Hey, gang, come aboard! You got to hear this. Hafiz is on the horn with some great news,” Captain Jonas P. Becker called from the descending robolift of the Condor, flagship of Becker and Son Interplanetary Recycling and Salvage, Ltd.
Acorna and Aari stood up from grazing in the lush meadow the Ancestors had allocated for their personal use and trotted over to the robolift. RK, Becker’s feline first mate, leaped from the captain’s shoulder to Acorna’s.
“Beam us up, Maak,” Becker said into the com he’d just installed on the robolift.
“How do I do that, Captain?” the android asked in a mystified tone.
“You can’t, buddy. I just always wanted to say that. You don’t really have to do anything. I’ll push the button like I always do.” Acorna and Aari smiled at each other. The captain was so pleased with something that his mustache was absolutely fluffy with joy. He was also carefully shielding his thoughts so they could enjoy the surprise element of the news he wished them to hear for themselves.
They ascended to the cargo deck, then up to the bridge. The robolift previously had gone only to the cargo deck. “This is a wonderful surprise, Joh,” Aari told him. “Making the lift go all the way to the bridge is both logical and practical.”
“Yeah, well, I thought of it when I was getting my strength back after the plague. The stairs were just too much, you know? But this is nothing!” He snorted and waved one sausage-fingered hand dismissively at the lift. “Come on, can’t keep His Hafizness waiting. He made me promise not to tell you so he could.”
Becker capered ahead of them and then, with a low bow, as if presenting royalty, indicated Hafiz Harakamian’s impatient countenance on the com screen.
“Acorna, most felicitous of female foster offspring! And Aari, supremely salubrious son-in-law. Greetings!” Hafiz nodded, a deep blue catseye chrysoberyl winking at them from the center of the peacock-feather fan adorning his turquoise turban. “Sit down, my dears, make yourselves company. Jonas, are you a barbarian? Serve your guests cakes—er—seed cakes, of course, and a sparkling libation. The tidings I bear require celebration, think you not?”
Hafiz himself was seated, and behind him a flowing curtain of amethyst and violet draperies indicated that his beloved Karina was hovering in the background. This impression was confirmed when her purple-catseye-encrusted hands caressed the teal-and-gold brocade shoulders of her husband’s robes.
Aari and Acorna sat. Roadkill walked from Acorna’s shoulders to the back of the command chair and draped himself across it, his bushy tail tickling her cheek.
Acorna knew the form Hafiz preferred, especially when he wanted to spin out a story, as he seemed to wish to do now. “How have you been, Uncle Hafiz? I trust you and Karina are well and that your enterprises flourish?”
“How kind of you to inquire, my child. I am well as is my beloved. As for my enterprises, as you know they faltered somewhat while the disastrous disease threatened to eradicate life in our home sector. Your father, Rafik, tells me that our losses are so great he has been unable to calculate them accurately as yet. So many of our employees in so many of our enterprises have succumbed that data has been difficult to gather.”
“But Rafik is well?”
“He is. As are your other fathers and their families. Your people retrieved and cleansed many of our vessels and other properties, so House Harakamian is in better order than the businesses of its—for the most part late—competitors.”
“We were all happy to have the occasion to repay your fathomless kindness to us and our worlds, Uncle Hafiz,” Aari replied. “Have you had any news of Khorii?”
Aari was much less accustomed to the circumlocutory manners that were Hafiz’s habit. As Joh Becker put it, Aari liked to “cut to the chase.”
“Ahhhh.” Hafiz smiled deep into his beard and mustache, leaned back in his chair and laced his fat, ring-encrusted fingers across his royal blue sash. Had RK favored a palette of blues instead of his brindled gray coat, he would have looked much the same after hiding a particularly well aged deceased rodent amid her bedclothes. “That I have, my children, that I have. I received a most encouraging relay mere moments ago from the Balakiire. Khorii is with them now, and thus far, are you ready?”
“They’re ready already, Hafiz!” Becker told him. “Enough’s enough. Tell them before they read my mind.”
“Thus far Khorii has confirmed their impression that the plague has run its course. There have been no new outbreaks, and all previously contaminated areas are, according to the talented pearl of your family oyster, now clear of the disease.”
