“You can’t have one,” Sapphire said automatically. But then she looked at Josh. “Where did you find it?”
“I didn’t.” Josh gestured to Dawn. “She did. In the woods outside the gate.”
“Mm. Fat lot of use that will be to the rest of us.” Sapphire turned to Dawn as though she was going to pose a question, then scowled and shook her head. “I won’t waste my time,” she said, and took Ruby by the hand. “It’s all right, Rube. We’ll go together, see what we can find. Anyone want to come with us?”
“I’ll come,” Amethyst said. “Who else?”
Josh and the Lasker brothers shook their heads. “Don’t want no dumb animal,” Rick grumbled.
“Yeah,” Hag agreed. “Bet it stinks.”
Sig said nothing, but when Rick and Hag wandered off toward the far side of the clearing he went with them. Josh noticed another closed gate in the fence. He watched the brothers open it and go through. What they would like, and what they were willing to admit they liked, might be two different things.
Josh was left with Dawn, Topaz, and the little native creature. After what Sapphire had said he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to Topaz, but she took care of the problem for him.
“Can I?” She spoke to Dawn in a completely normal way, as though she expected the other girl to understand her and respond. Without waiting for an answer, she reached out and gently lifted the spangle from Dawn’s grasp.
The trunk waved and the orange flowers began to open, just for a second, then the animal settled down into Topaz’s cupped hands. “What do you think it eats?” she asked Josh.
“I’ve no idea.” That seemed to him a pretty weird question. Who cared what it ate, provided it didn’t take a bite out of you? But Topaz, studying his reaction, said, “Have you ever had a pet of your own?”
“No.” His mother regarded all pets as dirty and a nuisance, but that was none of Topaz’s business.
“Well, if you had, you’d realize that the first thing you have to know is how to look after it properly.” Topaz did something that gave Josh the shudders. She put the finger and thumb of each hand on the spangle’s head and gently opened its jaws so she could peer inside. “Mm. No help there. Just sort of flat plates. Maybe we ought to bring different things from outside the fence, see if the spangle will eat any of them.”
Josh was not keen on the idea of another visit to the purple gloom beyond the fence. Bothwell Gage and Sol Brewster might say that everything was safe, but how did they know? Solferino was a whole planet. There was no way that Foodlines staff or machines could have explored every part of it.
Dawn banished his worries. “No,” she said. While the others stood and stared, she took the spangle away from Topaz and headed for the gate.
“What’s she doing?” Topaz asked.
“I don’t know.” But Josh was suddenly convinced that Dawn had listened to what Topaz was saying, and understood it. She was opening the gate and walking through it. She disappeared.
“I’d better go make sure she’s all right.” But before Josh could move, Dawn was coming back. She was no longer holding the spangle. She came to where Josh and Topaz were standing and looked right through them as though they were not there.
“Want to go,” she said as she passed. “Breakfast.” She moved on into the building.
“What did she mean?” Topaz asked. “That the spangle wanted to go free, or that she wanted it to go?”
“Or does she mean that the spangle wants breakfast, or that she wants breakfast?” It occurred to Josh that he was falling into the same trap as Topaz—the delusion that what Dawn said meant anything at all. Aunt Stacy, who ought to know her stepdaughter better than either of them, had other ideas. Dawn’s statements were just the mumblings of a badly retarded person.
But suppose that Aunt Stacy had her own reasons for thinking that way? Suppose that Topaz was right? She seemed to have a real understanding of Dawn. Being autistic wasn’t the same as being retarded; everything Josh had read made that clear. The brain might function as well as normal, or even better; it just worked differently.
That led straight to something that was really none of Josh’s business. But he blurted it out anyway.
“Did you know that your sister is on triple-snap?”
“Sapphire?” Topaz was perfectly calm—or pretended to be. “Yes, I know that. Ruby doesn’t, and I don’t think Amethyst does, either. I’d like to keep it that way, if you don’t mind.”
“Snap really screws up your brain. And triple-snap is worse.”
“A lot worse. I don’t think it has hurt Sapphire permanently—not yet, at any rate.” Topaz frowned at him, thick dark eyebrows above clear hazel eyes. “I’m surprised that you know anything about snap. Surely you don’t get exposure to it out on a farm.”
“I was raised in the city—a lot of cities. Dawn is the one who grew up on Burnt Willow Farm. I’ve seen a lot of druggies in the Pool, no jobs, no prospects, nothing to do but hang out and look for the next hit. Sapphire has to get off it. It will kill her.”
“You think I don’t know that? That’s why I was so glad to come here. I thought there’d be no pushers, no way for her to get any.”
“I don’t think there is. She said she’s down to her last twelve tubes. After that she doesn’t know what will happen.”
“It’s going to be really tough for her. She insisted on coming here, you know. She didn’t do it for herself. She did it for me and Ruby and Amy. Saph acts like she’s our mother.”
Josh thought of the earlier conversation, Sapphire accusing him of messing around with Topaz. He asked hurriedly, “What about your real mother? You have one, don’t you?”
“We have a mother, sure, and a father, too.”
“So why does Sapphire think that she—”
“Or maybe I mean we had a real mother and a real father. I remember what it used to be like. We had our own house, and we had a cat, and we were going to get a dog. We even had a name for him.”
“Was there an accident?”
“You might call it that.” Topaz sounded bitterly thoughtful, as if she had been over this in her head a thousand times. “They were both teachers, really smart. Everybody says Amy got their brains—she’s the brightest one of us, if you hadn’t already figured that out. She’s our walking data bank, she’ll tell you anything you want to know and a good deal that you don’t. Anyway, four years ago our parents entered a contest to name a new food product. You ever hear of Scooners?”
“I’ve eaten them. They’re not very good.”
“I know. But they won a trip together for naming them. It was to a place with gambling casinos. When they got back, they didn’t talk about anything else. My father said he had a way of beating the odds of the system, and when he explained it to my mother she got really excited, too. They went back and tried it.”
“Their system was a failure?”
“No. I wish it had been. Unfortunately, it worked very well.
They bought us all sorts of goodies. Next weekend, they went again. It worked again. They had all sorts of plans, a bigger house away from the city, lots of land, a flower garden, horses for each of us. But that time they lost. And after that they kept on losing. I don’t think they ever won again. They couldn’t stop, though. It was like they had gone crazy—they both got hooked on gambling as bad as if it was triple-snap. Within six months they lost their jobs, they lost the house, and long before that they’d started to tear into each other. And us. Last year, Dad broke Saph’s jaw when she tried to stop him hitting Ruby. He said he was sorry, and he took her for treatment, right away. But if you look close you can still see the scar. Right after that Saph started using snap.”