Luce Ramone sat down beside her with a bowl of chips. Luce was more talkative than others, and Stella greeted her with a smile that showed some need.
“What, you want a chatty person?” Luce asked. She was a year younger than Stella, from the tail end of the first boomers, small for a Shevite and pale of skin, with thick black hair that tended to bristle. She smelled wonderful, however, and attracted much attention from males hoping to be peripheral to her deme. Stella’s deme and Luce’s were currently in merger, coalescing but still keeping their bounds. Nobody knew where that might lead, or what it might mean to the domestic anglers, hopeful males and females in either deme.
“I’d love a chatty person,” Stella said.
“Hair of the human/ I’m your girl. You’re down/ looking stretched.”
“I’m thoughtful.”
Both were cheek-flashing, but speech over and under was dominant for the time being.
“Joe Siprio, you know him?”
“Will’s friend,” Stella said.
“He’s angling for me. Should I?”
“No way/ too young,” Stella said.
“You were angled at my age/ hypocrite.”
“Look what happened to me.” Not emphasized, but standing alone, no under.
“He’s a total cheer-fly,” Luce said with a musing glance. “Our bodies like each other.”
“What’s that got to do with a cat’s fart?” Stella asked, irritated. “You’re moth. You need to rise to bee.” Moth and bee were names for two levels of menarche in the Shevites. Women passed through three stages: the first, moth, receptive to sexual overtures but not to actual intercourse; the second, bee, sexually active but infertile—and this was still a guess, even to the Sakartvelos—to allow more subtle hormonal and pheromonal samplings and communications; and the third, wasp, total fertility, leading to sexual activity with prospects of pregnancy. Shevite females could actually fall back into bee stage if a deme broke up or an angling failed.
Males started puberty at bee and from there went straight to wasp, sometimes within hours.
“Lemon and Lime are old notion about that,” Stella added. Lemon and Lime were the fundamentals of the Sakartvelos. “They think you should wait.”
“You didn’t,” Luce said.
“It was different,” Stella said, and freckled a warning that she did not like thinking about this, much less talking.
“Lemon and Lime support you,” Luce said testily.
“They didn’t have much choice, did they?”
A ten-year-old male named Burke walked to the end of the table and stood there shyly, hands folded in front of him, rocking on his heels.
“What?” Stella snapped, facing him with cheeks flashing full gold.
Burke backed off. “Lemon and Lime are down at the gate with some others. There’s humans down there.”
“So?”
“They say they’re your parents. Another brought them, the numb-nose delivery guy.”
Stella slapped her hands on the table, then drummed them, shaking her head, making the plates rattle. Heads turned in the cafeteria, and two stood in case intervention was the consensus.
Luce pushed back, never having seen her friend this disturbed.
“It’s not them,” Stella said, and swung her legs around on the bench, then got to her feet. “Not now.” She approached Burke, face and pupils ablaze in full accusative query, as if she wanted to punish him.
“The woman smells like you!” Burke wailed, and then others surrounded them and prodded Stella aside with gentle elbow nudges. Touching with angry hands was considered very bad. Burke ran off, crying.
“Go see,” Luce suggested, her own color flaring. Nobody was a better persuader than Luce. “If they’re not your parents, they’ll smoke them out of here and they’ll forget everything. If they are your parents, you have to go.” She held out her spit-damp palms, as did others who had formed a circle around the table, but Stella refused them all.
“I don’t want to know!” she wailed. “I don’t want them to know!”
4
Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
Senator Laura Bloch greeted Christopher Dicken in the hall outside the courtroom. Dicken was dressed in his usual excuse for business wear, brown tweed jacket and corduroy pants with a wide tie completely out of fashion. Senator Bloch was dressed in a navy blue suit and carried a small briefcase. Behind her stood a younger balding man and a lone, harried-looking middle-aged woman, both wearing suits and carrying their own briefcases.
“She’s going to get off,” Bloch declared curtly. “She’s painting herself as the cop on the beat who protected us all.”
Dicken was not much on punishment, and did not look forward to having to testify.
“I wonder what Gianelli would think,” Bloch added softly, staring at the benches, the lines of lawyers and witnesses waiting to be allowed into the courtroom to sit and wait until called.
The sound of Mark Augustine’s cane was unmistakable. Dicken and Bloch turned to see him making his way down the hall toward the courtroom. He nodded to his attorneys, spoke to them for a few seconds, eyes turning to Dicken, then broke away and stepped gingerly toward them.
“Dr. Augustine,” Bloch said, and extended her hand.
“Senator, pleasure to see you.” Augustine smiled and shook her hand, but kept his eyes on Dicken. “Sorry duty, eh, Christopher?”
Dicken nodded. “How are you, Mark?”
“Steep learning curve for us all,” Augustine said.
Dicken nodded. He felt no triumph, only a hollow sensation of unfinished business.
Augustine pursed his lips and took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Two items of news,” he said. “First, I’ve got Sumner’s chief of staff, Stan Parton, on board for a reconciliation joint session. We’re going to have a select few children in the House chambers, at the president’s invitation. The vice president will be there.”
“That’s great,” Senator Bloch said, her eyes brightening. “Dick would have loved to hear that. When?”
“Could be months. The other news is bad.”
The last thing the group wanted was bad news. Bloch sighed and rolled her prominent eyes.
“Let’s have it,” Dicken said.
“Mrs. Rhine slipped into a coma at six thirty this morning. She died at eleven fifteen.”
Dicken felt his breath hitch.
“She had been in pain for years,” Augustine said.
“A blessing, really,” Bloch said.
Dicken asked where a restroom was on this floor, then excused himself. In the echoing hollowness, he closed the door to a stall. No tears came. He did not even feel numb.
“Funny world,” he whispered, and looked up at the ceiling, as if Mrs. Rhine might be listening. “Funny old world. Wherever you are, Carla, I hope it’s better.”
Then he stepped out of the stall, washed his hands, and returned to stand with Bloch and Augustine outside the courtroom.
Rachel Browning and her attorneys had arrived and now huddled in a tight cluster about twenty feet from Augustine and Bloch. Her face had become deeply lined, pale as if cast in plaster, a death mask. She nodded to the tune of the attorneys’ back-and-forth. One stopped to whisper in her ear.
“I’m sorry for her,” Dicken said, vulnerable to the point of charity.
“Don’t be,” Augustine primly advised. “She’d hate that.”
The court clerk opened the doors.
“Let’s go, gentlemen,” Bloch said. She placed her hands on their elbows and escorted them, three abreast, into the courtroom.
5