Chapter 9

 

Gina

 

 

It was okay to explore the woods. They couldn't get lost, Lillian said. There were low cliffs to the north, not far behind the Bahtan house and Al's house, and other people owned the land on top of the cliffs and were building houses. There was a housing development to the west. There were streets and houses to the south. There was civilization in any direction, Lillian said.

But there were trees and bushes, tiny wild flowers, and a wandering creek eventually swallowed up by culverts near the little cliffs. There were small meadows and thickets and even the cliffs were interesting, with tangles of bushes at the foot and miniature caves and they were not too high or dangerous to climb, Al and Clyde said.

Jared and two of the Bahtan girls took Gina and Terry through the woods to the stream, where Terry fell in; that was after he climbed the tree and couldn't figure how to get down. Jared, who helped him, said it was a learning process. Willis had chosen to stay behind, playing checkers with Al and listening to whatever Al would tell him about his experiences on the survey ship, so Gina picked a few leaves and a flower or two for him, to compare with the plants on Linden's World. He said they were all different. He seemed to think that was good. Gina's main experience with Linden's World plants was in the grassy little hollow and whatever grew wild around the house. She noticed the birds on Haivran were covered with bright colored scales instead of feathers, a little like the field varmints. But they were pretty, flashing in the sunshine; she liked to watch them, and Mutai and Clena, two of the Bahtan sisters, could tell her the kinds of birds they were. And the sisters knew all about the plants.

It was a very different place from Linden's World, but Gina was beginning to think it was a good place.

 

"We could put up some big shelves in here," said Lillian, looking around Gina’s room, "and you could get all those dolls unpacked and set them up with the furniture and all."

Gina thought the walls looked nice just as they were, rosy white with shelves for her readers and vids. But the dolls had always been in her room, and she supposed they had to be there. "Okay," she said without much enthusiasm, and Lillian shot her a glance and bent down to look at the boxes of treasures Gina had pushed to the back of the little student desk, where no one would see them and think they were junk and throw them away.

"Oh, look at those rocks," she said. "Did you find these yourself? Back home?" Gina nodded and, since Lillian looked interested, opened the top of another of the boxes, the one with the plastic-coated leaves and flowers. "That’s beautiful!" exclaimed Lillian, lifting one of the blue sroni flowers into the sunlight. "You know what we should do," said Lillian, "is put up some little shelves, maybe over the desk here, so you could put all of these lovely things out. And we could put the dolls into one of the other rooms, where they would have a wall all to themselves."

"Could we do that?" said Gina, surprised and pleased, and Lillian beamed.

"Let me get the hammer," she said, putting down the flower very carefully.

 

It took a little while to adjust to being in a classroom with a bunch of other kids, Earthians, Zamuaons, Bahtans; not D'ubians, of course; they taught their kids at home. But the lessons were pretty much the same as the ones on the computer on Linden's world, not very interesting, things Gina had seen in readers years ago. Math took a little work, but the rest was boring, which was how lessons always had been; this was just the way it was.

It was easier to adjust to life at home; the Hardesty house had become home within the first week to all three of them.

There were things to get used to, of course. A couple of weeks after they moved into the Hardesty house, Willis and Gina and Terry heard all the screaming and crying next door and went out to the porch to see what had happened; Willis thought one of the Bahtan sisters must have been hurt. But all five of them were fine, perfectly healthy, in fact, and very busy; four of them were engaged in dragging a large, struggling Bahtan male out of their van and up their front walk, where the fifth girl held the door open for them. They dragged him inside, as he clutched desperately at the door frame, wailing, and they slammed the door shut behind them.

"Oh, they got a new one," said Phyllis calmly, looking out through the window.

Willis stared, looking from Phyllis to the Bahtan house and back to Phyllis, and then he said, "Oh!" as if remembering something, and he blushed very red and told Gina and Terry they should come inside now.

"What are they doing?" Gina asked him, and he mumbled that it was private stuff and they shouldn’t bother the Bahtans this weekend. He shuffled himself inside, and Phyllis, looking amused, let him go past her.

So it had to do, Gina guessed, with sex. She thought of Nurse Dana and Connie and, unpleasantly, of Nurse Linda and she hesitated over that memory. "Are they going to hurt him?" she asked Phyllis uncomfortably.

"No, no," said Phyllis. "I think it’s just that they get the males very tired. They took him away from what he was doing and they, well, there are five of them, you know, and they sort of overwork him. This is the way they do it," she explained to Gina. "This is the normal thing for their people."

