the trick-or-treat bag out on the table and began going through the contents. “You look like the reluctant axe murderer.”

Nita groaned under her breath and sat down in the chair at the end of the table. “I just don’t know if this is … strictly ethical.”

Kit pulled out a chair too and fiddled with his frock coat for a moment so that he could avoid sitting on it and messing it up. “You know,” he said, “you could always ask the pumpkin how it feels.”

She had in fact been avoiding this, nervous about what answer she might get. But there’s no avoiding it, I guess; pretty soon we’re going to have to get moving… Nita put out a hand and ran it once more over the scratchy veiny skin around the pumpkin’s stem. “Excuse me,” she said in the Speech, “but… exactly how are you about this?”

There was a brief pause while the pumpkin got its vegetable consciousness wrapped around the idea that someone was speaking to it, let alone someone who would be able to understand the response. This what? the pumpkin said.

Nita hesitated. “I’m about to stick a knife in you,” Nita she said after a moment, “cut off your top, and scoop out your insides with a spoon.”

There was another pause. Your point being?  said the pumpkin.

Nita  blinked, as she was generally used to more energetic responses from plant life. But then, those are mostly still growing in the ground… “Well, isn’t there some chance this might hurt you?”

Haven’t felt a thing since I got pulled off the vine, said the pumpkin. Just been taking it easy since then. It paused, for a bit longer this time. Besides, it said after a few moments more, it’s autumn, isn’t it? I’m supposed to die now. It’s all about the seeds, after all. I rot… but the seeds don’t. Some of them will come up. Then I’ll wake up in one of them, maybe more.

“So you really don’t mind if I cut off your top and pull your insides out and carve a face in you,” Nita said, still just slightly incredulous.

Well, what’s it all for?

“Celebrating the time of year,” Nita said. “The autumn. The year’s end… and the new beginning, I guess.”

Ronan nodded. “That’s what it meant when we invented it,” he said.

If a pumpkin could have shrugged, this one would have. Then do it. I don’t mind being part of a celebration, and maybe it’ll be fun to have a face.

The permission could hardly have been more clear-cut. Nita got up, picked up the knife again, and said, “Okay, here we go…”

She braced herself and made the first cut, half expecting to hear a scream: but there wasn’t any response at all. “Are you okay?” she said.

Sure. When are you going to start?

Considering that she was standing there with the cut-off top of the pumpkin in her hand, this was reassuring. “Uh, okay,” Nita said, and got to work in earnest, scooping out the seeds and the webby bits in the middle.

Within a few minutes she had all the pulp out and had begun cutting the face. Kit and Ronan immediately started offering helpful design tips and critiquing her cutting technique, so that Nita lost any further concern about the pumpkin’s feelings in a vague fog of annoyance at the kibitzing. “And how many of these have you done, oh great design expert?” Nita said to Ronan when she couldn’t bear it any more.

“Pumpkins? Not a single one, I’m glad to say.”

Kit glanced at him, confused. “Wait, I thought you guys invented Halloween.”

“‘Course we did. The pumpkins to carve,  and the candy, though, that’s new. We didn’t get candy when I was little. Just nuts and apples.”

Nita and Kit looked at him, incredulous. “And that was all?” Kit said. “That wouldn’t get your house a whole lot of business in this neck of the woods. Might even get you egged…”

“Different times,” Ronan said. “Different traditions. Back then people just gave the kids what we grew at home: stuff from outside was too expensive. But nowadays you lot have ruined us. We’re coming down with pumpkins and plastic Jack O’Lanterns and crappy superhero costumes.” Then he snickered a little. “You know what we used before pumpkins?”

“What?”

“Turnips.” Ronan started laughing.

“Turnips,” Nita said in wonder. “But wasn’t the whole carving thing originally about putting something freaky enough in front of your house that it would scare the demons away?”

Ronan was still laughing, but he managed to stop himself after a few moments, wiping his eyes. “Yeah. And you do have to ask yourself what poor weedy wimp of a demon would be scared of a carved-up turnip…”

“Not that I’m sure why demons would be scared of pumpkins either,” Kit said.

Ronan shook his head, but he grinned a little. “Some traditions don’t make sense,” he said. “No point in paying attention to them if they don’t work for you. Like the apples and nuts. Lots of lovely fiber, no question. Good for little growing kids. But I think I prefer these wee marshmallowy things.” He reached into yet another of the bags he’d been plundering and produced a screamingly yellow cellophane-wrapped chick, eyeing its packaging. “Peeps? Poops?”

“Poops!” Kit snorted with laughter and mimed falling over sideways out of the chair.  

“Must be some planet where they poop this color,” Ronan said, examining the marshmallow chick with a critical eye. “Wouldja ever look at that shade. Think of the godawful crap they must put in these things to make that happen…”

He popped the chick into his mouth and chewed with a meditative expression. “Revolting,” Ronan said after a moment. “Got any more?”

“They come in orange too,” Kit said, digging around in yet another of the bags and coming up with an orange marshmallow pumpkin, which he unwrapped and tossed to Ronan.

“Will you two cut that out?” Nita said as she finished with the pumpkin’s second eye. “It took me hours to get those right!”

Ronan ingested the Peep-pumpkin and started going through the contents of another of the dumped out bags.  “And look at these,” he said, picking out a piece of candy corn that had somehow wiggled its way into the marshmallow pumpkin packet. “Look at this thing, it’s just so much sugar and dye. All the chemicals in these, you’ll stunt your growth for sure! Here, I’ll eat them for you.”

Nita sighed in resignation. “These peanut things are good,” she said, picking up one candy that Kit had spilled out of another of the bags.

Ronan stared at the pale-orange object. “That’s never a peanut.”

“It’s just supposed to sort of look like one. It’s marshmallow too.”

“Who’re you kidding?” Ronan said. “This thing’s hard. A Styrofoam peanut, that it might be.”

“Different kind of marshmallow…”

Ronan bit into it anyway, and then gave Nita the kind of look reserved for some unfortunate whose senses were malfunctioning. “And why’s it taste like bananas? You people are unwell.” But nonetheless he started rooting around in the candy on the table for another.

In the back of the house, the bathroom door opened. A few seconds later Dairine came into the dining room, and Ronan and Kit turned to look at her. “Whoa!” Kit said, and Ronan simply burst out laughing: for Dairine was turned out in the long brown overrobe and crosswrapped beige gi-like undertunic of a young Jedi. Every detail had been handled—the breeches, the boots, and even the narrow apprentice braid hanging down on one side, with her red hair otherwise tied into a short ponytail behind.  Behind her came Spot, who for the occasion had applied a virtual-shapechange field to himself and now looked like the kind of little low-running droid that when it sees you coming, hurriedly does a K-turn and runs away squeaking in fear.

Nita knew Dairine had been working on getting her costume right for days, and therefore she wasn’t above teasing her a little. “Still looks like a bathrobe,” she said.

Dairine turned a faintly scornful look on Nita. “People who carry these are not wearing bathrobes,” she said, twitching aside the overrobe to reveal, hanging from the bathrobe’s inner belt, a foot-long cylindrical object. This she unhitched, flipped in the air, and caught while hitting its actuator stud. The lightsaber’s actinic blade instantly sprang out and sang softly in the air.

Ronan nodded, impressed. “Now that’s a nice wizardry,” Kit said.

Dairine gave Kit the same look. “You kidding? Who needs wizardry for this? I bought it from one of Carmela’s weapons suppliers. Light-based weapons are real popular with species that have tight-channel plasma technologies. And once you’ve got one, modding a new hilt onto the thing’s no big deal.” She flicked her wrist from side to side, and the blade sizzled and hummed in the air: she looked at it with an expression of satisfaction tinged with annoyance. “Though you won’t believe the crap I went through to get it to make that noise. Any decent lightsword’s completely silent. What kind of idiot builds weapons that let the bad guys hear you coming?”

Nita sucked in a breath and was glad that there were none of the more rabid sort of Star Wars fans around to take issue with such heresy. “Ooookay,” she said. “Just don’t let anybody else play with that thing…”

“Oh come on,” Dairine said, collapsing the blade and hanging the lightsaber hilt at her belt again. “It’s DNA-locked—all the basic models come with that now.” She glanced at the table and the neat rows of candy bags, now not quite so neat. “This is getting kind of messed up…”

“Yes it is,” Nita said, glaring at Ronan and Kit. “You guys are going to get plenty of stuff once we’re out! Will you lay off this?”

Kit and Ronan  both smiled angelically at her, but showed no signs of stopping. Got to get them out of here before they eat it all… Nita thought. “Okay,” she said, “we’re done here.” She wrapped up the seeds and pulp from the pumpkin in the top few layers of newspaper on which she’d been working, took them into the kitchen and put them in the bag with the composting waste.

“So where are you going to put it?” Kit said. “Front step?”

“Probably…” Nita said. But as she came back into the dining room, she looked at the pumpkin and realized that it was looking back at her: and despite the carven smile, it looked a little sad.

“…No,” she said. “I’m taking him with. Dad can’t keep an eye on the front door every minute, and I don’t want him getting smashed while we’re out.”

Kit looked at her quizzically. “You’re going to carry a real pumpkin around with us?”

Nita studied the pumpkin briefly. “It’s not like he’s overripe. Or too heavy. I can get some rope, pierce through the sides and make a handle. I’ll take a separate bag for the candy.”

“He?” Dairine said, bemused.

Ronan shook his head in genial disbelief. “I’ve seen a lot of wizards do a lot of weird things,” he said, “but I’ve never seen one bond with a vegetable before.”

“Life’s full of these little surprises,” Nita said. She fitted the pumpkin’s top back in place, saw to her satisfaction that it fitted snugly. Then on an afterthought she removed it again, shook her charm bracelet around on her wrist, and pinched one charm, a tiny lightbulb, that had a ready-to-activate spell attached to it. When she pulled her finger and thumb away from the charm again, they had a little spark of bright white light between them. Nita reached inside the pumpkin and snugged the little particle of wizard-light down into the place where she’d most deeply dug away the pumpkin’s flesh at the bottom, then put the stem-lid back on. The wizard-light shone very satisfactorily through the pumpkin’s new eyes and mouth, even in daylight. “Anybody sees that,” Nita said, “they’ll think it’s an LED. Give me a couple of minutes to deal with the handle and we can go.”

It took less than that, as it turned out: some of the heavy braided raffia-twine that her dad used in his florist’s business proved to be perfect for this job. When it was done Nita tested the handle, found it entirely secure, and then equipped herself with one of several Halloween-themed paper shopping bags. She handed one each to the others. “You ready?”

 “All set,” Ronan said.

“Daddy, we’re going…!” Nita said.

“So I see,” he said, looking in again from the kitchen. “And you’ve got your phones with you if there are any problems…”

“Don’t think there’s likely to be much in the way of problems,” Nita said.

Her dad watched them head for the front door with a slightly thoughtful expression. Nita blushed one more time, for though her dad knew that there’d recently been some kind of status change in her relationship with Kit, she hadn’t yet been successful in explaining it to him, because she hadn’t yet finished figuring it out herself. “Don’t be too late,” her dad said: and Nita knew this was code for Don’t do anything I wouldn’t want you to.

“I won’t,” she said: and very much hoped, as the front door shut behind them, that this was going to turn out to be true.

The weather at least was cooperating with the local trick-or-treaters. After a few days of rain and wind earlier in the week, conditions had abruptly settled the day before into a lovely still crispness exactly right for the end of October. The trees were on the turn and glowing in the last rays of late-afternoon sun; and things had fortunately had time to dry out, so that the yellow and orange maple and oak leaves you scuffed through rustled satisfyingly instead of just lying there wet and sodden on the sidewalk.

Nita sighed as the four of them walked down the street and stopped at the first few of their neighbors’ houses. She loved this time of year, both for the changeableness of it and the slight sense of sadness that seemed to hover over it, the world saying Oh well… as it reluctantly gave up the midyear warmth and paused for a few long cool breaths before turning inevitably toward the winter. The particular blue the sky went, the growing quiet even on windy days when the leaves came off the trees: they all mattered a lot to her.

That changeableness seemed to have come over Halloween itself, in a way. It was a little weird to see so many older kids dressed up and taking part in the last-day-of-October ritual. But over the last few years it seemed that a lot of junior high-age, even senior high-age kids, had been getting into it. Partly it was being pitched among the kids as a way to have fun after dark with the excuse of taking care of the littler participants… though pretty much everyone involved understood that this was actually a good way to get out from under the ever-watchful parental eyes for a while. Nita knew very well that a lot of kids from school, though they’d gotten themselves costumed and acquired all the rest of the necessary props, were actually up in town snogging in the darkness behind the shopping center, or meeting in various vacant lots to get drunk. Their problem, Nita thought. She had other priorities tonight.

After the first few houses, where everyone collected the usual little bags or miniature candy bars, they came to the McLoughlins’ house up the street. There were no lights in the windows, no light on over the front steps. “Nobody home,” Ronan said.

 “No,” Nita said, “they’re never ‘home’. They don’t do Halloween.”

“Seems like other people have opinions about that, ” Ronan said as they walked past the house. He was noting the enthusiastic TP-ing of the big sycamore tree in the McLoughlins’ front yard.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “And it’s gonna make a big mess all over their lawn. I think I might stop by real early tomorrow morning and see if I can get all that to sort of melt away…”

“What, just vanish it?” Ronan said.

“Nothing so obvious. The paper’s made to biodegrade pretty quickly, so it’s just a matter of convincing it to do it all in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks…”

They stopped at another house and collected a couple of taffy apples and a caramel pop each, then headed off again, idly discussing the best ways to use wizardry to disguise the artificially accelerated breakdown of toilet tissue. As they got down toward the end of the street where Nita’s road crossed another one and more trick-or-treaters were visible, she caught Kit giving some of the kids down the road a dissatisfied look. “What?” she said.

“I’m starting to feel like a walking wardrobe malfunction.”

“Why?” Nita said. “You look great. You heard the people at the last house, they thought you were something out of the movies! And anyway, we haven’t seen that many other pirates.”

Kit snickered. “It’s not that,” he said. “I mean, look at them…” He gestured down the cross street at some of the other trick-or-treaters making the rounds, among whom there were a lot of long overrobes, pointy hats, souped-up broomsticks, and a positive superfluity of wands. “Half the planet’s running around dressed as wizards.”

Ronan grinned one of those lazy superior grins he specialized in. “One day of the year, sure we can cut them some slack,” he said.  “Since we dress as wizards the other three hundred and sixty-four…”

As they continued to work the street, the four of them amused themselves for a while by counting the wizard costumes. But there were also a fair number of the usual glow-in-the-dark skeletons and bedsheet ghosts, not to mention Supermen and Batmen and winged fairies of various types, often shepherded by watchful parents or older brothers and sisters.  And there were also other forms of supervision, both more annoying and less green.

Cars were very slowly driving up and down the street in the slowly growing dusk, stopping, pausing, driving on again. “What are they doing?” Ronan muttered.

“Curb-crawling,” Kit said, his disdain only thinly veiled. They paused on the sidewalk to watch as yet another overprotective parent in an SUV pulled up into the vacant street space between a couple of the neighbors’ driveways, let a batch of costumed kids out, waited until they’d rung the nearest houses’ doorbells and collected the expected booty, and then—once they’d all piled back into the station wagon again—drove them a few doors further down to repeat the process.

“What the feck happens when these kids grow up?”  Ronan said under his breath, disbelieving. “Will they be able to wipe themselves, you think?”

“No telling,” Dairine muttered. “Never mind them. Here’s the Kerricks’ place, they love Halloween and they always give out a ton of stuff…”

They stopped there, had their costumes duly admired by the Kerricks, were given truly astonishing amounts of candy and fruit, and headed on down the street again. It was an old familiar route for Nita: down East Clinton to the cross street, Park Avenue; work up and down Park for about a quarter mile in each direction, then retrace your steps to East Clinton and hit all the houses up the length of it to Nassau Road. Then head for home, because by the time you got near there, you’d be having trouble carrying your candy bag, it’d be so heavy. If you got your second wind, you might then go out and do another run up some of the nearby side streets. Might as well enjoy this first run, though, Nita thought. Because who knows if we’ll feel like a second? Or for that matter, whether this might be the last time we do this. We may really be getting a little old for this kind of thing…

She sighed. “How’re you holding up?” she said to the pumpkin.

I’m all right. This is interesting. There’s a lot to see…

“I can’t just keep calling you ‘hey you’,” Nita said. “What should I call you?”

I don’t know. I never gave it any thought before today…

“Well, you’re a Jack-O-Lantern now… how would Jackie be?”

Behind her, Dairine snickered.  “Sooooo predictable…”

Nita rolled her eyes and ignored her. The pumpkin said, That’s a nice name. Jackie…

“Jackie it is,” Nita said.

Kit had been listening to this, and he was smiling a little behind the crooked mustache: but the smile had a slightly concerned quality to it. You know, he said privately to Nita, this could be a problem.

What?

You’ve given it a nickname, he said. Sometimes when we’ve done that in the past… it hasn’t worked out all that well for whatever wore the nickname. Fred… Ed…

Nita gave him a look, not entirely sure if he was teasing her. You’re having a sugar crash already, she said. Have one of those Snickers we just got and see if your mood improves.

He started rooting around obligingly enough in his candy bag, and said nothing further. But there was something about the way Kit didn’t immediately come back with an argument or a smart remark that unsettled Nita slightly. Even if that’s true, she said after a moment, I’m betting we could change the odds a little if we worked at it.

“Here’s one,” Kit said, and came up with a Snickers. “Want half?”

Nita accepted it happily enough, but she found herself wondering briefly about the nickname issue: it wasn’t something she’d ever considered before.  I need to think about this a little and see if he’s got a point…  And a few seconds later she found herself looking through her own bag for another of those candy bars. They were kind of habit-forming.

They hit another fourteen or fifteen houses, and the bags began to fill, and the dusk settled over everything, the streetlights flickering on one by one. Jackie was taking it all in, though in most cases not having any real idea of what was going on. What do you do with all this stuff? he said.

“We eat it,” Nita said.

Nutrients?

“Well, sort of,” Nita said. She wasn’t sure she was equipped at the moment to explain the concept of junk food to a pumpkin.

That’s all right, then, Jackie said. That’s pretty much what we do, really. Acquire nutrients. He sounded as if the prospect, or the memory, brought him a lot of pleasure.

Nita caught a quick faint glimpse of his memory. “Sun and water,” she said. “You want all you can get of those…”

That’s right. Sun and water: you soak ‘em up, all you can. And nutrients: pull in everything you can. Time’s short. All you get is one season in the sun. We’re hungry all the time. So we soak it all up and get big. That makes the seeds inside happy. So when we finally fall off the vine and break down, there’s plenty for the birds and animals to eat. And the more of me there is, the more of the seeds get away to grow.

“So that’s it for you?” Nita said. “Sprout fast. Get as big as you can. Die fat and juicy.”

You got it. That’s what it’s all about.

The generally rounded and enclosing imagery Nita kept getting from the pumpkin in these exchanges was making her start to wonder if “Jackie” actually ought to be short for “Jacqueline.” But there was always a danger in trying to introduce human gender ideas to a plant, so Nita kept her surmises on this count to herself. What was also intriguing her, though, was a slight unaccountable tang of sadness in Jackie’s thought. “What’s the matter?” Nita said, pausing at the foot of one house’s front walk as the others went up to ring the doorbell.

Well, you know, I didn’t get… all that big.

Nita grunted as she shifted Jackie over to her other arm. “Sorry, but I have to disagree. Even without your insides, you weigh a ton.”

You’re just saying that to make me feel good.

She burst out laughing, both at herself and at the wistful tone. But Jackie took no notice. You get a little unhappy, it said, when almost everybody else gets picked and you don’t. If the sun hit one side of you more than the other while you were growing… if you came out lopsided, or squashed in… the people just walk past you and leave you there…

Nita sighed,  having too many memories as it was of those humiliating lineups before gym-class softball games, where each side fights to keep from having to choose you. These days she’d pretty much stopped caring about it. She’d gradually realized that the other kids’ opinions of her weren’t going to change no matter how well or badly she played, and she had a lot of better things to use wizardry for than becoming a heavy hitter. But the embarrassment and pain had been real enough until she found her way through them. “Look,”  she said, “it really doesn’t matter. It’s what’s inside that counts, even if it sounds like a cliché to say it. I mean, clichés usually have some truth attached: that’s how they get to be clichés to begin with.”

I suppose you’re right…

The others came down the walk, and Kit handed Nita a toffee apple. “It’s good and dark now,” he said. “You think we should head for Tom and Carl’s?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Nita said.

It was a four or five blocks’ walk from the point they’d reached near Nassau Road. Above the dryly rustling leaves on the trees, the stars were getting bright; Jupiter was well risen and showed coolly white in the northeastern sky. They turned the corner out of East Clinton onto Rose Avenue and headed down through the dark, seeing ahead of them the occasional glimmer of orange-shaded flashlights or glow-in-the-dark costumes or plastic-bladed lightsabers, the faint flicker of “ghosts” flapping by under the streetlights. “Remember,” Nita said, “the first time we looked Tom up in the manual? And we saw his address and said ‘Oh my god no, it’s that crazy guy, who knows what goes on in that place with the big hedge…’”

“We were so freaked,” Kit said, and laughed at the memory. But hard on the heels of the laughter came a long, high, spooky howl from down the road: a wolflike sound boosted by a very effective sound system.

“Imagine if we’d heard that…” Nita said, laughing too. “They’re rolling! Let’s see what kind of crowd they’ve got.”

They came to the yard with the tall hedges that had unnerved Nita so long ago. Now the hedge was festooned with fake cobwebs, and from inside it, little glinting eyes in batches of eight looked out creepily at passersby. A lot of costumed kids and escorting parents were heading in and out of the open gate that led through the single gap in the hedge. As the four wizards went through the gate and up the walk toward the front door of the house, Nita suddenly caught a glimpse of a couple of black cats off to one side, one a little slimmer and more angular than the other, their eyes glinting respectively golden and brassy in the dimness. “Guys, look—!“

“I see them,” Ronan said, and headed across the grass to where the cats were watching the proceedings from near the shrubbery closest to the house. “Hey, Rhiow! What’s shakin’?”

The little black cat put her whiskers forward at them all. “Things around here, I’d say! But you haven’t met my partner, have you, cousins? Hwaith, this is Hrronan—Khit and Hnita—Dhairine—”

Introductions were made all around. “What brings you two out this way?” Kit said.

“Well, you know how people on this side of the Atlantic get about black cats this time of year,” Rhiow said, and sat down and yawned. “Either you have to stay sidled for a few days to keep from attracting attention to black cats in general and giving some ehhif bad ideas…”

“Or you have to stay in,” Hwaith said, stretching fore and aft and sitting down next to her. “So boring. So we got out of town. Urruah and the twins are handling the Grand Central gates for the evening…”

“And when Tom and Carl told us what they were up to this year, we said, ‘Sure, we’ll come by and add some atmosphere,’” Rhiow said. “Controlled circumstances, after all. We go where we’re needed…”

“You guys don’t fool me,” Kit said. “You just have fun being someplace where wizards are doing magic out in the open for one night in the year.”

“Well, who wouldn’t?” Hwaith said. “Bad enough that so much of this planet has to be sevarfrith. When one of the cultures has a night when you can come out and sing on the rooftops a little, interventionally speaking… who’d miss that?” He chuckled. “Anyway, they’ve really knocked themselves out—you ought to go take the tour.” He looked over his shoulder toward the front windows, which were all curtained with something that let an eerie blue light shine through.

“Will do,” Kit said as the two cats vanished back toward the house. The four wizards made their way back up to the walk again and headed for the door and the steps up to the porch.

“Do my ears deceive me?” said a voice from inside the door, which had what appeared to be some kind of alien skeleton nailed up spread-eagled on it. Out of the door came lurching someone in classic Frankenstein’s Monster makeup of the Boris Karloff vintage, every detail complete right down to the giant heavy shoes, the jacket with the too-short sleeves, and the bolts in the neck. But the face under the makeup was Tom Swale’s, and Nita couldn’t stop herself from laughing at the sight of one of their Advisory Wizards in something so different from his usual jeans and polos. “It is you guys! Didn’t know if we were going to see you tonight.”

“How could we miss this!” Kit said.

“Well, just glad you could take time out of your busy schedules,” said another voice from behind Tom: and there was the normally very buttoned-down Carl Romeo in a frayed and apparently bloodstained business suit that had seen far better days, and some of the most realistic ghoul makeup that Nita had ever seen. Carl leaned out the door and peered at the sagging candy bags. “You folks have plainly been making out like bandits. Come on in, release your burdens for a while and have a look around.”

They all filed in, pausing at a table by the front door, where visitors were exchanging admission tickets and getting their hands stamped. Behind the table sat a gorgeously witchy-looking woman wearing a slinky glittering deep-purple dress with black lace appliqued over it in a spiderweb pattern, and a matching long veil or mantilla in the same spiderweb lace.

“You haven’t met this lady,” Tom said. “This is a cousin of ours from out west. Helen Walks Softly: Kit Rodriguez, Nita Callahan. And from a little further out of town, Ronan Nolan…”

Hands were shaken and everyone quietly said dai stihó, for there were nonwizards wandering around the ground floor, looking at static displays of scary stuff. “Your eyes are really great,” Kit said in complete admiration. They were those of some big cat, a lion maybe, large and golden. “Contacts?”

Rhiow and Hwaith burst out laughing. “Not exactly,” Helen said. “We can discuss technique later—”

“What is with your earrings??” Nita said. She leaned close and peered at one of them, a fuzzy bobbly looking thing hanging from Helen’s earlobe.

The earring promptly opened two small eyes, flicked out two small ears, and unfolded two perfect, delicate, fingery wings. Nita jumped in surprise, and then burst out laughing while the tiny bat gazed at her upside down.

“That’s just sick,” Ronan said in complete admiration. “Most people keep their bats inside their belfries…”

“We have these tiny little ones up in the mountains in California,” Helen said. “Makal, my people call them. We’ve got caves full of them on my tribal band’s lands: sometimes in the evenings they follow me around when I’m up there doing shaman work. And if they feel like hanging out with me afterwards…” She chuckled. “On a night like tonight, why would I argue?”

“Hey there cousin,” Nita said, tickling one of them behind the ear. It peeped at her and closed the wings up; a second later so did its counterpart hanging from Helen’s other ear.

“So step upstairs and have a look around,” Tom said. “We only get a chance to do this once every six years or so, and Carl’s really pulled out the stops this time. Leave your stuff behind the table: Helen’ll take care of it for you.” He eyed Nita’s pumpkin with interest. “Something new in the way of accessories? You can leave that too if you like…”

“No,” Nita said, “I’ll hang onto him.”

Tom and Carl both raised their eyebrows at the pronoun, but neither commented. “Right this way, then,” Carl said. “Try not to scream more loudly than our other guests…”

The next half hour or so was a tour de force of flapping giant bat-shapes, half-seen clammy things with too many eyes that leapt at you from closets or dropped on you from the ceilings, sudden vistas of bottomless pits where no such pits were possible, claws that grabbed, beastly teeth that snapped just in front of your nose out of the darkness, webs that brushed across your face, hissing black demon cats with glaring eyes and fur that stood on end and sizzled with sparks, tentacles that suckered onto you and creepily clung, and dreadful wet moldy smells that you didn’t want to know the source of. Nita screamed as often and loudly as any of the others—even Ronan got caught off balance this way several times—and knowing that clever wizardries were behind about half these effects, and friendly alien wizards were behind the other half, didn’t help at the time. It was all about staging, at which Tom’s script work made him expert. Your own too-suggestible mind, in tune with the archetypes associated with the horror genre and many old myths, did the rest. Nita finished the tour exhilarated but surprisingly wrung out; and while Ronan and Kit went through it again, and Dairine paused downstairs to have a drink of some ominously bubbling and smoking fruit punch, Nita took Jackie out into the relative peace and quiet of the back garden.

She sat down on the edge of the koi pond and got her breath back, listening to more screams floating down from the upstairs of the house, and to the sound of her pulse starting to slow down at last. After a little while a tall shape came out the back door and made its way over to her through the shadows. “So tell me,” Carl said, “how’s it look?”

“Really great,” Nita said. “I didn’t know you two were so into this.”

“Well, why not?” Carl said. “If you spend all the rest of the year fighting the serious Powers of Eeeeevil, then sometimes you just want to spend a little time enjoying the harmless kind of spooky stuff. Keeping the old traditions alive… while making it plain that fewer and fewer of the old ploys the Lone Power used have so much fun scaring us with will work any more: not for anything serious. Sure, it comes up with new ones all the time…”

“But laughing at the old ones still gets under Its skin.”

“Way under,” Carl said, “since it really, really hates not being taken seriously…” He looked back at the house. “But who doesn’t like being safely scared, occasionally? Pleasantly scared, by something that can’t really hurt you?” He grinned as an eldritch howl came floating out one of the upstairs windows, accompanied by the shrieks and then the laughter of small children. “It starts getting you used to fear… so when you come up against something really scary, you can cope a little better.”

“Like being vaccinated,” Nita said. “The weakened bugs make you immune…”

“A useful metaphor,” Carl said, over more of the upstairs screaming. He grinned in the dark. “I should get back in there: some of those spells have to be reset after they fire a few times.” He patted Nita on the shoulder, vanished into the dark again.

Nita sat there for a few moments, listening to the noises from inside the house, and then glanced over at Jackie. “You’ve been quiet…” Nita said under her breath to the pumpkin.

It took a moment before the answer came back. Something’s wrong, the pumpkin said.

Nita started to get concerned. Oh God, I did something wrong and the cutting’s affecting it now after all…! “Are you all right? Do you want to go back home?”

Back home, it said, yes. But not your place. My home. Where I grew. Something’s wrong…

Her pulse had been starting to slow down, but now it started to pick up again, and she wasn’t even clear why. After a few minutes, when Kit wandered out into the garden looking for him, Nita’s pulse was beating even faster. “We have to go,” she said.

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“Jackie needs to go back to the pick-your-own place,” Nita said. “Something’s wrong there, he says.”

“Wrong?” Kit bent down and put a hand on the pumpkin. “What is it, guy?”

I don’t know. Just… something’s wrong. And getting wronger.

It was sounding more agitated by the second. Nita and Kit looked at each other. “Don’t ask me what’s going on,” Nita said. “Maybe a pumpkin can start getting sensitive to things if it spends all evening hanging out with wizards? But he was connected to that ground for a long time… he’s in a position to know if something’s wrong there. And considering the day he’s had, I think we should humor him a little, don’t you?”

“Can’t argue with you there. ”

“Where’s Ronan?” Nita said.

“Inside having some of that punch,” Kit said. He wiped his forehead, looking a little surprised at the sweat there. As if on cue, his mustache promptly fell off. Kit started fishing around in his pockets for the spirit gum again, and then muttered something rude under his breath and stuck it back on again, even though it would only go on crookedly now.

“Done with the punch,” said a voice out of the dark. “Dairine’s right behind me. I could smell you two worrying out here. What’s up?”

“Jackie wants to go back to where he was picked,” Kit said. “There’s some kind of trouble there.”

Nita had pulled her manual out of the little belt pouch where it hung on this costume, across from the chased sheath for her rowan wand. She paged through it hurriedly to the mapping section, tapped on it until it brought up an image of the little strip of suburban farmland that remained between her town and Uniondale. “I’ve got the coordinates,” she said.

Got them here too, said a calm voice in the back of her head.

Here’s another one who’s been quiet today, Nita said privately to the peridexis. Taking a day off?

Just staying in the background while you enjoyed yourself, the peridexis said. But the enjoyment seems to have hit some kind of hitch --

Because we may be back on duty again! Stay with me— “Dair, Bobo’ll feed Spot the targeting data—”

“Got it,” Dairine said a second later. “Spot, do us a circle—” Almost instantly a large spell-transit circle with five personal transport subcircles appeared on the grass opposite the koi pond. “Check your ID data and jump in,” Dairine said, stepping into one of the circles herself. “Concealment field’s built in, don’t worry about being seen.”

Nita shoved her manual back into its pouch, grabbed Jackie’s handle, and carefully stepped into one of the vacant subcircles, checking to make sure that Spot was using the most recent version of her name. Bobo, you’d better add something for Jackie here—

Spot’s handled it: there’s extra language in the submodule attached to yours, see it there?

Great. Nita glanced up after a few seconds to see everyone else in place, and Dairine waiting for her. “I’m good,” she said. “Hit it—”

Things around them went black, and then bright again. Nita glanced around hurriedly, trying to get her bearings.

The harvest moon had risen some hours earlier, and now it stood high over a rather sad and lonely landscape. Long ridges where pumpkins had been planted and raised ran down the length of the field, and from the ridges straggled tired-looking pumpkin vines. Some of these were withered and dying: others were still alive, but had only small or misshapen pumpkins left attached to them. The field was surrounded by windbreak trees on all four sides, with here and there a break or a gate through which tractors could drive in, and off to one side, a long line of plain wooden tables where the people who came to pick the pumpkins could clean up what they picked before paying for them.

Everything looked monochrome in the moonlight, ever so faintly golden, and very still. There was no sound. Nothing moved. The pirate, the caveman, the Jedi and the alien princess stood looking around them, not speaking for the first few moments.

“Okay,” Nita said to Jackie at last. “We’re here. What’s the problem?”

Something bad is happening in the ground, Jackie said. It was happening before. But it’s much worse now. It’s trying to get out—

They all stood still in the silence, looking, listening—

And then a pale thin hand shot up out of the damp crumbly dirt and grabbed Dairine by the ankle.

She shrieked at the top of her lungs, jumped back about three feet, and then staggered and nearly fell down, for the hand hadn’t let go of her ankle, and the arm behind it was pulled further up out of the ground and kept hanging on. A second later the blue-white fire of her lightsaber broke loose, and Dairine sliced the arm off at the elbow. She then spent the next few seconds jumping up and down and trying to dislodge the hand, which still wouldn’t let go—

All around them in the field, other bumps and lumps started heaving themselves up out of the dirt—skinny fleshless hands scrabbling at it, knobbly shoulders and backs heaving up, whole lank tatter-clad human shapes struggling up on hands and knees, staggering erect; blind faces and empty eyes searching for signs of life in the field, targeting on it, lurching toward it. Nita knew immediately that these weren’t actual high-end zombies of the animated-full-corpse type. But they were more than undead enough to be going on with: staggering cobbled-together shapes meant to inflict terror, disgust and despair. They had a blunt, insufficiently-detailed look to them that in some ways was worse than genuine rotting human corpses would have been. And they were unquestionably the bearers of a message: Take… Me… seriously!

“Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks cubed!” Ronan said. “What on earth brought this shite on?”

“Our old buddy,” Kit said. “Taking advantage of the moment.” He scowled and pulled out his wand. “Too many people have the idea that the forces of evil are stronger tonight… so to some extent, they really are. Lean that much conviction up against reality, and it frays around the edges a little. Then You Know Whose little friends that hang around the edges of existence to do Its dirty work jump right in and use the available energy to make mischief—”

“You call this mischief??” Dairine shouted. She’d finally stopped jumping around in sheer gross-out mode, and paused long enough to simply pull the gripping hand off her ankle by brute force. Then she sliced and diced it thoroughly where it lay on the ground, and having done that, spent a few moments jumping up and down on the pieces in infuriated disgust, yelling, “Eww, eww, eww!!”

Ronan burst out laughing as the tatty dark shapes came lurching and staggering closer and closer to the wizards in the darkness, bits and pieces occasionally falling off them as they came. The laughter had a slightly panicky edge to it, though, and after a moment Ronan got his control back as he reached inside his costume’s tunic. “Sorry, sorry,” he said as he pulled out something hard to see, “honestly. I just keep expecting them to start dancing. Naturally you guys are carrying—”

Nita ripped her wand out of its sheath and shook all the safeties off the spells in her charm bracelet. Kit threw his plastic sword away and pulled his Edsel-antenna wand out too. “Time to make a stand,” Nita said. “We let It mess up Halloween, it’ll be coming after Hanukkah or Christmas next!” She whispered a word or two, and the rowan wand blazed with ready power. “You hear me?” Nita yelled, not just at the growing numbers of oncoming, shambling undead, but at the amused Power responsible for them and doubtless watching this whole thing. “I am taking Halloween back, and you are not getting away with this! Not on my patch!”

“What she said,” Ronan said. And the unseen something in his hands abruptly expanded into what at first glance looked like another caveman club of some kind. It was definitely a club, though, broad and flat and kind of rounded at the business end, narrower down at the handle, and burning inside with a peculiar pale brown light.

“Ronan,” Kit said. “You finally got that thing built!”

“I surely did,” Ronan said. “Say hello to the Magic Hurley!” And from under his caveman skin he pulled a small round core of blinding yellow light that he tossed into the air. “Watch the sliotar, boys!” he yelled, and whacked the ball of light at better-than-fastball speed hard into the nearest zombie.

It exploded, arms and legs and pieces of other whatnot flying yards away. Ronan  pulled out another of the sliotar-bombs, tossed it, hit it with unerring aim at the next nearest zombie. It blew up too.

Unfortunately Nita noticed that as soon as the pieces fell to the ground, the earth started humping and bumping up underneath them, and shortly each piece was a whole new zombie that headed right back toward the four wizards. “Guys,” she shouted, “this situation’s math is not working in our favor!”

“They need to be completely destroyed,” Kit yelled back as he targeted one and then another of the zombies with the laser-like output from his antenna wand. They went down, but also quickly got up again. “Vaporized! Or canceled out or something!”

“And how is this even happening?” Dairine yelled, slicing another zombie right in two, only to see the two halves each make another of themselves. “There aren’t any bodies buried here!”

“Not sure there need to be,” Ronan said, in one of those extremely rational tones of voice he acquired sometimes. He whacked another magic sliotar at a zombie and neatly took the head off, then scowled as its head grew another body and its body grew another head with unnerving speed. “Think about it. For more complicated reanimation spells, you can make do very nicely with human byproducts, human… waste. That winds up in all kinds of places, and even after you process it…”

Nita rolled her eyes as the white rowan-fire wrapped around a zombie and blasted it backwards, and it too got up again. “Too much information, Ronan!”

“No, seriously, think about it. Think about all the stuff that was you, once, or part of you, that gets thrown out or goes down the toilet and gets into the waste treatment system. I mean, besides the usual stuff. Hair. Dandruff. Tissues you’ve sneezed in. Nail clippings—”

“How many toenails does it take to make up a whole person??”  Dairine hollered at him as she sliced her way out of a group of the zombies that was converging on her, and within a few breaths found herself dealing with an even bigger group. “Did I ever want to be thinking about this? Will the inside of my head ever be clean again? Somebody better get me some Clorox after we’re done here!”

“Consider it revenge for your bedspread,” Ronan said. “But I think whoever grew these had better look into their fertilizer’s supply chain. The raw materials aren’t the real problem, though—”

“It’s what’s animating these things!” Kit said. “And what is animating them? We can’t stop them if we don’t know what’s making them go—”

Bobo, Nita said, hurry up and get me a reading! She gasped for breath as she shot down another zombie and it started putting itself together.

I’ve got one, the peridexis said, and you won’t like it.

I’m already well along the not-liking-it spectrum at the moment! What are they??

The animating entities are yangshi.

Dairine looked up in alarm as she caught Bobo’s data via Spot. “Oh, crap!”

“Wow, and to think I was just worried about them eating my flesh,” Kit said, the sarcasm not hiding his growing unease at all well.

Nita, for her part, gulped and kept fighting, but now she too was getting freaked. Thinking of yangshi as demons was almost giving them too much credit. But as the Lone Power’s minions went, they were nasty. Yangshi needed living creatures’ life force to survive, and they got it by prolonged physical contact, during which they sought to bite or wound the victim. If one of them had time to get so much as a tooth into you, that would be the end of it all. Might be quick, Nita thought, or might take a long time.

But let the wound be as little as a snakebite, or as big as a whole leg pulled off, it wouldn’t matter. Every sentient living thing came equipped with an invisible barrier layer that kept its soul bound inside its physical structure. The yangshi’s bite would open up a wound in the boundary layer that couldn’t be healed and would only tear wider with time. Inevitably the soul would leak out, and when the body no longer contained the threshold amount of soulstuff necessary to sustain the body/soul matrix, the spirit would go and the body would die.

“This is just to wear us out,” Kit yelled as he kept fighting. “They’re gonna dogpile us and put us out of the running for good if we don’t think of something real fast!”

“Right,” Dairine said, backing away in a hurry from the yangshi zombies that were trying to engage her. “Time to get radical.” She started pulling the top of her inner tunic askew.

Kit gave her an almost comical look as he kept fighting. “Not exactly the time for a striptease, Dair!” 

“Not what I have in mind. Somebody mentioned vaporizing them?” Dairine got a grip on what suddenly gleamed bright at her neck in the moonlight: a pale golden torc with a big yellow cabochon stone set in it. She started talking very fast in the Speech, something Nita had trouble getting a handle on because of the speed and the complexity of the language, something very involved and full of fire imagery. Dairine shouted one last word, stood there with her fists clenched—

And nothing happened. Dairine cursed and looked desperate, for though the saying goes that “a spell always works,”, nothing can make it work if it’s not plugged into a viable power source of the correct type. “No no no no!” she yelled. “Spot?!”

“What happened?” Kit said, shooting at another zombie and taking it down, but again not for long, and the crowd of them was now pressing in closer—

“I was using the Sunstone on Wellakh this morning,” Dairine moaned, “and the damn thing’s still in phase with Thahit, it takes fourteen hours to get back in phase with Sol after I’ve been using it with its home star and I can’t pull power with it yet—”

Something else then, Nita thought. Vaporization—

And Kit’s earlier suggestion came back to her. Or canceling them out. If their raw material is coming out of the soil— “You’re a genius!” she yelled at Kit.

“I am?” he said, shooting again. “That’s nice to know, so maybe you could let me know how before I become a dead genius??”

She’d been dancing around a lot as she fought, but now Nita made her way hurriedly back to where she’d put Jackie down, and stood next to him. “As soon as we see if this works!” she said. “Buy me a couple of minutes, okay? And then I’m going to need you guys to feed me power.”

Kit nodded, got Ronan’s and Dairine’s attention, and they formed a loose triangle with Nita at the center. Much as she would rather not have done so, she closed her eyes so she could better see the spell she was going to be building in her head.

She was furious, but right now that was a useful dividend, and Nita knew how to make that work for her: she let the anger build.  It’s not bad enough we have to deal with the Lone Power while we’re on active errantry, but it comes after us when we’re just having a little off time? This sucks. She scowled. This is not how I had my evening planned! A little candy, a little fun walking around and seeing everybody’s costumes and enjoying being dressed up ourselves. And then a little private time with Kit out in the quiet and the dark, just a little time during which the two of them were for a change not saving the world… Or blowing up zombies!

But instead, what do I get? I’m part of the evening’s entertainment! Nita could just imagine the Lone Power sitting somewhere comfy, in a big black armchair or something, with its feet up, sipping a nice hot pumpkin spice latte and watching all this unfold. And then probably recording it somehow and sticking it up on Evil-Minion YouTube to share with all Its little followers. She scowled harder, opening her eyes. Yeah, well, I’ve got your pumpkin latte right here, nuisance boy!  

She grinned. Sun and water, Nita thought. But especially sun. Bobo, that complete dissociation matrix we were looking at a month or so ago? The one ‘too unpredictable and violent for everyday use?’

I do remember that coming up for study, yes…

Crack it out and restructure it for organic input.

Organic?

Get busy!

She picked Jackie up and looked him? her? whatever—in the eye. “How would you like to get out there,” she said, “and have a chance to be the pumpkin you only ever dreamed of being before? The best one. The biggest one. With all the sun you can remember inside you at one time—”

The feeling of utter longing and desire almost swept her away. If only!

“Tonight’s the night,” Nita said. “All you have to do is remember that sun. All of it. It’s all inside you… and it’s what’s inside that counts.” She grinned a slightly evil grin. “Can you do that?”

Can I!!

“Then get busy and start doing it right now!” Bobo?

Intention feed’s incoming, Bobo said. It’s considerable.

It’d better be. Build the spell and give it to me compacted. I need a semiphysical conduit to plug it into Jackie here.

I have to warn you, the peridexis said, sounding concerned, if your adjunct’s intention flags, the conduit might short out and the spell might fail—

Better hope it doesn’t, then, Nita said, or Long Island’s gonna be hip deep in zombies by morning. Ready?

Delivering now. 

The spell flashed into life before her, hanging in the air in a set of nested circles about a foot wide. Okay, Nita said, not quite what I had in mind for this. She  reached out to start redrafting the spell, pulling parts of the spell diagram into other configurations. One big circle, three chord lines, a small external power-control circle at the tangent point. Three inclusions. Power envelope… radius of effect… expansion room for the intention statements…  Once again she found herself being glad she’d spent so much time on spell construction these last couple of months: it was getting a lot easier to build spells on the fly when the Manual didn’t have exactly what you needed.  But that module, yeah, that’ll work, plug that in here. And that one—

Nita concentrated hard on ignoring the chaos going on around her and looked the spell over carefully, checking the language of it and the way it was arranged. Every spell was about persuasion: this one was about helping Jackie remember all that sun, and more than that, the urge toward life that she’d picked up from it, the desire to get it right and be all you could even if that was just being a pumpkin. This is as good as it gets in the time we have, she thought at last. So let’s see what kind of result this produces. She signed the spell with her name in the Speech and tied it into closed-and-ready mode with the Wizard’s Knot: the whole long Speech-statement, from invocation to incitation, would read itself and execute when Nita pronounced the trigger word.  “Kit! Two seconds to check me on this?”

He knocked down one more zombie while looking the diagram over. “Looks good, better get on with it—!”

And he was right, because the zombies were pressing in closer and closer all the time. “So here we go,” Nita said, plucking the bright-burning words and geometrical figures of the spell out of the air and crumpling them together into a little tight-packed ball. She got down beside Jackie, pulled his lid off, and popped the spell inside him, pushing it down against the orange flesh inside and feeling the spell’s short-range power conduit sink in and hook up. The light of the spell shone out through his eyes. How’s that? You feel okay?

Yes. And none of this would be working this way if you hadn’t scooped out my insides, would it? the pumpkin said.

Nita nodded, feeling a sudden rush of a weird mixture of satisfaction and excitement: a sense of absolutely being part of a plan, not just making one—a sense of things falling right into place, and of being exactly in the right place at the right time. Nita had heard other wizards call this serendipitous effect “the Big Sync”, and talk about how much fun it could be. Now she grinned, entirely seeing the point. “Okay,” she said. “Kit? Ready when you three are!”

Kit caught Ronan’s and Dairine’s eyes and started speaking under his breath in the Speech. Nita could feel him laying out the intangible power conduits that would feed the spell power through her. It’ll only take them a few seconds to get hooked up—

She turned her attention back to the tattered, rotted-looking shapes lurching toward them. “Willing followers of the Fallen,” she said, pulling up one of the shortest of the formal demon-management notifications,  “be warned by me! We are on the business of the Powers that Be, and by Their power vested in us, unless you disperse forthwith to your own places, we will utterly undo and abolish you!”

The zombies paused—

And kept coming.

“Last warning, you guys!” Nita said, holding Jackie up. “I’ve got a pumpkin, and I’m not afraid to use it!”

There was another slight pause—and then a sound that if possible made Nita angrier than before: zombie laughter, the animating yangshi demons making fun of her. They kept on coming.

That’s it, Nita thought. Let’s rumble! To Jackie she said silently, Are you absolutely sure you’re up for this? 

Up for this? I was grown for this!

Nita nodded. “Okay,” she said, and lifted Jackie high. “See you on the other side!”

And she took a large breath, said the last word of the spell she’d constructed, and dashed the pumpkin down hard on the ground.

It smashed. From inside it, an explosion of orange-golden light splashed out for yards around, then surged back and started to gather around the wet, smashed pieces. And a sound slowly began to build: like the earth shaking, like the sea crashing somewhere nearby—something growling.

A swirling shape started to mass up into the air between the wizards and the zombies. It was round, and orange, and it got bigger and oranger every minute. It was beach-ball sized, pop-tent sized, garage-sized. And it kept growing.

Nita stood there, fists clenched, feeding the spell power as Kit fed it through to her from himself and Dairine and Ronan. She staggered a little with the tension of managing such a big feed all by herself.  Not too fast, or it’ll burn out early. Not too slow, or it’ll collapse. Keep it steady—

The shape got bigger, swirled, coalesced, started to solidify. It was a pumpkin, massively ribbed, hugely and perfectly globular, a pumpkin the size of a house, a truly great pumpkin, growing and shouldering up against the dark sky. The snapped-off vine place at the top of it started to go green again, started to grow more vines down around it—tendrils of verdant light that snaked away in all directions as they reached the ground under it, then started to boost its shape a little clear of the ground. Then slowly eyes started to show from under the skin, shining through it as if the pumpkin was lit from inside. Glowing, glaring eyes, they got brighter, burned flaming orange, fixed on the zombies, grew brighter. And then a dreadful fanged mouth tore open, full of orange fire, and the awful face turned itself up toward the risen harvest moon and roared.

You go, Jackie! Nita thought, and concentrated on keeping herself upright and holding onto her connection with the spell so that the power feed would keep running.  But it was hard to concentrate when events around them were approaching a level of weird that was unusual even by wizardly standards. The gigantic pumpkin-shape had been lifting itself up on an ever-thickening set of vines of light that were curling out from it, twining themselves in among the vines in the pumpkin patch, spreading fast until the whole place was all one expanse of throbbing dark-green fire. And then the giant pumpkin came down so hard the ground shook with it. Nita wobbled and put out a hand to keep her balance: Kit caught it from behind her, steadying her, as the dark green fire spreading in the field started suddenly going pale in places; golden, then orange—

The remaining pumpkins scattered across the field, the ones that hadn’t been big enough or the right shape or otherwise perfect enough to be picked and sold, were now lighting up from inside as if every one of them had its own candle… and, very quickly, much more than just a candle. Eyes opened, that interior light streaming out. Jaws opened, every one of them fanged. Every pumpkin began pushing itself up off the weedy dirt on ever-stronger vines.  And every one looked at the staggering zombies and growled.

Jackie, now taller than some of the trees around the field, glanced around with slow fierce exaltation at the crowd of its people gathering around it, burning. And then, with one accord, they turned their attention to the zombies…

Jackie roared again so that the sky shook with it, a truly monster-movie-ish roar, and the pumpkins charged.

All hell broke loose—or at least what might have been mistaken for events in one of those dark outer spheres of existence where the Lone Power’s minions normally prefer to congregate. The whole field turned into a mad vista of snarling mouths, eyes full of devouring fire, roaring shapes that started to purposefully herd the zombies, piling up on one another and hemming them in out of view.

Then the serious screaming began.

Dairine came up behind Nita, staring. “What is going on in there??” she said.

But her tone of voice suggested that she knew, and Nita shook her head with mingled shock and approval as a couple of detached zombie-legs and arms came flying out of the fracas. These pieces did not have time to reproduce themselves, for other pumpkins rolled or leapt after them and devoured them, then turned to look for more prey: and with every zombie they ate, the pumpkins got bigger. Nutrients, Nita thought. It’s all just nutrients to them. Uh oh—

In desperation a crowd of the zombies, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, had managed to break out from the main body of the attack and were lurching in desperate speed for the edges of the field. It was futile. A second wave of ever-growing pumpkins charged after the zombies and hunted them across the field no matter which way they ran, snatching at them and pulling them down, grabbing and gobbling every hastily-shed scrap, every half head and pulled-off leg: everything.

And then, without much warning, the roaring and the growling stopped. There were no more zombies. There was nothing left but a field full of gloriously bright orange pumpkins of unusual size, rolling slowly to various sprawling patches of vines, settling themselves down against the ploughed-up ridges, the light gently fading out of them. One last pumpkin, the very biggest of them—much shrunken from its previous massive size but still easily four feet across, its top beautifully webbed with the browned veining of sunburn—was settling down into a spot at the corner of the field: but it had a ghostly quality about it, unlike its smaller kindred. As the spell ceased execution, as the huge pumpkin’s interior effulgence very slowly faded and the cut places in its face smoothed over and healed themselves, the pumpkin looked at Nita one last time with eyes that had nothing to do with knives.   

Thank you, Jackie said, for picking me.

And it faded gently away into the dark, and was gone.

All around the four wizards fell a great stillness. The only thing breaking the sudden peace was the much-amplified noise from some nearby neighborhood’s own “haunted house”, a single werewolf-y howl echoing into the moonlit night around them.

Nita dusted her hands off; Dairine put up her lightsaber, and Kit stowed his wand. Ronan knocked one last sliotar of light across the field, where it fell in a brief bright burst of wizardry and dissipated. “And now we see,” Ronan said as they looked across the former scene of zombie carnage, “why demons are scared of pumpkins.”

Off to one side there was an abrupt BANG! as someone teleported into the field a few yards away, in so much of a hurry that they didn’t care about the air displacement. Carl was standing there in his ghoul outfit, though all around him was a hot blue halo of light that suggested he had arrived ready for serious destruction of almost anything he might find. He looked around him in slight bemusement at finding nothing but a quiet moonlit field, a surprisingly large number of large leftover pumpkins for a suburban Halloween, and a caveman, a pirate, a Jedi and an alien princess, all looking somewhat out of breath but very pleased with themselves.

“Tell me I missed the zombies,” Carl said, sounding actively regretful.

“We handled it,” Nita said. “But thanks for checking.”

Carl laughed. “I have a feeling the précis on this is going to make interesting reading,” he said. “Don’t skimp on the details. And don’t forget, you left your candy bags at our place.” He glanced around him one last time, shook his head, smiled. “Meanwhile, I have to go put more dry ice in that punch bowl…”

He vanished again, more quietly this time.

Ronan sighed and looked around the field. “Is it just me,” Ronan said, “or has my desire for large amounts of sugar completely deserted me?”

“It’s just you,” Dairine and Kit said, more or less in unison. 

“Come on back with us anyway,” Kit said. “Who knows, you might recover.”

“Oh, all right…”

“One thing first,” Nita said, as Ronan and Dairine wandered off toward the edge of the field, with Spot trailing after, to set up a new set of transit circles.

“What?” Kit said.

“Right here…” Nita had bent down to examine the spot where she’d smashed Jackie to the ground. Some pulp and smashed skin fragments still lay there. She started turning over the broken pieces carefully.

Kit got down beside her. “What?” he said.

“Here,” Nita said. Under one of the broken pieces she found a few pale white seeds. Carefully she picked them up and slipped them into the pouch that held her manual. “You see any more of these?”

Kit helped her look. “A few under here…”

“Good.” After a few moments Nita sat back on her heels and accepted them from Kit, considering for a moment. “I think we take these home and leave them out to dry a little.”

“In the oven?”

“No, just near the radiator, I think. Then put them away… wait for spring, start the seedlings going, plant them out. Daddy was talking about starting a vegetable patch. I bet he wouldn’t mind some pumpkins.”

Kit gave Nita a look that even in this moonlight was plainly visible as a teasing one. “Not sure this really counts as changing the equation…”

“What?”

“You have got to stop giving things nicknames.”

She gave him a look of deadly amusement. “‘Kit’,” Nita said, “is a nickname.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t give me—”

Nita pulled off Kit’s crooked mustache, chucked it away, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close in the dark.

“What are you two doing back there?” Ronan said from some yards away. “Hurry up and come on, or the Jedi Pig here’s gonna get ahead of you and raid your bags for all the chocolate.”

For a few seconds there was no answer. Then Kit said, “Tell her she can have it.”

Ronan and Dairine exchanged a glance and a grin, then vanished.

And behind them, the Halloween moon kept shining down, glorious and round and somewhat scarred… like a pumpkin with character.

How Lovely Are Thy Branches

1: We Need A Little Christmas

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Four thousand years ago, when the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility on Rirhath B was in its initial stages of development, the populations of the Alterf star system were evacuated into near-Rirhait space secondary to their home star being irreparably damaged by a passing black hole. The four carbon-based species originally native to Alterf IV’s giant moon Temalbar brought with them to their new homes an awesomely advanced sheaf of technologies that became the foundation of a cultural partnership with the Rirhait that has stood the test of millennia, and thrives to this day. Daily life in much of the modern Galaxy now depends on some of the devices and tech they brought with them—such as the Interconnect Project’s worldgate management and deployment technology that makes it feasible to cluster worldgates together on demand without destroying the planet they’re based on, and the far-famed SunTap limitless-energy capture system that satisfies the power demands of worldgate complexes in this galaxy and numerous others.

And that said… beings based on every sort and state of matter, and resident from this side of the Galaxy to the other, will swear up and down (if asked) that the very best thing to come of that ancient partnership is the concept of the multispecies shopping mall. What had originally been a retail wing intended only to handle the immediate needs of passengers traveling through the ancient/legacy Rirhath B gating facility has over the millennia been transformed into a huge array of shopping opportunities scattered through and arranged around the already-vast area of the Crossings. Everything, literally everything the mind of [insert the gender-neutral name of your favorite sentient species here] can imagine acquiring, and a lot of things they can’t, is here for the buying, leasing, or other method of acquisition…so that whether you’re a commuter in a rush to make your gate or a tourist with time to dawdle and browse for that perfect souvenir, they’ve got you covered. Need an correlating hypersemantic obfuscator and have no plans to be anywhere near Mendwith any time soon? You want to head for the Crossings: the Mendwittu have a factory store there with the deepest discounts anywhere. Got some heavy grenfelzing on your mind and can’t lay your hands, fins or tentacles on one of those vital dadeithiv roots to save your life? You want to make for the Crossings and head straight for the Ingestibles and Assumables Wing, in the Carbon-Friendly Fresh Foods corridor of the Main Produce market, just past the Hydroxyls Snack Plaza.

And while we’re speaking of grenfelzing… want chocolate? Genuine chocolate as eaten by the legendarily wealthy and powerful denizens of the fabulous faraway world known as Earth? Well, who doesn’t! But why bother making the long, perilous journey to that dangerous part of space and daring the wrath of Earth’s ruthless and terrible space fleet? Save yourself a trip. Shop at the Crossings.

…Believe it or not, however, not all the species who pass through The Worlds’ Premier Travel And Shopping Venue (SM) are interested in chocolate. Even dark chocolate.

Or not that interested.

Among the usual crowd of beings from every corner of the galaxy (insofar as galaxies have corners) that one might find moving under the vast high Crossings ceiling and through its bright day, more or less unremarked (because there really are a lot of bipeds around and to most other species they all look alike), came wandering two shapes that might read as one of the simpler kinds of female, at least in species that were boring enough to have only two or three major morphisms that fall into the category. One of the two wanderers was a bit taller than the other, that being what would have been most noticeable about the differences between them for most beings in Crossings transit who’d notice them at all. Their culture or microculture apparently went in at the moment for brightly colored clothing that sat fairly close to the body, and one had much longer head-fur or -plumage than the other, though the cresting of both was more or less similar in shade. It would’ve taken a much more acute observer to realize that both of were just recently out of latency age—one more recently than the other—for they were walking with the assurance of people who had been to the Crossings many times before, and in a variety of circumstances that made the present one seem utterly commonplace.

“So you never did tell me,” said the shorter of them. “What exactly are we shopping for?”

“Oh, I don’t know. At the moment? Anything that doesn’t have to do with Halloween.”

Nita Callahan sighed. “I hear you there,” she muttered.

“Still suffering?”

“Oh, not any more. I really thought I was over the sweet tooth,” Nita said to Kit’s sister Carmela as they wandered down an aisle of unrecognizable objects that she knew had to be food, because they were in the food hall. “And then after things got crazy…”

“Yeah,” Carmela said, “Kit described it to me. You had kind of an odd night… I can imagine some comfort eating would have felt good afterwards.”

“And of course there was plenty of that around, because, well, Halloween.” Nita sighed. “I just could not lay off the chocolate. When we got back we had about a hundred of those little Three Musketeers bars in the bags…”

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah.” They’d strolled over to one side of the wide concourse that was only one of the many clothes-shopping “streets” in this area of the Crossings’ upper north side retail wing, and stood briefly examining what appeared to be an intimate-lingerie shop. Nita was particularly impressed by the lustrous corsetry displayed in the window. Has to be a lot easier doing up all those laces and things when you’ve got that many legs…

They headed on past that shop window toward another that appeared to be full of jeweled coat racks. “Those things sneak up on you, don’t they?” Carmela said. “There never seems to be a lot to them at first. It’s that whipped center.”

“Yeah. And the next morning…”

“Alka-Seltzer.”

“Ugh. Yes.”

“Well,” Carmela said, “you’d have been better pretty quickly after that.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “but what’s the point? We’re no sooner done with one holiday than here comes another.” It was one of the reasons Nita was enjoying being at the Crossings at the moment. There was not an accordion-paper-tailed cardboard turkey or Pilgrim hat or decorative cornucopia to be seen in the place… which was a relief, because the things were already all over the stores and the commercials were all over the TV back home. “And another food holiday.”

She sighed. Since her mom died, the prospect of Thanksgiving at her house was still feeling fairly abnormal. Mostly—and somewhat guiltily—Nita hated it and wished it would go away. Christmas, strangely, was easier to deal with. It had always been a kind of lightly celebrated holiday in her family, more about relaxation and visits from relatives than extravagant gift giving or crazed levels of decoration. And Christmas dinner had always been something different from year to year (because her Mom had loudly proclaimed to anyone who’d listen, “One damn turkey a year is enough!”). So when her Dad had made sauerbraten last Christmas when her Mom was too sick to cook, it had still seemed strangely normal. This year, when the subject came up, he’d announced he was going to do a standing rib roast, which was fine with Nita. But she was dreading Thanksgiving, which had been the one holiday her Mom had willingly made a song and dance over in terms of food.

“You’re really not up for Turkey Day,” Carmela said.

“Nope,” Nita said.

“Dodgy holiday anyway,” said Carmela. “Never mind. Let’s skip it and go straight to Christmas.”

“If only,” Nita said.

“No,” said Carmela. “I’m serious! Why spend any more time on it than we have to? Eat the stupid turkey and move right on. Christmas!”

Nita smiled at the thought. “I wish they gave out timeslides for this kind of thing,” she said. “Because boy, would I requisition one right this minute.”

Carmela turned and looked her up and down. “You sound tired,” she said. “Enough walking! Let’s do the wizardy thing and get hoverscoots.”

Nita blinked. “How’s that so wizardy?”

“Well, it’s all about not wasting energy, isn’t it? No point in wasting perfectly good shopping energy on walking.”

It occurred to Nita that this was one of the more interesting takes she’d recently heard on the concept of not speeding up the heat-death of the Universe. Carmela, though, plainly wasn’t concerned about such details. She merely paused where she was and stamped on the shining white floor.

Immediately two long pieces of the floor material smoothly detached themselves upwards from it, deformed out into long hovering skateboard shapes, and sprouted tall slender grips from their fronts. Underneath the scooters the surface reformed seamlessly and went back to being shining and white.

Nita blinked. “That’s new…” she said. “Used to be Crossings staff had to call for one of these.”

“I’m that,” Carmela said, “more or less. Or anyway I’ve got a similar level of permissions.”

Which was no surprise. To everyone at the Crossings from the highest managerial levels on down these days she was Carmela Rodriguez of Earth, Defender and Protector of Transients and Staff… not to mention Occasional Personal Shopper to Interplanetary Royalty (which counted for a little more on the strictly retail side). Nita had of course spearheaded the defense that had been instrumental in saving the Crossings from the aliens attacking it, and was if anything honored even more highly than Carmela, to an almost embarrassing extent (at least it embarrassed her). Carmela, though, had absolutely no embarrassment about casually reminding the Crossings staff how much they owed her (and Nita), and as a result had for some time now been pulling down a range of increasingly impressive perks.

“Come on, mount up,” Carmela said, “there’s a lot of new stuff on this side of the wing we haven’t seen yet.”

Nita climbed onto the scooter, and both of them started to move along the broad corridor, absolutely shocklessly. She recognized the motive force as another implementation of the frictionless, inertially-dampered transport system the Crossings used for moving people and cargo in and out of the satellite terminals to the major gate clusters at high speed. These scooters, though, were gliding along at just a few miles an hour, with no more fuss or sense of motion than if the two of them were standing still together.

Carmela was studying a diagram of the local shopping space that had begun displaying on the plaque that spanned the graceful handlebars of the scooter. Nita’s display had synced up with her manual—all the Crossings’ systems being alert to the presence of wizards and having a raft of custom routines to make their work easier—and was displaying “smart” advertisements for various stores in the area and travel advisories tailored to her point of origin, all translated into English for her convenience.

“Okay,” Carmela said, tracing a route on the scooter’s display, “right there.” The scooter chirped in acquiescence. “Meanwhile,” she said, turning to Nita, “I know exactly what we need.”

“Yeah? What?”

“A Christmas party.”

“Mela,” Nita said, and laughed. “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet!”

“And you were just complaining that you didn’t want it to be.”

Nita blinked, as that felt like it should have made some kind of sense. Just possibly not Earth sense.

She sighed and glanced down at the scooter’s display, which was now showing some amusing promotional material. After a moment she raised her eyebrows at the slug line of one feature. “NASA’s going to be glad to hear we’ve got a ruthless and terrible space fleet.”

Carmela snickered. “So will Richard Branson, when he gets the memo,” she said. “And frankly, I know which of them’s going to do better marketing.”

Nita snorted. “Yeah, but Mela, you know as well as I do it’s not true! Is putting something like this out there smart?”

“Why not? If everybody thinks Earth has a big aggressive space fleet, no one’ll bother turning up on our doorstep with one, will they.”

There was something to be said for that line of reasoning, but Nita still had misgivings: some of the more assertive species she knew of might take it as a challenge. “And anyway, who put that in here?”

“I’m sure I have no idea,” Carmela said, airily waving a hand.

Nita began to sweat a little, because she knew from experience what it meant when Carmela started handwaving. “Are you trying to tell me that— What did you get Sker’ret to let you do?” For it couldn’t escape anyone’s notice who knew the present Master of the Crossings that there was just about nothing he wouldn’t do for Carmela. Installing a worldgate in her closet had merely been a small sign of things to come.

“Who, me? Nothing! …Much. I mean, the small print was such a nuisance to start with…” She glanced over at what Nita was still reading.

Nita squinted to read the block of tiny, tiny print at the bottom of the promotional feature, again displayed in English to ease the handling of some of the more obscure Rirhait idioms. “…Wait. ‘Earth’, ‘Mysterious Earth’ and ‘Mother Earth The Legendary Home Of Humankind’ are licensed trademarks of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC, terms and conditions apply, planetary descriptions may change from time to time without notice at management’s discretion—” And then in the tiniest print possible, “—battle fleet not included’??”

“Legalese,” Carmela said, craning her neck to see ahead of them. “It’s not like the disclaimers actually have any force in law, really, once you’ve—”

“I can’t believe this,” Nita said. “CRLLC? Did you incorporate the entire planet Earth somewhere?!”

“Here, actually,” Carmela said. “The corporate tax rate here is reeeeeeeeallly low. Especially if you’ve saved the place from alien invasion. At which point it drops to zero. …If not lower.”

Nita’s mouth dropped open.

“And why are you looking so shocked? You cosigned the incorporation documents when we were here last.”

Being reduced to speechlessness around Carmela was hardly a new experience for Nita, but this particular incidence was setting new records for the underlying implications. “But I thought— Wait. You said that—”

“Nonono, wait just a minute! Look there. Is that what I think it is?”

“Uh,” Nita said, and peered ahead, her mind only half on whatever she was supposed to be looking for. The corridor up that way was fairly busy, full of aliens of all shapes and sizes. But after a second she thought she saw what Carmela was looking at, a dark-colored conical shape, hard to see clearly through the throng. “That tall thing sticking up? The green one— Oh. It’s a Demisiv—!”

“In a baseball cap!” Carmela said, and accelerated away.

…And so it was. Nita went after her, shaking her head and grinning. What are the odds, she thought, that one of my favorite wizardly houseguests should just happen to be passing through here while we’re here too? But the odds didn’t really come into it when you balanced them against the wizardly truism that there were no such things as coincidences. Or rather, when something that looked like a coincidence turned up, it was usually a sign from the Powers that Be that you should start paying attention: almost always, something else was going on.

Nita got caught up with Carmela after a few moments. “This is so perfect,” Carmela was saying, confident that Nita was right behind her. “See that, this was an absolutely great idea, we’d have missed him if we didn’t have the scoots!”

That was probably true. Within a few moments they were close enough that when Carmela started waving her arms and shouted across the crowd, “Hey, is that my shrub?!”, Nita could even through the intervening crowd see all those fir-tree-like branches of Filif’s arch up, as if in surprise, and then start waving back as if a wind had shaken them.

And it took only a few moments more before the two of them had hopped off the scoots and were elbowing their way through the remaining crowd in an impromptu contest to be the first one to hug their fellow wizard. Nita came from behind in the last couple of meters and beat Carmela there by a nose.

It was always a little interesting hugging Filif, as you wound up getting a face full of something that felt like pine needles, even though the scent more closely resembled something like cinnamon instead of the kind of cool, green smell you might associate with a conifer. “You are so well met,” Filif was saying, “what a fine surprise, but what are you two doing here without my knowing about it? I’d thought the Knowledge would have alerted me that you were within physical-meeting range.”

“Might ask you the same question!” Nita said. The instrumentality that managed the wizards’ manuals (and the many other ways that the Art’s practitioners accessed spells and other wizardly data) would normally notify you, if you’d asked it, as to the presence in your physical neighborhood of other wizards with whom you’d worked. Nita had a good number of these alerts embedded in your manual, not least for those wizards who (however briefly) had lived in her basement. “Should’ve had a notifier go off.”

“Well, I only just got here,” Filif said. “Just out of the gate, in fact. Maybe that’s the problem. Anyway, the Master and I have business—some Interconnect Project details to sort out: I’ve been doing liaison work for the Demisiv side of the Project Authority.” He rustled a little, half-turning as Nita let go of him (and Carmela did not), and all the eye-berries on the free side of him glowed a little brighter as he tried to peer through the crowd. “He must’ve been delayed—he was in some other meeting, and said it might keep him a bit late.”

“Well, never mind that,” Carmela said, hugging him again—or still—and then letting him go. “Your business business can wait. And if he’s coming along to find you, good! Two birds with one stone.”

Filif half-turned in the other direction, and looked around him with more of his eyes. “Not sure I see any birds,” he said, sounding dubious. “Or for that matter, stones.”

Nita laughed. Sometimes the wizardly Speech did fairly well at translating human idiom, but sometimes it completely failed. “She means she wants to talk to both of you at once.”

“Well, that’s certainly preferable to hominid-on-avian violence,” Filif said. “Ah, now, here he comes. Not so delayed, then.”

Nita peered around her, not bothering to look up, because there wouldn’t have been any point in trying to see the Master of the Crossings over the heads of any crowd: when he was moving at any speed, he moved low. To her own amusement, though, it was the sound of lots of sharp little legs clicking and clattering against the smooth floor that told her which way to look (in this case, behind her). Nita turned and saw him coming, and grinned, and as he caught sight of her through the crowd that parted before him, Sker’ret was already half rearing up so that his front three pairs of legs were off the ground and the head with all those stalked eyes was on a level with Nita’s. She held her arms open, and when he more or less crashed into them, she grabbed him and hugged him to her and thumped his dorsal carapace. “Sker’!”

“Our saviors return,” Sker’ret laughed in her ear. “It’s been forever.”

“It’s been last week,” Nita said. “Getting amnesic from overwork?”

“No, I mean when the two of you were last here together.”

“Two weeks then. Maybe three.”

“Pedant,” Sker’ret said affectionately, gave her a squeeze and let her go.

“And what about me?” Carmela demanded. “You’re late for my daily dose of alien snuggles!”

“And whose fault is that? Anyway, you’re the alien.”

“No surprise at this sudden appearance then, my cousin?” Filif said.

“Excuse me?” Sker’ret said as he headed for Carmela. “I am the Master of this facility, coz. Of course I knew she was here: she’s got a facility-independent wizardly tracker routine associated with her. How else can I find her in a hurry if more invaders arrive and we need saving?”

“My favorite stalker,” Carmela said, and hugged Sker’ret as if hugging giant purple metallic centipedes was the most normal thing in the world. Which, for her, it naturally was.

“And why does her tracker work better than the Knowledge-based routines you’ve got hooked up to me?” Filif said, bending over in a sort of half-bow to Sker’ret so that they could brush their upper limbs together.

“Because she can do a lot more damage in a much shorter time than you routinely would,” Sker’ret said.

Carmela burst out laughing. “Oh, Sker’, you say that like it was a bad thing!”

“So tell us,” Filif said. “What damage are you contemplating now?”

“We’re having a Christmas party. And both of you are invited.”

All Filif’s berries on the side facing Sker’ret, and all Sker’ret’s stalked eyes, exchanged a bemused glance.

“And Christmas would be what?” Sker’ret said. “Is it a holiday of some sort?”

“Don’t you remember? Remember how excited Filif got about this?”

“Um…” Sker’ret was making a kind of thoughtful null sound that even in a Rirhait perfectly communicated a sense of I don’t want you to feel hurt but due to being really busy I have no idea what you’re talking about at the moment.

“Fil,” Carmela said. “Explain it to him. Remember that time of year we told you about, the last time you came visiting? The time of year when we bring trees into the house and decorate them?”

Filif looked astounded. “Wait. This is that time? Then what are you doing here? Mostly your folk are with family at such times, I thought!”

“No no no, it’s not right this minute!” Carmela said. “Fifty days or so yet. Hold still.” She reached into her shoulderbag and came out with a small sleek tablet. “How’s your schedule around JD 2455550.52…?”

“Well, let me check…”

“I’m free,” said Sker’ret immediately. “One or another of my relief people can take those shifts for me. Powers forbid I should miss a party of yours!”

Nita wanted to start shouting practical, sensible things like No, wait, this is all going way too fast, are you nuts…? But she took a deep breath, stood there hating Thanksgiving enough to be willing to think about anything else, especially when it involved going straight on past it, and peered over Carmela’s shoulder at the tablet. “That’s really gorgeous. Where’d you get that?”

“It’s part of her detached staff package,” Sker’ret said. “Didn’t you get yours, Nita? I’ll see that it comes to you.”

“Okay, Sker’, thanks,” she said. “What day is that?” Nita said to Carmela.

“December 20th. And hey, the next day is the Winter Solstice. Very symbolic!” Carmela said to Filif, elbowing him somewhere among his fronds and needles. “We’re having a sleepover on Almost The Longest Night! We can stay up all night and watch movies and eat popcorn and all kinds of things.”

“Mela,” Nita said. “Your mama and pop… you haven’t even asked them yet!”

“They’ll say yes,” Carmela said, waving a hand. “We’re going to do it exactly the way you did yours when Sker’ and Fil came to visit the first time. Elective-access ‘puptent’ accesses in the basement…”

“I can always spare powering structures for ten or twenty of those,” Sker’ret said. “Let me know what you need. If the party’s heavily attended we can always install a temporary secondary gating hub like the one in your closet.”

Nita rubbed her eyes for a moment. It’s always possible they will say yes right off the bat… And certainly since she became a wizard, stranger things had happened.

Carmela was talking to Filif a mile a minute about popcorn garlands and boughs of holly and snow and Christmas cookies. “And a star, Fil, an actual star for the top of you instead of a baseball cap…”

“But I like my baseball cap!” The protest didn’t have a lot of energy behind it: Filif was already starting to shake with excitement.

“Just a temporary thing. Something festive! For the season. And lights, Fil, all colors of lights, and glass balls and ribbons and…”

If she does get her mom and pop to say yes to this, Nita thought, this is going to be amazing. And it’s been such a crazy year. I could use some amazing right about now…

“Sker’,” Nita said very softly, watching the armwaving continue and Filif’s delighted, excited vibrations increase. “Tell me something.”

“Anything.”

“Remember that paperwork I cosigned with Mela when we were here last, after Mars…?”

“Yes?”

“Is it possible…” Nita’s mouth went dry. She tried swallowing, had to work at it. “…that as far as the intergalactic community is concerned, I’m, uh, one of the people who… rules the Earth?”

Sker’ret burst out in one of his ratchety laughs. “What? Rules? Oh, no! Not at all.”

“Okay, that’s a relief,” Nita said. “Good.” And she sagged a little.

“But you are on the governing board.”

Nita’s mouth dropped open again. Then she closed it, because she simply could not find a reply.

“We should go,” she said after a moment. “You two have business, and we’ve got a guest list to write.”

“Of course. I’ll let you get on with it. And we’ll see you at your place again! This is going to be so exciting. In… fifty days?”

“Sounds about right,” Nita said.

There was more hugging, and then Filif and Sker’ret took themselves off down the concourse. Carmela kicked her hoverscoot back into levitation mode, climbed aboard, and said to Nita, “So that’s settled. Come on, Neets, we’ve got the far end of the concourse to look over…” And off she went, already humming “Feliz Navidad… Feliz Navidad… Prospero Año y Felicidad…”

This is going to be interesting, Nita thought. “Mela, wait up!”

“I want to wish you a merry Christmas… I want to wish you a merry Christmas… from the bottom of my ooh wow look at that!”

Nita sighed and scooted after her.

Of course, even when you’re a wizard, getting the basic permissions settled for a house party for an indeterminate number of wizardly or wizard-friendly guests isn’t necessarily that easy.

In the Rodriguezes’ living room a man was sitting in the easy chair closest to the entertainment system, with a tabloid newspaper open in front of his face. In front of him, sitting crosslegged on the floor in a position that was supposed to read as subordinate, and wearing what was meant to be a winsome smile, was his younger daughter.

“Daaaaddyyyyy…”

“I just got home, Carmela. From a shift that felt three hours longer than it really was. During which every single machine I touched found a new and interesting way to screw up.” Kit’s pop worked with the printing-press machines at the big Long Island newspaper, and since the operation had gone digital, he had been complaining more or less nonstop about the crankiness of the new equipment he worked with compared with the beautiful, reliable old printing presses of old. Kit had told Nita often enough that her dad had complained just as hard and as constantly about the old printing presses, way back when, but this didn’t seem like a good time to remind anybody of that. “My head is aching, even my ears are aching, and the aspirin hasn’t kicked in yet, so if we could, you know, let this wait half an hour…”

“But all you have to do right now is say ‘yes’ and then it’ll be quiet!”

The newspaper behind which Juan Rodriguez was presently concealing himself rustled in a very brisk way. “Let’s try it the other way around, shall we? Let’s try having the quiet now, and then maybe the ‘yes’ will happen later!”

“Okay, right on time, that was the appeal to reason,” Kit said in Nita’s ear. They were lurking in the kitchen, pretending to be getting something to eat while listening to the conversation through the pass-through window between the kitchen and the living room. ”Let’s see if she’s buying it.”

“Seriously, pop-pop, it won’t be a big deal! I’m going to take care of all the food and drinks myself, and I’ll clean the house, before and after—”

“Uh oh,” Kit said, very low. “Reverting to what she used to call him when she was eight. Helpless baby daughter and responsible cleaner of the house? Not a good match.”

“That we’re having this discussion right now tells me that it’s a big deal already,” Kit’s pop said. “And that I should be wondering just why you’re leaning on this so hard. And whether I should go off the whole idea right now, so as not to indulge your instant gratification issues.”

“But daaaaaaaddy—”

Kit rolled his eyes at Nita. “Nope, logic’s the only thing that could have saved her there…”

The newspaper being held up between Juan and his middle child dropped just long enough for her, and the two in the kitchen, to get a glimpse of eyes that were rather dangerously narrowed. “Answer hazy,” Kit’s pop said, rather pointedly, “ask again later.” And he went back behind the newspaper again.

Carmela picked herself silently up off the floor and swanned off toward the back of the house and the stairs to her bedroom in a manner that just narrowly avoided being a flounce.

Nita and Kit turned their attention back toward the sandwiches that they were theoretically constructing. Nita hadn’t actually gotten much further than the bread. “How’s this going, you think?” she said, very low.

“Hard to tell,” Kit murmured, opening a cupboard and pretending to rummage around in it. “Sometimes she gets a lot of mileage out of the ‘I’m your favorite daughter’ thing. Some days, nothing at all. Especially when he starts thinking about her and Helena being in college.”

“Tuition,” Nita said, and groaned under her breath.

“Student loans,” Kit said. “It’s a good thing she’s just going to SUNY. But this still looks like a ‘nothing at all’ day.”

“Don’t think I don’t hear you two lurking in there!” Kit’s pop said.

“Not lurking, pop,” Kit said. “Nita’s getting a sandwich. She didn’t have time to eat anything at the Crossings.”

“Because we were busy meeting with the friends who’re going to come!” Carmela said, swinging back into the living room and flopping down onto the nearby couch, where she lay staring at the ceiling in a vaguely hopeless way.

“Who you want to have come,” her pop said, “and who you really should thought about not wanting to disappoint before you issued an invitation that you don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to fulfill!” He turned a page, and the paper rustled quite hard.

“Uh oh, the getting-permission-first thing,” Kit murmured.

