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Elanie and the Thing by Winter

* * * * * * Prologue - New Arrivals * * * * * *

Life returned to the city.

At first, only a few tiny creatures scuttled this way and that, darting in and out of the abandoned houses. The hardy ones; the tough ones. Those who not only survived, but thrived in the new paradigm.

The shadow dwellers, the lords and ladies of the underground.

For millennia, the insects ruled this once mighty metropolis, carrying out their not-so-glorious duty of cleaning up after its former residents.

And while they appreciated all the soft and edible things that Humankind had left behind, they never once stopped to admire the tall spires, the beautiful decorations and the works of art that slowly fell into decay around them.

Pragmatic, purposeful, persistent, the bugs paved the way for the next of kin.

The first warm-blooded creatures to return were all small to medium-sized; rodents, felines, birds, canines. Once the radiation had died down to no longer lethal levels, these were the ones who moved in. The larger animals stayed out of the city, the ones who could not fit easily into houses and apartments.

Of course, they were no animals that the long-gone humans would have easily recognised. They were changed; sturdier, craftier, moving with a kind of careful calculation that truly sentient beings would have found eery.

The insect cared very little, they simply moved deeper into the shadows and went by their lives.

The newcomers did, to some extent, appreciate the remnants of technology. Here and there an observer might have witnessed a band of cats poking through the intestines of a car engine, as if to try and figure out what it was, and what had once made it work. Elsewhere birds could be seen, staring at old billboards as if contemplating their meaning.

'Less fat, less calories', what could that mean to a bird?

Generations after generations passed, an endless string of centuries during which time nature worked its never-ceasing magic on the new city-dwellers, aided by the remnants of radiation that never quite seemed to reach what was once called background levels. Changes started coming more and more rapidly, changes in both intelligence and appearance.

The city and its wonders of technology had never been built for animals, so the animals adapted in the easiest way possible; by becoming more and more human-like. Sooner than one might think, they fit in so well that the city just might have been theirs all along.

They knew better, however. The city's former inhabitants had left behind so much documentation of themselves and their lives, that the animals could not help but learn and mimic. They began to walk and talk and almost act like their predecessors.

* * * * * * Part I - Elanie * * * * * *

The car screeched to a halt outside one of the city's tallest buildings, a skeletal tower of iron that reached for the clear summer sky. Before it had stopped completely, a lithe figure leapt out through the rolled-down window. She turned over in the air and landed on her two feet, striking a pose with her long, bushy tail stretched out behind her. Elanie was of a humanoid build, but her short greyish-brown fur and her slightly over-sized front teeth betrayed her ancestry; she was a squirrel, or rather she was of a race that had once been squirrels.

"Will you watch the paint?" the driver yelled after her, even as he stepped on the accelerator and sped away. "Crazy girl!"

"Whatever!" she called back, rolling her large, brown eyes. "I didn't even touch your precious paint."

"See ya tomorrow," came a voice from the back seat of the car as it passed by again on its way back. "Good luck!"

Elanie shook her head and sighed. The wish for luck was about as sincere as that car's paint was original. She had been coming here for over four seasons now, ever since she had found the thing last summer and managed to make it work. So far, no luck. Maybe there was none to be had. Maybe all her friends were right, and there simply was nobody out there.

"If I believed that," she muttered to herself as she walked briskly across the open plaza in front of the building, "I would have wasted four whole seasons of my life. That would be crazy."

Almost as crazy as talking to yourself, girl, she answered inside her head. She kept quiet during the last stretch of open ground. This was the part that made her jittery every time; she simply didn't like open spaces with no cover above her. A throwback, some of the others would call her, a flashback to the ancient times when her kind always had to watch the skies for danger. The squirrel's fear of the hawk still lived on in her.

And even though she knew that there were no flying birds in the city, and no birds at all that would attack and eat her, she stiil felt nervous. But of course, nothing happened. Very few people of any kind lived in this area, and those who did remained mostly underground. Like the one she needed to see before she did anything else.

Would he be there? There was no way of knowing; his kind bothered very little with keeping time. In fact, most of them didn't seem to fully understand the concept. They knew that night followed day, that spring followed winter. They even understood the general idea of counting the days and the seasons, although they never cared much for it.

"Why all this planning?" Elanie asked herself as she jumped over the rusty gate leading down into the tunnels. Her voice, his words, as clear as if he walked there beside her right now, speaking them. "You can't know what happens when the sun rises, so why decide in advance? You should just live it."

"Because you gotta think ahead," came a raspy voice from just behind her. Elanie jumped, and almost dropped the satchel she was carrying. "You gotta make sure you know what you're gonna do."

"Like you even understand that," she puffed, her heartbeat slowly returning back to normal. "And why do you keep scaring me? It's not funny!"

"I find it somewhat amusing." He clicked his pincers in a mockery of laughter that made Elanie shudder. "And it shows I can plan ahead. I knew what day you would come, and I knew where I would find you."

"Fine. You're a real calendar. Now give me my tool."

"Do you have the vegetables? Are they fresh?"

Elanie said nothing, but set the satchel down. He opened it and peered inside, then let out a series of clicks that she knew meant happiness. One of his many arms swished behind his back, a movement so swift she could barely see it, using so many joints and sharp angles that her poor limbs ached sympathetically. The tool looked perfect; a steel cylinder that tapered off to a cone at one end, and had a pair of clippers at the other. She tried them, then returned his happy clicks.

Over their many seasons of co-existing, insects and mammals had more or less learned each other's languages, even though they would probably never truly understand one another. What they did understand, however, was trading. The underground dwellers had developed a knack for working with metal, and often sold gadgets and gizmos for surface-grown food. Both sides always felt that they cheated the other in this trade, and so were almost always happy.

Elanie's tool-making friend had no name, like all of his kind. He was a 'he' in name alone, as he belonged to the vast majority of the insect-people that were genderless, but he preferred to be addressed as male when they talked. They were as much friends as ever an insect and a mammal, which really only meant that they traded well, and from time to time enjoyed each other's company. Very few ever met across the special barrier, and then almost exclusively for trade.

They spent a few minutes bringing each other up to date. Elanie told him about her work on the thing, and the insect told her about some of the things he was constructing for her. He also explained how to use the soldering iron, and clicked happily as she gave him a few extra carrots for the clippers. They had not been part of the original design, but added as an afterthought. Then, without really saying good-bye, since that was another concept the insect could not fully understand, they parted.

Elanie left the tunnels and walked the last few hundred metres to her tower. She liked to think of it as hers, since nobody else ever used it. As for why that was, she didn't know, but it suited her just fine. Once inside, she did what she always did, and took off her clothes, stuffing them into her satchel.

Maybe, she thought, this was another throwback thing. She had always felt better naked, as if her body were stuck in a time before the need for warmth morphed into a need to protect one's modesty. It wasn't a sexual thing for her to be naked, even though she had found it thilling the few times she had shared this secret with somebody.

* * * * * * Part II - The Thing * * * * * *

It lived on the top floor of the tower, the object she had been working on for so long now. Over the past seasons it had gone from puzzle to hobby to obsession, and even more so now that she knew that it worked. Elanie had no word for it, none that she had been able to find in the ancient texts on technology. True, many books and manuals had vanished or decayed over the endless seasons that had passed, and so much knowledge had been irrevokably lost.

Still, it irked her to not have a proper name for it. She could make something up, but that felt like cheating. So, for better or for worse, it remained the thing. Unique among all the trinkets salvaged from the city's founders.

Even after all the time she had spent working with it, Elanie didn't really know how it worked. For months and months, she had tweaked and tinkered with it, re-routing wires and replacing diodes, anything she could think of that might bring it to life.

Throwback or not, she had always been good with technology, almost as if the feral side, the squirreliness in her, also brought out the tinkerer. Nobody else understood machines as she did, and nobody cared about them like she did.

Elanie loved her gadgets and trinkets, and one day just after midsummer, the thing returned her love.

