Second Wave (30 page)

Moonmay’s face fell, but Sesseli said, “Can I have a kitty for my own? A little baby one?”

Jaya and Captain Bates joined them, and Jaya picked up a little black fellow with a white chest, and said, “Ooh, he’s cute. I never got to play with the ship’s cats. Papa said spoiling them would distract them from their pest control job.”

Captain Bates scratched another kitten’s chin, and asked, “How much do either of you know about caring for animals?”

Jaya rolled her eyes. “Who do you think changes the pan and feeds the ship’s cats? Or the other animal cargo we used to carry, for that matter.”

Khorii remembered Moonmay saying how she thought her kittens would like to travel on a spaceship and how Khorii had known that the little girl was investing her pets with her own dreams. “I don’t know, Jaya. It seems a shame to separate the kittens from each other, and that is adding a lot of new creatures to our crew. Elviiz was never programmed for cat care, Khiindi will not take kindly to them, Ariin is evidently not fond of cats, and we will all be busy with our missions. I think if we are to take extra feline crew members on this mission, they should have their own specialist. I wonder if Mr. Marsden would allow Moonmay to go with us if she wishes. While she couldn’t go to Vhiliinyar, I think she’d like MOO, and I might be able to convince the Council to let her visit narhii-Vhiliinyar. What do you think?”

Moonmay was dancing up and down, almost jostling kittens out of the basket. Jaya and Captain Bates looked at each other and shrugged.

Mr. Marsden had been watching the conversation with a proprietary eye on his granddaughter, and now, as the females all turned to him, he said, “If you all think you can put up with her and will see that she gets home safe, I see no harm in it. We were all a damn sight safer with you than we were before you got here, and I expect that Moonmay will be safe with you, no matter where you go.”

Chapter 28

T
he
Mana
was a much more interesting ship than the
Nheifaarir,
Ariin thought. It was bigger, and the only two people who thought-talked with her were Khorii and Mikaaye, who were usually both too busy to bother. Everyone was pleasant to her, from the child offering one of her mewling feline younglings to the adult human female who offered to braid and bead her mane as she had done everyone else’s. Ariin thought about refusing, just because she was pretty sure she could and nobody would do anything to her. Then she thought that if her mane looked exactly like Khorii’s, maybe nobody would be able to tell them apart. The idea intrigued Ariin, who had up until recently been so completely different from everybody else around her. It was a way to hide and also a good way to find out the things that were happening that nobody bothered explaining to a stranger.

Even Captain Bates remarked when she was done that now she wouldn’t be able to tell the twins apart. Ariin knew she couldn’t fool Khorii, of course, or probably Mikaaye, but she thought perhaps she could fool Elviiz. Unfortunately, he and Mikaaye were always together so Mikaaye could help him with male-specific functions.

Khorii caught on to that part of what was on her mind and looked up from her duties long enough to close and open one eye rapidly while smiling.
“I just winked at you, Ariin. It is a human gesture of complicity, although it sometimes has something to do with their mating habits, though I’m not certain about that. But I think you and I will have great fun on MOO fooling everyone into thinking I am you and the other way around.”

“Yes,”
Ariin answered with what she hoped seemed to be similar enthusiasm.
“It will be fun.”

While others were busy, the younglings Moonmay and Sesseli tried to interest Ariin in the antics of the young felines, but there was only one feline that interested Ariin. Khiindi. According to the technicians, the Friend who had stolen her from her family before she was born had been punished for not bringing Khorii as well. His punishment had been to be frozen into the shape of a regular domestic feline to be Khorii’s companion.

He probably thought that was a terrible punishment, and so did the Friends, but Ariin could see that her kidnapper had enjoyed the love of her family while she was being used as an experimental specimen by his people.

She tried to guard these thoughts carefully, but she knew that somehow he knew. No one said that he was no longer sentient, just that his form had been frozen. He pretended to be no more intelligent or capable of understanding words or thoughts than the kittens or the ship’s cats, but she was pretty sure that he understood exactly who she was and how she felt about him. If she surprised him as he lounged across the back of Khorii’s chair or purred in her lap or sometimes in Sesseli’s if she wasn’t cuddling kittens instead, the animal was a furry gray streak out the hatch or, if that was closed, under the nearest object as far out of reach as he could get.

