Chapter 29

 

Jared

 

 

Jared and Cara ran through the rain to the Hardesty house right behind Sofi and Issio, who paused on the porch to shake off the raindrops. The D'ubians were already inside, occupying the bottom steps of the staircase with their instruments, playing something quite upbeat, and the Bahtan girls, leaving Wundra at home to stand guard over their involuntary guests, arrived just after the Zamuaons. Clyde and Mimi, sharing an umbrella, rushed up to the porch holding a covered container between them, and Al followed them, collar turned up against the rain and a large plate with a towel over it in his hands. Gina, inside, was filling cups from the coffee maker and handing them out; Lillian was in charge of the teapot, which she and the Bahtans preferred.

"How's Terry?" Jared asked Gina as she handed him a cup.

"He thinks it was fun," said Gina, and she offered a cup to Cara.

"Where's that flying fiend?" Clyde inquired cheerfully.

"She is in our basement," said Issio. "We put her on top of the laundry appliance. She yelled all night. We closed the door."

"We are wondering what to feed her," said Sofi. "That part of her that is physical must require food. She will not tell us what she eats. We tried the stale berry Mutai brought us, but she would not touch it."

"There're stables north of town," said Mimi. "You can rent horses there, I know. You always see lots of flies –"

"They lay eggs in the feces of animals," said Issio. "I do not believe she needs to lay eggs. I hope," he added grimly, "that she does not need to lay eggs."

"Yuck!" said Gina, a sentiment they could all support. "Little Its!"

Phyllis came through the front door, shaking the rain off her long dark braid, and shrugging off her jacket; Gina brought her a coffee cup and she took it gratefully. "It's almost chilly out there," she said. "Terry is at his meeting, and he won't be back until dinner time. Nate's mother will bring him home, she said, if we pick up Nate for her Wednesday after band practice."

"Okay," said Lillian, taking charge. "I think everyone is here but Wundra, right, girls?"

"I am recording for her," said Evvie, lifting her hand, and she turned on the data recorder and tossed it down on the coffee table, more or less centrally located; the group settled in the chairs and on the couch and Gina sat on the floor next to Sofi and Issio chose a dining room chair right behind Sofi, a hand absent-mindedly resting on her shoulder.

"So," said Lillian. "First of all, I think we should listen to Gina, about these weird strangers wandering in our woods."

Jared had seen the man once before but it seemed that Gina had seen him many times, on Linden's World, with and without Gillian, and here on Haivran. She had seen him on Linden's World in the company of a Zamuaon woman with white body hair and a lot of jewelry, which had greatly impressed a child. They were looking for something in Gillian's room; that was interesting. And they had disappeared, just as the man had disappeared last night.

She had seen him once with a woman she believed to be Maud when Maud was, beyond question, alive. That had been before she saw Maud with Jared, before she knew who Maud was. This proved some sort of link, Jared thought, between the man and whoever was impersonating Maud, which had him pondering the arcane workings of the business world. He had no idea what connection the man had with his Maud's affairs, but there must be something.

And Gina had seen this man and woman a matter of days after the real Maud's death, and all of these sightings were in her mind and memory; Jared explored while the others commented and asked questions. The memories were slightly overlaid by time and other happenings, but she had actually spoken to the person she saw after Maud died. He saw, disconcertingly, Maud's familiar face, heard Maud's voice. He'll get over it, she said. So will I. You're sure? he said to Gina, and she glanced at him and nodded. She was sure.

He didn't know what to think about it. An impersonator, he thought, but a good one. And someone connected with that strange pale man, whoever that might be.

"Your father," said Clyde, as if it accounted for a great many things.

"Yes, Terry and Willis and me, he said," Gina agreed, in a neutral tone. She didn't know what to think about that, Jared suspected.

"Your father," said Lillian, sounding positively pleased, and Gina glanced at her. "Well, you and Terry don't look much like Eugene," Lillian explained, in the tone of one listing positive attributes.

"If it's true," said Gina, slowly, "and he, our father, isn't Earthian, and Sofi says he isn't, then we aren't either. Or only half. And we don't know what the other half is."

"And that's worth a question," said Clyde. "Not about Gina and Terry and Willis. You three are our kids, wherever your dad came from. But if he's not Alliance – we've been through this section of the galaxy, and we never found anyone outside our four species."

"Those arches," said Cara. "On Or2."

"Artifacts," said Mimi. "Left by someone. We never did figure out who, did we?"

"No," said Jared, who knew exactly how unlikely it was they ever would. :"They're very old. The species that erected them may be extinct by now." Which was pretty much all the public needed to know. These strangers wandering through their neighborhood could have nothing to do with the arches.

