interrupt you, I'm a stranger here-'
The computer translated what Dairine said into a brief spasm of bleating, but the spidery people made no response. They came to the end of the line of racks and turned the corner. Ahead of them was what looked like a big building, made in the same way as the cars, an odd aggregate of cubes and other geometrical shapes stuck together with no apparent symmetry or plan. The scale of the thing was astonishing. Dairine suddenly realized that the glowing green-white ceiling was in fact the sky-the lower layer of a thick cloudy atmosphere, actually fluorescing under the light of a hidden, hyperactive sun-and her stomach did an unhappy flip as her sense of scale violently reoriented itself. I wanted strange, she thought, but not this strange!
'Look,' she said to the person she was walking beside as they crossed another pathway toward the huge building, 'I'm sorry if I said something to offend you, but please, I need some help getting my bearings-'
Dairine was so preoccupied that she bumped right into something on the other side of the street-and then yipped in terror. Towering over her was one of the first things to get out of the car, a creature seven feet high at least, and four feet wide, a great pile of glittering, waving metallic claws and tentacles, with an odd smell. Dairine backed away fast and started stammering apologies.
The tall creature bleated at her, a shocking sound up so close. 'Excuse me,' said the computer, translating the bleat into a dry and cultured voice like a BBC announcer's, 'but why are you talking to our luggage?'
'Lip, I, uh,' said Dairine, and shut her mouth. There they were, her first words to a member of another intelligent species. Blushing and furious, she finally managed to say, 'I thought they were people.'
'Why?' said the alien.
'Well, they were walking!'
'It'd be pretty poor luggage that didn't do that much, at least,' said the alien, eyeing the baggage as it spidered by. 'Good luggage levitates, and the new models pack and unpack themselves. You must have come here from a fair way out.'
'Yeah,' she said.
'My gate is about to become patent,' the alien said. 'Come along, I'll show you the way to the departures hall. Or are you meeting someone?'
They started to walk. Dairine began to relax a little: this was more like it. 'No,' she, said, 'I'm just traveling. But please, what planet is this?'
'Earth,' said the alien.
Dairine was surprised for a second, and then remembered having read somewhere that almost every sentient species calls its own planet 'Earth' or 'the world' or something similar. 'I mean, what do other people call it?'
'All kinds of things, as usual. Silly names, some of them. There'll be a master list in the terminal; you can check that.'
'Thanks,' Dairine said, and then was shocked and horrified to see a large triangular piece of the terminal fall off the main mass of the building. Except that it didn't fall more than a short distance, and then regained its height and soared away, a gracefully tumbling pyramid. 'Does it do that often?' she said, when she could breathe again.
'Once every few beats,' said the alien; 'it's the physical-transport shuttle. Are you on holiday? Mind the slide, now.'
'Yes,' Dairine started to say, until the alien stepped onto a stationary piece of pavement in front of them, and instantly began slipping away from her toward the bizarre mass of the terminal building at high speed.
The surprise was too sudden to react to: her foot hit the same piece of paving and slipped from under her as if she had stepped on ice. Dairine threw her arms out to break her fall, except that there wasn't one.
She was proceeding straight forward, too, tilted somewhat backward, at about fifty miles an hour. Her heart hammered. It hammered worse when something touched her from behind; she whipped around, or tried to. It was only the alien's luggage, reaching out to tilt her forward so she stood straight. 'What is this!' she said.
'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
