Changelings
- Автор: Маккефри Энн, Скарборо Элизабет
- Серия: The Twins of Petaybee #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Changelings». Краткое содержание книги:
CHANGELINGS
They are Ronan Born for Water Shongili and Murel Monster Slayer Shongili. Twin brother and sister. Children of Yana and Sean. Children of Petaybee. As such, theirs is a destiny deeply intertwined with the sentient planet that is their home. For Ronan and Murel are more than human. Like their father, each can transform into a seal and converse telepathically with the planet’s creatures–such as the friendly otter whose life they save one day from a pack of ravenous wolves.
But the twins’ bravery has unforeseen results when a visiting scientist witnesses their startling metamorphosis and becomes obsessed with their capture. To protect their children, Sean and Yana send them to stay with a powerful family friend on an orbiting space station. But no one realizes that Ronan and Murel hunger to discover the origins of their shape-shifting talent–and that their search for knowledge will place them squarely in the path of peril.
Meanwhile, Petaybee is changing–and much faster than an ordinary planet’s natural evolution. It appears that portions of the sea are heating up and a landmass is suddenly rising from the depths. To investigate the startling occurrence, Sean heads out to the open water in his seal form. But the newly unstable region holds untold mysteries–and the potential for disaster.
"How does she manage that?" Then Yana waved off the need for an answer. She was only too grateful to get all they could of the useful buildings. They came equipped with all mod cons, as Clodagh called it, and required no special foundations or extra facilities, coming complete with solar heating and sanitary bioconveniences. Their only drawback was a certain characterless sterility, which with a little imagination could easily be imprinted with the individual style of the occupant.
The cubes were manufactured and distributed by a Japanese known to Marmion, and Yana and Sean suspected she had financial connections there as well. They had arrived in what Bunny called the "niche" of time. Building materials alone were precious on Petaybee, and energy to heat them even more so. The cubes were the perfect answer to provide accommodations for an overwhelmed planet that had never expected so many visitors or the need for such things as hotels, schools, offices, and storage space. One of the first to be placed was the cube that was next to Yana's old house and provided the couple with office space and occasional living quarters for legitimate visitors. A second was Kilcoole's school, and others had been placed at the Space Port for essential services and finally for the beginnings of the new hospital. Another cube was now the nursery.
Marmion had warned them that eventually Mr. Soshimi Nakatira wanted to visit this incredible planet and meditate in one of the communion caves. He hadn't yet taken Sean and Yana up on that invitation, but Marmion was certain that he would.
"He's the kind of guy you want to visit and to stay as long as he likes," Marmion had assured them.
At the time, plagued with importunate visitations, Yana had remarked with irony, "Which means he'll arrive in the midst of one of our crises. We'll have to save one cube for him alone."
"Oh, he'll probably bring his own accommodation," Marmie had replied negligently. "He's like that. A truly gifted man."
"At least we have Soshimi's cube available for the lawyers," Yana said cheerfully.
"Probably the time he'll come for that visit," Sean remarked.
"Now, let's not borrow more trouble," she said soothingly, stroking his hand where it was on her pillow.
"True, love. We'll be looking back on these as the grand old days soon enough. Once Petaybee's midsea volcanoes build up the landmass in the temperate zone, we'll be besieged with even more folk wanting to come to this unspoiled planet to 'improve' it. Without the cold climate to deter them, every planetless soul in the cosmos will be wanting to live here."
"That's far off in the future, Sean," she said. "From what you told me of your journey through that area before, everything is still well below the surface. These things take eons."
"In the natural way of things, that's true. But on a terraformed world like this one, even latent development is much accelerated. I give it a decade, tops."
"For someone not borrowing trouble, you're deep in debt now," she teased.
"Sorry, love, you're quite right. Now you get some sleep," he urged, leaning down to kiss her tenderly. "I want to do a bit more work before I join you. I've let things slide the last few days. Can't think why I've been so distracted."
Yana smiled and squeezed his hand.
