“What do you mean, always?” He looked over her shoulder. The old parents had doddered off, but Mam had not moved. Even though she was still a good thirty meters away, he lowered his voice. “It’s only been three times, and she wanted to see you.”
“Why can’t she wait until I come home for a visit? Besides, I don’t have anything to say to her. What am I supposed to do, play a game of fish and snakes? Climb into her fruity old pouch? I’m not a scrap anymore!”
“She’s unhappy, Tevul. She feels unwanted, useless.”
“Don’t use my name, because there’s nothing I can do about that.” Tevul’s ears went flat against her head. “It’s strange, you two here together. When the others have visitors, they get their mothers and fathers. She’s not my mother.”
“No,” he said, “she’s not.”
Tevul’s stem facade crumbled then and she broke down, quietly but completely, just as her mother had on the night she had left him. And he hadn’t seen it coming; Silmien cursed himself for having stones up his nose and knotholes for eyes. Tevul’s body was wracked by sobs and she keened into his chest so that Mam wouldn’t hear. “They say such mean things. They say that Mam picked my name, not you, and that she named me after a character in a stupid lovestory. I try to joke along with them so they won’t make a joke of me, but then they start in about my mother, they say that because she’s a doctor… that the aliens…”
She turned a scared face up to him, her scent was bitter and smoky. “What happened to the baby, pa-pa? Is he still in her? I want to know. It’s not fair that I never got to see you pull him from mother and bring him to Mam, that’s what’s supposed to happen, isn’t it, not all the disgusting things they keep saying, and I’m supposed to be there, only I wasn’t because she went to the aliens, it’s not my fault, I’m tired of being different, I want to be the same, in a real family like Tilantree, the same.” She caught her breath, sniffed and then rubbed her face into thestubby fur on his chest. “No blame, no shame,” she said. “The same.” She shuddered, and the hysterics passed, as cleanly as a summer squall.
He bent down and licked the top of her head. “Are you unhappy here, my beautiful little Tevul?”
She thought about it, then sniffed and straightened her dignity. “This is the world,” she said. “There is nowhere else.”
The orange fathermoon was up now, resuming his futile chase of the mothermoon. It was the brightest part of the night, when the two parent moons and their billion star scraps cast a light like spilled milk. A stirring along a hedge of bunchbead, where a farmbot was harvesting the dangling clusters of fruit, distracted Silmien momentarily.
“I am proud of you,” he said. It wasn’t what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t think of anything better. When the robot passed them, he dipped into its hopper, pulled out a handful of bunchbead and offered them to Tevul. She took some and smiled. Silence slid between them. Somewhere in the distance, the chickens were singing.
Tevul watched the stars as she ate. “Where is Mars?” she said at last.
“It’s too far away.” Silmien looked up. “We can’t see it.”
“I know that, but where is it?”
“Kadut showed me their star last week.” He came up behind her and, resting his elbow on her shoulder, pointed so that she could sight along his forearm. “It’s in The Mask, there.”
“Why did they come, the aliens?”
“They want to help, I guess. That’s what they say.”
“I have to get back soon,” said Tevul. “Let’s go see Mam.”
Tevul was very polite to Mam and Silmien could see that the visit cheered Mam up. Mam insisted on waiting while Silmien walked Tevul back to her burrow, but he finally understood that this was what both of them wanted. Back at the burrow, Tevul showed him a lifestory she was working on. It was about Ollut, the scientist who had first identified estrophins, the hormones that determined which females became mothers and which mams. Silmien was impressed by Tevul’s writing and how much she had absorbed from the teaching tells in just one season. She was quick, like her mother. Tevul promised to copy her working draft onto the tell, so he could follow along with her research. As he was getting ready to leave, her roommate Laivan came in. To his relief, Silmien remembered her name. They chatted briefly. Silmien was on his guard for any sign of mockery, but there wasn’t any. Laivan seemed to like Tevul, and for her sake, tolerated his intrusion into their privacy.
“Luck always,” he said. “To both of you.” And then he left.
It was only later that his anger caught up with him. Mam had fallen asleep, lulled by the whoosh of the go-to through the tunnels, so there was no one to notice when he began to wring his hands and squirm on his seat. First he was angry at himself, then at Tilantree, then at Tevul’s teachers, then at himself again, until finally his outrage settled on Valun.
She had been the leader of their family. Where she jumped, they followed, even if they landed in mud. It had been her idea to move to the paddies, where the air was thick and the water tasted of the swamp. Farmers needed doctors, too, she said. She had been the one who healed the family’s wounds as well, the one they all talked to.
Yet when she left them, she wouldn’t say exactly why she was going, only that there was something important she had to find out from the aliens. Valun had ripped his life apart, left him incomplete, but he had tried not to hurt her the way she had hurt him. Speakers from the tell had interviewed him about Valun and about his life now. In all his statements, he had protected her. Her work with the aliens was important, he said, and he supported it, as all the families must. There were so many diseases to be cured, so much pain to be eased. It was an honor that she had been chosen. If he had followed a different path, it was because he was a different person, not a better one. He had done all this, he realized now, not because it was the right thing to do, but because he still loved her.
Only Silmien had not realized how much she had hurt Tevul. Valun hadn’t visited the gardens, hadn’t even copied a message to the tell. Silmien had long since decided that Valun had left the family because she had been bored with him, and maybe he could understand that. But no mother ought to be bored with her own tween! For an hour, his thoughts were as blinding as the noonday sun.
Eventually, Silmien had to calm himself. Their stop was coming up and he’d have to rouse Mam soon. What was it Tevul had said? This was the world. What did he have to give to it? A new family? The truth was, he couldn’t imagine some poor out taking Valun’s place. But life was too short, twenty years from pouch to bone garden. A new family then—and afterward, he’d give the world his story. He would need to get some distance from Valun; he could see that. But eventually he would write of how she had hurt him and Mam and Tevul. He would tell how he had borne the pain, like a mam carries a scrap. He paused, admiring the image. No, not a lovestory—the story of how he had suffered. Because of her.
Because of Valun and the aliens.
Three
Valun thought she could feel the baby swimming inside her. Impossible. The baby was no bigger than her thumb. He was blind and hairless and weak and brainless, or nearly so. Couldn’t swim, didn’t even know that he was alive.
The baby wasn’t moving; she knew that the waves she felt were made by the muscles of her own uterus. The contractions weren’t painful, more like the lurch of flying through turbulence. Only this was a predictable turbulence, a storm on a schedule. The contractions were coming more frequently, despite her fierce concentration. It was what distressed her most about giving birth. Valun had gotten used to being in control, especially of her own body.