Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“Or ninth and tenth times,” Cheleb said, “just when think things will be quiet—things act up. Smaller portals have traffic problems. Or start throwing gravitational anomalies.” Hae shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Gates hate each other as much as space hates them. Pack so many gates so close together, even small ones, they throw mass-substrate errors, or else time and local space get out of synch. Act quickly, adjust local gravitational constant, gates don’t rip each other out of ground and ruin whole day.” Hae rolled his eyes most expressively, making Kit smile: he’d noticed more than once on trips to the Crossings that the gesture was surprisingly common among humanoid species, though it could mean really different things depending on cultural influences.

“Is there a control center,” Kit said, “or anywhere in particular we need to be while we’re monitoring all this?”

“I’m a nervous type,” Djam said. “I like doing it here.” He thumped his furry two-thumbed hand on the stone they sat on. “Makes me feel better to be able to see what’s going on without using remote sensors.”

“Personal preference,” Cheleb said, and shivered. “Can do it just fine from inside portable cave. Weather here’s terrible even when not dropping water all over everything from cold chilly sky.” Hae shivered again.

“Or else you just don’t care to look at that all day,” said Djam, and cast his eyes upward.

For a moment they all looked up at Thesba, now approaching the zenith. After a moment, “Wouldn’t try claiming otherwise in the Speech,” said Cheleb.

“Me either,” said Kit.

Djam sighed, got up. “Nor I. Kiht, we should get your puptent set up so you can get some rest. Your—manual?—will have a guide for you on how to handle the monitoring: I’ll sit with you for some of your first shift, give you pointers. After that we should sort ourselves a schedule, see whose planet’s day matches this one best, who does what best and when… because we’re going to be doing this for days.”

Cheleb got up too. “Have early-day shift tomorrow,” hae said, “need to go curl up now. Later, cousins…” And hae got up and went off to haes puptent’s portal, vanishing through it.

Kit looked up at Thesba, shivered one more time in that cold wind, and got up to go after Djam and get his puptent sorted out.

***

It was another hour or so before Kit was anywhere near ready to settle down. There was always so much sorting and settling to do; the things he’d fired into the pup tent at high speed when he was packing and getting out of the house now needed to be stacked up out of the way. And then of course he had to make his bed—literally make it, constructing the spell that would be substituting for a mattress. In fact he had to make it three times, because he kept getting the size of the air mattress wrong (and in order to get the mattress to the right level of firmness, the spell defining the volume of the air which was being “hardened” into the mattress was particularly rigorous). But finally he was standing there in the middle of the eggshell-white half dome that was the way the inside of the puptent expressed itself, looking at the neatly-made bed with his striped bedspread on it, and the boxes and containers of food piled up all around the edges of the space, and the stacks of books and other things he’d brought with him, and all of a sudden the weight of everything that had happened over the course of the day came down on Kit’s shoulders all at once and left him feeling desperately tired.

The temptation to simply flop face down on the bed and pass out right then and there was huge. Unfortunately there were still things that needed to be done. For the moment, Kit just sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for his manual, thinking nervously about what it was going to be like for him in the morning when he sat down on that flat rock outside and it was his turn to ride herd on a flock of cranky worldgates. He thought about Djam sitting up there now with his sleek little pull-out manual, and Cheleb, asleep in haes own “portable cave”, and was relieved that they were so nice and that he got along so well with them. Though that’s probably no accident, Kit thought. Some ways the Powers will be behind a lot of this, and mostly we’ll be put where we’ll work best…

He flipped through the pages to the messaging section and tapped on Nita’s last text message to him. “You conscious?” he said.

It went out as a text, since that was what he was responding to, but it was her voice that answered. “Nngh, barely,” Nita said. “What about you?”

“Getting ready to turn in,” Kit said, piling his pillows on top of each other and flopping back against them. “How is it where you are?”

She sighed. “It’s a mess. Six gates, funneling into one about halfway up the transit tree. So the team here has both incoming and outgoing schedules to worry about, and just after I arrived they had to shut down two of their incoming gates because of some kind of gravitational problem upstream. I’m just so very happy that they think I’m actually going to be good at keeping an eye on this thing when I have my first shift tomorrow.”

“This is all because we’re friends with Rhiow, isn’t it,” Kit said.

“Don’t know about all,” Nita said. “For all I know, it’s because you use your beam-me-up-Scotty spell more than anyone else on Earth.”

“Oh yeah,” Kit said. “Blame me.”

“Whenever possible.”

Kit laughed at her. “Are your teammates nice?”

“Nice? You have no idea. They were acting as if it was a big deal when I arrived… I have no idea why. Though maybe,” she added, as if the idea was just occurring, “they’re thinking that having a visionary on site would be useful if something starts to go wrong.”

She sounded uneasy. Kit knew why: Nita’s visioning abilities were going through changes, and right now they didn’t always work the way she wanted them to, or (sometimes) at all. “Look,” Kit said, “the monitoring equipment and spells they’ve got set up on these gates are really sensitive. I had a look at one of the basic readout arrays a while ago, and I doubt it’ll need a visionary to let people know if one of these things starts getting twitchy.” In fact it had better not, because I’m no visionary…

Nita sighed. “Okay.”

“So who’s on your team, then?”

“Oh. A sort-of-a-girl from Alya, that’s one of the star’s names, anyway—it’s a binary, over in Serpens someplace. I should know where but…” She yawned. “Ask me tomorrow. They’re sort of shelly all over, but the shell’s segmented, like what an armadillo has. And so pretty! She’s all inlaid with gems and metal and stuff; Carmela’s going to try to steal her look the minute she sees it. The other one’s a guy from Natih, you know the ones I mean, we’ve seen them at the Crossings a couple times. The little dinosaury ones with the neck frills and the unpronounceable names. Anyway, all very nice people. But they’re really tired out: this gate’s been running them ragged.” She yawned again.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “I get a feeling these guys have been having trouble too. …Well, here we are. We’ll see if we can get things to work a little better.” He yawned too.

“Listen to you,” Nita said. “You should crash.”

“You’re the one who got me started,” said Kit. And then he could feel another yawn on its way, and started to think she had a point. “And know what? You’ve convinced me. I’m done.”

“That was too easy,” Nita said, and laughed. “When are you getting up?”

He glanced at his watch, which was still running on New York time. “Uh… six hours from now, maybe. It’s late back home but I want to get used to the local time as quick as I can.”