“Um, yes. Okay, let’s make a tent for them, and leave it in sight. The neighbors will figure it’s some project my folks are doing.”
Nona’s full magic did seem to be working, here, so she did not have to grow material tediously. She simply scooped dirt from the ground and transformed it to tent cloth, and made pegs and poles similarly. They pitched the tent to enclose horse, man, and floater. Nona also made extra blankets, because it was winter in this region of this Mode, and too cold for comfort. She had used her magic to keep them warm in the night, a mild variant of the fire spell, but that would not remain in her absence. Then they went into the house.
“Sure is neat in here,” Colene murmured, looking around. “It was always pretty messy when I lived here. Mom was alcoholic, and the details of housework sort of got away from her. Dad was away, mostly.”
“He had a distant employment?”
“That too. But when he wasn’t working, he was off with his girlfriend.”
“But if he was married—”
“Marriage in name only, mainly,” the girl said sourly. “I think I was about the only thing they had in common, and they didn’t pay much attention to me. That sort of thing leads to juvenile misfits. Ask any psychologist.”
Unfortunately that reminded Nona of her own family. The despots had destroyed it, in revenge for her effort to bring the anima. That had perhaps been the last straw, leaving her no reason to remain on Oria.
“Hey, I’m sorry, Nona,” Colene said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“It is not your concern.”
“Yes it is. Because I’m your friend, and I was there, so maybe I have some responsibility for—”
“No, it was bound to happen, whoever was there. The despots did that sort of thing to anyone who opposed them. I knew that at the outset.”
They came to what Colene thought of as the living room. There on the table was a small pile of papers.
Colene went to it, startled. “This is money! And a note.” She picked up the note. “It says ‘COLENE: anything you want. We want to make it right. Only come back to us.’ ”
She sat down suddenly in the couch. Nona saw that she was crying. Colene had been alienated from her parents, yet she did still care for them.
“I think your parents need you as much as you need them,” Nona said.
“I don’t need them!” But Colene’s pain belied her words.
“They tried to keep you here by force, but lost you. Now they hope you will return voluntarily. That is not a bad thing to hope.”
“I can’t stay here. I have to go with Darius. If only I could marry him.”
Something connected in Nona’s mind. “On Oria, women become marriageable at eighteen. But they can do it younger, if there is reason and their parents approve. Is it that way in Earth Mode?”
“Yeah, I think so. We used to joke about it at school. Some kid looked it up in an almanac, and saw that in New Hampshire a girl could marry as young as thirteen, or a boy of fourteen, if the parents gave permission. A lot of other states have it at fourteen for the girl. Some don’t have any age limits at all, even, if it’s okay with the parents. We’d tease someone about getting a shotgun and—” She broke off, startled. “Fourteen! You know, I could get married, if—but no, my folks would never approve.”
Nona touched the note in Colene’s hand. She could not read it herself, because it was in the alien Earth script. “They offer you anything.”
Colene stared at her. “Even that?”
“Perhaps what they really want is for you to be happy, and to feel good about them. If you were to marry with their approval, and they were part of it, then perhaps they could let you go and be satisfied, their job as parents done. This is the way it is in my Mode.”
“But all they ever had was the shell of a marriage. We all faked it, so the neighbors wouldn’t know.”
“Perhaps their desire for the reality was greater, then. They knew that they had nothing, but through you they could have something.”
Colene considered it more seriously. “Our family was nothing, until I left. Then when I came back, with Provos, I found my mom and dad had almost made it real. She had stopped drinking and he had stopped with his mistress. I thought it was weird, that they became the family I wanted only when I was gone. Like maybe they did it only to spite me. But then they tried to keep me here. I thought that was the ultimate betrayal, and I hated them for that. But now I wonder.”
“They do love you, Colene. They just are not very good at it.”
“And you think that if I played along, doing something really family, like growing up and getting married, they’d let me go?”
“I think you should ask them.”
“You know, by the standards of my culture, a married woman is Old Enough. So Darius couldn’t say—” Then she crumpled again. “But I can’t marry him. Because his culture says he has to draw joy from his wife, to multiply, and I’m just not any vessel of joy.”
“His culture does differ, yes. But you would not be married by the conventions of his culture. Only by yours. So here you would be his wife; there you would be his mistress. In either case, you would be his love. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Oh, yes!” Colene grabbed Nona and kissed her. “You have solved my problem, just the way I solved yours.”
Embarrassed, Nona changed the subject. “But first we must save Burgess.”
“For sure! And now we have the money.” Colene got up and took the paper oblongs from the table.
They went upstairs to Colene’s bedroom, where clothing of her Mode’s type was hung in a closet. “You’ll have to change, too,” Colene said. “That red tunic’s no good, here. But I don’t think any of my stuff’ll fit you.”
“I can enlarge it,” Nona reminded her.
“Say, yeah! I keep forgetting that you’re magical.” She picked out a red dress. “You should like this. It’s not the color, it’s the style. Make this fit you, and some matching shoes, and you’ll be a knockout Earthgirl.”
Nona made the necessary adjustments and donned the dress and shoes, while Colene put on a blue dress. This startled Nona, because blue was the masculine color on her world, but she reminded herself that she wasn’t on her world now. Then they arranged their hair in an appropriate way, took up purses—Nona simply duplicated Colene’s, in red—and went back outside and to the tent.
Darius stared at them. “You are two lovely but strange maidens,” he remarked. “Colene I have seen in this manner before, but Nona seems to be a different woman.”
“We must go to seek help for Burgess,” Nona said.
“Seqiro, if anybody pokes around here, you make them go away,” Colene said. “Don’t make them scared, just make them lose interest. You can do that, right? We’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
Nona nudged Colene. “Shouldn’t you tell Darius? I suspect Seqiro did not relay the news.”
Colene was startled. “Right.” She turned to Darius. “Oh, just so you know, manface: we’re getting married.”
Darius’ jaw dropped, to Colene’s evident satisfaction. “Tell him, Seqiro,” she said, and turned to Burgess. “Burg, we’re going to get help for you. So hang on, okay? We aren’t going to let you die.”
Then Colene and Nona walked back into the house, where Colene used a magic device she called a phone to telepath a message to a central stable where they had many vehicles. A faint voice agreed to send a cab. They went out the front of the house, and to the street. In a while the vehicle arrived: one of those horrifying self-propelled machines they had seen zooming past at breakneck velocity on adjacent Modes.
“Don’t worry,” Colene reassured her. “I know what I’m doing, in my home Mode. This is no more chancy than riding in the hand of a giant, in your Mode.”