by Vernor Vinge
Sure enough, a couple minutes passed and the Ford was back—this time without its lights. It stopped on the other side of the road. The rain was heavy, and the wind came in gusts now. Sanda wasn’t sure, but it looked like two people got out of the car. Yes. There were two. They ran toward the house, one for the power meter, the other heading out of sight to her left.
This was more than the mysterious intruders had ever done before. And somehow there was a purposefulness in it tonight. As if this were no rehearsal. Sanda leaned out from the balcony. Her curiosity was fast giving way to fear. Not the psychic, moody fear the Gemstone broadcast, but a sharp, call-to-action type of fear. What is that guy doing? The dark figure maneuvered a small light, and something else. There was a snapping noise that came faintly to her over the rain.
And then she knew. It wasn’t just the power cable that came down to that side of the house; the phone line did, too.
Sanda whirled and dived back into her bedroom, shedding the jacket as she ran. She sprinted by the terrarium, barely conscious of the mood emerging from the Gemstone.
Grandmother stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking as if she were about to come up. She appeared tired, but there was a wan smile on her face. “Sanda, dear, I—”
“Grandma! Somebody’s trying to break in. Somebody’s trying to break in!” Sanda came down the stairs in two crashing leaps. There was a shadow on the porch where no shadow should have been. Sanda slammed the bolt to just as the doorknob began to turn. Behind her, Grandmother stared in shocked silence. Sanda spun and ran toward the kitchen. Once they had the intruders locked out, what could she and Gran do without a phone?
She nearly ran into him in the kitchen. Sanda sucked in a breath so hard she squeaked. He was big and hooded. He also had a knife. Strange to see such a man in the middle of the glistening white kitchen—the homey, comforting, safe kitchen.
From the living room came the sound of splintering wood and Grandmother screamed. Running footsteps. Something metal being kicked over. Grandmother screamed again. “Shut your mouth, lady. I said, shut it.” The voice—though not the tone—was vaguely familiar. “Now where is that prissy little wimp?”
“I got her in here,” called the man in the kitchen. He caught Sanda’s upper arm in a grip as painful as any physical punishment she had ever received and marched her into the living room.
Grandma looked okay, just scared and very small next to the fellow holding her. Even with the hooded mask, Sanda thought she recognized him. It was the clerk from the little grocery store they shopped at. Behind them, the electric heater lay facedown, its cherry coils buried in the carpet.
The clerk shook Grandma at every syllable he spoke. “All right, lady. There’s just one thing we want. Show us where they are and we’ll go.” This was the sense of what he said, though not the precise words. Many of those words were ones Sanda knew but had previously heard only from the rougher girls in gym class, where there was much smirking and giggling over their meaning. Here, said in deadly anger, those words were themselves an assault.
“I’ve a couple rings—”
“Lady, you’re rich and we know how you got it.”
Grandma’s voice was quaking. “No, just my husband’s investments.” That was true: Sanda had overheard Grandma telling Sanda’s surprised father the size of Rex Beauchamp’s estate.
The clerk slapped her. “Liar. Two or three times a year you bring a diamond into Arcata Gems. A rough diamond. Your husband was the big-time explorer.” There was sarcasm in the words. “Somewhere he musta found quite a pile of ’em. Either that or you got a diamond machine in your basement.” He laughed at his joke, and suddenly the girl saw through several mysteries. Not in the basement—upstairs.
“We know you got ’em. We want ’em. We want ’em. We want ’em. We—” As he spoke, he slapped her rhythmically across the face. Someone was screaming; it was Sanda. She barely knew what she did then. From the corner of her eye she saw Grandma’s meri lying on the sewing table. She swept it up with her free hand and pivoted swiftly around her captor, swinging the flattened stone club into the clerk’s chest just below the ribs.
The man went down, dragging Grandmother to her knees. He sat on the floor for several seconds, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Finally he could take great, gasping breaths. “I’ll. Kill. Her.” He came to his feet, one hand still on Grandma’s shoulder, the other weaving a knife back and forth in front of Sanda.
