Chapter 11

 

Gina

 

 

Mimi and Clyde and Gina took Terry to the doctor when he fell off the roof of the Hardesty house and cut his forehead. He thought it was all a great adventure; he showed off the seam with great pride throughout the neighborhood. He had only fallen, he said, because of a patch of ice by the chimney, where ice had no business being.

Willis twisted his ankle not during a game, but in the school parking lot after the victory dance when his team came in first in the city-wide tournament. The real problem, as far as he was concerned, was that all three of his girlfriends arrived at the Hardesty house to console him at the same time. The resulting uproar brought the neighbors out to enjoy the spectacle as two of the girls took off down the street in their aircars, the brunette trying very seriously to ram the car driven by the blond, the collision shields bumping together hard. The third girl dumped a vase of flowers on Willis’ head, stomped out to her car, and jetted it straight up into the air almost out of sight.

In the early spring Sofi thought she might be going to have a baby, and she and Issio were very excited about it. They badly wanted to have a child, to sanctify their marriage, Sofi explained to Gina; it was the way their people thought. And she wanted Gina to help pick out baby things and help them think about names. Gina could remember Terry as a tiny baby; she thought it would be great to have a new baby in the neighborhood, even if it meant that Sofi and Issio would have less time for her.

"What do you mean, less time?" protested Sofi, picking the thought out of her mind. "When I have a new baby, I will need you more than ever. I will need your help, and I will need your conversation, which will keep me sane with a new baby screaming, and when the baby is bigger, I will need you to help me teach him. You are very strong; by then you will be nearly as strong as Issio."

"Truly," agreed Issio, "we will have great need of you, and the baby, too, will need you." She could read it from both of them, that they thought of her as a sister to this new child. It gave her a warm good feeling; there was no one to whom she felt closer, except, perhaps, Jared.

But a few weeks later Issio took Sofi to the hospital in a great rush and when they came home, they said that they had lost the baby. It was a sorrow to everyone.

Sofi and Jared took Gina to the doctor late in the spring when she fell out of the tree she had been climbing and they couldn’t decide if her wrist were broken or sprained. "You might remember," Jared told her, punching Dr. Frank's address into the navigation unit so that the car could find its way by itself, "that we already have one Terry in the neighborhood, and we don't need a second one." He and Sofi had her between them, trying to cushion her from any bumps along the way.

"I was trying to see the nest," explained Gina, holding her wrist, which hurt a lot. "They didn't come back to it this spring, and I thought if it wasn’t going to be used, I could take it down and look at it."

"Yes, that is a good plan," said Sofi. "The birds have abandoned it; they will not return now. You can have it in your room."

"Are you telling her to climb up again and get it?" said Jared, laughing. "Phyllis and Lillian will wring your neck, Sofi. Tell you what," he said to Gina. "When we get back from the doctor, I'll get out the ladder and see if I can reach it for you."

Her wrist turned out to be sprained, and it seemed to take a long time to heal. The doctor said he could seal bones together, but there was only so much even modern medicine could do with pulled muscles, so it was painful and useless for what seemed like the rest of the spring. And Gina found out that, like her brothers, she could take painkillers by the handful and they wouldn't work at all; she too seemed to be drug resistant. Mimi said she and Clyde and Al were the same way.

But Jared was as good as his word; he found the ladder and he and Sofi and Issio climbed up the tree and took down the nest, and Issio explained to her how the birds had made it, and what kind of birds they were and how they raised their young. She gave it the place of honor on the small shelves Lillian had constructed over her desk. They were getting very full. Lillian said she would put up some more over the summer.

At the end of the school year, Terry performed on the D'ubian flute with the primary school band; he was the only one in his class to play anything more challenging than the basic rhythm instruments, and he played very well – not only in the somewhat prejudiced view of the neighborhood, which turned out in force to hear him, but in the opinion of the rest of the audience, too. His teacher cornered Lillian and Phyllis and talked with them a long time about musical prodigies, and the sense of pride from their little group was a huge rich warm cloud about them.

