Kit laid the manual down next to it, opening it out to the pages having to do with his own assignment in the intervention and the locality where they were based. Immediately the manual’s double-page spread shifted to mirror the display that Djam’s page was showing. There at the top of the display were five small spell-circles, one for each of the feeder gates, interlaced with a webwork of lines indicating power conduits and control structures. At the bottom of the display was the larger terminus gate, its circular diagram pulsing softly as it reported in second by second on the energy flow between it and its target gate light years away, along with the number of people passing through it. More readouts reflected local gravitational stresses caused by all the gates’ operation, the interaction of the larger gate’s portal interface with local spacetime, and the status of incoming traffic from the aggregate of portals upstream.
“There’s no point in trying to read any of it too closely,” Djam said. “The little changes that happen from minute to minute aren’t so important. It’s when you start noticing a trend over a few minutes, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, that you have to start paying attention. The system has its own alarms built-in, and they’re pretty sensitive. If something really starts to misbehave, it’ll give you warning. The art of it is to catch these things before they happen. And, as our seniors have been telling us since we got here, if the alarms go off, don’t waste time; yell for help and get the heavyweight talent in here.” Djam pointed at a softly red-glowing set of characters in the Speech that spelled out EMERGENCY. He touched it, and a list of names or similar personality identifiers popped up. “Whoever is at the top of that list,” Djam said, “just touch it and describe your problem, and they’ll gate straight in here so fast you won’t feel the wind of them arriving before you see their hands, claws, or tentacles getting right into the display and manipulating the gate structure.”
“That’s happened to you?” Kit said.
Djam tilted his head left and right. “Twice now,” he said. “Scared the fur off me the first time. The second time, they could’ve taken the fur for all I cared: I was just glad to get the big gate settled.” He shook himself all over, and his fur fluffed out. “Gravitational anomaly—something triggered by something going on in Thesba’s core. Not my fault, but I was glad when it was over.”
Kit nodded. “All right,” he said, “give me a second. I’ll go back and get some breakfast and you can help me get a handle on this.”
It took them something like an hour—along with a box of Pop Tarts and two cans of cappuccino, one of which Djam sampled and pronounced “awful in a strangely attractive way”— before Djam was satisfied that Kit knew what to look for and Kit was satisfied he was getting enough of a feel for the gate-monitoring interface to be left alone with it. Picking up the finest points of the way the gates interacted, Kit thought, was probably going to take another day or so. There was one proto-emergency after they’d been at it for about half an hour, and Kit was pleased that he had seen the pattern starting to build before the manual’s own alarm had time to go off. For a few moments it had looked as if he was going to get to call in his first assistant from the next level up, but it didn’t happen. The gravitational fluctuations associated with the number three feeder gate calmed down when Kit instructed the manual to boost the gate’s power feed enough to reinforce its own damping mechanisms, spoofing the gravitational field in its immediate neighborhood into ignoring the neighboring four gates and the way they were warping the gravity in space around them.
“That’s it,” Djam said, sounding very pleased as he rubbed his eyes and leaned against the back of the throne. “I’d say you’ve got the eye for this… inasmuch as any of us can have ‘an eye for it’ after we’ve only been doing it for a few days.”
It was as much as Kit could’ve hoped for. “I think I’m okay,” he said. “You should try to get some rest— you’ve really had a long shift. You’ll be close if I need to yell, and anyway—” He pointed at the red “emergency” herald on his manual pages, most carefully not touching it. “It’s not like they’re far away.”
“They’re absolutely not,” Djam said, “believe me.” He stretched and made a different bubbling noise, his version of a yawn, picked up the metal rod from which his energy-based manual page was extruded, and sucked the page back in.
Kit looked away from the manual across the grassy plain toward the masses of people streaming out of the feeder gates and into the terminus gate, so much more visible than they had been last night… but just as constant as they had been last night, the flow never stopping. “What about them?” he said. “Are we ever supposed to go over there and see how they’re doing?”
“Well,” Djam said, “if there was some kind of emergency, of course. But they’ve got Tevaralti wizards handling that side of it, mostly, and nonwizards too—people from their own clans or national emergency services. Mostly we’re expected to keep our eyes on the gates. After all, that’s what they brought us here for; because we’ve got some previous gate expertise.”
“And because we’re humanoid.”
“Well. If we do have to interact with Tevaralti people when they’re losing their world…” Djam sounded uncomfortable. “You can imagine how it would be. The more like you the people who’re helping you are, the less it’s going to upset you. And Powers only know, these people have enough to be upset about right now. Probably it’s best to keep all the on-planet help looking as humanoid as possible, even if we might not be interacting with Tevaralti all that often.”
“That’s excuse we’re given anyway,” said Cheleb from behind them, as hae came around to sit on the seat-stone of the throne on the other side of Djam. Hae shook all haes layers of clothing around haem in a big fabric-heavy shrug. “Who knows what Above-And-Beyonders really have in mind?” Hae stretched where hae sat, looked over at Kit. “Sleep well, cousin?”
Kit nodded. “Yes, thanks.”
“Plying colleague with exotic food, one sees,” Cheleb said, reaching across Djam to pick up the empty Pop-Tart box. “What is ‘raspberry’?”
“Um, it’s a fruit,” Kit said.
Cheleb wrinkled haes gum-flaps away from haes very, very sharp upper teeth. It was like having a crocodile make a distasteful face. “Not part of usual diet,” he said. “Contains carbohydrate, though?”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Starch, sugar…”
Cheleb elongated haes eyes at Kit and got up again. “Trade you some of mine later, perhaps? For experimentation. Have places to be, meanwhile.”
Djam looked up. “Where are you headed?”
“Got cousin on other side of planet. Cousin cousin, not hrasht.” Cheleb shook haes layers again, this time apparently to settle them into place. “Helping with small upstream gate. Might as well go see, not on shift until nearly sunset.”
“All right,” Djam said.
“If needed, call right away,” Cheleb said to Kit, patting a pouch slung under haes jacket layer: Kit supposed that was where hae had haes manual stowed, or whatever hae used for one. “Don’t hesitate. Sudden disappearance on Important Job will just impress cousin more.”
There was something so sly about the way he said it that Kit just had to snicker. “Okay,” he said. “Dai, cousin.”
Cheleb raised a claw to them and went off toward the little local-gating pad. Djam stood up too, stretching and bubble-yawning again. “So you’re sure you’re all right with this?” Djam said.
“As sure as I can be right now,” Kit said.
“All right. Call me right away if you need anything, or you’re not sure about a reading.”
“Will do.”
And Djam headed back to his standing stone, waved his portal open, and vanished into it.
Kit looked down at his manual, touched the control at the corner of the double-page spread that brought it into “active-for-intervention” mode, and got busy watching the gates.