Authors: Anne Mccaffrey
The poopuus swam up to meet them, and three fish flopped onto the deck, gifts for Khiindi, who had become their particular friend.
The poopuus seldom made friends with bipeds, much less quadrupeds. Their people had mutated long ago from being island-dwelling bipeds to ocean-dwelling mammals whose legs had fused into tails and whose feet had webbed into serviceable flippers.
Khiindi, of course, simply wanted to be where the fish were. Khorii loved her cat but knew him for the consummate opportunist he was.
They didn’t question her or even talk to her very much, but let her swim with them and, when she was relaxed enough, play. When she was underwater, she heard their voices as a kind of song. Being able to swim without having to purify anything or anyone in particular was so soothing.
The visit was all too brief, however. Khorii and the crew of the
Balakiire
had to resume their mission. As she dried off and bid farewell to the poopuus, Khorii consoled herself that the sooner they left, the sooner they’d be done and she could go home again.
The relay from home arrived after they returned to the ship.
“What is this
White Star?
” Neeva asked.
Khorii rolled her eyes. Trust Uncle Joh to think of his salvage even when the most serious work was under way. “It’s nothing. A derelict ship we found, full of plague victims. But everyone was already long gone before we found it. It will certainly keep.”
Neeva accepted her assessment. They made numerous inspections of other worlds, moons, and occupied asteroids. Occasionally there was a small pocket of plague that had cropped up recently, but nothing like the original outbreak. People had learned that children and elders were fairly immune, and were better able to contain the disease when a case or two occurred. Of all of the populations the
Balakiire
visited, only three had fresh outbreaks and among these, there were only two fatalities before the Linyaari arrived to completely eradicate the menace.
LoiLoiKua, Khorii was pleased to learn, was also free of plague, as it should be. This was where Khorii, in trying to save the kinfolk of her friends on Maganos, had ended by purifying the ocean that covered most of LoiLoiKua and everyone in it.
That was how she first discovered that people could be cured of the plague by contact with water she (or, later, other Linyaari) purified.
The
wii
-
Balakiire
set down on one of the islands along the central ridge separating the ocean into two sectors. Elviiz piloted the shuttle and stayed with it while Khiindi hopped out to patrol the shore for any stray fish that might have lost their way and beached themselves. Khorii dived into the water. She was surprised when no one came to meet her and swam out some distance before several of the people she’d met on her first trip popped up in front of her.
“Greetings, Korikori!”
they chorused.
“Greetings from your children,”
she told them.
“Is that what brought you here?”
asked Nanahomea, grandmother of Likilekakua, one of Khorii’s poopuu friends, and matriarch of a clan of the LoiLoiKuans.
“We did not dream you would return to us, much less so quickly. We are happy to see you.”
“I’m happy to see you, too,”
she said.
“Actually, I’m on a special mission with others like me to learn if the plague is still active. Has anyone else become ill since I was here before?”
“No. Our ocean, our shores, and our people were all healed when last you swam among us. So at least we have no new illness.”
Her thought politely concealed another, a worry or a fear that she was not stating. Khorii knew. Thought-talk, especially between people who did not know each other well, was a lot like the ocean. There were the surface thoughts, placid ripples or roaring waves, and those were what were expressed. Linyaari courtesy dictated that one did not delve below the thoughts most openly expressed. Of course, what was expressed openly revealed some of what lay underneath, in most people. And sometimes, without meaning to, the speaker dredged up material from the deep that flashed to the surface before sinking again.
“No plague but something else, other than your grief, that troubles you?”
Khorii asked.
“No, nothing that has caused any actual trouble, but things have happened, things have been seen, which should not be possible.”
A thought image came to Khorii of something huge and menacing lurking in the depths, sheltering in the reef where it could not be seen except for the snap of a massive barbed tail, a double bank of boulder-sized teeth.
“New life-forms?”
Khorii asked, and because Jalonzo had tried to explain his fantasy game to her so such things were on her mind,
“Monsters?”
“Things which have never existed here before,”
Nanahomea said cautiously.
“No one has seen a whole one. The parts that have been seen resemble slightly the creatures who died in the early stages of the plague, after
Raealacaldae poisoned the water. But these creatures are not the only disturbing matters.”
“What else?”
“I have seen lights inside Raealacaldae’s dwelling, and it makes noises.”
“What kind of noises?”
Khorii asked.
“It sounds as if dry things are moving in there,”
Nanahomea said after thinking it over.
“Dry things are leaping from their moorings and diving onto dry ground. The noises they make sound as if they are breaking into parts. Small explosions have also been heard, and scrapings, clankings, noises that only Raealacaldae made when he lived on the land here. We seldom make them because we live in the sea, where all falling things are buoyed by water.”
“I will look inside the sand castle for you and see if I can determine what’s making the noises,”
Khorii said.
She swam back to shore and stood on the beach. The flowers that had covered both the beach and the bodies of the dead were long gone, blown away by winds or rotted until they became part of the soil, as the bodies must have. Here and there Khorii saw holes in the sand, sinkholes, similar to the ones in the square in Corazon. Did they have a rainy season here, too? She would have to ask Nanahomea.
Seeing the door to the sand castle standing ajar, she thought that the wind had been blowing through the castle, sweeping through the former Federation administrator’s possessions as it had swept away the flowers.
Of course, that would not explain lights, but perhaps they were timed to come on automatically at certain times of the day or night, to coincide with the routines Raealacaldae had performed.
She had not entered the sand castle on her former trip. Her business was with the living, but if the material objects left behind by the dead were causing the ocean dwellers’ concern, she didn’t mind helping out.
“Hello?” she called, and immediately winced at her own rationality. There was no one here to answer, or even hear her greeting. She stepped inside and looked around. The little steepled windows made long blades of light on the floor, sparkling off shards of glass. The shadows were very deep, and she looked for the lighting controls. There were none.
