The alarm had sounded. The message had gone out, buzzing and clicking through the Tallus compound on a higher, more urgent frequency than ordinary communication. Reported by sentries who were seldom pressed into duty and who did not always get details right, the message was sketchy; all we knew at first -- all we needed to know -- was: DANGER.

Rapidly, details emerged, passed from one to another like partially digested food. Rory was causing trouble in town -- typical male foolishness without even the usual level of male self-restraint. Some kind of fight. Some kind of disturbance. Some kind of drawing attention to himself and, by extension, to us.

Avoidance of -- aversion to; terror of -- this sort of trouble was a constant and formative of our individual and communal lives because it could so easily jeopardize the entire community. Rory, obviously, had not thought about that, or he had not cared, or he had intended to jeopardize the community. In every generation were one or two or a few boys whose recklessness reached such depths; almost never did they live to adulthood.

My sister and our mother went in after him. He was, after all, their son and grandson, and it was still, barely, summer so he was still, barely, their responsibility. I shuddered to think what would happen if he pulled something like this two months hence, down in Ambergen, when the women were asleep and we men, stewards then, had to take care of things. I was, in fact, wryly surprised that he had not already done so, last winter or the year before, for his delinquency had by no means appeared suddenly or out of whole cloth. I did not let myself think about that.

"Come on, Joel."

I looked at Ma askance. "Why do I have to go?" To my own ears I sounded like a truculent adolescent, not much unlike Rory. Indeed, I generally felt less than adult when I talked to my mother, or to any woman for that matter. Such diminution had its advantages, chief among them the dearth of female expectations, so I was nonplussed by being ordered along, even mildly indignant.

"You and Pete. This could get physical. Come on."

Pete and I did not even exchange glances. There was no point. We just trudged to the garages, waited for an indication of which vehicle we were taking, hunkered down in the bed of the old Chevy pickup, and waited more or less stolidly while Alexis and Ma got in, Alexis driving.

We had backed out of the garage and turned onto the driveway, which curved and dipped for more than a mile from the compound out to the dirt road, when the truck stopped, roughly enough to throw Pete into me and me against the wheel well. Pete rolled his eyes and I heaved a sigh, exaggeratedly heavy but foreshortened so Ma would not catch it.

Among the men, there was a whole secret language like that, sighs and eye-rollings and exchanged looks and particular postures and gestures that the women, if they noticed at all, did not try to intercept or interpret. If they had, they would have found them laughable. "If men ran things," this code pretended to assert, "things would go better. Vehicles would be braked smoothly. Teenage boys would be kept in line." But even in the winter, when there were no women around to hear us, we never said such things aloud, and most men probably never gave them coherent thought -- not for fear of female retribution or mockery, really, but because responsibility even just for words or thoughts like that would have been too much for us, let alone any such actions.

Through the back window of the cab, we heard raised voices and saw Alexis gesturing angrily. Then Ma got out and, leaving the door ajar as if to show her intent to make this quick, came around to us. "Let me see you."

Neither of us knew what she meant at first. Then Pete said, "Oh, right," laughed a little, and hauled himself up onto all fours. When Ma circled her fingers around each other in long concentric circles, he grinned sheepishly and pirouetted on elbows and knees, awkwardly, of course. Noting that his long and bulky flannel shirt obscured the avial humps on his shoulder blades and made his arms look shorter than they were by creating the optical illusion of a lower-slung waist, and that his straight red-brown mustache all but hid the tips of his teeth where they protruded between his lips, I realized what Ma was inspecting for: that in town we could pass, long enough to get Rory without causing a greater stir.

Ma was wearing a voluminous slicker with a hood, which caused me to reflect that it was a good thing this was a rainy late-autumn midnight and not a morning in, say, June; her appearance might still be a bit odd by town standards, but it probably would not give rise to downright astonishment. From an inside pocket she took a roll of double-sided adhesive tape and handed it up to Pete. "For your ears."

He grimaced but did not really object. He made a tube out of a small piece of tape and carefully stuck it behind his left ear, then made a fold in the ear and pressed it back onto the sticky surface of the tube. He waited a minute, shook his head, leaned sideways. The tape held. He repeated the process with the right ear, then faced Ma with his eyebrows raised. Narrow-eared like that, he looked ridiculous, and even Ma laughed, but she nodded approval. "You'll do."

