The Inheritance And Other Stories Part 1

THE INHERITANCE.

And Other Stories.

Megan Lindholm.

Robin Hobb.

Preface.

Behind every story a writer writes, there is the story of how the writer came to the tale. In the introduction to each story in this collection, I hope to share a bit of what went on in my mind and in my life that prompted each story.

It is also true that behind every book, there is a story. This one is no exception.

I began my writing career when I was eighteen years old, as an aspiring children's author. I was newly married and living in a small village called Chiniak on Kodiak Island. The population was small, the local business was a combination gas station and convenience store that kept fitful hours, and initially there was little for me to do other than keep my small house trailer tidy and take long walks on the beach with my dog, Stupid. I had long known that I wanted to be a writer, so I borrowed a small portable electric typewriter from my sister-in-law, bought a ream of paper and some carbon papers, large brown envelopes for my SASEs (self-addressed stamped envelopes for rejection slips!), and a copy of Writer's Market. I was soon submitting short works to various children's magazines such as Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, and Highlights for Children, in addition to many tiny magazines with very small circulations. In the beginning, rejection slips far outnumbered sales, but with each contact with the editorial world, I was learning.

By the time ten years had pa.s.sed, I had realized that writing for children was hard work, much harder than simple words and linear plots had seemed at first glance. Trial and error had taught me that there was a corollary to the famous "Write what you know" advice. That was, "Write what you love reading." I had long been pa.s.sionate about fantasy and science fiction, but equally daunted at the prospect of trying to compare my work with the tales from the writers I lionized. But by my midtwenties, I was venturing out with submissions to "fanzines," the small-press homemade magazines of the genre. Some were little more than mimeographed or Xeroxed pamphlets while others had ventured into glossy pages and ill.u.s.trations. They were my proving ground as a writer, and I will forever owe a debt to magazines such as s.p.a.ce and Time, and editors such as Gordon Linzner.

When I began writing SF and fantasy for adults, I initially wrote as M. Lindholm. I was very happy with that sole initial in front of my surname. In 1978, I submitted a story to Jessica Amanda Salmonson that I hoped she would consider for her small-press magazine Fantasy and Terror. To my shocked delight, she wrote back saying that she would like to use it for her forthcoming feminist fantasy anthology, to be ent.i.tled Amazons! But she felt strongly that women writers needed to declare themselves as female. She urged me to put a name rather than an initial in my byline. I wrote back to her that I'd never been fond of my given name, Margaret, and that the nicknames such as Maggie, Peggy, Marge, and so on had never really felt like my own, either. I added, almost as an afterthought, that Megan was not so bad.

Months later, when the book came out, I was a bit astounded to see that I had a new byline. Megan Lindholm it was. I confess to having mixed feelings about it, then and still. A year or two later, when the first Ki and Vandien book, Harpy's Flight, sold to Ace Books, I realized that without my intending to I'd made an important decision. Since the story in Harpy's Flight featured the same characters as "Bones for Duluth," the story in Amazons!, I would have to use the same byline. Without giving it much thought, I'd become Megan Lindholm.

And Megan Lindholm I would remain for many years.

Leap forward in time yet another decade and a bit more. It was a time of change in my life. I had recently switched to a new US publisher, my career-s.h.i.+fting agent Patrick Delahunt had pa.s.sed me on to a new agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and I was writing a story of a type I'd never attempted before. This was to be a big fantasy, on an epic scale, and written from the first-person point of view of a young man. I was writing in a style that I felt was completely different from any I'd ever used before. Perhaps it was a time to make a complete break with the past. The idea of changing my pseudonym greatly appealed to me. Although I remained very fond and proud of my works as Megan Lindholm, the drama of adopting a "secret ident.i.ty" was irresistible. I jumped at the chance to become Robin Hobb.

My editors, my agent, and I all agreed that the change presented an opportunity for me to break out of my "Megan Lindholm" voice and tell a big compelling story in a very lively way, one that I hoped would reach new readers. I hadn't realized that I had begun to feel bound by what readers might expect of a Megan Lindholm book until I stepped away from that name. I wrote with a depth of feeling that I didn't usually indulge. When a.s.sa.s.sin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb was first published, I spent weeks with my nerves in a knot, wondering how this new series by a "new author" would be received.

The results were beyond my wildest hopes. I will never know how much the name change had to do with the success of a.s.sa.s.sin's Apprentice and the other Hobb books that followed it. I don't think there's a way to quantify that. But it felt absolutely wonderful to have reached a wider readers.h.i.+p. And for several years, I played my cards very close to my chest, concealing that Megan Lindholm and Robin Hobb were one and the same. I attended conventions as Megan Lindholm, and while I was there, I did not speak about my work as Hobb. I did not do any readings or signings for the initial Fa.r.s.eer books.

