Chapter 1.

 

Gina

 

 

Eugenia McIntosh was three years old when her little brother Terrill was born, and among her earliest memories was one of her big brother Willis lifting her up so that she could see the baby in his crib. He didn’t look like much; he was small, with spindly arms and legs all in violent if aimless motion, and his head looked bald, although in fact he had a small amount of fine pale hair, like her, like Willis. He had very blue eyes like Gina and Willis, too, blue enough that Gina at this young age noticed them, and a very large mouth that was open and emitting an enormous amount of sound.

Willis held her up, using both arms; he was a strong boy and she was very small and slight for her age, but she was still a load for a boy only nine years old. "He's hungry," he explained to her. "That's why he’s crying."

And Nurse Linda came then with milk in a bottle and shooed them out of the nursery. Willis put Gina down and took her hand. At the end of the hall Mom and Dad’s bedroom door was open, and Mom’s maid was coming out with an armload of Mom’s clothes. "Where’s she going?" Gina asked Willis, wondering what Mom would wear if the maid took all her clothes away. Mom liked clothes. Gina was only three, but she knew that much. Sometimes Mom spent hours putting on clothes and taking them off and looking at herself in the mirror. Sometimes she would tie scarves on Gina, or drape blouses over her small shoulders. The hems of the blouses dragged on the floor, like oversized dresses.

"Once I'm done with this damned contract marriage," Mom would say, "and I'm free again, you and I will go to whole new world where pretty girls like us are appreciated. And we'll find us some real men!" And she would dab sweet-smelling stuff on Gina’s neck and put red stuff on Gina’s mouth. Mom’s maid would come in to do Mom’s hair and she would look at Gina and laugh.

"That one is so small; she'll never fit into those clothes," she would say, and Mom would laugh and drink funny-smelling stuff out of her glass and wave Gina away to Nurse Linda, who would sigh and scrub off the red stuff and the sweet-smelling stuff and untie the scarves and put her back in her own clothes again.

But now the maid was taking away all of Mom’s clothes, and Gina watched with concern. "Is she taking everything away?" she asked Willis.

"No, just to another bedroom," Willis said. "Mom is going to be at the other end of the hall, see?" He pointed past the nursery, where the big bedroom at the far end was open and Gina could see sunshine on the walls and the floor. And sure enough, Mom’s maid went into that room with all of the clothes. So that was all right. It made sense to Gina that Mom would want to have a room of her own. Willis did, and Gina did and the housekeeper did, and even Nurse Linda did, a small room just off the nursery. Now Mom would too, and Dad.

And after that Mom tried on clothes in her new room, ordering things from far away worlds; they came in great boxes every few weeks, and sometimes there were dresses for Gina, too, and shirts and pants for Willis, and baby things for little Terry, who was filling out and getting bigger, if no quieter. And sometimes there were toys. They were better than the things you could buy on here on Linden's World, Mom said; they came from other places, those whole new worlds Mom spoke of, where things were good.

Willis, who was always quiet around Mom and Dad, took the new clothes or the toys politely. The one he liked the best was a low-power beam gun; with it he could knock over the targets he set up in back of the house. He could spend hours out there, shooting while standing, while sitting, while lying down like soldiers on the vids. Once he shot the housekeeper in the rear when she was bending over to pick up something on the back step. She yelled very loudly and said bad words and rubbed her behind and said she would tell their father. But even Gina knew that was an empty threat; Dad did not pay any attention to Willis or Gina or Terry.

The dresses Mom bought for Gina were all right if Mom helped her put them on, and fussed about the ruffles and the length of the sleeves, but Gina really preferred to wear the jeans and shirts she could play in without anyone yelling at her for messing them up. As for the toys, she already had dolls, prettily dressed, sitting on a shelf in her room. They were just to look at, not to play with, and she had her beloved old Teddy to sleep with her, and to come with her on her wanderings. And she didn’t need the little cups and saucers, or the doll-sized furniture, although she supposed the dolls did. Nurse Linda always arranged the furniture on the shelf with the dolls as if she knew they wanted the little chairs and tables just so.

