Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (11 page)

They went out through the gate for the platform between tracks fifteen and sixteen and paused just past it, looking up and down the length of the Main Concourse. It was a bright day; the scattered light of the sunbeams striking through the great south windows washed through the dusty early-afternoon air and lit up the turquoise of the painted sky high above them, washing out its stars. As they walked across the Concourse, good smells came drifting down from the steak restaurant at one end of the Concourse terrace. “Whaddaya think,” Kit said. “Food hall?”

Nita gave him a pretend-shocked look. “You mean you’re not going to just sit down on the stairs here and eat your bag lunch?”

Kit gave Nita a look. “Please. I’m saving it for when I’m feeling homesick. Meanwhile… ”

“Aha,” said a voice from just below knee level. “I heard you were coming through this morning.”

Nita looked down. Standing by them was a big, stocky, silvery gray tabby cat, waving his tail, and Nita knew only she and Kit and Ponch could see him because he was using a form of selective invisibility that left him visible to wizards but invisible to other humans. “Hey, Urruah!” Nita said.
“Dai stihó!”

Urruah was one of the feline wizards who kept the New York worldgates running properly, cats being much better than other Earthly species at seeing the superstrings on which the gates’ structures were hung. “Ponch,” Kit said, “would you come sit over here so it doesn’t look like we’re talking to the floor? Thanks.”

Ponch sat down next to Urruah, gazing at him. For a moment or so their gazes locked, then Ponch put down his ears, which had been up, and let his tongue hang out.

Urruah’s whiskers went forward. “Nice doggy,” he said.

Woof, woof,
Ponch said, his eyes glinting. The irony was audible.

“Good to see you,” Kit said. “Where’s Rhiow today?”

“Our esteemed team leader,” Urruah said, “is over in the FF’arhleih Building—that’s the old post office over on Eighth Avenue—doing stasis work on the substrates there for when we move the worldgates over.”

“I thought the new Penn Station project was on hold,” Nita said.

“Once again,” Urruah said. “
Ehhif
bureaucracy, such a wonderful thing.” He rolled his eyes. “But the more time you give the worldgate substrates to root, the less trouble the gates give you when you put them in place. We just didn’t realize there was going to be so much lead time, so Rhiow has to keep adjusting the wizardries on the mirror substrate to keep it from denaturing while we wait for the City to get its
vhai’d
act together. Meanwhile, I see you’re going somewhere for pleasure today… ”

“A sponsored noninterventional excursus,” Nita said.

Urruah grinned. “I did one of those once,” he said. “The species was aquatic: I didn’t feel dry for weeks afterward. Nice people, though. Where are they sending you?

“Alaalu.”

“Never heard of it,” Urruah said. “But why should I? With a billion homeworlds out there, and no time to see them all. By the way, were you issued subsidized jump-throughs?”

“You mean the custom worldgates? Yeah,” Kit said.

“And they’re wrapped up tight?” Urruah said. “You haven’t tried to commission them?”

“Huh? No,” Nita said. “The docs said you absolutely shouldn’t do that.”

“Okay, good,” Urruah said. “That’s fine.”

“But why shouldn’t you?” Kit said.

Urruah gave him a look. “You mean, why shouldn’t you take an open worldgate through an open worldgate? Please. Temporal eversions are bad enough. Those you can patch, or revert, if you know how. Even simple spatial ones, if the effect isn’t spread over too much area. But a
multidimensional
one—”

“Everything turns inside out?” Nita said, guessing.

Urruah gave her a pitying look. “The reality would be much more complex, much worse, and
very
much less reversible. Since I assume you like this planet as it is, and not as eighth-dimensional origami, let’s not do it. When are you two scheduled back?”

“Two weeks.”

“Well, have a good time,” Urruah said. “Try not to destroy your host civilization or anything. Going via the Crossings?”

“Yeah,” Kit said.

“I hoped so. Would you mind doing an errand as you pass through?”

“Sure,” Nita said, “no problem.”

“Great—I appreciate it. Stop by the Stationmaster’s office when you get there and tell him we’d appreciate it if they’d route the elective main trunk nontypical traffic around us for the next thirty-six hours. When Rhi’s finished we’re going to have to do some matching maintenance on the local gate substrates.”

Kit had his manual open and was making a note. “Thirty-six hours… Got it.”

“That should be plenty of time. I’ll message him when the maintenance is done, and one of us will drop by in a day or three to discuss some other matters.”

Urruah got up and stretched. “Meanwhile, your transit gate will be off platform eighteen. We just moved it over there from thirty; the Metro-North staff are doing track welding today. The locus’ll be patent for the Crossings in about six minutes, after the two-twenty to Croton-Harmon gets out of your way. If you hurry, you can catch it.”

“Thanks,” Nita said.
“Dai,
big guy.”

“Dai,”
Urruah said to her and Kit, and waved his tail at Ponch as he turned.

“Auhw heei u’uuw lau’hwu rrrhh’uiu,”
Ponch said to Urruah.

