They heard him rumbling about and cursing for a time, with a rackety bang from the washtub, then quiet came and the wind settled and they heard only the thunky-tunk of raindrops on the bottom of the washtub as the storm drummed its fingers, trying to decide whether to start over or finish up. Evidently it chose to finish up, for it wasn’t long before the rain ceased and then they could hear the sound of the sea crawling onto the shore, lisping to itself about all its secrets. The Crawling Sea was shallow and wind driven, and tonight it had crawled farther than any would have thought possible. Once the wind died, it began to hush itself away in little gravelly rushes. Lucy Low was between Grandmama and Diver with scarce room to breathe, but it was warm there, and before she knew it she’d drifted off to sleep to dream about waking in warm daylight and opening the fortune box.
Many families in the Shore Counties kept a fortune box. Fortunes were the acceptable coin of the place, the value placed upon them varying with the seer and the season. Fortunes not immediately needed to buy food or some such were put away against a rainy time, and seldom had one come as rainy as last night. Grandmama and her grandmama and even her grandmama had been saving sorts, always tucking a fortune away against future need.
“When a family can’t eat something new or change a word from what’s been said a thousand years,” Grandmama often said, “it matters mightily to have a fortune box to open when luck gives out. People set in their ways as a root into stone can take hope from the time the root rots and the stone cracks.”
The fortune box of the Biwots was at least five generations old, so it was bound to have a good many adventures in it. They didn’t even wait for breakfast the morning after the roof went. Diver took up the flagstone from the floor, and Wash and Burrow dug up the black bog-oak box from where it had lain between diggings these long years. The last fortune had been put in the box ten years or more ago, by Grandmama herself, and it hadn’t been dug up since.
They all sat in a circle on the floor. Grandmama was oldest, so she got to shuffle the fortunes, new with old, old with new, mixing them up, then putting them in a stack. She would pick from the stack, one at a time, and if the fortune didn’t fit this one, why then, that one might take it. Some fortunes didn’t fit any circumstances, and some fortunes were terribly dire, but direness and unsuitability were no bar. What was forecast, always passed, so said the Sworpian Society of Seers.
“All right,” breathed Grandmama. “We don’t want to open any more of these than need be, for we’ll need some to spend on our way wherever we’re going. I’ll read out the one on top. I mind me this one. My mama won this at a fair when she was just a girl, kept it always, showed it to me time on time. It has a golden egg on the seal, that’s how I remember.”
She broke the seal, opened the flap, and took out the folded parchment. That took some time to be unfolded and laid down flat as Grandmama turned it this way and that, finding the right way up of it. Grandmama was a pretty good reader. There were hardly any words she couldn’t make out if she took her time about it. “‘High ladies need sharp eyes to tend their geese,’” she read at last. “I think it’s geese.”
Lucy Low gave it a look. “It must be geese, Grandmama.”
Diver sniffed. “No job for a man, goose tending. More a girl’s job.”
“Well, shall we give it to Lucy Low or to the twins?” asked Grandmama.
“We don’t want it,” said the twins in one voice.
“I do,” said Lucy Low.
“Lucy Low’s it is, then,” Grandmama decided, handing over the parchment.
Lucy Low took it and smoothed it out, admiring the bright colors around the edges and the jiggery way it had been folded to make a long necked bird, and when she waggled the tail, the legs moved. Perhaps it was meant to be a goose. She’d never tended geese, but she’d seen them flying over, sometimes landing outside the reed beds and spending a day along the marshy shore, eating and gabbling to themselves. Goose tending would be fun, and it would keep her out of doors, as well. Lucy Low preferred the out of doors. Most onchiki did, truly, except for a few like Ring and Bright. The onchikiel heritage was an out-of-doors way of life, water and reed beds and fish and even the wild wind that pushed the sea. House living was nice when it was cold and drear, but out of doors was best most times.
Meantime Grandmama had unfolded the next one in the pile. “This says, ‘Treasure on Hovermount.’ Where’s Hovermount?”
