Chapter 51.

 

Jared

 

 

"Hey, good morning, Jared, good to see you." said Jake Weston, pausing just outside the conference room door with two data cubes in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. "How you feeling? How's your leg?"

"I feel great," said Jared, with his own cup and a Zeilmar pack, and Sandy Ott opened the conference room door from the inside and looked out and waved at him.

"There you are," she said, and at the end of the hall the door to the parking lot bumped and banged and Jared turned to see Patterson trudging up the hall with a large oddly-shaped object in each hand.

"Hey, boss," Patterson greeted Jared; he seemed quite cheerful for a Monday morning. "How you doing?"

"I'm doing fine," said Jared, gazing at the objects Patterson carried. They each appeared to be a half of a dining room chair.

"What," said Sandy Ott, "in the universe are those things?"

"I'm just putting them in my office for right now," explained Patterson. "I didn't want to leave them in my car all day. Someone might steal them."

"What are they?" asked Jared, and Patterson paused to display them. They were, indeed, dining room chairs sawn in half, one with half of a brown pad on the half of a seat, the other with half of a blue pad. Both half pads appeared to have been decorated with embroidered knots, done in very thick yarn, forming significant bumps on the surface.

"We're splitting up the household goods," Patterson explained with a cheerful smile. "Half and half." He nodded at the half a blue pad. "My mother-in-law gave us these for a wedding present. She did the embroidery herself. I've sat on these chair cushions every night of my life since then."

"Splitting up the goods," said Sandy in an awed voice.

"Half and half," Patterson said, and with a satisfied smile he headed off down the hall to his office. Weston and Ott and Jared stood by the conference room door watching while he leaned the half chairs against the wall and used the thumb pad to open his door, and then dragged the chairs inside. A moment later he emerged, heading down the hall to the parking lot again. "Four more chairs," he explained, and marched out the door.

"Incredible," said Sandy Ott. "Full-grown adults."

"Makes you want to think twice before you get married," said Jake Weston.

Jared grinned. "Too late," he said. "We got married last Friday."

It took, by his count, two and a half seconds for the news to penetrate, and then Sandy Ott gave a squeal that made him hope the glass on the windows was shatter-proof. "You're kidding!" she exclaimed. "You got married? You and Dr. Lindstrom got married? Oh, my god, that's wonderful! Congratulations! He got married!" she told Weston, just in case he hadn't heard. Jared thought that anyone within this wing of the building had at least noticed the squeal.

"The woman with the Drs. Wood?" said Weston. "Hey, yeah, congratulations, Jared. That's really great."

He pocketed his data cubes and shook hands with Jared with mild enthusiasm, while Sandy Ott was pounding on his shoulder and beaming. "Thank you," said Jared, finding that despite expectation, he was really didn't mind the excitement and the good wishes. He was, in fact, pretty pleased with the whole thing himself, and it was nice to have this pleasure reflected by the people around him.

But the joy would not be universal; Jared was not so lost in his own happiness that he could forget that. Patterson was coming through the outside door, wrestling two more of those chair halves. "Maybe we should wait a little while before we break the news to Patterson," he said to Ott and Weston, and they paused to watch with him. Patterson nodded and smiled at the three of them as he dragged the chair halves past them; one had a half-cushion in green, and one had a half-cushion in orange. Jared could not imagine trying to sit on the embroidered bumps for the space of an entire dinner; it made him ponder what message Patterson's not-quite-ex-mother-in-law had been giving him.

Jared had no doubt at all about the message from his own mother-in-law.

He and Cara got home late Sunday night, timing their arrival, as they had timed their departure, so that the neighborhood would be pretty much asleep. There would be fuss in the morning, of course, congratulations and questions; Cara said that Ann would have selected Cara's bridal gown and the silver pattern already, and would be very reluctant to give them up. And she wouldn't guarantee that Gina, at so impressionable an age, wouldn't have caught the contagion – Mimi too, maybe, and how about Phyllis? But they could avoid it all for a few more hours, if they were careful.

