Free Alien Child by Pamela Sargent

used to think I had only imagined it. I had a faint memory of another like me.”
    “Llare and I agreed that you would not know of each other until we saw what changes came to you later. We entered our time of silence.” She looked up at Nita solemnly. “We wanted to be sure a time of not-fighting was near before you learned of each other.”
    Was Llipel being completely honest with her now? Maybe she had intended to keep the secret for good, and was only saying this because Nita now knew about Sven. “You knew I longed for a friend,” she said. “Didn’t that tell you that it might be time for me to have one?”
    Llipel whistled softly, then mewed a protest. “That feeling passed from you—it was not always in you, and your body did not fail from that longing. You seemed content with the companionship of the cat. That told me it was not yet your time of togetherness.”
    Nita said, “That time has come.”
    “It seems so, if you are moved to take my authorization from me and run to that boy.” Llipel waved an arm. “I sensed that this time was near. Llare told me of how restless Sven was growing, of how often he searched the library’s records. We would have told you of each other before long.” She gazed at Nita steadily with her black eyes. “Now you have found each other, and I fear for you.”
    “There’s nothing to fear.” Nita hoped that was true. “We want to be friends—we won’t harm each other. We may be the only ones of our kind left—we have to be friends.”
    Llipel did not reply.
     
     

 
    8
     
    Nita had viewed the library through a screen before going there, but the room was smaller than she had expected. Tables, couches, and chairs were grouped in the center of the room, while slots that resembled those in the cafeteria covered the walls.
    Sven was expecting her; he looked up as she walked toward him. He was sitting on a couch and held a flat reading screen on his lap. Llare was seated on the floor near him, but before Nita could speak, Sven’s guardian stood up, murmured a greeting, then glided from the room.
    “Llare could have stayed,” Nita said. Llare’s presence might have eased the awkwardness she now felt.
    “It’s all right. He thought we might want to be by ourselves. He usually goes out to the courtyard in the afternoon, so maybe we can talk to him then.” He pointed toward a desk to her left on which a small console sat. “That’s the catalogue. I’ll show you how it works. You ask it for records on a subject, and if it isn’t sure what you want, it’ll ask you some questions until it finds out. Then it searches the records and displays them on a screen. You don’t really have to come here to use the library, now that you’ve got that.” He gestured at the authorization around her neck. “But I like coming here to read, anyway.”
    “I should have brought a reading screen with me,” she said. “I didn’t think—”
    “Turn around. See those thin slots on either side of the door? Just press a button under one of them.”
    She went toward the door and pushed a button; the slot extruded a flat screen. She pulled it out, walked back to the boy, and sat down on the couch across from him.
    Sven looked different. His thick light-brown hair was now curled around his ears and was shorter and more even around his face and neck. She wished that she had trimmed her own hair, which had grown past her shoulders; she had never worried about how she looked before. He wore a blue coverall, but this one fit him more snugly than the one he had worn in the tower. She suddenly wished that she had something to wear besides blue coveralls and white coats; the images on the screen often appeared in a variety of garments.
    Sven’s face reddened; she realized that she was staring at him. “Look directly at a person when you meet,” Beate had told her, “but don’t stare in a way that might make that person uncomfortable.” Nita was having a hard time grasping the