“Won’t,” the sibik said, and pulled all its tentacles in tight around itself until it was more or less hugging itself with all of them in a furious ball.
“Your call, buddy,” Kit said. “You say ‘please’ or there’s no cracker for you.”
The balled-up sibik glared at him with all the eyes on the top of its abdomen, and then squeezed them shut in annoyance.
Amused, Kit then tried what would with Ponch have been a most transparent ploy, one that would normally have provoked nothing but scornful eyerolling. “Mmm,” he said in a tone of exaggerated pleasure, “goooooood.” And he started eating the saltine he was holding.
The first crunch made the sibik twitch visibly. Uh huh, Kit thought, and went out of his way to make the second crunch much louder.
One eye squinted open: just one. Kit watched this happening out of the corner of his own eye, doing his best to seem to be idly regarding the scenic landscape of beautiful plainsland Tevaral and paying no attention whatsoever to the put-out ball of sibik in his lap. The eye-squinting was interesting, as there weren’t any eyelids as such: the closing of the eyes, or maybe shuttering was a better word, was being done by musculature in the top of the abdomen that actually pulled the eye slightly down into the body mass and pinched the hide closed over it.
There were only a couple of loud crunches available in a single saltine. Kit reached up for another one. The single open sibik-eye watched the movement and was joined by another that opened, and another; and a tiny miserable moan came out of somewhere in the middle of the sibik’s body. Is what they make noise with even associated with how they breathe? Kit wondered as he bit into the next saltine. Crunch! “Mmmmm…”
The sibik loosened its frustrated grip on itself somewhat, melted slightly into a less rigorously spherical bundle of body and tentacles, and made another of those sad little moaning noises. Kit felt sorry for it, but not sorry enough to give it the second half of the saltine without at least a gesture of willingness toward the behavior he was trying to teach. He looked from the saltine to the sibik’s two and a half open eyes and said firmly, “Please.”
Several more eyes opened and glared at him. The musculature that had pulled them down into the body of its abdomen now pushed them a bit out, so that they looked like shiny hemispherical pebbles. Up this close, it was possible to see that they were more than just dark solids. Except for the darkness of the four-branched pupil, a faint luminescence could be seen swimming in the eyes if your angle to the sun was right: a pale pinkish glow like the green glint you might catch in a cat’s eyes at night, except this was more milky, and less plainly located at the back of the eye.
At least it could be seen if the eyes didn’t squint themselves down tighter at you again in annoyance. “No.”
Kit shrugged and ate the rest of the saltine, making more noise than he would ever have been comfortable making at home; his Mama would have had his head for chewing like that. More of the sibik’s eyes were open now, maybe five or six and a half. Call it seven. They watched his hand carefully as it lifted to pick another saltine out of the air, judging distances—
Kit had seen that look on Ponch before, especially on one memorable occasion when his pop had thought that the piece of steak he was holding up for Ponch to jump for was out of his reach. (It hadn’t been.) Against his lap Kit could feel the sibik gathering its tentacles together, and just as it was getting ready to launch itself at the saltines Kit wasn’t holding, he simply said “Higher, guys, if you would…?” And all the loose saltines whisked themselves up to about fifteen feet over Kit’s head.
The sibik collapsed into a frustrated heap on Kit’s lap and hissed like an angry cat.
“See now,” Kit said, “if you don’t cooperate, they’re all just going to go to waste. By which I mean I’ll get them all and you won’t get any.” He bit into the one he was holding: crunch!—and all the sibik’s tentacles clenched.
“You want one,” Kit said, “you say ‘please.’” He held still and waited to see what the next move would be.
The sibik shuffled its tentacles around and for a few moments actually covered all its eyes with them. The gesture suddenly so bizarrely reminded Kit of his pop’s favorite gesture of frustration that he had to actually bite his lip to keep himself from laughing.
But then the sibik took the tentacles away, and every eye was trained on Kit, round and wide open and pleading.
