Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  And it was on her way to the House of the Oracles at age seventeen that she had met a man who said he was visiting the Oracles, who said he thought he’d stay for a while, who said his name was Joshua, that she was a really pretty girl, and would she have any idea what disease was bothering his chickens? Discussions concerning the diseases of fowl were followed by discussions about everything under the sun. They became acquainted, and better acquainted, and very well acquainted, and not long afterward he built a very solid house in nearby Hench Valley, invited her to share it, and fathered twin girls upon her.

  While all this was going on, he also intimated he had not merely happened to meet her, but had been sent for that purpose. And, she guessed, it was the Oracles who had sent him and the Oracles who summoned him away, along with their child.

  A year or so later, it was from the House of the Oracle, she assumed, that the other men came, four all together, counting Joshua. All these men shared certain attributes. She often thought they could have been brothers. One she remembered best for his beautiful voice, not that the others had not had nice voices. One had played the guitar wonderfully, like a master, not that the others couldn’t play well. One could tell stories that kept you waiting eagerly for the next word; well, they all did, really. All of them were full of laughter and pleasure. Nothing about this was a surprise; Lillis had been told by her first consort why they would be coming and leaving, and from everything she had read and knew, it had seemed a worthy reason. Until the last one and the last child: Trudis.

  Well, Trudis now had a Pa in the house, and Lillis did not intend to share either the house or her body with the Pa. Relinquishing the problem that was Trudis, Lillis returned home. Home was rather depleted, only three members of her earlier “family” were there, but others arrived. All of them were interesting and most of them were pleasant. There wasn’t much news. This one had moved to Wellsport. That one had gone south down the Big River to see the ocean. A man named Joshua had built himself a house up the hill, and was getting to be quite an acceptable neighbor. Lillis eagerly went to meet him. It was the same Joshua! Or Jeremy? Or Jubal? Strangely, she couldn’t quite remember the little differences that had distinguished them before. He was indeed very acceptable, and they subsequently shared many pleasurable activities from mushroom and herb hunting, to fishing, to exchanging views about the possible future of the world, to playing cards or “cubeys.” This was a kind of spelling game involving ten dice with different sets of letters on the sides. One posited a question, then each player made an answer to that question by throwing the cubeys, then using the ten letters on top—­or if one allowed oneself multiple throws, any multiple of ten—­to spell an answer. The number of throws was determined in part by the complexity of the question asked.

  At that point Lillis believed she had fulfilled every obligation she had incurred, every duty she had sworn. Now she could relax and delight in the simple pleasure of having a close and loving friend.

  Though Lillis had never felt comfortable enough with the Oracles to penetrate very far into their “House,” she had always had access to an area just inside the cave complex where various complicated machines were kept; some were food machines that could take any recipe and turn it into a meal. Some were information machines that answered virtually all questions; others would allow one to look at and listen to various places, if one knew the code locations of those places. Lillis learned the location numbers for the villages in Hench Valley, for a town over the mountain called Saltgosh, and for areas beyond that called Artemisia, as well as several other towns near roads where ­people traveled. One could see who was going where; one could hear what was being discussed. By using the device, she was able to find out what was happening in Tuckwhip or Grief’s Barn or anywhere else in Hench Valley by listening to the women at the well. Whether by foresight or good fortune, each village obtained its cooking and drinking water from its own good well. Men did not go to the wells, and women could speak freely only there, so everything suppressed and buried came boiling out at the wells.

  Lillis learned that Gralf had fathered, or “Pa’d” as the locals said, a baby on Trudis as quickly as any twelve-­year-­old female could manage it—­though she was actually not far from thirteen when the baby was born, a girl. This baby lived until she started to crawl, her neighbor reported. She crawled into the creek and drowned. She was too young to have acquired a name. Not quite a year later, Trudis set the second daughter outside in her basket, got to drinking beer with Gralf, ended up in bed, and “fergot ’bout the baby,” so Trudis said at the well. “Basket ’uz bloody. Wild dogs, prob’ly,” said Trudis, dry-­eyed, quoting Gralf. “Mebbe bobcat. Mebbe uh owl.”

