“Only a few minutes ago,” Kit said. “Maybe five. Is there something I can help you with?”
A long silence followed. Kit got the sense that the Fourth’s attention was focused on him in some way he’d never been looked at before, something profoundly revelatory in ways he couldn’t understand. It made him very, very uncomfortable. But even in his short wizardly career Kit had withstood the regard of beings of terrible power who were intent on his immediate destruction, and whatever this felt like, it didn’t feel like that. This felt like curiosity; and yes, danger, in some mode or other. But it was danger that meant him well—so strange a concept, in this intensity, that he could hardly get his head around it.
“Kiht?” he heard Djam calling. He wasn’t on the Stone Throne any more: he’d come out with a wizard-light hovering over his shoulder to see what was going on behind the circle. And then he caught sight of the Fourth. Djam stopped as if struck still, and stared.
The peculiarly indefinite figure didn’t move, but Kit knew it had briefly turned its attention to Djam. Then, a few moments later, that attention was back on Kit again. He could practically feel it on his skin, like a heat lamp, except that the sensation had nothing to do with heat or cold or anything else so mundane. Kit’s nerves tried to work out how to render the sensation and then apparently simply gave up, so that he felt nothing but a vague dull tingle along the front of him.
“Pathfinder,” the Fourth said, as if musing… but not so much for Kit’s benefit: for someone else’s. Not Djam’s, though.
“Sorry?” Kit said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
The Fourth leaned toward Kit just a little. That gesture he felt more clearly now: a pressure, almost a test. As if something was saying, Can you take it? Can you take this?
Kit frowned at that and leaned forward against what was pushing him: pushed back.
For a long, long few moments there was no response. Kit just kept pushing back. Then suddenly the pressure let up, so that Kit staggered when it was released. He was aware again of that strange dangerous attention bent on him, but something about the quality of it had changed. It seemed somehow more multiple; as if the attention of more than one being was bent on Kit now.
“Yes,” the Fourth said. “You know half the way. The other half will know the other half.”
A huge odd silence drew itself around the two of them… or however many of them there were. And then the Fourth said: “Yes yes.”
And without any further sign or movement, it was gone.
Kit swayed where he stood. Djam hurried over to him, braced him from one side and looked at him in concern. “Cousin, are you all right?”
Kit nodded and rubbed his eyes, and was astonished to find that his hand was shaking. “Yeah. I think. Wow was that weird.”
“You are just ordained to be having one of those interesting days, aren’t you?” Djam said.
Kit blinked his eyes a few times: they suddenly felt very tired. “Yeah, I’d say you’re right there.” He stared at the spot where the Fourth had been. “Djam, were you seeing what I was seeing?”
“When I figure out what I was seeing,” Djam said, “I’ll let you know.” He bubbled softly in his throat. “Pity Cheleb wasn’t here too so we could all compare notes. His night vision’s better than mine.”
“I don’t know whether broad daylight would’ve made any difference,” Kit said. “I think maybe my species just isn’t equipped to see those guys.”
“Most of ours wouldn’t be,” Djam said. “If that was a Fourth—”
“It was.” Kit was as sure as if the information had been communicated to him directly.
“They have a paraphysical extension into a higher-numbered dimension. Supposedly part of their nervous system and some of their physical components are positioned out there.” Djam waved a hand in an indefinite way, as if trying to suggest in which direction the fifth through eleventh dimensions were located. “And because they’re not all here here—meaning in our own dimension—your eyes and your brain can’t understand some of what they’re seeing. So they just make the best guess they can…”
“That sounds about right,” Kit said, still wobbling as they started to make their way back toward the circle.
“They’re handy to have around, though,” Djam said, putting a furry arm around Kit as Kit stumbled. “One of the things that is known about the Fourth is that worldgates just work better when they’re in the vicinity.”
“Maybe he was here to pick up a few tips,” Kit said, and laughed. But the laugh came out weakly, as if the joke was more on Kit than anyone else.
