I
t was mid-morning before I pressed the floater controls again to take me to the Andersons’. The more I thought about it, the more unlikely Mrs Anderson’s assertion that she’d seen a wolf by the lemon tree seemed. The light had been poor, her husband lay dead at her feet and, most importantly, she must have already heard the gossip that linked the clan from the Tree to the murders.
She had expected to see a wolf, I told myself. And so she had. Besides, she knew the Tree clan. Surely if she had really seen one of them in the darkness she’d have said ‘I saw Rex’ or ‘I saw Dusty by the lemon tree’.
What had Eleanor said? The hatred of the stranger is in every human. Mrs Anderson’s prejudice had probably created the wolf from leaves and shadows. She was only an Outlands farmer, I reasoned. Perhaps the Tree clan were the first Animals she’d ever known.
The floater rose noiselessly below the Tree’s great branches, above the not-quite grass and over the stone fence, then across the paddocks.
I hadn’t been able to see much the night before, even with the floater lights on. Now the strange green of the werewolf paddocks gave way to the normal green of grass and there were sheep below me, purple and green and yellow, and a particularly bright blue.
I blinked. I knew what sheep were like, of course, but only from Virtual. But I was pretty sure they weren’t supposed to be purple. Not without manipulation,
anyway. I wondered if they belonged to the Andersons. The image of naive Outlander farmers wavered slightly.
The floater veered around a pile of boulders that looked very similar to the ones the Tree’s sheds were made of. I supposed its builders had collected whatever material was to hand and fused it together with plasticrete. There was an ancient road now too, still marked with a line of trees that led to a driveway that must once have been the entrance to the Andersons’ farm.
In the days of roads I’d have had to travel twenty kloms instead of simply going in a straight line. It must have cost a fortune to keep the roads maintained, I thought.
The Andersons’ house was in sight now. It looked much as I’d imagined it the night before: an old farmhouse, shabby wood with plasticrete repairs, and a giant plasticrete shed, all painted with the almost transparent film of solar cells. There was also a lopsided swing and a few planks nailed onto the wide branch of a mulberry tree. A ‘cubby’ presumably, though I’d never seen one before. No one I knew in the City had ever bothered with one, when with a few pulses we could Net ourselves to a Virtual and a private Taj Mahal or a cave palace in the asteroids.
I landed, opened the door and suddenly noticed what I’d been unable to see the night before—the sea, glinting between the hills.
I took a deep breath, expecting salt air. But instead I breathed in something else, deep, strong and familiar.
The scent of fruit cake
T
he fruit cake rested on the table, along with a cooling tray of what smelt like ginger biscuits. A casserole steamed on the stove.
Mrs Anderson looked at them vaguely. She had changed her clothes since last night, into a faded old-style dress and slipons that were stretched out of shape with long wearing, but I didn’t think she’d slept. ‘Alan should be home soon,’ she said. ‘Fruit cake is his favourite.’
Ophelia shrugged across the table. She looked almost drugged with tiredness, as though she’d been here all night. I supposed she had.
‘What about your daughter?’
‘Sonia? Oh, no. She’s overseas.’ The pride in her voice temporarily overcame the blankness of grief.
‘Really?’ Since the days of the Decline, when the great plagues spread from country to country in hours via intercontinental flights, few people chose to go through the quarantine necessary to go overseas.
‘Sonia’s a Meditech. She has a scholarship to study with Professor Janetsdottir down in NewNew Zealand.’
Melanie had talked about Professor Janetsdottir. She was one of the pioneers of self-replicating gene therapy. Sonia Anderson must be very good indeed to be studying with her. It definitely seemed as though the Andersons were’t quite the hicks I’d thought.
‘Sonia started home at once,’ said Mrs Anderson, the
pride still overtaking her grief and weariness. ‘But it takes a month to get through quarantine, even from the Antarctic. I said, “I’m quite all right,” but she still insisted on coming home.’
‘So she should,’ I said, because it seemed as though she expected me to voice my approval. But I’d been a créche child most of my life, as all the Forest were. When my Trueparents died in the last Bioplague, I had been sorry but not distraught, and no one had expected me to do anything. I had no idea what family obligations after a father’s death usually involved.
