The Family Tree

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He finally caught on. “You’re on the prod! So, what’s with Jared and his mama?”

  “I don’t much care,” she lied.

  Together they drove to the house in the country club, where Phil fetched the address book and turned it over to Dora. She went through it, finding to her enormous satisfaction that there were at least three addresses in Alaska, plus others in remoter parts of Montana, Washington, and Michigan. Beneath some of the addresses were tiny notations in black ink. 2gb,mf. 1gb,f. 5p,3m2f. 4o,2&2. 6m,3&3. A dozen others.

  Two grizzly bears, male and female. One grizzly bear, female. Given her guests’ identification of the cover of the animal encyclopedia, she’d been expecting grizzlies. Five…pigs, three male, two female. Four otters, two and two. Or could be ocelots? Six monkeys…or macaques, three and three. Or could it be mink? Or macaw, mongoose, magpie…. Whichever, Winston had already dispersed them into the wild. And he’d done it secretly; it had never appeared in the press, so there had been no record of it for the Woput to find.

  Maybe. On the other hand, in the non-Woput world, Winston had not been murdered but had lived, perhaps to be quite old. In his golden years, he might have written a memoir which had survived at St. Weel. He might have mentioned in that book every person who had protected his creations. Even now, the Woput might be searching for them.

  Back at the station, Dora dug out the stack of scientific papers she’d been given and spent the afternoon locating and calling those scientists across the country who seemed to be involved in similar research to that done by Edgar Winston. Many other people were working on pieces of the genetic puzzle, they said, but no one else was doing what Winnie had done. Of those who had contributed most to the basic research, several mentioned Martin Chamberlain and Jennifer Williams.

  Dora forbore mentioning that both of them were dead, though several of her informants had already learned of it.

  “You finding anything?” Phil asked, about three in the afternoon, dropping by her desk with a fresh cup of coffee.

  “It’s mostly what I don’t find,” she told him. “I don’t find anyone else that this Wo—that is, murderer is likely to go after. The three victims here in this city seemed to be the people most involved in a particular kind of research.”

  “So if the research is the common factor, what the hell’s the motive?”

  Dora had been considering the need for an acceptable motive. “There’s animal rights groups, right?”

  “Sure. But Winston wasn’t doing anything bad. I mean, he wasn’t cutting up the animals, or torturing them or anything.”

  Dora agreed. “But some of these groups, they might not care what was really going on, right? Anybody experimenting on animals, he was a bad guy, so wipe him out.”

  “You think that’s what happened?”

  “Could be. We ought to look at animal rights groups next. If that doesn’t give us anything, go at it from the other side. There’s farm and ranch groups who’re anti-animal rights. The American Farm Bureau, for instance—it fights animal rights legislation….”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I lived on Grandma’s farm until just a couple of years ago, Phil. She had Farm Bureau Insurance, and I saw the mailings. Anyhow, so maybe some anti-animal rights group figures out Winnie was proving animals were smarter than we think or something. Like, let’s say Winnie could prove a pig could think almost like a person. That’d stir up the hog farmers, wouldn’t it? That’d make the anti-animal rights people pretty mad.” She waved an inclusive hand, trying to obscure the problems with this spontaneous persiflage.

  “That’s sounds kinda complicated to me, Dora. I like the other idea better.”

  “Well, so did I. That’s why I said we should do it first. I’ve started a list. You want to take the first five?”

  That took care of Phil for an hour or two. Dora called to arrange the rental of two vans, having checked with Abby to be sure he’d be available as driver. Then she got a call from Harry Dionne, saying his father would be in the following afternoon.

  “I think I’d better mention he’s now the archpriest,” Harry said in a slightly concerned voice, evincing more emotion than Dora had yet known him to show.

  “That would mean what?” she asked.

  “Beard, oak-leaf wreath, robes, staff, all that. A year or so ago, Dad ascended to the…well, it’d be like the papacy if we had one. Or like archbishop of Canterbury? At any rate, he rarely goes out in ordinary clothes anymore, and if we go out anywhere, the local group will probably insist on a procession. I just didn’t want you to be surprised.”

