Meeting

by Nina Hoffman

“Get going,” said Rowan in his bossiest voice, and the cousins scattered, including Rowan.

  Maya and Travis stood alone in the front hall.

  A stocky, dark-haired woman in an ochre smock and blue jeans opened the door to the apartment on the right. Her skin was a warm suede brown, and her face had a lived-in look. Her hair was short and straight. Maya knew she had seen this woman at Saturday Music Night, but she didn’t remember her name.

  “Maya? Travis?” she said.

  “Yes?” Maya said, and Travis said, “Ma’am?”

  “Both your teachers are guardians on today’s field trip. Did you hear about that?”

  “Yes,” said Maya.

  “I’m Columba Janus. I’m supposed to look after you two this afternoon until Maya’s company arrives, which is weird for me. I have an apprentice I’m training, and I work security. They don’t generally ask me to entertain. It’s not one of my skills.” She frowned, then shook her head. “It’s going to be a little while until you can meet your visitors, Maya, because the field trip has to use the portal to get to Sviv before your visitors can use it to come here. Travis, you could head home now.”

  “I don’t like to go home before I have to,” he said. “Could I meet Maya’s visitors, too?”

  Columba thought, then said, “I don’t see why not, but I’ll ask someone who knows more. Come on in.”

  They followed her into an apartment that was different from the others Maya had seen in the building. Columba’s apartment had big windows that looked out into a forest of potted plants on the verandah. Beyond the plants and the porch railings there was a stretch of the lawn that surrounded Janus House on all sides, and beyond that was Passage Street.

  Yellow and white curtains framed the windows. The light coming in was green, filtered by the porch plants’ leaves. One of the windows was open a couple of inches.

  Columba had a green and black zebra-striped couch, an entertainment unit, a desk with a computer on it, and more plants inside her living room. Some looked rain-forest exotic, with leaves like hands or palm fronds or platters with holes in them, and the flowers looked like insects or butterflies or the heads of dragons. The air smelled like vanilla and cinnamon and hot candle wax.

  Through an archway was a kitchen with red counters, wooden cupboards, more windows that faced the porch, and a door that led outside. A pale tan table with two chairs beside it stood in front of one of the windows. Warm daylight gilded the sink and stove.

  Maya liked this apartment the best of any she’d been inside in Janus House.

  “Have a seat,” Columba said, waving toward the green and black couch. Travis and Maya slid out of their backpacks and settled on the couch. Maya got her sketch pad out. The feel of the pencil between her fingers and the smooth paper under the heel of her palm reassured her. She opened to an empty page and sketched Columba’s apartment. She got out a second pencil and let Rimi fill in details. Travis leaned back, relaxed almost to sleep, his usual response to any available wait time, and watched the drawing appear.

  Columba went to a small round picture on the kitchen wall that showed a flower Maya knew was called a bird of paradise, only it was white instead of orange and blue.

  Is that power picture ugly? Maya whisper-thought to Rimi. As a design, it matched the house furnishings better than most.

  Not as ugly as most of them, Rimi thought.

  Columba touched the flower and spoke in Kerlinqua.

  A familiar voice from the picture answered her. Either Nola Noona or Namdi Sarutha, Maya thought.

  Columba cocked her head, then said another phrase. None of the words were ones Maya had learned yet.

  Then Columba and whoever was on the other end said, “Sesstra,” which Maya did understand: good-bye.

  Columba turned to them. “Aunt Noona says you can stay to meet the travelers, Travis, but then Maya and Rimi have to have alone time with them.”

  “Excellent,” said Travis.

  “So in the meantime, would you like some tea?”

  “Got any water?” Travis asked. “Some without knockout drugs in it? I would purely appreciate it.”

  Columba grinned. “I think I can manage that. Maya?”

  “Water would be good.”

  I wonder if she has anything to eat. You’re hungry, Rimi thought, and Maya’s stomach growled. Maya wondered if Rimi had made her stomach do that. What if Rimi could make her burp or fart?

  Rimi laughed. I’m not doing anything except noticing what signals your body sends, she thought.

