Brother Termite Read online

  “You taught me every lie, every trick. How can I help but not trust you?” Reen’s voice trembled with the conflict of emotions he felt for the man. Womack had been one of Reen’s longest-running trials–the cost, Reen had always figured, of victory. And yet, for all their arguments, he loved him, loved him with the same despairing love he felt for Marian Cole.

  “You know, when push comes to shove, termite, you won’t have the heart to get rid of me. But your Brother will.”

  Reen walked hastily out of the room. In the vestibule of the elevator he punched the button hard with his claw. He wanted to get away from Womack, but he wasn’t sure what drove him: anger at Womack or fear of the truth.

  “Hey, termite,” Womack called.

  Reen peeked around the corner. The President was framed in the doorway of his study, the pizza at his feet, a monarch amid the ruins of his kingdom. “Okay, so you don’t believe in mediums. But you believe in spirits, right? I mean, we picked this spiritualism up from you guys. You’re not just jerking me around?”

  The elevator opened with a rumble and shush. “Of course there are spirits.” Reen stepped into the car and let it take him down to safety, away from the torment in Jeff Womack’s eyes.

  BACK IN his office Reen sat at his terminal while the shadows of the trees outside lengthened and the day faded to night.

  At six-thirty Natalie came in, her coat on her arm. “I’m going.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, barely looking up from his work.

  She hesitated at the door. “I mean, I have to go home now, you know? Sam’ll want dinner.”

  He stopped scrolling the report, the cursor blinking on an item concerning unrest in Italy. “I understand,” he said, although he didn’t so much understand as accept. After years of frustration at his secretaries’ holidays and vacations, he’d stopped trying to change them. He’d discarded the idea that humans were lazy. He’d even once, not long ago, taken a sort of vacation himself.

  He expected her to leave, but she didn’t. She stood with one hand on the jamb. “You want me to turn on the light?”

  “No.” He went back to his work but then looked up again. Natalie hadn’t moved. “Is anything wrong?”

  She took a breath to speak, then let out the air and the thought in a barren sigh. “Well. Don’t work too late.”

  “I always work late.”

  “It makes me feel guilty. Thural’s usually with you. I don’t feel so bad when he’s here.”

  “Thural is seeing about Jonis.” Reen lifted his hands from the computer and set them primly in his lap. The room slowly darkened. The spill of light behind Natalie tossed a rectangle of gold across the carpet like an abandoned evening wrap. “You’ve worked for me now, what?” he asked. “Two months? When you work here long enough, you’ll get used to my hours and the fact that I often work alone.”

  She scratched idly at the doorjamb with one long fingernail.

  With a kind smile he said, “What would I do when I go home other than sleep?”

  “You could watch TV. Sometimes they have great stuff on TV. Sitcoms. True-life murder stories. Ought to try it. I’ll tell you when something good is coming on, and maybe you can bring in the portable.”

  “That would be nice,” he said vaguely, thinking how distasteful it would be to watch a program on crime. Human life was short enough without other humans bringing it to a premature close. He’d known twelve presidents, had loved three of them, and now had outlived all but one.

  “Sam,” he said finally, because apparently she was not leaving. “Is that your husband?”

  Natalie walked forward. Reached into her purse.

  Startled by the unexpected gesture, Reen shrank back against his chair. He thought of the graffiti, of the boy with the backpack, and expected to see a gun in Natalie’s hand. Instead she took out her wallet.

  “My kid.” She flipped open her wallet and held it toward him.

  Reen took the wallet and switched on his green-shaded desk lamp. In the photo it was high summer. A blond boy with a smile and a baseball cap stood in the batter’s box, bat in hand.

  Sam had the doomed, sad beauty of his dying breed. The pool of light under the lamp washed the freckled face with brass. His hands held the bat with nonchalant grace. There was arrogance in the set of his shoulders, a fearlessness in his eyes.

  “He’s a good kid.”

