The tall creature bleated at her, a shocking sound up so close. “Excuse me,” said the computer, translating the bleat into a dry and cultured voice like a BBC announcer’s, “but why are you talking to our luggage?”
“Llp, I, uh,” said Dairine, and shut her mouth. There they were, her first words to a member of another intelligent species. Blushing and furious, she finally managed to say, “I thought they were people.”
“Why?” said the alien.
“Well, they were walking!”
“It’d be pretty poor luggage that didn’t do that much, at least,” said the alien, eyeing the baggage as it spidered by. “The better grade of luggage levitates, and the high-end models pack and unpack themselves. You must have come here from a fair way out.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“My gate is about to become patent,” the alien said. “Come along, I’ll show you the way to the departures hall. Or are you meeting someone?”
They started to walk. Dairine began to relax a little: this was more like it. “No,” she, said, “I’m just traveling. But please, what planet is this?”
“Earth,” said the alien.
Dairine was surprised for a second, and then remembered having read somewhere that almost every sentient species calls its own planet “Earth” or “the world” or something similar. “I mean, what do other people call it?”
“All kinds of things, as usual. Silly names, some of them. There’ll be a master list in the terminal; you can check that.”
“Thanks,” Dairine said, and then was shocked and horrified to see a large triangular piece of the terminal fall off the main mass of the building. Except that it didn’t fall more than a short distance, and then regained its height and soared away, a gracefully tumbling pyramid. “Does it do that often?” she said, when she could breathe again.
“Once every few beats,” said the alien; “it’s the physical-transport shuttle. Are you on holiday? Mind the slide, now.”
“Yes,” Dairine started to say, until the alien stepped onto a stationary piece of pavement in front of them, and instantly began slipping away from her toward the bizarre mass of the terminal building at high speed. The surprise was too sudden to react to: her foot hit the same piece of paving and slipped from under her as if she had stepped on ice. Dairine clutched the computer to her and threw her free arm out to break her fall, except that there wasn’t one. She was proceeding straight forward, too, while tilted somewhat backward, at about fifty miles an hour. Her heart hammered. It hammered worse when something touched her from behind; she whipped around, or tried to. It was only the alien’s luggage, reaching out to tilt her forward so she stood straight. “What is this!” she said.
“Slidefield,” the alien said, proceeding next to her, without moving, at the same quick pace. “Inertia-abeyant selectively frictionless environment. Here we go. Which gating facility are you making for?”
“Uh—”
It was all happening too fast. The terminal building swept forward swift as a leaping beast, rearing up a thousand stories high, miles across, blotting out the sky. The slidefield poured itself at what looked like a blank silvery wall a hundred feet sheer. Dairine threw her arms up to protect herself, and succeeded only in bashing her face with the computer; the wall burst like a thin flat cloud against her face, harmless, and they were through.
“The Crossings,” said the alien. “What do you think?”
She couldn’t have told him in an hour’s talking. The Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility on Rirhath B is renowned among the million homeworlds for its elegant classical Lilene architecture and noble proportions; but Dairine’s only cogent thought for several minutes was that she had never imagined being in an airline terminal the size of New Jersey. The ceiling—or ceilings, for there were thousands of them, layered, interpenetrating, solid and lacy, in steel and glass, in a hundred materials and a hundred colors—all towered up into a distance where clouds, real clouds, gathered; about a quarter-mile off to one side, it appeared to be raining. Through the high greenish air, under the softened light of the fluorescing sky that filtered in through the thousand roofs, small objects that might have been machines droned along, towing parcels and containers behind them. Beneath, scattered all about on the terminal floor, were stalls, platforms, counters, racks, built in shapes Dairine couldn’t understand, and with long, tall signs placed beside them that Dairine couldn’t begin to read.
And among the stalls and kiosks, the whole vast white floor was full of people—clawed, furred, shelled or armored, up-right or crawling, avian, insectile, mammalian, lizardlike, vegetable, mingling with forms that could not be described in any earthly terms. There were a very few hominids, none strictly human; and their voices were lost in the rustling, wailing, warbling, space-softened cacophony of the terminal floor. They hopped and stepped and leapt and walked and crawled and oozed and slid and tentacled and went in every imaginable way about their uncounted businesses, followed by friends and families and fellow travelers, by luggage floating or walking; all purposeful, certain, every one of them having some-where to go, and going there.
Every one of them except Dairine, who was beginning to wish she hadn’t come.
“There,” said the alien, and Dairine was glad of that slight warning, because the slidefield simply stopped working and left her standing still. She waved her free arm around, overcompensating, and her stomach did a frightened wrench and tried once or twice, for old times’ sake, to get rid of food that was now on Ananke.
“Here you are,” said the alien, gesturing with its various tentacles. “Arrivals over there, departures over that way, stasis and preservation down there, !!!!! over there”—the computer made a staticky noise that suggested it was unable to translate something— “and of course waste disposal. You enjoy your trip, now; I have to catch up with my fathers. Have a nice death!”
