Chapter 53.

 

Maud

 

 

And this would naturally happen on a night when Chazaerte was out on what he euphemistically termed business, when Zarei had gone back between with Carter, when Maud was, in fact, alone. And the devices had been placed incorrectly, so her view was poor. She hadn't realized how seriously wrong it had all gone until the yelling began down at the foot of the basement stairs, attracting the attention of both Clyde and Mimi, waking them, bringing them to the basement door.

And now Maud stood by the insulated room at the end of Clyde's basement, feeling frustrated. Clyde had not moved; she didn't think that looked good, although the Bahtan girls seemed undisturbed. They methodically cataloged his injuries, paying no attention to what was going on around them. Clyde was the priority, the one obviously hurt, but Maud wished they would pay attention to Mimi, too. Clyde had certainly fallen down the stairs, just as Mimi kept saying, although the D'ubian It hadn't pushed him; it had, as far as Maud could determine, shot between Clyde's feet as he started down, causing him to lose his balance, and in falling, he had brought Mimi down after him. She looked undamaged, but Maud hadn't been able to see exactly how she landed, if she might have hit her head. She was not acting very rationally, and Mimi had faced many strange and terrible things in her life; she was not a woman to break down in the midst of a crisis.

But all she retained seemed to be the imperative to protect Clyde at all costs; she did not, Maud thought, recognize the people around her. Jared had her in a tight embrace she did not even seem to notice, and he was having trouble keeping her away from the pistol on the laundry appliance.

Possibly the ambulance attendants would take a look at her. Maud could see the lights strobing from upstairs, red and blue and green and white lights dancing across the basement ceiling. Car doors slammed; people moved and spoke outside. The neighborhood was awake and stirring. She heard Cara's voice, without being able to make out the words, and doors open and shut and footsteps crossed the upstairs floor. Mimi flailed her arms at the beam pistol out of her reach, and Jared swung her around so that he had his back to the laundry appliance; unfortunately this gave Mimi a clear view of Clyde on the floor. "Down the stairs!" she exclaimed, and tried to break free to go to him.

"It's all right, the ambulance is here, everything is going to be fine," said Jared, hanging on. A pair of feet hit the top step, and Maud, realizing how odd the scene was going to look to strangers, aimed a kick at the jar holding the D'ubian It, knocking it on its side. It rolled into the partitioned space with the imprisoned stoad and the remains of the fly's jar, and she pulled the door shut.

The first ambulance attendant came down the stairs at a leisurely pace and regarded Clyde with mild interest. "Had a fall, huh," he said, and Mimi made another lunge, almost tearing herself away from Jared. Issio grabbed her.

"It knocked him down the stairs," Mimi stated.

"Well, let's see what we have here," said the EMT, and Evvie moved to allow him room. The second EMT arrived and opened her bag on the floor by Clyde's feet.

By now the house was filled, Maud judged, hearing voices and footsteps; someone upstairs told Terry to stay upstairs and out of the way, and Maud spotted the gleam of a silver hatchet; Durakal peered down the stairs and withdrew to report to the others. Al appeared, an eccentric figure in socks and underwear and an open bathrobe about three sizes too large in a delicate shade of yellow, with little daisies appliquéd around the hem; he was carrying a cleaver from the Hardesty kitchen. "What the hell!" he exclaimed.

"Clyde fell down the stairs," said Jared, deciding, evidently, that this could be the official story again.

"Sure he did," said Al, pushing his way past the attendant on her way back upstairs, who looked at the cleaver, looked again, plastered herself against the wall to stay out of his way. As soon as he passed her, she got upstairs out of sight and Maud could hear her shouting at whoever was left in the ambulance to bring the gurney.

"They knocked him down the stairs!" cried Mimi, and Al looked at her and frowned.

"Hey, you all right?" he said.

"She's a little upset," said Jared, and she leaped forward and nearly broke away from him; Issio grabbed her again and hung on until Jared had her.

"They should examine her," said Al, and rushed back up the stairs with the yellow bathrobe flapping around him and the cleaver waving. Someone up above screamed. A door slammed.

"Hey, your stretcher is getting away!" cried Terry.

Jared and Issio had their hands full already. "I'll see what's happening," said Maud.

The living room and kitchen seemed full of people, all familiar faces, and Cara and Wundra were out on the porch restraining Terry, who was trying to get out to the street. He no doubt wanted to help the ambulance attendants.

One of them was lying on the grass, looking bewildered, and another was chasing the gurney, sailing on its antigrav unit toward the D'ubian house. Al arrived beside Maud on the porch, and the attendant on the grass spotted him and his cleaver and scrambled to her feet and took off as fast as her feet would carry her, almost catching up with the other attendant as the gurney crossed the intersection beyond the D'ubian house. They could have chased the thing halfway to the space port if it hadn't hit a tree on the far side of the street and veered off course, allowing the attendant in the lead to grab the end and shove it back in the right direction.

