Aliens In The Family (3 page)

Dora's heart missed a beat. She detested stories about monsters, vampires, ghosts, murderers and great battles between the forces of good and evil. She hated science fiction. What she enjoyed were ballet books about girls dancing beautifully in rose pink dresses, or homely comfortable stories, and, though she did not tell anyone, she still enjoyed reading her old copies of Milly Molly Mandy. Horror stories on the other hand filled her with dread, not because she actually believed in werewolves and vampires, but because the stories always suggested some unnamed thing, huge and hairy, moving through the darkness. Now she looked at Jake with despair. Jake smiled with one side of her mouth and not the other which looked more like a sneer. Picking up her pack, Jake hoisted it onto her shoulder with a movement that was easy but at the same time seemed resigned.

"Let me carry that for you," suggested David. "Come on, Jackie, don't be difficult."

"It's not heavy," she argued. "Anyhow, I'm used to carrying my own heavy things."

David took it from her all the same. "You're sharing—you've got to share—" he paused, "Dora's room."

Jake looked at Dora. "Right on!" she said quietly, unsmiling, and followed David. She might as well have said "That's the end! That's the absolute
pits!"

"Mum," whispered Dora as the door closed behind Jake and her father, "I
hate
her."

"Don't be silly," Philippa whispered back. "Of course you don't. You can't! But... oh dear... she certainly is different from what David said she was like."

"He said she could ride horses. That all she thought about was horses. I thought she'd be the sort of person who wore a silk shirt and jodphurs—a real rider," muttered Dora.

"I thought David was being too confident," commented Philippa. "He wanted to believe things would be straightforward. Never mind! We'll manage."

"How long is she staying?" asked Dora.

"Not long! Well—just until the end of the school holidays." Philippa spoke in a subdued voice.

"That's ages. I think I might be glad to go back to school again, even though I am going to be in Mrs Winward's class!"

"Give her a chance, poor girl!" exclaimed Philippa. "In a day or two she'll probably be like one of us."

But Dora thought that families were like planets. Each had its own creatures breathing its own special air, and no-one as alien as Jake could ever live happily on their particular planet.

Gliding slowly down the street, Bond looked so bright and energetic that some people smiled to see him go by while others frowned, mistrusting his roller skates on a busy city footpath, or puzzled by his suit of many pockets. Pockets of orange, green and gold, all differently shaped, were sewn down the legs of his blue jeans, and there were others like bright windows on his brown shirt. He was still dazed by his surroundings, for although he had been given what the Galgonqua called 'false' or 'induced' memories which enabled him to recognize and understand the uses of things he had never seen before, it did not altogether take the surprise out of those things.
That's a bicycle!
thought Bond, amazed, for it seemed to him that the pedalling motion of the rider was winding up invisible thread from the road behind him.

As he skated weaving along the street, Bond was performing two functions—both part of his test. He was receiving all sorts of signals, but was trying to untangle one in particular—the faint, unconscious trace emitted by the 'missing' Companion. It was also part of the talent of the Galgonqua that they should record. So Bond looked at things differently from anyone else in the street—for he looked at everything twice. His first glance was the surprised one, and his second was the remembering one. He chose to remember the most ordinary things: empty Coca-Cola cans in the gutter, the ill-shaven old man selling lottery tickets and horse-racing news, people's cars, shoes, shorts, shirts, the chains around their necks, the rings on their fingers. Their faces interested him too but he didn't dare look at them long, in case they noticed his curiosity and studied him too closely.

He skated along, smiling as he went. Sometimes he would see something not included in his false memory file and then he would blink as if his mind was taking a photograph. Later, if he was successful, these details would be read off by the School and recorded in the gigantic Inventory of the Galgonqua which was eventually intended to hold all the information, feelings, memories, sensations, ideas, jokes, riddles, mysteries, answers and explanations in the entire universe. They had already been building it up for thousands of years but sometimes it seemed as if they had barely begun.