Beyond my agent and publishers, only two people knew the secret. One was Steven Brust, my collaborator on The Gypsy. I think Steve enjoyed keeping the secret, and he did it very well, for which I will always be grateful. The other person was Duane Wilkins of University Book Store, Seattle. I'd known Duane for years at that point. He'd been instrumental in helping my career as Megan Lindholm, supporting me with signings and readings as he did many, many fledgling SF and fantasy writers in the Seattle area. One night I received a call from him. He mentioned he hadn't seen me in a while, and we talked about various forthcoming books and what he thought of them. Then he brought up a.s.sa.s.sin's Apprentice. It was very gratifying to hear him say nice things about the book I couldn't openly acknowledge as mine. But then he proceeded to say that he could tell it wasn't a first effort by any writer. And that he had noticed some stylistic resemblances. I kept my mouth shut. But then he asked me, directly, and there is no lying to old friends.

And Duane, too, kept the secret intact for me.

Of course, the information eventually leaked out, in drips and drops, and finally I did a Locus interview with Charles Brown in which I admitted that yes, Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm were both my pseudonyms.

But to this day, they remain separate writers in my mind. They may use the same battered keyboard, the one with the letters worn off the b.u.t.tons. They share office supplies and an a.s.sistant, and even do very similar online updates. But they are not the same author, but rather two writers with different styles, issues, and choices of tale. I think each writer continues to attract a different readers.h.i.+p, though some readers tell me they enjoy stories by both writers. Even today, when I get a story idea, I immediately know if it belongs to Lindholm or Hobb, and the story is written accordingly. Robin tends to hog the word processor with her big books, but Megan has continued to write and publish shorter works.

This is the first time that a selection of stories by both pseudonyms has appeared in one volume. The Lindholm stories are, if you will, the inheritance that Hobb built upon. The styles and the subject matter differ from name to name, but if you check the DNA, you will find the shared genetics and the common fascinations.

There are old stories here, written when Megan Lindholm was first establis.h.i.+ng herself, as well as new tales by both authors. Robin still tends to sprawl in her storytelling, so while she takes up as many pages, there are fewer stories by her in these pages.

To those readers who are encountering one (or both) of my bylines for the first time, welcome! And thank you for taking a chance on a "new" writer. And for those readers of Lindholm or Hobb who are taking the opportunity to acquire some of these stories in a more durable form, thank you, I hope you will not be disappointed.

PART I.

Megan Lindholm.

A Touch of Lavender.

The old question "Where do you get your story ideas from?" still has the power to stump me. The easy, and truthful, answer is "Everywhere." Any writer will tell you that. An overheard conversation on the bus, a newspaper headline read the wrong way, a simple "what if" question-any of those things can be the germ that grows into a story.

But for me, at least, there is one other odd source. A stray first line. I may be driving or mowing the lawn or trying to fall asleep at night, and some odd sentence will suddenly intrude. I always recognize these sentences for what they are: the first line of a story that I don't yet know.

In the days before computers figured into writing, I would jot those b.u.t.terfly lines down on a piece of sc.r.a.p paper and keep them in my desk drawer, with other stray ideas. I knew they had to be captured immediately or they would flutter off forever. The line "We grew up like mice in a rotting sofa, my sister and I" came to me at a time when I had just moved into a house that possessed just such an item of furniture. It was a smelly old sofa, damp and featuring a green brocade sort of upholstery. It came with the used-to-be-a-chicken-house house that my husband and I purchased with my very first book advance from Ace Books. My advance was $3,500 and the run-down house, on almost four acres of choice swampland (oh, wait, we call those "wetlands" nowadays and preserve them!) cost us the whopping sum of $32,500. The payment of $325 a month represented a $50 saving over what we had been paying in monthly rent! And we could keep chickens for eggs. Such a deal!

From the attic, I could look up and see sky between the cedar s.h.i.+ngles that were the roof. A brooder full of chickens was parked in the bathroom. (Buff Orpingtons for you chicken connoisseurs.) We regarded those twenty-five half-fledged layers as a value-added feature of the house, much better than a spare room. A spare room can't lay eggs! There were no interior doors in the house, and some of the windows didn't close all the way. We tore up the rotted carpet and lived with bare s.h.i.+p-lap floors. There were no shelves in the noisy old refrigerator; we cut plywood to fit and inserted it. The only heat came from a woodstove. It was thus a mixed blessing that the yard was dominated by an immense fallen cedar tree. My ax and I rendered it into heat for the house for that first winter, one chop at a time.

