Putting Up Roots

Chapter Four

Josh had asked Dr. Ergan—twice. On the way back to Burnt Willow Farm he asked Dawn a hundred rimes more, with no particular hope of getting a sensible answer. What was all this about going into space? Might they be going farther yet, through the node network?

The doctor could provide little information beyond what she had already shown them. She did mention that the medical appointment hadn’t been scheduled long ago, as Josh had assumed. Aunt Stacy had made it that very morning, for both of them. She had said it was urgent, without saying why. As for Dawn, whatever she might know about Aunt Stacy’s action, she either could not or would not tell it.

All the way home Josh couldn’t think of anything else. It must have something to do with yesterday’s talk during dinner. Solferino: the planet where Foodlines had biological exploration and exploitation rights, and the place where Uncle Ryan could get as much land as he wanted—if he wanted it, which he didn’t seem to. Josh had never heard of Solferino before, but if it was on the edge of the Messina Dust Cloud, as Uncle Ryan said, then the only way that anyone could get there was by transitions through the node network.

It was dark when the PV finally dropped them off and Josh could hurry Dawn along the slope that led to Burnt Willow Farm. Actually, it was much more the other way round. Josh wanted to hurry, but the half-moon was low in the sky and he could see little more than vague shadows. It was Dawn, somehow realizing that he wanted to get home quickly, who took his hand and steered him down a path that she must have known by heart. Had she done this many times before, in the dark? Or was her visual memory so strong that she had a full mental picture of the whole hillside stored away inside her head, like a three-dimensional map?

They reached the farmhouse—at last. Josh rushed in, only remembering when he was at the kitchen door that he had forgotten to take off his shoes. Never mind, he’d take a chewing out gladly to learn what was going on.

He pushed the door wide and burst in. The smell of new-baked bread jumped out at him. The room was empty.

A casserole sat on an electric warming plate on the table. Next to it was a handwritten note:

Eat all you want. Bread in the oven. We got the report from Dr. Ergan, and are glad that you are in great shape. Don’t wait up for us—we’ll probably be really late. Love, Aunt Stacy.

PS. Please tell Dawn that her father and I give her a hug, and she mustn’t wait up for us, either.

Joshua was ready to explode with frustration and disappointment. Don’t wait up for us. He knew now how his mother must feel when a promised acting part didn’t come through, and she would pick up dinner plates and smash them to the ground.

He picked up two dishes from the sideboard. Instead of throwing them, he set them out with spoons at the table. Then he went across to open the oven and take out a loaf of bread almost too hot to hold. While he was juggling it to the table, Dawn finally came in. She was in her stocking feet. She said not a word, but came to his side, knelt down, and began to unfasten his shoes.

“Dawn, your father and—er”—What did Dawn call her stepmother?—“Stacy, they’ve gone out and they are going to be late home.” He cleared his throat. Dawn was still single-mindedly untying his shoes for him, as though she didn’t hear one word. “We’re supposed to help ourselves to food. They say, don’t wait up for them. And they send you their love.”

To his surprise, she nodded and said, “All right.”

A simple sentence. But it was her sentence—the first one that was not a direct quotation from someone else.

And apparently the last, too. All through dinner he could not get another word out of her. He babbled on about anything that came into his head, mostly himself. When they were finished he started for the data center, then wondered if it was safe to leave Dawn by herself in the kitchen. He went across, took her by the hand, and led her to the old dairy.

“Sit down. We’re going hunting.” He placed himself at her side and called for information about Solferino. There was nothing in the general data banks, other than a reference to an old battle three hundred years ago, in a country which had not even existed for more than a century. He didn’t follow that to the second level, but instead asked for information on the Messina Dust Cloud.

That was better. It was there. But the banks offered so much information, and much of it so technical, that he settled for the shortest and simplest overview that he could find.

Josh read through to the end and finished more puzzled than when he started. Transuranics and starfires and shwarzgeld? Harvesters and rakehells? He could chase after those references, and maybe he could even find them; but the biggest puzzle was that almost everything in the Messina Dust Cloud seemed to be about mining. Uncle Ryan had talked about farming, or at least about wildlife exploration, and he said that the development franchise was owned by Foodlines. According to the database, that was wrong. Some other syndicate that Josh had never heard of, Unimine, had development rights. Exclusive development rights. Didn’t that mean that no one else could have any?

He set up the search for Unimine.

Josh leaned back, disheartened. He had missed something fundamental. Not one word about agriculture, or biological product development. And what was a “hazard level”? Presumably, some kind of a measure of great danger. Uncle Ryan could surely have told him what was going on in two seconds—if he were around to ask.

At his side, Dawn stirred and rose to her feet. She had been quiet while Josh was working, though she hadn’t seemed to watch the displays at all. Now she said, “Come on,” and held out her hand.