  “It takes rather a lot to surprise me these days,” she replied. “Ah…do you suppose you could get your father to come over to my place? I have some…important things that I think he should see.”

  “Things?”

  “Tell him things relating to Cory’s disappearance.”

  “That happened almost thirty years ago.”

  “Nonetheless. Tell him I know she was never found and I know why.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She spent the rest of the afternoon typing up a report for the lieutenant, taking it in to him and waiting while he read through it,

  “Sounds good, Henry,” he said. “I’m not sure you’re getting anywhere, but I can’t fault the work.”

  “It’s slow,” she admitted. “How have things been with the trees lately? We still getting as many calls?”

  “Things have settled some,” he admitted. “Mayor’s task force reports that every apartment in the city is now rented, including those in buildings that were almost vacant a few months ago. That big new apartment-condo complex out southeast, it’s fully leased even though it’s not half finished.”

  “Did we ever get anywhere with that baby that disappeared?”

  “Those babies. Kind of hard to focus on one when there’ve been a few dozen. Ran them through the computer looking for common factors, they’re all third living children or lower birth order. It’s happening other places, too. One guy called it kind of arboreal birth control.”

  “My God, I’d think we’d be having riots!”

  “No riots. A lot of hysterical mommies and daddies, but not much else. They don’t know what’s happened to the kids and neither do we. We do know we’re getting compressed, moved in tighter and tighter. My wife, she yelled at me for five years, I had to move us out in the country near where her friends lived. Now, every day it’s move back in the city, back in the city. My kids, Livia’s fourteen, Brian’s sixteen, they’ve done a hundred eighty from where they were a few months ago. They were both cutting school, Livia was sneaking cigarettes, both of them with a mouth on them you wouldn’t believe. Now all the kids out there have started this Cory group—”

  “Cory group!”

  “That’s what they call it, don’t ask me why. They leave the house on Friday night, don’t come back until Sunday. I ask them what they’re doing, they say they’re talking to the trees. I thought it was a lot of bull, so I went out there with them. That’s what they do, sit around cross-legged and talk to trees. And the smoking’s stopped. Whatever this Cory thing is, it isn’t…harmful. Not that I can see.”

  “Not a problem, then.”

  “Well, yeah, a problem, or half of one. My wife, she wants to move back into town; the kids they want to stay where they are. Either way, I’m the villain.”

  “Maybe your wife will get used to it.”

  “Not my wife. She sees a squirrel, she has hysterics because it’s planning to bite her. She sees a garter snake, she falls apart in little pieces. Not my wife she won’t get used to it. She wants the whole world paved and airconditioned, then she’ll be happy.”

  He laughed. Dora smiled weakly, waving the report at him. “You want me to go on with this, then?”

  “Sure. You might get somewhere. Maybe the address book will give you a lead.”

  The address book already had, but she didn’t mention that. As soon as the
clock would allow, she left the office, went to the car rental place and shuttled the two vans to a public parking lot, taking time with the second one to make a side trip to a pet store for several sacks of cedar shavings and some alfalfa-based feed pellets. While the veebles—and presumably the goats, if there were any talking goats—could graze quite nicely in the woods, if they had to hide out, they’d need food already prepared and she didn’t have time to drive to a feed store for hay.

  Finally, all preparations made, she took the bus home, arriving about ten minutes before Abby did. She was greeted by a group in full babble, wanting to tell her about Izzy’s attempts at magic in the forest.

  “Stop,” Dora begged. “Listen, I can only deal with one thing at a time. I want to tell you the plan, while it’s still clear in my mind! Izzy and Soaz and Oyk and Irk will go with Abby and me to pick up the vans, as soon as it’s dark enough. Because we don’t know how the…people in the pens will react to one another, I thought we’d put—I’ll use my own words for them—the bear and the cat and the dogs into one van with Oyk and Soaz, the pigs and the goats and whatever else in the other one with Izzy and Irk.”

