Chapter 10

 

Gina

 

 

At the end of the first school year on Haivran, they went back to Linden's World, with a pause on their return trip to visit Mom, but both visits were short. Dad wasn't home, which was fine, but there was nothing to do but hang around the house by themselves, with just the housekeeper, who had never liked them. And Mom was very busy; she had things to do every afternoon and every night, people to meet, parties, grownup things, and she stayed up late and slept most of the morning. Even Terry was willing, after a few days, to go home again.

And that’s how they all thought of it now; 24^th Avenue in Bridgeton on Haivran was home.

They returned to find a change in the neighborhood; the house to the west of Jared’s place had new owners, a Zamuaon couple, Issio f'Alzen and his wife Sofi p'Effyn. Issio was a stocky young Zamuaon with black and grey body hair and a fairly long tail; Sofi was very pretty with golden-white body hair. This reminded Gina of the white-haired woman she had seen on Linden's World with the tall blond man, but that woman had been plump and Sofi was slender and graceful. She and Issio both taught at Multicultural Secondary; Willis remembered them there from last year. He hadn’t had classes with either of them, but some of his friends did.

They were already settled into the neighborhood, just as the Bahtan sisters were, just as the D'ubians were. They had come from an apartment in a Zamuaon neighborhood, which you would think would be more comfortable for them, but they had not liked it there; there had been some sort of trouble, Gina thought, something that prevented their being accepted among their own people as they were on 24^th Avenue. Issio did not seem to have family on Haivran; Sofi did, in a northern city, but she didn't visit them. They were not happy about her marriage and they did not like Issio, although Gina could not imagine why not.

Issio taught biology, and Gina found he was even better than the Bahtan sisters when it came to identifying what she found in the woods. The Bahtans could tell her about whether she could transplant things into the Hardesty garden, and how to coax them to grow, but Issio could tell her about the animals and where they lived and what they ate and how they fitted in with the other animals and plants. He liked to hike and fish, too, and often went with her and Jared and Terry and, once in awhile, Willis. He took Willis out hunting, too. Like all Zamuaons, he liked very fresh meat, preferably immediately after butchering. They didn't, Gina found, care much about fruits and vegetables; they ate meat, cooked so rare as to be nearly raw, and sometimes little grain cakes.

Sofi taught literature and she had a dance class, too, and on nice evenings when Terry and the D'ubians played at the end of the block, she would go down and dance in the street, showing Gina how to do the steps and teasing Issio and Jared into dancing with her. Clyde and Mimi and Al said they were much too old for that sort of thing, and Phyllis and Lillian said they preferred to watch, although once in awhile Lillian would dance with Al.

Music and dance were important for the soul, Sofi said, and Issio told Gina that the ancient Zamuaons believed that the gods maintained the balance of the universe, which was, he said, always changing, evolving, by their dance in the heavens. The stars were the footprints they left in their dance, and when you grew old and died, you went to join the dance. Music was the revelation of the gods, and only the damned could fail to respond to it.

They proved to be an excellent addition to the reading circle, too; they had, together, an extensive library of her readers and his readers and readers they had acquired together, and like Jared they were always willing to lend readers and talk about them.

Gina had met a few Zamuaon children at school, but she really didn’t know any of them very well. While everyone was friendly enough, the species tended to sort of stick together. And Issio and Sofi were, like the D'ubians and the Bahtans, very different, and maybe a little scary; when they opened their mouths you could see that their teeth were sharp and long and more like fangs than anything else. And they had actual claws; they could retract them, but the claws could pop out at a moment’s notice if they needed to hold on to something or open something, or if they got mad. Gina saw Issio arguing with a man who had sold him a bad lift unit for his car; she saw that as he grew angrier, the claws came popping out all by themselves, without his really knowing it.

But with his wife and with his friends he was calm and polite and gentle, just as Sofi was. And there were two very interesting things about them. The first was that they both had Celtic knot pendants just like Willis and Gina and Terry and Jared, strung on silver chains. Sofi said that hers had been her mother's, who had died long ago. Issio didn't like to talk about his, but Sofi told her that he had had it from infancy. There was something odd about his childhood, something that left him angry and depressed when he thought about it, but he always wore the pendant, and Sofi usually wore hers.

Jared, who had become friendly with Issio, said the five of them were the Fellowship of the Celtic Knot.

