She could hold her breath underwater for a long time, but when she surfaced, halfway across the pool, she found herself encircled by poopuus.
"Hi, I'm Khorii. I'm new here. Who are you?" she said aloud.
"We are the children of LoiLoiKua. You are not," was the reply. It came from underwater but unlike the bubbling and popping language of the sii-Linyaari, the words came in Standard, accented so that the words seemed to be ebbing and flowing with a tide of their own. It sounded like "We are the children of LoiLoiKua. You are not." The last words did not seem to be said any more softly, but somehow from a greater depth or distance.
"You do not belong with us, Khorii," one of them said, surfacing to playfully flick water at her with the tips of webbed fingers.
"Your legs are separated," another one said. And she noticed for the first time that their legs were fused together from their waists to their knees. "If you belonged here, your legs would not come apart like that."
"She does not swim as if her legs are separate," another one observed. "She swims correctly, the way of the ocean people," and he demonstrated the undulating full-body motion that propelled him through the water.
"I was taught by ocean people," Khorii told them. "They have no legs at all. They have tails. They were distant relatives of mine, and they didn't care that I have legs. So I didn't think you'd mind either. If you do, I can get out. I just thought it might be friendlier to greet you on your own-well-territory."
"Look at the water," another one said. "Look at the 'puter screens. See how crisp the images appear, how the murkiness of the water has gone since she came." Khorii did not comment. In another moment, perhaps the observant student would think she imagined the change in clarity. The horn's powers were a Linyaari secret.
"She looks like Our Founder!" said another, this one with long, flowing hair that caught the webs of her fingers and floated up around her thighs.
"What do you mean?" asked one with pale skin and a thousand little brown spots across her wide nose.
"Look," said the first one, and swam to the edge of the pool. Now Khorii saw that a deep band around the pool's lining was clear, and behind the covering, computer screens waited for students to activate them.
The poopuu with the unruly hair did just that with a squeal pitched to turn the nearest machine on. A series of pictures flashed by-an elderly human Khorii did not recognize, a younger Uncle Hafiz, and her human grandsires, then-Mother!
"Our Founder," the student said.
"That is my mother," Khorii said.
"Does she not swim like you? Where is she? Is she here with you?" the student asked excitedly.
"Oh, yes, she swims really well-and correctly, too. But she and my father had to go to another world to help end a plague."
"Ahhh, do you speak to them in the far talk while they are gone?"
"You mean do I hail them on the ship's computer?"
"Noooo," the student said. "Do your water-kin not use the far talk?"
"I don't think I know what that is if it is not using the com units," she said. She wondered if they were telepathic.
"Mostly we use it only at night, when the others are sleeping," said a pretty young girl with a face like a full moon. "Otherwise, it interrupts studies. The dorms are farther from our lagoon than the classrooms."
"Is it loud then?"
"No, but it carries. It is the far talk. When we are very quiet, we listen for the far talk from our parents and grandparents on LoiLoiKua. They miss us. So we answer back."
"Could you do it just a little?" she asked.
"Oh, no, Calla asked us not to," the girl said. "She said 'You should use your 'puters like the land folk.' "
Khorii wanted to stay and ask the poopuus more questions, but footsteps echoed through the hallway leading to their pool. Moments later, several children trooped in, led by Calla Kaczmarek.
Oh, bother, what now? Khorii thought. Looks like I've put my hooves in it again.
Chapter 7
Calla Kaczmarek ordinarily enjoyed the open plan of the bubbles on the Moonbase. However, at times it was a pain in the keister. Times, for instance, when a much-anticipated visitor finally arrived and was on the verge, some people hoped, of satisfying their curiosity about her, when she suddenly turned tail and ran away.
Which wouldn't have been so bad except that she did it where a whole cafeteria full of kids just as nosy and curious as Calla could see her do it.
She hoped that Khorii wouldn't have to pay for her small gaffe.
Her hope died when a snarling voice that Calla knew all too well emerged from the students.
"What, we aren't good enough for the kid of the great Lady Acorna?" sneered Marl Fidd. This one, Calla knew, had never been a slave, as Calla had been during her early years. At least, nobody else had enslaved the brat. He'd done a good job of tying himself up in knots, however. Like many of the newer kids on Maganos Moon-base, he'd been sent here because the authorities had no idea what else to do with him. He had been found during a raid on a rave shack, plugged into the machines and oblivious to everything around him. He wouldn't say where he was from or who his parents were; but once he got unhooked, the authorities deemed him salvageable and shipped him off to MM. Calla was not at all sure their judgment about him was correct. He was, in her opinion, a punk. A punk with a mean streak a mile wide, and a bully who liked to push around anyone who didn't have the nerve to stand up to him. He was going to cause trouble someday, Calla figured. Big trouble. She only hoped she wasn't around when it happened.
"Maybe she's just bashful," suggested six-year-old Sesseli in a voice so shy it was seldom heard unless she was called upon directly. As she said it, however, the little girl rose from her seat and started for the walkway.
"Where are you going, Sesseli?" Calla asked.
"To see if I can help. She's come a long way, and she doesn't know anybody."
"Haps with her," Calla said.
"Yes, but he's a big boy, and he talks so much, maybe he scared her. I'll go see."
"Me, too," two more voices said in unison.
"Well, I certainly don't think it's right that the poopuus get to meet her first," said Fawndra Makatia, a good friend of La Shoshisha. "I'm going to see what's up as well."
That was the beginning of a general exodus. Calla, being the lunchroom supervisor, their teacher, and their nominal leader, followed them. Since she couldn't seem to stop them, it was her next best option.
The "poopuus," as the pupils inhabiting the pool had been dubbed by the general student population, were not, despite the administration's best efforts, well integrated. They were from one of the oldest human colonies in Federation space, and had been on their watery planet for so many years that no one remembered or could find a record of when their ancestors inhabited Old Earth. The theory was that they had been island people to begin with. When their once-idyllic home became so littered with other people and industry that their own identity had all but vanished, their leaders volunteered to colonize, and that was the end of it. Presumably, at some point in its evolution there had been more land on LoiLoiKua, as they called their new homeworld, but apparently when the LoiLoiKua version of the great flood from Terran myth and folklore occurred, the land did not come back-at least most of it didn't. Well adapted to making a living from the sea, however, the new inhabitants found their new sea even more inviting and over the years spent less and less time on land until they became complete sea creatures.