Fish Tails Page 7

  “Up until mankind, creatures didn’t need an if-­then part. That’s the part that says, ‘If we add one more human being to our tribe, then we’ll have to find a new cave.’ Or maybe, ‘If this grain is growing clear here where I spilled that little bit, then maybe if I put a lot more in the ground near the cave, it will grow there, too.’ Animals didn’t need the if-­then part because nature creates its own balance. IF there are too many rabbits, THEN the coyote population will increase to reduce the number of rabbits. Things will come into balance.

  “But that doesn’t work for the Mobwows. If there had been just the one race, the Mobwows, they’d have been wiped out, or at least there’d be many fewer of them. But nature was never allowed to balance monkey-­brain ­people. The other race of ­people, the smarter ones, always found a way to survive, and the monkey-­brain ­people always rode piggyback on top of the sensible ones. One can’t tell them apart, just looking.”

  “Couldn’t anybody teach the monkey-­brains?”

  “No, child. Whenever someone tried to teach them the ‘if-­then,’ they smothered it with myths. One of their favorite myths was ‘This earth doesn’t matter. We won’t really die. We’ll just leave this world and be taken away to another world in heaven where everything is perfect and we’ll live there forever.’ ”

  Needly was thoughtful for a long moment. “I suppose if you believe that, you can be totally selfish, can’t you. It wouldn’t matter what you did to other ­people or your world. You could just go ahead and ruin your world.”

  “You can ruin. You can kill. You can pollute. You chop your way through the world, taking, burning, and destroying, without feeling any responsibility at all. None for your descendants, none for the earth. You can father twenty children, and if they starve to death, don’t worry, they’ll all live forever somewhere else. There’s always enough well-­to-­do ones whose children are healthy and well fed to hold up as golden examples of Mobwowism. And every single one of those stories that they tell was started by a monkey-­brain person who believed in willy-­wagging as a way of life. You see, some of those ­people have only men to teach their religion—­a religion is a collection of myths, different ones for different ­people. So if they have only men as religious teachers, they never get any other viewpoint at all.”

  “Religion?”

  “One of my family members told me once there are over a thousand different sets of myths on this planet of ours, a thousand different ones with a religion following each set and ­people following each religion. Remember your litany. Some ­people are evidence-­driven, some ­people are myth-­driven. Mobwows are always myth-­driven.”

  “You mean like herd smell? And hive noise? Recognition rites.”

  “That’s partly what I mean, yes.”

  “You must have had a interesting family, Grandma.”

  “I suppose so. When I was very young I had a mother and a father and a grandmother. I had at least one sister and I think two brothers, full or half. It sounds disorganized, but you know, there were always good, caring ­people around me. The children in the family were always clean, well clad, well fed. I don’t know who bought the food, or who had built the house, but there was always plenty of food and firewood, and the roof didn’t leak, and I had warm blankets on my bed. No fleas. No hunger. Never any abuse, though I remember some very severe talkings-­to, with me the one talked at. I don’t remember grieving when any one of them went away for a while, but I do remember being glad when they came back. I don’t remember feeling deprived or orphaned. The ­people were most always interesting and spent quite a bit of time with me; many of them brought books into the house that I read. Including some monkey-­brain ones, as a warning.”

  “Is monkey-­brain catching?”

  “The groups that teach Mobwow try to infect as many ­people as possible. Some ­people are immune. My uncle Gren—­he may have been a real full uncle, brother to my maybe mother—­had a friend Holger who paid us a long visit when I was growing up. Holger called himself a ‘half-­assed philosopher.’ I think that just meant he didn’t have a license to philosophize. In times long past you had to have a license to call yourself anything fancy—­some kind of document or letters after your name, maybe. I just remember Holger was the one who first told me about monkey-­brains and about some ­people being immune to monkey-­brain disease because they have bah-­oh. I asked him what ‘bah-­oh’ meant, and he said the word means ‘thread.’ I didn’t understand that, so he took hold of my sleeve and he said, ‘This is made of threads. What is it?’ And I said, ‘It’s cloth, fabric.’ And he said, ‘Having bah-­oh means knowing your threadness.’ He wouldn’t explain it. He told me to figure it out, so I’ll tell you to do the same thing. Now there’s a puzzle for you.”

