Cephei IV / Tevaral 7 page

“I was saying to Nita just now, they’ve got some kind of connection,” Kit said. “This scent trail thing…”

“Might be more than that,” Djam said. “The Tevaralti have a low-level mindlink among themselves, a symbiotic thing. Why not the animals? Especially if some of them are pets.”

“The first one the other day wasn’t, though,” Kit said. “Or the one last night. At least I don’t think it was.”

Djam yawned again. “I don’t think either of us has really thought to make a study of the issue. We’ve been kind of distracted…”

“Well, yeah…” Kit said. “Kehrutheh, go on, I relieve you. Go get some rest and I’ll see what I can find out.”

Djam took himself off to bed, and Kit settled in with his manual open, watching the power levels of the feeder gates closely; but they were running steady, almost exactly at the center of their nominal operations range. Good, he thought: stay that way, cousins.

He kept the sibik waiting where they were for a while, as there were a few other things Kit wanted to check before relaxing—if that was the right word—into the day’s monitoring. Along with probably every other wizard on the planet, he took a few moments to check the status of Thesba.

It was holding together—which was really all that could be said for it. A team of around two hundred wizards, some days more and some less, all of them specialists in geology and geomancy, were doing nothing but patch the moon’s interior structure together every evening in those regions that had come under most stress during the previous day’s orbits. Their comments on their work and their debriefing documents were attached to the daily status report on the moon for anyone who cared to look at them… and it was fair to say they were depressing. “It's exactly like bailing out a leaky boat,” said one of the wizards in charge of doing stress relief on the region between Thesba's deformed cores and the “dynamo regions” of the deepest inner mantle. “You know it would be idiocy to stop bailing, so of course you don’t… but you know that at the last, the ocean has you outnumbered. This moon wants so much to come apart. And of course we must do what we’re doing; this world’s life must have time to escape. But it’s going to be a relief to let Thesba go at last.”

Kit sat looking at that page for a while before turning his manual back to the two-page spread that displayed his own gates’ parameters. It was strange how that comment about letting Thesba go led him back to Nita’s remark about there being no happy endings in this situation. Even if all the Tevaralti could be convinced to leave, Thesba would still fall and either render Tevaral uninhabitable or entirely destroy it; and that, Kit thought, was why he was experiencing this constant strange ache of unfulfillment.

That unreasonable ache for some reason also left Kit feeling annoyed. What, am I six? he thought. This isn’t a fairy tale. This isn’t magic we’re doing: it’s wizardry. It’s not like everything’s always going to turn out right.

Yet some part of Kit seemed unwilling to get to grips with this truism, wanted to cling to the concept that things might still work out somehow… and he didn’t know what to do with that. Trying to squash it seemed cruel.

Hope, he thought. Even when it’s ridiculous. Why would anybody want to kill that? Leave it alone.

Glancing up past the standing stones toward the gate complex again, Kit watched the crowds flowing through from the feeder gates into the terminus gate as they’d been doing since he came: a steady flow, unceasing… and between the complex and his circle, the silent encampment, the Tevaralti there shifting restlessly about, watching their species leave them behind—

And closer to him, something else shifting, and making a muted squeaking noise. Kit looked between the circle’s upright stones and saw tentacles inching in his direction, and eyes fixed on him, hopeful and hungry.

He sighed, glanced at the monitor spread in his manual, and then got up, glad to have an excuse to push the whole subject of his interior unease aside. “Okay, you guys,” he said, heading in the direction of his puptent. “Cracker.”

“Cracker!!”

“But only the Ritz crackers,” he said under his breath. “Not the saltines. Because I know I’m gonna need some comfort food before we’re done…”

***

The day went on. Kit shooed the gathered sibik away after they’d had about a third of the box of Ritz, and spent the following couple of hours watching the feeder gates’ sensor readings for some recurring gravitational-field fluctuations that had started to worry him. He installed some extra alerts in his manual’s monitoring display of the arrays to try to predict those patterns early. He chatted with Nita: he touched base with Ronan. He went through a couple more energy drinks and got himself a pillow from his puptent, because the Stone Throne really wasn’t very kind to the humanoid butt. Well, this humanoid’s butt, anyway.

