And his shoulders sagged and the breath went out of him. “Life’s just better,” he said, almost inaudibly.
A moment or so later he realized the sibik was looking at him very intently. “What?” Kit said.
The sibik was regarding the cellophane that was tightly crumpled up in Kit’s fist. “Is that good to eat?”
Kit stared at the cellophane. “Uh, not for me. You want to try it?” He held it out.
The sibik took it from him in two tentacles and introduced it carefully to its eating stoma, nibbled at it. Then it said, very clearly, “Bleah,” and spat it out.
All Kit could do was laugh.
“Can you take me home to my person now, please?” the sibik said.
Kit glanced at the gate-monitoring matrix display in his manual. All was quiet, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t do maintenance on the gates from anywhere in this neighborhood. “Sure, why not?” he said. “Up you come.”
He boosted the sibik up onto his shoulders and let it hang onto him with its tentacles. “Don’t strangle me again, now!” Kit said as it settled in place. “I breathe through this throat.”
“What’s a throat?” the sibik said.
Kit sighed. “Yeah, that would’ve been the cause of that problem…”
It was just then that Cheleb popped out of his puptent, glanced around with an air of concern, and spotted Kit. “Cousin, how long been here? Didn’t Djam say to wake me? Shouldn’t be on shift now!”
“Chel, don’t worry about it, everything’s all screwed up since last night,” Kit said. “And you had three shifts one after another yesterday, nearly. Djam probably just forgot to mention. But would you take over monitoring now? I have to take Wandering Boy here back to his people.”
“Feel free,” Cheleb said, eyeing the sibik with some concern. “Surprised to see him back.”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Crackers.”
“Crackers?” said the sibik brightly.
“Not the slightest chance,” said Kit. “You are going home.”
***
In the event, the sibik’s second rehoming was quite anticlimactic. Its young Tevaralti, whose name was Besht, was asleep when Kit arrived; it was possible that he’d already been asleep before the sibik had left. The youngster’s parents, when called to the front of the large communal tent structure they were sharing with fifty or so others of the transient Tevaralti, had certainly been surprised to see Kit again, and more than happy (though with some scolding of the erring pet) to take the sibik off Kit’s hands. However, the slighter-built of the three parents—possibly the mama, though Kit wasn’t sure about that; he might have it backwards—gave Kit a look that suggested she (if it was a she) might be about to scold him, too. “It keeps asking us for ‘crackers’—!”
“I’m so sorry about that,” Kit said. “I’m sure he’ll get over it…” And he said dai stihó to them all, and got away before anyone started bringing up any more embarrassing details that were somehow going to be his fault and that he was going to wind up having to deal with.
The long walk back to the stone circle left him feeling pleasantly tired, and what with one thing and another he was weary enough when he returned to simply say to Cheleb, “I’ll see you in the morning.” Kit took himself straight back to his puptent, got undressed, stretched out on his bed with a pile of pillows behind him and a bottle of water and some of Ronan’s beef jerky, and lay there for maybe an hour blissfully doing nothing more challenging then eating and drinking and reading The Eagle of the Ninth, letting the stress slowly drain out of his mind and his muscles. As he started to feel drowsy, Kit interrupted this process only long enough to reach for his phone and text his pop.
BUSINESS AS USUAL TODAY, OR AS UNUSUAL. WATCHED ALIEN MOVIE WITH WORK BUDDY WHO LOOKS LIKE CHEWBACCA, VERY INTERESTING CULTURAL EXPERIENCE BUT NO ROOM TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU HERE, WILL WAIT TILL I GET HOME. THINK GEORGE LUCAS HAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, THOUGH. RETURNED LOST PET TO OWNER AGAIN. ACTUAL LOSTNESS OF PET IN QUESTION, THIS GUY JUST THINKS I’M A SOFT TOUCH—
Kit was tempted to mention Ponch, but he paused and then didn’t do it. It wasn’t actually as if something whispered in his ear, don’t, but after a second the idea simply began to seem somehow unwise. Finally Kit just added to the text, NIGHT NIGHT, and hit “send.”
He dropped the phone on the floor beside him and picked up the manual, once more paging through to Nita’s profile. It was grayed out, and simply said, Scheduled rest period, unavailable; estimated time of next availability, six hours.
Sounds about right, Kit thought. “Wake me up when she comes online, would you?” he said to the manual.
The page grayed down further; a small box appeared saying CONDITIONAL ALARM NOTED: OPERATIONAL.
“Thanks,” Kit said to the manual, and dropped it on the floor beside the phone. He picked up Eagle again and started reading, but realized a short time later that the reading had been broken by a couple of those “long blinks” that are actually five or ten minutes apart. He closed the book and dropped it on top of his manual; then reached down to flip Eagle’s back cover open and see when the library wanted it back. FEBRUARY 3—
Whoops, Kit thought. Really overdue now. Except that when I get back with it, it won’t be… He let the cover fall shut again and flopped back among the pillows. “Lights down,” he said in the Speech.
Down they went, and he was asleep in minutes.
NINE:
Monday
Minutes later, it seemed, Kit’s eyes snapped open and he was staring at the ceiling. It was very strange. The waking position, the lighting, were all nearly identical to yesterday’s. Yesterday might almost never have happened.
Kit lay there blinking as he realized that what he’d just had was his least favorite kind of sleep—the kind that left you feeling like you hadn’t had any at all. He rubbed his face and moaned, feeling somehow vaguely cheated. It also didn’t help that he had to go to the bathroom really badly.
He got up and put on his clothes, and once again made his way out to the short-transport pad, where he jumped to Ronan’s gates, used the toilets there, and ducked into the shower. As he came out, he ran into Ronan strolling across the plaza. “How are things going over here?”
“Transit numbers are down a bit this morning,” Ronan said. “Some of the transport streams are beginning to slow a bit. Looks like we’ve actually crossed the three-quarter stage for the people who are going to go, so the upstream feeds are cutting back a bit on the inbound traffic.” He looked across at the transients’ camp with a sorrowful expression. “Meanwhile, what’s going on with you? You look terrible.”
“I had a weird night,” Kit said. “You know how that is when you fall asleep and when you wake up again it’s as if it’s only five minutes later? Or not even five minutes later. And it just doesn’t seem fair somehow.”
“I know all about that,” Ronan said. “I had one of those earlier the week. Nasty buggers, always takes me another night’s sleep to recover. And God forbid you get two nights like that in a row. You might as well just be shot and put out of your misery right there.” He shook his head. “How’s the beef jerky?”
“That was really good,” Kit said. “If you’ve got any more…”
“Running a bit low, but I can spare you some.”
“You are a true friend,” Kit said.
“Don’t forget handsome and a devil with the ladies,” Ronan said.
Kit laughed at him. “Like you let anybody forget it,” he said. “I’ll see you later on.”
He made his way back to the short-transport pad and then to the stone circle, feeling better every minute, in fact almost human again by the time he got back there. There was just something about having had a shower, especially one of the extremely aggressive Tevaralti ones, that made Kit feel altogether better.