Echoes In Time Part 13

The first realization banished that earlier image of women from some distant planet that happened to resemble her. The second realization made her heart pound.

If I have been here, she thought, then I know I will have left myself some kind of message. I know it as well as I know myself. Somehow, I must find it, so that I can accomplish what must be done, and protect the integrity of time.

So deciding, she felt inner conviction at last, and with it the ability to think-to a.s.sess.

She turned her attention to her surroundings.

Cool, dry air was her first awareness. The second was the glare-free light, from some hidden source. The walls were plain, as had been that parlor to which she'd initially been brought.

Before her stood two robed beings, one tall and spidery, the other feline, with sleek black fur everywhere except the face. The latter spoke.

"We, Rilla and Virigu, teachers of the House of Knowledge, now welcome Saba of the Far Star. We are teachers of deportment."

Saba knew the response to that. "I, Saba of the Far Star, am ready to learn deportment." If nothing else, this would buy her time.

"Saba now come with us." Rilla's voice was scratchy, her whistles weak, but she was understandable.

The Virigu had not yet spoken. Saba gave the spidery being a glance, remembering what the First Team had said about these creatures; they all bore the name Virigu, and they were the highest-ranking Nurayil in that they were involved with all levels of technology.

Saba was led up a curving ramp. "We are females," Rilla went on. "We wear robes which symbolize our dedication to Knowledge."

Saba said nothing. She felt her belt communicator buzzing against her hip, but she did not move her hands to it to acknowledge Gordon's call, not with these two beings watching her. Though so far Rilla and Virigu had behaved with respect, the fact that she had been taken here without being asked indicated she might in fact be in danger.

"We protect you," Virigu trilled, an uncanny parallel to Saba's thoughts. "We teach you."

They paused at a landing, and Saba paused as well. She glanced down, saw a splendid mosaic far below, on the ground floor. It depicted the night sky, and constellations not even remotely familiar.

Rilla moved again, leading the way. Saba was distracted momentarily by the swaying of a long, luxurious black tail among the draperies of Rilla's robe.

They paused before a door. Saba noted that it was alone on a corridor, with a blank wall adjacent. Virigu pointed to her hand with a long, chitinous digit. She then indicated a silver plate next to the door, and Saba pressed her hand against it.

A series of tiny lights rippled, and the door slid open.

All three pa.s.sed inside a small room furnished with a low couch. On one wall faded paintings made a complicated scene; on the other lines promised some kind of furnis.h.i.+ngs now folded away.

"You domicile here," Rilla said. She touched a control panel on the blank wall, and a kind of storage enclosure slid out. Saba saw what looked like a stepladder of boxes, each with a tiny light gleaming above a control b.u.t.ton at one corner. "Robes," Rilla added, pressing the control on the topmost box. It folded silently out, showing two of the flaxen robes neatly folded.

Saba nodded, unmoving. She was not going to change in front of these others unless she could not avoid it. She did not want to risk exposing, and then losing, her belt com, which she wore inside her overalls.

"We leave, you come to us for eat, we begin to learn," Rilla said, and with a swish of robes, the two left.

Before she did anything, Saba looked around the room. Was she being monitored? She realized that there was nothing obvious-nothing she could identify, so she might as well dismiss that worry for now.

Instead, she explored the room, first touching the controls on each of the storage boxes. Some of the implements she could only guess at; others seemed to be universal-a hairbrush. A toothbrush, though shaped differently. There was a box with a plate and Yilayil instructions. She puzzled out the script, then took off her boot and placed her foot on it. Lights rippled, and a moment later a slipper appeared from a slot in the back of the box, twin in color and material to those she'd seen on Rilla's feet.

She pressed the master control and the boxes all folded neatly away into the wall, leaving only faint lines to indicate where they were. She moved to a control near the corner; this one seemed to control something that extended from floor to ceiling.

She positioned herself directly before the control, touched it, and this time the wall slid back and a tiny alcove appeared, encompa.s.sing the corner of the room. She saw a recycle unit, a large frame that reminded her somewhat of the globe s.h.i.+p's sonic "shower," and a sink with a water faucet.

When that slid away, she tried the last control, and found herself with a desk and wall monitor. The keypads were utterly different than Terran keyboards.

But it was unmistakably a computer. Was it her own? Was there protected s.p.a.ce on it? This would take exploring-the entire room required careful examination. She knew that if she had any opportunity whatsoever, she would leave herself some kind of message, no matter how brief or crude. Something.

But that would have to wait. They apparently expected her to rejoin them in the House.

First she took out her belt com, and tried to raise Ashe. Nothing but static-inconvenient, but not unexpected. She tried the pulse-and a few moments later she got a return pulse.

So. She tapped out the code for "I'm well" and "I'm investigating." A moment later she got the expected answer: "I received your message."

Communication! For a moment she felt a strong urge to sit down and fumble her way through the other codes they'd developed-except she still did not know who might be listening, by whatever means. The whole idea behind the codes was quick exchanges, fast enough not to trip some kind of high-tech monitoring system.

