12
A NEANDERTHAL? A sub-human Neanderthal? Miss Fellowes thought in disbelief and bewilderment, with anger and a keen sense of betrayal rising right afterward. Was that really what the child was? If what Deveney had said was true, her worst fear had been confirmed.
She turned on Hoskins, glaring at him with a kind of controlled ferocity.
"You might have told me, doctor."
"Why? What difference does it make?"
"You said a child, not an animal."
"This is a child, Miss Fellowes. Don't you think so?"
"A Neanderthal child."
Hoskins looked puzzled. "Yes, yes, of course. You know what sort of experimentation Stasis Technologies has been involved in. Certainly you aren't going to tell me that you didn't realize the child would be drawn from a prehistoric era. We discussed all that with you."
"Prehistoric, yes. But Neanderthal? I expected to be looking after a human child."
"Neanderthals were human," Hoskins said, showing some signs of annoyance now. "More or less."
"Were they? Is that true?"
She looked toward Candide Deveney in appeal.
Deveney said, "Well, according to the thinking of most paleoanthropologists over the past sixty or seventy years, the Neanderthals certainly must be considered to be a form of Homo sapiens, Miss Fellowes-an archaic branch of the species, perhaps, or a subspecies, a kind of backwoods cousin, so to speak, but definitely close kin, definitely to be considered human-"
Impatiently Hoskins cut in. "Let that point go for a moment, Deveney. There's another issue to address here. -Miss Fellowes, have you ever had a puppy or a kitten?"
"When I was a young girl, yes. But what does that have to do with-"
"Back when you had this puppy of yours, this kitten, did you care for it? Did you love it?"
"Of course. But-"
"Was it human, Miss Fellowes?"
"It was a pet, doctor. We're not talking about pets now. This is a professional matter. You're asking a highly trained nurse with a considerable background in advanced pediatric medicine to take care of-of-"
"Suppose this child here were a baby chimpanzee," Hoskins asked. "Would you be repelled? If I asked you to care for it, would you do so or would you turn away in disgust? And this isn't a chimpanzee. It isn't any sort of anthropoid ape. It's a young human being."
"A Neanderthal child."
"Just as I said. A young human being. Strange-looking and wild, precisely as I told you it would be. A difficult case. You're an experienced nurse, Miss Fellowes, with a superb record of achievement. Do you shy away from difficult cases? Have you ever refused to take care of a deformed infant?"
Miss Fellowes felt her argument slipping away. She said, with much less vehemence, "You might have told me."
"And you would have refused the position, is that it?"
"Well-"
"You knew we were dealing with a range of thousands of years here."
" 'Thousands' could mean three thousand. It wasn't until this evening, when you and Mr. Deveney were discussing the project and the phrase 'forty thousand years' suddenly entered it, that I began to realize what was really going on here. And even then I didn't fully understand that a Neanderthal would be involved. I'm no expert in- in- What was it you said, paleoanthropology, Mr. Deveney? I'm not familiar with the rime-scale of human evolution the way you people are."
"You haven't answered my question," said Hoskins. "If you had known all the data ahead of time, would you have refused the position or wouldn't you?"
"I'm not sure."
"Do you want to refuse it now? There were other qualified candidates, you know. Is this a resignation?"
Hoskins gazed at her coolly, while Deveney watched from the other side of the room, and the Neanderthal child, having finished the milk and licked the plate dry, looked up at her with a wet face and wide longing eyes.
She stared at the boy. The ugly little boy. She heard her own voice saying, But Neanderthal? I expected to be looking after a human child.
The boy pointed to the milk, and to the plate. And suddenly he burst out in a short series of brusque, harsh sounds repeated over and over: sounds made up of weirdly strangled gutturals and elaborate tongue-clickings. Miss Fellowes said in surprise, "Why, he talks!" "Apparendy he does," said Hoskins. "Or at least he can make A feed me again sound. -Which any cat is capable of doing, of course."
"No-no, he was talking," said Miss Fellowes.
"That's yet to be determined. There's plenty of controversy over whether Neanderthals were capable of true speech. That's one of the things we hope we're going to be able to settle during the span of this experiment."
