To Grandmother's House We Go

Chapter 1

Ta Han Hasiuf*, Rais-qa of all civilized stars watched the work of the slave in fascination through the sensory window––spy ray, if you will.

Fortunately, he was the only one who had such a window. He had seen to that by de-funding the entire branch of university research with any potential for developing such technology. The original developers had been transferred to other lucrative projects far from each other.

Assassination would certainly have been simpler, but killing people tends to make other people mad, worse yet—they get curious.

He could not remember the creature’s name. He had learned that it had one, an unusual piece of baggage for a slave, particularly a female. A catalog designator should be sufficient. She was not a particularly attractive specimen, at least not by the icy standards of this present court. She was entirely too slim and muscular. A dense mantle of auburn hair hung to her waist, something particularly out of fashion this season. It was feathers at the moment. The green cast of her complexion helped things not at all, clashing with the violet flares of her eyes.

All of which undoubtedly kept her free from the bedroom duties of most of her more ravishing sisters and, consequently, invisible to the more thoroughbred matrons who would have made her life even briefer than normal.

This was not the first time he had watched her. He had never met her in person, would never even have considered it. Well, actually it had come to mind, and lately quite a bit.

She seemed a rather ordinary menial at first. But something else about her gnawed at his consciousness

Some ancient cynic had given such female slaves the euphemistic title, "Jewels of the Court." As far as he could tell they were all mindless slugs. They had come to his bed often when his hormones had begun to flow, and never more than once. He had wondered at that eventually. He was horrified later when he discovered why.

No Jewel ever came to the bed of the Rais-qa twice. They didn’t live that long. Court protocol mandated that they be sanitized before leaving the palace. It was a simple matter of hygiene, and he was not the only child of the Court for whom such measures were taken.

He found that he could not change this. His orders were accepted and then the servants changed. It was a custom too deeply set. It had left him with a very foul understanding of life. Much to the confusion of his court, the Rais-qa would allow no Jewel in his bed ever again.

This time he had intended looking in on one of the court ministers–an obsequious little toad with a bit too much jewelry. He had set the search parameters a little wide and then encountered this situation. Something odd about it now held his fingers from the selector keys. He found himself wondering what it would be like to carry on a conversation with the creature. What might it think about?

She was sitting at a keyboard of a small machine. He had never seen a ranked keyboard. All message composers in his experience were oral input.

Her fingers raced across the board composing script much faster than he could have talked. There was a holo display for the machine and he could see that it was setting up a text in the tinted curls and icons of a language he had never seen before.

When a yellow star blossomed in her display, the woman stopped and sat back from her work. She seemed to make a decision and touched a key.

Suddenly a yellow cartouche formed in his own display and he was face to face with the thoughtful glare of his little slave. She sighed bitterly in recognition—more of a growl, actually. Her eyes closed in exasperation; it certainly wasn’t fear. Outside the cartouche, he was looking at her from the back, and he saw her stab a key angrily. Then his holo-stage blanked. He stared in shock at the emptiness where her image had been.

This little female slave had jammed his signal and seized control of an instrument in the sacred hand of the Rais-qa, he who could command the death of whole planets on a whim. Well, there were days when it didn’t quite work like that, but it was the concept that counted.

She was a spy. Well, of course she was a spy. Who for, might be fun to know the answer to, but it probably would not prove particularly important. He had found that everyone at the court was a spy for somebody or other.

He could have her head in a basket inside of fifteen minutes. That would end the matter cleanly.

And any one of a thousand court officers could do the same.

He knew he was not being reasonable. This was going to complicate his life––probably. But it was suddenly very important to him that the head of this remarkable creature remain right where it was. He could also trust no one in the fortress to help protect her––at least not any person.

He ordered a new protective program to one of the A.I. sentries in the garden. It was the newest of the mechanisms, with a menu of superb nastiness. One of the items allowed the machine to bend light around itself. Effectively it could make itself invisible throughout most of the visual spectrum. It had proved useful to him on several occasions.