Sesseli and Moonmay were sitting in the cargo hold where the cats lived most of the time, watching the kittens trying to play with the older cat’s tail. It amused Ariin as much as it did the younglings to see how aggravated Khiindi got when the kittens would not stop playing with him no matter how he growled or postured. They probably knew he would not dare lift a paw to them while their young protectors were near. But she had only watched for a moment before he looked up, saw her, and shot off into the shadows of the cargo hold, the kittens looking puzzled for a moment as to where he might have gone, then turning to wrestle with each other in a tangled ball of fur.

“Hi, Ariin,” Sesseli said.

She had just had her braid done and decided to see if she could fool them. “Sesseli, I’m Khorii!”

“You’re not either!” Moonmay said.

“Why do you say that? Is it my voice? My accent?”

“It’s cause Khiindi runs away from you, and the other kitties don’t come to you for pettin’ nor play,” Moonmay said. “They know you don’t like them, Sissy.”

Ariin preferred her new name to the one Moonmay had assigned her, but understood from the girl’s thoughts that it was almost an endearment in her culture, often used for one’s own siblings, so she did not object.

“So they don’t like you,” Sesseli said, looking at her in exactly the way Hruffli might have when she was being difficult. Her brow was wrinkled and her jaw had a stubborn set to it.

Ariin sat down beside them and scooped up the kittens. “That is not so.” She petted the soft small life-forms as she had seen the others do. They made agreeable sounds that caused their entire bodies to vibrate and rubbed against her fingers before wriggling to get down. “You see? I am larger than you, and I startle them with my size and movement. I am not used to such small creatures. Where I lived before, there were not very many of them around, and none were kept as companions.”

“City girl, were you, Sissy?” Moonmay asked.

“In a manner of speaking. As for Khiindi, I have tried to befriend him, but he always runs away. Do you suppose he does not like it that Khorii has someone of her own race who might become closer to her than he is? He has been her companion for many years, she said.”

“That makes sense,” Moonmay said, after considering it. “Cats are mighty jealous, and they do take against even nice cat-lovin’ people, even their own people, if they take up with somebody else or especially another cat.”

“Maybe,” Sesseli said, “but Khiindi’s used to Elviiz, and he likes everybody else.”

Ariin sighed, suddenly sad, not because her enemy disliked her, but because it seemed that even he had forged closer relationships among the people who should be her friends than she had been able to do.
But of course he has,
she thought dejectedly,
he’s had years to ingratiate himself, while I’ve only been here a short while.

“Now don’t take on, Sissy,” Moonmay said, patting her. “He’ll come around likely as not when he sees you’re here to stay. He’s accepted the baby cats already, you saw. Just give him time, and pretend you don’t care about him one way or the other and he’ll be wantin’ you to pet him before long. In fact, if you really
hated
cats, he’d probably be all over you. They’re ornery like that.”

Ariin nodded as if consoled, but she knew that Khiindi, the former Grimalkin, was far too canny to try that brand of orneriness with her.

“I’ll try that and see if I can win him over,” she said. “After all, he is part of my family now.” Besides, if she could gain the cat’s trust and lead him to believe she had forgiven him or did not fully realize his part in her involuntary exile, she could more easily lay hands on him when she finally figured out the form his punishment should take.

K
hiindi stared at Ariin’s feet as she walked past his hiding place in the shadows of the cargo bay. An old trickster himself, he was not deceived by her vow to “be kind to Khiindi.” If his own people had been angry with him for bringing them only one of Acorna’s children, the child herself, somehow, he was sure, had found out his part in her upbringing and was far more furious than they had been.

He had to admit that his people had taught her well. She was good at shielding her feelings and intentions from other Linyaari and the humans, even the sensitive ones, but Khiindi wasn’t fooled. He smelled her anger every time she came near him, and the heat of it singed his whiskers. It was totally unfair, of course. He couldn’t defend himself, and if he started thought-talking enough to explain his side of the story, to be winsome and charming enough, even pitiable enough to dissuade Ariin from her bad feelings about him, then Khorii would realize he had been fooling her all along, and she’d despise him, too. And he had been a good friend to her, her good little kitty-cat. If he didn’t exactly keep her out of trouble, at least he ferreted it out first so that he got into it before she did, thereby alerting her to its presence.

