The perception appeared to be associated with an organ Daydanda had at first mistaken for a mouth: small and flat, centred towards the bottom of the face, and enclosed by just two soft-looking mandibles.
In the babe, the mandibles were almost constantly in motion, and there was a steady flow of undirected, haphazard communication, such as was normal for the little one's apparent level of development. With the older child, it was apparent that the messages that came when the mandibles were moving were stronger, clearer, and more purposeful in meaning than the others. Unfortunately, the content of these messages was mostly nothing but arithmetic.
Yet even when the 'mouth' was at rest, Daydanda noticed that there was a continuous trickle of communication from the Strange daughter—a sort of reluctant release of thought, rather like the babe's in that it was undirected and largely involuntarily, but with two striking differences: the eagerness of the babe to be heard, and the fact that the content of the older one's thoughts were not at all infantile, but sometimes startlingly mature.
Daydanda repeated her questions, this time watching the mandibles as the answers came, and realized that the thin stream of involuntary communication went on even while mandible messages were being sent—and that the 'opposite' answers she'd been receiving were the result of the differences between the purposeful broadcasts and the backeround flow.
The Strangers' Mother and her consort, it appeared, (gradually, the Lady learned to put the two answers together so that they made sense) had come here to survey the land (to look for a House-site, one would assume), and they had techniques as well for determining before excavation what lay far underground. However, they were now dead ... perhaps ... and ...
More arithmetic!
'What is it that you fear, child?' the Mother asked once more.
'I'm not afraid of those (unfamiliar symbol—something small and scuttling and unpleasant),' the daughter addressed her sibling, mandibling. 'Scared, scared, scared…' came the running edge of thought behind and around it.
'Don't be scared,' Petey told her.
'I'm not afraid of those old bugs!' she told him.
But it wasn't Petey, really; it was that big Mother-bug in the box. Mother-bug? What made her think that? That was what Petey thought....
Deborah was all mixed up. And she was scared; she was scared for Petey, and scared because she didn't know how they put things in her mind, and scared...
Scared all the time except when that good-feeling laughing was in her head; and then, even though she knew the—the Mother-bug must be doing that too, she couldn't be scared.
Deborah stood still, trembling with the realization of the awfulness of destruction she would somehow have to visit upon this bunch of bugs, if anything bad happened to Petey. She didn't understand how she had come to let them get him out of the ship at all; and now that they had him, she didn't know what to do about it. The first large tear slid out of the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek.
'Make food for sibling?' the Mother inquired, as she watched the clear liquid ooze out of the openings she had at first thought to be twin eyes.
The Strange daughter was apparently receiving all communication as if from the babe, for her answer was addressed to him: a reassurance, a promise, 'I will prepare (unfamiliar symbol) inside the ...' Another unfamiliar symbol there—ship—but with it came an image of an interior room of Strange appearance; and Daydanda safely guessed the symbol .to refer to the Wings-House. The first symbol—bottle, she found now, in the babe's mind—was a great white cylinder, warm and moist, and connected with the sucking concept ... but no time to classify it further, because the older child was mandibling another message, this time directly to the Mother.
'Return the babe to me, the babe is hungry. I must prepare his food.'
'You have food for the sibling now,' Daydanda pointed out patently. 'Come here to the litter and feed him.'
'Sure there's milk,' Dee said. 'There's lots of milk, Petey. I'll give you a bottle soon as we get back inside,' she promised, and warned the big bug hopefully: 'That baby's hungry; he's awful hungry—you wait and see. He'll start yelling in a minute, and then you'll see. You better give him back to me right now, before he starts yelling.'
'There is much food inside the ship,' the child told the babe, but all the while a background-message trickled out: 'There isn't; there really isn't. It won't last much longer.' And even as the two conflicting thoughts came clear in her own mind, Daydanda saw a large drop of the precious fluid roll off the girl's face and be lost forever in the ground.
'Come quickly!' she commanded. 'Now! Come to the Mother, and give food to the babe. Quick!'
But the doltish child simply stood there rooted in her fears.
Maybe if she just walked right over and lifted him out of the big box, they wouldn't even try to stop her ... but there were too many of them, and she didn't dare get much further away from the rocket.
'You better give him back to me,' she cried out hopelessly.
It took a while to sort out the sense from the nonsense. Of course, the child believed the babe to be hungry because the message about feeding came to her through him. Actually, the little one was warm and happy and content, with no more than normal infantile fantasies of nourishment in his mind. His belly was still half-full from earlier feeding.
But half-full meant also half-empty. If the older child was now producing food, and could not continue to do so much longer—as seemed clear from the contradictory content of her messages—the babe should have it now, while it was available. The daughter's reluctance to provide him with it seemed somehow connected with the bottle symbol. It was necessary to go into the Wings-House to get the bottle...
Daydanda searched the babe's mind once again. Bottle was food ... ? No ... a mechanism of some sort for feeding. Perhaps the flat mandibles were even weaker than they looked; perhaps some artificial aid in nourishment was needed ...
