minus two hours eighteen minutes to shift initiation.”
“Wrong, O Operations Director, it is two hours, seventeen minutes and twenty-three seconds, human time, precise, to channel open. Any load configuration changes in batch of cheap beads and trinkets you send to us?”
“Nothing appreciable. The outbound will be a couple of tons light. Quan Intertrade had a transshipment delay on a load of entertainment cards they wanted to squeeze aboard today’s load. They requested a hold, but I chilled it. I daresay the People can survive without The Classics of Twentieth Century Video Comedy, volume eight, for another twenty-four hours.
“Volume numbered eight?” Tarrischall chirped.
“Uh-huh,” Lane called up a data line. “Leave it to Beaver through Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
“My species thanks you for reprieve.”
“You’re most welcome. You never know, though. You might like the one about the beavers.”
Humor-purring to himself Tarrischall-of-the-Crystal Springs twisted his sphere-of-communications closed, stowing it into a pouch in his possessions harness. He had eaten in the lower observation bubble of the River-’Tween Worlds Nest-of-Guidance, simultaneously enjoying his meal, his conversation with Friend-Marta-of- the-Place-called-New-England, and the awe-inspiring view.
River-’Tween Worlds held in geosynchronous orbit above the North Pole of Life-Waters, the home world of the People. The huge northern polar continent with its central ice cap rotated slowly beneath them, half in shadow, half blazing in the golden light from Life-Fire-of-All-Things.
On the nightside of Life-Waters, the lights of the linear river cities of the People trickled along the numerous broad watercourses that connected the ice pack with the equatorial lake/seas. On dayside, in a half loop along the equatorial orbits, the sunward collector arrays of the light-power-gatherers glittered like a string of pleasure-time beads.
River–’Tween-Worlds itself was not visible from this end of the great cylindrical skynest.
The channel entry assembly held in a slightly higher orbit above the support facility.
However, the running lights and glowing propulsor vents of the orbital traffic servicing River-’Tween-Worlds spiraled up past the skynest, the trade of the People flowing out to buy the wonders and amusements of the distant Upright culture.
With a final quick cleansing lick of his forepaws, Tarrischall fluidly reversed himself in midair, launching down the core passage with a thump of his muscular tail against the dome surface.
Approaching the central interchange, he exchanged whistled salutations with a pair of coworkers. Spiraling past them, he snared the padded surface of the maneuvering ball that hung suspended at the corridor nexus. His six sets of claws caught a purchase in the webbed fabric and he relaunched himself into the guidance chamber access, his day’s duties due to commence in a sixteenth portion.
None of the People’s space facilities utilized artificial gravity unless it was necessary for some industrial application. A semiaquatic species, the People had come to relish free fall as much as they loved the floating freedom of their world’s vast network of lakes, rivers and shallow seas. A product of his planet’s water-dominated evolutionary processes, Tarrischall was a sexipedal, carnivorous semi-mammal, bearing closest resemblance to a terrestrial river otter blown up to the scale of a Bengal tiger. Covered from whisker pads to tail with a glossy blood- red fur that trended toward a yellowish cream tone along his belly, his species found clothing irrelevant.
Friend-Marta had often mentioned that her kind found the People to be most attractive.
Honestly flattered, Tarrischall had always replied with a verity of polite sophistries.
Marta’s folk were certainly nice enough to know and do trade with, but it had to be admitted that the Uprights were an odd-looking crew.
Tarrischall shot into the Guidance Chamber, a spherical structure with far-viewer panels sheathing its upper and lower surfaces and a row of task pallets spaced around it in a central belt.
The other Voices were already present and at station with shift preparations already underway under the guidance of Narisara-of-the-Ice-Crystal-River. The sleek, black-furred Voice-of-Physics would no doubt have an arch comment or two about the Voice-of-Decision being the last to arrive for duty.
Bouncing off the maneuvering ball in the center of the chamber, Tarrischall dove across to his task pallet. En route he aimed a teasing nip at one of Narisara’s rear legs. Without looking up from the glowing half-bubble of her instrument display she replied with a tail swat that could have broken a jaw if it had been aimed to connect.
Still purring contentedly to himself, Tarrischall belly flopped onto his pallet, his rear-and mid-claw sets hooking into the webbing while the stubby digits of his forepaws played across the touch bar arrays surrounding his display bubble, summoning it to life.
“Fair night, pups,” he called cheerfully. “Let’s send the Uprights some presents.”
The security hatch into the gate operations center recognized Marta’s bio-pattern, sliding open at her approach.
The compartment that contained the center was a large one for a space station. Three tiers of ranked workstations descended from Director’s row, facing the ten-by-five-meter main viewer tank inset in the far bulkhead. Her section chiefs were already hard at it, working the shift countdown.
“Evening, Marta,” Assistant Operations Director Estiban Rocardo called up from the central station of the upper tier. “T minus two and ten to dilation and we are showing all green boards.”
Behind him, the primary display held focus on the Worm Gate itself. Considerable familiarity was required before the view ceased to inspire awe.
The gate complex hovered in fixed orbit at the L-2 La-grange point beyond Earth’s moon. Several kilometers beyond the rotating rim of the command station, the gate itself lay silhouetted against the mottled gray expanse of Luna’s rear face.
The gate structure itself could only be called titanic. Taking advantage of free-fall engineering, its individual components were unconnected, stationkeeping on each other via cybernetically precise thruster control. The twin semi-cylinders of the field generator/accumulator arrays dwarfed the girder structure tube of the perimeter grid, the so-called “worm cage” at their center focus, and the cage itself was one half a kilometer across by one and a half in length.
The toylike myriad of support facilities clustering in free space around the gate, the barge docks, the maintenance and warehousing platforms and the habitat wheels, gave the facility scale. Smaller yet, tug and barge combos and orbital shuttles flitted between the stations like gleaming fish within the structure of a coral reef.
In absolute contrast was the wormhole itself. It was there. It was always there, trapped at the central nexus of the worm cage. Marta knew she was looking right at it, but there was nothing to be seen save for the hole’s imprint on her instrumentation.
In its power-conserving nontransit mode, the wormhole was almost microscopic, held open just enough to insure continued existence and to permit the coherent light flow of the communications laser.
The Worm Gate was beyond being the single greatest creation of humanity. Its building had required the concentrated efforts of two civilizations. The only like to it was its identical twin parked above the second planet of the Wolf 359 system.
Marta chuckled softly, deliberately pausing for a moment to make herself be impressed.
“What’s the joke, Marta?” Rocardo inquired, lifting a dark eyebrow.
“Oh, nothing, Estiban. It’s all so workaday anymore that sometimes I forget that we’re busy doing the impossible out here.”
“What do you mean by impossible?”
“Back in my first year at MIT I can remember attending a lecture by one of the world’s foremost physicists who loudly and firmly proclaimed that the worm search was a waste of funding and that interstellar travel was and would always be beyond the reach of mankind.”
Her Assistant Director smiled indulgently. “No insult intended. But that was a long time ago.”
“I suspect, young man, that had we not made contact with the Furrys that world view would still be in effect. Science is instinctively conservative. We don’t like to shuffle the laws of the universe around unless we have a very good reason for it. But once we knew that somebody was indeed in the neighborhood, we simply had to figure out a way to borrow each other’s lawn mowers.”
Marta had been a little girl when first contact had been established between Humanity and the People. The two species had found each other intriguingly different and yet much alike, both had a broad streak of curiosity in
