Brother Termite (18 page)

IT WAS NEAR
dawn when Reen arrived at the White House. Alone, he parked his small ship at the edge of the landing pad and trudged past the darkened colonnade to the stairs.

He was the only thing moving in the halls. A four-in-the-morning hush had fallen over the White House, time holding its breath for the sun.

When he got to the second-floor study, he noticed the light was still on. He lifted a heavy hand to switch it off. Shuffling into Womack’s adjoining room, he arranged himself on the bed. The mattress was so soft and so open that he couldn’t decide whether he was in danger of being swallowed or of falling. After a few minutes of tossing he got on the floor and positioned his body between the safety of the bed on one side and the rigid frame of the dresser on the other.

There was no way he could sleep. The corners of the room were too sharp and hard, its Georgian design too fussy. Predawn light, the wrong shade of blue, seeped around the heavy curtains. The room smelled not of peppery rest but of potpourri.

With a little moan, Reen pressed his head closer to the dresser, gathering what comfort he could from the hard surface.

The first day would be the worst. The first day his struggle to sleep would be frantic. After twenty hours or so, when his weary mind gave up the fight, the going would be easier. He would lie in dazed insanity until his heart gave out. Reen had never seen a Cousin die from
mitalet,
but he’d been warned enough by his elders.

Intelligence was too heavy a burden to carry alone.

Reen fought to drive out the thought, but like a boorish dinner guest it refused to go. Lying there, he remembered the smooth tunnels of childhood. He pictured his Second Brother: the resolute victory in a face turned to cruel stone.

Memories assailed him. He pulled the pillow over his eyes, as though the press of the satin might keep out the visions.

But they paraded: Angela and Marian in the snow; Oomal, pity and revulsion in his gaze; Jeff Womack’s head leaking pinkish gray brain; the fear in Hopkins’s face.

Without the tether of the Community, his walleyed imagination bolted. Tali would find Marian and kill her. The Community would unleash the virus on the humans if the humans didn’t revolt and kill the Cousins first. Thural, for his sympathy with Reen, would be chosen to die as consort.

Thural. Reen wished now that he had accepted his Cousin’s offer. Two weren’t enough to make a nest, but some of the edge might be blunted.

Thural. Reen tried to get up to go find him, but his body refused to move. Instead of rising, he flipped over on his side, his neck at an uncomfortable angle.

Reen heard a Cousin whimpering, then realized he was alone in the room and the whimpering came from him. Two more days.

The door hinges squeaked.

Reen lay in a tiny defenseless ball near the bed. Another squeak. Footsteps whispered across carpet.

“Reen?” Oomal called.

Reen rolled over. Oomal was standing at the corner of the bed, looking down.

Oomal should never have come. Reen’s defenses were down, and like Marian he would envelop the nearest victim in his own selfish need. He wanted to tell Oomal to run for his life, but he couldn’t.

“I took a little nap when I got back to Michigan,” Oomal said. “Then Sakan woke me up to say you hadn’t arrived. I figured you’d do something stupid.”

Another Cousin stepped around the side of the bed. “Hi, Reen,” Sakan said. “You look like shit.”

The two bent, grabbed Reen by his sleeve, and pulled him to his feet. Blearily he saw that four other Cousins were standing by the door, Louis Vuitton suitcases in hand.

“Oomal says we’re camping out,” Sakan said. “Like the time we went on the fishing trip.”

Oomal made quick introductions. “You know Sakan. He’s our director of marketing, the one who came up with the strained pea tartlets, remember?”

Sakan muttered, “Right. Bring that up again.”

“Radalt,” Oomal went on. “He’s our controller. Kresom, vice president in charge of personnel. Zoor–the humans call him Zoomer–vice president of sales. And Wesut, production manager.”

The Cousins gave Reen little waves of acknowledgment as they threw their suitcases on the bed.

“Zoomer,” Oomal said. “Go find us some sheets.”

Zoor nodded. “Where’s the linen closet?”

Reen pointed to the hall, and Zoor left.

Oomal said, “Follow the logic, Reen. We evolved from tunneling creatures.” He held up his opposable claws. “So we like semidarkness and confined spaces. Sleep’s our way of getting back to the larval stage.”

Radalt opened his suitcase and took out a blue light bulb.

“Communal Mind is part of it, but the ambiance has to be right, too,” Oomal said.

Zoor came back in, holding up a sheet patterned with red and blue cartoon dinosaurs. “Hey, guys. Get a load of this.”

Radalt stopped what he was doing. At the window, Kresom turned.

Looking down at the sheet, Zoor asked, “Our extinction or theirs?” Then he left on his quest again.

When the chuckles subsided, Oomal went on, “Anyway. The camping trip.”

“Zoor kept asking why they didn’t just cut out the middleman and eat the worms, remember?” Wesut said. “He popped a worm into his mouth, and Harvey Cohen from accounting fell over the side laughing and nearly drowned before we could get him back in the boat? Remember that? And then–”

“The humans kept telling us how much fun camping would be,” Oomal said. “So, what the hell, we decided to try it. That night we pitched a tent and slept just fine.”

