Third Watch (12 page)

“Surely she wouldn’t recognize our course,” Grimalkin said. “I doubt her kind excel at astronavigation.”

“Perhaps it’s an intuitive mechanism,” Khorii said. “But I feel sure she knows. After all, you knew things as a cat that people didn’t think you could know—”

“That was different. I was a superior sentient being in cat form, and nobody knew that.”

“We don’t know that she isn’t one, too,” Khorii said. “I wish I’d thought to bring a LAANYE along before we left our time.”

Whether or not the snake was a superior sentient being, she seemed to realize she was among friends. The rest of the crew were frightened of her at first, and annoyed by the holes in the deck her venomous dripping caused—it was actually a drool of sorts, and Khorii thought it might be a nervous response. Later, they grew used to her and nicknamed her Nagaine, the name of a serpentine shifter who once dwelled among the Friends. Grimalkin wondered if the original Nagaine might even be a founder of the snake’s race. He himself had initiated the population of feline breeds on several worlds.

As they drew nearer to the coordinates Khorii and Ariin had gleaned from Pebar and Sileg, the serpent began shaking her tail and would not leave the bridge. Finally, she remained in coiled position, with her head raised as the ship entered the target planet’s orbit, flattening only as its gravity caught hold of the ship and pressed the crew deeply into whichever soft surface they had strapped themselves.

When they had landed, it took one glance out the viewport for Pircifir to say, “Nagaine leaves the ship first. We will learn how sentient she is when she joins them.”

He nodded to the viewport, which showed a rocky but writhing terrain filled with other large serpents in various stages of locomotion, some flat out and undulating, some semicoiled, some coiled, others coiled with heads raised, all postures with which Nagaine had made them familiar.

“You can go now,”
Khorii told her.
“Please tell your people we mean them no harm and hope they feel the same. We would like to keep the tent thing.”
She touched the disk. With seeming reluctance, Nagaine withdrew the length of tail she had coiled around it.

“Are there more like it here as well as more of you?”
Ariin asked her.
“We’ll want many of them. Remember, we cured you and brought you home, so you owe us—”

“Nothing,”
Khorii interrupted Ariin’s thought.
“But if any of your people need our healing skills, we would be happy to treat them.”

“And if they want to show their gratitude by bringing us more of these, we’d call it even,”
Ariin said, with a frown at Khorii.

They weren’t sure if Nagaine understood or not, but she writhed eagerly through the hatch and twined herself down the gantry, then dropped to the ground and was instantly caught up in a large tangle of snakes.

Khorii felt Ariin shudder beside her.

“If we’re going to go down there among those, I want enough of these things to make houses for everyone in Kubiilikaan.”

“We don’t barter our skills, Ariin. We heal because it’s needed, not to make people give us what we want.”

“As if we could make that”—
she shuddered again at the writhing knots of snakes below
—“do anything! I don’t think the tunnel came from the same place. I think we just got the coordinates of the snake planet, not the tunnel planet, and we should go now. Besides, I don’t think the tunnel was ever a plague. The only thing I ever saw it eat were those silk flags. It’s probably just a similar organism, not the same thing.”

“I know. It looks the same, but it doesn’t behave the way the ones the plague made did, does it?”
Khorii agreed.

“We think we should just go, Pircifir,” Ariin said. “This is where the snakes live but not the tunnels.”

“I disagree,” Pircifir said, and directed her to look again at the viewport. The balls of snakes had been so repugnant to her that Ariin had looked away as soon as possible.

Most of the snakes were now retreating in waves but others crawled forward, pushing large balls with their noses, herding them toward the ship. Then the pushers, all but one lone serpent who was as clearly Nagaine as the others clearly were not, retreated beyond the rocky hills.

“There’s our cargo,” Pircifir said, with a satisfied smile.

“How do you know that’s what we want and not snake eggs full of baby snakes that will hatch as soon as we get into orbit?” asked a crew member who, like Ariin, was still shuddering from the spectacle presented by the sea of snakes.