The second thing was that they could read people just like Gina and Jared could, and did not mind at all talking with her about it.

Jared didn't seem to think about it very much, which amused Issio and Sofi; they said he was probably stronger than they were, if he would just practice and study and work a little. They thought it was interesting; they had never run into an Earthian with Ears before, and here in this neighborhood there were two of them. And that wasn't all, Sofi said. "We have Big Ears," Sofi told Gina. "This is what we say, and everyone in this neighborhood has Little Ears, even if they do not know about it, and do not know how to control them. This is very unusual. And you and Jared have Big Ears, truly."

Gina hadn't thought much about it. It was convenient, certainly, and it had often kept her out of trouble – she thought of Nurse Dana – but it was just a part of her life, a private part she didn't talk about with other people, only Jared and now Sofi and Issio. There were a lot of things it was better not to talk about with other people. But it was exciting to find out what Sofi and Issio could do and to find out there were ways to direct it and control it and they could teach her, just as they would teach the children they hoped to have one day.

It made her feel comfortable with them, just as she felt comfortable with Jared. She loved everyone in the neighborhood, but she felt especially close to the three of them.

Lillian let Willis use the air scooter, and when he could get a beginner's permit to drive an aircar, the neighborhood took on his driving lessons as a community project. The auto drive was easy, but he had to learn manual driving before he could get his license. He never had any trouble finding a car to learn with and someone willing to go with him, even after he ran Al’s car into the side of a hill, having accidentally turned off the collision shield. When he got his license, and Dad send the credits for him to get a little runabout of his own, Al and Lillian went to work with him to remove the low-power battery and install a good fuel cell. Clyde, passing by, remarked that he had seen rockets with less power.

"Hey, this is important," said Al. "How's a guy going to get girls if he doesn't have a decent ride?"

When he wasn't driving, Willis played jetball in a junior league and all of his games brought his own personal cheering section to watch; at least two and usually more of the neighbors were in attendance along with Phyllis and Lillian and his brother and sister. That winter he made the basketball team, and the neighbors arranged their weekly schedules around his games.

They also turned out to see Terry in his school rhythm band, where they all agreed his performance was superior; even the D'ubians came to that one. And they came to admire Gina's Science Fair exhibit, although everyone had already seen it while she was working on it at home, and they came to the mid-year class play where she played the wicked stepsister, a whole row of familiar faces beaming out of the audience in the auditorium. She could feel their pride and their pleasure – she could pick them up very easily now; she knew them all and she had learned a lot from Sofi – and it gave her a warm, belonging kind of feeling.

She sort of understood it; she and Terry and Willis were the sons and daughter, the nephews and niece, the kid brothers and sister that none of them had and all of them wanted. They were the children in the neighborhood family. And the adults were, in turn, the aunts and uncles, older brothers and sisters, and, perhaps, mothers and fathers that Willis and Gina and Terry needed.

So it was a pretty good exchange, Gina figured.

 

During that winter, on a weekday afternoon when everyone seemed to be busy somewhere else, Gina put on her coat and her mittens and her boots and waded out into the woods through a light soft snowfall. It was very quiet under the trees; she loved being out here by herself on afternoons like this. Most of the birds had flown south for the winter; only the really heavy-scaled ones remained. Lillian had a feeder in the back yard, and Gina liked to watch them balance on the rim and poke their long snouts into the seeds and dried berries she put out for them.

It was crisply cold, and she walked through a veil of falling flakes toward the little creek, now frozen and still. Snow clung to the bushes that grew beside the frozen creek, and snow drifted over the ice, and it looked like lace, Gina thought. She breathed in the sharp clean winter air, and she looked up the frozen stream to where it twisted and curled away from the south hills, and then she turned to look downstream.

They were standing near the snow-edged thicket, where the branches grew out over the stream and tangled with the bushes on the other side. She recognized the man at once. He was the same man she had seen in Terry’s nursery, and on the edge of the grassy hollow in the field, and in Mom's room, and somewhere else, perhaps, long ago before she could clearly remember. She had thought, now that she was no longer on Linden's World, she would not see him again, but here he was, after all. He stood straight and tall and thin, blond-white hair tucked behind his ears, pale complexion nearly blending with the falling snow; he wore a light-colored coat, not very warm-looking and he wore it hanging open, but he didn't seem to notice that it was cold.