So they had pulled into the carport in a silent and peaceful neighborhood, only a night light visible in the Hardesty house and the porch light over the Bahtan front door to suggest the presence of life. But inside their house, sitting in its full splendor on the breakfast bar, was a vase of amazing and unequaled hideousness. The thing was nearly as tall as the smallest D'ubian, which made it, they agreed, more of an urn than a vase, suitable, Cara said, for the interment of the D'ubian It.

Made of metal – unfortunately unbreakable – it was embossed in a random pattern of small and large protrusions, and painted. The background was a sickly blue, with other colors splashed over the knobs apparently at the whim of the madman who crafted it. Toward the bottom was a reddish splash that, with the bumps, looked like a bad rash or an acne attack. There was what looked like a growth of moldy green slime around the top; there were streaks of poisonous yellow going down the sides, and in the middle was a band of a textured dull brown that looked as if it smelled.

Around the neck of the urn a white satin ribbon had been tied, with a note printed in a decorative font; "Congratulations and Best Wishes, from your mother-in-law."

"She must have shopped all weekend to find something this ghastly," said Cara in tones of awe.

"You certainly couldn't come by it in any ordinary store," agreed Jared, and they looked at each other and collapsed in laughter.

He was perfectly willing to bury the offering in the darkest corner of the basement, which was certainly what the giver had expected, but Cara, giggling, said they could not possibly waste such a magnificent thing in the basement. Between them – it being rather heavy – they hauled it out to the front porch and set it beside the door, and Cara stuck a manual broom and two umbrellas in it and arranged the ribbon and the note on the front, where they could not be missed. "So no one will think we picked it out ourselves," she said, and Jared took note; the daughter was no more willing than the mother to let someone else have the last word.

Genes were odd things.

Patterson went back for the last load of chair halves, and Jared and Weston and Ott retired into the conference room, where Weston set up the projector for the day's work and Ott pumped Jared for wedding details; a registry wedding in Permidia, which they had selected because neither of them had been there before, and it was an easy flight out of Bridgeton, and a tropical paradise sounded romantic, although Jared thought a hotel room in Wark's Ferry would have been romantic too, under the circumstances. Assuming that a registry wedding didn't call for anything special in the way of dress, Ott didn't inquire what the bride wore and Jared did not try to describe how exquisite she had looked in the ruffled white sun dress with her pale gold hair floating about her face. But even if they ended up sawing chairs in half, he thought he would never forget how beautiful she had been on their wedding day.

He did not think they would end up sawing chairs in half.

Patterson, having locked up the last of the half-chairs, came in and turned on the screen and began to adjust the images again; they went back to work on the second arch, as enigmatic as the other nine, but Jared studied the Celtic knot motifs with even greater attention. The pendants had some sort of power; perhaps these glyphs did also.

The pendants carried Maud and her people from one place to another. The fly had hinted that the power might be available even to people like Jared and Issio, if he had understood her correctly. When he thought about it, Maud hadn't said he couldn't use the pendant, only that he didn't know how. That was interesting.

If it were not so dangerous, if the Azuri/zai project had not shut down access to Or2, he thought he would like to see in person what would happen if you brought one of the silver pendants into contact with one of the arches.

His phone chimed in his pocket and he looked at the indicator and, in deference to Patterson, retired to his own office before he answered. Dr. Louise could squeal as loudly as Sandy Ott, he noted, plugging the phone into the computer. "Cara called you," he greeted the faces on the screen, and Dr. Louise bounced and clapped her hands and squealed again; Dr. Ned, beaming, nodded beside her.

"My dear boy," said Dr. Ned, "congratulations, can't tell you how pleased for the both of you we are –"

"It's so romantic!" cried Dr. Louise. "It's so perfect! I'm so happy for you! Just think how it's happened – it's like a fairy tale!"

And since Jared privately agreed with her, he didn't argue.

 

They worked through the lunch hour, although Jared took time to call home; Cara was actually in the Hardesty kitchen, being bombarded with descriptions of party favors and shades of blue flowers, and he could hear Mimi and Phyllis and Ann in the background discussing, loudly, the merits of wedding bells as opposed to entwined wedding rings as a decorating theme. "They say we have to have a reception," she told him.

"We could always go out of town for the rest of the summer," he said.

"We'll follow you wherever you go, Jared Ramirez!" shouted Mimi over Cara's shoulder. "You escaped the wedding, but you won't get away from the reception!"

