Damia (18 page)

How long’s she been gone?
Afra was the first to ask.

How do I know?
the Rowan exclaimed, half-despairing, half-angry.
I was getting lunch. She’d been safely in the playroom with Jeran and Cera who, in their fashion
, and that was added in a terse tone,
have no idea where their sister went. Jeran said she knocked the gate down.

Remembering all too well Damia’s tendency to seek him out, Afra replied,
If you haven’t seen her on the remotes, then I’ve a good idea where she might be.

Relieve my mind?
the Rowan asked cryptically.

Afra had no trouble seeing her tapping her foot with impatience.

My place.

How in the world would she get there?

Walked
, was Afra’s laconic answer.

I’ll meet you there.
And the Rowan’s tone was severe.

Afra ’ported himself from Brian’s dining area to his living room and sure enough, Damia was busy feeding Ringle leftovers from his refrigerator. She was convulsed
with the giggles because Ringle was “washing” each handful before he popped it into his mouth.

The Rowan arrived only a moment later, anger and relief warring for dominance. But Damia’s laughter was infectious and, as Afra saw the Rowan’s expression soften, he allowed himself to grin.

Suddenly aware of observation, Damia swiveled about.

“Afra!” Abandoning Ringle, she raced to him, only then aware of her mother. She teetered to a stop, her expression one of total innocence. “The gate fell over, Mommy. Honest it did. They never play with me and I was bored! Afra always plays with me.” Grabbing his hand, Damia tilted her head up. “Don’t you, Afra?”

He squatted down to her level. “I do when it is the time to play, Damia. But you must wait for me to come. Do you understand? You mustn’t come looking.”

She nodded solemnly, one hand bringing her comfort finger to her mouth.

The Rowan hunkered down, too, her eyes on a level with her fractious daughter. “You know you’re not supposed to wander around the Station, Damia. Don’t you?”

Damia shook her head. “I wanted to play. Jeran and Cera won’t play with me. Ever.” She tried to squeeze a tear out of her eyes.

“How’d you get in?” Afra asked, knowing that Damia was trying the wrong tactics on her mother.

“Ringle let me in!” Damia pointed to the Coonie, who was now finishing his impromptu meal.

Afra and Rowan exchanged surprised looks.

“Ringle heard me,” Damia went on, “he let me in.”

“How could he do that?” Rowan asked Afra, then looked accusingly at her daughter. “You must tell the truth, Damia.”

“I tell the truth,” and Damia’s face began to contort as a prelude to tears over such adult intransigence.

“If Ringle heard her, he’d come to the door,” Afra said quickly, to forestall Damia’s tearful reaction. “His collar would open the door. It’ll close automatically.”

The Rowan let out a long, exasperated sigh and gathered
her daughter in her arms. “All right, Damia. Now don’t cry. But you mustn’t run about the Compound on your own. Promise, you won’t leave the house without someone with you?”

Clinging to her mother in an excess of contrition, Damia vigorously nodded her head.

“Now, your lunch is ready, young lady,” the Rowan said, hoping that she had made her point without frightening her wayward child.

“Ringle’s had his, and I’ll
go
back to mine,” Afra said, ushering the two out of his apartment. “And I’ll get a catflap in my door. Damia’s too big to crawl through one of those.”

There was relative peace for a few weeks. Afra was not the only one nervously anticipating the next Damianism. As it happened, there was a great deal of traffic in that morning, heavy stuff that needed careful handling. Tanya’s frantic cry for help was therefore not welcome to anyone in the Tower.

I can’t stop Damia, Afra
, the girl cried.
And I know the Rowan’s terribly busy, but I’m afraid Damia will hurt someone.

Afra signaled for Joe Toglia to take over as he spun his chair over to the nearest free monitor and called up the remote in the daycare center. He could see Tanya, cowering by the comunit, as the other children cringed under the small-scale furniture. Jeran and Cera serenely played some intricate game while a stream of toy bits and parts, and occasionally something heavier, was rained at them by an enraged Damia who was blubbering in fury.

