Nita sucked in her breath. The boy shook his head. “We’re going back to get some help. There are a few really young kids back on the Moon right now. Might be we can get together enough raw power to slow down the expansion.”
“Even if we can’t do that right away, we should be able to keep the blazar from igniting,” the girl said.
“We think,” said the Aussie-sounding boy.
All of them trailed off. They looked terrified, but determined. Nita thought, And that’s how we look to them, I’ll bet.
“Good luck,” Kit said.
“If there is such a thing,” said the girl. Her look was defiant. “But we’re not waiting to find out. Dai—”
The three of them waved and went back the way Nita’s and Kit’s group had come.
Nita turned to watch them go as Ronan came out of another of the cubicle shops over on the right and rejoined them. “So,” he said, “the big gut here finish stuffing himself?”
Ponch gave Ronan a dry look. I wouldn’t talk if I were you, he said. That greaseball hamburger you were eating was nearly strong enough to drown out the scent of what we’re tracking.
“Which you’ve finally got nailed down?” Kit said.
The scent’s faint, Ponch said, but I can find the way from here, or at least get us headed in the right direction. How do you want to go?
“Using a fixed gate would be better right now,” Ronan said.
Then I can show you the way in my head, Ponch said to Kit.
“And I can use the manual to convert those into coordinates the Crossings gating system can use,” Kit said. “But we’ll need to go talk to the station staff to get them to allocate us a gate.”
“Yeah. Let’s message Sker’ret.”
I can smell where he is, Ponch said. This way.
Ponch galloped off down the concourse toward the great intersection where the secondary concourse wing met the major one they were in. In the center of it rose an open structure of blue-green metal, looking like a cross between an office cubicle and a set of monkey bars. Around it a number of Rirhait people were gathered, making a noise like a lawn mower having an argument with a rock it had found hiding in the grass.
Sker’ret was there, the front half of him reared up off the floor as he worked at one of the subsidiary kiosk-columns that made up the body of the structure. The column had extruded a control console covered with patches of embedded light, which Sker’ret was tapping at with great speed. Three of the gathered Rirhait were looking over one or another set of his shoulders; two others were rushing around the cubicle as if they were looking for something. With a wizard’s ear, Nita could hear Sker’ret saying to one of the Rirhait looking over his shoulder, “See, this is all you need to do. It’s easier than you think. If you just make sure that the equations for the hypersphere balance have the same asymptotic expansion variables laid in—”
He looked up as Nita and Kit and Filif and Ronan stepped up to the cubicle. “Oh,” Sker’ret said.
“We’re about ready,” Kit said. “Can you finish up here?”
“I’m trying,” Sker’ret said. He cocked about three eyes each back at the two other Rirhait who were looking over his shoulders. “So are we clear about this, sibs? This is going to hold you just fine for the meantime.”
“I’m not sure exactly where to go after that, though,” said one of the Rirhait who was watching whatever he was doing at the console. She sounded nervous.
“What about the spin foam variables?” asked the other Rirhait.
Sker’ret reached out some spare legs to the column on the other side of him. It extruded another floating keyboard structure toward him, which he poked until it displayed the keying pattern he wanted, and started tapping on while still typing into the first one. “You do it like this,” he said. “Let the software handle the brane issues; it’s built for that. Ignore the zonotope and the polar sine relationships. All you have to do is intuit the way the spin foam variables are sliding, and add about a radian and a half—”
“You following this?” Kit said to Nita under his breath.
“You kidding?” Nita muttered. “It’s math, Kit, but not as we know it.”
“—and then you pull in the last twenty sets of figures from the leech-lattice version of the hypersphere-packing readings, paying special attention to the kissing number. Then you just massage the string density quotient—”
Sker’ret was too intent on simultaneous input at both consoles to notice the sudden frantic wreathing of eyes of all the Rirhait surrounding him, and the way the two who had been pacing now froze in place with all their eyes pointing over Sker’ret’s shoulders. “And that’ll hold you for the next two standard periods at least.”
“Good,” said another Rirhait voice from behind Sker’ret—and now it was Sker’ret’s turn to freeze. All his eyes held quite still, looking at what he had been keying in. Then, very slowly, one of them curled up and around to look behind him.
The Stationmaster of the Crossings, a Rirhait somewhat bigger than Sker’ret and of a lighter, more silvery-blue shade, poured into the cubicle and arranged himself among and over some of its interlocking rails and bars, peering with various eyes at the keypads where Sker’ret had been working. “So you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “I’m glad you’ve come to your senses. We need you here.”
Nita wasn’t sure how someone so smooth-carapaced could seem to bristle, but as Sker’ret curved some more of his eyes around in the Stationmaster’s direction, he was managing it. “Unfortunately, you’re wrong,” Sker’ret said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
“What?” The Stationmaster pointed all his eyes at once at Sker’ret. The other Rirhait around him all pulled their eyes in close to their bodies.
“You need me more where I’m going,” Sker’ret said. “I’ve spent all the time I can here. This fix will deal with the problem at hand. And now we’re going to head out.”
“Are you insane?” the Stationmaster said. “Look at this place!”
