Changelings

by Anne McCaffrey

  You’re impossible, you are, Murel said, and tried to keep a straight face, but then couldn’t do it with him tee-heeing all over the place. Apparently, the chauffeur asked Marmie what the children were laughing about, so Ro told Marmie and Marmie told him and he started laughing too, then Marmie. By the time the flitter reached the upper level where Marmie’s house was, Murel really had to use the outhouse bad.

  But even that was forgotten as she took in as much of Marmie’s house as she could.

  To begin with, it wasn’t a house, it was a whole section of the space station, the upper section. As the flitter rose to cross the garden and fountains, the broad pathways, and, oh yes, the beautiful little river running around the living area, it seemed as if the house was right on top of the space station, with no hull around it. Space showed all around them, a night sky made large by proximity to the nearest planet and its moons, which seemed even more huge than moons and the sun on Petaybee.

  “Don’t you worry that you’ll fall off?” she asked Marmie, feeling a little dizzy.

  “Cool!” Ronan said, and then thought about it and wondered how the water in the fountains could fall and the river could flow and the flowers grow without atmosphere. How, in fact, were they supposed to breathe?

  Marmie dimpled mischievously, then reached forward and touched a button. Instant sunrise. The blackness and the huge planet and moon were eclipsed by a skyscape very much like the one on Petaybee, the sky blue, the sun distant, and everything else had more color too. The flowers became blue and purple, yellow, red, orange, and pink. The grass was green without even a puddle of snow, and the fountains, made of some pretty pink stone, overflowed just enough to cascade into the river.

  “How’d you do that?” Ronan wanted to know. He was watching Marmie’s hand on the controls instead of looking at the scenery.

  “It’s just a hologram. What you saw when we came is how it would look with no illusion and no hull. Oh, I do have an observatory—several, in fact, in various strategic locations on different levels. But one feels so closed in living on the station with no real atmosphere or the boundaries of a horizon, so I had the holos created. We can even have weather if you like. Shall I make it snow?”

  “Oh, no. Not when it looks like springtime,” Murel said. “It would kill your flowers. But—could we have a thunderstorm? Once in a while, right around breakup, Petaybee throws tantrums, so Da says, and they’re ever so exciting.”

  “In that case I suppose we must have one. I like them too, actually. Do you want lightning or just thunder? Rain? Sheet lightning or the cracked forking variety?”

  “Can we have it all please?” Ronan asked.

  “With that attitude, you should go far, Mr. Shongili,” Marmie said with a smile.

  “Could the lightning strike something?”

  “Ronan! You want Marmie to burn down her house so you can see how it works?” Murel scolded.

  “No need for that. My lightning can only hit virtual trees. We can feel the wind but we will not get wet from the rain or cold from the snow, and once I turn it off, the ground will not be white or wet afterward.”

  “Oh,” Murel said, disappointed. “Then, why do you do it?”

  “For a little variety, mood, atmosphere. I can make it rain, you know, by switching the irrigation system from the belowground sprinklers to the overhead ones. And I have a device that will scent the air with that wonderful ozone smell that comes after a rain. So, do you want to see it?”

  “Yes,” both children said politely. Marmie’s fake weather couldn’t compete with Petaybee’s extremes.

  At least, that was how they felt when they first arrived. Everything seemed very tame. The little river was nothing but an oddly shaped swimming pool, with jets in the rocks creating the illusion of riffles or eddies. It never iced over, of course, and there were no other creatures to be discovered along its banks. And there were seldom fish. Even someone with Marmie’s resources couldn’t keep the artificial stream stocked with enough fish to keep the twins happily catching their own meals for as much as a week.

  The only excitement came when Marmie had an unexpected visitor and the twins had to hide their dual nature and talk in a silly way about the “pet” seals they’d brought with them from their home world.

  They hadn’t known what to expect from Marmie when it came to their education, but as it turned out, they went to classes with the other kids from the space station.

