Chapter 5.

 

Jared

 

 

Sofi p'Effyn was conceived some three weeks following the death of her mother on the family farm south of Tandoi, a small city on the central continent of the planet of Haivran.

The farm produced meat animals and dairy products for the growing Zamuaon population on Haivran. It was an extremely profitable operation on a planet with a mixed Alliance population; the stale products, even meat as much as 36 hours after butchering, could be sold to the Earthian and D'ubian markets, where the customers were perfectly content with outdated food.

So when his beloved young wife died in a freak collision between her aircar and a robotractor, Farshu f'Effyn could afford to have reproductive material harvested and fertilized. Their marriage had been happy but brief; they had not yet sanctified it with children, a Zamuaon imperative, and he could not bear to leave matters thus incomplete.

Sofi was delivered at full term from a prebirth tank in the Department of Fetal Management at the Alliance Institute for Genetic Improvement in Bridgeton, the capital city of Haivran, and she was raised by her father on his farm and her maternal grandparents in Tandoi. She was the last living link with her mother, even if she did not actually resemble her; her mother had been a tall, striking Zamuaon with red-orange body hair; Sofi was small and graceful, with huge green eyes and body hair of an unusual shade of white gold.

Slightly less than four years later Cara Lindstrom was also delivered at full term by the Department of Fetal Management in Bridgeton. So both Cara and Sofi were born, so to speak, on the planet of Haivran. So were the Hardesty sisters.

The others came from an assortment of Alliance planets, drawn to Haivran by an assortment of reasons, all of which sounded perfectly reasonable. It was a good place to live, after all.

Haivran had originally been opened by an Earthian team, and so, as was the custom, used the Earthian calendar and clock. Located in the central core of the Alliance planets, natural atmosphere and vegetation suited, with minor tweaking, to all four Alliance species, with a slightly longer day than Earth (nearly two hours) and a slightly shorter one than Bahta (nearly one musavh), a slightly warmer climate than Zamuao, a slightly cooler climate than D’ubia, it worked for everyone, and it had become in the past century the center of intellectual life in the Alliance.

The great agricultural college set up by the Bahtans was located there, along with their school of pharmacology, conveniently in reach (by car or supertrain) of the Institute for Biological Studies with all of its offshoots, and the three major medical research and teaching hospitals scattered over the planet, the largest, Alliance General, being located in the city of Bridgeton, which in itself housed the United Alliance Institute of Social Sciences, and the Alliance University of the Arts, founded by Earthians for all Alliance species. The D'ubians had their School of Mines and Metallurgy in one of the mountainous regions of Haivran, with small branches elsewhere, and several D'ubian groups taught in the School of Music at the Alliance University, and another group ran the music department of the Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Bridgeton. Laboratories and research centers of varying sizes could be found in almost all corners of the gracious green continents.

The population was top-heavy with scientists, teachers, researchers, persons of all four races with multiple degrees and lofty goals, and with students from every Alliance planet. Then there were the support persons, the secretaries and receptionists, the shopkeepers, and those who provided the entertainment, restaurants, beauty spas, gymnasiums. There were excellent nursery and child care facilities. The fertile plains encouraged producers of food, such at Sofi’s father, and Earthian and Bahtan farmers as well, but there was no heavy industry allowed on planet, to pollute air and water.

There was an unexpectedly large call for intimate personal services, properly licensed and regulated; success in intellectual life did not equal success in personal life, and those in the industry could testify to the number of Ph D's who satisfied their occasional emotional and physical needs by the use of professionals. There were also a number of independent, unregulated, unlicensed, marginally legal operations, especially in the spaceport areas and the poorer neighborhood, but that always existed in Earthian and Zamuaon societies. The Bahtans had a different perspective on such matters, of course, and no one but the D'ubians had any idea what the D'ubians did.

The schools, from nursery to post grad, were excellent. The medical facilities were outstanding, with the very best of cutting-edge care available. The pace of life was slower, perhaps, than on the industrial planets, and the tone was a little more intellectual.

