Free Migration by Julie E. Czerneda Page A

made of mem-wood, often, but not always, flat. Each new bout of construction had been justified with a scientific purpose: to secure an antenna or collector, to house a weather assembly, and so forth. Over the years, as the roofs became more useful and used, those purposes had expanded somewhat.
    Mac led Mudge past planters filled with mud—the planters had withstood the Ro attack but last year’s vegetable gardens hadn’t fared well, around the jumbled heap of newly replaced lawn chairs belonging to the Norcoast Astronomy Club—though the frequent cloud cover made precious little difference to attendance at “meetings” and almost none of the members could tell a star from a planet—and, finally, to a small, sturdy shed that had, alone among all the structures perched on Pod Three, been constructed to look as much like a natural rock formation as mem-wood, plaster, and imagination could allow.
    It had been a nice gesture. It might even have worked, had it not been for the giant parrot adorning one side of the shed. Appeared five summers ago, Mac recalled, patting the bird’s technicolor wing fondly. Preposterous thing, but with a cheerful, jaunty look. There was a pirate flag firmly in its beak; the traditional skull and crossbones replaced by a salmon skeleton. Barnacle Bill, they called it, and students learned to sing the parrot’s exploits in bawdy detail. Emily knew every verse . Mac had once accused her friend of making up the worst of them to shock her new students.
    Emily had only smiled.
    The memory might have been a floodgate. Mac tried to concentrate on stepping over real puddles, even as her mind swam with questions. Had Emily left with the Ro? Had the aliens truly left? And what did “leaving” mean to beings who could make their own transects through space at will?
    Or had Emily been taken? But by whom? The grim, black-garbed defenders of Earth? Their counterparts from any other threatened world?
    Or was Emily on Earth, sipping margaritas in a bar decorated with parrots, teaching bawdy verse to handsome tourists . . .
    Swearing under her breath, hiding the trembling of her hands, Mac yanked aside the weather screen covering the end of the shed.
    Was Emily dead? Had it happened months ago?
    Or had she waited for rescue, for friends, only to die alone?
    “It’s nothing fancy,” she warned Mudge, her voice less steady than would have been reassuring under the circumstances, “but it’ll get us to shore.”
    “In one piece?” he asked, eyes dropping from the parrot to stare in dismay at the personal lev cowering inside the shed. It was, as Tie referred to it, at that delicate age between junk and vintage. To survive long enough to be vintage, it shouldn’t have belonged to Mac.
    She wiped cobwebs from the yellowed canopy. “It’s this or nothing. Help me push it out.”
    Together they wrestled the old lev out of its shelter. The gentle light of early morning wasn’t kind. There were more patches than paint on its sides, the upholstery had endured too many buckets of overripe salmon, and a regrettable, although essentially harmless encounter with a barge had permanently resculptured its prow. Remarkably, last year’s tip and righting of the pod didn’t seem to have added any more dents. As far as she could tell.
    Mac gave the lev a surreptitious kick for luck. She’d bought the thing well and truly used her first year of tenure at Norcoast. Granted, it had been shiny, clean, and intact back then. Even better, dirt cheap. It was only later that Mac learned why few people bothered with levs for anything smaller than freight transport. Compact antigrav units were, to be generous, finicky beasts prone to suicide.
    Levs, boots. Same thing. Mac was satisfied when either got her where she wanted to go with dry feet, although she had noticed footwear was more reliable. Little wonder everyone at Base conspired with Tie to arrange to ferry their co-administrator from place to place, keeping her lev in