They were leaving the auditorium, surrounding Terry and talking about getting ice cream to celebrate – even the D'ubians were there, cheering with the rest of them – when Gina glanced toward the side of the auditorium, out of the way of the doors and the surging crowd, and there he was, the pale thin man from the woods. He stood against the wall, arms folded, the silver chain glinting in the ceiling lights around his neck, his intense blue eyes fixed on Terry. Gina still could not read him, could not tell if he were pleased or not in his cold white isolation. She hesitated, looking at him, and he took his eyes from Terry and met hers. After a moment he dipped his chin just a bit, a greeting, just like before.

She stopped, and Sofi turned to look at her, as if she had spoken, and then Sofi turned to look at the pale man, but he stepped back into the shadows beyond the auditorium seats and he was gone. Gina took a step toward the spot where he had last been and found Sofi beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

"He is not there," she said, which Gina herself knew.

"Where did he go?" she asked Sofi.

"I do not see," Sofi replied, eyeing the shadows where he had faded away. "He is not there. You know him?"

"I’ve seen him before," said Gina.

"He feels strange," said Sofi. "Not like others. And I could not read him." She frowned into the shadows, considering. "I did not feel danger," she said finally. "But you should come with us." And she nudged Gina back into the boisterous group around Terry, casting one last thoughtful look back at the shadows where the pale man had been.

 

The year he was seventeen, Willis decided to join the Alliance Defense Force.

He had spent great amounts of time on cars and sports teams and girls, but he had also spent a lot of time with Al and with Clyde and Mimi, listening to their stories, asking questions. He gobbled readers and vids about space, anything from the primitive Earthian expeditions to their satellite moon, through the early experiments with the true inner space drive, and the explorations possible through the jointly-developed technology of the Alliance, and the expansion and the colonies and the settlement of the core worlds. He couldn't get enough of it. When merchant spacers and enlistment officers from Defense toured his school on Career Days, he could hardly be pried away from them.

His hunger for space was apparent to everyone. "He won't be going back to the farm," Lillian told Phyllis. "McIntosh will have to hope Gina or Terry takes an interest."

"He may be disappointed altogether," said Phyllis, with a snort; Gina barely had to read them to know that neither of them were fond of Dad or Mom. But she did know that she or Terry or Willis had to go back to Linden's World to take over the farm; the family fortune was tied up in those thousands and thousands of kilometers of land, and it had been held by the McIntosh family for generations.

Terry didn't care about land and farming, but then he was only eight, and interested in everything, and far too young to settle on one thing yet. He didn't like team sports, as Willis did, but he liked individual sports like swimming at school, fishing and hiking with the neighbors at home. He liked fixing things; he spent lots of time with Lillian and Phyllis and Al, learning about cars and appliances and roofing and pipes. He had managed to fix the leak in the sink in his own bathroom, which now drained very neatly into the bathtub by Lillian's room. Lillian said it was a remarkably fine job, could not have been improved if he had actually meant to do it, and it was almost a shame to dismantle it.

He loved music. No one had any doubt of that.

As for Gina, at eleven, she didn't know what she was going to want to do when she grew up. She sometimes thought she might like to be a biologist, like Issio, teaching and studying and going out on field trips into the fields and the mountains and the lakes and oceans, looking at all the forms of life there, trying to find out how they all fitted together to make a world. And then there were other worlds to study, too; there could be no end to it. Or perhaps even better, she could write it all down, so that everyone could experience it.

She didn't know if she could do things like that on the farm. She supposed she could do some of it, but there was a great deal of farm work that would take precedence, and she would be confined to just the one world; Dad never had time to get off Linden's World, she knew, not that he ever seemed to want to.

The truth was, she didn't want to go back, even when she was grown up, and she had thought, if she thought about it at all, that of course Willis would take over the farm, leaving Gina and Terry free to find their own way.

So his dream of entering the Alliance Defense Academy when he graduated from Secondary was not particularly welcome to her. And she felt bad about that. She ought to want her brother to do what he most wanted to do.

But it would take him away.

"I could start at the Academy next year, right after I graduate," Willis told her one late autumn evening, as they sat on the Hardesty porch in the swing. They were wearing sweaters; it was getting chilly at night now, and the leaves, which had been bright with color, were fading into tans and browns and dropping from the trees. Lillian had the rake out; it was muttering away in the side yard, chewing leaves into mulch, while Lillian banged the dishes around in the kitchen, whistling, and Phyllis tried to interest Terry in his math homework at the dining room table.