Gina liked to play outside, digging behind the house, finding treasures in odd-shaped stones and pretty flowers, an egg shell dropped from a nest, a bright-colored feather. Once she found the empty skin of one of the field varmints, shimmering with gold scales. Willis told her they shed their skins every year and grew new ones.

Their house was like an island surrounded by fields planted with crops. Out of any of the upstairs windows, Gina could see the fields stretching to the edge of the sky in all directions. The farm machines, with two or three workers to watch them, swarmed over the fields, making noise and raising clouds of dust; then later the crops appeared, glowing green in the rows, and then the crops grew tall and turned gold or maybe a different kind of green, and finally the farm machines, different ones, came and cut down the crops and took them away, and Dad sold them to other worlds in the Four Species Alliance, Gina was told, so he could buy pretty dresses and dolls for little girls.

He bought dresses for other people too. Gina knew that. She was going past the nursery and she heard a sound like someone crying, not Terry at all, a different kind of crying, and Dad came out of the nursery saying crossly over his shoulder, "Quit that whining; I told you I would buy you a new dress." He walked off down the hall, not seeing Gina, and she peeked through the door, still open, and saw Nurse Linda sitting on the floor holding what was left of her dress around her. It was just a bunch of torn cloth, and Gina could see her skin, her shoulders and her top, which was bigger than Mom’s and kind of floppy, and her bottom, without even panties. There were red marks on her arms and her legs and one side of her face, and she was crying and her hair was all messed. And looking at her, Gina began to get a bad feeling. She felt things that hurt, down where no one was supposed to touch, and on her arms and legs and on her face, and she felt a hurt that wasn't in her body, somewhere deep inside her mind or her soul.

Gina backed away and went into her own room and shut the door, and she sat a long time on her bed holding Teddy, until things stopped hurting.

That was the last time Gina could remember seeing Nurse Linda, so she did not know what sort of new dress Dad bought her. She went away and Mom’s maid looked after Terry for a little while and helped Gina get dressed and undressed and made sure she took a bath and went to bed, but it made her angry, a dull red resentment Gina could see; she wasn’t supposed to have to look after children, she said.

So Nurse Dana came in from town, which was a long ways away, two hours by aircar, so she had to live with them in their house, and she took care of Terry and Gina. She was cross, though. She slapped Terry's hands and put him into his bed and left him there to cry for a long time when she said he got into things; Terry was starting to crawl now. When Gina spilled her milk on the floor, Nurse Dana whacked her bottom very hard, and made her stand in the corner of the nursery for a long time, although it had been an accident. Gina could see Nurse Dana's temper around her, a big black thundercloud, with flashes of lightening.

So Gina stayed away from the nursery when she could see that Nurse Dana had the thundercloud; she played by herself in her room or outside, behind the house, among the crop rows, especially if the crops were taller than she was. And sometimes Willis let her come with him. He was a very big boy, but he would play with her, showing her how to throw balls and teaching her the rules of some of his games, although they were hard for her to remember. He didn't have any thunderclouds around him, although he often had a dull grey darkness, like a long dragging rainy day. Gina noticed that being with her and Terry made the darkness lift a little. Willis didn't have people to play with. Some of the workers had children about his age, but none of them lived very close to the house. And Mom didn't like workers' children.

Dad wasn't around very often. He was very busy. He visited with other farm masters, and he went to town, where people came on ships that flew through the sky to buy his crops, and he had to see to his workers, the people who took care of his farm machines. He would come home smelling funny, like the stuff in Mom's glass, and he would talk loudly and be very silly. Once Gina saw him in the back of the kitchen with Nurse Dana; he was laughing, and Gina saw him swat Nurse Dana across the bottom, which she thought was only fair, after what Nurse Dana had done to her, but Nurse Dana didn't cry. She just laughed and walked away, with her bottom swaying and Dad watching. She didn’t have the thundercloud this time.

Mom spent a lot of time in her room. Sometimes she let Gina come in and try on clothes and fuss with the paint Mom had for her face; the red stuff was called lipstick, and there were other things on her dresser that smelled nice, black things and brown and blue and all kinds of red, light and dark. At times like that, Gina could see Mom as if she had lots of sparky things all around her. She seemed happy, in a sort of frantic way.

