Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

Nita and Kit and Ponch made their way down the main drag toward the core of the terminal structure, taking their time. There were three main wings to the

Crossings, each several miles long, and there were small intergates strung all down the length of each wing, marked on the floor by ellipses in various visible and invisible colors. There was also a selective-friction slidewalk down one side of each wing, which, while looking no different than the rest of the polished white floor, would scoot you along at high speed if you were in a hurry. But Nita was in no rush, and neither was Kit. Ponch paced along beside them, plainly enjoying himself, looking at all the strange people and smelling the strange smells, and amiably wagging his tail.

Scattered down the length of the mile-wide wing before them, in the middle of the floor, were platforms and daises and kiosks and counters of various shapes and sizes, each with a long, tall, cylindrical black sign on a black metal pole. These were gate indicators, flashing their destinations and patency times in hundreds of languages and hundreds of colors. Kit paused by one of these as they came up to it, a ring-fenced area where a number of people who looked like huge furbearing turtles striped in orange and gray were waiting for their gate to go patent. Kit put his hand on the pole and said in the Speech, “Information for Alaalu?”

On the side facing him and Nita, the jarring red symbols that had previously been showing there blanked out and were replaced by a long string of symbols in blue, in the Speech, which uncurled itself down the length of the sign. “Wing three,” Nita said, “gate five-oh-six…”

“In a little more than an hour,” Kit said.

“Great,” Nita said. “We can sit down somewhere near the gate and have a snack.”

Kit got a dubious look. “Uhh…”

Nita laughed at him: Kit had had a major problem with some of the local food their last time through. “This time,” she said, “just don’t eat anything you don’t recognize, and you’ll be fine.”

“Same rule as for the school cafeteria, I guess,” Kit said. “Yeah, why not? But let’s get that errand done for Urruah first.”

“Yeah.”

They made their way to the central area for which the whole facility was named: the original Crossings. Once upon a time, two and a half millennia before, it had been just a muddy place by a riverbank—one that became a crossroads over time as its own native species learned to exploit it. Then, much later, it became an interplanetary and interstellar crossroads as well. Soon, now, with the opening of the new extension, it would add intergalactic transport as well, becoming a master hub for worldgating operations among three other galaxies of the Local Group. But the Crossings would remain paramount among the intragalactic hubs, its local space having about it a concentration of those forces that, when entwined with specific planetary characteristics, made gating easier than anywhere else.

All alone in the middle of a great expanse of floor was the spot where a reed hut had stood by the riverbank, not far from the ancient cave that contained a natural worldgate. At the cave’s entrance, a sequence of footprints in the mud had suddenly stopped without warning—an image as famous on Rirhath B as the corrugated bootprint of an astronaut in the moondust was famous on Earth. Cave and hut were long gone. In their place stood a cubical structure of tubular bluesteel,

no different from many of the other kiosks that stood around the Crossings. This one had nothing in it but a desk, its surface covered with inset, illuminated input patches of many shapes and colors, the shapes and colors shifting every second. Behind the desk was a meter-high rack of thinner bluesteel tubing, shaped somewhat like the kind of kickable step stool to be found in libraries. And inside the rack, more or less—except where its many jointed legs hung out of the structure, or were curled around the racking for support—was the Stationmaster.

Nita and Kit walked up to the desk. Nita was calm enough about it at first: She’d been here before. But then she had a sudden panic attack. What do we say to it? She thought, looking at the silvery blue giant centipede, which was busily banging away with its front four or six legs at the input patches on the desk. When you were on wizardly business, the same phrase did the job no matter where you were: “I am on errantry, and I greet you!” But they weren’t on errantry this time out.

Kit and Nita paused in front of the desk, and the Rirhait behind it looked at them with several stalky eyes: The others kept their attention on what it was doing. “Oh,” the Stationmaster said. “You again.”

“Nice to see you, too,” Kit said.

Ponch sat down beside Kit, looking at the Stationmaster with an expression that suggested he wasn’t sure whether to chase it or run away. The Master, in its turn, turned an eye in Ponch’s direction, and the eye’s oval pupil dilated and contracted a couple of times.

“They’re hard on their associates, these two,” the Stationmaster said to Ponch. “And on the surroundings. Where they go, things tend to get trashed. Are you insured?”

Ponch yawned. I’m not too worried about it, he said.

“It wasn’t our fault, the last time,” Kit said, sounding just slightly annoyed. “We weren’t the ones who chased Nita’s sister through the terminal with blasters.”

“Not to mention the dinosaur,” Nita said.

“No, I suppose not,” the Stationmaster said, waving a casual claw in the air. “Well, the facility’s general fund handled it, and all the damage caused by your broodmate’s incursion and departure has been repaired now.” It tapped away at the desk a little more. “I assume this isn’t a social call…”

“No, actually,” Kit said, and pulled out his manual. “The New York gating team asked us to deliver a message, since we were passing this way.”

At that, six of the Stationmaster’s eight eyes fixed on Kit, all their pupils dilating at once. The effect was disconcerting. “New York,” it said. “That would be Earth.”

It sounded actively annoyed. “That’s right,” Kit said, throwing Nita a glance as he flipped open his manual. “Here’s what they say—” He read Urruah’s message aloud.

The Stationmaster’s antennae worked while Kit read, the equivalent of a nod. “Very well,” it said. “I’ll message them when I have a moment. Let’s move on. You have your departure data?”

“Yes,” Kit said.

“Excellent. Don’t let the gate constrict on your fundament on the way out,” the Master said, and it poured itself out of its rack, whisked around and out of the

kiosk, and went hastening away across the concourse, on all those legs, without another word.

A few moments’ worth of silence passed as Nita and Kit watched him go. “Maybe I’m from a little backwater planet at the outside edge of the Arm,” Kit said, “but where I come from, we would call that rude.”

“Oh, come on, you can’t be judgmental,” Nita said.

“It didn’t even say thank you!”

“Well…”

“You agree with me,” Kit said with some satisfaction.

Nita let out a long breath and turned to start walking in the general direction of their gate. “Yeah,” she said. “Even though I’m probably wrong to.”

Kit made a face as they turned away. “Okay,” he said, “and you’re probably right that I shouldn’t judge it by human standards. Maybe there was something else on its mind.”

“Maybe,” Nita said. “Though…it might be possible that Rirhait are just naturally rude.”

Kit sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We did the errand. Let’s go get some lunch.”

He still didn’t sound as if he was entirely happy about the idea. “You’ve still got your bag lunch if you want it,” Nita said.