Within ten pelas the sentry reported in from the slave’s location. It had completed a security survey and found only one surveillance tag covering her. It was a routine installation and not even monitored at the moment. The sentry also noted that the tag was very thoroughly compromised, sending out an image of the slave passively watching a particularly asinine entertainment holo.

Hasiuf* smiled at that. Perhaps there hadn’t been such an emergency after all. At any rate that would have to do for the time being. And it was actually pretty good. The device would protect her as effectively as its companions did himself.

Doubtless he was simply bored and needed a diversion. And yet he felt a perverse amusement that he should be protecting this slave-girl spy from his own justice system.

Chapter 2

Eli walked slowly along the path towards the University. Tucson’s sun was doing its very best to turn the sidewalk into a griddle. It was bone dry, easily 115 degrees and Eli loved it. He didn’t even wear a hat over his sun-bleached hair. When it was this hot adults and most of the other kids stayed in their refrigerated rooms. The whole rest of the world belonged to him.

At 9 years, he was now almost as tall as his mother. His chest sometimes hurt for no reason and he was constantly falling down and walking into things.

For the most part school had been pretty boring that day. Recess generally meant being close to a tree he could climb in a hurry. Today had been no exception. Lately he had been an item of interest for a number of bigger boys who thought he was too weird to live. The only break in the day was when his life sciences class had finally gotten to dissect the flowers.

He loved the sciences and hoped someday he could go into one of the fields like his mother had. She was teaching astronomy at Pima College. None of these ambitions improved his standing with the local bullies and that was one of the reasons he was having to take this back way home.

He crossed Speedway and ducked quickly into a side street. A white column of smoke rose from the general direction he was headed and he could hear the faint wail of emergency vehicles coming down the street on the other side of the column. Someone was in trouble close by and he picked up his pace a little. He lived in a pretty quiet neighborhood with a lot of older retired people. Sirens weren’t all that unusual as the neighbors tended to have heart attacks pretty often. The smoke, though, that was something new. He couldn’t remember ever having seen a fire in the neighborhood, or anywhere else in his short life for that matter.

At the corner, he turned and saw that the whitish plume was coming from down the block where he lived. Eli began to get curious and then he had the uneasy feeling that this might be involving someone he actually knew. The street curved around meandering through trees and he couldn’t see much more than he had when he had been crossing the main boulevard. He ran the last two blocks. On the third he had stopped breathing for a moment. He could see his house, and now knew where the smoke column was coming from. Rather he could see the smoke column. There was no house. Just a lot of yellow tape and emergency personnel milling around.

There was only a clean glass smooth hole in the ground where he had slept last night. Eli’s heart skipped and he had to remember about breathing. It was after 5:00 p.m., and his mother’s last class had ended at 3:00. His father had been camped out on the Internet when he left that morning. His father was a research librarian at the U.

A burly man in civilian clothes walked up to one of the fire trucks. Eli was walking slowly in the same direction, and the man looked down at him with some irritation. "Son, you’re going to have to get back. This area’s still hot."

It was. Even at this temperature, the intense heat rising from the hole rippled against the skyline.

Eli was close enough to the crater that he could just stop and stare. He didn’t even hear the man. He couldn’t cry. Not yet.

"Kid!" the man’s voice warned that he was losing patience. "...Oh, oh, Lord...wait a minute...," He trailed off and then he bent down to take a closer look at Eli.

A uniformed policewoman turned from her writing on a clipboard to look over in their direction. She dropped the clipboard to her side with some resignation and somberly came over. She was a very pretty woman with the dark eyes and raven hair of the White Mountain People.

"Hi lieutenant...," she said. "Neighbors said the Atreyas had a son...Eli...about nine years old, This boy’s age, I’d say."