He was wearing the silver chain and the pendant, a round thick medallion with the Celtic knot design on it.

The woman beside him was not the plump Zamuaon Gina had seen in Mom's room. This woman looked very much like the blond man; she too was tall and thin and pale, with masses of white hair piled on top of her head, and she had a long sweeping coat, with white fur at the neck and the wrists. She too wore a silver chain with a pendant, dark in contrast to the whiteness of her coat, but she also had earrings, something flashing, and on her hands, too, brilliant gems catching the fragile winter light in fire and ice.

They stood silently, looking with sharp clear bright blue eyes at Gina, and she could not read them, even with what she had learned from Sofi; all she could find was a cool white untouchable surface.

A sudden gust of wind raced down the stream bed, bringing with it a blanket of loose swirling snow, and when the snow settled, the man and the woman were gone. After a moment or two, Gina walked across the ice and stood on the opposite bank, close to where they had been, but the swirling snow had settled in their footprints and no trace of them could be seen any longer.

 

The only person she would have discussed it with was Willis, and Willis was frantically busy, between basketball practice and basketball games and sessions with the guys at school and time with his girlfriends – three of them now, and Gina gathered that they didn't know about one another, which no doubt added to Willis’ stress level.

Gina suspected she could have talked about those strange tall white people with others in the neighborhood. Phyllis and Lillian always listened, took her seriously, and gave her, if she asked, advice that turned out to be pretty good, Mimi, having traveled greatly, had a somewhat different perspective, but she was always sympathetic. And Sofi might have been very helpful, perhaps more than any of the others. There was something about those people that made Gina think of Sofi, of what she knew of a world where things were seen and heard differently.

But in order to explain them Gina would have to discuss Mom and – she wasn’t sure she wanted to go there, where the tall white man, ignoring the way Mom hung on him, gazed at the small boy in the crib with the pale hair and the blue eyes so much like his own. Over the years, Gina found she had come to some conclusions about this, although she did not allow them a good deal of conscious head-room. It seemed better not to.

That was of course the tall white man; Gina had never seen the woman before, but she saw her again only a month or so later, when the icy stream was beginning to thaw and the blanket of snow became threadbare with spring. Gina was walking through the woods again, looking at the buds at the ends of the branches, looking at the water in the stream bed; it was breaking free of the ice, tumbling cold and blue-white between banks still crusted with snow.

She went west and north straight across the woods, over the stream and through the brush and the trees, where she reached a space where the trees ended; in the summer there was a tangle of grass and flowers that reached from the edge of the woods to the bend of the street by the housing development beyond the woods. Someday someone would clear out the woods and build houses there, Lillian said, but not in their lifetimes; she and Phyllis owned those woods and no one was going to touch a twig while they had anything to say about it.

Gina lingered just inside the edge of the woods. It was getting toward evening. The sky, which had been cloudy white all day, was now that shade of soft lavender that would become dark lavender and then deep blue and then night; already the street lights were on in the housing development.

There was a car parked along the bend of the street, a small black one, very sleek and shiny and expensive-looking. Willis spent a lot of time looking at cars on his computer and telling everyone in the household about them. Gina knew more about cars than she really wanted to, and this one she thought was a luxury model, recommended as a city runabout to those people who wore jewels and elegant clothes and ran about, Willis said, scornfully, checking out their investments. It had a lot of power, he said, with some disgust; you could get up to serious speed in it, and he seemed to feel that the worthless rich did not deserve that, would not know what to do with it.

The car was parked and empty. Gina looked around to see if she could spot the driver; she wondered why it had been left there. There was a trail in the snow, she saw, leading away from the car toward the woods, a bit south of where she was, and as she stood there she heard, distantly, the murmur of voices.

Two people came out of the woods, walking slowly, and Gina recognized the woman at once. There was no mistaking that tall thin white figure in the sweeping white fur-trimmed coat; Gina could see the piled white hair, wound in a design not unlike the Celtic knot on Gina's pendant, and a stray beam of light from a passing aircar caught the fire and ice at her ears and on her visible hand. Her other hand was tucked into the arm of her companion, and he was much more familiar to Gina; she saw him, in fact, just about every day.

It was Jared.