Just before local noon Kit had another serious discussion—actually, more of a pep talk—with the number-three gate’s electronic and submolecular-machine control systems, which the gate’s portal field seemed to be trying to subvert so that it could throw some more gravitational anomalies without the systems giving warning. (“Do not let it push you around. And don’t let it pull that energy-is-more-senior-than-matter crap with you, either! You are of equal status. And anyway, you and I are both matter together, and we’re not gonna let it get all high and mighty with us, are we? If it gets snotty with you again you just tell the gate that if it keeps making trouble I’m going to have a consult with my friend who runs Grand Central, and then I’m going to come over there and give its strings such a yanking, it’ll unravel like an old sweater. Yeah? Yeah. Just tell it that.”)

After that Kit went and got himself a lunch that for once wasn’t junk food (a salami sandwich) and was working on it when Cheleb got up and prepared to go off once again about haes pre-shift business. Curious as always, Cheleb paused to examine Kit’s food and drink. “Composition?” hae said, pointing at the sandwich.

“Uh, bread. A grain derivative. Some seasonings—that’s mustard, it comes from a seed. And that’s meat.” Kit opened the sandwich to show him.

Cheleb poked the salami hesitantly with one claw. “This from animal? Strange looking one.”

Kit flirted with the idea of telling haem how sausage was made, and then wasn’t sure whether this might unduly strain interstellar amity. “You have no idea,” Kit said.

“Entertainment later?”

“When Djam gets up,” Kit said, “you bet.”

Cheleb went off to see haes other-side-of-the-planet cousin, and Kit visited his puptent again, stuffing more food and some books and other supplies into a backpack so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth. Once back at the Stone Throne with this, he settled into a rhythm that swung between gate monitoring and reading up in the manual about sibiks. He spent nearly three hours on this endeavor, afraid of missing something important. But except for the information that there were hundreds of species, which he’d already known, Kit came away from the effort only slightly better informed than when he’d started.

The manual did say that the ancestors of the dominant Tevaralti species and the ancestor species of the sibik had forged their initial partnership when they were both still up in the trees together—the sibik using their acute vision and sense of smell, and their own intraspecies-based link gift, to lead the tool-using Tevaralti to prey so that both species could then share the spoils. But the manual had almost no data on exactly how the sibik transmitted data even within each of its many single species, let alone across species boundaries. The Tevaralti seemed never to have done any serious research on the subject, and no one else seemed to have considered it of importance enough to contribute any information about it to the manual. Some kind of cultural blind spot, maybe…?

“Weird,” Kit muttered as he leaned against the back of the Throne and looked up through the streaky cirrus clouds overhead at Thesba, which was now well past the zenith and heading for its day’s first setting. “Wonder if anybody’s asked the sibik…”

He soon found that there was going to be opportunity enough for him to do that, if he could keep other things from happening. Kit had gotten up briefly to take a leak behind one of the big standing stones—he was less concerned about this when both his shiftmates were likely to be off-site for a while—when in the middle of zipping up he started hearing unexpected clunking and rustling noises. A few seconds later he came around the standing stone to see a sibik, dappled in green and blue and quite large, hastily pulling things out of his backpack and throwing them over its shoulder, or where its shoulder would’ve been if it had had a shoulder. Or just one, Kit thought. How many tentacles do these guys actually have? They move so fast it’s hard to get a count…

“Hey!” Kit yelled he hurried back to the Stone Throne. The sibik startled at his shout, hitching its abdomen up enough to give Kit what seemed a fairly guilty look, and dug through the backpack faster, flinging away whatever it didn’t want—full cans of soda or cappucino, mostly—as it dug for things that looked more appetizing. Its grasp of what to do about Tupperware was fortunately non-existent; it tossed away a sealed-up plastic container of cheese slices without a second thought. But someone seemed to have passed it the word about cellophane, even when it was hidden inside cardboard. The sibik went straight for the second of Kit’s saltine boxes and ripped it open, yanking out one of the packages of stacked saltines.

