That was what the scientists had decided about them, at least, and it matched some of what the elders of LoiLoiKua had told the Federation when their world joined. The world was in jeopardy now, apparently, and the elders had asked that their young be sent off-world to study and search for new habitats. Calla had not been able to get very far with the LoiLoiKuans, however. They accepted their pool and their own bubble, which was a good thing since it had been built at great expense to the foundation endowed by the late Mr. Li and House Harakamian. The poopuus seemed to enjoy their lessons, but they were not eager to mix with the others. No wonder Khorii was drawn to them. Despite her mother's role in the founding of MM, the lone Linyaari girl must feel as much of an outsider as her waterbound classmates.
Calla was still trying to decide if poopuus was a derogatory term or simply descriptive when she reached the interbubble iris.
She felt a moment of anxiety. One other thing they didn't actually know about the students from LoiLoiKua was how they might react, unsupervised, to unwanted company. Their culture was a simple one, even primitive-well, regressed at least. Their reactions might be rather basic.
The anxiety heightened when she saw the pool roiling with poopuus but no sign of Khorii in the pool or out.
Then suddenly the child she was looking for bobbed to the surface, looked startled to see the audience alongside the pool, then gave a small tight-lipped smile and waved.
Smiling, Calla wedged a path for herself among the staring students. "Khorii, I see you're making friends already, but now the rest of the students would like to welcome you as well. Please come and join us."
Hap, who she now saw was sitting on the edge of the pool beside the android child, jumped up and picked up her abandoned clothing lying beside the water. As Khorii swam to the poolside, he handed it to her. Crumpling the garment in one hand, Khorii gave a hop and popped gracefully-and nakedly-onto the side of the pool, then began donning the shipsuit as another student might dry off.
Snickers, embarrassed giggles, a wolf whistle and one call of, "All right, horny girl!" greeted her, and the girl looked puzzled. In truth, she was still flat on top, and her lower half was actually covered with some of the same short curly hair as that which feathered down her spine and calves to feet that were surprisingly like cloven hooves.
Calla had never had the honor of meeting Khorii's illustrious mother, and the descriptions she had of her, while they mentioned her two-knuckled three-fingered hands, her curly silver white mane, and, of course, the horn, hadn't really gone into detail about these aspects.
Khorii stood, fully dressed, and said something to the poopuus that seemed to be in their own language. They didn't surface to say good-bye to her, but Calla noticed that as soon as Khorii joined the other students and their backs were to the pool, a fish flipped up onto the side. The Linyaari girl's cat pounced on it.
It seemed that in at least one of the school's populations, Khorii and Khiindi had made some new friends.
The banner that popped up on every screen in the computer lab said "70,000 believed stricken, 40,000 presumed dead on palo-duro."
"thousands of new infections strike twi osiam."
"250 cases diagnosed on kezdet believed imported by federation communications crew."
"many federation relay stations fall silent as personnel FALL ILL, STATIONS QUARANTINED."
"quarantine restrictions tighten. food and water shortages in planetary colonies go unrelieved. all commercial interplanetary travel severely curtailed."
There followed an alarming list of cities, continents, space stations, moons, and planets believed to be infected with the disease, along with numbers of reported cases and deaths.
Khorii felt much as she did when sitting inside their pavilion on Vhiliinyar while a thunderstorm raged outside. Inside the weatherproof fabric of the pavilion they were so safe and dry that the wind hardly buffeted them, and the driving rain was only something that glistened in the darkness outside. It was almost imaginary. The plague seemed that way here among all of these healthy young people. Still, her parents were out there in the middle of whatever those statistics really meant, and it worried her. A lot. A whole lot. She knew her mother had done wonders in her lifetime and had seen other emergencies, many of them far worse, in the galaxy, and had coped with them. Her father, too, had battled monstrous Khleevi invaders and lived-the only one of their kind to be tortured by the buglike aliens and survive. But they were her parents-and they were so OLD! She'd found the problem first, after all-the bodies floating in a derelict spaceship. She felt like she should be out there with her parents, where she could protect them.
It took a great deal of effort for Khorii to ignore the escalating fatality figures and concentrate on the simple lessons at hand. Her mind's eye saw space full of ships like the Blanca, telescoping inside the hulls where blank-faced people performed an endless macabre ballet in zero G.
Khiindi did not help. He seemed to be as worried as she was. He sat with ears erect, staring at the screen as if he could read it, mewed once, and collapsed across her thighs with a huff of exhaled breath. His face scrunched up in an expression of feline concern- which lasted only until the cat fell over in her lap and went to sleep.
That would have been fine except that he then proceeded to snore, then to twitch, run in place, and rake her shipsuit's legs with his back claws while clutching at it with his front claws.
It was as though he were trying to save the universe in his sleep.
She had never once considered leaving her feline friend behind when she left Vhiliinyar, but she soon began to feel as if that indicated a lack of foresight on her part.
He did give her a reason to attend meals with the other students, however. Not to be outdone in cat bribes by the poopuus, at suppertime Hap, a little girl called Sesseli, and other students insisted that Khorii join them so they could offer Khiindi choice tidbits from their plates.
Khorii happily agreed and brought a selection of grasses and vegetables from the 'ponies garden so she could nibble along, thus blending in more satisfactorily.
This worked well, with Khorii happily chewing between answers to the questions of others, or nodding and asking her own questions regarding some of what they shared-excessively, in some cases-about themselves. Meanwhile one of the boys was foolish enough to voice a question about an astrophysics lesson earlier in the day and was treated to more than he could have possibly grasped in one sitting about the subject by Elviiz, in his most annoyingly superior tutorial tone.
Khiindi ingratiated himself for the sake of future handouts, sitting on first this lap, then that one, walking from knee to knee around the tables and pausing for a wash and brush-up on the lap of Sesseli. He did not even chide the girl when she interrupted his grooming session by stroking his head. Instead, he rubbed his nose and jaw against her hand, then carefully licked his paws and used them to scrub clean the area her touch had tainted.
One set of knees, however, Khiindi avoided. When Khorii noticed this, she glanced at the student being bypassed and caught glares of hostility following her harmless little friend. What could possibly make anyone react that way to a cat? Everyone on Vhiliinyar was extremely fond of cats. The Makahomian Temple Cats presented to her and to her people by the Makahomians reminded the older Linyaari of pahaantiyiirs, a feline species many had kept as companions before the Khleevi invasion. Even the rather grouchy Liriilyi had had a pahaantiyiir she doted on and had softened considerably when Mother and Father had insisted she be given one of the Makahomian kittens to raise.