"How long would you be there?"

"I could get my commission in four years," said Willis. "And then I could be stationed on a ship."

"Or stuck at a desk in a port somewhere," said Gina, knowing that she was trying to poke holes in his dream, unable to keep from doing it.

"Maybe for awhile," he agreed, "but it would be on another world, some new place, and think of all I could learn there."

He wanted it so badly, she thought, and summoned up a smile and listened, patiently, to the tales he spun of far away ports and distant stars and the adventures he would have among them, and tried not to mind that he would be going so very far away from her and Terry.

Because that was the worst part of it; Willis, who had been right at the center of her life since she could remember, would no longer be there, would be far away among the stars where she could no longer see and hear him. And things happened out there; suppose something happened to Willis? That was a thought that did not bear thinking.

"You have to let him go," said Sofi, out of absolutely nothing one quiet afternoon, as Gina sat in Sofi's living room watching her go through the basic ma/hifez moves; Sofi had just attained the green level in this Zamuaon martial art form, and she spent a lot of time practicing. Gina loved to watch her; it looked like dancing, although Sofi said that once upon a time it was a serious, even lethal, form of fighting. Now, even in their competitions, no one got killed, although it was certainly possible to get hurt.

"You mean Willis?" said Gina, and Sofi stretched, reaching up above her head and back until she looked as if she intended to touch the floor behind her, but she didn't go that far down this time. She straightened, with a swing of her tail for balance, and stretched her arms to the side instead.

"Yes, your brother Willis," said Sofi, and shook herself, settling her gold-white body hair, and sat down on the couch beside Gina. "He wants the life of a spacer; he wants it with all his heart. You can feel that for yourself."

"I know," Gina admitted.

"Perhaps later he will change his mind," said Sofi. "We do not know. The future must take care of itself. But you have to let him go now."

Things were changing again, Gina knew. The last time things changed, it had turned out to be good. They had come here to Haivran, to this neighborhood where they were at home, more at home than they had ever been on Linden's World. They had found family.

This next change seemed likely to take family away.

She tried to look at it in a positive way. If it changed again, perhaps that too would turn out well. She would miss Willis. She could not imagine life without him. But she was growing up herself; she was eleven now, and in a few years she would be going to Secondary and learning to drive a car and perhaps having boyfriends, and she did not need her big brother the way she had needed him when she was a child.

And she and Terry would not be alone here. They had the neighborhood. Terry had the D'ubians. She had Sofi and Issio, and Jared.

She shouldn't worry, and it wouldn't do any good if she did, she thought, wandering alone through the woods as autumn froze into winter. The trees were bare; the stream had not yet frozen but there was an edge of ice on it in the morning. Dead leaves underfoot no longer crunched; they were sodden with the autumn rain from yesterday. Lillian said the forecast was for more rain, or perhaps a little early snow; she was already putting away her rake and checking the snow clearer.

And it looked as if it might rain or snow; the sky was white and heavy and it was certainly cool. Gina had her winter coat on. She did not mind winter. The world outside slept under the snow, and the snow was clean and sparkling white, and indoors they could pop corn and play games and visit back and forth among their houses. The Bahtan girls had fewer men trapped in their back bedrooms during the winter, more time to socialize. Mimi and Clyde and Al liked to try out new recipes, filling their houses with sweet rich smells and steaming up the windows.

The D'ubians would spend less time in their yard, more time in the Hardesty living room playing their instruments with Terry. Gina had grown very fond of the five little hooded beings; she could even pick out who was who, at least some of the time. She wished they would spend more time in the neighborhood. She had never figured out why they went away so often, and so abruptly. One night they were there; the next night they tore out of their house and leaped into their car and drove away as if pursued by one of the thirteen poison-fanged demons Sofi called on in moments of crisis. A week or two later, they would be back. Even Terry didn't know why.

