The Misborn I

By L. V. MacLean

It's a fly, only a common housefly, one of those pests who accidentally hitched a ride on one of the innumerable ships from Old Earth to the new colony worlds of the Four Species Alliance.
So how can it scream and curse in the voice of a woman dead for months? And why is it attacking her daughter, and her daughter's would-be lover?
Jared Ramirez Ph.D has come a long way from the place of his birth, a domed colony on a remote mining world, where he and his mother lived in poverty. Now he has a doctorate in cultural linguistics and he is settled on the planet Haivran, the intellectual heart of the Four Species Alliance. He enjoys his work as a teacher and translator of historical documents from Alliance cultures. He has bought a house surrounded by neighbors from all four Alliance species who have become his virtual family. Some of them even share his telepathic gifts, a secret ability he has had from childhood. He has never thought much about it – just a little talent, he thinks – but it's nice to have people with whom he can share it.
Maud, his lover for over a decade, has recently died of heart disease. It was not unexpected; she was older than he was and ill, but he had hoped to have her for many years yet. He buries himself and his grief in a new intellectual challenge, heading a team studying the inscriptions found on a set of mysterious arches on an uninhabited planet at the edge of Alliance territory. Peculiar circumstances accompanied this discovery, halting colonial expansion of the Alliance species until the arches can be better understood.
And then Jared meets Cara Lindstrom, daughter of the late Dr. Margo Lindstrom, the scientist who first discovered the arches he studies. The bond between them is nearly instantaneous, and overwhelming for them both, but Cara has her own problems, an all-too-tangible reminder of her memorably difficult mother. It threatens not only her, but Jared and his friends and his neighborhood and, perhaps, the worlds around them. For the sake of the woman he loves, and the people who have become his family, Jared has to find ways to fight this entity, and other, similar creatures. This battle will call upon powers he does not yet know he possesses, and will lead him to the mysterious arches, to face the secret behind them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L. V. MacLean
• Release date: May 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311262639

L. V. MacLean

I come from a long line of story tellers and journalists, and I worked as a local journalist for years. That was fun, but my first love is fiction. Home is the eastern half of Montana, wheat fields and range land and small towns. I have a husband, two grown children, a lively grandson, and a superior cat. What more could anyone want? Just a laptop with a word processing program!

Book preview

Preface

The legend said that their wise men and warriors stole the power source from the gods, and thereupon turned around and drove out the gods, who had been cold and angry and never satisfied. For this reason, the people had no gods, beyond the One who brought about the Creation and required only acknowledgment, not worship.

There had never been a great many of them, even on their own world, but the power source made them strong enough to resist most threats, and perhaps made them complacent, so that when a true threat arose they had no defense. Many died; the remnant used their personal powers enhanced by the power source to open the ancient portals and escape and, so the story went, the invading forces slammed the portals shut behind them, so that they would not return and take back what they had lost. What they had lost was their world and the universe around it and their way of life, and the place where they found themselves was very different, not entirely suited to them.

What they had not lost was the power source, which had been brought with difficulty and sacrifice into this new universe and divided among the surviving family groups; they had always been organized in this way. Joining their portions of the power source, they were able to build their own places on a plane more compatible to them, and construct pathways to the material worlds below where their hopes for the future could take shape. The natives of the worlds in this new universe were surprising; they had no central power source, not on any of the worlds that cradled them, but they were astonishingly powerful in themselves. If this natural power could be joined with their personal power and the power they had brought with them – who could ever threaten them, who could kill them or hurt them or stop them again?

And it might, with care, with knowledge of the material world and careful manipulation, be accomplished.

But it was clear even at the start that it would take a very long time.

At least, this was the legend; she had heard it in early childhood from her father, who truly believed in it.

THE CHILDREN

Chapter 1.

Gina

Eugenia McIntosh was three years old when her little brother Terrill was born, and among her earliest memories was one of her big brother Willis lifting her up so that she could see the baby in his crib. He didn’t look like much; he was small, with spindly arms and legs all in violent if aimless motion, and his head looked bald, although in fact he had a small amount of fine pale hair, like her, like Willis. He had very blue eyes like Gina and Willis, too, blue enough that Gina at this young age noticed them, and a very large mouth that was open and emitting an enormous amount of sound.

