Chapter 3.

 

Gina

 

 

Not all of the readers had made-up stories. There were readers telling about a lot of real things, too, and Willis was studying these and very willing to share them with Gina, because, he said, Linden's World was only one world and there were lots of other worlds she should know about, now that she was getting big, going on seven. Even if she ended up living her whole life on Linden's World, she should know about the worlds where Dad and the other farm masters sold their crops to people who hadn't got the right kind of land to grow crops for themselves.

"Why wouldn't I live here?" Gina asked, a little surprised that there should be an "if" involved.

"Maybe Mom won't live here," said Willis. "Once the contract is over, she can leave, you know."

Gina thought about a life without Mom; Gina knew she was always just down at the end of the hall unless she went to town. If she were gone, it would be like she went to town, only she wouldn't be coming back in a week or so. That would be odd, hard to get used to.

And Gina did not see how Mom leaving would have anything to do with Gina coming or going. "Well, Mom might want to take you," said Willis, although he didn't sound as if he thought this very likely. Neither did Gina. "Or maybe when you get bigger, you can come with me. And Terry, too."

"Are you going?" That was serious; that was much more important than Mom going. She could imagine getting used to Mom being gone. Mom wasn't around that much, even when she was at home. But Willis mattered; Willis had been right there with Gina as long as Gina could remember. He was necessary.

"Sure I'm going, just as soon as I'm old enough," said Willis. "You won't catch me stuck on this world, nothing but those crops, no one around but us." And Dad, he was thinking; Gina could see that. It brought back the grayness surrounding Willis, which seemed more and more often like smoke, a low dark burning. Gina had seen workers burning stacks of dried weeds in the back of the house, watching to make sure the flames didn't get away and burn the house, or the fields. There was a lot of dark smoke, and underneath the smoke, a pile of glowing black red cinders on the ground. The grayness around Willis was like that. The cinders were his anger, and they never stopped burning. And there weren't any workers to keep the flames down, only Willis himself.

So he didn't want to stay here, she realized, and he wouldn't, and that meant that she would be alone with Terry and Dad, if Mom left too.

Or she and Terry would be with Willis on one of those other worlds displayed on Willis' screen, all neatly labeled in small letters because there were a lot of them, and still they were looking for new worlds, Willis said, because of course it wasn't just Earthians like Willis and Gina and Terry. There were four species in the Alliance – it was called the Four Species Alliance, after all – and that meant lots and lots of people needed places to live, and not all of them liked the same kind of places.

Gina knew about other species. There were, for instance, Bahtans among the workers; they were good at growing things. She hadn't talked with them because they weren't allowed to talk to the workers or their families, but she knew what they looked like. They were big, big as Dad, and they had thick brown skin, and what Earthians like Mom and Nurse Dana and Nurse Linda had on top – breasts; Gina knew the word for them now – the Bahtans mostly had much lower, around the waist or below. They had long, brown, kind faces with intelligent eyes. They did a lot of things with the machines – programming, Willis said, and they did a lot of things out in the field, making sure the machines did it right. And the doctor in town was a Bahtan, and both of her nurses were. The Bahtans Gina had seen were women, Willis said; the men were mostly in town working at warehouses or at the space ports, heavy labor jobs; the women were very smart and had more education, and a lot of them were doctors and scientists who figured out new medicines to help sick people and worked out ways to make the crops better for people to eat, so they had more vitamins.

They came from a world called Bahta, where there were many green fields, greener than Linden's World, and all of them ate vegetables, no meat at all, or cheese or eggs or anything like that. It was the women who ran things there, Willis said.

"What about the men?" asked Gina. Most of the farm masters on Linden's World were men; she was used to the idea of men running things.

"Well, they sort of stay by themselves," said Willis. He was, she saw, embarrassed, and he didn't want to tell Gina about it because it had to do with, well, that sort of thing Dad did in the study, or out in the fields or in his bedroom, what he had been doing, Gina had begun to understand, with Connie and Nurse Dana. It was ugly, it hurt people, and Gina didn't like to think about it. So she didn't ask Willis any questions about the Bahtans and their men and women.

That thing had something to do with having babies, though, so it couldn't be all bad. Gina had seen Bahtan children in the workers' village, sturdy young girls very like their mothers, and a handful of boys, taller and stronger but much quieter, hanging back as if they hoped no one would notice them. Gina knew about that; she did it herself.

