Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Life With the Tumblers

Written by Mary E. Lowd

Illustrated by Bob Greyvenstein

The boy didn't know how long six months would be. He was only five, and it sounded like forever. His mother, however, knew exactly how long six months would be. She could measure it out against the milestones of her life. It was the time between a kiss and the promise that bound her and Derrick together. It was the time between deciding pregnancy was unbearable and finally bearing Kyan. She knew six months. It was too long, and not nearly long enough.

"I hope you know what you're getting into."

Arlene brushed Derrick's worry aside with an amused shake of her head. "Of course, I don't. That's why I'm going. Complete immersion in the tumbler culture is the only way to really progress my studies."

"I just hope you're not too busy taking notes on those savage tumblers to look after Kyan."

Kyan looked up from the fortress he built on the floor: "Is Uncle Sleatoo a savage?"

Arlene grimaced. "They're not savages."

"Neither is he your uncle," Derrick told Kyan. "I don't want you calling him that."

"Don't worry, I'll make sure that your son remembers he's a human boy and not the nephew of a plant." Arlene moved closer to Derrick, slipping her arm around his back. "What're you really worried about?"

Derrick enfolded her in his arms. "I just want you to be careful out there. I'm not used to having you and Kyan so far out of my sight."

Arlene kissed her husband reassuringly, and whispered in his ear, "We'll be back before you know it."

The rest of the evening passed in a blur of preparations. Arlene planned to leave at dawn because it gave her sisters-in-law less of a chance to interfere. She knew they were afraid of the tumbler town, and she didn't want them filling Kyan's head with nonsense stories right as they were about to leave. Until now, they'd held their tongues, not believing she'd go through with it. Tomorrow, it would be too real, and she knew they would make a scene.

In the dark of morning Arlene finished the last minute packing, and Kyan played a game he called "packing." He put a few of his toys in and out of his own little knapsack, while Arlene packed everything he'd really need. Sleatoo met them at the edge of town, and Arlene entered a different world. That morning she'd been the wife of a farmer, and secondly she'd been a scientist. From the moment she kissed her husband goodbye, sending him out to work the fields, she was on sabbatical and could be a scientist first.

****

The tumbler village glowed with balls of light in the distance. Sleatoo told her the balls were hives of sun-bees, kept by a caste of beekeepers. Sleatoo's closest relative was a beekeeper, but Arlene didn't understand the relationship between them. In six years of talking to Sleatoo, Arlene could never get far enough past the language barrier to really understand the familial structure of tumbler society.

Tomorrow she would see it, and the abstract words she knew of Sleatoo's language would finally have concrete images to hang on.

"Why didn't Sleatoo stay to dinner with us?" Kyan asked.

"The tumblers don't eat like us, honey. They absorb light and minerals into their leaves."

Kyan wrinkled his nose, not understanding.

"Sleatoo says they have bathhouses, and when they soak in the mineral-treated water, all the food they need soaks into them."

"It's like if I put my hand in the soup?"

"Yes, honey, careful," Arlene brushed Kyan's hand away. "The soup's hot." She was cooking it over their portable camp stove.

Even during sabbatical from being a wife, being a mother never stops.

****

During the days, Arlene and Kyan moved among the tumblers. Arlene equipped her son daily with the raw materials to amuse and feed himself in the foreign landscape of the tumbler town—educational drives for his com-pad and a pack of bread, cheeses, and smoked meat. As the sun went down, they shared a hot meal over the camp stove, beyond the fringe of the tumbler town. But, during the day, Kyan was his own keeper.

Arlene worried. She trusted her son, but she didn't know what rules to give him, since she didn't know what transgressions would offend the tumblers.

Arlene watched the tumblers in silence, scribbling notes into her notebook. The tumbler way of life entered her eyes and exited through her fingertips. Her notes tantalized with the promise to coalesce into a whole string of academic papers. Once she got home, she'd have the raw material to keep her busy for months going on years.

Yet, she couldn't expect Kyan to carry on, quietly, as she did; young boys need to play.

Against every grain of her anthropological training, Arlene allowed Kyan, at the beginning of the second week, to join the tumblers in their bathhouse. His happy splashing echoed merrily through the town and left mineral water sloshed on the floor. The tumblers soaked, dancing their sustenance dances, the same as they had before—albeit rocked by Kyan's waves.

"He is a new kind of weather," Sleatoo assured her in his haunting, piping imitation of a human voice. "We take the weather here as it comes."

Arlene found reassurance in Sleatoo's expression. The purple tube leaves and greeny vines that vibrated when he spoke and the flowerlike blue parts, which were open wide, seeing her, nestled at the nexus of Sleatoo's long, bending limbs. No side was up, because each limb took its turn as foot and as arm when a tumbler walked. Thus, the leaflike sensory organs grew thick at the hub of the limbs, each type many times repeated, and enough types that Arlene still didn't understand them all.