Willis held her up, using both arms; he was a strong boy and she was very small and slight for her age, but she was still a load for a boy only nine years old. He's hungry, he explained to her. That's why he’s crying.

And Nurse Linda came then with milk in a bottle and shooed them out of the nursery. Willis put Gina down and took her hand. At the end of the hall Mom and Dad’s bedroom door was open, and Mom’s maid was coming out with an armload of Mom’s clothes. Where’s she going? Gina asked Willis, wondering what Mom would wear if the maid took all her clothes away. Mom liked clothes. Gina was only three, but she knew that much. Sometimes Mom spent hours putting on clothes and taking them off and looking at herself in the mirror. Sometimes she would tie scarves on Gina, or drape blouses over her small shoulders. The hems of the blouses dragged on the floor, like oversized dresses.

Once I'm done with this damned contract marriage, Mom would say, and I'm free again, you and I will go to whole new world where pretty girls like us are appreciated. And we'll find us some real men! And she would dab sweet-smelling stuff on Gina’s neck and put red stuff on Gina’s mouth. Mom’s maid would come in to do Mom’s hair and she would look at Gina and laugh.

That one is so small; she'll never fit into those clothes, she would say, and Mom would laugh and drink funny-smelling stuff out of her glass and wave Gina away to Nurse Linda, who would sigh and scrub off the red stuff and the sweet-smelling stuff and untie the scarves and put her back in her own clothes again.

But now the maid was taking away all of Mom’s clothes, and Gina watched with concern. Is she taking everything away? she asked Willis.

No, just to another bedroom, Willis said. Mom is going to be at the other end of the hall, see? He pointed past the nursery, where the big bedroom at the far end was open and Gina could see sunshine on the walls and the floor. And sure enough, Mom’s maid went into that room with all of the clothes. So that was all right. It made sense to Gina that Mom would want to have a room of her own. Willis did, and Gina did and the housekeeper did, and even Nurse Linda did, a small room just off the nursery. Now Mom would too, and Dad.

And after that Mom tried on clothes in her new room, ordering things from far away worlds; they came in great boxes every few weeks, and sometimes there were dresses for Gina, too, and shirts and pants for Willis, and baby things for little Terry, who was filling out and getting bigger, if no quieter. And sometimes there were toys. They were better than the things you could buy on here on Linden's World, Mom said; they came from other places, those whole new worlds Mom spoke of, where things were good.

Willis, who was always quiet around Mom and Dad, took the new clothes or the toys politely. The one he liked the best was a low-power beam gun; with it he could knock over the targets he set up in back of the house. He could spend hours out there, shooting while standing, while sitting, while lying down like soldiers on the vids. Once he shot the housekeeper in the rear when she was bending over to pick up something on the back step. She yelled very loudly and said bad words and rubbed her behind and said she would tell their father. But even Gina knew that was an empty threat; Dad did not pay any attention to Willis or Gina or Terry.

The dresses Mom bought for Gina were all right if Mom helped her put them on, and fussed about the ruffles and the length of the sleeves, but Gina really preferred to wear the jeans and shirts she could play in without anyone yelling at her for messing them up. As for the toys, she already had dolls, prettily dressed, sitting on a shelf in her room. They were just to look at, not to play with, and she had her beloved old Teddy to sleep with her, and to come with her on her wanderings. And she didn’t need the little cups and saucers, or the doll-sized furniture, although she supposed the dolls did. Nurse Linda always arranged the furniture on the shelf with the dolls as if she knew they wanted the little chairs and tables just so.

Gina liked to play outside, digging behind the house, finding treasures in odd-shaped stones and pretty flowers, an egg shell dropped from a nest, a bright-colored feather. Once she found the empty skin of one of the field varmints, shimmering with gold scales. Willis told her they shed their skins every year and grew new ones.

Their house was like an island surrounded by fields planted with crops. Out of any of the upstairs windows, Gina could see the fields stretching to the edge of the sky in all directions. The farm machines, with two or three workers to watch them, swarmed over the fields, making noise and raising clouds of dust; then later the crops appeared, glowing green in the rows, and then the crops grew tall and turned gold or maybe a different kind of green, and finally the farm machines, different ones, came and cut down the crops and took them away, and Dad sold them to other worlds in the Four Species Alliance, Gina was told, so he could buy pretty dresses and dolls for little girls.