The child made the clicking, gargling sounds again. Looked at Miss Fellowes. Looked at the milk, and at the empty plate.
"There's your answer," she said. "He's definitely talking!"
"If that's so, then he's human, wouldn't you say, Miss Fellowes?"
She let the question pass without responding. The issue was too complex to consider just now. A hungry child was calling to her. She reached for the milk.
Hoskins caught her by the wrist and pulled her upward so that she was facing him. "Wait a moment, Miss Fellowes. Before we go any further, I have to know whether you're planning to stay on the job."
She shook free of him in annoyance. "Will you starve him if I don't? He's asking for more milk, and you're preventing me from giving it to him."
"Go ahead. But I need to know your answer."
"I'll stay with him-for a while."
She poured the milk. The boy crouched down and plunged his face into it, lapping and slurping as if he hadn't had anything to drink or eat in days. He made little crooning noises deep in his throat as he licked the plate.
He's nothing but a little beast, Miss Fellowes thought. A little beast!
She came close to shuddering. She repressed it with a struggle.
13
Hoskins said, "We're going to leave you with the boy, Miss Fellowes. He's been through a considerable ordeal and it's best to clear everyone out of here and allow you to try to settle him down for some rest."
"I agree."
He gestured toward the oval metal doorway, much like the hatch of a submarine, that stood open at the entrance to the dollhouse. "This is the only door to Stasis Section One, and it's going to be elaborately locked and guarded at all times. We'll seal it when we leave here. Tomorrow I'll want you to learn the details of operating the lock, which will, of course, be keyed to your fingerprints as they are already keyed to mine. The spaces overhead"-he looked upward toward the open ceilings of the dollhouse-"are also guarded by a network of sensors, and we'll be warned immediately if anything untoward takes place in here."
"Untoward?"
"An intrusion."
"Why should there be-"
"We have a Neanderthal child from the year 40,000 B.C. in these chambers," Hoskins said, with barely concealed impatience. "It may sound unlikely to you, but there are all sorts of possibilities for intrusion here, anyone ranging from Hollywood producers to rival scientific groups to one of those self-styled advocates for children's rights that you and I were discussing at our first meeting."
Bruce Mannheim, Miss Fellowes thought. He really is worried about trouble with Mannheim. It wasn't just a hypothetical question, wanting to know if I had ever had any run-ins with Mannheim in my career.
"Well, of course," she said. "The child needs to be protected." Then something occurred to her. She glanced up toward the topless ceiling, remembering how she had been able to see into the little rooms of the dollhouse from the balcony. -"You mean I'll be in full view of any observers who might be looking down from up there?" she asked indignantly.
"No, no," said Hoskins. He smiled. A benign smile, perhaps a little condescending, she thought. The prudish spinster lady is worried about Peeping Toms, But there was no reason why she should have to dress and undress under the scrutiny of strangers. "Your privacy will be respected completely, Miss Fellowes. I assure you of that. Trust me. Miss Fellowes."
There he went. Trust me again. He liked to use that phrase; he probably used it all the time, with everyone he dealt with. It wasn't a phrase that inspired much trust. The more often he used it, the less she trusted him.
"If anybody at all can walk onto that balcony and look down into these rooms, I fail to see how-"
"Access to the balcony is going to be strictly restricted -strictly," Hoskins said. "The only ones going up there will be technicians who may have to work on the power core, and you'll be given ample notice if they do. The sensors that I spoke about will be conducting purely electronic surveillance, which only a computer will deal with. We won't be spying on you. -You'll stay with him tonight, Miss Fellowes, is that understood? And every night thereafter, until further notice."
"Very well."
"You'll be relieved during the day according to whatever schedule you find convenient. We'll arrange that with you tomorrow. Mortenson, Elliott, and Ms. Stratford will make themselves available on a rotating schedule to fill in for you whenever you're away from the froy. He'll have to be guarded by one of you at all times. It's absolutely essential that he remain within the Stasis area and that you be constantly aware of his whereabouts."
Miss Fellowes peered about die dollhouse with a puzzled expression. "But why is all that necessary, Dr. Hoskins? Is the boy so dangerous?"