A week after we bought it, at the end of March, Fred said good-bye and went off to fish the Bering Sea, leaving me there with my faithful portable Smith-Coronamatic, three children under ten years old, an overweight pit bull, and a tough old cat. I would not see my husband again until October. We were impossibly broke when he left, and I knew that somehow I had to hold it together until after the end of herring season when he would finally get paid. We borrowed money from his sister to buy a can of paint because my daughter could not stand the lavender walls left her by the previous tenant of her bedroom. The bathroom chickens got older and began to lay eggs. It was mend-and-make-do time. Smelly and mice infested or not, the couch and other abandoned furnis.h.i.+ngs were what we had. I felt a bit bad for the mice when I evicted them. They'd been cozy and safe there, despite the run-down surroundings. Vacuumed, cleaned by hand, and with an old bedspread tossed over it, the rotting sofa became the main seating in the living room.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I suppose it occurred to me that my children were now much like those mice had been. Tough as things were, we now had a place to call our own. And, I hoped, my kids had good folks who would see them through.

Did the lavender walls have anything to do with the story that would be written, years later, and feature that opening line? Who knows?

It's all grist for the writing mill.

We grew up like mice nesting in a rotting sofa, my sister and I. Even when I was only nine and she was an infant, I thought of us that way. At night, when she'd be asleep in the curl of my belly and I'd be half falling off the old sofa we used as a bed, I'd hear the mice nibbling and moving inside the upholstery beneath us, and sometimes the tiny squeakings of the newborn ones when the mother came to nurse them. I'd curl tighter around Lisa and pretend she was a little pink baby mouse instead of a little pink baby girl, and that I was the father mouse, curled around her to protect her. Sometimes it made the nights less chill.

I'd lived in the same bas.e.m.e.nt apartment all my life. It was always chill, even in summer. It was an awful place, dank and ratty, but the upstairs apartments were worse, rank with urine and rot. The building was an old town house, long ago converted to four apartments upstairs and one in the bas.e.m.e.nt. None of them were great, but ours was the cheapest, because we had the furnace and the water heater right next to us. When I was real small, three or so, a water main beside the building broke, and water came rising up in our apartment, maybe a foot deep. I woke up to my stuff floating beside me, and the old couch sucking up water like a sponge. I yelled for Mom. I heard the splash as she rolled out of bed in the only bedroom and then her cussing as she waded through the water to pick me up. Her current musician took the whole thing as a big joke, until he saw his sax case floating. Then he grabbed up his stuff and was out of there. I don't remember seeing him after that.

My mom and I spent that day sitting on the steps down to our apartment, waiting for the city maintenance crew to fix the pipe, waiting for the water to go down, and then waiting for our landlord.

He finally came and looked the place over and nodded, and said, h.e.l.l, it was probably for the best, he'd been meaning to put down new tiles and spraysulate the walls anyway. "You go ahead and tear out the old stuff," he told my mom. "Stack it behind the house, and I'll have it hauled away. Let me know when you're ready, and I'll send in a crew to fix the place up. Now about your rent . . ."

"I told you, I already mailed it," Mom said coldly, looking past his ear, and the landlord sighed and drove off.

So Mom and her friends peeled up the cracking linoleum and tore the Sheetrock off the walls, leaving the bare concrete floor with stripes of mastic showing and the two-by-four wall studs standing bare against the gray block walls. That was as far as the remodeling ever got. The landlord never hauled the stuff away, or sent in a crew. He never spraysulated the walls, either. Even in the summer the walls were cool and misty, and in winter it was like the inside of a refrigerator.

My mom wasn't so regular about paying the rent that she could raise a fuss. Most of the folks in our building were like that: pay when you can, and don't stay home when you can't, so the landlord can't nag at you. The apartments were lousy, but complaining could get you kicked out. All the tenants knew that if the landlord had wanted to, he could have gotten a government grant to convert the place into Skoag units and really made a bundle. We were right on the edge of a Skoag sector and demand for Skoag units was increasing.

That was back when the Skoags were first arriving and there wasn't much housing for them. It all had to be agency approved, too, to prevent any "interplanetary incidents." Can't have aliens falling down the steps and breaking a flipper, even if they are pariahs. These outcasts were the only link we had to their planet and culture, and especially to their technology for s.p.a.ce travel that the whole world was so anxious to have. No one knew where they came from or how they got to Earth. They just started wading out of the seas one day, not all that different from a washed-up Cuban. Just more wetback aliens, as the joke went. They were very open about being exiles with no means of returning home. They arrived gradually, in groups of three and four, but of the s.h.i.+ps that brought them there was never any sign, and the Skoags weren't saying anything. That didn't stop any of the big government people from hoping, though. Hoping that if we were real nice to them, they might drop a hint or two about interstellar drives or something. So the Skoags got the government-subsidized housing with showers that worked and heat lamps and carpeted floors and spraysulated walls. The Federal Budget Control Bill said that funds could be reapportioned, but the budget could not be increased, so folks like my mom and I took a giant step downward in the housing arena. But as a little kid, all I understood was that our place was cold most of the time, and everyone in the neighborhood hated Skoags.

