Aliens In The Family (15 page)

There was a brief silence. "Part of the test?" repeated one of the enemies.

"When I left the School my teacher was the only one who knew I wanted to look like a hero. It was a joke—but you must have come from the School to know about it," he announced, half jubilantly, half angrily.

Jake picked herself up, looking at Bond incredulously. Dora voiced her thoughts. "You mean they're your
friends?"
she cried in disbelief, while Bond and his opponents stared steadily at each other. It was Solita who spoke.

"Notice of threat!" she said. "Major object anomaly is imminent." Even as she said this there was a flare of new light. Off to Dora's right three young men had come out of the darkness and now stood shielding their eyes, dazzled and amazed at the scene before them. Two were dark and one was fair, yet they were dressed alike in a mixture of traditional Maori and European clothes.

Historical men,
thought Dora, for they reminded her of pictures from a history book. Outlined in broad bands of silver light they stood there, lips moving, obviously talking to one another although no sound reached the group standing around Bond. A fantastic possibility flashed into Dora's mind. She saw with amazement that the fair man wore an identical stone in his ear to that which hung around her own neck, the same stone that hung around Bond's neck like a worn splinter of green. A moment later she felt as if she had been seized in a soft but unyielding vice. The air grew solid about her as though she had been set in glowing glass. Bond, already in his true shape, did not change dramatically but his 'opponents' did. Sprouting upwards like columns of light they became patterns in which remarkable shapes moved, looking sometimes like faces, sometimes like birds, and sometimes like the letters of an unknown alphabet. Fixed as they were, Jake, Lewis and Dora could all see each other. Some time later, Dora would think that that was the moment she began to lose her fear of never looking good enough, but all she could think of now was that Jake looked beautiful and human, and she could tell that Jake was thinking the same thing about her. In spite of their differences, they were inhabitants of the same planet after all.

Hanging from Bond's shoulder, Solita was the only one able to speak. "We shall now return to the School," she said. The columns of light all moved together, melted into one another and became one, widening to engulf Bond who stood set in their light like a red-headed goblin caught in a rod of amber. The stone around his neck glowed in a ghostly fashion. It glowed in the ear of the fair historical man, and Dora felt it burn her own skin.

The children were surprised when Solita addressed them in their own language. "Bond will be safe," reported Solita. "I speak with the voice of the School. You have fallen under the power of a dislocation field brought about by the simultaneous presence of one object in three different times. It has created what we call a local paradox. As Bond returns to his School there will be another jump in time and you will all be set free. You must then be patient and in due course your own time will reassert itself. Bond's memories of you will be recorded. You will become part of the Galgonquan Inventory. But now we must resolve this knot and say goodbye. Thank you. You have been brave friends."

Solita began to emit a sound which was like nothing the three children had ever heard before. It was musical and soft, but seemed to go right through them as though their very bones had become harp strings. Its effect on the Galgonqua was stranger still. Their colours left them. They grew transparent, a tall column of glass. In the last second Bond half turned towards them and his lips moved, but no words came, only a faint, far-off murmur like the sound of the sea, and then they were gone. A door had shut. Bond was on one side of it and Jake, Dora and Lewis were on the other. There was a little jump—nowhere near as violent or frightening as the previous one. The light changed suddenly. They still stood in darkness, but were surrounded by a mysterious silver lace as if the world had become a puzzle of shining wire.

"The other men have gone too," remarked Lewis. "The Maoris."

"You know who it was, don't you?" Jake turned-to Dora. "It was Sebastian Webster."

Dora had already worked this out but rebelled against the knowledge. "It can't have been," she cried.

"It was. It all fits in," said Jake. "The first jump by the waterfall took us back to Webster's time, and then the next one dragged him and his friends back with us. That was the earthquake.
We
were his vision... we were the mannikins!"

Dora knew Jake was right. She and Lewis and Jake and Cooney had been ghosts. Having always been frightened of the haunted valley, she now knew who it was that haunted it. It was herself she had been afraid of all the time.

The redness of the light increased around them. Jake lifted her gaze to the black mass beyond the point where the Galgonqua had stood. Now she could see that it was a mountain—more than a mountain. The ground purred strangely, then growled and shifted. As she looked, a deep, rosy flow erupted at the peak of the mountain in a dazzling fountain. The night became like Guy Fawkes night, except that the fireworks let off on the fifth of November could not compare with the spectacle before them now. They were no longer on a peninsular but on an island. There was no longer any harbour beyond the hills, but an erupting volcano.

"What will we do?" asked Jake.

"Sit tight," suggested Dora. "It's what we were told to do." She looked around wildly. "Did you hear that?"

"What? The volcano?"

"No!" declared Dora, frowning. "Somebody called my name."

"They can't have," said Jake, but as she spoke she heard her own name called, faintly but distinctly.

"Ghosts!" Dora cried. "First men from outer space, then historical men, then a volcano, and now ghosts!" But it was not ghosts. It was David and Philippa coming out of the dark towards the light to find their children at last.

"It's Mum!" cried Lewis, forgetting the volcano and Bond too. "I knew we'd get home safely."

Up in the School, Bond walked for the last time through the rounded corridor of the student's section. His friends were still asleep. He had been returned to the School at the exact moment at which he had left it two and a half days earlier.

"Nexus ahead," advised a soft, mechanical voice and the rosy cone of light deepened in front of him once more. He saw the chair and the screen and the moving worms of light. To his surprise he found that some of the dials which he had not understood previously had developed some meaning for him and he could not think how it was that he could recognize them. The screen lit up.

"Bond," said the voice of his teacher. "They tell me you passed the test—though not without difficulty and making several mistakes. I hear that you made contact with the ancestors and involved them in your test. You know that is forbidden and you are only forgiven because you recorded good information. The use of hair dye was of particular interest."

