Kit just sat smiling at it for a moment, then felt around under his pillows for where he’d stuck his phone: there was one more thing to do before he could shut down. He woke up the screen, touched a couple of icons, and the text function came up.
Normally there would have been no limit on a text’s length when it was working as a manual function. But the screen of his phone was saying, in a very no-nonsense font, DUE TO INCREASED ENERGY REQUIRED FOR INFRATEMPORAL MESSAGING, 500 CHARACTERS PER LOCAL DAY ONLY. SORRY, NO AUDIO / IMAGE MESSAGING.
Kit sighed, but it made sense. Doing anything that messed with the arrow of time was inevitably extremely power-intensive. For all Kit knew, each character of the message was going to have to be inscribed on a separate tachyon, which would then have to be pushed backwards in time, or sideways, or something more complex. It was the kind of technical detail that probably would set Nita off into a long fascinating discussion with Bobo, but right now the whole idea just made Kit’s head hurt.
GOT HERE OK, Kit typed. VERY VERY— He deleted the extra “very.” —BIG CREEPY MOON OVERHEAD. NOW TO MAKE SURE IT STAYS THERE, AT LEAST UNTIL WE’VE GOTTEN EVERYBODY OUT. IF WE CAN.
He sat there a moment with his mind full of the image of Thesba, and paused: partly because that would have been the normal length of a short text or a tweet at home, and partly because the thought came to him once more that he simply couldn’t understand what was going on with the Tevaralti. How could anybody stay here with that hanging over their heads, ready to shatter and fall at any moment? Probably he’d get a better sense of whatever answers there might be over the days to come: but right now it seemed beyond strange.
PEOPLE I’M WORKING WITH ARE FRIENDLY, YOU WOULD LIKE THEM EVEN IF NOT AS INTERESTING TO LOOK AT AS FILIF OR SKER’RET. FIRST DAY ON THE JOB TOMORROW, BEDTIME NOW, LOVE YOU BOTH.
Kit yawned and hit “send”, then rearranged the pillows, shoved the phone under them again, and got up to go outside and take care of some before-bedtime physical things—carefully looking around both before and after to avoid stepping on any stray sibik that might’ve been in the neighborhood. Before he went back in he paused and glanced over at the throne-like center stone, where Djam was keeping an eye on things. Kit gave Djam a wave. The Alnilamev nodded at Kit, dropped his jaw in what Kit guessed might be his people’s version of a smile, and went back to intently watching his out-rolled manual page.
Kit nodded back, went into his puptent, secured the portal, and got undressed, yawning. Something to read?… But he was really too tired, and he knew he ought to get to sleep—tomorrow would come early and involve serious stuff. He put on pajama bottoms, for his own comfort if not his watchmates’, in case something that needed his presence happened between now and the morning. Then, flopping onto the bed, Kit flipped the manual open to the page that handled the settings for the puptent, and spoke the Speech-word that reduced the lighting to near-darkness. Not totaclass="underline" when he went on an away-jaunt like this, Kit preferred to leave some ambient light running in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night for something. Not a nightlight, he thought. Nothing like one, absolutely not…
He tossed and turned for a while, but couldn’t settle. Finally, though, it came for him: that strange moment when your body—now lying still in silence and dimness and having leisure to actually feel what’s going on around it—somehow finally understands that despite the presence of some basic comforts, your own food and your own bedding, the right kind of air and the right kind of gravity, you’re still not camping out in your back yard. The physical realization settled into Kit’s bones that he was hundreds and hundreds of light years from home, someplace completely strange… and in this case, someplace doomed. A shiver went right down him.
Sleep couldn’t come quickly enough for him: and didn’t.
FIVE:
Thursday
When the manual’s alarm woke him, Kit’s eyes snapped immediately open as if his body had been waiting for it. He moaned to himself and rubbed the graininess out of his eyes, then rolled over and tried to get himself oriented.
It took some minutes, as usual. Kit had noticed that when he slept offplanet on errantry, getting himself operational on the first away day was always more of a challenge than usual—partly because his normal morning routines couldn’t go ahead the way they did at home, and partly because he was always both buzzed and nervous about what was going on. Today was no exception, but he didn’t have time to indulge his wish that he could take things more slowly.
Kit headed straight over to his stash of food and drinks, cracked a bottle of water and chugged half of it, and then pulled his pajamas off and recited a useful spell that Ronan had shared with him. When you were in a place where there were no shower facilities—which this appeared to be—the wizardry in question simply stripped all the dead cells, dried sweat, and other detritus off the very topmost level of your skin, all over your body. Kit closed his eyes and stood there while the spell fizzed and tickled all over him, and then dusted himself off when it finished.
Got to talk to Djam and Cheleb about what they do about waste management, Kit thought. Technologically this is a pretty advanced planet; what do the Tevaralti do? Maybe we can get in a porta-potty or something… But as problems went, for the moment that was a relatively minor one.
He got himself dressed and had some more water, then reached for his manual, flipping it open to the messaging section. “You there?”
Unavailable, said Nita’s status listing on that page. On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading.
“Wow,” Kit said under his breath. “Already? At this hour?” But there was no telling what had come up at her end of things. “Just checking in,” Kit said. “Message me when you’re free.”
He dropped the manual on his bed and went out to take care of the most immediate physical need out back behind the standing stones. He was almost startled by how different the landscape looked in morning light. It was actually a nice morning; the sky was an unusual shade of pale green-gold dappled with little, feathery cirrus clouds, and a very bright white sun was shining from off to the left of the gating complex, low in the eastern sky—Kit decided to think of it as eastern to avoid confusion—throwing the standing stones’ shadows out stark behind them. In his opinion, the view was improved because for the moment Thesba was nowhere to be seen. It would be along soon enough; it circled Tevaral twice a day. But at least I don’t have to see it before breakfast.
On slipping back between the stones and coming around the side of the flat “throne rock” in the middle, Kit found Djam sitting there, leaning against the three-meter-high back of the throne but otherwise apparently hardly moved from when Kit had left him here last night. “How’s it been going?” Kit said, wandering over to sit down next to him.
“All quiet,” Djam said. “In fact, quieter than it’s been for the last couple nights. Makes me wonder if the complex has decided to behave better now that we have a full team on site.” Then he laughed. “Or whether it’s planning to start misbehaving once it’s lulled us into a false sense of security.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Kit said, looking down at the page with the sensor array that Djam had laid out now on the stone beside him. “But it does look good at the moment…”
“Might be a good time for you to synch up your own instrumentality,” Djam said. “I can show you what you need to be looking for.”
Kit nodded and headed back into his puptent. When he came out again, he saw that Djam had lengthened his metallic wand and heightened and broadened the manual page extruded from it so that it was nearly the size of a small flat screen monitor.