Who Goes Home? Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Naming

  1 Jacob’s Birthday

  2 Into the Night

  3 Revelations

  4 Saturday Morning

  5 Saturday Afternoon

  6 Working with Dad

  7 I’ve Never Heard of Him

  8 Looking After Vateelin

  9 Christmas Eve

  10 The Feast of Stephen

  11 Inside Vateelin’s Spaceship

  12 Go to the Spaceship

  13 A Monumental Mistake

  14 Jacob in York

  15 Jacob’s Decision

  16 What Next?

  17 The Next Day

  18 Spies

  19 Watchers in the Night

  20 Orders

  21 Eavesdropping

  22 York Station

  23 The Homecoming

  24 See to It!

  25 Stella’s Unwelcome Visitor

  26 February Fair-Maids

  27 The Invitation

  28 Travelling North

  29 In York

  30 In the Kitchen

  31 Things to Tell

  32 Belthorp

  33 A Restless Night

  34 Matthew Decides

  35 Seeing Stella

  36 At Home

  37 Highgate Cemetery on Saturday Afternoon

  38 Like a Great Voice Calling

  39 Who Goes Home?

  40 The Accidental Traveller

  41 So Much to Tell

  42 The Cube

  43 The Brick

  The Faraway Planet

  About the Author

  Also by Sylvia Waugh

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Steven Bradwell, a computer expert, works strange hours in his room at the top of the house. But only his son, Jacob, knows that he visits the cemetery at twilight, and that his everyday job is a cover for another strange and secret life.

  In this final gripping volume to the Ormingat trilogy, there are momentous decisions to be taken. Will tragedy be averted? How will it end? Who goes home?

  For Gary and Ruth Porteous.

  And in loving memory of my

  brother-in-law, Brian Porteous

  We are all souls in the same small Universe

  EARTHBORN

  * * *

  The Naming

  Infringement! Infringement! Rules are clear. Rules are meant for your protection, Sterekanda.

  Steven looked innocently up at the green cube, which flickered as sound waves passed beneath its glassy surface. The spaceship, where he now sat, was the same as always. Steven had paid frequent visits over the past three years, and had carried out all instructions to the very letter.

  So where was the infringement?

  The infringement lay in his arms. A baby was snuggled up close to him, swaddled in a white silk shawl. It began to whimper.

  ‘Hush,’ said Steven softly. ‘Hushaby.’

  Children of mixed parentage do exist. But they should never be presented. The communicator made its pronouncement flatly.

  Steven let the baby grasp his forefinger. He looked down at the helpless, pale little face and stooped to kiss its broad brow. The grating voice of the machine was no lullaby for a sick child.

  An Earth womb birthed this infant. He is Earthling.

  ‘He is my son,’ said Steven firmly. ‘His mother is my wife.’

  Ormingatriga who unite with Earth ones are not approved.

  ‘But allowed,’ said Steven quickly. ‘It is allowed. I have consulted the rules.’

  Only if unspoken.

  ‘It was unspoken,’ said Steven, ‘till necessity drove me to this. Without our help, my son would have died.’

  Children die. Life loses infants on Earth. That is known.

  ‘But infants are not lost on Ormingat,’ said Steven. ‘On Ormingat no child is lost.’

  He said this with conviction and the machine did not contradict him. The knowledge on which his statement was built was pure intuition. He had lived on Earth for three years, and was expected to live here for a further seventeen. As with all visitors from Ormingat, the peaceful planet, he had lost most of his memories of the place and of its language. These would be stored against his return, when his body would revert to being an Ormingat body, and his brain would be once more an Ormingat brain. On Earth he needed Earth memories and an Earthly mother tongue. So he was an Englishman, living in London and working as a freelance computer expert, well respected for his talents, and never lacking the normal Earth employment that covered his real reason for being here.

  Steven was not primarily an observer, as others were. He was an arranger, a facilitator. Those he helped he would never meet. It was all down in the rule book: Ormingat workers on the planet Earth, whatever their function, should never connect. It was no part of their brief to make any change to the planet that was not within the capacity of ordinary human beings.

  ‘I brought Jacob here that his life might be saved,’ said Steven. ‘Earth does not possess the medicine we need.’

  It is a misuse of power. You must know that.

  Jacob had ceased to whimper and had fallen into a calm, sweet sleep. The mativil was working. The baby’s tiny system was settling into comfort as the elixir Steven had fed him cruised gently round inside his body. Spaces were filled up. Gaps were repaired. In his sleep he still held tightly on to his father’s finger.

  Steven smiled down at him.

  ‘It is I who have misused it then,’ he said. ‘Without mativil my son would have died. He is not just any child on Earth. He is mine, and I am a son of Ormingat.’

  For some time the machine remained silent, as if its thought banks were constructing some very complex algorithm.

  Steven too was thinking of what to say next. He knew what needed to be said, but he was anxious to find the proper words. He laid the baby gently down on a cushion in the corner of the sofa. They were in the half of the ship that was Earth-simulated, a room that could have been in any ordinary English house. There was even a standard lamp behind the sofa, a bookcase full of Earthly books, and a small round table where one might sit to eat a meal. On the floor were rugs just like those you have at home.

