“Mac, you’re going to have to add about a foot to your height and get bigger around if you’re going to have room on yourself for all those modifications,” Becker said. Rafik was already earnestly in conversation with Mac’s electronic belly button.
“How far are they from your position, Aziza?”
The dancer, frowning with concentration, gave him the coordinates. “That makes them about the same distance from us as you are, but coming from the opposite direction.”
“Stay put. We’re on our way,” Rafik told her.
“We can’t just leave these people here with four bags of cat food and a hank of grass,” Becker said. “The way Aari talked, he ought to be back by now.”
“He may not return at all, Captain,” Acorna said. “The creature who just promised to save these people isn’t Aari.”
“You could have fooled me,” Becker said.
“And all of us as well,” Neeva told him. “But we just ran the DNA and checked it against Aari’s. That’s not him.”
“It’s Grimalkin,” Acorna said. “At least, I’m pretty sure it is.”
“Where’s Aari, then?”
“I’d like to know that myself,” Acorna said. “I’m hoping he was also on board the ship my parents came on, but there’s certainly been no evidence of that. If he was there, why wouldn’t he let us know? I’m afraid that I believe that Grimalkin wasn’t leaving in order to help us feed these people. I think that he left because he knew he was about to be caught out as an impostor. He has a lot of explaining to do, but I suppose answering questions right now didn’t fit in with his plans.”
“All I can say is he picked a lousy time to turn out to be somebody else,” Becker growled. Then he repeated himself, shouting. The refugees were making a lot of noise, what with chowing down on the cat crunchies and the grass. They had descended on the food like locusts and were already polishing off most of it.
“Mac, shut your shirt and let’s go use the real thing to call Hafiz.”
“We can remain here to help these people,” Vaanye said. “The Balakiire gardens will grow more food within twenty-four hours.”
(Can your people exist on salad for a while?) Acorna asked the refugees in general.
(It’s better than—) one began, but interrupted himself with sudden convulsive vomiting. Several of the others began doing the same thing.
“What?” Becker asked, alarmed. “The food we have doesn’t agree with them? But I ate those cat crunchies myself!”
“No, Captain,” Neeva assured him as she steadied the nearest sickly refugee, seeming accidentally to touch him with her horn. “They’ve simply been eating too fast on stomachs too long deprived of food.”
Acorna and the others surreptitiously healed the refugees with horn touches. As well as curing the starving people of nausea, the healing stopped the hungry people from wasting more precious nutrients.
(You white-horned people are very comforting to have around,) the musician she’d been speaking with in the hole said. (I don’t suppose any of you are musically inclined and would like to stay with us?)
(We can all stay with you if you like, until relief comes,) Neeva told him. (Captain Becker has gone to call Uncle Hafiz for it now.)
(I would like to complete the mission on the sulfur planet and return to Vhiliinyar as soon as possible,) Acorna said. (I’m worried about Aari now. Grimalkin must have done something to him or with him to conceal the ruse, whatever the reason for that was. And I’m afraid that even if they were friends, as Aari thought, and Grimalkin meant no harm, that creature’s judgment just isn’t very good.)
(It certainly is not!) Neeva agreed. (He may not be a Khleevi, but it would be just like him to endanger us all by going back in time and finding one just to see what they were like.)
Acorna shivered. (I hope my dreams were only dreams and not a vision of what that creature has done to Aari. I can’t bear to think of him back in the clutches of the Khleevi.)
Aari was wrong, Grimalkin decided. His Khornya was a hard-hearted, horn-headed filly who was not worth the effort. No matter how he courted her, she rejected him. He felt distinctly unappreciated and aggrieved. He would have got on better with her if he’d taken over that very territorial ship cat, RK. She cuddled with him readily enough.
He supposed he might as well return to Vhiliinyar and fetch Aari from the cave. As for his purported mission to get food for the people of Skarness, as far as he was concerned, that had been mostly an excuse to escape from Acorna’s penetrating gaze. Though that last horn touch she’d given him had been almost enough to make him stay, he’d sensed an ulterior motive on her part. Such abrupt changes in behavior, when he did them at least, were usually part of some sort of trick.
But now he was back in space, where he was responsible for no one and to no one. He could go his own way.
He lay on the broad windowsill in front of his viewport. As usual, when he viewed the stars, he wished he could rearrange them to his own liking. They were so random.
He really needed to go retrieve Aari. He had one last trick to play before returning to his friend, however. Those chrysoberyls were his by rights. Aari had made them from the contaminants in the Makahomian sacred lake. What nobody realized or at least remembered was that to begin with they had been just unattractive rocks. Fortunately for the planet, Grimalkin had a sense of myth and story. He had rearranged the molecules so that the rocks would always resemble the gleam in his own eyes. And as he and Aari departed their worshipers, Grimalkin had added one more mythic touch, blasting a long valley in each of the planet’s moons and setting each slightly off its axis. This gave the moons a slightly irregular orbit so they would align closely enough every so often, and the valleys would fill with shadow while the rest of the moons’ surface reflected the red sunlight. It was a lovely and mysterious sight, one that the Makahomians still trembled to see. Grimalkin licked the back of his hand and passed it over his face. His eyes really were, if not his best features, then his favorite among his many attractive personal attributes.