The other attendant ducked under it and stayed there across the street until her coworker spoke to her and grabbed her arm, shoving her along much as he had shoved the gurney. "But he has a knife," she cried, making a wide detour around Al.

"Get in here," said Sofi, stomping off the porch; she grabbed the nearest attendant and thrust him toward the house. The gurney drifted off toward the Hardesty house, and Al went after it and swung the cleaver at the front of it, knocking it back, and Cara, finding it had risen above her easy reach, jumped and hit it with a fist, driving it toward the porch. Maud, tall enough to reach it, gave it a shove through the front door.

"Your patient needs you," said Sofi to the other attendant, propelling her after the gurney. "In the basement," she said, pointing a claw, and the attendant gave her a scared look and scurried into the house.

There was some sort of fuss going on downstairs, bumps and thuds and voices. "Clyde!" shouted Mimi.

"The neck!" said Evvie. "You must immobilize the neck!"

"The scanner –" said the attendant downstairs.

"Where were you trained?" demanded Ollie. "In a slaughter house?"

"Clyde!" shouted Mimi again, and Issio gave a yell of pain, and the attendants on the stairs with the gurney screamed, both of them. "Get away from Clyde!" said Mimi. "Take your hands off him!"

"Lady, put that thing down!" said a frightened voice from downstairs, and the gurney took off down the stairwell at ceiling height, unattended. Maud pushed past the attendants and ran down the steps after it, but she was too late. The gurney was now sailing across the basement a few centimeters below the ceiling. Clyde was still sprawled on the floor, but a wad of gauze had been taped to his head; Issio was getting up off the floor; the attendant in the basement was backed up against the gardening table, and Mimi, wavering and shaking, was holding him off with her beam pistol.

Ollie and Evvie were carefully fitting a brace around Clyde's neck, paying absolutely no attention to what was going on around them. "The arm too," Ollie remarked.

"I am more concerned with the spine," said Evvie. "I believe we must brace that also."

The gurney bounced off the window above the laundry appliance and hit the insulated partition with a thud and started off for the west wall. The second attendant made a motion as if she intended to go after it, and Al appeared at the head of the stairs; she gave a shriek and flew down the stairs away from him and Mimi swung the pistol in her direction.

Jared, moving fast, got Mimi from behind, swinging her around so that her pistol was pointed harmlessly at the west wall; she yelled and struggled, kicking frantically and thrusting with her elbows, and Issio, still shaking his head, made a daring reach and got her wrists.

"It's all right, Mimi, it's all right," Jared said in his most soothing voice. "It's going to be all right," Issio wrestled her wrists up above her head and held them. This was something useful Maud could do; she began the process of prying the pistol loose again.

Ollie looked around the basement. "The foamwood panel," she said, "which we used for Willis and for Lillian; is it in here?"

"I see one by the shelves," said Cara, following Sofi down the stairs. Mimi's hand pulled against Maud's hands. Issio held on to her, and so did Jared. The gurney wandered overhead toward the east wall and the partition, the antigrav unit humming cheerfully as it passed.

"Don't touch him!" Mimi yelled.

Maud got the pistol loose and instantly bore it off, handing it up the stairs. "Get it out of sight!" Jared said. "Terry's up there," he told Issio, who shuddered.

"Terry, armed," he murmured, and leaving Mimi to Jared, he went to help Evvie and Ollie, who were sliding the braced and bracketed form of Clyde onto the foamwood panel while all three attendants crouched by the gardening table, out of the way, looking from the Bahtans to the gurney to Jared and Mimi to the basement stairs.

Al, still holding the cleaver, located an unpainted, somewhat scarred old chair in the west corner, moved it over under the central light fixture, climbed up on it, clamped the cleaver between his teeth, and grabbed the gurney as it went by and shoved it down toward the floor. Ollie caught it and guided it toward Clyde and hit the braking button; it hovered, while she and Evvie and Issio lifted the foamwood panel and got Clyde onto it. Mimi made a heroic lunge in his direction, and Jared held on.

"We'll follow him to the hospital," he assured her. "We'll be right after him. Just let them get him into the ambulance It's all right."

Cara ran ahead to hold the kitchen door and shouted to someone to get the front door. "Well?" said Sofi to the attendants. "Get to the ambulance!" The second EMT grabbed up her bag from the floor and the three of them scuttled up the stairs, keeping their heads down and looking warily around them. Cara considerately held the door for them, too, and watched them out to the porch. Maud heard Terry asking them something; she did not hear them answering.

"We'll never be able to get an ambulance here again," Jared remarked.

"Good," said Sofi at once. "They are incompetent. We shall do better without them."

"They should have examined Mimi," said Maud, but there was no point in calling them back. She doubted that they would come.

"She's upset," said Jared again. He put her on her feet and her knees buckled; he lifted her and carried her up the stairs. The flashing ambulance lights were pounding through the window along with some dark deep vibration from somewhere overhead.