  The other half of the ship was pure laboratory, almost empty, but with the suggestion that necessary things could be made to appear at short notice and occupy the space. The only permanent features were the green cube high up in the dome of the ship, and a great disc that seemed to lie below the level that one’s feet might reach. This disc was a clock of stars, a dial with bright points of light over which a wand swung like a single pointer.

  The green cube ceased to throb and went totally blank for at least half a minute. Then it glowed clear again.

  You have broken rule.

  On one level of thought Steven was still puzzling what to say; on a second level his mind came up with: That’s not much of a return on all your thinking, o voice of Ormingat! He had enough sense not to say it, of course. Instead, he pulled his own thoughts together and gave them expression.

  ‘What I have done,’ he said, ‘I have done for love. And now, because Jacob has come with me into this ship and has diminished just as I have, he must be recognized as Ormingatrig. Otherwise the risk of returning to the outside world would be too great. Entwine him with his name, I beg you.’

  You have broken rule.

  Steven had a sudden, sickening fear that the communicator had somehow crashed under the effort of solving a problem beyond its capability. Was this cube-failure? He hoped and prayed that it wasn’t. His baby was asleep in the corner of the sofa. His wife was in bed in the Whittington Hospital, totally unaware of what
was happening. The science of Ormingat must not fail!

  So it was with relief that he heard the cube grate out the words: What would you?

  ‘Give my child an Ormingat name. Entwine him with it. He has the right. I have presented him.’

  Sterekonda, said the communicator, with heavy emphasis upon Steven’s Ormingat name in token of the seriousness of this request, what you ask is a distortion.

  Steven reminded himself that this was a machine after all, however well stocked its databanks. One does not argue with machines; one presses on regardless. Just as they for their part obey inner circuits and hear only what has been taught to them.

  ‘My son’s Earth name is Jacob,’ said Steven as coolly as he could. ‘What will you call him in the Ormingat tongue? With what name will you entwine him?’

  Steven picked the child up from the cushion, unwrapped the shawl, and held Jacob up to the cube as if he were being presented in the temple. The child awoke and his thin, bare arms swayed about above his head, like weeds in water. He did not cry.

  From green, the cube turned to grey and then to yellow. That signalled a great computer dipping back into an even greater system. That was the path of entwining. Steven saw it and knew.

  ‘His Earth name is Jacob,’ he said with increased confidence. ‘Tell me his name on Ormingat.’

  The cube paused as if undecided, the waves on its surface flattening out into long undulations.

  ‘Give me his name,’ said Steven steadily, ‘his Ormingat name.’

  He is Javayl, throbbed the machine reluctantly, child of the broken word. He is Javayl, the outsider.

  At that moment an orb of silver light surrounded the child and he floated free from his father’s arms. Steven knew a moment of terror till the baby was returned to him. He had never witnessed an entwining before, but he knew that this was what he was witnessing now.

  In the maternity ward at the Whittington Hospital, Lydia slept, knowing nothing of Steven’s actions. They had been told, very gently, that their baby was in grave danger of dying. All that could be done would be done, but hopes were not high. Lydia had been allowed to hold the child very briefly in her arms, and the sadness was unbearable. He looked so perfect that it was incredible he should be so ill.

  ‘I’d like to keep him with me,’ she said. ‘Just a little longer.’

  But the masked nurse shook her head and, taking the infant gently back into her gloved hands, she placed him in the tent that was to be his protection for however long he might survive. ‘That would only put him at greater risk, Mrs Bradwell,’ she said sadly. ‘He must be kept in isolation.’

  They wheeled Lydia away to her own bed in the ward. She looked back over her shoulder towards the cot and her eyes were blurred with tears.

  Two hours later, Steven had gone into the nursery, unobserved, unobservable, and removed his baby from the incubator. He wrapped him in the shawl brought from home for the purpose, and simply walked out of the nursery, out of the ward and into the night. No one stopped him. No one noticed the empty cot. No one would notice it. That was the power of Ormingat, even stronger in Steven than in the other visitors to Earth. Deflection was, after all, an important part of his job.

  His return would be just as simple. Then the baby would be seen again, mysteriously fit and well.

  You are released. Now you must go.

  Steven turned to face the centre of the rear wall on the Earth side of the ship. This was familiar ground, a situation he had encountered many times over the past three years. A semi-circular door opened fanlike and from the opening the pull, as of a magnet, drew them towards it. Then, with a rush, Steven and the child were sucked out into the night. Up through a layer of soil they went, out into the air of North London, on to the wall of a cemetery. For a few seconds they were no more than tiny dots on the weathered old brick at the base of a rusty railing.

  Then the dots flew through the air and increased in size till they became a man holding a baby in his arms. Steven was now standing in Swains Lane, just outside the cemetery. It was nine o’clock on a cool autumn evening. All he had to do now was take the child back to the hospital, and return him to his cot as if he had never been away.

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Jacob’s Birthday

  It was Jacob’s thirteenth birthday. In many ways it was no different from all his previous birthdays. They didn’t hold a disco at the local club and invite dozens of friends from school. Jacob had no friends. He appeared to want no friends. There was his family – his father, his mother and his two young sisters, Beth and Josie. That was enough.

