The Ugly Little Boy Read online

  “How many?”

  Tree Of Wolves shook his head. He closed his eyes.

  “Many,” said Broken Mountain, finding his voice again suddenly. He held up both his hands and flashed all his fingers—again, again, again. “More than us. Two, three, four times as many. Marching from south to north.”

  “And a little west,” said Tree Of Wolves somberly.

  “Toward us, you mean?”

  “Maybe. Not—sure.”

  “Toward us, I think,” said Broken Mountain. “Or us toward them. We might walk right into them if we don’t take care.”

  “Other Ones out here?” Silver Cloud said, as though speaking only to himself. “But they don’t like the open plains. This isn’t their kind of country. There’s nothing for them here. They should be staying closer to the sea. Are you sure about the feet, Tree Of Wolves? Broken Mountain?”

  They nodded.

  “They are crossing our path, but I think that they won’t come toward us,” said Tree Of Wolves.

  “I think they will,” Broken Mountain said.

  “I think they don’t know we’re here.”

  “I think they do,” said Broken Mountain.

  Silver Cloud put his hands to his face and tugged at his beard—hard, so hard that it hurt. He peered into the east as though if he only looked intensely enough he would be able to see the band of Other Ones marching across the track his people meant to take. But all he saw was the rising glare of the morning.

  Then he turned and his eyes met those of She Who Knows.

  He expected that she would be looking at him in a smug, self-righteous, vindicated way. The unexpected midsummer snow had been a bad omen after all, hadn’t it? And not only had he completely failed to predict its coming, he had also utterly misinterpreted its dire significance. I told you so, She Who Knows should be saying now. We are in great trouble and you are no longer fit to lead.

  But to his amazement there was no trace of any such vindictiveness in She Who Knows’ expression. Her face was dark with sorrow and silent tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  She held her hand out toward him and there was something almost tender in the way she did it.

  “Silver Cloud—” she said softly. “Oh, Silver Cloud.”

  She’s not simply weeping for herself, Silver Cloud thought. Or for the danger to the tribe.

  She’s weeping for me, he realized in astonishment.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Loving

  [1]

  EDITH FELLOWES smoothed her working smock as she always did before opening the elaborately locked door and stepping across the invisible dividing line between the is and the is not. She carried her notebook and her pen although she no longer took notes except when she felt the absolute need for some report.

  This time she also carried a suitcase. (“Some games for the boy,” she had said, smiling, to the guard—who had long since stopped even thinking of questioning her and who waved her cheerfully on through the security barrier.)

  And, as always, the ugly little boy knew that she had entered his private world, and he came running to her, crying, “Miss Fellowes—Miss Fellowes—” in his soft, slurring way.

  “Timmie,” she said, and ran her hand tenderly through the shaggy brown hair on his strangely shaped little head. “What’s wrong?”

  He said, “Where’s Jerry? Will he be back to play with me today?”

  “Not today, no.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “I know you are, Timmie.”

  “And Jerry—?”

  “Never mind about Jerry now, Timmie. Is that why you’ve been crying? Because you miss Jerry?”

  He looked away. “Not just because of that, Miss Fellowes. I dreamed again.”

  “The same dream?” Miss Fellowes’ lips set. Of course, the Jerry affair would bring back the dream.

  He nodded. “The same dream, yes.”

  “Was it very bad this time?”

  “Bad, yes. I was—outside. There were children there, lots of them. Jerry was there, too. They were all looking at me. Some were laughing, some were pointing at me and making faces, but some were nice to me. They said, Come on, come on, you can make it, Timmie. Just take one step at a time. Just keep on going and you’ll be free. And I did. I walked right away from here into the outside. And I said, Now come and play with me, but then they turned all wavery and I couldn’t see them any more, and I started sliding backward, back into here. I wasn’t able to stop myself. I slid all the way back inside and there was a black wall all around me, and I couldn’t move, I was stuck, I was—”

  “Oh, how terrible. I’m sorry, Timmie. You know that I am.”