“Well, for one thing, would you send your babies off to be born on a foreign ship?” Khorii demanded. “Neither would Nagaine and her species.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” Khorii said.

“She does,” Grimalkin agreed. “Besides, when we take them, we will have the tunnels and can train them to be houses. Look—one is pulling out of disk shape already and forming a cone. We’d better go collect them before they turn into tunnels again and slither off after the snakes.”

Pircifir bravely led his crew to the ground, where he and Grimalkin opened one of the disks to show the crew there were no snakes inside. Then the gifts were loaded.

One member of the crew, the one Ariin remembered from the ball, came forward with a cleaning rag. “I’ll just give these a good mopping,” he said. “I guess all these alien snakes are a bit sloppy about the mouth, like Nagaine.”

As he rubbed, the disks moved with the motion of his rag. Fascinated by their antics, he swiped one way, then another, testing them. He stayed with the disks in an oxygenated cargo hold. He was still experimenting when they returned to the bridge.

R
eturning to Vhiliinyar with their cargo, the crew had the life-forms unload themselves, all but the original one, which Pircifir kept to experiment with on the ship. “I can’t wait until they see these in the city,” Pircifir said. “I believe the tunnel shape is probably the one they assume most naturally because the serpents use them as shelters. A handy relationship, but apparently not a symbiotic one, or the serpents would not have relinquished them so readily. The crew has found that with a little training, each creature can be turned into a vast variety of shapes.”

“In the future, they will provide the perfect variable facade dwellings for our shapeshifting species,” Grimalkin assured him smugly.

“I don’t know how you ever remember all that,” Pircifir said. “It’s all I can do to keep track of the present and the past, never mind the future.”

“I’m extremely gifted,” Grimalkin admitted.

“Now can we go home to our own time?”
Khorii asked Ariin.
“We’re not going to learn anything further here. I mean, now.”

“You’re forgetting my crono,”
Ariin said.
“I want it back.”

“It’s not yours anyway, it’s Grimalkin’s.”

“He’s got another one—or you do. I want mine back. He and Pircifir promised we could return once the mission was accomplished. They agreed that it wasn’t safe to leave the crono with Pebar and Sileg.”

Khorii sighed.
“I just want to go home and see how our parents are and if Elviiz is any better.”

“If we revert to a time shortly after we left, they won’t be any different at all. You may as well stop whining so we can finish what we’ve started.”

“Nevertheless, I want to go home now. Maybe you don’t care what’s happening to everyone, but I do.”

“You can’t leave without me.”

“Yes, I can. I have Grimalkin’s other crono, remember. You’ll have to convince Pircifir to use his to do what you want.”

“You have to help me convince Pircifir at least. He likes you better than me. Everyone does.”

“That is not my fault,”
she pointed out.
“Use your push.”

“He’s become a bit used to it,”
Ariin complained.
“Please?”

“Oh, very well.”
The two of them sought out Pircifir, who was supervising the fueling of his vessel. To Ariin’s surprise, he seemed almost as eager as she was to return to the blue-green paisley planet they had recently visited.

Khorii left Ariin to discuss the departure with Pircifir while she sought out Grimalkin.

“So I see no reason why I shouldn’t go home now. I’m figuring you don’t want to come and be stuck as a small cat again. But I thought you might want to come with me long enough to reclaim your crono so you could come back here. I mean, now.”

Grimalkin’s back was to her when he said, “But, Khorii, you can’t go without me! And I can’t stay here when you go. We’re a team. You need me. Khorii and Khiindi, Khiindi and Khorii, that’s how it’s been ever since you were born.”

“But it wasn’t your choice,” she said. “I respect that you were forced, and I’m old enough now to look after myself.”

He turned around with a “hmm?” that was half a purr. On his face was the same cagey expression he wore when he had, as Khiindi, just devoured some hapless living creature. “Not quite yet, Khorii. Perhaps Khorii could manage without Khiindi or Khiindi could manage without Khorii for a short time, but Ariin and Pircifir will be needing both of us, and we will need to be there. The patient cat catches the fattest birds.”