He bought dresses for other people too. Gina knew that. She was going past the nursery and she heard a sound like someone crying, not Terry at all, a different kind of crying, and Dad came out of the nursery saying crossly over his shoulder, Quit that whining; I told you I would buy you a new dress. He walked off down the hall, not seeing Gina, and she peeked through the door, still open, and saw Nurse Linda sitting on the floor holding what was left of her dress around her. It was just a bunch of torn cloth, and Gina could see her skin, her shoulders and her top, which was bigger than Mom’s and kind of floppy, and her bottom, without even panties. There were red marks on her arms and her legs and one side of her face, and she was crying and her hair was all messed. And looking at her, Gina began to get a bad feeling. She felt things that hurt, down where no one was supposed to touch, and on her arms and legs and on her face, and she felt a hurt that wasn't in her body, somewhere deep inside her mind or her soul.

Gina backed away and went into her own room and shut the door, and she sat a long time on her bed holding Teddy, until things stopped hurting.

That was the last time Gina could remember seeing Nurse Linda, so she did not know what sort of new dress Dad bought her. She went away and Mom’s maid looked after Terry for a little while and helped Gina get dressed and undressed and made sure she took a bath and went to bed, but it made her angry, a dull red resentment Gina could see; she wasn’t supposed to have to look after children, she said.

So Nurse Dana came in from town, which was a long ways away, two hours by aircar, so she had to live with them in their house, and she took care of Terry and Gina. She was cross, though. She slapped Terry's hands and put him into his bed and left him there to cry for a long time when she said he got into things; Terry was starting to crawl now. When Gina spilled her milk on the floor, Nurse Dana whacked her bottom very hard, and made her stand in the corner of the nursery for a long time, although it had been an accident. Gina could see Nurse Dana's temper around her, a big black thundercloud, with flashes of lightening.

So Gina stayed away from the nursery when she could see that Nurse Dana had the thundercloud; she played by herself in her room or outside, behind the house, among the crop rows, especially if the crops were taller than she was. And sometimes Willis let her come with him. He was a very big boy, but he would play with her, showing her how to throw balls and teaching her the rules of some of his games, although they were hard for her to remember. He didn't have any thunderclouds around him, although he often had a dull grey darkness, like a long dragging rainy day. Gina noticed that being with her and Terry made the darkness lift a little. Willis didn't have people to play with. Some of the workers had children about his age, but none of them lived very close to the house. And Mom didn't like workers' children.

Dad wasn't around very often. He was very busy. He visited with other farm masters, and he went to town, where people came on ships that flew through the sky to buy his crops, and he had to see to his workers, the people who took care of his farm machines. He would come home smelling funny, like the stuff in Mom's glass, and he would talk loudly and be very silly. Once Gina saw him in the back of the kitchen with Nurse Dana; he was laughing, and Gina saw him swat Nurse Dana across the bottom, which she thought was only fair, after what Nurse Dana had done to her, but Nurse Dana didn't cry. She just laughed and walked away, with her bottom swaying and Dad watching. She didn’t have the thundercloud this time.

Mom spent a lot of time in her room. Sometimes she let Gina come in and try on clothes and fuss with the paint Mom had for her face; the red stuff was called lipstick, and there were other things on her dresser that smelled nice, black things and brown and blue and all kinds of red, light and dark. At times like that, Gina could see Mom as if she had lots of sparky things all around her. She seemed happy, in a sort of frantic way.

But sometimes Mom took a lot of medicine because she had very bad headaches, the maid told Gina, and she would stay in her room with the door closed and she would sleep a lot. On those days Gina could see Mom sunk in the middle of a kind of muddy pond, moving sluggishly, not trying to find her way out. And sometimes Mom would take an aircar and go into town, and she wouldn't come back for a long time, days and days.

Terry was beginning to pull himself up to his feet, holding onto the furniture, wobbling back and forth unsteadily. He tried to walk, but mostly he just crawled, very fast, because he was in such a hurry to get wherever he was going. He could cross the nursery in no time. Once he crawled right out of the nursery door before anyone knew it, and Nurse Dana found him working his way down the stairs. She whacked his bottom that time and put him to bed, and he cried for an hour. Mom was in bed with a headache and couldn’t hear him. Finally Willis sneaked into the nursery and lifted him out of his baby bed and took him back to Willis' room until he stopped crying. Gina sat with them and let Terry play with the green ball Willis had given her; Willis said that was all right, and if Terry hurt it he would give Gina another one.

