Chapter 61

 

Jared

 

 

Sofi appeared with the bottle of blue pills and a glass of water and Phyllis arrived with a cold pack in one hand, humming softly as it chilled. Gina, looking much more like herself, located the remote on the now empty desk and darkened the windows. Willis, also looking more like himself, got off the bed with the crutch for support and eased into the desk chair. "Let her lie down," he advised Jared, and it sounded like a good idea. She took a whole pill, giving Jared an idea just exactly how bad it was this time, and lay down with the cold pack over her eyes and her forehead and Gina ran to get a blanket and a pillow.

There was a knock on the door frame, and Jared looked up to see Patterson peering in. "They want you to tell about Maud," he told Jared.

"Do I look like I'm interested in telling about Maud?" said Jared, which made Cara give a gurgle of laughter. "Go away," Jared told Patterson. "I'll be there when I'm ready; just go away."

"I will go and tell," said Sofi, "although I do not know as much about Maud."

"I can tell the doctor about last night," said Patterson helpfully.

The trumpet fanfare signaled the arrival of someone through the front door; Jared heard Ollie's voice as she came up the stairs. She passed through the hall and paused, concerned, at the bedroom door. "Another headache?" she said. "I do not like this."

"It'll go away in a minute," said Cara, being very careful not to move her head. Jared kept a hand on her back, rubbing gently; it seemed to soothe her.

Terry came to a halt beside Ollie. "Cara's mom wants her and Jared," he said in a lowered voice, "and Sofi's mom is here too." Sofi uttered a sort of hissing snarl. "And some man I don't know. Not our father," he told Willis and Gina, "but Maud said maybe later, with that doctor person."

"Not," muttered Willis, "my father."

"Not," growled Sofi, "my mother. Make no mistake. Not my mother."

"Maud says you could come too, Sofi," said Terry, undisturbed, "but your mom is scared of you, so maybe you shouldn't."

"She should be scared," said Sofi with a toss of her head, and she stalked out of the room and headed down the hall to Lillian's room, choosing the conference over a visit with her long-lost parent.

"Go listen to Sofi and Mr. Patterson about Maud," said Gina to Willis. "You should hear them."

"I think I heard enough," he said, but Gina handed him his crutches and he took them reluctantly. "You gonna be okay?" he asked, and Gina nodded and offered a bright, slightly tear-stained smile by way of proof; he sighed and swung off to the door and Patterson trailed after him. Terry vanished down the hall; the trumpets sounded again as he went out the door.

"You go talk to my mother," said Cara to Jared.

"I'm not leaving you."

"They might want to talk about last night," said Cara. "The arches and all of that. You have to see them; we can't miss the opportunity."

"They might wish to talk of Its," said Ollie. "This could matter. I will stay, Jared; Cara will be safe with me."

And all of this was probably true, but he didn't care. Cara seemed to be relaxing; the blue pill might be starting to work, in which case she would probably go to sleep, but he still wanted to be with her.

"I'm staying here," he said. "If they want to leave a message with Terry, that's fine."

"I can go down," said Gina. "It isn't my, you know, father. I'll tell them you can't come right now. Do I look okay?" She went to peer into the bathroom mirror, which amused Jared and made him sad at the same time; his little sister was growing up enough to care about her appearance.

"You look lovely," he assured her, and she gave him a disbelieving glance.

She ran down the stairs; he heard the trumpets at the front door. Terry and Duran and Durakal and Dural were playing pipes on the front porch, keeping time by tapping on the porch floor. Ollie looked out the darkened window and then came to check on Cara, touching her wrist, rearranging the cold pack over her forehead. Cara was still tense, fighting the pain; he rubbed her back gently. The pill would kick in pretty soon, he thought, and she would sleep and the pain would at least lessen in her sleep.

He felt her stiffen, her back and shoulders, and the window remote, which Willis had left on the desk, fell to the floor with a clatter. "Oh!" exclaimed Ollie, startled, and the remote spun on the floor momentarily and then glided halfway to the door before running into the little armchair and coming to a halt. "He put it down too close to the edge of the desk," Ollie said, and picked it up and it squeezed out of her fingers and this time it it did hit the door frame and Cara lifted her head and groped at the cold pack.

"The remote," said Jared, catching her hand. "Just the remote."

"I dropped it," said Ollie, looking at it with a puzzled frown as it lay on the floor half a room away from her. "Somehow I dropped it."

Cara subsided, head on Jared's arm; the pill was starting to work, he judged.

