Authors: Anne Mccaffrey
T
o think she had imagined that having a sister would be a good thing! Khorii could not believe what Ariin had done—to her, to Khiindi, to their poor, plague-ridden parents, and to Elviiz, who might not be worried, or even concerned, strictly speaking, but would certainly be baffled without her around to bully, protect, teach, embarrass, and aggravate. She was, after all, his prime mission.
Angry tears welled in her eyes, blurring the colored lights blinking on the walls representing people going about their business. Most of the lights were clustered beside the sea, she noticed. That was odd. They should be fanning out from the ballroom. Then she realized that the lights were in a different place because the people were moving in a different time. So where were they then?
The lights flickered back and forth slightly but stayed within that small area on the beach. It was not, Khorii saw now, the shore near Kubiilikaan but was farther down the coast, near the field occupied by the Ancestors. A red circle blinked slowly on and off. One by one the dots moved within the circle’s perimeter. Khorii watched, wondering what the circle could be. What had been there, on the way to the Ancestor’s meadow? The spaceport?
Suddenly, the red circle turned to green, and the blinking stopped. The circle and all four of the smaller lights it contained blinked out.
“Ariin?” Khorii called, but she could not feel her sister, could not hear her. Ariin was gone, not only out of time but off the planet. Khorii’s father had once done the same thing according to family lore, but he hadn’t left her mother stranded in a time not her own, had he?
Since this was a time machine, maybe she could get it to take her to the time before Ariin actually left. The only problem was she had no idea how it worked. It couldn’t be too hard, could it? And she could scarcely land herself in worse trouble than she was anyway. Anything would be better than being stuck here with Odus—anything except—when was it that the Khleevi invaded Vhiliinyar? When had they destroyed the timer for good? She certainly didn’t want to make a mistake and take herself to that time. No, if she was going to stop Ariin, then she could wait until she could watch the time device in operation, see how it worked. Meanwhile, she looked around for some kind of signature that would tell her when Ariin had disappeared so that she could judge her own departure accurately.
T
he little gray tabby trotted back to Kubiilikaan, wishing he could have remained a unicorn until he was most of the way there. A cat’s stride didn’t begin to compare when it came to covering distance. However, shapeshifting in the middle of the meadow might draw unwanted attention. He did not wish Halili or his fellow “Friends” to recognize his true nature yet. In this time he was not yet frozen in cat shape, and he wanted to keep it that way.
Once inside the city, he bounded up the short steps between the street and the time building, then had to wait for someone to open the door.
No techs worked in the time room today, and the little dots shifted minutely around the screen with each passing second, so the thing was working perfectly. That was good. The device was large and clunky and did not guarantee his ability to return quickly to this time without the benefit of a stream or other watery conduit. He much preferred a crono, but it was harder for his little cat paws to manipulate than the big screen. If he could find his earlier self, the two-legged version, he could retrieve his own crono, find Khorii and her bratty sister, and they could return everything to normal. Of course, normal would do nothing to solve the problem of the morphing alien blob that would probably spread itself like a giant mutant slug all over the known universe, destroying life as they knew it, but he didn’t see how that was any of his affair now. Even if it was, his girl should not be put at further risk to fix things. She was much too young to save universes yet. And someone needed to sit on that sister of hers until the wretched child was halfway socialized and safe to move among decent people and cats.
Elviiz now, Elviiz would be the ideal sort of fellow to help solve this glitch in the cosmic harmony to which Grimalkin was so uniquely and sensitively attuned. But Elviiz was incapacitated. A crono could fix that, too. All Grimalkin needed to do was fetch a future Elviiz, a fixed one, pull him back on a different time line and the two of them could go troubleshooting, with Elviiz doing the heavy lifting and the data compilation, analysis, and manipulation while Grimalkin operated on the more intuitive plane—or multiple intuitive planes, his particular area of expertise. It was vastly underrated and trivialized, but he was used to that. So few appreciated him. Tragic, but it seemed to be his lot. No matter. Once he saved the universe, he could return to the unicorn herd and Halili, for a while at least.