Djam laughed too, also sounding a touch nervous. “What was it doing here, though?”
“Not sure. It was asking for Mamvish. She left a few minutes before.”
Djam shook his head, bubbled again. “I know. My codex informed me she was arriving, but the visit was tagged as private, so I stayed where I was.” He looked at Kit with renewed interest. “You have interesting friends,” Djam said. “I look forward to meeting your partner.”
“So does Cheleb,” Kit said, and laughed again. It was halfway to a giggle, now; he was actually feeling lightheaded.
Djam made a soft sound of agreement and led Kit over to his portal, touched it open. “You should really try to get that rest now, cousin. Too much excitement for one day.”
Kit was inclined to agree with him. After just those few moments under the Fourth’s regard, he felt as if he’d been repeatedly running up and down flights of stairs till he was short of breath and actually aching. And that’s with this increase in my power levels. What would it have been like to meet that when I was running at my normal level? He didn’t want to know.
He made his way over to his bed and flopped down onto it. “Thanks, Djam,” Kit said.
And within no more than a few seconds both the puptent’s lights, and Kit’s, went out.
SEVEN
Saturday
Kit woke later than planned, sprawled face first on his bed, hardly having moved an inch from the way he’d fallen onto it. His annoyance at realizing he hadn’t been able to stay awake even long enough to get his clothes off was only exceeded by his horror at realizing what time it was: easily two hours into his shift. “Djammmm,” Kit said under his breath, suspecting that his shiftmate had decided to let him sleep late after the unsettling events of the predawn period. But it doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t the alarm in my manual go off? I don’t get it…
Then something occurred to Kit. He knew somebody who worked closely with the power that ran the wizards’ manuals: in fact, someone who had that instrumentality (apparently) inside her head.
“Bobo?” Kit said.
Nothing.
He sighed. “Never mind,” Kit said out loud. “Looks like weird’s the keyword for this whole damn intervention...”
Kit got dressed in fresh clothes, put his head out the puptent’s portal and saw that the wind was up again; so he reached back in for his vest and threw it on before he venturing outside.
To his surprise, Djam was not sitting on the Stone Throne: Cheleb was. “Earlier than I thought I’d see you,” Cheleb said, sounding quite cheerful. “Plainly name of planet Earth should be more correctly translated as Stone. Seems to be what you’re made of.”
“Always nice to be complimented,” Kit said, “assuming I can figure out why. And whether I deserved it. Where’s Djam?”
“Asleep,” Cheleb said. “Apparently visitor last night had same effect on him as had on you; just took longer to set in.” Hae shook haes head. “So sorry to have missed it. Never had a chance to see a Fourth before, probably never will again.”
Kit didn’t know what to make of this, so he just went and sat down by Cheleb for a moment and looked over his shoulder at the gate-monitoring diagrams laid out on the stone. “They behaving themselves?”
“Even better than when being shouted at by your good self,” Cheleb said. “Didn’t think it was possible. But then again, Fourth…”
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Kit shook his head. “How’s the sibik situation?”
“Not even one.”
“Yet,” Kit said.
“All right, so far. But pleasant change, frankly. Cute things, but can get a bit overbearing.” Cheleb sighed and stretched. “Any advancement on token-internalization side of things?”
“What? Oh.” Kit smiled. “Been working on it. I’ll be thinking more about it over the course of the day.”
“Good plan,” Cheleb said. “Had it strongly suggested to me by immediate gate-management supervisor upstream that you two should take day off, secondary to exciting events of last night. So maybe should go visit one’s errantry-partner and work on the project a little.”
Kit opened his mouth. “By suggested, I mean ordered,” said Cheleb. “Check own version of Knowledge.”
Kit stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Chel, I really, really want to take you up on this, but this ought to be my shift.”
