Blood Moon

by French, Jackie

  ‘All right,’ he said. Whatever his relationship with Eleanor, I thought with just slightly guilty satisfaction, I still outranked her in terms of loyalty.

  ‘Thank you.’ I hesitated. ‘Neil suggested…Well, he hadn’t quite suggested, I thought, but it was near enough. ‘…that one day maybe you’d like to come out here for dinner, or lunch. Take a look around the Utopia. You’d like Theo, I think.’

  ‘With you and Neil?’

  ‘With me and Neil.’

  He stared at me for perhaps ten seconds. Then he said slowly. ‘Perhaps. One day. Not this week or the next. But one day, yes I will.’

  ‘I’d like that Michael,’ I said, and found I meant it, with no sense of loss or confusion at all. I was happy, and fulfillment was at last within my reach.

  And I liked Michael. After all that had happened to us, I liked him still. Loved him, perhaps, in the way I was beginning to love Theo and Elaine, even the Wombat and Ophelia perhaps. Friendly love, quite different from what we’d had before, which had neither been friendship or even love, but a combining of our personalities that had made us less than we were apart, not more.

  I switched the Terminal off.

  Chapter 41

  The next person I had to speak to was Emerald. ‘She won’t speak to you,’ said Ophelia. I’d sent the floater over to Black Stump so she could bring Portia, Viola and Malvolio over for a swim at the beach. I’d expected the floater to return bearing a pirate flag, but it was splotched with blue and green instead.

  ‘A present for you,’ said Ophelia, waving her hand at the splotches. ‘The kids dreamed it up.’

  ‘Er, thank you,’ I said

  ‘It’s Black Stump,’ said Portia, bouncing slightly with excitement at her genius. ‘See, those are the trees!’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s beautiful!’ I told the children. And, after all, if I ever needed to camouflage the floater in jungle terrain, it might be useful.

  Portia nodded complacently. ‘Yes. Ophelia says you’ve got a pirate ship on your beach,’ she added.

  ‘Yes. But it hasn’t come in to shore yet.’

  Portia grabbed Malvolio, who was about to toddle off the steps. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said reassuringly. ‘If it does, me and Viola brought our slingshots. I can hit an apple at twenty metres! Or a pirate,’ she added.

  ‘Oh, good,’ I said. ‘Would you like a drink first?’

  ‘Swim first,’ said Portia firmly, brushing her hair back from her face so I saw the faintly pointed ears again. ‘And anyway we had lots of drinks in the floater. It had orange juice and passionfruit juice and paw paw punch and coldstim and Realcoffee and…’

  We walked over the ridge to the beach, the girls racing ahead. Ophelia lugged Malvolio up to the top of the hill on a hip that had obviously carried many children, even if none had been biologically hers, then sent him to toddle down the hill with the others while we walked behind.

  ‘Why won’t Emerald speak to me? Does she blame me for Len’s death?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It wasn’t your fault, she must know that. But—well, she loved Len passionately, you know. She loves all the kids there, but Len was different. Len was going to be the leader when he’d grown a bit more. That means a lot to them at the Tree.’

  ‘But if it wasn’t my fault?’

  ‘You’d still remind her. Let them heal, Danny.’

  I can’t, I thought. The wound stays open until the problem is solved. And it’s not solved, not yet.

  But I didn’t say that to Ophelia.

  The kids bounced in the waves, and the pirate ship and giant octopus floated satisfactorily out of slingshot reach, as Portia pursued them out beyond the breakers. (She’d wanted to count the octopus’s legs, she said, when she finally came ashore.) And I remembered I hadn’t yet kept my promise to the Water Sprite. I’d have to get working on it or she’d call again, or even land on our doorstep, all jiggling breasts and melting eyes…

  And suddenly I saw the solution, as plainly as if someone had unfurled a chart in front of my eyes. I didn’t have to program a Virtual octopus. I could keep the holo octopus, but form it over a Virtual man. There were enough ready-made porno programs (of men doing just about anything) to sink the pirate ship.

  All I had to do was adjust the basic program so the man had eight tentacles—simple enough—then set the Virtual program to match the movement of the present hologram octopus program. Result: something that looked like an octopus, felt like an octopus, and was sufficiently giant and tentacley enough to please any trio of Water Sprites, but didn’t need days of manipulating and rewriting.