The man stood back up. "Son, I’m Lieutenant Carrasco. This is officer Alope Gokhlayeh. Eli looked up at the pair, a little startled at the names in spite of his own situation. The southwest had a rich, but often very painful history. Eli knew these names as part of some of its bloodiest times.

"'Gokhlayeh' was Geronimo’s Apache name," he said to the woman.

She laughed a little somberly. "Well, well...there aren’t a whole lot of people who would remember that. Yeah, he was a great-great. I am full-blooded White Mountain Apache." She nodded in somber appreciation. "They also said you were something of a ‘brain’. You’re Eli Atreyas aren’t you?"

Eli nodded dazedly. "I live here. My parents...were they...." He tried to breath. He knew the answer to his question, and as he looked up into the sad faces of the adults, he knew for sure.

The lieutenant nodded unhappily. He saw a lot of dead people on Homicide, but he had a son Eli’s age. "I’m very sorry boy. I’m afraid so. The neighbors say your mother had just arrived home, a little after your father. The fire fighters think an underground gas tank exploded. There were a lot of them left in the ground around here after World War II. That’s pretty far fetched for me but they just don’t know for sure right now."

Eli was just standing staring at the hole. He didn’t see it, but that was where his eyes were looking.

"Everything looks like glass," the lieutenant said mostly to himself.

Alope nodded. "There’s just a pit. No fire and all that black glass. The walkway to the door looks like it was cut with a razor."

A television news truck rolled up. The camera-operator and a woman reporter were on the street before it stopped rolling. The reporter bounced herself in front of the crater and started talking with one of the fire fighters.

Alope looked meaningfully at the lieutenant who grimaced and nodded curtly. Then she said, "Eli, I want you to come with me. There’s nothing more you can do here, and we need to get some things figured out for you."

She helped him quickly into the front seat of the patrol unit. It was just in time. The reporter had broken off with the fire fighter, and was frantically trying to haul the camera operator over to the car by the mike cable. She didn’t quite make it. Alope made sure she didn’t.

Eli wasn’t really aware of too much going on around him. His head was roaring with the fact that the people he had loved most in the world were no longer in it.

It wasn’t until later when he was lying in bed in a foster home that he realized that he couldn’t feel anything gone. He didn’t know why that was. It seemed like there should be a hole somewhere, but there just wasn’t.

Chapter 3

Officer Gokhlayeh knew her stuff. She had cut through a lot of the red tape and taken Eli over to an emergency foster home. She knew the foster parents personally and as much as he could feel anything at all, he liked these people right away. They were older than his own parents. He thought they were probably grandparents and they said that they were. They knew this policewoman well. He had thought there was a family resemblance. These were Alope’s own maternal grandparents.

Grandfather had shown Eli his room and the refrigerator. "Boy, I know you hurt right now," he rumbled like a far off storm. "It happens now and then. A lot of kids have gone through our home...none of them came because they were happy."

Gokhlayeh’s Grandfather was tall and strong, but he was an old man too, and it took him awhile to get out of a chair. Eli looked up at him. He wasn’t crying. And he wasn’t going to either. If he started, he didn’t know if he would ever stop. He was definitely not going to cry like a little baby, not in front of this stranger no matter how nice he was.

The dam broke, and he had been right: he couldn’t stop it. The tears came first quietly and he tried to stop them, and then his shoulders started to shake and then he couldn’t control his voice.

Grandfather said not a word. He didn’t try to hold him or tell him to stop. The old man knew that would have hurt worse. Eli sat on the bed and blubbered like a two year old.

It was a selfish thing, he knew. He cried only for himself. The people he loved most in the world would not be there to roust him out of bed for school—not tomorrow morning. Not ever again

Grandma walked by the door and looked in briefly. She signaled to her husband to come along and Grandfather nodded. He reached down to stroke Eli’s hair lightly.

"Boy, maybe you’ll get hungry...maybe later," he rumbled. "You go get you something out of the refrigerator. As long as you’re with us, you just feel free to hit the refrigerator anytime."