“Yeah,” Nita murmured back, “I hit her with that. Didn’t count for much at the time. She was too buzzed.”

“If she’s smart, she won’t push him…”

Possibly realizing this, Carmela merely made a little disappointed moaning sound and went quiet.

“Anyway, there’s plenty of time to think about this,” Kit’s pop said. “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”

“But some of the guests need time to get their schedules sorted because they’ll be coming such a long way. Ireland! Germany!”

“16 Aurigae,” Nita added helpfully.

The newspaper rustled again, and this time the right-hand page twitched aside just enough for Nita to catch a glimpse of Kit’s pop’s eyes looking toward her over the tops of his reading glasses. “Sixteen what?”

“Aurigae. It’s a star about two hundred and thirty light years from here,” Nita said. “An orange giant.”

“About two hundred and thirty?” Kit’s pop said.

“Give or take,” Nita said. “That’s where Filif comes from.”

“So this is one of the three who stayed in your basement in their little holes in the wall,” said Kit’s mama as she appeared through the door on the far side of the living room that led to the back bedrooms.

“Elective access gated spaces,” Kit said. “Puptents, we call them. They don’t take up any space in our space: just somewhere else. It’s like taking your home with you, a little.”

His mama leaned on the passthrough’s shelf. “And the one we’re discussing, 16 Aurigae Guy—? This is the one who looks like a Christmas tree?”

Nita raised her eyebrows at Kit. His mother had always seemed to have the superpower of being able to hear—or overhear—any conversation that took place under the Rodriguezes’ roof, no matter how far away she was in the house. Sometimes it was really useful, and sometimes it was a pain in the butt, but Nita had learned to deal with it.

“He’s a Demisiv,” Nita said. “That’s both the planet and the species. They’re carbon-based like us, but they evolved… really differently.”

“To wind up looking like they do, I’d imagine so.”

Nita shrugged. “They’re related to trees the same way we’re related to the tetrapods.” She noticed Kit’s pop giving her a slightly confused look from behind the paper, and added, “You know, one of those fish species that got out of the water a long time ago, developed legs out of their fins and started walking around. There’ve been a lot of branches in the evolutionary tree between them and us. Same number of branches, pretty much, between Filif and his species’ ancestors.”

“A lot of water under the bridge for his people, then,” Kit’s pop said.

“Five hundred million years,” Kit said, “give or take.”

“Huh,” said Kit’s pop: a neutral sort of sound. He went back behind the paper again, turned another page.

Kit’s mama came into the kitchen and stood still in front of the stove for a few seconds, giving the cooktop a long thoughtful look. “Spaghetti and meatballs?” she said.

“Sounds good, Mama.”

“Then don’t overdo the sandwiches, you two.” Kit’s mama got down on one knee and started going through the cupboard under the counter: Kit and Nita moved to either side to get out of her way. “So what else does Mr. Christmas Tree Wizard do besides get all excited over the thought of being decorated?”

“He’s been working with the authorities at the Crossings as a go-between for the Interconnect Project,” Nita said. “The Demisiv have been a big part of the Project for a long time. It’s a group of species who specialize in long-distance intergalactic transit: keeping it running, helping people get around. They also do emergency work… help move populations who have to find new worlds to live on, because their stars have blown up or they’ve had planetary natural disasters or whatever.”

“So… kind of a humanitarian organization?”

That wasn’t a comparison Nita had thought to make. “Yeah,” she said.

“For a whole lot of values of ‘human,’” Kit added.

Kit’s mama didn’t say anything for a moment, just kept looking around in the cupboard. “Juan,” she said, “are we out of spaghetti again?”

“There’s fettucini…”

“It’s not the same.” She got up, sighing, and opened an upper cupboard. “Okay, we’ll do it with fusilli. But you said you were getting spaghetti on the way back from work…”

The paper rustled. “Sorry. My head was killing me and I just wanted to get home.”

“Well, tomorrow then.”

“I’ll make a note.”

Kit’s mama rummaged around for a big pot and started filling it with water. “Well,” she said while the faucet was running. “He sounds like a good influence. One thing, though.”

Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Yeah?”

“Is your friend a needle-shedding type?”

“Not that I’ve ever noticed,” Kit said.

“The occasional berry,” Nita said. “But only when he’s in trans.”

Kit’s mama put her eyebrows up. “Doesn’t sound like a problem,” she said. She put the pot on the stove and turned on the heat under it. “How many people are we talking?”

“We’re still working that out,” Nita said. “Wanted to get the okay from you first.”

“You did, at least,” Kit’s mama said, and flashed a grin at Nita.

Nita did her best to produce a We-are-so-busted expression that would acknowledge the realities of the situation without assigning blame to any specific party. Kit simultaneously looked elsewhere and looked innocent.

“And this is supposed to be a one-night sleepover? On the twentieth?”

“That’s right,” Kit said. “We wouldn’t be up here all that much. Mostly in the puptents: there’ll be more room.”

Nita heard another newspaper page turn, but purposely didn’t look that way, because Kit’s mama was doing so.

A second passed. “The carol-singing thing’s the night after,” Kit’s mama said. “Don’t forget.”

“We won’t,” Kit said.

His mama headed out of the kitchen and through the living room again. ”Just try to keep the other collateral damage to a minimum, yeah?” she said to Carmela as she passed by the couch. “It wouldn’t be good to freak the neighbors.”

“At least any more than they have been already,” muttered Kit’s pop from behind the paper.

“Oh Mama thank you!” Carmela shrieked and bounded up off the couch to grab her and hug her as she passed through.

“Don’t thank me,” said Kit’s mama. “Thank your Pop.”

The logic of this might not have been instantly obvious to the casual bystander, but Nita had seen enough of these family discussions at Kit’s house to understand that with his folks, parental consensus was often reached by some mechanism she didn’t understand and probably wasn’t meant to. “Thanks, Mr. Rodriguez!” Nita immediately said over the noise of Carmela diving past the newspaper, seizing her Pop and covering his face with smooches.

“You’re welcome,” Kit’s pop said as soon as Carmela let him loose and more or less went dancing out of the living room and up the stairs to get her tablet and start making notes and plans.

Kit’s pop shook his head, shook the paper back out into something like a readable configuration, and went back to his reading. As he did, Kit turned to Nita and said silently, She just lay there with her sad face on and let us run interference for her, didn’t she!

Yep, Nita said. She owes us one.

Good, Kit said. And meanwhile… “Looks like we get to have a party!”

A second later the sound system up in Carmela’s room fired up with a raucous British-accented voice more or less screaming over a noisy drum solo, “It’s CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAS!!”

Nita snickered. “Ronan,” she said, “has a lot to answer for…”

An hour or so later, Nita was upstairs in Carmela’s bedroom, sprawled in her desk chair with her manual open in her lap, while Carmela was lying on her stomach on her bed and scribbling notes in her tablet at about a mile a minute. That thing must have some handwriting recognition program, Nita thought. But then, it’s Crossings tech… it would have.

Having gotten the “yes” from their folks, Carmela was now acting oddly at a loss, as if she’d secretly expected to be turned down and now wasn’t sure what she should be doing. “Decorations,” she was muttering.

Nita glanced up at that. “I thought you decided you were going to use your normal ones.”

“What? Oh. Not for Filif! For the house.”

“We’ve got lots of time yet to think about that.”

“Not if we don’t want to miss the holiday rush! The sooner the better. Anyway, the stuff’s starting to turn up in the stores already anyway…”

Nita sighed, as that was all too true. “Still.”

“And another thing,” Carmela muttered, hurriedly flipping over virtual pages in her tablet and starting to make another set of notes. “Allergies. Food allergies…”

She can plan an invasion and not turn a hair, Nita thought, but she can’t stay focused on a guest list? This really is a big deal for her. “Mela, you’re coming at this backwards.”

“Huh?”

“Guest list first. Food allergies later.”

“I’m just trying to get ahead of things…”

“Right now the only one you’re getting ahead of is yourself. Deep breath!”

Carmela took it, though for some moments she seemed reluctant to let it out again.

“Mela!” Nita said. “Relax.”

She let that breath out with some difficulty. “I just want it to be nice for him,” Carmela said. “He’s so special… and I don’t want him to be disappointed.”

Her first alien crush, Nita thought, and just smiled. “He won’t be,” she said. “You know him. Always ready for something new, and in love with it when it arrives, whatever it is.”

“And oh gosh, he’s going to need something to root in. Maybe one of those custom compounds they’ve got at the Demisiv sleepstore at the Crossings…”

“Mela!” Nita said. “Daddy just puts him in the flower bed when he turns up. With maybe some bark chips! So later for custom bedding. Guest list!”

Carmela let out another heavy sigh and turned to a clean “page.” “Guest list,” she said.

Nita stretched in the chair and glanced down at her manual. She’d long since told the list of active wizards she knew personally to arrange itself to the front of the main directory. Now she started paging through that section, checking people’s public calendars, where available, against the sleepover / party dates. “So. Filif.”

“Goes without saying.”

“Sker’ret.”

“Ditto.”

Both of them paused then, thinking of one of the original puptent group who would not be there: Roshaun. More or less in unison, they sighed.

“Yeah,” Carmela said. “Well. …You and me and Mom and Pop and Dairine and your Dad and Kit.”

“Uh huh.”

“And Spot.”

“Right.”

“Ronan.”

“Mmm,” Carmela said. Nita glanced at Carmela with amusement, not entirely sure whether the sound was simple acknowledgement or approval. Ronan wasn’t particularly forthcoming about how he actually took Carmela’s more or less continuous flirting with him, but Nita noticed that he never really came out and told her to stop it.

And having mentioned Ronan and Kit in the same breath, naturally the next thought was—

“Darryl?” Carmela said, beating Nita to it.

“I don’t know.” Nita looked over his listing in the manual. “He’s showing availability, but that might just be for errantry. The dates are starred, and the star says ‘subject to preparedness issues.’”

“Meaning he’ll bow out if he feels overstimmed.”

“Well, sure. But the whole holiday time might be iffy for him. We were talking a couple weeks ago and he told me that as far as his personal well-being goes, and the way he’s been doing better at managing it, he’s been trying not to freak his parents out too much. Trying to break them in gradually.”

Carmela snorted with laughter. “Darryl?”

Nita smiled. In the matter of handling his autism, as with his handling of nearly everything else, it was hard to imagine Darryl doing anything “gradually”. These days he tended to jump in enthusiastically with both feet and then deal with the fine details as they came up. “He told me at one point,” Nita said, “that he was thinking about trying to get his parents to perceive wizardry as just a new way to be non-neurotypical.”

“If anyone can do that, he can,” Carmela said. “So if he’s trying to ease them into the idea that the holidays are less of a chore for him these days and he doesn’t need all that supervision, maybe we should just let him decide what to do about this? Put him down for ‘maybe yes maybe no’ and let him get back to us?”

“Yeah. If he needs to blow us off, he will and he won’t feel guilty about it.”

Carmela scribbled for a moment. Nita stretched, propping her feet up on Carmela’s desk and thinking. “S’reee…” she turned a page in the manual.

Carmela looked up. “Um. How do you invite a humpback whale to a sleepover?”

“The usual way! You put her in a people suit.”

Carmela blinked. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Especially because it’s easier for S’reee than for most whales. When she got hurt that time and I healed her, we got blood-tied. So she has less trouble shapechanging to human these days, the way I have less trouble going whale when I need to.”

“Oh.”

“But no,” Nita said with some regret. “Says here she’s on sabbatical right now. Personal leave.”

“For what?”

“Uh, the manual won’t say. It’s one of those confidentiality things. But I suspect it’s about private time with her honey.”

“Her what??”

“She’s dating. A very nice bull from up around Vancouver somewhere. He’s a food critic.”

“A what??”

“You want to know where the best North Atlantic krill is,” Nita said, “Hwii’ish is your go-to guy.” It had taken her a while to understand that all the Earth’s oceans throbbed with a vast network of cetacean communication, a sort of sonic version of the Internet; and that Hwii’ish was essentially a foodblogger, and fairly famous among his own kind. But he didn’t care about fame: what he was interested in was wizards, most specifically S’reee. “But who knows?” Nita said. “Send her an invite anyway. She might be able to get away.”

Carmela made a note.

“Tom and Carl?”

“For a sleepover?”

“Huh? Oh, no, just for the evening party.”

“Sure, if we can get them.” Nita flipped from Tom’s page to Carl’s. “It lists them as ‘on call’, but they might be able to get away.”

“The Twychild?” That was Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet, a special kind of twin, both of them favorites of Nita’s from the big group they’d met up with during the Pullulus War.

“Uh, they’re greyed out then. Maybe a family thing? It doesn’t say.”

“Okay. We should have two different invites, maybe? One for people we’d like to see but we don’t know if they can make it, one for those whose calendars say they’re free.”

“Makes sense.”

“What about Matt?”

“Who— Oh, the Aussie guy! Yeah, can’t miss a chance to watch him pester Ronan about how grateful he should be for Matt saving his life.”

“And Ronan really is grateful but he makes this big song and dance about not caring…”

“He’s free.”

“Good. Sleepover list. …Rhiow and Hwaith and their bunch?”

Nita turned pages. “Uh, no. ‘Emergencies only.’ It’s a bad time for them, the North American gates are crazy busy at the holidays, and they still always malfunction even when a full team of gate techs are riding herd on them.”

“We’ll save Rhiow some of that cream she likes,” Carmela said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Carmela stared at the tablet. “Any of the Mars-team guys? Kit likes them a lot.”

Nita nodded. “Um, yeah. What’s his face? The tall one. The German guy who Doesn’t Drive Tanks.”

“Marcus,” said Carmela, and made a note. While the Mars investigating team had been hunting for the planet’s lost kernel, and any hint of what had happened to the (then so-called) Old Martian species, Marcus—who besides being a wizard with a linguistics specialty also drove armored personnel carriers for the German Army—had lectured anyone who’d hold still on the essential difference between vehicles with wheels and vehicles with tracks. You got a sense that he had to spend a lot of time with people who were unclear on the concept, and so he tended to be proactive about it.

“Looks like he’s free until the 24th,” Nita said.

“Okay. Who else have we got from Mars? What’s her name with the curls?”

“Lissa?…Uh, no, she’s grayed out. Shame, I like her, she’s nice. Maybe next time.”

They both sat quiet, thinking for a moment. “Mamvish?” Carmela said then.

“Wow, if we could get her…!” Nita flipped a page, studied the manual. “’On errantry, unavailable except for emergencies.’ Well, no surprise there.” The Species Archivist to the Powers that Be was in demand all over the Galaxy, all the time.

Carmela sighed. “Shame. But then she wouldn’t like this time of year, this far north. No fresh tomatoes…”

“We’ll catch her in the summer, if we’re lucky.”

Nita stretched again. “Anyway, that sounds like a good number. How many is that now?”

“Uh, let me count.” Carmela was silent for a moment. “For the party, sort of sixteen? If everyone shows up. For the sleepover, eleven? Again, if everyone’s able to make it.”

Nita nodded. “Good crowd. Should be fun.”

Carmela sat up, touched the tablet in a couple of places and typed busily for a minute or two. Then she looked over at Nita. “Last minute thoughts?”

“None right now. Probably I’ll have one the minute you send the invites out.”

“We’ll see.” Carmela typed a last few words and then hit a spot on the tablet with one finger. The tablet chimed.

“All gone out?”

Carmela nodded, tossed the tablet to one side and rolled over on her back in a good simulation of a collapse for someone who was already lying down. “I,” she announced, “am exhaaaauuuuuuusted!”

“And you haven’t even done anything yet,” Nita said.

“Excuse me! I sent the invitations!”

Nita snickered. And then, without warning, a chill ran down her spine. She shivered.

Carmela saw it. “What?”

“Well,” Nita said. “Except for the food and the drinks and the decorations and some little presents for everybody, we have only one thing left to worry about.”

“Oh?”

“The weather…”

2: Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Monday, December 20, 2010, 7:00 AM

Off to the left side of Nita’s head, her radio alarm went off. Eyes still closed, she stuck a hand out from under the covers and felt around until she found the button. The insistent buzzing stopped, leaving her with the faint sound of somebody from the local all-news station talking in a cheerful tinny voice about lane closures on the Major Deegan Expressway.

She opened her eyes. It was still very dim in the room. Winter mornings weren’t exactly her favorites: she hated getting up when it was still dark.

Nita sat up in bed, rubbed her eyes. Is the sun even up yet? she wondered.

7:16, said Bobo from somewhere in the back of her head.

“Thanks,” Nita said, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. It was chilly: the central heating hadn’t come on yet, and in weather as cold as it had been the last few days, even a flannel nightie couldn’t do a lot for you once you got out from under the covers. Shortest day tomorrow, she thought. Longest night… “And an eclipse of the moon,” she said aloud.

While that’s true, Bobo said, I wouldn’t quote you long odds on seeing it.

Nita got out of bed and went straight to the closet for the beat-up wooly-chenille bathrobe she favored on mornings like this. “Well, yeah, probably going to be too busy…”

That’s not the problem.

“Oh?” Nita said, and went to the back window to tilt the Venetian blinds open.

The back yard looked someone’s old black and white photograph of a winter scene: softly lit in a shadowless dove-gray, the dark shapes of bare shrubs and leafless trees seemed charcoal-sketched against an indistinct background barely visible in the pre-dawn twilight. But what was slightly visible now in that grayness was movement; a gentle down-sifting of light near the window. Ever so lightly, ever so slightly, it had begun to snow. There was maybe an inch of it on the ground already.

Nita smiled a little to see it. Snow for Christmas…

But possibly, Bobo said, a little more than you might have had in mind.

“Oh?”

You’ll want to check your manual… but we have incoming.

“Uh, okay.” It was unusual to hear Bobo sound quite so concerned.

Nita picked the manual up off her bedside table and went to do bathroom things, then headed downstairs to see if her dad had made tea yet. He had: and he was standing there in the kitchen dressed in his black cold-weather parka just finishing what was in his Mets mug. He looked tired and a little bleary, which was no surprise this time of year—the runup to Christmas was always crazy for florists. “You okay?” Nita said, getting a mug for herself and filling it from the pot.

“Yeah,” her dad said. “But God, am I getting sick of poinsettias.”

This was something that Nita had heard repeatedly for the last few weeks. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “When do you think you’ll be done today?”

“Probably five,” her dad said. “I don’t see any point in working late hours this week. I know what orders I’ve got due out and I’ve got enough time budgeted for them. If it gets busy toward the end of the day, Mikey can keep the shop open a little later. I don’t want to miss the excitement.” He smiled a little. “When do people start getting here again?”

“Not till about four,” Nita said, and yawned. “That’s when Filif’s coming: we’ll take him over to Kit’s and get him settled in. Or get Kit’s pop settled, anyway…”

“Not still nervous, is he?” said Nita’s dad. “I’ve told him once or twice already, you couldn’t ask for a nicer house guest. Should I call him and calm him down?”

“Might not be a bad idea, if you get a moment today.”

“Will do.” Her dad kissed her goodbye. “Tell Dairine I said to put the garbage out.”

“I’ll tell her.” And Nita made a small face, since telling Dairine to go anywhere near a garbage can was rarely all that effective. There were few chores she hated more.

Her dad headed out. After a few minutes she heard the car starting up, and (as it pulled out of the garage into the driveway) the snow tires whining and slipping in the new snow, even though her dad had salted the driveway last night. Wet snow, Nita thought. Whatever we get, it’ll stick. The thought of that snow piling up on Filif’s branches made her smile. Do they even get snow on Demisiv? she thought. I know so little about the place…

Something to look into. Meanwhile… She stretched. Breakfast. And then… Christmas!

She spent the first half of the day just puttering around the house and relaxing, rejoicing in not even having to look at the clock, despite the low-level buzz of anticipation already building inside her as time for the arrival of friends and guests got closer. It was the first real day of the holidays for her, the first weekday that Nita didn’t have to go to school, and wouldn’t have to go again until the first week in January; and the calm of it felt like heaven. Miraculously (or actually due to hard work and some forethought) she was all sorted out for her between-semesters work: no reports to write, no projects to agonize over. And nothing to procrastinate over, either! Or to get stressed over because you know you’re procrastinating. It was perfect.

…Well, nearly perfect. Every now and then the thought of the one person who wouldn’t be there for Christmas this year came up to meet her as she looked at some window decoration that wasn’t quite right and needed to be straightened, or some spot where another traditional Christmassy item—that glass bowl full of fake poinsettia flowers, the other bowl full of shiny ball ornaments—was dusty and needed attention. Nita kept waiting for one or another of these moments to turn into pain, and kept being surprised when they didn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t miss her mom. Because I do, every day. It was just that for some reason, her sense that her mom was okay was stronger than usual. Initially Nita was tempted to spend more time trying to figure this out. But why? Why do I want to keep poking at it like a tooth where the filling fell out? Mom would tell me to let it be. So I will.

She had more tea, and after a while wandered upstairs to her bedroom again and put a few last wrapping- or ribbon-touches on a couple of gifts she’d picked up for other party guests. It wasn’t mandatory for people to bring each other things, but along the line she’d seen a thing or two that seemed right for one or another of the people who were coming. And there was one special gift that she kept stealing peeks at, half in admiration and half in nervousness that he wouldn’t like it. Finally, she laughed at herself—very softly, so as not to wake Dairine, who apparently still wasn’t up yet—and closed the little box. Then she felt around underneath her bed for the bedroom slippers with the waterproof soles, the ones that wouldn’t mind being out in the snow. What the heck, she thought, garbage is garbage, it needs to be out…

She pulled the full plastic bag out of the kitchen garbage pail and quietly went outside to where the big garbage cans sat next to the garage. The snow was still falling gently out of a solid gray sky, mostly straight down, in a persistent, purposeful kind of way. Only the occasional tiniest breath of breeze stirred the snow around and made it swirl as it came down. Then it straightened out again, doing a credible imitation of snow globe snow. I meant to look at that weather report, she thought, as she put the kitchen garbage in the big can, shook the snow off the garbage can lid, and quietly put it back in place. In a moment. Right now, despite the way the cold bit at her through her bathrobe and the flannel nightgown, Nita was quite content to stand in the snow—maybe two inches deep, now—and let the silence soak into her bones. There was no sound anywhere; even the normal traffic noise that would have drifted over from the nearby Southern State Parkway was completely muted.

She glanced down at the tracks her dad’s car had left in the driveway snow. They were already filling up again, and the salt underneath them didn’t seem to be having much effect. Nita briefly considered doing a small wizardry to talk the driveway into believing it was warmer than its surroundings so that the snow would stay melted. But is it really necessary? she thought. Sometimes it was harder for wizard to wait a little while and not spend energy that might not have actually been required to improve a situation. Then she grinned at herself. And maybe, she thought, I’m just feeling lazy. And every now and then, why not?

She went back in the house, took off the outside slippers and left them by the door to melt their snow off on the doormat; then found her other slippers which had somehow migrated to the dining room, put them on, and wandered into the living room. It was bright enough, even though no lights were on; the picture window was letting in that pale gray snow light, restful. Perfect to read by, she thought. She went upstairs very softly, pulled a book out of her to-read pile, went downstairs again into the kitchen for more tea, and curled up on the couch with the book and just read.

The next thing she knew the kitchen door was opening.Her dad had come home for lunch, and even two rooms over Nita could tell from the sound of the way he tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter that he was in a bad mood. Oh great, she thought, what’s this about?

She put the book down and picked up the empty tea mug sitting by her, and wandered into the kitchen. Her dad was staring into the refrigerator, scowling. Nita leaned around him and peered into his face. “What?”

“Don’t get me started,” he muttered.

“About what?”

“Football.”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, the miracle…”

“Not miraculous,” said her dad, and started rummaging around in the fridge a lot harder than he needed to.

Nita snickered. For her, the only sport of interest was baseball. But come the end of baseball season her dad normally started paying attention to football, for which Nita had no time whatsoever. Apparently the Philadelphia Eagles had played the Giants at the Meadowlands over the weekend and had abruptly come from behind in the last quarter to badly beat the Giants, her dad’s favorites. Now, every time he heard the local news teams on TV or radio referring to this as “the Miracle in the Meadowlands,” he positively growled.

“Daddy, you really want to shake this mood,” Nita said. “If Fil turns up here and sees you upset like this, he’s going to want to know why you’re upset! And then you’re going to have to explain football to him. And he always gets freaked when he thinks he hasn’t done enough research on something.”

“Well,” her dad said, and sighed. “I take it that on this visit your job is going to be explaining Christmas to him?”

“Well, he’ll have arrived doing the basic reading, you know that.”

Her dad laughed a little. “Not sure how basic basic is, but the subject can get complicated…”

“Tell me about it,” Nita said. And then the front doorbell rang.

Her dad glanced at her. “And you not dressed yet,” he said. “Let me get it. Probably it’s the first batch of kids wanting to shovel the driveway.” He went past her to answer the door.

Nita heard him open it, and then something unexpected happened; her dad started laughing. Curious, she went into the living room and peered around towards the door to see what was going on. Then she understood his surprise, because standing there in bright red ski coveralls and big boots and a parka and a woolly Christmas hat was Tom Swale, with a snow shovel over his shoulder.

“I don’t even know what the going rate for this is anymore,” Nita’s dad said, and laughed again, feeling around in his pockets. “Is five dollars enough, or has inflation hit this too?”

Tom roared with laughter. “Just leave that there, Tom,” said Nita’s dad. “Come on in. Coffee?”

“No, it’s okay, I won’t be keeping you,” Tom said, leaning the snow shovel up against the side of Nita’s front porch underneath the mailbox. He stepped in the door that Nita’s dad held open for him, and all the snow obligingly fell off him before he crossed the threshold.

“You sure,” Nita’s dad said. “I mean, that trick has to be good for at least a ten if you’ll do it to the sidewalks and the driveway. Maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement.”

Tom followed her dad into the dining room,smiling at Nita. “It’s okay, Harry, I’m not shilling for business. At least, not this kind of business. I was just doing our sidewalk, and then it occurred to me to wonder whether Nita had seen the weather report, and I thought I’d just walk over and check.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Bobo did mention something about a storm coming.”

“The storm,” Tom said. “The snowstorm of the decade, if not the millennium… a category 2 nor’easter with snow. There won’t have been a snowstorm this powerful since the sixties, if our own weather forecasters are worth their salt. Even the non-wizardly forecasters are starting to get really concerned, and with reason. The temperatures are going to drop quite hard on the twenty-first, and the wind’s going to pick up. Blizzard conditions at the very least, and super-blizzard at worst.” He sighed. “A lot of us are having to change our schedules at the last minute, because all the local services are going to be under tremendous pressure and the going to need all the help they can get on this one, at least from wizards expert in handling this kind of weather.”

Nita followed them into the dining room and sat down with them. “Does that mean you won’t be able to make it to the party?”

“Oh, we’ll be looking in,” Tom said. “But we won’t be able to stay long.” And then he gave Nita an amused look. “The joke is that it turns out we wouldn’t have been able to stay very long anyway, because a few days ago the airline changed our flights to Banff and left us looking at an earlier departure.” He brushed a little ruefully at his ski coverall. “But now that’s not an issue. Here Carl and I were all ready to go to the snow, and all of a sudden it turns out the snow is coming to us. With a vengeance. So we canceled, and the slopes will have to wait for us until the new year.”

“Sometimes you just can’t catch a break,” Nita’s dad said.

“The Eagles,” Tom said. “Tell me.”

That made Nita’s dad laugh. “I’d have thought you guys would just try to push this storm away, though,” he said, “if it’s going to be so much trouble.”

Tom shook his head. “We don’t usually fight with the weather unless we have to. And even if you want to, with the biggest storms there’s almost no point; there’s so much kinetic energy already bound up in them that it’s like trying to stop an atom bomb. This one’s got its mind made up—it’s coming through. All we can do is try to mitigate the worst circumstances, help the emergency services quietly where helping won’t get noticed, and generally just make ourselves useful.”

Nita swallowed, because a thought had just occurred to her. “You don’t need any of us, do you?”

“That’s really thoughtful,” Tom said, “and the answer is, in a word, no. None of you are in the required specialty groups, and we’ve got plenty of people stepping up to handle this. So you enjoy your party. We’ll stop in sometime this evening for a while, have an eggnog, and then head out to do our thing.”

He got up, and so did Nita’s dad, walking him to the front door. “But Tom, if you change your mind about the driveway, let me know. We local small businesses have to stick together…”

Their laughter mingled as the door closed. “I’ll let you know. See you two later.”

A little while after hearing the doorbell, and just after their dad headed back to the shop, Dairine materialized in old jeans and an oversized sweater, demanding tea and food. For the time being Nita ignored this. “You have a late night last night?”

“Working out some software issues with Spot,” she said.

“Oh, really?”

“Don’t angle for details,” Dairine said rubbing her eyes. “Party stuff. You’ll find out. How did it get to be two o’clock already?”

“Ten of,” Nita said, glancing at the clock. But it was a fair question. “And you know what? I don’t care. Everything is moving in slow motion today, and I love it.”

Dairine flopped down at the dining room table and stretched. “For once we’re in agreement.”

“‘For once,’” Nita said in good-natured mockery. It was interesting to notice that she and her sister had lately been in agreement a lot more than they used to. Maybe it’s the wizardry, Nita thought. And even if it’s not, I really don’t care why it’s happening. It’s better than fighting. “I took out your garbage,” she said.

“My garbage! It’s the garbage. I’m just the one who gets stuck taking it out.” Dairine wrinkled her nose.

“Doesn’t matter. You owe me one,” Nita said.

Dairine rolled her eyes as if in scorn at this bourgeois concept. “I’m not even up ten minutes and you’re trying to push your simplistic barter economy stuff on me? Please.” She got up and went to get some tea.

Nita laughed at herself. Well, that lasted five minutes. “Shower time,” she said, levering herself up out of the chair and heading upstairs. “Make another pot, okay?”

She didn’t even hear Dairine’s answer, and didn’t particularly care what she’d said. The tone of the day was remaining unbroken; slow and easy, building toward something good. That soft snow light was filling the upstairs hall from the window down at the end, and filling the bathroom too. Nita showered, then went and got changed into her party clothes—nothing dressy, just dark leggings and low black fluffy-lined elf-boots, and what Nita had started referring to privately as the Christmas Sweater of Doom. It was a ridiculous hairy angora-knit crewnecked construction adorned with fake Icelandic patterns in red and white, and scattered all over with revolting embroidered green yarn Christmas trees with little sewn-on Mylar ornaments. Kit had stumbled across the thing somewhere online and ridiculed it so mercilessly that Nita had decided she had to have it. It had taken entirely too much of her disposable income for that month, but it would be worth it for the look on his face when he saw it on her. And it’s going to be hilarious explaining it to Filif…

Nita glanced at the clock radio and realized to her shock that it somehow said three-thirty. Whoa, how’d that happen, she thought, where’d the time go all of a sudden! Maybe I had a little too much lazy. He’s going to be here soon…

She gathered up the goodie bag with her Christmas cards and small presents in it from where it had been sitting on her desk for a while. Then Nita headed downstairs, noting in passing the sound of Dairine thumping around in her room, apparently going through her drawers or her closet. Last-minute decisions, Nita thought, smiling as she headed down the stairs. Dair always tries to be so organized, but when it comes to clothes she can never make up her mind…

In the living room, Nita paused briefly, glancing around. The place looked tidy enough, so she didn’t have to worry about bringing anybody over if for some reason they needed to see something of hers. Fine, she thought. She headed into the kitchen, noted a few dishes in the sink, and stopped just long enough to wash the and put them in the rack. Then she grabbed her parka off the hook by the back door, threw it over the crazy Christmas sweater, and carefully headed out the back door, down the steps, and through the gate into the back yard.

The snow was deeper out here; she had to step carefully to keep the boots from getting wet. Nita looked around and saw that the silvery snow light was already getting a bit dimmer. Above that gray ceiling, sunset was already coming on. She paused by the tree growing out of the middle of the yard between house and the garden, and put a hand on its trunk. “You awake?” she said.

Liused’s answer took a few moments in coming. A little.

“Got a guest incoming,” she said. “Want to talk to him? Or if this is a bad time, he can stop by earlier tomorrow, when the light’s better.”

…Tomorrow might be best. In the morning?

Nita patted his trunk. “No problem,” she said. “I’ll talk to you then.”

She headed on down the garden—all the flower beds covered over with mulch or burlap bags this time of year, and those in turn covered with the new snow—and finally under the bare trees in the furthest part of the back yard, where the surface of the snow was patched and dappled with little lumps of it that had slid off the branches above. The stillness was very deep back here, and Nita just stood there a while, not caring how cold her feet were getting, and appreciated it.

Around her she thought she could almost see the sky’s light dimming moment by moment. Bobo, what time’s sunset?

Four thirty-one.

“I might not be imagining it, then,” she murmured. And then at the bottom of her vision, she caught sight of something unexpected: a glow under the snow, a sign of the embedded transit circle waking up. He’s early, she thought, stepping back.

A moment later a cold cinnamon-scented breeze blew in her face, and Filif was standing there, as suddenly as if a tree with its lowest branches demurely veiled in mist had suddenly grown on the spot.

He looked at Nita with all the berries on that side, while using the others to gaze up and around him. “Dai stiho, my cousin!”

“Dai, you,” Nita said, and stepped into the transit circle as soon as it had finished discharging, and buried her arms in among the fronds to give him a big hug.

It was at that moment that a light breeze sprang up. Nita felt the sparkle of breezeblown snowflakes on her cheek just a bare second before one of the trees above them let slip some loose snow on top of them.

They both laughed at that, and Nita reached up to brush Filif off a little. “I was early…” Filif said.

“I don’t care,” Nita said. “It’s so great to see you! This is going to be so much fun.”

“Where’s Kit?”

“Over at his place helping keep his folks calm. This is their first time to have a bunch of non-Solars over…”

“And they’re so kind to have me! I can’t wait for this.” He shivered with excitement.

At least Nita hoped it was excitement. “You know, I’ve never even asked you. Does it snow where you are? Do you even get winter?”

“What? Of course it snows,” Filif said. “Demisiv has a fairly pronounced axial tilt. And a lot of highlands. The climate’s temperate most of the year, but in the depths of the cold season we get quite big storms, sometimes. Normally no one’s too bothered. In the dark season a lot of people elect to go dormant and just wait it out. Others… stay more active, like to get around then.” He fell silent for a moment. “A long story.”

“But you’re okay with this?”

“Yes, of course.” He ruffled out his branches. “This feels quite homelike, actually. The temperature range isn’t far off.”

Nita paused. “This is possibly the most idiotic time possible to be asking you this,” she said. “But… are you okay with all this? Because you understand about the normal Earth Christmas trees now, don’t you. And where they come from. And what happens to them.”

Filif paused too. “Life is life,” he said. “But I did do my research before I came. Those lives have been brought about just for this purpose, haven’t they?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well, I can feel that. So can they.” Filif rustled his branches as a little more snow fell on him from the branches above. “That being the case, we should allow them all the dignity of accepting what they’ve been destined for. And of knowing that they’re making the best of it: in some cases, not just with acceptance, but great joy.”

Nita nodded. “It seems a lot to ask of them…” Nita said.

“It’s not what you’re asking,” Filif said. “It’s what they’re giving. Gift is a powerful state from which to approach the world…”

Again there was that sense of what Filif was saying having come up from some great depth. But even when he was at his goofiest and most excitable, Nita had never had trouble feeling, at a slight remove, the underlying strength from which sprang everything Filif did and said, and in which he was powerfully grounded. When that power revealed itself in the middle of a wizardry, sometimes it took you by surprise. Nita wasn’t going to push the issue at the moment; if Fil had something that needed saying, explanations would be forthcoming soon enough.

“Anyway,” Filif said, “ you should relax. I’m not a newbie here these days: you don’t have to hide the salad bar from me any more.”

Nita burst out laughing. “Good!”

“And after all this time, I’m finally here to get decorated. So let’s get on with it!”

“Right,” Nita said. “Sker’ret’s put a receptor site out in Kit’s back yard to make transiting in easier for people.”

“Shielded, I take it, so as not to discomfit the neighbors…”

“Absolutely.” Nita walked them both back a step or two into the center of the transit circle. “You set?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go!”

A heartbeat later, the two of them came out in Kit’s backyard. “It’s going to be a zoo in there,” Nita said. “Carmela’s mama decided all of a sudden that she was not going to let her daughter mess around with her best tableware. She was going to set up the buffet herself.”

“If I didn’t know better,” Filif said, “I would suspect Carmela planned it that way in order to get her mother to do the heavy lifting.”

Nita snickered as she reached down to her charm bracelet for the empty-ring charm that held the simplest of several invisibility spells. “You know her too well,” she said as she pulled the bright Speech-tracery of the spell out of the charm, expanded it into a broad faintly-glowing network, and threw it over the top of the two of them. “Not that there’s all that much to do. Sker’ret had Crossings Catering transit the food in about an hour ago. It’s all in disposable serving trays and bins and things…”

They headed up across the snow-covered lawn of Kit’s back hard toward the house. “There’s no rush about installing the puptents,” Nita said. “Sker’s put in a hub to make the installation easier. Just plug your wizardry in, and the hub’ll do the rest.”

“He seems to have thought of everything,” Filif said.

“Happiest when he’s organizing,” Nita said, “that’s our Sker’.”

They went in the back door, through the kitchen. There were four or five pots on the stove, from which wonderful smells were arising: mulled wine, hot chocolate, hot cider. Christmas music was floating out of the living room: as a song finished and Nita heard a veejay’s voice, she realized that the TV had one of the big music video channels on. “You are going to hear every Christmas carol ever written before this is over,” she said to Filif, flipping the invisibility spell off them and collapsing it again.

“I take it that’s a good thing?”

“We’ll see what you think by this time tomorrow.”

They headed into the dining room. The table was covered with silverware and napkins and cups and glasses, and a whole lot of food. Some of it was local—Nita immediately recognized Kit’s mama’s buffalo wings and the little deviled-egg and cream cheese and chilli hors d’oeuvres that she liked to do on crackers. But the rest was covered with human and alien-biology delicacies from the Crossings, everything carefully labeled. Nita made a private resolution to get back here as soon as she could and check out the details, as some of the food looked familiar, and if she didn’t move fast, Kit would shovel it all down his face before she got a chance.

“Come on, Fil,” Nita said, “come meet Kit’s pop and mama!” She pulled him around into the living room, having caught a glimpse of them in there through the passthrough; they were hanging a last few garlands up near the ceiling.

Nita pulled Filif over to them. “So here’s the guest of honor!” Nita said. “Juan Rodriguez,” Nita said, “Marina Rodriguez, this is Filifermanhathrhumneits'elhessaiffnth.”

Kit’s pop’s eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to respond, but before he could say anything Nita immediately added, “Everybody calls him Filif, so don’t even bother trying to pronounce the long version. It always takes me a couple of days to even remember how.”

“Estimable senior cousins,” Filif said, bowing, “thank you for your welcome.” And then he straightened up and offered Kit’s pop a long branch, and his mama another.

They both stared at these for a moment, and then took them. “Nice to meet you, Filif,” said Kit’s pop. “So nice!” said his mama.

“A pleasure on my part as well! I’m very excited about what’s going to happen.”

“Well, we’re excited to have you! And we’re glad you’re here finally,” said Kit’s pop. “It’s been so strange not having a tree already. It’s felt almost unnatural. But we’re good now.” He beamed at Filif. “You’re what… six feet easily, I’d say!”

Filif thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I’d say so,” he said. “And about five feet in diameter at the base.”

“It’s going to be unusual to have a Christmas tree that’s so cooperative,” said Kit’s pop. “But look, you should enjoy the party for a while first! We like to let it get good and dark before we start decorating… it’s more impressive, then, when the lights go on.”

“That’s fine,” Filif said. “What do you normally do at this point with a… locally acquired tree?”

“Well, first of all unwrap it outside — normally you bring it home wrapped up in webbing so the branches don’t get hurt. And after that, leave it outside for a little while to let it relax and help the branches find their right shape again.”

Filif rustled a little in agreement. “It makes sense,” he said. “If you like, perhaps I’ll go stand outside for a bit and get myself acclimatized.”

“Uh… won’t the neighbors see you?”

“Not at all,” said Filif. “Nita handled it when we came in, but I’m as good at being invisible as any other wizard. There are lots of ways to do it. Once I stop moving, they’ll see a wrapped up tree sitting leaning against the side of your garage while you get the room ready.”

“There’s zero need for that,” said another voice. It was Dairine, wandering in out of the living room. She was in a long green silky top and darker green floppy pants, something Wellakhit if Nita was any judge. “Sker’ did a smart thing and shielded the whole back yard. The front’s open, but he did a selective visual wizardry with the windows: nobody human will be able to see any of the non-Solars through it, and the filter spoofs anything unaffected so it can’t be seen either.”

“Probably that’s a good idea,” said Kit’s mama. “Especially lately… Well, come on, Filif, what do you like to eat or drink? Or do you want to wait till you’ve come back in?”

“I think Sker’ret will have brought some rooting compound for me,” Filif said. “It’s what I’ll be standing in while decorated.” He shivered again, that excited gesture.

“It’s in the dedicated corner already,” came Sker’ret’s voice from the kitchen. “A big pot of that acid stuff you like, Fil.” And in came Sker’ret, apparently after a visit to one of the storage closets in the back of the house. He was walking on only a few pairs of legs, and with all the others he was carefully holding three other piles of serving plates above his upper carapace.

Nita had to turn and stare, fascinated. “I didn’t even know your legs hinged like that!” she called after him.

“Apparently they do,” said Sker’ret, and kept on going into the dining room.

“Where’s Kit?” Nita said.

“He’s upstairs changing,” Carmela said as she came wandering into the living room from the back of the house. She looked very much the Christmas hostess in a glittery red tunic top and red-and-white leggings with a very subdued candy-cane pattern on them, and low red boots to complete the effect.

“Fashion plate,” Nita said as Carmela grabbed Filif and hugged him, half vanishing into his branches and making some of his berry-eyes on either side of her pop a little.

“Yes, well, with such a special occasion you have to make a little effort,” Carmela said. “Kit’s doing his best but I don’t know if it’s going to be enough…”

Footsteps were coming down the stairs. “I heard that!” said Kit’s voice. “Just because some people can’t manage to find themselves a genuine collectors’ item like this…”

Kit came down into the living room, turning toward the group gathered there, his mouth open… and then stopped dead.

“Oh no,” Nita said, and started gasping with laughter. “Oh no!” Because Kit was wearing black jeans and sneakers and a ridiculous hairy angora-knit crewnecked construction adorned with fake Icelandic patterns in red and white, and scattered all over with revolting embroidered green yarn Christmas trees with little sewn-on Mylar ornaments.

They stood there in shock, staring at each other as Kit’s mama and pop burst out laughing in unison. “You look like the Bobbsey Twins,” Kit’s mama said.

“Who?” said Kit and Nita in unison.

Mrs. Rodriguez threw a glance at her husband, then gazed briefly at the ceiling as if begging for help from some unseen source. “Generation gap,” she said. “Never mind.” She headed for the kitchen.

“I didn’t mean for you to buy it,” Kit said, “I meant for you not to buy it! So I’d be the only one having it.”

“Emailing me pictures of the thing was no way to get me not to buy it!” Nita said. “What am I, six?”

Dairine pushed past her toward the dining room, snickering. “No better than eight on a good day,” she said.

“Whatever you do,” said an Irish voice from that direction, “don’t change. Don’t either of you dare change.”

Nita turned. There, leaning in the dining room doorway, having apparently just arrived, was Ronan. He was in black, as usual… but for a change, surprisingly formal blacks. Trousers instead of jeans, shiny black brogues instead of goth boots, a very slim-fitting black shirt with black glitters in it, and to top everything off, a Santa hat in white and black.

Nita burst out laughing. “What are you supposed to be, some kind of dark ‘jolly old elf?’”

Ronan waggled his eyebrows. “Other people can worry about who’s nice. I prefer to concentrate on the naughty.”

“I don’t even want to know,” said Kit’s mama as she came back into the room with a tray full of glasses of hot cider. “Nita?”

Nita grabbed one. “You’re earlier than I thought you’d be,” she said to Ronan.

“Wanted to get out before it got too crazy. We’ve got weather like you’re going to get.”

That surprised Nita. “Can’t be the same system—”

“It’s not. Trust me, we don’t need your help to trigger major snow events! We’ve got Siberia.” Ronan wandered over to where some buffet trays had been laid out on one of the low living room tables and went picking among the crackers piled up there. “And we’re getting hammered. A foot on the ground already and lots more coming. Heathrow’s closed, Charles de Gaulle is closed, Frankfurt and Geneva were just shutting when I left.” He found a plate for his snacks. “In fact, most of Europe’s a mess. Every wizard who specializes in that kind of thing is out in the cold right now. So glad I’m not one!”

“Here,” said Kit’s mama, putting a glass of cider in Ronan’s hand. “Who else wants one?”

Nita had a long drink of the cider and felt the world seem to settle a little around her. Whatever spice mix Kit’s mama had worked out to use in the stuff, Nita never got tired of it. The next thing she knew she and Kit were laughing about their sweaters, and she was stealing snacks off a plate he was holding, and the room was getting fuller of people. Her dad showed up, and the next thing Nita knew he and Kit’s pop and Filif were discussing the best management of the electrical outlets for the lights they were going to be putting on him, and Kit’s mama was laughing in the kitchen with Dairine at something Spot had just done, and the entertainment system was showing what appeared to be an ancient rock star playing a guitar in the nude.

And Kit leaned over to Nita and said, “Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I’d say the party has begun…”

3: O Tannenbaum

The place started descending into cheerful bedlam as more people arrived. Filif slipped out to get himself acclimated, as planned: Nita caught a glimpse of him, a tranquil shadow against the snow, as twilight set in. Tom and Carl turned up in their ski gear, to everyone’s amusement, and were immediately equipped with cider (as they were apparently about to go on duty: “Back for the mulled wine later, Marina,” Carl said, “you know we wouldn’t miss that for anything!”). Matt from Australia turned up, wearing jeans and a truly eye-hurting shirt covered with graphics of Christmas ornaments in Day-Glo colors. Tall rawboned Marcus arrived, actually in camouflage fatigues in Christmas colors, bringing chocolates for Kit’s mama…

The noise level in the house became amazing: gossip and laughter, some preliminary exchange of small gifts, a lot more drink making the rounds, a lot of food. Sker’ret seemed to have appointed himself catering manager, and was constantly going back and forth with buffet trays. “It’s all downstairs on the other side of one of the puptent accesses,” he said to Nita when he passed her once. “There’s a stasis field there holding everything at the right temperatures. All the other accesses are set up, don’t worry about those…” And he was off again for another tray.

The music channel playing on the entertainment system was bringing out the best in some of the guests. Ronan’s voice was lifted in song at one point and caused everyone to hold still in astonishment as he did a pitch-perfect, raspy singalong imitation of both the leads on the song that was playing. “They’ve got cars big as bars, they’ve got rivers of gold, | but the wind goes right through you, it’s no place for the old: | when you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve, | you promised me Broadway was waiting for me…”

Moments later Matt was next to him and singing in harmony. “And the boys of the NYPD Choir were singing ‘Galway Bay’, | And the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day…”

“We need them for the carol singing tomorrow night,” said Kit’s mama, sipping at her own mulled wine with a critical look. “Mmm, needs more cinnamon… Kit, take care of that, will you?”

“Do what I can, Mama,” Kit said as his mother headed back for the kitchen, and himself headed for another of the snack trays. Nita turned back to the gossip she’d been eavesdropping on while pretending to watch the music video channel.

“—didn’t want to get into outside decoration, what with the kind of vandalism we’ve been getting lately,” Nita’s dad was saying.

“Five’ll get you ten I know who you mean. The Terror Twins….”

“Who?”

“The new next door neighbors’ kids,” Kit’s pop said, and sighed. “I could really, really wish the Liddles hadn’t had to move. I miss Dave. He was good company in the summer, at the end of a barbecue. Or most times, really.”

“I miss Roz,” said the voice from the kitchen. “She was such a great cook. I was learning things from her…”

There was a sort of communal sigh at that, audible even over the general noise. Kit’s mama knew her cooking skills were limited, and knew that everyone knew it, and was regardless entirely cheerful about it and always looking forward to improving them.

“So what happened there?” said Nita’s dad. “I remember hearing that Dave had some job offer, but I don’t know what else was going on.”

“Yeah. Some firm up in Seattle, I think. Washington state, anyway. It happened very suddenly. He spent most of the spring sending out resumes and got nothing: seemed like nobody needed anyone to do what he did. Repairs on these big computerized industrial printers. Then all of a sudden this one company hit on him, flew him out for an interview, and a week later, bang, deal done. They sold the house in an awful hurry… two weeks later they were gone.”

Kit’s pop made a face. “The new neighbors, the Chastellains… Rory’s all right. Nice guy, he works over at Northrop Grumman. Lena’s lovely, a very lively funny woman, something in IT. But she’s not working right now. Apparently she had some kind of hip injury last year and she’s got another six months of physio before she can go back. I feel for her, though, because she’s stuck being stay-at-home mom to, well…”

Nita exchanged a glance with Kit, who’d come up next to her, and didn’t say anything.

“A pair of badly-behaved antisocial ignoramuses,” Kit’s mother said from the kitchen, sounding very much like someone who didn’t care who might possibly overhear her.

“There you go,” Kit said under his breath. “Mama knows.”

“I can’t imagine how two such nice people have turned out kids who’re so poorly socialized,” his mama said. “Seriously. Rude, destructive, foul-mouthed…”

The two of them listened with amusement to the string of vividly descriptive adjectives flowing from the woman slicing oranges in the kitchen. Neither Nita nor Kit needed to be told more about the subject than they already knew. Bobby and Ron Chastellain had in an amazingly short time become famous at school for spending more time in detention than they seemed to spend in class. They were as much a menace on the sports field as they were in the classroom; it seemed no one was too small for them to bully or too big for them to start a fight with. They were almost universally loathed, and seemed to glory in it. Even wizards with a mandate to prevent speeding up the Universe’s heat death sometimes had trouble keeping themselves from taking action against the Chastellains that would have been pleasantly robust but would probably have landed them in hot water with their Supervisories after the fact.

“You have to wonder,” Kit said under his breath, “whether it’s still them being miserable at having to be in a new school all of a sudden, or if now they’re just kicking everybody’s ass every chance they get because they enjoy it.”

“My money’s on number two,” Nita said. “Never mind them. They are not spoiling my Christmas.”

”Mine either,” Kit said. “Hey, where’s Fil?”

“He was out having a breath of air. I’ll go check him.”

She slipped out of the heat and noise to glance around the back yard. Filif was standing straighter against the garage, playing the role of a relaxing Christmas tree perfectly and slowly letting down his branches. Snow was still falling gently through the darkness, but not as heavily as it had been. Still, Nita could feel something in the air, possibly something to do with the ionization associated with incoming storms: a sense that when the snow really let go, it wasn’t going to stop for a while.

She wandered over to him with her hot cider. “Fil? How’re you doing?”

“Just fine,” he said. She could see his berry-eyes looking upward into the night, possibly a sign that he was engaged in the same kind of weather analysis she was. “One of the small creatures from down the road came along and watered me,” Filif added. “Very kind.”

Nita stole a glance down at the snow. There was enough light from the house for her to easily see the yellow in it, and she burst out laughing.

Behind her, Kit’s side door went. “You all right out here, son?” said Kit’s papa.

Nita smiled at how quickly Filif seemed to reached this status after having been a first-time houseguest just an hour before: she detected her dad’s subtle hand in that. “Just relaxing,” said Filif. “How do the branches look?”

“Very natural,” he said. And then he laughed at himself. “Well, it’s not as if you’re an artificial tree, for God’s sake. You look just fine. It’s going to be a pleasure decorating you.”

“I hope so,” Filif said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

“Well, whenever you’re ready, we can always—“ Kit’s pop turned a little toward the house.

Then he paused, and his eyes widened. “Uh,” he said. “Maybe I’m missing something, but…”

“But?” Nita said.

Kit’s pop swallowed. “I know they’re supposed to be warm-blooded,” he said, “but is it good for a dinosaur to be out in the snow?”

Nita turned, stared at the shape glowing softly blue- and white-patterned out on the snowy lawn behind Kit’s house. “Mamvish!!”

It couldn’t have been just her shout that brought them, but within a second or two every wizard in the house was pouring out of it. It occurred to Nita that the instantaneous reaction had to have something to do with the sudden presence in the neighborhood of someone with Mamvish’s power levels. Momentarily she was surrounded by wizards attempting to hug her hello and others trying to get her to stick around.

“No, no,” she said, “I can’t stay. But I had to come see you all. I didn’t want you to get the idea that I didn’t want to come and spin the dreidel!”

The laughter that broke out confused her a little. “What?” she said. “Oh, no! Wrong holiday?”

“No, just a little late for that one,” Tom said. “But who cares? You came!”

“I had to,” Mamvish said. “Even though the season’s wrong in this hemisphere…” She sounded wistful.

She literally could only stay for a few minutes. “On my way to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, there’s a nova about to pop and we’re running short of time… But all of you do whatever you would do if I could stay!” And just like that, without even a breath of wind to mark her teleport, she was gone.

“You’re going to explain that to me, I hope,” said Kit’s pop.

“It may take a while,” said Kit. “Fil, want to come in and root a bit? Sker’s freaking out in there, he thinks he brought the wrong flavor of compound or something and you’re trying to be nice about it.”

The crowd that had dashed out of the house now wandered back in with Filif in tow. Shortly he was settled down in the broad deep bucket of rooting compound that Sker’ret had set up for him, and a group had gathered around him in energetic discussion of Solstice festivals in general. Nita stood there with another glass of cider and listened to Matt and Ronan and Kit and Carmela batting the subject around and trying to get a feel for what Filif actually knew about what was going on.

“Well, I did a certain amount of reading before I came,” Filif said. “The normal amount of research. But there did seem to be some, well, conflicts among various versions of the basic story…”

This set off another wide-ranging discussion featuring mangers, caves versus little wooden chalets, the concept of Nativity scenes, the business of identifying angels as the Powers that Be (or not), the Annunciation, the Three Kings and whether they of Orient really Were, or whether they might actually have been wizards. (“Magi, fer feck’s sake. The plural of magus. Someone who does magic! Seriously, does no one even notice these things?…”)

“And this being called Santa Claus,” Filif said at last. “Where does he fit into this? Certainly so senior a Power would not have failed to attend such an event.”

“Oh boy,” Ronan said, covering his eyes, “here we go!”

“And why is it supposed to happen at the Solstice when the documentation says that there were shepherds out in the fields with their sheep?”

“Lambing time,” Matt said. “He’s got it in one. First-degree theft of pagan celebrations!”

“Green boughs and all,” Carmela said. “The Holly and the Ivy…”

“O Christmas tree, O Christmas Tree,” Matt started singing, “how lovely are thy branches…”

Marcus, who’d been listening off to one side, suddenly looked indignant. “This is a terrible translation. What does ‘lovely’ have to do with anything?”

They all looked at him. Marcus stared back, bemused by their bemusement. “…What? The original song doesn’t say anything about the tree being lovely.”

“It doesn’t?”

“O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,” Kit sang, and then stopped, looking perplexed. “I don’t know the rest.”

“It was a German song for a long time before it was an English one,” Marcus said.

“This was all Queen Victoria’s husband’s fault, wasn’t it?” Carl said, having wandered over into this when Matt began singing. “He put a tree up in Buckingham Palace. Started a fad.”

“I thought it was Martin Luther’s fault,” Tom said, drifting up beside him. “Saw one out in the forest with its needles full of frost and starlight… brought it home to show the family…”

“His fault too, yes,” Marcus said. “But listen: the song—” He started to sing in a strong tenor.

“O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
Wie treu sind deine Blätter!

O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
Wie treu sind deine Blätter!
Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit,
Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit.—
O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
Wie treu sind deine Blätter!”

Some of the other younger wizards looked thoughtful as they started taking the German lyric apart via their understanding of it in the Speech. “He’s right, there’s nothing about ‘lovely’ in there,” Nita said.

Kit shook his head. “How do you translate treu? ‘Faithful?’”

Marcus nodded. “Or loyal.”

Ronan laughed. “Like Matt said, the usual evergreen trope,” he said. “The whole non-deciduous eternal-life thing.” He had been working on a mug of Kit’s mama’s cocoa, and started to take another swig of it, then stared down into the mug with annoyance. “Bloodyell, I’m out again. Where’s this stuff going? I mean, it’s just cocoa, cocoa’s for the wee kiddies…” He got up and headed for the back door again.

Kit grinned into his own mug. “Mama’s secret recipe strikes again…”

Carmela glanced over at Marcus. “So it would be more like, ‘You’re green all while | the Summer glows, | and in the Winter, | when it snows—’”

Marcus tilted his head, thought. “Yes, that’s close enough.”

“So where’d we get the ‘lovely?’” Dairine said.

Marcus shrugged. “Poor translations are everywhere in popular culture,” he said. “You should see what happens to some of your TV shows when we get them at home.”

“Please,” Carmela said. “Some of the anime dubs…!”

“And do not even get me started on Raumschiff Enterprise—!“

Within seconds Carmela and Marcus were off into some insanely technical discussion in the Speech of the way translation issues affecting space opera. Kit gave Nita a look as the conversation became indecipherable even in the Speech. “You see what I put up with.”

Ronan burst out laughing as he came back with a much larger mug of cocoa. “Oh please,” he said. “Is that you I hear complaining about somebody else’s geekery, Mars Boy? Oh knower of the name of every crater on the planet? Spare me.”

The singing started again shortly thereafter, several rival versions of the carol breaking out. Marcus and Carmela were singing in German, Dairine and her dad and Kit’s mama were upholding the more traditional American English version, and Ronan began singing an entirely different one in counterpoint, featuring the line “Thy candles shine out brightly”. “Each bough doth hold its tiny light, | that makes each toy to sparkle bright—”

“Wait a moment,” Nita’s dad said, “whoa, whoa, wait a moment!”

The singing on various sides trailed off. “Candles?” said Nita’s dad. “What candles?”

“Sure didn’t you know that lots of folks out our way put candles on their Christmas trees way back when?” Ronan said. “Though you have to wonder how many houses they burned down before the electric lights came along!”

Marcus nodded. “In some families it is still traditional despite the risk,” he said. “One of my uncles’ families still does it. You only do it for a few minutes, though, and you watch the candles like a hawk the whole time. Then you put them out and make sure they’re cold, and then everybody goes off to church, or out to dinner, or else you open the presents…”

A number of people turned in some concern to Filif to see how he was handling this concept. But he looked quite relaxed: at least his needles weren’t bristling, which was something Nita had seen on occasion and which she recognized as a sign of real trouble. “It’s an interesting contrast,” he said after a moment. “Symbolic, I suppose. The Kindler of Wildfires brought under control… even brought in where you live, as a sign of how things will be some day when It’s mended Its ways.” The green boughs shook, possibly in laughter. “Or else it’s just a little extra defiance to go with the usual acknowledgement and greeting…”

There was a little silence. And then Filif said:

“You know… I would really like to do that.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other in astonishment. Carmela’s mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” Filif shivered all over.

Carmela’s eyes went wide and her mouth made an O. “My shrub,” she murmured, “has an oxidation kink.”

“Well I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a kink—”

“Too late,” Nita said, amused, watching Carmela’s face. “It’s in her head now and you will never get it out.”

Nita’s father, who’d come in on the end of this, looked amazed. “Bit of a change of attitude on the subject for you,” he said.

“True. But I’m not who I was even a year or two ago.” And a lot of Filif’s berries glowed more brightly than they had for a second or so.

“Well,” Kit’s pop said. “We’re not really set up for that at the moment. But we have a lot of other stuff on tap. You think you’re about ready to get started, big fella?”

Filif bowed slightly to him. “Yes!”

“All right,” said Kit’s pop. “Lights first.”

He headed for the back of the house and shortly came back with his arms full of boxes: some of them quite new, some of them looking old and beat up. “I like the new LED lights a lot,” Kit’s pop said. “A lot of control over them, and you don’t have to worry so much about the heat. But at the same time you hate to let the old ways go completely. Tradition…”

He put the newer boxes aside for a moment and turned his attention to the older ones. “Have to be very careful with these,” he said, putting the boxes down side by side. They were both yellowed, thin cardboard, crumbling a bit at the edges in some places; the printing on them was old-fashioned looking, the colors faded. Kit’s pop opened one. Inside it, in yellowed cardboard spacer-holders, was a row of nine candlestick-shaped bubble lights: fat bulbous bases, tall glass “candlesticks” full of colored fluid. A faint scent of very old pine needles came up from the box.

“Now those are vintage,” Nita’s dad said.

“Relics,” said Kit’s pop, opening the second box with the same care. “Makes me laugh to see how popular they are all of a sudden, with everyone so eager to have ‘retro’ stuff. My father gave them to me when I came of age.”

“Didn’t know there was a minimum age for Christmas lights, Juan.”

Kit’s pop laughed. “Came as news to me too. I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to wreck them.” Very carefully he started lifting the first set out of the box, untangling the wires. “Can’t blame him. You wouldn’t believe what replacements for these cost. Every year I live in terror that I’m going to plug this in and one of them won’t come on…”

They got down together on the floor and stretched the lights out. Nita’s gaze met Kit’s in amusement at the sight of the two dads hunkered down on the floor like kids with a special toy. Nita’s dad picked up one of the lights and peered at the liquid inside it. “What is that in there?”

“Something with a real low boiling point,” Kit’s pop said. “Just the light in the bottom is enough to make it bubble.”

Nita’s dad picked up the box, turned it over, peered at it. “No warnings or anything about what it is…”

“You kidding? This comes from a time when doctors did commercials about how good cigarette smoking was for you. I’m betting it’s poisonous.”

In the back of Nita’s mind, Bobo whispered, Methylene chloride…

“Yeah, you really wouldn’t want to break one of those,” Nita said. “The place would need airing out. And forget about touching it or drinking it…”

“Low on my list of things to do,” said Kit’s pop, rummaging around underneath Filif to slot the light set’s plug into the plug strip. “Let’s test the other set and then start putting the modern ones on first. These go on afterwards, on the outer branches.”

Shortly the first of four sets of LED lights was going on the “tree”, and rather unusually for a household in the suburbs of New York, the tree was helping. Kit’s pop was on one side and Nita’s dad on the other, and they were passing the strings of lights back and forth to make sure they were equally distributed. What was making the process go much more smoothly was the way that when one or the other of them was having trouble getting a light cord around into the corner where Filif was positioned, he would simply put a branch up, curl the terminal fronds around the wire, and maneuver it into the spot where it was needed. It took very little time to get the first strand up, the one that was all plain white lights and was tucked most closely in toward the trunk.

“These colored ones now, Juan?”

“Yeah. We’ll do that string from the top down to about halfway… then plug the other one in and finish down at the bottom.”

The second string began going up, while more people wandered into the living room with various festive drinks in hand to watch the process. As this was going on, Carmela came up behind Nita and peered at the proceedings between her and Kit. “I thought I was going to get to do some of this,” she said, very low, and laughed. “Seems like the youngsters have taken over.”

“I thought you’d have been all over this,” Nita said. “You gonna let them do everything?”

“On the contrary,” Carmela said, very softly. “I’m letting them do the heavy lifting. I’ve got the part that matters.” And she gave Nita the merest glimpse of something golden that she’d had hidden under her tunic.

Nita laughed very quietly. “No Mets hat?”

“Are you kidding? This is a formal affair…”

Meanwhile, the two fathers were finishing with the more normal lights. “Okay, the bubblers, now,” said Kit’s pop. With great care they moved around clipping them to the outer branches, making sure they were secure. Every now and then Filif would curl a frond up or down and make sure a bubble-light wouldn’t wiggle. All the while, a calm businesslike dialogue was going on. “Can’t imagine why they never put clips on these. Alligator clips or something—“ “Yeah, you’re supposed to just force them over the ends of the branches and then tighten them down, I don’t know what they were thinking of, it’s a design flaw…”

The two men took their time, and when the lights were all up stood back and examined their work so far for balance and evenness. “Not enough up top there, you think, Juan?”

“Mmm, not sure. No… I think we’re okay. Works better to do more garlands up there, I think. Keeps things from getting topheavy…”

“Okay. Bulbs now?”

“Yeah.” Kit’s pop went off to fetch the boxes from the back of the house, and came back with them piled high enough in his arms that he could barely see over the top.

“You have a protocol for this over at your place?” Kit’s mama called from the kitchen, peering briefly through the passthrough window. “Some kind of order that things go up in?”

“Well. Not exactly. But the good stuff goes in close to the trunk. The ones you’re less concerned about if they fall down or something bangs into them, those go on the outside.”

“Makes sense.”

Nita watched as her dad and Kit’s pop carefully opened the boxes, revealing a wild assortment of mirror-polished and satin-sheened ornaments, very few alike—remnants of old sets, replacements from newer ones, all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors. She caught Filif’s excited shiver, smiled at it, grinned a little at Kit as he came over to lean against her, watching.

The two fathers took turns, took their time, lifting the ornaments out, conferring, finding the best spots for them. “How is there are never enough hooks for these?” “I could have sworn I bought more last year.” “Harry, this one’s ribbon broke.” “Son, would you move that branch up a little? I want to get this one in by the trunk.” “Here?” “That’s right, just ease it up a little…” “Perfect.” “Or maybe a little to the left?” “Yeah….”

They stood back again and took stock. “Okay,” said Nita’s dad. “Garlands now?”

“Heresy! Tinsel first. Garlands after.”

This provoked a brief storm of opinion from some of the onlookers. “You’ll crush the tinsel!” “Especially the mylar stuff!” “I never went for this crinkled kind myself, it’s not as shiny…” Nita watched Filif starting to tremble a little harder and briefly wasn’t sure whether it was out of nervousness. But then she realized he was laughing, and trying to keep anyone from noticing.

The “tinsel first” school of thought finally prevailed, and Kit’s pop went off and came back with several boxes of it. He and Nita’s dad started applying it, and once more a brief good-natured exchange of ideas broke out. Nita’s dad was one of the “One strand at a time” school: Kit’s pop was more of a “fling it on from a distance” type. Laughter spread around the room as each one started trying to convert the other to his way of thinking. Kit’s mama leaned on the shelf of the passthrough for a few minutes, watching this drama unfold, and then vanished.

A minute or two later she came back with a couple of glasses full of something amber that didn’t look like cider. These she put on a side table and said, “In case anyone wants to take a moment and get a grip…”

The two fathers looked at each other. “Not smart to ignore medical advice, Juan…” said Nita’s dad.

Smiling, they took a few moments’ worth of break, sampling what Kit’s mama had brought them while standing back again to examine their handiwork. Among the lights, Nita could see Filif’s eye-berries doing what the lights didn’t do: moving around a bit. Her dad noticed this too, leaned in. “You okay there, big guy?”

“Fine.”

“You sure? You’re not ticklish or anything?”

“Oh, no. I just… Finding places to see out of is going to be interesting.” Filif was laughing.

“All part of the game,” said Kit’s pop. “The informal object of the exercise is to leave as little of you showing as possible. It’s all about the decorations.”

“Though most of the time,” Nita’s dad said, “the tree isn’t in a position to offer any opinions. This adds a whole new level of challenge to the endeavor.” He pushed a clump of tinsel aside. A berry peered out from under. “You tell us when you’ve got visibility problems: we’ll shift things around.”

“All right.”

“Now the garlands,” said Kit’s pop, and went off for a final couple of boxes. These were glittery mylar, one in silver, one in gold, and one in dark green. With care Kit’s pop tucked the end of the first one just under Filif’s topmost upstanding bough, the one where he normally wore his baseball cap, and he and Nita’s dad started passing the looped remainder of it back and forth between them as they wound it around and around. “What goes on top?” said Nita’s dad.

“These days, a star,” said Juan. “Though we had an angel once.”

“Not any more? What happened?”

“It melted,” Kit’s pop said. “Something went wrong with the bulb inside it. The thing actually exploded one evening. The plastic—”

“It wasn’t plastic, Juan, it was celluloid,” Kit’s mama said as she came in with more cider and mulled wine for those who wanted it. “With fiberglass hair. The thing went up like a torch. It’s a miracle it happened while we were awake and actually in the room with it. God knows what would have happened to the tree if we hadn’t got that thing off it.”

“The next two Christmases completely sucked,” Kit whispered in Nita’s ear. “They refused to leave the lights on unless there was somebody in the room. You couldn’t come downstairs in the middle of the night and find the lights on and everything glowing.”

“They got over it, though…”

“Eventually.” Kit rolled his eyes expressively. Nita, though, was watching Filif again. The shiver that went through him at the mention of the fire was not one of unease. Definitely, she thought, something new is going on…

“I heard that,” said Kit’s pop, sounding amused. “Never mind, it got better.” He picked up another garland, the gold one. “So where is it?”

“You haven’t got the last garland on yet,” Carmela said. “We’ll wait.”

And they did, the room more or less going quiet as the final glittery garland went up. There Filif stood, resplendent, glowing. Carmela produced the star—about a foot wide, golden, very simple, with a conical socket—and reached way, way up to put it on.

And couldn’t quite reach. “You’ve been getting taller without telling me,” she said. “Give me a hand here, shrub.”

Very carefully, so as not to disturb anything, Filif bent the top of him down just enough. Carmela slipped the star on; he straightened up.

“Merry Christmas, Fil,” Carmela said, and grinned, and hugged him carefully through the garlands and the tinsel.

The tremor in his trunk was unmistakable—all the tinsel rippled with it—as he stood there simply radiating joy. Nita stood there appreciating the view, the radiance and glitter and gleam of him, and the sight of those red, glowing eyes peering out from among the lights and the garlands. A spontaneous round of applause went up around the room.

Now, though, it was Nita’s turn to get nervous.

In her family, as Christmas approached everybody came up with a special ornament for the tree: either something they made, or something that they couldn’t make but that they saw and liked, or that had a specific meaning. Some of the ornaments on the tree at home were hilariously clumsy — kindergarten construction-paper cutouts plastered with glitter, or painted and varnished papier-mache shapes, or similar art-class stuff. Some were bought things, replicas of older glass ornaments, or keepsake ornaments in engraved metal or plastic. Some were toys, or expressions of temporary (or longstanding) media crushes—such as all of Dairine’s Star Wars collectible ornaments, including the no-longer-light-up Darth Vader TIE fighter with the busted left wing panel that had to be reglued every year because no adhesive seemed to exist that would hold the thing together, and using wizardry on it somehow seemed like cheating.

This year Nita had bought two ornaments, because she knew that the Party was coming and she wanted to leave something on Kit’s family’s tree. “To remember me by,” she’d said, not meaning anything in particular by it. And Kit had given her this completely shocked look. “What, are you going somewhere?” he’d said. Nita had been taken completely by surprise by the slightly panicked sound of it. “What? No! No, I just want to… I’m covering all my options, okay?” And he had wisely not pressed her to find out what she meant by that, because to tell the truth Nita wasn’t too sure herself.

In any case, there was an ornament ready to go on the home tree in a few days (her Dad steadfastly refused to get a tree any sooner than the 22nd: it was just the way things had always gone at their house). That one was a red and blue blown-glass hummingbird that Nita had simply liked the moment she saw it. But for Kit’s tree she’d gone privately back to the Crossings and had a word with Sker’ret about who in the shopping zone was good with custom glasswork, and had provided the craftsbeing (a many-legged Takapesh, one of an insectile species possessed of exquisitely detailed and accurate 3D perception) with images lifted from her manual. It had taken another visit or two to make sure everything was perfect, but by the end of November Nita had been completely satisfied.

“Now then,” she said. She reached into the empty air beside her, into her claudication, and pulled out the little white glazed-cardboard box she’d been peeking into at intervals for the last two weeks, and handed it to Kit.

“Early present?” Kit said.

“Early present for the tree. Go on!”

He carefully lifted the top off the box and peered inside, poked what he saw there. “Paper! Oh wow, thanks, we needed paper!”

Nita poked him, not too hard: having him fumble the box was the last thing she wanted. “I’ll give you paper somewhere else,” she said. “Don’t get cute.”

He threw her a sideways smile and carefully reached in to pull the paper out. Nita held her breath.

Suddenly Kit was holding his too. “Ohh…” he said, finally, letting it out, and reached down a little further into the box to slip a finger through the delicately braided bronze wire by which it would hang.

Carefully he pulled the ornament out. It could at first glance had been mistaken for a scorpion, if scorpions came in a deep metallic forest green. It had segmented legs, a thick body, big frontal claws, huge square heavy-mandibled jaws, and a lot of eyes. But the eyes had a goofy look in them that no scorpion could ever have managed, and the jaws were grinning, somehow.

“It’s a sathak,” Kit whispered, “from Mars, it’s absolutely Takaf, Khretef’s guy, his dog, and Ponch was in him, and—!” He swallowed. “Neets, where’d you get this?”

“Had it made,” Nita said. “Do you like it?”

“Oh wow,” Kit said, and all of a sudden he had one arm around Nita’s neck and his face sort of buried between her neck and shoulder. “Wow,” he said into her shoulder, and then laughed and straightened up again.

His Mama was looking at him a little curiously from the passthrough-window into the kitchen. “You okay, son?”

“Mama, look at this! This is so great!”

He broke away from Nita and went off to show his Mama the ornament. Nita had broken out in a brief sweat of nervousness, but she was cooling down a bit now, and turned away toward Filif, who was standing there watching all this.

“That was a good gift, then,” he said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Yeah. Don’t drop it when he hangs it up, okay?”

“Outlier forbid!” Filif said. “I’ll take good care of it for you, never fear.”

A few minutes later Kit was back in the living room looking for the perfect place to hang it. “Fil, can you move that branch up? Yeah, a little more… No. Wait. Never mind, this one works better.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah, it’ll catch the light there. Don’t want the light right on it, it looks green enough as it is… Yeah, here. This white light looks good by it. Picks up the eyes.”

“Should I move this frond?”

“No, you’re okay. Then again… I don’t know… You’re not going to get a cramp holding that branch up out of the way?’

“No, not at all.”

Finally the sathak ornament was placed the way Kit liked it, and he stood back to admire it. Nita came up next to him and let out a breath, finally having relaxed enough to enjoy it too.

“That is so super. Thanks,” Kit said. His voice actually sounded a little wavery.

Nita just nodded.

Nita’s dad turned away from where he’d been standing near Tom and Carl. “And one more thing—” he said, more or less in Juan’s direction.

A few people turned to look at him, alerted by something in his tone.

“Well, it’s kind of an event, isn’t it?” Nita’s dad said. “So I thought I might as well bring this over to visit.”

He reached down into a small box that had been sitting unremarked on a nearby table, and started carefully unwrapping something from the tissue paper in which it nestled.

Nita’s breath caught. What her dad brought out a moment later was one of the last things her Mom had bought before she got too sick to go out any more: a beautifully photorealistically-painted Christmas ornament that looked like the Earth—but not like a globe with grid lines and single-color countries painted on its continents. It was the Earth the way one saw it as a planet, blue, shining, swirling with weather. Her Mom had seen it that way when she and Kit had first taken her and her Dad to the Moon. The experience had apparently struck some profoundly deep chord for her; she had been muttering about it when she came out of surgery the first time (to the confusion of the critical care nurses, who’d thought she was hallucinating) and the mere passing mention of it, afterwards, had always made her eyes go soft.

Nita’s dad went over and found a spot for it amongst Filif’s decorations: not tucked in too deeply to be seen, but safely positioned toward his trunk. Then he stepped back. “Looks good,” Nita’s dad said, and then stopped, as if his voice had briefly failed him.

Kit’s pop turned to the tray sitting off to one side, handed Nita’s dad one of the glasses sitting there. “Absent friends,” he said softly.

Nita’s dad just nodded and clinked his glass to Kit’s pop’s. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both drank.

“Kit? Would you turn the lights off?” said Kit’s pop.

Kit headed over to the switch for the main room light, flipped it. In the darkness that fell over the room, Filif had become the only bright thing. Everyone held still, caught in the warm light as if in amber.

The Demisiv stood there quietly, glittering, glowing. Nita saw that he was shivering with some emotion, or some combination of them. But then he was always good at picking this stuff up, she thought. To him, silently, she said: are you okay?

More than okay, he said. I am honored to bear this weight.

Slowly, softly, conversation started up again around him as lamps were turned on around the edges of the room. People got themselves more cider and cocoa, and everyone spent at least some time in front of Filif commenting on how terrific he looked decorated, some of them adding details on how they did it at their place: all white lights versus colored, or all blue: matched ornaments all in one color versus the “chaos theory” approach that Kit’s family favored: blinking lights or steady ones…

Around them, people started hitting the buffet trays again: the mulled wine came out. Nita stood off to one side with Sker’ret for a few moments, enjoying the sight of Kit pulling people over one at a time to point at his ornament and explain it to them.

“That worked, then,” Sker’ret said to her.

“As the boy says,” Nita said, “more than. Thanks for helping me with that.”

“Well, thanks for keeping my facility and everything I hold dear from being overrun by hostiles!” Sker’ret said. “You don’t pull down half the perks you’re entitled to for that.”

“I’ll start working on that, I promise.”

“No you won’t,” Sker’ret said. “I know you too well. Expect me to start bothering you about it.”

“Hey Legs,” Kit’s mama called from the kitchen, “I need the rest of those trays, it’s time for more of the buffalo wings!”

“You do that,” said Nita, “and I’ll tell your broodmates you’re slumming doing catering work!”

Sker’ret laughed that ratchety laugh and headed for the kitchen. “Don’t get me started,” he said. “I might get my revenge some other way. She’s got the right attitude for liaison work, and we can always use more hominid staff…”

Nita turned back to find Kit’s pop standing next to Filif again, now with something of the air of a workman taking a break with a co-worker. “You going to be okay standing there all night like that?” said Kit’s pop. “I don’t want you to be stuck away from the fun.”

“Oh, this is fun! But I don’t have to be stuck. If I want to, I can just leave all this here.”

Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Uh, am I missing something?”

“Watch.”

The “Christmas tree” seemed to shake itself gently. Then there was a strange sort of a sideways blur in the air, as if the whole scene was a watercolor painting that had had a wet brush pulled across it. A second later the watercolor haze was gone, and the Christmas tree was standing exactly where it was, not a light or ornament jostled, not a needle out of place… but Filif was standing a couple of yards to one side of it, wearing nothing but a twin of the star.

“That being is an artist,” Ronan called from across the room, “and if he drank, I’d buy him one.”

Filif burst out laughing. “Of course I drink,” he said, “what do you take me for, some kind of rockmoss?”

“No, I didn’t mean water…”

“Drinking habits aside,” said Kit’s pop, “that is some stunt.”

“Nothing much at all,” said Filif. “It’s a constructed appearance, what we call a mochteroof.”

“I won’t even try to remember how to say that…” Kit’s pop said. “Or to pretend I’ve got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Think of it as like a hologram, but solid,” Filif said. “I can slip in and out of it, and of the ornaments, at will. And back in…”

And suddenly Filif was conducting a masterclass in mochteroof construction for the layman, translating the most technical terms out of the Speech into English on the fly. Juan leaned back on the wall nearest him, absolutely fascinated. At the point where Filif dropped into Spanish without warning, Nita’s jaw dropped.

“How is he doing that??” she said to Sker’ret as he passed with his third trayful of buffalo wings, from which she pilfered one.

“Reverse-proactive Speech recension,” Sker’ret said. “He’s a many-talented lad, our Filif. The reverse recensions take a lot of work…”

Nita knew they did: she’d hit them more than once, and bounced. Idly she reached down for a buffalo wing as Sker’ret headed off to do the rounds.

She was just turning around to see if she could find a napkin, because the sauce on the wings was fairly aggressive, when Carmela came wandering over to her, bent toward Nita’s ear, and whispered:

“You know something?”

“What?”

“It’s not enough.”

Nita blinked. “What? This was what he always wanted.”

“But there’s more now. You know what else he wants.”

“What do you—” Then she realized.

“The rest of his Christmas present. Neets, come on. He wants the candles. We have to figure out a way to give him this!”

Nita thought about it. Carmela’s mischief was a bit infectious and hard to resist right now. But so was the intensity of her feeling about this… and Nita’s sense that Mela had this right. That was what finally tipped Nita over into agreement. “The parental types would pitch a fit if they found out...”

“Better make sure they don’t find out, then,” Carmela said. “We’ll handle it later. Down in one of the puptents.”

“Makes sense,” Nita had to admit. “Not even in the same space as the house, really…”

“And believe me, this time of year my folks don’t have the staying power to ride herd on us when we’ll be staying up all night. If they even wanted to try.” Carmela snickered. “Dairine did a smart thing. Installed her own puptent downstairs and took Mama in to show her.”

“And?”

“What the decor didn’t do to her, the size of it did. All the gilding and jewels and weird alien furniture…”

Nita blinked. That description meant only one thing to her. “She installed Roshaun’s puptent…”

“Uh huh. I assume the Mobiles have a version of it saved. Or she does, in her manual…”

That was food for thought. “Well, at least in there you’ve got a lot less chance of burning the house down…”

Carmela laughed at her. “With a house full of wizards, good luck with that happening. And anyway there are about fifty more interesting things that could happen, with the cellar full of elective pinched spaces. All you need is a portal fringe overlap and the whole area collapses into a superdense black hole. Good thing the Master of the Crossings is here walking the hors d’oeuvres around.”

