Fast Cars and Intergalactic Speed Dating

45: A Few Other Things

It was only a few days later that Richard woke with a jolt from a deep sleep to someone pounding on his dorm room door. Fear flooded him, leaving him cold as he scrabbled his way out of his blankets.

"Richard!" It was Kavita's voice, urgent.

"What? What's wrong?"

"Richard! Hurry!"

He staggered out of bed, one foot caught in the tangled sheets, and hurried to the door. He was wearing nothing but his boxers and yesterday's T-shirt, but he didn't even notice in his haste to find out what the trouble was and to help.

He threw open the door. Kavita stood in the hall, wearing a pair of pajamas: a button-down top and shorts, pale green. He had no time to take it in, no time to ask any questions. She grabbed his hands and dragged him into the hallway.

"Look!" she cried.

Richard looked.

The hallway was full of Karra. He knew a great number of them: there was Ol-Maran, their arm still bandaged, and Sah-Ladri, and Nen-Laya. There was Pey-Daika and, next to them, Jalala-Ko. There were all of the crew members of the Beyma Richard had come to know over the time he'd spent onboard.

But there were others, too, so many others that the crowd would surely have violated a fire code on Earth: unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar voices speaking in rushed, ecstatic Karran. People embraced; they touched their foreheads together, their tentacles twining together, interlacing like humans' hands.

"Oh, my God," Richard whispered.

Garth spoke from behind him. "They're here. They found them."

Kavita was watching the scene, her hand over her heart. A tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it away with her thumb. "Richard," she murmured.

He slipped his arm around the small of her back, drawing her into a one-armed embrace. She rested her cheek on his shoulder, wrapping her arms around his waist. After a moment, sensing Garth on his other side, Richard raised his arm and passed it over his best friend's shoulders. Garth draped his arm over Richard's in turn.

They stood for an endless, aching moment, watching the reunion of their friends with their loved ones.

It was thrilling and heartbreaking and one of the realest things Richard had ever seen.

"I wish Aialo-El were here," whispered Garth. "And Belna-Ai."

"Me too," Richard said.

"They are," said Kavita. "In a way, I know that they are."

***

It was absurd that after the culmination of their journey Richard would be capable of thinking of anything else but the reunion of the Karra with their friends and their family, but that night, it was not the day's events that Richard could not stop thinking about. What was playing over and over in his mind was what Fifteenth had said when she had helped the humans and the Karra to settle into their new accommodations.

Impede efficiency...Periodic outages...Use power wisely...

He lay awake in bed, staring out through the window at the dusky sky. There was no such thing on Las-Kendarr as night. The planet had two small suns which revolved around it as the moon revolved around the earth, orbiting it; there were shades of day, but never actual nightfall. The dust storms and cloud cover would certainly make it challenging for a solar cell to absorb sufficient energy, but what kind of cells were they working with here?

His were undoubtedly better. They were better on earth—and on earth, they only had half the day.

On Las-Kendarr, there was always sunlight. Not a lot of it, and sometimes it was obscured, but it was there around the clock.