“Our star!” she exclaimed, clacking her braids again. “If it wasn’t for my horn, I don’t think I’d recognize myself.”
“You’re safe,” Captain Bates said. “I haven’t figured out how to bead a horn yet, though there are pigments and gilt…”
“Perhaps not,” Khorii said.
“No, it might interfere with your abilities. I was going to put little bells on the ends of the braids but thought better of that, too. You might want to sneak up on someone, and bells would be counterproductive. Ask any cat.”
As if on cue, Khiindi scratched at the hatch and Sesseli called apologetically, “I’m sorry, Captain, he keeps wanting to come in. He can be such a silly kitty.”
But when she saw the quarters and Khorii’s mane, Sesseli’s eyes got wide. “Do mine!” she said. So she replaced Khorii in the chair in front of the table while Khorii found her new do was considered by Khiindi to make fine surrogate prey. She shook her head for him, and he batted her braids while Captain Bates twined and embellished Sesseli’s baby-fine blond curls with smaller beads.
The child examined her reflection. “My beads aren’t the same as Khorii’s.”
“No, because I didn’t want them to pull and give you a headache. But look here at this braid and at Khorii’s in the same place.” They came to stand by Khorii, and the teacher lifted a braided lock on the right side of each girl’s head. “See this sequence? Hot pink, purple, saffron, and turquoise with the little gold spacers? Just alike. Among the nomadic crews they use beaded braids to identify their own and former crewmen. If you see a nomad with hair as full of beads as Khorii’s, you know he or she has a long history with many crews and is probably highly experienced. What do you think about making this sequence our crew’s uniform? This is our second voyage together, after all. We could have our own special insignia. Shall we see what Jaya thinks?”
“Yes,” Khorii said, “but what about the males? I know Elviiz will feel left out if he doesn’t get a braid, too.”
“Males can wear them, too, although Hap may need to grow his hair a bit to hold the beads.”
The intercom opened abruptly, and Jaya’s voice, sounding shaky and tense, said, “Captain Bates? Are Khorii and Sesseli still with you?”
“Yes, Jaya. Is something wrong?”
“I’m not sure. Could you all please return to the bridge?”
“Certainly. Do you need Hap or Mikaaye?”
“I—I don’t think so, but I’ll buzz them to make sure they’re okay,” she replied.
Khorii, trailed by Sesseli and Khiindi, followed Captain Bates back across the corridor to the bridge.
Jaya’s skin was naturally a deep honey color, but when she turned to them she looked almost as pale as Khorii.
“What is it?” Captain Bates asked.
But Khorii saw everything in an intense flash of memory.
“My parents,” Jaya said, “and the rest of the crew. They were here.”
Alone on the bridge, Jaya had dutifully gone through her checklist and was playing a solitary game of 3-D chess with the computer when she happened to glance up to the wide viewport that stretched across the Mana’s nose. She had been in space and aboard this ship most of her life, and though her role as pilot was relatively new, it was really no big deal. The ship’s computer did most of the work. Even Sesseli could do this part, which was mostly minding the scanners and com set and watching the viewport to check on their position. That part was just a human thing for the most part. The computer and the scanners did the real “watching”—checking for all sorts of hazards, exploding heavenly bodies, other ships, asteroid fields, and adjusting the ship’s course to avoid them.
Nevertheless, computers, while less fallible than humans, were not entirely infallible and besides, someone needed to be on the bridge to coordinate the activities of the rest of the crew.
Glancing up at the viewport, Jaya thought how like eyes the stars looked. And then she realized that they looked like eyes because there seemed to be the dim reflections of faces superimposed on them.
Which was weird because viewports were made of nonreflective material, which was very expensive precisely because it was nonreflective as well as heat-, cold-, impact-, shatter-, and pressure-resistant and, of course, transparent.
She twisted her chair around to see what was casting the reflection, and it followed her across the screen until the insubstantial faces, with equally insubstantial, and even transparent bodies, came away from it to float in front of her.
They almost looked like they belonged there. She had seen them, in a more solid form, so often throughout her life. But they’d never been grouped together like this, staring at her. Her mother’s and father’s faces and partially realized forms were the foremost, but she could see others through them, behind them.
She scanned them with feelings of eagerness, hopefulness, glad to see them again, even if they were only fragments of her dreams or some sort of ghostly memory left behind in the ship, as such memories were said to do in haunted houses.
But they looked down at her with empty eyes, their expressions uninterested, as if they didn’t know her.
“Mom?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible even to herself. “Dad?”
The eyes didn’t blink. Had she done something to rouse their spirits and make them angry at her? Did they disapprove of the way she was using the Mana? Why?
The empty eyes seemed to bore into her, so unlike her the way her parents’ eyes had been in life. They had been meltingly dark, and always expressing something, laughter, worry, anger, fear, approval, love…she would rather not have seen them at all than to see them like this, so distant, so…alien.
It wasn’t until they receded, as if walking backward, footless, into the corridor, that she found the courage and the ability to move and speak. That was when she called for her friends.
Chapter 14
No wonder all the children were crying!” Khorii said aloud when she had absorbed Jaya’s impressions and feelings. “How awful for you. I wonder why this is happening.”
