Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal Read online

  But then Rho took a deep breath. Calm down! You know what comes next… Especially since he’d seen his father and mother do it countless times.

  It was one of his very early memories—his father teaching him to write his name in one of the simplest of the Speech’s recensions. “There’ll be more of it later,” his father had said, looking down with quiet satisfaction at the long careful vertical scrawl of curls and curves, “and it will mean more.”

  There definitely is, Rho thought as he looked down at the older-wizardly-Roshaun version of his name, all adorned with new outgrowths of characters he’d never seen before. And it definitely does… For he could feel the him-ness of it even at this distance, even from the parts of it he didn’t thoroughly understand as yet.

  Rho stood there for as long as he dared, scrutinizing the long chain of descriptors while the countdown kept sliding by. As far as he could tell the most basic version of his name was definitely there and correct: the newer additions to it would need study and analysis, but for the moment that would have to wait.

  Flashing a little further along in the spell-diagram was a trail of softly-lit characters suggesting where he should begin to recite the spell. Rho took a long breath and began to pronounce his very first words in the Speech as a wizard.

  He was in no wise prepared for the sense of exquisite, shattering certainty that flooded over him as he spoke words that had always before merely had sense and now also had meaning. And moment by moment Rho could hear everything around him going quiet as the meaning became more intense through being given voice by a living being on the Aethyrs’ business. Because I am! he thought in growing triumph. Even this little errand, this exploration, is on their behalf. This is errantry! More: this is the Challenge, the first act of the process that will prove me a wizard —

  —or not—

  Rho gulped, steadied himself, and concentrated on speaking the words as they were laid out in front of him, more and more quickly working how to move through the reading of the spell diagram. All around him he could feel the forces building, and both feel and see the structure of his on-demand worldgate constructing itself on the matrix of hyperspace strings that interpenetrated everything, space and matter alike. With the words of the spell Rho was binding himself into the new substructure, making a direct connection to the place in spacetime where he now desired to be.

  More and more intensely as he recited, Rho could feel that the words he was saying might possibly be more real than their mere surroundings—more real than the place where they were spoken or the being who spoke them. He was shivering with the perception, but not with fear. The words were older than he, stronger than he, endlessly ancient… but still fresh and strong and ready for whatever purpose he wanted them to serve. Or that they want me to—

  Because it was all starting to get confused as the room dimmed around him and the power kept flooding into the spell diagram. Increasingly Rho wondered whether he was speaking the words or they were speaking him as the until-now silent rumble of the turning world beneath him started scaling up and up, deafening, complaining as he was pried out of its grip and matter-of-factly removed from this airt of the world and dropped down into—

  Another!

  Rho gasped and blinked and stood very still on the sudden, shining floor, staring all around him.

  He’d noted the spell’s selection of his destination, a neutral arrivals area in the Crossings. And here he was, exactly in the center of a wide hex-paved space fenced off from a broad main concourse by a circular blue metal railing. The hexes were nonadjacent, spaced out from one another, and Rho was occupying one of his own, nearly as wide as he was tall. As he glanced around, elsewhere inside the railing other beings were appearing at intervals: here a hominid, there a jellylike creature all blue and shivering, over there a bright-carapaced arthropod of some kind—

  Rho stood transfixed with delight, gazing around. Beyond the railings stretched more and more and more of that broad white floor, away off into the distance. And out there in the concourse every kind of being one could imagine was walking or crawling or sliding or slithering to and fro, winging it from place to place in the middle airs, gliding along on small personal transports or on one of the larger moving walkways that crisscrossed the vast space at intervals.

  Above Rho, starting at about ten times his height overhead, floated elements of the daytime “elective ceiling” of the Crossings—hundreds of slabs of energy/matter matrix, some of them translucent, some transparent, some glowing slightly, floating serenely in many overlapping layers above the concourse and mercifully blocking out the view of Rirhath B’s blinding, scalding day. Rho stared up fascinated at that impossible vault, getting no more than a glimpse here or there of the sky itself, fluorescing under the ferocious radiation of that alien sun.

  And that was Rho’s major concern—not the ceiling, not the sky. That star—

  I can hear it!

  Even here, even through the overdoming rayshielding built to protect the many species who came here, he could hear the actinic shout of it, the roar of the solar furnace. Thahit, dangerous and unstable as it could be, did not begin to compare. Rirhath B’s star was a main-sequence giant, blue-white as a thunderbolt and millions of times brighter. He could feel the texture of its gravity well from here, sense how the air was almost thick with its neutrons. I could get out and feel that light on me without a ceiling in the way—

  Something began to buzz under his feet, pulsing. Rho looked down and realize that his hex was flashing. The intervals between flashes were getting shorter, and the vibration under his feet was getting stronger as the transport management system let him know that somebody else needed this hex very shortly. So maybe I should stop standing here like some gaping yokel and be about my business…?

  Rho laughed softly at himself and moved out of the railed area as quickly as he could, and then went to have a look at that star.