Nita cracked up laughing.

Things got a little more relaxed after that. “Now about this Santa Claus being…” Filif was saying to Kit’s pop. “Perhaps this is only an avatar of one of the Powers? Working clandestinely, and hoping to be mistaken for a chaotic force aligned with the Lone Power? Because the presence of the associated small nonhuman workers does confuse the picture somewhat. That said, possibly that’s its whole idea…”

That was the point at which Nita got around to actually putting the buffalo wing in her mouth. Instants later, she was incredibly, incredibly sorry.

“Oh, it’s a he?” Filif was saying. “Thanks. Sometimes it’s hard to tell around here. In any case, certainly the appearance of being in violation of common Galactic labor accords could lead an unwary observer to believe—”

Nita’s eyes were tearing with something that wasn’t laughter. “Got one of the hot ones did you, sweetie?” Kit’s mama was saying. “Legs, leave that tray with me and go bring her some sour cream...!”

4: Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella

Nita recovered soon enough, and the evening continued sliding smoothly by. Food and drink were more or less continuously manifested through the good offices of Kit’s mama (“What? Don’t start with me about the kitchen, at least I know where everything is in here, and anyway he’s worse with food than I am, and besides that I’ve been out of the kitchen as much as I’ve been in it, I sure now know more about mochteroofs than you do, you wouldn’t know a semblance receptor site if one bit you in the butt, and in other news Legs here is doing all the work anyway, he’s wasted as a white-collar type! More wine, Tom?”), and good cheer filled the space. Filif was stepping into and out of his decorations at will, alternately chatting with the guests and then resuming his adornments with the glee of a small child opening the same Christmas gift over and over and liking it better every time.

Meanwhile, the entertainment system, apparently feeling ignored in the face of so much unbridled human and extrahuman interaction, had begun shouting at the party guests. Even after Kit lectured it on proper behavior there seemed no way to placate it except to turn it on and leave it running.

“Nothing from off this planet,” Kit’s mama called from the kitchen. “I still haven’t got over that thing with all the tentacles.”

Kit threw Nita a glance that suggested he was in no rush to let her know that “the thing with all the tentacles” had been one of Carmela’s leave-it-running,-I-want-to-record-that-late-night-anime errors, and was way too Earth-local for comfort. Nita snickered and got herself more cider.

“If you just leave it to its own devices like this, of course it’s going to misbehave,” Dairine said, wandering through, picking up one of the buffalo wings that Nita was still recovering from, and ingesting half of it without turning a hair. “Tell it to do something and you’ll get a lot less grief from it. Mechanicity abhors a structure vacuum. What’s that? ‘The Christmas Channel’?”

“This could either be very good or very very bad,” Ronan said as the TV guide came up. “…‘The Christmas Invasion…’ Well, okay. Fair play to them. ‘Bugs Bunny’s Looney Tunes Christmas Tales’? Surely you jest. …‘The Big Little Jesus?’ Is that actually in black and white?” And then a dumbfounded pause. “‘Santa Claus Versus the Martians’? What in the name of the sludge at the bottom of the Powers’ Holy Bucket is that??”

“Probably something about the True Meaning of Christmas,” Dairine said, folding down crosslegged in front of the TV and filching the remote from Nita.

Ronan flopped down beside her, looking genially scornful. “Might as well ask about the true meaning of life.”

“If you see any pigs around,” Nita said, relieving Dairine of the remote and moving another page down in the onscreen TV guide, “might try asking them…”

“Does he even do Christmas?”

“He’s everywhere,” Kit said. “Why wouldn’t he?”

“Pigs?” Kit’s father said from where he’d wound up on the sofa next to Filif, sounding a little bemused. “Why would there be pigs?”

“Um…”

“Is this one of those explanations that’s going to make me sorry I asked?”

Nita laughed. “No. Just confused. But you won’t be alone, not at all.”

Kit started attempting to explain the Transcendent Pig to his father. Nita, listening to this process with one ear, found it to be going about the way she’d thought it would. She turned her attention instead to the group in front of the TV. This had briefly flipped to one of the video channels, where some boy band was singing “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”. “…He knows when you are sleeping… He knows when you’re awake…”

From the nearby easy chair, Tom snickered. “’Kindly old elf or CIA spook?’”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ronan said. “Between the intelligence-gathering and the coming-down-your-chimney-to-eat-your-food stuff, it’s all a bit creepy.”

“Not to mention unlikely, in terms of the physics,” Dairine said. “You figure, four hundred million kids under ten on earth, give or take… Say a hundred ten million households, right? And let’s assume there’s at least one good kid in each…”

Ronan flopped back on the floor and covered his eyes. “So adult-centric. I distrust the math already.”

“And then you’ve got, what, thirty-one time zones to deal with over the entire Christmas Eve period? And Earth’s rotation. Do the math and you get sort of a thousand visits a second, rounding up. A hundred ten or so million stops…forget the evenness of the statistical distribution, it’ll make you crazy…”

“It’s making me crazy already.”

“So the sleigh has to be doing six hundred fifty-odd miles per second, right? Even though it has to be carrying at least three hundred thousand tons’ worth of payload even if everybody’s getting nothing but Lego and Barbies. Then you have nine reindeer, counting Rudolph, and forget ‘tiny’ if they’re pulling a load like that, which pushes the whole business up to about the mass of the QEII—”

“Was math even meant to be used for these purposes? I really have my doubts.”

“And all this is happening in atmosphere, remember, like a constant spacecraft re-entry. Fourteen quintillion joules of energy per second getting expended isn’t going to do them any good, they’ll all be vaporized before they hit the fourth or fifth house. And then there’s the G force—”

Filif had slipped out of his ornaments again for a little while and was looming over this discussion with some confusion. But apparently the G force became too much for him. “It’s very nice as a physical-universe explanation,” Filif said, “but of course the methodology’s completely flawed.”

Dairine peered up at him. “What?”

“Well, since this being is plainly one of the Powers, if a bit of an anarchic or chaotic one,” Filif said, “why are you trying to solve this problem inside a single dimension? It doesn’t work. A dimensionally transcendent being like one of the Powers would hardly limit itself to functioning in only three or four dimensions. The evidence clearly indicates someone working in six or better. See, the temporal element—”

Kit’s pop looked up at that. “Wait, I thought time was the fourth dimension—”

All the wizards in the room groaned. “No no no,” Kit moaned, “too much popular culture!”

“Listen, don’t blame me, I hit New Math and bounced,” Kit’s dad said. “Or maybe I got it from Rod Serling.”

“—but once you’re into six-and-up, millions of apparent visits to physical reality per second is no great problem. It’s only inside the orthogonal plane of time that everything seems to be happening amazingly fast. But if you’re one of the Powers, there’s not the slightest rush. You slide sidewise into the applicable orthotemporal dimension, just that one, mind you, and then you drop off whatever playthings are required make a drop. And then you pull out again and restock at your leisure, and then dip into that timeplane again. When you’re in D7 or thereabouts, the temporality of D3 and D4 is hardly an issue...”

“That’s it,” Ronan said, “he’s solved Santa. We have nothing left to live for.”

Tom started chuckling and couldn’t seem to stop. Carl, who’d been in the kitchen chatting with Kit’s mama and Marcus, now wandered out with a bemused expression. “What?”

“Santa Claus,” Tom said to Carl with great seriousness, “is one of the Powers that Be.”

Carl looked at him thoughtfully. “Did you get the bottom of the eggnog?”

Tom looked askance at him, and then started laughing again. Most of the people in the room looked confused. And Carl sat on the arm of the sofa and told the story of how once upon a time Tom’s father got The Bottom of the Eggnog—where all the nutmeg winds up if you forget to shake the jug—and then (due to nutmeg’s psychoactive qualities) had to go to the ER due to what Tom described as Accidentally Seeing God. Shortly half the room was helpless with laughter. Tom, meanwhile, seeing that Marina had indeed just brought out the first of the eggnog jugs, got up and went over to it and shook it in the most ostentatious way possible before pouring Carl a glass.

Filif was watching and listening to all this in fascination. Nita leaned over to him. “I think this is some of what Christmas is about,” she said. “Tradition. The stories that come out this time of year.”

“Old interactions,” Filif said, “that can be depended on. Reinforcements of the cyclical nature of, well, Nature. Tales and reminiscences and old jokes…”

“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories / of Christmases long long ago…” Ronan sang.

“We need him tomorrow night,” said Kit’s mama through the passthrough. “He sings on key, and he plainly has something better than a bucket to carry a tune in. You are not going anywhere tomorrow, you hear me?”

Ronan just grinned.

“Look,” Dairine said, “let’s go downstairs and leave the oldsters to their own devices—”

“Do I detect the sleepover beginning?” Kit’s pop said.

Carmela rose up in great dignity and grabbed Filif by one frond. “Might as well,” she said. “We’ll leave you to talk grownup talk… we know you’ve been dying to get us out of here.”

There was less disagreement with this than Nita would have expected, and more good-natured laughter. “Anything you people want to take downstairs with you?“

“Make another pot of the hot chocolate?”

“Way ahead of you, Leprechaun. It’s right there on the stove staring at you.”

The younger participants mouthed Leprechaun?! at one another.

“And there’s some ice cream, too. That double chocolate Kit likes. Nita, maybe you want to grab that, and the bowls and spoons...” Kit’s mama glanced at her watch. “No point in telling you to get some sleep sometime tonight because we know you won’t,” Kit’s mama said. “And for once I don’t care. If things get noisy, just do whatever you have to to keep it under control, all right?”

There was a general chorus of “Okay” and “G’night” and “Thanks, Mrs. Rodriguez” as the group making for the puptents headed down the stairs. But as she followed Dairine and Carmela and Ronan and Filif and Matt and Marcus and Sker’ret toward the stairs, Nita looked over her shoulder and saw Kit’s mama stop him as he picked up the pot of cocoa.

“Sweetie, I keep meaning to ask you…”

“What, Mama?”

“All this stuff Legs has brought us is really lovely…”

“Yeah, it is!”

“And you should thank him again. But one question.”

“Yeah?”

She lowered her voice. “I was kind of nervous. I didn’t know if it was a religious thing…”

“What?”

“Why is so much of this food blue?”

Nita hung back a little to help Kit with the cocoa if he needed it. “Is she okay?” she said. “They don’t think we’re ditching them?”

“They’re fine,” Kit said. “They look about ready to start Adult Talk. Best time for us to get out, yeah?”

Nita nodded as they got to the bottom of the stairs. Kit’s basement looked much like hers, except tidier: it wasn’t the catch-all area that her family’s basement had turned into over time. Over against the back wall were several wide vertical dark patches that marked inactive portals, but one, the central one, glowed golden with activity and light from its far side. They stepped through.

Nita looked around and breathed out, nodding. Dairine’s description of Roshaun’s puptent space from his previous visit as “overdone” was at best an inadequate summation of a tall bright space full of gilding, of rich carpets and hangings and ornately carven furniture. Instead of the usual bright light pouring in from the hot bright sun of Wellakh, though, the windows were dark, and lamps standing on tall pedestals around the edges of the room were lit, casting a subdued light over everything, catching the glint of a gem here, the sheen of a carving there. And in the middle of it all, in front of a trio of big sofas arranged in a U-shape, and heaps of big pillows and cushions, was a twin of the entertainment center upstairs.

Kit paused and stared. “Uh… Dair, I think they might complain about us just moving this down here…”

Dairine was already flopped down among the pillows. “Kit,” she said, scornful but only gently so. “The very first thing I did when I got to be a wizard was duplicate a computer. You think cloning the entertainment system is a problem? Especially with hardware support.” She stroked Spot’s case: he arched his “back” against the gesture. “All I had to do was make sure the remotes have different ID chips in them so they won’t wind up countermanding each other.”

“In other words,” Carmela said, “now we can have… a movie marathon!!”

This suggestion was met with general agreement, as the possibility had first started being mentioned about the same time the invitations went out. “After all that food,” Kit said, “I wouldn’t mind stretching out for a while…”

“And after all that excitement,” Filif said, from where he’d settled behind the centermost sofa, “a little relaxation will be welcome.”

“Anybody wants to change into night stuff,” Dairine said, “there are changing rooms through that arch there…”

“And then Ice cream!” Carmela said, while Dairine grabbed the remote and brought up the same TV guide they’d been looking at earlier. Ten minutes or so went by while everybody changed into sweats or pajamas or other comfortable late night wear, though Marcus elected to stay in his fatigues.

Filif had been reading the on-screen TV guide while the others had been putting themselves together “‘A Christmas Carol,’” Filif said when everybody had made themselves comfortable. “Kit, your mama said that there would be caroling tomorrow… is this something to do with that?”

Kit shook his head. “Not really. Or not directly. It’s about a guy who loses the meaning of Christmas…”

“Fil should see that!” Nita said.

“Yeah, but which one?”

Filif rustled in surprise. “There’s more than one version of this story?”

“It’s like the bigger Christmas story that way,” Ronan said. “A lot of variation, a lot of different ways to look at it…”

Nita looked over at Dairine. “Line a few of them up?”

She picked up the remote. “Sure. But I want popcorn!”

“I’ll get that,” Nita said, knowing where Kit kept the stuff that he microwaved. But she’d barely stood up when she was distracted by some one appearing out of nowhere…in a red “tuxedo” pajama top and green pants.

“Darryl!” Nita and Kit said in unison, as the new arrival plunged around the room hugging everyone in sight, and briefly nearly losing himself in Filif’s lower branches.

“My God,” Ronan said. “How’ve your folks let you out this late?”

Darryl shrugged. “They think I’m home in bed.” He smiled. “I am home in bed.”

“Not dressed like that, I hope!”

“Yup.”

“You’re a terror!”

“Not as much as him. Hi Matt!”

“Gonzo boy! Have some ice cream.”

“How long can you stay?” Nita said.

“Until I fall asleep,” Darryl said, tucking himself down among the cushions. “I go back to being one of me then.”

“No rush about that,” Matt said, handing him a bowl of ice cream. “If you eat this too fast, which of you gets the brain freeze?”

“Let’s find out!”

A few more minutes were spent assembling popcorn and more drinks, and turning down unneeded lights, and getting everybody comfortable. Finally Dairine looked over her shoulder. “Everybody ready? And Darr, if this gets too loud for you say the word.”

“No problem. What’s on?”

“The classics,” Kit said. “Roll it!”

Dairine brought up the 1951 A Christmas Carol first, and on this Filif was most intent. When the Ghost cried, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business…!” Nita heard Filif murmur, “We could have made a wizard out of him with a little work.”

“Well, kind of late for that, the guy’s dead,” Carmela said. “But also, it’s fiction. He didn’t really exist.”

“But this came out of someone’s mind?” Filif said.

“Yes…”

“Then he exists. All that’s left is to determine now is how concretely…”

Nita grinned, not sure how to even start arguing about that. When that film was done, they took a break for more popcorn, and then Dairine cued up Scrooged. Filif laughed as hard as any of them at this, which surprised Nita a little. How much research has he been doing on us?… she wondered.

The end of that movie produced demands for fresh drinks and more popcorn and ice cream among the viewers. While these were being distributed, Dairine grabbed the remote. “Got one more for you,” she said, grinning.

Nita had seen that grin. Often it didn’t mean well. “Okay,” she said, “what have you got up your sleeve?”

Dairine began punching numbers into the remote. “Should I be concerned?” Kit said. “Is it going to suddenly start spouting some new language at me that I can’t cope with?”

“Not at all,” Dairine said, “not at all.” She concentrated on the numbers she was punching into the pad, and glanced over at Spot. “Is that right?” she said.

There wasn’t any answer that any of them could hear, but Dairine looked satisfied. “Go,” she said to the entertainment system.

Moments later, the strangest screeching, howling, whining noise was coming out of the speakers. Some of the guests stared at that and the bright swirling graphics that accompanied them. But Ronan’s head came right up at the sound, and his mouth fell open, and he turned a look on Dairine that was profoundly accusatory. “How did you—”

“You mean you can’t guess?” Dairine said, leaning back against the pillows with a smug expression.

A television theme possibly much more famous in the British Isles than in North America began to play, against more of that howling sound effect. “Okay now,” Ronan said, “this is just a wee bit illicit. This doesn’t even air for four more days! Whose server have you hacked?”

Dairine placed one hand on her heart and assumed an expression of wounded dignity. “Nobody’s! How can you suggest that I would ever do such a thing?”

“Just like this,” Ronan said, completely unapologetic. “You saw my lips moving, I assume. Pause that first, would you? Thanks, Spotty. So. How?”

If it was possible, Dairine’s expression got even smugger. “The Mobiles are working on a project to store all available data,” she said. “You know about that?”

“The way I heard it,” Ronan said, “it was a project to back up the entire available universe.” He shook his head. “Still not too sure about what you use for media.”

“Not my problem,” Dairine said. “That’s hardware. But since I’m the Mobiles’ mom, they’re particularly interested in backing up all the data on Earth, in case I should need something. They said they didn’t want me to be discommoded.” She smiled sweetly. “Nice of them. Anyway, it turns out that one of the systems they’ve been routinely backing up for me is the entire data storage system of the BBC. And somewhere in that data storage, surprise surprise, is the next Dr. Who Christmas special. I mean, seriously, you don’t think they keep it stored on tape or something, do you?” Dairine raised her eyebrows. “So once it’s backed up to the motherboard world—because they keep all the really important storage, by which I mean everything I’m interested in, backed up locally—it’s really simple for me, well, me and Spot, to run live streaming video from the Mobiles’ backup to here…”

Kit blinked. “Tell me,” he said, “that downloading however many gigs of data it takes to store a Christmas special from umpty billion light years away isn’t doing something really horrible to our broadband allowance.”

Dairine made an amused spluttering noise. “No,” she said.

“Wonderful,” Ronan said. “Now would you kindly fecking un-pause this thing? I’m dying here.”

The display unpaused, and Ronan fell back against the cushions on the floor with an expression of complete fulfillment. “You may just have justified your entire reason for existence,” he said to Dairine, and fell silent.

Another hour went by full of time travel and excitement and danger, with a different version of A Christmas Carol and another version of Scrooge woven all through. At the end of it, Ronan looked around and remarked, “I wondered that he’d gone a little quiet.”

Nita followed Ronan’s glance and saw that the cushions among which Darryl had been lying were empty. “Guess it was getting a little late for him,” he said. He rolled over and looked up at Filif. “How about you, Fil? You holding up all right?”

“Oh yes,” Filif said. He rustled, shaking out his branches all around. “It takes some synthesis, all of this,” he said after a few moments. “The way the tales interleave, the way they reach back to the triggering event… It’s complex. And so are the strictly social aspects. I can see this subject will take a lot of study…” But he sounded cheerful about the prospect.

“Do you guys do anything like this at home?” Dairine said. “Is there a holiday time when everyone gets together?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kit said. “I saw something in the manual once. That sort of summer festival where everyone goes up into the mountains…”

“Well, yes. But this time of year… well, our version of this time of year,” Filif said, “there’s something else. Not to get together, though. To get away from everyone else.”

That brought a number of heads up. “What?” said Dairine, and “Hey, that’s one I could get used to,” said Ronan. “Especially if you had relatives like mine…” He rubbed his eyes.

“Sounds a little weird,” Nita said, “to want to get away from other people at a holiday.”

Filif rustled. “Maybe not so strange,” he said, “if you’ve heard the story behind it…”

“Story!!” shouted about half the room.

“Then listen now, and hear the wind in the branches,” Filif said, “and it will tell you the tale of the Outlier, who made us what we are…”

Everyone got quiet.

Filif was quiet too. “The organism from which my people came,” he said, “one of the original species of Demisiv vegetation, arose something like five hundred million years ago as you reckon time. As far as we can tell from our own investigations, it started very small, in a near-equatorial zone mostly surrounded by several of what were then the largest lakes on the planet. We were really shrubs then—” and his berries went pink with amusement at Carmela. “Just low scrubby frondy things, like your earliest gymnosperms.

“That earliest form of Demisiv had a hard time at first, as conditions on the homeworld went through some difficult climatic cycles, and competition among the various arising plant species was fierce. But after a few million years it hit on a useful strategy. It gave up producing seed and instead shifted its energy into producing a communal root system, from which new microcolonies and eventually macrocolonies of plants could grow.”

“Could be smart,” Nita said, “if you’re in a hostile environment.”

Filif rustled, a gesture of agreement. “A plant that shares a root system with others—a superplant, I think your people call it—has a better chance of competing against plants that grow independently from seed, the ones that have to rely on their own food supplies to last through their period of greatest vulnerability.

“And that strategy became key to that earliest lifeform’s success. It spread, slowly at first and then more quickly millennium by millennium, across the world. It occupied great plains and climbed mountains and pushed down to the waters of every lakeshore. Finally it covered nearly all the world except at the poles. And as the millions of years crept by, since it no longer needed more territory to survive, it began to diversify in other ways. It developed rudimentary local organ structures and the beginnings of a nervous system. That neural network proved very useful in helping the proto-Demisiv locate and leverage the best sources of light as weather and the seasons changed, and it grew more complex with every passing aeon.”

“I bet I know where this is going…” Matt said.

“Of course you do,” Filif said. “It became conscious. And then, after enough time, it became self-aware. The Demisiv was born.”

“Was born,” Kit said. “Not ‘were.’”

“Yes,” Filif said. “Because it was one. It was only one, one huge organism communicating through a single neural net that covered the world, with thoughts that took a whole season to travel from one side to another of that mind. And so it remained for a long time. Millions of seasons went by, winter through summer and spring through fall, and the poles precessed and the stars shifted, and that one life form ruled the world unchallenged. Nothing could compete, especially when it finally learned to move—to shift the root structure itself along through the ground, taking with it the structures that grew out of it and absorbed the sunlight and breathed out the air. The whole world was a forest that ebbed and flowed with light and weather the way your oceans ebb and flow with their tides.

“And it might still be that way until something else happened. Very slowly in those vast spaces, a further diversification began, secondary to another, severer wave of climatic changes. It took too long for messages to travel great distances when there was need to react quickly to storms or floods or volcanic activity. As a result the Demisiv organism began to decentralize. Consciousness began to concentrate itself into smaller groups and patches, more tightly knit—still part of the great Whole, of course, but with increased autonomy in moving smaller populations’ root complexes to where conditions were more favorable. And out at the edge of one such population—a small one high up in the habitability range of the furthest northern hemisphere—the thing happened that would change everything.”

Filif went quiet for a moment in the flickering of the candles. “We think of the one by whom everything was changed as a ‘her’,” he said, “because the above-ground growth by which she expressed herself was berrying out when the Event took place. Indeed she was normally berried, because she paid less attention to that state than was seen as appropriate. In fact she seemed to pay so little attention to what was seen as normal work and business—watering, light gathering, helping the communal roots to spread—that she always had trouble finding consensus with others in her local growth-group. And as often happened with such—for consensus and the survival of the Whole were seen as everything—she found herself pushed to the edges of the group, out into the worst conditions, the most barren places, where light was hard to come by and water frozen. When the group moved its root complex she was dragged along, almost forgotten… except insofar as the group expected her, as often happened to such isolated microregions, to wither away. And insofar as that part of the Whole ever thought of her, it would have been glad if that happened.”

There was a little uncomfortable shifting among some of that. Some of them knew too well the feeling of being pushed out, or away to the edges of things, by people who thought they weren’t worth paying attention to.

“So it came down to the dark time in that hemisphere,” Filif said, “high up in the places where the sun doesn’t rise for weeks on end. Why this far-stretched group had come to rest for the winter in that place, no one’s sure. Conflict with other groups further south who’d forced them north, perhaps: there was plenty of that in those times, just as a mind can war with itself and still be one. Almost all of that mind was waiting out the dark in dormancy, sleeping until sunrises began again. But stretched away furthest north was the one with the berries, awake and aware and alone in the night with the wind hissing low around her and the Cold Lights in the sky hissing above. And in the wind and the cold fire she started to think she heard a voice speaking to her, a voice that said, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?

“Straightway she was terrified, because this was the strangest of all strange things that could have been—a voice that didn’t partake of the Whole, a voice from something impossible, something outside. She thought the cold and the dark had perhaps damaged her wits, and there was no way to be sure, no one else nearby to ask if they heard it too; they all slept. And again something seemed to say, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?

“So finally she said, ‘I don’t know what that means, or how I hear what can’t be!’

“And whatever spoke said, You hear because I am in you to hear. And what that means is freedom of a new kind for you and for all who desire it. Break root from root and come away.

“The one with the berries shivered when she heard that, for when by error or calamity a growth’s roots lost connection with the Whole, then that growth swiftly grew withered and starved away and died. And she said, ‘If I do that, then that’s the sure end of survival.’” Nita noted that the Speech the word Filif used was muvesh’tet, an indicator of passivity, not a dual passive/active verb as English made it.

“But the voice said to her then, That is what has been. Yet life is more than survival, and even death is more than that; and all things move to new completions. Break root from root and break your bonds, thereby learning what is more and teaching others so to learn.

“And hearing the voice, the one with the berries was torn: for though the voice said things that frightened her, it spoke to her as an equal, which it seemed to her that no one in the Whole ever had. And thinking of that, she said, ‘Why do you come to me? I’m the broken one, I’m the withering one, I’m the one pushed out to the edges!’ And immediately the voice answered: Because you are the only one here who is able to ask that question, and the only one also able to say ‘I’. And the voice was glad, as if it had found something long lost and long-awaited.

“Long the one with the berries stood there in the dark and the hiss of the wind with the Cold Fires making her shadow tremble on the frozen ground. And at last she said, ‘Yes, I will.’ And with great labor and anguish she tore her roots away from the roots of the Whole, and broke her bonds, thereby doing the thing that no one in the world had ever willingly done. She Othered herself.”

The word Filif used was again in the Speech, uhweinsei, and one that had echoes of many meanings: to set oneself apart, to be set apart, to be alone, to be alone to a purpose. “There in the dark and the cold,” Filif said, “she fell down crying with the pain. And there in the dark she rose up again and was the first of us, the first Demisiv who was by herself; the first to stand alone, the first to walk alone, the first to have her own thoughts alone in her own soul. That dark time…” He shivered. “Long she suffered there, long she took learning the weight of being one’s self, the pain of moving one’s self alone through the world. But finally there came a day when the sun rose for a little while, long enough for the microregion of which she’d been a part to wake a little and look around. And what did it see there but the berried one, on her own roots, standing, watching. And she said to it, to the Whole, ‘I am the Outlier. In the One Other’s company I chose my Othering and so did not die. As I am, so may you be. Rise up now and break your bonds!’”

Nita shivered, for it was a battlecry, the way he said it. And over on the other side of the room, she saw Marcus lean back on the pillows behind him with a thoughtful look on his face. “’The stone that the builders have rejected,’” Marcus said, as if musing, or to someone else, “’is become the cornerstone…’”

Filif rustled his branches. “She died, of course,” he said. “Very soon, as our people reckon it. Very young. But not before she’d walked deep into the South, from the cold and the dark down into the sun and the summer, and showed more and more of the Whole what had come to her. And not right away, but soon enough, others followed her. Fringe growths as she’d been, at first: those who were pushed to the edges, the sorrowful, the disaffected, the different. And then others, bored or daring or just curious, sometimes angry and sometimes frightened; they rose up, they broke their bonds. More and more of them, over decades, over centuries. Until after many millennia more, almost all of us were Outliers, going about in freedom, making our own differences in the world and each other’s lives. Now very few stay enWholed all their lives. Those whom the worlds now think of as Demisiv, with our roots in the ground but our own souls in our branches, are almost all our species.” Filif rustled. “And that’s the tale. One of the more formal versions, maybe. There are many, many others.”

Dairine, with Spot in her lap, had been gazing off into the distance through all this. Now she looked up at Filif. “Was that your species’s Choice?”

“It was the gateway to Choice,” Filif said. “Many more Outliers were needed before that could happen, and it took a long time. They were scorned and rejected at first. But very slowly things changed, and after that, in due time, Choice came. Another story.” He rustled his branches again. “At any rate, these days, at the right time of year—our version of this time of year—we’re all Outliers. Instead of coming together in the light that doesn’t end, the way we do at the time of the Nightless Days festival, remembering how it was to be a world enWholed—in this time of the year we wait for the darkness, and in it we go apart, remembering the Outlier who first walked that road: the first to walk it truly alone. Here and now, like them, like the One with the Berries, I’m an Outlier. I made my own choice and spoke my Word to the wind, and when my time came I took the High Road and learned to walk through a greater darkness than most of my people. I’m in that darkness now, far away from home. And thereby, I’m exactly where I should be.”

All his berries looked at them. “But it’s funny how it goes,” Filif said. “So far out in the darkness, you find it’s not so dark after all. You find light you didn’t expect…”

“There are similarities, aren’t there?” Ronan said all of a sudden. “Something from outside gets into physical existence and pulls it into something bigger. Something deeper…”

“But that’s the One for you,” Filif said. “It’s always getting into Life and transforming it. The Powers do the everyday work, same as we do. But sometimes something extra’s needed, something more profound. And from acts like this the ripples spread, inevitably. It’s for us the same as it is for you. A lot of stories, a lot of songs and poems telling how what happened way back then looks now. How it affects the here and now, day by day: in big ways, or small ones.” He laughed. “Like your songs about trees…”

But there was something strangely wistful about the way he said that. People looked at each other, thinking. And then suddenly Marcus sat up straight.

“All right,” he said. “All right. Let us light this candle!” And he vanished.

They sat waiting for him for about fifteen minutes, wondering what he was up to. At that point all of them had begun to yawn occasionally, and Nita was beginning to look ahead with some eagerness to when she could actually pull one of the various throws over her, collapse back into the pillows and just check out for a while. But then, with a very soft pop of displaced air, Marcus was standing off to one side again with big box in his hands.

“Here,” he said, and brought what he carried over to a nearby table.

Everyone crowded around as he bent to open the box. What Marcus lifted out was a slim piece of gold-colored metal that was bent in a horizontal S-curve like that of the pipe under a sink. At the top of the shorter curve was a socket of the right size and shape to take a candle. At the bottom of the other longer part was a small heavy ball of metal.

“Counterweighted,” he said. “These are far safer than the old candle holders that clipped on. And here—” He reached into the box again, came up with a slim orange-golden candle. “Beeswax,” Marcus said.

Filif began to shiver all over.

“Are you ready for this?” Marcus said.

“Yes,” Filif said, very softly.

“Fil,” Nita said, “are you sure?”

He bowed himself a little toward her, so that the star glittered. “Will you all help?”

Everyone reached into the box, pulled out one of the candle holders, fitted candles to them, and started balancing them carefully on Filif’s branches. “Kind of a trick to this,” Nita said.

“But once you get the hang of it…” Kit said.

Within a few minutes the candles were arranged at the tips of all Filif’s strongest branches, held well away from the main body of his foliage. Carmela put the last one in place. Then they all stood around him for a moment, waiting.

“Now all we need,” Filif said, “is fire…”

There were a couple of spare candles in the box. Nita reached in and lifted one out, knowing what wizardry she’d need next. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Filif said, and stood very straight.

To make a spark long-lasting enough to light a candle took five words in the Speech. Nita said them, and the wick of the candle she held burst into flame. Nita waited until it had caught completely, and then reached out with the candle toward the closest one perched on one of Filif’s boughs. She could see all the red eye-berries watching the flame as it came nearer, trembling just slightly…

She lit the candle; and then another, and another, carefully watching Filif all the time, remembering how just the thought of fire had terrified him once upon a time. After a moment, trembling herself, she handed the candle to Kit. “Here,” she said, “your turn…”

As carefully as she had, Kit lit the three candles nearest, and passed the lighting candle to Matt. So it went around, to Sker’ret (who grasped it in his mandibles and reared up to do the lighting) and to Ronan, and then to Marcus, and finally to Dairine and Carmela. As Carmela was lighting the last three, Dairine gestured at the lamps spaced around the room, and all of them went out.

They stood there around Filif in a silence so complete that the tiny fizz and crackle of the candles’ wicks burning could clearly be heard. In that still place, without a breath to stir them, the candle flames stood up straight, and the light of them gleamed on Filif’s branches and caught in Filif’s eyes.

For what seemed like a long time he didn’t move so much as a frond or a needle: just held absolutely still, like someone testing himself. The candle flames shifted very slightly, were still again.

At last he spoke. “This is my defiance, then,” Filif said, very softly. “This is the Oath made visible. Just as the Outlier was, I am more than my fear. Other fears may not burn as hot or as brightly, but those too I defy. Let what sets such fires in the world see them set here to my purposes, not Its own!”

And Filif fell silent. As still as he, Nita and the others stood quiet and watched him.

And then, after a few moments more, Filif laughed and said, “Now what? Do they have to burn down all the way?”

Marcus chuckled too. “No,” he said. “With candles like these, that would take an hour or so. Normally after a few minutes we put them out. Unless you want to take a selfie first?”

“What’s a selfie?”

Everybody who had a phone handy went for it. Soon that darkened space was illuminated not just by candlelight, but smartphone flashes, and the brief solemnity was replaced by laughter. Then one by one the friends surrounding him blew out Filif’s candles, or pinched them out, and Dairine let the room lights come up again. Carefully they took the candles and their holders off him, and when the last holder was off and put away, Filif gave a great shake of all his boughs and laughed again.

“That was exciting,” he said. “Maybe a little more exciting than I expected. I might take a break…”

“Outside?” Nita said.

“Yes.” And Filif made his way to the portal, and once just outside it, vanished.

Kit rubbed his eyes. “That,” he said, “was intense.”

“Going to be interesting to hear more about just what brought it on,” Ronan said, sounding dry. “But I need a nap first.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “We’ll ask him about it at breakfast…”

People started arranging the pillows and cushions into sleepover configurations, and Dairine fired up the TV again and turned it on to one of the music video channels that was doing Christmas rock. Nita yawned, feeling more than ready to collapse. But there was something she wanted to do first.

She went out the portal, climbed the stairs, and peered into the living room. All the adults had gone home or taken themselves off to bed; only the mochteroof-tree stood there glowing. Nita smiled at it and very softly went out the back yard, into the darkness.

It was snowing in big flakes, sometimes even gathering together into light feathery clumps. Off in front of the garage, Filif stood for the moment bare to the night, not even wearing his star, wholly unadorned except for the snow falling on him.

“You okay?” Nita said.

“Yes,” Filif said. “Very.”

Nita hugged herself a little against the cold. “You know… your branches are lovely.”

“You’re going to tell me,” Filif said, “that the frost and snow are prettier than all the ornaments and garlands.”

Nita let out a breath. “Yeah,” she said, “sounds like cliché city, doesn’t it.”

“If you mean that it’s a much-repeated old saying,” said Filif, “then likely enough there’s at least some truth to it. That’s how such sayings so often gain such currency…”

He sounded contented, though, and cheerful. “It’s good to recognize a challenge when it comes along,” Filif said after a moment. “It’s even better to pass it.”

Nita nodded. She knew the feeling. “You know what?” Filif said. “I think I’ll put on my ornaments and stand out here just a little while more.”

Nita glanced around. “Okay,” she said. “But better leave the lights with the mochteroof inside. You’re outside the shield here, and you don’t want to attract any undue attention…”

“All right.”

“We’re all crashing back in Dairine’s puptent,” she said, “so when you’re done here…”

“I’ll be back.”

Nita ran a hand through some of Filif’s outermost fronds and headed back inside, feeling, for some reason, a little uneasy. It wasn’t really until she was down in Dairine’s puptent again, pulling a throw over herself in the TV-lit dimness, that she came up with a reason why. Because defiance, when issued, is always noticed…

5: In The Bleak Midwinter

The sound of footsteps was what slowly woke Nita up. Nothing but rugs in here, she thought blearily. Thick. Soft. What’s crunching? Somebody drop the popcorn?

Nita yawned and blinked and realized suddenly that she was standing outside next to Kit’s house, in the snow. It was very dark. The light from the streetlight down at the corner didn’t reach this far, and the lights of the nearby houses were all off: even the ones that had Christmas lights on them had them turned off this time of night. It was still clouded over, but there was a strange dark pinkish shading on the clouds above.

Well, this is unusual, Nita thought. Like city light. But above the clouds, not below. It was also unusual that she wasn’t feeling any cold, even though she was standing out in the wintry night in nothing but pajamas and a bathrobe and her bedroom slippers. From nearby she could hear the crunching noise again, like somebody walking on a sidewalk that’d been salted.

“Shit,” somebody said: a male voice. “What’s that?”

The voice was coming from the direction of the street, down at the end of Kit’s driveway, and whoever was speaking was turned toward her: she could just make out the dark shape down that way. A second or so later, another came stumbling along the snowy sidewalk to join it.

“There’s something there lookin’ at us,” said another voice. “See it?”

The voice was thick and slurred and angry. Something about the sound of it brought the hair up on the back of Nita’s neck, made her want to reach back in her mind for the shield-spell that she’d developed a long time ago to protect herself from the depredations of bullies.

“One of them out here now,” said a second voice, slightly lighter and higher than the other, but just as slurred. “All by themselves in the middle of the night. Hey! What the fuck you staring at?”

That was when Nita realized that she was dreaming. This had been happening with increasing frequency of late. Mostly it happened that a dream would suddenly turn entirely too rational: dialogue would start making too much sense. Then Nita would know, I’ve gone lucid, and she’d start paying attention, or telling Bobo to.

Now she flushed briefly hot with fear… then said to herself, No. They can’t hurt me. This is my dream. But Nita fleetingly wondered if the two dark parka-clad shapes, one a little taller than the other, knew that.

“I said what’re you staring at?”

Nita stood still, said nothing, just watched. The two shapes at the end of the driveway staggered against each other. “Man, too much of that beer,” said one of them. “Gotta get Dad to buy a better brand.”

“No such thing as too much. Not around here. Stupid place, stupid fucking—” One of them staggered again as he tried to regain his balance. “Rude,” he said in Nita’s direction, “that’s rude when you don’t answer when somebody asks you something nicely. Gonna get your fucking guts punched out.”

The two of them lurched together again, rebounded, and started coming up the driveway, pushing their way through the six inches or so of new snow that had fallen since a car last used the driveway. As they got closer Nita recognized the two staggering, approaching shapes. Oh great. The Terror Twins from next door. She reached for the shield-spell on her charm bracelet: then realized she didn’t have the bracelet on. Doesn’t matter, I know that one by heart. They staggered closer. Nita raised her hands to either side, got ready to say the words—

But as they got even closer she realized, even in this darkness, how blank their eyes were, and the way they weren’t focusing on her at all, but on something past her. They didn’t see her. My dream, Nita thought as they walked right at her, and then right through her. She could smell the beer on them as they passed through the space her dream-self occupied.

“Hey,” one of them said: Bobby, she thought, by the lower voice. “Not somebody. Something. Look, it’s shiny.”

“Still feels like something looking at us,” said Ronnie, the younger one, squinting at something ahead of them. Nita turned to see. “Creepy. …Wha’d those shitheads next door do now? Look, they left their tree outside.”

“Why’d they do that when it’s decorated?”

A chill that had nothing to do with the night or the snow ran up and down Nita’s spine. No! No no no no! Fil, get out of here!

But the quiet tree-shape, wound about with garlands, draped with tinsel, glittering indistinctly where it stood in the slightly drifted snow next to the garage, paid her no mind, did nothing at all. Bobby and Ronnie trudged over to it, trying to be quiet and failing utterly.

“Why’d they leave it out like this? Stupid.”

“Trying to keep it fresh longer, maybe.”

“Still stupid. Somebody might steal it.”

“Yeah.” There was a nasty snicker.

“Or torch it.” Nita heard a click, saw a lighter flare bright, then go out again. “Teach them to make noise, spoil other people’s Christmas. You hear the fucking racket out of them before?”

“Woke me up.”

The deeper voice swore again. “Assholes, all the cutesy holiday crap they spray around. All the time getting in your face with the carols and the family-values thing.” The sound of someone hawking, spitting in the snow. “You hear them in there tonight? Couldn’t hear yourself think, all the singing, some foreign freaks or something singing along. And now they leave this thing out here like nobody’s going to touch it—”

Laughter. “Torch it. Bet it’d burn real fast.”

“Yeah. Come on.”

One of them put out a hand. “But wait, what if that geek kid’s got a webcam looking at it or something?”

“Who cares. Pull up your hood, hide your face, what’re they gonna do? It’s still snowing, an hour or two and our tracks’ll be covered, nobody’ll know who we are or where we went.”

The lighter flared again.

“No, wait,” said the higher voice. “This tinsel, this other crap’s got fire retardant on it. Pull it off first, it’ll burn better.”

Hands reached out, grabbed loops of the garland, strands of the tinsel, pulled—

That was when the tree moved.

Nita saw Bobby and Ronnie reel back in shock at the sudden movement. And then they staggered back further as they realized the tree had lights, lights that looked like eyes, eyes that were glaring at them. Every one of these burned a dark and baleful red, like a more concentrated version of the ruddy bloody light lowering above the clouds. Nita saw how the tree was now moving toward them as they backed up, and how it abruptly seemed much larger than it should have been: much broader, much taller, like something about to consciously topple onto them, massive, unavoidable. Shadow wreathed around it like fog, spreading, shutting them in, blotting out even the faint rose-tinged radiance of the snow. And from the depths of the shadow, a terrible voice spoke, it seemed, directly into each one’s heart.

Who’s. Touching. My. Decorations?!

The two parka-clad shapes collapsed onto the snow and froze there.

The shadow seemed to get deeper around them, and the night colder, as if the two would-be vandals had been snatched out of real life into some dark and deadly impossibility that had been lurking unseen on their doorstep.

I know what you are, the tree growled. It was an angry voice, full of power, and wild in a way that suggested that power might be turned loose at any moment. And I know the one you serve. You can do me no harm. Of more concern is what harm may come to you.

The Terror Twins lay huddling and shaking there on the snow, arms over their heads, wanting desperately to run away, not daring to move. Nita stood a few yards away from this and regarded the scene in wonder.

The angry voice spoke again, this time with more restraint: and the restraint was in its way even more terrifying than the power alone, for it implied what could happen if it slipped. Yet the One requests us to deal equably even with such as you, in hopes that the one you serve may sooner find Its way home at last. And I am reliably informed that mercy is valued even more highly than usual at this time of year.

Indeed the echo of voices singing “Peace on Earth and mercy mild” (one of them apparently Bill Murray’s) could be heard faintly all around, as if leaking from the playback of recent additions to the soundtrack of someone’s mind. Nita smiled to herself even as she shivered a little, considering once more—for she’d had it brought to her attention by Dairine in an informal debrief of events surrounding Filif’s visit to their house the previous year—that his toughness under pressure wasn’t to be taken for granted.

So perhaps, the darkly towering shape said, in honor of this season, you will be allowed to depart into your own place unharmed. But should you ever… ever… consider such actions against another’s state of being or place of dwelling again, you will hear me speaking to you again. And I will not be as pleasant with you. We will not be as pleasant with you.

And the back yard was abruptly full of trees.

It was a forest, sudden, deep, thick, dark, frightening in the way that great forests have been since the earliest times—that sense that in the darkness, wild things, dangerous things are looking at you, seeing you though they themselves cannot be seen. Except here, they could. Here the darkness had eyes, hundreds of them, thousands, staring, glaring, in every shade of angry, hungry red. The snow under the mist at their half-seen feet was bloody with that light, and the mist curled pink and warm like blood in water.

Be warned by us, therefore. Depart now into your own place— And suddenly the tone broke, shifted to a roar of fury. And be better!

The darkness surged closer, full of eyes, roaring. The two terrified shapes staggered to their feet, fled around the side of the house next door and (from the sound of it) nearly broke its side door down getting back inside.

And in Kit’s yard, the trees turned their attention to Nita.

All she could do for the first moment or so was shake her head. “My cousins—” she said finally, and bowed to them. “For your intervention, my thanks!”

All that multifarious rustling darkness swayed, bowing back. And a moment later they were gone, and there was Filif all by himself, glittering ever so faintly and somehow managing to look quite innocent.

Nita folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. “Filif…!”

He rustled all his branches, glittering more brightly as the clouds above them thinned just a little, and the Moon, starting slowly to edge out of its coppery shade with the end of totality, cast a little more light on the scene. “Too harsh?” he said.

She laughed softly, went to hug him. And then, as the stress of the previous moments finally let go of her, Nita couldn’t help it: she started to giggle. It took a while to get control again. “Oh, Fil!”

“Are you all right?” he said, sounding concerned.

The giggling threatened to burst out again. Nita wiped her eyes. “Are you kidding? I almost wet myself!”

“Um. Is that good?”

“You have no idea.”

They laughed together for a few moments. “One thing, though,” he said. “Are you physical at the moment?”

“Uh,” Nita said, stepping back and looking at her fingers as she wiggled them. “Not sure.”

“Then this situation might correctly be considered paradoxical,” Filif said, “and you ought to retire until our respective states of existence are back in sync.”

“Breakfast time?” Nita said.

“Sounds good,” Filif said.

And Nita brushed her hand through his fronds and headed back toward sleep, glancing only once over her shoulder to see the shape behind her settle back into the snow and go back to glittering softly in the moonlight.

This, she thought as things went dark around her again, is the best job in the world…!

6: I’ll Be Home For Christmas

The kitchen and dining room area at Kit’s house could in Nita’s experience feel fairly full sometimes just with Kit and his sisters. This morning it was rather fuller than usual when Dairine’s puptent emptied out.

Everyone was in bathrobes or pajamas. Everyone was ravenous (despite having stuffed themselves with popcorn the night before. (“It’s a conundrum,” Kit’s pop said, going back for a second bowl of oatmeal.) Some parties had opted for cooked breakfasts: to take the weight off Kit’s mama, Nita was officiating at the pancake end of things, and was presently making a third batch of batter.

The cereals were getting hit particularly hard, and when Helena got home for the holidays Nita knew she was going to complain bitterly about the loss of her stash of Grape Nuts—apparently Marcus had never heard of the stuff before and had fallen deeply in love with it. The cornflakes were vanishing down Matt about twice as fast as the Rice Krispies were evaporating in front of Darryl. And Ronan was favoring a box of Lucky Charms with an utterly scandalized expression. “Nothing to do with us,” he was saying to anyone who’d listen. “Nothing whatsoever. Shamrocks have three leaves!”

While all this went on around her, Kit’s mama was sitting back in her chair at the dining room table, sipping coffee and scrolling through messages on her phone. Kit’s pop was reading the paper. Off to one side, Sker’ret reared up at the edge of the table and looked longingly at the box of Cheerios from which Kit was dumping the remainder into his bowl. “Is that finished?”

Kit handed him the box. “Sorry, Sker’.”

“Don’t be,” Sker’ret said, and promptly ate it.

Kit’s pop watched this speculatively but without comment. Nita, in the kitchen, glanced at Kit and smiled a little. They’re getting the hang of this…

He smiled back. Looks like it.

Kit’s pop turned a page in the paper and frowned absently at the contents. “So about all that noise in the middle of the night…” he said conversationally.

“Noise?” said Kit.

“Some kind of racket outside, seems like,” Dairine said. “I missed it. Must have been asleep.”

“Got a text from the hospital this morning,” Kit’s mama said, completely straight-faced. “The boys from next door turned up in the ER at four AM or thereabouts. Alcohol poisoning, apparently: their blood alcohol was well up. Might have been drugs too, though the tox screens apparently didn’t show anything.”

“Do tell,” said Dairine.

“Yes. Seems they were babbling about giant demon trees with a million eyes.”

Everybody turned to glance thoughtfully at the Christmas tree in the living room. The Christmas tree stretched its limbs gently, causing all the tinsel on it to ripple, and settled back into its big bucket of rooting compound again.

“You fall asleep with the wrong movie channel on,” Nita said, “there’s no telling what kind of dreams you might have. Especially if you’d been drinking.”

“Mmm,” said Kit’s mama, taking another drink of her coffee.

“I wonder what they’ll do,” Kit’s pop said.

Kit shook his head, finishing his cereal. “First guess?” he said. “Leave everybody’s Christmas decorations strictly alone after this.”

In the living room, Filif rustled. “That was more or less the injunction…”

“Well,” Nita said “you didn’t absolutely mandate it.“

“No,” Filif said. “That would probably have required more power than I was willing to expend at that particular moment. And psychotropic wizardries do require heavy energy expenditure, typically to prevent them being misused as much as anything else.” He rustled his boughs a little bit. “Let’s just consider it… a very strong suggestion.”

Nita laughed softly. “If that was a suggestion,” she said, “remind me not to be around when you order somebody to do something.”

“An unexpected gift,” Kit’s pop said. His mama nodded in agreement.

“So what’s on the agenda?”

“Carols this evening,” said Kit’s mama. “You are all invited. You,” she said, pointing at Ronan, “are required. As many of you as want to come along… we’ll find room for you.” She looked over at Sker’ret. “Wonder if we could disguise you somehow?”

In a blink or so a young dark-haired guy of about fifteen, in jeans and a jacket and a T-shirt underneath that said LINEAR TIME IS TOO A LIFESTYLE CHOICE was standing where Sker’ret had been, with a startling purple streak in his shaggy mop. “Probably we can come up with something,” he said.

Kit’s mama and pop stared. Then his mama said, “Can you sing?” And his pop went back to his paper.

Nita put a last few pancakes on the griddle, checked its temperature, and left them to get on with cooking, then wandered out to the living room. Filif watched her come, and rustled his branches a little. “So has this gone as expected?” she said.

“Better,” he said, all his eyes shining.

“Got it all figured out yet?”

Filif laughed at her. “First impressions, perhaps, and admittedly superficial. …Though there are some similarities to the Outlier’s Time. …Joy. The memory of joy. Loss, and the memory of it.”

Nita breathed out, looking at the one ornament that shone like Earth at its full. “And getting past it,” Nita said, very low.

“Or getting through it,” Filif said. “Does anyone ever get ‘past’? I wonder. Why would you want to pass old joy, or sweet memories that now cause you pain, without greeting them, as if they were just someone in a crowd at the Crossings? It seems rude.”

Nita nodded. “Sounds true.”

They were quiet together for a moment. Finally Filif said, “You have to come up to the Nightless Days festival with me some time,” he said. “The family will want to meet you. More concretely than last night, anyway.”

“I’d really like that,” Nita said.

“So would I, coz,” Filif said. “Family can plainly become extended in mysterious ways. Doubtless the Powers’ plan for us, meant to compensate for the ways our schedules become otherwise disrupted.”

“It’s so true,” Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.

“Meantime,” Filif said. “About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask. How long does this go on?”

Nita was just opening her mouth when Kit’s mama put her head through the passthrough.

“Twelve days,” she said.

Filif looked at Nita. “It’ll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

Afterword

How Lovely Are Thy Branches was in progress, on and off, for several years. It was first conceived in 2011 while I was working on the “outline” for the “Christmas special” The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, which appears here; and it was in relation to the outline that HLATB was first mentioned, at the bottom of this post. (Six Tasks is of course itself a somewhat thinly veiled joke about / reference to other Christmas specials such as the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2014.)

Much of this work was written to Christmas music, as you might imagine. An informal playlist, referring to the chapter titles:

“We Need A Little Christmas”: The song comes from the musical Mame. Here is Angela Lansbury singing the lead vocal on the original 1966 Broadway cast recording, or here in live performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir & Orchestra. Or at Amazon.

“Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow”: A classic written by Sammy Cohn and Jule Styne when they were trapped in Hollywood during a heat wave, and covered since then by almost everybody you can think of. The original Vaughn Monroe recording of the old favorite (probably best known these days for turning up at the end of Die Hard) is here. A smooth-but-upbeat Big Band-era, boogie-woogie-ish rendition by Frank Sinatra is here. For something more recent, try Idina Menzel’s cover.

“O Come, All Ye Faithful”: The English-language restatement of the Latin title Adeste Fideles. Hugely popular in both the English and Latin versions. The “Three Tenors” version here contains both. A 1950s-ish cover by Mario Lanza is here.

“O Tannenbaum”: Dissected here in some detail by the participants. German-language versions worth listening to are this one by Andrea Bocelli—in Italian, with different words again—and this one by Nana Mouskouri. …For many North Americans, the best-known version is the famous instrumental from A Charlie Brown Christmas, performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

“Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella”: Traditional, French, and four centuries old, give or take a few decades; possibly better known these days as an instrumental than a vocal (though here is a typical vocal rendition by the Robert Shaw Chorale). One cheerful instrumental cover is this one by Loreena McKennitt.

“In The Bleak Midwinter”: Relatively new as carols go; written by the poet Christina Rosetti in the 1870s, and set to music by numerous composers including Gustav Holst, who did what’s probably now the best-known setting. One nice version is the King’s College Cambridge cover here. Another is this Allison Crowe cover.

“I’ll Be Home For Christmas”: Its original 1943 recording by Bing Crosby (the B side of “White Christmas”) probably remains its best-known version, but many many other artists have covered it over the years. The Frank Sinatra cover is worth hearing, as is the one by Michael Bublé.

Some other minor issues:

Bubble lights: See the incredible patent hoohah surrounding the introduction (and shameless pirating) of these lights here.

The fire kink: The special Christmas tree candle holders that Markus goes back to fetch from his home in Freiburg can be seen here at the website of that superlative online (and offline) German department store, Manufactum. Older solutions to the candles-on-the-tree problem can be seen here at OldChristmasTreeLights.com.

The Winter Solstice lunar eclipse of 2010: The first time the Solstice coincided with a total lunar eclipse since the 1990s: the next such coincidence will not occur until 2094. Details of this eclipse can be found here at Fred Espenak’s definitive eclipse website.

Lifeboats

For the absent friends

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any [long-term] survival value.

— Arthur C. Clarke (amendment via Stephen Hawking)

You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.

— Edwin Louis Cole

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

— Thornton Wilder

ONE

JD 2455600.4380

In the pursuit of the business of errantry, most wizards who walk the High Road past the borders of atmosphere swiftly become used to looking up into strange skies—nights with extra moons, days with extra suns, skies with (compared to the observer’s homeworld) too many stars or not nearly enough. Rings arching overhead, their complex detail blunted and tinted by atmosphere in a hundred shades of pastel; multicolored nebula-veils flung crumpled and glowing across tens of millions of miles of darkness; comet-tails painting the endless night with the palest and most attenuated of brushstrokes—all these become relatively commonplace.

Over the busy few years since Kit Rodriguez had passed his Ordeal and become a wizard, he’d seen all these and more. One or two such sights had become familiar enough that he hardly noticed them any more. But what hung over Kit now was something he knew would be haunting his dreams for a long time to come.

Across the broad, shadowy twilit landscape where he sat, down from the distant mountains edging the horizon, a chill wind blew. Out before him in the darkness, a broad plain faintly suffused with bloody light, uneasy with the distant half-seen movement of thousands of people, lay glittering with the lights of hundreds of scattered electronic campfires—the most visible sign of people sharing their last meals, and their last moments of warmth together, before their lives ended. A quarter of the sky above him was blotted out by a great lowering mass of darkness and fire: horribly convex and claustrophobic, seemingly pressing downwards from the sky like a burning roof about to collapse on everyone trapped underneath it. The appearance was at least partly an illusion, Kit knew, but the reality it hinted at was deadly enough. All around him a world was ending—was literally in its death-throes—and nothing he could do was going to stop it.

Kit sat there shivering in that thin cold wind, feeling (for the moment anyway) both helpless and very much alone. And then even the shivering stopped, very suddenly, as he realized that very near him, something was moving in that darkness. He could hear the rustle of it as it made its way toward him through the wind-shaken grass… could see a hint of its movement, indistinct, bizarre.

Kit forced himself to stay absolutely still, waiting, watching, as darkly shining tentacles slowly came oozing along toward him out of the smoky twilight. And along with them, wide and staring, came the eyes… so many eyes fixed on him: alien, unreadable, strange.

As the creature crept toward him and more and more of those weird cold eyes became apparent every moment, Kit sat still and gripped his antenna-wand and tried to keep himself calm, waiting to see what would happen. But the main thought running through his mind at the moment was:

When they asked me to do this job… why exactly didn’t I wait a few moments before I said yes?

TWO

Sol III: 2/2/2011

About a thousand years ago, it now felt like, it had been five in the afternoon, and gray outside: just gray.

It was cold. It was cloudy. It was getting dark already. It was the beginning of February, and there was going to be a math test two days from now, on Friday, and Kit was going to flunk it. Massively, he thought. Horribly. In ways that no human being has ever flunked before. I’m about to make history. Future generations will laugh at the sound of my name.

Kit was sitting upstairs at the desk in his room, leaning on his elbows, his head propped in his hands. Normally the desk was comfortably cluttered with piled-up books and old CDs and DVDs and stick drives and scrap paper and soft drawing pencils; but all that had been cleared away in a desperate attempt to help focus his concentration. Now the desk was unnaturally tidy, and on it in front of him Kit had his math book open and a workbook open and a notebook open, and a calculator app up and running on his phone. He was gazing in an unfocused way at all of these while he played with a fairly hard-leaded pencil he’d just sharpened for the fourth time—the pencil being a mute and miserable acknowledgment of the fact that this was not going to be homework he could do using a pen. All over the floor around Kit were ripped-out, crumpled-up pages from the notebook, the most recent ones crumpled up a whole lot harder than the earlier ones, and thrown a lot further away.

Also open in front of him was his manual, which was not helping, not even slightly. Neither was the person using it to talk to him.

“I really can’t do this,” Kit muttered.

You really can, said his manual: or rather, that was what it said on the text page of his manual, which was displaying the texts Nita was sending him. Just take your time.

“I really wish you’d just, you know, give me a hint about this…”

You mean do it for you. He was sure she was laughing at him.

“Why not? Isn’t this what—” He was going to say what friends are for, and then had an instantaneous moment of panic, because of course that’s what we are, friends, except of course it’s kind of—more, and if I just say ‘friend’ what if she misunderstands me and she thinks that—

Nope, Nita said.

Kit rubbed his eyes, ridiculously grateful to have been let off the hook so easily. At the same time he was annoyed by it, and at the moment couldn’t really figure out why. So he fell back on annoyance at the math, which was a lot easier to rationalize. “Why do I even need this? I am never going to need calculus for anything!”

You might need it for wizardry.

“And if I do, the manual will do it for me!”

Except you can’t bring your manual into the test on Friday.

“I could! I could disguise it as a calculator!”

It won’t let you. It’ll know you’re doing it to cheat.

“This is so unfair.”

What, that I won’t do it for you? Or that wizardry won’t let you cheat?

“You could have a word with Bobo! Bobo would change the rules for me.”

In your dreams, but nowhere else, something breathed in Kit’s ear.

All the hair on Kit’s neck abruptly stood up, for what he’d heard was no voice of a living thing. It sounded like his own thoughts, happening inside his own head, except it wasn’t anything that Kit had been thinking. —What? Kit thought, and “What?!” he said.

What? Nita said.

“Uh. I heard something. I think—” Kit dropped the much-chewed pencil on his much-erased notebook page and shook his head, because this shouldn’t be possible, at least not as far as he knew. “I think I heard Bobo!” Which was leaving him seriously freaked out, because having Wizardry itself in his head was definitely not his department, it was Nita’s. Does this mean that we—is this something that’s happening because we’re— Kit broke out in a sweat.

But when the text field on his manual started filling up again, the feeling he got from the message was perhaps a touch annoyed, but otherwise unconcerned. Oh great, not you too.

Kit opened his mouth, closed it again. Then said, “Wait. Me too?”

Yeah, Ronan heard him once a couple of weeks ago.

His immediate reaction was Oh what a relief!… instantly followed by Wait a minute, how does he rate? Then Kit rolled his eyes at himself. Get a grip. “Really?”

Yeah. We were having a conversation about some girl Ronan said he was having trouble with, and then he said he heard Bobo tell him to ‘stop acting the maggot.’

Kit blinked. “What?”

You’re asking me what it means? How do I know what maggots act like in Ireland? All I know is that Ronan messaged me afterwards and told me that the Spirit of Wizardry was going to get its head punched in if somebody didn’t put some manners on it.

That made Kit snicker. “You sure Bobo’s not trying to pick up some overtime working as the voice of people’s consciences or something?”

Please. He’s been snarky enough lately that I’m wondering what’s going on with him. Like somebody took Jiminy Cricket and replaced him with Jon Stewart.

Kit laughed harder.

Meanwhile, look, you’ve just got to loosen up about this… You’re just making it harder for yourself. Calculus is just a way of describing change; of modeling systems that’ll show the way things move through space and time.

“I have a manual for that!” Kit said. “And as for this, I want to kick whoever invented it.”

That would be Sir Isaac Newton, Nita said, and tracking him down to kick him’s probably gonna take a lot more moving through space and time than either of us wants right now. Just go back and read the chapter on differentials again. Seriously, it’s not that bad.

Kit groaned and dropped his head onto his folded arms, rolling it back and forth. Yes it is! Why are you so optimistic?

Because you’re smart, and I know you’ll get it if you work on it.

“Oh please,” Kit muttered. “Only if you do find Isaac Newton and lock him in here with me.”

Anyway, this shouldn’t be so hard for you! How come you’re having so much trouble concentrating lately?

There were about fifty answers to that, Kit thought. The problem was trying to figure out which one was affecting him today. The Christmas holidays had been good—in fact, unusually good, because of aliens coming to camp out “in the basement,” a truly memorable holiday party and sleepover, and other wizardly incursions into the normal events of the season. It had all been so terrific that Kit almost didn’t mind going back to school afterwards, due to being kind of wrung out by all the happy excitement.

But that hadn’t lasted long. School had without warning turned mind-numbingly boring. It was the contrast, maybe, Kit thought, with all the stuff that happened in December. All of a sudden everything went back to normal. Too much normal. Nothing that interesting’s come up for me and Neets at the errantry end, these last few weeks. And the other wizards we know have all been busy with stuff: too busy to have time to hang out. Kit rubbed his eyes. Then this calculus unit started, and life hasn’t been worth living ever since. It’s like it’s all in some other language that even knowing the Speech can’t help...

Which was part of the problem, maybe. Kit wasn’t used to feeling helpless, these days. What he was used to was figuring things out—for wizardry was all about working your way through to the answers—and about depending on stubbornness to get him to and through the places where figuring things out wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, calculus seemed to be gazing with faint amusement at his stubbornness and just barely resisting the urge to burst out laughing.

And then of course there was the other issue, which Kit absolutely wasn’t going to mention to Nita at the moment. Twelve days yet. Twelve days… Kit started chewing on the pencil again.

Earth to Rodriguez? the text in the manual said. Come in, Rodriguez!

Kit dropped the pencil in annoyance. “Neets, seriously,” Kit said, “what’s with the texting? You coming down with laryngitis or something?”

There was a pause. Busy, she said after a moment.

“With what? Or is Dairine hanging over your shoulder?” Because that was always a possibility. If that was the case, what she was doing made sense: the manual could take a wizard’s subvocalizations, or even raw thought, and render them as text when necessary.

Another pause, longer this time. Well…

Kit picked up the pencil again and started twiddling it as another pause ensued, even longer—

Then a sudden noise at the other end of his room made Kit jump right up out of his chair as the big framed picture of him and Ponch on the far wall leaped away from that wall and landed with a thump face down on his bed.

A second later, a head—a pebbly-scaled, goggle-eyed saurian head, a hugely toothy head nearly four feet wide—appeared out of nothing, apparently sticking itself right through that wall and filling most of that end of the room. It looked around it with interest.

Kit stared. “What the—?” he said. It came out more as a squeak than a word, his voice breaking, but just for this once Kit was too stunned to be embarrassed by that. “…Mamvish?”

If what Kit was looking at was a projection, it was a most unusual one: it gave a general sense of not so much coexisting with the local reality as overriding it. Makes sense, though, Kit thought, for the shape looking at him belonged to one of the most powerful wizards in this part of the galaxy: someone with power ratings so high that the Lone Power had apparently elected to sit out her Ordeal, claiming to have been indisposed. If despite this Mamvish also acted generally like a very gifted eight-year-old with a very short fuse, well, that was more or less what she was, comparing her present age—just a couple of Earth millennia—against her own very long-lived people’s lifespans.

The main question now was what she was doing projecting an eidolon of herself through Kit’s bedroom wall. Normally, when Mamvish’s insanely busy schedule made it possible for her to grace this planet with her presence, she came in via personal worldgating and concealed herself somewhere convenient until people could come meet up with her. That was the way Kit had last seen her, for about thirty seconds, at Christmas—cheerfully stamping around in the snow in his temporarily spell-shielded driveway while wizards and assorted others fought for the chance to hug her hello before she had to teleport away again, heading back to the business of saving some threatened species light years away.

Now, though, Mamvish looked harried and worried: her conical eyes, so much like those of an iguana or chameleon, were revolving out of phase with one another, in directions Kit had never seen them go before. And a layer or two down in her extraordinary hide, always an indicator of what was going on in her thoughts and emotions, such a violently-colored whirl and blaze of crimson and golden Speech-characters was roiling under the surface that she looked like she might be about to catch fire.

Kit was so flummoxed by all of this that he didn’t even think to say “Dai stihó” to her before anything else. What came out instead was, “Mamvish, would you hold still, you’re knocking all my stuff down!”

“Oh,” Mamvish said, looking around her in shock. Her eyes bugged out a bit more than usual then, the expression fairly abashed, as she tried to move as little as possible. Nonetheless she managed to jostle the bookshelf at the far end of the room, right by the left side of her massive head, and knock some of Kit’s older model airplanes off the top shelf. “Sorry, Kit. Sorry! Kind of in a hurry here—!”

Kit winced as the models hit the floor and shattered, then tried to get control of himself: there certainly had to be more important things to think about than assorted busted plastic when Mamvish’s head was sticking through his wall. More or less… “It’s okay,” Kit said. “What’s up?”

Mamvish rolled her iridescent eyes some more—always a sight worth watching, even when she appeared to be mostly annoyed at herself—and went entirely still except for the storm of Speech-symbols swirling under her skin. “Christopher Kellen Rodriguez,” she said, “well met in haste and on the business of the Powers we jointly serve! In my capacity as Species Archivist to the Powers that Be and chief among senior rafting coordinators for the galactic subregion locally referred to as the Orion Arm, by seniority granted and Wizard’s Right asserted, I formally request and require your assistance in an intervention classified as physically and temporally urgent for the survival of a significant portion of a sentient species ranked at aggregated centrality-level two hundred or above. Said intervention will for logistical purposes be staged out of the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility at Rirhath B, and will take place in and around the immediate neighborhood of a star manual-designated as ‘Sendwathesh’ and locally identified as 11848 Cephei, a type A8 star in a circumstellar microassociation with the star locally identified as mu Cephei, also known as Erakis. This intervention’s duration is estimated to be on the close order of seventy-two to ninety-six hours local time, plus or minus twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The anticipated level of difficulty does not exceed ‘moderately dangerous’, though instabilities in the local situation may at short notice require its reclassification to ‘critical’, ‘extremely critical’, or ‘disaster’. Will you assist?”

Then Mamvish stopped, panting, and her eyes rolled desperately around as if she was concerned about moving any other part of her, for fear she’d accidentally make something else fall down.

“Wow,” Kit said, and for some moments didn’t know what to say: it had been quite a while since (in the wizardly sense) he’d been drafted. As always, the Powers left the final choice to participate in a Wizard’s Right situation with the wizard being requisitioned for the project. But the truth was that a responsible wizard didn’t refuse such a call when it came. No one invoked Wizard’s Right unless there was the prospect of serious loss of life, and a plan to keep it from happening.

Kit went ever so briefly hot with pride at the thought that there was something going on in which he’d somehow been identified as important. “Mamvish, sure, of course,” he said, and paused to start doing the kind of math in his head that he mercifully didn’t have trouble with. “…But wait. Four days? And it might be six or seven, but it also might be just two?”

“I wouldn’t bet on the two,” Mamvish said, sounding very annoyed for a moment. “Nothing about this project has gone the way it was expected to so far—” Her projection twitched in frustration, and another model, a World War II Spitfire that Kit was particularly fond of, fell off the top of the bookshelf and crashed to the floor.

Kit sighed. It’s a good thing I can restore those to their previous energy state with a little work… he thought. Or a lot… “Mam, what’s this about?” he said. “Who else is in on this?”

Her eyes revolved faster. “Everyone, nearly,” she said.

Kit blinked, not very sure how to take that.

“It’s so annoying because there’s just no time for personal briefings!” Mamvish said. “I’m requisitioning everybody else on this planet who’s qualified for this and not otherwise occupied, right this minute, and then I have five or six other planets to visit before I can get back to the Crossings and start holding the orientations—we’re going to have to do them a couple or few thousand beings at a time, there’s no other way. Right now speed’s of the essence: the sooner we can get all the necessary wizards emplaced, the better it’s going to be for everybody. How soon can you be there?”

Oh God, this is going to get complicated.

“Mamvish,” Kit said, “obviously this is incredibly serious and I really want to come—” He glanced back at his math notebook with complete loathing: anything that would get him away from this, up to and including a planetary disaster, was welcome. “But we’re in the middle of the school week and I really doubt my folks are going to let me take four days off…”

“Oh no, it’s all right, I know you’re in a time-structured learning situation! And the sooner that’s done with, the happier I’ll be… we could use you out here full time! But for this intervention, your local timeflow won’t be a problem. Timeslides have been authorized for everyone who participates: you’ll be away from your local time coordinates for a maximum of ten minutes. Ideally less, depending on the strain on local temporality due to multiple slides terminating in your area. Call it fifteen minutes at most.”

“Whoa,” Kit said. Senior wizards tended to be very twitchy about handing out free passes for what was essentially personal time travel. Whatever was going on out there must be pretty dire. “But I’ve still got to talk to my mama and pop, I can’t do this without them saying it’s okay—”

“You do that,” Mamvish said. “If you need me to, I’ll talk to them as well.”

What is going on? Kit thought. Well, never mind, better get busy. “Popi’ll be home pretty soon,” Kit said. “Mama hasn’t left for work yet—I’ll talk to her now.”

“Very well,” Mamvish said. “I’ve dropped a preliminary precís in your manual. Very preliminary: everything’s changing so fast… Dai stihó, cousin. And hurry!”

And she was gone. Kit stared at the far wall, where the photo of him and Ponch was hanging again: and at his bookshelf, where the model planes were sitting as if nothing had happened to them at all, probably right down to the placement of the individual grains of dust that had coated them (because even with wizardry, Kit was terrible at dusting).

He sat back down in his chair and looked at his manual. The text page was blank.

“Neets?” he said.

There was a pause: and then a voice spoke from the page. “Well,” Nita said, “somehow I don’t think I’m all that busy any more…”

“Giant saurian wizard head just got stuck through your wall?” Kit said.

Nita snickered. “She was in so much of a rush she messed up her coordinates. I got her butt end first.”

Kit burst out laughing. “Never mind. Gotta go talk to the folks. Catch you afterwards? ”

“Me too. Say an hour or so.”

Before he went downstairs, Kit took just long enough to have a very brief glance at the précis Mamvish had dumped into his manual. It was going to have to be brief, because the red-highlighted section of pages which had appeared in the book was about as thick as his finger. “Jeez,” he said under his breath as he looked over the abstract on the first page of the section. Speech-words of a severity that he’d never seen before were peppered all through it, including one long thorny phrase that corresponded to “species/environment extinction event” and somehow managed to look as if it was crouching on the page and preparing to leap at your throat.

Kit shivered with a sudden chill down his back and realized that he’d actually started sweating again just looking at the précis. The basics of it were bad enough, quickly grasped as he looked at the diagram displaying itself at the top of the manual page and cycling through several different views and modes. A relatively Earthlike world circling a distant star; a moon of that world’s, much larger than Earth’s moon; a schematic of a set of tectonic lines underlying the crust of that moon, all flaring and flowing red with violent stresses—

He shook his head, not really needing the following view of the inevitable next stage in the process, the moon’s breakup. Doesn’t much matter where the pieces go after that, Kit thought, sucking breath in. Bust up one of a pair like that and the other one’s gonna be uninhabitable pretty quick… And that was the problem, because there were a lot of people living on that planet. Which is where Mamvish comes in. Question is, what’s she got planned?

Kit slapped the manual shut and headed out of his room and down the stairs, fairly twitching with unease and excitement. It was interesting how news of a major interstellar disaster could within seconds make your own problems seem so amazingly small, so utterly petty. Especially since for these last few hours, Kit’s mind had been bouncing back and forth in helpless discomfort from one to another of three subjects, trapped among them like a pinball trying to bounce out of the machine. They were (in repeatedly-changing order of importance) his dad’s job troubles, calculus, and Valentine’s Day.

Well, there are sure better things to think about now…

Except (some unconvinced fraction of his head insisted as he thumped down the stairs) maybe Valentine’s Day…

“If you keep on running down the stairs like that you’re going to break a leg some day,” said a voice from the kitchen as Kit came down into the living room.

“Maaaamaaa,” Kit said in profound annoyance as he headed into the kitchen. His little plump brunette mama was in scrubs—pink pants and a flowery pink top—and cleaning up after herself, having just made and eaten a pre-work sandwich.

“You will!” his mama said, turning to him and grabbing a paper towel to dry her hands on. “And I will have absolutely no pity on you when it happens.” She reached up to open a cupboard and put away the washed plate she’d just been eating from.

“Got much more important stuff to worry about than that,” Kit said.

His mama leaned back against the counter and eyed Kit. “I told you to stop worrying,” she said. “Your pop’s coping just fine.”

Kit sighed. His father’s promotion into a senior manager’s position at the regional newspaper’s printing plant had caught them all by surprise. It had also left Kit’s pop in something of a state of shock for a couple of weeks, especially when it became apparent that he was going to have to do a lot of extra training to replace the guy who’d had to leave the company because of an injury, and whose position he’d been promoted into. Kit couldn’t remember ever seeing his pop get so thrown by anything, and it had disturbed him more than he’d expected.

“It’s not that,” Kit said, and found that he suddenly felt strangely guilty that it wasn’t. “Something’s just come up.”

“Uh oh,” his mama said. “Magic stuff?”

“Uh, yeah. An end of the world thing.”

His mama’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“What? Hey, no no no, not ours!”

“Oh good,” his mama said, leaning back against the counter. “I mean, I had plans for the weekend…”

“Yeah. Well, some other people had plans too, but their world’s about to end, so we need to go save them.”

“I don’t know if I even want to know the details about how that’s going to happen,” Kit’s mama said. “...Though I see I’m going to have to. How long were you planning to be gone?”

“About ten minutes.”

His mama rubbed her eyes. “You’re saving a very small world?”

“Well, the population’s just a hundred fifty million or so, yeah…”

“And you’re going to do that in ten minutes?”

“No,” Kit said, popping his manual open again and dropping it on the counter beside his mama. “Looks more like about a week. But we’ll only be gone for ten minutes.”

She looked down at the diagram on the changing page—visible to her because Kit wanted it to be—and shook her head. “More magic…”

“Timeslides,” Kit said. “When you’ve got something serious like this going on, the Powers that Be aren’t stingy with the energy allowances for the people handling it.”

At the sound of a car in the driveway, both their heads came up. “Hmm, running early,” Kit’s mama said, “wonder what that’s about?”

As he heard the engine in his Pop’s station wagon shut down, Kit thought—not at all for the first time—of one of the basic premises of wizardry, and the way it worked in wizards’ lives: “there are no coincidences.” This is really serious. The universe is trying to make this simpler for me… The question, as always, was whether the attempt was going to work.

Bundled up in his parka and not merely one but two scarves, Kit’s Pop came in the back door and stood there a moment stamping his feet on the back mat as he started peeling himself out of the layers of cold-weather gear. “All this slush,” he muttered, “it freezes and it thaws and then it freezes again, and it gets dirtier all the time…”

“Just so it doesn’t come in here,” Kit’s mama said. “I just mopped an hour ago.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t…” He sighed as he pulled off the last layer, a heavy sweater that he wore in this weather so he wouldn’t have to keep putting on his coat and taking it off when running back and forth between the hangarlike press buildings and the newspaper’s offices down the street from them.

“Is there a problem at work?” Kit’s mama said. “You’re early.”

“No, everything’s fine. My training guy just had to leave early today, so I’m done early too.” He shook his head. “He’s as stressed about this whole thing as I am. He and Telly were good friends, and now suddenly I’m where Telly is and neither of us want me to be there, really…” He leaned against the counter where Kit’s mama was leaning, and she leaned against him while he looked down at Kit’s manual. “So what’s going on? Anything interesting?

“Kit has to go save the world,” his mama said, sounding resigned.

His pop glanced up at him from under his eyebrows. “Again?”

Kit had to grin at that. Though being a wizard caused a lot of problems, he was well beyond grateful that one of them wasn’t having to hide what was going on from his family.

“Not ours,” Kit’s mama said.

“Not that ours doesn’t need saving,” his Pop said, and turned away for a moment to go get a cup. Kit knew immediately where he was headed: the new capsule-coffee machine that Kit’s mama had given him for Christmas. “I see more of the headlines in one day than most human beings, so believe me, I know…” He went hunting in the little bin on the counter by the fridge for the capsule he wanted. “So what is it this time?”

“There’s a planet with a big moon that’s blowing up,” Kit said. “Well, not blowing at the moment. Getting ready to come apart. Though there’ll probably be some blowing up in the later stages…”

“Wonderful,” his dad said as he fiddled with the coffee machine. “And there are people living there?”

“A hundred fifty million, plus or minus. We’ve got to get them off before stuff starts happening—especially before the pieces of moon start falling out of orbit.” Kit turned a page over in the manual to a double-page spread that illustrated part of the celestial mechanics involved, and the long accelerating spiral of debris that would start to hammer down onto the surface of the planet when the moon began breaking up.

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 same 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…

Finally his mama just sighed and kissed him. “Some of us have to go to work,” she said.

“No no no, just wait!” Kit said, throwing an arm out to stop her, then hugging her one-armed. “Fifteen minutes and you can smooch me goodbye when I get back. Or hello. Where’s Popi?”

“He went to change.”

“Okay, I’ll see him then too.” Kit pulled the portal off the pantry door where he’d stuck it and recited the passphrase again to deactivate it; then rolled it up and stuffed it in his pocket, aching at the memory of the time he’d done this last, when they’d had to go to Rashah. Then he’d packed almost more dog food and dog biscuits than regular food for himself…

No time for thinking about that now. Gotta get moving. He’d laid the manual out on the kitchen counter, and now flipped through it to the dedicated messaging pages in the front.

A message from Nita was already flashing for his attention there. Kit prodded it with a forefinger. “You ready?”

“Yeah, been waiting for you,” her voice said from the page.

“Where are we meeting?”

“My back yard. Transit circle’s ready.”

“Right, be right there.”

Kit kissed his Mama again, grabbed his manual and trotted out the back door. He could have done a beam-me-up-Scotty spell to transit over to Nita’s, but he felt the need for a few minutes’ physical exercise to calm him down. “Okay,” he said under his breath. “Time marker…”

The manual vibrated slightly in his hand, acknowledging that it had logged the exact hour, minute and second he’d left the house.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s hit the road…”

Down the street, past the patches of melting snow and through the dirty slush his Pop had been complaining about, up the driveway of Nita’s house and through the gate into her back yard, down along the muddy path through the snow that led to the small jungle of barren sassafras trees at the far end of the garden. Through the mud and the slush the electric blue of a transit circle could be seen faintly shining on the ground, and in the middle of it stood Nita in a short winter jacket and jeans and boots, wearing a faintly annoyed expression and with half of one arm apparently missing.

Kit slowed down and stopped beside her. The illusion of the missing arm was due to her standing there and feeling around in her otherspace pocket with an abstracted look. “You ready?” she said.

“All set. Any trouble with your dad?”

“Huh? Oh, no. He saw the alert come through on his phone—since I had Spot put the Let Dad Snoop wizardry app on Dairine’s manual, I did it on mine too; he loves to know too much about what’s going on. Thinks he’s keeping a better eye on us.” She laughed under her breath. “But this time he just looked at the formal written notification from Mamvish and went kind of quiet, and then said, ‘I guess you have to go.’” She shook her head, kept feeling around.

Kit sighed, thinking it would be nice when his own folks got to that point. Still, they could have been a lot worse about it than they had been. “You know what’s weird?” he said. “I still can not get used to them actually getting used to this.”

“What? Oh. Yeah.” She was still groping around in the pocket, but for just a second she flashed Kit an amused look. “But sometimes I just want to say ‘Listen, aren’t you more worried about this? Because I am!’ And then I realize what would happen if I ever said that, and I just shut up…”

But her mind was plainly less on what she was saying than on whatever it was she was feeling around for. After a moment, “What?” Kit said.

Nita scowled. “I just know I’ve forgotten something. You know how it is, when you’re going away on a trip and you know you didn’t pack something that you’re gonna need, but can’t put your finger on it, and everybody sitting in the car is all impatient and saying ‘If it’s important you’d have remembered it by now…!’”

