The Family Tree (38 page)

“Oh, nine or ten,” said Dora. “Counting Jared’s mother. Normally there’d be three or four more, but Mrs. Gerber was doing some repainting so some of the rooms are vacant. You’re thinking he ended up in one of them….”

“It would mean he could be back in action quickly,” said one of the female elders. “Since it was a place he knew, people he knew, there might have been no period of extreme confusion. No aphasia or amnesia. It is possible nothing happened to make anyone suspicious….”

“How will we find out?” the archpriest asked.

“By asking about things the Woput does not know?” suggested Izzy.

“But Jared—that is, the Woput had been living there recently,” she cried. “He knew them all. He could copy their habits, their personalities. If he wanted to.”

“Would he want to, necessarily?” the old woman asked.

Izzy replied. “He might not bother. He might be preoccupied with other things. Tell us about the boarders, Dora.”

Dora composed herself, half shut her eyes and concentrated. “If it’s the Woput, and if he is not pretending to be someone else, he or she will show no sign of libido. He will be preoccupied with neatness and order. He will have no pets and tolerate none. Now, Mr. Calclough is a notable fanny pincher, and he used to talk about his girlfriend, a meter maid. Mr. Fries is a health nut. He does martial arts exercises in his room every morning, and it makes the whole house shake, and Momma Gerber complains about his leaving his towels and socks all over the floor.

“Mr. Singley has fish, tropical fish, in a tank, the kind with the little diver and the air bubbles, you know. Mrs. Sohn had a very old canary, but it’s dead, so that may not help. If Woput got into Ms. Michaelson, you prob
ably’d never know it from how she acts. She’s neat as a pin and sexless as—” She’d been going to say, “As I am.”

She took a deep breath. “However, she has no brakes on her mouth and no traffic signals in her head. The verbiage comes at you nonstop from all directions.”

“That’s very helpful. Unless the Woput knows them well enough to pretend.”

Doggedly, Dora went on: “He does. But as Izzy says, he may not bother. Momma…well, Momma Gerber is a stiff, rather impersonal woman, polite enough but not warm. The one thing I know about her that the Woput doesn’t is that Jared used to say something sweet to her at bedtime, before he got hit by lightning. Afterward, he didn’t remember, but Momma did. If she doesn’t remember anything about it now…” She subsided, fighting down the urge to scream, then went on:

“One thing in our favor: even though I was there when the Jared body died, the Woput doesn’t know that I know who he really is or why he came. I called him Jared. I accused him of stealing the pigs. I didn’t mention his killing Winston or coming from the future or anything. So, he doesn’t know about the people who came from the future, or the fact the control is here.”

“Unless Sahir told him,” said Izzy.

Dora’s mouth dropped open in dismay. Of course. Sahir could have told him.

Several of the elders had been taking notes, including the man with the eye patch, who now asked, “If he has seen television, he knows his Jared body was killed by an animal. Did he see the animal?”

“I don’t think so, no. Rosa came from behind him.”

“And did you say anything to…Rosa?”

“No,” she said. “Though Prince Sahir spoke in my hearing, and the Woput might remember that.”

The archpriest asked Izzy, “How does the control work, Prince Izakar? You plan to use it to return to your own time?”

Izzy nodded, though he wore a troubled frown on his
face. “The Weelians showed it to us when we came. It’s very simple. The key is turned on, then the coordinates of the physical destination are entered—if you’re going back. If you’re going forward, you can only end up at the hospice, that’s the only place it goes. Then there are keys that set the size of the field, and there’s a little light to tell you if the control is inside the field or out of it. Then a button is pushed, and the field moves you up either back one turn to the now, or forward one turn into the then, where you step off.”

“A reversible field?”

Izzy shook his head. “If you’re now, you go then. If you’re then, you come now. It’s a closed loop.”

“One can’t leave now and go back to 1000
B.C.
?”

“
B.C.
?” said Izzy.

“Three thousand years ago,” said Dora.

“They told me you can go one turn from the end of the loop and that’s all. One of the Weelians speculated to me that the thing is growing, and it hardens as it grows. Three thousand years ago is the last place soft enough to penetrate.”

“How strange,” murmured Vorn.

Izzy went on. “If the control field contains your body, your body goes back. If the field surrounds only your head, only your mind goes back—which is what the Woput did. And if the control isn’t inside the field when it turns on, it stays where it is. Simple-minded, really.”

