Gods, Danny thought, xenophobe on top of everything else. He ran a hand though his hair. Tungjii Luck, if I ever go back there, so help me, I swear I’ll put matches to your toes. He jerked to a stop as a tiny Tungjii sitting on an airbubble floated past his nose. The god twiddled hisser fingers, winked and vanished. Danny glanced at Felsrawg, but she was kicking along staring at a pair of hitsatchee posts planted beside an U-tree in bud. He stopped, felt the buds. They still had the fuzz on. Either he was coming back in the same season, maybe the same day in the season, or the time spent in that other reality had gone past between one blip and the next in this. He frowned at the sun. Not quite that fast. It was morning then, it’s near sundown now. If this is the same day, I bet La Kuninga is ready to snatch me… he grinned and smoothed his hand over his thick wavy hair… bald again.
The traffic got heavier; Felsrawg stopped twitching as the groundcars rumbled past, but she was still taut with a feeling half-fear, half-loathing. She kept snatching glances at him as if she expected him to turn into a slick skinned six-limbed hzardoid. When they reached the rim of the town, he stopped her. “Felsa, best thing for you is keep your mouth shut and do what I do. In a way it’s too bad the jump here gave you interlingue, there’s a lot to be said for dumbness covering ignorance.”
She gave him a fulminating look, but dropped a step behind him, even followed him into a ribbajit without corn-
ment. He dropped on the tattered seat, shifted over when a broken spring gave him a half-hearted poke. “Port,” he said and settled back as the jit trundled off.
Felsrawg spread her hand on her knee, exposing the skry rings, watching them from under her lashes.
Danny chuckled. “They won’t read, Felsa. This is a machine, it runs on batteries, not magic. Nothing stranger than a… um… a loom or a waterwheel.”
“There’s nothing to make it move and there’s no driver.”
“It moves, doesn’t it. Go with the flow, Fey.”
She was silent for several minutes as the ribbajit clunked around the edge of the town. “Why am I here, Danny?”
“You want me to explain the multiverse?”
“Fool! You know what I mean. You belong in this place. I don’t. “
He touched the pocket where Klukesharna had somehow inserted itself during the crossing between realities; he had a suspicion the thing had imagined some kind of link between him and Felsrawg just because she was standing beside him in that cave. Typical computer-think if you could even say a hunk of iron could think. “You do now. Better get used to it.”
“Send me back.”
“Can’t. There’s no magic here.” He said that flatly, giving her no room for argument. He believed it mostly, told himself that Tungjii’s wink was imagination, nothing more. The ribbajit clanked to a stop by the hitsatchee posts outside the linkfence that ran around the stretch of metacrete the locals called a starport. “We’re here,” he said. “Come on.”
“What’s here?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go see.”
##
A tall bony blonde woman with a set angry face was snapping out orders to a collection of Skinkers using motorized assists to load crates and bundles on the roller ramp running into the belly of her battered freetrader; now and then she muttered furious asides to the short man beside her.
“No, no, not that one, the numbers are on them, you can read, can’t you.” Aside to her companion: “Mouse, if that scroov shows his face round my ship again, I’ll skin him an inch at a time and feed it to him broiled.”
The little gray man scratched his three fingers through a spongy growth that covered most of his upper body; he blinked several times, shrugged and said nothing.
“Sssaaah!” She darted to the loaders, cursed in half a dozen languages, waved her arms, made the workers reload the last cart. Still furious, she stalked back to where she’d been standing. “Danny Blue, you miserable druuj, I’ll pull your masters rating this time, I swear I will, this is the last time you walk out on me or anyone else.”
“Blue wants, Blue walks,” the little man said. “Done it before, ‘II do it again.”
“Hah! Mouse, if you’re so happy with him, you go help Sandy stow the cargo.”
“I don’t do boxes.”
She glared at him, but throttled back the words that bulged in her throat, stalked off and stood inspecting the crates as they rolled past him.
Danny walked round a stack of crates, Felsrawg trailing reluctantly after her. “Hya, Kally, I’m back.”
She wheeled. “Where the hell you been, druuj!” Her eyes went wide when she realized what she was seeing. “Huh? You’re not Danny.”
“Remember lnconterza? Matrize Lezdoa the scarifier? I can go on.”
“Never mind. Someday you have to explain to me how you grew a head of hair and three extra inches and changed your face that much,” she glanced at her ringchron, “in nine hours.” She looked past him. “And where you got the baba there.”
“Be polite, Kally, Felsa’s no man’s baba. Woman’s either.”
“Hmp. You not giving me any excuse for leaving me to do your job, are you.”
“No. But I’ll contract an extra year if you give Felsa space onboard.”
“Guarantee no walking?”
“Guarantee. My word on it.”
“Deal. She got anything but what she’s carrying?”
“Nothing but a name. Felsa, I’ll have you meet free trader and shipmaster Kally Kuninga. Kally, this is one Felsrawg Lawdrawn. She doesn’t know what the hell’s going on, but she’ll learn.”
“You finished? Right. Get your ass over there and do your job. Mouse he’s been having vibrations which means we gotta get the hell out before the sluivasshi land on us.”
She looked Felsrawg over, head to toe back again. “She’s your problem, Danny. Keep her outta my hair and see she’s fumigated before you bring her on board.” She twitched her nose, swung round and stalked off.
Felsrawg snorted. “Bitch.”
“Sure. And if you say it to her face, she’ll laugh, then she’ll slap you down so hard you bounce. Come on. I’ve got work to do.”
##
Felsrawg found a quiet corner near a stack of empty crates where she’d be out of the way of the workers. Danny was right, she didn’t understand any of this, maybe she never would. She thought about that a minute and decided it was blue funk and not worth the air it took to say it, she might not know how those clink-clank slim-slam things worked, but she could see what they did. That’s all she needed. She looked at her slay rings, sniffed. I don’t know how they work either, but I got damn good at reading them. The sun was going down in the west, she thought it was the west, it felt like west, just like it did back home and the Kuninga woman was a gasht all right, but she looked normal, at least there was that.
The clattering stopped, the demons rode their metal carts across the hard white stuff that covered the ground and vanished behind some odd looking buildings. The rollerramp was folding itself up, squeezing together into an impossibly small package; it might not be magic, but it surely looked like it. Danny loped around like a Temu herder chasing strays, getting everything folded up and tucked away in that thing. Ship? It reminded her of an old tom swampspider after twenty years of mating battles, battered and molting, missing a leg here and a mandible there, but tough as boiled bull leather. She heard her name and stepped out of the shadow to wait for Danny who was coming to get her. It starts, she thought. Say one thing, it should be interesting.
3
Yaril and]aril went slipping down a long long slide and burst into brightness, glowspheres zagging across complex crystal lattices on a hot young world circling a sun in the heart of a hot young cluster. Aulis came zipping round them, cousins and strangers, seekers and linkers, greeting them swinging through wild exuberant loops yelling welcome come and see we thought a smiglar had eat you Yar000h Jar000h. Aetas came, younglings budded since they left, bursting with curiosity, wallowing in the explosion of joy, Afas came, trailing after Nurse Agaxes, laughing and singing their infant songs, absorbing the excitment, the joy, though they had no idea what created it. And Agaxes came, majestic and slow, swimming in on all sides, and, finally, finally, father-mother meld at last there shimmering, expanding, opening to absorb them, hold them within in a hot and loving embrace.