With a small popping noise, now beginning to be familiar to him, Maud appeared just inside the door; she looked at Cara with a frown and lifted an eyebrow at Jared. "She took a pill," he said, trying not to rouse Cara, but she stirred and felt for the cold pack again. "It's Maud, sweetheart," he said.

"Gina said you had a headache," said Maud. "I thought I would see how you were."

"I'm okay," said Cara. "I'll be better in just a little while. I told Jared he should go talk to you without me."

"We were just wondering when it would be convenient to see those virtual constructs again," said Maud. "And I'm sure it isn't convenient right now."

"You don't have to babysit," Cara told him. "You can go tonight. Probably I'll be better tonight, so I can go too." She made an effort to sit up and changed her mind abruptly and sank down against him again.

"Maybe," he said. "And I want Patterson there, so it will need to be after this conference. We're trying to bring Dr. Frank and Patterson up to date on what is going on," he explained. "The last I heard, they were going to try to explain you, Maud; you are just in time, if you'd care to speak for yourself."

"Thank you, I am sure your friends will do an excellent job," said Maud. "Why did you include that man Patterson in your conference?"

"Because he heard too much last night not to be included," said Jared.

"I suppose," said Maud with a sigh. "Well. We could do this tomorrow night, if you'd rather. Do you have these headaches often, Cara?"

"I never have headaches," said Cara, slightly slurring her words; the pill was definitely starting to work. "I'll be fine by tonight. I will. By eight," she said, as one determined to make and abide by a schedule. "We'll be there by eight. At the Institute."

"Only if you feel up to it," said Maud. "I'll check back later." She took half a step, ran into the remote on the floor, and picked it up and handed it back to Ollie. "Can I do anything?" she asked Jared. "I wonder if Lalia has any ideas that could help."

"I don't know," Jared admitted; he had mixed feelings about Maud and about Lalia, too, but he didn't want to ignore any useful advice.

"I'll ask," said Maud, and vanished.

The conference went on down the hall; the door was shut but Jared could hear a distant murmur of voices and once or twice a laugh or an exclamation. Ollie sat quietly in the desk chair, and after a little while he realized that Cara had gone to sleep, a relief. He held her and thought about injuries and migraines and power coming at her from those creatures in their cages. Both had been removed from the room before her headache started; one had actually been taken out of the house.

He wondered how the fly was, and, more importantly, where.

That popping noise again brought him out of his thoughts; Lalia took shape beside the door, dressed for a weekend in shorts and a loose shirt. She nodded to Ollie and eyed Cara. "Asleep?" she whispered, and Jared nodded. "Pills?" she asked Ollie, and Ollie offered the bottle of pills; Lalia opened it and sniffed them and smiled approval. "Talk outside?" she suggested, looking at Jared, and he eased Cara down on the bed. She didn't stir; he thought it might be safe enough for a few minutes, and Ollie was still here.

He left the door open and stepped down the hall. "Maud said Cara told her she doesn't have headaches," said Lalia, keeping her voice down.

"She fell," said Jared, "in her house, back at Spring Break. I thought she hit her head. But Dr. Frank can't find any sign of injury. He thinks it's migraines, but she says she doesn't have migraines."

"How many headaches has she had that you know of?"

"This is the third." He didn't like to speculate, but wasn't it all speculation? "Willis," he said, "believes that it has to do with the Its. He said he felt power coming at her from them today. We brought the stoad and the nuntulpo to show Frank and Patterson, so two of them were here."

"Willis said this?" It seemed to make some sort of sense to Lalia. "Chazaerte can feel some sorts of energy traces; it wouldn't be surprising if Willis could, too," she explained. "Maybe there's something to it."

"Then the headaches could be dangerous."

"Maybe. Maybe they're just trying to make her uncomfortable, which I imagine she is. Do the blue pills help with the pain?"

"They seem to work. Nothing else does. She'll sleep for a little while now, I think, and she should be better when she wakes up."

"It sounds like I'm rushing her," said Lalia, "but I think we should go ahead and look at those arches tonight, and you should bring her with you, unless she's in too much pain. I'll have a chance to
talk with her a little without making a big thing out of it."

"That makes sense, but I don't want her to overdo it," said Jared.

"I agree. And I'll see to it. If she gets tired, you can take her home again; Mr. Patterson will be there, I suppose, and he can run the projectors. If you trust us there after hours. It'll be just the five of us. Chazaerte wants to see, as long as you don't bring Ann. And Zarei, although she's scared to death of Sofi."

"I promise not to bring either of them," said Jared. "But I might bring Gina, if she wants to come along."