"So that's something to think about," said Clyde. "A species we don't know."

"It is," said Issio, "a very large galaxy, surrounded by an even larger universe. We have met only the species in the Alliance. Surely there are other species we have not met. It is possible that one has come to meet us." He glanced at "Gina. "This is not necessarily a bad thing," he said.

But it bothered her, as Jared could readily understand. You're our Gina, he told her, aware of both Sofi and Issio in the background, agreeing. You're my little sister. I don't care about this strange man. She gave him a little smile, but she wasn't convinced, he saw.

Emerging from consultation, Dural said firmly, "Terry is Terry. He does not need to be Earthian."

"Neither do you," said Sofi to Gina, and Issio nodded agreement and put his other hand on Gina's shoulder.

"My mother seems to be a fly, which is much worse," Cara pointed out on a cheerful note; Jared put an arm around her.

"And that's something else," said Mimi, "because frankly, Cara, just looking at you – I would swear you look a lot more like Gina and Terry than –"

"Like a fly?" laughed Cara. "Thanks so much, Mimi! It's probably my hair that makes the difference. The color, you know. Or maybe the earrings."

Rapunzel, Jared thought abruptly, and Gina looked up at him.

"She is right, Cara," said Ollie. "You do not look like your mother. I do not mean the fly. I knew Dr. Margo Lindstrom. In her regular body," she told the company. "I thought from the start how different Cara is. I thought perhaps she looked like her father."

"I don't know," said Cara. "It was an engineered conception; it was done at the Institute for Genetic Research."

"I also was started there," said Sofi, "after my mother's death. I have the records. Do you have records, Cara?"

"Yes, but no pictures; he was an anonymous provider. You must have pictures of your mother."

"Yes, but I do not look like her," said Sofi. "She was what you would call a redhead." She smoothed the white-gold body hair on her arm. "We do not know all about genetics, even now. I no doubt take after an early ancestor; perhaps you do too."

"Maybe you were changelings," said Phyllis, passing Al's plate of cookies. "Switched in the laboratory instead of in the cradle."

"It could happen," said Clena, who had done some work at the Institute lab a year or two ago. "There are of course many safeguards, but it could be possible."

"This man, though, whoever and whatever he is," said Lillian, "seems to have fathered Terry and Gina and Willis the old fashioned way. Gina saw him with Gillian. And you say he wears a pendant like yours. And Jared's. And Sofi and Issio and – you have one too, don't you," she said to Cara, looking at the silver chain she had been wearing since last Saturday morning. And this was the pendant the man had touched on his chest just before he disappeared, Jared thought, resisting an urge to touch his own.

"Mine came from my grandmother," said Cara.

"I found my pendant with my mother's jewelry," said Sofi. "It was, I believe, hers. Issio has had his all his life. We do not know where it came from." Issio muttered and looked away.

"I think," said Gina hesitantly, "that – that man – our father? – gave ours to Mom to give to us. I don't know for sure," she added apologetically.

"How about you, Jared?" inquired Mimi. "Or should I ask?"

He smiled at her. "Yes, Maud gave it to me," he said. "And yes, she wore one exactly like it, one of her own."

Cara touched her pendant. "She had one when we saw her in the yard Monday," she said.

"Whoever it was," said Jared, clarifying, and Gina looked thoughtful and Sofi, twirling her tail, looked amused.

"Now we speak of Maud," said Issio, getting past the issue of the pendants. "We have not discussed why this strange man may be seen with the woman Maud."

"Or whoever it was," said Jared again.

"You're certain Maud is dead?" Al asked Jared. "Did you see her?"

"No," Jared admitted, "her housekeeper had already called the ambulance; the emergency room doctor pronounced her dead. I did see the death certificate. She named me the executor of her will; I had to have the death certificate to handle her affairs. I am quite sure she is dead."

"Was there an autopsy?" asked Phyllis.

"Actually, no, they were satisfied it was her heart; she'd been in the hospital several times with heart trouble. Including the day before her death. They'd taken tissue and blood samples to clone a heart for transplant, and then she insisted I take her home. She died that night in her sleep, and her housekeeper found her. Poor Carter; he'd been checking on her every hour all night long, and she slipped away between checks."

"What became of the tissue and the samples?" asked Sofi.

"I don't know," said Jared. "They weren't needed. I imagine they were disposed of."

"Is she buried somewhere?" asked Mimi.

"She left instructions she was to be cremated and scattered in the ocean," said Jared. "Carter and I took a flyer and did that together."