She looked me over as though she had never seen me before, trying, I knew, to assume a townsperson's perspective. She had me loosen my belt so my pants would sag, and I thought that, while this would disguise my scoop, I would look like a middle-aged gang-banger wannabe, but I did not bother to tell her so. She insisted I trim my nails. This was no easy thing, since naturally they were long, thick, and curved, and Alexis had twice lain on the horn before I was done. If Ma noticed her daughter's impatience, she gave no sign; certainly it did not agitate her in the least, while it made me so nervous I nicked myself.

Finally she was satisfied, and we got on our way; Alexis floored the accelerator so that Pete and I slid toward the back of the truck bed, but Ma must have said something to her -- or her own common sense rose to moderate her maternal instincts, brash now as they so often were -- because the truck settled into a steady if too-rapid pace.

Leaving Tallus like this, such a rare occurrence, made the season seem farther along than I had realized, the year farther gone. I well knew the date, but the women's sleep and our trip south were triggered by weather conditions more than by the calendar, and I had thought we had more time than this. The passing landscape had a decided autumnal aspect, almost wintry. The deciduous trees overhanging our long private driveway and then the gravel county road had already begun to lose their leaves, and those that remained were colorless and soggy. The sky was a thick, wet gray. There was no breeze, but the air was chill.

I reminded myself, with both relief and resentment, that it was not up to me to decide when we would leave. I would be told when to take up my assignments. Until then, there was no point in worrying about it. There were plenty of things to worry about -- most immediately, my nephew Rory.

I pulled my pea coat under and up around me, wishing that I had worn more layers of clothing and that my hair were longer and thicker to cover more of me, though enough hirsuteness to keep me warm would surely have drawn unwelcome attention in town. That was probably one of Ma's reasons for insisting that I be part of this rescue mission -- I would not stand out as much as, say, Miles or Stockard, with their more admirable pelts.

Apparently I had been harboring the hope, secret even from myself, that my mother had chosen me for my competence or some other positive attribute, because the realization that it had probably been for my looks offended me, hurt my feelings. Sullenly I settled into a corner for the long ride.

"What do you suppose he's gotten himself into this time?" Pete mused.

"Who knows? Who cares? We'll find out when we get there."

"Do you think he has a self-destructive streak? Or is it just the process of individuation?" Pete had been studying psychology. His persistence, the very fact that he was interested in all this, annoyed me and struck me as borrowing trouble. I wanted only to make myself as comfortable as possible in this extremely uncomfortable situation and, literally and figuratively, ride it out. Nevertheless, and even more annoyingly, I found myself responding in a way that would give him more to speculate about -- and, therefore, more to talk about. "I think he's more homicidal than suicidal."

The instant I said it I wished I had not, because Pete, predictably, bared his teeth and sank them into it, treating this observation far more seriously than I had. "Do you really? Homicidal? Do you think he's that dangerous?"

Now I had to defend what had been essentially a throwaway comment. There was no reason to think I could successfully do that. This, I thought morosely, was why men habitually did not offer -- did not have -- opinions about much of anything. "I think he's more of a danger to the rest of us than he is to himself," I said reluctantly.

Pete made thoughtful noises, which was not a good sign. I did not want to engage in further frustrating conversation about a subject utterly outside our purview. I suspected that the women could do something about Rory, if they chose to; there were not many things that, individually or collectively, the women could not affect. It was, in fact, quite possible that they were taking action and Pete and I simply were not privy to their strategy. But Rory's misbehavior, its wider meanings and deeper implications, were pointless for us to consider.

I did consider them, though, if only superficially, my unwillingness to think deeply about troublesome matters serving not to quiet my ruminations but only to keep them specious and therefore more nerve-wracking. I thought about Rory as a child. He had not been an especially appealing child -- always obstreperous, often defiant, and sometimes mean. But the spring he was six, we had spent a fair amount of time in each other's displeased company while his mother gave birth to his brother Sebastian, then discovered Sebastian's multiple handicaps and enlisted veritable hordes of females, including our mother and Rory's then-four-year-old sister Meredith, to support her in her grief, tend the infant whose needs were apparently not like those of other infants, and decide what to do with him. Regarding this last, I did not know and did not want to know what the options had been.

It had not been a good summer. I knew not a thing about child care and had no interest; this was not a job for men. And we had not much liked each other, Rory and I. We still did not much like each other. But for some reason, memory had limned those months with pleasantness, which carried over when I thought about him now. To my displeasure, I retained a certain affection and sense of responsibility for the boy.