  So the birthday party was just a birthday tea, with a quiet sense of special occasion. There were only two guests from the outside world: Uncle Mark, Lydia’s only brother, her elder by some ten years, and his daughter, Molly. They had come, as always, to deliver a card and a present. They needed no invitation and they knew they would find the family at home. Mark’s wife stayed away and sent her excuses.

  The white cloth with its deep lace edging was brought out especially for party time. Lydia had baked scones and sausage rolls, and made mountains of sandwiches. There were cream cakes from the local bakery, and an iced birthday cake with thirteen blue candles. The leftovers, no doubt, would fill many baskets!

  Greetings had been exchanged and, with the exception of Beth and Josie, everyone was sitting around waiting for the feast to begin.

  Uncle Mark smiled across at Jacob. ‘So now you are a teenager,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to treat you like a grown-up!’

  ‘What do you treat a grown-up like, Dad?’ said Molly, who was only eleven but slick with it. The question was not asked in all innocence. She was already a dab hand at making fun of her father and the silly things he was apt to do and say. ‘Will Jacob be able to drink wine and stop out late?’

  ‘I don’t want to drink wine and stop out late,’ said Jacob impatiently. ‘I want to be spoken to as if what I had to say mattered. I want to be accorded –’ he blushed ‘– intellectual equality.’

  Mark laughed. His laugh was kindly enough, but to Jacob his manner was insulting. In appearance, Mark resembled his sister, but he was far more robust and extrovert. His complexion was rosier and his fair hair was inclined to curl.

  ‘They teach you some big words at that school of yours,’ he said.

  ‘See what I mean?’ said Jacob, turning to his father.

  Steven smiled at Mark mockingly. They were a complete contrast. Steven’s dark hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. His eyes were the deepest brown. But it was not just in colouring that they differed: Steven was much brighter than his brother-in-law, and not always kindly with it!

  ‘I do see what you mean, my son,’ he said, as if talking only to Jacob, ‘but maybe Uncle Mark would rather you opted for a place on the junior rugby team. Scrum half, or something like that?’

  ‘Jacob couldn’t play rugby,’ said Molly scornfully before her father could make any retort. ‘He can’t even run as fast as me. And he’s useless at catching.’

  ‘I don’t want to play rugby,’ said Jacob patiently. ‘My brains are not in my boots.’

  ‘That’s soccer,’ said Mark, trying to turn the conversation into a joke. ‘In rugby we mostly run with the ball, not kick it!’

  It seemed to him that Jacob had the knack of making people feel uncomfortable. He was always such an outsider. Not like his sisters: Beth and Josie were sturdy little girl guides, popular with everybody and full of fun. They were twins, fair like all their mother’s family, with light blue eyes and bright, eager smiles. They were eight years old, not particularly clever, but not stupid either.

  ‘Where are the twins?’ said Molly.

  ‘At dancing class,’ said Lydia as she came in from the kitchen carrying yet another tray of food. ‘They should be back any minute. Kerry from next door takes them.’

  She set the tray down on the dining table and found spaces for the plates. Then back to the kitchen again for a
jug of apple juice and a pot of tea.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s all have tea.’

  ‘What about the twins?’ said Molly, giving her aunt an accusing look. ‘We can’t start without them. It wouldn’t be fair.’

  ‘I think that’s them now,’ said Steven, hurrying to open the door. And sure enough in came the girls with Kerry from next door right behind them.

  ‘Come and join us,’ said Lydia to Kerry. ‘We’re having a birthday tea for Jacob. He’s thirteen today.’

  ‘No, Mrs Bradwell – no, thank you. I really have to be getting home,’ said the sixteen-year-old. Then she turned to Jacob and said, ‘Happy birthday, Jacob.’

  Without the prompting, she would never have noticed him. She hardly ever did. As for Jacob, he just shrugged his shoulders and made no reply.

  So it was just the family who sat down to tea.

  ‘Aunt Jane will be sorry she’s missed this,’ said Mark, observing how well they all looked as a family, ‘but you know how things are.’

  ‘She’s got another headache,’ said Molly. ‘My mother is always getting headaches.’

  ‘Have a sausage roll,’ said Lydia hastily. Molly was a precocious child with no sense of loyalty.

  Steven, Lydia and Jacob had little to say as they sat at the table. Lydia and her son were never talkative. Steven, as usual, had little patience with Mark. So silence was best. Beth and Josie more than made up for the rest of the Bradwells. They ate a lot, talked a lot, and then took Molly to their room to see an array of Barbie dolls dressed in every style you could think of.

  Jacob was about to make his getaway when Uncle Mark cried, ‘Hey, not so fast! You haven’t opened your present yet.’

  Jacob smiled weakly and turned to the box that was lying on the floor. Opening presents was always a worry. What if he didn’t like what was inside? Last year it had been a football strip two sizes too large. This year it looked as if it might be a football. But, credit where credit is due, when Jacob removed the wrapping and opened the box, what he took out was at least original, though not exactly welcome.