Authors: Anne Mccaffrey
She knew all about the timer, however. There was no need to involve him or the others. It looked very easy when she saw the Friends use it, but she had never had reason to try until now because she had not known before that she had family. All she had to do was find them.
There was another problem, she realized, once she left the Others and returned to her little cell off the laboratory. They could read her thoughts, but she couldn’t read theirs. They would know what she was planning. Or would they?
They weren’t ever interested in what she wanted to think about, only in what they wanted her to think about. Otherwise, they were preoccupied with their own much more important concerns. She didn’t think she’d be able to hide the revelation the Others had given her, but unlike everyone else, she wasn’t concerned about the mating aspects of finding her people. She only wanted to be among others like her, to belong. Still, it would be best if she could make her move before the next interrogation.
If only she could read their minds, too! Then she’d know exactly how to time travel and where to find her people. Why was it she could understand the thought-talk of the Others and not that of the Friends? Why couldn’t the probing work two ways? It was so unfair!
Then, looking up at the ceiling, she saw something looking back. An eye. A viewer that had never been there before, in the one space that they had given her to be her own. She groaned. Why was she surprised? But inside her anger began to burn. The more they tried to see her, the more they erased her. And she did not want to be erased, especially when she felt for the first time that she might be somehow enlarged when others like her taught her more about what she was,
why
she was, other than an object of study for the curiosity of the Friends.
She leaped from her cot and charged to her closed door, which she could not lock from the inside. As she stormed into the empty laboratory, looking for someone to complain to, not that it would do any good, she was startled to hear voices.
Not hear with her ears, exactly, but hear in the way she heard the Friends. The voices were inside her head, muttering and murmuring, even counting sometimes. She walked through the lab to the outer chamber where the great skein of water and energy twisted upward through the ceiling. She had observed enough to know that this was the power generator of the time device, and that it pierced the entire building and spread outward to catch the rains and downward, thrusting out into all of the waterways of the world.
Why? she wondered, and received a distracted answer.
“Because time and water flow, of course.”
Four technicians tended the timer, calibrating, tabulating, charting, and making adjustments she didn’t understand.
The person who answered her seemed to think that her question came from one of his colleagues.
“Interesting,”
she thought, unconsciously mimicking the response she often received from Akasa or Odus.
That, too, was taken to be the comment of one of the time technicians.
When they did see her, they ignored her without thinking about it. She had been among them since she was a baby. Unaccustomed to children, for the Friends did not seem to have any, they assumed she was as stupid and harmless now as she had been as a baby. During her toddler period, when she was extremely exploratory, she had been penned in a special environment with playthings that taught her skills the Friends found it useful for her to have, though she had learned far more than that. She had learned quickly to watch and listen but not touch any of their devices or instruments without being invited. Someone told her once not to touch things, and that was all it required. She stopped exploring tactilely beyond her play environment, and soon she was released from it.
So the technicians paid her no heed, something much to her advantage.
She noted that on the wall where all time and events were laid out in a sparkling mural of coded light, there was one area devoid of light or movement. In fact, a large X had been painted over it. It looked broken and incongruous next to the rest of the sleek equipment.
“Pity,” the nearest technician muttered aloud, then turned his body very slightly to bounce his remarks off the technician beside him, if not to open an actual dialogue. “Too bad we can’t send someone in there to repair it, but the Khleevi monsters caused great damage. We cannot arrive after the damage is done using our apparatus because it is broken beyond that time and we can’t arrive before it’s broken or risk meeting the monsters ourselves. The only way to do it would be by using one of the personal timers the nobles wear, but they’d never entrust one to a lowly technician.”
Narhii wondered why that was.
“They wouldn’t be able to stand the inconvenience of not being able to flit about from now till then till once upon a time as they choose. We run this entire system and yet when the new model became available from the homeworld, were we given any, even to study in case it needed repairs?”
“Not on your life!” a fellow technician answered.
Narhii found all of this very interesting. These fellows seemed to resent the noble Friends almost as much as she did.
Technician number 2 continued. After all the years she’d spent among them, Narhii had no clear idea of which one was which or what any of their names might be, if they had mates or interests aside from maintaining the time mechanism. The nobles, the scientists, were very colorful, bursting into alternate forms frequently and dressing in vivid colors and sweeping robes when in humanoid form. The technicians could have been siblings, and although some bore female secondary sexual characteristics, all had short hair, wore uniforms, and were of similar size. She saw the time technicians most frequently, but sometimes around the city she would see others repairing or installing other devices.
One of the females spoke up, “It would have made sense, when Grimalkin fell and was stripped of his timer, to allow us to study it so that we might produce more, but no, into Milady Akasa’s jewel box it went, and there it has remained, neglected and useless.”
“How do you know she put it in her jewel box?” one of the others asked.
“One of my batch sibs services her suite,” the female answered.
Batch sib? Here was another mystery and where she least expected it, among the dull technicians. A sib would be a brother or sister but why “batch”? Why not simply family or group, or even litter, as some of the smaller animals produced?
Who was this Grimalkin and why was he stripped of his timer?
As if she had asked aloud, the female continued. “Shame about Grimalkin, really. I always liked him.”
“Females do!” one of the males said.
“No, not that way. But sometimes when he was in trouble, he would switch to his cat form and lie beside me while I worked or rested. I found it very soothing. And his antics were entertaining. He annoyed the other nobles even more than they sometimes annoy us.”
“Hush! That’s heresy. The nobles are not annoying. We are merely inadequate to understand the nuances of their needs at times.”
“Oh please! You lot from the last batch are insufferable now, believing everything they coded into you. You’ll learn as you age and are around your prototypes more. They are so arrogant I sometimes think they created us to hold any humility that may have been part of their original characters.”
