Alternate Gerrolds (29 page)

In the aftermath, four stolen cars were recovered from joy-riding gang-bangers, seventeen people were arrested for possession and dealing of illegal substances, twelve illegal weapons were confiscated and twenty-six of the party-goers spent the night in jail for being drunk and disorderly. Fourteen outstanding warrants were served for offenses as varied as unpaid parking tickets and felony armed robbery. Vanessa’s friends were an assorted lot.

The following Monday, Lyn and Bryce were investigated by the Department of Social Services.

And I called Sara and asked what went wrong. She told me not to worry. Everything was fine. Just be patient.

She was right. It took a while for everything to get sorted out, but eventually, it did.

The judge ordered three years of family-counseling for the whole clan. Vanessa was put on probation, conditional on her remaining in Alcoholics Anonymous. Jabed and Jason were put into a special education program to help them recover from prolonged emotional abuse and also to prevent them from drifting into patterns of juvenile delinquency. Nolan was identified as suffering from a serious learning disability and is now in full-time therapy. Tali is in pre-school. Damien is president of the local Queer-Nation chapter. Grandma had to sell the house to help Lynn and Bryce cover the legal expenses. They all live with her now.

The insurance company leveled the remains of the house and sold the land to the city for use as a pocket park. It wasn’t cost-effective to rebuild.

To paraphrase my favorite moose, sometimes I don’t know my own strength.

For a while, both Sara and I were concerned about the backwash from the spell. We’d love-bombed the entire family, and they were all definitely much better off than they had been before. But Sara was afraid that there would be serious side-effects to the spell that might affect both of us. If there have been any, we haven’t noticed them yet. But then again, we’ve been much too busy. Sara’s planning to move in with me next month, and I’ve applied to adopt a little boy. And I expect to get back to my writing Real Soon Now.

 

DADDY WAS ARGUING WITH DR. BLOM AGAIN, so Mom told me to stay away from the dig for awhile, at least until tempers cooled off. That was the only thing likely to cool off anytime soon. Spring was rising, and so were the daytime temperatures. We would be heading back south to the more comfortable polar zones as soon as the last trucks were loaded and the skywhale arrived tomorrow morning. Twenty-four months would pass before the sand would be cool enough to stand on again, but nobody knew if we would be coming back.

“They’re arguing about the horn again, aren’t they?”

Mom nodded. “It’s their favorite argument.”

“Do you think Daddy’s right? Or Dr. Blom?”

“Actually, I hope they’re both wrong.” Mom looked up from the fabber she was disassembling. “Pray that we never find out what the damn thing was really used for. If either one of them is proven right, they’ll never be able to work together again.”

“They’ll just find something else to argue about.”

“No, this is one of those arguments that people don’t forget. If you’re wrong, it’s a career-killer. The only hope for resolution is for them to
be equally embarrassed by the facts. And don’t tell Daddy I said this. It would hurt his feelings enormously.”

“I didn’t think anyone could hurt Daddy’s feelings.”

“Only people he cares about.” She closed the lid of the machine and handed me the used cartridges for the recycler. “Just because he doesn’t show his feelings doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any.”

There were over two hundred people on the dig. We weren’t the only family here. There were twenty others who’d brought their children. We were a whole village. We had sixteen acre-tents and at least a hundred equipment and storage tents scattered around. Three of the acre-tents were habitats, with hanging rugs to give each family-group some privacy.

We had offworlders here too. The dig was big news all the way back to Earth; the first alien civilization ever discovered. And because the actual site was habitable only four out of twenty-eight months, this was a precious opportunity, especially for the Ph.D. candidates, like Hank, the big goofy guy who called me “swee’pea” and “short stuff” and “Little Darlin’” until Mom gave him
the glare
. So of course, I wanted to see more of him.

Actually, she’s my stepmom, and according to the rule-books, I’m supposed to resent her, but mostly she and I are good friends. Probably because she’s only twelve years older than me, so she feels more like a big sister than a stepmom, but I call her Mom anyway. I’m almost seventeen, old enough to get married; but Mom has this rule that nobody gets married until they finish college. She refused to marry Daddy for three years until she finished her doctorate.

Mom said that Hank was too old for me anyway. I respectfully did not point out that Hank was only five years older than me while Daddy was fifteen years her senior. I didn’t need to start that fight. And besides, she was twenty-four when she married him.

Hank was one of the offworlders who had trouble adapting to Gehenna’s seventy-two-hour day, but eventually he found his rhythm. The others settled in too. Everyone does. Daddy says that twelve hours on and twelve hours off mimics Earth time almost perfectly—despite the fact that the sunlight doesn’t match.

I’d been allowed to come on the dig because Mom and Dad were team leaders. There were another dozen college students who’d been brought along for grunt-work and experience, so I was lumped in with them.
We all had class in the morning and chores in the afternoon. Then class in the evening and chores again in the early morning. Interspersed with sleep, of course.

I was part of the toddler-team; we took care of the little ones while the various moms went off to work. There were only five of them, but they were a handful. I don’t think we ever had five dry diapers at a time. We solved the problem by putting one person on diaper-duty each shift.

There’s this about changing diapers—it keeps you from biting your nails. My private goal was to potty-train the little monsters as quickly as possible. We’d made real progress with the other four, but my little brother, Zakky, had so far resisted all inducements toward sanitary behavior. Despite that, I still thought he was cute. Mom said that my attitude would change as soon as Zakky learned how to say no. Once he learned how to argue, he’d be just like his daddy.