But sometimes Mom took a lot of medicine because she had very bad headaches, the maid told Gina, and she would stay in her room with the door closed and she would sleep a lot. On those days Gina could see Mom sunk in the middle of a kind of muddy pond, moving sluggishly, not trying to find her way out. And sometimes Mom would take an aircar and go into town, and she wouldn't come back for a long time, days and days.

Terry was beginning to pull himself up to his feet, holding onto the furniture, wobbling back and forth unsteadily. He tried to walk, but mostly he just crawled, very fast, because he was in such a hurry to get wherever he was going. He could cross the nursery in no time. Once he crawled right out of the nursery door before anyone knew it, and Nurse Dana found him working his way down the stairs. She whacked his bottom that time and put him to bed, and he cried for an hour. Mom was in bed with a headache and couldn’t hear him. Finally Willis sneaked into the nursery and lifted him out of his baby bed and took him back to Willis' room until he stopped crying. Gina sat with them and let Terry play with the green ball Willis had given her; Willis said that was all right, and if Terry hurt it he would give Gina another one.

Terry's mind was just all bright and sunny-white with pretty sounds; Gina couldn't find out what he was thinking.

Willis was a very good big brother. Nurse Linda used to read stories to Gina, one of the readers in the nursery with big bright pictures to look at, but Nurse Dana said she had better things to do. So Willis took the readers to his room or to Gina’s room and he would sit and read to Gina and, when Terry got big enough to toddle after them, he would read to Terry too and let him look at the pictures, and he would tell Terry about the pictures. Terry would look and listen for awhile, but then he would get bored and go play with Willis’ old blocks or his toy farm machines. Willis never got mad if Terry broke something.

The black squiggles beside the big pictures in the readers were letters, and they made the words that told the stories. When she asked Willis, he put his finger under the words as he read them so that she could read them too. She began to remember how some of the words looked so she could recognize them even when Willis wasn't there to read to her.

 

It was at about this time, when Gina was four and Terry was a year old, that she saw the strange man, only he wasn't really that strange; she thought she had seen him somewhere before. She just couldn't remember where or when.

It was evening, and it was after bedtime; Nurse Dana had seen Gina into bed, and turned out her light, and told her to go to sleep. She said it was a three-moon night, and the bad goblins came during three-moon nights and if they found a little girl who wouldn’t go to sleep, they would take her away to their caves, which were dark and slimy, and never let her go. Then Nurse Dana went away, although not back to the nursery, Gina thought. She was sure she heard Nurse Dana going downstairs. Dad was downstairs in the study, looking at farm plans, with a glass of that funny-smelling stuff. If Nurse Dana bothered him, Gina thought maybe he might whack her bottom again, which would be good.

Gina lay a long time in bed. It was summer; outside the crops grew tall and the wind stirred through them, like people sneaking through the stalks, like even maybe bad goblins. The three moons rose, the big one first and then the small one and finally the middle-sized one, and they shone in Gina’s window, making crisscross patterns on the wall across from the bed, and the tree by the window began to rustle, as if something were crawling up the trunk, digging small sharp toenails into the bark, catching at branches with long crooked fingers and pointy fingernails, snickering through their scraggly teeth as they climbed up to peer in her window and see if she was asleep –

Willis was sitting up in bed reading; he said there were no such things as bad goblins, but she could stay with him if she wanted. She snuggled down beside him and looked at his reader for awhile, but it was a reader for big boys like him. It had a lot of words, and not very many pictures.

"I’ll read to you," he said, "if you go get one of your own readers."

Gina was sure he was right about the bad goblins; she figured a big boy ten years old would know about such things, and Willis had never, in her short life, lied to her. But just the same she didn’t like to go into her room, so she tiptoed down the hall with the idea of getting a reader from the nursery. It should be safe enough. Terry would be asleep, and Nurse Dana was downstairs.