  Reen handed back the photo. “Such photos are to be valued.” He knew Natalie could not understand what he meant and that she would never be allowed to. One day his own daughter would look at such pictures to remind herself of the debt she owed the past. When the Cousins died out, as they one day surely would, and when Reen, for her sake, made humans extinct, he wanted Angela to remember.

  Natalie tucked the wallet back into her purse. “His dad, the son of a bitch, never sends us any money. That’s why I got a little upset with you today about the blouse.”

  Reen folded his hands. “You must have a raise. Thural will see to it.”

  Her mouth fell open. Even in the dim light of the reading lamp, he could see her cheeks blanch. “I didn’t mean–”

  “I know. Go home to Sam. Don’t worry about me. Mothers and fathers should concern themselves with their children.”

  “Okay. But stress can get to you. All work and no play ...” Her voice wavered in indecision or perhaps in futility. Without finishing the thought she turned and made her way from the room. Reen watched her go, thinking of the photo of the boy, of the baseball game.

  All work and no play.

  He didn’t understand the concept of baseball; he didn’t understand games. Take the snow and pack it, Marian had said. His daughter, so instructed, had thrown the snowball with somber dedication and only because her mother had told her to. Angela had the wide shoulders of a brachiator, the generous musculature of her mother. But Reen knew she would never stand in a batter’s box, her face agleam with joy.

  All work.

  He lifted his hands diligently to the keyboard. After a few moments of reading, his mind immersed itself in the Italian crisis, and Natalie and her son were forgotten. At eight o’clock a maid wordlessly brought his dinner. By eleven he was so tired, the letters on the screen began to blur. He checked to see that the French doors were locked, flicked off the terminal and the reading lamp, and left his office.

  The Secret Serviceman on duty in the colonnade gave him a brief glance. Other than that quick, furtive movement, nothing stirred.

  Reen paused at the open doorway of the pool that Roosevelt had constructed, Nixon had made a press room, and reporter-weary Womack had reconverted. The White House was otherwise quiet, but something by the pool was making a sound. He entered. The lights in the pool were on, reflecting blue ripples across the ceiling. The filtration system gurgled. Water lapped the tiles.

  On a lounge chair lay a bundle of old clothes, and from it came a noise like a buzz saw. And an arm. The hand, clutching an empty bottle of Mogen David, rested knuckles-down on the concrete.

  Reen tiptoed to the guard. “There is a man sleeping by the pool.”

  “Yes, sir. The President’s new medium.”

  “Why is he sleeping here?”

  “Passed out, sir.”

  The guard looked away. An oppressive silence fell. Reen waded through it to the exit. Outside, the night air was cool, and sparse traffic growled down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Reen walked across the grass, nervously searching for the boy with the backpack. The fence was empty. Beside the West Wing the commuter ship gleamed dully in the full moonlight, Thural a ghost beside it. Reen trudged up the ramp. At the door he paused.

  “Jonis bought liquor from a homeless man. Were you aware of this, Cousin?”

  Did Thural’s gaze shift in alarm? The movement was so quick that Reen couldn’t be sure. “Yes, Reen-ja. Although I never personally–”<
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  “Keep this information from the FBI but order the Guardians of the Community to find the man and bring him to me.”

  “I will give the Guardians his name and description–”

  “Good.” Reen turned his back on Thural and marched into the ship.

  The lounge seemed perversely vacant without Marian there to vex it with her colors. He sat. A few minutes later Thural came to him.

  “Reen-ja? We have landed at Andrews, and I have alerted the Guardians about Jonis’s human friend.”

  Reen stared at his feet. Stress will get you, Natalie had said.

  All work.

  Every part of Angela functioned. Her hands were marvels, her brain clear. But had he made some terrible mistake? Quiet, shy Angela had the strength of a human in her body and the stamina of a Cousin in her mind. How would she handle the stress that was bound to follow her as an unkempt dog its master? As countless parents had before him, Reen wondered whether she would be happy. And if she could not find peace, he wondered, would she ever forgive him?

  “Reen-ja?”

  Without meeting his aide’s gaze, Reen stood and followed Thural down the ramp.