If she were as big and strong as a Bahtan boy, though, she wouldn't have to, she thought.

So that was one of the Alliance species that she knew, and she knew a little about another species because Terry had a music vid, and they played the music and they had written it, and Terry liked it more than any other vid he had. They were odd people, little, Willis said, maybe taller than he was. Willis was short for his age and did not like to admit it, so he made sure Gina knew that the people on the vid were taller than he was because they were grownups.

They were called D'ubians; they wore, mostly, long brown robes with hoods and you could only glimpse the faces underneath, bright eyes and cheerful expressions. They enjoyed the music they were making in Terry's vid, seemed to be having great fun with it, and you could see them smiling. They wore the robes and hoods because, Willis said, they were very sensitive to light. It hurt their skin, like sunburn, and it hurt their eyes, like looking into a bright lamp. Their planet had maybe been a nice place once, but it was old and used-up now and the sun was very bright and hot, and the D'ubians lived underground, in caves and tunnels they had dug, because the D'ubians were miners and workers in metals and gems.

They also knew all about numbers, the things Gina was studying with greater or lesser success. They were extremely good at math, and they had developed the space drive the Alliance now used, combined with the less efficient drives developed by the early Zamuaons and Earthians. The D'ubians had used their math – no, Willis didn't exactly know how that worked – to find the power, the one they used for the ships that went through space like a needle through folds of fabric, like Mom's maid fixing a hem or a seam in a dress. This power was used also for cars and machines and things like the cooker and the cleaners and even little things, like the toy farm machines or the flashlights. They had found out about the power, and the Zamuaons and the Earthians and the Bahtans had made ways to use it.

The funny thing was, the D'ubians had figured out the power for the space drive, something to do with inner space, but they had never used it, because they didn't travel in space until they met the Zamuaons and learned to build big and powerful ships. Until then they had trouble building ships big enough for their families, which could be as many as a hundred people, Willis told her, and they couldn't stand to leave their families at home and go away from them. Willis thought this was a peculiar way to think, but it was the way the D'ubians were. They liked to be all together, almost on top of one another. They would hate this house on Linden's World, Willis said, where everyone had a separate room. They would all be together in one of those rooms and they would keep bringing in relatives until the area was all filled.

"All together, the men and women?" said Gina, thinking about the Bahtans.

"Well," said Willis, again a little embarrassed, trying to think how to say it. "Actually they're not just men and women. They're other things, too. They don't just, like we do it, a man and a woman getting together to have babies and all; it takes five of them."

Gina tried to figure out how that would work. Dad would have to have Mom and three other people. Maybe Connie and Nurse Linda and Nurse Dana all at the same time. She wondered how they would fit in a bed together, and if they would get along. Nurse Dana wouldn't like it. "How?" she asked Willis.

"Nobody knows," he admitted. "They don't tell. They're really nice people. You don't see many of them on Linden's World because there isn't mining here and there isn't a big audience for their music. Lots of them are musicians, like the ones on Terry's vid. But I talked with some people on the screen, some people doing math at the secondary school on Haivran, and there's a D'ubian group that talks. And they're really nice, but we talked in Trade, you know, because no one much knows D'ubian and they don't teach people their language, and they don't talk about their families and they don't talk about – but they're groups of five, and one of them does all the talking for the other four, maybe they don't all know Trade, and when they have babies they have five at a time. Everyone knows about that, but we don't know how they, uh, do it."

Gina thought that was very strange. "How about the Zamuaons?" she asked.

"The Zamuaons," said Willis, "were the very first ones into space, beyond their solar system, you know." He flipped pages in his reader to show her a picture of a group of Zamuaons. It was a mixed group, men and women, apparently just the two kinds, which was sort of a relief. The men were broad-shouldered and looked strong; the women were a little more delicate. They had ears that were ever so slightly pointed at the top, and fine soft body hair, many colors, blacks and oranges and whites and grays and browns, sometimes mingled in stripes or patches, and they had tails, which Gina thought was interesting. Some of the field varmints had tails which they flicked or waved as they scampered between the crop rows. Zamuaons flicked their tails, too.

"You haven't seen any Zamuaons here," said Willis, "because they don't do farming, just livestock, so they're not very interested in Linden's World." He was very sure about this, so Gina didn't tell him he was wrong about there not being Zamuaons here, and her not having seen one.