“In the Dire Mountains, past the Dread Marches,” said Uncle Wash. “East of the Crawling Sea. I knew a peddler used to go back and forth through there. Wicked awful country, he said.”
“Uk,” said Sleekele. “I won’t go there. Where do you suppose we got this fortune?”
Wash said, “Grandaddy got it, for some smoked fish he sold at market. See there, on the corner, there’s his name and the year. Lord Wind, but that was a long time ago. I’ve always wanted an adventure, so can I have this one?”
Grandma gave it to him, with her blessing.
“A chimney needs mending in the sea town,” said the next one. All the sea towns were west and north, past Isher and Fan Kyu Cyndly, all the way to Estafan, where Diver had often wanted to go. He perked up his ears. He was a good mender of most anything, and he thought it might be worth the trip.
And so it went, until they each had taken a fortune written on good official parchment and sealed with the signet of the Sworpian Society of Seers, certifying that the contents were true and binding, effective upon the breaking of the seal. There was an ale house fortune for the twins, and a fishing fleet destiny for Burrow, who said Mince could come along. Sleekele and Grandmama each had housekeeping fortunes, so it seemed likely they’d find their future in whatever sea town Diver found a chimney in. None of the family were holding any uncomfortable fortunes—though both Burrow’s and Sleekele’s were rather vague—and they were pretty well satisfied with the way things looked.
When Grandmama was putting the unopened ones back in the box, she came upon two little scrappy ones that didn’t look official at all. They were in a curly faded hand that was hard for Grandmama to see, so Lucy Low read them.
“Well, what do they say on the outside, child?”
“One says…umm, it says, ‘For Erntrude Biwot, A reward for service much welcome, give by Amalia Gershon.’ And the other one says, ‘For Erntrude Biwot, For thy kindness. Lady Amalia.’”
“Where’d we get those?” Burrow wanted to know. “They aren’t even real. There’s no seers’ stamp!”
“Maybeso,” said Grandmama, “and maybeso not. They’re written on vellum, and it’s expensive stuff, vellum. And there’s gold around the lettering. Erntrude was my way-back grandmama, the one who came up the river from the sea. Both of these fortunes are in the same hand, and it’s a lady’s hand, and she signs it as a lady would. Amalia Gershon. I’d say she was a seer, right enough, though perhaps not one of the Society of Seers. Not just anybody’s allowed to write a fortune, Burrow! That’d be forgery, and Onchik-Dau would chop off your hands for forgery.”
Burrow said stubbornly, “Well, what good are they? You can’t use ’em. Unless a fortune was give by a real Sworpian Seer, nobody’ll give you a net sinker for it. What good are these two?”
“Well, now, who knows? Likely my grandmama knew this lady who wrote them and trusted them to be good. Likely she valued them for more than the redemption would have been, and it’s even likely the fortunes inside were given for her, personal.”
This made all their jaws drop. Fortunes were fortunes. They didn’t go off until somebody broke the seal, and the only time somebody did that was when they had to. So long as the seal was intact, a fortune held itself in patience, just like coin, and when you paid someone with a fortune, they could look at the names and dates written on the outside and they’d know when that fortune was given and all the hands it had been through since. But a personal fortune! That was one given to a certain person, only for that person, and if these little scrappy ones were personal
fortunes, then the person who received them was long gone.
“Well, fortunes work themselves out in the generations, so it’s said.” Diver nodded ponderously. “A fortune given your grandmama, Mama, should work out with your grandchild, don’t you think?”
“I should think.”
“Well, then. Lucy Low should take both these as well, just to have, in case. If they was give personal, like you say, doubtless only a descendant could profit by it. I imagine we’ll find geese in the sea town where the chimney is that needs mending, and fishing boats going out from there, and an ale house there, and housekeeping needing done, and all our fortunes will be made in one place.”
