“Same rule as for the school cafeteria, I guess,” Kit said. “Yeah, why not? But let’s get that errand done for Urruah first.”
“Yeah.”
They made their way to the central area for which the whole facility was named: the original Crossings. Once upon a time, two and a half millennia before, it had been just a muddy place by a riverbank—one that became a crossroads over time as its own native species learned to exploit it. Then, much later, it became an interplanetary and interstellar crossroads as well. Soon, now, with the opening of the new extension, it would add intergalactic transport as well, becoming a master hub for worldgating operations among three other galaxies of the Local Group. But the Crossings would remain paramount among the intragalactic hubs, its local space having about it a concentration of those forces that, when entwined with specific planetary characteristics, made gating easier than anywhere else.
All alone in the middle of a great expanse of floor was the spot where a reed hut had stood by the riverbank, not far from the ancient cave that contained a natural worldgate. At the cave’s entrance, a sequence of footprints in the mud had suddenly stopped without warning—an image as famous on Rirhath B as the corrugated bootprint of an astronaut in the moondust was famous on Earth. Cave and hut were long gone. In their place stood a cubical structure of tubular bluesteel,
no different from many of the other kiosks that stood around the Crossings. This one had nothing in it but a desk, its surface covered with inset, illuminated input patches of many shapes and colors, the shapes and colors shifting every second. Behind the desk was a meter-high rack of thinner bluesteel tubing, shaped somewhat like the kind of kickable step stool to be found in libraries. And inside the rack, more or less—except where its many jointed legs hung out of the structure, or were curled around the racking for support—was the Stationmaster.
Nita and Kit walked up to the desk. Nita was calm enough about it at first: She’d been here before. But then she had a sudden panic attack. What do we say to it? She thought, looking at the silvery blue giant centipede, which was busily banging away with its front four or six legs at the input patches on the desk. When you were on wizardly business, the same phrase did the job no matter where you were: “I am on errantry, and I greet you!” But they weren’t on errantry this time out.
Kit and Nita paused in front of the desk, and the Rirhait behind it looked at them with several stalky eyes: The others kept their attention on what it was doing. “Oh,” the Stationmaster said. “You again.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Kit said.
Ponch sat down beside Kit, looking at the Stationmaster with an expression that suggested he wasn’t sure whether to chase it or run away. The Master, in its turn, turned an eye in Ponch’s direction, and the eye’s oval pupil dilated and contracted a couple of times.
“They’re hard on their associates, these two,” the Stationmaster said to Ponch. “And on the surroundings. Where they go, things tend to get trashed. Are you insured?”
Ponch yawned. I’m not too worried about it, he said.
“It wasn’t our fault, the last time,” Kit said, sounding just slightly annoyed. “We weren’t the ones who chased Nita’s sister through the terminal with blasters.”
“Not to mention the dinosaur,” Nita said.
“No, I suppose not,” the Stationmaster said, waving a casual claw in the air. “Well, the facility’s general fund handled it, and all the damage caused by your broodmate’s incursion and departure has been repaired now.” It tapped away at the desk a little more. “I assume this isn’t a social call…”
“No, actually,” Kit said, and pulled out his manual. “The New York gating team asked us to deliver a message, since we were passing this way.”
At that, six of the Stationmaster’s eight eyes fixed on Kit, all their pupils dilating at once. The effect was disconcerting. “New York,” it said. “That would be Earth.”
It sounded actively annoyed. “That’s right,” Kit said, throwing Nita a glance as he flipped open his manual. “Here’s what they say—” He read Urruah’s message aloud.
The Stationmaster’s antennae worked while Kit read, the equivalent of a nod. “Very well,” it said. “I’ll message them when I have a moment. Let’s move on. You have your departure data?”
“Yes,” Kit said.
“Excellent. Don’t let the gate constrict on your fundament on the way out,” the Master said, and it poured itself out of its rack, whisked around and out of the
kiosk, and went hastening away across the concourse, on all those legs, without another word.
A few moments’ worth of silence passed as Nita and Kit watched him go. “Maybe I’m from a little backwater planet at the outside edge of the Arm,” Kit said, “but where I come from, we would call that rude.”
“Oh, come on, you can’t be judgmental,” Nita said.
“It didn’t even say thank you!”
“Well…”
“You agree with me,” Kit said with some satisfaction.
Nita let out a long breath and turned to start walking in the general direction of their gate. “Yeah,” she said. “Even though I’m probably wrong to.”
Kit made a face as they turned away. “Okay,” he said, “and you’re probably right that I shouldn’t judge it by human standards. Maybe there was something else on its mind.”
“Maybe,” Nita said. “Though…it might be possible that Rirhait are just naturally rude.”
Kit sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We did the errand. Let’s go get some lunch.”
He still didn’t sound as if he was entirely happy about the idea. “You’ve still got your bag lunch if you want it,” Nita said.
Kit laughed, then. “Nah. What’s the point of going to alien worlds if you’re not going to at least try to eat their junk food on the way? Let’s go down by the gate and see what’s there.”
An hour later, they made their way over to the pretransit area by their gate. “That wasn’t so bad,” Kit said. “A lot better than last time…”
“Last time you didn’t read the menu,” Nita said. She had to grin, though, because this time the problem had been to get Kit to stop reading it.
Ponch was wandering along beside them looking as satisfied as Kit. They’d found a little snack bar a hundred yards or so along from gate 506, and once they’d figured out how to convert the seating system to suit bipedal humanoids, they discovered that all the tables had an embedded, programmable menu of a type new to Nita. You told the table, or touched in, the long version of the ten-letter acronym for your species—adding eight letters that concerned themselves only with your body chemistry—and the menu embedded in the tabletop changed itself to show only things that wouldn’t disagree with you. Kit, having tested one dish that looked like blue pasta, had been so taken with the flavor that he’d gone on a “blue binge” and eaten six more blue things, sharing them with Ponch.
“I can’t believe you pigged out like that,” Nita said under her breath as they made their way over to the pretransit lounge for their gate.
“Why not? It was good!”
“It was free,” Nita said.
“Oh, come on. Nothing’s free. You know that.”
“Of course I do. I mean, you didn’t have to pay for it…
They had both been prepared to pay for what they ate. Typically, when a
wizard was on errantry, the transfer of energy to pay for things was handled by the manual, to be deducted later if deferment was appropriate. But when they’d tried to take care of the bill early, putting their manuals down on the table’s deduction patch, the table had simply said CHARGED TO GENERAL FUND— EXCURSUS. Once they’d realized that the cultural exchange program was taking care of their expenses, Kit had gone, to Nita’s way of thinking, a little bit nuts.