The Family Tree (22 page)

“Remarkable.”

Ahead of us a line of pheled guards snapped to attention, maintaining their rigid stance while the duke and his guests paraded before a gleaming line of pikes to an iron-bound door that swung soundlessly open as we approached. In the courtyard, the veebles and our guards were put in the care of the stablemaster while the rest of us proceeded to the door of the residence. The High Duke bowed us in, muttering orders to an obsequious butler, who darted off at once in several directions.

“How did he do that?” I whispered to Izzy.

“Spontaneous disassembly,” muttered Izzy. “The butler seems to be a communal entity.”

“What in hell is a communal entity?” growled Soaz under his breath. “I’ve never heard of—”

“Just…something other than the usual,” Izzy replied. “I’m trying to remember what I’ve read about communal entities. I thought they were imaginary.”

Whether imaginary or not, the butler, or another similar one, met us at the end of the corridor and ushered us into a pleasant reception room overlooking the gardens.

“Breakfast will be served promptly,” said the High Duke. “I have an enormous appetite this morning, no doubt stimulated by all that sea air. And you, Countess, are you the least little bit hungry?”

She dimpled at him, fluttering her eyelashes. “You are too kind, Your Eminence. I know we of Estafan have been a trouble to you. You are generous to overlook it.”

“I overlook nothing,” he said firmly, striking a determined pose before the empty fireplace. “The emperor, my uncle, would be disappointed in me if I were not vigilant. But being aware of a problem does not mean I, we, the Farsakian Empire, should respond with viciousness or evil. The emperor is interested in peace, in the welfare of the earth, in peoples living together with a minimum of conflict. He believes that in order to achieve this balance, he must bring all provinces and princedoms under one government and, gradually, to a shared language and culture. Nonetheless, within that government he intends to maintain room for many customs and kinds of people.”

“I hope we will be able to meet the emperor, your uncle,” Izzy murmured. “Perhaps he can cast light upon the puzzles we are trying to solve.”

“Where’s Dzilobommo?” asked the countess suddenly.

“He asked our leave to go to the kitchens,” murmured the Duke. “He has some kindred there, lady, and he wished to spend some time with them.”

“Kind of you,” she murmured.

The Prime Duke bowed in acknowledgment. Servitors arrived with food—steak and eggs for Soaz, the duke, Oyk, Irk and the onchiki; fish, fruit and oatmeal for the rest of us—and our party, made hungrier by the danger we had so narrowly avoided, sat down to breakfast.

O
ne evening, a few days after meeting Abilene McCord, Dora received two phone calls.

The first was from the fireman she had talked to. The Dionne house, he said, had been arson. The place had burned to the ground, the arson squad had investigated, but they’d never had any good leads.

The second call was from Harry Dionne. She introduced herself as a police officer who was investigating this phenomenon and thought it might have started in the neighborhood where the Dionnes had lived.

“Why would you think that?” he asked calmly, with a strange degree of uninterest.

“Well…” She didn’t want to mention Jared. “I was living a few doors down from your old home site. I think I may have seen the first…ah, one of these new trees. And it may be related to that huge tree that was in your backyard.”

“What an odd idea.” His voice sounded removed and far away, like a bad long-distance connection.

She swallowed deeply and persevered. Well, it wasn’t certain and this and that, but could he meet with her and tell her about the people who had lived there, his brothers, his father, their cousins from out of town? Mrs. Gerber had mentioned their cousins from out of town.

Long pause. “I was twelve years old when Demmy and Cory came visiting. If you want to know about them, you should talk to my brothers. Or my father. I was a little too young.”

“Are your brothers or father here in town?”

“No. They aren’t.”

“Then, won’t you talk to me, please? Just give me your impressions. Were, ah…the women attractive?”

“Of course. Considering who they were, are, they’re attractive. That’s part of it, isn’t it? Though I was too young to understand what all the fuss was about, all the men in the neighborhood were prancing around like buck goats.”

Goats again. “Your brother…brothers are older?”

“Yes, I’m the youngest. I have four brothers, but they’re widely scattered by now.”

“So, you were twelve years old….”

“Tom and Dick were in high school, seventeen and eighteen, or thereabouts. Charlie and Roger were in their twenties, just graduating college.”

Somehow, from Mrs. Gerber’s satyric description, Dora had expected hooves and horns, people who peed on the ground and spit through their teeth, not a tribe of college graduates.

“If I met you for breakfast, could you tell me about that summer?” she asked.

He tried to put her off, half-heartedly, then agreed, still in that toneless and relaxed voice. Dora picked a hotel, one near the precinct. They’d try to be there at eight, they agreed, leaving it flexible, both of them realizing it might take longer to get there, depending on what the trees decided to do. She planned to leave a little early in the morning, which was no problem because she’d found herself waking earlier and going to
sleep earlier. Somehow, the forest around her place seemed to settle when the sun went down, a kind of drowsiness descending that was very hard to fight off, even with the TV on. The corollary of this was that the forest woke when the sun came up, announcing itself through a good deal of bird chatter that Dora couldn’t remember ever hearing before there had been trees.

