Third Watch (3 page)

On the street outside Akasa’s house, she perceived a familiar movement in the cityscape around her. Building facades shifted colors and shapes, though not their actual sizes, with a frequency that was fascinating in its variety, baffling as to what was causing it, and slightly nauseating in that she could get motion sick without moving a step, in the same way she had done entering the wormhole.

Doorways changed from round to rectangular, arched to irised, and windows changed similarly or disappeared altogether. Colors shifted constantly, and sometimes during the shift a wall could be blue on one side, green in the middle, and yellow on the other end. The ornamental patterns on what looked like tiles wriggled like worms as they rearranged themselves. A cold, wet wind blew up from the sea, but instead of going into the towering building Akasa had pointed her toward, Khorii walked down the street to the shoreline.

“Where are you going?”
Ariin demanded.

“Why are you monitoring my thoughts if I’m not being questioned or sending you questions?”
Khorii countered.
“I know you’re new to our customs, but that is considered rude.”

“I have to keep you from making silly mistakes, and this is one. You’re supposed to return to my cell and stay there until they come and get you. If they come for you and find you—me—gone, they’ll be very cross.”

“No worries on that account. I got the impression from Akasa that all of the Friends would be at the ball.”

“In our dreams! Besides, what if you get lost?”

Khorii sighed.
“It hasn’t changed all that much, in spite of everything. The reconstruction and the terraforming on Vhiliinyar have been extensively based on historical records and the memories of survivors of the Khleevi invasion. The research teams who traveled back to pre-Khleevi eras have also consulted extensively with the terraforming crews to ensure the authenticity of the planet’s re-creation. So I’ve lived here as long as you have. Just not in this city surrounded by these particular humanoids.”

“Go ahead then, Miss Stubborn, and do what you want, but don’t ask for my help if you get in over your head tonight. I have a mission to carry out.”

“And I don’t?”
Khorii asked.
“I’m beginning to get the picture now. The only reason you wanted me to come is so that I have to live like you lived all those years till you escaped.”

She could feel Ariin’s chagrin. Her silly sister had actually thought she was being devious.

“I don’t mind being the decoy when it’s necessary, Ariin,”
Khorii told her. “
But this is my mission, too. After all, I’ve been involved with the alien plague and the creatures it turns into longer than you have. I care about the people they’re threatening. And while I know you want to show me the misery I escaped all those years by not being you, two horns are better than one at sorting this thing out, right?”

Ariin didn’t answer but Khorii felt her seething, thinking to herself that Khorii, who everybody thought was so perfect, was going to hog all the glory from this mission, which was Ariin’s idea, too.

“Ariin, honest,”
she told her sister,
“you can take all the credit when your brilliant plan saves the universe as we know it ought to be, but I am not going to vegetate in your cell when I could be helping. For one thing, I’m going to go see how Khiindi is doing.”

“How do you know he’s even still there?”
Ariin demanded, adding nastily,
“He might be dead by now. One of the Others might have stepped on him, or something from the woods could have eaten him.”

“Khiindi can take care of himself. Makahomian Temple Cats can be very fierce, and they live almost as long as we do, longer lots of times. And he’s with the Ancestors. If anything happened to him, they’d cure him in a heartbeat. You shouldn’t be so mean to him. He’s just a little cat.”

“No, he’s not,”
Ariin said, then closed down and refused to say any more. Khorii wondered what she meant by that, but soon forgot about it as she began exploring the ancient city.

K
hiindi made the best of his situation. After twining through the legs of his new hosts, including those of the sympathetic female, he trotted off to the woods bristling on the hills above the meadow. He wasn’t sure when exactly he was, but he thought it ought to be before the time when he’d been form-frozen. If so, the situation was laden with possibilities. Once among the trees, he attempted an easy transformation first, trying to morph into another of his feline forms, a larger cat. After a few false starts—his tail length at one point exceeding twice his body length, then his ears sprouting so that each was larger than his entire head while his paws grew as big as galoshes on thin little cat legs—long eons of practice came back into play to make up for six
ghaanyi
frozen into one form. Of course, he’d have had to check his reflection in a pool to make certain, but every part of him he could look at or lick had become a quite presentable and apparently ferocious tiger.

Could he also change to something two-legged? He tried his humanoid form, and although a certain cattiness remained in his countenance—the long whiskers above his eyebrows and on his cheeks, a certain pointiness and furriness of the upper ear—on the whole he thought it a good try. Perhaps he should try a more recent incarnation? He had traveled with Aari and managed to impersonate him to his nearest and dearest for quite some time. He wished Khorii was still nearby. He would have loved to see if he could make her think he was her daddy and not her kitty.

As for Ariin, her nature led him to believe that perhaps his presence around her mother just before her conception must have had some influence on the girl. She was so devious and manipulative, albeit in a rather obvious way, that she seemed to be a chip off his own block rather than Aari’s or Acorna’s.

Taking Aari’s form again, the erstwhile cat grew a horn and lost the whiskers, though he did grow the little wispy beard under his chin that some Linyaari continued to sport in honor of the Ancestors. Now for the next step. He would turn himself into an Ancestor and go out and join his fellows. From Aari to Ancestor was an easier transition than it would have been from cat to unicorn. Once he had all of the unicorn parts in their proper places, he trotted out and began grazing, allowing the others to seek him out.

“Hello. I haven’t seen you before,”
said the female who had been sympathetic to him in cat form. She seemed slightly startled by his presence, interested in him but not suspicious.

“I was left behind on Terra when the ship picked up the rest of you. I was born on a big boat during a terrible flood, and both my parents were lost. I was crying for them when a passing patrol ship of Friends heard my heartbroken cries and whisked me away to grow up on their ship. They dropped me off near here only a few minutes ago.”

