Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Djam yawned again. “I don’t think either of us has really thought to make a study of the issue. We’ve been kind of distracted…”

“Well, yeah…” Kit said. “Kehrutheh, go on, I relieve you. Go get some rest and I’ll see what I can find out.”

Djam took himself off to bed, and Kit settled in with his manual open, watching the power levels of the feeder gates closely; but they were running steady, almost exactly at the center of their nominal operations range. Good, he thought: stay that way, cousins.

He kept the sibik waiting where they were for a while, as there were a few other things Kit wanted to check before relaxing—if that was the right word—into the day’s monitoring. Along with probably every other wizard on the planet, he took a few moments to check the status of Thesba.

It was holding together—which was really all that could be said for it. A team of around two hundred wizards, some days more and some less, all of them specialists in geology and geomancy, were doing nothing but patch the moon’s interior structure together every evening in those regions that had come under most stress during the previous day’s orbits. Their comments on their work and their debriefing documents were attached to the daily status report on the moon for anyone who cared to look at them… and it was fair to say they were depressing. “It’s exactly like bailing out a leaky boat,” said one of the wizards in charge of doing stress relief on the region between Thesba’s deformed cores and the “dynamo regions” of the deepest inner mantle. “You know it would be idiocy to stop bailing, so of course you don’t… but you know that at the last, the ocean has you outnumbered. This moon wants so much to come apart. And of course we must do what we’re doing; this world’s life must have time to escape. But it’s going to be a relief to let Thesba go at last.”

Kit sat looking at that page for a while before turning his manual back to the two-page spread that displayed his own gates’ parameters. It was strange how that comment about letting Thesba go led him back to Nita’s remark about there being no happy endings in this situation. Even if all the Tevaralti could be convinced to leave, Thesba would still fall and either render Tevaral uninhabitable or entirely destroy it; and that, Kit thought, was why he was experiencing this constant strange ache of unfulfillment.

That unreasonable ache for some reason also left Kit feeling annoyed. What, am I six? he thought. This isn’t a fairy tale. This isn’t magic we’re doing: it’s wizardry. It’s not like everything’s always going to turn out right.

Yet some part of Kit seemed unwilling to get to grips with this truism, wanted to cling to the concept that things might still work out somehow… and he didn’t know what to do with that. Trying to squash it seemed cruel.

Hope, he thought. Even when it’s ridiculous. Why would anybody want to kill that? Leave it alone.

Glancing up past the standing stones toward the gate complex again, Kit watched the crowds flowing through from the feeder gates into the terminus gate as they’d been doing since he came: a steady flow, unceasing… and between the complex and his circle, the silent encampment, the Tevaralti there shifting restlessly about, watching their species leave them behind—

And closer to him, something else shifting, and making a muted squeaking noise. Kit looked between the circle’s upright stones and saw tentacles inching in his direction, and eyes fixed on him, hopeful and hungry.

He sighed, glanced at the monitor spread in his manual, and then got up, glad to have an excuse to push the whole subject of his interior unease aside. “Okay, you guys,” he said, heading in the direction of his puptent. “Cracker.”

“Cracker!!”

“But only the Ritz crackers,” he said under his breath. “Not the saltines. Because I know I’m gonna need some comfort food before we’re done…”

***

The day went on. Kit shooed the gathered sibik away after they’d had about a third of the box of Ritz, and spent the following couple of hours watching the feeder gates’ sensor readings for some recurring gravitational-field fluctuations that had started to worry him. He installed some extra alerts in his manual’s monitoring display of the arrays to try to predict those patterns early. He chatted with Nita: he touched base with Ronan. He went through a couple more energy drinks and got himself a pillow from his puptent, because the Stone Throne really wasn’t very kind to the humanoid butt. Well, this humanoid’s butt, anyway.

Just before local noon Kit had another serious discussion—actually, more of a pep talk—with the number-three gate’s electronic and submolecular-machine control systems, which the gate’s portal field seemed to be trying to subvert so that it could throw some more gravitational anomalies without the systems giving warning. (“Do not let it push you around. And don’t let it pull that energy-is-more-senior-than-matter crap with you, either! You are of equal status. And anyway, you and I are both matter together, and we’re not gonna let it get all high and mighty with us, are we? If it gets snotty with you again you just tell the gate that if it keeps making trouble I’m going to have a consult with my friend who runs Grand Central, and then I’m going to come over there and give its strings such a yanking, it’ll unravel like an old sweater. Yeah? Yeah. Just tell it that.”)

After that Kit went and got himself a lunch that for once wasn’t junk food (a salami sandwich) and was working on it when Cheleb got up and prepared to go off once again about haes pre-shift business. Curious as always, Cheleb paused to examine Kit’s food and drink. “Composition?” hae said, pointing at the sandwich.

“Uh, bread. A grain derivative. Some seasonings—that’s mustard, it comes from a seed. And that’s meat.” Kit opened the sandwich to show him.

Cheleb poked the salami hesitantly with one claw. “This from animal? Strange looking one.”

Kit flirted with the idea of telling haem how sausage was made, and then wasn’t sure whether this might unduly strain interstellar amity. “You have no idea,” Kit said.

“Entertainment later?”

“When Djam gets up,” Kit said, “you bet.”

Cheleb went off to see haes other-side-of-the-planet cousin, and Kit visited his puptent again, stuffing more food and some books and other supplies into a backpack so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth. Once back at the Stone Throne with this, he settled into a rhythm that swung between gate monitoring and reading up in the manual about sibiks. He spent nearly three hours on this endeavor, afraid of missing something important. But except for the information that there were hundreds of species, which he’d already known, Kit came away from the effort only slightly better informed than when he’d started.

The manual did say that the ancestors of the dominant Tevaralti species and the ancestor species of the sibik had forged their initial partnership when they were both still up in the trees together—the sibik using their acute vision and sense of smell, and their own intraspecies-based link gift, to lead the tool-using Tevaralti to prey so that both species could then share the spoils. But the manual had almost no data on exactly how the sibik transmitted data even within each of its many single species, let alone across species boundaries. The Tevaralti seemed never to have done any serious research on the subject, and no one else seemed to have considered it of importance enough to contribute any information about it to the manual. Some kind of cultural blind spot, maybe…?

“Weird,” Kit muttered as he leaned against the back of the Throne and looked up through the streaky cirrus clouds overhead at Thesba, which was now well past the zenith and heading for its day’s first setting. “Wonder if anybody’s asked the sibik…”