Chapter 65

 

Jared

 

 

It was very peaceful and quiet at the Institute, with no one crying or screaming. Phyllis and Lillian seemed to be handling it pretty well; they were accustomed to the storms of adolescence, and this wasn't all that different, Jared supposed. And Cara, who knew how long Ann had felt her mother's abandonment, was understanding and supportive, and Maud, aghast at the uproar she had caused, did her best to sound sympathetic, although her patience, Jared knew, was running thin after the first hour.

"She is one of our people," she said, for not the first time, "and I can tell you she is a beautiful woman of many talents, and she greatly regretted having to leave you, but it was not possible, at that time, to keep you. There were situations out of our control, situations that forced us to make difficult choices."

"You know her!" Ann wept. "You know who she is; you know where she is!"

"I know she isn't able to be with you right now," said Maud, choosing her words with some care; she wasn't going to reveal a great deal about Ann's ancestry, Jared saw. For whatever reason, this was to be kept a secret, no matter what Ann said or did.

So while this answered some of Ann's questions, since no one had ever told her anything about her mother and only the barest essentials about her father, it was not at all satisfying, and in the end Phyllis resorted to a stiff shot of Bahtan brandy in Ann's coffee to tranquilize her, and Jared gathered Maud and Patterson and Gina and Cara and headed for the Institute. He felt a great deal of sympathy for Ann. He had grown up without a father; he understood what she was dealing with, but there wasn't much he could do to help her. Even if he could persuade Maud to tell the girl her mother's name, it wasn't all Ann needed to know, and Maud wasn't going to tell the rest. If she could have, she would have done so by now, just to calm Ann.

"She'll be a little less hysterical tomorrow," said Cara, "when she's had a chance to sleep on it. It was just the shock of it, you know. She never thought anyone would tell her anything about her mother. All she's ever known is that she was left with her father, who dropped her off with her aunt and wandered away himself. I don't think she's heard from him in years."

"And a very good thing," said Maud, "from all I've heard, although of course I won't tell the poor girl about that. Her mother is quite different, I assure you, and perhaps at some point in the future she can make contact. It simply isn't possible right now."

"Not one of the six of you on Haivran?" said Jared.

"I told you there are others, attached to other worlds, not all of them owned by the Alliance," said Maud.

"Other people? Other species?" That was very interesting.

"You don't think your four species are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy," said Maud. "But you're unlikely to meet others for several generations."

"We already met two other species," said Patterson, "only we didn't know it."

There was a vague thumping and some odd smells coming down from the mad scientists in the upstairs lab, but no one was in the conference room. Jared helped Patterson turn on the projectors and unlock the box of lenses from the underside of the big chair by the window, and then, leaving Lalia and Carter and Zarei and Patterson pouring over the arches and the screen images, and Chazaerte sitting on the end of the table awkwardly exchanging a few words with Gina, who didn't look much more comfortable than he did, Jared caught Maud by the elbow and, accompanied by Cara, steered her into his office and closed the door.

"Don't tell me," she said. "Let me guess. You've decided to change the color scheme of the reception; you want shades of red and pink instead of blue. Ann will be crushed, and she has had enough trauma today."

"I was thinking of mold green," said Jared, "to go with that vase you gave us."

"I thought the diarrheic yellow, myself," said Cara. "Do sit down, Mother."

Looking amused, Maud sat down in one of the visitors' chairs in front of the desk, and Cara took the second chair and Jared dropped into the desk chair, rather glad to have the expanse of the desktop between him and Maud and her reactions. He was not at all sure how cooperative she was going to be, and without her cooperation and that of her people, he knew they would have trouble presenting these ideas to the Drs. Wood, let alone the Azuri/zai command.

"We have been thinking," he told her, "how best to introduce you to the Drs. Wood. They are on the Azuri/zai committee, you know, in charge of this project of ours; it was the Drs. Wood who brought me into this study."

She looked him over, cool sharp blue eyes. "Ah," she said. "And here it is. You mean to tell them all about us, don't you."

"There is information they need to have," said Jared. "I don't know how else to give it to them."

"You don't think you could have made some brilliant breakthrough of your own?" she suggested. "It would be entirely reasonable, given your ability. The Gif'zi translation –"

"I thank you for your faith in my ability," said Jared, "but the Gif'zi translation was another matter entirely. The language is a living language; the legends are still told on Zamuao."