"Is Carter still around?" asked Clyde.

"No, he and his friend Neville moved off-planet five or six months ago."

"I hope she remembered you in her will, after all that," said Phyllis.

Jared smiled. "Unfortunately," he said, "she did leave me a legacy, more or less, although she knew I didn't want it; she put me in charge of a trust fund for one of her causes." And this was true, after a fashion, and he would let it rest there for the present. "She arranged that I receive the interest," he continued, by way of a distraction, "and she said I should buy a decent shirt." A ripple of laughter ran through the room as they looked at his comfortable gray T-shirt.

"You had a new shirt after the funeral or whatever it was, when you came back," said Gina.

"Yes, I did," he said, impressed that she remembered; Gina was young, but it would never do to discount her. "I arranged for the interest to go back to the principal, and then I bought a new shirt with my own credits. Getting the last word," he said, grinning.

"So was she as wealthy as they said?" asked Phyllis.

"Oh, yes, she had a considerable financial empire," he said, "which luckily I don't have to deal with; I have an attorney for that, juggling the accountants."

"So we don't have a rich man in our midst," said Phyllis.

"Hardly. And I can't help thinking that all of this is connected somehow to her wealth," he said. "I know you think it was Maud," he said to Gina, "but I honestly don't see how it could be." He could not believe it of her, in fact; if it was true, he had to ask how much he had ever known of the woman he had loved for thirteen years.

"What about relatives?" asked Mimi. "Did she have a sister or someone who might look like her? Did she have a brother, or a son, maybe? A daughter? Something about inheritance," she told the company.

Jared looked at Cara, who was concentrating on her coffee cup, and wished they could get off the subject of Maud. "She told me," he said, "that she didn't have family. She lost her mother early; she said once that she had been in her teens. She didn't like to talk about it. She said she had no children." My daughter, she said, in the lowered lights of her bedroom in the penthouse. I'm leaving you my daughter. He hesitated over this, realized that Sofi and Issio and probably Gina had seen it. So it was a mystery, but not a secret any longer. "The last night," he said, "the last time I saw her, she said something about a daughter, but you have to realize she had been medicated at the hospital, and she wasn't well; I don't know how seriously to take what she said."

Remember that I love you, she said, always.

"What about a daughter?" asked Lillian.

He laughed. "She said a wicked witch was keeping her a prisoner in an ivory tower, and she suggested that I go rescue her. Medicated. As I said."

"Nothing about a man hanging around Gina?" said Clyde.

"That," said Jared, "sounds bad, like something we should do something about." And they should; he didn't want to make an issue of it around Gina; he didn't want to frighten her. But they really should do something about this man.

'"He isn't hanging around, exactly," said Gina, not defending the man, only making it clear. "I just see him sometimes. Did you ever find out anything about her daughter in the tower?"

"There's no record of a daughter," said Jared, "or any relatives, in fact. My attorney looked for any possible claims on the estate." And very little would have escaped Trudy's notice. "And I haven't noticed any ivory towers, although you know people often refer to academics and intellectuals as people living in an ivory tower – not in contact with the real world."

"It sounds to me," said Lillian, "that, at the last, Maud was the one out of contact with the real world. And I don't see how there could be a connection with this skinny man. Did she have any business dealings with Linden's World?"

"Food production wasn't one of her interests. Maybe some investments, but I can't think of anything; I can check with my attorney, though." And he would have to think of a good excuse to offer Trudy; he had avoided any detailed inquiry into estate affairs, feeling that they were in good hands with her and having no expertise to offer.

"I want to know about this man who claims to be Gina's father, and Terry's, and vanishes right in front of all of us," said Cara. "I mean, we all saw that. He was in the middle of the yard; there was nowhere he could have gone without us spotting him. Does anyone have any idea how he did that? And how did he get into Jared's yard in the first place?"

The D'ubians consulted. "He changes vibrations," said Dural, and looked about the room at the uncomprehending faces, and looked back at the rest of the D'ubians. They all five shrugged. "He does this," Dural said with a sigh. "We do not know how. There are ways, but we do not know his way."

"Okay," said Lillian. "We have a tall skinny pale man who changes vibrations. And a woman no longer living who hangs around our back yards, and a fly who sounds like Cara's late mother, and your It." She nodded to the D'ubians. "Is that about it?"

"Yes, your It," said Jared to the D'ubians, who were consulting frantically. "Can you tell us about your It? Is it like an insect? You said it wakes you up, and insults you –"

"As your It does," agreed Dural. "It flies, but it is not an insect. It says we are misborn. It has the voice of a progenitor no longer alive. Like yours," he said to Cara, who nodded.