I was spared further risky musings and more conversation or avoidance of conversation with Pete when Alexis threw open the driver's door and flung herself out. Still speeding, the truck careened, and Ma reached across to grab the wheel, barely keeping us on the road. Alexis, as was her wont, was screeching. "This is stupid! I can get there faster on my own!"

She took off through the woods toward town. Already she was clicking and squeaking, as if she could locate her son from here. Perhaps she could; it was a given that women had higher-developed echolocation skills than men. Pete and I listened to her until the trees and the divergence of her route from the truck's obscured her.

Ma had slid over behind the wheel. Just the top of her shiny-hooded head showed above the seat, and I wondered if her feet even touched the pedals. But it never would have crossed my mind to doubt that, one way or another, she would handle the truck. Women always handled things. In particular, my mother always did.

The truck fishtailed a few times, but she got it under control before any damage was done to either the vehicle or its trajectory, and we continued on our way. Pete cocked his head in the direction Alexis had taken, and the tape behind one ear popped loose as the muscles strained to fan. Myself, I heard nothing but engine and tire noise, drizzle on cold metal and glass, leaves damply falling, the skittering and flittering of small warm-blooded creatures we passed too quickly for me to identify. I thought Ma and Alexis probably cataloged, so readily as to be almost subliminal, every living thing that ever crossed their paths, but I was just as glad to allow some of them to escape my notice.

After a few minutes Pete gave up trying to follow Alexis's flight. He folded up and secured his ear again, half turned toward me as though to say something, thought better of it. We rode the rest of the way in a silence that he might have called companionable but was, to me, merely the welcome absence of chatter. The older I got, the more I valued peace and quiet, and the less of either I seemed to get.

We were well into the outskirts of town before I realized it. Instinctively, feeling ambushed or -- worse -- on the verge of being ambushed, I gathered myself, wrapped myself smaller and tenser. In my nearly fifty years, I had been to town perhaps twice, and the place did not sound at all familiar. The heat of it was dense and animated, confusing.

When I was a child, Ma and a few other adult women had had to go into town once every month for supplies. There had routinely been extensive preparation: careful scheduling to minimize the number of stops, rehearsal of speech and bearing, disguise that seemed playful to me when I was very young but that I soon recognized -- was forced to recognize -- as deadly serious. If we ran out of something before the month was over, it was understood that we would do without until the next appointed shopping time. While the shoppers were gone the community buzzed with an undercurrent of anxiety, though we all went about our daily business as we always must; when they returned, there was no celebration, but there was widespread communal relief.

The relationship of Tallus to the town had varied throughout the history of both, and I never knew much about it. Women were the keepers of the past -- historians, storytellers, mythmakers, genealogists -- and bearers of the future because they knew how to plan and prepare and were constitutionally able to imagine beyond the next night or the next season. I, being male, had enough trouble navigating the immediate present, the immediate past, the very near future.

I did, though, have a vague impression that there had been times when Tallus was almost entirely self-sufficient. Ma had alluded to elaborate farming and livestock operations where now there were only gardens, orchards, and a few animals more pet than prey -- enough work in themselves. When I thought about it at all, I supposed that back then the community had boasted more and better tailors, toolmakers, carpenters, entertainers than when I was growing up, and/or that those recent ancestors had been less restless, less greedy than we were.

Even more dimly, I was aware that once we had had far more contact with our neighbors, and that this had been an ugly and hazardous period all around. This had to have been a very long time ago, when the Old Women were young or even before they were born -- a perspective almost impossible to maintain; considering the Old Women at all was like leaning out over a seething pit, and considering them when they had been something other than Old Women induced profound disorientation and dread. It had been before there were any investments and then, while the investments were proving themselves, before we had had agents in distant cities and foreign lands.

Now, lately, we were mutating into another sort of self-sufficiency that I scarcely comprehended. Tallus had been wired. We had stepped into cyberspace. I was not even sure I had the jargon right, but the results were legion: Financial matters could be handled with nary a personal meeting, phone call, postal delivery, or stroke of the pen. Orders for groceries and other supplies could be placed via modem, and the only interpersonal interaction required was the dispatch of a single representative to meet the delivery truck at the end of the driveway. The children's home-schooling, for generations hotly debated among educationally minded women, now had access to vast data banks and infinite permutations of source materials, not to mention all the tools for teaching and self-instruction I kept hearing about. Youthful enthusiasts -- and my mother, too, which galled me -- claimed that before long we would not have to deal directly with anyone outside the community. I did not argue, naturally, but I was skeptical, more in a futile attempt at self-protection than out of any knowledge or intuition.