Willis didn't want to talk about it with his little sister. So Gina consulted the computer, and learned at last why the males hid from the females. They were afraid of them, afraid of being caught and dragged off to, well, have sex, a lot of sex. When they got as old as Willis, they left their mother's house and moved in with other Bahtan men and tried to stay out of sight.

The Bahtan sisters kept that male until he sneaked off one day while they were at work and school, and after a couple of weeks they went and got another. It was just the way it was for them.

It was so very different from anything Gina had observed, but different people, she was learning, did different things. Mimi said that was what made the galaxy interesting.

 

Autumn set the leaves on fire with color, and the days became shorter and cooler. Lillian began to teach Willis how to drive her air scooter. Willis had always wanted to operate the farm machines, the ones the workers rode on, but he wasn’t allowed to, and he had no experience in driving vehicles. The first afternoon he hit the wrong button and ended up on top of Clyde’s car port, and Jared laughed so hard he had to sit down at the picnic table while Clyde and Lillian called up instructions about switches and gears.

Once Willis got down, Terry said he wanted to learn too. "You have to wait until you're as big as your brother," said Phyllis. "Thank heaven." They all knew about Terry now. Within the first week he had climbed on top of Al's house and fallen down, not breaking anything that time, and he had attached Mimi's rake to her front porch with an adhesive he found in Clyde's toolbox. It had been intended for ship repairs, and it held the rake to the porch railing even though it buzzed and whirred and squealed and spat chewed-up leaves. Back on the farm, the housekeeper and Posie would have been furious; here, everyone laughed, and Clyde and Mimi left the rake glued to the railing until Jared and all the Bahtan sisters got home from work to see it for themselves.

"Not that you're supposed to do that," Phyllis told Terry.

"I just wanted to know," said Terry. "It's really strong glue, isn't it."

The second week, he fell from the little cliff behind Al's house and broke his wrist, and they all got acquainted with Dr. Frank, who took care of most of the neighbors. He was a very nice man who had an office downtown, and he sealed Terry's wrist with no scolding or fussing. He handled the sprained ankle the next month, and the cut on Terry's leg just before Solstice Day, when Phyllis and Lillian were both out shopping and Al and Clena couldn't get it to stop bleeding. Clena knew a lot about medicine but she wasn't licensed to practice yet, and they had only a little home sealer, not big enough for that cut.

Terry also put his foot through a partition in the attic, swinging on a rope he had tied to a rafter, and he put a bucketful of rocks into the laundry appliance in the basement to get them clean, but they didn't need Dr. Frank for that. Phyllis showed him how the laundry appliance worked while it spit out rocks and cleaned itself, so he would know why it hadn't worked on rocks, and Lillian explained a little about carpentry while she and he fixed the partition. Willis apologized for their little brother, but Lillian and Phyllis said that sort of thing was to be expected with a very young and very smart and very active boy. They had once had a boy who had taken the dishwasher apart, down to the very last bolt; he had been older than Terry, though.

So Terry was back to being Terry. He took very little interest in school and the work his class was doing to get ready for reading next year. Sometimes, Lillian said, kids just weren't ready to start reading at six. It hadn't to do with whether he was smart or not. Jared agreed; he said it had to do with whether the brain was developed enough in that way, and a lot of very smart kids weren't developed until they were seven or eight, and they shouldn't be pushed. He had studied things like that at the Institute, so he knew. He himself loved to read; his house was filled with readers of all sorts, bright colored boxes on the shelves, and once he found out that Gina could read well enough, he encouraged her to borrow anything she liked.

"If she doesn't understand something," he told Phyllis, who looked uncertain, "she can ask one of us, and we can explain it to her." He would steer her away from readers that were too grownup, Gina saw; he had a pretty good idea about where she was at, because he could reach her mind. He didn't snoop, he was very careful about that, but they could talk a little that way sometimes and Gina thought that was fun. She was beginning to figure out how to make words in her mind, like a real conversation, and how to pay attention to feelings, too, so there were two ways to talk mind to mind. And she felt very safe with Jared; he knew about her, and she knew about him. He liked all three of them, her and Willis and Terry, and he would do nothing to hurt any of them, and he wouldn't let anyone else hurt them, either.

He read people very easily, far more easily than Gina could, but he didn't have a lot of experience with other people who could see inside him; there was a woman he knew – something about business, that part of his business that had to do with women, which he kept just a little out of Gina's reach – who could also do it, not as well as he and Gina could. She wasn't as strong, he said. No one else knew that he could, not even his girlfriend. Gina thought that other people in the neighborhood sort of guessed it, even if he had never told them. She could feel it in them, that they understood, at least a little, and that they had their own powers, although not as strong as his.