“Play with me! Look at me! Talk to me!” she was screaming. As soon as she exhausted the objects on the shelf beside her, she moved to the box of connectable shapes. Fortunately her aim was skewed or—and Afra couldn’t quite believe this—Jeran and Cera were deflecting the projectiles, for most items dropped well short of the targets who blithely ignored her.

Instantly Afra ’ported the box out of reach and, when
she squealed in outrage, cleared the next likely ammunition out of range.

No, Damia
, he said in as disapproving a tone as he had ever used with her.
That is not allowed.

“They won’t talk to me!” Damia cried, sobbing with frustration. “S’not fair! They never talk to me! They never play with me.” Then she ran to the pile of things that had fallen short of their mark and would have pelted Jeran and Cera with them if Afra had not made a clean sweep. “And that’s not fair, Afra. That’s not fair at all!”

Tanya!
Afra called.
Grab that little minx and make her take a nap! Damia, you will go with Tanya this instant and stop making such a display of bad manners. Such a temper for someone who will run a Tower!
He was slightly appalled to hear one of his mother’s favorite admonitions emerge from his lips.

To his amazement, Damia gulped back the next of her indignant sobs and submitted to Tanya’s ministrations. She was asleep before Tanya got through the first verse. Jeran and Cera continued their game as if nothing had happened.

*   *   *

“I think, Rowan, that you had better speak to Jeran and Cera,” Afra told her when Jupiter occluded Callisto and everyone could take a break.

“Why? What have they done?”

So Afra explained the scene in the daycare room. “It’s my opinion that they do that deliberately, knowing it will upset her. She does indeed feel left out.”

The Rowan considered this, slightly defensively. “They have this bonding. And Damia is much younger . . .”

“That doesn’t give them the right to exclude her, especially when they do it deliberately.”

“She shouldn’t lose her temper that way.” The Rowan set her mouth firmly. “She’s constantly demanding attention.”

“Perhaps, but Jeran and Cera could include her in their games once in a while. You know they never do. And don’t tell me they’re more advanced. Damia’s advanced, too.”

The Rowan had to admit that, for Damia’s vocabulary was at least as extensive as her siblings’, and certainly her small muscle control was excellent. So she did have a talk with her elder children, quietly and positively, and, after they had listened attentively to her, they had one of their short-speak conversations that so excluded her she experienced reluctant sympathy for her youngest.

“We will teach Damia to play one of our simpler games, Mother,” Jeran said in his prosaic way. “That should satisfy her.”

The Rowan told Afra later that it had been all she could do to keep from giggling at his pomposity.

“You see, then, Damia had a valid complaint,” Afra said.

“Yes, she did,” and then the Rowan sighed deeply. “I want all my children to love and understand each other.”

Afra gave a derisive snort. “Wait till they’re old enough, my dear. Right now, they’re cruel, heartless, mean little monsters.” Rowan gave him a startled stare. “Well, they are, but I’m sure they’ll grow out of it.”

*   *   *

Tanya contacted the Tower ten days later, tactfully waiting until the break.

“Jeran and Cera played a new game with Damia, and with half the other children,” she told the Rowan, trying very hard not to laugh.

“Then why . . .”

“Because the game was color-oriented,” and now Tanya did burble with laughter. “Your three are green and the others are a sort of pied-piper of whatever other colors were left in the water paints. I can’t get nine children clean by myself, so could parents be excused for fifteen minutes? Fortunately it is a water-soluble emulsion. And they did take their clothes off first.”

*   *   *

That mischief had not originated with Damia, but she did her own variation several days later when she tried to paint Rascal and every Coonie in the Compound. This
time with an oil-based paint she had evidently found where the maintenance man had left it while he ate lunch.

Everyone was annoyed with her for that one and the Rowan insisted that she help the owners clean their pets’ fur. She also insisted that everyone let Damia know how much they disapproved.

“Maybe she’ll come to realize that she could hurt the animals with a trick like this. They’ve feelings, too.”

Damia was indeed much chastened by human censure, but neither Rascal nor any of the Coonies seemed to avoid her. In fact, there were half a dozen who would happily throng to her at her peculiar warbling whistle. During the outdoor activities that Tanya conducted every afternoon, Damia was usually surrounded by the pets while she waited for her turn. As her brother and sister could ignore extraneous matters, Damia could inhabit a world that consisted of herself and the animals.