“But—” Dairine said. Too late. The broad armored shape had taken a few steps into a small crowd, stepped on a spot on the floor that looked exactly like every other, and vanished.
Dairine stood quite still for a few minutes: she had no desire to hit one of those squares by accident. I’m a complete imbecile, she thought. Look at this. Stuck in an airport—something like an airport—no money, no ID that these people’ll recognize, no way to explain how I got here or how I’m gonna get out—no way to understand half of what’s going on, scared to death to move… and pretty soon some security guard or cop or some-thing is going to see me standing here, and come over to find out what’s wrong, and they’re gonna haul me off somewhere and lock me up….
The thought was enough to hurriedly start Dairine walking again. She glanced around to try to make sense of things. There were lots of signs posted all over—or rather, in most cases, hanging nonchalantly in midair. But she could read none of them. While she was looking at one written in letters that at a distance seemed like Roman characters, something bumped into Dairine fairly hard, about shin-height. She staggered and caught herself, thinking she had tripped over someone’s luggage.
But there was nothing in her path at all. Dairine paused, confused, and then tried experimentally to keep walking: the empty air resisted her. And then behind her someone said, “Your pardon” and slipped right past her: something that looked more or less like a holly tree, but it was walking on what might have been stumpy roots covered in a sort of gauzy cloud, and the berries were eyes, all of which looked at Dairine as the creature passed. She gulped. The creature paid her no mind, simply walked through the bit of air that had been resisting Dairine, and vanished as the thing with the tentacles had earlier. Just as it blinked out of existence, air whiffing past Dairine into the place where it had been, she thought she caught sight of what looked like a little triangular piece of shiny plastic or metal held in one of the thing’s leaves.
A ticket, Dairine thought; and a little more wandering and watching showed her that this was the case. Wherever these little gates might lead, none of them wou
ld let you step on it unless you had the right ticket for it: probably the bit of plastic was a smart card of some kind, programmed with the fact that you’d paid your fare. So there was no need to fear that she might suddenly fall unshielded into some environment where they were breathing methane or swimming around in lava.
Dairine began to wander again, feeling somewhat better. I can always sit down in a corner somewhere and program another jump, she thought. Be smart to do that now, though. In case something starts to happen and I want to get out quick….
She looked for a place to sit. Off to one side was a big collection of racks and benches, where various creatures were hung up or lying on the floor. On a hunch she said to the computer, “Is it safe to sit over there?”
“Affirmative,” said the computer. Dairine ambled over in the direction of the racks and started searching for something decent to sit in.
The creatures she passed ignored her. Dairine found it difficult to return the compliment. One of the racks had what looked like a giant blue vampire bat hanging in it. Or no, it had no fur: the thing was actually more like a pterodactyl, and astonishingly pretty—the blue was iridescent, like a hummingbird’s feathers. Dairine walked around it, fascinated, for quite a long time, pretending to look for a chair.
But there seemed to be no chairs in this particular area. The closest to a chairlike thing was a large low bowl that was full of what seemed to be purple Jell-O… except that the Jell-O put up a long blunt limb of itself, the end of which swiveled to follow as Dairine passed. She hurried by; the effect was rather like being looked at by a submarine periscope, and the Jell-O thing had about as much expression. Probably wonders what the heck I am, she thought. I’d say it’s mutual….
Finally Dairine settled for the floor. She opened the computer, brought up the utilities window and started running down the list of flagged planets again…. then stopped. “Assistance utility,” she said.
“Nature of query,” said the computer.
“Uh…” Dairine paused. Certainly this place was what she had thought she wanted—a big cosmopolitan area full of intelligent alien creatures. But at the same time there were hardly any hominids, and she felt bizarrely out of place. Which was all wrong. She wanted someplace where she would be able to make sense of things. But how to get that across to the computer? It seemed as though, even though it was magical, it still used and obeyed the laws of science, and was as literal and unhelpful as a regular computer could be if you weren’t sufficiently familiar with it to know how to tell it what you wanted.
“I want to go somewhere else,” she said to the machine.
“Define parameters,” said the computer.
“Define syntax.”
“Command syntax. Normal syntactical restrictions do not apply in the Help/Assistance facility. Commands and appended arguments may be stated in colloquial-vernacular form. Parameters may be subjected to manual analysis and discussion if desired.”
“Does that mean I can just talk to you?” Dairine said.
“Affirmative.”
“And you’ll give me advice?”
“Affirmative.”
She let out a breath. “Okay,” she said. “I want to go somewhere else.”
“Acknowledged. Executing.”
“No don’t!” Dairine said, and several of the aliens around her reacted to the shriek. One of the holly tree people, standing nearby in something like a flowerpot, had several of its eyes fall off on the floor.
“Overridden,” said the computer.
“Help facility!” Dairine said, breathing hard. Her heart was pounding.
“Online.”
“Why did you start doing that?!”