He shook his head in sheer admiration, for he had never had puppy eyes made at him by something with so many eyes. Fortunately, the effect was more amusing than heartrending.
Kit worked to control his laughter. “No,” he said at last. “Nice try, guy, seriously. But it’s no good. Give up and just say ‘please!’”
“Hungry,” the sibik whimpered.
Kit shook his head. “Please.”
The sibik trembled all over. “Cracker!”
“Please.”
It collapsed flat in his lap as if too famished to support itself. All its tentacles went limp and hung down like so many rubbery toy snakes, and the sibik sucked most of its eyes down into its body again in what appeared to be a gesture of utter hopelessness.
Kit regarded the sibik sympathetically while finishing the saltine he was eating. When it was done he beckoned another one down.
With the three eyes that remained visible, the sibik watched Kit pluck the cracker out of the air and just hold it there. Kit waited until its gaze left the saltine and met his.
“So what’s the magic word?” Kit said.
It trembled all over several times in his lap, one after another, as it repeatedly started to gather its tentacles under it and then each time abandoned the gesture.
“You know what it is. Come on.”
The three eyes still open now angled in three different directions as if looking for help to come from one of them. Kit thought with amusement of Mamvish, who sometimes did something similar with her eyes—she might have only the two, but she got the maximum effect out of them—and simply waited.
Finally the sibik squeezed the remaining three eyes shut and said, distinctly and in utter disgust, “Please.”
“There you go,” Kit said, and held out the saltine.
All eyes flew open and the cracker was instantly snatched out of Kit’s hand and stuffed into the sibik’s eating stoma. This time there was less spraying of crumbs.
Now we’ll see if he can do it twice, Kit thought. Assuming ‘he’ is the word we’re looking for here…
“Another?” Kit said.
“Please!”
“You’re a smart guy,” Kit said. He pulled down another cracker and handed it right over.
The next few minutes were devoted to repeated administrations of positive reinforcement on Kit’s side, and shameless stoma-stuffing on the sibik’s. “You should slow down,” Kit said eventually. “You’ll get indigestion or something.”
“Cracker,” the sibik said, waving its tentacles at him.
“I think you missed a word there..”
“Cracker please!”
“Absolutely,” Kit said, and handed it another. “Question is now, how long’s my supply going to last me? I thought I brought enough for a week, but at this rate…”
“Still hungry,” the sibik remarked.
“Yeah, well, that kind of seems like the default state for you guys, doesn’t it,” Kit said. “So do you think you can tell me something, now that our little power struggle’s over with? You knew there was food here. You even knew it was called ‘cracker’. How did you know?”
“Just knew,” the answer came back after a few moments; and some of the eyes looked at Kit as if he was an idiot for asking.
Well, let’s see if we can’t get at this some other way. “Where did you come from?”
“Don’t know. With people.”
So definitely somebody’s pet, Kit thought. Also, however, through the words, he picked up a faint metallic scent and a feeling that was like feathers, though strangely scratc
hy.
Useful, Kit thought. A fair number of creatures, when you dealt with them in the Speech, would also pass you back sensory information associated with the data being discussed. The sibik was apparently one of these, which could make things simpler. “So,” he said. “Where do you usually go for food?”
“Don’t go. It comes.”
“People give it to you?”
“Yes.”
“The same people all the time?”
“Yes.” And suddenly there was emotion there: sorrow. Kit might have wonderful new food, but he was not those people.
“You’re lost,” Kit said. “You got lost.”
The sibik made that unhappy deflated-balloon sound again.
“The people who brought you here,” Kit said. “Do you know where they are?”
“Not sure.” There was a sudden sense of entwined scents, astonishingly directional, as Ponch’s combined senses of smell and hearing had sometimes seemed to Kit when they were communicating in a similar mode. The impression he was now getting from the sibik rendered itself visually. It was like a trace or track, a thin red line or a thread, that led away from here across the plain in the general direction of the gating complex. But the track was obscured in places, tangled or rubbed out, and when one was at ground level one couldn’t see the way back clearly. All that could be clearly seen was the place where the straight track faded out.
