Changelings

by Anne McCaffrey

  Shall we tell this smart river otter our secrets? one cousin asked another.

  Yes, he is our cousin and gives good gifts. Besides, we were going to tell all our cousins the big secret.

  Before Otter knew it, his family surrounded him, all of them waiting to hear the big secret of the sea otters.

  The planet is making a new home for us, said the sea otters. It’s a bit hot, but it will be a wonderful home when it is done.

  How will we know when it is done? Otter asked.

  It will come up out of the water and cool off and not smoke or make fire anymore, said a cousin. At least, that is what Senior Sea Otter says, and Senior Sea Otter has lived a long long time and spoken to many creatures who have lived much longer. A few of the oldest have seen this thing happen in other places, long ago. Others have heard of it happening from their grandparents and their grandparents’ grandparents. And now it is happening again and sea otters can watch!

  So you go to watch it being made?

  And to eat! Everything in the sea is attracted to the new home and many delicious fish already live near it, sheltering in it.

  Suddenly, right under his paws, Otter felt the ground tremble. It did that sometimes but it always startled him. “Hah!” he said nervously.

  Do not be alarmed, cousin. That is what the planet does when it is making the home.

  That is an extremely fine secret, Otter said, impressed. Is there another secret?

  We have found a new branch of the family.

  New branch?

  Yes, before there were always you river otters and us sea otters. Now there are other otters.

  What otters are these? How different are they?

  They are deep sea otters. They can live under the water and have a home there. It is too deep for us to dive but they say it is the kind of home deep sea otters like. They sang us wonderful songs of deep sea otters and wanted us to sing them sea otter songs too. We sang of you, little cousin, the River Otter who Plays with River Seals. It is not a sea otter song but it is a very good song. It was the best song we know and we know many good sea otter songs. You will not bite us for singing your song?

  Hah! Bite you! You are our cousins and now our neighbors. You share these very fine secrets. You may sing my song to other otters whenever you like.

  Good. But we will all sing it together soon. The deep sea otters say that one day when we come again to see the new home the planet is making, they will swim back with us. They wish to hear your song from you.

  All Otter could think of to say to that was, “Hah!”

  CHAPTER 12

  HOLOGRAMS WERE HANDY things. They could be lessons or environments or costumes, if you needed them to be. It was a little hard to keep them in place in zero g, but everyone seemed to have a good time swimming or flying, depending on what they were supposed to be. Ke-ola was a sea turtle, a big one. Lan Huy was a dragon. Rory was a shark, which was a little scary, especially for Chesney, who was a lake gull. She flapped her arms so hard she ended up hitting Dewey, who came as a monkey, in the nose, which made him cry until Marmie had him come out to help her bring down the cake.

  “I thought Marmie had people who did things like baking cakes and carrying them around for her,” Ronan said.

  “She does. I think she wants to do this personally because it’s, you know, for us. Letting Dewey help instead of one of the people who work for her keeps him from crying. Have you noticed how if one person starts crying, pretty soon everybody else does too?”

  Suddenly, Ronan wasn’t having any fun anymore. He faked being an otter sliding but since he didn’t go down, no matter what, it didn’t look right. By the time he stood back up, he saw that Murel’s eyes were glistening, and he felt a lump in his own throat. But then a voice on the intercom said, “All members of the Shongili birthday party please report immediately to Ms. de Revers Algemeine’s deck for cake and ice cream.”

  Rory, sharklike, burst through the hatch and fell with a clunk into normal gravity on the deck outside.

  Ronan did a halfhearted otter slide and landed on his butt, without his holo-costume. Murel slid down beside him. “Your costume is still flickering on and off,” Rory told her. “But you’re barely ottered at all!”

  Murel just groaned and rolled her eyes, and Ronan pretended he was puking.

  Aboard the intrastation transfer flitter, however, they saw someone who lifted their spirits. “Look!” Murel said aloud, pointing. “It’s Johnny!”

  You think he’s come to take us home? Maybe as a surprise?