No other human alive—except for Kyan—could have found a face in the shrubby center of a tumbler, but Arlene found expressions there.

"Doesn't your village have children?" Arlene asked, wishing for a companion for Kyan. At home, he had seven cousins to play with him. Here he was all alone. "Do they play like Kyan does?"

"Children are rooted."

"You grow from the ground? Where?"

So, Sleatoo showed Arlene the nursery.

****

Tumbler homes are platforms at the tops of tall poles. Rungs stick out from the poles, creating a spiral ladder. Some platforms are glassed in; others are not. As far as Arlene could tell, the difference depended on the preference of the individual tumbler. All tumblers lived alone; they never shared a platform.

But, tumblers grow up quite differently.

The nursery was one of the two largest buildings built on the ground, entirely walled with glass like a greenhouse. The other was the center of the adult community—the bathhouse, where tumblers met to soak, dance their sustenance dances under the water, converse, and carry on the business of the town. It was like the church, town hall, and saloon all rolled into one.

"I grew here," Sleatoo said, extending the slender end of his most convenient limb towards the back corner of the nursery. "It's why they call me shlivilee. It means 'one who grew in a corner.' They say it's why I'm shy, why I spend my time visiting your colony."

"How do you mean?"

"When you grow in the center, everyone talks to you. You are the center. Only Kliassara, my beekeeping sister, talked to me. She grew here." Sleatoo gestured to a space a little out from the corner; a location cutting the corner off from the rest of the open room.

"You got less practice socializing," Arlene said. "Everything is determined by physical location... Aren't there any children who don't grow here?"

"If we find stray seedlings, we transplant them here. Children are tended here. Talked to; taught. But, there are always wild ones. They are grim and silent, and don't know our ways. They come out of the forest, and sometimes join a village. Sometimes they stay wanderers, but they're always welcome. They're strong from growing up alone and surviving. We village-dwellers admire that."

Arlene put down her notes. "I'm confused," she said. "Where are the children?" She looked at the stiff, leaf-bare tumblers crouched around the room. "These? Are these them?"

"No!" Sleatoo exclaimed with the shaking and tinkling of his ginger-colored leaf parts that signified laughter. "These are the old ones who are waiting. They're ready to move on, so they're waiting for the next crop of children."

"So there are no children now?"

"Oh, there are. We've had flowering dances here several times since the last crop. They're waiting underground."

"They haven't sprouted yet?"

"Right."

Arlene sighed. Kyan would have to make do without playmates, even rooted ones, for a while longer.

****

Come the third month, Sleatoo left his human charges alone in his tumbler town. Wanderlust struck his heart, and he set out for the human colony. He took his usual pack of tumbler goods to trade, but he also bore messages from Arlene and Kyan to their husband and father.

Without her guide, Arlene found that her tongue had less of a hold on the tumbler language than her ear. At times, she resorted to signs and gestures to make herself understood. Finally she realized that Kyan could hum, sing, and whistle the tumbler language as proficiently as if he had all those bizarre leaf organs hidden in his throat instead of a single tongue. He'd been listening to Uncle Sleatoo tell him stories since infancy, and the sounds seemed natural to him.

"Which tumblers do you like talking to best?" Arlene asked her son. If he was to translate for her, she wanted him to enjoy it.

"The old ones in the nursery," Kyan said. "They play pirates with me."

Arlene asked if she could watch them play, and Kyan told her she'd have to be the wicked sea witch guarding the gold. "The treasure's at the bottom of the sea," Kyan explained. "We're in boats all the time in the nursery."

Playing pirates turned out to mean that the stiff, old tumblers watched Kyan run around the nursery and listened to him describe his exploits. "We're cannonballing the sea witch!!!" or "I have to get the water out of my boat..." He knelt to the floor and pantomimed bucketing water.

When Kyan tired himself out, he sat in the dirt and listened to the tumbler ancients' stories. It was a culture of reminiscence: rather than living life, these tumblers had resigned themselves to retelling it, reanalyzing it, finding peace with it, and preparing to leave it. They seemed truly grateful for the fresh audience Kyan provided. Perhaps that's why they lived now in the nursery? Perhaps they were waiting for the new tumblers to sprout?

"My favorite is Sleatoo's granddaddy," Kyan confided as they walked back to camp.

"How do you know," Arlene asked, "that he's Sleatoo's granddad?"

"He talks proud of Sleatoo, and tells stories about him all the time. Like you said my granddad talks of me."

They both looked at the stars, and Arlene tousled Kyan's hair. "You'll meet him someday. Someday we'll all go on a trip. You, and Daddy, and me, and we'll go see your granddad."

Although, honestly, Arlene had to admit that arranging to visit her homeworld would be ten times more difficult than arranging this sabbatical in the wilderness. She felt a twinge, realizing that her sabbatical was now more than half over.