  His too-large teeth showed as he tried to smile, and his lips stretched wide, making his mouth seem to thrust even farther forward from his face than it actually did.

  “When will I be big enough to go out there, Miss Fellowes? To really go outside? Not just in dreams?”

  “Soon,” she said softly, feeling her heart break. “Soon.”

  Miss Fellowes let him take her hand. She loved the warm touch of the thick dry skin of his palm against hers. He tugged at her, drawing her inward, leading her through the three rooms that made up the whole of Stasis Section One—comfortable enough, yes, but an eternal prison for the ugly little boy all the seven (Was it seven? Who could be sure?) years of his life.

  He led her to the one window, looking out onto a scrubby woodland section of the world of is (now hidden by night). There was a fence out there, and a dour glaring notice on a billboard, warning all and sundry to keep out on pain of this or that dire punishment.

  Timmie pressed his nose against the window.

  “Tell me what’s out there again, Miss Fellowes.”

  “Better places. Nicer places,” she said sadly.

  As she had done so many times before over the past three years, she studied him covertly out of the corner of her eye, looking at his poor little imprisoned face outlined in profile against the window. His forehead retreated in a flat slope and his thick coarse hair lay down upon it in tufts that she had never been able to straighten. The back of his skull bulged weirdly, giving his head an overheavy appearance and seemingly making it sag and bend forward, forcing his whole body into a stoop. Already, stark bulging bony ridges were beginning to force the skin outward above his eyes. His wide mouth thrust forward more prominently than did his wide and flattened nose and he had no chin to speak of—only a jawbone that curved smoothly down and back. He was small for his years, almost dwarfish despite his already powerful build, and his stumpy legs were bowed. An angry red birthmark, looking for all the world like a jagged streak of lightning, stood out startlingly on his broad, strong-boned cheek.

  He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him more dearly than anything in the world.

  She was standing with her own face behind his line of vision, so she allowed her lips the luxury of a tremor.

  They wanted to kill him. That was what it amounted to. He was only a child, an unusually helpless one at that, and they were planning to send him to his death.

  They would not. She would do anything to prevent it. Anything. Interfering with their plan would be a massive dereliction of duty, she knew, and she had never committed any act in her life that could be construed as going against her duty as she understood it, but that didn’t matter now. She had a duty to them, yes, no question of that, but she had a duty to Timmie also, not to mention a duty to herself. And she had no doubt at all about which the highest of those three duties was, and which came second, and which was third.

  She opened the suitcase.

  She took out the overcoat, the woolen cap with the ear-flaps, and the rest.

  Timmie turned and stared at her. His eyes were so very big, so brightly gleaming, so solemn.

  “What are those things, Miss Fellowes?”

  “Clothes,” she said. “Clothes for wearing outside.” She beckoned to him. “Come here, Timmie.”
r />   [2]

  She had actually been the third one that Hoskins had interviewed for the job, and the other two had been the preferred choices of the Personnel people. But Gerald Hoskins was a hands-on kind of chief executive who didn’t necessarily accept the opinions of those to whom he had delegated authority without taking the trouble to check those opinions out for himself. There were people in the company who thought that that was his biggest fault as a manager. There were times when he agreed with them. All the same, he had insisted on interviewing all three of the women personally.

  The first one came with a three-star rating from Sam Aickman, who was Stasis Technologies’ Personnel chief. That in itself made Hoskins a little suspicious, because Aickman had a powerful bias in favor of hard-edge state-of-the-art sorts of people. Which was just the right thing if you happened to be looking for an expert in implosion-field containment, or someone who could deal with a swarm of unruly positrons on a first-name basis. But Hoskins wasn’t convinced that one of Sam’s high-tech types was exactly the right choice for this particular job.