If he timed it right, he wouldn’t even have to explain to her why he left without so much as a horn touch.
Paws and mind control were all he needed to operate the time device. Even tail brushes could shift the time lines of the sensitive machine. The best course of action would be to search for himself at an earlier time, use the time device to reunite his selves and acquire the crono, fetch Elviiz, save the universe, then collect the girls.
Of course, that was assuming there were no hitches in his plan, and even he had to admit that there always were. So, no, he really needed to secure the girls, get his crono back from Ariin, return the youngsters to safety, not that they’d stay there, then collect Elviiz, who would no doubt be more cooperative, knowing his sisters were safe.
Find Ariin and the crono, that was his first priority. Only, maybe it would be better to collect Khorii first, and they could both use the device to find Ariin and the crono. There was always the little problem that when he returned the girls and went to fetch Elviiz, the form-freeze would once more trap him in small cat form, which would be highly inconvenient.
Hmmm. Even if he found himself and his own crono, he wondered if he could outsmart himself long enough to get control of the device—or would his two forms meld? Ah, the much-vaunted time-space continuum conundrum. But, if anyone would understand his motives, he would.
He scanned the screen, searching for the deceptively insignificant dot that represented his own two-legged self. During this time period, his interests had included romantic dinners and long walks on the beach with any female he could interest in pursuing those activities and the ones he wished to follow them. His own kind were a bit indiscriminate that way, since all of the actual breeding they did was in the laboratory. No combination of themselves had actually produced offspring since he was born.
Perhaps the females of his species were sterile. He knew beyond a doubt that he was fully capable of reproduction. His activities in other times on other planets had proved that.
Where was he, anyway? He saw the avatar of his cat self sitting in front of the machine in the time building, blinking as the individual dots did when one sought them out. Was the machine refusing to acknowledge that there might be two of him during the same time? How limited!
He framed a protest to the technicians’ guild in which he complained about the lack of individual freedom implied by such shortsightedness on the part of the device. Why should there not be two of someone as dynamic and large-spirited as he was? Who made up these silly rules anyway?
He lashed his tail in irritation and groomed his whiskers to calm himself. When he looked back up at the wall screen, he was gratified to see that his complaint had already been addressed. There were indeed two of him represented—both showing up as cat avatars inside the time device room.
At the same time that he saw this, he heard the growl. A low, menacing, ferocious growl, that of a powerfully fierce beast, almost made him jump out of his fur coat. He leaped three feet in the air, made a 180, and faced himself in the form of a magnificent, tawny tiger cat with a full, fluffy ruff and tail and a long lustrous coat sticking straight up over most of his body in a display of outrage. Unfortunately, Khiindi had little time to admire himself because he—the other he—seemed to be in an uncharacteristically nasty mood. Before he landed, his other cat met him in a midair clash of fang, claws, and filthy feline language.
“No, wait!” Khiindi squalled. “Hurting me will only hurt yourself. Inhale! Sniff! Do I not smell intimately familiar?”
His other self ripped his poor little gray ear before the thought sunk in. “You smell like me and—and—the Others! Who are you?”
His other cat self wasn’t thinking, but Khiindi was. The ear really hurt, but as the other cat’s claws reached out to shred it, Khiindi had seen the gleam of metal among the hairs of the distended ruff. The crono! Quickly, and with great relief, Khiindi changed into his two-legged form, snatched up his feline self, and relieved the cat of the crono as gently as possible, considering that the cat self was filleting his hands. He tried to drop himself back onto the floor as he pulled the crono onto his bleeding wrist, but the other Grimalkin dragged claws all the way down his bare body.
“Stop it!” he commanded. “I’m only borrowing”—But suddenly, the claws gave way, and when he looked down, no fur or whisker of his other self remained.
Had he absorbed the other cat self into his two-legged form in the course of the fight? Had the cat recognized his own blood and retreated in embarrassment? He really didn’t care. He’d had no intention of returning the crono anyway. It was his, after all.