Alexis had indeed located her son well before we got there, causing me to wonder why we had taken the truck. Maybe Ma and Alexis had anticipated that Rory would give them trouble and refuse to come home under his own power. In any case, I never would have questioned the decision, and I did not even think about it for long, because my attention was claimed by a commotion in a little half-block park and by Pete's hissed "Shit."

Before I had managed to scramble out of the truck -- before I had even resigned myself to the patent necessity of doing so -- I picked up heat and motion and incipient motion from perhaps a dozen warm-blooded bodies in the park, one of them, closest to us and separated from the others, was my sister. The others were particles circling around each other, drawn to and repelled by each other, all these forces combining to create a seething whole. I had not expected to be able to isolate Rory among them. I was sure Alexis had done so from some distance away; I was sure Ma was doing so now, as she flew out of the truck and across the sidewalk to Alexis's side and past, black raincoat billowing.

Sensory perceptions began to sort themselves out as Pete and I approached the crowd. I could hear individual voices, discrete breathing patterns, footsteps and the sliding of hands on weapons. Young men, all of them, townspeople, with Rory surrounded.

Alexis was squeaking madly, summoning her son, but nobody in the park was paying her the slightest heed; Rory was simply ignoring her, and the others would not have heard. I noticed now, through the painful haze of the bright gray glow from the security lights, that all the boys were wearing a uniform -- baseball caps with the bills turned sideways, khaki pants sagging below their knees. I had read about gang costumes but had never seen them before, and, once I recognized what the outfits signified, my first reaction was amusement, for they really did look ridiculous, like pompous children, playing and posturing, out of their league. And they were so young; it was hard for me to tell their ages in comparison to Rory's, but I guessed none of them to be older than he was, and he was only seventeen, I thought, eighteen at most. Although I knew they were dangerous, could be lethal -- especially to us -- it was hard to take them seriously.

It was also hard to determine precisely in what way they were threatening Rory, although the sense of threat was palpable. In the approximate middle of their rough circle, he stood half bent, shoulders arched in fighting stance. He was shorter and slimmer than most of them, although among us he was on the stocky side. I was struck simultaneously by how much he resembled them -- the same fearful bilateral symmetry, the same imploded and furious energy, the same hot blood -- and by the differences in physical configuration and internal structure that set him so apart.

Alexis shouted, "Rory, get your ass over here!"

Rory, of course, immediately set his stance and growled, "Go fuck yourself." The others, of course, hooted with derision. The sheer dumbness of my sister's move amazed me, put me on some sort of unaccustomed alert.

Alexis was fairly atwitter with frustration, both because Rory was not minding her and, worse, I knew, because she did not dare be as forceful as it was possible for her to be. "Joel, Pete, what the hell are you guys doing? Don't just stand there! Go get him!"

Pete cocked his head at me as though listening for a reaction but did not wait for it even if I had had one. He plunged into the melee. I remember hesitating, but I followed, it being unimaginable to me what I would do if I did not do that. "Be careful!" my mother commanded, and I knew she was not urging caution for our safety so much as reminding us to fight circumspectly, not to use everything we had, not to betray any skill we did not absolutely have to use.

As it turned out, we served primarily as decoys. The gang turned on us, away from Rory, and I heard his yelp of indignation; whatever was going on here, he was by no means entirely an innocent victim.

One big kid swung his stick at my knees and I leaped easily over it, restraining myself from going too high in the air. Pete dived up and sideways into another one's neck; I heard the rubbery rustling under his shirt but I doubted any of them would hear it or would have any suspicion about what it was.

Pete was dancing. When I realized what he was doing, I was impressed by his creativity and quick thinking. Several of the punks were guffawing. Pete pirouetted on tiptoe and executed several minor flying leaps, then took off across the park, diagonally away from my mother and sister, who had taken hold of Rory's arms. Hooting and brandishing their clumsy clubs, all the attackers but one chased Pete.

I was so sure that the herd instinct of these boys would be as strong as ours that I did not at first realize this one had stayed behind his fellows, his sights on me. Instead of taking him on directly, as I should have done, I moved toward Alexis, who was handling Rory alone and having trouble with him. I was not sure what she would want me to do, but I knew I was expected to be available to her.