  “Do you suppose maybe we could be part of something like a breeding program?” whispered Needly, who was fully aware of the mystery surrounding her own birth.

  “Oh, I’ve always wondered that, wondered about it for both of us, Needly. I’m almost positive I was. That’s the only explanation. You’re not part of a plan I know anything about, but I’m sure you’re part of something interesting and important. There’s more to the world than Hench Valley. Things happen in places we don’t know about. There may be many ­people working on the Mobwow problem and the solution might include you and your half sisters and brothers. I hope . . . I thought at one time that my children might be part of something like that, too, though I may have been lied to about that. Or I was just lying to myself, making myself feel better about things.”

  “Hench Valley doesn’t seem to be the right sort of place for anything like that to happen . . . you know. It’s such an awful place to—­”

  “Oh, Needly, I’ve asked myself that question! If Hench Valley is really being used for some kind of project like that, the only reason I can think of is because it’s such an awful place. It would not surprise me to learn that Hench Valley is widely known as an awful place and has been carefully dropped into the vocabulary and consciousness of ­people everywhere.”

  Needly giggled, something she did not do often and never within the hearing of a Pa. “I can hear mothers telling their children, ‘Wipe your shoes! Were you reared in Hench Valley?’ ”

  “Exactly! It would be impossible for anyone from Hench Valley to have the brains to be involved in anything intellectual or demanding.”

  Needly murmured, “So . . . it would be like a . . . source disguise. So nobody knows what tree we’ve really been grown on. What seeds we carry . . .”

  Lillis felt tears come into her eyes. “My children could do nothing useful here, child, no one can be useful here, but being from here might be a useful part of their story. If that’s what the mysterious they are doing—­which may only be a vain hope on my part—­if they were, though, ­people coming from a place like this would never be suspected of being part of anything sensible.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Oh, Needly, when I’m wildly dreaming, I hope they’re propagating a virus that will kill all the monkey-­brain cells in ­people’s heads. Gren and Holger said it was a brain pattern, a thought pattern. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were just a neat little cluster of cells that could be targeted and killed without hurting ­people otherwise? Of course, it might be easier to disrupt a pattern.” She stared wistfully into the distance, slowly shaking her head. “I can’t pretend that’s true, though. That’s what we need, a pattern disrupter!”

  “Maybe someone will invent one.”

  “Oh, we’ll hope they do. And we’ll hope they keep it secret. Because ­people with monkey-­brain don’t want their brains changed; they’re happy with their do-­whatever-­you-­want-­to-­and-­then-­live-­forever myths. You and I can pretend it can be cured, we can dream about it being cured, we can imagine a world that doesn’t have it, but we shouldn’t talk about it to other ­people, because most of the world is in
love with the disease.”

  ONE DAY, SOME MONTHS AFTER her birthday journey to see the Listener, Needly saw the sunrise creature again, the mother one, on a cliff top closer to the valley than the one near the Listener. She ran at once to tell Grandma the creature had returned. Gralf was gone and Trudis was curled up in bed with most of a gallon of recently brewed beer. Grandma decided the child’s sighting the creature might be a hint as to what was intended. Perhaps they should, lacking any other directive, go to the bottom of the cliff where the Griffin roosted. The place was some distance away and had no village near it, but she took Needly with her, for the child was not safe left behind. She told herself she was looking for a certain root that she’d been unable to find any closer than a little canyon east and two steep ridges over. It would do as a reason for their journey, if she were asked.

