“Mamvish,” Kit said, and started to laugh. Ronan, and then Cheleb, and now this… what is this, Tevaral Planetary Innuendo Day or something? “No. Crackers are not part of my anatomy. Anybody’s anatomy. It’s okay, it’s just food.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely sure.” He stopped laughing, but it wasn’t easy.
“Oh,” Mamvish said.
“So why would you be thinking that crackers had anything to do with… what you were thinking about?”
“Um…” Mamvish shuffled her feet.
This is so funny, but no one will ever believe me if I tell them about it. And somehow I don’t think I should. “Mamvish,” Kit said, trying to sound firm, “if you don’t tell me exactly what the sucralose does, I’m going to get really frustrated here. …And not in that sense.” It seemed smart to add that.
“Oh,” Mamvish said. “Well. There are certain reproductive events in my species that the compound would very much…” She trailed off, sounding both embarrassed and anticipatory. “Enhance.”
Kit rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Oooookay,” he said. I have to keep reminding myself: as wizards go, she’s young, really young. And also incredibly smart and powerful. Neither of which necessarily answers the question, how mature is she? Reproductively speaking. However she does that. Because however we have it wired up on Earth, she’s not from Earth…
Suddenly Kit’s life seemed more than usually surreal. I’m two thousand light years from home, standing around in a field on a doomed planet in the middle of the night, trying to discuss saurian sex. Or trying not to discuss it. And I’m not sure which is worse.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me any more about this just now,” Kit said. “I mean…”
“It’s late for you—”
“Yeah. But look, I’m glad you like it, okay? I thought it was mostly the tomatoes that’d be interesting.”
“Oh, they are. To have that compound… associated with tomatoes…” Mamvish was absolutely gleeful. “When the right time comes I’m going to be so very popular.”
“Uh, that’s good then,” Kit said. “Good.”
“Just for my own information, though… what exactly is a cracker? So I don’t make that mistake again.”
Kit chuckled and got his manual to show her a view of the inside of his puptent, then zeroed in on one of the remaining open packages.
“Oh,” she said, peering at the manual with the eye on that side. “It doesn’t look like much. What’re those crystals?”
“Salt.”
“More of the sodium chloride?” she said, bemused. “Your kind seem really fond of this stuff.”
“Well, we do need it, it’s an electrolyte thing. But sometimes we like too much of it. Or so my mama keeps saying.”
Mamvish rolled her eyes. “Egg-dams,” she said. “Always fretting. I swear, they all go to the same school.”
The image of Kit’s Mama and Mamvish’s dam going to the same school to learn how to fret professionally made Kit burst out laughing again. It was surprising how good it felt.
But then Mamvish’s head went up. “Ah me,” she said, “they’re paging me. Kit, I have to go back up there and continue explaining to Thesba why it isn’t allowed to fall apart just yet.”
“Just yet,” Kit said. There was a question he was nervous about asking.
She gave him a weary look. “How long will it take once we take the restraint wizardries off,” she said, “is that what you’re wondering?”
Kit nodded. “Yeah.”
Her underhide colors went quite somber. “Not very long,” she said. “When you repeatedly enact wizardries that restrain a natural process from occurring, the reaction when the restraint is removed can be significantly increased. If there was going to be no one here, the result would be interesting to watch for scientific purposes. As it is…” She swung her tail slowly from side to side. “We will watch, of course. We must watch; we’re responsible for the outcome here. But as for it being exciting, or pleasant, under the circumstances…”
“I know,” Kit said. “Look, get going. But thanks for coming all this way to see me!”
“Thelef’,” Mamvish said, “if not you, then who? Especially now.” She dropped her jaw in a grin, levitated the squeeze bottle up into a suddenly-open otherspace pocket, and vanished it. “Later—!”
And she was gone.
***
Kit stood there for a while after her departure, still with his back turned to the gate complex and the stone circle, letting the strangely-scented wind ruffle his hair in the near-darkness and cool him down again. He was definitely tired enough to sleep now: it seemed likely that he might be able to grab at least a few hours before he had to go on shift. I’m going to be sort of wired when people start turning up for this picnic or whatever we’re having, but I guess for that there’s always that canned cappucino. Good thing I brought a lot of it…
He stood quiet and let the wind whisper. It wasn’t as strong as it had been earlier. Morning’s coming, Kit thought. There wasn’t a lot of sign of it just yet: the latitude here was close enough to Tevaral’s equator that morning and night seemed to come very suddenly by comparison with the slower twilights of Kit’s latitude on Earth. The cloud overhead had thickened, so that everything above was shut away. All the plain before Kit was drowned in a strange slowly-lightening half-gloom, in which nothing was certain. Even looking down at his own hands in that light they looked indefinite, almost insubstantial.
Kit laughed down his nose at himself and turned to go back to the circle and his puptent.… and stopped.
Something was standing there, between him and the circle and just four or five meters away, looking at him.
A hot-cold wave of adrenaline ran through Kit’s body at the sight of it. His first impulse was to reach for his back pocket, where his wand normally rode when he was bothering to carry it. But it wasn’t there, and whatever was standing and watching him… just stood there and kept watching.
It was astonishing how hard it was to see whatever was examining him. Yet Kit knew right down to his bones that his inability to clearly make out any details about the being looking at him had nothing at all to do with the lighting. And though he wanted to see clearly, his eyes were flatly refusing to do so. He could make out an upright shape, longer than it was wide, broader in its top half than its bottom. But beyond that—
Kit blinked, rubbed his eyes. His vision didn’t improve. Past the being who watched him, the stones of the circle were perfectly clear, silhouetted by the soft light of the electric campfire that Djam had brought out with him. But the being itself remained a mere tangle of shadow in an upright shape. And not even that, Kit thought. Shadow would be more definite than this.
He couldn’t think what else to do, so Kit simply said, “Dai stihó. I’m on errantry, and I greet you.”
The tangle of indefinite there-ness regarded him.
“Mamvish was here,” it said.
There was something extremely peculiar about its voice, or rather, about the way it used the Speech. It wasn’t that the phrasing was in any way unusual. But the sound of the words themselves seemed to strike Kit’s ear differently, as if there was a great deal of meaning underneath the bare statement that was somehow being held in reserve. And the voice seemed somehow almost to be coming out of the ground—a mineral sort of voice, seemingly having nothing to do with sound-producing organs or air. The whole effect was incredibly unnerving.
Still, no point in just standing here being unnerved, Kit thought. “Yes, she was,” he said. And as he spoke he suddenly remembered the group of people from the three other Temal species that he’d seen while he and the rest of the inbound group had been passing through the Crossings. Kit was now sure, without knowing exactly how, that this was a member of the remaining Temal species, the one for whom there was no name but “Fourth”.