Whispered Magics (10 page)

I caught that hand and squeezed it. “No one here but us,” I
said, faking a laugh. It sounded like the rattle of pebbles on ice.

Ben was silent, his breathing ragged, which sent pain through
me, sharp as ice shards. In the distance I heard sirens wailing, and I squeezed
his hand again, harder.

“Unh,” he groaned—a protest. But when I eased my grip, his
fingers tightened on mine, just a pulse.

I looked at his thin face, knowing that I’d chosen my
darkness, while he hadn’t. My family all tried in their own ways to hold out
lights to me, but I was too angry to see them. Ben, closed off from the light
by other people’s anger, had no lights—no hope.

He squinted up at me. “They are gone. I can’t see them.”

“Maybe the ghosts found their light,” I said. My eyes stung,
my throat hurt, my nose was running. Footsteps clumped around us, flashlights
glared in our faces. Hands reached, some to help him, some to push me away. But
Ben’s head turned toward me, so I gripped his hand and said, like making a
promise, “Let’s find yours.”

“Honk! Honk!” The damage alarm was louder than the pings
and klonks of the meteorite shower our scout ship had accidentally encountered
on our emergence from hyperspace.

“A puncture! We’re losing energy,” Kikinee shrilled.

“Teer! Noot! Take evasive action,” the Vmmm’s voice hummed
over the intercom. “I will fix the puncture.”

Teer waved at me to take piloting as she worked at her
computer.

I did my best to guide our scout ship around the biggest
meteorites. There was no time to set up a course. I punched us back into
hyperdrive, and the screens smeared as our engines took us between dimensions.

With no idea where we were going, I yelled to our navigator,
“Thisko, can’t you—”

“Navigational computer is down,” Thisko said, five of his
eight tentacles working away.

“At least if we drop out of hyper around a planet,” came
Smelch’s mournful hoot, “we won’t have to spend five long hours in the Room for
Reviewing Actions.”

Kikinee waved at a cable that had shaken loose when the first
big rock hit the ship, and chirped, “Quiet, Smelch, and give me a hand with
that gravity-link.”

Still muttering, Smelch shot one of its six hands across the
cabin to the dangling wires. The fingers quickly maneuvered the gravity-link
back to where it ought to be, and we felt gravity ripple through the ship
again.

Then Kikinee tossed the hand back across the cabin and with a
loud splorch, it reattached to Smelch’s arm.

We were all strapped into our pods, so we hadn’t floated, but
a couple of the things that had come loose—like part of Kikinee’s lunch—stopped
floating and dropped with a thud, klank, and a squashy noise. Kikinee and
Smelch scrambled to clean up.

When things were stable again, I pulled us back into the
realtime dimension, hoping we would emerge in the safety of space.

We were lucky.

“We’re near a system,” Thisko said after a pause, and sent the
coordinates to my screen. “Noot, get us there! The third planet shows that the
atmosphere is mainly oxygen and hydrogen—”

“Is the planet on the survey list?” came the Vmmm’s voice.
“Dangerous life form warnings?”

“Class Five listing for this system,” Teer said, checking
Thisko’s data.

I was still busy piloting us toward the mysterious planet and
trying to shed the enormous velocity built up during our jump between
dimensions.

“Average sun, ten planets in all—looks like one broke up—”
Teer went on.

The scout ship bucked again.

“No details now,” I said. “We’re still not stable! I’m taking
us to the planet with the oxygen. At least we can breathe that.”

Except for the Vmmm, of course, but the Vmmm doesn’t need to
breathe. A capsule of carbon dioxide once a lunar orbit, and the Vmmm is fine.

“Third planet in from the primary. . .” Teer said, scanning.
“Noot! Slow us down! We’re approaching way too fast! We’ll bounce off the
atmosphere and back into space!”

“I’m trying,” I yelped, braking us hard. Energy was
disappearing fast.

I used the atmosphere itself as a brake, looping tightly round
the planet twice. When our speed was not going to cause us to burn up on
entering the planet’s atmosphere, I dropped us toward the planet, this time
using the atmosphere to help brake us despite how hot it made the outside of
the scoutcraft. We had very little energy left, just enough to land us.

I cut in the thrusters at the last possible moment, and once
we’d gone aerodynamic, it was time to look for a place to set down.

“Life form readings,” Kikinee chirped. “Lots. Especially in
these areas with all the cubes.”