Poor Khornya. The wench had no idea what she was missing. It wasn’t as if he meant to take her away from Aari. He’d just wanted to borrow her for a little while to get the species started. If she wasn’t so distrustful and particular, she probably wouldn’t have known the difference. He had hoped, actually, to feel some of the emotion he drank in from Aari when the lovesick boy talked about her. If his recent experiences were any indication, well, mostly he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Yes, she was an interesting member of her species, but she was not so special she could really afford to go turning down the advances of interested males, especially a male whom she had every reason to believe was her chosen mate.
Grimalkin would just have to find another way to capture her and Aari’s particular genes for the future of their race—the race he would brilliantly create where his fellow scientists had failed.
But meanwhile, there were those chrysoberyls, down there among beings that had no use for them, or any appreciation for them, at all. He decided to lurk back in time a few days and wait to intercept the thief. That was the when. Now he just had to find out where to lurk. Again, that was no problem, except that the spot he needed to occupy was presently filled with Aziza Amunpul’s ship, the Ali Baba. What to do…What to do…
“Hi, y’all. Anybody hungry?” asked the voice from inside the front of Mac’s shipsuit.
Becker stopped in his tracks and in midgrowl. “Honeybunny?” he asked. “Is that you, Andina?”
“You bet your sweet rolls, Jonas. Speaking of which, I have a full cargo of cooking supplies and equipment along with the basic food groups for the ten primary types of alien and humanoid found within the Federation and the immediate vicinity of Vhiliinyar.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going all psychic on me, too, sweetie…” Becker said. “How did you know we were going to have three hundred extra mouths to feed?”
“I knew you were on a rescue mission. I
n my experience, there is always somebody who gets very hungry, even if it’s only the rescuers. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to cook for rocks or not, since it was the Singing Stones sounding the alarm, but I came prepared for all eventualities.”
“Thank goodness someone thought of it,” Neeva said with relief.
The musical refugees happily supplied a list of their normal dietary requirements and preferences. Mac relayed it to Andina, who very shortly set the Heloise down on the other side of the Condor from the Balakiire. Her staff immediately set up a soup-kitchen-type operation, three of them serving, while a fourth staff member handed out dishes and a fifth herded the refugees into line. Andina and her personnel grew a bit sharp with the customers when they refused to allow them to stack up Singing Stones to a height suitable for seating. But, even without handy seating, food was soon in the hands of those who needed it.
“That seems to be well in hand,” Neeva said aloud. (Feriila, Vaanye, as much as I hate to, perhaps I should eschew your company for now. Khornya urgently needs to return to Vhiliinyar. I know you want to spend time with her. So it seems to me that you might want to accompany her on her journey.)
(We will go with her and her human friends,) Vaanye told her. (Until we meet on Vhiliinyar, lifemate-sister.)
The three of them touched horns in farewell.
Becker returned from bidding Andina a fond farewell. “She is so great. She always knows what people are going to need,” he said, wondering how she did it.
Acorna was wondering about that, too. She was wondering just how, in this particular instance, Andina had known that food would be needed right here, right now.
As an empath, Grimalkin had felt many borrowed emotions, but he had never acquired the knack for guilt. He didn’t worry about his promise to return with food or with ships that had food for the refugees. He could always attend to that, if he decided to, later, with a time shift.
He made a slight one now, back to the time of Smythe-Wesson’s drop of the chrysoberyls, cloaking his ship to escape the notice of both the thief and the sulfur beings. He watched the whole thing, from when Smythe-Wesson sliced up the first group of Solids to the decapitation of the volcano and the treelike Solids of the wedding party, to the burial of the catseye stones. As he watched, he began to understand Smythe-Wesson better and to guess at his plan. It gave him an amusing idea.
He had already discarded the notion of retrieving the stones before Aziza was sent to guard them. To do so would negate the mission to Skarness and his coup of presenting Acorna’s parents to her. Not that Acorna deserved all the trouble he had gone to after her repeated rebuffs of his affection, but he was justifiably proud of what he had pulled off and had no wish to undo it. Or not right away, at least. The only thing he did while he was waiting for time to catch up with him again took place after the Condor approached the sulfur planet and made contact with Aziza. Once the Condor was well away, Grimalkin, as Aari, hailed MOO and tipped them off that there were humanoids on Skarness who needed feeding.
Too bad the sulfur beings weren’t humanoids. Grimalkin had no trouble shifting his own shape, or that of certain other things, but after he saw the reception Rafik got from the sulfurians he decided that he’d do better to stay off the surface of the planet, if possible.
He zoomed in, extending both the very sensitive monitors on his ship and his own psychic receptors as he watched the sulfur beings attempt to destroy Rafik and his vessel. He plucked up the data Mac gathered on the communications of the aliens and his analysis of it, and “overheard” Acorna’s reception of the sulfur beings’ emotional outpourings.
