Sharon Shinn - Gateway

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He led her across the greensward and onto one of the streets cluttered with a mishmash of buildings. Traffic was heavy, but it consisted mostly of people on foot or riding contraptions that looked like bicycles crossed with carts. There seemed to be thousands of people crowded into the streets and on the sidewalks. By the time Kalen had turned a couple of corners, Daiyu was hopelessly lost; she couldn’t even orient herself by the placement of the river. She hoped they didn’t have to walk far. She was feeling pretty worn.

A clattering sound caught her attention, and she looked up to see a long, narrow trolley heading their way, slowing down as Kalen raised a hand to signal it. She couldn’t tell what powered it-not horses, at any rate, and she couldn’t smell gasoline fumes-but she didn’t greatly care. She climbed on behind Kalen and sank gratefully onto a hard wooden bench between Kalen and an older woman.

“It’s not that far,” he told her in an encouraging voice.

She nodded wearily and looked around. Her fellow passengers were almost all Chinese, most of them more shabbily dressed than those who had been at the red gate. Of the other thirty or forty people crammed onto the trolley, Daiyu saw only five besides Kalen who were Caucasian and two who were black. One of the white women was middle-aged, dispirited, and dressed in layers of ill-fitting clothing. If she’d been back in St. Louis, Daiyu would not have been surprised if this woman had come up to her asking for a handout.

If she’d been back in St. Louis…

Where was she?

The trolley made a cheerful racket but fairly slow progress as it wound its way through a maze of streets, stopping every few blocks to pick up or drop off passengers. As it moved into an increasingly residential district, the makeup of the ridership changed, and soon almost all the passengers were white. It was quickly clear that this particular neighborhood was not for the affluent. Most of the buildings were small and squat, built out of a dull gray stone or an even drearier brown material. Here and there, filling in gaps between sturdier structures, Daiyu spotted what looked like tents-heavy cloth strung over avariety of makeshift supports.

“People live there?” she asked Kalen.

He nodded. “Most of the cangbai laborers make their homes in this district.”

“The what?”

“Cangbai. Like me. Pale.” He gestured in an indeterminate direction. “Across the river is where most of the Han live.”

“Han?”

“Like you,” he said.

Chinese,she thought. What kind of world had she stumbled into?

He smiled as if a thought had occurred to him. “Well, the poor Han live across the Zhongbu River. The rich ones live in big houses on this side of the river.”

Sheofferednoanswer, and they made the rest of the journey in silence. They finally got off at a tumbledown street corner and walked three blocks to a one-story building of tired white stone. The two windows that she could see were open to allow in the sultry air. It was pretty clear there wasn’t going to be air-conditioning inside.

There wasn’t-and not much else, either. Daiyu stood just inside the doorway and took along, comprehensive look. There was one main room that seemed to serve as kitchen and common area. Three doors, all closed, probably led off to other rooms, and she hoped one was a bathroom. The furnishings seemed to consist mainly of rag rugs over a scarred wood floor, a couple of benches close to a sturdy table, and shelving units holding an unclassifiable assortment of objects. If there had ever been any paint on the interior of the stone walls, it had long since peeledoff. Her father would be absolutely in his element trying to rehab this place.

The thought of her father gave her a sharp stab of pain, and she turned rather fiercely on her new acquaintance.

“My parents-they’ll be so worried about me,” she said. “I don’t know why I was brought here, but I don’t want to be here. How can you just take people away from their homes? What do you want with me?”

“Your parents will have no reason to fear for you,” said a deep, rich voice, and Daiyu spun around to see a black man stepping in through the door behind them. He was shorter than Kalen and at least fifty years older, with closely cropped hair that had turned entirely gray. He was dressed in black pants and a sleeveless black shirt that showed off powerful arms. “You will be returned to them unharmed, only seconds from when you saw them last. Your iteration does not vibrate in synchronicity with this one. You exist here, as it were, outside of time.”

Daiyu pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “What?” she said faintly.

“This is Ombri,” Kalen said helpfully. “He can explain everything.”

Daiyu dropped her hands to glare at Ombri. “Are you the one who brought me here?” she demanded.

“I would more truly say I invited you here and you accepted,” Ombri replied.

“There was no invitation! There was no acceptance! How can you say that?”

He pointed to her hand. “You wear the dragon ring. Only someone who is willing to sojourn between iterations can wear the ring on her finger.”

“I’m not willing to-to sojourn between worlds!” she said. She tugged the ring off and flung it across the room.“There.It’s gone. Now, take me home.”

Kalen loosed an exclamation of dismay, looking between Daiyu and Ombri as he spoke in some rapid, unintelligible language. Ombri kept his dark eyes on Daiyu as he responded, his voice much calmer than Kalen’s, though equally impossible to understand.

Daiyu threw her hands in the air. “I have no idea what you’re saying. I don’t care. Just take me home.”

Kalen turned to her with a pleading look and spoke even more urgently. Again, she couldn’t make out a word. Now Daiyu felt another spike of fear. It hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder how she was able to understand these strange people in this utterly strange place. If she had somehow lost the ability to communicate with them-

Kalen dove across the room to search the pile of shoes and papers where the dragon ring had landed. As soon as he found it, he hurried back to Daiyu, offering the black jade circlet to her with a single pleading word.

“I don’t want it,” she said.

Kalen slipped the ring on his finger and then spoke into it as if it held a concealed microphone. Then he held it up to his ear and his expression of exaggerated bewilderment cleared up. “Oh!” he exclaimed, followed by a few more happy words.

The ring appeared to be a translator. Daiyu could certainly use some translating right about now. She slipped it back onto her finger, where she was annoyed to find it made her hand feel just right.

“I’m not wearing this to tell you that I accept your invitation to travel to your world,” she said icily. “But if it lets me have a conversation with you-”

“Yes, that is exactly what it does,” Ombri said, and Daiyu felt a rush of relief when she was able to understand him again. “We also have a pair of black jade earrings, if you would be more comfortable wearing them.”

“I don’t want to wear your jewelry!” she exclaimed. “I just want to understand what’s happening, or I would take the ring off right now!”

“For now, we will agree that the ring does not constitute any kind of offer or acceptance, and let it serve only its more practical purpose of interpreting speech,” Ombri said. “As long as you wear it, you will be able to understand any of the dialects in our iteration, and your speech will be comprehensible to any individual you encounter.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” she demanded. “What’s an iteration?”