Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (12 page)

All alone in the middle of a great expanse of floor was the spot where a reed hut had stood by the river-bank, 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. But both 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, like those in the virtual displays hanging in the air around it and drifting around and over one another in a small-scale imitation of the elective ceiling overhead.

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 dinosaurs!” 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. 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 sighed 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. Though… it might be possible that Rirhait are just naturally rude.”

Kit shrugged “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.

Kit laughed. “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 pre-transit 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.

“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 cylindrical 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 her 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 really 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. “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 alien 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 locating the horizon proper. 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 breathe.
It’s just me…

Nita knew perfectly well that the apparent flatness of her home planet was an illusion. She had seen, on the Moon, the unexpected curvature of a body much smaller than the Earth, so that the horizon seemed cramped and close, and things a mile or so away seemed much too near. What she saw now was the opposite of that. Things that seemed far away would turn out to be farther still. Those mountains towering up against the edge of things were even farther away. And that was the problem. It shouldn’t be possible to be under a sky and still
see
things that were so far away, against a horizon that left you feeling you were at the bottom of a huge, shallow bowl, with all that blue sky pooling on top of you, pouring onto you like water, pressing you down…

It’s just big,
Nita thought.
Just the size of the planet makes it seem this way.
But it was
too
big. And something else about it seized her by the heart and squeezed, so that she was almost having trouble breathing.

Why do I know this place?
Nita thought.
What does this remind me of?

“Neets?” Kit said to her. “Neets, you all right?”

She swallowed. “Yeah,” she said. “How about you?”

“Uh, yeah.”

She glanced over at Kit. He looked a little pale but seemed otherwise all right. “But how can it be this big?” she said. “How can
anything
be this big? And do you feel it—”