Thinking about the D'ubians, and the way Terry played their stringed instruments, as if he had been born with one in his hand, she stepped over the stream at a narrow spot and looked up to see the thin pale man standing by the deadfall beyond the pair of evergreens, looking at her.

He was alone this time, remote, wrapped in the icy white that she always felt around him, and the silver chain and the pendant glittered coldly against his white shirt and his jacket, which did not look warm enough. He stood very still and looked at her, and Gina looked back.

And she was growing up now, no longer a helpless child, and for the first time in the presence of this man she found her voice. "Who are you?" she said. "Why are you here?"

He lifted a pale eyebrow as if surprised and, amazingly, spoke. "Don’t you know? Your mother didn't tell you?" he said; he spoke in Trade. She couldn't make out an accent, but after all, he had uttered only a few words.

"Are you – " she couldn't say it directly after all. "I saw you at my brother Terry's school concert. Are you related to Terry?"

He looked at her with his clear sharp blue eyes; he looked somewhat uncomfortable. "Yes," he said. "And to you, and to Willis. I saw your school play. It was very good," he said, on an odd, defensive note; the cold white around him seemed to warm just a little. Did he think she was envious of his attention to Terry's activities? And he really did not have an accent to tell her what his origins were. Perhaps he was one of those persons who always spoke Trade, never tried any other language.

"Are you – " she still couldn't quite say it. It was some vestige of loyalty to her mother; she had long ago drawn her own conclusions. She hadn't consciously included herself or Willis in the equation, but it must have occurred to her somewhere in her mind, because she was not aware of any sense of surprise.

"Well. Yes," he said, sounding not quite comfortable. "I – yes, I'm your, well – " He cleared his throat; he was blushing, she saw. "That is, your mother and I, we knew each other; we were friends. And so we, uh – " He cleared his throat again. "I'm actually your father," he said. "All three of you."

It wasn't as if she felt any loyalty to the man she called Dad, but she did not know this blond man at all, and she had no idea how to answer him. "What's your name?" she said finally.

"My name is – " She heard something like "Charles," but not exactly, and some other letters, "R's" and "T's"; it wasn't Trade, or the Zamuaon or the Bahtan she was learning from Sofi and Issio and the Bahtan sisters and Jared. He shrugged and gave her a vague smile. "And I have to go now," he said, "but it's – nice – to talk to you."

"Will you be back?" she asked.

"Yes, certainly, I sort of – have to," he said. "So – "

And then he stepped backward, looking at her, into the trees, fumbling at the pendant at his neck as he went, and then he was simply no longer there. She could not feel him anywhere. There was no point in looking for him; he was gone.

The first flurry of snowflakes drifted past her face, a scattering of big fat flakes, hitting the ground and melting at first, but by the time she had gotten home they were beginning to stick and the ground was turning white.

 

Gina and Terry built snowmen on the lawn, and drank hot chocolate made from scratch in the warm sweet-smelling kitchen; it was much better than anything out of the synthesizer. The snow fell; frost etched glittering flowers on the windows. Terry went off to see if he could ice skate on the stream, and managed to cut through the ice at a deep spot and fall into water up to his waist.

They weren't allowed to walk to school; Phyllis said they would freeze their toes off. Someone was always around to drive them, sometimes Willis, sometimes Phyllis or Lillian or Mimi and Clyde or Al. Sofi and Issio, both teaching, had to go to work early and came back late, but if Terry stayed late with band practice they were glad to pick him up and bring him home. The Bahtans were keeping odd hours with their schools and their work, but the two youngest sisters were sometimes able to drive them. They were working nights helping to take care of a patient who was, Gina gathered, bedridden, and extremely difficult. "She is what you call a bitch," said Evvie.

"Gina is much too young to call her that," said Phyllis.

"I am not too young," said Evvie firmly. "And she is."

They often got home before Gina and Terry had to get to school, and they were quite willing to take them in their car, still heated, before they went to bed. And Jared was frequently heading for the Institute at about that time. He was busy that winter; he had completed his studies, Gina knew, and now he was working there, teaching classes and studying very old papers in ancient languages no longer spoken anywhere in the Alliance. Mimi said he was very well regarded at the Institute; he was considered outstanding in languages and things to do with the people who spoke them.