  “I could get you tutors, but that would be a bore, don’t you think?” Marmie asked. “You must meet these other children, and more than the teachers will instruct you, you will instruct each other.”

  They were highly skeptical. After all, here they were the outsiders, an uncomfortable thought. On the other hand, they weren’t the offworlders because on a space station nobody was on a world as such, so they signed up. Instead of books, as they had on Petaybee, they were given individual clipboard-sized screens on which they could receive the text or computerized lesson material for each class. They also carried another clipboard-sized computer for note taking and doing their class exercises and homework.

  The flitter let them off on the school level of deck three just in time to join a bunch of other kids pouring in from other flitters, lifts, and staircases.

  Murel said, There’s the loo. I’m going before we get to class. Meet you there.

  Yeah, sure, Ronan said, but he was already scanning the doors and the diagram on his text pad, looking for the right room. Looking up and to the side instead of straight ahead, he ran right into a wall and both his pads went flying.

  “Hey!” the wall said.

  It seemed to be slightly domed and wore floral wallpaper right at eye level. Ronan looked up and stared into the piercing dark eyes and black eyebrows of a boy about three times his size. Oh great. He was in for it now. This guy was way bigger than Dino Caparthy. He so did not want to get beaten up on his first day at Marmie’s school.

  “S-Sorry, I didn’t mean anything. I was looking for my class instead of looking where I was going. I, uh, I have some lunch credits if that will—”

  The tall boy put his palms out in front of him. “No, no, little bruthah. I don’ want your lunch credits. I hope I didn’t hurt you? I was lookin’ too and did not look down.” He made a sudden move and Ronan jumped back. This guy was enormous! But he had only stooped to pick up Ronan’s pads, which he handed back to him. “Good thing these are sturdy, yeah? Where you goin’?”

  “Professor Freyasdottur’s geography class. You?”

  “Same place. I am Ke-ola. You?”

  “Ronan. Here comes my sister. Murel, hey, this is Ke-ola.”

  Murel looked up and then creaked her neck back and looked up a little farther until she met the large boy’s friendly grin with one of her own. “Hey. Ke-ola, slainté.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We say it to mean hello and good-bye,” Ronan, now official Petaybean goodwill ambassador, told him.

  “Ah, we say ‘aloha.’ Means a couple of other things too. Slainté. You guys twins?”

  “Yeah, we are. You got any brothers or sisters?”

  “Ten sistahs, twelve bruthahs. Four sets twins. I had a twin myself but he died when we were born.”

  “Whew, that’s a lot of sibs!” Ronan said.

  “Your mum must be tired,” Murel said.

  “Six sistahs, four bruthahs are half—we got different mamas,” he told them.

  “Here’s our classroom,” Murel told him, as if saying good-bye. He reached above her and shoved the door open a little farther.

  “Mine too,” he said.

  As it turned out, the space station school was sort of fun. On Petaybee there were no other kids their own age from the planet. Almost all of the kids in the lower levels were offworlders. Here it was the same, but everyone was in the same boat, or rather, on the same space station. And now Ronan and Murel had journeyed among the stars too, so even though they maybe hadn’t seen other worlds like some o
f the kids had, they had more in common with them than they did with the offworld kids back home.

  Also, they weren’t the littlest kids here. Many of the others were younger than they were and several were their own age. A couple of them had never been off the space station.

  They were friendly too, if a little too curious for comfort sometimes.

  “Hey, twins, I heard you brought your pet seals with you,” a younger boy named Dewey said. “Madame built them a pool up at her house, is what my mom said. Can I come and play with them?”

  What shall we say? Murel asked.

  We can say we had to send the seals home, Ronan suggested.

