“The sky must really be something around there,” Kit said.
“Yeah,” Nita said as their part of the waiting crowd inched forward again. “Not just because of those. But this…”
She tapped the page of her manual, and the view changed, shrank, veered off to one side of the OB association. Not too far away, as stellar distances went, there was a star that stood out among the neighboring blues and blue-whites, for it was vividly, dazzlingly red; as deeply red as a burning coal.
“That’s the landmark,” Nita said. “Mu Cephei, astronomers on Earth call it. Or Erakis. It’s been on the radar for a long time. Herschel ID’d it as a red giant in seventeen-something… called it the Garnet Star because it was so red.” She shrugged, snapped the manual shut and tucked it away in her otherspace pocket again. “Anyway, where we’re headed, at least the star’s not the problem.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Kit said. “I saw Dairine on the outbound list too, and I thought maybe that had something to do with why they were sending for her.”
Nita shook her head. “Nope. She’s on this job for the same reason we are: because we’re hominids.”
“Well, that much I got. But I didn’t get through as far as any explanations of why they need so many of us.”
“The problem’s the planet, looks like. The précis got into a lot of detail about this—”
“I noticed.”
Nita gave Kit an amused look at his annoyed tone. “It’s something to do with their psychology,” she said. “But it’s physiological too. It’s not like any species that evolved on a planet won’t be really attached to it and unwilling to leave if it’s going to be destroyed!… But it looks like this is something more.”
“So they’ve enlisted lots and lots of hominids to… what? Try to figure out why so many of the people there don’t want to go?”
Nita nodded. “That’s some of it. But also, when you’re dealing with a species in emergency mode—some disaster, or a catastrophic relocation situation like this—best practice is to send wizards who’re as close to their physiology as possible.” She looked uneasy. “The Tevaralti aren’t mammalian, it looks like, but we’re close enough to their kind of humanoid. We’ve got more or less the same body symmetry, and the manual says our psychologies aren’t too different…”
The crowd in front of them moved forward a bit again, and now Nita and Kit were right behind the four or five wizards who would go next. Kit looked around him and behind him, and Nita gave him a bemused look. “What?”
“Well, you mentioned Dairine. Where is she? Thought she might be coming with us.”
Nita shrugged. “No idea. Went ahead of us, maybe. I messaged her just after Mamvish stuck her butt through my bedroom wall, but I haven’t heard anything back. Not unusual; sometimes she doesn’t pay attention to her texts if she’s distracted…”
They were close enough to the wide, oval interface of the gate hanging in the air to see that it was running in safe mode—flickering briefly into patency long enough for the group ahead of them to step through, then going dark for a second or so while the wizards who’d just stepped through it were getting themselves out of the transit space on the other side. Nita and Kit stepped forward, waiting for it, and along with them the girl in the pink sweats came up on their left, and another couple of older wizards—a tall woman in a long dark winter coat and a shorter man in actual ski gear—came up on the right. They all exchanged glances and nods: the same kind of look that people getting into an elevator give each other in token of a brief moment of doing something together even though they’re complete strangers. Then the gate went patent.
Through it they could see the vast main gating concourse in the Crossings. Quickly they stepped forward into the twenty foot wide hex on the far side, stepping high as usual over the lower threshold of the gate hanging just off the edge of the train platform (because even though it had a safety on it to keep from cutting anybody’s feet off at the ankles, it was smart to be cautious). Behind them it went dark, a wide black oval hanging in midair. All of them hustled to get off the gate hex, and the second all of them were beyond the blue lines, the gate went patent again and the next group of wizards started coming through.
Kit and Nita walked off to one side, pausing by one of the tall silvery “information herald” posts that automatically located themselves near active gate hexes. “This is so weird,” Nita said, glancing around them.
“What?” Not that the Crossings couldn’t set the weird level pretty high on a regular basis.
“I have never seen so many humanoids here in all my life,” Nita said. “It’s bizarre. Not nearly enough aliens.”
Kit glanced around and had to agree with her. Normally any crowd you might see in the Crossings’ vast main concourse would be a very mixed bag—traveling members of hundreds if not thousands of oxygen-breathing species passing through on their way from one place to another, hurrying from hex-hub to hex-hub and mingling under the vast floating-segmented ceiling in a great hubbub of voices and noises impossible for humanoid life to make. And that doesn’t even begin to suggest what’s going on over in the methane-breathing and hypercold sections, Kit thought. But now, as far as the eye could see, they were surrounded by hominids of every imaginable kind—tall and short, broad and thin, mostly bilaterally symmetrical but not always, mostly with two arms and two legs but not always, furred or feathered or scaled or skinned in a hundred colors, and sporting an assortment of sensorial organs usually impossible to classify at first glance. It was all alien enough, but not as alien as they were used to… and that by itself was very odd.
And there was something else going on that Kit found a bit disturbing. This place was always busy, day and night, twenty-eight hours a day, but the normal level of busy-ness was very much like that of an airport at home: people running for close worldgate connections, people lazing along among the shops and restaurants in no particular hurry while killing time until their gate was ready to go patent, people making their way purposefully to some one gate to meet a friend or a business connection. Now, though, something else had been added to the mix: a tremendous sense of urgency. Even without the increased sensitivity to such matters that a wizard was likely to pick up in the course of practice, the feeling of thousands of people in this space hurrying in largeish groups toward four or five different destinations couldn’t be missed—the pattern impressed itself on the alert mind more or less immediately. That was something unnerving about it, but also something exhilarating. It’s not like being on errantry can’t get dangerous, Kit thought. But it doesn’t usually feel that way right at the beginning. Usually things take a while to get dangerous. But here you can feel that they’re dangerous now. Or about to be…
The two of them pulled their manuals out to check for notifications on exactly where they were supposed to go from here. The nearby gate-herald post, which was scrolling long Speech-sentences from top to bottom under its metallic skin, was presently displaying the stats for the gating hex connected to the Platform Twenty-three gate. Nita looked up at it, reading the most recent stats, and shook her head. “This thing has had more than eight thousand wizards through it in the past hour,” she muttered. “Is it even rated for that kind of traffic?”
“It must be,” Kit said, “or it wouldn’t be doing it. Rhiow and her team wouldn’t let it.”
Nita looked over her shoulder as yet another group of five wizards came through together and hurried out of the hex, followed no more than a few seconds later by another four. “If they keep doing that for another hour or or so,” she said, “something like twenty percent of the wizards in the New York metropolitan area are going to be in here…”