Advanced Mythology (13 page)

“I perceived only a potential instinct for survival,” his father disagreed. “I vould be pressed to insist upon intelligence.” The two of them faced one another, looking profoundly alike in spite of the differences in hair color and age.

Dola piped up. “Where did it go?”

“Not into this boy,” Rose said, standing up and slapping Holl on the shoulder. “It just disappeared.”

“It’s in the house,” Candlepat said, shivering as she looked around the ceiling.

“We must root it out and prefent anything like it from happening again,” Aylmer said. “Ve vill increase the protections around the house. This proofs ve haf not adequate safeguards.”

“This could be kickback from the spell we already have around this place,” Holl said. “Keith Doyle remarked upon it himself. We are pouring so much energy into this area that it is almost certain to rebound upon us. I think we may have created our own monster.”

But no one listened to him. They were already arguing about the best way to reinforce the charm of protection. Enoch glanced at him over the crowd and shook his head. Holl gave up trying to get their attention. His chest hurt. It felt as though someone had struck him with a battering ram. Maura had a draught that would help him sleep. He pushed open the kitchen door.

“Got it!” Borget crowed triumphantly. Behind Holl, the computer sang to life. He stepped out into the night.

***

Chapter 11

“I’ll go out and get breakfast,” Keith insisted, for the fourth or fifth time. “Thanks for asking me, but I can find something. Really.” The kitchen was full of cooks, yet nothing was getting cooked, except tempers. He tried to catch Keva’s eye, but she wasn’t looking at him or anyone else. Holl, head propped up on his palm, sat beside him, looking as though he hadn’t slept much. Keith’s cheerful queries about how everyone had slept had been met with uneasy glances or glares.

“Stay,” Maura said, laying a hand on his arm. She was the only one who didn’t seem to be involved in whatever was eating everybody else, but he could see worry in her eyes, and did not want to add to it. He wondered if it was about him. Even Dola didn’t meet his eyes, concentrating on playing with baby Asrai. Maybe Holl had caught flak for letting Keith stay. Despite the expense he’d better find a place of his own. “It’s all right.”

“No, really,” Keith said. “I’ve got to get to class by nine. Thanks.” He started to rise from the bench at the long table. Several of the Folk hurried over to pull him back down to his seat.

“Wait,” Dennet said, his kindly eyes pleading. “It will be ready soon.”

Keith waited, but his invisible whiskers were twitching with curiosity.

A tapping came at the back door. Everybody turned to look. Diane leaned in, smiling.

“Morning, everyone!” she said. Keith sprang to greet her.

“Hi,” he said. “This is a surprise.”

She smiled impishly. “I’ve come to drive you to class.”

“That’s great of you, but my car’s okay.”

“No, I want to,” Diane insisted. “You’ve done all this driving. Besides,” she added, lowering her head so her blue-green eyes glinted like jewels through her long eyelashes, “I want to have you at my mercy.”

Keith grinned. “Yes, ma’am.” He went for his backpack, which he’d stowed under the table next to the server.

“What about your breakfast?” asked Laniora, a fellow student in the Master’s class. “The eggs are nearly done.”

“Well …” Keith began, torn between hunger and escaping from the tension in the house. “Diane’s here, and everything.”

“I wasn’t trying to invite myself for a meal,” Diane said, with hope that turned into dismay as she watched them bustle around her. She was surprised that the Folk didn’t at once invite her to sit down. She looked at Keith with alarm.

The telephone rang, making everyone jump. Dennet seized it.

“Who is calling?” he asked. “No, we do not wish to cable service. I have told you many times: the installer has never come, because we don’t want him. No, you may not send a representative to see!” Dennet cradled the phone with a bang, then looked surprised at the force of his action. “I apologize,” he told the Big students. “They have been relentless.”

“Do you want me to go to the office and tell them to lay off?” Keith asked. “I think I’ve seen it right near campus.”

“Thank you, no,” Dennet said, though his face was pale. “It is just one of many unwanted calls. Whether our number is unlisted or no, they always seem to find us. It is disturbing.”

“Welcome to modern technology,” Diane said, with a snort.

“And do you not care for the tools of convenience?” Laniora asked, challenging her. If there was someone you could call a militant Progressive, Keith thought, she was one. Diane was taken aback.

“No, I mean, there’s … I get all sorts of calls I don’t want, too. Everyone does.”

“We are not everybody,” Keva said. “I’d rip the cord fro’ the wall if that’d stop the interruptions.” Pointedly, she looked at Keith and Diane.

“Well, I’m really sorry to intrude,” Diane said, stung. “I’ve got to be at work by nine.” She tossed her hair back defiantly, glared at Keith. “Are you coming?” She strode out, head held high,
not looking back.