And that thought brought with an equally startling notion in explanation of the Wings-House ... a Strange race of people might possibly need artificial Wings to carry out the nuptial flight ...
That was beside the point from now. Think about it later. Meantime ... she had to reject the idea of artificial aid in feeding; the babe's repeated sucking image was too clear and too familiar. He nursed as her own babes did; she was certain of it.
Then she recalled the Strange daughter's earlier crafty hope of finding some way to return to the Wings-House with the babe, and emerge no more. Add to that the child's threat that the babe, if not immediately returned to her, would start yelling—would attempt to block communication as the girl herself did. It all seemed to mean that bottle was not a necessity of feeding at all, but some pleasurable artifact inside the ship, somehow associated with the feeding process, with which the daughter was trying to entice the babe.
'You wish to feed?' Daydanda asked the little one, and made a picture in his mind's eye of the girl's face with liquid droplets of nourishment falling unused to the ground.
'Not food,' came the clear response. 'Not food. Sad.' Then there was an image once again of the tubular white container, but this time she realized the colour of it came from a cloudy fluid inside ... milk. 'Milk-food, Tears-crying-sad.'
Tears-crying was for the face-liquid. It was useless, or rather useful only as emotional expression. It was a waste product ... (and she had been right in the first guess about twin eyes!) ... and then the further realization that the great size she had at first attributed to the bottle was relative only to the babe. The thing was a reasonably-sized, sensibly-shaped storage container for the nutrient fluid the babe and child called milk; and it was further-more provided with a mechanism at one end designed to be sucked upon.
Out of the welter of freshly-evaluated information, one fact emerged to give the Lady an unanticipated hope.
There was food—stored, portable food inside the winged structure. The Strangers were not biologically tied to the Wings; there was no need to return t
he babe in order to satisfy its hunger. Babe and Strange daughter bath could, if they would, return to Daydanda's House, there to communicate at leisure.
It remained only to convince the daughter ... and Daydanda had not forgotten that the child was susceptible to the Homecalling and to laughter both.
XIII
DEBORAH WALKED BEHIND the litter where Petey rode in state with ... with the Mother ... and all around her walked a retinue of bugs; dozens of them. They walked on four front legs, heads carried down and facing backwards, eyes looking forward. The tallest of them was just about her own height when it stood up straight. Walking this way, none of them came above her waist; they weren't so awful if you didn't have to look at their faces.
Certainly they were smart—so smart it scared her some ... but not as much as it would have scared her to keep on staying in the rocket. She was just beginning to realize that.
Dee still didn't know how they made her think things inside her head; or how they made Petey seem to talk to her; or how they knew what she was thinking half the time, even if she didn't say a word. She wasn't sure, either, what had made her decide to do what the Mother wanted, and packed up food to take along back to their house. She didn't even know what kind of a house it was, or where it was. But she was pretty sure she'd rather go along with them than just keep waiting in the rocket alone with Petey.
Wherever they were going, it was a long walk. Dee was tired, and the knapsack on her back was heavy. They'd started out right after lunch time, and now the dimness in the forest was turning darker, so it must be evening. It was hot, too. She hoped the milk she'd mixed would keep overnight; but she had crackers and fruit, too, in case it didn't. It wasn't the food that made the knapsack so heavy, though; it was the oxy torch she'd slipped into the bottom, underneath the clean diapers.
These bugs were smart, but they didn't know everything, she thought with satisfaction. They never tried to stop her from taking along the torch.
It was hot and damp, and the torch in the knapsack made a knobby hard spot bouncing against her back. But the bugs never stopped to rest; and Dee walked on in their midst, remembering that she was a Space Girl, so she had to be brave and strong.
Then suddenly, right ahead, instead of more trees, there was a bare round hill of orange clay. Only when you looked closer, it wasn't just a hill, because it had an opening in it, like the mouth of a cave, because the edges of the arch were smooth. It was even on both sides, and perfectly round on top; it had little bits of rock or wood set in cement around the edges to make it keep its shape…
She couldn't tell what was inside. It was dark in there `Too dark. Deborah paused inside the entranceway, oppressed by shadows, aghast at far dim corridors. One of the bugs tried to take her hand to lead her forward. The touch was sticky. She shuddered back, and stood stock-still in the middle of the arch.
`I hate you!' she yelled at all of them.
'Not hate,' said Petey, laughing. 'Fear.'
'I'm not scared of anything,' she told him; 'you're the one who's scared, not me. Petey's afraid of the dark,' she said to the big bug. 'You give that baby back to me right now. That's not your baby. He's my brother, and I want him back.'
The rocket, lying helpless on its side in the bare black clearing, seemed very safe and very far away. Dee didn't understand how she could have thought—even for a little while—that this place would be better. Everything back there was safety: even the burned-out memory of the control room was sealed off behind a safety door. Everything here was strange and dark, and no doors to close on the shadows—just open arches leading to darker stretches beyond ...
"Fraid of a door!' said Petey.