He got back to the conference room to find that Ott had decided that Patterson had to know what was going on; he was sitting slumped in a chair while she patted his shoulder and Weston watched warily over the table. When Jared came in Patterson got up and offered his hand. "Some people make it," he said, apparently as much encouragement as he could bring himself to offer. Jared shook his hand and patted his arm and got back to work.

They would be finishing the second arch in the morning, they agreed by the end of the day, and they got the equipment turned off and stored. Leaving Weston making just a few more minor adjustments, as usual, Ott and Jared and Patterson walked together out into the heat of parking lot with the afternoon sunshine simmering on the paving.

Patterson stopped dead in the middle of the parking lot and let out a scream that would not have shamed the D'ubian It.

Someone had sawed his car in half lengthwise and towed away the driver's side.

 

Phyllis and Ann and Mimi had gone downtown by the time Jared pulled into his carport; they were on an errand involving blue roses and many yards of white gauze, with or without entwined wedding rings that lit up in rainbow colors. Cara was sitting at the picnic table drinking wine as if she needed it; Gina and Sofi had iced tea and Issio had a bottle of Zamuaon beer.

He got up to shake Jared's hand, and Sofi and Gina sprang up to hug him, and then Jared slid onto the seat next to Cara and said, "Mrs. Ramirez, I presume," and kissed her, and took the fresh bottle of beer Issio had brought for him.

"You would not believe," she said, "what Ann is planning for us."

"Those wedding bells," said Sofi, shaking her head, "the ones that play music; also the garland of flowers that has lights!"

"Blue punch," said Issio.

"She and Al are planning the cake," said Gina. "She found a picture of a cake with a fountain in the middle."

"Robotic doves," said Issio, looking deeply into his beer. "I understand they sing."

"Is there any chance," said Jared, "that she can work off all this energy on her own wedding? That Charles No-Last-Name might come through in time to save us?"

"If we're lucky," said Cara, "Charles No-Last-Name won't steal her last credit when he leaves."

"Hey," said Gina. "If we're really lucky, maybe she'll invite him to the reception, and we'll get a chance to meet him."

"If we're really really lucky, he won't steal Phyllis and Lillian's silverware while he's there," said Jared.

"He may be a fine man," said Sofi, not sounding especially hopeful. "We do not know him, after all."

"He may drink the blue punch," said Issio generously.

"I thought you might get this planning fever," Jared said to Gina, and she shuddered.

"You didn't see the bells that play music," she said, and he caught a quick picture in her mind, along with a view of fake flowers pulsating with colored lights in time to the music.

"This girl," said Sofi, "has taste. I have doubts about Our Ann."

"Ann does get a little flamboyant," admitted Cara. "Although her intentions are good. What we should do," she said, turning to Jared, "is get ahead of this. We should host our own reception. We could make reservations somewhere nice, like Kingsleys, one of their banquet rooms, and we could invite everyone and we could set up our own decorations. And choose our own menu. No blue punch," she told Issio.

"No wedding bells?" said Gina. "With music?"

"I think flowers," said Cara, "just a few flowers, in all sorts of colors. Summer colors. No white gauze, either. Unless Ann and Phyllis and Mimi go ahead and buy yards and yards of it; then we have to use it for something. Drape it in the corners."

"That," said Jared, "sounds like an excellent idea."

"We could invite your team from the Institute," said Cara, "and maybe the Drs. Wood would come, if we planned it for a weekend, and it will be quiet and dignified and nice." She paused, her attention caught. "I just realized," she said to Jared. "We are the Drs. Ramirez."

"So we are," he agreed, laughing back at her.

"And I can try to get hold of Saizy," she continued, "if I can get her attention off her book."

"Dr. p'Anotta," Jared told Issio, who nodded, impressed as any biologist must be.

"But she is retired, I understand," he said. "Living somewhere north."

"She came for the funeral," said Cara. "And she wasn't even that fond of my – of Dr. Lindstrom. Surely she can come for the wedding reception."

"The D'ubians and Terry want to play music," said Gina.