  She so convinced herself of that reason that two days later, when they actually came upon the plant she had supposedly sought, right there in front of them in the middle of the path they were on, she stopped utterly still in surprise—­not at the seed head, ripe at the top of the stem, or the rosette of hand-­shaped, furry leaves, like a cluster of tiny knitted mittens, that told her the root was there below, ­but at the other plant growing next to it. It was one she had been told of in whispered words, had seen its effects demonstrated, had copied a hand-­drawn picture of, and had herself prepared from dried samples, but she had never seen it growing. She was also astonished at the things that lay atop the two growths, like shards broken from the sun. On the fuzzy mittens lay a Griffin tear, a multifaceted crystal tear as big as a pigeon egg, with sunrise colors all through it. On the other lay a bronze neck feather as long as her little finger, glowing as though from the forge.

  “Is this a plant?” whispered Needly, staring at the second growth as she picked up the feather. “It looks like a rock, like a bunch of rocks.”

  As indeed it did: a paving cluster of small, smooth stones, each seeming pebble a straight-­sided irregular polygon from being pushed tightly against its fellows. They could have been stones except that they had roots binding them to the soil. This plant, too, had a ripe seed head nodding above it. The feather lying upon it smelled of spice and sweetness and glory, but also of pain and loss. Needly held the crystal tear and the bronze feather while Grandma carefully planted both sets of ripe seeds along the path where the parent plants had grown, while she dug parts of the two roots with the little folding spade she had carried—­the stone plant roots went very deep—­wrapping each plant carefully, separately, so they would touch nothing else. There was enough coincidence and contrivance about the whole episode that she supposed she had been given the sign she’d been waiting for, and therefore, she would probably be able to determine what it all meant: the Griffins, the Listener, the two plants, the tear, the feather, all of them meant something, and maybe, oh, maybe she was part it. Even though she had Needly, the loneliness ate at her too much of the time.

  Once they were home, Needly helped her find a nicer bit of wrapping to put around the crystal tear and the feather and tucked them away with the others, the ones they had found on her birthday morning. It was a good hiding place, where Trudis, Gralf, Slap, or Grudge could not find them. It had been during their search for a very good hiding place that Grandma and Needly had discovered Gralf’s hoard. They had looked at it, counted it, and been amazed by it. It must have been accumulated over several generations. They left it as they had found it. Grandma had even dropped spiders on top of it to renew the webs they had disturbed. She had selected black widow spiders for the purpose, as the hoard was in the kind of place that particular spider preferred.

  Grandma searched out two of the little bottles men sometimes brought her from their diggings in the buried city. She paid a dozen cookies per bottle. Keeping cookie ingredients took some doing, but she managed. If the bottle was of colored glass, she added another half-­dozen cookies. Colored bottles were easier to tell apart.

  So now she took two of the buried-­city bottles, one blue, one green, and she boiled them for a long time. She waited until Gralf and Trudis were asleep that night before preparing the roots she’d found. She bottled the two syrups that resulted, being very careful not to let the stone medicine touch her skin and washing every trace of it from the utensils she had used, pouring the wash water in a certain place where nothing was growing. Needly watched the process, Grandma making sure she wasn’t too sleepy to remember. These particular concoctions stayed potent for years, some said for centuries, so they would be ready if something of their kind were needed, which undoubtedly would happen. Why else, Grandma murmured, had she been led to them?

  Later, she told Needly, “If you vanish, child, be sure to take my medicine bag with you. The new syrups are in there. Remember, the furry, hand-­shaped leaves, that ones in the green bottle. That’s the antidote for the stuff in the blue bottle, the stone medicine.”

  “What’s the stone medicine for, again?”

  “If . . . if it should happen someone is hurt bad, so bad you can do nothing to help, you can put a drop or two of that upon his tongue, or over his heart, and he will become as stone. And that stone will keep him as he is, alive, maybe forever, until someone comes who can fix him so you can give him the antidote and he can go on living. The little dark green bottle has the antidote. Not a lot because I found only that one plant and you saw I took only part of it.”

  “Not to be a monkey-­brain and eat it all. You planted the seed.”

