“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.