Changelings

by Anne McCaffrey

  No, you were right the first time, bro. We have to help it get away. Just because we’re not together all the time anymore doesn’t mean I don’t still care about the same things you do. I haven’t ever met a sea turtle before, but I’m sure I’d like him. And I’d help him escape torture and maybe death even if I didn’t. You used to know that.

  Aw, sis, I still do. I’m just worried. And the professor is right here next to me in the flitter so I can’t think straight.

  I can. Has she got the key to the lab on her? Can you nick it?

  Yeah, as a matter of fact, I think I can. It’s in the pocket of her lab coat. Sometimes you’re really quite brilliant, you know. I suppose that’s why I keep you around.

  Yeah, yeah. Now all you have to do is sneak the keys away from her.

  Oh, well, if that’s all. His thought was accompanied by an image of him rolling his eyes.

  Look, when the flitter lands, Murel said, I’ll create a diversion. I’ve been watching lots of vids. Creating diversions is how people always manage to swipe things. There’s an accomplice or two, and while one person creates a diversion, another one does the actual stealing.

  Mum and Da are going to be really pleased to know they’ve sent us here so far from home just so you can study how to lead a life of crime.

  Do you want to save the sea turtle or not?

  As the flitter set down, Murel ran up to it. Her eyes were red as if she’d been crying, though Ronan suspected an onion had more to do with it, and she seemed very upset. “Professor Mabo,” she whined, poking her head into the flitter and blocking Ronan’s exit. The professor leaned forward to hear her over the flitter’s motor.

  “What is it, Murel?”

  “When do I get to be your assistant? Ronan and I always share everything, and now he gets to do all this interesting stuff and—and—you don’t let me do anything. It’s not fair! I’m just as smart as he is. I’d be just as much help.” Murel reached in and grabbed the professor’s hands.

  Now, she told Ronan.

  The old-fashioned keys were outlined by a bulge in the lab coat pocket nearest Ronan’s fingers. The way Professor Mabo was leaning toward Murel, the pocket was practically in his fingers. He slipped the key from her pocket as easily as he slipped through the water in seal form.

  When the professor snatched her hands away from Murel’s grasp with a cutting remark, Ronan jumped out of the flitter.

  CHAPTER 17

  JOHNNY GREEN KNEW something was wrong the moment he saw Yana Maddock-Shongili waiting at the dock, her hands folded behind her at parade rest, her eyes first on the ground, then looking up as he climbed off the gantry. Her jaw was set and her eyes were blazing.

  “Yana, how good it is to see you. And how is Sean? Busy as always, I imagine.” He always talked too much when something made him nervous, and women wearing that look—especially women with advanced training in sophisticated weaponry—definitely made him nervous.

  “He’s not here at the moment, Johnny,” she said, her voice as tense as her jaw looked.

  “What a shame. I’ve a message for him from the children.”

  “They sent their father a message, but not me? Why? Is it in seal-speak or something?”

  “Worse. It’s about biology and genetics and such.”

  “I know a bit about that too after all these years on Petaybee. And I am their mother.”

  “Yes, Yana—”

  “Whatever anyone thinks, I am their mother. Petaybee may have given them to me, but it’s a planet. If it had children, they’re—let’s not get into that right now, actually. But my kids are mine too, and they’re half human. I never meant, in sending them off to Marmie, that they should stay three years. I would never have agreed to that.”

  The normally taciturn Yana was babbling like a brook let loose from the winter ice. He knew something else was bothering her too, though. It wasn’t just the kids’ absence.

  “You can send for them at any time, Yana, you know that. Marmie would never keep them from you. She is only trying to help you keep them safe.”

  “Well, their father and I have a disagreement about that. I thought, after they’d been attacked by wolves and almost snatched by those otter-napping biologists, that they’d be safer away. But the truth is, Johnny, I can take care of my children better than anyone else. I’m trained to be able to care for the people under my—you should pardon the expression—command. They are safer with me than anywhere else.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear you feel that way. You see, the message I had for Sean concerns their own worries about some security issues. I don’t know if you can answer for him, but once the kids are back here, they can ask him themselves.”

