Paul stopped, then slowly turned. Coming forward out of the blanketing mist were two shapes, one large, one small. He saw something glint on one of the dim faces.
"F-Finch? Mullet?"
The big one honked a laugh. "We've come to show you the way home."
The terror that had dissipated now came flooding back. He took a step nearer to the golden glow.
"Don't do that!" Finch said sharply. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. "Come on, old mate, don't make it harder on yourself. If you come back peaceful-like—well, it's just shell shock. Maybe you'll even get a little time in hospital to pull yourself together."
"I . . . I don't want to come back."
"Desertion, is it?" Mullet came nearer. He seemed bigger than before, immensely round and strangely muscled. His mouth wouldn't close all the way because there were too many teeth. "Oh, that's very bad, very bad indeed."
"Be reasonable, Jonesie." Finch's spectacles threw back the light, obscuring his eyes. "Don't throw it all away. We're your friends. We want to help you."
Paul's breath grew short. Finch's voice seemed to pull at him. "But. . . ."
"I know you've had a bad time," the small man said. "You've been confused. Felt like you were going mad, even. You just need rest. Sleep. We'll take care of you."
He did need rest. Finch was right. They would help him, of course they would. His friends. Paul swayed but did not retreat as they came nearer. The golden glow flickered behind him, growing dimmer.
"Just give me that thing in your hand, old mate." Finch's voice was soothing, and Paul found himself holding the feather out to him. "That's right, pass it here." The golden light grew fainter, and the reflection on Finch's spectacles grew fainter, too, so that Paul could see through the lenses. Finch had no eyes.
"No!" Paul staggered back a step and raised his hands, "Leave me alone!"
The two figures before him wavered and distorted, Finch growing even leaner and more spidery, Mullet swelling until his head disappeared down between his shoulders.
"You belong to us!" Finch shouted. He looked nothing like a man any longer.
Paul Jonas clutched the feather tightly, turned, and jumped into the light.
CHAPTER 7
The Broken String
NETFEED/NEWS: Fish-Killer Feared in Pacific
(visual: Scottish fishermen in port, emptying nets)
VO: The dinoflagellate parasite responsible for the North Atlantic die-off that killed hundreds of millions of fish a decade ago has reappeared in mutated form in some Pacific Ocean spawning grounds.
(visual: dead fish with severely ulcerated skin)
UN authorities fear that this version of the organism may be resistant to the laboratory-constructed virus with which the dinoflagellate's reign of terror was halted last time. . . .
Stephen lay motionless, sunk in the smeary depths of the plastic tent like a fly entombed in amber. He had tubes in his nose, his mouth, his arms. He looked, Renie thought, as though he were slowly becoming part of the hospital. Another machine. Another appliance. She clenched her fists hard, fighting the swell of despair.
!Xabbu put his hands into the gloves attached to the tent wall, then looked up at her, asking permission. All she could do was nod her head. She did not trust herself to speak.
"He is very far away," the little man whispered. It was strange to see his light-skinned Bushman features peering from behind a plastic faceplate. Renie felt a pang of fear for him, a sudden spike that punched through even the misery of seeing her brother's unchanged state. VR, quarantine—every new experience she gave !Xabbu seemed to demonstrate another way not to touch. Would it all sicken him? Was his spirit already weakening?
She pushed the thought away. !Xabbu was the sanest, most well-grounded person she knew. She was worrying because her brother and her friend were much the same size, and both were sealed away behind layers of plastic. It was her own helplessness pulling at her. She moved forward and touched !Xabbu's shoulder with her gloved hand. In a way, since he was touching Stephen, she was touching her brother also.
!Xabbu's fingers traced the lines of Stephen's sleeping face, their movements careful and precise in a way that suggested doing something rather than merely feeling, then moved down his neck to his breastbone. "He is very far away," he said again. "It is like a powerful medicine trance."
"What's that?"
