Penny asked quickly, before the two of them could start going at it again. Honestly, they were really nice people but it was kind of annoying how quickly they forgot someone else was in the room and went into love-making mode!
“Oh, he was a young man we met on our travels—one of our guides on a previous expedition,” Rivas explained.
“His people were humanoid,” Y’lla added. “In fact, he looked like he could have come from Earth—well, except for his bright yellow eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human with yellow eyes. Have you, my darling?” she asked Rivas.
He shook his head.
“No. But other than that, he looked like a healthy young man when we first met him.”
“But then, when we saw him a year later, he had changed completely,” Y’lla said. “The poor dear had long gray hair and his lovely yellow eyes were nearly brown with age. His body was twisted and his hands were just arthritic claws. Oh, it’s almost too awful to talk about!” She buried her head in Rive’s shoulder again.
“He went through an anomaly?” Penny guessed.
“Yes—he went through a quick-time one.” Rive nodded, being careful not to dislodge his wife who was curled against him.
“It aged him eighty years in a second!” Y’lla said, looking up. “He was little more than a boy when we first met him and an old man, near death, the next time we met.”
“That’s awful.” Penny had to admit she felt shaken by the story. “But what happens if you end up in a, uh, slow-time anomaly?”
“Well, it depends on how slow it is. It might make your hour last a day or your day last a week or your week last a whole solar year,” Rive said thoughtfully. “I had heard of something like that happening to another traveler who was unfortunate enough to fly through a slow-time pocket. He said it felt like he was trapped in one spot for years and in fact, he was. When the anomaly finally passed through his ship—or his ship passed through it, whichever you like—he found out that twenty solar years had gone by on his home planet.”
“All his children were grown up and his mate had joined with someone else, thinking he was dead.” Y’lla shivered. “Just imagine—how awful!”
“Being stuck in one place for years or losing your entire family?” Penny asked. “Though I guess both would be pretty terrible.”
“Exactly. Which is why we’re so careful about our approach to Yown Beta,” Rive remarked. “No matter how low the odds are, we don’t want to risk flying through any anomalies.”
“I understand now.” Penny nodded. “Thank you for explaining it to me.”
“No problem, Penelope.” Rive and Y’lla both smiled at her. “We know how primitive Earth technology is and that your people haven’t had a chance to get much interstellar experience yet,” Y’lla said.
“Which is one reason I was so eager to go on this mission,” Penny said, smiling at them, though Y’lla’s words about Earth tech being “primitive” were a bit galling. Though she supposed it was true if you compared Earth tech to the Kindred’s advanced science.
“Well, we’re glad to have you,” Y’lla remarked. “Especially with your expertise in dealing with stone artifacts. Why, you know—”
“There it is—Yown Beta!” Rive interrupted his wife, pointing excitedly at a gray speck on the viewscreen.
“Really?” Penny squinted at the screen. “What’s that one, then?” she asked, pointing at another, greenish speck far from the gray one.
“Oh, that’s Yown Alpha,” Rive explained. “Yown Beta’s sister planet. They have almost the exact same mass and composition but they’re located at opposite ends of the habitable zone for this solar system.”
“While Yown Beta is a frozen waste land, Yown Alpha is supposed to be a tropical paradise,” Y’lla added. “But it’s pretty much uninhabited because a lot of the vegetation is poisonous—both to touch and to eat.”
“Oh, too bad,” Penny remarked. “It sounded like a nice place to visit until you said that.”
“It’s not our destination anyway,” Rive said, shrugging. “And speaking of Yown Beta, we’re not far from it now. We should be making orbit in less than an hour.”
“Oh! Penelope, you and I had better go put on our warm-skins,” Y’lla said. “We’re going to need them down there!”
They left the control area and went to the back of the ship. As she dressed, Penny felt an excited flock of butterflies taking off in her stomach. Finally, after crawling through space for a week to get to it, they had reached