“I’ve got doughnuts but not the ones you want,” Nita said, sounding annoyed. “Because certain little sisters have figured out a way to use Spot to pilfer my supplies even though my puptent’s portal was secured and the interior discontinuity rotated forty-five degrees out of true with this space. I had a whole large-sized box of the Entenmann’s Chocolate Lovers assortment and a box of the devil’s food frosted ones, and she took them both and left me nothing but a box of the miniature ones with the powdered sugar.” She scowled at Ronan. “So don’t complain to me, because this is your fault.”
Ronan produced an expression of exaggerated innocence. “Mine?”
“My money says she’s secretly trading the chocolate to some wizard she’s working with for diamonds or transuranian isotopes or something,” Nita said. “So you’d better hope she doesn’t trigger some kind of diplomatic incident.” She leaned her shoulder against Kit’s, and her head against his. “I’m awake now,” she added, giving him a most pointed look. “So you can tell me whatever you were supposed to tell me as soon as you got up.”
“Forgive me for wanting to pee first!” Kit said.
Nita waved a hand at him. “Too much info way too soon,” she said, reaching out for the espresso that Ronan handed her. “Is there sugar in this?”
“Yes, your royal highness and ruler of all you survey, there is sugar in it for feck’s sake, pray allow your servant to go on living and drawing breath in your service, at least until you’re carbed up enough,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.
Nita snickered and drank about half the espresso at a gulp. “It’s okay,” she said to Kit. “I use the toilet here too. The one over by my gates is really basic, and they don’t have a shower—they’ve got an automated dust bath. Great if you’re Tevaralti, but for humans—” She shook her head. “If you stumble into one by accident, you’d better like sneezing.”
They went off to lean against the plate-glass wall of the building where Kit had been using the facilities. Kit juggled his croissant around, ready to unwrap it but not sure what to do with the espresso in the meantime.
“You should just levitate it,” Nita said, looking out at the feeder gates. “For the time being you’ve got the power to burn…”
That was something that Kit kept forgetting. “…Still,” he said, and tucked the croissant into the crook of his arm until the espresso was gone.
“Old habits are hard to break,” Ronan said, looking where Nita did, toward the unending flow of the crowds.
Nita nodded. “You see something like this,” she said, “and you start thinking we’ve been really lucky.”
Kit glanced at her. “How do you mean?”
“Well, think about it. Since we got started, most of the jobs we've been sent on have been pretty easy to solve.” Kit and Ronan both turned incredulous expressions on her, which Nita ignored. “Relatively speaking, okay? Mostly we’ve been sent on errands that we could handle by ourselves. Sometimes we haven’t known we’ve been sent, but we were still able to work out what we needed to do to fix the problems, and then we did that. Without help, or sometimes with it. We haven’t always had happy endings, as such….”
She trailed off, and Kit knew that Nita’s mother was on her mind, even though neither of them had any doubts that her mom was okay. “But things have always worked out,” she said. “This ending, though? It’s not going to be happy no matter what we do, not really. Even if all those Tevaralti there—” She gestured at them with her chin. “Even if all of them right this minute said, ‘Hey, you know what, we’ve been all wrong about this, shove over because we’re going too’… we still don’t get a happy ending. We still get a destroyed planet, and millions of people really unhappy because their home that they loved is gone forever. All we can do is the job we’ve been given until the Powers or whoever tell us we’re done, and then go home.”
Ronan blew out a frustrated breath. “Yeah,” he said, “there are things about this that aren’t ideal. And yeah, the thing about being just another cog in the machine… Go here, do that—”
“A little too much like school,” Kit said.
Nita threw him a dirty look. “Please. You had to remind me? You’re not the only one who has a test coming up.” Kit smiled slightly: in between trying to get him and calculus to make friends, she’d spent a lot of time lately ranting about the upcoming test on her modern history unit. (“Asia! No more Asia! I want to bang all those people’s heads together.”) “And another thing: no matter how this ends up, the minute we go home, tomorrow will still be a school day.”