“Isn’t anymore,” Cheleb said. “Made of stone Earth wizard may be, but should know that before arrival of you two, had been handling triple shifts myself. Tailored hormonal shift—easy to implement when there’s warning. Doing one hundred of your hours straight through not difficult when hormonal alteration protocol is in place, and using wizardry to augment it.” Cheleb grinned at him. “With heightened power levels, truly not a problem. Getting a lot done, time for much multitasking. Investigating more Earth entertainment as well.”
Oh boy, Kit thought. What have I done? “All right,” Kit said. “I’ll grab a bite to eat and go see Nita. How long?”
“As long as liked,” Cheleb said. “Will message you on manual if any problem. Go!” Hae made a shoo-ing gesture at Kit. “Eat, visit, get internalizing!”
So Kit did as he was told. He ate, took the short-transport pad over to Ronan’s gating complex to shower and take care of other necessities, changed clothes, padded back to the Stone Circle to drop the dirty clothes off in his puptent, and then went back to the pad, giving it the coordinates for Nita’s gating complex.
She had shown that to him briefly in a panorama she sent him via the manual, so Kit knew more or less where to find her without too much looking. Pragmatic as always, Nita had brought a couple of lawn chairs with her from home—or maybe she’d already had them in her puptent: Kit wasn’t sure. He found her sitting off to one side of a very large grassy area, probably a park, its boundaries surrounded by tall, handsome gleaming little skyscrapers and smaller buildings—all very elegantly and gracefully made in various kinds of glass and glazed metal.
And all soon to be abandoned, Kit thought sadly as he strolled across the park to her. Nita’s view was essentially the same as his: the several smaller, local Gates, all their portal orifices locked in continuously-open configuration, with Tevaralti endlessly streaming out of them into the long-jump gate on the far side of the park: people hurrying, shouting, pushing hovercarts or floating platforms, or driving larger vehicles, full of their personal effects. And here, too, Kit saw so many of them doing what he’d seen people doing at his own gate: taking that last, desperate look up into their own sky, or at the moon that was going to kill their world, just one last time before they vanished through into a new place forever. Nita's gate-plaza, too, had its own transients’ encampment—its occupants watching the others go, staying where they were, and silently grieving.
He sighed and looked back at her. As if she felt him coming, Nita glanced up, closed the manual in her lap, dumped it in her chair, and got up to greet him. Suddenly, it seemed Kit as if everything he’d gone through in the past couple days came down on him at once. He went straight to Nita and grabbed her and hugged her very hard.
She hugged him back at least as hard, and buried her face in his shoulder for a moment. “What were you doing last night?” she muttered. “I can’t let you out of my sight for a moment without you getting in trouble.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Kit said. “The trouble came looking for me.”
“Oh yeah,” Nita said. “Sure.” She let go of him, and though she was smiling, there was some worry in it. “Maybe not trouble as such. But still… I read the précis of what happened. Your manual was recording.” She shook her head at him. “That was extremely bizarre.”
Kit took a long breath and let it out. “Yes it was.”
Nita reached down under her chair, pulled out a soda, and handed it to him. “Sit down and tell me everything.”
So he did. It was strange how rare such debriefings were for them, since they tended to be deployed together almost all the time. It was strange, too, how Kit kept stopping himself every now and then and go over what he was telling Nita to make sure that he wasn’t missing some specific detail that would be important for her to know. The problem was that he couldn’t always tell what was going to turn out to be important. Still, he did his best. And he found that it was making him feel better when he could make her laugh, because he saw the way her eyes kept straying across to the transients’ encampment on the far side of the park.
The story of the little Tevaralti boy’s greedy, naughty sibik made Nita laugh so hard that she almost couldn’t breathe. But then came the story of taking it home—or at least, what passed for home—and neither of them was able to laugh much at that. As Kit got to the point where there was no more to tell of that story, Nita pushed herself back against the back of her chair, and stretched her legs out in front of her, sighing.