The other fellow grabbed the meri from Sanda’s hand and pulled the girl back from the clerk. “No. Remember.”
The clerk pressed his knife hand gently against his chest, and winced. “Yeah.” He pushed Grandmother down onto the sofa and approached Sanda.
“Lady, I’m gonna cut on your kid till you start talking.” He barely touched the knife to Sanda’s forearm. It was so sharp that a thin line of red oozed, yet the girl scarcely felt it.
Grandma came off the sofa. “Stop! Don’t touch her!”
He looked around at her. “Why?”
“I-I’ll show you where the diamonds are.”
The clerk was genuinely disappointed. “Yeah?”
“You won’t hurt us afterwards?”
The one holding Sanda touched his mask. “All we want are the diamonds, lady.”
Pause. “Very well. They’re in the kitchen.”
Seconds later, Mrs. Beauchamp showed them where. She opened the cabinet where she kept flour and sugar and withdrew a half-empty bag of rock salt. The clerk grabbed it from her, then swept the salt and pepper and sugar bowl off the kitchen table. He carefully upended the bag of rock salt and spread it so that no piece sat on another. “Do you see anything?” he said.
The other man spent several minutes examining the table. “One,” he said, and moved a tiny stone to the edge of Grandmother’s china rack. It looked glassy except for a milky haze on its surface. “Two.” He looked some more.
No one spoke. The only sounds were the clerk’s harsh breathing and the steady throbbing of rain against the windows. The night beyond the windows was black. The nearest neighbors were hidden beyond trees.
“That’s all. Just the two.”
The clerk’s obscenities would have been screamed if his chest had been up to it. In a way, his quiet intensity was more frightening. “You sold ten of these the last three years. You claim you’re down to two?”
Grandma nodded, her chin beginning to quiver.
“Do you believe her?”
“I don’t know. But maybe it doesn’t matter. We’ve got all night, and I want to cut on that girl. Either way, I’ll get what’s due me.” He motioned with his knife. “C’mere you.”
“Just as well. I think they recognize you.” The vise on Sanda’s upper arm tightened and she found herself pushed toward the point of the knife.
“Smell something burning?” her captor said abruptly.
The clerk’s eyes widened, and he stepped out of the kitchen to look down the hall. “Jesus, yes! The carpet and some newspapers. It’s that heater.”
“Unplug the heater. Roll the carpet over it. This place burns, we got nothing to search!”
“I’m trying.” There were awkward shuffling sounds. “Need help.”
The man holding Sanda looked at the two women. She saw his hand tighten on his knife. “I know where the rest of them are,” Grandma suddenly said.
He grabbed her, too, and hustled them to the basement door. Sanda was shoved roughly through. She crashed backwards against the rack of brooms and fell down the steps, into the darkness. A second later Grandma’s frail body fell on top of hers. The door slammed, and they heard the key turn in the lock.
The two of them lay dazed for a second. Next to her face, Sanda could smell the moldy damp of the stairs. Part of a mop seemed to be strung across her neck. “Are you okay, Grandmother?”
Her answer was immediate. “Yes. Are you?”
“Yes.”
Grandma gave an almost girlish laugh. “You make rather a goo
d pillow to land on, dear.” She got up carefully and switched on the stairs light. There was that impish smile on her face. “I think they may have outsmarted themselves.”
She led Sanda farther down the steps and switched on another light. The girl looked around the small basement, made even smaller by the old sample crates and Grandma’s laundry area. There was no way out of here, no windows set at ground level. What was Grandmother thinking of?
The older woman turned and slammed shut the interior hatch that Grandfather had mounted in the stairwell. Sanda began to see what she had in mind: The top of the stairs could be locked from the kitchen side, but this heavy door was now locked from their side!
Grandmother walked across the floor toward a stack of cases that sat under the living room. “Rex wanted this to be his laboratory. He was going to refrigerate—actually try to imitate polar conditions. That turned out to be much too expensive, but the heavy doors he installed can be useful…Help me with these crates, please, Sanda.”