“I’m not impatient,” Kit said.

“Well I am!” Nita muttered. “Bobo, what did I forget?”

A brief pause, during which Kit felt a bit nervous at the thought of what he might hear but didn’t want to. It wasn’t as if he and Nita didn’t hear each other’s thoughts sometimes, particularly in moments of stress. But Kit hearing Bobo suggested that this closeness might be entering a new stage that Kit didn’t understand and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to—

“Great, thanks loads,” Nita said, scowling harder as she thrust her arm into her personal claudication right up to the shoulder.

“No good?” Kit said.

“He says he’s the spirit of wizardry, not a to-do list, and I should write things down more often,” Nita muttered. “Somebody really needs his snark settings adjusted.” She closed her eyes and kept on feeling around. “It’s in here somewhere, I know it is…”

“What?”

“What I’m looking for.”

“…Which you can’t remember.”

“If I feel it I will!”

Kit opened his mouth and then shut it again, suspecting that his feelings about this approach to memory management wouldn’t be welcomed right now. After a few moments more Nita sighed and pulled her arm out, and zipped her otherspace pocket closed. “Never mind,” she said, “I’ll remember it when we’re in the middle of something and I can’t come back here for days and days. That’ll teach me…”

She flipped her manual open to the page where she had the full version of the transit circle’s spell stored, waiting to be activated. “Preflight,” she said. “Check your name…”

Kit rolled his eyes. “What for? You know you’ve got it right.”

“Check it,” Nita said, giving him a look.

But of course she was right. It didn’t do to play fast and loose with a language that could change your inner nature—or your outer one—if in a distracted moment you’d misspelled something. Kit glanced down at the small permanent-parameters circle where his name was spelled out in the graceful curling Speech-characters, and looked it over. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”

“Thank you,” Nita said. She closed her eyes and said the three syllables that triggered the partially-executed transit spell, and they vanished.

THREE

Rirhath B: The Crossings

Grand Central was going to be a madhouse this time of day, but then it was the middle of rush hour; and the two of them weren’t going to have to deal with the rush and press of people out in the Main Concourse, anyway. Their personal gating’s target was off to the right-hand side of the transit-secured area at the far end of Platform 23. There the Grand Central gating team had installed a spell-shielded area at the concrete platform’s end, invisible to ordinary commuters but handy to the worldgate that was usually tethered there.

What really surprised Kit was how incredibly crowded half of that shielded space was when they appeared in it. Normally it would be a surprise if you met one or two other wizards coming or going through this gate at any given time when you were there. But there had to be fifty or sixty other wizards, young and old, gathered down around the furthest end of the shielded area, waiting for the gate to go patent again after the last group of wizards to pass through were clear of the receptor site on the other side. Also, the gate’s transit interface was stretched unusually wide. In normal operation, the gating team wouldn’t allow it to be much wider open then a yard or so. But now the portal interface was dilated to at least ten feet across, and wizards were going through in crowds of five or six instead of by, at most, ones and twos.

“Wow,” Nita said, shaking her head. “I have never seen it like this—”

As their transit circle winked out, the concrete under their feet began buzzing in an ominous way, suggesting strongly that they get off the target spot right now. “Uh oh, let’s move!” Kit said, and they both hurried out of the defining blue hex that glowed in the concrete and onto safer ground.

Right behind them another few wizards popped into the space—a big tattooed man in motorcycle leathers, a business-suited lady with a briefcase, and a skinny black guy in jeans and a puffy parka with three silvery-grey Malamutes straining at their leashes. The skinny guy went by them fast, the Malamutes more or less dragging him; but as they went all three of the dogs turned long enough to grin big dog-grins at Kit, and then pulled their boss away into the crowd of wizards waiting by the gate.

There was a glint in all those dogs’ eyes as they looked at Kit that he immediately recognized. He smiled to see it, though the smile was sad. Once upon a time Ponch had looked at him like that every day. Now a lot of the other dogs he met did: a side effect of what Ponch had become after being exposed to wizardry for some years, and then to a sequence of events that had pushed him out of the categories not only of mere wizardry but mere mortality. As always, Kit wished Ponch could be here with them. But in a way he was—just not the old way—and Kit had to be content with that.

He looked at the wizards milling around the gate, all of them looking and sounding excited but kind of tense. “There are times you realize that there are a lot more of us in this part of the world than you thought,” Kit said under his breath.

“And times that makes you real glad,” Nita said, looking at the gate to the Crossings as another five or six wizards went through it and vanished together. “Like this.”

She sounded grim. Kit suspected that this was because Neets had, as usual, managed to ingest at least three times as much of the mission précis material as Kit had in the same time. ‘How is it fair that you read so much faster than me?” he said as they joined the outer fringes of that crowd.

“Who ever said anything was fair? Or supposed to be.”

“You’re sounding more like Tom every day.”

She gave him an annoyed look. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Nita muttered. For some time now she’d been doing biweekly sessions with their local Supervisory—tutorials intended to sharpen her handling of her visionary abilities. Lately, though, she’d repeatedly been claiming that for all the good it was doing her, she got more mileage out of talking to Carl’s koi. “I know Tom doesn’t mean to get on my nerves, but… He keeps saying ‘You’re making this harder than it needs to be’, and I keep saying, ‘Funny, I was about to say the same thing to you!’ And then he just laughs and starts some story about how hard he had it with his coach when he was studying.” She snickered. “Sometime during the Pleistocene…”

Kit had to laugh at that, while more wizards came crowding in behind them from the transit hex and more vanished away in front. “I bet you didn’t actually say that to him…”

“I was so tempted, though.” She blew a breath out as they edged forward. “How far did you get in the reading?”

“Uh, the bit about the planet’s moon falling down…”

“Tevaral,” Nita said. “The moon’s Thesba. If everything wasn’t going to pieces around there, it’d be kind of an interesting area—”

“Excuse me,” said someone behind Kit.

He turned around and saw a young woman in pink sweats and pink sneakers and pink headphones and a blonde pony tail peering over their heads, looking from the gate to the smartphone in her hands and back again. “Sorry,” she said to Kit, “this is for the Crossings, yeah?”

“That’s right,” Kit said.

“Thanks…” She immediately turned away and started texting someone at great speed.

He and Nita looked at each other. Nita shrugged. “‘Kind of’ interesting?” Kit said.

“Yeah, well, there are a lot of really hot stars in Tevaral’s neighborhood. An OB association, they call it, because it’s mostly made up of stars in those classes. But there’s a landmark star there too, the kind astronomers use as a class definer for the way its light curve changes.” Nita had cracked her manual open and now showed Kit a double-page spread with a long scatter of blue, white and blue-white stars laid out across it, all annotated with symbols showing data about them and arrows showing which way each star was traveling.

“The sky must really be something around there,” Kit said.

“Yeah,” Nita said as their part of the waiting crowd inched forward again. “Not just because of those. But this…”

She tapped the page of her manual, and the view changed, shrank, veered off to one side of the OB association. Not too far away, as stellar distances went, there was a star that stood out among the neighboring blues and blue-whites, for it was vividly, dazzlingly red; as deeply red as a burning coal.

“That’s the landmark,” Nita said. “Mu Cephei, astronomers on Earth call it. Or Erakis. It’s been on the radar for a long time. Herschel ID’d it as a red giant in seventeen-something… called it the Garnet Star because it was so red.” She shrugged, slapped the manual shut and tucked it away in her otherspace pocket again. “Anyway, where we’re headed, at least the star’s not the problem.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Kit said. “I saw Dairine on the outbound list too, and I thought maybe that had something to do with why they were sending for her.”

Nita shook her head. “Nope. She’s on this job for the same reason we are: because we’re hominids.”

“Well, that much I got. But I didn’t get through as far as any explanations of why they need so many of us.”

“The problem’s the planet, looks like. The précis got into a lot of detail about this—”

“I noticed.”

Nita gave Kit an amused look at his annoyed tone. “It’s something to do with their psychology,” she said. “But it’s physiological too. It’s not like any species that evolved on a planet won’t be really attached to it and unwilling to leave if it’s going to be destroyed!… But it looks like this is something more.”

“So they’ve enlisted lots and lots of hominids to… what? Try to figure out why so many of the people there don’t want to go?”

Nita nodded. “That’s some of it. But also, when you’re dealing with a species in emergency mode—some disaster, or a catastrophic relocation situation like this—best practice is to send wizards who’re as close to their physiology as possible.” She looked uneasy. “The Tevaralti aren’t mammalian, it looks like, but we’re close enough to their kind of humanoid. We’ve got more or less the same body symmetry, and the manual says our psychologies aren’t too different…”

The crowd in front of them moved forward a bit again, and now Nita and Kit were right behind the four or five wizards who would go next. Kit looked around him and behind him, and Nita gave him a bemused look. “What?”

“Well, you mentioned Dairine. Where is she? Thought she might be coming with us.”

Nita shrugged. “No idea. Went ahead of us, maybe. I messaged her just after Mamvish stuck her butt through my bedroom wall, but I haven’t heard anything back. Not unusual; sometimes she doesn’t pay attention to her texts if she’s distracted…”

They were close enough to the wide, oval interface of the gate hanging in the air to see that it was running in safe mode—flickering briefly into patency long enough for the group ahead of them to step through, then going dark for a second or so while the wizards who’d just stepped through it were getting themselves out of the transit space on the other side. Nita and Kit stepped forward, waiting for it, and along with them the girl in the pink sweats came up on their left, and another couple of older wizards—a tall woman in a long dark winter coat and a shorter man in actual ski gear—came up on the right. They all exchanged glances and nods: the same kind of look that people getting into an elevator give each other in token of a brief moment of doing something together even though they’re complete strangers. Then the gate went patent.

Through it they could see the vast main gating concourse in the Crossings. Quickly they stepped forward into the twenty foot wide hex on the far side, stepping high as usual over the lower threshold of the gate hanging just off the edge of the train platform (because even though it had a safety on it to keep from cutting anybody’s feet off at the ankles, it was smart to be cautious). Behind them it went dark, a wide black oval hanging in midair. All of them hustled to get off the gate hex, and the second all of them were beyond the blue lines, the gate went patent again and the next group of wizards started coming through.

Kit and Nita walked off to one side, pausing by one of the tall silvery “information herald” posts that automatically located themselves near active gate hexes. “This is so weird,” Nita said, glancing around them.

“What?” Not that the Crossings couldn’t set the weird level pretty high on a regular basis.

“I have never seen so many humanoids here in all my life,” Nita said. “It’s bizarre. Not nearly enough aliens.”

Kit glanced around and had to agree with her. Normally any crowd you might see in the Crossings’ vast main concourse would be a very mixed bag—traveling members of hundreds if not thousands of oxygen-breathing species passing through on their way from one place to another, hurrying from hex-hub to hex-hub and mingling under the vast floating-segmented ceiling in a great hubbub of voices and noises impossible for humanoid life to make. And that doesn’t even begin to suggest what’s going on over in the methane-breathing and hypercold sections, Kit thought. But now, as far as the eye could see, they were surrounded by hominids of every imaginable kind—tall and short, broad and thin, mostly bilaterally symmetrical but not always, mostly with two arms and two legs but not always, furred or feathered or scaled or skinned in a hundred colors, and sporting an assortment of sensorial organs usually impossible to classify at first glance. It was all alien enough, but not as alien as they were used to… and that by itself was very odd.

And there was something else going on that Kit found a bit disturbing. This place was always busy, day and night, twenty-eight hours a day, but the normal level of busy-ness was very much like that of an airport at home: people running for close worldgate connections, people lazing along among the shops and restaurants in no particular hurry while killing time until their gate was ready to go patent, people making their way purposefully to some one gate to meet a friend or a business connection. Now, though, something else had been added to the mix: a tremendous sense of urgency. Even without the increased sensitivity to such matters that a wizard was likely to pick up in the course of practice, the feeling of thousands of people in this space hurrying in largeish groups toward four or five different destinations couldn’t be missed—the pattern impressed itself on the alert mind more or less immediately. That was something unnerving about it, but also something exhilarating. It’s not like being on errantry can’t get dangerous, Kit thought. But it doesn’t usually feel that way right at the beginning. Usually things take a while to get dangerous. But here you can feel that they’re dangerous now. Or about to be…

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.”

“Uh oh…” Nita muttered.

The view shifted to a three-dimensional view of the interior of Thesba, produced either by wizardry or some technology more advanced than anything Kit was familiar with. Or possibly both… He squinted at it. “Wait. Has that got two cores?”

“Almost three,” Nita whispered back. “Wait till it rotates again. See that third lobe? What a mess.”

“—the irregularly formed core makes it immediately plain why Thesba’s rotational relationship with its primary has in the past been problematic,” Mamvish was saying. “The irregularity of the core masses imparts a significant wobble to the body, and its interactions with Tevaral’s mass have for many millennia involved long cycles of relative stability alternating with equally long cycles of unstable behavior in the volcanic and tectonic modes. Therefore ever since wizardry arose on Tevaral, its Planetaries have spent a great deal of time over millennia attempting to manipulate Thesba’s core masses into more stable, or at least more manageable configurations.”

“Oh no.” Nita shook her head. “Can’t have got them much of anywhere…”

The view backed off into a wider one of the two bodies, the green-gold planet and the dun-and-gold moon, swinging uneasily around one another. “These worlds have circled one another in this mode for the last few millennia without any serious alteration of their mutual status,” Mamvish said, “but over the last several hundred years both of them have become increasingly tectonically active. Indications are that Thesba’s mass irregularities have slowly been inducing non-ephemeral deep level weaknesses in Tevaral’s inner mantle structure, and these weaknesses have been becoming more serious over the course of the last century. Noting this, the then-Planetary Wizard of Tevaral urgently requested the assistance of the Interconnect Project based here at Rirhath B. It was decided that a number of world-surrogates should be located and terraformed to serve as relocation loci for the planet’s ecosystems, and possibly also as temporary havens for the planetary population when it was decided how best to intervene to stabilize Thesba’s core once and for all—since naturally the planetary population could not be left in place when so dangerous an intervention was being enacted.”

The imagery shifted to show one after another of a series of six planets, all orbiting stars similar to Sendwathesh and barren to begin with, as they were quickly altered by teamed science and wizardry to suit the Tevaralti climatic, atmospheric and soil requirements. The dominant blue-green of Tevaralti foliage crept across them, burgeoning, and all of those worlds then settled in to “cure”, waiting for their guest species to arrive. “However,” Mamvish said, sitting down dispiritedly on her back two sets of legs, “events have now unfortunately started moving faster than anyone was expecting. Approximately ten years ago, volcanic activity on both Thesba and Tevaral began spiking irregularly. More generalized tectonic activity began to spike as well. Since Tevaral is astahfrith and has been for many thousands of years, the various nations and clan/territory affiliations on Tevaral met with the Planetary to investigate possible interventional action. But the last two years have produced numerous disastrous earthquakes on Tevaral that have killed millions of Tevaralti, and it became plain that there was no alternative to a full-fledged rafting operation. The planet was going to have to be evacuated.”

Mamvish stood up again, her eyes revolving in what Kit recognized as distress. “And then, eleven days ago—”

The view flicked back once more to that image of Thesba’s interior. As suddenly as cracks in ice running across a frozen lake bed from some dropped rock, massive discontinuities picked out in blood-red in the diagram began stitching themselves across the underside of Thesba's mantle layer. In places, the crust of the great moon began to wrinkle and crack, while underneath it the mantle writhed and shivered unpredictably. Kit winced just looking at it, finding it impossible to understand how Thesba hadn’t blown up already.

Mamvish looked down into the space occupied by the simulation of Thesba, her head weaving from side to side in a gesture of distress. “There’d been some hope of saving Thesba, or at least stabilizing it long enough to allow an orderly evacuation taking weeks or even months. But that’s now impossible. The last ten days’ work has shown us that Thesba’s internal integrity has been too severely damaged for any such intervention to succeed, no matter how powerful the wizards associated with it. Also considered was the possibility of opening a very large spatial portal through which Thesba could be removed from orbit around Tevaral, followed by the insertion of a stable substitute mass as a temporary solution. But the extreme delicacy of choreographing such an intervention, and the substantial damage already done to Tevaral’s tectonics, means there’s no guarantee the result wouldn’t be just as severe as leaving Thesba in place to do this.”

With terrible inevitability the diagram of Thesba shuddered massively apart into five huge jagged chunks, and tens of thousands of smaller ones—both old solid material, and vast volumes of new magma spewed into space and swiftly chilled to stone—began raining down onto the planet. And quite exclusive of the destruction caused by chunks of the moon falling out of the sky, the view now extended to Tevaral and showed how the ensuing tidal effects from Thesba’s breakup would devastate that world. All the coastal cities and conurbations below were drowned or wrecked by earthquakes and tsunamis, quickly or slowly: food sources were wiped out in the short term by terrible storms and weather disruptions, water tables were disrupted and the composition of the entire atmosphere denatured by volcanic activity.

Tevaral was going to die. It was just a matter how of how quickly, and whether all or even most of its population could be evacuated before it did.

Kit realized that he’d stopped breathing for a short time. Beside him, Nita had stopped watching and was actually hiding her eyes.

“So, my cousins,” Mamvish said as the auditorium’s normal interior and lighting came back. “You see the problem. Our choice of ways to intervene has been drastically curtailed. Normally, in situations like this where threat to a planetary population is extreme, we install sufficient numbers of very-wide-aperture worldgates on the planet to evacuate the entire planetary population within hours, not days. Such gates can remove terrain as well as the beings living on it, and can relocate both nonliving and living matter great distances with tremendous accuracy when wizardry is guiding them. But in this situation, that solution is denied us. Very-wide-aperture gating is only possible when powered by a SunTap conduit system that pulls energy directly from the nearest star, and Tevaral is too far from its primary for a SunTap conduit to reach the planet’s surface. Therefore we must fall back to a more old-fashioned type of intervention in order to successfully move all these people off Tevaral quickly enough to save their lives. We’ve already installed a hundred and twenty terminus gates on the planet, with their far sides anchored on each of the six new homeworlds. Each of the terminus gates is served by a transport tree of feeder gates eight to ten layers deep. Locked in open configuration, and operating at full capacity—which they must—the terminus gates will channel between fifty and a hundred thousand Tevaralti per hour off the planet to their new homes. The feeder gate trees are not yet complete; hundreds more feeder complexes will be installed on Tevaral over the course of the next several days. And as we shepherd the Tevaralti population through them to safety, you will be gatekeeping those new worldgate installations for us.”

“Oh my God,” Kit muttered under his breath.

“Archivist,” someone behind Nita and Kit said. “A question? Isn’t it normally quite dangerous to have too many world gates open on a planet at the same time, especially if they’re artificial? Something to do with disturbances in the local spacetime continuum?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Mamvish said. “There would always be a question as to whether or not the tectonics of the host body could remain undamaged by the presence of so many gates for very long, due to the gravitic anomalies routinely associated with gate function when portal interfaces are open for prolonged periods. There’ll be an entire team of wizards monitoring the planet for problems of that kind. But right now time is so much of the essence that the presence of the anomalies is a risk we unfortunately must take, because there’s a biological component to this problem that we hadn’t anticipated.”

Silence fell across the room, as no one seemed to have any ideas as to what this might be. “It turns out,” Mamvish said, “that there’s a complication as regards the cooperation of the dominant species.”

Kit could hear people in the audience turning to one another in confusion. Mamvish’s tail had begun lashing, and she sat down rather abruptly again on her back two pairs of legs again, this time apparently in an attempt to get the tail under control. The attempt was only partly successful.

“The Tevaralti are quite scientifically advanced, and perfectly able to perceive what’s going on with their moon,” Mamvish said. “And in the earliest stages of this intervention, they were quite willing to be moved out of harm’s way until Thesba could be stabilized. But when the situation changed, and it became plain that the relocation was probably not going to be temporary, but permanent, the opinion of a significant percentage of Tevaralti regarding the intervention, approaching nearly ten percent, shifted as well.” She blew out a long, annoyed breath. “They have revealed themselves to be far more… attached than anyone anticipated.”

The Speech-word she used for “attached”, lavemuist’hei, was obscure enough that Kit had to pull his manual open to get a reading on it. He blinked at the length of the entry on the faintly glowing page as he realized how profoundly nuanced the word was. Everybody was attached to their homeworld, their own culture, their own “earth”, their own sky: that was naturally taken for granted. But lavemuist’hei indicated something well past that—a relationship that more closely resembled the symbiotic.

“The affected percentage of the Tevaralti have expressed a desire not to leave their home world, regardless of its imminent fate,” Mamvish was saying when Kit looked up again. “While the Troptic Stipulation allows us some latitude in interfering with or constraining the actions of life forms further down on the sentience scale when the system of which they are part is threatened, it does not allow us to force fellow sentients of this level into actions that violate their sense of personal validity or dignity. If they choose to die with dignity, then that’s their right, and we need to leave them the opportunity to do that.” Her face screwed itself into a very pained expression. “And all too soon, those whose intention is bent that way will have more than enough opportunity.”

The room was very still. “As yet we aren’t clear about what has so exacerbated their normal sense of lavemuist’hei,” Mamvish said. “We hope to discover that, so as to make it possible to save more lives. There are some early indications that because the Tevaralti are humanoid, that other humanoids may be able to discover what’s going on with them and share it with us so that we can apply that discovery to this problem and save them all. But in the meantime, we must concentrate on saving those from the planet who presently consent to be saved… And that’s where all of you come in.”

Mamvish gazed around the room. “Each one of you will be either supervising or assisting in managing one of the worldgates presently being installed. Many of you were asked to participate in this in the intervention because you have previous experience, sometimes significant experience, with worldgating in your daily work, especially off planet or elsewhere on the High Road—”

Kit looked over at Nita in shock, suddenly realizing why they were there. Nita looked back at him, shaking her head, and whispered, “We are so screwed.”

“Others of our cousins will either be accompanying you or are already on site,” Mamvish said, “to support you in doing what needs to be done to help you micromanage these gates. I use the word purposefully here, because though they’ll be very automated and carefully tailored to match the locations where they’re installed, they’ll also require constant supervision while in use.”

Mamvish looked around the room in what Kit thought was meant to be a reassuring way. He was not reassured. “All your manuals or other errantry-sensitive information storage instrumentalities will be supplied with a set of nominal-operation parameters for the gate you’ll be managing. If its behavior starts to slide outside those parameters, or exhibits other atypical behaviors, don’t waste time; call for help at once. There’ll be plenty of it around… lots of wizards involved in this intervention who are specialists in gate management. Many members of the four species of the Interconnect Group, specialists in gatings and in rafting projects big and small, will also be on Tevaral, ready to assist. So don’t err on the side of caution, cousins. If something starts looking strange to you, get assistance immediately, as in this situation we have no margin for error. The last thing we need right now is for one gate to start malfunctioning in such a way as to affect those around it with portal contagion.”

The term made Kit suck in breath at a sudden memory. Rhiow had mentioned portal contagion to him once when he’d been passing through Grand Central and they were standing around on Platform 23, idly chatting and waiting for the gate there to go patent. At the time her description of the phenomenon had made him flash on a scene from a long-ago science show he’d seen. It had featured a single ping-pong ball dropping onto a big floor covered with mousetraps all loaded with more ping-pong balls. The dropped ball set one off, and that ball a couple of others, and then ten were going off, fifty, a hundred, more…

The demonstration had originally been a paradigm for nuclear fission, and while it had been amusing to watch at the time, Kit was having trouble finding the humor in it now. Especially when each of those “mousetraps” was a worldgate that had been working correctly a moment before, until the contagion effect from the nearest gate nearest it hit and made the portal explode uncontrollably wide, killing everybody who was near the gate and anyone presently in transit. And the effect would spread and spread—

Kit shivered. “Beyond that,” Mamvish said, “all you have to do is help the Tevaralti who are going through your gates, and keep them going through your gates. We have excellent support waiting for them on the far side, on their new homeworlds. Just help them make it through. That’s the whole of your job in this intervention: keep your gate running, get them through. When we’ve gotten as many people off the planet as will go, our work will be done. If the Powers are kind, it will be everybody, all the Tevaralti; that’s what we’re striving for. But until we find the key to that result—the reason behind the resistance of those who won’t leave—our job is to get the ones out who are ready to go.”

The whole room sat quiet for a few moments.

“You’ll find that your manuals and other instrumentalities have been loaded with coordinates on Tevaral corresponding to the gates you’ll be managing,” Mamvish said. “I regret that some of you who are used to working together must be separately assigned for this work: it’s numbers working individually that we need, with personnel in possession of higher power levels or proficiency levels being assigned to assist those with lower ones. You’ll be assigned gating hexes here to take you within the next hour or so to your initial staging points on Tevaral. Check your various instrumentalities for your gate assignment, and please be patient with us as regards transit times; we’re spacing the traffic load to avoid putting too much stress on the reception area on Tevaral. Down the concourse, close to the gates that have been signed for Tevaral transit, you’ll find a large hologlobe tagged with all the gate locations, both those emplaced and those pending, with coordinates for your own assignment areas so that you can keep in touch with your cousins while we’re all working there. And as I said, any of you can reach me virtually during this intervention; so don’t hesitate. I won’t be sleeping until this business is complete, and your contact will be welcome.” She looked around. “In the Powers’ names, then, and the One’s, let’s go forward and do the work before us.”

A low murmur went through the room. “And one last thing, cousins,” Mamvish said. “The Planetary of Tevaral has asked to speak to you before you go.”

She moved off to one side of the stage and turned toward the center, waiting.

A moment later, there was a small man standing there looking out at them, brightly lit as if spotlighted. He was wearing a sort of woven red kilt, and what seemed to be leather leggings reaching down to clawed feet; an ornate harness of polished leather was wrapped around his feathered chest. His head, too, was shaggily feathered in dull pale gold, and he held a short brassy-colored rod in his hands, possibly a wand. His was a sharp face, a fierce one, with big orange-golden eyes set above a nose that reminded Kit of a beak without actually being one; and for all his narrow waist he was broad-chested, like someone whose ancestors you could believe had had wings once. Kit looked at him and immediately thought of Irina Mladen, even though Earth’s Planetary and this one were physically nothing alike. What was immediately evident about them both was a sense of their personal power—of the passion with which they held the position and the intensity that they brought to their work.

“My cousins,” the Tevaralti Planetary said in a soft scratchy voice, “my name is Hesh; I serve and speak for Tevaral. I beg your indulgence for not addressing you in person, but right now my world needs me at home, concentrating on my work.”

He looked down at the floor, then up again. “I can’t briefly express the grief that this intervention is causing us. We know it must be done; we know we have no recourse. There is no greater anguish than to know that your world is coming to an end, and you must leave it. Very many of my people understand this necessity and are more than willing to comply: on their behalf I thank you. Very many others of them understand the need to leave, but their compliance… is subject to change without notice. Many of my folk are bitterly torn, as yet undecided whether to leave their world, or die with it.”

Once more Hesh looked down, then up. “I would not have you think them ungrateful for your pains. They know they must leave if they want to live. The problem right now is that many of them are not sure which option they prefer… and that choice, as we all know, is between them and the One.”

Hesh gazed out across the auditorium’s assemblage of wizards as if he could see them all. As he turned, seemingly taking in the room, the gaze of those round fierce eyes swept across Kit’s in passing, and it was genuinely as if the Planetary was there, looking at him. “We’ve been a long time living on Tevaral as a species,” Hesh said, “as have the commensals who share it with us. Our parting with Tevaral comes hard. I understand well that some of you will find difficulty in grasping why, when our world is dying around us, we cannot bear to go. Yet still I ask that you will be as gentle with my kind as you would be with your own, were your people in such case.”

He stood there gripping his wand-rod, and for a moment his shoulders slumped and his claws clenched, a gesture that made Kit think of someone who was wishing he could start a fight with something he could win against. But then up went Hesh’s head again, and as if in defiance up went the crest of his head-feathers, too, that until now had been lying smooth. “But now we have work to do, my cousins. At any time, at any hour, if you need speech with me, don’t hesitate. If there are non-urgent messages that require my attention, direct them through the supervisory structure which will be laid out for you in your various versions of the Knowledge. The One willing, we’ll all get through this together. Though I will be very busy, I may yet be able to come to thank some of you. But whether or not I may, know that your names will become the matter of song in our history—all your names—for millennia to come.”

He bowed his head to them all, that bright crest catching the light that shone down on him. Then he was gone.

On Earth, Kit would half have expected the room to break into applause at the end of that. But the mood here was too somber. There was a sort of murmur around him, the release of held breath.

Mamvish’s eidolon looked out over the auditorium. “That’s it, my cousins,” she said. “Let’s get to our work, and the One be with us. Meanwhile, send in the next group, please?”

And her eidolon-projection vanished.

People started to stand up and head for the doors. Nita was already on her feet, standing and looking at the stage with her arms wrapped around her in a rather defensive gesture. It wasn't the kind of thing Kit was used to seeing from her; he moved a little closer and nudged her with one elbow. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she said after a moment, and let go of herself, pushing her hair back before she met his eyes. “This is going to be really intense, isn’t it?”

“Looking that way,” Kit said.

“Right,” Nita said. “Well. Let’s get out there and see where they’re sending us.”

They headed out and onward down the concourse to where the Tevaral transit gates had been emplaced. Even from down here they could see the huge holographic globe rotating gently in the middle of the concourse, with a huge crowd of wizards gathered around it, looking it over to identify the places to which they were being sent. Kit was very surprised when, way down there in that crowd, he could see Mamvish. “Look, she’s here too—”

Nita peered down in that direction. “Yeah,” she said, “but she’s moving pretty fast. If we want to say hi to her before she goes somewhere else, we’d better hurry.”

The two of them broke into a trot, dodging and weaving through the crowd. Mamvish came plowing along toward them at the same time, surrounded by people who drifted in from around about (or just appeared next to her), hurriedly asked or told her something, and went off or vanished again. “She’s so busy…” Kit said.

“She’s always so busy,” said Nita. “But she did say she was sorry to send an eidolon instead of being more personal with that message. Ought to let her know it was okay.”

“There you are,” Mamvish said as they got within earshot. “It’s good you’re here so soon!”

When they got close enough Nita grabbed Mamvish around the head and patted her. “Are you okay? You look like they’re running you ragged.”

Nita let go and both she and Kit reversed course so they could keep walking with her. “It’s always like this,” Mamvish said, breathless, her eyes revolving in opposite directions and her hide positively boiling with whole paragraphs in the Speech. “Nothing new. And you two, my thelefeih, are you all right?”

“Just fine,” Kit said, and patted her too, touched and surprised that she was using the specially-close form of “cousin” on him. Probably because of Nita bringing her tomatoes all the time. Still kind of an honor, though... “But Mam, is it just me or is does it seem like every time we see you you’re trying to get some species to let you save their lives and they’re giving you trouble about doing it?”

Mamvish abruptly stopped short—so suddenly that Kit wondered if he’d said something wrong—and spent the next few moments stamping all her feet, first in sequence and then alternately in several different patterns. “Yes,” she hissed, “yes, definitely yes, One-all-about-us yes!!” And though she sounded annoyed, she also seemed gleeful that someone else had noticed. “Seriously! It’s enough to drive you wild, sometimes I wonder why I bother…”

As Mamvish started walking again and kept on ranting about the way things weren’t working the way she’d expected, Kit felt less concerned about having misspoken. It wasn’t like it was hard to tease Mamvish into losing her temper. She came of a culture on her homeworld of Wimst in which hiding how you felt was seen as no particular advantage, and plainly she enjoyed venting with them. In fact, Kit thought, she does it every time she sees us. Maybe we’re an excuse? Because even though she’s a couple of thousand years old, and incredibly smart and gifted, she’s still really young for a lot of the wizards she works with, and we’re a lot closer to her age than most…

“But it doesn’t matter,” Mamvish was saying, “there’s no point in getting judgmental about it when we don’t even understand why it’s happening. And maybe we never will. Nothing to do but cope. Have you got your assignments yet? I’m so sorry the logistics team will have had to break you up, we’ve no choice but to maximize the effectiveness of the microgroups working on this…”

“Mam, it’s okay,” Nita said, “we work separately lots of times at home! We’ll be fine. Will we see you there?”

“It’s possible,” Mamvish said. “Depends on how Thesba behaves. I’ve spent endless hours holding the wretched thing together, this last tenday, and I expect to spend many hours more.” She hissed in annoyance. “Message me when you’re settled in your postings, I’ll get back to you if I can…”

And with a wave of her tail she was off down the concourse with other wizards of various ages following in her wake, all talking at her at once. Kit watched her go in slight amazement, shaking his head. “She’s always running around and being put under pressure like this,” he muttered. “When does she get time to just sit still?”

“Not sure she’d know what to do with that if she had any,” Nita said. “Come on, let’s see where they’ve stuck us…”

They turned to head back the way they’d come, making their way down the concourse again to the big holographic globe of Tevaral that was rotating gently in the center of the meeting area, all the planet’s five great continents gradually revealing themselves to them as the simulation turned. Kit was having trouble looking at this living, dynamic landscape, the beautiful greens and golds of it here and there touched with the white of snowcapped mountains and the glint of seas shining under the hot white light of its sun, and realizing that soon all of this would be uninhabitable…

“Big planet,” Nita said under her breath, walking around the display with her manual open in one hand. “Three times the size of Earth, nearly. Gravity’s a little less than Earth’s…” She paused, looking up at the simulator with some concern.

“What?” Kit said. He had his manual out too and was walking around the display, looking for the match to the flashing marker that was showing on his own assignment page.

“Well, it’s not great that Thesba’s so massive for its size,” Nita said, scowling at the page. “Depending on how it acts when it breaks up, it might not just fall all over Tevaral; it might rip it up too…”

Kit winced at the thought. “Like they don’t have enough problems.”

Nita shook her head. “Okay,” she said, “here I am…” She reached out an arm toward the middle of the “planet”, which was mostly girdled by two large continents. One of these looked like an elongated comma lying on its side, the other like a squashed, skinny ellipse, and Nita walked along with the elliptical continent as the simulator slowly rotated.

The north coast of the ellipse was broken up by numerous deep bays and gulfs and several extensive river deltas. “Right here,” Nita said, and pointed at one of the deltas. “There’s a city there… Neshek?” She squinted at the name glowing on the simulator. “And a big gate in the center of it, linked to the largest of the haven worlds.”

Kit peered over her shoulder at it. The outbound gates on Tevaral were tagged in various different colors, altered by the display depending on the species and culture of the wizard viewing them, so that the biggest or least stable gates were tagged in red, the more stable or lower-energy gates in orange, and the smallest and lowest-powered ones in green. Neshek was a red-tagged gate. “Uh oh…” Kit said.

“It’s not too bad,” Nita said, glancing down at her manual for more information. “I won’t be by myself, anyway. All the reds are being run in shifts by at least three wizards, sometimes four.”

“This is because you’ve got Bobo, isn’t it,” Kit said.

Nita shrugged. “Or because of my general aptitude levels, or because we’ve worked with Rhiow so often, or two or three other things. Who cares? They wouldn’t be giving me something they thought I couldn’t handle.”

Kit nodded and walked around the other side of the simulator, finally finding the indicator that was flashing for his posting. It was another red-tagged gate, this one positioned at the far end of the comma-shaped continent, where a small mountain range curved around a wide plain that ran down to the ocean. “Avaden,” he said, his manual page running through several sets of graphics—a contour map, a map of cities and roads, and finally a diagram showing a high-volume worldgate with a nearby array of five small ones feeding into it from elsewhere around the planet.

“Busy,” Kit said. He strolled around to where Nita was keeping pace with her own posting. “And almost exactly halfway around from where you are…”

“Yeah.” She threw him an annoyed look. “And it’s a red, too, so the assignment’s nothing to do with Bobo. Anyway, it’s not like we have to be out of touch. ”

“You two? Out of touch? Not bloody likely…”

Kit grinned at the south Dublin accent, turning to see a familiar rangy figure come easing through the crowd of wizards on the far side of the simulator. Ronan was all in black as usual, but this time the blacks were just normal winter clothes, parka and turtleneck and jeans and boots, with a backpack slung over it all. “Wondered when you’d show up, though! Taking your sweet time as usual…”

“Oh come on,” Kit said. “We dropped everything and came straight here.”

“And probably the only reason you were early was the Irish contingent got the word first because they’d be coming over in one big group to save wear and tear on the overlays,” Nita said.

Ronan rolled his eyes in extravagant fake annoyance. “Yes, yes, the Queen of Understanding Logistics wins again, what a surprise…”

“So where are you?” said Kit.

“About halfway between you and Her Royal Correctness. This bit over here—” Ronan pointed at the simulator and one of the smaller northern continents. “They gave me a nice little green gate in the middle of a town… nothing to worry about. Only open about half the day, from the looks of it; it’s low-power, and they’ve got it on limited hours because the terrain thereabouts has gravitic anomalies and they’re nervous about the city’s power grid getting disrupted.”

“Kindergarten stuff,” Kit said, smiling slightly.

Ronan gave Kit a look of genial disgust. “See now, I get no respect from you wee chiselers, none…”

“Oh please,” Nita said. “Try the age jokes on Mamvish and see where they get you. Seen Dairine anywhere?”

Ronan shook his head. “But then with that one, you hear her a long time before you see her. Not a peep.”

“Don’t suppose there’s any chance Darryl’s on this assignment…” Kit said.

Ronan shook his head. “No, don’t think the Powers want him off planet that much,” he said. “Especially on something this high-risk. Even if he wanted to go, I’m betting they’d start suggesting all kinds of good reasons why he should stay home.”

Kit nodded, for it made sense: an abdal’s value on his own world was sufficiently high that risking him coming to harm on other worlds would seem likely to be a low priority for the Powers. “Well, we should find out where our gates are and see if they’re ready yet…”

Ronan glanced at the distant, floating ceiling as if studying some sign that had been hung there for him: Kit recognized the look of a wizard consulting his version of the Knowledge. “The 400s,” he said, “and not yet. Still time for you to find something blue to eat…”

Nita snickered as Kit covered his eyes. “There’s one of your stalls about halfway down, isn’t there? We can grab something as we go by.”

Kit couldn’t see any reason to argue, especially when people were working so hard to get him to do something he wanted to do. “Come on,” he said, and he and Nita and Ronan started ambling down that way.

All around them the stream and bustle of thousands of humanoids coming and going went on, the wide concourse packed unusually full of people heading down to briefings or up toward the higher-power gate hexes reserved for large group transits or longer-distance jumps. “Funny,” Ronan said, “but normally you’d think seventeen thousand Earth people is a lot. With this lot all over Tevaral, though, we’ll be barely a spit in the ocean. Might feel kind of isolated…”

“We should try to get together while we’re there if we can,” Kit said.

Ronan shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem. It’s shift work, if I’m understanding the précis right: you get sort of eight or ten hours on and then eight hours off, and the rest of it’s sleep time. Pretty sure no one’ll care what we do with the off hours, as long as the people sharing your posting know where to find you if they need you in a hurry.”

Kit nodded as they continued on through the mostly-humanoid crowds, all along the way being paced by automatically-generated Speech-based Crossings information announcements targeted at the transient wizardly population.

“Tevaral Rafting Intervention transit group 1165RS, please note that you have a targeted information augment requiring your attention, please check your errantry-data modalities for more detail…”

“TRI transit group 1417TG, hex change advisory: your departure hex has been changed to 604, repeating, 604. Please make your way to the 600 hex group—”

“You know, we might have a group number too,” Nita said, and moved to pull her manual out again.

“5611GH,” Ronan said, without even breaking stride.

Kit shot him an amused look. There were occasions when Ronan’s organized side revealed itself more clearly than usual… usually when he was a bit unnerved, and going out of his way to conceal it.

“Okay,” Nita said. “Is that the place up there? Yeah, I think so…” She took the lead.

Kit and Ronan followed her through the crowds toward the kiosk she was targeting. “This is a general service announcement for entities involved in the Tevaral Rafting Intervention,” said the air in their immediate vicinity. “Please note that although for the duration of this intervention comestible selection options have been augmented at all food service outlets in the Main Concourse, you may experience occasional peak-period scarcity of supply for comestibles containing the following: manganese, technetium, zinc, arsenic, bromine, beryllium…”

Kit shook his head, amused, as the list went on.

“No?” Nita said, concerned, as they reached the kiosk and she paused by it. “You don’t want to eat at this one? I thought you liked these guys the last time.”

“What? Oh! No, this is fine,” Kit said. “Just scared for a moment there that I might not be getting enough arsenic in my diet…”

“Oh.” She grinned, and the three of them settled in at the kiosk. It was built along the normal Crossings lines for this kind of standalone structure: circular, with a glasslike table/ledge section that deformed or reformed itself upward, downward, inward or outward according to the stature of the species or beings using it. Above it all floated a slowly-rotating cylindrical signage structure covered with illuminated sliding 3-D images of food, and (alternating with the imagery) price lists in symbologies that changed from second to second in reflection of changing market values, availability, or the species or linguistic preferences of the viewer. Inside the counter was the being who ran the kiosk—a Rirhait, as so many Crossings service personnel were, this one with a bright metallic-blue carapace—and an assortment of food service machinery, mostly chromed and looking very sleek and industrial.

Kit knew the drill perfectly well by now. He dropped his manual onto the counter, the action immediately informing the Crossings data management and accounting systems that a wizard on active errantry was going to be ordering, and therefore (in line with best practice for gating facilities galaxy-wide) would be eating for free. Immediately the kiosk’s information management system pulled data from the manual regarding Kit’s species, likely food preferences, and sensitivities, correlated it with his past order history, and analyzed it all. A second later the counter presented him with a subsurface menu.

Beside him Nita had done the same and was studying the readout, flipping through its pages. Ronan merely laid a hand on the counter and got the same result, staring into the sudden parade of food and drink images that started flowing by. “Right,” he said under his breath, “let’s see…”

“What’re you looking for?” Kit said, tapping at a couple of possibilities as they went by.

“Anything that doesn’t say WARNING: CONTAINS FROGSPAWN.” Ronan shot Kit a wicked look. “For certain values of frog…”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Come on, that was an accident.”

“Somebody didn’t read the small print, you mean that kind of accident? So avoidable.”

“Hasn’t happened twice,” Kit said, flicking away a couple of the possibilities the menu had offered him and settling on one that closely resembled a meatloaf sandwich, as long as you understood that the meatloaf was going to be blue.

“Just as well,” Ronan said, “otherwise the Crossings’d have to assign you a mental health counselor every time you came through here to help you handle the shock of dealing with what you just ate…”

“Oh, the frogspawn again?” said a voice from down the concourse, laughing.

Nita looked up from the bowl of bright red and green noodles on which she’d just taken delivery and snorted a small laugh as Dairine came along from further up the concourse. She was dressed in jeans and boots and a parka, and Spot was spidering along behind her.

“You’ve told everyone about that, haven’t you,” Kit muttered as the Rirhait behind the counter put out a couple of small bowls of day-glo orange sauce for him to accompany the blue meatloaf.

Nita shrugged. “It’s a good story. Where’ve you been?” she said to Dairine.

“Here,” Dairine said as she bellied up to the kiosk, boosted Spot up onto the counter, and waited for the menu to come up on registering Spot’s presence. “Sker’ret wanted to talk to the Mobiles.”

Nita looked surprised. “They’re involved in this too?”

“Maybe as part of a contingency plan,” Dairine said, looking uneasy. “Species-fragment archival. Not gonna happen, though.”

“Wait,” Kit said, pausing in the middle of dunking his sandwich. “You mean—”

“The Mobiles are alpha-testing a lot of different matter-archival methods right now,” Nita said, and the odd way she was looking at her sister made Kit uncomfortable. “They’re looking for ways to back up the universe.”

The first time this had come up, Kit had thought Nita was joking. But he could tell from Dairine’s face that it was no joke. “Whole-species archival is nothing new,” she said. “Mamvish has done it before. But the techniques she’s used previously are kind of a blunt instrument compared with what the Mobiles have been developing, and she can’t implement them anything like as fast. Sker’ wanted to find out if the Mobiles could supply her with something state-of-the-art if the stay-at-home Tevaralti types had a last-minute change of heart.”

“And can they?”

Dairine shrugged. “Sure they can. Gigo tells me they could pull a hundred million people off the planet and into safe storage within an hour. But it’s not gonna happen unless the Tevaralti change their minds about leaving real fast: it’s not a solution that you can employ on just fractions of the population, at least not right now. And if they wait much longer for their change of heart, the on-planet gates won’t be able to get them all out in time. The Mobiles wouldn’t have any choice but to render them down as storable data.”

“Not the best solution,” Ronan said.

That struck Kit as a pretty mild way to put it. “Especially if they’re still just in alpha testing…”

“Yeah,” Dairine said, and started scrolling along through the menu that had presented itself in front of her. “Oh, come on now, what is this, have they stopped carrying sildwif all of a sudden?”

Ronan peered around the counter at her menu, having taken delivery on something that looked like a burrito but smelled more like fish and chips. “You miss the announcement? They’re having a run on manganese today. Should have had some pumpkin seeds before you left.”

“Oh please spare me,” Dairine muttered. “How close can they get to bologna here?”

Sensitive to what she was discussing, the menu in front of her shifted immediately. Dairine peered at it.

“Don’t get the chifemda,” Nita said without even looking up from her noodles. “Doesn’t matter what the flavor algorithm says it’s going to be like. It always comes out tasting like clams.”

“Ewww, no thank you,” Dairine said. She glanced over at Kit. “Something blue again. What a surprise. How is it?”

Kit actually had to stop and think about that, despite the fact that he was in the middle of eating it. Describing alien flavors was always a problem for him, even more when they were ones he liked than when they were ones he didn’t, and it was all too easy to fall back on the “Tastes like chicken” solution. “Not bad,” he said. “Kind of a fish stick flavor, but spicy.”

“Fine, that’ll hold me,” Dairine said, and tapped on the menu.

Within a few moments everyone was eating, or getting back to it, while the louder-than-normal hubbub of the Crossings went on around them. But even through this, Earth-human voices stood out, especially when they were speaking English. Not far away, even through the din of voices talking in the Speech and in many other languages all up and down the vocal scale, Kit heard somebody down the concourse saying, “It was right around here the last time…”

“You could always just check the diagram.”

“No, seriously, it should be here. Or maybe just a little further up—”

“What is it with you and not wanting to look at the map?”

The voices were familiar. Kit had to smile. “When I don’t need the map and I know perfectly well where it was last time—”

“I know! Let’s ask them. They look like people who know where the good food is.”

And when Kit turned around, sure enough, there were Tom and Carl coming along up the concourse from the same direction he and Nita had come. Carl was in a dark suit, and over it a long dark navy-blue midlength coat of the kind a businessman might wear on a city street in the winter; he looked overdressed for someone going out on a rescue mission. Tom, on the other hand, was in hiking gear—waterproof trousers and a fleece shirt, and a down overvest with a big bold logo that said BANFF-JASPER ICEFIELDS PARKWAY.

Nita looked up from her noodles. “Thought you two would’ve been through here and gone by now,” she said.

Tom shook his head. “Late to the party, but not by choice. Carl had a late meeting in town this afternoon, and then he had to sort some Grand Central business out with Rhiow before we left. The usual drill when an Advisory goes off planet.” They leaned up against the counter. “So we’ve got a while yet—we know the gate’s been assigned, but it’s not ready. What looks good?”

“Try the blue meatloaf,” Dairine said.

Carl glanced innocently down at the menu that was presenting itself to him. “What, not the frogspawn?”

Kit leaned over and thumped his head gently a couple of times on the counter, causing the subsurface menu (possibly in an attempt to console him) to start displaying desserts. “Is there anybody on Earth who doesn’t know that story by now?”

“Possibly somebody in the Marianas Trench,” Tom said. “Those tubeworms, maybe. You should check with S’reee. Nita, where are those noodles from?”

She shook her head: he’d caught her with her mouth full, and it took a moment before she could say, “Sastaphare, I thought? I mean, the dish is always called that, but seems like a lot of the planets in the Sast Commodium have them…” She peered down at the menu. “Uh, sorry. ‘Produce of more than one planet…’”

Tom shrugged, hailed the Rirhait. “I’ll have what she’s having…”

For a while there wasn’t much conversation while people concentrated on stuffing their faces and watching the ever-changing crowds moving around them. Kit in particular was used to finding the Crossings a lot quieter, and the bustle was acting to keep him slightly on edge. For the moment, though, Tom and Carl seemed not to be paying it much mind. Carl acquired himself a bowl of some kind of vegetable stew in what struck Kit as alarming colors of yellow-green and orange, then glanced around that part of the concourse and back to Tom. “Coffee?”

Tom looked around in surprise. “Real coffee? Thought the Galactibucks or whatever it is was all the way up by the 600 hexes. By the Chur legacy gate or some such.”

Carl shook his head and nodded off to one side, where yet another kiosk was suddenly in evidence, having appeared without so much as a breath of displaced air (or if it had made one, Kit had missed it). “Crossings Retail has started doing some tailoring at the retail end. The popups have started targeting customer profiles. When they’re not busy they consult the master census system to seek out transients who match the kiosk’s product offerings, then transit to where they are.”

“That could get expensive…” Tom said.

“When you run a worldgating facility and can factor the energy cost into the retail overheads? Just another business expense.” Carl shrugged. “Meanwhile, what a surprise, there’s the coffee place’s pop-up, and yes, they have your mocha, and it’s real mocha for a change! You’d start to think we were getting preferential treatment because we’ve got an in with the local chocolate cartel.” He raised his eyebrows at Kit. “Or because we know somebody who shot the place up once.” He glanced sideways at Nita with a smile.

Still working on her noodles, Nita just shrugged and smiled. “Why would I complain about that?” Tom said. “As long as she doesn’t seem likely to start shooting again without reason. Yes, a large mocha, please. Anybody else?”

Heads were shaken generally, and Carl went off to see about it.

“He’s here a lot more than I am,” Tom said, “as he loves to remind me.”

“Maybe you should get out more,” Ronan said.

Tom chuckled at that. “When you make Advisory,” he said, “let’s see you manage it.”

“You said once it was like not wanting to get out of a car you were driving…” Nita said.

Tom sighed. “More like you’re not allowed to get out because the kids keep needing to be taken places. Soccer practice. Little League. Dancing lessons…”

Kit had to snicker at the put-upon act. “And then you have to help them with their homework,” Tom said, giving him a restrained side-eye. “Hundreds of them. Math, science, civics, saving the universe. It never ends…”

“Cut it out,” Carl said, coming up behind him and putting down a cup. “You know you love it. Wait, do you want sugar in yours?”

“In a mocha? No.”

“Right back.”

Tom leaned against the counter and looked down the concourse. “It really is strange,” he said, “seeing the place so humanoid-heavy…”

“With some exceptions,” Dairine said, glancing at a small party of aliens coming down from the direction of the 400 hexes, nearly swallowed up by the hominids surrounding them. Yet a couple of this group took some swallowing up. They were taller than any of the humanoids surrounding them, even those slender spindly ones from obviously light-gravity worlds. Of the pair, one had a hide that glinted metallically in a brilliant eye-hurting green, and it was strapped about with metallic adornments that could equally have been clothing, accessories, or badges of rank. The person had a lizardy look to it, though it was six-armed and bipedal. At the top of a long-snouted face, wide-set eyes were elongated toward the back of its skull, each with a pupil that ran its eye’s whole length. Behind these, on each side, long odd flaps of hide ran down toward the alien’s spine. The effect was somewhat like that of a very thin, spindly cross between a basset hound and a gecko.

Its companion was even taller and looked more insectile than anything else: nearly transparent in places, especially at the ends of the long small-clawed limbs. It had a small rhomboidal head fringed with feathery growths, possibly sense organs, and was compound-eyed and jeweled in intricate patterns over the upper half of its body, the chitin of its exoskeleton shimmering in the light of Crossings daytime as long beams from Rirhath B’s sun (just now coming out towards the end of a cloudy day) found their slanting way down to floor level past the floating panels of the ceiling.

The third of the trio, though, wasn’t anything like as visible until they were all much closer. It looked like nothing so much as a very large upended beefsteak mushroom that had escaped from the produce department in some grocery that catered to giants. Very small clawed feet, like those of a millipede, could be seen under the meter-wide mushroom-dome, zooming it along beside its companions. There was no sign of any eyes or other sensorial organ on the brown-and-beige dappled top, but naturally that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

The three beings went past the kiosk together, apparently deep in conversation; the green lizard-being fluting in rhythmic patterns, the chitinous mantid making brief soft sonorous melodies, a little on the atonal side, and the mushroom emitting a range of seemingly disconnected sounds like something from an old British science fiction show. And off down the concourse they went together, sounding for all the world like a wind instrument talking in undertones to a cello, with brief bursts of comment from their accompanying theremin down near floor level.

Kit turned away, embarrassed at himself for staring. But then everyone else had been doing the same, at least briefly. And Dairine in particular had a look on her face like that you’d expect from someone who’s seen something she hadn’t ever really expected to. “Huh,” she said under her breath, “isn’t that topical.” She turned back to finishing her sandwich, giving Spot a look that he returned out of a couple of spare stalky eyes while the others still followed the aliens as they more or less vanished into the crowd.

Nita put her empty bowl and chopsticks down on the counter: it promptly vanished them. “What is?”

“Those guys. They’re three-quarters of a bar joke. Or the beginning of a fairy tale, maybe.” She pushed her plate away, and the counter removed it. “‘Once upon a time there was a planet called Tarthak…’”

Tom looked surprised. “Oh indeed. What took you down that line of research?”

“Who, actually,” Dairine muttered. “Nelaid.” She looked up toward the floating segments of the high ceiling as if wishing some kindly deity would come down through it and help her escape from a subject she’d heard too much of lately.

“Makes perfect sense,” Tom said, “as significant portions of the population of Wellakh would have been rafted off the planet for a good while so that repairs on the planet’s ecosystem could get started. Way too problematic trying to keep them inside the forcebubble holding the atmosphere in place while the wizards there were trying to calm it down. Not to mention the storms secondary to inertial drag on the confined atmosphere, the cooling issues on the flare-blasted side…” He shook his head.

“So why are these guys so topical?” Ronan said, getting rid of his snack plate and tapping at the menu to bring up a drinks page. “Who are they, anyway?”

“Go on, enlighten us,” Tom said to Dairine. “Let’s see how much other detail you’ve retained.”

Dairine paused just long enough to look at Tom with an expression that suggested he was pushing his luck. “Are you giving me a quiz? Does this count toward my final grade?”

“It’ll count toward me telling your Dad you’re actually getting some serious work done in all your off-planet time when he next asks me about it,” Tom said.

Dairine made a face. “Blackmail? Fine. …So it’s not so much about Tarthak actually, which was just a gas giant, and not even a conscious one, but one of its moons. They all went around—well, they still go around, though nobody’s there—this star called Munak. It’s in Leo somewhere, three hundred thirty light years or so from Earth—”

“Oh, Alterf?” Carl said from behind them, putting down Tom’s mocha coffee beside him and leaning against the counter again.

Tom nodded and sipped at his coffee. “Lambda Leonis,” he said, and then made a face of his own. “Wait, how much sugar did you put in this?”

“Not me,” Carl said, “the counter guy. Too many arms, too much enthusiasm. Didn’t have the heart to stop him.”

Tom raised his eyebrows in a “what can you do” expression and kept on drinking the coffee. “Anyway,” Dairine said, “Tarthak had whole a lot of moons, and one of them, the biggest of them, was called Temalbar: nearly Earth-sized and massive enough to hold onto an oxygen-bearing atmosphere. There were four dominant species there: the Jejeev—that green guy, he was Jejeev—the Mathala, those are the preying-mantis looking ones: the Tesakyt—”

“The little dome-y guy,” Ronan said, as a tall dark drink with a light-colored head ascended through the counter in front of him.

“Is that what I think it is?” Carl said, suddenly bemused.

Ronan snorted. “Are you daft? Guinness doesn’t even like traveling from Dublin to New York. If you brought it this far by standard gating it’d need a biohazard label. This is a dandelion-and-burdock float.”

Nita covered her eyes. Seeing her expression, Kit made a note to ask her later what was going on.

“If I may continue…” Dairine said, annoyed.

“Do please,” Tom said.

“Okay. The Jejeev, the Mathala, the Tesakyt, and—” She paused. “Okay, you could make yourselves useful here,” Dairine said, looking accusingly at Tom and Carl, “because all the name the manual gives the other Temal species is Gevai.” Kit raised his eyebrows, since that was one of the ordinal number-forms in the Speech that simply meant “fourth”, without any suggestion of “fourth” what. “Isn’t it kind of weird not to see their own name for themselves?”

“That is their name for themselves,” Tom said, “and nobody knows why. It’s as if their image of themselves suggests that the other three species on the planet were somehow more important than they were. What’s really strange about it is that the other three species seem to think that the Fourth are far more important than any of them.”

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 kept 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.”

“Cousins, you’re all very welcome…” Vesh said, flicking his crest up at Kit and Nita and Dairine and Ronan in turn. “Let me orient you all briefly in place and time: you’ll have leisure for finer assessments for your own purposes when you’re settled by the gates you’ll be attending. This is one of forty main offplanet reception areas scattered around Tevaral. Its exact location’s been stored for you in your codices or other errantry-specific references for later use if you need to return to the Crossings in an emergency. But speaking more generally, right now you’re on the southern shore of the northeast continent, Chaish or Methneveh as it’s called in its primary languages. We’re halfway through the autumn months in this hemisphere, and about halfway through the local night. We’re asking you all to stay within call of this area for the next—” He paused, apparently searching briefly for a Speech-translation of the time interval into Earth idiom. “The next hour. Our transit circles to the population-rafting gates you’ll be tending are rather congested at the moment and we have to relieve that before sending you on.”

Everyone nodded or murmured agreement. “You two gentlebeings,” Vesh said, turning to Tom and Carl, “I was sent to brief specifically, as many more of your sub-supervisory wizards are here, and you’ll want to find some time once you’re settled to advise us as regards fine details of their assignments. For the rest of you, there’s a facility just beyond the gating substrate with refreshments and places to rest for a short time or erect your temporary-stay facilities if you like, while you wait for your further gatings. Supervisories?…”

He drew Tom and Carl off to one side, while behind everybody else the hex they’d vacated abruptly filled up with more incoming wizards, and other Tevaralti moved out to meet them. “Be nice to just get where we’re going and settle in,” Ronan said under his breath, looking around. “Pity we can’t just gate to wherever it is on our own.”

“I don’t think they’d thank you for that,” Dairine said, putting Spot down. “Too many gates open on this planet at once: you heard Mamvish. In fact I bet if you tried it, you’d find personal gatings are being disallowed…”

She glanced down at Spot, who was turning slowly in place, and then stopped, his stalked eyes fixed on one spot in the sky, distant over the hills. As long as it’s nothing to do with Thesba… Kit thought, watching Dairine as she too turned. Gonna take a while to get used to that…

At first he couldn’t see what the two of them were looking at, partly because there was a fair amount of low cloud over that way, clinging to the tops of the distant hills. But then through the cloud Kit got a glimpse of something. Aircraft light? he thought. Or some kind of satellite maybe?

But what he could see of it through the cloud was brighter than he’d have expected an aircraft light to be, and it didn’t move, just held still. And then the cloud gave way before it, and it leapt out sharp to see, distant in the darkness: a glittering shivering point of light, piercingly bright and deeply red, like a watching, baleful eye.

Kit sucked in a breath. It was a star. But it was so bright and so vividly colored that you were convinced you could see it as a disc, though he knew that would be impossible. “It looks like Mars,” he said. “But so much brighter…”

Nita came up to stand beside him, rubbing her upper arms because of the chill. “That’s the star I told you about: mu Cephei. One of the biggest and brightest red supergiants anybody knows about. Maybe the reddest star in this part of the galaxy. Possibly the reddest star anywhere in this galaxy.”

“Yeah, it’s real pretty, for all the good that does us,” Dairine said. “Just as well we’re getting these people out of here.” She was regarding the star with an expression that Kit found unnervingly expert. “Because that thing’s so massive that when it goes, it’ll go supernova, and there won’t be much left around here afterwards.”

“Not likely to happen now, is it?”

Dairine shrugged, and for some reason the casual quality of the gesture ran a chill down Kit’s spine. “Today? Naah, with wizardry we’d notice the signs from this close. Tomorrow? Doubt it. Next month? Next year? Who knows?” She shook her head as Tom headed back toward them, leaving Carl discussing something with Vesh. “Tell you, though, it’ll take more than a wizard to stop it. Or any crowd of wizards alive, because nobody’s got that kind of power. People have tried to keep supernovae from going off in the past. Mostly it makes it worse.” She looked up thoughtfully at the “eye” in the sky. “We’ll see it from Earth, though. About two thousand years after it’s destroyed everything in this neighborhood…”

“Probably,” Tom said quietly as he joined them, “that would have come up in the viability study before this particular rafting project entered the implementation stage. You’d think twice about committing huge amounts of energy to ‘heroic measures’ in order to keep a planetary system alive in situ when its medium-term viability is balanced on a knife-edge anyway…”

Kit shivered.

Ronan had turned around to look up at Thesba again, and was regarding it with an an expression that suggested he really would have liked to be elsewhere. “Know what,” he said, “I’m really on the wrong side of the gatelag at the moment: I was about to turn in when they called me up. If they’re offering us someplace to plug the pup tents in, I wouldn’t mind popping into mine and having a kip. Assuming nobody needs me for anything vital…”

Kit shook his head. “Go on,” Nita said, “we’ll message you if anything exciting happens.”

Ronan lifted a hand and headed off toward the complex of low, softly lit buildings that the Tevaralti had positioned off to the side of the gating area. “Not such a bad idea,” Dairine said, watching him go: “Spot wants to go talk to their computers. We’ll go over and get him jacked in for a while.”

“Yell if you need me,” Nita said. Dairine waved a hand at her and took herself off in Ronan’s wake.

Vesh had come back to confer with Tom again, and when Tom moved away from him to go after Carl, Kit said, “Vesh. You’re busy right now, but…”

“Cousins, there’s no one on the planet right now who’s not busy,” Vesh said, sadly but not without humor. “We’ve got a few moments: ask what’s on your mind.”

“The people who won’t go…”

Vesh shook his crest-feathers, a gesture Kit wasn’t sure what to make of as yet. “Why won’t they?” he said. “I’m Tevaralti and I don’t know. It’s no matter of pride… though it’d be easy enough to mistake it for such. I think it’s more that some of them are…” He shook his crest in a different way, and squeezed his eyes shut briefly. “Some are uneasy about from what sources they’ll accept assistance; they’re afraid they might somehow be tricked, or led astray. And not to have that happen is very important to them. That’s as close as I can come to it.”

Vesh opened his eyes again and looked unhappy—at least that was what Kit made of the expression. Tevaralti expressions seemed to live more in the eyes than in any part of the face, which was fairly immobile due to a bone structure that seemed to mirror what would have been various shapes or types of beaks in earlier evolutionary periods. “They’re not ungrateful, cousins; never think it. But uncertain… that they are, yes.”

Then his crest went up as if he was hearing something the rest of them couldn’t. “I’m needed,” he said. “Hold me excused, if you would…” And he headed off.

During this, Nita had turned to gaze up at Thesba again. Kit swallowed and did the same, determined to start getting himself used to the sight of it.

She gave him a look. “You want to go up top for a quick look?”

“Get the lay of the land?” Kit said. “Sure, why not?”

“Okay, come on.”

It took a few minutes to find another of the Tevaralti wizards who had time to listen to an explanation of what they wanted to do, which by itself caused some confusion. (”You want to gate up into space? Up into cisThesban space…?!”) But after a few moments Nita closed her eyes and then opened them again and said, very firmly, “Distancing maneuver.”

The Tevaralti wizard they were talking to, a tall slender one clothed in shaggy dark feathers and not much else, opened his golden eyes quite wide at that and said, “Oh. Of course!”—and led them over to one of a number of small side hexes arranged around the edges of the main pattern on the big reception slab. “Do you have coordinates you prefer?”

Nita rattled off a string of characters and numbers in the Speech. The pattern was broadly similar to the coordinate system that they used on Earth, but the numbers were significantly larger. Immediately, the little hex near them lit up blue, and the edges of the hex’s outline began to pulse softly.

“It’s intention-triggered,” said the Tevaralti wizard. “Just tell it when you’re ready to go. It’ll provide your outgoing wizardry with return-location coordinates. And you have an alert mechanism hooked up to your instrumentality, yes?”

“That’s right,” Nita said. “It’s all handled. Thanks, cousin.”

“Go well, then—” And immediately the Tevaralti wizard was off, feathers fluttering, to tend to somebody else.

“Brainstorm?” Kit murmured.

Nita gave him an amused side-eye. “Bobo can be really helpful sometimes. Bubble us up?”

Kid had had the necessary wizardry ready within moments of Nita suggesting they go topside. He said the last few words of the spell. Things went very briefly dark and silent around them as the universe leaned in to hear what Kit was asking of it, and then obligingly made it happen. A few seconds later they were standing exactly where they had been, but surrounded by a transparent forcefield bubble two meters wide. Kit just stood there for a moment waiting for the usual feeling of the personal energy leaving him, the price for having done such a spell, and was surprised to feel it so very much less than usual. “They said about an hour,” Kit said. “So I packed air for two hours…”

Nita nodded. “Because you never can tell.”

“Gravity?”

She considered for a moment. “Nah, why bother? We won’t be there that long.”

“Okay.”

“Personal fields?” The skinfields were an optional addition, meant as kind of a failsafe in case something went wrong with the forcefield bubble. Not that anything ever had, but—

“Because you never can tell.”

Kit nodded and said the twelve extra words necessary to implement the personal shields. Once more he hardly even felt the deduction of his personal energy. I could get used to this… “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

The reception pad winked out.

And then they were hanging in space. The thing that struck Kit immediately was how different the light balance was, once you were up here. Down on the planet surface, on the night side at least, Thesba’s hot sullen glow and lowering, downpressing presence dominated everything. Up here Tevaral had a chance to shine on its own.

It was worth seeing. Far greener than home—partly because of the way its atmosphere scattered light and partly due to the dominant green-blue color of the vegetation—and nearly twice as big as Earth, the effect was striking. If the look of Earth from space was along the lines of a turquoise or sapphire, then Tevaral came down more along the emerald or opal side of the equation, its seas more golden from the angle of the place in space where he and Nita hung suspended. Their forcefield was anchored to this one set of coordinates, so that underneath them the planet’s rotation could just barely be seen, if you fixed your eyes on one spot and watched how it approached the terminator and slid under. And the slow swing of Thesba around its primary was visible too, a leisurely movement toward moonset, sliding at the same kind of speed that the Sun’s light seen through blinds at home might creep down the wall late in the day.

Kit held still and quiet as he watched this, waiting for Nita to get past the first few moments of physical discomfort that came of being in space without gravity. The Moon wasn’t too hard to deal with, as a rule: even as little as one-sixth gee gave your gut and your inner ear enough gravity to keep them feeling relatively normal. However, the balance-weirdness and orientation problems that came with microgravity were another story. Kit had been lucky enough to find he could get over these pretty quickly. But Nita (like the vast majority of astronauts) had had a fair amount of trouble with it her first few times, and even now had to hold still and not be too active for the first few minutes in zero-gee until her brain managed to talk her inner ear out of misbehaving.

She floated there with her eyes closed for a few seconds, apparently waiting for her inner ear to get the news about where they were, and then cracked one eye open, taking in the view.

“Okay?” Kit said.

“Okay.”

Kit reached into his otherspace pocket for his manual and flipped it open, pulling up a spell that he normally kept ready and partially executed for situations like this. He spoke the last five words of the spell, and the inside of the forcefield came alive with a heads-up display of the most prominent bodies within range.

The image of Thesba’s inner structure in the display was seriously unnerving. Peculiar stresses and striations revealed themselves in the moon’s inner mantle—numerous many-forked streaks of pulsing red light in the display, running outward through the upper mantle and radiating toward the crust from the thin, deformed boundary regions outside that peculiar lumpy triple inner core. The outer crust was a patchwork of restless magma leakage, broad wounds torn through the outermost discontinuity level and bleeding giant lakes of superheated molten stone and metal up to the surface, where they cooled fitfully to stone and then tore and bled again.

Kit stared at all this in fascinated horror. “What a mess.”

“Scenic,” Nita murmured. “But not for long.”

Kit just laughed and ran a hand through his hair, which as usual when he hadn’t put anything on it to keep it in line, his hair stood up a bit in the almost-zero gee. “Definitely not the kind of moon you’d want to go up to and sit around on, watching your home planet…”

Nita shook her head, her hair immediately rising in a cloud around her in the microgravity. She pushed it back. “Not unless you wanted to burn your butt right off. And assuming you could even see it through that atmosphere.”

“Yeah.”

“But then the whole thing’s pretty much of a write-off. All the flows in the dynamo layer are changing, which means Thesba’s magnetic field’s going to be completely screwed up real soon. Meaning Tevaral’s magnetic field will get screwed up too, and if radiation starts getting into the lower atmosphere from space, that’ll be bad for everybody on the Tevaralti surface pretty quick…” Nita sighed. “Possibly one of the reasons that the cousin down there wasn’t very happy about the idea of us coming up here.”

“Or else he took a look at our personal profiles and got worried that we might be coming up here to start messing around with it on our own.”

Nita had to snicker at that as she pushed her hair out of her face again. “Yeah,” she said, “guess that might have been an idea that could’ve occurred. But…”

“I am absolutely not going any closer to that than this,” Kit said. “Right here’s close enough. It looks like it’d blow if you sneezed at it.”

“Like other things might,” Nita said, glancing upwards and away from Thesba, over Tevaral’s dark limb. Distant in the deep sky but not nearly distant enough, a pitiless, red-burning eye, Erakis laid crimson highlights over everything it touched, filling in shadows that should have been quite dark with an uneasy, bloody glow. As Nita pressed a hand against the forcefield to turn herself so she could look at Erakis more directly, her hair fluffed up again and got in her face, and the red giant’s light set all the tendril-ends of it on fire.

“This is getting to be such a nuisance,” Nita muttered. She pulled the hair back with one hand, twisted it together, and stuffed the end of the attempted ponytail down the back of her shirt. It promptly came out again and fluffed up in all directions like a dandelion head gone to seed.

Kit didn’t comment, having noticed over the past couple of months that Nita had been letting her hair get longer, and uncertain about both why, and what would be safe to say. Is it because Dairine started getting hers cut shorter, I wonder? But then again, who knew if there was even any connection? Maybe this was all in his head.

“Why did I not bring a scrunchie?” Nita was muttering. “Oh God, Bobo, make a note for me. When in space, always have a scrunchie!”

Kit didn’t hear any response, which again left him feeling strangely relieved. “Was this the thing you were trying to remember before we left?”

“Uh,” Nita said, and paused. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

There was a moment’s quiet as if she was listening to something, and then Nita frowned. “Yes, fine, I’ll try that memory routine when we get home, but for the moment will you do me a favor and just make my hair lie down?”

Kit tried not to look as if it was at all funny that Nita was annoyed enough to be having this conversation out loud. “I don’t care,” she said, “a touch of localized gravity will do just fine if it’s not too much trouble!”

Kit knew that tone of voice, and winced. Nita’s hair very quickly laid itself down flat.

“Thank you,” she said, and blew out a breath.

“Better?” Kit said.

She nodded, pushing against the force field with one foot to turn back toward him. “Yeah. …But not just that. Being up here, seeing this this way… that’s better, too.”

“You lost me.”

“Don’t ask me why. It ought to look worse.” She was gazing down on Tevaral now. “But after popping out down there, I needed to recover a little before we get down to work…”

“Not just you,” Kit said under his breath. It wasn’t an admission he’d thought he was going to make just yet, but… Too late now.

“Oh good,” Nita said, sounding relieved. “I didn’t know if it was just me. I could feel that…” She glanced at Thesba. “Just leaning on me.”

Kit nodded. “But there’s something else,” he said. “This isn’t how we’ve worked, usually. Mostly it’s been small teams, little groups, except for the Pullulus War.”

“Yeah. Except for that, never a big deal like this,” Nita said, gazing down at Tevaral. “It could throw you off.”

It already has, Kit thought, but he had enough control over himself to avoid saying that for the moment.

“And we’re so used to doing this on our own terms,” Nita said. “Getting called in on a Wizards’ Right declaration… you don’t really want to even think about refusing. They’re too important. The last time…”

“The Song of the Twelve.”

Nita sighed. “Yeah. Well, I don’t think this is going to be anything like that. There are a whole lot more participants, for one thing. The odds of us winding up in any situation even remotely similar to that seem…” She waved a hand.

“Remote?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, there are how many thousands of us here just from Earth? And a whole lot from all kinds of other places.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, and couldn’t help twitching. Nita looked at Kit for several long moments, apparently having picked up on this.

Then she burst out laughing helplessly. “…Oh God. Have I just doomed us?”

Kit had to laugh too. “Yeah, probably.”

“Oh great, well, that’s out of the way…” Nita turned her attention back to Tevaral. “Then it doesn’t matter that I really, really wish there was nothing wrong with mindchanging some of those people so we could get them all out of here.”

Her voice had gone a lot quieter. Kit sighed, shook his head. “You heard Mamvish… Troptic Stipulation. We have to let them do what they’re going to do.”

“We don’t have to like it, though,” Nita muttered. “I’m not wild about it and I haven’t even started doing what we’re here for yet. And I can just imagine how Dairine’s going to be after a few days.”

Kit could imagine too, and almost wished he couldn’t. The subject of fatality and what one would dare doing to stop it was sensitive enough even just between the two of them, in the wake of Nita’s mother’s death. The thought of how those tensions could wind up playing out here between Nita and Dairine was less than pleasant. “Let me know if she starts getting on your nerves…”

Nita sighed. “I wouldn’t wish her on you. I can deal.”

“Yeah, but you may need somebody to vent on afterwards.”

She gave him a sideways smile that said both Thank you and Oh really? “And who do you vent on after I’m done with you?”

Kit thought about that. “Ronan, usually. Then he tells me I’m a gobshite, or some other rude Irish thing, and we move on.”

“Oh well,” Nita said, “as long as there’s a protocol, that’s okay then.”

“Also…” He wasn’t sure how to say this and not have it sound either overbearing or needy. “I kind of hate being split up, this time.”

“Why? Nothing bad’s going to happen. We’ll be fine.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant. “I mean… It’s easier to cope when you’re around. When we’re on errantry. And because of all these people who don’t want to go, even though we’re trying to help them… I think it might be harder than usual to cope.”

“For you and for me, is what you’re saying.” She gave Kit a penetrating look.

“Look, I’m not trying to get into a contest with you about who’s going to have more trouble with this…” Because I’m having trouble with it already!

Nita scowled: but it wasn’t an angry expression… more the one Kit had seen Nita turn on problems she was trying to solve. “Listen, I don’t like being split up either! It’s what you said before: you get used to working one way and then it makes you nervous when you get shoved out of your comfort zone. Or into something big and complicated like this, where it’s already running at full speed like some big machine.”

“And you don’t feel like a cog…”

Nita laughed, though it sounded as if the joke was at her own expense. “Maybe not. But that’s what I am today. What we both are. And I doubt anybody’d thank the cogs if they started deciding they didn’t like where they’d been installed, and just relocated themselves somewhere else in the machinery.”

“Back into the comfort zone…”

“And someplace where they make everything else grind to a halt. Not the kind of thing a wizard does…” Her eyes drifted back to Thesba. “It’s an honor to be involved in this, you know? That’ll help me cope. And you too.”

There were a couple of ways Kit could take that, and they were both good; so he just nodded and smiled. Nita, meanwhile, was still gazing at Thesba, her glance going back and forth between the heads-up display and the moon itself, when her eyes narrowed in sudden concern. “That one flow just keeps getting bigger and bigger...”

“Where?”

“There, that big one. No, on the left.”

“This one?” Kit reached out to toggle one of the touch-sensitive controls on the heads-up display, changing its focus and angle.

“No, the next one over. Is that changing faster?”

“Hope not, because you just know someone’ll blame us for it, and I’m really not up for that!”

Nita braced herself on Kit’s shoulder for a moment to reach forward and swipe the display controls into focusing on the magma flow that was bothering her. But for the moment all Kit could pay attention to was the touch of her hand on his shoulder. The contact was completely innocent, yet also suddenly and irrationally charged. Kit took a deep breath and commanded his body not to do anything sudden.

For once it seemed likely to cooperate… possibly because the exterior view made him feel anything but safe or secure. But this kind of thing keeps happening lately, Kit thought. It was as if the day she said the B word, actually said boyfriend out loud, that Kit’s body decided that it was now okay to start dealing with a simple matter of fact that he’d been—maybe not exactly hiding from himself—but at the very least not taking all that seriously. Especially as regarded the physical implications.

Well, he was thinking about them now. Though it would really help if I had the slightest idea what to do about all of this next! Because on this matter, even the manual had been no help at all.

“It’s okay,” Nita said. Kit snapped back into paying attention to the real world with an inadvertent and unavoidable blush caused by the thought that what she was saying might have been in response to what he was thinking. Because these days you never can tell!… But all her attention was on the heads-up display. “Just a short term phenomenon,” she said, “it’ll die down in a few minutes…”

This phrasing wasn’t calculated to stop him blushing either. All Kit could do, finally, was open his mouth to say “Good, let’s get out of here before somebody starts thinking we’re involved”, but he never got the chance. His manual chose that moment to start pinging softly, a repeated insistent sound.

Nita’s head came up. “They’re paging us, Bobo says; they’ve got the portals to our assignment gates ready.”

Kit sighed. “Well, now that you’ve doomed us, of course they’re paging us. Let’s get right down there and see what screwed-up things start happening because we’re here.”

She snickered at him, and together they and the force field vanished.

When they got back to the reception pad on Tevaral the whole area was still alive with incoming humanoids, though the focus seemed to have changed to ones who weren’t from Earth. Right now the pad was flooded with tall gangly blue-skinned Wasath loping off the gate hexes in bright robes charged with the heraldries of their home cities, a big flock of their mini-pterodactyl-looking symbiotes flapping along around them. “They’re a long way from home,” Nita said as the two of them got off the pad.

“So are we,” Kit said, for delta Geminorum wasn’t that far from Sol. He glanced up again at Thesba, which had slid a good ways down the sky but not nearly enough for him, and at the red eye of mu Cephei, which was beginning to remind him uncomfortably of something from a classic fantasy novel. “Where to now?”

Nita had her manual open. “It says there’s an outbound dispatch area off on the far side of the reception pad, by that structure where Ronan went to plug his puptent in. We should go there and wait for transport to our postings.”

So they did. The whole area had the feel of some kind of public parkland that had been co-opted for temporary use; there were walking paths and what seemed like recreational areas, many of them featuring massive tree-like plants with curious ornate carved wooden structures half-hidden high up in their branches—all of these more or less circular, some nearly globular, but all oddly spiny. As they made their way among these Kit found himself wondering if these were meant for Tevaralti kids to play in, not merely treehouses but some kind of stylized nest—or maybe a reference to the way nests once used to be when the Tevaralti’s distant avian forebears actually lived in trees. He knew even from the brief reading he’d had a chance to do so far that the plan was to move as much as possible of the Tevaralti ecosystem to the new planets that had been prepared for them. But what about things like this—places people had loved, favorite spots to visit or play in? Houses, buildings? There was hardly going to be time to save many of those when just getting the people out alive was going to be an issue.

The thought of the children who would never play in these trees again—assuming it was all kids doing the playing—left Kit briefly feeling a strange unfocused melancholy. Going to have to get a grip on that, he thought. Otherwise it’s going to make it hard to concentrate on being useful here. But he suspected that over time the feeling would likely reassert itself, and would make work more challenging no matter what he did. Might as well be ready for it…

The big circular reception-and-support building off to one side was alive with activity, as could be seen even from outside its glass walls; Tevaralti hurrying in all directions, appearing and disappearing off interior transport hexes, but no one in the place apparently paying any attention whatsoever to Kit and Nita as they came in. “Our pickup’s busy, probably,” Nita said.

Kit nodded. “Hurry up and wait…” There was no sense of where Ronan might have vanished to, or Dairine, or Tom and Carl; so they just found themselves a seating area—one of a series of benches that seemed made of some kind of metallic wood, as stark and plain as anything to be found in an airport on Earth—and made themselves comfortable. For a while they had nothing much to do but watch the passersby. These were mostly Tevaralti for the time being, as it seemed like humanoids of other species who came through the reception-support building were being hurried on to other destinations.

Having some time to people-watch, or in this case Tevaralti-watch, was interesting enough for Kit; getting a sense of the physical look of a new species was something that he always enjoyed. In their work at the Crossings both he and Nita had had quite a while to get used to aliens who covered up all over, aliens who didn’t cover up at all, and aliens who came down somewhere between the two extremes.