Harry Dionne was six or eight years older than she, forty-two or three, maybe. He shook her hand and sat down across from her. He had an eponymous name, for as Mrs. Gerber had said, he was hairy, with a fine pelt on the backs of his hands and a blue shadow extending down his neck into the collar of his spotless button-down shirt. He wore a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, however, and the hairs of his neck were neatly shaved. Dora, trying to be reasonably subtle about it, sniffed the air for the smell of goat. An aroma was detectable, strong but not at all unpleasant. So much for Mother Gerber’s characterization.

“Now,” he said, when they had received coffee and ordered orange juice, omelettes and toast. “Though I doubt my ability to do so, how may I try to help you?”

“That huge old tree behind your old house…or, where your old house was, seems to be something very rare. People are interested in knowing about it, who planted it, how long it’s been there, that kind of thing.”

Long silence. He looked around the room, his face rather troubled. “You mean, because of what’s happening.”

She fidgeted, uncertain how much to say. “I wondered if it might not have started there, in your old backyard, where that tree is. It’s the center, so to speak.”

He fixed her with his gaze, and she found herself unable to look aside. “It’s a family tree, Sergeant Henry. We’ve planted cuttings of that kind of tree everywhere we’ve ever been. We’re an old family, very old, with old traditions.”

They were interrupted by the waitperson bringing their orders and refilling their cups.

When she had gone, Dora asked, “Do your traditions include early marriage?”

“Why do you ask?”

“The mother evidently wanted your girl cousin to be married. According to Jared’s mother, anyhow.”

Another long silence. “She did, yes.” Harry Dionne picked up his coffee cup and regarded her over it as he drank. “Tom was supposed to marry Cory. My brother, Tom. They were much of an age. That’s the way it’s done in our family, though I must admit that Tom felt quite rebellious about the whole thing.”

“But she wanted to run off with Jared, instead?”

“For some reason I’ve never been able to understand, that is evidently what she did, but how would you have learned about that?”

She spoke without thinking. “I was married to Jared, Mr. Dionne.”

He stared at her, forehead slightly furrowed, eyes intent. “You were married to him?”

“For a couple of years, yes.”

“But you didn’t stay married to him.” It was a statement, not a question.

She flushed, at which he nodded, as though she had replied.

He said, “People who become associated with our family in that way don’t marry someone else. Jared’s mother forbade the marriage, said she’d have it annulled, but that was only a legal matter. It couldn’t change what I assume had already happened.”

“But Jared did marry me,” she said.

He smiled at her. “You’re quite a lovely woman, Ms. Henry, but I don’t think Jared cared about that, did he? If our religion has truth in it, at best, your marriage would have been…let us say, companionate?”

She concentrated upon her orange juice, feeling again that wariness, that edginess, that almost fear. Was she wearing a label? Did everyone in the world know she was a virgin?

“My father would say that no one married to Cory
could ever again marry anyone else. I believe that’s true, and it has nothing to do with you.”

Long silence.

“You asked about the tree,” he said. “That particular tree, the one you’re referring to, was planted by my father’s father’s father, back in the 1800s. There was a big farmhouse built there at the same time. The place subsequently changed hands several times. The farmhouse was still there when my family came back to it the summer I was eleven.

“The year we came back, my brother Dick nailed a ladder up the trunk of the tree, and he and Tom built a tree house in it. We used to hide out up there and spy on all the neighbors, not that we were in the neighborhood all that long. The house burned and Father made no effort to rebuild. After what happened with Jared and Cory…well, Father felt the neighborhood was rather too small town. Too many people minding everyone else’s business. It was that kind of block.”

“Enforced conformity?” she asked, forking a mouthful of eggs.

“Um.” He nodded, buttering a piece of toast. “Yes. Mrs. Gerber, down on the corner, seemed to know everything about everybody and have an opinion on everything.”

“Especially your cousins?”

“As I said, I was too young to be emotionally involved, but I do remember Dad’s surprise when he learned Demmy and Cory were coming that summer. He’d known they might arrive eventually, of course, but he hadn’t realized it would be that summer. The place was a mess. It usually was with five boys, and none of us were housekeepers. We boys just couldn’t be bothered, and of course Dad was very busy with the church—”

“Church?”

“I say church because it’s conventional. Actually, we don’t have
a
church, as in edifice, but my father is a leader of our religion.”

“What is your religion?”

