Once more Hesh looked down, then up. “I would not have you think them ungrateful for your pains. They know they must leave if they want to live. The problem right now is that many of them are not sure which option they prefer… and that choice, as we all know, is between them and the One.”
Hesh gazed out across the auditorium’s assemblage of wizards as if he could see them all. As he turned, seemingly taking in the room, the gaze of those round fierce eyes swept across Kit’s in passing, and it was genuinely as if the Planetary was there, looking at him. “We’ve been a long time living on Tevaral as a species,” Hesh said, “as have the commensals who share it with us. Our parting with Tevaral comes hard. I understand well that some of you will find difficulty in grasping why, when our world is dying around us, we cannot bear to go. Yet still I ask that you will be as gentle with my kind as you would be with your own, were your people in such case.”
He stood there gripping his wand-rod, and for a moment his shoulders slumped and his claws clenched, a gesture that made Kit think of someone who was wishing he could start a fight with something he could win against. But then up went Hesh’s head again, and as if in defiance up went the crest of his head-feathers, too, that until now had been lying smooth. “But now we have work to do, my cousins. At any time, at any hour, if you need speech with me, don’t hesitate. If there are non-urgent messages that require my attention, direct them through the supervisory structure which will be laid out for you in your various versions of the Knowledge. The One willing, we’ll all get through this together. Though I will be very busy, I may yet be able to come to thank some of you. But whether or not I may, know that your names will become the matter of song in our history—all your names—for millennia to come.”
He bowed his head to them all, that bright crest catching the light that shone down on him. Then he was gone.
On Earth, Kit would half have expected the room to break into applause at the end of that. But the mood here was too somber. There was a sort of murmur around him, the release of held breath.
Mamvish’s eidolon looked out over the auditorium. “That’s it, my cousins,” she said. “Let’s get to our work, and the One be with us. Meanwhile, send in the next group, please?”
And her eidolon-projection vanished.
People started to stand up and head for the doors. Nita was already on her feet, standing and looking at the stage with her arms wrapped around her in a rather defensive gesture. It wasn't the kind of thing Kit was used to seeing from her; he moved a little closer and nudged her with one elbow. "You okay?"
"Yeah," she said after a moment, and let go of herself, pushing her hair back before she met his eyes. “This is going to be really intense, isn’t it?”
“Looking that way,” Kit said.
“Right,” Nita said. “Well. Let’s get out there and see where they’re sending us.”
They headed out and onward down the concourse to where the Tevaral transit gates had been emplaced. Even from down here they could see the huge holographic globe rotating gently in the middle of the concourse, with a huge crowd of wizards gathered around it, looking it over to identify the places to which they were being sent. Kit was very surprised when, way down there in that crowd, he could see Mamvish. “Look, she’s here too—”
Nita peered down in that direction. “Yeah,” she said, “but she’s moving pretty fast. If we want to say hi to her before she goes somewhere else, we’d better hurry.”
The two of them broke into a trot, dodging and weaving through the crowd. Mamvish came plowing along toward them at the same time, surrounded by people who drifted in from around about (or just appeared next to her), hurriedly asked or told her something, and went off or vanished again. “She’s so busy…” Kit said.
“She’s always so busy,” said Nita. “But she did say she was sorry to send an eidolon instead of being more personal with that message. Ought to let her know it was okay.”
“There you are,” Mamvish said as they got within earshot. “It’s good you’re here so soon!”
When they got close enough Nita grabbed Mamvish around the head and patted her. “Are you okay? You look like they’re running you ragged.”
Nita let go and both she and Kit reversed course so they could keep walking with her. “It’s always like this,” Mamvish said, breathless, her eyes revolving in opposite directions and her hide positively boiling with whole paragraphs in the Speech. “Nothing new. And you two, my thelefeih, are you all right?”