I don't think it really bothered Mom. She wasn't home that much anyway. She'd b.i.t.c.h about it sometimes when she brought a bunch of her friends home, to jam and smoke and eat. It was always the same scene, party time, she'd come in with a bunch of them, hyped on the music like she always was, stoned maybe, too. They'd be carrying instruments and six-packs of beer, sometimes a brown bag of cheap groceries, salami and cheese and crackers or yogurt and rice cakes and tofu. They'd set the groceries and beer out on the table and start doodling around with their instruments while my mom would say stuff like, "d.a.m.n, look at this dump. That d.a.m.n landlord, he still hasn't been around. Billy, didn't the landlord come by today? No? s.h.i.+t, man, that jerk's been promising to fix this place for a year now. d.a.m.n."

Everyone would tell her not to sweat it, h.e.l.l, their places were just as bad, all landlords were a.s.sholes anyway. Usually someone would get onto the Skoag thing, how it was a fine thing the government could take care of alien refugee trash but wouldn't give its own citizens a break on rent. If there'd been a lot of Skoags at the cafe that night, Mom and her friends would get into how Skoags thought they were such hot s.h.i.+t, synthesizing music from their greasy hides. I remember one kid who really got worked up, telling everyone that they'd come to Earth to steal our music. According to him, the government knew it and didn't care. He said there was even a secret treaty that would give the Skoags free use of all copyrighted music in the United States if they would give us blueprints of their s.h.i.+ps. No one paid much attention to him. Later that evening, when he was really stoned, he came and sat on the floor by my sofa and cried. He told me that he was a really great musician, except that he couldn't afford a good synthesizer to compose on, while those d.a.m.n Skoags could just puff out their skins and make every sound anybody had ever heard. He leaned real close and told me that the real danger was that the Skoags would make up all the good music before he even got a chance to try. Which I knew was dumb. While Skoags can play anything they've ever heard, perfectly, no one had ever heard them play anything original. No one had ever heard them play Skoag music, only ours. I started to tell him that but he pa.s.sed out on the floor by my sofa. Everyone ignored him. They were into the food and the beer and the music. All my mom's parties were like that.

I'd usually curl up on one end of the sofa, face to the cus.h.i.+ons and try to sleep, sometimes with a couple necking at the other end of the sofa and two or three musicians in the kitchen, endlessly rehearsing the same few bars of a song I'd never heard before and would never hear again. That's what Mom was really into, struggling musicians who were performing their own stuff in the little "play for tips" places. She'd latch on to some guy and keep him with her aid check. She'd watch over him like he was gold, go with him every day, sit by him on the sidewalk while he played if he were a street musician, or take a table near the band if he was working cafes and clubs. They'd come home late and sleep late, and then get up and go out again. Sometimes I'd come in from school and find them sitting at the kitchen table, talking. It's funny. The men always looked the same, eyes like starved dogs, and it seems like my mom would always be saying the same thing. "Don't give up. You've got a real talent. Someday you'll make it, and you'll look back at them and laugh. You've really got it, Lennie (or Bobby or Pete or Lance). I know it. I can feel it, I can hear it. You're gonna be big one day."

The funny part is, she was always right. Those guys would live with us for a few months or a year, and suddenly, out of the blue, their careers would take off. They'd be discovered, on a sidewalk or in a cafe, or picked up by a band on its way up. They'd leave my mom, and go on to better things. She never got bitter about it, though she liked to brag to other women about all the hot ones she'd known "back when they were nothing." Like that was her calling in life, feeding guitar humpers until someone besides her could hear their songs. Like only she could keep the real music flowing. One night she brought home a disc and gave it to me. It was called Fire Eyes, and the guy on the front had dark hair and blue eyes, like me. "That's your daddy, Billy Boy," she told me. "Though he don't know it. He took off before I knew you were coming, and he was on a national tour by the time you were born. Look at those pretty, pretty eyes. Same as you, kid. You should have heard him sing, Billy. I knew he had it, even then. Even then." I think that was the first time I ever saw her sit down and cry. I'm still not sure if she was crying over my dad leaving us, or something else. She didn't cry long, and she went to bed alone that night. But the next night she brought home a whole pack of musicians from some open mike. By next morning, she had a new musician in her bed.