Likewise she did not know how long Rilla and Virigu would wait for her without coming back to investigate.

So she changed into the robe, used the alcove to freshen up, and pa.s.sed her clothing through the "shower" experimentally. It seemed to work on clothes as well as on people. She checked the water with a tool that Zina had issued to each team member; it registered as pure H20. She tasted a sip from a cup that she found waiting-handleless, but unmistakably a drinking cup-and found that the water reminded her of pure, almost tasteless distilled water.

Did all the beings here, then, need light, water, and...

And harmony?

It was time to find out.

She dressed again in her overalls, but put one of the robes on over them. Her belt com went right back on her belt under the robe, but she stowed her pack-with her laptop-in the lowest of the closet boxes, as she'd mentally named them.

Then it was time to go to work.

CHAPTER 14.

THE NEXT FEW days were so much alike that they later blurred in memory.

Each morning Ross and Eveleen left their little cell and walked across the Nurayil district of the port city. Sometime during that first night, a heavy cloud bank had moved in, and a light but steady rain began to fall-without, apparently, surcease.

Ross felt at first that this was a blessing. The rain cooled the humid air slightly, but more importantly it drenched the overpowering scents emanating from the vast jungle bordering the Nurayil area. His sinuses cleared; the heavy smell of wet pavement was preferable to to the millions of sweet perfumes. the millions of sweet perfumes.

At the Transport facility, he and Eveleen worked hard, almost continually, alongside numerous other beings descended from a variety of races. Virigu seldom spoke to anyone, but watched continually. Some beings did very little, and no one said anything. Ross and Eveleen kept at their jobs- and by the second day, they saw that good workers would be promoted to other sections.

Their goal was to pilot the rail-skimmers so that they could enable the team to be able to move about undetected, should movement be needed. If they could only become drivers through promotion, then they would continue to work hard.

Most of their fellow workers kept to themselves, or stayed strictly with those of their own land, but not all. At the one break officially designated, at midday, there was some chatter among a few beings-while little gray Moova circulated through with vending carts, selling an astonis.h.i.+ng variety of foods.

Ross noted that the Moova had palm plates on their vending machines: there did not seem to be any kind of coinage or money in other forms. Just the unknown credit as registered by the palm plates.

The mealtime conversation was seldom interesting, but it was good practice in following the language-especially as used by a variety of beings with different types of mouths and vocal structures. Some of the whistles were thin and piercing, others curiously liquid. One set of beings sounded like oboes; lacking a name for them, Eveleen and Ross in private referred to them as the music people.

They both noticed that even among those beings who stayed close to their own kind, no one spoke anything but Yilayil. Ross and Eveleen were careful to do the same, if there was any remote chance of being overheard. It was sometimes frustrating, but at least he was with Eveleen, whose spirits were irrepressibly high. She attacked the work with vigor and interest, and she seemed to regard the world without fear.

As Ross once had. He tried to regain that carefree sense of adventure, but Eveleen's presence triggered that protective instinct. He was always on the watch for danger-something he was careful to hide.

Each evening, Irina, Vera, and Gordon joined them in Ross and Eveleen's room-theirs being the first one of the Terrans along that ramp.

At first, no one had much of anything to report. Gordon had exchanged some brief communications with Saba, who- not surprisingly-seemed to be "learning deportment" as well. He had not heard from Misha and his partner.

The two Russian women were at least as busy as Ross and Eveleen at their jobs. The rest of their time they spent trying to listen to the conversations around them, without trespa.s.sing against "proper deportment." Vera did her best to get the beings she encountered talking; Irina listened, and took copious notes on her laptop. She did that at the nightly sessions as well, something that bothered Ross slightly at first, but then he decided it was her way of approaching her own part of the mission, and so he tuned her out. Eveleen didn't seem to mind. She kept up her martial-arts practice every night, whether the others were around or not.

"They all talk so fast," Ross said one night. "And there's so much we hadn't been able to learn about this language. We're still having a tough time at Transport."

"It reminds me of English lessons," Vera said with a grin. "Four years in school, and I thought I was so good with this tongue. But then my schoolmates and I were taken on a trip to England, and-ha! Everyone talked so quick, and with slang, it made my head spin! So much I found that I didn't know."

"A good time, then, to compare notes," Gordon put in. "Here is a challenge I heard today between the guardians of the House of Knowledge and a pair of those gray-skinned beings who look a little like tree stumps with extra eyes-"

"Moova," Irina said. "We found out today. The Moova all take a very great interest in foods."

"Moova," Gordon repeated. "I'll remember. Here's the exchange."

And he whistle/droned, in quick fas.h.i.+on, a long pattern to which they all listened intently.

"What's that tense?" Vera asked. " Time-as-was.

"Sounds like a mixture of time-as-was/to come."

"Conditional?" Ross asked, trying to concentrate.

"No." Gordon shook his head. "Conditional goes like this-" He demonstrated, and Ross remembered the lesson.