“Just fine,” Kit said, and patted her too, touched and surprised that she was using the specially-close form of “cousin” on him. Probably because of Nita bringing her tomatoes all the time. Still kind of an honor, though... “But Mam, is it just me or is does it seem like every time we see you you’re trying to get some species to let you save their lives and they’re giving you trouble about doing it?”
Mamvish abruptly stopped short—so suddenly that Kit wondered if he’d said something wrong—and spent the next few moments stamping all her feet, first in sequence and then alternately in several different patterns. “Yes,” she hissed, “yes, definitely yes, One-all-about-us yes!!” And though she sounded annoyed, she also seemed gleeful that someone else had noticed. “Seriously! It’s enough to drive you wild, sometimes I wonder why I bother…”
As Mamvish started walking again and kept on ranting about the way things weren’t working the way she’d expected, Kit felt less concerned about having misspoken. It wasn’t like it was hard to tease Mamvish into losing her temper. She came of a culture on her homeworld of Wimst in which hiding how you felt was seen as no particular advantage, and plainly she enjoyed venting with them. In fact, Kit thought, she does it every time she sees us. Maybe we’re an excuse? Because even though she’s a couple of thousand years old, and incredibly smart and gifted, she’s still really young for a lot of the wizards she works with, and we’re a lot closer to her age than most…
“But it doesn’t matter,” Mamvish was saying, “there’s no point in getting judgmental about it when we don’t even understand why it’s happening. And maybe we never will. Nothing to do but cope. Have you got your assignments yet? I’m so sorry the logistics team will have had to break you up, we’ve no choice but to maximize the effectiveness of the microgroups working on this…”
“Mam, it’s okay,” Nita said, “we work separately lots of times at home! We’ll be fine. Will we see you there?”
“It’s possible,” Mamvish said. “Depends on how Thesba behaves. I’ve spent endless hours holding the wretched thing together, this last tenday, and I expect to spend many hours more.” She hissed in annoyance. “Message me when you’re settled in your postings, I’ll get back to you if I can…”
And with a wave of her tail she was off down the concourse with other wizards of various ages following in her wake, all talking at her at once. Kit watched her go in slight amazement, shaking his head. “She’s always running around and being put under pressure like this,” he muttered. “When does she get time to just sit still?”
“Not sure she’d know what to do with that if she had any,” Nita said. “Come on, let’s see where they’ve stuck us…”
They turned to head back the way they’d come, making their way down the concourse again to the big holographic globe of Tevaral that was rotating gently in the center of the meeting area, all the planet’s five great continents gradually revealing themselves to them as the simulation turned. Kit was having trouble looking at this living, dynamic landscape, the beautiful greens and golds of it here and there touched with the white of snowcapped mountains and the glint of seas shining under the hot white light of its sun, and realizing that soon all of this would be uninhabitable…
“Big planet,” Nita said under her breath, walking around the display with her manual open in one hand. “Three times the size of Earth, nearly. Gravity’s a little less than Earth’s…” She paused, looking up at the simulator with some concern.
“What?
” Kit said. He had his manual out too and was walking around the display, looking for the match to the flashing marker that was showing on his own assignment page.
“Well, it’s not great that Thesba’s so massive for its size,” Nita said, scowling at the page. “Depending on how it acts when it breaks up, it might not just fall all over Tevaral; it might rip it up too…”
Kit winced at the thought. “Like they don’t have enough problems.”
Nita shook her head. “Okay,” she said, “here I am…” She reached out an arm toward the middle of the “planet”, which was mostly girdled by two large continents. One of these looked like an elongated comma lying on its side, the other like a squashed, skinny ellipse, and Nita walked along with the elliptical continent as the simulator slowly rotated.
The north coast of the ellipse was broken up by numerous deep bays and gulfs and several extensive river deltas. “Right here,” Nita said, and pointed at one of the deltas. “There’s a city there… Neshek?” She squinted at the name glowing on the simulator. “And a big gate in the center of it, linked to the largest of the haven worlds.”
