“What’re you looking for?” Kit said, tapping at a couple of possibilities as they went by.
“Anything that doesn’t say WARNING: CONTAINS FROGSPAWN.” Ronan shot Kit a wicked look. “For certain values of frog…”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Come on, that was an accident.”
“Somebody didn’t read the small print, you mean that kind of accident? So avoidable.”
“Hasn’t happened twice,” Kit said, flicking away a couple of the possibilities the menu had offered him and settling on one that closely resembled a meatloaf sandwich, as long as you understood that the meatloaf was going to be blue.
“Just as well,” Ronan said, “otherwise the Crossings’d have to assign you a mental health counselor every time you came through here to help you handle the shock of dealing with what you just ate…”
“Oh, the frogspawn again?” said a voice from down the concourse, laughing.
Nita looked up from the bowl of bright red and green noodles on which she’d just taken delivery and snorted a small laugh as Dairine came along from further up the concourse. She was dressed in jeans and boots and a parka, and Spot was spidering along behind her.
“You’ve told everyone about that, haven’t you,” Kit muttered as the Rirhait behind the counter put out a couple of small bowls of day-glo orange sauce for him to accompany the blue meatloaf.
Nita shrugged. “It’s a good story. Where’ve you been?” she said to Dairine.
“Here,” Dairine said as she bellied up to the kiosk, boosted Spot up onto the counter, and waited for the menu to come up on registering Spot’s presence. “Sker’ret wanted to talk to the Mobiles.”
Nita looked surprised. “They’re involved in this too?”
“Maybe as part of a contingency plan,” Dairine said, looking uneasy. “Species-fragment archival. Not gonna happen, though.”
“Wait,” Kit said, pausing in the middle of dunking his sandwich. “You mean—”
“The Mobiles are alpha-testing a lot of different matter-archival methods right now,” Nita said, and the odd way she was looking at her sister made Kit uncomfortable. “They’re looking for ways to back up the universe.”
The first time this had come up, Kit had thought Nita was joking. But he could tell from Dairine’s face that it was no joke. “Whole-species archival is nothing new,” she said. “Mamvish has done it before. But the techniques she’s used previously are kind of a blunt instrument compared with what the Mobiles have been developing, and she can’t implement them anything like as fast. Sker’ wanted to find out if the Mobiles could supply her with something state-of-the-art if the stay-at-home Tevaralti types had a last-minute change of heart.”
“And can they?”
Dairine shrugged. “Sure they can. Gigo tells me they could pull a hundred million people off the planet and into safe storage within an hour. But it’s not gonna happen unless the Tevaralti change their minds about leaving real fast: it’s not a solution that you can employ on just fractions of the population, at least not right now. And if they wait much longer for their change of heart, the on-planet gates won’t be able to get them all out in time. The Mobiles wouldn’t have any choice but to render them down as storable data.”
“Not the best solution,” Ronan said.
That struck Kit as a pretty mild way to put it. “Especially if they’re still just in alpha testing…”
“Yeah,” Dairine said, and started scrolling along through the menu that had presented itself in front of her. “Oh, come on now, what is this, have they stopped carrying sildwif all of a sudden?”
Ronan peered around the counter at her menu, having taken delivery on something that looked like a burrito but smelled more like fish and chips. “You miss the announcement? They’re having a run on manganese today. Should have had some pumpkin seeds before you left.”
“Oh please spare me,” Dairine muttered. “How close can they get to bologna here?”
Sensitive to what she was discussing, the menu in front of her shifted immediately. Dairine peered at it.
“Don’t get the chifemda,” Nita said without even looking up from her noodles. “Doesn’t matter what the flavor algorithm says it’s going to be like. It always comes out tasting like clams.”
“Ewww, no thank you,” Dairine said. She glanced over at Kit. “Something blue again. What a surprise. How is it?”
