Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“Yeah, and it looks just like… a magic wand,” Dairine said in a tone halfway between mystification and scorn. But she had a point. It looked like the classic stage magician’s wand, black with a white tip, though considerably longer than usual.

Tom picked it up and held it out for her. Hesitantly, Dairine took it. “Present from a friend,” Tom said. “Don’t scratch the finish.”

“I thought that wasn’t allowed,” Kit said. “Doesn’t everybody have to make their own wand? And from donated material?”

“There are exceptions to the rule,” Tom said as Dairine handed the wand back. “Certain heirloom wands are exempt. Happens this is one.” He put his plate down, braced the wand end-to-end between his hands, then collapsed it between his hands and vanished it.

“Snazzy,” Ronan said.

“And you’ve been doing what?” Dairine said. “Besides checking up on us.”

“Same as you,” Tom said, rubbing his legs. “Gate management. Spent the last eight hours in the middle of one of the big cities on Continent Four, watching thousands and thousands of people pouring by.” He sighed. “Makes me remember that I keep promising myself to get more exercise. Spending eight hours on your feet…” He shook his head. “A little different from sitting around writing spells all day.”

“And you came all this way to see us on your off time!” Ronan said.

“‘Off time?’” Tom laughed at him. “As if a Supervisory gets any of that in a situation like this. I’m just here making sure you lot aren’t getting into trouble.”

“Us?” Ronan said, with a hilariously manufactured expression of disbelief and shock. “The very thought!”

“Please, spare me,” Tom said, amused. “After what happened with you and Kit on Mars? Now any time the two of you are posted on some new planet together, I get a tagged travel advisory in my manual.”

Kit reddened with embarrassment, as this was probably true. “Yeah, I’m such a bad influence,” Ronan said, and laughed. “Well, not here. This situation’s too edgy to have much fun with.”

“Fun aside,” Tom said, “I know you’re serious about what you’re doing here. So does Irina, otherwise she wouldn’t have let you onto the ‘go’ list. Rafting’s too serious to let any potential loose cannons on deck, believe me.”

“Irina signed off on us being here?” Nita said, sounding surprised.

“Oh yes. You didn’t know? Well, now you do.”

“Where’s Carl?” Dairine said.

“Other side of the planet,” said Tom. “He’ll be off shift shortly. There’s a particularly difficult gate over there in the middle of one of the capital cities… a terminus gate, one of the biggest-aperture ones. Because of the size of it and the number of people using it per hour, it needs more watching than usual. Gravitic anomalies…”

A sympathetic groan went up from most of the picnic guests. Tom sighed. “He’s working double shifts on this one. I feel for him: he’s going to be a wreck when he gets off. Thanks,” he said as Ronan, without comment, shoved a bottle of not-quite-draft Guinness into his hand.

“Thought that stuff doesn’t travel,” Kit said.

“If you put it in stasis inside an otherspace pocket, the bottled kind does,” Ronan said. “But it’s inherently inferior. Keep meaning to talk to Sker’ret about finding a way to stabilize the draft kind. A problem for another day.”

While Tom was assaying the Guinness, Ronan stood chafing his upper arms. “Getting kinda nippy, yeah? Time to get the campfire part of the evening going.”

“Oh, we are having that?” Kit said.

“I did some prep while others were snoring,” Ronan said as he slipped out between two of the standing stones. A few moments later he came back with an armful of bent and twisted branches of various sizes.

“Where’d you find those?” Djam said.

“Got a fair amount of the stuff over by our gates,” said Ronan. “Old cuttings left from when they were removing some of the local fauna, I’m guessing.” He paused, eyeing a spot down at the far end of the oblong that made the “seat” of the Stone Throne. “Here be okay?”

“Should work fine,” Cheleb said, helping Djam clear away some of the plates and food containers that were closest. Ronan arranged the wood in an artful pyramid on the spot, then looked toward Kit. “Do the honors?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.” Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket and pulled out his wand, stowed in there earlier when he’d been tidying. He smiled slightly in a moment of nostalgia: the spell for summoning fire from noon-forged steel was one of the first ones he’d learned. Kit whispered the fourteen Speech-words necessary for activation, braced the Edsel-antenna wand over his forearm, and fired. The piled-up firewood burst instantly into flame.

Kit tucked the wand away and watched the firelight dance over the faces of his friends and the ancient stones of another world, and shivered for a moment with the strangeness of it all. If someone had told me five years ago where I’d be now…

Tom sat back and chuckled. “And now what? Songs around the fire? Scary stories?”

“Got enough scary to be going on with at the moment, thanks,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes in the general direction of Thesba.

“Dessert,” Nita said. She’d set her lawn chair down next to where Kit had perched himself at one end of the Stone Throne; now she got up and started rummaging in one of the bags she’d brought with her but hadn’t yet opened. “Here,” she said to Djam, and held out a Creamsicle. “If you like that juice, I bet you’ll like this.”

“Ice cream,” Ronan said, impressed. “How do you have ice cream?!”

“With the power allowances they’ve given us for this, why wouldn’t I bring ice cream? I have a stasis field running in my puptent,” Nita said. “And one right here in this bag.”

“I hope you brought enough for everybody,” Tom said.

Nita snickered. “I brought enough for me,” she said, “for about a week. So that should be enough for everybody. Nothing fancy, just the usual mass market stuff. I would have brought Ben & Jerry’s, but some people apparently ate it all before we left home.”

Dairine looked angelically unconcerned by this accusation. To Kit’s surprise, Nita just gave her an annoyed look, and then shrugged. “Here, help me pass these out.”

Kit passed a fudgsicle over to Tom and an orange popsicle over to Cheleb, who needed some assistance with packaging concepts (”No, wait, don’t eat the paper!”) and then rather overenthusiastically disposed of the popsicle in three bites, spending the next several minutes groaning and clutching haes head due to the most emphatic case of brain freeze any of them had ever seen.

Kit had trouble not laughing at Cheleb being reduced to speechlessness for that long, but he just managed it. “Shame none of us thought we might have have a campfire before we came,” he said as he sat down again. “We could have brought stuff to make s’mores.”

Djam looked up in interest from his third plateful of multicolored veggies. “What’s a s’more?”

The conversation that ensued immediately got very tangled, and Kit saw Djam and Cheleb reacting with fascination and concern, since once or twice it seemed as if violence might be about to break out.

“Oh God. How are we supposed to show him?”

“Did anybody bring graham crackers?”

“What in the Powers’ sweet fecking names is a graham cracker?”

Laughter from Dairine. “How can you not know this?”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “Why should I bother when I know you’re going to enlighten me?”

“It’s brown, and flat, and it’s got wheat in it.”