Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“Heard and understood,” Ronan muttered. “Oh wow, look at this…”

They stopped and looked at the grass around them. The whole area was an incredible tangle of scent trails. Kit’s sibik’s trail here turned into something like an extremely tight and complex knot about a meter wide, probably the result of it shuffling around in excitement as it ran across a crowd of wild sibik who’d probably been tracking it.

“Okay, this is where you started getting lost, isn’t it,” Ronan said to the sibik. It gave him a reproachful look and then hid all its eyes against Kit’s head.

“Yeah, you can see why…” Kit said. “Must’ve been five, six, maybe eight of them here.”

“I can also see what is probably somebody’s butthole,” Ronan said, covering his eyes for a moment. “Holy Powers, there’s two of them. No, three! Sure you’re oversubscribed in the bottomly wonderfulness department, fella. But nobody else needs to see that, you’ll just embarrass the lot of us who can’t compete, ah jeez would you ever stop waving it about and just sit yourself down!”

The sibik put its body back down on Kit’s shoulder again, giving Ronan a sidelong look out of several eyes. Kit’s laughter almost got away from him before he managed to strangle it. “Okay,” he said. “Looks like a few meters further along this pretty much straightens out. Seems like they all actually did physically meet up, and then the others ran off for some reason…”

“Maybe not enough buttholes?” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.

Kit snickered as they once more started along the sibik’s trail. There were several more of these ball-of-yarn knots ahead of them, apparently more artifacts of yet more excited small wild sibik groups running across the domesticated one. Kit had a sudden mental image of a slightly nervous Labrador or Great Dane wandering through a strange dog park and being repeatedly mobbed by gangs of excited Chihuahuas.

“These lads just seem to come from all directions,” Ronan said, turning to look along some of the wild sibiks’ tracks out into the plain. “I guess they’re out foraging for whatever it is they usually eat. Have to be all kinds of wee things in the grass…”

Kit nodded. “And when they run across other sibik and check their scent trails, they know if they found anything, and they know what direction they found it in. Kind of like ants, one way.”

“Or bees, without the dancing.”

“Yeah.” It was funny that Ronan should mention bees just now, as Kit had been registering a faint humming at the edge of hearing. As they walked, though, Kit realized that what he was hearing had nothing to do with insect life. He was hearing, at a distance, the sound of movement and voices from the transients’ encampment ahead of them; and it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

It’s not like we haven’t been within visual distance of them for a couple of days, Kit thought. But the motion at that distance had been indistinct, sort of an average of many movements seen together; and sometimes, even under Thesba’s light when darkness fell, difficult to see at all. Now he could see people, or the individual shapes of people anyway, moving around, moving among one another, clothed or not-so-clothed over their feathers; sitting outside the small tentlike structures scattered throughout the encampment, standing and talking, and sometimes pausing to look up at Thesba as it slid across the sky.

Kit and Ronan followed the sibik’s track past another tangle of knotted light in the grass, while the hum became louder and started turning into a huge low murmur of voices in many Tevaralti languages. The path began to angle to their right, somewhat toward the encampment’s western edge, now just a couple hundred meters ahead of them. That was when the wind that had been blowing at their backs dropped off for a few moments, and then changed, swinging around to gust toward them from the encampment.

Two things happened. The grip of the sibik’s tentacles around Kit’s shoulders and head immediately tightened, and it made another of those little moans; of excitement this time, but strangely mixed with dread. And as it did, Kit got a strong whiff of something he hadn’t smelled since he came, or had mistaken it for part of this world’s larger, natural scent. It was a metallic aroma, or at least that was the way it read to him. But it wasn’t until he saw the small, cubelike sanitary arrangements that were set outside the edges of the encampment that he realized his error. The biology of human beings from Earth naturally arose from and was geared to a very specific biosphere, meaning that human bodies and senses were wired to read certain scents as unwholesome or noxious. Aromas from other planets would naturally mean nothing to them. If I’d smelled something recognizable as piss or crap, Kit thought, or both of those mixed up with chemicals meant to hide the odor—if it’d smelled like people crowded together in really basic conditions—

He wasn’t sure what was supposed to come after the ‘if.’ But it was funny, the way a smell could concentrate your mind when sound or sight hadn’t done so before.

“Kit,” Ronan said. “Stay focused.”

Kit looked at Ronan out of the corner of his eye. It was unusual enough for him to call Kit by his name instead of one of the endless series of rude nicknames he’d evolved over time. Ronan’s face looked unusually tight, the wide mobile mouth set thinner and harder than Kit was used to seeing it. It was unnerving.

“You okay?” Kit said.

Ronan nodded just once. “Trail’s swinging again,” he said.

So it was, further to their right, right off toward the encampment’s westward side, to a point where it amgled southward and dove straight into it. Kit and Ronan worked around the edge of the encampment’s boundary, more or less defined by a line of long low tents and the cubical structures that Kit’s nose now identified as the Tevaralti version of portable toilets—extremely advanced, yes, but not quite perfect at disguising their purpose or their contents. And then the wind shifted again, and the sibik grabbed Kit even tighter, almost throttling him with a tentacle that had been left around his neck, and shouted “Yes!”

Kit tried to ease the tentacle’s grip slightly as they followed the sibik’s trail into the encampment. All around them, Tevaralti in their many kinds of dress, from harnesses to kilts to robes and everything in between, in small groups or larger ones, were staring at him and Ronan as they made their way between the temporary buildings and among the lookers-on. Kit tried to smile at the ones who stared at him, but he wasn’t at all sure that they were prepared or even able to understand the expression as a gesture of friendliness.

And the way the Tevaralti around them were regarding him was peculiar. They didn’t seem hostile, but they did seem sad and afraid, afraid of them—as if Kit and Ronan somehow were symptoms of everything that was going wrong with the world right now. The people they passed most closely drew back from them, still staring; and as this happened again and again, even though he was perfectly safe, a wizard in company and in his power, out and about on the Powers’ business, Kit started feeling small and unsettled and strangely alone.

Fortunately he had something to distract him—the sibik, which was now yelling “Yes yes! Yes yes!” over and over again in response to something it was smelling. The rhythm was strangely like that of a dog barking. And as that thought crossed Kit’s mind, suddenly a peculiar unexpected wave of sensation washed over him, one that meant something: or rather, someone. Someone for whom the sibik didn’t have a name, nothing so advanced. It was a scent, or actually a whole bundle of scents bound up together, clothes and food and possessions and a personal aroma laden with meaning and safety and warmth and the reality of a place to be and someone to belong to, and oh, it missed them, it missed them—