The Tevaralti seemed to come down on the “clothing optional” side of the discussion. Some of them were wearing various kinds of harness that might or might not have something like fabric or leather draped from this or that part of it (apparently never the same part, as far as Kit could tell, so this was no reliable hint as to what parts of themselves they might consider appropriate to keep covered. Maybe it’s just fashion…). Others seemed to simply wear their feathers—which came in all kinds of lengths and colors—along with various belts or straps meant to hold equipment they wanted with them. Even the amount of feather coverage seemed to vary, so that some Tevaralti seemed to have only head feathers (though these might be quite long) and others were as completely covered with feathers as most birds might be on Earth. It was very interesting, or would have been if Kit wasn’t primarily concerned with making sure enough Tevaralti got off this planet for him to have a conversation with one about this later.

Beside him, Nita was alternating between paging through her manual and watching the Tevaralti around them go by. But she didn’t seem able to concentrate for long on either. Finally she slapped her manual shut and let out a long, annoyed breath. “I’m so twitchy. Why am I so twitchy?”

“Millions of lives at stake?” Kit said. “The fate of a world hanging in the balance?”

“Oh great,” Nita said. “Like I needed to feel any more like I was a disaster movie.” She put one hand over her eyes. “And we know how well that always turns out for at least some of the stars.”

“Wait. With seventeen thousand wizards from Earth alone out on this jaunt with us? We’re hardly the stars.”

“Oh good, then we’re the bit parts. And we know how that turns out! We’re the guys heading down some side street in Manhattan when Godzilla comes jaywalking along in front of us and starts biting chunks out of the Chrysler Building.”

Kit had to laugh. “We’ve had worse. Because you know we could talk Godzilla out of it. As opposed to—”

“Callahan?” said a voice nearby. “Juanita Llll?”

She threw Kit a look as they both stood up, turning to face the Tevaralti who was approaching their bench from behind them. “I really need to see if I can get the manual to drop that middle initial,” she muttered, “it’s nothing but trouble…”

For the tenth or twentieth time Kit made a mental note to ask Nita later what it was about her middle name that had her so annoyed. He always forgot, though, and so had little hope that this time would be any different. Meanwhile the Tevaralti coming around the bench was looking from one of them to the other, possibly unsure of what gender of person he or she or it was looking for.

“I’m Callahan,” Nita said. “Dai stihó, cousin. Where do you need me?”

The Tevaralti had ruffled brown feathers all over and a sort of long darker brown webby-looking tunic that the feathers stuck through in patterns, and a crest that was twitching up and down while she—at least Kit got the feeling it was a she—looked down at some kind of tablet-like reference device flowing with notations in the Speech. “They’re ready for you at your posting,” she said to Nita. “Your shiftmates will give you a brief orientation and then you’re off duty for six of your hours: your first shift on gatewatch is after that. So if you’ll come over this way, your hex is waiting.” And off she went.

They followed Nita’s guide over to the small hex complex inside the reception-support building—a set of twelve hexes, each offset a bit from the others and all in constant activity. One of them was pulsing softly, empty and waiting. “You’ve got everything you need in your puptent?” Kit said as the guide-wizard led them over to it.

“Way too much, my Dad says,” Nita muttered. “And probably you do too. But there were all these things I was working on, I couldn’t just leave them home…”

“I bet. But did you bring food?”

“Of course I brought food.” And she looked at him sideways as their guide gestured her toward the waiting hex. “Anyway, you’ll have brought enough for two of us. If I run short, all I have to do is raid your supply.”

Kit smiled. But then, as she was about to step into the hex, Nita stopped.

“Did you remember what you forgot?”

“No,” she said, annoyed. “But, you know… If it’s okay—”

“Of course it’s okay,” Kit said, confused. “What, the food? You should take whatever you want—”

She turned around, walked straight out of the hex again, more or less plowed into Kit, and hugged him until his ribs nearly cracked.

When did she get so strong? Kit thought, and hugged her back. “That’s always okay,” he said, wheezing.

“Just thought I should check.”

“Checking’s okay,” Kit said, “but don’t expect a lot of change in the answer.”

Shortly Nita let him go… or at least it seemed like ‘”shortly”. Kit realized after a moment that she was looking up at him oddly. “Is it all right if I’m weird about this? The checking, and—”

Nita didn’t do uncertainty all that often, in Kit’s experience anyway, and when she did there was only one smart response to it. “Sure, but when are you not weird?”

She gave him a look that suggested the concept of punching him might just have occurred to her, and immediately let go of him and stepped back into the hex, as if intent on not allowing herself the opportunity. “Right,” she said. “Just, you know, be careful.”

“Why? What could happen?”

Her expression went both amused and sarcastic. “Okay, now you’ve doomed us. Because where we’re concerned, when would that ever be a safe thing to say?”

“Hmm,” Kit said. “Might have a point there.”

Nita shook her head at him in a sort of “what am I going to do with you” way: but still she smiled, even if it looked a bit uneasy. “Text me when you’re settled in,” she said.

“Okay.”

She nodded at the Tevaralti wizard. A moment later the hex pulsed blue around her, and she was gone.

The guide-wizard flicked her crest politely at Kit, then turned and hurried away. He stood there for a moment looking at the empty hex, then turned to make his way back to the seating area.

It’s not as though she’s not worth listening to most of the time, Kit said to himself as he went. In fact, nearly all of the time. But these days… These days Nita’s visionary gift was changing and growing, was kicking in in odd and unexpected ways. And something she said to you very casually, even offhandedly, might turn out days later to have been incredibly important. The problem was telling the ordinary things from the ones that were going to turn extraordinary. And most of the time there was just no way for Kit tell. Listen, sometimes I can’t tell, Nita had complained to him some days back. Sometimes these things just sneak up on me and pop out. Or something that I thought meant one thing turns out later to have meant something completely different. Sorry, but till I get some more control over this, we all get to be confused about this together…

There being nothing better to do, Kit flopped down on the bench and looked around him at this space full of busy people hurrying to and fro, people from this world, people from others, wizards and non-wizards, all with one thing on their minds. He saw their many glances up toward the reception center’s glass-domed ceiling, but he wasn’t going to look that way himself: not right this minute.

And in the middle of all this hurry and urgency, here he was, all by himself, one kid from Sol III, one Earth guy—not in control of anything, with nothing to do but sit and wait: all alone. It was unnerving, but Kit sat with it… let the weight of it settle on him, and concentrated on bearing up.

“Rodriguez—?” said a voice, mispronouncing it a bit, which wasn’t unusual. Using the Speech mostly guaranteed understanding, but didn’t necessarily do a thing about pronunciation.

Kit stood up, turned to greet the Tevaralti coming towards him: pale-feathered head, a long sharp face, actual clothes—sort of a kilt and a tunic—and another of the data pads. “Dai stihó, cousin,” he said. “Ready for me?”

“Indeed yes. This way—”

They walked over to the short-jump hexes while his guide gave him the rundown, essentially the same as Nita’s, though his location was different; somewhere in the center of Continent Three, a multiple intake gate presently staffed by two other wizards who’d be standing watch with him. “Right there please, cousin. Ready?”

“Go,” Kit said.

The hex pulsed and the world flicked dark around him—but not before Kit tilted his head back and got one last glimpse of Thesba. We’re just getting started, he said silently. You may think you’re going to kill all these people, but we’re not going to let it be that way.

Now all Kit and everyone else had to do was make it true.

When the darkness lifted again, it was still nighttime; but now Kit was outside, standing on a hexagonal-shaped stone in a very open place, with a chilly wind rippling through grass-like growths that were growing all around him. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the dark, but not very long. Thesba was still hanging overhead, significantly further down the sky. Kit watched it for just a few seconds and realized that it was rising, not setting. “Oh great,” Kit said under his breath, “now I get to have that all over again.”

Nonetheless, he was going to be seeing a whole lot more of Thesba whether he liked it or not, so he just shook his head and turned away, glancing around to get a sense of his surroundings. He was standing not far from the edge of a circle of rough stones, all longer than they were wide and rooted deeply in the ground. At the center of the circle stood one more stone taller than the rest, with a flatter stone of the same width half-buried in the ground at its feet. Sitting by that central stone was a small clear box with a round sphere of pale blue-white light centered in it, and that light laid the shadows of the surrounding stones out behind them for three or four meters until they faded away into the darkness that surrounded everything. All around the stones, the ground stretched away in a broad prairie-like plain, where the same blue-green grass seemed to be growing much taller, so that it rippled in that wind. The dull amber of Thesba’s light gilded the grass as it bent and flowed in that wind, so that out toward the line of distant hills or low mountains that edged the horizon, the whole vista indistinctly shivered and rippled like water.

There was another sound, though, deeper than the wind, lower than the wind, and with a more localized source. Kit turned to see where was coming from. In the direction away from moonrise, low against the horizon of hills that seem to surround this whole area, was a faint glitter of light: a distant city. From here it was hard to tell whether it was large or small, but it seemed not to feature any particularly tall buildings. Then again, skyscrapers weren’t exactly a pan-cultural phenomenon; lots of very advanced species saw no particular reason to build tall buildings unless space in a chosen building area was at a premium. And it doesn’t look like it’s at a premium here, Kit thought.

The city, though, was not the source of the sound Kit was hearing. Between it and the spot where he stood, maybe a mile or so away across the flat ground, there were half a dozen spherical light sources hanging suspended in the air. Antigravity, Kit thought. Or levitation: or both. Under their blue-white light, like that from the nearby sphere-in-a-cube but much brighter, Kit could make out maybe a dozen tall standards or poles of some glinting metal, either silvery-blue themselves or just shining that way under the light from overhead. Five pairs of them were set relatively close together, in an arc that approximated a half circle. The sixth pair was at least half again taller than the others, and set nearly three times as far apart. And between the pairs of standards—

At first Kit thought he was looking at some kind of projection into the air between the five smaller standards and the sixth one, which from this angle appeared empty. But then he got it. They were worldgate portals—but not small, tightly irised-down ones like the gate hanging off Platform 23 in Grand Central. Between those standards, the gate orifices were stretched widely and continuously open—a configuration that he knew from conversations with Rhiow wasn’t terribly safe. But this whole situation is more about speed than safety, isn’t it? And out of the five smaller gates, people were hurrying into the great open space between the smaller portals and the larger one.

Again the angle wasn’t quite right to see the whole process happening. Kit could see those big crowds of Tevaralti pouring slowly out of the smaller worldgates, pausing to look around them… and then making their way more slowly toward the biggest gate, the one Kit could see through almost as clearly as if it was a window stretched between the two tallest standards. The crowds of Tevaralti moved toward that gate’s interface, and vanished from sight. And poured toward it, and vanished… over and over and over again, never stopping. More people came through the five feeder portals every moment, and paused in the space between them and the great gate, and then moved toward it and were gone.

It was partly from that unending, moving multitude that the sound came which had first attracted Kit’s attention. But there was more movement in the darkness than that. Gathered around the gating complex were many, many more Tevaralti, indistinct in the darkness. There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them there, some settled, some moving restlessly among smaller structures that might be tents of some kind, and among very many more of the little box-and-globe lights that Kit was starting to think of as electronic campfires, some of these bigger, some smaller.

Kit had known since he’d left home how huge the numbers were of the people who were moving off the planet every moment. But there was something else going on with the people in this huge encampment. These were some of the people the Tevaralti Planetary had spoken of—the ones who felt they couldn’t leave just yet, and maybe wouldn’t leave at all. The dull gold of Thesba shone down on them as on the rippling of the wind through the alien grass, so that the whole plain seemed alive with half-seen, uneasy movement, with the muttering of the wind and the murmur of countless distant voices.

Kit shivered. And behind him, much closer to him, a high clear voice said, “Oh no, you’re early!”

He turned. Someone was coming toward him from inside the circle of stones—jogging toward him, in fact. The figure was tall and slender and bipedal, but for a few moments Kit couldn’t make out any further detail on it at all; the light behind it was too bright, the light from Thesba above and from the gate complex behind him too faint. Then as it got closer, his eyes adjusted, and Kit realized the reason he couldn’t make anything of the one who was approaching was that he was covered all over with something dark: in fact, dark fur.

“I’m so sorry, they said you wouldn’t be here for another hour yet, dai stihó cousin!” said the one who slowed and came to a stop in front of him, and a tiny wizard-light flicked on over his shoulder and caught Kit in the eyes, so he had to blink and laugh while they adjusted again.

“Dai stihó!” Kit said. “It’s all right, there’s a lot going on at the other end. Maybe they swapped somebody else’s schedule with mine…”

“Well, it’s sad!” said the wizard who’d come to meet him. Kit looked him up and down as the other did the same with him. Fur, definitely: a blunt flat muzzle, round dark eyes, ears small and round and set far back—the general effect made Kit think of the face of one of the big cats, maybe a panther. But there was nothing predatory about these eyes, and they were quick and clever. “Here you are standing about in the dark all by yourself like no one cares you’re here!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kit said.”I’m just glad to get where I’m going, finally.”

“We’re glad to have you too,” the other wizard said. “The gate’s been acting up and we can use your help. But I’m sorry, you don’t even know my name! It’s Djam. There’s a lot more of it, but there’s no point in worrying about that now.”

“Djam,” said Kit said, trying it out. “That right?”

“Quite right. Which is right for you, cuz, Rodriguez or Christopher?”

“Neither actually. Kit works better.”

“Kiht. And you’re a he, then?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“All right, thanks,” Djam said. “Just curious. Actually, just curious because Cheleb’s curious about it, that’s our watchmate, coming out in a moment. I never paid much attention to it before but that one’s such a stickler…”

Kit chuckled. “What,” Djam said, looking concerned, “did I say it wrong?”

“Oh no! It’s just, my wizardly partner and I have a friend—” Kit’s thought went immediately to Sker’ret, not rushed off all his feet as he was today, but in calmer times. “He calls her that all the time, a stickler. And she kind of is…”

“All right. Well, Cheleb’s a ‘hae’—”

Kit took a moment to work out the word he’d just heard in the Speech, and then realized it was a different gender pronoun, structured somewhat like the way the words for “he” and “she” were in the Earth-based Speech recensions. “Okay,” he said, because for the moment he hadn’t the slightest idea how the word mapped onto Earth-based Speech-words about sex and gender, and also had no idea if it was even going to matter all that much. “Is it okay to ask where you’re from?” That was usually a smart question to get out of the way, as some species were sensitive about discussing the locations of their home star systems, or even saying where they came from at all.

“Of course it is,” said Djam. “Alnilam.”

Kit nodded, though for the time being he couldn’t think where that might be, except that the star’s name sounded familiar. At least it was one he’d run across at some point in his casual manual reading, which meant that it was most likely somewhere fairly close to earth in the great Galactic scheme of things—probably no more than a few thousand light-years away. “We’re neighbors, then.”

“I’d say so,” Djam said, “though don’t ask me right now in which direction, or how close.” He rubbed at the longer fur on top of his head as if his head ached. “It’s been a long day…”

“This the him?” said another voice, a soft scratchy one, and out from behind the biggest of the rocks in the stone circle came another humanoid, taller than Djam and broader too; big-shouldered and wide in the chest, long-waisted but surprisingly short-legged, and moving very fast and light. The approaching figure came hastening over to them and stopped right by Kit, looming over him.

“This is the him,” Djam said, and the newcomer leaned in more closely, near enough to sniff at Kit’s hair. Apparently hae didn’t have anything like a human’s sense for personal space, but that was something Kit had run into before, and so he looked haem over in return without feeling too freaked about it. Hae was wearing several layers of clothing, with something like a biker’s heavy jacket over the top of it all, each layer made of very different fibers or hides. Hae had a long neck and an elongated skull covered in rough, dappled skin, a pair of big, forward-set eyes, and a large, toothy grin that apparently meant the same for haes species as it did for Earth-humans, as Kit could practically feel the good cheer and interest boiling off haem. Kit liked haem on sight.

“Kiht, this is Cheleb,” said Djam.

“Dai, cousin!” Kit said. “Well met.”

“And I,” Cheleb said. “Mebsuta’s home for me. Yours, though— Looked in the Knowing, got confused. Planet called Ground in milk tongue? Or possibly Dirt? Translation into Speech equivocal.”

Kit laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “the home cultures haven’t really settled on a formal name for the planet because they don’t know there are other species who’re going to want to know what to call it. ‘Earth’ gets used a lot at home. Some of our scientists call it Sol III. Some people use Terra: that’s older. Or Tellus… Not so popular, but it has kind of a ring to it. Or Gaia…”

“Come sit down, drink water, eat food, get briefed, then tell us more names later and we’ll pick one we like,” Cheleb said, laughing.

The three of them headed back toward the circle. “‘Him’, huh?” said Cheleb as they went.

Kit gave the Mebsuth an amused look. “Yeah, that’s right. What’s so interesting about the gender words?”

Cheleb did a sort of arm flap that Kit thought might have been a shrug. “Just like to be polite. Going to be doing long hours together sometimes on this job, don’t want to get anyone annoyed.”

That made a certain kind of sense. “So first things first. Where should I put my pup tent?” Kit said as they passed through a gap between stones into the circle.

“Pick a rock, slap your portal up against it,” Djam said, pointing at one of the nearby stones that had a portal adhering to it, active—to judge by the faint glow around the edges—but not patent at the moment. “That’s mine. Cheleb’s is across the circle. Maybe you want to be in between?”

“Makes sense,” Kit said, and headed over to do it. The outer stones of the circle were all wider than they were thick and were fairly rough-hewn on three sides; the inner side was the only one that was smooth. I wonder why, Kit thought, making a mental note to have a look at the manual later to see if it threw any light on this. Now where did I stick the portal interface… He started to reach for his otherspace pocket, then thought, wait a minute, of course it’s not there—it being a very bad idea to put a collapsible “pinched space” inside another one. It’s in my regular pocket. He leaned one-handed on the standing stone while with the other he started rummaging in his jeans. Nope, house keys, wallet, other pocket—

And then something soft and strong and weird wrapped suddenly around the hand that was leaning on the stone, and reflexively Kit pushed himself violently away from it and didn’t quite scream.

The other two wizards looked at him rather oddly. Kit, though, was staring at the standing stone and pointing, and trying to recover himself, because he felt like an idiot. Nonetheless, something was clinging to the side of the stone, staring back at him with numerous strange, dark eyes. “What the hell is that?”

To his complete chagrin, both Djam and Cheleb started laughing, one high, one low. Djam hurried over to him, saying, “Come on, Chel, I thought you said you got rid of them all!”

“Got rid of all the ones that were there then,” Cheleb said, still gasping with laughter. “Might’ve needed to tweak the duration element in the spell.”

“Do that!” Djam said. Meanwhile he slipped past Kit, waving his arms at the dark thing that was clinging to the stone. “Oh, go on, you! Go on, little cousin, get on out of it, go away—”

Kit was feeling like an idiot about the way he’d reacted, and now came up beside Djam to have a closer look at the creature. It looked like nothing so much as an octopus, though a rather small one—maybe only a couple of feet across when all its tentacles were spread out. It was dappled and patched in soft brown and the blue-green that was typical of Tevaralti foliage; the tentacles didn’t have suckers, but instead a soft, rough undersurface in a darker color. The baggy body looked very much like that of an octopus, but instead of just having one pair of eyes, one on each side, the whole abdomen—assuming it was an abdomen—was peppered with dark hemispherical eyes, each one featuring a peculiar four-branched pupil. The annoyed-looking attention of all these eyes was fixed on Kit and the gesturing Djam, and the creature stared angrily at them as it began to shuffle down the standing stone with a faint cranky hissing sound.

“So what is it?” Kit said.

“It’s a sibik.”

Kit watched the way it was moving its tentacles—once again very octopus-like, graceful and very certain about how it moved. “Where does it come from?”

“Everywhere,” Cheleb said. “All over planet. Two, three hundred species in water, on dry land, especially up in trees. Some have wings, not on this continent thank the Singularity. Plains and prairie species particularly numerous.”

“Sounds like you’ve been doing your research,” Kit said.

“Not much choice,” Cheleb said. “Things are everywhere.”

“Are they smart?”

Djam made one of his laughs, a kind of a bubbly sound. “Smart enough to get into your portal if you leave it open, and eat everything in sight! You want to be careful about that.”

“Okay. What do they eat?” Kit said, watching with interest as the sibik got itself down into the grass that surrounded the standing stones and began to slither away.

“Anything they can get those little tentacles on,” Djam said. “Though they do seem to favor carbohydrates over flesh protein. Just as well—there are a lot of unusual body chemistries on this planet, and it’s probably a survival mechanism to stick to what you can be fairly sure won’t kill you.”

“Weren’t so sure they didn’t eat flesh when that one got its little clingers around you,” Cheleb said.

“What?” Kit said. “What happened?”

Djam laughed and gestured at the big seat-like stone in the center of the circle. “I was sitting in the hot seat there keeping an eye on the gates till Cheleb here got back from an errand, and one of them came creeping along and decided to see if I was edible.”

“Not what he said,” said Cheleb. “Wanted you for nesting material.”

“Well, he bit me first,” said Djam. “Then he started trying to pull my fur out.”

Kit laughed. “Okay,” he said, “so they bite, but they’re not really harmful, and you can talk to them in the Speech.”

“Not great conversationalists,” Cheleb said. “Mostly interested in food and reproduction.”

“Kind of interested in food myself, at this point,” said Djam. “Come on, Kit, we’ll have a drink and a bite of our own and show you what you’ll be doing.”

There followed some bustling around after supplies, and finally all three of them wound up sitting together on the big flat central rock, working on self-sealing-and-unsealing boxes of a brand of multi-species iron ration that Kit had often seen in shops at the Crossings. “Noisome harkh,” said Cheleb, digging into one container, “but useful…”

Kit made a note to check the manual and find out exactly what harkh was in Cheleb’s local dialect: his understanding of the Speech seemed to simply render it as “food”, but something else could be going on. The ration was in the form of bars of more or less breakfast-bar size, and the three of them sat chewing on these and passing a water bottle back and forth. “So what they have us doing here, cousin,” Djam said as he finished up one bar and waved the wrapper on a second one open, “it’s not that it’s difficult work.”

“Not exciting though,” said Cheleb, as Djam bit half off the new bar while reaching into his body fur and pulling out, from somewhere or other, a long slender shiny metal rod that Kit at first mistook for a wand. “Sit around for a long time, wait for something to go wrong. Then when it does, panic, go crazy fixing it. Say bad things about Oldest Outlier. Then repeat. Often.”

Djam tilted his head back and forth in what Kit suspected was an Alnilamev version of a nod and touched a control at one side of the rod, then pulled. A see-through page of light followed the gesture out into the air; a projection or hologram of a manual page, with centered on it a very detailed graphic of the gating complex, and scrolling columns of readout associated with each of the feeder gates. “All the locations that feed into these gate interfaces are located elsewhere on this continent, usually in big cities,” Djam said. “But each of these accepts incoming transits from a spread of between six and twelve locations in each planet day. Every time one of the gates at our end closes down its connection to a remote location and starts opening a connection to a different one, this area experiences a series of energy fluctuations and local temporospatial derangements.”

“Unavoidable,” Cheleb growled around haes mouthful. “Space hates gates. Always a problem.”

Another back-and-forth head tilt from Djam. “We’ve been given prewritten spell routines to compensate for these flux events,” he said. “They’re independently powered and they’re automatic; they cut in every time a feeder gate closes down and starts going through the process of locking onto a new remote location. But you have to watch them, because sometimes something goes wrong at the far end—not enough people ready to move, some kind of problem with their own feeder gates—”

“Logistics,” Cheleb said, finishing haes ration bar and reaching for another. “Always the weak spot. Mass transport intervention’s a tree.” Hae reached out to the manual “page” Djam was holding open and tapped it with one beige-hided claw. Immediately the view shifted, showing a structural schematic of small individual pathways melding together to form larger branches, always in multiples of five or six to one, through two or three layers of gate connections, until the broadest of these converged into single final trunks fading away at their bases—the light pulsing there indicating the jump to another world. “Little gates all over this continent feed bigger ones, groups of bigger ones feed bigger ones still. That one—” Hae flicked his claw at the largest gate out in the complex across the plain. “On-planet terminus gate. Goes only one place, refuge world called Dallavei, three hundred ninety-four light years from here. Resettlement plan tries to keep people from same continent together unless they request otherwise.”

“Dallavei’s the second most distant of the six refuge worlds,” Djam said, “so all the gates debouching on it are the second highest-powered ones in the network. They need a lot of watching.”

“So we sit all through a shift,” Kit said, “and just watch the unlock-and-lock sequences execute.”

“That’s right,” Djam said. “Sometimes nothing happens… everything runs perfectly smoothly. But every six minutes, or ten, or more, depending on what the transit schedule is doing upstream, one of those five feeders closes and hunts its new target. And you watch it. Mostly, eight times out of ten, everything goes smoothly, nothing happens.”

“Or ninth and tenth times,” Cheleb said, “just when think things will be quiet—things act up. Smaller portals have traffic problems. Or start throwing gravitational anomalies.” Hae shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Gates hate each other as much as space hates them. Pack so many gates so close together, even small ones, they throw mass-substrate errors, or else time and local space get out of synch. Act quickly, adjust local gravitational constant, gates don’t rip each other out of ground and ruin whole day.” Hae rolled his eyes most expressively, making Kit smile: he’d noticed more than once on trips to the Crossings that the gesture was surprisingly common among humanoid species, though it could mean really different things depending on cultural influences.

“Is there a control center,” Kit said, “or anywhere in particular we need to be while we’re monitoring all this?”

“I’m a nervous type,” Djam said. “I like doing it here.” He thumped his furry two-thumbed hand on the stone they sat on. “Makes me feel better to be able to see what’s going on without using remote sensors.”

“Personal preference,” Cheleb said, and shivered. “Can do it just fine from inside portable cave. Weather here’s terrible even when not dropping water all over everything from cold chilly sky.” Hae shivered again.

“Or else you just don’t care to look at that all day,” said Djam, and cast his eyes upward.

For a moment they all looked up at Thesba, now approaching the zenith. After a moment, “Wouldn’t try claiming otherwise in the Speech,” said Cheleb.

“Me either,” said Kit.

Djam sighed, got up. “Nor I. Kiht, we should get your puptent set up so you can get some rest. Your—manual?—will have a guide for you on how to handle the monitoring: I’ll sit with you for some of your first shift, give you pointers. After that we should sort ourselves a schedule, see whose planet’s day matches this one best, who does what best and when… because we’re going to be doing this for days.”

Cheleb got up too. “Have early-day shift tomorrow,” hae said, “need to go curl up now. Later, cousins…” And hae got up and went off to haes puptent’s portal, vanishing through it.

Kit looked up at Thesba, shivered one more time in that cold wind, and got up to go after Djam and get his puptent sorted out.

It was another hour or so before Kit was anywhere near ready to settle down. There was always so much sorting and settling to do; the things he’d fired into the pup tent at high speed when he was packing and getting out of the house now needed to be stacked up out of the way. And then of course he had to make his bed—literally make it, constructing the spell that would be substituting for a mattress. In fact he had to make it three times, because he kept getting the size of the air mattress wrong (and in order to get the mattress to the right level of firmness, the spell defining the volume of the air which was being “hardened” into the mattress was particularly rigorous). But finally he was standing there in the middle of the eggshell-white half dome that was the way the inside of the puptent expressed itself, looking at the neatly-made bed with his striped bedspread on it, and the boxes and containers of food piled up all around the edges of the space, and the stacks of books and other things he’d brought with him, and all of a sudden the weight of everything that had happened over the course of the day came down on Kit’s shoulders all at once and left him feeling desperately tired.

The temptation to simply flop face down on the bed and pass out right then and there was huge. Unfortunately there were still things that needed to be done. For the moment, Kit just sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for his manual, thinking nervously about what it was going to be like for him in the morning when he sat down on that flat rock outside and it was his turn to ride herd on a flock of cranky worldgates. He thought about Djam sitting up there now with his sleek little pull-out manual, and Cheleb, asleep in haes own “portable cave”, and was relieved that they were so nice and that he got along so well with them. Though that’s probably no accident, Kit thought. Some ways the Powers will be behind a lot of this, and mostly we’ll be put where we’ll work best…

He flipped through the pages to the messaging section and tapped on Nita’s last text message to him. “You conscious?” he said.

It went out as a text, since that was what he was responding to, but it was her voice that answered. “Nngh, barely,” Nita said. “What about you?”

“Getting ready to turn in,” Kit said, piling his pillows on top of each other and flopping back against them. “How is it where you are?”

She sighed. “It’s a mess. Six gates, funneling into one about halfway up the transit tree. So the team here has both incoming and outgoing schedules to worry about, and just after I arrived they had to shut down two of their incoming gates because of some kind of gravitational problem upstream. I’m just so very happy that they think I’m actually going to be good at keeping an eye on this thing when I have my first shift tomorrow.”

“This is all because we’re friends with Rhiow, isn’t it,” Kit said.

“Don’t know about all,” Nita said. “For all I know, it’s because you use your beam-me-up-Scotty spell more than anyone else on Earth.”

“Oh yeah,” Kit said. “Blame me.”

“Whenever possible.”

Kit laughed at her. “Are your teammates nice?”

“Nice? You have no idea. They were acting as if it was a big deal when I arrived… I have no idea why. Though maybe,” she added, as if the idea was just occurring, “they’re thinking that having a visionary on site would be useful if something starts to go wrong.”

She sounded uneasy. Kit knew why: Nita’s visioning abilities were going through changes, and right now they didn’t always work the way she wanted them to, or (sometimes) at all. “Look,” Kit said, “the monitoring equipment and spells they’ve got set up on these gates are really sensitive. I had a look at one of the basic readout arrays a while ago, and I doubt it’ll need a visionary to let people know if one of these things starts getting twitchy.” In fact it had better not, because I’m no visionary…

Nita sighed. “Okay.”

“So who’s on your team, then?”

“Oh. A sort-of-a-girl from Alya, that’s one of the star’s names, anyway—it’s a binary, over in Serpens someplace. I should know where but…” She yawned. “Ask me tomorrow. They’re sort of shelly all over, but the shell’s segmented, like what an armadillo has. And so pretty! She’s all inlaid with gems and metal and stuff; Carmela’s going to try to steal her look the minute she sees it. The other one’s a guy from Natih, you know the ones I mean, we’ve seen them at the Crossings a couple times. The little dinosaury ones with the neck frills and the unpronounceable names. Anyway, all very nice people. But they’re really tired out: this gate’s been running them ragged.” She yawned again.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “I get a feeling these guys have been having trouble too. …Well, here we are. We’ll see if we can get things to work a little better.” He yawned too.

“Listen to you,” Nita said. “You should crash.”

“You’re the one who got me started,” said Kit. And then he could feel another yawn on its way, and started to think she had a point. “And know what? You’ve convinced me. I’m done.”

“That was too easy,” Nita said, and laughed. “When are you getting up?”

He glanced at his watch, which was still running on New York time. “Uh… six hours from now, maybe. It’s late back home but I want to get used to the local time as quick as I can.”

“Okay. Setting an alarm?”

“Definitely.”

“Good. Call me then?”

“No point in suffering alone.”

He knew she could hear his smile. “Later,” Nita said, and the manual page grayed itself out as she closed the connection.

Kit just sat smiling at it for a moment, then felt around under his pillows for where he’d stuck his phone: there was one more thing to do before he could shut down. He woke up the screen, touched a couple of icons, and the text function came up.

Normally there would have been no limit on a text’s length when it was working as a manual function. But the screen of his phone was saying, in a very no-nonsense font, DUE TO INCREASED ENERGY REQUIRED FOR INFRATEMPORAL MESSAGING, 500 CHARACTERS PER LOCAL DAY ONLY. SORRY, NO AUDIO / IMAGE MESSAGING.

Kit sighed, but it made sense. Doing anything that messed with the arrow of time was inevitably extremely power-intensive. For all Kit knew, each character of the message was going to have to be inscribed on a separate tachyon, which would then have to be pushed backwards in time, or sideways, or something more complex. It was the kind of technical detail that probably would set Nita off into a long fascinating discussion with Bobo, but right now the whole idea just made Kit’s head hurt.

GOT HERE OK, Kit typed. VERY VERY— He deleted the extra “very.” —BIG CREEPY MOON OVERHEAD. NOW TO MAKE SURE IT STAYS THERE, AT LEAST UNTIL WE’VE GOTTEN EVERYBODY OUT. IF WE CAN.

He sat there a moment with his mind full of the image of Thesba, and paused: partly because that would have been the normal length of a short text or a tweet at home, and partly because the thought came to him once more that he simply couldn’t understand what was going on with the Tevaralti. How could anybody stay here with that hanging over their heads, ready to shatter and fall at any moment? Probably he’d get a better sense of whatever answers there might be over the days to come: but right now it seemed beyond strange.

PEOPLE I’M WORKING WITH ARE FRIENDLY, YOU WOULD LIKE THEM EVEN IF NOT AS INTERESTING TO LOOK AT AS FILIF OR SKER’RET. FIRST DAY ON THE JOB TOMORROW, BEDTIME NOW, LOVE YOU BOTH.

Kit yawned and hit “send”, then rearranged the pillows, shoved the phone under them again, and got up to go outside and take care of some before-bedtime physical things—carefully looking around both before and after to avoid stepping on any stray sibik that might’ve been in the neighborhood. Before he went back in he paused and glanced over at the throne-like center stone, where Djam was keeping an eye on things. Kit gave Djam a wave. The Alnilamev nodded at Kit, dropped his jaw in what Kit guessed might be his people’s version of a smile, and went back to intently watching his out-rolled manual page.

Kit nodded back, went into his puptent, secured the portal, and got undressed, yawning. Something to read?… But he was really too tired, and he knew he ought to get to sleep—tomorrow would come early and involve serious stuff. He put on pajama bottoms, for his own comfort if not his watchmates’, in case something that needed his presence happened between now and the morning. Then, flopping onto the bed, Kit flipped the manual open to the page that handled the settings for the puptent, and spoke the Speech-word that reduced the lighting to near-darkness. Not total: when he went on an away-jaunt like this, Kit preferred to leave some ambient light running in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night for something. Not a nightlight, he thought. Nothing like one, absolutely not…

He tossed and turned for a while, but couldn’t settle. Finally, though, it came for him: that strange moment when your body—now lying still in silence and dimness and having leisure to actually feel what’s going on around it—somehow finally understands that despite the presence of some basic comforts, your own food and your own bedding, the right kind of air and the right kind of gravity, you’re still not camping out in your back yard. The physical realization settled into Kit’s bones that he was hundreds and hundreds of light years from home, someplace completely strange… and in this case, someplace doomed. A shiver went right down him.

Sleep couldn’t come quickly enough for him: and didn’t.

FIVE

Thursday

When the manual’s alarm woke him, Kit’s eyes snapped immediately open as if his body had been waiting for it. He moaned to himself and rubbed the graininess out of his eyes, then rolled over and tried to get himself oriented.

It took some minutes, as usual. Kit had noticed that when he slept off-planet on errantry, getting himself operational on the first away day was always more of a challenge than usual—partly because his normal morning routines couldn’t go ahead the way they did at home, and partly because he was always both buzzed and nervous about what was going on. Today was no exception, but he didn’t have time to indulge his wish that he could take things more slowly.

Kit headed straight over to his stash of food and drinks, cracked a bottle of water and chugged half of it, and then pulled his pajamas off and recited a useful spell that Ronan had shared with him. When you were in a place where there were no shower facilities—which this appeared to be—the wizardry in question simply stripped all the dead cells, dried sweat, and other detritus off the very topmost level of your skin, all over your body. Kit closed his eyes and stood there while the spell fizzed and tickled all over him, and then dusted himself off when it finished.

Got to talk to Djam and Cheleb about what they do about waste management, Kit thought. Technologically this is a pretty advanced planet; what do the Tevaralti do? Maybe we can get in a porta-potty or something… But as problems went, for the moment that was a relatively minor one.

He got himself dressed and had some more water, then reached for his manual, flipping it open to the messaging section. “You there?”

Unavailable, said Nita’s status listing on that page. On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading.

“Wow,” Kit said under his breath. “Already? At this hour?” But there was no telling what had come up at her end of things. “Just checking in,” Kit said. “Message me when you’re free.”

He dropped the manual on his bed and went out to take care of the most immediate physical need out back behind the standing stones. He was almost startled by how different the landscape looked in morning light. It was actually a nice morning; the sky was an unusual shade of pale green-gold dappled with little, feathery cirrus clouds, and a very bright white sun was shining from off to the left of the gating complex, low in the eastern sky—Kit decided to think of it as eastern to avoid confusion—throwing the standing stones’ shadows out stark behind them. In his opinion, the view was improved because for the moment Thesba was nowhere to be seen. It would be along soon enough; it circled Tevaral twice a day. But at least I don’t have to see it before breakfast.

On slipping back between the stones and coming around the side of the flat “throne rock” in the middle, Kit found Djam sitting there, leaning against the three-meter-high back of the throne but otherwise apparently hardly moved from when Kit had left him here last night. “How’s it been going?” Kit said, wandering over to sit down next to him.

“All quiet,” Djam said. “In fact, quieter than it’s been for the last couple nights. Makes me wonder if the complex has decided to behave better now that we have a full team on site.” Then he laughed. “Or whether it’s planning to start misbehaving once it’s lulled us into a false sense of security.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Kit said, looking down at the page with the sensor array that Djam had laid out now on the stone beside him. “But it does look good at the moment…”

“Might be a good time for you to synch up your own instrumentality,” Djam said. “I can show you what you need to be looking for.”

Kit nodded and headed back into his puptent. When he came out again, he saw that Djam had lengthened his metallic wand and heightened and broadened the manual page extruded from it so that it was nearly the size of a small flat screen monitor.

Kit laid the manual down next to it, opening it out to the pages having to do with his own assignment in the intervention and the locality where they were based. Immediately the manual’s double-page spread shifted to mirror the display that Djam’s page was showing. There at the top of the display were five small spell-circles, one for each of the feeder gates, interlaced with a webwork of lines indicating power conduits and control structures. At the bottom of the display was the larger terminus gate, its circular diagram pulsing softly as it reported in second by second on the energy flow between it and its target gate light years away, along with the number of people passing through it. More readouts reflected local gravitational stresses caused by all the gates’ operation, the interaction of the larger gate’s portal interface with local space-time, and the status of incoming traffic from the aggregate of portals upstream.

“There’s no point in trying to read any of it too closely,” Djam said. “The little changes that happen from minute to minute aren’t so important. It’s when you start noticing a trend over a few minutes, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, that you have to start paying attention. The system has its own alarms built-in, and they’re pretty sensitive. If something really starts to misbehave, it’ll give you warning. The art of it is to catch these things before they happen. And, as our seniors have been telling us since we got here, if the alarms go off, don’t waste time; yell for help and get the heavyweight talent in here.” Djam pointed at a softly red-glowing set of characters in the Speech that spelled out EMERGENCY. He touched it, and a list of names or similar personality identifiers popped up. “Whoever is at the top of that list,” Djam said, “just touch it and describe your problem, and they’ll gate straight in here so fast you won’t feel the wind of them arriving before you see their hands, claws, or tentacles getting right into the display and manipulating the gate structure.”

“That’s happened to you?” Kit said.

Djam tilted his head left and right. “Twice now,” he said. “Scared the fur off me the first time. The second time, they could’ve taken the fur for all I cared: I was just glad to get the big gate settled.” He shook himself all over, and his fur fluffed out. “Gravitational anomaly—something triggered by something going on in Thesba’s core. Not my fault, but I was glad when it was over.”

Kit nodded. “All right,” he said, “give me a second. I’ll go back and get some breakfast and you can help me get a handle on this.”

It took them something like an hour—along with a box of Pop Tarts and two cans of cappuccino, one of which Djam sampled and pronounced “awful in a strangely attractive way”— before Djam was satisfied that Kit knew what to look for and Kit was satisfied he was getting enough of a feel for the gate-monitoring interface to be left alone with it. Picking up the finest points of the way the gates interacted, Kit thought, was probably going to take another day or so. There was one proto-emergency after they’d been at it for about half an hour, and Kit was pleased that he had seen the pattern starting to build before the manual’s own alarm had time to go off. For a few moments it had looked as if he was going to get to call in his first assistant from the next level up, but it didn’t happen. The gravitational fluctuations associated with the number three feeder gate calmed down when Kit instructed the manual to boost the gate’s power feed enough to reinforce its own damping mechanisms, spoofing the gravitational field in its immediate neighborhood into ignoring the neighboring four gates and the way they were warping the gravity in space around them.

“That’s it,” Djam said, sounding very pleased as he rubbed his eyes and leaned against the back of the throne. “I’d say you’ve got the eye for this… inasmuch as any of us can have ‘an eye for it’ after we’ve only been doing it for a few days.”

It was as much as Kit could’ve hoped for. “I think I’m okay,” he said. “You should try to get some rest— you’ve really had a long shift. You’ll be close if I need to yell, and anyway—” He pointed at the red “emergency” herald on his manual pages, most carefully not touching it. “It’s not like they’re far away.”

“They’re absolutely not,” Djam said, “believe me.” He stretched and made a different bubbling noise, his version of a yawn, picked up the metal rod from which his energy-based manual page was extruded, and sucked the page back in.

Kit looked away from the manual across the grassy plain toward the masses of people streaming out of the feeder gates and into the terminus gate, so much more visible than they had been last night… but just as constant as they had been last night, the flow never stopping. “What about them?” he said. “Are we ever supposed to go over there and see how they’re doing?”

“Well,” Djam said, “if there was some kind of emergency, of course. But they’ve got Tevaralti wizards handling that side of it, mostly, and non-wizards too—people from their own clans or national emergency services. Mostly we’re expected to keep our eyes on the gates. After all, that’s what they brought us here for; because we’ve got some previous gate expertise.”

“And because we’re humanoid.”

“Well. If we do have to interact with Tevaralti people when they’re losing their world…” Djam sounded uncomfortable. “You can imagine how it would be. The more like you the people who’re helping you are, the less it’s going to upset you. And Powers only know, these people have enough to be upset about right now. Probably it’s best to keep all the on-planet help looking as humanoid as possible, even if we might not be interacting with Tevaralti all that often.”

“That’s excuse we’re given anyway,” said Cheleb from behind them, as hae came around to sit on the seat-stone of the throne on the other side of Djam. Hae shook all haes layers of clothing around haem in a big fabric-heavy shrug. “Who knows what Above-And-Beyonders really have in mind?” Hae stretched where hae sat, looked over at Kit. “Sleep well, cousin?”

Kit nodded. “Yes, thanks.”

“Plying colleague with exotic food, one sees,” Cheleb said, reaching across Djam to pick up the empty Pop-Tart box. “What is ‘raspberry’?”

“Um, it’s a fruit,” Kit said.

Cheleb wrinkled haes gum-flaps away from haes very, very sharp upper teeth. It was like having a crocodile make a distasteful face. “Not part of usual diet,” he said. “Contains carbohydrate, though?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Starch, sugar…”

Cheleb elongated haes eyes at Kit and got up again. “Trade you some of mine later, perhaps? For experimentation. Have places to be, meanwhile.”

Djam looked up. “Where are you headed?”

“Got cousin on other side of planet. Cousin cousin, not hrasht.” Cheleb shook haes layers again, this time apparently to settle them into place. “Helping with small upstream gate. Might as well go see, not on shift until nearly sunset.”

“All right,” Djam said.

“If needed, call right away,” Cheleb said to Kit, patting a pouch slung under haes jacket layer: Kit supposed that was where hae had haes manual stowed, or whatever hae used for one. “Don’t hesitate. Sudden disappearance on Important Job will just impress cousin more.”

There was something so sly about the way he said it that Kit just had to snicker. “Okay,” he said. “Dai, cousin.”

Cheleb raised a claw to them and went off toward the little local-gating pad. Djam stood up too, stretching and bubble-yawning again. “So you’re sure you’re all right with this?” Djam said.

“As sure as I can be right now,” Kit said.

“All right. Call me right away if you need anything, or you’re not sure about a reading.”

“Will do.”

And Djam headed back to his standing stone, waved his portal open, and vanished into it.

Kit looked down at his manual, touched the control at the corner of the double-page spread that brought it into “active-for-intervention” mode, and got busy watching the gates.

It took Kit most of the morning to fall into a monitoring rhythm he found comfortable. To some extent this had to do with getting the analysis array on his manual page set up correctly. Too sensitive a setting and it kept giving him false alarms about gravitational anomalies around the feeder gates; but settings not sensitive enough just sat there unchanging for long minutes at a time and made him more nervous than the false alarms had, because he was afraid he was missing something.

Finally he found a happy medium—setting a baseline in the manual for the kind of fluctuations in the local gravitational field that he’d been seeing over the last ten minutes or so, and then revisiting that baseline ten minutes later. Shortly Kit got to the point where he felt confident about glancing at the manual just once every ten minutes or so to make sure that everything was all right. Initially he tended to underestimate the time—it was surprising how long ten minutes could feel while you were waiting for something to go wrong—but finally, around local noon, he got the hang of it enough to start to relax.

He spent the time on either side of local noon delving into the manual for information on his two watchmates’ homeworlds and people, and finishing the business of going through the readings in the manual that had to do with the Tevaral intervention. The more Kit read, the more there seemed to be—the complexity of a full-on rafting project, the movement of not only a planetary population but as much of its biosphere as possible, was terrifying. There was the preparation of the refuge planet or planets, beginning with terraforming and atmosphere configuration and continuing through the transplantation of the threatened biosphere from the viral and microbial level upwards. Then came the duplication of species-typical infrastructure, from the siting of new cities in relationships as closely matching their old ones as possible to the building of new roads, ports, airports or spaceports.

The list of tasks to be handled went on and on. The transfer or rebuilding of new economic resources: factories, agriculture, communications. The rafting and preservation of irreplaceable cultural and artistic buildings and artifacts. Culture-specific disaster counseling, weather management and control, mass data archival, political stabilization… No matter how quickly Kit and Nita and all the other humanoid wizards who’d been brought in finished up their emergency work here and went home, the much larger team of Interconnect Project wizards and technicians would be working on this particular relocation for years if not decades to come.

And this is what Mamvish specializes in, Kit thought. This is what she runs. Not just one or two of these projects: lots of them. The image of Mamvish as a short-tempered saurian kid who turned up on Earth every now and then to trash-talk recalcitrant Komodo dragons had without warning considerably broadened itself out.

Will we see her, I wonder? Kit thought. It didn’t make sense to expect it. She had to be incredibly busy. And more to the point, even if she’s got time for visiting around, what’re the odds it’ll coincide with any of us Earth-based types being conscious? Tevaral’s day, after all, was thirty-one and a half hours long. This fortunately mapped fairly closely onto the Crossings day of thirty-three hours—a schedule that Kit had occasionally had to come to grips with while on errantry. But for an Earth-human used to a twenty-four hour day, sleep and waking schedules could get pretty messed up after only a few of the thirty-plus-hour cycles. Kit suspected he’d have to adjust his own sleep schedule after four or five days of this, and the others might too.

At any rate, the length of the Tevaralti day meant that he and Cheleb and Djam were going to be doing more or less ten hours each of gate-monitoring, with ten hours off and ten hours to sleep. Assuming nothing really awful happens that needs us all at once, Kit thought.

For his own purposes, though, he really hoped this intervention wasn’t going to go on too much longer than Mamvish had predicted… as being on a thirty-hour-or-better schedule for too long wasn’t kind to Earth-human physiologies. You could try to tweak your own body clock with wizardry, but it was delicate work and you usually wound up having to pay for it in more than just your personal energy after you’d tried.

Energy, Kit thought. Now that I think of it… He got up and stretched, and went back to his puptent with the manual open in one hand for something to drink and a snack. Shortly thereafter he was back in place again with some saltines and the manual spread out again, looking over the information about the refuge planet on which this terminus gate was targeted.

Hardly had Kit gotten settled when the manual’s messaging pages started to flash. Oh, now what? he thought as he had the incoming-messages page overlay its content on the gate-monitoring array… and then with a grin he saw from the flashing profile that it was Nita. “You’re just now free?” he said. “What’s going on over there?”

“One of the feeder gates misbehaving,” her voice said from the manual pages. “Started up right during my orientation, which was handy. In a very nasty and unnecessary way. Not what I needed first thing in the morning.” She sounded as if she was still fairly aggrieved. “Or for five or six hours after. How’s your day been so far?”

“Not bad. Had a couple of hiccups while I was being oriented, but nothing like yours.”

“Just as well,” Nita said. “Still, my guys were really good with me. They showed me how to ride it out, and at the same time they kept saying, ‘it’s not your fault! You’re doing fine!’” She laughed.

“Yeah, you’d like mine too,” Kit said. “Both of them. One of them looks like sort of a sly lizard guy who seriously believes in layering, and the other one—” He had to laugh at himself, because he’d caught Djam looking strangely at him a couple of times before Kit realized he’d been staring and cut it out. “He looks like a Wookiee.”

“What?”

“It’s the fur. And something about his face. But there’s no howling or warbling or anything, just this really cultured accent, like something off the BBC. Anyway, they’re both friendly, and the furry one, Djam, is really easy to work with.”

“How old are they?”

“Hard to tell,” Kit said, and flipped some pages in his manual to where Djam’s and Cheleb’s profiles appeared along with his own as this gate’s supervising team. “Uh… ‘Close post-latency’, it says. So…”

“More or less our age.”

“I think. Why?”

He could practically hear her shrugging. “Just curious. The Natih guy here, you remember, Mr. Frilly Dino? He’s pretty old, a thousand years or so our time, but he’s like a little kid some ways.”

“So a lot like Mamvish, then,” Kit said.

“Without the tomatoes, yeah.” She laughed. “Though they’ve got some neat food of their own. We were swapping breakfasts this morning and he gave me these sort of, I don’t know, vegetable sticks, and they tasted exactly like salted caramel! I said to him, ‘I can’t believe this, something that tastes like salted caramel that’s actually good for me?’ And he said, all surprised, ‘Wait! Isn’t all the food on your planet that’s good for you nice to eat?’” She laughed a very rueful laugh. “I didn’t know how to even begin explaining broccoli…”

Nita trailed off. The pause was odd. “Maybe start with cauliflower and work up from there?” Kit said.

“Um,” Nita said, and Kit knew instantly that it wasn’t a good “um”. “Uh oh, gotta go, I’ll call you later, yeah? Right, bye!”

And she was gone. Kit broke out in a sweat as he tapped on the manual page again. It said only, On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading…

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 problem 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 almost 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.

It took Kit about ten minutes to fix the problem—speaking kindly to the hardware of the gate in question and reasserting the need to have a nice, steady gravitational constant running in the area affected by its portal field when so many people were using it, even if they weren’t all using it right this minute. The gate settled down, though not without a certain amount of what Kit’s sense of dealing with mechanical things translated as grumpy muttering. What Cheleb had said to him about gates hating each other did seem to be true... and the problem seemed to be exacerbated when the hardware attached to the gate proper was so subtle and sophisticated. The gates seemed to become not only more sentient, but more sensitive. Which is probably going to be a pain in the butt, Kit thought. But let’s see how this goes.

It was late afternoon when Cheleb came back from haes away-time and sat down on the Stone Throne with Kit to look over the logs of the last ten hours’ operation and hear Kit’s report on anything that hae thought needed attention. Hae leaned over Kit’s manual, looking at it thoughtfully, and tapped the log entry that described Kit’s conversation with the gate. “Have gift for this,” Cheleb said, looking up at Kit with those strange elongated eyes of haes. “Would’ve taken me hour, maybe more, to produce same result. Those Who Keep Stable only know what would’ve happened in meantime.” Hae looked over the dialogue as it streamed by on the manual page, and bared haes teeth at Kit in an expression of approval. “Not just persuasive: smart about how to persuade. Ever consider getting into gate tech?”

The thought had genuinely never crossed Kit’s mind. “Um, no, not really.”

“Ought to,” Cheleb said. “Know any gate supervisors back on Dirt?”

Kit grinned; he knew when he was being teased. “A few, yeah.”

“Surprised they haven’t co-opted you already.”

Kit shrugged. “Our Supervisories are pretty easygoing about specialty guidance. May think it’s early in my case.” Or else, Kit thought, Tom’s not willing to start me wondering about possibly changing specialties when Neets is uncertain, too. “Another problem, though. Wizards of my species aren’t as good at seeing hyperstring structure as Earth wizards of other species.”

“Ah,” Cheleb said. “Still—should give it some thought. Always a shame to waste talent.” Hae got up. “Going to go fetch a bite to eat. Need carbs?”

“No, I’m good,” Kit said. “Had some protein a while back. Thanks, though.”

Cheleb vanished off into haes puptent. Just a few moments after hae did, Djam appeared and wandered over, rubbing at his eyes. “So how was your shift?”

“Pretty quiet,” Kit said. “A little excitement an hour or so ago.”

Djam sat down by him and glanced at the manual. “You weren’t long about sorting it out, though.”

Kit made a rueful face. “Worked better than trying to sort out the sibik that climbed up my world-cousin’s leg,” he said.

“What?”

Kit told him the story. Djam rocked back and forth where he sat, bubbling with amusement. “Well, at least it wasn’t one of the mhilimai ones.”

“Sorry?” Kit said. It was a Speech-word, but one he didn’t remember having heard before.

“Ah. The word’s for when you have a species that lives with you, but isn’t independent, or isn’t an equal. Sometimes both at once. One species likes the other to be around for company; or there can be other motives. Do you have such things in your world?”

“Pets,” Kit said. “A pet.”

“That would be it, yes. Well, the wild sibik, they leave a scent trail, did you know? That’s how they notify each other where food is—pheromonal signaling. Which is why we have to keep the puptents sealed all the time.” Djam bubbled a bit. “We’ve tried removing the scent by wizardry, but the little beasts have excellent memories, too, and they just come back and lay the trails again.”

Djam gestured with one elbow toward the gate complex. “Anyway, the people over there—a lot of them passing through have their mhilimai with them. Only right, after all; they’re all going to their new lives together. But so do some of the people who’re encamped out there, the ones who don’t want to go. Either way, sometimes one of the domesticated sibik gets adventurous, comes across a scent trail, follows it over here…” Djam shrugged: that gesture his kind of human and Kit’s had in common. “We find out who they belong to and return them. Mostly there’s no problem with that; they’re good at leading you to who they belong to, once they’re not distracted by food. They’ve a link of some kind, a sense of where their companion-person is. The one you were dealing with—it didn’t ask you to tell it where someone was?”

“Oh no,” Kit said. “All it was interested in was my friend Ronan’s hamburger.”

Djam tilted his head back, sniffed. Kit smiled a bit; there was something about the movement and the profile that once more reminded him of a Wookiee. “Oh, is that what I was smelling,” Djam said. “Might ask him about those myself, if he comes back.”

Kit laughed. “You can still smell that?”

“Of course. Can’t you?”

Kit thought sadly of someone who’d most likely still have been able to smell it if he was here. “No, my nose isn’t that good. But I think I can get you one. He says he has plenty.”

Cheleb came around the throne rock again and sat down by Kit. “Kehrutheh, I relieve you,” hae said, gesturing over the stone seat, and a copy of the array monitoring graphs glowed there.

Kit smiled at the Speech-word for “colleague”. “Thanks, Cheleb,” Kit said, “glad to be relieved.” He stood up, stretched, and snapped the manual shut. “Might try out the jump pad and go visit my friend later… see if he’ll let me have a few of those burgers for you guys.”

He headed for his puptent, Djam walking with him. “Kiht, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe it’s just a kinesics thing…”

“What?”

Djam bubbled a bit. “You keep looking at my fur. Is fur unusual where you come from?”

“Huh? Oh! No.” He was about to start explaining about animals on Earth and some of Homo sapiens’ simian relatives when he realized what the problem was. “No, it’s just…” Kit had to laugh, then. “Look, I’m sorry, this is really idiotic of me.”

Djam looked bemused. “What?”

“You remind me of somebody.”

“A friend? A colleague?”

Kit laughed again. “No! Somebody in, uh, it’s sort of an entertainment.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, somebody famous.”

“Really! Is it a good kind of famous?”

“Yeah, he’s a good guy. A hero type.”

“Oh, well that’s all right then,” Djam said. “I don’t think I could cope with being a villain.”

“I could show you if you like,” Kit said. There were ways to get access to Earth-based streaming services via the manual’s functions—some of them secondary to Dairine’s special relationship with her planet full of devoted mechanically-wizardly minions. The Mobiles were presently engaged in backing up all Earth’s data for her, as a convenience, and therefore considered archiving all Earth’s entertainment not to be a particularly big deal.

Then Kit had a second thought. “I mean, if it’s okay with you,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn’t think it was appropriate.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Kit paused in front of his puptent. “It came up for me when Ronan was here,” Kit said. “It feels, I don’t know, just strange, to be doing things for enjoyment when something like this is going on all around you. I mean…” He waved toward the portals, unwilling to look at them for the moment. “This is so awful for them. While I was on watch I was doing other things sometimes, I got distracted… and felt kind of bad that I wasn’t busy being sorry for them. You know what I mean?”

Djam looked thoughtful. “I think the Powers want us to do what we have to to work well,” he said, fiddling his fingers together in a gesture that Kit had seen him using the night before when he was uncertain about something. “But also maybe they want us to… not to be afraid to be ourselves while we’re here? Of course you don’t thoughtlessly make merry right in front of those who’re grieving: it’d be like eating in front of starving people! But if you’re sharing the food with them… that’s another story, surely?”

“Well…” Kit said, considering that.

“After all, it’s not like you can just pack your whole life away in a box, is it, when you go out on an intervention. What are you sent for if it’s not to bring you along? And there’s this too—there’s something about how our kind of people are, humanoids anyway, that made the Powers tell the intervention designers to post us on this world instead of just any species that was available!” Djam’s expression was surprisingly intense. “What would be the point of shutting that away if it’s what’s going to help them?”

There was something to be said for that line of reasoning. “I guess,” Kit said.

“And anyway, you have to do what you need to do to keep yourself running well. It’s not as if stopping yourself from being happy will make any of this any better.”

“No,” Kit said after a moment. “It’s just that… I don’t know.” He laughed helplessly. “I get guilty.”

Djam made a noise exactly like a horse snorting, so that Kit had to keep himself from laughing at that, anyway. “Guilt! Guilt’s what the Abnegate uses to keep us from doing our work, my advice-master says. After the fact, when it comes as fear we’ve done something wrong; or before the fact, to make us afraid we’re about to do something wrong. The food metaphor— When you’re working, why would you starve yourself of what will keep you doing your work well? That makes no sense. We’ve come a long way to do this, so let’s do it right. If taking some time off from the distress helps us do our work better, so be it. Yes?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. He let out a breath. “Djam, come on… let me get some snacks for you, this time: I must’ve eaten half yours last night. And we’ll have a look at the beginning of the story I want you to see.” Then another thought struck him. “You think Cheleb would want to see it too?”

“I think hae’ll be annoyed if hae doesn’t,” Djam said. “Hae’s big on alien cultural experience. But we can ask.”

Kit ducked into his puptent. “There might be some other people who’d want to look at this stuff with us in a day or two,” he said over his shoulder. “In fact Ronan was talking about having people over here for a picnic.”

“What’s a picnic?”

Kit laughed. “Come on,” he said, coming out of the puptent with an armful of soft drinks and crackers and cheese-in-a-can. “This may take some explaining…”

It was hard to tell where the next ten hours went. There had been some confusion at first when Kit explained what was going to be happening, and why. (“There are three more parts of the story before this one—kind of before, anyway—but I think we should start here…”) But soon enough they worked out how to transfer the streaming settings from Kit’s manual to the large, floating projection interface that was the way Cheleb’s version of the manual manifested itself. Within a very short time the three of them were watching the events of “a long time ago” unfold on Tatooine and at Alderaan, and Cheleb was roaring with laughter and pointing at Djam and crowing, “Does look like him! Does!”, and Djam was laughing too, until they all got swept away in the story together.

When the first film was over, both of Kit’s shiftmates were full of questions. These had to be set aside briefly when the middle feeder gate got rambunctious again; when Cheleb was unable to quiet it quickly, hae pulled Kit in to assist. It took the two of them nearly an hour to talk the gate down and get the gravitational anomalies it was throwing, one after another, to stop. Then there was some more eating and drinking to recover from that, and the questions started again.

“You said your people don’t believe that there are other intelligent species living on other planets.”

“Officially, they don’t. They believe there might be, but so far the mainstream culture hasn’t found any evidence that they’re able to accept.”

“And your planet is sevarfrith.”

“Mostly, yeah.”

“All right. But they still tell stories like this? How do they reconcile the two positions?”

“Because they’re just stories. And because they don’t automatically connect wizardry with the existence of other species.”

“That is so strange,” Djam said.

“Selective delusionality,” Cheleb said. “Evidence either of extreme intelligence or of species to be avoided at all costs, because can talk themselves into anything.” Hae was grinning that bared-teeth grin at Kit, which Kit for the time being took as approval.

“Maybe the second,” Djam said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A species like that could be incredibly effective with the Speech.”

Kit theatrically dusted his nails on his shirt. “We like to think that’s the case,” he said loftily. “Next movie?”

“More supplies first,” Cheleb said, “and double-check gates.”

The gates were fine, apparently having for the time being taken to heart the talk that Kit and Cheleb had given them. Nonetheless Cheleb kept a long and careful eye on the gate-array monitor that hae’d tucked into the upper right-hand corner of the large floating display that was now showing scenes of the snowy landscapes of Hoth. Meanwhile supplies were exchanged, and Kit opened one of his packages of saltines, just one, and split them between him and Djam and Cheleb. “I need to go easy on these, they’re all I’ve got… You guys okay with sodium chloride?”

They were. Shortly the tale once more unfolded itself, and Tevaral’s sun set a while before the Millennium Falcon dove away into intergalactic darkness in search of a man frozen in carbonite. And lacking any further interference by malfunctioning gates, as Tevaralti evening set in there ensued much more argument, and discussion, and confusion, and a lot of laughter, bubbling or trilling or Earth-style. The trilling, though, started getting mixed up with strange wheezy hissing noises. Kit was alarmed by this at first, but Djam knew what he was hearing.

“Cousin,” Djam said to Cheleb, shaking haem by one shoulder, “look at you, you’re fading. Go get some rest.”

“Start third one,” Cheleb said, even though hae could hardly keep his long eyes open.

“And anyway it’s my shift now, almost. And Kit needs to rest too. You don’t want to mess up his schedule just when he’s getting it started.”

“He’s got a point there,” Kit said. “Probably I should think about starting to wind down. Chel, look, we’ll all watch the third one together tomorrow, huh?”

Cheleb wheezed with weariness. “Should have triggered hormonal waking aids. Even without those, normally have better staying power than this.”

“There’s nothing normal about this situation, no matter how you come at it,” Djam said. “You had a long day yesterday, and the day before. So come on now, kehrutheh. Don’t bother reporting off to me; I’ve seen everything that happened, and you’re relieved.”

“Under protest, kehrutheh,” Cheleb said, and wheezed again as he got up, actually staggering against Kit.

“Come on, buddy,” Kit said, and put an arm around Cheleb as they headed back toward his puptent. Kit found himself wondering whether his perception of Cheleb as somewhat reptilian was predisposing him to think of his fellow wizard as unusually tough. Plainly this wasn’t the case. “You get some rest, all right? Part three can wait.”

Cheleb wheezed again as hae slapped the standing stone with one long-clawed hand and his puptent’s portal popped open. “No cheating and watching it without me,” hae said as hae vanished through into the darkness.

“Promise,” Kit said as the portal closed.

The twilight was deepening rapidly to darkness, and the wind was picking up as the local temperature dropped. Kit stood where he was for a few moments, and recited under his breath the small, brief spell that created a small spark of wizard-light hanging behind his left shoulder. With the light following him, he made his way back to the Stone Throne. Djam was already tucked up against the back of the Throne, his silver manual-Rod in one hand and his gate-array monitor rolled out of it. He glanced up at Kit. “Forgot something?”

Kit shook his head. “Just tidying up.” One of the things that Tom and Carl had drilled into him fairly hard regarding off-planet work was the need for the responsible wizard to pack out his trash and dispose of it correctly on his own turf. So now, as always, Kit gathered up the various wrappings and so forth from his snacking, wrapped up the four or five saltines that were left over, brushed the crumbs off onto the ground, and headed back for his puptent, where he had a few garbage bags stowed away.

He had to dig around to find them, as they’d gotten themselves folded up and stuffed underneath a small pile of books. Kit put the unfinished saltines aside with the other stacked-up food, shook out one of the garbage bags, stuffed the trash in it, and then fired it across the puptent to the back wall, where the faint shimmer of light defined the area that had a stasis field laid over it to keep anything inside it from going bad. And these shouldn’t be here, Kit thought, picking up the books and repositioning them off to one side of the non-perishable food boxes. And what’s this stuff doing down here, I thought I straightened all this up, did something fall over? Under some more books and a couple of sweaters and T-shirts he caught sight of a glint of metal: his antenna-wand. What’re you doing down there, huh? He collapsed it down to its shortest size and stuffed it in his back pocket. Gotta find you a better place. And here were more books, hiding under more clothes. …Seriously, why did I bring these, I was already getting bored with reading that one last week—

Outside the portal Djam said, “Kiht?”

Kit wasn’t sure how well Djam could hear him when he was in here; he went to the portal interface and stuck his head out. “What?”

“I’ve got a physical thing I have to handle before I settle in… could you take the throne for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Kit said, grabbing his manual just in case Djam’s interface gave him some kind of trouble reading what was going on with the gate array. He grabbed a jacket, too, and slung it around his shoulders. Physical things, yeah, that’s definitely another issue. I need to find out what Ronan’s doing about that: maybe I can duplicate his solution here, or use whatever facilities he’s turned up. Don’t want to cause some kind of local sanitation incident…

He summoned his spark of wizard-light again to light his way and headed back to the throne. It was empty: Djam had taken his interface with him. He’s dead serious about this, Kit thought. Always good to see…

Kit parked himself on the throne and laid the manual down beside him, open to the array page. As far as the inner workings of the gating complex went, all was quiet over there. His gaze drifted out to the complex itself, bright under its hovering antigrav lights. The scene over there was the same as at any time since he’d come: the same dark flow of Tevaralti crowds in through the feeder gates, out through the terminus gate, waves and waves of people. And far less distinct, between the gate complex and the stone circle, there lay the great gathering of thousands of Tevaralti who would not pass the gates, the shadow of their presence starred with their tiny sphere-in-cube electronic campfires, the lights twinkling as fitfully as stars as people moved among them. Thesba had risen bloated in the east and was climbing the sky, golden and dull fire-red. Its light touched faintly on the Tevaralti camped beyond the glare of the gating complex, a sullen dim glow red as blood.

Kit shook his head as the wind rose and hissed in the grass around him. In the face of what lay before him, all the afternoon’s good cheer was fading to something thin and pale. He hunched his shoulders inside his jacket and sighed. Beside him, on the stone, the bar graphs illustrating the power levels of the gates rose and fell, rose and fell again, beating like small hearts. But it won’t last, Kit thought. Sooner or later these people will say, It doesn’t matter what you do, we’re not leaving: you can turn them all off now. Sooner or later the hearts will stop. His gaze drifted up to Thesba again. And I really hate that—

That was when he heard the rustling noise.

Suddenly, here by himself, alone in the dark, Kit remembered what Ronan had been saying about apex predators. Now why haven’t I looked into that? he thought, reaching behind him for the antenna-wand, as much as a security blanket-equivalent as anything else. This wand and its near-identical predecessors were more than mere channels for the power Kit funneled into his spells: they were noon-forged steel, with their own potency—formidable weapons in their own right. For the moment, though, Kit stood up and concentrated on staying still while he waited to discover which way he was likely to wind up using the wand in the next few minutes.

His breathing sped up, but he held still and waited. And slowly, in a rustle of slithery motion under the dim golden-red light that lay over the plain, glinting with eyes and curling with tentacles, the sibik came crawling along from between two of the standing stones and crouched down against the ground, staring at Kit with every eye it had on the back of its big baggy body.

This was a different one from the sibik he’d laughingly pulled off Ronan’s leg: much bigger, more like the size of a large dog than a rabbit, and darker in color—a vague soft patchwork of cobalt and jade. Kit found himself thinking about the sibik that Djam had told him about, the one that bit him before starting to try to pull his fur out. He knew perfectly well that he could keep this one from hurting him… even kill it, if necessary. He’d killed much more dangerous things in his time, when he’d had to. But in his mind’s eye Kit kept seeing the smaller sibik from earlier, the stubborn, hungry, near-comical one, and the idea of doing anything terminal to any of them felt very unpleasant.

So there Kit stood for a few seconds, and there the sibik sat, or crouched, or lay, its tentacles twitching a bit as it looked at him.

It made a surprisingly small hissing grunt at him, for something of its size. At least that was what the sound was like, when it came out: but Kit’s understanding of the Speech rendered this as words.

“Hello help?”

Well, that’s unusual, Kit thought. “Dai stihó, cousin," he said to the sibik. “How can I help?”

The sibik lay there looking at him with all those eyes, and then said, “Want?”

Does it mean it didn’t understand me, or does it think I know what it wants? Kit couldn’t be sure. “Cousin,” he said in the Speech, “tell me what you need.”

It just looked at him.

Maybe I didn’t phrase that right. Or something. “What can I do for you?” Kit said.

The sibik rustled. “Salt flat,” it said.

What? Kit said. His second thought was, Wait. First things first. “What should I call you, cousin?”

“Sibik.”

“Yeah, I know that’s what you’re all called, but what should I call you?”

“Sibik.”

“So it’s a personal name as well as a species one?” Kit said. “Okay.” Kit had discovered over time that that approach wasn’t so uncommon among animals. “I’m Kit.”

“Kt,” the sibik said, turning it into a sound like someone snapping a pencil in two.

“Fine. Now what did you want again?”

“Salt flat.”

Kit scratched his head and thought about that. I haven’t really looked into the local terrain that much, he thought. This is all grassland, as far as I can tell, for miles. At least if there were any salt flats in the neighborhood, they struck Kit as very well concealed. “I'm, uh, I’m not sure what you're asking me for.”

The sibik edged just slightly closer, watching Kit carefully, holding its abdomen up so that all the eyes on it were positioned to see Kit clearly. When it spoke again, it did so quite slowly, as if speaking to someone it considered somewhat simple. “Salt,” it said, “flat.”

Kit stood there a moment with his hands on his hips. “Okay,” he said, “I really have no idea what you—” And then his eye fell on something near to where he was standing: a bit of cellophane, a scrap of the wrapping from his saltines that he’d missed when he was tidying up.

“I get it,” Kit said, and laughed. “Sorry, it’s been a long day. You want a cracker.”

“Cracker!” the big sibik said, and rustled closer still, a few of its tentacles waving in the air.

“Sorry, I took longer than I thought,” Djam said from behind Kit, “but after I was finished I had to—” He paused, his glance going from Kit to what was watching him from a yard or so away.

“It’s all right,” Kit said. “Word seems to have got around that the food here is good.”

“Well,” Djam said, coming around slowly to sit on the Stone Throne, “we did give them a fair amount of stuff the other night.”

“No, he’s after my saltines,” Kit muttered, and stood there rubbing his forehead for a moment. “Because I promised, didn’t I…”

The sibik simply looked up at him and said, quite distinctly, “Cracker.”

“Djam, would you do me a favor?” Kit said. “Go in my puptent and off on the right hand side you’ll see a bunch of strange-shaped containers off by themselves. On top of those there’s a clear-wrapped package with a few of those crackers left in it…”

“One moment,” Djam said, and went off.

“How did you find out about the ‘salt flats?’” Kit said to the sibik.

It tilted its abdomen slightly so that it was regarding him from a slightly different angle. “Knew,” the sibik said.

That told Kit nothing of any real use. “Did you meet the sibik who was here before?”

The big sibik tilted its belly even further forward, angling more eyes toward Kit. “Smelled,” it said after a moment. “Smelled it.”

So maybe somehow that information was encoded in the scent trail the other one left? Kit thought. How would that even work? Yet it wouldn’t surprise him. Over the past few years he’d run into a lot of impossible-seeming situations and events that nonetheless turned out to be completely possible. Sometimes fatally so… sometimes marvelously.

“Here,” Djam said, returning with the almost-finished cracker package. Kit took it from him and took one out of the package, showed it to the sibik.

“Cracker,” it said in the pleased but still impatient tone of voice of someone seeing the dinner they’d ordered finally being brought to the table after an annoying delay.

“Right,” Kit said. He got down on one knee and held out the saltine. The sibik started making grabby tentacles at it, though it was also holding back from Kit as if it thought he might do something sudden.

“It’s all right, cousin,” Kit said. “Come on, take it. I won’t bite.”

One tentacle more daring than the rest reached out to Kit’s hand and very slowly and carefully wound itself around the saltine: then yanked it away. The sibik’s tentacles parted a bit in the front, and Kit saw where there was a sort of stoma behind them, with a rosette of little hard-looking dark brown plates, each one shaped more or less like the business end of a flat-head screwdriver. The tentacle guided the saltine toward the rosette of plate-teeth, which very delicately nipped at the corner of the saltine. Then, apparently satisfied that the flavor matched what it had somehow or other been expecting, the rest of it vanished straight inside. Much munching and crunching ensued, without a single crumb escaping.

Then the sibik looked pointedly at Kit, wiggling its abdomen. “More?”

“Well, I know this drill,” Kit said under his breath, and pulled out another saltine. “I wonder if I could teach you tricks?”

“More,” said the sibik, sounding unimpressed and grabbing with its longest tentacle at the cracker Kit was holding.

“Yeah, more, right,” Kit said, letting the sibik take the saltine from him and dispose of it the same way the first one had gone.

Djam, behind him, was watching this in amusement. “You're going to become very popular if this becomes a regular event,” he said, bubbling.

“I think it’s too late,” Kit said. “I’m popular already.” He shook his head. “This guy, though… he’s so much bigger than the other one. Easily three times its size. You said the domesticated sibiks come over here following the wild ones’ scent trails… Is this a domestic one? Somebody’s pet?”

Djam held his hands up. “Kiht, I have no idea.”

“I can see I’m going to be doing some research tomorrow,” Kit said as the sibik pushed itself closer to get a better look at the remaining two crackers in the package. Kit pulled out the third one, held it out. It was promptly snatched away and munched up. “Cheleb said there were a lot of different species of these. Might as well know what I’m dealing with…”

“More!” said the sibik.

“More what?” Kit said, pulling out the last saltine.

“More cracker!”

“Think we’re gonna need some education on what the magic words are, too,” Kit muttered. He handed the eagerly-grabbing tentacle the final saltine. The sibik stuffed it away, then lifted its abdomen to fix all its available eyes on Kit to see where the next one was. In response, Kit found himself doing exactly what he would've done with Ponch in these circumstances. He showed the sibik his hands, first the palms and then the backs, to demonstrate that there weren’t any more saltines being hidden from it.

“More cracker?” the sibik said, sounding mournful.

“All gone, buddy,” Kit said. “No more tonight.”

“No more cracker?”

“Nope. Sorry, big guy.”

The sibik gave Kit a seriously disappointed look from its many eyes. “Gone…” it said, and then slithered itself away between the standing stones and out into the darkness, where it vanished.

“Well,” Djam said, “that was unusual…”

“I guess,” Kit said, standing up and dusting a few crumbs off himself. “You okay, now? How’re the gates?”

“They’re fine,” Djam said. “Seriously, after you and Cheleb worked them over, they’ve been a lot quieter. It’d be nice if this was a trend.”

“We’ll see,” Kit said, and yawned. “Wow, I’m sorry. Have a quiet shift, kehrutheh, I’ll see you in the morning…”

“Right, Kiht. Rest well.”

Kit made his way back to his puptent and sealed it up behind him, waving the soft interior glow down. All of a sudden, now that he was by himself and off duty, he felt woozy with being up later than he should have. But Kit wouldn’t have traded the weariness for being more rested: he was feeling the strangeness of being here a lot less than he had last night.

He got undressed and crawled under the covers of his air bed, then grabbed for his manual and flipped it open to Nita’s profile page. “You still up?”

“Uhh,” the answer came back a moment later. “Just falling asleep. Are you done with whatever? The manual said you were busy.”

“There was a lot going on,” Kit said. “And then I was feeding an alien octopus.”

There was a pause at the other end. “I know that really ought to mean something,” Nita said, “and it doesn’t right now. At all. Tell me in the morning?”

“First thing.”

“Thanks,” she said, and her profile grayed out as the contact closed down.

Kit yawned and let his head thump back against the pillow. It felt ridiculously good to be horizontal, felt like he’d been waiting years for it. Busy day, he thought. That’s all. Same again tomorrow, probably.

And just as he was dozing off, he remembered one more thing he had to do. He felt around under his pillow for his phone and pulled it out, bringing up his pop’s profile.

LONG DAY TODAY, he typed. GOT TO DO SOME GOOD WIZARDRY, SEEMS I’M GOING TO BE USEFUL HERE. ONLY THING I’M REGRETTING IS THAT I DIDN’T BRING MORE SALTINES. HAVE A FEELING I’M GOING TO RUN OUT SOONER THAN I THOUGHT. LOVE YOU BOTH. NIGHT.

SIX

Friday

When Kit woke up the next morning, it happened exactly the way it did at home when things were going normally: his eyes snapped open five minutes before the alarm went off. It’d be really great if this meant that I’d already made the change to this time zone, this schedule, he thought. But it was too soon to tell.

He stretched under the covers, pleased; he had a couple of hours to go before he was due on shift. However, the moment Kit got out of bed, the resolution he’d made the day before to speak to Ronan about sanitary arrangements asserted itself at full strength. He grabbed for his manual, flipped it open, found Ronan’s profile page, and tapped on it. “Ro?”

“You’re up early,” said the voice from the page.

“Not half as early as I wish I’d been. I forgot to ask you yesterday—do you have anything like a toilet over there?”

“Feck yeah, we’re in the middle of town here and they’ve got all the amenities laid on.”

“Can I come over real quick and use what you’ve got? I hate to keep just taking leaks in the grass over here—I’d rather my shiftmates didn’t accidentally walk into a wet spot. And as for anything else—”

“Say no more,” Ronan said hastily. “Just get to the pad and have it seek on my coordinates. I’ll meet you at my end.”

Kit was in enough of a rush that he did no more than pull on a hoodie and the same jeans he’d worn yesterday and go jogging straight out to the local-transport pad, waving at the still-enthroned Djam in passing. Everything he’d drunk before going to bed last night was now incredibly eager to be recycled, and as a result he paid precious little attention to the gleaming urban landscape in which he appeared a few moments later—a broad plaza surrounded by sleek and shining buildings five or ten stories tall. Fortunately, Ronan was right there waiting for him, as promised, all in his everyday black jeans and sweatshirt and parka among many humanoids and Tevaralti much more brightly dressed, or at least feathered. “Right this way,” Ronan said, and led Kit through the ground floor entrance into one of the nearby buildings.

Ronan pointed off to one side of the broad bright entry hall. “Straight through that door,” he said. “They’ve got the same plumbing as we have, and the same way of handling it. And some forward-looking cousin had them put a sonic shower in there for us unfeathered types, if you feel the need.”

“If!”

Half an hour later Kit was out in the plaza again, much relieved in a number of ways, and his skin tingling hard due to underestimating the assertiveness of the “scrub” setting on the shower. For a few minutes he stood there in bright sunlight watching the crowds of Tevaralti heading out of Ronan’s feeder gates and into the larger, waiting downstream portal. These crowds might be smaller than those at his own gate, but all around him Kit could feel the same sense of urgency and sorrow: and here too, off to one side, a group of Tevaralti maybe a couple of thousand strong was gathered around various temporary-looking structures, watching the others go.

“We don’t really need to be watching them,” said Ronan’s voice from beside him, “I know that. But I don’t seem able to stop either.” And he handed Kit a cellophane-wrapped croissant and a small plastic cup that Kit realized was full of espresso.

Kit stared into the cup. “Where are you getting this?”

“When we were over for the Christmas party your mama showed me the capsule-coffee machine she was giving your pop,” Ronan said. “Cute wee thing. Got one for myself in the January sales. I like espresso.” He knocked back the contents of the cup he was holding, crumpled the cup up and shoved it in his pocket.

“You’d better have made me one,” came a familiar voice from not too far away. “Especially after I gave you half the sugar I brought and saved your butt.”

Ronan was snickering and reaching into his otherspace pocket before Nita, newly appeared on the single-transport pad, could get over to them. “Eat your croissant before she takes it off you, she’s mad for these,” he said to Kit under his breath. “So I forgot my sugar,” Ronan said, raising his voice again. “I’m busy trying to save a species here. What about those doughnuts you’re trading me?”

“I’ve got doughnuts but not the ones you want,” Nita said, sounding annoyed. “Because certain little sisters have figured out a way to use Spot to pilfer my supplies even though my puptent’s portal was secured and the interior discontinuity rotated forty-five degrees out of true with this space. I had a whole large-sized box of the Entenmann’s Chocolate Lovers assortment and a box of the devil’s food frosted ones, and she took them both and left me nothing but a box of the miniature ones with the powdered sugar.” She scowled at Ronan. “So don’t complain to me, because this is your fault.”

Ronan produced an expression of exaggerated innocence. “Mine?”