She had believed for a while that the magnetised membrane on its left side was a loudspeaker, kind of like the ones in her friends' fancy cars. Much less sophisticated, even primitive, and as far as she could tell it wasn't hooked up to any kind of music or video player. It seemed to be a loudspeaker with nothing to say.

So she had treated it as such, fixing it up as best she could and then connecting it to the solar panels on her building's sides. It was a grand day when she finally fired it up, with not a cloud in the sky. She wished she could have shared the moment with someone, but none of her friends were the least bit interested. The only one who might have cared was her insect friend, but like all his kind he didn't care much for leaving the tunnels.

What happened when she turned the thing on, almost made her wet herself. Without any music player, Elanie had expected dead silence, but instead the loudspeaker came to life with a crackling hiss. After the initial shock, she had soon managed to find a wheel inside the thing that acted as volume control, and another one that seemed to regulate the hissing. For lack of better words, she named them noise regulator and hiss regulator.

The following couple of weeks had been little but trial and error. She found out that the long string of steel wire attached to the thing's backside, which she had thought to be a kind of decoration, had a lot to do with the hissing. If she removed it, the hisses all but died away, and when she unrolled it and hung it out the window there was almost, almost a kind of clarity to the noise. Every now and then she thought she could hear something coherent, not really a voice but a kind of regular up-and-down movement in pitch.

It was maddening, and exciting at the same time.

Then, two weeks ago, came the voice, and it scared her so badly that she stayed away from the building for almost two whole days. Longer than ever, after she had discovered the thing.

Elanie had been toying with the steel wire, holding it up in the air as if trying to catch the hissing in a butterfly net. And by accident, she had dropped a length of it out the window. The end of the wire touched the tower's slightly rusty iron body, and it happened. The loudspeaker crackled to life behind her, and a male voice spoke, as clearly as if the speaker had been standing right behind her.

"...eating..."

She had screamed loudly, and dashed from the place without even turning the thing off. Several streets away from the building, she had stopped to put on her clothes, panting hard and with her heart beating like crazy. She had never, ever been so scared, not in all her life. Right then and there, she decided to go back there some night when the solar panels didn't work, and smash the thing to pieces before it frightened her again.

Curiosity soon won out, though, and she returned to the tower a couple of days later. The thing had been quiet again, and no matter how much she tried, she couldn't get the voice back. In the end she had climbed out of the window, relying on her natural agility and sharp claws to keep her from a fatal fall. Her tower was one of the tallest buildings in the entire city, and certainly the tallest where she could easily climb on the outside. All the others had smooth surfaces and straight angles, but here there were plenty of footholds.

She climbed up to where she was level with the ceiling inside, then wrapped the end of the steel wire around one of the tower's many iron bars. Immediately there was a loud crackling noise from inside. This time she was ready for it, and she wasn't nearly as scared as she had been before.

Over the next week or so, the voice had returned a couple more times, never for more than a few seconds at a time, and never really coherent. She thought that she could make out words now and then, but they didn't make much sense. One of her friends, Ante, who was very good at reading the old texts and who spent as much time in libraries as she did with her technology stuff, explained that part to her. The language they all spoke was a kind of mixture of words from the past, a blend of languages that nobody from the old days would even understand.

This news had excited Elanie to no end. What if she had found a true human voice? Some kind of recording inside the thing that had held up against time and decay, so that she could hear it? All records and videos that she and her friends played on their modern music machines were recently made, no more then a few hundred seasons old. This voice could be from way before time even existed!

This day, despite the increased ridicule from people she did not consider friends at the moment, she felt optimistic. Today she was certain she would find new clarity and new meaning in the voice. She would put her new soldering iron to good use, and with the added bonus of the clippers it would be much easier. If this worked, she would bring her tool-maker a crateful of carrots.

Ten minutes later, she hung by the claws on one hand, while using the clippers with the other. A stray thought dashed through her mind and escaped as a giggle, despite the fierce winds this high up; what if someone who had binoculars were watching her right now? They would see a butt-naked squirrel girl, on top of one of the tallest buildings, busily demolishing a forest of steel rods and wire vines. What would they think of her?

The artificial forest, as she had named it, sat on top of her building. Dozens upon dozens of thin metal rods pointing towards the sky, with steel wires hanging randomly between them. She had thought the whole thing was nothing but decorations, but after the steel wire on the thing's backside had worked so well, she now felt sure that this would do even better.

She had soldered the thing's wire to several of the ones hanging up here, and now she was cutting them up and attaching them to the metal rods. Maybe, just maybe, they would help her find the voice again, just like the building's iron exterior had. Why she thought metal would help, she couldn't really tell. It was a gut feeling, and she had learned to trust those when it came to mechanical things.

Once she felt sure that she could do no more, she took the soldering iron between her teeth, then nimbly slid down the outside of the thing's home and in through the window. She paused for a moment or two, to flatten her fur and give her tail a couple of brush strokes. She always fluffed up when it was windy, and this high up it was always windy.

Her hand was shaking badly as she reached for the thing's on-button. Part of her didn't want to do it, to keep the mystery alive and exciting rather than risk revealing something disappointing. Because she had been having new thoughts over the last few days, thoughts that were both disturbing and exhilarating; what if the voice was no recording? What if it came from a real, living human being? As excited as she had been over the idea, as let down she had been by her friends' attitudes. Only Ante had seemed mildly interested, even though he had kept to his claim that no humans could possibly be alive after all this time. Elanie had felt discouraged, but only for a moment. Then her ears had perked and she had stood as tall as a squirrel ever could.

"Well, I don't believe that!" she proudly announced. "I know what I heard."

She repeated those words to herself now, as she hesitated one last time. What if she were wrong? What if she were right? Either way, this would be a deciding moment. She had done all she could, and whatever came next was out of her hands.

Her hand suddenly steady and her breathing even, she turned the thing on.

* * * * * * Part III - The Voice * * * * * *

At first, there was nothing but silence. Elanie's lower lip trembled, and she felt close to tears before she realised that the noise regulator was turned way down. Slowly, she raised the volume until the crackling and sputtering was at a comfortable level for her twitching squirrel's ears.

Was there greater clarity to it? That was impossible to tell; every now and then she thought she could hear a click or a hum inside the static, but nothing that resembled the voice she had heard before. She glanced at the other button, the hiss regulator. So, should she turn it left or right?

"Heads or tails?" she yelled out, almost startling herself as she performed a mental coin toss. But instead of waiting for her imagined coin to reach the ground, she spun around and hugged her bushy brown tail. "Tails!"

Now the only question was; did tails mean left or right? Elanie sucked in her lower lip and chewed gently on it, racked by indecision. Then she closed her eyes thinking that if she couldn't see what she was doing, the choice would be random.

Nothing happened as she spun the regulator to the left, except for the usual changes in tone of the hissing. She reached the furthest left position, feeling both angry and confused. Had she done it all wrong? Would she have to go back outside and solder some more?

Or was there no voice? Had there perhaps never been one except for inside her own head? Tears streamed down her cheeks as she spun the hiss regulator rapidly towards the rightmost extreme, and that was when she heard it again.

Even though she had hoped, wished, longed, for the voice to return, it startled her so badly that she was halfway to the stairs before she regained her composure. As she tip-toed back to the thing, her tears had changed from sad to happy.

"...an... ....e...r... ...if... ...aower..."

Those were words, lost inside the hissing, Elanie just knew it! She tweaked the regulators, then gasped as the voice reached a kind of clarity she had never before heard, not even in the recorded songs of her own kind. Her excitement peaked to a level that was almost sexual in nature, and she felt her cheeks burn.

"Hen te? Ca you hen te?"

The words sounded like questions, but they made no sense to Elanie. Then again, she had hardly expected a human to speak her language. If, of course, the speaker was human. The voice talked fast, with hard consonants and quick burst of vowels, while Elanie's speech was more drawn out, relying as much on shifts in pitch and intonation as on the words themselves. It was almost, she thought, like the difference between a wild dog's barks and a wild cat's meows.

