He framed a protest to the technicians’ guild in which he complained about the lack of individual freedom implied by such shortsightedness on the part of the device. Why should there not be two of someone as dynamic and large-spirited as he was? Who made up these silly rules anyway?

  He lashed his tail in irritation and groomed his whiskers to calm himself. When he looked back up at the wall screen, he was gratified to see that his complaint had already been addressed. There were indeed two of him represented—both showing up as cat avatars inside the time device room.

  At the same time that he saw this, he heard the growl. A low, menacing, ferocious growl, that of a powerfully fierce beast, almost made him jump out of his fur coat. He leaped three feet in the air, made a 180, and faced himself in the form of a magnificent, tawny tiger cat with a full, fluffy ruff and tail and a long lustrous coat sticking straight up over most of his body in a display of outrage. Unfortunately, Khiindi had little time to admire himself because he—the other he—seemed to be in an uncharacteristically nasty mood. Before he landed, his other cat met him in a midair clash of fang, claws, and filthy feline language.

  “No, wait!” Khiindi squalled. “Hurting me will only hurt yourself. Inhale! Sniff! Do I not smell intimately familiar?”

  His other self ripped his poor little gray ear before the thought sunk in. “You smell like me and—and—the Others! Who are you?”

  His other cat self wasn’t thinking, but Khiindi was. The ear really hurt, but as the other cat’s claws reached out to shred it, Khiindi had seen the gleam of metal among the hairs of the distended ruff. The crono! Quickly, and with great relief, Khiindi changed into his two-legged form, snatched up his feline self, and relieved the cat of the crono as gently as possible, considering that the cat self was filleting his hands. He tried to drop himself back onto the floor as he pulled the crono onto his bleeding wrist, but the other Grimalkin dragged claws all the way down his bare body.

  “Stop it!” he commanded. “I’m only borrowing”—But suddenly, the claws gave way, and when he looked down, no fur or whisker of his other self remained.

  Had he absorbed the other cat self into his two-legged form in the course of the fight? Had the cat recognized his own blood and retreated in embarrassment? He really didn’t care. He’d had no intention of returning the crono anyway. It was his, after all.

  Now to find Khorii and Ariin. From what the girls had said, he was fairly certain they would have returned to the building where he stood. Ariin wanted Khorii to take her place so she would return them to the time when she had lived among his own kind.

  He could have used the crono, but it was easier to use the larger device to confirm the presence of the girls at the estimated time. He saw Khorii’s dot, wavering uncertainly from within the time lab in the future. Ariin’s dot did not wink at him from anywhere on the wall. He could backtrack to an earlier time, when presumably the girls would still be together, but then he decided that meeting Khorii alone would be easier. He wanted to explain his side of things to her without Ariin inserting her own interpretation.

  He triggered the device, and there was Khorii, standing in front of him. He was in cat form again! She gasped as he leaped to her shoulder, crono around his neck again, and with a dextrous maneuver of his left hind paw returned them to the time he had just left. He preferred to be able to shift shapes at will while they finished what they had to do, and his unwilling transformation showed that the time Ariin had taken her to was within the boundaries of his banishment to permanent cat form.

  Once the transition was made, he leaped from her shoulder and returned to two-legged form. He was naked, and naked humanoids were more naked somehow than naked Linyaari. Although he knew himself to be a beautiful male, he didn’t want the appearance of all other males who might be appropriate mates for his young charge to pale by comparison with her memory of him forever after. He turned himself into a tiger, pawed open the panel where the techs hid their work robes, and held it in his teeth while he changed back again while she watched, puzzled, squeaking slightly at the tiger form, then rubbing her eyes while he pulled the robe around his two-legged form.

  “Do not be afraid, Khorii,” he told her.

  She looked annoyed. “So Ariin was telling the truth. All this time you’ve actually been an alien shapeshifter, one of the demideities my people call the Friends. Some Friend! Bad cat, Khiindi! Very bad cat indeed.”