“Ugh,” Kit said under his breath. “Thanks, we’re even now.”
“I know you hate letting me suffer alone,” Nita said. “Could be it’s mutual.”
Kit almost smiled. “Problem is, I keep having this idea…”
He trailed off. Ronan threw him a look. “Sounds like it’s an idea you don't much like.”
Kit folded his arms, leaning against the glass wall behind them. “I'm wondering whether we're going to start getting more of this kind of job because the Powers think we’re grown up enough to take it. And I start wondering if most of wizardry might be like this. If we’re being eased in slowly to a kind of errantry that isn't—” Kit stopped himself.
“Isn’t going to be as much fun?” Ronan said.
The three of them were quiet for a moment. Kit wasn’t sure what was going on in their heads, but right now he was hating the idea.
“Might be too soon to jump to that conclusion,” Nita said. “But we’ve done group work with other wizards before, and sometimes lately it’s definitely been kind of edgy. Maybe the Powers, or whoever handles assignment logistics for them, are thinking we’re ready to expand our boundaries?”
“Or that it’s time they pushed us out of our comfort zones, you mean,” Ronan said.
Kit threw a glance eastward past the buildings that surrounded them. Thesba wasn’t yet visible, but he could just feel it there, creeping up towards the horizon. “Alaalu and Mars and the Pullulus War,” he muttered, “those comfort zones? Terrific.”
Nita looked at him sidelong. “Wow, listen to that blood sugar. Eat your croissant.”
Kit snorted softly and unwrapped the croissant, which turned out to be surprisingly good and flaky for something cellophane-wrapped. “Seriously,” he said to Ronan, “this comes from a grocery store?”
Ronan shrugged. “You should come along shopping sometime,” he said. “Be a nice change from wee Darryl. He always makes me push him in the trolley.”
Kit sprayed crumbs everywhere. “I want in on that!” Nita said, grinning.
“We’ll discuss it later.” Ronan turned his head to regard the gating complex on the other side of the complex, and briefly got an unfocused look: probably consulting his internal manual to see how his gates were behaving. “Very quiet at the moment,” he said. “I wonder if they’re plotting something. Or maybe this just has something to do with you being here.” He looked at Kit.
Nita shot Ronan a bemused look. “What?”
“He seems to have a calming effect on gates. I was looking at his intervention logs this morning.”
“Now wait a minute,” Kit said, “isn’t that stuff supposed to be privacy-locked?”
“Not when we’re all on the same intervention,” Ronan said, “and when gates’ behaviors tend to get interlinked. I take it you got the lecture from Rhiow on portal contagion.”
Kit nodded, getting busy with what remained of the croissant. Nita rolled her eyes. “Well, we should be grateful almost all the rest of the gating’s done,” she said, “the heavy-duty stuff—”
“Oh bollocks,” Ronan said. “As if moving however many million people doesn’t count as heavy-duty.”
Nita laughed at him. “Compared with moving the biosphere? Half the planet’s been scraped bare over the last month, right down through the lithosphere. Huge populations and communities of animals, plants… whole big chunks of the ecology already transplanted to the refug
e worlds. You want to look at the logs for that—they’re something else.” Nita shook her head. “But you know what’s really interesting? The further down the biological hierarchy you go, the more eager life is to get out of here. The plants, especially, aren’t arguing the point. They can feel the change in the local gravity, the magnetic fields. They know what’s coming. So do most of the animals.” She frowned. “What’s weird is the way the ones closer to the Tevaralti, the domesticated ones and the animals in their food chain… they’re a lot less eager. There’s more conflict about going, and when you ask them what’s going on, they can’t tell you.”
“Something to do with this symbiotic thing the Tevaralti have going on, I guess,” Ronan said. “But they will go if you tell them to?”
“Yeah. The Planetary’s had words with the less volitional parts of the biosphere; that pretty much settles it. If they can be gotten out, they’ll cooperate.”
