Rety!
A bath alone would have transformed the sooner girl. Resplendent garments took things further. But Harry saw that her face had also changed. Where scar tissue had once puckered her cheek and jaw, smooth pink skin now glistened.
The customer at the body shop wasn’t Diver, after all. I should’ve guessed.
Rety must have nosed around Kazzkark till she found the one group that would find her invaluable — a cult whose icon was the blue wolfling planet. Indeed, from the looks of things, she had risen to some prominence. A survivor, if Harry ever saw one.
“And now,” Kiwei Ha’aoulin murmured. “We complete the circle. You are about to be reunited in full, and I will take my leave.”
Harry reached out to stop the Synthian … then noticed that the audience was rippling once again. Like the Red Sea, parting. Emerging from a morass of beings who shuffled, slithered, flopped, or crawled out of the way, there strode a slim figure dressed in dun-colored clothing that seemed blurry to the eye. With the hood of his homespun garment thrown back, Dwer Koolhan’s shock of unruly hair seemed to gleam in contrast, like his dark eyes.
Well, he must’ve spent some of the seventy-five coins, Harry thought, noting that the young man held a small electronic tablet and was using it the way natives on Horst would hold a dowsing rod, searching back and forth for water. On the back of one arm, Dwer also wore a makeshift arrangement of bent metal tubes and elastic bands that no Galactic would see as a weapon, but Harry recognized as a vicious-looking wrist catapult — more useful at close urban quarters than any bow and arrows. At his waist, the human wore a long knife in a sheath.
To anyone but another Earthling, he might have seemed completely calm, oblivious to the crowd. But Harry read tension in Dwer’s shoulders as the living aisle spilled him toward the dignitaries’ ramp. Kiwei had begun edging away again, but now the Synthian’s curiosity overcame caution and she stayed to watch the young sooner approach.
“Well, well …,” Kiwei said, over and over, licking her whiskers nervously.
Dwer acknowledged Kiwei with a nod, showing no sign of any rancor over being cheated — much to the Synthian’s obvious relief.
Approaching Harry, he turned off the small finder tool.
“Smart of you to set up a personal beacon, Captain Harms. I bought some lessons how to set this tracker onto your signal. We use sniffer-bees for the same purpose, back home.”
Harry shrugged. He hadn’t expected it to work. But clearly, wherever these sooners came from, their schooling included resiliency.
“I’m just glad you two are all right,” he replied gruffly, nodding toward Rety.
Dwer scanned the scene onstage, where Rety could now be seen with the Skiano’s parrot on her shoulder, leading the audience in a strangely compelling psalm, merging contributions from at least half a dozen Galactic dialects with slow, sonorous Anglic. Though his pupils dilated, Dwer’s face showed no surprise.
“Shoulda figured,” he commented with a terse head-shake. “So, how d’you suggest we get her out of there without startin’ a riot among these—”
The young man stopped abruptly. His jaw dropped … then snapped shut again.
“I don’t believe it,” he murmured. Then, with an expression of grim determination, he added, “Excuse me, Cap’n Harms. There’s something I got to do right now.”
Harry blinked. “But … what—”
Dwer moved past him, quickly and silently slipping off his outer tunic. With rapid, agile motions, he tied the arms and hooded neck, creating a makeshift bag which he grasped in his left hand. Creeping in back of the first row of dignitaries, Dwer ignored protesting grunts from those seated in the second rank. The crowd’s continued chanting covered all complaints as he sidled behind Twaphu-anuph and the inspector’s daughter, making straight for the third hoon — the young male, whose ferretlike pet seemed at last to sense something. Though it faced the other way, spiny hackles on its neck lifted from the mass of black fur. It started to turn, bringing both glittering eyes around. Eyes that flared with shocked realization the same moment that Dwer lunged.
Well I’ll be shaved, Harry thought as the creature writhed in Dwer’s hard grasp, snapping and hissing furiously until it was swallowed by the improvised sack. Even then, the fabric container bulged and jerked as the beast fought confinement.
That was a tytlal! He had thought there was something familiar about the lithe creature — but the size had seemed wrong. A miniature tytlal … riding the shoulder of a boon!
No wonder recognition was slow. Tytlal normally massed nearly as much as a chimpanzee. Far from being mere pets, they were intelligent, articulate starfarers, well known and admired on Earth. Also, like their Tymbrimi patrons, they thoroughly disliked hoons!
Possible explanations occurred to Harry. Was Dwer rescuing a captive tytlal child from captivity?
That theory vanished when the third hoon turned around, saw Dwer, and cried out an umble of delighted surprise. While the bag kept quivering, onlookers were treated to a sight unprecedented in the annals of the Civilization of Five Galaxies — a human and hoon embracing each other joyfully, like long-lost cousins from the same hometown.
They found a place to talk, assembling in the lattice space supporting the dignitaries’ platform. Harry watched in amazement as Dwer’s huge alien friend spoke colloquial Anglic perfectly, though with an archaic accent.
“Alvin” also exuded an enthusiasm — a joie de vivre — that seemed totally natural, though Harry had never seen anything like it in a hoon before.
“Hr-rr. The last time I saw you, Dwer, you were dangling under a hot-air balloon, preparing to take on a Jophur battleship single-handed. How did you wind up here?”
“It’s a long story, Alvin. And we’d never have made it without Captain Harms, here. But what about you? Does this mean the Str—”
Dwer stopped abruptly and shook his head, amending what he had been about to say.
“Does this mean our friends escaped to the transfer point all right?”
For the first time in his life, Harry saw a hoon shrug — a surprisingly graceful and expressive gesture for such an uptight species.
“Yeah, they did. That is, sort of. In a way.” The tattooed throat sac fluttered and sighed. “For now let’s just say it’s also a long story.”
Kiwei the Synthian had a suggestion.
“I know a very nice establishment where they offer free food and drink to tellers of fine tales, no matter how long. Shall we all go—”
Dwer ignored Kiwei.
“And your pals? Ur-ronn? Huck? Pincer? Tyug?”
“They are well — along with the friend who brought us here. You can imagine that some of us find it easier to get around in public than others do.”
Dwer nodded, and Harry saw that levels of meaning passed between the two.
Wait a minute, he pondered. If Dwer and Rety are sooners, from some hidden colony world, but they know this hoon, then that must mean—
He lost the thought as Alvin responded to something Dwer said by umbling with jovial tones that sounded uncannily like laughter.
“So, you finally got the drop on old Mudfoot.”
The young human held up the now quiescent bag. “Yeah, I did. And he doesn’t come out till I get some answers, at long last.”
Alvin laughed again — making Twaphu-anuph shiver with visible confusion. But the bureaucrat’s daughter seemed to adore the sound. With a second show of rather unhoonish enthusiam, she introduced herself as Dor- hinuf, and surprised both Earthlings by offering to shake their hands.
“Ever since he arrived, Alvin has been telling us about your wonderful world of Shangri-la,” she told Dwer. “Where so many races live together in peace, and where hoons have learned to sail!”
Her infectious excitement seemed as strange as the sudden bizarre image filling Harry’s mind — of hoons braving sea and spume in spindly boats.