“ ‘OK’ is a system command causing an exit from the Help facility and a return to command level,” said the computer.
“Do not run any program until I state the full command with arguments and end the sequence with ‘Run’!”
“Affirmative,” said the computer. “Syntax change confirmed.”
Oh God, Dairine thought, I’ve started messing with the syntax and I don’t even understand it. I will never never use a program again till I’ve completely read the docs… “Good,” she said. “The following is a string of parameters for a world I want to transit to. I will state ‘End of list’ when finished.”
“Affirmative. Awaiting listing.”
“Right. I want to go somewhere else.”
“Transit agenda, confirmed. Specific arguments, please.”
“Uhh…” She thought. “I want to go somewhere where there are going to be people like me.”
“Noted. Next argument.”
What exactly am I looking for?
Darth Vader…? She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Think I’ll wait a bit on that one. “I want to go somewhere where I’m expected,” she said.
“Noted. Next argument.”
“Somewhere where I can use some of this magic.”
“Argument already applies,” said the computer. “You are using wizardry at this time.”
Dairine made a face. “Somewhere where I can sit down and figure out what it means.”
“Argument already applies. Documentation is available at this time.”
Dairine sighed. “Somewhere where I will have time to sit down and figure out what it means.”
“Incomplete argument. State time parameter.”
“A couple days. Forty-eight hours,” she said then, before it could correct her syntax.
“Noted. Next argument.”
“Somewhere—” One more time Dairine stopped, considering the wild number of variables she was going to have to specify. And the truth was, she didn’t know what she was after. Except… She looked around her conspiratorially, as if someone might overhear her. Indeed, she’d have simply died of embarrassment if Nita, say, should ever hear this. “Somewhere I can do something,” Dairine whispered. “Something big. Something that matters.”
“Noted,” said the computer. “Next argument.”
“Uh…” The embarrassment of the admission out loud had driven ev-erything out of her head. “End arguments,” she said.
“Advisory, available” said the computer.
“So advise me.”
“Stated number of arguments defines a very large sample of destinations. Stated number of arguments allows for interference in transit by other instrumentalities. Odds of interference approximately ninety-six percent.”
That brought Dairine’s chin up. “Let ‘em try,” she said. “The arguments stand.”
“Instruction accepted. End advisory.”
“Fine. List program.”
“Transit program. Sort for Terran-type hominids along maximal space-time curvature. Sort for anticipated arrival, time continuum maximal but skewed to eliminate paradox. Sort for opportunity for intervention. Sort for data analysis period on close order, forty-eight hours. Sort for intervention curve skewed to maximal intervention and effect. End list.”
“You got it,” Dairine said. “Name listed program ‘Trip 1.’ ”
“Named.”
“Save it. Exit ‘Help’ facility.”
“Trip 1 saved. Command level,” said the computer.
“Run Trip 1.”
“Running. Input required.”
Dairine rolled her eyes at the mile-high ceiling. Nita doesn’t do it this way, she thought. I’ve watched her. She just reads stuff out of her book, or says it by heart… Oh well, someone has to break new ground. She stretched her legs out in front of her to keep them from cramping. “Specify,” she said.
“Birth date.”
“Twenty October nineteen ninety-seven,” she said, looking out across the floor at the great crowd of pushing and jostling aliens.
“Place of birth.”
“Three-eight-five East Eighty-sixth Street, New York City.” The hospital had long since burned down, but Dairine knew the address: her dad had taken them all there to a German restaurant now on the site.
“T
ime of birth.”
“Twelve fifty-five a.m.”
“Favorite color.”
“You have got to be kidding!” she said, looking at a particularly busy knot of aliens across the floor. Security guards, most likely: they were armed, in a big group, and looking closely at people.
“Favorite color.”
“Blue.” Or were these critters security guards? There’d been other creatures walking around in the terminal wearing uniforms—as much or as little clothing of a particular shade of silvery green as each alien in question felt like wearing. And their weapons had been slim little blue-metal rods strapped to them. These creatures, though—they wore no uniforms, and their weapons were large and dark and looked nasty.
“Last book read,” said the computer.
“Look,” Dairine said, “what do you need to know this dumb stuff for?”
“Program cannot be accurately run without the enacting wizard’s personal data. You have no data file saved at this time.”
She made another face. Better not interfere, Dairine thought, or you might wind up doing the breaststroke in lava after all. “Oh, go on,” she said.
“Last book read—”
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” said Dairine, looking with increasing unease at the armed bunch of aliens. They were not nice-looking people. Well, lots of the people in here didn’t look nice—that purple Jell-O thing for one—but none of them felt bad: just weird. These creatures with the guns, though, had an unfriendly look to them. Most of them were mud-colored warty-looking creatures like a cross between lizards and toads but upright, and not nearly as pretty as a lizard or as helplessly homely as any toad. They went about with a lumpish hunchbacked swagger, and their eyes were dark slitted bulges or fat crimson bloodshot goggle-eyes. They looked stupid, and worse, they looked cruel….