“I looked and it isn’t. It’s been used some, but it hasn’t been tampered with, not the way they do there.”
“So what did the hotel say?”
“The hotel picky-pecked at its little keyboards and winky-winked at its little screens and told me to take it away. Not theirs, they said. They didn’t have any like this one, and if they did have, all theirs were accounted for.”
“I be damned.”
“Yes. Exactly what I said. Couldn’t be a Commons townee, could it?”
“You know every one of ’em as well as I do, Ducky. You know every face and every figure and if any of ’em puts on five pounds or insults his sister-in-law, you’d know and so would I.”
“Well, we both know what that leaves, Jelly That leaves the estancias, that does. Lots of unfamiliar faces out there. But that’s very puzzling indeed, isn’t it, my dear? If it had come from there, we’d have seen it.”
Aircars going between Commoner Town and the estancias were permitted to land only at the car terminal at the center of town or at the port. Any aircar landing at the port or in town would be observed. If this lovely creature with the strange eyes had turned up either place, surely somebody would have seen it.
“Off a ship?” hazarded Jellico.
“You know the silly regulations as well as I do, Jelly, dear. Passengers and crew off, fumigate at every port. How could this have lived on a ship while it was being debugged? No, it didn’t come off an empty ship. And it didn’t come from the hotel. And it doesn’t belong to me or to Saint Teresa or to any of the other bitty bit-players down in our place, no it doesn’t. I’m afraid it’s your problem, Jelly. Yours alone.” Ducky Johns giggled, the ruffles on the tent-dress quivering, a fleshquake in paroxysm.
Jellico shook his head. “Not mine, Ducky, old girl. I’ll get an image of her, then you take her back. You’ve got plenty of room in that place of yours. Put it in an empty room and feed it something. The stasis-tank is no place for that. Doesn’t need freezing. Needs tending. Better with you.”
“How trusting,” she simpered.
“Oh, you won’t sell her, Ducky. If she can’t talk, she can’t speak a consent waiver, and you know I’ll be comin’ down to look her over again next time I’m in Portside to check transience permits. And after I’ve had a chance to ask around. If this isn’t the damnedest thing…”
He went on looking at the girl as he set up the imager, she returning his gaze with her head turned sideways so that he saw only one eye, an eye in which no intelligence showed at all. And yet, when he had finished recording the creature’s image and Ducky held out her hand, the girl took it and smiled, turning the head upward and to one side again to cast a sidelong look.
Jelly shivered. There had been something strangely familiar about that look. Almost as strange as where the girl could have come from. Not through the swamp, that was certain. Not in an aircar. Not on a ship. Not from the hotel. And what did that leave?
“Damn all,” whispered Jelly to himself, watching old Ducky loading the girl back into her three-wheeled runner before turning it back toward Portside. “Damn all.”
The morning after the bon Damfels’ Hunt, Marjorie was up before light. She had slept little, and that little restlessly. When she slept she had dreamed of Hippae, and her dreams had been threatening. She had risen in the night to walk about the winter quarters, going into the children’s rooms, listening to them breathe. Anthony had been making little groaning sounds and shivering in his sleep, almost as El Dia Octavo had done that day she had seen the things on the ridge. Marjorie sat on the edge of his bed and ran her hands over his shoulders and chest, stroking him as she would have one of the horses, pulling the anxiety out of him until he lay motionless beneath her fingers. Dear Tony, little Tony, firstborn and much beloved. So like her that she could read every flicker of his expression, every line of his body. She yearned over him, wishing the disappointments away. They would come anyway. He was so like her that they must come, as day follows night.
In the neighboring room Stella slept soundly, rosy in the dim light, lips slightly parted. Each day made her resemblance to Rigo more pronounced — his passion, his pride, and a stunningly feminine version of his handsome face. Marjorie stood over her, not touching her. If Stella were touched she would come awake, full of questions, full of demands — questions Marjorie couldn’t answer, demands she couldn’t meet. Like Rigo, Marjorie thought to herself, just like Rigo. And like Rigo, Stella demanded that the world understand her even while she overwhelmed any effort to be understood.