Daddy was famous for his arguments. Of maybe infamous. He wasn’t loud or aggressive. I’d never even seen him raise his voice. He was painfully polite. He would make his points carefully, exquisitely, elegantly reasoned, making connections so obvious you could slap your forehead for not seeing them yourself. And when he was done, he had assembled a framework of logic as marvelous as a Chinese tapestry—so beautiful and compelling and overwhelming in its construction you were left with no place to stand. You just wanted to find a great big club and whack him across the head with it for being so damnably, blandly, patiently,
right
. Again.

Daddy’s brain never stopped working. The universe was a giant puzzle to him, and he felt it was his personal responsibility to fit the pieces together. When I was little, I was afraid of him; but now that I understood better, I admired him. I used to wonder why Mom had married him, but most times I envied her for the adventure.

But Daddy could get so preoccupied with solving the puzzles of the universe that sometimes he forgot everything else. Sometimes we had to drag him physically away from the dig just to get him to eat, and even then we could have put a slice of shale between two pieces of bread and he wouldn’t have noticed, he’d be so busy talking about what he had found and what he had to do next and what it might mean. Of course, that led to a lot of arguments with the other diggers, about what each new discovery
meant.
They were all on new ground here. Nobody knew for sure what any of it really was, so everything was still just opinion.

The one thing we knew about the tripods—that’s what we called them—was that we didn’t know anything about them at all. We had no idea how they had lived, what they ate, what they believed in, what kind of culture they had or even how many sexes they had. Every new fragment suggested as many possibilities as it disproved.

Daddy wasn’t the only one arguing, of course. Everyone argued with everyone. Mom said that was because -ology didn’t mean “the study of” as much as it meant “the argument about.” But Daddy
liked
to argue. He said that arguing was the highest exercise of intelligence at work, measuring, testing and challenging ideas. He said that it was the passion of the argument that ultimately revealed the true self. Of course, Daddy would argue with the weather if he could. Failing that, he had argued for extending our stay onsite by an extra two weeks. He’d won half that argument. We were a week past our original departure date and already the temperatures were half-past unbearable.

But Daddy wasn’t the only one who wanted to stay. Almost everybody on the team was so excited at what they were pulling out of the ground that nobody wanted to quit, even if it meant working in 110-degree weather. What if we were only half an hour away from finding the tripod Rosetta Stone? There might not be another expedition like this one in our lifetime. Gehenna’s weather wasn’t exactly friendly.

The tripod village had only been discovered six years ago, when one of the radar-mapping satellites discovered patterns underneath the sand. Detailed scanning showed eleven separate buildings embedded in the soft shale. The access team had trucked in huge sand-dredges and digging machines and cut a ramp down to the target layers. Only then could the archeology teams start working.

Once we’d finally gotten down to the roofs of the domes, and gotten inside a few, we began discovering the first artifacts of an entire civilization. Dr. Blom said this village was less than a hundred thousand years old. On a geological scale, we’d just missed them. Of course, having their star flare up might have had something to do with that too.

Daddy’s team had put a three-acre tent over the site. That got everybody out of the direct sun, and it brought the temperature down at least ten degrees; but mostly it kept the sand from covering the dig. The long nights brought hot roaring winds that could dry out your skin in an hour, leaving you itchy and cranky and desperate. Thirty-six hours later, when the sun crept over the sharp horizon again, there would be
orange dust covering everything, sometimes as much as thirty centimeters. Everything had to be tented, or you might as well abandon it.

Mom’s team kept busy cataloguing the artifacts, scanning and deconstructing them, then test-fabbing duplicates and comparing them to the originals. When the dupe was accurate to the limits of the measuring equipment, Mom would finalize it and make it available in the catalog. Then, anyone could log on and fab a copy.

Some of the artifacts were easy, because they were mostly complete. A knife. A basket. A bowl. A jar of dessicated grain. A stool. But some of the items were impossible to figure out. Not just because they were fragments, but because nobody had any idea what kind of people the tripods might have been. Like the hairbrush thing with two handles—what was that for? A toothbrush? A backscratcher? An envelope holder?

Even the word “people” was cause for argument. Dr. Blom was an alienist. She said that alien meant
gaijin
. Different. Therefore, human paradigms couldn’t apply. Just using the word “people” created an anthropomorphic mind-set.

So of course, Daddy took the anthropomorphic position—that life is messy everywhere, but it isn’t infinite. The physics of the situation define what’s possible. Life occurs as an expression of opportunity. And the same evolutionary imperatives are at work everywhere, regardless of the DNA coding; Gehenna had oxygen and water and a mobile temperate zone conducive to the carbon cycle, etc. etc., therefore, knowing the circumstances of the environment, we know the limits of what kind of life is possible. Therefore, therefore…ad infinitum. Rumor had it that Dr. Blom had actually asked one of her assistants to fab a club….

Eventually, the whole camp was arguing the point—if the tripods were so alien as to be beyond our comprehension, and this dig represents an insoluble puzzle to humankind, then why are we even bothering to dig anything up and study it? Wasn’t the whole point of any “-ology” to increase our understanding, not our befuddlement?

None of which solved the problem of the
thing
, which along the way had become the focus of the whole argument. Dr. Blom had found it in one of the broken domes. It was some kind of ceramic, so it was obviously manufactured for a purpose. But what purpose? She and Daddy had been arguing about it from the very first day.