Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“Cut it out,” Carl said, coming up behind him and putting down a cup. “You know you love it. Wait, do you want sugar in yours?”

“In a mocha? No.”

“Right back.”

Tom leaned against the counter and looked down the concourse. “It really is strange,” he said, “seeing the place so humanoid-heavy…”

“With some exceptions,” Dairine said, glancing at a small party of aliens coming down from the direction of the 400 hexes, nearly swallowed up by the hominids surrounding them. Yet a couple of this group took some swallowing up. They were taller than any of the humanoids surrounding them, even those slender spindly ones from obviously light-gravity worlds. Of the pair, one had a hide that glinted metallically in a brilliant eye-hurting green, and it was strapped about with metallic adornments that could equally have been clothing, accessories, or badges of rank. The person had a lizardy look to it, though it was six-armed and bipedal. At the top of a long-snouted face, wide-set eyes were elongated toward the back of its skull, each with a pupil that ran its eye’s whole length. Behind these, on each side, long odd flaps of hide ran down toward the alien’s spine. The effect was somewhat like that of a very thin, spindly cross between a basset hound and a gecko.

Its companion was even taller and looked more insectile than anything else: nearly transparent in places, especially at the ends of the long small-clawed limbs. It had a small rhomboidal head fringed with feathery growths, possibly sense organs, and was compound-eyed and jeweled in intricate patterns over the upper half of its body, the chitin of its exoskeleton shimmering in the light of Crossings daytime as long beams from Rirhath B’s sun (just now coming out towards the end of a cloudy day) found their slanting way down to floor level past the floating panels of the ceiling.

The third of the trio, though, wasn’t anything like as visible until they were all much closer. It looked like nothing so much as a very large upended beefsteak mushroom that had escaped from the produce department in some grocery that catered to giants. Very small clawed feet, like those of a millipede, could be seen under the meter-wide mushroom-dome, zooming it along beside its companions. There was no sign of any eyes or other sensorial organ on the brown-and-beige dappled top, but naturally that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

The three beings went past the kiosk together, apparently deep in conversation; the green lizard-being fluting in rhythmic patterns, the chitinous mantid making brief soft sonorous melodies, a little on the atonal side, and the mushroom emitting a range of seemingly disconnected sounds like something from an old British science fiction show. And off down the concourse they went together, sounding for all the world like a wind instrument talking in undertones to a cello, with brief bursts of comment from their accompanying theremin down near floor level.

Kit turned away, embarrassed at himself for staring. But then everyone else had been doing the same, at least briefly. And Dairine in particular had a look on her face like that you’d expect from someone who’s seen something she hadn’t ever really expected to. “Huh,” she said under her breath, “isn’t that topical.” She turned back to finishing her sandwich, giving Spot a look that he returned out of a couple of spare stalky eyes while the others still followed the aliens as they more or less vanished into the crowd.

Nita put her empty bowl and chopsticks down on the counter: it promptly vanished them. “What is?”

“Those guys. They’re three-quarters of a bar joke. Or the beginning of a fairy tale, maybe.” She pushed her plate away, and the counter removed it. “‘Once upon a time there was a planet called Tarthak…’”

Tom looked surprised. “Oh indeed. What took you down that line of research?”

“Who, actually,” Dairine muttered. “Nelaid.” She looked up toward the floating segments of the high ceiling as if wishing some kindly deity would come down through it and help her escape from a subject she’d heard too much of lately.

“Makes perfect sense,” Tom said, “as significant portions of the population of Wellakh would have been rafted off the planet for a good while so that repairs on the planet’s ecosystem could get started. Way too problematic trying to keep them inside the forcebubble holding the atmosphere in place while the wizards there were trying to calm it down. Not to mention the storms secondary to inertial drag on the confined atmosphere, the cooling issues on the flare-blasted side…” He shook his head.

“So why are these guys so topical?” Ronan said, getting rid of his snack plate and tapping at the menu to bring up a drinks page. “Who are they, anyway?”

“Go on, enlighten us,” Tom said to Dairine. “Let’s see how much other detail you’ve retained.”

Dairine paused just long enough to look at Tom with an expression that suggested he was pushing his luck. “Are you giving me a quiz? Does this count toward my final grade?”

“It’ll count toward me telling your Dad you’re actually getting some serious work done in all your offplanet time when he next asks me about it,” Tom said.

Dairine made a face. “Blackmail? Fine. …So it’s not so much about Tarthak actually, which was just a gas giant, and not even a conscious one, but one of its moons. They all went around—well, they still go around, though nobody’s there—this star called Munak. It’s in Leo somewhere, three hundred thirty light years or so from Earth—”

“Oh, Alterf?” Carl said from behind them, putting down Tom’s mocha coffee beside him and leaning against the counter again.

Tom nodded and sipped at his coffee. “Lambda Leonis,” he said, and then made a face of his own. “Wait, how much sugar did you put in this?”

“Not me,” Carl said, “the counter guy. Too many arms, too much enthusiasm. Didn’t have the heart to stop him.”

Tom raised his eyebrows in a “what can you do” expression and kept on drinking the coffee. “Anyway,” Dairine said, “Tarthak had whole a lot of moons, and one of them, the biggest of them, was called Temalbar: nearly Earth-sized and massive enough to hold onto an oxygen-bearing atmosphere. There were four dominant species there: the Jejeev—that green guy, he was Jejeev—the Mathala, those are the preying-mantis looking ones: the Tesakyt—”

“The little dome-y guy,” Ronan said, as a tall dark drink with a light-colored head ascended through the counter in front of him.

“Is that what I think it is?” Carl said, suddenly bemused.

Ronan snorted. “Are you daft? Guinness doesn’t even like traveling from Dublin to New York. If you brought it this far by standard gating it’d need a biohazard label. This is a dandelion-and-burdock float.”

Nita covered her eyes. Seeing her expression, Kit made a note to ask her later what was going on.

“If I may continue…” Dairine said, annoyed.

“Do please,” Tom said.

“Okay. The Jejeev, the Mathala, the Tesakyt, and—” She paused. “Okay, you could make yourselves useful here,” Dairine said, looking accusingly at Tom and Carl, “because all the name the manual gives the other Temal species is Gevai.” Kit raised his eyebrows, since that was one of the ordinal number-forms in the Speech that simply meant “fourth”, without any suggestion of “fourth” what. “Isn’t it kind of weird not to see their own name for themselves?”

“That is their name for themselves,” Tom said, “and nobody knows why. It’s as if their image of themselves suggests that the other three species on the planet were somehow more important than they were. What’s really strange about it is that the other three species seem to think that the Fourth are far more important than any of them.”