"It's a matter of energy, Miss Fellowes. There are conservation laws involved that I can explain to you if you like, but I think you have more important things to deal with just now. The point to bear in mind is simply that he must never be allowed to leave these rooms. Never. Not for an instant. Not for any reason. Not to save his life. Not even to save your life, Miss Fellowes. -Is that clear?"
Miss Fellowes raised her chin in something of a theatrical way. "I'm not sure what you mean by a conservation law, but I do understand the orders, Dr. Hoskins. The boy stays in his rooms, if there's some good and sufficient reason for it, and evidently there is. Even if my own life is at stake, melodramatic as that sounds, I'm prepared to abide by that. -The nursing profession is accustomed to placing its duties ahead of self-preservation."
"Good. You can always signal via the intercom system if you need anyone. Good night, Miss Fellowes."
And the two men left. Everyone else had already gone out. The hatch swung shut and Miss Fellowes thought she heard the sound of electronic devices clicking into place.
She was locked in. With a wild child from the year 40,000 B.C.
She turned to the boy. He was watching her warily and there was still milk in the saucer. Laboriously Miss Fellowes tried to show him in pantomimed gestures how to lift the saucer and place it to his lips. The pantomime had no effect. He simply stared but made no attempt to imitate her. She acted it out instead, as she had before, lifting the saucer to her own face and pretending to lick the milk from it.
"Now you," she said. "Try it." Still he stared. He was trembling. "It isn't hard," she said. "I'll show you how to do it. Here. Let me have your hands."
Gently-very gently-she put her hands to his wrists. He growled, a terrifying sound coming out of a child so small, and pulled his arms away from her with startling force. His face blazed with rage and fear. The lightning-bolt birthmark stood out fiercely against his newly cleansed skin.
Dr. Hoskins had seized him by the wrists only a little while ago. And had pulled his arms together across his body and dangled him in mid-air. No doubt the boy still could remember the sensation of those big male hands roughly grasping his wrists.
"No," Miss Fellowes said, in her softest tone. "I'm not trying to hurt you. I just want to show you how to hold your milk saucer."
His frightened eyes were on her, watching, watching for any false move. Slowly she reached for his wrists again, but he shook his head and jerked them out of her reach. "All right," she said. "I'll hold the saucer. You just lick from it. But at least you won't be crouching on the floor like a little animal."
She poured a little more milk into the plate, lifted it, held it out to him at his own level. And waited. Waited.
He made the clicking sounds and the guttural gargles that meant hunger. But he didn't move toward the plate. He looked up at her, big-eyed. He made a sound, one which she didn't think that she had heard him make before.
What did this one mean? Put the plate down, you stupid old creature, so I can lick some milk! Was that it?
"Come on, child. Drink it without going down on the floor, the way a decent little human child should."
He stared. Clicked again, a little mournfully.
"Do it like this," Miss Fellowes said. Practically bending double, she thrust her face forward-it was hard; she didn't have a jutting muzzle-like mouth like his-and kpped a little milk from her side of the saucer as she held it in front of him. He peered solemnly at her from the other side, just a short distance away.
How huge his eyes are, she thought.
"Like this-"
She lapped a little more of the milk.
He moved forward. Kept his hands at his sides, so that she had to continue to hold the plate; but he let his tongue flicker out tentatively, then with more enthusiasm, and began to drink, still standing.
Miss Fellowes started to lower the plate toward the floor.
He grunted in displeasure as it descended and brought his own hands up to maintain it at his level. She took hers quickly away. Now the boy was holding the saucer all by himself. Lapping eagerly.
(Well done, child. Magnificent!)
The plate was empty. Now that he was through drinking, he casually let it drop to the floor, and it smashed into half a dozen pieces. The boy looked up at her in what seemed almost certainly an expression registering dismay, chagrin, maybe even fear. Something like a whimper came from him.
Miss Fellowes smiled.
"It's only a plate, boy. Plates are of no importance. There are plenty more where that one came from. And plenty more milk, too."
She shoved the broken pieces aside with her foot-it would be important to get them picked up in a moment, because they were sharp, but let that wait for now-and drew another plate, identical to the first, from the cabinet at the base of the food cart. She held it up to him. The whimpering stopped. He smiled at her.