  “I’m not,” he said, his lordly baritone carrying a hint of the plaintive mew that usually made her forgive him any trouble he’d caused. “Haven’t I been your loyal friend all these years? It’s very unkind of you to say otherwise. I pledged to help you through any troubles you encountered, and I always have. That’s what I’m doing now, only I need my true form to do it. And I wanted to talk to you, face-to-nonfurry-face.”

  “I’m listening.”

  But at that point, a gaggle of female techs entered the time lab. “Lord Grimalkin, you’ve returned!” one of them said. “Why are you wearing that old thing?”

  The speaker was clearly dazzled by him, and he gave her a kindly smile. “I fear I lost something in my translation,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d be a dear and go to my quarters and collect my amber robes, would you? The matching slippers and headdress are packaged with it.”

  She nodded, he winked, and she danced out the doorway. Some days it took so little from him to bring happiness to others.

  When he looked back at the other techs, they were whispering behind their hands, their eyes looking speculatively at Khorii.

  “Ah,” he said. “You’re wondering about this youngling, I see. She’s—mmm—the result of experiments I’ve been conducting in the future.”

  “Experiments?” the eldest of the techs chortled. “Is that what you call it now, you sly cat? Experimenting?”

  He shook a finger at her. “You know me too well, Twexa. You’re right, of course, she’s a descendant we lords have been attempting to reverse-engineer.”

  “Bit young for that, isn’t she, sir?” Twexa asked.

  “You wrong me, Twexa. I am as serious a scientist in my own way as my colleagues are in theirs.”

  “Of course you are, dear. Your sense of fun can be misleading. I’m always telling the others that,” she said.

  “Thank you, Twexa. Your understanding means a lot to me.”

  The tech he’d sent to fetch his robes returned, and he allowed her to help him don them, leaving Khorii in the care of the others. At least she wouldn’t have to answer any questions, since they were all asking them at once. He regretted the necessity for speed in his toilette. The tech—Polida—was touchingly appreciative. But her time would come as long as he had the crono. There was no reason for his sweet Halili to know about anything he did in his two-legged form.

  With a hand in the middle of Polida’s back, he shepherded her to the main time chamber, where Khorii was surrounded by techs, all gabbling together as they surveyed the time map spread before them.

  He broadcast a burst of commands, and the techs scattered throughout the facility, leaving him alone with Khorii.

  Turning from the time map to face him, she said in an accusatory tone, “Ariin isn’t here!”

  “I can’t be held responsible for that!” Grimalkin replied. “If you recall, she was the one who got rid of me, not the other way around. I thought we two should stand together, as we have your entire life to solve this problem, so when I saw that she had abandoned you as well, I came to your rescue.”

  “You never told me you were a grown-up man,” she said, unmollified. “Of course we stood together when you were my kitty.”

  “It makes no difference if we are standing together on four feet or six,” he said, the wheedling mew underlying his voice again. “We are still a team. I may look like a grown-up, but many of my own kind claim that is a false assumption. Your sister dislikes me, and resents you because, when I was forced to bring back your mother’s egg, I brought hers instead of yours. That is how I came to be frozen in the shape of a small cat. My people ganged up on me, took my crono, froze me, and sent me back to your parents as a birthing gift for you to punish me for not breaking your parents’ hearts.”

  Khorii, arms crossed over her chest, snorted. “From what I hear, you didn’t care about that when you ran away with my father, then tried to convince my mum that you were him.”

  “No, I didn’t care particularly then. Even more than most of my kind, I am a curious and exploratory sort of fellow. But your parents rescued me from the Khleevi—returned for me when they could have safely escaped. And although, as you suggest, my previous actions may have caused them alarm, even psychological pain, neither of them tried to hurt me. They were so happy once it was all over.

  “I could not betray them so completely as to take both of their potential children. I knew you were twins and would be exactly the same for the purposes of science, so I simply took the nearest, your sister, and allowed the other, you, to be born in due time. Had I not been forced into small cat form to be your pet, I could have remained with Ariin and instructed her about her origins. I could also have shown my people how to treat a sensitive and impressionable child so she didn’t grow up bitter and sneaky.