  I could even choose a porno program already set for Virtual interact, one that would respond to the Water Sprites’ own actions. Well, maybe not to all their actions, I thought, but enough to make them stop pestering me for more.

  It was so simple! A holo didn’t have to be just a holo. You could combine it with Virtual. It struck me then—so horribly simple I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. You could combine a hologram with a real person, too…

  Someone had waited for me in the floater, I thought. Someone real, with a portable hologram Terminal, the sort that doting aunts used to capture images of their nieces and nephews.

  Someone had hidden in the darkness, wearing dark cloth over their face and hands. Someone had slashed at my neck, either with their claws or something meant to act like claws. Someone who didn’t necessarily have the form of a wolf, but who had dressed up in something black and furry.

  Then they slid into the darkness on the right-hand side of the floater door, while over to the left, in the light from the hall and kitchen, the hologram of Len peered up at us, and ran. Simple. It had been simple.

  ‘Almost foolproof,’ I said, under my breath, cursing myself inwardly for being a fool.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Ophelia, lying back against the tree trunk.

  ‘Nothing. Hey, don’t lean too far that way or you’ll press the stop button.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The waves will turn off. It’s in case anyone has an accident. It’s all quite shallow out there when it’s off—most of the water seeps down into the storage cisterns underneath. That’s in case there’s a real water shortage, and we don’t want to expose it to so much evaporation.’

  ‘Really?’ said Ophelia vaguely. ‘Hey, guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gloucester’s taken up with a Wanderer.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said. I had wondered how long it’d take before he started to recover from Perdita’s death.

  ‘Don’t think it’s serious,’ said Ophelia. ‘It’s Lucy, as a matter of fact. You know, the one we had before? She came back. She’s a twit actually, but it breaks the ice. It’ll make it easier for him next time.’

  ‘Mmm. How are Romeo and Juliet?’

  ‘Still revoltingly romantic. It wouldn’t be so bad if I thought they were kidding us, but they actually mean it.’

  ‘Ophelia?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Have you ever had kids?’

  Ophelia opened her eyes. ‘Of course. Juliet’s my son. I thought you knew.’

  ‘Juliet is yours! Well, no, no I didn’t. You don’t have a genealogy chart on the wall at Black Stump you know, saying who begat whom.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Ophelia shut her eyes again. ‘I forget that you haven’t known us, oh, for years.’

  ‘Who was his father?

  ‘Hamlet.’

  ‘Oh, naturally.’

  ‘Well, that’s what we called him when he was with us. He was a Wanderer, then he stopped Wandering for a while. He moved on years ago. He calls Juliet sometimes. And Malvolio’s my grandson.’

  ‘By Juliet and who else?’

  ‘Romeo naturally. Gene splice. Romeo had a TempMod for nine months so he could have a Truebirth.’

  I stared. ‘That’s incredibly expensive!’

  ‘Four crops of Cannibas multiflora magnifica,’ said Ophelia matter-of-fac
tly. ‘Or our share of the profits anyway. That was why we let them slip the stuff in our corn. Good thing we don’t need the money now they’re going to be raided.’

  I shook my head. Black Stump couldn’t afford Realcoffee, their meat was provided mostly by the generosity of their neighbours (I was sure the Tree didn’t really need their corn), but they squandered what little money they had on fabulous temporary modification so one of them could bear a child…

  Or perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t squandering at all.

  ‘Who are Portia’s parents?’ I’d assumed that all the kids were Gloucester’s and Perdita’s.

  ‘No idea. One of Nearer to Heaven’s Devotees abandoned her when she was a baby. Brother Perry liked them young, but not in nappies. So we took her. You know what you need here?’

  ‘A lecherous twelve-tentacled tangible octopus?’

  ‘What? No, a butler. A nice Virtual butler with a real tray of something long and cool. And cakes,’ said Ophelia dreamily. ‘Real white flour cakes with cream and jam that isn’t apple and blackberry.’

  ‘There’s a cake up at the house,’ I said. ‘Elaine made it, not me, so it’s edible. Not jam, though. Chocolate. But it’s made with wheat flour.’

