Third Watch (7 page)

He broadcast a burst of commands, and the techs scattered throughout the facility, leaving him alone with Khorii.

Turning from the time map to face him, she said in an accusatory tone, “Ariin isn’t here!”

“I can’t be held responsible for that!” Grimalkin replied. “If you recall, she was the one who got rid of me, not the other way around. I thought we two should stand together, as we have your entire life to solve this problem, so when I saw that she had abandoned you as well, I came to your rescue.”

“You never told me you were a grown-up man,” she said, unmollified. “Of course we stood together when you were my kitty.”

“It makes no difference if we are standing together on four feet or six,” he said, the wheedling mew underlying his voice again. “We are still a team. I may look like a grown-up, but many of my own kind claim that is a false assumption. Your sister dislikes me, and resents you because, when I was forced to bring back your mother’s egg, I brought hers instead of yours. That is how I came to be frozen in the shape of a small cat. My people ganged up on me, took my crono, froze me, and sent me back to your parents as a birthing gift for you to punish me for not breaking your parents’ hearts.”

Khorii, arms crossed over her chest, snorted. “From what I hear, you didn’t care about that when you ran away with my father, then tried to convince my mum that you were him.”

“No, I didn’t care particularly then. Even more than most of my kind, I am a curious and exploratory sort of fellow. But your parents rescued me from the Khleevi—returned for me when they could have safely escaped. And although, as you suggest, my previous actions may have caused them alarm, even psychological pain, neither of them tried to hurt me. They were so happy once it was all over.

“I could not betray them so completely as to take both of their potential children. I knew you were twins and would be exactly the same for the purposes of science, so I simply took the nearest, your sister, and allowed the other, you, to be born in due time. Had I not been forced into small cat form to be your pet, I could have remained with Ariin and instructed her about her origins. I could also have shown my people how to treat a sensitive and impressionable child so she didn’t grow up bitter and sneaky.

“I am the most empathic of my kind, which is one reason the females love me so, and I’d have had a softening influence on your sister’s upbringing. It’s not my fault that my people’s idea of justice meant that you got the advantage of a loving family and an extremely talented, versatile and clever feline companion while your sister grew up surrounded with the tenderness commonly shown to laboratory animals.”

Khorii thought that over, and finally said, “You have to admit you have caused a great deal of trouble for both of us, my parents, and even yourself.”

“Yes, but see how that trouble has also made all of you learn and grow—even Ariin, who did find you after all. Now that we’ve resolved all of this, perhaps we can stop casting blame and get on with the mission?”

“First we have to find Ariin,” Khorii said.

“I suppose we must,” he agreed. “Now then, when could she have gone?”

Twexa reappeared as if they had summoned her. “Couldn’t help overhearing you talk about some mission, sir?”

“Indeed, Twexa. There is an alien threat in my little friend’s time that may be the doom of the universe as we know it if it isn’t addressed, and smartly. We have noticed certain similarities between the threat—”

“It involves great galumphing masses of matter-eating—er—matter,” Khorii put in. “Organic.”

“Yes,” Grimalkin said. “It put my friend’s sister and me in mind of the shapeshifting nature of our own fluid dwellings. You’re a tech. Ring any bells with you?”

“Certainly, sir. Would the young lady have been using the time map or a crono?”

“She—uh—borrowed my crono from another time”—he supplied the signature—“but I don’t know which she used. She will be raised right here in the time lab a few years hence and is familiar with the operation of the device.”

“Ah well, I’ll check the logs of both then.”

“There are logs?” Khorii asked. “Why didn’t you say?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t know. Normally we leave these things to the techs.”

Waving her palm across one of the wall panels, Twexa revealed a long, scrolling graph, then another. “Aha! There you are, you little minx. Gotcha.”

“You found her?” Khorii asked.

“Indeed. After she left
then,
she went
then,
” Twexa said, pointing to Ariin’s points of departure and arrival, respectively.

“What is significant about
then.
In particular?” Grimalkin asked.

“Ah, of course. That is when Pircifir launched his voyage of discovery and also when he returned with the organisms we’ve groomed into your lordships’ dwellings. She arrived shortly before launch.”

