Gibbon's Decline and Fall (65 page)

They were all thinking the same thing. They had been confused to the point of rebellion. They could tolerate no further delay or complications.

Carolyn became all too self-consciously diplomatic, made more uncomfortable by the sound of her own plaintive voice. “We appreciate your hospitality, Tess. We appreciate the trouble you've taken with us, but we haven't talked about what brought us here. Is Sophy here?”

A long silence. Tess murmured, “My daughter you called Sophy is departed.”

“You mean dead?” Faye challenged.

Tess drew a deep breath. “Sophy is gone. She has been gone for some time.”

Faye said, “She can't be! She talks to me! She dictates verses to Bettiann!”

“She walks around with me,” said Ophy. “She's there with me in the hospital!”

“And with me in the nights, and in the pastures,” said Carolyn. “She's been with all of us!”

Tess stood up, her form rigid and angular with surprise. “All of you?”

“All of us. We've seen her or heard her. Whatever she may be, she's not gone.”

The veils shivered. “But she must have gone. Always my daughters lived in one another, your Sophy and my Sovawanea, like two bodies with one mind. But then Sophy was gone. Sovawanea could not reach her, could not hear her.…”

“That tells us nothing!” Agnes drew a breath so sharp it cut her like a knife, the blade sliding along her ribs, piercing her heart. “You tell us nothing! What are you? What was she?” She moaned, clutching her side.

Ophy bent over her. “Aggie. Aggie, dear. Come on. Sit up a little. Someone get me my bag. I left it on the porch. You're all right, Aggie.”

“I'm not,” cried Agnes. “Never.”

“She loved your daughter,” Bettiann told Tess very softly when she returned from the porch with Ophy's bag. “She could never … show it, because of her religion, you see.”

“I know,” said Tess. “We know. Sovawanea told us.”

Agnes panted, “If Sophy is gone, then let me see her sister. Let me see Sovawanea! Let her tell me what she is!”

“Yes,” said Carolyn. “Please. It's the only thing that will convince her. Do let us see her.”

Tess spoke hesitantly. “She wants to see you. But she is somewhat … fearful. She became very fond of you, through Sophy. She doesn't want you to … reject her, not to be … surprised by her.”

“Reject her!” cried Faye, outraged.

“Surprised at what!” demanded Jessamine.

“Surprised … at what we are.” Tess's voice was tense as she turned and took a few steps away from them, as though separating herself. Her veiled arms were folded high across her chest, protectively.

“You see!” Aggie cried triumphantly. “I told you.…”

They shared confused glances, casting sidelong looks at Tess, who stared at Aggie, teetering back and forth, her indecision plain despite the veils. After a moment she made a painfully
inhuman sound, something between a hiss and a scream, and put her hands to the fastening of her robes. She wrenched at the closure and let the robes fall to the floor around her feet.

Ophy gasped. Aggie made a strange choked noise. The others were silent, with no breath for speech.

Slowly, Tess pulled the veil from her face to stand before them naked-faced, naked-armed. They saw scaled skin, very fine scales, so fine as to be almost invisible on the face and throat; hair that was not so much fur as feathers, on the head and shoulders and down the backs of the arms; no ears, but a definite tympanum at each side of the head; eyes that were protuberant and individually mobile, lashless, with vertical slits; the mouth more muzzlelike than their own, but with mobile lips.

Faye focused on the hands. They were bonier than human hands, and the nails, claws, were triangular in cross section, stronger than human nails. The teeth were sharper, too. At least those in the front of the mouth were. She assured herself that at a small distance the figure would appear quite human. That was important, though she couldn't say why. It was important that the figure should appear human because … because Sophy, well … It was important that Sophy had been human. Wasn't it? Except for the narrower shoulders, Tess looked human. Under the loose shift, or in profile, Tess might appear quite inhuman, of course. Which was, for this moment at least, unthinkable.

Jessamine wondered, might they have tails? No good reason they should, but it did rather go with scales. There was a folded structure around the neck and back of the head, possibly erectile.…

“Exactly the kind of person one would extrapolate arising from a saurian ancestor rather than a primate one,” she murmured, not realizing she was speaking aloud.

