“Got rid of all the ones that were there then,” Cheleb said, still gasping with laughter. “Might’ve needed to tweak the duration element in the spell.”
“Do that!” Djam said. Meanwhile he slipped past Kit, waving his arms at the dark thing that was clinging to the stone. “Oh, go on, you! Go on, little cousin, get on out of it, go away—”
Kit was feeling like an idiot about the way he’d reacted, and now came up beside Djam to have a closer look at the creature. It looked like nothing so much as an octopus, though a rather small one—maybe only a couple of feet across when all its tentacles were spread out. It was dappled and patched in soft brown and the blue-green that was typical of Tevaralti foliage; the tentacles didn’t have suckers, but instead a soft, rough undersurface in a darker color. The baggy body looked very much like that of an octopus, but instead of just having one pair of eyes, one on each side, the whole abdomen—assuming it was an abdomen—was peppered with dark hemispherical eyes, each one featuring a peculiar four-branched pupil. The annoyed-looking attention of all these eyes was fixed on Kit and the gesturing Djam, and the creature stared angrily at them as it began to shuffle down the standing stone with a faint cranky hissing sound.
“So what is it?” Kit said.
“It’s a sibik.”
Kit watched the way it was moving its tentacles—once again very octopus-like, graceful and very certain about how it moved. “Where does it come from?”
“Everywhere,” Cheleb said. “All over planet. Two, three hundred species in water, on dry land, especially up in trees. Some have wings, not on this continent thank the Singularity. Plains and prairie species particularly numerous.”
“Sounds like you’ve been doing your research,” Kit said.
“Not much choice,” Cheleb said. “Things are everywhere.”
“Are they smart?”
Djam made one of his laughs, a kind of a bubbly sound. “Smart enough to get into your portal if you leave it open, and eat everything in sight! You want to be careful about that.”
“Okay. What do they eat?” Kit said, watching with interest as the sibik got itself down into the grass that surrounded the standing stones and began to slither away.
“Anything they can get those little tentacles on,” Djam said. “Though they do seem to favor carbohydrates over flesh protein. Just as well—there are a lot of unusual body chemistries on this planet, and it’s probably a survival mechanism to stick to what you can be fairly sure won’t kill you.”
“Weren’t so sure they didn’t eat flesh when that one got its little clingers around you,” Cheleb said.
“What?” Kit said. “What happened?”
Djam laughed and gestured at the big seat-like stone in the center of the circle. “I was sitting in the hot seat there keeping an eye on the gates till Cheleb here got back from an errand, and one of them came creeping along and decided to see if I was edible.”
“Not what he said,” said Cheleb. “Wanted you for nesting material.”
“Well, he bit me first,” said Djam. “Then he started trying to pull my fur out.”
Kit laughed. “Okay,” he said, “so they bite, but they’re not really harmful, and you can talk to them in the Speech.”
“Not great conversationalists,” Cheleb said. “Mostly interested in food and reproduction.”
“Kind of interested in food myself, at this point,” said Djam. “Come on, Kit, we’ll have a drink and a bite of our own and show you what you’ll be doing.”
There followed some bustling around after supplies, and finally all three of them wound up sitting together on the big flat central rock, working on self-sealing-and-unsealing boxes of a brand of multispecies iron ration that Kit had often seen in shops at the Crossings. “Noisome harkh,” said Cheleb, digging into one container, “but useful…”
Kit made a note to check the manual and find out exactly what harkh was in Cheleb’s local dialect: his understanding of the Speech seemed to simply render it as “food”, but something else could be going on. The ration was in the form of bars of more or less breakfast-bar size, and the three of them sat chewing on these and passing a water bottle back and forth. “So what they have us doing here, cousin,” Djam said as he finished up one bar and waved the wrapper on a second one open, “it’s not that it’s difficult work.”
“Not exciting though,” said Cheleb, as Djam bit half off the new bar while reaching into his body fur and pulling out, from somewhere or other, a long slender shiny metal rod that Kit at first mistook for a wand. “Sit around for a long time, wait for something to go wrong. Then when it does, panic, go crazy fixing it. Say bad things about Oldest Outlier. Then repeat. Often.”
Djam tilted his head back and forth in what Kit suspected was an Alnilamev version of a nod and touched a control at one side of the rod, then pulled. A see-through page of light followed the gesture out into the air; a projection or hologram of a manual page, with centered on it a very detailed graphic of the gating complex, and scrolling columns of readout associated with each of the feeder gates. “All the locations that feed into these gate interfaces are located elsewhere on this continent, usually in big cities,” Djam said. “But each of these accepts incoming transits from a spread of between six and twelve locations in each planet day. Every time one of the gates at our end closes down its connection to a remote location and starts opening a connection to a different one, this area experiences a series of energy fluctuations and local temporospatial derangements.”
“Unavoidable,” Cheleb growled around haes mouthful. “Space hates gates. Always a problem.”
Another back-and-forth head tilt from Djam. “We’ve been given prewritten spell routines to compensate for these flux events,” he said. “They’re independently powered and they’re automatic; they cut in every time a feeder gate closes down and starts going through the process of locking onto a new remote location. But you have to watch them, because sometimes something goes wrong at the far end—not enough people ready to move, some kind of problem with their own feeder gates—”
“Logistics,” Cheleb said, finishing haes ration bar and reaching for another. “Always the weak spot. Mass transport intervention’s a tree.” Hae reached out to the manual “page” Djam was holding open and tapped it with one beige-hided claw. Immediately the view shifted, showing a structural schematic of small individual pathways melding together to form larger branches, always in multiples of five or six to one, through two or three layers of gate connections, until the broadest of these converged into single final trunks fading away at their bases—the light pulsing there indicating the jump to another world. “Little gates all over this continent feed bigger ones, groups of bigger ones feed bigger ones still. That one—” Hae flicked his claw at the largest gate out in the complex across the plain. “On-planet terminus gate. Goes only one place, refuge world called Dallavei, three hundred ninety-four light years from here. Resettlement plan tries to keep people from same continent together unless they request otherwise.”
“Dallavei’s the second most distant of the six refuge worlds,” Djam said, “so all the gates debouching on it are the second highest-powered ones in the network. They need a lot of watching.”
“So we sit all through a shift,” Kit said, “and just watch the unlock-and-lock sequences execute.”
“That’s right,” Djam said. “Sometimes nothing happens… everything runs perfectly smoothly. But every six minutes, or ten, or more, depending on what the transit schedule is doing upstream, one of those five feeders closes and hunts its new target. And you watch it. Mostly, eight times out of ten, everything goes smoothly, nothing happens.”
“Or ninth and tenth times,” Cheleb said, “just when think things will be quiet—things act up. Smaller portals have traffic problems. Or start throwing gravitational anomalies.” Hae shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Gates hate each other as much as space hates them. Pack so many gates so close together, even small ones, they throw mass-substrate errors, or else time and local space get out of synch. Act quickly, adjust local gravitational constant, gates don’t rip each other out of ground and ruin whole day.” Hae rolled his eyes most expressively, making Kit smile: he’d noticed more than once on trips to the Crossings that the gesture was surprisingly common among humanoid species, though it could mean really different things depending on cultural influences.