One of the interesting things about the Zamuaons, Willis said, was that they said they could read minds, hear what other people were thinking; they called it Ears, having Big Ears. They were born with Big Ears and learned how to use them, just like Gina was learning how to use the keyboard and how to do math. Gina had never heard of anyone else who could hear other people's thoughts; she wanted to ask more about it, but she had never told anyone, even Willis, that she could do it too.

It would be good, though, to be with other people who could do this, and who could teach her how to do it better. She tucked this thought away in the back of her mind for later.

"Some people say," said Willis, "that the Zamuaons had to go into space because they needed to hunt for fresh meat. The Bahtans, you know, eat plants and stuff? The Zamuaons eat meat. They don't even cook it very much, and they want it really fresh, right after the animal is killed. I don't think they eat many other things. Grain stuff sometimes. The Bahtans needed space for crops. The D'ubians needed space for their mines, and new caves because it was getting too crowded even for them. That's really crowded," he added. "Must have been just solid people. Earth was crowded, too, and running out of a lot of things, because for a long time people didn't use natural resources right. And the Zamuaons were running out of land for their animals, and hunting grounds."

So the Zamuaons had been the first to develop a ship that could leave their solar system and find another place to live. And they were crowded too, Willis said, because they liked to have big families. It was really important to them, and who they were related to; they kept track of who belonged to what family, and had for a long time. DNA, said Willis, which was something in your body that showed what sort of things you had inherited, like blue eyes and being short, which came from your parents.

"But Mom and Dad have brown hair," said Gina, "and they aren't real short. Does that mean we don't belong to their family?"

Willis looked as if he would like to say yes, but he didn't. "We maybe look like a grandparent or something," he said. "We don't know who our grandparents were. Mom and Dad never say. But maybe they had blond hair and blue eyes." He did not mention being short or tall, and Gina thought she shouldn't say anything either.

So DNA showed what family you came from, which the Zamuaons wanted to be able to prove, because it mattered in their society, Willis explained. Only the very bad people, the nasty ones who lived in dirty places called slums and were criminals or stupid and depraved – no, he couldn't explain that to Gina, but it was a bad thing to be – didn't have DNA registered and couldn't prove who they were related to, and the worst thing that could happen to you would be to have your registration revoked, so you were like one of those junk people.

So the good families had lots of children. It honored their marriages, the families they came from, the families they had, and made sure there would be people to grow up and marry and pass on their DNA to new children. And that meant that the population grew very big, so they needed new places just like the D'ubians and the Bahtans and the Earthians.

And all four species had knowledge and resources that they could put together, so they were stronger and could do more things together than they could do alone. This was why the four species had gotten together a long time ago and made an alliance, which was like being friends, only with documents on actual paper, not just data cubes, written with ink. And now they worked together, and they often lived on the same worlds together, like the Bahtans here on Linden's World with Earthians. On some worlds all species lived and worked together all the time. Haivran was one of those places, where their lessons came from, because Haivran had big schools, colleges and universities for grownups as well as elementary and secondary schools for kids. And they had hospitals and special schools for medicine and technical things, like the space drive, and places where scientists worked to figure out all sorts of things, and places where people thought up new things and how to make them. And there were theaters there, and they made vids and they learned about music and played it in big concert halls sometimes, or even just parks and places like that. There were a lot of smart people on Haivran, Willis said, and talented people, and the Defense Academy was there, too, so there were people who knew about military things.

All the species lived there and worked together, and there were other worlds, too, other kinds of places where they mostly did mining for minerals and metals and jewels, too, and places where they made things, manufacturing, with big factories and places to test things. There were places, and Willis showed Gina pictures, where you couldn't breathe the air and had to live under a huge dome that kept air inside so people could be there.

Sometimes those worlds could be made to have air themselves, Willis explained, something called terraforming, which Earthians had thought of in their solar system when they first left their home planet, because they wanted to make colonies on other planets near them, so that was why it was called "terraforming," forming the world to be like Terra. "Terra" was one of the names the ancient Earthians had for their planet. If the planet was terraformed, it would have plants and air and people wouldn't need domes, but it wasn't an easy thing to do and it didn't always work.