An unmistakable smile, the first one she had seen from him since his arrival. It was astonishingly broad- how wide his mouth was, truly ear to ear!-and wonderfully brilliant, like sudden sunlight breaking through dark clouds.
Miss Fellowes returned the smile. Gingerly she reached out to touch him, to stroke his hair, moving her hand very slowly, letting him follow it with his eyes every inch of the way, making sure that he could see that there was no harm in it.
He trembled. But he remained where he was, looking up at her. For a moment she succeeded in stroking his hair; and then he pulled back, bucking timidly away, she thought, like some frightened little-beast.
Miss Fellowes' face flamed at the thought.
(Stop it. You mustn't think of him that way. He's not an animal, no matter how he may look. He's a boy, a little boy, a frightened little boy, a frightened little human boy.)
But his hair-how coarse it had felt, in that one moment when he had allowed her to touch it! How tangled, how rough, how thick!
What strange hair it was. What very, very, very strange hair indeed.
14
She said, "I'm going to have to show you how to use the bathroom. Do you think you can learn?"
She spoke quietly, kindly, knowing quite well that he wouldn't understand her words, but hoping that he would respond to the calmness of the tone.
The boy launched into a clicking phrase again. More milk, was that was what he wanted? Or was this something new he was saying? Miss Fellowes hoped that they were recording every sound he made. Very likely they were, but she meant to mention it to Hoskins the next day anyway. She wanted to study the child's way of speech, to learn his language if there were some way she could manage it. Assuming it was a language, and not just some kind of instinctive animal sounds. Miss Fellowes intended to try to teach him English, if she could, but that might not be possible, and in that case she would at least attempt to learn how to communicate with him in his own fashion.
A strange concept: learning how to speak Neanderthal. But she had done a few things almost as odd in her time, for the sake of making contact with difficult children.
"May I take your hand?" she said.
Miss Fellowes held hers out and the boy looked at it as though he had never seen a hand before. She left it outstretched and waited. The boy frowned. After a moment his own hand rose uncertainly and crept forward, quivering a little, toward hers.
"That's right," she said. "Take my hand."
The trembling hand approached within an inch of hers and then the boy's courage failed him. He snatched it back as though fire were coming from her fingertips.
"Well," said Miss Fellowes calmly, "we'll try again later. Would you like to sit down here?"
She patted the mattress of the bed.
No response.
She pantomimed sitting down.
Nothing. A blank stare.
She sat down herself-not easy, on a small bed so close to the ground-and patted the space beside her.
"Here," she said, giving him her warmest, most reassuring smile. "Sit down next to me, won't you?"
Silence. A stare. Then a barrage of clicking sounds again, and some deep grunting noises-new ones, she was sure of it this time. He seemed to have a considerable vocabulary of clicks and grunts and gargles. It had to be a language. A major scientific breakthrough already: Dr. Hoskins had said that no one knew whether the Neanderthals had a language or not, and she had proved right at the outset that they had.
(No, not proved, Miss Fellowes told herself sternly. Merely hypothesized. But it was a plausible hypothesis.) "Sit down? No?"
Clicks. She listened and tried to imitate them, but they came clumsily off her tongue, with none of his rapid-fire crispness of delivery. He looked at her in- wonder? Amusement? His expressions were so hard to read. But he seemed fascinated by the idea that she was making clicks at him. For all she knew, she was saying something vile and dreadful in his language. Speaking the unspeakable. But it was much more likely that the sounds she was making were just so much incomprehensible gibberish to him. Perhaps he thought she was deranged.
He clicked and growled, in a low, quiet, almost reflective way.
She clicked back at him. She mimicked his growls. They were easier to imitate than the clicks. He stared again. His expression was grave, pensive, very much the way a child who has been confronted by a crazy adult might look.
This is completely ridiculous, Miss Fellowes told herself. I need to stick to English. He'll never learn anything if I make idiotic mumbo-jumbo noises at him in what I imagine is his own language.