Kit dove for the saltines and snatched them out of the tentacles, which grabbed at the package as Kit pulled it up out of reach. “Now stop it!” he said. “Who told you that you could just take whatever you wanted—”

“Cracker!” The sibik promptly dug into the saltine box, yanked out the second package, and pulled it open. Saltines flew everywhere.

“Oh come on, you’re making a mess…!” Kit moaned. Then he heard what he’d just said, and snickered both at having unconsciously quoted the original scene from the movie they’d been watching yesterday evening and at the memory of Djam bubbling at the scene in amusement. “Right, that’s it…”

Kit tossed the saltine package he was holding into the air and said to it in the Speech, “You, just stay there, okay?” It hung there, levitating at the high point of his toss. Kit gestured at the saltines that had fallen all over the Stone Throne and the ground. “You guys, up you go.” Up they went, and hung there in a scatter of little squares.

The sibik, meanwhile, was making off with the half-empty package. The method was interesting: a couple of tentacles hugged the package to the underside of its body, while the rest on either side of its body ran it hurriedly away through the grass. “Nope,” Kit said, pointing at it. “Up.” And up went the sibik, its tentacles working comically against the air, like something out of a cartoon, as it lost contact with the ground.

“Nope,” the sibik squeaked, “nope nope nope nope!”, flailing around in the air while still doggedly hanging onto the package of saltines. For his part, Kit had to stand still for a moment as a shiver ran through him with the realization of just high his personal power levels were running at the moment—so high that merely using the Speech with full intention was, with simple things at least, enough to produce a result without needing to explicitly build a spell. This is really something... But strangely enough, he found that he wasn’t really liking it.

Kit shook his head and went over to the sibik. He tugged the half-empty package of saltines out of its tentacles and shoved them in his hoodie’s front pocket, then reached up and plucked the sibik out of the air. It grunted and thrashed and tried to get away.

“Now cut that out,” Kit said. “Calm down. Okay? Stop it now, just stop it…” He had to pull back his head a bit to avoid being lashed across the face with panicked tentacles. “Cut it out. Just relax. Okay? I’m not going to hurt you, but we have to have a talk about not taking people’s stuff without permission.”

The sibik thrashed and wriggled and waved itself around for some seconds more, and Kit just hung onto it until all of a sudden it made an upset giving-up noise like a half-inflated balloon losing all its air, and went limp in his arms.

“Okay,” Kit said. “Now come on and let’s sit down and talk like reasonable people.”

He headed back over to the Stone Throne and sat down with the sibik in his lap. Nine tentacles, Kit thought as he tried to arrange the creature so that it looked less disheveled. But despite his best efforts it still wound up looking like some kind of limp and extremely peculiar mop, and the eyes on the back of its abdomen were all dark and squinted, as if avoiding looking at Kit. It was sulking.

“Okay now,” he said. “Let’s not be like this. Tell me what brought you here.”

The response was sullen silence. “Come on,” Kit said, “how’d you find your way?”

If possible, the sibik went even flatter.

Kit rubbed his face. “Let’s start this over, yeah?”

He beckoned over one of the saltines floating in the air. “Look,” he said, “this is what you were after. You might as well have one…”

It snatched the saltine out of his hand with a pair of tentacles and shoved it hurriedly into its between-tentacles stoma, as if afraid Kit might have been about to change his mind. Crumbs sprayed everywhere; apparently annoyed or upset sibik were messy eaters. “Okay. Better?”

“No,” the sibik said with some force. “More cracker better.”

Interesting the way it’s picking up Speech vocabulary, Kit thought. It doesn’t just acquire it from other sibiks who’ve heard it; it gets it from me too, at least a little. Is it hearing it in Tevaralti, though, the way a human hears the Speech like it’s their milk language, or as Speech-words proper? …Something to look into later. “Okay,” Kit said, “more cracker.” He gestured the little cloud of saltines over to him and plucked another one out of the air.

The sibik grabbed at it. “Hungry!”

Kit held the saltine up out of the way and held the sibik down against his lap when it tried to climb up him to gain altitude. “Fine, but we’re gonna teach you another word first,” Kit said. “‘Please.’”