Radalt switched on the lamp, flooding the room with blue. Kresom closed the heavy velvet draperies on the gray morning. Zoor came back with a sheet and tossed it to Sakan. “Colored sheets, but that’s all I could find.”

“If we wrap ourselves up tightly enough, we feel we’re in the security of the nest,” Oomal lectured as Sakan flapped out his sheet and rolled himself up in the material. His gyrations fetched him up against a night stand with a thud.

“Comfortable, Sakan?” Radalt asked the pink cocoon.

A shiver went through Reen. He was looking at Sakan, he knew, but thought of Jonis, Jonis in his shroud.

Sakan’s reply was muffled. “Just fine.”

Zoor passed out sheets to the rest of them. Oomal helped Reen into his, showing him how to hold his arm down, demonstrating how to flip the end over his head.

“Sleep, Reen,” Oomal said gently when his Brother was a tight cocoon in the corner.

Reen’s sheet was a pale yellow, and once he was rolled up in it, the blue tinged the color light green. Arms pinioned at his sides, he caught the first whiff of spice. One of the Cousins had quietly and without the least difficulty fallen asleep. A moment later the room was heavy with the dumb inescapable weight of Communal Mind. Reen fretted for a moment against the confines of his shroud before he, too, dropped into the dim, thoughtless regions of slumber.

Reen,
the Old Ones called.

Reen couldn’t see them, but he could hear them. His mind was falling, falling.

Reen,
they said, but he was plummeting too fast to answer, his guilt wrapping him as tightly as the sheet.

He couldn’t reply. He shouldn’t. All ties with the Community were gone except for Oomal’s unbreachable pity.

Aerodynamics,
Reen thought giddily. The word dropped from his mind and fell with him, a small, round, heavy thing. Down and down and down. He imagined he could feel the edges of the sheet flutter.

Reen.
The voices of the Old Ones echoed like thunder from the mouth of a well. And Reen knew they couldn’t understand why he refused to answer.

REEN
was yanked
out of his doze by the clamor of angry voices. He was awake but couldn’t move. He couldn’t see. He tussled frantically until he remembered that he was wrapped in Jeff Womack’s sheet.

“–back to Michigan!” Tali was shouting.

Oomal’s reply was calm, but Reen could hear the anger in his voice like the throbbing bass note in a musical chord. “Order the other Cousins if you can, Tali. By law I don’t have to listen to your shit.”

Reen flipped the sheet from his head and wriggled his way out of the tangle. Tali and Oomal were standing in the doorway, the other Gerber executives watching, their empty, makeshift cocoons littering the floor.

Radalt smiled down at Reen. “Oh, hi. You awake? Want a bath?” he asked pleasantly. “We filled the tub with tannic water and set a fresh uniform out for you.”

Tali’s fury shifted from Oomal to Radalt. “You speak to the air! There is no one there! No one!”

It looked as though Radalt was longing to make some snappy rejoinder but couldn’t quite work up the courage. Zoor bent and started picking up sheets.

“This is the law,” Tali said, speaking into the averted faces of the Michigan Cousins, who seemed to be engaged in trying to pretend that Tali was invisible instead of Reen. “It is cleanliness to throw the dead from the Community because if the dead stay, they breed disease. And this Nameless Cousin, like a dead thing, will breed a terrible illness, a sickness of the soul.”

Burdened with his pile of sheets, Zoor made his hesitant way past Tali and out into the hall, searching, Reen supposed, for a maid, for deliverance, or at least for a washer and dryer.

“Go back to work, Cousin Brother,” Oomal said, snagging Tali’s sleeve. “There’s nothing to interest you here.”

Tali jerked away. “You speak to me of
work?”
he shrieked. “You who bring your workers here with nothing for them to do? Where are we without purpose, Brother? Illness and insanity are the fruits of idleness.”

“You know, Tali,” Oomal said with amused irony, “you’re just like a damned elderly Cousin looking for spots of fungus in his claw and telling scary stories to the young. But I’m grown now, and those Communal myths don’t frighten me anymore.” Turning, he motioned the other Michigan Cousins out of the room. “Go on down to the office we set up in the East Wing, guys. It’s okay. Let my Brother and me scream at each other in private.”

When the Gerber execs had all filed out, with backward looks of concern, Tali muttered, “Envy-eyed liar. Spiteful stomach for eggs. You want my place. It eats at you that I am First now and you are Second. Do not think I am blind to this.”

“Paranoia is a human malady, Cousin Brother,” Oomal said gravely. “You should add it to your list of diseases. As Conscience I thought you might need to hear that.”

Tali pivoted on his heel and marched out of the room. When he had left, Oomal said irritably, “Get up, Reen. Get off the floor, damn it! Take a bath. I have work to do.” Then he slammed out the door.

In the bathroom Reen stripped off his uniform and lowered himself into the water. There he sat, heartsick, knowing that Oomal still loved him but would never forgive him.

When he had sloughed off the coating of sleep, he dressed in a fresh uniform, and after a moment’s thought pinned his nametag to his tunic. Then he walked into the study, the one room in the White House where Jeff Womack had always said he felt comfortable.