She was wearing the extremely ragged jeans that she favored for times when she most needed to be comfortable and when whatever species she was working with wouldn’t have any cultural judgments to make about the rips and tears. Now, as she sometimes did when she was nervous or unhappy about something, Nita started unraveling one of the raggedy places just above her knee. Kit watched her doing this for a few moments before speaking again. “They told us that our main job was with the gates. And I understand that. I really do. But I keep feeling like I ought to have gone there before. Ought to go there again, talk to them more…”
“‘Ought to,’” Nita said. She sighed. “I think maybe our ‘oughts’ aren’t really what matters here. …I thought that too, Kit, you know? I thought ‘I really should be with these guys more.’ But then I realized, Hey, I’m an idiot. I don’t have anything to share that’s really going to help them. We’re all humanoids, yeah, but… right now the gap’s too big.”
She fell silent for a moment. “Look, when Mom died, yeah, that was the end of a world.” She gulped at her soda. “No question! But not the end of the world. This is so much bigger, so much worse. Anything I’d say to these people about what grief looks like would seem so stupid and small by comparison. Just the thought of it… I get all choked.” She shook her head. “Nope. I feel a lot better sitting still here and watching the gate. That’s how I’m helping them. This isn’t about me, or how I feel: it’s about them.”
She looked across at the streams of Tevaralti hurrying out of the feeder gates toward the downstream one. “And anyway, when you come right down to it, the stories they’re living right now are so much bigger than mine. Just look at them. Everything’s ending for them, and they’re being so brave. All the carts and trucks and floater pads, all loaded up with everything that matters to them, household stuff and artifacts and data and art. They’re trying to save everything they can, not just themselves. All their stories, all their culture, all their history: everything they can save, they’re taking away with them. But there’ll be so much they can’t save… that not all the wizards here can save. The moon’s going to fall down, and break it all up, and destroy everything. Hidden things, forgotten things: they’ll all be gone forever now. No matter what you do, things get lost…”
Kit heard the slight quiver in her voice, and didn’t have to look at Nita to know that there were tears in her eyes. He didn’t turn to look at her because he knew that would make them spill, and right now she was holding on tight. So he just put his hand out toward her, and she grabbed hold of it, sq
ueezing it. Then they just sat together and were heavy-hearted for a bit, and Kit once more was astonished at how the pain did lessen slightly when someone was sharing it with you, clichéd though that should have been.
“Better?” Nita said after a while.
“Better,” Kit said. “You?”
“Yeah.”
Nita tipped her head back and stared straight up at the sky. “All I’m trying to figure out now,” she said, “is what the Fourth was there about.” She tilted her head back over to look at Kit. “Sure, he may really have been looking for Mamvish, but somehow I find it really hard to believe that’s the only reason he was there. These upper-dimensional guys—” She waved her hand in a way strangely reminiscent of the gesture that Djam had used. “They see things, patterns, that we can’t. The trouble is that because they are multidimensional, they don’t always know how to communicate what they’re trying to tell you so that you’re able to get it. Even in the Speech, they have trouble narrowing things down enough to be comprehensible.”
Kit looked at her in some surprise. “When did you meet one of these people? You never told me about this.”
“There were one or two of them who turned up in the Playroom when I was doing all that kernel work for my mom,” Nita said. “One guy—tall, a lot of eyes—he was really creepy. Or at least that was all I could make of him when I met him first. He always seemed to have a way of looking at you didn’t have anything to do with any of those eyes. Turns out that’s kind of a diagnostic, that feeling of being weirdly watched. If all of you lives in just one set of dimensions, then having somebody around who has footholds in more than one set kind of makes your skin crawl.” She shivered. “But it turns out it didn’t have anything to do with bad intent. It’s just the way our nervous systems react to their nervous systems. Later on, when I thought about some of the things he’d said to me, they were really useful. Or they would’ve been, if I just hadn’t been so freaked by him.” Nita laughed at herself. “Nothing I can do about it now, but at least now when I run into somebody who has that going on, I know what to make of it.”