"Slidefield," the alien said, proceeding next to her, without moving, at the same quick pace.
"Inertia-abeyant selectively frictionless environment. Here we go. Which gating facility are you making for?"
"Uh-"
It was all happening too fast. The terminal building swept forward swift as a leaping beast, rearing up a thousand stories high, miles across, blotting out the sky. The slidefield poured itself at what looked like a blank silvery wall a hundred feet sheer. Dairine threw her arms up to protect herself, and succeeded only in bashing her face with the computer; the wall burst like a thin flat cloud against her face, harmless, and they were through.
"The Crossings," said the alien. '-What do you think?"
She could not have told him in an hour's talking. The Crossings Hypergate Facility on Rirhath B is renowned among the Million Homeworlds for its elegant classical Lilene architecture and noble proportions; but Dairine's only cogent thought for several minutes was that she had never imagined being in an airline terminal the size of New Jersey. The ceiling-or ceilings, for there were thousands of them, layered, interpenetrating, solid and lacy, in steel and glass, in a hundred materials and a hundred colors-all towered up into a distance where clouds, real clouds, gathered; about a quarter-mile off to one side, it appeared to be raining. Through the high greenish air, under the softened light of the fluorescing sky that filtered in through the thousand roofs, small objects that might have been machines droned along, towing parcels and containers behind them. Beneath, scattered all about on the terminal floor, were stalls, platforms, counters, racks, built in shapes Dairine couldn't understand, and with long, tall signs placed beside them that Dairine couldn't begin to read. And among the stalls and kiosks, the whole vast white floor was full of people-clawed, furred, shelled or armored, upright or crawling, avian, insectile, mammalian, lizardlike, vegetable, mingling with forms that could not be described in any earthly terms. There were a very few hominids, none strictly human; and their voices were lost in the rustling, wailing, warbling, space-softened cacophony of the terminal floor.
They hopped and stepped and leapt and walked and crawled and oozed and slid and tentacled and went in every imaginable way about their uncounted businesses, followed by friends and families and fellow travelers, by luggage floating or walking; all purposeful, certain, every one of them having somewhere to go, and going there.
Every one of them except Dairine, who was beginning to wish she had not come.
"There," said the alien, and Dairine was glad of that slight warning, because the slidefield simply stopped working and left her standing still. She waved her arms, overcompensating, and her stomach did a frightened wrench and tried once or twice, for old times' sake, to get rid of food that was now on Ananke.
"Here you are," said the alien, gesturing with its various tentacles. "Arrivals over there, departures over that way, stasis and preservation down there,!!!!! over there"-the computer made a staticky noise that suggested it was unable to translate something- "and of course waste disposal. You enjoy your trip, now; I have to catch up with my fathers. Have a nice death!"
"But-" Dairine said. Too late. The broad armored shape had taken a few steps into a small crowd, stepped on a spot on the floor that looked exactly like every other, and vanished.
Dairine stood quite still for a few minutes: she had no desire to hit one of those squares by accident. I'm a spud, she thought, a complete imbecile. Look at this. Stuck in an airport-something like an airport-no money, no ID that these people'll recognize, no way to explain how I got here or how I'm gonna get out-no way to understand half of what's going on, scared to death to move. . and pretty soon some security guard or cop or something is going to see me standing here, and come over to find out what's wrong, and they're gonna haul me off somewhere and lock me up….
The thought was enough to hurriedly start her walking again. She glanced around to try to make sense of things. There were lots of signs posted all over — or rather, in most cases, hanging nonchalantly in midair.
But she could read none of them. While she was looking at one written in letters that at a distance seemed like Roman characters, something bumped into Dairine fairly hard, about shin-height. She staggered and caught herself, thinking she had tripped over someone's luggage. But there was nothing in her path at all.
She paused, confused, and then tried experimentally to keep walking: the empty air resisted her. And then behind her someone said, "Your pardon " and slipped right past her: something that looked more or less like a holly tree, but it was walking on what might have been stumpy roots, and the berries were eyes, all of which looked at Dairine as the creature passed. She gulped. The creature paid her no mind, simply walked through the bit of air that had been resisting Dairine, and vanished as the thing with the tentacles had earlier. Just as it blinked out of existence, air whiffing past Dairine into the place where it had been, she thought she caught sight of what looked like a little triangular piece of shiny plastic or metal held in one of the thing's leaves.
A ticket, Dairine thought; and a little more wandering and watching showed her that this was the case.
Wherever these little gates might lead, none of them would let you step on it unless you had the right ticket for it: probably the bit of plastic was a computer chip, programmed with the fact that you had paid your fare. So there was no need to fear that she might suddenly fall unshielded into some environment where they were breathing methane or swimming around in lava.
Dairine began to wander again, feeling somewhat better. I can always sit down in a corner somewhere and program another jump, she thought. Be smart to do that now, though. In case something starts to happen and I want to get out quick. .
She looked for a place to sit. Off to one side was a big collection of racks and benches, where various creatures were hung up or lying on the floor. On a hunch she said to the computer, "Is it safe to sit over there?"
"Affirmative," said the computer.
Dairine ambled over in the direction of the racks and started searching for something decent to sit in.
The creatures she passed ignored her. Dairine found it difficult to return the compliment. One of the racks had what looked like a giant blue vampire bat hanging in it. Or no, it had no fur: the thing was actually more like a pterodactyl, and astonishingly pretty-the blue was iridescent, like a hummingbird's feathers. Dairine walked around it, fascinated, for quite a long time, pretending to look for a chair.
But there seemed to be no chairs in this particular area. The closest to a chairlike thing was a large low bowl that was full of what seemed to be purple Jell-O. . except that the Jell-O put up a long blunt limb of itself, the end of which swiveled to follow as Dairine passed. She hurried by; the effect was rather like being looked at by a submarine periscope, and the Jell-O thing had about as much expression. Probably wonders what the heck / am, she thought. Boy, is it mutual. .
Finally she settled for the floor. She brought up the utilities menu and started running down the list of planets again. . then stopped and asked for the "Help" utility.
"Nature of query," said the computer.
"Uh. ." Dairine paused. Certainly this place was what she had thought she wanted-a big cosmopolitan area full of intelligent alien creatures. But at the same time there were hardly any hominids, and she felt bizarrely out of place. Which was all wrong. She wanted someplace where she would be able to make sense of things. But how to get that across to the computer? It seemed as though, even though it was magical, it still used and obeyed the laws of science, and was as literal and unhelpful as a regular computer could be if you weren't sufficiently familiar with it to know how to tell it what you wanted.