“Uh, yeah, I’d better not be late. Um, thanks for breakfast,” Keith said, hurrying to pick up his backpack. He ran out the door behind Diane.

“I’ve never been so embarrassed,” Diane said, leaning over the wheel of her car as she zoomed down the hill and up out onto the road. “What’s with them?”

“I don’t know,” Keith said, trying not to stomp on an imaginary brake on his side of the car as they skimmed around corners, narrowly missing farm equipment, mailboxes and squirrels that hesitated on the narrow pavement for one breathless, heart-stopping second before hightailing it into the nearest tree. “They’ve been like this since I got up, snapping at each other, forgetting things. They’re not usually like this. They didn’t mean to make you feel unwelcome. You know that.”

“I can’t help it,” she said. Keith leaned over to put his arm around her. She froze. Quickly, he pulled back. Diane turned to him, her eyes blazing. “I’ve never felt comfortable with them. Every time I go over there, I feel like I am being checked out by a zillion relatives, and they’re all looking out for
you.
Just you.”

“That’s not true,” Keith said, very gently. “They love you, too. They care about you. You know that.”

“No. They’re your thing, not mine. I don’t know why you have to spend so much time with them when you could be with me. I miss you so much!”

Keith thought desperately, trying to come up with a joke to defuse the moment. “I’m not used to being fought over. Hey, slow down and let me enjoy it for a second.”

For answer, she stepped hard on the accelerator, until the little white car skimmed over the top of a hill. It launched into space for a moment, coming down hard on a patch of gravel.

“You haven’t talked to me. I hardly know what you’re doing all week,” Diane said. “Do you think I would tell anyone if you didn’t want me to?”

“I had to sign a confidentiality agreement,” Keith said. “I had no choice.”

“But you told
them,
didn’t you?”

“That was different,” Keith said.

“Different
how
?”

“Pull over. Come on, please? You’re scaring me.” Pretending terror, he clenched his teeth and bugged out his eyes. He leaned over and clutched the dashboard with both hands. He held on until Diane screeched to a halt at a stop sign. She pulled over onto the gravel shoulder, her hands clenched, her face contorted between tears and laughter.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what got into me. I do love them, but I love you more.”

Keith scooted over, oblivious of the jab in the ribs he got from the emergency brake handle, and put his arms around her. “It’s okay,” he said, as they sat just leaning on one another. Diane let out a sigh, and her body relaxed. “They’re having a bad day, and it’s catching.”

“It’s whatever I had to drive through to get onto their property, too,” Diane said, gesturing toward her ears with a vague hand. “It’s not like it was in the library. It feels as though I’m coming into an armed camp. I feel better now, but I don’t think it was me. Something back there made me want to run screaming.”

“You’re right,” Keith agreed. “It’s bad. No one is telling me what’s up.”

“And the famous Doyle Snoop System isn’t working?”

Keith waggled his eyebrows at her. “It will, my dear. I’m just giving them a chance to twist themselves into a rope of their own making.”

“
That
didn’t make any sense.”

“I know,” Keith said, shifting back into his seat and letting out a mighty yawn. “I’m not really awake yet. I slept like a log. It’ll take me another century or two until I can stretch out my roots.”

“
You
need coffee,” Diane said definitely, and put the car into drive.

* * *

They stopped for a bite of breakfast before Diane dropped him off in front of Midwestern’s business school. Keith took his coffee in with him, prepared to dump the cup if he had to,
but several of the other fifty or sixty students in the airy lecture hall were clutching their own caffeine wake-ups. They needed it. The teacher in Business Management, Professor Larsen, a lanky, fast-moving man with cavernous eyebrow ridges above round blue eyes, spoke rapidly and seldom repeated himself. Because of his schedule change Keith had missed the first Saturday class. It took him a while to catch onto Larsen’s style. Once he did, he found the class stimulating but exhausting.

Graduate classes were offered in a format more oriented toward peers than students. The lectures were long, but Larsen gave the class a chance to respond to the topics he covered. When the discussion flagged, the professor tossed out a challenge to the group, demanding they learn to think about each business problem from several angles. Suggestions and arguments flew too fast for manual note-taking. Keith vowed to bring a tape recorder the following week.

A brief lunch break was followed by the second three-hour course, Franchise Organization, taught by an Asian woman, Dr. Li Slim, compact and dark-haired, she was Larsen’s physical opposite, but his match in lecture delivery. By the time Diane came for Keith at 4:00, his fingers were numb.