Terry's mind was just all bright and sunny-white with pretty sounds; Gina couldn't find out what he was thinking.

Willis was a very good big brother. Nurse Linda used to read stories to Gina, one of the readers in the nursery with big bright pictures to look at, but Nurse Dana said she had better things to do. So Willis took the readers to his room or to Gina’s room and he would sit and read to Gina and, when Terry got big enough to toddle after them, he would read to Terry too and let him look at the pictures, and he would tell Terry about the pictures. Terry would look and listen for awhile, but then he would get bored and go play with Willis’ old blocks or his toy farm machines. Willis never got mad if Terry broke something.

The black squiggles beside the big pictures in the readers were letters, and they made the words that told the stories. When she asked Willis, he put his finger under the words as he read them so that she could read them too. She began to remember how some of the words looked so she could recognize them even when Willis wasn't there to read to her.

It was at about this time, when Gina was four and Terry was a year old, that she saw the strange man, only he wasn't really that strange; she thought she had seen him somewhere before. She just couldn't remember where or when.

It was evening, and it was after bedtime; Nurse Dana had seen Gina into bed, and turned out her light, and told her to go to sleep. She said it was a three-moon night, and the bad goblins came during three-moon nights and if they found a little girl who wouldn’t go to sleep, they would take her away to their caves, which were dark and slimy, and never let her go. Then Nurse Dana went away, although not back to the nursery, Gina thought. She was sure she heard Nurse Dana going downstairs. Dad was downstairs in the study, looking at farm plans, with a glass of that funny-smelling stuff. If Nurse Dana bothered him, Gina thought maybe he might whack her bottom again, which would be good.

Gina lay a long time in bed. It was summer; outside the crops grew tall and the wind stirred through them, like people sneaking through the stalks, like even maybe bad goblins. The three moons rose, the big one first and then the small one and finally the middle-sized one, and they shone in Gina’s window, making crisscross patterns on the wall across from the bed, and the tree by the window began to rustle, as if something were crawling up the trunk, digging small sharp toenails into the bark, catching at branches with long crooked fingers and pointy fingernails, snickering through their scraggly teeth as they climbed up to peer in her window and see if she was asleep –

Willis was sitting up in bed reading; he said there were no such things as bad goblins, but she could stay with him if she wanted. She snuggled down beside him and looked at his reader for awhile, but it was a reader for big boys like him. It had a lot of words, and not very many pictures.

I’ll read to you, he said, if you go get one of your own readers.

Gina was sure he was right about the bad goblins; she figured a big boy ten years old would know about such things, and Willis had never, in her short life, lied to her. But just the same she didn’t like to go into her room, so she tiptoed down the hall with the idea of getting a reader from the nursery. It should be safe enough. Terry would be asleep, and Nurse Dana was downstairs.

The door was a little bit open and she peeked, just to be sure that Nurse Dana wasn’t there. She wasn’t. Instead, standing beside Terry’s bed was Mom, and with her was the strange man. He was very tall, taller than Dad, and not as big around as Dad, who had a stomach that stuck out, and round cheeks. This man was very straight and thin. His hair wasn’t brown like Dad’s, either; it was so light a gold that it was almost white and he wore it long, pushed back behind his ears. And his eyes were as blue as Terry’s eyes, as the eyes Gina saw in her own mirror when she bothered to look.

And she had the feeling that she had seen him before, but she couldn’t think where; he was familiar in some strange way, but she couldn’t think how.

Neither of them saw Gina; they were both looking at Terry, who was curled under a light blanket fast asleep – the only time in the day he was quiet and motionless. He looked like one of those angels Gina had seen in pictures in her readers, which was funny, considering how he acted when he was awake. His hair was short, and fine and pale like the strange man, and he was flushed with sleep, color under his fair thin skin.

Mom and the strange man stood very still beside the bed, looking, and then Mom moved so that she was leaning against the strange man, but he didn’t look at her; he was gazing at Terry, intent, as if he were trying to memorize how Terry looked. There was something inside Mom reaching for the man, sort of grabbing at him; Gina could feel it, but the man’s mind was drawn apart, behind a hard white wall, where she couldn't touch it.