  Why else would he be going to Marmie’s on our birthday? Murel asked.

  They kept it to themselves, though, thinking Marmie meant it to be a big secret, which they didn’t want to spoil. Johnny and Marmie ate cake and ice cream off to one side and watched while Ronan and Murel opened their gifts. Rory gave them each a shark’s tooth he swore had been dug out of somebody’s leg. He didn’t say if the leg had still been attached to the person when the teeth were removed. They were strung on thongs for the twins to wear around their necks.

  “Do you like it?” the boy from Wurra-Wurra asked.

  “It’s awesome,” Murel replied.

  “Yeah,” Ronan said, almost forgetting to be sad or anxious about what Johnny was doing there. Rory was turning out to be okay after all.

  Lan Huy gave them a scroll that turned out to be a blueprint of the space station. “There’s lots of interesting ways to get where we’re not supposed to go,” she leaned forward and whispered. “You just have to study it a bit.”

  Chesney gave them free passes to see the new vids the last supply ship had delivered. Her dad was the morale and recreation chairman.

  “Gosh, thanks, Chez,” Murel said. “I’ve been wanting to see the one about the explorer who finds the ancient civilization filled with the remnants of a highly advanced race.”

  “They never find the ruins of ancient civilizations filled with the remnants of a buncha complete eejits, do they?” Rory observed.

  “Probably no ruins left because complete eejits wouldn’t have figured out how to build an ancient civilization in the first place,” Ke-ola said.

  Ke-ola handed them each a saucer-sized flower from the ponics garden then helped Murel stick it behind her ear.

  “There’s no music at this party so far,” he said. “What, nobody sings to you on your birthday?”

  Under Chesney’s direction, the other students dutifully sang a round of “Happy Birthday.”

  Ke-ola groaned. “That’s lame, man. You got to have real music at a party. You twins say on your world you sing at the parties all the time. So okay, I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna make you an old-style song, my little bruthah and sistah, the kind we sing at home. You other kids, you can sing with me.”

  “That’s great, Ke-ola, but we don’t know your language.”

  “Don’t matter. Just do what I do and say what I say after me. You can do the dance and hum the words if you want to. “

  “Dance?” Rory made a face. “That’s sissy stuff.”

  “Yeah? Okay, you don’t have to do it then if it’s sissy. I didn’t know that. We do sissy stuff at home all the time I guess.”

  “No offense, man,” Rory said. He didn’t want to make the big guy mad.

  “No offense,” Ke-ola said, shrugging. Then he jumped, stomped, bellowed, snapped bent knees back and forth, and chanted in a language that had lots of great rhyming and repetitive sounds that seemed vaguely funny sometimes and beautiful at others. Murel thought he was choosing the words that would be the most fun to say, to get the other kids to say them too, and it worked. Some of the movements he made, which were a kind of sign language, looked like they might be something rude, and others looked like waves or stars twinkling or wind in the trees.

  “I don’t see how all of that could be about us,” Murel said. “But thanks.”

  “You’re right. It’s not all about you. You haven’t been around long enough for it to be all about you. It’s
about where you come from, where you are now, and how you managed to land where you get to hang out with such great people like us.”

  Then he told them what the gestures meant and some of the words he said the most.

  “That’s a lot like Petaybee songs,” Ronan told him, “except we use drums a lot.”

  “We use drums too,” he said. “Come here, Rory, man. Bring your empty head so I can show you all some drumming.”

  But Marmie’s butler, who’d been watching everything onscreen inside the house, came out bringing a drum that usually acted as a side table in Marmie’s main living room. Ke-ola looked at it critically, then started in on a beat that sounded a lot like a heartbeat and went perfectly with the chant he sang in quite a different tone from the last one. Periodically he danced along with his drumming, stomping for emphasis between drumbeats. Pretty soon everybody was doing it, even Rory.

  “What’s that one about?”

  “Oh, it’s just a song we do a lot on birthdays at home,” he said vaguely. “It’s the men’s part. You do one now.”