  Maya burped, startling herself. “Excuse me!”

  “Nice one,” said Travis.

  You didn’t make me do that? Maya asked Rimi.

  Uh, thought Rimi.

  Wait! You did make me do that?

  I didn’t know I could do anything like that, but when you thought about it, I wondered. So I—well, I—

  Maya felt a burp building again, this time a big one. She managed to shape the words all right! around the burp as it came out.

  “Stellar!” said Travis. Columba frowned at Maya.

  Stop that.

  Okay, thought Rimi. I wonder what happens if I—

  Don’t do it! Maya thought. At least, not here and now. Don’t. Okay?

  All right, Rimi thought with a mental sigh. Ask Columba for food, or I’ll go find some for you.

  “Do you have any snacks?” Maya asked quickly. “Please?”

  “What did you have in mind?” said Columba.

  “Cookies. Crackers. Fruit. Bread. Anything like that.”

  “Sapphira cooked up a batch of spice bread last night. Wait here and I’ll get you a loaf,” said Columba. She left the apartment.

  “What’s with the burps?” Travis asked when the door had closed behind Columba. “That’s my department.”

  “Rimi made me!” Maya said.

  “Whoa. Weird. How does that work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It is gas teased in a particular direction, Rimi thought.

  “Eww!” said Maya.

  “What? What did she say?”

  Maya told him.

  “She can tease gas? Who knew gas had self-esteem problems?” Travis said, and then Columba was back with something the size of a loaf of bread, wrapped in cloth.

  “All right,” she said. She went to the kitchen, unwrapped the bread, and sliced it on the bread board, then brought out a plate and some cloth napkins. The slices were rich, moist, and dark brown, and they smelled like ginger and cloves and nutmeg.

  “Thank you,” Maya said as Columba set them on the table in front of her. Now she felt her own hunger.

  “You’re welcome. I could use a snack myself.” Columba grabbed a slice and bit into it. Maya and Travis helped themselves.

  “Have you been to Sviv?” Maya asked Columba.

  Columba made a face. “It’s on my list of least favorite places to visit. That’s why I volunteered to host you two today. Much less evil.”

  “What’s a sva nut?” asked Travis.

  “The only thing that makes Sviv worth going to. They’re these nuts as big as your hand. You can slice them like you slice bread, and they’re these big, delicious, nutritious, buttery-tasting slices of, well, they’re kind of like macadamia nuts in texture and a little in taste. They’re like elite travel rations. One nut can keep you alive a week.”

  “Benjamin said they were going there for medical training,” said Maya.

  “Yeah, I admit Svivani doctors are good to know when you have medical emergencies.”

  “How can they doctor people from another planet?”

  “Their senses are all geared toward understanding other organisms, how circulatory systems work, muscles, stuff like that. They were champion predators before they civilized themselves. They could always tell the sick prey from the well prey. As a consequence, some of their prey animals evolved into fast, intelligent people, too. They share the planetary government now. So anyway, the Svivani have these extended senses,
and they can tell things about plants, too. By now they have huge lists of how plants will act to strengthen or weaken body systems. Some of that they can teach and some they can’t.”

  The power picture chimed. Columba put down her napkin and went to tap it. Noona’s voice spoke. After a short conversation, Columba turned to Maya. “Your company has come. They’re in the tea room now.”

  EIGHT

  Maya wrapped an extra piece of spicebread in a napkin and tucked it into her backpack. She stood up, and so did Travis.

  “Do you know where the tea room is?” Columba asked.

  “Nope,” said Maya.

  “I’ll get you both down there, and I’ll get Travis out afterward,” Columba said.

  “What’s the tea room?” Maya had heard of the tea room on the first day of school—a fairy had escaped from it and come to Maya’s room in the middle of the night, and that was how Maya got involved with the Janus House people in the first place.

  “It’s one of the places where we entertain travelers,” Columba said. “We have several, with different atmospheres and refreshments, depending on what the travelers need. The tea room is for people who can process Earth air and food.”

  “Ah,” said Maya. They went down the stairs to the tunnels under the apartment complex.