"Putting that together with the writing on the documents," said Maud, "required an intellectual leap; that is your genius, Jared, to be able to make that leap. A similar leap –"

"Simply isn't possible," said Jared. "Isn't supported by anything here in this dimension. No language, spoken or written. No legends told anywhere at all. I'm not making any translations, Maud; if Carter comes up with something, it's out of his knowledge, not mine."

"If you think Carter," said Maud, "or any one of us would demand credit –"

"Oh, heavens," said Cara.

"Not the point, Maud," said Jared. "We're not a bunch of academics squabbling over footnotes and proper attribution. If Carter can tell us something of what the glyphs mean, the Azuri/zai committees need to know about it, and they need to know, clearly and accurately, where the information comes from. How can they trust it otherwise? And, under the circumstances, they may need to trust it."

"They have to know about you and your people, Mother," said Cara quietly, and Maud turned and studied her with those cool blue eyes. "We've always known those arches were used by another species, not one of the four in the Alliance. Known to be in the Alliance," she amended, and Maud gave a short nod, acknowledging it. "It turns out that this fifth species exists, and it's in contact with us. I think they need to know about this."

Maud studied her, turned her eyes again to Jared and studied him over the desk.

"Are you afraid to come out into the open?" Jared inquired, meeting her eyes squarely, challenging her.

She smiled. "There isn't much anyone could do to us," she said, "at least on this plane. If they don't like us, that's too bad; we're here. So no, I'm not afraid of our coming into the open. But do you know, you blazer of trails, that you are planning to break literally millennia of tradition? No one knows about us; no one ever has. For centuries, you short-lived children! For centuries!"

Jared looked across the desk at Cara, who looked back. He still couldn't read her, any more than he could read Maud, but she was with him; he could see that in her eyes.

"So?" he said to Maud.

She looked at him, turned to look at Cara, looked back at him. "Damn you," she said with real amusement. "I should have known what a troublemaker you are."

"Probably," agreed Jared.

"You too," Maud said to Cara, who smiled back at her.

"Yes, Mother," she said.

Maud got up and walked over to the window, thrusting her long elegant hands into the pockets of her imported linen pants; she stood looking out at the darkening sky, the city lights, the moving lights of passing traffic.

"I am not the leader of our group, if that's what you were thinking," she said. "We don't have a leader. There are only six of us; we yell and whine and throw things until we come to an agreement, like any well-run family. This full-disclosure policy of yours extends only as far as Haivran, you know; I can't speak for groups elsewhere, nor can any of the rest of us."

"I imagine not," said Jared, "but at this moment we're not involved with groups elsewhere anyway. Only the six of you." Of which they knew only five, but he didn't think this was the moment to ask about the sixth one.

"I will talk to the others," said Maud, turning back from the window. "If the whole group objects, would you give up this idea?"

"No," said Jared. "But it would be better if you were there to speak for yourselves. Easier for us. Better for you."

"He seems nice and quiet," Maud told Cara, pointing a fingernail at Jared. "Have you noticed? Very pleasant, polite, calm-tempered, tolerant, and do you see what he does? Over and over, he stirs things up. He attracts strange people, and odd things happen around him. All the time. Do you see how he is?"

"Yes, it keeps life interesting," said Cara, and Maud laughed.

"All right," she said. "I will tell the others what you've said, and I will tell them, also, that I vote with you. We will have a nice conversation with the Drs. Wood, and see what happens. They are coming in, when, Saturday?"

"I talked to Louise yesterday," said Cara, "and she said they should get in Friday night. I said we'd pick them up at the train," she told Jared, and he nodded.

"Good," he said. "Are they staying up on Seven Tree Circle?"

"They want to check on their house," said Cara. "So we can take them there, and I think the train is getting in pretty late, but we could have them to lunch Saturday and talk then. With you," she added, looking at Maud, who chuckled.

"Yes, indeed, over club sandwiches and salad," she said. "Perhaps at that nice little place on 43^rd Avenue; get a back table."

"It would work better," said Cara, "if we had them at our house. Privacy."

"With that little hellion Terry running around loose?" said Maud. "Not to mention those creatures in cages, and who knows what else? Forty-third Avenue. I'll reserve a back table myself; I'll call tomorrow. Besides, the reception is that night. You won't have time to produce a special lunch too."

"Suppose," said Jared, breaking into these vital considerations, "we have lunch somewhere, anywhere, and then come here to my office and shut the door? That would give us privacy, and uninterrupted time. The only problem I see is that if we leave Ann unsupervised she'll probably hang those blue and white streamers between the candles on the lace table runners in the banquet room."