‘She said I shouldn’t be living here all alone,’ said Mrs Anderson. ‘She said, what if the killer strikes again? I said, I’m not alone, the Tree is only five minutes away, they could help me…’ She looked at me helplessly. ‘I didn’t think when I said that. It just popped out. They’ve been such good neighbours, especially since Andy’s been ill. It’s so hard to believe…’
‘I still can’t believe it,’ said Ophelia helplessly.
‘They even looked after the sheep for us,’ said Mrs Anderson. She shivered. ‘There’s only one explanation, I can think of. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’
I leant forward. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, that they’re werewolves.’ She said flatly.
‘But they’re not. Not really—being part wolf doesn’t make someone a werewolf.’
‘But it’s the only think that makes sense, dear,’ said Mrs Anderson. She was quite serious.
‘But there’s no such thing as werewolves: no one can really change from one animal into another and back again.’
‘You don’t know them.’ She seemed to be grieving for more than a lost husband now. ‘They are such, such nice
people. None of them could possibly have done this. And then I thought, what if it’s the moon? What if the moonlight makes them change, turns them into something else? Then they couldn’t help it, couldn’t help…’ Her face crumpled.
Ophelia moved swiftly round the table and put her arms around her. She shook her head at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
It seemed all too close to Eleanor’s description. When violence struck, humans blamed the outsider.
Poor innocent Mrs Anderson had probably never met an Animal before, despite her daughter’s choice of study. She had probably never even left the Valley. It must seem quite logical to her that genetic manipulation might breed all sorts of vicious aberrations…
The putter of a dikdik interrupted us. Mrs Anderson looked up, relief staining her cheeks with faint colour. ‘It’s Alan,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank goodness he’s home.’
The dikdik puttered to a standstill as she spoke. Footsteps clattered up the steps. Mrs Anderson rose as they pounded down the corridor, and a young man burst into the room.
And I sat there, looking at him, stunned.
O
phelia had seen him before, of course. She grinned weakly at my reaction.
My first thought was that he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. My second was that he wasn’t a man at all. He was a bird.
Or not quite a bird. His arms were feathered, and the naked, lovely chest, and as he moved I saw he had wings but that they were simply membranes between his long arms and his body. His head was a man’s, with feathers instead of hair. Soft fine feathers you could feel your hands stroking.
I felt Ophelia’s amused eyes on me and blushed. The feathers on his torso ended just where it was getting really interesting, or perhaps they continued underneath his trousers. My blush deepened as I tried not to imagine further.
He must have been used to stunned females, he didn’t even look at me. He said: ‘Mum!’, and his voice was beautiful too, then hugged her fiercely. He topped her by about a metre. He nodded to Ophelia over her head.
‘Mum, I’m sorry! I should have been here!’
‘No, Alan, really…’
Ophelia stood. ‘We’ll be outside if you want us,’ she said, just as Alan said: ‘Where is he? Where have you put his body?’
We left mother and son together.
‘Wow,’ I said, as soon as the back door was shut behind us. (I tried not to look at the stain on the stairs.)
Ophelia grinned. ‘Takes some getting used to,’ she said.
‘Was he always that gorgeous?’
‘Oh, yes. Even as a small boy. He was angelic then. Now he’s…what? Not an angel anyway.’
‘He’s really the Andersons’ son?’
‘Yes. He’s a good deal younger than his sister. Florrie wasn’t able to conceive again so any other child was going to have to be a knife job anyway. So Florrie decided she’d have something beautiful, that’s how she described it.’
‘She certainly did. He can’t really fly, can he?’
‘No. I’ve seen him glide though. The wing membranes open right out. They sort of billow above him like parachutes. We used to see him gliding down from the ridges behind the Tree. With a good updraught he’d get almost to our place or the farm.’
‘That would be…quite a sight.’
‘Mmm. Especially from underneath.’ She saw my reaction. ‘He doesn’t wear clothes when he’s gliding.’
‘Oh my.’ I pulled myself together.
‘He said clothes interfere with the air currents. Hippolyta and I assured him it would be a great pity to interfere with the air currents.’
‘Definitely. Oh dear, I shouldn’t laugh, not with poor Mr Anderson lying there. He’s just so…so over the top. Well, at least that proves Mrs Anderson doesn’t have any prejudice against modifications.’