  “Fine. But we have to find him first.”

  “Where is he?” Johnny asked.

  “He went for a long swim. Out to the coast, and then to explore a new volcanic mass building up at the equator. He’s been gone ten days now and we’ve heard not a word. That little otter the kids are so fond of seemed to come looking for him, but I am the only member of my family who doesn’t speak otter, so I haven’t a clue what he wants.”

  “I don’t speak otter either, Yana, but I do fly helicopters. Has anyone gone out to have a look?”

  Yana nodded. “Scads of people. I’ve gone out there too. But the ash and steam are so bad out that way you can’t see anything. Divers can’t get near the place. I don’t know why the man thinks that just because he’s a man who turns into a seal and vice versa that it makes him superseal or something. He’s a mortal man and a mortal seal, and I am mortally afraid he’s got himself into more than he can handle.”

  “He’s been in scrapes before, I’m sure. Superseal he may not be, and mortal man he may, but he is a most resourceful fellow and wise in the ways of this world.”

  “Yeah, I know, and too cocky by half about it sometimes. Clodagh has been petitioning the planet for news, and Sinead and her posse have joined up with the coastal folk to patrol the shoreline looking for—in case Sean swims ashore. But so far all they seem to be doing is annoying the local wildlife, including some otters. Possibly that’s what the kids’ little buddy is here about.” She gave a small smile that bloomed on her anxious face like a flower in the snow. She had a sense of whimsy, did Yana, and a connection with natural things that had come with her to Petaybee despite her offworld life. “He wants to protest the human invasion of his territory to the Petaybean government officials.”

  “Or perhaps he’s just looking for his friends.”

  “Yes. I can’t blame him there. As for fly-bys, Bunny has tried it in Frank Metaxos’s single-engine plane, and Aoifa organized the divers right off. But the bloody volcano is hampering any efforts they have to make a good search.”

  “It can’t hurt if we go out there again, Yana. You still have a chopper available?”

  She shook her head. “Not until the last one that went out searching returns. I can try to get them on the radio, but the com unit has been fried by the quakes and the electromagnetic waves Petaybee is putting out. I guess I could feed you while we wait.”

  Johnny had eaten Yana’s cooking in the past. “Let’s just go see if Clodagh has had any luck with the planet, shall we? She could tell us over dinner.”

  CLODAGH SEEMED OUTWARDLY as imperturbable as ever, large, round as Petaybee, moving about her cabin with a fluid grace that seemed strange in such an enormous woman, as if she were swimming through the air instead of constrained by gravity like the rest of them. Though her eyes lit with welcome when she saw him, Johnny felt she had known all along he’d be showing up at her door. Yana had already told him that she’d been haunting Clodagh when she wasn’t haunting everyone else.

  Clodagh dished each of them up a huge bowl of rabbit stew and served it with blueberry bread and rose-hip jelly. As soon as she served the food, however, she slung her pack onto her shoulder and went to the door. “You can leave those things and I’ll clean them when I get back, Yana.”


  “Going to the spring?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait and we’ll come with you,” Johnny said. “Unless you’d rather be alone.”

  “No, you should come. Petaybee is pretty excited right now. I have a hard time getting any attention. We should have a latchkay, but folks are too busy looking for Sean to get organized. A couple more voices might get heard better than just mine.”

  On the way to the spring and the communion cave, Johnny nearly fell twice with the force of the quakes shaking the ground. Petaybee had always been prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity, the legacy of its comparatively recent rebirth by terraforming, but this was quite energetic shaking, even so.

