Elfhome

14: MONSTER POPSICLES

“I thought you said that black-willow saplings were non-ambulatory,” Tinker grumbled. The one-foot-tall seedlings were zipping around Lain’s high-walled nursery bed like mice on crack. They were cute in a very ugly way. Their trunks thickened into a wrinkled old-man “face” and their branches splayed out like a head of mad hair. They looked like little miniature Albert Einsteins racing blindly about the box.

It was a lot easier to focus on the saplings than how badly she missed the ordered serenity of Lain’s house. Her earliest memories were filled with the smell of fresh dirt and bruised greens.

Tinker studied Lain out of the corner of her eye. Lain was a head taller than Tinker ever hoped to be, with strong shoulders and arms from decades of relying on her crutches to move around. Her eyes were a pale blue-gray, and her hair had been gray for as long as Tinker could remember. Tinker could see nothing of herself in her aunt. It was like her father’s side of the family had won every chromosomal flip of the coin; Tinker was dusky skinned, dark haired and dark eyed, small nosed and chesty. Not that it was all that surprising. The Skin Clan apparently had made sure that the genes that they wanted were extremely dominant.

How much different would her life been if she’d looked more like Lain? Would she have guessed then that Lain was her aunt?

Lain seemed willing to totally ignore their fight and everything that followed. “I said the saplings that I observed were non-ambulatory. After I was able to study the mature black willow, I realized that the level of magic altered the plant’s activity level. This bed is on a ley line.”

A weak ley line meandered through the back corner of Lain’s greenhouse. When Tinker was growing up, it was the corner where her radio-controlled cars would suddenly run amuck. As a domana, she could now sense the flow of magic as a slight trickle of power over her toes, like she was standing in a shallow stream of warm water.

While Tinker could understand how magic could influence the saplings’ movements, she wasn’t sure about accelerated growth. When she last saw Lain, she had been culling seedpods. “Did you grow these from seeds?”

“No, I transplanted them from a very magic-weak area to test my theory.”

Tinker leaned down to catch one. She wanted to have a closer look at their feet. “I didn’t think plants could move so fast.”

“Careful.” Lain blocked Tinker’s outstretched hand with the tip of her crutch just as Pony caught Tinker by the shoulder and pulled her backward.

“They bite,” Lain said in English as Pony murmured in Elvish, “Domi, they can bite.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Tinker’s shadow seemed to have attracted the saplings’ attention; they gathered against the wall in front of her and scrambled wildly at the smooth surface. It was creepy and funny at the same time.

“When the saplings are en masse like this, they act like a school of piranha.” Lain seemed inordinately pleased at that. She was probably wallowing in the joy of alien biology. Lain had thought her career as xenobiologist ended with the shuttle explosion that crippled her; Earth’s space agencies only tapped the most physically fit for extraterrestrial missions. When Pittsburgh had been accidentally transported to Elfhome, though, Lain had gained a second chance to study life on another planet. “They tore a large groundhog apart in a matter of minutes and swallowed even the bones whole.”

The rust-colored splashes on the nursery walls took on ominous meaning. “You fed them a live groundhog?”

“Not intentionally. The stupid thing burrowed into the nursery.” Lain pointed out a mound of disturbed dirt near one corner. “So far, when Earth’s flora and fauna meet Elfhome’s, Elfhome’s come out the winner. Magic seems to raise the whole ‘survival of the fittest’ to a higher level. Just consider the elves themselves. They’re taller, stronger, and immortal. If we could use magic to bioengineer—”

“You can study how magic changes plants.” Stormsong was the only one of Tinker’s sekasha fluent in English, thus the only one following the conversation. “But you must not try to use what you learn. That type of magic is forbidden.”

“Forbidden?” Lain looked pointedly toward Tinker, who had been human up to a few months ago and was now undeniably elf.

“There are exceptions, but they are few and strictly controlled,” Stormsong said. “Nature did not make us this way. The Skin Clan enslaved us and treated us like animals. They bred us for desired traits and slaughtered any infant that didn’t meet their standards.”

“Yeah, spell-working — bioengineering using magic — is a major no-no.” Tinker waved a warning to Lain to back off the subject. The Skin Clan had set out to create the perfect beings in the sekasha to act as their bodyguards. While they wildly succeeded, the perfection worked against them. The sekasha were morally horrified by their makers and wiped them out.

“For a long time, spell-working was completely forbidden,” Tinker explained. “That’s the importance of Tempered Steel, the sekasha monk that they make such a big to-do over during the Harvest Faire.” While she was growing up, the story competed with the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving; every Harvest Faire featured a cute little puppet show and an odd fixation on keva beans. Only after becoming an elf did she realize all the little nuances of the story that she’d missed. “Wheat blight was creating a massive famine until Tempered Steel successfully argued for special allowances for spell-working.”