"Panties, panties!" Suddenly, Elanie's jaw dropped, and she burst into surprised laughter. Surely he hadn't said... "Panties, panties!"

No, she must have heard wrong! But then the words were repeated once more, and she fell over laughing, rolling around on the floor while clutching her sides. The greatest moment of discovery ever since the animal folk had started trading with the insects, and the voice was asking for her underwear! It was unbelievable, impossible! Ridiculous!! It must be some kind of language barrier problem, some kind of...

"Panties, panties!"

"I'm not wearing any!" Elanie gasped between bursts of giggles and fits of laughter. Feeling almost giddy by the absurdity of it all, she rolled over onto her back and held up her legs, spread wide so that no part of her remained hidden. "See? No panties. I'm naked!"

"Kam it aower. Hello, panties!"

"Hello yourself," Elanie squealed, now laughing so hard that she almost lost her breath. "Wait, wait, I'll find them."

She crawled over to her satchel and dug through it, pausing for a new fit of laughter as the voice kept repeating its request. Once she had found her panties, one of her favourite pairs with white cotton and pink lace stripes, she slipped them on and returned to the thing.

"Aower, aower, kam it!"

"I've put them on now," Elanie said, knowing fully well that the thing and the speaker could not hear her. "Is that okay or should I wear my shirt as well? Can you stand looking at my boobs?"

"Panties, panties, kam it!"

"Do you want them?" She took them off again and held them up to the loudspeaker. "Hello?"

"Bakk morroe. Out, panties."

"What!?" Elanie shrieked. "No, pleae don't go! Talk to me! I'll bring you more panties, dozens of panties, just talk to me!"

But there was no use. The voice was gone, and it did not return no matter how many times Elanie spun the hiss regulator from right to left, then back again. She cried a little, feeling as if a friend had abandoned her, but then she sat up straight, gasping as the realisation hit her. She had understood what the voice had said! 'Back tomorrow.' She was sure of it.

Joy welled up inside her, and she danced her way down all the stairs once she had switched the thing off. She didn't even bother to get dressed, not until she had passed a couple of wide-eyed fox kids playing at the edge of the plaza. They giggled as she waved to them, then dashed off into an alley. Possibly to tell their friend about the crazy squirrel girl who ran around naked in the heart of the city.

That was when she began to return to her senses again. She hurriedly got dressed, smiling to herself as she felt the soft fabric of her panties against her private parts. For luck, and maybe also because she was feeling so out-of-her-head excited, she gave the front of them a couple of rubs. Not enough to really arouse, just to get a nice warm feeling inside.

"Panties, panties!" she yelled, not really caring if anybody heard her or what they might think. She took a couple more dance steps, then started running towards home. "Panties, panties!"

* * * * * * Part IV - Understanding * * * * * *

"You must have heard it wrong. Or maybe the recording's faulty."

"Look, I know what I heard. And I'm tellin' you, that is not a recording!"

"But how can someone talk out of a music player?" There was a tone of impatience in Ante's voice, as if he were explaining something obvious to an obstinate child. "It's just not possible."

"The thing is not a music player. It doesn't have a disc player or anything. I don't know how, but that guy's voice is getting in through the metal rods on the roof."

"Sounds silly. So why would he be askin' for your panties?"

"I don't know."

"I'm telling you, you misheard it. Maybe he's speaking some language we've never heard of."

Elanie sighed, feeling at her wits' end. No matter what she told her friend, he simply would not believe it. Talking to a real, living human being lay so far outside his imagination that he couldn't even consider it.

She was lying on a tree branch in one of the city's many parks, while the slender feline figure of her friend lay resting against the tree trunk a couple of metres above her. They had been talking back and forth for over an hour, neither giving way nor convincing the other. She was on the verge of stomping out of the park, but if only she could get him to tag along. The voice had said it would be back tomorrow. Then he would hear it, too.

Refusing to let Ante's stubbornness win out, she spent the night with him. The feline boy had made his home in the house at the far end of the park, and Elanie really liked the place. It wasn't tall like the tower where she kept the thing, but it was still huge. An old stone house that was both comfortable and kind of fun. When they were younger the two of them, along with whatever friends were close by, had played hide-and-seek in there. Elanie firmly believed that nobody could ever have visited all the rooms in the house, there were just too many of them.

They did not make love that night, not so much because they were at odds with each other as because Ante was currently courting a feline boy who lived down by the river. She and Ante had been friends since they were little, and on-and-off lovers for almost as long, but whenever one of them had something serious going, the other stayed away. Not that she had had many boyfriends, but Ante was often in a relationship or two, even though they never seemed to last very long.

In the morning, Elanie more or less begged him to come with her, and with a sigh as if making a huge effort, he gave in. The two of them dashed through the streets of the city, occasionally greeting some friend or other, and pausing once at a food place to eat a morning meal.

The sun had reached half midday when they got to the plaza, where Elanie stopped to scan the sky. Ante rolled his eyes, but played along in this little habit of hers. A bit away, a group of tiny fox kids pointed towards them and started chanting 'panties, panties'. Elanie waved at them, and they disappeared into an alley leaving only giggles behind. They were just about to make their way over to her building when there was a clicking sound behind them. Elanie spun around and was treated to a very rare sight. Her insect friend, out in daylight.

"Hey!" she greeted him, giving him a quick hug that he did his best not to shy away from. "How come you're out and about?"

"I just..." He glanced warily at Ante, but seemed to relax when the cat smiled at him. Elanie had told both of them about the other, but this was their first meeting. "I wanted to know if it worked satisfactorily? The soldering iron?"

"Perfect! And the clippers, too. You're a genius." He clicked happily, which encouraged her to go on. "Wanna come and see how I've put it to use? Now that you're already up above ground, I mean."

He clicked nervously, but when Elanie promised him that they would stay out of the sunlight most of the time, he trudged along across the plaza. This was the first time Elanie had got a really good look at her underground friend. He looked a lot less than an insect than she had imagined from the brief glimpses in poor lighting she'd had. Most of all he resembled a short, chubby boy, but with a black chitinous shell rather than skin and fur. His face was what was most bug-like, with its long pincers and multi-facetted eyes; that, and his many arms.

Watching him climb the stairs was an eye-opener. Elanie and Ante, like most of their kind, thought that the insects were a slow and patient kind, living out their entire lives in just a few hundred metres of their gigantic network of tunnels underneath the city. Yet here he was, speeding up and down and urging them on with his clicking voice, often getting down to use some of his arms as extra legs. He seemed really eager for knowledge, now that he had crossed the line into the upper world.

They spent about an hour checking the thing and dicussing it. Elanie and the insect immediately fell into technical jargon, and Ante found himself a bit outside the conversation. Instead, he walked up to the window and looked out over the city. In the distance he could see the park where he knew his own house lay, and just below he could see the river as it curved its way through the city. He also saw a sight that brought a smile to his lips; his favourite place in the whole world. The library.

Ever since he was a little kitten, Ante had loved the books and the texts, and the stories they told. As a child, he had not been able to discern fact from fantasy, and had found equal thrills in both fairy tales and history books. By now he had read almost a thousand books, but even though it felt as if he possessed more knowledge than he could ever need, he knew that he had still only read a fraction of all the books the library held. Even if he spent all his life in there, he would never be able to read it all. It was a sobering kind of thought, yet sad at the same time.

The familiar sense of resignation held him for a minute or two, then he moved around the room along the windows, following the river as it rounded Elanie's tower until it snaked away into the horizon. Ante had never been this high up before, and now he regretted not visiting Elanie before. The city was truly beautiful when viewed from above. He spotted the house where Manny, his current lover, lived, and even though he felt silly doing it, he couldn't help but wave.

As he completed his tour around the room, he came across a section of wall where there were no windows, but rather lockers of some kind. Elanie's voice coming from behind him told him that they couldn't be opened. She and her bug friend had turned on the thing and were searching for the voice, but Ante wasn't really interested. The lockers had caught his attention, and awakened his natural curiosity; something Elanie would have teased him for if she hadn't been so busy.