!Xabbu did not reply. His hands remained on Stephen's chest, just as hers stayed on the little man's shoulder. For long moments all the parts of the small human chain were still, then Renie felt a gentle motion: within the baggy confines of the Ensuit, !Xabbu had begun to sway. Gentle sounds, like the sonorous hum and click of insects in tall grass, rose and mixed with the mechanical noises of life support. After a few seconds, she realized that !Xabbu was singing.
The little man was silent as they left the hospital. At the bus stop he remained standing when Renie sat down, staring at the passing cars as though looking for an answer to some difficult question in the patterns of traffic.
"A medicine trance is not easy to explain," he said. "I have been to city schools. I can tell you what they say—a self-induced hypnotic state. Or I can tell you what I grew up with in the Okavango Swamps—that the medicine man has gone to a place where he can talk with the spirits, even the gods." He closed his eyes and was quiet for a time, as though preparing for some trance state of his own. At last he opened his eyes again and smiled. "The more I learn of science, the more I respect the mysteries of my people."
A bus pulled up and disgorged a weary-looking group of passengers who all seemed to hobble, shuffle, or limp as they made their way up the ramp toward the hospital. Renie squinted at the bus until she located the route number. It was not the one they wanted. Obscurely angry, she turned away. She felt unsettled, like the sky before a storm.
"If you mean that science is useless, I can't agree with you . . . unless you're talking about medical science, that is. Bloody worthless." She sighed. "No, that's not fair."
!Xabbu shook his head. "I do not mean that at all, Renie. It is hard to express. I suppose it is that the more things I read about the discoveries of scientists, the more I respect what my people already know. They have not come to these understandings in the same ways, in closed laboratories and with the help of thinking machines, but there is something to be said for a million years of trial and error—especially in the swamps or the Kalahari Desert, where instead of just spoiling an experiment, a mistake is likely to kill you."
"I don't . . . what understandings are you talking about?"
"The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it" His smile returned, but it was small and thoughtful. "As I said, it is hard to explain . . . and you look tired, my friend."
Renie sat back. "I am tired. But there's lots to do." She moved, trying to find a comfortable position on the molded plastic bench. Whoever made them seemed to intend the things for something other than sitting: no matter how you arranged yourself, you were never quite comfortable. She gave up and slid forward to perch on the edge, then pulled out a cigarette. The flame-tab was defective, and she wearily groped in her bag for her lighter."What were you singing? Did it have something to do with a medicine trance?"
"Oh, no." He seemed mildly scandalized, as if she had accused him of a theft. "No, it was merely a song. A sad song made by one of my people. I sang it because I was unhappy seeing your brother lost and wandering so far from his family."
"Tell me about it."
!Xabbu let his brown eyes drift to the crush of traffic once more. "It is a song of mourning for the loss of a friend. It is about the string game, too—do you know it?"
Renie held up her fingers in an imaginary cat's cradle. !Xabbu nodded.
"I do not know if I can make the exact words in English. Something like this:
"There were people, some people Who broke the string for me And so This p
lace is now a sad place for me, Because the string is broken. "The string broke for me, And so This place does not feel to me As it used to feel, Because the string is broken. "This place feels as if it stood open before me Empty Because the string has broken And so This place is an unhappy place Because the string is broken."
He fell silent.
"Because the string broke for me. . . ." Renie repeated. The quietness of the sorrow, its very understatement, made her own feelings of loss come rushing up inside her. Four weeks—a full month now. Her baby brother had been sleeping for a month, sleeping like the dead. A sob shook her body and tears forced their way out. She tried to push the misery back, but it would not be suppressed. She wept harder. She tried to speak, to explain herself to !Xabbu, but couldn't. To her embarrassment and horror, she realized she had lost control, that she was having a helpless crying fit on a public bus bench. She felt naked and humiliated.
!Xabbu did not put his arms around her, or tell her over and over that things would be fine, that everything would work out. Instead, he seated himself beside her on the smooth plastic seat and took her hands in his, then waited for the storm to pass.