  “I am the most empathic of my kind, which is one reason the females love me so, and I’d have had a softening influence on your sister’s upbringing. It’s not my fault that my people’s idea of justice meant that you got the advantage of a loving family and an extremely talented, versatile and clever feline companion while your sister grew up surrounded with the tenderness commonly shown to laboratory animals.”

  Khorii thought that over, and finally said, “You have to admit you have caused a great deal of trouble for both of us, my parents, and even yourself.”

  “Yes, but see how that trouble has also made all of you learn and grow—even Ariin, who did find you after all. Now that we’ve resolved all of this, perhaps we can stop casting blame and get on with the mission?”

  “First we have to find Ariin,” Khorii said.

  “I suppose we must,” he agreed. “Now then, when could she have gone?”

  Twexa reappeared as if they had summoned her. “Couldn’t help overhearing you talk about some mission, sir?”

  “Indeed, Twexa. There is an alien threat in my little friend’s time that may be the doom of the universe as we know it if it isn’t addressed, and smartly. We have noticed certain similarities between the threat—”

  “It involves great galumphing masses of matter-eating—er—matter,” Khorii put in. “Organic.”

  “Yes,” Grimalkin said. “It put my friend’s sister and me in mind of the shapeshifting nature of our own fluid dwellings. You’re a tech. Ring any bells with you?”

  “Certainly, sir. Would the young lady have been using the time map or a crono?”

  “She—uh—borrowed my crono from another time”—he supplied the signature—“but I don’t know which she used. She will be raised right here in the time lab a few years hence and is familiar with the operation of the device.”

  “Ah well, I’ll check the logs of both then.”

  “There are logs?” Khorii asked. “Why didn’t you say?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t know. Normally we leave these things to the techs.”

  Waving her palm across one of the wall panels, Twexa revealed a long, scrolling graph, then another. “Aha! There you are, you little minx. Gotcha.”

  “You found her?” Khorii asked.

  “Indeed. After she left then, she went then,” Twexa said, pointing to Ariin’s points of departure and arrival, respectively.

  “What is significant about then. In particular?” Grimalkin asked.

  “Ah, of course. That is when Pircifir launched his voyage of discovery and also when he returned with the organisms we’ve groomed into your lordships’ dwellings. She arrived shortly before launch.”

  “Please arrange for us to join her, Twexa.”

  “If I may make a suggestion, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “I—er—couldn’t help overhearing what you and your young friend were saying about her sister. Perhaps if you arrive when she returns home from the voyage, she will have gained some maturity, a sense of personal accomplishment that will serve to alleviate part of her anger. If not, you can always return to the beginning of the journey. It was only a moment or two before the end, since Pircifir used his crono to return them just after they departed. Watch now. They should be arriving momentarily.”

  They waited for the egg shape indicating the space vessel to reappear on the time map, and for Ariin’s and Pircifir’s dots to emerge from it, but after several minutes, the map remained clear.

  “Oh dear,” Twexa said. “This is not how it’s supposed to go at all. I’ll do a forward search.” The time map scrolled so rapidly Khorii felt slightly dizzy. Twexa turned to face them, looking worried. “They’re not here, sir. Neither Pircifir nor Ariin. It’s as if they never existed.”

  Chapter 5

  Grimalkin dismissed the puzzling disappearance of Pircifir and Ariin and had Twexa direct him and Khorii to the moment just before Pircifir and Ariin boarded.

  As Twexa had suggested, Ariin was less than thrilled to see Khorii. “How did you get here? Who’s that with you?”

  Grimalkin nodded to Pircifir. “Greetings, brother.”

  Pircifir’s stoic face warmed when he saw Grimalkin. “Brother!” He looked at Khorii and at Ariin and back again. “I see you have one, too.”

  “You’re spoiling everything,” Ariin told Khorii. “Pircifir thinks I’m one of the Friends in disguise.”