Kit actually had to stop and think about that, despite the fact that he was in the middle of eating it. Describing alien flavors was always a problem for him, even more when they were ones he liked than when they were ones he didn’t, and it was all too easy to fall back on the “Tastes like chicken” solution. “Not bad,” he said. “Kind of a fish stick flavor, but spicy.”
“Fine, that’ll hold me,” Dairine said, and tapped on the menu.
Within a few moments everyone was eating, or getting back to it, while the louder-than-normal hubbub of the Crossings went on around them. But even through this, Earth-human voices stood out, especially when they were speaking English. Not far away, even through the din of voices talking in the Speech and in many other languages all up and down the vocal scale, Kit heard somebody down the concourse saying, “It was right around here the last time…”
“You could always just check the diagram.”
“No, seriously, it should be here. Or maybe just a little further up—”
“What is it with you and not wanting to look at the map?”
The voices were familiar. Kit had to smile. “When I don’t need the map and I know perfectly well where it was last time—”
“I know! Let’s ask them. They look like people who know where the good food is.”
And when Kit turned around, sure enough, there were Tom and Carl coming along up the concourse from the same direction he and Nita had come. Carl was in a dark suit, and over it a long dark navy-blue midlength coat of the kind a businessman might wear on a city street in the winter; he looked overdressed for someone going out on a rescue mission. Tom, on the other hand, was in hiking gear—waterproof trousers and a fleece shirt, and a down overvest with a big bold logo that said BANFF-JASPER ICEFIELDS PARKWAY.
Nita looked up from her noodles. “Thought you two would’ve been through here and gone by now,” she said.
Tom shook his head. “Late to the party, but not by choice. Carl had a late meeting in town this afternoon, and then he had to sort some Grand Central business out with Rhiow before we left. The usual drill when an Advisory goes off planet.” They leaned up against the counter. “So we’ve got a while yet—we know the gate’s been assigned, but it’s not ready. What looks good?”
“Try the blue meatloaf,” Dairine said.
Carl glanced innocently down at the menu that was presenting itself to him. “What, not the frogspawn?”
Kit leaned over and thumped his head gently a couple of times on the counter, causing the subsurface menu (possibly in an attempt to console him) to start displaying desserts. “Is there anybody on Earth who doesn’t know that story by now?”
“Possibly somebody in the Marianas Trench,” Tom said. “Those tubeworms, maybe. You should check with S’reee. Nita, where are those noodles from?”
She shook her head: he’d caught her with her mouth full, and it took a moment before she could say, “Sastaphare, I thought? I mean, the dish is always called that, but seems like a lot of the planets in the Sast Commodium have them…” She peered down at the menu. “Uh, sorry. ‘Produce of more than one planet…’”
Tom shrugged, hailed the Rirhait. “I’ll have what she’s having…”
For a while there wasn’t much conversation while people concentrated on stuffing their faces and watching the ever-changing crowds moving around them. Kit in particular was used to finding the Crossings a lot quieter, and the bustle was acting to keep him slightly on edge. For the moment, though, Tom and Carl seemed not to be paying it much mind. Carl acquired himself a bowl of some kind of vegetable stew in what struck Kit a
s alarming colors of yellow-green and orange, then glanced around that part of the concourse and back to Tom. “Coffee?”
Tom looked around in surprise. “Real coffee? Thought the Galactibucks or whatever it is was all the way up by the 600 hexes. By the Chur legacy gate or some such.”
Carl shook his head and nodded off to one side, where yet another kiosk was suddenly in evidence, having appeared without so much as a breath of displaced air (or if it had made one, Kit had missed it). “Crossings Retail has started doing some tailoring at the retail end. The popups have started targeting customer profiles. When they’re not busy they consult the master census system to seek out transients who match the kiosk’s product offerings, then transit to where they are.”
“That could get expensive…” Tom said.