“Please arrange for us to join her, Twexa.”

“If I may make a suggestion, sir?”

“Yes?”

“I—er—couldn’t help overhearing what you and your young friend were saying about her sister. Perhaps if you arrive when she returns home from the voyage, she will have gained some maturity, a sense of personal accomplishment that will serve to alleviate part of her anger. If not, you can always return to the beginning of the journey. It was only a moment or two before the end, since Pircifir used his crono to return them just after they departed. Watch now. They should be arriving momentarily.”

They waited for the egg shape indicating the space vessel to reappear on the time map, and for Ariin’s and Pircifir’s dots to emerge from it, but after several minutes, the map remained clear.

“Oh dear,” Twexa said. “This is not how it’s supposed to go at all. I’ll do a forward search.” The time map scrolled so rapidly Khorii felt slightly dizzy. Twexa turned to face them, looking worried. “They’re not here, sir. Neither Pircifir nor Ariin. It’s as if they never existed.”

Chapter 5

G
rimalkin dismissed the puzzling disappearance of Pircifir and Ariin and had Twexa direct him and Khorii to the moment just before Pircifir and Ariin boarded.

As Twexa had suggested, Ariin was less than thrilled to see Khorii.
“How did you get here? Who’s that with you?”

Grimalkin nodded to Pircifir. “Greetings, brother.”

Pircifir’s stoic face warmed when he saw Grimalkin. “Brother!” He looked at Khorii and at Ariin and back again. “I see you have one, too.”

“You’re spoiling everything,”
Ariin told Khorii.
“Pircifir thinks I’m one of the Friends in disguise.”

Khorii hadn’t ever been able to thought-talk with Khiindi, as far as she knew, but she quickly transmitted the idea to Grimalkin. She was relieved when he said smoothly, “Yes, this guise is all the rage among the ladies at the moment. You’ve had your nose in your schematics too much to notice the fashion, it seems.”

“I can trust you to keep up enough for us both,” Pircifir replied. “I don’t suppose you would care to come along on this little jaunt, would you?”

Grimalkin grinned ingratiatingly. Pircifir seemed very fond of him.
Are they real brothers?
Khorii wondered. She didn’t know any of the other Friends on what she considered a truly friendly basis, but presumably they had families, or at least relatives. She looked more closely. Pircifir and Grimalkin were around the same height and had the same tawny coloring, but Pircifir wore his mane quite short, whereas Grimalkin’s flowing locks billowed in the breeze, and he sported a full beard as well, the total effect being that of a ruff surrounding his entire head and making it look four times its actual size. The complete effect was quite striking, even among the Friends.

Of course, with shapeshifters it was hard to say whether their resemblance was natural or assumed, but she hadn’t heard any of the others address each other as kin.

“Exactly what I had in mind,” Grimalkin replied. “We see each other so seldom these days.”

“Come along then,” Pircifir said. He turned to Ariin. “But—”

“I asked first!” she said belligerently. “And it’s really important that you take me.”

“Of course!” Pircifir said. “I was only going to say that you and my brother’s friend will have to share a cabin. You seem to have a lot in common.”

Ariin snorted with outrage, and for a moment Khorii thought she was going to throw a fit, but Ariin controlled herself and marched into the ship without so much as a glance at the rest of them.

This ought to be a fun trip,
Khorii mused, shaking her head.

I
n his own way, Pircifir was as different from the other Friends as Grimalkin claimed to be. He was more polite, for one thing. Khorii thought it might be because his interests lay beyond Vhiliinyaar, exploring new worlds and finding new cultures and their products just for the fun of it, apparently. Anywhere else he might have been a merchant, making his living by importing exotic fabrics, jewels, foods, spices, and furnishings. However, the Friends did not seem to have anything like an economy that she could see, at least among themselves.

“If people don’t pay Pircifir for what he brings back, how does he pay for the items in the first place?” Khorii asked Ariin, who had spent a lot of the time in their cabin sulking.

“How should I know?”

“You grew up with them. Didn’t you learn anything about them?”