That was not the sort of argument to win her over, but obviously, now that Khiindi had Grimalkin’s sleeves back, he had something up them. And Ariin was right about one thing, at least. They could use the cronos to return to her family before they left, so it didn’t actually matter that they had been away so long. Their family would never know. But she knew, and she missed them. Still, she didn’t even need to worry about what was happening while she was gone. With the help of the crono, all she had to do was picture things as they had been, and she could be in the midst of them once more and watch events unfold with everyone else.

It was very handy. Nevertheless, she began to understand Pircifir’s dislike of loops.

“R
uined!” Pebar growled, when he and Sileg returned to the spot where their trunks, a few props, and the iron cage marked all that was left of their livelihood. “It’s gone, all gone. No snake, no tunnel, no horned priestesses, nothing. We’ve been robbed.”

The crowd, suddenly and inexplicably deprived of its prey, had quickly dispersed. The market bustled around them now, and it wouldn’t be long before some other act tried to usurp their little piece of street.

Sileg opened the trunks. “So we have. Someone got back here before us and made off with the costumes. We could sell the trunks and the cage, I suppose. Start over. Book passage on another scout ship. Nothing here for us. Or is there? Lookit here, the lip of the urn is broken, but nobody saw the cash box.”

He picked up the urn and smashed it against the cage. The metal cash box jingled to the ground.

“That’s something,” Pebar said, opening the box and extracting a fairly good take for the two days the horned girls had been with them.

Sileg scratched his head, then his beard, dislodging several fleas. While the girls remained, his infestations had vanished, but now that they were gone, his unwelcome tenants were back with a vengeance. “We should have been nicer to them, Pebar. We could have had a class act and plenty to share. They weren’t bad kids, but they were just kids. They wanted to go home, and you can’t blame them for that.”

“Simple ‘kids’ don’t have flying tigers that turn into humans as guardians,” Pebar told him. “I wonder where they’re from anyway.” Putting the cash into one of his pockets, he touched a piece of cool metal and pulled out the strange watch he’d taken off one of the girls.

“There’s got to be more where those came from. Ones who’d like to join us, maybe, or at least ones who don’t know any winged tabbies,” Pebar mused.

Sileg touched the watch. “Honestly? I never heard of girls with a horn in the middle of their foreheads and healing powers before. Now, in olden times, there used to be unicorns, but they went extinct a long time ago.”

While he spoke, Sileg stroked the face of the watch thoughtfully, remembering the pictures he’d seen of unicorns in the woods around castles and that sort of thing, way back in times before space travel, before Terra had to be reterraformed the first time even. What that must have been like! “They not only had healing powers, they could clean water and neutralize poison, and they say a little of that horn dissolved in water could restore a fellow’s manhood.”

Before he said the last word, the air around Pebar and him blurred strangely. It also suddenly smelled so different he found it hard to breathe. The familiar piss, spice-sweat, and smoke scent of the market had been replaced with something so thin in its clarity that he had trouble pulling it into his lungs.

The street was gone, and he stood ankle high in a fast-moving stream, though Pebar stood on a rock in its midst. Instead of traffic and people passing all around them, there were funny-looking brown poles covered in fluttering, fragmented green canopies so full of holes they’d never keep the rain out.

Trees. That was what they’d been called back in the olden days when such things were needed. A bunch of trees was a forest. They were soaking their—well, his—feet in a forest stream.

Most remarkable of all were the creatures that had been startled by their instant appearance and were now running away from them. White as the skin and hair of the priestess girls, these creatures had four legs instead of two. But each of them also had a single spiral horn in the middle of the forehead, much longer than the horns of the girls, and very sharp and fierce-looking.

“Unicorns!” he whispered to Pebar.

“What?” his brother asked, his eyes wide as he tried to take in all of the differences confronting him.

“Poachers!” someone else cried, and a horn sounded. “Poachers have come to take the last of the king’s unicorns. Cut them down, men!”

Chapter 10