One by one, he tried the locker handles, but none opened. The strange thing was that he couldn't find anything that looked like locks. There was no place where a key would fit, and certainly no padlocks or anything like that. A brief spell of imagination swept through his mind, as he envisioned some dying humans, ages upon ages ago, using the last of their strength to crawl inside the lockers and seal them from inside. The thought made him shudder, and he moved away from there.

He then spent a little time listening to Elanie and her interesting friend. Ante had never seen one of the insect folk before, and was fascinated by how similar they seemed, despite their different appearences. All three of them walked on hind legs, but could get down on all four if need be, to gain speed. Also, they seemed to share the same curiosity and fascination with the old days and the old ways. One of the major differences, though, he thought as he looked his new friend up and down, was that the insects seemed to have no need for clothing. Obviously, someone with no gender would have no bits that needed hiding.

The insect and Elanie had removed the thing's plastic casing, and were gently examining all the stuff inside. Most of it was cables, almost as if they had gutted some strange technological creature and were studying its intestines.

All the technology soon bored him again, though, and he completed another turn around the room. Then he was back at the lockers again. He dismissed his first, dark thought. Surely they would have smelled any dead bodies? What if someone had stored away things that could be of value? Ante had always loved going on treasure hunts, rummaging through old discarded things to find something that might turn out to be useful.

Once more, he examined the lockers carefully, but he could find nothing that showed how to open them. Maybe it had been so obvious that no instructions were needed. Maybe it was just him, being stupid. Then he noticed that there was a tiny crack right beside the handles, too thin and too wide to be for any kind of key. Carefully, he pulled off a thread from his tattered shorts, and pushed one end into the crack. To his surprise and delight, there was a faint hum as if something had moved in there.

"Hey!" he cried out, startling the other two. "These things are electrical!"

For the first time in over four seasons, something other than the thing occupied Elanie's mind. She was holding a flashlight to the opening of the crack, and watched as Ante inserted his thread again. A small piece of machinery slid down from out of sight, and fired a beam of light against the thread. Then, apparently unsatisfied with the result, it slid back up.

"It's a laser," she whispered. "Kind of like in a disc-player. It checks if you have the right key, or whatever, then opens if you do."

"Have we got anything that might function as key?" her insect friend asked, clicking excitedly as he tried to peer into the crack. "It must be very narrow, no wider than a leaf folded once."

"I doubt a leaf would work as key," Elanie muttered, rubbing her chin in the way she always did when something was puzzling her. "It needs to be something unique, that the machine can recognise as the owner's."

"A library card," Ante said, his ears perked and his fingers tapping against the cool metal of the locker door. His curiosity was getting one over on him. "Kind of a plastic thing. They used them in the old days, to show who borrowed books."

"That's it!" Elanie jumped to her feet, then hugged the cat boy. "You're a genius!"

"I doubt you can find any, though."

"That, my friend, is where you're wrong! It so happens that... Meep!"

"Panties, panties!" The voice made all three of them jump, and once more Elanie had to pull herself together before she reached the stairs. "Eating aower, eating panties?"

"Digesting clothing?"

The insect's puzzled words set Elanie off into a fit of laughter, and Ante joined in. All three, in their respective ways, laughed long and hard as the voice repeated its request to 'digest clothing'. In the end Elanie managed to stand up, and she moved over to shut the thing off. She had other things on her mind now, namely the lockers.

"Wait!" Ante cried out before she could touch the button. "You're right, it makes sense!"

"It sounds..." The cat listened to a couple of repetitions from the voice, his face scrunched up with concentration. "It's not 'eating', it's reading. Reading tower."

"Tower? Could that be... could that be us?" Elanie suddenly felt dizzy, and she leaned against the table the thing stood on, trying not to fall over. "Is he really... calling for us? But what does 'reading panties' mean?"

"The old name," the insect said, his voice subdued and almost free from clicking. "The old name of the city sounded something like that."

"Like panties?"

"Almost. I cannot pronounce it, but almost like panties."

"How do you know that?" Ante asked, sounding almost annoyed over the fact that there was knowledge that had eluded him. "It's in none of the books I've read."

"It's everywhere. My people share knowledge that has been passed down through generations, ever since we first came to the city. The name is written all over, but not in letters like in your books. Old writings, older than anything that remains."

"And it's called 'Panties'?" Elanie felt as if she were about to start giggling and wouldn't be able to stop. "We live in Panties?"

"No, it's different. Like I said, I cannot pronounce it, but it has more of a growl to it."

"Aower, kam it, kam it. Aower spond."

"Tower, come in, come in," Ante and Elanie helped each other translate. "Tower respond."

"They truly are communicating," the insect almost whispered. "This machine is for talking."

"How do we respond?" Elanie squealed. "How, how?"

"Waves," the insect replied. "I remember old tales. They used waves, I think electric waves, to talk to each other. Our race remembers that. Sometimes they could feel the waves through the air and through the ground."

"But how do we make electric waves?" Ante thought out loud. Elanie had started shouting at the thing, but to no avail. "Maybe it's broken."

"What is?"

"Whatever we're supposed to use for making electric waves."

"Wait, waves!" she suddenly cried out. "Waves! Do you mean vibrations? The loudspeaker works with vibrations in a membrane, so does a recording device! A microphone!"

"You mean like people sing in, to record songs? That's all we need?" This time it was Ante's turn to feel dizzy, and he sat down on the floor, staring at the thing. "They're real? And we can talk to them?"

"Yeah! All we need is a microphone."

"Manny's sister has a lot of recording stuff, maybe she has one."

"Is Manny your new boyfriend?"

"Yeah." Ante got to his feet and headed for the stairs. "I'll be back soon, it's not far from here!"

* * * * * * Part V - Communication * * * * * *

Elanie and her insect friend stayed silent for several minutes after Ante had left. Meanwhile, the voice kapt calling for them every now and then. It sounded, now that Elanie really thought about it, almost bored. As if it had been calling for a long time and no longer expected a reply. She wondered what the speaker looked like. The humans she had seen in pictures looked a lot like the animal folk, only with flatter faces and very little fur. Had they changed over the aeons? Would they look scary?

"Why was he wrong?"

"Huh?" Elanie had been so lost in thought that it took her a couple of seconds to realise that her friend had broken the silence. "Who's wrong?"

"The one you call Ante. You said he was wrong, before the voice made an interruption."

"Oh yeah, I forgot!" She ran over to a walled-off compartment inside the big room, where she rummaged through a couple of drawers. "I've got cards, all kinds of plastic cards."

"Where did you find then?" the insect clicked as he curiously examined one of the small plastic rectangles. "I have not seen things like this before."

"Actually, they can be found all over the place. I'm kinda collecting old stuff, and I like these."

"Shall we try them or wait for your friend?"

"Let's try them!"

It was frustrating work. The two of them divided Elanie's collection between themselves and started pressing them into the cracks of two locker doors. It seemed to take forever for the machinery inside to check and reject each card, and Elanie soon grew impatient. For Ante, she knew, the slow progress would have been close to unbearable. She had gone through half of her pile of cards, when there was suddenly a loud beep coming from beside her. The insect clicked excitedly and pointed to the door with several of his hands. It was slowly swinging open.

Ante swung his bag over his shoulder while he gave Manny one last kiss, and another for good measure. Then he reluctantly let go of his dark-furred boyfriend's hands and started running back towards Elanie's building. In the satchel, he had three different microphones, and he felt certain that at least one of them would work. It had taken some time to persuade Ninna to lend him them, and only with Manny's help had he managed to get all three. They were both under a death threat now, in case any of the microphones were damaged.

While he trotted along near-empty streets and narrow alleyways, his thought were still back there with Manny. In the past, Ante had not been very good at making relationships last, and even when he had been head-over-heels in love it had always ended after a little while. Maybe it was the fickle nature of the tomcat, or maybe he just hadn't found the right mate yet. Until now. The two of them would last for life, if he had anything to say about it. Even now, when they were parting just for a few hours, Ante still wanted nothing but to turn around and head back, and to bring Manny up to his top floor apartment where they would make lots of fun and noise.

