A Gathering Of Stones

2

Danny Blue finished the step he’d started ten subjective years before and nearly tripped over Felsrawg who was crouching on the roadway in front of him. He took her hand, pulled her to her feet.

“What happened?” Felsrawg turned her head from side to side, startled by the strangeness around her. “Where are we?”

“Skinker world, from the look of it.”

‘^•What?”

“Another reality, Felsa, I doubt you’re going to like it. No gods here.”

“Hah, that so. I like it already.” She shied as a skip went groaning past overhead. “What…”

Danny looked from her to the skip vanishing in the distance. What am I going to do with you, he thought. You’re a survivor, but it’ll take some doing to catch up on a good ten millennia of technological development between one breath and the next. He started walking; Felsrawg was still lost in shock and let him get several steps ahead. She gave a sharp exclamation and trotted after him; when she caught up, she walked beside him staring round with interest and uneasiness at an array of vegetation odd enough to start her licking her lips and touching the knives hidden under her long loose sleeves.

She shied again as a ground vehicle clattered past, the Skinker in it turning to stare at them from bulging plum-colored eyes. “Demon!”

Danny scratched at his stubble, sighed. His immediate future looked a lot more interesting than comfortable. “No demon, Felsa. You start acting evil to these Skinkers and I’ll thump you good. This is their world. You hear?”

She scowled at him, shrugged. “Demon,” she said stubbornly, but relented enough to promise a minimal courtesy. “Just keep them away from me. “ -

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.”