“It sounds close,” Kit said.
Nita raised her eyebrows. “No kidding,” she said. “That first date’s tomorrow at three in the afternoon. Didn’t realize it was so soon!”
“You won’t hear me complaining,” Kit said. “What’s the other date?”
“Exactly two weeks later. Friday after next.”
“And then school starts again the Monday after,” Kit said. “Good thing I finished my break work early.”
Nita made a face. “Wish I had,” she said. “I’ve got a few reports to do… I’m going to have to bring them with me.” Then she grinned again. “Fortunately, that’s not a problem. See that one there, the big one?” She pointed at another of the packages floating over the desk.
Kit went to it, brought it into the middle of the room, and pulled its “tag.” Instead of unfolding itself, the package rolled itself up tight into a narrow cylindrical shape, losing its “wrapping” in the process. There it hung in the air, a silvery rod about three feet long and half an inch wide.
“What is that?” he said.
“A pup tent,” Nita said. “Watch this—”
There was another of those little threads of words in the Speech hanging down from the middle of it. Nita pulled on the thread. As if it were a window shade, a pale sheet of shadow pulled down out of the rod.
“That’s really slick,” Kit said. “What’s it for? Shelter?”
“Storage,” Nita said, “for the things you need to bring with you. It’s a claudication, but a lot bigger than our little pockets.” She finished pulling the access interface down to floor level and straightened up again.
“Hey,” Kit said, looking through the shadow. He put a hand through the shadow: The hand vanished. Then he put his head in through the access.
Inside was just a gray space about the size of Kit’s living room, with a ceiling about ten feet high. The space was softly illuminated by a light that came from nowhere. Through the walls of the “pup tent,” he could faintly see his own room. It was a good trick, because from the outside there was nothing to be seen but the rod and the rectangular doorway hanging down from it.
When he pulled his head out, Nita was snickering. “You should see how you look when just your head vanishes,” she said.
Kit thought about that for a moment. “What did my neck look like?”
“A guillotine ad…”
Kit raised his eyebrows. “Mama would probably be interested.”
“We can show her later. Anyway, clothes and books and things can go in there… ”
“Some spare food?” Kit said. “In case you wake up in the middle of the night and need potato chips or something?”
Nita gave him a look that was only slightly dirty. Potato chips were a recent weakness of Nita’s, one that Kit had started actively teasing her about. “Yeah,” she said. “A case or so of those… and see if I give you any.”
Kit grinned. “Okay,” he said. “What’s that last one? Did you open yours?”
“Nope,” Nita said. “It says not to. In fact, it just about screams not to. Check it out.”
Kit picked up the last package. It, too, had a “tag” of characters in the Speech hanging from it, but as Kit started to pull on it, a little half-transparent window appeared in the air, like a floating page of the manual. Nita peered over his shoulder at it.
DANGER!—CUSTOM PORTABLE WORLDGATING LOCUS—DANGER!
DO NOT IMPLEMENT WITHOUT READING INSTRUCTIONS!
The display skipped a few lines and then went on, in the Speech:
DEPLOYMENT INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Before departure: Insert coordinates of desired “home” egress points into compacted routine package, including at least two alternate points for each primary point (for use should primary point be occupied).
2. Transport compacted routine package to relocation site.
WARNING! DO NOT attempt to deploy routine package before arrival at final relocation site. Note that basic deployments cannot be reversed once exercised.
3. After arriving at relocation site, attach coordinate package to supplied power conduit package, choose an appropriate locus for installation,1 and activate in the usual manner.2
See main documentation for details regarding operation and decommissioning at end of legitimacy period. NOT RATED FOR TRANSITS OF MORE THAN 150,000 l.y.
1See attached annotation for cultural and logistical considerations.
2This installation requires a matter substrate. Do not install in areas where matter state is likely to experience unpredictable shifts. Do not deploy in vacuum or microgravity. Retroengineering this wizardry is not recommended unless you are confident that you have sufficient understanding of gate substrates, hyperstring structure and string tension relationships, and matter-energy polymorphism. Consult your local Advisory or gating technician for technical assistance.
“They’re spatial-only transit gates,” Nita said. “Subsidized ones. You can use them as many times as you want… come home whenever you want… and you don’t have to pay for it. I love this!”
“I wonder what happens if you try to deploy them ‘before arrival at final relocation site,’” Kit said. He juggled the claudication package in one hand.
“You wouldn’t!” Nita said.
“Well… ” Kit grinned, finally, and shook his head. “No. But you do have to wonder… ”
Kit put the worldgate package aside and looked up again at the cultural exchange mission statement. “So, who are they sticking us with?” he said, looking through the cultural info. “Wait. Here it is—”
Your host family: The Peliaen family consists of a female-analogue parent (Demair), a male-analogue parent (Kuwilin), and one sublatency Alaalid, your counterpart and fellow wizard Quelt (female analogue). The Peliaens are atypical in that one family member (Kuwilin) has elected to do physical labor as a permanent avocation rather than in rotation, as is common in this society.
