Migration (15 page)

She sat up. “Yes, I am. Think about it, Case. You bring the perspective of a Harv, the knowledge of your deep-water fishing heritage, to the work in tidal systems. Every question you ask will have the unique value of coming from that knowledge. Bottom line? Lee and his team don’t know what you know, and they’ll benefit from your insights.” Mac grinned. “I admit there’s the chance you’ll drive Lee nuts—but I think his new lady love is already doing that.”

There was something immensely satisfying about the stupefied look on the young man’s face. “You’re saying Kammie assigned me to Lee’s research team because I don’t have a clue about his work and he doesn’t have a clue about mine.”

Mac nodded cheerfully. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“That’s not—I’m really—Mac?” He gave her a desperate look. “What do I do now?”

“You go home,” she advised. “Spend some time on that open sea. Think to your heart’s content. Just be back here in three weeks, ’cause we have work to do this season, despite earthquakes and Norcoast.”

Case stood when she did, then offered his hand. Mac took it, enjoying the feel of warm calluses, noticing the strength. “You believe I can do this,” he told her. Almost a question, as though he had to be sure.

“I believe neither of us will know that until you try,” she said honestly. “I hope you will, Case.”

His grip tightened before letting go, his freckles prominent on his very serious face. “I promise. Thank you.”

The ensuing pause had the potential to become awkward, but Case relaxed and smiled before it did. An unexpectedly mischievous smile. “So if I’m to try what Kammie says, will you do the same? Take a vacation?”

Mac raised one eyebrow. “Eavesdropping?”

“The door was open,” he said, appearing completely unrepentant.

Grad students,
she sighed to herself. “I’m considering it.”

“You’re welcome to come home with me.” The young man blushed and added hastily: “Don’t worry. My parents and sister will be on the trawler, too.”

One of the few times to be grateful Emily
wasn’t
around.

Mac coughed. “I appreciate the offer, Case, but I’ll probably help Kammie with the courses she’s running. Or there’s a taxonomy conference in Brussels—”

“When was the last time you took a vacation?”

Mac found herself at a loss.

“Aha!” Case crowed. “I bet you’ve never taken one. I bet you don’t even know how!”

“Of course I do,” Mac huffed. “I haven’t bothered.”

He gestured at her cluttered office. “So it’s true!”

“What’s true?” she asked cautiously.

“What they say. You really do live here all the time. Year in, year out. You don’t even bother with sleeping quarters.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a passion for one’s work,” she said primly, then winced.
No doubt about Emily’s response to that line.
“Don’t you have a ride to catch, Mr. Wilson?”

Unfortunately, grad students loved nothing more than a mission. Case, Mac realized glumly, happily relieved of his own conundrum, had his teeth firmly in this one.

Which would have been fine, if it wasn’t her
.

“I promise to think about it, Case. Oh, no,” Mac forestalled his next outburst. “This is where I get to pull rank. End of argument.”

He chewed on his lower lip, then nodded. “You promise, though.”

“Go chop fish heads,” Mac suggested with a grin, making a shooing motion with her hands.

She closed and, as an afterthought, locked the door to the terrace, before making one last walk-through of her office and lab. She opened cupboards. Counted Emily’s boxes of belongings. Found a hose clamp in the wrong drawer and put it with the rest.

Mac shook off the foreboding. She was tired. Tired and thoroughly offended by the current state of things. Neither led to peace of mind.

Of course, it didn’t help her mood to return to her office to find two black-garbed monoliths guarding her desk.

They’d left their visors down for some unfathomable reason.
It had to be hot in there,
Mac thought, not for the first time. She scowled until, one after the other, they flipped them up on their helmets. The revealed faces shared a sheepish look. “Jones. Zimmerman,” she acknowledged, feeling uneasy.
Nice guys; but they never came to her office like this.
“What can I do for you?”

“Hi, Mac,” Jones said. “We’re here to help you pack.”

Mac reached down and grabbed her bag, holding it up for inspection. “Done.”

Zimmerman, dark-skinned, dark-haired, and perpetually dark of mood, so far as Mac could tell, heaved a sigh, rattling something loose among the weapons clipped to various parts of his armor. “Told you we didn’t have time for supper, Sing-li.”

