Wood Sprites - eARC

by Wen Spencer

  Earth was nearly plunged into global warfare over whether or not the gate should continue to operate. The biggest problem was that Dufae had died before the gate’s first activation. Other scientists couldn’t figure out how his gate worked, so they couldn’t simply tweak his design to something less inconvenient. No one really wanted to break contact with Elfhome completely. After a great deal of heated negotiations, an awkward schedule of turning the gate on and off, or Startups and Shutdowns, was established.

  “That is so cool!” Louise whispered. “But he’s been dead for forever. Maybe before Mom and Dad were even born!”

  “Lou,” Jillian whispered. “Leonardo DaVinci Dufae is our father.”

  “He was just a sperm donor and he’s dead.” Louise pointed out again. “Who’s donated the egg? His wife?”

  The egg donor was Esme Shenske. They didn’t recognize the name, but the Internet did. She was the captain of the third colony ship, the Dahe Hao. The holographic star field ceiling, complete with astronomy lessons, suddenly made sense.

  “Wow. Our donors are famous,” Jillian said.

  “Were famous. He’s dead and she’s at Alpha Centauri or someplace like that. What the hell happened to our older sisters? Did they go to Alpha Centauri with her?”

  After some digging they found that the first batch of embryos had been inserted into April Geiselman of Pittsburgh exactly nine months prior to Esme Shenske leaving the Solar System.

  “That means our older sisters are eighteen next month,” Louise said. “But where are they? Did Esme take them with her? Or did they stay in Pittsburgh with Geiselman?”

  “I’m looking,” Jillian said. “What about our baby sisters?”

  Louise checked and found that there were indeed more embryos in storage. There was a recent date on their records. She frowned and checked the code for it. “Oh no, they’ve been flagged for disposal. The company sent out a letter last month to inform the estate that if they didn’t respond, the embryos should be thrown away. No one has responded to the letter. We have six months to save them.”

  3: MUNDANE MONDAY

  “I think we’re lucky that our male genetic donor is dead,” Jillian whispered in art class the next day.

  Louise glanced automatically to Jillian’s tablet to see what triggered the comment. Her twin had multiple newspaper web pages up, all featuring a Boston murder case. According to the headlines, the killer’s name was John Wright, who had beaten his wife, Ada, to death. “What?”

  “Leonardo DaVinci Dufae had one sister. Ada Lovelace Dufae. She married John Wright and had one son, Orville Wright.”

  Louise snickered at the names. “Wow, the Dufae’s have a twisted sense of humor when naming children.” DaVinci had been a scientist as well as an artist. Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on the prototype of the computer. Orville Wright invented airplanes with his brother, Wilbur.

  “Yes, obviously our grandfather hated being Tim No Middle Name Dufae.”

  “I wonder what they would have called us.”

  Jillian squinted a moment. “The mind boggles. The Wright brothers are the only sibling pair of inventors that leap to mind. But Orville is our cousin, not our brother.”

  “You can be Wilbur. I’ll be Jane Goodall.”

  “I’ll be Marie Curie, merci beaucoup. You should be Maria Goeppert Mayer, since we’re already Mayers.”

  “Marie? Maria? We have hard enough time with people telling us apart. I’d rather be Jane Goodall.”

  “Okay, monkey girl.”

  “Okay, Wil-burr.” Louise giggled.

  Jillian snorted. “I can’t find out what happened to Orville after his mother was killed.”

  “Oh.” The headlines made sense now; their Aunt Ada had been murdered by her husband. “How old is he?”

  “He was ten when his mother died.” Jillian pulled up a picture of a boy that looked eerily like Louise now that her hair was boy-short. His dark eyes were haunted; they spoke to her of unimaginable horrors. “He saw it happen. He’s twenty-two now. Wherever he is. Trying to find out anything about him is getting me spammed with hits on the airplane inventor. Our stupid grandfather!”

  Jillian fell silent, focused on creating a more accurate genetic family tree than the one that hung over their fireplace at home. Ironically both were equally bare. Orville was their only cousin by blood or birth. Their “Aunt Kitty” was a girl that their Grandma Johnson took under her wing but never formally adopted.