“My money says she’s secretly trading the chocolate to some wizard she’s working with for diamonds or transuranian isotopes or something,” Nita said. “So you’d better hope she doesn’t trigger some kind of diplomatic incident.” She leaned her shoulder against Kit’s, and her head against his. “I’m awake now,” she added, giving him a most pointed look. “So you can tell me whatever you were supposed to tell me as soon as you got up.”

“Forgive me for wanting to pee first!” Kit said.

Nita waved a hand at him. “Too much info way too soon,” she said, reaching out for the espresso that Ronan handed her. “Is there sugar in this?”

“Yes, your royal highness and ruler of all you survey, there is sugar in it for feck’s sake, pray allow your servant to go on living and drawing breath in your service, at least until you’re carbed up enough,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.

Nita snickered and drank about half the espresso at a gulp. “It’s okay,” she said to Kit. “I use the toilet here too. The one over by my gates is really basic, and they don’t have a shower—they’ve got an automated dust bath. Great if you’re Tevaralti, but for humans—” She shook her head. “If you stumble into one by accident, you’d better like sneezing.”

They went off to lean against the plate-glass wall of the building where Kit had been using the facilities. Kit juggled his croissant around, ready to unwrap it but not sure what to do with the espresso in the meantime.

“You should just levitate it,” Nita said, looking out at the feeder gates. “For the time being you’ve got the power to burn…”

That was something that Kit kept forgetting. “…Still,” he said, and tucked the croissant into the crook of his arm until the espresso was gone.

“Old habits are hard to break,” Ronan said, looking where Nita did, toward the unending flow of the crowds.

Nita nodded. “You see something like this,” she said, “and you start thinking we’ve been really lucky.”

Kit glanced at her. “How do you mean?”

“Well, think about it. Since we got started, most of the jobs we've been sent on have been pretty easy to solve.” Kit and Ronan both turned incredulous expressions on her, which Nita ignored. “Relatively speaking, okay? Mostly we’ve been sent on errands that we could handle by ourselves. Sometimes we haven’t known we’ve been sent, but we were still able to work out what we needed to do to fix the problems, and then we did that. Without help, or sometimes with it. We haven’t always had happy endings, as such….”

She trailed off, and Kit knew that Nita’s mother was on her mind, even though neither of them had any doubts that her mom was okay. “But things have always worked out,” she said. “This ending, though? It’s not going to be happy no matter what we do, not really. Even if all those Tevaralti there—” She gestured at them with her chin. “Even if all of them right this minute said, ‘Hey, you know what, we’ve been all wrong about this, shove over because we’re going too’… we still don’t get a happy ending. We still get a destroyed planet, and millions of people really unhappy because their home that they loved is gone forever. All we can do is the job we’ve been given until the Powers or whoever tell us we’re done, and then go home.”

Ronan blew out a frustrated breath. “Yeah,” he said, “there are things about this that aren’t ideal. And yeah, the thing about being just another cog in the machine… Go here, do that—”

“A little too much like school,” Kit said.

Nita threw him a dirty look. “Please. You had to remind me? You’re not the only one who has a test coming up.” Kit smiled slightly: in between trying to get him and calculus to make friends, she’d spent a lot of time lately ranting about the upcoming test on her modern history unit. (“Asia! No more Asia! I want to bang all those people’s heads together.”) “And another thing: no matter how this ends up, the minute we go home, tomorrow will still be a school day.”

“Ugh,” Kit said under his breath. “Thanks, we’re even now.”

“I know you hate letting me suffer alone,” Nita said. “Could be it’s mutual.”

Kit almost smiled. “Problem is, I keep having this idea…”

He trailed off. Ronan threw him a look. “Sounds like it’s an idea you don't much like.”

Kit folded his arms, leaning against the glass wall behind them. “I'm wondering whether we're going to start getting more of this kind of job because the Powers think we’re grown up enough to take it. And I start wondering if most of wizardry might be like this. If we’re being eased in slowly to a kind of errantry that isn't—” Kit stopped himself.

“Isn’t going to be as much fun?” Ronan said.

The three of them were quiet for a moment. Kit wasn’t sure what was going on in their heads, but right now he was hating the idea.

“Might be too soon to jump to that conclusion,” Nita said. “But we’ve done group work with other wizards before, and sometimes lately it’s definitely been kind of edgy. Maybe the Powers, or whoever handles assignment logistics for them, are thinking we’re ready to expand our boundaries?”

“Or that it’s time they pushed us out of our comfort zones, you mean,” Ronan said.

Kit threw a glance eastward past the buildings that surrounded them. Thesba wasn’t yet visible, but he could just feel it there, creeping up towards the horizon. “Alaalu and Mars and the Pullulus War,” he muttered, “those comfort zones? Terrific.”

Nita looked at him sidelong. “Wow, listen to that blood sugar. Eat your croissant.”

Kit snorted softly and unwrapped the croissant, which turned out to be surprisingly good and flaky for something cellophane-wrapped. “Seriously,” he said to Ronan, “this comes from a grocery store?”

Ronan shrugged. “You should come along shopping sometime,” he said. “Be a nice change from wee Darryl. He always makes me push him in the trolley.”

Kit sprayed crumbs everywhere. “I want in on that!” Nita said, grinning.

“We’ll discuss it later.” Ronan turned his head to regard the gating complex on the other side of the complex, and briefly got an unfocused look: probably consulting his internal manual to see how his gates were behaving. “Very quiet at the moment,” he said. “I wonder if they’re plotting something. Or maybe this just has something to do with you being here.” He looked at Kit.

Nita shot Ronan a bemused look. “What?”

“He seems to have a calming effect on gates. I was looking at his intervention logs this morning.”

“Now wait a minute,” Kit said, “isn’t that stuff supposed to be privacy-locked?”

“Not when we’re all on the same intervention,” Ronan said, “and when gates’ behaviors tend to get interlinked. I take it you got the lecture from Rhiow on portal contagion.”

Kit nodded, getting busy with what remained of the croissant. Nita rolled her eyes. “Well, we should be grateful almost all the rest of the gating’s done,” she said, “the heavy-duty stuff—”

“Oh bollocks,” Ronan said. “As if moving however many million people doesn’t count as heavy-duty.”

Nita laughed at him. “Compared with moving the biosphere? Half the planet’s been scraped bare over the last month, right down through the lithosphere. Huge populations and communities of animals, plants… whole big chunks of the ecology already transplanted to the refuge worlds. You want to look at the logs for that—they’re something else.” Nita shook her head. “But you know what’s really interesting? The further down the biological hierarchy you go, the more eager life is to get out of here. The plants, especially, aren’t arguing the point. They can feel the change in the local gravity, the magnetic fields. They know what’s coming. So do most of the animals.” She frowned. “What’s weird is the way the ones closer to the Tevaralti, the domesticated ones and the animals in their food chain… they’re a lot less eager. There’s more conflict about going, and when you ask them what’s going on, they can’t tell you.”

“Something to do with this symbiotic thing the Tevaralti have going on, I guess,” Ronan said. “But they will go if you tell them to?”

“Yeah. The Planetary’s had words with the less volitional parts of the biosphere; that pretty much settles it. If they can be gotten out, they’ll cooperate.”

Kit finished his croissant, crumpled up the cellophane and stuck it in his pocket. “You could really wish the Planetary could do the same for the people,” he said, looking at the little crowd of encamped Tevaralti across the plaza and thinking of the huge crowd of them back at his own gates.

“Wouldn’t be just you,” Nita said. “I don’t get how they know what’s going to happen and they just want to sit here and let it happen. There are moments when…” She trailed off, as if she wasn’t entirely happy with what she was about to say. “‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake…’” She shook her head. “Supposedly that’s what it’s all about. Life. Saving it. How are we supposed to stand around and let it just throw itself away?”

Kit had no answers. For the moment his mindscape was rebelling against getting to grips with the huge numbers of Tevaralti who might not survive. Instead in his mind’s eye he suddenly saw the tentacled shape he’d been feeding saltines last night. “You said they were half done with the biosphere,” he said. “What about my part of the continent? There are still a lot of animals running around.”

Ronan stretched himself against the glass wall. His mouth had gone tight. “If the research I’ve been doing on rafting is right,” he said, “only two hundred and twelve rafting projects in all the Interconnect Project’s history have ever achieved one hundred percent clearance of a planet. In all those projects they had decades to work in, not months or days. And even so, that number only works when they leave bacteria and viruses and the smallest in-soil or in-water organisms out of the count.”

He looked away. “Rafting’s about preservation… not total rescue. At least that’s what the docs say. You pull the best case you can out of a worst-case scenario—try to get enough life forms out of a planetary-extinction scenario for them to reproduce themselves, continue as a species… reconstruct their cultures, if they have cultures, somewhere else. Saving every single one of them, it’s a goal all right, something to shoot for. But then so’s perfection.” And Ronan too looked toward the edge of the plaza in the direction where Thesba would be rising. “With a half-busted moon hanging over our heads and getting more fragile every orbit, there may just not be enough time…”

That hopelessness that Kit had been trying to deal with earlier came back for him, in spades. Yet he wasn’t going to give in to it: not yet. We’re just getting started here. “I guess,” he said aloud, “all we can do is do our jobs and try to make sure what we’re doing goes as well as it can.”

“There you go,” Nita said. “We’re on the same page.” She stretched too, bumped her hip against his again. “So what was that you were going to tell me last night?”

Ronan glanced over at them. “I’ll go pretend to do something else so as not to have to stand here and listen to you two embarrassing each other, shall I?”

“No, you don’t have to go anywhere, it’s not embarrassing! Have you seen the local octopuses?”

Nita looked at Kit in bemusement. “Okay,” Ronan said, “I admit that’s not how I imagined your next sentence coming out.”

“And what do you mean ‘octopuses’?” Nita said. “I thought you were somewhere landlocked.”

“We are. They’re kind of field octopuses. They can climb, too: I think maybe some of them live in trees.”

Ronan rubbed his face. “If I wasn’t grateful to be in a city on this planet before,” Ronan said, “I am bloody grateful now. Having octopus things drop on me out of trees is not something I’d be excited about.”

“They wouldn’t hurt you!” Kit said. “You saw the one yesterday. They’re pretty friendly.”

“Tell me about it. If he’d have climbed up me any further, that lad would’ve got friendly with bits of me I really prefer to reserve for humans. And now we’re talking octopus-things that’ll drop out of trees on me and get friendly?” Ronan shook his head incredulously. “Janey mack, there’s something I really don’t need when the fecking moon’s already trying to drop out of the sky on my head.”

Nita gave Ronan’s histrionics an amused look. “But what’re they doing around your gates?”

“There are wild ones running around out in the grasslands,” Kit said, “but sometimes pet ones wander over from the people who’re not using the gates.” He gestured with his head at the gathering across the plaza. “Aren’t you seeing them here?”

“I wasn’t looking for them,” Ronan said, “because it never occurred to me I needed to be looking for octopuses.”

“Sibik,” Kit said. “They’re called sibik.”

“You know,” Nita said, “there’ve been Tevaralti going through my gates with little boxes, and now that I think of it they do look kind of like those dog carriers people at home have to use for their dogs when they’re flying them somewhere.” She stood up a bit and stretched as if her back was bothering her. “So what about them?”

“Well, nothing specific,” Kit said. “Except they seem to have their own version of the symbiosis thing going on, which is interesting. I fed one of them a saltine yesterday, and last night a completely different one came along and asked me for crackers.”

“Asked you?” Ronan said.

“Well, more like demanded. And he knew the language I’d used with the first guy. It’s kind of weird.”

“Think they’ll come back later?” Nita said. “I might come see them if I can get the scheduling to work.”

“I don’t know. I can message you if one shows up. My shiftmates say that sometimes a lot of them turn up, looking for food mostly.”

“Speaking of shiftmates,” Nita muttered, looking over to the short-jump transport pad, “I need to get moving.”

“Before you bugger off,” Ronan said. “We were thinking of having a picnic out at Kit’s place.”

“We?” Kit said, amused.

“In our off time,” Ronan said. “It’s nice out there. Fresh air, peace and quiet...”

“Mr. Party Organizer here hasn’t mentioned that I haven’t cleared it with my two colleagues…”

“You think there’d be a problem?” Nita said. “If we’re in our own downtime, and we’re well away from—” She waved a hand at the transients moving through the square. “—people who might be bothered… don’t see why they’d object.”

Her immediate acceptance of the idea surprised Kit. “Um, okay. When?” He looked at Ronan.

“Don’t ask me right this minute!” Ronan said. “I may have the Knowledge in my head, but that doesn’t turn me into a scheduling app. Maybe you can help, though,” he said, glancing at Nita. “Your silent partner—”

Nita looked vague for a moment; then her eyes snapped back into focus. “Maybe Saturday?” she said to Kit.

He frowned. “Wait, what’s today? So much has been happening…”

“Tell me about it. It’s Friday. So… tomorrow, in the evening in your timezone? Bobo says he needs to do some checking, but that might work, if the people we invite feel like it. Us, Dairine, Tom and Carl if they can make it, some of the shiftmates…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “We can bring some of our supplies to trade around… kick back a little.”

“Sounds good.” She pushed herself away from the glass wall, headed off across the plaza. “Call me about your sibik-y guys if they turn up. At least I can look at them with the manual, even if I can’t come out.”

“I will.”

And off Nita went across the plaza. “I should go too,” Kit said, watching Nita jump up onto the pad, all business, and promptly vanish. “Look, about the picnic: I’ll shoot you a note when I have a chance to talk to Cheleb and Djam. But, listen, thanks… I really needed that shower. And other things.”

“Any time,” Ronan said. “As long as we keep the gates running smoothly, nobody here cares what we’re up to, really. Their minds are pretty much elsewhere.” He looked across the plaza at the crowds pouring from the feeder gates into the downstream one.

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Later.”

He headed back for his puptent to find Djam still enthroned, almost without having even changed his position. “Hey, sorry, that took longer than I thought,” Kit said. “Just let me change and I’ll be right with you.”

“Nothing’s happening here,” Djam said, yawning one of his small bubbling yawns: “don’t rush on my behalf.”

Kit hurried about about changing anyway, picking up some Pop-Tarts and a bottle of water and a can of one of the milder energy drinks to hold him until he could settle in and assemble a more meal-like meal. Because if Mama looks at my supplies when I get home and sees I haven’t eaten anything but junk food while I was away, I’m really gonna be in for it…

He headed back for the Throne Rock and was surprised to see the long grass in front of him waving. Except it wasn’t the wind producing the movement. It was sibiks, a small crowd of them, all humping and slithering along toward him. The one in the lead of the crowd had its abdomen up to see better, and when those eyes spotted Kit approaching, it shouted in a small sibik voice, sort of a squeak, “Cracker!”

“Cracker, cracker!” all the sibiks behind it started shouting. They swarmed to meet Kit and began bouncing up and down around him as he made his way over to the Throne Rock, and a few of them started trying to climb up his legs. “Cracker cracker cracker!”

Kit had a lot of trouble not bursting out laughing at them: if squeaky-toys could shout, this was what they would sound like. “Are you kidding?” Kit said to them as he waded through them, trying hard not to step on any tentacles. “I haven’t even had my cracker yet. What makes you think you’re getting any?”

He sat himself down by Djam and more or less immediately found himself shoving sibiks off his lap. “They weren’t bothering you earlier, were they?”

“Not at all,” Djam said. “In fact I haven’t seen any of them until just now, when you turned up again.”

Kit shook his head. “No, you guys!” he said, as one of the shoved-off sibiks started climbing up his leg. “Not now! You all just behave yourselves until I tell you I’m ready for you.”

“Then cracker?” came the chorus from ankle height.

“Jeez, yeah, then cracker but not now cracker! Now go on, all of you. Outside the circle.”

Some of them started moving off. Others moved a few feet and then crouched down in the long blue-green grass, flattening their little eye-studded abdomens down and looking back sidelong at Kit as if expecting him to forget they were there.

“Outside the circle,” Kit said, waving his arms at them. “Go on! Shoo!”

Reluctantly, even sulkily, the remaining sibiks slunk away, and gathered along with all the others just outside of the circle of stones.

Kit sighed. “Okay,” he said, “tell me how it’s been overnight. Pop-Tart?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

They sat and ate and chatted for a few moments, and then Djam started going over the night’s logs with Kit. The gates had been relatively well-behaved—a few minor gravitational fluctuations around the portal interfaces, but nothing worse. “Indeed they seem quite docile after you and Cheleb spoke to them last night,” Djam said. “Maybe we should make this a daily ritual. You two get together in the evening between your shifts and tell them how to behave, and then I have a nice quiet shift.” He bubbled softly, the laugh turning into a yawn a moment later.

“You should go get some rest,” Kit said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Djam stretched and stood. “But remember, you promised us more of that entertainment, so don’t forget to wake me when you’re ready to start. We left those wizard-knights and their friends with much unfinished business…”

Kit grinned: if Dairine heard that description applied to Jedi she’d be most amused. As Djam got up, Kit caught motion from the corner of his eye. A few sibik were trying to sneak in through the circle of stones without being noticed.

Kit held up a warning finger. “Ah ah!”

The foremost sibik immediately crouched themselves down into the grass again, and one of them said defiantly, “Mealtime!”

Others took up the cry: “Mealtime! Mealtime!” Kit looked at Djam in bemusement. “Now how do they all know this word all of a sudden? I only told it to one of them, and he’s not here.”

“Powers about us, I don’t know! Telepathy? Sign language? Maybe it’s something chemical. The Telling does say something about them using a form of DNA-based learning, and you see a lot of them sucking on others’ tentacles. They could be passing DNA back and forth that way…”

Kit shook his head. “This is so strange. Before I got here, did any of these things even speak to you at all?”

“Not to me,” Djam said. “Perhaps to Cheleb, but if they did, he hasn’t mentioned. I didn’t think much about it, anyway. You know how it differs from world to world. Some animals don’t like aliens because they look or feel or smell strange. Others don’t care for species they’re not commensal with, and so won’t talk to them.”

“I was saying to Nita just now, they’ve got some kind of connection,” Kit said. “This scent trail thing…”

“Might be more than that,” Djam said. “The Tevaralti have a low-level mindlink among themselves, a symbiotic thing. Why not the animals? Especially if some of them are pets.”

“The first one the other day wasn’t, though,” Kit said. “Or the one last night. At least I don’t think it was.”

Djam yawned again. “I don’t think either of us has really thought to make a study of the issue. We’ve been kind of distracted…”

“Well, yeah…” Kit said. “Kehrutheh, go on, I relieve you. Go get some rest and I’ll see what I can find out.”

Djam took himself off to bed, and Kit settled in with his manual open, watching the power levels of the feeder gates closely; but they were running steady, almost exactly at the center of their nominal operations range. Good, he thought: stay that way, cousins.

He kept the sibik waiting where they were for a while, as there were a few other things Kit wanted to check before relaxing—if that was the right word—into the day’s monitoring. Along with probably every other wizard on the planet, he took a few moments to check the status of Thesba.

It was holding together—which was really all that could be said for it. A team of around two hundred wizards, some days more and some less, all of them specialists in geology and geomancy, were doing nothing but patch the moon’s interior structure together every evening in those regions that had come under most stress during the previous day’s orbits. Their comments on their work and their debriefing documents were attached to the daily status report on the moon for anyone who cared to look at them… and it was fair to say they were depressing. “It's exactly like bailing out a leaky boat,” said one of the wizards in charge of doing stress relief on the region between Thesba's deformed cores and the “dynamo regions” of the deepest inner mantle. “You know it would be idiocy to stop bailing, so of course you don’t… but you know that at the last, the ocean has you outnumbered. This moon wants so much to come apart. And of course we must do what we’re doing; this world’s life must have time to escape. But it’s going to be a relief to let Thesba go at last.”

Kit sat looking at that page for a while before turning his manual back to the two-page spread that displayed his own gates’ parameters. It was strange how that comment about letting Thesba go led him back to Nita’s remark about there being no happy endings in this situation. Even if all the Tevaralti could be convinced to leave, Thesba would still fall and either render Tevaral uninhabitable or entirely destroy it; and that, Kit thought, was why he was experiencing this constant strange ache of unfulfillment.

That unreasonable ache for some reason also left Kit feeling annoyed. What, am I six? he thought. This isn’t a fairy tale. This isn’t magic we’re doing: it’s wizardry. It’s not like everything’s always going to turn out right.

Yet some part of Kit seemed unwilling to get to grips with this truism, wanted to cling to the concept that things might still work out somehow… and he didn’t know what to do with that. Trying to squash it seemed cruel.

Hope, he thought. Even when it’s ridiculous. Why would anybody want to kill that? Leave it alone.

Glancing up past the standing stones toward the gate complex again, Kit watched the crowds flowing through from the feeder gates into the terminus gate as they’d been doing since he came: a steady flow, unceasing… and between the complex and his circle, the silent encampment, the Tevaralti there shifting restlessly about, watching their species leave them behind—

And closer to him, something else shifting, and making a muted squeaking noise. Kit looked between the circle’s upright stones and saw tentacles inching in his direction, and eyes fixed on him, hopeful and hungry.

He sighed, glanced at the monitor spread in his manual, and then got up, glad to have an excuse to push the whole subject of his interior unease aside. “Okay, you guys,” he said, heading in the direction of his puptent. “Cracker.”

“Cracker!!”

“But only the Ritz crackers,” he said under his breath. “Not the saltines. Because I know I’m gonna need some comfort food before we’re done…”

The day went on. Kit shooed the gathered sibik away after they’d had about a third of the box of Ritz, and spent the following couple of hours watching the feeder gates’ sensor readings for some recurring gravitational-field fluctuations that had started to worry him. He installed some extra alerts in his manual’s monitoring display of the arrays to try to predict those patterns early. He chatted with Nita: he touched base with Ronan. He went through a couple more energy drinks and got himself a pillow from his puptent, because the Stone Throne really wasn’t very kind to the humanoid butt. Well, this humanoid’s butt, anyway.

Just before local noon Kit had another serious discussion—actually, more of a pep talk—with the number-three gate’s electronic and submolecular-machine control systems, which the gate’s portal field seemed to be trying to subvert so that it could throw some more gravitational anomalies without the systems giving warning. (“Do not let it push you around. And don’t let it pull that energy-is-more-senior-than-matter crap with you, either! You are of equal status. And anyway, you and I are both matter together, and we’re not gonna let it get all high and mighty with us, are we? If it gets snotty with you again you just tell the gate that if it keeps making trouble I’m going to have a consult with my friend who runs Grand Central, and then I’m going to come over there and give its strings such a yanking, it’ll unravel like an old sweater. Yeah? Yeah. Just tell it that.”)

After that Kit went and got himself a lunch that for once wasn’t junk food (a salami sandwich) and was working on it when Cheleb got up and prepared to go off once again about haes pre-shift business. Curious as always, Cheleb paused to examine Kit’s food and drink. “Composition?” hae said, pointing at the sandwich.

“Uh, bread. A grain derivative. Some seasonings—that’s mustard, it comes from a seed. And that’s meat.” Kit opened the sandwich to show him.

Cheleb poked the salami hesitantly with one claw. “This from animal? Strange looking one.”

Kit flirted with the idea of telling haem how sausage was made, and then wasn’t sure whether this might unduly strain interstellar amity. “You have no idea,” Kit said.

“Entertainment later?”

“When Djam gets up,” Kit said, “you bet.”

Cheleb went off to see haes other-side-of-the-planet cousin, and Kit visited his puptent again, stuffing more food and some books and other supplies into a backpack so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth. Once back at the Stone Throne with this, he settled into a rhythm that swung between gate monitoring and reading up in the manual about sibiks. He spent nearly three hours on this endeavor, afraid of missing something important. But except for the information that there were hundreds of species, which he’d already known, Kit came away from the effort only slightly better informed than when he’d started.

The manual did say that the ancestors of the dominant Tevaralti species and the ancestor species of the sibik had forged their initial partnership when they were both still up in the trees together—the sibik using their acute vision and sense of smell, and their own intraspecies-based link gift, to lead the tool-using Tevaralti to prey so that both species could then share the spoils. But the manual had almost no data on exactly how the sibik transmitted data even within each of its many single species, let alone across species boundaries. The Tevaralti seemed never to have done any serious research on the subject, and no one else seemed to have considered it of importance enough to contribute any information about it to the manual. Some kind of cultural blind spot, maybe…?

“Weird,” Kit muttered as he leaned against the back of the Throne and looked up through the streaky cirrus clouds overhead at Thesba, which was now well past the zenith and heading for its day’s first setting. “Wonder if anybody’s asked the sibik…”

He soon found that there was going to be opportunity enough for him to do that, if he could keep other things from happening. Kit had gotten up briefly to take a leak behind one of the big standing stones—he was less concerned about this when both his shiftmates were likely to be off-site for a while—when in the middle of zipping up he started hearing unexpected clunking and rustling noises. A few seconds later he came around the standing stone to see a sibik, dappled in green and blue and quite large, hastily pulling things out of his backpack and throwing them over its shoulder, or where its shoulder would’ve been if it had had a shoulder. Or just one, Kit thought. How many tentacles do these guys actually have? They move so fast it’s hard to get a count…

“Hey!” Kit yelled he hurried back to the Stone Throne. The sibik startled at his shout, hitching its abdomen up enough to give Kit what seemed a fairly guilty look, and dug through the backpack faster, flinging away whatever it didn’t want—full cans of soda or cappuccino, mostly—as it dug for things that looked more appetizing. Its grasp of what to do about Tupperware was fortunately non-existent; it tossed away a sealed-up plastic container of cheese slices without a second thought. But someone seemed to have passed it the word about cellophane, even when it was hidden inside cardboard. The sibik went straight for the second of Kit’s saltine boxes and ripped it open, yanking out one of the packages of stacked saltines.

Kit dove for the saltines and snatched them out of the tentacles, which grabbed at the package as Kit pulled it up out of reach. “Now stop it!” he said. “Who told you that you could just take whatever you wanted—”

“Cracker!” The sibik promptly dug into the saltine box, yanked out the second package, and pulled it open. Saltines flew everywhere.

“Oh come on, you’re making a mess…!” Kit moaned. Then he heard what he’d just said, and snickered both at having unconsciously quoted the original scene from the movie they’d been watching yesterday evening and at the memory of Djam bubbling at the scene in amusement. “Right, that’s it…”

Kit tossed the saltine package he was holding into the air and said to it in the Speech, “You, just stay there, okay?” It hung there, levitating at the high point of his toss. Kit gestured at the saltines that had fallen all over the Stone Throne and the ground. “You guys, up you go.” Up they went, and hung there in a scatter of little squares.

The sibik, meanwhile, was making off with the half-empty package. The method was interesting: a couple of tentacles hugged the package to the underside of its body, while the rest on either side of its body ran it hurriedly away through the grass. “Nope,” Kit said, pointing at it. “Up.” And up went the sibik, its tentacles working comically against the air, like something out of a cartoon, as it lost contact with the ground.

“Nope,” the sibik squeaked, “nope nope nope nope!”, flailing around in the air while still doggedly hanging onto the package of saltines. For his part, Kit had to stand still for a moment as a shiver ran through him with the realization of just high his personal power levels were running at the moment—so high that merely using the Speech with full intention was, with simple things at least, enough to produce a result without needing to explicitly build a spell. This is really something... But strangely enough, he found that he wasn’t really liking it.

Kit shook his head and went over to the sibik. He tugged the half-empty package of saltines out of its tentacles and shoved them in his hoodie’s front pocket, then reached up and plucked the sibik out of the air. It grunted and thrashed and tried to get away.

“Now cut that out,” Kit said. “Calm down. Okay? Stop it now, just stop it…” He had to pull back his head a bit to avoid being lashed across the face with panicked tentacles. “Cut it out. Just relax. Okay? I’m not going to hurt you, but we have to have a talk about not taking people’s stuff without permission.”

The sibik thrashed and wriggled and waved itself around for some seconds more, and Kit just hung onto it until all of a sudden it made an upset giving-up noise like a half-inflated balloon losing all its air, and went limp in his arms.

“Okay,” Kit said. “Now come on and let’s sit down and talk like reasonable people.”

He headed back over to the Stone Throne and sat down with the sibik in his lap. Nine tentacles, Kit thought as he tried to arrange the creature so that it looked less disheveled. But despite his best efforts it still wound up looking like some kind of limp and extremely peculiar mop, and the eyes on the back of its abdomen were all dark and squinted, as if avoiding looking at Kit. It was sulking.

“Okay now,” he said. “Let’s not be like this. Tell me what brought you here.”

The response was sullen silence. “Come on,” Kit said, “how’d you find your way?”

If possible, the sibik went even flatter.

Kit rubbed his face. “Let’s start this over, yeah?”

He beckoned over one of the saltines floating in the air. “Look,” he said, “this is what you were after. You might as well have one…”

It snatched the saltine out of his hand with a pair of tentacles and shoved it hurriedly into its between-tentacles stoma, as if afraid Kit might have been about to change his mind. Crumbs sprayed everywhere; apparently annoyed or upset sibik were messy eaters. “Okay. Better?”

“No,” the sibik said with some force. “More cracker better.”

Interesting the way it’s picking up Speech vocabulary, Kit thought. It doesn’t just acquire it from other sibiks who’ve heard it; it gets it from me too, at least a little. Is it hearing it in Tevaralti, though, the way a human hears the Speech like it’s their milk language, or as Speech-words proper? …Something to look into later. “Okay,” Kit said, “more cracker.” He gestured the little cloud of saltines over to him and plucked another one out of the air.

The sibik grabbed at it. “Hungry!”

Kit held the saltine up out of the way and held the sibik down against his lap when it tried to climb up him to gain altitude. “Fine, but we’re gonna teach you another word first,” Kit said. “‘Please.’”

“Won’t,” the sibik said, and pulled all its tentacles in tight around itself until it was more or less hugging itself with all of them in a furious ball.

“Your call, buddy,” Kit said. “You say ‘please’ or there’s no cracker for you.”

The balled-up sibik glared at him with all the eyes on the top of its abdomen, and then squeezed them shut in annoyance.

Amused, Kit then tried what would with Ponch have been a most transparent ploy, one that would normally have provoked nothing but scornful eyerolling. “Mmm,” he said in a tone of exaggerated pleasure, “goooooood.” And he started eating the saltine he was holding.

The first crunch made the sibik twitch visibly. Uh huh, Kit thought, and went out of his way to make the second crunch much louder.

One eye squinted open: just one. Kit watched this happening out of the corner of his own eye, doing his best to seem to be idly regarding the scenic landscape of beautiful plainsland Tevaral and paying no attention whatsoever to the put-out ball of sibik in his lap. The eye-squinting was interesting, as there weren’t any eyelids as such: the closing of the eyes, or maybe shuttering was a better word, was being done by musculature in the top of the abdomen that actually pulled the eye slightly down into the body mass and pinched the hide closed over it.

There were only a couple of loud crunches available in a single saltine. Kit reached up for another one. The single open sibik-eye watched the movement and was joined by another that opened, and another; and a tiny miserable moan came out of somewhere in the middle of the sibik’s body. Is what they make noise with even associated with how they breathe? Kit wondered as he bit into the next saltine. Crunch! “Mmmmm…”

The sibik loosened its frustrated grip on itself somewhat, melted slightly into a less rigorously spherical bundle of body and tentacles, and made another of those sad little moaning noises. Kit felt sorry for it, but not sorry enough to give it the second half of the saltine without at least a gesture of willingness toward the behavior he was trying to teach. He looked from the saltine to the sibik’s two and a half open eyes and said firmly, “Please.”

Several more eyes opened and glared at him. The musculature that had pulled them down into the body of its abdomen now pushed them a bit out, so that they looked like shiny hemispherical pebbles. Up this close, it was possible to see that they were more than just dark solids. Except for the darkness of the four-branched pupil, a faint luminescence could be seen swimming in the eyes if your angle to the sun was right: a pale pinkish glow like the green glint you might catch in a cat’s eyes at night, except this was more milky, and less plainly located at the back of the eye.

At least it could be seen if the eyes didn’t squint themselves down tighter at you again in annoyance. “No.”

Kit shrugged and ate the rest of the saltine, making more noise than he would ever have been comfortable making at home; his Mama would have had his head for chewing like that. More of the sibik’s eyes were open now, maybe five or six and a half. Call it seven. They watched his hand carefully as it lifted to pick another saltine out of the air, judging distances—

Kit had seen that look on Ponch before, especially on one memorable occasion when his pop had thought that the piece of steak he was holding up for Ponch to jump for was out of his reach. (It hadn’t been.) Against his lap Kit could feel the sibik gathering its tentacles together, and just as it was getting ready to launch itself at the saltines Kit wasn’t holding, he simply said “Higher, guys, if you would…?” And all the loose saltines whisked themselves up to about fifteen feet over Kit’s head.

The sibik collapsed into a frustrated heap on Kit’s lap and hissed like an angry cat.

“See now,” Kit said, “if you don’t cooperate, they’re all just going to go to waste. By which I mean I’ll get them all and you won’t get any.” He bit into the one he was holding: crunch!—and all the sibik’s tentacles clenched.

“You want one,” Kit said, “you say ‘please.’” He held still and waited to see what the next move would be.

The sibik shuffled its tentacles around and for a few moments actually covered all its eyes with them. The gesture suddenly so bizarrely reminded Kit of his pop’s favorite gesture of frustration that he had to actually bite his lip to keep himself from laughing.

But then the sibik took the tentacles away, and every eye was trained on Kit, round and wide open and pleading.

He shook his head in sheer admiration, for he had never had puppy eyes made at him by something with so many eyes. Fortunately, the effect was more amusing than heartrending.

Kit worked to control his laughter. “No,” he said at last. “Nice try, guy, seriously. But it’s no good. Give up and just say ‘please!’”

“Hungry,” the sibik whimpered.

Kit shook his head. “Please.”

The sibik trembled all over. “Cracker!”

“Please.”

It collapsed flat in his lap as if too famished to support itself. All its tentacles went limp and hung down like so many rubbery toy snakes, and the sibik sucked most of its eyes down into its body again in what appeared to be a gesture of utter hopelessness.

Kit regarded the sibik sympathetically while finishing the saltine he was eating. When it was done he beckoned another one down.

With the three eyes that remained visible, the sibik watched Kit pluck the cracker out of the air and just hold it there. Kit waited until its gaze left the saltine and met his.

“So what’s the magic word?” Kit said.

It trembled all over several times in his lap, one after another, as it repeatedly started to gather its tentacles under it and then each time abandoned the gesture.

“You know what it is. Come on.”

The three eyes still open now angled in three different directions as if looking for help to come from one of them. Kit thought with amusement of Mamvish, who sometimes did something similar with her eyes—she might have only the two, but she got the maximum effect out of them—and simply waited.

Finally the sibik squeezed the remaining three eyes shut and said, distinctly and in utter disgust, “Please.”

“There you go,” Kit said, and held out the saltine.

All eyes flew open and the cracker was instantly snatched out of Kit’s hand and stuffed into the sibik’s eating stoma. This time there was less spraying of crumbs.

Now we’ll see if he can do it twice, Kit thought. Assuming ‘he’ is the word we’re looking for here…

“Another?” Kit said.

“Please!”

“You’re a smart guy,” Kit said. He pulled down another cracker and handed it right over.

The next few minutes were devoted to repeated administrations of positive reinforcement on Kit’s side, and shameless stoma-stuffing on the sibik’s. “You should slow down,” Kit said eventually. “You’ll get indigestion or something.”

“Cracker,” the sibik said, waving its tentacles at him.

“I think you missed a word there..”

“Cracker please!”

“Absolutely,” Kit said, and handed it another. “Question is now, how long’s my supply going to last me? I thought I brought enough for a week, but at this rate…”

“Still hungry,” the sibik remarked.

“Yeah, well, that kind of seems like the default state for you guys, doesn’t it,” Kit said. “So do you think you can tell me something, now that our little power struggle’s over with? You knew there was food here. You even knew it was called ‘cracker’. How did you know?”

“Just knew,” the answer came back after a few moments; and some of the eyes looked at Kit as if he was an idiot for asking.

Well, let’s see if we can’t get at this some other way. “Where did you come from?”

“Don’t know. With people.”

So definitely somebody’s pet, Kit thought. Also, however, through the words, he picked up a faint metallic scent and a feeling that was like feathers, though strangely scratchy.

Useful, Kit thought. A fair number of creatures, when you dealt with them in the Speech, would also pass you back sensory information associated with the data being discussed. The sibik was apparently one of these, which could make things simpler. “So,” he said. “Where do you usually go for food?”

“Don’t go. It comes.”

“People give it to you?”

“Yes.”

“The same people all the time?”

“Yes.” And suddenly there was emotion there: sorrow. Kit might have wonderful new food, but he was not those people.

“You’re lost,” Kit said. “You got lost.”

The sibik made that unhappy deflated-balloon sound again.

“The people who brought you here,” Kit said. “Do you know where they are?”

“Not sure.” There was a sudden sense of entwined scents, astonishingly directional, as Ponch’s combined senses of smell and hearing had sometimes seemed to Kit when they were communicating in a similar mode. The impression he was now getting from the sibik rendered itself visually. It was like a trace or track, a thin red line or a thread, that led away from here across the plain in the general direction of the gating complex. But the track was obscured in places, tangled or rubbed out, and when one was at ground level one couldn’t see the way back clearly. All that could be clearly seen was the place where the straight track faded out.

It’s partly using scent trails, Kit thought. But partly something else too. And it looks like there’s something wild sibik do when they’re communicating with each other that interferes with a pet sibik’s link to its owner, if it’s in the area. Maybe it’s just numbers? Maybe they drown it out or something?

He breathed out. Never mind that now. First let’s see how much of a problem we’ve got. “When you came,” Kit said, “did your people stop a while, or did they go straight from one portal to another?”

There was some confusion over the “portal” concept, but once that was resolved the answer came back promptly. “They stayed.”

“Good,” Kit said.

“They were sad,” the sibik said.

“Yeah,” Kit murmured, looking up and across the plain, “I bet they were. Are.”

“Cracker!”

Yeah, I imagine you’d feel the need for some comfort food too right about now. “Forgot a word there, big guy,” Kit said.

“Please.”

The capitulation was immediate: the sibik had other things on its mind now. Kit fed it another of the few remaining floating saltines. “Let me get clear about one thing,” Kit said. “You didn’t run away from them on purpose, did you? You want to go back to them.”

“Want to go back, yes. But did run away on purpose! Smelled/tasted/wanted food others had, wanted cracker!”

“Oh great,” Kit muttered, “just what I needed about this. Guilt.” …Yet he couldn’t be held responsible for what the wild sibik were up to in their spare time—which doubtless included investigating the transient-Tevaralti campsite and shaking them down for food, as well as coming back here to do the same. It was probably a wonder that there weren’t more escaped pet sibik over here, seduced by the covertly-communicated scent of exotic alien foodstuffs.

“Possibly a good reason for us to find something else for you guys to eat when you turn up here,” Kit muttered. “Something less fancy. I mean, besides generic wizard rations and Earth crackers, I mean. If lots of Tevaralti keep you guys as pets, then somebody here must make, I don’t know, sibik chow…”

But it appeared what this sibik was mostly interested in chowing on was Kit’s crackers: it was trying to climb up his arm for one right now. “Sorry,” Kit said, giving it the cracker. “And I’ll take you back to your people and you’ll be all spoiled, and it’ll all be my fault. I can just hear your boss now. ‘What did that nasty Earthling do to you, your appetite’s all ruined!’”

The sibik ate the latest cracker and ignored this line of reasoning, apparently finding it beneath its notice. But, “Yes, what is the nasty Earthling doing with that creature?” said a familiar voice from behind him. “I can think of any number of media outlets who’d love an answer. Preferably with video.”

Kit snickered as Ronan came strolling around one of the standing stones and stood there for a moment, shaking his head at Kit in huge amusement. “Jaysus, this is so suggestive.”

“Of what?” Kit said.

“Oh, come on, finding somebody with a lapful of tentacles? What an innocent you are. And there’s not even any point talking to you about cartoon smut, is there? Or even smut in general. It just rolls right off.”

Kit managed to look faintly offended. “Excuse me! I know about smut, thanks.”

“Oh yeah? What kind?”

Kit opened his mouth and then closed it again, briefly stifled by the complete disconnect that came with the prospect of sitting here, in the middle of a refugee crisis on an alien planet, preparing to talk about porn. Yet Kit knew if he didn’t do something about this right now, Ronan was going to get the wrong idea.

“I don’t know,” Kit said, “why don’t we start with whatever kind you’re thinking about right now?” A sudden image flashed into his mind, and almost as if his mouth had decided to go ahead without consulting his brain, he found himself saying, “Maybe that thing you were looking at on your manual with Dairine’s streaming plug-in last night, the one about the hotel Jacuzzi and the two— Uh, that.” Kit stopped, as the image he’d glimpsed was way too interesting to describe any further without possibly starting to produce a result that would betray his own interest.

Meanwhile, Ronan’s mouth had fallen open. Kit was concentrating on not letting his own do the same. Now where the hell did that come from?

Consider it a favor, something whispered in the back of his mind. Strictly a one-off, of course.

Kit’s mouth went dry with shock. Bobo??

No response.

And to Kit’s complete amazement, Ronan was blushing. Kit couldn’t recall ever having seen this happen before. “Or maybe not,” Kit said, instantly following up on the momentary advantage. “Never mind, wouldn’t want to embarrass you when Dairine’s messed up the security settings somehow. Neets keeps telling her to stop tweaking the connection parameters, but she just won’t quit.” He shrugged.

“Well, fine. And meanwhile, Powers forbid I should fail to cut you some slack when you so plainly need it,” said Ronan, not missing a beat. “Look at you, you’re the color of beetroot.”

Kit didn’t waste time trying to deny it, assuming that beetroot was the same as beets; sometimes with food from Ronan’s part of the world it wasn’t easy to tell. “So, things get boring over on your side, or was there a purpose for this visit?”

“I was just coming over to tell you that we’re on for the picnic tomorrow night, if your shiftmates are okay with it.”

“Oh God, I forgot to ask Djam this morning,” Kit said. “Doesn’t matter, he’ll be up shortly, and Cheleb will be back any minute: he’s a real on-time kind of guy. Sit down, get comfortable! When one or the other of them comes along we can let them know what’s on tap, and then take this guy back over there.” Kit pointed with his chin at the transients’ camp. “He’s nervous about going out there by himself, thinks he’ll get lost again. We’ll escort him over.”

“Cracker,” the sibik said, a touch cranky now that less attention was being paid to it.

Kit gave it a look. “What do we say?”

“Please,” it said. The sulky tone suggested it was embarrassed again, now that there was someone else watching it do what it was told.

Ronan fell over laughing, which didn’t help the sibik’s temper: it snatched the last cracker away from Kit and practically inhaled it, crumbs spraying everywhere.

It was into this tableau that Cheleb came strolling a moment or two later. Kit was spluttering with laughter: Ronan’s presence made it somehow impossible for him to keep his face straight. He pushed the sibik gently off to one side and onto the Stone Throne, brushing crumbs off himself. “Cheleb,” he said, “we’ve got a lost one here.”

“What a shame,” Cheleb said, looking sympathetically at Ronan. “Big well-grown specimen, doubtless someone misses their pet.”

Ronan stared at Cheleb, then collapsed again, hooting with laughter. Kit snickered. “Just be glad Carmela’s not here to agree,” Kit said. “Chel, this is my friend Ronan. Ronan, Cheleb—”

Dai stihós and arm-clasps were exchanged, at least as soon as Ronan could start himself breathing again and get up to do it properly. “Chel,” Kit said, “we were thinking we might invite some friends over here tomorrow evening, after your shift starts, for food and drink and himiniw.” The Speech-term exactly translated the English term “get-together”. “Would that bother you? Feel like taking part?”

“Glad to, not bothered at all,” Cheleb said. “Djam certainly will too, was complaining the other day about grinding boredom.”

“Relief from grinding boredom I can pretty much guarantee him,” Kit said. “So would you relieve me early? Got to return the prodigal squid to his proper sphere of influence before he eats all my food.”

The sibik had already climbed halfway up Kit’s arm and was in the process of festooning itself around his shoulders. “No problem,” Cheleb said. “How have gates been?”

“Mercifully quiet,” Kit said, “considering what else has been going on.”

“Entertainment still on for this evening as scheduled?”

“Oh yes. As soon as we dispose of Wandering Boy here.”

“Then relieving you, kehrutheh. Go restore lost one so can get started soon as Djam gets up. Don’t want to leave poor long-ago-far-away humanoid stuck in carbonite any longer than necessary.”

“Right. Back soon.”

Ronan threw Kit a look as the two of them headed out between the standing stones toward the encampment a mile or so across the plain. “What the everloving feck have you been doing to these poor innocents?”

Kit grinned as they struck out through the long turquoise grass. “Long story. Let’s deal with this first.”

Just outside the circle of stones Kit paused and rummaged inside his hoodie’s front pocket, handing the package of saltines to Ronan while he fished around for his manual. “Let’s make this easier for ourselves,” he said, flipping its pages open to one of the sections that had to do with biology and biochemistry.

“Tracking spell?” Ronan said.

“More or less.” Kit ran a finger down one page full of Speech-cursive, didn’t find what he was after; turned another page, and another. “The shiftmates have been saying there are scent trails involved, but I think there’s something else going on too. Some connection that started out just plain chemical, and then something happened. It got involved with something else, some other process…”

The next page had what he wanted: a spell that would key to a given set of chemical or olfactory signatures, analyze them, and track them visually. “Okay,” Kit said, “let’s see how this goes.” He made sure his own name in the Speech was locked into it correctly, then tugged one of the sibik’s tentacles loose, bringing it down to touch the page.

The page held the tentacle in place as if it was glued there, and Kit could feel the sibik go stiff with alarm. “No, no, it’s okay,” Kit said. “Ro, pet it a little, I need to concentrate on this.”

“Good thing nobody else we know is here,” Ronan muttered, “because adding ‘octopoid wrangler’ to my CV at this stage isn’t something I’d anticipated. Might never live this down. Where’s okay to pet it?”

“Probably smart to avoid the eyes,” Kit said, reading down the spell to get the structure and the rhythm of it. “Otherwise most places should be all right.”

Kit was surprised to feel the sibik start going rather limp. “Oho, that’s where it is,” Ronan said, sounding smug.

“Where what is?”

“The good spot. Doubt there’s an animal alive that doesn’t have one. The spot that would be the one back a bit and between the ears, if it was a dog.”

Kit smiled: he knew that spot. “Great, hold that thought…”

“You need me to move anywhere?”

“Nope, you’re fine. Just a sensor spell, doesn’t need a circle.” Or rather, the circle had spread itself across the manual page. All Kit needed to do was verbally tag the scent cues that the manual was picking up from the sibik and tell the wizardry to locate and visually identify them.

Kit began to read the spell—fairly slowly and carefully, as the Speech-names for some of the aromatic esters and other chemicals involved in the sibik’s scent were fairly complicated, and misplacing a syllable could render the tracker function ineffective. All around him and the sibik and Ronan, for a few moments the world went dim and quiet as the Universe leaned in around them and listened to see what Kit wanted done. Kit finished the recitation of the spell’s power-feed component—which flared up and extinguished itself on the page quick and bright as a struck match bursting into flame, and seemed to cost Kit no more energy than it took to breathe out at the end of the phrase. I can not get used to that, he thought as he finished the spell proper and recited the shorthand verbal version of the Wizard’s Knot to close the spell and set it working: seven syllables in four groups.

Kit experienced no final burst of energy leaving him to fuel the triggering of the spell; his intervention allowance had so increased his normal power levels that for so relatively minor a spell there was almost nothing to feel. So weird, Kit thought as he closed the manual and watched the spell work. A tangled strand of pale blue light started laying itself down across the ground from near where he and Ronan stood, weaving off southward through the long turquoise grass, more or less in the direction of the transients’ encampment. But Kit could already see where it started to angle away to the westward, a few hundred yards ahead of them. Other trails, fainter than their sibik’s, crossed it and smudged it and made it wander.

“Can you see that okay?” Kit said to Ronan.

Ronan glanced around them, immediately picked up the track, and nodded. “No wonder he couldn’t figure out how to get back,” he said. “Must have been a dozen of them cluttering up the picture. Repeatedly.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, tugging the sibik’s tentacle loose from the manual and tucking it back up onto his shoulder. “With any luck we won’t find his people too far from where they lost touch with him. From the time-stamping on this, doesn’t look like he’s been gone too long.” The complex chemical signatures that the sibik emitted and the spell was tracking all had clearly defined “expiration dates”. Another sibik could judge by their strength exactly when and how quickly another of its kind had passed this way, not to mention a lot about what it had been eating and even a certain amount about its emotional state. There’s so much information encoded in these, Kit thought. Maybe I can figure out which compound is signaling the presence of saltines, so I can work out a way to spoof it and make them stop coming here and looking for more…

But right now that wasn’t the main problem. Kit and Ronan struck out across the grassy plain, following the trail, while the sibik peered past Kit’s ear with most of its tentacles wrapped around his shoulders and throat and a few spare ones playing with his hair. Kit tilted his head back to smell the wind, just letting himself enjoy it for a moment: the strange scents, the clearing weather (it had been gray for a lot of the day but hadn’t ever gotten around to actually raining), the sound of the wind itself and the quiet that underlay it. “You know what’s weird?” Kit said after a moment. “The Tevaralti are avian-descended, but I haven’t seen a single bird here. Are there even any? Because I haven’t seen anything that flies at all.”

“I think there are some,” Ronan said, “but I don’t know about what would normally live on this continent. And anyway a lot of the local wildlife’s been removed already, and a lot more is just weirded out by what’s been going on with the magnetic fields and so forth.” He looked around him, shook his head with a frown. “This would be a really nice place if it wasn’t about to wind up somewhere between mostly and completely destroyed.”

Kit nodded.

“Speaking of which,” Ronan said, “I guess I should be grateful that certain other wizards working on this planet with access to that streaming video system didn’t see any of what I was looking at last night—”

“Because ‘somewhere between mostly and completely destroyed’ might in that case be an accurate description of your general status today?” Kit said.

“Or yours, if you’d started looking at the wrong channel and her manual noticed that…”

The issue of what Nita’s manual (or the power that ran it) was capable of noticing, and how much of that it chose to share with her, was somewhat on Kit’s mind right now. “Between you and me,” Kit said, “I think it might be smart to stay out of the Jacuzzi Channel for the time being.”

“Heard and understood,” Ronan muttered. “Oh wow, look at this…”

They stopped and looked at the grass around them. The whole area was an incredible tangle of scent trails. Kit’s sibik’s trail here turned into something like an extremely tight and complex knot about a meter wide, probably the result of it shuffling around in excitement as it ran across a crowd of wild sibik who’d probably been tracking it.

“Okay, this is where you started getting lost, isn’t it,” Ronan said to the sibik. It gave him a reproachful look and then hid all its eyes against Kit’s head.

“Yeah, you can see why…” Kit said. “Must’ve been five, six, maybe eight of them here.”

“I can also see what is probably somebody’s butthole,” Ronan said, covering his eyes for a moment. “Holy Powers, there’s two of them. No, three! Sure you’re oversubscribed in the bottomly wonderfulness department, fella. But nobody else needs to see that, you’ll just embarrass the lot of us who can’t compete, ah jeez would you ever stop waving it about and just sit yourself down!”

The sibik put its body back down on Kit’s shoulder again, giving Ronan a sidelong look out of several eyes. Kit’s laughter almost got away from him before he managed to strangle it. “Okay,” he said. “Looks like a few meters further along this pretty much straightens out. Seems like they all actually did physically meet up, and then the others ran off for some reason…”

“Maybe not enough buttholes?” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.

Kit snickered as they once more started along the sibik’s trail. There were several more of these ball-of-yarn knots ahead of them, apparently more artifacts of yet more excited small wild sibik groups running across the domesticated one. Kit had a sudden mental image of a slightly nervous Labrador or Great Dane wandering through a strange dog park and being repeatedly mobbed by gangs of excited Chihuahuas.

“These lads just seem to come from all directions,” Ronan said, turning to look along some of the wild sibiks’ tracks out into the plain. “I guess they’re out foraging for whatever it is they usually eat. Have to be all kinds of wee things in the grass…”

Kit nodded. “And when they run across other sibik and check their scent trails, they know if they found anything, and they know what direction they found it in. Kind of like ants, one way.”

“Or bees, without the dancing.”

“Yeah.” It was funny that Ronan should mention bees just now, as Kit had been registering a faint humming at the edge of hearing. As they walked, though, Kit realized that what he was hearing had nothing to do with insect life. He was hearing, at a distance, the sound of movement and voices from the transients’ encampment ahead of them; and it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

It’s not like we haven’t been within visual distance of them for a couple of days, Kit thought. But the motion at that distance had been indistinct, sort of an average of many movements seen together; and sometimes, even under Thesba’s light when darkness fell, difficult to see at all. Now he could see people, or the individual shapes of people anyway, moving around, moving among one another, clothed or not-so-clothed over their feathers; sitting outside the small tentlike structures scattered throughout the encampment, standing and talking, and sometimes pausing to look up at Thesba as it slid across the sky.

Kit and Ronan followed the sibik’s track past another tangle of knotted light in the grass, while the hum became louder and started turning into a huge low murmur of voices in many Tevaralti languages. The path began to angle to their right, somewhat toward the encampment’s western edge, now just a couple hundred meters ahead of them. That was when the wind that had been blowing at their backs dropped off for a few moments, and then changed, swinging around to gust toward them from the encampment.

Two things happened. The grip of the sibik’s tentacles around Kit’s shoulders and head immediately tightened, and it made another of those little moans; of excitement this time, but strangely mixed with dread. And as it did, Kit got a strong whiff of something he hadn’t smelled since he came, or had mistaken it for part of this world’s larger, natural scent. It was a metallic aroma, or at least that was the way it read to him. But it wasn’t until he saw the small, cubelike sanitary arrangements that were set outside the edges of the encampment that he realized his error. The biology of human beings from Earth naturally arose from and was geared to a very specific biosphere, meaning that human bodies and senses were wired to read certain scents as unwholesome or noxious. Aromas from other planets would naturally mean nothing to them. If I’d smelled something recognizable as piss or crap, Kit thought, or both of those mixed up with chemicals meant to hide the odor—if it’d smelled like people crowded together in really basic conditions—

He wasn’t sure what was supposed to come after the ‘if.’ But it was funny, the way a smell could concentrate your mind when sound or sight hadn’t done so before.

“Kit,” Ronan said. “Stay focused.”

Kit looked at Ronan out of the corner of his eye. It was unusual enough for him to call Kit by his name instead of one of the endless series of rude nicknames he’d evolved over time. Ronan’s face looked unusually tight, the wide mobile mouth set thinner and harder than Kit was used to seeing it. It was unnerving.

“You okay?” Kit said.

Ronan nodded just once. “Trail’s swinging again,” he said.

So it was, further to their right, right off toward the encampment’s westward side, to a point where it angled southward and dove straight into it. Kit and Ronan worked around the edge of the encampment’s boundary, more or less defined by a line of long low tents and the cubical structures that Kit’s nose now identified as the Tevaralti version of portable toilets—extremely advanced, yes, but not quite perfect at disguising their purpose or their contents. And then the wind shifted again, and the sibik grabbed Kit even tighter, almost throttling him with a tentacle that had been left around his neck, and shouted “Yes!”

Kit tried to ease the tentacle’s grip slightly as they followed the sibik’s trail into the encampment. All around them, Tevaralti in their many kinds of dress, from harnesses to kilts to robes and everything in between, in small groups or larger ones, were staring at him and Ronan as they made their way between the temporary buildings and among the lookers-on. Kit tried to smile at the ones who stared at him, but he wasn’t at all sure that they were prepared or even able to understand the expression as a gesture of friendliness.

And the way the Tevaralti around them were regarding him was peculiar. They didn’t seem hostile, but they did seem sad and afraid, afraid of them—as if Kit and Ronan somehow were symptoms of everything that was going wrong with the world right now. The people they passed most closely drew back from them, still staring; and as this happened again and again, even though he was perfectly safe, a wizard in company and in his power, out and about on the Powers’ business, Kit started feeling small and unsettled and strangely alone.

Fortunately he had something to distract him—the sibik, which was now yelling “Yes yes! Yes yes!” over and over again in response to something it was smelling. The rhythm was strangely like that of a dog barking. And as that thought crossed Kit’s mind, suddenly a peculiar unexpected wave of sensation washed over him, one that meant something: or rather, someone. Someone for whom the sibik didn’t have a name, nothing so advanced. It was a scent, or actually a whole bundle of scents bound up together, clothes and food and possessions and a personal aroma laden with meaning and safety and warmth and the reality of a place to be and someone to belong to, and oh, it missed them, it missed them—

The pang of its emotion pierced so profoundly through Kit that he actually staggered, and stumbled and might have gone down on his face if Ronan hadn’t caught him by one arm. “Are you okay, what the f—”

“No, it’s OK, I’m OK,” Kit said, “we’re here, he’s here, he’s home—”

Right in front of them, someone was crying in one of the Tevaralti languages something like, “Weegie? Weegie!” And the sibik undid all its tentacles from around Kit and more or less launched itself off him at the small feather-crested figure that was running toward them, and the next moment or so was taken up with Kit stumbling back into Ronan (who was still bracing him, and sharing Kit’s surprise at how much force a sibik that size could impart to you when using you as a launch platform).

The little one meanwhile caught the sibik in mid-leap and clutched it to him as if it was the only stable thing in a world gone mad. “Weegie, oh Weegie, I felt you! I felt you and you were sad and you couldn’t come back and now you’re here—!”

Moments later Kit and Ronan were surrounded by a crowd of Tevaralti all of whom seemed to be talking at the two of them in different languages (understandable via the Speech, but still aurally confusing in such numbers), and Kit was being hugged around his waist by the little boy, who was wearing a kilt and very raggedy feathers, mostly brown ones. The sibik meanwhile concentrated on wrapping itself more and more tightly around the little boy’s shoulders as if intent on melting into his body.

Kit was still trying to get control of his breathing, and also trying to recover from his perception of the sibik’s ecstatic certainty that here, in the middle of a refugee camp, with the world about to be destroyed, it was finally home and safe and everything was all right, in fact absolutely perfect. Kit was shaking with the echoes of the feeling, rocked to his core. He was also determined not to have to start wiping his eyes, especially with all these people looking at him. Though would they even know what that meant? Maybe wiping your eyes for no reason is perfectly normal behavior for some weird featherless humanoid species from Powers only know where.

He pulled away from Ronan, enough to let him know that he was okay, and Ronan let him go, patting him on the back. To the Tevaralti around them—especially the three who’d come up behind the young boy, who were apparently his parents or at least his guardians—Ronan simply said, “We’re on errantry, and we greet you.”

While there were any any number of more specific phrases you could use as a wizard on assignment and greeting nonwizardly people from astahfrith cultures, Kit saw the point of simplicity right now—specifically because after the emotional gutpunch he’d just received, he didn’t feel he was up to anything that complex. He just looked down into the big birdlike eyes of the little Tevaralti hanging onto him, and said, “Your friend here wanted to come home.”

The three parents-or-guardians were looking in astonishment at Kit and Ronan. “Honorable Interveners,” one of them said, “how do you come by our child’s sibik? We were in such pain for him, our child was in such pain, and— We’d thought in this great crowd the sibik had maybe come to harm, or, or been lost forever—”

With the Tevaralti’s glance toward the gates came a sudden sense of fear and distrust. Kit held himself still, not sure where this was coming from or what to do about it.

Fortunately Ronan showed no sign of being similarly affected. “We’re posted near here,” Ronan said, turning to gesture away back toward the ring of stones. “Our business is monitoring the gate complex to make sure it’s working correctly. And while we were doing that, your sibik found us—”

Kit restrained himself from adding And started eating us out of house and home. “And once we’d given him something to eat, he was able to start showing us the way back to where he belonged,” Kit said.

The little one who had Kit by the waist looked up at him again. They moult while they’re growing, these people, Kit thought, seeing feathers still in their narrow cylindrical casings scattered all through the downier feathers they were replacing on the youngster’s head and shoulders. Under his feather-coat the little boy was thin and gangly, and Kit found himself thinking back to when he was small and skinny and getting picked on a lot, and Ponch was the only friend he had—before wizardry, before Nita, before any of the other people he knew now who accepted him for exactly what he was.

“Thank you for finding him,” the little boy said. “He was sad and he was hungry and I was afraid he might starve.”

“No, he seemed to have been doing all right,” Kit said. “Sibiks seem pretty good at finding food. In fact I may have overfed him a little.”

One of the eyes on the back of the sibik—all of them having been squeezed shut until now—opened and regarded Kit. “Cracker,” the sibik said.

“What’s ‘cracker’?” the little boy said.

“Something he’s not going to get any more of, I’d say,” Ronan said. “Special food from a planet two thousand light years away.”

The parents-or-guardians looked impressed. The little boy looked suspicious. “It won’t make him sick, will it?”

“No, it’s all right for him,” Kit said. “I checked.”

“And having said as much, we should probably get back,” Ronan said, “because our pet-feeding duties are strictly unofficial.”

“Interveners for the One,” the tallest of the three adult Tevaralti said, “we’re deeply in your debt. Thank you for being so kind, for helping our child!”

Kit nodded to them as the youngster unwound himself from him, and the sibik threw him one last glance, closed its single open eye, and cuddled down into the boy’s shoulder again. “It’s our pleasure, cousins,” he said. He was about to say “Go well,” but then it occurred to him that this was possibly not the best idea: these people weren’t going anywhere.

Ronan turned away: Kit started to follow him. But the Tevaralti beside the tall one, a fluffier-feathered one in a long netlike garment, reached out to stop him. “Intervener— I’m guessing you don’t understand what’s going on.” The voice was distressed. “You’ve come a long way to help, we know you have.”

“Uh, yes,” Kit said.

The shorter parent looked regretful. “We can’t go, though. It’s not right for us. These others of our people, they feel that it is right, right for them anyway. But it’s not how we feel. We have to be of one mind, and we’re not… We’re just not.” There was terrible sorrow layered under the words, and a sense that there was nothing to be done about the problem… and the cold frightened certainty that there wouldn’t be much longer for it to be a problem.

Kit could think of about a hundred things he wanted to say to that at the moment: but none of them were a wizard’s business to let out of his mouth in such a situation. Finally, “I’m sorry,” was all he could find to say. “But I hope everything works out all right for you.”

The three parents-or-guardians bowed their heads to him. Kit turned away, feeling forlorn, knowing the hope was an empty one. He caught a last glimpse of the little Tevaralti boy hugging his sibik to him as his parents shepherded him away: then they vanished into the crowd.

Kit and Ronan made their way out into the grassland again, toward where the stone circle stood up alone against the northern horizon like fingers reaching up from the ground into the twilight. It was some while before Ronan said anything, which suited Kit. He was feeling extremely unsettled.

“That’s the first explanation I’ve really heard about from any of those people about what’s going on with them,” Ronan muttered at last, “and maybe it’s just that my interplanetary people skills are shite, but I still don’t get it.”

Kit sighed. “Neither do I.”

They walked on into the growing twilight. Inside the stone circle ahead of them, a light came on, spilling shadows out across the grassland from the stones: Cheleb had brought out one of the electric campfires. “I guess they have to do what they think is right for them,” Ronan said. “But it doesn’t make it suck any less, from where I’m standing.”

Kit shook his head. “Nope.”

They reached the circle of stones, and for a moment Kit just put a hand out and leaned on the nearest one, breathing out. He suddenly felt very tired in a way that didn’t have anything to do with a full day of gate monitoring.

“You sure you’re all right now?” Ronan said. “You really took a hit of some kind back there.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “But I’m okay. I think I was just picking up something from the sibik because I was holding it. It was really glad to be back…”

“I got that feeling,” Ronan said, grabbing Kit by the shoulder and shaking him. “You make sure you’re all right now, yeah? Get some food in you tonight instead of feeding it to every bloody octopus that comes along.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Kit said. “Gonna stay for the video portion of the evening?”

“No, gotta go,” Ronan said, “I’m taking an extra shift this evening: my daytime shiftmate gave me some extra time to come over here and I’ve got to get back there now. He has to take some time off.” Ronan looked over his shoulder. “All this has been getting to him. I can see why.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay. Look, text me later if you feel— You know.”

“Like kicking somebody?” Ronan said, amused.

“Like dumping,” Kit said.

Ronan took a big breath, sighed it out. “Yeah,” he said. “Same from your end.”

Kit nodded. “Let’s see how it goes.”

Ronan lifted a hand, a slightly weary wave, and headed back for the short-transit pad. Kit watched him go, then turned inward to go sit on the Stone Throne with Cheleb and give him a more complete shift debriefing before finding some food that no tentacles would now be grabbing for.

A cheerful enough evening ensued, though under the circumstances it took a good while for Kit’s mind and mood to settle. At least part of this is blood sugar, he thought. After all, he hadn’t really had all that much of anything today but coffee and crackers and a croissant, and bearing in mind everything he’d been up to, that wasn’t much.

Kit ducked into his puptent and pulled together a selection of snacks, avoiding the saltines, which really were seriously diminished; he was going to have to take inventory to see what he had left and start rationing them. Instead he fished out the box of Ritz crackers, along with some more of the spray-can cheese and a can of deviled ham and one of deviled chicken (so that he wouldn’t keep hearing his Mama yelling at him in his head, “Man is not meant to live on carbs alone, eat some protein!”). There was also some of the regular, plastic-wrapped sliced yellow cheese that his Mama sniffed at and pronounced “barely worthy of the name”. But Kit liked it, and it was protein, so for the time being he pulled out some slices of that too and decided to see what Cheleb and Djam made of it.

When he got out again, Djam already had his floating holographic screen display up and running, and had laid out some of his own homeworld’s food and drink. His people were essentially vegetarian as far as Kit could tell, and what he set out on a few hovering trays was a batch of strange-shaped fruits and giant berries and drupes patterned in a rainbow of colors, and slabs of processed fruit and vegetable snacks. There was also a large product-labeled jug of something that looked so much like Star Wars “blue milk” that Kit burst out laughing when he saw it. “Did you bring this out on purpose after yesterday? What is it?”

“Sekoldra juice,” Djam said. “Extremely healthy, or so my parents insist.”

“Any truth to rumor?” Cheleb said.

Djam shrugged. “Could be,” he said, “but I’d be slow to admit it. They run too much of my life as it is. No point in letting them think I agree with their food choices.”

The three of them laughed together, each after his or haes own fashion, and shared some of the blue milk, which Kit took to immediately. It tasted a lot like a Creamsicle might have if you melted it down, and had a slight fizz. “So, ready for more entertainment now?” Cheleb said as they pooled the rest of their various foods and started divvying them up.

“Absolutely. At the very least we can finish up the first trilogy,” Kit said. “…Though as I said, actually it’s the second. But it came out first.”

Cheleb threw haes arms up in a shrug-like gesture. “Temporal discontinuities,” hae said, “story of our lives for wizards. Got some questions before we start, though.”

“Sure, shoot,” Kit said, getting himself comfortable on the cushion he’d brought out to the Stone Throne and reaching for his manual to bring the streaming-video linkage up.

Cheleb gave him a bemused look. “With what? Not armed.”

“Sorry,” Kit said. He’d dropped into English for the moment. “It’s an idiom. Ask away.” He started pulling up the streaming-video settings on his manual so that Djam could screen the content from them as they had yesterday.

“Humanoid people we saw in first two entertainments yesterday,” Cheleb said, “main characters; some localized hominomorphism there perhaps? Guessing they’re based on some of your species’ major physical/gender arrangements.”

“Safe guess,” Kit said. He guessed that this was more of Cheleb’s ongoing inquiry into the biology of every species hae ran into. It had something to do with haes specialty, which was life-science based, Kit knew; but the small amount of research he’d done on it so far had just confused him.

“So,” Cheleb said. “Those were all ‘he’?”

“Well, not all. A lot of them.”

“But the Wookiee was one?” Djam said. He had taken an interest in the character and had started casually referring to him as his “counterpart.”

“Uh, he’s a male, yeah. Everybody calls him ‘he’, anyway.”

“And person we saw in white clothes all the time,” Cheleb said, “small one with hair like wheels in the first entertainment, arguing with vested fellow all the time—that was a ‘she’?”

“That’s right,” Kit said, wondering where this was going.

“Your errantry-partner also,” Cheleb said, “similarly a ‘she’?”

“Uh, yeah,” Kit said.

“Aha!” Cheleb said. “Thought so. Reminds me; meant to ask you. Conducted traditional fertility-confirmation ritual as yet?”

Kit stared at him, taken aback. “Sorry?”

“Impregnation,” Cheleb said. “You’re ‘he’, that one’s ‘she’, both well past latency now according to Knowledgebase, both of you entering prime fertility period, when does impregnation ritual happen?”

“Uh,” Kit said, as his brain more or less whited out. Immediately after that came the thought, I have got to keep Neets away from here somehow till I get this guy settled or we are going to have such a demonstration of Callahan’s Unfavorable Instigation...!

“Researched your species/culture in Knowledge last night,” said Cheleb with considerable relish, and exuding that particular kind of satisfaction that comes of having done your homework and of being absolutely ready to give a report on it. “Many highly nuanced traditions and rituals for such a simple sex/gender setup, most creative from culture to culture, all delightfully inventive.”

“What?”

“And all interleaving to greater or lesser extent with Earth-human fertilization procedure,” Cheleb said. “Some ambiguities in Knowledge material. Perhaps explain how works? Just highlights of course.”

“Uh,” Kit said again, as his brain threatened to overload again at the very thought of where even to begin such an explanation. And one not aimed at a three-year-old whom you could foist off with a vaguely third-person “when two people love each other very much” explanation, either, but a curious fellow wizard who was going to want the details from an intelligent adult of another species. Just the highlights! All of a sudden the inside of Kit’s head sounded like the outline for a sex-ed course. Sperm, ova, gametes, zygotes, developmental stages, gestation, labor, childbirth, no, nope, no way! I have got to get him off this line of inquiry. Otherwise there’s going to be so much trouble.

And at the same time, backing completely away from the whole concept seemed somehow like cowardice. Also, Kit suspected it might just make Cheleb more eager to find out what was really going on. There has to be a way I can spoof haem into thinking hae’s found out everything he needs to. But somehow I’ve also got to do it without haem realizing hae’s being spoofed… and without fibbing. Lying in the Speech was, after all, even when possible, very, very unwise.

Yet Kit knew that if you were careful, it was possible to tell someone something in the Speech and allow them to draw the wrong conclusions from it… And all the wrong conclusions, I hope. Oh please.

He was well into several interminable seconds’ worth of desperate mental flailing among ineffective possible solutions when, completely without warning, the idea came to him—so quickly that at first Kit mistrusted it. But a moment later he found himself having to actually had to hold his face still to keep his jaw from dropping at how good the idea was. It could… It could just work.

Kit took a deep breath and said, “Well… let me tell you.”

He lowered his head conspiratorially close to Cheleb’s. “It just so happens there’s a really important ritual coming up shortly. We call it Valentine’s Day. And a lot of our kind feel it’s really important for two people who’re, you know, interested in each other to give each other special presents then. Otherwise there won’t be any…” He waggled his eyebrows at Cheleb, hoping the gesture would be read correctly. “Satisfaction.” He’d spent a few moments hunting around for a word in the Speech that would both accurately complete the sentence and yet have a completely different meaning from what Cheleb was considering… without seeming to.

“Truly,” Cheleb breathed, fascinated.

Kit grinned. “And we have these special tokens that we exchange…” He jumped up. “Wait, I’ll show you.”

He trotted across the stone circle, waved open the portal in the stone and headed into his puptent, where he spent a few moments digging hurriedly through his supplies until he finally found the little package that he’d thrown in here so casually while packing. Oh I am glad I brought this, so glad so glad so glad…

Kit headed out to the Throne Rock again, plopped himself down next to Cheleb and showed haem the box. “See these?”

And he took Cheleb’s clawed hand, turned it palm-upwards and poured a bunch of candy hearts out into it.

Cheleb poked them with a claw, saw that they had words written on them, and started examining them closely, one by one, reading the English-language sentiments via the Speech. “Oh my,” hae said, actually sounding shocked. “Quite intense.”

Kit was surprised. He’d been hoping for a reaction that would make Cheleb back off a little, but this was beyond what he had in mind. “Um, well,” he said, “this is sort of an important event.” Which was true enough.

But Cheleb’s long eyes went way wider as hae turned the hearts over one by one, gazing at them with some trepidation, as if they might explode if mishandled. “Seriously. Look at these! ‘Be Mine.’” Hae looked at Kit with an expression that suggested hae too was considering the ramifications of Speech-possessives as they applied to other sentient beings, and finding them as daunting as Kit had. And if hae’s projecting those concepts onto English words, Kit thought, that’s hardly my fault, is it? “And this. ‘You’re Cute.’ —And this!” And Cheleb sucked in his breath. “‘Text Me’!”

Kit was about to ask what was so dangerous about that sentiment, and then changed his mind. Don’t make haem tell you! Just go with it.

“And this one. ‘Be Good!’” Cheleb looked at Kit in a strange combination of approval and nervousness. “Most profound commitment to wizardly principles…!”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “And what these are for is to be… internalized.”

And he picked that heart up from Cheleb’s hand, flipped it up in the air, tilted his head back, caught it in his mouth and crunched it up.

Cheleb’s jaw dropped: not in his usual smile, which didn’t normally involve allowing his slightly forked tongue to hang out. This was astonishment. For his own part, Kit was simply relieved that he’d caught the heart without choking himself.

But Cheleb was still struggling for words. “And all must be internalized before…”

Don’t let haem go any further! Hae might just mean ‘before the use-by date’! Which would be true! “Yes.”

Cheleb’s jaw just worked for a moment. “Amazing,” he said at last. “Unique mindsets of other species never cease to astonish.”

“Cousin, that is so true,” Kit said, and had rarely meant it more.

“When finish internalizing them?” Cheleb said.

Kit concentrated on looking thoughtful. “Might take a while,” he said. “Can’t rush these things, after all— every one of them has to be given proper consideration. They have to be mulled over. The emotional context has to be right. And in a situation like this—” He spread his hands, glancing around them; the gates, the refugees, Thesba. Kit shook his head. “It can’t always happen as fast as you wanted to.” He kept his face very straight, very somber. This was something of a challenge, since he’d reached a point in the conversation where he wasn’t entirely sure what “it” was any more. And maybe that’s just as well!

Cheleb glanced at Kit for permission, picked up the box and poured the rest of the hearts it held into haes hand, reading through every one. After a while hae found one that said LOVE YOU and examined it thoughtfully. “Considering yesterday,” hae said, nodding one of haes sideways nods at the streaming-video display, “strange there isn’t one of these saying ‘I KNOW.’ Seems an omission.”

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.”

This was getting a bit beyond Kit. Kernel theory was more Nita’s specialty, and even at her level of study—which in her more frustrated moods she described as “well-meaning but clueless beginner”—she tended to lose him when she started talking kernel business. “So you really think this is why so many of the Tevaralti don’t want to leave?”

“It could very well be,” Mamvish said, and blew out a breath. “But without being sure, there’s no way we can safely do anything about it. Now there’s no time to be sure. And even if we were sure… it’s not like this is something one would dare try to operate on from outside. It’s far too dangerous, especially at a crisis time like this. Assuming we knew for certain that this was what was going on with the Tevaralti kernel, not even their Planetary would willingly touch the problem without extended study. And by that time…” She angled her head toward the lowering glow of Thesba, now half-set and only partially visible through the blowing clouds.

“Yeah,” Kit muttered.

“Best we concentrate on handling the problem we can handle,” Mamvish said. “Though it’s so frustrating…”

She sighed, sounding somewhat downhearted. I wish there was something I could do to make her feel better… Kit thought

But then something occurred to him. “Mamvish,” Kit said, “I’ve got something for you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It’s back in my puptent.” He got up to walk back. “I’ll go get it. Just wait here—”

“What in the worlds for?” she said, levering herself up again on all those legs, her hide suddenly running blue-hot with Speech-characters.

And between one blink and the next the two of them were standing behind the stone circle. Kit shook his head and laughed. “You are so smooth when you do that,” he said. “Just wait here, I’ll get the thing.”

It only took him a few moments in his puptent to find it. She might as well have it, Kit thought, because at this rate there won’t be enough saltines to use much of it on. And if I’m right about this…

He popped out again and trotted back through the circle to her, holding out a plastic bottle for her to examine. “Here,” Kit said, “I thought maybe you might like this.”

Mamvish rotated that eye at it curiously, then sniffed. And that eye suddenly fixed on the red container with its white label with much, much more interest. “What… Wait. This smells like…” She blinked at him. “Is this made… of tomatoes?”

“Well, yeah. A lot of ketchup is.” Originally he’d thought all of it was, but his Mama had started pulling down cookbooks to set him straight on the concept. Apparently tomato ketchup was a relatively recent development.

“And this is… for me?”

“Well, yeah, Mam, why not?”

She stamped all her feet in sequence in what Kit realized from the sunny yellow of the Speech-characters suddenly roiling under her hide was a gesture of flummoxed delight. “Why are you all so good to me?!”

Kit had to laugh. “Well, why wouldn’t we be?” And then the laugh turned rueful. “You do so much, you work so hard… I have a feeling people don’t say thank you to you enough.”

“The Powers thank me,” Mamvish said. “The work thanks me. That’s as it should be.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, “but other people should do it too. A lot more. So… Here. You want to try some?”

“Do you think I should?” The barely-repressed excitement in her voice made her sound like a kid who’d been invited to open presents early on Christmas.

“Sure,” Kit said. And then, looking at the bottle in his hand and turning it over to look at the back label, he paused. “Then again, it’s not pure tomatoes. Might be smart if you checked the other ingredients. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they put in our food…”

“Well, naturally.”

“Okay, let me talk these out…” Kit pulled out his manual, paged through it to one of the active analysis pages, and laid the ketchup bottle on top of the page. Immediately the various molecules and compounds involved in the ketchup began laying themselves out in structural form just above the ground around them, a bright spill of glowing stick-and-ball structures. “So that complex over there,” Kit said pointing at one of these while he read down the text readout on the page, “that’s the tomatoes. It’s a concentrate—they render them down first. Then this is the vinegar—”

“Is there a generic name?”

“Oh, yeah. Acetic acid. Then the salt—that’s sodium chloride—”

“A fair amount of it in there.”

“Yeah, you should hear my mama about it. The people who make these prepared foods use it as a flavor enhancer. Kind of overuse it, actually. Is that okay for you?”

Mamvish waved her tail around. “It’s all right, I can instruct my metabolism to pay extra attention to it on the way through. It won’t cause any trouble.”

“Okay. And then these—” Kit waved his hand at another series of compounds. “They’ve just said ‘natural flavorings’ here, I think to keep their competition from finding out what they put in this stuff to make it taste the way it does. They’re all vegetable extracts, looks like. “

“Those all look fine,” Mamvish said. “And then this one—”

“Onion powder,” Kit said. “An onion’s a vegetable too, kind of a sharp flavored one. This thing,” and he pointed at another molecule—a couple of benzene rings with various hydrocarbons hanging off them—“this is a sweetener, it replaces one that has more calories.” He squinted at the manual. “One, six-dichloro, one, six-di-deoxy… whatever! The short name’s sucralose. And this last one, ‘spices’, that’s the company who made this getting all secretive again. Looks like there’s paprika in it, that comes from another vegetable—”

“Kit.”

“And this one’s harder to be sure about, but I think it’s—”

“Kit.”

He looked at her, concerned by Mamvish’s tone, which was both alarmed and somehow strangely surprised. “That one,” she said. “The sweetener, you called it—”

Oh no, don’t tell me she’s allergic! “Here,” Kit said, and squinted at the manual for a moment as he worked out how to get it to display the molecule in a higher level of detail.

The molecule spread itself out across the ground around them, and Mamvish turned in a slow circle and stared at the diagram. “Oh my,” she said. “Your world. Your world…!”

“Uh, look, this isn’t the regular kind,” Kit said, turning the squeeze bottle over with some annoyance. “My Mama started getting it because they put this fructose syrup in the regular ketchup. And she’s really annoyed about that stuff, it’s like the food makers in our part of the world put it in everything. I can get you some that doesn’t have the sucralose in it—”

“What? No!!”

Mamvish was shaking all over, and only Kit’s ability to read her skin colors—now swirling with violet and pink—told him that the emotion underneath the shaking was delight: she was aglow with it. “I can’t believe it,” Mamvish murmured. “How could it possibly have gotten any better? Except this way. It’s absolutely true what they say, that what the Powers have made, what they keep on making, is not only more amazing than you imagine but more amazing than you can imagine—”

“Um, okay,” Kit said.

She was turning her head from side to side so she could take turns staring at some parts of the diagram with alternate eyes. “Seriously, you put this in food? Truly yours is a planet of wonders! If it wasn’t for the bloody Idiot Dragons of the South Sea, it would be a perfect place, perfect beyond any possible belief…”

Kit didn’t quite have the heart right now to disillusion her. “Okay,” he said again. “So this molecule is all right with you?”