  “Exactly. So, you memorize the plant, and if you see it, you dig only some of it! And if it’s in seed, you plant them and you remember where. The drawing of the plant is in the notebook, along with the way you make the antidote. They’re unique, those two plants. I don’t know of anything that looks anything like them. Keep your eyes open for them. They’re rare, but the root dries well, so you can keep the dried roots and make the antidote later. If you vanish, be sure to take them with you.”

  “I’ll remember,” said Needly. “But I’m not planning on vanishing, Grandma!”

  Grandma turned on her, taking her by the shoulder, shaking her firmly. “Now you listen to me, Needly. Listen hard, remember well. If the time comes that life gives no choice you’d choose to put your hand on, not a one, don’t you lie to yourself and say maybe it won’t be so bad, or maybe you can bear it or survive it or anything of that sort . . .”

  Needly was both startled and puzzled. “Like what, Grandma?”

  The old woman lowered her voice. “Like Gralf telling you he’s sold you to Old Man Digger, or, more likely, you overhear him tell someone else, Trudis, maybe. No girl has survived to reach womanhood once she was sold to Old Digger. And don’t believe for a moment that Gralf would be ashamed to do that to a daughter, because Pas do it all the time in Hench Valley, and Gralf has no shame, none!”

  Needly was too smart to cry out or say anything stupid like “You don’t mean?” or “That’s just a story,” because when Grandma said things in that particular tone of voice, she was telling the absolute truth. “Why would Digger kill them so fast, Grandma? Doesn’t he want children?”

  Grandma bit her lip, shook her head, finally nodded to herself. “No real reason not to tell you, child, ’cept it’s so ugly. Long years ago Digger had a woman, and she bore him a child. She was a big woman, very big, but it was a huge boy baby, biggest newborn I ever saw. The baby grew fast. Boys here in the valley do grow up dreadfully fast—­more like animals with short life-­spans than humans with decades . . .” She stopped, suddenly thoughtful: Hench Valley men have shorter life-spans than most men! Well. That’s interesting. Now someone should look into that. She shook her head and went on, “In any case, when the boy was twelve, he was nearly as big as Digger. When he was fifteen, he was bigger than Digger. The boy got mad at Digger, took a hayfork to him, nearly killed him before Digger found an ax near to hand.

  “Digger swore he’d never let another child be born
to a woman of his. So, whenever he buys a woman, Digger buys a little girl just maybe big enough to get some pleasure out of without any chance they’ll get pregnant. Once they’re old enough to be pregnant, they vanish. I suppose if one dug up the floor of Digger’s barn, one would find what was left of them.”

  Needly swallowed and breathed hard a time or two. “Well then, you said Gralf knows that. Why would Gralf sell me to Digger?”

  Grandma gave her a look. “Needly, you know very well why, but you want me to confirm it. Your senses tell you Gralf has no moral values whatsoever, your brain tells you he’ll do anything for gold, but you can’t quite believe your own intelligence. What have we just been talking about with the Mobwows? Making up nice stories instead of accepting uncomfortable reality? Living a myth-­driven life?”

  Needly flushed. It was true.

  “Have you ever known Gralf to look past gold? Has he ever held on to anything that can be sold? You saw his hoard!”

  Needly shook her head.

  Grandma’s voice softened. “His father was the same. Gralf had two brothers, they were the same, they had sons, and they are the same. They will give nothing for love or care! Nothing for comfort or beauty! But they will sell anything for gold. For hoarding! Not to spend, mind you. To have. Just to have. Like a dragon’s hoard! All of them the same.”

  “They don’t spend any?”

  “You saw the hoard when we found it, Needly. It had cobwebs and dust on it. Nobody spends it. They trade things they find that a trader will buy. The main trader up there at the pass, he’s called the Gold King. Always pays in gold. The men, they spend silver, but they hoard gold.”

  “Why do they have hoards?”

  “Well, next time I meet a dragon, I’ll be sure to ask her. Or him.”

  Needly grinned. Then she sighed. “I don’t understand my Pa.”

  “Needly, you know full well he is not your Pa.”