  Yeah, but then if anyone sees us accidentally in seal form we won’t have any way to explain it, Murel said. Finally she told Dewey, “You know, the reason we brought them with us, Dewey, is that they’re really shy—even around our parents. They hide if they know anybody else is around. They’re, uh—”

  “They’re rescue seals,” Ronan said. “They were going to be killed by offworld fur trappers when they were babies. The trappers already killed their families and everything. It was terrible. Our aunt Sinead is the Game Warden and she gave them to us to raise but they never have wanted to be around any other humans, only us.”

  “Oh,” Dewey said. “Well, maybe when you’ve been here awhile and they get a little older they’ll get used to us too, if you have us up to Madame’s a lot.”

  “Yeah, maybe so,” Ronan said. But to Murel he said, Like we’re going to be away from Petaybee that long.

  They had one teacher overall for each age group, and that teacher supervised all the computer classes that made up the bulk of their studies. But since they had several very prominent scientists on board the station, Marmie had talked some of them into teaching classes in their specialties in the school too.

  Dr. Freyasdottur, their geography teacher for this class, was also a sociobiologist and an environmental systems engineer, responsible for the weather system on Marmie’s level, among other modifications on the space station. She was a sturdy young-looking blond woman with a round face, dancing blue eyes, and large teeth that showed a lot because she smiled often. Her hair was cut short and by the end of the class stuck out in all directions because she often grabbed at it, stuck pencils in it, or pulled at it for emphasis.

  She employed a lot of holos as models and teaching tools and hopped enthusiastically around each, pointing out the features of systems full of planets that had worlds within worlds. The holos showed people working in fields blooming with crops or picking fruit from trees, manufacturing parts for electronic equipment, or mining minerals. Each planet had a different skyscape, and after they studied one, Dr. Freyasdottur would zip it back into its star system to show them where it fit in the cosmic scheme of things.

  “Now then,” she said at the end of class one day, “for your homework, I want you all to design a holo of your own home world. Yes, yes, I know a few of you are station born and bred and have never been dirtside, so you will need to ask your parents for help locating, gathering information about, and depicting their worlds of origin. If they are from one of the older planets, you may place your focus on the country from which they come, its language, if other than Standard, customs as they deviate from those in station life, imports and exports, and contributions to the Federation. If you or your parents come from one of the planets terraformed by Intergal to house the inhabitants of Old Earth and some of the other older worlds, then we’d like to know what life is like there.

  “Focus on how your world has been developed and what it’s like for boys and girls who grow up there. If possible, compare their lives with yours here on the station. You will be sharing your holos with the rest of the class in two weeks. In the meantime, this class period will be devoted to learning to design holos. My assistant, Top Tech Wayans, will be helping you develop the technical end of your projects.”

  Murel’s hand shot up and Dr. Freyasdottur called on her. “What if there’s two of us from the same planet? Can we do our holo together?”

  “Certainly, Murel. In fact, most of you here have other family members in class. Even if you share a holo, you will each have to do a presentation of a different aspect of your planet’s culture, environment, or social structure, of course.”

  Marmie’s eyebrows rose when they told her about the assignment. “Alors! That should be extremely challenging for children your age, but no doubt you will all learn a lot about each other as well as other places in the universe and how to design a holo.”

  The twins were so involved in their own project, they didn’t realize how truly Marmie had spoken until the other kids began their presentations.

  “This is Wurra-Wurra, where my folks came from,” a boy named Rory said. His skin was very dark, almost black, and his features looked like the ones some of the old men carved with chain saws out of tree stumps. His eyes were a brilliant and startling blue. He opened his program, and a stretch of salmon pink sky and blowing sand that looked like a spray of blood under two glowing suns spun out before them. Tall rusty spires rose in clusters here and there. “It’s got two suns, see, and they dry everything up. So it’s desert, right?”

  “Are those tall things the buildings of your cities?” Lan Huy, a girl a year or two older than the twins, asked.

  Rory laughed, a sharp little yip. “Not our cities, Lan. They are cities, though. The ants that live there could probably tell you all the best places to get tea or go shopping.”