Sometimes during a party, if Mom was really stoned, or safe-s.e.xing someone in the bedroom, I'd get up in my pajamas and make for the food, stuffing down as much as I could and hiding a couple of rice cakes or a handful of crackers behind the sofa cus.h.i.+on. I knew the mice would nibble on it, but h.e.l.l, they never took much, just lacing around the edges. I figured they didn't do much better than I did anyway. If I was really lucky, there'd be some girls in the group, and they'd fuss over me, telling me how my big blue eyes were such a surprise with my dark hair, and giving me gum and Life Savers from their purses, or maybe quarters and pennies. Like people in sidewalk cafes feed sparrows. If my mom caught me, she'd get mad and tell me to get to sleep, I had school tomorrow and didn't I want to make something of myself? Then she'd smile at everyone like she was really saying something and go, in a real sweet voice, "If you miss school tomorrow, you miss music cla.s.s, too. You don't want that to happen, do you?" As if I gave a s.h.i.+t. She was always bragging that I had my daddy's voice, and someday I was going to be a singer, how my music was my life, and that the school music lesson was the only way she could get me to go to school.

Dumb. Like singing "Farmer in the Dell" with forty other bored first graders was teaching me a lot about music. Music was okay, but I never understood how people could live for it like my mom did. She'd never learned to play any instrument, and while she could carry a tune, her voice was nothing special. But she lived for music, like it was air or food. Funny. I think the men she took in might have respected her more if she'd been able to create even a little of what she craved so badly. I could see it in their eyes, sometimes, that they looked down on her. Like she wasn't real to them because she couldn't make her own music. But my mother lived music, more than they did. She had to have it all the time; the stereo was always playing when she didn't have an in-house musician of her own. I'd be half asleep watching her swaying to the music, singing along in her mediocre voice. Sometimes she'd just be sprawled in our battered easy chair, her head thrown back, one hand steadying a mug of tea or a beer on her belly. Her brown eyes would be dark and gone, not seeing me or the bare wall studs, not seeing the ratty couch or scarred cupboards. Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else's words and notes.

I know the day my life changed. I was about three blocks from home, partway into the Skoag sector, listening to some Skoags on a street corner. Not listening, really, so much as watching them puff their greasy skins out until they looked like those stupid balloon animals Roxie the clown used to make for my Head Start cla.s.s. Then when they were all puffed out, membrane ballooned over corally bone webs, they'd start making music, the skin going in and out just like speaker cones on really old speakers. They reminded me of frogs, because of how their throats puffed out to croak, and because of the wet green-yellow glints on their skins.

I kept a safe distance from them. Everyone did. From the Don't Do Drugs sessions at school, I knew what the stuff on their skin could do to me. I'd seen Skoag gropies, wandering around bald-eyed, hands reaching to grope any pa.s.sing Skoag, to get one more rush even if it deafened them. Skoag gropies were always getting killed, squashed by cars and trucks they could no longer hear, or dreaming themselves to death, forgetting to eat or drink, forgetting everything but groping a fingerful of Skoag slime. But there were no gropies around these Skoags, and because they all still had crests, I knew they were new to Earth. Skoags usually lost their crests pretty fast in our gravity. One of these Skoags had the tallest crest I'd ever seen, like a king's crown, and purple like a deep old bruise.

There was a mixed crowd around the Skoags. Inlander tourists who'd never seen a Skoag before, taking videos, making tapes. Locals panhandling the tourists, sometimes pretending they were pa.s.sing the hat for the Skoags. Older boys and a few girls, just hanging out, calling the Skoags dirty names to shock the tourists, making out with a lot of tongue. And a few kids like me, skipping school because the sun was s.h.i.+ning and it wasn't too windy and we didn't feel like doing the weekly pee-in-the-bottle thing. The Skoags played for us all.

They'd been playing all morning, the usual Skoag set. They did "Happy Trails to You," and "Horiko Cries," and "When You Were Mine," and then "America the Beautiful." That was the weirdest thing about Skoags, how they'd pick up any music they fancied, and then play it back in any order. They'd started "Moon over Bourbon Street" when I saw my mom coming.

She and Teddy had gone to pick up her aid check that morning. But Teddy wasn't with her, and I knew from her face that another musician had moved out. I was glad in a selfish way, because for the next few days there'd be regular meals on the table, and more food, because the check would only be feeding us two, and Mom would talk to me twice as much as usual. Of course, she'd make sure I actually got up and went to school, too, but that wasn't much price to pay. And it wouldn't last long before she'd hold another party and reel in a new musician.

So I was determined to enjoy it while it lasted. So I ran up to her, saying, "Wow, Mom, you should hear this purple-crested one play, he's really something." I said that for about four reasons. First, so she wouldn't have the chance to ask me why I wasn't in school, and, second, to show that I wasn't going to notice that jerk Teddy was gone because he wasn't worth her time. Third, it cheered her up when I acted like I was interested in music. I think she always hoped I really would be like my father, would grow up to be a singer and redeem her, or justify her life or something. And fourth, because the purple-crested one really was something, though I couldn't have said why.