They were heavy, but Grandma didn’t care if they went crashing to the floor. In minutes Sanda saw that they were uncovering another stairway, one that must open into the living room. “If they can put the fire out as easily as they should, then we’ll simply wait them out. Even a small fire can be seen from the street and I’ll wager the Fire Department will be here straight away. But if the fire wins free and the whole house goes…” There were new tears streaking her face. She swayed slightly on her feet, and Sanda realized that the older woman had been limping.
Sanda put her arm about her grandmother’s waist. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Grandma looked at her and smiled. Her face was a little bit puffy, swelling from the blows to it. “Yes, dear.” She bowed her head and touched her front teeth. “But my dentist will be overjoyed by all this, I fear.”
Grandmother turned back to the door and wiped at a quartz port set in the metal. “I still don’t know why Rex wanted this stair up to the living room. P’raps he just felt obligated to use both the surplus hatches he bought.”
Sanda looked through the tiny window. It was a viewpoint on the living room she had never imagined. They were looking through the decorative drapes that covered the wall behind the sofa.
The robbers had pulled off their masks and were madly dragging furniture—including the sofa—away from the blaze. They had rolled the carpet over the fire, but it was still spreading, leaking out toward the TV and the Maori statues on the far wall.
The floor itself was starting to burn.
The men in the living room saw this, too. The clerk shouted something that came only faintly through the insulated walls. Then they ran out of view. The fire spread up the legs of the TV and onto a Maori statue. For a moment, the figure blazed in a halo of light. Flames played from the twisted hands, from the thrusting tongue.
The lights in the basement went out, but the red glow through the quartz window still lit Grandma’s face. “They couldn’t save it. They couldn’t save it.” Her voice was barely audible.
Heavy banging at the other hatch, the one to the kitchen. Sanda knew that was no rescue, but murder denied. The banging ceased almost immediately; these two witnesses would live to tell their story.
She looked back through the quartz. The fire was spreading along the far wall. Their side of the living room was untouched. Even the drapes seemed undamaged.
“I’ve got to go out there, Sanda.”
“No!…I-I’m sorry, Gran. If they couldn’t save it, we can’t.”
“Not the house, Sanda. I’m going to save the Gemstone.” There was the strain of physical exertion in her voice, but the girl couldn’t see what she was doing. Only Grandma’s face was lit by the rose and yellow light. She was not pushing on the door; Sanda could see that much.
“You can’t risk your life for diamonds, Grandma. Dad and Mom have money. You can stay—”
The older woman grunted as though pushing at something. “You don’t understand. The diamonds have been wonderful. I could never have lived so free with just the money Rex left me. Poor Rex. The Gemstone was his greatest find. He knew that. But he kept it in a freezer down here, and never saw the miracle it really is.
“Sanda, the Gemstone is not just a thing that eats plastic flowers and passes diamonds. It is not just a thing that sends out feelings of cold and emptiness—those are simply its memories of Antarctica.
“Next to you and your dad—and your mum—I value the Gemstone more than anything. When I put my hand on it, it glows back at me—you felt that, too. It is friendly, though it scarce seems to know me. But when I touch it long enough, I feel Rex there, I feel the times he must have touched the stone…and almost I feel that he is touching me.”
She grunted; Sanda heard something spinning on oiled bearings. There was a popping noise from the hatch and Sanda guessed it could be pushed open now.
“The fire is along the outer wall. I have room to get to the stairs. I can pick up the Gemstone and get out down the backstairs—on the other side of the house from the fire. You’ll be safe staying here. Rex was very thorough. The basement is an insulated hull, even over the ceiling. The house could burn right down and you’d not be harmed.”
“No, I’m going with you.”
Grandmother took a breath. There was the look on her face of someone who must do something very difficult. “Sanda. If you ever loved me, you will obey me now; stay here.”
Sanda’s arms hung numb at her sides. If you ever loved me…It was many years before she could live with her inaction of the next few seconds.
Grandma pushed the door back. The drapes parted and there was a wave of heat, like standing near a bonfire. The air was full of popping and cracking, but the drapes that swung into the opening were not yet singed. Gran pulled the cloth away and pushed the door shut. Through the quartz window Sanda saw her moving quickly toward the stairs. She started up them—was almost out of sight—when she looked down, puzzlement on her face.