  Columba turned down a dark corridor off the main route. Glowing dots of green and blue made spirals and light trails along the walls and ceilings, with an occasional flash of purple or red. At the end of the short spur corridor, Columba paused at a black door with complicated lines of purple, lilac, and lavender inlay. The symbols there looked like some of the symbols Maya had seen in the floor of the portal room, and the writing she’d stared at in the books written in Kerlinqua, which she couldn’t read yet.

  Columba sang a short phrase of song, repeated it, traced a pattern in the center of the door, and gave it a gentle push. It swung open, letting out soft glowing greenish light and a whoosh of heavy air that smelled like autumn leaves burning.

  Sarutha’s sister, Noona, stood waiting for them on the other side of the door. “Maya-Rimi, Travis,” Noona said, her voice formal. “Please meet Kachik-Vati.”

  NINE

  Rimi tightened around Maya, an embrace from many overlapping hands.

  The tea room had softened corners and a low, round, central table. The dark wood of the tabletop glowed with bits of mother-of-pearl inset in a glittering random scatter. The table stood on a thick carpet patterned in swirls of green, purple, and rose. Around the edges of the room were puffy pillows covered in cloth of the same colors, some large and some small. A door in the left wall was ajar.

  Noona stood with her hands clasped in front of her, and beyond her stood someone taller than Maya, taller even than Noona, a person who looked like a stretched pyramid with its base toward the ground and its point toward the ceiling. His skin was the color of bricks, and he had three pale eyes just below the pointed end of the pyramid. He had a lot of arms lying against his body, long, softly furred brown limbs with their hand-ends pointing downward, as though he wore a coat of foxtails. Maya couldn’t see if this person had feet. One of his arms was twice as long as the others, and it was a darker color, too, and almost in the center of what might be his chest.

  The dark arm rose. At its end was a whorl of tentacles. “Greetings,” said the pyramid person from a mouth Maya couldn’t see, and the tentacles whirled one way, then the other, then drew their ends together in the center so that they looked like a flower.

  “Greetings,” Maya said, and gulped. She felt a little dizzy.

  “Hiya, big dude,” said Travis. Maya glanced at him. He had gone pale, but he was smiling. She hadn’t talked to him much about his training to be a giri, a human helper to the people who lived in Janus House and their guests, but she guessed some of it must be about encountering people who weren’t human. Travis was holding up better this time than he had the first time he encountered otherworlders.

  “Greetings to you, smaller dude,” said the pyramid person.

  Rimi, a faint pressure everywhere against Maya’s exposed skin, sent a couple of small jolts into the back of Maya’s neck. Maya recognized the calm Rimi could give her when she felt off balance. Her mind steadied; she let her confusion fade and set her brain on memorize so she’d be able to draw pictures of all this later.

  “I am Kachik,” said the pyramid person, his voice deep and dark. “This is Vati.” The darker arm in the center of his—chest?—made a graceful rippling motion. It didn’t have elbows; it was many-jointed, like a snake. The tentacles at the end spread into a multi-rayed star, then drew back into a flower shape.

  “I’m Maya,” Maya said. She swallowed, straightened her shoulders, and reached for the stability Rimi had given her. She gestured toward her friend. “This is Travis. Rimi is—”

  Rimi rose up, in shadow form, a stretched version of Maya, translucent, a dark stain in the air, still attached at Maya’s feet, but beside her now, a wavery twin.

  “Rimi is here,” Maya said.

  “Oh!” cried Kachik. “Never have I seen such a flower shape!”

  The darker arm, Vati, wound around Kachik, then unwound and reached toward Maya and Rimi. Kachik’s own arms ended with clusters of tentacles, but there weren’t as many tentacles per cluster as Vati had.

  “Vati says Rimi is beautiful,” Kachik said, “like smoke shaped by wind.”

  I told you they would appreciate me, Mayamela, Rimi thought. She sounded a little shaken.

  Maybe you should compliment them back, thought Maya.

  Tell them Vati looks very useful and has lovely fur.

  Maya repeated this aloud.