“Nobles have no need for humility. They are infallible,” the new batch lackey replied with a sincerity that the others, Narhii could tell, found pitiable.
“That’s what I liked best about Grimalkin. He was not infallible. And it was unfair, his disgrace. He brought back the mutant, even though he had to steal her egg from her mother, who had saved his life, you know, and was his friend, before the twin was born. But they were angry that he didn’t take both twins!”
“How do you know that?”
“My sib overheard Lady Akasa complaining about it. She laughed about how, since he was so devoted to that family and had left the other poor twin to grow up among them, the nobles had stripped him of his timer. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they froze him in his alter form, even regressing the form so that he was presented as a juvenile feline to grow up with the twin.”
Narhii ducked back into the laboratory, stunned by this information and needing time to digest it. Not only did she have people, she had a twin! And she had been stolen from a brave mother before she could be born.
She had to return to her people—
had to.
But the timer was useless beyond a certain point, and she gathered from the chronology of the technician’s thoughts that she had been born after the damage, in the distant future. If only she could lay hands on Grimalkin’s timer and learn how to use it, she would be able to return to her family, to her twin, and expose the disgraced noble, now her sister’s cat, for what he was.
“Mu, there you are!” Odus said. “It is time to continue yesterday’s session. But today we must probe a bit deeper.”
N
o, Khorii!” Elviiz said, holding her back when she would have dived into the water. “You will not swim.” He dragged her back into the shuttle, Khiindi a jump ahead of them. “The
wii
-
Balakiire
has an amphibious mode. If there are monsters, the vessel will be much less vulnerable than you are.”
And though she seethed at her android brother’s assumption of command over her actions, she had to admit, as the
wii-Balakiire
sped into the sea and submerged, that he was correct.
“Aunt Neeva and the rest of our people, especially those on the rescue teams, would be displeased if you perished,” Elviiz said.
“What if the monster can attack vessels more easily than people and kills us all?” Khorii asked, still sulking a little.
“Then at least I will not have to bear their reproach,” Elviiz answered, quite seriously. Of course, he was seldom anything
but
serious.
Even so, the
wii
-
Balakiire
, with guidance from Khorii’s psychic sense of the location of Nanahomea and the others, brought them there quickly and with an unexpected benefit.
Mokilau, though covered with strange sores and bruises and clearly shaken, floated beside Nanahomea while the remaining elders supported him.
At Khorii’s insistence, Elviiz opened the underwater airlock and she swam out to join the LoiLoiKuans.
“Your ship made the monster release Mokilau,” Nanahomea said. Khorii swam to the old mer man and gently applied her horn to his wounds, which healed instantly.
All underwater healing did not deplete her—just the plague, so far. Unlike the last time she used her horn to heal while inside the ocean, the water was not disease-infested, nor were any of the other people, so her horn’s power localized to where it was most needed and restored Mokilau’s body to its uninjured state.
The old man’s white lashes raised, his chest heaved, and he grinned, then flipped in the water, took a brief swim, and returned clutching something. “A trophy,” he said, flourishing a long green object that looked half fin and half frond. “I took a piece of its tail.” With a bow that turned into a somersault, he proffered the object to Khorii. “I thought to keep this for my regalia, but the victory is truly yours, Korikori. Wear this proudly.”
She took it, though she couldn’t imagine accessorizing her shipsuit with it. “We cannot chase the monster and slay it,” she told them. “You understand, my people are not aggressive, and we do not kill.”
She thought it was rather too bad Khiindi couldn’t assume her size and command of the shuttle temporarily. She hated leaving these people unprotected and at the mercy of this mysterious monster after everything else they had endured. Khiindi would have had no reservations about dispatching the creature, as he had demonstrated on the beach.
Nanahomea brushed her cheek with webbed fingers. “Child, you have done enough for us already. You must not bear the weight of our world on your shoulders when you already have a universe to heal. We can take care of ourselves against tangible enemies.” She opened her other hand to reveal a blade. “We know how to hunt creatures larger than ourselves with the weapons our reef gives us.” Some of the others held blades in their hands or brandished long branches of coral with pointed ends as spears or harpoons.
Mokilau looked doubtful. “It is larger than the biggest whale, larger than a school of whales. And it has as many mouths and suckers like a squid or octopus—also it makes a cloud around it as they do so that you see nothing but cloudy water before it is upon you, stinging like a thousand jellyfish until one of its mouths can bite you in half.”
“So it will take more than one knife,” another male elder said. “Maybe a good harpoon.”
“Can you hide from it, stay away from it until we can find people with the technology and know-how to help you?” Khorii asked.
“Did I mention that the suckers are attached to tentacles, each like a giant fire eel, long enough to penetrate deep into crevasses?”
Exasperated by her inability to help and by Mokilau’s escalating description of the horrible features of the sea beast, Khorii resorted to one of Uncle Joh Becker’s expressions. “Mokilau, work with me, will you?” But when she touched his mind, she saw that the beast was much as he had described. She recalled her dream. “If you can evade this beast a short while longer, perhaps we can find you a new place to live, a safe place, with a healthy and friendly land species. Would such a solution be acceptable to you? I understand that you sent your children to Maganos because this world is dying.”
“Do what you can,” Nanahomea said. “We will try to evade the creature, as you say.”
“But it is very hungry,” Mokilau said. “The disease killed most of the sea’s creatures, and there is little left for it—or us—to eat. I do not think it will content itself with seaweed.”
W
hen the shuttle returned to the
Balakiire,
the other crew members read her quickly and examined the piece of sea monster with scientific curiosity.