“Me too,” Kit said, getting up and stretching. “I’m ready to turn in.”
“Into what?” Cheleb said.
“More idiom,” Djam said, bubbling at Kit. “Your milk tongue’s rich with it. Chel, just mind these gates for these few minutes. I want to fetch out my night’s reading.”
He and Kit walked around the back of the Stone Throne toward the stones that held their puptents’ portals. Djam put his head down by Kit’s and said very low, “Colleague. Earlier, about your errantry-partner. Was Cheleb… inappropriate with you?”
Kit started helplessly snickering. “Djam…”
Djam’s eyes went wide. “Oh no. Hae crossed some kind of taboo line, didn’t hae. Your people aren’t allowed to discuss it.”
“Oh no, we are, it’s just… Just.” Kit had absolutely no idea where to begin. “Djam, do me a favor.”
“Cousin! Whatever you like.”
“If hae starts having that conversation with me again… please do whatever you can to help me not have it. Seriously. Some kind of emergency would be useful. Any kind of emergency you can think of.”
Djam started bubbling quietly again “I can’t think of any time of the day or night,” he said, “when it wouldn’t be useful to have you talk to these gates, Kiht. They behave so well after you’ve had a word with them! Indeed one might want to do it proactively. At a moment’s notice. To prevent problems later in the shift…”
“That’s the spirit,” Kit said, intensely relieved. “Don’t hesitate.”
“Trust me,” Djam said, and patted Kit on the arm. “Go rest now.”
Still laughing as quietly as he could, Kit went.
***
Bed, though, didn’t turn out to be the easy solution to the day’s stresses that Kit had been hoping for. Without the entertainment and his two colleagues to distract him, the sights and sounds of the day, and of the transients’ encampment, kept coming back to haunt him.
Initially Kit tried to do routine things, or at least the things that were starting to become routine, to settle himself. He changed into nightclothes and tidied up in the puptent a little, and texted his pop (”INTERESTING DAY BUT VERY TIRED. SPENT A LOT OF IT FEEDING A SPACE OCTOPUS AND WENT TO VISIT SOME NICE BUT VERY UPSET BIRD HUMANOIDS. MISS YOU AND WISH YOU WERE HERE WITH ABOUT TEN BOXES OF SALTINES”).
Then he tried to reach Nita again but didn’t have any luck: her profile in the manual simply said Unavailable. Kit flopped down on his bed and rubbed his eyes. Is she working? At this hour? Though she was having a lot of trouble with her gates…
“Wait, wait, I’m here!” her voice said from the manual.
He grabbed it, pushed himself up against his pillows and propped the manual in his lap. “No picture?” He said.
“Oh God,” Nita said. “You really don’t want to see me right now.”
From someone whom Kit had seen over the past few years in almost every state of dress and some kinds of undress, that said a lot about Nita’s state of mind. “Yes I do,” Kit said. “But it’s okay.”
He heard her sigh, and after a second her image appeared on the page—or an image of her head, anyway. Her hair was all over the place and she looked a bit drawn, and Kit thought maybe there were dark circles starting to form under her eyes. From the page Nita caught his glance, and smiled. “Yeah, well, you don’t look all that great yourself right now.”
“Makes sense,” Kit said. “Kind of a long day over here.”
“Yeah,” she said. “For me too.”
“Gate trouble?”
Kit could hear her trying not to admit it. Finally she gave in. “Quite a bit, actually. Thesba’s dynamo layer is really screwed up, and for some reason our gate-branch seems a lot more susceptible to the magnetic-field aberrations than others. Nothing we can do except ride it out and keep all the gates working.” She sighed. “It’s fiddly work. Fix this thing, then something else breaks. Fix that thing, and something breaks back where you started. Getting pretty sick of it, to be honest.”
Kit nodded and didn’t ask whether she wanted him to come over and have a talk with her gate; if she wanted that, she wouldn’t be shy about it. Nita was too straightforward to let her own feelings interfere with what needed doing about wizardly work. “We had to go over to the transients’ camp today,” Kit said after a moment.
“Really? Mostly we’re supposed to avoid that—”
“I know,” Kit said. “Lost pet problem.”
Nita laughed at that. “You know, I didn’t think there was going to be any way to keep you away from people’s pets. Funny to find out it’s true.”
“Wasn’t my fault!” Kit said. “He came over here and started eating my food. Had to do something to get him out of here.”
Nita laughed, and then yawned as the laugh was trailing off. “I’m keeping you up,” Kit said, guilty.
“I’m keeping you up,” she said. “Tell me all about this tomorrow, okay? Because you look like you need to tell somebody.”
Kit nodded. “Yeah. Have a good night.”
“Yeah, you too.” Her picture vanished and her profile grayed out again.
Kit shut his manual and dimmed down the lights in the puptent, and settled back under the covers and closed his eyes.
An hour later he was in exactly the same place, and just as awake. Reading hadn’t helped; music hadn’t helped. He just didn’t seem able to relax. Finally Kit sat up. No point in just lying here when it’s not doing any good, he thought. He threw on the clothes he’d been wearing earlier, stuffed his manual in his vest pocket, and went out again.
Djam was sitting there on on the Stone Throne as always, reading from a small roll-shaped device that looked like a more compact version of his manual interface. “What’s the matter?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Kit said. He looked out toward the gates again, seeing them, as he’d seen them every day, with people streaming in through the feeder gates and out through the terminus gate, and just shook his head and turned away.
Djam looked at him and let out a breath, and said, “I know, cousin. Believe me, I know.”
Kit nodded. “I’m going to go walk a while,” he said. “It might help.” He didn’t say what he was thinking: that what would really have helped was to have Ponch with him. He could have taken him for a good, long walk and gotten his head cleared. Well… Maybe the walk by itself will be enough. He waved at Djam and headed out through the stone circle in the direction away from the view toward the gates, making his way out into the broad, empty plain and however much was left of the night.
It was windy out but not actually that cold; very like an April night might have been at home. Some cloud cover had rolled in since Kit had initially tried to get to bed—enough to obscure most of the sky overhead, including Thesba, which was now well on its way to setting again. The light of it still glowed ruddy golden on the upper cloud deck to the westward, and occasionally bloomed into shape when the clouds thinned enough: but mostly the great moon was hidden.
That suited Kit’s mood at the moment. He’d seen more than enough of Thesba for the moment, even if the conditions also meant he was denied the sight of the fiercely burning stars of the local OB association, or of the burning, staring eye of Erakis. For a long time he just walked and walked, to the point where the lights of the gate complex had dwindled to a faint bright patch that the stones of the stone circle would obscure if you kept them right between you and the gate. Kit did that, only rarely looking back, mostly walking further and further away and just letting the rhythm of his walk and the swish of the tall grass against his boots take him away from actually thinking about anything. There was nothing going on out here but the wind blowing, muttering in his ears. He was feeling a lot more tired than he had, but at least he was also feeling a bit more peaceful.