Changelings (9 page)

“What is it with you Shongilis, coming out here to throw your weight around?”

Liam Maloney stepped forward now. “Dr. Sean and his wife are the co-governors of Petaybee. I am Sheriff Maloney, and you are in violation of ever so many serious statutes. Do as Warden Sinead says and release the otters or we’ll be lockin’ yourselves up instead.”

“I believe I can clear this up, sirs and madam,” said the small wizened woman with the dark brown skin and heavily chiseled broad features of an aboriginal New Adelaidian. “I am Dr. Marie Mabo of IGISI, the Inter Galactic Institute of Species Identification. My team and I are here by their authority, so naturally I assumed that our presence and mission were known to and approved by local officials as well. We have been observing these creatures in their wild state for some time and two days ago were privileged to see them interacting peaceably with a pair of seals who seemed to be accompanied by a pair of children who fended off a wolf attack.”

“You saw the wolves menacing the children and you did nothing to help?”

“It looked like the wolves were doing fine to me,” said the man the otters had identified as the one with fur on his chin.

“That will do, Eric!” Dr. Mabo said. To the Petaybeans, she said, “I apologize that my colleague chooses to display his rather sardonic sense of humor at such an inappropriate moment. I do realize the children must have been yours, Warden, since you and your canines and felines came to their rescue. Had you but known it, we were right behind you, ready to intervene ourselves. We hesitated only because we truly had no wish to shoot the beautiful wolves encircling the children and it seemed we had no alternative. You proved us wrong.”

“Did, didn’t I?” Sinead said. She stepped forward, her rifle over her arm, and opened an otter cage. There were only three otters in it but they seemed to explode all over the clearing in their haste to get away, and looked like at least ten times their number. No wonder the otter thought he had a hundred family members.

Sinead signaled her rangers to continue opening cages while she opened the puff tents. An anesthetized pregnant female otter lay on a folding table. Her belly was shaved and a needle fed into one of her paws. She was shivering either from shock or hypothermia. Computer equipment in an enclosed thermal shell lined one side of the tent.

Sinead picked her up and folded her inside a special pouch she carried next to her body. She carried the otter in the pouch over to the curly coat where Deirdre Angalook, Clodagh’s student, received her, bundling the injured animal to her as if she were a baby. The only other otter to be seen by the time she emerged was the one who had accompanied them from Kilcoole.

“I’m guessin’ the only reason you put this little one out was so she wouldn’t bite your hand off, right?” she said to Dr. Mabo.

“Actually, we wanted to preserve the specimens as long as possible for more testing,” Eric the Whiskers said.

Dr. Mabo whipped around so fast the hood from her parka fell away from her face. “Somebody gag him,” she said.

“Nobody will be gaggin’ anybody else,” Liam Maloney said. “But we’ll be cuffing all of you and then taking you back to Kilcoole for deportation, at least until your institute sees fit to consult with us before conducting a study on our four-legged friends.”

Deputy Tukaluk walked around the tents and into the forest. “They got a snocle over here, Sheriff. Big one. I never saw one this big. Musta brought it with them when they landed.”

“How many will it hold exactly?” Sean asked.

“Six and a driver,” Tukaluk said.

“Very well, then. I’ll drive and Dr. Mabo can ride in Sinead’s sled on the way back.”

“Ought to make them walk, Sean,” Liam said.

“That would slow us down too much,” he replied. “I’ve business back in Kilcoole. I must tell my children, for one thing, that the otters have been released and are safe.”

“Those were
your
children, then, Dr. Shongili?” Marie Mabo asked, but not as if she didn’t already know.

“They were. And like my sister the Game Warden, they are extremely protective of the other species on this planet.”

“I’d very much like to talk to them and apologize for worrying them,” Dr. Mabo said. “They’re the age of my grandchildren, and we certainly didn’t mean to frighten them.”

Sean’s heart pounded extra loud for a couple of beats before he said, “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. They’ve gone to visit a friend offworld. I’ll relay your apologies.”

After the cuffed prisoners had been loaded into the snocle, Sean took the helm. Sinead had already strapped Dr. Mabo to her sled. Deirdre and the injured otter took off on the curly coat while the other sleds followed. Nobody remembered the single otter that had not run away.

In moments only tracks remained where the rescue party, the offworld scientists, and the captive otters had been. The lone remaining otter returned to the tunnels where he had played with his family and the river seals, but they were still smashed and still abandoned.

CHAPTER 10

A
T
M
ARMIE’S INSTRUCTIONS,
as soon as the communications officer received word from Kilcoole about the capture of the otter rustlers, she reported straight to Ronan and Murel.

“Oh, good,” Murel said absently.

Ronan nodded and said, “Serves ’em right.”

If the ship’s crew was expecting a big reaction from the children about this bit of news that, according to the boss, the Petaybean kids had been waiting for throughout the trip, they were disappointed.

The twins had eyes for nothing but the viewscreen. Through it they watched the space station, its lights in the darkness of space making it look as if it were decorated for the holidays. Larger and larger it grew until it filled up the screen and only a tiny portion of it was visible. Then that portion, the port hatch, opened like a water lily unfolding to receive the ship into its heart.

“Reminds me of the otter’s den,” Murel said, smiling to her brother, who grinned back as they raced to their quarters. There, they gathered the few things they’d brought with them, their warm suits and their more conventional parkas, mukluks, snow pants, and mittens for when they went home, plus pouches of Clodagh’s remedies and the journals Mum had given them.

When they followed Marmie out of the ship into the docking bay, they looked all around them.

It’s
huge, Murel said, her neck straining as she looked up and up and up. Flitters, carrying passengers, zipped from a wall to a bit of ceiling to another bit of wall, busy as—well, insects. It didn’t matter if they were bees or wasps or mosquitoes.

Yeah,
Ronan said.
I bet you could fit all of Kilcoole in just this part.

His sister nodded mutely.

“Come along, children,” Marmie said. “We can do the tour after you’ve settled in a bit.”

A flitter landed in front of them. A very handsome man in a uniform was at the helm.

“Is that your husband come to collect us, Marmie?” Murel asked.

“No, dear, he’s one of the chauffeurs, I suppose you might say. There’s an entire cadre of them here just to man the flitter fleet.”

“Flitter fleet?” Ronan asked, laughing. And had to say it several times over until Murel said privately,
Stop. It’s getting annoying. You don’t want Marmie to get cross, do you?

Marmie’s not cross. You’re the one being bossy. What do you think? Now that we don’t have Nanook and Coaxtl to mind us you get to be in charge? Not likely, my girl!

Now you’re being snotty. I just want us to make a good impression. Marmie is our friend but she’s a very important lady.

So? Mum and Da are governors. That makes them just as important.

Yes, but not us. Mum and Da are our parents. They have to love us. Marmie doesn’t.

Maybe she’ll get mad at us and send us back,
Ronan said.
I wouldn’t mind.

You’d mind by the time Mum got done with you, and once she was through, Clodagh would be after us. We’d bring disgrace to all of Petaybee if Marmie sent us back because we were too big a handful for her.

I don’t think that will be a problem. If she gets tired of us, she can just hand us over to the cadre of chauffeurs and their fleet of flitters.
With this he began shaking again with another fit of the giggles.

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 of 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.