That was why there was a big Alliance project, where teams of people were out looking for new planets they could use, that were right to live on, or could be made right by the scientists. Willis thought that was exciting, because it meant people were going out and finding really new things and exploring planets no one had seen. "What if someone is already living there?" asked Gina.

"They can't take the planet for the Alliance then," said Willis. "That's in the rules, and also I think there's an Alliance law about that, not taking places away from people who already use them. But they haven't found anyone."

"Have they found planets?"

"A few, I guess. They thought there'd be more." He flipped to another page, and Gina ran her finger over the title in big letters: "Azuri/zai Project." There was a drawing of deep blue space with many stars and little red arrows pointing to specks around the stars, only a few red arrows compared to all the stars.

"That's a Zamuaon word, 'Azuri/zai'; it means a perfect balance between nature and civilization," Willis told her. "It's really important, this project, and that's on Haivran, too, the command center."

And that was where their lessons came from; Gina regarded the beginning readers with a little more respect, even if they did still bore her. Haivran was a very smart place, with lots of people from all the Alliance species doing important work, and Gina thought it was nice to be connected even in this small way with them. She wondered if that was one of the places Willis wanted to go to when he got bigger.

She didn't know if she wanted to go with Mom if Mom left. She didn't know if she wanted to go anywhere else at all. She had spent all her life here on Linden's World, and how could you tell, she wondered, if you would be happy somewhere else? Yes, there were things here that weren't good, but she had already figured out how to live with them, most of them. A new place would also have not-good things, and she didn't know about them or how to live with them. It was a little scary to think about that.

But she knew for sure she didn't want to be here if Willis went away. So if he went to Haivran, or even one of those places where there wasn't good air and everyone lived under domes, Gina would have to go with him, although it was a little scary, and they would have to take Terry too, because they could not possibly leave Terry here alone with Dad. Gina knew how to avoid Dad when things were bad. Terry was too little to know and, lost in the sunshine and the music in his head, he might not ever learn, Gina thought.

 

Gina had only been in the town twice in her life, so she didn't know if there were any D'ubians living there; she only knew the ones on Terry's music vid. She didn't know if there were any Zamuaons there, either, but she had seen one up close, although she had not told Willis about it.

It had been in the spring when she was six, and it was a nice warm night, smelling good outside, fresh-turned ground and things growing, the crops coming up very new and green in their rows. Willis and Gina and Terry decided to make a tent by the storage shed in back of the house, and Willis showed them how to make a frame with old foamboards from inside the shed, and how to drape blankets over the frame for a roof and walls. It was an excellent tent, Gina thought, like a little house. They could sit inside there with their readers and not feel the breeze or the wet mist from the sprinklers when they came on in the crop rows. But it was dark inside, only the lights from their readers showing, and Willis sent Gina inside to get their flashlights while he and Terry spread more blankets on the ground, making a floor and a place for them to sleep, if they wanted to.

Posie wouldn't like them sleeping outside in the tent because she liked them to be where they belonged; that was inside, in their beds. But Posie was in her room, having taken a lot of pills after dinner, and she wouldn't wake up until tomorrow morning. Gina knew; she had a lot of experience by now. The housekeeper was in her room, not likely to come out until she had to fix breakfast. And Mom was in town. She had gone the day before, with her maid, slamming the car door and driving away very fast. And Dad didn't care where they slept, or if they slept. He was in his room, not alone. Gina had heard a woman talking, and once screaming.

Coming upstairs, where there were only night lights in the hall, Gina was surprised to see light from Mom's bedroom, seeping around the door. Mom never came back this soon. If anything, she stayed in town for longer and longer spells now. Dad was still in his room. The door was shut, but Gina could hear, through the broken bottom seal, a woman's voice, and Dad laughing. The housekeeper almost never came upstairs, and Posie was in bed. Gina checked, reaching out with her mind to Posie's room, and Posie blundered about in confused dreams, the sort of muddle Mom got into when she took her pills.

So who was in Mom's room? Gina thought about calling Willis, but someone had to stay with Terry, after all, and she wanted to see for herself. She tried with her mind, which sometimes worked; she was learning how to do it at a little distance, and if it had been someone in the household, like Posie, she would have felt them at once, since she was used to them. These were strangers; she could tell that about them, and nothing more, except that there were two of them, and she did not know how they had gotten into the house and into Mom's room, or why.