His train of thought was interrupted as he crossed the smaller open space on the back of Elanie's tower. He gazed up its slender iron structure to the large circular room at the top, where they kept the thing, and he almost thought he could see movement behind the windows. The fox kids spotted him again and started up their 'panties, panties' chant, but they ran away squealing when he hissed at them. As he dashed up the long, narrow stairs, his heart was pounding rapidly inside his chest. And not just because he had been running.

"Ante, nice of you to join us," Elanie said as he burst into the room. She had an uncharacteristically smug look on her face, and her tail was wagging almost like a happy canine's. "We decided to wait for you, even though the microphone's all set up and ready to go."

"Huh?" was his only reply, as his jaw dropped. "What?"

Elanie was holding a microphone that looked to be in far better condition than any of Ninna's, and she was grinning widely at his surprised look.

"Where...? How...?"

"Waiting bored us," the insect said, clicking happily. "So we decided to open the lockers."

"There was... there was a microphone in there?" Ante's vision of dead humans returned to his mind's eye, and it took him a second or two to regain his composure. "A working one?"

"There's all kinds of neat stuff in them, but we don't have time to investigate them now. Let's go!" Elanie pressed the 'record' button on the microphone and spoke into it. "This is the tower speaking. Can you hear me?"

It had taken her and the insect almost an hour to connect all the wires of their lucky find to the back of the thing, but they had made it. The final soldering had been in place even as they heard Ante's rapid footsteps coming up the stairs. If he had been any later, she thought, they would have found it hard to wait for him.

There was a couple of seconds of near-total silence in the room after Elanie had sent her greeting out to... who knew where? All three of them held their breaths in anticipation, listening to the low hissings coming from the thing. Then the voice returned, clearer than ever.

"Dusting peach. Please hole."

Elanie felt the tension leave her as a giggle, and Ante joined in. She reached down and rubbed the front of her pants, and her feline friend turned around and rubbed his own backside. 'Please hole,' indeed! They both fell over, rolling around on the floor while laughing until their sides hurt. The insect kept looking from one to the other, apparently puzzled by their behaviour. Then the thing made a crackling noise, and all three immediately turned their attention to it.

"Speech adjustment complete. Can you understand? Repeat, can you understand?"

"W-we understand!" Elanied squealed, her voice breaking. Then she remembered the 'record' button, and pressed it. "Yeah, we understand. Who are you? What's your name?"

"Irrelevant. This is a computer-generated voice. Please stand by your radio until an operator is ready to communicate."

Elanie stood there with her mouth hanging wide open. Her knees were trembling, and she thought about joining Ante, who had already sat down on the floor. His green eyes were wide, and his lips kept twitching into a smile.

"A computer..." she whispered. "A talking computer..."

Elanie knew all there was to know about computers, except of course how to make them work. The animal folk had studied and managed to repair lots of technological things, but computers had always turned out to be too complicated and too heavily damaged. Through the old books and texts, she knew that the computers were supposed to have been quite wonderful machines, capable of doing almost anything their operators could think of. To any mechanically inclined animal folk, computers had an almost mystical aura about them, and to think that she would find one, even speak to it...

She staggered over to Ante and sank down by his side. The two of them held each other in a tight embrace as they stared at the thing, waiting for the computer voice to return. Meanwhile, the insect rummaged through Ante's satchel and found some vegetables. After a nod from the cat boy, he started munching on a carrot. The other two shook their heads as he offered them a treat. Even though Elanie was kind of hungry, the excitement would have made it impossible for her to get anything down. And poor Ante was probably worse off.

"Tower, please respond."

"Meep!" Elanie hopped to her feet and dashed over to the thing, pressing the button on the microphone. "I'm here! We're here!"

"An operator will communicate with you now."

Elanie tried to think of something to say, but all she could do was to open and close her mouth. Ante made a grab for the microphone, but she pushed him aside. This was her thing, her project, and she would at least make first contact.

"Hey there, tower," came a new voice. It was higher in pitch than the computer's had been, and Elanie's first thought was that this speaker was a boy. It might have been a woman, but something about the tone and the slight touch of raspiness made her think of a young teenaged boy. "So glad to finally hear from you."

"N-nice to hear from you, too," Elanie managed, inwardly cursing herself for sounding so lame. "Uhm... who are you? Not another computer?"

"No, I'm not a computer." He laughed, a boyish-sounding giggle that made both Elanie and Ante smile. "My name is Sammy, you could say I'm the computer's boss."

"Wow, hehe, that's so cool." Elanie winced and bit her knuckles. This was not the way a first contact should be made! "Uhm, where are you calling from? Are you in the city?"

"Better sit down, my friend. I'm calling from orbit around Saturn. The view is quite nice."

"Saturn? The planet?" Elanie heard a thud as Ante sat down, or rather fell over. It took her an effort of will not to join him on the floor. Her mind's eye filled up with visions of astronomy books she had read, of a huge dust-coloured sphere with magnificent rings. "Oh, wow."

"And you're in the tower. We've been sending to your radio for over a decade. What happened, was it broken?"

"Yeah, it was. I've been working on it for four seasons, almost a full turn. I just heard your computer's voice a little while back."

"What is your name, my friend?"

"Huh?" The sudden change of subject threw Elanie off track completely. She had just been ready to boast a little about her mechanical skills. "M-my name is Elanie. My friend Ante is here, too, and our third friend doesn't have a name."

"Elanie, I'm very pleased to meet you. And your friends as well. But I need you to tell me something now." There was an urgency in the voice now, a kind of tenstion, as if Sammy dreaded the answer. "What happened to the Earth?"

"Happened? I don't understand..."

"Our long-range scans show a severe drop in population, and there are no radio or telelvision broadcasts, no wireless communication of any sort that we have been able to detect. Has there been some kind of disaster?"

"Not that I know of," Elanie answered meekly. "But... uhm... I kind of don't understand what you mean with wireless communication and that stuff."

There was a long silence, and the three of them kept looking at each other. Elanie finally gave in to her trembling knees and sank down next to Ante, microphone still in hand. Disaster? Drop in population? Saturn? Part of her wanted to throw the thing... the radio... out the window and watch it smash on the plaza below, then go home and sleep for a week. Ante summed up her thoughts quite well as he whispered into her ear.

"My brains hurt."

* * * * * * Part VI - A Mystery * * * * * *

The silence kept dragging on, and soon Elanie began to worry. Had she said the wrong thing? Had something else gone wrong? She glanced out through the window and saw a bright blue sky, which meant that the thing had power. So why wasn't Sammy talking to them? His words about disaster scared her a little bit, and she couldn't help but think that something was terribly wrong. Ante, she noticed, was frowning and looked to be deep in thought. She nudged him with her foot and gave him a quizzical look.

"I just don't understand..." he began, then seemed to lose his train of thought. It took another nudge before he started talking again. "I can't understand why Sammy's lying. Why would he do that?"

"Lying? What do you mean?"

"Oh, come on, Elanie! You know that Saturn is far, far away. Like, millions of miles!" He pointed at the thing. "If that's really a radio, it would take many minutes, maybe even hours, for your voice to reach Saturn. And for his to get here. Get it?"

"Oh." The insight felt a bit like ice cold water running down Elanie's back. She shuddered. "But we talk like he's in the next room. So what's up with all that?"

"I don't know. It might just be some prankster, or someone trying to sound important."

"But the computer? It really sounded like one."

"How would we know?"

"Well, it was kind of machiny. All business-like." They both fell silent for a little while, then Elanie couldn't hold in the thoughts that were aching to burst out. "But what was that thing about a disaster? About... about no radio and people dropping and all that."

"I just don't know," Ante sighed, then he turned to the insect. "What do you think?"

"There... was..." Elanie looked up at her friend, suddenly frightened. She had never heard him sound so subdued, so uncertain of himself. He was staring out through the window as if lost in thought. "There was... some kind of happening. The lights. The lights that killed. And they went into hiding. Underground."