“Now, you see,” he told her, as they drove off campus. “If I had Doris, I could have typed all my notes, or recorded the teachers to transcribe later. And hey! If I used Dunn’s software, the notes could transcribe themselves!” Keith threw his arms behind his head. “Yeah. That’d be great.”

“Terrific,” Diane said. “And if you could get the computer to organize your notes into thesis form there’d be no need for you to go to class yourself.”

“Hmmmm …” Keith intoned, speculatively. “I wonder if the guys at Gadfly are open to suggestions.… Could I get a bonus for putting them together with Dunn?”

“All right,” Diane announced. “I don’t want to hear about Doris all day long. I’m beginning to think she’s my rival.”

Keith sat up at once. “Never! Don’t you know you’re my one true love?”

“Well,” Diane said, “start acting like it.”

Keith bowed as low as he could, considering the shoulder harness of the seat belt. “Your wish is my command.”

She smiled, her skin glowing golden in the autumn sunlight. “That’s what I like to hear.”

They spent the rest of the day just driving around the central Illinois countryside, chatting, and catching up on the news of the week, enjoying one another’s company, and simply being together. Keith concentrated on going along at a leisurely pace, trying not to let the thoughts of homework, advertising, the unfinished essay for the Master, or the Little Folks’ worries interfere. It was a warm and lovely afternoon, the prelude to a happy weekend.

* * *

Sunday afternoon, they arrived back at the farm in time for the Elf Master’s class. Keith realized Diane had been right: there was a palpable sense of ill-feeling in the air. And, he realized with dismay, they’d come into the middle of another argument.

“… If the young ones hadn’t filled up the postcard for a free T-shirt—which is big enough to cover a mattress besides—we wouldn’t be overrun now with unwanted offers,” Ligan complained. He was the oldest of the Master’s clan, a frail-looking male with a few pumpkin-colored streaks left in his thinning white hair and beard. “Givin’ out the telephone number, as if they’d no one to consider but themselves!”

“We never wrote down the telephone number,” Borget insisted. The small boy stood his ground in the face of the Conservatives.

“They’ve other ways of obtaining that information,” Catra added. “Don’t blame the child.”

“Whose side are ye on?” Ligan demanded, rounding on the Archivist.

Keith grabbed Diane’s arm and began to back out of the kitchen. Calla, Holl’s mother, caught sight of them and waved them in. She gave them an apologetic smile. The Folk in the kitchen looked around at her gesture. They seemed surprised to see the two Big students behind them. They’d been so intent on their discussion that they hadn’t heard them approach. That was
not
normal, Keith thought. His invisible whiskers were on full red alert.

He held up a disk. “I’ve got my essay,” he said. “Can I use your printer?” Abashed at being caught fighting, most of the Folk cleared the kitchen.

“Of course you may,” Catra said, grateful for an excuse to break up the discussion. She sprang to open up the cabinet and turn on the computer. Dola took the disk out of Keith’s fingers and inserted it into the drive.

“You must have lunch with us before class begins,” Calla said hospitably. “The weather is so fine we’re picnicking outside. You ought to have a decent meal under your belt before you go running back to Chicago.” She took their arms and led them out of the house and around onto the grassy slope in between the house and the old barn.

Once he was outside, Keith wondered if he’d ever want to go inside again. The difference in atmosphere between the house and the yard was palpable. Everybody outside was smiling and relaxed. It was the house, he thought. He’d have to pull Holl aside for a private conversation. The Maven was on the far edge of the slope, turning sausages on a grill over a fire that belched clouds of smoke. If not then, Keith amended, perhaps later.

Different, too, was the elves’ mood. They seemed far more relaxed and cheerful. Everyone crowded around him and Diane, greeting them and asking questions.

“Apologies, dear Diane, for the morning,” Dennet said, drawing her toward a comfortable corner near the side of the house. “You caught us out of sorts earlier. A personal matter that should never have affected you. Never do we want you to feel you do not belong among us.”

“Well, thanks,” Diane said, mollified, with eyebrows raised toward Keith.

“There, you see?” Keith said.

A few of the volunteer cooks brought them food, and someone ran inside for an armload of pitchers. Keith found himself on the lawn with a cold drink and an audience as he described their Saturday afternoon out.

“I stopped by to see a few of the old clients,” he said, answering Marm, who was thoughtfully carving the top knob of a beechwood cookie jar in between bites of his lunch. Keith got up off his back pocket and fished out a few crumpled papers, which he handed over. “Three of them gave me orders. You’ve got most of them using the fax or the Internet to send in orders, but they like seeing an actual person once in a while. Face-time is important. I’d be happy to stop by once in a while during the weekends. That is, when I have time,” he added, meeting Diane’s eyes.