"However did I find you in all the worlds I could have gone to?" she asked with a grateful sigh.
"I know you looked long and hard, love," he said, half teasing, half serious, as he pulled the soft fur around her shoulders and kissed her forehead. "Remember, it'll be Ronan gets the source this morning."
"I did remember that."
"I'll remind you," he whispered as he left the room.
Closing the door behind him, Sean looked in on the twins before returning to the office cube.
Asleep in their new dual cradle, they looked as sweet and peaceful, as peachy and golden, as if they had never turned into little silvery seals. That trick of theirs this evening showed him that he would need to be on his guard with these two slippery characters. He was glad to see the cats had taken notice too. Marduk had planted himself across the twins' legs, making a living fur blanket, and Nanook and Coaxtl stretched out beside the cradle. Nanook opened one eye, and Sean nodded and closed the door.
He was glad that Yana had been too tired to take in the end of Shanachie Desi's song, where after seven years Murel changed back into a seal and swam out to meet her brother, neither of them ever to be seen again by her foster mother. It was nonsense, of course. That was a fairy tale told back on earth about a supernatural species, not a genetic mutation like himself. All of those stories involved seals temporarily turning into people and, when they became seals once more, never being able to return. They were wild creatures, not part of families like his. Of course if his children swam away, they would return. He always had, hadn't he? Becoming a seal was a gift, an ability, a talent, actually, that allowed him to do certain things others could not.
Still, he was grateful that Yana had not heard the rest of that song, and he hoped no one would ask her about it. She had enough to worry about without bringing in folk tales that had nothing to do with the mutation brought about by Shongili genetic engineering, accident, and Petaybee's own tendency to adapt species to its own needs. With the big cats for babysitters when he himself could not be teaching them about being seals, the kids would be fine; sure they would.
CHAPTER 4
Murel and Ronan were quite advanced in most ways. They learned to walk very early, and to run almost as quickly. By the age of three they could sit on the back of a curly coat without being held there. They started school when they were five, and learned to read and write, demonstrating their abilities by reading to each other at home. But by the time they were seven, they were in and out of trouble all the time, the mildest problem being that the teacher was unfairly suspicious when they kept turning in identical test papers written in nearly identical left-handed printing.
The teacher also noted in their student evaluation that Murel and Ronan did not reach out to befriend the other students, especially the newcomers, and spoke mostly only to each other unless asked to recite.
The truth was, they not only didn't reach out to newcomers, they didn't like or trust them much either.
"They come to our world because they're sick or other worlds won't have them, and act like they're better than us," Ronan told their mother.
"They're just scared," she said. "It's rough for them, you know. They realize that they're not as well adapted as you are, so they have to act as if they know more in other areas."
"I don't see why," Murel said. "If they were nice, we'd try to teach them stuff about Petaybee, but some of them, especially the older ones, are just nasty and mean. All they do is moan and groan about how bad the com stuff is around here and how they can't always depend on it to reference their lessons or talk to their friends wherever they were before they left. They want to know why we don't have a decent satellite so all the stuff that needs a satellite works better.
They don't care about learning about here."
When Ronan came home with a black eye and Murel with a cut lip, their father said,
"Fighting, were you? Murel too?"
"It wasn't our fault, Da. That Dino Caparthy is a bully. He's really big and he has a gang and they jumped Ronan-I mean all of them. I sorted-I helped Ronan sort them out and sent Dino away with a bloody nose, grabbing his bollocks with both mittens, but they're really a problem."
"So you did win then, did you?" he asked. They looked at each other, shrugged, looked back at their father and nodded. He said, "Well, good. I'll speak to their parents and teachers but I'm not sure how much good it will do. They came here from Romopolis on Mingus Prime. It was one of the earliest terraformed worlds and it's not in very good shape. The cities are filthy and the air has been recycled so many times inside the domes that you can cut it as quick as breathe it. Their folks applied to us so they could get their kids out of that environment to someplace more wholesome, and since they've skills we can use, we accepted them. But they're going to have to talk to their kids about cooperating."