It did not pass quickly. Every time Renie thought it was over, that she had regained control over her emotions, another convulsion of misery broke across her and set her weeping again. Through tear-blurred eyes she saw another busload of passengers delivered to the curb. Several stared at the tall, weeping woman being comforted by a little Bushman in an antique suit. The idea of how odd she and !Xabbu must look tripped her up; soon she was laughing as well, although the weeping had not stopped or even weakened. A small, separate part of her that seemed to hover somewhere in the center of the maelstrom wondered if she would ever stop, or if she would instead be stuck here like a hung program, switching back and forth from hilarity to grief until the sky grew dark and everyone went home.
At last it ended—more from fatigue than any recovery of control, Renie noted with disgust. !Xabbu released her hands. She could not look at him yet, so she reached into her coat pocket and found a crumpled piece of tissue she had used earlier to blot her lipstick, then did her best to dry her face and wipe her nose. When she did meet her friend's eyes, it was with a kind of defiance, as though daring him to take advantage of her weakness.
"Is the sadness less painful now?"
She turned away again. He seemed to think it was perfectly natural to make an idiot of yourself out in front of the Durban Outskirt Medical Facility. Maybe it was. The shame had already diminished, and was now only a faint reproving voice at the back of her mind.
"I'm better," she said. "I think we missed our bus."
!Xabbu shrugged. Renie leaned over and took his hand in hers and squeezed it, just for a moment. "Thank you for being patient with me." His calm brown eyes made her nervous. What was she supposed to do, be proud of herself for breaking down? "One thing. One thing in that song."
"Yes?" He was watching her carefully. She couldn't understand why, but she couldn't take the scrutiny. Not now, not with swollen eyelids and a running nose. She looked down at her own hands, now safely back in her lap.
"Where it said, 'There were people, some people, who broke the string for me'. . . . Well, there are people—there must be."
!Xabbu blinked. "I do not understand."
"Stephen isn't just . . . sick. I don't believe that any more. In fact, I never really believed it, although I could never make sense out of the feeling. Someone—some people, like in the song—did this to him. I don't know who, or how, or why, but I know it." Her laugh was strained. "I guess that's what all the crazy people say. 'I can't explain it, I just know it's true.' "
"You think this because of the research? Because of what we saw in the library?"
She nodded, straightening up. She felt strength coming back. Action—that was what was needed. Crying was useless. Things had to be done. "That's right. I don't know what it means, but it has something to do with the net."
"But you said the net is not a real place—that what happens there is not real. If someone eats there, it does not nourish them. How could something on the net cause an injury, send a young child into a sleep from which he will not wake?"
"I don't know. But I'm going to find out." Renie suddenly smiled at how the most critical times in your life always threw you back onto clichés. That was the kind of thing people said in detective stories—it had probably been said at least once in the book she was reading to Stephen. She stood. "I don't want to wait for another bus and I'm sick of this bench. Let's go get something to eat—if you don't mind, I mean. You've wasted a whole day on me and my problems already. What about your work for class?"
!Xabbu showed her his sly grin. "I work very hard, Ms. Sulaweyo. I have already completed this week's assignments."
"Then come with me. I need food and coffee—especially coffee. I'll leave my father to fend for himself. It will do him good."
As she set off down the sidewalk, she felt lighter than she had for weeks, as though she had thrown off a soaking garment.
"There must be something we can learn," she said. "All problems have solutions. You just have to work at them."
!Xabbu did not reply to this, but sped his pace to keep up with her longer strides. The gray afternoon warmed as points of glowing orange bloomed all around them. The streetlights were beginning to come on.
Hello, Mutsie. May we come in please?"
Eddie's mother stood in the doorway, looking from Renie to !Xabbu with a mixture of interest and suspicion."What do you want?"
"I want to talk to Eddie."
"What for? Did he do something?"
"I just want to talk to him." Renie was beginning to lose her temper, which would not be a good way to start. "Come on, you know me. Don't keep me standing at your door like a stranger."