"Sit," she said, the way she would have said it to a puppy. "Sit! -No? Well, no, then. Bathroom? Take my hand and I'll show you how to use the bathroom. -No again, is it? You can't just go on the floor, you know. This isn't 40,000 B.C., and even if you're accustomed to digging a hole in the ground after yourself, boy, you aren't going to be able to do that here. Especially with a wooden floor. Take my hand and let's go inside, all right? -No? A little later?"
Miss Fellowes realized that she was starting to babble.
The problem was, she began to see, that she was exhausted. It was getting late, now, and she had been under a bizarre strain since early evening. There was something very dreamlike about sitting here in this dollhouse room trying to explain to a little ape-child with bulging brows and great goggling eyes how to drink milk from a saucer, how to go to the bathroom, how to sit down on a little bed.
No, she thought severely. Not an ape-child.
Never call him that-not even to yourself!
"Take my hand?" Miss Fellowes said again.
He almost did. Almost.
The hours were crawling slowly along, and there had been scarcely any progress. She wasn't going to succeed either with the bathroom or with the bed, that was obvious. And now he too was showing signs of fatigue. He yawned. His eyes looked glazed; his lids were drooping. Suddenly he folded himself up and lay down on the bare floor and then, with a quick movement, rolled beneath the bed.
Miss Fellowes, on her knees, stared down underneath at him. His eyes gleamed out at her and he chattered at her in tongue-clicks.
"All right," she told him. "If you feel safer there, you sleep there."
She waited a little while, until she heard the sound of steady, regular breathing. How tired he must be! Forty thousand years from home, thrust into a baffling alien place full of bright lights and hard floors and strange people who looked nothing at all like anyone he had ever known, and even so he was capable of curling up and falling asleep. Miss Fellowes envied him that wonderful adaptability. Children were so resilient, so capable of accommodating to the most terrible disruptionsShe turned out the light and closed the door to the boy's bedroom, and retired to the cot that had been left for her use in the largest room.
Overhead there was nothing but darkness. She scrutinized it, wondering whether someone might be lurking about on the balcony, observing her. It was impossible to tell. Miss Fellowes knew that she was being absurd, that it was late and there was no one up there. The only eyes that would be watching her were those of a bunch of electronic sensors. But still-to have no privacy at all- They were filming everything, very likely. Making a complete visual record of all that took place in the Stasis zone. She should never have taken on this job without insisting that Hoskins let her inspect the sort of place where she was going to have to live. Trust me, he had said. Right. Certainly.
Well, she'd make do for tonight. But tomorrow they were going to have to put a roof over her living quarters, at least. And also, she thought, those stupid men will have to place a mirror in this room and a larger chest of drawers and a separate washroom if they expect me to spend my nights in here.
15
It was difficult to sleep. Tired as she was, she lay with her eyes open, in the kind of absolute wakefolness dial one reaches only in a state of die most extreme fatigue. She strained to hear any sounds that might come from the next room.
He couldn't get out, could he? Could he?
The walls were sheer and impossibly high, but suppose the child could climb like a monkey?
Up a vertical wall with no hand-holds? And there you go again, thinking of him as a monkey!
He couldn't climb up and over, no. She was certain of that. And in any case, there were Hoskins' ever-watchful sensors up there in the balcony. Surely they'd notice and give an alarm, if the boy started climbing around from room to room in the middle of the night.
Surely.
(There's so much that I didn't take the trouble to find out, Miss Fellowes thought.)
And then suddenly she found herself asking herself: Can he be dangerous? Physically dangerous?
She considered how much trouble it had been to give him his bath. She had watched first Hoskins and then Elliott battling to hold him in place. Just a little child, and how strong he was! The scratch he had given Elliott!
What if he came in here andNo, Miss Fellowes told herself. He won't hurt me.
Beyond any doubt Hoskins wouldn't have left her in here alone, overhead sensors or no overhead sensors, if he felt there was any risk thatShe tried to laugh at her own fears. He was only a three-year-old child, perhaps four at most. Still, she hadn't managed to get his nails trimmed yet. If he should attack her with nails and teeth while she sleptHer breath came quickly. Oh, how ridiculous, how completely ridiculous, and yetShe was endlessly going back and forth, she knew, unable to take a consistent position and hold it for long. Was he a dangerous nasty litde ape, or was he a miserably frightened litde child far from his loved ones? One or the other, she told herself. But why not some of both? Even a frightened litde child can hurt you if he strikes out with enough force. She could remember a few nasty episodes at the hospital-children driven to such desperation that they had attacked staff people with real vehemence and done some real damage.