The ambulance lights moved; the ambulance lifted. Terry on the porch exclaimed with pleasure that they were breaking the law, look at that, and Mimi gave another scream and reached for the door. "She's more than upset," said Maud, and Cara paused, looking at her and at Mimi.

"You're right," she said. Mimi was struggling again, kicking bare feet in the air as Jared held her around the waist.

"At the hospital," he said. "We'll get one of the doctors to look at her."

"One of the sisters," said Maud. Wundra was out in the street with several D'ubians; Maud called to her. Ollie and Evvie must have gone with the ambulance, whether the attendants wanted them or not; they weren't visible.

A light flashed and that deep rumbling sound came again, and Maud identified it as thunder, just before the skies opened and the rain bucketed down.

 

Jared wrestled Mimi into the back seat of Cara's car; she wanted to go with Clyde, although the ambulance was out of sight by now. Wundra ran across the street from the Bahtan house with a small bottle in one hand, and Jared held Mimi's head while she poured the contents down Mimi's throat.

They were all going, it seemed. Wundra climbed into the car with Mimi, once they got her folded into the back seat, and Issio and Sofi with Gina and Phyllis climbed into Issio's car, and a swarm of brown-robed persons closed around Terry and swept him off toward their car.

Phyllis leaned out Issio's car window, rain pelting on her head. "Al, are you coming?" she called, and he stood on Clyde's porch and waved them off with the cleaver.

"I better stay with Lillian!" he shouted back. "Call me when there's news!"

Maud, staying on the porch out of the rain, dug her traveler out of the neckline of her shirt. Lightening slashed across the sky and the thunder shook the porch roof. Cara's motor started, and her windshield wipers sprang into action, and then she opened the car door and got out into the rain, looking over the top of the car. "Hurry up!" she called to Maud.

Maud waved her away. "Go on! I'll be there before you!"

"Of course she will," Cara said to her passengers. "Why can't I have a normal mother, like other people? First it's this brilliant scientist who's never home, and then it's a cursing screaming fly, and now it's this woman who zaps around the galaxy like magic, and pops in and out of our house without using the doors."

"Clyde!" shouted Mimi in the back seat, and Cara swung into the driver's seat and slammed the door hard. The D'ubian car ripped over their heads, shooting over treetops and off to the distant lights of downtown Bridgeton. They clipped off the top of an evergreen tree just past Al's house in passing.

Maud departed.

She paused in the storage area long enough to locate her raincoat and check to see if anyone was around, but no one was. And this was fine; the worst of the emergency was over. There were more than enough people to handle the aftermath.

She went below, landing very neatly in the shadows by the door to Emergency. The ambulance was there, and the patient and the small army accompanying him were already inside. The D'ubians and Terry arrived in the D'ubian car a few minutes later, and she held the door for them and waved at Issio's group, and at Cara's, Jared and Wundra supporting Mimi, who was no longer struggling, only crying in a steady, monotonous way.

Jared put Mimi on a couch by the window and paused to talk quietly with Mutai and Wundra. The Duri group, casting looks at the very bright overhead lights, retired under a table holding a coffee maker and piles of disposable cups and spoons; Terry climbed in after them. Gina, looking quite damp, sat down between Sofi, who wore a maternity dress still too big for her, and Phyllis, who wore an aggressively orange housecoat. It was a Monday night; there were only a few other people in the waiting room, and most of them drew back from this sudden influx of people.

Starting into the waiting room, Maud found that Cara was standing by the door, small and very damp in Jared's old black T-shirt, looking at the crowd in the waiting room. She glanced at Maud. "Nice raincoat," she said.

"Yes, I picked it up at Malen's on sale," said Maud, "three or four years ago. One of those classic styles that never goes out of fashion."

"Yes, so useful, worth hanging on to," agreed Cara without hesitation, as though nothing could be more normal than discussing a raincoat Maud had selected before her death. Maud had to admire that.

"By the way," she said, "now that we have a moment, I want to congratulate you on your marriage."

"Thank you," said Cara. "And I can't tell you how much we appreciated that remarkable vase you gave us." Maud caught the unexpected flash of humor and mischief in Cara's blue eyes and paused, charmed by childhood memories of dancing blue eyes. It occurred to her that there might be a little more to this girl than appeared on the surface. "And since I have you here," continued Cara, "we're planning a wedding reception not this coming weekend, but the next weekend, just our friends, nothing very elaborate, but if you would care to come – and, of course, your – Chazaerte is his name?"

"Yes," said Maud. "That's correct."

"I'd call," said Cara, "or write, if I had phone numbers or addresses. But Jared and I would love to have you both."

Maud doubted that, but it was very courteously put, and it struck her as amusing, at the very least, to attend a wedding reception for her barely-known daughter and her former lover. "I would be delighted," she said. "And I will pass your invitation on to Chazaerte. I'm sure he will be very happy to come to his sister's reception." She thought, under the circumstances, it did not hurt to bring the relationship to mind. They might well end up seeing more of each other than had been planned.