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THE DOOR behind him, Sean looked in on the twins before returning to the office cube. Asleep in their new dual cradle, they looked as sweet and peaceful, as peachy and golden, as if they had never turned into little silvery seals. That trick of theirs this evening showed him that he would need to be on his guard with these two slippery characters. He was glad to see the cats had taken notice too. Marduk had planted himself across the twins’ legs, making a living fur blanket, and Nanook and Coaxtl stretched out beside the cradle. Nanook opened one eye, and Sean nodded and closed the door.
    He was glad that Yana had been too tired to take in the end of Shanachie Desi’s song, where after seven years Murel changed back into a seal and swam out to meet her brother, neither of them ever to be seen again by her foster mother. It was nonsense, of course. That was a fairy tale told back on earth about a supernatural species, not a genetic mutation like himself. All of those stories involved seals temporarily turning into people and, when they became seals once more, never being able to return. They were wild creatures, not part of families like his. Of course if his children swam away, they would return. He always had, hadn’t he? Becoming a seal was a gift, an ability, a talent, actually, that allowed him to do certain things others could not.
    Still, he was grateful that Yana had not heard the rest of that song, and he hoped no one would ask her about it. She had enough to worry about without bringing in folk tales that had nothing to do with the mutation brought about by Shongili genetic engineering, accident, and Petaybee’s own tendency to adapt species to its own needs. With the big cats for babysitters when he himself could not be teaching them about being seals, the kids would be fine; sure they would.

CHAPTER 4
    M UREL AND R ONAN were quite advanced in most ways. They learned to walk very early, and to run almost as quickly. By the age of three they could sit on the back of a curly coat without being held there. They started school when they were five, and learned to read and write, demonstrating their abilities by reading to each other at home. But by the time they were seven, they were in and out of trouble all the time, the mildest problem being that the teacher was unfairly suspicious when they kept turning in identical test papers written in nearly identical left-handed printing.
    The teacher also noted in their student evaluation that Murel and Ronan did not reach out to befriend the other students, especially the newcomers, and spoke mostly only to each other unless asked to recite.
    The truth was, they not only didn’t reach out to newcomers, they didn’t like or trust them much either.
    “They come to
our
world because they’re sick or other worlds won’t have them, and act like they’re better than us,” Ronan told their mother.
    “They’re just scared,” she said. “It’s rough for them, you know. They realize that they’re not as well adapted as you are, so they have to act as if they know more in other areas.”
    “I don’t see why,” Murel said. “If they were nice, we’d try to teach them stuff about Petaybee, but some of them, especially the older ones, are just nasty and mean. All they do is moan and groan about how bad the com stuff is around here and how they can’t always depend on it to reference their lessons or talk to their friends wherever they were before they left. They want to know why we don’t have a decent satellite so all the stuff that needs a satellite works better. They don’t care about learning about
here.
”
    When Ronan came home with a black eye and Murel with a cut lip, their father said, “Fighting, were you? Murel too?”
    “It wasn’t our fault, Da. That Dino Caparthy is a bully. He’s really big and he has a gang and they jumped Ronan—I mean all of them. I sorted—I helped Ronan sort them out and sent Dino away with a bloody nose, grabbing his