Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

She hugged him back at least as hard, and buried her face in his shoulder for a moment. “What were you doing last night?” she muttered. “I can’t let you out of my sight for a moment without you getting in trouble.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Kit said. “The trouble came looking for me.”

“Oh yeah,” Nita said. “Sure.” She let go of him, and though she was smiling, there was some worry in it. “Maybe not trouble as such. But still… I read the précis of what happened. Your manual was recording.” She shook her head at him. “That was extremely bizarre.”

Kit took a long breath and let it out. “Yes it was.”

Nita reached down under her chair, pulled out a soda, and handed it to him. “Sit down and tell me everything.”

So he did. It was strange how rare such debriefings were for them, since they tended to be deployed together almost all the time. It was strange, too, how Kit kept stopping himself every now and then and go over what he was telling Nita to make sure that he wasn’t missing some specific detail that would be important for her to know. The problem was that he couldn’t always tell what was going to turn out to be important. Still, he did his best. And he found that it was making him feel better when he could make her laugh, because he saw the way her eyes kept straying across to the transients’ encampment on the far side of the park.

The story of the little Tevaralti boy’s greedy, naughty sibik made Nita laugh so hard that she almost couldn’t breathe. But then came the story of taking it home—or at least, what passed for home—and neither of them was able to laugh much at that. As Kit got to the point where there was no more to tell of that story, Nita pushed herself back against the back of her chair, and stretched her legs out in front of her, sighing.

She was wearing the extremely ragged jeans that she favored for times when she most needed to be comfortable and when whatever species she was working with wouldn’t have any cultural judgments to make about the rips and tears. Now, as she sometimes did when she was nervous or unhappy about something, Nita started unraveling one of the raggedy places just above her knee. Kit watched her doing this for a few moments before speaking again. “They told us that our main job was with the gates. And I understand that. I really do. But I keep feeling like I ought to have gone there before. Ought to go there again, talk to them more…”

“‘Ought to,’” Nita said. She sighed. “I think maybe our ‘oughts’ aren’t really what matters here. …I thought that too, Kit, you know? I thought ‘I really should be with these guys more.’ But then I realized, Hey, I’m an idiot. I don’t have anything to share that’s really going to help them. We’re all humanoids, yeah, but… right now the gap’s too big.”

She fell silent for a moment. “Look, when Mom died, yeah, that was the end of a world.” She gulped at her soda. “No question! But not the end of the world. This is so much bigger, so much worse. Anything I’d say to these people about what grief looks like would seem so stupid and small by comparison. Just the thought of it… I get all choked.” She shook her head. “Nope. I feel a lot better sitting still here and watching the gate. That’s how I’m helping them. This isn’t about me, or how I feel: it’s about them.”

She looked across at the streams of Tevaralti hurrying out of the feeder gates toward the downstream one. “And anyway, when you come right down to it, the stories they’re living right now are so much bigger than mine. Just look at them. Everything’s ending for them, and they’re being so brave. All the carts and trucks and floater pads, all loaded up with everything that matters to them, household stuff and artifacts and data and art. They’re trying to save everything they can, not just themselves. All their stories, all their culture, all their history: everything they can save, they’re taking away with them. But there’ll be so much they can’t save… that not all the wizards here can save. The moon’s going to fall down, and break it all up, and destroy everything. Hidden things, forgotten things: they’ll all be gone forever now. No matter what you do, things get lost…”

Kit heard the slight quiver in her voice, and didn’t have to look at Nita to know that there were tears in her eyes. He didn’t turn to look at her because he knew that would make them spill, and right now she was holding on tight. So he just put his hand out toward her, and she grabbed hold of it, squeezing it. Then they just sat together and were heavy-hearted for a bit, and Kit once more was astonished at how the pain did lessen slightly when someone was sharing it with you, clichéd though that should have been.

“Better?” Nita said after a while.

“Better,” Kit said. “You?”

“Yeah.”

Nita tipped her head back and stared straight up at the sky. “All I’m trying to figure out now,” she said, “is what the Fourth was there about.” She tilted her head back over to look at Kit. “Sure, he may really have been looking for Mamvish, but somehow I find it really hard to believe that’s the only reason he was there. These upper-dimensional guys—” She waved her hand in a way strangely reminiscent of the gesture that Djam had used. “They see things, patterns, that we can’t. The trouble is that because they are multidimensional, they don’t always know how to communicate what they’re trying to tell you so that you’re able to get it. Even in the Speech, they have trouble narrowing things down enough to be comprehensible.”

Kit looked at her in some surprise. “When did you meet one of these people? You never told me about this.”

“There were one or two of them who turned up in the Playroom when I was doing all that kernel work for my mom,” Nita said. “One guy—tall, a lot of eyes—he was really creepy. Or at least that was all I could make of him when I met him first. He always seemed to have a way of looking at you didn’t have anything to do with any of those eyes. Turns out that’s kind of a diagnostic, that feeling of being weirdly watched. If all of you lives in just one set of dimensions, then having somebody around who has footholds in more than one set kind of makes your skin crawl.” She shivered. “But it turns out it didn’t have anything to do with bad intent. It’s just the way our nervous systems react to their nervous systems. Later on, when I thought about some of the things he’d said to me, they were really useful. Or they would’ve been, if I just hadn’t been so freaked by him.” Nita laughed at herself. “Nothing I can do about it now, but at least now when I run into somebody who has that going on, I know what to make of it.”

She stretched again, lacing her fingers together behind her head. “So what’s the plan for tonight?”

“I think everybody just comes over starting around sunset,” Kit said. “The general idea seems to be that everybody should bring food and drinks, and we’ll set up a buffet, and sit around and talk and maybe watch some video. Also, possibly, have a campfire—a real campfire, not one of these electronic things. One of my shiftmates is all excited… hae thinks this is going to be a genuine Earth togetherness ceremonial.” He grinned: he could still see the excitement on Cheleb’s face. “Hae asked me if there were special clothes hae had to wear. I said ‘no, this is a come as you are thing’. And hae got incredibly excited and started spouting a whole bunch of really serious and deep stuff about the revelation of true selves and I don’t know what else.” Kit had to laugh. “You have to watch out for Cheleb. Hae’s got a little trouble with idiom…”

“Okay,” Nita said, straightening up. “Tell me what kind of food you want me to bring, and then I’m going to throw you out of here. Bobo advises me that the number three gate is about to get goofy again, and I have to remind it who’s running this show…”