  So first they sang the otter song, then Murel sang one about mosquitoes.

  Ke-ola laughed. “You want to see what dance my people do about mosquitoes?” he asked, and when they said they did, he did a rhythmic chant that involved slapping himself silly on his thighs and chest, belly and forearms, the back of his neck and his face, even the soles of his feet.

  “Wow, you must have bigger mosquitoes than we do even,” Ronan said.

  The kids started trying to make up their own dances then for a while, but they got pretty silly. Ke-ola jumped into the fake river and floated there like a contented island.

  And Dewey was in a much better mood. He helped serve the refreshments, and now sat beside the fake river, his pant legs rolled up and his bare feet kicking back and forth in the water. The lights from below lit up his toes so they looked all white and corpsey. Or at least, what Murel thought corpse toes would probably look like.

  “Do you guys swim here?”

  “Uh, no,” Murel said. “We, uh, we’re afraid of the water.”

  “How deep is it?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s different in different places,” Murel said casually. Actually, it was a good five feet deep in some places, and more in others.

  “How about right here?”

  “I dunno. I could get a line to measure it, though, if you really want to know.”

  “I got a better idea,” he said, and slid off the edge, and sank. Bubbles blew up from his mouth, but his face looked really white and corpsey now. Murel didn’t even think about the secret. She just dove in after him, clothes and all. Ronan, help! No, don’t you come in too. Just stand there and wait, she said. Try not to let anybody else see me. Fortunately, Dewey hadn’t realized he was in trouble until it was too late to scream, so maybe nobody else noticed.

  She caught the neck of Dewey’s ship suit in her mouth, since she now had flippers poking out of her sleeves, and hauled him up to the surface where Ronan began pulling him up onto the “bank” of ponics-grown turf.

  Ronan was not quite alone, though. Ke-ola and Rory helped, Ke-ola pulling Dewey the rest of the way to his feet. Murel flipped the water off her head and hands and turned her back on everyone.

  “I thought you were afraid of the water?” Dewey said between chattering teeth.

  “I was more afraid you’d drown,” she replied, as soon as her muzzle turned back into a separate mouth and nose again, which fortunately didn’t take but a second. “I mean, I can swim, I just don’t like to.”

  Lan Huy said, “Wow, you had a whole nother holo, Murel. Cool one! You looked just like a seal carrying Dewey in her mouth!”

  “Yeah,” Murel said. “So now this seal is flapping back inside to change into something dry.”

  That sort of broke up the party. Marmie directed a flitter to return the other kids to their quarters.

  By the time Murel came out, Ronan was staring at the packages Johnny carried and thinking that if these were from home, it meant that he and Murel weren’t going to get to go back to Petaybee now.

  “I’m sorry,” Murel said, apologizing before she reached the place where their chairs were clustered around a realistic holo of a blazing fireplace. Enough heat came from it to dry her hair into the long wild red-brown Irish curls that distinguished her from Ronan now. His hair was Inuit or maybe Navajo, straight and black. You couldn’t tell them apart in the water very easily, though. “The water’s ten feet deep there, and the silly git doesn’t know how to swim. Someone should teach him.”

  “I’ll speak to his parents,” Marmie said. “That was very brave of you, cherie. No harm done. The others thought you had a good second holo.”

  Murel smiled, but it faded as she saw the presents.

  “You don’t even know what’s in them,” Johnny exclaimed. “Why the long face?”

  “We thought maybe you had come to take us home,” Ronan said. “I know Marmie said not now, but we thought maybe Mum and Da had changed their minds.”

  “No, my pets, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for the time being,” Marmie said.

  But she didn’t say what the time being might be.