"Excuse me for asking," said Jared, venturing. "I know we violate your privacy. But if you could tell us – you have no elders? No progeny?"

The four D'ubians behind him seemed to be urging Dural on without consultation. "No progeny, although we are together many years, many times trying, many times losing," Dural said. "We leave progenitors, long ago, on D'ubia. We come here. The It comes also. It has the voice of the progenitor who is center to an upbringing group."

"A Progenitorvoice," murmured Cara, leaning back against Jared's shoulder.

"So," said Clena, taking another cookie. "Misborn. We are all, then, misborn, you – "she nodded at the D'ubians – "and you Earthians, no regular families, and Cara and Sofi come from engineered conceptions, and Issio – " Issio muttered darkly, and Clena let it be. "And we also could be said to be misborn," she said to her sisters, who nodded as if pleased with the description.

"We are full sisters," explained Ollie. "We were sired by the same male. This is not usual. Also our mother is dead, following my birth, and she had only one sister, who raised us. It was not good." The sisters nodded again. "When they could, Clena and Mutai and Wundra all left, to establish a home here on Haivran. When we were old enough, Evvie and I joined them. That was better."

"You all had the same father?" said Lillian, lifting the teapot. "I didn't know that happened." And this was true. The Bahtans kept track of those who sired their offspring in order to prevent accidental interbreeding, so it was possible to prove this. And this was very rare. Jared thought the reason was simple enough; once caught by a group of sisters, a male did his best to avoid them a second time. Another group might capture him, but not the same group, not twice.

"This happens seldom," said Ollie. "Perhaps our mother and her sister, only two of them, could capture just the one male." She raised her cup for a refill.

"I don't suppose you know him," said Phyllis, and the Bahtan girls looked faintly shocked.

"We know who he is," said Wundra. "We do not know him personally. He left for a colony after Ollie was born. He was afraid of all the females he had sired."

And this seemed reasonable enough, Jared thought, amused; besides, if it became known among the Bahtans that this particular male sired predominantly females, he would find himself entirely too popular as a breeding partner. Wherever his colony was, Jared was willing to bet the poor fellow was spending his life there in hiding.

"What an odd bunch we are," murmured Mimi, "all of us. Complete with two Its."

"We need to capture this second It also," said Sofi. "We need to compare them. We need to know if they are connected with the blond people. There are too many strange things happening here," she explained.

"You say your It isn't a fly?" said Al, and Dural consulted with his group.

"You say a lizard," he said, and lifted his hands, maybe 30 centimeters apart. "We call it a nuntulpo. Small. With a tail, wings. Runs very fast, and flies. We try to catch it, with our axes. It does not like axes." Jared had a clear vision of five small brown-robed beings chasing a fleet-footed flying lizard around the basement of their half-a-house, chopping at it with their silver axes; it was disturbing, and it was also funny.

"The next time the thing shows up," said Lillian, "you call us. Just shout out the window if you have to. All together, I bet we can catch this thing."

"I will bring butterfly nets," said Issio. "My freshman class used them in the autumn. I have many at school. They should be big enough to capture a lizard." He paused to count the company. "There are twenty-one of us," he said, "with Terry and Wundra. I will bring extras. Not for you," he told Sofi, who gave him an exasperated look.

"What?" asked Phyllis, startled, and Sofi flicked her tail with the twisted gold ring and turned her back to her annoying husband to answer.

"We have news," she said, "which we wish to share with all of you. We are expecting a baby in the autumn. And my husband wishes to lock me in the house until that time, also to keep me in a glass case."

"Two miscarriages," said Issio, and all four Bahtan girls nodded at the same time.

"Yes, yes, you must be careful not to stress yourself," said Clena, "and we will make for you a good drink, with many vitamins, which will help. You will not lose this baby."

"A Zamuaon drink," said Ollie, grinning at Sofi's dubious expression.

"Well, this is really good news," exclaimed Mimi, and she got up and went over to hug Sofi and Clyde and Al slapped Issio on the back and Gina threw her arms around both of them, and Cara got up to hug Sofi herself and Phyllis passed Sofi the entire tray of cookies, which she handed quickly to Mimi. Lillian offered Issio a drink of her tea; he refused, politely, with a small shudder.

"Perhaps," said Jared, "We ought to find some other place for that fly. Not," he said to Cara, "our basement." He would, in fact, see the thing dead before he allowed it into his house, he thought. He would, in fact, like to see the thing dead. Ridiculous as it was, it had threatened Cara.