The family lives in a typical rural dwelling by the shore of the Inner Sea, twenty [kilometers] from the nearest large population aggregate…
“It’s a beach,” Kit said. “It’s actually a beach! This is gonna be terrific!”
Nita’s expression went briefly wry. “Last time we had a vacation by the beach,” Nita said, “I almost got eaten by a shark. Let’s hope this goes a little more smoothly, huh?”
“It has to,” Kit said. “The Powers wouldn’t let anything like that happen to you now! See, it says right there, in big letters, ELECTIVE/NONINTERVENTIONAL!”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I guess you’re right.” She let out a breath and looked relieved.
“Kit?” came his mama’s voice from downstairs. “Nita?”
“Chicken!” Nita said, and was out of the room before Kit even had time to turn around. He chuckled, folded up the wizardries to bring them down to show his mama and pop, and went down after her.
As he passed through the living room, Carmela was sitting in front of the TV again, looking at a screenful of data. “More chat stuff?” Kit said casually as he passed.
“Oh, no,” Carmela said, intent on the screen. “I didn’t know there was a galactic positioning system! And look, you can put in a planet’s name, and it looks in the database, and, see that, here’s the address of Earth!”
Kit caught up with Nita as they went into the dining room, where his mama was setting the table. “The sooner we get out of here, the better,” he said under his breath. “I just don’t know if halfway across the galaxy’s gonna be far enough.”
4: On the Road
Nita was up late that night, reading over the cultural exchange material. A little voice in her head kept nagging her, saying, You really need your sleep. You’re going to be wrecked tomorrow… But she couldn’t help herself: She was too excited. She lay in bed for a long time with her copy of the briefing folder hanging over her head, reading about the planet, the society, the people
They had never had a war on Alaalu. They didn’t seem to have any disea
ses, and the manual said there wasn’t any crime. Their climate was stable, so that natural disasters like floods and hurricanes happened only once or so every few centuries; their planet’s tectonics were unbelievably leisurely, so that whole lifetimes might go by without there being even one earthquake or volcanic eruption. It has to do with the size of the planet, I guess, Nita thought, sleepily reaching out to touch the folder to get the content she was reading to scroll down a little. And there’s no moon big enough to stress the planet’s crust. And the weather stays calm because the axis doesn’t tilt, and the sun’s the right distance away…
She lay back after looking at one of the images of a beach—broad, white, and tideless—with that golden sun lying low over an endless blue-green sea. This is going to be just what I need, Nita thought. Two weeks at the beach…
But the beach was full of statues.
Nita stood looking around her in a twilight that, as she considered it, was not the one that came before sunset, but the one that came before dawn. The water ran up and down the beach, strangely quiet. The waves were very small; she thought perhaps she was on a lakeshore somewhere.
At this time of day, everything—sea, sand, sky—seemed to be the same color, a soft bluish gray. The beach ran seemingly to infinity on each side, sloping strangely upward and vanishing in a mist of twilight distance. And in that dimness, dotted here and there along the beach, a hundred thousand tall statues stood.
Every time Nita looked in a different direction, there seemed to be more of them. They were wonderfully made. It seemed to Nita that the statues had been painted to look just like real people: very tall people, of whom even the shortest were six or seven feet high. They wore long, loose, comfortable clothes, tunics and soft trousers and long skirts, and they were all dark and very handsome, with blind, bland faces, all slightly smiling.
Nita went over to the closest of them, admiring the wonderful realism with which the statue had been carved. You could even see the coarse, soft weave in the fabric of the clothes it wore, as if it were real. She reached out to touch the “fabric” of the nearest statue’s sleeve—
And found that it was fabric, something like loosely woven linen… and the arm underneath it was warm.
They’re not statues—
Nita snatched her hand back, shocked. But there was no answering movement from the— Not a statue. A person. But what’s the matter with them? Why don’t they move?
“Why don’t you move?” she cried to the night. “What’s wrong?”
No voice answered her, at first. But then, slowly, Nita began to hear another sound, one she’d mistaken for the sound of the little waves coming up the beach. It was someone whispering. The whisper said, “We are as we’ve decided to be. Everything is fine.”
“It’s not!” Nita said. “There’s more to life than just standing around! You should move! You should do things!”
“We are as we’ve decided to be,” said another whisper. And another, and another, until there was a whole chorus of them, all saying, as if in perfect content, “Everything is fine. Everything is fine… ”
In the dream, Nita wasn’t convinced. She started to walk down the beach, looking for just one of these people who would say something besides “Everything is fine.” Finally, she broke into a run, looking into face after smiling face, and the speed of her running stirred the clothes of the people she ran past… but nothing else.
None of them moved. None of them turned to watch her. Finally, after a long dream-time of running, Nita stopped. Because this was dream, she wasn’t out of breath. But she could still hear the whispering, endless, like the sound of the sea:
“We are as we’ve decided to be… ”
“…and everything is fine… ”
She stood there in the twilight, which was slowly growing brighter, and started feeling like she wanted to leave. She didn’t want to see the light of full day shine on all these statues and make it plain how stuck they were. Nita started to look for a way to get off the beach. But it was all beach, a beach full of statues, no matter where she turned. She started to despair.
