Twin-Bred

by Karen A. Wyle

  “Every time, I hope it’ll be you coming next.”

  Veda stood in silence.

  “Veda, haven’t you stayed here long enough? You know how awkward it is for Brian to commute, when this place doesn’t officially exist. And I miss you! And Melly. I’m not getting any younger, Veda.”

  “Daddy, you’re hardly old and doddering! And you do get to see me. Us. It’s official business for you to come here.”

  “It’s not like having you at home. Or near home, with other — in a normal neighborhood. Living a normal life.”

  “You didn’t care so much about my living a normal life when you saw a use for me. Before the political winds shifted. You were quite insistent.”

  “So now you’re punishing me? By isolating yourself out here with all these —”

  “Don’t say it!” She started walking, and he scurried after her. “No, Daddy. I’m not angry, not really. I had my own reasons — not that you noticed. . . . And this is my life now. I don’t want it to be different. What we’re doing out here — it’s important. I may not have had quite the right experience to join the scientific or technical staff, but I’m part of the effort. I’m raising my boys to be good and decent, and to use their skills to help others. And if things work out — they could do great things, I know it.”

  “And Melly? What’s her place in this grand plan?”

  “Daddy, she’s the happiest child! She has dozens and dozens of what amount to big brothers and sisters. And she’s learning most of what the older children are learning. They’re getting a fantastic education, Daddy. Better than any children get back home, I’d wager. Whether Melly wants to be a scientist, or a historian — or a politician! — she’ll be well prepared.”

  Stewart shook his head. “I don’t know what to say to you. Aren’t you even thinking about it? About coming home?”

  They were almost to the entrance. Veda stopped again and put a hand on his arm. “We can’t really see what’s coming. Everything we’re here for — none of us really knows if it’ll come to pass. You know the saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ Please don’t wish too hard for me to come home, Daddy. Please — please wish for us, for the Twin-Bred, to do what this world needs so badly.”

  Stewart smiled a little painfully. “By gum, I’ve raised an idealist. What would my colleagues say?. . . Very well, my dear. I wish you the best. And I’ll come when I can.”

  Veda leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Please do. And don’t forget the cat food.”

  Veda plunked the cat on the empty chair in Mara’s office. Mara stared. “Good Lord. I’ve only seen a few, and so long ago! It’s like seeing an alien.” She laughed a little. “So to speak.”

  “My father brought it. There’s some concern the Tofa may not like having them around, and he’s the Tofa’s tame Councilman of the moment. . . . What do you think? Can we keep it here?”

  “Has Peer-tek seen it? What was his reaction?”

  “Curious. Cautious. Not hostile. Yet another way the Tofa Twin-Bred are different from other Tofa?”

  “Let’s not over-generalize. Not all humans are fond of cats. But it’s an interesting data point.” Mara gazed over Veda’s head, thinking hard. “If it were a dog, I’d wonder if this was yet another case of human trait crossover. Humans and dogs co-evolved, after all. Human reaction to dogs may be instinctive. Cats are a different story, at least to some extent. Cats tolerate people, for their own purposes, and some people find that independence endearing. And cats have their dignity. They don’t like disrespect. For cat lovers, that’s quite all right. Cat lovers are the sort of people who can take another species on its own terms.”

  “Well, I rather hope that most of our Twin-Bred — human and Tofa — are that sort of people. . . . So what shall I do with it?”

  “Keep it, by all means, if you don’t object to it. In fact, I have a plan for your new arrival.”

  The memo went around the next day to the teachers of Diplomacy. Each of them was to work a visit from Veda and her cat into his or her curriculum.

  Veda sat at the front of the room with the cat — now named Mia — in her lap. The twins in their pairs came up and squatted down beside her, one on each side. Ms. Wilson had told them they could take turns looking at the cat and stroking it, and should then write down their thoughts about it, to be shared when all had had a turn. Mia was of a fairly unflappable disposition and took it all quietly, honoring the occasional pilgrim with a purr.