“Won’t,” the sibik said, and pulled all its tentacles in tight around itself until it was more or less hugging itself with all of them in a furious ball.

“Your call, buddy,” Kit said. “You say ‘please’ or there’s no cracker for you.”

The balled-up sibik glared at him with all the eyes on the top of its abdomen, and then squeezed them shut in annoyance.

Amused, Kit then tried what would with Ponch have been a most transparent ploy, one that would normally have provoked nothing but scornful eyerolling. “Mmm,” he said in a tone of exaggerated pleasure, “goooooood.” And he started eating the saltine he was holding.

The first crunch made the sibik twitch visibly. Uh huh, Kit thought, and went out of his way to make the second crunch much louder.

One eye squinted open: just one. Kit watched this happening out of the corner of his own eye, doing his best to seem to be idly regarding the scenic landscape of beautiful plainsland Tevaral and paying no attention whatsoever to the put-out ball of sibik in his lap. The eye-squinting was interesting, as there weren’t any eyelids as such: the closing of the eyes, or maybe shuttering was a better word, was being done by musculature in the top of the abdomen that actually pulled the eye slightly down into the body mass and pinched the hide closed over it.

There were only a couple of loud crunches available in a single saltine. Kit reached up for another one. The single open sibik-eye watched the movement and was joined by another that opened, and another; and a tiny miserable moan came out of somewhere in the middle of the sibik’s body. Is what they make noise with even associated with how they breathe? Kit wondered as he bit into the next saltine. Crunch! “Mmmmm…”

The sibik loosened its frustrated grip on itself somewhat, melted slightly into a less rigorously spherical bundle of body and tentacles, and made another of those sad little moaning noises. Kit felt sorry for it, but not sorry enough to give it the second half of the saltine without at least a gesture of willingness toward the behavior he was trying to teach. He looked from the saltine to the sibik’s two and a half open eyes and said firmly, “Please.”

Several more eyes opened and glared at him. The musculature that had pulled them down into the body of its abdomen now pushed them a bit out, so that they looked like shiny hemispherical pebbles. Up this close, it was possible to see that they were more than just dark solids. Except for the darkness of the four-branched pupil, a faint luminescence could be seen swimming in the eyes if your angle to the sun was right: a pale pinkish glow like the green glint you might catch in a cat’s eyes at night, except this was more milky, and less plainly located at the back of the eye.

At least it could be seen if the eyes didn’t squint themselves down tighter at you again in annoyance. “No.”

Kit shrugged and ate the rest of the saltine, making more noise than he would ever have been comfortable making at home; his Mama would have had his head for chewing like that. More of the sibik’s eyes were open now, maybe five or six and a half. Call it seven. They watched his hand carefully as it lifted to pick another saltine out of the air, judging distances—

Kit had seen that look on Ponch before, especially on one memorable occasion when his pop had thought that the piece of steak he was holding up for Ponch to jump for was out of his reach. (It hadn’t been.) Against his lap Kit could feel the sibik gathering its tentacles together, and just as it was getting ready to launch itself at the saltines Kit wasn’t holding, he simply said “Higher, guys, if you would…?” And all the loose saltines whisked themselves up to about fifteen feet over Kit’s head.

The sibik collapsed into a frustrated heap on Kit’s lap and hissed like an angry cat.

“See now,” Kit said, “if you don’t cooperate, they’re all just going to go to waste. By which I mean I’ll get them all and you won’t get any.” He bit into the one he was holding: crunch!—and all the sibik’s tentacles clenched.

“You want one,” Kit said, “you say ‘please.’” He held still and waited to see what the next move would be.

The sibik shuffled its tentacles around and for a few moments actually covered all its eyes with them. The gesture suddenly so bizarrely reminded Kit of his pop’s favorite gesture of frustration that he had to actually bite his lip to keep himself from laughing.

But then the sibik took the tentacles away, and every eye was trained on Kit, round and wide open and pleading.

He shook his head in sheer admiration, for he had never had puppy eyes made at him by something with so many eyes. Fortunately, the effect was more amusing than heartrending.

Kit worked to control his laughter. “No,” he said at last. “Nice try, guy, seriously. But it’s no good. Give up and just say ‘please!’”