So both Cara and Sofi grew up on Haivran, as did Phyllis and Lillian Hardesty, but they did not meet until they were all adults.

 

The Hardesty sisters were the first in the neighborhood; in a manner of speaking, they created the neighborhood. Their father, who had been born on Earth and fled the poverty and overcrowding there for the colonies and the expansion settlements on Alliance worlds, built the big rambling house on a large hunk of land at the end of a dirt road just southwest of Bridgeton. He imagined that when one of his various business schemes made his fortune, he would be able to live in luxury on a vast estate.

Unluckily none of his schemes made him his fortune, an injustice that made him resentful and angry. He took out his anger on his wife, who stayed long enough to present him with two daughters, both dark-haired and dark-eyed and somewhat swarthy of complexion, possibly throwbacks to some unremembered ancestor. Three months after the birth of the second child, she eloped with an assistant grocer with whom she had been exchanging love letters through the robot delivery service.

So, even angrier, he raised Lillian and Phyllis himself with the help of his father, a retired space port worker; with a rigid set of rules; and with the end of his leather belt, which he applied liberally; thereby raising a pair of girls with a hatred for rigid rules and the violent men who enforced them.

Eventually the girls' grandfather, from whom their father had inherited his temper, died of a heart attack during a dispute over a poker game in a downtown bar. A year after that, the older girl, Lillian, yanked the belt out of her father's hand and threw him across the room; when he rose and went for her, she and Phyllis pitched him out of the house altogether. He took ship for old Mars, in the Earthian solar system, and was never heard of again.

Lillian and Phyllis remained in the big house, financing their college educations by selling tracts of their father's land. The original forest still encircled the dirt road, but lots were cleared, and a two-story family home rose up beside the dirt road east of them. Two or three families revolved through the place and moved on. A small one-story place was erected on the other side of the two-story house, clinging to the land between the trees. A honeymooning couple lived there until the honeymoon was over,left the house and each other; a single woman with an active social life replaced them, found it too far from the bright lights, also left. Across the road, which was beginning to be called an avenue, running as it did from east to west, a developer threw up a trio of identical houses, separated by car ports with room for two aircars; each house had two bedrooms, one bath, unfinished basement, small front lawn and large back yard fringed with the small wilderness of trees. Young couples came and went.

Phyllis married twice, unsuccessfully. Lillian married once, and had two serious live-in relationships in the big Hardesty house. None of the unions produced children. Lillian and Phyllis taught Alliance history and mathematics, respectively, at the Haivran Multicultural Secondary School in Bridgeton, a highly-regarded and expensive private school, and settled into the house of their childhood for their retirement. They supplemented their pensions by taking boarders, children and young people from distant worlds whose parents had been attracted by the outstanding educational opportunities on Haivran.

Mimi and Clyde Dokker were the next of the group to move into the neighborhood. They had begun life on old Earth and, under circumstances they did not discuss, had met in the streets of old New York City as nearly feral street children. They had, at one time, had parents. Mimi, at least, had been heard to refer to her father, from whom she had inherited her shorter stature and the epicanthic fold of her upper eyelids; Clyde, who appeared to have an Anglo-Saxon heritage, never spoke of his family at all. The pair had formed an alliance there on the streets, and had gone on, with a great deal of determination and ambition, into space, working on merchant ships until at last they owned their own small trader and made a comfortable income for themselves.

They, too, had no children, and their space careers came to an abrupt end when a gang of space pirates took notice of them. They got into port, were transferred to the superior medical facilities on Haivran, and, at last released, decided to remain there. Their inventory fetched an excellent price – they had traded heavily and profitably with the D’ubian miners on several colony worlds. Their ship, even damaged, was sold almost immediately for a good chunk of credits. And they had had some insurance, along with their savings, so they were able after their medical expenses to buy a modest house and settle into a quiet retirement.