“Sergeant Henry, I didn’t want to get into this. I’m always explaining my family
and
my religion. Since I was six years old, kindergarten age, I’ve been explaining my family. When I fell in love with a non-family member, you have no idea what I went through, explaining my family. I get very tired of explanations! However! We are a family and we have a religion. I don’t mean just my brothers and father, but all our family, everywhere around the world. There are thousands of Dionnes, though not all of us bear that surname, and we have a religion that maintains our traditions and performs our ceremonies. Think of us as being rather like…well, say gypsies, though we’re rather better educated and acculturated than the Rom. We’re more like the Diasporic Jews, separated but faithful to their heritage. No matter where we live, we’re still family members. We still learn to speak the old tongue, at least for ritual occasions, and we cherish the old ways.

“Father is one of the Vorn, which is the priesthood. Vorn can be used as either a title or a name. You could say he is a Vorn, or he is Vorn Dionne. Demmy is one of our priestesses. The arranged marriage between a son of the priestly line and a daughter of the priestess’s line is a periodic religious rite that takes place roughly once a generation, say three or four times a century. It is meant to be a binding between ourselves, our family, and the world in which we live.” His tone was bland, as though he’d said it so often it had lost its meaning.

She thought about this for a moment. “Your brother, he was the human side of it, right? And Cory…she would have symbolized what? Nature?”

His eyes met hers with sudden surprise. “In a way, yes. Are you interested in religions?”

“In hearing about them? Learning about them? Yes. Very.”

He nodded slowly, making up his mind. “Well, all right, since you’re genuinely interested. Our religion teaches us that the maiden selected for the rite—and to
be sure she is a maiden, she is selected at about age four or five—is the current receptacle of the divine. Think of it as similar to the selection of a little boy to be the Dalai Lama or the Panchen Lama. That child is widely sought, then identified, then reared to be the next Lama. This always seems to ‘work,’ which is quite miraculous, at least to outsiders. Is it in the rearing? Or is it in the inclination? Or is the child really an incarnation? Or is it some combination of these factors?

“What I personally believe about all this varies from time to time, depending upon who I’ve been talking with or what I’ve been reading lately, but my father sincerely believes the girl selected by the priestess is an incarnation. As a priest, one of the high priests, in fact, he could hardly believe otherwise, and the fact I can’t always believe it causes some strain between us.” He sipped his coffee, shaking his head with a rueful expression.

“The selected maiden becomes a ‘daughter’ of the high priestesses. She is
very
carefully reared and protected. Every few years, a boy is selected, too, from among the priestly lines of descent, so that when the female avatar comes of age, there will be a man of roughly her own age to mate with. My brother Tom was selected when he was about eleven, I think. The high priestesses meet each of the selected men or boys. It is up to them to arrange the mating.”

She worried this for a moment, then set it aside. “What did you think of your cousin?”

“Well, she was gorgeous, of course. Even a twelve-year-old could see that. Wild, wonderful hair, eyes you could drown in, and a body like a wonderful cat, all muscle and sleek skin and lean bone.”

“She must have caused a stir.”

He smiled. “Among the neighbors she did. I remember thinking it odd that my brothers weren’t affected, except for Tom, of course. Tom took one look at her and decided marriage couldn’t be all bad. All my brothers were furious when they found out Jared Gerber had gone off with her. No, that’s not putting it accurately
enough. They and my father and Demmy were astonished. There should have been no way that it could happen. Cory simply couldn’t have done it, any more than the Dalai Lama could give up his religion and become a rock star.

“Mrs. Gerber came to the house and had a fit over it, that I do remember. Demmy was in a sort of quiet rage, talking to my father in the den, with the door shut. I think she threatened us with calamity for at least a generation. Next thing we knew, Jared came home alone saying Cory had left him and run off somewhere. Mrs. Gerber got the marriage annulled, and Cousin Demmy went off looking for the girl.”

“Did she find her?”

“I don’t know. I only know what I overheard. At that age, I wouldn’t have been in on discussions of religious matters. Even among adults, only the members of the family who join the priestly caste would have been concerned, and even at twelve, I was considered not to qualify. I was too talkative, too gregarious, not sincere enough. My brother Tom did become part of the priestly caste, the rest of us have gone into other professions.”

“You’re allowed to go into other professions?”

“Encouraged. Into the sciences, mostly. For the last several decades the biological sciences have been very, very big with our people. Some big project is no doubt being planned, but though one brother is in on that, I’m not. I’m an accountant.”

“I’m sorry, I interrupted. You said you weren’t in on religious matters….”

“I wasn’t included in the talk about it. There were a number of distractions, too, since that was about the time the old farmhouse burned down. We weren’t in it at the time. Dad had taken all of us boys away for a camping trip.”

“What is this religion of yours called?”

He flushed slightly. “We usually just say,
our religion
.”

She turned her cup in the saucer, chasing elusive frag
ments of thought. “Nobody in your family was studying botany or anything like that, were they?”