The whole room sat quiet for a few moments.
“You’ll find that your manuals and other instrumentalities have been loaded with coordinates on Tevaral corresponding to the gates you’ll be managing,” Mamvish said. “I regret that some of you who are used to working together must be separately assigned for this work: it’s numbers working individually that we need, with personnel in possession of higher power levels or proficiency levels being assigned to assist those with lower ones. You’ll be assigned gating hexes here to take you within the next hour or so to your initial staging points on Tevaral. Check your various instrumentalities for your gate assignment, and please be patient with us as regards transit times; we’re spacing the traffic load to avoid putting too much stress on the reception area on Tevaral. Down the concourse, close to the gates that have been signed for Tevaral transit, you’ll find a large hologlobe tagged with all the gate locations, both those emplaced and those pending, with coordinates for your own assignment areas so that you can keep in touch with your cousins while we’re all working there. And as I said, any of you can reach me virtually during this intervention; so don’t hesitate. I won’t be sleeping until this business is complete, and your contact will be welcome.” She looked around. “In the Powers’ names, then, and the One’s, let’s go forward and do the work before us.”
A low murmur went through the room. “And one last thing, cousins,” Mamvish said. “The Planetary of Tevaral has asked to speak to you before you go.”
She moved off to one side of the stage and turned toward the center, waiting.
A moment later, there was a small man standing there looking out at them, brightly lit as if spotlighted. He was wearing a sort of woven red kilt, and what seemed to be leather leggings reaching down to clawed feet; an ornate harness of polished leather was wrapped around his feathered chest. His head, too, was shaggily feathered in dull pale gold, and he held a short brassy-colored rod in his hands, possibly a wand. His was a sharp face, a fierce one, with big orange-golden eyes set above a nose that reminded Kit of a beak without actually being one; and for all his narrow waist he was broad-chested, like someone whose ancestors you could believe had had wings once. Kit looked at him and immediately thought of Irina Mladen, even though Earth’s Planetary and this one were physically nothing alike. What was immediately evident about them both was a sense of their personal power—of the passion with which they held the position and the intensity that they brought to their work.
“My cousins,” the Tevaralti Planetary said in a soft scratchy voice, “my name is Hesh; I serve and speak for Tevaral. I beg your indulgence for not addressing you in person, but right now my world needs me at home, concentrating on my work.”
He looked down at the floor, then up again. “I can’t briefly express the grief that this intervention is causing us. We know it must be done; we know we have no recourse. There is no greater anguish than to know that your world is coming to an end, and you must leave it. Very many of my people understand this necessity and are more than willing to comply: on their behalf I thank you. Very many others of them understand the need to leave, but their compliance… is subject to change without notice. Many of my folk are bitterly torn, as yet undecided whether to leave their world, or die with it.”
Once more Hesh looked down, then up. “I would not have you think them ungrateful for your pains. They know they must leave if they want to live. The problem right now is that many of them are not sure which option they prefer… and that choice, as we all know, is between them and the One.”
Hesh gazed out across the auditorium’s assemblage of wizards as if he could see them all. As he turned, seemingly taking in the room, the gaze of those round fierce eyes swept across Kit’s in passing, and it was genuinely as if the Planetary was there, looking at him. “We’ve been a long time living on Tevaral as a species,” Hesh said, “as have the commensals who share it with us. Our parting with Tevaral comes hard. I understand well that some of you will find difficulty in grasping why, when our world is dying around us, we cannot bear to go. Yet still I ask that you will be as gentle with my kind as you would be with your own, were your people in such case.”
He stood there gripping his wand-rod, and for a moment his shoulders slumped and his claws clenched, a gesture that made Kit think of someone who was wishing he could start a fight with something he could win against. But then up went Hesh’s head again, and as if in defiance up went the crest of his head-feathers, too, that until now had been lying smooth. “But now we have work to do, my cousins. At any time, at any hour, if you need speech with me, don’t hesitate. If there are non-urgent messages that require my attention, direct them through the supervisory structure which will be laid out for you in your various versions of the Knowledge. The One willing, we’ll all get through this together. Though I will be very busy, I may yet be able to come to thank some of you. But whether or not I may, know that your names will become the matter of song in our history—all your names—for millennia to come.”
He bowed his head to them all, that bright crest catching the light that shone down on him. Then he was gone.
On Earth, Kit would half have expected the room to break into applause at the end of that. But the mood here was too somber. There was a sort of murmur around him, the release of held breath.
Mamvish’s eidolon looked out over the auditorium. “That’s it, my cousins,” she said. “Let’s get to our work, and the One be with us. Meanwhile, send in the next group, please?”
And her eidolon-projection vanished.
People started to stand up and head for the doors. Nita was already on her feet, standing and looking at the stage with her arms wrapped around her in a rather defensive gesture. It wasn’t the kind of thing Kit was used to seeing from her; he moved a little closer and nudged her with one elbow. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said after a moment, and let go of herself, pushing her hair back before she met his eyes. “This is going to be really intense, isn’t it?”
“Looking that way,” Kit said.
“Right,” Nita said. “Well. Let’s get out there and see where they’re sending us.”
***
They headed out and onward down the concourse to where the Tevaral transit gates had been emplaced. Even from down here they could see the huge holographic globe rotating gently in the middle of the concourse, with a huge crowd of wizards gathered around it, looking it over to identify the places to which they were being sent. Kit was very surprised when, way down there in that crowd, he could see Mamvish. “Look, she’s here too—”
Nita peered down in that direction. “Yeah,” she said, “but she’s moving pretty fast. If we want to say hi to her before she goes somewhere else, we’d better hurry.”
The two of them broke into a trot, dodging and weaving through the crowd. Mamvish came plowing along toward them at the same time, surrounded by people who drifted in from around about (or just appeared next to her), hurriedly asked or told her something, and went off or vanished again. “She’s so busy…” Kit said.
“She’s always so busy,” said Nita. “But she did say she was sorry to send an eidolon instead of being more personal with that message. Ought to let her know it was okay.”
“There you are,” Mamvish said as they got within earshot. “It’s good you’re here so soon!”
When they got close enough Nita grabbed Mamvish around the head and patted her. “Are you okay? You look like they’re running you ragged.”
Nita let go and both she and Kit reversed course so they could keep walking with her. “It’s always like this,” Mamvish said, breathless, her eyes revolving in opposite directions and her hide positively boiling with whole paragraphs in the Speech. “Nothing new. And you two, my thelefeih, are you all right?”