  “Is it safe in the cave, Clodagh?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  Johnny was more reassured by that than he would have been were he not a native-born Petaybean. He was a brave man, the veteran of many years of military service in the Company Corps and numerous hazardous missions on behalf of his civilian employer. Still, he found himself reluctant to step into the tunnels leading deeper into the planet’s grumbling bowels, which sounded as if Petaybee could use a dose of antacid and a nice cup of tea.

  However, though the walls shook and the footing was uncertain, though the water sloshed and rolled in the little hot pool as if it were a miniature ocean, they reached the communion cave without incident. The major pieces of rock all seemed inclined to remain where they were.

  Clodagh pulled out a thermos and four cups, as if she’d read its mind about the planet needing tea. “There now, just you simmer down, love,” she murmured to Petaybee.

  Yana smiled and said quietly to Johnny, “Clodagh’s talking to the planet like she did to me when I was going into labor with the twins.”

  “Our Sean is still missing,” Clodagh said conversationally, not to Johnny or Yana. “We’d like him back safe, please.”

  After a while other people began filing into the cavernous room, people with drums and other instruments.

  They started singing songs. Yana and Johnny sang a couple too, then Yana said, “I can’t sit here. We have to go look. Call Marmie and have her send another chopper if we must, but we have to go back out there. He could be hurt, clinging to a log or something.”

  But one of the search copters had returned by then, and the pilot, who had been out since daybreak, was more than willing for Johnny and Yana to take the evening shift. With summer, evening was very long—it lasted until twilight, and somewhere around midnight the sun, which had only taken a slight dip in the sky, began to rise again.

  Even so, the weather was hardly bright. Debris in the air almost obscured the sun entirely. Johnny didn’t expect to be able to find anything farther away than the copter’s nose.

  Unfortunately, his expectations were fulfilled. He and Yana ventured as close as they could get to the steaming smoking vent in the ocean, closer than they should have gone, but to no avail. They spent hours circling it, waiting while the quakes grew greater and subsided, backing off as the rumbling grew more intense and edging closer when it stilled, but they couldn’t see more than the surface of the water, and even then infrequently. They had to return to refuel twice, and both times he could almost hear Yana fretting that they had missed Sean at the very moment when they might have saved him.

  At her insistence, they did the same thing after the next crew went up, and again the following day. They spoke very little the entire time. Yana’s focus was total and she could not seem to bear a word to break into her thoughts.

  But finally, after the third search shift, Johnny said, “I think I’d best give you the children’s message, Yana, and you pass it on.”

  At once her eyes snapped to his like an eagle fixing claws on its prey.

  “They want to know if people can tell about their selkie nature from a blood sample. Their new science teacher, Dr. Mabo, was seen to pocket a handkerchief Murel bled into after cutting herself in lab class. They thought it suspicious and figured their father would know.”

  They were on their way back to the helicopter, but Yana turned and pointed in the direction of Johnny’s ship. “Go get them now and bring them home, Johnny,” she said, and as an afterthought added, “Please.”

  “I guess the answer would be yes to that question then?”

  “I don’t know about the blood, but a Dr. Marie Mabo was one of the scientists—the head one, if I remember correctly—Sean and Sinead arrested for, as Sinead put it, ‘unlawful detention of river otters.’ Mabo and the rest were deported. It may not be the same person, but I don’t want to even entertain the possibility that the woman might be anywhere near my children. Losing Sean is bad enough.”

  “I’ll go then,” he said, his hand on her shoulder squeezing a little, trying to be reassuring. “But you’ve not lost him yet. He may have swum to the other pole to get out of the way, for all you know. Communications haven’t been the best so we wouldn’t necessarily know. But I’ll get the kids nonetheless. They’ll be glad to be returning.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE TWINS WERE tired by the time they reached the laboratory. First they had to convince Marmie that they were too sleepy to stay up and play a game with her, as she suggested, but needed to go straight to bed. Then they had to wait until all was quiet and they were sure she’d retired to her quarters before they crept out of the house.

