Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“Before you bugger off,” Ronan said. “We were thinking of having a picnic out at Kit’s place.”

“We?” Kit said, amused.

“In our off time,” Ronan said. “It’s nice out there. Fresh air, peace and quiet…”

“Mr. Party Organizer here hasn’t mentioned that I haven’t cleared it with my two colleagues…”

“You think there’d be a problem?” Nita said. “If we’re in our own downtime, and we’re well away from—” She waved a hand at the transients moving through the square. “—people who might be bothered… don’t see why they’d object.”

Her immediate acceptance of the idea surprised Kit. “Um, okay. When?” He looked at Ronan.

“Don’t ask me right this minute!” Ronan said. “I may have the Knowledge in my head, but that doesn’t turn me into a scheduling app. Maybe you can help, though,” he said, glancing at Nita. “Your silent partner—”

Nita looked vague for a moment; then her eyes snapped back into focus. “Maybe Saturday?” she said to Kit.

He frowned. “Wait, what’s today? So much has been happening…”

“Tell me about it. It’s Friday. So… tomorrow, in the evening in your timezone? Bobo says he needs to do some checking, but that might work, if the people we invite feel like it. Us, Dairine, Tom and Carl if they can make it, some of the shiftmates…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “We can bring some of our supplies to trade around… kick back a little.”

“Sounds good.” She pushed herself away from the glass wall, headed off across the plaza. “Call me about your sibik-y guys if they turn up. At least I can look at them with the manual, even if I can’t come out.”

“I will.”

And off Nita went across the plaza. “I should go too,” Kit said, watching Nita jump up onto the pad, all business, and promptly vanish. “Look, about the picnic: I’ll shoot you a note when I have a chance to talk to Cheleb and Djam. But, listen, thanks… I really needed that shower. And other things.”

“Any time,” Ronan said. “As long as we keep the gates running smoothly, nobody here cares what we’re up to, really. Their minds are pretty much elsewhere.” He looked across the plaza at the crowds pouring from the feeder gates into the downstream one.

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Later.”

He headed back for his puptent to find Djam still enthroned, almost without having even changed his position. “Hey, sorry, that took longer than I thought,” Kit said. “Just let me change and I’ll be right with you.”

“Nothing’s happening here,” Djam said, yawning one of his small bubbling yawns: “don’t rush on my behalf.”

Kit hurried about about changing anyway, picking up some Pop-Tarts and a bottle of water and a can of one of the milder energy drinks to hold him until he could settle in and assemble a more meal-like meal. Because if Mama looks at my supplies when I get home and sees I haven’t eaten anything but junk food while I was away, I’m really gonna be in for it…

He headed back for the Throne Rock and was surprised to see the long grass in front of him waving. Except it wasn’t the wind producing the movement. It was sibiks, a small crowd of them, all humping and slithering along toward him. The one in the lead of the crowd had its abdomen up to see better, and when those eyes spotted Kit approaching, it shouted in a small sibik voice, sort of a squeak, “Cracker!”

“Cracker, cracker!” all the sibiks behind it started shouting. They swarmed to meet Kit and began bouncing up and down around him as he made his way over to the Throne Rock, and a few of them started trying to climb up his legs. “Cracker cracker cracker!”

Kit had a lot of trouble not bursting out laughing at them: if squeaky-toys could shout, this was what they would sound like. “Are you kidding?” Kit said to them as he waded through them, trying hard not to step on any tentacles. “I haven’t even had my cracker yet. What makes you think you’re getting any?”

He sat himself down by Djam and more or less immediately found himself shoving sibiks off his lap. “They weren’t bothering you earlier, were they?”

“Not at all,” Djam said. “In fact I haven’t seen any of them until just now, when you turned up again.”

Kit shook his head. “No, you guys!” he said, as one of the shoved-off sibiks started climbing up his leg. “Not now! You all just behave yourselves until I tell you I’m ready for you.”

“Then cracker?” came the chorus from ankle height.

“Jeez, yeah, then cracker but not now cracker! Now go on, all of you. Outside the circle.”

Some of them started moving off. Others moved a few feet and then crouched down in the long blue-green grass, flattening their little eye-studded abdomens down and looking back sidelong at Kit as if expecting him to forget they were there.

“Outside the circle,” Kit said, waving his arms at them. “Go on! Shoo!”

Reluctantly, even sulkily, the remaining sibiks slunk away, and gathered along with all the others just outside of the circle of stones.

Kit sighed. “Okay,” he said, “tell me how it’s been overnight. Pop-Tart?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

They sat and ate and chatted for a few moments, and then Djam started going over the night’s logs with Kit. The gates had been relatively well-behaved—a few minor gravitational fluctuations around the portal interfaces, but nothing worse. “Indeed they seem quite docile after you and Cheleb spoke to them last night,” Djam said. “Maybe we should make this a daily ritual. You two get together in the evening between your shifts and tell them how to behave, and then I have a nice quiet shift.” He bubbled softly, the laugh turning into a yawn a moment later.

“You should go get some rest,” Kit said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Djam stretched and stood. “But remember, you promised us more of that entertainment, so don’t forget to wake me when you’re ready to start. We left those wizard-knights and their friends with much unfinished business…”

Kit grinned: if Dairine heard that description applied to Jedi she’d be most amused. As Djam got up, Kit caught motion from the corner of his eye. A few sibik were trying to sneak in through the circle of stones without being noticed.

Kit held up a warning finger. “Ah ah!”

The foremost sibik immediately crouched themselves down into the grass again, and one of them said defiantly, “Mealtime!”

Others took up the cry: “Mealtime! Mealtime!” Kit looked at Djam in bemusement. “Now how do they all know this word all of a sudden? I only told it to one of them, and he’s not here.”

“Powers about us, I don’t know! Telepathy? Sign language? Maybe it’s something chemical. The Telling does say something about them using a form of DNA-based learning, and you see a lot of them sucking on others’ tentacles. They could be passing DNA back and forth that way…”

Kit shook his head. “This is so strange. Before I got here, did any of these things even speak to you at all?”

“Not to me,” Djam said. “Perhaps to Cheleb, but if they did, he hasn’t mentioned. I didn’t think much about it, anyway. You know how it differs from world to world. Some animals don’t like aliens because they look or feel or smell strange. Others don’t care for species they’re not commensal with, and so won’t talk to them.”

“I was saying to Nita just now, they’ve got some kind of connection,” Kit said. “This scent trail thing…”

“Might be more than that,” Djam said. “The Tevaralti have a low-level mindlink among themselves, a symbiotic thing. Why not the animals? Especially if some of them are pets.”

“The first one the other day wasn’t, though,” Kit said. “Or the one last night. At least I don’t think it was.”