Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

The sibik loosened its frustrated grip on itself somewhat, melted slightly into a less rigorously spherical bundle of body and tentacles, and made another of those sad little moaning noises. Kit felt sorry for it, but not sorry enough to give it the second half of the saltine without at least a gesture of willingness toward the behavior he was trying to teach. He looked from the saltine to the sibik’s two and a half open eyes and said firmly, “Please.”

Several more eyes opened and glared at him. The musculature that had pulled them down into the body of its abdomen now pushed them a bit out, so that they looked like shiny hemispherical pebbles. Up this close, it was possible to see that they were more than just dark solids. Except for the darkness of the four-branched pupil, a faint luminescence could be seen swimming in the eyes if your angle to the sun was right: a pale pinkish glow like the green glint you might catch in a cat’s eyes at night, except this was more milky, and less plainly located at the back of the eye.

At least it could be seen if the eyes didn’t squint themselves down tighter at you again in annoyance. “No.”

Kit shrugged and ate the rest of the saltine, making more noise than he would ever have been comfortable making at home; his Mama would have had his head for chewing like that. More of the sibik’s eyes were open now, maybe five or six and a half. Call it seven. They watched his hand carefully as it lifted to pick another saltine out of the air, judging distances—

Kit had seen that look on Ponch before, especially on one memorable occasion when his pop had thought that the piece of steak he was holding up for Ponch to jump for was out of his reach. (It hadn’t been.) Against his lap Kit could feel the sibik gathering its tentacles together, and just as it was getting ready to launch itself at the saltines Kit wasn’t holding, he simply said “Higher, guys, if you would…?” And all the loose saltines whisked themselves up to about fifteen feet over Kit’s head.

The sibik collapsed into a frustrated heap on Kit’s lap and hissed like an angry cat.

“See now,” Kit said, “if you don’t cooperate, they’re all just going to go to waste. By which I mean I’ll get them all and you won’t get any.” He bit into the one he was holding: crunch!—and all the sibik’s tentacles clenched.

“You want one,” Kit said, “you say ‘please.’” He held still and waited to see what the next move would be.

The sibik shuffled its tentacles around and for a few moments actually covered all its eyes with them. The gesture suddenly so bizarrely reminded Kit of his pop’s favorite gesture of frustration that he had to actually bite his lip to keep himself from laughing.

But then the sibik took the tentacles away, and every eye was trained on Kit, round and wide open and pleading.

He shook his head in sheer admiration, for he had never had puppy eyes made at him by something with so many eyes. Fortunately, the effect was more amusing than heartrending.

Kit worked to control his laughter. “No,” he said at last. “Nice try, guy, seriously. But it’s no good. Give up and just say ‘please!’”

“Hungry,” the sibik whimpered.

Kit shook his head. “Please.”

The sibik trembled all over. “Cracker!”

“Please.”

It collapsed flat in his lap as if too famished to support itself. All its tentacles went limp and hung down like so many rubbery toy snakes, and the sibik sucked most of its eyes down into its body again in what appeared to be a gesture of utter hopelessness.

Kit regarded the sibik sympathetically while finishing the saltine he was eating. When it was done he beckoned another one down.

With the three eyes that remained visible, the sibik watched Kit pluck the cracker out of the air and just hold it there. Kit waited until its gaze left the saltine and met his.

“So what’s the magic word?” Kit said.

It trembled all over several times in his lap, one after another, as it repeatedly started to gather its tentacles under it and then each time abandoned the gesture.

“You know what it is. Come on.”

The three eyes still open now angled in three different directions as if looking for help to come from one of them. Kit thought with amusement of Mamvish, who sometimes did something similar with her eyes—she might have only the two, but she got the maximum effect out of them—and simply waited.

Finally the sibik squeezed the remaining three eyes shut and said, distinctly and in utter disgust, “Please.”

“There you go,” Kit said, and held out the saltine.

All eyes flew open and the cracker was instantly snatched out of Kit’s hand and stuffed into the sibik’s eating stoma. This time there was less spraying of crumbs.

Now we’ll see if he can do it twice, Kit thought. Assuming ‘he’ is the word we’re looking for here…

“Another?” Kit said.

“Please!”

“You’re a smart guy,” Kit said. He pulled down another cracker and handed it right over.

The next few minutes were devoted to repeated administrations of positive reinforcement on Kit’s side, and shameless stoma-stuffing on the sibik’s. “You should slow down,” Kit said eventually. “You’ll get indigestion or something.”

“Cracker,” the sibik said, waving its tentacles at him.

“I think you missed a word there..”

“Cracker please!”

“Absolutely,” Kit said, and handed it another. “Question is now, how long’s my supply going to last me? I thought I brought enough for a week, but at this rate…”

“Still hungry,” the sibik remarked.

“Yeah, well, that kind of seems like the default state for you guys, doesn’t it,” Kit said. “So do you think you can tell me something, now that our little power struggle’s over with? You knew there was food here. You even knew it was called ‘cracker’. How did you know?”

“Just knew,” the answer came back after a few moments; and some of the eyes looked at Kit as if he was an idiot for asking.

Well, let’s see if we can’t get at this some other way. “Where did you come from?”

“Don’t know. With people.”

So definitely somebody’s pet, Kit thought. Also, however, through the words, he picked up a faint metallic scent and a feeling that was like feathers, though strangely scratchy.

Useful, Kit thought. A fair number of creatures, when you dealt with them in the Speech, would also pass you back sensory information associated with the data being discussed. The sibik was apparently one of these, which could make things simpler. “So,” he said. “Where do you usually go for food?”

“Don’t go. It comes.”

“People give it to you?”

“Yes.”

“The same people all the time?”

“Yes.” And suddenly there was emotion there: sorrow. Kit might have wonderful new food, but he was not those people.

“You’re lost,” Kit said. “You got lost.”

The sibik made that unhappy deflated-balloon sound again.

“The people who brought you here,” Kit said. “Do you know where they are?”

“Not sure.” There was a sudden sense of entwined scents, astonishingly directional, as Ponch’s combined senses of smell and hearing had sometimes seemed to Kit when they were communicating in a similar mode. The impression he was now getting from the sibik rendered itself visually. It was like a trace or track, a thin red line or a thread, that led away from here across the plain in the general direction of the gating complex. But the track was obscured in places, tangled or rubbed out, and when one was at ground level one couldn’t see the way back clearly. All that could be clearly seen was the place where the straight track faded out.