Urruah paused in midturn, and Nita’s eyes widened slightly as she caught sight of the look on Urruah’s face. It was always dangerous to judge animals’ expressions by comparing them with human ones, but wizards’ knowledge of the subverbal modes of the Speech lent them some slight latitude in reading nonhuman expressions—at least those of creatures from their own worlds that were not too far removed from them in basic psychology. Whatever Ponch had said, it had been in Ailurin, the cats’ language, and it hadn’t been something Urruah had been expecting. It had also gone by too quickly for Nita to “listen” in the Speech and hear what it had meant.

“Uh, yes, certainly,” Urruah said, recovering himself. He waved his tail at them all once more, then strolled off across the Main Concourse, weaving from side to side to avoid the commuters, who couldn’t see him.

They turned away, and Kit looked at Ponch with some surprise. “What was that about?” Kit said. “I didn’t know you spoke cat.”

Correspondence course,
said Ponch, and kept on walking.

Nita threw Kit a glance.
Have I told you recently,
she said silently,
that your dog is getting
strange?

You and the rest of the world…

The three of them made their way to the gate for platform eighteen and, once through it, slipped to the right of it, away from the main part of the platform, where they wouldn’t be seen disappearing.
Hurry up,
Ponch said as Kit’s invisibility spell came down over him, too.
It itches!

“So stop complaining and come on,” Kit said. They walked down the length of the platform, staying to the left side, where there was no train. People went tearing past them on the right as down at the end of the platform the 2:20’s conductor yelled ‘“Boarrrrrrrrrrrd!” Those last few people made it onto the train, its doors closed, and with a great revving roar of engines, deafening in that confined space, it slowly began to pull out.

Kit and Nita and Ponch stayed off to the side while a few more people came running down the platform, saw that the train was already on its way out, and slowed to a stop, then turned and went back down toward the Main Concourse to find out when the next train was. “We’re clear,” Nita said softly. “Come on.”

The three of them made their way down to the end of the platform, where steps led down to the track level. The steps were of no interest to them, though. They looked to their left, where no train stood… but where the air just past the platform’s edge, to a wizard’s eye, rippled gently, as if with uprising heat.

“It’s patent,” Kit said. “Let’s go. Ponch, jump it, the edge is sharp… ”

I know that!

Kit grinned, took a deep breath, glanced at Nita. She nodded. They stepped forward together, into the empty air, into the dark, as Ponch jumped past them…

… and the three of them stepped out again a long second later, ditching their invisibility spells in the process, into the white brilliance of the Nontypical Transit area at the Crossings Hypergate Facility on Rirhath B.

The inbound gating was a “hardwired” one, long-established and with a lot of comfort features built in for the convenience of the wizards who used it every day on business. Nita and Kit came out on the other side without feeling the unsettling effects usually associated with moving several light-years between worlds, which were not only spinning in different directions and velocities but being dragged through interstellar space by their home stars along wildly differing vectors. Regardless of having no need to settle their stomachs or wait for their inner ears to recover, the three of them took a moment to just stand there on the shining white floor and look around; for the place was worth looking at.

Nontypical Transit was a wide empty space about the size of a football field, and around it that wide white floor went on and on for so far around on all sides that Nita was fairly sure she ought to have been able to see the curvature of the planet, had it not been so completely covered with people of a thousand different species. “Is it rush hour?” she said.

“Probably. Let’s get out of here before something materializes on top of us.”

This wasn’t really a concern, Nita knew, as the manual made it plain that the whole NT area was programmed not to allow two different transportees, whether using wizardry or another form of worldgating, to occupy the same space. All the same, she and Kit and Ponch made their way toward the edge of the Nontypical Transit area, looking up at what every tourist passing through the Crossings spent some time admiring: the ceiling. Or rather, the ceilings, for there were thousands of them, real and false, interpenetrating one another or floating under or over one another, in a myriad of airy, randomly shaped structures of glass and metal and other materials that Nita didn’t immediately recognize. The effect was like a shattered, miles-wide, horizontal stained glass window, eternally looking for new and interesting ways to assemble itself, and then eternally changing its mind. It was morning at the moment, and the violent silver-gilt light of Rirhath B, only slightly softened by the eternal green-white cloud of daylight hours, burned through the glass high above them and cast bright, sliding shadows on the vast floor in a thousand colors, all changing every moment as ceilings high up in the tremendous structure briefly eclipsed one another and parted company again.

“It’s different from last time,” Kit said.

Nita nodded as they finally reached the end of the NT area. It had been night the last time they’d been here, and at night the ceilings simply seemed to go away, appearing to leave the whole vast terminal floor open to the view of Rirhath B’s astonishing night sky—a crowded vista of short-period variable stars, all swelling and shrinking like living things that breathed light. “This is nice, too,” Nita said, and then had to laugh at herself as they headed out into the main terminal floor.
Nice
was a poor word for this tremendous space, for its many cubic miles of stacked-up glass and metal galleries, holding offices, stores, restaurants, and a hundred other kinds of facilities for which English has no words.

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 single or clustered hexagons that glowed 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. The string of characters uncurled itself gracefully 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 spot 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. In more recent centuries it had become an informal hub for intergalactic transport within the Local Group as well. With the opening of the new fourth-wing extension, its hub status for inter-Group transit would be formalized. But regardless of the expansion of its role, the Crossings would remain paramount among the Milky Way’s intragalactic hubs — its local space having about it a particularly high concentration of those forces that, when entwined with certain relatively rare planetary characteristics, made gating easier than anywhere else.