His work was all at the Institute now; he did not work with women any longer, although a few of those he had known were still friends. There was no passion attached to them, Gina noticed; that was all centered around Maud. And he liked it this way; finding Gina touching his mind, he explained to her that it was better, stable, real. It was, he told her, a deeper love, more satisfying. And he seemed happy and content. She thought about Maud, about how Maud was not well and how he had said he would lose her one day, and she wondered how it would be for him when that happened.

But he was enjoying the time he had now. That was, as he had said, what mattered.

Anyway he never minded taking Gina and Terry to school, and now and then he picked them up, as did any and all of the other neighbors. Gina liked coming out of the school building and seeing a familiar car parked at the curb, a familiar driver talking with Terry inside or standing outside, bundled into a winter coat, watching as he tried to kill himself on the playground equipment.

They were always there, Gina thought, which made them more her relatives, more Terry's relatives, than a tall thin pale man who only watched them from the shadows. When Terry drove his sled into a tree, the pale man wasn't the one who pried him out of the wreckage, bundled him into the nearest car, and headed off to doctor once again. Clyde and Phyllis did the work that time. ("He might live to grow up," said Dr. Frank, laughing as he got out the sealer again, "but I don't guarantee it." The tally was three big cuts to be sealed, a twisted ankle, and a broken tooth. Terry was very upset about the sled, which was beyond repair.)

And when Gina got the flu bug going around that winter, making her light-headed with fever and aches for the better part of a week, it wasn't a tall thin pale man who sat by her bed, reading to her and watching vids with her and trying to keep her mind off her miseries. Sofi and Issio did, and Mimi and Clyde did, and Jared, busy as he was that winter, did. So did Al, and he rewired the light over the bed so it worked better, too, and fixed the remote to darken and lighten the windows.

Parents, she thought, lying in bed with her head aching, were not all that important if they weren't in their children's lives. Neither Dad nor Mom were there, or ever really had been, and this pale watcher who claimed parentage was only a remote figure, someone who checked in now and then and went back to his life wherever and whatever it was. Lillian was here, with cold compresses for her forehead and warm blankets. Phyllis was here – well, not at the moment; Phyllis was downstairs where she thought Gina couldn't hear her, talking to Dr. Frank on the phone, trying to see if he knew of any remedy that would help. Gina and her brothers seldom caught anything, and none of them knew what to do about it when it happened.

Dr. Frank gave them another prescription for cough syrup, but the Bahtan sisters came over that evening with a potion of their own. Mutai and Wundra were studying all-species pharmacology and they were particularly interested in natural remedies, using plants and herbs found locally. Gina felt miserable enough to try nearly anything and either she was nearly over the flu anyway or the Bahtan potion had some virtue of its own. She felt better by the next day, and was up and around again by the weekend. She wasn't, it seemed, resistant to the Bahtan remedies.

 

Right after the winter break, Willis announced over the dinner table that he had applied to the Academy and had, he said, producing an actual paper letter, been accepted, pending satisfactory final grades, for the following fall, when he would be eighteen and would not require the agreement of a parent.

Lillian and Phyllis read the letter and passed it to Gina, who held so Terry could read it too. "That's super, Willis," said Terry. "Do you have to go now?"

"Not until September," said Willis, and he looked somewhat anxiously at Gina; he was aware of her mixed feelings, she saw, but he was determined to go. And, as Sofi said, she had to let him go.

"Willis, I'm glad for you," she said, which was at least half true, and she felt Phyllis, under the table, pat her knee approvingly. "Have you said anything to Dad or Mom?" she asked, and he shook his head.

"I wanted to know for sure," he said. "Maybe I should wait until I graduate, and get my grades posted."

"You should call them now," said Lillian. "They have the right to know, Willis. They may not like it, but they have the right."

"Just as you have the right to do what you need to do with your life," added Phyllis. "You remember that." She beamed at him over the table. "We are so proud of you," she said.