 

Cara slept in the artificial twilight of darkened windows. She looked comfortable and free of pain; he hoped she was. Ollie stayed; Phyllis, passing in the hall, checked on them. Jared braced his back against the headboard and put his hand lightly on her pale hair. He wished he could read her. He had often wished he could read Maud. Like mother like daughter, he thought, amused to find this one area in which they were, in fact, alike.

He thought he saw signs of Maud and Cara working out some sort of understanding, though, and that was good, since they were obviously going to have Maud in their lives whether they wanted her or not. Cara's outburst in Wark's Ferry had been the last; she had talked with Maud at some length with no hostility the night they brought Mimi to the hospital, and they had later speculated on what Maud had said as they had discussed Lalia's revelations, without the emotional baggage Maud brought with her.

And that was good, that was a start, anyway. Jared knew there was no magic word that would relieve Cara's insecurities on the subject, but perhaps, as time passed, his actions would prove how much he loved her, how far he had moved from any past relationship with anyone at all, let alone her mother, of all people. Rapunzel, he thought, with tired humor. That was a complication both he and Cara could have done without.

He wished they could just start over, the two of them, with no previous strings or ties or entanglements.

And they thought perhaps the Its caused the headaches; he could think of several very good reasons she might have headaches that had nothing to do with Its. Luckily he wasn't prone to headaches himself, or he might be taking big blue Bahtan pills also.

The conference was beginning to break up in Lillian's room when Cara stirred and opened her eyes, lifting the cold pack from her face and frowning as if she had forgotten what it was doing there. Yes, she said, she was better; the headache was nearly gone, and to prove it she sat up, without wincing very much, and smoothed her hair and smiled brightly at Jared and Ollie and said they could very well meet Maud at eight at the Institute; she would be fine.

And yes, of course she would eat pizza with the rest of them.

Dr. Frank was divorced, as Jared hoped Patterson one day would be. So he, too, was free to join in the general pizza party and ask all the questions he wanted, and he had a lot of questions. He was especially interested in the full account of how Lillian and Willis had been injured. "So you really did tell me the truth," he said to Jared, "knowing damned well I couldn't do anything with it."

"And you knew it was the truth," said Jared, thinking of the tube of ointment.

"I knew it," admitted Dr. Frank, "even if I couldn't believe it."

"Those things in the cages," said Patterson, munching on a slab of double pepperoni and extra cheese, with mushrooms.

"I can understand," Dr. Frank told Issio, "why you were after that fly at the hospital. If it's as bad as the other two, I'd kill it before I left it around Mimi. I don't care what would happen. Is that why one of the sisters is always there?"

"The only reason," said Clyde, "that I didn't insist on bringing her home is that the girls are there. I still think I ought to. It'd be more convenient for you," he told Ollie, who was chewing on a slice of vegetarian pizza.

"Dr. Frank is correct that we do not have the equipment," she said, "but perhaps when we are all satisfied that she is stable, we can do that."

Jared didn't like the sound of that; it was as if they assumed Mimi was going to be lying unconscious in bed for a very long time. "Do you know what's wrong with her?" he asked Dr. Frank, who shook his head and picked a red pepper off his pizza slice and popped it into his mouth.

"And now I'm wondering if it has something to do with those damned creatures," he said. "Not a stroke at all. No sign of a blockage." He removed a mushroom and placed it carefully on Patterson's pizza. Patterson murmured thanks and closed his teeth around it. "At least," he said, "now I know why the whole lot of you is drug resistant. Do you realize you're personally related, genetically connected, to a fifth race? A non-Alliance race?"

"They are," said Issio, licking sauce off his fingers; Phyllis had ordered a Zamuaon special just for him and Sofi. The meat looked entirely raw. "All of them, it seems, if Maud is correct. Jared and I, however, are not. So I do not know what we are doing here, except perhaps as mates." He nodded at Sofi, who took his hand. "In some way our genes are considered useful, maybe."

"They said," Cara remarked, "Mother said that you and Jared were different. From a slightly different genetic line, she said."

"The old ones," said Gina. "The strong ones. And Maud said you were powerful, and your children will be extraordinary."

"I knew this," said Sofi. "I did not need Maud to tell me this, or any other of her people." A twitch of her tail made it clear which other of her people Sofi referred to. "Our daughter is extraordinary. So will be your child, Jared."

"Not yet!" said Jared and Cara in perfect unison, and looked at each other and laughed, and clicked coffee cups. They weren't in a rush; being together was enough for now. But he thought one day it would be something to consider.

It would be nice to solve some of their present problems first.