  “Where will everyone sleep?” asked the countess. “We are already crowded.”

  “This isn’t crowded,” said Lucy Low. “Why at home—”

  Dora interrupted firmly. “We’ll clear a space downstairs for anyone who needs shelter. I’ve got some sacks of bedding material in the van. I wanted straw, but none of the feed stores were close. Maybe I can pick up some tomorrow. And hay.”

  “Someone’s knocking….” said Mince.

  “It’s Abby. Please let him in.” Dora went over her plans, ticking off the points. “When we’ve dropped off our new visitors, Abby and I will take the vans back downtown. We don’t want them seen here.”

  Abby came puffing up the stairs. “I brought more groceries,” he said. “I thought we might be running low.”

  Dzilobommo and Nassif went to help him dispose of the vegetables and packaged goods he had brought, and Abby left them to it while he went to move his car back to the avenue before it was treed. Dzilobommo had already prepared food for the evening meal, and he began setting it out while Dora finished her explanation.

  “…then tomorrow, Abby and I’ll take the vans to the carwash, then back to the rental place. There should be nothing to link us to the disappearance. Once the people are here, we can call the people in Winston’s address book—the local ones—and make arrangements for housing them.”

  “It sounds well thought out,” said the countess in her soothing voice. “You sound as though the day has been stressful.”

  “It was,” said Dora, her voice breaking. “I verified that Woput is definitely Jared, or the other way round. After Jared got hit by lightning, he didn’t remember who he was. He had to learn all over again.”

  “So he’s not even partly Jared?”

  Dora shook her head. “His mother says he never remembered really private things, so I think we have to believe he’s all Woput. She should have known he was different, changed, but she’s not a very perceptive woman, and he’s all she had in the way of family. Perhaps she didn’t want to see that he wasn’t really her son. And I feel a fool, of course. Why didn’t I see that he wasn’t really a…well, whatever.”

  “You are distressed,” the countess said. “I know. But think, this is good knowledge, for now we know where he is, who he is. Now we can take proper steps to confound him. Sit down. Nassif, bring Dora a cup of tea.”

  Dora was brought a cup of tea, and some savory bits that Dzilobommo had baked, and she ate and sipped quietly while Izzy explained what he had learned from the trees.

  When he had finished, she rubbed her head fretfully. “I’ll have to think about it later, certainly we need to talk of it before Vorn Dionne arrives. Right now, I feel like my mind is about to explode.”

  They ate their dinner while Blanche told them a story of the stolen eggs of Kumper-Kraw, a very funny story at which the onchiki laughed immoderately. This was followed by a rendition of certain folk tunes by the onchiki themselves, and the recitation of a Farakiel love poem as translated into fractured Inglitch by Izzy. When Dora finished her supper, she was amazed to find the sky already darkening, and she realized the diversion had been planned, probably by the countess, in order to give her, Dora, some moments of relaxation.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

  It proved an inappropriate idiom, which both Blanche and the onchiki found offensive, as they could not comply with the direction. The figure of speech had to be explained before Abby and Dora could leave on their night’s work, their four chosen companions with them.

  36

  A Gathering of Tribes

  At Randall Pharmaceuticals, Dora and Abby found the gates shut and the guardhouse untenanted. They turned down the slope along the outside of the fence toward the line of trees that marked the lower boundary, and there they waited in fidgety silence while their companions went under the fence and up among the pens.

  The pigs were to be brought out first. Dora listened for Sahir, whose loud complaints she thought she would hear long before she saw him, but the night was utterly quiet. After what seemed far too long a time, they heard scuffling noises by the fence and Soaz came darting up to them, the shadowy bulk of a bear behind him.

  “I thought you were going to bring the pigs first?” said Dora.

  “Gone,” breathed Soaz. “The Woput got them.”

  “He got Sahir?”

  “All of them.”

  “All of the animals but the bear?”