They chose the easternmost of the three identical houses on what was now being called 24^th Avenue, Bridgeton having grown out to encompass the dirt road and the Hardesty house, leaving, however, the tract of forest around them on Hardesty land. Within a week of moving in, Mimi and Clyde and Phyllis and Lillian had struck up a firm friendship, and a year later, when Clyde’s friend Al Crane was looking for a place to spend his own old age, they unhesitatingly recommended their neighborhood.

Al, who had worked as a navigator on a Defense survey ship, was an orphan and had been raised in a Children’s Shelter on Old Earth. He had been told a little about the mother he did not remember; she had been Cherokee, from a Native American Earthian tribe, accounting for his darker skin. His father was not in the picture at all.

Al, a widower, childless, bought the small house buried in the trees across the street from Mimi and Clyde. He brought along his chess and checkers sets, his Planet Monopoly board, his Scrabble set, Parcheesi, Backgammon, two cribbage boards, and many decks of cards, all of which had accompanied him during his wanderings through space. He also had several large recipe readers collected from second-hand stores. He spent his time with the Hardesty sisters and Clyde and Mimi playing games, and his time alone teaching himself how to bake from scratch. Fine-quality synthfillers were available on Haivran for the automatic cookers, of course, but there were also excellent raw ingredients, flour and eggs and butter and milk from the farms to the east and north of Bridgeton. Inspired by Al’s efforts, Mimi and Clyde studied the art of bread making.

A new developer began construction of a three unit apartment building on the other side of Mimi and Clyde, fitting it into the available space by fronting 42^nd street rather than 24^th Avenue. The basement was dug and concrete and foamstone poured, but before the building was completed it caught fire, due to a malfunction of the welding robots, and the empty foundation sat for some time, covered with a temporary roof to keep the rain out.

The two-story family home was purchased by three Bahtan sisters; two of them worked as nurses at Alliance General, and the third was studying pharmacology. They were far more interesting neighbors than any who had been there before. Being young, in their early reproductive years, they worked hard and played even harder; the household was seldom without a male Bahtan or two, caught, dragged inside by the enthusiastic sisters and kept until he managed an escape. A year or so later, the two younger sisters, student nurses, joined the household, and the group became woven into the fabric of the neighborhood. They gardened, filling their yard with flowers and vegetables and fruit in a vast mixed profusion, and shared their harvest by the armful with Mimi and Clyde, Al, Phyllis and Lillian. Al and Mimi and Clyde shared their baked goods, and Lillian and Phyllis shared their casseroles and their accumulated expertise in household and vehicular repair. They had long ago decided to do it themselves and see that it was done right.

The developer with the corner lot threw up a one-story apartment building that disintegrated in a spectacular explosion when the private generator blew; luckily the construction was not yet finished and no one was living there. The basement was once again covered with a temporary roof and left to the elements.

The middle of the three identical houses was occupied by a misanthropic man who avoided his neighbors at all costs. When he retired and went to live with his son, the house sat empty for half a year before it was sold to a much younger man, in his late twenties or early thirties. He looked at the place with a woman companion; she looked old enough to be his mother, if an elegant fair-haired blue-eyed pale-skinned woman could give birth to a son with black hair and dark brown eyes and black skin. Whoever she was, she did not move in with him; he lived alone. He was an attractive man, very tall, pleasant; his name was Jared Ramirez, he told the neighbors as they found excuses to meet him on the sidewalk or in the yard. The sour-faced woman in the house on the west side of his place grumbled to Phyllis that a man that young would have parties, disrupting the peace of the neighborhood, and when she heard where he worked she was sure they were in for endless orgies and inventive and noisy perversions. Jared worked for the Premier Escort Services Agency Inc., and had for ten years or so at that time.

But if he took part in any orgies or perversions in the course of business, he didn’t do it at home. He was sometimes gone on weekends and evenings, but his arrivals and departures were quiet and unspectacular. He was in graduate school, as it turned out, at the United Alliance Institute of Sciences, had his Master’s degree, was working for his doctorate – cultural linguistics – was actually teaching undergraduate classes, and he was working no more than part time at the Agency now. He didn’t talk about his work there, but the impression in the neighborhood was that he was dealing only with established clients, and gradually phasing them out.