What she didn’t realize as a child was the fact that despite the domana-caste being “the lords” of the elves, it was the sekasha that had the final say in all matters. Tempered Steel hadn’t gone to the elf king but to the sekasha monasteries of all the clans to argue his case. Being sekasha, his argument had been backed by serious sword skills. In the puppet show, he would defeat the monastery’s champion before uttering his famous line of “Evil lies in the heart of elves, not in magic.” In the end, it was the sekasha that decided that spell-working would be allowed and created the guidelines.

“Spell-working is really at the heart of why the elves so vehemently oppose the oni. The greater bloods practice wholesale bioengineering on their people. The tengu were humans that an oni greater blood spell-worked as punishment for resisting their takeover. He merged them with the crows who were feasting on their dead fathers and brothers.”

Lain sighed. “Yes, I understand that applying bioengineering indiscriminately to sentient beings is morally wrong. But there is so much that the elves and even the oni could teach us. Most biologists coming to Pittsburgh from Earth look down their noses at the ‘primitive’ elves without realizing that the elves had been manipulating DNA with magic for thousands of years before we even began to imagine what it was.”

Tinker didn’t want to stand and argue the point in front of Stormsong. She was fairly certain that Stormsong wouldn’t hurt Lain, but she didn’t want to find out the hard way that she was mistaken. Being wrong once was enough. “Lain. Really?” Tinker motioned to the sapling dashing madly about the nursery bed. “A food we need to chase down and catch?”

Lain scoffed but allowed the subject to be changed back to the saplings. “I’m going to have to do something with them before they get much larger. Based on what I learned from the mature tree, I think they’ll freeze nicely. I could thaw them out one at a time to study.”

“Monster popsicles,” Tinker said. “Black-willow flavored.”

Lain smiled at her; a rare and treasured thing. “I’ve missed you.”

Three little words that made Tinker’s heart seize up. While she was growing up, Lain was the closest thing to a mother that she had. Betrayed couldn’t describe how Tinker felt when she learned that Lain had lied to her every day of her life — she let Tinker believe that they weren’t related when in truth Lain was her aunt. She had to cling to the knowledge that Lain had always been there for her. Lain had nursed her through childhood colds, stitched up cuts, cleaned out wounds, taught her how to deal with the mysteries of menstruation, and expanded her knowledge past quantum physics. Without Lain, she wouldn’t have been able to save Windwolf’s life, escape from the oni, or anything. And wasn’t that the truly important thing? “Yeah. I’ve missed you, too.”

Lain took Tinker’s right hand and ran light fingers over the spectacular purples and yellows mottling her forearm. “Did you break it?”

Tinker tried not to wince as the feather touch still gave her tinges of pain. “It was just a hairline fracture. I basically slept for a week while the healing spells were running, and it’s back to new.”

“With all our science, we still can’t heal a bone that fast.”

“The spell focuses magic onto the elves’ regenerative powers, puts it into hyper-drive, which is why I slept for most of the week. Also ate like a pig every time I woke up — which also meant I spent the rest of my awake time in the bathroom. It was a really annoying week.”

Lain kissed her on the forehead. “I was worried about you, ladybug. I’m glad to see you’re looking like your old self.”

“It’s the shirt.” Tinker didn’t want to go out in just a camisole, so she had raided Stormsong’s bedroom again. The result was yet another of Roach’s limited editions: a hoverbike sliding sideways through a cloud of dust that spelled out “Tinker.” (She wouldn’t have borrowed it, but Stormsong had pulled it over her head and grinned.)

Lain hugged her and then let her go. “I had a feeling that you would be coming to see me, so I made cookies and lemonade.”

A rifle was lying on the island of Lain’s sprawling kitchen. It was Lain’s Winchester. The twenty-two-caliber rifle was the least powerful of Lain’s guns, just a popgun when compared to her Barrett Light Fifty. Any trip into Elfhome’s virgin forest required a gun and often a flamethrower. Lain used to collect samples of Elfhome plants, kept them in quarantine for a month, and then shipped them to Earth during Shutdown.

“Are you going out?” Tinker sighed as she realized that Pony and Stormsong had drifted between her and Lain. She wanted to smack them for acting suspicious of Lain. In truth, though, she couldn’t entirely blame them. They had been there when Lain finally admitted the truth. They had seen how badly Tinker lost it. They knew how crazy Lain and her sister Esme — Tinker’s real biological mother — had made Tinker.

“I’ve been having a problem with groundhogs.” Lain took a pitcher of lemonade out of the refrigerator and set it beside the rifle, making the sekasha twitch. “I expanded my outside beds and planted them all with keva beans. The damn rodents act like I set up a feeding trough.”

Since Lain didn’t need the rifle for anything life threatening, Tinker picked it up and carried it to the gun rack in the center hallway. The Barrett Light Fifty was missing. The big gun was protection against the giant reptilian saurus; it was extreme overkill for groundhogs. What was Lain thinking? “Why aren’t you using your live traps?”