“Would you like me to take off my shoes and shift?” Tess asked, her voice noticeably less tense than before she had disrobed. “I will if you like.”

Ophy looked up sharply, realizing that Tess had been really afraid of them. Of them!

“Only if you would not be disturbed by it,” she said in her gentlest voice.

Tess dropped the shift, kicked off her soft shoes, actually more like foot socks, with soft soles, then turned slowly so
they could see all sides, gradually relaxing as she preceived their interest. They were surprised, yes, but they were not angry, or fearful enough to become angry—except for Faye. She seemed more shocked than the others. And Aggie more dumbfounded.

They saw an incurved remnant of a tail, a stubby thing, rather graceless. The scales on Tess's back were individually larger and more ornamental than on the arms, making a definite though subtle pattern. The belly was even more finely scaled than the arms, almost silver in color. The shoulders were definitely narrower than human, the neck longer. No breasts. Not a mammal. No pouch. Not a marsupial. Nothing like a vulva. Whatever was down there was protected by the incurved tail. Now exposed, the feet were long-toed like a lizard's.

“No horns,” giggled Aggie hysterically.

Ophy patted her shoulder. “May I?” she asked, holding out her hand toward Tess.

“Of course.” Tess submitted to being touched lightly; stroked lightly. Her crest rose, broad at the sides and high behind, elegantly patterned. Jessamine thought of the frilled lizard of Australia. Faye thought of a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, with her extravagant ruff. Around her neck Tess wore a simple chain with a heavy pendant. She touched it now, stroking it, like one touching a talisman.

“What are you?” breathed Agnes from the depth of her private nightmare.

Tess shrugged, a weirdly human shrug from this inhuman form. “Not devils, friend Agnes. We are what we are. Another branch of the bush. Another twig on the evolutionary tangle. I am as earthly as you are. We are saurian, not mammalian. Not monkeylike, but lizard-bird-like, though we can't fly any more than you can still swing through the trees. Our lineage separated from the saurian-avian branch a long time before yours separated from the primates, so we've come a bit farther from our nearest kin.”

“But you can talk!” cried Bettiann.

“So can parrots,” Tess said softly.

“But you left no fossils,” cried Jessamine. “No remnants of cities!”

“The fossils are there, you just haven't known they were us. And we never lived in cities.” She lifted her hands, an age-old gesture, her eyes swiveling to light upon each of them.
“Since men started swarming about, we've been careful to destroy what older traces were left and not to leave new ones.”

Jessamine persisted. “And have I understood correctly, from the seeming absence of any males at all, that you're parthenogenic!”

“That's true.”

“What does that mean?” demanded Agnes, eyes darting wildly.

“It means we have children without males. It means we are identical mothers and daughters, with a few males every tenth generation or so, to allow genetic variation.”

They stared for a long time, wordlessly.

“Have you seen enough?”

Her voice was not offended, merely patient. Something about it reminded Faye strongly of Sophy. Sophy, who did not mind being painted or sculpted in the nude, so long as the work did not resemble herself. Not self-conscious, merely modest.

She asked, “Sophy … she is, was, one of you?”

“Her mind was, yes,” said Tess, resuming the light shift that covered her body from shoulder to ankle but left her taloned feet bare. “Though it happens rarely among us, once in a great while a very large egg is laid, and twins come from it, each able to share what the other feels and knows. So Sovawanea was twinned in the egg, each twin to know what the other knew and feel what the other felt. One twin kept her own body, but we grew a human body for Sophy.”

“How?” breathed Jessamine.

“We borrowed some human people to get the cells we needed. We always returned the people, of course, with memories, if any, of quite some other creature than ourselves. It took us a long time to find the right way to do it, to make, as it were, a chimera … a mosaic, a human body with another's mind, but at last we succeeded in creating grace and beauty. We were too proud to let one of us go among you in an ugly form, but her perfection was a mistake. Pride is always error. She drew too much attention until you helped her become plain.”