So the sour-faced woman – later they all agreed how odd it was they could not remember her name – could find nothing to complain about, and anyway she moved away two months later to follow her husband when his application to a colony settlement was accepted. No one could remember what colony it was, although all of them remembered speculating on how far he would be willing to move to get away from her.

That house remained vacant over the winter, although realtors showed it regularly; none of the prospective buyers seemed quite comfortable there.

By the end of his first summer in the neighborhood, Jared had bought a second-hand picnic table which he installed on his front lawn by Mimi and Clyde’s property, and they all began to gather there with Al’s cards and games and Mimi’s lemonade, or iced tea, or pitchers of coculi juice Observing Al’s rheumatic stiffness and the way both Mimi and Clyde limped in cooler weather – all three of them were unfortunately resistant to pain killing drugs and had given up hope of pharmaceutical relief – Jared opened the hot tub the previous owner had installed on the back porch to all comers, registering their thumb prints on his door pad so they could get in even if he wasn’t there, in any other neighborhood an act of singular trust. In return, Clyde and Mimi brought him bread and rolls and Al brought him cake and pies, and the Hardesty sisters fixed the leak in the roof of the small bedroom, which he used as a study, and the squeaky door between the big bedroom and the back porch, and helped him change fuel cells on his car.

He didn’t talk much about his early life. He had grown up on Danmira, a mining colony not yet terraformed, still mostly domed; he had apparently been raised by a single mother, not in affluent circumstances, now deceased. His black skin came from a wide-ranging heritage that included most Earthian races; his mother was half Mexican, on her father’s side, he said, and his great great grandmother was half Korean, and a great grandfather was mostly Lakota Sioux, and he understood there was Polynesian blood somewhere back there. His father, he said, was some big beautiful black guy; he said this, smiling, as a rote answer, one he had repeated many times to explain his parentage. Basically he was Earthian, he said, and perfectly content with it.

And so the neighborhood began to take shape.

 

The woman who accompanied Jared on his house hunt was Maud Clipper, and they had been lovers for years, a disparate match neither had ever sought. There were thirty years between them.

Despite her age, Maud was attractive. She was nearly as tall as Jared, with a slender elegant figure unimpaired by age, perfect oval face, long white hair piled in convoluted curls on her head, pale complexion and sharp blue eyes that missed absolutely nothing. She wore only the best, and her taste was impeccable; jewels flashed at her throat, her ears, her fingers.

She was wealthy, very wealthy; her deceased husband had been successful in business, if not in pleasuring his wife. "I chose not to die without finding out what all the shouting was about," she told Jared, who was by no means the first of her young men, only the last.

She checked out the Agency regularly; she asked for him, the newest employee, because she always did that, they told him. She was older, exacting, demanding, hard to please, pick your description; an old bitch, said the more experienced Agency men, the ones who had failed to amuse her. Not yet quite twenty, feeling all the potency of his youth, Jared was willing to try. He liked the idea of a woman of her age so lustily enjoying her sexuality, and he was confident of his own ability to satisfy her – or, at that time in his life, any woman at all.

And at first sight, he liked her, not only the body, shapely as a young woman, but also the spirit behind those clear blue eyes, which was ageless. She explored the world, he was to find, all it had to offer, with the same zestful enjoyment he found in her approach to sex.

"You could be my son," said Maud, leaning over him as he lay in her bed. "Or even my grandson. What do you think of that?"

"If you don't mind, I don't mind," he said, "but I don't feel like your son." He ran his dark hands up over her white body, to the breasts that showed no more than the slightest sagging of age. The nipples contracted as he touched them.

Maud laughed, studying him with those sharp blue eyes. He could not imagine all of the things that she knew.

