Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

And now something extra had been added to the mere word, as if someone knew that Kit needed confirmation that the hint was worth following up. Seer for the seer in the dark…

He could see himself standing there on the Playroom’s peculiar, endlessly-Euclidean, white-shining floor. He’d followed Nita’s trail there with Ponch’s help, after Neets had vanished while working on healing the kernel of her mother’s body. Having found his way there, Kit had run into some of the colleagues that she’d been working with. Now he thought of the one with all the eyes and all the tentacles—an alien called a Sulamid—and how at the time it had spoken to him and looked at him so strangely, and had used that phrase. He was so distracted then by his worry for Nita that he’d hardly given thought to the peculiar way he felt when the Sulamid looked at him. Now, though, he had a referent for that. It was very like the bizarre, unclassifiable sensations he’d experienced the other day with the Fourth.

Another of these creatures with a metabolic extension into a higher-numbered dimension, then. What they certainly seemed to have in common so far was a gift for being obscure. But from what Nita had said, it sounded as if this was just a side effect of their particular style of being. Apparently it was hard to make sense to a creature living exclusively in one set of dimensions when you lived in more than one.

Standing there with his bottle in his hand, Kit laughed once under his breath. If I got into a conversation with Mr. A. Square from Flatland, he thought, probably a lot of what I might wind up saying to him would seem obscure too. And if there was a multidimensional take just on physical things, there was no reason to think there wouldn’t be a similar angle on mental ones, emotional ones, philosophical ones, as well.

He put the bottle down and started putting on clothes. I need to start making some kind of sense out of this, Kit thought. But first I want a shower, and some food. And I want to talk to Neets.

First, though, he waved the puptent’s portal orifice open and stepped out. It was dark, but the light was growing. Not even dawn yet, Kit thought, and made a face. The clouds had moved on, though; the predawn sky was a clear, intense, dark blue-green, and many stars of the neighboring OB association were blazingly bright in it, a scatter of white and blue-white jewels. And most to the point, the sky was empty of Thesba. The moon’s absence made the sky look healthier, less oppressive somehow.

Kit breathed out in the cold, clear air and leaned against his standing stone. His breath actually smoked, the temperature having dropped lower than usual over the course of the night. Kit tilted his head back against the stone and just rested there, feeling the cold, breathing out, relaxing into the feeling of looking up into a sky that didn’t have a horrible, crushing weight lowering down from it.

Pathfinder. Kit turned the word over in his mind. Maybe it meant more than just being a tracker, a physical locator—though Ponch had been that, too, while hunting for Nita. They both had.

Or maybe it meant not just finding physical paths, but virtual ones: metaphorical ones. Finding a path, a way, as in a way to do something. To fix something, Kit thought. Solve something.

But what? And how, exactly?

No answer came.

A moment later Kit laughed quietly at himself. This was part of what being a wizard was: when you asked the universe for answers, often you expected to get them. But that approach made sense, since so much of the universe would talk to you, once you started the conversation. That was what the Speech was all about, after all. Not commanding things to happen; convincing them to. You could command if you had to… but persuasion always worked better. Conversation was the whole point of the exercise.

Kit shivered again, but now it was for a different reason. The sensation that made the hair rise on the back of Kit’s neck now was the beginning of excitement, a hint of exhilaration. There was something he was needed for here, some purpose above and beyond just minding a gate. In the face of that realization, everything suddenly got… not easy to bear, but at least easier. A little less hopeless.

Okay, Kit thought. What now?

No answer came. That’s fine with me, he thought. I need a shower anyway.

And sometimes, maybe, all you can do is wait.

So Kit got busy doing that, and meanwhile did his job: the things that over recent days had started to become routine, and some things that hadn’t.

He went over to Ronan’s gate complex to shower and touch base with him. He came back to the circle of stones and had some breakfast (dry cereal that promised it was fortified with vitamins and minerals, which made him feel just a shade less guilty about his eating habits over the past few days). Then for the next four hours or so he shared the Stone Throne with Djam, who had taken over from Cheleb a few hours before dawn, and gatewatched with him while idly chatting some more about Earth entertainment, as well as some Alnilamev media-based “ritualized storytelling” that looked to Kit like a strangely jazzy cross between kabuki theater and a sort of interactive Cartoon Network.

This wound up distracting Kit for a good while, as shortly after that Djam got very excited about showing Kit a 3D recording of an entertainment called The Faded Liver—at least that was how it seemed to translate into the Speech. Together they spent easily two hours on it while Djam waved his arms and went on and on about characterization and plot and resonances to other stories in the same cycle, and the talents of the performers of this entertainment, several of whom had volunteered to discorporate for maximum verisimilitude in the event…

Kit nodded and asked questions and did his best to get into what was going on, since Djam seemed so enthusiastic. But by the time Djam was ready to report off to Kit on the gate complex and formally go off duty, all Kit could make of it all was that The Faded Liver seemed like a somewhat bizarre version of Romeo and Juliet, featuring a whole lot more violence and an eventual, if ambiguous, happy ending that left you wondering which of the happy trio was alive, which was dead, and which was in a sort of nonconnoted limbo state like that of Schrödinger’s Cat. This made a lot more sense when Kit realized that Djam’s people came of one of those species that had done a fairly unusual form of deal with the Lone Power during their Choice, so that death was for them a more temporary than usual phenomenon—like someone on Earth having a job and agreeing to take a brief cut in pay until the local economic picture improved. Probably, Kit thought, Romeo and Juliet would strike an Alnilamev audience as a romantic comedy hinging on a series of madcap misunderstandings that would be resolved after story’s end when everyone got bored enough with being dead.

After Djam took himself off to rest, the number three inbound gate started to get cranky again, and Kit sat there with the manual and spoke sharply to it for fifteen or twenty minutes until it behaved once more. He spent the next hour watching the power levels of the other four feeder gates as they jumped around and threw minor gravitic anomalies. These Kit shut down one after one as they popped up, judging the behavior to be a transparent attention-getting ploy from submolecular gate machinery that wanted Kit to prove that he liked it as much as the other guy who got yelled at an hour ago.

He paused afterwards for a very late lunch featuring one of Ronan’s weird ready-made supermarket hamburgers, gazing out at the plain as Thesba rose into the a sky where late afternoon was giving way to early evening, and wondering anew at the concept of selling people individual cooked hamburgers that were made and then chilled and wrapped up, buns and all, and served like ready meals. And probably pumped full of preservatives and God knows what to keep them from going inedible, Kit thought. I can just imagine what Mama would say if she could see one of these things. He grinned. Maybe I can trick Ro into bringing one of them around…