“Come on where? Oh, who cares. I’m not getting anywhere here.” Josh allowed himself to be dragged out of the data center and up the stairs, higher and higher, until they came to a little room at the end of the loft. He hadn’t remembered its existence until he saw it again. Then he remembered that it always used to be locked. Dawn went in and pulled a swing-down ladder into position, which also opened a skylight. She led the way up.

They emerged onto a flat part of the roof. Josh was sure that he had never been here before, and it took a few seconds to orient himself. City kids didn’t see open sky very often—too many streetlights and tall buildings—but the rising moon told him which way was east.

The night sky was so clear that you thought you could see a million stars in it, as well as dozens of rapidly moving points of light that had to be ships and stations in low orbit. He thought that Dawn had just brought him up to look at everything, until she took his arm to get his attention and pointed up and to the southwest.

“What is it?” He couldn’t see a thing where she was telling him to look.

She giggled. “Belt node.”

No wonder he couldn’t find anything. No one could possibly see a node in the Asteroid Belt or the Kuiper Belt from here, not if they had the biggest telescope on Earth to look through. He stared anyway, for a long time, and saw nothing.

Then she was pointing farther north. “Messina Dust Cloud.”

Again, there was nothing visible. But she certainly seemed to be staring at something.

It gave him a definitely creepy feeling. Either she could pick up something that was totally invisible to him, or she couldn’t, and she was playing some sort of game of her own. Either way, he didn’t like it. For the first time, his feelings about Dawn took a strongly negative turn. With her long silences and her strange reactions, she really spooked him.

They stayed on the flat roof until the air cooled. At last Josh felt himself shivering. Dawn, in her sleeveless dress, must have been freezing. He said “Come on” and led the way back inside. She followed, and, rather to his relief, continued on to her own room.

He did the same. The house doors were already locked, though that seemed to be of less concern here than in the apartments where he and his mother had always lived. This time he undressed and put on night clothes before he lay down on his bed.

He welcomed the chance to be alone for a while. He had a lot to think about. The fact that he had been dropped onto Burnt Willow Farm uninvited; Aunt Stacy and Uncle Ryan and the medical examination; the network nodes and the Messina Dust Cloud; Solferino and Foodlines and Unimine; they all swirled around disturbingly inside his head.

And Dawn. What strange ideas ran around in her head, when she lay down to sleep? Did she, like Josh, worry about the next day and her own future? Or did she live all in the present, like Mister Micklegruber, now snoring so loudly outside that Josh could hear him through the open window?

Josh did not know if it was Uncle Ryan and Aunt Stacy’s return that woke him up, or the sound of their voices.

He lay flat on his back and wondered what time it was. It felt like the middle of the night. He was ready to turn over and try to go back to sleep when he thought that he heard Uncle Ryan say the word, Joshua, with unusual emphasis.

He lay totally still, staring up at the ceiling and listening intently. It was no good—he could hear enough to be sure that they were talking, and sometimes pick out odd words and phrases, but he could not quite make sense of the whole conversation.

He eased out of bed as quietly as he could and moved across to the door. Their bedroom was on the floor below his, but for some reason he could hear even less when he was here at the head of the stairs. In fact, he didn’t think they were in their bedroom at all. There was a light on farther down, as though they were still downstairs. He knew how much the old stairs creaked. If he went down, they would surely hear him coming no matter how quietly he tried to walk.

He moved back and put his ear to the wall at the head end of his bed. That was a lot better. Through some trick of the house’s construction, sounds below carried here almost perfectly.

He stood motionless and tried not to breathe.

“I’m not saying it isn’t.” That was Uncle Ryan. “In fact, it’s a good deal more than I expected.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“Well, for one thing it’s our existing commitments. I have contracts for crop delivery this harvest.”

“Harvest?” Aunt Stacy laughed, but it carried no humor. “If we don’t take the Foodlines offer, there’ll be no harvest. You’ll be plowing under dry stalks. But if we take their offer, they’ll make water available. And you heard Mort, he’ll make sure that our contracts are fulfilled no matter what.”

“So he says. You know I don’t trust that man as far as I can throw him.”

“I don’t see why. He’s always been straight with me.”

“You weren’t around when other farms were bought out, Stacy. You haven’t heard the stories. Mort Langstrom made promises, but once the deal was signed and people were off their own property, that was the last anybody heard about prior commitments.”

“I see.” There was a pause, then Aunt Stacy spoke again in a different voice. “Suppose that we could talk Foodlines into signing a deal now, but they agree we can stay on at Burnt Willow Farm until this harvest is in. Would that make a difference?”