Though Bond drifted through the crowds without any apparent purpose, he was in fact following his clue. The faint impulse from the Companion was a thread he could follow, running through his head, a constant drone like the humming of a tiny fly, and growing more distinct when he turned his face to it—a thrill which he alone in the busy street could pick out of the air. Earlier in the day this sensation had been interrupted by distance, by his own confusion, by pneumatic drills, by the radios of taxis calling to each other across the city like animals separated from their herd, and even by the electronic presence of microwave ovens in restaurants and coffee bars. He had patiently picked his way through all this, untangling that one thread from all the threads the city offered him. But now it was constant. He had trapped it inside him and even began to feel his old confidence returning.

It's hot a difficult test after all,
he thought,
or perhaps it is
—
for others.
He had always been very clever at detecting and unravelling the signals by which the Galgonqua kept in touch with one another. He was a tireless and deft unraveller. So at last, by following this impulse and recording as he went, he came to a particular shop and stood outside it, hesitant and uncertain.

Peering in at the door as a cautious animal might inspect a trap, Bond saw racks of old cardigans and dresses, somehow more sinister than new ones, as if ghosts had been trapped and strung up on coat hangers. Even from the door it seemed to Bond that the brown jersey on the front of the rack still carried the shape of the woman who had once worn it. He went in at last, feeling his skates, so quick and clever out on the footpath, grow clumsy and heavy on the worn, green matting. A woman sat knitting behind the counter.

"Can I help you, dear?" she asked.

"Just looking" replied Bond, and he
did
look with great curiosity at vases, china ornaments and old cups and saucers set on a shelf. On other shelves behind the woman were the more valuable things, including a black box studded with buttons and little dials. Bond knew at once that this was no ordinary transistor radio. This was what he was searching for—the Companion emitting its constant location call but giving no information about what had happened or why it was here in this shop or quite how he was to get it. He supposed it must be for sale and he had been issued with money—but had he been given enough? He felt frightened at the sight of the box, so square and dark in the shop full of ghosts. It seemed so open, so obvious, yet he was sure there must be a catch. All the time he hesitated he was aware that in that black square, under those studs and dials was unbelievably tiny and intricate machinery, and that set in a maze of pinpoint circuits was the voice, the reasoning and some of the powers of his older sister Solita. She had been sent down in this form to be part of his test, and also to record for the Inventory in a different and more complicated way than a young, untested student such as Bond could manage. The Solita in the box had been set in a state of unconsciousness but the School had told him that her brother's voice was one that might interrupt whatever strange mechanical dreams she was dreaming. He was to reclaim her, awaken her and bring her home.

At that moment the woman behind the counter spoke to him once more. "Can I help you, dear?" she asked with the identical words and expression she had used a moment ago.

"How much is the transistor?" Bond enquired casually. His blood chilled as the woman calmly pulled the knitting off her needles and rose, pointing them at his heart like twin swords. They were steel and very sharp.

"You must be the one," she said in a high, cold voice. Simultaneously, the curtains around the changing booth behind Bond were swept aside and a dark figure appeared—a man with white hair erupting around his forehead and chin as though he were more goat than man. His bumpy forehead even looked as though it might be growing horns, and his yellow eyes bulged.

"You!" the man snorted. "Did you not think there might be a trap for anyone the School sent down? Your people are not all-powerful, you know."

"Who are you?" Bond asked, appalled at being recognized, but even as he spoke, the answer—incredible and terrifying—came into his mind. Under the skin of his wrist throbbed a mechanism called 'the pulse' which enabled the School to trace his progress even though he could not contact the School. Contact until the proper time was strictly forbidden. He touched the pulse with his thumb.

"You're Wirdegen!" he cried. "You're trying to find a way into our Inventory!"

"Knowledge is the greatest treasure of all," said the man. "The woman there—she's nothing. She's under our control, as you will be in a minute."

Bond quickly turned and shouted across the counter to the Companion "Wake up Solita! Wake up!"