  “We thank you,” said Kachik-Vati. “We greet you. We would know you better if we could. Will you allow it?”

  “Travis, it is time for you to leave the tea room,” Noona told him.

  “Huh?” Travis straightened, took one more look at Kachik-Vati, and then saluted. “Aye-aye, Aunt Sir. Nice to meet you, K-V. Hope to see you later.”

  “My hope lies there as well,” Kachik-Vati said.

  Columba opened the door, and Travis went through it. Columba followed him out and closed the door.

  Maya looked at Kachik-Vati, then at Noona. “Now what?” she asked.

  “Kachik-Vati would like to study you and Rimi. The sissimi bonded have a cache of knowledge they share about how sissimi have gone out into the universes, what has become of them. They would collect your bond, and tell you what other bonded have done. Ara-Kita took first news of you to Rimi’s home planet. Kachik-Vati is here to take second news of you. In return, Kachik-Vati will help you with sissimi issues. They have already given us some help about this.”

  Maya felt Rimi tense, a vague tightening in the shadow self beside her. Rimi was anxious to find out more about what she was and what she could be, but she and Maya were afraid of having anyone else find out their abilities. “What kind of help did they give you?” Maya asked.

  “They have, for instance, told us whom to call should Rimi fall ill,” said Noona. “None of us knows how to doctor a sick sissimi. She was sick when you first connected to her, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” said Maya. When she had stopped being scared of Rimi, she had worried about her, it was true. Maya had been the cure, though. Easy.

  “We have a contact we can call now,” Noona said.

  “Good.”

  “Younger two, will you touch selves with me?” Kachik-Vati asked.

  “Would that be like it was when Kita and Rimi touched?” said Maya.

  “Each sissimi is different. Each touch-to-touch, each fusion, is different. It is sharing, though, and it is something we all treasure.”

  Maya studied Kachik-Vati, who stood quiet, except for Vati’s tendrils, which whirled and stopped, whirled and stopped, weaving into different flowery shapes.

  I want to touch them, Rimi thought. I want to learn. I want—Vati is my Peter. Well, maybe I’m Vati’s Peter and he’s my Maya.


  Is Kachik my Candra? Maya wondered.

  We can’t know until we touch.

  “Okay,” Maya said slowly. “Okay. Let’s . . . get to know each other.” She and Rimi might reveal their secrets. Maybe they’d get new secrets in return.

  Two of Kachik-Vati’s arms reached for the round table between them. “Noona, your permission to move this?”

  Noona inclined her head. “Of course.”

  Kachik lifted the table and moved it out of the way. All his arms curled against him, the tendrils pointing upward.

  Maya straightened up and took three steps toward Kachik-Vati. Rimi moved with her.

  Kachik-Vati said, “You look young, as your species looks young. Very young to have established a sissimi bond.”

  “Is there an age limit?” Maya asked.

  “Usually sissimi bond with people who have spent several years studying for such a gift. There is shared vocabulary that goes across all languages. Some the sissimi will know, and some it is the other’s job to teach. Only certain people receive the gift of the sissimi bond. There are tests one must undergo. You didn’t go through them, did you?”

  “No,” said Maya.

  Noona stepped between Maya and Kachik-Vati. “You are to know this child and this sissimi bonded out of necessity. The sissimi was dying with its original host, and Maya took it over and saved it. She had no training at all.”

  “Yes,” said Kachik. “One of our Lost. We are all grateful the bond succeeded with someone unprepared. Especially since the Lost was too young to leave the vine when it was taken. It is the good kind of chance-meet. All our longing is to help you learn, grow, and be together.”

  Vati’s arm curled and uncurled in an elaborate and graceful dance, its tendrils waving almost hypnotically.

  “May we touch now?” Kachik asked.

  Maya lifted a hand. “Okay.”

  Kachik-Vati glided across the floor somehow. Maya still wasn’t sure if Kachik had feet. She couldn’t even tell if he wore clothes; some kind of skirt hung down to the floor beneath the lowest of his dangling arms, but whether it was part of his skin or an overgarment, Maya didn’t know.