"Ben! It's Mother. I don't know . . ." She stopped, seeing the blood matted in his hair. "God Almighty, Ben . . . what happened?"
"I had a fall," he said, coming out into the hallway and pulling the door closed behind him. "I blacked out a while, that's all. Now what's all this about Mother?"
"I can't find her, Ben. IVe looked everywhere. IVe even been down to the meadows and called, but there's no sign of her. And that's not like her, Ben, is it? I mean, she always says where she's going."
"Okay . . ." He put his arms about her, drawing her close, reassuring her by his touch. "Okay. Now tell me when you last saw her. She was there when we got back from the old house, wasn't she?"
Meg looked up at him. "Yes. In the rose garden."
"Right. And that was shortly after seven. So she can't have gone far, can she? You say you've looked everywhere?"
"Three times at least. I even took a torch down to the bay."
"Okay." He kneaded her shoulders. "There's probably a perfectly good explanation. Look, why don't you go down to the kitchen and make us some supper while I check the house again. And don't worry, Meg. It'll be all right."
She nodded and turned away, happy to have something to occupy her mind, but Ben, watching her go, felt a tightness at the pit of his stomach. What if he was wrong about Virtanen? What if he'd miscalculated and the man had taken her? What if he had her now?
He began, searching the upper rooms. In his mother's room he stood there a long time, staring into her wardrobe, trying to work out what it was that was missing. Her robe. The red silk ankle-length bathrobe that she used to wear before his father's death. Everything else was there. All of her dresses, every one of her coats and long jumpers.
He turned, looking about him at the smooth white surface of the quilt, the jars of creams and perfume bottles on the dressing table, surprised by how tidy, how orderly the room was. If Virtanen had taken her there'd be some sign of a struggle, surely? Unless he'd come upon her in the meadow. But then, why would she be wearing her bathrobe in the meadow?
He went down. Down, past the old dresser in the hallway, and left, ducking under the low lintel and into the lounge where he and his father had entertained Li Shai Tung on that spring evening eight years past.
On the far side of the long oak table was a small, black-painted door, set back into the whitewashed wall. Ben went across and put his ear to it, then gave it a gentle push.
It swung back noiselessly, revealing a flight of steps, leading down. It ought to have been locked. In fact, it had been locked. He had locked it himself, only yesterday.
He turned, listening, hearing Meg at work in the kitchen, then turned back. He went down five steps, then reached back to pull the door closed behind him. Ahead was the faintest glow of light, like a mist over the blackness.
At the foot of the steps he stopped, his pulse racing. He had known. Yes, even as he had been entertaining those absurd notions about Virtanen kidnapping her, somehow he had known she would be here.
He looked about him at the shadowy rows of standing shelves that filled the cellar workplace; at the crowded racks and gaunt machinery that stood untended on every side.
She was here. Her scent was in the air. He walked on slowly, silently, moving between the shelves toward the source of light at the far end of the cellar. Turning the comer, he stopped, taking in the scene. Ten feet away, the morph was slumped in its metal frame, just as Ben had left it yesterday. But about its shoulders now Was draped a red silk bathrobe.
Ben moved on, slower now, more reluctantly, knowing now what he would find; knowing, even before his eyes confirmed it, why his mother had been so happy these past few days. Why she no longer cried in the night.
He stopped, letting his fingers move absently across the smoothly lacquered surface of the Shell. He had made changes to it since his father's time, but it still looked like a giant scarab beetle, its dark, midnight-blue lid not quite opaque. Peering close, he could just make out her form, there inside the coffinlike interior; could see from the rise and fall of her breasts as much as from the flicker of the control panel just below the catch, that she was living out the dream.
He looked down at the panel. She was more than halfway through the three-hour sequence. It would be another hour, maybe more, before she was back with them again.
Ben turned and went across to his desk. Seated there, he took a notepad from the drawer and tore two sheets from it. The first note was to his mother. "I'm sorry," it read. "I didn't realize. I hope it brings you comfort, Love, Ben."
He folded it and set it aside, then began the second. On one side of the paper he wrote "Ben &. Meg" in a small, neat hand that was unlike his own. On the other side he quickly penned a note from his mother, telling them that she had gone to see an old friend and that she would be back after midnight. He signed it with a flourish, then folded it lengthwise, the way his mother always folded her notes to them.
Satisfied, he got up and, setting the fake note in his pocket, he took the other across and slipped it into the pocket of the bathrobe, ensuring it would be seen.
He had never told his mother about the Shell he and his father had made for her. In the wake of Hal's death he had thought it best to keep it from her, lest it upset her even more. But he had been wrong. Just looking at her through the darkness of the glass, he could see how happy she looked, how at peace.
Ben stood there, staring at the Shell, understanding, perhaps for the first time, just how powerful this was. The Shell could heal. Could turn misery to song and make whole the wound of death. It was a powerful medium—the most powerful the world had ever seen—and it had been trusted to him to make it work.
He touched his tongue to his top teeth, the way his sister Meg did, then, with a tiny laugh, he went back up, pulling the door to behind him. As he came out into the dining room, he called out to her.
"Meg! Meg! IVe solved the mystery!"
She came to the kitchen door, her face half smiling, half anxious, then took the note from him.
"Thank God!" she said, looking back at him. "I knew it had to be something like that. Even so, it's odd, don't you think? I mean, it's not her way to go off without telling us."
"Maybe she's got herself a lover," Ben said mischievously. "A dark-eyed soldier with a waxed mustache."
Meg looked at him, surprised. "Ben!"
He laughed. "No. I'm serious, Megs. I mean, haven't you noticed how she's been these last few days? Haven't you heard her singing in the garden?"
Meg went silent for a moment, her eyes thoughtful. "Yes, but. . ."
Ben reached up and lifted her down the four steps, twirling her about. "Besides, while she's away, I could make love to you. Upstairs. In her bed. She'd never know. She'd never ever know."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Hole in the Dark
HE ROSE EARLY and went to his father's room to survey the tapes. The meeting was interesting, but it was what had happened after Virtanen had left that had Ben on the edge of his seat.
The elders, silent throughout the exchange between Tewl and the Major, had gathered about the big chieftain, gesticulating wildly, their faces filled with a fierce passion. But it was not their animation that fascinated Ben, so much as the language they used; a crude, alien tongue that he had never heard before. For a while he had sat there, letting the strange music play in his head, sending ripples down his spine. Then, calling up Amos's Universal Lexicon, he requested an aural trace on four words that had cropped up often during their exchanges: Omma, Gwayteea, Nans, and Golaw.
At once a list of close matches in more than fifty languages appeared beneath each word, the spellings as varied as the meanings given, but in only eight instances did all four appear within a single language set. He cleared all but those, then fed in a fifth: the word the crowd had chanted; the word engraved on the pendant that hung about the chieftain's neck.