How could his people have treated this child so badly that, even after she escaped them to the collective bosom of her own people, she still harbored such an unhealthy (for him particularly, but of course he was far more concerned about the toxic effect of such negative feelings on one so young) grudge against him? How could his people have let her escape, period, for that matter? They were in a different time, the machine was broken and had not been repaired in present-day Vhiliinyar, and they would never have allowed a child as valuable to them as Ariin to touch a crono.

Not if they could help it. Not if they knew about it. Not if they realized what a sneaky little creature she really was. Apparently they hadn’t realized it, of course, or she would not be here, and since, from what he could pick up from Maati’s and Thariinye’s thoughts about the girl, she had arrived alone, the only way she could have done it was with the help of a crono.

He would have to be very brave if he wanted to save himself. He would have to remember that he was not merely a small and weak domesticated feline, albeit one carrying a reasonable facsimile of the DNA of fierce Makahomian Temple Cats. He had to remember what it had been like to be Grimalkin, the father of half the universe, the maker of cultures, the shaper of societies, lord of time and space. So from that point on, although his claws dug into the back of Khorii’s chair or Sesseli’s shipsuit when Ariin approached, he did not allow himself to run. As long as one of his other people was there, he stayed put when she drew near and even allowed her to touch him, commanding his fur not to bristle, although the purr he offered was the Purr of Tension, not the Purr of Pleasure. No one who was not a cat seemed to be able to tell the difference anyway.

When she did touch him, rubbing his fur the wrong way quite as if she didn’t realize that cats hated that, he quelled his qualms and opened his mouth and rubbed his cheek against her hand. And he smelled it. Or rather, he smelled himself as he had been, long ago. She had something of his, and although she was not wearing it on her wrist, he knew what it was and he knew he had to get it away from her before any more trouble could happen.

“See there, Sess,” Moonmay said as the younger girls and the insufferable bullets of feline energy trooped onto the bridge. “Khiindi knows he’s hurt Sissy’s feelings by running away from her. He knows she wants to be his friend. Look how he’s rubbing against her.”

“That’s good,” Sesseli said, but Khiindi thought—and certainly hoped—that the child, who was unusually sensitive and had saved his tail at least once, was not entirely deceived.

Chapter 29

C
aptain Becker’s storage asteroid was on the outermost fringe of Federation space, in an unpatrolled loophole in the cosmos reached by navigating through a section of what Becker called “pleated space” and a wormhole. As the
Mana
drew close to the coordinates that would require it to warp out of space as most navigators knew it, they received a relay from the tanker that all three of the vessels had arrived safely on LoiLoiKua.

“I hope the monster took no more lives before you arrived,” Khorii said.

“No,” Neeva told her. “Not a single one. The people were going to hide in the reef, but the monster was more interested in it than it was in them. Then it transferred its attention to diving to the sea bottom and attacking the shores of the islands. It hasn’t been seen for several days, but the odd thing is, the reef seems to be growing. We scanned it to see if we could determine what was happening and found that the new section is stone, not coral. I do not suppose the LoiLoiKuans are in any actual peril at this time, but since their world is endangered in other ways already, and in the new sea on narhii-Vhiliinyar they will be reunited with their grandchildren from Maganos, we all agreed to continue the evacuation as planned.”

The tanker, the
Balakiire,
and the
Nheifaarir
were about to leave LoiLoiKua in a convoy that would soon be joined by another Federation tanker found by other Linyaari on Kezdet. This tanker had already transferred the poopuus from their watery classroom along with their educational equipment, which had been graciously donated by the school under the direction of Khorii’s human grandparents. Then all of the vessels would meet on MOO, where the Linyaari crews would transfer the aquatic people and their grandchildren to the seas of Vhiliinyar and, when the terraforming of a new sea was complete, to narhii-Vhiliinyar.