  ***

  It took some doing to work out how to get out of the Crossings facilities proper. Rho quickly realized that this was intentional. There were too many ways for unwary transit travelers to come to grief on this planet, considering the inherent dangerousness of the exterior environment. Leaving aside the radiation and the brilliance of the light, for all he knew the atmosphere might be bad for hominids too.

  Belatedly Rho found he also had to admit that he wasn’t in a terrible hurry to get out of the main concourse area, because there was too much to see. The shops, the restaurants, the banking and business facilities, the bars and leisure centers, even the sanitary facilities, were all utterly fascinating— full of wares he could sometimes barely understand, foods he’d never imagined, businesses and currencies and modes of fiscal exchange he couldn’t even begin to figure out at such short notice. And it was all new, a complete superfluity of things to wonder at. All around him moved beings of every possible description, beautiful, bizarre, extraordinary, peculiar, delicate or gross, occasionally familiar but mostly strange beyond belief, the din of their multitude of voices making the strangest music imaginable—

  I could stay right here for years and never understand all this, Rho thought in utter joy. And the cultures, the worlds beyond, the sources of all this— I can go there! I can be somewhere else than where I’ve been trapped all this while, I can see those worlds and meet those people and understand them! Because that was one of the things the Speech was for, and though he’d been able to speak it before, it hadn’t been anything like this. Now he could look even at the signs by the gate hexes, and as he read the prosaic workaday scheduling notifications on them he could also see in the very words themselves their ancient pedigree. He could directly feel in them the power of the Aethyr that had invented them in the deeps of time—

  Rho had to stop himself and swallow, and once more command himself to calm down and cope. Here I am standing looking at a gate information standard as if it’s the Most Central manifesting in person! “Outside,” Rho said under his breath, not caring if a
nyone saw him talking to himself.

  But now as before, “outside” meant figuring out how to do it. Well, best go ask for directions, then, he thought, and started looking for a sign that would head him where he wanted to go without first sending him into a philosophical tizzy.

  He walked on through he concourse, trying to read the signs a little less immersively. Shortly Rho caught sight of a general-information pillar of some bright silvery metal with bands of glowing words in many languages rotating around it. At once, apparently responding to his attention, one of the bands began displaying messages in Wellakhit and the Speech; and the first of these were the words MAIN INFORMATION AND STATIONMASTER’S OFFICE. After them a pointer-symbol rotated into view, indicating that he should proceed to his right.

  Rho headed that way, pausing only once when his attention was caught by a shop window where the management seemed to be offering integuments, carapaces and skins for sale, and advertising INSTALLATION WHILE YOU WAIT. He couldn’t help but stand there for some moments wondering what it would be like to have true body armor grafted onto you—jeweled body armor, to judge by the rather glamorous samples on display in the window. What would my royal mother say? Rho thought. And then, And what would they say at lessons! But the thought of his mother’s likely response (he could just see her raised eyebrows) drowned out the thought of what of his schoolfellows and instructors might think.

  Regretfully he left the shop window behind and made his way down the long broad shining concourse toward what appeared to be some kind of giant nest knitted out of the blue metal that appeared frequently in the public space here. And moving in and out of the space were a number of long, shining beings, glittering in light that shone down on them from the open frame-network and from invisible sources higher above.

  What are those?

  Rirhait, whispered something in his mind. Rho started, but it was only the Aethyr. The dominant species on this planet. And without warning it spilled a great flow of data into his mind: details about the species’ anatomy, physiology, history, interactions with other species, languages, literature, mindset..

  Rho had to stand still again and concentrate to keep from simply being mentally washed away in the flood of information. I’m going to have to get used to this, he thought. “A little more slowly?” he muttered, as a crowd of blobby bubbly creatures made of some clear jellylike substance and filled with peculiar colorful squirming shapes divided around him and flowed past him, throwing annoyed looks at him as they passed. And it was extremely strange that he could tell that they were looking at him, when they didn’t have anything like eyes or faces to do it with—

  Chelicerae, said his Aethyr (in a slightly different voice this time), and immediately dumped what seemed like another bucket of data over Rho. They were called the Mafesh and they hailed from a planet of a small collapsed red star so cool that it actually had steam in its upper atmosphere, not that this bothered the inhabitants of its one world Maf, because their big core-heated world was completely covered by a complex-hydrocarbon soup—

  “Will you slow down!” Rho said to the empty air. “I’m never going to remember all this if you just dump it into my head like that!”

  Yes you will, the Aethyr said.

  Rho made a face, because he was none too sure. “Just don’t do it when I’m in the middle of a conversation with somebody, all right?”

  Noted, the Aethyr said. But it sounded a bit smug for some reason.

  Rho just shook his head and made his way on along the concourse to that complex blue-metal framework. Inside it was a crammed-in assortment of seating frames and data panels and nonphysical displays hanging in the air. Rho slowed down a bit on his approach, as the information center had seemed to be coming down with Rirhait a couple of minutes ago. Now, though, he could see only one. It was a long-bodied creature wearing a segmented silver-blue shell as metallic as the gleaming blue framework around it. With many of the legs attached to its front segments it was tapping away at some sort of apparently featureless data input console, and staring at this with a wreathing bundle of long-stalked eyes that were rooted in one end segment.