And they should be proud; as Al said, not everyone was accepted into the Academy, and of those accepted, not many went right out of secondary school; some had to spend a year or more in a prep school before they could qualify. Al, and Mimi and Clyde, who had not been Alliance Forces but had worked with them on occasion, were so delighted with the news that Gina couldn't help feeling better herself. It would all work itself out, she thought, and meanwhile the neighborhood threw a party at the Hardesty house, which was large enough to include even the Bahtan girls and the five D'ubians. They and Terry played music; everyone, including Clyde and Mimi, danced; Issio brought a supply of Zamuaon beer and even Jared, who seldom touched alcohol, drank half a bottle; the men let Willis drink a little too when they thought Lillian and Phyllis weren't watching, and Willis pretended he had never had any before, fooling no one.

Mom was seeing a very nice man who had bought her a diamond necklace that outshone the sun, Gina thought. It glared in faceted brilliance over the screen when she talked with Willis. She said it was very nice that he had been accepted to the Academy, and she bet he would look really cute in those uniforms. She would, she said, come for his graduation in the spring.

Dad congratulated Willis and told him not to forget the farm. He looked very heavy, as if he had put on a great deal of weight, and his face was shiny red. He inquired if Willis needed anything, and said the boy was to call him at once if he did.

So that was all right, and Willis buckled down to study seriously through the rest of the school year, but no one feared he would have any problems with his final grades. He had settled his future, and Gina managed, part of the time, to be glad about it and not to worry.

 

Mom really did come to Willis' graduation, wearing her diamonds and a gleaming coat of thick real leather that had the Bahtan sisters looking askance at her; they did not approve of animal skins used in clothing. She brought with her the very nice man she was seeing; he was probably twenty years older than she was, Gina thought, very richly dressed, with a heavy gold chain and a bracelet and three big gemstones in rings on his fingers. He was polite but condescending to Mom's children and not very interested in their friends. They stayed in the penthouse of one of Bridgeton's better hotels; Willis and Gina and Terry visited there the day after graduation and had dinner, a long and elaborate meal during which Terry managed to spill a large carafe of wine on the next table, and trip a waiter, heavily laden.

It was a relief when Mom and her nice man left the following morning.

Mom gave Willis a credit chip, and Dad sent one; he was busy with the spring planting and could not come, he said. The neighbors went together and got a three-screen unit and a pile of Academy first-year text chips, and Al dug out his own laser pistol, regulation weaponry when he entered the Academy, he said, although by now it was an antique, but he thought Willis might be interested in having it. "Passing the torch," he said, and Willis, beaming with pride and delight, put it up on the wall opposite his bed in his room, and checked regulations to be sure he could take it to the Academy with him in the fall.

The D'ubians and Terry sat on the stairs with their instruments, talking among themselves between musical pieces. Gina helped Phyllis and Lillian bring out the platters for dinner; this was a serious and formal occasion, Lillian said, and it deserved a serious and formal dinner party. The rest of the neighbors, including the three Bahtan sisters who were not at work, were clustered in the living room around Willis, who had, daringly, a glass of Bahtan wine in his hand, sent by the two sisters who were stuck with their invalid patient overnight. Clyde and Mimi and Al were talking space again – Gina could tell by the sweeping movements of their hands, tracing the trajectory of their ships into the heavens – and Issio, who had worked on merchant ships as a very young Zamuaon, listened and nodded. Sofi was between Issio and Jared, an arm around each of them, doing little dance steps to the D'ubian music as she stood there.

When Jared's phone rang he took it out of his pocket and looked at it as if hoping it was a call he wouldn't need to take, but he looked at the indicator and excused himself and walked out to the porch to talk privately. Counting forks and spoons, Gina suddenly got a very clear picture in her mind of Maud, and a feeling that something was very wrong. After a few minutes Jared came back in and followed Phyllis and Lillian into the kitchen to make his apologies; he had to leave, he said. It wasn't something he could put off. And no, he didn't think he'd be back until very late. He stopped in the living room to speak to Willis and shake hands with him again, and on his way out the door he glanced at Gina as if she had spoken to him; he gave her a quick smile intended, she thought, to be reassuring; he knew she had picked up something from him, but he was too busy to pursue it right now.

And then he left, pulling his aircar out of the carport and lifting up over the rooftops, which wasn't entirely legal, in a hurry to get to a main street.