But they didn't talk about it, any more than they talked about Jared's girlfriend. She came to visit once in a while, in a very nice car she parked in front of his house, but Gina never actually saw her. Everyone left them alone when she was there. Nobody knew her very well, and Gina had the feeling that most of them didn't think she was right for Jared. Mimi, Gina knew, felt that she was taking advantage of him, something about her being older than he was.

So the neighbors didn't talk about the girlfriend, and they didn't talk about what he could do. And they knew about Gina, too, on some deep level, and they didn't talk about that, either, but they accepted it and her without question. And that might be why Gina felt so comfortable with all of them, more at home here in this place than she had been back on Linden's World, where she was born.

 

In the early spring, Gina extracted Terry from the playground, where he passed the time waiting for her class to be dismissed, and they walked home together. Phyllis and Lillian had been allowing them to walk when the weather was nice, although one or another of the neighbors always picked them up if it was raining or snowing or too cold. Today was nice, and it was fun to walk through the streets and see the birds who had just come back from where they spent the winter, and Terry always had a lot to say about the other kids and what they were doing at recess, but he didn't seem interested in his classes. Gina wondered if Jared was right and Terry wasn't ready to read. She knew she had been picking out whole words before she was Terry's age, and she hadn't seen Terry doing this. She remembered sitting in the hollow by the natural spring when she was five, reading one of Willis' books.

That would have been when the strange pale man came to the edge of the hollow and stood looking at her. Which was on Linden's World, left far behind them.

They reached the corner where the half-a-house sat, and there was a great pile of foamwood and other building stuff being unloaded from a truck by a couple of workmen and five small persons in hooded brown robes, an actual D'ubian group. They were piling foamwood boards beside the plastic-covered foundation, moving back and forth efficiently, hoods pulled down and sleeves worn long to protect them from the sun.

"They got here just about an hour ago," said Phyllis when Gina and Terry got home. "It looks like they're going to build something there."

"The lot has been for sale all year," said Evvue, from the Bahtan house next door, sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea with Lillian. "They say it is bad luck. They try to build there, and what they build burns. It has happened two times," she told Gina.

"Do you suppose the D'ubians are going to try?" said Lillian, peeking out one of the front windows.

By the end of the week there was a roof built right on the foundation, and there was a door half above ground and half below, with steps going down instead of up like all the other houses on the street. Toward evening of the next Monday, the D'ubians rolled up in a truck, parking sideways next to the white fence they had put up at the edges of their lot, and began hauling boxes and bundles down the steps and in the door.

"They like it dark and close where they live," Jared said, sitting at his picnic table in the spring sunshine with Mimi and Al and Willis and Gina. He had known D'ubian groups before in the mining colony where he had grown up. He even spoke some of their language, but then he spoke all of the Alliance languages, Willis said; he was into languages at the Institute.

"They live underground on D'ubia," said Mimi, she and Clyde having traded with them when they were in space.

"So a basement is just about ideal for them," said Jared, "but I’m surprised they want to live outside the D'ubian neighborhood. Mostly they want their own people around them."

"I thought they had big families," said Willis. "More than just five."

"Yes, usually the older D’ubians live with them and raise the children," said Jared, "and where I grew up, there would be three or four families, three generations apiece, living all together in one place like that."

"Crowded," said Mimi.

"Maybe once they get this place ready they'll bring the rest of the family," said Gina. But they never did. There were only five of them there, arriving in a big black car driven erratically, wavering from side to side and up and down the street; they stayed for a week or two and then vanished again. A week later, they came back to the house, to stay another week and a half and vanish once more. This was the pattern of their residence in the neighborhood.

They seemed to Gina to be afraid of other people; they never came out by themselves, only in that tight group of five. The only one who spoke to the neighbors was the one who always walked in the front, the tallest one, who spoke Trade with an accent. He said they were the Duri group, which was, Jared told her, the family name; their individual names were all based on that family name – Dural, Duran, Durakal, Durata, Duroh – and Dural was the speaker. Communicating with non-D'ubians, they clustered together, brown hoods touching, talking together in their own language, and then Dural translated for the outsiders.

Jared also said that Dural might not be a "he"; the D’ubians had more than just he's and she's but no non-D’ubian knew very much about it, so he couldn’t tell her more than Willis had years ago.

Anyway the Duri group was musical, Dural said, and they worked in a studio downtown and wrote music, and sometimes you could hear pipes or drums or string things playing very softly from the direction of their house. Gina thought it was beautiful music, and she liked the times when they were in residence, when she could hear it. Terry loved it; he sat outside listening, even if it was raining and chilly.

