Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

And then Kit realized she was laughing.

“We are such idiots,” Nita said, pulling away. And her eyes were wet, but they were tears of laughter. “Look at us!”

It was just as well there was no one else around to witness the moment, because Kit would have simply died. …Yet it was also funny, impossibly funny. There they stood in the middle of an alien mass migration, under a moon that was so far from being romantic that it was genuinely ridiculous, and they were having a physiology-based personal-crisis moment. At least Kit was. It was hard to work out what Nita was having, and he was both chagrined that he couldn’t read her mind and desperately glad that she couldn’t read his. At least I don’t think she can…

She was still shaking with laughter, though. “Kit. Do you honestly think I don’t notice this stuff?”

“Uh,” Kit said in a desperate moment of honesty, “I was kind of praying for that, yeah.”

“Well I hate to tell you this, but plainly the One is on another call at the moment.”

Kit burst out laughing. And then Nita was laughing again too, and…

“Uh, that hug. Can I have one not contaminated by…”

“Undue boner action?”

“Oh shut up.”

“Besides,” she whispered in his ear after as she slipped her arms around him again, “…could be it’s kinda late for that.”

Kit’s eyes widened.

“Because it’s not like you’re the only one who—”

And that was when the cry came from behind them:

“Oh no! Wait! Is this impregnation event? Didn’t want to miss it!”

Kit froze as he realized there was something really important he had forgotten to tell Nita about. Completely forgotten. Cheleb. Biology. And the candy hearts.

Oh God!

Cheleb stopped where hae was as hae saw that they’d stopped what they were doing and both had their gazes fixed on haem. “Chel,” Kit said, and couldn’t for the life of him work out where to go from there.

Nita pulled back and gave Kit a look. “Is this conversation one I should be part of?” she said.

“Uh, no. Well, yes. Not now okay?” he whispered desperately in her ear.

“Wow,” Nita murmured, plainly impressed by a display of truly world-class ambiguity and indecisiveness.

Kit groaned softly to himself and turned his attention to Cheleb again. “Cheleb. You were saying?”

“Ah. Well.” Cheleb shifted from one clawed foot to another. “Didn’t have time to tell you earlier. After you left for Nita’s gate complex, had… an incursion here.”

“Oh brother,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me…”

“Well, all right,” said Cheleb, “but failing to do so will leave you in data vacuum—”

“No, it’s an idiom,” Kit said, just a touch exasperated, because he was afraid he knew what was coming. “Do tell me. Sibiks?”

“Many,” said Cheleb. “Among other things, very interested in place where food got dropped around Stone Throne. Took a while to get rid of them but were almost all gone and then found that portal on your puptent had been open a while, maybe since you left…”

Kit covered his eyes.

“Couldn’t find command interface to shut portal interface right away, had to go in and then chase some of them out.” Kit blinked: Cheleb was practically babbling. “Was looking for last one to get rid of it, hiding under some boxes, and then found this—”

Embarrassed, Cheleb proffered the empty heart-candy box.

Kit took the box and immediately understood what had happened. One of the sibiks had found the open box and eaten all the hearts. But Cheleb didn’t know that. Hae thought that Kit had eaten them, and of course that would mean—

Kit stopped, because Nita was looking at him very strangely. He was trying to come up with some creative excuse for having a box of candy hearts at all when Nita simply reached out and took the box away from him.

“They’re all gone,” she said. It was astonishing how she could make a simple declarative sentence sound so much like it meant about five other things, all at once.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “they are.” He swallowed. “And that’s really terrific.”

Nita looked at him carefully and then started nodding. “Yes it is!” she said. “Isn’t it!”

“And Cheleb is really excited for us,” Kit said, “because hae’s pretty sure that since all these are gone, that means…”

“That we really like each other in a very special way!” Nita said. Her eyes were had gone theatrically wide in a way that Kit recognized, and both made him nervous and made him want to laugh.

“And that because of that,” Kit said, “we’re going to do something about it—”

“Right this minute!” Nita said, with increasingly terrifying enthusiasm.

Kit just kept quiet after that and waited with some trepidation to see what would happen.

“You did tell haem, I hope,” Nita said, very seriously indeed, “that among members of our species this gesture has to be reciprocated by the other party—”

“In a similar manner,” Kit said.

“—on or around February 14th.”

“I, uh, might have neglected to mention.”

“And so of course we can’t do anything right now,” Nita said, “not only because February 14th is a while away yet, but because we’re in the middle of a planetary disaster and it would be incredibly inappropriate to distract one another from our Wizardly Duties.”

He could actually hear the capitalization. Kit merely nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s so sad.”

“But duty comes first,” Nita said, nodding in unison with him. “Still, we will be strong.”

“Yes, we will,” Kit said with all the sincerity he could muster.

Nita gestured with her eyes in Cheleb’s direction, and then turned her head to look at haem. Warned, Kit did it in unison with her.

Cheleb was practically vibrating with emotion. “So beautiful,” hae said, positively starry-eyed—which with haes eyes, took a lot of work.

“Thank you,” Kit said.

“But we really ought to be alone right now,” Nita said.

“Yes, yes, of course!” Cheleb said, and vanished back into the stone circle, overjoyed.

Nita waited until he was safely gone, and then said, “Sometime real soon, tomorrow maybe, I’m going to need you to explain what that was all about,” she said. Her voice was shaking with laughter that she was refusing to let out.

“I will,” Kit said. “But first I need to tell you that you are so smart.”

She grinned. “Takes one to know one.” Then she sighed. “Shame, though. If your tentacly guys got in there and ate your candy, they probably got all the rest of the saltines, too…”

Kit sighed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Besides, I gave Mamvish my ketchup. Not much point in getting all hung up about the saltines when there’s no ketchup to put on them…”

She pulled him close again. Kit cooperated, wholeheartedly. After a moment she said, a bit breathlessly, “When we get home, after all this crap is handled… let’s talk about this, yeah? A long, long talk.”

“Yeah.”

And Nita vanished back into the circle to pick up her things and make for the short-transport pad.

There were only a few more goodnights after that as people went back on shift or headed back to their puptents to rest. Ronan was last to go. He and Djam made it through most of The Phantom Menace before Djam ran out of energy and Ronan ran out of sardonic epithets (temporarily) for Jar Jar Binks. Finally there was just Cheleb again, stretched out on the tidied Throne Rock and keeping an eye on the glowing matrix of gate-function graphs.

Kit paused by the display and looked it over. “No problems?”

“Nothing at all,” Cheleb said. “Go rest, cousin. Had busy day, you have.” Haes expression was difficult to read, but Kit had the feeling Cheleb felt hae’d been part of something special.