Cheleb came around the throne rock again and sat down by Kit. “Kehrutheh, I relieve you,” hae said, gesturing over the stone seat, and a copy of the array monitoring graphs glowed there.
Kit smiled at the Speech-word for “colleague”. “Thanks, Cheleb,” Kit said, “glad to be relieved.” He stood up, stretched, and snapped the manual shut. “Might try out the jump pad and go visit my friend later… see if he’ll let me have a few of those burgers for you guys.”
He headed for his puptent, Djam walking with him. “Kiht, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe it’s just a kinesics thing…”
“What?”
Djam bubbled a bit. “You keep looking at my fur. Is fur unusual where you come from?”
“Huh? Oh! No.” He was about to start explaining about animals on Earth and some of Homo sapiens’ simian relatives when he realized what the problem was. “No, it’s just…” Kit had to laugh, then. “Look, I’m sorry, this is really idiotic of me.”
Djam looked bemused. “What?”
“You remind me of somebody.”
“A friend? A colleague?”
Kit laughed again. “No! Somebody in, uh, it’s sort of an entertainment.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, somebody famous.”
“Really! Is it a good kind of famous?”
“Yeah, he’s a good guy. A hero type.”
“Oh, well that’s all right then,” Djam said. “I don’t think I could cope with being a villain.”
“I could show you if you like,” Kit said. There were ways to get access to Earth-based streaming services via the manual’s functions—some of them secondary to Dairine’s special relationship with her planet full of devoted mechanically-wizardly minions. The Mobiles were presently engaged in backing up all Earth’s data for her, as a convenience, and therefore considered archiving all Earth’s entertainment not to be a particularly big deal.
Then Kit had a second thought. “I mean, if it’s okay with you,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn’t think it was appropriate.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Kit paused in front of his puptent. “It came up for me when Ronan was here,” Kit said. “It feels, I don’t know, just strange, to be doing things for enjoyment when something like this is going on all around you. I mean…” He waved toward the portals, unwilling to look at them for the moment. “This is so awful for them. While I was on watch I was doing other things sometimes, I got distracted… and felt kind of bad that I wasn’t busy being sorry for them. You know what I mean?”
Djam looked thoughtful. “I think the Powers want us to do what we have to to work well,” he said, fiddling his fingers together in a gesture that Kit had seen him using the night before when he was uncertain about something. “But also maybe they want us to… not to be afraid to be ourselves while we’re here? Of course you don’t thoughtlessly make merry right in front of those who’re grieving: it’d be like eating in front of starving people! But if you’re sharing the food with them… that’s another story, surely?”
“Well…” Kit said, considering that.
“After all, it’s not like you can just pack your whole life away in a box, is it, when you go out on an intervention. What are you sent for if it’s not to bring you along? And there’s this too—there’s something about how our kind of people are, humanoids anyway, that made the Powers tell the intervention designers to post us on this world instead of just any species that was available!” Djam’s expression was surprisingly intense. “What would be the point of shutting that away if it’s what’s going to help them?”
There was something to be said for that line of reasoning. “I guess,” Kit said.
“And anyway, you have to do what you need to do to keep yourself running well. It’s not as if stopping yourself from being happy will make any of this any better.”
“No,” Kit said after a moment. “It’s just that… I don’t know.” He laughed helplessly. “I get guilty.”
Djam made a noise exactly like a horse snorting, so that Kit had to keep himself from laughing at that, anyway. “Guilt! Guilt’s what the Abnegate uses to keep us from doing our work, my advice-master says. After the fact, when it comes as fear we’ve done something wrong; or before the fact, to make us afraid we’re about to do something wrong. The food metaphor— When you’re working, why would you starve yourself of what will keep you doing your work well? That makes no sense. We’ve come a long way to do this, so let’s do it right. If taking some time off from the distress helps us do our work better, so be it. Yes?”
“Yeah,” Kit said. He let out a breath. “Djam, come on… let me get some snacks for you, this time: I must’ve eaten half yours last night. And we’ll have a look at the beginning of the story I want you to see.” Then another thought struck him. “You think Cheleb would want to see it too?”
“I think hae’ll be annoyed if hae doesn’t,” Djam said. “Hae’s big on alien cultural experience. But we can ask.”
Kit ducked into his puptent. “There might be some other people who’d want to look at this stuff with us in a day or two,” he said over his shoulder. “In fact Ronan was talking about having people over here for a picnic.”
“What’s a picnic?”
Kit laughed. “Come on,” he said, coming out of the puptent with an armful of soft drinks and crackers and cheese-in-a-can. “This may take some explaining…”
***
It was hard to tell where the next ten hours went. There had been some confusion at first when Kit explained what was going to be happening, and why. (“There are three more parts of the story before this one—kind of before, anyway—but I think we should start here…”) But soon enough they worked out how to transfer the streaming settings from Kit’s manual to the large, floating projection interface that was the way Cheleb’s version of the manual manifested itself. Within a very short time the three of them were watching the events of “a long time ago” unfold on Tatooine and at Alderaan, and Cheleb was roaring with laughter and pointing at Djam and crowing, “Does look like him! Does!”, and Djam was laughing too, until they all got swept away in the story together.
When the first film was over, both of Kit’s shiftmates were full of questions. These had to be set aside briefly when the middle feeder gate got rambunctious again; when Cheleb was unable to quiet it quickly, hae pulled Kit in to assist. It took the two of them nearly an hour to talk the gate down and get the gravitational anomalies it was throwing, one after another, to stop. Then there was some more eating and drinking to recover from that, and the questions started again.
“You said your people don’t believe that there are other intelligent species living on other planets.”
“Officially, they don’t. They believe there might be, but so far the mainstream culture hasn’t found any evidence that they’re able to accept.”
“And your planet is sevarfrith.”
“Mostly, yeah.”
“All right. But they still tell stories like this? How do they reconcile the two positions?”
“Because they’re just stories. And because they don’t automatically connect wizardry with the existence of other species.”
“That is so strange,” Djam said.
“Selective delusionality,” Cheleb said. “Evidence either of extreme intelligence or of species to be avoided at all costs, because can talk themselves into anything.” Hae was grinning that bared-teeth grin at Kit, which Kit for the time being took as approval.
“Maybe the second,” Djam said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A species like that could be incredibly effective with the Speech.”
Kit theatrically dusted his nails on his shirt. “We like to think that’s the case,” he said loftily. “Next movie?”