It’s partly using scent trails, Kit thought. But partly something else too. And it looks like there’s something wild sibik do when they’re communicating with each other that interferes with a pet sibik’s link to its owner, if it’s in the area. Maybe it’s just numbers? Maybe they drown it out or something?
He breathed out. Never mind that now. First let’s see how much of a problem we’ve got. “When you came,” Kit said, “did your people stop a while, or did they go straight from one portal to another?”
There was some confusion over the “portal” concept, but once that was resolved the answer came back promptly. “They stayed.”
“Good,” Kit said.
“They were sad,” the sibik said.
“Yeah,” Kit murmured, looking up and across the plain, “I bet they were. Are.”
“Cracker!”
Yeah, I imagine you’d feel the need for some comfort food too right about now. “Forgot a word there, big guy,” Kit said.
“Please.”
The capitulation was immediate: the sibik had other things on its mind now. Kit fed it another of the few remaining floating saltines. “Let me get clear about one thing,” Kit said. “You didn’t run away from them on purpose, did you? You want to go back to them.”
“Want to go back, yes. But did run away on purpose! Smelled/tasted/wanted food others had, wanted cracker!”
“Oh great,” Kit muttered, “just what I needed about this. Guilt.” …Yet he couldn’t be held responsible for what the wild sibik were up to in their spare time—which doubtless included investigating the transient-Tevaralti campsite and shaking them down for food, as well as coming back here to do the same. It was probably a wonder that there weren’t more escaped pet sibik over here, seduced by the covertly-communicated scent of exotic alien foodstuffs.
“Possibly a good reason for us to find something else for you guys to eat when you turn up here,” Kit muttered. “Something less fancy. I mean, besides generic wizard rations and Earth crackers, I mean. If lots of Tevaralti keep you guys as pets, then somebody here must make, I don’t know, sibik chow…”
But it appeared what this sibik was mostly interested in chowing on was Kit’s crackers: it was trying to climb up his arm for one right now. “Sorry,” Kit said, giving it the cracker. “And I’ll take you back to your people and you’ll be all spoiled, and it’ll all be my fault. I can just hear your boss now. ‘What did that nasty Earthling do to you, your appetite’s all ruined!’”
The sibik ate the latest cracker and ignored this line of reasoning, apparently finding it beneath its notice. But, “Yes, what is the nasty Earthling doing with that creature?” said a familiar voice from behind him. “I can think of any number of media outlets who’d love an answer. Preferably with video.”
Kit snickered as Ronan came strolling around one of the standing stones and stood there for a moment, shaking his head at Kit in huge amusement. “Jaysus, this is so suggestive.”
“Of what?” Kit said.
“Oh, come on, finding somebody with a lapful of tentacles? What an innocent you are. And there’s not even any point talking to you about cartoon smut, is there? Or even smut in general. It just rolls right off.”
Kit managed to look faintly offended. “Excuse me! I know about smut, thanks.”
“Oh yeah? What kind?”
Kit opened his mouth and then closed it again, briefly stifled by the complete disconnect that came with the prospect of sitting here, in the middle of a refugee crisis on an alien planet, preparing to talk about porn. Yet Kit knew if he didn’t do something about this right now, Ronan was going to get the wrong idea.
“I don’t know,” Kit said, “why don’t we start with whatever kind you’re thinking about right now?” A sudden image flashed into his mind, and almost as if his mouth had decided to go ahead without consulting his brain, he found himself saying, “Maybe that thing you were looking at on your manual with Dairine’s streaming plug-in last night, the one about the hotel Jacuzzi and the two— Uh, that.” Kit stopped, as the image he’d glimpsed was way too interesting to describe any further without possibly starting to produce a result that would betray his own interest.
Meanwhile, Ronan’s mouth had fallen open. Kit was concentrating on not letting his own do the same. Now where the hell did that come from?