Kit finished his croissant, crumpled up the cellophane and stuck it in his pocket. “You could really wish the Planetary could do the same for the people,” he said, looking at the little crowd of encamped Tevaralti across the plaza and thinking of the huge crowd of them back at his own gates.
“Wouldn’t be just you,” Nita said. “I don’t get how they know what’s going to happen and they just want to sit here and let it happen. There are moments when…” She trailed off, as if she wasn’t entirely happy with what she was about to say. “‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake…’” She shook her head. “Supposedly that’s what it’s all about. Life. Saving it. How are we supposed to stand around and let it just throw itself away?”
Kit had no answers. For the moment his mindscape was rebelling against getting to grips with the huge numbers of Tevaralti who might not survive. Instead in his mind’s eye he suddenly saw the tentacled shape he’d been feeding saltines last night. “You said they were half done with the biosphere,” he said. “What about my part of the continent? There are still a lot of animals running around.”
Ronan stretched himself against the glass wall. His mouth had gone tight. “If the research I’ve been doing on rafting is right,” he said, “only two hundred and twelve rafting projects in all the Interconnect Project’s history have ever achieved one hundred percent clearance of a planet. In all those projects they had decades to work in, not months or days. And even so, that number only works when they leave bacteria and viruses and the smallest in-soil or in-water organisms out of the count.”
He looked away. “Rafting’s about preservation… not total rescue. At least that’s what the docs say. You pull the best case you can out of a worst-case scenario—try to get enough life forms out of a planetary-extinction scenario for them to reproduce themselves, continue as a species… reconstruct their cultures, if they have cultures, somewhere else. Saving every single one of them, it’s a goal all right, something to shoot for. But then so’s perfection.” And Ronan too looked toward the edge of the plaza in the direction where Thesba would be rising. “With a half-busted moon hanging over our heads and getting more fragile every orbit, there may just not be enough time…”
That hopelessness that Kit had been trying to deal with earlier came back for him, in spades. Yet he wasn’t going to give in to it: not yet. We’re just getting started here. “I guess,” he said aloud, “all we can do is do our jobs and try to make sure what we’re doing goes as well as it can.”
“There you go,” Nita said. “We’re on the same page.” She stretched too, bumped her hip against his again. “So what was that you were going to tell me last night?”
Ronan glanced over at them. “I’ll go pretend to do something else so as not to have to stand here and listen to you two embarrassing each other, shall I?”
“No, you don’t have to go anywhere, it’s not embarrassing! Have you seen the local octopuses?”
Nita looked at Kit in bemusement. “Okay,” Ronan said, “I admit that’s not how I imagined your next sentence coming out.”
“And what do you mean ‘octopuses’?” Nita said. “I thought you were somewhere landlocked.”
“We are. They’re kind of field octopuses. They can climb, too: I think maybe some of them live in trees.”
Ronan rubbed his face. “If I wasn’t grateful to be in a city on this planet before,” Ronan said, “I am bloody grateful now. Having octopus things drop on me out of trees is not something I’d be excited about.”
“They wouldn’t hurt you!” Kit said. “You saw the one yesterday. They’re pretty friendly.”
“Tell me about it. If he’d have climbed up me any further, that lad would’ve got friendly with bits of me I really prefer to reserve for humans. And now we’re talking octopus-things that’ll drop out of trees on me and get friendly?” Ronan shook his head incredulously. “Janey mack, there’s something I really don’t need when the fecking moon’s already trying to drop out of the sky on my head.”
Nita gave Ronan’s histrionics an amused look. “But what’re they doing around your gates?”
“There are wild ones running around out in the grasslands,” Kit said, “but sometimes pet ones wander over from the people who’re not using the gates.” He gestured with his head at the gathering across the plaza. “Aren’t you seeing them here?”
“I wasn’t looking for them,” Ronan said, “because it never occurred to me I needed to be looking for octopuses.”
“Sibik,” Kit said. “They’re called sibik.”
