Second Wave by Anne McCaffrey Page A

she was extremely exploratory, she had been penned in a special environment with playthings that taught her skills the Friends found it useful for her to have, though she had learned far more than that. She had learned quickly to watch and listen but not touch any of their devices or instruments without being invited. Someone told her once not to touch things, and that was all it required. She stopped exploring tactilely beyond her play environment, and soon she was released from it.
    So the technicians paid her no heed, something much to her advantage.
    She noted that on the wall where all time and events were laid out in a sparkling mural of coded light, there was one area devoid of light or movement. In fact, a large X had been painted over it. It looked broken and incongruous next to the rest of the sleek equipment.
    “Pity,” the nearest technician muttered aloud, then turned his body very slightly to bounce his remarks off the technician beside him, if not to open an actual dialogue. “Too bad we can’t send someone in there to repair it, but the Khleevi monsters caused great damage. We cannot arrive after the damage is done using our apparatus because it is broken beyond that time and we can’t arrive before it’s broken or risk meeting the monsters ourselves. The only way to do it would be by using one of the personal timers the nobles wear, but they’d never entrust one to a lowly technician.”
    Narhii wondered why that was.
    “They wouldn’t be able to stand the inconvenience of not being able to flit about from now till then till once upon a time as they choose. We run this entire system and yet when the new model became available from the homeworld, were we given any, even to study in case it needed repairs?”
    “Not on your life!” a fellow technician answered.
    Narhii found all of this very interesting. These fellows seemed to resent the noble Friends almost as much as she did.
    Technician number 2 continued. After all the years she’d spent among them, Narhii had no clear idea of which one was which or what any of their names might be, if they had mates or interests aside from maintaining the time mechanism. The nobles, the scientists, were very colorful, bursting into alternate forms frequently and dressing in vivid colors and sweeping robes when in humanoid form. The technicians could have been siblings, and although some bore female secondary sexual characteristics, all had short hair, wore uniforms, and were of similar size. She saw the time technicians most frequently, but sometimes around the city she would see others repairing or installing other devices.
    One of the females spoke up, “It would have made sense, when Grimalkin fell and was stripped of his timer, to allow us to study it so that we might produce more, but no, into Milady Akasa’s jewel box it went, and there it has remained, neglected and useless.”
    “How do you know she put it in her jewel box?” one of the others asked.
    “One of my batch sibs services her suite,” the female answered.
    Batch sib? Here was another mystery and where she least expected it, among the dull technicians. A sib would be a brother or sister but why “batch”? Why not simply family or group, or even litter, as some of the smaller animals produced?
    Who was this Grimalkin and why was he stripped of his timer?
    As if she had asked aloud, the female continued. “Shame about Grimalkin, really. I always liked him.”
    “Females do!” one of the males said.
    “No, not that way. But sometimes when he was in trouble, he would switch to his cat form and lie beside me while I worked or rested. I found it very soothing. And his antics were entertaining. He annoyed the other nobles even more than they sometimes annoy us.”
    “Hush! That’s heresy. The nobles are not annoying. We are merely inadequate to understand the nuances of their needs at times.”
    “Oh please! You lot from the last batch are insufferable now, believing everything they