"You playing tourist, Billy Boy?" my mom asked me in her teasing way that she used when it was only she and I together again. And I laughed, because it was dumb the way the tourists from inland came down to our part of Seattle to spy on the Skoags and listen to them jam. Anybody who'd lived here ignored them the way you ignored supermarket music or a TV in a store window. All you ever heard from a Skoag was the same thing you'd heard a hundred times before anyway. So what I said was sort of a joke, too, to make her laugh and take the flatness out of her eyes.

But Teddy must have been better than I'd known, because her smile faded, and she didn't scold me or anything. She just stooped down and hugged me like I was all she had in the world. And then she said, very gently, as if I were the adult and she were the little kid explaining something bad she'd done, "I gave him our check, Billy Boy. See, Teddy has a chance to go to Portland and audition for Sound & Fury Records. It's a new label, and if things go like I know they will, he'll be into the big money in no time. And he'll send for us. We'll have a real house, Billy, all to ourselves, or maybe we'll get a motor home and travel across the country with him on tour, see the whole United States."

She said more stuff but I didn't listen. I knew what it meant, because once one of her guys had stolen both checks, her Career Mother Wage and my Child Nutrition Supplement. What it meant was bad times. It meant a month of food-bank food, runny peanut b.u.t.ter on dry bread, dry milk made up with more water than you were supposed to use, generic cereal that turned into sog in the milk, and macaroni. Lots and lots of microwaved macaroni, to the point where I used to swallow it whole because I couldn't stand the squidgy feeling of chewing it anymore. I was already hungry from being out in the wind all morning, and just thinking about it made me hungrier. There wasn't much food at home; there never was right before the aid check was due.

I just went on holding on to Mom, hating Teddy, but not much, because if it hadn't been Teddy, it would have been someone else. I wanted to ask, "What about me? What about us? Aren't we just as important as Teddy?" But I didn't. Because it wouldn't bring the money back, so there was no sense in making her cry. The other reason was, about three weeks before, Janice from upstairs had sat at our kitchen table and cried to Mom because she'd just given her little girls away. Because she couldn't take care of them or feed them. Janice had kept saying that at least they'd get decent meals and warm clothes now. I didn't want Mom to think that I wanted food and clothes more than I wanted to stay with her.

So I wiped my face on her s.h.i.+rt without seeming to and pulled back to look at her. "It's okay, Mom," I told her. "We'll get by. Let's go home and figure things out."

But she wasn't even listening to me. She was focused on the Skoags, actually on the one with the big crest, listening to "Moon over Bourbon Street" like she'd never heard it before. It sounded the same as always to me, and I tugged at her hand. But it was just like I wasn't there, like she had gone off somewhere. So I just stood there and waited.

My mom listened until they were done. The big purple-crested Skoag watched her listen to them. His big flat eye spots were pointed toward her all the time, calm and dead and unfocused like all Skoag eyes are. He was looking over the heads of the tourists and hecklers, straight at her.

When the song was finished, they didn't go right into another song like usual. Purple stood there, watching my mother and letting the air leak out of his puffers. The other Skoags looked at him, and they seemed puzzled, s.h.i.+fting around, and one made a flat squawk. But then they let their air out, too, and pretty soon they were all empty and bony, their puffer things tight against their bodies again. My mom kept staring at the Skoag, like she was still hearing music, until I shook her arm.

"I'm coming," she said, but she didn't. She didn't even move, until I shook her arm again and said, "I'm hungry."

Then she jerked and looked down at me finally. "Oh, my poor little kid," she said. She really meant it. That bothered me. I thought about it while we walked home. I wasn't any more selfish than any kid is, and kids have a right to be selfish sometimes. So I walked along, thinking that she really did know how awful this month was going to be and how much I hated squidgy macaroni, and she probably even knew that the sole was coming off my sneaker. But she'd still given the check to Teddy. And that was a hard thing for a kid to understand.

So we went home. Mom switched on the stereo and went right to work. She was real methodical and practical when there wasn't a musician to distract her. She sorted out what groceries we had and organized them in the cupboard.

Then she went through all the pockets of her clothes and dug inside the chair and got together all the money we had. It was ten seventy-eight. Then she sat me at the table with her, like I was one of her musicians, and told me how she was going to get us through the month. She explained that if I went to school every day, I'd get the free morning milk and vita-roll, and free hot lunch on my aid ticket. So I'd be mostly okay, even if there wasn't much for dinner. We'd get through just fine. After all, we were pretty tough, weren't we? And couldn't the two of us beat anything if we just stuck together? And were we going to let a month of crummy groceries knock down tough guys like us? All that stuff. But suddenly, in the middle of the pep talk, she got up and knelt by her stereo. She twiddled the k.n.o.bs, frowning. "Signal's drifting, or something. d.a.m.n, that's all I need. For this to drop dead on me now." She tried about three different stations, then snapped it off. "Lousy speakers," she complained to me. "Everything sounds tinny."