In a bit they put their fortunes away, each in his or her own pocket. Grandmama put the leftover ones back in the box and gave the box to Diver for safekeeping. Then Sleekele and Grandmama pounded the dried fish and stewed it for breakfast. They started packing after breakfast. About noon Wash found a veeble that had been killed in the storm, so they roasted that, partly, leaving it underdone, though Onchik-Dau had told them they’d get worms if they didn’t cook their meat. Onchik-Dau was a fuss budget. It was almost worth being roofless just to get away from Onchik-Dau, always looking at them out of his watery eyes, always barking commands. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. Uttering directions at the top of his lungs, waving his arms, heaving his great fat body around. Well, worms or no, they ate heartily, putting the rest of the meat to dry in the smoke. Veeble jerky made good way-rations. By the time night fell, each of them had his or her belongings bundled up, and the household stuff—such as was moveable—was in the veeble packs. Uncle Wash took one pot, the littlest one, and a good veeble-hair blanket, for he was going east, around the Crawling Sea, to the Dread Marches, hunting the treasure that his fortune promised.
“Tomorrow morning,” said Grandmama. “Tomorrow morning we load the pack veebles, turn the others loose, and away we go.”
“Chimary and Chock and Willigong and Bai will like that,” said Lucy Low. “They like to travel, even when it’s only to market. So where will we go? What’s the nearest sea town? Where are we headed to?”
“Down the coast of the Crawling Sea,” said Diver, running his hands over his hair to smooth it down and scratching himself vigorously around the middle. “Through Isher and Fan-Kyu Cyndly, all the way to Zallyfro in the country of Estafan.”
9
Several Saintly Ph.D.s
Dr. Winston, so Dora was told, could not possibly have been murdered for any personal reason. He was—depending upon whether Dora talked to his wife, his neighbor, his mistress, his boss or his coworkers—a jewel, a prince, a sweetheart, an irreplaceable project manager and a seminal thinker.
“What exactly is that?” Dora asked, with a straight face.
“Well, I mean,” said the coworker, running his hands through his already disordered hair, “Winnie came up with stuff nobody else would ever think of. Like that pig. And the talking dog.”
“Talking dog?”
“Well, yes, sort of. It could only manage about a dozen words, but you could tell the brain was there. When old Ralph—that was the dog’s name—said ‘food,’ you knew he meant it.”
“Do you still have this dog?”
“Poor thing got sick. Winnie took it home, but he said it died.”
“What exactly does that have to do with improved breeds of livestock?”
“Well, the boss didn’t think it had anything to do with anything,” said the coworker. “Dr. Winston was always getting himself in trouble with the boss, but he used to say every time he isolated a particular combination of genetic instructions and saw what the effect was, he’d filled in a bit of knowledge. He said eventually we should be able to cure or prevent all genetic diseases. Eventually we should be able to tailor livestock to particular ecologies. Winnie really opened our eyes to the possibilities. He was working on clusters, you see. Discrete genetic items that added up to more than the sum of the parts. One change in skull structure plus one change in hormonal tissue, plus or minus some other odds and ends, gave us horns on a pig. Horns are useful for some animals, not for others, depending. We should be able to supply them either way, to order. Some brain modifications, another change in skull structure to make it curved instead of flat, and a change in throat and tongue structure should theoretically give us a sheepdog that could talk to the shepherd. You know, something along the lines of, ‘Bring the gun, boss, there’s a coyote over that ridge.’ Actually, Winnie was still working on that.”
“It sounds too simple,” said Dora.
“I’m making it sound one hell of a lot simpler than it is,” the man grated, almost resentfully. “The change in skull structure that makes it curved so it can accommodate a voice box might actually be sixty or seventy changes in DNA. No. It isn’t simple at all! A lot of it seemed to be instinctive with him. Magical. There are only a few people in the country who can do even half what Winnie did, and I’m not one of them. He used to say, ‘Bert, any fool can see so-and-so.’ It would make me madder’n hell, because I couldn’t see it. He was a genius, Winnie was.”
“Would there have been any…oh, say, professional jealousy? Any quarrels over who discovered what first?”
Absolute denial. No, and no. Winnie had been generally adored. Winnie was a prince, a jewel, one really nice guy.