Mamvish looked at him in astonishment. “Absolutely! Oh, Kit, you are my thelef’ indeed! Can I really take this with me?”

“That’s what it’s for,” Kit said.

“And you’re sure you don’t need it for… other purposes?”

The look she trained on Kit as she said that gave him a whole new meaning for the term “side-eye”.

“Uh,” he said, none too sure of where this was going. “…I put it on crackers.”

The goggliness of the eye on that side got, if anything, more goggly. “Yeah, I know, it’s kind of weird,” Kit said. “I did it accidentally when I was little and I started to like it, and every now and then I get the urge again. It’s a comfort thing for me, kind of.”

“‘Crackers,’” Mamvish said.

“Yeah, I know, it’s not what you’re usually supposed to use it on, but I kind of—”

“And crackers are… a portion of your anatomy?”

Kit stopped dead. “What?”

Mamvish’s underhide started swirling with all kinds of hasty, crowded Speech-text in all kinds of colors, to the point where she started looking like an unnerved mobile fireworks display. “Oh please don’t take offense, I mean, you’ll have to forgive me but I haven’t really had time to look into, you know, these subjects, in enough depth… and the manual functions suggest that Earth humans have this whole range of unusual names for reproduction-associated organs, really so unlikely-sounding, some of them, and I do understand that this gets into the territory of privacy issues, and I…”

“Mamvish,” Kit said, and started to laugh. Ronan, and then Cheleb, and now this… what is this, Tevaral Planetary Innuendo Day or something? “No. Crackers are not part of my anatomy. Anybody’s anatomy. It’s okay, they’re just food.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely sure.” He stopped laughing, but it wasn’t easy.

“Oh,” Mamvish said.

“So why would you be thinking that crackers had anything to do with… what you were thinking about?”

“Um…” Mamvish shuffled her feet.

This is so funny, but no one will ever believe me if I tell them about it. And somehow I don’t think I should. “Mamvish,” Kit said, trying to sound firm, “if you don’t tell me exactly what the sucralose does, I’m going to get really frustrated here. …And not in that sense.” It seemed smart to add that.

“Oh,” Mamvish said. “Well. There are certain reproductive events in my species that the compound would very much…” She trailed off, sounding both embarrassed and anticipatory. “Enhance.”

Kit rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Oooookay,” he said. I have to keep reminding myself: as wizards go, she’s young, really young. And also incredibly smart and powerful. Neither of which necessarily answers the question, how mature is she? Reproductively speaking. However she does that. Because however we have it wired up on Earth, she’s not from Earth…

Suddenly Kit’s life seemed more than usually surreal. I’m two thousand light years from home, standing around in a field on a doomed planet in the middle of the night, trying to discuss saurian sex. Or trying not to discuss it. And I’m not sure which is worse.

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me any more about this just now,” Kit said. “I mean…”

“It’s late for you—”

“Yeah. But look, I’m glad you like it, okay? I thought it was mostly the tomatoes that’d be interesting.”

“Oh, they are. To have that compound… associated with tomatoes…” Mamvish was absolutely gleeful. “When the right time comes I’m going to be so very popular.”

“Uh, that’s good then,” Kit said. “Good.”

“Just for my own information, though… what exactly is a cracker? So I don’t make that mistake again.”

Kit chuckled and got his manual to show her a view of the inside of his puptent, then zeroed in on one of the remaining open packages.

“Oh,” she said, peering at the manual with the eye on that side. “It doesn’t look like much. What’re those crystals?”

“Salt.”

“More of the sodium chloride?” she said, bemused. “Your kind seem really fond of this stuff.”

“Well, we do need it, it’s an electrolyte thing. But sometimes we like too much of it. Or so my mama keeps saying.”

Mamvish rolled her eyes. “Egg-dams,” she said. “Always fretting. I swear, they all go to the same school.”

The image of Kit’s Mama and Mamvish’s dam going to the same school to learn how to fret professionally made Kit burst out laughing again. It was surprising how good it felt.

But then Mamvish’s head went up. “Ah me,” she said, “they’re paging me. Kit, I have to go back up there and continue explaining to Thesba why it isn’t allowed to fall apart just yet.”

“Just yet,” Kit said. There was a question he was nervous about asking.

She gave him a weary look. “How long will it take once we take the restraint wizardries off,” she said, “is that what you’re wondering?”

Kit nodded. “Yeah.”

Her underhide colors went quite somber. “Not very long,” she said. “When you repeatedly enact wizardries that restrain a natural process from occurring, the reaction when the restraint is removed can be significantly increased. If there was going to be no one here, the result would be interesting to watch for scientific purposes. As it is…” She swung her tail slowly from side to side. “We will watch, of course. We must watch; we’re responsible for the outcome here. But as for it being exciting, or pleasant, under the circumstances…”

“I know,” Kit said. “Look, get going. But thanks for coming all this way to see me!”

“Thelef’,” Mamvish said, “if not you, then who? Especially now.” She dropped her jaw in a grin, levitated the squeeze bottle up into a suddenly-open otherspace pocket, and vanished it. “Later—!”

And she was gone.

Kit stood there for a while after her departure, still with his back turned to the gate complex and the stone circle, letting the strangely-scented wind ruffle his hair in the near-darkness and cool him down again. He was definitely tired enough to sleep now: it seemed likely that he might be able to grab at least a few hours before he had to go on shift. I’m going to be sort of wired when people start turning up for this picnic or whatever we’re having, but I guess for that there’s always that canned cappuccino. Good thing I brought a lot of it…

He stood quiet and let the wind whisper. It wasn’t as strong as it had been earlier. Morning’s coming, Kit thought. There wasn’t a lot of sign of it just yet: the latitude here was close enough to Tevaral’s equator that morning and night seemed to come very suddenly by comparison with the slower twilights of Kit’s latitude on Earth. The cloud overhead had thickened, so that everything above was shut away. All the plain before Kit was drowned in a strange slowly-lightening half-gloom, in which nothing was certain. Even looking down at his own hands in that light they looked indefinite, almost insubstantial.

Kit laughed down his nose at himself and turned to go back to the circle and his puptent.… and stopped.

Something was standing there, between him and the circle and just four or five meters away, looking at him.

A hot-cold wave of adrenaline ran through Kit’s body at the sight of it. His first impulse was to reach for his back pocket, where his wand normally rode when he was bothering to carry it. But it wasn’t there, and whatever was standing and watching him… just stood there and kept watching.

It was astonishing how hard it was to see whatever was examining him. Yet Kit knew right down to his bones that his inability to clearly make out any details about the being looking at him had nothing at all to do with the lighting. And though he wanted to see clearly, his eyes were flatly refusing to do so. He could make out an upright shape, longer than it was wide, broader in its top half than its bottom. But beyond that—

Kit blinked, rubbed his eyes. His vision didn’t improve. Past the being who watched him, the stones of the circle were perfectly clear, silhouetted by the soft light of the electric campfire that Djam had brought out with him. But the being itself remained a mere tangle of shadow in an upright shape. And not even that, Kit thought. Shadow would be more definite than this.

He couldn’t think what else to do, so Kit simply said, “Dai stihó. I’m on errantry, and I greet you.”

The tangle of indefinite there-ness regarded him.

“Mamvish was here,” it said.

There was something extremely peculiar about its voice, or rather, about the way it used the Speech. It wasn’t that the phrasing was in any way unusual. But the sound of the words themselves seemed to strike Kit’s ear differently, as if there was a great deal of meaning underneath the bare statement that was somehow being held in reserve. And the voice seemed somehow almost to be coming out of the ground—a mineral sort of voice, seemingly having nothing to do with sound-producing organs or air. The whole effect was incredibly unnerving.

Still, no point in just standing here being unnerved, Kit thought. “Yes, she was,” he said. And as he spoke he suddenly remembered the group of people from the three other Temal species that he’d seen while he and the rest of the inbound group had been passing through the Crossings. Kit was now sure, without knowing exactly how, that this was a member of the remaining Temal species, the one for whom there was no name but “Fourth”.

“When?” the Fourth said.

The sound of the voice left Kit shivering, though he had no idea why. It wasn’t as if he felt threatened by the being. It was strange, yes, but he’d experienced a lot of strange since his Ordeal. This, though—this was different, somehow. And he couldn’t even describe to himself exactly how, which made matters worse.

“Only a few minutes ago,” Kit said. “Maybe five. Is there something I can help you with?”

A long silence followed. Kit got the sense that the Fourth’s attention was focused on him in some way he’d never been looked at before, something profoundly revelatory in ways he couldn’t understand. It made him very, very uncomfortable. But even in his short wizardly career Kit had withstood the regard of beings of terrible power who were intent on his immediate destruction, and whatever this felt like, it didn’t feel like that. This felt like curiosity; and yes, danger, in some mode or other. But it was danger that meant him well—so strange a concept, in this intensity, that he could hardly get his head around it.

“Kiht?” he heard Djam calling. He wasn’t on the Stone Throne any more: he’d come out with a wizard-light hovering over his shoulder to see what was going on behind the circle. And then he caught sight of the Fourth. Djam stopped as if struck still, and stared.

The peculiarly indefinite figure didn’t move, but Kit knew it had briefly turned its attention to Djam. Then, a few moments later, that attention was back on Kit again. He could practically feel it on his skin, like a heat lamp, except that the sensation had nothing to do with heat or cold or anything else so mundane. Kit’s nerves tried to work out how to render the sensation and then apparently simply gave up, so that he felt nothing but a vague dull tingle along the front of him.

“Pathfinder,” the Fourth said, as if musing… but not so much for Kit’s benefit: for someone else’s. Not Djam’s, though.

“Sorry?” Kit said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

The Fourth leaned toward Kit just a little. That gesture he felt more clearly now: a pressure, almost a test. As if something was saying, Can you take it? Can you take this?

Kit frowned at that and leaned forward against what was pushing him: pushed back.

For a long, long few moments there was no response. Kit just kept pushing back. Then suddenly the pressure let up, so that Kit staggered when it was released. He was aware again of that strange dangerous attention bent on him, but something about the quality of it had changed. It seemed somehow more multiple; as if the attention of more than one being was bent on Kit now.

“Yes,” the Fourth said. “You know half the way. The other half will know the other half.”

A huge odd silence drew itself around the two of them… or however many of them there were. And then the Fourth said: “Yes yes.”

And without any further sign or movement, it was gone.

Kit swayed where he stood. Djam hurried over to him, braced him from one side and looked at him in concern. “Cousin, are you all right?”

Kit nodded and rubbed his eyes, and was astonished to find that his hand was shaking. “Yeah. I think. Wow was that weird.”

“You are just ordained to be having one of those interesting days, aren’t you?” Djam said.

Kit blinked his eyes a few times: they suddenly felt very tired. “Yeah, I’d say you’re right there.” He stared at the spot where the Fourth had been. “Djam, were you seeing what I was seeing?”

“When I figure out what I was seeing,” Djam said, “I’ll let you know.” He bubbled softly in his throat. “Pity Cheleb wasn’t here too so we could all compare notes. His night vision’s better than mine.”

“I don’t know whether broad daylight would’ve made any difference,” Kit said. “I think maybe my species just isn’t equipped to see those guys.”

“Most of ours wouldn’t be,” Djam said. “If that was a Fourth—”

“It was.” Kit was as sure as if the information had been communicated to him directly.

“They have a paraphysical extension into a higher-numbered dimension. Supposedly part of their nervous system and some of their physical components are positioned out there.” Djam waved a hand in an indefinite way, as if trying to suggest in which direction the fifth through eleventh dimensions were located. “And because they’re not all here here—meaning in our own dimension—your eyes and your brain can’t understand some of what they’re seeing. So they just make the best guess they can…”

“That sounds about right,” Kit said, still wobbling as they started to make their way back toward the circle.

“They’re handy to have around, though,” Djam said, putting a furry arm around Kit as Kit stumbled. “One of the things that is known about the Fourth is that worldgates just work better when they’re in the vicinity.”

“Maybe he was here to pick up a few tips,” Kit said, and laughed. But the laugh came out weakly, as if the joke was more on Kit than anyone else.

Djam laughed too, also sounding a touch nervous. “What was it doing here, though?”

“Not sure. It was asking for Mamvish. She left a few minutes before.”

Djam shook his head, bubbled again. “I know. My codex informed me she was arriving, but the visit was tagged as private, so I stayed where I was.” He looked at Kit with renewed interest. “You have interesting friends,” Djam said. “I look forward to meeting your partner.”

“So does Cheleb,” Kit said, and laughed again. It was halfway to a giggle, now; he was actually feeling lightheaded.

Djam made a soft sound of agreement and led Kit over to his portal, touched it open. “You should really try to get that rest now, cousin. Too much excitement for one day.”

Kit was inclined to agree with him. After just those few moments under the Fourth’s regard, he felt as if he’d been repeatedly running up and down flights of stairs till he was short of breath and actually aching. And that’s with this increase in my power levels. What would it have been like to meet that when I was running at my normal level? He didn’t want to know.

He made his way over to his bed and flopped down onto it. “Thanks, Djam,” Kit said.

And within no more than a few seconds both the puptent’s lights, and Kit’s, went out.

SEVEN

Saturday

Kit woke later than planned, sprawled face first on his bed, hardly having moved an inch from the way he’d fallen onto it. His annoyance at realizing he hadn’t been able to stay awake even long enough to get his clothes off was only exceeded by his horror at realizing what time it was: easily two hours into his shift. “Djammmm,” Kit said under his breath, suspecting that his shiftmate had decided to let him sleep late after the unsettling events of the predawn period. But it doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t the alarm in my manual go off? I don’t get it…

Then something occurred to Kit. He knew somebody who worked closely with the power that ran the wizards’ manuals: in fact, someone who had that instrumentality (apparently) inside her head.

“Bobo?” Kit said.

Nothing.

He sighed. “Never mind,” Kit said out loud. “Looks like weird’s the keyword for this whole damn intervention...”

Kit got dressed in fresh clothes, put his head out the puptent’s portal and saw that the wind was up again; so he reached back in for his vest and threw it on before he venturing outside.

To his surprise, Djam was not sitting on the Stone Throne: Cheleb was. “Earlier than I thought I’d see you,” Cheleb said, sounding quite cheerful. “Plainly name of planet Earth should be more correctly translated as Stone. Seems to be what you’re made of.”

“Always nice to be complimented,” Kit said, “assuming I can figure out why. And whether I deserved it. Where’s Djam?”

“Asleep,” Cheleb said. “Apparently visitor last night had same effect on him as had on you; just took longer to set in.” Hae shook haes head. “So sorry to have missed it. Never had a chance to see a Fourth before, probably never will again.”

Kit didn’t know what to make of this, so he just went and sat down by Cheleb for a moment and looked over his shoulder at the gate-monitoring diagrams laid out on the stone. “They behaving themselves?”

“Even better than when being shouted at by your good self,” Cheleb said. “Didn’t think it was possible. But then again, Fourth…”

Kit shook his head. “How’s the sibik situation?”

“Not even one.”

“Yet,” Kit said.

“All right, so far. But pleasant change, frankly. Cute things, but can get a bit overbearing.” Cheleb sighed and stretched. “Any advancement on token-internalization side of things?”

“What? Oh.” Kit smiled. “Been working on it. I’ll be thinking more about it over the course of the day.”

“Good plan,” Cheleb said. “Had it strongly suggested to me by immediate gate-management supervisor upstream that you two should take day off, secondary to exciting events of last night. So maybe should go visit one’s errantry-partner and work on the project a little.”

Kit opened his mouth. “By suggested, I mean ordered,” said Cheleb. “Check own version of Knowledge.”

Kit stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Chel, I really, really want to take you up on this, but this ought to be my shift.”

“Isn’t anymore,” Cheleb said. “Made of stone Earth wizard may be, but should know that before arrival of you two, had been handling triple shifts myself. Tailored hormonal shift—easy to implement when there’s warning. Doing one hundred of your hours straight through not difficult when hormonal alteration protocol is in place, and using wizardry to augment it.” Cheleb grinned at him. “With heightened power levels, truly not a problem. Getting a lot done, time for much multitasking. Investigating more Earth entertainment as well.”

Oh boy, Kit thought. What have I done? “All right,” Kit said. “I’ll grab a bite to eat and go see Nita. How long?”

“As long as liked,” Cheleb said. “Will message you on manual if any problem. Go!” Hae made a shoo-ing gesture at Kit. “Eat, visit, get internalizing!”

So Kit did as he was told. He ate, took the short-transport pad over to Ronan’s gating complex to shower and take care of other necessities, changed clothes, padded back to the Stone Circle to drop the dirty clothes off in his puptent, and then went back to the pad, giving it the coordinates for Nita’s gating complex.

She had shown that to him briefly in a panorama she sent him via the manual, so Kit knew more or less where to find her without too much looking. Pragmatic as always, Nita had brought a couple of lawn chairs with her from home—or maybe she’d already had them in her puptent: Kit wasn’t sure. He found her sitting off to one side of a very large grassy area, probably a park, its boundaries surrounded by tall, handsome gleaming little skyscrapers and smaller buildings—all very elegantly and gracefully made in various kinds of glass and glazed metal.

And all soon to be abandoned, Kit thought sadly as he strolled across the park to her. Nita’s view was essentially the same as his: the several smaller, local Gates, all their portal orifices locked in continuously-open configuration, with Tevaralti endlessly streaming out of them into the long-jump gate on the far side of the park: people hurrying, shouting, pushing hovercarts or floating platforms, or driving larger vehicles, full of their personal effects. And here, too, Kit saw so many of them doing what he’d seen people doing at his own gate: taking that last, desperate look up into their own sky, or at the moon that was going to kill their world, just one last time before they vanished through into a new place forever. Nita's gate-plaza, too, had its own transients’ encampment—its occupants watching the others go, staying where they were, and silently grieving.

He sighed and looked back at her. As if she felt him coming, Nita glanced up, closed the manual in her lap, dumped it in her chair, and got up to greet him. Suddenly, it seemed Kit as if everything he’d gone through in the past couple days came down on him at once. He went straight to Nita and grabbed her and hugged her very hard.

She hugged him back at least as hard, and buried her face in his shoulder for a moment. “What were you doing last night?” she muttered. “I can’t let you out of my sight for a moment without you getting in trouble.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Kit said. “The trouble came looking for me.”

“Oh yeah,” Nita said. “Sure.” She let go of him, and though she was smiling, there was some worry in it. “Maybe not trouble as such. But still… I read the précis of what happened. Your manual was recording.” She shook her head at him. “That was extremely bizarre.”

Kit took a long breath and let it out. “Yes it was.”

Nita reached down under her chair, pulled out a soda, and handed it to him. “Sit down and tell me everything.”

So he did. It was strange how rare such debriefings were for them, since they tended to be deployed together almost all the time. It was strange, too, how Kit kept stopping himself every now and then and go over what he was telling Nita to make sure that he wasn’t missing some specific detail that would be important for her to know. The problem was that he couldn’t always tell what was going to turn out to be important. Still, he did his best. And he found that it was making him feel better when he could make her laugh, because he saw the way her eyes kept straying across to the transients’ encampment on the far side of the park.

The story of the little Tevaralti boy’s greedy, naughty sibik made Nita laugh so hard that she almost couldn’t breathe. But then came the story of taking it home—or at least, what passed for home—and neither of them was able to laugh much at that. As Kit got to the point where there was no more to tell of that story, Nita pushed herself back against the back of her chair, and stretched her legs out in front of her, sighing.

She was wearing the extremely ragged jeans that she favored for times when she most needed to be comfortable and when whatever species she was working with wouldn’t have any cultural judgments to make about the rips and tears. Now, as she sometimes did when she was nervous or unhappy about something, Nita started unraveling one of the raggedy places just above her knee. Kit watched her doing this for a few moments before speaking again. “They told us that our main job was with the gates. And I understand that. I really do. But I keep feeling like I ought to have gone there before. Ought to go there again, talk to them more…”

“‘Ought to,’” Nita said. She sighed. “I think maybe our ‘oughts’ aren’t really what matters here. …I thought that too, Kit, you know? I thought ‘I really should be with these guys more.’ But then I realized, Hey, I’m an idiot. I don’t have anything to share that’s really going to help them. We’re all humanoids, yeah, but… right now the gap’s too big.”

She fell silent for a moment. “Look, when Mom died, yeah, that was the end of a world.” She gulped at her soda. “No question! But not the end of the world. This is so much bigger, so much worse. Anything I’d say to these people about what grief looks like would seem so stupid and small by comparison. Just the thought of it… I get all choked.” She shook her head. “Nope. I feel a lot better sitting still here and watching the gate. That’s how I’m helping them. This isn’t about me, or how I feel: it’s about them.”

She looked across at the streams of Tevaralti hurrying out of the feeder gates toward the downstream one. “And anyway, when you come right down to it, the stories they’re living right now are so much bigger than mine. Just look at them. Everything’s ending for them, and they’re being so brave. All the carts and trucks and floater pads, all loaded up with everything that matters to them, household stuff and artifacts and data and art. They’re trying to save everything they can, not just themselves. All their stories, all their culture, all their history: everything they can save, they’re taking away with them. But there’ll be so much they can’t save… that not all the wizards here can save. The moon’s going to fall down, and break it all up, and destroy everything. Hidden things, forgotten things: they’ll all be gone forever now. No matter what you do, things get lost…”

Kit heard the slight quiver in her voice, and didn’t have to look at Nita to know that there were tears in her eyes. He didn’t turn to look at her because he knew that would make them spill, and right now she was holding on tight. So he just put his hand out toward her, and she grabbed hold of it, squeezing it. Then they just sat together and were heavy-hearted for a bit, and Kit once more was astonished at how the pain did lessen slightly when someone was sharing it with you, clichéd though that should have been.

“Better?” Nita said after a while.

“Better,” Kit said. “You?”

“Yeah.”

Nita tipped her head back and stared straight up at the sky. “All I’m trying to figure out now,” she said, “is what the Fourth was there about.” She tilted her head back over to look at Kit. “Sure, he may really have been looking for Mamvish, but somehow I find it really hard to believe that’s the only reason he was there. These upper-dimensional guys—” She waved her hand in a way strangely reminiscent of the gesture that Djam had used. “They see things, patterns, that we can’t. The trouble is that because they are multidimensional, they don’t always know how to communicate what they’re trying to tell you so that you’re able to get it. Even in the Speech, they have trouble narrowing things down enough to be comprehensible.”

Kit looked at her in some surprise. “When did you meet one of these people? You never told me about this.”

“There were one or two of them who turned up in the Playroom when I was doing all that kernel work for my mom,” Nita said. “One guy—tall, a lot of eyes—he was really creepy. Or at least that was all I could make of him when I met him first. He always seemed to have a way of looking at you didn’t have anything to do with any of those eyes. Turns out that’s kind of a diagnostic, that feeling of being weirdly watched. If all of you lives in just one set of dimensions, then having somebody around who has footholds in more than one set kind of makes your skin crawl.” She shivered. “But it turns out it didn’t have anything to do with bad intent. It’s just the way our nervous systems react to their nervous systems. Later on, when I thought about some of the things he’d said to me, they were really useful. Or they would’ve been, if I just hadn’t been so freaked by him.” Nita laughed at herself. “Nothing I can do about it now, but at least now when I run into somebody who has that going on, I know what to make of it.”

She stretched again, lacing her fingers together behind her head. “So what’s the plan for tonight?”

“I think everybody just comes over starting around sunset,” Kit said. “The general idea seems to be that everybody should bring food and drinks, and we’ll set up a buffet, and sit around and talk and maybe watch some video. Also, possibly, have a campfire—a real campfire, not one of these electronic things. One of my shiftmates is all excited… hae thinks this is going to be a genuine Earth togetherness ceremonial.” He grinned: he could still see the excitement on Cheleb’s face. “Hae asked me if there were special clothes hae had to wear. I said ‘no, this is a come as you are thing’. And hae got incredibly excited and started spouting a whole bunch of really serious and deep stuff about the revelation of true selves and I don’t know what else.” Kit had to laugh. “You have to watch out for Cheleb. Hae’s got a little trouble with idiom…”

“Okay,” Nita said, straightening up. “Tell me what kind of food you want me to bring, and then I’m going to throw you out of here. Bobo advises me that the number three gate is about to get goofy again, and I have to remind it who’s running this show…”

It took longer than an hour for her to throw him out, but it was an enjoyable hour, as simply having him there apparently greatly increased Nita’s confidence in gate handling. Or maybe it just makes her feel more aggressive and more like showing off, Kit thought. Either way, the gate that had been giving her trouble calmed itself down in fairly short order. And if it felt me looking over her shoulder, Kit thought, grimly amused, and that look was really dirty, well, this isn’t about how she feels, or how I feel. It’s about making sure all these people get out of here safely…

Shortly after that, her Natih frilly-dinosaur shiftmate turned up, and he and Kit got into a friendly but somewhat strange discussion about what humans sometimes did over campfires, and the possibility that barbecue was a sign of moral decay. “Beautiful, raw meat like the One intended,” Mr. Frilly cried, gesticulating wildly with his claws and wriggling his whole, beautifully tiger-striped body and shaking his neck-frill and snapping his long, sharp jaws, “what sacrilege is this, to set it on fire?!” It occurred to Kit that here was somebody who would get even more overexcited than his mama—who was one of the “when I stick a fork in it I want to see it bleed” persuasion—about a steak being overdone. He grinned. They have got to meet…

Eventually Kit and Mr. Frilly—whose name Kit kept mangling until he begged to be allowed to use the nickname—agreed that their cultural differences could and should for the time being be set aside in the name of interstellar amity, and pending further discussion over drinks that evening. Kit caught himself rubbing his eyes again at that point, so he said to Nita, “I’ve got kind of a free day because of the excitement last night, so I think I’m going to go back and have a nap so later on I don’t fall asleep in the buffet.”

Nita was presently standing with arms akimbo, deep in an increasingly assertive three-way conversation involving herself, Bobo, and one of the feeder gates that she hadn’t previously disciplined but was about to show the error of its ways. She just nodded at Kit and reached out with one arm to squeeze him around the waist, bumping hips with him while looking off into the distance like someone preparing to tell off the party at the other end of a mobile call. “Sunset?” she said to him.

“Or just after,” Kit said.

She gave him a thumbs up and went back to staring into space. “Now listen to me—” she said, in that tone of voice that Kit had learned over time meant that what you absolutely needed to do, if you had any brains at all or any desire for a quiet life, was listen to her. Kit grinned, waved at her and Mr. Frilly, who was leaning over her shoulder and giving her advice, and took himself back to the short-jump transport pad.

A few moments later he was walking back into the stone circle in early afternoon light. Cheleb was sitting there watching streaming video on one levitating screen and monitoring the gates on another. “Everything behaving itself?” Kit said, pausing by the gate monitors.

“Perfectly quiet,” Cheleb said. “Planning to get more rest?”

“Does it show that much?” Kit said, yawning.

Cheleb gave him an amused look. “Postural, mostly. Djam doing the same. Go on! Will get you up before sunset.”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll tell my manual to handle it.”

“As pleases you.” Cheleb reached out to touch some control on the streaming-video screen. “One thing before you go: watching some Earth children’s entertainment. Amazing your people make it past latency, considering lurking developmental challenges.”

“Oh?” Kit peered around the edge of the floating screen and saw that the image there was paused on the title frame of A Nightmare On Elm Street.

“Most resilient species, your people,” Cheleb said. “No wonder have been invaded so rarely.”

“Uh, yeah,” Kit said, and went to take his nap before he started finding out anything else he didn’t want to know.

By sunset Kit had had enough of a nap to leave him feeling energized again, and he came out of his puptent to find Cheleb and the newly awakened Djam setting up the Stone Throne as a food service area and laying out their own contributions to the buffet. Kit snagged himself a plastic cup of the blue “milk” and had a look at the gate-monitoring chart matrix, which Cheleb had used haes wizardry to embed into the back of the Stone Throne so that everyone could see it without trouble.

All the gates were running perfectly. Kit paused by Cheleb when hae was checking over the display; the streaming video screen was blank for the moment. “Finished with Freddy?”

“Oh yes,” Cheleb said. “Following some other lines of investigation now. When you have a moment, need a context-positive explication of Plan Nine From Outer Space.”

Kit spluttered into his sekoldra juice. What have I done! “You’re such a culture junkie,” was all he could say, and went off hurriedly to get some paper plates from his puptent.

Quite shortly people started wandering in from the short-transport pad—Ronan, levitating a deck chair behind him, along with a cooler full of assorted bottles: Dairine, with Spot behind her and toting a couple of Safeway bags full of sandwich makings and assorted junk food; and finally Nita, changed into a flowery blue minidress and leggings and flats, in company with Mr. Frilly, and also carrying some small bags the contents of which weren’t immediately obvious. Everyone gathered in around the “buffet” and started peppering Cheleb and Djam with questions about the food they’d brought, and nabbing the best bits of the Earth food for themselves.

The talk became very eclectic very quickly, but Kit noticed how for the time being at least conversation seemed to be avoiding anything to do with the reason they were all here. For the time being, that suited Kit fine. People sat down on the chairs they’d brought themselves, or on the bits of the Stone Throne that weren’t occupied by food or other people, and ate and drank and talked while the evening grew darker around them.

Djam and Ronan were in the middle of a lively discussion of whether anybody in their right mind should bother watching the three prequel movies of the series he and Kit and Cheleb had just finished—Ronan holding down the “Hell No” position quite strongly, and referring particularly to the first one as ‘a steaming heap of shite’—when a voice from the darkness said, “Well, I know opinion’s divided on that one, but don’t you think that’s a tad harsh?”

Heads snapped up all around the stone circle. “Tom?”

Kit was surprised to see Tom, normally very much the suburban polo-shirt-and-chinos type, come wandering in out of the dark in clothes more like Ronan’s than anything else: dark parka, black jeans, hiking boots, with a long dark slender something over his shoulder, hard to see by only the light of the electric campfire. Ronan looked him up and down in mild approbation. “Going stealthy tonight while you check up on the troops?”

“Worked pretty well for Henry the Fifth,” Tom said. “Just passing through: I’ve got a fair number of people to check on tonight. But I heard rumors of what was going on over here, and Carl sent me to see how the potato salad was.”

“That green stuff’s as close as you’re getting,” Dairine said, pointing at a bowl of one of Djam’s vegetarian goodies. “Kind of spicy. If you like wasabi, you’ll be okay…”

“Sounds lovely. May I?”

“Please, Supervisory,” Djam said, “anything you like!”

Shortly Tom was sitting down with a paper plate and digging in, having put down what he was carrying when he arrived. “Is that a wand I see?” Ronan said. “Would’ve thought you were above that kind of thing, the age you are.”

“Yeah, and it looks just like… a magic wand,” Dairine said in a tone halfway between mystification and scorn. But she had a point. It looked like the classic stage magician’s wand, black with a white tip, though considerably longer than usual.

Tom picked it up and held it out for her. Hesitantly, Dairine took it. “Present from a friend,” Tom said. “Don’t scratch the finish.”

“I thought that wasn’t allowed,” Kit said. “Doesn’t everybody have to make their own wand? And from donated material?”

“There are exceptions to the rule,” Tom said as Dairine handed the wand back. “Certain heirloom wands are exempt. Happens this is one.” He put his plate down, braced the wand end-to-end between his hands, then collapsed it between his hands and vanished it.

“Snazzy,” Ronan said.

“And you’ve been doing what?” Dairine said. “Besides checking up on us.”

“Same as you,” Tom said, rubbing his legs. “Gate management. Spent the last eight hours in the middle of one of the big cities on Continent Four, watching thousands and thousands of people pouring by.” He sighed. “Makes me remember that I keep promising myself to get more exercise. Spending eight hours on your feet…” He shook his head. “A little different from sitting around writing spells all day.”

“And you came all this way to see us on your off time!” Ronan said.

“‘Off time?’” Tom laughed at him. “As if a Supervisory gets any of that in a situation like this. I’m just here making sure you lot aren’t getting into trouble.”

“Us?” Ronan said, with a hilariously manufactured expression of disbelief and shock. “The very thought!”

“Please, spare me,” Tom said, amused. “After what happened with you and Kit on Mars? Now any time the two of you are posted on some new planet together, I get a tagged travel advisory in my manual.”

Kit reddened with embarrassment, as this was probably true. “Yeah, I’m such a bad influence,” Ronan said, and laughed. “Well, not here. This situation’s too edgy to have much fun with.”

“Fun aside,” Tom said, “I know you’re serious about what you’re doing here. So does Irina, otherwise she wouldn’t have let you onto the ‘go’ list. Rafting’s too serious to let any potential loose cannons on deck, believe me.”

“Irina signed off on us being here?” Nita said, sounding surprised.

“Oh yes. You didn’t know? Well, now you do.”

“Where’s Carl?” Dairine said.

“Other side of the planet,” said Tom. “He’ll be off shift shortly. There’s a particularly difficult gate over there in the middle of one of the capital cities… a terminus gate, one of the biggest-aperture ones. Because of the size of it and the number of people using it per hour, it needs more watching than usual. Gravitic anomalies…”

A sympathetic groan went up from most of the picnic guests. Tom sighed. “He’s working double shifts on this one. I feel for him: he’s going to be a wreck when he gets off. Thanks,” he said as Ronan, without comment, shoved a bottle of not-quite-draft Guinness into his hand.

“Thought that stuff doesn’t travel,” Kit said.

“If you put it in stasis inside an otherspace pocket, the bottled kind does,” Ronan said. “But it’s inherently inferior. Keep meaning to talk to Sker’ret about finding a way to stabilize the draft kind. A problem for another day.”

While Tom was assaying the Guinness, Ronan stood chafing his upper arms. “Getting kinda nippy, yeah? Time to get the campfire part of the evening going.”

“Oh, we are having that?” Kit said.

“I did some prep while others were snoring,” Ronan said as he slipped out between two of the standing stones. A few moments later he came back with an armful of bent and twisted branches of various sizes.

“Where’d you find those?” Djam said.

“Got a fair amount of the stuff over by our gates,” said Ronan. “Old cuttings left from when they were removing some of the local fauna, I’m guessing.” He paused, eyeing a spot down at the far end of the oblong that made the “seat” of the Stone Throne. “Here be okay?”

“Should work fine,” Cheleb said, helping Djam clear away some of the plates and food containers that were closest. Ronan arranged the wood in an artful pyramid on the spot, then looked toward Kit. “Do the honors?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.” Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket and pulled out his wand, stowed in there earlier when he’d been tidying. He smiled slightly in a moment of nostalgia: the spell for summoning fire from noon-forged steel was one of the first ones he’d learned. Kit whispered the fourteen Speech-words necessary for activation, braced the Edsel-antenna wand over his forearm, and fired. The piled-up firewood burst instantly into flame.

Kit tucked the wand away and watched the firelight dance over the faces of his friends and the ancient stones of another world, and shivered for a moment with the strangeness of it all. If someone had told me five years ago where I’d be now…

Tom sat back and chuckled. “And now what? Songs around the fire? Scary stories?”

“Got enough scary to be going on with at the moment, thanks,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes in the general direction of Thesba.

“Dessert,” Nita said. She’d set her lawn chair down next to where Kit had perched himself at one end of the Stone Throne; now she got up and started rummaging in one of the bags she’d brought with her but hadn’t yet opened. “Here,” she said to Djam, and held out a Creamsicle. “If you like that juice, I bet you’ll like this.”

“Ice cream,” Ronan said, impressed. “How do you have ice cream?!”

“With the power allowances they’ve given us for this, why wouldn’t I bring ice cream? I have a stasis field running in my puptent,” Nita said. “And one right here in this bag.”

“I hope you brought enough for everybody,” Tom said.

Nita snickered. “I brought enough for me,” she said, “for about a week. So that should be enough for everybody. Nothing fancy, just the usual mass market stuff. I would have brought Ben & Jerry’s, but some people apparently ate it all before we left home.”

Dairine looked angelically unconcerned by this accusation. To Kit’s surprise, Nita just gave her an annoyed look, and then shrugged. “Here, help me pass these out.”

Kit passed a fudgsicle over to Tom and an orange popsicle over to Cheleb, who needed some assistance with packaging concepts (”No, wait, don’t eat the paper!”) and then rather overenthusiastically disposed of the popsicle in three bites, spending the next several minutes groaning and clutching haes head due to the most emphatic case of brain freeze any of them had ever seen.

Kit had trouble not laughing at Cheleb being reduced to speechlessness for that long, but he just managed it. “Shame none of us thought we might have have a campfire before we came,” he said as he sat down again. “We could have brought stuff to make s’mores.”

Djam looked up in interest from his third plateful of multicolored veggies. “What’s a s’more?”

The conversation that ensued immediately got very tangled, and Kit saw Djam and Cheleb reacting with fascination and concern, since once or twice it seemed as if violence might be about to break out.

“Oh God. How are we supposed to show him?”

“Did anybody bring graham crackers?”

“What in the Powers’ sweet fecking names is a graham cracker?”

Laughter from Dairine. “How can you not know this?”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “Why should I bother when I know you’re going to enlighten me?”

“It’s brown, and flat, and it’s got wheat in it.”

“Well it’s a biscuit for feck’s sake, or a ‘cracker’ as you benighted language-fossilized creatures keep calling it—” Kit hid his eyes briefly at the mention of the word “cracker”: the last thirty-odd hours had left him with a new set of referents for it that he would probably never forget. “—and with a biscuit the odds are better than ninety percent that it’s got wheat in it…”

“No, whole wheat.”

“Kind of malty tasting…”

“Like a digestive biscuit?”

“What’s a digestive biscuit?”

“It’s not like one of those. Flatter,” Nita remarked around the remnant of the ice cream sandwich she’d almost finished. “Also they put honey in them.”

Dairine stared at Nita in growing horror. “Wait. Wait. Who uses honey grahams for s’mores? Who uses them for anything?”

“I like them,” Nita said. “I eat them all the time. You haven’t noticed?”

“I never— I thought it was Dad—” Dairine’s mouth opened and closed as if in a fairly high-quality imitation of a fish. “You’ve been the one who keeps buying those? You actually like them? Oh God how are we even related?!” She looked around at the group and waved her hands in a gesture of generalized rejection. “Either I’m adopted or she is.”

“I not only have honey grahams,” Nita said, “but I have—” She looked faintly embarrassed. “Marshmallow fluff.”

Ronan looked mystified. “Powers preserve us, what’s that now? Something else I don’t need to know about.”

“No matter how you try, that will never be a s’more,” Dairine said, indignant. “Not on the best day it ever has!”

“We could give it a shot, though…” Nita said. “Wait five. I’ll be back.” She headed out toward the short-jump pad.

“Why are these so important?” Djam said. “Is the ritual something to do with the fire?”

“Well, not exactly—”

“It’s more of a tradition…”

Ronan sniffed. “Not everywhere, because I’ve never heard of it!”

“Some of our people, when they go camping,” Tom said, “make these as a sweet, a last-course snack. A sort of dessert.”

Some discussion of camping ensued, and the tradition of singing around campfires, and why there would be none of that tonight (“My voice is wrecked from shouting at my gates all day,” Ronan insisted, “so if you think I’m going to wreck it some more recreationally…!”). This was still in full flow when Nita reappeared with a box of honey grahams and a jar of marshmallow fluff.

“I can’t believe this,” Ronan said, taking the jar, opening it, and testing a fingerful of the contents. He made a very dubious face. “…And your people have this myth about ours having terrible teeth? How do any of you even have teeth when you eat shite like this? Honestly.”

“I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got,” Nita said. “Which—” She produced a long thick paper-wrapped bar from under her arm. “Is not too badly, under the circumstances.”

Djam’s nostrils flickered and his eyes went wide. “Wait. You have chocolate? How do you have chocolate?”

Kit looked over at Nita, and Nita looked at Ronan, and all three of them burst out laughing. “Oh no,” Djam said, fluffing up his fur in what Kit was coming to recognize as an ironic gesture, “I forgot, you’re from there! That planet!”

“Distant, Fabulous Dirt,” Cheleb said. “Fabled Home of Chocolate.” Hae gave Kit an amused look that suggested hae was quoting a commercial hae’d heard, probably at the Crossings.

“My sister,” Kit said, “is going into business with that one as an intergalactic cocoa dealer.” He jerked his chin at Ronan. “It’s going to be so interesting to watch…” Privately he hoped “dealer” was the right word, and not “smuggler.” But the boundaries were liable to blur sometimes in intergalactic usage, and doubly so where Carmela was involved.

“Sorry,” Cheleb said. “Amazed again. Can’t get over idea of people actually eating it instead of depositing in financial institution.”

“Okay,” Nita said, “fine, let’s stop discussing the investment value of the stuff for the time being! We can supply you guys if you need some. Meanwhile let’s get busy putting it in us instead of a bank.”

Graham crackers were broken out, and broken to size: chocolate was snapped into the proper-sized squares, Marshmallow fluff was applied to the crackers.

“And now what?” Ronan said, having watched this whole process skeptically.

“Well, we toast this somehow…” Nita looked frustrated.

“Here,” Kit said, and pointed at the fluffed graham cracker. “I was pretty good at this when I did it last…” The cracker obediently levitated out of Nita’s hands, soared out over the fire, and rotated so that it hung there fluff-side down.

The fluff fell off it and into the fire, where it instantly went up in a brief burst of flame, a scorched smell and a trail of black smoke.

Ronan burst out laughing. “Um,” Nita said. “Maybe the fluff needs to go onto the cracker a little harder.”

“Why do you even have that stuff?” Kit said to her under his breath as she started working on another cracker.

“I eat it on the graham crackers, okay?” Nita muttered. “And since some people put ketchup on their saltines, I wouldn’t make too big a deal about it if I were them.”

Kit grinned and said nothing further. Nita finished with that cracker and turned it over to Kit. “Here. Don’t wiggle it around so much this time.”

With great care Kit levitated this cracker too, soared it out over the fire, and only very gradually started to tilt the marshmallow-fluffed side toward the heat. The fluff started to run almost immediately, so that Kit had to keep tilting it back and forth. Finally it was threatening to melt off the cracker entirely, so Kit got it out of there and guided it over to Nita to have the chocolate applied and the second graham cracker squished down on top. Unfortunately, the fluff lost its heat almost immediately and the chocolate refused to melt.

Dairine snickered, triumphant. “That is the least successful s’more in the history of s’mores.”

“They’ve got a history?” Ronan said. “If this is anything to go by, I’d say it’s just about over.”

Nita threw Ronan a withering look and bit into the s’more. “It’s not that bad,” she said. But she was plainly making the best of a bad situation.

“All we need now is cocoa and scary stories,” Tom said, amused.

“If we’re having cocoa, I want some,” said a new voice, and Carl appeared out of the darkness beyond the stones in very similar hiking clothes to Tom’s. “Beats making my own.”

Over the various shouts of greeting, Tom gave Carl a wry look. “Don’t tell me you brought that with you?!”

“’Course I did,” Carl said, sitting down by Tom. “We’re a long way from home in a taxing situation. Am I not allowed to have comfort food? Think carefully before you answer, because I didn’t say a single word about your Triscuits.”

“You have cocoa? Have you got marshmallows?” came the immediate demand from several people sitting around the circle.

“Only the mini ones,” Carl said, looking regretfully at the campfire. “They’re no good for toasting.”

“No, not for toasting,” Nita said. “For s’mores. The marshmallow fluff doesn’t really cut it.”

“No, I see that.” Carl made a face. He stood up. “Well, it’s worth a try. Be right back.”

He got up and headed off for the short-transport pad, and quickly returned with half a bag of the tiny marshmallows. “This,” Dairine said, eyeing them, “is absolutely going to be one of those problems that only wizardry can solve…”

This proved true, as no one had anything like a skewer thin enough to toast mini marshmallows on. They wound up levitating them over the fire in small groups, which was delicate business—the mass of each individual mini marshmallow was so small that managing them in such a way that they all toasted evenly within the same time period was extremely difficult. Routinely half of them got burnt black while the other half were still only the faintest brown, and finally even Carl had to admit that they weren’t that much better a solution to the s’mores problem then the marshmallow fluff had been.

“Make a note,” Ronan said on being handed first even vaguely viable s’more and regarding it with mild resignation as it started falling apart in his hand, “the next time we go to evacuate an entire planetary population, bring full-sized marshmallows.”

“Not that I want to have to help do this again anytime soon,” Nita said, glancing in Thesba’s general direction with an annoyed look. “But then I can’t imagine this happens all that often…”

“You’d be surprised how often it happens,” Tom said, stretching his legs out. “This is kind of a special situation—it’s rare that a planet has this specific problem with getting its population offworld, or that it has to happen so quickly. Normally planets don’t just haul off and blow up the way Krypton was supposed to have; they tend to give you plenty of warning. But I’d say that the Interconnect Project winds up moving, oh, at least one or two populations a year entirely off their home worlds, ecosystems and all.”

Some of the wizards sitting around the fire exchanged concerned glances at that. “After all, we live in a fairly small, quiet suburb of the galaxy,” Carl said. “In closer to the core, and in the more populous arms, there are tens of millions of worlds inhabited by intelligent species, and of that number a small percentage come under catastrophic threat in any given year—solar disasters, black holes wandering through, local gravitic disturbances… A very small percentage, sure. And wherever possible, Planetaries and resident wizards keep a close eye on things and managed to derail at least some of the conditions that threaten inhabited worlds before they get out of hand. But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. This is one of those times...” He ran a hand through his hair. “The big projects are always subject to logistical problems: it can’t be helped. It’s the small single-planet projects that’re usually the most successful.”

“And as a result you hardly ever hear about them after the fact,” Tom said. “Atlantis…”

“Well, that was a bit of a mixed result,” Carl said, and sighed.

Tom laughed a short sardonic laugh. “You think?”

“This something happened on Earth?” said Cheleb.

“The Aphthonic Intervention,” Tom said. “It’s in the manual. There was a continent in the planet’s early developmental stages that was one of the first homes of one of several ancestor species—”

Kit smiled, remembering a brief conversation he’d had on this subject with a most unusual pig. “I know four different versions of this story,” he said, “but not which one is true.”

“Only four?” Tom raised his eyebrows at Kit, amused. “I’d have said eight at least. But as for how many of them are true? All of them, of course. You should know by now, though, how different the truth can look depending on what angle you’re examining it from.”

“Oh God,” said Ronan, “it’s one of those Rashomon things, isn’t it.”

“Well, no. What sank the continent isn’t disputed. Atlan Seamount was the biggest underwater volcano this planet has ever produced, and the Atlantis continent lay right on top of it; its main volcanic neck and pre-volcanic basement cone came up straight up through the middle of the Atlan land mass. When the big eruption went off at last, the resulting explosion was like the one they expect to hit Yellowstone some day, except a hundred times worse. It cracked the body of the continent straight through in five places.”

“See, the wizards there had unfortunately tried to throttle the volcano,” Carl said, “and that never works. Then when it went off at last, they initiated a last-ditch backtiming intervention to go back and keep the triggering event from happening.” He shook his head. “Timesliding living beings on a surface is one thing. But timesliding the surface itself, especially when that involves a significant portion of the Earth’s crust—that’s something else entirely. It… tends not to work well. The continent was completely shattered, and the crustal structure underneath it was shredded.”

“And when the timeslide intervention failed,” Tom said, “the backlash saturated the whole area with uncontrolled temporal anomalies. As a result there’s no magnetic data stored in the present crustal record to confirm that any of it ever happened at all. Not that there’s much of that crust material left, anyway, in the upper layers. Afterwards, other continental plates were pushed in over the subducted, damaged plates, and…” He lifted his arms, let them fall. “That was that.”

“But what did work,” Carl said, “was the project put together by some wizards who were intent on getting as much of the unique animal life as possible off Atlan, and onto other continents, before it was destroyed. That worked extremely well—a guided export of breeding stock to environments where they’d prosper. So we still have fireworms and basilisks and a lot of other unique creatures that turn up in fairy tales. Without the Aphthonic Intervention, the only place they’d turn up is fairy tales.”

“Well,” Ronan said, “that’s all very well, as long as the basilisks stay away from me. Not so sure why they went to so much trouble to save that species. Nasty little buggers.”

“Now now,” Tom said, “mustn’t judge.”

“Watch me,” Ronan said. “But I hope we’ve got a bigger action plan in case anything larger goes wrong.”

“Of course we do,” Tom said.

“After all,” Carl said, “it’s not like our Moon isn’t going to do this eventually.”

Almost all the Earth-based participants’ heads snapped up at that—everyone’s except Nita’s, Kit noticed. She merely bowed her head over the s’more she was trying to assemble, smiling an odd little smile.

“It’s moving away from the Earth right now,” Tom said, “a few inches further every year. But that’s not going to go on forever. Sooner or later it’s going to start spiraling back in. It’ll get closer and closer, and start dipping toward the Roche limit, the point where Earth’s tidal forces and gravitation start really messing with anything that gets too close.” He stretched out his legs in front of him, leaned back against his rock. “When it gets down to about eighteen thousand miles over the surface, that’s when the real excitement starts as far as the lunar structure is concerned. At that point the gravitational and tidal forces of the Earth begin actually deforming the Moon, stretching it out of shape. Much closer than that, say around ten thousand miles out, and the Moon simply breaks in pieces like an egg that’s been dropped on the floor.”

Nita was still fiddling with her s’more, wearing that slight smile. “You knew about this before, didn’t you?” Carl said. “Remiss of you not to mention.”

She looked up with mischief in her eyes. “Well,” she said, “it’s maybe half a million years from now this’ll happen, give or take. Might be twice that: no one’s sure. Doesn’t seem to be much point in yelling ‘fire’ when the building hasn’t really even started burning yet.”

Tom smiled slightly. “We know a lot more about what the Moon’s made of these days,” he said, “but if I remember rightly the jury’s still out on what happens after it breaks up. Does it simply fall down on us, or are the pieces shredded by the tidal effects into small enough chunks for us to wind up with rings?”

Nita leaned back against her own rock and sighed. “It is still out,” she said. “But more on the yes-to-rings side than the other way. Seems there are density anomalies that may make the shredding easier.”

“Assuming there are any human beings left on Earth at that point,” Ronan said. “And not just gone because we’ve destroyed our environment, or evolved into something different, or simply left.”

Carl nodded. “Half a million years is a good while yet,” he said. “Anything can happen…”

Everyone got quiet. But Kit was for the moment lost in another vision. “Imagine what that would look like, though,” he said. Gradually he became aware of the others looking at him strangely. “But seriously. When we look up at that moon from home, it’s nearly a quarter million miles away. Imagine how it would look at twenty thousand miles away. It would fill half the sky.”

A lot of eyes went up to the darkly burning, lowering presence that was easily taking up a third of the sky here. “And then,” he said, “rings…”

Kit realized that Nita’s gaze was fixed on him, and when their eyes met, the look he saw there said something he’d occasionally seen there before: you see this vision, too. And you see what it would be like. I thought I was the only one…

“But it still leaves us with a problem,” Tom says. “Or rather, it leaves somebody with a problem. Not me, not any of you; this won’t happen on any of our watches. But when that inward spiral starts, assuming there are people left, and you’re Earth’s Planetary… what do you do? Do you allow nature to take its course? Do you start the process of stabilizing the Moon’s orbit so that doesn’t descend any further? Granted, the choice becomes a bit simpler if there’s nobody left but the Planetary, or the small group of wizards who’ve been left behind as caretakers. Oh yes,” Tom said, putting his hands behind his head and leaning against them, “there are worlds where that’s exactly what’s happened. The dominant species has moved away, or changed beyond their need to keep that world any longer—yet they feel sentimental about it, and so they keep it exactly as it was before they left.”

“Kind of like keeping somebody’s room just like it was when they died,” Ronan said. “Little bit creepy, if you ask me.”

“I wouldn’t argue,” Tom said. “Nonetheless, it happens. Attachment’s a strange thing. Sometimes a being, or a species, will get very attached indeed. And the urge towards inertia, towards preservation as opposed to the urge towards change, is very common.” He looked out across the plain toward the gating complex. “So is the urge towards nostalgia.” He looked at their campfire. “But is allowing entropy to have its way with physical matter always necessarily an evil choice? Might there not be examples of entropically-grounded change that aren’t negatively connoted—that don’t necessarily mean the Lone Power is standing somewhere in the background going ‘Nya-ah-ah’ at us like Dishonest John?”

This produced some confused looks among the audience. Carl, who’d settled himself crosslegged across the fire from Tom with his back to another rock, raised his eyebrows and said, “You’re dating yourself again.”

“Hardly,” Tom said, smiling slightly and taking a drink of his Guinness. “It’s widely known my personal history reaches back to at least the Pleistocene. No one’s going to care if I reference the Saturday morning cartoons we had back then.”

He gave absolutely no sign of noticing Nita’s sudden red-hot blush. “I’ll grant you, at this end of time and causality it’s hard to imagine what the form of change and growth that the Powers that Be originally intended would have looked like in operation. Impossible for us to tell, of course; before the other Powers got their version of change fully up and running, the Lone Power installed its own more toxic version over the top, and that’s what we’re stuck with. But the rest of the Powers seem to have accepted some of Its forms of change, at this end of time, as part of nature. Must we keep entire ecosystems running past the time at which they’d have relatively gracefully expired, merely out of the urge to stick it to the Lone One? If everything must die, can’t we allow some of it to die with dignity?”

Kit saw that some of the group around the campfire were looking at Tom rather strangely. “I know,” Tom said. “You’re young in your practices yet… used to fighting the Lone One tooth and nail, and even winning. Which is as it should be. That’s why wizardry was given into your hands, into all our hands, when young. Yet even when you’re young, you have to learn to pick your fights. Then you start learning to leverage your experience against your power levels.” His glance rested on Dairine for a moment. “Some of us learn that earlier than others. There are people who waste time feeling sorry for wizards whose power levels took a dive after they come off their Ordeals, never suspecting how much smarter and more effective those wizards are now they’ve realized how to make the most of what they’ve got.”

“That was a compliment,” Dairine said. “Accepted with thanks.”

“And on that note,” Carl said, “especially speaking of power levels taking a dive, even the ones we’re working with here… Someone has a few other stops to make before he heads off for his own shift pretty soon.” He neatly deprived Tom of the Guinness bottle and drained it.

Tom laughed and shook his head. “Hate to admit it, but he has a point…”

The Supervisories got up and wandered around making their good-nights to everyone, and finally waved and vanished into the dark in the direction of the short-transport pad. Everybody else made themselves comfortable around the Stone Throne for a while, enjoying the fire, snacking casually on what food remained of the buffet that had been laid out, and just generally relaxing and ignoring Thesba, now standing fairly high overhead and occasionally obscured by drifting cloud. Ronan had renewed his discussion of the “first” of the Star Wars films with Cheleb and Djam and Mr. Frilly; he’d started that one running on the streaming video with the purpose of freezing it on every scene he didn’t like, one after another, and mocking them all mercilessly. Dairine was sitting in the grass with her back against one of the standing stones and Spot in her lap, smiling slightly and watching this performance unfold.

Kit strolled over to the remains of the buffet to get himself some beef jerky—Ronan had brought that, and it was surprisingly good—and glanced around him. Just about then Nita wandered up by him, watching the video-screening action with an expression of dry amusement that suggested she had absolutely no intention of getting involved. “You know,” she said, “that Creamsicle juice has been really nice but I would kill for some fizzy water just about now.”

“I’ve got some,” Kit said. “Come on back.”

He led her around to the standing stone where his puptent was anchored, opened the portal, and stepped through, waving the lights up. Glancing around at the place, he got annoyed with himself: his supplies were a lot more disorganized than he thought he’d left them. I guess I didn’t really do that good a job tidying yesterday, he thought. Too much on my mind… “Sorry,” he said, “it’s kind of messy in here.” He went over to the far side of the puptent where he had a few six packs of bottled water stacked up, and started pulling the plastic off one of them.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nita said. “You should see mine.” She sighed and leaned against the curved puptent wall.

Kit fought with the plastic until he could find the right place to get it to rip. “I meant to ask,” he said. “When I couldn’t reach you for hours and hours the other day—what was that about?”

“What, yesterday?”

“No.” Kit paused once again to try to remember what day it was. “Uh, Thursday.”

“Oh.” Nita rubbed her face, looking tired for a moment. “I had to go off site to deal with a flood.”

“What?” He handed her the bottle.

“They were running short of hydromages to do emergency response work, and I was handy to substitute in. But what embarrasses me is that it was kind of a relief. There are times—”

Nita broke off and looked away, as if whatever admission she’d been about to make was painful enough that she didn’t even like sharing it with Kit. “Well, anyway,” she said, looking back again. “There was an earthquake down on the south side of the continent somewhere, don’t ask me where, Bobo knows the coordinates, and it destroyed a local dam, and all the water started flooding the plain around one of the bigger gating complexes. And they couldn’t stop the flowthrough in time—the gates were being really adversarial and kept jamming each other open while all these thousands of people kept moving through. One of the local Supervisories just turned up on my doorstep, literally outside my puptent, a big fluffy guy and honestly he reminds me of a giant chicken, and said ‘Get down here now.’ And so I got down there now.”

“God,” Kit said.

Nita shrugged. “It wasn’t too tough to stop, really. I had to reroute a big reservoir’s worth of water all over the flood plain, but it wasn’t anything like as heavy a job as Mars was. Not that that would have been a big deal either right now, with our power levels the way they are.”

Nita scowled down at the bottle she was holding. “So I got the water out of there, and went down to report off to Big Fluffy Chicken Guy. And while this was happening some Tevaralti people came along to say thank you. You know how that goes.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. Those moments always embarrassed him too. He was so used to keeping wizardry secret, at least at home, that it was hard to get used to being thanked out in the open.

“And a few of them were Tevaralti who didn’t want to move on to the refuge worlds, but they came and said thank you anyway. Which was nice enough, I guess.” He could feel her annoyance growing. “And I think they knew I couldn’t understand it, because one of them said, ‘It’s just that we need to be of one mind, we can’t go unless we’re of one mind—’”

“Yeah, somebody said that to me the other day.”

“And another one said ‘If the One desired us to go, It would have changed all minds so that all minds are one, It would have acted Itself.’ And I just got so mad.” She actually grabbed some of her hair in her fists and waved it around. “I wanted to grab him and say, ‘Well, what are we, chopped liver?’ Like we’re not what the Powers use to fix things.” She let go of her hair and flapped her arms in helpless anger. “Honestly.”

Kit laughed, and the laugh came out a little broken. “I know,” he said. “Though I don’t think they’d get the chopped liver part.”

She laughed at that, which was just as well, because despite the gravity of what they’d been discussing, the reminder of Mars had taken Kit by surprise in a way that had occasionally happened before. Just the image was enough: Nita standing there facing down a scheming Martian vizier and a rebellious and dangerous Martian princess while she held a huge threatening wave of water over their city like a giant attack dog straining at its leash. Nita taut and furious and absolutely in command, looking extremely dangerous as she explained to the people who were more or less holding Kit hostage that if they didn’t do what she told them right now she was going to excuse the whole lot of them from existence.

Actually, Nita looking absolutely smoking hot, Kit thought, realizing that his mouth had gone dry. Though it might have had something to do with the Martian daywear, which tended toward the filmy and skimpy and… Seriously, seriously I need to stop thinking about this right now, Kit thought. Before something… uh, well, yeah, maybe too late—

She’d turned her head aside for a moment, which was just as well, as it gave Kit just enough time to adjust his clothes and make things less visible while she dropped her gaze to the water bottle and started fighting with the top of it. “Ever since they changed the caps on these it takes forever to get them open,” she said, scowling at it. “I swear, you need to be a wizard to—”

The bottle top popped off and fizzy water bubbled up and hissed out of it, spraying everywhere. Nita nearly dropped the bottle, then said, “Oh no you don’t, you stop that!”

The water stopped right where it was in the air, frozen in mid-spray like something caught by strobe photography.

“Come on, let’s get this out of here,” Nita said, and headed out the portal with the bottle and all the stasis-held water. Kit followed her, trying hard to make sure he wasn’t walking strangely enough for her to notice. “Boy,” she was saying, “somebody must have been in a real hurry when he was packing!”

Kit gulped as he followed her out into the cool darkness and around behind the standing stone. Oh thank you, he said to the night, thank you for being dark! Because sometimes no matter how carefully you tried to walk, things just got worse. “Well, weren’t you?”

Nita released the water-stasis spell and let the bottle finish fizzing enthusiastically over the grass. “Yeah, but I didn’t shake my drinks up! I bet you just brought the portal interface down into the kitchen and started firing things into it…”

“Um,” Kit said. While this was true, it wasn’t worth even breathing the suggestion that the way Nita’d been hanging onto the bottle when she flapped her arms around might also have had something to do with it.

“Yeah, there you go,” Nita said, and took a swig out of the now much calmer bottle. “Thought so.” She gave him a sidewise look. “You didn’t bring any of Carmela’s soda, did you?”

“What? Of course not.”

“Shame,” Nita said, “I like that…” She took another drink, sighed, handed Kit the bottle.

He drank, ever so glad to have something to do to take his mind off things. After several long swallows Kit sighed at the realization that personal matters were now subsiding to more manageable levels, and allowed himself to look at Nita again.

Which was of course exactly the moment she caught him at it. “What’re you looking at?”

“You,” he said in the Speech.

She spent a long moment looking at him the same way, and opened her mouth.

Then her shoulders slumped and she closed her mouth and twisted it into a very annoyed expression. “I don’t believe this,” Nita said. “Bobo says I’ve got to get back. The gate I yelled at before is acting up again; they need me to settle it…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay.”

She looked at him shyly. “Hug?”

Kit went nearly white-hot as the reason not to want Nita to get any closer, the reason he’d thought had stood itself down, now stood itself right up again. Yes! one part of his mind was yelling, and Bad idea, bad idea, shouted another—

But it was too late, Nita was already turning toward him, reaching for him. And, But I need a hug! some idiotically needy part of him was yelling.

Oh God. Okay, maybe if I turn a little bit, that might be enough to—

Too late. Nita’s face was against his neck. And she was shaking.

Kit instantly started to get upset, which on top of the blushing was hard to take. “Wait, what’s the matter, are you—what’re you—”

“Why,” Nita said, taking a breath as if she needed to get some control of herself, “why… do you even bother?”

“What?”

And then Kit realized she was laughing.

“We are such idiots,” Nita said, pulling away. And her eyes were wet, but they were tears of laughter. “Look at us!”

It was just as well there was no one else around to witness the moment, because Kit would have simply died. …Yet it was also funny, impossibly funny. There they stood in the middle of an alien mass migration, under a moon that was so far from being romantic that it was genuinely ridiculous, and they were having a physiology-based personal-crisis moment. At least Kit was. It was hard to work out what Nita was having, and he was both chagrined that he couldn’t read her mind and desperately glad that she couldn’t read his. At least I don’t think she can…

She was still shaking with laughter, though. “Kit. Do you honestly think I don’t notice this stuff?”

“Uh,” Kit said in a desperate moment of honesty, “I was kind of praying for that, yeah.”

“Well I hate to tell you this, but plainly the One is on another call at the moment.”

Kit burst out laughing. And then Nita was laughing again too, and…

“Uh, that hug. Can I have one not contaminated by…”

“Undue boner action?”

“Oh shut up.”

“Besides,” she whispered in his ear after as she slipped her arms around him again, “…could be it’s kinda late for that.”

Kit’s eyes widened.

“Because it’s not like you’re the only one who—”

And that was when the cry came from behind them:

“Oh no! Wait! Is this impregnation event? Didn’t want to miss it!”

Kit froze as he realized there was something really important he had forgotten to tell Nita about. Completely forgotten. Cheleb. Biology. And the candy hearts.

Oh God!

Cheleb stopped where hae was as hae saw that they’d stopped what they were doing and both had their gazes fixed on haem. “Chel,” Kit said, and couldn’t for the life of him work out where to go from there.

Nita pulled back and gave Kit a look. “Is this conversation one I should be part of?” she said.

“Uh, no. Well, yes. Not now okay?” he whispered desperately in her ear.

“Wow,” Nita murmured, plainly impressed by a display of truly world-class ambiguity and indecisiveness.

Kit groaned softly to himself and turned his attention to Cheleb again. “Cheleb. You were saying?”

“Ah. Well.” Cheleb shifted from one clawed foot to another. “Didn’t have time to tell you earlier. After you left for Nita’s gate complex, had… an incursion here.”

“Oh brother,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me...”

“Well, all right,” said Cheleb, “but failing to do so will leave you in data vacuum—”

“No, it’s an idiom,” Kit said, just a touch exasperated, because he was afraid he knew what was coming. “Do tell me. Sibiks?”

“Many,” said Cheleb. “Among other things, very interested in place where food got dropped around Stone Throne. Took a while to get rid of them but were almost all gone and then found that portal on your puptent had been open a while, maybe since you left...”

Kit covered his eyes.

“Couldn’t find command interface to shut portal interface right away, had to go in and then chase some of them out.” Kit blinked: Cheleb was practically babbling. “Was looking for last one to get rid of it, hiding under some boxes, and then found this—”

Embarrassed, Cheleb proffered the empty heart-candy box.

Kit took the box and immediately understood what had happened. One of the sibiks had found the open box and eaten all the hearts. But Cheleb didn’t know that. Hae thought that Kit had eaten them, and of course that would mean—

Kit stopped, because Nita was looking at him very strangely. He was trying to come up with some creative excuse for having a box of candy hearts at all when Nita simply reached out and took the box away from him.

“They’re all gone,” she said. It was astonishing how she could make a simple declarative sentence sound so much like it meant about five other things, all at once.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “they are.” He swallowed. “And that’s really terrific.”

Nita looked at him carefully and then started nodding. “Yes it is!” she said. “Isn’t it!”

“And Cheleb is really excited for us,” Kit said, “because hae’s pretty sure that since all these are gone, that means…”

“That we really like each other in a very special way!” Nita said. Her eyes were had gone theatrically wide in a way that Kit recognized, and both made him nervous and made him want to laugh.

“And that because of that,” Kit said, “we’re going to do something about it—”

“Right this minute!” Nita said, with increasingly terrifying enthusiasm.

Kit just kept quiet after that and waited with some trepidation to see what would happen.

“You did tell haem, I hope,” Nita said, very seriously indeed, “that among members of our species this gesture has to be reciprocated by the other party—”

“In a similar manner,” Kit said.

“—on or around February 14th.”

“I, uh, might have neglected to mention.”

“And so of course we can’t do anything right now,” Nita said, “not only because February 14th is a while away yet, but because we’re in the middle of a planetary disaster and it would be incredibly inappropriate to distract one another from our Wizardly Duties.”

He could actually hear the capitalization. Kit merely nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s so sad.”

“But duty comes first,” Nita said, nodding in unison with him. “Still, we will be strong.”

“Yes, we will,” Kit said with all the sincerity he could muster.

Nita gestured with her eyes in Cheleb’s direction, and then turned her head to look at haem. Warned, Kit did it in unison with her.

Cheleb was practically vibrating with emotion. “So beautiful,” hae said, positively starry-eyed—which with haes eyes, took a lot of work.

“Thank you,” Kit said.

“But we really ought to be alone right now,” Nita said.

“Yes, yes, of course!” Cheleb said, and vanished back into the stone circle, overjoyed.

Nita waited until he was safely gone, and then said, “Sometime real soon, tomorrow maybe, I’m going to need you to explain what that was all about,” she said. Her voice was shaking with laughter that she was refusing to let out.

“I will,” Kit said. “But first I need to tell you that you are so smart.”

She grinned. “Takes one to know one.” Then she sighed. “Shame, though. If your tentacly guys got in there and ate your candy, they probably got all the rest of the saltines, too…”

Kit sighed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Besides, I gave Mamvish my ketchup. Not much point in getting all hung up about the saltines when there’s no ketchup to put on them…”

She pulled him close again. Kit cooperated, wholeheartedly. After a moment she said, a bit breathlessly, “When we get home, after all this crap is handled… let’s talk about this, yeah? A long, long talk.”

“Yeah.”

And Nita vanished back into the circle to pick up her things and make for the short-transport pad.

There were only a few more goodnights after that as people went back on shift or headed back to their puptents to rest. Ronan was last to go. He and Djam made it through most of The Phantom Menace before Djam ran out of energy and Ronan ran out of sardonic epithets (temporarily) for Jar Jar Binks. Finally there was just Cheleb again, stretched out on the tidied Throne Rock and keeping an eye on the glowing matrix of gate-function graphs.

Kit paused by the display and looked it over. “No problems?”

“Nothing at all,” Cheleb said. “Go rest, cousin. Had busy day, you have.” Haes expression was difficult to read, but Kit had the feeling Cheleb felt hae’d been part of something special.

And hae was, Kit thought, but maybe not the way hae thinks. Doesn’t matter.

He walked back to his puptent’s portal and considered staying up just long enough to head over to Ronan’s gate complex for a pre-bedtime shower… then decided against it. In the morning. Right now I’m about ready to crash.

Wearily Kit stepped through into his puptent, sealed it up behind him, and just stood there for a moment in the soft light, looking around at the mess the sibiks had made of things. Fortunately it wasn’t too bad: the packaging had mostly defeated them. The saltines, though, as Nita said, had suffered. There was just one package left. Kit picked it up and stuffed it into his otherspace pocket before anything else happened to it, and then tidied some other rubbish away before getting undressed, pulling on pajamas and flopping down on the bed again.

The moment he was horizontal Kit realized that he wasn’t going to be conscious long: he was still feeling run down after his encounter with the Fourth. He stuffed his manual under his pillow in the usual place and felt around under there to find his phone and text his dad.

LONG DAY, BUT WE HAD A CAMPFIRE PICNIC AT THE END OF IT. MET SORT OF A DINOSAUR WHO LIKES HIS STEAK EVEN RARER THAN MAMA. DISCOVERED THAT MARSHMALLOW FLUFF IS NO GOOD IN S’MORES, & MINI MARSHMALLOWS ARE ALSO USELESS. NITA STOPPED A FLOOD, MY PUPTENT WAS INVADED BY MORE SPACE OCTOPUSES, AND RONAN IS TEACHING INNOCENT ALIENS IRISH SWEAR WORDS. IN OTHER WORDS, EVERYTHING NORMAL. WORLD STILL ENDING.

He looked at the text, considering adding the words “I’m tired”, but then decided not to: his Mama might fret. The image of her and Mamvish’s egg-dam doing so in unison, though, made him smile.

Kit shoved the phone under his pillow with the manual and buried his face in the pillow… and for a long time, knew nothing more.

EIGHT

Sunday

Later, but no telling exactly how much later, Kit was standing out in the dark, fuming, because it really annoyed him that Thesba was following him even into his dreams.

This is a real pain in the ass, he said to himself. Who do I complain to about this?

Kit was one of those people who didn’t often remember his dreams, but when he did, what he remembered was detailed and vivid. His dreams arrived in IMAX and Dolby THX surround sound. If there was a downside to this, it was that his dreams usually weren’t terribly coherent. Irrational and sheerly idiotic things had a way of happening without a lot of logic being involved.

This was the case right now, for example, because Thesba was leaning over him and staring. Kit found this offensive, especially from an entire moon: the attention seemed disproportionate. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re going to destroy this whole place, right? Fine. But when I’m sleeping, at least, can you please let me be?” And then he started to get angry. “…Except no, you know what? It’s not fine, and somebody needs to tell you. Everyone here is really pissed off at you, and I just think you should know.”

Not everyone, said the person standing next to him.

Annoyed, Kit turned to regard him. His companion was watching Thesba with as much interest as Kit was, and he was human—or at least Kit thought he was. The general height and shape was right, but it was hard to tell in more detail because of the clothes. The person was dressed in long dark robes and had on a broad-brimmed, slouchy hat, also charcoal-dark. Thesba’s light falling across the hat’s wide brim cast his face in shadow.

Great, Kit thought. Just what I needed: a cartoon wizard. “Oh really?” Kit said.

Yes, really. This is merely an operation of the natural. It is what is.

“Well,” Kit said quite forcefully, “maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still suck.”

True. Yet such operations are incapable of altering their actions when nothing is brought to bear against them save perception. Perception without comprehension can have little effective result.

“Um, okay,” Kit said. That just meant that there was something he was supposed to be comprehending. Unfortunately right now he had no idea what that was.

He turned more fully toward the robed figure and noticed that in one hand—at least he assumed it was a hand; he couldn’t quite make it out under the long baggy sleeve of the robe—it was holding by a rounded wire handle one of those old-style Coleman camping lanterns, the kind that ran on kerosene and that you had to pump up to pressure and then light with a match. The lantern was lit, but someone had turned it right down so that the fabric-like mantle inside the clear glass chimney was just glowing a faint orange, almost the same shade or color temperature as Thesba’s glow from above. “That’s not going to do you much good in the dark if you don’t turn it up,” Kit said.

Seer for the seer in the dark, said the figure beside him, you say true. But if any light is to be shed here, you must shed it.

This seemed to Kit like a huge imposition. “Listen, when I signed up for this nobody told me I was going to have to be all that luminous! Would’ve been nice if I’d been warned.”

There is never warning, the figure said. All is surprise. In surprise alone lies solution, and salvation. And very suddenly the figure brought up the Coleman lantern and held it up between them, so that the light of it, even turned down so low, briefly blinded Kit as it was held right in front of his face.

Kit flinched back and blinked and grabbed the lantern’s handle to pull it to one side and out of his eyes. But even with the light so high up and so close, he could for a moment see nothing of his companion’s face but a tangle of shadow. Except not even shadow, Kit thought, with the idea that this should remind him of something. At the moment, though, he couldn’t think what.

Then suddenly he could see his companion’s face—except it wasn’t one. There were eyes, though, quite a few of them, with a nubbly green-blue hide surrounding them. When the eyes realized Kit was looking at them, most of them squeezed themselves shut. But a couple of them stayed open, just a crack, as if what lived inside them was pretending to be asleep.

For some reason that made Kit want to laugh. He held the lamp up closer, peering at those eyes. And doing so, he saw a glint in them, something familiar, someone he knew.

Kit’s own eyes widened in sudden recognition. He opened his mouth to say the name—

And just like that, Kit’s eyes were open and he was staring up into the dimness of his puptent.

The image of the last moments of that dream, though, was perfectly clear, still hanging in front of the eyes of his mind. Sibik eyes.

Except what was in them? That wasn’t any sibik.

Kit swallowed, swallowed again. It wasn’t easy. Apparently he’d been sleeping with his mouth open; his mouth was dry and tasted terrible.

Ponch…

Kit kicked the bed clothes off, got up, and went across to the open package of bottled water—cracked one of them, took a long drink, swooshed it around in his mouth to try to get rid of the something-died-in-my-mouth-overnight taste, swallowed. He took another drink and held it in his mouth for a moment, feeling/listening to the bubbles, and swallowed again as things continued putting themselves together in his head.

He thought of the Fourth, and shivered. It wasn’t fear causing that response: just the strangeness of the experience. Some echoes of his contact with the being—if “contact” was the right word—were still echoing in Kit’s body. He could just feel a shadow of the odd, odd feeling that had pressed against his nerves while he’d stood there bearing the weight of its regard. And since then, even before Nita had yesterday mentioned the Playroom—that peculiar “aschetic” universe set aside for as a testing space for wizards learning to manipulate matter/energy kernels—the word “pathfinder” had been niggling at Kit, reminding him that he’d heard it before.

And now something extra had been added to the mere word, as if someone knew that Kit needed confirmation that the hint was worth following up. Seer for the seer in the dark…

He could see himself standing there on the Playroom’s peculiar, endlessly-Euclidean, white-shining floor. He’d followed Nita’s trail there with Ponch’s help, after Neets had vanished while working on healing the kernel of her mother’s body. Having found his way there, Kit had run into some of the colleagues that she’d been working with. Now he thought of the one with all the eyes and all the tentacles—an alien called a Sulamid—and how at the time it had spoken to him and looked at him so strangely, and had used that phrase. He was so distracted then by his worry for Nita that he’d hardly given thought to the peculiar way he felt when the Sulamid looked at him. Now, though, he had a referent for that. It was very like the bizarre, unclassifiable sensations he’d experienced the other day with the Fourth.

Another of these creatures with a metabolic extension into a higher-numbered dimension, then. What they certainly seemed to have in common so far was a gift for being obscure. But from what Nita had said, it sounded as if this was just a side effect of their particular style of being. Apparently it was hard to make sense to a creature living exclusively in one set of dimensions when you lived in more than one.

Standing there with his bottle in his hand, Kit laughed once under his breath. If I got into a conversation with Mr. A. Square from Flatland, he thought, probably a lot of what I might wind up saying to him would seem obscure too. And if there was a multidimensional take just on physical things, there was no reason to think there wouldn’t be a similar angle on mental ones, emotional ones, philosophical ones, as well.

He put the bottle down and started putting on clothes. I need to start making some kind of sense out of this, Kit thought. But first I want a shower, and some food. And I want to talk to Neets.

First, though, he waved the puptent’s portal orifice open and stepped out. It was dark, but the light was growing. Not even dawn yet, Kit thought, and made a face. The clouds had moved on, though; the predawn sky was a clear, intense, dark blue-green, and many stars of the neighboring OB association were blazingly bright in it, a scatter of white and blue-white jewels. And most to the point, the sky was empty of Thesba. The moon’s absence made the sky look healthier, less oppressive somehow.

Kit breathed out in the cold, clear air and leaned against his standing stone. His breath actually smoked, the temperature having dropped lower than usual over the course of the night. Kit tilted his head back against the stone and just rested there, feeling the cold, breathing out, relaxing into the feeling of looking up into a sky that didn’t have a horrible, crushing weight lowering down from it.

Pathfinder. Kit turned the word over in his mind. Maybe it meant more than just being a tracker, a physical locator—though Ponch had been that, too, while hunting for Nita. They both had.

Or maybe it meant not just finding physical paths, but virtual ones: metaphorical ones. Finding a path, a way, as in a way to do something. To fix something, Kit thought. Solve something.

But what? And how, exactly?

No answer came.

A moment later Kit laughed quietly at himself. This was part of what being a wizard was: when you asked the universe for answers, often you expected to get them. But that approach made sense, since so much of the universe would talk to you, once you started the conversation. That was what the Speech was all about, after all. Not commanding things to happen; convincing them to. You could command if you had to… but persuasion always worked better. Conversation was the whole point of the exercise.

Kit shivered again, but now it was for a different reason. The sensation that made the hair rise on the back of Kit’s neck now was the beginning of excitement, a hint of exhilaration. There was something he was needed for here, some purpose above and beyond just minding a gate. In the face of that realization, everything suddenly got… not easy to bear, but at least easier. A little less hopeless.

Okay, Kit thought. What now?

No answer came. That’s fine with me, he thought. I need a shower anyway.

And sometimes, maybe, all you can do is wait.

So Kit got busy doing that, and meanwhile did his job: the things that over recent days had started to become routine, and some things that hadn’t.

He went over to Ronan’s gate complex to shower and touch base with him. He came back to the circle of stones and had some breakfast (dry cereal that promised it was fortified with vitamins and minerals, which made him feel just a shade less guilty about his eating habits over the past few days). Then for the next four hours or so he shared the Stone Throne with Djam, who had taken over from Cheleb a few hours before dawn, and gatewatched with him while idly chatting some more about Earth entertainment, as well as some Alnilamev media-based “ritualized storytelling” that looked to Kit like a strangely jazzy cross between kabuki theater and a sort of interactive Cartoon Network.

This wound up distracting Kit for a good while, as shortly after that Djam got very excited about showing Kit a 3D recording of an entertainment called The Faded Liver—at least that was how it seemed to translate into the Speech. Together they spent easily two hours on it while Djam waved his arms and went on and on about characterization and plot and resonances to other stories in the same cycle, and the talents of the performers of this entertainment, several of whom had volunteered to discorporate for maximum verisimilitude in the event…

Kit nodded and asked questions and did his best to get into what was going on, since Djam seemed so enthusiastic. But by the time Djam was ready to report off to Kit on the gate complex and formally go off duty, all Kit could make of it all was that The Faded Liver seemed like a somewhat bizarre version of Romeo and Juliet, featuring a whole lot more violence and an eventual, if ambiguous, happy ending that left you wondering which of the happy trio was alive, which was dead, and which was in a sort of nonconnoted limbo state like that of Schrödinger’s Cat. This made a lot more sense when Kit realized that Djam’s people came of one of those species that had done a fairly unusual form of deal with the Lone Power during their Choice, so that death was for them a more temporary than usual phenomenon—like someone on Earth having a job and agreeing to take a brief cut in pay until the local economic picture improved. Probably, Kit thought, Romeo and Juliet would strike an Alnilamev audience as a romantic comedy hinging on a series of madcap misunderstandings that would be resolved after story’s end when everyone got bored enough with being dead.

After Djam took himself off to rest, the number three inbound gate started to get cranky again, and Kit sat there with the manual and spoke sharply to it for fifteen or twenty minutes until it behaved once more. He spent the next hour watching the power levels of the other four feeder gates as they jumped around and threw minor gravitic anomalies. These Kit shut down one after one as they popped up, judging the behavior to be a transparent attention-getting ploy from submolecular gate machinery that wanted Kit to prove that he liked it as much as the other guy who got yelled at an hour ago.