“Then she—everyone else, too, of course—will be coming home soon?” Acorna asked. Her hands trembled in her lap. She reached up with her left and stroked RK’s tail.
“As soon as possible,” Hafiz said, nodding. “But you understand, beloveds, that it may not be possible for her to return very soon. She alone can confirm that all traces of the illness have vanished, and the area of infection was, as you know, quite extensive.”
Becker chewed his mustache, as if trying to decide something, then said, “Hafiz, tell Khorii if she wants a good litmus test for the course of the disease to check the White Star,” he said. “I’d appreciate if you passed it on just that way and went through as few relays as possible—better yet, send it to the Mana. I don’t exactly want the whole Linyaari fleet trying to read my mind on this one.”
Hafiz raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t ask,” Becker said, and Hafiz nodded. The two men of business respected each other’s mysterious silences, at least superficially. That didn’t mean they might not do some sneaking around later trying to find out what the other one was up to, but they kept it polite for the sake of their mutual friends. “But if she checks the White Star and it’s clear and there are still no new outbreaks, it should be safe for her to return home.”
“As you have said, so shall it be done,” Hafiz replied formally.
“Is that all?” Aari asked, sounding a bit disappointed. Acorna knew he would have preferred to hear that their daughter was currently waiting for someone to collect her from the Moon of Opportunity and bring her back to Vhiliinyar.
“It is,” Hafiz said. “And now, I must forsake your company, which is like unto a waterfall in the desert of my despair, and return to—yes, dear?” He looked up, nodded, and patted the feminine hand on his shoulder. “Karina has something she wishes to impart to you as well. Farewell for now.”
“Farewell, Uncle Hafiz,” they said, and Acorna added, “A thousand thanks.”
Karina Harakamian settled her drifts of draperies into the chair like a purple flower shedding its petals. She beamed triumphantly at them through the com screen, her eyes twinkling like her many jewels. “No disrespect to my hubby, kids, but I’ve had a vision that portends even better news than his!”
Karina must be excited indeed, Khorii thought, because she had momentarily forgotten the funereal tones she ordinarily employed to announce her “visions.”
Generally, Karina also chose to have her visions in the presence of those who would be most impressed by them. Contacting them after the fact was not her style. “When did you have this vision?” Acorna asked her, putting more eagerness into her voice than she actually felt. Often Karina’s visions of the “future” simply restated the present. Occasionally she had a true flash of insight, but during those times, in Acorna’s experience, her presentation was quite dramatic, if accidental, usually coming within the framework of one of her questionable trances.
“Just now!” she said. “While Haffy was speaking to you. It was quite clear though disappointingly brief and, forgive me, dears, but this is the way my gift works, a bit cryptic.”
As if they were not all well aware of that!
“What was your vision?” Aari asked.
“Simply this, and do remember I am but the messenger. Hafiz and Neeva are being overly optimistic. Khorii will not return to you before twelve months and a day have passed, but your daughter is close at hand, and you will be reunited within the week.”
“Standard measurement?” Acorna asked, as it differed from the Linyaari concept of time.
Karina cupped her right eye with her thumb and index finger, consulting her inner timekeeper, then nodded. “Standard, yes.”
They thanked her, and the com screen went blank.
“What in the multiverse did she mean by that?” Joh Becker asked them.
She was such a freak that she didn’t even have a proper name, like all of the others. The Friends called her The Mutation and sometimes addressed her as Mu. The Others called her Narhii, which in their language meant “New.”
But she was not new any longer. She had existed for six full rotations of the Star and was tall, awkward, and changing. As a baby and a toddler, she had longed to be held, but the Friends were far too busy and the Others didn’t have arms, though they lay beside her and nuzzled her with their soft noses when she brought her troubles to them, and sometimes touched her horn with one of theirs, which comforted her instantly, though it was not what she instinctively craved.
She shared many characteristics with the Others, physiologically, but she was a biped, like the Friends. Most of the time most of them were bipeds anyway. They changed shapes when it suited them. Even their dwellings changed shapes depending on who was utilizing them and for what purpose.
She preferred the flower-strewn fields where the Others lived, though they sheltered in caves during bad weather, eating dried grasses and grains provided by the Friends and reminiscing about what their ancestors told them about life on their planet of origin.
