Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Kit shivered.

Ronan had turned around to look up at Thesba again, and was regarding it with an an expression that suggested he really would have liked to be elsewhere. “Know what,” he said, “I’m really on the wrong side of the gatelag at the moment: I was about to turn in when they called me up. If they’re offering us someplace to plug the pup tents in, I wouldn’t mind popping into mine and having a kip. Assuming nobody needs me for anything vital…”

Kit shook his head. “Go on,” Nita said, “we’ll message you if anything exciting happens.”

Ronan lifted a hand and headed off toward the complex of low, softly lit buildings that the Tevaralti had positioned off to the side of the gating area. “Not such a bad idea,” Dairine said, watching him go: “Spot wants to go talk to their computers. We’ll go over and get him jacked in for a while.”

“Yell if you need me,” Nita said. Dairine waved a hand at her and took herself off in Ronan’s wake.

Vesh had come back to confer with Tom again, and when Tom moved away from him to go after Carl, Kit said, “Vesh. You’re busy right now, but…”

“Cousins, there’s no one on the planet right now who’s not busy,” Vesh said, sadly but not without humor. “We’ve got a few moments: ask what’s on your mind.”

“The people who won’t go…”

Vesh shook his crest-feathers, a gesture Kit wasn’t sure what to make of as yet. “Why won’t they?” he said. “I’m Tevaralti and I don’t know. It’s no matter of pride… though it’d be easy enough to mistake it for such. I think it’s more that some of them are…” He shook his crest in a different way, and squeezed his eyes shut briefly. “Some are uneasy about from what sources they’ll accept assistance; they’re afraid they might somehow be tricked, or led astray. And not to have that happen is very important to them. That’s as close as I can come to it.”

Vesh opened his eyes again and looked unhappy—at least that was what Kit made of the expression. Tevaralti expressions seemed to live more in the eyes than in any part of the face, which was fairly immobile due to a bone structure that seemed to mirror what would have been various shapes or types of beaks in earlier evolutionary periods. “They’re not ungrateful, cousins; never think it. But uncertain… that they are, yes.”

Then his crest went up as if he was hearing something the rest of them couldn’t. “I’m needed,” he said. “Hold me excused, if you would…” And he headed off.

During this, Nita had turned to gaze up at Thesba again. Kit swallowed and did the same, determined to start getting himself used to the sight of it.

She gave him a look. “You want to go up top for a quick look?”

“Get the lay of the land?” Kit said. “Sure, why not?”

“Okay, come on.”

It took a few minutes to find another of the Tevaralti wizards who had time to listen to an explanation of what they wanted to do, which by itself caused some confusion. (”You want to gate up into space? Up into cisThesban space…?!”) But after a few moments Nita closed her eyes and then opened them again and said, very firmly, “Distancing maneuver.”

The Tevaralti wizard they were talking to, a tall slender one clothed in shaggy dark feathers and not much else, opened his golden eyes quite wide at that and said, “Oh. Of course!”—and led them over to one of a number of small side hexes arranged around the edges of the main pattern on the big reception slab. “Do you have coordinates you prefer?”

Nita rattled off a string of characters and numbers in the Speech. The pattern was broadly similar to the coordinate system that they used on Earth, but the numbers were significantly larger. Immediately, the little hex near them lit up blue, and the edges of the hex’s outline began to pulse softly.

“It’s intention-triggered,” said the Tevaralti wizard. “Just tell it when you’re ready to go. It’ll provide your outgoing wizardry with return-location coordinates. And you have an alert mechanism hooked up to your instrumentality, yes?”

“That’s right,” Nita said. “It’s all handled. Thanks, cousin.”

“Go well, then—” And immediately the Tevaralti wizard was off, feathers fluttering, to tend to somebody else.

“Brainstorm?” Kit murmured.

Nita gave him an amused side-eye. “Bobo can be really helpful sometimes. Bubble us up?”

Kid had had the necessary wizardry ready within moments of Nita suggesting they go topside. He said the last few words of the spell. Things went very briefly dark and silent around them as the universe leaned in to hear what Kit was asking of it, and then obligingly made it happen. A few seconds later they were standing exactly where they had been, but surrounded by a transparent forcefield bubble two meters wide. Kit just stood there for a moment waiting for the usual feeling of the personal energy leaving him, the price for having done such a spell, and was surprised to feel it so very much less than usual. “They said about an hour,” Kit said. “So I packed air for two hours…”

Nita nodded. “Because you never can tell.”

“Gravity?”

She considered for a moment. “Nah, why bother? We won’t be there that long.”

“Okay.”

“Personal fields?” The skinfields were an optional addition, meant as kind of a failsafe in case something went wrong with the forcefield bubble. Not that anything ever had, but—

“Because you never can tell.”

Kit nodded and said the twelve extra words necessary to implement the personal shields. Once more he hardly even felt the deduction of his personal energy. I could get used to this… “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

The reception pad winked out.

And then they were hanging in space. The thing that struck Kit immediately was how different the light balance was, once you were up here. Down on the planet surface, on the night side at least, Thesba’s hot sullen glow and lowering, downpressing presence dominated everything. Up here Tevaral had a chance to shine on its own.

It was worth seeing. Far greener than home—partly because of the way its atmosphere scattered light and partly due to the dominant green-blue color of the vegetation—and nearly twice as big as Earth, the effect was striking. If the look of Earth from space was along the lines of a turquoise or sapphire, then Tevaral came down more along the emerald or opal side of the equation, its seas more golden from the angle of the place in space where he and Nita hung suspended. Their forcefield was anchored to this one set of coordinates, so that underneath them the planet’s rotation could just barely be seen, if you fixed your eyes on one spot and watched how it approached the terminator and slid under. And the slow swing of Thesba around its primary was visible too, a leisurely movement toward moonset, sliding at the same kind of speed that the Sun’s light seen through blinds at home might creep down the wall late in the day.

Kit held still and quiet as he watched this, waiting for Nita to get past the first few moments of physical discomfort that came of being in space without gravity. The Moon wasn’t too hard to deal with, as a rule: even as little as one-sixth gee gave your gut and your inner ear enough gravity to keep them feeling relatively normal. However, the balance-weirdness and orientation problems that came with microgravity were another story. Kit had been lucky enough to find he could get over these pretty quickly. But Nita (like the vast majority of astronauts) had had a fair amount of trouble with it her first few times, and even now had to hold still and not be too active for the first few minutes in zero-gee until her brain managed to talk her inner ear out of misbehaving.