“Who made this thing?” the archpriest murmured in a fretful tone. “This timeworm. It seems a pointless invention.”

Izzy smiled ruefully. “The Weelians don’t know who made it or where it came from. No one in our time knows. The seeress referred to a Great Enigma, and maybe that’s why. It may be a magical creation, and one of the Weelians suggested it was a natural phenomenon. That seems unlikely to me, for when the Weelians found it, the control was there, and the control is obviously a manufactured thing. I myself believe it was created by another race, come to our world from out of space.”

“Um,” said the elder with the eye patch, turning to the white-haired, olive-skinned woman. “Better one or two of us investigate this boardinghouse. You and I, Benedeta? An elderly couple looking for temporary housing? Leaving Dora completely out of it?”

It was agreed. Dora told them what she had planned for the next day, and the elders agreed to assist her and Abby by providing vehicles and drivers to pick up the animals from the Randall Building. When the group left, sans sistra or incense, nothing about them would have drawn any attention to them at all.

W
hen the religious people were gone, the countess went back to the house and tried to find out from Sahir if he had told the Woput anything at all, but he made a cutting, unpleasant remark, then walked off into the woods. Soaz went after him. Oyk and Irk went out with the onchiki, while the rest of us gathered in Dora’s house. We made tea. She had some interesting kinds. The armakfatidi were in the kitchen, inventing something delicious. Sheba curled up on the bed in the sleeping room. Blanche perched on the stair rail. The rest of us sat around the table.

“The Korèsans are very pleasant persons,” said the countess, lowering her lips to her cup, as she did when she was being informal. “Though something is going on with them they did not tell us about. Did you feel it?”

“I felt something,” Dora confessed. “Secret societies are probably like that, don’t you think? Passwords and secret signs. I think they are allies of yours. I said there would be allies.”

“I know. But we did not expect Korèsans in this time. We did not expect talking umminhi in this time. We did not expect our Woput to become someone else. Most of all, we did not expect to find friends. There is little doubt these Korèsans are our friends. Are they yours, do you think?”

Dora flushed, smiling a little. “If you mean their judgmental attitude toward people, I’d say they’re clannish. They may be more accepting of you all than they would be of another human who doesn’t accept their way of life.”

The countess nodded. “Non-humans are by no means perfect. One of us scuini has been very stupid, I’m afraid. Sahir won’t tell me what he said to the Woput, but I fear he told about our coming from a future time.”

Izzy looked around as though tallying those of us present. Dora, the countess, Blanche, me and him. The armakfatidi were not listening to us. Sheba was asleep. Only the five of us could hear. He whispered:

“If the Woput knows we came from the future, then the Woput knows the control is probably here. Maybe we’d better hide the control and the key. We wouldn’t want something to happen we weren’t all agreed on.”

The countess nodded. The five of us went downstairs. The control was in a red leather case about the size of a book, and the case was in one of our packs. Izzy took the control out of the case and returned the case to the pack, then we went out of the house and hid the control very well. As for the key, Izzy put that on a thong around his neck, under his clothes, after which we returned to our teacups.

“Let’s remember that we’re not sure Sahir said anything,” Dora reminded us. “We must consider him innocent, not prejudge him.”

The countess smiled at her. “You are quick to defend him. Just as you were very quick to befriend us.”

Dora laughed weakly. “Oh, not prejudging people is just part of my job, but befriending you…If you only knew how long you had been my friends. People like
you, I mean. When I was a child…” Her voice trailed away.

“What?” the countess urged. “Tell me!”

“Oh, when I was a little child I talked to people like you all the time: four-legged people, winged people, furred people, feathered people, all the time. Grandma said it was the same for her. She said she knew others who had been the same, children who reached out instinctively to anything that shared life with them, who talked with other creatures and heard—I believe this—heard them talk back.

“Adults say it is fantasy, of course. Perhaps it is real, but temporary, then we grow older and the music stops and our friends are no longer our friends. When you came…”

There was silence. “I think that’s remarkable,” said the countess at last. “I have no experience like it.”

“But you do,” cried Dora. “You live in a world like it.”

Blanche said, “Our world is not that perfect, Dora. We have our struggles and our conflicts, too. I know what you mean, however. When I was very little, I used to hear music, also. Mine was bird music, but it had the same feeling you describe.”

“Perhaps the reason is simple,” Izzy commented. “Perhaps when we are very young, we can hear Korè speaking through all life.”