She was conscious of that music somewhere in the background on the evening she went to Terry’s room to read to him before bedtime, and found that he wasn’t there. His pajamas were on his bed, and the stuffed blue dog, but he wasn’t there or in the bathroom, or in Willis' room. Willis wasn’t there either; he had borrowed the air scooter, which he now drove pretty well, and he had gone to play basketball with some of his school friends. He had been on his class team in the winter.

Getting worried, Gina went downstairs to look for Terry but she couldn't find him there, either, only Phyllis and Lillian watching a vid in the living room. They hadn’t seen Terry for at least half an hour, they said, sounding alarmed, and they turned off the vid and got up to go look out in the yard, and then Phyllis phoned the Bahtan sisters and Lillian went out into the woods with a light, and Gina started down the street with the thought that he might have gone to Clyde or Al. It was not good to lose track of Terry. He might be doing anything.

The music was louder now that she was outside, and she followed it down the street to Clyde's house, and from there she saw the five D'ubians sitting in a row on the outside of their white fence, one with a flute-like instrument, one with a small drum, two with stringed instruments, like very small guitars, and one, the tallest, bending over to show Terry how to blow into another wind instrument. He was concentrating very hard and trying to do just what Dural told him, and the others were accompanying whatever he could play with a very pleasant harmony, making it sound a great deal better than it probably was.

The smallest D'ubian, the one with the drum, looked up and saw Gina and stopped playing the drum to bow to her, and then the others all bowed too. "Hey, Gina," said Terry brightly, waving the flute in his hand. "Dural said I could play."

"Okay," said Gina, "but we've been looking for you. It’s bedtime."

"Can't I stay up a little longer? Just a little longer," pleaded Terry. "I’m getting this figured out."

The five brown hoods bent together as they consulted one another and then Dural turned to her with another bow. "He plays," he said. "Good music. You listen?"

"I have to tell Lillian and Phyllis," said Gina, hesitating, and all five D'ubians nodded enthusiastically, and Terry beamed. She turned back to the house to find Mimi just stepping out on her porch.

"Well, look at that," said Mimi. "I’ll call Phyllis," she told Gina, and fumbled in her pants pocket for her phone.

So the evening ended with the whole neighborhood clustered around the D'ubian house listening as the five little brown-robed persons and Terry McIntosh had what Clyde said was a jam session right at the end of the street. Terry probably wasn't that good, playing alone, but the six together sounded very fine indeed, and it ran a lot later than it should have for a school night. Phyllis said once in awhile you had to do things like that, though, just sort of seize the moment, which Gina thought was a really great idea.

After that, if the D'ubians were at their house and Terry was missing, the whole neighborhood knew where to look for him.

Terry had found a place for himself in this new world.

 

The D'ubians weren't at home the night Gina noticed the light in the study off the living room of the Hardesty house. She knew Phyllis was in the basement sorting through jars of preserves and Lillian and Al were making cookies in the kitchen, so it had to be Terry in the study, with the door closed, and there were readers in there, and nice lamps, and a pretty rug Phyllis probably didn't want anything spilled on, and Gina thought she had better find out what he was doing.

What he was doing was sitting in the biggest armchair engrossed in the reader Gina had finished last week. It was a grownup reader, with no illustrations and a lot of big words – big, at least, if you were a little boy in kindergarten.

"Terry?" she said. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing," said Terry, lifting blue eyes, innocent as the cherub he resembled.

"That's Jared's book. Phyllis was going to read it."

"It's pretty good. It was the co-pilot; he made up records that weren't true. Falsified," said Terry, working on the word.

"It was not," said Gina, who had enjoyed the book. "That's just what they want you to think. You've only read part of the story yet." And she stopped to think herself, and realized what her baby brother had just told her. "You can read?" she said.

"Sure," said Terry with a shrug.

"But how come you can't read the school readers?"

"Who wants to read those? They're boring," said Terry. "This is a good story. I like this one. I still think it was the co-pilot."

"You'll find out," said Gina, " but you can't read all night. We have to go to school tomorrow. You have to go to bed pretty soon."

"I'll be done in an hour," said Terry, and returned to the reader. Gina closed the door on her way out and went to the porch, where she could share the scene with Jared, who was working in his study. She could reach that far, she had found, if she concentrated, but not much further. He could reach back, and did; So he's been reading all this time! he said, and sat back in his chair laughing, and Gina went inside to tell Lillian and Al and Phyllis.