“Hungry,” the sibik whimpered.

Kit shook his head. “Please.”

The sibik trembled all over. “Cracker!”

“Please.”

It collapsed flat in his lap as if too famished to support itself. All its tentacles went limp and hung down like so many rubbery toy snakes, and the sibik sucked most of its eyes down into its body again in what appeared to be a gesture of utter hopelessness.

Kit regarded the sibik sympathetically while finishing the saltine he was eating. When it was done he beckoned another one down.

With the three eyes that remained visible, the sibik watched Kit pluck the cracker out of the air and just hold it there. Kit waited until its gaze left the saltine and met his.

“So what’s the magic word?” Kit said.

It trembled all over several times in his lap, one after another, as it repeatedly started to gather its tentacles under it and then each time abandoned the gesture.

“You know what it is. Come on.”

The three eyes still open now angled in three different directions as if looking for help to come from one of them. Kit thought with amusement of Mamvish, who sometimes did something similar with her eyes—she might have only the two, but she got the maximum effect out of them—and simply waited.

Finally the sibik squeezed the remaining three eyes shut and said, distinctly and in utter disgust, “Please.”

“There you go,” Kit said, and held out the saltine.

All eyes flew open and the cracker was instantly snatched out of Kit’s hand and stuffed into the sibik’s eating stoma. This time there was less spraying of crumbs.

Now we’ll see if he can do it twice, Kit thought. Assuming ‘he’ is the word we’re looking for here…

“Another?” Kit said.

“Please!”

“You’re a smart guy,” Kit said. He pulled down another cracker and handed it right over.

The next few minutes were devoted to repeated administrations of positive reinforcement on Kit’s side, and shameless stoma-stuffing on the sibik’s. “You should slow down,” Kit said eventually. “You’ll get indigestion or something.”

“Cracker,” the sibik said, waving its tentacles at him.

“I think you missed a word there..”

“Cracker please!”

“Absolutely,” Kit said, and handed it another. “Question is now, how long’s my supply going to last me? I thought I brought enough for a week, but at this rate…”

“Still hungry,” the sibik remarked.

“Yeah, well, that kind of seems like the default state for you guys, doesn’t it,” Kit said. “So do you think you can tell me something, now that our little power struggle’s over with? You knew there was food here. You even knew it was called ‘cracker’. How did you know?”

“Just knew,” the answer came back after a few moments; and some of the eyes looked at Kit as if he was an idiot for asking.

Well, let’s see if we can’t get at this some other way. “Where did you come from?”

“Don’t know. With people.”

So definitely somebody’s pet, Kit thought. Also, however, through the words, he picked up a faint metallic scent and a feeling that was like feathers, though strangely scratchy.

Useful, Kit thought. A fair number of creatures, when you dealt with them in the Speech, would also pass you back sensory information associated with the data being discussed. The sibik was apparently one of these, which could make things simpler. “So,” he said. “Where do you usually go for food?”

“Don’t go. It comes.”

“People give it to you?”

“Yes.”

“The same people all the time?”

“Yes.” And suddenly there was emotion there: sorrow. Kit might have wonderful new food, but he was not those people.

“You’re lost,” Kit said. “You got lost.”

The sibik made that unhappy deflated-balloon sound again.

“The people who brought you here,” Kit said. “Do you know where they are?”

“Not sure.” There was a sudden sense of entwined scents, astonishingly directional, as Ponch’s combined senses of smell and hearing had sometimes seemed to Kit when they were communicating in a similar mode. The impression he was now getting from the sibik rendered itself visually. It was like a trace or track, a thin red line or a thread, that led away from here across the plain in the general direction of the gating complex. But the track was obscured in places, tangled or rubbed out, and when one was at ground level one couldn’t see the way back clearly. All that could be clearly seen was the place where the straight track faded out.

It’s partly using scent trails, Kit thought. But partly something else too. And it looks like there’s something wild sibik do when they’re communicating with each other that interferes with a pet sibik’s link to its owner, if it’s in the area. Maybe it’s just numbers? Maybe they drown it out or something?