  “No. All the pigs. Others are still here. We’re bringing them.”

  Oyk came through the fringe of trees, four dogs trotting quietly at his heels. Soaz darted away again, leaving the bear and her cubs standing quietly beside the van.

  “How do you do,” said Dora. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your names.”

  “Rosa,” said the bear, in a breathy contralto. “I have not named the children yet.”

  Irk came out of the trees, followed by a medium-sized raccoon and by the lovely female cat Dora had seen previously. Soaz came bounding forward. “Sheba,” he said, making introductions. “Dora. Abby.”

  Oyk and Irk trotted back the way they had come, returning in a moment. Oyk said in an annoyed voice, “Dora, we are sure the goats can talk, but they won’t. All the buck does is fart at us and look the other way.”

  “Did that raccoon talk?”

  “The raccoon grummels.”

  “That’s right. You said that before. Damn, damn, damn!” She screwed up her face, trying to think. “We don’t dare leave any creature here that the Woput can come after. Go back in there, go to every pen and tell the creatures in it that this is their last chance at safety, and if you think they can talk but won’t, bring them anyhow! We can’t wait forever, so make it fast.”

  She put her head in her hands and growled, not quite silently, “I should have been quicker! When did he come?”

  The bear rose on her hind legs, sniffing the air, one foreleg resting on the head of each cub. “After the humans left the big building. When it was almost dark. He came in a big car and opened the gate. I was watching. He had a net. The new pig, he was in a panic. He got in front of the hole, and the others couldn’t escape, so the man got them all.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Just that he was taking them to his place, that they would be the first race of inferiors destroyed.”

  “Did they talk?”

  “We all warned them not to. I don’t think he cared if they talked or not.”

  Dora drew herself up. “Would you agree to assist in a rescue mission?”

  The bear showed her teeth. “If you will help me find the male I mated with, wherever Daddy Eddy took him, I will help you rescue the pigs. That is, if the children are kept safe.”

  “You’re fond of him,” said Dora. “The male.”

  “Not particularly
, no,” said Rosa in a thoughtful voice. “He is no more than competent at what I need him for, but these two are almost two years old. It is time for me to mate again, and I prefer a male who talks! Don’t you?” She glanced meaningfully at Abby.

  Dora flushed, started to speak, and was interrupted by Oyk, who called, “The buck has his horns caught in the wire.”

  Abby said, “I thought that might happen. I brought wire cutters.”

  He went into the trees, returning in a few moments followed by four goats, one buck with long, curly horns, and three spike-horned does. The buck snorted and made a farting noise. The does murmured a chorus of nervous thank-yous that only expectation made intelligible. Everyone hurried; no one talked; and as soon as they were loaded, Dora announced they were going to attempt rescuing Sahir and the scuini.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Abby whispered.

  “Abby, I can’t just leave them there. It could be the whole scuinic race. And Sahir, we know Sahir. He’s our friend.”

  “He’s a snotty little git,” said Abby. “But I suppose if you’re a sultan’s son you get like that. Lord, this is turning into a cross between Indiana Jones and the San Diego Zoo.”

  They drove almost furtively, slowing well in advance of every cross street, keeping exactly to the center of their lanes, attracting no attention whatsoever. They turned off the avenue at the boardinghouse corner and crept down the swerving alley that had been left by the trees. A large, dark car was parked in front of Jared’s place, blocking the way. They parked the vans some little distance behind it.

  Dora had been thinking about the situation during the drive, and she had her strategy firmly in mind.

  “Rosa, if you’ll go back to the garage and make sure no one’s in it, then you can come to the back door. Abby and I’ll meet you there. I’ve still got a key. Your children can stay locked in the van where they’ll be safe. Oyk, can the new dogs…kanni help? All right, two of you on each side and two in front, just in case somebody comes bursting out of the house and tries to get away. Soaz, if you and Sheba can guard that car and the vans to be sure no one gets away or gets hurt. The others can help best by staying quiet.”