The woman was tall, but he was taller, black against her whiteness and the remains of winter snow, dark skin and hair, dark winter coat, the dressier one he wore to the Institute. He had his head bent as he listened to what she was saying, and he was smiling; Gina saw his dark eyes turn toward the woman and she heard the murmur of his voice, answering, but she couldn't hear what either of them said. She could feel them, though; she could feel that whiteness around the woman that wasn't cold anymore; she could feel it blending with the dark warmth around Jared. She could feel a little of what he felt; she could feel something close to the sort of feeling Issio and Sofi had for each other.

They reached the little black car and stopped, and the woman spoke and smiled, taking her hand from his arm. He asked her something, and she smiled and lifted her hand as if waving him away and began to turn away toward the car. He reached for her and turned her around quite gently and smiled at her, and then he kissed her, tipping her head up to his with his free hand. Gina might have thought of one of the romantic vids Mimi liked, but this was too real, too solid, to compare to the vids, which were only make believe; she felt the emotions that swirled through the air, through the field and the woods and around her. There was love again, and passion, and tenderness, and things she found confusing, regret, sorrow, a sort of yearning toward something that couldn’t be reached. She wasn’t sure who it came from. She thought it came from both of them.

They separated, and the woman opened the door of the aircar and Jared held it for her as she got inside. They paused for just a few more words and a long silent moment as they looked at each other, and then she settled back in the driver’s seat and Jared closed the door. The car glided away from the curb and he stood watching as it followed the bend of the road and vanished among the streets and houses beyond.

Then he put his hands in the pockets of his coat and started back along the trail the two of them had made in the snow; he looked thoughtful and a little sad. Without thinking Gina touched his mind to see what was there, and he stopped as if he had heard something, and turned to look right at her in the woods. "Gina?" he said.

He was surprised but he wasn't, she thought, angry, although she shouldn't have been snooping; embarrassed, she moved a step or two among the trees so that he could see her and said, "I'm really sorry; I didn't mean –"

"It's okay." He smiled and gestured for her to join him. "You're out late. Phyllis and Lillian will want you home for dinner pretty soon. Want to walk back with me?" He reached out a hand for hers and started back into the woods and she came with him, wondering what was in his mind, thinking she shouldn't try to read him again, since he had spotted her intrusion so easily.

He glanced at her and smiled again. "Her name is Maud," he said. "Don't worry about it; it's not a secret. Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you."

So this was the girlfriend. Gina knew about the girlfriend, of course, but she'd never seen her, and what she had felt this afternoon between them was somehow more than she had expected. Was this the woman Mimi thought was taking advantage of Jared? She didn't seem to be. Of all the feelings in the air, that was not among them. And yet there was the thin blond man; if she had Jared, what was she doing with the blond man? Gina pushed down that thought so that Jared couldn't see it; she thought it might hurt him, and she didn't want that.

"She's your girlfriend?" said Gina.

Jared thought about it. "You could say that," he said. "Yes. We – it's one of those mixed-up adult things, to tell you the truth." This usually meant that the adults involved weren't going to answer her questions, Gina knew; she walked beside Jared in silence for a few moments, following the tracks he and Maud had made. She was pretty sure she shouldn't, but if he wasn't going to tell her – she reached, very lightly, and he paused and smiled at her and let her see; he wasn't brushing her off. This was Jared; he didn't do that. He was trying to think how to explain it to her.

"You see, honey," he said, "you notice things, you're take in everything around you, but you don't talk about what you see, so I don't always know what kind of sense you make of it. And I'm not sure what you already know . . ." He looked at her thoughtfully and then she felt him touch her mind, sliding in very gently, as he always did. She felt him brush against memories; she felt him touch the image of Nurse Linda, and pause, disturbed, at Dad, at the scene with Nurse Dana and Connie, at the vision of Dad rising, naked, in the crop rows, roaring at Terry.

That got his attention and his search took on a new focus; she realized that he was looking for any sign that she had been hurt that way too, the way Dad had hurt Nurse Linda and Connie and other women, a jumble of unclothed bodies and grasping hands. The thought of her being touched by those hands upset him; few things really made Jared angry, but this was one of them. Someone he loved, she saw, someone long ago, had been hurt in this way, and he couldn't forgive it. There was never, he felt, a good reason for a grownup to touch a child like that, and the damage left by such handling could linger for a lifetime.

