Changelings by Anne McCaffrey Read Free Book Online

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.”
    “To hear Dino tell it,” Ronan said, “Romopolis is a wonderful funfair of a city, and Kilcoole is at the end of the universe and the bottom of the food chain. He said we were all so breaded our chrome was broken and we were mutes with scales.”
    “Is that insulting?” Da asked, looking puzzled.
    “What he
meant,
of course,” Murel said in a very careful and grown-up voice, “is that we are
inbred
and our
chromosomes
are broken so that we’re
mutants
on the
evolutionary
scale, but he’s too dumb to even know how to call people bad things.”
    Da looked like he was trying to keep a straight face and not smile. He liked it when they used big words, and because he and Mum used them a lot to talk about their work, Murel and Ronan knew how to say the words. And because they wanted to join in the conversation but had to keep asking what things meant, and Mum and Da always told them to go look it up—now—they knew what the words meant. Dino didn’t like that about them either.
He
was the real mute with scales.
    “And what inspired this lad to call you all of these things he couldn’t pronounce?” Da asked.
    “Nothing!” they both exclaimed, and Ronan continued, “It was just because we didn’t feel bad that the stupid game his uncle sent him won’t work here and because he thinks we should have great clattering halls full of fake stuff for him to play with. I can’t tell you what he called Petaybee but it had to do with shite and it wasn’t nice.”
    Da nodded, but whether he ever did anything about it, they didn’t know. Whatever he did, it didn’t work very well. After that, Dino only hit Ronan when he was sure Murel wasn’t around. The gang still said horrible, if garbled, things about them and the few other kids actually from Kilcoole, but they said it out of range of Murel’s fists, feet, and fingernails.
     
    I F THEIR TEACHER thought the twins were withdrawn, the track cats, Coaxtl, and the curly coats had the opposite opinion of them. It was everything the helpful creatures could do to keep the pair out of trouble. They were insatiably curious, absolutely fearless, and downright dangerous to be around sometimes.
    “They keep leaving their outer coats lying around on the riverbank where anyone can find them,” Nanook complained. The intrepid track cat was getting a little tired of playing nanny. Nevertheless, she dutifully turned around and used her hind paws to spray powdery snow over the snow pants and parkas the twins had carelessly left lying near their latest ice hole in the river before taking an afternoon dip in seal form.
    “It’s a very good thing for Sean and Yana that they aren’t exactly like the seal people in the old stories,” Coaxtl said, settling her white fluffy belly into the snow. She placed her huge paws with their tufts of fur between the toes on either side of the ice hole and watched with flicking fringe-tipped ears for fish swimming across the exposed circle of running water. The water was so deep and cold it looked black at this time of the year.
    “Do you recall the song sung at the naming latchkay?” Nanook asked.
    “Many songs were sung,” Coaxtl replied. “It was very