Eli heard this barely. It seemed so irrelevant a thing to say to a kid right now. And yet somehow it was exactly right.

"Breakfast will be in the morning and we can get school and everything else started. My granddaughter will try to call any of your folks she can find. Don’t worry about it tonight. You’ve got trouble enough." He turned to go and then stopped at the door. "Both of us sleep light, boy...in case you need anything...someone to talk to."

After the grandfather left Eli cried for what seemed to be hours. Later in the night he found that he had cried himself to sleep. He woke up and lay staring at the ceiling, his mind wandering. He had never considered the possibility that his parents might one day be gone. He was a little boy yet, but Eli knew that he was. He understood that he would grow up and go out and make his life as an adult. But he would always have these people to talk to. He just had always known that. They would all live forever. But they hadn’t. Now they were gone. Forever gone from his life by some freak accident.

He reached out with his mind and tried to imagine them. At least he felt like he did. Telepathy would be a wonderful thing to have, he thought. Sometimes he wondered if maybe some people really could do that. And how would they know if they could.

For a moment a picture came to mind of his father floating high above a sea of lights. It was something like the city of Tucson he had seen from Mount Lemon, and probably why he could imagine it. His mother’s arms were holding his father. He seemed to be asleep in her lap. He couldn’t see her face, but those arms had held him from infancy. He knew who they belonged to. Well, he thought, that would be right.

His parents had taken him to the little Lutheran church near their home. He knew about Heaven. He could imagine they would be on their way by now. He shook his head in the dark. Lately his imagination had been getting pretty wild with stuff like that.

After awhile he slipped out of his clothes. He had his own bathroom so he took a shower and brushed his teeth. He felt a bit better. At least he had stopped crying. He no longer felt quite so sad, and he wasn’t too sure why that was. There was a part of his brain that he knew was there but couldn’t quite talk to. Anyway, eventually he remembered about the refrigerator and he was hungry.

Actually, he was famished. He didn’t have other clothes with him so he got dressed again and opened the door. The hall was dark as he made his way down the stairs and into the kitchen.

Then he froze against the wall. The front door had creaked slightly, and he could see a sliver of moonlight on the front room carpet. The sliver flickered several times and a red light traced its way to the base of the stairs. Someone was whispering. He couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, but he was very sure it wasn’t in English.

He counted four shadows. They all walked like adult men, and moved soundlessly. Before he could decide what to do, one of them was at the top of the stairs and had opened the door of the foster parents room. Eli could see a violet flash from his hand and then he waved the red light down to the base of the stairs. The others came up silently and moved towards the room he had been in. They were speaking louder now, apparently less concerned about being encountered. The language was oddly familiar to Eli. He couldn’t place it, but it seemed like he should know some of the word. And then he found that he did know—not just words either. He knew exactly what they were saying, and it very definitely was nothing even remotely related to English.

Whoever was in charge of this group was very angry with another man for his sloppiness. They had just stunned the foster parents. He wanted no more dead Terrans. The old people were supposed to wake up by morning and report that their charge had run off in the night.

Then the stunner flared violet again and they stormed into the room Eli had just left.

Burglars? And with purple ray guns.

Eli had left his pack with his shoes by the front door. He needed no further encouragement. Whatever was going on, these people were not his friends. He hoped he had heard right, that Grandma and Grandfather were alright.

He picked up his shoes and pack as he slipped through the door. He could hear the uproar from his room as the men discovered that he hadn’t been where they thought.

There was a closed convenience store on the corner. When he called the police from the pay phone he was told to wait there. The man he talked to had something of an accent Eli couldn’t place. Something about that bothered Eli. His teachers had always told him to follow the directions of a police officer. They were friends to children, and yet....

Eli was pulling on his shoes when a dark colored van killed its headlights and sped into the lot. Four figures got out pointing what looked like more ray guns and surrounded the store front. Eli was two hundred meters down the street in a tree shadow, when the entrance way lit up in violet.

So much for 911.