  Rho made his way up to the most open-looking space in the framework that would allow him to see and be seen by the creature. He arranged his face into what he hoped would be construed as a courteous expression, and said in the Speech, “Gentlebeing, the Aethyrs’ favor on you; will you help me? I seek the Stationmaster.”

  “Yes, naturally you do, what else is new,” the creature said, turning not a single one of all those eyes toward him. And it kept on working.

  Rho paused, not sure if somehow he’d gotten his phrasing wrong, or if he was dealing with a species that had difficulties parsing the speech. “Sorry,” he said. “Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.” And then he found himself actually shaking with the thrill of being able to speak his next words to another living creature for the first time. “I am a wizard—” he said.

  “Yes of course you are, why wouldn’t you be, the place is coming down with them,” the creature said. It sounded less than impressed.

  It occurred to Rho that he had forgotten something. “And I am on errantry,” he said hastily, “and I greet you.”

  The Rirhait fixed its gaze on him. It was a progressive business, this—one eye turning its regard to him, and then the next, and the next, and the next…

  Rho had no trouble holding still for this performance, partly due to its uniqueness, and partly because he was after all a prince and used to having a lot of eyes on him. What he was not prepared for was, when those eyes were all trained on him, to see every one of them sequentially rolled at him and shifted away in an expression of exquisite ennui.

  When the eyes were all pointed in every direction that was not toward Rho, “And?” the being said.

  Rho opened his mouth and closed it again, having absolutely no idea where to go from here. “Uh,” he said. Then he rolled his own eyes, for he could just hear his royal father saying, Truly, my Prince? Grunts? Shall we have it noised about that mere surprise can reduce the Sunlord-to-Be to take refuge in grunting?

  Rho’s frustration tipped him over the edge, and he threw any further thoughts of caution to the five airts. “Excellent gentlebeing,” he said, drawing himself up tall, “perhaps a misunderstanding is in progress. Be it known to you that I am Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Nuiiliat det Wellakhit, Son of the Sun Lord, Beloved of the Sun Lord, firstborn of the Sister of the Sun, Prince and Ruler in Waiting to the Wellakhit lands, and Guarantor of Wellakh.”

  The Rirhait kept tapping away at the data input. Finally it paused, swung exactly one eye in his direction, and said:

  “How lovely for you.”

  Rho couldn’t prevent his jaw from dropping.

  “So was there something in particular I can assist you with,” the Stationmaster said, “or do you have a cultural imperative that requires you waste other beings’ time?”

  Rho closed his mouth and then opened it again.

  “Or wait,” the Rirhait said. And slowly one after another of the eyes came around and trained themselves on Roshaun again. “You haven’t actually been put up to this by one of my broodlings. Have you.”

  The tone was bizarrely accusatory. “What?” Roshaun said. “No.” And then, because he honestly couldn’t think of what else to say, he added, “My apologies.”

  The Rirhait began to emit an odd scratchy noise like something mechanical that badly needed a service call. Belatedly Rho realized the sound was laughter: apparently even the enacture property that invested the Speech with wizardly power didn’t necessarily enable one to automatically parse emotional responses. “You’re sure he didn’t talk you into this? You are? What a pity.”

  More eyes trained themselves on Rho again, and the front end of the Rirhait was vibrating a bit. “Well then, young prince from the back of beyond, you have found the one you seek. So my question to you is: is this a business matter regarding
relations between your homeworld and the Crossings, or do you need assistance with infrastructure?”

  “The latter,” Rho said. “I would like to go outside.”

  More eyes fixed themselves on him. “Rather dangerous for thin-skinned species such as yours, by and large, unless you come with subcutaneous rayshielding.”

  “I have some engineered in,” Rho said, “and I can add to it with wizardry if there’s need.”

  “All right,” said the Stationmaster. “Turn around and look back the way you came. See the second standard on your right there, with the crosscorridor just beyond? Those are the legacy 200-group gates. All those hexes have access to the the facility exterior. Choose any one you like and specify your preferred destination using your instrumentality. There’s an observation deck up on top of one of the hard transport parking and storage structures, if you prefer a relatively unobstructed view.”

  “That sounds acceptable,” Rho said. “Thank you.”

  “If you decide to go further afield, princeling,” the Stationmaster said, cocking several eyes at a nearby data tablet which looked to Rho to be just a plate of blank blue metal, “I note that your instrumentality is equipped for unlimited travel for the duration of your Challenge, Ordeal or Invigilation—”

  “Challenge.”

  “Fine. Just present it to the gate attendant or gate management system, or automatic hex for access to the master gating system. Please study any gate’s associated schedule carefully as outbound gatings do not necessarily imply timely inbound or return legs. Anything else?”

  “Ah, no,” Rho said. “Thank you.”

  “Very well.” The Stationmaster turned the attention of almost all its eyes back to the dataplate it was working with; but one eye remained looking at Rho. “So go well then,” it said.

  Rho gave it a small bow and turned away.