Sanda saw the fire burning out of the wall beneath her an instant before the stairs collapsed and Grandmother disappeared. The house groaned and died above her.
“Grandma!” Sanda crashed against the metal door, but it would not open now; ceiling timbers had fallen across it. The scene beyond the quartz was no longer recognizably a home. The fire must have burned behind the walls and up under the stairwell. Now much of the second floor had collapsed onto the first. Everything she could see was a glowing jumble. The heat on her face was like looking through a kiln window. Nothing out there could live.
And still the heat increased. The fallen center of the upstairs left a natural flue through the skylight. For a few moments the heat and rushing winds lived in equilibrium, and the flames steadied to uniform brilliance. Brief stillness in hell.
SHE WOULD HAVE FELT IT sooner if she had been waiting for it, or if its mood hadn’t been so different from all that went on about her: a chime of happiness, clear and warm. The feeling of sudden freedom and escape from cold.
Then she saw it: Its surface was no longer black and gray. It glowed like the ends of the burning timbers, but with overtones of violet that seemed to penetrate its body. And now that it moved, she could see the complete regularity of its shape. The Gemstone was a cross between a four-legged starfish and a very small pillow. It moved nimbly, gracefully through the red jumble beyond the quartz window, and Sanda could feel its exuberance.
Grandfather had been wrong. Grandmother had been wrong. The cold and desolation it had broadcast were not memories of antarctic centuries, but a wordless cry against what still was cold and dark to it. How could she have missed it before? Daddy’s dog, Tyrann, did the same thing: locked out on a misty winter night he keened and keened his misery for hours.
Gemstone had been alone and cold much, much longer.
And now—like a dog—it frisked through the brightness, eager and curious. It stopped and Sanda felt its puzzlement. It pushed down into the chaos that had been the stairs. The puzzlement deepened, s
haded into hurt. Gemstone climbed back out of the rubble.
It had no head, no eyes, but what she saw in its mind now was clear; it felt her and was trying to find where she was hiding. When it “saw” her it was like a searchlight suddenly fixing on a target; all its attention was on her.
Gemstone scuttled down from its perch and swiftly crossed the ruins. It climbed the wood that jammed shut the door and—from inches away—seemed to peer at her. It scampered back and forth along the timber, trying to find some way in to her. Its mood was a mix of abject friendliness, enthusiasm, and curiosity that shifted almost as fast as the glowing colors of its body. Before tonight it had taken minutes to change from one mood to another; before, it had been frozen to near unconsciousness. All those centuries before, it had been barely alive.
Sanda saw that it was scarcely more intelligent than she imagined dogs to be. It wanted to touch her and didn’t realize the death that would bring. Gemstone climbed back to the little window and touched a paw to the quartz. The quartz grew cloudy, began to star. Sanda felt fear, and Gemstone immediately pulled back.
It didn’t touch the quartz again, but rubbed back and forth across the surface of the door. Then it settled against the door and let Sanda “pet” it with her mind. This was a little like touching it had been before. But now the memories and emotions were deeper and changed quickly at her wish:
There was Grandmother, alive again. She felt Grandma’s hand resting on her (its) back. Wistful sometimes, happy sometimes, lonely often. Before that there was another, a man. Grandpa. Bluff, inquisitive, stubborn. Before that…Colder than cold, not really conscious, Gemstone sensed light all around the horizon and then dark. Light and darkness. Light and darkness. Antarctic summer and antarctic winter. In its deadened state, the seasons were a flickering that went on for time the little mind in the starfish body could not comprehend.
And before that…
Wonderful warmth, even nicer than now. Being cuddled flesh against flesh. Being valued. There were many friends, personalities strange to Sanda but not unknowable. They all lived in a house that moved, that visited many places—some warm and pleasant, some not. It remembered the coldest. In its curiosity, Gemstone wandered away from the house, got so very cold that when the friends came out to search, they could not find. Gemstone was lost.