  Louise tapped the icon in the corner of her tablet to check on their art teacher Miss Gray, who liked to roam while her student sketched. Making eye contact would warn her that the twins weren’t working on the assignment. Normally not a good thing, but since they were hacking various computer systems, it could be catastrophic if they were caught. Louise had a monitoring application that tracked the tablet that Miss Gray usually carried during class, but sometimes she put it down. The program showed that Miss Gray was in motion on the other side of the art classroom.

  Louise minimized the window and went back to chasing down leads on their older sisters’ surrogate mother, April Geiselman. She had three leads so far, one in Honolulu, one in Arizona and one in Queens. She needed to dig into their past to see if any of them had lived in Pittsburgh at some point.

  The morning had been surreal agony as they went through the motions of pretending to be normal nine-year-olds. Almost everything covered in class, they’d learned through online computer courses when they were in kindergarten. After a series of tests showed that they read at college level and could do advance algebra equations, the public school system tried to push the twins straight into middle school. Their parents resisted the move, stating life was more than just grades. Instead of calculus and chemistry, the twins were enrolled in first grade to learn a more complicated subject: socializing with their peers.

  Unfortunately, “peers” was a very imperfect fit.

  In theory their school was for the gifted. Yes, all their fellow students tested higher than the typical fifth grader, but they were also dropped off by nannies in BMWs. At times it seemed that the parents’ net worth was more important than their children’s IQ. It meant that otherwise fascinating subjects were dumbed down to the class average. Art, for instance; their assignment was to draw a two-dimensional still life of what the teacher arranged on the center table. How interesting could a flat representation of a bouquet of sunflower, a collection of stoneware bowls and a length of red velvet be?

  Luckily the teacher was letting them use their tablets instead of forcing them to use actual pencils and paper. It meant that for the first time all morning they could work on saving their siblings. According to Cryobank, there were four embryos still in storage. While the sex of the embryos weren’t given, Jillian decided that it would be best if they were three girls and one boy. Louise had considered the matter and had to agree. More than one boy and they would gang up together and be totally, annoying boys. Case in point, the whole reason they weren’t using pencil and papers was because Kelsey and Gage stabbed each other repeatedly during their last freehand drawing lessons.

  Louise grinned as she hit pay dirt on the April Gieselman in Queens. “Look, look,” she whispered, tilting her screen. “Her records show that she was born in Pittsburgh! She’s the one!”

  Their datapads suddenly enlarged their drawing window. Louise controlled the urge to glance up to double-check that their teacher had actually moved into viewing range. If their teacher realized that they were using her tablet to track her movements through the classroom, she would probably hover over them, and they would have to actually pay attention to the assignments. Lousie’s sketch was just a rushed collection of yellow pen swipes to place hold the sunflowers. Louise winced, picked a red that roughly matched the velvet and added in the draped fabric in the same quick lines.

  “Is that all you have done?” Miss Gray said above her head.

  “I had more.” Louise made a show of pausing and considering her drawing. “I
didn’t like how it was going, so I erased it. It seemed too—too real.”

  “Too real?”

  “Well, if we wanted the picture to look real, wouldn’t we just take a photograph of the flowers?” Out the corner of her eye, Louise could see Jillian frantically drawing on her blank tablet. Louise held up her picture to keep Miss Gray’s attention; she at least had something to show and had already started into a reasonable excuse. “Art is translating what we feel into a visual medium. Obviously, the flowers can’t look like a photograph or otherwise I wouldn’t be putting my emotions into the picture. To me sunflowers are like…like…”

  “Flowing sunlight,” Jillian prompted in a whisper.

  “Flowing sunlight.” Louise babbled on to give Jillian more time. “Like the sun dripped down onto the flower and will flow away again. It’s all bright and sunny and temporary. At any moment, poof, it will be gone. What I had before just seemed too permanent. It didn’t have all of that ‘life is fleeting’ kind feeling.”