He paused afterwards for a very late lunch featuring one of Ronan’s weird ready-made supermarket hamburgers, gazing out at the plain as Thesba rose into the a sky where late afternoon was giving way to early evening, and wondering anew at the concept of selling people individual cooked hamburgers that were made and then chilled and wrapped up, buns and all, and served like ready meals. And probably pumped full of preservatives and God knows what to keep them from going inedible, Kit thought. I can just imagine what Mama would say if she could see one of these things. He grinned. Maybe I can trick Ro into bringing one of them around…

After that he tried once again to get in touch with Nita, as he’d done several times that day already. He wanted to talk to her about the situation with Cheleb and the candy hearts, as he’d suddenly had a thought about one of the mottoes that had caused Cheleb the most astonishment, possibly even distress: TEXT ME. Between one blink and the next, Kit found himself thinking, Did he think that meant I was asking Neets to change my name or something? My name in the Speech? Or maybe hers? Oh wow.

He laughed again at that idea as he flipped through the manual to Nita’s profile. But it still said what it had been saying all day: On active intervention, messages storing for later access— This time at least the manual showed Kit a location for her, once again an area that had had some severe seismic activity that morning. They’ve got her water-wrangling again, then. Kind of amazing we haven’t had any earthquakes here, actually. He realized that even after days spent here, he knew almost nothing about the arrangement of tectonic plates on Tevaral, so that now he wound up spending a while consulting the manual on the subject, and getting twitchier all the time, for the area had been quite active. Finally Kit just shut the manual and gazed out into the plain once more, watching the shifting, dimming light as the hot white disc of Sendwathesh slid down westwards into gathering blue cloud, the shadows of the standing stones swinging across the surrounding blue-green fields as if from the gnomons of a multiplex sundial, slowly fading away against the grass as the day declined.

Kit sat there on the Stone Throne watching Sendwathesh go down behind the bumpy horizon in a glory of aquamarine and turquoise and peacock blue, while the high sky shaded to an intense green-tinged cobalt and the fierce brilliance of the nearer blue-white stars pricked through it, Thesba hanging high among them, lowering and burning red: death in a physical shape. It made Kit shiver. Yet at the same time, Tevaral’s moon still looked somehow beautiful even in its deadliness. And when it goes—

Kit found himself wondering where the first truly deadly crack would form… the one that would go straight down into Thesba’s mantle and release the pressure that had been building up there for so many thousands of years. He tried to imagine it: the explosive spray of vast amounts of magma into vacuum, the brief blue-tinted destroying flame around the edges of the extrusion while close to the moon’s surface the blast of molten stone and metal shot up through the murky atmosphere at supersonic speeds, setting fire to the hydrogen and nitrogen there. Then the misshapen chunks of suddenly supercooled magma either starting to rain down on Tevaral—depending on the initial explosion’s dominant vectors—or settling into brief uneasy orbit around the planet, orbits that would soon decay…

And what about that, he thought, gazing past Thesba’s darkside limb to something as unnerving in its way: the hot red coal of mu Cephei, so many light years distant. But not nearly distant enough. From what Dairine had said about it, in the long term, it was another part of this world’s problem… even a more definitive one, in its way, than Thesba. Why go crazy trying to keep a planet running as a going concern when sooner or later, that’s going to go off and destroy everything in the near neighborhood?

And suddenly Kit found himself wondering: where does Earth stand as regards that thing? If it goes off—when it goes off—what’s the wavefront going to do to our world when it gets there?

Great, one more thing to worry about. He rubbed his eyes. Not in our lifetimes, anyway. No more than what’s going to happen with the Moon. But sooner or later…

Kit leaned his head against the back of the Stone Throne in the twilight and felt a sudden strange sense of relief that most of the errantry he’d been sent on involved relatively short-term problems, with relatively short-term solutions—and that most of the solutions had produced relatively positive results. I mean, sure, positive’s relative. You don’t get sent out on errantry unless it’s to make something better.

But there’s nothing we can really do about this. This world’s going to be destroyed, and a lot of Tevaralti are going to be destroyed along with it, no matter what we do…

Kit sighed as the twilight deepened and the stars shone more fiercely, actually casting faint shadows from the standing stones. Am I really cut out for this kind of work? he thought. What happens when I run into wizardries like this closer to home, things I’m needed for, that are more like unsuccessful surgery than anything else? Or like amputations? Where you’ve saved a life, but it’s never going to be the same for that person again, no matter how hard you tried?

The thought trailed off. Kit was more than aware that the universe didn’t come with happy endings installed as standard. Wizards were not omnipotent, and wizardry couldn’t fix everything, or stop everything. Sometimes there’s just not enough energy, he thought, or things happen too fast to stop, or you find out about them too late. Things like this, where no matter how much power you bring to bear on the problem, it still won’t help. Inevitable things…

The sorrow that rose up in Kit surprised him as he gazed across the plain, where the lighting hovering above the gating complex was now a beacon to the southward, and the distant glitter of electronic campfires coming on was like starlight to a sun. All those people, he thought, shaking his head, and tilted his head back to look at Thesba again, and let out a long pained breath, his eyes stinging. All this way we’ve come for them, and there’s nothing we can do…

From down by where Kit’s feet were stretched out on the long wide seat of the Throne, something rustled. And then a voice spoke.

“Cracker?”

Kit stared through the dimness and then—he couldn’t help it—just started laughing. “Oh no,” he said. “Not you again. Seriously, no…”

“Cracker please?” it said.

Kit rubbed his eyes. “You’re a clever guy, aren’t you,” he said. “You know a good racket when you see one. Sneak away from home, track down soft-hearted aliens, shake them down for food, then get carried home and welcomed like a returning hero.”

There was no immediate response to this assessment, just more rustling.

“Oh, come on,” Kit said. “Come up here.”

After a moment or so the long green-blue tentacles started curving up over the end of the Throne’s seat, and with a couple of jumping wiggles the sibik hoisted itself up onto the stone and then hunched itself down against it, abdomen raised so that it could look at Kit with all those hopeful eyes.

Kit rolled his eyes at his own inability to resist being taken for a sucker. “Come on,” he said, “I’ve got what you want right here…” He reached sideways to the opening of his otherspace pocket, found it, reached in, and pulled out the very last package of saltines.

Kit sighed as he turned it over in his hands. “Do you have any idea how far these have come? Huh?”

“Very far,” the sibik said, creeping closer.

“Yes, that’s right! Very far. Two thousand light years, nearly.” Kit pulled the cellophane at the top of the package apart. “And you and I are going to finish them up, right?”

“Please,” said the sibik, creeping closer.

Kit smiled, because he knew this move. At home it had once meant that in a few moments you wound up with a dog’s nose on your knee. And then sniffing at the bottom of the saltine package… and then in the saltine package.

“And thank you,” the sibik said, sliding over his knees. It was surprisingly heavy.

“Wow,” Kit said, “you’re better at talking than you were yesterday, aren’t you.”

“I think so,” said the sibik.

Kit thought of that intense wave of experience, of emotion, that had washed over him before and after the little Tevaralti boy seizing his pet again and cuddling it close. Something’s happened. To it? To me? Or both? Who even knows, right now? He turned his attention back to the sibik. “You remember what these are called?”

“Saltines.”

“That’s right. Now we’ll learn a new word, yeah?”

“Yeah please.”

“Good. We’re going to share.”

“Yes share, please and thank you,” said the sibik with enthusiasm, hauling itself up wholly into Kit’s lap.

Kit laughed. “Okay. Do you know what share means?”

It eyed him. “Tell me?”

“It means you get some, and I get some.”

“That sounds good,” the sibik said. “Who gets more?”

Kit snickered, then shook his head. “We both get the same. That’s what sharing is.” At least most of the time, Kit thought. Certainly the definition broke down somewhat with Nita where Ben ‘n’ Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” ice cream was involved.

“Okay,” said the sibik, sounding just slightly regretful. “Please share the saltine crackers now.”

It was very demurely keeping its tentacles to itself, though they were twitching. There was no way Kit could delay rewarding such good behavior. “So this is how we do it,” he said. “I give you one. Then I give me one. And that’s the way it goes until we’re done and they’re all gone.”

“That will be sad,” said the sibik solemnly, its eyes not leaving the saltine package for a moment.

“Yes it will,” Kit said. He pulled the first cracker out and looked at it with a sigh. “Just so long as you’re clear that these are the very last saltines on this planet, and the next nearest ones are…”

“A long way away,” said the sibik.

“That’s right. So here.” He handed the sibik the first saltine.

It took it reverentially, stuffed it into that blunt-toothed, half-hidden eating orifice, and started crunching.

Kit took out the next one and crunched it up too, sighing just once at the thought of the ketchup which would not be going on any of these. Oh well, he thought. Mamvish’ll be putting that to good use. Some good use. One of these days, when all this was over, he was going to find out exactly what good use. I just hope it’s something that won’t make me need to reach for the brain bleach afterward.

“So,” Kit said. “Want another?”

“I would like another saltine please,” said the sibik.

“Your syntax is really improving, you know that?” Kit said as he pulled out another saltine.

“What’s syntax?” said the sibik as it reached out and took the cracker.

“The way you speak. Sort of.”

It stuffed the second cracker into the eating orifice and started crunching again. “All right,” the sibik said perfectly clearly.

“Interesting,” Kit said. “Whatever you use to talk, it’s not the mouth you eat with…” He had his next cracker, and looked out past the sibik toward the plain, trying to work out in his head approximately where he and Ronan had found this one’s people the other day. I could take the pad over instead of walking all that way, he thought. The manual will have rough coordinates for the edge of the encampment…

“Another please?”

“Oh yeah, sorry. Here.” Kit handed the sibik its next cracker while feeling faint amusement at the roles that the Powers that Be appeared to have dropped him into here. Official Shouter at Machinery, he thought, pulling out a cracker for himself. Provider of Probably Controlled Substances to Species Archivists. And Freelance Animal Control Officer and Rehomer. …For certain values of rehoming.

But that thought made Kit pause. This entire project—the whole business of rafting life away from a doomed world—was in its way a gigantic rehoming effort. If no one was paying attention to the effect it had on the pets, if everybody was concentrating on the dominant species, maybe that was reason enough for his presence here, gates or no gates. Even if I can only help one of them. ‘All is done for each,’ isn’t that the saying about wizardry?

And anyway, what makes me think I know what job’s most important for me here? Kit thought about the little moulting Tevaralti boy, desperate to have his lost pet back, overjoyed to have him in his arms again. If somebody had sent a wizard to help Ponch if he’d been in trouble when I was just a kid, I’d have thought that wizard was the most important one in the world… no matter what the wizard thought he was doing.

“You’re not eating yours,” said the sibik.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

“If you gave it to me,” the sibik said thoughtfully, “I could have more.”

More dog biscuits, said a familiar voice in Kit’s memory, yay!

Kit absently gave the cracker to the sibik, smiling slightly. Yet still he found himself wondering. He’s spoken to me before, often enough, through other people’s pets. Especially the doggy ones. These guys are doggy enough. Why’s he being so quiet? It was strange. Once Ponch had found out that he could communicate with Kit, when he was still a dog, it had been impossible to shut him up. Even now, when off about his newer, much larger business, he often found time to break through to Kit and have a word.

But not here, not now. Not directly.

Something’s definitely going on.

“You could let me have another more,” said the sibik pointedly.

“So I could,” Kit said, and handed the sibik another saltine to buy himself time to think.

Sometimes the Powers have refused to do anything but whisper when they didn’t dare discuss something in the open, Kit thought. In the Pullulus War, they couldn’t tell us about the Hesper. They could only hint and give us clues, because if we knew for certain who was coming, the Lone Power would’ve known what we knew, and would have moved against her. Not even the Winged Defender was sure what was going on until nearly the end.

Kit took a cracker for himself. But if the Powers could whisper… then the One could too. It, or one of Its avatars. Leaving the one who heard the whispers to work out what they meant, forge the connections: find the way through.

Pathfinder.

Kit ate his cracker and swallowed with some difficulty: his mouth was dry. He wished he could get up and fetch some water from his puptent, but he didn’t dare move. The sudden certainty of all this being intended had fallen across Kit’s mind like having a heavy wet coat dropped on him, and the effect was much the same: it made him shiver.

Yet after a moment he found himself sitting up straighter in response. He wasn’t in this alone. He had help: the very best help imaginable… even if for some reason that help wasn’t able to come out into the open and make itself available directly.

Now all he had to do was figure out exactly how to use it.

“Okay,” Kit said, “who’s ahead?”

“I am,” the sibik said. “You should take a more now.”

“Thank you,” Kit said, and had another cracker, while the sibik’s eyes all followed it with stark interest. When he finished the cracker, he said to the sibik, “Ready for another one?”

“Yes please.”

“Then here’s yours… and here’s mine.”

They ate their crackers together. “These are very good,” the sibik said.

“Yes they are,” Kit said, looking mournfully at the half-empty package. And soon I’ll be sitting here with a space octopus in my lap and no crackers left but Ritz. It was a bleak prospect. “Another?”

“Another more.”

“So you mean you want two.”

“I thought I said that.”

“Not exactly,” Kit said. “But here.” He gave the sibik two crackers, which it took from him each in a separate tentacle. Then it began regarding them alternately, unable to make up its mind which to eat first.

He couldn’t help snickering as the sibik abruptly shoved both the crackers into its eating orifice at once, with the result that crumbs started getting sprayed around again. “You’ve barely started working out how to talk,” Kit said; “learning how to count can probably wait until tomorrow.” Kit had another cracker himself. “Maybe we can get Nita over to tutor you. She’ll probably have you up to calculus by the end of the week…”

Dark eyes looked at him with interest. “What’s a calculus?”

“God, don’t ask,” Kit said.

They alternated crackers again a few times, until they were left looking at the last six in the package.

“Those are all there are?” the sibik said.

“Those are all,” Kit said.

“I am very sad,” said the sibik.

“So am I,” said Kit.

“Not because of the crackers.”

Add ‘Alien Pet Psychologist’ to the list, Kit thought. “Why are you so sad?”

“I couldn’t find them.”

The sorrow in its voice was unmistakable, and definitely had nothing to do with crackers. “Your people?” Kit said.

“My people. My person. He’s lost.”

“Well, this is the same problem you had yesterday, isn’t it?”

“No. That was just outside-smelling finding them. This is inside-smelling finding them.”

Kit held quite still.

“My person doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know where home is any more. And my person’s sires and dam are so very sad. Because everything’s ending.”

“I know,” Kit said softly.

“They came so they could see their friends one last time,” the sibik said. “The ones who’re going away, who aren’t going to end.”

Kit’s insides clenched with sorrow, for that was a thought that had occurred to him before: How many of those little campfires are hosting last meals? Some parts of a family who think it’s okay to go, and some who don’t?

Kit swallowed again. “Are you sad because you’re—” He had to say it: there was no point in not saying it, in this landscape full of thousands of people who were thinking it right this minute. “Because you’re going to die?”

“No!” the sibik said, and pulled its tentacles in around it. “Everything dies! I don’t mind dying, as long as it’s with him.”

The previous stab of pain was nothing compared to this one. And as if feeling it too, the sibik made the most pitiful small noise Kit thought he’d ever heard in his life, as if it wanted to cry but was holding it in. “But he doesn’t want to die. They don’t want to die. Yet they don’t want to leave either, they don’t feel like they can. And they’re scared, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Oh, baby,” Kit said, which was probably the least likely thing he’d ever imagined himself saying to a space octopus, and gathered it in and hugged it close. It threw all its arms around him and squeezed him desperately.

“Believe me, you’re not the only one who’s sad,” Kit said.

The sibik pulled itself away from him so it could angle its abdomen up and study him with those odd eyes. “Why are you sad?”

“It’s just—” Kit sighed and shook his head, and leaned back against the Stone Throne. “Maybe because I’m really, really frustrated and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The sibik cocked even more of its eyes at him. “What’s ‘frustrated’?”

“Upset at something that’s making me unhappy. Something I can’t change.”

“Why does it make you unhappy?”

Kit closed his eyes for a moment, all too willing to block it all out—the lights down by the patent gates and the hopeless glitter of the electronic campfires, the downward-crushing weight of Thesba hanging up there in the sky and waiting, waiting to fall. “It’s hard to explain.”

But the sibik was waiting too. Finally Kit opened his eyes again and looked down at the ridiculous tentacly thing in his lap. “My pop told me this story once and the other day I started thinking about it—”

“Your pop,” the sibik said, “is that like a sire?”

You get hurt sometimes, said a memory, a whisper: your sire and your dam and your littermates... That makes me sad.

“Yeah,” Kit said, and swallowed with slight difficulty. I am going to drink a whole bottle of water after this. But the connection, the connection was there right now, tenuous, maybe fragile. The water could wait.

“All right. What’s a story?”

“It’s telling how a thing happened once.” Kit laughed at himself. “This is isn’t even a story, it’s more of a joke…”

“What’s a joke?”

His laugh this time was more sardonic. “Me,” he said. “All of this. Might as well be a joke, ‘cause if we don’t laugh, we’re all going to cry.”

“What’s cry?” the sibik said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kit said. “I don’t think you’ve got the plumbing. Anyway, you comfy there?”

The sibik in his lap shifted a bit and wrapped some more tentacles around his legs. “Now I am.”

“Okay,” Kit said. “So once upon a time there was this guy—”

“What’s a guy?”

“A person,” Kit said. “A human being. One of my people.”

“All right.”

“So there was this guy, and he lived in a house not too far from a river—”

“What’s a house?”

Kit smiled, realizing that this was going to be one of those storytelling sessions. But he’d had enough of these with Ponch over the years to know that all you could do was just keep on answering the questions until the audience ran out of them. Sometimes it took a while.

“A house is a kind of building where you stay most of the time, eat and sleep and so on,” Kit said. “My people live in houses, in a lot of places.”

“Okay,” the sibik said. “I know what that is. My people had a house.”

Had, Kit thought, with yet another pang of sorrow. “And one time the weather got bad and it was going to rain a whole lot, and there was going to be a flood.”

There was no “What’s a flood?”, so Kit paused. “You know what a flood is?”

“A lot of water,” the sibik said, with profound distaste. “Everything floats away.”

“Okay, good, you get it. Well, when the people who know about weather realized that was going to happen, the local government put out notices on TV and the radio and the Internet telling everybody—”

“What’s a government?”

Kit could just hear some of the suggestions his pop would make. “Uh, the people in charge of making sure that the things people need to share work right.” At least that’s the theory.

“Like giving people food?”

“Uh, yeah, sometimes.”

“Good, I’m still hungry, may I have a cracker, please?”

“Aren’t we asking nicely,” Kit said. “Very good.” He fished out another saltine, which the sibik accepted gravely and stuffed into its eating orifice. Five crackers… “Anyway, the government sent messages to everybody saying that the rain was going to flood everything and they should leave and go up to high ground where the water wouldn’t reach.” He paused. “You with me so far?”

“I have been with you for some time,” said the sibik with a peculiar dignity; and Kit shivered with the thought that he might be hearing someone else whispering through the words.

“Right,” Kit said, his throat getting tight for a moment. He ahem-ed a little to clear it and went on. “Well, the guy we’re talking about heard the news, and he said to himself, ‘This sounds like it’s going to be really bad, this flood. But I trust God—’”

“What’s God?”

Kit laughed and covered his eyes. “Uh, yeah. You know about the One?”

The sibik actually drew away from him and stared at Kit in astonishment. “Of course.”

“Okay. God is the One, more or less. Or the other way around. Anyway, this guy said, ‘I trust God, God’ll keep me safe and see me through this.’ And then he felt better.”

“This would be a good time for another cracker,” the sibik said.

“Of course it would,” Kit said, and gave the sibik another, and looked sadly at the emptying package. Four…

“So then it started to rain,” Kit said. “And there was more and more water, and it got deeper and deeper. All the ground down by the river got flooded. And then water started rising up from where the river was, and flooding everything nearby. And pretty soon it rose up so high it was all around the guy’s house. And some of the people from the National Guard—those are some people whose job it is to protect other people in their area,” Kit added hurriedly, because he could feel the sibik twitching with the next question—“they drove by his house in a big vehicle. And one of them shouted to him, ‘Hey buddy, the water’s not gonna stop rising. So come on with us, jump in our truck and we’ll get you out of here!’ And the guy said, ‘No, it’s all right, God’s going to see me through this, I’m okay. You go ahead and help someone else who needs it.’ So when they realized they weren’t going to be able to get him to go with them, the National Guard people went away.”

“The crackers are going away too,” said the sibik, not entirely mournfully.

“Yeah, I see that,” Kit said, and gave the sibik another. Three… “So all that night the flood waters kept rising, and they rose so high that they came in the doors and the downstairs windows of the guy’s house, so that he had to go up to the second floor. And later that day some people came along who were from the Coast Guard. They usually take care of people who go out on the water on purpose. Now, though, because it was an emergency, they came along in a boat—” Kit paused. “You know what a boat is?”

“It goes on top of the water,” said the sibik. “My person has a small one he plays with.”

“Well, imagine a bigger one, like twice as long as this stone, okay?” Kit said, indicating the seat of the Stone Throne. “And maybe twice as wide, with room for people in it. So the Coast Guard people came and called to the guy in the house. They said, ‘Buddy, come on, the water’s going to be rising all night and all tomorrow and the day after; you can’t stay here or you’ll drown! Get in the boat and we’ll get you out of here.’ But when the guy looked at them, he thought, ‘I don’t know—this doesn’t look all that much like God saving me.’ So he called back to the Coast Guard folks from his upstairs window, and he said, ‘It’s okay, God’s going to see me through this, so I don’t need a lifeboat! You should go on ahead and help somebody else.’ And they couldn’t get him to come with them, so they revved up the motor of the boat and went away.”

“Like the crackers…”

Kit took the hint and gave the sibik another one. Two… “So then the water rose and rose even faster than it had before. And it got so high that it started coming into the man’s house through the second-floor windows. So to get away from the water, the guy climbed up on his roof—”

“What’s a roof?”

“Uh, the top of his house.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, he sat there for a while, and late in the day he heard something noisy in the sky, and he looked up and saw a helicopter coming. That’s a flying craft,” Kit said, feeling the sibik start twitching again. “It came from the local TV station—”

“What’s a TV station?”

Kit covered his eyes for a moment. “Something you don’t need to know about. Have a cracker.” One… “Anyway, a man from the TV station leaned out of the helicopter and yelled to the guy who was sitting on top of his house, ‘Buddy, we thought everybody was evacuated from here! The water’s going to keep rising, so here, climb up this ladder and we’ll get you out of here!’ But the guy said, ‘No, it’s okay, I have faith in God, He’s going to see me safely through this! You go ahead and help someone else if they need it.’ And they couldn’t convince him to come with them, so the helicopter flew away.”

The sibik sat looking at the last remaining cracker. Then it said, “What happened to Buddy next?”

Kit sighed. “Well, the water rose and rose, and it rose over the top of the guy’s house, so he had to swim away. But he couldn’t keep swimming forever, so finally he sank in the water and he drowned. And after he was dead, there he was all of a sudden standing before the One. And he was very disappointed: the guy, I mean. He said to God, ‘You know, I had faith in you! I waited for you to save me, to see me through! What went wrong?’”

Kit snorted softly, partly because his Pop had at this point in the story. “And the One said to the guy, “Well, I sent you a truck. I sent you a boat. I sent you a helicopter. How obvious do I have to be?…”

The sibik rustled. The sound might have been laughter.

On the other hand, Kit thought, it might have more to do with the last cracker— On which all the sibik’s eyes were presently fixed.

He sighed, pulled the cracker out of the cellophane sleeve, and handed it over to the sibik.

The sibik munched it up. “And then what happened?” it said.

Kit stared at it for a moment… then began to laugh helplessly as he looked out toward the plain and the gating complex. “I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly. It’s how what’s going on here might end, if somebody doesn’t do something!” Kit rubbed his face, feeling his eyes start to sting again. “And that would be really sad, because whether everybody’s of one mind or not, when it comes down to dying or living, in a situation like this, life is better!”

And his shoulders sagged and the breath went out of him. “Life’s just better,” he said, almost inaudibly.

A moment or so later he realized the sibik was looking at him very intently. “What?” Kit said.

The sibik was regarding the cellophane that was tightly crumpled up in Kit’s fist. “Is that good to eat?”

Kit stared at the cellophane. “Uh, not for me. You want to try it?” He held it out.

The sibik took it from him in two tentacles and introduced it carefully to its eating stoma, nibbled at it. Then it said, very clearly, “Bleah,” and spat it out.

All Kit could do was laugh.

“Can you take me home to my person now, please?” the sibik said.

Kit glanced at the gate-monitoring matrix display in his manual. All was quiet, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t do maintenance on the gates from anywhere in this neighborhood. “Sure, why not?” he said. “Up you come.”

He boosted the sibik up onto his shoulders and let it hang onto him with its tentacles. “Don’t strangle me again, now!” Kit said as it settled in place. “I breathe through this throat.”

“What’s a throat?” the sibik said.

Kit sighed. “Yeah, that would’ve been the cause of that problem…”

It was just then that Cheleb popped out of his puptent, glanced around with an air of concern, and spotted Kit. “Cousin, how long been here? Didn’t Djam say to wake me? Shouldn’t be on shift now!”

“Chel, don’t worry about it, everything’s all screwed up since last night,” Kit said. “And you had three shifts one after another yesterday, nearly. Djam probably just forgot to mention. But would you take over monitoring now? I have to take Wandering Boy here back to his people.”

“Feel free,” Cheleb said, eyeing the sibik with some concern. “Surprised to see him back.”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Crackers.”

“Crackers?” the sibik said brightly.

“Not the slightest chance,” said Kit. “You are going home.”

In the event, the sibik’s second rehoming was quite anticlimactic. Its young Tevaralti, whose name was Besht, was asleep when Kit arrived; it was possible that he’d already been asleep before the sibik had left. The youngster’s parents, when called to the front of the large communal tent structure they were sharing with fifty or so others of the transient Tevaralti, had certainly been surprised to see Kit again, and more than happy (though with some scolding of the erring pet) to take the sibik off Kit’s hands. However, the slighter-built of the three parents—possibly the mama, though Kit wasn’t sure about that; he might have it backwards—gave Kit a look that suggested she (if it was a she) might be about to scold him, too. “It keeps asking us for ‘crackers’—!”

“I’m so sorry about that,” Kit said. “I’m sure he’ll get over it…” And he said dai stihó to them all, and got away before anyone started bringing up any more embarrassing details that were somehow going to be his fault and that he was going to wind up having to deal with.

The long walk back to the stone circle left him feeling pleasantly tired, and what with one thing and another he was weary enough when he returned to simply say to Cheleb, “I’ll see you in the morning.” Kit took himself straight back to his puptent, got undressed, stretched out on his bed with a pile of pillows behind him and a bottle of water and some of Ronan’s beef jerky, and lay there for maybe an hour blissfully doing nothing more challenging then eating and drinking and reading The Eagle of the Ninth, letting the stress slowly drain out of his mind and his muscles. As he started to feel drowsy, Kit interrupted this process only long enough to reach for his phone and text his pop.

BUSINESS AS USUAL TODAY, OR AS UNUSUAL. WATCHED ALIEN MOVIE WITH WORK BUDDY WHO LOOKS LIKE CHEWBACCA, VERY INTERESTING CULTURAL EXPERIENCE BUT NO ROOM TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU HERE, WILL WAIT TILL I GET HOME. THINK GEORGE LUCAS HAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, THOUGH. RETURNED LOST PET TO OWNER AGAIN. ACTUAL LOSTNESS OF PET IN QUESTION, THIS GUY JUST THINKS I’M A SOFT TOUCH—

Kit was tempted to mention Ponch, but he paused and then didn’t do it. It wasn’t actually as if something whispered in his ear, don’t, but after a second the idea simply began to seem somehow unwise. Finally Kit just added to the text, NIGHT NIGHT, and hit “send.”

He dropped the phone on the floor beside him and picked up the manual, once more paging through to Nita’s profile. It was grayed out, and simply said, Scheduled rest period, unavailable; estimated time of next availability, six hours.

Sounds about right, Kit thought. “Wake me up when she comes online, would you?” he said to the manual.

The page grayed down further; a small box appeared saying CONDITIONAL ALARM NOTED: OPERATIONAL.

“Thanks,” Kit said to the manual, and dropped it on the floor beside the phone. He picked up Eagle again and started reading, but realized a short time later that the reading had been broken by a couple of those “long blinks” that are actually five or ten minutes apart. He closed the book and dropped it on top of his manual; then reached down to flip Eagle’s back cover open and see when the library wanted it back. FEBRUARY 3—

Whoops, Kit thought. Really overdue now. Except that when I get back with it, it won’t be… He let the cover fall shut again and flopped back among the pillows. “Lights down,” he said in the Speech.

Down they went, and he was asleep in minutes.

NINE

Monday

Minutes later, it seemed, Kit’s eyes snapped open and he was staring at the ceiling. It was very strange. The waking position, the lighting, were all nearly identical to yesterday’s. Yesterday might almost never have happened.

Kit lay there blinking as he realized that what he’d just had was his least favorite kind of sleep—the kind that left you feeling like you hadn’t had any at all. He rubbed his face and moaned, feeling somehow vaguely cheated. It also didn’t help that he had to go to the bathroom really badly.

He got up and put on his clothes, and once again made his way out to the short-transport pad, where he jumped to Ronan’s gates, used the toilets there, and ducked into the shower. As he came out, he ran into Ronan strolling across the plaza. “How are things going over here?”

“Transit numbers are down a bit this morning,” Ronan said. “Some of the transport streams are beginning to slow a bit. Looks like we’ve actually crossed the three-quarter stage for the people who are going to go, so the upstream feeds are cutting back a bit on the inbound traffic.” He looked across at the transients’ camp with a sorrowful expression. “Meanwhile, what’s going on with you? You look terrible.”

“I had a weird night,” Kit said. “You know how that is when you fall asleep and when you wake up again it’s as if it’s only five minutes later? Or not even five minutes later. And it just doesn’t seem fair somehow.”

“I know all about that,” Ronan said. “I had one of those earlier the week. Nasty buggers, always takes me another night’s sleep to recover. And God forbid you get two nights like that in a row. You might as well just be shot and put out of your misery right there.” He shook his head. “How’s the beef jerky?”

“That was really good,” Kit said. “If you’ve got any more…”

“Running a bit low, but I can spare you some.”

“You are a true friend,” Kit said.

“Don’t forget handsome and a devil with the ladies,” Ronan said.

Kit laughed at him. “Like you let anybody forget it,” he said. “I’ll see you later on.”

He made his way back to the short-transport pad and then to the stone circle, feeling better every minute, in fact almost human again by the time he got back there. There was just something about having had a shower, especially one of the extremely aggressive Tevaralti ones, that made Kit feel altogether better.

Yet he couldn’t quite get rid of the feeling that something else was going on too. Something had shifted, and Kit had no way of describing to himself just what that was. It was inexplicable, the feeling: not as if something was about to happen, but as if it already had. There was a lightness about it, like what he’d felt on seeing Thesba not in the sky. Yet there Thesba was—it could be seen setting in the west, bloated by atmospheric magnification but paled by being up in daylight and so close to the horizon—and he still felt light.

Reaction, Kit thought. Or something. Because actually everything’s the same… He looked across the field to where the transients’ encampment was right where it had been, a vague blot of dark almost-unseen movement.

He shook his head and made his way back to the Stone Throne, where Djam had his manual interface spread out as usual. When Kit sat down by him, Djam said, “You know, after what we watched yesterday… I had this idea.” He actually looked slightly guilty.

“Yeah?” Kit said, mystified by the apparent guilt.

“Well,” said Djam. “There’s this version of The Faded Liver that… well, a lot of people don't know about it, because it's kind of controversial. Maybe even a bit scandalous.” His gaze shifted briefly from side to side, as if he expected some of those people to turn up right now.

Kit looked at him. “So?”

“It's like this,” said Djam. “In this version of Liver? Everybody dies… and they don't come back.” He laughed nervously. “Isn't that edgy?”

Kit shook his head in wonder. “Groundbreaking,” he said. “So when can we see it? Doesn’t seem to be much else going on here today…”

“I’ll set it up for us in a while,” Djam said. “Have you eaten yet?”

“No, not really. I had so many crackers last night… I'm still working them off.” He sighed. “And then again, if my mama heard me saying that, first she'd yell at me for the crackers, and then she’d yell at me for not having any protein. And if I go home looking like I’ve lost weight or something, I’m never gonna hear the end of it. What’ve you got that has some protein?”

“Let me go see. I’ve still got plenty of things left over from the—what was it you called? Buffet?”

They had breakfast together, Djam fetching out some of his people’s more interesting processed foods. “I can't believe these are all vegetables,” Kit said, shaking his head. “It's a shame we can't get these on Earth. So many of our vegetables are—” He waved a hand. “Boring.” He sighed. “Or maybe that’s just the way my culture prepares them or something. I should look into the way other people do it. Maybe I’m missing something.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine a place where food doesn’t taste good,” Djam said. “The two concepts would seem to be mutually exclusive. You’re going to have to let me try some of the stuff you don’t like and find out for myself.”

“I await your opinion on broccoli,” Kit said. “I know you’re enthusiastic, but it’d take somebody from another planet to be that enthusiastic.”

After breakfast, or probably it was more like brunch, the two of them settled in to watch the new version of The Faded Liver. Kit had to admit that it was a shade darker than the more classic one, though there was still a general sense that the actors, and the writers of the entertainment, didn’t entirely believe in death and weren’t sure how to handle it as a permanent phenomenon.

They were eventually distracted from this, though, by a general trend that Djam noticed late that afternoon. It hadn’t been anything that triggered any of the alarms in their matrix-analysis system, but Djam had a sharp eye for small variations in what was going on with the gates. “Kiht,” he said, “are you seeing this?”

Kit leaned over the readout to see if he could tell what the problem was. “Looks like the numbers passing through are… dropping off some? Ronan mentioned to me that he’d seen something like that this morning. Maybe somebody upstream doing some maintenance or something.”

“I could believe that on one gate,” Djam said, “but on three? And they usually tell us if they’re going to slow down the throughput to tweak something.”

Cheleb had emerged, and wandered over to look over their shoulders at the readouts. He shook his head. “Starting to run out of people to transport,” Cheleb said sorrowfully. “Had to start happening eventually. Job getting finished. No surprise there, I suppose; numbers were straightforward enough. Move fifteen, twenty million people per day, eventually even here start running out of them.”

“I didn’t look at the daily bulletin with the project progress report this morning,” Kit said. “Just went straight off for my shower. As of yesterday they had moved…”

“Something like a hundred and ten million,” Djam said. “They were expecting to move what looked like the final ten or fifteen million today and tomorrow. After that…”

“Some gates supposed to be left in place and operational,” Cheleb said. “Hoping transient encampments’ populations might change mind at last minute.” Hae shrugged, a rather hopeless gesture. “Not much chance of that, or so seems.”

They all stood a while looking at the gate management matrix. Slowly the bar graphs for transport numbers began to edge upwards again. Djam shook his head. “No,” he said, “the numbers are coming up again. A blip.” He sighed. “Probably it was one of those load-balancing things they were doing in the first couple of days, before you got here. Lots of flow without warning, then it would back down…”

They all looked sorrowfully at the graphs, and then Djam sat back down on the Stone Throne and picked up his reading again. “So,” Cheleb said to Kit, “See he’s getting you into his entertainments now. Still waiting for explanation why shouldn’t have a look at first entertainment in long series. Friend was very emphatic the other night.”

Kit rubbed his face and laughed, looking out sadly into the afternoon light. “If I show you that thing,” he said, “it’s just going to make me angry.”

“If distracts you from being sad,” Cheleb said, “might not be a bad thing.”

“Oh God,” Kit said. “All right! On your own scaly head be it.”

It did make Kit angry: incredibly so, as he hated some of the characters in the first sequence of the movies with a pure, white-hot flame. When he was home, Carmela knew that the quickest way to get Kit angry about almost anything was to start imitating Jar Jar Binks. Tonight, though, even though it made Kit angry, there was a strange kind of relief in it. The old familiar anger was distracting him from his own foolish hopes that something that couldn’t really happen here might’ve started happening anyway.

So he willingly lost himself as best he could in the intensely frustrating and unsatisfying display that was Phantom Menace. The only things making it tolerable were Djam’s delighted scorn—he described Qui-Gon Jinn as “a wise man who’s wise about everything but himself” and “the least effective wizard ever seen”—and Cheleb’s unremitting mockery of the Gungans and the pod race. (“Child only successful because machines love him as much as they love you!”)

It got dark, and Thesba rose over them, and things might’ve gone on in that mode well into the night, if Cheleb hadn’t gone into haes puptent at one point to bring out some of a sour-sweet fizzy drink that haes people favored, and then paused before sitting down on the Stone Throne with the other two. For some moments hae stood looking out across the plain.

“Come on, Cheleb, I’m dry here!” Djam said.

But Cheleb’s response was to stand there a little longer, and then say, as if hae doubted the evidence of haes own eyes, “…Fewer campfires out there than last night, cousin? Check me on this.”

Djam got up and went over to where Cheleb was, between two of the standing stones. He peered out into the dark. “It’s hard to tell,” Djam said.

“Broadcast power source over there having problems, perhaps?”

Kit looked up. “No,” he said “that would show on the monitor readout. Remember the other day? We saw that right away.”

And suddenly Kit’s mouth was going dry again. He reached for his manual, started flipping pages.

“Another blip?” Djam said.

Kit found his own gate monitoring readout, studied it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Something’s wrong with the numbers.”

“What?” said Cheleb.

“They’re…” Kit peered at his manual for a few moments. “Show me what yesterday’s minima and maxima were like?” he said to it. “Thanks.”

The display altered, steadied down. No question, yesterday’s numbers were far lower. This morning’s had been similar. But now— Now they were scaling up again. They were heading for local throughput numbers that looked nearly ten percent higher than they had been.

“We should call Shask,” Djam said, that being their upstream Advisory, the Tevaralti wizard responsible for the management of the whole transport tree that culminated in their terminus gate. “Make sure this isn’t something going wrong.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. To his own surprise, his hands were shaking. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. “Djam,” he said, “call him. If this is just us, I want to know.”

But it wasn’t just them.

All over the planet, wherever gate teams had transient camps nearby, the wizards managing them were seeing similar spikes in their local transport numbers. The increase had started very slowly, just that morning, early in the day, and had been growing steadily all day ever since. The Transients were picking up their belongings and had begun passing through the gates to the refuge worlds.

Most of them, it seemed, hadn’t made any particular fuss about it; they had simply moved through the nearest gates to those gates’ next destinations. Only a very few, late in the day, had spoken to the wizards and support staff at the gate complexes proper; and those who’d taken the time had simply said, “It’s all right, we’re of one mind now.” As the upstream supervisors started collecting reports to analyze them, and Kit and Djam and Cheleb, like many other wizards around the planet, read the incoming data and tried to understand it, one report jumped out and caught Kit’s attention. “Our sibik said we had to go,” one Tevaralti sire had said. “That the One had said that life was better. And so of course, then, we had to go.”

When he read that, Kit went hot and cold with terror and delight.

It did happen! he thought. It couldn’t happen until someone who was humanoid helped them make the connection. Someone who was a different kind of humanoid, and had a connection to a sibik….

…and to someone else.

For quite some time Kit was practically speechless with relief. Gradually that state began to shift as the evening went on and Thesba left the sky, and he and Djam and Cheleb gazed out into the plain, watching the campfires very slowly continuing to wink out. They wouldn’t all go out at once, Kit knew. But he grinned helplessly into the dark and thought, Tomorrow night, maybe. Or the day after. They’ll all be gone then.

And if his shiftmates caught sight of the wetness that once or twice went running down their strange Earth- companion’s face, neither of them said a thing.

That evening, along with the usual daily bulletins from the intervention supervisors regarding the progress of the population transfer, all kinds of other announcements came down, mostly to do with aperture-size increases to accommodate the extra outbound flow from the transients’ camps. Then one came down that was so unexpected, wizards all across the planet stared at it dumbfounded. And in many places—at least where their cultures allowed for such reactions—they began to cheer.

Word came down from Tevaral’s Planetary, and from the executive committee handling business for the interconnect group on Tevaralti, that the upstream gates were going to start to be decommissioned: that traffic from the less active gate trees was already low enough that their transport load could be transferred to others; that nearly seven-eighths of the Tevaralti species had been successfully moved to the refuge worlds, and with the swiftly-increasing mobilization of the remaining fifteen percent or so, the true end of this intervention was in sight. No one had ever expected such an announcement to be made.

But then no one had been prepared for the attitudinal shift among the transients, or the way it had swept around the world. Nearly a million of them had already departed. Millions of others were in the process of being transferred to higher-capacity gates through which they could be moved more quickly. The transients’ encampments all over the planet were shutting down one by one.

Cheleb volunteered to take the late shift that night, claiming that hae was too excited to sleep. Kit was just weary, and was glad to let haem take it. But he had enough energy to text his Pop before he collapsed on his bed.

BUSY TODAY. GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING. BETTER THAN WE HOPED FOR. SO TIRED, NO TIME TO TELL YOU MORE, WILL TELL YOU ALL SOON. THINK WE MAY BE HERE ONLY ANOTHER DAY OR TWO. MAYBE NOT EVEN THAT. LOVE YOU BOTH, MORE SOON.

TEN

Tuesday

As it turned out, it wasn’t even that long.

Kit woke up and felt something so very strange when he did: the relief of that feeling of irremediable unease that he’d felt here since he came. It wasn’t that he’d gotten used to it. It was that it was gone. The context had shifted. It was still a terrible and tragic thing, what was happening here: but the best result that could be found was apparently now in train. Someone else knew that. Someone had communicated that feeling to him.

And it felt incredible.

He had barely even had time to shower and come back and eat breakfast before word came through to all their manuals or other instrumentalities that Djam and Cheleb and Kit were all being relieved by a single two-wizard team from elsewhere in the Interconnect Project, and were being released from their drafted-in status. If they chose to remain, they could, but they were no longer needed on this gate. Its upstream tree was being decommissioned, and the gate itself was expected to be closed down within the next thirty hours.

This too had been expected… but nothing like so soon. “Good news for us,” Cheleb said to Djam and Kit in the early-evening light as hae peeled his puptent’s interface off the stone where it had been anchored. “Got the job done. Can go home with a clean conscience.”

“But more than that,” Djam said. “I don’t know how closely you two looked at the statistical analysis that came down earlier today. The thing that started, the change in the numbers? It started here. It started yesterday morning, and began to spread.”

And both of them looked thoughtfully at Kit.

Kit’s problem was that at this point there was no way to be sure of anything. He had his suspicions, very strong suspicions, but he refused to take credit for what had been occurring around them until he had some kind of confirmation that the opinion was justified. “What?” Kit said. “Why would this necessarily have anything to do with me?”

“Because you were the one who was always doing something different,” Djam said. “Entertainment. Strange ideas about food.”

“Feeding sibiks,” Cheleb said. “Repeatedly. Thought you were a bit eccentric at first. Have to wonder now whether you were onto something.”

Kit wanted to believe it was true. But without more data… “Look,” he said. “If what’s been happening is something to do with me, then… I’m really happy. But I’m just one more wizard doing my job. You did your jobs too. Without you two, maybe I wouldn’t have had time to do what I did… assuming I did anything. Maybe what I did wouldn’t have been possible without you two.”

“Maybe we were emplaced here,” Djam said, “to make it possible for you to do what you did. Whatever that was.”

“If that’s true,” Kit said “then it’s as much your success as mine. Don’t go handing me credit that’s partly yours.”

Djam was looking at his manual interface. He pulled it out and let it snap back into the silver rod that housed it. “Pad’s been programmed and it’s waiting for us,” he said. “They’re taking the gates off-line until the decommissioning team comes through.”

The three of them turned to look at into the plain and saw it happening, what they had never yet seen, any of them—the space between the spinney of gate standards suddenly going empty and showing nothing but the further plain beyond.

“So where to now?” Kit said, as the three of them walked together toward the short-transport pad.

“Reception center,” Cheleb said. “Then—” he grinned. “Home. Unexpectedly happy ending. Some celebration.” Hae poked Kit as they jumped up onto the pad together. “Probably not enough entertainment to match quality of recent offerings.”

A few moments later they were all in the reception area together. It was astonishing how empty it looked by comparison to the bustle and crush of the place when Kit had arrived. There were only a few Tevaralti wandering around now, taking care of whatever last-minute administrative tasks were their responsibility; all the rest of the people in it were wizards of other species making their way to outbound gates and off planet. Most specifically, though, the pressure-cooker feeling of a week ago was gone. There was still a sense of sorrow, of something sad coming to an inevitable end. But it had changed. Though the world was ending, it was doing so with much less tragedy than had been anticipated.

Kit and Djam and Cheleb stood there for a moment looking at each other a bit strangely, all somewhat at a loss. None of them had been expecting to say goodbye quite this soon, or under circumstances so much more positive than anyone had anticipated for the end of this intervention. Finally, Kit just stuck out an arm to each of them, and had it grasped, hand-to-elbow, in the way that so many humanoids did when saying hello or goodbye. “Cousins,” Kit said. “When you’ve had a chance to recover, come to Earth and visit!”

“Have to,” Cheleb said, grinning. “Too much culture to investigate.”

“And someone’s got to keep you eating right,” Djam said. “Anyway, I never did get enough of those saltines.” He bubbled softly. “The makers are going to get some great publicity off this. The Snack That Saved A Species…”

“Not all of it,” Kit said in protest.

“Save a single being,” Cheleb said, “in the One’s eyes, supposedly like saving the world entire.” Hae shrugged. “Wouldn’t start quibbling over numbers with the One who invented them. Only one result looks possible…”

Kit grinned at him. “There’s never any arguing with you, is there?” Kit said.

“Not by any reasoning being,” Cheleb said, smirking.

“I think you need to meet my sister,” Kit said. “Djam—”

They hugged. “If she’s not interested in him,” Djam said, “ask her if she’d like to date a Wookiee’s cousin.”

“Oh God,” Kit said, imagining what kind of crush Carmela might attach to an alien with beautiful, soft, fluffy fur. “I’ll have to get back to you on that. Djam, go well!” He looked at Cheleb. “And both of you, stay in touch!”

“Have to,” Cheleb said as the two of them turned off toward their own homeward gates. “Without you, won’t have the slightest idea what to make of Attack of the Clones.”

Kit snickered, watching them go. Then, for a few moments, he just stood there and let it all sink in.

It worked, he thought. It did work…

“So,” said Nita’s voice from behind him, “you took long enough to get here.”

“Been waiting long?” Kit said as she came up beside him.

Nita shook her head and took his elbow to guide him down and over to one spread of hexes, where a very large saurian and a single Tevaralti were waiting for them. It was Mamvish, of course, and beside her, golden-feathered, Hesh the Planetary of Tevaral.

Sweat started popping out on Kit. “Am I in trouble?”

“I think exactly the opposite,” Nita said. “Come on, stop freaking.”

Hesh was standing there in typical Tevaralti dress, one of those net-like robes that let the feathers stick out through the netting. “This is he?” he said to Mamvish.

“This is he,” Mamvish said.

“Is it Christopher?”

Kit swallowed. “Kit, actually.”

Hesh erected his head-crest at Kit in what Kit knew was a gesture of congratulation. “We’ve been continuing to crunch the numbers,” he said, “and I thought it was only right to confirm to you before you left that whatever action it was you took, that action was what began the movement of those of my people who had elected to remain behind.”

“I told a sibik a story,” Kit said.

“Whatever the details were,” Hesh said, “that story spread. It spread the way data spreads from sibik to sibik. It spread through scent trails, it spread through contact, it spread through their symbiotic/empathic links. And as it spread among them, it spread along the sibiks’ links to their owners. Then it started spreading along our own links among families and clan-groups and nation-groups, making its way among those of us who until then hadn’t shared the perception that rescue wasn’t a violation of their single-mindedness. They were exposed to the concept, as if from within them, that what was happening was another way of being of one mind.”

Kit stood there shaking as he started to understand. I was a vector, he thought. An infection, a way to spread a message. Or else the sibik was… or the one who was inside the sibik was. He rubbed his face, briefly overwhelmed. Or both of us together.

“If that message had come to the uncertain ones any other way, from the outside, it wouldn’t have worked,” Hesh said. “But because it came this way, from their own pets, along our own symbiotic and empathic linkages—along a wholly trusted connection, from our oldest companions in this world and with unprecedented power—those of our people who had previously felt themselves held away from this rescue were now able to accept that it was meant for them too.” Hesh let out a long, shaking breath. “And now we can all be saved.”

“I’m,” Kit said, and had to stop for a moment; he was reeling. “I’m really glad.”

“We will, of course,” Hesh said, rather more drily, “need a writeup from you on exactly what happened, or what you think happened, on your side.”

Kit laughed. Why wasn’t I expecting that? “Sure,” he said. “Would a couple of days from now be okay?”

Hesh twitched his crest in agreement. “That’s soon enough, I would say.”

“And in the meantime… Well, we know that Life usually finds a way,” Mamvish said, and grinned at Kit with all her teeth showing—not something you saw often, and always a good sign. “But sometimes it has help.”

“That’s what wizards are for,” Hesh said. “You did that, and did us proud. Cousin, for all our people, all the Tevaralti across all our new homes: our thanks to you, now and forever. So go—and go very, very well.”

Kit went away from that conversation very much in the mode of someone who is not going to be able, for a long time, to get his mind wrapped around the concept that he has just saved fifteen million lives. But it was them too, he kept thinking. It was Djam; it was Cheleb; it was Neets, and Ronan, and Dairine. It was Tom, and Carl, and everybody who put me in the place where I needed to be to make this difference. It was all of us. And most especially, it was Ponch.

“Cut it out,” Nita said as they headed for their hexes.

He looked at her in surprise. “What?”

“I can just hear you trying to make it smaller, what you did. Stop it,” she said. “Just let it in. You did a huge thing. Maybe this was more… I don’t know: personal than some of the stuff we’ve done? Fine. And more in your face. Just leave it alone until you can cope with it.”

“You are so smart,” Kit said softly.

“Takes one to know one,” said Nita. “Come on!”

Their hexes for the Crossings were called, and they headed over for them. There was no rush this time, no crush of wizards coming through behind them in haste. A lot of people had left already. Those who were leaving now weren’t in a rush. For the moment, for at least the next thirty-plus hours, the “weather report” for Thesba was relatively calm. Many more wizards had been added to the team tasked with keeping it from disintegrating; those others who were leaving, decommissioning gates or shutting down other services, could safely take their time.

There was a multispecies sanitary facility nearby, and as they passed it Kit said, “Just two minutes…”

“Should’ve gone before you left,” Nita said and snickered.

Kit ducked into the facility, used it—because it made sense: sometimes it could be an awfully long walk to one in the Crossings—and then pulled out his phone one last time.

WE’RE DONE HERE. LOTS TO TELL YOU, BUT I’M NOT GOING TO DO IT NOW. EVERYTHING’S GREAT. ON MY WAY HOME, SEE YOU SOON. ALSO: PLEASE TELL ME THAT THERE ARE SALTINES. AND TELL MAMA SHE’S GOING TO NEED TO BUY MORE KETCHUP.

He hit “send” and hurried out to the hex rosette again. The information standard on one of the hexes was already running a countdown, and Nita was standing there, arms folded, looking a touch impatient. Kit trotted over to her and turned around inside the hex to look his last on Tevaral. Above them, through the building’s clear ceiling, Thesba burned pale in a bright noon sky as the herald-standard counted down the seconds till their gate went patent.

Four: three: two: one…

“Last one off the planet,” Nita said softly as they looked their last on Tevaral, “turn out the lights…”

And the momentary darkness of gate transport fell over them, putting the lights out.

ELEVEN

Wednesday

Some while later they were standing in line near the 400 hexes in the Crossings, waiting to catch one of the dedicated gate hexes back to Grand Central. There the local gating staff were waiting to process them through the locally anchored timeslide that would return Earth-based interveners who’d needed a timeslide to their departure time on February 2nd.

…Or at least Kit was standing in line at the moment. He was holding Nita’s place, as she’d gone off to the various-kinds-of-ladies’ room.

“Penny for them,” said the voice behind him.

Kit turned and saw Tom there, in his winter jacket with a backpack over his shoulder. “Hi. …Uh, sorry, what?”

“You’re looking thoughtful. Or maybe it’s just fatigue.” Tom yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Wouldn’t be just you. This has been a real slog.”

“Maybe you’re just not used to going out on errantry like the rest of us,” Kit said with a grin.

“Hey now,” Tom said, and gave him a mock-warning look. “…But seriously: I know that expression. What’s on your mind?”

“Well,” Kit said. “I was talking to one of the Fourth…”

“Or possibly more than one of them,” Tom said. “Difficult to tell, I imagine. How did that go?”

“Like you suggested,” Kit said. “Weirdly.”

“But something came of it.”

“Maybe,” Kit said. “I’d be happier if I understood just what. Or how.”

“Tell me about it,” Tom said with a sigh. “The story of all our lives…”

But Kit took Tom at his word for the moment, and told him about his conversation with the Fourth. Tom listened to the details without reaction, and finally shook his head. “So?” he said at last.

“So the question is… how did it know what it knew? This multidimensional thing they’ve got—does it mean they can see ahead in time somehow?”

“More like ‘ahead in space’, actually,” Tom said. “If I understand it right. Which I may not.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “But the two get so tangled up. Time’s such an odd thing… So malleable, some ways, even though people tend to think of it as immutable. There are so many ways the natural universe twists it around. It’s easy to forget that every time we look up at the sky, we’re looking back in time. Eight minutes, for the Sun; hours, days, for the outer planets. Years, for the stars… hundreds of years, thousands. Time and our perceptions are always messing with each other. Add other universes to the mix, and our intersections with them, and things get even odder. Then add wizardry, and shake…” He shrugged. “Time’s arrow may be in flight, but when it gets sucked into a tornado, who knows where it’ll come down?”

Kit blinked. “Want to mix a few more metaphors in there?”

Tom grinned. “I’ll work on that. But you know, causality can be as much an illusion as time, in some situations. This might be one.”

He moved forward with Kit as the line shuffled forward. “And whether you like it or not, you’re the star of the hour,” Tom said. “While they’ll be debating the actual mechanism for a while, it’s plain where and when the change started: where you were. The timeline of increased gate accesses, in particular, starts spiking soon after you returned little Besht’s pet the second time. Then the ripples start to spread.” He shrugged. “You can’t argue with the stats. So?”

“I told it a story,” Kit said. “Or I told Ponch a story, and he passed it on.”

“Must have been some story,” Tom said. “Care to share?”

So Kit repeated it for him. Tom was quiet for a while, and then just said, “Interesting. Not so much a joke, though. A parable. Those tend to have a certain punch.”

“Um,” Kit said, and considered that for a moment.. “Okay.”

“And the other party wasn’t just your dog… not that you don’t know that… but an aspect of the One. Getting a bit theoretical—” Hands in the small of his back, Tom stretched. “It’s not like the One isn’t paying attention to all of us all the time. That’s what It’s there for, apparently. Or, if you need another take on it, that’s what we’re here for. To be given attention to. You, however… have a lot more of the attention of one of Its aspects than is possibly strictly usual. And every now and then, if the right set of circumstances come together in the right order and the right shape, if all the pieces of the puzzle snap together correctly… unusual results can occur. Extremely good results, you’d have to admit.”

“Okay,” Kit said. He wasn’t sure he knew how he felt about any of this just yet. He shook his head. “It’s just that it was, I don’t know… Such a little thing.”

Tom gave him a look. “There are no little things,” he said. “Only things whose full relevance hasn’t yet become plain. Give it time.” And he glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which—” He patted Kit on his shoulder. “They’re calling my gate. See you at home.”

And he was off.

And when Kit and Nita caught their own gate, maybe twenty minutes later, and got into Grand Central and the shielded end of Platform 23, they found that the reverse timeslide had already been implemented for them. It was ten minutes after their initial departure time from GCT.

Kit stared at his watch. “This is so weird. It does not at all feel like it, but it’s Wednesday again.”

“And you still have a test on Friday.”

“I was hoping you would wait at least five minutes before reminding me of that,” Kit said. “Five minutes?! …But no.”

“And I am completely shattered,” Nita said in horrified realization. “Why am I feeling it all now? I was fine five minutes ago…”

“Five minutes ago,” Kit said, “tomorrow wasn’t a school day.”

“Ow,” Nita said. “Revenge. You are so mean to me.”

“You started it…”

“No I didn’t.” She sighed. “Anyway, it’s timeslide backlash. We’ve had it before. Just not when we weren’t also completely wrecked by other things.”

“Speak for yourself,” Kit said.

“I am. As usual. …But you know what I really want before I crash?”

“Tell me,” Kit said, as they walked around toward the protected transport area.

“Pointlessly crunchy chocolate cereal with no nutritive value.”

“Go for it. All I want is some saltines.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that? Never mind. Let’s go.”

Kit had almost forgotten how good it felt to be free to do a beam-me-up spell. Moments later they popped out in Nita’s favored landing spot out in the sassafras-shielded part of her back yard. Within a few minutes after that Nita was having her cereal in a house that was blessedly quiet, as her pop was at work and Dairine wasn’t back yet. Kit waited only long enough to see that she was sitting down, as he could tell she was fading already.

“My folks are waiting,” Kit said. “I should go.”

“Oh God,” Nita moaned, dropping her head onto the table beside the cereal bowl. “Tomorrow really is a school day. I hate this!”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Look, you really are wrecked. So am I.” He reached out and rubbed her arm. “See you tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah.”

Kit walked home and found his mama and pop standing in the kitchen, looking expectantly at the back door. Kit looked at them blearily. It’s so weird, he thought. It feels like I left them standing here a hundred years ago…

“Twenty minutes,” his pop said. “You’re late.”

“Give me a break! I walked over from Nita’s.”

His pop smiled. “Ever the gentleman. How’re you feeling?”

“Wrecked.” Because there still wasn’t a better word for it. “You got the texts?”

“Yeah. Still reading them, actually…”

His mama was looking at him curiously. “I don’t know, Juan,” she said, looking thoughtfully at Kit. “But it looks like someone’s filled out a bit. What’ve you been eating?”

Kit thought it would probably be better not to get into the cheese-in-a-can too much. They were going to have enough to say about all the saltines. “Vegetables,” Kit said.

His mama’s eyebrows went up, and she stepped forward and put the back of her hand against his forehead for a moment, then reached down to take Kit’s pulse.

Kit laughed and pushed her away. “Mama!”

“Just checking,” said his mother.

Kit grinned, then yawned. It was all hitting him at once. “Gonna crash,” he said. “Make sure I don’t miss the alarm in the morning?”

“I’ll make sure,” his mama said, and kissed him. “See you in the morning, sweetie.”

Out she went, the door shutting behind her: moments later the car started and she was gone, off to work. Kit stood there wobbling slightly as he got his coat off and tossed it over one of the dining room chairs. “So,” his pop said, scrolling down through the texts, “world saved as planned?”

“Not as planned,” Kit said. “Absolutely not. But saved? Yeah.”

“Good,” Kit’s pop said, “because it’s hard to tell from some of these. This one has a lot to do with marshmallows.”

“Oh.” Kit started laughing again. “Yeah, they were kind of a problem that night. Was that Friday? Saturday? I can’t remember.”

“I don’t know,” his pop said, “it’s got all these JD numbers over it...”

“I’ll give you a better timeline tomorrow,” Kit said. “There’s all this paperwork they’re going to make me do. They make you write it all up when you save the world…”

“Such a nuisance,” Kit’s Popi said, and came over and gave him a hug. “Go on, get some sleep, you look like you need it.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, able to summon up at least enough energy to hug his pop back. Then he hauled himself up the stairs to his room.

He paused in the doorway, looking at everything. As so often happened after spending a lot of time away in a new place, everything familiar also looked somehow small and strange. And the knitted-rag rug by the bed was still empty. Yet at the same time… not so empty: Ponch’s presence still made itself very much felt even though his physicality might be absent.

Or not so absent, some places. Tentacles! “You goofy mutt,” Kit said. “What am I going to do with you?…”

Kit shuffled in and stood for a moment looking at his desk with vague disgust—the math books and notebooks still scattered across it where he’d left them, a hundred years ago. Dammit, Kit thought, calculus still exists. But that was a problem for another day. And now I have to make my bed.

He turned, prepared to throw the portal against his closet door and go in and fish his blanket out. But then he realized he was already staring at a bed all made up with blankets and sheets. I have the best mama in the world, he thought. Any world. Oh God I’m wrecked.

He fell onto the bed face first, arms spread, reveling in the marvelous smell of sheets and pillowcases and blankets and in not having to move.

“Better get some rest,” Carmela said from down the hall in her room, “because you have to start studying for your test again tomorrow.”

“I hate you,” Kit said. “I completely forgot about calculus for almost a week. It was wonderful.”

“It’s still there, though,” Carmela said from the hallway.

“Yes. And so are you. Better if you didn’t remind me.”

“Better if you were nicer to me,” Carmela said, sticking her head in the door, “or when I’m a wealthy cocoa smuggler I won’t buy you your own starship.”

“Who needs a starship when we’ve got worldgates?” Kit said, not looking up. “The technology’s way inferior.”

“Snobby,” Carmela said. “Starships are cool.” She trotted down the stairs.

Kit turned his head. “Only if you can afford to pay the crew!” he shouted after her. But a moment later the back door banged shut.

Kit turned to go face-forward into the pillow again, inhaled from the pillowcase the smell of the fabric softener his mama favored for the laundry, and instantly fell asleep.

In the middle of that nap, it struck him as not even slightly surprising that Ponch was lying on the bed with him. They’d been having a conversation for some while, but at the moment Kit couldn’t remember how it had started.

“Timeheart’s such an echo chamber, though,” Ponch said. He was lying with his hind legs splayed out to one side underneath him, his nose propped on Kit’s shoulder. “The more central it gets, the more connected everybody is. The Powers work in and out of each other all the time, the One works in and out of all Its avatars… Anything can get heard. And because the Lone Power is still a Power, It can still hear some things too. That ability can’t be removed from It. Once given, gods can’t take back their gifts.”

“Mmm, kind of a problem.”

“Yes. And sometimes things are delicate; sometimes they have to happen just so, if they’re going to happen at all. It’s like stalking a squirrel. You twitch at the wrong moment and they see you, next moment they’re up a tree and it’s all over…”

“So sometimes you have to whisper.”

“Yes. But I knew you’d hear me,” Ponch said. “You always did. You hear me even better now.”

“Sometimes, anyway.”

“Oh, most of the time,” Ponch said. “Sometimes, like this, it’s important. I knew you’d get it. You were always smart; if I got smart, it was because of you. So this went really well.”

“I hated running out of saltines,” Kit said. “But somehow I knew that was you.”

“And you gave them all away,” Ponch said, nuzzling him. “So typical. Whatever I know about sacrifice, I learned from you.”

“Well, okay, that’s good.” He reached up to scratch Ponch behind the ears. “But now there’s a whole species of creatures crazy about saltines and living in a world where there aren’t any. You’re gonna have to do something about that.”

“Always thinking of everybody else,” Ponch said. “Leave that with me. I’ll take care of it. You get some sleep.”

So Kit did.

TWELVE

February 14, 2011: Tevaral

Elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, in the planetary system of a star of the great OB association near mu Cephei, otherwise known as Erakis, matters progressed to their inevitable conclusion. And as usual, when reality reasserted itself after wizardry had so tightly held sway over Thesba, the natural processes that had been baulked for so long turned out to have their own surprises up their sleeves.

The wizardly team who had been holding Thesba together through the final weeks of the Tevaral Rafting Intervention were naturally unwilling to simply remove all the safeties at once. Best practice in such events mandated that when discontinuing a wizardry that had been changing or maintaining the structural integrity of an entire astronomical body, the constrictions and controls applied to it should be removed in reverse order to that in which they’d been applied.

One by one, power feeds were gradually reduced to the complex webwork of wizardries that had been holding the warped and damaged cores of Thesba in the same relationship to one another, then to the ones that had been maintaining those cores’ integrity relative to the moon’s inner mantle and its outer one, and then to the largest and most powerful of the wizardries, those that had been holding the crust in place over the restless, molten substructure. Finally the last connections between those wizardries and the hundreds of wizards who had been fueling them were cut. Everyone for whom breathing was a normal function of their physiology then held that breath to see what would happen next.

For some long minutes Thesba seemed to do nothing in particular—merely continued on its normal course around Tevaral, heading for what in Kit’s gates’ location would have been its second rising of the day. Many of the wizards involved in monitoring the decommissioning of the management wizardries, at least those who were of a betting temperament, began laying wagers with one another as to how long this process would continue. Others, more deeply versed in planetary and orbital mechanics, or with a better instinctive feel for events of this type, didn’t bother.

Approximately six minutes and forty seconds after power was withdrawn from the final maintenance wizardries that had been holding Thesba in one piece, a fissure began to develop in the crust on Thesba’s leading side, stretching from about halfway up into its northern hemisphere to just south of its equator. Other similar fissures began to develop on the opposite side of the moon, but the first one continued to grow, stretching longer, pulling wide, deepening with astonishing speed. Through the already-hot glow of the revealed upper mantle, hotter material from deeper inside the moon began to spew out. The great longitudinal fissure pulled wider yet, stitching up into the polar regions, across them, and down into the northern hemisphere on the other side.

Though wizardly data recorders were functioning and analyzing every movement of mass in real time, with merely visual senses it quickly became impossible to grasp exactly what was happening. The moon’s atmosphere had kindled, and the flammable gases in it began oxidizing at such a rate that within a very short time all of Thesba’s surface became invisible under a planet-wide sheet of fire.

It took some minutes more of the moon’s transit along its already disturbed orbital path to make it possible to tell what was going on. Thesba’s overall shape seemed now more transversely ovoid than spherical as it sailed along in an obscuring cloud of its own rapidly combusting atmosphere, trailing burning gases and outthrown magma behind it in a long disastrous trail. But then came the unexpected thing—terrible in the way that only events of such magnitude can be, fascinating even though frightening, a sight that would leave the analysts working out the moments of inertia behind this particular event for months if not years to come. Through the ruin of Thesba’s structure, past the split shell of the mantle layers and the shattered crust, the misshapen iron core slowly shouldered bodily out of the moon that had hidden it since it coalesced, tumbling as it came, rotating more quickly now that it was freed from the pressure of the quintillions of tons of mass that had so long held it in check. Slowly the core began to draw further and further away along the orbital path, making its way ahead of the broken halves of Thesba that were now ever so gradually beginning to fall behind it, trailing further and further in its wake.

The general prediction of what would come next, once this had happened, was straightforward enough. The two great halves of Thesba would remain in orbit a while, tumbling, fragmenting, some of the fragments rebounding into one another. A debris field somewhat congruent to the moon’s old orbit would form. But it would not remain in that form for long. The core, plowing through Thesba’s shattered remnants again and again in its early orbits as the fragments began to decelerate due to their lesser mass, would impact over and over with the larger pieces—some of them becoming briefly gravitationally associated with the core again, some being caromed violently out of its way in what to a player of the Earth game “billiards” would have recognized as massively destructive bank shots. Those impacts, brutally inelastic and as subject to the laws of motion as anything else, would themselves change the rogue core’s orbit more than once, deforming that orbit, bumping it into a more elliptical configuration and finally into one that would be terminally parabolic. It would be the core’s acceleration, increased by interactions with Tevaral’s mass and a serendipitous angle with the system’s white-giant primary, that would finally bring the core plummeting into Tevaral’s southern hemisphere in sixty-three days’ time—the bullet-like impact of a three quintillion-ton mass of spinning metal into the body of a dying world already racked by weeks of massive earthquakes and tsunamis.

The Interconnect Project wizards and scientists most skilled with numbers and probabilities would be exercising their skills at the betting end of things for several weeks to come over the issue of whether Tevaral itself would survive that impact as a single body, or itself break up as Thesba had, its shattered mass slowly becoming the source of a vast asteroid field that would someday occupy its orbit around Sendwathesh. But on the day Thesba shattered, the world called Tevaral, identified (in Earth’s astronomical nomenclature) as 11848 Cephei IV, was proactively struck from the records of all extant Galactic and interstellar associations of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, and formally declared uninhabitable…

…and its dominant species and biosphere classified as “successfully resettled without undue loss of life”.

THIRTEEN

February 14, 2011: Earth

Valentine’s Day was a Monday this year. Mondays were bad enough as a general thing, but the strains of this one had been unusual. Now Nita and Kit were walking home from school, both of them slightly weary after the overexposure to everybody else’s showy declarations of affection.

Kit in particular was tired due to the results from his calculus test having come back. He hadn’t failed. Neither had he passed brilliantly. He was going to be hearing about this from his Pop. Right now he had other things on his mind as they came up to his driveway.

“I didn’t want to give you your thing today,” Kit said, “because everybody was watching and… I didn’t want to have to make the explanations in front of them, because it would all have been made up and it wouldn’t have made any sense. I thought I’d wait till now. So here.”

He reached into his pocket. “I was going to wrap this,” he said, “and then I couldn’t find any wrapping paper—and we were all out of ribbon—”

“And you are absolutely useless at wrapping things,” Nita said. “I hate to have to say it, but you know it’s true. So it’s okay.”

Kit nodded, blushing, and reached into his pocket: handed her what he had made. It was a small heart-shaped object, maybe an inch long, and it glinted in the afternoon light.

Nita turned it over in her fingers, feeling the weight of it. “It’s crystallized carbon,” she said.

“There was a lot of it exposed on Tevaral’s surface after they started scraping the biosphere off,” Kit said. “So I thought—”

“It’s diamond, actually,” Nita said.

Kit blushed. “It’s not diamond diamond,” he said. “The crystalline structure’s all wrong, you know that perfectly well, don’t give me grief here. It’s pretty, and it’s tough, and it takes a whole lot to hurt it.” Like someone else I know.

“Oh really,” Nita said very softly.

Kit cleared his throat. “I asked Hesh if he would have somebody grab me a chunk. Worked it over a little bit.”

Nita turned the little heart over in her hand. On the outside of it was engraved one of the simpler graphical restatements of the Wizard’s Knot. “There’s something in there, though,” she said, looking up at him.

Kit nodded. “Turn it over,” he said.

She did. The other side was very finely micro-engraved with the words, TEXT ME.

“Cheleb had this funny idea,” Kit said. “That maybe you’d asked me to change my name for you. Or that I was thinking about asking you to change yours for me.”

Nita laughed under her breath. “He really has a tendency to sort of plunge around without being entirely clear about the cultural underpinnings of some of the things he says, doesn’t he?” She gave Kit a wicked look. “‘Impregnation rituals…’” She covered her eyes.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “when we get him here, we’ll sort him out. Anyway… I encoded my full name in the Speech into the crystalline structure in there for you, and it syncs to the one in my manual. It’s not like you didn’t have it already, anyway, it’s not like we haven’t done stuff like this occasionally when we needed to for spells, for interventions. But if you need it in a hurry, or when we’re doing preflight on a wizardry, with this you can just plug this into the spell the way you would plug in a USB stick.”

Nita nodded, smiled. “Great minds think alike,” she said.

“Oh really?”

She reached into the pocket of her jeans, brought something out and handed it to Kit. At first glance it appeared to be a very tightly-woven cord of metal mesh, the individual strands of the black metal catching the light as you turned it. There was a black metal catch to fasten it. The thing as a whole looked very sleek and smooth, like one of those elephant-tail-hair bracelets that people used to wear. It wasn’t very long: in fact, bracelet length was just about right.

Nonetheless, Kit was in teasing mood. “Keychain?” he said.

Nita gave him a look. “Maybe,” she said, “if I asked Sker’ret really nicely, he’d sort me out a ‘trapdoor transport’ so I could drop you in it and have it send you back to Tevaral in exactly the spot where you could stand there just long enough to have time to look up and see a nice big chunk of Thesba getting ready to fall on your head…”

She was kidding. It was just as well. Kit grinned at her, and they started walking again while Kit ran the smoothly braided thing through his fingers. It felt beautiful. He could also feel the Speech, a lot of the Speech, sizzling in it.

“You were working on this before we left, weren’t you,” Kit said. “All those times when we were manual-chatting and you didn’t want to go visual.”

“Yeah, I tried doing both at once earlier on and— well, it wasn’t a good idea.” She grinned. “A few accidents…”

“So what is it?”

“It’s every spell we’ve ever done together,” Nita said. “With the enacture stripped out. And the actuator sequences removed, just to make sure.”

Kit breathed out, shaking his head in amazement. “It’s terrific,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

They’d come to a stop at the end of Kit’s driveway. “Oh,” Nita said. “There’s one more thing.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and pulled it out, handing it to him.

It was a box with a heart-shaped cellophane window. He looked up from it and grinned at her.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, and hugged him.

He hugged her back, not particularly caring at the moment if the neighbors saw. After a moment, though, she put some air between them and made a peculiar face. “Also,” she said, “I have no idea what this is about, but Bobo says to tell you, ‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t know about the Jacuzzi.’” Nita raised her eyebrows. “You had a Jacuzzi over there? You had it really well hidden.”

“Uh, no,” Kit said. “Something Ronan was up to.”

“What hasn’t he been up to, more like,” Nita said under her breath. “Never mind.”

She hugged Kit harder, then pushed him away and headed off down the street.

Kit looked at the box, opened the top of it, and as he’d done with Cheleb, poured a little stream of hearts out into his hand.

Then he started to smile… and then to laugh out loud where he stood. Kit turned over the hearts in his hand, the way Cheleb had, with his finger, one by one. They were pink and blue and yellow and purple and green and white. And regardless of the color, every single one of them said:

I KNOW.

1

Afterword

There’s a saying among some writers that a novel should be the story of the single most important thing then happening in the viewpoint character’s life. This seems like a good rule to follow, and until now I think all the major Young Wizards works in print have followed it. However, it’s been my intention for a while to do some longer works in-universe that would be, not so much an abandonment of the rule, but a relaxation of it. I’ve been wanting a chance to display and explore aspects of the characters’ lives that we don’t always get a chance to see in a main-continuity YW novel—situations in which the characters’ usual position at center stage is subverted a bit.

Probably this urge arose because in real life, we’re not always at the center of the stories that surround us. In fact, mostly we’re not. Often enough, whether we like it or not, we function at the periphery of something much bigger, our contributions seeming marginal. And since the life Nita and Kit are living is real-life to them, it stands to reason that sometimes the wizardly life will be less personally manageable, in terms of just deciding what you’re going to do and then going off and doing it. Sometimes you’re going to be part of a larger group, working on a single problem in unison, and you won’t be driving the problem’s solution except in the sense that you’re working in support of it.

Unfortunately it seems likely that in traditional or conventional publishing, and especially in the present market, the proposal for such a novel might not get much further than your editor’s desk. Fortunately, the technologies now available to storytellers to independently make out-of-continuity works available to large numbers of readers have made it possible to tell this kind of story after all.

Various versions of the “How To Save A Planet” problem have been wandering around in the YW universe’s middle distance for me for a good while now. In particular, questions and answers about the technologies and themes implied by Mamvish’s appearance on the scene in A Wizard of Mars have been percolating since approximately 2008, when the first skeletal notes on the Interconnect Project begin appearing in the Errantry Concordance. You could in fact make a case that this whole issue has been bubbling under the surface for much longer than that—since the time our viewpoint characters first set foot in the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility during the course of High Wizardry. After all, it hardly seems likely that a gigantic gating facility of this kind would just appear out of nowhere all by itself. The presence of a place that works and acts like the Crossings implies the presence of massive technological and infrastructural support from multiple species, along with a long-established tradition of interstellar trade, commerce and cooperation.

Getting more specific, though, I think it’s safe to say that the seed of this aspect of Crossings-related backstory was planted in High Wizardry and the events that follow it. Dairine’s overheard conversation in which she tells somebody “No I will not move your planet, it’s fine right where it is!” can be read as implying not only that species may and do move their planets electively, but also, logically, that they may relocate them when dire necessity requires it.

And, wizardry being what it is—all about preserving life—when I started considering the issue, it seemed likely that there would be, at the very least, some kind of working group that dealt specifically with this kind of problem, and concentrated the expertise for its solution in a single resource. From that understanding, the basic blueprint and rationale behind the Interconnect Group—originally primarily concerned with worldgates, but its remit having since been extended to include many other useful technologies—began to lay itself out.

The Group’s operational rationale is straightforward. When they’re endangered, move planets and their populations to safety if you can. If you can’t move the planet, clone or twin it as closely as you can somewhere else, and relocate the population. If you can’t do that, archive the living population—using some instrumentality either wizardly or scientific (or both)—and preserve them until you can.

The old saying “show don’t tell” is sometimes somewhat abused by people who don’t understand that sometimes, despite your best intentions, you do have to tell. That said, showing is usually better. Once I started to understand how the Interconnect Group functioned, the next question became how to tell a story that showed the saving of a specific world.

The idea of a moon falling onto its primary, and the image of what would really happen, had been nagging at me for a while secondary to my involvement as science advisor for an event-TV project called Impact that eventually aired on SyFy. (For all I know, it still may air occasionally, and you’ll see my advisor-credit there if you bother watching through to the end.) As sometimes happens in cases like this, the script’s story through-line was already in place, and a lot of creative choices had been made that didn’t have a lot to do with physics, or indeed with many of the finer details of physical reality as we presently understand it. I was therefore thrown into the position of being the youngest fairy godmother at the christening, with no power to undo the curse presently saddling the about-to-be-newborn infant—only enough to attempt to mitigate the curse somewhat. (And even this attempt turned out to be of minimal effect. Never mind: you do what you can, cash the check, and move on.)

As part of this work I found myself in the situation of giving notes to the production partners rather than taking them, which was interesting (and amusing) for a change. But some of the notes have a certain air of desperation about them. Like this one:

Just a note here in passing: whichever character tells the President or whoever it is that "not even bacteria would be left" after an impact of any significant portion of the Moon with the Earth is seriously understating the nature of the problem by suggesting that there would be something left afterwards that vaguely resembled a planet. The result would more likely be the very early stages of an asteroid belt… if that. An impact of this type would at the very least split the Earth open like a melon. But much worse damage is likely.

Think of the structure of a bubble. The air inside is held in place by a very thin and fragile structure, and the whole thing comes undone with any really significant puncture. The Earth's crust is similarly thin in comparison to what it contains. (Just as a referent: no known meteoric impact has ever punched all the way through the crust, not even the great Yucatan impact. Proof: life still exists here.) A much more likely outcome, after the initial splitting that would follow so traumatic an impact, would be the explosive escape of vast amounts of magma from the Earth's lower mantle, where all that molten metal and stone is held (under immense pressure) by the upper mantle and crust above it. Imagine shaking a bottle of soda and then popping off the cap. Then imagine that the soda is four sextillion tons of molten metal and lava …You wouldn't want to be standing too close.

… So if you get a sense that I was looking forward to a chance to tell a Moon-falls-down-on-a-planet story correctly, you’d be absolutely right. In particular, I was looking forward to a chance to tell the tale of such a cataclysm not as something that happens all of a sudden and in a hilariously compressed time frame—the way it did in Impact—but as something that’s been going on for a while and still, sadly, even with all available technological and wizardly power brought to bear on it, just can’t be stopped.

This was the story I realized I needed for Lifeboats. It involves the kind of wizardly work that’s probably about half or three-quarters of what wizards do—work not characterized by breakneck haste or personal versions of what we now sometimes refer to in film trailers as “situations of extreme peril”. It allowed me the opportunity to put our viewpoint characters in situations where they have enough time to examine what’s going on around them in depth, and where the work requires revelation of some of what’s been going on in the background, unsuspected or uninvestigated, for a long time.

Inside the shell of the story, of course, lies the matter of most interest, to me anyway: the characters’ reactions to being stuffed into this kind of situation, along with many many others, and the understanding that sometimes you don’t get much of a vote in how things play out. Sometimes, instead of making up your own mind what you’re going to do, you’re just going to have to do what those older, wiser, or more centrally placed have told you to do. Sometimes you’re going to have to sit on your butt and wait. And sometimes (as here) there’ll be obscure or mysterious elements to what’s going on around you. That’s as it should be. Even for wizards the world isn’t always explicable, no matter how much we’d like it to be. And it would be a duller place if it was.

The challenge for a wizard doing such work will always be remembering that employment of the Art in this mode can be surprisingly efficacious, even if you’re not always “in control”, or involved in what looks like a dangerous and convoluted quest or a heroic last stand. In the normal course of things, I suspect that if you’re a youngish wizardly practitioner, you’re going to frequently be reminded that sometimes you and the Powers That Be get the job done simply by holding still, paying attention, and allowing yourself to have your natural reactions to what’s going on. You don’t always have to nearly get nuked by the Lone Power or nearly eaten by a shark. Sometimes slow and steady really does win the race… even when you honestly don’t think you’re racing: because all is done for each.

In the broad spectrum of wizardly intervention, there have to be a lot of stories like this. It’s been fun to tell at least one of them.

Thanks for listening!

— Diane Duane

September 1, 2015

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