Anne McCaffrey - Twins of Petaybee 02 - Maelstrom

VIP免费
2024-12-07 0 0 647.84KB 252 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Maelstrom
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (1 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
Maelstrom
The Twins of Petaybee Book 2
By
Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann
Scarborough
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (2 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
Contents
|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|
|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24|25|26|27|28
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (3 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (4 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
DR. TONY AND JEANNETTE ROGSTADT, PHYSICIAN, VET TECH, AND
RESCUER OF MANY CRITTERS DOMESTIC AND WILD.
The authors would like to acknowledge the advice and support of their editor,
Shelly Shapiro.
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (5 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
CHAPTER 1
WAVING GOOD-BYE TO their parents and friends, their beloved river and
forests, to their home world, Petaybee, Murel and Ronan Shongili strapped
themselves in for another launch into space.
So soon! It seemed they’d only arrived home and now it was time to go again.
It’ll be great fun, sure it will, Ronan assured his twin sister in thought-talk. We’ll
see new places, meet new people, make new friends—
I’d have liked a bit more time with the old places and old friends nevertheless,
Murel complained. But here we are again. It feels as if we never left. She looked
around the lounge of the Piaf, a luxury liner much larger and more sophisticated
than Kilcoole, the tiny village that was home. The lounge alone was as long as
Kilcoole’s main street and could have held eight of the village’s largest building,
the latchkay lodge, inside.
Except for that, Ronan said, with a meaningful nod at the one big difference in the
lounge since their last trip.
Since they’d traveled from school back to Petaybee less than three short months
before, the small saltwater tank had been replaced by an enormous one that
dominated the lounge and dwarfed its occupants. Now the tank held a single Honu,
the sentient sea turtle that was the sacred totem animal of their friend Ke-ola. The
tank looked vast and empty despite the energetic game of tag between the Honu
and Sky, the twins’ river otter friend. On the return journey, if all went well, the
tank would hold many more—and even larger—Honus traveling with their people
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (6 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
to what would become their new Petaybean home.
During takeoff, the ship’s owner, Marmion de Revers Algemeine, and Captain
Johnny Green, its commander, remained on the bridge. Marmion’s friendship had
helped their family, their village, and their planet countless times over the years.
The twins had known her all of their lives, and by now she knew their most
important secret, as well as their father’s. Many people on Kilcoole knew but very
few outsiders. Johnny was not an outsider, since he’d been born on Petaybee.
When the time had come for him to leave the Company Corps, he had chosen
service with Marmie over life on Petaybee, but he was Petaybean all the same.
Ronan, Murel, and Ke-ola watched the liftoff from the lounge’s viewport and the
bank of screens that flanked it. Ke-ola was the reason for their current journey—
and the reason Ronan and Murel were using thought-talk. They didn’t want him to
overhear their complaints and get the idea that they hadn’t wanted to come.
The actual sight of Petaybee receding to a cold white and gray ball seemed no more
real than its image on the screens. The cabin’s pressure and gravity were so well
maintained that the ship might have still been on the ground. They could not hear
or smell or taste the passage, or feel it in the wind that was not there. They felt no
sensation of lifting or moving.
The water in the tank didn’t so much as slosh, but the Honu and Sky swam to the
side to watch the departure. Then Sky tagged the Honu’s shell and they began their
game afresh.
The twins and Sky had become swimming friends before they were sent away to
Marmie’s space-station school. When they returned, Sky was waiting to help them
find their missing father, even though Da had been lost at sea where river otters
didn’t ordinarily go. For their sake, the otter had even allowed himself to be
transported in a helicopter, which was how he, as the first and only otter of any
kind to inhabit Petaybee’s skies, however briefly, had earned his name: Sky, the
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (7 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
sky otter. Murel hoped that now that the little fellow was going into space he
wouldn’t want to change his name to Space. She’d just got used to calling him Sky.
As soon as the ship was free of Petaybee’s gravity, the twins and Ke-ola
unstrapped and raced to the tank to swim with the Honu and Sky. Ke-ola climbed
the ladder to the top of the tank. The ladder had a staging platform on the top and
was situated right beside the wide waterslide that ended in a shallow pool from
which the water was recirculated into the tank. Sky and otter-kind in general loved
to slide. Also, when it came time to remove the Honu from the pool, the slide
would allow the tortoise to descend to the smaller pool without injury.
Murel clambered up the ladder behind Ke-ola and pulled off her clothes so that she
wore only the harness holding the tiny bag containing her dry suit. A passing crew
member would have seen a brief flash of white skin and dark hair before she dived
into the water. Instantly she transformed into a silver-brown seal and streaked