"Who did?" Elanie asked. "Who went into hiding?"

"My people. My ancestors. They hid from the lights underground, when everything else died." He glanced down at the floor, shivering slightly. "So long ago, the memory is almost gone."

"Was that before us animal folk came along?" Ante whispered, his eyes wide. "When the... when the humans disappeared."

"Yes. I think... I think the lights killed them, too."

"Enough!" Elanie jumped to her feet, her instincts telling her to run as far away from the tower and the thing and Sammy as she could possibly get. Instead, she grabbed the microphone and pressed the button. "Sammy! Sammy, tell us what's going on! You're scaring us!"

Tears were running down her cheeks, but she calmed down a little when her two friends closed in against her sides, giving her some comfort. Over the next few minutes, she kept calling for Sammy, but to no avail. Almost half an hour had passed before the loudspeaker hissed into life.

"Elanie, are you still there?"

"Sammy! Yes! Yes, we're here!"

"Elanie, there seems to be something terribly wrong. Can you tell me about yourself. About your history."

"History?"

"Please," her insect friend interrupted, holding out a hand to her. "May I borrow the microphone?"

"Okay..."

"Sammy?" the insect asked, and Elanie noticed that he kept his voice as free from clicking as he possibly could. "Sammy, are you a human?"

"What?" For the first time, Elanie thought that he sounded slightly out of control. "What kind of question is that? Of course I'm human."

"Sammy, neither of us is human. In fact, there are no humans left here in..." He spoke the city's name, which still sounded almost like 'panties' to Elanie. "Your kind left long ago, or perished."

"H-how?"

"I am not sure. But there were lights, killing lights. My kind went into hiding for many, many seasons. They came out when the lights died away, and then the animal folk came, too. The memories are almost gone."

"Confirmed," Sammy answered, his voice a bit higher in pitch than before. "Our star charts don't match, and the solar scan shows that... that over a million years have passed since this ship left Earth."

"Your ship?" Elanie asked, after taking the microphone back from the insect. "You're on a... a spaceship?"

"Yes." There was a brief silence. "Elanie, I think we need to..."

"Why do you say you're at Saturn?" Ante called into the microphone, which he had wrestled away from Elanie. "You can't be, there's no delay!"

"Are you Ante?" Sammy asked. Ante nodded, then remembered that the other couldn't see him, and gave his affirmative over the radio. "Ante, have you ever heard about sub-space?"

"No."

"It's not easy to explain, I don't fully understand it myself. But it means that we can fold space, and send things like radiowaves, light or microwaves through the folding. That way we can communicate instantly, even over a distance of lightyears."

"Oh." Ante grinned sheepishly. "Sorry. I just..."

"It's okay. May I speak to Elanie again?"

"I'm here, Sammy. What were you gonna say? What do we need to do?"

"I need to go away for a little while. Can you return to the tower tomorrow, as soon as the sun is up?"

"Sure! I'll sleep here!"

"That won't be necessary," Sammy laughed. "But please come back tomorrow. We need to investigate this further."

* * * * * * Part VII - The Starling * * * * * *

Elanie didn't sleep at all that night. She had declined Ante's invitation to join him and Manny, feeling that sex would be every bit as impossible as sleep. Her thoughts were back inside the top room of her tower. Why did they have to wait? Why couldn't he tell them what was wrong right away? Maybe he didn't know.

That thought scared Elanie more than anything else. Sammy was a human, a creator of technology! There shouldn't be anything he didin't know! Unless it was really, really bad. Would he blame them, the animal folk, for what had happened to Earth? To his fellow humans? A shudder went through her as she pondered what kind of fantastic or terrifying weapons his starship might have.

Eventually she must have fallen asleep, though, because suddenly Ante was shaking her awake. She sat up and rubbed sleep out of her eyes, protesting mildly as he started helping her into her clothes. Then she remembered yesterday, and she was out of Ante's house before she was even fully dressed. The cat joined her a little while later, kissing Manny goodbye a couple of times before they took off running towards the tower.

"He gave us some food," Ante said, grinning as he held up a small bag. His eyes sparkled and went slightly out of focus. "He's so sweet."

"Yeah, great. Thank him from me, will you?"

"Oh yes."

"Not like that!" Elanie laughed. "A hug will do fine. What you do when the lights are out, I'm not sure I wanna know."

They met up with their insect friend at the edge of the plaza, and Elanie was so excited by then that she totally forgot to look for birds of prey. To the tune of a distant chorus of 'panties, panties', they reached the tower and started climbing the stairs. Elanie was the first to reach the round room, and she was still panting heavily from the run as she turned the thing on. Forgetting the others, she started pulling off her shirt, but immediately changed her mind when she heard Ante's footsteps coming up the stairs.

"Whew," he breathed as he sat down next to where she was standing. "You're fast."

"No Sammy yet," she said, drumming her fingers on the bench. "Are we early or late?"

"Early, I guess. Though how can you tell? When's morning in space?"

"When you wake up, I guess."

"Or when you turn on the lights."

"Or..."

Two things happened just then, that interrupted Elanie's musings about time in space. First, the insect walked up to her and touched her shoulder with one of his many hands, clicking excitedly. The second thing that happened was that a low humming noise began to fill the room. Elanie first looked at the thing, but it was as quiet as before. The noise grew until she could feel her teeth clattering from the vibrations. The insect grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the window. He had to shout in order for her to hear what he was saying.

"Please come! I think you might want to observe."

Ante hopped to his feet and joined the other two, but Elanie forgot about him, about the insect, about the thing and the voice and Sammy and her tower and everything, as she glanced out the window. Her jaw dropped, and only her curiosity kept her from fleeing, or fainting. She wasn't sure which lay closer to hand.

It was as if a cloud had drifted in front of the sun; even though the sky was clear and blue, the light grew dim in the round room. It took Elanie's stunned mind a few seconds to realise what her eyes were seeing, and when it finally did she first gasped, then screamed.

Outside, a huge object was slowly turning its broadside towards the tower, while it sank lower and lower until they were at a level. The room's three occupants fell into a hushed reverie, not really noticing that the humming noise had grown almost unbearably loud. This was something that nobody in the city had seen since times long forgotten, something that insects and animal folk knew only from lore or literature. A flying machine.

"It's fantastic," Elanie whispered. "So beautiful."

She had meant to shout for the others to hear, but her voice caught in her throat. Ante still nodded, and she realised that the humming had ceased. The two of them began to laugh, accompanied by the insect's clicks of delight. Elanie's eyes were wide, as if she tried to look at all of the machine at once. It truly was beautiful, she thought as she let her gaze wander from aft to stern, then back again. The machine was sleek, a narrow metal tube about half as long as the tower was tall, with pointed ends and a pair of small wings sticking out its sides. She could see no engines, nothing that would explain the humming. At least, she realised, nothing that looked like the pictures of plane engines she had seen.

"Please step back from the window," Sammy said over the radio. "We're sending over a walkway."

A small section of the ship's hull slid back with a soft whoosh, and what looked like a metre-wide metal board slid over to the window. Elanie had a sudden memory of pirate stories and walking the plank, but she shook them aside and opened the window. The plank came to a stop a mere inch from the windowsill.

"Come on over," Sammy said. "We can't wait to meet you."

"Come on!" Elanie squealed excitedly, tapping the others' shoulders. She hopped up onto the plank and started crossing it. "Let's go!"

"It does not look very safe," the insect clicked, but he did let Ante help him up. "I do not really enjoy this."

Elanie's heart was pounding rapidly inside her chest, but it had very little to do with the height. She was used to climbing, even as high up as the roof of her tower-top room. No, it was the excitement, the almost fearsome thrill of discovery that made her knees tremble slightly. She stared down the length of the machine, and almost gasped out loud as she realised that she was looking at writings. No letters that she could really recognise, but still, writings. The ship's name, she thought.