“When you run a worldgating facility and can factor the energy cost into the retail overheads? Just another business expense.” Carl shrugged. “Meanwhile, what a surprise, there’s the coffee place’s pop-up, and yes, they have your mocha, and it’s real mocha for a change! You’d start to think we were getting preferential treatment because we’ve got an in with the local chocolate cartel.” He raised his eyebrows at Kit. “Or because we know somebody who shot the place up once.” He glanced sideways at Nita with a smile.
Still working on her noodles, Nita just shrugged and smiled. “Why would I complain about that?” Tom said. “As long as she doesn’t seem likely to start shooting again without reason. Yes, a large mocha, please. Anybody else?”
Heads were shaken generally, and Carl went off to see about it.
“He’s here a lot more than I am,” Tom said, “as he loves to remind me.”
“Maybe you should get out more,” Ronan said.
Tom chuckled at that. “When you make Advisory,” he said, “let’s see you manage it.”
“You said once it was like not wanting to get out of a car you were driving…” Nita said.
Tom sighed. “More like you’re not allowed to get out because the kids keep needing to be taken places. Soccer practice. Little League. Dancing lessons…”
Kit had to snicker at the put-upon act. “And then you have to help them with their homework,” Tom said, giving him a restrained side-eye. “Hundreds of them. Math, science, civics, saving the universe. It never ends…”
“Cut it out,” Carl said, coming up behind him and putting down a cup. “You know you love it. Wait, do you want sugar in yours?”
“In a mocha? No.”
“Right back.”
Tom leaned against the counter and looked down the concourse. “It really is strange,” he said, “seeing the place so humanoid-heavy…”
“With some exceptions,” Dairine said, glancing at a small party of aliens coming down from the direction of the 400 hexes, nearly swallowed up by the hominids surrounding them. Yet a couple of this group took some swallowing up. They were taller than any of the humanoids surrounding them, even those slender spindly ones from obviously light-gravity worlds. Of the pair, one had a hide that glinted metallically in a brilliant eye-hurting green, and it was strapped about with metallic adornments that could equally have been clothing, accessories, or badges of rank. The person had a lizardy look to it, though it was six-armed and bipedal. At the top of a long-snouted face, wide-set eyes were elongated toward the back of its skull, each with a pupil that ran its eye’s whole length. Behind these, on each side, long odd flaps of hide ran down toward the alien’s spine. The effect was somewhat like that of a very thin, spindly cross between a basset hound and a gecko.
Its companion was even taller and looked more insectile than anything else: nearly transparent in places, especially at the ends of the long small-clawed limbs. It had a small rhomboidal head fringed with feathery growths, possibly sense organs, and was compound-eyed and jeweled in intricate patterns over the upper half of its body, the chitin of its exoskeleton shimmering in the light of Crossings daytime as long beams from Rirhath B’s sun (just now coming out towards the end of a cloudy day) found their slanting way down to floor level past the floating panels of the ceiling.
The third of the trio, though, wasn’t anything like as visible until they were all much closer. It looked like nothing so much as a very large upended beefsteak mushroom that had escaped from the produce department in some grocery that catered to giants. Very small clawed feet, like those of a millipede, could be seen under the meter-wide mushroom-dome, zooming it along beside its companions. There was no sign of any eyes or other sensorial organ on the brown-and-beige dappled top, but naturally that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
The three beings went past the kiosk together, apparently deep in conversation; the green lizard-being fluting in rhythmic patterns, the chitinous mantid making brief soft sonorous melodies, a little on the atonal side, and the mushroom emitting a range of seemingly disconnected sounds like something from an old British science fiction show. And off down the concourse they went together, sounding for all the world like a wind instrument talking in undertones to a cello, with brief bursts of comment from their accompanying theremin down near floor level.
Kit turned away, embarrassed at himself for staring. But then everyone else had been doing the same, at least briefly. And Dairine in particular had a look on her face like that you’d expect from someone who’s seen something she hadn’t ever really expected to. “Huh,” she said under her breath, “isn’t that topical.” She turned back to finishing her sandwich, giving Spot a look that he returned out of a couple of spare stalky eyes while the others still followed the aliens as they more or less vanished into the crowd.