  Her name was Marianne Levien and she was a real tiger. Somewhere in her late thirties: sleek, lean, trim, glossy. Not actually beautiful—that wasn’t the most precise word for her—but striking, definitely striking.

  She had magnificent cheekbones and jet-black hair that was pulled back tight from her forehead and cool glittering eyes that didn’t miss a thing. She was wearing an elegant business suit of deep rich brown with gold piping that she might have picked up in Paris or San Francisco the day before yesterday, and an oh-so-underplayed little cluster of pearl-tipped gold strands at her throat that didn’t strike Hoskins as the sort of jewelry one usually wore to a job interview, especially one of this sort. She looked more like an aggressive youngish executive who had a slot on the board of directors as her ultimate target than like his notion of what a nurse ought to be.

  But a nurse was what she was, fundamentally, even if that seemed a very modest designation for someone of her professional affiliations and accomplishments. Her résumé was a knockout. Doctorates in heuristic pedagogy and rehabilitative technology. Assistant to the head of Special Services at Houston General’s children’s clinic. Consultant to the Katzin Commission, the Federal task force on remedial education. Six years’ experience in advanced artificial-intelligence interfacing for autistic kids. Software bibliography a mile long.

  Just what Stasis Technologies, Ltd. needed for this job?

  So Sam Aickman seemed to think, at any rate.

  Hoskins said, “You understand, don’t you, that we’ll be asking you to give up all your outside projects, the Washington stuff, the Houston affiliation, any consulting work that might require travel. You’ll basically be pinned down here on a full-time basis for a period of several years, dealing with a single highly specialized assignment.”

  She didn’t flinch. “I understand that.”

  “I see that in the last eighteen months alone you’ve appeared at conferences in São Paulo, Winnipeg, Melbourne, San Diego, and Baltimore, and that you’ve had papers read on your behalf at five other scientific meetings that you weren’t able to attend personally.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And yet you’re quite sure that you’ll be able to make the transition from the very active professional career outlined in your résumé to the essentially isolated kind of existence you’ll need to adopt here?”

  There was a cold, determined glint in her eyes. “Not only do I think I’ll be completely capable of making the transition, I’m quite ready and eager to do so.”

  Something sounded just a little wrong about that to Hoskins.

  He said, “Would you care to expand on that a bit? Perhaps you don’t fully grasp how—ah—monastic we tend to be at Stasis Technologies, Ltd. And how demanding your own area of responsibility in particular is likely to be.”

  “I think I do grasp that, Dr. Hoskins.”

  “And yet you’re ready and eager?”

  “Perhaps I’m a trifle less eager to run around from Winnipeg to Melbourne to São Paulo than I used to be.”

  “A little touch of burnout, maybe, is that what you’re saying, Dr. Levien?”

  A shadow of a smile appeared on her lips, the first sign of any human warmth that Hoskins had seen her display since she had entered his office. But it was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  “You might call it that, Dr. Hoskins.”

  “Yes, but would you?”

  She looked startled at his unexpected sally. But then she drew a deep breath and reconstructed her all but imperturbable poise with hardly any show of effort.

  “Burnout might be too extreme a term for my current attitudinal orientation. Let me just say that I’m interested in repositioning my energy expenditures—which as you see have been quite diffusely manifested—so that they’re allocated to a single concentration of output.”

  “Ah—yes. Exactly so.”

  Hoskins regarded her with a mixture of awe and horror. Her voice was a perfectly pitched contralto; her eyebrows were flawlessly symmetrical; she sat splendidly upright with the finest posture imaginable. She was extraordinary in every way. But she didn’t seem real.

  He said, after a little pause, “And what is it, exactly, that led you to apply for this job, other than the aspect of allowing you a single concentration of energy expenditure?”

  “The nature of the experiment fascinates me.”

  “Ah. Tell me.”

