He tapped the manual again to bring up his own gate complex’s array of controls and make sure that whatever was going on at Nita’s end wasn’t something that was manifesting system-wide. An event like that was what everyone had been watching for, and even more of a concern than the local anomalies. But a look across their graphs told Kit that all the gates were running well within their nominal ranges.
He sighed, and thought for a moment about home, and life at home, which suddenly seemed incredibly calm and attractive. Except there were problems even with that at the moment. Pop’s new job, Kit thought. Calculus. Valentine’s Day. What, what, what am I going to do about Valentine’s Day?… Shame the candy hearts don’t work.
When Kit had been in the grocery store that day and his glance had fallen on them, the idea had (so briefly) seemed so brilliant. Get candy hearts, use wizardry to erase sayings they came with, replace with cute brief sayings in the Speech… job done. Unfortunately the idea worked better in concept than in execution. Even such a simple message as BE MINE created complications in the Speech. Possessives in particular involved a range of words that in turn invoked a whole range of agency/patiency issues, not least important the concept of whether “ownership” was actually code for a consensual relationship with a fellow sentient being, and if not, what exactly it involved. (Even using ownership words with inanimate objects could prove problematic in the Speech in practice. “Does anyone truly own their car keys?” he’d heard Carl remark once when this subject came up. “Try claiming that you do and see what happens.”)
It was always possible to string a pick-n-mix group of Speech-words together to suggest what you meant, but it was complicated work. Kit had sat back after the third or fourth attempt to render BE MINE and thought, I should try something else. But that might be even worse. And anyway, what if she thinks this is too much? Or is it going to seem like too little? What if she thinks I’m making a joke out of it? Or that it’s way too serious? Oh crap. And then the whole thing had started seeming impossibly complicated and not nearly as clever as it’d seemed in the store, and Kit had shoved the candy-hearts box in the kitchen cupboard and forgotten about it.
Well, he thought, not today’s problem. Next week’s, maybe. Right now we’ve got other things to think about.
He boosted the manual up onto his lap and sagged against the back of the throne rock, crossing his legs and glancing idly eastward as he settled himself. Away across the plain and past the low hills that defined the local horizon, Kit saw a hump or curve through the midday haze and squinted at it before he realized what it was: Thesba, starting to ease its way up over the horizon again for its first pass of the day. Its rising limb looked for the moment almost innocuously pale and golden against the green-gold of the sky.
He scowled at it, almost glad to let his gaze drift back to the gates—not their schematic diagrams, but the gates themselves—and the streams of Tevaralti flowing out of the feeder portals and into the terminus gate that led offplanet, carrying all their worldly belongings with them. Granted, the carts and carrying vehicles they were using were all extremely futuristic, all of them levitating, no one having to actually bear those burdens themselves. But they’re bearing plenty of others, Kit thought as he watched them flowing by. They reminded him of too many images from the TV news—migrants and refugees, desperate people, fleeing from war zones and trying to find somewhere safe.
But at least there’s nobody where they’re going who’s going to argue with them about whether they have a right to be there. Kit had trouble enough imagining what it was like for human refugees fleeing an endangered homeland—everything left behind you, not knowing whether you were ever going to be able to go back. These people, though, knew it was for the last time. There would be no returning. Even after less than a day here, he was beginning to understand better how there might be people who were terribly conflicted about the idea of going away at all. Even though there’s something else going on with them, he thought. Something a lot more urgent, more compelling… whatever that is. The Tevaralti Planetary hadn’t been able to shed much light on exactly what was going on. It was entirely possible that everyone from offworld would finish this job and go home and still be none the wiser afterwards.
Or after we finish as much of the job as we can, Kit thought, looking across the plain to the hazy blot on the landscape that was the campsite of the people who had not gone through the terminus gate… who maybe never would go through.
And I just don’t get it. Nor, to judge from manual chatter around the planet, did a lot of other people. Why didn’t so large a segment of the Tevaralti population want to leave? Seriously, Kit thought, if the Moon was going to fall on the Earth and destroy it, I would not hang around. I’d be upset, sure. Furious! I’d do everything I could to try to stop it. But if it couldn’t be stopped, I wouldn’t say ‘Nothing else is good enough, I want to die with my world…’
There seemed to be a lot of other wizards working here who agreed with him. But Kit was entirely aware that that didn’t necessarily make it right. And the simple mystery of the why of it kept teasing at his thoughts.
Never mind. It may be one of those things that really just doesn’t cross the species barrier, even with the Speech…
Yet all these humanoids had been brought here in hopes that something might leak across that barrier, might eventually make sense for one side or the other, enough to help. The Powers, Kit knew, were gamblers. Trouble is, Kit thought as he bit into a saltine, there’s no telling for sure whether the gamble will pay off…
From off to one side came a sudden soft thump, a sound Kit had learned to recognize over time as the way an inbound nonpersonal gating often sounded in an open area. And here comes one now, Kit thought, and what’s this about?
Kit gave his manual a glance, then stood up and started to head over to the pad, half expecting the visitor to be a Tevaralti or other Interconnect Project official passing through; they’d had one earlier this morning on a routine check. But instead what he saw kicking casually along toward him through the green-blue grass was a long lean figure in black denim and a black parka, which in turn was unzipped to show a black t-shirt underneath that said U2 GLASTONBURY 2010.
Kit watched him come with some astonishment, for two reasons: first, that Ronan was actually wearing a color other than black—specifically, a pair of beautifully tanned and beat-up brown cowboy boots—and second, that he was eating a hamburger. “You busy?” Ronan said. “No, don’t answer that.” He eyed the saltine in Kit’s hand. “I see you’re completely overworked right now.”
Kit snickered and shoved the saltine away into a pocket as Ronan paused to look around. “I take it you’re not on shift until later.”
“You take it right,” Ronan said. “Just making the rounds. Nothing better to do for a couple hours.” The hamburger forgotten for the moment, he looked around him at the broad fields, the wind stroking through the rippling waves of turquoise grassland. “Very pastoral, this…”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Could be pretty nice without what’s going on in the background.” He glanced toward the gating complex.
“Though in some other ways a bit unusual,” Ronan said, looking down at one of his boots.
Kit did too, and his mouth dropped open at the sight of brown tentacles reaching up out of the grass and wrapping around the boot as a sibik about the size of a small bunny rabbit started hauling itself up it.
“Friend of yours?” Ronan said.
“Uh, no!” Kit said as the sibik headed up Ronan’s leg. It had twisted the main part of its sacklike body around so that all its little eyes were fixed upwards on the burger in Ronan’s hand.