It had sounded okay to me, but I didn't say anything. Instead, I sat still and watched her take out a pot and run water and take things from the cupboards for dinner.

We had oatmeal for dinner, and toast with peanut b.u.t.ter melting on it. Mom gave me the last of the brown sugar for my oatmeal. "Good grains and protein in this meal," she said wisely, as if she had planned it rather than sc.r.a.ped together what we had left. I nodded and ate it. It wasn't so bad. At least it wasn't macaroni.

That evening Mom sat at the table, reading a paperback that Teddy had left and wearing his old sweats.h.i.+rt. I guess she felt pretty bad. Every so often, she'd turn on the stereo and fool with it for a while, then shake her head and snap it off. She'd read a little longer, and then she'd get up and turn the stereo on again, searching through the stations, but never finding what she wanted. In between, I was listening to the building sounds, spooky at night. The water heater in the utility room was growing and gurgling through the wall. I was coloring a Don't Do Drugs handout from school, wis.h.i.+ng they'd given me more than three crayons. I wanted to color the spoon and syringe silver. Yellow just wasn't the same.

Mom had just snapped the radio off for about the twelfth time. In the quiet I heard a sound like someone dragging a bag of potatoes down our steps. Mom and I looked at each other. She lifted her finger to her lips and said, "Shus.h.!.+" So I sat perfectly still, waiting. There came a slapping sound against the door, and whatever was slapping pushed against it too. The door thudded against the catch.

My mom's dark eyes went huge, scaring me more than the noises outside the door. She went to the kitchen and got our biggest knife. "Go to my room, Billy Boy," she whispered. But I was too scared to move. Like a monster movie, when the music screams and you know they're going to show you something awful, but you can't look away. I had to know what was outside. And Mom was too scared to make me obey. Instead she crept a little closer to the door, holding the knife tight. "Who's out there?" she yelled, but her voice cracked.

The pressure on the door stopped, and for a moment all was silent. Then there was a sound, sort of like a harmonica wedged in a trumpet, and someone blowing through it anyway. It was a silly cartoon sound, Doofus Duck smacked with a rubber mallet, and my mom looked so startled that I burst out laughing. It was a dorko noise. Nothing scary could make a sound like that. Then a voice spoke, a low, low voice, like cello strings being rubbed slowly.

"That is my name on my world. But humans call me Lavender."

"The Skoag?" Mom asked, but I was already past her and undoing the flimsy dead bolt on the door. I had to see it. It was so impossible for a Skoag to be outside our door at night that I had to see it was real. "Billy!" Mom warned, but I dragged the door open anyway.

The Skoag was there. The same purple-crested one we had listened to earlier. Only he looked a lot smaller with all his bladders deflated, not much bigger than my mom. He was wearing a sort of pouch thing on his front, and in it was a brown grocery sack, a bouquet of flowers wrapped in green tissue paper, and a skinny brown liquor store bag. He was draped in the transparent plastic robe Skoags were supposed to wear in human dwellings. His skin glistened through it in the watery streetlamp light like oil on a puddle, iridescent and s.h.i.+fting. His fat little flippers waved up and down slowly, like a fish underwater. His murky blue eye spots fixed on my mother.

She stared back at him. She still had the knife in her hand, but she had forgotten it. She crossed her arms, a closing, denying gesture. "What do you want?" she demanded, in the scared stubborn voice she kept for the landlord.

A little bladder above his eyes pulsed with his cello voice. "To come in."

"Well, you can't," she said, at the same time as I asked, "How did you get down the steps?"

"With great difficulty," he pulsed at me, but there was a violin squibble above the cello that made his answer a sort of joke. I grinned at him; I couldn't help it. He'd noticed me. He'd answered my question before he paid attention to what my mom had said, and he'd answered it in the way one buddy might kid with another. I felt two feet taller.

He looked back at Mom, waiting.

"Go away," she told him.

"I cannot," he said, all cello again. "Earlier today, I heard you listening to us. I think. My companions tell me it was not so, that I am tricking myself because I want too badly. But I am not deceived. I have hope only. I have brought gifts. Flowers and wine for you, as is fitting, and food for your child, who said he was hungry. May I come in?"

She just stood there, staring at him. A car shushed by in the rainy street outside, and the wind gusted, blowing cold air down our steps and in past the Skoag. And still they both just stood there, waiting for something.

"I love you," the cello thrummed, and the sound swelled, like a big warm wave was.h.i.+ng through our apartment. The sound didn't end with the words, it went on with musiclike embroidery on the edges of the thought. I listened to it pa.s.s and fade, and then the silence came behind it, separating us again. The silence seemed unbearable.

"Come in," said my mother.

So Lavender came to live with us.

Everything changed.

Everything.