‘I never thought she had,’ said Ophelia, as a cry came from indoors, sharp and anguished. Alan Anderson, seeing his father’s body, and what had been done to it.
Suddenly the back door opened and Alan Anderson came leaping down the stairs. He loped across the hot brown grass, his legs were impossible—long and fragile-looking. But he wasn’t an angel now. Or were there avenging angels too, with swords and trumpets? Alan Anderson had no sword, but he looked like he wished he had one.
I was better prepared this time. My mouth didn’t even open as I looked at him. Nor did I drool.
Ophelia stepped towards him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I know it’s inadequate, but that’s all I can say.’
The young man shook his perfect feathered head. ‘How could anyone…anything…do that to someone! It’s inhuman. Of course it’s inhuman. It’s too much, just too much to accept.’
The wide, too-beautiful eyes turned to me. They were green, as I’d always imagined angel’s eyes would be. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m being rude. It’s just…’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.
He held out his hand to me and after a moment’s hesitation I took it. It seemed cooler than Truenorm and the feathers around the edges of his bare palm were as soft as I had imagined.
‘Thank you for looking after my mother,’ he said. ‘You too, Ophelia.’
‘No worries,’ said Ophelia. ‘I might go home now and get some sleep.’
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ I said.
‘Thank you. I could do with it.’
Alan Anderson raised his fine-featured jaw, ‘Tell Gloucester I’ll be over later,’ he announced.
‘Gloucester?’
‘He called me. Said he’s organising a patrol. ‘The
beautiful green eyes flashed—that’s the only to describe it. ‘We should have done it long ago!’
‘It’s a big valley,’ I said.
‘We don’t need to patrol the whole valley. As long as we keep our eyes on the bastards at the Tree.’ He ran his hands over his feathers angrily. It was obviously a familiar gesture. ‘Maybe we should just shoot the lot of them now.’
‘You can’t be sure…’ began Ophelia.
‘My mother knows what she saw,’ said Alan.
‘But it was dark!’ I said. ‘Look, you stand by the stairs. Whatever she saw was over here…’ I walked over to the lemon trees. ‘Now say I stood here’…I stopped.
Some time in the past the soil under the lemon tree had been dug for a flower bed. Now the flowers were dead. I suppose that Mrs Anderson had no time for flowers with her husband’s illness. The soil was bare and in that bare soil…I bent and examined it more closely.
‘What is it?’ called Ophelia. She ran over. Alan Anderson followed her, with his strange and graceful lope. He bent beside me, so close I could smell a slight muskiness that must have been his feathers.
‘A wolf print,’ he said shortly.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ said Ophelia automatically. ‘Dusty and Emerald were here last night…’
‘You mean they were here when you arrived…?’ The feathers rose in anger, like the hair on a dog’s back.
‘No, I mean they came when your mother called for help. Maybe Dusty had a piss or something by the lemon tree.’
‘With my father lying dead by the stairs?’
‘It’s still not proof!’ cried Ophelia desperately, as much to herself, I thought, as to Alan Anderson.
The lovely face shut down. ‘Tell Gloucester I’ll be over this afternoon,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll bring Mum too. No one should be left alone till we get this thing sorted.’
He turned so swiftly that his wings spread behind him, and loped towards the kitchen, his feathers quivering with anger.
I wondered suddenly if his modification would breed true. Was it a dominant or recessive gene responsible for feathers? Would he have to meet a feathered mate for his children to have feathers too?
I glanced at Ophelia, then we walked around the house to the floater.
I
punched in Black Stump’s coordinates. The floater rose over the dusty garden. Neither Ophelia nor I spoke.
I glanced up the hill. Yes, it was possible to see the Tree from here, waving its branches high above the Valley. It was possible to imagine, too, a vigilante mob marching up the hills towards it, with flaming torches.
No, not flaming torches. I wasn’t building a Virtual here. Nor would they come as a mob. They would simply wait below the old stone wall, with rifles and Brother Cydore’s tangler, and even lasersaws, or any other farm tool that might kill.
And next time Uncle Dusty or one of the cubs ran in the moonlight a bullet would bring them down. Death for death, the humans quietly eliminating the strangers of the night.