Now to find Khorii and Ariin. From what the girls had said, he was fairly certain they would have returned to the building where he stood. Ariin wanted Khorii to take her place so she would return them to the time when she had lived among his own kind.
He could have used the crono, but it was easier to use the larger device to confirm the presence of the girls at the estimated time. He saw Khorii’s dot, wavering uncertainly from within the time lab in the future. Ariin’s dot did not wink at him from anywhere on the wall. He could backtrack to an earlier time, when presumably the girls would still be together, but then he decided that meeting Khorii alone would be easier. He wanted to explain his side of things to her without Ariin inserting her own interpretation.
He triggered the device, and there was Khorii, standing in front of him. He was in cat form again! She gasped as he leaped to her shoulder, crono around his neck again, and with a dextrous maneuver of his left hind paw returned them to the time he had just left. He preferred to be able to shift shapes at will while they finished what they had to do, and his unwilling transformation showed that the time Ariin had taken her to was within the boundaries of his banishment to permanent cat form.
Once the transition was made, he leaped from her shoulder and returned to two-legged form. He was naked, and naked humanoids were more naked somehow than naked Linyaari. Although he knew himself to be a beautiful male, he didn’t want the appearance of all other males who might be appropriate mates for his young charge to pale by comparison with her memory of him forever after. He turned himself into a tiger, pawed open the panel where the techs hid their work robes, and held it in his teeth while he changed back again while she watched, puzzled, squeaking slightly at the tiger form, then rubbing her eyes while he pulled the robe around his two-legged form.
“Do not be afraid, Khorii,” he told her.
She looked annoyed. “So Ariin was telling the truth. All this time you’ve actually been an alien shapeshifter, one of the demideities my people call the Friends. Some Friend! Bad cat, Khiindi! Very bad cat indeed.”
“I’m not,” he said, his lordly baritone carrying a hint of the plaintive mew that usually made her forgive him any trouble he’d caused. “Haven’t I been your loyal friend all these years? It’s very unkind of you to say otherwise. I pledged to help you through any troubles you encountered, and I always have. That’s what I’m doing now, only I need my true form to do it. And I wanted to talk to you, face-to-nonfurry-face.”
“I’m listening.”
But at that point, a gaggle of female techs entered the time lab. “Lord Grimalkin, you’ve returned!” one of them said. “Why are you wearing that old thing?”
The speaker was clearly dazzled by him, and he gave her a kindly smile. “I fear I lost something in my translation,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d be a dear and go to my quarters and collect my amber robes, would you? The matching slippers and headdress are packaged with it.”
She nodded, he winked, and she danced out the doorway. Some days it took so little from him to bring happiness to others.
When he looked back at the other techs, they were whispering behind their hands, their eyes looking speculatively at Khorii.
“Ah,” he said. “You’re wondering about this youngling, I see. She’s—mmm—the result of experiments I’ve been conducting in the future.”
“Experiments?” the eldest of the techs chortled. “Is that what you call it now, you sly cat? Experimenting?”
He shook a finger at her. “You know me too well, Twexa. You’re right, of course, she’s a descendant we lords have been attempting to reverse-engineer.”
“Bit young for that, isn’t she, sir?” Twexa asked.
“You wrong me, Twexa. I am as serious a scientist in my own way as my colleagues are in theirs.”
“Of course you are, dear. Your sense of fun can be misleading. I’m always telling the others that,” she said.
“Thank you, Twexa. Your understanding means a lot to me.”
The tech he’d sent to fetch his robes returned, and he allowed her to help him don them, leaving Khorii in the care of the others. At least she wouldn’t have to answer any questions, since they were all asking them at once. He regretted the necessity for speed in his toilette. The tech—Polida—was touchingly appreciative. But her time would come as long as he had the crono. There was no reason for his sweet Halili to know about anything he did in his two-legged form.
With a hand in the middle of Polida’s back, he shepherded her to the main time chamber, where Khorii was surrounded by techs, all gabbling together as they surveyed the time map spread before them.