The door was a little bit open and she peeked, just to be sure that Nurse Dana wasn’t there. She wasn’t. Instead, standing beside Terry’s bed was Mom, and with her was the strange man. He was very tall, taller than Dad, and not as big around as Dad, who had a stomach that stuck out, and round cheeks. This man was very straight and thin. His hair wasn’t brown like Dad’s, either; it was so light a gold that it was almost white and he wore it long, pushed back behind his ears. And his eyes were as blue as Terry’s eyes, as the eyes Gina saw in her own mirror when she bothered to look.

And she had the feeling that she had seen him before, but she couldn’t think where; he was familiar in some strange way, but she couldn’t think how.

Neither of them saw Gina; they were both looking at Terry, who was curled under a light blanket fast asleep – the only time in the day he was quiet and motionless. He looked like one of those angels Gina had seen in pictures in her readers, which was funny, considering how he acted when he was awake. His hair was short, and fine and pale like the strange man, and he was flushed with sleep, color under his fair thin skin.

Mom and the strange man stood very still beside the bed, looking, and then Mom moved so that she was leaning against the strange man, but he didn’t look at her; he was gazing at Terry, intent, as if he were trying to memorize how Terry looked. There was something inside Mom reaching for the man, sort of grabbing at him; Gina could feel it, but the man’s mind was drawn apart, behind a hard white wall, where she couldn't touch it.

Gina took a step backward, very quietly, and Mom didn’t seem to hear her, but the strange man looked up from Terry’s bed and his bright blue eyes fastened upon Gina. He didn’t speak and he didn’t smile or frown; he just looked at her, and she looked back, and she could not tell what he was thinking, and then he glanced down at Terry again and Gina ducked down the hall and ran into Willis’s room.

"There’s a man," she said when Willis looked up from his reader. "He's in the nursery with Mom."

"Huh?" said Willis, but he got up right away, without waiting for her to repeat what she said, and he stepped out into the hall barefoot and tiptoed down to the nursery. Gina thought about it for a moment and then she followed as quietly as she could. Willis peered cautiously around the edge of the door and Gina sneaked another peek just under his arm, and saw an odd thing. Mom was standing with her arms around the strange man and her eyes closed, and the strange man was still staring at Terry as if he couldn’t take his eyes off the baby, and inside Mom it was like she was standing there all alone, in a cold place, and it made her unhappy and afraid.

Willis backed up and got hold of Gina’s arm and put a finger to his lips to tell her to be quiet, which he didn’t need to do; Gina knew she shouldn’t make any noise. Mom wouldn’t want them there looking, and the strange man – Gina felt his sharp blue gaze upon her and it made her uncomfortable.

So she didn’t want his attention either, and she followed Willis back to his room, padding barefoot and silent. Willis mostly closed his door but stood just inside, listening, and Gina stood beside him. After a few minutes they heard the nursery door shut, and Willis risked a look down the hall. Gina, standing on tiptoe to look past her brother, saw the tall white man and Mom going down the hall to Mom’s bedroom at the end of the hall. They went inside and closed the door.

Willis went to look out of his window, which looked over the back of the house; he could see the grass, and the aircars parked on the drive, and the crops bending in the light breeze. "I wonder how he got here," Willis said to Gina. "I don't see a car he could have driven."

He peered out his door again, but there was nothing in the hall; he sprinted quickly to the bathroom on the other side of the hall, with Gina right behind him, and he looked out the bathroom window to the front of the house, where the drive came down between fields, under the big old trees at the front gate, across the front of the house and around the corner to the back. There were no cars at all out there, and Gina couldn’t see anything beyond the grass and the trees but the endless crops, spreading to the very ends of the world.

After awhile Willis took her back to his room and set her up on his bed with a couple of his old vids, from when he was little like she was, and he sat on the floor by the door, listening, paying no attention to the vid characters as they moved through the room. He was still there when Gina began to yawn, and when she woke up in the early morning with the birds singing and the sky just turning white-gray, he was asleep on the floor.

There was no sign of any strange men that morning, and Mom didn't say anything about him, and Gina knew not to say anything herself. She was four years old, after all, getting to be a big girl.