Brother Termite (2 page)

REEN WAITED
in the Oval Office fifteen minutes before opening the door to the huge reception area to find Marian Cole talking to Natalie as though they were old friends. The two women, one tall and blond, the other short and blond, turned. Natalie, he noticed, had exchanged her irritating blouse for a cream-colored sweater.

“I told you I wanted to see you,” Reen said to Marian.

Natalie spoke up: “But you said first thing this morning to hold all calls.”

“You might have announced Director Cole was here.”

“That would have been a call. You tell me ‘Hold all calls’ when you don’t want to talk to anyone; and then you’re supposed to say, ‘Hey, I asked so-and-so to come over, so forget the holding-the-calls thing.’ That’s how you’re supposed to talk to a secretary.” She rolled her eyes.

“Hold all calls while the director and I are speaking,” Reen told her.

Natalie went back to her typing. “Okay.”

When he reentered his office, Marian followed. He closed the heavy oaken adjoining door, his claw clicking on the brass knob.

“So. What’s Billy Hopkins been saying about me?” she asked.

Reen walked to the windows and peered out. The riots were over, and a sanitation department truck was washing the blood from the streets. “I don’t talk about him to you or you to him. That would be disloyal.”

“Disloyal?” she asked in amusement. “I thought maybe Billy was babbling again.”

He was glad that she was standing directly at his back, right in the sixty-degree dead spot of his three-hundred-degree vision field. He didn’t want to see her face. “Angela asks about you.”

Behind him there was silence. Reen, who ached no less for Marian’s approval than four-year-old Angela did, longed to turn to see if she was smiling or frowning. “It’s been nearly a month. I thought we would go see her.”

“I’m tired of this, Reen.” Marian’s voice was so weary that it frightened him. Humans aged in too short a season, like the fleeting Appalachian fall. From the past year to this it seemed that her moistness and energy had gone. There were new lines on Marian’s face, more silver in her hair. She was slipping from him too quickly.

Marian moved slightly to the right and entered his peripheral vision. She stood as she stood when they had first met: hands clasped, chin lifted. The other children, stolen in their sleep and awakened to alien surroundings, had screamed. But not five-year-old Marian.

That one,
he told the doctors.
I hope it will be that one.

“Don’t fight me, Marian,” he told her.

She gave Millard Fillmore an appraising look. “How can I? You always get your way.”

He knew he should apologize but didn’t. Too many years, too many chances for apologies had passed. He opened the French doors for her, and together they walked to the south lawn.

In the Rose Garden the crisp air held the tangs of autumn and cordite. Down the spread of grass, on the other side of the fence, stood two knots of humans encumbered by still cameras and minicams. Reen would have found it difficult to distinguish reporter from tourist but for the frenzied shouting from the media and the CNN truck parked nearby.

His eye lit on a solitary figure between the throngs: a young man with a purple Vespa and a backpack. For two days now, each time Reen had ventured onto the south lawn, he had seen the boy. And even from that distance Reen could feel the disquieting intensity of his stare.

What could be so important to demand such a single-purposed vigil? The boy’s pose was taut, his expression that of barely contained fervor. Reen pictured the boy reaching in the backpack, bringing out a gun, a bomb. Head down, Reen hurried his stride.

Past a knee-high barrier of ornamental shrubbery the ovoid commuter waited as it always did. And there waited Thural, a head taller than the three Loving Helpers at his side. His black eyes were pools of calm. The Loving Helpers’ eyes were dark, abandoned wells.

“Cousin Reen-ja,” Thural said, speaking quietly in Cousin language. “Jonis went with two Loving Helpers to observe the riot and has not yet returned.”

Reen entered the shelter of the ship’s doorway, just out of the backpacked boy’s possible line of fire. “But the riot has been over for some time.”

“Yes, Reen-ja. It causes me to wonder.”

“Inform the Community, then,” Reen said. “Maybe they can find him. In the meantime we will be taken to West Virginia.” He motioned to Marian, who was standing on the lawn, well out of the shadow of the ship’s overhang. Well out of the Loving Helpers’ reach.

“Keep those things away from me,” she said.

After a self-conscious glance at Marian Cole, Thural told the Loving Helpers, “Go.” In unison the three about-faced and marched toward the command room, Thural at their heels.

When they left, Marian entered. Reen led her down the right-hand corridor.

“I hate them,” she said. “I can’t stand the way they move, like little robots. I hate the blank way they look at me. Ninety-three percent of your people. Doesn’t that scare you?”

Reen stopped in the middle of the hall and looked back, searching her expression for pity. Her face was hard. “We live with it.”

“No, you don’t.”

Embarrassed, he continued down the hall to the lounge. Marian gave the monochromatic, minimalist room a sweeping glance and then tried to make herself comfortable on a chair that was too short for her legs. Reen perched on a sofa opposite her and contemplated the wall. There was a falling sensation as the ship’s gravity changed.

When Reen glanced at Marian, he found himself staring into the side of her cheek.

“I want you to be happy,” he told her.

“That’s great, Reen. You rape me, then insist I enjoy it.”

Humans always muddied the clear water of emotion; and in that murk the handsome, darting shapes of love swam with ugly creatures of lust.

Once she had loved him as a playmate. Then he took the place of her absent father.
I’m going to marry you,
Marian, at six years old, had told him. And the psychologists, accustomed to the caprices of human children, had laughed.