Miss Fellowes didn't dare let herself fall asleep. Didn't dare.
She lay staring upward, listening with painful atten-tiveness. And now she heard a sound.
The boy was crying.
Not shrieking in fear or anger; not yelling or screaming. It was crying softly, and the cry was the heartbroken sobbing of a lonely, lonely child.
All her ambivalence dissolved at once. For the first time, Miss Fellowes thought with a pang: Poor thing! Poor terrified child!
Of course it was a child. What did the shape of its head matter, or the texture of its hair? It was a child that had been orphaned as no child had ever been orphaned before. Hoskins had said it, and said it accurately, at their first meeting: "This will be the most lonely child in the history of the world." Not just its mother and father were gone, but all its species, every last one. Snatched callously out of its proper time, it was now the only creature of its kind in the world.
The last. The only.
She felt her pity for it strengthen and deepen, and with that came shame at her own callousness: the repugnance she had allowed herself to feel for the child, the irritation she had let herself show at its wild ways. How, she wondered, could she have been so cruel? So unprofessional Bad enough to be kidnapped like this; worse to be looked upon with disdain by the very person who was supposed to care for you and teach you to find your way in your bewildering new life.
Tucking her nightgown carefully about her calves- the overhead sensors, she couldn't stop worrying about those idiotic sensors!-Miss Fellowes got out of bed and tiptoed into the boy's room.
"Litde boy," she called in a whisper. "Litde boy."
She knelt and started to reach under the bed. But then the thought came-shameful but prudent, born of long experience with troubled children-that he might try to bite her, and she pulled back her hand. Instead she turned on the night light and moved the bed away from the wall.
The poor thing was huddled miserably in the corner, knees up against his chin, looking up at her with blurred and apprehensive eyes.
In the dim light she was able to ignore his repulsive-ness, the thick blunt features, the big misshapen head.
"Poor litde boy," she murmured. "Poor frightened litde boy."
Miss Fellowes stroked his hair, that harsh tangled bristly hair that had felt so disagreeable to her a few hours before. Now it merely seemed unusual. He stiffened at the first touch of her hand, but then she saw him relax.
"Poor child," she said. "Let me hold you."
He made a soft clicking sound. Then a little low growl, a kind of gentle unhappy rumbling.
She sat down on the floor next to him and stroked his hair again, slowly, rhythmically. The tension was visibly going from his body. Perhaps no one had ever stroked his hair before, back in whatever ferocious prehistoric life it was that he had left behind. He seemed to like it. Gently, tenderly, she played with his hair, smoothing it, straightening it, picking a few burrs out of it, but mainly just running her hand along the top of his head, slowly, slowly, almost hypnotically.
She stroked his cheek, his arm. He allowed it. Softly she began to sing a slow and gentle song, a wordless repetitive one, a tune that she had known since childhood, one that she had sung to many disturbed children to soothe them, to calm them.
He lifted his head at that, staring at her mouth in the dimness, as though wondering at the sound.
She maneuvered him closer, gathering him in while he listened to her. He offered no resistance. Slowly she pressed her hand against the side of his head, gendy guiding it toward her until it rested on her shoulder. She put her arm under his thighs and with a smooth and unhurried motion lifted him into her lap.
She continued singing, the same quiet, sinuous musical phrase over and over, while she rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
He had stopped crying, somewhere along the way. After a while the smooth, even purr of his breathing told Miss Fellowes that he was asleep.
With infinite care she nudged his bed back against the wall, pushing it into place with her knee, and laid him down on it. She pulled the covers over him-had he ever known a coverlet before? Certainly not a bed!-and tucked them in and stood over him for a time, staring down at him. His face looked wondrously peaceful as he slept.
Somehow it didn't matter so much now that it was so ugly. Really.
She made her way out of the room on tiptoes. But as she reached the door she paused and halted, thinking: What if he wakes up!
