Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Most of them, it seemed, hadn’t made any particular fuss about it; they had simply moved through the nearest gates to those gates’ next destinations. Only a very few, late in the day, had spoken to the wizards and support staff at the gate complexes proper; and those who’d taken the time had simply said, “It’s all right, we’re of one mind now.” As the upstream supervisors started collecting reports to analyze them, and Kit and Djam and Cheleb, like many other wizards around the planet, read the incoming data and tried to understand it, one report jumped out and caught Kit’s attention. “Our sibik said we had to go,” one Tevaralti sire had said. “That the One had said that life was better. And so of course, then, we had to go.”

When he read that, Kit went hot and cold with terror and delight.

It did happen! he thought. It couldn’t happen until someone who was humanoid helped them make the connection. Someone who was a different kind of humanoid, and had a connection to a sibik….

…and to someone else.

For quite some time Kit was practically speechless with relief. Gradually that state began to shift as the evening went on and Thesba left the sky, and he and Djam and Cheleb gazed out into the plain, watching the campfires very slowly continuing to wink out. They wouldn’t all go out at once, Kit knew. But he grinned helplessly into the dark and thought, Tomorrow night, maybe. Or the day after. They’ll all be gone then.

And if his shiftmates caught sight of the wetness that once or twice went running down their strange Earth-companion’s face, neither of them said a thing.

***

That evening, along with the usual daily bulletins from the intervention supervisors regarding the progress of the population transfer, all kinds of other announcements came down, mostly to do with aperture-size increases to accommodate the extra outbound flow from the transients’ camps. Then one came down that was so unexpected, wizards all across the planet stared at it dumbfounded. And in many places—at least where their cultures allowed for such reactions—they began to cheer.

Word came down from Tevaral’s planetary, and from the executive committee handling business for the interconnect group on Tevaralti, that the upstream gates were going to start to be decommissioned: that traffic from the less active gate trees was already low enough that their transport load could be transferred to others; that nearly seven-eighths of the Tevaralti species had been successfully moved to the refuge worlds, and with the swiftly-increasing mobilization of the remaining fifteen percent or so, the true end of this intervention was in sight. No one had ever expected such an announcement to be made.

But then no one had been prepared for the attitudinal shift among the transients, or the way it had swept around the world. Nearly a million of them had already departed. Millions of others were in the process of being transferred to higher-capacity gates through which they could be moved more quickly. The transients’ encampments all over the planet were shutting down one by one.

Cheleb volunteered to take the late shift that night, claiming that hae was too excited to sleep. Kit was just weary, and was glad to let haem take it. But he had enough energy to text his Pop before he collapsed on his bed.

BUSY TODAY. GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING. BETTER THAN WE HOPED FOR. SO TIRED, NO TIME TO TELL YOU MORE, WILL TELL YOU ALL SOON. THINK WE MAY BE HERE ONLY ANOTHER DAY OR TWO. MAYBE NOT EVEN THAT. LOVE YOU BOTH, MORE SOON.

TEN:

Tuesday

As it turned out, it wasn’t even that long.

Kit woke up and felt something so very strange when he did: the relief of that feeling of irremediable unease that he’d felt here since he came. It wasn’t that he’d gotten used to it. It was that it was gone. The context had shifted. It was still a terrible and tragic thing, what was happening here: but the best result that could be found was apparently now in train. Someone else knew that. Someone had communicated that feeling to him.

And it felt incredible.

He had barely even had time to shower and come back and eat breakfast before word came through to all their manuals or other instrumentalities that Djam and Cheleb and Kit were all being relieved by a single two-wizard team from elsewhere in the Interconnect Project, and were being released from their drafted-in status. If they chose to remain, they could, but they were no longer needed on this gate. Its upstream tree was being decommissioned, and the gate itself was expected to be closed down within the next thirty hours.

This too had been expected… but nothing like so soon. “Good news for us,” Cheleb said to Djam and Kit in the early-evening light as hae peeled his puptent’s interface off the stone where it had been anchored. “Got the job done. Can go home with a clean conscience.”

“But more than that,” Djam said. “I don’t know how closely you two looked at the statistical analysis that came down earlier today. The thing that started, the change in the numbers? It started here. It started yesterday morning, and began to spread.”

And both of them looked thoughtfully at Kit.

Kit’s problem was that at this point there was no way to be sure of anything. He had his suspicions, very strong suspicions, but he refused to take credit for what had been occurring around them until he had some kind of confirmation that the opinion was justified. “What?” Kit said. “Why would this necessarily have anything to do with me?”

“Because you were the one who was always doing something different,” Djam said. “Entertainment. Strange ideas about food.”

“Feeding sibiks,” Cheleb said. “Repeatedly. Thought you were a bit eccentric at first. Have to wonder now whether you were onto something.”

Kit wanted to believe it was true. But without more data… “Look,” he said. “If what’s been happening is something to do with me, then… I’m really happy. But I’m just one more wizard doing my job. You did your jobs too. Without you two, maybe I wouldn’t have had time to do what I did… assuming I did anything. Maybe what I did wouldn’t have been possible without you two.”

“Maybe we were emplaced here,” Djam said, “to make it possible for you to do what you did. Whatever that was.”

“If that’s true,” Kit said “then it’s as much your success as mine. Don’t go handing me credit that’s partly yours.”

Djam was looking at his manual interface. He pulled it out and let it snap back into the silver rod that housed it. “Pad’s been programmed and it’s waiting for us,” he said. “They’re taking the gates off-line until the decommissioning team comes through.”

The three of them turned to look at into the plain and saw it happening, what they had never yet seen, any of them—the space between the spinney of gate standards suddenly going empty and showing nothing but the further plain beyond.

“So where to now?” Kit said, as the three of them walked together toward the short-transport pad.

“Reception center,” Cheleb said. “Then—” he grinned. “Home. Unexpectedly happy ending. Some celebration.” Hae poked Kit as they jumped up onto the pad together. “Probably not enough entertainment to match quality of recent offerings.”

A few moments later they were all in the reception area together. It was astonishing how empty it looked by comparison to the bustle and crush of the place when Kit had arrived. There were only a few Tevaralti wandering around now, taking care of whatever last-minute administrative tasks were their responsibility; all the rest of the people in it were wizards of other species making their way to outbound gates and off planet. Most specifically, though, the pressure-cooker feeling of a week ago was gone. There was still a sense of sorrow, of something sad coming to an inevitable end. But it had changed. Though the world was ending, it was doing so with much less tragedy than had been anticipated.