She tiptoed down the hall. The light was showing around Mom's door because it was open, just a little, and she peeked through the crack, being very quiet.

And there he was again, that strange man, tall and thin and blue-eyed, with blond hair pushed behind his ears. It occurred to Gina that Terry and Willis looked a lot more like this man than they did Mom or Dad. He didn't know how to dress for the weather; he was wearing a thick blue sweater and sandals. He was by the closet, looking on the shelf above the clothes, running his hands under the piles of things Mom had up there, and by the dresser, going through the drawers, was someone Gina had never seen before and this person was a Zamuaon. There was a picture in one of her readers, so she knew. This was a Zamuaon woman, a kind of a fat Zamuaon woman, with white body hair that was pretty, very clean and soft-looking. It looked nice with all the jewelry the woman wore; she had bracelets, several on each arm, some in colored metals and some with gemstones, and she had ankle bracelets, two on one ankle and three on the other, and she had rings on every finger, twists and spirals and gemstones, and she had necklaces, beads and gold chains and silver chains. One of the silver chains, Gina saw, had a pendant like the one the blond man wore, with the design like a knotted ribbon. And she had earrings, two in each ear.

And she had a tail, a long white one with five rings on it, all twinkling under the ceiling lights whenever her tail moved, which it did frequently. The tip twitched, and then the whole tail swung from one side to the other.

"It is not here," she said. She was wearing a hot pink shirt and a skirt with pink and green and purple flowers; it almost hurt Gina's eyes to look at it.

"It has to be someplace," said the man at the closet. He began to move the clothes on their hangers so he could see into the back and the corners of the floor.

"Perhaps she took it; she will like to have such a token with her," said the woman. "From the man she loves?"

The man said something Gina couldn't hear, but it didn't sound pleasant. "Look in the jewelry box," he said. "It's over there somewhere."

"The box is not here. I think she took it with her. To be beautiful in town, if her lover comes to her there. You should do that. Who knows, it might lead to another good result."

The man said something again. They had been speaking in Trade, like many people here on Linden's World. Their family mostly spoke Earthian but Mom said the children should speak Trade too, and Gina was pretty good in both languages. What the man said wasn't in Trade, though, or Earthian either. "I've had enough good results," he said, switching back to Trade "I've done everything Mother wanted me to. Three, in the name of the ancient gods. Enough is enough. If I can just get that traveler back – "

"You should not have given it to her in the first place," said the Zamuaon, crossing her arms and twitching her tail. She had, Gina saw, very sharp fangs. They were visible between her lips.

"I didn't mean for her to take it for herself," said the man. He sighed and shut the closet door. "Okay, it isn't here, and it isn't over there and it isn't in the maid's room."

"So it must be with her."

"You could go look in her hotel room."

"Only if she is not there. Only if she is kept busy somewhere else while I look."

The man sighed. "Maybe she's at the casino. Maybe she'll stay there for a few hours. Is that busy enough?"

"If you are with her," said the Zamuaon, sounding amused, sounding as if she were teasing, "then she would be busy enough."

"Thanks," said the man, "but no. Let's go check the casino. That's the best thing; she likes the casino, whether she's winning or not."

"We will try," said the Zamuaon, "but our best chance is with you to distract her."

She closed her hands around the silver pendant and then, astonishingly, she was no longer there. She simply vanished, with a very small popping sound as if the air opened up and snapped back together after she was gone. The man glanced about the room, apparently making sure there were no signs of their having been there; he went over to the dresser and closed the drawer the woman had left slightly open, and then he took hold of his pendant, and he was no longer there either.

Gina stood there for a little while, half expecting them to appear again just as they had vanished, but they didn't, and once the sensors noticed that no one was in the room, the lights turned off. She thought about going in and, when the lights came on, looking around to see what the two of them had been doing, but she didn't go into Mom's room unless Mom invited her, and she wouldn't know if they had taken anything or rearranged anything.

She had no idea what to do. When she told Willis about the blond man out in the fields last year, he got angry, although she didn't quite know why; it had to do with Mom and what he thought she ought to be doing, but Gina didn't understand what. So she thought maybe she shouldn't tell him, since she didn't know what it was all about anyway. They were looking for something, but she didn't know what; something Mom had, apparently. Mom had lots of things, but none of them were what they wanted.

She decided not to say anything; it was simpler.