"You can't wake a Companion out of a Zahn trance by shouting to it," said the man contemptuously. "Even a Delta function student should know that!" He threw himself at Bond who, still shouting Solita's name, leapt over the counter to brave the steel needles, hoping they were more to frighten him than to kill him. He felt one of them stab his arm as he fell behind the counter taking the bell, invoice book and skeins of wool with him.

"Solita!" he shouted again. The light changed. The box lit up as if a little fire blazed in it.

"Bond? Is that you Bond? Is it rescue?" asked a girl's voice. The man appeared astounded and stood as if the steel needles had pinned him into the air in some way.

"Audio defence!" commanded Bond desperately, trying to recall all he could about this Wirdegen enemy who had appeared out of nowhere and who now tried to grab him and to set a small disc against his forehead.

"Bond, is that you?" asked Solita again.

"Audio defence!" screamed Bond. "Yes, this is Bond—
Bond.
I wouldn't deceive you. Read my bio-phase! Audio defence! This is override instruction." He shouted a series of numbers, thrashing his head backwards and forwards as he cried out. The disc placed against his temple slid down, scraped the side of his face and struck his ear as he managed to knee the man in the side. The woman topped like a heavy doll across his legs, trapping him. But even as it seemed as if he might be caught, a thin, keening sound made itself heard, rapidly rising and swooping up into the range of inaudibility.

Several things then happened at once. A fine shiver ran through the shop. There was a shocking uproar, not from the transistor but from a little dog tied to a parking meter howling dismally and tugging at its leash. Several car horns sounded in the street outside and could not be turned off, and glasses shattered on nearby tables, exploding into glittering daggers of glass. The woman on top of Bond clasped her hands over her head and tried to crawl towards the door. The bearded figure hanging over Bond suddenly collapsed. One minute it was suspended above him, powerful and menacing, the next it was collapsing with a slow, billowing grace. The pale, goatish face shining between the upper and lower nests of hair, and the live yellow eyes, vanished as if they had been sucked back into darkness. The woman did not vanish in the same way but fell to one side in an apparent faint. Bond pushed his way out from under empty clothes and, shuddering, seized the Companion and clumped out of the shop.

Once back on the pavement he grew as swift and as graceful as a bird, sliding in and out between passers-by, clasping the black box to his chest as if he was warming it back to life. No-one followed him.

Early on Friday morning, the morning on which Bond began his search for the Companion, just when Philippa found she was unable to sleep any longer and David was mumbling, "There's no way round it, I've got to get up and face the world," there was the sound of a terrible fight. The only voice to be heard was Dora's and it went on and on, punctuated with thumps like commas. Then the sound of breaking china came as if it were a full stop. A door opened and slammed. Hasty footsteps made their way down the hall.

Philippa sat up like a jack-in-a-box, her hair standing on end as if with terror. "What was that?" she said. "Oh dear, oh dear..." Her voice started off in its usual bright tone, but sank down into a whispery mixture of squeaks and hisses like a bicycle pump needing oil and repairs. "Yesterday was awful, but this is worse.
Now
what's wrong?"

"Only one way to find out," said David, leaping out of bed and pulling on his dressing gown.

Jake was standing in the hall already wearing her cowboy hat even though it was only seven o'clock in the morning. Her pyjama top didn't match her pyjama pants, and the sleeves and legs were much too short for her anyway.

"I said something," she told David at once, "and it started a fight."

"What did you say?" asked her father.

"Jake, what's happened?" asked Philippa appearing in the hallway.

"You take yours and I'll take mine," said David. "Keep them clear of anything valuable and we'll see if we can't work it out. Come on, Jake—into the living room!"

Jake marched ahead of him like the Lone Ranger with a gun held to his back. "The next time you get married, let's have nothing but boys," she flung at him over her shoulder. Once in the living room David sat on the new, floral settee and patted the empty space next to him. Jake looked at it suspiciously, but after a moment she moved forward and sat down stiffly beside him.

"Jacqueline—Jake," David corrected himself. "You can't be enjoying any of this very much."