  When all had filed past, Veda put Mia in her box and slipped away. Ms. Wilson called for her students’ attention. “All right. Before you read your notes to each other, let’s get a few preliminary reactions. How many of you liked being near the cat?”

  Most of the humans and about half of the Tofa raised one hand apiece.

  “How many of you didn’t like being near it?”

  Five Tofa raised a hand, more hesitantly.

  “It’s all right. Ka-teer, why didn’t you like it?”

  Ka-teer swiveled slightly back and forth and blinked. Ka-teer’s twin Mario patted Ka-teer’s nearest hand in reassurance. Ka-teer spoke with some hesitation. “It was different. I had never seen one before. I could not predict how it might react to me, or what it might do.”

  “Yes, cats can be rather inscrutable. . . . You didn’t know enough about it, and so you didn’t — what, didn’t trust it?”

  “Yes! That is just how I felt.”

  “That’s very interesting, Ka-teer. Thank you. I want all of you to think about what Ka-teer has just said.

  “Russell, you see Tofa every day, and all our Tofa see you humans. Do you know how often most humans out there see a Tofa? And vice-versa?”

  Russell cleared his throat. “Not very often. Maybe once a week?”

  Ms. Wilson looked around the room, from human to Tofa to human. “I know how strange this will seem to you twins, but many humans see a Tofa two or three times a year, and usually from a distance. And many Tofa see humans even less often. There are members of both species who have never seen the other.”

  Ms. Wilson looked around sharply to hush the murmurs that spread round the classroom. “Ka-teer, if you saw a cat once or twice a year, briefly and with minimal contact, do you think you would learn much about it? Enough to become more comfortable with it?”

  “No, Ms. Wilson. I probably would not.”

  “Just so.” The classroom was completely quiet now. “When you go out into the world, you will be meeting with humans and Tofa who do not understand or trust each other. Your job will not be simply to talk to your own species and convey the results. You will need to show them, by example and by your leadership, that they can learn about each other, and learn to trust. It will be a challenge. But I and all your teachers will keep preparing you to meet it.

  “We’ll all read our notes now. Peggy, you go first.”

  As Peggy lifted her tablet, Crel-tan leaned over to Simon and whispered in his ear. “And let us hope that when we meet our own people, they do not regard us as cats.”

  Chapter 30

  Melly sat entranced in front of the viewer. Brian came in and kissed Veda on the neck. “She’s viewing it again?”

  “For the fourth time this week. . . . I was afraid it’d make her sad, but it doesn’t seem to have that effect on her.”

  Melly paused the viewer and ran up to be kissed. “Daddy, I have an idea, and I want you to talk Mommy into it.”

  Veda laughed. “At least you’re up front about it!”

  Brian dropped into a chair. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I want to put on a play. With Twin-Bred actors.”

  “Hon, you don’t mean —”

  “Yes. Romeo and Juliet.”

  Mara ushered Veda and Melly into her office. “Mother Veda, how good to see you. Melly, you keep growing! Are you trying to catch up with Peer-tek?” Melly started to roll her eyes, then politely refrained.

  They sat down. Veda plunged in. “My enterprising daughter has an
interesting idea.”

  Melly leaned forward. “I want to put on a play. For everyone here. With Twin-Bred actors. I’ve been watching this play lately, and I think it’d be just perfect. With a few changes, maybe.”

  Mara tried to remember if she had ever anticipated adding anything like theater producer to her job description. “And the play is?”

  Melly squirmed a bit in her chair. “It’s maybe not what you’d expect. But it’s all about warring clans, and trying to make peace between them, and how people don’t have to take sides just because their families did.”

  Mara turned to Veda. “Mother Veda, is she suggesting what I think she’s suggesting?”

  Veda smiled, a bit sheepishly. “If you’re guessing Romeo and Juliet, you’re right. I’ve explained that the idea of a human and a Tofa falling in love is rather — impractical.”

  “Mom, I know that humans and Tofa can’t — you know. I said we could change it.” She turned back toward Mara. “They could just be really, really good friends. Almost like brother and sister.”