“Must be domiciles.” The Vmmm’s voicebox vibrated warningly.
“Avoid those.”

“Keep us cloaked until the last moment,” Thisko warned. “And
keep us high enough to cool off the exterior of the craft!”

“I see a nice space there, past those tall things that look
like giant vorch,” I said, steering the craft down in a gentle circle. “Right
next to the water.”

“Trees,” Teer said, peering into his viewer. “I have the
language converter working. Those tall, rooted things are called trees.”

“Shall we talk to them?” Vmmm said.

“I don’t trust life forms that don’t move,” Smelch added
mournfully.

“According to the computer, the life forms that have audible
language have two legs—”

“Like those ones?” Thisko looked down through the viewscreen.
“Look at them, running about on the green filaments.”

“Grass,” Teer said, working quickly. “And the life forms are
the youth of the local sentient species.”

“Like us!” I cried.

“Not like us, Noot,” Teer said warningly. “They aren’t
cadet-scouts in the Interplanetary Trade School.”

Thisko waved his tentacles. “This is true,” he said.
“Supposedly these life-forms have not traveled to other worlds. That’s what a
Class Five means.”

No one spoke for a long time. Class Five! So primitive! We
couldn’t imagine what it could be like not to travel to other worlds—not to
even know about them.

“Tell us more about these life forms,” Kikinee chirped.

“Well, they come in two kinds,” Teer started.

“A perplexing arrangement,” Smelch commented with pity. Its
world has only one kind of people: after twenty years each citizen has an egg,
and that’s that for family.

“Boring,” Thisko said, his tentacles vibrating. On his world,
there are five kinds of people, and a young person might change two or three
times before deciding whether to be a her, a him, a lon, a ril, or a zee.

And when you want to start a family, you have to have all five
together, at least one of each kind. Family life on Thisko’s world is very,
very complicated.

“The types are called ‘boys’ and ‘girls,’” Teer went on. Teer
and I nodded. We have the same on our world. The males stay home in the hive,
and we females go out to work.

“Which one is which?” Kikinee whistled, bobbing near the
viewscreen.

“They all look exactly alike to me.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Smelch sighed. “We don’t dare stay long
enough to interact with them. We’ll be in bogs of trouble as it is.”

The Vmmm hummed briskly, “Smelch is right. Let’s get what we
need and lift again, before we really start breaking the Fourteen Laws of
Interference.”

Before anyone could speak, the ship, which had been zooming
along fairly quietly, gave a bleep, and a zoop, and thunk! We landed on the
grass not far from the water.

“Our ship’s energy is zapped,” I said.

“Then we’re zapped,” Smelch moaned.

No one answered.

Because the cloaking device was still working, as yet the
young life forms had not seen us, and for a short time we watched them running
about, kicking at a round shape. I was wondering what to do now.

“They really are all exactly alike,” Teer said. “Look! They
all have two legs, two arms, two eyes—”

“One nose,” Kikinee offered. “That’s at least a bit of
variety.”

“Only if others of them had four noses, or six, or three,” Smelch
said, rubbing two of its noses. Growing extra noses is common on its world.
They are all enthusiastic about smell-o-vision there.

“They aren’t completely alike,” Kikinee whistled. “The faces
and hands and the filaments atop their heads—fur?”

“Hair,” Teer said, looking into the computer. “Hair on top.”

“Well, the hair seems to be brown and black and yellow and
there’s a red one. But their fur looks like various shades of brown. Kind of
boring, to be mostly the same color. Not a green or a blue in sight.”

“Or even a handsome purple, like us,” Teer said, pointing at
herself and me.

“That’s not fur,” Vmmm said. “That’s a kind of flimsy
carapace. Not solid like yours.”

“It’s not a carapace,” Kikinee put in, “it’s a little like
feathers—”

“It’s skin,” Teer corrected, looking into the computer. “And
the cloth is called clothing, for protection and social signaling.”

Everyone spoke at once. “What’s that?”

“Decorative protection?” Teer asked, tapping at the
computerpads.

“Weird,” Kikinee hooted.

“Embarrassing,” Thisko pronounced. “I would not like to have
to wear strangely colored plant fibres over my pelt. What if you can’t get your
tentacles free when you need them?”

“These beings don’t have tentacles,” Smelch said sadly.