The Friends had good stories, too, and they didn’t mind if she listened, but they had no interest in educating her. Their involvement with her was mostly scientific. They studied her. A portion of every day of her life had been spent in the laboratory, having her bodily fluids collected and analyzed, being stuck with needles to take her blood, being scanned by computers, tested, and documented.
Worst of all, they invaded her mind. They not only seemed able to tell what she was thinking, but they made her think about specific topics, and when she replied, verbally or just by thinking, they probed and probed for more details. When she was little, she had tried very hard to answer their questions in such a way as to please them; but they never seemed pleased by anything and indeed, always seemed impatient.
During the last two seasons, their attitude toward her changed from one of boredom to anticipation. They had begun to expect something from her. The nature of their questions changed. Had she experienced unusual bleeding from her reproductive orifice or a feeling of heaviness in her lower abdomen? Any warmth or unusual urges?
She had no idea what they considered unusual, but the questions made her uncomfortable anyway. Did they think she was ill? Would they care? She had never been ill, but the Others spoke about it among themselves, and how a touch from one of their horns could remedy even the worst illness, which seemed to be a bodily malfunction. Her body, misshapen as it was compared to everybody else’s, had always functioned well enough to suit her, if not the Friends. They were not deliberately unkind, and if she expressed a need for something tangible, they supplied it in a disinterested way, but the new gleam in their eyes was not appreciation or fondness, and their probing and questions were even more relentless than they had been before.
Finally, she was sitting at the table with Akasa, the female who was most often her questioner. Akasa had not been satisfied with her answers. “You are reaching what should be puberty for your kin—for you,” she said aloud. “Do you feel no changes, no urges, no different wishes toward other beings, especially males?”
Odus, the male interrogator, entered the room. He would have been watching from behind the wall panel, opaque from within the room, transparent from the observation area beyond. At times there had been a large invisible audience present at her sessions with Odus or Akasa, she knew because she saw them leave their chamber when she was allowed to leave.
“We are approaching her the wrong way, Akasa,” he said. He had taken the form of a tall male biped, with blue eyes and golden curls and an erect posture. In this form he was often at his most dismissive, more interested in appearing wise and clever to those beyond the panel than in her responses. In his most customary alter-form as a golden-maned, four-legged large feline he was somewhat more likable, though his roar was fearsome.
“And what would the right way be?” Akasa asked.
“How can we expect her to attain the proper state without the proper stimulation.” He shed his robes easily, as the Friends often did when transforming, and changed swiftly, his muscular torso remaining golden and much the same but his face elongated, he sprouted a small beard, and his hair curled down his spine and up his calves. His soft five-toed feet solidified into a solid unit, then split until they were two-toed hard feet like her own. His five fingers fused to three. His male reproductive organs had grown, and his phallus had assumed an alarmingly erect posture.
“There now, Mu, I am a male like you. How does that make you feel?” he asked aloud while searching her mind for any deeper or hidden responses.
She looked at Akasa, whose expression was both curious and disapproving.
“It makes me feel that I would like to leave now and go out to graze with the Others,” she replied honestly. To her relief, they acquiesced, and Odus, unable to maintain a tertiary transformation for any length of time, reverted to his lion form.
The openness of the fields, the scent of the flowers, the breeze ruffling her mane, helped calm the queasiness that she felt beholding the Friend she had known from infanthood in that mocking guise.
“Poor Narhii!” said Nrihiiye, the senior dam among the Others who was her special friend. Although the Friends always wanted her to answer their questions in detail, the Others, particularly Nrihiiiye, always knew how she felt. Like the Friends, they heard her thoughts but unlike them, the Others listened to her without probing and did not expect her constantly to define and explain what was inside of her that even she did not understand.
“No wonder you are upset,” her mate, Hruffli, said, nuzzling her. “I could just kick Odus and Akasa so hard they landed on the Star itself! They have no sense. I don’t know why they act like other creatures have no will of their own. They’re telepaths. They should know better.”
“It’s not just carelessness, it’s selfishness,” Nrihiiye disagreed. “They are so eager to use Narhii as breeding stock that they have frightened and repulsed her. Don’t they know there’s more to mating urges than form? I suppose not. They’re rather indiscriminate in their unions.”