Consider it a favor, something whispered in the back of his mind. Strictly a one-off, of course.
Kit’s mouth went dry with shock. Bobo??
No response.
And to Kit’s complete amazement, Ronan was blushing. Kit couldn’t recall ever having seen this happen before. “Or maybe not,” Kit said, instantly following up on the momentary advantage. “Never mind, wouldn’t want to embarrass you when Dairine’s messed up the security settings somehow. Neets keeps telling her to stop tweaking the connection parameters, but she just won’t quit.” He shrugged.
“Well, fine. And meanwhile, Powers forbid I should fail to cut you some slack when you so plainly need it,” said Ronan, not missing a beat. “Look at you, you’re the color of beetroot.”
Kit didn’t waste time trying to deny it, assuming that beetroot was the same as beets; sometimes with food from Ronan’s part of the world it wasn’t easy to tell. “So, things get boring over on your side, or was there a purpose for this visit?”
“I was just coming over to tell you that we’re on for the picnic tomorrow night, if your shiftmates are okay with it.”
“Oh God, I forgot to ask Djam this morning,” Kit said. “Doesn’t matter, he’ll be up shortly, and Cheleb will be back any minute: he’s a real on-time kind of guy. Sit down, get comfortable! When one or the other of them comes along we can let them know what’s on tap, and then take this guy back over there.” Kit pointed with his chin at the transients’ camp. “He’s nervous about going out there by himself, thinks he’ll get lost again. We’ll escort him over.”
“Cracker,” the sibik said, a touch cranky now that less attention was being paid to it.
Kit gave it a look. “What do we say?”
“Please,” it said. The sulky tone suggested it was embarrassed again, now that there was someone else watching it do what it was told.
Ronan fell over laughing, which didn’t help the sibik’s temper: it snatched the last cracker away from Kit and practically inhaled it, crumbs spraying everywhere.
It was into this tableau that Cheleb came strolling a moment or two later. Kit was spluttering with laughter: Ronan’s presence made it somehow impossible for him to keep his face straight. He pushed the sibik gently off to one side and ont
o the Stone Throne, brushing crumbs off himself. “Cheleb,” he said, “we’ve got a lost one here.”
“What a shame,” Cheleb said, looking sympathetically at Ronan. “Big well-grown specimen, doubtless someone misses their pet.”
Ronan stared at Cheleb, then collapsed again, hooting with laughter. Kit snickered. “Just be glad Carmela’s not here to agree,” Kit said. “Chel, this is my friend Ronan. Ronan, Cheleb—”
Dai stihós and arm-clasps were exchanged, at least as soon as Ronan could start himself breathing again and get up to do it properly. “Chel,” Kit said, “we were thinking we might invite some friends over here tomorrow evening, after your shift starts, for food and drink and himiniw.” The Speech-term exactly translated the English term “get-together”. “Would that bother you? Feel like taking part?”
“Glad to, not bothered at all,” Cheleb said. “Djam certainly will too, was complaining the other day about grinding boredom.”
“Relief from grinding boredom I can pretty much guarantee him,” Kit said. “So would you relieve me early? Got to return the prodigal squid to his proper sphere of influence before he eats all my food.”
The sibik had already climbed halfway up Kit’s arm and was in the process of festooning itself around his shoulders. “No problem,” Cheleb said. “How have gates been?”
“Mercifully quiet,” Kit said, “considering what else has been going on.”
“Entertainment still on for this evening as scheduled?”
“Oh yes. As soon as we dispose of Wandering Boy here.”
“Then relieving you, kehrutheh. Go restore lost one so can get started soon as Djam gets up. Don’t want to leave poor long-ago-far-away humanoid stuck in carbonite any longer than necessary.”
“Right. Back soon.”
Ronan threw Kit a look as the two of them headed out between the standing stones toward the encampment a mile or so across the plain. “What the everloving feck have you been doing to these poor innocents?”