  “But Melly — the characters wouldn’t be Twin-Bred, would they? And normal humans and Tofa — they don’t usually understand each other very well. Or become friends easily.” Veda stirred as if to speak, then sat back as if thinking better of it. Melly did not notice.

  “But some of them might. Like when two people see each other and fall in love, right away. If there’s love at first sight, why can’t there be best friends at first sight, too?”

  Mara stroked her chin, and batted aside the stray thought that a beard could be useful on some occasions. “Hmmm. It is intriguing. There is the obvious connection to our efforts here. Have you any actors in mind?”

  Melly beamed. “I think Peer-tek would make a terrific Romeo. And Becca looks a lot like the Juliet in the play I saw. And they both like to talk a lot.”

  “Well . . . let me consult a few of the other staff. But I think we might give it a try, if you can find actors who are interested, and people to do set decoration and the like. Think about making your sets portable. We might just want to take this show on the road.”

  Melly’s eyes were wide. “You mean — show it to other people? Outside?”

  “Maybe. Later on. After all, who needs to hear the play’s message more than the Capulets and the Montagues?”

  “Mom!”

  Veda looked over her shoulder to where Melly was hunched over her tablet, concentrating with all her might. She put down the carrot she was peeling and joined her. “Do you need some help, hon?”

  “Do Tofa have ‘loins’?”

  Time to call for reinforcements. Veda turned and shouted, “Brian!”

  “Seriously, Brian! It’s not just the awkward questions, it’s the unanswerable ones. We know that the Tofa don’t have our male/female gender set-up, but we know so little about what they do have. We don’t know how their friendships work. We don’t know what their parent-child relationships are like. We don’t know if young Tofa can keep secrets from their parents. We don’t even know for sure if young Tofa live with their parents!”

  “Can’t she just cut out everything where we aren’t sure of a Tofa equivalent?”

  “And leave what? There’d be darned little left. Not enough to make for a satisfying play. I hate to say it, but I think she’d better wait until we know enough about the Tofa to fill in at least some of the gaps.”

  Brian sighed. “She could be a grown woman by then. OK, I’ll talk to her.”

  Melly cried; but she had to agree. “I don’t want to waste everybody’s time on a play that isn’t even good. Then they wouldn’t want to help with the next one.”

  “That’s the spirit! Why don’t you find something you can stage in the meantime? And sooner or later, we’ll know enough to come back to Romeo and Juliet, if you still want to.”

  Nine weeks later, Melly triumphantly directed a production of Little Red Riding Hood with a small Twin-Bred cast and elaborately painted sets. It was a hit.

  Chapter 31

  Cindy threw down her tablet. It clattered against the desk; Dar-tan hastily checked it for damage. Cindy scowled. “I don’t want to do this any more!”

  Dar-tan projected puzzlement. “What exactly do you want to stop doing?”

  Cindy gestured wildly. “All of this. Studying all the stupid things people have done before, and all the stupid things they’re going to keep doing. Practicing how to talk people into being less stupid. And once we get started — being in public all the time. Being around angry people, and who-knows-what Tofa. But that’s what I’m supposed to do, and for how long? Forever? And no one has ever asked us if that’s what we want to do with our lives!”

  Dar-tan reached toward Cindy’s hand and then pulled back. “Are you sorry that you were born here? That we are twins?’

  Cindy grabbed his nearest hand and kissed it. “Oh, no, Darrie, of course not! I love you! I would never want to be a singleton. I would always want to see you and spend time with you. And I would hate not knowing any more about Tofa than the people out there. But — I don’t care if I was created as a test-tube ambassador. It’s not me.”

  Dar-tan stood silently for a moment, then asked: “And what is?”

  “I’ll bet you can guess that.”

  Cindy felt his smile. “You want to hole up in a lab somewhere and tell a computer how to make animals. Cows. Horses. Zebras. Bunnies.”

  “What’s so funny about rabbits? I read about people keeping them as pets. And of course you can eat them too.”

