The Anything Box

dark, remembering how beautiful it was in the afternoon sun. Then the sun was
gone and she saw a black ship destroyed, a home craft plunging to incandescent
death, and the pink and green and yellow and all the other bright furs
charring and crisping and the patterned materials curling before the last
flare of flame. She leaned her head on her hand and shuddered.
But then she saw the glitter of a silver ship, blackening and fusing,
dripping monstrously against the emptiness of space. And heard the wail of a
fatherless Splinter so vividly that she shoved the drawer in hastily and went
back to look at his quiet sleeping face and to tuck him unnecessarily in.
When she came back to bed, Thorn was awake, lying on his back, his elbows
winging out.
"Awake?" she asked as she sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Yes." His voice was tense as the twang of a wire. "We're getting nowhere,"
he said. "Both sides keep holding up neat little hoops of ideas, but no one is
jumping through, either way. We want peace, but we can't seem to convey
anything to them. They want something, but they haven't said what, as though
to tell us would betray them irrevocably into our hands, but they won't make
peace unless they can get it. Where do we go from here?"
"If they'd just go away—" Rena swung her feet up onto the bed and clasped
her slender ankles with both hands.
'That's one thing we've established." Thorn's voice was bitter, "They won't
go. They're here to stay—like it or not."
"Thorn—" Rena spoke impulsively into the shadowy silence. "Why don't we
just make them welcome? Why can't we just say, 'Come on in!' They're travelers
from afar. Can't we be hospitable—"
"You talk as though the afar was just the next county—or state!" Thorn
tossed impatiently on the pillow.
"Don't tell me we're back to that old equation— Stranger equals Enemy,"
said Rena, her voice sharp with strain. "Can't we assume they're friendly? Go
visit with them—talk with them casually—"
"Friendly!" Thorn shot upright from the tangled bedclothes. "Go visit!
Talk!" His voice choked off. Then carefully calmly he went on. "Would you care
to visit with the widows of our men who went to visit the friendly Linjeni?
Whose ships dripped out of the sky without warning—"
"Theirs did, too." Rena's voice was small but stubborn. "With no more
warning than we had. Who shot first? You must admit no one knows for sure."
There was a tense silence; then Thorn lay down slowly, turned his back to
Serena and spoke no more.
"Now I can't ever tell," mourned Serena into her crumpled pillow. "He'd die
if he knew about the hole under the fence."
In the days that followed, Serena went every afternoon with Splinter and
the hole under the fence got larger and larger.
Doovie's mother, whom Splinter called Mrs. Pink, was teaching Serena to
embroider the rich materials like the length they had given her. In exchange,
Serena was teaching Mrs. Pink how to knit. At least, she started to teach her.
She got as far as purl and knit, decrease and increase, when Mrs. Pink took
the work from her, and Serena sat widemouthed at the incredible speed and
accuracy of Mrs. Pink's furry fingers. She felt a little silly for having
assumed that the Linjeni didn't know about knitting. And yet, the other
Linjeni crowded around and felt of the knitting and exclaimed over it in their
soft, fluty voices as though they'd never seen any before. The little ball of
wool Serena had brought was soon used up, but Mrs. Pink brought out hanks of
heavy thread such as were split and used in their embroidery, and after a
glance through Serena's pattern book, settled down to knitting the shining
brilliance of Linjeni thread.
ABC Amber Palm Converter,http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Before long, smiles and gestures, laughter and whistling, were not enough,
Serena sought out the available tapes—a scant handful—on Linjeni speech and
learned them. They didn't help much since the vocabulary wasn't easily applied
to the matters she wanted to discuss with Mrs. Pink and the others. But the
day she voiced and whistled her first Linjeni sentence to Mrs. Pink, Mrs. Pink
stumbled through her first English sentence. They laughed and whistled
together and settled down to pointing and naming and guessing across areas of
incommunication.
Serena felt guilty by the end of the week. She and Splinter were having so
much fun and Thorn was wearier and wearier at each session's end.
"They're impossible," he said bitterly, one night, crouched forward tensely
on the edge of his easy chair. "We can't pin them down to anything."
"What do they want?" asked Serena. "Haven't they said yet?"
"I shouldn't talk—" Thorn sank back in his chair. "Oh what does it matter?"
he asked wearily. "It'll all come to nothing anyway!"
"Oh, no, Thorn!" cried Serena. "They're reasonable human—" she broke off at
Thorn's surprised look. "Aren't they?" she stammered. "Aren't they?"
"Human? They're uncommunicative, hostile aliens," he said. "We talk
ourselves blue in the face and they whistle at one another and say yes or no.
Just that, flatly."
"Do they understand—" began Serena.
"We have interpreters, such as they are. None too good, but all we have."
"Well, what are they asking?" asked Serena.
Thorn laughed shortly. "So far as we've been able to ascertain, they just
want all our oceans and the land contiguous thereto."
"Oh, Thorn, they couldn't be that unreasonable!"
"Well I'll admit we aren't even sure that's what they mean, but they keep
coming back to the subject of the oceans, except they whistle rejection when
we ask them point-blank if it's the oceans they want. There's just no
communication." Thorn sighed heavily. "You don't know them like we do, Rena."
"No," said Serena, miserably. "Not like you do."
She took her disquiet, Splinter, and a picnic basket down the hill to the
hole next day. Mrs. Pink had shared her lunch with them the day before, and
now it was Serena's turn. They sat on the grass together, Serena crowding back
her unhappiness to laugh at Mrs. Pink and her first olive with the same
friendly amusement Mrs. Pink had shown when Serena had bit down on her first
pirwit and had been afraid to swallow it and ashamed to spit it out.
Splinter and Doovie were agreeing over a thick meringued lemon pie that was
supposed to be dessert.
"Leave the pie alone, Splinter," said Serena. "It's to top off on."
"We're only tasting the fluffy stuff," said Splinter, a blob of meringue on
his upper lip bobbing as he spoke.
"Well, save your testing for later. Why don't you get out the eggs. I'll
bet Doovie isn't familiar with them either."
Splinter rummaged in the basket, and Serena took out the huge camp salt
shaker.
"Here they are, Mommie!" cried Splinter. "Lookit, Doovie, first you have to
crack the shell—"
Serena began initiating Mrs. Pink into the mysteries of hard-boiled eggs
and it was all very casual and matter of fact until she sprinkled the peeled