Aliens In The Family

by Margaret Mahy

  The redness of the light increased around them. Jake lifted her gaze to the black mass beyond the point where the Galgonqua had stood. Now she could see that it was a mountain—more than a mountain. The ground purred strangely, then growled and shifted. As she looked, a deep, rosy flow erupted at the peak of the mountain in a dazzling fountain. The night became like Guy Fawkes night, except that the fireworks let off on the fifth of November could not compare with the spectacle before them now. They were no longer on a peninsular but on an island. There was no longer any harbour beyond the hills, but an erupting volcano.

  "What will we do?" asked Jake.

  "Sit tight," suggested Dora. "It's what we were told to do." She looked around wildly. "Did you hear that?"

  "What? The volcano?"

  "No!" declared Dora, frowning. "Somebody called my name."

  "They can't have," said Jake, but as she spoke she heard her own name called, faintly but distinctly.

  "Ghosts!" Dora cried. "First men from outer space, then historical men, then a volcano, and now ghosts!" But it was not ghosts. It was David and Philippa coming out of the dark towards the light to find their children at last.

  "It's Mum!" cried Lewis, forgetting the volcano and Bond too. "I knew we'd get home safely."

  Sixteen - New Directions

  Up in the School, Bond walked for the last time through the rounded corridor of the student's section. His friends were still asleep. He had been returned to the School at the exact moment at which he had left it two and a half days earlier.

  "Nexus ahead," advised a soft, mechanical voice and the rosy cone of light deepened in front of him once more. He saw the chair and the screen and the moving worms of light. To his surprise he found that some of the dials which he had not understood previously had developed some meaning for him and he could not think how it was that he could recognize them. The screen lit up.

  "Bond," said the voice of his teacher. "They tell me you passed the test—though not without difficulty and making several mistakes. I hear that you made contact with the ancestors and involved them in your test. You know that is forbidden and you are only forgiven because you recorded good information. The use of hair dye was of particular interest."

  Bond did not reply.

  "Are you pleased?" asked the teacher. "You are now a probationer and will be reunited with your sister Solita once more. They are presently waking and disconnecting her."

  "I don't understand," said Bond, "why you would allow anyone to take over Lewis. He was so little and helpless."

  "You were the one who made the contact," the teacher pointed out, "and all that happened to them was as a direct result of your involving them in your test. If the Wirdegen had really been after you, things might have been a great deal worse for them."

  "If the Wirdegen had really been after me I would have been caught a lot sooner," Bond replied, his voice heavy. "It explains a great deal."

  "Don't underrate yourself, Bond. It is the same with all you confident students—if you can't be heroes you want to be villains. You were brave, you thought quickly, and at the end you were prepared to sacrifice yourself for your friends and for the School. In the end, too, you guessed that it was all part of the test. Give yourself credit for this."

  "They became my friends," Bond explained. "They had a lot of troubles of their own, but they still became my friends." Something else suddenly occurred to him. "There was an object anomaly," he exclaimed. "The first one was only a slight one, but the second was serious even though the prophecy circuits said I could take my stone down to the city. They must have been wrong."

  "No, they were not wrong," answered the teacher. "But something very mysterious was involved and we have a team working on an analysis now. It may be that this particular anomaly changed the lives of everyone involved—even the men from the past—in an important and necessary way. And now, Bond—you must go."

  "I'll do better next time," Bond stated confidently, "but..."

  "Lewis will not suffer at all," the teacher reassured him. "There is no danger for any of them." The screen went dark. Bond got up and began to walk away. Silently the screen behind him lit up again. "Bond! You are going in the wrong direction," called the teacher. "You have passed your first test, remember. And Bond—the School is proud of you."

  Bond stopped in his tracks. Slowly he began to smile. Then he turned and walked down the rounded corridor in the opposite direction towards another part of the school, and as he walked, light ran beside him like a faithful dog.

  In the distant past of the planet below, Sebastian Webster spoke through the darkness that surrounded them and said, "I can smell the bush. It's going to be all right after all."

  "I knew the valley was full of ghosts," said Koro. "Everyone knows, but I didn't think a pakeha would see them."

  "He's got Maori eyes after all," said Hakiaha. "He sees in the Maori way."

  The tension had eased between Sebastian and his Maori friends. Sebastian touched the stone in his ear and felt it cold and smooth, as if the hills had wept a stone tear. It had no more messages for him. "I told you—I don't build fences," he said. "I don't fence anyone out, and I don't fence myself in. Not like the others."

  And there among the ferns he sat patiently with his friends and waited for morning to come, which it did—as magical as the bush, the hills and the old volcano, not because it was strange but because it was familiar. Although he welcomed it with Maori feelings, Sebastian also had one pakeha thought as the sunlight fell on him. Someday, he thought, I'll write it all down. He knew he could not quite tell it or sing it in the Maori way of passing information down through generations. It would have to be written. Then he rose and walked with his people down into the volcano which time had turned into a smooth, green harbour.

