Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

The pang of its emotion pierced so profoundly through Kit that he actually staggered, and stumbled and might have gone down on his face if Ronan hadn’t caught him by one arm. “Are you okay, what the f—”

“No, it’s OK, I’m OK,” Kit said, “we’re here, he’s here, he’s home—”

Right in front of them, someone was crying in one of the Tevaralti languages something like, “Weegie? Weegie!” And the sibik undid all its tentacles from around Kit and more or less launched itself off him at the small feather-crested figure that was running toward them, and the next moment or so was taken up with Kit stumbling back into Ronan (who was still bracing him, and sharing Kit’s surprise at how much force a sibik that size could impart to you when using you as a launch platform).

The little one meanwhile caught the sibik in mid-leap and clutched it to him as if it was the only stable thing in a world gone mad. “Weegie, oh Weegie, I felt you! I felt you and you were sad and you couldn’t come back and now you’re here—!”

Moments later Kit and Ronan were surrounded by a crowd of Tevaralti all of whom seemed to be talking at the two of them in different languages (understandable via the Speech, but still aurally confusing in such numbers), and Kit was being hugged around his waist by the little boy, who was wearing a kilt and very raggedy feathers, mostly brown ones. The sibik meanwhile concentrated on wrapping itself more and more tightly around the little boy’s shoulders as if intent on melting into his body.

Kit was still trying to get control of his breathing, and also trying to recover from his perception of the sibik’s ecstatic certainty that here, in the middle of a refugee camp, with the world about to be destroyed, it was finally home and safe and everything was all right, in fact absolutely perfect. Kit was shaking with the echoes of the feeling, rocked to his core. He was also determined not to have to start wiping his eyes, especially with all these people looking at him. Though would they even know what that meant? Maybe wiping your eyes for no reason is perfectly normal behavior for some weird featherless humanoid species from Powers only know where.

He pulled away from Ronan, enough to let him know that he was okay, and Ronan let him go, patting him on the back. To the Tevaralti around them—especially the three who’d come up behind the young boy, who were apparently his parents or at least his guardians—Ronan simply said, “We’re on errantry, and we greet you.”

While there were any any number of more specific phrases you could use as a wizard on assignment and greeting nonwizardly people from astahfrith cultures, Kit saw the point of simplicity right now—specifically because after the emotional gutpunch he’d just received, he didn’t feel he was up to anything that complex. He just looked down into the big birdlike eyes of the little Tevaralti hanging onto him, and said, “Your friend here wanted to come home.”

The three parents-or-guardians were looking in astonishment at Kit and Ronan. “Honorable Interveners,” one of them said, “how do you come by our child’s sibik? We were in such pain for him, our child was in such pain, and— We’d thought in this great crowd the sibik had maybe come to harm, or, or been lost forever—”

With the Tevaralti’s glance toward the gates came a sudden sense of fear and distrust. Kit held himself still, not sure where this was coming from or what to do about it.

Fortunately Ronan showed no sign of being similarly affected. “We’re posted near here,” Ronan said, turning to gesture away back toward the ring of stones. “Our business is monitoring the gate complex to make sure it’s working correctly. And while we were doing that, your sibik found us—”

Kit restrained himself from adding And started eating us out of house and home. “And once we’d given him something to eat, he was able to start showing us the way back to where he belonged,” Kit said.

The little one who had Kit by the waist looked up at him again. They moult while they’re growing, these people, Kit thought, seeing feathers still in their narrow cylindrical casings scattered all through the downier feathers they were replacing on the youngster’s head and shoulders. Under his feather-coat the little boy was thin and gangly, and Kit found himself thinking back to when he was small and skinny and getting picked on a lot, and Ponch was the only friend he had—before wizardry, before Nita, before any of the other people he knew now who accepted him for exactly what he was.

“Thank you for finding him,” the little boy said. “He was sad and he was hungry and I was afraid he might starve.”

“No, he seemed to have been doing all right,” Kit said. “Sibiks seem pretty good at finding food. In fact I may have overfed him a little.”

One of the eyes on the back of the sibik—all of them having been squeezed shut until now—opened and regarded Kit. “Cracker,” the sibik said.

“What’s ‘cracker’?” the little boy said.

“Something he’s not going to get any more of, I’d say,” Ronan said. “Special food from a planet two thousand light years away.”

The parents-or-guardians looked impressed. The little boy looked suspicious. “It won’t make him sick, will it?”

“No, it’s all right for him,” Kit said. “I checked.”

“And having said as much, we should probably get back,” Ronan said, “because our pet-feeding duties are strictly unofficial.”

“Interveners for the One,” the tallest of the three adult Tevaralti said, “we’re deeply in your debt. Thank you for being so kind, for helping our child!”

Kit nodded to them as the youngster unwound himself from him, and the sibik threw him one last glance, closed its single open eye, and cuddled down into the boy’s shoulder again. “It’s our pleasure, cousins,” he said. He was about to say “Go well,” but then it occurred to him that this was possibly not the best idea: these people weren’t going anywhere.

Ronan turned away: Kit started to follow him. But the Tevaralti beside the tall one, a fluffier-feathered one in a long netlike garment, reached out to stop him. “Intervener— I’m guessing you don’t understand what’s going on.” The voice was distressed. “You’ve come a long way to help, we know you have.”

“Uh, yes,” Kit said.

The shorter parent looked regretful. “We can’t go, though. It’s not right for us. These others of our people, they feel that it is right, right for them anyway. But it’s not how we feel. We have to be of one mind, and we’re not… We’re just not.” There was terrible sorrow layered under the words, and a sense that there was nothing to be done about the problem… and the cold frightened certainty that there wouldn’t be much longer for it to be a problem.

Kit could think of about a hundred things he wanted to say to that at the moment: but none of them were a wizard’s business to let out of his mouth in such a situation. Finally, “I’m sorry,” was all he could find to say. “But I hope everything works out all right for you.”

The three parents-or-guardians bowed their heads to him. Kit turned away, feeling forlorn, knowing the hope was an empty one. He caught a last glimpse of the little Tevaralti boy hugging his sibik to him as his parents shepherded him away: then they vanished into the crowd.

Kit and Ronan made their way out into the grassland again, toward where the stone circle stood up alone against the northern horizon like fingers reaching up from the ground into the twilight. It was some while before Ronan said anything, which suited Kit. He was feeling extremely unsettled.

“That’s the first explanation I’ve really heard about from any of those people about what’s going on with them,” Ronan muttered at last, “and maybe it’s just that my interplanetary people skills are shite, but I still don’t get it.”