  ‘Is it? Lovely. Wake me when the kids get tired of chasing pirates will you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but she was already asleep.

  Chapter 42

  It was late when they left. Neil had come home early for once—whatever his new project was, it kept him busy—and we’d eaten roast turkey, because that was at least one thing I could cook, and also something I knew they rarely, if ever, got at Black Stump. Also fruit salad, because even I could chop things up, with pineapple, jaboticoba, lychees, sherbet melon, strango, paw paw—everything I could think of that they didn’t grow at Black Stump. We ate the rest of the chocolate cake for supper and Malvolio fell asleep and dribbled chocolate on my shoulder.

  ‘Ophelia?’

  ‘Yes?’ She turned as Neil handed the still sleeping Malvolio into my newly decorated floater. The girls were blinking away sleep too.

  ‘Could you do something for me tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure. What?’

  ‘Call up Emerald for me, then patch her through to me. I know she doesn’t want to talk to me, but I need to talk to her. Really.’

  Ophelia looked at me consideringly.

  I thought she was going to ask questions, but she just nodded, once as though to herself and once, more firmly, to me. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘About ten, if I can manage it.’

  ‘I’ll be at the Terminal. And Ophelia—just Emerald. I don’t want anyone else to know.’

  ‘I’ll say I want a recipe,’ said Ophelia. She was silent for a moment then shook her head, at some thought that I couldn’t guess, then followed the girls into the floater.

  Chapter 43

  The house was silent. No, not silent. The roof creaked as it expanded as the day grew hot; a magpie defended its territory musically somewhere on the hill.

  It was 10.10.

  At 10.12 the screen brightened automatically. (It was still strange not to have the comsig pulse directly in my head.) Ophelia’s head said briefly, ‘Here she is,’ and suddenly Emerald was staring at me.

  She looked older. I knew she was a litter-mate of Eleanor’s, and so must be exactly the same age, but either Eleanor had been rejuved (though I wondered if wolf genes would affect rejuvenation) and Emerald had not, or else being lead wolf kept you young. But even in the past month Emerald had aged.

  She stared at me with…what? Not hatred. Not even bitterness. It was the look of a dog who says, ‘You are not my master, or of my master’s household. You are not one of us at all.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked shortly.

  ‘Emerald, I’m…’

  ‘Don’t say you’re sorry. I don’t even care if you mean it. Just tell me what you want and let me go.’

  ‘All right. Three questions. What happened to your mother?’

  ‘What?’ Whatever Emerald had been expecting, it wasn’t that. ‘I challenged her. You know that. I won.’

  ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘Eleanor challenged me.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Nothing happened after that. Nothing could happen. Eleanor was head of the clan. Rusty…Rusty was mated with her, not me. Mum was dead. Life went on.’

  ‘Eleanor killed your mother?’

  ‘That’s what happens,’ said Emerald shortly.

  ‘Then why didn’t you kill her?’

  ‘Mother and I could have worked together, but Mum and Eleanor were too alike. It wouldn’t have worked. They both knew it.’

  ‘So Eleanor challenged your mother again?’

  ‘No, why should she? Eleanor was leader. She didn’t have to challenge anyone. Mum challenged her. But it’s—different—when you’ve lost before. Mum knew she’d lose.’

  ‘Len said he wouldn’t kill Rusty.’

  ‘That’s different. Len was different.’ Emerald’s voice almost broke, but her eyes still met mine. ‘Rusty’s different from Dad too. Being top dog isn’t Rusty’s whole world. He’ll survive being challenged and losing. Len…’ the voice did break then, but continued. ‘Len would have been able to tolerate his father at his shoulder all the time too.’

  ‘But your mother…?’

  ‘Mum was old style. She didn’t want to linger after she was supplanted anyway. Eleanor realised that. I didn’t. Which is one of the reasons Eleanor is leader now and I am not. These things…they’re understood. Is that all you wanted to ask?’

  ‘No. Who will challenge Rusty now?’

  ‘Ben. Or Johnnie, perhaps,’ said Emerald slowly. ‘But I doubt it somehow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Neither of them are like Len. Len was a leader. Even as a puppy, Len was in charge. Ben never challenged Len, even in play, and Johnnie…? Well, give him a bone and take him for walk and he’s happy.’

