Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

He soon found that there was going to be opportunity enough for him to do that, if he could keep other things from happening. Kit had gotten up briefly to take a leak behind one of the big standing stones—he was less concerned about this when both his shiftmates were likely to be off-site for a while—when in the middle of zipping up he started hearing unexpected clunking and rustling noises. A few seconds later he came around the standing stone to see a sibik, dappled in green and blue and quite large, hastily pulling things out of his backpack and throwing them over its shoulder, or where its shoulder would’ve been if it had had a shoulder. Or just one, Kit thought. How many tentacles do these guys actually have? They move so fast it’s hard to get a count…

“Hey!” Kit yelled he hurried back to the Stone Throne. The sibik startled at his shout, hitching its abdomen up enough to give Kit what seemed a fairly guilty look, and dug through the backpack faster, flinging away whatever it didn’t want—full cans of soda or cappucino, mostly—as it dug for things that looked more appetizing. Its grasp of what to do about Tupperware was fortunately non-existent; it tossed away a sealed-up plastic container of cheese slices without a second thought. But someone seemed to have passed it the word about cellophane, even when it was hidden inside cardboard. The sibik went straight for the second of Kit’s saltine boxes and ripped it open, yanking out one of the packages of stacked saltines.

Kit dove for the saltines and snatched them out of the tentacles, which grabbed at the package as Kit pulled it up out of reach. “Now stop it!” he said. “Who told you that you could just take whatever you wanted—”

“Cracker!” The sibik promptly dug into the saltine box, yanked out the second package, and pulled it open. Saltines flew everywhere.

“Oh come on, you’re making a mess…!” Kit moaned. Then he heard what he’d just said, and snickered both at having unconsciously quoted the original scene from the movie they’d been watching yesterday evening and at the memory of Djam bubbling at the scene in amusement. “Right, that’s it…”

Kit tossed the saltine package he was holding into the air and said to it in the Speech, “You, just stay there, okay?” It hung there, levitating at the high point of his toss. Kit gestured at the saltines that had fallen all over the Stone Throne and the ground. “You guys, up you go.” Up they went, and hung there in a scatter of little squares.

The sibik, meanwhile, was making off with the half-empty package. The method was interesting: a couple of tentacles hugged the package to the underside of its body, while the rest on either side of its body ran it hurriedly away through the grass. “Nope,” Kit said, pointing at it. “Up.” And up went the sibik, its tentacles working comically against the air, like something out of a cartoon, as it lost contact with the ground.

“Nope,” the sibik squeaked, “nope nope nope nope!”, flailing around in the air while still doggedly hanging onto the package of saltines. For his part, Kit had to stand still for a moment as a shiver ran through him with the realization of just high his personal power levels were running at the moment—so high that merely using the Speech with full intention was, with simple things at least, enough to produce a result without needing to explicitly build a spell. This is really something… But strangely enough, he found that he wasn’t really liking it.

Kit shook his head and went over to the sibik. He tugged the half-empty package of saltines out of its tentacles and shoved them in his hoodie’s front pocket, then reached up and plucked the sibik out of the air. It grunted and thrashed and tried to get away.

“Now cut that out,” Kit said. “Calm down. Okay? Stop it now, just stop it…” He had to pull back his head a bit to avoid being lashed across the face with panicked tentacles. “Cut it out. Just relax. Okay? I’m not going to hurt you, but we have to have a talk about not taking people’s stuff without permission.”

The sibik thrashed and wriggled and waved itself around for some seconds more, and Kit just hung onto it until all of a sudden it made an upset giving-up noise like a half-inflated balloon losing all its air, and went limp in his arms.

“Okay,” Kit said. “Now come on and let’s sit down and talk like reasonable people.”

He headed back over to the Stone Throne and sat down with the sibik in his lap. Nine tentacles, Kit thought as he tried to arrange the creature so that it looked less disheveled. But despite his best efforts it still wound up looking like some kind of limp and extremely peculiar mop, and the eyes on the back of its abdomen were all dark and squinted, as if avoiding looking at Kit. It was sulking.

“Okay now,” he said. “Let’s not be like this. Tell me what brought you here.”

The response was sullen silence. “Come on,” Kit said, “how’d you find your way?”

If possible, the sibik went even flatter.

Kit rubbed his face. “Let’s start this over, yeah?”

He beckoned over one of the saltines floating in the air. “Look,” he said, “this is what you were after. You might as well have one…”

It snatched the saltine out of his hand with a pair of tentacles and shoved it hurriedly into its between-tentacles stoma, as if afraid Kit might have been about to change his mind. Crumbs sprayed everywhere; apparently annoyed or upset sibik were messy eaters. “Okay. Better?”

“No,” the sibik said with some force. “More cracker better.”

Interesting the way it’s picking up Speech vocabulary, Kit thought. It doesn’t just acquire it from other sibiks who’ve heard it; it gets it from me too, at least a little. Is it hearing it in Tevaralti, though, the way a human hears the Speech like it’s their milk language, or as Speech-words proper? …Something to look into later. “Okay,” Kit said, “more cracker.” He gestured the little cloud of saltines over to him and plucked another one out of the air.

The sibik grabbed at it. “Hungry!”

Kit held the saltine up out of the way and held the sibik down against his lap when it tried to climb up him to gain altitude. “Fine, but we’re gonna teach you another word first,” Kit said. “‘Please.’”

“Won’t,” the sibik said, and pulled all its tentacles in tight around itself until it was more or less hugging itself with all of them in a furious ball.

“Your call, buddy,” Kit said. “You say ‘please’ or there’s no cracker for you.”

The balled-up sibik glared at him with all the eyes on the top of its abdomen, and then squeezed them shut in annoyance.

Amused, Kit then tried what would with Ponch have been a most transparent ploy, one that would normally have provoked nothing but scornful eyerolling. “Mmm,” he said in a tone of exaggerated pleasure, “goooooood.” And he started eating the saltine he was holding.

The first crunch made the sibik twitch visibly. Uh huh, Kit thought, and went out of his way to make the second crunch much louder.

One eye squinted open: just one. Kit watched this happening out of the corner of his own eye, doing his best to seem to be idly regarding the scenic landscape of beautiful plainsland Tevaral and paying no attention whatsoever to the put-out ball of sibik in his lap. The eye-squinting was interesting, as there weren’t any eyelids as such: the closing of the eyes, or maybe shuttering was a better word, was being done by musculature in the top of the abdomen that actually pulled the eye slightly down into the body mass and pinched the hide closed over it.

There were only a couple of loud crunches available in a single saltine. Kit reached up for another one. The single open sibik-eye watched the movement and was joined by another that opened, and another; and a tiny miserable moan came out of somewhere in the middle of the sibik’s body. Is what they make noise with even associated with how they breathe? Kit wondered as he bit into the next saltine. Crunch! “Mmmmm…”