"Soliton!" Will corrected angrily; he never did like those race names.
"This funny-looking soliton, then, and why does he look that way?"
"I almost didn't," he whispered, while Dieter's ripply face expressed polite interest, "but then I figured he ought to have a chance to mend his karma with the rest of us."
"And for this," Dieter von Knefhausen said politely, "I am quite grateful, although the alterations you have "made in my appearance are, you could say, most disagreeable."
"Shut up, Kneffie," Will whispered. "Just count yourself lucky you're here at all. Anyway! Listen. Here's what we've decided! Jeron, Bill, and the two girls are going to stay here, and so am I, for a while. Molomy and the others will take ten Earthies back to Alpha-Aleph for training. We'll radio for some more ships to be built. Lots of them— what?"
Knefhausen coughed and indicated the Pugets. The indrawn look was tighter than ever. Will sighed with a sound like a distant air-brake—an irritated one. The happy villagers were supposed to be dancing and throwing flowers by that point, but the script wasn't playing.
Will sighed. "How annoying it is," he remarked, "when you strike a spark and the audience does not catch fire. Well. If I can't tell you, then I will show you," he whispered, and flung a glassy arm toward the sea.
I will say for Uncle Ghost that he can put on a great show when he wants to. The distant shore began to wrinkle and fade; the setting sun turned glassy, paling from apple to peach to soft shimmering pineapple Jell-O, and then it all melted away. We were looking at a huge fluted shell of color, like what I think Radio City Music Hall used to look like, and within it Will was staging a show that beat the Rockettes.
Oh, none of it was real. The Pugets knew that as well as we did. It didn't even look real, because it was all that wrinkled-cellophane look that was the best Will could manage. Through the paler parts of the display you could see the sun and even the beached wreck of the Japanese warship—but, oh, what a show all the same! He threw a starry sky across the shell. Against it a dozen golden globes slid through space, then a hundred—many hundreds—then one spun directly toward us, growing huge, changing shape. It opened at the side and stretched and flowed aifd turned into an immense golden cornucopia, with all the treasures of the world—our world—spilling out. Trees that grew into barkless two-by-fours, then cabins, then handsome homes. Luscious fruits in a hundred shapes and colors— you could nearly smell them and touch them, though not quite. Vegetable wombs with cunning cherubs popping out, blinking adorable eyes and clapping fat little hands with glee—oh, Will was stretching it some. No doubt about that. We never grew a house like that, although I suppose we could have if we'd wanted to, and babies from the cabbage patch get just as wet and cranky as any from Nature's Gate.
But it was a real five-bell smash performance, and what astonished me was that it was falling flat. The Pugets weren't buying it. Will knew it, too; the vision collapsed and the sun popped out again.
I felt Toby let go of my hand, and realized how terribly confusing this must be for the poor darling. "It's all right," I said reassuringly. "It's good, really—no, wonderful! We've all come to the same conclusion, and we're going to turn your life right around!"
"Turn us around?"
His tone worried me. All the other Pugets were straining to hear, but not crowding around—they stayed back, almost out of earshot. It was all pretty peculiar. I said impatiently, "We're going to give you the help you need. Teach you how to use the I Ching, show you how we edit our offspring for any characteristics we like—why, Will might even teach you how to turn your terminally ill people into solitons, so that you don't even need to die!"
Toby sighed deeply and nodded. "I thought it was something like that," he remarked, and his hand went to the butt of his gun. And his was not the only one. All those Pugets lounging around were suddenly a guard perimeter, and half a dozen of them had guns.
"That's it," cried Darien McCullough. "You're all under arrest. Nobody moves, nobody goes near your ship until we get things straightened out."
It was one of the worst moments of my life. I mean, gunsl Rational adult human beings don't use guns to settle differences! And they were all in it together, that hypocritical Darien, my own all but perfect Toby, every one of them; they'd planned it all along and rehearsed it.
Much good it did them.
What they did not know, of course, was that five of the six children had grown up under Zen Master Ski's personal tutelage, and all those years of challenging each other with flower stems paid off at once. "Hai!" shouted Molomy, launching herself at Toby's knees, and "Hai!" yelled Jeron, spinning like a top with his two fists locked together; the battering ram of his fists bloodied the nose of one of Toby's gunmen while Jeron's foot in the abdomen of another took him out of action. "Hai!" and "Hai!" and "Hai!" and Araduk and Ringo and Modany each marked a target and clobbered them, and even little Jeromolo Bill, who had done most of his growing-up light-years away from Ski, threw himself at the two young women who were heading for the ship. Even I managed to get the old bones moving long enough to lay out the girl behind me, and Will Becklund, who had no body to charge with, blew himself up huge as a Macy's Thanksgiving monster. No Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse, he; he towered like a demon in a Chinese opera, hands the size of mattresses, tipped with talons as long as spears, and out of them he hurled grenades and firebombs, Napalm and fiery coals at the Pugets. None of them were real, of course. As with all Will's shapings, you could see clear through them when the light was right. But they sure were disconcerting. And he yelled-—if you can imagine a cobra yelling instead of hissing, immense volume but no voice to give it body—"Stop it, all of you! This minute!"
And when we sorted ourselves out, the biggest of the Pugets were rolling on the ground, mostly clutching their testicles, and all the rest of them were staring at a gun apiece in the hands of Araduk and Bill and Molomy, and one in each hand for Jeron.
"Let me up," said Toby from the ground, wriggling slightly under the not very considerable weight of Molomy sitting on his chest.
"For what?" Jeron demanded, trying to point both guns at him simultaneously.
Toby sighed. "Don't wave those things around, will you? We weren't going to shoot you."
"No!" sneered Jeron. "Of course not! You were just going to try to steal our ship and our technology!"
Toby lifted Molomy clear and sat up. "Wrong," he said. "One hundred percent dead wrong. We weren't trying to take any of that stuff from you. We were trying to get you to keep it."
Way, way back, ever so long ago, when I was a happy head in the beautiful California Southland, I made an anniversary present for my dad and mom. The present was me. For two solid weeks before their anniversary I didn't drink a drop or smoke a joint. I washed my hair every morning, and brushed it a hundred strokes every night; I took the money I made from hustling junk jewelry to the tourists and bought a white blouse and a dark skirt, and on the plane ride home I not only didn't take a drink from the airline stewardesses, I didn't even eat their peanuts. And you know what my mom said when I came in the door? She said, "Evelyn, why do you let yourself get so fat?"