  Marmie had set the weather for fall. Holo leaves fell from holo trees and wind gathered them in breathy gusts into holo piles along the banks of the fake river, from which a holo deer was drinking. Realistic rattling and rustling sounds accompanied the whistle of the wind as if an overly friendly ghost were trying to get their attention.

  They made it through the garden without arousing Pet or the security staff, and reached the utility stairs leading to the next level. Stairs and elevators honeycombed the vast station, though most people chose to use the flitter fleet.

  The stairs were metal, grated, and zigzagged back and forth in a seemingly endless sawtooth between Marmie’s deck and the next one. Every step the twins took clanked and clattered, but it didn’t make a lot of difference since most of the station’s nonresidential areas operated continuously, were brightly lit, and had people coming and going at all hours.

  The third level, where the school and Professor Mabo’s science lab were located, was an exception. The white-tiled hallways that were so brilliantly lit during school hours were now dimly lit tunnels demarcated by strip lighting running the length of the hallway where the floors met the walls.

  Each footstep seemed to them to echo as loudly as a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil as they tried to creep forward toward the lab.

  When they reached the lab door, Ronan pulled out the keys. This is it. You keep lookout.

  Out here? By myself? The whites of Murel’s eyes seemed very white indeed as she peered down the maze of hallways.

  Sure, what are you afraid of? If there are any wolves around here, you can trust Professor Mabo to have them locked up in cages.

  Professor Mabo makes the wolves look gentle and friendly as sled pups, Murel said. I don’t mind admitting I’m a bit afraid of her. What if she decides to come back?

  Oh, she won’t do that, Ronan said with more certainty than he felt, once he had a moment to think it over. She doesn’t plan to do any more work until tomorrow, when she tortures the turtle.

  Well, go on then. And make it snappy, will you? We have a lot of stairs to carry a turtle up before it’s time to get ready for school again.

  Ronan fitted the key, gave Murel a thumbs-up sign, opened the door and let it snick gently closed behind him. The lights in the lab immediately flared into brilliance. They did that when anybody walked in. It wasn’t so—sudden—during school hours, but now he felt as if a spotlight had been focused on him. He shook himself a little, as if misgivings, like water, could be dispersed that way.

  The lab seemed huge now, the tables with the chairs upended over them for the custodian to clean th
e floors, the racks of beakers and bottles above each table. His footsteps and even his breath sounded unnaturally loud.

  He had not pulled the curtain over the front of the water tanks again, but even so, he couldn’t see much but the ladder at the top of the tank and the glint of water among the chair legs and beaker racks as the light sparked white from its surface. As he drew nearer, he could see more of the tank walls, and expected to see the turtle by the time he’d drawn close enough to touch the tanks and could see their bottoms. To his surprise, however, both tanks appeared empty.

  He couldn’t see the turtle at all. True, the saltwater tank did seem a bit murkier than it had before, the sandy bottom stirred into the water making it cloudy, but that shouldn’t have kept him from seeing the turtle. He checked the freshwater tank and the tank in which the Honu had been housed to begin with, but both were empty. Turtle? Honu? You there? Where are you? It’s me, Ronan. I came to—

  Heeeelp, a feeble thought reached him. The turtle sounded weak and frightened. Help me, Ronan. I’m stuck.

  Stuck? Where? Ronan pressed hs face to the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes to try to see into the tank more deeply without interference from the lights in the room. They cast his reflection back at him so that he got in his own way when he tried to see.

  Down here. In this cave.

  Cave? The tank was glass, not natural landscape. Why would there be a—Oh, you mean a drain, I bet. How did you get in there?

  Tried . . . escape . . . but . . . I . . . am too big. No air here. Need air.

  Sea turtles, like seals, needed to breathe every few minutes, Ronan knew. He and Murel had done a search for the Honu’s species in the station’s extensive computer databanks. They’d learned some other interesting things about the Honuian sea turtles too, while trying to figure out what they would feed the turtle and where the best place would be to keep him once they rescued him.