Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

There being nothing better to do, Kit flopped down on the bench and looked around him at this space full of busy people hurrying to and fro, people from this world, people from others, wizards and nonwizards, all with one thing on their minds. He saw their many glances up toward the reception center’s glass-domed ceiling, but he wasn’t going to look that way himself: not right this minute.

And in the middle of all this hurry and urgency, here he was, all by himself, one kid from Sol III, one Earth guy—not in control of anything, with nothing to do but sit and wait: all alone. It was unnerving, but Kit sat with it… let the weight of it settle on him, and concentrated on bearing up.

“Rodriguez—?” said a voice, mispronouncing it a bit, which wasn’t unusual. Using the Speech mostly guaranteed understanding, but didn’t necessarily do a thing about pronunciation.

Kit stood up, turned to greet the Tevaralti coming towards him: pale-feathered head, a long sharp face, actual clothes—sort of a kilt and a tunic—and another of the data pads. “Dai stihó, cousin,” he said. “Ready for me?”

“Indeed yes. This way—”

They walked over to the short-jump hexes while his guide gave him the rundown, essentially the same as Nita’s, though his location was different; somewhere in the center of Continent Three, a multiple intake gate presently staffed by two other wizards who’d be standing watch with him. “Right there please, cousin. Ready?”

“Go,” Kit said.

The hex pulsed and the world flicked dark around him—but not before Kit tilted his head back and got one last glimpse of Thesba. We’re just getting started, he said silently. You may think you’re going to kill all these people, but we’re not going to let it be that way.

Now all Kit and everyone else had to do was make it true.

***

When the darkness lifted again, it was still nighttime; but now Kit was outside, standing on a hexagonal-shaped stone in a very open place, with a chilly wind rippling through grass-like growths that were growing all around him. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the dark, but not very long. Thesba was still hanging overhead, significantly further down the sky. Kit watched it for just a few seconds and realized that it was rising, not setting. “Oh great,” Kit said under his breath, “now I get to have that all over again.”

Nonetheless, he was going to be seeing a whole lot more of Thesba whether he liked it or not, so he just shook his head and turned away, glancing around to get a sense of his surroundings. He was standing not far from the edge of a circle of rough stones, all longer than they were wide and rooted deeply in the ground. At the center of the circle stood one more stone taller than the rest, with a flatter stone of the same width half-buried in the ground at its feet. Sitting by that central stone was a small clear box with a round sphere of pale blue-white light centered in it, and that light laid the shadows of the surrounding stones out behind them for three or four meters until they faded away into the darkness that surrounded everything. All around the stones, the ground stretched away in a broad prairie-like plain, where the same blue-green grass seemed to be growing much taller, so that it rippled in that wind. The dull amber of Thesba’s light gilded the grass as it bent and flowed in that wind, so that out toward the line of distant hills or low mountains that edged the horizon, the whole vista indistinctly shivered and rippled like water.

There was another sound, though, deeper than the wind, lower than the wind, and with a more localized source. Kit turned to see where was coming from. In the direction away from moonrise, low against the horizon of hills that seem to surround this whole area, was a faint glitter of light: a distant city. From here it was hard to tell whether it was large or small, but it seemed not to feature any particularly tall buildings. Then again, skyscrapers weren’t exactly a pan-cultural phenomenon; lots of very advanced species saw no particular reason to build tall buildings unless space in a chosen building area was at a premium. And it doesn’t look like it’s at a premium here, Kit thought.

The city, though, was not the source of the sound Kit was hearing. Between it and the spot where he stood, maybe a mile or so away across the flat ground, there were half a dozen spherical light sources hanging suspended in the air. Antigravity, Kit thought. Or levitation: or both. Under their blue-white light, like that from the nearby sphere-in-a-cube but much brighter, Kit could make out maybe a dozen tall standards or poles of some glinting metal, either silvery-blue themselves or just shining that way under the light from overhead. Five pairs of them were set relatively close together, in an arc that approximated a half circle. The sixth pair was at least half again taller than the others, and set nearly three times as far apart. And between the pairs of standards—

At first Kit thought he was looking at some kind of projection into the air between the five smaller standards and the sixth one, which from this angle appeared empty. But then he got it. They were worldgate portals—but not small, tightly irised-down ones like the gate hanging off Platform 23 in Grand Central. Between those standards, the gate orifices were stretched widely and continuously open—a configuration that he knew from conversations with Rhiow wasn’t terribly safe. But this whole situation is more about speed than safety, isn’t it? And out of the five smaller gates, people were hurrying into the great open space between the smaller portals and the larger one.

Again the angle wasn’t quite right to see the whole process happening. Kit could see those big crowds of Tevaralti pouring slowly out of the smaller worldgates, pausing to look around them… and then making their way more slowly toward the biggest gate, the one Kit could see through almost as clearly as if it was a window stretched between the two tallest standards. The crowds of Tevaralti moved toward that gate’s interface, and vanished from sight. And poured toward it, and vanished… over and over and over again, never stopping. More people came through the five feeder portals every moment, and paused in the space between them and the great gate, and then moved toward it and were gone.

It was partly from that unending, moving multitude that the sound came which had first attracted Kit’s attention. But there was more movement in the darkness than that. Gathered around the gating complex were many, many more Tevaralti, indistinct in the darkness. There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them there, some settled, some moving restlessly among smaller structures that might be tents of some kind, and among very many more of the little box-and-globe lights that Kit was starting to think of as electronic campfires, some of these bigger, some smaller.

Kit had known since he’d left home how huge the numbers were of the people who were moving off the planet every moment. But there was something else going on with the people in this huge encampment. These were some of the people the Tevaralti Planetary had spoken of—the ones who felt they couldn’t leave just yet, and maybe wouldn’t leave at all. The dull gold of Thesba shone down on them as on the rippling of the wind through the alien grass, so that the whole plain seemed alive with half-seen, uneasy movement, with the muttering of the wind and the murmur of countless distant voices.

Kit shivered. And behind him, much closer to him, a high clear voice said, “Oh no, you’re early!”

He turned. Someone was coming toward him from inside the circle of stones—jogging toward him, in fact. The figure was tall and slender and bipedal, but for a few moments Kit couldn’t make out any further detail on it at all; the light behind it was too bright, the light from Thesba above and from the gate complex behind him too faint. Then as it got closer, his eyes adjusted, and Kit realized the reason he couldn’t make anything of the one who was approaching was that he was covered all over with something dark: in fact, dark fur.