must have Kaa, if you’re to stand a chance.”
Huck complained of course, waving all her eyestalks and protesting with that special whining tone that only an adolescent g’Kek can fine-tune to perfection.
“We’re being exiled,” she wailed. “Just when Streaker’s going someplace really interesting!”
“It’s not exile,” Gillian answered. “You’re taking on a dangerous and important mission. One that you Jijoans are well qualified for. A mission that might make everything we’ve gone through worthwhile.”
Of course they both have it right. I have no doubt we’re being sent away in part because we’re young and Gillian feels guilty about keeping us aboard where there’s danger every dura, sometimes from a dozen directions at once. Clearly she’d like to see the four of us — especially Huck — taken somewhere safe as soon as possible.
On the other hand, I don’t think she’d part with Kaa if it weren’t for important reasons that’d help her accomplish her mission. I believe she really does want us to make our way in secret through the Five Galaxies, and somehow make contact with the Terragens Council.
“We couldn’t do it before,” Dr. Baskin explained, “with just humans and dolphins aboard. Even sneaking into some obscure port, we’d have been noticed the second any of us spoke up, to buy supplies or ask directions. Earthlings are too well known — too infamous — for us to go anywhere incognito these days.
“But who will notice a young urs? Or a little red qheuen? Or a hoon, walking around one of those backspace harbors? You’ll be typical shabby starfarers, selling a few infobits you’ve picked up along the way, buying fourth- class passages and making your way to Tanith Sector on personal business.
“Of course, Huck will have to stay secluded or disguised — you may have to ship her in an animal container till you reach a safe place. The Tymbrimi would protect her. Or maybe the Thennanin — providing she’d accept indenture and their pompous advice about a racial self-improvement campaign. Anyway, too much is riding on her to take any chances.”
Gillian’s reminder silenced Huck’s initial outrage over being “shipped” from place to place. Of all us voyagers, my friend has the biggest reason to stay alive. She’s the only living g’Kek outside of Jijo, and since the Jophur might annihilate all the g’Keks back home, it seems that motherhood, not adventuring, will be her calling now. A change she finds sobering.
“What about Kaa?” asked Ur-ronn, waving her sleek, long head, speaking with a strong urrish lisp. “It will ve hard to disguise a vig dolphin. Shall we carry hin in our luggage?”
Ignoring urrish sarcasm, Dr. Baskin shook her head.
“Kaa won’t be accompanying you all the way to Tanith. He’d be too conspicuous. Besides, I made him a promise, and it’s time to keep it.”
I was about to inquire about that … to ask what promise she meant … when Lieutenant Tsh’t entered the Plotting Room to say that she’d finished loading the boat with supplies for our journey.
My pet noor, Huphu, rode my shoulder. But her sapient relative, the secretive tytlal named Mudfoot, licked himself on a nearby conference table, resembling that Earth creature, an otter, but with white bristles on his neck and an expression of disdainful boredom.
“Well?” Gillian asked the creature, though he’d refused to speak since we left Jijo. “Do you want to go see the Tymbrimi, and report to them about matters on Jijo? Or will you come with us, beyond anything our order of life normally gets to see?”
When she put it that way, I think Gillian expected one answer from the — curious tytlal. But it didn’t surprise me that she got the other.
A tytlal will bite off its own tail for a joke.
I guess I ought to update how we got to this point — hurrying to pack a small boat and send it off toward a place where Streaker had expected to be going.
The reason is that Gillian seems to have gotten a better offer.
Or at least one she can’t refuse.
How did we get to this parting of the ways?
Where I last left off, Streaker was swooping along the complex innards of a transfer point, just a couple of dozen arrowflights ahead of a Jophur battleship that clung to us the way a prairie-hopper holds on to its last pup. It seemed there’d only be one way to shake our enemy, and that was to head straight for one of the huge headquarters worlds of the Great Institutes, where there’d be lots of traffic and other warships around. If everything worked just right, an Institute armistice might be issued in the nick of time, and protect us before a free-for-all firestorm blasted Streaker to kingdom come.
All right, it was a flaky plan, for sure, but the best one anybody thought of. And it beat letting the Jophur capture Streaker’s secrets to use against all other clans in the Five Galaxies.
So there we were, darting along a t-point thread, dodging refugee traffic from hundreds of broken fractal worlds that were falling apart all over Galaxy Four.…
Don’t ask me how or why that happened, because it’s way beyond me. But at least one of us Jijoans had a clue to what was going on. Sage Sara seemed to grasp the meaning when a number of those giant spaceships changed their shape right before our eyes, as well as the symbols on their bows.
As I understand it, some of the refugees were looking for new retirement homes, to resume their quiet lives of contemplation. (Though it seems vacancies were hard to find.)
Others decided to abandon that comfortable existence and head back to rejoin their old oxy-life cousins during the present time of crisis. Dr. Baskin thought we’d slip in among this mob, flooding through the crowded transfer point on their way to populated zones of the Five Galaxies.
There was a third option, being chosen by a smaller minority — those who thought themselves ready to climb the next rung on the ladder of sapiency, rising out of the Retired Order to a much higher state. But we didn’t think that group could possibly concern us.
Boy, were we wrong!
So there we were, diving into the heart of the t-point — a looping, knotlike structure Kaa called a transgalactic nexus — that would send us out of old Galaxy Four altogether … when it happened.
Alarms blared. We swerved around another loop-de-loop, and there it was.
At first, I saw just a floating cloud of light, shapeless, without a hint of structure. But as we drew near, this changed. I got an impression of a tremendous creature with countless writhing arms! These appendages were reaching down to the converging transfer threads and plucking starships off like berries from a vine!
“Uh … is that normal?” Huck asked … unnecessarily, since we could see the looks on the faces of our Earthling friends. They’d never seen anything like it before.
Pincer-Tip stammered in awe.
“Is it a go-go-go-god?”
No one answered, not even the sarcastic Niss Machine. We were heading right for the giant thing, and there wasn’t any possible route to jump away from it in time. All we could do was stare, and count the passing duras, plunging toward the brilliance till our turn came.
Light flooded the sky. A tremendous arm of light came down upon us … and suddenly things began moving v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
Queasy sensations flowed outward from my gut while my skin felt a strange kind of spreading numbness. As Streaker was lifted bodily off the transfer thread, her roaring engines muted to an idle whisper. All view screens filled with whiteness, a glow that did not seem to carry any heat. Paralyzed with fear, I wondered if we were about to be consumed by some kind of hungry being, or a dispassionate natural phenomenon. Not that it made the slightest difference which.
The illumination was so perfect in its hue, and resplendent texture, that I felt suddenly sure it could be nothing other than pure and distilled death.
How long the transition lasted, I have no idea. But eventually the brilliant haze diminished and all the visceral sensations ebbed. Streaker’s engines remained damped, but time resumed its normal pace. At last we could see clearly again.
Sara was holding Emerson tightly, while the little chimp, Prity, hugged them both. Ur-ronn was huddled next to Huck and Pincer, while Huphu and Mudfoot clung with eight sets of claws to my tingling shoulders.
We all looked around, amazed to be able to do so.
