Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Nita laughed, and then yawned as the laugh was trailing off. “I’m keeping you up,” Kit said, guilty.

“I’m keeping you up,” she said. “Tell me all about this tomorrow, okay? Because you look like you need to tell somebody.”

Kit nodded. “Yeah. Have a good night.”

“Yeah, you too.” Her picture vanished and her profile grayed out again.

Kit shut his manual and dimmed down the lights in the puptent, and settled back under the covers and closed his eyes.

An hour later he was in exactly the same place, and just as awake. Reading hadn’t helped; music hadn’t helped. He just didn’t seem able to relax. Finally Kit sat up. No point in just lying here when it’s not doing any good, he thought. He threw on the clothes he’d been wearing earlier, stuffed his manual in his vest pocket, and went out again.

Djam was sitting there on on the Stone Throne as always, reading from a small roll-shaped device that looked like a more compact version of his manual interface. “What’s the matter?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Kit said. He looked out toward the gates again, seeing them, as he’d seen them every day, with people streaming in through the feeder gates and out through the terminus gate, and just shook his head and turned away.

Djam looked at him and let out a breath, and said, “I know, cousin. Believe me, I know.”

Kit nodded. “I’m going to go walk a while,” he said. “It might help.” He didn’t say what he was thinking: that what would really have helped was to have Ponch with him. He could have taken him for a good, long walk and gotten his head cleared. Well… Maybe the walk by itself will be enough. He waved at Djam and headed out through the stone circle in the direction away from the view toward the gates, making his way out into the broad, empty plain and however much was left of the night.

It was windy out but not actually that cold; very like an April night might have been at home. Some cloud cover had rolled in since Kit had initially tried to get to bed—enough to obscure most of the sky overhead, including Thesba, which was now well on its way to setting again. The light of it still glowed ruddy golden on the upper cloud deck to the westward, and occasionally bloomed into shape when the clouds thinned enough: but mostly the great moon was hidden.

That suited Kit’s mood at the moment. He’d seen more than enough of Thesba for the moment, even if the conditions also meant he was denied the sight of the fiercely burning stars of the local OB association, or of the burning, staring eye of Erakis. For a long time he just walked and walked, to the point where the lights of the gate complex had dwindled to a faint bright patch that the stones of the stone circle would obscure if you kept them right between you and the gate. Kit did that, only rarely looking back, mostly walking further and further away and just letting the rhythm of his walk and the swish of the tall grass against his boots take him away from actually thinking about anything. There was nothing going on out here but the wind blowing, muttering in his ears. He was feeling a lot more tired than he had, but at least he was also feeling a bit more peaceful.

His thoughts had been drifting for a while when he suddenly felt a breeze that had nothing to do with the local weather. Kit halted and looked around. Not too far ahead of him, glowing faintly in the indistinct light, Kit saw a huge long saurian shape making its way across the plain toward him from the spot where she’d appeared, all elbows and lashing tail and big toothy head.

“Mam!” Kit said as she came up to him. “What’re you doing here?”

“Came to see you,” Mamvish said. “I have a little time off. Nita and I were talking this afternoon while I was making rounds on all the gate complexes, and she made me promise to stop by.”

Kit smiled. “Well, okay. How’re you holding up?”

Mamvish slumped down onto the grassy ground beside him. “All right, I suppose,” she said. “It’s so amazing to have a few minutes to myself, I can hardly remember what it’s like. It’s been power feed, power feed, day and night: keeping that thing in one piece for the moment.” She rotated an eye in Thesba’s direction. “Not much thinking in that kind of work, not much challenge…”

Kit sat down beside her head and looked in the direction from which he’d been walking. He’d gotten off his original line, so that the distant light of the gating complex wasn’t blocked. “Mamvish,” he said, “why?”

Mamvish hissed out a sigh. “Everybody’s question at this point,” she said, “for a thousand values of ‘why’. Which one are you chasing?”

“The ‘why’ as in ‘why don’t all these Tevaralti want to get out of here?’”

Another long sigh, a sound like a steam train venting. “It’s hard to be absolutely certain,” Mamvish said, “but I think it’s most likely something to do with the way their species interacts with the planet’s kernel.”

She put her head down on her foreclaws, a weary gesture, and cocked her portside eye at Kit. “It’s always unique,” she said, “a species’ connection to its world, and to the One. The Tevaralti had a seshtev, a perceived-revelation-of-intent, some time back—”

The Speech-word she used to translate the Tevaralti word “seshtev”, methenlet, was the shortest of the formulations that the Speech used to designate what on Earth people might have called a “group religious experience”. “I looked into it once when I first started consulting here, but it doesn’t seem to translate well, even into the Speech,” Mamvish said. “That’s not unusual, though: often these things don’t.”

“‘Some time back?’” Kit said.

Mamvish waved her tail. “A millennium or so. Not that long ago really, when you consider the age of their civilization. Anyway, the core of this experience seemed to be a sort of realization that the species needed to be ‘of one mind’.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “One of them said that to me today.”

“Now there are a lot of ways that can look…”

“Especially depending on who’s making the mind up.”

“True,” Mamvish said. “But this particular opinion, or set of opinions about the way they should live their lives, seemed to spread fairly quickly across the planet—probably secondary to their empathic-symbiotic linkage with one another. That’s been in place for many millennia, and it’s probably one of the major factors in their planetary civilization as a whole being so long-lived. Probably it originally developed very early in the evolution of the Tevaralti species as a survival mechanism. Tevaralti who were part of the linkage were better protected against predators, perhaps, or better able to find places where food was plentiful and living conditions otherwise favored them.”

“So more of them survived to have more Tevaralti who had the symbiotic linkage, yeah?” Kit said. “And now they all do.”

“To greater or lesser degrees, yes.” Mamvish said. “There’s some variation in its presence and prevalence among world populations. Some clans or nation-regions possess the symbiotic sense more acutely, some less. But local variations aside, in the long run it’s been advantageous for them. Cultural changes that on other planets would most likely only have taken effect secondary to warfare, on Tevaral would take hold simply because of the symbiotic connection among groups that were in relatively close physical proximity to one another—say on the same continent.”

“So this religious experience spread through the linkage?”

“Partly. But also by normal cultural exchange. Overall, the concept of ‘being of one mind’ settled in without too much fuss. And it seems not to have been a bad thing for them, by and large. Certainly they’ve not had a war since it happened.”