Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

He thought about that as he sealed the puptent up again. Well, I can make it take a long time to eat these. A really long time. If I’m smart…

Kit got back to the Stone Throne to find that Djam already had the frozen frame of the LucasFilms logo cued up and waiting on the floating screen. Moments later, under the blazingly starry sky of a world that (while in the same galaxy) was still far, far away from its birthplace, a great orchestra cried out the single triumphant opening chord of a defiant fanfare into an alien night, and the three of them settled in to watch the tale unfold.

For Kit there was something surprisingly comforting about this in the wake of the day he’d had—watching something much loved and reliable that had a known happy ending; and watching it with new friends who knew absolutely nothing about it in advance. It was like seeing it for the first time all over again. There were cries of shock and shouts of laughter and gasps of excitement and fear and groans of pain and anticipation and yells of delight (“Told you about ‘I Know!’ Told you!”). And then came the lines that always made Kit’s hair stand up on end: “You’ve failed, your Highness! I am a Jedi—like my father before me!”—and everything that followed: the destruction and the redemption and the final joy.

After the singing and dancing and the final glimpse into “a larger world” had blackscreened into the end titles, Djam and Cheleb sat babbling to each other and to Kit about what they’d seen for a good while afterwards. Favorite lines were repeated, disliked characters dissected. Cheleb got surprisingly heavily into the politics of it (“Empire apparently inherently unstable,” he said, “would have fallen to Rebel Alliance eventually regardless of Jedi intervention!”), while Djam remained most interested in Chewbacca, and became repeatedly and cheerfully scornful about the Ewoks (“What adorable dolts. Plainly the Powers have a soft spot for fools and fuzzy creatures”).

The long discussion pleased Kit for another reason besides his shiftmates’ evident enjoyment. He’d been half afraid that they’d immediately want to start another movie after that, and he couldn’t really get into it, which both annoyed and saddened him. But with the adrenaline fading down now after the film’s end, he was starting to feel wasted. Even though it’s not like today’s been all that strenuous… Still, there’s more than one kind of strain.

Kit wasn’t alone, though: Cheleb kept yawning. His gatewatch shift was more than over when they finished, and Djam took Cheleb’s report—not that he really needed to, for they’d all been keeping an eye on the complex-monitoring readouts while watching the film, and the gates been perfectly quiet and well-behaved all evening. “Go on, cousin, I see you’re tired,” Djam said, as Cheleb yawned yet again, more cavernously than ever and displaying teeth Kit hadn’t seen before. “This world’s day is closer to mine in length than yours, and I can tell how this is starting to wear on you.”

“Me too,” Kit said, getting up and stretching. “I’m ready to turn in.”

“Into what?” Cheleb said.

“More idiom,” Djam said, bubbling at Kit. “Your milk tongue’s rich with it. Chel, just mind these gates for these few minutes. I want to fetch out my night’s reading.”

He and Kit walked around the back of the Stone Throne toward the stones that held their puptents’ portals. Djam put his head down by Kit’s and said very low, “Colleague. Earlier, about your errantry-partner. Was Cheleb… inappropriate with you?”

Kit started helplessly snickering. “Djam…”

Djam’s eyes went wide. “Oh no. Hae crossed some kind of taboo line, didn’t hae. Your people aren’t allowed to discuss it.”

“Oh no, we are, it’s just… Just.” Kit had absolutely no idea where to begin. “Djam, do me a favor.”

“Cousin! Whatever you like.”

“If hae starts having that conversation with me again… please do whatever you can to help me not have it. Seriously. Some kind of emergency would be useful. Any kind of emergency you can think of.”

Djam started bubbling quietly again “I can’t think of any time of the day or night,” he said, “when it wouldn’t be useful to have you talk to these gates, Kiht. They behave so well after you’ve had a word with them! Indeed one might want to do it proactively. At a moment’s notice. To prevent problems later in the shift…”

“That’s the spirit,” Kit said, intensely relieved. “Don’t hesitate.”

“Trust me,” Djam said, and patted Kit on the arm. “Go rest now.”

Still laughing as quietly as he could, Kit went.

***

Bed, though, didn’t turn out to be the easy solution to the day’s stresses that Kit had been hoping for. Without the entertainment and his two colleagues to distract him, the sights and sounds of the day, and of the transients’ encampment, kept coming back to haunt him.

Initially Kit tried to do routine things, or at least the things that were starting to become routine, to settle himself. He changed into nightclothes and tidied up in the puptent a little, and texted his pop (”INTERESTING DAY BUT VERY TIRED. SPENT A LOT OF IT FEEDING A SPACE OCTOPUS AND WENT TO VISIT SOME NICE BUT VERY UPSET BIRD HUMANOIDS. MISS YOU AND WISH YOU WERE HERE WITH ABOUT TEN BOXES OF SALTINES”).

Then he tried to reach Nita again but didn’t have any luck: her profile in the manual simply said Unavailable. Kit flopped down on his bed and rubbed his eyes. Is she working? At this hour? Though she was having a lot of trouble with her gates…

“Wait, wait, I’m here!” her voice said from the manual.

He grabbed it, pushed himself up against his pillows and propped the manual in his lap. “No picture?” He said.

“Oh God,” Nita said. “You really don’t want to see me right now.”

From someone whom Kit had seen over the past few years in almost every state of dress and some kinds of undress, that said a lot about Nita’s state of mind. “Yes I do,” Kit said. “But it’s okay.”

He heard her sigh, and after a second her image appeared on the page—or an image of her head, anyway. Her hair was all over the place and she looked a bit drawn, and Kit thought maybe there were dark circles starting to form under her eyes. From the page Nita caught his glance, and smiled. “Yeah, well, you don’t look all that great yourself right now.”

“Makes sense,” Kit said. “Kind of a long day over here.”

“Yeah,” she said. “For me too.”

“Gate trouble?”

Kit could hear her trying not to admit it. Finally she gave in. “Quite a bit, actually. Thesba’s dynamo layer is really screwed up, and for some reason our gate-branch seems a lot more susceptible to the magnetic-field aberrations than others. Nothing we can do except ride it out and keep all the gates working.” She sighed. “It’s fiddly work. Fix this thing, then something else breaks. Fix that thing, and something breaks back where you started. Getting pretty sick of it, to be honest.”

Kit nodded and didn’t ask whether she wanted him to come over and have a talk with her gate; if she wanted that, she wouldn’t be shy about it. Nita was too straightforward to let her own feelings interfere with what needed doing about wizardly work. “We had to go over to the transients’ camp today,” Kit said after a moment.

“Really? Mostly we’re supposed to avoid that—”

“I know,” Kit said. “Lost pet problem.”

Nita laughed at that. “You know, I didn’t think there was going to be any way to keep you away from people’s pets. Funny to find out it’s true.”

“Wasn’t my fault!” Kit said. “He came over here and started eating my food. Had to do something to get him out of here.”