By that time they had paged Hap and Mikaaye, and Mikaaye had arrived, saying Hap was on his way. The summons had not been an urgent one, as until Jaya explained aloud as best she could what had happened, they had no idea what sort of crisis had caused her to call for them.
Mikaaye’s brow puckered around his horn. “Perhaps with so many dying so quickly, the spirits could not find their way to their transition points. I have never heard of such a thing occurring, but then, we know very little of what comes after.”
Jaya was not crying, but she was very upset. Sesseli released Khiindi, who landed indignantly on the floor. Khorii thought it was a good thing the little girl had to let go of him sometimes, or her silly cat would forget why he had four legs.
He immediately jumped into Jaya’s lap. Shortly after, Sesseli returned with Captain Bates’s beading tray and handed it to the former teacher.
As they talked, Captain Bates and Jaya released her braids, and the captain combed her hair and slowly braided the beads into it as she had done with Khorii’s. Jaya began relaxing with the gentle change of pressure on her scalp, feeling her hair lifted and released repetitively in that hypnotic soothing way.
Finally, she said, “I don’t know why whatever that was looked like my family. I think maybe if it was them, they were so far away in whatever place people go when they die that they couldn’t really come back enough to be them. Maybe it was just me wanting to see them again.” She shuddered. “But not like that. Everything that made them themselves was gone.”
“That’s how it is,” Captain Bates agreed. They all fell silent, thinking it over when Hap burst in.
“Jaya!”
She looked up. Hap was more agitated than she had been. Although he was extremely competent, he was also very excitable and imaginative and could not help showing his feelings.
“I’m sorry. I had to go to the head, but while I was there, all of a sudden I saw some—we
ll, they were almost people, and they looked like your folks and the other crew members. I mean, they weren’t real, couldn’t have been because we’d have never all fit into the head if they had been but—”
“You saw them, too?” Jaya asked, looking up but not becoming overly excited again, still under the spell of the hair braiding. “And you recognized them?”
“Sure. I mean, I guessed it was them because what other older couple who looked like you and their friends would be hanging around here as ectoplasm or anything else?”
Hap was pretending that the idea of ectoplasmic forms was just one of those things people sometimes encountered, but Khorii could tell he was almost as shocked as Jaya had been.
When Hap walked into the room, Khiindi looked up. All the time the tall boy spoke, Khiindi had stared first at him, then up at Jaya, and finally, with a glance at Khorii, jumped down and ran to the hatch, which irised open automatically. Before it closed again, Khorii heard his paws thudding down the hall as if he had hooves like hers.
“You know what I think?” Hap said. “I think they want us to give them a proper burial, off the ship, somewhere dirtside.”
“Traditionally our people cremate the dead,” Jaya said. “But the medical officials seemed to fear that might spread the disease.”
“It won’t with Mikaaye and me there to purify the smoke as it rises,” Khorii said.
“There’s only one planet on our course to Becker’s wormhole where we might be able to do that,” Captain Bates said. “That would be Rushima.”
“Then that’s where we’ll stop,” Khorii said. “My people have friends there because we helped them repel the Khleevi invasion.”
“Oh yes!” Mikaaye said. “That is a very good story. Both Khorii’s mother and mine helped the settlers there and they were very grateful. They are certain to help us give proper ceremony to Jaya’s family.”
“Rushima it is then,” Jaya said.
Khiindi pelted down the hall, knowing he would be able to see the specters that had disturbed Hap and Jaya. There was something extremely familiar about all of this. Perhaps in his former life he had seen the sort of thing Jaya’s family had become in their next life?
Just when he thought he would need to search the entire ship, he heard a “RRRROWL!” and a hiss and saw four felines bounding out of the cargo bay that contained the makeshift graveyard.
He might have known—had he not seen the other odd occurrence there himself? Except somehow, he thought at that time it was caused by the malign presence of that tail-breaking Marl creature.
Now the Vermin Eradication Squad stood hissing and spitting outside the hatch, even the half-grown kittens twice their size, every hair on their furry bodies standing at attention, backs arched, tails bristling, ears flat, and white fangs bared through peeled-back lips.
“I don’t suppose I need to ask if you saw anything,” Khiindi said.
“Wick-ed!” spat the queen.
“Nassss-ty,” hissed the kits.
“Scared the crap out of me,” their father, now surgically celebate, like the rest of them, agreed.
“Did they look like your old humans?” Khiindi asked.
“Of course not!” the queen said, and Khiindi jumped back for fear she might give him a claws-out smack. “Didn’t look like anything but a collection of evil dust motes.”
“How can dust motes be evil?” Khiindi asked. He knew, of course, he just wanted to see if she could articulate what he felt better than he could.
“Well, they smell that way, don’t they?” the unfortunate male responded. Of them all, he had calmed down the most quickly. Queens with kits, even when both were incapable of reproduction, could be excitable. “Worse stench than jellified mouse.”
“Go see for yourself if you’re so curious,” the queen said, hissing the “curioussss.” “But remember what they say about that.”