“He really was an awfully nice man,” said his widow. “I know all about his mistress, too, so don’t go thinking nasty thoughts. He often had these little affairs because he was simply too nice to hurt women’s feelings. I should have been jealous, I suppose, but I wasn’t. It might have been different if we’d had children, a threat to the family and all that, but I have my own work. Having one’s own work is a powerful anodyne against jealousy, don’t you think?”
Though slightly shocked at this matter-of-fact attitude, Dora had to agree that having one’s own work made a big difference. Sometimes all the difference.
The widow nodded. “He was such a good man, an ethical man! Do you know, he paid for all his animals himself, and for their food and upkeep. He owned them, and his contract with the lab specified so! He would not allow them to be taken away and used for some cruel experiment. He thought it unconscionable that men raised apes and taught them to talk, then when the grant was over, they let them be taken for medical experiments. Winnie wouldn’t do it!”
“Remarkable,” said Dora.
“We were so comfortable together. I’ll miss him terribly,” said Winnie’s widow. And then the tears leaked down her cheeks, unregarded.
“We’re getting nowhere with this,” Dora told Phil, almost angrily, as they left Winston’s home. “Lynn Beatty says there have been two other stabbings, one in June, one in May. Not our territory, but I think we ought to find out about it.”
Phil demurred. “Hey, Dora, we got enough to do….”
“Yeah, Phil. And I’d like to do it. I’ve got the names and case numbers. You mind?”
Phil, still feebly protesting, stopped with her by records, where Lynn Beatty furnished the file on Martin Chamberlain, geneticist, and on Jennifer Williams, botanist who had worked for Pacific-Alaskan.
“Doesn’t your ex work for Pacific-Alaskan?” Phil asked.
Dora nodded mutely. He did indeed. She went through the folder. All the recorded interviews seemed to establish that Chamberlain had also been a prince, a jewel.
“What is it with these scientists?” Dora grumbled. “Three people stabbed, and two out of three were candidates for sainthood.”
“I suppose you want to go out to Pacific-Alaskan and ask some questions?”
She shook her head regretfully. “I don’t, Phil. I don’t want to run into…Well, Jared. He’s being rotten about my moving out.”
“Trouble?”
“I don’t know. He hasn’t…done anything except make veiled threats. He says he won’t let me do this or that.”
“Dora, if you need help…”
“I know, Phil. I know you’d help. God
, there’s half a dozen of the guys I could ask to help if I needed it. I don’t know I need it. I want to know about Chamberlain, though.”
“Why don’t I talk to Manconi, set up a lunch date, maybe. Maybe we can solve both of them at the same time.”
The following morning, Dora read in the morning paper an account of what the reporter called “spontaneous reforestation” of some badly eroded areas along creeks that had been polluted by mining operations. Scientists had found mineral-fixing weeds growing on the tailing piles, weeds that pulled the heavy metals out of the soil and concentrated them to a level that made recovery of the metals economically feasible while also allowing regrowth of native plants. Though metal-fixing plants in general were not a new discovery, said the reporter, the very efficient ones on the tailings were a species new to science.
Elsewhere in the paper was a report on certain areas of northern Africa, where the U.N. had been attempting to restore native vegetation by reducing the flocks of goats and sheep which had denuded the land for centuries. Though starvation threatened the herds every year, the native peoples counted their wealth by heads of livestock and vehemently opposed reduction in their numbers. Recently a spontaneous mutation of the thorny growths native to the area had proved to be extremely palatable to the flocks. The new plant grew so freely and was so nourishing that the need for reducing herds was being questioned.
Dora read these accounts with a good deal of interest. On her way out, she remarked to the weed, “Morning paper has some stories about new plants. Maybe they’re cousins of yours.”
The weed nodded in the early summer breeze, unconcerned at the news. It had ramified itself above the door, creating a little half-domed sunshade before continuing up the side of the garage. One sprig had reached the eaves, where it had turned abruptly sideways and crawled along under the gutter, adding about three feet a day. A bird had chosen this runner for a nest location and the vine had obligingly ramified again at the nest site, forming an appropriate base for the collected twigs and fibers.