But neither Reen nor the psychologists had been prepared for her determination. It was Marian, not Reen, who always got her way.

Remembering that touch was important to humans, he leaned forward to grasp her beautifully wrought hand. The Cousins, in their twelve hundred centuries of civilization, could have created splendor with hands like those. With their three stubby fingers and claw they had managed only to produce utility.

He noticed the aging lizard texture of her skin and tried, with helpless dismay, to smooth it. His claw gently traced the raised white scars at her wrist, the evidence of her earlier disappointment with her husband. Once, he reminded himself, she had loved Howard, too.

“It’s my fault you’re so bitter. If I had known that remembering would ...”

She slipped her hand from his. “You never come by anymore. But you got what you were after.”

“Angela.” He rolled the name in his mouth like candy. “Wasn’t Angela worth it?”

Her eyes narrowed, her lips twisted. The savagery in her face unnerved him. “Women are made to be brood mares, is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” he replied, wondering what he could do to make things right. He suddenly realized how deluded he had been. And how tragically his experiment was turning out.

Thural poked his head into the lounge to say they had landed. Marian got to her feet.

“You will hug her,” Reen blurted.

She looked at him blankly.

“I don’t care how you feel about me. And it doesn’t matter whether you wanted Angela or not. She is here, and you are her mother. Angela is a mammal. She needs to be hugged. I’m not practiced at touching. And I suspect I’m no good at it.”

But Marian knew that, didn’t she? Their own shy, awkward embraces had led to–what? he wondered. A sterile thing that surely hadn’t been enough for her and had been nearly too much for him. No, theirs had been a laboratory mating, not warm limbs wrapping warm limbs but a petri-dish entwining of DNA.

As he followed her off the ship, he wondered dismally if she needed more and if that was the reason for her anger.

It had snowed in the West Virginia mountains. The sun was struggling to peek out from behind a layer of cirrus clouds. Reen slogged through the drifts on the walkway and kicked his boots clean on the mat before he entered the house.

A knot of gray, large-headed, and huge-eyed children were playing ball on the living room floor. As soon as Marian entered, one popped up from the group and darted her way, as dramatically and hopelessly drawn to Marian as an iron filing to a magnet.

Love, Reen thought. One day his daughter would choose another of the recombinants to mate with, and when they mated, they would do so with love. Perhaps they would talk after the act was over, the way humans so often did. Angela’s children would grow up under the sunny indulgence of both mother and father, and her life would be sweeter than Reen’s had been.

As Angela hugged Marian’s legs, Marian stood immobile, gazing into the distance, seemingly unaware or perhaps embarrassed by the show of adoration. After a heartrending wait, Marian bent, pried the child’s grasping hands from her thighs, and picked her up.

Reen relaxed and studied the perfect five-fingered gray hand now clasped in Marian’s pink one. Angela’s nose was tiny and well formed, her mouth a small bow. On the top of her head was a dusting of hair as pale as the snow on the hills outside. Despite her color, despite her huge eyes, she was mostly Marian’s child.

“Reen,” Angela said and blinked.

The ice of Reen’s earlier annoyance thawed. He put out his hand to his daughter, and she grabbed his claw.

Sandra Gonzales, the caregiver, and Quen, the Cousin overseer, ambled up.

“Such a good child,” Mrs. Gonzales was saying. The caregiver had the plump roundness of bread dough. Gray children trailed in her wake like eager gulls behind a tugboat. “Angela’s such a kind, sweet little thing, Ms. Cole. She plays with the other children so well.”

Marian had not ceased her vague contemplation of the room. Although she held Angela in her arms, she had not once looked at her child. “You should have some colors in the house. Children like bright colors.”

“Distracting,” Quen said. “They must learn to focus. They are human, but they are Cousin as well.”

Marian put the little girl down. “I want to take her outside. Does she have a coat or something?”

Mrs. Gonzales fluttered her hands. “Yes, yes. A coat.” She bustled out of the room, the children following.

The two Cousins and Marian Cole stood in uneasy silence until Mrs. Gonzales came back and began to bundle Angela into a zippered windbreaker. “Your mother wants to take you outside. Won’t that be fun? And then you can tell all the other children about it.”

“What will she tell them about?” Marian asked sharply. “About having a mother that she knows or about playing in the snow?”

The smile slid like melted frosting from Mrs. Gonzales’s sweet roll of a face.

“The other children have no idea who their parents are,” Marian said.

“Not important,” Quen told her.

Mrs. Gonzales was studying the zipper intently, much more intently than the job deserved.

“Then why is it so damned important that Angela know who I am?” Marian asked Quen with such ferocity that the Cousin blundered backward.

“Why is it so important?” Marian demanded.

No one answered her. Quen stood where his backward flight had taken him, his gaze averted. Mrs. Gonzales, lips puckered, was still fiddling with the coat zipper.

“They’re killing us off,” Marian told Mrs. Gonzales. “All very quietly. We’re being sterilized, lady. Did you know that? Look at the statistics. The birthrate is down eighteen percent, and no one realizes what’s happening.”

“Not in front of the children,” Reen said.

She gave him a brief glance and turned to Mrs. Gonzales.

“Can’t you see? In a hundred years or so, there won’t be any humans left. These children will take over the world.”

Quen stiffened. “These children,” he said with pride, “will inherit the universe.”