“I tried to know Rigo,” Marjorie whispered to herself, an old litany, almost an apology, an excuse, something she said to herself again and again. Something she used to say to Father Sandoval before he had tried to mend what seemingly could not be mended by giving her penance after penance of obedience and submission until she had felt so trapped between them, she could not ask for forgiveness anymore. What she had told Father Sandoval was true, so far as it went. When she and Rigo had been newly married she had sometimes waited until Rigo was very tired or even asleep and then curled against him, pressed herself tight, wanting to feel him in his skin, feel all the muscles running there softly, getting to know the body of him as she did his face. He always responded, fiercely, passionately, hammering at her, until she was lost. There was no separate place she could stand to feel what he was like. If she stood apart from him, he accused her of being remote. If she came close, he swallowed her up.
“I tried to tell him,” she whispered, still looking at the sleeping Stella. “I tried to tell him, just the way I’ve tried to tell you.” And that, too, was true. She had tried to say, “Rigo, just hold me, gently. Let me learn the rhythm of your blood and your breath.” Or, “Stella, be still a moment. Just talk to me. Let us know one another.”
Marjorie remembered lying in the stable with her belly pressed close to a foal, quiet on the straw, the mare whickering above, soft nose pressing down on the foal and on the child-Marjorie both, until all three were same- scented, hay-scented, straw-smelling. Marjorie had felt the blood running in the foal’s veins, felt the smooth pull of the muscles over the bone. Then later, when the foal grew and they raced together, she understood what it was that moved and the spirit that moved it. She had wanted to learn Rigo like that, but he wouldn’t let her.
Stella was the same. Always passionate. Always in the depths or on the heights. Always give me, give me, give me, and never anything warm or gentle in return, never any simple affection. No hug. No little joke for the two of them to share. No peace. Not that Stella shared much with her father, either. No. If she was capable of affection at all, she had saved it all for her friend back home, the beatific Elaine.
Marjorie felt her own heart thudding away under her hand and smiled ruefully at herself. She was too old to feel this jealousy. It was not her heart that yearned toward Stella, it was her stomach, clenching now with an agony of helpless love which she could not show. Showing love to Stella was like showing meat to a half-wild dog. Stella would seize it and swallow it and gnaw its bones. Showing love to Stella was opening oneself up for attack.
“You don’t really love me. When I was little, you promised me a trip to Westriding, and I didn’t get to go!” This, the then sixteen-year-old Stella, rehearsing a grievance at least eight years old.
“You’ve been told a thousand times that Grandpa was ill. Stella. He was too sick to have company. He died not long after that.”
“You promised and then you decided all by yourself we shouldn’t go. You’re always saying we’ll do things and then we don’t. Now you’re dragging me off to this awful place, making me leave my friends without even asking me if I want to go! Why aren’t we more like a family? I wish I were Elaine’s sister. The Brouers don’t act like you do.”
“If she mentions the Brouers to me again,” Marjorie had said to Rigo, “I will strangle her.”
“They’re friends,” Rigo had replied, giving her a curious look. “They’re best friends. Why should you resent that?”
“I don’t resent that. I resent the Brouers being held up to me as a standard of perfection.”
“All kids think some other family is perfect,” he said.
“I never did.”
“Yes, but,” he had said, “you’re strange.”
“I’m strange,” she told herself now, looking down at the sleeping girl, wondering what it was about the Brouers that had evoked Stella’s admiration. What quality did the Brouer family have that attracted her? Family? What did Stella mean by family?
“I wish the Brouers were my family,” Stella had said dozens of times, stubbornly, without explaining, knowing she was hurting, wanting to hurt. “They do things together. I wish I had a family like that.”
