Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

Kit laughed, then. “Nah. What’s the point of going to alien worlds if you’re not going to at least try to eat their junk food on the way? Let’s go down by the gate and see what’s there.”

An hour later, they made their way over to the pretransit area by their gate. “That wasn’t so bad,” Kit said. “A lot better than last time…”

“Last time you didn’t read the menu,” Nita said. She had to grin, though, because this time the problem had been to get Kit to stop reading it.

Ponch was wandering along beside them looking as satisfied as Kit. They’d found a little snack bar a hundred yards or so along from gate 506, and once they’d figured out how to convert the seating system to suit bipedal humanoids, they discovered that all the tables had an embedded, programmable menu of a type new to Nita. You told the table, or touched in, the long version of the ten-letter acronym for your species—adding eight letters that concerned themselves only with your body chemistry—and the menu embedded in the tabletop changed itself to show only things that wouldn’t disagree with you. Kit, having tested one dish that looked like blue pasta, had been so taken with the flavor that he’d gone on a “blue binge” and eaten six more blue things, sharing them with Ponch.

“I can’t believe you pigged out like that,” Nita said under her breath as they made their way over to the pretransit lounge for their gate.

“Why not? It was good!”

“It was free,” Nita said.

“Oh, come on. Nothing’s free. You know that.”

“Of course I do. I mean, you didn’t have to pay for it…

They had both been prepared to pay for what they ate. Typically, when a

wizard was on errantry, the transfer of energy to pay for things was handled by the manual, to be deducted later if deferment was appropriate. But when they’d tried to take care of the bill early, putting their manuals down on the table’s deduction patch, the table had simply said CHARGED TO GENERAL FUND— EXCURSUS. Once they’d realized that the cultural exchange program was taking care of their expenses, Kit had gone, to Nita’s way of thinking, a little bit nuts.

Now, walking along beside them, Ponch burped happily and wagged his tail. When can we come back?

“You’ve done it now,” Nita said. “You’ve got him spoiled for alien food. Your mom’s going to have words with you…”

“Aw, he knows it’s a vacation. Don’t you, Ponch?”

Yes. But we can come back other times! And Ponch paused. I can come here by myself, too.

Nita shook her head as they made their way over to the transit gate. “From now on you’ll know where to find him when he’s missing,” she said. “Shaking down alien tourists for blue stuff.”

Their gate was like many others in that part of the terminal: an information kiosk with a big, flat, vertical screen, a tall standard with the gate number, and the outline of a hexagon embedded in the floor, constantly shifting colors and wavelengths of light as it tried to make itself visible to as many species’ visual senses as possible. By the kiosk, a gate technician was standing—a tall bipedal humanoid in a green glass jumpsuit cut down the back to allow its rudimentary wings room to move.

Nita went up to her and held out her manual. “We’re scheduled for a gating to Alaalu,” she said.

“Alaalu?” whistled the gate technician in a cordial tone as she took Nita’s manual, waved it in front of the data screen. “Never heard of it. Where is it?”

“Radian one-sixty somewhere,” Nita said.

The gate tech’s feathered crest went up and down as the display brought up an abbreviated version of Nita’s name and identity information in the Speech, along with a little bare-bones schematic of the galaxy. “Oh, I see. Thank you, Emissary,” she said, handing Nita back her manual. “How interesting…I’ve never gated anyone there before. It doesn’t seem to get much traffic. But then that’s quite a jump; it’s nice for you that it’s subsidized, isn’t it?”

“We sure think so,” Kit said. Usually, the energy to pay for such a “fixed” gating also eventually would have been deducted through the manual, either in a lump or as time payment—and even the extended-payment option could leave a wizard fairly wrecked when such distances were involved.

The gate technician put her crest up in a smile. “So do a lot of your colleagues. I’ve seen quite a few of them through here in the past two hands of days.”

Nita stole a look at the technician’s claws. A little more than a week… “Do these exchanges usually all happen at this time of year, or are they staggered?” she said, curious.

“I’ve never thought about it,” said the gate tech, taking Kit’s manual and waving it in front of the display in turn. “I always assumed they were staggered. But

there does seem to be an unusual amount of excursus traffic right now.” Kit’s information came up, and the gate tech examined it for a moment, then handed Kit back his manual and raised her crest to Ponch. “It’s probably a coincidence. The time indicator’s up there on the standard, Emissary, Interlocutor. Stand clear of the locus until it goes dark, then enter it and hold your position. And go well.”

“Thank you.” They wandered over to the standard; Nita put her hand on it. “Minutes, please?” she said.

The charactery running up and down the standard writhed, gathered itself together into a bright blob, and then resolved itself into the digits 14:03. The last two digits then started counting down in seconds.

“Not long now,” Nita said, putting her manual back in her backpack. “I can’t wait!”

Ponch sat down, his tongue hanging out, and burped again. Is there time for a nap?

“No!” Kit and Nita said in unison.

Ponch let out a big sigh. Oh, well…

They waited. Five minutes went by, and then ten, and they were still the only ones waiting there. “This must really be a quiet place we’re going to,” Nita said to Kit.

“That’s what the manuals said.”

“Terrific!” Nita said. And right at that moment, the hexagon on the floor in front of them went black.

“Let’s go!” Kit said. They stepped into the hexagon; Ponch got up, sauntered onto it, and sat down next to Kit. On the standard nearby, the digits changed themselves to read “59,” and started counting down again.

Nita became aware that her heart was pounding. She had to smile as the count went down past thirty, and she stole a glance at Kit and saw that he was grinning, too. “20… 15… 10…”

Nita almost felt like she should be hearing rocket engines igniting, but around them was nothing but the sound of hoots and shrieks and rumbles and roars and laughter, the voices of life. Here we go! she thought.

3, said the countdown clock on the standard.

2

1—

—and then Nita found herself under another sky, with the wind in her hair.

She took a first deep breath of another world’s air, rich with scents she couldn’t identify—and then completely forgot to breathe as she tried to find the horizon and get herself oriented. It wasn’t that there was any trouble finding the horizon. In front of her lay endless green fields all starred with blue flowers, until, as she looked much farther away, the blue of the flowers was all she could see. But beyond that, where the horizon should have been, there was more of it; landscape dappled in a hundred shades of green and blue green, sloping upward to gently rolling hill country, sloping further upward still to the beginnings of mountains. They were not so high by themselves, but the horizon was. To Nita, the world around her seemed to climb halfway up that blue, blue sky, three-quarters of the way up it, impossibly high. It felt wrong. But it wasn’t. It’s me, she told herself, working to