****

The coming caravan raised a ribbon of dust Arlene could see hours before she interpreted it. She kept looking up from her notes to squint quizzically at the skyline, but she didn't understand until Kyan emerged from his pirate lair. He summed it up in one word: "Cousins!"

Nothing would do but to run and meet them. Arlene put aside her work and trailed behind, wondering what could possibly have gotten into her sisters-in-law. Whatever in the world could drag them across the wilderness to a place that scared them? And whyever hadn't Derrick stopped them?

"My god, but you've come a long way," Arlene called when she got close enough. Kyan, running ahead, had already joined them. He was part of the many armed, many legged, many voiced band of children.

"Nothing better for tiring out the little ones!" came the call back from Gina. Derrick was walking beside her.

Derrick smiled when they met, took her hand, and said "Surprised?"

"Yes," Arlene answered, but her accompanying smile was halfhearted. The smile half was for seeing Derrick; the worried half was for all the children and the havoc they might wreak on the tumbler town.

The reunited spouses didn't have time to talk. Gina was doing all the talking for all of them: "I see why you went away now!" Gina's speech was punctuated by inarticulate commands and reprimands to her children. "Why, Derrick's missed you so much, Leanne and I were getting jealous. Our husbands are so used to us, they barely pay us the time of day!" Gina resettled the toddler on her hip. "Thought we'd kill two birds with one stone. Derrick gets to see you again, and we see if we can't make our husbands miss us too."

"My camp's not really set up for visitors..." Arlene began, flustered, but Gina smiled broadly and dismissed her objection.

"Don't you mind that. We'll take care of everything. You just focus on that work you're doing," Gina wrinkled her nose as she said it, "and spend time with Derrick!"

"Thanks," Arlene said and looked over at Derrick. With her face turned away from Gina and while Leanne was busy with the children, Arlene mouthed the words, "Why did you bring them?"

****

True to her word, Gina and her sister Leanne took care of everything. Arlene's once unimposing camp—a butane stove and two sleeping bags under the stars—was transformed. Gina pitched tents, and Leanne built a bonfire; Kyan and his cousins created a ruckus, running like bandits, screeching like banshees.

Before beginning the bonfire, Leanne pulled Arlene aside. "They won't mind, will they? Gathering up wood... bracken... we won't accidentally burn any of their children." Leanne looked nervously at the tumbler town in the distance. "Will we?"

Arlene blushed at her sister-in-law's ignorance born of prejudice. "You would know if a ball of bracken were a tumbler," she said. "It would roll away." Neither Gina nor Leanne belonged out here.

Though, Arlene had to admit her own ignorance; the idea of a bonfire made her nervous because she had no idea how the tumblers would react. She never saw them make fire themselves, and she kept her own fires small. Discrete. Yet, the tumblers must have some relationship to fire. Was it taboo? Or unimportant? Ceremonial? Possibly as part of a ceremony Arlene hadn't seen? She had to have her notebook....

Arlene sat herself down away from the chaos and pored over her notes, hunting for details she might have recorded but ignored. Clues about the tumblers and fire.

In time, a shadow loomed over her, long in the setting sun, and its source scuffed his feet in the dust. The light was already dim, and Derrick's shadow made it hard to read. However, Arlene didn't want to talk to Derrick right now. If she did talk to him, she would just snap at him for turning her quiet camp into a circus. So, she strained her eyes and held her tongue.

Nonetheless, Derrick joined her, sitting on the splintery log. "You're doing a good job with Kyan here," Derrick said, but Arlene merely frowned at her notes. "He's thriving. He's learning real independence." Derrick paused, waiting for Arlene to jump in. When she didn't, he rattled nervously on. "Gina's kids and Leanne's kids—they're such apron-string holders. Don't get me wrong, I love my nephews and nieces. Every one of them. But, Kyan, he's the pick of the litter. And it's no stretch to see why," he smiled, "with the way that you look after him."

Arlene finally looked up to see Derrick expectantly watching her. "You're mad," he said. After a moment, he added, "I'm sorry."

"Yes, but what for?" Arlene asked, testing Derrick to see if he knew what he'd done.

"For making you angry."

A long drawn out sigh. "You don't know?"

"Sorry," he shrugged. "You'll have to tell me."

Arlene closed her eyes and spoke in even, measured tones. "Bringing a child on an anthropological field study is unorthodox, but, as you say, Kyan is an exceptional child. I can trust him." Arlene's eyes opened and fixed directly, angrily on Derrick. "However, Gina and Leanne's children—not to mention Gina and Leanne—are completely out of control." Her volume mounted with her anger, though she tried to control it for the sake of appearances, in front of her sisters-in-law.

Continuing in a forced hush, she said, "I have no idea what kind of damage they could do to the tumblers or their town. Let alone my ability to objectively research. Why did you bring them?!"

"That's what you're mad about?" Derrick sounded genuinely surprised. "They wanted to come."

"Of course, they didn't." Exasperation colored every