Djam got up and went over to where Cheleb was, between two of the standing stones. He peered out into the dark. “It’s hard to tell,” Djam said.
“Broadcast power source over there having problems, perhaps?”
Kit looked up. “No,” he said “that would show on the monitor readout. Remember the other day? We saw that right away.”
And suddenly Kit’s mouth was going dry again. He reached for his manual, started flipping pages.
“Another blip?” Djam said.
Kit found his own gate monitoring readout, studied it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Something’s wrong with the numbers.”
“What?” said Cheleb.
“They’re…” Kit peered at his manual for a few moments. “Show me what yesterday’s minima and maxima were like?” he said to it. “Thanks.”
The display altered, steadied down. No question, yesterday’s numbers were far lower. This morning’s had been similar. But now— Now they were scaling up again. They were heading for local throughput numbers that looked nearly ten percent higher than they had been.
“We should call Shask,” Djam said, that being their upstream Advisory, the Tevaralti wizard responsible for the management of the whole transport tree that culminated in their terminus gate. “Make sure this isn’t something going wrong.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. To his own surprise, his hands were shaking. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. “Djam,” he said, “call him. If this is just us, I want to know.”
***
But it wasn’t just them.
All over the planet, wherever gate teams had transient camps nearby, the wizards managing them were seeing similar spikes in their local transport numbers. The increase had started very slowly, just that morning, early in the day, and had been growing steadily all day ever since. The Transients were picking up their belongings and had begun passing through the gates to the refuge worlds.
Most of them, it seemed, hadn’t made any particular fuss about it; they had simply moved through the nearest gates to those gates’ next destinations. Only a very few, late in the day, had spoken to the wizards and support staff at the gate complexes proper; and those who’d taken the time had simply said, “It’s all right, we’re of one mind now.” As the upstream supervisors started collecting reports to analyze them, and Kit and Djam and Cheleb, like many other wizards around the planet, read the incoming data and tried to understand it, one report jumped out and caught Kit’s attention. “Our sibik said we had to go,” one Tevaralti sire had said. “That the One had said that life was better. And so of course, then, we had to go.”
When he read that, Kit went hot and cold with terror and delight.
It did happen! he thought. It couldn’t happen until someone who was humanoid helped them make the connection. Someone who was a different kind of humanoid, and had a connection to a sibik….
…and to someone else.
For quite some time Kit was practically speechless with relief. Gradually that state began to shift as the evening went on and Thesba left the sky, and he and Djam and Cheleb gazed out into the plain, watching the campfires very slowly continuing to wink out. They wouldn’t all go out at once, Kit knew. But he grinned helplessly into the dark and thought, Tomorrow night, maybe. Or the day after. They’ll all be gone then.
And if his shiftmates caught sight of the wetness that once or twice went running down their strange Earth-companion’s face, neither of them said a thing.
***
That evening, along with the usual daily bulletins from the intervention supervisors regarding the progress of the population transfer, all kinds of other announcements came down, mostly to do with aperture-size increases to accommodate the extra outbound flow from the transients’ camps. Then one came down that was so unexpected, wizards all across the planet stared at it dumbfounded. And in many places—at least where their cultures allowed for such reactions—they began to cheer.
Word came down from Tevaral’s planetary, and from the executive committee handling business for the interconnect group on Tevaralti, that the upstream gates were going to start to be decommissioned: that traffic from the less active gate trees was already low enough that their transport load could be transferred to others; that nearly seven-eighths of the Tevaralti species had been successfully moved to the refuge worlds, and with the swiftly-increasing mobilization of the remaining fifteen percent or so, the true end of this intervention was in sight. No one had ever expected such an announcement to be made.
But then no one had been prepared for the attitudinal shift among the transients, or the way it had swept around the world. Nearly a million of them had already departed. Millions of others were in the process of being transferred to higher-capacity gates through which they could be moved more quickly. The transients’ encampments all over the planet were shutting down one by one.
Cheleb volunteered to take the late shift that night, claiming that hae was too excited to sleep. Kit was just weary, and was glad to let haem take it. But he had enough energy to text his Pop before he collapsed on his bed.
BUSY TODAY. GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING. BETTER THAN WE HOPED FOR. SO TIRED, NO TIME TO TELL YOU MORE, WILL TELL YOU ALL SOON. THINK WE MAY BE HERE ONLY ANOTHER DAY OR TWO. MAYBE NOT EVEN THAT. LOVE YOU BOTH, MORE SOON.
TEN:
Tuesday
As it turned out, it wasn’t even that long.
Kit woke up and felt something so very strange when he did: the relief of that feeling of irremediable unease that he’d felt here since he came. It wasn’t that he’d gotten used to it. It was that it was gone. The context had shifted. It was still a terrible and tragic thing, what was happening here: but the best result that could be found was apparently now in train. Someone else knew that. Someone had communicated that feeling to him.
And it felt incredible.
He had barely even had time to shower and come back and eat breakfast before word came through to all their manuals or other instrumentalities that Djam and Cheleb and Kit were all being relieved by a single two-wizard team from elsewhere in the Interconnect Project, and were being released from their drafted-in status. If they chose to remain, they could, but they were no longer needed on this gate. Its upstream tree was being decommissioned, and the gate itself was expected to be closed down within the next thirty hours.
This too had been expected… but nothing like so soon. “Good news for us,” Cheleb said to Djam and Kit in the early-evening light as hae peeled his puptent’s interface off the stone where it had been anchored. “Got the job done. Can go home with a clean conscience.”
“But more than that,” Djam said. “I don’t know how closely you two looked at the statistical analysis that came down earlier today. The thing that started, the change in the numbers? It started here. It started yesterday morning, and began to spread.”
And both of them looked thoughtfully at Kit.
Kit’s problem was that at this point there was no way to be sure of anything. He had his suspicions, very strong suspicions, but he refused to take credit for what had been occurring around them until he had some kind of confirmation that the opinion was justified. “What?” Kit said. “Why would this necessarily have anything to do with me?”
“Because you were the one who was always doing something different,” Djam said. “Entertainment. Strange ideas about food.”
“Feeding sibiks,” Cheleb said. “Repeatedly. Thought you were a bit eccentric at first. Have to wonder now whether you were onto something.”
Kit wanted to believe it was true. But without more data… “Look,” he said. “If what’s been happening is something to do with me, then… I’m really happy. But I’m just one more wizard doing my job. You did your jobs too. Without you two, maybe I wouldn’t have had time to do what I did… assuming I did anything. Maybe what I did wouldn’t have been possible without you two.”