  WHEN REEN walked into the Cousin Place, the first thing he noticed was the peppery acid smell of sleep. The second thing stopped him, brought him up short with a jolt of pleasure: the blandness of the gray monolithic room. The room was empty but for one Cousin. The Sleep Master sat quietly, his dark eyes full of slumber.

  Reen, Thural at his heels, turned to enter the right-hand room.

  “Wait.”

  The raspy voice came from behind. Hand to the soft wall, Reen turned. The Sleep Master’s gaze was focused on him.

  “You may not go forward.”

  Reen stood back to let Thural pass. He cast one look of longing into the chamber, at the Cousins packed quietly into their niches, before he made his way across the floor to sit at the Sleep Master’s feet.

  A light airy silence settled around them like mist.

  “I am very tired,” Reen said pointedly.

  “I know. But you bring humanity with you when you come. Wash yourself of the humans, and I can allow you in with the others.”

  Reen fixed his eyes on the curve between wall and floor, willing his mind blank; but his brain fussed against rest like a recalcitrant child at bedtime. Gradually he became aware he was thinking again, picking at the problem of Marian, sorting through his worries about Womack and Jonis.

  “Even in here, Reen-ja, you disturb the sleepers. I feel them stir.”

  “Should I leave?” he asked dully, hoping the Sleep Master wouldn’t take him up on the offer. His tiredness was ponderous and inescapable, like a weight about his neck. More than anything he wanted to crawl into a niche, feel the stiff embrace of the close walls, and relinquish, for a few hours, the strain of individuality.

  “No. Talk to me. If you talk to me, perhaps your mind will not shout.”

  Reen looked into the Sleep Master’s pocked gray face. “What do you wish to discuss?” he asked, wondering if this would lead to another lecture.

  “I have found that if you talk about your day, you steal the power from it.”

  Reen dropped his weary eyes to the old Cousin’s black boot. “Jonis has been kidnapped, Europe threatens war with China, and President Womack is still on strike.”

  “Yes?”

  The room was cloying with the spice of sleep, and Reen found himself nearly dozing where he sat. And I love my daughter and her mother to my own detriment. “That is all.”

  “Those are small things to disturb the sleepers so.”

  “Complications are made of small things.”

  “Better that you put these small things away to come here.”

  As though I could put my troubles in a pocket. But the Sleep Master, insulated from human minutiae, could not understand. Reen tried to relax again, his mind peeling away the day in tiny patches, as though it were the clinging skin of an orange. Suddenly his consciousness lay stripped in his palm, tender and naked to the veins.

  “Go, Reen-ja. Go before you fall asleep on the floor.”

  Reen staggered as he stood. He shuffled his way through the chamber door and into the blue-lit niches beyond. Finding a vacant hole, he clambered in and lay down, unblinking eyes to the ceiling, arms rigid at his sides, as comfortable as a larva in its egg.

  Angela slept like a human. Standing over her bed, Reen would often marvel at the way her lids shuttered her eyes. Her arms would curl to her side, her legs bend. She would press her head into the pillow and give herself to the dark.

  The idea of darkness terrified Reen. It was darkness that bred human dreams. The closest Reen came to dreaming was when he felt the ghosts of long-dead consorts near him and heard their whispery voices.

  Reen, the Old Ones said, and he knew he was sleeping.

  Reen, you disappoint us.

  They didn’t speak with the anger he had been expecting but with a serene sort of dismay. Within arm’s length of his niche stood three gigantic shadows.

  The people are dying, Reen. Who will guard the eggs? Who will guard the sleepers?

  Go away. Reen wished that he could sleep as Angela did. He would close his eyes on the ghosts. We are all dying, and the egg cases are barren.

  The shadows at his shoulder began to dissipate into the gloom. You are a father. You should understand, the Old Ones hissed.

  “Reen-ja?”

  The Old Ones were back again for more of their fruitless lectures, only this time the ghosts were small.

  “Reen-ja?”

  A curt sound. A ssst. “Quiet, Thural,” Tali said. “You will wake everyone.”