Bond did not reply.

"Are you pleased?" asked the teacher. "You are now a probationer and will be reunited with your sister Solita once more. They are presently waking and disconnecting her."

"I don't understand," said Bond, "why you would allow anyone to take over Lewis. He was so little and helpless."

"You were the one who made the contact," the teacher pointed out, "and all that happened to them was as a direct result of your involving them in your test. If the Wirdegen had really been after you, things might have been a great deal worse for them."

"If the Wirdegen had really been after me I would have been caught a lot sooner," Bond replied, his voice heavy. "It explains a great deal."

"Don't underrate yourself, Bond. It is the same with all you confident students—if you can't be heroes you want to be villains. You were brave, you thought quickly, and at the end you were prepared to sacrifice yourself for your friends and for the School. In the end, too, you guessed that it was all part of the test. Give yourself credit for this."

"They became my friends," Bond explained. "They had a lot of troubles of their own, but they still became my friends." Something else suddenly occurred to him. "There was an object anomaly," he exclaimed. "The first one was only a slight one, but the second was serious even though the prophecy circuits said I could take my stone down to the city. They must have been wrong."

"No, they were not wrong," answered the teacher. "But something very mysterious was involved and we have a team working on an analysis now. It may be that this particular anomaly changed the lives of everyone involved—even the men from the past—in an important and necessary way. And now, Bond—you must go."

"I'll do better next time," Bond stated confidently, "but..."

"Lewis will not suffer at all," the teacher reassured him. "There is no danger for any of them." The screen went dark. Bond got up and began to walk away. Silently the screen behind him lit up again. "Bond! You are going in the wrong direction," called the teacher. "You have passed your first test, remember. And Bond—the School is proud of you."

Bond stopped in his tracks. Slowly he began to smile. Then he turned and walked down the rounded corridor in the opposite direction towards another part of the school, and as he walked, light ran beside him like a faithful dog.

In the distant past of the planet below, Sebastian Webster spoke through the darkness that surrounded them and said, "I can smell the bush. It's going to be all right after all."

"I knew the valley was full of ghosts," said Koro. "Everyone knows, but I didn't think a
pakeha
would see them."

"He's got Maori eyes after all," said Hakiaha. "He sees in the Maori way."

The tension had eased between Sebastian and his Maori friends. Sebastian touched the stone in his ear and felt it cold and smooth, as if the hills had wept a stone tear. It had no more messages for him. "I told you—I don't build fences," he said. "I don't fence anyone out, and I don't fence myself in. Not like the others."

And there among the ferns he sat patiently with his friends and waited for morning to come, which it did—as magical as the bush, the hills and the old volcano, not because it was strange but because it was familiar. Although he welcomed it with Maori feelings, Sebastian also had one
pakeha
thought as the sunlight fell on him.
Someday,
he thought,
I'll write it all down.
He knew he could not quite tell it or sing it in the Maori way of passing information down through generations. It would have to be written. Then he rose and walked with his people down into the volcano which time had turned into a smooth, green harbour.

When Jake and Dora saw their parents, they understood at once that no matter how frightening the events of the last twenty minutes had seemed to them, it had been even worse for these grown-ups who had not known anything about Bond. Even explanations you were unable to understand were better than no explanations at all, and perhaps children, being closer to fairy tales, could cope better with terrifying transformations. So it was Dora and Jake and Lewis who did most of the comforting as well as the explaining, and Cooney who was probably the most at ease in this remarkable world in which they now found themselves.

However strange and unnatural things seemed, finding the children safe and well meant so much that it was not very long before Philippa and David stopped shaking with fear and shock and began to act like parents again—joking a little and refusing to take things too seriously in case the gravity of the situation got too much for them once more. At first they looked only at their children and not at the changed world around them, but soon they began to dart curious glances out into the darkness and up into the air and their voices grew softer and more normal again. Nevertheless they made everyone hold hands in case, by some unimaginable magic, one of them should be plucked away and lost forever.

The roar of the volcano filled the air and the sky above turned the colour of molten steel, but the patchwork family reunited at its foot did not particularly notice.

"There are things more important than volcanoes," said David grandly, and for a few moments it seemed that simply being together was enough to make a happy ending. But the volcano did not wish to be ignored. It had never had an audience till now, for it had risen out of the sea long before there were any people around and it wanted people to notice it and to tremble at its force.

"Noisy old thing!" commented David nervously, staring up at it. It painted his face with its savage light. "I don't think it can hurt us though. We seem to be untouchable here. I think if we were as close to a volcano in our own time, it would be deafening."

It was curious that they had wound up huddled together in a circle among the stones like jittery hens. They had started off hugging each other over and over again while Cooney, snorting scornfully and shifting his feet on the stones, watched them. From the children's point of view it was a wonderfully secure feeling to have parents around who might know what to do.

When Dora expressed this sentiment however, David replied, "But I don't know what to do! There's nothing in the Good Parent's Instruction Manual to tell you what to do when you're lost in time with a volcano as a next-door neighbour!" Nevertheless it was true that the relief of being together made the strangeness seem less so.

"I'm so glad to see you," Jake said to David, and cried big, wet, silent tears onto his shoulder, because she was speaking not just for that moment, but for yesterday and the day before that and the year before that. She was telling him in her own way that she had been frightened of riding, frightened of adventure, but mostly frightened of giving in.

"I was scared," admitted Dora. "Jake was the brave one."

"Dora was so brave," cried Jake simultaneously.

"I was too," Lewis said proudly. Their three voices made a pattern. They had started off as individuals from different planets, but at last they were breathing the same air. Just for a moment Bond was forgotten.