These creatures were a bit too alien, even for someone of Grimalkin’s universality. Grimalkin had difficulty figuring them out. He had never met any individual of any race of beings who didn’t want something, and he was sure these creatures did, too. At least some of them did. They were themselves, at least some of them, shape-shifters, so what else could he offer them? Something. There had to be something.
Ah, yes. The same old godhead thing really, except this time he wasn’t about to join with anyone to spread his glory along with his seed. The sulfur people were not a species he cared to mate with. However, he could temporarily make himself over in their image—at least in the consciousnesses of those he wished to contact. Creating a form that resembled what he gathered from the sulfurous masses below was considered the noblest and most elevated among the Sulfurians, a Mutable, he projected this image of himself to the audience he had selected from among their number.
“Hear me, you Liquids,” he transmitted in a mind voice suggestive of explosions and frantic boiling bubbles as the image of himself shifted from one of the treelike victims of Smythe-Wesson to a rocklike Solid and on through Liquid form until returning to the original. “Why should you who can assume the form of any container you allow to hold you be bound by the edicts of the other forms? Heed my words and I will deliver you from your bondage and give you the form you most desire.”
“What are you? Some kind of container?” the hissing Liquid consciousness inquired.
“I am far more than that. Heed me and you will never again be dependent upon a container for your shape. Never again shall you spend your substance, losing precious molecules as you become acid spray to fight the battles of the Mutables and the Solids.”
“But you are a Mutable,” they observed suspiciously.
“Not a Mutable. I am the great Mutator. I have the power to change all beings. I can change you from Liquids to Solids if you wish, and back again, making you as great as any except myself.”
“Prove it. Change us to Solids now.”
“But if you are Solids and Mutables, who shall be beneath you? Who shall spray the acid to protect the memorial of the fallen and the stones that lie under it?”
“It’s true. It’s true. Only Liquids can do that.”
“Cannot the Mutables become Liquid?”
“They can, but you’d never catch them wasting their drops to spray acid. They leave that to us. But when you make us like them, they’ll have to, won’t they?”
“I could in fact, stabilize their forms so they can no longer mutate. If they should become Liquid, while you become Mutable, your positions would be reversed.”
Malevolent acidic glee bubbled up from the beings below. “Do it! Do it!”
Grimalkin’s sulfurically impressive thought-form gave the local version of a shrug. “I will change you. Can you change them?”
The Liquids formed a whirlpool of consultation.
“What are you up to? That is not the proper formation for guarding the memorial!” a delegation of Mutables informed the Liquids.
“You know how we are without a container,” the Liquids replied slyly. “We forget all about the proper form. You had better show us again.”
Whereupon the Mutables turned into Liquids to demonstrate. Grimalkin froze the lot of them, turning them all temporarily Solid, and used his own tractor beam to extract the chrysoberyls from the war memorial. Once he had the stones aboard the ship, he rolled them around and played with them when he didn’t actually have to navigate. Then it was time to play with Smythe-Wesson.
Twelve
Listen,” Becker said, turning the com unit up several decibels and cupping his hand over his ear.
“What?” Rafik asked. “There’s nothing to hear.”
“Yeah. Ain’t it great? No rock music. Just nice, empty, silent space.”
And at that moment, Aziza’s face appeared on the screen. “That traitor cur Smythe-Wesson is closing in, Condor. Are you detecting his signal yet?”
“Oh, yeah,” Becker said, nodding at the small blinking image appearing on three out of ten of the screens of his current scanner array. “With these babies I can practically count his nose hairs. I’m not getting any noises from our amps any longer though, are you?”
“We are not. But then, he is not yet close enough to interfere with them. As long as everything is as it should be, we wi
ll hear nothing, yes?”
“That’s the general idea,” Becker said.
Acorna had been following this conversation with a sense of unease. At first she attributed it to her anxiety over Aari—the real Aari. But as the ship drew nearer to the sulfur world, she realized she was picking up on something else altogether.
“Captain, doesn’t it strike you that the Sulfurian planet is a bit too quiet?” She indicated the area of the central scanner where once a small red light had pulsed. “You see? No homing beacon coming from there.”
“Well, I’ll be spaced!” Becker said. “She’s right!”
“She usually is,” Rafik said. “It’s a habit with her. But look—the signal is coming from that ship instead.” He indicated an image of the second of two vessels approaching the sulfur planet. Its pale green icon bore a pulsing red heart.
“Smythe-Wesson must have doubled back while we were on MOO and retrieved the stones, before Aziza took up her post here. But I don’t see how he got past the sulfur beings this time unless he finished them all off. Are you getting any sense of their status, Acorna, or are we too far away?”
She took a moment to concentrate on the sulfur beings. “They are exhibiting a new emotional pattern for them,” she said when she had finally decided what the information she was receiving indicated.
“Happiness?” Rafik guessed.
“Peace in the universe and goodwill to all species?” Becker guessed.
“Nothing that uncharacteristic,” Acorna told them. “They seem to be even more furious than ever. But what they feel now is, in some cases, a suppressed fury. But I don’t know why they feel that way. All I’m picking up is emotion, not thoughts. I’ll tell you as soon as I pick up any specific expressions for Mac to translate.”
Acorna's Triumph Page 16