***
It took Kit most of the morning to fall into a monitoring rhythm he found comfortable. To some extent this had to do with getting the analysis array on his manual page set up correctly. Too sensitive a setting and it kept giving him false alarms about gravitational anomalies around the feeder gates; but settings not sensitive enough just sat there unchanging for long minutes at a time and made him more nervous than the false alarms had, because he was afraid he was missing something.
Finally he found a happy medium—setting a baseline in the manual for the kind of fluctuations in the local gravitational field that he’d been seeing over the last ten minutes or so, and then revisiting that baseline ten minutes later. Shortly Kit got to the point where he felt confident about glancing at the manual just once every ten minutes or so to make sure that everything was all right. Initially he tended to underestimate the time—it was surprising how long ten minutes could feel while you were waiting for something to go wrong—but finally, around local noon, he got the hang of it enough to start to relax.
He spent the time on either side of local noon delving into the manual for information on his two watchmates’ homeworlds and people, and finishing the business of going through the readings in the manual that had to do with the Tevaral intervention. The more Kit read, the more there seemed to be—the complexity of a full-on rafting project, the movement of not only a planetary population but as much of its biosphere as possible, was terrifying. There was the preparation of the refuge planet or planets, beginning with terraforming and atmosphere configuration and continuing through the transplantation of the threatened biosphere from the viral and microbial level upwards. Then came the duplication of species-typical infrastructure, from the siting of new cities in relationships as closely matching their old ones as possible to the building of new roads, ports, airports or spaceports.
The list of tasks to be handled went on and on. The transfer or rebuilding of new economic resources: factories, agriculture, communications. The rafting and preservation of irreplaceable cultural and artistic buildings and artifacts. Culture-specific disaster counseling, weather management and control, mass data archival, political stabilization… No matter how quickly Kit and Nita and all the other humanoid wizards who’d been brought in finished up their emergency work here and went home, the much larger team of Interconnect Project wizards and technicians would be working on this particular relocation for years if not decades to come.
And this is what Mamvish specializes in, Kit thought. This is what she runs. Not just one or two of these projects: lots of them. The image of Mamvish as a short-tempered saurian kid who turned up on Earth every now and then to trash-talk recalcitrant Komodo dragons had without warning considerably broadened itself out.
Will we see her, I wonder? Kit thought. It didn’t make sense to expect it. She had to be incredibly busy. And more to the point, even if she’s got time for visiting around, what’re the odds it’ll coincide with any of us Earth-based types being conscious? Tevaral’s day, after all, was thirty-one and a half hours long. This fortunately mapped fairly closely onto the Crossings day of thirty-three hours—a schedule that Kit had occasionally had to come to grips with while on errantry. But for an Earth-human used to a twenty-four hour day, sleep and waking schedules could get pretty messed up after only a few of the thirty-plus-hour cycles. Kit suspected he’d have to adjust his own sleep schedule after four or five days of this, and the others might too.
At any rate, the length of the Tevaralti day meant that he and Cheleb and Djam were going to be doing more or less ten hours each of gate-monitoring, with ten hours off and ten hours to sleep. Assuming nothing really awful happens that needs us all at once, Kit thought.
For his own purposes, though, he really hoped this intervention wasn’t going to go on too much longer than Mamvish had predicted… as being on a thirty-hour-or-better schedule for too long wasn’t kind to Earth-human physiologies. You could try to tweak your own body clock with wizardry, but it was delicate work and you usually wound up having to pay for it in more than just your personal energy after you’d tried.
Energy, Kit thought. Now that I think of it… He got up and stretched, and went back to his puptent with the manual open in one hand for something to drink and a snack. Shortly thereafter he was back in place again with some saltines and the manual spread out again, looking over the information about the refuge planet on which this terminus gate was targeted.
Hardly had Kit gotten settled when the manual’s messaging pages started to flash. Oh, now what? he thought as he had the incoming-messages page overlay its content on the gate-monitoring array… and then with a grin he saw from the flashing profile that it was Nita. “You’re just now free?” he said. “What’s going on over there?”
“One of the feeder gates misbehaving,” her voice said from the manual pages. “Started up right during my orientation, which was handy. In a very nasty and unnecessary way. Not what I needed first thing in the morning.” She sounded as if she was still fairly aggrieved. “Or for five or six hours after. How’s your day been so far?”
“Not bad. Had a couple of hiccups while I was being oriented, but nothing like yours.”
“Just as well,” Nita said. “Still, my guys were really good with me. They showed me how to ride it out, and at the same time they kept saying, ‘it’s not your fault! You’re doing fine!’” She laughed.
“Yeah, you’d like mine too,” Kit said. “Both of them. One of them looks like sort of a sly lizard guy who seriously believes in layering, and the other one—” He had to laugh at himself, because he’d caught Djam looking strangely at him a couple of times before Kit realized he’d been staring and cut it out. “He looks like a Wookiee.”
“What?”
“It’s the fur. And something about his face. But there’s no howling or warbling or anything, just this really cultured accent, like something off the BBC. Anyway, they’re both friendly, and the furry one, Djam, is really easy to work with.”
“How old are they?”
“Hard to tell,” Kit said, and flipped some pages in his manual to where Djam’s and Cheleb’s profiles appeared along with his own as this gate’s supervising team. “Uh… ‘Close post-latency’, it says. So…”
“More or less our age.”
“I think. Why?”
He could practically hear her shrugging. “Just curious. The Natih guy here, you remember, Mr. Frilly Dino? He’s pretty old, a thousand years or so our time, but he’s like a little kid some ways.”
“So a lot like Mamvish, then,” Kit said.
“Without the tomatoes, yeah.” She laughed. “Though they’ve got some neat food of their own. We were swapping breakfasts this morning and he gave me these sort of, I don’t know, vegetable sticks, and they tasted exactly like salted caramel! I said to him, ‘I can’t believe this, something that tastes like salted caramel that’s actually good for me?’ And he said, all surprised, ‘Wait! Isn’t all the food on your planet that’s good for you nice to eat?’” She laughed a very rueful laugh. “I didn’t know how to even begin explaining broccoli…”
Nita trailed off. The pause was odd. “Maybe start with cauliflower and work up from there?” Kit said.
“Um,” Nita said, and Kit knew instantly that it wasn’t a good “um”. “Uh oh, gotta go, I’ll call you later, yeah? Right, bye!”
And she was gone. Kit broke out in a sweat as he tapped on the manual page again. It said only, On assignment, occupied. Availability set to: store messages for later reading…
Kit sighed. Probably the gate again. Oh well.