The three of them entered a small, square room, and as soon as Ante's swishing tail was inside, the door closed behind him. For a moment, there was a dead silence, then the computer voice made Elanie jump.

"Please wait for scanning process to end." She looked around, but could not see where the voice was coming from. There was light coming from a glass panel in the ceiling, and it changed to a slightly redder tone. "Scanning initiated."

"Scanning?" Elanie whispered. "Are they watching us?"

"Watching for germs and stuff, I think," Ante said. "I've read about how diseases could spread in the old days, when..."

"Scanning complete," the computer interrupted. "Bio-readings green. Physical anomalies detected, but safety procedure overridden. Radiation levels unacceptable. Please discard all clothing and personal artefacts, then proceed to the next room."

"They wanna see us naked?" Elanie giggled nervously. "How come?"

"Radiation levels unacceptable. Please discard all clothing and personal artefacts, then proceed to the next room."

"That was a slick way of explaining," Ante snorted as he stepped out of his pants. Elanie couldn't help but glance over at him; it had been a few seasons since she had last seen him naked. "You're a really lean-mouthed guy, aren't you?"

"Question perceived as rhetoric or ironic."

"Try both."

Elanie listened as Ante tried a couple more times to rile the computer, but recieved nothing but the same toneless response. What a fascinating thing, she thought, until she realised that she was still fully dressed while the other two were already leaving the room. She hadn't even noticed it when the inner door opened. As fast as she could, she tossed off her clothes, deciding against joking about panties, then she followed her friends.

The next room looked exactly like the first, but as soon as the door had closed behind them, a small table slid up through the floor in one corner. Elanie looked at the various bottles that stood on it, then picked one up. There were more writings that she could not read. From the walls, nozzles appeared that started spraying them with nicely warm water.

"Please wash carefully," the computer said. "Use all the detergent bottles."

"You think we stink?" Ante asked. "I bathed this morning."

"Odours and previous cleanings are irrelevant. This procedure is staged to minimise radioactive contamination of vessel."

"You mean this ship?" Elanie asked as she opened a bottle and smelled the liquid inside. "What's its name? I couldn't read it."

"This vessel is designated as the Starling. One of six orbit-to-surface vessels currently operational aboard the Nest."

"Nest is the mothership? And this is like... like a lifeboat?"

"Affirmative, though the analogy is quite crude."

The Starling... The name sang like a melody in Elanie's mind, and she could easily picture the ship as a small bird, flying in and out of a large nest. She had stepped directly into the spray from one of the nozzles, and hummed softly to herself as she rubbed some kind of soap into her fur.

Washing took quite some time, not only because it had to be done with four different soaps, but also because the insect didn't know much about cleaning himself in a shower. His kind, he explained while the other two helped scrubbing his chitinous shell, very rarely doused themselves with water, but had other ways to stay clean.

Once they were done cleaning the insect, Elanie and Ante set about washing each other's backs. The every-day feeling of the task made her forget where they were and why they were showering, and her mind slipped back to other showers she had shared with the cat boy. She found that she was getting aroused, and she playfully let her fingers slide lower and lower on his back, until she was cupping his buttocks. He slapped her hands away with a giggle, but when they returned he pushed back against the touch.

When they were done with the last of the bottles, they moved closer together and let their hands roam all over one another, to get every last bit of soap out of their fur. Elanie kissed her friend's cheek when she felt his fingers move in between her legs, touching her in a way that made her see stars. To return the favour she rubbed her palm against the underside of his erection, gently closing her fingers around it so that she could slide the foreskin on and off his tip. It only took a couple of moments for them to reach climax, then they hurried to wash their hands. Ante tried to kiss her lips, but she turned her head so that he only found her cheek.

"Save the deeper stuff for Manny," she giggled while the shower nozzles slid back into the wall and a table with towels and clothes on it appeared. "This was just a bit of fun between friends, as always."

"I almost forget sometimes," he whispered. "You're so pretty. I thought so eight turns ago, when we first kissed, and I still do."

"I was only twelve then, you naughty kitty."

"And I was even younger." They rubbed noses affectionately. "I stll care a lot about you."

"Your mating ritual is quite fascinating," the insect said, clicking in a way that Elanie knew meant dry humour. "But you really should get dressed."

The two of them blushed, as neither had remembered that they weren't alone in the shower. They hurried to get dry, then put on their new clothes; light blue one-piece suits that covered everything but hands, feet and head. There was one for the insect, too, modified to fit his many arms, and despite his protests they helped him into it. As soon as they were done, the inner door opened, and a boy who had to be human entered.

"Sammy?" Elanie asked, her voice suddenly unsteady. "Sammy, is that you?"

"Ya." He held out his hand, but not to shake theirs as Elanie first thought. Instead he handed her two small objects. "Ere. Need thee."

"What are they?"

"For you ees." He pointed to his own small, furless ears. "In ees."

Ante also accepted two of the curious-looking little things, and he immediately slipped them into his ears. Elanie looked at Sammy, who also had something in his ears, and she thought she understood. Once she had them in place, she heard Sammy's voice again as he spoke to the insect.

"I'm sorry we have none for you yet, my friend. We have never encountered someone with your physique before."

"I understand, I think. You are not too difficult to understand when you speak slowly, and I will ask my friends to translate when I need to."

"Very good." The human turned to face the others. "Are they working?"

Elanie nodded, smiling. She was not surprised to see that Sammy's lip movements didn't match his words. Translating devices. She shouldn't have been as surprised and impressed as she was, she realised. After all, she should have know from the start that Sammy's speech would be more like how the computer had spoken at first. She poked the translators a couple of times, to make sure they stayed in place.

"They're made for our ears," Sammy said, "but they should fit you pretty well."

"They're amazing," she said, then stretched her hand out towards the human. "Hi, Sammy."

"Hello, Elanie." He smiled back at her when they shook hands. "I must say you don't really look like I imagined at first."

"I can understand that," she laughed. "Neither do you."

* * * * * * Part VIII - Sammy * * * * * *

It was true; he did not look like the images that had floated through Elanie's mind when she first heard him talk. For a start, he looked older. His voice sounded like that of a young teenager, yet the tall, slender man who stood before her looked almost fully grown. Elanie thought that it was difficult to guess the age of a human, having never met one before, but she estimated him to be around eighteen. Maybe a year or two younger, maybe a little older.

What struck her most was his smooth skin. It was pale, almost milky white, and with almost no fur. She could see a dusting of fine, short hairs on his arms, as he wore his blue one-piece suit with the sleeves rolled back. Other than that, the only fur she could see were two light strips of fine hair above his eyes, and a mop of long, golden blond hair on top of his head. It hung down to his shoulders, and she thought it suited him very well.

"Let's go inside," he said, touching her arm with his hand and steering her out into a well-lit corridor. "I want you to meet my crew."

"Are there many of you?"

"Only two of us aboard the Starling."

He smiled, showing even, white teeth. Elanie noticed that his blue eyes lit up when he smiled, and she felt a jolt of something not entirely unlike electricity shoot through her. When she opened her mouth to speak, she couldn't form words. Her heart fluttered, and all she could do was to smile back. Was she falling for this person, this human? Could that really be possible, just seconds after meeting him?

"How does your ship fly?" the insect asked, shaking Elanie out of her reverie. This was a question she had wanted to ask, herself. "I saw no rockets and no jet engines."

"Orbit-to-surface vessels operate with electro-magnetism," came the computer's voice, seemingly from out of nowhere. "Basically, the Starling glides on your planet's natural magnetic field."

"Basically, right," Ante muttered. "Does that thing know everything?"

"The Nest's data banks are quite comprehensive, spanning most written texts on science, technology and history."

"It's also a bit of a know-it-all," Sammy said, making the others laugh. The corridor made a turn, and he opened a door to their left. "Here we are."

The Starling's control room was a surprisingly large space, with instrument panels and screens to one side and what looked more like a lounge to the other. A girl who looked to be a couple of years older than Sammy got up from a soft armchair and came to greet them. She, too, was tall and slim, and had the same long, blond hair and sparkling blue eyes. Elanie thought at first that they were siblings, but then she felt a pang of pain in her heart when the girl kissed Sammy's lips.