Within just a few days, the neighbors stopped knowing us. I'd walk down the streets, and rocks would bounce around me, but I'd never see who'd thrown them. The radio was never turned on again. There was real food, every day. Mom stopped looking at street musicians and haunting the open mikes. The street people called her ugly names, and our mailbox got ripped off the wall in the upstairs lobby. I got into so many fights at school that the princ.i.p.al said I had to stay in at recesses for the rest of the year. After that, I was left totally alone. I didn't care. Because I had Lavender at home.

Every day I went to school, because Lavender said I should. It would be important later, he a.s.sured me, and that was enough for me. Every day I came home and slid down the ridged ramp that had replaced our steps. And Lavender was always waiting for me to come home, even if my mother wasn't there. Always before, Mom's musicians had tolerated and ignored me, treated me like a cat or a houseplant, a semiannoying creature that lived in my mother's house. Not Lavender. He knew I was there, and he was glad. He made me important. We would have a snack together, he rubbing his sludgy porridge through a membrane on his chest, me munching cookies and milk. Then I had to show him every single paper I'd brought home, read aloud from every library book I'd checked out. All I did amazed him. But mostly we'd talk and laugh. His laugh reminded me of a giant gra.s.shopper chirring. Once he told me that Skoags had never laughed before they came to Earth, but the idea of a special sound made just to show happiness was so wonderful that now it was the first thing that all exiles were allowed to do. Each Skoag got to make up his own kind of laugh. He said it like it was some big favor for them. Then he told me that my laugh was one of the best ones he'd ever heard. That first day, when he'd heard my laugh in the street, he'd known that anyone who could create so marvelous a sound had to be very special indeed. And then he laughed my own laugh for me to hear, and that set me laughing; and we laughed together for about ten minutes, in harmony, like a new kind of song.

Looking back, I know he didn't understand much of basic human needs. Because he learned mostly from me, he had a seven-year-old boy's idea of what was important. Food he understood, and he always made sure there was plenty of it, though he tended to buy the same kinds over and over again. He loved bright, simple toys that moved, yo-yos and tops and plastic gliders, marbles and Super b.a.l.l.s and Frisbees. I'm convinced he thought that flowers were essential to my mother, and he filled our little apartment with graceful gla.s.s vases full of them. I never thought to ask for anything more than what he brought and I know my mother never did. She was too used to giving to learn taking easily. Still, Lavender tried to provide for us. I remember the day I came home and found him cautiously touching his flippers to the protruding nails and scabs of Sheetrock on the two-by-four wall studs. "This pleases the Mom?" he asked me.

"No. It's really ugly. But it's all we've got," I told him. A wrinkling ran over his deflated bladders, a gesture I had learned was like an excited grin. "This would please the Mom?" the cello thrummed, and he began pulling yards and yards of stuff out of his belly pouch. s.h.i.+ny like plastic, but soft like fabric, and so thin you could crumple up a square yard of it in your fist. He began fastening it to the wall, in graceful drapery, and as it fell straight, the room warmed with both color and heat, the musky bas.e.m.e.nt smell faded, and a gentle light suffused the room. Then we hid in the closet until my mom came home and was surprised by it. "Oh, Lavender, you cover up all the rough edges of my life," Mom told him. For a long time, I thought she meant the wall studs. He could make the hanging different colors, and he adjusted it almost daily, though I never asked how. If I had, he would have told me. I just didn't ask.

He told me anything I wanted to know. I knew more about Skoags than any of the "experts" of that time. Anything I asked him, he answered. I knew that they had been exiled to our world because they sang in public, and that was not permitted in their home world. I knew that they sang only other people's music, because making up new music was something only a holy leader could do. The Earth Skoags were religious rebels, sort of like the Pilgrims. They believed singing was so wors.h.i.+pful that Skoags should do it all the time, everywhere, and that everyone should do it, not just priest-Skoags. On their own world, that was heresy, and anyone caught at it had to choose between exile or "a most unfortunate happening." For a long time I didn't know what he meant by that. A lot of what he told me was puzzling. Lavender kept trying to explain to me that singing was a circle, and that if one sang well enough to make the perfect music, it would create the one that would close the circle. My mom, he said, was "Close. Almost the end of the circle. The one, but not quite." I never understood what he meant, but it was very important to him. A day didn't pa.s.s without him trying to make me understand. There just weren't human words for the Skoag ideas. It worried him very much. It was the only hole in our communication. He told me other stuff, like how some Skoags had long, articulated flippers like my fingers, and how they were dehydrated for their s.p.a.ce journeys, and how they thought of humans as "half s.e.xed" because we weren't self-fertile. Anything I asked, he answered. But if I didn't ask, he didn't bother me with it. I never asked him if he had come to end his people's exile, or if he were a very important Skoag on his world or how their s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps operated. Or he would have told me. But I didn't ask.