  Many men made a strong town: that was the sum and total of truth. Nobody really wanted the bother of rearing girl babies and no one in Hench Valley planned for a future in which those females might be wanted. Gralf chastised Trudis after each female birth and again after each one died, though not as severely as for having had them in the first place.

  After that came four boy babies, two sets of twins. None of them had suffered fates similar to the girl babies because Gralf kept an eye on them, though Trudis did not. Trudis didn’t keep an eye on much—­except perhaps Gralf himself. Time went on. After the second set of twins, Trudis did not conceive again. As the boys reached their sixth or seventh year, they joined the pack of boys who lived out in the wild. “Parenting” in Hench Valley consisted of a Pa pointing at a dirty, probably hungry, mostly nude boy and saying, “That-­un’s wunna mine.” Lillis believed they recognized their sons by smell. She could not think of any other possible way. The boys took refuge where they could during the winters—­often in the tunnels the Hench Valley men had dug into the buried city that lay beneath the valley, often earning their food by helping a Pa extend his “treasure tunnels” farther into the buried city. Eventually, if not killed in a fight, they went off “hunting women” and didn’t return. If anyone had bothered to remember, it had been more than twenty years since any man from Hench Valley had gone off hunting a woman and had actually brought one back.

  It seemed Trudis’s childbearing was over. That fall, however, when Slap and Grudge, the second set of Trudis’s boys, were six years old, a predator began killing livestock, including one of the half-­dozen cows left in the valley. None of the cows were in milk, the men having inadvertently slaughtered their only bull calf for a barbecue, so amply supplied with beer that the recent death of the only other bull in the valley had been forgotten. When they sobered up enough to become infuriated—­fury was always an acceptable substitute for thought in Hench Valley—­the men went hunting for the killer, whatever it was.

  The killer beast had left very catlike tracks, and the tracks led the Hench Valley men a great distance away, deep into distant woods, beyond twisted ridges. In their absence, a tall, strong, quiet sort of fellow made camp out in the woods at a point equidistant from the towns of Tuckwhip, Bag’s Arm, Gortles, and Grief’s Barn, and thereafter he became familiar to the women—­and to Grandma, who watched his amatory adventures as though they had been a play on a stage. But then she had always thought of Tuckwhip as a stage and of herself more as bit-­part player than as a resident. The women were quick to notice how clean he was, and how pleasant his manner. They noticed his very pale skin, his white hair, not from age but from birth. There was a sudden onset of bathing in hot springs among the village women, only two of whom—­captured as children some thirty years before from among a group of travelers on the road—­had ever before met a male who was either clean or pleasant. Several months went by. Shortly before the valley men returned, the stranger departed. There were three reminders he had actually been there: several women had become pregnant; some women so enjoyed being free of the itch that they kept up their habit of bathing and washing their clothes; and there was a young bull in the cowshed at Grief’s Barn. The stranger had brought it, leading it on a leash, like a dog. No one had wonder
ed at that, no one at all. One or two of the women thought fleetingly that the cows could be bred and would come into milk about the time the women would have their children, just in case cow’s milk was needed.

  Along with all this, Lillis learned that Trudis, the only woman of childbearing age left in Tuckwhip, was among the pregnant in Hench Valley. In the family home near the House of the Oracles, where Lillis now dwelt in a degree of comfort that almost repaid her years of frustration, Lillis recalled what she had heard of “Silverhairs,” a race said to be preternaturally wise, able to read the future, able to set things in motion to achieve future ends, sometimes generations in advance—­able, indeed, to do most if not all of the wonders the Oracles were reputed to achieve. If what was said of them was true, then Trudis’s pregnancy might result in something other than the birth of another Hench Valley stone. Lillis talked with Joshua/Jeremy/Jubal/James about it, saying, “I think I’ll consult the Oracles about it.”

  Joshua et al. grinned and said, “Now, Lill, why would you do that?”