Gina took a step backward, very quietly, and Mom didn’t seem to hear her, but the strange man looked up from Terry’s bed and his bright blue eyes fastened upon Gina. He didn’t speak and he didn’t smile or frown; he just looked at her, and she looked back, and she could not tell what he was thinking, and then he glanced down at Terry again and Gina ducked down the hall and ran into Willis’s room.

There’s a man, she said when Willis looked up from his reader. He's in the nursery with Mom.

Huh? said Willis, but he got up right away, without waiting for her to repeat what she said, and he stepped out into the hall barefoot and tiptoed down to the nursery. Gina thought about it for a moment and then she followed as quietly as she could. Willis peered cautiously around the edge of the door and Gina sneaked another peek just under his arm, and saw an odd thing. Mom was standing with her arms around the strange man and her eyes closed, and the strange man was still staring at Terry as if he couldn’t take his eyes off the baby, and inside Mom it was like she was standing there all alone, in a cold place, and it made her unhappy and afraid.

Willis backed up and got hold of Gina’s arm and put a finger to his lips to tell her to be quiet, which he didn’t need to do; Gina knew she shouldn’t make any noise. Mom wouldn’t want them there looking, and the strange man – Gina felt his sharp blue gaze upon her and it made her uncomfortable.

So she didn’t want his attention either, and she followed Willis back to his room, padding barefoot and silent. Willis mostly closed his door but stood just inside, listening, and Gina stood beside him. After a few minutes they heard the nursery door shut, and Willis risked a look down the hall. Gina, standing on tiptoe to look past her brother, saw the tall white man and Mom going down the hall to Mom’s bedroom at the end of the hall. They went inside and closed the door.

Willis went to look out of his window, which looked over the back of the house; he could see the grass, and the aircars parked on the drive, and the crops bending in the light breeze. I wonder how he got here, Willis said to Gina. I don't see a car he could have driven.

He peered out his door again, but there was nothing in the hall; he sprinted quickly to the bathroom on the other side of the hall, with Gina right behind him, and he looked out the bathroom window to the front of the house, where the drive came down between fields, under the big old trees at the front gate, across the front of the house and around the corner to the back. There were no cars at all out there, and Gina couldn’t see anything beyond the grass and the trees but the endless crops, spreading to the very ends of the world.

After awhile Willis took her back to his room and set her up on his bed with a couple of his old vids, from when he was little like she was, and he sat on the floor by the door, listening, paying no attention to the vid characters as they moved through the room. He was still there when Gina began to yawn, and when she woke up in the early morning with the birds singing and the sky just turning white-gray, he was asleep on the floor.

There was no sign of any strange men that morning, and Mom didn't say anything about him, and Gina knew not to say anything herself. She was four years old, after all, getting to be a big girl.

Chapter 2.

Gina

Nurse Dana left that winter, and Gina was glad about that.

There was a big snowstorm. Mostly they didn't have that much snow where they lived, although Willis said there was lots of snow on Dad's north fields. So this was a treat for the children.

Mom didn't like storms. She took a whole bunch of medicine and went to bed with her headache. Gina and Willis and Terry played out in the yard almost all day. Willis knew wonderful things to do in the snow, building things, big walls and round snowmen and lots of snowballs. They threw the snow at each other in great armfuls, and then they went inside and the housekeeper let them get hot synth cocoa from the cooker, although she grumbled about all the melting snow they had tracked in on her floors.

So they were tired that night, and Gina fell asleep as soon as she went to bed, only to be roused up several hours later by a lot of screaming at Dad's end of the hall. It sounded like several people, all yelling and shrieking, and one of the voices was, Gina was sure, Nurse Dana.

She opened her door and looked out.

There were three people down by Dad’s open bedroom door, Dad, and Nurse Dana, and Connie, who was a grownup woman, fifteen years old, who lived with her Dad and Mom. They fixed some of the farm machines if they got broken. They lived in one of the workers' houses, about half an hour away by aircar. Gina could not imagine what Connie was doing here in their upstairs hall, and she wasn't even wearing clothes. She was naked, and Nurse Dana was angry with her; the thundercloud was full of lightening, great white bolts of it. She had Connie's hair in her fist, a big handful, and she was banging Connie’s head against the wall and when Connie tried to get away from her she began pounding on her with her fists, her head and her shoulder and her back, and then she grabbed Connie's hair again, all the time yelling, saying words Gina didn't know, but they didn't sound nice. Connie was screaming and crying, and Dad was trying to get between the two of them, shouting at Nurse Dana to stop it, she was acting crazy.