He gave her a soulful look meant to inspire pity, and it did, sort of.

“Some younglings dropped off a frightened little felinoid thing just before you came. He ran away, but I fear he will be eaten or get lost and cold. He seemed so lonely.”

“Why, yes, I believe I saw such a creature. He was going off into the deep woods. Come, and I’ll show you where I saw him last.”

He hadn’t lost his touch. Batting her ivory lashes over her beautiful golden eyes, the female trotted beside him, touching shoulders now and then.

Khiindi/Grimalkin’s attitude toward Ariin softened considerably.

Now

“Mating,”
Thariinye said wisely when the girls did not return from their nocturnal walk.
“No getting around it, they’re that age. They’ve gone off looking for mates, or to prepare to look for mates, or to make themselves more attractive to mates.”

“They’re too young!”
his own mate Maati protested.

“You weren’t much older when you pointed your horn at me,”
Thariinye reminded her, unwisely.

“I did no such thing. I thought you were the most conceited, deceitful Linyaari male ever born.”

“But I grew on you,”
he insisted with a wink.

“Not exactly. Once I realized that you were much more trouble to yourself than to any of the females you fancied, I felt someone had to keep you from an early demise. It was the
linyaari
thing to do.”

“My hero!”
he said, snorting.

Khornya, as Acorna was known among her own people, interrupted in a pleading tone.
“Whatever you think, Thariinye, would you and Maati please go ask the
sii
-Linyaari and the LoiLoiKuans if they saw the girls?”
She felt so helpless being stuck in quarantine.

Aari tried to soothe her.
“They can’t be in worse trouble than they’ve been in while they were off-world, love. There’s no trouble to get into now, since we eradicated the Khleev—”
He stopped and looked at her, the same idea dawning on both of them at the same time.

“They’ve got a time device, haven’t they?”
Khornya said, though she needed no answer.
“Ariin had to have something to come forward to this time. Why didn’t we think of it before and confiscate the wretched thing?”

“Ariin probably masked it so we didn’t even think about it,”
Maati said.
“She’s very clever at thought-misdirection, you know.”

“She didn’t have to have a device, did she?”
Thariinye asked.
“She could have used the big machine before it got broken, and found a way to get herself sent here even though it’s broken on this end. She did come out of the water, after all, and that’s the way the big device worked.”

“I hope you’re right, Thariinye,”
Aari said.
“Because if that’s the case, then the girls are still in the here and now. It will be easier to find them elsewhere than elsewhen.”

Joh Becker emerged from the
Condor,
his shoulders and mustache drooping. “Damn kids,” he complained. “They should all be implanted with personal locator chips at birth.”

“If they timed it, a chip wouldn’t help, Joh,” Aari told them. “But, on the bright side, if they timed it, they will literally be back before we know it and we will not retain even the memory of worry on their behalf.”

Khornya didn’t bother to point out the holes in her mate’s logic. They already knew the girls were gone. And she was already very worried.

“K
hiindi!” Khorii called, “Khiindi cat.” By now she was far enough away from the city that she felt her calling would not arouse undue interest on the part of the Friends. Ariin’s comment that Khiindi might have died by now did worry her. She didn’t have control of time-travel devices. She had no idea how long ago in the past he had been left. He might be so old he’d lost his hearing. Not that he ever came when she called, unless food was involved.

In the meadows ahead, a small group of Ancestors looked up from their grazing and gazed quizzically in her direction.

“Narhii?”
one of them, a female by the thought-voice, asked.

“Not Narhii!”
a male voice told the female emphatically.
“Who are you, youngling?”

“I’m Khorii, her sister.”

“Ah, Narhii’s sister,”
several in the herd murmured to themselves.

“Yes, only her name is Ariin now. It’s a proper name, like mine, a combination of our parents’ names. We’re twins.”

“We know that, Khorii. We told her about you.”

“How could you? I’ve never met you before.”

“No, but we know of you. Because he did not bring you back with him and brought only your twin, Grimalkin was form-frozen and stripped of his powers.”

“I heard something about that, but I don’t know any Grimalkin. I’m looking for my cat. Do you remember him?”

The Ancestors broke into what could only be described as horse laughter.

“It’s not funny! He’s gray and fluffy and has been with me since I was a baby. We’ve never been separated before. If you ask me, my sister’s upbringing here has made her kind of cruel for a Linyaari.”

“There’s no cat here now, youngling,”
another female said.
“But if we see one, we’ll tell him you’re looking for him. But why are you here?”

“My sister has a plan, and I’m supposed to be helping her with it.”
Khorii sighed.
“Although I think she really just wanted to bring me here to suffer like she did.”

“We did not think she would ever return once she left this time,”
a gruff older male said, with a snort.
“The last thing we expected was that she’d return with you. Why are you not both back with your family? You’re both just foals.”

Khorii shrugged, feeling much wearier than she had realized.
“It’s a long story.”

“Scoot over, Hruffli, and make room for her to graze too,”
said the female.
“Tell us all about it.”

Khorii did, starting with the quarantine, working forward to how her parents became ill and she recognized her special talent, and forward again until she met Ariin, they witnessed the plague’s mutations, and returned once more to their parents.
“I thought the plague would be gone, but Mum and Dad are still affected. Ariin seems to think there’s a clue of some sort back here that will help us unravel the source of the disease or infestation or invasion or whatever the wretched thing is.”

“That was very brave. How is it going for you?”

“So far, it doesn’t seem to me to be going at all. Ariin’s idea is that I take her place as the lab rat for the Friends while she pursues the investigation. She’s a bit angry with me at the moment because I want to see what I can find out, too—at least when I’m not supposed to be pretending to be her.”