  “So—you’re not the dominant species on your planet?” Ke-ola asked curiously and with no hint of humor or mockery. In school he spoke more correctly than he did when he was just messing around with the other kids, Murel noticed.

  “We think so. Don’t know what the ants think. Stay away from them, my folks said, much as possible.”

  “Where’s your water?” Murel asked.

  “Underground, what there is,” Rory said. “Mum says you have ter dig for it.”

  Murel said, “Underground water is the only water you have? We have underground water too, but we’ve got regular rivers and seas and such as well.”

  “You’ll have your turn soon enough, Murel,” Dr. Freyasdottur said. “Go on, Rory.”

  Rory finished up.

  Ke-ola was next. He shuffled to the front and tapped in his program, picked up his laser wand. As soon as he started his presentation, Murel and Ronan realized there was even more to their large friend than there appeared to be. Three worlds started spinning.

  “I am Ke-ola O’honu-aumakua. On Old Earth my people lived on islands in the warmest of the two great oceans, the Ocean of Peacefulness. Originally we ate what the islands brought us, fish from the sea, fruit from the trees. The climate was mild and warm, and except for volcanoes erupting at times, or monsoon rains, our lives were peaceful. Then other people came to the islands with things and ideas they said would make our lives better. Some things seemed to but others did not. Finally came the day when Intergal came to the few of us who were left and still in possession of some of the islands in our chain. They told us they now owned our island and we could not live there any longer but would be moved to a better place. We did not quite believe them because, although the islands were not as good in many ways as they had been before the new ideas and things came, they were still a very good place to live. The new place was a specially prepared world that much resembled our own. We brought with us the seeds to some of our trees, and the eggs and young of our fish and animals. My family brought the eggs of the sacred Honu, the sea turtle that is our special animal. Our last name means ‘people of the sea turtle.’

  “For a time we lived in the new place fairly contentedly, though it was a new place and never home and we still sang to each other of the old islands lost to us. Then the company came and told us that our new place, which they already owned, had been found to have a rare mineral they needed for a vital manufacturing process, but that another place had been prepared for us and we would be moved
again.

  “This time, the new place was not as well prepared as the other, and though we brought our plants and animals with us again, they do not thrive in this new place. Neither do we. The gravity is greater, the weather is colder and more changeable, and our animals must be kept in artificial pens and tanks, our plants in big houses with artificial sunlight. Once, on the old world, and to a lesser extent on the second one, we were scientists and singers, ranchers and dancers, teachers and creators of beautiful and useful items.”

  He paused, pointed the wand to the first globe and drew up a picture of what looked like a hat made of flowered fabric with a pineapple-shaped container strapped to either side of it. Ke-ola suddenly grinned, a warm and funny expression that seemed totally at odds with the serious and even sad look he’d worn throughout the rest of his recitation. “Well, some of the items were ugly and useless too, but the outsiders seemed to want them so we sold them to them.” Then the grin went away as if it had never been and he continued in the same slightly singsong voice, “We were healers, lawgivers and musicians, makers of food and purveyors of goods. We have become a people of zookeepers and gardeners.

  “The company tells us that we are ungrateful for everything they have done for us and that our people must learn new jobs and new ways to be more productive to repay the kindness of the company. And so I have been sent here to school on a special scholarship to learn more about how to maintain space stations. I cannot tell you of imports or exports—everything my people have they have brought with them or have had provided for them, at a cost, by the company, who may take back whatever they need, including us. Fortunately, even though the heavy gravity is very hard on the mamas when they give birth, our families have become large with little to do but grow food and children. We don’t manufacture much anymore or work away from home much either. Mostly the older people tell the younger ones stories and teach us our old songs and dances so we don’t forget who we are or what we had a long time ago. That’s all good, but as you can tell, we don’t always have enough to eat.” He patted his round stomach. “So probably it is a good thing I am here among you, my classmates, where I don’t get so skinny I blow away on the wind. Makes more food for my family at home too.”