"What you really want to worry about, " said Maud, "is her latest plan for the cake. Between tiers," she explained. "A pair of love birds in a cage. Live."

"You're joking," said Jared hopefully, and Maud shook her head. Cara rolled up her eyes and pulled her phone out of her pocket.

"I'm calling Al," she said, scrolling the directory. "I'll put up with streamers and lighted garlands before I'll have birds in my wedding cake."

 

By the time they got back to the conference room, Lalia and Patterson were engaged in a lively discussion about the images he was printing out. Zarei was up on the table with Carter, pointing at various glyphs and arguing about the possible meaning of their placement. Gina was standing under the second arch, toward the head of the table, with a set of Zeilmars, looking with a serious expression back and forth from the left leg to the right leg. Chazaerte was sitting at the end of the table with his chin in his hand, looking glumly at nearest pair of shoes, Carter's, as it happened.

Jared reached out to Gina. Problems? Are you okay?

I don't know. I guess so. She was frustrated, he saw, unable to get a real conversation going with her father, unable to get any information about him, or Ann, or anything else. He was good enough at the cryptic comments, Jared thought, but not at any emotional connection, not to Gina, probably not to Terry either, although Terry was not interested enough to be bothered by it. Terry had all his emotional needs met by his neighborhood family, by his brother and sister, by his D'ubian friends. His father would have been a nice bonus, but he didn't really need him.

Gina probably did need a father, and so did Willis, and they hadn't had a father in Eugene and it was a shame they weren't going to have this father either, Jared thought. He sent what warmth he could toward her, and she glanced down from the table and smiled at him and at Cara. I have you and Cara and Sofi and Issio, she sent to him, with a dash of humor, and I share all of you with these others.

Patterson had removed his half mattress and the half bedding that went with it from the conference room; Lalia said that they had all joined in jamming it into his office before they left the night before, or rather, in the very early hours of the morning. It was, she said, a rather full office. She thought he might need to rent a storage unit somewhere, if he kept on at this rate.

"Oh, no, most of our things are split up now," said Patterson blithely

"And when exactly are you getting the divorce finalized?" inquired Maud, looking over his shoulder at the printouts.

"Well, we need to make arrangements about the house," said Patterson.

"You aren't going to saw the house in half, are you?" asked Gina apprehensively.

"I can't," said Patterson. "It's too big a job; I couldn't finish it in a single day, while she's at work. I was thinking of trying the garage, though."

"But why?" said Maud. "Just to annoy her?"

"Well, actually," said Patterson, "it seems only fair. She denied me my visitation with Yvonne Marie last week, did you know that? We're supposed to have joint custody, but she refused to even let me see her."

"Your daughter?" said Lalia sympathetically.

"Our poodle," said Patterson. "I raised her from a pup," he said to Lalia's startled face. "I bottle fed her on a two-hour schedule, while that lazy bitch slept."

"Her mother?" said Lalia, groping.

"No, my wife. And now she's trying to deny me my visitation rights."

"Where in the universe do you find these people?" Maud asked Jared, but he and Cara were laughing too hard to answer her.

Carter handed his Zeilmars to Maud and gave her a hand to the top of the table, and then came over to the side nearest Jared and sat down on the table edge. "Mr. Patterson is giving me copies of the diagrams," he said, "and I will compare them to my own sources." Jared contemplated an image of a library in that odd purple-toned place where he had found himself between Linden's World and Haivran; he could see Carter sitting at a desk, ornately carved, studying huge ancient tomes by candlelight – purple candlelight, he supposed. "It will take a little time," said Carter. "You'll want your information to be as accurate as possible. Especially if you mean to present this to the Azuri/zai committees, as I assume you do."

"You'll need to talk with Maud," said Jared.

"You and I have known each other for some years, Dr. Ramirez," said Carter with a smile. "Maud gave us our invitations to your wedding reception next Saturday; thank you, I accept with great pleasure. And as Dr. Ned and Dr. Louise Wood will be attending, I assume you will want my report before then. If you require my presence during your conference with them, please let me know. One or another of us will be in contact with you, if only because of your neighbor Mimi. You can send a message through any of them."