“I thought you’d left by now,” Mac commented.

“We’re waiting to take you to join the others at the university,” Jones informed her.

Were they, now
.

Mac tightened her grip on the bag handle. “Why?”

The two exchanged looks, likely reflecting on other situations involving that question in that tone from Mac. “It’s a nice campus. Great facilities—”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I do know the place. The point, gentlemen?”

Jones managed to shrug his encased shoulders. “It’s a secure option, Mac,” he told her. “ ’Sephe’s already there, doing the prep work. After what’s happened—well, we all felt some extra precautions might be necessary. I know you won’t be happy about this, but—”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Sounds perfectly reasonable,” Mac said blandly. “Just give me half an hour to locate the samples I’m taking from storage. One of the courses we’re teaching has an anatomy component. Where shall I meet you? Front entrance? Back here?”

They probably should leave their visors down more often,
Mac decided, amused by the war between suspicion and relief on their faces.

Suspicion won. “We’ll come with you,” Zimmerman said. “Help you pack.”

Mac smiled. “Perfect.” She slipped her arms into the shoulder straps of her bag, and waved her “helpers” onward.

Mac had no idea what Kammie and the University of British Columbia would make of five preserved orca heads, two bottles of giant squid eyes, and fifty-three huge, “too good to discard but on the way to rancid” clumps of mutually cemented rock barnacles. If they got there.

As expected, however, her “samples” made admirably awkward burdens for two overly helpful Ministry guards.

By the second load, they’d begun working together, leaving her to pull out the next load from the stas-unit in Pod Four.

By the third, Mac was no longer at the stas-unit, but on her way to Kitimat, having squeezed herself and her bag in with a bunch of homebound and very happy Preds students, much to the delight of Case Wilson.

“Vacation, here I come,” she told him, dropping into the tiny space they’d cleared her for a seat.

- Encounter -

O
EISHT
WALKED restlessly up the hillside, each step bringing front legs forward, brace, then drawing the hind set through. The rhythm was soothing and efficient.
Oeisht
covered ground rapidly, each step a surge of muscle and bone.

Behind
oeisht,
on the lower third of the slope,
aisht
huddled in the homes of the settlement,
isht
of every life stage safe in their pouches.

Safe. Was there meaning to the word? This far from kin,
oeisht
panted with despair.
Oeisht
had seen for
oeishtself
the desecration of the farmland in the next valley to this. A single
isht
had survived, jammed inside a hollow roof pipe, the only living thing between the hills of scoured rock. Too young to grieve; too young to have concepts for what had happened.

But Others knew. Others had sent urgent messages. Travelers, the infertile
aisht,
restless, always seeking, ever curious, had interpreted their meaning for those who dwelt within the Pouch of their kind.

Oeisht
let the latest swing forward of his hinds stop, easing to his haunches. By the new thinking, the Pouch was far larger than this one place.
Oeisht, aisht,
and
isht
lived on a world within its star system, that star within a cluster of stars, that cluster, within others.
Oeisht
wasn’t a theologian, but this new concept, that the dark sky of night was itself the inner folds encompassing the universe, had a good feel, a comfort to it.

Oeisht
had come to the hilltop for comfort. Now,
oeisht
gazed upward, elongating and thinning
oeisht’s
eyestalks to sharpen the focus of the stars winking above. Each, if
aisht
were to be believed, might have worlds, worlds with those who had eyes looking toward
oeisht
.
Oeisht,
out of sight of
aisht,
who might think
oeisht
foolish, flared ears in greeting. Then,
oeisht
crouched, retracting ears and eyestalks.

The stars were wrong.

The stars were coming closer.

Oeisht
leaped to all fours, surging downslope in prodigious leaps, moaning
oeisht’s
despair.

The stars were faster.

And they brought the Dhryn.

It is the way of the Great Journey that what can be gathered cannot satisfy. That which is Dhryn cannot be filled.

That which is Dhryn . . .
hungers
.

Only at Haven, will there be enough.

All that is Dhryn must move.

Or all that is Dhryn will end.

M
AC COULD SEE them all now. Case, triumphant. Kammie, openly smug. The Ministry’s finest probably still explaining the presence of orca heads and the absence of hers on campus. Her father, who’d let her pretend this trip had been her idea all along.