  “As every first-rate author of children’s literature knows, the world of the child is very different from the world of adults—an alien world, in fact, whose values and assumptions and realities are entirely other. As we grow older, most of us make the transition from that world to this one so completely that we forget the nature of the world we’ve left behind. Throughout my work with children I’ve attempted to enter into their minds and comprehend the other-worldly nature of them as profoundly as my limitations as an adult will enable me to do.”

  Hoskins said, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice, “You think children are alien beings?”

  “In a metaphorical way, yes. Obviously not literally.”

  “Obviously.” He scanned her résumé, frowning. “You’ve never been married?”

  “No, never,” she said coolly.

  “And I assume you haven’t gone in for single parenting, either?”

  “It was an option I considered quite seriously some years ago. But my work has provided me with a sense of surrogate parenting that has been quite sufficient.”

  “Yes. I suppose that it has.—Now, you were saying a moment ago that you see the world of the child as a fundamentally alien place. How does that statement relate to my question about what led you to apply for this job?”

  “If I can accept at face value the remarkable preliminary description of your experiment that I’ve been given, it would involve me in caring for a child who quite literally comes from an alien world. Not in space, but in time; nevertheless, the essence of the existential situation is equivalent. I’d welcome a chance to study such a child’s fundamental differences from us, by way of obtaining some parallactic displacement that might provide additional insights for my own work.”

  Hoskins stared at her.

  No, he thought. Not real at all. A cleverly made android of some sort. A robotic nursoid. Except they hadn’t perfected robots of this level of quality yet—he was certain of that. So she had to be a flesh-and-blood human being. But she certainly didn’t act like one.

  He said, “That may not be so easy. There may be difficulties in communication. The child very likely will have a speech impediment, you know. As a matter of fact there’s a good chance that it may be virtually incapable of speech at all.”

  “It?”

  “He, she. We can’t tell you which, just yet. You do realize that the child won’t be arriving here for another three weeks, give or take a day or two, and until the moment it arrives we’ll basically know nothin
g about its actual nature.”

  She seemed indifferent to that. “I’m aware of the risks. The child may be drastically handicapped vocally, physically, and perhaps intellectually.”

  “Yes, you may well have to deal with it the way you’d deal with a severely retarded child of our own era. We just don’t know. We’ll be handing you a complete unknown.”

  “I’m prepared to meet that challenge,” she said. “Or any other. Challenge is what interests me, Dr. Hoskins.”

  He believed that. The conditional and even speculative nature of the job description had produced no reaction in her. She seemed ready to face anything and didn’t seem concerned with the whys and wherefores.

  It wasn’t hard to see why Sam Aickman had been so impressed with her.

  Hoskins was silent again for a moment, just long enough to give her an opening. Marianne Levien didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it.

  She reached into her attaché case and drew forth a hand-held computer, no bigger than a large coin. “I’ve brought with me,” she said, “a program that I’ve been working on since the word came across on the computer network that you were open for applications for this position. It’s a variation on some work I did with brain-damaged children seven years ago in Peru: six algorithms defining and modifying communications flow. Essentially they bypass the normal verbal channels of the mind and—”

  “Thank you,” Hoskins said smoothly, staring at the tiny device in her outstretched hand as though she were offering him a bomb. “But there are all sorts of legal complexities preventing me from looking at your material until you’re actually an employee of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. Once you’re under contract, naturally, I’ll be glad to discuss your prior research with you in detail, but until then—”

  “Of course,” she said. Color flooded her flawless cheeks. A tactical error, and she knew it: overeagerness, even pushiness. Hoskins watched her elaborately making her recovery. “I quite see the situation. It was foolish of me to try to jump past the formalities like that. But I hope you can understand, Dr. Hoskins, that despite this very carefully burnished façade of mine that you see I’m basically a researcher, with all the enthusiasm of a brand-new graduate student setting out to uncover the secrets of the universe, and sometimes despite all my knowledge of what’s feasible and appropriate I tend to sidestep the customary protocols out of sheer feverish desire to get to the heart of—”