She took another cautious step, toward the broken glass, treading carefully since, although her feet were hard enough to need no coverings, they could be pierced by sharp objects, and she had no wish to lame herself.
Outside she heard the purr of the surf as it pushed and pulled at the beach. She heard the cries of birds, too. She didn’t recall seeing any birds on her previous visit, but she had been much preoccupied. Though the plague killed animals and even plants, it probably spared these birds because most of its energies were spent in the sea. Perhaps the birds had sensed instinctively that they needed to avoid the areas where bodies were piled, though under most circumstances, from what she knew of many species of seabirds, they would have relished carrion.
She stooped and looked more closely at the broken object. A filament, a socket, and much broken glass. A lamp. One with its own individual power source and control, as colonists sometimes used in places where the trappings of larger settlements had yet to be installed. Whatever the nature of the mysterious lights that Nanahomea had seen, this lamp was not responsible. Looking up she saw the empty wall sconce where it had been stationed.
How would the wind have knocked it down from there?
Her eyes more accustomed to the light, Khorii saw that the desk, the chair, and the narrow bed that were the other furnishings of the room were also in pieces. Pictures and documents lay atop the rubble, more glass, more twisted metal and broken frames.
What could have caused all this? No puddles of water among the wreckage suggested a wave. A determined animal could do some of it—or a herd of determined animals. But the only amphibious animal she’d encountered here had been a turtle, and turtles were not only unlikely to be excitable, they also were low to the ground when on land and would never have been able to reach some of the objects, even by crashing into lower ones.
She shrugged to herself and stood. And whirled around when she heard something, or thought she did. Had there been a noise from just beside her, or was it some weird echo of the sound she made when she stood?
There.
Again.
This time from overhead. She looked up, but the shadows were even deeper at the top of the castle’s towers, which rounded out the corners of the single room. The roof was flat. Perhaps it was coming from up there? There was no staircase, but peering into the tower enclosures more closely, she saw a ladder leaning against a far wall. She looked up and saw a thin rectangular thread of light above the highest rung of the ladder. She took it to be a trapdoor to the roof.
The round rungs of the ladder were not easy for her hard Linyaari hooves to manage. Ship’s ladders had proper steps, narrow, of course, but flat enough that Linyaari were able to plant their feet on them. This ladder was more primitive. She propped it at an angle against the wall. She was small and light, but the ladder wobbled alarmingly.
Was that some sort of laughter or had her stomach gurgled? She really wished Elviiz were with her, or Neeva. Even Khiindi could have scampered up the ladder with his nimble paws, though she doubted he had the weight to open the trapdoor.
She tested her weight on the next rung and lifted herself, using her hands to bear most of her weight. As she took her foot off the lower rung, it rolled and slid loose, throwing her off-balance so that the other foot slipped from the ladder as well. For a moment she clung with her hands, then realized that was stupid. She wasn’t that far off the ground, and if she clung to the ladder, she’d pull it down on top of her. So she let go and hopped down. The ladder tried to follow her but she caught it in time and propped it up. Well, it was a flat roof. She’d go outside and see what she could see. She hadn’t heard any more noises that she was not generating herself because hers were so loud they would have drowned out anything softer.
She stepped out into the sunlight again and looked up at the roof, but the only sounds she heard were the wind and the sea, which were lost as the shuttle descended.
It set down on the beach, the roar of its landing drowning out the subtle sounds Khorii had been trying to trace.
Khiindi leaped from the hatch and landed protectively in front of her, growling up at the castle’s flat roof.
She laughed. “Good show, cat, but I know you only came here hoping that the LoiLoiKuan elders would be as generous with the fish as their children.”
Khiindi cast a wounded glance in her direction, then let out a long ferocious hiss at the roof and with an unusually long spring placed himself on the rooftop where he made a great show of hissing, snarling, stalking, pouncing, then chasing something off the far edge. He jumped back to the beach and gave chase as far as the water’s edge, then cast a reproachful look back at Khorii as if she should have prevented his imaginary quarry from escaping.
By that time, Elviiz was standing beside her. She was laughing so hard the tears were streaming, and she could scarcely draw breath.
“Oh, Khiindi Kaat, you were magnificent!” she said. “Whatever that was will think twice before returning while
you’re
around.”
Khiindi turned and stood up straight, head proud, chest puffed out, tail held like a standard with its fluffy hairs flagging in the wind, and pranced toward her, the conquering hero, or, if not conquering, at least undefeated.
And then, suddenly, her mind was full of frenzied thoughts, cascading over her so fast and so furiously that she couldn’t separate them. The LoiLoiKuans were desperately agitated about something—fear, pain, more fear…Khorii waded back into the water and swam out in search of the emotional hornets’ nest.
“What is it?”
she called.
“Nanahomea, what’s wrong?”
“Korikori, come quick, the monster attacked Mokilau.”
N
arhii is not going in that thing alone,” Hruffli said.
“Don’t be daft, old nag,” Neicaair told him. “You can’t use that machine.”
“I can be with her,” the old stallion said. “If we should land during the time of the monsters Grimalkin spoke of, I will defend her with hoof and horn, and she may escape while I fight them off.”
“You don’t know how to use it,” Morniika said.
“I think I do,” Narhii told her. “I’ve seen the Friends do it. I think I even know how to tell where to go. And Hruffli, if I chose a wrong time and we landed among monsters, I would never leave you to fight them. I appreciate your wanting to defend me, but you have family here and mine is there. I would not feel right if you come with me and then I’d never know if you safely returned to this time again.”
“Couldn’t be that much to it,” the old stallion grumbled. But he nosed her neck, and she felt his relief in his touch. He was brave, he was willing, but he did not truly wish to leave.