Nita looked. She couldn’t see anything wrong with it, except that it did seem much emptier than usual.
Sker’ret glanced around with various eyes. “This is only a symptom,” said Sker’ret, “of what’s coming. And no one with all their brains in place wastes time treating symptoms. A cure’s what’s needed … and that’s what we’re dealing with now.”
The Stationmaster flowed a little closer to Sker’ret and did something that Nita found briefly alarming: it reared up and grasped Sker’ret’s front end with some of those many little clawed legs. “Listen to me, broodling,” the Stationmaster said. “What’s happening out there is far too big for any species to cure. The world is changing! And there’s nothing we can do. How do you seriously expect to keep space from expanding?”
“But wizards—”
“If wizards could have stopped it, they’d have done that already,” the Stationmaster said. “We’ve just got to teach our mechanisms to handle the new distances and vectors in the long term … or all this is going to come to a halt, and with it the transport and commerce of three galaxies!” More of the Stationmaster’s legs waved around them at the travelers of many species who were hurrying by, ignoring them.
“Your sibs have better sense,” the Stationmaster said. “They’re not running off on some fool’s errand at a critical time. But you’ve been hard to reason with lately.” The Stationmaster glared with many eyes past Sker’ret at the gaggle of humans and others who were uncomfortably watching all this unfold, and one eye stared straight at Nita. “Something to do with the company you’ve been keeping.”
Nita went very hot and opened her mouth. Before she could say anything, Sker’ret shook off his ancestor’s forelegs and bent every eye on him. “I’ll thank you not to malign wizards of goodwill and friends of mine,” he said. “And as for the long term, there’ll be no long term for anyone or anything if we don’t move to alter what’s happening.”
“And so you’ll go off and abandon
the place to which you owe the most responsibility.”
“We can’t turn inward now!” Sker’ret nearly shouted. “This is no time to try to find ways to dig our own burrow deeper! Turning outward to solve the bigger problem is the only way for us to save ourselves!”
“I have been Master here for nearly two hundred circuits of our sun,” the Stationmaster said, very quietly. “And it’s amusing to hear someone barely out of his fifth decade claim that he understands better than I how to handle the threat that—”
“You don’t understand a tenth of what you think you do!” Sker’ret said. “You’re too scared to raise an eye or three to peer past the obvious conclusions. And your job description has changed, but you haven’t even noticed—even though the truth’s staring you in the head and waving all its eyes at you. You saw the Station’s stats! Gating across the three major galaxies is down almost thirty percent! Everyone’s turning inward, from fear, and that’s just what our old Enemy wants! To drive us apart, each into his own burrow, to keep us away from the interaction that keeps us in touch with the Prime Mover and makes us one—”
“I don’t have time for metaphysics right now,” the Stationmaster said. “I need to keep this place running. If you’re going to forget where your real place is and go running off Mover-knows-where, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But you’re jeopardizing your positions here. All of them.”
There was an unnervingly final sound to that. Nita swallowed, waiting to see what Sker’ret would do.
He disentangled himself from the support framework and dropped back to the horizontal position. “Perhaps I am,” he said. “But at least, when we succeed in what we’re doing, there’ll still be a place for my replacement to have a position at. And a place for my sibs to learn whether you value them as you do me.”
All his eyes were fixed on all his ancestor’s. There was a terrible silence. Then slowly, one after one, the Stationmaster turned those eyes away.
Sker’ret didn’t flinch. “We need a gate,” he said after a moment.
“The one-seventies are all idle,” said the Stationmaster, in a tone of voice that made Nita wonder how she’d ever thought it sounded rude before. “Use one of them. And don’t let us delay you.”
He turned and swept off down the far side of the concourse. With reluctant backward looks, Sker’ret’s sibs went pouring after him. A few seconds later, only Nita, Kit, Filif, Ponch, and Ronan stood there.
“Wow,” Kit said softly.
Sker’ret glanced over at Nita with some of his eyes; the rest of them were still on his esteemed ancestor and his sibs as they hurried away across the shining floor.
Nita shook her head as Sker’ret flowed out of the cubicle structure, and hunkered down beside him as he paused, still looking down the concourse. She rested one hand on the carapace-segment just behind his head. “What I said about our basement,” she said, “I meant it.”
“Thank you,” Sker’ret said, and the strange eyes that Nita had previously had so much trouble reading now seemed full of gratitude and weariness. “But everything is still all wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
Sker’ret paused. “None of that sounded like what my ancestor would say,” he said at last. “You don’t get to be Stationmaster of the Crossings by saying how things can’t be fixed. You find ways to fix things, no matter what it takes. ‘Broken’ isn’t an option. And the bigger the problem, the more committed you are to fixing it.” Sker’ret shook his head, and the ripple of it went all the way down his body. “That’s the kind of thing he would always say to me. And all of a sudden, to hear him sound like he did just now—” Sker’ret sounded confused. “He’d given up. He didn’t sound … like him, somehow.”
Kit looked at Nita. “Tom warned us,” he said, “that there would be changes because of the way space was stretching. Ethical changes, personality shifts.”