  ‘He’s young.’

  ‘Old or young, the character is the same,’ said Emerald. ‘No, Ben or Johnnie will wait till their father is long past it before they challenge him. And by that time,’ she shrugged, the strange sharp shrug I hadn’t seen since I left the Tree. ‘Maybe Eleanor’s new puppy will take over instead.’

  ‘Oh…’ I hadn’t realised, hadn’t thought that Eleanor was so close to term. ‘They’ve been born.’

  ‘He’s been born,’ said Emerald. ‘Only one pup this time. Eleanor went into labour after…after it was all over.’

  ‘Only one? Did the others die? Emerald, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No,’ said Emerald. ‘There was only one.’

  Did I only imagine the strange note of doubt in her voice? If it was really there, it was soon gone. ‘The pup is thriving and so is she.’ A smile almost broke through the grimness of her face. ‘A little boy. She’s called him Mitch.’

  Mitch, I thought, son of a bitch: Mitch, Michael, Michael, Mitch. ‘I thought you always had three,’ I said calmly.

  ‘Not always. Mum had just one litter with the four of us. But one…well, Eleanor says the wolf strain is slowly dying out and Mitch is a sign of it. Maybe the next generation will have singletons too.’

  ‘The baby, Mitch, is he like Len?’

  ‘Wolf shape, do you mean? Or a possible leader? No, he looks human,’ said Emerald. ‘Almost Truenorm. As for being a possible leader—well, he yells loud enough, if that’s any guide.’ For a moment she looked almost happy, until she remembered who she was speaking to. ‘Was that your third question?’

  ‘No…I’m sorry, I suppose it’s four questions now. This is the last one, I promise. Have you ever met Michael? The person Emerald works for in the City?’

  ‘No,’ said Emerald.

  My theory crashed around me. ‘Oh,’ I said slowly. ‘So he’s never been to the Tree?’

  ‘Only in Virtual’ continued Emerald. She shook her head. ‘I hate that thing,’ she added bluntly. ‘Wrong smells
all over the place.’

  ‘I explained,’ I said. ‘You can’t really smell them after the Virtual has been turned off. You can only smell Eleanor’s reactions.’

  ‘I know. Still don’t like it. It worries Rusty too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Smells on Eleanor sometimes. Other men’s smells. Oh, Eleanor’s explained it all, how the Virtual catches up the scents of anyone else near the Terminal. Some Truenorm’s just had sex, and the scent comes through to Eleanor and she reacts. Rusty understands. He just can’t help what he feels.’

  ‘But it shouldn’t happen like that…’ I repeated, then stopped. I substituted: ‘Rusty doesn’t like it when he smells an outside male?’

  Emerald almost laughed, then her face tightened again. ‘Rusty? He almost has a heart attack trying to be all human polite and not sniff bums and defend his territory every time there’s a gathering here.’

  The hair was shivering along my arms again. I could see the pattern now. Even the last small pieces had fallen into place.

  Emerald was still staring at me through the screen. ‘Danielle?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know it wasn’t your fault.’ Her voice was forced, but she was obviously trying to be fair. ‘What happened to Len. We all know it wasn’t your fault.’

  I shook my head. ‘It was my fault,’ I said. ‘You’re right to blame me. I killed Len, more surely than Gloucester and the others.’

  Chapter 44

  Eleanor would call next. I knew it and waited for it. After that conversation, after my confession, Emerald would have to tell Eleanor all about it: Eleanor the lead wolf of the household, so much more in control of the family than sweet protective Rusty.

  And when Eleanor heard what I had said to Emerald, she’d need to speak to me.

  I needed to take a break before I took that call. I needed to think the whole thing through again, just to make sure.

  I scribbled a note for Neil on the kitchen table, telling him where I’d be. I hesitated, then added a short account of what I knew and what I suspected.

  Then I called Michael. For the first time there was neither an answer nor a default signal on his comsig, indicating he’d be available soon. Instead an image of his face (taken two years ago, I thought, at least) introduced himself as Virtual Michael 4 and asked if he could help me, or would I like to leave a message for Michael Realtime.