  Miss Gray was getting that slightly panicky look she had often with the twins—like she realized she was in over her head. Jillian’s theory was because it was Miss Gray’s first year of teaching and hadn’t firmly latched onto the idea that she was an adult. Louise leaned more toward the notion that Miss Gray was smart enough to know that they were pulling something over on her, but not smart enough to figure out what or how.

  “I see. Well. Then. Jillian, what do you have?”

  Jillian held up her sketch. She’d gone to extreme cartoon to cover her lack of details. The sunflowers had eyes, huge sharp mouths and holding wriggling students in their leaves. One student was crying “help me” as she was being dropped head first into a gaping mouth. “These are carnivorous sunflowers from Elfhome. Like strangle vines and black willow trees, they’re distant cousins to Venus flytraps and the waterwheel plant. Those are both snap trap plants as opposed to flypaper traps or pitfall traps that you have in butterworts and pitcher plant. Did you know that the Black Willow trees on Elfhome can walk close to two miles per hour and can swallow a man whole?”

  Miss Gray gave a tiny whimper and her eyes went wider.

  Louise ducked her head and pressed her lips tight together to keep from laughing.

  Jillian frowned at her datapad as if she was totally unaware of the effect she was having on Miss Gray. “Luckily all Elfhome plants need some magic to thrive, and magic doesn’t exist on Earth, so these are most likely harmless.”

  Miss Gray whimpered again.

  Elle Pondwater unintentionally rescued them by waving her hand and calling “Miss Gray, I’ve finished!” Elle and her friends were on the other side of the room; all dressed in their Girl Scout uniforms. The distance illustrated that the twins were currently failing at socializing with their peers. “Can I put my picture up on the wall display?”

  “That would be good, Elle.” Miss Gray fled their table while Elle uploaded her drawing onto the wall display. “Oh, Elle that is wonderful!”

  While reasonably intelligent, Elle was not one to think outside the box. Add in her need to please adults, and it came as no surprise that Elle had done exactly what Miss Gray asked. Her picture looked like a bad photograph of the objects on the center table. Elle beamed with imagined triumph. “My mother set up art classes at the Children’s Museum of Art for our Junior Legacy National Proficiency Artist Badges. It was eight sessions of private lessons, all in drawing.”

  Elle showed off her badge and explained that they were having a meeting after school to coordinate their cookie drive with the Daisies, Brownies, Cadettes, and Seniors. “We donate half the money so that underprivileged girls can go to camp.”

  Jillian was moving her mouth in silent mimicry of Elle, getting the tilt of her shoulders and toss of her head down perfectly but adding in a dramatic roll of the eyes.

  Louise shook her head. She really didn’t know why Elle bothered Jillian so much. It could have been because Elle was one of the few people who never believed a word coming out of Jillian’s mouth. Or maybe it was because the reason that Ella didn’t believe Jillian had nothing to do with the level of truthfulness of her statements. She could say that the sun was hot and Elle wouldn’t believe her.

  Nor did it help that Elle’s mother had been a Miss Universe before becoming a trophy wife. Elle got “classic American Beauty” in bucket-loads. She was freakishly tall and had stunningly pale skin that never seen the light of day. Despite being blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and beautiful, she was also unexpectedly smart, although not in the same league as the twins. Her mother dressed her in impeccable fashion and had taught her stage presence when she was still a toddler. It surprised no one that Elle got all the lead roles for the class plays, from Cinderella to Snow White.

  Jillian wanted the lead but because the twins were short and brown, she was always cast as the evil stepmother or witch. She tried her hardest to steal the spotlight from Elle by going big and chewing on the scenery. She had taken the news hard when they learned that their father, Leonardo, had only been five foot seven. Their Aunt Ada had never even cleared five foot; she was only four foot and eleven inches when she was killed. While Esme Shenske was five foot six, chances were not good for them getting much taller.

  Louise didn’t mind being short, but she didn’t plan a career in Hollywood.

  “I liked your sunflowers,” Louise said after the bell rang. Everyone swept out of the art room because recess was next. The twins followed slowly since they planned to continue working on their tablets.

