Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Kit nodded. “Seen Neets?”

Ronan shook his head. “Knowledge said she’s very occupied. No point in going where you’re not going to be welcome. Or a distraction.” He uncrossed his legs, crossed them again into what was apparently a more comfortable configuration. “Looks like they stuck her onto one of the more active gates…”

“Yeah, she mentioned.”

Ronan chuckled. “Probably they mean to have her lose her temper with it and terrify it into submission.”

Kit wondered whether there might not be something to that concept. “What about Dairine?”

“Seems quiet where she is.” Ronan shrugged. “Though I haven’t been over there yet.” He sighed and looked around. “This place you’ve got, though… it’s nicer than anybody’s that I’ve seen so far. We should all come over here in our spare time and have a picnic.”

Kit laughed. “You’re always trying to find fun ways to slack off.”

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” Ronan said. “Doesn’t it make sense to stay on an even keel when we’re in this situation?” He looked out toward the gating complex. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been looking at that… or that fecking thing…” His glance went to Thesba, now almost entirely risen above the horizon. “…and thinking about how hard it’s going to be to make a difference to these people. The difference we want to make, anyway.”

There was no point in denying it: Ronan knew him too well. “If the difference we want for them isn’t the difference they want…” Kit said.

“Normally I’d be tempted to agree with you,” Ronan said. “But the Powers seem to be going to a lot of trouble to try to shift that perception somehow—”

He paused, his eyebrows going up. “Feck, so much for my break time,” Ronan said, getting up and dusting his jeans off. “They need me for something on site. Anyway, think about that picnic.” He glanced around him. “Could be fun. Assuming we can keep your little friends out of the potato salad.”

Kit snickered around a bite of the burger. “And look into the protocol for these, yeah?” Ronan said, heading back through the circle of stones and gesturing toward the single-user gating pad. “No point in you being marooned out here.”

“I should ask the shiftmates,” Kit called after him. “See how they feel about it.”

“Can’t see why they’d disapprove,” Ronan said. “Who knows, maybe they’ll bring something blue…”

Kit laughed. “Thanks for this!” he said, waving the burger.

Ronan waved an arm, not turning around: trotted off to the pad, hopped up onto it, and vanished.

***

Kit spent the afternoon getting caught up on his reading and his snacking, chatting with Nita once or twice, and making sure the check-the-gate-complex-every-ten-minutes habit became thoroughly ingrained. Only once did the complex act up—when Thesba was setting for the first time, and the number three feeder gate threw a small gravitational conniption. The fluctuation appeared to have something to do with that gate having had significantly fewer Tevaralti passing through it for a ten-minute period during which the gates on either side of it were at much higher pass-through levels. Or something like that, Kit thought. At the moment he was fairly vague about the finer details of the theory behind the way gates in close proximity to one another behaved. But here his affinity with mechanical systems served him well, and at any rate he’d been warned about this kind of problem and knew what to do about it.

It took Kit about ten minutes to fix the problem—speaking kindly to the hardware of the gate in question and reasserting the need to have a nice, steady gravitational constant running in the area affected by its portal field when so many people were using it, even if they weren’t all using it right this minute. The gate settled down, though not without a certain amount of what Kit’s sense of dealing with mechanical things translated as grumpy muttering. What Cheleb had said to him about gates hating each other did seem to be true… and the problem seemed to be exacerbated when the hardware attached to the gate proper was so subtle and sophisticated. The gates seemed to become not only more sentient, but more sensitive. Which is probably going to be a pain in the butt, Kit thought. But let’s see how this goes.

It was late afternoon when Cheleb came back from haes away-time and sat down on the Stone Throne with Kit to look over the logs of the last ten hours’ operation and hear Kit’s report on anything that hae thought needed attention. Hae leaned over Kit’s manual, looking at it thoughtfully, and tapped the log entry that described Kit’s conversation with the gate. “Have gift for this,” Cheleb said, looking up at Kit with those strange elongated eyes of haes. “Would’ve taken me hour, maybe more, to produce same result. Those Who Keep Stable only know what would’ve happened in meantime.” Hae looked over the dialogue as it streamed by on the manual page, and bared haes teeth at Kit in an expression of approval. “Not just persuasive: smart about how to persuade. Ever consider getting into gate tech?”

The thought had genuinely never crossed Kit’s mind. “Um, no, not really.”

“Ought to,” Cheleb said. “Know any gate supervisors back on Dirt?”

Kit grinned; he knew when he was being teased. “A few, yeah.”

“Surprised they haven’t co-opted you already.”

Kit shrugged. “Our Supervisories are pretty easygoing about specialty guidance. May think it’s early in my case.” Or else, Kit thought, Tom’s not willing to start me wondering about possibly changing specialties when Neets is uncertain, too. “Another problem, though. Wizards of my species aren’t as good at seeing hyperstring structure as Earth wizards of other species.”

“Ah,” Cheleb said. “Still—should give it some thought. Always a shame to waste talent.” Hae got up. “Going to go fetch a bite to eat. Need carbs?”

“No, I’m good,” Kit said. “Had some protein a while back. Thanks, though.”

Cheleb vanished off into haes puptent. Just a few moments after hae did, Djam appeared and wandered over, rubbing at his eyes. “So how was your shift?”

“Pretty quiet,” Kit said. “A little excitement an hour or so ago.”

Djam sat down by him and glanced at the manual. “You weren’t long about sorting it out, though.”

Kit made a rueful face. “Worked better than trying to sort out the sibik that climbed up my world-cousin’s leg,” he said.

“What?”

Kit told him the story. Djam rocked back and forth where he sat, bubbling with amusement. “Well, at least it wasn’t one of the mhilimai ones.”

“Sorry?” Kit said. It was a Speech-word, but one he didn’t remember having heard before.

“Ah. The word’s for when you have a species that lives with you, but isn’t independent, or isn’t an equal. Sometimes both at once. One species likes the other to be around for company; or there can be other motives. Do you have such things in your world?”

“Pets,” Kit said. “A pet.”

“That would be it, yes. Well, the wild sibik, they leave a scent trail, did you know? That’s how they notify each other where food is—pheromonal signaling. Which is why we have to keep the puptents sealed all the time.” Djam bubbled a bit. “We’ve tried removing the scent by wizardry, but the little beasts have excellent memories, too, and they just come back and lay the trails again.”

Djam gestured with one elbow toward the gate complex. “Anyway, the people over there—a lot of them passing through have their mhilimai with them. Only right, after all; they’re all going to their new lives together. But so do some of the people who’re encamped out there, the ones who don’t want to go. Either way, sometimes one of the domesticated sibik gets adventurous, comes across a scent trail, follows it over here…” Djam shrugged: that gesture his kind of human and Kit’s had in common. “We find out who they belong to and return them. Mostly there’s no problem with that; they’re good at leading you to who they belong to, once they’re not distracted by food. They’ve a link of some kind, a sense of where their companion-person is. The one you were dealing with—it didn’t ask you to tell it where someone was?”