“No, I was too busy being studied,” Ariin snapped.

“You didn’t notice where the meals were produced, or the clothing?” Khorii persisted. “I didn’t see anything that looked like industry there, yet they have spacecraft and the time lab, all of these scientific things.”

“Why don’t you go ask your cat?” Ariin asked. “Not that he’s very truthful.”

“Maybe I will,” Khorii said.

But when she asked Grimalkin, he just smiled in the same way he had when he was a cat and had caught something particularly tasty in a particularly clever way. “If you have an asset that’s important enough, you don’t need to have a lot of others, youngling,” he told her. “When we dock at the next port, you’ll see. But don’t interfere. Remember the larger mission.”

That aggravated her so much she forgot how irritated she was with Ariin. “He was such a
nice
kitty,” she said, mourning the loss of her pet who, now that he walked on two legs, acted more like Elviiz than Khiindi, all superior and lording over her.

“I tried to warn you not to let him loose,” Ariin said.

“I didn’t. He found me. You took him back to before his friends made him stay a cat all the time.”

Ariin repeated a word that Captain Bates sometimes used when she was mad, after which the captain usually mumbled an apology. Ariin didn’t bother, however.

“For once you could have let me handle this on my own, you know,” she groused. “You don’t have to hog all the credit for everything all the time.”

“We were going to,” Khorii told her. “But once you got on board, the ship didn’t come back like it was supposed to, so we came early enough to join you. Look, I don’t really care about credit at this point. I’ll be glad to tell everybody that everything was your idea—then they can look sad and disappointed at you because we ran away and scared them…”

“We’ll use the crono and be back before they miss us,” Ariin said in her own superior way, as if Khorii was being tedious.

“We’ll still have to let them know about the mission,” Khorii replied. “If we find the origin of the aliens invading everything, we’ll probably still need help stopping them.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Ariin said.

Khorii privately thought the Friends relied on their cronos and the time device too much. If it wasn’t for the time map, they wouldn’t know whether they were coming or going.

She didn’t know the half of it.

W
hen they docked on a green planet paisleyed with deep blue oceans, Pircifir and his crew trooped out on foot to a nearby marketplace that reminded Khorii of the nanobug market on Kezdet.

They heard and smelled the market four blocks before they actually entered it. Vendors either cried their wares or broadcast prerecorded advertisements and jingles. Strange music blared, accompanying every variety of entertainment and many of the sales pitches. Engines drove both the machinery on display and the machinery used to transport and display it. Animals roared, brayed, growled, and chattered. Intertwined, over and under and all around these noises, were voices babbling in many tongues, bartering, admiring, disparaging, or just trying to make themselves heard in shouts and sometimes screams.

The medley of conflicting aromas, scents, fragrances, and stenches was exciting, but slightly sickening, too. Spicy foods, sweat, cooking meats, baking sweets, more sweat, excrement, pungent incense, animal odors, fresh, exotic flowers, and rotting vegetation assaulted their nostrils.

Awnings covered the merchandise of the foremost layer of street-level vendors, and banners hanging from the windows of the upper stories fluttered in a brisk breeze, creating a colorful canopy that whipped and twisted overhead.

It was larger and cleaner than the nanobug market, and had bigger, permanent enclosures, some several stories high. Except for the generally rowdy and rank atmosphere, it could have been a regular city.

Pircifir’s ship had a very powerful drive, and she knew they had traveled far beyond the planets in Vhiliinyar’s immediate vicinity, maybe even beyond the planets where she and her people had been trying to contain the plague. He had declined her help or Ariin’s on the bridge, and she could not get a look at the charts, so she did not know exactly where they were. She only knew she had never been here before, in any time, although as they had approached from the air, she had thought there was something familiar about its color scheme.

The inhabitants were human, as far as she could tell, with a few other species sprinkled in among them. There were also companion animals and beasts of burden. She wondered if anyone had a litter of kittens. She’d need to start looking for a new cat now that Khiindi had turned into Grimalkin. She didn’t suppose he’d want to turn back, and even if he did, it wouldn’t be the same.