“Why?” cried Agnes. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because we needed to find the enemy! We could look from this place and see what was happening among you, but that wasn't enough. We could hear your voices, but that wasn't enough, either. If we were to find your enemy and ours,
one of us had to be among you and feel it. One of us had to live it.”

Carolyn whispered, “They were both Sovawanea?”

“Both of them, yes.”

“And our friend, she … you think she died?”

Tess paused; her eyes swiveled. They could not read the expression on that unfamiliar face, but the voice seemed uncertain. “I don't know what to believe. You believe you have heard her, seen her. And what seems even stranger to me, Agnes has seen our Goddess, though she still half believes we are demons and is a sworn bride of your male God! How could that be? Such a thing is unkown!”

She shook her head, obviously baffled. “So what is true about Sophy? I don't know. You must ask Sovawanea.”

“May we go to her?” Carolyn asked.

A moment's silence while she pondered. “Now that we are sure she will not be … endangered, she will come to you.”

Tess picked up her robe and sandals and went away, down the dusty street. Across the road, in a paddock, old Josephus was currying a mule. Down the street three robed forms were hoeing a garden. As Tess passed, they looked up, nodded, then took off their robes, hung them across the fence, and went back to their work. They, too, wore simple ankle-length shifts. Their scales varied in color: soft green, ivory, gray.

“I wonder why they wear anything at all,” Faye said in a dull voice. “They have no sexual parts to conceal.”

“Perhaps as we do, for protection. Or for warmth,” suggested Jessamine.

“But aren't they cold-blooded?” asked Bettiann. “Like snakes?”

“She is warmer than the air,” said Ophy, staring at the hand that had stroked the scaled skin.

Carolyn said, “Like birds, Bettiann. And, as she said, egg laying.”

Jessamine nodded. “Which would make fiddling around with fetal DNA much easier than when it's in a womb inside someone's body.”

During all this Agnes had said nothing, had merely stared, paling, breathing more quickly, clasping her arm as though it hurt her. Seeing her distress, Ophy beckoned to Jessamine, and together they lifted Aggie onto one of the cushioned benches along the wall.

Ophy used her stethoscope, muttered instructions to the others to help Aggie lie down and put pillows under her feet. She rummaged among bottles in the bottom of her bag, coming up with a small pill that went under Aggie's tongue.

“What?” Carolyn asked, drawing her away to speak privately.

“Heart,” said Ophy. “I think it's just an arrhythmia, but she's really stressed out by this.”

“Can't accept it?”

Faye joined them, murmuring, “Can't or won't. She was in love with Sophy. She told us, there in Vermont.”

Carolyn nodded thoughtfully. “Of course. She'd have thought of that as sinful, wouldn't she? She's probably long since confessed it and expiated it, but now she doesn't know what she was in love with, or how sinful it may have been. All the confessions and expiations are useless if Sophy wasn't even human. And if she was a demon, well … where does that put Aggie?”

They turned back to Aggie and were all closely huddled around her when the well-remembered voice said, “Let me see.”

They turned, stood, looked, and looked away, then looked back even as they made room. It was Sophy. Not her face, form, eyes, features, nothing. Not her hair, breasts, hips, no. Not those sweet legs and lovely feet. No. But, still, Sophy. Her voice. Her hold upon them, whatever it had been, so strong still that it made them gasp. Sophy, in a simple white shift like the others.

Not Sophy, they told themselves. Sovawanea.

Sovawanea, who knelt beside Aggie and took her into her arms. “Aggie, love,” she said, patting the woman's shoulder. “Aggie, my dear.”

And Aggie wept, leaning upon that scaled breast, arm across that scaled shoulder, weeping as though her heart would break, while Sovawanea murmured over and over again: “It's all right, Aggie, dear, it's all right. I'm not some awful thing, dear, I'm not. It's all right.…”

Time passed. The room seemed chill. Carolyn built a fire in the tiled stove and shut the wide-flung casements against the cool. They found a kettle, heated water, and made tea, the six of them and this scaled stranger who was no stranger to any of them. For a time they dwelt in a timeless enchantment; the
one they had lost was returned to them; they feared to say anything to break the spell.