  “Well, it’s important, maybe. And the Oracles are right here, pretty near here, anyhow. And with them available, wouldn’t one be foolish not to consult them?”

  “Well then, love, you go right ahead and consult. Just don’t place much faith in what they have to say.”

  He was right. Why should she behave foolishly? Instead, why not simply find out? She decided to go back to Tuckwhip when the baby came. Selfishly, she preferred to return at the latest possible time: when Trudis was already in labor. If the baby turned out to be another stone, she would be able to tell at once and could leave without unpacking. When she reminded herself of Trudis’s propensities, however, she utilized other bits and pieces of the Oracles’ equipment to make a number of surreptitious visits during the pregnancy, enough of them to assure the child would be born without the handicap of a drunken mother. Unaccountably, though temporarily, Trudis lost her insatiable thirst.

  NEEDLY WAS ONE OF THE six babies born in Hench Valley that summer, though no one except Grandma seemed to notice them. The babies seemed to slip through the mind like the shadow of trout in a brook: half gone before half glimpsed. Needly—­from the moment Grandma finished washing and wrapping her—­was tiny and pale, with hair as white as the moon, appearing to be almost silver in good light. Grandma visited every one of the babies: watched their eyes, their gaze, their quiet, and decided that none of them were stone. Not only were they not stone, they were very definitely something far superior. In the light of what knowledge she had about genetics, she found this . . . more than merely puzzling. It contradicted everything she knew about breeding. A metallurgical analogy would be to melt equal parts of gold and lead together and pour the mixture out as pure gold. It couldn’t happen!

  Or it could if an ovary could be induced to produce one golden egg out of ten thousand lead ones. Perhaps by chance. Or the impossibly favorable result of cosmic rays. Or if someone transplanted an already properly fertilized egg into the woman at the appropriate time.

  Once she had decided it was remotely possible, Lillis gave up thinking about it.

  It had been considered lucky to have “the Healer” provide a secret name for a baby, as she was one of the handful of residents who could read. So Lillis played cubeys to get baby names for the new mothers. The other two girls were named Clethra (discarding a Z, a Q, and an X) and Acrea (discarding two Us, two Ws and another R). Cubeys provided the boys with the names Brian and Galan and Victor. Like Needly, their hair was silvery, like spun metal. The ­people of Hench Valley glanced across Silverhair babies and, except for their mothers, forgot what they had seen. Needly had two half sisters and three half brothers, and every one of them survived: two in Gortles, two in Grief’s Barn, one in Bag’s Arm, Needly herself in Tuckwhip.

  Lillis had left Hench Valley wearing Healer Ma’s shoes. Healer Grandma Lillis returned to Tuckwhip wearing those same shoes. The only way she could guard this child was by living there or taking her away, and—­yet again!—­everything about the child spoke of a predestined life in which it would be unwise to interfere too greatly. Joshua thought it would be dangerous for the child and for Lillis if he came within reach of Gralf, and Grandma concurred, suggesting that Joshua take a short vacation, look up some old friends. She thought she wouldn’t be staying long. Just long enough to find out what was going on, then maybe she’d leave and take the little one . . . ones with her.

  She visited the other mothers just as a Healer Grandma would do, checking them out, seeing if they were healthy. Grandma Lillis decided that as soon as they were weaned she would take them away. All of them were alike: healthy, vigorous, and they cried seldom if ever. They looked at the world out of wide, knowing eyes.

  And they disappeared. As they got to early weaning age, they disappeared, one at a time. Only Grandma Lillis realized this, and she nodded to herself: so these babies were intended for something specific, and someone had come for them! When they disappeared, the mothers of the babies behaved oddly for a few days, walking around, peering behind things, as though trying to find something that was lost without knowing what it was. Sometimes each would take a gold coin from a pocket and fondle it, wonderingly. The little ones had not been sold or killed; gold had been left behind to pay for what . . . ? The womb? The breast? Certainly no one had ever abused the infants, not by word or action. No one had abused the women who had borne the children either, which was most surprising! No one took the gold away from the mothers either, which was truly astonishing! The third boy was only a little under a year old when he, too, was gone. All gone, except for Needly!

