Tom's action. With a little swagger he faced the alien device. It flashed through the air, landing with a satisfying smack in Tom's hands.
"Come on, Tachy, time to go," he sang out, his round cheeks flushed with excitement.
Tach laid Zabb gently down, and leaped to his friends. Not a single relative made a move.
Tom handed over the device with an awkward little bow. Tach returned the salute. "Well done, Turtle. I knew you could do it."
He looked to Benaf'saj, made an elegant leg, winked, and ordered them home.
It was like being in the center of a vortex of nothingness. Icy cold and utter darkness, and for Tachyon the feeling that his mind was being torn into tiny, tattered streamers by the stress of holding all four travelers within the envelope of the singularity shifter.
By the ancestors, he wailed. At least let us land on dry land.
Tachyon crumpled, the device rolling from his nerveless fingers. Trips was squatting in a gutter holding his head in his hands, and muttering over and over, "Oh wow!" Tom retched a few times as his abused stomach tried to decide just where in space and time it was currently residing. There was a growing commotion, people yelling, windows being flung open, horns blaring as cars rolled to a stop, their occupants gawking at the tableau on the sidewalk. Tom dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, looked down at Tach, and quickly dropped to his knees beside the Takisian. Blood was pumping sluggishly from the long gash on his arm, and was running from his nose, and he was alarmingly white. The alien seemed to be scarcely breathing, and Tom pressed his ear to his friend's chest. The heartbeat fluttered erratically.
"Is he gonna be all right, man?" mumbled Trips.
"I don't know." Tom threw back his head, and stared up at a ring of black faces. "Somebody get a doctor."
"Shit, man, they just popped in from nooowhere."
"Teleportin' honkies. You think they be aces, or what?"
"Doctor, git a doctor," bawled a burly man.' Asta backed slowly away from the circle of spectators, her eyes searching quickly for the black ball. A couple of kids were inspecting the device, and she stepped to them.
"I'll give you five dollars each for that."
"Five dollars! Shit! It just be a bowlin' ball with no'holes in it. What good that gonna do you?"
"Oh, you'd be surprised," she said softly, and fished her billfold out of her dance bag. The exchange was quickly made, and she tucked away the alien device.
The howling of sirens presaged the arrival of the police and an ambulance. Tach was loaded in, and Tom started to climb in with him. "Hey, where's the gizmo?"'
Asta opened her mouth, blinked several times, and closed it. "Gee, I don't know." She peered about as if expecting it to materialize from the Harlem landscape. "Maybe somebody in the crowd took it."
"Hey, buddy, you want to get your friend to the hospital or not?" growled one of the ambulance attendants.
"Well . . . look for it," Tom ordered, and climbed in. Asta gave an ironic wave to the departing ambulance. "Oh, I will."
And Kien is going to be so pleased with this.
She sauntered away, searching for a subway station to carry her to the waiting arms of her lover and commander.
The padlock opened with a grating snap, and Tach pushed open the small side door to the warehouse. Trips and Turtle followed him into the echoing gloom, and Trips muttered something unintelligible at the sight of the ship resting in the center of the vast, empty building. The amber and lavender lights on the points of her spines glimmered faintly in the gloom, and dust spiraled in from all sides as she quietly collected and synthesized the tiny particles into fuel. She was singing one of the many heroic ballads that made up such a large part of ship culture, but cut off when she perceived Tach's entrance. The music was, of course, inaudible to the two humans.
Baby, he telepathed to her.
Lordly one. Are we going out? she asked with pathetic eagerness.
No, not tonight. Open please.
There are humans with you. Do they also enter?
Yes. This is Captain Trips, and Turtle. They are as brothers to me. Honor them.
Yes, Tisianne. I am pleased to have your names.
They cannot hear you. Like most of their kind, they are mind-blind.
Sorrow.
There was the ache of another kind of sorrow in his chest as he led the way to his private salon. Memory-it could be so