"Sorry. Come inside." She stepped aside to let them pass, then indicated the slightly concave sofa covered with a brightly colored throw rug. Renie nudged !Xabbu toward it. Not that there would be anywhere else to sit—the apartment was as cluttered as the night Stephen had gotten ill.
Probably the same clutter, Renie thought, then chided herself for mean-spiritedness.
"The boy's taking a bath." Mutsie didn't offer to bring them anything, and didn't sit down herself. The moment hung awkwardly. Eddie's two sisters lay prostrated like worshipers in front of the wallscreen, watching two men in brightly colored jumpsuits floundering in a vat of some sticky substance. Mutsie kept looking at it over her shoulder; she clearly wanted to sit down and watch. "I'm sorry about Stephen," she said at last. "He's a good boy. How is he?"
"Just the same." Renie heard the tightness in her own voice. "The doctors don't know. He's just . . . asleep." She shook her head, then tried to smile. It wasn't Mutsie's fault She wasn't a great mother, but Renie didn't think what happened to Stephen had anything to do with that. "Maybe Eddie could come with me sometime to see him. The doctor said it would be good for him to hear familiar voices."
Mutsie nodded her head but looked uncertain. A moment later she went into the hallway. "Eddie! Hurry up, boy. Stephen's sister wants to talk to you." She emerged shaking her head, as though she had performed a difficult and thankless task. "He stay in there for hours. Sometimes I look around and say, 'Where is that boy? Is he dead or something?' " She stopped herself. Her eyes grew round. "Sorry, Irene."
Renie shook her head. She could almost feel !Xabbu's eyebrow lifting. She had never told him her real name. "It's okay, Mutsie. Oh, and I didn't introduce !Xabbu. He's my student. He's helping me do some research to see if we can find out something about Stephen's condition."
Mutsie cast an eye across the Bushman on her sofa. "What do you mean, research?"
"I'm trying to see if there's something the doctors missed—some article in a medical magazine, something." Renie decided to leave it there. Mutsie had no doubt already made up her mind who and what !Xabbu was to Renie: suggesting that they were trying to find out whether the net might have made Step
hen ill would only make the story sound even more feeble. "I just want to do everything I can."
Mutsie's attention was drawn to the wallscreen again. The two men. covered with sticky ooze, were now trying to climb the sides of a rocking, transparent vat. "Of course," she said "You do everything you can."
Renie reflected on the worth of this wisdom, coming from a woman who had once sent her children on the bus to her sister's house for the weekend without remembering that her sister had moved across Pinetown. Renie knew because the children had fetched up on her own doorstep and she had wasted an entire weekend afternoon tracking down the aunt's new address and delivering them to it.
Oh, yes, Mutsie, you and me, we do everything we can.
Eddie appeared from the back, hair wet and close to his head, wearing a pair of striped pajamas that were far too big: the cuffs, rolled several times, still dragged on the floor. His head was held low, as though he anticipated a whipping.
"Come in here, boy. Say hello to Irene."
" 'Lo, Renie."
"Hello, Eddie. Sit down, will you? I want you to answer some questions for me."
"People from the hospital asked him all kinds of questions already," Mutsie said over her shoulder. She sounded almost proud. "Some man come, he took the food out of the refrigerator, made notes."
"I have other things I want to ask about. Eddie, I want you to think very carefully before you answer me, okay?"
He looked to his mother, begging her further intervention, but she had already turned back to the wallscreen. Eddie sat down on the floor in front of Renie and !Xabbu. He plucked one of his little sisters' action figures from the threadbare carpet and began to twist it in his hands.
Renie explained who !Xabbu was, but Eddie didn't seem too interested. Renie remembered how she had felt in these situations at the same age, that adults were to be considered part of a shapeless enemy mass until proven otherwise.
"I don't blame you for anything, Eddie. I'm just trying to find out what happened to Stephen."