But it hadn't happened to Gina, and seeing this, she felt his relief. He left her mind as gently as he had entered it, stood thinking for a moment. "It sounds odd, calling Maud my girlfriend," he explained, "because she's not a girl. She is quite a bit older than I am, and most people would think that it's too big a gap for a man and a woman in love. But people aren't always right. Remember that," he added, with a grin. "It's a useful thing to know."

Gina hadn't been conscious of age at all; she hadn't felt any great gap between Maud and Jared, but she felt the yearning and the sadness underlying the love and the passion – that had to do with sex, she knew, and she caught just an echo in his mind, black skin and white, arms and legs tangled in heat; he withdrew the thought at once when he realized that she had found it, thinking that it would upset her. Last year it probably would have, remembering Dad and Nurse Linda and other girls since then; last year she thought it was scary, that it hurt and made girls cry. But she knew more now. For one thing, she knew that something like this underlay the feelings Sofi and Issio had for each other, and that was a good thing with them, a warm and loving thing. And Jared tried not to let her see too much, but it was something he had done with a lot of women. And they liked it, and he liked it, and his feelings about those women were not the same as the feelings he had for Maud, but they were warm and he would never hurt them, or allow them to be hurt.

So it wasn't always scary, like Dad with Nurse Linda; catching this he laughed. "No, it's not scary. And that's only part of what it means to love someone; you need to know that, too. But I'm not sure I'm the right person to be telling you about this, honey," he said. "You should talk to Phyllis and Lillian and Sofi."

They fell in step again, moving through the woods; twilight was fading and it grew dark under the trees, but Gina could see their footsteps in the snow. Holding his hand, half listening to the thoughts drifting through his mind, Gina ran into something he believed he had outside her reach. It had to do with Maud, who was not very healthy, and with the woman friend with Ears, and seeing it, she stopped in the snow, bringing him to a stop too. "Oh, she died!" she exclaimed, and he looked at her with surprise. "The woman you could talk to with Ears. She died!"

She felt his astonishment; he thought she couldn't find that, that he'd hidden it. But since she had – "Helen," he said. "Yes. An illness she caught off-world. Early last summer, while you three were gone."

He hadn't been in love with her. Gina might be only ten, but she could see that; no one in his mind matched Maud. But Helen had been – a client; this was the term that came to Gina, one of the women he worked with, something about sex, and she was also a friend, because they shared several interests, the theater, for instance, and concerts, the music he loved that bored Maud. And he had been with her when she died, which was something Gina had never seen and couldn't really imagine. She wondered if he had been in her mind at the end.

No, he said, she drifted away, where I couldn't find her. Gina caught a glimpse of this, how she had grown small and remote like a person walking away down the street, walking a long long ways away. And, she saw, something like that was going to happen with Maud, not a disease but her heart, which was not strong. He was going to lose her, too, and he was thinking today that it would come sooner than he had expected, and the thought hurt, and it reminded him of Helen.

But it's not today, he told Gina. We still have today, and tomorrow, and whatever time we're able to take, and that's what matters.

But it wouldn't last, no matter what. "And now you don't have anyone to talk to with Ears," said Gina, dismayed.

"Of course I do," he said, putting it into words, because he wanted her to hear as well as Hear. "I have Issio, and I have Sofi, and I have you, Gina." And he let her see, just for a moment, how he felt about her, how she was important to him, how, in a way, she belonged to him, like she belonged to Willis and Terry, and he belonged to her, as they did. And she felt as if she belonged to him; she depended upon him the way she depended on Willis, a thought that pleased him when he caught it. "Well, you're my little sister," he said.

They turned away from the trail of footprints toward his house and angled toward the Hardesty house instead, stepping over the little stream. "You okay with this?" he asked her. He wanted to be sure she understood about what she had seen in person and what she had seen in his mind, because he thought not understanding could hurt her a lot more than truth, and he was willing to explain if she was confused.

But she wasn't, and she could touch his mind for answers if she was. "Yes," she said, and he nodded and smiled and let go of her hand. The Hardesty house looked warm and welcoming, with the lights in the windows, and her bike leaning against the handrail by the steps. The windows weren't darkened, and she could see Phyllis moving in the kitchen.

"Then I'll see you tomorrow," said Jared, and he turned toward Issio's house and Gina went on toward the misty kitchen window and dinner and homework and bed and all the days of winter melting and making way for spring.