So it had been stupid to even think of it. Of course it had been! Why would someone like him want someone like her? A strange furry creature he had found on a world where he had expected to meet his own people? She bit back a sob and cursed herself for being such an idiot. Love at first sight, that was more of Ante's thing, wasn't it?

"Elanie?"

"Huh?" She looked up and saw the human girl smiling at her. Next to her stood Sammy, with a worried frown on his forehead. Obviously, Elanie had missed something. She faked a laugh. "Sorry, I must've been thinking. All this is quite new to me."

"I wanted to introduce you to the Starling's pilot, Sarah." Elanie shook the girl's hand, and tried her best to smile. "She also happens to be my twin sister."

"Your..."

Elanie fell silent, then a genuine smile spread across her lips, and she even gave Sarah a brief hug.

Late that evening, after a delicious meal prepared by the computer, the five of them sat in the control room's lounge, still talking about their different lives. The two humans never seemed to tire of hearing how life was in the city, and how the animal folk and the insect led their lives. They, in turn, were absolutely fascinated by the concept of space travel. Even things that Sammy and Sarah thought were just every day life, made Elanie and Ante gasp for breath, while the insect clicked excitedly.

"So what happened?" Ante said, interrupting stories that had begun to get repetitive. "How come a million turns have passed since you left, yet you're still alive?"

"Not us," Sarah answered. "This ship left Earth about three hundred years ago. We, and our parents and grandparents, were all born aboard the Nest."

"Like a colony?" the insect asked. "A mechanical colony?"

"Exactly. Only, it happened that way by accident."

"The Nest's mission," the computer explained, "was to rendez-vous with previous colonising vessels at the Sirius system. There are three planets there that are suitable for human lives, one of which had been decided as fit to be colonised."

"So what happened?"

"Data insufficient. The incident in question most likely damaged the Nest's sensory equipments, and definitely its propulsion."

"We were left drifting in space," Sammy said. "It took us all this time just to make it back home."

"But how come a million turns have passed," Elanie asked, "and not just three hundred?"

"We may never know. It might be a relativistic effect, from travelling at high speed. Our honourable computer has another idea, though."

"Let's hear."

"A possible explanation might be a chance encounter with a point singularity. The gravitational distortion would explain both the vessel's sustained damage, the loss of sensory input and the temporal displacement."

"A point what?"

"A tiny black hole." Sarah shook her head. "It's hard to believe, but it's the best theory we've got."

"It really doesn't matter, though," Sammy said, his blue eyes suddenly filled with worry. Elanie had to suppress a desire to hug him. "What does is, that we're here. The Nest holds two hundred and fifty-four humans, and we had all hoped that our journey was over."

"Isn't it?" Elanie asked. "You're home, aren't you?"

"Yes, but not to a home where we can stay. Whatever happened to the people, the humans, on Earth, had consequences."

"What do you mean?"

"The level of radiation outside this vessel is harmful to humans," the computer said. "Calculations guarantee the entire crew's demise within three solar years."

"Radiation?"

"Whatever happened, if it was a war or an accident or a natural phenomenon..." Sammy fell quiet, and Sarah finished his sentence in a whisper. "It took the Earth from us. The world is yours now."

After that, the evening seemed to come to an end. Sarah stood up and offered their guests rooms for the night. Both Ante and the insect followed her, but Elanie chose to linger in the control room. Before they left, the cat boy caught her eye and winked, making her blush. She grinned back at him and gave him a brief thumbs-up.

As soon as she was left alone with Sammy, though, her courage seemed to falter. She wanted to talk to him, not about Earth and black holes and journeys through space, but about them. About him and her. About her feelings that had continued to grow during the evening, up to a point when it was almost painful not to kiss him. Yet no words came to her, and so she walked over to the control panels.

"I don't think I could ever learn how to fly a thing like this," she said, almost biting her tongue. "I mean, I can't even drive an ordinary car."

"You could still fix a radio," Sammy said, moving up so close that their shoulders touched. "That's more than I ever could, I'm hopeless with electronics."

"Sammy?"

"Yes?"

"What will you do now?"

"I don't know. The Nest will expect us back tomorrow, then I guess we will make repairs, and head for Sirius again." He sighed. "It's the only choice we have."

"But will those planets still be there?"

"Long range scans say so." He reached reached up with one hand and stroked her cheek. The touch was very gentle, but it still made her shiver. "Elanie?"

"Yes?"

"I know it might not seem proper to you, but... I mean, all we have might be just this one night, and... I think you felt it too, right? The attraction? If we should...?"

"I'm glad you asked."

She kissed him on the lips, then took his hand and let him lead her towards his bedroom. It was small, almost cramped, and the bed just barely had room in it for the two of them. Comforts were far from their minds, though. They made love three times that night, and in between they talked, getting to know one another to a point where it felt to Elanie as if they had been best friends all their lives. By the time the sun was rising outside the ship, she felt sure of what she had hardly dared to think the previous day. She loved Sammy, loved him with all her heart. Seeing him go would break her.

"Elanie?"

The name-question came as a surprise to her. After their third bout of love-making, the two of them had laid cuddled together in silence, just enjoying each other's company. It had been a nice silence, where Elanie had been able to almost forget what the new day brought, and instead pretend that the moment would stretch out into forever. But now it was broken, and she sighed as she leaned back to look at Sammy.

"Yes?"

"There is a solution."

"To what?"

"Us."

"What..." she began, but her breath caught and she had to start over. This time her voice was a mere whisper. "What solution?"

"I think you know."

For a long time, she just lay there, staring into his deep blue eyes, then a smile spread across Elanie's lips. She nodded.

* * * * * * Epilogue - The Squirrel and the Stars * * * * * *

Elanie nodded to herself, ticking off the last box on her clipboard. The Starling's and the Robin's final flights to Earth had brought the last of the needed supplies, as well as a few surprises. She stood on a runway looking out over the Nest's gigantic cargo deck, and watched as workers began to unload copper wires, steel cables and bars of raw metal that would be used for the final repairs.

Another door in the Starling's hull opened, and a row of figures trooped out, looking around at all the new. Elanie exchanged waves with Ante, Manny and Ninna, and she was joyfully happy to see one of the dark-skinned insects wave to her as well. To the last, her friend had been unsure whether or not he would be chosen among the few insects who would accompany the Nest's crew to their new home. Apparently, her word and the word of the Nest's captain, Sammy's and Sarah's grandfather, had pulled some weight with whatever leadership the insects had. Elanie smiled to herself. There was still so much she didn't know about Earth, and still she was leaving it behind for someplace that was even more unknown.

The smile turned into a laugh as she watched Ante fuss over whatever precious books he had managed to sneak with him onboard. A couple of the Nest's crewmen had worked around the clock with him to scan and record as much of the animal folk's knowledge as they could, but apparently he still needed some real paper books.

At first, Elanie had thought that the Starling's arrival in the city - she still couldn't pronounce the name that sounded almost like 'panties' - would cause much commotion and that people would line up to join her on the voyage. Instead, it had been a curiosity and not much more. In the end only two dozen furry creatures had joined about as many insects, leaving their world behind for good.

Elanie would miss the city, her tower and her friends who, unlike Ante and his new family, had chosen to stay. She would miss the streets and the alleys, the houses and the river. Even the fox kids who had only had their 'panties, panties' chant as farewell when she made her last visit to Earth. Yet, she had gained so much more, and who knew what would await them at their destination.

Just then, a gentle hand touched her shoulder, and she turned around to give Sammy a kiss. The human boy had turned out to be an excellent lover, and it still thrilled her that he was every bit as much in love with her as she was in him. Yes, she thought as she tucked the clipboard under her arm and followed him out of the cargo deck, she would miss a lot. But what she gained would mean so much more. She had found love, adventure and more technology than she could ever have dreamed of. And even more still.

She had gained the stars.