Siberia by Ann Halam

before, but I’d been ill in the hospital and then getting better at home. And then it had been spring and summer: which were the wrong seasons for sowing these strange seeds. My hands were bigger than they had been. I could put on the clinging, glimmery gloves that were folded up in the white envelopes; though they were still overlarge. I could put one of the gauze masks over my nose and mouth.
    Mama watched carefully, as I prepared the dishes of new-treat all on my own, and added the seed powder. I watched for the signs of life, then I fitted the six tiny dishes into their places in the bottom half of the nutshell, and stretched the barrier my mama called the incubator membrane over them. When the shell was closed and sealed, we put everything away and I repeated my roll call, glowing inside because I knew I’d done everything exactly right. I repeated the strange names of the orders; I described the different kinds of animals
. . . .
    “The nutshell will grow as the kits grow,” I said.
    “Incubator,”
murmured my mama.
    “I should look at them often, and I should handle them when I have learned to handle them safely. If you’re friendly to them that helps them to grow, and it will remind them that I am the guardian, so they’ll trust me. They get enough food from the new-treat to grow into kits, but if you’re growing a kit into a full-grown animal, you have to feed it extra. When the nut—er, incubator is about as big as an apple, the Lindquists will get sleepy. One day I’ll look inside and find they’ve shrunk and curled up in their dishes again, and turned into cocoons. They can’t make a mistake. They know which dish is theirs, because it has traces of them in it. Then I powder up the cocoons, and put them in fresh tubes, with the right colored caps. But I don’t throw the old tubes away until I’ve tested the new seed, by letting a Lindquist kit of each kind go through its full expression.”
    There was a store of extra tubes in the base of the white case, with the packs of extra gloves and new-treat, and the cleaning powders.
    “You can’t tell how long
. . . ,
” prompted my mama.
    “You can’t tell how long it will take for the kits to live and die, or to go into second stage, which is a real wild animal like Nivvy. It depends on many factors.”
    “When you test them to the second stage you must be careful—”
    “Not to distress them, because if you do they will express everything. They have instructions packed inside them, although they are so small, for making lots of different kinds of animals. You ought to check that they’re all there, to make sure the Lindquist is working properly. But we can’t do it because we are in hiding. It wouldn’t be safe
. . . .
That’s why we didn’t distress Nivvy. He was always happy. Why wouldn’t it be safe, Mama?”
    “Ah,” said Mama. “Well, strange things, marvelously strange things, happen to the Lindquists at full expression
. . . . Artiodactyla
is big, but Nivvy is a special case. Be
very
careful about distressing the
Carnivora
kit, should you ever second-stage him.”
    “I’m not going to second-stage them,” I said, uneasily. “I’m going to school. Next summer I’ll come home, and you will be here, and you’ll teach me lots more.”
    “Yes,” said Mama. “That’s how it’s going to be. But
suppose
I wasn’t here, you do understand everything, don’t you, Rosita? You know what the Lindquists are, and what you have to do, and why they are so important?”
    “Of course I do.”
    I said it to please her. My mind wasn’t really on the kits at all
. . . .
I was thinking about the heartbreak of leaving Mama, and the excitement of my new school. But I put everything away while she watched me, and I did it all exactly right. The next night we opened the nutshell, and six tiny creatures stared up at me, already clad in brown fur, with shining pinhead eyes and quivering almost-invisible whiskers. The delight came back to me