This drew my unwelcome escort toward them, too, just as Ma came at Rory from above. I heard her tiny body slash through the air like the flattened head of a spear, followed by Rory's startled outrush of breath as she tackled him. Then she had hold of the back of his collar and the back of his belt. He was bigger than she was by quite a bit, but, with strength that thrilled me even though I had always known it was in her, she lifted him off his feet and started to carry him off. Although it was a risky, brazen thing for her to do and was sure to complicate things, I very nearly applauded.

"Rat face!" The kid's taunt was a bit breathless, I thought. "Shit, it's the fucking Flying Mouse!" as if that were an insult or a joke. I all but chuckled at his puny meanness, but Ma's hissing, suddenly vicious, made it clear to me -- and to the hoodlum himself, apparently, for he grew quiet and started to retreat -- that this was no laughing matter.

Screeching and swearing mightily, Rory had twisted himself upside down and wrapped arms and legs around his grandmother's torso. With the fight torque, his bite would be fearsome, and I thought I should go to my mother's aid, but my impulse was too scattered to act on. I hovered helplessly.

Ma easily tossed Rory to Alexis, who easily caught him. As she carried him off, in scoop and claws, in the direction of the truck and Tallus, I heard her whispering to him in a decidedly nasty way, "You little son of a bitch, who do you think you are?" and, despite my own anger at him, I wished she would not call him names and would not ask him a question that pierced so surely to the heart of the matter.

Ma went after the kid who had so injudiciously followed me. He ran, but pointlessly. She swooped around in front of him and came up from underneath to sink her teeth into his throat. He gave a gurgling sound, surprisingly brief and muffled.

I had never known my mother to kill before. I had, in fact, never known anyone to kill before; there had never been any need. The eruptive smell of the boy's blood nauseated me, excited me, made me salivate. I understood why she had to dispose of this foolhardy witness, but I could not myself have done it, and my mother's ability to take such decisive, violent action was appalling.

She carried the limp body off to the far side of the park, where there were trees and a little band shell. I heard her teeth slash his throat, which was strange, and then tear at other parts of his flesh, and I realized, with grudging admiration because I never would have thought of it, that she was disguising the kill.

A cacophony like rising wind, interspersed with footsteps and shouts, approached from behind, and Pete shouted for my help in fending off his attackers. As if to some signal inaudible or incomprehensible to me, the entire mass of them stepped back, reassembled, and attacked. Pete was buried; I could not see him, and, much more alarmingly, I could neither hear him nor detect his body heat.

My mind went utterly blank. I had no clue what I should do. I was not used to making decisions on my own, and certainly not decisions whose consequences were this enormous.

It could not have taken long, in real time, for me to do what I did, and I was never aware of making a conscious decision; indeed, if I had been I might well have been paralyzed. Before I knew it, I had sprung into the mob -- which, for all the metaphorical appeal of regarding it as an undifferentiated mass, a single and single-minded creature, was, in fact, comprised of a finite number of separate organisms, each in some or many ways vulnerable.

My teeth punctured the first flesh they encountered and drew blood. Invigorated, I flung the kid aside and went for the next one. I met with very little resistance, perhaps because I could move faster than they could, perhaps because my method of attack was a surprise to them. It was fortunate that their only weapons turned out to be makeshift clubs, which they found difficult to manipulate at such close range; had they been seriously armed, of course, the rules and stakes of combat would have been considerably different. But, whatever the reason, the bottom line was that they were no match for me, assisted belatedly but significantly by Pete as he worked himself free, and cutting through them to Ma and Rory was really rather easy.

The two of us shot upward, enough to escape but still well under control, and then out of the park. I was sorely tempted simply to take flight. Had it not been two o'clock in the morning, had our opponents and observers been other than drunk, stoned, and otherwise unreliable, even the minimal amount of airborne locomotion we indulged in would have attracted troublesome attention, and there would have had to be more casualties; as it was, we were taking a risk less calculated than, later, in the retelling, Ma and Alexis would make it out to have been.

Alexis, now with Rory rather meekly at her side, caught up and took over. By the time we got back to the pickup, she was well into a hissing, spitting torrent of vituperation that took in all males, past, present, and future, with her son as the perfect exemplar of every enumerated character flaw. By the time we were on the road -- Rory in the cab between his mother and grandmother without so much as an objection on his part; Pete and I relegated to the open bed again -- it was hard to think of the rescue, which actually had been rather daring, as having had much to do with me, except for my uncomfortable sensation of having committed an act out of character for myself and my entire gender. I was hungry, and by the time we got back to Tallus I had managed to make pervasive in my mind the worry that the sun would come up before I had had a chance to eat.