  “I can draw better than her when I put any effort into it,” Jillian complained.

  The twins used their Barbie dolls to do motion capture, painstakingly moving them one step at a time in front of a green screen. Even with their computers doing the bulk of the processing, the twins spent countless hours drawing in finer details on their videos. Their Summer Court Palace of Soulful Ember, Queen of the elves, would put Elle’s still life to shame.

  “We both know you can, so why let it bug you?” Louise poked at Jillian, trying to push her out of her mood. “I bet Elle only spent so much time learning how to draw well because her mother wanted her to be good at it. She only does things to get praise. She doesn’t know what she likes when she’s alone.”

  Jillian snorted. “She likes being popular.”

  “She doesn’t know how to be anything else. You’ve seen how Mrs. Pondwater treats her like a little puppet.” Louise pretended to have a sock puppet on her hand. “Stand straight. Say ‘how nice it is to see you’ and smile.” She had the pretend puppet straighten and mouth the words. “How nice it is to see you.” She clawed her fingers so that the “smile” was a showing of fangs.

  Jillian snickered and then sobered. “I suppose that’s true. I think why I get annoyed by her is because she could be such a cool friend if she wasn’t so—so—her! Everything is a competition and she has to win.”

  Louise shrugged. “She’s been in beauty pageants since she was three, what do you expect?”

  “But she doesn’t win because she’s smarter or wiser or more creative, she wins because her father is rich and bought himself a beauty queen as a wife. She wins because her mother doesn’t need to work and set up endless little bribes to make sure her daughter is the most popular girl in class. She wins because she’s tall and blonde—and I’m not.”

  “So basically you’re pissed off at her because she’s not as smart or creative as we are and needs her mommy to fight her battles?”

  “Shush you, monkey girl.” Jillian paused at the playground door. On the other side of the asphalt, Elle and the other Girl Scouts were playing jump rope. Elle’s loose blonde hair waving like a banner in the weak spring sunlight as she skipped through the doubled ropes. They stood a moment, watching enviously as Double Dutch was one of those things the two of them couldn’t do alone. “I just wish sometimes Elle could be our friend without one of us having to be the loser. It’s not like with you—I don’t ever have to worry about which one of us
is the winner.”

  Said the twin that everyone said was the cutest and the most creative. Louise blinked quickly to keep tears from showing in her eyes and lifted up her tablet to distract Jillian. “So, Wilbur, now that we found April Gieselman, what do we do?”

  “We go and see her!” Jillian glanced back at Elle and smirked. “And I think I know how we’re going to do it.”

  * * *

  Jillian decided that they’d go disguised as Girl Scouts selling cookies.

  Louise wasn’t sure they needed disguises. And she was fairly positive that they hadn’t needed to actually join the Girl Scouts in order to obtain the uniforms. She suspected that Jillian secretly just wanted to join but wouldn’t admit it. Elle had been so stunned when they showed up at the after-school meeting that she just stood there, mouth open, with a confused look on her face. Mrs. Pondwater was much better at covering her emotions. She ran on autopilot, welcoming them to the troop with only flashes of horror going through her eyes when she happened to look at Louise’s blast-shortened hair. Jillian told everyone in class that Louise’s new hairstyle was because of an accident with bubblegum so there were no embarrassing questions about explosions, leveled playhouses, or emergency room visits. Mrs. Pondwater apparently knew the truth, hinting that the woman obsessively tracked everyone that touched upon her daughter’s life. She obviously didn’t want to take responsibility for anyone who had already managed to blow themselves up once. The spirit of Girl Scouts—as Jillian pointed out—was to accept any girl no matter her ethnic and social group.

  So they had the uniforms, cookie order forms, and a creditable alibi for all of Saturday.

  Neither one of them remembered that Saturday was their birthday.

  * * *

  “The Girl Scouts?” their mother said for the third time after they told her. She was in her power business suit, her briefcase on the counter, and dinner from the supermarket’s hot deli still in its insulated bag on the kitchen table. The evening news was on but muted.