  Seventeen - The Beginning Place

  When Jake and Dora saw their parents, they understood at once that no matter how frightening the events of the last twenty minutes had seemed to them, it had been even worse for these grown-ups who had not known anything about Bond. Even explanations you were unable to understand were better than no explanations at all, and perhaps children, being closer to fairy tales, could cope better with terrifying transformations. So it was Dora and Jake and Lewis who did most of the comforting as well as the explaining, and Cooney who was probably the most at ease in this remarkable world in which they now found themselves.

  However strange and unnatural things seemed, finding the children safe and well meant so much that it was not very long before Philippa and David stopped shaking with fear and shock and began to act like parents again—joking a little and refusing to take things too seriously in case the gravity of the situation got too much for them once more. At first they looked only at their children and not at the changed world around them, but soon they began to dart curious glances out into the darkness and up into the air and their voices grew softer and more normal again. Nevertheless they made everyone hold hands in case, by some unimaginable magic, one of them should be plucked away and lost forever.

  The roar of the volcano filled the air and the sky above turned the colour of molten steel, but the patchwork family reunited at its foot did not particularly notice.

  "There are things more important than volcanoes," said David grandly, and for a few moments it seemed that simply being together was enough to make a happy ending. But the volcano did not wish to be ignored. It had never had an audience till now, for it had risen out of the sea long before there were any people around and it wanted people to notice it and to tremble at its force.

  "Noisy old thing!" commented David nervously, staring up at it. It painted his face with its savage light. "I don't think it can hurt us though. We seem to be untouchable here. I think if we were as close to a volcano in our own time, it would be deafening."

  It was curious that they had wound up huddled together in a circle among the stones like jittery hens. They had started off hugging each other over and over again while Cooney, snorting sc
ornfully and shifting his feet on the stones, watched them. From the children's point of view it was a wonderfully secure feeling to have parents around who might know what to do.

  When Dora expressed this sentiment however, David replied, "But I don't know what to do! There's nothing in the Good Parent's Instruction Manual to tell you what to do when you're lost in time with a volcano as a next-door neighbour!" Nevertheless it was true that the relief of being together made the strangeness seem less so.

  "I'm so glad to see you," Jake said to David, and cried big, wet, silent tears onto his shoulder, because she was speaking not just for that moment, but for yesterday and the day before that and the year before that. She was telling him in her own way that she had been frightened of riding, frightened of adventure, but mostly frightened of giving in.

  "I was scared," admitted Dora. "Jake was the brave one."

  "Dora was so brave," cried Jake simultaneously.

  "I was too," Lewis said proudly. Their three voices made a pattern. They had started off as individuals from different planets, but at last they were breathing the same air. Just for a moment Bond was forgotten.

  "What's been going on, anyway,?" asked David. "What have you done to the world?"

  "We went back to the days of Sebastian Webster," said Lewis. "We had a turn at being ghosts." The mountain roared and great rivers of incandescent fire began to wind down its sides. They shone like great tears, destroying everything in their path. "It feels so old." Lewis sighed. "We went back in time with Bond and the ones that were after him."

  "Bond!" Philippa cried in sudden recollection. "Where is he? I can't imagine what's happened to him."

  "It isn't a thing you can imagine," explained Jake. "Bond wasn't a real person. He was something else, but he said we weren't to worry. He said time would go faster and faster until whole years went by in seconds and we would end up in our own time—exactly when we left it—and we'd go on from there."

  "We'll wait then," said David, "because I for one don't want to find myself wandering too far away from where we left the horses. So... let's just sit here and talk about the weather!"

  Lewis laughed at David's joke. "There isn't any weather here," he said. "No sun, nothing but the light of the volcano."

  "But the sun's rising, I'm sure of it," Philippa said. "There's a glow in the sky over there—away from the volcano. I'm sure it's the beginning of a new day—or should I say an old one."

  "An old, old one!" added Lewis.

  They sat and watched for a while in silence. The sky began to change colour before their eyes. It was the most brilliant sunrise any of them could remember seeing. It looked as if the surface of the sky was polished and was reflecting the volcano's glow in pink and gold so brightly it seemed as if it might suddenly burst into flames and burn up overhead. When the sun did rise it moved so rapidly that Lewis felt an angel was drawing an arch over their heads with a felt pen that left a line of fire.

  "It's so scary," said Philippa in wonderment, "and yet—look Dora—it's beautiful too, in a frightening way. Like a film that's been speeded up."

  "I'm never going to be frightened of anything again," remarked Dora. "So many frightening things have happened today, I've used up all my scaredness!"

  They were in a barren world. Although there were a few trees, they looked distant and stunted. They were the only living things in a landscape of stone mottled with yellow sulphur. Steam rose from crevices in the flank of the mountain, and the air was filled with a burnt chemical smell.

  "Isn't it funny," reflected Dora. "David wished we could get back to some beginning place and here we are!" She looked respectfully at David as if here was a man whose wishes, no matter how unlikely, had a chance of coming true.

  "Yes, David, it's all your fault," said Philippa good-naturedly. Cooney, his lead rope tucked under a heavy stone so that he couldn't wander away, snorted as if he agreed.

  "I actually rode him," said Jake to no-one in particular. "I stuck on for quite a while."