"Thank you," said Jared, and when Carter offered his hand this time Jared shook it with something like the old warmth. He might have known, he reflected, that he would have support from Carter, and from Maud too, however their relationship had shifted and changed. Carter got up and walked across the table to Patterson and began gathering printout sheets, and Maud and Lalia and Zarei, at the far end of the table, put their heads together; Jared caught a glance from Lalia and another from Zarei and suspected what the subject of the conversation was. Chazaerte was within hearing distance, but didn't seem to be paying any attention; he was meditating on sad dark topics instead.

Jared reached up to lift Gina down from the table. "It's getting late," he said to her; she looked as tired as he felt. "Suppose," he proposed to the room in general, "that Cara and Gina and I go on home for now; can one of you get Patterson home? Unless you go on until dawn," he added, seeing that Patterson showed no signs of tiring; he looked perfectly willing to stay here until Weston and Ott arrived on Monday morning.

"We'll see him home," said Lalia. "Don't worry about a thing."

Jared thought that sounded good, but he thought he had quite a few things to worry about anyway.

Locking the doors behind them, he took Cara and Gina out to the parking lot, where the smaller moon danced over treetops and a large sign, painted in dripping red paint on white foamboard, was fastened to the streetlight closest to the center of the lot. It said, "FABIAN PATTERSON MOLESTS POODLES!!!"

"Oh, hell," said Jared, coming to a halt.

"Are they both crazy?" asked Cara, staring.

"Is his name really Fabian?" asked Gina, beginning to laugh.

Jared crossed the lot and took hold of the bottom corner of the sign. It seemed to be glued in place; it was powerful glue. He tugged at it and then pulled hard, putting his weight into it. It stayed.

"Patterson, hi, would you hand your phone to Maud?" said Cara into her phone. "I just have a question for her. Yes. Mother, you've got to come out to the parking lot. Don't say anything to Patterson, but come out here right away; you've got to see this. Yes, bring Lalia."

Jared craned to look up under the sign; he could see where a thick line of some seriously adhesive substance held it to the light post. Possibly he could saw the board off the post, if he had a saw, which made him think of power tools and the potential proximity of the not-yet-ex-Mrs. Patterson, who had no doubt posted the sign in the first place.

Maud and Lalia came down the walk, as if they had just come through the door, and stopped short to view the sign in its full magnificence. "Oh, my," said Lalia, and she began to laugh.

"Where do you find these people, Jared?" exclaimed Maud.

"I didn't find Patterson's wife; he did," protested Jared.

"Imagine, a poodle molester in our midst," said Lalia. "No wonder she wouldn't allow him to see Yvonne Marie last week! No responsible lazy bitch would! I have to tell Denieal," she told Maud, and ran back toward the door; it took an experienced eye in the dark to see that she did not actually open the door, only vanished when she reached it.

Jared had to open the door the old-fashioned way, but he locked it behind him before finding the lift to take him down to Maintenance. There was no one there on a Sunday night, but the door to the supply closet was unlocked, and he found a pruner and a power cutter and a small hand saw. By the time he came back out, Carter was there, with Maud and Zarei. "Chazaerte should see this," Zarei said to Maud, and passed Jared on her way back up the walk.

Zarei and Lalia stayed with Patterson and the projections. He could not be allowed outside until they had handled the matter. Chazaerte, looking as if this were the sort of behavior to be expected from the lunatics in this dimension, provided one shoulder for Jared to brace himself against while Carter provided the other. The pruner wasn't very useful, but the power cutter whined its way through the foamboard pretty efficiently, cutting away the sign, leaving thick globs of adhesive attached to the post. Gina and Cara took the sign as Jared cut it loose and they tried to stuff it into the litter chute, but the opening wasn't big enough. Jared got down and used the power cutter to carve it into smaller sections.

"Isn't this vandalism? All that glue she used? She probably damaged the finish on that lamp post," said Maud, who seemed to be enjoying herself.

"Don't you have police to deal with this?" asked Chazaerte, watching as Gina thrust the last piece into the chute, where it was sucked down into the garbage line with a scraping sound.

"We couldn't prove Mrs. Patterson did it," said Cara. "And if we did, she'd just be more upset and this thing would escalate."

"I don't see how it can," said Jared. "They've broken up their household goods. Literally. I don't suppose they can saw their financial assets in half. They can wrangle over Yvonne Marie, I guess, but they've exhausted the patience of the judge. They're going to have to go ahead and get this divorce; that's all that's left."

"Fabian," said Gina, giggling. "Don't you love it?"