Nita put her empty bowl and chopsticks down on the counter: it promptly vanished them. “What is?”
“Those guys. They’re three-quarters of a bar joke. Or the beginning of a fairy tale, maybe.” She pushed her plate away, and the counter removed it. “‘Once upon a time there was a planet called Tarthak…’”
Tom looked surprised. “Oh indeed. What took you down that line of research?”
“Who, actually,” Dairine muttered. “Nelaid.” She looked up toward the floating segments of the high ceiling as if wishing some kindly deity would come down through it and help her escape from a subject she’d heard too much of lately.
“Makes perfect sense,” Tom said, “as significant portions of the population of Wellakh would have been rafted off the planet for a good while so that repairs on the planet’s ecosystem could get started. Way too problematic trying to keep them inside the forcebubble holding the atmosphere in place while the wizards there were trying to calm it down. Not to mention the storms secondary to inertial drag on the confined atmosphere, the cooling issues on the flare-blasted side…” He shook his head.
“So why are these guys so topical?” Ronan said, getting rid of his snack plate and tapping at the menu to bring up a drinks page. “Who are they, anyway?”
“Go on, enlighten us,” Tom said to Dairine. “Let’s see how much other detail you’ve retained.”
Dairine paused just long enough to look at Tom with an expression that suggested he was pushing his luck. “Are you giving me a quiz? Does this count toward my final grade?”
“It’ll count toward me telling your Dad you’re actually getting some serious work done in all your off-planet time when he next asks me about it,” Tom said.
Dairine made a face. “Blackmail? Fine. …So it’s not so much about Tarthak actually, which was just a gas giant, and not even a conscious one, but one of its moons. They all went around—well, they still go around, though nobody’s there—this star called Munak. It’s in Leo somewhere, three hundred thirty light years or so from Earth—”
“Oh, Alterf?” Carl said from behind them, putting down Tom’s mocha coffee beside him and leaning against the counter again.
Tom nodded and sipped at his coffee. “Lambda Leonis,” he said, and then made a face of his own. “Wait, how much sugar did you put in this?”
“Not me,” Carl said, “the counter guy. Too m
any arms, too much enthusiasm. Didn’t have the heart to stop him.”
Tom raised his eyebrows in a “what can you do” expression and kept on drinking the coffee. “Anyway,” Dairine said, “Tarthak had whole a lot of moons, and one of them, the biggest of them, was called Temalbar: nearly Earth-sized and massive enough to hold onto an oxygen-bearing atmosphere. There were four dominant species there: the Jejeev—that green guy, he was Jejeev—the Mathala, those are the preying-mantis looking ones: the Tesakyt—”
“The little dome-y guy,” Ronan said, as a tall dark drink with a light-colored head ascended through the counter in front of him.
“Is that what I think it is?” Carl said, suddenly bemused.
Ronan snorted. “Are you daft? Guinness doesn’t even like traveling from Dublin to New York. If you brought it this far by standard gating it’d need a biohazard label. This is a dandelion-and-burdock float.”
Nita covered her eyes. Seeing her expression, Kit made a note to ask her later what was going on.
“If I may continue…” Dairine said, annoyed.
“Do please,” Tom said.
“Okay. The Jejeev, the Mathala, the Tesakyt, and—” She paused. “Okay, you could make yourselves useful here,” Dairine said, looking accusingly at Tom and Carl, “because all the name the manual gives the other Temal species is Gevai.” Kit raised his eyebrows, since that was one of the ordinal number-forms in the Speech that simply meant “fourth”, without any suggestion of “fourth” what. “Isn’t it kind of weird not to see their own name for themselves?”
“That is their name for themselves,” Tom said, “and nobody knows why. It’s as if their image of themselves suggests that the other three species on the planet were somehow more important than they were. What’s really strange about it is that the other three species seem to think that the Fourth are far more important than any of them.”