You don't understand! he said. You've got it all wrong! It isn't what you think!

"This whore was lying naked in your bed, that's what I understand; what have I got wrong about that, you two-timing bastard!" Nurse Dana hollered, and she slammed Connie against the wall again, and Connie screamed. At the other end of the hall Mom’s door opened, and Mom’s maid appeared, staring.

Gina! whispered Willis urgently, and Gina ran down the hall to him, very fast, and he put an arm around her and told her to go into his room and stay there, but she didn't want to; she wanted to see. Connie was shielding her face with her arms and she was crying, and Nurse Dana hit her very hard on the ear with her fist. The whole of the hall was full of thunder and lightening and all sorts of hurt.

Baby love! said Dad, and even Nurse Dana could see he didn't mean it. He grabbed Nurse Dana's arm, and she let go of Connie's hair and swung around and slapped him across the face with her free hand. He stepped back, and Connie, one eye puffed up and blood oozing out of her nose, scuttled back into his bedroom. Damn bitch, said Dad, and he slapped Dana back, very hard, and she kicked at him, aiming for the place between his legs and hitting his leg instead when he ducked, and he backhanded her, knocking her against the wall.

Connie, clothes in a bundle in her naked arms, tried to scoot around Dad, and Dad grabbed a handful of her hair and flung her back into the bedroom. Nurse Dana flew at Dad with her fingernails scraping his face and he yelled and hit her again, and Connie darted around Dad and down the hall and down the stairs, as fast as she could run, leaving a trail of blood spots behind her on the floor.

Nurse Dana went for Dad, hitting him right in the stomach; he said, Oof! and doubled over, and Nurse Dana screamed something at him – Gina had never heard the words before – and then pelted down the hall and into her little room beside the nursery, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the whole upstairs. Dad, wheezing, straightened up and stormed after her, but she must have locked her door. He tried it, pulling with all his strength, but it wouldn’t open, so he began hammering on it yelling at her to open this door this moment, you stupid bitch, and Gina could hear Terry starting to cry in the nursery, frightened awake by all the noise.

We’ve got to get Terry, said Willis into her ear, and he began to edge down the hall. It scared Gina to be that close to Dad, who was red-faced and pounding on the door with his fists and kicking it and yelling awful things in that great furious voice, but she followed Willis, because Terry was so frightened and they had to do something about that, and she couldn’t let Willis do it all by himself. They got past Dad, who never even noticed they were behind him, and they ran into the nursery.

Terry was standing up in his crib, as red-faced as Dad and screaming his head off, and when he saw them he reached out his little arms right away to be picked up. Willis pushed the button on the end of the crib and the railed side slid down and Willis was able to lift Terry out, while Gina gathered up an armful of Terry’s blankets and his big blue stuffed toy dog.

Terry wrapped himself around Willis and stopped his screaming, although he was still sniffling and sobbing, and Willis led the way back to his own room, edging past Dad, who was beating on Nurse Dana’s door with both fists. She was yelling at him from inside the room; she was saying that he would never get his stinking hands on her again.

Willis put Terry down on his own bed, and Gina gave him the stuffed dog, which he clutched tightly. He stopped crying, sticking his thumb in his mouth and looking at his sister and brother with a sort of misty relief, and Gina used one of his blankets to wipe off his face. I’ll get a washcloth, said Willis, and started out into the hall and stopped in the doorway.

Goddamn, Eugene, shut the hell up, said Mom’s voice very clearly, and Gina could hear a big Whack, followed by a heavy thud. She ran to the door. There was Dad lying on the floor rubbing his head and moaning, and there was Mom wobbling from wall to wall, her maid trying to guide her back to her bedroom, and Mom was holding with both hands what looked like a leg from a chair, bent in the middle.

Once I get done with this damned contract marriage, this filthy place is history, Mom shouted, although it was hard to understand her, the way her words ran together, and she stumbled into her bedroom and slammed the door.