He breathed out. Never mind that now. First let’s see how much of a problem we’ve got. “When you came,” Kit said, “did your people stop a while, or did they go straight from one portal to another?”

There was some confusion over the “portal” concept, but once that was resolved the answer came back promptly. “They stayed.”

“Good,” Kit said.

“They were sad,” the sibik said.

“Yeah,” Kit murmured, looking up and across the plain, “I bet they were. Are.”

“Cracker!”

Yeah, I imagine you’d feel the need for some comfort food too right about now. “Forgot a word there, big guy,” Kit said.

“Please.”

The capitulation was immediate: the sibik had other things on its mind now. Kit fed it another of the few remaining floating saltines. “Let me get clear about one thing,” Kit said. “You didn’t run away from them on purpose, did you? You want to go back to them.”

“Want to go back, yes. But did run away on purpose! Smelled/tasted/wanted food others had, wanted cracker!”

“Oh great,” Kit muttered, “just what I needed about this. Guilt.” …Yet he couldn’t be held responsible for what the wild sibik were up to in their spare time—which doubtless included investigating the transient-Tevaralti campsite and shaking them down for food, as well as coming back here to do the same. It was probably a wonder that there weren’t more escaped pet sibik over here, seduced by the covertly-communicated scent of exotic alien foodstuffs.

“Possibly a good reason for us to find something else for you guys to eat when you turn up here,” Kit muttered. “Something less fancy. I mean, besides generic wizard rations and Earth crackers, I mean. If lots of Tevaralti keep you guys as pets, then somebody here must make, I don’t know, sibik chow…”

But it appeared what this sibik was mostly interested in chowing on was Kit’s crackers: it was trying to climb up his arm for one right now. “Sorry,” Kit said, giving it the cracker. “And I’ll take you back to your people and you’ll be all spoiled, and it’ll all be my fault. I can just hear your boss now. ‘What did that nasty Earthling do to you, your appetite’s all ruined!’”

The sibik ate the latest cracker and ignored this line of reasoning, apparently finding it beneath its notice. But, “Yes, what is the nasty Earthling doing with that creature?” said a familiar voice from behind him. “I can think of any number of media outlets who’d love an answer. Preferably with video.”

Kit snickered as Ronan came strolling around one of the standing stones and stood there for a moment, shaking his head at Kit in huge amusement. “Jaysus, this is so suggestive.”

“Of what?” Kit said.

“Oh, come on, finding somebody with a lapful of tentacles? What an innocent you are. And there’s not even any point talking to you about cartoon smut, is there? Or even smut in general. It just rolls right off.”

Kit managed to look faintly offended. “Excuse me! I know about smut, thanks.”

“Oh yeah? What kind?”

Kit opened his mouth and then closed it again, briefly stifled by the complete disconnect that came with the prospect of sitting here, in the middle of a refugee crisis on an alien planet, preparing to talk about porn. Yet Kit knew if he didn’t do something about this right now, Ronan was going to get the wrong idea.

“I don’t know,” Kit said, “why don’t we start with whatever kind you’re thinking about right now?” A sudden image flashed into his mind, and almost as if his mouth had decided to go ahead without consulting his brain, he found himself saying, “Maybe that thing you were looking at on your manual with Dairine’s streaming plug-in last night, the one about the hotel Jacuzzi and the two— Uh, that.” Kit stopped, as the image he’d glimpsed was way too interesting to describe any further without possibly starting to produce a result that would betray his own interest.

Meanwhile, Ronan’s mouth had fallen open. Kit was concentrating on not letting his own do the same. Now where the hell did that come from?

Consider it a favor, something whispered in the back of his mind. Strictly a one-off, of course.

Kit’s mouth went dry with shock. Bobo??

No response.

And to Kit’s complete amazement, Ronan was blushing. Kit couldn’t recall ever having seen this happen before. “Or maybe not,” Kit said, instantly following up on the momentary advantage. “Never mind, wouldn’t want to embarrass you when Dairine’s messed up the security settings somehow. Neets keeps telling her to stop tweaking the connection parameters, but she just won’t quit.” He shrugged.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 551