Then, far away, something moved. Nita strained her eyes to see it. Slowly, she began to see that it was shorter than all the other blind, frozen figures, and it was walking right toward her. As it came ever closer, Nita found herself feeling an irrational fear, which grew with every step it took toward her.
She wanted to run. But she couldn’t. Now she was the frozen one, a statue herself. No! Nita thought, and tried and tried to move; but she’d stayed here too long, and the statues’ immobility had spread to her. And that single moving figure was closer now. Much closer. Only a few hundred feet away—
In terror she stood there, rooted to the sand, and watched him come. He was only as tall as she was, but Nita felt as afraid of him as if he’d been a hundred times taller. He was as dark-skinned as everyone else, wearing pale, long, loose clothes like the statues wore. He had long, dark reddish hair-stuff that hung down his back, and his eyes were dark, too, unreadable. He came to stand right in front of Nita, and nothing she could do made her able to move so much as a muscle, though she desperately wanted to get away.
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” the man said. “You know what has to be done.”
Nita couldn’t speak, couldn’t even shake her head.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’ll be morning soon.” And sure enough, dawn was coming on. In fact, it seemed to be coming on with a rush, as if something had held it back, waiting for this man to arrive. Now the whole eastern sky went pale with light, paler, bright, blinding, and the Sun leaped into the sky as if over a wall, and the whole beach went up in a single cry of terror as at last, at last, the statues spoke—
***
It was the Sun that woke Nita up, finally, streaming very early into her room through the east-facing blinds that she’d forgotten to close. The briefing folder, programmed not to waste energy, had folded itself up again after Nita fell asleep and was hovering in the air over her head, a neat little dark package. Nita plucked it out of the air, threw off the covers, got up, and stuffed the folder into her backpack, which was hanging over the back of her desk chair. Then she got into her jeans and threw on a baggy T-shirt stolen from her dad.
“Everything is fine… ”
Wow, Nita thought. That’s one for the book. She got her manual, opened it to her “dream log” pages, and added a record of what she could remember of the dream. Most of it, I think. It was vivid.
When she finished, she went down for breakfast. Dairine was there ahead of her, which was moderately unusual. She was sitting at the dining room table, halfway through a bowl of cornflakes, with a folder spread out on the table next to the bowl. Spot was crouched off to one side, with no legs in evidence, but he had put up a pair of stalked eyes and was regarding the cornflakes with a dubious expression.
“Morning,” Nita said.
“Yeah.”
Nita put a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster, started them toasting, and went to get a mug from the dish drainer. “What’s that you’re reading?”
“An orientation pack with information on the incoming guests. Dad’s got one, too.”
Nita was surprised. “When did that come in?”
“Last night.”
“It is in English, isn’t it?”
“No,” Dairine said. “It’s got a Speech-to-text converter, though. Very neat. He started in on it last night. I think he’s reading the rest of it in bed right now.”
“Great. How many guests are we getting?”
“Three, it looks like.”
Nita opened the cupboard over the counter and rummaged around a little for the dark tea she liked. “Where from?”
“All over. There’s a Demisiv, a Rirhait, and somebody from Wellakh, which I’ve never heard of.”
“Wellakh,” Nita said. “Don’t think I’ve heard of it, either.” Then it hit her. “Three? Where are they all going to stay? We’ve only got
one extra bedroom, and I don’t have the bunk beds in mine anymore.” She found the tea bags and fished one out of the box. “Assuming they can even use beds, and don’t need racks or hooks or something… ”
“They’ll stay in the pup tents. That’s what they’re for,” Dairine said. “They can put as much of their own stuff in there as they like, if it turns out they need it. Beds, furniture, whatever. In fact”—and Dairine looked up at Nita—“I’ve been looking over the docs, and they could do a lot more than that if they liked… ”
Nita looked around the corner of the kitchen door at Dairine. The expression on her sister’s face was one Nita had seen entirely too often—the amused look of someone who’s figured out a new way to put something over on the universe. It’s too early in the morning for this, Nita thought, picking up the kettle and going over to the sink to fill it. “How do you mean?” she said.
“The pup tents have a ‘back door,’” Dairine said.
“What, like the main access?”
“No, it’s different,” Dairine said. There was a pause and some crunching. “If you change the permeability of the pup tent’s matter-void interface—”
“Whoa, wait a minute!” Nita said. “That’s reverse engineering! The custom gate interface said you weren’t supposed to do that.”
“Oh, to the gate, yeah. But the pup tents—”
“Dairine!”
There was a pause for more crunching. “I said you could do that,” Dairine said. “I didn’t say I was going to.”
This declaration wasn’t specific enough to give Nita any relief, but she sighed and put the kettle on the stove, turning the burner on. And if she does start gimmicking things while I’m not here, well, that’s just her problem. The thought of not having to be involved in cleaning up after some trouble of Dairine’s made Nita feel oddly cheerful.
Her toast popped up. Nita got a plate and reached into the fridge for the butter. “So how are you guys doing your big transit to this planet?” Dairine said.