Willis backed into his room and shut the door, and he and Gina climbed back into his bed with Terry between them, sucking his thumb and now looking rather pleased at this midnight adventure. After awhile they heard someone stumbling up the hall, bumping into the walls just like Mom had, and then they heard Dad’s door slam shut. The hurt and anger out there began to fade. Gina felt a little better. Now that it was safer, Willis went and got a damp washcloth and a towel from the bathroom across the hall, and they washed Terry and let him settle down in Willis's bed, and Gina lay down there too. Willis folded up a quilt on the floor and slept on that. He said it was like soldiers, out on maneuvers; they didn't have beds either, he said, and they were very tough and didn't need beds. They probably didn't even like beds, he said.

Willis, said Gina, softly because Terry had finally gone to sleep with his thumb still in his mouth, why was Nurse Dana mad at Connie and Dad?

Just grownup stuff, said Willis. You’re too little to understand. When you get bigger you can figure it out.

Which wasn’t very satisfactory, but Gina knew not to ask any more questions. Willis was lying there on his back looking at the ceiling, and she could feel his anger. It wasn’t a thundercloud or the tired grayness either; it was something dark and deep, dug right into him, part of him, and it had to do with Dad. It was scary. But he wasn't mad at her and Terry, anyway, and now that the house was quiet again and they were all in Willis’ room and safe, Gina snuggled down beside Terry and went to sleep herself.

The next morning Nurse Dana was gone, with all her clothes and everything, and her aircar which had been parked in the drive out back. Dad didn't get up until it was afternoon, and Mom didn’t get up at all that day, which meant she had a bad headache. Her maid came downstairs and looked at Willis and Gina and Terry in the kitchen having lunch and she said she wasn't paid to look after kids and didn’t like kids and wasn’t going to do that again.

Well, said the housekeeper, leaning back against the food keeper with her arms folded, if you think I'm going to be a nursery maid at my age, and that one just starting to get into mischief – ! She looked darkly at Terry, who was toddling after the cleaner as it whirred through the room; he kept trying to grab it and it kept bobbing back and forth just ahead of him, sucking the dirt from the floor as it went. I have too much to do now, she said, which was funny; she just used the synthesizer most of the time, so she didn’t cook, and she used disposable dishes, so she didn’t have to wash them, and the cleaner did most of the floors and walls and curtains downstairs, and Mom's maid cleaned her room and everyone else cleaned their own, except for Terry, who was too little, and Dad. But the housekeeper was encased in a solid untouchable dark grey cloud; Gina could see it. No one could argue with her now.

You don't have to look after us, said Willis, forking macaroni and cheese into his mouth at the kitchen table. We can look after ourselves.

Well, you're going to have to look after yourselves today, said the housekeeper. I'm plenty busy this afternoon. You keep your brother and sister out of trouble and out from under my feet, you hear me, boy?

Willis gave her a dark grim look and went back to his macaroni and Terry, with a sunny laugh, fell upon the cleaner and tried to pick it up, but the vacuum held it down to the floor and it lurched away from him and swung out into the hall that led to the big dining room, where the grownups ate when other farm masters visited. Terry trotted after it, and Gina put down her fork and hurried after him, to be sure he stayed out of trouble, like the housekeeper said.

Nurse Dana never came back, and Mom finally hired a woman named Posie, who was bigger than Dad and very old, older than either Mom or Dad, and Gina could not see how she felt as easily as she had seen with Nurse Dana. Mostly Gina just picked up a kind of vague misty disinterest. But she let Gina alone after she found out that Gina could manage her own buttons and fasten her own shoes and she was nice to Terry, in a kind of absent-minded way. She had very bad headaches like Mom and sometimes she took a lot of medicine and didn’t get up from her afternoon nap until quite late, but that was all right. Gina and Willis didn’t mind looking after Terry. He could walk and talk a little, and he was kind of fun.

Spring came, and warmed into summer. Now that Gina was five, she found her freedom somewhat curtailed; she was big enough, Mom said, to take lessons on the computer like Willis did, learning how to read and write and keyboard and figure numbers, and she was stuck inside most mornings with the lessons, which came from a school which specialized in long-distance learning on a far-away planet called Haivran. There were schools on Linden’s World, but they were in the towns, which were also far away although not as far away as Haivran. A lot of the workers sent their children to board in town and go to schools, but Mom said no child of hers was going to attend classes with that rabble, and it was in the contract.