Khiindi may have been born on Makahomia, but prior to that birth he had been around enough to be familiar with that old saw. And in his experience, lack of curiosity at certain times could kill the investigatively impaired as quickly as the alternative.
Whatever it was couldn’t be worse than it had been before, when Marl Fidd had been involved, too. Bravely, Khiindi strutted forward, into the cavernous cargo hold.
His gorgeous golden eyes—although he was of course behind them, he was well aware of how gorgeous they were, since others frequently remarked upon it, and he was not the sort of foolish cat who imagined that the magnificent creature in the mirror could be anyone but himself—quickly adjusted to the darkness. Fur erect, tail lashing, ears pricked and rotating to detect the slightest sound, he slunk forward, crouching and stalking toward the mound of soil held in place by banks of large containers.
He had spent a lot of lap time soaking up antique vids aboard the Condor and on Maganos Moonbase. He knew very well that hyperactive dead things tended to return to their places of not so eternal rest when they ran out of things to frighten or mischief to do.
Compared to himself, they were rank amateurs at mischief doing, and when he could switch shapes, he had sometimes been very frightening. The dead part was something else again. He had never been nor did he have any intention of becoming dead but he knew that dead things lay still. That was how it worked. They didn’t roam around worrying their living offspring or interfering with the duties of working felines. Of course, there might have been time travel involved, but he didn’t think so. In that case they would now look exactly as they had before. The VES denied recognizing them, and Jaya had said that though they resembled her family superficially, she felt that they were not the same.
Even the soft footfalls of his paws echoed in the emptied hold.
The distance from hatch to graves felt as if it could be measured in light-years. But hovering over the graveyard, he saw the same shimmering shapes he had seen before, except that now they seemed more solid and better defined. They did indeed seem to have coalesced into roughly bipedal forms.
He slunk closer, keeping his belly low to the deck, but they seemed unaware of him, or, if they were aware, not properly respectful of him as a potential predator.
The nearer he drew, the more his nostrils filled with their scent. He did not find it quite so thoroughly offensive as the ordinary cats did, but he did find it distinctly odd. A medley of rot, metal, and something like the smell of the cultures Jalonzo was growing in the laboratory was as close as Khiindi could come to describing it. It was also very much the same sort of odor he had detected around the sand castle on LoiLoiKua. Khorii had acted as if he were merely showing off, which hurt because he had definitely sensed this same sort of presence and had been trying to protect her from it.
But while the smell was strong to a cat’s sensitive olfactory organs, he doubted that the blunted senses of the humans or even Linyaari could detect more than a whiff of it.
As he had thought they might, the forms began to pour themselves back into the soil, returning to their graves. Oooooooooh. Khiindi was not going to let them get away with that spooky nonsense around him.
He put his paws into warp drive and raced for the mound, leaping the barriers with a single bound and landing stiff-legged, claws extended in the grave dirt.
Rats! The last few motes were sinking into the soil even as he stood there, escaping his wrath. Or almost.
A final trail of the dustlike specters spiraled before his eyes, sailed over his head and behind him, and curled itself around his tail, tugging it, tugging him, trying to pull him down after it. With a mighty yowl and a twist of his lithe body, Khiindi pounced on the thing holding his tail, dispersed it, and teleported across the cargo bay and through the hatch where he landed sprawling on the deck with the queen and a kit squashed beneath his prostrate form.
“They—they almost got me,” he panted.
“Nasty and incompetent then!” the queen snarled. “Get off me, you, and unpaw my child or I’ll finish what they left undone!”
Khiindi lev
itated and raced down the corridor toward the bridge and the protection of Khorii and Sesseli.
As he reached the hatch, it irised open and he leaped in, the queen half a body length behind him.
The two-leggeds watched stupidly, all except Sesseli, who snatched him up with her telekinesis and pulled him into her arms, while the queen braked, smacking her tail against the deck and glaring up at them.
Khiindi wriggled free of Sesseli and hopped onto Khorii’s shoulders. Because it was expected of him, he laughed down at the angry queen, but his heart wasn’t in it.
How was he going to find a way to warn Khorii that the plague was not dead after all but changing into another form?
Chapter 15
It is she, as I saw it would be!” An unusually round humanoid female pointed at Narhii. She was so covered in the feminine garb Akasa prized, and needed so very much of it to cover her, that she might well have used up half of Akasa’s extensive wardrobe. Jewels hung from every part of her a jewel could hang from, covering her otherwise mostly bare upper chest, arms, fingers, and dangling from her ears and the draperies veiling her mane, which was a sort of roan color.
“Please, Karina, you’re frightening the child,” another female voice said, and a face much like Narhii’s appeared on the screen. “Who are you, youngling, and how did you come to be in the sea?”
Narhii knew the female wanted to ask about her clothing as well. She also knew, just by looking at her over the com screen, that this female had been hoping to see her, though not perhaps in this fashion.
“I don’t like talking into this thing, in front of so many others,” she replied, feeling very daring. She hadn’t heard all of the others, but she could feel them watching her even though the female like her was the only one she saw.
“It’s really quite all right,” the other female assured her. “These are all friends and—well, I’m afraid that I cannot come and speak to you in person, nor can Aari, my mate.”
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