“Of course it would. But you know they won’t go for that. They were quite clear about the situation on Solferino. If we want to get that early-in working interest that they talked about, we have to have a physical presence there within sixty days. I must say, I’ve never heard of a contract clause like that in my life. I wonder who put it in.”

“I wonder, too.” There was a certain tone in Aunt Stacy’s voice. Josh recalled his mother’s acting-out of parts. See this now. Wide-open eyes. The mouth parted, just a little. Perfect innocence.

Aunt Stacy was continuing, “But Ryan, it could still work.”

“How? We can’t be in two places at once.”

“We don’t have to be. There’s Joshua.”

Josh, his ear to the wall, felt the goosebumps rise at the sound of his own name.

“What about Joshua?” asked Uncle Ryan.

“He could go on ahead of us, and establish a presence on behalf of the family. He would need special training anyway, to live and work on Solferino. It would be better if he had it there than here.”

Josh gasped with excitement and put his hand over his mouth. But Ryan said, more than loudly enough to cover the noise from Josh, “Stacy!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Are you crazy? We don’t even know how to reach Lucy to discuss it.”

“So what? We can hardly be blamed for that. What makes you think she wants to discuss this, or anything else to do with Joshua?”

“She’d have to.”

“Why? She sent us all the legal records on him; we can take any action we believe to be to his benefit. Ryan, can’t you see that Lucy Kerrigan doesn’t give a damn what happens to her son? From all I’ve heard about her, she’s a totally selfish bitch who never did one thing for anybody except herself in her whole life. Who was Joshua’s father? Can you tell me that?”

“I don’t know. Maria didn’t know, either. Lucy never told us.”

“Wonderful. So Lucy Kerrigan has herself a bastard. And when it becomes inconvenient to have him around, what does she do? She drops him off on strangers.”

“Stacy, we’re not strangers. I’m his uncle.”

“Right. But she hadn’t seen you for eight years. And she didn’t even realize that Maria had died. And I’m certainly a stranger to her. She doesn’t know that I exist.”

“Well, of course she doesn’t.” There was the scraping of a chair on a wooden floor and the sound of footsteps, then Uncle Ryan went on, “Look, I’m not going to start us arguing by defending Lucy Kerrigan. It’s Joshua I’m concerned about.”

“And it’s Joshua that’ll be concerned about, too. Ryan, I never want to argue with you, about anything. But we don’t disagree at all. This is the best thing that could possibly happen to Joshua. There’s no future for him here at Burnt Willow—you know that even if you don’t want to admit it. Solferino is a whole new world. It will be marvelous for him. For Dawn, too.”

“Dawn can’t possibly go!”

“Well, if we go we can’t possibly leave her behind.”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean, Dawn can’t go before we do.”

“Oh, sure.” There was a pause, then Aunt Stacy went on in a thoughtful voice. “Mind you, Dawn will need special training anyway, because of—well, you know. She has her problems. It might help a lot if Foodlines agreed for her to go a little ahead of us, so they could take longer with her than usual. I’ll tell you what, why don’t I call Mort Langstrom tomorrow, and talk all this over with him? But I don’t want to discuss it any more tonight. It’s getting late, and I’m tired.” There was another scrape of a moving chair on the board floor, and an audible kiss. “Come on to bed, love. We’ll sort all this out in the morning.”

Josh heard footsteps, first on the lower level and then ascending the stairs. He tiptoed to his bed and lay down on top of the covers. There was the sound of running water, then the murmur of voices that gradually faded in the next few minutes.

Josh lay in the darkness with his eyes wide open. He felt too excited ever to sleep again. He knew what was going on, even if Uncle Ryan didn’t seem to. Aunt Stacy didn’t want Josh around, and the best way to do that was to make sure that Josh was twenty-seven light-years away, on Solferino.

Well, Josh wouldn’t say no to that. He could hardly wait. No place on Earth had anything to offer him. He would willingly go to Solferino tomorrow, or tonight, or as soon as they would let him.

But there was one other factor. Josh lay totally still, listening. There was not a sound inside the house. He eased himself off his bed and crept down the stairs to the next level. Uncle Ryan’s bedroom door was closed, but Dawn’s was open a crack.

Josh peeped in. She was asleep, her face pale and expressionless in the moonlight that slanted in through the window. He stared at her, and his earlier uneasiness changed to irritation.

He had a premonition about what was going to happen. Aunt Stacy didn’t just want Joshua out of the way; she wanted Uncle Ryan all to herself, for as long as she could get him. And that meant Dawn had to be out of the way, too.

By the sound of it, Aunt Stacy had some kind of deal going with Foodlines and Mort Langstrom. She would work them, as she was already working Uncle Ryan. And who would finish up dragging his dumb and retarded cousin after him through the node network, like a big dead weight around his neck?

Josh had his suspicions.