through the water after Ke-ola, Sky, and the Honu. A moment later they were
joined by Ronan, also in seal form.
The water was saline to suit the Honu, but it didn’t smell or taste quite right to the
twins. No fish, for one thing. Still, it felt wonderful to be wet again. They dived,
surfaced, splashed, tackled, were tackled, escaped, and dived again until Sky
suddenly said, “River seals, look!”
He swam to the front of the tank where Marmie stood. She was saying something
as she looked up toward the top of the tank.
Ke-ola, who had to go up for air more frequently than the others, was on the
surface. He dived again, touched each of the twins, and pointed toward the top of
the tank. Then with a pump of his arms and a thrust from his muscular brown legs,
he shot upward.
Sky streaked past everyone and flung himself through the opening at the top of the
tank that formed the lip of the waterslide. Hah! he cried. Otters first!
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (8 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
Ke-ola surfaced almost at once, followed by the twins. At the bottom of the slide
they jumped onto the wet deck and shook themselves dry until they resumed
human shape. A privacy screen installed beside the pool provided cover for them to
pull their dry suit packets from the harnesses on their backs and pop into the suits
before joining anyone else who happened to be in the lounge.
When they came out, Ke-ola and Marmie were sitting in bright cushioned chairs,
sipping from tall drinks on the table between them. Sky sat on another chair,
grooming his coat. A pot and four cups for tea sat on the table, along with a plate
of chocolate biscuits. When Murel picked one up, she found it was just-baked
warm.
Marmie smiled as they approached and took the other two chairs. “Ah, mes petits, I
am sorry to interrupt your play, but we need to talk.”
“Certainly, Marmie,” Ronan said, sitting erect and using his best manners. Marmie
had changed out of the white, fur-trimmed snowsuit she’d worn on Petaybee into a
long skirt made of many colored patches of smooth and textured fabric that looked
as soft as the coat of one of Clodagh’s cats. With it she wore a long-sleeved
turtleneck the color of the deepest part of the river on a sunny day. The fabric
shimmered from midnight blue to steel gray with flashes of silver and cobalt.
Around the high collar was a copper torc in the shape of a clamshell. Now and then
Sky looked up from his preening to peer at the neckpiece.
“What’s the matter?” Murel asked.
“Oh, nothing! But some of your fellow Petaybeans had questions about why you,
mere children, only recently returned from school, were chosen for this mission
instead of adults still able to travel. Do you two also have such questions? Or any
others?”
“It’s okay, Marmie,” Ronan said, with a quick glance at Ke-ola, who seemed more
interested in selecting a biscuit.
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (9 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
Maelstrom
“Well, actually…” Murel said, hesitating. She didn’t want to appear reluctant to
help, but after all, Marmie was giving them the opportunity to speak up. Who knew
when another chance would come? “I do wonder about one or two things.”
“Yes?” Marmie asked, cocking her head and leaning forward slightly, her light
exotic perfume flavoring the recycled air of the lounge as if a few flowers had
blossomed there.
“I don’t think I know why exactly you need us to come. Ke-ola can tell his people
about Petaybee and that it wants them to come and live there. They’ll believe him
before they’d believe us, surely.”
“Yes, chérie, but Ke-ola is not yet considered a Petaybean. It was very difficult to
convince the Federation that Petaybee is not only a sentient planet but that people
who live there for any length of time acquire a symbiotic relationship to the world.
People died—”
“Laverne!” Ronan said. “Liam’s mum. The Corps arrested her and she died when
they took her offplanet for questioning. Bunny and Diego have a really sad song
about it they sing at latchkays sometime.”
“Yes, and your mother and father fought very hard to convince the company that
removing your people from Petaybee and taking them elsewhere would be fatal to
them. Ultimately they and other scientists were able to provide enough scientific
evidence that the Federation recognized officially what you grew up knowing
about Petaybee. The board feels that only people native to the planet have a unique
interest in fulfilling Petaybee’s wishes.”
“And they—the Federation—think that if we are symbiotic with Petaybee, we
won’t want to do anything that goes against what Petaybee needs because it’s what
we need too, is that right?” Murel asked. “Because it isn’t really about wishes, you
know, Marmie. Clodagh says we don’t always understand why Petaybee requires
what it requires, but it doesn’t ask much of us, so when it does, we should pay
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20...%20of%20Petaybee%20Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html (10 of 252)6-8-2007 22:36:39
摘要：

Maelstromfile:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%2Book%202]%20-%20Maelstrom.html(1of252)6-8-200722:36:39MaelstromMaelstromTheTwinsofPetaybeeBook2ByAnneMcCaffrey&ElizabethAnnScarboroughfile:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Anne%20McCaffrey%20&%20E...s%20of%20Petaybee%2Book%202]...

展开>> 收起<<
Anne McCaffrey - Twins of Petaybee 02 - Maelstrom.pdf

共252页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：252 页 大小：647.84KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-07

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

高考理综 人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 252
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注