He might be even more troubled than before, expecting to find her comforting presence close at hand and not knowing where she had gone. He might panic; he might run amok.
Miss Fellowes hesitated, battling irresolutely with herself. She stood above the bed again, studying him as he slept. Then she sighed. There was only one thing to do. Slowly she lowered herself to the bed and ky down beside him.
The bed was much too small for her. She had to draw her legs up close against her chest, and her left elbow pressed against the wall, and to avoid disturbing the boy she had to twist herself around into an intricate uncomfortable curve. She lay there wide awake, cramped and bent, feeling like Alice after she had sampled the "Drink Me" botde in Wonderland. Very well: so she'd get no sleep this night. This was only the first night. Things would be easier later on. Sometimes there were higher priorities than sleep.
She felt a touch against her hand. The child's fingers, grazing her palm. He was reaching for her in his sleep. The rough litde hand crept into hers.
Miss Fellowes smiled.
16
She awoke with a start, wondering where she was, why she felt so stiff and sore. There was the unfamiliar smell of another person in her nostrils and the unfamiliar sense of someone's body pressing against hers.
She had to fight back a wild impulse to scream. She was able just barely to suppress it into a gurgle.
The boy was sitting up, looking at her wide-eyed. The ugly little boy, the child snatched from time. The little Neanderthal child.
It took a long moment for Miss Fellowes to remember getting into bed with him. Then it all came back. She realized that she had managed somehow to fall asleep, despite everything. And now it was morning.
Slowly, without unfixing her eyes from his, she stretched one leg carefully and let it touch the floor, and then the other. Her muscles were tensed for quick disengagement in case the boy should go into a panic.
She cast a quick and apprehensive glance toward the open ceiling. Were they watching, up there? Cameras grinding away as she made her bleary-eyed entry into the new day?
Then the boy's stubby fingers reached out and touched her lips. He said something: two quick clicks and a growl.
Miss Fellowes shrank involuntarily away from him at the touch. She glanced down at him. A little shiver ran through her. She hated herself for it, but there was no preventing it. He was terribly ugly in the light of day.
The boy spoke again. He opened his own mouth and gestured with his hand as though something were coming out.
The meaning wasn't hard to decode. Tremulously Miss Fellowes said, "Do you want me to sing again? Is that it?"
The boy said nothing, but he was staring at her mouth.
In a voice that was quavering and slightly off-key with tension, Miss Fellowes began the little song that she had sung the night before. The ugly little boy smiled. He seemed to recognize the melody, and he swayed clumsily in rough time to it, waving his arms about. He made a little gurgly sound that might have been the beginnings of a laugh.
Miss Fellowes sighed inwardly. Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. Well, whatever would helpShe said, "You wait. Let me get myself fixed up. It'll just take a minute. Then I'll make breakfast for you."
She rinsed her face and brushed out her hair, maddeningly conscious the whole time of the lack of ceiling covering, the invisible staring electronic eyes. Perhaps not only electronic ones, she thought.
The boy remained in bed, looking toward her. He seemed calm. The fierce frenzied wildness of his first few hours in the twenty-first century seemed long ago, now. Whenever she turned his way, Miss Fellowes waved at him. Eventually he waved back, an awkward but charming gesture that sent a little chill of surprise and delight down her spine.
When she was done she said, "You could use something solid, I suspect. What about some oatmeal with your milk?"
He smiled, almost as though he had understood her. Almost.
It took only a moment to prepare the cereal in the microwave oven. Then she beckoned to the boy.
Whether he understood the gesture or was simply following the aroma, Miss Fellowes had no way of knowing; but he got out of bed and came stumping over to her. His legs were very short in proportion to his stocky trunk, which made them look more bowed than in fact they were.
He glanced down at the floor, plainly in the expectation that she was going to set the bowl of oatmeal in front of him down there for him to lick.
"No," she said. "You're a civilized little boy now. Or at least you're going to be one. Civilized little boys don't eat on the floor."
Clicks. Growls.
"I know you don't understand anything I'm saying. But you will, sooner or later. I don't think I can learn your language, but I'm pretty certain you're capable of learning mine."