“You know,” Nita said, “there’ve been Tevaralti going through my gates with little boxes, and now that I think of it they do look kind of like those dog carriers people at home have to use for their dogs when they’re flying them somewhere.” She stood up a bit and stretched as if her back was bothering her. “So what about them?”
“Well, nothing specific,” Kit said. “Except they seem to have their own version of the symbiosis thing going on, which is interesting. I fed one of them a saltine yesterday, and last night a completely different one came along and asked me for crackers.”
“Asked you?” Ronan said.
“Well, more like demanded. And he knew the language I’d used with the first guy. It’s kind of weird.”
“Think they’ll come back later?” Nita said. “I might come see them if I can get the scheduling to work.”
“I don’t know. I can message you if one shows up. My shiftmates say that sometimes a lot of them turn up, looking for food mostly.”
“Speaking of shiftmates,” Nita muttered, looking over to the short-jump transport pad, “I need to get moving.”
“Before you bugger off,” Ronan said. “We were thinking of having a picnic out at Kit’s place.”
“We?” Kit said, amused.
“In our off time,” Ronan said. “It’s nice out there. Fresh air, peace and quiet...”
“Mr. Party Organizer here hasn’t mentioned that I haven’t cleared it with my two colleagues…”
“You think there’d be a problem?” Nita said. “If we’re in our own downtime, and we’re well away from—” She waved a hand at the transients moving through the square. “—people who might be bothered… don’t see why they’d object.”
Her immediate acceptance of the idea surprised Kit. “Um, okay. When?” He looked at Ronan.
“Don’t ask me right this minute!” Ronan said. “I may have the Knowledge in my head, but that doesn’t turn me into a scheduling app. Maybe you can help, though,” he said, glancing at Nita. “Your silent partner—”
Nita looked vague for a moment; then her eyes snapped back into focus. “Maybe Saturday?” she said to Kit.
He frowned. “Wait, what’s today? So much has been happening…”
“Tell me about it. It’s Friday. So… tomorrow, in the evening in your timezone? Bobo says he needs to do some checking, but that might work, if the people we invite feel like it. Us, Dairine, Tom and Carl if they can make it, some of the shiftmates…”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “We can bring some o
f our supplies to trade around… kick back a little.”
“Sounds good.” She pushed herself away from the glass wall, headed off across the plaza. “Call me about your sibik-y guys if they turn up. At least I can look at them with the manual, even if I can’t come out.”
“I will.”
And off Nita went across the plaza. “I should go too,” Kit said, watching Nita jump up onto the pad, all business, and promptly vanish. “Look, about the picnic: I’ll shoot you a note when I have a chance to talk to Cheleb and Djam. But, listen, thanks… I really needed that shower. And other things.”
“Any time,” Ronan said. “As long as we keep the gates running smoothly, nobody here cares what we’re up to, really. Their minds are pretty much elsewhere.” He looked across the plaza at the crowds pouring from the feeder gates into the downstream one.
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Later.”
He headed back for his puptent to find Djam still enthroned, almost without having even changed his position. “Hey, sorry, that took longer than I thought,” Kit said. “Just let me change and I’ll be right with you.”
“Nothing’s happening here,” Djam said, yawning one of his small bubbling yawns: “don’t rush on my behalf.”
Kit hurried about about changing anyway, picking up some Pop-Tarts and a bottle of water and a can of one of the milder energy drinks to hold him until he could settle in and assemble a more meal-like meal. Because if Mama looks at my supplies when I get home and sees I haven’t eaten anything but junk food while I was away, I’m really gonna be in for it…
He headed back for the Throne Rock and was surprised to see the long grass in front of him waving. Except it wasn’t the wind producing the movement. It was sibiks, a small crowd of them, all humping and slithering along toward him. The one in the lead of the crowd had its abdomen up to see better, and when those eyes spotted Kit approaching, it shouted in a small sibik voice, sort of a squeak, “Cracker!”