  Dar-tan opened his communication program. “There is no reason to wait. We can collaborate on a message to the Biological Sciences Supervisor. We will tell him together.”

  “And if he says no?”

  “We will use the skills you despise to negotiate the bureaucracy, and to negotiate with it. If necessary, we will simply insist. It would be foolhardy in the extreme for the Project to rely on a mediation team that might have its own agenda — particularly if the agenda was to show that its members should have been left at home.”

  “My, my. So some of your Twin-Bred are so audacious as to act like real people, with their own preferences. Even their own ambitions.”

  “I guess we had some dim notion that this might happen, because we’ve been trying to prevent it — we’ve been, I guess you could say indoctrinating them since they were young children. But that only goes so far, obviously.”

  “How nasty did things get with Cindy and Dar-tan, before anyone brought you into the loop?”

  Mara finished her drawing of Cindy, Dar-tan and a host of farm animals surrounding two human adults. “Not very. They went to O'Mara in Biological Sciences first, who didn’t know what to think, so he talked to Barrows in Training, and Barrows talked to me.”

  “And the upshot is?”

  “Cindy is now the animal biogenetics unit’s first student-apprentice. She’s thrilled.”

  “And the scientists in that division will get some practice dealing with human Twin-Bred peculiarities. And Dar-tan? What happens to him?”

  “We’re going to do some role-playing exercises involving uneven-numbered teams. And he’s very good at mathematical modeling. We can involve him in some of the nitty-gritty research work.”

  “So all’s well that ends well. For that pair at least.”

  “It’s going to be a good deal tougher to deal with the others. . . .”

  Randy and Jak-rad stood side by side, as tall as they could stand. Mr. Barrows thought of the expression “shoulder to shoulder”: if their respective anatomies had permitted, that would have been their posture.

  “We both want the same thing, in our different ways. We want to go back to our people.”

  Mr. Barrows concentrated on appearing patient and calm. “What do you believe you could do, in your communities of origin?”

  “I want to be a farmer.” Randy spread his arms wide, almost knocking into Jak-rad. “Not like here, with our little gardens and sheds. I want to run a really
large hydroponics set-up, and a whole lot of soil-space, and see which is better for which kinds of crops. I want to feed lots and lots of people, and design and improve and maintain industrial-size equipment.”

  Mr. Barrows nodded. “And you, Jak-rad? What is your dream? I mean, your idea of a different future?”

  Randy, if not Mr. Barrows, could sense Jak-rad’s frustration. “I do not know. How could I know? I know nothing of what Tofa do. I do not know how they work, when they work, why they work, what they work at. I do not know how they live with each other. Since the Tofa host mothers and nurses left, the only Tofa in this place are Tofa who do not know any of those things either.”

  Mr. Barrows turned to Randy. “Randy, we could try to find a way for you to join a human community. We could look for a sponsor, someone to keep an eye on your welfare, and a farming unit that would like some enthusiastic young labor. But first, we would have to — to retrain you. You and the other human Twin-Bred don’t look and act just like typical humans your age. Or any age. It could take months before you’d have a good chance of living in, say, the agricultural sector of Campbell City, and having people just think you’re strange. Which isn’t the best way to live, anywhere.”

  Randy looked mulish. “I’ll take that chance.”

  “And you, Jak-rad.” Jak-rad waited. “You must see that it’s that much more difficult for us to help you achieve your goals — just because of the situation you’ve described. We don’t have Tofa contacts that we can trust even as much as our human ones. And we can’t possibly train you to fit in. But some years from now — I know that sounds impossible, at your age, but if you can wait, there’s a good chance we’ll be in a much better position, more knowledgeable, more connected, in a few years’ time.”

  Jak-rad shook his head in what Mr. Barrows despairingly noted as an all-too-human gesture. “I will find a way. I will take my chances.”

  Months later, Randy and Jak-rad waited at the helipad. Randy’s ride would arrive in minutes. Unofficially, it was Jak-rad’s ride as well. Randy was heading for a job and a rented room. Jak-rad had Tofa currency estimated to suffice for two weeks’ subsistence.