She took a spoon from the drawer and showed it to him.
"Spoon."
He looked at it stolidly, without interest.
"To eat with. Spoon."
She dipped it into the oatmeal and carried it to her mouth. His eyes widened and his broad nostrils flared even wider and he made a strange uneasy drawn-out noise, like a very quiet howl: the sound, Miss Fellowes suspected, of a hungry creature that thinks some other creature is going to steal its breakfast.
She pantomimed putting the spoon into her mouth, swallowing the oatmeal, licking her lips in pleasure. Round-eyed, unhappy-looking, he watched the process, all too obviously failing to comprehend.
"Now you try it," Miss Fellowes said. She dumped the oatmeal back into the bowl, turning the empty spoon toward him to show him that she hadn't eaten any of it. Then she scooped more onto the spoon and held it out to him.
He drew back, eyes wide with alarm as though the spoon were a weapon. His tawny little face puckered in fright and he uttered a sound that was not quite a sob, not quite a growl.
"Look," she said. "Spoon. Oatmeal. Mouth."
No. Hungry as he was, he didn't want to know anything about the spoon. Well, time enough for that, Miss Fellowes thought. She put the spoon away.
"But you're going to have to hold the bowl in your hands. You know how to do that. There's going to be no crouching on the floor to eat around here."
She offered him the bowl. He glanced at it and looked down at the floor.
"Hold it in your hands."
Clicks. She thought she recognized them as a familiar pattern, but she couldn't be certain. By God, Hoskins would have to tape those sounds! If he wasn't already doing so.
"In your hands," Miss Fellowes said again, firmly. "Here."
He understood. He took the bowl into his hands, with his thumbs sticking into the oatmeal, and lifted it to his face. He did it clumsily enough and it was incredibly messy but most of it did get into him.
So he was a quick learner-when he wasn't numbed by fear. Miss Fellowes doubted that there'd be much more animal-like lapping of food on the floor.
She watched him closely as he ate. He seemed to be in good health, sturdy and strong. His eyes were bright, his color was high, there were no outward signs of fever or illness. So far he appeared to be withstanding the rigors of his extraordinary journey very well indeed.
Although she knew no more than anybody else about the growth patterns of Neanderthal children, Miss Fellowes started to think now that he probably was older than she had originally thought, definitely closer to four years of age than three. He was small, yes, but his physiological development was beyond the modern child's three-year-old level. Of course, some of that might just be the result of the conditions under which he had lived, back there in the Stone Age world. (Stone Age? Yes, of course. Neanderthals must be Stone Age. She was reasonably certain of that. There was so much that she needed to learn, when she had the chance.)
She tried having him drink his milk in a glass this time. He seemed to catch on swiftly to the idea of holding the glass in his hands-he needed both hands to do it, but that was the way most children his age held glasses, and at least he didn't find the glass as threatening as the spoon appeared to have been. But he had trouble with the opening, which was too small for him to get his face into conveniently, and he began to whine, a high-pitched keening sound of frustration that was starting to edge upward into anger. Miss Fellowes put her own hand over the little boy's, making him tip the glass, forcing his mouth to the rim.
Again a mess, but again most went into him. And she was used to messes.
The washroom, to her surprise and immense relief, was a less difficult matter. At first he appeared to think that the toilet bowl was some sort of fountain that might be fun to splash around in, and she was afraid that he was going to climb into it. But Miss Fellowes held him back and stood him in front of it and opened his robe, and he understood right away what it was she expected him to do.
She found herself patting his head, saying, "Good boy. Smart boy."
And to Miss Fellowes* exceeding pleasure, the boy smiled up at her.
It was going to be a morning of discoveries, Miss Fellowes realized pleasantly. For him and for her as well. He was learning about spoons and milk glasses and toilet bowls. She was learning about him. Discovering the essential humanity that lay behind that strange and ugly- oh, so ugly!-face of his.*
She replied to his smile with one of her own. He smiled again. It was a very normal smile, the smile of a child who has seen that his smile has brought a pleasing response.
He wasn't at all a normal child, she reminded herself. It would be a serious mistake to allow herself any illusions about that.
But when he smiles, she thought, he's quite bearable. Really.