"We can keep her in our basement," said Clyde. "I have an insulated room at the back; I was thinking of making a safe there. If we put her there, we'll hardly hear her."

"I am stressed," said Sofi, raising her voice over the voices around her, "because you think you must keep me from being stressed. The fly stays in our basement. Period. I wish to keep her safe; she must not escape."

"Sofi, we won't let her escape," protested Mimi, and Sofi shook her head.

"I am," she said, raising her voice even more, "getting upset." She looked at Issio. "Stressed!" she said, and Issio looked at her and threw up his hands.

"We will keep the fly," he announced, "so that my wife is not stressed." Laughter ran through the room, and under its cover, Jared spoke to Issio quietly.

"Do you think it's safe? Under the circumstances?"

Issio shrugged. "She spoke of Cara. She did not speak of Sofi. What is safe; do we know? I will watch as well as I can."

"So will I," said Jared, and he and Issio nodded at each other in agreement.

 

He made another try with the fly the next day. She was talkative. She had a great deal to say about her captors, who and what they were and what should happen to them in the near future. Threats from an insect in a jar lost something in translation, Jared thought, but you had to consider how very strange it was that she was able to utter them in the first place. If she could do that, who knew what else she could do?

He asked about the D'ubian It; she advised him to mind his own business. Besides, she said, who knew what those shitty little brown-robed motherfuckers were up to, anyway? "Elegantly phrased," he said, and Issio twirled his tail with great amusement.

There was a small chunk of meat beside the slice of berry, oozing red juices. The fly had been slightly interested in this offering, Issio said, but he thought it was too fresh for her; she would like it better when it was slightly spoiled.

"Although, if she starves herself to death," said Issio, "it will save us the trouble of swatting her when we tire of her."

The fl buzzed contemptuously and turned her back on both of them.

Jared called Trudy Monday from his office at the Institute. Cara hadn't said anything about Maud, and neither had he, and he thought on the whole that was a good thing, as good as her decision to stay away from the fly. He had done his best to distract Cara entirely from both subjects, and he wasn't about to bring either one back to her mind.

"Why Linden's World?" asked Trudy, eyeing him on the screen.

"It's complicated," he said. "It's possible Maud knew someone who was connected to Linden's World, and I guess I'm trying to find out about this."

"Well, if she did, she didn't invest with him," said Trudy. "What is that, agriculture? Isn't that where those kids in your neighborhood came from?"

In his years with Trudy, Jared had mentioned the children a time or two, possibly more. "Yes, their father is a farm master there," said Jared, and offered a version of the truth. "Gina, the little girl, was saying she thought she had seen Maud with someone from her home world. I couldn't remember anything about Linden's World, but I was curious, because it made an impression on Gina."

"Her interests," said Trudy, "her business interests were all centered here, on Haivran. I don't see anything about Linden's World. Maybe it wasn't business. Or maybe your little girl saw someone that looked like her. She could always ask this person she saw Maud with."

Jared decided to let that alone. "You checked out her background, didn't you? She didn't have any relatives that you found?"

"No, none on record," said Trudy.

"Do you have her birth certificate?" asked Jared. "I know she lived here on Haivran most of her adult life, but I don't remember if she said she was born here."

"The records are pretty sketchy," said Trudy, "because you can't get anything detailed out of that place; there's just too much population and records get lost. People get lost. Cities, I swear, get lost. But she seems to have been born on old Earth; that's what it says on her wedding registration, when she married Gerald Clipper. Parents deceased, no siblings listed, no children, no prior marriage. She listed her occupation as designer, self-employed. She didn't say what she designed. Her address was here in Bridgeton. An apartment, somewhere in the south end, on the Heights." So the presumption was that she hadn't married Gerald Clipper for his wealth; she already had her own fortune if she could afford an apartment on the Heights. And this fit in with Jared's impression of her earlier life.

"There could have been relatives left back on old Earth," he mused.

"Probably were." Trudy was eyeing him very closely. "Why, Jared?" she asked. "You think this person your little girl saw was related to Ms. Clipper somehow? This isn't an idle question," she said, waving a finger at him. "A relative might imagine he or she has a claim on the estate. I need to know if something like this comes up."

Would a resurrected decedent have a claim, Jared wondered, and what would an impersonator do when the woman she impersonated was known to be dead? Unlikely that she would appear in his back yard attracting the attention of his neighbors, not to mention his new lover.

"It's a lot of imagination, and a little misunderstanding," he said. "That's what I think. But if I find out anything different, I will make sure you know."

No matter which way he looked at it, it made no sense.