"Then what is this new tense?" Irina asked. "Or is it merely some kind of shortcut?"

"We'll have to be on the listen for more of these shortcuts," Eveleen suggested in a grim voice as she moved through a kata. "In case they have a third meaning that the First Team never caught onto."

"Hmmm," Gordon frowned, and Irina looked up, her eyes narrowed.

After they'd thoroughly discussed possible meanings for all the words in the exchange, the group parted to sleep. Ross found himself reluctant to see them go.

As soon as the door was shut, Eveleen yawned, then said, "Weird, how isolation will make a small society into a very intense society."

"What do you mean?" Ross pulled out their single furnis.h.i.+ng, gotten the day before. It was a kind of futon that functioned as a couch and as a sleeping mat. The air never seemed to get cool, so they hadn't any need of blankets. At least the sonic shower kept the air filtered.

"Well, we all know how-if one were to try to define a social b.u.t.terfly-Gordon would be the last person ever named. Irina and Vera are nice, but I never would have picked them as buddies. Yet I look forward all day to seeing them, and I find every word they say interesting. Then, when the evening ends, I'm sorry to see them go. Was it the same when you were stuck in the past with other men, or is this a female thing?"

"No, it was more or less the same," Ross admitted. "Travis, Gordon, Renfry, and I talked a lot about home when we first came here. Those cubes that showed what you valued most had to be hidden for a while, there-it hurt too much to look at them, but we couldn't stay away."

Eveleen nodded slowly. "That was real isolation," she said with sympathy. "You four didn't have any idea if you'd ever go home again."

"Exactly. But it was the same on Earth. I remember hunkering around the fire with some of the other time agents, back in prehistoric times. There was a sense of companions.h.i.+p, though I don't think any of us would have named ourselves particularly social men."

"It's this weird isolation within a crowd. I felt a bit like that when I went with my high school team to j.a.pan to attend a special martial-arts camp," Eveleen admitted, yawning again. "Though there, everyone I encountered was really nice, but I couldn't speak the language, and not everyone spoke English."

"At least you were all humans," Ross commented.

Eveleen grinned. "Yes. At least we were all humans. Here, they don't care, which is a good thing, since too much notice might be dangerous. I can't get it out of my head. Though we're being so careful to follow all the rules reported by the First Team, we still don't know which rule they broke-what caused their disappearance."

"It's been on my mind as well," Ross admitted, feeling that instinct flare again. But he repressed it, just as he repressed the urge to sneak out of the Nurayil dorm and nose around-see just what it was the mysterious Yilayil didn't want the underlings seeing.

This urge hadn't been so bad the first night or so. Then, everything was so new, and he was tired and ready for sleep as soon as the nightly talk session was over. But now, especially when there was no land of distraction in the little cell- no books, television, music, even-he wished to be out exploring. If he were alone...

No. Don't even think that. Not for a moment, he told himself.

He turned to look at his wife, who was seated on the ground, working a complicated yoga step, her face serene. She was content, and he ought to be happy it was so.

As for exploring, that was Misha's job. And if Ross had that guy figured right, he wouldn't appreciate anyone horning in on his turf.

"Ross?"

He looked up, saw Eveleen watching him.

"Anything wrong?" she asked.

"No," he said. "Just thinking-about the mission. You know, those other races. That kind of thing. As for our not being noticed, I'm just as happy to be ignored."

Eveleen smiled, shrugged, and went back to her yoga.

CHAPTER 15.

THE VERY NEXT morning the Transport Maintenance Virigu a.s.signed Ross and Eveleen to a new area of the maintenance facility. Virigu seemed to a.s.sume that they worked as a pair- an impression that they did nothing to dispel.

They were greeted by a small scaled being who had hands and tentacles, again reminding them of the modern-day savage humanoids. Otherwise there was no resemblance; the creature had a beaklike snout, deepset eyes, and a tail.

"I, Bock of Nurayil Transport Design, this day must accept two Nurayil of unknown enclave and ability. Virigu of Nurayil Transport maligns the Jecc of Harbeast Teeth Islands!"

As Bock spoke, several more Jecc gathered round, their tails twitching. Ross looked them over, noted that they all wore identical garments rather like overalls, but with no pockets. The arms and tentacles were free; front flap of the garments covered the creatures' bulky midsections.

"I, Ross of Fire Mountain Enclave, this day am told by Virigu that our job is here, and so it is," Ross hum/whistled. Annoyance sharpened his tones, but he didn't think that so bad a thing-this groundless challenge was too blatant.

Chirps and whistles went up from all the a.s.sembled Jecc. Two or three of them crowded close to Ross; one nudged Eveleen, and she almost stumbled. But she recovered her step, planted her feet, and the next push caused the small creature to squeak and back up a step or two, to the dismay of the others pressing in. Eveleen didn't budge.

Bock riposted with a rapid series of whistle/drones, meaning: "We'll test your knowledge, interloper."

And Ross fired right back the equivalent of: "Be my guest."