“While we’re still part of everything,” mused Dora. “Before we grow up and learn to believe we’re something separate.”

“Dora, you have interesting thoughts,” said the countess.

“Kind of you to say so,” said Dora, sighing. “But I know I’ve never been very interesting.”

I had been only half listening, until then. I looked up, hearing something in her voice that resonated in mine. I started to ask her a question, but Izzy beat me to it.

“Why do you say that?”

She flushed, as though aware only then of what she
had said. “I never…never had a chance to be, maybe. No. I think…girls have a hard time being interesting. It’s actually easier to be famous, or notorious, than it is to be interesting. In our world, girls climb very well until they hit puberty—sexual maturity—and then they begin to fall out of the tree. They start role-playing instead of thinking, flirting instead of learning. They start admiring how smart the boys are—or how athletic or how handsome—instead of concentrating on their own intelligence.”

“Aren’t they educated as well?” asked Izzy.

She shook her head. “It’s not that, not exactly. Women fought very hard for equality in education, and now it turns out women do better if they go to all-female schools. Most of the women who have high positions in government and business graduated from women’s schools. In girls’ schools, they can concentrate on the reality of intelligence; if they’re with males, biology takes over. It’s no one’s fault. It just happens.”

“Aaah,” said Izzy. “And you do not trust males.”

She flushed. “Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that’s a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can’t be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can’t be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired lawmakers who end up losing it all because they can’t control how they react to women! And I certainly don’t trust how most women are around men. We get stupid!”

“That’s why you and Abby are not lovers,” I said, unthinking.

Dora turned very red, turned and fled into the bathroom, from which we soon heard sounds of water running very hard.

“That was not tactful,” said the countess in an admonishing voice.

I grew somewhat annoyed at this. Why did I always
have to be tactful? Sahir was not tactful. Izzy was not tactful. Soaz was not tactful. Only the countess and Blanche and I were expected to be tactful. I said as much, and this time it was the countess who turned rather pink.

We simmered for a moment until Blanche murmured, “She is pretty for an umminhi. I have been watching the television. She compares well with those considered attractive. Less thin than some, but healthier looking.”

We thought about this for a time. I offered, “Abby is also attractive of his kind.”

Izzy nodded. “He has a foxy face, but his eyes are clear, his teeth are very white; I like the look of him. Of course, I am not an umminhi female….” He looked at me and winked. I was glad he was not an umminhi female.

“What a pity if all her life the only man she should have known was a Woput,” said the countess. “It would be good if she could learn that Abby is trustworthy, and that one can love without turning into a slooge.”

“Slooge?” asked Izzy.

“It is what we scuini call the occasional female among us who has a litter and from that moment on is interested only in suckling, mating, suckling, mating. She becomes a slooge. We educated females feel that one carefully planned litter in a lifetime is enough; life has so many challenges. The slooge, however, must continually be bearing. Her litters are a burden on her people and the world, many of them run away and get eaten, and when she is too old to bear any longer, she is useless for anything.”

“Some of the sultanas must be slooges,” I said, without thinking. “Of course, they’re not allowed to be anything else!” I popped my hand in front of my mouth. “Ooh, don’t tell Sahir I said that.”

The bathroom door opened and Dora came out, her face wet but calm. She gritted her teeth and announced, “Nassif, you may be quite correct as to the reason Abby and I aren’t lovers.”

The countess nodded. “It’s all right, dear. Nassif and I understand completely.”

“I heard what you’ve been saying,” said Dora from between her teeth. “My mother was evidently what you call a slooge. I do not want to be a slooge. It’s a risk I’ve been unwilling to take. It’s kind of you to interest yourself in my personal life, kind of you to think me attractive, but it’s really none of your business, and I would just as soon not talk about it anymore.”

Across the room, the armakfatidi looked up alertly, then went ostentatiously back to their cookery. The countess was momentarily astonished, but in a moment she returned to her tea, for all the world as though no one had said anything. I wanted to argue with Dora, to make her like Abby better, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. She still looked distressed and annoyed, either with us, or herself, or both. Whichever, further conversation would only make her angry.

Izzy, for a wonder, kept his mouth shut, and after a moment, Dora sat down with us once more.

When the others returned to the house shortly thereafter, Sheba emerged from the bedroom, and we were family again. As family, we spent the evening discussing the following day’s expedition to rescue the last of Daddy Eddy’s children from the lab.