“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…