There were other compensations, of course. On her Ordeal and after it, she had seen things that few other human beings have been privileged to see. She had watched the Sun rise through Saturn’s rings, heard spring thunder in Jupiter’s atmosphere, watched distant galaxies rise over alien landscapes; she had even officiated at the birth of a species. But none of these experiences had gone very far to make her any more patient. Maybe when I’m older, she thought. By the time I’m
twenty I’ll probably have it licked.
It wasn’t licked yet, though. Dairine looked at her watch again. It’s ten after three, she thought. Where are these people?
Beside her, on the step, Spot sat and looked at the sunny spring afternoon with a much calmer attitude than Dairine. Probably gate-traffic congestion, he said.
Behind the thought came the usual background that Dairine heard when she and Spot were communicating: a sort of stream-of-machine-consciousness, a trinary roar, seething with background thought that sounded like distant surf. The background thought was both Spot’s and that of the far-distant wizardly machine intelligence to which Dairine was a sort of godmother, and with which she had been affiliated since passing her Ordeal. Sometimes that distant activity of mind, half manual, half living thing, looked out through Dairine’s eyes and lived with her at what it considered an incredibly leisurely pace, thinking thoughts in whole seconds rather than in milliseconds; but mostly it went about its own business at its own speed, a blur of thought of which only the high points emerged in Dairine’s consciousness. Now, in that mode, Spot said, It’s not as if they’re using a private gating complex. There may be delays at the other end—
“Yeah,” Dairine said. She sat on the step again—this was probably the fourth or fifth time she’d stood and sat down—and picked Spot up. “Let me see that briefing pack again.”
Spot obligingly flipped up his screen and went into “wizard’s manual” mode. On the screen appeared Dairine’s version, in the Speech, of the briefing pack that the Powers That Be, or their administrative assistants, had sent her dad. Dairine had read it through once last night, mostly with an eye to seeing how good the translation was. Even considering the source, she was concerned that a Speech-to-text utility couldn’t be perfect. There were words in the Speech that simply didn’t go into English, and Dairine had wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything in her dad’s version of the briefing that he was going to misconstrue. To her relief, though, the material had been translated as perfectly as could have been expected, the translation being more a simplification than anything else.
Each of the visitors had his—or its—own page in the package. There were 3-D “live” pictures of them embedded in the briefing pack, though even in manual-based documents there was never any guarantee that the image would be an exact rendition of any being’s state or likeness when it actually arrived. But even if the documentation hadn’t exactly and accurately portrayed them, they were still, to put it mildly, a mixed bunch. The Rirhait was more like a giant metallic purple centipede than anything else; one of twenty-four of its parents’ first brood hatched out, very newly become a wizard—within the past Rirhait year, which was about two Earth years. It was interested enough in other worlds and other scholia of wizardry to have applied for this excursus almost as soon as it hit post-Ordeal status. “It” was probably incorrect: Sker’ret (that being the part of his name that Dairine could most easily pronounce, the rest being all consonants) was more or less a “he.”
She keyed ahead to the next page. All of the visitors, in fact, were “he”s, though with the next one, it was hard to say exactly what made him that way. Maybe it’s the berries, Dairine thought, studying his picture. Filifermanhathrhumneits’elhhessaiffnth was his whole name, a word that to Dairine
sounded oddly like wind in branches—and that was probably appropriate because he was a tree. If there are trees that walk, Dairine thought. But, plainly, on his world, Demisiv, there were…though walking probably wasn’t the right word for it. They got around, anyway, and could be surprisingly mobile when they needed to be. As far as Dairine could tell from the manual’s description of the Demisiv people, they spent all their lives wading around through the ground, and the whole surface of their sealess planet was one great migratory forest, with mighty bands of trees rooting only briefly and then getting on the move again, hunting other skies to grow under, new ground to grow in. Maybe the concept of a tree with wanderlust isn’t so weird, Dairine thought as she studied Filif’s image, which looked rather like a Christmas tree with red berries. His whole people seem to have it, in a way. He’s just wandering farther than usual…
She keyed ahead to the last page in the info packet and looked at it rather speculatively. “Roshaun ke Nelaid (am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz…) det Wellakhit,” said the entry beside the live image of someone who was obviously humanoid. Good thing Neets isn’t here, Dairine thought, studying that picture one more time, because he’s really hot.
The manual gave only a head shot unless you requested another view of a subject, and right then Dairine didn’t bother. Roshaun-and-all-the-rest-of-the-names was handsome, almost perfectly so—and it was the disbelief in his apparent perfection that kept Dairine looking at him rather longer than she intended. He had a long, fair-skinned face with a very thoughtful expression. This was partially concealed by surprisingly long, blond hair, most of which was tied behind his head, but he also had very long bangs, which he was probably always pushing out of his eyes, and a long lock of hair hanging down in front of each ear. The eyes were a startling green, a shade not normally achieved on Earth without the assistance of contact lenses.
He’s definitely a looker, Dairine thought, though the handsomeness was a little less striking now, on her second or third glance, than it had been at the first. What is it with his name, though? It goes on and on. She looked at the referral to the planet Wellakh, turned to that page, and tried to find something that explained the name structure. She scanned down the planet’s entry, skipping the usual information about size and location and so forth, looking for anything that could give her a hint.
Something’s coming, Spot said.
Through him she could feel the faint troubling of local space that meant a worldgating was incoming: a kind of curdling or shivering in the air. Dairine stood up. “Well, finally,” she said. “How many? Are they all together, or are they coming separately?”
Separately, I think, Spot said.
“Where’s the locus of emergence?”
Out in the backyard, where you and Nita usually vanish.
“Right,” Dairine said. She snapped Spot’s lid shut and headed through the backyard to the part farthest to its rear, where the sassafras trees had been growing wild for as long as Dairine could remember.
Though her dad was careful about the landscaping, he had purposely left the back of the lot a casual, partial wilderness of trees of all sizes, self-seeding, and
blocking the view of the yard from the neighbors’ lots. About fifteen feet in among them, well sheltered by growth of all sizes, was an empty patch about six feet in diameter, which Nita had talked into staying that way. There the ground was bare of everything but fallen leaves, and just outside that spot Dairine now stationed herself, putting Spot down.
“How long?” she said.
Any moment—
Her hair blew back in the abrupt breeze of an appearance, which made only a very small Whumff sound as the air displaced. Standing in front of her, low down in that rough circle of brown and gold leaves, was the Rirhait, gleaming softly in the sunlight that was filtering through the new leaves. Likening him to a centipede, Dairine thought, was probably a little simplistic. The body wasn’t a series of smooth sections but looked rather as if a number of metallic purple beach balls had been stuck together, flattening a little at the ends. Then someone had attached three pairs of legs to each beach ball—two pointing down, and a third pointing up. When we get friendly, I’ve got to ask him what those extra ones are for, Dairine thought. At one end of the centipede, stalked eyes—Dairine thought there were about eight of them—were fastened to the top of the last “beach ball,” and there were some scissory mouth parts underneath.