Everyone looked uncomfortable. “It’s going to get worse,” Nita said. “We’ve just got to get on with what we’re doing. Though it really is freaky.” She glanced at Kit. “You see any adult human wizards here while you were on your own? I didn’t.”
Kit shook his head. “Sker’, where are the one-seventies?”
“Hang a right, thirty stads down on your left,” Sker’ret said. “It’s one of the bigger clusters.”
“Let’s go,” Nita said.
Their group left the cubicle and followed Sker’ret as he led the way around the corner and down yet another of those seemingly endless, shining white corridors, all the gate hexes and squares lining either side of it alight… and many of them empty. For someone who knew the Crossings as well as Nita did, the effect was unnerving. It was like going into Grand Central Terminal at what should have been rush hour and finding it deserted.
“This way.” Sker’ret turned off into a large circular area, maybe a quarter mile across, that budded off the transverse concourse. The area was completely surfaced with gate hexes, nested fairly closely together, outlined in many different colors depending on the species intended to use them.
“Here we are,” Sker’ret said. He led them over to the large gate at the center of the hex grouping, went to its kiosk-column, reared up against it, and tapped his uppermost legs against it. The column extruded a console like the ones he had been working with at the central resource station.
The embedded outline of the largest hex came alive with a clear fierce blue. Sker’ret turned to Kit. “What have you got for me?”
Kit looked at Ponch. Nita could feel something of the communication between them; it was like watching someone whisper to someone else, while not being able to hear what they were saying. And still, at one remove, it smelled of cocoa and motor oil. Weird, she thought, as Kit turned to Sker’ret.
“I’m not sure I can handle this keyboard,” he said.
“Just speak it to me in the Speech,” Sker’ret said. “I can do the input.”
Kit recited a long string of words, numbers, and variable statements to Sker’ret. Sker’ret’s little end-of-leg claws danced over the keypad.
“Done,” Sker’ret said. “Everybody into the zone, please. Thirty seconds to the transit.”
He pushed the keypad away from him; it vanished into the column. Sker’ret headed into the middle of the biggest hex, and they all followed. Nita was half amused, half scared to see how everybody put themselves as far into the middle of the hex as they could, so that at the end of the exercise three humans, a dog, a centipede, and a Christmas tree all stood back to back, facing outward against whatever might come at them.
“Twenty,” Sker’ret said. “Ten.”
Nita looked around her at a section of the Crossings that had no one in it but them, no one at all. It gave her the shivers.
“Five.”
Her heart was pounding. She glanced over at Kit.
“Zero—”
Everything went dark.
Nita had to blink a couple of times to get used to the darkness. There was air, at least—Crossings gateways had a vacuum-guard on them, so they wouldn’t dump you out into an inimical or absent atmosphere without warning. As usual, she looked up first at the sky.
There wasn’t one.
They stood on a small, arid, empty world, and Nita had known it was empty the moment they came out of nowhere. The lack of life has a specific feel to which any wizard past Ordeal quickly becomes sensitive, a sensation of something missing that ought to be there, but isn’t, like a pulled tooth. Above them, there should have been stars.
But there weren’t.
Nita tried to make sense of what she was seeing as she looked up. It was like when you stare into the dark for a long time and start imagining that the dark itself is moving. But this movement was real. It was as if the darkness was heaving with small shapes, no bigger than grains of rice—but all darker even than the blackness where they grew.
Nita had a sudden thought of the mealworms she’d once found all through a bag of bad flour—heaving, rustling again
st each other, like a live thing that was also a lot of little live things. The darkness of space above them stirred and heaved with little darknesses. They were there. And Nita very much did not want to think what they would start to be like when they were bigger.
She swallowed, fighting the thought of being sick, which wouldn’t have helped. Before this, space might have been inimical, bitterly cold, airless, arid, but it was at least clean. Suddenly that innocent, unself-conscious deadliness had been taken from it. Something was trying to squirm through the crevices of reality and fill that calm dark emptiness, void of everything but stars, with something heavier than starstuff, darker than the longest night, and horribly, mindlessly alive … with no interest in any other kind of life except squeezing it out, pushing all the native life more and more apart, filling everything so full with itself that there was no room for anything else. This was what the dark-matter expansion looked like, up close and personal. But the dark matter, innocent enough in itself, had had something added to it… something terrible.
She looked over at Kit: his expression was as shocked and horrified as hers must have been. She wondered how all the wizards there were could possibly stop such a thing. And we don’t even have all the wizards there are. Old age and experience can beat youth and power every time, Dad always says. Now all we’ve got is youth and power. Is it going to be enough?
And what if it’s not?
Kit put out a hand and said a few words in the Speech. A moment later, a small bright spark of wizard-fire materialized above his hand. Nita followed suit, telling hers to hover over one shoulder and just behind her. Around them, the others brought light about as well—Sker’ret’s carapace came alive with it, and all of Filif’s berries blazed. Ronan took that clip-on ballpoint pen out of his pocket and gave it a shake. A moment later he was holding the Spear of Light in its full form—the seven-foot spear shaft glowing softly, the head of the Spear wreathing itself in a chilly white-golden flame.
Kit was looking up into the darkness, and to Nita’s eye, he looked faintly unwell. “That has to be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.