Gina didn't know much about numbers, but she knew how most words looked printed, and Willis had showed her a little bit about the sounds the letters stood for and how to figure out the words she didn't know. So the lessons for beginning readers were kind of boring, things she had known for a long time. But Mom thought it was very important, so Gina dutifully went through the motions.

Gina wondered what it would be like to go to school with a lot of other kids. She had very little experience with other kids; they weren’t encouraged to socialize with the workers’ children, and there were no other farm masters close enough to visit. Mom said they were better off with the computer and that was the sort of thing they had computers for, and she should be grateful, which Gina tried to be.

She worked on the numbers. Mom said she would help, but she was drinking a lot of that funny-smelling stuff, and she didn't always make a lot of sense. So if Gina had any problems she asked Willis, who had gone through these lessons years ago and knew everything about them. He was eleven now, and had much harder lessons. He was very smart; he got very good grades. He had a real gun now and hunted the varmints through the rows of the croplands around their house, and he lifted heavy weights and spent a lot of time running and throwing balls and tossing them through hoops and things like that. But he always seemed to have time for her and for Terry, and unless he was doing something dangerous, like hunting with his gun, he was always willing to take them along.

Gina liked to wander by herself, though, if Willis was with Terry, or if Posie wasn’t having a headache and could watch him. There were many hidden places in the crop fields, rises and dips in the land that the farm machines mostly went around as they planted and tended and harvested. One she particularly liked was just a little walk away from the house, but you’d never know it was there. It was a hollow lined with native grass, a velvet green, and in summer, like now, with clumps of stiff dark leaves and little white flowers. And in the center of the hollow was a pool of water, bubbling up from the stone-lined bottom, a natural spring, Willis told her. It watered the plants in the hollow, he said, and he thought it was safe to drink, too. He tried it and he didn’t get sick, so Gina wasn’t afraid to sample it herself. It was very cold, even on a hot day, and had a tang to it. Willis said it was minerals in the water.

The water and the grass made it seem cool down there even on a hot summer afternoon, and Gina wound her way through the rows of the crops with the sun beating on her head, planning to sit on the grass by the spring and eat her cookies and look at the reader Willis had loaned her. She couldn't read it in the house, where someone might see her reading something too old for her. They thought she should stay with the beginning readers, which weren't any fun. Up in her room, she showed the beginning readers to Terry, who liked the pictures, although what he really enjoyed was music vids. He could beat out a rhythm to go with the songs on an old plastic bowl, and he played a lot with a little toy flute Posie gave him.

He was with Willis today, and Gina was by herself. The water bubbled through the rocks and flowed in a small gentle stream through the green grass and out to the cropland. Gina crouched down by the water and took a drink, and then she sat by a clump of the flowering plants, cushioned by the grass under her, and turned on the reader.

It was a really good story, about a boy and a girl and a strange make-believe world only they could go into, by magic. Later in the story, Willis had told her, there were big battles, with primitive weapons and lots of blood; that was the part he liked. Gina liked the magic. She took a bite of one of her cookies and looked up to see, standing among the crop stalks on the side of the hollow, the strange man with the pale skin and the white hair and the very blue eyes, the one she had seen in the nursery last summer with Mom. She hadn’t heard him walking through the stalks, but there he was anyway, just standing there looking down at her with those sharp clear sky-eyes.

She stared back. He was wearing a white shirt, tan pants, a loose red and black jacket with wide sleeves, which looked too hot for a day like this; his hands, pale as his face, hung quiet and empty at his side. He had a fine silver-colored chain around his neck, and a pendant, with a design that looked like a ribbon or a cord tied in complex knots, hanging from it. The pendant was silver, too, but it looked dark against the white shirt.

He just looked at her, without moving or saying a word, all by himself and separate in the cold whiteness around his mind, and she felt once more as if she had seen him somewhere else, before he had been in the nursery with Mom, but she couldn’t remember where.

She stared back at him, as silent as he was.

Finally he blinked those vivid blue eyes and then he stepped back from the edge of the hollow into the rows of the crop land and he was gone. She scrambled out of the grass and looked around, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. He was swallowed up by the plant stalks, and the sky, and the golden sunshine, and there was not the slightest sign of his passage.

He might never have been there at all.

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