Reen didn’t feel comfortable there. He went past the strip of bare carpet padding and out into the cold wind on the Truman balcony. An itchy sort of need crawled his spine. If sleep was drink to Cousins, work was food. Reen was hungry for something to do. He walked back through the warmth of the oval study and down the grand staircase to the colonnade.

It was as though an invasion had begun in the executive offices. Cousins were everywhere, striding purposefully down the halls, stacks of paper in their hands. They passed Reen without a glance. An unfamiliar Cousin was perched behind Natalie’s desk. And in the Oval Office, Reen saw with bitter shock, Tali stood conversing with the Sleep Master and Thural.

For a heartbeat the conversation paused. Of the three, only Thural’s gaze flickered as Reen entered and sat on one of the loveseats.

“We will bring the law to bear on him,” the Sleep Master was saying, eyeing Tali so hard that Reen imagined he was fighting not to let his eyes slip to Reen.

“Do not be stupid,” Tali shot back. “If he has other Cousins here, his sleep may be uncomfortable but not impossible. They slept last night, apparently. Oomal has learned many things in Michigan, Cousin. And one of them is how to do without the Community.”

“A dangerous precedent,” the Sleep Master agreed. “For without the Community, what are Cousins? And how chaotic may such lives become?”

Tali looked down at the presidential seal woven into the thick wool carpet. “The humans infect us. I believe it is time to cleanse this place. I will tell the Guardians to prepare the viruses.”

Reen jumped to his feet. Only Thural’s calm voice stopped him from launching himself at his Brother. “You are not so much in the law as that, Cousin, to order such a thing. After all, you are no First. There are others, like me, who will refuse you.”

“Back to the ship,” Tali commanded.

“I think I will stay. You have a gift for avoiding witnesses, and you have too great a love of secrets. I wonder what you would talk about if I left the room. And I wonder where you went last night alone when the rest of the Cousins were settled into their niches.”

Tali gasped. He whirled on Thural. “Back to the ship!”

Thural didn’t move. It seemed to Reen that the Cousin was scarcely breathing.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Tali screamed, the fury in his voice surprising even the Sleep Master, who stepped away from the pair.

“Kill me, then,” Thural said quietly, “as you once led my Brother Jonis to slaughter. Kill me so that all the Community will know you are
tulmade,
and Oomal can take your place.”

“Enough of this,” the Sleep Master hissed from his refuge against the wall. “The sickness of disobedience has fevered us. You, Tali, must accept the charges of your Cousin, for he heard the wrong that the human Hopkins admitted to. And you, Thural, must forgive Tali.”

Slowly, slowly, Thural turned to the Sleep Master. The light from the French doors glinted in his eyes, making them seem less flesh than obsidian. “Have someone with clean hands point the way, then. Give me a First I can follow, and I will study forgiveness. The mother that spewed forth these Brothers was cursed, and she laid the germs of her insanity in them. Two Brothers as murderers. Perhaps if we breed the female, we will find that our seed is not barren but warped, and we will father a generation of killers. Ask him yourself, Sleep Master. Ask why he left the Cousin Place last night alone with three Loving Helpers.”

From Tali’s throat came a snarl of rage. He seized a vase from an end table and, before the Sleep Master could stop him, hurled it at Thural’s chest. The thin porcelain shattered with a bang. Amazement on his face, Thural staggered into a loveseat.

The Cousin in the secretary’s office came rushing in to stare aghast at the shards of china that littered the floor.

“Are you all right?” the Sleep Master asked in a horrified voice.

Shakily, Thural grabbed the arm of the sofa and pulled himself upright. “Yes. I think so.”

“It is best that you rest now,” the Sleep Master suggested.

Thural gave a weak nod.

“When your rest is over, the world will look better.”

Thural’s expression suggested strongly that he doubted that. Tali’s secretary backed cautiously from the room. After a pause to gather his composure, Thural left, too.

When they were gone, Tali said, “Thural goes too far.”

“Silence,” the Sleep Master said. “And watch yourself, Tali-ja. I back you because you know the law, but I begin to see that for you the law is a surface thing. Perhaps Thural is right. Perhaps there was something wrong with the eggs in your batch. I warn you now: Break the law again, and you will find yourself a ghost like your Brother.”

Tali looked thoughtfully at the Sleep Master as the old Cousin stalked out. From the anteroom Reen heard the tap-tap of clumsy Cousin hands on a keyboard, the quiet murmur of voices.

“Have you ever stuck a stick into an ant bed, Cousin Brother?” Reen asked quietly.

Tali walked over to the French doors and pulled back the sheers.

“That is what you have done,” Reen told his Brother’s back.

Somewhere in a neighboring office a phone rang, and Reen heard the high, clear, enchanting sound of a human laugh.

“You are stirring the stick, Cousin Brother. Ants, when disturbed, will sting. I have a piece of advice for you: Learn to love chaos, for you will be surrounded by it now.”

When Reen left a few minutes later, Tali was still staring wordlessly out at the Rose Garden.