  Khorii hadn’t ever been able to thought-talk with Khiindi, as far as she knew, but she quickly transmitted the idea to Grimalkin. She was relieved when he said smoothly, “Yes, this guise is all the rage among the ladies at the moment. You’ve had your nose in your schematics too much to notice the fashion, it seems.”

  “I can trust you to keep up enough for us both,” Pircifir replied. “I don’t suppose you would care to come along on this little jaunt, would you?”

  Grimalkin grinned ingratiatingly. Pircifir seemed very fond of him. Are they real brothers? Khorii wondered. She didn’t know any of the other Friends on what she considered a truly friendly basis, but presumably they had families, or at least relatives. She looked more closely. Pircifir and Grimalkin were around the same height and had the same tawny coloring, but Pircifir wore his mane quite short, whereas Grimalkin’s flowing locks billowed in the breeze, and he sported a full beard as well, the total effect being that of a ruff surrounding his entire head and making it look four times its actual size. The complete effect was quite striking, even among the Friends.

  Of course, with shapeshifters it was hard to say whether their resemblance was natural or assumed, but she hadn’t heard any of the others address each other as kin.

  “Exactly what I had in mind,” Grimalkin replied. “We see each other so seldom these days.”

  “Come along then,” Pircifir said. He turned to Ariin. “But—”

  “I asked first!” she said belligerently. “And it’s really important that you take me.”

  “Of course!” Pircifir said. “I was only going to say that you and my brother’s friend will have to share a cabin. You seem to have a lot in common.”

  Ariin snorted with outrage, and for a moment Khorii thought she was going to throw a fit, but Ariin controlled herself and marched into the ship without so much as a glance at the rest of them.

  This ought to be a fun trip, Khorii mused, shaking her head.

  In his own way, Pircifir was as different from the other Friends as Grimalkin claimed to be. He was more polite, for one thing. Khorii thought it might be because his interests lay beyond Vhiliinyaar, exploring new worlds and finding new cultures and their products just for the fun of it, apparently. Anywhere else he might have been a merchant, making his living by importing exotic fabrics, jewels, foods, spices, and furnishings. However, the Friends did not seem to have anything like an economy that she could see, at least among themselves.

  “If people don’t pay Pircifir for what he brings back, how does he pay for the items in the first place?” Khorii asked Ariin, who had spent a lot of the time in their cabin sulking.

  “How should I know?”

  “You grew up with them. Didn’t you learn anything about them?”

  “No, I was too busy being studied,” Ariin snapped.

  “You didn’t notice where the meals were produced, or the clothing?” Khorii persisted. “I didn’t see anything that looked like industry there, yet they have spacecraft and the time lab, all of these scientific things.”

  “Why don’t you go ask your cat?” Ariin asked. “Not that he’s very truthful.”

  “Maybe I will,” Khorii said.

  But when she asked Grimalkin, he just smiled in the same way he had when he was a cat and had caught something particularly tasty in a particularly clever way. “If you have an asset that’s important enough, you don’t need to have a lot of others, youngling,” he told her. “When we dock at the next port, you’ll see. But don’t interfere. Remember the larger mission.”

  That aggravated her so much she forgot how irritated she was with Ariin. “He was such a nice kitty,” she said, mourning the loss of her pet who, now that he walked on two legs, acted more like Elviiz than Khiindi, all superior and lording over her.

  “I tried to warn you not to let him loose,” Ariin said.

  “I didn’t. He found me. You took him back to before his friends made him stay a cat all the time.”

  Ariin repeated a word that Captain Bates sometimes used when she was mad, after which the captain usually mumbled an apology. Ariin didn’t bother, however.

  “For once you could have let me handle this on my own, you know,” she groused. “You don’t have to hog all the credit for everything all the time.”

  “We were going to,” Khorii told her. “But once you got on board, the ship didn’t come back like it was supposed to, so we came early enough to join you. Look, I don’t really care about credit at this point. I’ll be glad to tell everybody that everything was your idea—then they can look sad and disappointed at you because we ran away and scared them…”