  That year, their gifts were new journals from Mum. She had kept them all yearlong to let the twins know what was happening between the rare times when they could talk via the com units. Da sent them carvings he had made of otters, each carving wrapped with a clamshell. Clodagh sent them a big plastic tub of her rose hip preserves and loaves of zucchini bread. Aunt Sinead and Aisling sent them “Eskimo yo-yos”—moose-hair-stuffed hide sewed into balls, beaded by Aisling and attached to a long thong. You twirled it and then threw it at a bird, to either knock it out of the sky or snag its feet. They didn’t have any birds to try them out on and got in trouble if they used the yo-yos on other kids, so finally they each sort of left them somewhere and forgot about them.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, when they turned ten, went much faster. They’d made friends, together and separately, and did a lot of visiting away from Marmie’s deck, studying in the excellent multimedia library, playing nonwater sports, studying martial-arts moves, and hanging out at the large shopping mall, the holo deck, and the homes of their friends. Marmie also welcomed the other kids to her compound, but the twins were worried that their friends would want to go swimming. Marmie’s private waterway was a treat for the others since the station only boasted a single large pool complex, which was packed all the time. The twins made excuses not to go into the water but hated not to join in. It was fine to swim alone on the waterways, though awfully tame after the rivers around Kilcoole, but it would have been fun to play water games with the other kids.

  “I wish we could control the change a little more,” Murel said one day, watching the sparkling drops spraying up from the usually still pool as their friends splashed each other. They had said they had sinus infections and weren’t supposed to go in.

  “Yeah, swim like people sometimes, or be seals on dry land. That might be good once in a while,” her brother agreed.

  A well-known geneticist had arrived at the station and would teach the children during the next round of classes. “It’s my granny,” Rory said proudly. “She’s retired now and come to live with us, she says. But she’s been all over the universe with her institute, studying all the different species on all the different worlds. She’s really interested in the new ones.”

  “What new ones?” Ke-ola asked.

  “You know, the mutants that form because of conditions on one planet or the other. Seems the worlds terraformed by Intergal to house different races from Old Earth change things.”

  “Like how?” Ke-ola asked, trying not to sound too interested.

  “Oh, one of them has a special disease that people who work the soil get. It killed off a lot of them, but then they found a drug to help it, and the ones that get it now are okay but they shed their skin every year.”

  “Like snakes?” Ke
-ola asked.

  “No, not all in one piece. They shed it in big flakes or scales, kind of like some trees lose their leaves.”

  “Don’t their insides fall out then?” Chesney asked.

  “No, of course not, ’cause they have new skin underneath,” Rory said, looking at Chesney as if she were a silly little girl, which, actually, she wasn’t.

  When the twins told Marmie that Rory’s granny was a famous scientist and was going to be one of their teachers, she seemed pleased, but was distracted by business. They realized that though she tried to act interested in their school and what they were doing, she was as busy, or maybe even busier, than Mum and Da. Marmie had lots of people working for her and doing things for her, but that gave her even more problems to solve. Often when they talked to her, she nodded and smiled or made appropriate noises, but wasn’t really listening. And of course, she didn’t personally pick out the teachers or have a lot to do with the school. She was too important for that.

  “I think she liked us better when we were little,” Murel said later.

  “Nah, she still likes us. She’s just used to us now,” Ronan told her. “She knows she doesn’t have to worry about us all the time. Why should she? We know our way around now and who to go to for stuff. We know how to keep people from finding out about us. We’re almost adults, when you think about it.”

  “True. And it’s not as if she’s our mother or even a real auntie,” Murel said a little bitterly. She had wanted to tell Marmie about them wanting to ask the new teacher if she could help them learn to control their shape-shifting. But Murel knew she could have said they were going to jump off the station into space without the benefit of suits and Marmie would have probably replied, “Bon, cherie. Très bon. You are so clever.”

  “Really,” Murel told her brother, “she’s sort of a glorified babysitter. Only not as furry as ’Nook and Co’.”

  Mentioning the cats’ names made her homesick. She longed to bury her face and hands in their fur, feel their raspy tongues on her cheeks and fingers—or flippers as the case might be—hear their thundering purrs or even their disdainful scolding. She missed mind-talking with them, missed talking with other creatures who were not her twin brother.