  The sun moved faster and faster. "It's making me dizzy," complained Lewis. "I can see the shadows spinning around."

  "It's true!" said Jake suddenly, but without saying what it was that was true. "Dora's still got the same hair of course, but it's very untidy..."

  "I don't care," Dora butted in, touching her head anxiously all the same.

  ". . . and I haven't got my cowboy hat," continued Jake. "Lewis hasn't got his felt pens or eagle feathers, and there's no new house and no red car."

  "But we've got each other!" declared Philippa.

  "That's right," David agreed. "Remember how we wished we'd get back to a place where there was nothing to hide behind, no props and no history? Then we'd be able to talk to each other, ask questions, give honest answers..."

  "O.K.," said Jake. "So why didn't you ask me to your wedding?" She directed a penetrating look at David who considered his reply carefully.

  "Jacqueline—Jake," he said at last. "I did invite you. Your mother wrote back saying you didn't want to come. I had written a long, careful letter because I knew it might be awkward, even upsetting for you, but I wanted you to be there. I was very happy and wanted to share it with you if possible—but Pet said you didn't want to come."

  "Oh," said Jake. It was her turn to be silent. Dora opened her mouth to say something but Philippa caught her eye and shook her head. "She reads the letters you write me," Jake said after a while. "She's frightened I might want to live with you for always and then there'd be no-one to look after things at home."

  "Look after things?" asked Philippa, puzzled.

  "Jake's grandma and grandpa aren't very well," said Dora, secretly pleased that she knew something her mother didn't, "and her mother wants to be looked after."

  "It isn't her fault!" Jake cried defensively. "It's just that she never learned to look after herself, and slowly she grew more and more disappointed and can't see any reason to try hard."

  "Do you have to do all the dishes?" asked Lewis aghast at the thought. "Dry them too?"

  "Uh-huh. I help cook, and peel the veggies and things like that," said Jake. "And I do the washing and cut the wood, and sometimes do a bit of gardening, and remember to put out the milk bottles, and dress my grandpa. I have to learn how to look after myself and it's all good practice."

  "You should come and live with us forever," Lewis offered generously.

  Jake looked at David. "I have a pretty good time in a lot of ways," she continued. "I have some good friends at school. And I know Mum really does love me, even if she doesn't want to look after me the way other mothers look after their children."

  "I know," David said in a gentle voice.

  "She says that I need her, but really she needs me."

  "I know," repeated David sadly.

  "We have some good times. Sometimes she'll say, for no reason at all, 'Let's have a party!' and we do. It's a lot of fun but the trouble is we spend all the housekeeping and have to live on mince for a week. I still like things like that though."

  "What if she marries Manley?" asked Dora.

  "I think she's got too much sense for that," Jake replied. "I mean she knows Manley would never look after anyone but she likes having someone to go to the movies with. They go to films that I'm not allowed into."

  A rapid night fell over them. They sat quietly watching as the stars moved like glittering moths blown over the sky by a high wind.

  "The thing with me," said Dora, encouraged by Jake's disclosures, "is that I'm always afraid someone will come in when I'm not expecting it and catch me out looking awful, and then he'll go away again."

  "Your father perhaps?" asked David, probingly.

  "i don't know," said Dora looking puzzled. "Sometimes, perhaps. Not that I want you to go away, David," she added quickly.

  They could all see David's funny, sad smile by the light of the volcano. "We can all tell a secret or two at the beginning of the world," he said. "Life's very mixed up, Dora. It's just the way it is. There's
no need to worry too much about it. There are times when your mother misses your father too."

  "Yes, every now and then something happens which I think is funny but David takes it so seriously," said Philippa. "I don't exactly miss Joe at times like that but I do think of him because I know he would have thought it was funny too. And every now and then David thinks of Jake's mother in the same way."

  "Mmm. Like, as Jake was saying, sometimes Pet would say 'Let's have a party!' and she'd spend all the housekeeping," said David. "And we had some wonderful parties. Even if we did have to live on mince for a fortnight. It's hard to say these things under a family roof, but it's different under a volcano."

  The days and nights shivered around them. Months and years flickered by. Whole summers went past like the flashes of a distant mirror. The volcano climbed higher while they watched, then it grew darker and slower.

  Rain and frost worked on it but the small family group were not touched by wetness or by cold. The crater began to crumble at its upper edges and at last everything ran into a strange twilight just as Bond had predicted—no sun, no moon, no day, no night—only their five faces looking at each other and the nervous stamp of Cooney's hooves on the stones.

  "You'll be able to learn to ride when we get back," said Dora, already imagining herself teaching Jake to ride and how grateful Jake would be to her forever after, and somehow this thought turned into a dream. She sighed, leaned against David and closed her eyes. "I'll never throw books at Jake again," she promised drowsily.

  "Even if you do, I suppose we'll get over it sooner or later," Jake said smiling, but Dora did not hear her. She was asleep.

  "Don't you believe in happy endings?" David asked his daughter.

  "I suppose I do," replied Jake yawning. "Sort of. For a while anyway!" She lay back against Philippa. "Do you think this is a happy ending?"