(We're ten or twenty feet underground,) Nita said silently. (We'll get you some Sun as soon as we get off.)
Kit looked at Fred with concern. (You've been twitchy ever since we went into the tunnel, haven't you?)
Fred didn't speak for a moment. (I miss the openness,) he said then. (But worse I miss the feeling of your star on me. Where I come from no one is scaled away from the surrounding emissions.) He trailed off, his thoughts full of the strange hiss and crackle of interstellar radiation — subtly patterned sound, rushing and dying away and swelling up again — the Speech in yet another of its forms. Starsong, Nita thought. (You said you heard about the Book of Night with Moon,) she said. (Was that how? Your… friends, your people, they actually talk to each other over all those distances — millions of light-years?)
(That's right. Not that we use light to do it, of course. But the words, the song, they never stop. Except now. 1 can hardly hear anything but neutrinos…)
Kit and Nita glanced at each other. (The worldgate is underground, Fred,) Kit said. (In back of a deli, a little store. We'll have to be there for at least a few minutes to get Nita's pen out.)
(We could go out first and look around,) Nita said. {We're early—it's only nine thirty. We don't even have to think about anchoring the timeslide for a little bit yet.)
The subway cars screeched to a halt, doors rolled open, and the crush loosened as people piled out.
Nita got off gladly, looking around for directional signs to point the way toward the concourse level of Grand Central—it had been a while since she'd been there.
"Are you sure you know your way around this place?" Kit said as Nita headed down one tom- up looking corridor.
"Ub huh. They're always doing construction in here. C'mon."
She led them up a flight of stairs into the lower Grand Central concourse__ all beige tiles,
gray floor, signs pointing to fifty different trains, and small stores packed together. "The deli's down there," she said as she went, waving a hand at a crowd of hurrying people and the wide hall past them. "We go up here." And another flight of stairs, wider and prettier, let them out on the upper concourse, a huge stretch of cream-colored marble under a great blue dome painted with constellations and starred with lights.
They headed across the marble floor, up a short ramp, and out one of many brassy yellow doors, onto the street. Immediately the three of them were assailed by noise, exhaust fumes, people hurrying in all directions, a flood of cabs and buses and cars. But.there was also sunlight, and Kit and Nita stood against the wall by the Grand Central doors, letting Fred soak it up and get his composure back. He did so totally oblivious to the six men and three jackhammers working just across the street behind a barrier of saw-horses and orange plastic cones. (That's much better,) he said.
(It was quieter inside, though,) Kit said, and Nita was inclined to agree with him. The rattling clamor of the jackhammers was climbing down her ears into her bones and making her teeth jitter. The men, two burly ones and one skinny one, all three broad-shouldered and tan, all in helmets and jeans and boots, appeared to be trying to dig to China. One of them hopped down into the excavation for a moment to check its progress, and vanished up to his neck. Then the hammering started again, "How can they stand it?" Nita muttered. (Stand what? It's lovely out here.) Fred danced about a little in the air, brightening out of invisibility for a few moments and looking like a long-lived remnant of a fireworks display. (Fred, put it out!) Kit said. (If somebody sees you—)
(rtiey didn't see me in the field the other day,) Fred replied, (though Artificer knows they looked.)
(Probably the Learjet distracted them. Fred, come on, tone it down a t'e,} Nita said. (Let's go back inside and do what we have to. Then we can the timeslide and have fun in the city for the rest of the day.)
1 hey went back inside and down the stairs again, accompanied by the jA'et inward sound of Fred's grumbling. There was no trouble finding the
Je deli where the worldgate was situated, and Nita and Kit paused outside ubu have everything ready?) Nita said. in here.) Kit tapped his head. (The spells are all set except for one or two syllables — it's like dialing almost all of a phone number. When I call for you, just come on back. All we need is for the supplies to be in range of the spell; there's nothing special that has to be done with them. Fred, you stay with Nita.) (As you say.)
They went in. Nita lingered by the front counter, staring at dill pickles and sandwich makings, trying to look normal while she waited for Kit to call her. Fred hung over her shoulder, looking with great interest at bologna and salami and mayonnaise and cream cheese. (You people certainly have enough ways to internalize energy,) he said. {Is there really that much difference between one brand of matter and another?)
(Well, wasn't there any difference when you were a black hole? Didn't a rock, say, taste different from a ray of light, when you soaked one or the other up?)
(Now that you mention it, yes. But appreciating differences like that was something you had to work at for a long time. I wouldn't expect someone as young as you to—)
(Nita,) Kit's thought came abruptly. (We've got trouble. It's not here.)
(What? It has to be!)
(It's gone, Nita.)
"Girlie," said the man behind the deli counter in a no-nonsense growl, "you gonna buy anything?"
"Uh," Nita said, and by reflex more than anything else picked up a can of soda from the nearby cooler and fished around in her pocket for the change, "Kit—" she called.
"Coming?"
Nita paid for the soda. Kit joined her, carrying a small bag of potato chips, which he paid for in turn, Together they went back out into the corridor, and Kit knelt down by the window of a store across the way, a window full of shiny cutlery. He got his wizards' manual out of his pack and began going through the pages in a hurry. "I don't get it," he said. "I even checked this morning to make sure there hadn't been any change in the worldgate status. It said, right here, 'patent and operative.' "
"Were the spells all right?"
Kit glared up at Nita, and she was instantly sorry she'd asked. "The spells were fine," Kit said. "But they got caught like that first one I did, when you came along. Oh, damn… " He trailed off, and Nita edged around beside him to look at the page, "Something's changed," Kit said, and indeed the page didn't look as it had when Nita had checked it herself in her own manual the night before.
The listings for the other Manhattan worldgate5 were the same — the World Trade Center gate was still listed as "under construction" and the Rockefeller Center gate as "closed for routine maintenance." But under the Grand Central gate listing was a small red box that said in boldface type, Claudication temporarily dislocated due to unscheduled sdatial interruption, followed by a string of numbers and symbols in the Speech, a description of the gate's new location. Kit glanced up at the roof, through which the sound of jackhammers could plainly be heard. "The construction," he said. "It must have screwed up the worldgate's interruption of space somehow."
Nita was puzzling over the symbols for the new location. "Isn't that term there the one for height above the ground?" she asked.
"Uh huh. Look at it, it must be sixty, seventy stories straight up from here." Kit slapped the book shut in great annoyance, shoved it back in his backpack. "Now what do we do?" {We go back outside?) Fred said, very hopefully.