"The D'ubians and Terry can play music," said Jared, "and make all the other diners jealous of us." Cara and Gina exchanged a conspiratorial glance, and Jared saw a glimpse of a conference between Cara and Terry and Dural, something about rings, and then Gina shut it off and grinned at him, daring him to penetrate further. He could guess, however; he had had the forethought to order a matching wedding ring for Cara along with the engagement ring, using Cara's old class ring from her jewelry box to give the size, but he hadn't thought about a ring for himself, and Cara hadn't had time to order anything.

They had a great deal to do, actually, trivial things like rings and receptions, bigger matters requiring decisions. Cara, not in the least interested in perpetuating the name of Lindstrom no matter who her actual mother was, had authorized the name change from the registry office for all her legal documents, but they had to make sure the notifications had arrived. She wanted to put the Seven Tree Circle house on the market as soon as possible, which meant they had to locate someone to replace the floor in the back bedroom and then contact a realtor. And there was furniture – a certain oversized desk, for instance – and other household goods, including a set of dishes, some broken, to be sold or given to a favorite enemy.

Jared wanted to be sure her name was on their house here, and he needed to get her name on his insurance policies, and he planned to get her name on his accounts; he thought he had better take her into his confidence about Maud's legacy too, and see that she was in position to administer the trust if something happened to him. Marriage, he thought, made a man think even more seriously about the future, its hopes and its responsibilities.

He liked it.

He took her hand, the one with the rings, and smiled at her; he was unreasonably happy, he found, and very contented.

The Bahtan girls came over as they arrived at home, or took a break from their inside activities, and offered congratulations, although the concept of marriage was quite foreign to them. The shopping party, with Clyde looking bemused, returned with samples of white gauze and blue gauze and spangled gauze but no decision made yet and Jared accepted their hugs and good wishes and left them to spread samples and printout pictures of exotic wedding decorations over the picnic table while he and his own party retired inside and set to work on their arrangements. Dr. p'Anotta did not answer her phone, but the Drs. Wood could take the supertrain down not this coming weekend, but the following one, and would be delighted to be included; Jared called Kingsleys to make reservations, and Sofi and Cara discussed the menu, making sure that no blue punch was included.

They would probably have to go with Al's wedding cake, they agreed, but Jared voted against the blue fountain, making it unanimous, and he and Cara ducked out the back door to go up to the Hardesty place and talk to Al in person.

Lillian was sitting up in an armchair in Willis' room, her damaged leg in its brace propped up on a stool. Al was sitting in the student desk chair, and Willis was lying in bed, with the remote by his hand and a vid on the screen beside him. He politely silenced it for his visitors, but he showed no particular interest in actually conversing with them.

He did rouse himself to congratulate the bridal couple, and Al shook hands with them and Lillian demanded that they come over to kiss her, since she had just got here and didn't want to get out of the chair again so soon. She was doubtful about getting to Kingsleys, but Jared promised her that if all else failed, they would carry her. He couldn't imagine the party without her, and he was selfish enough to be glad Willis was here, too, to take part, although he ought to wish the boy were at the Academy still.

No chance of that, though; Willis had resigned, and couldn't imagine trying to get reinstated, even if his leg healed enough to make admittance possible. He was too depressed, Jared judged, to imagine much of anything at all. Gina, who had escaped from the group outside, sat down on the end of the bed and tried to make bright conversation to cover her brother's lack of interest, but it wasn't working. He said, pressed, that he would sure try to get to the reception, he would be getting around better in a couple of weeks, but he couldn't summon up any pretense of caring.

Al looked relieved to find that the fountain wasn't going to be needed for the wedding cake. He said he kept thinking about the thing overflowing. He suggested a simpler construction with maybe flowers on top; he liked the idea of summer colors. So that much was settled, and now they had to break the news to the planners at the picnic table.

"I wonder," said Cara, "if we should try to find a way to invite Maud."

"How would you do it?" asked Lillian. "It's not like you have a phone number."

"If I see – anyone," said Gina, not looking at Willis, who seemed acutely uncomfortable at even this sideways reference, "I could ask him to get hold of Maud."

"And invite him, too," said Jared, feeling generous.

"I saw the vase from the bedroom window," said Lillian. "That is probably the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. That thing could turn you into a toad just looking at it."

"We should bring it to the reception," said Cara, giggling. "We could fill it with blue roses and make it the centerpiece."