“I thought it would be good for my neighbors to know that this little old crippled lady was armed.”

The neighborhood of Observatory Hill had been quite wealthy at the end of the eighteenth century and was filled with grand Victorian houses. Lain lived on the edge of the scientific commune huddled around Allegheny Observatory. Her mansion sat apart from the houses that had been converted into dorms for the rotating base of Earth scientists that came to Elfhome to study the parallel universe. The distance of Lain’s home from the dorms reflected the fact that normally only Lain lived in Pittsburgh while all the other scientists were transient. That of course changed when Tinker destroyed the hyper-phase gate that shuffled Pittsburgh back and forth between the two worlds.

It was disturbing to realize that all of Lain’s neighbors had been on Elfhome for only a couple of months. They were complete strangers who had signed up for a thirty-day visit to an alien planet and found themselves stranded. “They’re scientists! Do you really think they’d attack you?”

“I don’t know them, ladybug, and they don’t know me.”

Tinker considered the missing Barrett and how it sounded like a cannon when shot. “At this rate, they might be afraid to get to know you.”

“That would be fine with me,” Lain said, and Tinker knew that Lain meant it. “Fiercely private” must run in the family. Before Tinker became an elf, she spent days alone at her salvage yard, focusing on her inventions. Looking back, though, she knew that deep down she’d been lonely.

Was Lain lonely? Tinker, at least, had Oilcan while she had been in her mad-scientist phase. He was always quietly but intensely protective of Tinker. Everyone in Pittsburgh knew that the cousins fought as a tag team.

“It’s going to be a rough winter,” Lain called. “Everyone up here knows that I’ve been laying in stores of food. Not that I made a point of telling anyone, but an acre of keva beans is hard to miss. These newcomers don’t know me. As far as they’re concerned, I’m just a harmless crippled geek.”

Tinker suddenly hated the idea of Lain being alone. “Is Esme staying with you?”

There was no answer from the kitchen except extremely loud rattling of silverware. Apparently Tinker wasn’t the only one annoyed with Lain’s little sister.

Tinker put the Winchester in its place and relocked the gun rack. The rifle safely locked away, the sekasha drifted off, giving Tinker the illusion of privacy as she went back to the kitchen. “Have you seen Esme?”

Lain laughed. “If you count watching her sleep at Mercy Hospital, yes, I’ve seen her. She apparently was suffering mostly from exhaustion. When I went back yesterday, she had checked herself out and left.”

“You’re kidding! She’s been gone for—”

“For a few weeks.” Lain overrode Tinker. “For Esme, she’s was only in space for a few weeks, not eighteen years. According to the nurses, she didn’t realize at first that she’s basically jumped forward in time nearly twenty years. It apparently sank in yesterday morning.”

And Esme promptly checked herself out. “Oh.”

“You didn’t tell her?” Lain leveled a hard gaze at Tinker.

Tinker could deliberately misunderstand and pretend she thought Lain meant about the time difference, but she knew what Lain really was asking. “No. That didn’t come up. We were kind of busy.”

Lain snorted and released Tinker from her Medusa gaze. “You two are entirely too much alike. God have pity on me, having to deal with both of you at the same time.”

Tinker focused on raiding the cookie jar. It was filled with her favorite — thin, crunchy sugar cookies. Lain had known she was coming. Apparently both sisters could see the future. It explained how Lain had always managed to stay one step ahead of Tinker when her grandfather couldn’t.

“So, what’s this puzzle that you can’t figure out that you’ve brought me?” Lain proved that she was two steps in front of Tinker.

Stormsong had loaned Tinker a canvas messenger bag to carry the DNA spell sheets. Tinker spread them out on the butcher block — topped island as she explained how the oni had kidnapped the Stone Clan children.

“I’m afraid that the oni might have done something to the kids. It’s horrible to say this, but the best thing we can hope for is that the oni simply bred them with an animal. The hospice made sure that’s not a worry anymore. Considering what the oni did with the tengu — transforming an entire generation of humans into half-crows — I’m afraid of what the worst could be.”

Lain picked up the first sheet and studied it intently. “These look like DNA scans.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Lain picked up another and studied the two side by side. “It’s against the treaty to cull any genetic samples from elves.”

“I don’t think the oni care.”

Lain gave her a dark look. “I have nothing to compare these with. Are you even sure these are from the children?”

“Um, no.”

Lain sighed. “First you’re going to have to get DNA samples from the children and see if these are indeed matches. And it has to be you — I can’t do it.”

Tinker decided not to point out that the treaty no longer existed. If someone was going to get in trouble for this, she wanted it to be her.

“While you’re at it, any other baseline samples you can get me would be good. I would have to build an entire index to see what is normal before I can tell if there’s anything abnormal.”

Tinker winced. The elves were not going to like that. “I’ll see what I can do.”