  Unfortunately, when the others had gone, so had the protective immunity that infancy had provided. Gralf had begun to notice the baby. Lillis, who was now a Grandma, managed to keep the infant out of his way while she waited for someone to come and collect the little girl. Her wait was a troubled one, as she half hoped someone would come soon, before the child fell to harm, half longed that no one would take her. Lillis had a great store of thwarted mother love saved up, and she had come to love Needly dearly. She had loved all her own but had given them up as she had been told, had presumed, had accepted that destiny required her to do so. This one, she rebelliously decided, would be taken over her dead body! She even threw a few tantrums with those . . . Oracles, asking them to find out what in . . . was going on?

  The Oracles reacted to tantrums as they did to anything suggesting criticism. They disappeared. They were simply not there when one went looking for them. If eventually discovered and confronted, the Oracles were oracular, meaning allusive rather than definitive, indicative rather than directional, and always refusing to clarify until the matter in question culminated, at which time they invariably said, “Well, that’s more or less what we meant.” With Lillis occupied full-­time down in Tuckwhip waiting for Needly to disappear, Joshua did disappear. Lillis had a crying fit over this, before deciding that she had deserted him, and in all honesty, she would have done the same if he had deserted her. When the second year passed, and the third, Lillis decided Needly’s continued presence could mean only that she, Lillis, was considered to be an adequate custodian or keeper or guardian. This both pleased and annoyed her. Someone could have told her! It would have been polite! She could have told Joshua, and she could have taken the child to their home. If he had consented. Probably.

  The child, though remaining as pallid as those strange growths sometimes seen in cellars, thrived and grew and no one . . . nothing ever informed Lillis, now Grandma, whether she really was the proper guardian or whether Needly had just been overlooked. Was Needly different in some way? Was she, Lillis, supposed to do something about Needly, or was something else supposed to happen? Fearing any attention paid to the child, Lillis did what all mothers in Hench Valley did for their daughters: she uglified the child so that nobody would look at her covetously. Even as she rubbed soot on the child’s skin and made her hair look like a rat’s nest wi
th a carefully contrived horsehair wig, Lillis kept exploring, looking around herself for clues, going off into the woods and speaking into the silence of the trees, asking!

  Once, only once, she went all the way to the Listener and asked it, not really expecting and not receiving any answer.

  She wanted badly to take the child away but was fearful of upsetting some larger purpose. She had learned many things from her real family . . . the one she had supposedly been born into. She had learned that there were larger purposes in the universe than those readily apprehended by human beings, and though it would be egocentric to believe one was, necessarily, part of any such predestined thing, if one truly thought one was involved, then it might be wisest to go along with it.

  Lillis did believe it: she thought she might be caught up in such a purpose. She was, nonetheless, annoyed. If something was supposed to happen, someone or something ought to be kind enough to give her a set of ­directions!

  No one did. She struggled with her annoyance—­sometimes outright rage—­and kept the matter to herself as much as she could. Rage was wearying. It wore itself into tatters and the pieces eventually blew away. It was entirely possible she was already doing precisely what they, whoever they were, wanted her to do, and until something else was required, she would simply go on doing whatever it was she was doing. She had dealt with the Gralf-­being-­the-­Pa-­in-­the-­house problem early on by saying she had a disease, and if any man bothered her, his parts would fall off. Gralf believed her. Gralf told every other Pa, and they too believed. Also, Gralf was neither as young nor as insatiable as he had been at one time.

  As Needly grew, Grandma taught her everything she could about healing, herbs, the nature of plants and how to distill them into useful, portable substances. She taught her about beasts and their treatment as well. She took the child, from the age of five, with her when babies were delivered and had her assist in the process, borrowing newborns now and then so that Needly could feel them. “See, that’s the head. Feel it. Imagine it all slimy, but under the sliminess, that’s the way it feels. That’s the little arm, feel it, and the leg. See, if it’s turned wrong in the womb, you might have to grab this and pull, so. Understand?”