Hruffli stamped his foot angrily. “This is bad. Unnatural. Not to be tolerated. This filly belongs with her own people. Among them she will find a suitable mate when the time and place are right.”
“I don’t have any people!” Narhii wailed.
“Yes, you do,” Hruffli said.
“I do?” she asked, surprise and—yes—relief—flooding through her. “I’m not just a mutation? A solitary aberration?”
“Whoa there, sweetweed,” Nrihiiye cautioned her mate, “we promised the Friends not to disclose any of that.”
Narhii’s relief and pleasure receded as the betrayal stung her. She had people and Nrihiiye knew and hadn’t told her because of some stupid promise to the Friends?
“We couldn’t,” Nrihiiye said. “We owe our lives and the continuation of our race to the Friends. And though their means may be questionable, their motives are not so bad. They know they created your race in the future, but they haven’t figured out how they did it.”
“Stinks worse than hound-shite to me,” Hruffli said. “Thornin’ simpleminded of such lofty bipeds to try to create a race by bringing a member of it back here to seed it. And anybody would know that if you have the filly, you need the colt as well.”
“Yes, Hruffli, but you know how they are. They tell us they’ll do the science and we can do the healing and purifying and keep our chin whiskers out of their business. If you ask me, it’s all that gallivanting around they do from one time to the next as well as one world to the next. That lot never know where or when they are, much less who they are. No wonder they have to keep asking Narhii who she is.”
“Look at her!” Hruffli said. “She’s more like us than them. She is our business, and I’ll not have them frightening her away from stallions forever by having one of those—those—they’re not my friends—interfering with her. I don’t care if they take us back to Terra to be run to ground by the horn hunters. No matter how it works or when it happens, Narhii is our grandchild.”
“We can’t. There is nowhere for her to go, Hruffli. That’s always been the problem.”
“There thornin’ well is. She can use that contraption they used to fetch the ones who got away.”
“But it’s broken in the future. I heard Grimalkin say so. She might be lost in time, and then where would she be?”
“Not here for them to warp her natural inclinations, that’s where,” Hruffli said. “You know Grimalkin. That slyboots would say anything to cover his own tail, and he stole her, or she wouldn’t be standing here. Those others like her seemed respectable. She can use the contraption to find them, and they’ll look after her.”
“Got it all figured out, eh, Hruffli?” Neicaair, another stallion, spoke up.
“I reckon,” Hruffli said, his chin whiskers jutting and his eyes narrowed. His left front hoof scraped the ground three times, defiantly.
Neicaair backed down a fraction. “Say they’re right though and she’s the key to re-creating her race. The Friends know about those things. Lot more than you do or any of us. If she is and we put her in the contraption and she goes off looking for her people, there won’t be any, will there, because she didn’t finish the job they brought her here to do.”
Neicaair’s mate Morniika flopped onto her side, her hooves kicking back and forth. “Stop! You’re making me dizzy, Neicaair, and the rest of you, too. It isn’t up to us to decide. If the Friends think Narhii is old enough to begin thinking about mating, then she is old enough to decide what she wants to do.”
“Of course, wildflower, you’re absolutely right,” Neicaair replied. Narhii thought he seemed eager for the escape route she offered. “And if the girl chooses to leave, who are we to stop her? So, Narhii, what will it be? Stay here and be goaded into mating with one of those old plugs who’ve been studying you like you were scat on their hooves your whole life or risk annihilating your race and maybe getting lost in time and space looking for those other bipeds who look like you?”
If they hadn’t known all along that she didn’t belong here, that she was not the only one of her kind, that in fact she had probably been stolen from the future, if they hadn’t told her, she wouldn’t have been able to go. The Others were as close to family as she’d ever known, the only warmth or affection or play in her life. But they had known, and they also knew how freakish she felt and how much she longed to belong and until now none of them had told her. They’d kept it a secret even though it was her secret, her truth, and one she deserved to know.
“The machine,” she said. “I won’t get lost, and somehow or other they’ll start my race without me and my people will be waiting, my dam and my sire. They’ve probably worried about me and wondered where I was my whole life.”