  Putting his hand to the close roof, Reen slid himself out of his niche. Thural and Tali were standing in the hazy blue aisle, the Sleep Master behind them, wringing his hands.

  “Yes?” Reen whispered, wondering what time it was and whether their interruption of his sleep meant that Jonis and the rest of the kidnapped Cousins had been found.

  “The police have discovered a body, Reen-ja,” Thural said, keeping his voice down.

  “The body of Bernard Martinez,” Tali added importantly.

  Around the three talkers, Cousins began to wake.

  “The homeless man that Jonis often spoke with,” Thural said. “He has been found strangled. I think it best you get up.”

  OUTSIDE the cousin place a rain fine as an aerosol was falling. Lights glistened on the tarmac. To the east a lethargic dawn was bleaching the sky. Tali, Reen, and Thural walked past a mothballed B-1 bomber to a four-seater Cousin craft. As they climbed into the ship, his Brother resumed what must have been an earlier lecture.

  “It was embarrassing to the Keepers,” Tali grumbled, appropriating the front passenger seat.

  Thural plunked himself down gloomily at the controls, leaving Reen the back.

  “Involving the police. Looking for a man only to find him recently dead,” Tali went on.

  The ship, not sensing other passengers, closed its transparent canopy. Thural grasped the control ball and pulled, drawing the craft upward a few feet, where it paused, wobbling.

  “I had no way of knowing he had been murdered. And if the Keepers were more skilled at hiding the truth, the police would have never found out we were looking for him.” With unCousinly petulance, Thural slammed the control ball right. The craft skipped northwestward like a flat stone across water.

  Past the white egg shapes of the Anacostia Cousin Center the Capitol dome rose through a thorny crown of trees. Beyond that, the Washington Monument stood gravestone sentinel over the Mall.

  Tali swiveled toward Thural. “I think you know more than you are telling. That this man was found strangled means the President is involved in a conspiracy against us.”

  Alarmed by the direction of the conversation, Reen l
eaned forward, inserting his body between the two Cousins. “You jump to conclusions, Brother Conscience. That there is a conspiracy is obvious, but perhaps the President, not the Cousins, is the target.”

  “Gullible Reen.” Tali’s vitriol stung. “You trusted Eisenhower. You signed his silly Vandenberg treaty. And you see how he lied to us.”

  Reen sat back, perplexed. “Lied to us? Eisenhower might have delayed our landing, but even as he signed the treaty he vowed his people would never accept our leadership. And so it is. It was we with our arrogance who misjudged the situation. The humans are thrown into chaos, Brother, even fifty years after contact.”

  Tali sniffed. “It is not chaos. It is anger you see. The humans rage as Eisenhower did the first time he saw our ships. The man smiled and smiled, but still he raged.”

  Reen recalled Eisenhower’s fixed, tense grin; how the President’s hands, held stiffly at his sides, had clenched with impotent, white-knuckled fury.

  The ship banked over the drab Potomac. Ahead of them, a Delta airliner, landing lights blazing, descended from the low clouds toward National.

  “But we were the ones who broke the Vandenberg treaty,” Thural said. “We allowed the humans to think we could wage war against them.”

  “It is not our fault they jumped to conclusions. And who broke the treaty first, Cousin, when Kennedy plotted to have Reen killed? In the skill of lying the humans will always have the edge.” Tali’s gaze fell on his Brother with the finality of a guillotine. “Find us a good man to take over the presidency, Reen-ja. Someone like J. Edgar Hoover. Someone we can trust.”

  Reen tried to avoid Tali’s eyes but was only partially successful. The way the seating was arranged in the ship, it was impossible to turn his back.

  “Where are we going?” Reen asked Thural.

  “M Street,” Thural muttered.

  Reen glanced down. The quaint roads of Georgetown were constipated with rush-hour traffic. Ahead, where Wisconsin Avenue crossed M Street, strobes from a group of squad cars washed the morning sidewalk with festive red and blue. Thural inched the ship over the gold dome of the Riggs Bank and to an empty space near the curb.