“Poor things,” Thisko said, but softly. Rule One of the Nine
Rules of Polite Interaction is not to brag about your race’s attributes—and
Rule Two is not to comment about another being’s lack.

“Only one nose,” Smelch grumbled, breaking Rule Two again.

No one said anything more about noses. We were all too shaken
up by our close call.

“We must plan.” The Vmmm’s voice hummed like a hive of
stickle-insects, a sure sign zir was upset. It’s not safe to get the Vmmm
upset.

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

I said, “Our first need is energy.”

Thisko said, “Scanning for sources . . . ah. Next to the
water. This light brown stuff is full of it. We’ll have to filter . . .”

“That’s sand,” Teer said.

On our world, we have lots of sand, but it’s not brown, it’s
purple—like us. Thisko’s world is all ice, and they live in towers.

“What if it’s valuable?” Kikinee chirped. “We ought not to
just take it. Then we are breaking the First Rule of Equitable Trade!”

“But we haven’t anything to offer in return,” Teer said.
“We’re on a scouting assignment, after all, not a trade assignment.”

Silence again.

We turned to the Vmmm.

“We will have to speak with the life-forms,” the Vmmm hummed,
louder than before.

That hum made us scramble into action.

Thisko decloaked the ship. Teer programmed the computer to
translate the local language. Kikinee let down the ramp. We all breathed the
air, which smelled of salt and herbs. then Smelch sneezed, and three of its
noses flew off, one of them landing outside on the grass.

“Eeeeuw! What’s that!” one of the life forms yelled, pointing
at Smelch. The computer translated the language into our headsets.

“Looks like a ball of guts with body parts stuck all over,”
another said.

“That’s Smelch,” I said carefully, and the computer’s
Translator took my words and broadcast them in the local language. “It needs to
retrieve its noses.”

“Wow! One of the giant purple lobsters talks English!”

“Extra noses? That’s disgusting,” a fourth life-form started,
but a tall one, with dark skin and hair, waved a hand and the others stopped
talking.

“Not where it comes from, I bet. We might be the disgusting
ones.”

The other life-forms looked at us quietly. We looked back.

“AyYesha is right,” a little one chirped in a voice kind of
like Kikinee’s. “Me, I think they look kinda cool. All of ’em! Are you guys,
like, in a movie or something?”

“Movie,” Teer said, tapping her belt computer. “Oh! It’s an
entertainment form.”

“Like smell-o-vision,” Smelch said, sounding happy for once.

“We need an energy source,” I said. “Silicon.”

“Sand is full of it,” the life-form called AyYesha said.

“We know,” Kikinee chirped, fluffing his feathers. “We wish to
effect a trade.”

“What do you got?” a small life form asked.

“Just a sec,” AyYesha said, stepping forward. “We should
introduce ourselves. I’m AyYesha, and here’s my little sister NaTasha. She’s
Laurie, and those boys are Adam, Mick, and Kenji.”

AyYesha was a girl, then. Teer said, “We are Teer and Noot,
here’s Kikinee, and Thisko, and Smelch. Inside is the Vmmm.”

“The what?” Adam asked.

“The Vmmm,” I said. “Every ship has one.”

“May we look inside?” AyYesha asked.

“Please do,” Thisko said, glad that things were starting out
like a proper trade ought to.

The boys and girls swarmed inside the ship, curious about
everything, some using their arm-digits to touch things. AyYesha moved very
slowly, examining everything with close attention.

“Wow, look at that computer,” Kenji exclaimed, and Laurie
expressed enthusiastic agreement, “I could use one of those!”

“It smells so good in here,” NaTasha said to me.

“That’s the Vmmm,” I told her. “They get CO
₂
once a
month, and the rest of the time they spurt out pure oxygen. Unless they get
angry.”

“You mean they fart good air?” Mick asked, making a hooting
noise. “Where’s this guy hiding?”

“The Vmmm is fixing the energy compartment,” I said. “And zir
is not hiding, they just don’t come out into the light. It hurts them unless
they wear a coating of light-blocking alloy. But zir is listening. The Vmmm
always listen.”

AyYesha turned from studying our piloting console. “You mean
they are telepathic?”

We looked at one another. “The Vmmm seem to hear one another
no matter where they are,” Thisko said, waving two tentacles. “But I don’t know
if they hear us when we don’t speak.”