 

Jared called it a May-October romance; Maud, who had few illusions, said it was more like February-December. Maud predicted that he would meet a beautiful woman of his own age and lose his heart to her; Jared said that he would certainly let her know if this happened. It didn't. Jared attended classes with women at the United Alliance Institute of Sciences, and he met more women through his work at the Agency. He couldn't take any interest in men as sexual partners, so his work was a little limited; he did well anyway. He became very fond of some of his regular clients, "little affairs," Maud called them, but none of these women equaled Maud in her quiet elegance, and none of them had the mind and the wit and the complexity he so much enjoyed in her.

He might sleep with many women, but he loved only one.

And the odd thing was that he couldn't read her mind. He could, to some extent, read most other people, although he never spoke of it, not even to Maud, because it was only a little skill. He could not remember when he wasn't able to do this; he thought, given the circumstances of his childhood, it was a survival skill. He could read at least the simple surface thoughts of the people around him, and in some cases he could penetrate their minds quite deeply. He could persuade them a little, too, tiny nudges in one direction or another. He didn't attempt anything big.

So as a child he could help Gram a little, sensing a threat lurking in a dark alley, deflecting the attention of a shop keeper from the merchandise she had just slipped into her bag. Later he could spot a dangerous man and, with luck, nudge Ava away from him. Sometimes he could nudge Ava away from the pills and the bottles, too – not, unluckily, often enough.

Now he found it a handy talent at the Agency, being able to see what his clients wanted and needed. A few people spilled their thoughts and feelings liberally around them; they were easy to read. Most were harder; it helped to know them a little, and it helped to touch them.

Maud, well known, welcoming his touch, could not be read at all. He could sense, sometimes, the surface drift of a thought, but most of Maud was hidden away from him; he saw her mind as a shining white wall, marble, perhaps, or D'ubian firestone tiles, shimmering under the surface with shades of red and gold, impenetrable. It didn't lessen her attraction; it intrigued him.

And sometimes it frustrated him. She traveled, attending to the businesses she had inherited, supervising the establishments of charities and foundations. She had a passion for education – she had encouraged his initially vague thoughts on this subject until they took on form and reality – and she liked medical research and she was fascinated with genetics. Returning from these trips, she was sometimes triumphant, sometimes agitated and upset, from, he supposed, problems she would not discuss. And he couldn't read her; he could only love her and hold her, tease and distract her. He could offer no real help.

But it seemed to be enough for her. As the years passed, he grew to understand that however much she wanted to appear powerful and invulnerable, even to him, she leaned on him.

After he entered the Institute, after he declared his major – psychology, in the beginning – Maud suggested that he give up the Agency and move into her penthouse. He had, initially, been overawed at the sight of her penthouse, but he had grown accustomed to it by now, and he had never been overawed by Maud. He couldn't read her, but he understood her well enough to know that allowing her to possess him in this way was a very bad idea, at least for a man who loved her. He refused, gently, firmly, continually. He continued at the Agency, and he did very well there; he could pay his own way, and he much preferred this.

The argument about this went on for years.

And now a decade had passed, and he was no longer arrogant enough to think he could conquer anything life threw in his path, but he had a realistic idea of what he could do. His time with the Agency was ending, which pleased Maud, and it was ending on his terms, which pleased him. He liked the look of the future that he was making for himself, a long way from his beginnings. And he liked knowing that the woman he loved was with him, her arm in his. It would not last forever. Maud's health had never been good; heart trouble was in her genes, she said. But she was still here, and that was enough.

He didn't really expect her to move in with him in the little house on 24^th Avenue. She was unlikely to give up the luxuries and conveniences of her penthouse for the undistinguished two-bedroom simplicity of his house. But she was a frequent visitor there. The neighbors were pleasant and polite, but there was a negative undercurrent under their courtesy. They didn't quite trust her. Jared thought it might be the obvious age difference, which bothered many of her friends, too, and caused them to regard him with suspicion. And Maud had a reputation as a ruthless businesswoman, which might well color the perceptions of his new friends, who were not part of that world and were wary of it.

He was accustomed to this vague unvoiced disapproval, and he and Maud paid no attention to it. They were happy together. That was all that mattered.