Kit peered over her shoulder at it. The outbound gates on Tevaral were tagged in various different colors, altered by the display depending on the species and culture of the wizard viewing them, so that the biggest or least stable gates were tagged in red, the more stable or lower-energy gates in orange, and the smallest and lowest-powered ones in green. Neshek was a red-tagged gate. “Uh oh…” Kit said.
“It’s not too bad,” Nita said, glancing down at her manual for more information. “I won’t be by myself, anyway. All the reds are being run in shifts by at least three wizards, sometimes four.”
“This is because you’ve got Bobo, isn’t it,” Kit said.
Nita shrugged. “Or because of my general aptitude levels, or because we’ve worked with Rhiow so often, or two or three other things. Who cares? They wouldn’t be giving me something they thought I couldn’t handle.”
Kit nodded and walked around the other side of the simulator, finally finding the indicator that was flashing for his posting. It was another red-tagged gate, this one positioned at the far end of the comma-shaped continent, where a small mountain range curved around a wide plain that ran down to the ocean. “Avaden,” he said, his manual page running through several sets of graphics—a contour map, a map of cities and roads, and finally a diagram showing a high-volume worldgate with a nearby array of five small ones feeding into it from elsewhere around the planet.
“Busy,” Kit said. He strolled around to where Nita was keeping pace with her own posting. “And almost exactly halfway around from where you are…”
“Yeah.” She threw him an annoyed look. “And it’s a red, too, so the assignment’s nothing to do with Bobo. Anyway, it’s not like we have to be out of touch. ”
“You two? Out of touch? Not bloody likely…”
Kit grinned at the south Dublin accent, turning to see a familiar rangy figure come easing through the crowd of wizards on the far side of the simulator. Ronan was all in black as usual, but this time the blacks were just normal winter clothes, parka and turtleneck and jeans and boots, with a backpack slung over it all. “Wondered when you’d show up, though! Taking your sweet time as usual…”
“Oh come on,” Kit said. “We dropped everything and came straight here.”
“And probably the only reason you were early was the Irish contingent got the word first because they’d be coming over in one big group to save wear and tear on the overlays,” Nita said.
Ronan rolled his eyes in extravagant fake annoyance. “Yes, yes, the Queen of Understanding Logistics wins again, what a surprise…”
“So where are you?” said Kit.
“About halfway between you and Her Royal Correctness. This bit over here—” Ronan pointed at the simulator and one of the smaller northern continents. “They gave me a nice little green gate in the middle of a town… nothing to worry about. Only open about half the day, from the looks of it; it’s low-power, and they’ve got it on limited hours because the terrain thereabouts has gravitic anomalies and they’re nervous about the city’s power grid getting disrupted.”
“Kindergarten stuff,” Kit said, smiling slightly.
Ronan gave Kit a look of genial disgust. “See now, I get no respect from you wee chiselers, none…”
“Oh please,” Nita said. “Try the age jokes on Mamvish and see where they get you. Seen Dairine anywhere?”
Ronan shook his head. “But then with that one, you hear her a long time before you see her. Not a peep.”
“Don’t suppose there’s any chance Darryl’s on this assignment…” Kit said.
Ronan shook his head. “No, don’t think the Powers want him off planet that much,” he said. “Especially on something this high-risk. Even if he wanted to go, I’m betting they’d start suggesting all kinds of good reasons why he should stay home.”
Kit nodded, for it made sense: an abdal’s value on his own world was sufficiently high that risking him coming to harm on other worlds would seem likely to be a low priority for the Powers. “Well, we should find out where our gates are and see if they’re ready yet…”
Ronan glanced at the distant, floating ceiling as if studying some sign that had been hung there for him: Kit recognized the look of a wizard consulting his version of the Knowledge. “The 400s,” he said, “and not yet. Still time for you to find something blue to eat…”
Nita snickered as Kit covered his eyes. “There’s one of your stalls about halfway down, isn’t there? We can grab something as we go by.”