One afternoon, while others were gathered around Tanya, Damia was cajoling her four-footed cohorts to try and catch the ball on a string that she was dragging behind her as she ran pell-mell around the Park. She ran out of breath by the pool door that someone had left slightly ajar.

She peered inside. This pool was much much larger than the one in her house where she often swam with her parents. While she knew that the pool was here, she’d never had occasion to visit it. And at this time of the day, it was empty. Suddenly Ringle batted her string ball through the door, onto the tiled surface around the pool. The string whipped out of her hand and Ringle triumphantly carried it off down the pool side.

“Ringle, that’s not playing the game,” she said, running after him. But the soles of her sandals were slick and she skidded, her feet going out from under her. She fell heavily on her shoulder and tipped over into the pool with a huge splash.

She was competent enough in water not to panic, and surfaced. The Coonies shrieked at the top of their lungs and Rascal, who’d been the last one in the pool, responded by throwing himself into the water, raising a wave that hit
her right in the face, swamping mouth and nose. She started to choke, couldn’t get her breath, and became frightened.

Afra! Help me!
she cried, flailing her arms about in panic, trying to reach the pool ledge. The Coonies, in trying to reach her, got in her way and she went under the water.

The next thing she knew, hands were dragging her to the surface, hauling her from the pool, pounding her back to open her airways.

It’s all right, baby, it’s all right. Afra’s here
, and she was held against a wet but reassuring human body.

DAMIA!
cried her mother, and suddenly the Rowan was there, reaching to take her from Afra, holding her so close that Damia was amazed to discover that her mother could tremble. She could “feel” her mother’s fear and that so shattered her confidence that she burst into tears.

It took time to calm her down, calm the Rowan down, dry soaking Coonies and Rascal, and then more time for Damia to insist that it had not been
their
fault. The door had been open and she had slipped on the wet edge.

“But you
know
you’re not supposed to go into a pool room without someone with you, Damia,” her mother said, with an edge to her voice that Damia now recognized as disapproval. “And Coonies do not constitute someone else!”

“I wasn’t
going
swimming, Mommie, I was playing with my friends.”

Over her head, the Rowan looked hopelessly up at Afra, who was wringing out his shirt. “She’s never in the wrong, is she?”

“Actually,” and Afra paused to tower his sopping hair, “she often isn’t. She’s simply inquisitive, inventive, isolated.”

“Well, I’m doing something about that!” the Rowan said, “with or without Jeff Raven’s complete cooperation. Damia
needs
a companion.”

Afra managed to hide his grimace in the towel and then stopped rubbing his hair as he reviewed her phrasing.
“With or without Jeff’s complete cooperation”? He dropped the towel and stared at her.

“Angharad Gwyn-Raven, do you mean what I think you mean?”

She gave him a wide-eyed stare of innocence, still rocking her daughter. “I want my children to have a happy childhood, and not feel excluded or forced to play with animals.”

“Damia loves the Coonies.”

“Exactly! I want her to have a brother to love.”

When told of the afternoon’s escapade, Jeff sighed deeply. “She’s like me at the same age. Mother couldn’t keep me in the yard with a logging chain.”

“So how did she keep track of you?”

Jeff grinned in reminiscence. “Dad was good at training animals . . .” and he laughed when he saw the exasperated expression on the Rowan’s face, “. . . and he sicced a wolf bitch on me as guardian. She followed me everywhere and if she thought I was likely to get in trouble, she’d trip me up, knock me down, sit on my back and howl. Sometimes she was howling a long time, but I didn’t come another cropper even if my knees and ribs were always bruised from being knocked flat by thirty kilos of white wolf.”

“Barque cats and Coonies are sufficient livestock in a dome.”

“Oh, I know that. Merely apprising you that Damia’s escapades follow a well-established genetic pattern.”

“We can’t have more animals, but we can provide her with another sort of suitable companion,” the Rowan went on, bringing the conversation neatly to where she wanted it.

“I gather that you are in the process of providing that companion,” Jeff remarked with a bite in his tone.

The Rowan took a backwards step, nervously biting her lip. “How did you know?”