Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“No, not really. I had so many crackers last night… I’m still working them off.” He sighed. “And then again, if my mama heard me saying that, first she’d yell at me for the crackers, and then she’d yell at me for not having any protein. And if I go home looking like I’ve lost weight or something, I’m never gonna hear the end of it. What’ve you got that has some protein?”

“Let me go see. I’ve still got plenty of things left over from the—what was it you called? Buffet?”

They had breakfast together, Djam fetching out some of his people’s more interesting processed foods. “I can’t believe these are all vegetables,” Kit said, shaking his head. “It’s a shame we can’t get these on Earth. So many of our vegetables are—” He waved a hand. “Boring.” He sighed. “Or maybe that’s just the way my culture prepares them or something. I should look into the way other people do it. Maybe I’m missing something.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine a place where food doesn’t taste good,” Djam said. “The two concepts would seem to be mutually exclusive. You’re going to have to let me try some of the stuff you don’t like and find out for myself.”

“I await your opinion on broccoli,” Kit said. “I know you’re enthusiastic, but it’d take somebody from another planet to be that enthusiastic.”

After breakfast, or probably it was more like brunch, the two of them settled in to watch the new version of The Faded Liver. Kit had to admit that it was a shade darker than the more classic one, though there was still a general sense that the actors, and the writers of the entertainment, didn’t entirely believe in death and weren’t sure how to handle it as a permanent phenomenon.

They were eventually distracted from this, though, by a general trend that Djam noticed late that afternoon. It hadn’t been anything that triggered any of the alarms in their matrix-analysis system, but Djam had a sharp eye for small variations in what was going on with the gates. “Kiht,” he said, “are you seeing this?”

Kit leaned over the readout to see if he could tell what the problem was. “Looks like the numbers passing through are… dropping off some? Ronan mentioned to me that he’d seen something like that this morning. Maybe somebody upstream doing some maintenance or something.”

“I could believe that on one gate,” Djam said, “but on three? And they usually tell us if they’re going to slow down the throughput to tweak something.”

Cheleb had emerged, and wandered over to look over their shoulders at the readouts. He shook his head. “Starting to run out of people to transport,” Cheleb said sorrowfully. “Had to start happening eventually. Job getting finished. No surprise there, I suppose; numbers were straightforward enough. Move fifteen, twenty million people per day, eventually even here start running out of them.”

“I didn’t look at the daily bulletin with the project progress report this morning,” Kit said. “Just went straight off for my shower. As of yesterday they had moved…”

“Something like a hundred and ten million,” Djam said. “They were expecting to move what looked like the final ten or fifteen million today and tomorrow. After that…”

“Some gates supposed to be left in place and operational,” Cheleb said. “Hoping transient encampments’ populations might change mind at last minute.” Hae shrugged, a rather hopeless gesture. “Not much chance of that, or so seems.”

They all stood a while looking at the gate management matrix. Slowly the bar graphs for transport numbers began to edge upwards again. Djam shook his head. “No,” he said, “the numbers are coming up again. A blip.” He sighed. “Probably it was one of those load-balancing things they were doing in the first couple of days, before you got here. Lots of flow without warning, then it would back down…”

They all looked sorrowfully at the graphs, and then Djam sat back down on the Stone Throne and picked up his reading again. “So,” Cheleb said to Kit, “See he’s getting you into his entertainments now. Still waiting for explanation why shouldn’t have a look at first entertainment in long series. Friend was very emphatic the other night.”

Kit rubbed his face and laughed, looking out sadly into the afternoon light. “If I show you that thing,” he said, “it’s just going to make me angry.”

“If distracts you from being sad,” Cheleb said, “might not be a bad thing.”

“Oh God,” Kit said. “All right! On your own scaly head be it.”

***

It did make Kit angry: incredibly so, as he hated some of the characters in the first sequence of the movies with a pure, white-hot flame. When he was home, Carmela knew that the quickest way to get Kit angry about almost anything was to start imitating Jar Jar Binks. Tonight, though, even though it made Kit angry, there was a strange kind of relief in it. The old familiar anger was distracting him from his own foolish hopes that something that couldn’t really happen here might’ve started happening anyway.

So he willingly lost himself as best he could in the intensely frustrating and unsatisfying display that was Phantom Menace. The only things making it tolerable were Djam’s delighted scorn—he described Qui-Gon Jinn as “a wise man who’s wise about everything but himself” and “the least effective wizard ever seen”—and Cheleb’s unremitting mockery of the Gungans and the pod race. (“Child only successful because machines love him as much as they love you!”)

It got dark, and Thesba rose over them, and things might’ve gone on in that mode well into the night, if Cheleb hadn’t gone into haes puptent at one point to bring out some of a sour-sweet fizzy drink that haes people favored, and then paused before sitting down on the Stone Throne with the other two. For some moments hae stood looking out across the plain.

“Come on, Cheleb, I’m dry here!” Djam said.

But Cheleb’s response was to stand there a little longer, and then say, as if hae doubted the evidence of haes own eyes, “…Fewer campfires out there than last night, cousin? Check me on this.”

Djam got up and went over to where Cheleb was, between two of the standing stones. He peered out into the dark. “It’s hard to tell,” Djam said.

“Broadcast power source over there having problems, perhaps?”

Kit looked up. “No,” he said “that would show on the monitor readout. Remember the other day? We saw that right away.”

And suddenly Kit’s mouth was going dry again. He reached for his manual, started flipping pages.

“Another blip?” Djam said.

Kit found his own gate monitoring readout, studied it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Something’s wrong with the numbers.”

“What?” said Cheleb.

“They’re…” Kit peered at his manual for a few moments. “Show me what yesterday’s minima and maxima were like?” he said to it. “Thanks.”

The display altered, steadied down. No question, yesterday’s numbers were far lower. This morning’s had been similar. But now— Now they were scaling up again. They were heading for local throughput numbers that looked nearly ten percent higher than they had been.

“We should call Shask,” Djam said, that being their upstream Advisory, the Tevaralti wizard responsible for the management of the whole transport tree that culminated in their terminus gate. “Make sure this isn’t something going wrong.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. To his own surprise, his hands were shaking. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. “Djam,” he said, “call him. If this is just us, I want to know.”

***

But it wasn’t just them.

All over the planet, wherever gate teams had transient camps nearby, the wizards managing them were seeing similar spikes in their local transport numbers. The increase had started very slowly, just that morning, early in the day, and had been growing steadily all day ever since. The Transients were picking up their belongings and had begun passing through the gates to the refuge worlds.