Kit couldn’t see any reason to argue, especially when people were working so hard to get him to do something he wanted to do. “Come on,” he said, and he and Nita and Ronan started ambling down that way.
All around them the stream and bustle of thousands of humanoids coming and going went on, the wide concourse packed unusually full of people heading down to briefings or up toward the higher-power gate hexes reserved for large group transits or longer-distance jumps. “Funny,” Ronan said, “but normally you’d think seventeen thousand Earth people is a lot. With this lot all over Tevaral, though, we’ll be barely a spit in the ocean. Might feel kind of isolated…”
“We should try to get together while we’re there if we can,” Kit said.
Ronan shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem. It’s shift work, if I’m understanding the précis right: you get sort of eight or ten hours on and then eight hours off, and the rest of it’s sleep time. Pretty sure no one’ll care what we do with the off hours, as long as the people sharing your posting know where to find you if they need you in a hurry.”
Kit nodded as they continued on through the mostly-humanoid crowds, all along the way being paced by automatically-generated Speech-based Crossings information announcements targeted at the transient wizardly population.
“Tevaral Rafting Intervention transit group 1165RS, please note that you have a targeted information augment requiring your attention, please check your errantry-data modalities for more detail…”
“TRI transit group 1417TG, hex change advisory: your departure hex has been changed to 604, repeating, 604. Please make your way to the 600 hex group—”
“You know, we might have a group number too,” Nita said, and moved to pull her manual out again.
“5611GH,” Ronan said, without even breaking stride.
Kit shot him an amused look. There were occasions when Ronan’s organized side revealed itself more clearly than usual… usually when he was a bit unnerved, and going out of his way to conceal it.
“Okay,” Nita said. “Is that the place up there? Yeah, I think so…” She took the lead.
Kit and Ronan followed her through the crowds toward the kiosk she was targeting. “This is a general service announcement for entities involved in the Tevaral Rafting Intervention,” said the air in their immediate vicinity. “Please note that although for the duration of this intervention comestible
selection options have been augmented at all food service outlets in the Main Concourse, you may experience occasional peak-period scarcity of supply for comestibles containing the following: manganese, technetium, zinc, arsenic, bromine, beryllium…”
Kit shook his head, amused, as the list went on.
“No?” Nita said, concerned, as they reached the kiosk and she paused by it. “You don’t want to eat at this one? I thought you liked these guys the last time.”
“What? Oh! No, this is fine,” Kit said. “Just scared for a moment there that I might not be getting enough arsenic in my diet…”
“Oh.” She grinned, and the three of them settled in at the kiosk. It was built along the normal Crossings lines for this kind of standalone structure: circular, with a glasslike table/ledge section that deformed or reformed itself upward, downward, inward or outward according to the stature of the species or beings using it. Above it all floated a slowly-rotating cylindrical signage structure covered with illuminated sliding 3-D images of food, and (alternating with the imagery) price lists in symbologies that changed from second to second in reflection of changing market values, availability, or the species or linguistic preferences of the viewer. Inside the counter was the being who ran the kiosk—a Rirhait, as so many Crossings service personnel were, this one with a bright metallic-blue carapace—and an assortment of food service machinery, mostly chromed and looking very sleek and industrial.
Kit knew the drill perfectly well by now. He dropped his manual onto the counter, the action immediately informing the Crossings data management and accounting systems that a wizard on active errantry was going to be ordering, and therefore (in line with best practice for gating facilities galaxy-wide) would be eating for free. Immediately the kiosk’s information management system pulled data from the manual regarding Kit’s species, likely food preferences, and sensitivities, correlated it with his past order history, and analyzed it all. A second later the counter presented him with a subsurface menu.
Beside him Nita had done the same and was studying the readout, flipping through its pages. Ronan merely laid a hand on the counter and got the same result, staring into the sudden parade of food and drink images that started flowing by. “Right,” he said under his breath, “let’s see…”