'I'm not afraid of any old door.' Deborah's voice was hoarse from pushing past the choke spot in her throat that was holding back the tears. 'You give me back my brother, that's all; we're not going into your house. He is, too, afraid of the dark; and he hates you too!' A Space Girl is brave, she thought, and then she said it out loud, and walked right over to the shadowy outline of the big bug's box, and reached in and grabbed for Petey.
Only he didn't want to come. He yelled and wriggled away; held on tight to the Mother-bug, and kicked at Dee.
She didn't know what to do about it, till she heard that good laughing in her head again. Petey stopped yelling, and Dee stopped pulling at him. She realized that she was very tired, and the laughing felt like home, like her own mother, like food and a warm room, and a bed with clean sheets—and maybe even a fuzzy doll tucked in next to her as if she were practically a baby again herself.
She was tired, and she didn't feel brave any more. She didn't want to go inside, but she didn't want to fight any more, either—especially if Petey was going to be against her, too. She sat down on the ground under the arch to figure out what to do.
'Light?' a voice like Mother's asked gently inside her head. 'You want a light inside?'
'I've got a light,' Dee said, before she stopped to think. 'I've got a light right here.'
She dragged the knapsack around in front of her and dug down into it. She was going to have to go in after all; there wasn't anything else to do. She got the torch out, and turned it on low, so it wouldn't get used up too fast. Then she started laughing, because this time it was the bugs who were scared. They all started running around like crazy, every which way, and half of them ran clear away, inside.
The child was certainly resourceful, Daydanda thought ruefully, as she issued rapid commands and reassurances, restoring order out of the sudden panic that the light had caused among the sensitive unpigmented wingless ones.
No daughter of mine, she thought angrily, with admiration, no daughter of mine would even dare to act this way!
'So you begin to see, my dear Lady ...' Kackot was obviously irritated and not impressed ... 'They have no place in the House-hold. Useless parasites ... Why not admit ...?'
'Quiet!'
Useless parasites? No! Dangerous they might well be; useless only if you counted the acquisition of new knowledge as of no use. The child would certainly have to be watched closely. This last trick with the light was really quite insupportable behaviour: rudeness beyond belief or toleration. Yet the bravado of the Stranger's attitude was not too hard to understand. Still unequipped for Motherhood, she had already acquired the instincts for it; she was doing, in each case, her inadequate best to protect both sibling and self from any possible dangers. And each new display of unexpected—even uncomfortable—ingenuity left Daydanda more determined than before to make both Strangers a part of her Household.
There was much to be learned. And...
Daydanda was many things :
As a Mother, she felt a simple warm solitude for two unmothered creatures.
As the administrative Lady of her Household, it was her duty first to make certain that the Strangers were so established that they could do no harm; and then to learn as much as could be learned from their Strange origins and ways of life.
As a person—a person who had flown, long ago, above the treetops—a person who had only a short time ago walked through the enlarged archway in defiance of all precedent and tradition—a person who had just this day dared the impossible, and ventured forth from her own House to make this trip—Daydanda chuck-led to herself, and wished she knew some way to make the Stranger understand the quite inexplicable affection that she felt.
The child said the babe feared darkness; this was manifestly untrue. The Mother still held the soft infant in her arms, and she knew there was no fear inside that body. As for the older one —it was not lack of light that she feared, either. Yet if the presence of accustomed light could comfort her—why, she should have her light!
`Come, child,' Daydanda coaxed the girl gently through the mind of the babe. `Inside, there is a place to rest. You have done much, Strange daughter, and you have clone well; but you are tired now. Inside, there is safety and sleep for the babe and for you. Come with us, and carry your light if you will. But it is time now to sleep; tomorro
w we will plan.'
At the Lady's command, the litter-bearers picked up her stretcher once more, and the lurching forward motion recommenced. The child on the ground stood up slowly, holding her light high, and followed after them. All down the dim corridors, Daydanda's warning went ahead, to spare those whom the little light might hurt from the shock of exposure.
XIV
DEBORAH LAY ON her back on a thick mat on the floor. It had looked uncomfortable, but now that she was stretched out on it, it felt fine. She had no blanket, and no sheets, and she'd forgotten to bring along pyjamas. At first she tried sleeping in all her clothes, but then she decided they were only bugs after all, and they didn't wear anything; so she took off her overalls and shirt. The room was warm, anyhow—almost too warm.
She got up and went across the room to the other mat, where Petey was, and changed his diaper and took off the rest of his clothes, too. She didn't know what to do with the dirty things; there was no soil-remover here. Finally, she folded them up neatly—all except the dirty diaper, which she wadded up and threw in a far corner. The rest of the things they'd have to wear again tomorrow, dirty or not.
Then she propped up Petey's almost empty bottle, and went back to her own mat, lay down again, and turned the oxy torch as low as she could, without letting it go out altogether. She could barely see Petey across the room, still sucking on the nipple, though he was just about asleep.
They hadn't really been captured, she told herself. Nobody tried to hurt them at all. It was more like being rescued. She didn't know what would happen tomorrow, except one thing—and that was that she would have to go back to the rocket to get some clothes at least. It was a long walk, though. Right now, she felt warm and safe and sleepy.
Daughters of Earth and Other Stories Page 24
